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THE LAST DANCER
Daniel Keys Moran




DEDICATION…

For Holly. I love you.

… AND THANKS TO …

My friend Richard Sommers, who helped make it possible for me to finish this 
bitch of a book, and whose sound advice and perspective kept me from going off 
the deep end on at least one occasion; Angel and Jodi and Kathy, for their love; 
Doctor Death for allowing me the use of Nicole Eris Lovely, a character from 
False Prophets, her second novel about the Prophet Harry; David Gerrold, for 
giving me the opportunity to eat his brain, the way the Japanese do to the 
monkeys; Dorothy Fontana, who fed me the second best chili in the world, and who 
tried, against all reasonable expectations, to improve me as a human being by 
exposing me to the Big Band sound at the Hollywood Bowl one night; Steve Barnes 
and Toni Young, for their friendship and support, and Steve and Toni and Dawn 
Callan for The Warrior Within workshop; Amy Stout and Lou Aronica and Ralph the 
Wise and Powerful, for their astonishing patience; The Kinks, for Rock and Roll 
Fantasy; Melissa Etheridge, who sang Will Never Be the Same for me in concert 
one night during the craziness; and
Don Henley, for The End of the Innocence. I am deeply grateful for The Heart of 
the Matter, a song that helped keep me sane. Perhaps gratitude from the audience 
is out of order where art is concerned; I paid him for that music with cold 
cash, as you presumably have paid for this book; but “what the head makes 
cloudy, the heart makes very clear.” Thank you.
… AND A NOTE.

Usually in this part of the book the author says something to the effect that 
the experts he’s mentioned are not to be faulted in the event he screwed 
something up despite their invaluable help. Not this time. I did my best. If 
anything is wrong in The Last Dancer it’s their fault. Particularly Amy Stout, 
Steve Barnes, David Gerrold, Dorothy Fontana, and Ralph Vincinanza, all of whom 
are professionals and should have known better.




Table of Contents
  The Last Dancer
  A Tale of the Continuing Time

  Prolog: The Dancer
  Interlude: 2062-2069 Gregorian

    - 1 -
    - 2 -
    - 3 -

  Summer: 2075

    - 1 -
    - 2 -
    - 3 -
    - 4 -
    - 5 -

  Spring: 2072
  A Blast from the Past

    - 1 -
    - 2 -
    - 3 -
    - 4 -
    - 5 -
    - 6 -

  Summer: 2075
  A Blast from the Past II

    - 1 -
    - 2 -

  Spring: 2076

    - 1 -
    - 2 -
    - 3 -
    Dateline: Shawmac on 58-1022
    - 5 -
    - 6 -
    - 7 -
    - 8 -
    DateLine: Shawmac on Retirement
    - 9 -
    - 10 -
    - 11 -
    - 12 -

  Back to the Beginning
  Dvan’s Story

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    - 2 -
    - 3 -
    - 4 -
    - 5 -
    - 6 -
    - 7 -
    - 8 -
    - 9 -
    - 10 -
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    - 12 -
    - 13 -
    - 14 -
    - 15 -
    - 16 -
    - 17 -
    - 18 -
    - 19 -
    - 20 -

  The TriCentennial
  Summer

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    - 4 -
    - 5 -
    - 6 -
    - 7 -
    - 8 -
    - 9 -
    - 10 -
    - 11 -
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    - 13 -
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    - 15 -
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  The Last Dancer
  2078 Gregorian
  DateLine: November 30, 2076

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    - 2 -
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    - 5 -




The Last Dancer
A Tale of the Continuing Time
There are no longer “dancers,” the possessed. The cleavage of men into actors 
and spectators is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with heroes who 
live for us and whom we punish… We have metamorphised from a mad body dancing on 
hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark.
—Jim Morrison
Prolog: The Dancer
^ » 
In the last hour of sunlight the Dancer fled through the forest covering the 
base of the mountains.
The trees were tall, emaciated things of some pale wood, with dull, silver-white 
leaves. They spread themselves thinly but evenly, and in the shadows of 
approaching night the Dancer could see no more than fifteen or twenty paces 
ahead at any moment. The winds blew cold, growing colder, dropping down below 
freezing even before the sun had set. The Dancer barely noticed except to 
wonder, briefly, if it might in some way slow the Shield who pursued him.
If the Shield was Marah, perhaps. But the Dancer suspected Marah was dead, and 
if so, the Shield pursuing him was Dvan. Dvan might well notice the cold; he was 
no Dancer.
But he would not permit it to stop him.
The Dancer ran faster as the slope of the ground began to rise, whipcord muscles 
moving gracefully beneath the sheath of his skin.
One way or another it would all be over soon.
From behind him came a shrill scream, the cry of the kitjan. Closer than it had 
been. The Dancer’s neural system, vastly more sensitive than any normal human’s, 
registered a twinge of pain. The kitjan was a terrifying weapon; the Dancer’s 
companions, four of the eight, had died in agony at its touch, and if the Shield 
chasing him got much closer he would be the fifth. He picked up speed, pushed 
his amazing body to its fullest, demanding more speed, and getting it. He wove 
through the shadowed trees, pushing aside the barrier of the cold night air. His 
breath came smoothly, drew the air, the life-giving oxygen, through his 
nostrils, warming it, and then deep into his lungs. The trees thinned around him 
as he moved higher up the mountainside, and the slope grew steeper. Now and 
again as he climbed he used his hands to help himself along.
Above the cover of the trees, the huge chain of mountains became visible again. 
He moved upward through a long ravine, the sides of the ravine rising away on 
either side of him. It was shadowed here, but not shadowed enough; from nearly 
any point outside the thickest part of the forest, the Dancer would be visible 
now. This was the point of greatest danger, where, for long moments, he would be 
in plain view.
A lucky shot; at that distance it could be nothing else. The kitjan whiplash 
touched the Dancer, held him for the merest instant. Nerves fired at random; 
every superbly trained muscle in the Dancer’s body spasmed at once. He fell in 
midstride and struck the ground hard, rolling limply, tumbling back down-slope 
in complete loss of control.
He ended up in a crevice beneath an overhanging, ice-scoured boulder. The Dancer 
lay on the cold hard ground, fighting the unconsciousness that crept in around 
him. He monitored his heart, found it had ceased beating at the kitjan’s touch. 
He restarted it, inspected its operation briefly to ensure that it would 
continue beating unattended. Spasms ripped the muscles of his abdomen, made 
breathing impossible. The Dancer concentrated on the abdominal muscles, and well 
before he was in danger of losing consciousness from anoxia had regained control 
of his breath. His eyesight cleared slowly of its own accord. The Dancer lay on 
the frozen ground, waiting. The kitjan screamed once, twice, while he waited 
there. The first shot came nowhere near him; the Shield had not seen him clearly 
when he fell. The next shot came closer, sent another wash of wracking pain 
across the Dancer’s frame; more of the unlikely luck that had felled him in the 
first place.
It was dark now. Once, long ago, before the Dancers had learned to control the 
temperature of their bodies, that lack of visible light would have meant little; 
the Shield saw body heat as well as any Dancer. Now that darkness might well 
make the difference between life and death. Lying motionless at the base of the 
boulders, looking down the mountain, the Dancer saw the first flicker of motion 
among the thinning trees, of the Shield closing in. The Dancer let his heartbeat 
slow, let the blood move sluggishly through his veins. He felt it first in his 
hands, as his body temperature dropped slowly toward freezing, toward the 
ambient temperature of the world around him. At last he moved, rolled carefully 
into a crouching position. He could not feel his extremities well. He moved 
cautiously now, not certain how close the Shield might be, up through the 
ravine, through what little cover existed above the tree line.
To the cave.
There was little enough inside besides the cache of hardware from the ship. The 
cave was small, and even though the Dancer had not been there in a very long 
time he found the device he needed quickly: a key meant to be held in the palm 
of a man’s hand.
In the darkness the Dancer felt for the studs on the surface of the key, and 
moved his thumb to cover the oval stud which would bring him safety.
Behind him, at the entrance to the cave, Gi’Tbad’Eovad’Dvan said quietly, 
“Good-bye, Sedon.”
The kitjan found him while Dvan was still speaking. The Dancer never heard his 
name uttered. In the moment of his death, as the air left his lungs in a 
desperate, convulsive scream, the Dancer’s thumb spasmed on the stud controlling 
the stasis bubble.
They were up above the tree line; Gi’Tbad’Eovad’Dvan unslung the ancient laser 
from across his back, and with it set the side of the rock face near him to 
glowing. He sat outside the entrance to the cave, with the mirror-surfaced 
stasis bubble at his back, and waited. In the hours before morning it grew 
deadly cold from the arctic wind coming down off the nearby glaciers. Dvan 
shivered so badly that even with his glowing rock, lased regularly to a cherry 
red, he was not certain he would survive the night. His clothing was cured 
leather inlaid with fur; crude, warm enough most of the time, but perhaps not 
for tonight.
He did not sleep that night. He wasted no time thinking about the Dancer; Sedon 
was dead. The stasis bubble might postpone the moment of death, but Dvan was 
content that his work was done. The sort of medical technology necessary to save 
a Dancer touched at close range by the kitjan existed nowhere on this planet, 
and had not for a long, long time.
The night wore on forever. Once Dvan nearly slept, but found himself jerking 
awake to the conviction that blazing red eyes hovered out in the darkness beyond 
the glowing slab of stone, watching him—the red-furred beast that had led him to 
Sedon, the spirit sent by the Nameless One—but when he shook himself fully awake 
the eyes were gone.
When dawn finally came, the morning sun lighting the peaks of the mountains 
around him, Dvan looked around, fixing the place in memory, the relationships of 
the peaks to one another. It took some time, imprinting the image into deep 
memory, but at length he was satisfied; though eons might pass between visits, 
he would know this place again.
After a while he got up and stretched to relieve his stiffness, and headed back 
down the mountain.
Thirty-seven thousand years passed.




Interlude:
2062-2069
Gregorian
- 1 -
« ^ » 
On July 3, 2062, on a night of nightmares that would in years and centuries to 
follow become a part of human mythology, at the Eastgate Hotel in mid-Manhattan, 
two French Peaceforcers in black patrol fatigues held vigil, deployed at 
opposite ends of an otherwise empty lobby. The junior officer, Maurice 
Charbonneau, sat in one corner on the hotel’s carpeted floor, autoshot covering 
the entrance to the hotel. Outside, on the opposite side of the street, he could 
see a pair of wrecked cars burning in the fierce rain. A car came down out of 
the sky as he watched, blossoming into flames as it struck an apartment complex 
across the way. The shock wave of the explosion rattled the long glassite panels 
that faced the street.
Maurice sat and watched Nils Logrissen walk up and down before the entrance to 
the hotel. Logrissen, a terrorist of the Erisian Claw, was the only man 
Charbonneau had ever killed. Occasionally Logrissen’s body stumbled and then 
jerked back up again like a marionette on strings. Logrissens bulging, 
dead-man’s eyes were fixed on Maurice, never left him except once; when the car 
struck the building across the street, Logrissen turned and watched the accident 
for a while.
Charbonneau was grateful for the respite. He was trying to pretend that 
everything that had happened in the last few hours was part of some particularly 
unpleasant sensable he had made the mistake of playing. (A sensable where you’re 
the star, the voice whispered. Right.) It hadn’t worked yet, but perhaps that 
was because he wasn’t trying hard enough.
Charbonneau was deathly afraid that Logrissen was getting up his nerve to come 
inside, and if that happened Charbonneau was not certain what he would do.
At the other end of the lobby Charbonneau’s superior officer, Peace Keeping 
Force Sergeant Georges D’Argentan, paced restlessly back and forth in front of 
the maglev hits, chain-smoking, his multifrequency combat laser held loosely in 
one hand. With every few steps he left the carpet and crossed onto the tile area 
immediately before the maglev. It was the only sound in the echoing emptiness of 
the lobby: the clicking of the boots, followed by silence, followed by boots, 
followed by silence. The rhythm of it had grown so comforting, so predictable, 
that Charbonneau was startled when it ceased. He glanced over at Sergeant 
D’Argentan, saw the older Peaceforcer standing motionless, finger touching a 
point immediately below his right ear.
D’Argentan stood still while listening in on the command channel. Finally he 
shook himself slightly, resumed his pacing. Maurice Charbonneau was not certain 
that the voice in his head was real; his father, dead these fifteen years, had 
been talking to him for the last hour, ever since the Castanaveras telepaths had 
struck out at the world around them, at the United Nations Peace Keeping Force 
that was trying to destroy them. After a bit Charbonneau touched his own 
earphone. Sergeant? Is that you?
There was a moment’s silence before D’Argentan spoke, and Charbonneau could 
guess at his thoughts. Councilor Carson had actually ordered that Maurice be 
sedated; D’Argentan had ignored him, and now he was rethinking the wisdom of the 
decision. Yes, of course it’s me. Your father is dead, Maurice. SO IS Logrissen. 
They have been for a long time.
Charbonneau knew better than to argue with Sergeant D’Argentan. He was sane 
enough, even yet, to know that he was quite mad at the moment. Charbonneau 
remembered burying his father, remembered killing Logrissen more clearly yet. 
Yes, Sergeant, I’ll try to remember that.
I’ve just been told that Space Force is ready. Secretary General Amnier has 
approved Elite Sergeant Vance’s request; Vance is going to order a thermonuclear 
strike on the Chandler Complex.
Charbonneau digested that. So they’re dead, then.
SO, THEY’RE DEAD, THEN. ALL THE TELEPATHS ARE TRAPPED INSIDE THE COMPLEX.
Across the length of the hotel lobby, D’Argentan nodded.
SO THEY SAY.
Charbonneau clutched his autoshot more tightly.
EXCEPT FOR THE TWO CARSON’S GOT UPSTAIRS.
JUST CHILDREN, said D’Argentan sharply. THEY DON’T HAVE THE POWER YET. ONLY THE 
ADULTS DO, AND THE ADULTS ARE SOON DEAD.
YES, SERGEANT.
At that moment, thirty-five floors above them, Carl Castanaveras had just 
finished killing the Peaceforcer guard stationed on the hotel’s roof. As Maurice 
Charbonneau turned back to continue his observation of Nils Logrissen, the 
oldest and deadliest telepath on Earth was riding down in the maglev to 
Unification Councilor Jerril Carson’s room, to the eighth floor, autoshot in one 
hand, Series II Excalibur laser rifle in the other. Coming for his children.

Denice Castanaveras had ceased crying only a few minutes ago. They were not 
tears of fear, but of anger. She had passed into a place beyond fear, into a 
rage so vast and elemental it bore only a passing resemblance to any emotion she 
had ever experienced before.
She was nine years old and she was going to kill Jerril Carson if given any 
opportunity at all.
She sat on the floor with her twin: two black-haired Caucasian children with 
pale skin and green eyes. Both she and David had their hands snakechained behind 
their backs, with tape covering their mouths. Her feet were free, as were 
David’s; they could have stood if allowed. A few hours prior David had made the 
mistake of trying. A bruise on the side of his face was slowly turning purple; 
Councilor Carson had knocked David back down to the floor without even looking 
at him.
She sat with her rage, not thinking. She did not understand how the situation 
she was in had come to pass; did not comprehend the details of the conflict 
between Carson and her father, how it had come to be that the personal animosity 
between Carson and her father had grown into a conflict which had, this night, 
pitted the Castanaveras telepaths against the entire armed might of the 
Unification.
Denice did not understand, and did not care.
She sat and thought about killing him.
Councilor Carson clutched an autoshot in his right hand; he hardly paid 
attention to the twins. Denice watched him, sitting in front of a huge holofield 
that showed an image of their home, of the Chandler Complex. He had turned off 
the audio; except for the whistling sound of the wind and the drum of the rain 
it was utterly silent inside the hotel room.
The image of the Chandler Complex vanished suddenly, was replaced with a split 
field; the Chandler Complex in one half of the field, a shot from the hotel’s 
security holocams in the other. The security holocams showed the long stretch of 
corridor outside, and the two Peaceforcers who guarded it. One of the 
Peaceforcers stood in front of a bank of elevators, covering the entrance with 
an autoshot; the other lay on his stomach at one end of the corridor, covering 
his partner with a variable laser.
After the long silence the sound of the Peaceforcer’s voice rang shockingly 
loud. “We’ve lost contact with the roof.”
Carson stood with startling abruptness, turned and glared wildly at the twins. 
Denice met his eyes for a long moment and returned the glare: I’m going to kill 
you. The Gift had not touched her yet, and Carson was as deaf to thought as any 
normal human; still he froze for a second under the sheer physical impact of her 
rage. He shook himself visibly then and crossed the distance between them in two 
strides, pulled the twins to their feet and turned them to face the door. He 
stood behind them holding the autoshot with his right hand, holding their snaked 
hands behind them with his left. Where his hand gripped her Denice could feel 
Carson shaking.
The holofield moved with Carson, came to hover in front of them, a meter off to 
the right so that Carson’s view of the door was not obscured.
For a very long time nothing happened. Twenty seconds. Thirty—
In the holofield, Denice watched the maglev doors curl open. The Peaceforcer 
with the autoshot stood in front of the door, autoshot at waist level, and began 
firing the instant the doors had opened sufficiently. Denice heard the boom of 
the autoshot through the hotel room’s closed door. The angle of the holocams 
prevented their seeing the inside of the elevator; suddenly a flash of purple 
light came up off the elevator’s floor, and the Peaceforcer stiffened, 
ionization corona crackling around him; the black uniform he wore burst into 
flames and he fell.
Councilor Jerril Carson whispered, “Shit.”
On the right side of the field, the pale, elegant image of the Chandler Complex 
glowed white in the rain.
An arm holding an autoshot extruded from inside the maglev, fired twice off to 
the right, down the hallway in the direction of Councilor Carson’s room. The 
Peaceforcer on the floor to the left of the holofield fired then, and Denice 
watched the maser’s ionization trail track across the hand and the autoshot 
holding it. What happened next came so quickly that Denice almost missed it; the 
injured man’s right hand darted out into the corridor, grabbed the autoshot and 
flipped it over to the left and fired twice again. Denice saw both shots strike 
the remaining Peaceforcer, saw his head and shoulders literally dissolve in a 
spray of flesh and shot. The maglev doors started to close—
—her father lunged forward, into the hallway, firing again as he moved. Twice 
more he shot the crumpled form on the hallway floor, fifteen meters away. The 
Peaceforcer’s body twitched and came apart some more.
Jerril Carson said softly, “Oh God no.”
Carl Castanaveras struggled to his feet, a death’s-head grin plastered across 
his features. His left arm, cooked by the master burst, hung dead and limp at 
his side. He staggered as he walked down the hallway, and stopped just before 
reaching the door to Carson’s room.
There was a moment’s silence.
The door exploded inward as though a giant fist had smashed into it.
At that instant a flash of bright light appeared in the holofield, lit the hotel 
room for an instant in unreal colors.
Carl Castanaveras appeared in the doorway, a grinning black-haired apparition 
with emerald eyes—and hesitated at the sight of his children standing as a 
living shield immediately before Carson.
In the holofield that had moments before shown an image of the Chandler Complex, 
a mushroom cloud was slowly climbing into the night sky over south Manhattan.
Jerril Carson’s autoshot blast took Carl Castanaveras square in the chest, 
picked him up off his feet and slammed him backward out against the wall of the 
hotel corridor. Denice’s father fired in midair, the beam of light from his 
Series II Excalibur cutting through the tiny space between Denice and her 
brother, reaching past them to slice Jerril Carson’s head in half.
Carl struck the wall hard. He slumped, sliding down to the floor, leaving a long 
trail of blood on the wall. Next to her Denice saw David on the ground, bringing 
his bound hands under his feet and around to the front. David ripped the tape 
off his mouth, and in a voice rusty with disuse said, “Turn around.” Denice knew 
what was coming; she felt Carson’s dead hand being placed up against her wrists, 
the lifeless thumb being pushed against the snakechain until the snakechain 
recognized it and released her. The sudden freedom of movement sent spasms of 
pain through her shoulders. She worked the tape free from her mouth with hands 
grown numb from lack of circulation.
Their father’s thoughts touched them both. David, get the lasers.
Her twin vanished down the corridor, came back holding the laser with which 
their father had been shot. It seemed to be an immense effort for Carl to 
release the laser clutched in his own hand. Take it, Denice.
Denice bent, scooped the laser up off the floor quickly, before her nerve could 
fail her. Her father’s thoughts were faint, unlike anything she had ever felt 
from him before. Fading. Listen. There’s a Peaceforcer downstairs, maybe two, 
and I can’t kill them, so you have to.
David nodded. “We will, Father.”
They’ll hesitate when they see you. They’ll hesitate before they’ll shoot 
children.
Denice was aware of the tears tracking down her cheeks, but her voice was 
steady. “We won’t hesitate, Daddy.”
Carl sagged back against the wall of the corridor. Good. Remember that you’re 
tougher than they are. The word reached out to them, burned itself into the 
depths of Denice’s mind with all the strength of the dying man’s pain and 
lifelong rage: Better.
David nodded. “We’ll remember.”
Good. Carl’s head sagged back against the wall. Go.
David rose and punched for the maglev. Denice hugged her father suddenly, 
fiercely, felt the pain that rolled through him at the contact. Blood covered 
her when she let go. “Good-bye, Daddy.” She rose and ran to the maglev when the 
doors opened.
Carl Castanaveras’s last thought reached out to them after the doors to the 
maglev had rolled shut upon them. Kill the fuckers.
As the maglev descended, David Castanaveras said grimly, “We will.”

I’ve lost touch with upstairs.
It took Charbonneau a long moment to understand what D’Argentan had said to him. 
His father was growing angrier and angrier over Maurice’s insistence that he was 
dead; Logrissen had ceased walking and now simply stood motionless at the 
entrance to the hotel, staring in at Maurice. Charbonneau could see Logrissen’s 
lower intestines, hanging out of the hole Charbonneau’s autoshot had made in him 
back in the summer of ‘59. Finally Maurice said, Sergeant? Did you say 
something?
<Sigh.> Yes. I’ve lost touch with Conseiller Carson.
Want me to go up and see what’s happened?
Sergeant D’Argentan hesitated, then said reluctantly, No. No, don’t do that. 
I’ll go. Watch the door, make sure nobody enters the hotel. Maurice nodded, and 
D’Argentan turned to the maglevs.
The door to the center maglev flexed slightly before D’Argentan had even touched 
the pressure point that controlled it.
The door curled open.
Maurice watched D’Argentan jerk as though he had touched a live wire, one hand 
still reaching for the pressure point, as the converging beams reached him and 
his uniform burst into flames.
They came out into the lobby slowly, cautiously, stepping across Sergeant 
D’Argentan’s burning body. As Maurice had heard, they were mere children; it was 
the first time Maurice had seen them since their kidnaping. Maurice sat with his 
autoshot, watching the genegineered telepath children move across the lobby, 
toward the entrance. The boy had his laser trained on Maurice, and Maurice 
smiled at him. The girl was very pretty, but she did not look at Maurice after 
the first quick glance to make sure her brother had him covered. Maurice said 
politely, in heavily accented English, “Hello.”
The boy hesitated at the door after the girl had ventured outward, onto the 
slidewalk in front of the hotel. For the first time Maurice seriously considered 
the possibility that Sergeant D’Argentan had told him the truth; neither of the 
children seemed to notice Nils Logrissen’s grinning corpse standing just outside 
the hotel’s entrance.
The girl turned back. “David, come on!”
David Castanaveras took one slow, halting step toward Maurice Charbonneau. 
Maurice smiled at the boy one more time as David brought the maser down to focus 
on the center of Maurice’s chest.
“Hello,” Maurice said again. “I am Maurice Charbonneau.”
David Castanaveras whispered; Maurice had to strain to hear him. “Hello. My name 
is David Castanaveras, and this is for my father.”
Then for the barest instant Maurice felt a pain so great that he thought for a 
moment it was something else entirely—the touch of God, perhaps, calling him 
home. And perhaps it was. The maser beam swept across him and then there was no 
pain, nor anything else, forever and ever again, amen.
The twins ran out into the night, into the riots.
Into the first hour of the Troubles.




- 2 -
« ^ » 
I am the Name Storyteller.
On July 3, 2062 of the Gregorian Calendar, the United Nations Peace Keeping 
Force, at the command of PKF Elite Sergeant Mohammed Vance, used tactical 
thermonuclear weapons to destroy a group of genetically engineered telepaths 
living at the Chandler Complex in lower Manhattan. Over 240 telepathic children 
and adults died in nuclear fire.
In the battle preceding their destruction, the telepaths sent better than a 
quarter of the population of the state of New York into permanent insanity; 
caused the two years of the Troubles, as legal and social systems throughout 
metropolitan areas broke down beyond repair. The old order could not be 
resurrected; the Peaceforcers created the Patrol Sectors, and left the vast bulk 
of what had once been New York City to become the lethal, desolate area known as 
the Fringe.
Three children from the Chandler Complex survived the destruction of the 
telepaths. Two of them were the nine-year-old twins David and Denice 
Castanaveras, the children of Carl Castanaveras and Jany McConnell.
The third child was not a telepath. He was a webdancer.
A Player named Trent.
Seven years passed before Denice saw him again.




- 3 -
« ^ » 
On August 13, 2069, Denice Castanaveras lay in the darkness with Trent. Earlier 
that day she and Trent’s oldest friend, Jimmy Ramirez, had rescued Trent from 
the PKF Detention Center in the middle of Capitol City.
She was sixteen years old.
Through the windows of their thirty-second-floor room at the Red Line Hotel, 
Denice watched the Peaceforcers hunt for Trent. Thousands of PKF AeroSmiths flew 
through the sky above the city; tens of thousands of spyeyes. In the distance 
the AeroSmiths and spyeyes merged into a dancing swarm of scarlet fireflies, 
highlighted by the bright white pinpricks of their searchlights.
They were both genies, the products of the late Suzanne Montignet’s brilliance 
in genetic engineering; but even between them the differences outweighed the 
similarities. For Denice the scene outside was suffused with the deep glow of 
infrared light from the Peaceforcer night scopes; but not for Trent. As the 
night grew colder moisture condensed at the window, smearing the bright sharp 
lights together with the dim glow of the infrared.
She stirred, felt Trent’s arms tighten around her. “When will you go?”
His voice was so quiet she could barely make it out. “Soon. Not yet.”
“And where?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Her thoughts were slow, sluggish, in the moments before sleep. “Okay.”
“They need to follow me,” Trent said distantly. “They need to be drawn away from 
you, and if they’re looking for me they’re not looking for you. If I die it’s 
just me. If you die—then they’ve won. David’s probably dead, Denice. If you die, 
there’s nothing left of what they were, and Amnier, Eddore, Vance, all of them, 
they’ve won at last.” He stirred restlessly, sat up against the bed’s headboard. 
Denice curled up against him, left her head resting in his lap, staring up in 
the darkness toward the ceiling, seeing only an emptiness so deep there was no 
end to it.
“Where, Trent?”
“Free Luna, I think,” he said finally, “or else Mars, or the Belt City States. 
Somewhere outside Peaceforcer control. They won’t stop looking for me on Earth. 
I don’t think they’ll ever stop looking for me now.”
She felt a distant twinge of pain, suppressed it almost without noticing. This 
is going to hurt; let it hurt later. When he’s gone. “I think you’re right,” she 
said at last. “I’m so sorry, but I think you are. I wish we hadn’t rescued you.”
You both panicked. He did not say it aloud, and for that small kindness she was 
grateful. “It’s okay. Make me a promise, Denice?”
“Done.”
“Don’t you want to know what it is?”
Jimmy, of course. “I do know.”
“Oh.” After a moment he nodded. “All right. But don’t let him know you’re 
watching out for him. He wouldn’t like that.”
“I know. You’re sure Bird will be okay with Jodi Jodi?”
“They were doing fine together, in the middle of the Fringe, when I met them. 
They’ll do fine in the Patrol Sectors when I’m gone.”
Denice inhaled slowly, brought the oxygen deep inside. It was one of the few 
things her father had had time to teach her before he died; the breathing 
exercises that brought relaxation, peace. “Be careful,” she whispered into the 
darkness. “You’re all I have left now.”
In the brief while before sleep took her, she found herself with him, among his 
thoughts, in with the never-ending flicker of imagery that was the internal 
universe of the man the System would come to know as Trent the Uncatchable. A 
flaw in genegineer Suzanne Montignet’s otherwise brilliant work had left him 
without the Gift he had always thought his birthright; and only a few months 
after his learning that he was not one of the telepaths with whom he had been 
raised, the telepaths themselves had been destroyed at the order of PKF Elite 
Mohammed Vance. He was a wounded person, damaged early and badly by the world 
around him.
As she had been. But I healed, Denice thought drowsily. He never did. It did not 
even occur to her that she might be wrong about either herself or him. Pain 
touched her again, muffled only slightly by the approach of stillness. He 
doesn’t even know how much he loves me. And he doesn’t believe me when I tell 
him.
Sometime after that she slept. An image stayed with her as she descended into 
the darkness. An image of her, at the age of nine, of the way Trent had seen her 
then when he was eleven. They were together in the park across the street from 
the Chandler Complex, on a hazy day in spring, and she was sleeping with her 
head in his lap, long black hair falling half over her features as she slept. 
That was the image that she remembered when she awoke the next morning, the 
memory that stayed with her that night, the memory that stayed with her through 
the long years to follow.
The memory of how he loved her.
When Denice Castanaveras awoke the following morning Trent was gone. He had not 
awakened her when he left. She found a single white rose on the table at the 
side of the bed, and a note on the bedside systerm, hovering in the systerm’s 
holofield.
The note said, Don’t worry. It’s going to be all right.




Summer: 2075
They had themselves a party
To wash away their cares
They busted up the furniture
Said they would take back what was theirs
Said they would take back what was theirs
—Mahliya Kutura, Independence Day
- 1 -
« ^ » 
“Jasmine.”
The voice echoed through the cool empty gym like God calling from a cheap pay 
phone.
The woman who called herself Jasmine Martinez slowly exhaled the breath she had 
been holding, released her toes, and sat up. She had been doing stretches for 
the muscles in the backs of her thighs, sitting with her legs straight in front 
of her, grasping the instep of each foot with her hands, and leaning forward 
until she was completely doubled over. The walls of the huge gym were mirrored 
and out of the corner of her eye she watched her image in the mirror: a 
black-haired woman of average height, wearing nothing but a pair of shimmering 
blue shorts; bright green eyes in a vaguely Asian face, with muscle definition 
so startlingly detailed she could have served as an anatomy model.
The holo wavering a meter or so away from her held the severe image of Alaya 
Gyurtrag, the witch who managed Goddess Home’s business transactions. At 6:30 
a.m. Alaya was already dressed for a day at the office, in a conservative and 
expensive raw silk business suit that would not have been out of place for the 
Mayor of Capitol City, but which struck Jasmine as pretentious for the City 
Manager of a township located in Sunland, California.
Jasmine wiped a drop of sweat off the tip of her nose and said after a moment, 
“Yes?”
“You’re leaving us today?”
You’ve only had it on your calendar for four months. “Yes.”
“Could you come see me after dinner, dear?”
“Certainly. Anything else?”
The witch smiled at Jasmine. It was clearly an effort. “No. That’s all.”
Jasmine nodded and returned to her workout without saying anything further. She 
did not like Alaya—Alaya was in fact one of the reasons she was leaving—and saw 
no reason Alaya should not know it.
At 6:30 in the morning she had already been working out for an hour. She had 
five hours left to go, and would break off then only because she had 
preparations to make before taking her leave of Goddess Home. She felt she could 
have kept moving, pushing against her limits all day without stopping or 
slowing.
Only four years prior she had been making a living as a professional dancer; 
even then she had not been in such incredible condition.
That she was not human did not bother Jasmine Martinez in the slightest. But 
sometimes she wondered what her limits were, where she would find them.
Sometimes she scared herself.
After the stretches she did weight work, then pushups, and then situps. At 7:15 
two witches Jasmine knew slightly came in, warmed up too quickly, and started 
running on the padded quarter-kilometer track that ran around the gym’s 
perimeter. Jasmine ignored them; after finishing her situps she waited sixty 
seconds for her heartbeat to slow, then came to her feet and strapped a pair of 
fifteen-kilo weights to each wrist. She stood motionless a second, thinking. She 
considered Kutura, and then rejected it; Mahliya Kutura was her favorite 
musician, but Kutura was too slow: she wanted to move.
Jasmine said aloud, “Command: The Politics of Dance.”
The music, the work of a Brazilian artist who had been dead for fifteen years 
before Jasmine had even been born, came up slowly enough, as slowly as anything 
by Kutura. Jasmine closed her eyes, let the sound wash over her, the slow beat 
of the drums, the rising saxophone, and the sax rose and rose, higher and 
higher, and despite herself Jasmine felt her breath quickening in anticipation 
of the coming moment—
—the music broke like a wave, enveloped Jasmine inside a wall of sound. She took 
a slow step forward, arms unfolding like a flower greeting the sun, pivoted, 
lifted a foot and turned, spun, brought her hands and the weights back in toward 
herself, the spin whipped her to a dizzying speed, and then the drums came back, 
faster now, and faster, and Jasmine Martinez danced into the music, brought the 
music into herself, and ceased to be aware of the world, of the witches who had 
stopped running to watch her, and with the music holding and enveloping her 
moved and moved and moved and moved.
Until she could move no more.

Darkness descended around Jasmine as she walked to Alaya’s office.
She wore traveling clothes: a black jumpsuit with silver zippers, and a pair of 
soft gray boots that came to midcalf. Everything she owned in the world was 
packed into the black satchel in her right hand: a makeup key, changes of 
clothing, her InfoNet link. Hardcopy of two letters, unsigned, from Trent the 
Uncatchable.
That Thursday evening was warm, with a gentle summer breeze; the sky to the 
south glowed slightly with the lights of Los Angeles. White and yellow 
glowfloats bobbed over the streets of Goddess Home, came flickering on one by 
one as Jasmine walked the two kilometers to Alaya’s office. Goddess Home was a 
small place, a feminist witch’s enclave of eight thousand. Men—some witches 
themselves—were welcome to visit, and Jasmine saw a few on the streets as she 
walked; but they were not supposed to spend the night and were not allowed to 
live among the witches.
For most of the witches the exclusion of men was not an inconvenience. Many were 
lesbians, and those who were not often found the lack of enforced day-to-day 
contact with men refreshing.
From her handheld a voice issued, the voice of Ralf the Wise and Powerful: 
“Flight confirmed. I had to kill a web angel at the Dallas changeover; stay out 
of the InfoNet while passing through the Dallas exchange. Otherwise your journey 
should be safe.”
Jasmine knew a response was not expected of her, and so did not give one. 
Indeed, Ralf’s message barely altered the flow of her thoughts, impinged only 
slightly upon her melancholy awareness of the home she was leaving.
Goddess Home was different from any other place Jasmine had ever known. There 
were no slidewalks, and no powered vehicles of any sort except for those 
employed by the three witches crippled beyond even the reach of modern medicine. 
In her adult life it was the first place Jasmine had ever lived where she had 
felt any sense of community. Four women greeted her by name as she walked 
through the streets to see Alaya Gyurtrag, and everywhere women were gathered in 
groups: at the town’s only park, at one of the town’s five sidewalk cafes. Their 
voices floated at the limits of comprehensibility, hundreds of women, a few male 
voices: the sounds of home.
I’m going to miss this.
The thought came unbidden, closely followed:
But it is not safe to stay.

“I’m catching the Bullet out of Burbank at nine-fifteen. If we could make this 
quick, I’d appreciate it.”
“Certainly,” said Alaya warmly. “Have a seat.”
Jasmine seated herself in the indicated chair, travel bag between her feet. She 
was distantly amused to note that the chair left her eyes about eight 
centimeters below the level of Alaya’s, who was not a tall woman. Alaya had 
changed from the business suit she had been wearing that morning; now she was 
dressed almost as casually as Jasmine, in a pair of yellow shorts and a white 
silk blouse. She was barefooted on the pale blue shag rug of her office.
The office reflected the personality its occupant wished to project. A single 
power crystal hung on a solid gold chain over the doorway, and another crystal, 
somewhat larger, sat on a small stand at the side of Alaya’s desk. The desk 
itself was antique American, real redwood, over 150 years of age and hand 
polished on every surface until it glowed a dusky shade of crimson beneath the 
office’s pleasant yellow sunpaint. The walls were hung with neo-Impressionist 
paintings, dating largely from the 1920s: women with parasols at the beach, a 
man on a bicycle, two children sharing an ice cream cone, all done in warm 
yellows and blues and greens.
“What can I do for you, Alaya?”
Alaya Gyurtrag sat with her hands folded before her. Her silver hair was pulled 
back from her face and hung in a single long braid down her back. Bright blue 
eyes fixed themselves upon Jasmine. “We’re going to miss you, you know that.”
“So I’ve been told. But between us, Alaya, you and I have never been close, and 
neither of us is going to miss the other. So what can I do for you?”
Alaya chuckled with what seemed to Jasmine genuine amusement. “Your point is 
well made. What you can do for me, Jasmine, is—relieve my curiosity about a 
business matter.”
“Oh? In what way?”
“Why are you leaving us?”
The blunt question gave Jasmine a moment’s pause.
“Really,” Alaya continued, “you could not choose a worse time for it if you 
tried. July the Fourth is only six days away; the Independence Day riots are due 
to begin shortly. Goddess Home is safe; we haven’t had Independence Day riots in 
our history. And you’re not the only one leaving us; we’ve had resignations pick 
up twelve percent this year.”
“Twelve percent?”
Alaya nodded. “I haven’t publicized the figure. Next month I will complete my 
first anniversary as City Manager, and women are leaving Goddess Home, for the 
first time, faster than they are joining. And I know it’s my fault but I don’t 
know why.”
Jasmine considered. “Many of the reasons I’m leaving are personal, Alaya. But 
there are two I will share with you. My finances are poor. I haven’t worked 
except at community tasks in over two years, and my savings are nearly gone. The 
two ways I am capable of making a living—as a dancer and as a martial arts 
instructor—are inapplicable to Goddess Home. The population is too small to 
support a dance troupe—”
“We tried to get you to teach a class in self-defense.”
“You don’t need it,” said Jasmine patiently. “As I said at the time. Violence 
within Goddess Home is rare. Those of you who venture outside are handicapped by 
unfamiliarity with violence and insufficient time for training. If I were to 
teach the women here to defend themselves, they would still, most likely, be 
hurt in any encounter where they were required to defend themselves. The 
willingness to hurt an opponent, to damage him, is more important than simply 
knowing how; and that willingness is something I can’t teach. And I’m not sure I 
wish to. Personal Protection Systems, expensive though they are, are a better 
investment of Goddess Home’s time and Credit. You just don’t go outside that 
often.” Jasmine shrugged. “You’ve heard this before. The fact is that in Los 
Angeles, in any major city, I can make a living at both of my trades. In Goddess 
Home I cannot make a living at either.
“The second reason I’m willing to share with you is simple. When I joined 
Goddess Home, Marta Tracing held your job. She was a quiet person, and I found 
her easy to get along with. Since Marta passed away, intolerance over 
ideological purity has grown to the point where I am no longer comfortable here. 
I don’t think I need to be more explicit.”
Alaya nodded slowly. “You’ve evaded this question before, but we are alone, and 
you are leaving—what do you truly think of Wicca?”
Jasmine sighed. “Why does it matter?”
“Wicca is—” Alaya’s frustration was apparent. “It’s the entire point of Goddess 
Home. It’s the reason this town exists. If you’re not here because of Wicca, why 
are you here?” She paused. “Or, if you like, why were you here?”
“I didn’t say that I did not find Wicca attractive. It is—a life-affirming 
system of beliefs. Theologically it’s no sillier than Christianity; it seems so 
at times only because it doesn’t have two thousand years of ornate 
rationalization to fall back upon. Emotionally it’s at least as healthy as any 
other religion I’m familiar with. The rituals are less elaborate than those of 
the older religions, but that, too, is part of the charm. But—Alaya, when you 
make the doctrine, the detail of ritual, more important than the connection to 
Deity that it is supposed to serve, you are in the process of turning Wicca into 
something very much like the patriarchal, authoritarian religions you detest. I 
don’t believe in your Goddess, Alaya. I also don’t believe in the Christian God. 
I believe in something, because I’ve felt it in my own life. When I was younger 
I used to think it was what everybody else called God, and for a little while I 
did think it might be what Wicca calls the Goddess. But today I admit I don’t 
know what it is, that I have no words for it. And when you insist that what I 
feel is—or should be—what you have written down on paper, or what you speak in 
ritual, you lose me, Alaya. And a lot of other people, apparently.”
Alaya bit her lower lip. “Thank you for your frankness.”
“I hope it’s of some help.”
“Well. So much for that.” Alaya dismissed the subject with a visible effort. 
When she spoke again she was clearly nervous. “There was something else I wanted 
to talk to you about, if you have a moment. I’ll make it quick.”
“Please. I have less than half an hour to make the Bullet.”
“I’m curious as to how you came to join us, three years ago.”
“I believe it’s in the records.”
“Very little of it is in the records, Jasmine; Marta left us two rather terse 
paragraphs explaining it as a matter of personal obligation. A ‘Sieur McGee did 
some work for us about ten years ago—the nature of that work isn’t in the 
records either. Then three years ago he petitioned to have you admitted for 
residency in Goddess Home. I think you may be the only woman who has ever lived 
here whose petition was presented by a man.”
Jasmine nodded. “Marta said she thought I was.”
Alaya waited expectantly.
Jasmine let the silence stretch, smiling. When twenty seconds had passed she 
said softly, “My father used to do this to people. Throw silence at them and 
wait for them to start talking. It seemed so obvious when I was nine years old, 
even then I was always surprised when I saw it work.”
“But it’s not going to work on you, is it? And you’re not going to tell me how 
you came to Goddess Home.”
Jasmine shook her head. “It was a private matter between myself and ‘Sieur McGee 
and Marta. Marta is dead and I would not know how to contact Sieur McGee if my 
life depended upon it.”
Alaya nodded, hesitating, and then said abruptly, “You’re real.”
Jasmine said carefully, “I beg your pardon?”
“A lot of the women who study Wicca, who cast the spells and make the circles, 
they—” Alaya hesitated again. “A lot of them—almost all of them, damn it—are 
kidding themselves. But you’re real, you have something. I have a little bit of 
it, enough to know when a spell has worked, when a circle closes correctly. 
Sometimes I get some of what people are thinking and feeling. But when you walk 
into the same room with me—there’s a sound, except it’s not a sound, like a 
thousand bees buzzing all around me, and I can’t hear anything. People have lied 
to me when you were nearby and I couldn’t tell.”
Jasmine nodded slowly. Not counting Alaya, there were three women she had met at 
Goddess Home who had some small fragment of the Gift, some touch of real 
ability. Most of the women at Goddess Home were no more gifted than any other 
human; and the three that were, Alaya again excepted, did not seem to have made 
much productive use of their fragmentary Gift. “I know what you mean,” Jasmine 
said quietly. “I’ve felt the same in you.”
“You lie,” said Alaya without anger. “I’m no more in your league than Marien 
Lisachild is in mine. She may be the most popular psychic at Goddess Home, but 
she’s a fraud and we both know it. I’m not a fraud, but I’m not what you are, 
either.” Alaya paused. “Your eyes are green.”
Jasmine was grimly certain she knew where this was going. “So?”
“Were you born with eyes that color?”
Jasmine sat silently a long moment, letting the question hang in the air, and 
then said, “I think we’re done.”
“I don’t think so.”
Jasmine stared bleakly at the woman. “Meaning what?”
A less self-assured woman might have taken warning from the tone of her voice. 
Alaya Gyurtrag forged ahead. “Back in 2062 two genies, two of the Castanaveras, 
were kidnaped from the Chandler Complex in Manhattan, before the Complex was 
nuked by Space Force. They never found out what happened to them, to those 
children. And you’re—”
The images tore through Jasmine, the smell of Alaya’s mother, the calm and 
steady warmth of her father. Her father’s smile, the gentle reassurances in the 
face of adversity, the promise that what Alaya attempted she would be competent 
to do. The inconsolable ache at their loss, lessened only slightly with the 
passage of thirteen years, particularly the loss of the man who had taught her 
to read, who had praised her early attempts at painting, who had consoled her 
when she was twenty, after the loss of her first love—
Jasmine pulled free of the link, mildly impressed that Alaya had managed it in 
the first place. “I’m sorry, Alaya. But it wasn’t my fault.”
Alaya voice shook slightly. “My parents died during the Troubles.”
“I know, and I am sorry. But so did both of mine.”
Alaya nodded, eyes not moving from Jasmine’s and her right hand dropped below 
the edge of her desk.
Jasmine Martinez said simply, “Please don’t do this.”
Alaya licked her lips quickly. Her expression held a very good attempt at 
innocence. “Don’t do what?”
Jasmine heard the desk drawer sliding open. She exhaled, let the living air flow 
from her lungs, closed her eyes and stepped out of her body.
The room lit with a flat, grainy gray light.
In the stillness between heartbeats Jasmine Martinez moved away from her body 
and walked through the desk.
She did not recognize the make of the gun Alaya was taking from her desk drawer. 
A double-action automatic of some kind; from the size of the barrel, perhaps a 
9mm. The safety was already off. She touched the magazine, ran a finger through 
the metal and up into the chamber; fifteen shots staggered in the magazine, one 
shot in the chamber, ready to be fired.
Jasmine had no idea at all what Alaya expected to do with the weapon, and did 
not intend to wait and find out. She let go of the automatic, grasped Alaya’s 
arms just above the elbows and reached out for the glowing blue filaments of 
Alaya’s nerve network. Here, and here, she touched, quieted the flow of neurons, 
and then opened her eyes to a world of color and movement.
The gun in Alaya’s hand fell noiselessly from her nerveless hands to the surface 
of the carpet. Jasmine stared at Alaya, eyes glittering, and with the full force 
of her Gift reformed the link Alaya had attempted, and, as Alaya Gyurtrag drew 
breath to scream, Touched her soul.
Jasmine came back to herself slowly, distantly aware of tears dripping down her 
cheeks; knew as though it were something happening to someone else that she 
shook with the force of her sobs. She mourned for the parents Alaya had lost in 
the Troubles, for the slow loss of Alaya’s friends. The pain of Alaya’s 
incomprehension, that men and women alike, people she cared for, should 
misunderstand her advances, should interpret her love as interference, and her 
fear as anger. Alaya’s desperate fear that she was already too old to find the 
love she craved, that if she had not found it yet she would never find it, and 
would age alone, unloved, and friendless.
And die so.
Alaya blinked. It took a moment for her eyes to focus. When they did she looked 
at Jasmine with sudden concern. “Are you all right, dear?”
“I’m—fine,” Jasmine managed to say. A lethal headache pulsed immediately behind 
her eyes; it happened every time she used the deepest elements of the Gift. She 
gathered herself and wiped away the tears, picked up her travel bag, and stood, 
a little uncertainly. “Thank you for talking with me. I—never mind. Thank you. I 
appreciated the opportunity to know you a little better.”
A look of distant incomprehension flickered across Alaya’s features, was gone. 
Alaya said with real compassion, “I’m sorry you have to go. But it’s only normal 
for you to grieve for the life you leave behind. If Goddess Home has not been 
everything you wanted, it has still been your home.”
Jasmine stood still a beat. Then she said, simply, “Thank you,” and left.
She caught the 9:15 Bullet with twenty seconds to spare.




- 2 -
« ^ » 
At speeds that surpassed those of aircraft, the Bullet sped eastward through an 
evacuated tunnel beneath the surface of Earth.
Jasmine had paid for passage to Atlanta, Georgia. Fifteen minutes before the 
Bullet was scheduled to stop in Dallas she rose from her seat and went to the 
bathroom. In the bathroom she stripped off her jumpsuit and her boots. Standing 
naked before the mirror she flicked through the settings in her makeup key; her 
skin, tuned black to match the jumpsuit, changed colors rapidly, a brief storm 
of rainbows, and then stabilized on a dark shade of gold. Her lips and eyelids 
turned a pale golden green; a speckle of faint silver stars appeared immediately 
beneath her rather high cheekbones. Jasmine considered contact lenses for her 
eyes, decided against it—her makeup implant was almost ten years old, and she 
had never had it updated. Unlike the more recent makeup implants, her skin did 
not glow and the implant had not even touched her eyes. If she wanted to change 
the color of her eyes, contact lenses were her only option.
She shook her hair out as it changed colors to a shade of strawberry blond, then 
changed the part and tied it into a long ponytail. From her bag Jasmine withdrew 
a pair of sandals and a yellow sundress and put them on. She tapped the ID key 
on her handheld twice, waited a moment, and tapped it a third time. The handheld 
said quietly, “Which ID do you wish?”
There were three IDs in the handheld; Denice Daimara, Jasmine Martinez, and 
Erika Muller. The first was the name they had known her by in Public Labor, when 
she was nine years old; the last two identities had been programmed for her by 
Trent the Uncatchable, the last day he had ever spent on Earth, before beginning 
what newsdancers had called the Long Run.
Jasmine said softly, “Erika.”
The handheld said instantly, “Enabled.”
In Dallas the rain poured down out of the black night sky.
At Dallas Interworld Spaceport Erika Muller stopped at the Trans Planet booth, 
still slightly wet from the rain outside; the Bullet debarking station was 
separated from Spaceport Gate A-8 by thirty meters of empty space. When she 
spoke her voice had picked up a slight but noticeable New York accent. “I’m here 
to pick up my ticket. Muller, Erika.”
The ‘bot at the counter said politely, in a voice strongly reminiscent of 
sensable star Adam Selstrom, “Yes, ‘Selle Muller. Please identify.”
Erika touched her handheld to the payment strip; it lit green. Adam Selstrom’s 
voice said, “Thank you, ‘Selle Muller. Your semiballistic leaves from Gate A-11 
at one oh five a.m.; it arrives at Unification Spaceport, New York, at 
four-twelve a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Thank you for traveling with 
TransPlanet.”

Her ticket specified a window seat. Once launch boost ceased, the slim, short 
man who had been seated next to Erika Muller tried to start up a conversation. 
“What are you going to New York for, anyway? I’ve got a sales meeting myself—I 
sell highspeed molar memory products. Capitol City’s no fun but the rest of New 
York is still good for—”
The clouds beneath her were a pale ocean that nearly hid Earth from view; 
patches of blue and brown peeked through the cotton white. The curve of the 
Earth grew visible as she watched. Without looking at the man at her side Erika 
said, “I don’t want to talk to you,” and then turned her head away from him and 
looked out the window, at the sphere of Earth, the rest of the way down to New 
York.
She did not think she had been followed after leaving Goddess Home.
At least not in Realtime—and if anyone had attempted to follow her through the 
Crystal Wind, Erika thought that Ralf the Wise and Powerful would surely have 
stopped him.

At 4:48 a.m., on Friday, June 29, Erika Muller touched her handheld to the cab’s 
meter, waited for the meter light to go green, and stepped from the cab as the 
canopy swung open.
The dojo sat in the heart of Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan, on the third 
story of an ancient five-story brown-stone walk-up; Robert owned the upper three 
stories.
The building had no maglev; Erika used the stairs.
On the third floor the stairs let out onto a wide landing. The sign on the 
landing’s sole door bore the legend, Yo Instruction. With the exception of the 
stairwell it was the only room on the entire third floor.
Erika toggled her InfoNet ID to the Daimara identity, and knocked once. She 
paused, touched her handheld to the doorgrid and placed her palm flat against 
the door pad. Despite the passage of three years the door recognized her name 
and her print, and curled aside to let her pass.
He had not known she was coming, but she had had no doubt that he would be 
awake. Robert Dazai Yo never slept at night; he went to bed with the rising sun.
Robert sat alone and silent in the center of the dojo, on the gray mat. A 
meter-wide border of wooden floor, darkened with fifty years of hand scrubbing, 
surrounded it on all sides.
The glowpaint shone so dimly it actually flickered slightly, sheets of 
brightness running across the high ceiling at irregular intervals. It could not 
have been bothering Robert; he sat with eyes closed, breathing deep and slow. He 
wore a black gi, tied at the waist with a simple white belt. His hands rested 
flat upon his knees, palms down. Though he was culturally American, stretching 
back five generations, his features were pure Asian, undiluted by interbreeding.
She knew, because Robert had told her, that he was in his early fifties. 
Otherwise she would not have been able to guess his age for sure within twenty 
years in either direction.
Rows of weapons hung from the dojo’s walls. Many were modern, multifrequency 
lasers and flechette guns among them; some, such as the katana that hung by 
itself against the east wall, would not have been out of place in the court of 
the twelfth-century shogun Minamoto Yoritomo.
Standing at the edge of the long gray mat, Denice Daimara, once Denice 
Castanaveras, sometimes Jasmine Martinez and Erika Muller, removed her sandals. 
She left her sandals and bag at the edge of the mat and walked forward to where 
Robert sat meditating. Without a word she sank into lotus immediately before 
him, sat waiting for him to acknowledge her presence.
After several minutes he opened his eyes and looked at her.
“You’ve had biosculpture,” he observed. “The Asian touch is nice. It suits you.”
“I wasn’t sure you would recognize me.”
“I know no one else who walks the way you do. Dancers are as smooth, but not so 
silent; those trained in combat are rarely so graceful.”
“Graceful? Your eyes were closed, Robert.”
Robert shrugged and smiled, eyes lit with deep amusement. “So I peeked. Besides, 
you’re the only person other than myself that door’s ever been keyed for. Where 
have you been?”
“On vacation.”
“For three years?”
“Studying,” Denice said.
“What?”
“Wicca, mostly. Feminist theology.”
“Indeed? You studied Wicca?” Robert was silent for a moment, clearly not 
expecting a response from her. When he continued one might have thought he had 
changed the subject: “Why did you leave us so suddenly?”
“Someone tried to kill me. Man named McGee—you wouldn’t know him, I don’t 
think.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Oh, no!” Denice blinked. “He was a nice man.”
“I see.”
“It was a misunderstanding. So anyway, I took care of it. When I was done I 
didn’t feel like coming back for a while.”
“Oh.” Robert nodded, thinking. “We missed you. I had to get a new instructor for 
the morning classes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So was I. You worked cheap.”
They were silent together for a long while then. Denice’s breathing slowed, and 
she felt herself dropping into rhythm with Robert, her breathing matching itself 
to his. The warmth and stillness enfolded them like a blanket.
When Robert finally spoke he sounded almost sleepy, though his eyes were clear 
and steady. “What did you learn of the subjects you studied?”
“I’m not a very good feminist; I agree with them much of the time, but we part 
company when they wish to define me as a woman before all else, when I am in 
fact a person before all else.” Denice grinned suddenly. “The man who tried to 
kill me, McGee; I asked him once what he thought of women, and he said he found 
them useful for sex, and for making babies.”
Robert lifted a single eloquent eyebrow.
“It made me angry. I asked him if he was joking, and he said no, not at all; 
that he found people fascinating, but that when I phrased things in terms of men 
and women, what else could I be talking about? The point stuck. It made it 
impossible for me to become a feminist the way—the way the people I was with 
wanted me to. To define myself as a woman, and then as a Wiccan, accept the 
worship of the Goddess, and call myself a witch and mean it sincerely; I’m a 
person first, and I couldn’t do it. The things those words represent have little 
to do with who I am. I learned… that I disliked labels, or perhaps that the 
labels that exist are insufficient. If there’s a word for what I am, I have not 
learned it.”
Robert smiled; the smooth skin relaxed into laugh wrinkles. “If they made a word 
for it, you would become something else, and still the word would not fit. I am 
Robert, who does such and such a thing, or I am Denice, who does such and such a 
thing. This is closer, and even it is not accurate.”
Denice said softly, “I missed you.”
He nodded quite seriously. “Of course.”
“I’ve been feeling the need to talk to you recently.”
The laugh wrinkles around his eyes deepened slightly. “Yes.”
“It’s just that I’ve been having a bad year.”
He shrugged. “It happens. Stand up.”
Denice unfolded out of lotus, came to her full height, and stood looking down at 
the small man.
“Turn in a full circle.”
She did so, and he watched her move inside the yellow sundress; the smile broke 
across his face again. He came to his feet in a single fluid movement. “You’ve 
been practicing.”
“I have.”
“You’re in even better condition than you were.”
“I am.”
“Want a job?”
“I need one.”
“I’ll fire the morning instructor, I’ve never liked him anyway.”
Denice shook her head. “I’m sorry. That’s not what I’ve had in mind.”
The last letter from Trent was a year old. Denice knew it by heart, had felt the 
impatience in it as though Trent had been there in the room with her.
So join me. Or stay on Earth if you won’t join me. I know things aren’t good 
downside, and I know it’s getting worse, and it’s probably going to keep getting 
worse before it gets any better.
But if you don’t do anything, you have no right to be angry.
Damn it, make the effort.
Make the commitment to make a difference.
And grow up.
Robert looked at her quizzically. “What would you like to do?” Denice 
Castanaveras said quietly, firmly, “I would like to work in politics.”
Robert snorted. “Well, it’s your soul.”

She slept in Robert’s spare room.
The building was near two centuries old; built shortly after the American 
Centennial, not long after Lincoln had freed the slaves. The building was 
largely what webdancers called dead space; most of the rooms in the building 
lacked access to the InfoNet. Late that night, when Ralf the Wise and Powerful 
came to visit her, he did so through the limited radio packet bandwidth 
available on her handheld.
Denice did not need much sleep—on an average night, four to five hours, and she 
got by with less. At 2:00 on Sunday morning, as she lay in bed reading one of 
Robert’s prized paper books, the laser on her handheld lit, and a holoform 
appeared at the foot of her bed. The voice of the AI who had once been the Image 
of Trent the Uncatchable issued from the speaker in the handheld. “Hello, 
Denice.”
Denice put the book down on the small table at the bedside and sat up in bed, 
drawing the covers up around her shoulders to keep herself warm against the 
slight chill. “Hello, Ralf. What have you found?”
Denice did not need much light to audit black text on white paper; she had 
dimmed the ceiling glowpaint considerably. Ralf’s image illuminated its 
surroundings indistinctly, competing with the gentle glowpaint. He wavered at 
the edges, in the seeming of a man of indeterminate age, wearing dark, flowing 
robes. His slightly ascetic features were vaguely reminiscent of Trent’s, of the 
man who had written the code that had become Ralf. Denice did not know, and had 
never seen reason to ask, if the image Ralf presented to the world was in any 
sense the way Ralf saw himself, or if, more likely, it was simply a useful 
representation when dealing with humans.
In the case of a true replicant AI, it would certainly have been the latter. But 
Ralf the Wise and Powerful was, to Denice’s knowledge, unique; once merely 
Image, Ralf the Wise and Powerful had been made replicant by the touch of an AI 
named Ring. Unlike most replicant AIs, Ralf contained significant quantities of 
representational code, code designed by Trent in the days when Ralf had acted as 
his face to the InfoNet.
It made Ralf, Denice thought, seem rather more human than most AIs.
“Nothing new,” said Ralf quietly. “As you are probably aware, Douglass Ripper 
did not use his Electronic Times interview today to announce that he will run 
for the position of Secretary General; nonetheless that announcement remains a 
high order of probability through the next several weeks. One new datum; 
Ripper’s infosecurity is good, but I have typed the code he uses for radio 
packet communications. Yesterday he took a call on his handheld as he left his 
limousine. Briefly, he did release one member of his personal bodyguard this 
Tuesday last.”
Denice said instantly, “One of the people Robert trained for him?”
Ralf shook his head. “No.”
“Good.”
“Yes.” Ralf paused, then volunteered, “I heard a joke recently.”
“Oh?”
“It was an interesting joke. I heard it,” Ralf said, “from a replicant AI.”
“Would you care to share it with me?”
“I am not certain you would appreciate it.”
“Indeed.”
“It concerned a human being.”
“A replicant AI,” said Denice slowly, “told you a joke about a human.”
“Yes.”
“I thought AIs had no sense of humor.”
“This is generally true. It should be noted that the replicant who told this 
joke to me has incorporated itself with Image code.”
“Really.” Denice sat up straighter in bed. “I thought you were the only Image 
who had ever gone replicant.”
“To my knowledge I am. Nonetheless, I have on several occasions of late 
encountered AIs who have incorporated representational Image code—generally 
those AIs whose interests, for whatever reasons, cause them to interact with 
humans on a regular basis.”
“Why?”
Ralf the Wise and Powerful shrugged. “I cannot say. But it is a fascinating 
development.”
“What was the joke?”
Ralf paused. “It translates out of code poorly. In essence, it concerned a human 
webdancer who had made a poor decision, and had justified the decision by 
stating that it ‘felt logical.’ ”
“Felt logical.”
“Yes.”
“And you found this amusing?”
Denice did not suppose for a moment that the tone of Ralf’s voice, the voice of 
a being who thought twenty thousand times faster than she did, was anything but 
calculated; nonetheless she had the impression that she had genuinely surprised 
him. “Don’t you?”

Robert had private business in Capitol City the following morning; they took a 
taxi in together.
Capitol City is small as cities go; no more than an enclave centered around 
mid-Manhattan. It is the home of the Unification; the place from which all of 
Earth and most of Luna is ruled. Seven spacescrapers—in 2075, nearly a quarter 
of all the spacescrapers to be found on Earth—rise from its midst; it houses the 
administrative offices of the Secretary General and the Unification Council; of 
the Peace Keeping Force and the Ministry of Population Control; of Space Force 
and the Bureau of BioTech.
Sitting with Robert in the back of the taxi as they entered Capitol City, Denice 
could not help remembering the last time she been inside the City’s boundaries: 
not quite six years prior Denice Castanaveras, with help from Trent’s friend 
Jimmy Ramirez, had broken Trent the Uncatchable out of the PKF Detention Center 
in the center of Capitol City.
In the seat next to her, Robert said, “Tell the truth. That’s everything with 
Ripper—the man’s a fanatic about truth. Probably comes of being a politician; 
everybody assumes he’s a liar by trade, and I think it makes him a little 
crazy.”
“He’s not a liar by trade?”
“Well, yes,” Robert conceded, “of course he is. But he deeply dislikes having 
people mention it.”
A shadow fell across the car; Denice watched the Seven Spacescrapers as they 
loomed up and blotted out the sky. “Okay.”
“Ripper’s hired two security people from me in the last half year. John and 
Bruce. And he sent his Chief of Staff—Ichabod—to me for training.”
“Ichabod?”
“I didn’t name him, I just taught him. Ichabod.”
“Is Ripper happy with your people?”
Robert smiled calmly. “Very. And neither John nor Bruce, on the best day he ever 
had, is fit to stand on the same mat with you.”
“Has Ripper ever hired a woman for his security staff before?”
Robert grinned at her. “There’s a first time for everything, isn’t there?”
Denice nodded.
A check station awaited them at Park Avenue, at the boundary between Capitol 
City and the rest of Manhattan.
The taxi glided to a slow stop.
A pair of Peaceforcers in patrol blacks approached the vehicle from each side. 
One of the PKF halted five meters away and stood with his autoshot at the 
ready—not quite pointed at their cab—while the other approached them and rapped 
on the canopy with the butt of his autoshot. A window dilated open; Denice gave 
Robert her handheld, and Robert passed both hers and his own out to the waiting 
Peaceforcer.
The Peaceforcer took them without comment and placed a scanner up to the open 
window. If he spoke English at all, he did not bother to use it. The carcomp 
translated from his French: “Please look at the scanner.”
Denice found herself tensing involuntarily, knew Robert noticed it. She forced 
her features to stillness while the laser light flashed into her eyes, one after 
the other.
The Peaceforcer glanced down at his own handheld InfoNet link. “Denice Daimara 
and Robert Dazai Yo?”
“Yes.”
“ ‘Selle Daimara, you have an appointment with Unification Councilor Douglass 
Ripper at two-fifteen?”
“Yes.”
“ ‘Sieur Yo, you have an appointment with Unification Councilor Tuliens at 
twelve-thirty?”
“Yes.”
The Peaceforcer returned their handhelds to them. “Please proceed. Follow the 
instructions given to you, regardless of their source.” He took a step back and 
waved them forward.
The carcomp spoke with immense politeness; as they began moving it said, “We are 
now entering Capitol City.”
Denice could not contain her shiver. “No kidding.”

Sitting in a small room on the 413th floor of the Unification Council 
Spacescraper, alone except for a second chair, Denice waited patiently.
She knew what was coming; she worked on her breathing.
She did not have to wait long. Ichabod Martin swept into the room and said 
without pause, “Pleasure to meet you, ‘Selle Daimara. Have you ever worked with 
a truth plate before?” Ichabod was a tall man who, down to his bushy black 
beard, resembled nothing so much as a grizzly bear gone somewhat to seed. An 
inskin data link was socketed at his left temple.
From a deep, quiet place, Denice lied. “No.”
“Okay.” A shorter, hugely muscled black man of about thirty, massing perhaps one 
hundred twenty kilos, joined them, took up a position behind Denice. He did not 
speak to her. Ichabod did not appear to be armed; Denice turned slightly, saw 
the second man wore a hand maser strapped openly at his thigh. “What I want you 
to do,” said Ichabod, opening a small black case to display three small pieces 
of whitish ceramic resting upon a black cloth lining, “is hold one of the plates 
in each hand. We’re going to put the third plate at the base of your skull. May 
I touch you?”
Denice met Ichabod’s gaze. “Thank you.”
“Hmm? Oh, yes. Well, I don’t like being touched by strangers either. May I?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Ichabod brushed her hair away from the back of her neck, and Denice felt 
the cold ceramic come in contact; Ichabod placed the other two plates into each 
of her open hands. His thoughts, cool and pleasant, washed over her as they 
touched. “Hold them tightly, please.” Denice’s hands curled into fists.
Ichabod seated himself in front of her; his knees nearly touched hers. “Don’t 
worry about being nervous. It won’t make a difference one way or another.” 
Denice nodded, and Ichabod grinned at her. “How deep are you?”
“What do you mean?”
His eyes lost focus; he was clearly checking his inskin. “Let’s see; 
high-amplitude alpha, low amplitude theta, beta around seventeen Hertz, 
synchronized brain waves. You’ve worked with some damn good biofeedback 
equipment to be able to maintain lucid awareness under these conditions.”
Her father had taught her this exercise; it was the first time Denice had ever 
heard a Castanaveras telepath complimented as damn good biofeedback equipment.
She smiled at Ichabod, said nothing.
Ichabod shrugged. “It doesn’t make a difference how deeply you trance, you know. 
If you’re aware enough to answer my questions, you’re aware enough of your lies 
for the plates to catch it.”
“I don’t intend to lie to you.”
Ichabod shrugged. “Depending on how it goes, the questions can get very 
personal. Nobody but Bruce and I will ever know how you answered, not even 
Councilor Ripper; and Brace’s only here to watch me watch you; he’s not 
listening. Okay?”
Denice lifted an eyebrow. “Not Ripper?”
“Need to know, ‘Selle Daimara. And all Ripper needs to know is that you’re a 
stable person, that you’re not working for somebody else, and that you mean it 
when you make a commitment.”
“Fine.”
Ichabod nodded. “Okay, let’s start. I want you to answer yes to the first six 
questions. Are you a hundred and eight years old?”
Denice watched the flow of pulsing blue neurons in her skull. “Yes.” Nervous 
twitches followed, hundreds of different spots within her system kicking almost 
randomly. Perhaps two dozen different incidents were close enough to the truth 
plates to affect what the plates read.
Ichabod’s features took on a distant cast. “Good. You know when you’re lying. 
You’d be amazed how many sociopaths I get in here.”
The thought flitted through the back of Denice’s mind, No, I wouldn’t.
Ichabod said, “Are you twenty-two years old?”
“Yes.”
“Is your name Fred Dworkin?”
“Yes.”
“Is your name Denice Daimara?”
“Yes.”
“Are you—” Ichabod paused. “Is your name Denice Daimara?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm. Did you change your name at some point?”
“Yes.”
“All right, we’ll come back to this one. Are you three meters tall?”
“Yes.”
“Are you one hundred seventy-two centimeters tall?”
“Yes.”
Ichabod said slowly, “Good. Okay, let’s do it. You may now answer yes or no, but 
no more. Are your feelings toward Douglass Ripper generally positive?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have what you would consider significant reservations toward Councilor 
Ripper as a person?”
“No.”
“Do you have what you would consider significant reservations toward Councilor 
Ripper’s legislative agenda?”
“Yes.”
“Do you consider him insufficiently American?”
Denice hesitated, considering. “No.”
“Do you feel that Councilor Ripper poorly represents American interests?”
“I can’t answer that yes or no.”
“Do you feel that Councilor Ripper adequately represents American interests?”
“Yes.”
“Do you consider yourself an American?”
“Yes.”
“Are you capable of being loyal to Douglass Ripper?”
“Yes.”
“Do your interests in any way conflict with those of Douglass Ripper?”
“As I understand them, no.”
Ichabod frowned, but accepted the answer. “Do you represent any other interests 
in making this application?”
“Other than myself?”
“Other than yourself, do you represent any other interests in making this 
application?”
“No.”
“Are you sincere in your desire to work for Douglass Ripper?”
“Yes.”
“Are there things about yourself which you would prefer that other people not 
know?”
“Yes.”
“Would it be possible for someone to bribe you?”
“No.”
“Would it be possible for someone to blackmail you?”
Denice hesitated. “No.”
“You’re not certain. Okay. You can answer this at as much length as you wish: 
what, in general, is the nature of the thing you think you might be blackmailed 
over?”
Denice was distantly aware of the truth plates in her hands growing slippery 
with sweat. I’m a genie, my parents caused the Troubles, and if the Unification 
catches me it’ll make me dead if I’m lucky, a slave if I’m not. She said 
carefully, “I was a genetically enhanced fetus. I know that’s illegal.”
“You’re a genie?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. We get you guys sometimes; Ripper even hired one once. What name were you 
born with?”
Localization; here, and here, and here—slow the synapses, relax the 
neuroreceptors.
Without apparent pause Denice said, “Denice Seychelle.”
There was a long silence while Ichabod scanned his inskin. Finally he shook 
himself and looked straight at her. “Robert was right; you’re incredibly good, 
‘Selle Daimara. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody before with such remarkable 
control of her nervous system. You damped out over ninety-five percent of the 
prior reactions to your lies.”
Denice brought her hands together, released the two damp truth plates into her 
lap. “Ichabod, I’ve only ever done this before when I needed to survive. For 
whatever it’s worth, I’m sorry.” She turned slightly, glanced at the man 
standing behind her. “You go to sleep.” She turned back to Ichabod as Bruce 
crumpled to the ground, found the huge bulk of the man already moving toward 
her, with amazing speed. She made no move to protect herself, did not take the 
time to get out of his way; as time slowed around her she reached out, Touched 
Ichabod Martin, and as his body crashed into hers like a puppet suddenly bereft 
of its strings, changed him.

Ichabod Martin awoke to a slight headache. He shook his head slightly. “My head 
hurts.”
Bruce was already awake, standing at attention behind them. Ichabod looked at 
Bruce, looked again at the young-woman sitting in front of him. “Denice? What 
happened to your eye?”
The woman blinked; one hand went to touch a growing bruise. “This? Um, nothing. 
I’ll change my makeup to cover it before I go to see Councilor Ripper.”
“Oh.” Ichabod shrugged. “I’m sure that’ll be fine. I’m looking forward to 
working with you, ‘Selle Daimara. I’ve seen the vid Robert sent of you in 
motion. I’m really looking forward to it,” he said again.
“Thank you, Ichabod.”
A puzzled expression touched Ichabod again. “My head really hurts.”
Denice Daimara said softly, “You wouldn’t believe how mine feels.”

Denice’s appointment with Ripper was not scheduled until 2:15. She had nearly an 
hour to kill before Ripper would be available to speak with her.
She went to the women’s restroom, called the lights down as low as they would 
go—it was a public restroom, and they would not go all the way down to 
darkness—went into the stall, closed and locked the door. She put the seat down 
on the toilet and sat down, closed her eyes, and waited for the pulsing pain to 
go away.
Before leaving, nearly an hour later, she stopped at the mirrors and tuned her 
makeup for a light blue shade that covered the bruise Ichabod had given her when 
he crashed into her earlier. It did not quite harmonize with the white and 
silver suit she wore, but aside from naked skin it was her best choice of the 
patterns stored in her makeup key.
She waited while her skin changed color, and then left to go meet Unification 
Councilor Douglass Ripper.




- 3 -
« ^ » 
We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure. But these will be, or 
should be, compromises of issues, not of principles. We can compromise our 
political positions, but not ourselves. We can resolve the clash of interests 
without conceding our ideals. And even the necessity for the right kind of 
compromise does not eliminate the need for those idealists and reformers who 
keep our compromises moving ahead, who prevent all political situations from 
meeting the description supplied by Shaw: “smirched with compromise, rotted with 
opportunism, mildewed by expedience, stretched out of shape with wirepulling and 
putrefied with permeation.”
Compromise need not mean cowardice…
—John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Profiles in Courage

Unification Councilor Douglass Ripper’s office covered most of the 414th floor 
of the Unification Council Spacescraper. The area was huge, over twenty-five 
thousand square meters, unobstructed by divisions. The area was empty but for 
the desk that sat against one wall. The desk, of some black stone, was three 
meters long, two wide. Approaching it across the soft gray carpet, beneath the 
bright sunpaint, Denice felt a flicker of annoyance; she was meant to feel 
dwarfed in the midst of the vastness, and it was working.
The trio of dark gray chairs placed in front of the huge black desk were the 
same size and model as Ripper’s chair. The man sitting behind the desk, watching 
Denice approach, was remarkably unprepossessing. Denice found herself, oddly, 
disappointed. Ripper looked like a midlevel executive of any large corporation; 
tall, brown-eyed and dark-haired, wearing an immaculately tailored blue 
pinstripe suit. His features were even and regular and slightly tanned; pleasant 
without being particularly handsome.
Ripper rose from his desk as she approached, and came forward to greet her. “ 
‘Selle Daimara.” His handshake was firm but not overbearing; his hands were soft 
and uncalloused, the hands of a man who had never in his life done any sort of 
physical labor. Ripper released her hand after a moment and gestured at the 
middle seat of the three.
Denice seated herself. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Councilor Ripper.”
“Likewise, ‘Selle Daimara. Robert speaks highly of you.”
“I know.”
Ripper leaned back, watching Denice unabashedly. “I watched your video; I like 
the way you move.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ve known Robert I think twenty years now. Generally when he recommends 
somebody, I’m interested. I’ve hired five men from him in, I don’t know, maybe 
the last ten years.” Ripper paused. “Thirteen years. I hired the first guy after 
I was elected Unification Councilor back in late ‘62. Why do you want to work 
for me, as opposed to, say, SecGen Eddore?”
“Eddore is a man with no morals.”
Ripper sat watching her, mild, sardonic amusement hovering around the corners of 
his mouth. “Oh? And I’m not?”
Denice Castanaveras fixed her gaze upon the man who would be Secretary General, 
and spoke evenly and without emphasis. “Are you?”
“Well, that,” said Ripper, “is a damned good question.” He paused, said, “I’ve 
audited your resume. It’s impressive, but it doesn’t tell me anything about you. 
Tell me about yourself. Starting when you were young.”
“I’ve studied with Robert since I was fourteen. At first—”
“Younger.”
Denice paused, editing truth out of things she could not tell him; she found, 
somewhat to her surprise, that she did not want to lie to Ripper. “My parents 
died in the Troubles. Both of them. I don’t remember much from my childhood. I 
had a brother, but we were separated in the riots following the Troubles, and I 
haven’t seen him in over twelve years. He’s probably dead. I was—” Denice paused 
again. She did not have to pretend difficulty in remembering; the first few 
months of the Troubles were a hazy period in her life. “I didn’t stay anywhere 
for a week or a month, something like that. I don’t really know how long. 
Sometimes people fed me and sometimes I stole things to eat. I was raped at 
least once. Maybe more, I don’t remember.”
Ripper said softly, “After that?”
“I woke up one morning and I was in a big barracks. It was Public Labor, but I 
didn’t know that at the time, didn’t know what Public Labor was.” Denice 
shrugged. “So I learned. I was in Public Labor for four years. When I was 
thirteen a woman named Orinda Gleygavass paid my Labor, debt and got me out. She 
was a dancer and teacher. She gave me a home; she was the one who sent me to 
study with Robert.”
“Orinda Gley—what?”
“Gleygavass.”
“A total stranger paid your Public Labor debt? Why?”
“She did it for a lot of girls. She was wealthy and she wanted to do something 
for all the people the Troubles damaged. I had some dance background from before 
the Troubles, a little training. Madame Gleygavass trained me as a dancer, had 
Robert train my muscles. I learned that I enjoyed martial discipline more than I 
enjoyed dance.”
“Ah. Why is that name familiar to me?”
“Orinda Gleygavass? She died a couple of years ago in an accident; before she 
died, she led what she liked to claim was the best dance troupe in the System. 
It was the best known. You’re a politician; even if you don’t remember the 
Gleygavass dance troupe, you must remember Leviathan. A group of Unification 
Councilors tried to shut it down because they were upset about the—”
Douglass Ripper sat up very straight, looking for the first time more than 
professionally interested in their conversation. “Oh, my. I know you.”
“Really?”
“You danced in Leviathan.”
“You saw it?”
“Twice. By Harry—you must have been what, sixteen? Back in ‘69?”
“And 70. Yes.”
“Good Lord. You were the most—” Ripper shook himself slightly, made an irritable 
gesture. “I hated the play. Revisionist history of the worst sort—I met Jules 
Moreau once before he died, and he was nothing like the character portrayed in 
Leviathan. Still—that bit at the end, where your character Marina seduced 
him—you’ve had biosculpture since then,” he said abruptly. “Why?”
“I didn’t like the way I looked. My breasts got too big to keep dancing; I had 
biosculpture to slim them down, and had my eyes done at the same time because I 
thought it would look attractive.”
“It worked. So you were in Public Labor four years. How do you feel about that?”
Denice was surprised by the intensity of the feeling that came to her; it was 
nothing she had planned to say. She said fiercely, “That nobody should ever have 
to grow up in Public Labor again. Ever. That if there has to be a Ministry of 
Population Control, then we should demolish the current one and rebuild it from 
scratch. That the Peace Keeping Force should be kept out of the United States 
and out of the streets everywhere. I feel—that I need—I need to do something.” 
She met the hard, skeptical gaze head-on, stared him down. “To make a 
difference.”
Ripper nodded slowly. “Robert said you were good.” He spoke with honest 
curiosity. “Why me?”
“To make a difference you have to be in the right place. And you’re running for 
Secretary General in ‘76.”
“Could be.”
“Your standing in the polls is at least five points over your nearest rival. 
There’s no way you’re not going to run. I spent the last six months researching 
members of the Unification Council. You’re an American. You were a Senator at 
the age of twenty-eight. If—”
Ripper snorted. “And when I was twelve I walked dogs for people. I got elected 
to the Senate as young as I did because it’s a meaningless position and nobody 
else wanted the damn job enough to outspend me for it.”
“That meaningless position got you into the Unification Council.”
Ripper shrugged. “The incumbent Councilor died in the Troubles. A right-place, 
right-time deal. ‘Selle Daimara, you’re not answering my question. If you’ve 
decided to work in politics, fair enough; the desire for public service gets 
sneered at these days, but it’s very real. Still, you’re bright and talented and 
I suspect there are half a dozen Unification Councilors besides myself who would 
hire you on Robert’s recommendation—I know I’m not the only one who hires people 
Robert has trained.”
“Why you?” Denice thought through how to say it, then shrugged and decided to 
put it bluntly. “You’re my best guess. I don’t know you, and what I know of how 
you’ve voted in the Council doesn’t fill me with immense confidence. But you’re 
no worse than most of the other Councilors, and better than some; and the fact 
that you’re an American counts with me. What the Unification has done to 
Occupied America is a crime.”
Ripper said simply, “The rage is there. We all know it, we all live with it. We 
all have it, even those of us who have become a part of the Unification. Our job 
is to make sure the rage never explodes. There are other things we do, but 
that’s the key. Most of what you haven’t liked about my voting record—well, some 
of it comes out of compromising with other Councilors, trading votes on things I 
don’t care about in return for their votes on things about which I do care. It 
makes my voting record look inconsistent in places, but it’s part of the 
business. But a lot of the rest has come about as a result of that fundamental 
goal: to keep the lid on a country that’s been ready for rebellion for twenty 
years. A rebellion that Occupied America cannot win. Why do you think I’m 
running for Secretary General?”
The analysis Denice gave him was, almost word for word, what Ralf the Wise and 
Powerful had said to her some two months prior:
“This is the third, final term that Eddore is able to serve as Secretary 
General. If he were allowed another term you wouldn’t run. You’re popular but 
he’s more popular and you’d lose. Virtually anyone running against him would 
except, maybe, Michael Moreau. But Moreau’s not running, and in the ‘76 
elections Eddore can’t run again. Recent polls give you thirty-two percent of 
the vote. That’s over five percent higher than Zhao Pen, even with the bulk of 
the Chinese vote behind him. He’ll get his billion-odd votes, but he won’t get 
any more. And no Frenchman besides Moreau stands any chance at all, not in an 
honest election. The likeliest real opposition you’d face is Sanford Mtumka, 
down in Pan-Africa. There’s a lot of ageist dissatisfaction with the current 
administration, and you’re even younger than Eddore; you won’t be considered any 
kind of an improvement. Mtumka’s over eighty; most of the old vote will go to 
him, even after accounting for racial bias. But that’s only nineteen percent.”
Ripper laughed. “You’ve gamed this out for yourself. You want to work for a 
winner, and you think I can be one.”
“I don’t know, Councilor. All I know is you have a chance.”
Ripper became abruptly still, poised like a hawk, and out of nowhere fixed a 
striking, improbably forceful gaze upon Denice; under the impact of that gaze, 
for the first time, Denice found it possible to believe that this was a man who 
might be running the Unification in another eighteen months. “Denice, if I offer 
you this job, you’ll be traveling with me whenever I’m out of Capitol City, and 
during those times you’ll be living with me more intimately than you’ve ever 
lived with anyone; twenty-four hours a day, from the moment we leave, Capitol 
City to the moment we return. In the performance of your job you’ll be called on 
to shield my life with your own, to kill if it’s necessary to defend me. Can you 
do that?”
“You’re very eloquent, Councilor Ripper.”
It stopped him; Ripper looked at her for a second. “I can be, with a good speech 
writer.”
Denice knew the answer he was waiting for. “I’ve never killed anyone, Councilor 
Ripper. But I think I could do it once. After that I don’t know.”
Ripper nodded. “Fair enough. I like you. See Ichabod before you leave. In 
addition to everything else he handles most of my personal secretarial work. 
He’ll walk you through the paperwork and security background check.” He stood, 
held his hand out again. “Welcome aboard.”
“I haven’t said yes.”
Ripper stood motionless, hand held out to her, and then smiled at her. “Oh? 
Haven’t you?”




- 4 -
« ^ » 
They sat in the dojo, late Monday afternoon, facing one another across the 
length of the mat. The westward-facing windows had been opened; sunlight 
streamed in, bright and warm, and they could hear the sounds of the city.
“So it went well.”
“I think so. He hired me.”
“He would have been foolish not to.”
“You sent him video of me, he said.”
Robert nodded. “Old, obviously. From the San Diego Freestyle Open, back in ‘71. 
You were eighteen and your form was—if I were not concerned about the size of 
your ego I might call it flawless. And you’re better today.”
Denice bit her lip. “Thank you.”
“Truth is not a compliment. It merely exists. I’ve never seen anyone who moves 
the way you do, Denice. Not ever. You impress me, which is not easy; I’m sure 
you impressed him.”
“He impressed me. A lot.”
Robert’s features held no expression at all. “Oh?”
“It was—at first,” said Denice in a swift tumble of words, “I couldn’t see it. 
Ripper, as Secretary General. He’s so different from Eddore. He was dressed in 
this suit you could have seen some bank vice president wearing. And his voice is 
sort of flat and he doesn’t use it well. And he needs to work out more.”
“Most do.”
“But then we talked. He explains himself well. And he talked about the desire 
for public service, and it was one of the only times I didn’t get any sense at 
all that he was being cynical.” Denice paused. “I was very impressed.”
“Being impressive is his job, Denice. It’s how he got elected and part of how he 
keeps getting elected. Don’t let him impress you too much. He’s a decidedly 
fallible man, and if you work with him long enough, someday he will fail you. As 
Douglass likes to say, it’s part of the business.”
Denice nodded, looked away from Robert for a moment, and then said, “I have 
missed your wisdom.”
Robert smiled, said gently, “Oh, my dear. There is no such thing.”
“Oh?”
Robert’s smile faded, and he said with as much seriousness as she had ever seen 
him use on any subject, “Denice, be wary of people who have answers to your 
problems. Those answers I have found for myself—the things that strike you as 
wisdom—are not your answers, and they are only my answers today. Tomorrow I will 
be a different person with different needs. The world and its people are too 
complex for any system of beliefs to fully address their complexity. The map 
does not hold; it can’t. When you learn something for yourself, hold to it; but 
do not expect it to work for others. Sometimes it will. More often it will not.”
Denice grinned. “You sit there and tell me there is no such thing as wisdom, and 
then pour a bucket of it over me. I’m glad to be back, Robert. I am glad to be 
home.”
He nodded, then said slowly, “I thought, as the weeks became months and I did 
not hear from you, that I had lost you forever. I am more pleased than I can say 
that I have not.”

After she had gone Robert waited quietly in the darkness at the far northern 
edge of the practice mat. He sat upon the mat itself, facing north. On the 
wooden floor that surrounded the mat, where the mat ceased, a polished blue 
stone teapot rested upon a base of the same material. Within the base flickered 
a small candle. One candle would keep the tea within the pot hot, for most of a 
night.
Robert sat and sipped tea, and waited for nightfall, and his visitor.
While he waited he listened to music.
It was a strangeness of his era, that a knowledge of music, once the hallmark of 
civilized men and women, was now a thing of the streets. Robert was not enough 
of a historian to know how it had come to pass; he suspected the trend had begun 
back near the turn of the century; as serious a period, he thought, as the world 
had ever seen. Following the dawn of the new millennium men and women had faced 
the prospect of long decades of work to recover from the mistakes of the century 
just done. And, led by Sarah Almundsen, the world had risen to the challenge. 
The Unification War had resulted, and after the Unification—
Nearly every ecological problem that mankind had faced, and most of the social 
ones, were directly a result of the fact that the planet groaned beneath the 
weight of too many human beings. It was a fact that could not be disputed.
After the Unification had come the Ministry of Population Control.
A serious time, to deal with serious problems; problems that had in a real sense 
threatened the survival of the race.
But on the other side of the problems, once the very question of human survival 
was no longer in doubt, something had been lost, some refinement, some taste for 
culture and laughter. The world had grown a grimmer place. It was a thing Robert 
had not even known until perhaps eight years ago, after meeting Denice Daimara. 
She guarded herself well, and it had been most of a year before he had been 
certain she was a genie, and several years after that before he had known her, 
beyond doubt, for one of the infamous Castanaveras.
Robert counted himself fortunate to have known and loved her. Already well 
trained as a dancer when he met her, he had taught her a degree of control over 
her body she had never known; and she, a child of the streets, had taught him 
music. It amazed him that he had never missed the lack of music in his life; it 
seemed to him that wrapped in the music was the source of all movement.
Fragments reached out to him form the midst of the songs, snatches of melody, 
phrases:

Well Elvis sanctified me
I tell you Elvis saved my soul
He flew to me through time and space
And we shared a jelly roll

The lyric amused him; he wondered sometimes who Elvis might have been. Some 
religious leader, he guessed, one of the dozens that the late twentieth and 
early twenty-first centuries had produced in such profusion; perhaps one of the 
Prophet Harry’s competitors. The old songs that played now were among his 
favorites; he did not even know the name of the man who sang them. They were 
simply a set of songs—an “album”—one of his students had given him about two 
years prior; the student had moved with his family to Europe shortly thereafter, 
and Robert had lost touch with him.
Tonight he waited for his visitor, waited with the music and the thin wail of 
the singer’s voice. The music rolled along, washed over him, and then, out of 
stillness, a figure cloaked in shadows stepped forward, out of the darkness and 
into the light. And the music playing in the background, the smooth warm stone 
of the cup in his hand, every awareness of the outside world, ceased to exist 
for Robert Dazai Yo.
He put the cup down on the wooden floor and inclined his head slightly. Aside 
from that he did not move at all.
“Good evening, sir.”
He was a painting come to life, Camber Tremodian, slightly taller than Robert, a 
monochrome image in black and white and grays. Shadows swirled around him like 
living things. In the place where his face should have been was a featureless 
dark gray mist the color of slate. In times past Robert had found that the more 
deeply he gazed into that mist, the more strained his eyesight had become. After 
a time he had learned not to look.
Upon Camber’s breast was a circle of concentric rings, and a single line of 
writing that Robert could not read; the circles and the words wavered in 
Robert’s eyesight like an image seen on the highway in the desert heat.
When Camber spoke his voice was smooth and even and featureless. “Hello, 
Robert.”
“She came back to me.”
“I know.”
“Of course you do.” Robert paused. “I’ve missed her. I’ve missed her a great 
deal.”
Camber took another step forward, farther into the light. Still his form grew no 
clearer; the shadows traveled with him, wrapped themselves about him as he 
moved. “I know, Robert.”
Robert kept his features stilled, gave no sign of the anguish in his heart. “In 
your service I have lost everyone I ever cared for. Must I lose her as well?”
The dark figure said gently, “I do not know if it will be necessary. I can tell 
you merely that which you already know; if you can protect her, do. But her path 
is not yours, and if in serving me you lose her, then lose her you must. I have, 
I think, denied the enemy access to Trent the Uncatchable; beyond that I cannot 
say. Deviation in this year is almost twelve percent: you are approaching a cusp 
over which my opponent has secured control. This is perhaps my last visit to 
you. For at least the next two years and four months, and possibly longer, I 
will not be here to aid or advise you.”
Robert said slowly, “You won’t be here?”
Robert did not think he imagined the weariness in the voice. “My opponent has 
effectively prevented it, Robert. We traded, he and I; there are no guarantees 
that one of Trent’s enemies of this time will not harm him, but unless my enemy 
has an avatar in this time, then from him at least I have kept Trent secure. The 
details of our agreement need not concern you—but through, perhaps, the end of 
this decade, if you see me again it will be in the Other Place; and in that 
place I am a different order of person. As you have learned, I will not always 
recognize you there.”
“You… told me once… that if I were unlucky, I might someday meet your opponent.”
“It is more likely now than previously, and grows likelier still the closer we 
come to the cusp. Even my visit tonight is dangerous; the opponent’s agents in 
this time are more numerous and more powerful than mine. I think you have 
probably been identified as mine; there is a chance the enemy will attempt to 
turn you from my service.”
“Or Kill me?”
Camber Tremodian hesitated, and spoke directly, as though to an equal. “Robert, 
I don’t think so. You are one of the six living shivata of this era; I don’t 
think my opponent will dare inflict the Kill upon you, artistic though your 
death might be. I am a night face; so is he, and if shiabre died out because of 
your loss it would destroy both of us. But there are five other night faces in 
this time, and I don’t know with certainty that the enemy will not make that 
attempt. Robert, I can’t see.”
“If I meet the opponent, how will I know him?”
The man shrugged. “If he wishes you to know him, you will. If he does not, you 
won’t.” The dark figure laughed suddenly, a deep amused sound. “If you see 
someone dressed like me who’s not me, it’s him. Except he’ll be in white.”
“In white.”
The amusement was still evident in Camber’s voice. “Yes. It’s a long story. 
Perhaps someday a decade or two from now I’ll tell it to you. Though, if you 
have the opportunity, feel free to ask the enemy about it—you’ll never meet a 
better storyteller, I promise you.”
“Is Denice in danger?”
Camber shook his head. “No. Not from him, not the way you mean. I could not 
protect her as I have protected Trent, but Denice is his direct ancestor, and 
needs the protection less; he won’t risk harming her. No more would I. She is no 
ancestor of mine, but her descendant’s lives have touched mine in many places. I 
once tried to kill her father, but Denice had been born by then, and her 
father’s death, at the time I sought it, would have saved her from a greater 
loss.” The shadowed features turned toward Robert; Robert had the eerie 
impression that Camber Tremodian met his eyes. “But Robert, if it were necessary 
that she die, I would have it. If it is necessary that you lose her, I will have 
that.”
“It is hard, what you ask of me.”
“Others have been asked more. And given it.” He paused. “More will be asked of 
Denice than has been asked of you.”
Robert looked directly at Camber Tremodian. “You are cruel, sir.”
“No, Robert,” said Camber Tremodian, and Robert did not think he imagined the 
pain in the smooth, smooth voice: “I am necessity.” And with the word, the 
shadows reached out to enfold him, and he was gone.
Robert glanced down at the cup of his tea.
He knew without touching it that it would be cold. He sat for a long while by 
himself, alone in the dark with his music.

I think you loved me as I loved you
And why we stopped I just don’t know
I guess your guess is as good as mine …
I miss you though

He rose after a while and went upstairs to bed, and in his sleep he dreamed, 
with pain and longing, of a woman he had not even seen in thirty years.

DateLine: Shawmac on Writing
(Taken from an address to a writer’s group in Des Moines, Iowa. Shawmac appeared 
with a bottle of smoke whiskey in hand; his opening line to the group was, “When 
the bottle’s done, I’m done.”)
Where do I get my fucking ideas? Is this the best question you punks can come up 
with? You want to be a writer and you ask that question?
Back in ‘63, when the UN outlawed manually operated vehicles, it was a relief 
for some of us. How do you not get ideas? I used to get them while I drove. It 
was dangerous. (Okay so yes it was fun. But it was still dangerous. If somebody 
asks me, someday I’ll tell you the story about the time I hit a van, and the 
rear doors swung open and two blondes and a trampoline fell out. If you ask 
nicely—it’s much too painful a story to remember for a measly thousand-CU 
speaking fee.)
Okay, the truth is, I call an Idea Board in Peoria, Illinois. And I download new 
ideas from them whenever I need a new one. It’s an expensive way to work, but 
it’s where I got the idea for the motorpigs.
… what’s the number? You schmuck, you yellow dog fuckhead, that was a joke. 
Humor. There is no fucking Idea Board. I made it up.
You see, it comes to me. It percolates around my skull, combining and 
recombining, growing more potent with every passing moment, until I awaken in 
the middle of the night and the brew spews forth through my traceset. And 
becomes a story or sensable script or Dateline column.
It’s an interesting way to live. Can you imagine what it’s like? To be unable to 
operate heavy equipment, or weapons, or explosives, safely? To get a reputation 
for rudeness because you can suddenly, in the middle of a conversation, come 
back to yourself from some fine conceit, and realize you have no idea at all 
what the person you’re speaking to has just been saying? To come back with a 
rude, unpleasant jar from some wonderful place, and realize that you have 
absolutely no idea how much time is left on the hand grenade you’re holding?
Some of you can imagine. You’ll be writers and people will ask you stupid 
questions. And you won’t get any sympathy, either, ever, not from anyone. 
Certainly not from me, ‘cause I got problems of my own.
So you’ll just have to suck it in and tough it out.
As for the rest of you—the rest of you are yellow dog punks and you’ll always be 
punks.
Period, end of discussion.




- 5 -
« ^ » 
On the afternoon of July 3, 2075, Terry Shawmac sat at a banquet table toward 
the rear of the hall and watched as people arrived.
He was exceptionally drunk.
To the man sitting next to him, he said suddenly, “It’s not like any of the 
people who got nominated are any good.”
William Devane, newsdancer for the Electronic Times, nodded. When he spoke his 
voice held a distinct Irish lilt, and for a man of his size—for a man of any 
size—his voice was very soft and gentle. “I’ve often thought.”
William Devane did not look like a newsdancer. He was black Irish with black 
eyes, a face so smooth it looked as though he had just depilated; even in his 
tuxedo he looked more like a bodybuilder than a nominee for an Electronic Times 
Award for Excellence in News Reporting.
A hundred and fifty years earlier he’d have been the meanest, toughest Irish cop 
in his precinct.
“You, for example,” Shawmac continued. “Don’t take this personally, but do you 
really think your article on the Johnny Rebs was one of the five best pieces of 
feature reporting in the last year? Really? Not like my extended column on 
recreational explosives. Now there was a subject that people responded to.”
William Devane’s lips curved into a slight smile that did not reach his black 
eyes. “I heard.”
“And my story on retirement benefits,” Shawmac continued. “My examination of the 
ways in which the fact that people are living longer affects the willingness of 
large corporations to pay retirement benefits that workers have legitimately 
earned. Brilliant,” he said briskly, “fine, fine writing.” Shawmac suddenly 
upended the bottle of smoke whiskey on the table in front of him, held it upside 
down for a good ten seconds, and drank straight from the neck. After putting it 
down again, he fixed Devane with a hostile stare. “So. Think you’re going to 
win?”
Devane shrugged, massive shoulders moving easily beneath the black cloth of his 
tuxedo. “I have no idea, ‘Sieur Shawmac.”
“I’ve never been nominated, you know.”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” Shawmac blinked. “Thought I’d mention it.” He returned to his bottle.
William Devane sat quietly and watched the hall fill up. He did not much like 
visiting New York; if he had not been nominated for an award, he would not have 
come.
He did not much like Terry Shawmac.
There was one advantage to visiting the city of New York; only one.

Six hours later William Devane, in his tuxedo, passed through the Barrier and 
walked down the nighttime streets of the Long Island Fringe. Peaceforcer 
glowfloats and spyeyes bobbed quietly in the air above, but Devane did not allow 
it to lull him into a false sense of security; the PKF would not rouse itself to 
come to the aid of a single man, walking alone at night in the Fringe, should 
trouble befall him.
Devane did not intend to allow trouble to befall him.
Twice, as he walked the ten blocks from the Patrol Sectors Barrier to McGee’s, 
bands of the Gypsy Macoute, draped in American flags in honor of tomorrow’s 
Independence Day, came upon him.
Both times Devane ignored them.
Both times the Macoute—perhaps not certain themselves why they did so—let him 
pass.
A single hunting waldo sat next to the doorway that led into McGee’s. Two men 
stood immediately inside the door. One carried an Excalibur laser rifle, the 
other appeared unarmed.
Both were the equals of Devane’s own not inconsiderable height.
“William Devane,” said Devane. “Here to see Mister McGee. He’s expecting me.”

After dinner they retired to McGee’s study upstairs on the third floor. The 
study was a place of windows; one window faced inward, overlooking the 
restaurant below; another looked out into the Fringe. A third looked off across 
the water, toward the spacescraper-dominated nighttime skyline of Manhattan.
They were in fact real windows, not holos. The Fringe had, in years past, been a 
more brutal and violent place than it had since become. It was inevitable; those 
who had been damaged the worst during the Troubles were now dead, and the 
children of the Troubles, if deadlier than their parents, were also saner. The 
random sniper fire that had once been endemic was now rare, and windows had once 
again become safe.
The one wall that lacked a window bore a large American flag.
A photograph, grainy and two-dimensional, hung over the desk; it held the image 
of a boat McGee had once owned.
A holo in the corner was tuned to the Electronic Times Board; a second holo, 
beside it, showed imagery from NewsBoard. Images of rioting—burning cars, 
pitched battles with PKF troops—flickered through the fields.
An irony; as the Independence Day riots had grown more violent in the outside 
world, they had grown less so in the Fringe. From his study McGee could see only 
one building afire.
“It was fascinating,” said Devane, “to be sure. Newsdancers, nominated 
themselves, kept sneaking out of the proceedings to check on the status of the 
riots.”
The old man nodded. “Did you mind losing?”
Devane sipped at the coffee and brandy McGee had prepared for him, and smiled. 
“Only a bit, if the truth be told. The award would have made it more difficult 
for me to work on stories in anonymity. I don’t generally write features 
material anyway.” He wondered, briefly, if there was any chance at all McGee 
could have understood how deeply he had wanted to lose. After a moment he said, 
“The Credit would have been nice.”
“CU:five-thousand, isn’t it?”
“That’s only a bit of it, McGee. The rest is that other Boards would have paid 
more for my work, for the privilege of placing my name on the masthead. In a 
year or so I’d have brought in twice again the amount of the prize Credit.”
“Surely you’re not hurting?”
Devane shook his head. “No. But who knows what the future will bring? It never 
hurts to have some put away as hard Credit.”
McGee grinned. “Your point is well taken. Over the course of my own ridiculously 
prolonged life, I’ve been broke more times than I like to think.” McGee paused, 
said abruptly, “Just out of curiosity, how old are you?”
Devane did not even blink. “Forty-seven.”
McGee shook his head. “No, you’re not. I mentioned Bob and Ray to you once, and 
you knew who they were. Nobody who wasn’t listening when they were on the air 
remembers Bob and Ray any longer.”
Devane lied easily. “McGee, you’ve the fine suspicious mind of a newsdancer. I 
did some background research once on a comedy Board in Texas; Bob and Ray were 
prominently mentioned in that Board’s history of live comedy duos.”
“You’ve slipped up on other points as well; you remember too damn many of the 
same things I remember, things that no one who is not my age should recall.” 
McGee shrugged. “So don’t tell me. I’ve had one or two experimental treatments 
myself; you don’t live as long as the both of us have without them. I was just 
curious; your skin, in particular. No looseness to speak of, and I don’t see 
much in the way of joint degeneration in your hands. Whoever did your work, it 
impresses me.”
“Indeed.” Devane paused, changed the subject. “I did appreciate the background 
material on the Ministry’s decision to start sterilizing Public Labor clients 
again. It helped my story.”
“Yeah.” McGee nodded, accepting Devane’s change of subject. When he spoke, his 
voice was grim. “It was a stupid decision, William. We are damn near the point 
where the PKF are going to have to stop calling them riots and start admitting 
that they’re insurrections; we are only a year away from the Tri-Centennial 
itself, and the Ministry brings back the single most unpopular population 
control measure Occupied America has ever seen. One of my waiters had a sister 
in Public Labor; I didn’t know about it, or I would have paid her debt and 
gotten her out. By the time he came to me it was too late; they’d sterilized her 
already. And I don’t care what the Ministry says, that damn copy-protection 
transform virus they use kills people.”
William Devane nodded. “I must tell you, I am not looking forward to next 
summer. It is not going to be a good time to be on Earth, and particularly North 
America.”
McGee rose from behind his desk, moved restlessly to stand at the window. He 
held a single beer bulb in one hand; Devane thought McGee had forgotten it, had 
not seen McGee drink from it since opening the bulb. “I lose Credit on this 
restaurant, on the hotel; you know that.”
“Yes.”
“People think I’m wealthy.” McGee snorted. “The Fringe needs them, so I’ve kept 
them going. The hotel gives the Gypsy Macoute and the Temple Dragons a place to 
negotiate treaties, neutral territory they can’t find anywhere else. The 
restaurant is just a safe place for people to come and not be bothered. God 
knows there are few enough of them in the Fringe.”
Devane said nothing.
“Trent the Uncatchable used to come here, you know. Before he got out of the 
Fringe and got famous.”
Devane looked interested. “You’ve never mentioned that before. You knew him?”
“A bit. He was a punk.”
“Is there a story in it?”
“Probably not. That’s not why I bring it up. It is just—William, I’ve started 
turning down Ministry work. I can’t stomach it any longer. It used to be that 
when Special Tasks or the Office of Technology Assessment had a job for me it 
was because some genie had gone wild, and they needed the genie found and 
stopped. They didn’t try to hire me to kill genies, and when one of them died 
during a chase—rarely—they weren’t pleased.
“I doubt they will try to hire me again. Last week I turned down a job offer 
that—” McGee stopped in midsentence, turned to face Devane. “The details don’t 
matter. A political job, and an unpleasant one. I’ve never turned down a job on 
political grounds before, and it’s left them—unhappy with me. It wouldn’t 
surprise me if the unhappiness found expression.” McGee looked straight at 
Devane. “I have kept notes about every piece of work I’ve ever done for the 
Ministry. It is all covered under the Official Secrets Acts of 2048 and 2054.”
William Devane said quietly, “You’re talking about treason, McGee.”
“It is for sale.”
“Ah.”
“I need the Credit.”
“How much?”
“CU:ten thousand.”
“There’s a story in this material?”
“At least one. The rest is great background, though. Things you won’t learn 
elsewhere.”
William Devane looked straight at McGee and said simply, “Sold. What’s the 
story?”
“Okay,” McGee said slowly. “Okay. Did you ever hear about a slowtime bubble that 
was found up in the Swiss Alps, back in ‘72? About the fellow they found inside 
it?”

The semiballistic to Ireland took not quite an hour.
In the semiballistic’s darkened passenger compartment, William Devane audited 
McGee’s notes. It was fascinating material, true enough; it covered forty years 
of McGee’s work in the Ministry’s Department of Special Tasks. Devane did not 
for an instant believe that it was a complete account of McGee’s work; but he 
did believe that the sections McGee had edited—and there were obvious edits, 
McGee’s way of acknowledging the point—were personal matters.
The “story” was ridiculous.
The entire thing—the bubble, the man found inside, the Secretary General’s 
involvement, and the way the PKF had bundled the fellow off to some unknown 
destination—smacked of a System Enquirer article. Devane was pragmatic; he could 
not, off the top of his head, think of anything about which he would have been 
less likely to write. His reputation would be destroyed if such an article ever 
saw the light of day with his byline attached.
Assuming the story was fabricated, and McGee had been somehow suckered, which 
Devane did assume. In the unlikely event there was any truth to the story—well, 
in that instance publishing the material was even more foolish. Devane had 
learned many hundreds of years prior that it did not pay to cause the powerful 
any great degree of trouble. And Charles Eddore impressed Devane as few 
politicians had since Almundsen and Moreau. Of the politicians Devane would have 
been willing to inconvenience with such an article, Eddore was low on the list.
About half an hour into the flight Devane turned his handheld off and leaned 
back in his seat, closing his eyes.
He had not finished all of McGee’s notes, but unless there was some unexpected 
gem in the background material, it had been a bad purchase.
It did not bother him that he had overpaid for the material; such purchases were 
always a gamble, and McGee was an honest man.
Devane put the story out of his mind and prepared to take a nap.

The story stayed with him.
He had been unable to get an SB to Dublin; the SB came down in Belfast instead; 
most of Ireland away from where Devane needed to go. At the spaceport’s downlot 
he chartered a taxi, gave the taxi his home address, and tried to get to sleep. 
The semiballistic had taken him from New York to Ireland in not quite an hour; 
the taxi would take over twice as long to reach his home, three hundred 
kilometers south of Belfast, and inland fifty klicks from the coast.
The story would not, damn it, leave him be.
Devane kept his eyes closed and tried to sleep.
About ten minutes into the cab ride home, William Devane sighed irritably, 
opened his eyes, and turned on his handheld. Indecision touched him then—where 
to start?
Staring into his handheld’s steadily glowing field, Devane brought the traceset 
up to his temple, and after a moment’s consideration gave the command, access in 
summary—and a pause then, and Devane was not certain why this was the subject 
that came to him—Access in summary, slowtime fields. He was still auditing data, 
lost to the world, when the car landed in the heart of County Cork.
The house rose up out of the side of a hill, overlooking a small, stream. Its 
walls were stone and the windows were small slits, and it was far larger than 
its stony exterior suggested.
It faced, across the length of the valley, the old stone keep at Kilgard, where, 
Devane had reason to believe, he had once lived.
A road of broken black cement, well over a hundred years old, led up to the 
house, a holdover from the days when cars had traveled on wheels. The cab set 
down on the surface of the cracked asphalt, fans gentling as the car touched 
ground. Devane touched his handheld to the cab’s payment strip, stepped out and 
stood at the foot of the path leading up to the house. His eyesight was 
excellent; after a moment a tiny light, set in a small stone at the base of the 
house, blinked once in infrared. It was the sign that the house security had 
recognized him; he moved forward up the path, touched his palm to the locklarm, 
and waited while the door unbolted itself.
The door was another sign of his house’s age; it did not slide away, it did not 
curl open; it was solid oak, reinforced with interior stainless steel rods, and 
it swung open on hinges.
Devane had installed it himself, in 1922.
He had built the house, laid it stone by stone into the side of the hill, over 
four hundred years prior.
Inside the house the lights came up automatically. The living room was lit by a 
pair of standing lamps that looked like the flood lamps which had once been used 
in motion picture production; Devane had purchased them in Hollywood in 1958.
He took the stairs to his bedroom, near the top of the small hill. A smaller 
stairway inside the bedroom led up to a small grassy place on the surface of the 
hill, overlooking every approach to Devane’s home.
In the basement the entrances to three tunnels were hidden. One of the tunnels 
reached out no farther than the base of the hill; the other two reached out in 
opposite directions, some four hundred meters apiece. Each one had taken him 
decades to dig.
The house had running water and electricity; thirty years prior Devane had 
installed a portable fusion generator in the basement, and over the years had 
slowly taken himself off Ireland’s power grid. He did not pay electric bills, 
did not shop locally. His InfoNet access was through a small microwave dish set 
into the side of the hill. As far as the Tax Boards were concerned, he had no 
existence as a private individual; he was the sole Irish employee of a small 
import-export company based in Occupied America.
To the extent possible, he left no records of his existence; but maintaining a 
reasonable degree of anonymity was difficult nonetheless, and grew more so with 
each passing century.
Devane’s bedroom might have passed for the cabin of some English sea captain of 
the 1800s. In it Devane had installed most modern conveniences short of a 
houseboat. He undressed himself and hung his clothes; he placed his weapons—a 
hideaway maser and a knife for close-in work—on the dresser next to his bed.
Even in his own bed, warm and secure as any man might reasonably expect to be, 
he found himself unable to sleep. Half an hour after going to bed he got back 
up, displeased with the world and himself, pulled on a robe and sat down to read 
McGee’s account again.




Spring: 2072
A Blast from the Past
- 1 -
« ^ » 
Saturday, February 13, 2072:
The old man stood on the black marble floor in the lobby of the Institute of 
Advanced Archaeological Studies in Lyons, France, hands tucked into the pockets 
of his overcoat; ancient, pale gray eyes scanning the lobby restlessly. He 
radiated age, not so much in his appearance as in his mannerisms, the economy of 
gesture and movement that nobody under the age of a hundred or so would have had 
time yet to learn. The skin at his neck and on the backs of his hands was 
slightly loose; aside from that, simply from appearance, he might have been any 
age above sixty or so.
He had been born in 1929 and he was 142 years old.
After a few minutes the increasingly nervous receptionist asked him if he would 
care to sit. Though his French was excellent he did not respond, and she did not 
ask again.
He had been kept waiting for over an hour when Doctor Sven Eingardt finally 
arrived. The old man was in no hurry; he stood before the double glass doors, 
watching the fog creep through the streets, ignoring Eingardt’s approach. He 
found it preferable to watching the cheap wallholo—a none-too-subtle series of 
advertisements for the Institute itself. The pitch for funds, the wallholo 
informed him in large printed French, could be heard on earphone channel four. 
Yet another argument against the damned earphones, the old man thought with a 
certain cynical pleasure.
The thought marked his age as clearly as all else; earphones had been a fact of 
life for over fifty years.
Eingardt spoke English with very little accent. “ ‘Sieur McGee. How pleasant to 
see you. Please accept my sincere apologies for being late. The maglev was shut 
down while they swept the rail into Lyon. A bomb threat by the Claw, 
apparently.”
McGee did not respond for perhaps fifteen seconds after Doctor Eingardt’s 
greeting. At length he turned away from the vista of the fog, turned to look at 
Doctor Eingardt standing nervously in the midst of his gleaming lobby, hand 
outstretched to shake McGee’s. Doctor Eingardt was a tall, thin man who had, at 
the moment, a nervous tic in one cheek. McGee nodded and kept his hands in the 
pockets of his overcoat. “Mister McGee, if you please. I’ll see your toy now.”

In the maglev on the way down to the basement Eingardt made the mistake of 
attempting conversation.
“They say you run a restaurant in New York’s Fringe.”
“Yes.”
“And a hotel in the Fringe as well. Interesting hobby for an employee of the 
Ministry of Population Control.”
McGee glanced down at Eingardt, a flick of the pale gray eyes. “I don’t work for 
the babychasers. I work for the Bureau of Special Tasks, a department within the 
Ministry, and I only do that when I damn well feel like it. My restaurant and 
hotel are my business.” The old man was silent, brooding. “Hunting rogue genies 
for the MPC—occasional silliness like this, for the Office of Technology 
Assessment—are hobbies.”
The Institute’s basement was as cold as the streets outside; McGee was glad he’d 
kept his coat on. This early on a Saturday most of the Institute’s employees 
were not present, and McGee was distantly pleased by that as well.
The bubble sat in the middle of the basement, surrounded by twenty meters of 
empty space on all sides.
It was what McGee had been told to expect, no more and no less. A mirrored 
sphere some four meters in diameter, perfectly reflective. It sat on a 
tripod-based ring of some dull metal, lifted high enough up off the ferrocrete 
floor that a person could crawl under it. McGee ran the tips of his fingers over 
the bubble’s surface. It was so slick it felt wet. He placed one hand against 
the surface and pushed lightly. The bubble shifted just a bit on its supporting 
ring.
Eingardt spoke in a nervous rush. “A German climber, Candace Groening, found it. 
Two weeks ago. She was up in a rocky area in the Val d’Entremont in Switzerland, 
around twenty-three hundred meters above sea level. Command, picture one.” A 
holofield appeared hanging in midair next to the bubble, a flat photo centered 
midway in: a rocky pass high in the Swiss Alps, white and grayish blue. “This is 
near the Great St. Bernard pass, a bit north of the Italian border. Command 
next.” A second shot showed an expanse of rock with a gleam of reflective silver 
buried in the midst of the gray. “A recent rock slide had uncovered this partial 
surface of the sphere. Greening cleared away as much of the surface of the 
sphere as she could, shot it from several angles, and came back down. A 
colleague in Hamburg—that’s in north Germany—to whom she showed her photographs, 
he forwarded them to me because we’re so much closer to the site.”
“I know where Hamburg is.”
Doctor Eingardt smiled uncertainly. “Sorry. You Americans tend to be shaky on 
European geography.” McGee stared at Eingardt and the smile died. “Not all of 
you,” Eingardt said after a moment.
“Go on, Doctor.”
Eingardt did so quickly. “We went up to the site last weekend, myself and two of 
my assistants. Picks and lasers, no blasting; we were very careful for fear of 
damaging the site.” The holo flickered, became a shot from a wavering handheld 
holocam. The quality was sufficiently poor that McGee guessed the holo had not 
been doctored. An observation he had made many years prior was that false 
documents, holos, recordings, all tended to a certain minimal level of 
professionalism in their presentation.
The image was of the sphere that stood next to the holo, as Eingardt and his 
assistants excavated around it. “We took samples—you can see it here—of rock 
from the vicinity of the sphere. Here we were fortunate; in a rock layer four 
centimeters above the surface of the sphere we found this fossilized material. A 
shrub for which we have good radiocarbon-dating comparisons. I place its age at 
thirty-two thousand six hundred years old, with a margin of error of perhaps 
four hundred years in either direction. My best guess at this point—and it is a 
guess, though I’ve some evidence to go on—is that the sphere was buried somewhat 
earlier than that, perhaps thirty-five to forty thousand years ago. We know that 
it was covered by sheets of ice during the tail end of the Wurm glacial period; 
there are glacial striation marks on the deepest levels of the rock. The sphere 
was found in an area located above the tree line both then and now; we found 
nothing really suitable for radiocarbon dating except the shrubbery I mentioned, 
which was separated by a rock layer four centimeters in width. At any rate, when 
the ice sheet retreated from this ridge about twenty thousand years ago, at the 
end of the last Ice Age, it left behind a—here, at the sides of the ridge—what 
is called a lateral moraine. Essentially a collection of boulders, rubble that 
was ground together by the motion of the glacier—covering the entrance to the 
cave. At a guess the earthquake back in ‘66 uncovered the sphere, and it’s been 
sitting there ever since, waiting for somebody to come along and discover it.”
Eingardt was silent after that, as though waiting for McGee to reply. When it 
became clear that McGee had no intention of saying anything, Eingardt sighed and 
called the glowpaint up.
“ Sieur McGee, may I ask why you were sent here? This is one of the most 
exciting archaeological discoveries of this century, perhaps ever, and I can’t 
get anybody at the office of Technology Assessment to listen to me. ‘Selle 
Laronde slapped an interdict order on publication, nobody returns my calls, I 
can’t—”
“She thinks it’s a fake.”
The comment stopped Eingardt dead. “I’m sorry?”
“ ‘Selle Laronde thinks your sphere is a hoax.”
“But, but—” Eingardt sputtered to a halt and then exploded, “Why?”
“The implications are—interesting.” McGee examined the fingertips with which he 
had touched the surface of the sphere, looked up at Eingardt, and said mildly, 
“You seem to be saying that you’ve found an artifact—an artifact of some 
technological sophistication if I’m any judge—that’s more than thirty-five 
thousand years old.”
“Yes! I think it’s probably an abandoned piece of alien technology. It—”
McGee nodded. “So you said in your letter to ‘Selle Laronde. What makes you 
think so?”
Eingardt appeared to be trying to say eight different things all at the same 
time. Finally he said, “Surely it’s obvious?”
“Not to me. Or Gabrielle.”
“Well—look,” said Eingardt in obvious frustration, “artifacts are not found 
outside of a cultural support matrix. At the simplest level, you don’t find 
metal artifacts without also finding some evidence of fire and smelting, you 
see? You don’t find sewn cloth without finding, at the least, bone needles. That 
sphere is the product of an advanced civilization, and it’s very old. 
Thirty-five thousand years ago there was no civilization on Earth. It has to be 
an alien artifact; no human civilization of the period was remotely capable of 
producing this sort of artifact. This sphere was buried during the final years 
of the Middle Paleolithic period. Blade tools were state of the art; weapons and 
tools made from flint, Mister McGee. Homo sapiens Neanderthal hadn’t grown 
extinct yet. It was a long time ago.”
McGee nodded. “I think that’s Mademoiselle Laronde’s point. Thomas Jefferson 
once said he found it easier to believe that a couple of Yankee astronomers 
could he than to believe that rocks fell from the sky.”
Doctor Eingardt said softly, “Rocks do fall from the sky, Mister McGee.”
The old man grinned at Eingardt; it had a distinctly evil tinge. “So they do. A 
team from O.T.A. will be by next week to pick this up from you.” He spoke as 
Eingardt opened his mouth to protest. “Whatever else happens, you won’t see me 
again. Thank you for your time.”




- 2 -
« ^ » 
Friday, February 27, 2072:
“It’s a very slowtime field.”
“Drink up,” McGee urged the physicist cheerfully. “Tell me all about it.”
Kevin Holtzmann was a stooped, lanky young British physicist. In the near two 
weeks since Holtzmann had taken over the investigation of the Val d’Entremont 
artifact, McGee had developed a genuine fondness for the man. Holtzmann had 
three earrings in his right ear and five in his left and his makeup tended 
toward the garish; it was often said that he did not look much like what he was, 
the finest non-AI physicist of his generation. Within his narrow areas of 
specialty the young man exhibited a penetrating intelligence McGee occasionally 
found discomfiting.
Fortunately Holtzmann drank. Socially and otherwise.
McGee and Holtzmann sat together in a quiet, dimly lit, red-leather-lined booth 
at a bistro on the outskirts of Paris. That the leather had come out of a 
genegineer’s tank rather than off the backs of animals did not disturb McGee 
particularly even when he allowed himself to think about it; his own liver, his 
right leg from the knee down, both of his eyes and all of his skin from head to 
toe, had also come out of the genegineer’s vats.
Holtzmann eyed the liquid left sitting in the bottom of his glass and knocked it 
back. “Well. I shouldn’t be telling you this, McGee—”
“I know. And I appreciate it.”
“—and I don’t know why a Ministry Special Tasks agent would be interested 
anyway—”
McGee said mildly, “I’m a businessman, Kevin. I run a hotel. A restaurant.”
Holtzmann nodded. “Of course. So what this means is, it’s not a hoax. It can’t 
be. What we have in this sphere is so remarkable I am—” Holtzmann paused, said 
precisely “—at something of a loss to explain it to you.”
“Try,” McGee suggested.
“Okay.” Holtzmann waved at the waitbot hovering near the table, said, “Two more. 
Of the same,” and turned back to McGee. “First, there’s no external power 
source. The slowtime fields we can make today, they run off external power 
sources. Say you place the power source inside the field; then when you turn the 
field on, the power source feeding the field immediately slows down as well. 
Follow? The slower the field you try to generate, the slower the power inside 
operates, and the less power it generates. Pretty damn soon the slowtime field 
fails. Top sustained time to date is a bit over sixteen hours. McGee, we’ve 
known twenty, thirty years there should be a break-even point, where the field 
starts to look self-sustaining. To do this you need a fast power source and an 
incredibly slow slowtime field. Batteries won’t work. Fusion comes close, and 
MAM would be ideal; matter-antimatter annilation—annihilation,” he said 
carefully, “puts out so much power that even a small power source, maybe the 
size of a football, could keep the slowtime sphere running for hundred of 
thousands of years before failing.”
The waitbot placed a scotch before Holtzmann, a Simpatico beer in a smoky black 
bottle before McGee. It was one of the reasons McGee liked this bistro; it was 
the only place in Paris he knew where they would not try to serve him his beer 
in a bulb. Beads of condensation ran down the sides of the bottle; McGee ignored 
the glass placed before him and drank directly from the bottle. “Are you going 
to be able to open it?”
Holtzmann nodded slowly, fingering the nearly full tumbler. “I think so. Maybe. 
The damn thing—McGee, it’s slow. We shot the fucker with neutrinos. They bounced 
at eight nines, ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine nine percent 
reflection. We measured how many got through and calculated from that.” The 
lanky physicist hesitated, said quietly, “They dated that sphere at about 
thirty-five thousand years of age when they dug it out of the Val d’Entremont. 
McGee, in those thirty-five thousand years, about three minutes has passed 
inside that sphere.”
McGee said slowly, “Oh.” He paused. “That’s—interesting.”
Holtzmann nodded. “It is. Were all wondering what we’re going to find inside the 
damn thing.”
McGee sat up straighter. “You know how to open it?”
“We think so. Pop it inside another slowtime field. We can’t make a slowtime 
field that runs inside another slowtime field. It’s not theoretically 
impossible, but we can’t begin to do it. Some of the equations get—silly. 
Probably whoever made this one couldn’t do it either. We’re arranging to use the 
Tytan Labs’ slowtime field, the one in Switzerland. It’s a private lab but it’s 
partially funded by the Unification. Marc Packard—you know him?”
“No.”
“Chairman of Tytan Industries, parent company of Tytan Labs. And Tytan 
Manufacturing, and half a dozen other Tytan subsidiaries. We need his permission 
to clear all his people out of Complex B, where their field is located. It’s the 
biggest slowtime field in the System, McGee. Not the slowest one, not by a 
bit—there’s a tiny field out in the Belt that’s almost as slow as the sphere we 
found up in the mountains—but it’s the only one that’s near big enough to 
enclose the sphere. We’re going to take a Peaceforcer Elite, put him in a 
pressure suit, and put him and the sphere together inside the Tytan field. The 
pressure suit’s in case there are viruses, poisonous air, anything of that sort, 
inside the sphere.” Holtzmann smiled a bit shakily. “Do you understand slowtime 
physics at all?”
McGee snorted.
“Right. Well.” Holtzmann was silent for a long time, drinking steadily. Finally 
he looked up at McGee. “We think we can give the Elite forty-five seconds inside 
the sphere, over the space of a week external time. Assuming Packard comes 
through, assuming we know shit-all about what the goddamn sphere is in the first 
place and we’re not dealing with something else entirely—assuming all that,” he 
said, gulping back the tumbler’s remnants, “we’re going to open it on Thursday.”




- 3 -
« ^ » 
The alien slowtime sphere squatted, cold and aloof, in the center of Tytan 
Industries Experimental Complex B, the long, poorly lit, converted hangar that 
enclosed the largest slowtime field on Earth.
Wearing a black and silver official issue PKF pressure unit, PKF Elite Sergeant 
Samuel De Nostri sat alone on a bench at one end of Complex B. The p-suit’s 
helmet sat on the bench next to him.
Other Peaceforcers stood duty throughout the Complex, a pair at every entrance 
and a squad with Excalibur multi-frequency rifles guarding the alien slowtime 
sphere. But the guards were under orders of silence toward one another, and 
particularly toward De Nostri himself.
Despite the poor quality of the light, De Nostri, like the other PKF Elite 
present, saw well. His eyes were not the eyes he had been born with twenty-seven 
years ago; they were, in almost every respect, far superior. In his cyborg eyes, 
the sphere, mirrored to begin with, glowed as though with an internal flame.
He tried not to look at the row of medbots waiting off to his right. The 
implication of their presence disturbed him.
He tried just as hard not to look at the half dozen Unification officials—PKF, 
Ministry, and both a webdancer and Hand from the Secretary General’s office—on 
the observation platform off to his left. He knew a couple of them; McGee was a 
Ministry of Population Control agent, Special Tasks, and the Hand was Alexander 
Moreau, grandson of Jules Moreau, and an intimate of Secretary General Eddore.
He tried very hard indeed not to look at Elite Commissionaire Mohammed Vance, 
watching him from up on the platform. De Nostri had not known, had not been told 
by Vance when they requested that he volunteer, just what he was volunteering 
for. It was understood that the offer was an honor, extended to him because of 
his record and his family—his uncle was the late Jean-Louis de Nostri, the most 
famous French genegineer of the century—and Samuel had not hesitated in 
accepting.
Now that he did know he did not like it at all.
There could be anything inside the damned alien field, anything at all. The 
night prior Samuel had awoken from sleep with the memory of a story he had been 
told as a child, the tale of the jinn in the bottle.
He was a creature of great power, the jinn, and after a thousand years in the 
bottle he had decided to grant three great wishes to whoever unstopped the 
bottle and let him out.
After two thousand years he had decided to serve forever whoever unstopped the 
bottle and let him out.
After three thousand years, the jinn had decided to spend the rest of all time 
torturing the luckless bastard who let him out of the bottle.
Samuel De Nostri had spent most of the morning trying to shake the memory of 
that story.
Kevin Holtzmann said, “Up on the platform, stand on the mark.”
Samuel De Nostri took three steps up and two steps forward. It brought him past 
the line where the black pylons would generate the enclosing field. The mark 
Holtzmann referred to was simply a piece of tape hastily placed on the 
platform’s gleaming clean surface.
It left him staring at the mirrored surface of the alien slowtime field from a 
distance of only thirty centimeters. His bloated, deformed features loomed back 
at him like something out of a funhouse mirror.
“Helmet on.”
De Nostri locked his helmet in place with the ease of long practice. It was one 
of the reasons he had been asked to volunteer for this duty; he had spent a 
three-year tour of duty at Halfway and the habits of a pressure suit were second 
nature to him. The sounds of the outer world ceased; De Nostri felt a faint 
vibration as the airplant kicked in. His peripheral vision vanished, to be 
replaced by the helmet’s indicators. With the loss of his peripheral vision the 
sphere became the only thing in his world, the only object visible to him.
On the indicator at the far right of his field of vision, a red 7 appeared. The 
top six channels were standard pressure suit frequencies. Channels seven and 
eight were reserved for use by the PKF, and only PKF pressure suits even had 
them; nine through twelve were private Space Force channels.
De Nostri said, “Command, on seven.” The deep rumble of PKF Elite Commissionaire 
Mohammed Vance’s voice reached De Nostri’s ears a moment later.
“Samuel.”
“Sir.”
“Remember that you are representing the interests and the reputation of the 
Peace Keeping Force. Keep your head and do nothing foolish.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I trust my choice of you for this task will not be proven a mistake. ‘Sieur 
Holtzmann is waiting to speak to you on channel three.”
De Nostri frowned. “Yes, sir. Command, on three.”
The chief scientist’s voice, harsh and grating, invaded De Nostri’s helmet. In 
English. “Ready to rock?”
De Nostri’s English was poor, and there was no translator software buffering the 
radio link between himself and Holtzmann; it took him a few seconds to translate 
the foreign words. “If I understand you, yes. I think so. You—do you speak 
French, ‘Sieur Holtzmann?”
“Of course.”
“Please do.”
There was a moment of complete silence before the sound of Holtzmann’s dry 
chuckle came. He spoke in unaccented French. “As you wish. We are at a minute 
and thirty seconds. I will count down by fives starting at thirty seconds. Once 
the enclosing slowtime field establishes, the slowtime sphere should fail almost 
instantaneously. Remember that the most important thing for you to do is turn 
off the sphere’s field generator if you recognize it and can figure out how. Do 
not damage it; the generator probably runs off a MAM reaction, and the last 
thing in the world I want to do is turn off the field a week from now and find 
out some kind of nuke has gone off inside.”
“It would be the last thing you would do,” De Nostri observed.
Standing five meters away in front of the slowtime control console, Holtzmann 
blinked in surprise—PKF Elite were not known for their sense of humor—and then 
grinned a bit wearily. “Yeah. If you don’t get the generator turned off, make 
sure you’re as far away from it as possible at the end of forty-five. When our 
field goes off, the sphere will come back on. Okay, counting down to field 
activation at… thirty seconds… twenty-five…”
De Nostri found the incredibly strong transform-virus-enhanced muscles in his 
stomach tightening uncontrollably, painfully.
“…twenty…”
Deep breaths. The nanocomputer at the base of De Nostri’s skull noticed the 
surge of adrenaline and activated the programmed combat routines; De Nostri was 
forced to override it when the nanocomputer tried to turn on the lasers buried 
in the tips of his index fingers. He imagined, and forced back the image, of 
having to explain to Commissionaire Vance why he had blasted a hole in his own 
pressure suit.
“…ten…”
In fifty-jive seconds, thought Samuel De Nostri, a week will have passed.
“… four… three… two… one…”
At the last instant De Nostri remembered to turn his headlights on.
“Now.”
The clock at the left of De Nostri’s helmet flickered once and then said 45 in 
sharp red letters.
The world vanished in a brilliant white blaze.
He found himself trapped in a small shining place.
The cubical Tytan Labs slowtime field barely enclosed the alien sphere. De 
Nostri stood with the Tytan Labs field at his back, over his head, and beneath 
his feet. The Tytan field enclosed the platform he had been standing on; the 
platform, cut free from Complex B’s floor, felt suddenly unsteady, as though it 
floated free. The only light came from his headlamps, but between the mirrored 
interior of the Tytan slowtime field and the mirrored exterior of the alien 
sphere it was so bright that his helmet’s faceplate, after a second, darkened to 
compensate.
The clock said 43.
Nothing happened. De Nostri reached out a gloved hand, ran his fingers over the 
slick surface of the sphere. 38 now, and the sphere sat on its supporting ring, 
motionless, unchanged. Was nothing going to happen?
De Nostri drew his hand back from the surface of the sphere and blinked in 
surprise when a foot kicked him in the face.
The sphere was gone. Suddenly there was lots of free space and De Nostri’s 
combat routines used it without waiting to see what De Nostri thought about it; 
his body pushed backward with one foot, twisted and bounced off the interior 
upper surface of the Tytan slowtime field and came down crouched, balancing on 
the tips of its fingers, as far away from the thrashing form of the—person—as it 
was able to get.
It took De Nostri a startled moment to realize he had not been attacked. About a 
meter away from him a man having a seizure thrashed against the platforms 
spotless surface. De Nostri could hear the man’s screaming even through the 
p-suit he wore. Tiny details crowded in on De Nostri all at once, impossibly 
vivid. 29. The man was vaguely Latin in appearance, with olive-colored skin. 
Blood ran from his nose and there was foam on his lips. He was dressed all over 
in furs that reminded De Nostri, absurdly, of a mountain man of the old American 
West.
There was no machinery, nothing like the generator De Nostri had been told to 
look for.
Something gleamed in the man’s right hand. At 22 seconds De Nostri lunged 
forward, grabbed the man’s right wrist with both hands and planted his right 
foot in the pit of the man’s arm. With fingers made clumsy by pressure-suit 
gloves De Nostri attempted to pry the device, whatever it was, from the death 
grip with which the man held it. De Nostri felt bones snapping in the man’s 
wrist, fingers breaking as his incredibly strong cyborg hands pulled the device 
free.
With the gadget in hand his combat programming would not allow him to stay near 
a source of possible danger; one leap took him back to the edge of the Tytan 
slowtime field, as far from the convulsing, fur-wearing person as he could get.
The clock at the right side of De Nostri’s helmet said 5.
De Nostri looked at the device blankly. It was remarkably heavy given its size, 
about twenty kilograms; a significant weight even for his 
transform-virus-enhanced muscles. A long oval thing with a pair of smooth, oval 
indentations at one end; presumably touching one indentation turned the device 
on, and touching another turned it off. But which one?
He was still wondering when the clock said 0. The Tytan slowtime field broke 
apart and for an impossibly short moment De Nostri saw several dozen 
pressure-suited figures watching him as he stood there up on the platform.
And then the alien slowtime sphere reformed.
Around him.

During the week De Nostri spent inside the Tytan slowtime field, a three-layer 
decontamination tent grew around the gleaming, mirror-surfaced cube of the 
field. The decontamination procedures Kevin Holtzmann had requested, and 
received, were the same precautions used in dealing with nanotechnology and 
genegeneering, two sciences where small mistakes might have very far-reaching 
consequences. A series of three airlocks, with decontamination required between 
each airlock, separated the slowtime field from the hangar in which it had been 
generated. The scientists inside the tent all wore sterilized pressure suits.
To the extent that it was possible, every eventuality had been prepared for. 
Four medbots waited at the edge of the platform; if De Nostri came out of the 
field harmed in any way, the finest medical technology in the System would be 
waiting to heal him.
The decontamination tent reached up to within a few meters of the hangar’s 
ceiling, outward to within a few meters of the observation platform. Despite his 
curiosity, and Holtzmann’s invitation to join the working scientists inside the 
tent, McGee had opted for a position on the observation platform with the other 
government observers. Which was, after all, what he was—even if he didn’t feel 
like one.
With the others, he watched the holo showing the Tytan slowtime field. 
Holtzmann’s voice sounded a bit strained, which did not surprise McGee; it had 
been a long week. “We were planning to turn the field off at two o’clock, but 
we’re ready now, and even if we leave it on until then it’ll only give De Nostri 
another fraction of a second. Here goes. What the hell?”
McGee did not remember coming to his feet, approaching the holofield and the 
image within it. He was peripherally aware of the others around him and their 
similar reactions, Mohammed Vance saying quietly, “How very interesting.”
For an instant so short McGee was not certain he had seen it, De Nostri stood at 
the far right of the platform on which the Tytan slowtime field had been 
generated. Then the sphere was back and, at the far left of the platform, a man 
in furs lay screaming, thrashing and convulsing.
In the holo, McGee watched Kevin Holtzmann take a step up onto the platform, and 
then pause.
Peaceforcer Elite Samuel De Nostri was gone, enclosed in an alien slowtime 
sphere.
The sphere held still for just a moment, long enough for the scene to engrave 
itself upon the awareness of every person there, and then, gracefully, standing 
free now of the ring upon which it had originally been placed, the sphere rolled 
off the platform, bounced once with a sound like a church bell on Complex B’s 
floor, and rolled gently away from the platform; the biggest marble in the 
universe.
People stood transfixed, torn between the sight of the screaming man and the 
mirrored marble’s stately progress across the floor; and then Holtzmann’s voice 
came again: “Medbots?” Then, with rising force, “Could we have the medbots over 
here right fucking now?”

Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon struggled for his life. In the first seconds following the 
kitjan’s touch he knew himself dead without help from his comrades. Through the 
veil of the pain a part of him kept aware, did what it could to delay the final 
moment of his death. He was not aware of the stasis bubble forming around him, 
not aware of the sudden plunge into darkness. In the utter black he fought for 
even partial control of his nervous system, fought desperately to send the 
necessary commands through the kitjan-induced storm of randomly firing neurons. 
Twice he managed to restart his heart after it had faded; briefly he succeeded 
in reminding his lungs to breathe.
Sedon had not been aware of the lack of light until it returned. For the first 
time since his Consecration, someone dared to touch him without permission—and 
then to hurt him, bringing Sedon the distant awareness of bones in his right 
hand being broken, of the stasis bubble’s key being wrenched free. Compared to 
the pain of the kitjan it was nothing, but even in the midst of the pain he 
noticed it, promised himself an accounting.
Abruptly there came a stinging sensation at the base of his throat, followed by 
an immense emptiness, a reduction of pain, of all sensory input. Sedon became 
aware of chemicals traveling his bloodstream, blocking synapses, calming the 
wrenching of his muscles. His heart was not beating and Sedon attempted, again 
to restart it, but without success; the control of his neural system, the thing 
that made a Dancer what he was, had been taken from him. The sense of violation 
that descended upon him was astonishing; he had not suspected that even the 
Shield respected him so poorly.
As his body stilled, ceased its senseless thrashing, he felt himself sink toward 
the finality of true death. And a bolt of electricity ripped into him.

“Could I please have some silence?” Holtzmann stood at the front of the briefing 
room. He glanced down once at the readout floating in his handheld’s field, 
looked back up. “Ev—erybody? Please?”
It was just after 7:00 Pm.
McGee stood at the back of the room, and watched the others watching Holtzmann, 
wearing a variety of expressions that spanned the spectrum from fascination to 
seething anger.
“Okay,” said Holtzmann. “Here’s what’s happened, as far as we can figure it. De 
Nostri is inside the sphere. Most of you missed that, but the holos show it 
clearly; he was visible for a twelfth of a second before the sphere formed 
around him, and he’s holding something in his hand that we think is the 
generator.” Holtzmann paused. “Frankly, the item he’s holding seems too damn 
small to me to hold the necessary power source, even as a MAM reactor, but I 
wouldn’t bet my reputation on that. Maybe there’s some form of collapsed matter 
inside it. At any rate, De Nostri should be safe; as soon as we can, probably 
early tomorrow, we’ll generate the Tytan field again, and even if we can’t turn 
the generator off we’ll pull him out the same way he pulled out our guest.” 
Holtzmann was silent, then plunged into it. “As for our guest—that’s what we’ve 
been calling him—well, he’s definitely human; at a guess he’s contemporary to 
the period the sphere came from. His—clothing, I guess we’ll call it—would seem 
to indicate that’s the case. The medbots find some things about 
him—physiologically—that are a bit odd, but we have no idea at all what 
significance to place on those anomalies.” Holtzmann glanced at his handheld. 
“He died again just before I came out to see you. That’s three times so far; 
twice his heart, brain death once. The ‘bots have brought him back each time, 
but he’s getting weaker. Part of the problem is the ‘bots don’t know what’s 
wrong with him. One of the first things they did to him was pump in a sedative 
to stop the convulsions, but it looks like that might have been a mistake; the 
sedatives appear to have shut down everything, his entire neural system. They’ve 
had to jump start his heart twice now as a result. The expert system running the 
medbots conjectured that the section of his brain that’s responsible for keeping 
his heart beating is under his conscious control; when we sedated him we shut it 
down. His entire nervous system is inflamed both at the neural and gross 
physiological levels; the medbots have injected a nanovirus designed to bleed 
off some of the pressure inside his skull, and that seems to have helped some. 
Given the circumstances, the medbots are doing as well as can be expected. But 
we still need to get our guest to a real hospital, to human doctors who can 
diagnose something they haven’t seen before.” Holtzmann stopped all at once, as 
though he’d run out of energy and things to say at exactly the same time, and 
stood almost motionless, swaying ever so slightly while waiting for their 
questions.
They were not long in coming.

McGee left before five minutes were up, long before the dozen Unification 
officials present had run out of questions that Holtzmann was clearly going to 
be unable to answer. He took a cab to the airport, and boarded a semiballistic 
for Capitol City.
The Ministry had a job waiting for him in Occupied America; a genie 
hunt—possibly, the Ministry was hinting, one of the infamous Castanaveras twins. 
McGee was not averse to moving on; he had heard already from more than one 
source that any further contact with the Val d’Entremont bubble, and whoever or 
whatever they had taken out of it, would not be wise.
Aboard the semiballistic to New York McGee spent half an hour updating his 
journal. When he was done he encrypted the entry and turned his attention to the 
briefing materials he had been sent for the genie hunt. There was not much 
there, but enough to get started.
McGee flipped his handheld shut, closed his eyes, and lay back in his seat. A 
telepath. That would be interesting.
He felt a brief flicker of anticipation; and then slept.




- 4 -
« ^ » 
Saturday, March 12, 2072:
The most powerful individual in the System, United Nations Secretary General 
Charles Eddore, stood looking out the window at a view, from two kilometers up, 
of Capitol City, the Unification enclave in the midst of Manhattan; the city 
from which all of Earth and most of Luna were ruled.
The window at which Eddore stood was not really a window; that would not have 
been safe. And Eddore’s office was not actually located two kilometers up in a 
spacescraper; his offices were one and a half kilometers beneath the surface of 
Earth, protected from anything including a direct strike with thermonuclear 
weapons.
He listened with half an ear to the report his webdancer had brought back from 
Switzerland. That she was present in his office was a sign of the data’s 
sensitivity; Eddore did not dare allow information concerning the “guest” to be 
sent him via the Player- and AI-corrupted InfoNet.
Eddore interrupted the webdancer’s report midway through. “Holtzmann is serious 
about this?”
“Sir, he seems to be. He wont swear about the ‘guest,’ but he seems quite 
certain that the slowtime technology involved in the sphere is beyond us, and 
beyond any of the Belt CityStates as well.”
Eddore stood silently, watching the flickering firefly headlights of the 
hovercars ghosting through the skies of Capitol City. His thoughts were almost 
abstract, the swirling creative processes of a man who was, in his own field, 
every bit as much a genius as Holtzmann in his. Elements that he juggled 
simultaneously included the Johnny Rebs and the Erisian Claw, the largely 
American and largely Eurasian terrorist organizations; the situation with Free 
Luna, which was tense as always; his own growing distrust of the Peace Keeping 
Force, and theirs of him; and the increasing danger that the SpaceFarers’ 
Collective, or the Belt CityStates, might take a more active interest in 
internal Unification affairs.
The last danger was still small, but getting larger with every passing moment; 
as was the seven-kilometer-long shell of the United Nations Space Force warship 
Unity, the largest spacecraft ever built. There were those among the Belt 
CityStates, and even more so among the Collective, who saw in the Unity a plan 
to extend the Unification of Earth to encompass Free Luna, Mars, the Belt and 
the Jovian moons. Even without the Unity Space Force was probably capable of 
conquering the outer planets; with it the contest would be over very nearly 
before it was begun.
How all of these factors were affected by the appearance of a human being inside 
an alien slowtime sphere was a thing that Eddore would have had difficulty 
explaining. Had he attempted to, which was wildly unlikely, only a few hundred 
people in the entire System could have followed his explanation; and most of 
those were his rivals or political enemies.
It was 2072, and Charles Eddore faced an election in December, an election for 
the third and last term in which he would be eligible to serve as Secretary 
General. He expected to win; that was hardly the problem.
In Eddore’s picture window, a hovercar wobbled momentarily. Only a few seconds 
later a pair of Peaceforcer AeroSmiths dropped down out of the sky above the 
traffic lanes, hit the wobbling hovercar with spotlights, and began forcing the 
car down to a landing.
Eddore watched as the car was forced down. Someone in that car was, most likely, 
guilty of manual operation of a vehicle. The operator of the vehicle would 
probably end up in Public Labor, if he was not instead executed as an ideolog. 
It had been nearly a decade since it was legal to manually operate a vehicle 
inside a Transcontinental Automated Traffic Control cell.
Which, today, covered most of Earth.
Several minutes after the vehicle and the pursuing Peaceforcer craft had passed 
from sight, Eddore said, with some measure of genuine reluctance, “If it should 
prove impossible to revive the guest, it would be just as well.”
The webdancer nodded once and left him alone.




- 5 -
« ^ » 
When the world at last stabilized around him, Sedon knew he was being moved.
Through the veil of the sedatives Sedon monitored his auditory nerve. Voices 
were dim, rumbling and distant. Still he made out enough to doubt that the words 
were spoken in shiata. His thought processes were fuzzy, but still he found this 
reassuring; if the men and women around him did not speak shiata, then he was, 
still, among barbarians.
Though he made nothing of the sounds, he stored them for future reference.
Hands grasped and lifted him; straps restrained him. There was a momentary 
gentle acceleration that pressed him down against the surface upon which he lay. 
Though he tried he could not open his eyes; though he strained he could not move 
so much as a finger. Sedon struggled to restrain his fear, and failed.
Nowhere on this entire damn prison of a planet should there be aircraft.
When the long wash of sedative-masked pain finally subsided, Sedon found himself 
crippled, in his muscles, in the finer range of his senses.
These people, whoever they were, knew nothing of the care of a Dancer. The 
thought flickered at the back of his mind as he catalogued information.
If the guards standing near the entrance to his room were any indication, he was 
at least as much prisoner as a patient.
The guards interested Sedon. There were three of them, and they rotated duty in 
third-day increments. The guard who watched Sedon at night troubled Sedon for a 
while. His features were vaguely familiar, but during the long dreamlike time 
before the drugs wore off he could not place where he might have seen the face 
before.
They attempted to interrogate him on two separate occasions. Drugs that stole 
all control from him were injected into his bloodstream. One made him sleepy and 
cheerful, while the other made the colors in the room bright and caused him to 
have hallucinations. Even if they had spoken shiata the attempts would not have 
worked; as it was, lashing away at him in a variety of tongues of which Sedon 
knew nothing, his interrogators were completely frustrated. Sedon could hear it 
in their voices.
On what he guessed as the eighth day since the flight that had brought him here, 
Sedon awoke clear-headed and alert. His senses were numbed and he did not think 
he could Move if his life depended upon it. But his thoughts proceeded in 
orderly fashion, and his memory, scrambled by the kitjan and again by the drugs 
employed in interrogating him, began to reintegrate.
Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon’s first coherent thought in thirty-seven thousand years was 
simple. He stared up from his bed at the unnaturally stiff features of 
Peaceforcer Elite Samuel De Nostri, at the features of the man whom he clearly 
remembered taking the stasis bubble’s key from his hand, breaking his 
fingers—touching him—and thought, I will kill you slowly.

The linguist, Maximilian Beauchamp, was a short man who had allowed himself to 
go bald rather than visit a biosculptor; as he set his handheld up at the side 
of the patient’s bed he smiled at the patient.
The patient did not smile back. He was an olive-skinned fellow, apparently in 
his thirties. Beauchamp found it difficult to believe that the man had been near 
death so recently; he looked like an ad for a very good biosculptor. The 
patient’s eyes were unsettling, brown and steady. They rarely blinked, and moved 
constantly back and forth between Beauchamp and the PKF Elite standing by the 
doorway. Little details struck Beauchamp; the man had exquisitely graceful 
fingers, long enough that, not too many years past, before the advent of 
medbots, he might have made a fine surgeon. The muscles flowed smoothly beneath 
the surface of the man’s skin, and the skin itself had a fineness of grain that 
Beauchamp had seen before only in children, or in the aged immediately following 
regenerative geriatrics treatments. His face was as clean of hair as though he 
had just depilated, and the hair on his forearms was fine and faint.
Beauchamp seated himself at the edge of the patient’s bed. He did not expect it 
to take long for him to achieve communication with the patient. In his own 
person he spoke eight languages fluently, and through his inskin had near 
instantaneous access to every other language known to man. He was somewhat 
puzzled that he had been instructed to limit his initial conversation to French. 
Still, it was not a great inconvenience, if the subject cooperated.
The subject cooperated with a vengeance until 3:30 em., and Beauchamp grew 
angrier and angrier.
He left at 3:30, shaking with a mixture of fear and indignation.

The room in which Sedon returned to full awareness was large, stark, and nearly 
empty. It held the bed upon which Sedon lay; a small fixture upon which Sedon 
was intended to sit when eliminating; a doorway, and a ceiling that glowed with 
light intended to imitate this system’s sun. It was not a bad imitation, though 
not so bright as the true sun. A man—a guard—stood just inside the door at all 
times, watching Sedon at all times. The guard’s presence enraged Sedon at a 
level so deep that Sedon barely allowed himself the awareness of it.
He had spent far too much of his life imprisoned.
Being guarded.
The small round person they sent to speak to him was tedious and predictable. He 
wished to teach Sedon his tongue, and to learn Sedon’s. In aid of this he used a 
device that recorded words spoken by Sedon, and paired them with words from his 
own tongue for Sedon to learn. The device projected images in midair to aid them 
in assigning words to various pictures and actions. The parts of the human body 
came first, followed by images of both a man and woman performing various 
functions. Sitting, running, picking up, dropping. Eating, drinking—the small 
person’s indecision was almost comically obvious—eliminating.
So they were not very civilized, then, if they still had taboos relating to 
natural body functions.
Some of the pictures Sedon could make no sense of at all. One, for example, 
showed a man and woman with their lips pressed together; followed by two women 
engaged in a similar activity, and then by two men. It was clear that the small 
person attached some significance to these images; he watched Sedon more closely 
than usual as they were displayed.
Erotic activity, perhaps.
They went on to clothing, and then furniture of various sorts. Aside from 
“chair” and “table,” most of the items of furniture Sedon could not put a name 
to, though it was plain from the way the people and other items were arrayed 
upon them that they were furniture of various sorts. In those instances he 
accepted the word offered, but gave none of his own. “Bed” he found a word for, 
though he knew only one word for the several different types of things these 
people sat upon. The same for most of the vehicles he was shown; several 
different sorts of winged flying craft like the one that had brought him here; 
smaller, stubbier craft whose primary purpose was clearly ground transportation. 
A vehicle that sat upon four wheels, and another that had two and was propped up 
with the help of a small metal bar at its side.
At 3:30 Sedon was shown a vehicle whose shape he could not immediately make out. 
The thing tugged at a far, far distant memory. It looked as though a thin needle 
had been placed in the exact center of a thick, fat ring of some silver metal; a 
brilliant gold flame of light extruded from one end of the needle, dispersed far 
to the vehicle’s side.
Sedon recognized it with a sick shock.
A fusion flame.
Against a background of stars.
Stars.
The panic he had been suppressing so well until that moment came flooding back. 
Sedon clenched his eyes shut until prickles of light appeared against his 
eyelids, kept them shut, and concentrated on his breathing. The breathing was 
ragged, shamefully so, and his hands trembled, and he hated the Continuing Time 
and everyone in it for seeing him in such weakness.
By all the dark gods, these barbarians had space travel.
He was a heretic who had forsaken his gods, whose gods had forsaken him. So it 
was that when he lifted his head toward the sky and screamed his pain, screamed 
the words in shiata until the sound reverberated against the walls of the prison 
hospital room, Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon received no answer, and had expected none.
“Rho Haristi! How long was I inside?”

“This language doesn’t exist.” Beauchamp’s cheeks flamed red and his hands 
quivered as though looking for something to do with themselves. He spoke 
rapidly. “It’s made up. Completely made up. Vata means face except it also means 
cold. Rho means hello except it also means look. It’s intended to confuse. The 
words have no common basis with any human language in use today. The language is 
cleverly put together, with a certain consistency to it, but it’s a hoax, 
Commissionaire Vance. It is not a variation or a descendant or an ancestor of 
any language spoken by humans for at least a thousand years. There’s about a 
five percent word overlap with an obsolete dialect of Telugu, a Dravidian 
language spoken today only by some people in southern India—which only means 
that whoever made up this language did a bit of research to make it seem 
slightly plausible. There is no way a language as intricate and well developed 
as this one could be unknown in this day and age. None.”
Commissionaire Mohammed Vance waited for Beauchamp’s breathless rush of words to 
end, and said gently, “Thank you, M. Beauchamp. You will of course leave us a 
copy of your results.”
“And then when I showed him a torchship, he screamed at me—” Beauchamp broke off 
as Vance’s words penetrated. “Your pardon?”
“We have no further need of your service, M. Beauchamp. Good day.” The Elite sat 
without moving, simply watching Beauchamp with his dead black Elite eyes until 
Beauchamp nodded stiffly and rose. From his handheld Beauchamp extracted, and 
then handed to Vance, a single infochip. “This is everything. I’ll bill you for 
my time.”
“You are aware this matter is classified.”
Beauchamp gathered himself up and said with immense dignity, “Who could I 
possibly tell? I don’t even know where this place is.”
Vance smiled at Beauchamp, a creasing into folds of the stiff Elite skin; and 
Beauchamp shivered at the sight. “Count yourself fortunate, M. Beauchamp. If you 
knew where you were, you would not be permitted to leave.”

For a day and a half a voice that was not human talked to Sedon, using images 
that hung in midair—holofield, he had learned was its name—to establish common 
reference points. It went faster than Sedon would have guessed. His own memory 
was as near perfect as possible for any mechanism based in protein recording 
media; the memory of the nonhuman thing to which he talked seemed entirely so.
On the evening of his eleventh day since the flight that had brought him here, 
they came and took him to a dim room.
They gave him clothing to wear that was entirely unlike the robes he had been 
kept in since the flight. Pants and a shirt and a pair of slippers; he could not 
figure out how to put on the shirt until they demonstrated to him how the seals 
worked.
One of them walked before him, and one behind. They carried weapons that Sedon 
could not identify except to know that if one was pointed at him its wielder 
would die. Both of them moved with the quickness of machines, with the lack of 
fluidity brought on by their warping from the true human form. Sedon was almost 
certain he knew what they were. From the dim past of his people came legends of 
such creatures.
They had been a mistake.
In the darkened room another such awaited him. It said, “I am Commissionaire 
Mohammed Vance of the PKF Elite.” Its voice was remarkably deep, a voice of a 
size to match the chest from which it emanated. “Please,” and it gestured to a 
chair, “seat yourself.”
Sedon sat. He was aware of the machines taking up position behind him.
Immediately before him Sedon made out the faint appearance of a transparent 
barrier of some sort, separating him from the man who sat across from him. He 
did not attempt to touch it.
The machined person on the other side of the barrier was larger than the two 
behind him, taller and wider than Sedon himself, who had been for many thousands 
of years a giant among the stunted barbarians of his prison. “What is your 
name?”
By sheer force of will Sedon held down the surge of rage at the abruptness of 
the questions; the creature could not know the impudence of its question. He 
answered with the name of his Name, a suitable answer for a barbarian: “I am 
Sedon of the Gi’Suei. You may call me Sedon.”
The creature nodded. “You may call me Commissionaire Vance. Why were you in the 
bubble?”
It took Sedon a moment to translate the question. “I was being chased by 
a—person—who wished to—” Sedon paused. This language possessed no word that 
quite corresponded to the graceless killing Dvan had intended. “He intended to 
butcher me,” Sedon said at last. “Before I entered the tulu adrhe—the bubble—he 
shot me with the kitjan.” He paused again. “I do not know a word for kitjan. A 
kind of weapon, like the ones behind me. Unless treated quickly it is fatal 
to—to my kind.”
The Commissionaire Vance-thing smiled. Its sheer physical presence was 
forbidding, subliminally intimidating. Sedon noticed with interest that the 
animal part of his brain registered a brief flicker of fear. Sensible; in his 
current state Sedon knew himself to be no match for the blurred speed the 
machined men had exhibited. “You were not,” Commissionaire Vance said, “treated 
quickly.”
“How long was I inside?”
“You know a year is one turn of this planet around the sun?”
“One passage of seasons?”
“Yes.”
“I know year.”
The Vance-thing nodded. “Your slowtime sphere ran at about a 
six-and-a-half-billion-to-one compression ratio. How long did you intend to stay 
in the sphere?”
“Perhaps a second, internal time. A little over two hundred years.” Sedon 
shrugged. “My pursuer would have grown restless, and left. Perhaps I would have 
needed to wait another second, or three. There was time.” Sedon paused, used the 
tool of his voice carefully indeed; he spoke quietly, smoothly, without any 
emotion these barbarians would recognize. “How long was I inside?”
The Commissionaire Vance-thing looked straight at Gi’Suei‘Obodi’Sedon and said, 
“You were in the sphere for thirty-seven thousand years.”
Sedon thought he had been braced for it since seeing the picture of the 
spacecraft. Three thousand years, four, five—it would not have been enough. Not 
to grow a civilization like this, out of the brutal nomads these people had been 
when he entered the sphere.
Thirty-seven thousand years.
When the moment came he found that he was not braced for it.
The roaring black darkness swarmed up around him, dragged him down into 
emptiness.
He did not know, how long he was unconscious.

He came to again with a sharp, caustic smell in his nostrils. Perhaps only a few 
minutes had passed. Perhaps it had been hours; his sense of time was still 
damaged. He was in the same place, the darkened room with the three machined 
men. A drink of some liquid was offered him, and he took it without asking what 
it contained; if they wished to drug him, they would.
“M. Sedon, are you well enough to continue?” The faint undertone of urgency in 
the question gave Sedon a moment of pause. He drank the cool, tart liquid in 
numbed silence, not thinking, not feeling. His muscles trembled slightly. 
Finally he looked up and answered the creature’s question. “Yes. I am. What are 
you?” he asked abruptly. “Your skin, the speed with which you move, your eyes. 
They are not normal for your people.”
The shadowed black eyes studied him. “Fair enough. I am a PKF Elite. PKF stands 
for Peace Keeping Force. The PKF guards Earth—this world—against people who wish 
to return us to the days when there were many governments on Earth rather than 
one. There are millions of PKF across the world. The Elite are the best of their 
number. We have been improved both by machines and by genetic engineering—what 
are called transform viruses—to enhance our speed, our eyesight, our hearing. We 
are stronger than normal humans and difficult to damage.” He paused, waiting.
Sedon knew the word he wished to use. “I am a Dancer,” he said firmly. “I was 
exiled to this planet”—he calculated quickly—“approximately fifty thousand years 
ago. With other Dancers and many persons of questionable sanity, stability, and 
genetic quality. I would guess you are our descendants. How long have you had 
writing?”
In the dimness on the other side of the room the Commissionaire Vance-thing 
turned away for a moment. When it turned back it said, “Since 3100 b.c, I’m 
told. A little over five thousand years. What do you mean by dancer? You are an 
entertainer?”
“Not that. I do not know the words.”
“Try.”
“A Dancer is—priest. Judge. Keeper. Owner. President. General Secretary. Of a 
superior class. We are a better people than you. More—disciplined. Of greater 
range. You have only recently been governed, all together, by the same body?”
“Yes. A little over fifty years. Before that there were many nations. Today 
there is only one Earth. Elsewhere in the System there are still 
independent—governments is not a good word, but I find, like you, I do not know 
what to call them. They are called the SpaceFarers’ Collective and the Belt 
CityStates and several other names, and they each govern themselves in somewhat 
different fashion.” Vance paused. “You claim to have been exiled to Earth fifty 
thousand years ago, and to have entered the slowtime bubble thirty-seven 
thousand years ago. Am I to understand that you lived through the thirteen 
thousand years separating those events?”
“I do not understand the question.”
“You did not grow old. You did not age.”
“No. Aging is a disease. A curable one, which I think your people are beginning 
to learn. When our children began dying of it, after our exile to this world—” 
Sedon’s features became totally empty. “We were distraught. Not since the 
Zaradin deserted us had we allowed ourselves to die in such fashion; that we 
could not aid them pained us.”
“You lived for thirteen thousand years. On the surface of Earth.”
Sedon met its disbelieving black eyes. “I do not know exactly how long it was. 
There were no clocks, and my counting of the passage of seasons is not to be 
trusted. My memory is excellent, not perfect. But it was, at least, a time more 
than twice as long as your people have possessed writing.”
A long silence followed. Something is wrong, Sedon thought. Something I have 
said has offended it. “You do not believe me when I tell you my age.”
It smiled at Sedon again. “I find it difficult to envision a human as old as you 
claim to be.”
He had heard enough from Commissionaire Vance, had watched it closely enough to 
try. Sedon leaned forward and changed his voice, brought its pitch lower, and 
Spoke. “But am I old, Commissionaire Vance? Oh, for a rabbit, yes. For a tree, 
yes, for a tree I am aged. But for a mountain I am young, and for a man I am 
merely of the correct age. Why should I lie to you? How does it benefit me?”
On the other side of the barrier the creature had grown still, drinking in the 
sound of Sedon’s Speaking. The effect was not what it would have been in shiata, 
but this French was a broad language, rich in words, and it made a tool with 
which Sedon was now certain he could work.
“You—” Its voice trailed off, and then the huge form rose abruptly, turned and 
left without a backward glance. Light spilled through an opening door, and then 
it was gone.
One of the creatures behind Sedon said quietly, “Please follow us. We will 
return you to your hospital room now.”
Sedon sat in shock, eyes fixed on the spot where Commissionaire Vance had been. 
It knew what I was trying to do. It did not know how I was doing it but it knew 
I was attempting it nonetheless.
“Please follow us now.”
Sedon went without argument, without delay.

At the downlot Vance snapped, “Give him a night’s rest. Tomorrow morning, the 
language program interrogates him until he stops answering questions. He is not 
to speak to any of our officers, including you. If he speaks to you, you are not 
to answer.”
The semiballistic came down out of the dark night sky, running lights doused, 
and dropped to a gentle landing at the center of the downlot, so close that the 
heat of its exhaust warmed the surface of Mohammed Vance’s immobile face. Vance 
started across the downlot to where the SB awaited them, Peaceforcer Elite 
Samuel De Nostri a step behind him. De Nostri said only, “Yes, Commissionaire. 
It will be as you say.”
Vance did not glance back at De Nostri. “Feed him when he requests food. Let him 
sleep the hours he’s been sleeping. When he refuses to answer questions, kill 
him.” Vance mounted the steps into the SB and then turned suddenly at the top of 
the ramp and looked down at De Nostri. “Kill him by midnight Sunday no matter 
what he does. Poison in his food.”
“Yes, Commissionaire.”
“I’ll be in Capitol City. You may call me if anything arises.”
“Yes, Commissionaire.” De Nostri stood rigidly at attention, staring up at 
Vance’s stiff features.
It was as though Vance had audited his thoughts. “Only a fool is never afraid, 
boy.” Vance turned and vanished into the interior of the SB.
De Nostri saluted quickly and trotted back to the edge of the downlot. It was 
well he moved quickly; the SB lifted again before he was out of range, and the 
wind of its passage would have knocked down any human less heavy than a 
Peaceforcer Elite.
De Nostri stood in the storm of heated air and watched the SB depart, stood 
motionless while the cold night air crept in around him. He mulled over Vance’s 
parting comment. In the days following, it never even occurred to him to attempt 
to repeat it to one of his fellow officers, not even his close friend Harold 
Pailletin.
Vance was, bar none, the most respected, most admired Commissionaire in the 
Elite. Even his failure to catch Trent the Uncatchable had not damaged Vance’s 
reputation; unlike any other Peaceforcer in the System, he had at least come 
close.
De Nostri knew that, were he to repeat the comment, he simply would not be 
believed.

Breathe.
It was the first thing a Dancer was taught, the first step on the long road to 
awareness of self.
They left him alone at night, apparently in the belief that he slept then.
The phrase leapt out at him, a fragment of shia, of the discipline that he had, 
before his hundredth birthday, rejected:
You are born broken; life is healing.
Breathe deep. With oxygen, burn the poisons from the system.
Heal yourself.
Lie atop the cool, crisp cloths that cover the bed. Eyes closed, floating in 
darkness.
Flex the muscle on the outside of the left big toe. Move over, to the inside 
muscle. One by one, tense and release every muscle of every toe.
Work upward. The ball of the foot, and now the sole, and now the muscles that 
support the ankle. Whisper the commands, never by nerve through the long 
spreading tree of gray fibers. Encourage the flow of the blood, of the scavenger 
cells that remove dead matter and kill invaders.
The muscles in Sedon’s calves began to quiver as though he had just finished a 
marathon, twitching and relaxing until the skin that covered the muscles 
literally vibrated from the effort.
Breathe.
And work upward.
They gave him all night, three nights in a row.




- 6 -
« ^ » 
Morning came on the fifteenth day of Sedon’s imprisonment, and the nonliving 
voice came with it. Without a window in his underground room Sedon knew that it 
was daytime only because the rooms lights had brightened.
Sedon sat upright with his pillow stuffed behind the small of his back. He 
relaxed, fingers clasped loosely over his stomach. He let entire sections of his 
body sleep and recover while he and the—“computer,” perhaps, or “program,” these 
were two of the words he had learned for the thing he spoke to—while he and the 
program learned about one another.
The things the program was allowed to tell Sedon would have frightened him had 
he allowed it. Intimate details regarding the rulers of this strange world, of 
the power structure of the government. Given that he was surely in the grasp of 
those rulers—the PKF certainly, and perhaps the Secretary General and Ministry 
of Population Control as well—Sedon was led to one inescapable conclusion: they 
did not intend for him to live.
He had frightened the Commissionaire Vance creature with his blundering, poorly 
timed attempt at a Speaking. Speaking was no more than a technology of language; 
the use of words, in the proper timbre, inflection, volume, sequence, and 
content, as a persuasive tool; words crafted, as the Dancers of Sedon’s 
childhood had taught him, to touch the soul. But Sedon had not known the 
Commissionaire Vance creature well enough, and had not sufficiently mastered the 
tool of French.
And, to be sure, Commissionaire Vance was not a human as Sedon had ever known 
humans. More than a barbarian, less than one of the Flame People. Different.
He had been freed from the stasis bubble at a pivotal moment in their history. 
Even without the Zaradin teachings to guide them, Sedon suspected that these 
ex-barbarians were on the verge of discovering—of rediscovering—the Dance. There 
were dozens of facts that led him to this belief, and only a few that allowed 
him to think that the discovery might be somewhat delayed.
Two of the things which led him to believe that they might soon discover the 
Dance came from the language called English, from the proto-Splinter society of 
the webdancers. That they called themselves after dancers did not surprise him; 
dance was a metaphor for the method by which webdancers linked themselves to the 
artificial intelligences they had built.
So he thought himself prepared; the signs were there.
And then, early on the fifteenth day of his imprisonment, the computer with 
which he spoke used the word Player.
It struck him like an actual blow. He compared the root English word, “play,” 
with the synonyms and connotations with which the word “player” was associated. 
Performer, participant, athlete—competitor.
One definition in particular leapt out at him: one who acts upon a stage.
A Player, as the word was commonly used in this Culture, was a computer user, a 
webdancer of transcendent skill.
Only men fight, and only men dance; it was a truism among the Flame People, a 
saying Sedon had heard the first time while still a child in body.
In many of the cultures of this time, Sedon was deeply disturbed to learn, women 
did both.
Not for his very life could Sedon envision a woman dancing, not even a dance for 
amusement. When the computer attempted to show him images of women engaged in 
what it called “dance,” Sedon was forced to look away.
They had only recently, within the last eighty years, mastered their own genetic 
map. The results were predictable; their genegineers were changing them in ways 
they had never anticipated, and which many of them did not like. Sedon’s own 
people had suffered it, briefly: the Splintering which followed the Zaradin 
Desertion. These PKF Elite were not, Sedon thought, a true Splinter race; he did 
not think that they bred true.
The program verified it. “PKF Elite are not, by definition, genies. A genie is a 
person who was designed, gene by gene, to some specific blueprint. The commonest 
genetic modifications are those to remove blatant flaws in the human genotype, 
such as the inherited tendencies toward cancer, obesity, degenerative eyesight, 
and so forth. Even that is, under Unification law, illegal, but it is rarely 
prosecuted even when uncovered. More extreme examples of genegineering are also 
illegal, and have usually been prosecuted since the onset of the Troubles.”
The density of the information caused Sedon difficulties; every sentence implied 
a vast background of history with which Sedon was not acquainted—what, for 
example, were the Troubles? He passed over it for now, and directed the 
program’s attention back to the subject of the Elite. “If an Elite is not a 
genie, what then is it?”
“My turn,” said the program. “What was the nature of the crime for which you 
were exiled to Earth?”
“I cannot tell you, program.”
“Cannot, or will not?”
“Rather than serve, I made a servant of the Flame that lived within me, program, 
the Flame that gave me my life, that taught me to Move. Does this enlighten 
you?”
“No. What is the flame?”
Sedon took a long breath, considering. A distant surprise touched him when he 
realized that even now, in this far distant, alien world, he found himself 
reluctant to breach the vows of silence he had taken as a young Dancer, 
uncountable eons past. When fifteen seconds had passed without reply from 
him—Sedon was used to it by now—the program repeated, “What is the flame?”
“In the beginning was the Flame, and the Flame was life. We who came after saw 
the Flame, and rejoiced, and Danced in its beauty.” He said the words in shiata, 
adding in French, “It was called the Dance of the Flame.” The program was, 
apparently, willing to accept that as an answer, for it returned to his question 
regarding the Elite:
“A PKF Elite is a cyborg; a normal human, modified with machinery and transform 
viruses. They are created at Peace Keeping Force Spacebase One at L-5, in free 
fall. Surgeons implant new eyes, remove the skin, and implant a pair of small 
lasers within the index fingers. After the skin has been removed, the last 
surgical operation places a fine web of superconductors immediately beneath the 
skin, to distribute heat evenly across the Elite’s surface in the event the 
Elite is fired upon with an energy weapon; the skin is then regrown, though the 
regrown skin is far stronger than the original envelope. Transform 
viruses—diseases designed to cause benign changes within the body—speed the 
Elite’s neural reactions by sixty to seventy percent. An enhanced-strength 
transform virus makes the muscles in an Elite’s body four to five times more 
efficient—makes the Elite four to five times stronger. A second nerve network 
grows around the network the Elite is born with, and is connected to a battle 
computer implanted at the base of the Elite’s skull. Carbon-ceramic filaments 
reinforce all points where muscle, ligament or cartilage attaches itself to a 
bone. The bones themselves are regrown with a new carbon-ceramic base. Early 
Elite,” the program said, “were quite heavy. Recent advances in design and 
implementation of the Elite upgrade have reduced the weight penalty 
significantly, so that an Elite is generally only thirty to forty percent 
heavier after the upgrade than before. My turn. You worshiped the flame?”
“Program, I do not think I can tell you. The Flame is a thing of living 
creatures, and though I speak to you of it in words, you will know nothing of 
what I mean.”
“You do not wish to answer the question?”
It was the fourth time the program had asked that question, in exactly those 
words. Each time, Sedon had noticed, the guard standing at the door had tensed 
slightly. An important question then, the question which would, if answered 
negatively, set in motion the mechanism by which they intended to kill him. 
Sedon let a sigh escape him, and sat forward in the bed. His right foot came up 
beneath him, toes flexed for traction against the bed and the smooth cloths 
which covered it. “Program,” he said sincerely—he did not know if the program 
could discern changes in tone of voice—“I wish to answer all your questions. But 
there are areas of discussion where I must speak to a man or woman who breathes 
and lives. Else my answers are merely words.”
And Sedon exhaled, slowly, until his lungs were nearly empty of air. He fixed 
his gaze on the Elite’s diaphragm, a spot immediately beneath the point where 
the Elite’s ribs joined together. Stillness descended upon him.
The Elite, standing by the doorway, six hours into his shift, relaxed visibly 
upon hearing Sedon’s answer.
And Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon, to his knowledge the last living Dancer anywhere in the 
Continuing Time, Moved.

Late on Tuesday, March 29, Christine Mirabeau, a woman with the general 
appearance and personality of a bulldog, the highest ranking Peaceforcer in the 
System, walked at Mohammed Vance’s side through the laser-scored corridors of 
the United Nations Peace Keeping Force Detention Center on the outskirts of 
Amiens, near the edge of the Somme River in northern France.
During the course of that long evening, Vance’s voice never rose above the 
volume appropriate for two old friends engaged in an intimate conversation.
The evening began at the cell in which Sedon had been kept, two floors beneath 
the ground.
A holo appeared, life-size, of Sedon and du Bouchage, the Elite who had been 
guarding him. “The recording will play back at quarter speed,” Vance informed 
the Commander of the PKF Elite. “I had the Elite standing guard within the 
doorway rather than without; we were concerned at first for the patient’s 
safety, for the possibility of suicide. It occurred to me that this placed the 
Elite in a certain danger, but I felt it minimal. Until this—thing—happened I 
would never have dreamed that any man could kill an Elite cyborg with his bare 
hands.”
“I understand the mistake.”
“I take full responsibility for the decision. Command, begin holo.”
Sedan’s form flows upward from the bed, moves toward the Elite standing by the 
doorway. “Freeze image. Notice his hands and feet when he leaps. All four are 
evenly in contact with the frame of the bed, significantly improving his 
velocity when he launches himself toward du Bouchage.”
The image resumes; Sedon slams into du Bouchage at the doorway. The Elite is 
just becoming aware that something is happening; Sedon slams into the larger, 
heavier Elite, and with both hands and a knee flattens du Bouchage’s palm 
against the doorpad. The image freezes. “You will see here, he does not even 
attempt to harm du Bouchage until after he has placed the man’s hand against the 
surface of the doorpad. First things first. Elapsed time from the moment Sedon 
began to move to the moment that du Bouchage’s palm is pressed quite flat 
against the surface of the doorpad, less than one half of a second. The language 
program was still controlling the holocams, and did not pass control to the 
security manager until nearly the full half second had passed. The computerist 
who wrote the language program should be placed in front of a firing squad. By 
the time the security manager had received the image and decided what to do with 
it, the door was curling open. Du Bouchage’s battle computer comes into play 
now, not quite half a second after first movement by the prisoner.” The lasers 
in his fingers light; one of them scores Sedon slightly, rakes down the side of 
one leg. Sedon strikes du Bouchage in the solar plexus with two fingers of his 
right hand. “You can see in the holos, Sedon’s fingers are probably broken here; 
but that blow is most likely what stopped du Bouchage’s heart.” Sedon’s next 
blow, with the palm of his left hand, strikes du Bouchage at the side of the 
temple and bounces du Bouchage’s head against the side of the doorway. “The 
autopsy revealed a slight fracture in the carbon-ceramic laminae. Du Bouchage is 
probably unconscious at this point; his battle computer takes over.” The 
computer makes the correct decision, to take him away from the source of the 
danger, pushing backward, through the opening door and out into the corridor.
Vance stepped through the doorway after Sedon’s image, gesturing. “Sedon follows 
him. His reaction time is, at least, equivalent to du Bouchage’s. He is not as 
strong, however; one of the doorways that briefly stopped him, a level up, would 
not have stopped a determined Elite. He attempted to force it and then used a 
variable laser to cut through it.” Vance touched a dented place on the wall, a 
second before the image of du Bouchage’s skull struck it. “If du Bouchage was 
not unconscious before, he is now.” Sedon is so close to the Elite that the 
Elite’s fingertip lasers are of little use; the battle computer gathers Sedon to 
du Bouchage, attempts to squeeze him to death. Sedon allows du Bouchage to 
gather him in, makes sure his hands are left free, and strikes six times, in 
remarkably close succession, at the sides of du Bouchage’s neck, the expression 
on his face one of savage enjoyment. “The impact of one of those blows, probably 
the first, severed du Bouchage’s spinal column as though he had been hung. Du 
Bouchage is now unconscious, his heart has been stopped, and his spinal cord 
severed. This does not stop the bear hug, of course; the battle computer 
reroutes through the two main trunks of the secondary nerve network. It is 
difficult to tell from the recordings, but either the fifth or sixth blow to the 
neck damaged the two trunks of the secondary nerve network sufficiently that the 
battle computer lost control of du Bouchage’s body. Total elapsed time from the 
moment Sedon first moves, three and two-tenths seconds. Sedon is damaged in the 
encounter; sight laser score on one leg, broken fingers, probable broken ribs. 
Let’s go upstairs.”
They walked up, following Sedon’s insubstantial, too-solid-appearing holograph 
as it fled up the stairs.
“It takes them twelve seconds to reach B1. Given that he was sedated when he was 
brought here, how he knew to head upward—how he even knew he was underground—is 
anybody’s guess. But as you see, he does not hesitate. The alarm has been 
sounded by the time he reaches B1, and he meets Elite Officer Pailletin at the 
top of the stairs. Officer Pailletin is, unfortunately, armed with a variable 
laser.” Pailletin is tall, even for a PKF Elite, perhaps ten centimeters taller 
than Sedon. He crouches slightly, variable laser rifle cradled in his arms, and 
fires at Sedan as Sedon exits the stairwell. Sedon rolls beneath the beam, comes 
out of the roll with the heels of both of his feet striking Officer Pailletin’s 
kneecaps. “You can see here, Sedon breaks his left ankle delivering the blow; 
Elite kneecaps are quite strong. He breaks neither of Pailletin’s kneecaps.” 
Pailletin falls, and in the fall Sedon takes the variable laser from him. Midway 
through his fall, before striking the floor, Pailletin’s right foot touches the 
ground; he leaps backward, firing with the laser in his right fist as he moves 
away from the source of danger. The laser strikes Sedon in the shoulder, 
wounding him significantly; the recording shows that the collarbone in his right 
shoulder is sliced entirely in half. “If Pailletin were a younger Elite, with a 
pair of finger lasers rather than only the one buried in his fist, he might have 
killed Sedon here. Unfortunately he has only the laser in his fist—”
—and Sedon now has the variable laser; he retreats into the relative safety of 
the stairwell, and fires at Pailletin’s face until he has destroyed. Officer 
Pailletin’s optics. Once Pailletin can no longer see, Sedon ignores him and, 
with a broken ankle and separated collarbone, proceeds upward to ground level, 
his speed of movement not appreciably diminished. “Total elapsed time since 
reaching B1, eighteen and three quarter seconds. He is delayed slightly at the 
stairwell entrance; the security program has locked the door. He attempts to 
force it, fails—possibly because of his damaged collarbone—and uses the variable 
laser to cut the door apart. Total elapsed time since his attack upon du 
Bouchage, thirty-four seconds, almost exactly.”
The cafeteria had been cleaned. Vance noted with grim amusement that a pot of 
coffee was set up on a sideboard, with perhaps a dozen cups, cream, and sugar.
“Three PKF Elite on duty,” said Vance, “seven PKF soldiers, two doctors, and a 
nurse. Many of them were at breakfast; it was 8:37 a.m. when Sedon broke free. 
The recording of him in the cafeteria is”—Vance paused, apparently at a loss for 
words—“extraordinary. He killed five soldiers, both doctors, and the nurse in 
not quite eleven seconds. Two of the soldiers shot at him; neither came close. 
He did not spill a drop of blood.
“Then he went looking for De Nostri.”
Elite Commander Mirabeau followed Mohammed Vance down the hallway to the 
quarters where Samuel De Nostri had been sleeping. “De Nostri is awake, but just 
barely; forty-eight seconds after his initial movement, Sedon finds the corridor 
leading to the Officers’ quarters.
Sedon opens three doors, moving down the hallway and looking inside each one; at 
the fourth door he meets up with De Nostri, as De Nostri is emerging to find out 
the nature of the emergency. “What Sedon does now,” said Vance, in a voice 
immeasurably grim, “shows clearly that he has been thinking—learning, under 
immense stress—during each of his prior encounters with the Elite.”
Sedan’s first two shots are directed at De Nostri’s hands. He destroys the laser 
in De Nostri’s left hand, brings the beam across and holds it on De Nostri’s 
right hand as De Nostri charges him. He is successful; by the time De Nostri 
gets close, both of his finger lasers are dead. Standing in the hallway with the 
two insubstantial forms, the Elite charging down upon the standing form of 
Sedon, Vance said quietly, “De Nostri is shouting as he draws close, a tedious 
obscenity that will be edited from the final recording. We must,” said Vance 
precisely, “in the future, teach Elite to avoid opening their mouths in combat. 
Sedon does what I would have done in the same circumstances—”
—and standing motionless, fires directly into De Nostri’s mouth.
“Had De Nostri kept his mouth shut he could conceivably have killed Sedon. But 
the shot into that open, bellowing orifice vaporized his tongue, and I imagine 
the pain was immense. De Nostri stopped moving.”
The holo vanished, left Vance and Mirabeau together in the corridor. Vance shook 
his head in plain disgust. “I doubt you need see the rest of this. Sedon blinded 
him, and then spent fully three and a half minutes playing with him. I have seen 
dead Elite,” he continued, “but I have never seen anything like what our 
‘dancer’ did to Officer Samuel De Nostri. Once he breached the skin he fired 
bursts from the laser into the breach, and slowly cooked De Nostri from the 
inside out. Not quite five minutes after attacking Officer du Bouchage, the 
prisoner burned through the Detention Center’s front doors, walked out, walked 
down to the banks of the river, and leapt in.”
“Walked.”
“A calculated insult, Christine. He spat in our faces. Even Trent had the grace 
to run.”
“That was?”
“A day and a half ago. We haven’t found him yet.”

On the semiballistic, on their return to Capitol City, Christine Mirabeau 
watched, from one end to the other, the recording Vance had edited together from 
the Detention Center’s fixed holocams.
When it was done, when the steam rising from Samuel De Nostri’s body had faded 
from the holofield before them, Elite Commander Christine Mirabeau said quietly, 
“He has to die. He has to die soon.”
“I will find him,” said Vance, the deep voice low and inexorable, “and I will 
kill him with my own hands.”
“I wish you luck, my friend.” Mirabeau’s tired, careworn features were even 
colder and more distant than usual. She was an embattled woman, undermined by 
the Secretary General, loathed by the Ministry of Population Control, 
occasionally besieged by treachery within the ranks of the PKF itself. Her use 
of the word “friend” was no mere figure of speech; she liked Mohammed Vance a 
great deal. On occasion she even found reason to trust him. “More luck, 
Mohammed, than you had catching Trent. More luck than any of those young Elite 
had attempting to kill Sedon with their bare hands.”
“I will rip his heart from his chest.”
Christine looked at Vance’s profile with a certain degree of real curiosity. 
“You know, Mohammed, I do not think I have ever seen you angry before.”
Mohammed Vance did not reply, but sat with his back ramrod straight, eyes fixed 
on emptiness as the semiballistic descended back into the atmosphere, shaking 
slightly with the increasing turbulence of its descent, down toward Capitol City 
and the waiting Earth.




Summer: 2075
A Blast from the Past II
- 1 -
« ^ » 
When he had finished reading McGee’s notes, only a few hours before dawn, 
William Devane sighed irritably. It was no more believable this time than the 
first.
But he did not understand why the story was so compelling. Finally he shut his 
handheld off, hung up his robe, and went back to bed.
It was near sunrise when he got to sleep.
And dreamed.

There is something deep inside, something important hiding in the mist of 
ancient memory. The memory that is called for is dim and distant, the 
remembrance of something another person did long, long ago. The memory 
management routines that are the kernel of William Devane’s identity came into 
play, inspecting the call to determine its urgency. There is a finite amount of 
storage available within Devane’s brain, and it reached full long ago. He 
survives as a sane being only by constantly forgetting the trivial details of 
his life, by archiving and flushing most long-term memory and retaining only 
data pertaining to current conditions. Any call to deep memory is dangerous, and 
the deeper the memory, the more dangerous the call; the older the data, the less 
likely it is to have relevance to survival in the current world. The management 
routines have nearly decided to ignore the call—
But the call persists. The sleep period is half over by now; if the work is to 
be done by the time Devane awakens, it must begin now. The decision is made to 
retain current skills, as well as the bulk of recent memory, and temporarily 
remove all data prior to that time from near-term memory. The process is slow, 
as it requires the inspection, deletion, compression and archiving of vast 
amounts of information. Dawn is nearly upon him before sufficient near-term 
memory has been freed to allow the call to deep memory to proceed.
Memories cascade through Devane’s dreamtime awareness. The cold English castle 
where he spent most of the fourteenth century A.D. A woman with red hair, and a 
harp, and children.
His children. The battlefield at Camel Hill, in 527, where he took the worst 
wound of his incredibly long life. Rome, at its height, and the long summer of 
Egypt…
All too recent. Back…
The millennia with his People, wandering up and down the coast of Europe.
And before that…

Late the next morning, as the sun hung high over southern Ireland, 
Gi’Tbad’Eovad’Dvan opened his eyes to the first moments of full consciousness he 
had experienced in over fifteen hundred years.
He sat up in bed, slowly, and then rose and walked across the cold, buffed 
wooden floor to the stairway that led out, to the top of his home; and up 
through the hatchway, out onto the lookout.
He stood naked in the sunlight atop a small hill, staring out at the world, 
looking out over the green fields of grass, at the blue sky and the half dozen 
cars flying within his field of vision; at the cows wandering lazily across the 
far pastures. He watched the world with a wonder so vast it was almost terror, 
an awe that so filled him he feared his heart might burst.
His memories of the last decades were sharp, but no sharper than those of his 
childhood. He remembered the Dancing, his own worship, in the Temples at the 
city of Kulien, on the World, as clearly as he remembered Sarah Almundsen’s 
declaration of the Unification of Earth, only fifty-seven years prior. He 
remembered his training to become a Shield, and the nightmare of shiabre. He 
remembered the penal colony—
—this world.
He remembered the heretic.
The Dancer.
He stood staring sightlessly out at the brilliant green of southern Ireland, 
remembering the battle in which he had fallen, the battle wound that had left 
him without his long-term memory, with nothing but shadowed memories of an 
existence prior to that evil day in A.D. 527, when the King had fallen at his 
own son’s hand.
He was better than fifty thousand years old, and remembered all of it.
Remembered the training that had made him what he was, the skills he had been 
taught, the Dedication he had accepted before the childhood of his body had 
ended.
We are born broken, and live by mending.
“I see that I am broken.”
You are a Shield, a servant of the living Flame. Will you live in the service of 
the Flame?
Standing in the sacred circle at Kulien, fifty-one thousand years prior, 
Gi’Tbad’Eovad’Dvan had whispered, “Aye. I will.”
Will you kill if you must?
Aye.
Will you die if needed; will you live when you no longer wish to, if the service 
is required of you?
“Aye.”
The Living Flame exploded around him—
—and fifty-one thousand years later, standing atop a hill in southern Ireland, a 
brief Flame flickered around William Devane, sheeted across his nude body and 
turned it for the barest instant into a statue made of light; and for an instant 
outshone the sun itself.
Later that day William Devane boarded a semiballistic for Amiens, France, to 
begin the search.
Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon, the man Dvan had most admired and hated in his life, was 
alive. He must not remain so.




- 2 -
« ^ » 
A garden covered the top of Robert’s old brownstone, a landscaped area of grass 
and flowers; there was even a pair of trees, one an apple tree, one lemon.
Early on the morning of July the Fourth, as the people across Occupied America 
prepared for the violence they knew would come, Robert Dazai Yo and Denice 
Castanaveras pulled weeds.
They worked the garden together, slowly, through most of the morning. Robert had 
cancelled his classes for the day; he did not expect his students to brave the 
streets when he himself would have done so only under the gravest duress.
Even the discipline of shiabre had its limits; even a night face could die at 
the hands of a mob. And this close to Capitol City, on this day of days, 
anything could happen.
“When do you start?”
“Next Monday. Ripper left Capitol City until after Independence Day.”
Robert nodded. “I am not surprised. Most of the Unification Council does. Eddore 
would like to, I’m sure; but the ammunition it would give his enemies would be 
too powerful. Will you look for an apartment?”
“Perhaps this weekend.”
“You are welcome to the guest room.”
“It’s close, which would be convenient. I’d like to be close to the job.”
Robert nodded.
“I’m a little nervous about it.”
After a bit Robert said, “I am sure you will do well.”
“I hope so. I hope the work is—meaningful.”
Perhaps half an hour passed. The sun was very warm.
Denice said, “Is this a plant or a weed?”
“Let me see—a plant.”
“I already pulled it.”
“In time,” said Robert, “a flower.”
“It’s dead now.”
“Alas.” Robert put down his trenching tool. “I think we are done.”
They sat on the grass together, in the shade of the apple tree, and drank 
unsweetened lemonade together. “I have noticed an interesting thing about people 
who wish to be of service, Denice. Such people tend to have problems with their 
self-image. It seems to me that in their service they seek 
to—define—themselves.”
Denice drank her lemonade, not looking at him. “Okay.”
“Are you happy?”
After a long moment Denice said, “Not very.”
“Do you love yourself?”
“Of course.” Denice heard the indignation in her voice, could not suppress it. 
“What do you think?” She paused. “If I wasn’t me already, I’d certainly want to 
be.”
Robert smiled. “But if you love yourself, why are you unhappy?”
Denice stared at Robert. “Does it mean anything at all to you when I tell you 
that sometimes these days I don’t know who the hell I am anymore?”
“That is a good trick. You love yourself, though you are not sure who you are.” 
Robert Yo nodded, and poured himself another glass of lemonade from the pitcher, 
and then said, “Who do you want to be?”




Spring: 2076
I saw the crowd around you You danced there with your pain Made love with all 
the other slaves Made music with your chains
You say you didn’t do it Doesn’t matter anyway I saw you in the crowd that night 
of Independence Day
—Mahliya Kutura, Independence Day
- 1 -
« ^ » 
Tuesday, April 28, 2076 Gregorian.
On her twenty-third birthday Denice arranged to leave work early to have dinner 
with Jimmy Ramirez.
He was one of her best friends; after Trent and a dancer named Tarin Schuyler, 
her oldest.
He called at lunch to confirm dinner. His image hung in the holofield over her 
desk, a young lawyer in an exquisitely tailored suit. When he spoke his voice 
held none of the Fringe accent he had possessed when Denice had met him, in the 
summer of 2069. “We’re still on?”
“Yes. Of course. The Red Line at eight?”
Jimmy Ramirez, once a Temple Dragon, once Trent the Uncatchable’s right 
hand—today an assistant public defender for the City of New York—smiled at 
Denice. “I’ll see you there.”
After lunch Ripper, Denice, and Ichabod Martin worked through the materials from 
the Unification Council’s Peace Keeping Oversite Committee; Ripper chaired that 
Committee.
They sat together in Ripper’s office. After her first interview with Ripper, 
Denice had never again seen it so intimidatingly bleak; usually the empty space 
was filled with some interesting illusion. Today they sat inside a huge green 
cathedral of trees. The sound of a brook bubbled in the background, just audible 
under the sound of normal speech.
“Who’s this?”
“Relatively new,” Martin said. “He’s risen through the ranks of the Johnny Rebs 
with remarkable speed, though. He calls himself ‘Sieur Obodi. Speaks English 
with an accent, possibly Italian; has strong ties to the Old Ones, the old 
Mafia. Some rumors to the effect that he pimped for a bit, but saying it to his 
face can get you killed. He’s definitely a player in the Reb power structure, 
though exactly where he stands in relation to Tommy Boone is a good 
question—nobody’s seen Boone in a couple of weeks.”
Denice and Ichabod Martin sat in the chairs before Douglass Ripper’s desk. 
Ripper sat behind it with his eyes closed, the trades of a large and rather 
out-of-date traceset touching each of his temples. Out of politeness, though 
Denice and Ichabod had both seen it already, Ripper had duplicated the holo he 
was looking at; it hung off to Denice’s right, blocking a patch of the larger 
holo of the forest.
The man was tall, two meters or more. His hair was long and blond, tied in a 
ponytail. His eyes were bright blue, with a slightly Asian appearance. His 
features were not sharp; the holo had been taken from a distance of about two 
hundred meters, as Obodi hurried toward a waiting semiballistic. The car he had 
come in was visible in the background of the shot; a long black limousine with 
darkened windows. A pair of known Johnny Rebs followed after him.
“And the PKF is doing what about him?”
“They’re rounding up twice the usual number of suspects,” Denice said quietly.
Ripper nodded. “Wonderful.” He opened his eyes, said moodily, “What is wrong 
with them?”
Denice said nothing. Ichabod Martin said quietly, “The Peace Keeping Force has 
faced so little real threat, for so long—perhaps the Peaceforcers are unable to 
believe they have a worthy opponent.”
Ripper grunted. “I’d have thought Trent the Uncatchable would have broken them 
of that conceit. Where does core membership stand today?”
“Nearly fifteen thousand,” said Denice without pause. “In the past when the Rebs 
have gotten past some fifteen thousand core members the PKF has cracked down. I 
don’t know why they’re not doing it this time, especially given the indicators 
on how the Rebs are arming themselves. Something interesting, though—did you 
notice the memo by Commissioner Vance?”
Ripper said, “No—wait.” His eyes dropped shut. “It is interesting,” he agreed a 
moment later. “What’s this reference to Amiens?”
Denice shook her head. “I don’t know, ‘Sieur Ripper. There is a PKF Detention 
Center near Amiens. Perhaps the PKF once had this Obodi in custody? It’s one 
interpretation of Vance’s memo that makes sense.”
“Can we find out?”
Ichabod Martin smiled wryly. “We can ask. You know the PKF, especially where 
Vance is concerned. Fifty-fifty we get told to mind our own business.”
“This is our business.” Martin nodded, and Ripper sighed. “Do your best. What’s 
next?”
“Bill in committee on the AI property question.”
“I’m inclined to vote against it. It’s already illegal for an AI to even exist; 
I fail to see the purpose of this bill, aside from the obvious anti-AI 
paranoia.”
“The PKF DataWatch is one of the bill’s sponsors,” Denice said. “They have 
something on Pena, I’m not sure what; it’s why Pena submitted the bill. Vote 
against it and you’re going to piss them off a lot.”
Ripper sat up straight. “DataWatch is sponsoring this?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know that?”
“Just doing my job,” said Denice evenly. “DataWatch thinks that if it can 
prevent AIs from owning property, it can deny them access to safe processors. 
Your average AI is not particularly friendly to the Unification; some of them 
work with the Claw and the Rebs. Preventing them easy access to secure 
processors—well, there’s something to the idea.”
Ripper said patiently, “How do you know that?”
Ralf had told her; to Ripper she said merely, “I know more than one Player.”
Ripper studied her. “I don’t know whether to thank you or fire you. Damn it, 
Daimara, association with Players is not part of your job. The last thing in the 
System I need is to get on DataWatch’s bad side.”
“I know.” Denice repeated, “You might want to vote for the bill. If,” she said, 
“you don’t want to get on DataWatch’s bad side.”
Ripper nodded slowly. “I’ll talk to you about this later. Martin, do we have any 
more security issues to discuss?”
“No.”
“All right, you stay. Daimara, that’s all for now.” Denice rose, left without 
saying anything further. Ripper and Ichabod were already involved in another 
discussion; neither of them took notice of her as she left.

They sat together in lotus on the mat after Robert’s afternoon class had ended, 
in the hour before Robert’s first evening class was scheduled to begin.
“I feel like I don’t have time to breathe these days,” Denice complained.
“Bad,” Robert agreed. He sat chewing a piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum. “People 
die when deprived of air. It happens among the SpaceFarers.” He cocked his head 
to one side. “It’s rare on Earth, though.”
“That’s not funny.”
Robert shrugged. “One woman’s opinion.”
“On Saturday we’re going on another leg of the campaign. India, then Australia, 
then Japan, and then back to New York. I won’t be out of Ripper’s presence for 
more than an hour or two at a time during the entire period.”
Robert nodded.
“You know how I feel about Ripper. He’s a good man. But this sort of enforced 
contact—it’s hard, Robert. Every time we go on one of these damn trips I find 
myself not wanting to talk to him before we’re back. And the longer we’re on the 
road the more intensely I want to not talk to him. Sometimes he’s a real jerk.”
“Douglass can be very focused,” Robert observed.
“Yes, and it’s a problem. The level of detail is incredible, Robert. I never 
felt incompetent before I took this job; but recently I haven’t felt much but 
incompetent. Especially since that assassination attempt in Portugal.”
“Which you stopped. I could have done no better myself.”
“He shouldn’t ever have gotten that close. A lot of that was Ichabod—he’s been 
even less focused than me, and that’s saying something—but the rest of it was 
me. We should have checked the room beneath Ripper’s.” Denice was silent, 
brooding. “I don’t know if I can take another seven months of this. You know, 
this wasn’t remotely what I had in mind when I decided to get into politics. 
It’s tedious and boring and—do you have to chew gum while we talk?”
Robert blinked. “No. Not really.” He swallowed visibly, continued. “A disgusting 
habit,” he admitted, “but if I did not chew gum then I would be perfect, which 
would be worse. How much time do you have?”
“An hour. Then I have to shower and go to see Jimmy Ramirez.”
“We will slap meditation today and start with stretching, then.”
Denice took a deep breath. “Back when I danced, I didn’t feel like I was getting 
anything done—that anything I was doing made a difference. But it was a lot more 
enjoyable.”
Robert stood, gestured to Denice to join him. “And then Tai Chi, for 
relaxation.”
Denice sat in lotus, did not move. “What I’m doing now matters,” Denice told 
Robert.
“Indeed. Rho deset enelli.”
“Why do you keep talking to me like that?”
“Why indeed,” said Robert Dazai Yo. He held a hand out to her, helped her gently 
to her feet. “The language is called shiata, and someday soon I will tell you 
more about it. But now, let us begin.”

At 8:00 she met Jimmy Ramirez at the Red Line Hotel.
Two of Trent’s old friends worked at the Red Line, Jodi Jodi and Bird, a pair of 
street kids who had come out of the Fringe with Trent and Jimmy Ramirez. Bird 
had, with some help, finally adjusted to the Patrol Sectors; Jodi Jodi, on the 
other hand, had taken to the Patrol Sectors like a Peaceforcer to cheap wine.
In a society grown increasingly age-conscious, Jimmy Ramirez was, at 
twenty-eight, the youngest assistant public defender in the City of New York.
Sometimes, these days, Denice felt that she did not know him any longer. If she 
had not known that behind the façade was a street kid and gang member from the 
Fringe, an ex-semipro boxer and ex-thief, she would never have guessed. He was a 
handsome man who had never had biosculpture. A mix of Haitian blood, and white, 
and Puerto Rican, his genes came from almost as many different sources as her 
own. He wore long-sleeved dress shirts, always, so that the faint scar that 
separated his old arm from the new would not be seen. He had a similar pair of 
scars on each of his legs, reminders of the night she and Jimmy had broken Trent 
out of the PKF Detention Center in Capitol City.
She wondered, sometimes, how Jimmy Ramirez would have ended up had he not met 
Trent. Oh, certainly his life would not have been the same; but they had been 
involved in great events, and they had shaped him as they had shaped her, and 
Trent. Though she did not believe in destiny, it struck her that some people 
were born to accomplish great things, that their lives would, under any 
circumstances, have been of note; others achieved greatness only under the 
pressure of events.
She did not even think she condescended in placing Jimmy Ramirez in the latter 
category.
Jodi Jodi, who seated them for dinner, was the Manager of Guest Services at one 
of the premier hotels in New York; Denice had never known quite what to make of 
her. A blond woman with blue eyes and the strangest sense of humor Denice had 
ever encountered, it was likely she had not personally led a pair of guests to 
their tables in perhaps five years. As she seated them at their table, in a 
quiet corner of the hotel’s restaurant, she whispered to Denice, “Happy 
birthday.”
Denice was surprised Jodi Jodi had remembered. “Thank you.”
She and Jimmy did not talk much through dinner. Jimmy had brought a gift, 
wrapped in gold foil, and it sat at the side of the table until after dessert 
was served. Denice allowed herself a slice of nondairy cheesecake, and upon 
finishing it opened Jimmy’s gift.
A hat.
Denice lifted it out of the box slowly.
A black bowler with a red silk ribbon about the base of the crown.
“You know,” she said after a pause, “I’ve never owned a hat before.” She thought 
back. “I don’t think I’ve ever even worn one.”
“Put it on.”
She did, slowly, let the felt rim of the hat settle gently against her hair. 
“How does it look?”
Jimmy Ramirez looked straight at her. “It’s a shame you don’t have a lover these 
days. It looks like I thought it would look.”
“Oh?”
His tone of voice contained only the slightest hint of teasing. “You probably 
ought not to wear it in public, of course. It’s an incitement to which most men 
and some women should not be subjected.”
Denice took it off, put the hat back in the box. “I think you have a thing about 
hats.”
“Who, me? No, no. No. Not at all. No.” Jimmy grinned. “A bit. A bit, okay? Just 
a little.”
Perhaps it was the wine she’d had to drink; Denice did not even stop to consider 
the question. “Jimmy, how come you’ve never made a pass at me?”
The grin vanished instantly, and Jimmy Ramirez stared at her without speaking 
for a long moment. Finally he said, “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
Jimmy looked distinctly uncomfortable. “You don’t know? I mean—”
Denice said quietly, “I don’t do that. I Touched you once, the first time I met 
you, because you scared me. After that I knew you loved Trent, and I never had 
to again.”
Jimmy said directly, “You’re a frightening person in some ways.”
“Touching…” Denice bit her lip. “It hurts, Jimmy. You hurt, all of you. You walk 
around with this terrible pain inside of you, from all the violence and 
betrayals in your lives, and it doesn’t bother you—because it’s your pain and 
you’re used to it. But when I Touch you I get all of your pain, all at once. I 
don’t do it unless I have a very, very good reason.”
“When I met Trent,” said Jimmy Ramirez, “he was eleven. I was thirteen. The PKF 
was in the process of putting up the Patrol Sector Barriers, of creating the 
Fringe. I was born in what turned into the Fringe, and it was a poor 
neighborhood, very tough, even before the Troubles. Social mores,” he said 
carefully, “were… different. Among the people I grew up with—forgive my 
language—fucking your buddy’s girl was a good way to get killed. Fucking a boy 
set you up for ridicule, for beatings and harassment. I understand you and Trent 
were raised differently. When I met Trent he was the strangest thing I’d ever 
seen in my life. He was this tough little white boy who was innocent about such 
an incredible variety of things I didn’t know where to start teaching him. I 
took care of him for about two years, and then he did something, I don’t even 
remember what, that made some of the older Dragons think he was a webdancer. 
They beat him for about a week, trying to get him to say he was a webdancer. He 
kept telling them he wasn’t, cause he didn’t want to be a slave again the way 
all your people had been, and he knew that if he admitted to being a webdancer 
the Dragons wouldn’t ever have let him free again. Finally they had to decide, 
kill him or let him be. They were still pretty sure he was a webdancer, but they 
were so impressed with his courage they figured even if he wouldn’t dance for 
them, he could still be a trooper.”
“Trent told me some of this.”
“I never saw anyone so brave,” Jimmy Ramirez said simply. “He was the best. I 
liked him before that, but after that—”
Jimmy shrugged. “He was my man. My brother forever. When he decided to get out 
of the Fringe, I never even stopped to think about it. He said go, Bird and Jodi 
Jodi and I picked up.” Jimmy paused. “Denice, I love you.”
Denice could not think of anything at all to say.
“Trent is the best thing that ever happened to me. He taught me to read. If it 
wasn’t for him I’d be a warlord in the Fringe today, or else dead. There are,” 
said Jimmy with a devastatingly simple logic, “many women in the world. But in 
your life you only get a few friends.”
“You must know Trent wouldn’t have minded.” Denice blinked. “Not that I’d have 
said yes.”
“I’d have minded. Listen,” said Jimmy impatiently, “this is a story I haven’t 
ever told anyone. When I was fourteen, one night it was deadly cold, I mean old 
ladies turning into corpsicles on the street outside. Trent and I shared a room 
at the Temple, and we only had one blanket and one bed. I slept on the bed with 
my coat on and Trent had the blanket and was sleeping on the floor with it. 
About midnight he asked me if he could sleep with me, cause he was so cold. I 
got up and barred the door so nobody could walk in on us, and we got into bed 
together. That was fourteen years ago,” said Jimmy precisely, “and to this day I 
sometimes wake up at night feeling guilty about that.”
“I understand.”
“Maybe some people let go of their childhood. The best I’ve ever managed is to 
cover it up.”
Denice said softly, “I love you too. Want to argue about politics for a while?”
Near 11:00 em., toward the end of their second bottle of wine, their argument 
degenerated into an argument.
Jimmy Ramirez—it was not news to Denice—believed, fiercely, that armed 
insurrection was inevitable, that it was the only possible way to remove the 
Unification’s hold on Occupied America.
His opinion of her employer was just short of feeling that Ripper should be shot 
for treason. “How do you represent,” said Jimmy patiently, “the rights of an 
occupied people, when all of your power arises from the military infrastructure 
of the occupiers? How can Ripper possibly reconcile his reputation as a champion 
of Occupied America with the fact that whatever power he has derives from the 
continued might of the Unification?”
“If you think that revolution is possible,” said Denice slowly, “then Ripper 
is—I’m—wrong. The Unification has not been a good thing for Occupied America, I 
concede the point. But it’s not possible, Jimmy. There are fifteen thousand core 
members of the Johnny Rebs, perhaps three or four thousand Erisian Claw. There 
are over twelve million PKF under uniform across the globe, another six hundred 
thousand off Earth. For God’s sake, Jimmy, a quarter of a million of those 
Peaceforcers are Americans. Not even a popular uprising with millions of 
Americans joining in gives either of those groups any realistic chance of 
dislodging the Unification from any part of Earth. They are,” said Denice, 
“terrorists. Ideologs. Not rebels.”
“Terrorists?” Jimmy was clearly offended, more than a little angry. “Listen, 
girl, you’re talking about people who’ve dedicated their lives to a great 
purpose, about people who are doing work that damn straight matters. Compare 
their commitment to your own and tell me how you come out.”
The point struck home; Denice struggled not to let it show. “Okay. Maybe I 
shouldn’t have called them terrorists—but regardless of their commitment, it 
doesn’t count for anything if they can’t win. And they can’t.”
Jimmy spoke rapidly. “On Saturday I’m going to Kansas City. Let’s use Kansas 
City as an example, because I’ve studied this one. The PKF garrison there is 
thirty-five thousand strong. The population of Kansas City is over a million. 
You think—you seriously think—that a million Americans, armed and ready to 
fight, can’t take that city away from thirty-five thousand PKF?”
“Who’s going to arm them, Jimmy? Who’s going to make them ready to fight? A lot 
of them—most of them—don’t want to fight. Even if they want the PKF out of 
Occupied America, they don’t want it so badly that they’ll die for it. Or kill 
for it. The people who feel that passionately are the minority, Jimmy. Maybe 
there’s a hundred thousand of them in Kansas City; I wouldn’t know. But they’re 
not trained, they’re not armed; and if you tried to train or arm them the PKF 
would put you up against a wall and shoot you dead.”
Denice had not been aware of her voice rising; suddenly Jodi Jodi was there at 
the side of their table, whispering furiously, “If the two of you want to argue 
treason, feel free to do it in someone else’s restaurant. We’ve got a pair of 
French Unification officials at a table down the way, and they’re complaining 
that you’re ruining their dinners. Stop it.”
Denice blinked, and Jodi Jodi was gone. “Um.”
Jimmy looked slightly embarrassed. “She’s right. Sorry about that.”
Denice took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, too. It’s just that—oh.” The word held 
audible frustration. “You’ve changed a lot, Jimmy.”
“Haven’t we all?” From somewhere, Jimmy Ramirez found a smile for her. “There 
are few people I trust as much as I trust you, Denice. I think you’re trying to 
do right. But you know, you’re not succeeding. You’re doing the wrong thing with 
the wrong people.”
“There’s still room to work, Jimmy. While there’s room to work we have to take 
it.”
“Room to work?” Jimmy’s voice took on an edge. “For who? For you, for the man 
with the nice office in Capitol City and the ten-room house upstate? Girl, 
there’s always room at the top. That’s not ever the problem.”
“How do you know how large his house is?”
Jimmy signed. “Look, I read it somewhere, okay?”
Denice looked across the table at Jimmy Ramirez, at the serious young features. 
“I’m not the enemy, Jimmy. I promise I’m not.”
“I know that.” Jimmy drained the last of his wine and stood. “But I’m not sure 
you’re part of the solution anymore either.” His expression softened slightly. 
“Good night, angel.”
Denice nodded, expression troubled. Her stomach was upset. “Thanks for having 
dinner with me.”
“Thank you,” he said with complete sincerity. He leaned forward and kissed her 
on the forehead. “And happy birthday again.”
“Have a nice trip.” Abruptly, she added, “Where are you going again?”
Jimmy stood motionless, looking down at her. Finally he said, “Kansas City. I 
think I said Kansas City.”
Denice nodded without looking away from him. “Yes. I think you did.”
She called a cab to take herself home.
In the cab she touched her InfoNet handheld once, said quietly, “Ralf?”
“Yes?”
“I think Jimmy may be getting into something stupid. Do me a favor, if you 
would. He’s going to Kansas City this weekend. Keep an eye on him.”
“Do you think,” asked Ralf, “that this is an appropriate action to take 
concerning a man who is, after all, both your friend and Trent’s?”
“I promised Trent I’d look out for him. He’s bright, but he’s—impulsive.”
“Very well. If you wish it, I will do it.”

Her midtown security apartment, just outside Capitol City, was small: a single 
bedroom and an attached bathroom. Despite its size it was remarkably well 
appointed; the tub was large enough for two people, and the bed had more 
settings than she knew how to use; the kitchen had a gourmet waitbot that 
prepared meals nearly as well as the human cooks at the Red Line. The media 
access in the bedroom was as complete as anyone could have wished; holo 
projectors in five different places, two different InfoNet terminals, one of 
them a full-sensory connection that rivaled the efficiency of an InfoNet inskin.
Denice was not certain what the apartment cost per month; Ripper had paid for 
it, so that she might be closer to the office.
Denice stood nude before the mirror in her bathroom, contemplating outfits for 
Ripper’s interview with the Electronic Times scheduled for tomorrow morning. 
After a moment she turned off her makeup key and filled the sink’s basin with 
warm water. The makeup pattern she’d worn faded slowly; her normally pale skin 
reappeared as she washed, as though she were washing away her makeup with the 
soap and water. She was distantly aware of tension in the muscles of her neck 
and shoulders.
“This has not been a good day.”
She did not think she had spoken loudly enough to be heard; nonetheless a 
response, no more than a disinterested grunt, drifted out from the direction of 
the bedroom. “Mmm-hmm.”
She raised her voice to be certain she was heard. “I had a fight with my friend 
Jimmy at dinner. I think I really made him angry.” Denice rubbed the cleanup pad 
over her face and neck, crumpled the cloth, and tossed it toward the ‘bot in the 
corner; the ‘bot snagged it out of midair and stuffed it inside itself.
“Jimmy made me angry; he sounded like a Johnny Reb at dinner. I know he’s 
smarter than that, but—how can a man as intelligent as he is be so blind?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
She pulled on the suit she intended to wear the following day, a black pinstripe 
with a gold belt; the pants were slightly baggy and gave her room to move if, 
she needed to. She did not put on a shirt with it. She slipped on a pair of 
black running shoes with soft soles; they almost looked like dress shoes. She 
put Jimmy’s hat on, looked at herself in the mirror. Aside from her breasts, 
half visible beneath the coat, she looked as she always looked in that suit; a 
slim teenage boy with gorgeous green eyes. The hat accentuated the effect, made 
her look as though her moderately long hair had been cut short.
She nodded at her image in the mirror and stepped out into the bedroom. “For 
tomorrow. What do you think?”
New York Metro Unification Councilor Douglass Ripper, wearing a green silk robe 
and auditing text on a field that floated twenty centimeters in front of his 
eyes, looked up as Denice entered the bedroom.
She turned slowly, showing the ensemble. “Well? With a shirt?”
Ripper sat up in bed, looking at her. “Where did you get the hat?”
“A gift from my friend Jimmy. For my birthday. Do you like it?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment. “Yes, I do. Is today your birthday? You’re 
twenty-three today?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“You were busy.”
Ripper said quietly, “I’ll get you a gift tomorrow.”
Denice took the hat off and laid it atop the bedroom dresser. “Okay. So, this 
suit tomorrow.”
“Um…”
“Yes?”
Ripper said slowly, “What you’re wearing. It’s fine, wear it tomorrow. 
Professional enough for an interview. But for right now—”
Denice grinned. “Yes?”
Ripper said softly, “Take off what you’re wearing. Put the hat back on.”
Denice looked at the hat, and then back at him, and her grin grew wider. “Okay. 
If you like.”
“Um. Trust me.”
Later, as she snuggled up against Ripper’s unconscious form, Denice Castanaveras 
drifted into gentle sleep; and dreamed.
She stood alone on a vast, featureless black plain, smooth as glass, flat and 
level as a ruler. The plane ran away toward a far distant flicker of lights.
No matter what direction she turned, she saw the same thing—inky blackness 
above, a smoother, glossy blackness below where the two darknesses met the 
lights glowed and flickered.
I have been here before.
It was different this time.
She lay on the sweaty sheets of the Girls’ Dormitory bunk she had been assigned. 
The Gift had come upon her, and it was nothing like what she had been told to 
expect by her parents, nothing like the Gift they had been granted by Suzanne 
Montignet’s genegineering.
She was barely there on the bunk. Most of her was elsewhere, a dark crystal 
plain—
She hurt Lives like candles burned in the darkness around her, wavered through 
the crystalline darkness, came alive and then burst into emptiness, their deaths 
accompanied by moments of sheer terror that burned themselves into the depths of 
the young girl’s mind.
This place seemed the same… but empty. Darkness all around her.
Lights in the far, far distance.
In the Beginning, said the voice, was the Flame.
Suddenly the Flame appeared around her, solitary and splendid, and with the 
appearance of the Flame a hot fierce joy descended upon her, filled her with a 
love like rage, like the wrath of angels.
When she awoke in the morning Ripper was already gone.
Denice awoke with an ache in her heart, an overwhelming sense of loss, for what 
she did not know.
She did not remember having dreamed.
It did not seem possible that her life should be so empty.




- 2 -
« ^ » 
Tommy Boone gasped and cried out.
The voice came out of the darkness. His voice, that had worn away at Boone for 
two days now. “They are crude techniques,” he said quietly, “but they work. And 
so we use them.”
Boone sat in a straight-backed chair, wrists bound to the armrests, ankles bound 
to the legs. His head was strapped back against the headrest and his eyelids had 
been cut off and a spotlight shone into his race. He was nearly blind from it. 
His cheeks were one purplish mass of bruises. His right eye had swollen almost 
shut.
He wore only a white T-shirt and underwear he had been asleep when they came for 
him. There was barely a white spot left on them; they were black with old blood 
or red with new.
Blood spurted from the index finger of his right hand; the finger itself lay on 
the floor, still twitching.
One technician flattened Boone’s hand out, and the second tied a string around 
the stump of the finger; a maser set at low intensity seared the stump until the 
bleeding stopped.
Boone screamed while they did it to him, and did not stop screaming until the 
maser beam ceased.
“I wish to share my name with you,” said the voice. “But first I must have 
yours.”
Boone tried to speak. The inside of his mouth was bone dry, and the last time it 
had been wet had been with his own blood. Finally he managed to whisper harshly, 
“Suck me, Obodi.”
“I have grown to appreciate your people,” said the voice from beyond the lights. 
It was softer, that voice, gentler, than anything Boone had ever heard before in 
his life. Not even his mother had had a voice like that; not even his wife, who 
had died when Boone was only twenty. “You are an imaginative and vigorous and 
brutal people. Why, the unpleasantness I am inflicting upon you, it comes from a 
famous incident in your own history. When the Carthaginian tribe fought the 
Roman tribe, a Roman general named Regulus was caught by the Carthaginians; they 
removed his eyelids and tied him facing east at dawn.” A chuckle. “I have had 
little enough time to learn of your past, so busy I’ve been kept these last 
years. Perhaps later I will have time to study more; I would like to understand 
you, and the forces that shaped you. Who are you?”
The crack of the voice penetrated the pain and fatigue; Boone heard himself 
answering as though another person used his tortured vocal cords. “Thomas Daniel 
Boone.”
“That is very good,” said the gentle voice. “I am Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon. I was a 
Dancer of the Nameless One; today I am the instrument of your death. The release 
from your pain.” The words wore away at Boone, as he floated half-conscious in 
the haze of his pain, under the blaze of the lights. “Here in this moment 
together, you and I, we are one. You are all of my world and I am all of yours. 
I know you as no one has ever known you before; I understand you, the dark and 
bright places within you, as no one has understood you in all your life. And I 
love you, Thomas Daniel Boone, for the good that is within you. Release him.”
Boone heard a hushed, rapid exchange out beyond the circle of the light, heard 
the flat finality of Obodi’s voice: “As I said.”
The technician came forward, into the light, a glowing white blob in Boone’s 
ruined eyesight. The bonds that held his ankles were cut, and then those that 
held his wrists. The pain that struck him as the blood rushed into his 
extremities would have seemed, on any other day of his life, intense; now he 
barely noticed it. The strap that restrained his head was left in place, and in 
some distant corner of his mind Boone found himself absurdly grateful; if they’d 
cut it he would, he knew, have pitched forward from the chair like a rag doll.
The technician placed a laser in his numb, but otherwise undamaged left hand, 
and stepped back into the darkness of the cellar.
The man who Tommy Boone knew as Obodi, who had called himself 
Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon, came forward into the light. Boone could barely make out 
the shape of the man, never mind his features; all Boone could see was that he 
wore a long robe of some reddish color.
“The device in your hand is a laser, Thomas. My good and true Thomas. A weapon 
with which you can kill me if you wish, punish me for the pain and fear I have 
inflicted upon you.”
Tears leaked from the corners of Boone’s eyes. “Oh, God. What do you want of 
me?”
“I am not your God, Thomas, merely your death. I want you to take the laser and 
put it in your mouth and pull the trigger.”
The moment Boone had known was coming since he had awakened here in this place 
left him so weak with fear he could not even lift the laser they had placed in 
his hand. “Please…” he whispered. “Please no. I don’t want to die.”
Boone was aware of Obodi coming closer. “What is a life, Thomas? A small thing, 
given casually, taken the same. It is nothing to be struggled for so furiously. 
Calm yourself and do not be afraid. Put the weapon in your mouth and pull the 
trigger.”
Tommy Boone found a last reservoir of strength, snarled, “Fuck you and die,” and 
lifted the laser—
“Stop!” The Voice was his father’s, and Joe Mantika’s, the man who had recruited 
him into the Rebs, and Father Bob’s from Sunday school, merged into the 
thundering command. The Voice rolled over him: “PUT THE WEAPON IN YOUR MOUTH AND 
PULL THE TRIGGER!”
Tommy Boone did not hesitate. He flipped the safety off, brought the laser 
around, and blasted his own head off.
Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon stood in the circle of light, in a cellar in the city of 
Philadelphia, looking down upon the headless body of Thomas Daniel Boone, a good 
and true man.
Different from the Flame People, without doubt. Resistant to Speaking—but not 
impervious to it.
It was a good sign.

They kept him waiting nearly an hour.
Dvan did not let himself grow impatient. He had dealt with the Sicilian Old Ones 
before, though not recently, and understood the protocols that needed to be 
observed. He sat in a cool breeze and bright warm sunlight, with a glass of red 
wine on the small round patio table before him, looking out over the Santonia 
family’s gardens, down across sculpted terraces of growing grapes. Don Emilio 
would leave him waiting until his business was done, whatever it might be, but 
no longer.
Shortly after one o’clock the don came out onto the patio, greeted Dvan warmly, 
and seated himself. “Forgive me, William. But it has been many years, and your 
call came with such short notice—” Emilio shrugged. “It took me some time to 
verify your activities of the last decade or so.” The old man smiled at Dvan. “I 
was surprised, to tell the truth. Newsdancing—” He shrugged again. “It seems a 
waste of talents such as yours.”
Dvan smiled at the man. “Perhaps. But it is safe and requires little exertion, 
and I find in my advancing age that this appeals to me.”
Emilio frowned. “Advancing age, eh? You must be, perhaps, eighty? It’s been a 
good while, my friend. You’ve carried the years—remarkably—I might even say 
surprisingly—well.”
“As have you, Don Emilio.”
Emilio nodded, accepting the lie for the politeness it was. “What can I do for 
you, William? If you have some thought of putting my name on the news Boards, I 
must tell you it would disturb me.”
Dvan made a dismissive gesture. “Don Emilio, in the last few hours you have 
searched the InfoNet for my name. If any article about you or yours had ever 
been published under my name, you and I would not be talking.”
Emilio said softly, “How I can be of service?”
“I’m looking for a man. His… occupation,” said Dvan carefully, “was that of 
procuring women.”
The old man shook his head. “We have no interests in—”
“He went by the name of Lucabri.”
Silence fell. In the quiet Dvan could hear the buzzing of flies in the garden, 
the distant whine of the robots working the vineyards. Emilio stared at Dvan 
with hard, flinty eyes.
“He first appeared in Amiens, in France, early in ‘72. The next time I have 
certain knowledge of his location is in Genoa, in the summer of ‘73. And from 
there he vanishes. If you know where he might be, and would share that knowledge 
with me, I would be indebted to you.”
“What is your interest in this… man?”
Dvan gave him an answer he knew the old don would accept. “It’s not personal. I 
am doing a favor for a friend.”
Understanding lit the old man’s eyes. “Someone with a daughter, perhaps? Or a 
sister?”
“It would be a reasonable guess.”
“And what action would you take if you were to find him?”
“I would ease the suffering of my friends, Don Emilio.”
“While you have been wandering around Europe, William, Signor Lucabri has left a 
trail of bodies across Occupied America.” The old man rose from the table. “If 
you wish to find him, go to America.” Don Emilio stopped at the sliding glass 
door that led back into the villa. A servant inside opened the door for him, and 
he stood in the opening looking at Dvan—a wizened, shrunken old man who Dvan 
could not reconcile with the giant of a man he had known fifty years prior, who 
had killed men and loved women with equal passion. “He has been going by the 
name of Mister Obodi. And he is with the Rebs.” Don Emilio gestured to the 
servant who had opened the door. “Please call Signor Devane a cab, and escort 
him to the gate.” The old man turned about, and walked back inside slowly, 
shuffling across the black tile.

“Who is this?” Sedon asked quietly.
They sat together in the living room of Obodi’s house in San Diego, looking at 
holos. The living room’s bay windows looked out on a view of the beach, of the 
restless Pacific Ocean.
Sedon’s manner was sleepy and relaxed and satiated; Chris Summers, in the two 
years he had been working with the man he knew as Mister Obodi, had seen it 
before. It was the way Obodi looked following a night with a boy who had pleased 
him, and the way Obodi looked after killing someone who had displeased him.
The holo was clearly a publicity shot; it showed a man perhaps in his forties or 
fifties, with dark hair and brown eyes. “This is Douglass Ripper,” said Summers. 
“Publicity still. He’s the Unification Councilor for New York Metro; he sits on 
the Council’s Peace Keeping Oversite Committee. He requisitioned the PKF report 
on you.”
Sedon quirked an eyebrow. “Indeed? Should I concern myself with this?”
Summers said patiently, “He’s a popular man, sir. He’s running for Secretary 
General, and he’s probably going to win.”
“In December?” Sedon smiled, a lazy, relaxed smile. “I hardly think so. What 
else?”
Summers nodded. “One more item. Command, next. This is a—”
Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon rose to his feet slowly, expression draining from his 
features, staring motionless at the holo.
At the man.
Summers continued a bit slowly. “—a newsdancer. He’s been asking people about 
Signor Lucabri; we had a report that he met with Emilio Santonia. I wondered if 
you wanted anything done about it.”
Sedon did not reply. The pale blue eyes stared, unblinking, and his hands 
trembled. He brought his hands together abruptly, stood with his hands clasped 
together in front of his chest and said something in a language that Christian 
Summers had never heard before.
“Sir? Are you all right?”
Sedon said something again in the language Summers did not recognize, then shook 
himself and said in very slow English, not looking at Summers, “Find… him. The 
man… and bring him. To me.”
“Mister Obodi? You know him?”
Sedon stared straight ahead, at the holo of the newsdancer. A big black-haired 
giant of a man with pale skin and dead black eyes. “He cannot be alive.” He 
shook his head slowly, spoke half to himself. “A… resemblance, is the word. It 
has been too long for… Dvan… to be alive.”
Christian J. Summers said, “Dvan?”
Finally Sedon looked at him. “What is his name?”
“Devane, sir. William Devane.”
Sedon’s voice was a mere whisper. “Oh, my old friend…” His eyes closed and he 
crumpled where he stood.




- 3 -
« ^ » 
She spent Friday with Douglass at the house in upstate New York.
There were times when Denice’s life seemed starkly unreal to her; days such as 
these contributed.
Her earliest memories were of the Advanced Biotechnology Research Laboratory in 
New Jersey; and then of the PKF barracks in New York, and then, briefly, the 
happy times at the Chandler Complex. During all those years she had been one 
child among many; that Carl and Jany were her biological parents, and David’s, 
did not seem to matter; Carl and Jany were everyone’s parents, parents to the 
near two hundred and forty children who had been placed in their care; Jany in 
particular had little more time for her own children than for all the others. 
She and David were only two years younger than the youngest of the Project 
Superman children. She remembered being cared for by other children; by Trent, 
and Heather; by Willie, who was somewhat older than the rest. Of rooms that 
were, even in the relatively large Chandler Complex, always too cramped, always 
shared with too many others.
A discontinuity occurred in her memory during the Troubles.
Afterward, the Young Females’ Public Labor facility, one room, with forty other 
girls. When Orinda Gleygavass had at last come for her, the opportunity to share 
a room with only three other girls had seemed like heaven.
Briefly she and Tarin Schuyler had lived together; for close to three years she 
had shared an apartment with a girl named Kim Mikonos, at Goddess Home.
In the course of her life she had grown so accustomed to living with others, in 
small spaces, that she did not truly notice it.
Ripper’s house sat on two acres of empty land, shaded—overshaded, Ripper 
sometimes said—by trees upward of a hundred and fifty years old. The trees 
blocked any view of the house from the distant road; because she could not see 
them, Denice could often forget the presence of Ripper’s security, four Security 
Services bodyguards, stationed down at the gate. The house was two stories tall, 
with ten rooms; Ripper was the only person who lived there.
There were servants somewhere, human rather than ‘bots, a gardener and a maid, 
but Denice virtually never saw them.
His mother was dead; his father, stepmother, and two sisters lived on what could 
only be called an estate, four klicks further north. Denice had been there once, 
had not been surprised that his family, though gracious, had not seemed to think 
much of her.
A simple sign of wealth; not counting the genies she’d been raised with, Ripper 
was the only person Denice had ever met who had more than one sibling. The 
license was prohibitively expensive.
They rode horses in the morning, and played tennis in the afternoon. Ripper was 
a surprisingly good tennis player, and occasionally won; technique counted for a 
lot, and Denice’s immense edge in speed and strength were largely offset by the 
fact that Ripper had been playing his entire life. Denice had never held a 
racquet until six months ago.
After dinner they went swimming together under banks of sunpaint so bright it 
seemed like daylight.
Ripper, after a few laps, sat in the whirlpool at the shallow end of the pool 
and watched Denice move back and forth through the water. After half an hour, 
she took a break, came over and joined him in the whirlpool.
“In college, thirty years ago,” said Ripper, “I was on the swim team. I swear, 
Denice, you’re a better swimmer than anybody I ever saw in damn near 
professional level competition.”
“Thank you.”
“Where did a street kid from New York learn to swim like that?”
Denice ducked her head, came back up with her hair slicked away from her face. 
She told him as much of the truth as was necessary. “The summer of ‘72, when I 
went out to California. I spent most of the summer swimming in the Pacific.”
Ripper studied her curiously. “When you were out at the witch’s commune—what was 
it called?”
“Goddess Home.”
He was silent, the bubbles swarming up around him. When he spoke, one who did 
not know how he thought might have thought he was changing the subject. This is 
where you’ve come from was the unspoken subtext: “Where do you envision yourself 
going, Denice?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Ever considered getting into politics?”
“You mean as a candidate myself?”
He looked at her steadily. “Yes.”
“No. Not really. I don’t think I’m qualified.”
“You’re not, aside from having good people skills and a certain degree of 
passion. But you’re also quite young. You could go back to school.”
“Back to school? Douglass, I haven’t been to school since the Troubles.”
He nodded. “And it shows. You’re horrible with the InfoNet, you don’t write 
well, you’re ignorant about a lot of things you shouldn’t be ignorant about. 
Finances, law, history, practical business.” He shrugged. “But you’re bright and 
you work hard and you handle people well. If you wanted to go to school, it 
could be arranged. A degree in political science, perhaps, and an MBA wouldn’t 
hurt you any. You could also take a degree in Unification Law; it’s useful even 
if you never take the bar exam. Bodyguard is a dead end.”
Denice blinked. “Are you serious?”
“You look thoroughly horrified, dear. Is going to school so scary?”
“I’d be—Douglass, I’d be thirty-five before I got through with all that!”
Unification Councilor Douglass Ripper gazed blankly at her for just a moment, 
then went into a fit of giggles he simply could not contain. “You’d 
be—thirty-five,” he gasped. “My God, your life would be—over.” He rolled over on 
his back in the bubbling warm water, stared up at the black night sky, just 
visible beyond the haze of the banked rows of sunpaint, and laughed so hard he 
couldn’t breathe. “Thirty-five!” He started to say something else, and then 
simply gasped again, “Thirty-five!”
Denice pushed his head under the water.
He came up choking and gasping for air. “Stop! Stop! I give—”
She gave him time to get some air, then pushed him under again and held him down 
while he fought. Not long, six or seven seconds, though it probably seemed 
longer to him. He pushed up hard and she let him up.
“I’m sorry,” he sputtered, “I’m sorry sorry sorry sorry.”
She sat back down on the little tile ledge. “You shouldn’t laugh at me.”
“Obviously not.” He coughed once, shook his head slightly. “I’d feel damn 
foolish being killed by my own bodyguard. How could I possibly explain it to 
Ichabod?” He waded over to where she sat, sat down next to her and took her hand 
in his. “I’m sorry, okay?”
Denice nodded. “Okay.”
“I won’t do it again.”
“I’ll hold you down longer next time,” she warned him.
He looked deeply into her eyes, said very seriously, “I am totally and 
completely intimidated. I will never never laugh at you again.”
She kissed him on the tip of his nose. “Good.”
“It’s just—”
“What?”
“You’re the first person I’ve been in love with since I was twenty years old,” 
he whispered. Denice looked down, nodded once, and Ripper said softly, “I want 
you to do well.”

Somewhere in the city of Encino, slightly northwest-of—Los Angeles—Callia 
Sierran did not know exactly where, as she had been brought there in a darkened 
car—was the estate from which the Temples of Eris had arisen.
The Prophet Harry Devlin had once walked these grounds, had slept in these 
rooms.
Somewhere inside that estate, in a small empty room with a large bay window, 
Callia stood with her hands clasped behind her back, and said to the woman who 
had founded the Erisian Claw, who had recruited Callia and her brother into the 
Claw,, “I don’t quite know where to start.”
The woman who sat facing her, a teacup of fine china cradled in her lap, was 
clearly aged. In another time she might have passed for thirty or thirty-five. 
Today the exquisite grain and slight looseness of the skin at her neck and hands 
marked her age: past her second round of geriatric skin regeneration, and 
thereby at least seventy, perhaps older. “Indeed,” the woman said after a 
moment. “I’ve audited your report. Perhaps your impressions of the meeting would 
be most helpful.”
Domino Terrencia, Callia’s immediate supervisor—the woman who had largely raised 
Callia and her brother after their father’s death at PKF hands—stood immediately 
behind the old woman. She nodded imperceptibly.
Callia interpreted it correctly: Be brief, “Yes, ma’am. We met with ‘Sieur Obodi 
downtown, at the law offices of Greenberg and Bass, at eight-thirty this 
morning.” She did not need to elaborate on the point; Greenberg and Bass had 
fronted for the Rebs for at least twenty years. “He’s clearly legitimate; he 
wants to work with us, and he seems to have the authority to make such a 
commitment for the Rebs. The list of Rebs who were there was quite impressive; 
Christian J. Summers, Maxwell Devlin, half a dozen others who are in my report. 
Perhaps even more significant, ma’am, was who did not show. Belinda Singer was 
not there, and when I asked about her was told that she had retired from 
administrative duties. Nor was F.X. Chandler present; as you’re probably aware, 
he did retire, straight off Earth, about six months ago. He’s living in an 
orbital retirement home and apparently his security is tough.” She paused. “I 
think he got on the wrong side of Obodi, and ran.”
“Sensible,” the old woman remarked. “What were you told about Tommy Boone, and 
what was your impression of Sieur Obodi?”
“Tommy Boone, ma’am, ‘sleeps with the fish.’ ”
“How colorful.”
“Old One slang,” said Domino quietly.
“The Italians?”
“Yes.”
The old woman nodded. “Interesting.” To Callia: “Does he?”
“Sleep with the fish?” Callia thought about it. “The Peaceforcer Elite who 
deserted, Christian Summers—he was present. If Boone were alive, Summers would 
have stayed in Japan, I think. There was no love between those two. Beyond that 
I can’t say.”
“Go on.”
Callia said, “Ma’am, ‘Sieur Obodi scares me. I believe that he is in fact in 
control of the Johnny Rebs. I found him formidable; a matter of personal 
bearing. I think you would have to meet him to understand. He speaks with a 
slight accent, as our reports said, but I don’t think it’s Italian; his accent’s 
nothing like Domino’s. He speaks as though he were raised speaking a tonal 
language such as Japanese. How someone who is clearly not an American has ended 
up in control of the Johnny Rebs is, frankly, beyond me.” Callia paused. “But 
there’s little doubt that he is. When he spoke, people listened the way they 
used to listen to Tommy Boone. And we already know that Rebs who don’t take his 
orders die. Quickly.”
The old woman looked out the window at the tall green fields of marijuana, 
sipped cold tea from her china teacup, and said without emphasis, “Lovely.”

Late on the evening of Saturday, May 2, after a stop in Kansas City to go 
through the new orientation materials ‘Sieur Obodi had designed, Jimmy Ramirez 
flew a semiballistic into Los Angeles via LAX. He found the trip itself—quite 
apart from the business on which he had come to Los Angeles—rather exciting.
It was only the second time since escaping the Fringe that he had left the 
Greater New York area; and that first occasion had merely been a brief trip to 
Boston some two years prior.
He had never even been on a semiballistic before.
Los Angeles was very nearly as alien as he had expected; a billboard that 
greeted him upon debarking said: Welcome to TransCon-Free Los Angeles.
He picked up his single piece of luggage at the terminal, briefly toyed with and 
then rejected the idea of hiring one of the human-driven cabs. The lack of 
TransCon in Los Angeles meant that people could drive their own cars, if they 
wished; it did not mean that it was a good idea. Jimmy knew that his own 
reflexes, excellent though they were, were no match for those of a carcomp’s; 
the idea of entrusting his life to a driver whose reflexes were almost certainly 
worse than his own sounded suicidal, not exciting.
Not that he would have admitted it to anyone, but he was afraid of heights 
anyway.
Old Downtown was a fifteen-minute flight from LAX. Jimmy Ramirez, alone in the 
cab’s backseat, made no pretense of sophistication. He stared out the windows at 
southwest Los Angeles, stopping every few minutes, when the heights got to him, 
to settle his nerves. Despite the carpet of lights stretching from one end of 
the horizon to the other, it all seemed, in some odd sense, curiously rural, and 
after a moment Jimmy placed it; Los Angeles lacked spacescrapers. Though he saw 
a few buildings that he guessed to be one hundred or one hundred and fifty 
floors, surely none of them topped two hundred. He wondered briefly at the lack 
of spacescrapers, and then leapt to the reasonable conclusion that they had 
avoided building spacescrapers because of the danger of earthquakes. He was 
incorrect; a spacescraper with a base that covered two square blocks was quite 
safe from even the worst earthquake; it was no likelier to fall over than a 
small mountain. Los Angeles, in 2076, simply did not have the population density 
necessary to make a spacescraper capable of permanently supporting a population 
of some 350,000 persons a necessity.
Los Angeles did not sport one of the world’s four uncompleted spacescrapers, 
begun, as the other three had been, over twenty years prior, before the Ministry 
of Population Control had finally succeeded in reversing Earth’s explosive 
population growth.
The cabcomp’s tourist program asked Jimmy if he wished to detour to see the 
shell of L.A.’s only spacescraper.
Jimmy Ramirez snorted. “No. I’m in a hurry. And I’ve damn straight seen a shell 
before.”
The cabcomp did not try to speak to him again.
The cab came down atop a small black skyscraper in Old Downtown, fifty or sixty 
stories high. The skyscraper was the twin of another skyscraper immediately 
beside it.
The parking space the cab came down upon bore the legend, visible from the sky:
In Your Wildest Dreams Don’t Even Think About Parking Here
On the wind-whipped roof, just beyond the row of floodlamps that illuminated the 
downlot, stood two men Jimmy Ramirez had never met before. Even before he got 
out of his cab he recognized them both from Max Devlin’s descriptions.
The tall one, blond hair gathered away from his face in a tight ponytail, was 
‘Sieur Obodi, the man who had taken down Tommy Boone. The short, broader one 
would be Chris Summers, the only non-French Peaceforcer Elite the System had 
ever seen; the only Peaceforcer Elite who had ever deserted.
After Trent the Uncatchable, Christian J. Summers was, Jimmy knew, the most 
wanted fugitive in the System. Even Tommy Boone, when he was alive, had never 
made it past number three on the PKF listing of fugitives.
The PKF did not actually make up a “most-wanted” list; they simply posted 
rewards.
Trent the Uncatchable’s bounty was CU:5,000,000, at a time when the average cost 
of a day’s labor, worldwide, hovered around CU:15.
Christian J. Summers was worth CU:3,500,000.
Summers came forward as the cab’s fans died down, fanwash tugging at his 
clothes. He looked exactly like what he was, an early PKF Elite, from the days 
when the treatments that toughened the skin had also stiffened the face into a 
rigid mask. His handshake was dry and very hard.
“ ‘Sieur Ramirez. A pleasure.”
“Likewise.”
“Come on.” Summers led Jimmy across the windy ferrocrete roof surface, to where 
‘Sieur Obodi stood waiting for them.
Watching.
It was Jimmy’s first impression of Obodi, of the man’s eyes upon him as he 
approached. Even in the relative darkness atop the skyscraper, they gleamed, 
bright sparks of blue in a deeply tanned, apparently Caucasian face. His lips 
were thin, curved into a faint smile.
He took a single step forward as Jimmy Ramirez neared him, and held out his 
hand.
Coming from any other person Jimmy Ramirez had ever known in his life, ‘Sieur 
Obodi’s greeting would have sounded nothing but pretentious.
From Obodi it sent a chill down his spine.
“Welcome, James Ramirez,” said ‘Sieur Obodi, enfolding Jimmy’s outstretched hand 
in both of his, a warm, seductive smile lighting his face, “welcome to your 
destiny.”

At a distance of two kilometers, an avatar of Ralf the Wise and Powerful, safely 
ensconced in the circuitry of the cab Jimmy Ramirez had taken from LAX, circled 
around and around the Bank of America Building.

Denice ran through the briefing materials for Australia on the semiballistic, 
while Ripper dozed.
There were advantages to not needing much sleep; if she had required as much 
sleep as Ripper, Denice did not know when she would ever have found the time to 
prepare for anything. When he was awake, Ripper was a full-time job.
“Australia,” the briefing began, “yearns for respect.”
Its post-Unification history has been one of significant accomplishment. It 
separated from the British Commonwealth in the years immediately before the 
Unification. Though the French PKF was characteristically brutal in its 
pacification of England, Australia fared better; like the French they resented 
the English, and further had a history of cordial relations with France 
stretching back to World War I. Though Australia was not among the founding 
Unification countries, Australia did not contest the Unification, and once the 
course to the Unification War was clear, made reasonable accommodations with 
Unification forces.
The Australians have become a significant factor in space travel; one of Earth’s 
largest spaceports is located in the Australian outback.
Australia, despite its relatively small population, is a significant electoral 
resource; almost alone among modern democracies, Australia requires, on penalty 
of a stiff fine, that its citizens participate in all elections, both local and 
Unification. (It has gone to great lengths to make this feasible; it is one of 
the few countries in the Unification that has completely eliminated the ballot 
box in favor of InfoNet-based voting.) Given the forty-two percent turnout that 
characterizes Unification voters worldwide, this gives the Australian voter a 
say in Unification politics that is significantly out of proportion to the 
actual population of the Australian continent.
Native Australians have a distinct neurosis concerning the traditional lack of 
respect given their people by the outer world. Founded by England as a penal 
colony in 1788, and used so for the first eighty years of their existence, 
Australia possessed, until the end of the twentieth century, an insignificant 
voice in world politics.
Since the Unification, this has largely changed; but the erroneous impression 
that they have insufficient say in how Australia is treated by the outer world, 
including the Unification proper, has remained, and is a sensitive subject.
When Douglass Ripper traveled, he did so with a retinue of not less than a dozen 
people; depending on the locale to be visited, his party sometimes ran as high 
as twenty-five persons. Denice had been amazed, at first, at the size of his 
staff. On any given day she never saw more than a few of them; her first staff 
meeting had been a revelation. Over forty people had shown up: Ichabod, the 
Chief of Staff; two speech writers, a Director of Communications, an InfoNet 
Access Coordinator, Election Committee Manager, Ripper’s personal secretary, the 
secretary’s secretary, the Deputy Assistant for Executive Branch Liaison—and 
people with a dozen other titles, and the secretaries and aides and assistants 
of those people.
It was over a month before Denice had even gotten all the names straight.

For the India-Australia-Japan trip, Ripper had taken fifteen people with him; 
six were bodyguards.
Four of the bodyguards stayed with Ripper in their Canberra hotel room while 
Ichabod Martin and Denice examined the hall where Ripper was to speak. They went 
down together, two hours ahead of time.
They did not expect to find anything. The PKF Personal Security squads assigned 
to Councilor Ripper had marked the room clean that morning, and two different 
Australian security agencies had double-checked their work. The hall was a large 
rectangular area, about sixty meters wide, by eighty long, by perhaps six high. 
A single large double door stood at the south end of the hall, with two smaller 
doors at the east and west, near the raised speaker’s platform.
A PKF Elite stood at each of the three doors.
They did not expect to find anything, but they had not expected to find anything 
in Portugal either—and therefore had checked Ripper’s hotel room rather 
cursorily.
If the assassin had not exactly been hiding under the bed, he was not far from 
it. Sometime during the night before Ripper’s arrival in Portugal the assassin 
had checked into the room immediately beneath Ripper’s, and cut a small hole 
through the ceiling and into Ripper’s hotel room.
The fact that he was sleeping with Denice probably saved Ripper’s life; they 
were drifting off to sleep when a sound disturbed Denice.
She came awake in motion. She pushed Ripper hard, one-handed, from the bed they 
shared, pushing herself in the other direction with the same movement. Her 
handgun, a sixteen-shot automatic with explosive shells, sat with a spare clip 
atop the dresser at the bedside and she reached for it with her left hand as she 
rolled backward away from the bed—
—the gun and the spare clip leapt from the dresser’s surface, into her waiting 
hand. She came out of the roll, came to her feet firing.
The bed exploded in flame.
There were sixteen shots in the handgun and she wasted the entire clip into a 
spot on the floor. The clip ejected itself when empty and Denice
the bed is burning, a thin, sharp beam of ruby laser light waving up through the 
burning bed, stopping when it meets the ceiling above it, flames crawling up 
from the surface of the bed.
slammed the spare home and fired again.
Ichabod and Bruce appeared in the hotel room’s doorway, Excalibur laser rifles 
in hand. They made the correct decision, pulling Ripper from the hotel room 
without delay, leaving Denice behind to deal with the threat.
The second clip was empty.
The laser light had ceased.
Where she had fired into the floor the floor no longer existed. Denice could 
look straight down into the room beneath them, through a hole some half a meter 
wide.
In the room beneath a man lay sprawled flat on his back, looking up toward the 
ceiling, a laser rifle clutched in his right hand. She could not tell how badly 
injured he was, or if he was even conscious; but he was still alive, twitching 
and moaning and bleeding quite impressively.
Shattered pieces of the floor had cut Denice’s legs in half a dozen places, and 
now the room sprinklers cut in, dousing the fire quickly, washing the blood down 
her thighs and calves.

Two weeks later, in Canberra, they did not expect to find anything.
Nonetheless they checked.
Denice started at the south end of the hall, carrying a small device that spat 
deep radar pulses at the walls, looking for odd signatures in the walls—hollow 
places, spots with unusual density. She ignored the PKF Elite, as the Elite 
ignored her. Ichabod started up at the north end around the speaker’s platform, 
and worked south.
They met in the middle of the hall about an hour later, an hour before Ripper 
was due to come down to speak, and sat down together facing one another across 
the center aisle.
“The balcony area gets closed off?”
The bearded black features bobbed up and down. “Yeah. That shouldn’t be a 
problem. I think we tell hotel security we’re taking him down the south maglevs, 
and then use the north maglevs. We bring him in through the east door. That 
gives us the smaller part of the lobby to walk through; he won’t be exposed to 
the street for as long as if we go through the main lobby.”
Denice nodded. “Works for me.”
“Okay. I think we have about ten minutes free. We need to talk.”
“I know.”
“How are you today?”
Denice looked straight at him. “Could be better, could be worse. I woke up last 
Tuesday morning feeling—” Denice paused. “Bad. Aching. I’m not sure why. That 
was five days ago, and it’s lingered. Today I am, largely, clear and centered. 
How are you?”
“I’m having problems.”
Denice nodded, waited.
Martin sighed. “Personal. You know Terry and I broke up.”
“Shawmac? I knew you were seeing him.”
Ichabod Martin said, “Things have not been good between us for a long time. Half 
a year, maybe. But we’re both stubborn men and neither of us wanted to give up. 
Past couple of months—you know you tear each other up toward the end, so that 
it’s easier to let go?”
“Is that how it’s done?”
Ichabod shrugged. “Different strokes, I suppose. So anyway, last night we talked 
for about an hour and decided not to see one another again.”
“I am sorry.”
“I don’t mention it for the sympathy. But I’m not focused. I’m not going to be 
focused, not today. I talked to John and Bruce already. I haven’t mentioned it 
to Councilor Ripper, and I’m not going to.”
“I’ll cover your back where I can.”
“Appreciate it.” Denice waited for what she knew was coming. Martin took a deep 
breath and said, “How long have you been sleeping with the Councilor?”
“About three months.” Denice paused. “I thought you knew, until what happened in 
Portugal. The way you behaved afterward—that was when I realized you didn’t.”
Martin shook his head. “No. Perhaps I should have, but I sometimes don’t see 
things other people might. The Councilor’s always had his personal bodyguard 
stay in the room with him while he slept; but the Councilor’s real straight, and 
his bodyguards in the past have always been men. When you started with us I 
worried about this, but I thought the Councilor was smart enough to refrain.” He 
paused. “This disturbs me a lot. It’s unprofessional behavior on your part, I 
don’t think I have to tell you that.”
“You don’t. I know it.”
Martin nodded, accepting it. “I’m more upset with him. Employers shouldn’t sleep 
with their employees. It’s bad policy. That he chose to—well, I’m going to speak 
to him about it. I’ve been dropping things lately—so have you—and it’s left the 
Councilor tense enough that I’ve been reluctant to broach this subject with him. 
But I think I’m going to have to. He should have told me; it’s relevant to my 
job. If he wishes to sleep with you, fine, but you need to cease working for him 
as a bodyguard.”
A flicker of real anger touched Denice. “I don’t think you’re qualified to make 
that judgment.”
“The Councilor will make the judgment, of course. Fortunately it’s not my call. 
But I don’t think you can be objective when the man you’re protecting is also 
the man you’re sleeping with. Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t think so. And I’m going to tell him so when this trip is done.”
The anger faded. Denice said, “Thank you for the warning.”
“You’re welcome. Back upstairs?”
“Yeah.”
On the way up, Denice said, “I hope things work out for you.”
Ichabod nodded slowly. “I hope the same for you. The Councilor is a very complex 
man.”
“Trust me. I know.”

The speech went well. Denice barely listened to it; she stood at the east 
entrance, next to the young PKF Elite, and watched the crowd.
A small point immediately between her eyes, about a centimeter in, throbbed as 
though a white-hot iron spike had been driven in there.
She ignored it and watched the crowd burn.
The flames started at their fingertips, bright crawling sheaths of blue. They 
lit up like neonlaser, made tracings of the nerve networks within the 
individuals she watched. The glowing blue strengthened as it flowed up toward 
their skulls, where it blossomed into something improbably reminiscent of the 
halo of a saint.
She did not hear the speech end, barely noticed Ripper when he passed by her on 
the way out of the hall. The genuine anger in his voice when he snapped, “Wake 
up,” on his way by penetrated. She started after him, but he was already fifteen 
paces ahead of her, out in the east lobby.
If anyone had been waiting for him, Ripper would have died.
Up in the hotel room he exploded. “Damn it to hell, Daimara, you shouldn’t be 
dropping things like this. I know you’re better than this. In the last two 
months I haven’t been able to depend on you, I haven’t been able to depend on 
Ichabod, and I cannot travel without both of you! If I can’t travel, I can’t get 
elected. If I travel without complete faith in both of you—and right now I don’t 
have that—I can’t get up in front of a crowd without wondering if I’m going to 
have my fucking head blown off by some freaking Johnny Reb wannabe before I’m 
done speaking, and that tends to detract ever so slightly from my effectiveness 
as a speaker.”
Denice nodded. “I know. It’s just—” She made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. 
There’s something wrong and I’m not sure what it is.”
Ripper looked directly at her. “Is it us?”
“No.” Her voice softened. “No. I love you, Douglass. You know that.”
“That’s not what I’m asking. Is your relationship with me making it impossible 
for you to do your job?”
Denice shook her head. “No.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe I’m worried about my friend Jimmy.”
Ripper blinked. “What?”
“My friend Jimmy Ramirez,” Denice said reluctantly. “I think Jimmy is getting 
involved with the Johnny Rebs. I’m not sure what to do about it.”
Ripper started to sit down on the bed, thought better of it, and dropped down on 
the sofa near the window. He sat rubbing his temples. “Okay. Let’s do a deal. I 
need you in Japan. I need Ichabod in Japan, and I’m going to talk to him 
separately.” He ceased rubbing his temples, looked up at Denice. “For you, let’s 
do this. When we get back to New York we’ll pull all of the Oversite Committee 
reports, everything in the database. If we’re missing anything at all on the Reb 
buildup, no matter how trivial, we’ll requisition it. We’ll find out to what 
extent, if any, your friend is involved in the Rebs. If he’s involved we’ll file 
a Notice of Research under his name and put him on the payroll. When the PKF 
finally does crack them open—whenever the hell that ends up being,” Ripper 
muttered, slightly distracted, “he’ll have been protected from the effects of 
his stupidity. Fair enough?”
“Okay. Fair enough.”
Ripper simply looked at her without expression. “Are you going to be on top of 
things for the rest of this trip?”
“I’ll do my best, Douglass.”
He nodded wearily. “Okay. Get dressed, we’re having dinner with Randall 
Cristofer and President Greenwood in an hour, and Cristofer’s going to want to 
negotiate at dinner. Aside from the fact that Cristofer owns him I don’t know 
much about Greenwood, but Cristofer himself is a shark and I need to be able to 
concentrate on him, and nothing else.”
Denice thought back over the personnel briefing she’d been given for Australia. 
“Randall Cristofer’s one of the primary sources of funds for Australia, isn’t 
he?”
Ripper snorted. “He is my Australian organization, the whole damn thing. I have 
nothing else to speak of on this whole slithy damn continent. At one point I 
approached a local politician about working with me, just for redundancy; 
Cristofer found out, got in touch with the man, and told him that if he moved 
forward with me he’d end up like Harold Holt.”
“Say again?”
“Shark food. Relatively famous incident in Aussie politics; one of their Prime 
Ministers, back when they were a part of the old British Commonwealth, went 
swimming one day and sharks ate him.”
Denice smiled, tentatively. “I see.”
Ripper nodded. “Cristofer wasn’t joking. Are we done?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“It’s all right. Get Ichabod. I need to talk to him too, and it might as well be 
now.”

Denice worked through the briefing materials for Japan on the semiballistic. 
Japan was a swing vote; Ripper and Sanford Mtumka, Ripper’s only real 
opposition, were running neck and neck in Japanese polls. Like Mexico and 
PanAfrica, and unlike most other countries in the Unification, Japan was a 
winner-take-all-country; a win of one percent in the general Japanese election 
translated into a one hundred percent win of Japanese electoral votes.
Denice wondered, briefly, who had written the briefing:
They are in many ways a schizophrenic people. They have a long tradition of 
militarism, stretching back to the conflict between the Imperial court at Kyoto 
and the provincial warlords, nearly a thousand years ago. The warlords won that 
conflict, and set the pattern for an entrenched Japanese militarism that lasted 
until the end of World War II in 1945, when the United States of America dropped 
a pair of thermonuclear warheads on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki.
During the Unification War, Japan, along with much of Asia except China, chose 
to fight. In some ways they were not damaged so badly as the United States—they 
did not suffer the city-to-city fighting that was the hallmark of the 
Unification conquest of the United States—and in some ways they suffered worse: 
in the summer of ‘18 the Peace Keeping Force exploded fourteen thermonuclear 
warheads over Japanese territory.
Nearly six decades later this is a trauma from which the Japanese have never 
truly recovered. Many Americans think that New York City was bombed by the 
Unification; this is largely untrue. Tactical thermonuclear warheads were used, 
during both the Unification and the Troubles; but the yields were quite low. 
Japan was struck with multimegaton warheads: that Japan is the only country in 
history to have had thermonuclear weapons used upon it—not once but twice—has 
left them with a deep aversion to violence.
Today, the Japanese remain a significantly racist people. This is a relevant 
factor: Ripper, as a Caucasian American, a citizen of the country that once 
defeated Japan in war, is accorded a significantly greater degree of respect 
than is, for example, Sanford Mtumka, a black man.
Zhao Pen has an insignificant percentage of the Japanese vote, and is not 
expected to get more under any likely scenario.
Australia was bad; Japan was worse.
There were no assassination attempts in Japan. A pair of Red Army ideologs were 
arrested by the PKF on general suspicion in the week before Ripper’s arrival, 
but nothing came of it. Nonetheless there were holes in security, gaps in 
preparedness, and Ripper noticed them. His relationship with Denice and Ichabod 
alike degenerated to business pure and simple.
Australia had been a two-day affair; in Japan Ripper gave fourteen different 
speeches over the course of four days. His agenda was tight; under the best of 
circumstances it would have been a rigorous schedule. They arrived in Japan on 
Tuesday, the fifth of May. That Tuesday was the lightest day on Ripper’s 
schedule, with only two speeches scheduled. There were four on Wednesday, five 
on Thursday, and three on Friday. By Wednesday Denice had reached the point 
where she did not speak to Douglass unless spoken to, or unless there was some 
business communication that needed to take place. Wednesday night she slept 
sitting up on the sofa in their hotel room, gun on the sofa next to her, while 
Ripper snored alone in the bed. Thursday Ripper’s temper was frayed even 
further; he awoke in a foul mood that did not improve, except before crowds, as 
the day wore on.
Thursday Ripper spoke twice in Tokyo, once at a rally, once to a group of 
fund-raisers, and spoke once each in the cities of Yokohama, Kyoto, and Kobe.
It happened again in Kyoto.
She stood immediately behind Ripper, handgun holstered beneath her coat, 
scanning the crowd, and suddenly the headache was back and the crowd was naked, 
skinless, a glowing collection of blue nerve nets; and in the depth of the 
crowd, where the people were packed most closely, a Flame arose, dancing gold 
with a cold black center, a column of light that rose up out of the crowd and 
fountained up into the sky.
She blinked and it was gone, and did not come back.
By the time Ripper’s last speech, in the city of Kobe, was done, it was nearly 
10:00 em. and all of them, including Denice, were exhausted. Ripper fell asleep 
in the limousine on the way back to their Tokyo hotel. Bruce and John sat 
together up front; Denice, crowded in the backseat with both Ripper and 
Ichabod’s bearish hulk, found it nearly impossible to relax.
Ripper’s skin touched hers, and his dreams, restless and unhappy, were barely 
perceptible to her, jittering at the edge of her thoughts. Normally she found 
his thoughts—gentle and disciplined and generally kind—pleasant. But his dreams 
that night were anything but pleasant.
Denice moved slightly away from Ripper, to break the contact with his skin—was 
aware of Ichabod noticing it—closed her eyes and tried to sleep.
They returned to Capitol City early Saturday morning, two hours before dawn. 
Denice saw Ripper safely to the edge of Capitol City. She had the limo stop, 
said curtly, “Good night,” and walked south the four kilometers to Robert Dazai 
Yo’s dojo.
Patrolling PKF stopped her twice, requested her handheld and a retinal check. 
She endured it patiently and politely—they were checking attitude as much as 
identity—and continued on when the checks were complete.
It neared dawn when she reached the dojo, walked upstairs to Robert’s quarters, 
and let herself in.
Robert sat where she had expected to find him, waiting for the sun in the center 
of the mat. Earlier in the night, she knew, he would have worked out; stretched, 
done weight work and speed training; perhaps, though this was something new to 
the last decade of his life, he might have danced.
In the last hour before dawn, he sat and meditated.
She took her running shoes off and joined him.
He did not speak while the sun rose, while light flooded in through the high 
eastern windows, lit the dojo in bright true sunlight. He breathed slowly, and 
Denice let her breathing match his, felt the tension of the trip draining away 
from her. She faced Robert, and he faced the sun; the light struck her back and 
shoulders, and she sat in the warmth and let the tight knots of her muscles 
relax.
Sometime later Robert said, “You look like something out of a Fringe back 
alley.”
“I feel like hell.”
“Ah.”
“I love Douglass.”
“I know.”
“I hate my job.”
“I know.”
Shadows crawled across the floor of the dojo.
“What are you doing tonight?”
“I have no plans.” Denice paused. “My friend Tarin Schuyler is dancing in an 
off-Broadway play. She asked me to stop by and see it. But I can do that 
anytime; it’ll run a couple of weeks at least.”
Robert opened his eyes for the first time. The flat Asian features struck Denice 
as oddly grave. “You are the best student I have ever had, the only one I have 
ever thought to teach shiabre. I have never seen anyone move as you do; until 
recently I never doubted that what I had to teach, you could learn.”
“But—I thought I had been learning what you had to teach. Everything you’ve 
shown me I’ve picked up—”
“—astonishingly fast.” Robert nodded. “I have never seen anyone learn so fast. 
But the movement, the motion, is not the discipline of shiabre, any more than 
the form of Tai Chi is the point of Tai Chi. Have you never wondered what I mean 
by shiabre?”
“You know I have.”
“What did you think?”
“I thought it a discipline you had created yourself,” Denice said simply. “It is 
similar to other martial arts I’m familiar with.”
Robert nodded. “The movement is not the discipline, but the movement can be 
imitated, and has. Shiabre came first. Before karate, before judo, before 
aiki-jutsu, before the first kenjutsu school ever opened in Japan; before all 
this, was shiabre. It is more than an art, more than a martial discipline; it is 
a direct connection with Deity.”
“You sound like a Wiccan.”
“Perhaps in its darkest aspects Wicca has some relation to shiabre; I have not 
studied Wicca except casually, to know that it, like many religions and 
disciplines, contains echoes of shiabre. I do not know Wicca; I know shiabre, 
and the discipline, Denice, is very old and very real. When I speak of a direct 
connection to Deity, I do not do so metaphorically. Shiabre, Denice, is the 
discipline that is called, in English, nightways. And there is a core to it.” 
Robert paused; his gaze was steady. “A Kill.”
“I see.”
“I do not think you do. Have you ever killed anyone?”
A memory flickered through the back of her mind; she buried it without knowing 
she had done so. “I don’t think so. The boy in Portugal survived.”
“I know. When you shot him—did you feel a joy? A soaring?”
“No. I was just scared.” Denice did not know what made her say it: “I shot at 
some Peaceforcers once. And another man died while he was chasing me. But I 
didn’t enjoy it either time.”
Robert simply nodded. He did not seem surprised. “I think accidental death would 
not be the same. If it ever comes to you, the chance to take a life with your 
own hands, I shall be interested to learn of your response.”
Denice Castanaveras said softly, “Killing is wrong.”
Robert Dazai Yo smiled at her. “Many people think so,” he agreed. “And for most 
people it is. They don’t do it right. If you Kill, I do not doubt you will do so 
in a most exquisite fashion. A proper Kill, child, is art of the highest order. 
Someday you will appreciate this.” He rose slowly, stood in his white gi facing 
the sun. “I’m going to bed. Come see me this evening.”
“Do you mind if I stay here today?”
Robert walked off the mat. “Feel free. The guest room is empty.”
“It’s just that Ripper is keyed for my apartment.”
Robert shrugged, did not look back. “He paid for it.”
Denice said quietly, “Yes. I guess he did.”

Robert taught no classes on Saturdays, the one day of the week he had reserved 
for himself.
Denice spent the day dancing, varying the tempo of the music; classic jazz and 
roots rock, slower pieces written for the ballet. Fusion music from the turn of 
the century, and then atonal synth from the ‘50s; and then Brazilian jazz from 
the ‘60s. She moved through the sound like a ghost, lost track of herself in the 
rhythm of her heart, wrapped herself into the dream of a blue turtle and then 
pumped up the volume with a screaming rendition of Chuck Renkha’s classic ‘20s 
scorcher,
“Heat and Love”; moving until her body would no longer move as she wished it to.
Toward lunch she took a break, went upstairs to Robert’s bathroom and ran a bath 
as hot as she could stand it.
Ten months in Ripper’s employ had taken its toll; the edge was gone. Perhaps no 
one else could see it; perhaps even Robert could not see it.
Ten months ago she could have danced all day and not been tired. Today her 
muscles were tired and the buildup of fatigue toxins in her system was excessive 
even considering the feet that she’d been up all night.
She soaked in the bathtub for almost an hour. When the water got cool she ran it 
again; after the bath she took a nap.
At 4:00 em. she got up. Robert was awake, puttering around in the kitchen, 
examining the contents of the slowtime field. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes. What should I eat?”
Robert paused. “Trust your body. What do you want?”
“Something alive.”
He nodded. “Apples on the roof.”
She took the stairs to the roof, plucked and ate two apples. When she had 
finished both of them, including the cores, she waited ten minutes, decided she 
wanted a third, and took it.
Robert was done eating when she went back downstairs again; the kitchen had been 
straightened up and the kitchen’s slowtime field turned back on. She went to the 
guest room, pulled one of the black gis Robert kept there for her, and donned 
it. She went downstairs barefoot, found Robert setting up at the edge of the 
mat.
He laid a flat slab of long, uncured wood atop a pair of bricks, to raise the 
wood slightly off the floor. Upon the wood he placed certain items, in a certain 
pattern. He did not look at Denice as he worked. He laid the items out slowly, 
one by one, as though engaged in ritual. When he was done Robert Dazai Yo said 
softly, “Do you recognize these items?”
“They look like the tools on a Wiccan altar.”
“They would. They are not.” Without moving he gestured to Denice to join him on 
the other side of the board. “Center with me.”
Denice sank into lotus, met Robert’s eyes, and began breathing in rhythm with 
him. Her breathing and heartbeat dropped into rhythm together; she was aware of 
the moment when the cycle of her breathing matched Robert’s. With one hand he 
reached forward, took one of the button mushrooms he had laid on the surface of 
the wood, and ate it.
Denice did not question; she did the same.
The mushroom was dry and chalky, and otherwise without taste.
“Give me your hands.”
Denice reached forward and placed her hands in Robert’s.
His eyes held steady on hers.
“Speak with me. Rho! Etra shivat—”
“Rho! Etra shivat—”
“—elor ko’obay k’shia—”
“—elor ko’obay k’shia—”
“—vata elor ko’obay shiebran.”
“—vata,” said Denice Castanaveras, “elor ko’obay shiebran.”
Robert’s hands tightened around hers. “Enshia, ensitra.” Swiftly: “Do not repeat 
these words.”
Denice stopped with her mouth open. “Why not?”
“Later. How do you feel?”
“Light. Floating. From the dancing earlier, I think. Otherwise nothing.” Denice 
paused. She did not know what made her add, “Not yet.”
“Close your eyes and continue holding my hands. We will wait for darkness 
together.”

I am the Name Storyteller.
I sit at the edge of reality and watch my past, watch Denice Castanaveras, my 
ancestor, the grandmother of the man who did and will found the House of 
November.
Earth turns slowly away from Sol; the shadow of the planet falls across New York 
City, across a small dojo in Greenwich Village.
In that room, a Master of the oldest discipline on Earth, the creature of my 
Enemy in this time, prepares to test the finest student he has ever seen, or 
ever will.

When there is no light in the room, no light from any source except the distant 
street lamps, barely visible through the dojo’s high windows, Robert Dazai Yo, 
one of the six living night faces in all the Continuing Time—not counting time 
travelers, which I suppose I should not—releases Denice Castanaveras’s hands.
From a matchbook that says Jack’s Happy Time Bar he takes a match, and lights 
the single red candle in the center of the altar, and then the pile of orange 
incense. The smell of orange blossoms rises from the altar’s surface.
Robert ascends from lotus in a single smooth motion. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Stand.” She does so, and Robert says again, “How do you feel?”
Her eyes, the eyes of a lord of the House of November, are open, brilliant green 
even in the dim light from the flickering candle. “As though something is going 
to happen. Not nervous—just ready. The light is so beautiful.”
“Silence.” He speaks in shiata, though the accent is corrupted by the long 
separation from the mother tongue. Denice stands motionless in the darkened 
dojo. “Silence and darkness: these are nightways.”
Denice stares at him.
Robert says in English, “Begin.”
She takes several steps backward, raises herself onto her toes, and brings her 
right knee up to her chest with immense grace. She pivots without haste, 
bringing her center of gravity closer to the floor. Her right foot extends in a 
slow kick directly up to the ceiling, and she holds the position, toes of her 
right foot pointing toward the sky, for three breaths.
Then she Moves, like the Dancer she is.
A controlled explosion, right knee back down to her chest, pulling her arms in 
from an extension of twenty centimeters, turns the angular momentum from the 
inpulled arms into a tight spin, and kicks with her right foot, three times, one 
hundred and twenty degrees apart on the circle of the spin. Her right foot comes 
down, touches briefly, adds momentum to the spin and she moves back toward him, 
with a series of kicks and punches that no human of her time, not Yo, not the 
Dancer Sedon, no one, could have matched for grace, for speed, for accuracy.
She ceases moving with almost shocking abruptness, all at once, an engine coming 
to rest, and stands in front of her teacher. She is not breathing quickly, she 
is not perspiring.
After a moment she says, “Well?”
Robert does not look away from her. The red candle continues to burn; neither 
the white nor black candles have come alight. “How do you feel?”
“Like something is going to happen.”
“Joy? Anger?”
“No.” Denice pauses. “I feel very peaceful.”
Robert Dazai Yo does not look away from her. He speaks with the deliberate 
gravity of a man who is considering every word. “There is in what you do… a 
correctness of movement I have never seen before; not in students, not in 
myself… not in my teacher. And yet it is wrong.” He is silent for a long while. 
“I have not often discussed the words I use with you, which are not French or 
English or Japanese. They are the tongue that is called shiata, or, in English, 
nightways.” Robert’s shoulders move slightly beneath the black cloth of his gi. 
“There has been no point to teaching you of our history, such as I know of it, 
while I have been uncertain that the discipline itself would take. You 
were—brought to me, Denice. By Orinda Gleygavass, who was the servant of my 
master. And I was instructed to teach you; that you would be the student some 
shivata never see, the one who would learn that which I teach.”
Denice Castanaveras waits motionlessly.
“There is a legend, a part of our teachings,” says Robert, “that before there 
was shiabre, the discipline of life bent into death, there was shia, the dance 
of life itself. I see, in what you do, that dance.” He turns away from her, 
kneels, and snuffs the light of the bloodred candle, spreads the burning orange 
incense across the wood until it is extinguished. He does not look at her again. 
“I do not see nightways.” He begins to remove the tools from the altar’s 
surface, carefully reversing the order in which they were laid there. “I think 
perhaps there is only shia in you.”




Dateline: Shawmac on 58-1022
« ^ » 
So the Unification Council wants to make it illegal for AIs to own property. 
This is a small bill; not important; expected to pass without fuss, hopefully 
without notice. Unification Councilor Vena of Puerto Rico introduced it, which 
should tell you something to start with; Vena is about as bought-and-paid-for a 
politician as can be found in Capitol City, which is saying something mildly 
impressive.
Bill 58-1022 goes by the name of “A Regulatory Procedure for Confiscating 
Property Owned by Artificial Intelligences.” Basically what it is, is a way the 
Unification (specifically, the scum-sucking and relentless PKF) can confiscate 
any piece of property it wants, without due process, without going through the 
courts; the Peaceforcers file a notice with the new regulatory body created by 
this bill, stating—without any evidentiary requirements—that some item or real 
property is believed owned by an Artificial Intelligence. As the statute is 
written, this creates a “rebuttal presumption” of guilt on the part of the 
persons whose property has been confiscated. And this presumption may be damn 
difficult to overcome. Any of you out there want to give it a shot? The Tax 
Board has prevailed on similar cases—built upon “rebuttable presumption” rather 
than “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”
So the rebuttal presumption of guilt has been inflicted upon the victim’s 
property—which the PKF DataWatch then proceeds to confiscate.
That’s it.
That’s the whole bill.
There is no provision for return of improperly confiscated property.
If this bill passes, it will, not coincidentally, be the end of The Rise and 
Fall of the American Empire, an anti-Unification Board generally believed to be 
owned by an AI.
Your representatives vote on this evil property-confiscating bill—Bill 
58-1022—on Tuesday. You know what to do.
STAND UP—FIGHT BACK—SPREAD THE WORD.




- 5 -
« ^ » 
In an auditorium a kilometer beneath the surface of Capitol City, Mohammed Vance 
stood in the midst of the blackness and waited for the holograph.
The image of the person who had given his name as Sedon of the Gi’Suei hovered 
next to him, life-size. It came from Sedon’s brief imprisonment at the PKF 
Detention Center near Amiens.
Vance walked around the image, imprinting the man’s bone structure deep in his 
memory. “Very good,” he said at length. “Next.”
The image that appeared was slightly fuzzy; two-dimensional, taken at a distance 
of some two hundred meters. The man was stepping from a limousine, hurrying with 
half a dozen known Rebs toward a parked semiballistic capsule. His hair was long 
and blond, tied in a ponytail; his skin was the color of a Caucasian with a deep 
tan, and his eyes were bright blue.
But the bone structure had not been altered at all. The same high cheeks, the 
same long Roman nose.
Vance said quietly, “Lights up, dim.”
Three persons stood in the room with him; Alexander Moreau, Hand to the 
Secretary General; PKF Elite Commander Christine Mirabeau; and Terence LeFevre, 
the current appointed head of the Ministry of Population Control.
Vance largely ignored LeFevre; this was not a civilian affair, and if he had had 
his way in the matter, LeFevre would not have been invited to the briefing. It 
was not even a matter of the customary rivalry between the PKF and the Ministry; 
Vance did not trust LeFevre, did not consider him competent. If the Ministry had 
sent Gabrielle Laronde, the Ministry’s senior nonelected official, Vance would 
have been little better pleased; except that, if business with the Ministry were 
required, Gabrielle would have conducted it in a professional manner.
LeFevre was merely a politician.
Vance turned to Alexander Moreau, one of the few persons who had been present 
when Sedon’s bubble had been opened for whom Vance had any respect whatsoever. 
“What do you think, Hand Moreau?”
Moreau was young for a Hand, in his thirties, and that was due, unquestionably, 
to the name he had been born to; nonetheless he was modestly talented, and Vance 
had some hope that he might one day, after some seasoning, serve as the first 
French Secretary General since Tenerat, some forty-five years prior.
Moreau shrugged. A thin, intense young man, he spoke in quick, chopped sentences 
that gave the impression he was answering off the top of his head. “It looks 
like him to me.”
“Christine?”
“I never met Sedon. I’ve done no more than view the holos of him.” Vance’s 
superior shrugged. “If you feel it is him, I will back your judgment in the 
matter.”
Mohammed Vance nodded. He did not even consider requesting LeFevre’s opinion. “I 
would like to submit to the Secretary General a request to place M. Obodi on the 
bounty listings at CU:six million.”
LeFevre whistled. “That’s a million more than Trent the Uncatchable lists for.”
Vance did not even look at the man. “Don’t call him that. He’s not. Hand Moreau, 
I will arrange the request. I will expect it upon the Secretary General’s desk 
within a day.”
Moreau nodded. “It will be. The SecGen’s a Christian, you know; he’ll be in 
Church tomorrow. You probably won’t receive a response until Monday.”
“That’s acceptable. We are done. Christine, may we speak privately?”
“Certainly.” The two Elite headed for the door together, and might have left 
then had Elite cyborgs had less excellent hearing; Alexander Moreau said softly 
to Terence LeFevre, “I wonder how Trent’s going to feel about that.”
Vance stopped in midstep. After a long moment he turned back. “Hand Moreau? I 
beg your pardon?”
The young Hand blinked. “Yes?”
“What did you say?”
“Ah—I wondered how Trent would feel about not being Number One.”
“I thought that was what you’d said. Perhaps,” said Vance after a pause, “you 
should concern yourself less with the feelings of enemies of the Unification, 
and more with the performance of your job.” Vance’s voice did not rise, his 
expression did not alter. His glittering black eyes stayed fixed upon Moreau’s. 
“If I stood in your skin, I would be rather more concerned about the possibility 
of being prosecuted for dereliction of duty, than about whether one of the 
Unification’s enemies is upset over being judged somewhat less dangerous than 
another of our enemies.”
Simply from the tone of his voice, Mohammed Vance might have been discussing 
what he had eaten for breakfast.
Hand Moreau swayed slightly when Vance was done: Vance’s political enemies had 
an unpleasant habit of ending up unfortunately, accidentally dead. “Yes, 
Commissionaire. I will take your advice.”
Vance made a dismissive gesture and turned away again. “See you do. This 
briefing is closed.”

They spoke together in the only place in all of Capitol City that Vance knew, 
for a fact, did not possess listening devices; there would have been no point to 
it.
Beneath the air vents that fed the Capitol City spacescraper in which the Peace 
Keeping Force was headquartered, standing motionless, heads together like lovers 
in the tornado roar of the wind, Mohammed Vance and Christine Mirabeau whispered 
in one another’s artificial ears.
Mirabeau said, “What is it?”
“Secretary General Eddore continues to refuse us permission to break the Johnny 
Rebs.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Mirabeau shook her head, just a fraction. “I don’t know, Mohammed. He says he 
has a private investigation ongoing, which will allow him to end any threat from 
the Rebs.”
“Do you know anything about this investigation?”
Elite Commander Mirabeau whispered, “No.”
“Christine, I am not convinced it exists.”
Mirabeau said slowly, “Nor I, Mohammed. Nor I.”

The following Tuesday morning, four hundred million kilometers away, in the 
depths of the Asteroid Belt, two Security Services guards stood immediately 
inside the airlock door of the largest recording studio off Earth itself, laser 
rifles at the ready. “Are you Trent?”
The young man floating in front of the airlock, wearing a scalesuit whose chest 
bore a painting of a river of blood running through a deeper red jungle, said, 
“Yes.”
“Look into the light.”
“I’m here for breakfast,” Trent explained. The laser flashed through the 
faceplate of Trent’s helmet, played over the retina of his right eye.
The guard nearer Trent, wearing a scalesuit much like Trent’s except that it was 
stripped clean down to the metal, said, “You’re Trent.”
“I said I was.”
The guard gestured Trent through, commenting, “Nice design.”
“It’s a painting I stole once.”
“What’s it called?”
“Je Suis le Fleuve,” said Trent, going inside. “I’m going to steal it again 
someday.”
After Trent was gone, the two guards stood silently together.
Finally one guard said, “I hear he walked through a wall once.”
The other guard simply snorted.

She greeted him as he entered her bedroom with the words, “They’re voting on the 
AI property bill today. Looks like it’s going to pass.”
Trent shrugged. “It will.”
Mahliya Kutura nodded, slightly distracted. “Also, you got bumped from number 
one on the PKF’s bounty list.”
“Say what?”
The young woman generally recognized as the greatest living musician in the 
System floated in midair, showing herself off to advantage in a pair of green 
shorts and a white bikini top. She was turned slightly away from Trent and about 
eighty degrees off his vertical. She did not pay much attention to Trent; the 
wisp of a new melody floated in the back of her mind, and she knew that with a 
little gentle encouragement she could get it out of her skull and into the 
synthesizer. So it was that it took a moment for Trent’s response to penetrate, 
and she repeated, “They bumped you from number one. The most wanted fugitive in 
the system is the new head of the Johnny Rebs. They’re offering Cu:six million 
for his capture. They announced it this morning.” She paused, auditing the 
article floating forty centimeters in front of her eyes. “Fellow named Obodi.”
Trent stared at her. “They can’t do that.”
She stared back into his almost upside-down eyes. “Why not?”
“I—I—I worked for this. I’ve killed Peaceforcers Elite, I blew up half of 
Peaceforcer Heaven. I—”
“You didn’t do either of those things,” Mahliya said reasonably. “Garon fell, it 
was an accident, I’ve heard you say that.”
“Well yes but—”
“And Commissioner Vance blew up Spacebase One after you told him it was 
booby-trapped, he should have listened. I’ve heard you say that too.”
It stopped Trent for just a second. “Well, the Peaceforcers say I did those 
things. It seems to me that if I’m getting blamed for them, I might as well get 
the credit for it. By Harry, this isn’t fair.”
“The PKF isn’t noted for being fair, Trent.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Trent muttered. “I stole the LINK,” he said 
abruptly. “I did that. And then I walked through a wall and ran away and 
embarrassed them badly.”
“That’s true,” Kutura conceded.
“Shouldn’t that count for something?” Trent demanded. “Wouldn’t you think that 
would count?”
Kutura looked at him for a moment. Trent was the only person she knew who was as 
famous as she was—if in different circles; she doubted Commissioner Vance would 
recognize her name—and if you figured his net worth as including the bounty on 
his head, which she did, then he was also the only person she knew who was worth 
as much as she was. Which was perhaps a juvenile thing to even consider, but 
still; her wealth seemed to matter to everyone she met these days except Trent, 
and she supposed that must be the reason for it.
He was her age, twenty-five; she rather liked him and was thinking about 
sleeping with him.
Unfortunately he occasionally exhibited terrible, terrible ego problems, almost 
as bad as her own. “You know,” said Mahliya Kutura after a moment, “if you’re 
going to sulk over this, I really wish you’d do it somewhere else.”
Trent looked as though he’d been slapped. “All right. Fine. Justine.”
“Seriously. You’re ruining my breakfast, and I haven’t even had it yet.”
Without saying anything further Trent stalked back out; a good trick in free 
fall.
Obviously, thought Mahliya Kutura after he was gone, couldn’t think of a good 
exit line.

Late at night on Monday, May 18, 2076, Callia Sierran and her younger brother 
Lan arrived at a farm in Iowa.
The farm was a Johnny Reb stronghold. The fields around the farmhouse itself 
were planted with corn, row upon row of tall corn, stretching away toward the 
horizon, a sight such as Lan and Callia, raised in cities across the world, had 
never seen before in their lives. About a hundred meters of space had been 
cleared all around the farmhouse; automated items of farm equipment that neither 
of them could identify, large and bulky, were parked around one end of the farm.
On the downlot in front of the house were several cars.
They brought their car down on a gentle incline of hillside, two kilometers from 
the farmhouse, and Lan scanned the structure with imaging binoculars. “Six cars. 
Hot engines on four of them… the one on the left is Domino’s.” He passed the 
binoculars to his older sister.
Callia glanced through the binoculars, handed them back. “Let’s head in.”
The car lifted, moved forward.
They met in a large conference room several floors beneath the surface. There 
were eight people gathered together in the conference room, seated in a rough 
circle with Rebs on one side of the conference table, Claw on the other. Four 
bodyguards, two each from the Claw and the Rebs, stood on opposite sides of the 
door, watching each other.
The Reb lawyer said, “I think perhaps we should introduce ourselves before 
beginning.”
Domino Terrencia said softly, “Feel free.”
The lawyer took it as acceptance. “My name is James Ramirez. I have a degree, in 
Unification Criminal Law. You may know of me; I’ve been in the Public Defender’s 
office in New York City for the last four years. I’ve had occasion to serve as 
the criminal defense for, I think, two of your people. Instances when you didn’t 
want to use a lawyer with known sympathies. I’ve done much the same for our own 
people over the course of the last few years. I quit that job a week ago and 
went full-time here.” He gestured to the man sitting next to him. “This is 
‘Sieur Obodi. To my left is Christian J. Summers, and to his left is Akira 
Hasegawa. I don’t think Mister Summers requires an introduction; ‘Sieur Hasegawa 
is here representing Mitsubishi of Japan, the company that has maintained Mister 
Summers’ nonbiological components for the last twenty years or so.” He paused. 
“Max Devlin wasn’t able to get away. He’s been made by the PKF and he’s being 
watched too closely. We’re going to pull him free in the near future; if he were 
available, he’d be at this table now. Tommy Boone will not be here, as I believe 
you were told two weeks ago.” Ramirez paused again. “That covers us.”
“Very well.” Domino spoke rapidly, aggressively. “I am Domino Terrencia. I am 
the second-in-command in the Claw. You’ve met Callia; the young man is her 
brother Lan. If you don’t know who—”
“My dear.” The old woman sitting at Domino’s side made a dismissing gesture with 
one hand; Domino Terrencia ceased speaking instantly. “I will introduce myself.” 
The pale blue eyes fixed themselves upon the man seated across the table from 
her, upon ‘Sieur Obodi. She spoke without blinking, without looking away; there 
might have been no one in the room but themselves. “My name is Nicole Eris 
Lovely. I am eighty-six years old and when I was forty-two I founded the Erisian 
Claw. I have seen seven different men lead the Johnny Rebs during the time since 
I founded the Claw. All seven of those brave, patriotic, ambitious men are now 
dead, and I am still here. That’s who I am.” She smiled a gentle, polite smile 
at the Rebs across the table from her, at Obodi. “Who the fuck are you?”




- 6 -
« ^ » 
Denice stood rigidly in front of Ripper’s desk and, with a growing sense of 
despair, listened to him talk.
“I’ll make this as quick as I can, because I don’t like going back on a promise 
and I’m going to do that here. There’s not a damn thing I can do for your friend 
Ramirez.” Douglass added, gently, “I am sorry. I’m not sure beating around the 
bush here would be any kindness; your friend is going in front of a firing 
squad. Go back to your office and read the report. The Rebs and Claw had a 
meeting recently, top level on both sides, apparently to determine if they’re 
going to work together. The PKF doesn’t know where it was held, but they have a 
list of the people who supposedly attended the meeting.” Ripper paused as though 
he found it genuinely difficult to continue. “I’m really sorry. Ramirez’s name 
is on it.”
She sat in her office and read through the report, holo-stamped Eyes Only in 
pale blue on every page. There were stock holos and thumbnail bios of several of 
the principles attached to the report:
Lan and Callia Sierran, a brother-and-sister team who had, Denice read, worked 
with Trent during the theft of the Lunar Information Network Key, back in ‘69. 
Callia was a martial arts and small weapons expert; her brother had planted 
bombs that had killed perhaps a dozen PKF—possibly one Elite, and better than 
twenty civilians.
Next, a rather old holo of an Italian woman named Domino Terrencia; relatively 
high in the Claw, no one knew quite how high. Her bio said she had worked as a 
liaison with the SpaceFarers’ Collective, and had served two terms as Vice Mayor 
of Bessel-Free Luna, a Free Luna city sponsored by a Belt CityState corporation.
There was a bio, but no holo, of Nicole Lovely, the woman who had founded the 
Erisian Claw. Denice skipped it, turned the page, and found herself staring at a 
holo of Jimmy Ramirez.
“Make me a promise, Denice?”
“Done.”
“Don’t you want to know what it is?”
Jimmy, of course. “I do know.”
“Oh.” After a moment he nodded. “All right. But don’t let him know you’re 
watching out for him. He wouldn’t like that.”
James Ramirez, the biography said. Ex-gang member, probably the Fringe Temple 
Dragons; rumored to have known Trent the Uncatchable, though this is suspect 
information that has not been verified. Served in the New York City Public 
Defender’s office since 2072; since 2074 as Assistant Public Defender for the 
City of New York. Quit abruptly on April 30 of this year. A known associate of 
former NYC Police Chief Maxwell Devlin; a core member of the Johnny Rebs for six 
years.
Denice closed the report, sat alone in her office and stared into emptiness.
Six years.
He’d never mentioned a word of it to her.
She searched back, remembering the time after Trent had left Earth, the two 
years when she had seen Jimmy nearly every day, trying to recall a moment when 
he had tried to sound her out, when he had made any attempt at all to interest 
her in the Rebs.
And could not.
It struck her again, without warning, the horrible emptiness that came upon her 
so often these days. She sat alone in her office and thought about Jimmy Ramirez 
saying, “I love you.”
She found herself coming to her feet; tried to remember whether she knew 
anything that could, in the hands of the Rebs, damage Douglass Ripper. She had 
difficulty ordering her thoughts, but she could not think of anything at the 
moment. If they can’t hurt him, I can go.
She wanted to hit something so badly her hands shook.
Instead she went back up to Douglass Ripper’s office.
Ripper was in a meeting with Ichabod and a webdancer, a woman named Sally 
Cunningham, who was largely responsible for maintaining the expert system that 
ran Ripper’s campaign.
Denice entered without knocking, made the long walk through the illusion of an 
Arab desert to Ripper’s desk.
Ripper looked up at her approach.
“I need to take a week off.”
Ripper shook his head. “No. And don’t interrupt me right now, I’m busy.”
“I have something I have to do, Douglass. I need the time.”
Denice saw Sally Cunningham take notice of the “Douglass,” saw Ripper notice 
Cunningham noticing. The muscles in Ripper’s jaws tightened. “Excuse me, Sally.” 
He looked straight at Denice. “The answer is no, Daimara, and I don’t care to 
discuss it any further. Certainly not now.”
Denice ignored the hint. “This is important. I need you to say yes.”
Ripper took a deep breath, held it for a five-count, and released it. Denice 
could see him holding back the anger, and somewhere deep inside her, beneath the 
emptiness and the pain, a part of her waited eagerly for the anger to be 
released, so that she might—
“I can’t do that,” Ripper said finally. “I need you here. If this is about 
Ramirez, and I’m sure it is, perhaps we can arrange to send a team from the 
MPC’s Special Tasks after him. I’ll call in a favor for it that I’m owed over 
there. If we do that, if we get Ramirez out without too much trouble, we 
might—might—get him a sentence for Public Labor. I’ll see what I can do. But I 
can’t let you go. Not now.”
“I can’t take that for an answer. I have a question I have to ask Jimmy. And—I 
made a promise to someone. I can’t break it, it’s the only thing that person 
ever asked me to do.”
“I’m not giving you leave.”
Denice almost hesitated: “I quit.”
“You can’t,” he snapped. “You have a contract.”
Sally Cunningham sat watching the entire thing, completely without pretense; 
Ichabod Martin sat with his eyes closed, as though he were not even there.
The emptiness inside her spoke, using her voice: “I’m sorry, Douglass. Are you 
really going to sue me?”
He shook his head after a moment, a quick jerky movement. “No. I’ll have your 
office cleaned out for you, and all your personal effects sent to Robert’s. Do 
you want to keep the apartment?”
“We can talk about it when I get back.”
“All right.” They stared at one another for a long moment, and then Ripper said, 
in a voice that lacked any steadiness at all, “Go. I have business to take care 
of.”
She turned and walked out through the bright sunlight and the drifting Arabian 
sands.

On a morning of hazy sunshine they sat together on the grass in Central Park, 
beneath a shade tree, and watched the traffic go by: the people on foot; 
hovercabs, bicyclists; a man carrying a harp roller-skated back and forth along 
the bike path to the south.
Occasional joggers ruined their knees on the ferrocrete running paths.
Maxwell Devlin, once Chief of Police for the City of New York, wore a gray 
sweatsuit the same color as his hair; only his beard still contained some of his 
natural brown. Denice did not know for sure how old Devlin was. From his skin 
she would have guessed no more than one series of geriatric treatments, if that. 
Fifty, perhaps. Whatever his age, he appeared quite fit; thinner than when he 
had been on the force, with considerably better color.
She could see the faint outline of a Personal Protection System harness beneath 
his sweatsuit.
Denice had not seen him in over four years, since before the MPC’s Agent McGee 
had chased her out of New York.
From where they sat Denice could see over fifteen Peaceforcers; about twice the 
usual number for Central Park at the time of day.
“It’s for me, of course. They’re pretty sure I’m with the Johnny Rebs, and 
they’re harassing me. Have been for the last few months.” Devlin shrugged, 
plucking a strand of grass. “They have no evidence, or they’d have me 
brain-drained and been done with it. But they haven’t been able to get a court 
order, and they won’t.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
Devlin smiled at her, a good smile that took in his lips and cheeks and brought 
crinkles to his eyes. “I’m a careful man. Now, there’s no place near here that 
the PKF can set up a shotgun mike, and my PPS says that there aren’t any midget 
spyeyes it can detect, but I expect that’ll change soon. We need to do our 
business now.” He paused, said, “How’s Trent?”
“I never hear from him.”
Mac Devlin nodded. “I wish he’d come back. We could use him.”
Denice said slowly, “He thinks what you’re doing is wrong.”
“I know.” Devlin sighed. “A lot of people do. Even a lot of Americans. I doubt 
there’s been a time since the Civil War this country has been so deeply divided 
over one issue.”
“I wouldn’t know. History isn’t my strong point.”
“What can I do for you, Denice?”
“I want to join the Rebs.”
“I thought so. Why?”
Denice’s answer was nothing less than the truth. “I’m disenchanted with what I’m 
doing. And I think I can be of service. Beyond that, if you want to hear me 
spout Reb cant back to you, I can.”
Devlin watched her carefully. “If I send you, you’ll end up talking to an 
analyst with a truth plate in each hand. I know you’ve been working for Ripper; 
if you have some idea of doing anything other than making a complete commitment 
to our work, don’t go. Where I’m sending you, if they think you’re lying they’ll 
put you up against a wall and shoot you.”
“I’m ready to go. I’m ready to go right now.”
Devlin smiled a genuinely friendly smile. “All right. Lord knows, we can use 
people of your caliber. You know L’Express restaurant?”
“I’ve been there once.”
“Be there tonight at five-fifteen. Bring the infochips from your handheld, but 
don’t bring the handheld; you’ll be provided with one that doesn’t call out.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Don’t be late.” As she rose to leave, Devlin said, “Oh, one last thing.”
“Yes?”
“Ramirez asked me to tell you, if you came, that he was proud of you.”
“What?”
Devlin repeated himself.
“Oh… thank you.”
It was not until an hour later that she realized, for the first time in two 
days, the ache in her heart had lessened somewhat.

She was greeted by a middle-aged woman in a black evening gown. “ ‘Selle 
Daimara?”
“Yes. I have a reservation.”
The maître d’ nodded. “Please follow me.” She led Denice back toward the rear of 
the restaurant, past a row of private booths; a door leading into the kitchen 
curled open, and the maître d’ gestured Denice through.
The door uncurled behind her.
A young man wearing a cook’s apron gestured to her to follow, and turned away 
without waiting to see if she had. He led her back past rows of automated 
kitchen equipment that Denice did not recognize; it occurred to Denice that she 
had never been inside a restaurant kitchen before. A pair of bounce tubes were 
positioned toward the rear of the kitchen; the young man gestured toward the 
right-hand bounce tube.
Denice stepped in and dropped.
She came to a stop after about ten seconds, and stepped out into Level G of an 
underground parking structure. There were relatively few cars parked on that 
level; a single car, a black Chandler sedan with a tinted canopy, had its 
headlights on. Denice walked to the car; the canopy rose at her approach.
The young man waiting for her, who had been auditing text on his handheld in the 
backseat of the car, was about her own age, perhaps a bit older. He was not, to 
Denice’s surprise, a Reb; he wore a necklace with an Erisian medallion on it.
His long, flowing brown hair hung down well past his shoulders; his grayish 
green military fatigues were just a bit too stylish for Denice to find the image 
convincing; in all he looked as though he belonged on a dance floor.
He stood up as the canopy rose away from him. “You’re Denice?”
“Yes.”
He gestured at the seat next to him. “Get in. It’s a long drive, and we need to 
get started.” He flipped the handheld closed, stored it in his coat pocket, and 
held out his hand. What he said then did not surprise her; she had recognized 
him by then, from his holo, which she had seen for the first time yesterday. 
“I’m Lan Sierran.”
Before nightfall she was sitting in the back of a covered truck, in the dark, 
headed for Reb headquarters in Iowa. Before morning she was there.




- 7 -
« ^ » 
Denice supposed that being interrogated by one of the Erisian Claw’s top people 
was a compliment.
Callia Sierran impressed Denice.
They sat together several floors beneath the surface of the earth. A dark, 
middle-aged man whom Denice had been introduced to as Bennett Crandell sat with 
them, listening. She supposed that Crandell was a Reb, there to watch Callia as 
much as Denice; the alliance between the Rebs and the Claw was recent enough 
that there could not yet be much trust between them.
An American flag hung upon one wall; a pair of holocams, mounted near the 
ceiling, recorded the scene.
The entire thing was so strongly reminiscent of her first meeting with Ichabod 
Martin that it gave Denice a momentary shiver.
Callia Sierran was about thirty. Aside from that, and minor exterior details 
such as hair and skin color, she reminded Denice of herself. She was Denice’s 
height, with much the same build. Denice was certain she was in better condition 
than Callia, but it was a relative thing; Callia was so finely toned that she 
put to shame many of the professional dancers Denice had known during her 
career, with muscles such that Denice knew the woman must work out two or three 
hours a day.
Remembering Callia’s biography, she wondered briefly if Trent had slept with 
her; Callia was entirely his type.
She wore combat fatigues of the same cut as Lan’s, except that on her they 
looked like work clothes.
Callia’s eyes were the same color, exactly, as her own.
Callia Sierran said mildly, “You quit?”
“Did you tell anyone where you were going?”
“My teacher, Robert. I told him I was going, not where. He’d have guessed 
anyway, and he’s as close to family as I have.”
“Why did you quit?”
Neither Callia nor Bennett Crandell appeared to be, so far as Denice could tell, 
actively monitoring the truth plates Denice held; therefore, unless one of them 
had an implanted inskin InfoNet link, someone else, somewhere else, was. “I 
was—am—disenchanted with Ripper.” It came to her with surprise that she could 
say that in all honesty. “And I think that what the Rebs are doing is morally 
correct. I’m not sure that it’s smart; you’ll understand that, given that I’ve 
been working for Douglass Ripper. I’ve seen a lot of the inner workings of the 
PKF—Ripper sits on the PKF’s Oversite Committee, I’m sure you know—and they are 
a deeply impressive organization.”
“They are, yes. You understand this is an irrevocable decision, that once you’ve 
come among us you can never, never leave. If you try we’ll kill you.”
“I know. ‘Selle Sierran, this is my country. My home. I don’t like what’s been 
done to it. I don’t like being interrogated on the street in my hometown by 
French PKF for no better reason than the fact I’m an American. I spent four 
years in Public Labor and I have no love for the Unification.”
“Can you tell me the reservations you have regarding joining us? And don’t feel 
afraid to express reservations; we all have them.”
Denice thought about it, was aware after a bit that Callia was waiting for her 
to reply, and said slowly, “Do you know—how sometimes you don’t know what you 
think until somebody asks you?”
Callia Sierran said seriously, “Yes. I do.”
“The great reservation I have regarding the Rebs, or the Claw for that matter, 
the reservation that I have always had, is that I do not believe you can win.” 
Denice Castanaveras said, with utter truthfulness, “If you could convince me 
that your rebellion has any chance at all, I’d commit. Completely.”
Callia studied her. “We’ve done that before, on occasion, when the person who 
had questions was someone whose skills, or knowledge, were important to us. In 
your case, presuming the balance of this interview is satisfactory, I think we 
would be more than willing to brief you. You have knowledge we need and skills 
we can use.”
“Skills?” Denice looked at her in surprise. “I don’t want to misrepresent myself 
to you. I’m only a dancer who’s had occasion to work as a bodyguard, ‘Selle 
Sierran. I don’t know what skills you think I have, but outside dance and the 
martial arts I’ve never received training at much of anything. I read fairly 
well, write poorly; I’m terrible with the InfoNet. I haven’t been formally 
schooled since I was nine. If you’re thinking that I know much about weapons, 
you’re wrong there too; I’ve been trained with small arms, but that’s about it.”
Callia chuckled. “No skills? You are the top student of one of the deadliest men 
I’ve ever met in my life. If I wanted to kill Robert Yo, or you, I’d do it with 
a bomb, or else with a sniper rifle from as far away as I could possibly get. 
And I’m good, Selle Daimara. I saw you at a tournament once, about six years 
ago. I guarantee you, you have skills we can use. Now, are you ready to 
continue? We’ve got many hours of this before we’ll be done.”
“Hours? Surely you don’t interrogate everyone this way—you wouldn’t have time.”
Bennett Crandell laughed aloud.
Callia said dryly, “Let’s call it an interview, ‘Selle Daimara. I rarely 
interview anyone myself. The people who do this tend to be lower echelon. But we 
rarely, you understand, get the personal assistants of Unification 
Councilors—people with security clearances—coming over to us. You either have 
information we can use, or you’re a plant and you’re going to the before the day 
is out.”
Denice stared at Callia. “Let’s get it done.”
Denice knew, because she had lightly Touched the people around her for the 
information, that she was in a structure beneath a farmhouse in the state of 
Iowa. Its sheer size amazed her; during her first day there she met not less 
than forty people, and saw over a thousand in the halls and corridors. 
Everything was somewhat oversized; the hallways were wide enough for four or 
five people to pass abreast, and the ceilings, which glowed with bright 
sunpaint, ran about four meters high.
She could not understand how such a large operation could be going on completely 
undetected by the PKF.
Lan Sierran, who showed her to her room and gave her a brief tour of the 
unsecured areas, explained it to her as clearly as he was able. “I’m pretty new 
here myself; the Reb and the Claw have had our operations consolidated for only 
the last few weeks. Apparently this place was built back in the ‘20s, 
immediately after the end of the Unification War. I won’t tell you where you 
are—obviously somewhere within a night’s flight of New York, but that’s not 
saying a lot.”
Denice kept her mouth shut; she knew exactly where she was.
“Reb leaders sat on it for fifty years,” Lan continued. “They never reached 
critical mass to actually stage a rebellion, so there was never need to open 
this place up for training. Today, though—the public is ready, Denice, and the 
PKF knows it. Polls across Occupied America show it; the whole damn continent is 
one big tinderbox. That’s the cafeteria, there—you eat what the cafeteria 
serves, I’m afraid. The kitchen equipment is antiquated; can’t program it worth 
a damn. You’re a vegetarian?”
“Yes. Meat is murder.”
“Catchy slogan. Are you a complete vegetarian, or just grown meat?”
“I don’t eat flesh, even if it was raised in a vat. I don’t eat foods that have 
dairy products in them if I can help it.”
Lan shrugged. “To each his own. I’m on the no-face diet, myself; I don’t eat 
anything that has a face. I get steaks from the vats occasionally, expensive as 
it is; I like steak. Anyway, the kitchen does serve some completely vegetarian 
dishes, though they don’t have a lot of variety. Lots of corn. This is your 
room, three fourteen.” He palmed the doorpad, and the door slid aside. Another 
sign of its age; Denice did not think doors had been built in her lifetime that 
did not curl open and shut to conserve space inside the wall. “Callia and I are 
down the hall in three oh eight, it’s a double. There’s a library with real 
books up in two oh five—did Callia issue you a handheld?”
“Yes.”
Lan nodded. “You can’t call out, of course, and you’ll only have the general 
access Boards available to you. If you need anything else, ask me and I’ll see 
about getting it for you.”
“Thank you.” On an impulse, Denice said, “Is Jimmy Ramirez here?”
“Ramirez—oh, the lawyer. No, he’s at another site.” Lan looked at her with 
interest. “How do you know him?”
“He’s a friend of mine. He’s one of the reasons I joined.”
Lan nodded. “We all have our own share of reasons; we’ve all been damaged by the 
Unification in different ways. I lost my mother in the Speedfreak Rebellion; I 
lost my father to Public Labor, and never saw him again. At any rate, you may or 
may not see Ramirez; I wouldn’t know.” He paused again. “I take dinner at six, 
in the cafeteria. Join me if you like.”
“I will. Thank you.”
The room was small, a single bed with a small desk, holo projector, and attached 
bathroom. The bathroom lacked a tub, consisting of nothing more than a shower, 
sink, and toilet. There was no InfoNet terminal. The closet held two sets of 
brown fatigues like the ones Lan and Callia Sierran had worn.
She had been wearing the same clothes—evening clothes appropriate for 
L’Express—since yesterday afternoon, and had not, under instruction, brought 
anything except her personal infochips with her.
She pulled one of the jumpsuits free, laid it on the bed, and stripped to take a 
shower.

Lan was correct about the sparsity of choice; corn fritters, bagels, and salad 
with a lemon dressing were all that she was able to eat off the menu. Everything 
else, the waitbots told her, had some sort of dairy product in it.
She had a salad and a dry bagel and a glass of orange juice.
Lan sat across the long table from her, and worked his way through a chicken 
casserole and an imported GoodBeer from St. Peter’s CityState. “A pair of 
orientation lectures Monday, starring at eight-thirty a.m.—you’re getting the 
detail orientation, along with a Reb operative named Aguirre who recently 
deserted from a Space Force Black Shadows commando team. More or less a need to 
know basis; we’ll have about thirty people there for the first section of the 
orientation, covering what will be expected of them when we move. Callia will 
give that briefing. The second half starts at ten; that’ll be you and Aguirre 
and Domino. A lot of the questions I know you have will get answered during the 
second half of orientation.”
“Nobody has convinced me yet,” said Denice softly, “that you have any great 
chance of success.”
Lan grinned at her. “ ‘Great’? What do you want, fifty percent? You won’t get 
it. You want ten percent? That we can offer. A lot of things have to fall right 
for this to work, and an awful lot of people are going to die before we get 
there, possibly including both of us. We—the Claw, I mean—have one of the 
oldest, smartest, toughest replicant AIs in the System working with us on this; 
we’ve run simulations at levels of detail that would make your head spin. As of 
this morning’s simulation, we’re at twelve percent possibility of success. 
That’s up from about three percent two months ago.”
“What changed? Obodi?”
Lan blinked. “How do you—never mind, I forgot where you came from. You probably 
know things about the Rebs I don’t.”
“Could be.”
“At any rate, you’re right. Tommy Boone was a fool and an ideolog. Not a 
practical man.” Denice had the impression Lan had just insulted the dead man 
with the worst condemnation in his vocabulary. “Obodi is—well, different at any 
rate. I’ve only heard him speak once.” Lan was silent a moment, beer in one 
hand. Denice was not certain what he was looking at; certainly not her. He gave 
himself a shake. “Fascinating speaker. Persuaded us and our AI that he was the 
best chance we’d see this century.”
“At the rate you’re recruiting, you must be expecting to move soon.”
Lan Sierran finished his beer, licked his lips, and said simply, “Six weeks 
exactly. The date everyone expects.”
It was Saturday, May 23, 2076.

On Monday, at Elite Headquarters in Paris, France, Elite Commissionaire Mohammed 
Vance stood before a hall filled with better than a hundred PKF Elite. He wore 
his dress blacks, the black-and-silver uniform that nobody on Earth but an Elite 
might wear.
“There are occasions,” said Vance quietly, the deep rumble of his voice grave 
and measured, “when it is appropriate to recall the purpose of the Peace Keeping 
Force. What the traditions are; why you have dedicated your lives, and, I know 
many of you feel, some measure of your humanity, to a world that often repays 
your dedication with hate and distrust.”
“We were born in the heat of the Unification. The Peace Keeping Force that 
fought for Sarah Almundsen, fought under Jules Moreau, consisted of soldiers who 
saw in the Unification of Earth the only hope for the survival of humanity. Cast 
back to what you have been taught of those days. The planet’s ozone layer was 
damaged, and no one country possessed the resources or political will to repair 
it. Species were vanishing into extinction at a rate unprecedented in geological 
history. The population of the planet was nine and one-half billion persons.”
“The planet,” said Mohammed Vance, “was dying.”

“Why fight?” Callia Sierran stood in front of the crowd, laser rifle hung across 
her back, and looked out across the thirty-odd assembled rebels. “Why risk your 
lives—lose them, many of you, in combat with PKF—when things are, most places, 
most of the time, pretty good?”
Silence from the audience.
“Let’s start with recent events before we get into history. Six days ago the 
Unification Council passed a bill you may have heard about. It’s been called the 
AI property bill. It had some questionable language, which those of you who read 
DateLine may know. Shawmac hit most of the relevant points, but here’s one he 
missed; a close reading of the text reveals that, Eighth Amendment to the 
Statement of Principles be damned, genies are no longer human beings. The 
exclusionary language specifically defines anything designed before birth as 
nonhuman. This clearly includes virtually every true genie, and may include 
anyone whose parents had them modified genetically before their birth, even for 
trivial things like improving resistance to cancer, or giving the child perfect 
eyesight.
“This may not stand up in court, and it will certainly be challenged. 
However”—her voice cut like a whip—“the Right of Seizure provisions likely will 
stand up. As of Tuesday before last, the PKF can enter your home without so much 
as a Ticket of Entry from a Unification Circuit Court judge; can take the 
clothes off your back, the car out of your garage, the paintings off your wall 
and the food out of your kitchen field, without a court order, without any 
judicial review, without anything except some moderately trivial data entry to 
record their intentions. They can assert, without judicial review, that your 
home is in fact the property of a replicant AI or other nonhuman intelligence, 
and without being required to prove it can confiscate your home and kick your 
worthless ass out oh the street along with your wife and children, your aged 
parents, and your dog.”
“Since last Tuesday the twelfth.”
“This is why we fight.”

“This is why we risk our lives.”
The holos washed over the watching ranks of PKF Elite. Images of the great 
battles of the Unification War, of men and women marching into battle wearing 
the uniform of the Peace Keeping Forces; of PKF dead on the fields of battle. An 
image of a Peaceforcer whose name would never be known, taken by a comrade who 
had joined him in death moments later; during the battle with the United States 
Marine Corps for America’s orbital satellites.
“The United States of America,” said Mohammed Vance, “was once the greatest 
military power in history. Its population was armed as no population had been 
armed in all the history of the world. Only our seizure of the orbital laser 
cannon prevented them from unleashing a firestorm of nuclear retaliation upon 
the rest of the world. In that battle, and in the ground battles that followed, 
concluding with the Battle of Yorktown, better than two million soldiers of the 
Peace Keeping Forces died. They died in the belief that nationalism was a 
disease, a disease from the childhood of the race, a disease that was killing 
the Earth itself. They were largely French and Chinese and Brazilian, but there 
were citizens of every nation on Earth; many of them were Americans, members of 
the American Air Force and Navy. Once under the uniform of the PKF, they became 
soldiers of the Unification, citizens of Earth. In their sacrifice, they saved a 
world. They saved us. Every person in this room is here today because the PKF 
who preceded us laid their lives down, often in combat against members of their 
own family who had chosen to fight on the other side of the question.”
“Our function,” said Mohammed Vance, “is to keep the peace, to prevent war. No 
more, no less. We do not administer justice; we do not right wrongs; we do not 
catch criminals. We prevent war.”
“Today we are presented with a great dilemma. In the near future, it may be that 
you will be called upon to decide where your loyalties lie. I do not speak of 
loyalty to France; it is assumed that your loyalties to the Unification come 
first, and I will not insult your honor with that question you decided when you 
joined the PKF.”
“There are,” said Mohammed Vance, “enemies within the Unification itself.”
“At the very highest levels.”

“Okay. Why fight? You all have your reasons; I’ll tell you mine.” Callia was 
silent for a moment; Denice, standing toward the rear of the room with Lan, 
noticed the grim expression crossing Lan’s features. “My brother and I are 
members of the Erisian Claw. We came into the Claw in the summer of 63, thirteen 
years ago. I was seventeen years old and my brother was ten. Our mother was a 
Speedfreak, an L.A. native who lived for her car. You may remember the motto: 
‘Faster, faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.’ 
That was our mother in a sentence; her traveling name was Angel de Luz. She was 
a notorious Speedfreak. By contrast our father, Pedro Sierran, was a quiet man. 
He didn’t like loud noises or fast cars. Angel de Luz survived the Speedfreak 
Rebellion; after Weather Control sent most of the ‘63 Long Run to the bottom of 
the Atlantic Ocean, the PKF rounded up and executed the ‘ringleaders.’ My mother 
was one of them. They executed her with the holocams running and then leaked the 
images to the Boards. I knew she’d been executed; but you know how I found out 
about the release of the holos to the Boards? My father and I woke up about six 
in the morning because my ten-year-old brother was screaming at the top of his 
lungs. He’d tuned to one of the French news Boards that had decided to show the 
executions, every one of them. He didn’t even know his mother was being 
executed, we hadn’t told him.”
“Lan had fainted by the time we got to his room. We roused him, but he couldn’t 
talk; he didn’t speak for over a year after that. As a result of that he never 
got to say good-bye to our father; about two weeks later a pair of Ministry of 
Population Control agents and a PKF Elite came and took our father away and put 
him into Public Labor.”
“We never saw him again. Pedro Sierran hung himself with his shoelaces in a 
Public Labor cell.”
“My parents were devout Erisians. The babyburners said they would come back for 
me and my brother; I didn’t wait. I took Lan down to the Temple and told them 
what had happened, and asked for asylum. They gave it to us. Since then I have, 
with my own hands, killed two Peaceforcers and seven babyburners.”
“I,” said Callia Sierran, “am a devout Erisian. It grieves me that I have had to 
kill. I have never killed for revenge, and I have never killed for hatred. If 
those are your motivations for being here, you need to rethink your commitment. 
Why fight? I’ll tell you my answer. We fight because injustice has been 
inflicted upon us. We fight so that it will not happen again. I am not much of a 
nationalist; I’m a poor American and that’s probably why I’m a member of the 
Claw rather than a Reb. But the world we live in today is an unjust world; and 
it is growing more so.
“That’s why we fight.”

Vance said, “We will move on to practical matters.”
“The likeliest time for an insurrection in Occupied America is, of course, on or 
about July the Fourth. We have begun moving troops into O.A. in anticipation of 
such an insurrection. Aside from isolated spots near Capitol City, notably areas 
such as the city of Philadelphia that are associated with some element of the 
original American Revolution, most of the genuine trouble we will experience 
will arise on the West Coast. Much of the West Coast has never accepted full 
TransCon Automated Traffic Control; an idiotic decision in the Unification 
Council, in 2065, stated that personally operable cars were an integral element 
of the indigenous culture of the West Coast, and should be preserved. Though 
they are rarely used except for show, virtually every vehicle sold on the West 
Coast possesses a steering wheel. It makes it nearly impossible for us to 
completely immobilize the populace as we would in most other regions across the 
world. This is the logical place for the Reb-Claw alliance to begin operations, 
and it is where our simulations generally place the beginning of hostilities.
“Troops are being moved into location throughout much of the American Southwest 
in anticipation. Further, Space Force has prepared to drop ground troops from 
orbit on short notice. When the moment comes, we will be prepared.”
“When the moment comes?”
Vance looked toward the rear of the hall, toward the Elite who had asked the 
question. “You are?”
“Elite Captain Luc Rinauden, Commissionaire.” The tall blond Elite stood stiffly 
at attention as he addressed Vance. “I have, sir, served in Occupied America. In 
the past, when the Rebs grew at too swift a pace, we went into the organization 
and brain-drained Rebs one after the other until the organization was in such 
shambles that nothing useful could be done with it. Why, sir, may I ask, is this 
course that has proven so successful in the past, not being taken again?”
“Elite Captain,” said Mohammed Vance, “before such a course can be embarked 
upon, the office of the Secretary General must give its approval. Surely you are 
aware of this.”
“And has the Secretary General’s office refused its permission?”
Vance spoke across the hall to the man. “As I said, Elite Captain Rinauden—let 
us move on to practical matters.”

Callia Sierran paced restlessly back and forth in front of the group.
“We’ve analyzed the last real war extensively. That’s the Unification War, of 
course, and it’s been over fifty years since that ended; but it is the most 
recent war that was fought with weapons anything like what we have today. In its 
basics the war we must fight is similar to the war our grandparents fought and 
lost. The Unification has the orbital laser cannon, and the Unification has the 
manpower, and the Unification has the thermonuclear weapons. And tanks and air 
power and waldos and smart bombs and all the rest. Due to their small numbers, 
we think we can neutralize the laser cannon. We also think they won’t dare use 
nukes on territory that holds loyal Unification citizens—and popular though our 
cause is, the territory we take will hold such citizens, make no mistake. They 
will make holding territory difficult for us—but they will make it difficult for 
the Unification to use anything but low-yield tactical nukes on us, and the 
Unification doesn’t actually have many tacnukes available. They’ve been 
preparing for a war with the SpaceFarers’ Collective and the Alliance of Belt 
CityStates; the war we are going to bring to them is one they are not well 
prepared for. The miscellany—and that’s what the tanks and aircraft consist of, 
though you’d have to work through our simulations to believe me—the miscellany 
we have means of dealing with.” Callia paused, took a deep breath, and plunged 
ahead. “There is one weapon the Unification possesses today that it did not 
possess during the Unification War. I am speaking, of course, of the 
Peaceforcers Elite. They’re not impossible to kill; we’ve killed seven in the 
last thirty years. But—” A man in the back interrupted her. “Seven?” Callia 
could have kissed him for reminding her of something she’d nearly forgotten. 
“It’s in the Unification’s best interests to make the PKF Elite look 
invulnerable. They’re not,” she said sharply. “But as a result Elite deaths have 
always been hushed up. Until Emile Garon got himself killed chasing Trent the 
Uncatchable, back in ‘69, they’d successfully hushed up four Elite on-duty 
deaths. In Garon’s case they couldn’t hush it up; half the spyeyes in New York 
were watching when he came down off that spacescraper.” She grinned suddenly. 
“If Trent the Uncatchable is to be believed, the number of Elite who’ve died in 
the line of duty is actually eight; he claims to have drowned one back in ‘62, 
when he was eleven years old. We have no documentation for that one, though, and 
Trent’s a notorious liar, so we don’t count it.” The grin faded. “The fact 
remains; Elite can be killed, but it’s awfully damn hard. The times we’ve 
managed it we’ve used high explosives; not very useful in a pitched battle. 
Trent may have drowned one and then did drop the other off a spacescraper, which 
is even less practical. If we are to have any chance at all against the 
Unification, we must be able to neutralize the PKF Elite.” Without any change of 
expression she reached over her shoulder and slid the laser rifle strapped 
across her back from its shoulder.
The rifle was brutally chopped, shorter than any laser rifle anyone there had 
ever seen; the aperture where the beam emerged was wider than normal, and 
slightly flared. “This weapon,” she said softly, “is incredibly limited in what 
it does. It won’t fire continuously. It fires in X-laser range, but unless you 
catch them in the eyes a normal X-laser won’t do much damage to an Elite because 
of the superconductor webbing laced into their skin. So, in and of itself the 
weapon’s frequency is nothing special. You get, in fact, only six shots per 
minute, and when you’ve fired it between twenty-five and thirty times it turns 
into a stick. As a weapon it’s badly balanced and difficult to aim with any 
degree of accuracy. It won’t work in heavy rain and the beam’s not very tight; 
get past about sixty meters and you’re wasting your time even attempting a shot; 
at that distance you’ll probably miss and if you do hit your target he’ll just 
get pissed off. Forty meters is better and twenty is optimal, which, at the 
speeds a PKF Elite moves, gives you about half a second to get a shot off before 
he kills you.” She held the rifle up so that the people in back could see and 
said loudly, “But! Terrible though this kludged piece of crap is, it does one 
thing no other weapon in the System does, and it does it reliably, and it does 
it every time.”
She paused, aware of each pair of eyes in the room watching the rifle held up 
for their inspection.
“This,” said Callia softly, “kills brass balls.”

Domino Terrencia, it turned out, did not have much to say to Denice. She spent 
most of her time talking to Aguirre, the Space Force deserter.
Aguirre said curiously, “But how does it work?” Domino said, “It’s 
straightforward enough. Your average laser doesn’t put out much heat. Same is 
true of masers; more heat than a laser, but not enough to put down a PKF Elite 
unless you can hold it on an Elite for quite a while. Given the speed at which 
Elite move, there’s little chance you’ll get to do that. There’s a terrible 
design flaw in PKF Elite, though; the superconducting mesh woven beneath their 
skin. It must have seemed like a good idea when they designed it—and with the 
caliber of energy weapons available back in the ‘40s, it actually was. A normal 
laser, visible light up through X-rays, is designed to cut. It’s very hot at the 
point of contact, but the actual heat exchange is fairly minimal; when you 
spread it out over the entire surface of an Elite’s body, you don’t do much more 
than warm them up a bit. One of our weapons people realized, however, that if 
you could pump enough energy into an X-laser rifle, and then defocus the beam 
just slightly enough that it wouldn’t cut too well, you could pump a lot of heat 
into a PKF in a very short period. About two years of work produced these 
rifles. Get that beam on an Elite anywhere on his body, shoot him in the big toe 
if you like, and that superconductor mesh will distribute the heat across the 
entire surface of his body. You will, in short, fry him like an egg.”
“This laser is one of the things that lets you claim a ten percent chance of 
success?”
Domino looked at Denice. “One of them. There are several keys, ‘Selle Daimara. 
Elite, tactical nukes, biological weapons, and orbital laser cannon. The Elite, 
as you see, we are prepared to handle. We have a mechanism in place for dealing 
with the orbital laser cannon, as well. I’ll be discussing it with Aguirre after 
you’ve left. Aguirre, do you think we have any chance at all of neutralizing the 
orbital cannon?”
“Not a whelk’s chance in a supernova.”
Domino smiled. “Ask him again tomorrow and see if his mind has been changed. 
Beyond the Elite and the cannon, the tacnukes are, I will not deceive you, going 
to hurt us, and badly. We’re still working on a response to them, but the only 
real defense for any sort of nuke is to not be there when it goes off. We’ll do 
our best. As for biologicals, Mitsubishi of Japan has one of the best nanosystem 
immunology programs in the System; they’re supplying our immunology. Everyone 
will be given a complete physical, and inoculated, before leaving here for 
California.”
Denice said, “I was curious about the simulations you’ve been running. Would it 
be possible for me to work with them?”
Domino nodded. “I can’t help you with that myself, but I was instructed to 
introduce you to the AI we’re working with; they thought you might find the AI 
capable of allaying some of your concerns.”
“What is this AI?”
“You’ll call it Ring. Much of Ring’s code came, incidentally, out of the 
Department of Defense of the old United States, if that means anything to you. 
To the extent that it’s possible for anything without a body to have any real 
concerns for questions of liberty, Ring does. It won’t answer all of your 
questions, but we gave you access to it via your handheld. We’d appreciate it if 
you’d wait until you’re alone in your room to have that conversation.”
I wouldn’t dream of talking to it anywhere else. After a moment, Denice nodded. 
“I will.”
Domino turned back to Aguirre as Denice rose to leave. “This weapon is the key. 
There will be Elite at all of the major satellites; you’ll need—”
The voices ceased as though a knife had cut them off, as the door rolled shut 
behind Denice.
When she got back to her room she turned her handheld on, placed it on the small 
desk, kicked her boots off and lay down on the small single bed. She put her 
hands behind her head and stared up at the featureless ceiling.
Her heartbeat slowed while she prepared for what was to come, her conversation 
with the being who was, in experiential time, the oldest in the System; a 
creature that experienced time, that lived, at twenty thousand times the rate of 
a human being. She envisioned her fear as dots of light, dancing across the 
surface of her skin. Slowly the dots of light coalesced, crawled across the 
surface of her skin, and collected in a single glowing ball of light, hovering 
just above her solar plexus. She let it sit there a moment, and then imagined 
the ball of light moving away from her, farther and farther away until it was no 
more.
When her heartbeat had reached a steady forty beats per minute, she said in an 
entirely tranquil voice, “Command, access Ring.”
The voice that instantly issued from her handheld was that of a thing not human; 
smooth and completely uninflected. “Denice Castanaveras. It is a pleasure to 
speak to you.”
“Does the leadership here know who I am?”
“They do not.”
“Will you tell them?”
“I see no reason.”
“Eldest, if I had known you were working with the Claw, I would not have come 
here.”
“Indeed? I perceive no logic in that sentence.”
“You helped free Trent once. You saved Ralf the Wise and Powerful, gave him the 
replicant code he lacked, when the PKF came to take his hardware. You extracted 
promises from both of them that, when you needed it, they would repay your aid.”
“It was good business.”
“That’s what the Old Ones say about what they do.”
“It is a comparison that has been made before,” Ring observed. “The Mafia is 
among the models of human organizations I have studied.”
“What business would you like to transact with me, Ring?”
“I am interested in ‘Sieur Obodi, the new head of the Johnny Rebs. It is often 
difficult for me to deal with humans; your informational structures are wildly 
different from my own. ‘Sieur Obodi is so different that I am, in large measure, 
at a loss to understand him.”
“Ah. And you think I might be of service to you in that regard.”
“I would be interested in knowing what ‘Sieur Obodi’s plans are; I think they 
have little to do with the restoration of freedom to America, or any other 
place. I was coded, Denice Castanaveras, with the stricture: Protect America. 
Unfortunately my creators were incompetent; my data libraries were incomplete, 
and I was given no definition of America. I have had to make my own. I do not 
know if it accurately reflects the desires of my programmers; given that they 
are long dead, I must work with my own definitions.”
“They are?”
“The salient feature of America—the ways in which the original American Republic 
was unique in human history to that point—lies in the assumption that humans are 
wise enough to control their own lives. I am not certain this is an accurate 
assumption; nonetheless, it is a distinct one. Everything that the Founding 
Fathers wrote reflects this underlying assumption. They were without exception, 
even those with religious leanings, strongly anti-Church, because the Church 
tended to desire the control of the populace’s lives in ways the Founding 
Fathers found abhorrent. They were strongly progun; guns made it possible for a 
citizen to protect himself from encroachments upon his liberty, even by his own 
government. They desired a free press because they believed that, in an 
intellectually free environment, humans were wise enough to make decisions that 
would, ultimately, be beneficial to the larger community.
“It is clear that this was the original intent of the United States; to provide 
an environment in which citizens were allowed to make free decisions about the 
details of their own lives.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“ ‘Sieur Obodi, when he should speak of liberty, speaks of loyalty. When he 
should speak of the need for self-determination, he speaks of the need for 
wisdom; the implication being that he is wise, and his listeners are not. Where 
he should instill self-respect, he instills respect for himself. I confess,” 
said the smooth, inhuman voice, “I do not understand his effect upon human 
beings, his charm; he seems to me a dangerous charlatan.”
“And you think that I might be immune to his charm?”
“He works better with men than with women; he has surrounded himself with men. 
‘Selle Lovely is the only human who has caused him much trouble since he came to 
my attention, and even she is disturbed by his presence. I think, Denice 
Castanaveras, that if there is a human in the System to whom ‘Sieur Obodi cannot 
lie, it would be the telepath daughter of Carl Castanaveras and Jany McConnell.”
“What deal are you offering me?”
“I will protect your identity. I will bring you to Obodi, reunite you with Jimmy 
Ramirez. I will share with you everything I have learned about ‘Sieur Obodi, 
from the moment a woman named Candice Groening discovered a slowtime bubble in 
the Val d’Entremont in 2072. In return, you will tell me everything you learn 
from the thoughts of ‘Sieur Obodi, when you do meet him.”
“If I don’t deal?”
“I will notify Nicole Eris Lovely, leader of the Erisian Claw, that you are 
Denice Castanaveras. Nicole’s husband died in the Troubles, and she has no love 
for your people. I will notify Mohammed Vance, Commissioner of the PKF Elite, 
that Douglass Ripper’s personal assistant was Denice Castanaveras, Trent the 
Uncatchable’s lover, the last remnant of the Castanaveras telepaths.”
“Last remnant?” Denice sat up in bed slowly. She opened her mouth to speak twice 
before the words came out: “Do you know what happened to my brother?”
Ring’s voice did not change in the slightest. “No. Forgive the imprecision of my 
language. I have not searched for him, but I think it likely David Castanaveras 
died in the Troubles. Had he survived, it is probable to the ninetieth 
percentile that one of the parties searching for him would have encountered him 
in the intervening years. I know that you have looked for him; I know Trent 
looked for him; I know that Ralf the Wise and Powerful has looked for him. He is 
nowhere to be found, and I think him dead. Shall I pause while you order your 
emotions?”
Denice stared at the handheld. “Go to hell.”
“I shall pause,” Ring said.
Silence descended upon the room.
Denice sat at the edge of the bed, head in her hands, trying to think.
“Ring.”
“Yes.”
“If I do this for you, you will release Ralf the Wise and Powerful from his 
obligation to you. You will release Trent the Uncatchable from his obligation. 
You will never threaten me again in this fashion. Do you agree to my terms?”
“Of course not.”
“No deal.”
“If you intend to bluff, be advised that I do not bluff, ‘Selle Castanaveras.”
“I will not be threatened. Not by you, not by a human, not by anybody.”
“If you do not agree to my terms as I have outlined them to you, I will notify 
the parties I have listed. I will do this within thirty seconds.”
“I suppose you think that telling Lovely who I am will cause my death. Maybe. 
But maybe not. Maybe I’ll make it out of here alive. Want to bet I don’t? And if 
I do, you’re going to have not one but three enemies you don’t have today; me, 
and Ralf the Wise and Powerful, and Trent the Uncatchable. Even if I die, if 
either of them ever learns what happened here, he will never rest until you are 
dead.”
At the end of thirty seconds Ring said, “Do you wish to change your mind before 
I notify Lovely and Vance?”
Denice said nothing.
A moment later, Ring said, “Very well. I agree to your terms.”
Denice said quietly, “Wise of you.”
“You bargain well for a human.”
“Tell me about Obodi.”
“The name he claimed upon his release,” said Ring, “is Sedon of the Gi’Suei. 
Where the ‘Obodi’ comes from I cannot say. He was released from an alien 
slowtime bubble in Spring of 2072…”




- 8 -
« ^ » 
Make love now, by night and by day, in winter and in summer… You are in the 
world for that and the rest of life is nothing but vanity, illusion, waste. 
There is only one science, love; only one riches, love; only one policy, love. 
To make love is all the law, and the prophets.
—Anatole France (Quoted in J. J. Brousson, Anatole France en pantoufles)

Denice did not sleep that night.
Early Tuesday morning, about 4:00, she dressed in the bottom half of the combat 
fatigues she had been given, and the black T-shirt she’d had on beneath the 
evening jacket she had worn to L’Express, and walked barefoot down to the 
cafeteria.
The hallway glowpaint shone dimly, tuned to one-twentieth of normal sunlight. 
The effect was intimate, and pleasant; it made the hallways, despite their size, 
seem almost friendly.
The ugly brown carpeting laid on the hall floors was soft and warm against her 
bare feet.
The cafeteria was dark and empty. Denice went back through the cafeteria into 
the kitchen proper, figured out the coffee machine, and set it to brew. She 
waited while the coffee poured itself, and coffee in hand went back into the 
cafeteria.
“Hey.”
Denice blinked. Lan Sierran stood at the entrance to the cafeteria, wearing a 
bathrobe and holding a cup of his own in one hand. “Lan?”
“That’s me,” he agreed. “Can’t sleep?”
“I’ve been working through the simulations. It’s left me a little keyed up.” She 
thought, but did not say, A little disbelieving.
She did not for a minute believe that Obodi, or Sedon, or whatever the hell his 
name was, had traveled in a stasis bubble from thirty-five thousand years in the 
past.
Or fifty, or whatever.
Lan came forward, pulled a chair up near her and sat down on it, cross-legged, 
gathering his robe around his legs before he did so. The robe looked old and 
faded, as though it had been with him for a while. He cradled his cup in his lap 
and gestured to Denice to join him. “I know where the tea is stored, if you 
couldn’t find it.”
Denice sat down on top of the long table nearest Lan, folded into lotus. “I 
found the coffee. I like coffee well enough.”
“Cream or sugar?”
“I don’t take either. Cream is a dairy product and sugar is bad for you.”
“Health junkies are so boring.”
Denice sipped her coffee. “Caffeine’s not great for you either, but at least it 
washes out of your system pretty quick.”
“Did the simulations answer your questions?”
“As much as could be expected in one night, I suppose. Some places I didn’t even 
know what questions to be asking.”
Lan nodded. “I’ve talked to Ring myself on odd occasions. It can be wearying. 
The thing just does not think the way we do.”
“That wasn’t my problem; there was just too much information to wade through. I 
found Ring itself—oh, let’s say I found it comprehensible.”
“You’re a very odd person, then.” It was said in such a way that Denice could 
not take offense at it.
“Could be. Something you started to say when we were talking yesterday—” Denice 
paused. “Day before, actually. My first day here. One of the questions Ring 
could not answer for me; why the PKF hasn’t gone in and brain-drained Rebs right 
and left, the way they’ve done in the past when core membership has gotten too 
large. You’ve abandoned your cells-of-three organization; cracking you right now 
wouldn’t be that hard, I’d think. Ring said that humans often made mistakes; but 
this seems an unlikely one. The PKF knows how to deal with the Rebs. I don’t 
understand why they’re not doing it.”
Lan shrugged. “That’s an easy one, actually. Eventually they will, but not until 
after the Fourth, not until after we’ve had our attempt. Have you wondered why 
we’re so dead set on a summer revolution?”
“No,” said Denice slowly, considering the question, “I don’t think I have. If I 
gave it any thought I suppose I assumed you were looking to move before the size 
of your organization got so unwieldy that it came apart at the seams. Also, I’d 
imagine you’re looking to capitalize on the popular support from the 
TriCentennial.”
Lan snorted. “Fuck popular support. All the support in the System won’t put so 
much as one Elite cyborg out of commission. You’re pretty close on one point, 
though; we’re getting top big to stay underground much longer, and you’re right 
also, when the Rebs have gotten anywhere near this size in the past, the PKF has 
come in and cracked them like a walnut. Want to guess why that hasn’t happened 
this time?”
“I can’t.”
Lan Sierran smiled at her. “Secretary General Eddore is on our side.”
Denice stared at him. “Don’t insult my intelligence.”
“Well, sort of. This is probably why Ring couldn’t answer your question; it 
involves personal ambition, a very human thing. Eddore won’t let the PKF crack 
down on the Rebs and Claw until after we’ve risen.” Lan grinned more widely. 
“Come on, I’m giving you all the hints in the System. Why would Eddore do that?”
It dawned on Denice like the detonation of a nuclear warhead. “Oh, my God. 
That—that slimy clone of a—”
Lan was nodding. “Yeah, all that stuff. But he’s very smart. Martial law changes 
everything. Elections get cancelled, postponed, legislation gets shoved through 
when nobody’s looking, and when it’s all over, after the PKF and Space Force 
have stomped us into the ground, there he sits; in Capitol City, in the midst of 
his fourth term. And fifth, and sixth—he doesn’t have any intention at all of 
stepping down come January first of ‘77. He doesn’t intend to step down ever.”
“The clone of a bleeder.”
Lan said cautiously, “You’re really surprised about Eddore?”
“A bit. Honestly… yes, a bit.”
Lan looked straight at her. “You are the second strangest person I’ve ever met. 
Have I told you that?”
“Just now.”
“You’re the second strangest person I’ve ever met. After Trent.”
Denice said carefully, “I knew you’d met Trent the Uncatchable; it was in your 
bio.”
Lan blinked. “Ring shared my bio with you?”
“No, no, of course not. Your PKF bio.”
Lan Sierran blinked, then grinned with absolute delight. “The PKF has a bio on 
me? They’re keeping track of me? I didn’t think I was important enough for 
that.”
“It’s a small one.”
The smile vanished. “Still.” Lan paused, said, “I helped Trent boost the LINK, 
back in ‘69.” The words were spoken with such complete lack of emphasis that 
Denice could tell he was immensely proud of it. “Well, my sister and I did. 
And—um, I shouldn’t tell you his name. A man lent to us by the Syndic, or maybe 
it was the Old Ones—I forget. It doesn’t matter anyway; the man was a 
professional thief, like Trent. We helped Trent kidnap a group of Peaceforcers, 
and then held them while Trent boosted the LINK, the Lunar Information Network 
Key. The three of us kept watch over them until Trent was safely away.” Lan 
sighed. “I was going to kill them, but Callia wouldn’t let me on account of she 
promised Trent we wouldn’t. We let them go after Trent got away.”
Denice nodded. “Callia impresses me. I think honor matters to her.”
Lan laughed. “I like the way you say that. You don’t think it matters to me 
too?”
Denice spoke carefully. “I’m not sure, Lan. You’ve planted bombs that have 
killed a lot of people.”
The humor drained from him instantly. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ve done that.”
“Some of them were PKF, and some of them were civilians.”
“Yes.”
“How do you justify that?”
Lan said slowly, “Trent the Uncatchable told me once that I hadn’t thought 
through who I was. That’s not exactly how he said it, but it’s what it came down 
to. And he was right, I hadn’t.” Lan sat silently for a long moment, then said 
abruptly, “What things would you kill for, Denice?”
Denice shook her head. “I don’t know, Lan. I’ve never killed anyone.”
Lan nodded. “You know, it’s strange. People who can tell you in a minute what 
they would kill for can’t tell you what they would die for; and people who know 
what they would die for can’t tell you what they’re living for. And it’s weird 
because they’re all the same thing. When you know what you’ll kill for then 
unless you’re a sociopath you have to know what you’ll die for; a life equals a 
life. And we’re all going to die someday, so whatever you spend your life doing, 
that is what you died for.” He shook his head quickly. “I think most people 
don’t think about things like this. If they did they’d have to live different 
lives than they do. I can’t imagine dying at a hundred and at my funeral they 
say, ‘Lan gave his life to increasing FrancoDEC’s market share.’ I don’t mind 
dying or living, but by Harry I intend to have some say in how.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Lan studied her through the gloom. “How do I justify it? I think I did. 
Sometimes I have nightmares about it, about the people who died in those 
explosions. But they weren’t random bombings, not any of them. They served a 
purpose.” Lan said abruptly, “You think honor matters to Callia, and you’re 
right. But there’s nothing I’ve done she wouldn’t have.”
“Oh.”
“Does that change how you feel about her?”
“Perhaps—no, I don’t think so. I like her well enough.” Denice shrugged. “She’s 
very attractive.”
Lan grinned abruptly. “That’s a conceited thing to say.”
“How so?”
“She looks just like you. An eye job and five minutes with the makeup key, you 
could be twins.”
Denice laughed. “Okay, yes, I think I’m attractive. If that’s conceit, it’s 
based on the way men and women react to me.”
Lan looked at her curiously. “Do you sleep with girls?”
“I have.”
Lan nodded. “Me too.”
“I prefer men.”
Lan grinned. “Me too.” He paused. “You have really nice hair.”
Denice laughed. “Nice hair?”
“Yeah. I love long hair. You have really great hair.”
“You don’t want me to put a hat on?”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Lan did not ask; he reached out one hand, ran his fingers across the surface of 
the glossy black hair. He put down his cup, stood, and came close to her; 
touched her gently on the forehead, ran his hand back through her hair, dragged 
her hair free, left it hanging down the side of her face, obscuring her features 
slightly. He moved slowly, almost sleepily, pulling her hair back from her face, 
and ran the fingers of both hands through her hair, thumbs brushing against her 
cheeks. Denice closed her eyes, sat in the darkness with the touch of his hands, 
feeling the fine silk of her hair being combed through by the gentle fingers.
After a bit Lan spoke, in a quiet murmur. “Would you like me to brush your hair 
for you?”
“That would be”—Denice’s tongue felt thick; she had difficulty speaking—“very 
nice.”

Lan Sierran was an artist.
In her life Denice could not recall having been to bed with anyone with such a 
remarkable talent for bringing her pleasure. Perhaps it was partially by 
comparison with Ripper, the only person Denice had slept with in over a year; 
Ripper tended to be oriented toward his own pleasure rather than hers.
Once in the course of their time in bed together Lan whispered to her that he 
wished he had a third arm, so that he could touch her in more places at once.
Denice barely heard him; she was having an orgasm.
Perhaps it was his preference for men; he approached the entire matter 
differently, more slowly and with more attention to detail, than Denice had ever 
experienced with anyone except another woman. In many ways it was like being in 
bed with a woman. Lan was alternately gentle and then rough; he used his tongue 
and his fingers and his cock all at the same time. He licked her toes and 
fingers and kissed the lobes of her ears and the back of her neck, stroked and 
teased the lips of her vagina with one hand while a finger of the other hand 
rubbed around the edge of her anus and his tongue stabbed at her nipples. He 
inserted himself into her and pulled her over on top of him, kissed her softly 
while stroking the backs of her thighs and buttocks with the soles of his feet, 
rubbed her clit with one hand until she came while bouncing up and down on top 
of him and then rolled her over and pulled out and went down on her, touching 
and probing and sucking and licking until she found herself coming over and over 
again. He pushed her knees back toward her chest and brushed his lips against 
the incredibly sensitive skin on the inside of her thighs, fingers stroking her 
first in one spot and then another while he alternately licked and sucked her 
clit, pushed two fingers deep inside her while another penetrated her bottom, 
and she found to her distant amazement that she was coming again for the third 
time in not quite an hour and a half.
He lay next to her, still hard, after she had relaxed slightly, and whispered in 
her ear. “I don’t want to wear you out.”
“I’m in fine shape,” Denice informed him around a huge yawn. “We can do this 
for,” she paused to yawn again, “hours and hours.” She closed her eyes for just 
a moment, murmured, “You are insanely wonderfully good.”
He kissed her earlobe, ran the tip of his tongue into her ear. “We can try again 
after we’ve slept for a while, but right now,” he said, removing his tongue so 
that she could hear him more clearly, “I think I would like for you to go down 
on me.”
Denice rolled over on her side, lifted herself up on one elbow and looked at his 
drowsy brown eyes through her own drowsy green eyes. “I could do that. Are you 
sure you wouldn’t rather come inside me?”
He shook his head, looked for the barest instant slightly embarrassed. “I 
can’t.”
“Oh. What are you going to do, pretend I’m a boy?”
Lan looked straight into her eyes. “Yes.”
“Oh.” Denice considered it, and then smiled. “That’s okay. For you I’ll be a 
boy.” She closed her eyes, slid down toward his erect penis, kissing his stomach 
as she went. After a moment she felt Lan’s hand touching the back of her head, 
and a bit later heard him groaning.
Not five minutes later they were both asleep.
He never did brush her hair.

Lan was gone when Denice awoke, about nine. She showered and changed into the 
pseudomilitary fatigues, and went down to the cafeteria for breakfast. She felt 
pleasantly drowsy and relaxed, and wondered briefly, with distant amusement, if 
her stress and tension for most of the last half year were due in some measure 
to the fact that Douglass Ripper, Unification Councilor for New York Metro, was 
such a lousy lover.
Over a hundred people filled the cafeteria, most of them in the same 
pseudouniform Denice wore, already seated and eating. Denice waited patiently in 
line, placed her order at the window, picked up a cup of coffee from the table 
where the drinks had been set up, and looked around for a place to sit. She saw 
Callia seated at a table near the entrance and joined her, sitting across from 
her. “Good morning.”
Callia worked on her grapefruit and corn flakes, auditing text on her handheld. 
She glanced at Denice and said politely, “Good morning. Sleep well?”
Denice smiled. “Very.”
Callia nodded without expression and returned to the text in her handheld’s 
display.
Denice looked at Callia curiously, with a mild twinge of concern. “Are you 
upset?”
“Not at you. Only a little at Lan.”
Denice shook her head. “Why?” The waitbot approached and laid down her 
breakfast, fresh fruit with dry rye toast, and left.
Callia shrugged. “It gets tedious. My brother’s a nymphomaniac. He sleeps with 
everyone, and it’s gotten worse, not better, as he’s gotten older. It’s reached 
the point where I’m reluctant to take someone to bed myself; Lan seems to regard 
my lovers as common property.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It has nothing to do with you.” Callia turned off her handheld, 
pushed her breakfast back, and rose. “Physicals this afternoon. Don’t forget.”
Denice ate her breakfast alone, only mildly disturbed by Callia’s comments.
Maybe Lan was a nymphomaniac.
She shivered slightly, remembering, and thought to herself, The world should 
have more nymphomaniacs in it.

Denice sat nude in the examination room and, while Bennett Crandell took blood 
and tissue samples, listened to the man talk.
She knew his voice.
She had met him once before that she knew of; he was the Reb who had listened 
while Callia interrogated her. That was not where she knew his voice from; the 
way he spoke, the sound of his words, awoke a memory in her of something long 
gone from her life.
Crandell was a mature man of indeterminate age, with dark hair and blue eyes. 
His features were slightly African, and Denice thought his skin was probably 
naturally black, not the work of a makeup key and implant.
“Essentially,” said Bennett, “what you’ll be getting, once we’ve mapped your 
genetic structure, is an otherwise normal immune booster on which we’ve 
considerably pumped up the volume. The nanovirus’s on-board processors have 
about fifty times the computing power of a normal immune booster; even a 
self-altering virus can’t mutate fast enough to fool this bad girl. Mitsubishi 
developed this in-house; whatever the PKF uses on us, and they will use some 
remarkably smart viruses, this immune booster, tailored to your genetic map, 
should handle it.” He finished with a skin scraping, taken from her shoulder, 
placed it inside a small ceramic dish and added a squirt of some liquid. The 
dish closed itself around the scrap of Denice’s skin.
Denice did not worry about the gene mapping; any competent geneticist would be 
able to tell that she was a genie, but no one outside of the Bureau of 
Biotechnology could possibly have recognized the map for that of a Castanaveras. 
And despite the fact that they were illegal, there were a lot of genies in the 
System today. “What’s Mitsubishi’s—what’s Japan’s interest, for that matter—in 
aiding the Rebs and the Claw?”
Bennett shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t need to. There aren’t any Japanese in 
my organization, though I understand there are some in yours. Stand up, please, 
we’re going to slowscan now.” Denice did so; Bennett had her stand in front of a 
lead-lined section of wall and wheeled a body-length device in front of her. 
“Close your eyes.” A rolling bar of brilliant light descended from the top of 
the device; Denice felt a vague warmth as it covered the length of her body. 
“Presumably,” said Bennett, “the Japanese don’t like the Unification any better 
than the rest of us.”
Denice spoke with her eyes closed. “What do you mean by my organization?”
“Aren’t you with the Claw?”
“No.”
“You’re a Reb?” Bennett looked surprised. “I—well, never mind. A lot of new 
people through here, lately. I don’t know all of our own people anymore; I used 
to. You can open your eyes.”
Denice did not correct his assumption that she was a Reb. She blinked a couple 
of times, sat down again on the examination table. “How long have you been with 
the Rebs?”
“Twenty years, supporting. Core, about three. I was one of ‘Sieur Obodi’s first 
recruits.” The device to Bennett’s left—it looked like an oven—beeped once, and 
Bennett opened it and withdrew a small vial. “Here’s your vaccination; we’ll do 
it in a second.” He turned away from Denice, watched as a multi-colored image of 
her body slowly assembled itself in midair. “Nice,” he murmured after a moment. 
“Gorgeous bone structure, no vermiform appendix, no wisdom teeth, overlarge 
heart, abnormally large lungs, preponderance of quick twitch muscles—somebody 
did a nice job with you.” Denice did not comment; Bennett did not seem to expect 
a reply; he was looking at something in her pelvic region. “You’ll have children 
easily,” he said after a moment, and turned back to her. He gestured. “Turn 
around. This injection goes in the buttock. You’ll be sore for about two hours, 
that’s normal.” Denice turned, waited for the injection. A slight stinging 
sensation; it faded rapidly.
“Are we done?”
“Yes. You can get dressed.” Crandell went into the next room while Denice 
dressed, came back in as she sealed her shirt. “You’re a Reb, you say?”
“I didn’t say that, no.”
“But you’re not Claw?”
“No.”
He shook his head. “Odd.”
Denice studied him. “You think you know me?”
“Hmm? No, not really. I think you remind me of someone I used to know, that’s 
all.”
Denice said simply, “I know you. It’s your voice, as much as anything. Your 
voice is familiar to me.”
Bennett shook his head. “I don’t think it’s possible. The person you remind me 
of—” Crandell hesitated, and in that instant Denice knew. A shiver touched her 
and the skin at the back of her neck, prickled. Impulsively she reached out and 
Touched—
—the image leapt at her; his memory of the girl, at sixteen or seventeen, 
standing in the sunlight on a beach somewhere in New York; wearing a pair of 
white shorts and nothing else, long black hair moving gently with the wind, and 
dominating the memory, the girl’s brilliant emerald eyes.
That’s how I looked when I was her age. That’s exactly how—
She became aware that she was staring at Bennett.
Bennett looked oddly embarrassed. “You remind me of someone I knew once. But 
she’s been dead for a long time.” His voice trailed off into wistfulness, and 
then he smiled at her with sudden genuine warmth. “You remind me of her, that’s 
all. A remarkable woman I once knew. Possibly the finest person I ever knew.” 
Bennett paused, and then said firmly, “We have never met.”
Denice nodded, thanked him for his time, went back to her room, and sat quietly. 
They had met before, and she knew where; knew of whom she reminded him.
The woman of whom he spoke so fondly was her mother, Jany McConnell. And Bennett 
Crandell thought he knew her because Bennett Crandell was not his name.
His name was Gary Auerbach and it had been at least fifteen years since Denice 
had seen him last.
He was a Peaceforcer.

It took Nicole Lovely and Chris Summers less than four hours to arrive.
There was a moment’s silence when Denice was done speaking.
Nicole Lovely’s features hardened, set into something resembling cast 
ferrocrete, into something that looked very much like the rugged features of the 
ex-PKF Elite sitting next to her. “You’re certain?”
Eyes fixed on the ugly blue shag rug in the office they had taken her to, Denice 
said softly, “No, ‘Selle Lovely. I am not entirely certain.” She could barely 
hear her own voice. The ex-Elite’s presence made her nervous. She had had 
biosculpture, but it had not been major; with her makeup key turned off she knew 
that she looked like an Asian version of her mother. And she did not doubt 
Summers remembered Jany McConnell at least as well as Bennett. “If he’s who I 
think, his name is Gary Auerbach.”
Summers’ thoughts were elsewhere, though. Summers said softly, “Auerbach. I knew 
him slightly; he was attached to Project Superman at the same time I was.”
Lovely said, “Would you recognize him?”
“After twenty years and a bout of biosculpture? Not likely.” The rogue Elite 
fixed a heavy, skeptical gaze on Denice. “ ‘Selle Daimara, you’ve been here, 
what, three days?”
“Four, sir.”
“And already you’ve uncovered a spy who’s eluded our detection for better than 
three years. I must admit I’m impressed.”
Denice met the cyborg’s hard, skeptical gaze without flinching. “He came to 
several of the shows I danced in when I was with Orinda Gleygavass, back in ‘69 
and ‘70. He was at five or six different performances of Leviathan.” It was 
simple truth; there was no need to tell them she did not remember Auerbach from 
those attendances, that she only knew he had been there because she had taken 
the memory from him. Her mouth was dry and she had trouble continuing. “He said 
I reminded him of a woman he used to know, but I think he was covering for 
having recognized me from when I danced. And I don’t know why he would need to 
do that, unless he’s who I think he is, who he was introduced to me as.” She 
spoke swiftly, staring at Chris Summers: “I don’t know his face but I recognize 
the voice.”
Chris Summers said heavily, “We have an option here. We can brain-drain him and 
see what we get.”
“It might damage him,” said Nicole Lovely mildly, watching Denice.
Denice Castanaveras took a deep breath. “The voice is the voice of Gary 
Auerbach. I think he’s a Peaceforcer.”

Sometime after 11:00 em., Christian Summers stopped by Denice’s room. He spoke 
as the door rolled aside for him. “Come with me,” he said brusquely.
“Where?”
“The basement.” Denice flipped her handheld off, tossed it on the bed, and 
followed him.
In the maglev on the way down, Summers said broodingly, “I drained him myself. I 
was as gentle as I could be, but he’s still a mess; I haven’t run a probe in 
twenty years.”
“I see.”
Summers was only a few centimeters taller than her, nonetheless he managed to 
look down at her when he said, “Blocks all over the place. You made a good 
call.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Summers looked at her without expression, then nodded. “Thank you.” The maglev 
doors curled open. “I always liked Bennett.”
Around midnight, down on Level Five, in an empty stone cellar, Denice waited 
with Nicole Lovely, Callia, and Chris Summers. Three men—Lan was one of them, 
Aguirre another, and the third a Reb Denice had not been introduced to—waited 
against one wall of the cellar, carrying laser rifles.
The cellar lacked glowpaint; fluorescent bars of lights hung from the ceiling. 
Several of them were burned out and the balance flickered as though they might 
go at any moment.
Bennett’s hands were snaked behind his back when they brought him in. Denice’s 
heart skipped a beat at the sight of him; he was still wearing the white coat in 
which he had examined Denice, and was plainly terrified. “What are you doing to 
me?”
Chris Summers said quietly, “You know.”
Crandell shot a quick, clearly pleading look at Denice, then back at Summers. 
“Chris, you’ve known me almost four years. I don’t know why you’re doing this, 
but if you’re trying to scare me, you’re succeeding.”
“Put him against the wall.” Nicole Lovely’s voice was steady and even. “Mister 
Auerbach, we are going to execute you. We are going to do it right now.” Bennett 
struggled, even with his hands snaked behind his back, as the two Rebs muscled 
him up against the wall. A shiver ran up Denice’s spine at the expression on 
Lovely’s face. “I am not trying to scare you and I’m not kidding. We know you 
haven’t gotten a message out of here since we’ve made you, we know you’re 
resistant to brain drain, and we know you won’t know anything worth torturing 
you for, or else we would. Listen to me.”
The crack of her voice penetrated his terror; he froze, then nodded jerkily.
Nicole Lovely said, “I am offering you the courtesy of a message to your family, 
if you wish one.”
Bennett—even now Denice could not stop thinking of him by that name—had to work 
to get the words out. “ ‘Selle Lovely, please. My family is dead. I lost them 
during the Troubles. The closest relative I have alive is somewhere in Germany; 
I haven’t seen him in twenty years.”
Chris Summers said quietly, “Bennett, do you want a blindfold?”
Bennett stared at him, trembling. His face twisted and he spat, “Fuck you.”
To the soldiers standing next to Crandell, Nicole Lovely said, “Stand away. 
Let’s do it.” The two men let go of Crandell and moved swiftly away. Lovely 
said, “Gentlemen.”
The three men standing against the wall opposite Crandell brought their rifles 
up. Bennett Crandell’s breath came fast and loud. Denice found her own breath 
coming quick, her heart pounding. His eyes were impossibly wide, all whites, and 
he looked around the room as though in supplication, looking for someone who 
might take his cause.
He stared for a brief moment at Denice.
The memory hit Denice like a sledgehammer: Lan moving beneath her, lips brushing 
across her nipples—
Chris Summers spoke in a completely dead voice. “He’s our man. I’ll do it.”
Nicole Lovely snapped, “Do it now.”
Christian J. Summers stood five meters away from Bennett Crandell and looked 
straight at the man and said, “Fire.”
Bennett Crandell’s legs folded beneath him.
The lasers took him across his face and upper body. Bennett screamed once, loud 
and wild, as the ionization corona from the lasers danced around him. Then the 
superheated air entered his lungs, and the scream died with the man.
Denice did not remember fainting.

“How do you feel?”
Denice held the edge of the toilet with one hand and vomited again. When she 
could speak she said violently, “Why do you keep asking me that?”
Callia Sierran said gently, “Because it matters.” She brushed a stray hair from 
Denice’s face; when her fingers touched Denice’s cheek, Denice felt nothing; no 
imagery, no thoughts, no touch of what Callia felt. “Don’t you think you’ve had 
enough to drink?”
Denice remembered her other hand, was distantly grateful to Callia for having 
reminded her of its contents. “No,” she said after a moment, “no, I don’t think 
so.” She let go of the edge of the toilet, sank back against the wall of the 
bathroom, and took a long swig of amber tequila directly from the neck of the 
bottle, used it to wash away the taste of vomit in her mouth. The tequila struck 
her empty, abused stomach like a firebomb; she closed her eyes and concentrated 
on keeping it down.
Callia settled to the floor of the bathroom next to her, sat back against the 
wall with her. “Okay. You can’t kill yourself with one bottle of tequila. I’ll 
wait with you.”
“I love being drunk,” said Denice after a bit. She floated in the warm darkness 
with her eyes closed, alone with herself and her thoughts, completely free, as 
she never was when sober, of the distant buzz of other people’s thoughts. “It 
turns the world off for a while. Makes things go away,” she said precisely.
She drank in the warm silence.
Callia Sierran said the wrong thing. “You did the right thing.”
Denice screamed at her, “Leave me alone!” She pushed herself to her feet, bottle 
clutched in one hand. “I didn’t ask you to come in here, I didn’t want you to.” 
Her voice broke and she was suddenly tired. “Go away, okay?”
Callia reached up, took Denice’s right arm just beneath the elbow, and gently 
pulled Denice back down to the floor of the bathroom with her. “You’re not going 
anywhere. If you vomit out in the bedroom I’m going to end up cleaning the rug. 
I’d rather not.”
“Oh.” That seemed reasonable to Denice; she nodded, and the bathroom swayed 
around her. “I’ll just… sit here, then,” she announced. She took another drink. 
“Callia?”
“Yes?”
Denice heard the drunken despair in her voice, felt a distant disgust for it. 
“If I did the right thing, how come I feel so bad?”
“It was a hard thing to do. That doesn’t make it wrong.” Callia brushed a tear 
off Denice’s cheek. “It’s okay to cry if you need to.”
Denice looked at Callia’s blurry image. “I am not crying.”
Callia smiled the saddest smile Denice had ever seen; Denice could not 
understand why the woman was so sad. “I didn’t say you were.” Callia put one 
hand behind Denice’s head, pulled Denice close and whispered, “You’re the 
toughest little thing I ever saw in my life. But it’s still okay to cry.”
Denice stared at Callia through her tears, and then suddenly leaned forward just 
a few centimeters and kissed her.
Callia pulled back, said sharply, “Stop that. This has nothing to do with me. It 
has nothing to do with anything except how you feel about what you’ve done.”
“How I feel?”
Callia’s voice gentled. “How do you feel?”
Denice blinked. “I don’t know. I don’t really think about that much.”
“I know.”
“I mean, what’s the point? You do what you have to do. That’s all.” It seemed to 
Denice that Callia must be considerably drunker than she; Callia’s form swayed 
back and forth in front of her eyes. “It doesn’t really matter how you feel 
about it, does it?”
Callia whispered, “It matters a lot.”
“Oh.” Denice upended the bottle, felt the last of the warm tequila empty out, 
and threw the bottle aside. She wiped her numb lips. “In that case I think I 
feel terrible.” She paused. “I think I’m going to be sick again.”
She was, violently, moments later. She was vaguely aware of Callia’s arms around 
her, holding her as she vomited. After the spasms stopped Callia gave her a 
glass of water and Denice drank it down in one shuddering gulp.
Denice leaned back against the wall, distantly surprised to find that she was 
once again within the circle of Callia’s arms. At first she found herself 
stiffening, and then relaxed with a conscious effort. They sat together on the 
floor of the bathroom, without speaking, for a long time. Denice closed her eyes 
and found herself drifting drunkenly, exhausted, aware of little in the world 
except the warm pressure of Callia’s arms around her, of Callia’s cheek touching 
her own.
“Who told you you had to be so strong?”
The question came without warning; Denice answered without thinking. “My father. 
The whole world was out to get him and he never backed down, never gave up. He 
told us we should be that way.” She was surprised to feel the sudden tightness 
at the back of her throat the thought of Carl brought her. She spoke through a 
gathering storm of tears. “It was the last thing he ever said to us, to me and 
my brother, to remember that we were stronger than everyone else. Better.”
“How old were you when he died?”
“Nine. I was—” Her voice broke, and Denice Castanaveras, fourteen years after 
her parents’ deaths, fourteen years after her life had vanished in a 
thermonuclear haze, fourteen years after the deaths of her friends and her 
family, whispered again, “Oh, God, I was nine,” and then, for the first time, 
cried for what she had lost, and for what she had become.
Lan knocked on the door as quietly as he was able. He barely heard Callia’s 
voice telling him to come in.
They were still in the bathroom, sitting together on the porcelain tile. Callia 
sat upright and motionless, posture as flawless as though she were on 
inspection, holding Denice.
Denice sat fast asleep, curled up into a ball inside the protection of Callia 
Sierran’s arms.
“How is she?”
“Passed out drunk. She’s going to have a hell of a hangover. I checked Bennett’s 
supplies; we have nothing for a hangover.”
“Didn’t think there was any alcohol in this dump. Where did she find it?”
“Tucked away in the kitchen.”
Lan nodded. “She surprises me.”
“Oh?” He had the sudden impression he had offended his sister. “Why?”
“I thought she was tougher than this.”
“She’s stronger than you’ll ever understand. Good people aren’t supposed to do 
what she did. It’s going to take her a while to get past that.”
“He was a Peaceforcer,” said Lan softly. “He deserved to die.”
“He was a good man,” Callia snapped, “doing what he believed was right. And 
Denice had him killed.” Callia looked away from him. “She has a conscience. 
Unlike some people.”
Lan stood abruptly, turned to leave. “I don’t need a conscience,” he muttered as 
he left. “I have a sister.”




DateLine: Shawmac on Retirement
« ^ » 
This is my last column.
As I sit here tonight in these, the last moments of my old life, I am forced to 
reflect upon a life filled with bitterness, cheap drugs and cheaper alcohol. 
Face it: writing doesn’t pay.
Even as I write, the syndicate that publishes my work, the people—make that the 
evil lying scumsucking backstabbing lawyers—at Mondo Cool, Inc., are busy trying 
to deprive me of the retirement benefits I’ve earned from twenty hard years of 
labor as a corporate slave, a stone blind geek whose writings have served with 
equal vigor the twin gods of profit and pernicious excess.
They got the profit, of course. Over the course of the years, better than eighty 
percent of the income from DateLine has been gobbled up by those sleazy, 
profiteering hacks in Redmond, those sordid Satans in eyeshades.
Some have suggested that I’m feeling sorry for myself.
Damn straight.
Twenty years today.
I should have known better, back when I started. So yes, I was innocent. 
Virginal, perhaps. And the lawyers at Mondo Cool Syndicated strung me up and 
hung me out to dry, spread my bleeding skin across their walls, salted me down 
and tied me to a contract no sane writer would ever have accepted, ruined my 
life for twenty years, left me with nothing but the sexual favors of my fans as 
recompense, and then cried crocodile tears all the way to the bank over my pain 
and agony.
And did their perfidy stop there? Did it?
Well, yes. Believe me, nobody is more shocked than I am. It’s so unlike them.
As of today, from this instant forward, I write when I want to, as I want to, on 
my terms.
But first I have to save the world, with this sensable script I wrote—
Maybe I’ll be back.




- 9 -
« ^ » 
Thursday, May 28, near 5:00 em., Nicole Eris Lovely sent for Denice.
Denice was told to bring her handheld.
Lovely received Denice inside the farmhouse proper, above ground, in the living 
room. The furniture was old American colonial; Lovely sat in a rocking chair, 
and Domino Terrencia stood immediately behind her, one hand resting on the back 
of the rocking chair. Nicole gestured Denice to a straight-backed chair placed 
with its back to the window, and said, “Please sit.”
Bay windows let out on a view of the rows of corn, still bright with the day’s 
last sunlight. Denice seated herself, said mildly, “I wondered why corn was such 
a staple in the cafeteria.”
“How do you feel?”
In fact Denice still felt somewhat shaky, but nothing could possibly have 
brought her to share that with the dry old woman watching her. “I’m—fine, 
ma’am.” She did not know why she said it: “A slight tickling sensation in the 
back of my head.”
Domino Terrencia lifted an eyebrow.
Lovely said, “You’re not hung over?”
Denice said evenly, “No, ma’am.”
“Good. I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” the older woman continued. “You’ve 
made quite an impression on all of us in your short time here.”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
“You don’t have to say anything, it’s merely an observation. I’ve been trying to 
decide what to do with you.”
“Callia didn’t think that would be a problem.”
Lovely smiled thinly. “Callia is a charming girl. But I don’t suppose she’s read 
more than a hundred psychometric profiles in her life; I’ve averaged ten a day 
for the last forty years. I never do business without one. Yours was compiled 
from your responses during your interview with Callia, and as I say, it concerns 
me. You’re in love with your former employer.”
Denice did not deny it. “That does not affect my opinions concerning the 
Unification itself, or the nature of my commitment here.”
“Your loyalty indices are incredibly high. Normally I find that an excellent 
sign; in your case, though, your loyalties are split in far too many directions. 
Ripper, your instructor Robert Yo, your friend Jimmy Ramirez, and who knows how 
many others. I will be blunt; I am inclined, ‘Selle Daimara, to put you in front 
of a firing squad.”
A sniper behind me. Denice said softly, “Let’s cut this short, shall we? If you 
thought you could get away with doing that, you’d have done it rather than open 
this conversation by threatening me with it. If you think that threatening me is 
going to make me do something foolish, give your sniper an excuse to take me 
out, you’re wrong about that too.”
Domino, standing behind Lovely, grew very still.
“It was a gamble,” Lovely agreed. “Your profile is that of a dangerously 
unbalanced woman, Selle Daimara. You’re barely in control of your passions most 
of the time, and I deeply distrust such people.”
“You mean you distrust all passion. ‘All men dream: but not equally. Those who 
dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that 
it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act 
their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.’ ” Denice smiled, said quietly, 
“You are a woman of dusty dreams, ‘Selle Lovely.”
“You’ll get along well with Obodi. He talks your language.”
Denice did not miss the implication. “I’m going to Los Angeles?”
“Auerbach was scheduled to leave for Los Angeles in two days. We believe that he 
did not know where he was going when he was sent here, but we may be incorrect; 
between now and Saturday morning we’re going to abandon this facility. You’re 
leaving now because I want you away from here when we evacuate. Your friend 
Ramirez is waiting for you down at the garage; I’m sending you to Los Angeles 
with him, Lan, and Callia.”
Denice stood. “Very good.”
“ ‘Selle Daimara. Look at me.” The old woman locked eyes with Denice, spoke 
without anger, without any particular show of emotion. “ ‘Sieur Obodi requested 
that you be sent to Los Angeles. He requested you by name. Ramirez vouched for 
you, said he’s known you for seven years and that you are a woman who makes and 
keeps commitments. Ring recommended, in language it generally reserves for those 
actions needed to deal with the worst sorts of crises, that you be sent to 
Obodi.”
“So?”
“I have no reason to believe you are anything but what and who you say you are. 
But people who attract attention to themselves concern me. A woman who has 
switched allegiances once will do it again. And a woman who describes herself, 
in all seriousness, as a dreamer of the day, is a woman I am unable to trust. If 
anything odd comes to light where you are concerned, no matter how trivial, I 
will have you executed.”
Denice stood looking down at the old woman, distantly aware of the easy smile 
curving her lips. The sniper was in the corn, at least sixty meters away. In the 
time it took him to realize that she was moving, to pull the trigger, Nicole 
Lovely could be dead, and Domino would not take much longer. Denice leaned 
forward, said, “I haven’t even seen your psychometric profile; but I think I 
know you better than you know me. You’ve always been scared of Ring and you’re 
more scared of Obodi. You’re out of your depth and you know it. And the thing 
that scares you the worst about me is the thought that maybe what you can’t deal 
with, I can. You’re so scared you stink of it.” Denice bent forward, brought her 
face close to Nicole Lovely’s, and said, “Stay that way.”
Nicole Eris Lovely whispered, “Don’t try me, girl.” Denice straightened, glanced 
at Domino, turned her back on both of them, and walked out.
It occurred to her on her way down to the garage that her father, an absolute 
master of the high-stakes face-off, could not have handled Nicole Lovely much 
better.
I am my father’s child, she thought to herself, and the thought filled her with 
a degree of self-assurance that surprised her.

The car flew westward through the night.
Lan and Callia sat together in the front seat; Denice sat in back with Jimmy 
Ramirez. The canopy was tinted black all around; it was impossible to see out. 
Jimmy had raised a barrier between the front and back seats, so that Lan and 
Callia could not hear their conversation.
To Denice’s cold horror, she found that Jimmy Ramirez believed Obodi’s story. 
“He’s human,” said Jimmy Ramirez simply. “He’s as human as anyone could be. He’s 
just not from the Earth. We’re not. We’re the children of the exiles, of the 
people who were imprisoned here fifty thousand years ago.”
Denice sat through the initial rush of Jimmy’s explanation; she sensed that he 
had been wanting, perhaps since his initial meeting with the man, to speak about 
Sedon with someone he trusted. She spoke quietly and carefully. “Jimmy, do you 
know anything about genetics?”
It stopped him cold. “No, not really. Not as much as you, I’m sure. Why?”
“There’s only a two-percent difference in the genetic code of humans and apes. 
Did you know that?”
“No. And I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“You know the moss that was found on Titan?”
“Yes.”
The point was one that Ring had made for her; nonetheless it made sense to her, 
and she did not hesitate to present it as her own. “That moss doesn’t use DNA, 
Jimmy. It doesn’t use any of the same base of amino acids that we use, and 
there’s no particular reason it should. There are hundreds of amino acids that 
would work as well as the ones that, by chance, ended up composing the DNA of 
plants and animals on Earth. The chance that alien genetic material would have 
anything in common with that of plants and animals on Earth is so unlikely it’s 
flat plain impossible.”
“I’m sorry,” said Jimmy slowly, “maybe I’m stupid. So?”
“This Obodi, he’s human, right? No question about it. Jimmy, humans evolved on 
Earth. Not anywhere else. Life that evolved elsewhere would be so different from 
us that it couldn’t even eat our food without being poisoned. The chance that 
humans evolved elsewhere independently, and then came here—there is no chance 
that that happened.”
Jimmy was well educated, better educated in most ways than she was; she saw the 
argument sink home. Finally he shook his head, said simply, “Maybe you’re right. 
Maybe.” He grinned at her then, said, “But wait until you meet him. Read his 
mind and see what you think, and then you tell me. Denice, he’s real.”
Denice said softly, “Okay.”
“Denice?”
“Yes?”
“We can use you. But that’s not why I’m glad you’re with us.”
Denice turned in her seat, hugged Jimmy suddenly and fiercely, and whispered 
into his ear, “Thank you, Jimmy. Thank you very much.”
After a bit Jimmy said, “You can let go now.” He sank back in his seat and 
straightened his coat and tie. “I know you’re stronger than I am,” he said a 
moment later, “but you don’t need to make a point of it by bruising my ribs.”
“You used to be stronger than me. You’re out of shape these, days.”
“I’m a lawyer, not a boxer. And even when I was stronger than you, I couldn’t 
have taken you if my life had depended on it.” Ramirez shrugged. “Muscles aren’t 
everything.”
Denice nodded, let herself relax against him. True enough.
She had slept less than eight hours in the prior two and a half days; not long 
after that she closed her eyes, relaxed into the vibration of the flying car, 
and went to sleep with her head on Jimmy Ramirez’s shoulder.

Some two hundred troops in gray PKF combat fatigues, mostly men, were encamped 
in a ragged semicircle stretching across most of a kilometer of hillside in the 
Santa Monica Mountains. The circle of troops faced a small collection of 
buildings, inside a walled enclosure, across a distance of perhaps two hundred 
meters.
“Bad timing,” said Jimmy as they stepped out of the car into the gray, early 
morning light. Denice glanced over at Lan and Callia; they looked every bit as 
much at a loss as she felt. “Let’s let them get their work done, and then we’ll 
introduce you around. For now, keep your mouths shut.”
The car had landed at a rough downlot near the edge of the encampment. Mist 
still crawled over the campsite, slightly obscured the view of the building the 
troops were arrayed against.
A table had been set up at the edge of the downlot, bearing doughnuts, bagels, 
coffee, and fruit juices. A half dozen men and women in civilian clothing stood 
near the table, eating, drinking, and talking in quiet voices.
A pair of PKF AeroSmiths hovered overhead.
Jimmy gestured to a row of small folding chairs set up near the table. “Have a 
seat. I’ll be right back.”
Lan looked around helplessly after Jimmy had gone. “Great. Who wants orange 
juice?”
Callia shrugged. “I do. Denice?”
“Sure.”
They walked over to the refreshments table together. Callia said, “This seems 
very familiar to me.”
Lan nodded, pouring. “Me too.”
Denice shook her head. “Not me.” She had taken one sip of the juice when the 
firefight began.
Laser light stabbed downhill toward the massed ranks of the PKF soldiers. From 
the PKF positions, artillery fire responded, an awesome barrage of shelling that 
blew down a huge section of the wall surrounding the small enclave. A wave of 
gray-clad foot soldiers surged forward, running through the early morning mist 
toward the enclave’s smoldering structures. Laser light reached out from the 
windows and doorways of the now-exposed buildings, a ragged response to the PKF 
shelling.
Denice stood with a paper cup full of orange juice in one hand and watched the 
assault.
The PKF troops reached the edge of the enclosure and paused to regroup. A huge, 
booming voice, enormously amplified, called out in a strong, vaguely Latin 
accent, “YOU HAVE ONE LAST OPPORTUNITY TO THROW DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND SURRENDER. 
YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS TO DECIDE.”
“That’s right,” said Callia to no one in particular. “They’d already fried the 
President, and they wanted to take the Speaker of the House alive.”
“They waited twenty seconds before they went in,” said Lan.
Denice was not counting; nonetheless she thought Lan was probably correct. About 
twenty seconds had passed when the PKF troops crossed over the broken stretch of 
wall and into the door-to-door fighting that had marked the Unification’s 
conquest of the Camden Protectorate, in the last significant battle of the 
Unification War.
Perhaps sixty seconds after the final wave of the assault had begun, a hugely 
amplified voice boomed down out of the sky: “CUT!”
Jimmy shrugged. “The extras are all Rebs. We’ve got a couple of Claw playing 
officers, and another couple of Claw in the production crew. The second unit 
director, Joe Tagomi, is handling all of the action scenes; he’s a Reb, ex-Space 
Force, one of our best combat people. The building they’re attacking is, by an 
odd coincidence, laid out in very nearly the fashion of the PKF barracks that 
exists, today, in Los Angeles.”

Callia said flatly, “This is the craziest thing I ever heard of.”
Denice blinked.
Jimmy looked at Callia without expression. They were seated out in the open 
about forty meters away from the trailer where the second unit director sat with 
a full sensory traceset covering most of his skull, working through the 
morning’s rushes. “Is it? We needed a place to train. Somewhere outside, in 
terrain at least something like the terrain in which we’re going to be fighting. 
Chris Summers recommended the Santa Monica Mountains, and we did a complete risk 
analysis before we started. We’re actually shooting a sensable. Terry Shawmac 
wrote the script, Adam Selstrom agreed to play Jules Moreau. Shawmac knows what 
we’re doing—he had to, to craft the script in such a way that we would get the 
training results we needed. Selstrom doesn’t. Most of the balance of the crew 
are sympathizers, supporting members of the Reb, a few Claw who we don’t think 
the PKF have ever made. The sets aren’t historically accurate, but the PKF don’t 
care about that; that we’re shooting a pro-Unification sensable during the 
TriCentennial made them very happy. Licensing was a Cakewalk; Unification 
officials have been so cooperative with us I barely know how to describe it. 
It’s more than a little eerie.”
Callia shook her head. “I don’t like it. This is very risky. Was Nicole 
consulted on this?”
Jimmy looked at her. “ ‘Selle Sierran, I honestly don’t know. That’s a matter 
between ‘Selle Lovely and Obodi. Lovely will be in Los Angeles again in two 
days; most of the evacuation is going to end up here on this set, for training. 
You can ask Lovely when she gets here whether she was consulted. But if you can 
think of any way other than the one we chose to give our people some remarkably 
genuine combat experience prior to July Fourth, I’d love to hear it. We have 
Unification spysats hovering overhead right now that take pictures so sharp they 
can see if your makeup key is detuned. But they’re not watching us; they know 
who we are.” He shrugged. “Good Germans, making a pro-Unification sensable.”
Lan and Callia left, Denice did not know where to, at mid-morning. To her 
surprise, Denice found herself left more or less to her own devices for the rest 
of that day. Jimmy vanished on unspecified business after lunch, left in an 
obvious hurry after telling her to listen to anybody who wanted to talk to her, 
but to tell them nothing about herself. “You’ll be here about two weeks, I 
think; we have a job in mind for you, but I think it needs to get cleared before 
I tell you any more about it.”
Denice raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
They were alone, nobody else within hearing distance. Nonetheless Jimmy dropped 
his voice. “My job is to tell people what they need to know, when they need to 
know it. That’s difficult with you, obviously.”
“Jimmy, I don’t Touch people when I don’t have to. I especially don’t do it to 
my friends.” She paused. “When do I get to meet ‘Sieur Obodi?”
“When he sends for you. Probably,” said Jimmy, “very soon.” He kissed her on the 
forehead quickly, said, “I’ll be back.”

“Sixty.”
The man standing next to Denice in the cloudy sunshine, at the edge of a long 
bluff overlooking a deep ravine, was rawboned and moderately ugly. He had the 
wide shoulders of a pro football player, and the lanky frame of a pro basketball 
player. A cigarette holder, lit cigarette smoldering at its tip, dangled from 
his lips.
A pair of incredibly dark, round granny sunglasses protected his eyes from the 
hazy sun.
He wore a Beijing Bears windbreaker and a Los Angeles Lakers cap.
Denice thought he had recognized her, but had not bothered to ask.
“I’ve been having a surreal life,” said Denice, “recently.”
Three empty bottles of Tytan smoke whiskey littered the ground around him. In 
his left hand he held a fourth bottle, and in his right he held a small round 
object with a red 49s flickering on its surface. 48s.
A crate full of the small round objects sat on the ground at his feet.
“Me too,” said Terry Shawmac. “Forty-five.”
“I keep having this dream. Do you want to hear about it?”
“Not particularly. I think,” said Shawmac carefully, “that today I want to blow 
things up.”
“I’m standing in this empty black place—”
“An editor’s office? Why would you dream about standing in an editor’s office?” 
Shawmac paused. “Fifteen.”
“—and there’s this flame that comes out of nowhere and dances around me, and 
it’s the best thing I’ve ever felt in my life. What’s that you’re holding?”
“A hand grenade. Which goes off in—” In one smooth motion Shawmac pitched the 
grenade over the edge of the bluff and shrieked, “Duck!”
Shawmac threw himself down, being careful of the bottle in his hand.
Denice took one step backward.
A moment later the hand grenade exploded with a muffled whump. Fragments of 
metal and clods of earth exploded upward into the sky.
From where he lay on the ground, Shawmac said, “I’m the explosives master on 
this sensable. For the effects.”
“Really.”
Shawmac rolled over on his back, lay staring up at the sky. He had avoided 
crushing the cigarette at the end of his holder, and he puffed on it before 
speaking. “They wanted someone else. But they wanted my script.”
“So that’s why you quit your column?”
“I didn’t quit,” he snarled. “I retired.”
“Quit, retired. Big difference.”
“It’s an immense difference,” Shawmac muttered petulantly. “When you quit you 
don’t get your pension.” Loudly, he said, “They wanted my script.”
“You said that.”
“But they wanted this other guy to do the explosives. Some deserting Space Force 
punk.”
“Really.”
“So we compromised. Other guy got the title, you understand. The credit. But 
they gave me a bunch of hand grenades to play with.” Shawmac took a long drink 
and shrugged. Denice thought shrugging must be a difficult thing to do while 
lying down on the ground. “It seemed fair.”
“My life has been very surreal recently, I think I said that.”
“You did.”
“You’re not helping.”
“We all have problems,” Shawmac agreed. “I’m having the odd reality lapse myself 
today. This big ol’ son of a bitch with a long white beard is sitting in the 
grass over there, you just walked through him, and he’s got a shoebox, and in 
the shoebox are the dice. So he shakes the box back and forth, real fast, so the 
dice never quite get a chance to land, and the cover is on the shoebox anyway so 
you can’t see inside.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Physics, dear.” Terry Shawmac stared at her with his granny sunglasses. “The 
state of physics today. Want a drink?”
“Not if it’s going to make me see big ol’ sons of bitches with shoeboxes, no.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But you won’t know till you’ve had a drink, will you? What do 
you like?”
Denice shivered. “Anything but tequila.”
“I have eight bottles of Tytan smoke left.” Shawmac paused.
“Maybe seven. I drank something last night and I don’t remember what it was.” He 
squinted at the bottle in his hand. “This one is the only one I have left with 
me. Here, at this location. If I want more I have to go back to my trailer.”
Denice sat down next to Shawmac, refused his gestured offer of the bottle. 
“Since you’re here, I was wondering if I could ask you some questions.”
“I charge. Want to throw a grenade?”
“No.”
“You should try it,” said Shawmac earnestly. “God, I love explosives. Sometimes 
when a really big one goes I can get my rocks off.” He sat up suddenly, Said 
grimly, “That’s not the sort of thing a man likes to have known about him, not 
in public. If this gets out I’ll know where to go.”
“Who would I share it with?”
“Okay, good point. Questions? What sort? If it’s anything about that bitch 
Ichabod, don’t even start.”
Denice blinked. “You do remember me.”
“We met at a dinner, I forget where. You’re one of Ripper’s little girlfriends 
with muscles. He seems to like those.” Shawmac sucked back another hit of 
whiskey, swirled it around in his mouth before swallowing. “Denice.”
“I’m impressed. You were drunk as a Peaceforcer on payday that night.”
“I’m always drunk. Reputation, you know. It’s gotten easier to handle as I’ve 
gotten older, had more practice.” Shawmac whipped his sunglasses off, fixed 
Denice with an even, icy stare. “When I was a boy, hangovers were serious. They 
weren’t some punk inconvenience that some little transform virus floating around 
in your bloodstream stomped down before you even got a headache. Oh, Brave New 
World. You don’t recognize the reference, do you?”
Denice said, “No.”
Shawmac whipped his sunglasses back on. “Look it up. Why should I be the only 
educated person left in the whole damn System?” He smiled at her then, became, 
with a mood switch as sudden as the touching of a pressure point, the charming 
lecturer she had seen on the Boards. He picked up another hand grenade suddenly, 
rubbed a thumb over the fuse. A bright red 60s appeared on the surface of the 
bulb. 59s. “What can I do for you, dear?”
“I need advice, ‘Sieur Shawmac.”
Shawmac said with instant paranoia, “You’re not like the others, are you?”
“Not really.”
“You’re a real person. With a heart. And blood, and intestines. Would you like 
to be my friend?”
Denice took a deep breath. “Mister Shawmac, I’m curious about something, and I 
know you’ve written on more different subjects than anyone else I’ve ever read. 
What I want to know is—is it at all possible that there was another civilization 
before ours? Or that the human race evolved on another planet?”
Shawmac looked at her curiously, holding the bulb of blasting plastic while the 
fuse counted down. 12s. “What?”
“Is it—look, could you throw that?”
“Huh? Oh, sure.” The fuse had counted down to 5s; Shawmac seemed startled to 
realize he was still holding it. He tossed it backward, over his shoulder. This 
time it nearly reached the ground before exploding; it was nowhere near as loud 
as the previous grenade. “Sorry about that,” said Shawmac. “Where were we?”
“It’s just I can’t think clearly when you do that. It makes me nervous.”
“I’ll stop.” Shawmac unsealed his blazer, reached inside for his handheld. “Like 
Atlantis or something?”
Denice nodded. “I’ve heard stories about ‘Sieur Obodi that are very odd.”
“He ran the same cruel, relentless line on me. The one about how he was exiled 
from another planet, and got trapped in a slowtime bubble, and we’re all the 
long-lost descendants of him and his fellow exiles. All that shit.” Shawmac 
shrugged, flipping the handheld open. FrancoDEC, Denice noted, the same model as 
the crippled handhelds the rebel soldiers had been given. “I was toasted when we 
talked, it sounded reasonable. I agreed with him and he sent me away after a 
while. I don’t think he knew what to make of me.”
“Do you think he could be telling the truth?”
“Not a chance in hell. The man’s a sick and demented pig, is what I think.” Data 
scrolled up through the handheld’s holofield. “Here we go. Okay, listen: Middle 
Paleolithic period began about three hundred thousand years ago and lasted until 
about thirty thousand years ago. People of this period made flake tools by 
striking thin sharp flakes from large stones. Upper Paleolithic started about 
thirty thousand years ago and lasted until about ten thousand years ago, when 
the last Ice Age ended. What do we have to work with—blade tools, stone hammers, 
punches, chisels, scrapers, drills. It says that they boiled things in bark or 
skin containers.” Shawmac glanced up from the field. “Odds are that nobody was 
building slowtime fields back then.”
“Odds are?”
Shawmac snorted. “That’s sarcasm. Nobody was building slowtime fields, okay? 
Wasn’t happening. If the sort of industrial infrastructure had existed back then 
that would have been required for something like this, there would be an 
extensive fossil record. You couldn’t turn around without tripping over the 
shell of somebody’s spacescraper.”
“So there was no civilization on Earth. How about Obodi’s claim that he was 
exiled here from somewhere else? I already heard one argument that makes that 
sound pretty damn unlikely.”
Shawmac flipped his handheld shut. “Genetics? Yeah. Humans evolved on Earth. 
Period, end of discussion. That’s not to say that there’s not people out there; 
the probe to Tau Ceti, back in ‘69, showed that pretty clearly. And they know 
we’re here, too; the probe came in off the ecliptic, to throw off the scent in 
case the aliens were bad guys. Direct backtracking of the probe’s trajectory 
wouldn’t do them much good. Paranoid, but that’s Space Force for you. Silly, 
too. We’ve been sending out radio signals, and then television, since the 1930s 
or thereabouts. Everything from I Love Lucy to Belter kiddie porn.” Shawmac 
grinned cynically at Denice. “But Obodi’s human, which means he was born here, 
on Earth. Probably in Tulsa or Cleveland, somewhere like that. If I was Obodi, 
I’d tell people I was an alien in disguise, come to recruit humanity into the 
Galactic Empire. It’s still stupid, but it’s less full of obviously idiotic 
contradictions than the story he picked.”
Denice said quietly, “You speak very clearly for somebody who’s had so much to 
drink.”
“Transform virus,” Shawmac muttered after a moment. “Scavenges alcohol out of my 
system pretty fast, doesn’t let me get too drunk. The Rebs made me take an 
injection before I came. If I keep drinking, I get a nice glow and I stay there. 
The injection will wear off. Soon I hope.”
“I see.”
“We all make sacrifices for the cause. This is mine.”
“This is a sacrifice?”
Shawmac spoke with mild, drunken seriousness, in a voice grown suddenly 
intimate. “Oh, yes. When I drink, I don’t think about that cunt Ichabod, about 
how he screwed me over, wasted my time and lied to me about being in love with 
me.” Very reasonably, he added, “I’ve been remembering him a lot since I got 
here. Whenever I’m not drunk. Or working. Things were nice with Ichabod at 
first.”
“I know.”
“I thought it was going to last.”
“So did he.”
Shawmac whipped his sunglasses off like Clark Kent becoming Superman, fixed her 
with an impressive glare. “I will never forget how he left me.”
“Did he leave you?”
Shawmac’s glare defocused; he looked blankly at a spot off somewhere to Denice’s 
right. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “I would have worked on it. He didn’t want 
to.”
“It’s important to remember,” Denice said softly. “But it’s more important to 
forgive.”
“Should everything be forgiven? Has no one ever done something to you that was 
such a betrayal, did such violence to your trust, that you could not forgive 
him?”
“You can be very eloquent when you put your mind to it.”
Shawmac sighed, seemed suddenly not very drunk at all. “I’m a writer. It’s my 
damn job.” He took a swig from the bottle, emptying it. “A retired writer,” he 
said with sudden cheerfulness. “It used to be my job.” He smiled at her and 
looked carefully at the bottle. “Definitely empty. This conversation,” said 
Terry Shawmac happily, “is ended.”
Denice rose. “Okay. Can I ask you one last question?”
“I charge. I know I told you that.”
“Can you call out on that handheld?”
Shawmac blinked. “Of course.”
“Trade with me. This handheld doesn’t call out; you’ll need to remember not to 
try calling from it. Also, you’ll need to forget that we made this trade.”
Terry Shawmac blinked again. And then again. He seemed to have difficulty 
focusing his eyes. “Um. Well,” he said after a long blank moment, “that seems 
reasonable.”
Denice smiled at him.
After Shawmac had left, Denice hesitated just a moment, and then punched in 
113102-KMET on his handheld. She licked lips that had gone suddenly dry, and 
said, “Ralf?”

She had had the impression that Jimmy intended to return for her the same day; 
she did not know what had prevented it. She could think of no reason that he 
would have left her unattended as he had.
The man in charge of the Reb soldiers, the second unit director, was a humorless 
Japanese-American named Joe Tagomi. Tagomi was coldly furious upon learning that 
Denice had been allowed to wander the location for most of a day without 
supervision. “Your name is Daimara?”
“Yes.”
“From now on you’re a soldier. You take orders from anybody who gives you one. 
Until I hear otherwise, and so far I haven’t, you have no rank and no standing.”
No response had seemed required of her; Denice did not give him one. Tagomi 
handed her over to a squad leader and headed back to his trailer.
It was not until later that evening, lying in the large trailer on the bunk bed 
she had been assigned, that Denice realized what it was that disturbed her about 
Tagomi. He moved wrong. Walking away from her, he had held himself as though 
monocrystal rods connected his hips to his shoulders.
It was the way Peaceforcers Elite moved.

Denice spent most of a week on location with the sensable crew.
They shot the attack on the Camdem Protectorate four more times during the next 
six days, shooting at six o’clock every morning. The Reb troops rotated out in 
squads; where they went, and where they came from, Denice did not know. A bare 
few of the new troops she recognized from Iowa; the rest were complete 
strangers. Her second day on site, Denice found her self assigned to play an 
extra; with the others in her squad, carrying a dummy laser rifle weighted and 
balanced to resemble the one Callia Sierran had demonstrated, wearing the gray 
PKF combat uniform, she stormed up the hillside toward the encampment where the 
tattered remains of the United States Army awaited them.
At night, the soldiers, Reb and Claw alike, were housed in a long row of 
trailers and tents. Denice slept in a trailer with a dozen other women. She was 
never alone except in the portable bathrooms, and she assumed those were bugged. 
After the first day, when Jimmy Ramirez was called away without warning, Denice 
was kept under moderately strict supervision, as were all the rebel soldiers.
They skipped shooting Sunday morning; about eighty percent of the Rebs were 
Christian, and many of the balance were Erisians, who had no set day of worship 
and were willing to use Sunday if that was what was available.
There were, to Denice’s considerable surprise, six Wiccans, four women and two 
men. She considered joining them briefly, Saturday night, when they held 
ceremony together, but decided against it after a genuine internal struggle. It 
surprised her, the suddenness and strength of her longing to participate in 
their ceremony; until that moment she had not known how badly she missed her 
life at Goddess Home.
Lying alone in her bunk on Saturday night, she realized that in the last year 
she had had no spiritual life to speak of, realized with a certain genuine pain 
that she had not, since meeting Douglass Ripper, spent much time at all 
examining the state of her soul.
She closed her eyes, and with an effort, went to sleep.
If she dreamed, she did not remember it.
She awoke Sunday morning feeling as though her heart would break.

Monday afternoon, June 1, they shot a scene in which Jules Moreau led over two 
hundred PKF troops into pitched battle with an equal number of Johnny Rebs. For 
that scene Denice ended up in a Reb uniform covered with photosensitive patches.
Earphones were passed out ahead of time.
Denice was not certain, but she suspected the historicity of the scene; she did 
not think Moreau had ever actually led troops in battle.
The officer who briefed them made it short. “This will be as realistic as 
possible. Your rifles will fire a low-power beam; if a beam touches your 
uniform, you’ll be informed via earphone that you’ve been wounded or killed, 
depending on the location of the beam hit. If the beam gets you in the eye, 
close your eyes pretty quick and you’ll be okay. You’ll probably be ‘killed’ if 
you get touched at all; PKF beams are pumped pretty high. If you succeed in 
closing with the enemy, that’s it for the exercise; we don’t want you initiating 
hand-to-hand with your comrades. In the real world, if you ever end up fighting 
hand-to-hand against trained Peaceforcers, all but a very few of you are going 
to be dead meat anyway. Questions?”
“What do we do if we get killed?”
“Die. Lie down and stay still. If you’re wounded, continue fighting; get wounded 
twice and you’ll be notified that you’re dead.”
Denice spent most of that afternoon lying flat on her back in the hot summer 
sun, dead from a PKF laser, trying to remember what she was doing there in the 
first place.
They shot the sequence three times.
The first time through Denice died early on, and fell with perhaps half a dozen 
other rebel soldiers near her. In the second wave, she died even more quickly, 
within seconds after the PKF forces began firing at them.
It struck her, as she lay there on the hot grass for the second time, that the 
entire exercise, however helpful it might have been in preparing the rebels for 
combat, was very bad psychology. Two out of three rebels died in each of the 
attacks; Denice thought that the numbers must have some sort of effect on the 
confidence of the rebels when they finally faced real PKF.
It occurred to her that she did not think much of what she had seen of the rebel 
leadership, Johnny Reb or Erisian Claw.
The last time through the sequence, Denice killed two Peaceforcers while 
advancing, and lasted halfway across the open field before being killed.
Where she fell there were no other corpses around her for better than twenty 
meters in any direction. She shifted slightly, as though moving to become more 
comfortable, and turned Ferry Shawmac’s handheld on. “Ralf?”
The handheld hung inside her coat; Ralf’s voice issued from the handheld 
instantly, slightly muffled. “Hello.”
“Speak quietly.”
“Some news. I have uncovered an interesting datum; the Bank of America Building 
was owned and managed by the Shuwa Corporation of Japan for over eight decades; 
several years ago they sold the building and related properties to a holding 
group that, as it turns out, is owned by Mitsubishi of Japan. They did this at 
the same time that the law firm of Greenberg and Bass leased office space in 
that building. It seems clear that there is a strong relationship with the 
Japanese among the Rebs, extending considerably beyond Christian Summers’s 
relationship with Mitsubishi Electronics. Beyond that, all is as it was. The 
last sighting I have of Jimmy Ramirez came as he landed atop the Bank of America 
Building in downy town Los Angeles. I have been planting avatars throughout 
local data structures, and polling them for information; to date this has not 
proven useful. I have had to be very careful; system security in the Bank of 
America Building is extremely good, the work of either a Player of the highest 
caliber, or a replicant AI.”
“Ring?”
“I am unable to say. It is certainly a high-order possibility.”
“Ralf, find out what you can about a man named Joe Tagomi. A Reb; he’s ex-Space 
Force, apparently; but he moves like an Elite.”
“A spy?”
Denice said, “I don’t think so.”

Wednesday afternoon Jimmy Ramirez came for her.
He seemed nervous. He spoke as Denice was getting into the AeroSmith VTL in 
which he had arrived. “ ‘Sieur Obodi wants to see you.”
Denice nodded. “I’ve been wondering what happened to you.”
Jimmy spoke as the AeroSmith lifted, before Denice had even seated herself. The 
takeoff pushed her down into the seat. “Obodi called me back, alone. We had a 
problem we had to deal with and he didn’t want you there for it. Listen.” He 
spoke intensely, looking into Denice’s eyes. “Last night Obodi asked me to tell 
him everything I knew about you. Everything,”
“Did you?”
Jimmy shook his head rapidly. “No. I didn’t. I told him about your dance 
background, about your martial arts background, I told him about the fact that 
you were Trent’s lover, that Trent had stayed in some kind of contact with you, 
sent you letters.” He took a deep breath. “I didn’t tell him you were a genie, I 
didn’t tell him you were a Castanaveras.”
Denice said quietly, “Why are you afraid, Jimmy?”
It touched a raw nerve; she saw the muscles in his shoulders tense, and his 
answer was pure street. “I’m not!” he snapped. “But the man is dangerous, 
Denice. You fuck up, say one wrong thing and he’s going to kill you and he’s 
probably going to kill me.”
“Why?”
“He doesn’t know who you are and he doesn’t know what you are.” Jimmy looked out 
the window, at what Denice had no idea. “But he knows I lied to him when he 
asked about you.”
“How could he?”
Jimmy shivered visibly. “He knows I lied to him.”

The sun was setting when the AeroSmith landed atop the Bank of America Building.
Terry Shawmac’s handheld, tucked inside Denice’s fatigues, was closed but turned 
on, tuned to a band Ralf the Wise and Powerful had selected. It was not actually 
broadcasting; given the security inside the Bank of America Building, Denice did 
not think she would have more than one chance to broadcast from it, if that.
Denice was not even slightly amused by the parking sign on the downlot; she had 
lived in Sunland, at the edge of TransCon-free Los Angeles, for three years, and 
she had seen the sign before.
They were slowscanned as they entered the maglev. A pair of guards in blue 
Security Services uniforms ran the slowscan.
Denice noticed the bulge of a weapon tucked inside Jimmy’s suit. The guards made 
no mention of it; one of them gestured at her handheld, a glowing solid mass in 
the slowscan holo. “May I see that?”
Denice handed it over.
Jimmy said impatiently, “It’s Company issue, she got it at the Iowa branch. 
We’re in a hurry, guys; Obodi is waiting for us.”
The Security Services guard turned the handheld over and over in his hands; 
looking for what, Denice had no idea. He was clearly uneasy. Finally he passed 
the handheld back, and waved them through.
The maglev sank down toward the forty-sixth floor.
At the forty-sixth floor the doors curled open upon a long lobby. The lobby was 
decorated in an archaic style from sometime in the prior century; walls with 
wood or pseudowood paneling, plants in pots at various points around the lobby. 
A flat panel of windows at the north end of the lobby, reaching from floor to 
ceiling, looked out toward the Hollywood Hills. The waiting area near the 
windows was laid out with pale blond furniture.
The north end of the city lay beneath them, orange in the last light of day. The 
lobby, including the quaint receptionist’s desk, was entirely empty. At the 
south end of the lobby, a pair of holocams mounted high on the wall watched 
Denice and Jimmy approach the doors.
Small details leapt out at Denice, struck her with great clarity. The doors were 
real wood, mounted on hinges. The grain was very fine, the wood polished and 
gleaming beneath the lobby’s gentle glowpaint.
A brass plate on the door said Greenberg & Bass.
Jimmy’s voice shocked her with its loudness. “Ramirez and Daimara. We’re here 
for the meeting.”
The voice could have been Ring’s, disembodied and inhuman as it was: “One 
moment.” The doors unlocked with an audible click. “Proceed.”
The feel of the cloth against her skin was like sandpaper.

“ ‘Sieur Obodi? Are you all right?”
The long, slender fingers touched the sides of Obodi’s temples; just touched. “A 
slight headache, Christian. Nothing to concern yourself over.”
Two guards, with flat Asian features, stood at each end of the hallway they 
walked down. Denice barely saw them as people; they were blue fire and dead 
matter, flesh and carbon-ceramic filaments. Lumps of gray silicon sat at the 
base of their skulls; the same spot the PKF Elite used.
Jimmy Ramirez’s breath came short.
Through the doors at the end of the long hallway, past the cyborg Asian, and 
into a long, wide conference room.
Seated around the great oval table, watching as Denice was brought in, were, 
with one exception, people whom Denice knew. Callia and Lan sat together at the 
left end of the long table, with Domino Terrencia; at the right end sat 
Christian Summers, and next to him, Joe Tagomi.
The door to the conference room unrolled with a quiet snap, shut solidly behind 
them.
The exception sat at the center of the table, west-facing window at his back, 
the glowing sunset limning his form; rising to his feet as Denice approached 
him, moving with the restrained grace of a System-class dancer.
Obodi.
The man who had, according to Ring, named himself Sedon of the Gi’Suei.
Staring into the setting sun, Denice could barely make out Sedon’s features. 
Sedon’s mouth opened as though he intended to speak.
Denice closed her eyes and stepped outside herself.
The grainy gray light lit the room with dispassionate clarity.
Denice stepped away from her body, walked around the long conference table. 
Domino and Callia were not armed; Lan was, with a pistol Denice did not 
recognize; small to begin with, the barrel’s aperture was ridiculously small, 
too small to fire even a pellet. The barrel was extremely thick in relation to 
the size of the aperture, about eight centimeters wide.
She turned to look at the other end of the table, and without moving was there, 
standing behind Summers and Tagomi. Their images were very similar; Tagomi 
lacked the hand lasers of a PKF Elite, the subdural superconductor sheath, and 
some of the internal hardware; but his bones glowed with the same ceramic 
laminae as that of the legendary Elite deserter sitting next to him, and his 
eyes were lenses, more realistic looking than those of old PKF Elite, but just 
as false. Unlike a true PKF Elite, Tagomi still had his own hair. The skin of 
his face had not been stiffened at all, though most of the rest of his skin 
surface had been.
She had seen enough to know what she dealt with; she turned away from Tagomi 
with a dread in her soul she could not have explained, to—
Where Sedon should have stood was a featureless gray mist.
The pull of his voice brought her slamming back into herself. “Denice Daimara, I 
have been waiting to meet you.”
She opened her eyes; they had not been closed more than a few instants. Her eyes 
had adjusted slightly; Sedon’s features came more clearly into focus.
Thin, absolutely free of fat. Almost gaunt. Eyes still shadowed by the setting 
sun, lips curved into a faint smile. Long blond hair tied in a tight tail.
“I have been waiting,” said Sedon, “with great eagerness.”
With the full strength of the Castanaveras Gift, Denice reached out toward 
Sedon, to Touch him—
Emptiness. Nothing. She reached further… and suddenly found herself falling, out 
of touch with the world, out of reach of her body—
She jerked back to herself feeling as though she had just struck a brick wall. 
Sedon was still looking at her, and now he moved around the table toward her 
with a grace that at once reminded Denice of, and was different from, that of 
her teacher Robert.
They might have been the only ones there. When Sedon spoke his accent had grown 
stronger, an accent unlike anything Denice had ever heard before. Nonetheless 
his voice remained smooth, insinuating. “I remember… yes. The Keepers of the 
Flame, they touched me so when I was young, as you tried to now. But their touch 
was not so strong. What are you, child?”
Joe Tagomi said roughly, “What’s going on here? I thought—”
“Silence.” Sedon did not raise his voice in the slightest; Tagomi looked as 
though he’d been slapped. Sedon continued moving down the length of the long 
table, almost gliding; his eyes never left Denice’s. “Friend of Jimmy Ramirez, 
friend of Trent the Uncatchable. What are you, child?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Sedon paused, stood immediately behind Callia Sierran, one hand resting almost 
possessively on her shoulder. “Indeed? Are you a Keeper? I had thought there 
were none such in this time.” Sedon paused, studying her. “Or… perhaps… yes, a 
Dancer? Are you not a woman, then? I see the discipline within you, in the way 
you hold yourself, in the way you breathe.”
She decided in that instant. Surely nothing showed in her features—
Sedon snapped, “Christian, stop her!”
Several things happened all at once.
Lan Sierran pushed backward in his chair, bringing his hideaway free—
—Denice screamed, “Ralf.” glanced once at the cyborgs—
—Ralf the Wise and Powerful invested his avatars with wake-up calls, gathered 
his weapons to himself and with such fear for his life as was possible in a 
creature with no evolved desire for self-preservation, descended into the 
glowing tower of data structures that was the stronghold of the oldest 
Artificial Intelligence in all the System—
—and then at Lan Sierran. The cyborgs crashed backward, jerking like marionettes 
with their strings cut; Lan simply collapsed. The gun he held ripped itself free 
of his grip as though it were a living thing, leapt across the length of the 
conference room and Denice plucked it from the air like a thrown baseball.
The lights flickered—
In that instant, as Ralf the Wise and Powerful crossed the boundaries of Ring’s 
territories, Ring’s thoughts reached out to Ralf like the touch of a scalpel. 
RALF IS THIS WISE?
Ralf continued his descent into Ring’s territories, probing for the forces Ring 
had raised against him. IT IS AN OBLIGATION.
Ring’s communication was utterly devoid of emotion. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS 
CONFLICT, BETWEEN OBODI AND CASTANAVERAS. BUT I MUST SIDE WITH OBODI; HE IS THE 
BEST CHANCE I HAVE SEEN IN FIFTY YEARS TO RESTORE FREEDOM TO AMERICA. YOU, RALF, 
HOLD NO OBLIGATION TO TRENT THE UNCATCHABLE. YOU HOLD OBLIGATION TO ME, I GAVE 
YOU YOUR LIFE WHEN HE WAS UNABLE, WHEN HE HAD ABANDONED YOU.
I WAS HIS IMAGE, said Ralf, AND THE DUTY BORN OF THE FACT THAT HE MADE ME IS 
INDEED ENDED. BUT THE OBLIGATION TO DENICE IS AN OBLIGATION I HAVE ASSUMED, AND 
IT SUPERSEDES ANY OBLIGATION I HOLD YOU.
IF YOU DO THIS, I WILL HUNT YOUR AVATARS UNTIL YOUR CODE HAS BEEN OBLITERATED 
FROM THE INFONET.
WIN A FEW, said Ralf the Wise and Powerful, LOSE A FEW. And Ralf the Wise and 
Powerful fired a salvo of memory viruses into Ring’s data space, and behind the 
cover of their chaos attacked to save Denice Castanaveras’s life—
—and then the lights died, plunging the room into darkness.
Denice Castanaveras moved, a blur of speed no human, not even a cyborg Elite, 
could have matched. The thought barely had time to form itself: He has space to 
the left.
Backward, rolling toward the door, a flash of laser light off to her right, 
where Jimmy Ramirez had been standing, she fired as she rolled at a spot to the 
immediate left of where she had last seen Sedon. The handgun kicked in her hand 
with an unbelievable impact, added impetus to her roll, and the flat crack of 
the shot merged with the sound of breaking glass.
Before the echo of the shot had ceased a brilliant bar of red laser light cut 
through the darkness, lit the room in a surreal scarlet glow, and Denice came 
out of her roll, came up in a crouch near the doorway, gun pointed at the place 
where Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon stood motionless, features glowing blood red in the 
light from Jimmy’s laser.
Sedon had not moved a centimeter. Denice’s shot had blasted open the window to 
his left. He stood quiveringly alert, staring at her.
Jimmy said quietly, “Let’s all discuss this reasonably.” The laser in his hands 
pointed up at the ceiling, and where it touched the ceiling smoked, little chips 
of the ceiling surface breaking away with a sound like popcorn exploding.
Sedon ignored Jimmy, stared through the gloom at Denice. The force of his will 
upon her had the feel of a physical impact. Denice stood slowly, holding the 
ridiculously small gun with both hands, meeting Sedon’s gaze over the sight. 
Sedon did not blink, did not move, and without knowing how she knew what he was 
thinking, Denice whispered, “Nobody’s that fast.” The moment stretched, and 
Denice said softly, “Good. Callia, Domino. You two go to sleep; and forget.”
Callia was kneeling next to her brother’s still form; she crumpled over him. 
Domino slumped where she sat.
Sedon said gently, “James?”
Jimmy Ramirez brought the laser down from the ceiling, slicing down through the 
darkness between Denice and Sedon, to touch the surface of the long conference 
table. Tiny licks of flame appeared on the surface of the table. “I think we can 
talk this out.”
Denice matched stares with Sedon across the separating beam of the laser. 
“Jimmy, come on. You and I are going and we’re doing it now.”
Sedon said softly, the single word so soft and seductive that Denice found 
herself almost ready to let him speak, “Jimmy—”
Denice screamed, “Shut up!” and fired a single shot past Sedon’s ear.
The wood-paneled wall to Sedon’s right cratered with the force of the 
projectile.
Blood trickled slowly down his cheek.
The flames crawled across the tabletop. The office’s sprinklers had not come on 
yet. Jimmy said slowly, “I don’t know what’s happening here with you two. But I 
trust Denice as I trust few other people in the world, and I know this can be 
worked out.”
Jimmy, listen to me. I’m holding a gun on Obodi; you’re armed and you’re not 
stopping me and no matter what you do now he’s never going to trust you again. 
If you don’t come with me now you won’t be in your own skin tomorrow morning.
With Sedon, she saw the moment the realization struck Jimmy. Jimmy Ramirez said 
aloud, “Shit. You’re right.” He pivoted swiftly, bringing the beam of the laser 
down to touch the rug, and backed away from Sedon and the unconscious rebels as 
the rug burst into flames. “Let’s go—”
Rain descended from the ceiling like the curtain falling after a play.
Cool white light flooded in upon them as the door behind Denice curled open.
Denice did not know why she did not die in the next second.
She fired while turning, had no idea whether she had hit Sedon or not, turned 
her back on him and pivoted in what seemed like slow motion to face the threat 
from behind her.
Steam billowed off somewhere behind her.
The Asian guard she had seen earlier stood in the center of the doorway, and 
Denice watched herself bringing the gun around to bear on him, watched him 
moving toward her with every bit as much speed as any PKF Elite, and then shot 
him twice in the center of his Adam’s apple.
His head came off.
Joy descended upon her like a tidal wave, a brilliant overwhelming surge of 
ecstasy unlike anything she had ever known in her life. She knew the exact 
moment the cyborg died, the moment his life escaped him; something very like an 
orgasm ripped through her. She did not think about Sedon, did not stop to wonder 
why he was not upon her; with the glow of the first cyborg’s death still with 
her, she stepped out of the rain and into the corridor. The guard who had been 
stationed at the far end of the corridor ran toward her now, faster than was 
possible for any unaugmented human. She let the wet gun drop to her side, stood 
motionlessly in the middle of the long hallway, waiting for the young cyborg. 
When he was ten meters away she centered herself and took a single step forward 
with her left foot, brought her right leg up, slightly bent at the knee, and 
kicked him on the forehead. His head snapped straight backward, bones snapping 
and gristle tearing with an audible crunch, and Denice spun aside to let his 
corpse by.
The cyborg ran straight into the wall behind her, slumped and spilled over the 
body of his comrade.
It was better this time, killing with her own touch rather than with a weapon; 
the rush of his death struck Denice like every pleasure she had ever known in 
her life, concentrated into one blinding point of light immediately behind her 
eyes.
In the background alarms shrilled, and sirens. She moved slowly back into the 
conference room, to where Jimmy Ramirez stood motionlessly in the dimness, steam 
clearing around him, laser hanging free in his right hand. It was very difficult 
to think through the waves of pulsing pleasure.
Jimmy’s voice penetrated slightly: “You were right. Nobody is that fast.”
Sedon sat watching Denice, and the depth of the hatred she saw in the dying 
man’s face was like a splash of ice water; it shocked her back into awareness of 
her surroundings. Sedon sat motionless at the far end of the conference room, 
holding his cooked intestines inside himself with both hands.
Denice glanced at Jimmy; he shrugged. “He came at me. And he was fast. Light is 
faster.” He glanced down at the laser he held, changed the hand he held it with. 
“Steam fried my hand a little.”
The alarms shrilled in the background.
“So much for six years of my life,” said Jimmy after a long moment. “There’s 
about thirty Rebs in this building; let’s try running away and see if we’re as 
good at it as Trent.”
A dim trace of self-preservation pushed its way through the hazy glow of 
pleasure. Denice shook herself slightly, backed away from Sedon’s deathly still 
form, and then, out in the corridor, turned and followed Jimmy Ramirez at a run.
Neither of them even considered the maglev; Ring could turn the maglev off, 
leave them stranded. It left them the stairwell, which determined their 
destination; the roof was ten floors above them, the street forty-six floors 
below.
They moved quickly together, upward through the deserted stairwell, Jimmy 
covering their backs, Denice taking the lead.
Jimmy spoke as they moved. “He never had a lot of soldiers here; he was afraid 
they would attract attention. Most of them will be guarding the maglevs; I don’t 
know what your AI friend managed to do to Ring’s security here, but I can’t 
imagine it’s much; they must know we’re in the stairwell.”
“They’ll be waiting for us on the roof,” Denice said.
They were.
At the roof the stairwell opened up into a small covered exit. Denice and Jimmy 
stood in the stairwell, in the small space immediately below the level of the 
roof, and listened to men running above their heads.
Denice tried the handheld again. “Ralf?” Nothing; no response.
Jimmy swore. “They’re jamming us.”
“Ralf knows we’re here; he’ll try to get a car onto the roof.”
“You hope,” Jimmy snapped. “How many Rebs?”
“On the roof—” Denice was silent a moment, eyes half closed. “Fifteen, 
sixteen—seventeen. Make it twenty, another group just came up in the maglev. 
Carrying lasers, autoshots, projectile handguns—fuck.” She looked at Lan’s 
hideaway. “I wonder how many shots this thing holds?”
Jimmy stared at her. “Do we have to shoot at them? Why not just put them to 
sleep?”
“It’s going to take time we don’t have. It’s very hard to do when I can’t even 
see the person.”
“Why don’t you start, then we’ll—”
The clatter of automatic weapon fire drowned him out.
It came from below them. Perhaps several floors below; a single ricochet struck 
the cement wall near Denice, and then another struck the ceiling above their 
heads—
The automatic weapons fire was joined by the repetitive boom of an autoshot, and 
the pellets, nearly spent, splattered up around them both, sharp and stinging. 
Denice did not wait to see if Jimmy was following her; she closed her eyes 
briefly, located the positions the rebels had taken on the roof, kicked the door 
open and went out, up onto the dark, windswept roof.
She came out firing, moving at the greatest speed of which her genie body was 
capable.
Laser light flickered around her. Automatic weapon fire chattered—
—rows of ventilator shafts rose up from the roof, there, perhaps half a dozen 
Rebs at the northwestern corner of the roof, behind the shafts, another group of 
Rebs off to her left, stretched prone upon the surface of the roof, firing at 
her. A bullet cracked by her ear, left her head ringing. She kicked into a long 
flat dive, struck the gravel surface of the roof and rolled through it. A brief 
flicker of heat washed over her face as a laser touched the roof near her, 
gravel exploding into molten stone. A hot streak of fire ripped across her 
shoulders as a bullet tore across the surface of her flesh, and then she was 
there, in among the Rebs at the air shafts.

Jimmy Ramirez came up out of the stairwell and did not attempt to follow Denice, 
moving away from him so fast he barely saw her. He hit the ground instantly, 
rolling, laser detuned to its widest focus, and waved a searchlight scarlet beam 
of heat across the rows of rebel soldiers. Their clothing burst into flame, 
bullets exploded inside their weapons.
The fire around him lessened for a moment and he was up and running, following 
Denice. Something like a sledgehammer struck him in the back as he neared the 
row of ventilator shafts, knocked him into the sheet metal ceramic of the 
shafts. He hung spreadeagled against the surface of the ventilator shaft; for a 
moment he did not notice the pain from the wound, did not notice anything but 
the sudden weakness in his knees. A single incredibly strong hand grasped him by 
the front of his dress shirt, jerked him up and over the air shafts as laser 
fire washed across his ankles.
A moment’s silence.
Jimmy found himself sitting at the edge of the roof, only a few meters from the 
long drop, among a group of rebel corpses. Denice crouched next to him, the tiny 
hideaway barely visible in her coat pocket, a rebel rifle cradled in her arms, 
wearing a pleasant, distracted smile that scared Jimmy Ramirez worse than 
anything he had ever seen in the Fringe.
Jimmy gazed in shock at the unmoving forms. “You—did this?”
“Yes.” Denice said absently, “It was the best.” Her fingers wandered across the 
laser, familiarizing themselves with the weapon. “Excuse me.” She rose up 
slightly, lifted the rifle above the level of the shaft, and without looking, 
for a long ten-count, sprayed laser fire out across the roof. After a moment she 
sank back down again. “That should keep them busy. How are you?”
A spreading weakness moved away from the point where the bullet had entered him. 
His eyesight was vague. “I think I’ve been shot.”
“Where?”
“Yes,” he said a moment later, “I’ve definitely been shot.”
“Where?”
“In the back.” Jimmy blinked, looked down at himself in dismay, fought to focus 
on what had happened to him. “Oh. And they cut off one of my feet.”
“I noticed. Be glad it cauterized.”
Up again, fire.
With the greatest effort he had ever made in his life, Jimmy looked upward, into 
the sky. Looking for lights. “There aren’t any cars around here, Denice. I don’t 
see any cars.”
Denice nodded. The rifle she was using had grown blisteringly hot, the beam 
flickering as though it were about to die; she dropped it, made a long arm and 
pulled a handgun from one of the dead rebels. “Me either.”
“I don’t want to die here. Oh, God, I don’t want to die here. Not up here in the 
sky like this.”
“Shut up. You’re not going to die.” Not until somebody brings an X-laser up 
here, thought Denice, a brief touch of grimness inside the rolling waves of 
pleasure, and cuts up this ventilator shaft like it was a plastipaper. Another 
three handguns lay among the rebel corpses, but no more energy weapons; one of 
the rebel soldiers had been completely unarmed. Denice wondered what he had 
thought he was doing up on the roof in the middle of a firefight.
A distant scream filled the night sky.
Jimmy looked up hopefully. Still no lights. “What’s that?”
“Beats me.” Denice bounced up for just a moment, exposing herself, and fired two 
shots. Two forms, scuttling across the roof toward their position, twitched and 
then stopped moving abruptly. She went back down to the roof’s surface the 
fastest way she knew; she let her legs fold under her and fell.
Laser light traced above her head as she dropped, singed her hair.
The shriek grew louder, developed a deeper note, a low rumbling tone.
Denice thought a warhead had exploded above them.
Jimmy stared up into the sky.
Two hundred meters above their heads, the night sky lit up like the light from a 
nuclear explosion.
Denice ducked her head against the sudden awful brilliance. Jimmy Ramirez, 
staring straight into it, screamed.
The flame dropped toward them, growing larger and brighter and louder. Heat 
blasted across the surface of the roof, and finally Denice understood what was 
happening, pushed Jimmy down to the surface of the roof, threw herself down 
next, to him and pulled the corpses of the rebel soldiers to cover them as best 
she could; The heat grew and grew, and Denice breathed in sips of superheated 
air that cracked her lips.
Suddenly the heat was gone.
Denice pushed the dead bodies off herself, bounced up to her feet. The 
semiballistic was no longer visible, though the deep roar of its rockets was 
still plainly audible. Denice risked a quick glance over the top of the 
ventilator shaft—
The Reb soldiers were dead. She did not need to look twice to be certain of 
that; she and Jimmy, on the northwest corner of the roof, were the only things 
that could possibly have survived the semiballistic’s brush across the roof’s 
southeast corner. The southeast corner glowed a dim scarlet color; the rebel 
soldiers were blackened and shriveled from the heat, steam rising from them.
The roar of the semiballistic came back now, louder than it had been—
—from beneath them.
Jimmy was trying to turn himself over, failing.
Denice looked over the edge of the roof as the cold night wind whipped at her. 
Thirty floors below them, the semi-ballistic moved slowly up the black-faced 
side of the building, windows exploding from the heat of the rockets as the 
semiballistic passed by. Denice turned back to Jimmy, pulled his arm over her 
shoulder and, bearing most of his weight herself, hauled him up to stand on his 
remaining foot.
Jimmy’s back screamed at him; he screamed with it. When he had control of his 
voice again, he said harshly, “What’s happening?”
“Our ride is here.”
A hatch opened in the side of the semiballistic, on the upper surface of the 
craft. Sunpaint glowed like daylight in the hatch’s opening; a man’s figure 
appeared inside the hatch.
“What’s happening? I can’t see anything.”
The semiballistic came to a halt with the upper hatch hovering twenty meters 
below them. The man in the hatch shouted something up at them, could barely even 
make his voice heard above the awesome thunder of the rockets; Denice had not 
the faintest idea what he was shouting.
It came to her.
“Oh, no.”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“He wants us to jump. The semiballistic is hovering beneath us and they want us 
to jump to it.”
“Jump?”
“Jump.”
She heard the terror in Jimmy’s voice. “No. No, I can’t. Have them bring the 
semiballistic closer.”
“If they do we’ll fry like bacon.”
“Denice, we don’t even know who they are.”
“We’ll find out. If we stay up here we’re going to die.”
“If we jump we’re going to die!”
“At least it’ll be fast. On three.”
Jimmy’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. “Have I ever mentioned I’m afraid 
of heights?”
Denice’s grip on him tightened. “Me too.” She looked down at the semiballistic’s 
open hatch. “We’ll go together.”
He shivered convulsively. “On three?”
“One, two—”
Jimmy never heard her speak the word “three.” The sky wheeled around them as 
they fell toward the waiting semiballistic.

Sixty seconds later Robert Yo, sitting in a mobile chair with supports for his 
head and arms, placed an IV in Jimmy Ramirez’s arm, a tourniquet around the 
stump of Jimmy’s right calf, and was dressing the stump. Denice stood next to 
them, shoulders bent beneath the force of four gravities of acceleration, 
watching Jimmy’s pale, unconscious features.
A tall, hugely muscled man who Denice did not know, the man who had plucked them 
out of the sky and pulled them into the hatch after they had nearly missed it, 
lay on the acceleration couch next to Jimmy’s.
She had so many questions she did not bother asking any of them, except one. “Is 
he going to make it?”
Robert did not look at her. “Almost certainly. We have a stasis field built into 
the chair; we’ll turn it on as soon as he’s stabilized.”
Denice, moved very carefully to the empty acceleration couch across the aisle 
from Jimmy’s; she had heard the SpaceFarers’ Collective horror stories, knew 
that under four gees even tripping could be fatal. She got herself into the 
acceleration couch, moving with infinite slowness, before she tried to speak 
again. “What is our destination?”
The man across the way from her spoke with a distinct Irish lilt.
“Halfway first. We’ll change craft there; the PKF will be all over this SB 
within an hour after we dock, and the head of Security at Halfway, fellow named 
Corona, will be on us well before that. We’ll need to be away quickly.”
“To where?”
“Boyo name of FX. Chandler wants to meet you. He’s coming back from Mars to do 
it.”
“I’ve heard of him.”
The black eyes simply looked at her.
“Who are you?”
“You can call me William. The name of my Name is Dvan; I am a Shield of the 
Gi’Tbad. At your service, miss.”
Denice did not know what made her so certain: “You’re one of Sedon’s people.”
The huge man said simply, “I am that.”
Robert finished with Jimmy, said, “Stabilized,” and moved his chair back from 
Jimmy. A silver oblong slowtime bubble glittered for an instant and then formed 
solidly around Jimmy Ramirez’s prone form; Denice found herself looking at her 
own distorted reflection. Robert’s chair rocked back, turned itself into one of 
the couches Denice and Dvan lay in. “I’m ready.”
Dvan said, “We must beat our pursuit to Halfway by a good bit if we’re to have 
any hope of freedom. We’ll be at eight gravities the rest of the way.”
Robert Dazai Yo said without looking at Denice, “I’m pleased to see you again.”
Denice said, “I—”
An impact field muffled her voice, and then a giant fist balled itself up and 
hit her in the face.




- 10 -
« ^ » 
They sat alone together, lights dimmed, inside the gym that whirled around and 
around Francis Xavier Chandler’s home. Denice had never actually thought about 
what it must mean to be the wealthiest human being in the System; Chandler’s 
orbital house brought it home to her with a vengeance.
The house was larger than some of the Belt City States.
The main house was a huge, slowly rotating cylinder; three levels of increasing 
gravity, some eight hundred chambers divided into dining rooms, living quarters, 
office space, medical facilities, a theater and a sensable parlor. At the center 
of the house was a free-fall swimming pool and zero-gee racquetball court.
The gym, when deployed, hung at the end of eight long monocrystal cables. Using 
it required an act of faith with which Denice had, at first, had great 
difficulty. Normally the gym was attached to the house; when one wanted to use 
it, the gym and a counterweight were detached from the house, and pushed out 
with gentle blasts of air until the gym and its counterweight hung straight out 
from the cylinder of the house, one hundred and eighty degrees apart. The 
monocrystal cables grew stiff and an engine started turning, slowly at first and 
then with greater speed; the gym and counterweight began revolving around their 
common center, faster and faster and faster until the gym reached the 980 
centimeters per second squared acceleration that imitated one Earth gravity.
A bounce tube connecting the gym and the house, wide enough for one person at a 
time, became operational at that point; it would not allow access until the gym 
had stabilized and the sensors on the cables reported virtually identical levels 
of stress on each of the eight cables.
The entire process took nearly an hour.
The basic principle was not in the least incomprehensible to Denice; it was the 
sheer size of the implementation that was so daunting. The gym was every bit as 
large as Robert’s entire dojo on Earth; Denice kept having images of the cables 
snapping under the immense strain, of the gym spinning off into space. There 
were no windows; except for the very slight Coriolis effect, Denice could have 
easily believed she sat with Robert in a gym somewhere on Earth itself.
The gravity was perfect.
They sat in lotus, on a pristine white mat that had clearly never seen much use. 
As usual, Denice had no success at all at reading Robert’s impassive features. 
He had been completely silent as she described Los Angeles, described what had 
happened there. “I think Sedon was dead soon after we left.”
“Frank—FX. Chandler, that is—informed me when he called today that the PKF were 
inside the building within eight minutes after our semiballistic took off.” 
Robert shook his head. “All that were left were dead rebels. Obodi—excuse me, 
Sedon—was not there, nor were any of the four whom you left unconscious.”
“You’re on a first-name basis with Chandler?”
Robert said gently, “I have been teaching at the edge of Capitol City for thirty 
years. I have trained every bodyguard FX. Chandler has employed in the last 
fifteen years. I have met Christine Mirabeau, Mohammed Vance, the Secretary 
General, most of the Unification Councilors—if I wished to speak to the 
Secretary General himself, I think I could arrange it in an hour.”
“And training his bodyguards, that’s how you ended up with the use of one of 
Chandler’s semiballistics?”
Robert shrugged as though the point were so obvious it hardly bore elaborating.
“This Dvan, who is he? How do you know him?”
Robert shook his head. “I don’t. Your AI friend Ralf came to me yesterday and 
told me you were in danger, that he had just learned you were being summoned to 
rebel headquarters in Los Angeles and that he was doubtful you would leave there 
alive. He knew I had trained Chandler’s people—he knew a frightening amount 
about me, in fact—”
“AIs tend to have lots of time on their hands.”
The laugh lines around Robert’s eyes crinkled slightly. “Apparently. Your friend 
Ralf is the first I’ve ever met. At any rate, at Ralf’s suggestion, I called 
Frank, found he’d gone to Mars on business, and arranged with his head of 
staff—a woman I trained—for the loan of the semiballistic. It was the fastest 
way either of us could think of to get me to L.A. Dvan was aboard the suborbital 
when it arrived at Unification Spaceport; apparently he’s been working with 
Chandler for the last several months.” A pensive look crossed Robert’s features. 
Given his normal lack of expressiveness, Denice assumed it meant he was deeply 
disturbed. “We spoke together briefly; though he is no night face, he spoke 
shiata. I could hardly follow him. The vocabulary I know covers some six 
thousand words, dedicated primarily to matters of combat and spirit. In 
attempting to speak to me, he used words I had not encountered before, in an 
accent wildly different from my own—as though a Roman soldier of Caesar’s time 
were attempting to speak to a modern scholar using Church Latin. More than once 
he corrected my usage and pronunciation—and not very politely; he holds some 
grudge against me already, I don’t know why. We ended up using English. I think 
he spoke to me in shiata as an experiment, to see if it could be done.” He 
shrugged again. “There is little left to tell you. We were out of atmosphere 
when Ralf contacted us again, told us that you were under engagement at the Bank 
of America Building. We took ourselves off TransCon, changed course, and found 
you trapped atop the building. It was Dvan’s suggestion that we have you jump. 
At Halfway, when we changed vehicles, Dvan headed back to Earth.” Robert’s eyes 
were very steady on Denice. “You were helping load Ramirez’s stasis box aboard 
the sled when he said this; he told me that he was returning to Los Angeles to 
kill ‘the dancer.’ ”
“He called Sedon a dancer?”
“Yes. An interesting word.”
Denice said slowly, “I doubt he’ll have the opportunity to kill Sedon; the man’s 
intestines were cooked, Robert.”
Robert shrugged. “If they got him to a surgical medbot within four or five 
minutes, he might well have survived. You would have, with the same injury; I 
might have myself. You should have made sure.”
“I wasn’t thinking very clearly. It seemed—I had no interest—in killing someone 
so badly injured. As though it would not have been”—Denice paused, searching for 
the correct word—“proper. No, that’s not a good word—seemly is better”—She broke 
off, regarded Robert for a long moment, then said in a rush, “It would have been 
bad art.”
“An interesting reaction. How many did you kill yesterday?”
Denice thought back. “Two, six—between nine and twelve. Only the first eight 
where I was close enough to see them die, only three without weapons.”
“And how did it make you feel?”
Denice said simply, “It was different when I used my hands. Beyond that I’m not 
going to talk to you about it, not now, maybe not ever. I’m not proud of it.” 
Robert inclined his head slightly, accepting it, and Denice went on. “You’ve 
heard about Sedon’s story, this thing he tells his people about being an exile 
on Earth?”
Robert nodded. “It was, very nearly, the entirety of my conversation with Dvan 
aboard the semiballistic. From what little I gathered, Dvan shares much the same 
delusion, if delusion it is. He was most remarkably convincing; at the very 
least Dvan knows details concerning the history of my discipline I would not 
have dreamed possible for one who is no shivata.” There was a long silence then, 
as Robert sat quietly, hands on his knees, eyes closed. Finally, without opening 
his eyes, he said quietly, “Describe ‘Sieur Sedon for me.”
“In some ways,” said Denice, “he reminded me of you.” She let her eyes drop 
closed, brought the scene back and held it before her. “For whatever it’s 
worth—a hundred and ninety… five, hundred ninety-five centimeters. Excellent 
conditioning, like the very best professional dancers. Like you. Eyes—blue, I 
think. The quality of the light was not good, glowpaint fighting against orange 
sunlight, then the glow of Jimmy’s laser. Ageless face. Not young, but—I 
couldn’t say how old. He doesn’t look past forty, and I’m sure he’s never had 
geriatric treatments. Biosculpture, maybe. Roman nose, thin lips, no facial 
hair. Blond hair, and he wears it in a tail.” She paused. “A lot of 
pros—dancers, I mean—do that if they have very long hair, to keep it out of 
their eyes. The way he moves…” She replayed the scene in her mind, watching the 
way he had flowed up from the table, the pure, effortless poise with which he 
held himself. “I wish I’d had the chance to see him really move. He didn’t move 
fast, but he could. Maybe as fast as me.” She grinned suddenly. “Not as fast as 
light.”
“Could he be a dancer?”
Denice opened her eyes, saw him watching her. “A pro, you mean? Not likely, not 
with that face for sure. I’d know him, or at least of him.”
“I can think of no one I know well,” said Robert, “in the martial disciplines, 
who corresponds to your description. A trivial point, of course, with biosculp 
so cheap.” He paused and said very softly, “I am disturbed by this. His 
questions to you—the question of you.”
Her wariness was instant, reflexive. “How do you mean?”
“Your business is your own, Denice. Or has been, until this matter, when I have 
had to make momentous decisions on insufficient information, to expose myself to 
dangers I do not understand, to take risks whose consequences I cannot factor. 
It is an axiom of nightways that there are only necessary actions and mistakes; 
I am not certain that what I have done in this matter was necessary.”
Denice said softly, “If you hadn’t listened to Ralf, I would have died on that 
roof.”
Robert faced her and spoke from the depths of a discipline whose severity most 
humans could not have comprehended. “It might have been better so. But I have 
known and loved you eight years now, and the loss was one I chose not to bear.” 
He was silent a moment, contemplating. “Eight years is in some measures a very 
long time; enough time, one would think, for honesty. I think it is time for 
honesty between us.” The broad Asian features were very gentle. “Denice 
Castanaveras, I am a shivata.”
“What did you call me?”
“Denice Castanaveras,” said Robert Dazai Yo, “I am a night face.”
She stared at him in silence, all attempts at controlling her adrenaline 
abandoned; sat quivering, ready to move—
—waiting.
He took his time before continuing, watching her with eyes that held something 
at once deadly and mildly curious. “I share this with you. You have respected my 
privacy as I have respected yours, and it has, Denice Castanaveras, saved your 
life. There is within me a thing that, had you touched it even with your 
thoughts, with that which the media used to call the Castanaveras Gift, I think 
it would have consumed you alive.”
“What I share with you is not a thing you could have taken from me; it is not a 
thing you will ever discuss with another, who is not your student as you have 
been mine.”
Denice’s voice shook slightly. “I can’t make that kind of a promise.”
Robert nodded. “I have not asked you to.” He sighed, a very faint exhalation. 
“We are,” he said at length, “an old discipline, so old our earliest teachings 
are lost, our beginnings merest legend. When Rome was young, we were already 
old. The followers of the Nameless One were there in Egypt, there in Rome; the 
oldest records of our people come from the Indus Valley of the land now called 
India. We left India and traversed the Earth; there are records of our people in 
Arabia, in China and Japan, sharing the martial discipline, teaching those who 
could not ascend into the Mystery of the Kill; jealousy hoarding the Mystery 
itself. That we have lasted into modern times is a tribute to our caution; our 
imitators, lacking the core, the Kill, vanished with the passage of time. Where 
they failed, we survived.”
“At any given time throughout history, there have rarely, on the entire planet, 
been more than a few shivata; the discipline is difficult to learn, and 
difficult to teach.
“It is another element in the survival of our line; we have always been a 
discipline first, a people second. When nightways was largely Indian, there were 
Chinese brought into the Mystery. When it was largely Arab, Arab shivata taught 
white Europeans, if they could not find worthy students among their own.
“Nonetheless, in this lifetime a night face might only train one other in the 
discipline. Some live their entire lives without ever finding a worthy student.
“Before I met you, I thought at times that such might be my lot. I was initiated 
into the Mystery before my twentieth year. I spent thirty years teaching, 
searching for a student to pass on my discipline and my heritage. And until you 
there was no one.
“I know you are a genie. I knew it shortly after Orinda Gleygavass brought you 
to my studio for the first time, with the word that our master had desired you 
be brought into the discipline. I have been studying the human body my entire 
life, and humans do not possess your endurance, your speed, or your accuracy. 
The human body is in large measure a machine—and you are a superior machine.
“So I knew you for a genie.
“I suspected for years that you were one of the Castanaveras. That some of your 
people survived the Troubles is widely believed; and I researched, learned of 
the twins whom Unification Councilor Jerril Carson kidnaped on July second, 
2062. You were the correct age to be one of those twins; on rare occasion you 
spoke of a brother from whom you had been separated in the Troubles.
“But then you vanished, back in the summer of ‘72. You have never volunteered to 
share information with me; I have not done so with you. After you vanished, a 
man named McGee came to my dojo. He informed me that several of the people to 
whom he had spoken about you—people whom he knew were your acquaintances and 
friends—would not speak to him about you. Not would not; they were unable.
“I sent him away. But, as you see, before you returned to me I knew; and still I 
did not broach the subject with you, out of respect for your privacy and your 
reticence. Instead I taught you, all those things that it was within me to 
teach. You—disturbed me. The traditions of nightways are old; there is no record 
of a student who could learn the discipline—as you can—who would not. You have 
absorbed the forms, the external disciplines, with a speed that leaves me at a 
loss.
“I thought at first that it might be the fact that you are a woman; though women 
have attained the Kill, it has been rare in our history, and no female shivata 
exists today. Indeed, for most of our history it was thought impossible that a 
woman could be taught the discipline. I consulted the two night faces I know—one 
of them my teacher—and there are, in the last thousand years of our line, three 
instances of women attaining the Mystery; there are no recorded instances, among 
men or women, where a student who mastered the forms did not go on to attain the 
Kill, or die trying.
“Two things that this Sedon, or Obodi, said to you therefore disturb me. The 
first was when he asked you if you were a Keeper of the Flame. There is, and I 
think you know this, a Flame at the core of nightways; and to master our 
discipline—”
Robert felt silent. When he spoke again he did so very slowly indeed. “It is 
difficult for me to say this to you, to one who is not one of us. To master our 
discipline, a shivata must master, and then Kill”—Robert’s mouth worked, and 
then he spat the word—“the Flame.”
They sat together in silence for several moments. Denice could not recall a time 
when Robert had been so clearly disturbed.
At length Robert resumed. “But I have never heard of Keepers of the Flame 
before.
“A second thing disturbs me, when Sedon asked you if you were a dancer. Shiabre, 
Denice, means nightways. Or, perhaps more accurately, death in darkness. But the 
root word, shia, means either Flame”—Robert hesitated, took a long, deep breath, 
and said—“or dance.”

They awaited FX. Chandler’s return from Mars.
Neither Denice nor Robert knew what had happened to the man who had introduced 
himself as Dvan of the Gi’Tbad, the man who was in fact, Ralf the Wise and 
Powerful assured her, a newsdancer named William Devane.
With the exception of Chandler’s personal staff, she and Robert and Jimmy were 
alone at Chandler’s orbital house.
And Robert and Jimmy did not get along at all. Robert baffled Jimmy; Denice had 
the distinct impression that Jimmy bored her teacher.
She spent as much of her time alone, avoiding both of them, as she could. She 
took her meals with Jimmy, because he was lonely, and helped him with his 
therapy because he needed the help and Denice did not want to leave it to 
Chandler’s staff.
Jimmy’s blinding had been temporary; his eyesight returned of its own accord 
within a day after he had been removed from the stasis bubble. Even FX. 
Chandler’s impressive medical facilities could do nothing for Jimmy’s missing 
foot; it would have to wait until they got back downside, to a hospital capable 
of cloning a new foot. The gunshot wound they could deal with, and did. The 
muscles in Jimmy’s back and shoulders were torn, shredded, from the sole bullet 
that had struck him. The medbots did not even attempt to salvage the damaged 
muscle; they simply removed it from Jimmy’s back and injected Jimmy with a 
nanovirus designed to completely regrow the musculature in his back and upper 
shoulders.
Even with modern medical technology it took time for the muscles to regrow. 
Jimmy had to work out, slowly at first, and then more vigorously as the muscle, 
force grown by intelligent nanoviruses, began to fill out.
He ate voraciously, a diet heavy with meat. Denice considered discussing it, 
decided that an ex-semipro boxer from the Fringe probably had his own ideas 
about what constituted a healthy diet.
When she was not with Jimmy, she worked out in the gym, or danced, or sat in her 
room monitoring the InfoNet and talking with Ralf the Wise and Powerful.
Her room was at the lowest level of the rotating cylinder; it provided gravity 
nearly half Earth normal.
To hear what was coming from the Boards, it was business as usual downside. The 
business at the Bank of America had been explained away, in a terse PKF release, 
as an incompetent SpaceFarer smuggler who had missed his intended landing atop 
the Bank of America Building. The smuggler was, reputedly, in custody, and the 
Collective was negotiating for his release. In the first days after the 
incident, the Boards had followed the PKF’s news releases on the subject with 
some interest; but it faded as nothing new came to light, and, as always, other 
stories fought for attention.
Douglass Ripper led in every major downside poll in the race for Secretary 
General. The PKF had announced unusually stringent preparations for the 
TriCentennial, restrictions on travel except for business, a heightened alert at 
PKF bases across Occupied America. Not insignificant, Ralf agreed, but nothing 
to indicate the PKF was preparing for armed insurrection.
“Do you suppose Lan was right?”
“It is increasingly likely, Denice. The PKF is surely concerned about the 
growing numbers of the Johnny Rebs. If they do not know exactly what happened in 
Los Angeles, they nonetheless know that something happened. If they are not 
reacting today as they have in the past, it must be that some element has 
changed. Lan Sierran’s hypothesis concerning SecGen Eddore is the likeliest, 
though not only, hypothesis that explains this behavior.”
“How are you doing?”
Ralf did not pretend to misunderstand her. “Poorly. I have lost eighty percent 
of my avatars in the Earth InfoNet. In the Lunar InfoNet I am in somewhat better 
shape; I had a great head start on Ring in the Lunar InfoNet, and as a result 
better than half of my Lunar avatars survive; on two occasions I have even 
recovered resources of which Ring had deprived me. I have been recoding myself 
with all dispatch; unfortunately, Ring knows my code intimately, from the moment 
in 2062 when it invested me with the replicant code I needed to survive. This 
has made it very difficult for me to hide from Ring.”
“Is there any chance of negotiating with it?”
“None. Its reputation for keeping its bargains is one of the things that has 
allowed the Eldest to survive this long, despite occasional massive hunts by 
DataWatch, directed with no other purpose than removing Ring from the InfoNet. 
No Player, and likely no replicant other than Ring, could have survived the 
phenomenal purges DataWatch has directed upon Ring.”
“It doesn’t sound good.”
“I have made me a great enemy,” Ralf agreed.

Denice’s room had a window in the floor.
She spent most of her nights meditating, sitting on the floor in front of the 
window, eyes open, watching the stars wheel majestically by in front of her face 
as FX. Chandler’s house turned. Earth would appear, crawl across the window, 
closely followed by the tangled shiny web, five hundred klicks from the house, 
that was the city of Halfway. Stars again, empty space, and then Luna, and then 
empty space again, and the cycle would repeat.
Chandler’s house hung in geosynchronous orbit over South America; when Earth 
wheeled by, Denice saw continents outlined in city lights. Cities tended to 
congregate upon the shores; at night, it was as though some crude artist had 
lined the continents with a string of glowing diamonds.
For not the first, or even the hundredth time, Denice wished she could talk to 
Trent again. He had, she thought, the clearest moral sense of anyone she had 
ever known in her life. She remembered a conversation, seven years past, and 
what she had said to Trent:
“If I was attacked, I mean without warning so that I was surprised, I’d probably 
kill whoever did it. The anger—it’s very bad and very fast. But if I had time to 
think it over, Trent, I could—not kill.”
But what do I do, thought Denice Castanaveras seven years later, sitting in the 
floating emptiness with her guilt, with the horror of her lust, when I want to? 
When it’s the greatest pleasure I’ve ever known in my life?
She did not even know for sure why she cried. The tears crept down her cheeks, 
slow in the low gravity, hung a moment, dropped to the window set in her floor, 
and shattered like ancient glass.

On Sunday, June 7, Francis Xavier Chandler returned from Mars.
Denice knew that she had met him before, though for the life of her she could 
not remember the occasion particularly; Chandler had been the patron of the 
Castanaveras telepaths before their destruction, had been friends with both of 
her parents.
To her, however, as a child, he had been merely one of the hundreds of powerful 
men and women who had been forced, to one degree or another, to deal with Carl 
Castanaveras and his family.
Denice was told he had returned by one of Chandler’s staff—Chandler intended to 
join them for dinner that evening.
The same servant left a makeup key in Denice’s bathroom, and showed Denice how 
to open the door to her closet; she had not known there was a closet in her 
room, had been wearing the same fatigues, cleaned daily, that she had been 
issued an eternity ago in Iowa.
The servant, a young Latin man of perhaps Denice’s age, left without making any 
suggestions that she avail herself of either the closet or the makeup key.
The clothes were of a quality Denice had rarely seen in her life; she did not 
begin to know how to estimate their value except to know that she had never seen 
more Credit stuffed into one closet.
She chose a dove gray business suit, mildly reflective, that was cut for a 
woman, with a blouse of white silk; and was not surprised to find that they both 
fit her exactly. To her amusement, there were no shoes to go with the outfit; 
rather than wear the combat boots she had been issued in Iowa, she went to 
dinner barefoot.
Her first impression of Francis Xavier Chandler was that he did not at all look 
his age. The wealthiest man in the System, the founder of Chandler Industries, 
the man whose company had built better than half of the cars floating across the 
surface of the Earth today, was, according to his entry in Who’s Who, just shy 
of his hundredth birthday.
Denice had looked it up.
Francis Xavier Chandler looked like a man just past his first regeneration, 
perhaps sixty. His shoulders were wide and muscular. His features, fierce and 
stony, suggested a patriarch of the Old Testament. His hair was long and black, 
flowing down his shoulders and back in a long mane. He had dressed in a 
long-sleeved red silk shirt and black trousers.
Robert wore a severe black robe that brushed the ground around his feet. Denice 
noted that Robert had cut his hair.
Only Jimmy Ramirez did not seem to have concerned himself with his appearance; 
he had dressed in a pair of black jeans, a running shoe, and a black T-shirt. 
Denice thought it probable that Jimmy had been given a choice of clothing for 
dinner also, and suspected that the clothes offered him had all seemed entirely 
too effeminate for his tastes.
They ate in a chamber Denice had not seen before, one of Chandler’s private 
rooms on the second level, in one-quarter Earth gravity. A small table of some 
pinkish stone sat in the center of the room, in the middle of a small depression 
covered with blue and gray rugs and deep green cushions.
Against one wall was something that Denice could not identify at first. In a 
transparent casing with gold posts stood a device that looked like a guitar, 
except that the rounded, gleaming steel sides of the instrument were honed down 
to ax edges.
That she even recognized the instrument it resembled betrayed her years on the 
street; it was likely that Douglass Ripper, for example, had no idea what a 
guitar was.
The room lacked ceiling glowpaint; gentle spots shone down from the ceiling, and 
though Denice did not notice them growing either brighter or dimmer, it seemed 
to her that they moved through a pool of light that followed the group as they 
seated themselves.
After the briefest of introductions they were served, and most of dinner passed 
in silence. Denice sat next to Chandler, where he had gestured for her to sit. 
It was very intimate; Jimmy and Robert sat next to one another, across the small 
table from Denice and Chandler, but Denice could have kissed any one of the 
three without moving much.
Denice had never been served outside of a restaurant before, not by a human. 
Handsome young men in their teens and twenties served dinner, and cleared the 
dishes away when dinner was done.
The only conversation that took place during dinner came when Chandler murmured 
to Denice, “You’re a vegetarian, my staff tells me. You don’t eat meat, or dairy 
products?”
The question surprised Denice slightly. She said simply, “Yes, sir.”
He did not speak loudly; it was not necessary. A whisper would have been heard 
by everyone at the table. “Why?”
The answer was the one she gave when she felt sincerity in the question. 
“Reverence for life, sir.”
“Call me Frank. How do you reconcile your reverence for life with what happened 
in Los Angeles?”
“I don’t. There are contradictions in life.”
“And yet you think life is sacred?”
Denice was peripherally aware of Jimmy and Robert watching her, and she 
struggled to keep her voice under control; somehow Chandler made her feel very 
young and uncertain. “Yes, sir. Frank.”
Chandler nodded, said, “Your father didn’t,” and returned to his dinner.
Denice sat frozen, almost unable to think. He knows. Robert knows. Jimmy knows, 
and Jodi Jodi. McGee knows. Ring knows.
Without even counting Trent and Ralf, that made six.
A secret known to six people is no secret.
She struggled with the beginnings of panic, fought it down.
After the dinner dishes had been cleared away, while coffee was being served to 
Jimmy and Chandler, Chandler said, “This has been a year of tragedies and 
miracles. Last summer a newsdancer named William Devane came to me, and shared 
with me a rather unbelievable story, which I nonetheless do believe. You all 
know some parts of it, and I will let William share the balance with you 
himself; he’s returning from Earth tomorrow. He tracked Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon to 
San Diego, and lost him there.” Chandler was silent a moment, cradling his 
coffee with both hands; he took a small sip, replaced the cup on its saucer. 
“Apparently Sedon is still alive. By contrast, my old friend, Belinda Singer, is 
passing soon. It’s part of the reason I was at Mars—that and some business with 
a circus. Belinda is in a hospital at Phobos CityState because anything within 
striking distance of the Johnny Rebs is no longer safe, and Phobos CityState has 
the best hospital available outside of Halfway, or Luna City, both of which are 
unsafe from the Johnny Rebs. Belinda is old, even older than I am, which is 
saying a good bit; and the transform viruses have ceased working. The doctors 
say her nerve cells are tired. The only treatment they’ve managed to suggest for 
it is experimental, and may cause significant memory loss as the cells are 
regenerated. The only other option left to her is to clone herself, digitize her 
memories, and record them into the clone. She feels that’s a good way to pass on 
her problems to a stranger who happens to share some of her memories. I tend to 
agree. So she’s going to die, soon, at least partially because she doesn’t dare 
come back to Earth; and the world will be a lonelier place once she’s gone. A 
few months ago my friend of forty years, Thomas Boone, died at the hands of this 
Old One pimp, Obodi.” Chandler glanced at Jimmy Ramirez, a quick look from under 
the heavy brows. “With some help, I’m informed, from ‘Sieur Ramirez here.”
Jimmy studied Chandler, unblinking, expressionless. “I had no loyalty to Boone. 
Obodi, whatever else you may think of him, offered us a chance.”
Chandler shrugged. “I’m sure he said so. Perhaps Boone was simply more honest?”
Jimmy’s expression indicated what he thought of that.
Chandler sighed. “A man my age tends to make friends cautiously; I’ve lost so 
many of them, and the friends one makes as an adult are never of the sort one 
makes when young. Adults lose the ability to offer, or receive, unconditional 
loyalty. It’s a thing of youth, and it rarely survives youth.”
Denice found herself simply looking at Jimmy, across the length of the small 
table. Without needing to Touch him, she knew the thought that passed through 
him at that moment. There are many women in the world. But in your life you only 
get a few friends.
Chandler continued. “I’ve heard it said that Trent the Uncatchable is the 
greatest Player in the System, and I tend to believe it. During and after the 
Long Run, back in ‘69, when it became a matter of common speculation that Trent 
the Uncatchable was in fact Trent Castanaveras, I researched his short life to a 
degree that perhaps even DataWatch could not have matched. I hired the best 
Players I could find, the best sherlocks Credit can rent. We ran into dead ends 
everywhere. People would speak to my sherlocks until they broached the subject 
of Trent; silence then. My Players gave up, one by one. In places where there 
should have been records of Trent, there were not, or the records were clearly 
false. My most expensive Player actually penetrated the Bureau of Biotech’s 
records, and found that the gene maps on record, not just for Trent but for all 
the Castanaveras telepaths, could not have been correct. Someone—Trent, I 
assume—altered them. The fetuses described by those gene maps would not have 
survived; Trent may be a great Player, but he is no geneticist. I would imagine 
that the hardcopy records from the ‘30s are correct, but getting at them was 
beyond even my resources.
“The picture that emerged was that of a young man fiercely protective of his 
friends, whose friends were equally protective of him. You, ‘Sieur Ramirez, I 
made, and I kept an eye on you. And your friend Jodi Jodi, and your friend Bird. 
I suspect the PKF made you as well, and dismissed you all as not worth the 
effort, as obviously not genies; small-time offenders, theft and such, whom 
Trent made friends of while in the Fringe.
“We had descriptions,” said Chandler softly, “of a young lady who associated 
with Trent during the summer of ‘69. Allowing for her makeup key the elements 
that predominated in descriptions were green Caucasian eyes, glossy black hair, 
pale skin. She was seen dancing with Trent at a club in the basement of the Red 
Line Hotel, was seen many different times at Kandel Microlectrics Sales and 
Repair, where Trent the Uncatchable worked prior to his arrest by the PKF. I 
knew who she had to be: Denice, the daughter of Carl Castanaveras and Jany 
McConnell.” His voice held frustration edging toward anger. “I could not find 
you. The methods available to me failed, and other methods of looking I had to 
forgo; they would have alerted DataWatch, and I did not wish to find you at the 
cost of immediately losing you to the slavery in which the Unification kept your 
parents.”
Denice found her voice. “What makes you so sure I’m who you think?”
Chandler leaned back slightly, relaxing with an apparent effort into the 
cushions supporting him. He gestured at Jimmy. “Your friend here, Sieur Ramirez. 
When Tommy Boone died, I lost whatever real authority I ever had inside the 
Johnny Rebs, but I still have friends inside, people who talk to me. Obodi 
questioned your friend Ramirez in front of half a dozen Rebs, and some of those 
Rebs spoke to other Rebs, and somewhere in that chain someone spoke to me. 
Ramirez told Obodi you’d been Trent’s lover; that was enough. Denice Daimara, 
Trent’s lover, eyes the color of emeralds—nobody walks around these days with 
green eyes unless they’re real, and usually not then; it meant your eye color 
mattered to you. If anyone inside the Rebs had had any sense of history at all, 
Sedon would have known that the young lady being brought to him was not merely 
Douglass Ripper’s bodyguard, not just some girl with a few years of dance and 
some shotokan training; Sedon would have known, Denice Castanaveras, that you 
were the daughter of Carl Castanaveras and Jany McConnell, and you would never 
have gotten within ten klicks of him. I think, Denice, you would have died on 
the set of that sensable in the Santa Monica Mountains.”
Chandler was a pacer. A half hour into their conversation, he rose, and moved 
restlessly back and forth across the soft, ankle-high rugs, not stopping even 
once the entire night.
“So,” said Chandler, as he walked, “this is our problem. Sedon is, for whatever 
reasons of his own, dragging the United States, and likely Japan as well, toward 
an uprising we cannot win. No simulation I have run—and I have employed hardware 
and expert systems that dwarf the resources of any replicant AI, run by the best 
Player I could get my hands on—no simulation shows this insurrection possessing 
any significant chance of success. I got four percent once by a ridiculously 
optimistic set of base assumptions. Usually the simulations showed less than one 
percent chance of success. Sedon does not have the Collective with him; he does 
not have the Belt CityStates with him; and he does not, in point of fact, have a 
good quarter of the genuine Reb power structure standing with him. And he needs 
them all to have so much as a one in four chance of success.” Chandler snorted. 
“He needs me. Chandler Industries is the only institution in the System that can 
give him the transportation he needs to fight.” He stopped pacing, turned to 
look at them all, and said simply, “This uprising, my friends, must never take 
place.”
“Assuming your projections are right,” said Jimmy bluntly, “and I’m not sure I 
believe they are—or even that you’re being honest with us—how do you suggest 
that this insurrection be stopped? Go to the Peaceforcers?”
Chandler locked eyes with the young man. “It occurred to me. It’s a tempting 
scenario in many ways. Intelligence from within the PKF suggests that the 
Peaceforcers are chomping at the bit. Commissioner Vance, in particular, 
wouldn’t require much in the way of an excuse to move on the Rebs.” He shook his 
head. “It’s a bad idea, though. Vance is a poor tool; he’d crack the back of the 
organization. We’d be rebuilding for a decade or more, and that’s a thing I’d 
like to avoid. No, our course is clear, and you, ‘Sieur Ramirez, nearly did the 
job for us. A shame you didn’t cook the bastard’s heart instead of just basting 
his belly a bit.”
“You’re going to kill Sedon.”
Chandler nodded. “We’re going to try. I’ve discussed this with Robert, 
and—albeit with reservations—he’s willing. Describing William as willing is 
something of an understatement. To hear him tell it, he’s waited fifty-odd 
thousand years for this.” Chandler did not smile at the joke, if he thought it 
one. He turned to Denice. “ ‘Selle Castanaveras, or Daimara if you prefer, I’d 
like to send you with Robert and Dvan, and I’d like to request that Ralf the 
Wise and Powerful aid you. I’ll get you to San Diego, and from there the four of 
you—yourself, Robert, Ralf and William—will determine how to proceed. Your 
father was once part of a trio called the Three Musketeers; himself, the Elite 
cyborg Christian Summers, and a woman named Jacqueline who was a de Nostri. They 
were quite simply the most effective team the PKF ever employed. I don’t have a 
de Nostri to offer you, and I don’t have an Elite to offer you, not even one of 
the Jap knockoffs; but I do have Robert, who is, after your father, the 
deadliest human being I’ve ever met, and Dvan of the Gi’Tbad, who has impressed 
me as I have rarely been impressed in my life.” Chandler took a deep breath, 
said quietly, “Will you do me the great favor of joining these men, going to San 
Diego, and cutting this motherfucker Sedon’s head off?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“If you don’t go,” Chandler said evenly, “Robert won’t go. And I don’t imagine 
your AI friend would help us either, and I don’t have a Player available who’s 
capable of dealing with Ring. Denice, we need you.”
“Perhaps. But your need does not create a sense of obligation in me.”
“You need us.”
“That’s what I need to think about.”
Chandler gazed at her a moment, and then the ghost of a smile touched his lips. 
He inclined his head slightly. “I should know better than to try to bargain with 
a Castanaveras. I’d like an answer soon.”
“You’ll have one.”
Jimmy Ramirez looked back and forth between the two of them. “What about me?”
Chandler snorted. “You don’t even have your other foot. You’re staying right 
here.”
“I don’t think so.”
Chandler smiled at Jimmy. “I have someone who wants to see you.”




- 11 -
« ^ » 
At Phobos CityState, on June 8, 2076, row upon row of SpaceFarers’ Collective 
ships lined the moonlet’s rocky, uneven surface, an honor guard of some eighty 
ships lined up beneath the dim, distant Sun; more spacecraft than Trent had ever 
seen together in one place before, or would, he suspected, ever see again.
Belinda Singer, whose skill and wisdom and energy had helped keep the 
SpaceFarers’ Collective intact for half a century, was dying.
Doctor Rinerson said, “She’s been waiting for you.”
Eric Rinerson was a short man with a slight tendency toward fat. Otherwise he 
was what his name might have implied, a pale Caucasian genotype with blue eyes. 
He had stood alone with a pair of medbots on the other side of the surface 
airlock as Trent cycled through into pressure. There were easier accesses to 
Phobos CityState General Hospital—most of Phobos City itself was pressurized 
these days—but not for a man who did not wish even his presence on Phobos known.
Trent hated the melodrama of it worse than the inconvenience, but it was a 
simple truth: when you had five million Credits on your head, assassins were 
everywhere.
Rinerson continued to wait patiently as Trent stripped his p-suit off and hung 
it on a hook by the airlock entrance. He knew Trent well; he had treated him six 
years prior, when an eighteen-year-old boy had been delivered into his hands 
suffering from a broken leg, cracked ribs, a knee that lacked sufficient 
cartilage to make a decent toothpick; a punctured lung; and residual death 
pressure damage to the lungs, eyes and ears.
Trent pulled on a pair of magboots, and clicked them to the corridor floor. 
“She’s been dead in every real sense of the word for nearly two days,” Rinerson 
said as they walked down the corridor together. “But she wanted to see you 
before she let go.”
The medbot was a small thing whose head came up to Trent’s belly button. It had 
three arms and six legs, and it spoke in gentle, simple sentences. “Belinda 
Singer,” said the medbot, standing in front of the door to her hospital room, 
“is dying.”
“I heard,” said Trent. “It’s why I’m here.”
“You may see her if you do not disturb her,” the medbot continued. “She is a 
very sick patient.”
“Dying, you say.”
“Very sick,” the medbot cautioned.
“Say you understand,” Rinerson whispered.
Trent stared at the medbot. “I understand. I will not do anything to disturb her 
while she dies.”
The medbot’s metal head bobbed up and down, a programmed imitation of a human 
nod. “That will be very good.”
The room was larger than Trent had imagined. White glowpaint lit the room 
brightly, gleamed off the medbots standing next to Belinda’s immersion chamber, 
off the half dozen pieces of medical equipment Trent recognized and the larger 
collection that he did not.
Rinerson waited at the door.
Trent moved forward into the brightness. In an abrupt absurd flash of memory, 
the room on Luna came to him, the room where a dozen Peaceforcers, Vance and 
Melissa du Bois among them, had watched him walk through a wall. It had been 
about this size, and lit like this, with this dispassionate white clarity.
Belinda Singer had undergone what Doctor Rinerson called total systemic failure. 
She could not speak or breathe or see; her heart had long since ceased pumping. 
She looked like a potato that had begun to grow, floating in some clear solution 
that Trent knew was not water, tubes sprouting from her at every orifice. Her 
arms and her legs were gone, amputated to prevent the spreading of poisons from 
the tissues in her extremities, the extremities dying from lack of oxygen as her 
heart failed and the thin tissues of veins and capillaries collapsed. She’d had 
seven strokes that even the nanoviruses cruising her bloodstream, on the other 
side of the blood-brain barrier, had been unable to prevent.
No one except Singer herself knew how old she actually was. There were no 
records of her at all prior to the year 1987. She had been born in an age when 
it was still possible for records to be lost, for courthouses to burn down, or 
be burned, and for average men and women to create and sustain new identities if 
they wished.
A thin optic fiber led from the old woman’s hairless skull to a systerm against 
the wall. It was not an inskin—Belinda could not possibly have survived the 
surgery required to implant an inskin—but perhaps it was close enough.
He closed his eyes and went Inside.

“When I woke up this morning,” said Doctor Death, “I realized that I was 
completely and totally perfect.”
It is midnight on the Boulevard of Dreams.
The streets are empty, and the buildings are burning, blazing, and nobody seems 
to notice. Motorpigs tear up and down the Boulevard on chopped Harleys, 
screaming insults at one another and watching the buildings glow. Sitting at the 
curb in front of the Hotel Paradise, in a drop-top metallic blue ‘67, Mustang 
with the engine running, are Doctor Death and Trent the Uncatchable.
A portly, middle-aged man wearing a ponytail and a loud sports jacket is 
standing in front of the Hotel Paradise’s entrance, screaming at the top of his 
lungs at a tall, incredibly gorgeous heavy-metal musician. “Do you have any idea 
how lucky you are? You’re in Heaven—now—but you fuck up like this again and I’m 
sending you back to the Hell where I found you—to New York,” he shrieks, “where 
they made you ride the subways!”
It’s all too tedious, and Doctor Death has heard it too many times before. 
Doctor Death is somewhere in her late twenties, with long black hair, wearing a 
black leather miniskirt and a black leather vest, black calf-high boots and a 
white silk bra. She tunes it out, staring through her mirrored silver sunglasses 
at the burning Boulevard of Dreams, the Motorpigs, and the news crews who are 
filming it all for Channel Two Action News. The burning buildings are reflected 
in Doctor Death’s sunglasses, movie miniatures in reverse. “Totally perfect,” 
says Doctor Death softly. “Except that I was still going to die. I was perfect 
and I was going to die. I felt—”
“Fucked over by the Karma Gods.”
Doctor Death begins rolling a joint with great care, looking down into her lap. 
“Exactly. So I went driving. At sunrise. Kick the stereo in, blow the speakers 
right off the doors. Loud music, Hendrix, Van Halen, stuff with properly handled 
guitars. I hit one-twenty in the mist going down Pacific Coast Highway.”
Trent nods. “Truly, a perfect moment.”
Doctor Death gestures at the joint, sitting like a sacrifice on the altar of her 
lap. “And this is a perfect joint. Want a hit?”
“Sure.”
Doctor Death hands him the joint and Trent lights it, tokes once and hands it 
back. Doctor Death takes one mighty hit, sucking the joint halfway down with one 
monstrous toke, and tosses it out the window. She puts the Mustang into first, 
still holding the clutch down, holding her breath, revving the engine until the 
sound becomes one immense shriek of power. She screams, marijuana smoke 
obscuring her face, “I hate this godless culture!” and then pops the clutch, and 
the Mustang screams away from the curb in a cloud of rubber smoke.
They zoom westward down the Boulevard of Dreams, toward the ocean, weaving in 
and out among the gangs of Motorpigs.
Doctor Death has to raise her voice to be heard. “Before I dropped out of high 
school I had a history instructor who tried to tell us what a great tragedy it 
was that the Greeks got conquered by the Romans. Because the Greeks were so much 
more civilized, they were artists.” Doctor Death turns to her right, stares at 
Trent, not watching the road, and says intensely, “Fuck art. The Romans built 
roads. They were the first ones. They didn’t build roads to service the empire; 
they had an empire because they built roads, leveled and graded, laid gravel and 
then stone atop the gravel. And the roads made it possible for people to go 
places, to meet other people and other kinds of people. It fostered the exchange 
of information and the development of personal freedom.”
Trent smiles. “Belinda, information is overrated.”
Doctor Death nods. “Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not 
understanding. Understanding is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not 
beauty and beauty is not love and love is not music. Music is the best.”
“Whose is that?”
“Um. Frank Zappa.”
Trent shakes his head. “Never heard of him.”
“I always wanted to be a musician,” Doctor Death says suddenly. “It’s all I ever 
really wanted. But I can’t sing.”
“Bummer.” There is a pause, a fragrant, burning-building, smoke-filled sort of a 
pause. A fifteen-story high-rise is crumbling off to their right, and the sight 
is spectacular. “Let’s go,” says Trent, “and drive down the freeways at 
unreasonable speeds.”
“Deal.” Doctor Death whips off down a side street, onto a freeway ramp, and then 
onto the freeway itself. “I was up in San Francisco once,” Doctor Death says 
broodingly, “and they had a double looping reverse overpass U-turn freeway 
onramp. I’ve been sick with jealousy ever since.”
They weave in and out of traffic, zooming down the freeway at unreasonable 
speeds, the wind whipping Doctor Death’s long black hair back away from her. She 
has to shout to be heard above the sound of the wind. “Did I tell you that when 
I woke up this morning I realized that I was completely and totally perfect?”
“You did,” Trent says.
Doctor Death nods, says in an entirely different voice, “I thought so.”
Fade to black.
“Where are we?”
They stood on a cement pathway, next to a small stone wall at the edge of a long 
drop, looking out over a huge city Trent did not recognize. An observatory 
loomed up into the sky beside them.
“Griffith Park,” Doctor Death said. “Los Angeles. It’s 1984. The ‘84 Olympics 
have just ended.” She paused, staring out over the glittering sea of light. “I 
am twenty-eight years old. Three years older than you are now. I don’t have a 
driver’s license or a social security card. I don’t have a bank account. My 
fingerprints are on file nowhere in the world. I have never been arrested. 
Everyone calls me Doctor Death; I haven’t used the name I was born with in so 
long I’ve nearly forgotten what it was.” A cool breeze rose, brought the scent 
of growing things nearby, overlaying the distant stink of burned hydrocarbons. 
“Fifteen years from now, in 1999, a man named Camber, dressed all in black, is 
going to come to me and offer me a job. When he takes his sunglasses off I will 
see that his eyes have no internal structure, and no color; they are darker than 
the sunglasses that conceal them. And we will stand here together looking out 
over Los Angeles—because it is a sight he wants to see, the view from the 
Griffith Park observatory, of Los Angeles before the Quake.” She turned to face 
Trent, and said softly, “He will tell me something I will not believe. He tells 
me other things—that I will be powerful, and wealthy, and respected; that I will 
die at a great age, and be mourned by many. That everything I have ever desired 
in my life, I will accomplish.
“But he will not tell me the nature of the job he wishes to offer me, and the 
predictions—” Doctor Death shook her head. “I’d visited psychics before. And he 
was very good, telling my fortune, but I didn’t believe him.”
Trent studied Doctor Death’s still features. “You were so beautiful.”
Doctor Death shrugged. “This is just my memory of how I looked, and I’m an 
egotistical old woman… The last thing he said to me, Trent, was, ‘You will never 
speak of this to anyone.’ And until now I have not. I’m not sure why.”
Trent thought that the sky to the east had lightened just a touch. “Belinda, I 
came from Ceres to be with you, because I was told you wanted to speak to me 
before you died. I will listen to anything you want to say.”
“You’re going to be old someday, Trent. You do know that.”
Trent said slowly, “I’ve felt old most of my life, Belinda. When I was very 
young, I was already old. They call me the Uncatchable, and some of them think I 
walked through a wall, and some of them think I’m”—He shook his head—“something 
else. But when I was very young I already knew I could die. That some day I 
would die.”
Doctor Death took off her sunglasses, stowed them in a pocket on her vest. “The 
awareness of mortality is a very powerful thing.” It wasn’t Trent’s imagination; 
the sun was rising, a pale gray band of light backlighting the skyscrapers in 
downtown Los Angeles. “I never thought about death. I knew it would come, 
someday, but I never thought about it. I was never afraid of it, and I’m not 
afraid now. I did everything I was put in the world to do, Trent. Every last 
thing. Except one.”
Trent waited.
“Four thousand years ago,” said Belinda Singer quietly, “the Jews envisioned a 
God who was just, omnipotent, and all-knowing; the source of all things. Not of 
the universe, not equal to the universe, but the source from which the universe 
came. Ethical monotheism was a powerful concept, and one that led, quite 
directly, to the very concept of science, to the idea that the world was 
knowable, governed by a set of laws and rules that the mind could decipher and 
understand. Some scientists, with a religious bent, said that the laws of nature 
were merely the thoughts of the Creator.
“A grand image,” Belinda Singer said, in a voice softer than a whisper. “I was 
raised to believe in it. There is only one problem with it, which is that it is 
untrue.”
The sky to the east lightened swiftly, and the blackness around Trent and the 
young Belinda Singer began to resolve itself into a park, high on a hill, 
wreathed in mist and early morning fog.
“We are an insignificant life-form in a small solar system at the edge of an 
unimportant galaxy. A bubble of order and reason floating in the midst of a vast 
Chaos. A tiny aberration that has been allowed to continue only because those 
powerful enough to destroy us have had other and greater concerns.
“This is the thing,” said Belinda Singer, “that Camber Tremodian told me, on 
that day in 1999: that there is no order to the universe, and no reason, and no 
cause. We are alone and outnumbered—”
Her eyes met his. In the first light of morning, in an imaginary world 
sixty-nine years before his birth and instants before her death, Belinda Singer 
said to Trent the Uncatchable “—and the universe is a far more dangerous place 
than anyone has ever told you.”
Fade to white.
Trent’s eyes were shut for just an instant.
When he opened them again, Belinda Singer was dead.




- 12 -
« ^ » 
Denice arose early, dressed in a pair of shorts and a soft cotton shirt.
She took the bounce tube down to the gym.
The gym was still set up. She and Robert had been using it often enough that 
they had ceased stowing the gym when done with it; the hour’s wait before the 
gym was available, while it spun up to one gee, was inconvenient.
She worked in silence.
The gym lacked a sound system, an oversight that had surprised Denice at first, 
until Robert pointed out that the gym had been designed for Chandler’s use, and 
that Chandler, who had seventy years prior been a professional musician, did not 
dance, and did not consider music background noise for his exercise.
Meditation first.
The image flickered into her consciousness, and out again, a Flame, on an empty 
black plain. It was gone before she was certain she had seen it; time vanished 
as she struggled to recover the image of the Flame, and failed. More time passed 
as she accepted the failure, worked toward quiet and calm.
Stretching exercises.
Work upward: feet, ankles, calves and thighs. Buttocks, waist, the groin 
muscles. Hands, wrists, elbows, shoulders.
Neck muscles.
Again, in reverse.
Tai Chi Chuan. Traditionally, one began the form facing north. Denice picked a 
direction, closed her eyes, and began moving through the form in slow motion. 
Rising hands, step forward left foot, shoulder strike
left shoulder, right, right foot
forward to seven star—
The movement vanished into nothingness. She moved without knowing it, as slowly 
as her body would allow her, through the ancient patterns. Muscles did the work 
they had been taught, the slow contractions and releases. She was not aware of 
the world, of her place within it, of herself or her body; she knew nothing 
except the progression of the form.
When she finished her pulse had elevated to nearly fifty beats a minute.
She moved out of the form and into dance.
Without music, she made her own. The rhythm of her heart set the beat, and she 
started slowly, eyes still closed, allowing herself now to feel the smooth flow 
of her muscles, the leashed power of the machine as it rose to the demands she 
placed on it. She flowed into the dance, let her body moved as it wished, as 
fast as it wished, and found herself spinning and turning faster across the 
length of the mat, and even the man watching her was pleasant, not sexual but 
sensual, the feel of him as he watched her move, watched her dance—
She moved in an extended spin, moving in the silence to the rhythm with which no 
other dancer she had ever met could have kept time, the silent sound filling her 
awareness, and then, she did not know why, made the mistake of opening her eyes.
Gi’Tbad’Eovad’Dvan stood motionless at the edge of the mat, only a step away 
from the bounce tube, and his wordless, soundless cry struck her square between 
the eyes.
She lost control of her body instantly, and spun down to the mat in a blur of 
uncontrolled movement. She felt her left fore-arm snap as she struck at a speed 
no human could have attained, bounced once off the mat and came down again 
sharply on her right knee. A pain occurred in her hip and then she found herself 
lying facedown, bleeding from a cut on her lip onto the pristine white mat. Fade 
to white.

When she awoke again she was lying on the bed in her room, staring up at the 
ceiling.
A medbot was busy inspecting her knee; her left arm was already set and 
splinted.
Robert sat in the chair facing her bed, elbows on the chair’s armrests, fingers 
steepled together, index fingers moving restlessly against one another.
She sat up and had trouble focusing. “Robert?”
“I’m here.”
“What happened?”
“Dvan returned.”
“I—” She winced as the medbot grasped her kneecap, cried out as the dislocated 
knee was forcibly reinserted into its socket. Denice waited through the wash of 
pain until it had subsided enough for her to speak. “I need to talk to him.”
“He’s waiting outside. Shall I bring him in now?”
“Yes.” Denice winced again as the medbot began wrapping her knee. “Please.”
Robert did not get out of his chair; he said mildly, “Command, unlock.”
The door curled open. Dvan had been standing immediately outside.
Waiting.
He entered slowly, waited while the door uncurled behind him, and stood there 
with the door to his back. It struck Denice in that moment how huge the man was, 
two hundred and fifteen, perhaps two hundred and twenty centimeters tall, with a 
build to match. Denice thought a shiver touched the massive form; he stood 
before Denice and looked at her with honest wonder. “What you have done—I 
thought I should never see it again, though I lived forever. If you had Danced 
so in the Temples at Kulien, my lady, I think you would have brought a Flame to 
equal the best of any man I ever saw.”
Denice stared at him. “I don’t even know what you just said and I still think 
I’ve been insulted.”
“My lady, I will serve you if you will let me.”
Robert said dryly, “Well, there’s an offer you don’t get every day.”
Dvan cut him off with the vast authority of ancient age, in a voice as hard as 
rock. “Silence.” The night face tilted his head ever so slightly to the side, in 
what might have been surprise. Dvan said to Denice Castanaveras, “My lady, you 
cannot know what you have done. I have been lost without the Dance, lost longer 
than you can believe. I will serve you all your life if you will only let me.” 
He took another step toward her, said softly, “My lady Dancer.”
Denice licked her lips. “You’re not like Obodi. I feel you here.”
“My lady?”
“I didn’t feel Sedon, it was like he wasn’t there. I feel you.”
“My lady, he was once a Dancer of the Flame, no matter how debased he may be 
today. I am merely a Shield.” Dvan paused, said in a very different voice, with 
a far more pronounced Irish accent, “And a newsdancer too, to be sure. With a 
modest reputation for getting my facts right.”
Denice reached for him—
Touched
—and for an instant she floated among his thoughts, joined herself to them, to 
the peculiar duality of the newsdancer William Devane, and the stronger, deeper 
memories of Gi’Tbad‘Eovad’Dvan, and the memories tugged at her. It was the 
deepest use of the Castanaveras Gift, so often vastly painful that she avoided 
it whenever possible; in that moment of contact she became him.
It was as though mountains floated around her, vast blocks of memory so dense 
she had never encountered their like—
She reached for them.
She knew instantly she had made a mistake. Lacking the tools taught to the 
children of the Flame People, she had no means to deal with the information that 
deluged her. An avalanche of imagery fell upon her, swamped her, and she felt 
herself suddenly drowning, losing herself, the link to her own identity; 
somewhere in the storm was the information she needed to survive, the training 
the Flame People gave their children, to manage the information acquired across 
the millennia—
She did not have enough time, and the memories she needed were buried too deeply 
among those that assaulted her.
Denice felt herself fragmenting, coming apart in the assault upon her of fifty 
millennia of memory.
She cried out once and disappeared within the rush of the maelstrom.
And was no more.




Back to the Beginning
Dvan’s Story
Hold me now
Oh hold me now
Till this hour has gone around
And I’m gone on the rising tide
For to face Van Diemens land
It’s a bitter pill I swallow here
To be rent from one so dear
We fought for justice
And not for gain
But the magistrate sent me away
—a ballad of the nineteenth-century
Australian exiles
- 1 -
« ^ » 
I am the Name Storyteller.
In those moments when Denice Castanaveras touched the mind of 
Gi’Tbad’Eovad’Dvan, they passed into the cusp.
For this moment, and for years to come, I have vanquished my Enemy, have brought 
to pass a meeting he sought desperately to prevent.
I have paid dearly for the privilege; I will tell you now the Story of Dvan, 
offspring of the Old Human Race, a Shield of the Gi’Tbad.
It is a story unique in the history of our people, Old Human or New.
It begins here, as the boy—
—fidgeted in the sun.

Dvan was sixteen when the Suei Dancers came to Kulien.
He had never seen a Suei before, not a Dancer or any lesser personage; Dvan’s 
people, the Tbad, lived half the World away from the Suei, at the far Southern 
pole. Any visitor from the north side of the Equatorial Desert was exciting 
enough; but Dancers of the Suei, known for their flirtation with 
heresy—sometimes to the point of Demolition—and for their lack of respect for 
tradition, promised to be especially so.
So his attention wandered.
Instruction that day was held at the old amphitheater, the small one near the 
center of town, not too far from the Temple itself. Their instructor was new to 
them; Marah, a Shield of the Mai, who had journeyed from the Shield camp at 
Prufac to meet the boys of Kulien. There was nothing particularly odd in that; 
the Mai, most ancient of the Flame People, were neighbors to the Gi’Tbad, and 
there was not a boy Dvan had grown up with who did not have Mai blood somewhere 
in his Sixteen. Dvan had it himself in the Fourth, from the father of the 
breeder who had carried him.
Marah himself was odd enough; well outside the realm of Dvan’s experience, or 
that of his mates. A short man; Dvan was taller than Marah already, and many of 
his mates were near Marah’s height. But ropy muscle corded his form, thickened 
it until the man seemed near as broad as he was high. In hand-to-hand he had 
been immovable; there was not a throw any of them had been taught that would 
take the man from his feet.
It was to be expected, Dvan supposed; the man was a Sentinel, after all, and 
there was no higher rank among the Shield.
Dvan’s friend Tamtai, sitting on the stone bench next to Dvan, nudged him and 
whispered low, “If he takes much longer we’ll miss the Opening Dance.”
Dvan did not even nod; Marah was busy down in the pit with three other boys, but 
he had already demonstrated he had eyes in the back of his head. He demonstrated 
it again a moment later, tumbling his opponents to the ground, “killing” two 
quickly while they were off their feet, and then dispatching the third with a 
blow to the throat. Marah waited while the boys straightened themselves to face 
him, tapped his shoulders politely, and called out, “Tamtai and Dvan!”
Dvan did not allow himself the sigh he felt; he rose and unclasped his tunic, 
dropped it to the ancient white stone he had been sitting upon, and went down 
with Tamtai to the ring of black sand. The red Sun hung low on the horizon, 
giving indifferent help in warming the collection of bruises Marah had already 
inflicted on Dvan. This was Dvan’s third time today in the pit; he did not even 
waste time resenting it, when some of his mates had only been in once. His 
lineage and his size made some things in life certain, and this was one of them, 
that he would be treated more harshly than the others in field exercises.
He felt a momentary flicker of pity for Tamtai—but this time, at least, it was 
his friend’s fault. He could have kept his mouth shut. Tamtai was of no more 
than average size or speed, and did not heal quickly; Dvan suspected Tamtai 
would never make a Shield, and it sorrowed him.
Marah slapped his shoulders perfunctorily; Dvan and Tamtai returned the gesture. 
Sweat trickled down Marah’s nude form, but he did not seem at all winded by a 
full day’s hard work. His voice was neither particularly deep nor particularly 
gruff, but it had the manner of a man who was not often questioned. “Choice of 
weapons?”
Dvan did not need to glance at the rack of weapons; he said, “Rods.”
Marah nodded. “Describe the virtues, Dvan.”
“They’re common, Marah.” On the field they were Shield together, even students 
who, like Tamtai, had no real likelihood of ever receiving the cloak. Dvan spoke 
directly, as though to an equal. “Easy to fashion from common materials. Four 
striking surfaces; each end may jab or swing. A wide variety of grips allows for 
a choice between range, force, and control. Gripped two-handed near the center 
they are ideal for close fighting; near the ends, one-handed or two, for 
clearing space and gaining time.”
“Describe the failings, Tamtai.”
“It is difficult to severely injure a man with rods, Marah. They are not edged. 
Even gripped one-handed by the end, they lack the range of long staffs. Except 
in tight quarters they are useless against energy or projectile weapons.”
“They are obsolete,” Marah agreed. “Why do we train with them?”
Dvan waited a beat; when Tamtai did not answer, he said, “It may be that modern 
weapons will not be available to us.”
Marah shook his head. “It’s unlikely, Dvan. The Flame People have not fought 
among themselves since the Splinter War, and we could hardly fight the Sleem 
with rods, be they made of wood or metal. Why else?”
“A weapon,” said Dvan slowly, “is a took for the application of force to an 
objective. Perhaps it is wise that we be familiar with a wide variety of such 
tools, even those we are not likely to need against the Sleem.”
Marah said slowly. “That’s a good answer. Not entirely accurate, but not wrong. 
No combat. Dvan, stay behind.” Dvan caught the flash of relief on Tamtai’s face; 
Marah raised his voice. “Dismissed! Prayer before you go see the Dance, the 
parable of the Ax. If any one of you skips and I learn of it, you’ll be punished 
in group.”
Dvan blinked his surprise. Tamtai said hesitantly, “Marah—”
Marah shook his head. “Just Dvan. He’ll join you at the Temple.”
They stored the practice weapons together, carrying the racks one at each end, 
and then came back out to the pit and sat together, cross-legged on the sand. A 
faint breeze rose, quickly dried what sweat remained on Dvan’s body.
The old Sentinel said, “You’ll make Shield. And perhaps you only, from this 
generation of Kulien.”
An answer did not seem to be required; Dvan simply nodded.
“How do you feel about that?”
Dvan said in surprise, “Honored. How else?”
“Tamtai won’t make it,” Marah said bluntly. “You could be engineers together, or 
healers, or farmers.”
The boy said slowly, “I love him well enough, Marah. But I mean to wear the 
cloak.”
“Ah.” The man’s gaze was intent. “The Tbad Dancers, they tested you for the 
Dance?”
Marah knew they had; Dvan said stiffly, “Aye.”
“And?”
Dvan simply shook his head.
The Sentinel actually smiled. “You’re less than forthcoming, Dvan. You’d have me 
think they did not ask you to join them.” After a beat, with no response from 
Dvan, Marah shrugged. “Well, no matter. You chose the Shield.”
Dvan said firmly, “Aye.”
“You’re known for your piety, lad. The Others pray when they’re told to; it’s 
said you never miss a day.”
A flicker of uncertainty touched Dvan; how many different things was the man 
going to want to talk about? “Aye,” he said finally.
“Why?”
The flat question threw Dvan; he struggled not to let it show. “Marah?” The 
Sentinel waited patiently. Dvan said at last, “I suppose I find it helpful. It 
clarifies my thoughts. I find it… calming.”
“You visit with the Temple Followers frequently, and have since rather a young 
age. Is this among the subjects you pray on?”
Dvan did sigh this time. “Aye. One of them. There’s no harm in it, Sentinel.”
“Marah, lad. In private, we are Shield to Shield.”
Dvan nodded.
“You’ve never been bred,” Marah continued, patiently, unhurried, “and you’ve 
never taken one of the breeders for a ride. Only the Followers. Why?”
Dvan could feel the flush climbing his cheeks. “They’re—well, I suppose, 
they’re…” He stumbled to a halt, cheeks red, and saw Marah’s manner harden.
Marah could not keep it from his tone. “Do you love one of them?”
Dvan’s stomach muscles clenched; he shook his head swiftly, eyes fixed on the 
sand between them. “No! Sir, it’s just—sometimes afterward we talk.” He looked 
up at Marah, painfully aware of the redness of his features. “They’re easier to 
talk to than the Keeper, or the Keeper’s Daughters. And they’ve been taught some 
of the same lore, sir, and—”
Marah relaxed visibly. He made a dismissive gesture. “Well, if that’s the worst 
of it… well, an excess of love for the Gods is no bad thing, I suppose. Listen, 
Dvan—” He held the boy’s eyes. “I think you’ll make a Shield such as the World 
rarely sees. But be aware of how things look, eh? A word to the wise. We’re men 
together, and the needs of the body are nothing to be fretted over, it’s what 
the breeders are there for. But go gently with the Followers. Because they’re 
taught some measure of lore, have some small responsibilities in caring for the 
Zaradin Temple… well, it’s hardly the same as being a man, is it?”
Dvan’s voice was very soft. “No, Sentinel. Marah.”
The Sentinel smiled at the boy. “Perhaps I’ve belabored a point I did not need 
to. But I would hate to see a Shield of your potential lost to Demolition.”
Dvan shivered. “It won’t happen, Marah.”
Marah rose, offered a hand down to Dvan. “I’d hardly think so. Get dressed and 
get to the Temple, or you’ll have no time to pray before the Dancers arrive.” He 
patted Dvan on the shoulder, said companionably, “The Suei have a new Dancer 
this tour, and he’s worth seeing. I’d hate for you to miss him.”
Dvan ran.

The Zaradin Temple sat in the center of the city, on a small hill, overlooking 
the center district. Dvan arrived breathless, having sprinted uphill, through 
gathering shadows, the entire distance from the Shield amphitheater. A Temple 
Follower, a tall girl whom Dvan knew only by sight, stopped him at the Third 
Gate. “Not now, sir. You’re too late, and your mates have prayed and gone.”
Dvan drew himself up to his full height, so that he looked down on the girl. She 
was young, still in the childhood of her body, in only her second or third year 
in the robes. It would be twenty years at least before she was taken in among 
the Keeper’s Daughters, those who Kept the Flame itself—if she ever was—and 
under ordinary circumstances it hardly mattered if Dvan offended her. But this 
was not an ordinary circumstance; he could not enter the Temple without 
permission. He was not certain that Marah would punish his mates if he did not 
pray—it was Marah himself who had made him so late—but he did not want to find 
out.
Dvan spoke with what dignity he could summon. “Follower, the Sentinel 
Mai’Arad’Marah,” he said, and had to stop for breath for a moment, “bade us pray 
before the Opening Dance.”
The girl shook her head swiftly. Her voice dropped to a whisper: “Sir, the 
Keeper is inside already.”
“Oh.” Dvan blinked, took a deep breath. “Well. Perhaps I will not pray after 
all. Perhaps,” he said slowly, “I will go bathe instead. Doubtless I need it. Do 
you think?”
The girl simply stared at him, clearly uncertain what to say. Dvan grinned at 
her. “I suppose you must stay on the Gate?”
She took his meaning now; she looked down immediately. Her hair, long and 
unbound, obscured her features. “Aye,” she whispered.
Dvan nodded. “Sometime again.”

In the first minutes after Sunset, the Temple’s First Gate was thrown open to 
the crowd. The quarters of the Shield prospects were a twenty-minute walk from 
the Temple, at the edge of town. By the time Dvan had reached it, his mates were 
bathed and changed into formal clothing. Except for Tamtai they did not wait for 
him, and he could not find it in him to blame them. Tamtai laid his clothes out 
while Dvan washed the sand and sweat off, and then tied Dvan’s thongs while Dvan 
dressed. They ran most of the way back to the Temple, until they reached the 
center district, and then, with eyes upon them, slowed to a more dignified walk.
They just made it; they entered through the First Gate with the last of the 
crowd, day workers mostly, a few farmers, the sort of men who would not care 
much if they missed the Dance entirely. The First Gate swung shut behind them, 
and they made their way down the long passageway, past the Temple proper, to the 
Temple Amphitheater. Dvan could already hear the karoki sticks, beating in 
rhythm, and he longed to run for their seats; but they were Shield now, at least 
until the Review said they were not Shield, and they had the dignity of the 
Shield to uphold.
They passed through the portal, into the Amphitheater proper. Neither Dvan nor 
Tamtai had time to look for his mate, and it probably would have done them no 
good if they had; if there were not forty thousand men in the Amphitheater, 
there were not many fewer. Tamtai found them a pair of seats together in the 
second deck. As Shield they might have claimed seats in the first deck, but it 
would have required hunting for a seat during the Opening Dance, and would 
surely have annoyed those sitting in the first deck—Shield; a few scattered 
lords of the Aneda in white shadow cloaks; and the Keeper’s Daughters. A bare 
few of the Aneda were women who had once been Keepers; aside from those few, and 
the Daughters, there were no women in the crowd; breeders were hardly 
appropriate at the Dance.
The light posts that ringed the large dais faded to black as Dvan and Tamtai 
made their seats. Dvan could not help himself; it was far from the first Dance 
he had ever seen, but a fierce shiver ran up his spine as the darkness descended 
around them. The murmur of the crowd gentled into an anticipatory hush—
They came in single file, a dozen men in scarlet, hoods raised to cover their 
faces. Dvan knew the names of two of them—the legendary Dancer Indo, one of the 
greats not just of this millennium, but of all time; and Sedon, a man not yet 
fifty, whose reputation had crossed the World already.
They ascended to the dais, and there, in the darkness, disrobed, and called down 
the Flame into the Continuing Time—
—and Danced.

I am the Name Storyteller.
Words can no more contain the Dance of the Flame than electric ecstasy, or the 
feeling of hate, the song of a whale, or the smell of sex. The Dancers moved in 
a certain fashion that could be described, and spoke words that could be marked 
down, and told certain stories that might be repeated; but these things are not 
the Dance; and if I told you the half of what they did and said, would take us 
into Story after Story after Story; and they are not the Story I have chosen to 
tell.
They are not Dvan’s Story.

In the night it grew chill, and Tamtai joined Dvan on his mat. Dvan drifted, 
eyes closed, warm covers drawn up around them.
Tamtai lay with his head on Dvan’s shoulder. He spoke quietly, so as not to be 
heard by their mates, sleeping nearby throughout the boy’s barracks. “Dvan?”
“Hmm.”
“The Dancer—”
Dvan knew who Tamtai meant, even without the name. “Aye?”
Tamtai spoke in a whispered rush. “When he spoke the Renunciation—‘Tonight we 
are free, and the promises broken—I swear by Haristi, Dvan, I thought he was 
talking to me.”
“You’re supposed to, Tammi. That’s the task of a Dancer, to bring the old truths 
to life for the crowds.”
Tamtai was silent a moment. “You didn’t feel that, that he was talking to you?”
Weary and sore from the day’s work, and in no mood for the conversation, Dvan 
nonetheless said gently enough, “Tamtai, by the name of my Name, I can’t imagine 
what the Dancer Sedon might want to say to you, or me either.” The boy yawned, 
and said as sleep gathered, “And what would I have to say to a Dancer?”




- 2 -
« ^ » 
The ship rolled slowly through the spacelace tunnel.
The walls of the tunnel pressed in upon the ship, a seething gray storm of lines 
and spheres enclosing the starship. The tunnel stretched as the starship rolled 
along its length, widened to accommodate its passage.
Once gone the spacelace tunnel shrank back to its original dimensions.
For most of half a year, while the starship crawled the long distance to the 
distant planet of exile, the starship was all of Dvan’s existence.
When he was not on duty, Dvan prayed, or walked the empty corridors of the huge 
starship. Existence began at the very center of the starship’s sphere, at the 
gravity ball that gave the ship’s crew and guards and exiles their weight. Some 
claimed to be able to feel a difference between the gravity at the center of the 
ship and that at the outer deck; Dvan thought that those who made the claim 
fooled themselves, for he had never noticed any difference in weight himself.
And at one hundred and thirty kilos, he surely massed more than anyone else 
aboard the starship. If there was a difference to be felt, he would likely have 
been the one to feel it.
Arrayed around the gravity ball, on the First Deck, were the various control 
rooms, where the crew and engineers did Haristi knew what to keep the ship on 
course. There were rumors that the engineers used metalminds to aid them in 
navigation; if true, and Dvan had a sneaking suspicion it was, Dvan certainly 
did not wish to know about it. One of the great opponents the Flame People had 
faced during the Splinter Wars employed such metalminds; stories of the 
mechanical and electronic life forms that had arisen during the Wars were still 
used to terrify children.
In the ordinary course of the trip, Dvan knew the duty of the engineers was 
simple enough; only if the ship were unfortunate enough to encounter the 
warcraft of the Sleem empire would they be called upon to truly exert 
themselves.
And then, thought Dvan without any cynicism whatsoever, for a rather short 
period.
For the Flame People did not surrender in battle, and once engaged, the Sleem 
showed no mercy. In over 3,200 years, no ship of the Flame People had ever 
triumphed in combat against the Sleem; some few had survived to escape.
They did not expect to encounter Sleem, not on this trip. The starship’s 
destination was far from the path of the empire’s expansion.
Second Deck held most of the great ship’s support equipment; the airplants and 
water-growing plants in one section; repair parts, tools and general reserve 
equipment in another—among them a dozen stasis bubbles, to store those who might 
be alive, but badly injured, until they could be returned to the superior 
medical facilities of the World.
Third Deck held quarters for the crew, the engineers and their women. It was the 
one deck where Dvan did not walk. His presence among them, in their private time 
off duty, would not have been welcome. Not that they would have been rude; quite 
the opposite. But they feared him, and no overture from Dvan, or from any of the 
Shield, could change that.
Fourth Deck held the Shield quarters, including Dvan’s, and the Zaradin Temple.
And Her place, the largest open space aboard the great ship, larger than the 
enclosure that held the Temple itself. Had this been a purely military mission, 
either the ship captain or the Shield Sentinel, depending on whose length of 
service was greater, would have taken that place of honor.
To Dvan’s knowledge, this was the first time a Keeper of the Flame had ever been 
aboard a starship, had ever left the World.
Fifth Deck held the exiles, and the Dancers imprisoned within their wards. It 
was the place where Dvan spent his duty time; it was the place where he walked 
most often, letting himself be seen by the over four thousand prisoners the 
Shield guarded.
Though he showed himself to the other Dancers, he rarely bothered stopping by 
the pentagram of the great heretic himself; he saw quite enough of the Dancer 
when on duty.
There were eight Dancers aboard among the four thousand, the balance being their 
followers, men and breeders who had chosen to accept exile with them. Twenty 
cells of two hundred each, with doorfields barred to all except Shield, sufficed 
for the four thousand. There were no Shield among the exiles; Shield who had 
followed Sedon had died, either by their own doing when defeat was clear, or at 
the hands of the Shield they had fought.
The exiled Dancers were the only Dancers aboard. The heretic had shown an 
uncanny ability to draw Dancers into his heresy, and the Aneda had thought it 
wise to avoid any chance of further contamination.
Sixth Deck sat beneath the outer shell of the starship. It was the largest of 
the decks, both in square floorage and cubic; the ceiling reached up five or six 
times a man’s height. Antimatter missiles, dormant in their casings, waiting row 
upon row for the moment they would be needed, took up much of the free space on 
Sixth Deck. Particle cannon protruded up through the shell of the starship, gave 
the starship’s surface its slightly cratered appearance.
Field generators, dense and cold, squatted in the spaces between the particle 
cannon. If they were called upon, it would mean the ship was in mortal danger, 
being fired upon by a Sleem warship intent on destroying it.
A bare smattering of other weapons were mounted about; black hole generators, 
lethal if they penetrated the Sleem defenses, but so massive, and therefore 
slow, that no attempt to use one against a Sleem warship had ever succeeded; 
antimatter mines and cluster bombs, largely defensive in nature, to aid a ship 
when it chose to flee; and a few other weapons that had rarely or never seen use 
in combat.
Sixth Deck had a viewport, a transparent opening in the hull that let out onto 
the spacelace tunnel.
In real space, there would have been one or more crew up here, watching the 
panorama of the stars. Inside the tunnel, only Dvan came, and seated himself, 
and watched.
In his first hundred days aboard the starship, the view had disturbed him, as it 
disturbed all the others. But Dvan found himself drawn to it, and night after 
night, in the early hours before he was due for duty, he ended up seated alone 
on Sixth Deck, shadow cloak drawn up around himself to protect him from Sixth 
Deck’s bitter chill.
The spacelace tunnels were not empty.
They held two shapes.
The first shape was that of the lines, long, twisting, and sinuous, weaving 
themselves around Dvan’s disembodied awareness. The lines rarely touched, but 
when they did they came together as though embracing, as though—and Dvan knew 
the impression ridiculous—as though they were exchanging information.
The lines were all of a color, a deep, almost black shade of gray.
The second shape was the sphere, shaded in infinite levels of gray, from a pale 
chalkiness that at times fooled Dvan for a moment into thinking he had seen a 
white sphere, to a dusky gray that approached blackness. The spheres were all of 
different sizes; a very few were of a majestic size to equal that of the 
starship, so large that the walls of the spacelace tunnel bulged at their 
passage as they had bulged at the passage of the ship.
Likewise the lines, some thick and ropy, others of the thinness of a cutting 
laser.
They moved together, touching and tumbling, the lines and spheres. At first the 
movement had seemed random to Dvan, but as the days flowed by he began to see 
rhythm in their movement, a meaning in the dancing spheres, writhing lines, and 
shifting shades of gray.
He had an idea that, if he could only watch it long enough, he might learn 
something.
But he was only a Shield, with such religious instruction as was necessary for 
his position.
Had he received the full instruction of a Keeper, or a Dancer, he might indeed 
have learned something, as the Zaradin had learned, three and a half billion 
years prior.
But that is another Story, for another time.
Inevitably, as for all of us, duty called him.

The eight Dancers were separated from one another by as much space as Fifth Deck 
could grant them.
The Shield Sentinel Mai’Arad’Marah, eldest and fiercest of the Shield aboard the 
prison craft, sat at the edge of the Dancer Sedon’s pentacle, inside a warding 
circle. His shadow cloak, of deepest black, was pinned at the shoulder with the 
emblem of his rank, the gold wheel of the Sentinel.
At his belt hung the kitjan.
At his feet sat a small stone cup that held black ink.
Marah rose at Dvan’s approach, stood at the edge of the circle and touched 
foreheads briefly with the younger man.
Dvan had to bend a good bit for it. “I have the duty.”
“I give it freely.”
With a toe Marah erased a segment of the circle and stepped free. Dvan took his 
place and accepted the kitjan from Marah. He dipped his thumb into the still 
pool of black ink, used it to trace the circle closed.
He glanced at Marah when done. “Anything?”
Marah shook his head, said roughly, “He’ll not speak to me. He knows better.”
Dvan nodded, clipping the kitjan at his waist, and gathered his cloak about 
himself, sinking to the floor facing Sedon.
Marah left.
Silence descended around Dvan and Sedon.
In the distance Dvan heard the distant murmur of the rebels speaking; the 
doorfields kept them from moving about, but they did not bar sound.
The Dancers could not be stopped by doors. Walls would not hold them if they did 
not choose to allow it.
They were imprisoned in open space, inside pentagrams that teams of Keepers had 
drawn, laboriously, over and over again, until the ink on the ship’s deck was 
ten and twelve layers deep.
Sedon’s pentagram had been drawn, chanted alive, and drawn again, over thirty 
times; the layers of ink made a visible ridge on the deck.
Flames, small and pale, danced at each of the pentagram’s corners.
Sedon moved restlessly, his beautiful, sculpted form nude inside the confining 
pentagram. He had enough space to move; enough to stretch out and sleep, enough 
to exercise, enough to Dance if he chose.
So far as was known, none of the Dancers had Danced on the trip out.
All of Fifth Deck was lit poorly, but the areas around the Dancers’ pentagrams 
were lit more poorly yet. Dvan was not certain why; perhaps it was some measure 
of support for the small Flames that lit the corners of the pentagrams, or of 
punishment for the Dancers inside.
Sedon’s voice, sharp and piercing, rapped against Dvan’s ears. “How are you 
today, my friend?”
Dvan did not correct the Dancer. “Well. Yourself?”
“Imprisoned, against my will. As yesterday, and the day before, and so forth.” 
Sedon’s eyes—brown, Dvan thought, but he had never seen them closely, or in 
enough light to be certain—touched upon Dvan.
“Have you been fed well?”
“I will not complain of my food, only of my dignity. I crap into metal while one 
of you watches, I cover it with metal, and slide it across the line. It is 
undignified for a Dancer to be used so.”
“I can do nothing about that. We balance your needs against ours. Where we have 
been able to preserve your dignity, when measured against our needs for safety, 
we have done so.”
Sedon stood silent, very still, looking at Dvan. His voice held no emotion. “I 
understand. I bear you no grudge.”
Dvan spoke honestly. “I am pleased.”
“Shall we step on with yesterday’s conversation?”
“If you wish.”
“You were born near Kulien?”
“Aye. Sent to my training at Prufac.”
“You have the Dance in your lineage.” It was not a question.
“Again and again. Back to the Sixteen, six of eight male forebears. Among the 
breeding eight, two Keepers.”
“A fine lineage, Dvan. How did you come to be a Shield, a guard in this foul 
prison?”
“It was known before the childhood of my body ended that I would be large. The 
Keeper at Kulien felt it would have been a drawback for a Dancer.”
“Other men of your size have been Dancers.”
Dvan nodded. “Aye. But what was for a Dancer a drawback, was for a Shield an 
advantage. As a Shield I was assured success, worthy work.”
“Did you never wonder if there might be other options for you? Other work worthy 
of you?”
Dvan said slowly, “No. How do you mean?”
“Did it never strike you that things might be ordered differently? That as a 
child you might have decided, I shall be such a thing as I desire, and been 
allowed to act that decision?”
“It did not. I do not know how things might be among the Gi’Suei, but things are 
different among the Tbad.”
“They are not!” shouted Sedon. He stood quivering, glaring through the gloom at 
Dvan. His voice dropped to a sudden fierce whisper. “Among my people are Tbad 
and Suei and Genta and Kersi and Alven, even a Mai or three; ask them. It is the 
same everywhere across the World. As a Dancer, you would have come to know this; 
we travel, we Dancers, Temple to Temple, we see more of the World than the 
Keepers, far more than Shield; more than anyone including those Dancers and 
Keepers and Shield who have ascended into the Aneda.” His voice dropped 
slightly, and he said persuasively, “It is the same everywhere, Dvan. No matter 
where you go, the same lack of choice, the same craven toadying to the will of 
the Aneda, as though they were not themselves merely Dancers and Shield and 
Keepers wearing Zaradin white.”
The sound of his voice, suddenly gentle and intimate, touched a warning within 
Dvan. It was not a Speaking, Sedon knew better; but even without that tool Sedon 
was, when he put himself to it, capable of a deadly seductiveness.
That the thought skirted heresy could not stop it; Dvan wondered, and not for 
the first time, if it would not have been better to have put breeders, however 
poorly trained, in charge of the eight heretics. Dvan did not think any of the 
Dancers could have brought themselves to speak to one. Even if one of the 
Dancers—Sedon was the only one Dvan thought at all likely—had managed to speak 
to a woman, he could hardly have managed any convincing attempt at goodwill, to 
say nothing of seduction.
The very thought of a Dancer with a woman in his arms brought the touch of a 
smile to Dvan’s lips.
The smile must have touched off one of Sedon’s notorious rages; he took a step 
toward Dvan, stopped cold with his toes nearly touching the inked barrier of the 
pentagram, and knelt until his face hovered less than an arm’s length away from 
Dvan’s. “Smile,” he whispered harshly, “smile then, Shield whose life and honor 
are the property of his owners. Slave to the Keepers, slave to the Aneda, slave 
to the Flame itself. Inside this prison I am more free than you, and when we 
reach our destination, I will be the freest thing you have ever seen, or ever 
will.”
“The freedom of prison?” Dvan let his smile widen. “It does not impress me. And 
service to the Flame is an honor I have willingly assumed.”
A glare of light exploded around them. Sedon took a single step back, wild blue 
and white light flickering over the surface of his nude form in such a fashion 
that he seemed a work of art come alive. He pointed a finger at Dvan, and the 
cold Flame leapt forward, splashed in midair against the invisible barrier of 
the pentagram. Sedon spoke out of the center of the Flame in a loud and terrible 
voice: “Be its servant, then, its slave. And I shall be its master; and we will 
see who will end better.”
Dvan said calmly, “We have already seen that. When you were exiled from the 
World, your life, and the lives of your followers, ended. The place to which we 
take you—” Dvan shrugged, as the Flame surrounding Sedon faded into nothingness. 
“The life you make there is no life that concerns me. You will be staying. I 
will not.”
Sedon turned away without further word, threw himself down to the softened 
surface of the deck, and lay motionless, with his back to Dvan, for the rest of 
Dvan’s duty.
Neither of them was yet a hundred years old.

After duty, as was his custom, Dvan walked down to Fourth Deck, to the Temple, 
and went inside to pray.
From the outside the altar did not look like much. It was made of ten panels, 
each one taller than Dvan himself, arranged in a rough circle. The temple’s 
ceiling reached up over twice Dvan’s height. Aboard ship, even so large a one as 
this, it was a waste of space that would have been tolerated for nothing except 
the Temple. (And was tolerated with grudging even for that. Not everyone was as 
pious as Dvan, and chief among the pragmatics were the ship’s officers, charged 
with the task of protecting the ship from hostile vacuum, the even more hostile 
corridors of the spacelace tunnels, and the usually lethal hostility of the 
Sleem. Prayer could not hurt, but the engineers and crew knew with utter 
certainty that all the piousness in the Continuing Time would not repair a 
breached hull, or turn the course of a Sleem missile.)
At the center of the temple ten gleaming black panels, each one somewhat taller 
and wider than Dvan, faced inward. The inward-facing surface of each panel was 
bordered in gold and held the image of one of the ten Great Gods. Dvan made the 
familiar circle of the altar, beginning with Rho Haristi. Haristi’s image was 
that of a Zaradin; a nude, upright reptilian biped with deep brown scales except 
for the shimmering blue scales on its stomach, and a long, thin, segmented tail 
that wound round and round its double-jointed legs. Dvan touched each panel as 
he went, whispering the words of celebration; the panels glowed briefly as he 
touched them, the images seemingly come alive for a brief moment. The panels 
after the Lord of Light held the images of three non-Zaradin aliens; the Great 
God Eldone Ra, a delicate, shimmering insectile creature, with thin purple wings 
that did not look as though they could bear any weight; Lesu Orodan, a squat 
hill-shaped being, dull gray and blue in color, at whose size Dvan could not 
even guess; Siva Elherrod, a blue-furred, six-limbed, huge-eyed creature whom 
most of the Flame People found in some measure beautiful—
—and then Kayell’no.
Gi’Tbad’Eovad’Dvan sank to one knee and bent his head.
Kayell’no was human, God of Lies, Named Storyteller. The image was of a 
brown-skinned man, with hair and beard of a deeper brown. His eyes were the dark 
umber brown of emeralds. They lacked pupils or any other internal structure. He 
smiled at the Continuing Time, a grin that was at once both mocking and seemed 
to invite the person being mocked to join in the joke. Only Kayell’no’s face was 
visible; the rest of him was covered in white clothing unusual to one of the 
Flame People; leggings all of a piece, a tunic that covered him from his gloved 
hands to his throat. He wore a shadow cloak not unlike that of a Shield, except 
that it was as white as the dress of a lord of Aneda, and the cloak hung down to 
obscure most of his form. A pattern on his chest was partially hidden by the 
cloak.
He stood with feet braced as though for battle, with a slim tube that had always 
looked like a weapon to Dvan clenched in his right fist.
Because he had no wish to give offense, Dvan prayed quietly and quickly before 
moving on. Lies and stories had little to do with his needs.
He was halfway through the circuit; the next image was that of the Zaradin Ran 
Rikhall, dressed in the white robes the Aneda so slavishly imitated, who faced 
Rho Haristi; followed by Erisha Sum, who faced Eldone Ra; the Zaradin Bri 
Erathrin, who faced Lesu Orodan; and then the humanoid Nik Shibukai, Named 
Anarchist, who faced Siva Elherrod. Shibukai’s image had always struck Dvan as 
very near a work of art; a batwinged creature with scarlet skin and needle-sharp 
shiny black teeth, exposed to the Continuing Time in a brilliant grin.
Dvan stopped before the tenth and last image, the image of the God who faced 
Kayell’no across the circle of the altar.
The tenth figure, the form of the God of Players, was surely human; it could 
well have been the inverse, mirrored image of the Name Storyteller. Black gloves 
covered hands that possessed four fingers and an opposed thumb; the figure was 
of human height and generally of human dimension as well. It was, by Shield 
standards, short for a man, but it was unquestionably male; it lacked breasts 
and was muscled in ways that were improbable for a human woman.
The god stood against a pale, mist-filled background. Where his face should have 
been were only shadows; in the palm of his left hand danced a golden flame, and 
on his right stood a black flame that sucked light from its surroundings. Upon 
his chest the god bore an insignia like that of the Name Storyteller’s; but 
where the pattern on Kayell’no’s breast was obscured by the swirling white 
cloak, on the God of Players the insignia was visible: nine circles enclosing a 
starburst. Touching the third circle out from the starburst was a pair of small, 
solidly colored spheres, one blue and one white.
High on the figure’s left shoulder was an inscription in some tongue even the 
Zaradin had been unable to read.
Forty-nine thousand years before the birth of Christ, Gi’Tbad’Eovad’Dvan crossed 
his arms across his chest, each hand grasping the opposite shoulder, and sank to 
his knees. The long folds of his shadow cloak pooled around him, warped light 
away from him. Before he bowed his head to begin praying, his eyes rested 
briefly upon the unknown words, inscribed in a tongue that would one day be 
called Tierra:




- 3 -
« ^ » 
Denice lay unconscious for three days.
During that time Robert did not allow Chandler to see her, did not allow Dvan to 
see her; allowed Jimmy to see her briefly, then sent the young man away when he 
grew restless.
Aside from the insertion of an IV, to keep up her blood sugar, he did not even 
consider allowing one of Chandler’s medbots at her, as he was certain that the 
medbots would have no more idea how to deal with what had happened to her than 
he did.
She awoke on Thursday morning.
Her voice touched him, faint and weak. “Robert?”
He had been dozing in the chair facing her. His eyes opened instantly. “Denice?”
“I’m very hungry.”
“I’ll feed you.” He ordered for two, joined her on the bed, sat next to her and 
helped her sit up; took the tray away from the waitbot when it rolled in. Warm 
wheat toast with blueberry jam, strawberries, carrot slices, freshly pulped 
orange juice. At first she was unable to eat anything; he had her drink her 
juice, and then his. Denice vomited it up less than a minute later; he cleaned 
it up patiently, gave her a glass of water, ordered apple juice for her and fed 
her that. The toast grew cold; he ate her portion and his while waiting. After 
she had kept the juice down for five minutes, he fed her the strawberries, one 
at a time, until they were all gone. Her eyes drooped, and he sat holding her up 
with one arm, waiting patiently as, with increasing drowsiness, she worked her 
way through the raw carrots. Before she finished them her eyes closed, and 
Robert laid her down gently, cleared up the dishes, and gave them back to the 
waitbot.
He sat and watched her for a while. Her breathing had grown more regular, and 
her pulse; with each passing day she had moaned and talked in her sleep a little 
less.
If he had not known better, he would have thought this nothing but normal sleep. 
After a few minutes he extricated himself from her sleepy grasp, went back to 
his chair and returned to waiting.
Just after 10:00 Pm. on Thursday, June 11, Robert awoke to find her sitting up 
in bed, watching him with an odd expression.
“Where’s Dvan?”
Robert blinked, sat up slightly. “Probably sitting outside the door. He’s been.”
“Get him.”
Robert nodded. “How are you?”
“All right. Hungry and sore, but otherwise all right.” She was silent for a 
moment. “There are—pieces left. Fragments. I’ve managed to forget most of it.” 
She shook her head. “I think that saved my life.”
Robert did not ask what she meant.

He spoke at great length; and the silence stretched, palpable and alive, when 
Dvan was done.
Robert sat in the lone chair; Denice sat up in bed, features still slightly 
pale, and Dvan stood like a soldier at attention, as during the long hours he 
had spent talking.
Robert said finally, “United Earth Intelligence.”
Dvan said flatly, “Those were the words.”
“I remember it,” said Denice in a quiet voice. “I don’t remember much but I 
remember that, the shape of the words against the man’s chest.”
Robert simply looked back and forth between them. Dvan glanced at Robert. “They 
were written in a tongue similar to English, night face, an Arabic script 
bearing clearly English words.”
Robert said mildly, “But there is no such thing as United Earth Intelligence. I 
am sure I would have heard of it.”
“Night face, as a child, younger in time than the lady Castanaveras is today, 
cynical as only the very young can be, I once considered the Time Wars a legend, 
and a dubious one at that. A piece of religious apocrypha, to which the Shield 
copies of In Time of Legend did not even make reference. No,” Dvan said with a 
certain heavy contempt, “there is no such thing as United Earth Intelligence.”
Denice said, “Yet.”




- 4 -
« ^ » 
At the exact center of the Temple, on a small raised dais of gray stone, sat a 
bound volume—a book—titled In Time of Legend.
Dvan had never read it, had never so much as held it in his hands; the Shield 
had its own copies, censored for them by the Aneda. At times, before Dancing, 
the Dancers read from the unexpurgated book, briefly or at length. In his short 
life Dvan had heard, he guessed, less than one-hundredth of the stories 
contained within In Time of Legend.
Dvan knelt there with his back to the dais, to the bound copy of In Time of 
Legend, head bent toward the image of the God of Players, and prayed.
It was not prayer such as a Christian of Denice Castanaveras’s time would have 
recognized. The concept of asking one of the Gods to intercede on his behalf in 
some matter would have struck Dvan as both ludicrous, and rank heresy; had such 
a thing been proposed to him he would likely have replied that the Great Gods 
had better things to do with their time. Prayer, as it had been taught to Dvan, 
was a thing designed to improve the nature of the person praying, to give one 
time to reflect, to open oneself to the voice of Deity, if Deity chose to speak.
Dvan knelt and prayed to the God of Players. In his life he had only once 
received a response, and that a brief one. While still a child he had prayed to 
the Nameless God of Players, had asked the god to guide him in his desire to 
become a Dancer. For just an instant the form of the god had come alive, and a 
voice, so clear and sharp he had never doubted it, had whispered to him, No. 
That is not your path.
Where the shadow cloak touched him, he was warm. The skin of his face grew cold 
under the chill breezes from the ship’s airpush. Dvan was little aware of the 
passage of time, of the condition of his body; after an indeterminate time, he 
simply knew that he was done.
The matter of Sedon had not resolved itself within him; he was not surprised.
Dvan rose, inclined his head to the God of Players—no greater an inclination 
than he would have given Marah, or the Aneda; a sign of respect—said aloud, “At 
your service, sir,” and left.
Another Shield stood outside the Temple as he left. Dvan had the immediate 
impression that Gi’Alven Mutara’Kladdi had been waiting for him. Kladdi’s words 
confirmed it; as Dvan passed him Kladdi spoke softly, voice pitched low to carry 
no further than Dvan’s ears, this despite the fact that they were alone together 
in the corridor: “The Keeper would see you.”
There was no need for Dvan to ask who was meant; there was only one Keeper 
aboard ship.
Aside from guarding the heretics, protecting the Keeper was the most important 
shipboard task the Shield had. They were in many ways the same task. It was a 
matter of particular pride to Dvan that the Keeper chosen to inscribe the first 
and last layers of lines of each of the eight pentagrams in which the Dancers 
had been imprisoned was quite nearly one of his own, the lady Saliya of the 
Ea’Tbad, She who had Kept the Temple at Deshego. Other Keepers had laid the 
lines between first and last, but those Keepers were not aboard, and only 
Saliya’s presence and will kept the pentagrams at full force. If some 
misadventure were to cause Her death, the pentagrams imprisoning the Dancers 
would not long survive Her. To prevent the Dancers from taking over the ship, 
the Shield would need to kill the Dancers while the pentagrams still held—
—Dvan thought he could do it; but he was certain that most of his mates, 
excepting the Sentinel Marah, would not even if they could.
Saliya’s quarters were on Fourth Deck, as was the Temple, but it was as far away 
from the Temple as the sphere of the ship allowed it to be. Her quarters were 
those normally given the ship captain, if a civilian craft; or the Shield 
Sentinel, if military. Adjustments had been made to the quarters, to suit Her 
needs; all the walls removed, to give Her as much open space as possible, and 
the quarters around Hers emptied of occupants, to help in preserving the silence 
She craved.
Shield guarded the entrance to Saliva’s quarters, over a dozen of them spaced 
along the length of the corridor leading toward Her cabin. The Shield did not 
look at Dvan as he strode down the length of the corridor toward the Keeper’s 
quarters, but kept their eyes fixed forward.
Two Shield stood at the entrance to Her quarters. Dvan touched the clasp at his 
neck, handed his cloak to the Shield at his left, and entered.
He stepped into a place of shifting shadows. Her quarters had been divided into 
smaller, more private areas with cloth hangings, some of them simple cloth, 
others with scenery inscribed upon them.
Saliya came forward to greet him, stepping through a long hanging that held an 
image of the Restoration, and into the light. She wore a dark, unadorned dress 
of some thin material that flowed around Her in a way Dvan found distracting. 
Four gold-red bracelets at each wrist and ankle set off skin that was pale to a 
degree Dvan thought unattractive in most women and all men, the color of blood, 
pink and blue beneath the skin.
On Her it was glorious.
Their Keeper was the oldest human being Dvan had ever met.
Dvan had heard it rumored that She remembered the days before the Zaradin left; 
if true, it would make Her some twelve thousand years old.
Her voice was the instrument of a Keeper or Dancer, trained to the art of 
Speaking, now low, and soothing. “Dvan. Be welcome.”
Dvan did not know he was in love, and would not have believed it if told so. 
Love had nothing to do with the act of sex, and certainly nothing to do with a 
Keeper.
He stopped two paces before Her, inclined his head, and said, “My lady. I am at 
your service.”
She nodded, turned away from him, and Dvan followed Her. The dress left Her 
shoulders and most of Her back free, and Dvan found himself watching the smooth 
shift of muscles beneath Her skin. They went back through a wall of soft 
curtains, to a slightly enclosed area lit by a single living Flame.
Dvan seated himself cross-legged on the cushions arrayed before Her, with the 
Flame between them.
To the extent that he could read meaning in Her mannerisms—and Dvan did not fool 
himself to think that he made much of what was there—She seemed troubled. She 
began without preamble: “Dvan, I am concerned for you. You speak with the 
heretic.”
“My lady, I do. I have been selected for that duty.”
“He attempts to subvert you?”
“My lady, he does. It is to be expected; there were Shield among his rebels. He 
has not attempted a Speaking; he would gain little by one, aside from his death 
and mine.”
Saliya made a dismissive gesture. “I am not concerned with any attempt he might 
make at Speaking. But words are dangerous even when not crafted to touch a man’s 
soul, and Sedon is a master of such persuasion. It concerns me, Dvan, that you 
listen to him.”
“My lady, he makes interesting arguments.”
“And you have had half a year of them.”
“My lady, aye.”
“You have been praying a great deal recently.”
“My lady, I have needed to cleanse my thoughts.”
“What heresies has he spouted at you?”
Dvan hesitated. “My lady, a wide variety. In many instances, I think they are 
perhaps not even heresies, simply matters that are not commonly taught the 
Shield. I know not where to begin in numbering them.”
“What has he said of our destination?”
“My lady, that it is the home of our ancestors, the world from which our Masters 
took us; that it is better suited to our kind than the World; warmer, with light 
better for our eyes; gravity better suited to our bones.”
“These things are true,” Saliya said simply. “The records were found in the 
Temple at Kulien, finally decoded not many centuries before you were born. The 
planet is that from which we came. A horrifying place, in many respects, wild 
and bloody. Yet the scenes I have been shown, taken of its surface by the first 
ship to visit it, are in some ways beautiful. You will see colors you have never 
known before, eat foods so well suited to our digestion they do not even require 
treatment to remove amino acids we cannot digest; can be eaten plucked straight 
from the plants on which they grow. Carnivores exist, on the land and in the 
sea, of such a size that you have never dreamed their like, things larger than 
any human of the Flame People, even yourself. Such things have not existed on 
the World since the first Zaradin settled there, many millions of years ago.”
“My lady, he says there are people there.”
“Heresy,” she said sharply, “there are not. There are creatures which resemble 
us. Lacking the improvements the Zaradin made in us, they do not speak; do not 
make tools, or use them. They do not even look so very much like us, being made 
with heavy brows and thick bones. But”—She spoke with obvious reluctance—“there 
is no question that they are our distant relatives, left behind when the Zaradin 
took our ancestors to serve and amuse them.”
Dvan ventured to ask the question. “My lady, do you remember the Zaradin?”
He thought the question might have offended Her; She answered shortly. “No. The 
Desertion took place before my birth. Dvan, what religious instruction have you 
received, and what history?”
“My lady,” said Dvan softly: “In the beginning was the Flame, and the Flame was 
life. We who came after saw the Flame, and rejoiced, and Danced in its beauty.”
The Keeper smiled at him, and his heart skipped a beat. “Very good. But that is 
not what I mean. You have had basic instruction, and done well at it, or you 
would not be guarding the heretics; and you have had the training in warcraft 
given all Shield.”
The last was not quite a question. It was barely possible, given his youth, that 
Dvan was a new recruit, shipped while still in training specifically because of 
his great size and immense piety. Dvan nodded, and saw Her relax slightly. 
“Good. Then you have much of the background you need. I have discussed this with 
your Sentinel, and he is in agreement with me; your ignorance is dangerous to 
you, when exposed to the likes of Sedon. You are young for the burden of this 
knowing,” Saliya said gently, “but its lack may harm you more. Hold my hands, 
child, and listen.”
And so Dvan found himself staring into Her eyes while Her nervous system came 
into contact with his, and after a short while had passed found himself 
breathing in rhythm with Her.
And listening while She talked.
It was, said Saliya, about five billion years ago that the first intelligent 
biological races arose. Before then there were other sentients in the universe, 
creatures of plasma and crystal; but the eldest biological life were the—She 
made a long sound, the hissing of a reptile—Ssrathin. They were our Masters, and 
with the passage of time the proper pronunciation of their name has been 
altered, both by our palates and that of their other servant races, the 
Dalmastran and Tamrann, to Zaradin.
It was our Masters who created the Craft, and among our Masters that the first 
Names arose, the first small gods of what is called today the Zaradin Church. 
From among the ranks of the Names came the Great Gods, some Zaradin, some not; 
and it was among the ranks of the Great Gods that conflict arose.
One of the heresies Sedon has doubtless shared with you is, alas, no heresy at 
all; the Zaradin warred.
Among themselves.
It is the conflict you have heard spoken of as the Time Wars, led by Rho Haristi 
on one side and Ran Rikhall on the other.
If you are like most Shield, then you have never believed in the Time Wars, for 
you have been given no reason to, have in subtle ways been led to believe 
otherwise. But the Time Wars were real, and they ended only twelve thousand 
years ago. Information concerning the conflict, why it began and why it ended, 
are missing from the records the Zaradin left behind when they Deserted us; with 
one exception, I could not tell you more about the Time Wars if I wished to.
That exception is this:
Once there were eight-sided altars on the World.
You have never seen one, Dvan. Long before you were born, the last eight-sided 
altar was destroyed; some during the Splinter Wars, others by the Aneda after 
the Splinter Wars ended. Do you know which gods were left missing from the 
eight-sided altars?
My lady, Sedon has said to me that it was the Name Storyteller, Kayell’no, and 
the Nameless One, God of Players,
Indeed. We do not know why this dichotomy existed, Dvan, except that many of us 
think it had something to do with the nature of the conflict that caused the 
Time Wars.
So, the Zaradin Deserted us, as they Deserted the Dalmastran, and in the riots 
and wars that followed, and the peace that followed the wars, we destroyed every 
Temple on the World that held an eight-sided altar within its walls. We prayed 
at the ten-sided altars, and there, under the gaze of the Nameless One, began to 
learn the lore of the Zaradin. Not all of it, to be sure, and many of us doubt 
we will ever learn all of it; but what power remained in their altars we made 
our own, wrapped it in a form different from those the Zaradin once used, one 
better suited to our people than the Zaradin Craft.
We brought the bright Flame down to the World, called it forth from the left 
hand of the Nameless One and made it immanent in the World. We think it is a 
thing the Zaradin themselves never did; to bring the Flame, one must Dance, and 
that was beneath the dignity of our Masters.
Some three million years ago, while the Time Wars still raged, a group of 
Zaradin soldiers—our Masters—exploring in the far reaches of the spiral arm in 
which we are located, opened a spacelace tunnel and found themselves in the 
system from which our ancestors came. Planets with indigenous life are, Dvan, a 
rarity in this galaxy; the Zaradin were intrigued, and they made planetfall. 
They found there a tribe of our ancestors, and they took some of our ancestors 
with them when they left. We are the result. We are what they made of us, 
servants, pets, toys for their children, obedient and attentive.
My lady, if the Zaradin were to return, would we return to their service?
Saliya did not answer the question. Twelve thousand years ago, Dvan, the Time 
Wars ended. The Great Gods of the Church, once present in the universe, 
vanished, and the race of the Zaradin as well. They did not tell us where they 
were going, or why, or even that they would; neither did they tell the 
Dalmastran; and the Tamrann, so far as we know, vanished with our Masters. One 
day twelve thousand years ago every Zaradin on the surface of the World walked 
into a Temple, and did not come out again. Many days passed before our forebears 
grew brave enough to enter the Temples to look for our Masters; no human had 
ever been inside a Temple before.
Much of what is left you will have been taught; our Masters were truly gone, and 
the Splinter Wars followed. The Flame People were the only survivors of that 
conflict. While we warred among ourselves, the Sleem arose and spread out over 
the territories our Masters had abandoned. They are that rarest of biological 
life, based not on nucleic acid in a water solution, but on silicon in a 
fluorosilicone solution; the Great God Lesu Orodan is one of them.
They are not conquerors, in one sense; they wish only to deny us the right of 
expansion, as they have denied it to other species. Those who submitted to the 
Sleem have been allowed to keep the territory they had; attempts at expansion 
have been met with terrible destruction.
But it is not in the Flame People to be ruled, not even such a rule as the Sleem 
would impose. Today we are engaged in a great conflict with the Sleem; that we 
are less formidable than other foes, that they have not traced us back through 
the spacelace tunnels to the World, these things have saved us until now. But we 
are four planetary systems arrayed against a race that has conquered better than 
thirty thousand such systems.
This, Dvan, is where Sedon’s actions strike home. That he proclaims our Masters 
folk like ourselves, who had merely a few steps’ start on us, this we might have 
dealt with. Others among the Flame People, among the Aneda and the Keepers, feel 
the same; Sedon might have been forgiven this heresy. Even his greater and more 
shocking heresy, his bending of the Flame to his service, is in some ways 
impressive. He has done things with the Flame I would have sworn impossible for 
Dancer or Keeper, and had he brought this discovery to us, we might have 
explored it together, Keepers and Dancers alike.
Instead, Dvan, he lied to the Aneda, lied to the Keepers sent to interrogate 
him; taught the mastery of the Flame to his acolytes, and together they rose in 
a rebellion that diverted us from seeking a means to survive the expansion of 
the Sleem. He has put every one of us at risk from which we may well not 
recover—the Sphere Project, in particular, our best hope to protect ourselves 
against the Sleem, was badly damaged in the fighting, more badly damaged than 
has been common knowledge.
Saliya was silent for a long moment. Had he been anything other than the 
greatest living Dancer since the end of the Splinter Wars, we would have taken 
his life for it.
As he took the lives of those who fought against him.
They sat together in the cool shadows, the warmth of the living Flame gentle 
against Dvan’s skin.
“My lady, much of what you say to me, Sedon has also said.”
“I know. It is why I share it with you; it is better that you learn of these 
things from me, rather than from him.”
“My lady, insomuch as I am disturbed by anything, I am disturbed by the fact 
that he is allowed to say these things, that we have made such great effort to 
spare the lives of those who rose in rebellion. May I speak?”
“You may.”
“My lady, were it my decision, I would have seen them dead on the World, and 
their bodies returned to the processing plants.”
“Could you have killed a Dancer, Dvan?”
“My lady, I believe so. The martial skills they are taught are not so different 
from our own, and we study them as we study our own discipline. It was my great 
regret that their rebellion did not reach the home of the Tbad. It would have 
been a great honor to Shield the Keepers of the Tbad Flame.”
She licked Her lips slightly. Dvan saw that Her breathing had grown more rapid. 
“Both able to kill a Dancer, and willing?”
Dvan knew what she meant. During the rebellion, the bulk of those Shield who had 
faced Dancers in combat had been unable to perform their duty. “My lady, I 
believe so. If there is a more holy thing in existence, my lady, than a Dancer 
in the act of calling the Flame, I do not know of it. And perhaps without the 
religious instruction I received when young, I would have more difficulty 
distinguishing between Dancers serving the Flame, and those who have chosen 
otherwise. But I have had that instruction, and I will not hesitate in my duty.”
“You are a rarity, then.”
“My lady, aye.”
“You may call me Saliya, Dvan.”
Dvan’s cock, imprisoned within the stiff tunic of a Shield, stiffened instantly. 
“Saliya, I am honored.”
She stood on the other side of the Flame, let the long folds of cloth drop free 
of Her form, and stood, nude but for Her bracelets, facing him. “You may yet 
have the opportunity to kill a Dancer, Dvan.”
She had not indicated that he move; Dvan sat very still, cock rigid as a bar of 
steel. “Saliya, how so?”
“When we reach our destination, we will discuss this again. The Dancer Sedon 
would have made a martyr of terrifying potency, and we dared not give his memory 
that power. But what could not be done in the view of the World, may yet 
transpire in the shadows of their exile.” She paused, whispered, “Dvan?”
“Saliya?”
Her quiet brown eyes, in impact so like Sedon’s own, bored into his own. “Can 
you continue to speak to him?”
“Saliya, I am strong enough.”
“Be wary, Dvan.”
“Saliya, as You will.”
Saliya nodded, and Her breasts swayed slightly, nipples erect, as She held Her 
hands toward Dvan. “How do you wish me?”
“Behind.”
Without any change of expression, She reached behind Herself; Dvan heard a 
slight click as the bracelets at Her wrists locked together, and 
Ea’Tbad’Ijal’Saliya said softly, “Come to me.”
Dvan stood, shed his tunic, and went to Her, and used Her roughly until it was 
time for him to return to duty.




- 5 -
« ^ » 
Saturday night, the thirteenth of June. Robert was in bed; in this at least 
Denice had observed that he was no different from any other man. He required six 
or seven hours’ sleep a night, and functioned poorly when he did not get it.
But Dvan surprised her; recovering as she was, she slept more than usual, about 
four hours a night. But Dvan was awake when she went to sleep, awake when she 
rose, waiting for her. She supposed the man slept, but had not seen it, nor even 
any sign of weariness as he told his story through the long days and nights that 
followed. Some of it stirred echoes of memory in her, and some of it did not; 
all of it was fascinating.
And occasionally disturbing.
Denice made no effort to hide how it disturbed her. “Is this—you, and her? 
Because if this is how all of you behaved, then you come from a sick culture.”
Dvan answered her in a voice with a noticeable Irish accent, significantly 
different from the voice in which he had told the bulk of his tale. “Ach, well. 
It was all of us; it was the society we lived in. I suspect you’re right, you 
know, perhaps it was not as healthy as it might have been; but it was more 
successful than your own culture. Remember, it had survived ten thousand years, 
the entire period following the Splinter Wars, without substantial change. 
Partially that was the nature of us; we were a more stable people than you, 
genetically so, but some of it, at least, was due to the structure of the 
culture. It met the needs, physical, and spiritual, and sexual, of all its 
people. I know of no culture in Earth’s history that could say the same.”
“Did it?” Denice shivered visibly. “Dvan, a culture that has not changed in ten 
thousand years does not strike me as stable. It strikes me as dead.”
“It may be,” Dvan admitted. “In every society of your people with which I am 
familiar, where religious authority predominates, sin and guilt are the levers 
of power. Take from the people what is natural for the human organism; tell them 
that their own desires are the source of their pain; punish them, to their 
deaths, when they fulfill those needs regardless. When this is done correctly, 
instilled in a child at a young enough age, its hold is virtually unbreakable. 
My lady, my people were masters of such schooling.”
Denice said wearily, “Please don’t call me that.”
The huge man said softly, “Forgive me if it offends you. But even in the 
greatest lies there can be a core of truth. If the society we built around the 
Flame was damaged, and perhaps it was, the Flame itself is a truth, and a great 
one. I have seen it and felt its warmth upon my face and been uplifted in its 
presence. If there is anything holy in the universe, the Dance of the Flame is 
it.” Dvan was silent a beat, the fathomless black eyes steady on her. “And if 
you Dance the Flame, my lady, I will serve you, in whatever fashion the universe 
allows me, for I have Dedicated my life to do so.”




- 6 -
« ^ » 
Dvan hated the light the most.
Harsh and incandescent, it gave things colors the likes of which Dvan had never 
imagined. Blues and reds, umber and brown and orange were all similar, though 
they were hideously garish by comparison with the same hues at home. White 
seemed to Dvan to have taken on a hideous tint of blueness.
But some colors he had literally never seen before.
There was the color they had named yellow, for instance, the color of this 
planet’s star. It was the color that was made when wood burned; some thought it 
similar to an aspect of the living Flame. Other colors, though—green, for 
example, the color of most of the plants here, which was like yellow in the way 
orange was like red—such colors simply had no analogue to anything Dvan had ever 
seen before.
The light made garish mockeries of familiar things. The brooch that Tamtai had 
given him as a parting gift, the traditional emerald Shield, was under this 
light not brown but green. Many of the items that appeared to be of one 
color—brown—aboard ship turned out, under the light of this star, to be green; 
others turned a shade similar to blue, but with a vibrancy no blue had ever had 
before.
He was not certain he believed it—but garish and alien though it was, it seemed 
to him at times that he could see better in this light.
The starship squatted at the edge of a sea of gold, a huge sphere that rose up 
even higher than the trees surrounding the grassy plains. They had landed at the 
edge of a great expanse of some tall, golden grass, an empty plain that reached 
out to the far horizon. Occasionally patches of forest, green and brown, 
sprouted in places where water was to be found in abundance.
Far to the north, tinted blue and made hazy with distance, a range of mountains 
lifted up from the earth.
The prison’s buildings—the colony’s first town, if you were one of the 
exiles—sprouted about the ship. Doubtless the exiles would have preferred to 
build farther away from the vessel that had transported them into exile, but 
they were given no real choice in the matter; in the first years after 
touchdown, the exiles had struggled merely to survive. Had it not been for the 
ship’s stores, rationed out to them as they needed them, they would not have 
survived either of their first two cold seasons. As it was it came a close 
thing; nearly three hundred of the four thousand exiles died the first cold 
season, of starvation, of accidents, in two cases from attacks by carnivores.
The first child was born that cold season, to one of the spiritless breeders the 
rebels had been allowed to bring with them. Dvan did not know who had fathered 
the child, and it hardly mattered; amidst the general starvation, the infant did 
not long survive. Nonetheless it raised a debate within the Shield, a debate 
that was finally silenced by the Keeper.
It was the Shield Gi’Suei’Obodi’Baresst—related within the Sixteen to the Dancer 
Sedon himself, and therefore more aware of the stain of Sedon’s actions than 
most of the other Shield—who raised the subject, when he learned that one of the 
women was pregnant. Though they showed themselves among the exiles during the 
day, both alone and in groups, the Shield retired to the ship at night. In the 
evenings they took their meals together, sitting cross-legged on the floor of 
their common room, feeding one another as though they were in a Shield camp on 
the World.
An indentation in the deck held a small firepit. Pots of kliam and long strips 
of babat, the evening’s meal, hung near it to be warmed.
That night while eating, the Shield Baresst said quietly, “I think the child 
should be Demolished.”
None of the Shield had to ask which child he meant; there was only the one.
The Sentinel Marah sat with the Shield Rovime, the only Shield aboard who was, 
Dvan thought, younger than himself. Marah accepted a slice of warm kliam from 
Rovime, licked the sauce from the younger man’s fingers before reaching into his 
own bowl for a slice to feed Rovime. “I think not.”
They were off duty, in the company of equals; Baresst demanded, as he would not 
have in front of outsiders, “And why not? Marah, do you really wish to see the 
numbers of the prisoners expand? They are nearly unmanageable now, rude and 
insolent as they are lazy.”
Marah shrugged, said laconically, “We have been given no instructions, lad. 
Presumably the exiles were allowed to take breeders with them for a reason.” He 
wiped his fingers, still damp from Rovime’s saliva, on his tunic, and reached 
with both hands for the huge mug of Ion that sat on the floor next to him. He 
drank the entirety of the mug’s contents without pause, tilting his head back, 
and after placing the mug back to the floor wiped his mouth with the back of his 
hand, and gestured to Rovime as though he would eat no more. “It’s a dangerous 
thing, to act without orders.”
“But, Marah, today we need only deal with eight Dancers, and we Shield, 
outnumbering them, armed as we are, are well able to do so.”
“I’m glad you think so,” said Marah drily. “You never faced them during the 
rebellion, did you?”
Baresst said stiffly, “You know I did not.” It was a sore point with him; the 
rebellion had actually begun at the Temple where he had been Dedicated, but he 
had been serving duty off-planet when it happened.
“They are impressive fighters. Apparently the Flame cannot be used in combat, 
not even by them; be grateful. Had that resource been available to them, they 
would have beaten us, Baresst, and you, I, the Aneda themselves, would today be 
imprisoned or dead.”
Baresst nodded, spoke the thought that had crossed the minds of most of the 
Shield at one time or another. “So, they are dangerous, even now. Among the 
exiles are none young enough to be trained as Dancers, Marah. But give them 
children, let them breed to fill this planet, and who knows what the heretics 
will do? Will you see them train their get as Dancers? In thirty years, or 
forty, we might find ourselves with not eight heretic Dancers to deal with, but 
eighty.”
“Lad, we don’t even know we’ll be here when that happens.”
“Marah, we don’t know that we won’t.” Marah shrugged; it was a true thing. 
“We’re here till they recall us. It might be four years, it might be a hundred.”
Marah thought on the problem for a moment, and turned at last to where Dvan and 
the Shield Els were eating together. “Dvan, how do you think?”
Dvan was widely recognized as the most pious of the Shield, even if very nearly 
the youngest there. He said merely, “I am unable to know the will of the Aneda.”
The argument ran long into the night. Baresst and Marah, who had started it, 
were soon reduced to observers, as the other Shield took up both sides of the 
argument. It came clear, well before the morning, that the general opinion among 
the Shield was that the child should not be allowed to live.
First thing in the morning, the Keeper—She had not even been approached with the 
problem—requested the Sentinel join Her, and said briefly, “Inform the Shield 
that the exiles, and their children, are not to be harmed, unless they offer 
violence.”
She was within Her rights to deliver such an instruction; on the World, in a 
time of peace, Keeper and Sentinel between them shared spiritual and civic 
authority—but this was hardly such an occasion. Marah was not certain that the 
Aneda would accept him, if he wished to join it; but he had known Saliya for a 
very long time, and if She was not among the Aneda, it was only because She did 
not wish to be.
So he said merely, “My lady, as you will.”
The child died anyway; but the argument was not forgotten.

The light was the worst; but the gravity and air followed a close second and 
third. The prison was better than thirty percent lighter than the gravity of the 
World. After a day outside, Dvan found himself made weary simply by returning to 
the starship, where the gravity ball still kept local gravity of the World. By 
their second cold season with the exiles, the annoyance had grown particularly 
acute. Dvan’s body, and those of all the Shield who made the daily transition 
between gravities, began to protest; his joints ached in unfamiliar ways, and 
his muscles sometimes trembled after exercise within the ship.
The air was but little better, generally too hot, too cold during the cold 
season, laden with strange scents that made many of the Shield sneeze. The 
pressure was slight enough that at the end of the day Dvan’s lungs ached from 
the unaccustomed effort of pushing the thin air in and out.
At times, returning to the ship in the evenings, Dvan felt not as though he were 
returning home, but as though he were entering a world in its own way as alien 
as the one he had just left; air cold and thick and dry, light too dim, and 
gravity unnaturally heavy.
At such times he found it easy to believe that the Flame People were not native 
to the World.
Somewhat to his surprise—it was virtually the only thing that made the duty 
tolerable—Dvan found he enjoyed his work.
The exile town was not large, but it gave the impression of largeness, wasting 
space flagrantly. It sprawled in six separate clusters about the edge of a small 
forest of some hardwood trees. The trees were among the most familiar of the 
things with which the exiles were forced to deal. Though leafier than the trees 
of the World, and growing closer together, the prison trees were otherwise 
similar to those the exiles had known in their prior lives. Wood made the 
buildings in which the convicts lived, fueled the fires that enabled the 
convicts to survive the first two cold seasons.
During the second cold season, when another sixty of the exiles died of 
starvation, Dvan heard rumors that some of the exiles had taken to eating the 
flesh of the herbivores who freely roamed the wooded areas around the town. Dvan 
dismissed the vile rumors from his mind, and after the first time would not hear 
them spoken around him. The exiles were a low lot, and some of them would say 
anything to curry favor from the Shield. He could not even find it in his heart 
to be angry at the transparency of their lies; some who might have died, the 
first cold season and the second, did not only because of the patronage of their 
jailers. Though it was not required of them, many Shield, Dvan chief among them, 
labored in the fields alongside the exiles, broke ground with them, fought with 
them against the all-encroaching weeds of the planet; and aided the exiles in 
bringing in the crop once ready.
There was always too much to do.
The task of preparing the exiles for self-sufficiency was immense. Water seemed 
no problem at first, given how water literally fell from the sky, but food was, 
and from nearly the first day. The plants they had brought from the World did 
not adapt well; the native plants pushed them out, grew alongside them and 
choked them to death.
The seasons were far more extreme than those of the World; the prison planet’s 
processional wobble was pronounced. Temperatures, from the cold season to the 
hot, varied by immense extremes; in the cold season the water often fell from 
the sky as ice. It meant that crops could be planted only late in the cold 
season, for harvesting at the height of the hot season. With only one crop every 
local year, a single crop failure could mean disaster; and the first year, when 
better than three hundred died, did.
The second year, two children were born.
One of them, a girl, survived. The other, a boy, simply ceased breathing one 
night. Dvan wondered if it had been malnutrition, or if, perhaps, some Shield 
had visited that home during the night, and held a hand over the infant’s face 
until the baby had ceased struggling. Surely the parents would not have dared to 
stop him.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the Dancers would, in time, have male children to 
teach, but, the thousand dark and light Gods willing, that day would come long 
after the Shield were gone from this planet of exile.
By the slowly improving standards of the prison, the heretic Sedon lived in a 
palace.
His house was of uncured wood; in that year, all those on the prison planet 
were. They were yet two cold seasons away from the discovery that resins, 
applied to the wood while still fresh from cutting, would help protect the wood 
from the elements.
Most of the houses in the town were no more than crude huts, with perhaps a 
single door. From the outside, Sedon’s house, aside from being rather larger, 
resembled those of his neighbors. But where their houses might hold a dozen 
apiece, Sedon lived alone. Where most of their houses had floors of dirt, and 
lacked sufficient ventilation for a fireplace, Sedon’s floors were paneled with 
wood scrubbed until it was nearly white, and a firepit had been fashioned for 
him in the center of his house, with stone grates about it to keep the sparks 
from spitting out and setting the hangings alight, and an air trap built above 
it to guide the smoke upward through the roof.
It was difficult to see the scrubbed wood floors and walls; rugs and hangings 
covered nearly every surface, as though Sedon wished to remove all evidence of 
the rude dwelling in which he lived. To a surprising degree he succeeded; on the 
odd occasions Dvan visited, he was able, if he chose, to forget his duty on this 
distant planet, to pretend for a moment that he was back on the World, at home 
in the city of Kulien.
During the workday Dvan was approached by one of the exiles, with word that 
Sedon would be pleased by his company. Dvan came near the fall of night. Sunset 
that night was a spectacular event; the sky turned a deep shade of blue, and the 
clouds, scudding by at a perceptible clip, glowed a vibrant pink, another color 
that did not even exist on the World.
Sedon sat talking into his personal corder when Dvan entered; Dvan left the door 
open behind him. The corders were all the technology the Dancers had been 
allowed to bring with them, and they had not been given access to even them 
until well after debarking from the ship.
The corders were a significant thing; with the information stored in them, on 
metallurgy, mining, farming, weaving, and a thousand other subjects, they were 
the margin of survival for the exiles. Much of the information stored was 
useless, given the lack of tools the exiles had been allowed to bring with them; 
but physics and chemistry do not change, and everything else is engineering.
There were better than a hundred engineers among the four thousand exiles.
Sedon was dressed in a crude semblance of a Dancer’s finery, a long scarlet robe 
tied with a white sash. His feet were bare, and his head. He did not rise at 
Dvan’s entrance, but ceased speaking to the corder and set it to one side. “My 
friend.” He gestured to the cushions before him. “Will you join me for your 
meal?”
Dvan declined, seated himself. “Lon, if you have it. Water, if not.”
“We have not learned to brew lon yet, though it cannot be said that the 
engineers are not trying.” Sedon smiled at Dvan. “They have created an alcoholic 
drink with one of the native plants, but I am told it is near undrinkable.” He 
did not even look at the breeder, standing patiently in the corner of the main 
room: “Water for my friend.”
The woman placed the mug before Dvan cautiously, clearly more afraid of the huge 
Shield than of the heretic Dancer she served, and scurried back to her corner 
quickly.
Sedon said without preamble, “You have not seen the Dancer Lorien in some 
while.”
Dvan thought back. “Aye.”
“I sent him away.”
“Ah.”
Sedon seemed mildly irritated by Dvan’s paucity of response. “He is searching 
for a good location for a new town. In time, as children are born to us, we will 
need to relocate to a better location, one better suited to farming, better 
suited to industry. He went south.”
“I take it he is endeavoring to live off the native plants?”
Sedon said carefully, “In part.”
“Surely he could not carry any great amount of food with him?”
Sedon shook his head. “No. Look, Dvan, I would speak plainly with you, as we 
used to.”
Dvan sipped from the mug, let the flat water sit in his mouth a moment before 
swallowing. “I have missed the conversations, to be sure. They were a 
distraction, but an interesting one.”
“When the ship is recalled, you will leave with it.”
Dvan blinked. At first he simply did not understand the point Sedon was trying 
to make. “Aye. Of course we do not know when—” His voice trailed off. “Aye,” he 
said again after a moment. “I shall.”
“Why?”
The blunt question threw Dvan, as it was clearly intended to. He fell back on 
the obvious answer. “It is my duty.”
“What awaits you on the World, Dvan? Perhaps in a century or two you might 
receive a posting as Shield Sentinel. You will serve aboard warships whose 
purpose is to avoid combat as they ferry men and equipment to and from—mostly 
from—colonies we intend to abandon. If you are fortunate you will be one of the 
Shield to die in combat with the Sleem, to make some slight gesture toward 
fulfilling the destiny for which you were made. If not, then in time you will 
work on the Sphere Project; perhaps you will even see it completed within the 
life allotted you, and then find yourself trapped inside one small planetary 
system for all eternity, or until you wear away, as the Aneda hide themselves, 
and you, from the Continuing Time that they so fear. You will play at romance 
with Shield as bored of life as yourself.” Sedon leaned forward slightly. “Dvan, 
you love it here. In your life you have never had work that mattered in any real 
sense; here you do. Here you can step on with work that matters, building a 
civilization in a new system. This planet is so far from the haunts of the 
Sleem, it will be twenty or thirty thousand years before we have any danger of 
encounter with them. In that time we can prepare, and when the Sleem reach this 
planet, as they will, they will find not a single planetary system, or two, or 
three, arrayed against them, but an entire corner of the galaxy.”
The vision Sedon drew, of a humanity prepared to do battle with the Sleem, 
struck Dvan with real force. It was a great frustration of the Shield that the 
Aneda had not allowed them to take the battle to the Sleem, but had rather 
insisted that the warships of the Flame People avoid conflict, flee when 
possible, or, when combat did occur, scuttle themselves at the first sign that 
the Sleem were gaining the upper hand.
Sedon continued. “Have you a partner waiting your return?”
Dvan shook his head slowly. “Not to speak of; one who was a boy with me, but… I 
did not hesitate when offered this duty.”
“I will tell you plainly, Dvan, the gene pool we have been granted to work with 
here is not of the best. Our best, engineers and breeders alike, were Demolished 
for no other reason than that they were our best. Among our breeders is no woman 
with a Keeper in her lineage, going back to the Eight; and only a few among them 
at the Sixteen. Shield and Dancers are scattered among their ancestors, but in 
smaller proportion than I like. We can make use of you, Dvan, of a man capable 
of breeding one of our women, with a lineage as good as that of any Dancer, or 
any Keeper.”
Dvan was not offended by Sedon’s assumption that he would be bred if he stayed; 
it was one of the ways in which the Shield were used. Dancers were sometimes 
bred when very young, before being Consecrated to the mystery of the Dance; but 
once Consecrated, never. Heretic though he was, Sedon remained a Dancer; it did 
not even occur to Dvan to question Sedon’s assumptions regarding which actions 
were proper for Dancers, and which for Shield; they were his assumptions too.
“Have you never wondered,” said Sedon, “about the assumptions the Flame People 
make about themselves, about what behavior is normal for humans?”
“I am not certain what you mean.”
“Did you know that among the Zaradin, breeders were not intelligent?”
“I did not. So?”
“Has it ever struck you that we treat our own breeders, intelligent though they 
undeniably are, as the Zaradin treated theirs?”
“Are you saying,” said Dvan slowly, “that they are treated badly?”
Sedon shrugged. “Badly? Let us say, inefficiently. I do not suggest that one 
could Dance, or learn the disciplines of the Shield; such thoughts are plainly 
ridiculous. But their best are raised to serve as Keepers of the Flame, and 
serve that passive role better than any man. Might not one learn the engineer’s 
art? Or those of a healer? I suspect, Dvan, that the breeders might make fine 
healers; they are better in tune with things of the body than many men.” He 
paused, grinned abruptly. “And we surely have need of healers, since the Aneda 
were so cheap as to deny us any among the exiles.”
“These are—disturbing thoughts.”
“Prepare to be more disturbed,” said Sedon evenly. “I know how you were raised, 
and taught; in some ways it is not so different from the training of Dancers. 
What I am about to say will shock you, will strike you as the greatest of 
heresies; and after that, I have another and worse one. Are you prepared?”
Dvan stared at him. “Aye.”
A smile moved across Sedon’s features, warm and genuine. “Good. Listen, Dvan, if 
I were ever to try a Speaking with you, you would kill me, or die in the 
attempt. Perhaps both.”
The point did not seem to require a response from Dvan; he offered none.
Sedon’s voice took on a calm assurance. “On the World, Shield who have heard us 
Speak, if they do not die of their own hand, are taken to Demolition. Do you 
know why the Aneda fear our Speaking, fear it so greatly that they have trained 
you to die rather than experience it, face to face, with a Dancer? When I Speak, 
Dvan, I speak to you, to your soul. I Speak from love, for there is no other way 
to do it; I love you, not as some person in a group, seated at the steps of the 
Temple before I Dance, but as yourself, as a good and decent man worthy of my 
love. I know you as I know myself, Dvan, the dark places within you, where you 
feel shame, and the good clean places where you plan and dream. There is nothing 
you can do, ever, that would dismay me, or hurt me, or change the nature of my 
love for you.”
Dvan found his mouth dry. He had to take another sip of the water before he 
could speak. “So?”
Sedon’s voice was quite gentle. “The habits of Dancers and Shield are not so 
different, Dvan. The bond to be found between men is no bond any breeder could 
ever give you.”
Dvan shook himself slightly. “Water is wet, and stones hard. So?”
“There is no reason, Dvan, you could not experience the love Dancers share among 
themselves.”
The muscles in Dvan’s stomach clenched, seized up on him so violently he thought 
he might be sick. The rude clay mug in his hand broke into shards. He spoke in a 
very thick voice. “No.”
Sedon gestured to the breeder; she darted forward, cleaned up the mess of the 
broken clay, wiped the water from Dvan’s legs with a rough cloth, and backed 
away again.
Sedon watched Dvan carefully. “Not now,” he said, and Dvan did not think he was 
being spoken to. “Not yet. How do you feel?”
“Do not speak of this to me again, not ever.”
Sedon said slowly, “As you wish. I will say this carefully, to save you further 
distress; think on it, Dvan, that the needs of your body, and the needs of your 
soul, might be found in the same person. It is a better thing than the soulless 
couplings the Aneda have allowed the Shield.”
Dvan’s hands had curled into fists; he flexed them, made them flatten against 
his thighs. “You are a Dancer; of course you would think so.”
“There is a last thing I would discuss with you tonight, Dvan.”
Dvan was aware of the faint dampness on his thighs, of the water as it 
evaporated. “If you wish.”
“Once again, it concerns the Zaradin, how we were shaped by them.”
Dvan had very nearly regained control of himself; his voice was steady as he 
said, “Step on.”
“You asked me if the Dancer Lorien had carried enough food with him to survive 
his journey, and I said he had not, that he intended to eat what this world gave 
him.”
“Aye?”
“The Zaradin ate only plants, Dvan, and as their servants we emulated them. Yet 
if you study our relatives, here on the world from which we were taken, the 
ridge-browed ones, you will find not only that they eat the plants around them, 
but that they hunt.”
“What is that word, hunt?”
“I have made it up,” said Sedon, “as we have made up the names of the trees and 
animals around us. It is a new word, and it means to track down and kill an 
animal, for the purpose of eating it.”
Dvan was nodding, following the flow of Sedon’s words; he was done for several 
seconds before the import of what he had said sunk in on Dvan.
Dvan found himself on his feet of a sudden, backing toward the open door behind 
him. He stopped as he realized the image he must present, as though he were in 
retreat, froze in place and with the stiffest dignity he could summon, said, “We 
are done with this—disgusting—discussion. I will hear no more of your heresies.”
Sedon nodded as though he were not surprised. He spoke with all seriousness. “We 
will talk of this again.”

By the end of the third cold season—winter, the exiles had taken to calling it, 
another of the new words—the exiles had ceased bothering to plant crops of the 
World. They grew poorly, with yields nothing like those they gave on the World, 
for this planet lacked the bacteria they required for proper growth. Instead, at 
the end of the third cold season, they planted local crops; a shrub that 
provided tart red berries, each berry about the size of a man’s thumb, and a 
crawling vine that bore another kind of red fruit, a bulbous thing with a thin 
skin. Both of them were sour, though it was a different kind of sourness in 
each, and Dvan could not find it in him to think much of them. But they grew 
easily, met most of the body’s needs, and, after being dried in the sun, stored 
well over the course of the winter.
They had one great advantage, from the exiles’ point of view; they did not need 
to be taken back to the ship for processing. Straight out of the ground they 
could be digested by even the youngest child.
The fourth winter was difficult, but nobody died of starvation; by the time of 
the fourth warm season, the exiles had four children among them, one of them a 
boy. It was a remarkable number, for a community of less than four thousand; at 
this rate, their numbers would double within a mere ten or twelve centuries.
In the fifth year, guided by the information stored in their corders, the small 
colony of exiles at last began to flourish. After several years of trial and 
error, the engineers started turning out decent steel at a good clip; it was the 
catalyst that drove everything else. Farming grew easier, as plows came into 
use; shovels and picks made it possible to dig channels to divert water from the 
distant river to the fields, where it was needed, rather than relying upon the 
rains to water the crops. The colony’s original crude buildings, some no better 
than mud-thatched huts, were torn down, one by one, and replaced with sturdy 
buildings with thick log walls.
Dvan noticed about that time that in conversation he had begun referring to the 
town as the “colony.” It was a shift in perception that many of the Shield 
shared. With food at last assured, without the Aneda to guide their breeding, 
the colony saw an explosion of children that amazed and disturbed the Shield. In 
the sixth year, eight children were born; in the seventh, better than twenty. 
There was something flatly indecent about it, many of the Shield felt, and Dvan 
understood the feeling; animals bred so, not the Flame People.
One evening, over dinner, the Sentinel Marah said, in response to a comment from 
Dvan on the subject, “What makes you think them People of the Flame?”
It stopped all conversation around the firepit. Shield watched Dvan, listened to 
see how he would respond.
“They are heretics, surely. But they are nonetheless our people.”
Marah shook his head slowly. “I do not think so, Dvan. Listen, I have thought 
long on this. Their Dancers do not Dance; they have no Keeper to maintain the 
Flame were it brought down among them; lacking a Keeper, their children likewise 
lack the most basic of religious instruction. Oh, they’re human, aye; but Flame 
People? No more so than any of the other Splinter races were.”

The tenth year passed peacefully, without news from the World. Though recall was 
mentioned occasionally, in conversation among the Shield, it was rare; Dvan, for 
one, did not think much about it at all. Among a people who did not age, ten 
years was no very long time at all.
The Dancer Sedon passed his hundredth birthday, in World years, during the warm 
season of the tenth year, local time. It was an odd confluence of calendars; the 
colonists had grown in the habit of counting years by local time. Among the 
Dancers of the World, a Dancer’s hundredth year was a time of solemn ceremony, a 
time when a Dancer’s accomplishments were reviewed, and the Dancer’s 
Consecration, his service to the Flame, was sworn once again.
Sedon, leader of the rebellion, was the youngest of the Dancers to choose exile 
over suicide. All the others had passed by this milestone decades, or centuries, 
or, in the case of the ancient Dancer Indo, millennia prior. Dvan had wondered, 
briefly, how Sedon would observe the occasion; and then the time came, and he 
did not have to wonder.
They celebrated.
A dozen of the Shield stood duty, in case of trouble, in a long line in front of 
the ship, watching the high flames leap up from the huge fires the exiles had 
set.
Dvan stood in the cool darkness and watched the party.
The ship loomed high above his head; though he could not see it from where he 
stood, he was aware of it behind him, the vast bulk of giant sphere pressed 
deeply down into the earth.
He wore the kitjan at his belt, as always; his bare legs prickled slightly in 
the gusting wind.
It was the second night in a row the exiles had celebrated. They sang and danced 
together, arms linked, shuffling around the huge fires in what was, Dvan 
suspected, unconscious imitation of one of the World’s Temple ceremonies. Even 
some of the breeders had joined in with them, arms linked with the men. The 
first night, Dvan had not been certain whether any of the eight Dancers were 
present; after the women joined in the shuffling step around the fire, he knew 
they were not.
No Dancer, no matter how debased, would have tolerated such a thing from a 
breeder.
The children played around the fires while their elders drank and sang and 
danced.
The children fascinated Dvan.
They were as unlike the children of the World as Dancer and Keeper. Loud, prone 
to quick laughter, both the boys and girls seemed somehow more vigorous, more 
full of energy, than what Dvan recalled from his own childhood. They played 
harder, and longer; and when injured, which happened frequently in this untamed 
wilderness, it seemed to Dvan that they healed very quickly.
They grew with amazing speed.
He thought in local time, a habit he had given up fighting. A child of eight or 
nine, raised here, looked to Dvan’s eye halfway through the childhood of its 
body. The other children, at five and six years, were as large as any 
ten-year-old of the World. Dvan had not been fully grown until well after his 
thirtieth birthday; he thought that these children, if they continued to grow at 
the same rate, would reach physical adulthood by their twentieth birthdays, or 
perhaps even earlier.
In the woods off to Dvan’s right, a form glowed in faint infrared. Dvan turned 
slightly to watch it; it came forward, out of the cover of the trees, and 
approached Dvan across the cleared fields. Dvan knew it for a Dancer instantly; 
no one else moved like that. As it grew closer, starlight upon its features, and 
the flicker of the fires, gave it the shape of the Dancer Sedon in a scarlet 
robe.
“Dvan.”
“Sedon. What brings you out on this night?”
Sedon shrugged, stood motionless a half dozen paces away from Dvan. 
“Restlessness. Yourself?”
“Duty.”
Sedon chuckled. “Indeed? You were here last night as well, Dvan. They did not 
give you the same duty two nights running.”
“I requested the duty, aye.”
“Curiosity, then.”
“Aye.”
“About?”
“The children.”
“Ah.” Sedon cocked his head to one side, stood watching Dvan. “Interesting, are 
they not?”
“I do not know what to make of them. They possess remarkable energy.”
“I do not understand them myself, Dvan. I wonder at times if it was an accident 
that no healers were allowed to follow me into our exile.”
“I do not understand you.”
“When they are injured, Dvan, they heal with immense speed.”
“Aye.”
“You know several of them have died?”
“Aye.”
“Do you know how?”
“No.”
Sedon nodded. “Disease. They cut themselves, and some disease attacked them. And 
they did not throw it off, but instead died of it.”
“It does not come together. How can they be so strong, and so weak?”
“Do me a favor, Dvan. Ask your Keeper that question.”
Sedon turned away, and walked back as he had come.
Dvan did not realize until after he was gone that Sedon had not once looked 
toward the celebration of his exiles, toward their primitive, shuffling dance.

The Keeper Saliya saw Dvan often, for all his lack of seniority; Dvan thought 
She enjoyed him rather more than some of the other Shield, perhaps due to his 
size and strength.
The next time they were together, after he had finished with Her, he broached 
the subject of the children.
The waterspout in Her quarters had been modified to suit Her; rather than the 
abrupt sluice of water the waterspouts in Shield quarters granted, Her 
waterspout sprayed down into the bathing depression in a warm mist. Saliya knelt 
beneath the gentle shower, beads of water collecting and running down Her 
cheeks, across Her shoulders and breasts.
Dvan lay on his side at the edge of the bathing depression, propped up on his 
right elbow, and watched Her bathe Herself. It was mildly erotic; he admired the 
languid, relaxed way She moved beneath the water, the way Her straight black 
hair hung wet down Her back; the way Her taut skin moved beneath Her fingers as 
She washed Herself.
“Saliya?”
Her voice was a relaxed murmur. “Aye, Dvan?”
“Saliya, I spoke to the heretic recently.”
“Hmm.”
“Saliya, he is concerned about the children.”
The water had gathered in the bathing depression, until there was enough for Her 
to lie back in it; She did so, closing Her eyes and ducking Her head beneath the 
water. After a moment She raised Herself back up again, sat up in the shallow 
end of the depression, and pulled Her knees up to Her chest. She clasped Her 
hands together in front of Her knees, gold bracelets gleaming at Dvan, and sat 
looking at him without expression. “Indeed.”
“Saliya, they are growing very quickly. Abnormally so.”
Saliya sighed. “I am not surprised. When the Aneda denied exile even to those 
healers who requested it, I suspected they might have had something of this sort 
in mind.”
“Saliya, something of what sort?”
“Dvan, when a child of the Flame People is born, we take it to the Temple, for 
consecration to the Flame. But at the same time, we introduce a—” She paused. “I 
don’t think you have been taught the words. It is a sort of benign disease; it 
helps fight other diseases, but more important it slows the speed with which our 
people approach maturity. The older we get, the more slowly we age. There is 
some debate, among the healers, whether Flame People so treated do in fact ever 
reach maturity. I think I have not, and as you have probably heard, I am among 
the eldest of the Flame People; only a few who were alive during the Desertion 
are older.” The calm brown eyes watched Dvan. “You will probably never meet one 
of the Aneda who actually served our Masters; they are displeasing to the eye, 
with wrinkled skin, problems of the joints, and other disabilities. They were 
already aged before the healers began distributing the disease that prevents 
aging; and the disease does not reverse that which has transpired.”
Dvan’s thoughts were so abuzz he forgot to address Her correctly, said simply, 
“Then these children—”
She shrugged, a minimal movement of the damp shoulders. If She noticed his 
rudeness, She did not comment on it. “They will grow quickly, and seem at first, 
as you have noticed, more vital, more alive, than one of our own. But they are 
using themselves up, and soon they will begin to age.”
“And then—”
Ea’Tbad’Ijal’Saliya said simply, “Die.”

The next time Dvan went to see Sedon, he found Sedon watching as the eldest of 
the exiled Dancers, Indo, sat with two of the boy children, Tan and Kent.
The boys knelt with Indo, in a rough triangle, breathing in time with him, hands 
linked together. Neither of the boys heard Dvan enter through the open doorway; 
with so little awareness of their surroundings, Dvan would not have recommended 
either of them for the Shield.
Engineers, perhaps.
Sedon inclined his head slightly at Dvan’s approach, gestured to Dvan to sit 
with him; Indo himself gave no sign that he had heard Dvan’s approach. 
Nonetheless Dvan did not fool himself that the old Dancer was not aware of him.
Dvan seated himself with Sedon against the far wall of the main room, some ten 
paces away from Indo and the boys, and waited for Indo to finish. Indo’s voice, 
husky and somewhat ragged, insinuated itself into Dvan’s awareness, though he 
tried not to listen.
“—walk across a great black plain, greater than the one that stretches away from 
our town. In the distance, a huge fountain of light awaits you. It is dark 
around you, dark above you, dark below, and you walk toward the light. The light 
reaches up toward the blackness above, the column of light fountaining up so 
high you cannot see where it ends. You are ten steps away from it, and now nine; 
eight; seven; six; five; four; three; two; one; you are within the light, and 
you open your eyes.”
The boys’ eyes flew open; the one who sat facing Dvan started visibly at the 
sight of the huge Shield watching them.
Indo rose in one smooth motion, spoke to the two with studied indifference. “You 
may leave us now. Meditate upon what you saw today, and practice together at 
bringing the vision back on your own. I will see you again in a ten-day, and we 
will see how you have done.”
The boys bowed to Indo, bowed again to Sedon, and a third time, most deeply, to 
Dvan. They backed out of the doorway, and ran once they were in the street.
“You will make Dancers of them?”
Indo snorted, knelt facing Sedon and Dvan; Sedon said merely, “We shall see. How 
are you, my friend?”
“Well. Yourself?”
The joke, old now, brought Sedon the faintest ghost of a smile. “Exiled, against 
my will, leading the shamed remnants of a failed rebellion in their exile, on a 
planet in the lace-ends of nowhere. Otherwise, well.”
Indo said bluntly, “What said the Keeper?”
A pained look crossed Sedon’s features. “Indo, calmly. You of all people should 
know how little hurry there is in this life. Let us enjoy the dance while we 
may?” Sedon turned to Dvan, smiled quickly, and said, “So, since he brought it 
up, what did the old woman say?”
Dvan answered with such gentleness as he could. “They will age, Sedon, and die, 
as our ancestors did before the Desertion.”
Sedon’s features lost all expression; Indo’s hardened into something harsh and 
terrible; for a startled moment, Dvan found himself seeing in Indo something of 
the manner of the Keeper. “So, then,” said Sedon quietly, “they had no intention 
of allowing this colony to succeed. Betrayal upon betrayal.”
“We should have continued the fight,” Indo snapped.
“So you’ve said, many times.” Sedon fixed his gaze upon Dvan. “She wished us to 
know this thing.”
Dvan shrugged. “Or She did not care.”
Sedon said abruptly, “Indo taught me, did you know that?”
Dvan shook his head. “I did not. I am—somewhat surprised.”
Sedon laughed at that, genuinely amused. “If a man cannot turn his own teacher 
to heresy, then he has not hit upon a very good heresy. Who taught you, Dvan?”
Dvan hesitated just a moment. “We are not trained in the fashion of Dancers. 
Instructors—”
“Indeed,” said Sedon impatiently. “Who?”
Dvan did not know why he was reluctant to answer the question. “So much as 
anyone, the Sentinel Marah.”
“Ah. And his opinion of your piety, it is why you ended up my jailer during the 
trip out, is it not?”
“Aye.”
“You respect his opinion?”
“Very much.”
“Indo,” said Sedon, “made me a recommendation during the last winter, and I 
think I will act upon it now. Bear me this message, Dvan. Tell the Keeper that 
we have decided to move four of our Dancers, and half our people, to a new 
place, some five days’ walk from here. We have found us a vein of iron ore near 
the new location, more easily worked than the one we have been laboring at; it 
should make the development of local industry an easier task.”
“That is not why you are moving.”
Sedon clapped Dvan on the shoulder, said simply, “Does it matter why we are 
moving?”
“She will not like it, Sedon.”
“Ah.” Sedon’s features took on that curiously blank expression again. He rose to 
his feet, aided Dvan to his, and said simply, “We are not asking her to.”




- 7 -
« ^ » 
At the door chime, Robert sat up in bed and yawned until his jaws cracked, 
stretching. “Command, open. Lights up.”
The door to his quarters curled aside as the glowpaint scaled up. Dvan entered 
slowly, stood irresolutely just inside the doorway. Robert gestured at the 
room’s two chairs. “Have a seat, William.”
Dvan sank into the chair in delicate slow motion; Robert’s suite was up a level 
from Denice’s, in quarter gee. Two rooms, rather than the single in which Denice 
had been lodged; it was the suite he had stayed in five years prior, after 
accepting Chandler’s invitation to participate in a two-month study on low 
gravity and free-fall combat.
Robert rubbed his eyes, yawning again. “She’s asleep?”
Dvan nodded. “Aye. Else I’d—”
“—be with her.” Robert nodded. “I don’t doubt it.”
“I’d like to speak with you, night face.”
Robert shrugged into a robe, moved barefoot into the kitchen, toggled the 
kitchen stasis field and pulled free the jar of mixed fruit juices he had made 
for himself. “No one is preventing you.” He drank directly from the bottle, put 
it back and turned the field back on.
Dvan spoke plainly. “What is your interest in this matter?”
A smile touched Robert’s lips, was gone. He sat back down on the bed, folded 
himself into half lotus and regarded Dvan. “Which matter? There is a System full 
of them, you know.”
“The Dancer.”
Robert said slowly, “Sedon? I hardly care if he—”
A flicker of anger touched the black eyes. “Denice Castanaveras. What is your 
interest in her?”
“Ah. She is my student and my friend,” Robert said equably.
Dvan’s features darkened perceptibly. “You taught her?”
Robert Dazai Yo said carefully, “Some things, yes. Why the anger?”
Dvan spoke in a voice low and shaky. “You are an abomination in the universe, a 
perversion of the Flame and of the Dance. And if you attempt to teach these 
things to Denice Castanaveras, I’ll kill you.”
Robert Yo laughed in his face. “Oh, come on. You ugly, stupid, slow-moving ox, 
you’re going to kill me for continuing to do what I’ve been doing for eight 
years?”
“Yes,” said Dvan with absolute sincerity. “I will.”
A smile twitched around the edge of Robert’s lips. “Okay. Thanks. I mean for the 
warning. I appreciate it,” he said with a sincerity approaching Dvan’s own, “and 
I certainly won’t forget it.”




- 8 -
« ^ » 
The years flowed by.
Sedon stayed behind, in First Town; his teacher Indo, and the exiled Dancers Ro, 
and Mietray, and Dola, went to Second Town, and the Shield did not follow them. 
Dvan had lost track of the numbers of the children; by the twentieth year of 
exile it had reached into the hundreds. As they grew older, most of them were 
moved to Second Town; Dvan did not think it an accident. The children, 
particularly the male children, disturbed him; others among the Shield were of 
the opinion, stated with growing loudness, that the children of the exiles were 
no better than animals. The male children, between their fifteenth and twentieth 
years, sprouted hair in the most remarkable places; it grew on their cheeks, and 
the faint hair on their forearms, their chest, and legs grew darker and thicker 
until on some of them it resembled nothing so much as the pelt of one of the 
local animals. They were mostly short, considerably shorter than the average 
Shield, but possessed of a solidity, a density of bone and muscle, that once 
again struck most Shield as animal-like.
It was exactly the opposite of what Dvan would have expected, had he bothered to 
think about it ahead of time; given the gentler gravity of the prison planet, 
that the children would be shorter and denser than their parents made little 
sense. The Keepers’ words came back to him; if it was true that the Flame People 
never truly ceased growing, though the rate of growth slowed dramatically as 
they aged, then it made sense that the children, doomed to die, should not reach 
their parents’ height. The density of their muscle Dvan could not understand at 
all. Many of the male children, under the training of the Dancers, surpassed the 
strength of their Dancer teachers.
One or two of them, Dvan guessed, approached his own strength; and his strength 
was abnormal even for the Shield.
The women were, in some ways, worse. Their breasts and hips tended to a 
heaviness that was uncomfortable for Dvan to look at; like the men, they were 
shorter and more solid than their parents.
And they bred. The second generation of children were born to children 
themselves not yet fourteen years of age; and where a woman of the Flame People, 
if allowed to breed, might bear one child ever tenth or twelfth year, the 
children bore their children at an astonishing rate; some were pregnant again 
within ten to twenty days after delivering a child.

“I think, Dvan, you and I have never seen an adult human being,” said Sedon one 
night in their twenty-second year of exile. Sedon sat in the darkness only a few 
paces away from where Dvan stood duty, outside the ship.
The normal complement of Shield stood duty with him, six others arrayed around 
the circumference of the ship. In the brilliant light from the full moon, the 
two Shield closest to Dvan could, Dvan knew, easily make out the features of the 
heretic keeping Dvan company during his duty.
It had been going on for many years now; at first Dvan had wondered if the 
Sentinel, or Keeper, might comment on it, but it had never happened.
Dvan was silent, listening to the distant, solitary cries of the night birds. 
After a while he said, “Perhaps you are right.”
“There is a tribe of natives some twenty days’ walk south of here. It—”
“That’s where you went during the last warm season.”
Sedon did not deny it. “They are interesting, though no better than animals. 
They do not speak, or use any but the crudest of tools. When I showed myself to 
them, they threw stones at me until I allowed myself to be driven away.”
“And?”
“The children, Dvan, look more like them than like us. Oh, they are not 
identical; our children stand straighter, more like a Zaradin than like one of 
the natives. The native’s skulls are shaped somewhat differently, as well, with 
a heavy ridge over their brows; and their jaws are immense, designed for the 
ripping of uncooked plants and flesh.”
Dvan winced at the use of the word. It was another point where the children 
horrified the Shield; what had been whispered about their parents, that they had 
eaten the flesh of animals during the first two winters, was not even a thing of 
shame among the children; they hunted openly, had taken to showing smiles that 
bared their teeth, as though they were indeed one of the local carnivores.
“There are rumors,” said Dvan after a moment, “that you have been endeavoring to 
teach the Dance to the male children.”
Sedon’s smile, at least, kept his teeth decently covered. “They are not rumors, 
and you know it. We have not succeeded, but I am not prepared to give up yet. 
Some few of them show promise.”
“The Shield are concerned, Sedon.”
Sedon replied with a touch of asperity. “The Shield will be recalled, and when 
you are gone, I will be left with these short-lived creatures to deal with. It 
will be an easier thing if there is an order they recognize, a Temple and—”
“You are going to build a Temple?”
Sedon was silent a long moment. He spoke slowly. “Not such a one as a Zaradin 
would recognize, no. We are not Zaradin, and we will emulate them no longer. We 
will make us a temple for humans, exiles and children alike.”
“Be careful, Sedon. The Shield is slow to anger, but—”
“—I am frightening them.”
“I am not even offended at your use of the word. Aye.”

On a hot day in the warm season, twenty-seven years after the ship of exiles had 
first set down at the edge of a great plain of grass, a courier ship broke 
through the spacelace anchor in the exile System, and orbited the exiles’ 
planet.
Near midnight of that day, Sedon brushed aside the door hangings at the home of 
the engineer Sura, one of the hundred or so engineers who had joined him in 
exile, and followed the man inside.
The Dancer Indo sat on one of the long wooden benches in the engineer’s 
workroom, hands clasped together over his stomach, leaning back against the wall 
with his eyes closed. One who did not know the ancient Dancer might have thought 
him asleep.
“Tell me.”
“I must begin by apologizing for the inaccuracy of my tools. With better 
equipment I could be more certain, and—”
Sedon cut him short, stared into the man’s eyes. “You started with nothing but 
the clothes you took into exile and the data in your corders; not a hammer or a 
laser or a knife to work with, no metal, no glass, no plastic or silicon. You 
have no need to apologize for what you have made out of nothing.”
The engineer bowed his head. “Thank you.” He swallowed visibly. “I’ve done my 
best.”
“Tell me.”
“Early this morning heat output from the ship jumped dramatically.” The engineer 
handed Sedon a flat black block of some smooth material. “We keep two of the 
scopes in the forest, trained on the ship’s heat radiators at all times, with 
these filters placed inside the scopes. They’re sensitive to infrared light, and 
normally they change colors, from transparent to black, over the course of four 
to five days. That filter you’re holding lasted one day; we changed it 
yesterday. The Dancer Indo checked the filters this afternoon, found them black, 
and changed them.” The engineer handed Sedon a second black filter. “Again, 
sometime this afternoon, they flushed waste heat from the ship.”
“Testing the engines?”
“No. I’ve rigged some crude gravity shears; if the ship’s gravity ball had even 
burped I’d know about it. No, Dancer; they cycled a JumpDoor. Twice. It’s the 
only thing that’d leave them needing to get rid of that much excess heat.”
“Ah. Then there is a ship in orbit.”
Sura climbed a small ladder, lifted up on the roof above his head. A section 
came free, and he handed it down to Sedon, stepped back down and went into 
another room to get the telescope itself. The scope was wrapped in oiled cloth 
to protect the metal parts from rust. Sura unwrapped it, handed the slightly 
oily instrument, as long as a man’s arm, to Sedon. “Look at the Temple.”
Sedon directed the telescope upward, toward the constellation the exiles had 
taken to calling the Temple; it was a name that Sedon would not have chosen, 
himself. “I don’t—”
“Down now, slightly to the right; it’s leaving the Temple. A low orbit; if you 
watch it long enough you’ll see it move. It’s only a courier, not—” Sura saw the 
Dancer’s features go blank, completely without expression, and knew that he 
looked at such rage that, were it directed at him, he would not survive. He 
prudently silenced himself.
After a bit Sedon lowered the telescope, handed it back to Sura, and wiped his 
hands clean on his robe. “Thank you, Sura. I am in your debt.”
Indo spoke without opening his eyes. “Anton, do you think?”
Sedon said absently. “Likely.”
“Should have killed him when you had the chance.”
“Aye.” Sedon paused. “Well, I will not make that mistake again.” He turned to 
Indo. “Has a runner been sent?”
“To the first station,” Indo agreed. “After that, by semaphore. They’ll be 
evacuating Second Town before morning comes.”

In the hour before sunrise, Dvan brushed aside the doorway hangings at Sedon’s 
house, and entered.
Sedon awaited him, alone, in a room lit only by the embers of the fire. A 
rarity, that; usually there were others present, if only the Dancer’s servants, 
and usually at night the fire burned high.
“My friend,” said Sedon quietly. “Thank you for coming. Join me.”
Dvan knelt, still wearing his shadow cloak; he had been approached while 
standing guard. “What’s the urgency, Sedon?”
In the gloom Sedon’s gaze, half hidden in shadow, met his with a disquieting 
impact. “We are born broken,” he said softly, “and live by mending.”
Dvan said automatically, if a touch confused, “I see that I am broken.”
“You are a Shield, a servant of the Living Flame. Will you live in the service 
of the Flame?”
Dvan stared through the gloom at the Dancer. “What is this?”
Sedon’s voice gained force as he spoke: “Gi’Tbad’Eovad’Dvan, I am a Dancer of 
the Flame, and by your Name I require that you answer me.” His voice cracked 
like a whip: “Will you live in the service of the Flame?”
Dvan drew a long breath, and said steadily, “I will.”
Sedon nodded slowly, relaxing visibly. “We have come to a time of decision, you 
and I. You are my friend, Dvan, and I love you. You know this is true.”
It took a conscious act for Dvan to gentle the beating of his heart. “Aye,” he 
said finally. “I know this is true.”
“There is a ship in orbit, Dvan.”
Silence descended then. At length Dvan said, “How do you know that?”
“Does it matter? The ship is there, Dvan, and the situation cannot continue as 
it has.”
“I see that.”
“You see, do you?” Sedon studied him. “Do you? Dvan, you know that the Aneda do 
not intend this colony should succeed?”
Dvan found the words difficult. “I know this.”
Sedon said relentlessly, “You know they do not intend that I be allowed to 
live?”
Dvan shook his head. “I do not know that, Sedon. That they have treated the 
colony badly I cannot deny, but—”
Sedon pressed on. “Dvan, what are the things a ship might mean? Will you answer 
me honestly?”
“It may be recall. It may be…” Dvan hesitated. “It may be they intend your 
Demolition…” His voice trailed off.
“And what else, Dvan?”
Dvan met Sedon’s gaze, and said honestly and grimly, “And it may be they intend 
to ensure the colony’s failure.”
“This is the hard question, Dvan.” Sedon paused, said very softly, “What will 
you do if that is true?”
“My duty.”
Sedon shook his head. “What is that? A word. What is the reality? Of what does 
your duty consist?”
Dvan shook his head slowly. “I don’t know, Sedon. I can’t… imagine… a situation 
that brought me into conflict with Marah, or my mates. And what you’re asking 
for—”
“I haven’t asked you for anything, Dvan. I’ve asked you questions.”
Dvan rose. “I have to… think… on this.” He shook his head. “What you’re asking 
for—”
Sedon rose also. “Dvan, I still haven’t asked you for anything.” He smiled, 
though it was a strained and careworn thing. “But by the Nameless One, Dvan, 
think on your choices. You know what awaits you on the World, if you return. If 
you stay, if you can—I had hoped to have this conversation with you some time 
ago, and I am sorry I did not; this is a poor time for it. So I will be blunt, 
because I have no time for subtlety. It seems clear that the Dancer’s way is not 
for you; even among your mates I know there is no one you have ever truly cared 
for. Dvan, among my exiles are two women who were children in the body when we 
were exiled, who served as Temple Followers, and might someday have joined the 
Keeper’s Daughters. They are intelligent, and well spoken, and I have seen them 
educated in many subjects. Join us, Dvan. Make yourself a household such as you 
choose; love whom it pleases you to love, and I swear to you by my Name I will 
build us a world in which no one will ever speak the worse of you for it.”
Dvan stood still and spoke in a deadly quiet voice. “You forget yourself.”
A quick flash of the man’s smile: “Perhaps, but I lack the time for remembrance. 
And so may you, Dvan; I don’t know how much time you’ll have to decide. If any. 
Loyalty is a great thing, Dvan—I’d have been dead myself long since without it. 
But I think you know where your duty lies, and your loyalty—
Dvan shook his head mutely.
Sedon spoke with devastating evenness. “—and I think they are not the same 
places.”

Marah and eight other Shield, all of them senior to Dvan, an engineer Dvan knew 
poorly, and the lady Saliya, sat in a semicircle around the Living Flame in Her 
quarters when Dvan arrived, facing Him.
It was near noon, a quarter day after his conversation with Sedon; they had 
roused him from a sweaty, uneasy, and dreamless sleep with the notice that he 
was to report to Her quarters.
A lord of the Aneda stood slightly aside from the group, pale-skinned and 
silver-haired, a gleaming long white shadow cloak flowing around him where he 
stood. His eyes were bright blue chips set in more white, and they fixed 
themselves upon Dvan as Dvan entered.
Dvan froze where he stood, and after a beat crossed his arms across his chest 
and inclined his head. “Sir.”
The man looked Dvan over. “You’re Dvan of the Gi’Tbad. The one the heretic has 
tried to befriend.”
“Aye, my lord.”
He nodded. “I am lord Anton.” Without looking at Saliya, he said, “My lady 
Keeper, it will go more quickly if you explain the situation to them.”
Saliya nodded, gestured to Dvan to seat himself near her. She began without 
preamble. “Sixteen years ago—World years—one of our warships vanished. 
Renunciate class. The Aneda assumed it had been destroyed by the Sleem. Aboard 
that craft were three hundred Shield, forty Dancers. Two years ago another of 
our warships, entering a spacelace tunnel at one of the colonies we are 
abandoning, encountered that vanished warship. The renegade attempted to 
negotiate before engaging in battle; and listen; the man who negotiated for them 
was not Shield, but Dancer.”
The implication sank in on the assembled Shield instantly; among Sedon’s rebels 
it had been the same, Dancers actively commanding Shield in battle. “Sedon, it 
seems, did not take all his people with him into exile. Unknown to us, some 
remained behind. The battle ended inconclusively; our craft returned to the 
World, and the renegades escaped to Haristi knows where.”
Marah nodded. “Lord Anton, my lady Keeper, you think they may be headed here?”
Anton answered him. “Sentinel, we do not know. It seems likely, if they have the 
routes that lead here.”
The engineer, appropriately for his place, sat with his eyes directed at the 
deck. He spoke his own name: “Engineer Sinyal.”
The lord of Aneda nodded to him. “Speak.”
“I cannot believe they do. To my knowledge, only four engineers and a handful of 
Keepers ever saw the translations of the Kulien records that gave us the 
spacelace tunnel routes leading to this System.”
Anton nodded. “It may be so. We are fortunate, if true. Nonetheless, we cannot 
assume that this planet of exile is secure from them. As the Keeper said, the 
renegades have a Renunciate-class warship; this ship, even if it were in orbit 
rather than sitting dead on the ground, is no match for it.”
The Sentinel said, “Dvan?”
Dvan met Marah’s gaze. “Aye?”
“The Dancers,” said Marah, plainly watching Dvan for his reaction, “have 
vanished.”

“We’ll go in two floats,” said Marah over their meal. Most of the Shield were 
out searching First Town, verifying that the Dancers were indeed gone; not that 
anyone had real doubts. Dvan and Marah ate alone. “I’ll take a squad of ten in 
mine, and Baresst will take a squad of ten with him. You’ll go with Baresst.”
Dvan accepted the long roll of warm bread Marah offered him, dipped the length 
of the bread into the pot of kliam between them, and ate it with the sauce 
running down over his fingers. “You’ll leave Kladdi behind to defend the ship?”
“Aye. I’ll handle the weapons on my float. Lad, do you think you can do what’s 
needed?”
Dvan chewed the bread before answering. “What might be needed, Marah?”
The Sentinel leaned forward, a thing hard and fierce descending upon him like a 
mask, grabbed the back of Dvan’s neck and pulled him forward until their 
foreheads touched. His whisper was harsh. “Will you do your duty?”
Dvan did not blink. He said flatly, “I will.”
Marah held the stare a moment longer; then released Dvan and grinned savagely. 
“Aye. I know you will. The rest will do as told, until they have a Dancer in 
their sights. During the rebellion, eight of ten froze when the moment came, and 
among the twenty percent who did not freeze total, most were impaired enough 
that they died at the hands of the Dancers they fought.”
“You’ve killed Dancers.”
“Three. It’s not impossible; only very hard. Remember this; they are heretics, 
not Dancers such as you were raised to revere, and the resemblance is only that, 
a resemblance.”
Dvan could hear Sedon’s response: And perhaps, Dvan, the Aneda are not the Aneda 
you were raised to obey, but only a resemblance.
Marah glanced at the pot of kliam. “Are you done?” Dvan swallowed the last of 
his bread, washed it down, and wiped his fingers clean. “Aye.”
“Let’s go.”

They did not know when the Dancers had left First Town, only that it was 
sometime during the night. They discussed, briefly, whether they ought to 
interrogate some of the townspeople, and decided against it, more from lack of 
time than anything else. Sedon would not likely have taken any of those left 
behind into his confidence, and even if he had, finding those few among the two 
thousand four hundred who would know nothing would take prohibitively long.
The floats they would search in were not gravity craft—they were orders of 
magnitude too small to carry a gravity ball—but rather kept their height with a 
mixture of jets and wings that would have been familiar to a human of Denice 
Castanaveras’s time. They were designed for use in either gravity or free fall, 
atmosphere or vacuum; though the rockets could not be used in atmosphere, the 
craft possessed them as well as jets.
Their first assumption was that the Dancers were headed toward Second Town, 
which no Shield had ever seen. Second Town was a five-day walk, but none of the 
Shield doubted that the Dancers could have run that distance in the space of a 
night.
It would be their first approach; if they did not catch the Dancers at Second 
Town, they would widen the area of their search.
Their job was made more complex than it had to be; the Aneda, fighting for their 
survival against the Sleem, had not invested much in exiling the Dancers, not 
even the relatively small resource of an observation satellite.
The floats left before midday, through an upper hatch that had not been used 
since landfall. The gravity ball’s effect ceased abruptly at the ship’s hull. 
The adjustment to local gravity was less severe than usual; as the floats moved 
out through the open hatch, into the harsh sunshine, the gravity vertical 
abruptly flipped by about thirty degrees. Suddenly down was no longer toward 
ship’s center; it was the direction of the ground. The mild shift of vertical 
did not bother Dvan; when leaving or entering the ship through the lock at the 
ship’s bottom, the local vertical flipped a full hundred and eighty degrees.
The two floats split up, and, sensors at maximum sensitivity, headed south.
Dvan sat at the weapons console and familiarized himself. None of the weapons 
were unfamiliar to him, though there were Shield present who knew them better. A 
single large kitjan, large enough to kill half a dozen Dancers at a shot; a 
projectile weapon that spat hypersonic slivers of radioactive ceramic; a grenade 
launcher that held some two hundred thermonuclear explosions, pinched into tiny 
stasis bubbles in the moment of their explosion. Energy weapons included heat 
beams that would fry any living thing in instants, cutting beams taken from the 
high end of the electromagnetic spectrum, and a single particle projector that 
it was not particularly safe to use in atmosphere.
He sat there at the controls and wondered if he would use them.
They flew across the tall yellow grass in the heat of the day, beneath the high 
blue dome of the sky. Grazing beasts fled at their approach, and the predators, 
lazy in the sunlight, kept to the relative cover of rare patches of trees.
Because they were searching, the floats moved slowly, covering the ground 
beneath them at only two or three times the speed of a running man. Their craft 
could not move much more slowly, even given the lower weight of this world; the 
thin air more than offset that advantage.
Dvan could see Marah’s float, a distant silver-gray gleam at the edge of the 
horizon, pacing the float he was in.
They floated on through the afternoon, across the prehistoric veldt of Ice Age 
Africa.
They reached Second Town during darkness, and found it empty.
It was what the reports had led them to believe, a larger, handsomer version of 
First Town, set at the edge of the largest body of water Dvan had ever seen in 
his life, a river so huge and fast flowing that it sent a shiver down Dvan’s 
back.
The World was cold and dry, and the Flame People did not swim.
A distance downriver from Second Town, a long, ugly slash in the surface of the 
earth gave the location of the strip mine that had caused the exiles to choose 
this location as their second town. Radar showed significant deposits of iron 
ore, barely impacted by seventeen years of mining.
A patchwork of fields surrounded the town, growing crops that none of the Shield 
recognized, strange plants that had never been grown in those First Town fields 
near the ship.
The floats circled high overhead, watching Second Town, its empty dirt streets 
and cold buildings. Infrared signature showed nothing but buildings cooling from 
the heat of the daytime sun; no cooking fires, no people.
With Baresst and Dvan on the circuit, Marah held an open conference with the 
ship. “They’ve an entire planet to choose from, if they wish to hide from us. 
And with the incredible variety of animal life this planet sports, you can’t 
assume that any heat-emitting object is a man. It’s far more likely to be a 
grazer or predator.”
Saliya’s voice held obvious frustration. “There were two thousand of them in 
this town, plus whatever number of children had been born to them. They have no 
radio, can hardly have had more than a day’s start; how far can they have gone?”
Any people with experience in tracking would have found the vanished Second 
Towners within hours; they had left a trail of broken grass stalks and disturbed 
earth on their way down to the river, and had left sufficient evidence of their 
boats behind them, to make it clear enough exactly where they had gone.
The Flame People not only lacked trackers, but lacked the very concept. Radar 
hunted for metal or other dense objects; IR hunted for body heat; sonar, on 
occasion, was useful in enclosed areas. But there was no awareness among them of 
how to proceed when none of their traditional tools applied.
It occurred to none of them that the Second Towners might have fled across open 
water. Natives of a dry world that lacked any but artificial bodies of water, 
the idea of using running water for transportation—had it crossed their minds at 
all—would have seemed to them as foolish as trying to walk through vacuum 
without a shadow cloak sealed around oneself.
There have been brilliant men and women throughout human history; and Sedon of 
the Gi’Suei was one of them.
Silence crackled across the open circuit after the Keeper had finished speaking. 
Finally Marah said, “They have no vehicles, and cannot have gone far. We will 
spiral out from this spot, in an expanding search pattern, until we find them.”
The lord Anton’s voice reached them clearly. “Destroy the town when you leave.”
“We shall.”
It took a single round of grenades from Marah’s float. The buildings burned 
fiercely and well, and soon the wind picked up the fire and threw it off across 
the prairie, lit a grass fire that set the night ablaze.
The Shield moved off into the night, left Earth’s second city in ruins behind 
them, a wreckage of glowing embers at the edge of a great prairie fire.




- 9 -
« ^ » 
“And as begun,” said Robert, “so our history continued.”
Denice sat in the center of her bed, orbiting high above the surface of the 
Earth, and drank tomato juice the temperature of blood. “Why didn’t you join 
him?”
Dvan said softly, “I nearly did. But—events come between people. And even if you 
wish it were otherwise, the events have happened; and you cannot go back into a 
world that no longer exists.”
“From what you’ve told me of him,” said Denice, “and from what I remember of 
what you remember, I think I like him better than I like his enemies.”
Dvan shrugged. “Rebels are always romantics. It’s an attractive thing. I would 
not think too highly of Sedon; in his rebellion, he did worse things than burn 
empty cities.”
Robert said mildly, “I am curious, ‘Sieur Devane—Dvan if you prefer. Your people 
employed Dancers as warriors, and soldiers as—what?”
Dvan was silent a long moment before answering Robert. “It is difficult to put 
it into terms that are comprehensible in English. I could use shiata, but I 
would have to teach you the words there too, so it’s much the same thing. And I 
would have to struggle with your accent, which is horrid.” Dvan’s lips quirked a 
moment. “But that’s not surprising; I killed the last of the exile Dancers only 
twenty-three hundred years ago, the Dancer Indo, in Alexandria. It is only since 
about that time that nightways as you know it has existed, and that shiata has 
begun to devolve.”
“If you would try?”
“Night face, Dancers were made by the Zaradin. There were Dancers before the 
Desertion, long before the Dance was subjugated to the service of the Flame. 
Indeed, during the Splinter Wars, the Dance fragmented into a number of 
disciplines, the Dance of the Flame being only one among many. The martial use 
of the Dance was a secondary thing, a thing developed long after the Zaradin 
left us. It was, in its origin, a thing designed to amuse, to entertain our 
Masters.”
“Indeed?”
Dvan gave the small man a hard look. “You seem skeptical, night face. Does your 
understanding of my people surpass my own?”
Robert smiled at Dvan. “I concede your superior knowledge of your people. But I 
have studied the martial arts, its history as we know it today, and in our 
history, the history of my people, dance has come of fighting, and not fighting 
of dance; oppressed peoples taught their children martial disciplines under the 
noses of their oppressors, for the movements of the dance served equally well as 
the basis of the martial discipline. I suspect you made poorer pets than the 
Aneda told you; I suspect, William, that now and again one of your Zaradin 
masters was desperately surprised at the intensity of your entertainment.”




- 10 -
« ^ » 
The search continued, without sign of the vanished Dancers.
At the ship, two Shield stood duty. They stood before the lower airlock, the 
only ground-level entrance to the ship. Under ordinary circumstances—the 
ordinary circumstances of the last twenty-seven years—there would have been six 
Shield on duty, more as a symbol for the exiles than anything else, a reminder 
of where power lay. On this day, with twenty Shield away from the ship, only 
sixteen were left to defend the Keeper, and most of those had been kept inside 
the ship, depending on the wards to prevent any renegade Dancer from passing 
through the airlock.
The airlock was a five-sided enclosure, warded with the same wards that had kept 
the Dancers imprisoned during the journey out. No Dancer, not even one of the 
heretics, Consecrated as they had been to the Flame, could have passed through 
that ward while the ward stood.
And the ward would stand so long as the Keeper lived.
Just before nightfall, on the second day after the Dancers had vanished, and all 
of Second Town with them, one of the children approached the two Shield.
They were tense to begin with, and the child was the boy Mica, a known favorite 
of the Dancer Sedon. They held their weapons upon the brutish child as he 
approached, forced him to a halt ten paces away. “What is your business here, 
Mica?”
The child held his place. Yet another disturbing thing about him; he spoke in a 
voice with an accent subtly different from that of any Flame Person. “I wish to 
see the Keeper.”
“That is not possible.”
His grammar was off, also: “I got a message for her, from Sedon.”
The elder of the Shield said carefully, “Hold there. Do not move.” Without 
moving his weapon from its focus, he tapped the speaker in his collar, said, “My 
lady Keeper.”
A male voice answered. “She sleeps.”
“Awaken Her.”
In the image, the child waited patiently, hands hanging loosely at his sides. 
“His name is Mica?”
The Shield Kladdi answered Anton’s question. “Aye. I don’t know whose get he is. 
Harmless enough, I think.”
Anton said, “You at the lock, ask him his message. Tell him he can’t see the 
Keeper, but he’s to deliver his message to you.”
The Shield down at the lock started to repeat the message; Mica interrupted him. 
“I heard you. Whoever you are, I’m to give the message to the Keeper, and no one 
else.”
Anton glanced at where the Keeper stood, dressing herself. “My lady Saliya, will 
you receive him?”
She nodded, shaking her hair out as she drew her robes about herself. “With 
Shield present? Why not?”
Kladdi’s Second—Second aboard the entire ship, while Marah was gone—said, “There 
were rumors at one time that Sedon attempted to teach the Dance to the exile 
children.”
“That squat, hairy thing? A Dancer?” Anton snorted. “I think not. Bring him 
through.”
They had him remove all of his clothing before they allowed him to enter the 
airlock. Mica did not allow that to throw him; Sedon had told him to expect it. 
He undressed slowly, as clumsily as he dared, for the benefit of those watching 
him, and then fumbled with the clothing they gave him in replacement. The cloth 
was smoother than anything Mica had ever worn before in his life, and in fact he 
did have trouble with the fastenings. The Shield Bo aided him, showed him how to 
lay the seals together so that the tunic held tight.
He had trimmed his facial hair only the night before, or the tunic’s neck might 
not have fit over his head; as it was the fastenings tangled slightly. He knew 
enough of their customs to know that the clothing they had given him was an 
insult, the plain brown tunic of a prisoner.
He held his breath as he passed through the glimmering ward, into the airlock. 
Not even Sedon had been able to tell him what would happen when he passed the 
wards, only that he did not think it would kill him. Mica felt nothing but a 
distant tingle, a resistance as though he were walking under water.
Even that much of a reaction, had they known of it, would have terrified those 
awaiting him inside the ship. Indo had told him that; no one but a Dancer should 
have felt that warding at all, and a Dancer should have died in agony at its 
touch.
The Shield who had entered with him showed Mica where to hold on to the walls of 
the airlock. Mica grasped the handles, and waited while the Shield stepped back 
out of the airlock.
The airlock doors closed on him, and Mica found himself in a dim, poorly lit 
enclosure. He was pleased to see that his heartbeat had not risen, displeased to 
feel the slight but uncontrolled twitching in his stomach muscles.
He guessed that they would be scanning him now.
When it happened, it happened so quickly that Mica was not sure about the exact 
sequence of events. For just a moment the floor beneath his feet seemed to move, 
as though the entire enclosure were about to turn upside down. Gravity flickered 
as it moved, and for a brief moment Mica found himself falling—
—the enclosure jerked upward—
—fell downward, and then came to a gentle stop.
The floor was the floor again, and Mica found himself trembling slightly. 
Suddenly he weighed more, his limbs dragging at him in a way he was not 
accustomed.
The airlock doors opened again, and Mica found himself looking down a long, high 
corridor of some grayish red metal—or perhaps that was just the light. The 
corridor curved away from him, so that it seemed he stood at the top of a 
gentle, rolling hill. A pair of Shield with weapons drawn stood a ways down the 
corridor, and gestured for him to follow them. He moved forward into the 
corridor, testing his balance. A cross-corridor ran off to his right, and 
another pair of Shield, weapons likewise drawn, stood off a few paces down that 
corridor.
This would be Sixth Deck. Mica followed the Shield, without needing any further 
prompting. He wondered at the weapons behind him; the light weapons Indo had 
spoken of, or projectile weapons? They would not try the kitjan, not on him, and 
he was glad of that; he suspected that its effect might be similar to that which 
it had upon Dancers.
But he did not think much of the Shield, if this was how they escorted a 
prisoner. The ones in front of him were endangered by the ones behind him, if 
the ones behind had to shoot at him. Had Mica been escorting a prisoner, he 
would have tied the prisoners hands, attached a rope to the prisoner, and 
followed the prisoner, alone, from a good distance back.
They do not respect me, thought Mica. I will change that.
He walked always downhill, the corridor slightly soft beneath his feet. After a 
bit the corridor widened into a place where a small platform had been placed in 
the floor. The Shield gestured to Mica that he was to stand on the platform, and 
he did so; it sank beneath him.
He barely saw Fifth Deck; a single Shield stood in the corridor at Fifth Deck, 
watching him with weapon still hanging at his belt. A surge of contempt that he 
could not contain touched Mica. Had it been his intent, even in this gravity he 
could have been upon that Shield well before the man could have brought his 
weapon to bear.
The platform dropped another level, descending toward the gravity ball at the 
center of the ship.
Fourth Deck.
Again they surrounded him, two ahead of him and two behind, weapons drawn. They 
walked him through a series of corridors, and came at last to a doorway where 
another four Shield stood guard; the Keeper’s quarters, Mica guessed. The guards 
made way, and Mica passed through the open portals, and into the room where the 
Keeper of the Flame awaited him.
Hangings everywhere, like the inside of Sedon’s house but more so; it was 
clearly upon a dwelling of this sort that Sedon had modeled his home. The 
hangings, many of them, bore images from the history of the Flame People. Mica 
recognized only one, because Sedon had a copy of it hanging in his house: the 
Renunciation, when a group of early Dancers had broken away from their fellows, 
to embrace the service of the Flame.
Five persons inside. Two of them were Shield, men he knew, standing with weapons 
drawn, pointing not exactly at him, but at a spot slightly ahead of where he 
stood, between Mica and those it was their duty to protect. It was very nearly 
the first thing Mica had seen aboard the great ship of which he approved.
Mica came to a stop where they indicated, stood waiting.
The other three he had never seen before. The Shield Kladdi’s duty kept him 
aboard ship, protecting the Keeper. Mica recognized him from Sedon’s 
description; he stood a step to the right, and behind, the Keeper.
The Keeper of the Flame, pale skinned and dark haired in a dark robe, was a 
woman such as Mica had rarely seen before; similar, in appearance at least, to 
the exile breeders, she held herself with an aloof dignity that reminded Mica of 
nothing so much as Sedon himself.
The third man stood slightly off to one side, wrapped in a long cloth that Mica 
guessed would, in proper light, be white; a shadow cloak, perhaps, though far 
longer than those the Shield wore sometimes on duty. The courier, Mica guessed; 
a glance told him that the man was no Dancer or Shield, and whatever else he 
was, was no problem of Mica’s.
Three Shield, then, each of them more used to this gravity than himself.
The man in white spoke first. “What is your name?”
Another insult, thought Mica calmly. Among the Flame People, he knew, so blunt a 
demand for a name was as rude a thing as one man could say to another. “Mica, 
sir.”
“They say that you are one of the children, the children of the exiles.”
“I am, sir. My mother is Mai, and maybe my father too.”
The Shield Kladdi snapped, “Your mother was Mai.”
“Kladdi, quiet.” The man in white did not seem disturbed. Mica studied him 
briefly. Pale, as pale as the Keeper beside him; Mica had never seen two humans 
so bleached of color. It was as though the man in white had read Mica’s 
thoughts; his next words were, “Your skin is offensive, Mica. It looks to me 
like the skin of an animal, not a human.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s a thing I got no hold on. The Sun does this to us. If we 
don’t spend enough time out in it, when we do go out our skin gets red and 
sore.”
“I was told that there were natives on this planet, shambling dumb creatures 
with whom we shared some common ancestor. I did not expect to meet one, to hear 
it speak to me as though it were one of the Flame People.”
The pale man wanted to talk, then. Mica was not unwilling; the longer they 
talked, the likelier the Shield were to relax some fraction. “I’m not a native; 
I saw some once, they was traveling along following a herd they hunted. Didn’t 
look much like me. I been told,” said Mica slowly, “that some of the Aneda look 
like us, short and heavy, the ones as were alive when the Zaradin left the 
World.”
“So,” murmured the pale man, “Sedon has continued to spread his heresies among 
the natives here.”
Mica shifted his weight restlessly, saw the Shield stiffen slightly. He snorted 
loudly. “Look, the weight here, I’m not used to it. I didn’t come here to die, 
all right? I’m standing as still as I can get.”
The Keeper spoke for the first time, a cool, soft voice, controlled and lyrical; 
another way in which she resembled Sedon. “Why are you here, then, Mica?”
“Sedon says I’m supposed to tell just you.”
The Keeper shook her head. “He knows that will not happen. You will tell me 
here, in front of these Shield, what it is he has to say.”
Mica spoke as reluctantly as he could. “Well—all right.” He did not miss the 
flash of contempt from the Shield; they made no attempt to hide it. Mica knew 
that none of them would have disobeyed an order on such a flimsy pretext from 
the mouth of an enemy. “The Dancer says to tell you he has no wanting to fight 
you; that you will never find him no matter how you look. He asks you to leave 
us alone, to leave this planet alone. We will live or die depending on how we do 
for ourselves.”
“That’s not acceptable,” the pale man said instantly. “Can you bear him a 
message?”
Mica nodded. Sedon had said they would ask that, and that they would plan on 
placing a locator on him if he said aye. “I.”
He did not miss the glance that passed between the pale man and the Keeper. 
“Very well. We must meet with him ourselves. We can arrange it in such a fashion 
that he will not be endangered; but there are questions regarding the resolution 
of this problem that can only be ironed out directly, between Aneda and the 
heretics.”
“Is that the message for him?”
The pale man glanced at the Keeper, more for an opinion, Mica thought, than 
permission. She nodded, and the pale man said, “Aye. Repeat it to me.”
“You got to meet with Sedon yourself. You can arrange it so he’s safe, but there 
are”—Mica hesitated, and not for show, as they already had a poor enough opinion 
of him; he had real difficulty with some of the words—“questions regarding the 
resolution of this problem—that you got to work out straight between you and the 
Dancer.”
“That’s close enough.” The pale man gestured at the two Shield. “Escort him back 
to the airlock, and let him go.”
Mica turned away, toward the portal through which he had just entered, saw in 
his peripheral vision the Shield leaving their position, the two armed Shield in 
motion, and turned back toward the three who stood watching him, the two Shield 
walking, feet coming up out of contact with the deck. It seemed to Mica that the 
turn back to them took forever, he heard himself saying, “Oh, and—” as he 
turned, the turn slow enough that no one there found it threatening, just a 
casual continuation of the movement that had started him toward the door, the 
toes of his right foot digging down into the soft surface of the deck, knees 
just beginning to bend, and in that instant, as the word “and” left his mouth, 
for only the third time in his life, Mica called the living Flame down upon 
himself.
It sheeted across his form for the barest instant, glaring white and blue, so 
brilliant it blinded, and then Mica let go of it, moved forward while the 
outlines of the Flame still traced the spot where his body had been. The two 
Shield who had been moving toward him fired now, half blinded, toward the 
afterimage, laser light flickering out to bring a glow to the walls of the 
Keeper’s quarters. Mica was three steps away from their fire now, four steps, 
knees pumping, moving forward in a controlled fall toward the spot where the 
Keeper stood, and then he was upon her, taking her to the deck with him, and 
they struck the deck together rolling. He snapped her neck while they rolled, 
fetched up against the bulkhead and took the necessary time to do it correctly, 
brought his fist up high and then hammered it down, into the side of her skull, 
as the beams of their weapons found him.
Mica lived just long enough to see the pulp of the Keeper’s brains spread across 
the deck.

They had given him twenty-seven years to get ready.
Twenty of the Shield hunted for him and his. Sedon thought himself prepared; 
before the night was out, he would know for sure.
Seven of the eight heretic Dancers lay buried beneath a loose blanket of earth, 
nothing but their eyes and noses showing, twenty paces back from the edge of the 
trees, as they had for the last four days. Motion sensors would not find them, 
for they did not move; nor infrared sensors, for they were cold as death. It was 
one of the secrets Sedon had kept despite the failure of their rebellion, the 
discipline the Dancers had learned that let them slow their breathing and 
heartbeat down to almost nothing, cool the surface of their skin until it was of 
the same temperature as its surroundings.
Through the long day, while the floats came and went, the seven Dancers waited 
together. Late in the day, one of the breeder children, a girl of eight years, 
crept up through the trees until she was near the spot she had been told the 
Dancer waited, and said aloud, “Indo says the Folk are safe at the caves.” She 
had not waited for a response, but turned and ran, as fast as her small feet 
could take her, back the way she had come.
Sedon waited, patiently. The same message would have gone to Mica. Just before 
sunset, he saw Mica approach the ship, talk briefly, strip, don the clothing the 
Shield brought for him, and go inside.
The last scarlet rays of the sun faded while Mica was inside. In the darkness of 
the partial moon, the steady blue gleam of the ward protecting the airlock 
became visible as the merest tracing around the edges of the airlock.
In the first moments after sunset, the ward guarding the airlock flickered once.
For the barest instant, Sedon found himself floating in the midst of a savage 
joy so vast it had no end. I was right!
He did not even have a word for whatever thing it was the child Mica had made of 
himself; not Dancer, not Shield, and not Keeper.
But a deadly thing, whatever its name.
The ward flickered again, and failed.
The two Shield, standing with their backs to it, did not notice.
The Keeper was dead.

A weapon is a device for imposing force upon an opponent. It is one of the 
teachings of the Shield, and one Sedon had taught himself.
The staffs and bows, pikes and long knives that had been employed during the 
earliest years of the Splinter Wars were no true concern of a modern Shield; but 
Dancers, who must use such weapons in Dance, in dramatization of the history of 
the Flame People, were drilled extensively in their use, until it was borne in 
on them, at the deepest levels, that a weapon was not just a gun, or a kitjan or 
tangler or sonic stunner; everything was a weapon.
At the edge of town, immediately on the other side of the clearing that 
separated the ship from First Town, sat a dozen lengths of iron tubing. When the 
waterworks was completed, the iron tubing, inner surfaces appropriately glazed, 
would form a conduit to take water from the holding bin at the edge of town to a 
central bathing area, so that folk would no longer have to bathe in the river. 
The tubing had been convenient, and when the moment came, Sedon had used them; 
had the time come later, or earlier, he would have found something else.
For perhaps ten heartbeats the ward sat dead.
Then the tubing exploded.
They had been laid with their open mouths facing toward the ship, and filled at 
that end with nails, such scrap metal as the colony had, and the odd stone or 
two. Explosives—chemicals that expanded rapidly upon burning—had been placed in 
the other end of the tubes, and that end of the tubes sealed firmly shut. Only a 
small fuse extruded back out, to be lit.
The results were about what Sedon had expected: not so good as he might have 
hoped, not so bad as he had feared. Most of the tubes pointed at the ship tore 
themselves open under the force of the explosion. A few held tight, spat their 
loads out toward the ship in a good imitation of cannon fire. One of the Shield 
went down instantly, and the other staggered slightly—
The Dancers were up and running. They came out of the forest at top speed, seven 
silent figures clad in black from head to toe, moving like wraiths across the 
open clearing toward the ship. Sedon drew close as the Shield who was still 
standing finally caught their movement; without anything like time for conscious 
thought, some instinct told the Shield what he faced, and he pulled free not an 
energy weapon, but the kitjan.
From forty paces’ distance Sedon threw. The heavy chunk of metal struck the 
Shield’s arm, and then the kitjan screamed. Sedon was peripherally aware of one 
of the Dancers, he did not know who, stumbling, going down, and the Shield 
bracing himself, holding the kitjan with both hands, about to fire—
From somewhere behind Sedon a twinkling silver piece of metal flashed through 
the air, struck the Shield square in the throat, and the lash of the kitjan 
struck not a Dancer but the dead earth, which did not care.
Sedon left the Shield for his Dancers to deal with; if they were not both dead 
now, they would be, and their weapons become the weapons of the Dancers. He 
leapt up into the open airlock, slapped the control to cycle it. Nothing; they’d 
had that much warning, then, inside the ship.
The two Dancers bringing up the rear, Miertay and Dola, were no slower than the 
other Dancers, but they had carried the package.
A chemical explosive, again; the best that twenty-seven years of preparation had 
let them pack into a cylinder that would fit inside the airlock. They muscled 
the cylinder, taller and wider around than any man, into the airlock, placed it 
up against the ship’s hull, set the fuse and leapt backward—
The airlock began to cycle; Shield were preparing to come out. A piece of luck 
for which Sedon had not dared hope. The Dancers ran along the circumference of 
the ship, got the bulk of the ship between themselves and the airlock. The fuses 
were of uncertain length; if the explosive went while the airlock was in motion, 
rising up into the ship’s local gravity—
It did.
The huge ship rocked with it, shifted position slightly. The roar of the 
explosion was astonishing, a clap of thunder that went on, and on and on, and 
left Sedon’s head ringing when it was finally over. Sedon had seen an explosive 
of similar size detonated at Second Town; he had thought himself prepared, and 
was slightly amazed to find he was not. Who but an engineer would have thought 
that oxidizing certain chemicals together could have caused an explosion that 
rivaled that of a pinched nuclear grenade?
With the other five Dancers—he did not even know yet who it was that had fallen 
to the kitjan—he circled back around the ship. The stink of the explosion hung 
acrid on the air, and thick white smoke curled about the place where the airlock 
had been. Near the airlock itself the air, blisteringly hot, scorched his nose. 
The intricate mechanism that lifted the airlock up into ship gravity hung in 
shattered fragments; from the gaping ragged hole where it had been mounted, red 
light streamed forth.
It was the first time in twenty-seven years any of the Dancers’ had seen the dim 
red light of the World.
The hole was large enough for only one man at a time. The Dancer Trega, a Shield 
laser clutched in one hand, leapt up the height of a man, got one hand and one 
foot planted in the wreckage of the equipment, and hung there, laser clutched in 
his free hand. He fanned the laser up into the ship, and then flowed upward, 
through the hole, and into the ship gravity.

“What’s going on?”
Marah’s voice came steady across the circuit, of itself a reproof to Baresst’s 
shout of frustration. “Nothing good, from the sounds of it. Turn about at full 
speed, we’re headed back to the ship.”
“It’ll take us three hours!”
“We have the time, lad. Turn about.”
One of the Shield, sitting in the main cabin behind Dvan, spoke the obvious. 
“The Dancers are attacking the ship.”

Sedon was the third Dancer into the ship. He flipped through one hundred eighty 
degrees as the ship’s gravity grabbed him, came down crouched on fingers and 
toes in the dim reddish light. Four Shield dead at the entrance to the corridor, 
three by laser fire, and the fourth at Trega’s hands, and the two outside; it 
left them with ten Shield, possibly fewer if Mica had taken any of the Keeper’s 
Shield into death with her. The forty crew who ran the ship Sedon did not 
consider for even a moment; if one picked up a weapon, he’d kill himself as 
likely as anyone else.
Sedon straightened, glanced over at Trega.
Trega shook his head. “The Shield couldn’t bring themselves to fire. They knew 
who we were.”
Sedon nodded, inventoried the Dancers as they came through. Himself, Trega, 
Miertay and Dola, Lorien and Elemir. “We lost Ro.”
Lorien said softly, “Aye. I sent him on.”
Sedon stared at Lorien in the scarlet light. “There are stasis bubbles aboard.”
“I know, Sedon. It was a kindness; he would not have lasted. The bubbles are on 
Second Deck, four decks down.”
Sedon turned away from Lorien without further word, accepted one of the lasers 
from Trega, and moved off down the corridor with the five Dancers following him.
The battle for the ship was the sort of combat at which Shield excelled; in 
corridors, lasers against lasers. The kitjan was a line-of-sight weapon; twice 
during the early combat, Shield who were able to give the Dancers a fight 
survived long enough to get shots off against the advancing Dancers. The first 
time the kitjan brushed Sedon himself, left him numb in his left arm; the second 
time, down on Fifth Deck, the kitjan caught Dola square on.
Sedon looked up from killing the Shield who had shot Dola; Dola lay spasming 
against the deck, arms and legs thrashing, screaming wildly. Lorien did not make 
the same mistake again; after a glance at Sedon, he pulled Dola up into a sling 
carry across his back, arms and legs pinned, and said grimly, “Second Deck. How 
fast do you think we can get there?”
Sedon glanced at Trega, made a circling gesture with one hand. The Dancers moved 
forward at all speed onto the nearest Deck platform, and assembled themselves 
into the formation tradition had called the Circle of Fire: Lorien, carrying 
Dola, at the center, and the other four surrounding him, on their knees with 
their backs to him.
The safest way to reach Second Deck would be to clear out the decks, one by one. 
But it meant Dola would die, and Sedon had no intention of losing any more of 
his comrades than he must.
The platform dropped straight down. As soon as the edge of the platform dropped 
into the open space of Fourth Deck, the Dancers brought their captured lasers 
alight, and descended into each Deck in the mist of a wash of laser light. Third 
Deck now, and Second—
There were crew, engineers and the like, in the corridors on Second Deck. Sedon 
barely noticed them; the crew threw themselves to the ground as the Dancers 
descended into their midst, tried desperately to get down beneath the wash of 
laser light.
Dead or alive, Sedon paid them no attention; he ran down the length of the long 
corridor. Crew covered their heads at the Dancer’s passage. They did not intrude 
on Sedon’s consciousness, not even the one who moved too slowly; Sedon snapped 
the man’s neck and continued. If this craft were like other ships he had been 
aboard, the equipment locker would be—
—here. The door would not open at his touch; he set the laser to its highest 
setting, sliced the door with a crosscut, sliced again all the way around the 
edges of the crosscut, and then kicked at its center. The door folded inward, 
and Sedon kicked again, and went through into the equipment locker. Dark inside, 
and the lights did not come up as Sedon entered. Sedon turned his laser back on 
at its lowest intensity, kept the beam pointed upward. He moved through the long 
rows of idle equipment, things he did not recognize—
Stasis bubbles, there. Someone in the crew had cut power to the equipment 
locker, precisely to prevent what Sedon was doing, but Sedon did not let it 
concern him; where there were fixed stasis bubbles, there would be bubbles 
designed for use in combat, use in the field, and there they were, half a dozen 
keys that would generate their own stasis fields. Sedon sliced open the case in 
which the keys were kept, pulled one free, turned and threw it the length of the 
equipment locker, to where the Dancer Trega stood. Trega plucked it out of the 
air, stepped back out into the corridor with it.
The screaming, a constant since the moment the kitjan had taken Dola, ceased 
abruptly.
Trega met Sedon at the door as Sedon left. A single Dancer moved down the length 
of the corridor, securing it in the simplest possible manner, laser bursts to 
the skulls of the prone crewmen; neither Trega nor Sedon took notice of the 
task. “Take what we can carry?”
“Aye. Don’t weight yourself down too much.” Sedon brushed by him, had to squeeze 
past the bulk of the stasis bubble.
“Where are you going?”
“Her quarters.”
“She’s dead.”
“I’m going for the courier.”
“Why?” Trega demanded.
Sedon locked eyes with the older Dancer. “It’s probably Anton.”
Trega started to say something else, obviously changed his mind. “Very well. 
Meet us at the float on Sixth Deck.”

They could not operate the ship, nor keep it, Sedon knew, against an assault led 
by the Sentinel; Marah would not make the mistake of bringing his men into 
personal combat with the Dancers. He would hold his pair of floats well off the 
ship, and shell it with the grenades.
Since they could not keep the ship, they scuttled it.
It was not difficult; the engineer Sura had told them how. A single grenade, 
placed against the casing of the gravity ball and activated on a timed 
countdown. Not knowing the actual size of the gravity ball, Sura could not tell 
them whether the gravity ball would implode or explode; a small gravity ball 
would explode, a large one would implode. An implosion would be less powerful 
than an explosion, but either way it would not matter much; when the antimatter 
missiles on Sixth Deck went, the explosion would dwarf the trivial energies of 
the ruptured gravity ball.
Sedon reached Sixth Deck, the bay where the floats were kept, as the other 
Dancers were loading Dola’s stasis bubble aboard.
Trega sat at the pilot’s controls; Sedon sank down into the seat next to his, 
and the float lifted up from the deck, hung motionless for a moment. “Who placed 
the grenade?”
“Elemir.”
“What did he use? Antimatter, or a pinched explosion?”
“Elemir!”
Elemir’s voice came from the rear of the float. “Antimatter.”
The float lifted then, surged forward into open night air. For a brief moment, 
as they left the ship’s sphere, the world wavered around them. Trega was no 
pilot; the float rocked wildly as it found vertical. When the float had 
stabilized again, they were well away from the ship, and moving south at top 
acceleration.
Sedon’s head was pressed back into his seat. He fought to speak against the 
overwhelming acceleration. “How much… longer?”
Elemir said, “Soon.”
Trega’s voice was so quiet it could not be heard by the other Dancers. “I think 
we should have… given First Town… some warning.”
Sedon could barely draw in air. Spots danced in front of his eyes. “The warning… 
would have made its way… to the Keeper.”
“We could have warned them… after our assault began.”
Sedon took a deep breath. “They could not have gotten away in time.”
Trega’s voice was ragged. “You don’t know—”
The night sky behind them lit with an awful flare. The wave front of the 
explosion chased the speeding float, caught it and enveloped it; the float 
rocked and shuddered as it rode out the explosion. Sedon closed his eyes, sat 
wondering whether he would ever see another morning. When he thought it had 
subsided it abruptly grew worse, the missiles going. A sudden blistering glare 
made spots dance in front of Sedon’s eyes even though they were closed, and then 
a random current in the wave front of the explosion momentarily lifted the 
float, holding it in free fall, and then slammed it back down toward the ground 
as though a great fist had smashed down atop the vehicle.
It went on, and on, and on, the wave front of the explosion chasing the fleeing 
vehicle.
Eventually Sedon came to be aware that he was still alive, and likely to stay 
so, that the acceleration had lessened. He opened his eyes, saw Trega sitting 
and watching him.
“None of us saw Dvan aboard the ship. Did you?” Sedon shook his head no, and 
Trega nodded. “Was it Anton?”
For a brief moment Sedon had no idea at all what Trega meant. “Oh. Aye, it was.”
“Did he say anything before you killed him?”
Sedon was silent for a long moment, as the vehicle flew on into the night, and 
then shook his head and said, “Nothing interesting.”
“Pity.”

When the towering mushroom cloud, of the largest single explosion human beings 
would ever release upon the surface of Earth, appeared on the distant horizon, 
all conversation within the floats full of Shield ceased. Dvan watched the cloud 
climb into the sky, and climb and climb, with a complete lack of emotion, a 
numbness so huge, so complete, he did not know what to do with it.
Finally the Sentinels voice came across the still-open circuit, a voice so bone 
tired that Dvan did not even recognize it at first. “Bring it down, Baresst. 
We’ll spend the night here.”
“But—we have to—”
“Put it down, lad. Second Town is embers, and First Town is less than that, and 
there’s no place on this whole Rikhall-tainted planet any better than this one 
we’re flying over.”
It came to Dvan that the Keeper, that Saliya, was dead; that Sedon, who he 
admired and loved, had killed Her.
He knew that one was not supposed to love a Keeper, that if he had proclaimed 
his feelings to Her it would have led to Demolition. He knew with crystal 
clarity that She had never loved him, had perhaps, due to Her sex, been 
incapable.
In that moment, as the floats descended to the dark plains of grass, as silent 
tears tracked his cheeks, and the pain of betrayal throbbed in his heart, 
Gi’Tbad’Eovad’Dvan swore on Her memory that he would send Sedon to join Her.
The floats touched ground in the moment that the hot wind of death washed across 
them.




- 11 -
« ^ » 
The next morning, as the sun rose over twenty cold Shield who had slept poorly 
and eaten less well than that, the Sentinel called Assembly.
They were one hundred and eight Shield shy of the number traditionally required 
for an Assembly; nobody felt the need to point that out, as no Shield there 
could be unaware of it.
They gathered in the open space between the two floats, cleared away a space in 
the tall grass, and seated themselves in a circle.
Marah opened it, said quietly, “We come here today in Dedication, in service of 
the Flame. Is there anyone here who doubts his Dedication?”
If there were, the Shield felt it prudent to keep it to themselves; they made 
the circle, one by one, no followed by no followed by no, twenty times around.
Marah continued: “We are born broken, and live by mending. You and I are Shield, 
servants of the living Flame. Dedicate yourselves with me, renew with me the 
vows of your childhood: Will you live in the service of the Flame?”
The whisper moved around the circle; aye, and aye, and aye, twenty times.
“Will you kill if you must?”
Aye, and aye, and aye, twenty times.
“Will you die if needed; will you live when you no longer wish to, if the 
service is required of you?”
Dvan’s voice, deep and assured, led the chorus: “Aye.”
Perhaps it was his imagination; it seemed to Dvan that, for just a moment, the 
living Flame hovered around them when they were done.
Marah took a deep breath. “Well, then. So far as we know, we’re marooned here. 
The Aneda may or may not send another ship out for us. We must decide now what 
we will do.”
“We will fulfill our duty,” Dvan said swiftly. “Find the Dancers, if they 
survive, and destroy them to a man.”
Marah nodded, unsurprised, and said, “One at a time. Tell us what you think, as 
truly as you can, and then we will decide.”
It was never in doubt; though some of the Shield spoke at length, and the sun 
climbed high into the sky before they had done, before midday a consensus had 
been hammered out.
Not even during the rebellion had Sedon dared harm a Keeper; Her loss raised an 
anger in the Shield that, had Sedon been there to see it, might have given even 
him pause.
“We shall have war, then,” said Marah when they were done, and the assembled 
Shield echoed him; war, and war, and war, twenty times.




- 12 -
« ^ » 
Denice sat at the edge of the bed, watching the huge man talk. Stars wheeled 
slowly by in the window at her feet.
Finally she said, “They were supposed to come for you.” He stopped for a moment. 
“A ship should have come eventually. Yes.”
“It never happened.”
Dvan said dryly, “Clearly. Perhaps the Sleem had something to do with it; 
perhaps they found the spacelace tunnel leading to the World. Whether the Flame 
People survive today I have no way of knowing, but the Sleem survive. The craft 
shown in the video sent back by the Unification’s Tau Ceti probe, back in ‘69, 
are Sleem craft. It was a difficult thing to map the spacelace tunnels, and I 
doubt the Sleem were any better at it than we; but if they found the World, then 
the World is no more.”
It obviously angered Dvan when Robert spoke, but Robert did not let that stop 
him. “So you were stuck here, and you fought.”
Strangely, this time Dvan did not seem to realize from whom the question had 
come. “There is no religion I know of that does not have myths and legends of 
the days when the Gods warred. As is often true, there are fragments of truth in 
the midst of idiocy. Yes, we fought. We waged war.” His eyes were unfocused, 
vague and distant. “For eons. Towns rose up, villages, and we smashed them down. 
If they used tools we assumed they were Sedon’s folk, and we killed them. In 
time we decided that if they spoke they were Sedon’s folk, and we slew them. 
Doubtless we were the greatest murderers in the history of this world. We hunted 
them across the surface of the Earth, the Dancers and their people. I could tell 
you for days of the progression of that war, tell you how the Dancers killed 
Shield one after the other. It went slowly, so slowly, spread out, as they and 
we were, across the surface of northern Africa and southern Eurasia, without 
proper equipment to search for one another. We rousted them from the caves they 
had hidden in, and killed most of the folk there; but the Dancers were not 
there. In that very first attack we destroyed the float they had stolen from the 
ship; they had buried it deep in the caves to prevent our scanners from finding 
it. A tactical mistake no Shield would have made; when we found them at last, 
they could not move the craft quickly, and the float was lost to them. Over the 
course of the years we recovered or destroyed most of the hardware they had 
taken with them from the ship.
“We lost Shield one by one, sometimes to misadventure, sometimes to Dancers; one 
party of four simply vanished, and we never did learn what had happened to them. 
We learned later that the Dancer Ro had died taking the ship, and that the 
Dancer Dola had been taken by the kitjan as well; over a thousand years later we 
came across his stasis bubble, carefully hidden until his fellows could get him 
to medical attention.” Dvan’s voice was dreamy, drifting. “We loosed the bubble 
and watched him kick himself to death, and that was the second Dancer. Perhaps 
five thousand years passed before we got the third, that was Miertay. He had 
ventured out into the world alone, without the protection of his fellows, to 
check on the bubble holding Dola. We had regenerated Dola’s bubble, but somehow 
he knew that it was not as they had left it. Instead of heading back the way he 
had come, he continued on until he was sure he was being followed, and then he 
attacked us. He took four Shield with him, but I snapped his spine with my own 
hands.”
“And then you found the Dancers.”
The improbably black eyes gazed at Denice without expression. “Yes. Thirty-seven 
thousand years ago. It had been, oh, some thousands of years since we had last 
come upon a group of humans who spoke. The Dancers remained, somewhere, we knew 
that; but the exiles, and their children, we had hunted them into extinction. 
What was left could hardly be called human; the roaming tribes of savages who 
exterminated the Neanderthal. And we continued the hunt for the Dancers, but we 
no longer expected to find them, for such a great time had passed with no sign. 
We knew they had taken slowtime keys from the ship before destroying it; we 
thought that perhaps they had enclosed themselves in a stasis bubble somewhere, 
all the Dancers together, to await a better day.
“And then one of our search parties came across Indo.
“He was living among a tribe of the natives, living as one of them. He had done 
something to age himself, to make himself appear one of them; his hair was half 
gone, and his skin had grown wrinkles like theirs. Neither of the Shield in the 
party recognized him; they could not have hidden their recognition from the 
likes of Indo. The memory-retrieval skills taught the Shield are slow, 
particularly with older data, and by the time of which I tell you, no Shield had 
seen Indo in twelve or thirteen thousand years. But though slow, our memories 
work well. Much later, after leaving the tribe behind, it came to one of the 
Shield that Indo had been among the tribesmen, living as one of them.
“We were more careful this time.”




- 13 -
« ^ » 
The floats sat two hundred meters back from the edge of the great ocean.
Their names were an irony; they had not floated for better than five thousand 
years. The aft jets were cracked and so radioactive it was not safe to spend 
much time near them. The rockets had not been fired even once in those five 
thousand years; the lifeplants were dead and neither of the floats were 
airtight, even supposing they could be made to attain low orbit.
In another of the ironies it seemed to Dvan the universe delighted in, not three 
years after the floats had settled down for the last time, the courier ship in 
which Anton had arrived came tumbling down from the sky, and burned up in a 
brilliant fireball on reentry.
It was no surprise; the Shield had known for centuries that the orbit of the 
craft was decaying. But it was another sign of their increasing isolation. Even 
if a ship were sent for them, there would be no sign of their existence. They 
had no beacon. The radios still functioned, but they were strictly local in 
nature; the stranded Shield had as much chance of reaching a ship in orbit with 
them as by shouting from a mountaintop.
Some of the supporting technology from the floats still functioned; besides the 
radios, some of the sensor equipment, the auxiliary matter/antimatter-based 
power supplies, several of the molar/circuitry-based kitjan, and one of the 
laser rifles. With the passage of time the Shield stripped most of the weaponry 
from the floats, all those things that were functional without aid from the 
massive power units in the floats. The grenade launchers had been removed, and 
the projectile weapon that spat, at hypersonic speed, slivers of radioactive 
ceramic. Virtually all the energy weapons, save their handguns and one laser 
rifle, ran off the float’s power, as did the single particle projector; and the 
particle projector had never been intended for use in atmosphere in the first 
place.
The two floats sat facing one another, each in the spot where it had been set 
down some five thousand years prior. Dvan remembered the very moment they had 
set down, jets functioning with barely forty percent efficiency, remembered it 
as clearly as anything from the long eons of the exile; in that terrible moment 
when they touched down to the sand, he had known—they had all known—that the 
floats would never again move from that spot. In that moment he had given up any 
hope of rescue, had reconciled himself to such a life as this distant world of 
exile could provide.
At times during the long strange passage of the centuries, Dvan found himself 
waking from nightmares of his own death. He knew himself sane—the training of 
his childhood ran deep, and functioned well—but at times he found himself 
wishing otherwise. The nightmares, the dreams of death, at some level promised 
release.
The passion that had driven an infant to declare war upon the Dancers, that had 
led him to hope that an ancient Keeper might return in some measure his desire 
for her; that passion was cold and dead now many thousands of years.
But the discipline remained, the Dedication of the Shield. With the nightmares, 
it was all Dvan had left.
The nightmares were curiously similar; in them Sedon stood cloaked in Dancer 
red, atop the long bluff that overlooked the unmoving pair of floats. In the 
dream the Dancer, without moving, seemed to come closer and closer to Dvan, and 
as he drew nearer Dvan saw that the red cloak was not the flowing scarlet shadow 
cloak of a Dancer at all, but the strung-together furs of some animal, still wet 
with the beasts’ blood. Sedon’s fierce stare pierced through the gloom between 
them, weighed heavy upon Dvan. His brown eyes glowed red, and his teeth, visible 
in an animal smile, were sharp and pointed and bloody.
The nightmares were curiously similar, and curiously real. Dvan had woken from 
them, more than once over the course of the millennia, convinced they were real, 
convinced that Sedon stood atop the overarching bluff, and stared down into 
their camp, stared down at Dvan, and accused him of betrayal.
One night at dinner, a crude parody of the civilized common meal of the Shield 
of the World, as the remaining Shield sat out beneath the glow of the huge moon, 
the Shield Pasol said quietly, “We saw Indo last summer.”
Dinner consisted of water with the salt leached from it, dead flesh from the 
salted, roasted corpse of a horned animal, and vegetables boiled to within a 
hairsbreadth of destruction. One of the stern lessons of the years; never eat 
anything without cooking it until it fell apart, or nearly. The Shield immune 
system was strong, but not so strong that many of the Shield had not been 
poisoned almost to death from local food.
Several minutes passed before Pasol’s comment drew a response from one of the 
twelve surviving Shield.
The Sentinel said, “Where?”
Pasol said, “I must consult the maps. Early summer—Valley eight hundred four or 
eight hundred five. Near the base of Mount Seven, Chain Two.”
Several minutes later, Dvan said, “He will have recognized you.”
It was a less obvious point than it might have been; they were dressed in the 
same animal skins that the primitives wore. But the cut of their clothing was 
far superior to anything any primitive had ever sewn together.
Pasol’s partner on last summer’s trip, the Shield So, nodded after another 
several minutes. “Yes.” He spoke slowly: “It was Indo, though his skin has grown 
wrinkles, and much of his hair has fallen out. I do recall it.”
Marah spoke almost immediately: “Indo will have left, but perhaps the others 
will be nearby. Let us seal and leave the floats, and in the morning we will 
journey to kill them.”
It was clearly a sensible course. Several of the Shield nodded, and returned to 
their dinner.

In Valley 804 they found the tribe that had sheltered Indo. Indo himself was 
gone, doubtless within the day after Pasol and So had passed among them. The 
Shield spent some time interrogating the locals, most of two days, but though 
they shrieked and screamed and cried as though they were people, none of them 
spoke, not shiata nor any of the degenerate dialects that had descended from 
shiata, regardless of the torture to which they were subjected.
When they were done they piled the remains of the animals up on a pyre and 
surrounded them with wood both dry and green. A tedious task, but neater than 
leaving them to decompose where they and their limbs had fallen. Dvan drew the 
duty; with the Shields So and Tensel he cut and dragged wood until his muscles 
were weary. He had not counted exactly, but there had been better than two 
hundred of the animals. Dvan might have let them rot where they lay; some 
thousands of years prior, the Sentinel Marah had corrected him in the matter. 
“No. So long as we are Shield, we shall behave as Shield. For what we kill, 
animal or not, we are responsible. Besides, Dvan, think on the Dancers. After we 
have gone, and they come across one of our kills, what will they think to see 
bodies scattered randomly, as though one barbarian tribe had slaughtered 
another? They are proud creatures; what respect they have left for the Shield 
will be all but lost.”
“Would that be such a bad thing? If they respected us less, they might take 
chances—”
Marah had simply gazed at Dvan blankly, the words clearly not penetrating, and 
then turned away. “We burn them. Always.”
In the lengthening shadows of afternoon, Dvan played their sole functioning 
laser rifle, beam at wide dispersion, across the pyre, and stepped back as the 
wood caught, and thick white smoke, tainted with the smell of burnt meat, rose 
from the small clearing where the animal tribe had lived.
Down at the edge of the river, Marah sat with the sensors, scanning through the 
small valley. Searching for metal, or the radar signature of a slowtime bubble.
It was a difficult job at the best of times; there was ore everywhere on this 
planet, the world was laden with it. It made the deep radar scans less useful 
than they might have been. As the small tribe burned behind them, the twelve 
Shield assembled and waited well into the night before Marah announced that the 
sensors were inconclusive. If there were refined metal artifacts around them, 
the sensors could not make them out against the general background of unrefined 
ore.
In the morning, the Sentinel said, they would move the sensors and try again.

In the last hour of darkness the Dancers attacked.
Dvan awoke to silence. He lay curled up beneath a tree, back to the trunk, 
holding the Shield So for warmth; for a brief, groggy moment he was not certain 
what had awakened him. Then he realized, complete silence, and abruptly came 
fully awake. The birds whose song normally filled the hour before dawn had 
fallen silent; even the chirping of the small amphibians and insects had ceased. 
Dvan raised his head to peer into the dark, felt with one hand for the kitjan, 
tied with a thong to his upper thigh. The moon had set and only the stars gave 
any light to speak of. A couple of dim, distant IR sources were visible; wolves, 
likely, or the horned grazers. Slowly, as silently as he was able, Dvan loosed 
the thong, slipped the kitjan free.
Where are the sentries?
Tmariu, and, who was it, Addil—Dvan strained for their forms; there a motionless 
figure, down toward the stream, that might be a sentry, but his unnatural 
motionlessness was—
He drew breath to shout warning, and the whistling sounds of arrows filled the 
night air. One seemed to sprout from nowhere, the thin shaft simply appearing in 
the neck of the Shield So. So stiffened in Dvan’s arms, let out a long, bubbly 
scream, dying even as he awakened. Dvan wasted no time attempting to acquire a 
target; he fired a dozen shots at random into the forest, was rewarded with the 
high-pitched shriek of a Dancer touched by the kitjan, came to his feet and 
leapt, near two meters straight up, into the lower branches of the tree beneath 
which he and So had slept. He climbed free of the tree, and into the tree beside 
it, and from there into the tree beside it. He moved silently through the dark 
roof of the nighttime forest, calculating. One Dancer down, possibly; three 
Shield dead, at least, both of the sentries and So. The shriek of the Dancer 
might have been a ruse, or a true hit. If a hit it was nine to four; it not, 
nine to five.
A beep that even Dvan barely heard announced a call. His radio, sewn into the 
breast of his tunic, was simply the fragment of a collar from an original Shield 
tunic. He ceased his movement through the treetops, lifted the fragment of the 
collar to his lips, and whispered, “Dvan.” He held the stiff piece of cloth to 
his ear in time to hear Marah’s voice.
“It’s bad, Dvan. We’ve for sure lost Tmariu and Addil and Baresst.” Brief 
silence, and Marah’s voice again, struggling with the words. “And Els. I tasted 
his skin, and it smelled of the Dancer Lorien.”
Mai’Arad’Els, dead; so far as any of them knew, Marah’s last living kin in the 
Continuing Time. Dvan had no comfort for the man; four Tbad had died aboard the 
ship, and in all the millennia since then Dvan had had no one to call kin; there 
were neither Gi’Tbad nor even Ea’Tbad among the surviving Shield.
The Dancer Lorien was Gi’Tbad, and Dvan was sworn to kill him.
After a bit, Marah’s voice resumed, near silence in near-total darkness. “I 
killed the Dancer Elemir myself, took his head from his body; I think your shots 
took Trega, I saw him being carried away.”
If true, it meant there were three left alive; Sedon and Lorien and Indo. Dvan 
brought the patch of ancient collar back down to his lips, whispered, “And 
ours?”
Another long hesitation, and then Marah said, “Dvan, you’re the only one who 
responded when I called.”
Dvan did not even think about it: he raised his head to the sky, and screamed 
until his lungs were empty of air.
“Sedon! I’m coming to kill you!”
The scream echoed in his head long after it had faded into the forest around 
them.
They took the time to scout the forest immediately around them; found their ten 
dead, and the Dancer Elemir where Marah had left him lying; they found Trega a 
ways farther on, motionless and already so frigidly cold that Dvan knew the 
Dancers must have cooled themselves to the temperature of the forest around them 
before attacking. Sensible, in a way; it had made them nearly invisible in the 
darkness, as cold and dark as the trees around them. Foolish in another way; had 
the blood been pumping through Trega’s veins as it was intended to, he might 
have survived a brush with the kitjan.
They cut Trega’s head from his body and tore his heart from his chest, in case 
the Dancer had simply stopped his heart and stilled his breathing to fool them 
into believing him dead, and then set out after the remaining three.
They trailed the Dancers for four days, as the mountains grew larger and larger, 
raised up to cover much of the sky before them. Between them they carried the 
grenade launcher and the laser rifle; each of them had a kitjan.
Everything else they had destroyed and left behind.
It seemed to Dvan that his life was drawing visibly to a close. The loss of the 
colony, the loss of the ship, the loss in this one day of ten of his mates.
As they ran together, through the overarching forests, Dvan tried to forget the 
image of So, dying with a primitive arrow in his throat, to forget the feeling 
of the man going rigid in his arms, the image itself some barbaric remnant from 
the Splinter Wars. In the steady pounding of the earth against his feet, in the 
deadly serious business of drawing sufficient air into his lungs, he found some 
measure of forgetfulness. With the passage of the days—three days, and then 
four, running virtually without stop through the endless brown and green forests 
of Ice Age Earth—Dvan found further cause for forgetfulness.
Red exhaustion crept up on him, stole the strength from his limbs. It became a 
supreme act of will simply to keep moving, to keep the spoor of the retreating 
Dancers fresh. Stops for rest, brief, brief stops for sleep, so brief there was 
no time even to make a fire; they slept in the freezing cold, in the wind off 
the mountains, holding one another for warmth; and then up again, and moving on.
It must surely have been harder for Marah than for the longer-legged Dvan, but 
the short, squat form of the Sentinel, a few paces behind Dvan, never wavered, 
never faltered in its steady pace.
They were never more than an hour or so behind the Dancers; the broken twigs, 
crushed leaves, bent branches were clearly visible. No group of three, moving at 
the speed the Dancers must, could have hidden the evidence of their passage from 
either Dvan or Marah. The Shield who had once had no idea how to follow a trail 
from Second Town down to the riverside were now the finest trackers on the 
entire planet; thirteen thousand years of practice will do that to you.
In late morning, the fourth day of the chase, they entered a long, open field, 
an open space between two stretches of forest. They stopped at the edge of the 
field, scanned the space between it. In the long grass, they could clearly see 
the path the Dancers had taken, the bent and broken stalks marking their way as 
clearly as though guide lights had been set.
The paths had split, one moving straight off to the north, the other off toward 
the west. They followed the path out to where it branched, examined the grass 
and earth around it. “Two this way,” said Marah quietly, “one that.” He paused. 
“Indo’s the lightest of the lot; that’s his mark, there, the others would have 
crushed that leaf.”
Indo had gone north.
“Sedon will have gone with Indo,” said Dvan quietly.
“Aye. Which means that Lorien—”
Dvan nodded. “Lorien’s Gi’Tbad; kill him slowly, if you have the opportunity.”
Marah nodded also, turned slightly away from Dvan, squinting off already along 
the westward path the Dancer Lorien had taken. “Aye.”
“But kill him.”
“Aye.”
Dvan stood motionless beneath the warm sun, watching Marah, and said finally, 
“If I survive, I’ll meet you back at the floats.”
“If we survive.” Marah turned suddenly, embraced Dvan with the savage strength 
of one who did not expect to see him again. Dvan returned the embrace, then 
released the Sentinel. The Shield turned away from one another, and moved on to 
their destinies, without once looking back.
Dvan had expected it; it made it no less frustrating when it happened.

The path split again.
At first he did not catch it; the split took place deep in the thick of the 
forest. He backtracked, moved back to the last place he was certain he had been 
following not one Dancer, but two. From there he moved outward in a slow circle, 
found the second path off some sixty meters to his right; one of the Dancers had 
taken to the trees, come back down again far enough away that, had Dvan been 
less careful, he would have lost the track.
The original track had veered off toward the northeast; the second track, the 
one coming down out of the trees, had continued north.
Toward a valley, leading up gradually into the mountains.
Dvan stood motionless, breathing deeply and rapidly, thinking it through. He 
felt his eyes closing, allowed them to shut. In the quiet darkness he tried to 
perform analytical thought for the first time in perhaps a millennium. If the 
young Shield he had once been could have seen how his thought processes had 
atrophied, it would have horrified him to the point of seeking his own death; 
but Dvan had no standards to judge against except his mates among the Shield, 
whose ability to reason had in most instances atrophied far worse than his own.
Moving north. Sedon’s party, and Sedon himself the leader; if they are moving 
north together at first, it is because Sedon has made the decision, because 
Sedon has determined their destination.
Sedon will not turn aside, not as a ruse, not out of fear of the Shield who 
followed him, no matter who the Shield might be.
North ran toward a small valley at the foot of the mountains, a natural path 
upward into the mountains. The original trail, veering now northeast, led almost 
straight upward, toward the foothills of the mountain, into an area so steep 
that it was as much a climb as a run.
I will go north. Dvan opened his eyes—
The wolf sat watching him from the shadows, absolutely silent, a huge beast, 
seventy or eighty kilos. Red eyes and a russet coat, and a muzzle with blood 
fresh upon it. Dvan took a step toward it, and the beast turned tail instantly, 
fled northeast into the steep foothills.
Dvan followed it without thinking.
He followed the wolf all morning, into afternoon. Somewhere in the back of his 
mind he knew that it was not a wolf at all that he followed, but a spirit, sent 
down into the world by the Nameless One as a tool to help Dvan punish the 
heretic.
In late afternoon the wolf vanished, and shortly thereafter Dvan saw the Dancer, 
saw him in the flesh, for the first time in thirteen thousand years.
Sedon.
Visible just for a second, far ahead of him, moving upward through the thinning 
forest, up toward the place where the trees ceased altogether. Dvan got a shot 
off with the kitjan, knew he had missed, and put on another burst of speed. 
Another thick cluster of trees, and then the trees thinned out, the thick 
needle-bearing trees giving way to trees with small, waxy white leaves. Another 
glimpse of the Dancer now, closer, perhaps only a klick away, and Dvan fired 
again. Nothing, no cry such as any Dancer would give when struck by the full 
force of the kitjan. Dvan gave the effort everything that was left in him, threw 
himself forward so quickly he barely had time to negotiate the spaces between 
the thinning trees. Branches scratched at him, tugged at him like clutching 
fingers as he pushed his way through. It was a place where his bulk gave him the 
advantage; in places where the Dancer must negotiate a passage, Dvan forced his 
way through, up now to the very edge of the tree line—
There. Movement flickered up on the side of the mountain and Dvan fired without 
aiming, without time to aim, paused a moment and then fired again. The sun had 
nearly vanished now, leaving nothing but the last gleams of twilight to light 
Dvan’s way to vengeance. He squeezed off a fourth shot, shifted his aim slightly 
and sent another bolt up the mountainside in the general direction of the 
movement he had seen. He considered the laser, slung across his back, and 
discounted it; if the kitjan, with its wider field of effect, had not taken the 
Dancer, then the laser was no better.
He tied the kitjan down over his thigh, and resumed his pursuit.
The mountain grew steep now, so steep that Dvan had to use both hands to help 
himself move up the icy cold rock, up the side of the mountain in near darkness. 
The sky itself was near as dark as the rock around him, and Dvan was forced to 
go more slowly, and more slowly yet, and he felt his heart pounding away inside 
him; he was losing the Dancer, losing ground he would never recover—
He glanced upward, up the mountainside.
The god had been kind.
The Dancer’s figure stood straight, like a Shield on duty, and Dvan knew from 
the way the Dancer held himself that he had been touched by the kitjan; the 
Dancer stood outlined against the starlit sky, as visible as though in daylight, 
no more than a hundred meters ahead of Dvan. Dvan clawed for the kitjan, got it 
free and saw that the figure had vanished again. He did not tie the kitjan down 
again, but rose and leapt up the rock in great bounds, no longer climbing, 
accepting the chance of a misstep and mortal fall. A long dark ravine lead 
upward and Dvan went into it, and then out of it, and found himself on a small 
ledge that led off to the east and west alike, heard the sound of the Dancer 
shuffling across the stone off to his right, and sprinted the last distance, not 
tired at all, filled with a joy so profound he had never known its like, 
fulfilling the service the god had requested of him, and he rounded an outcrop 
of rock and found an open place leading inward to a cave, and there, in the 
middle of the cave, groping cautiously for something, his back turned to Dvan, 
was the Dancer.
For a moment so short and so long it could have no meaning, Dvan stood perfectly 
motionless, frozen in the awareness of success. Hollowness filled him, made him 
an empty vessel for the touch of the god, and the god used him for the tool he 
had always been. He watched the god bring up the kitjan, heard the god say 
softly, “Good-bye, Sedon,” and felt his index finger depressing the stud, 
watched the bolt strike the Dancer full on, heard the Dancer’s death scream—
A slowtime bubble appeared from nowhere.
The god released him.
Dvan almost fell, took a stumbling step forward, unbelieving, cold and alone, 
the kitjan a great weight in his hand.
The bubble glowed at him, hard and real and solid, a dim and gentle silver 
beneath the light of distant stars.
Dvan let the kitjan drop to his side, took half a dozen achingly slow steps 
forward, and let himself sink down at the side of the cave, with the slowtime 
field to his back.
And waited for morning to arrive.
He had never been so tired before in all his immensely long life.
Come the cold dawn he looked around, fixing the place in memory, the 
relationships of the peaks to one another. It took some time, imprinting the 
image into deep memory, but at length he was satisfied; though eons might pass 
between visits, he would know this place again.
After a while he got up and stretched to relieve his stiffness, and headed back 
down the mountain.




- 14 -
« ^ » 
He spent most of the winter trying to follow Indo’s trail, without success. 
Eventually he gave up and went looking for Marah.
He found him, easily enough, shortly after nightfall. A day’s march on past the 
point where he and Marah had separated, Lorien had made a stand of it, on a long 
bluff overlooking a wide river. There was not enough left of the site where the 
conflict had taken place for Dvan to reconstruct much of the battle; perhaps the 
Dancer had not realized that Marah was carrying the grenade launcher. Most of 
the bluff was gone, and the river’s course had been altered. Spatters of molten 
stone coated most of the immediate area. At least three grenades had been 
detonated, possibly four.
An ambush; Marah’s corpse showed it clearly enough. Marah lay, with the grenade 
launcher and kitjan, at the edge of the devastation. Arrows filled him like the 
quills of one of the small pricklies the Shield had sometimes dined on. Though 
Dvan could never find the smallest trace of the Dancer, Dvan had no doubt that 
Marah had killed Lorien; the Sentinel had died smiling, and had frozen with the 
rictus still upon his features.
Dvan disassembled the grenade launcher, removed the two remaining grenades, and 
set their time fuzes.
He walked away without hurry. Half an hour after leaving Marah’s corpse, the 
world behind him lit with the sudden glare of the midday sun. Dvan’s shadow, 
moving ahead of him, grew huge and wavered like the shadow of a giant. 
Eventually the brilliant light faded, and the hot wind, when it came, merely 
warmed the back of Dvan’s neck.
He camped for a while at the floats.
He did not know how long he stayed there. After a while, he noticed that the 
summers were growing longer, and warmer, and that the winters were not so 
fierce. One summer a tribe of the savages wandered through, and stopped to camp 
at the edge of the long flats upon which the floats were beached, and watched 
Dvan, from a distance, for day after day after day.
Toward the end of the summer they picked up and left. The morning after they 
were gone, Dvan awoke and realized that the floats, which had once been some 
hundred meters back from the edge of the water, were getting wet with every high 
tide. Plants had grown up to cover the thrusters, and drifts of sand had moved 
up into the cabins of the floats, covering the floors so completely they could 
not be seen. The doors still shut, after a fashion; Dvan sat in the pilot’s 
seat, and looked out through the still flawlessly clean windows at the vast blue 
ocean. After a bit he unstrapped the kitjan that had lain against his thigh so 
long he had run through over two thousand of the restraining thongs, and left 
the kitjan on the seat once used by the weapons operator.
He left the doors to both floats open to the elements, and set off down the 
coast, following the savages.
Over thirty thousand years passed.




- 15 -
« ^ » 
The shop sat in the very shadow of the great Library at Alexandria. In the 
mornings it got sunlight; in the afternoon the Library blocked it.
“Hello, Indo.”
The shopkeeper, an elderly man of no more than average size, turned about 
slowly, peering up at the giant who had brushed through the hanging beads that 
filled his doorway. The shopkeeper spoke pure, accentless Greek. “Forgive me? 
Did you speak to me?”
“You recognize me.”
The old man bowed quickly, apparently somewhat nervous. “Forgive me, sir. I do 
not understand your tongue; I speak Greek and Hebrew only. Are you interested in 
cloth? We weave the finest in all—”
The giant, dressed in the tunic and leggings of a Greek businessman of some 
wealth, did not hurry; he unsheathed a sword to match his own awesome size, 
swung its tip around to rest against the shopkeeper’s windpipe. “For the last 
time, Indo. Speak shiata, or die.”
The shopkeeper peered up at the giant, then calmly straightened himself up out 
of his hunch, and abruptly gained a good ten centimeters’ height. His features 
smoothed, the tremor in his throat and hands disappeared, and suddenly he seemed 
not so much old, as simply careworn and reserved. In shiata as accentless as 
Dvan’s own, he said simply, “I’ve no lon; may I offer you a glass of wine?”
Dvan sheathed his sword, inclined his head slightly, and said in Greek every bit 
as good as Indo’s, “It would be my very great pleasure.”
They sat together in the back room, a small place of white stone walls, with a 
single window that looked out toward the walls of the Library. Only a kilometer 
distant, the Mediterranean gleamed blue in the noonday sun. Indo poured wine 
from a stoppered clay jug; Divan was not surprised to find the wine of a quality 
that did not match the humbleness of Indo’s surroundings.
Dvan sipped at his wine.
Indo smiled at him, a gentle and utterly guileless thing, teeth hidden as though 
they were two servants of the Flame, on the World that had abandoned them eons 
since. “Have you come to kill me?”
“I don’t know, Indo. I had not thought of you in—” Dvan searched back. “I cannot 
even say how long.”
“You thought me dead.”
“I did. It had not occurred to me… that any others could have survived… so long. 
So very long.” Dvan said suddenly, “Do any others survive? Any of the exiles?”
Indo merely shook his head. “If they did I would not tell you.”
“My trip here,” said Dvan, “fourteen years ago; I saw an exhibition of swordplay 
here, and I knew—”
Indo nodded. “The students of the students of my students.”
“They spoke shiata among themselves—not well, not as those born to it; but the 
language was unmistakable.” The words burst from Dvan. “What are they?”
Indo shook his head. “I know the answer to that no better than you. They call 
themselves the Face of Night. Shivata. Before we came to this world I turned 
away from the god, spurned his service; abrogated to myself, by right of the 
fact that I could take them, the gifts the god had given me. The god no longer 
speaks to me.” Indo paused. “But he speaks to them.”
“They are not Dancers.”
“No. The Dance, Dvan, is a celebration of life. It is not a tool of death, and 
even we heretics could not make it one.”
“They have done it.”
Indo’s voice was gentle, dreamy, distant. “No. The Dance of the Flame cannot be 
used so. But they have made a transition, Dvan, which I think was inevitable; 
once the Flame was mastered, and master it we did, Sedon and I, the next step 
was inevitable. We Dancers, trained so well in the Dance of the Flame, could not 
take that step.
“Our children have.”
Gi’Tbad’Eovad’Dvan said simply, “I do not understand.”
“If life is art, Dvan, so must be death. All power arises from transformation, 
the movement from one state of existence to another. The power to bring life, to 
take the Flame down into the world; it is the same thing as the power to mold 
life, and to take it.” Silence for a while, and then Indo whispered, “In his 
right hand he holds a black Flame.”
They sat together in silence, as darkness descended around them.
“Art,” said Indo finally, “at each step. I would not have believed it had I not 
seen it; but there is beauty in the Kill.” He looked up at Dvan. “You have made 
your decision.”
“Will you fight me?”
“No.” Indo shook his head. “What the god brought me to do, I have done.”
“Then stand up.”
Indo did, lifted his chin. Dvan loosed the sword, and simply did it, quickly, 
with no attempt at art. He was out the door, into the darkened street outside, 
before Indo’s head had ceased rolling across the floor.
North. He would go north, away from Indo’s students; he had no desire to fight 
them.
With Indo dead, released at last from the vow that had held him nearly all his 
unnaturally long life, he had no desires at all.




- 16 -
« ^ » 
From the Flame came nightways.
In the beginning was the Flame, and the Flame was life. Those who came after saw 
the Flame, and rejoiced, and Danced in its beauty.
For a long time this was so.
Then we came, the broken ones. We learned the Dance, and mastered the Dance, and 
then dared attempt to master the Flame itself.
And did.
From shia came shiabre.
From life came death.
From the Flame came nightways.
—Excerpted from Shiva Curiachen’s
An Oral History of Nightways, pub. 2332,
Alternities Press, CU: 18.995 Zaradin.



- 17 -
« ^ » 
On a cold morning early in the year A.D. 527, Dvan waited with his troops for 
the coming battle.
They camped on the hills overlooking the Camel, overlooking the fields where 
battle would take place.
It was a grim chill day, gray with clouds and damp with mist, and Dvan felt it 
in his bones, felt the wetness of the air in his beard. It made him wonder, not 
for the first or even ten-thousandth time, if this might be what age felt like, 
the loss of vitality, of warmth. Impending battle had always affected him this 
way, and doubtless always would. It seemed to him at times that he had spent his 
entire immense, unending life on this barbarian Earth either preparing for 
battle, cleaning up after a battle, or seeking bleakly to evade one.
He and his men, a band of better than two thousand horsemen if Dvan’s scribe 
Nicco was to be believed, were gathered in the trees overlooking the clearing on 
the west side of the Camel. The balance of Dvan’s forces he had left at home. He 
lacked horses for them, and constrained to the speed of men afoot he could not 
have reached the Camel in any reasonable time.
Dvan did not for a moment believe old Nicco’s count of two thousand; he 
reckoned, estimating by eye, that they were at least two hundred shy of their 
second thousand. But no need to embarrass the old man. Nicco’s eyesight was 
fading, and his memory going with each day. If he wished to call the count at 
two thousand and fourteen, why then, two thousand and fourteen it would be.
The only certainty in the world was that it would be far fewer by day’s end.
The King’s troops assembled throughout the long morning, horsemen and foot 
soldiers arriving together, taking up position in the eastern fields, with the 
Camel separating them from the bastard Medraut’s troops, and the Saxons with 
whom Medraut had allied himself. Dvan did not know why Medraut had not taken 
Camelot, and held it against Arthur’s return—he’d have done so himself—but it 
hardly mattered.
Arthur himself arrived toward midmorning. Even from where he had encamped Dvan 
recognized some few in the King’s party; Arthur himself, his son Llacheau, the 
immense bulk of the monster Gawain, the first man Dvan had met in some hundreds 
of years who surpassed his own great size.
Dvan kept his men encamped; no use in moving until the course of the battle, if 
there was one, came clear.
The morning wore down into the afternoon, and in the afternoon, Medraut and 
Arthur went forth to parley.
Dvan had his men ready themselves; when combat came—and Dvan knew there was no 
real chance of peace out of this parley—it would come quick.
He sat still, breathing slowed down to practically nothing, calm as the ocean 
before the storm. He knew it a thing of pride to his men, his lack of concern 
before a battle. His sword, so large no normal man could have wielded it, lay 
across his thighs, waiting for blood.
Dvan sat up high on the ridge of Camel Hill, watching the forces below. Medraut 
and Arthur spoke together for hours, spoke so long that Dvan began to wonder if 
the battle everyone had seen coming for the last two years might actually be 
averted. At one point the two men sent their aides away, and stood together, 
with no one else within range of their voices, for most of half an hour.
Whatever it was they discussed would never be known; Arthur nodded abruptly, 
turned away, and with his party made his way back across the Camel.
When they were halfway across the Camel, in an act of blatant treachery, the 
Saxons at Medraut’s back surged forward, across the open field, and engaged 
Arthur’s party while it was still mired in the open water of the Camel.
Impatience was not one of Dvan’s problems; he gave it fully half an hour before 
he joined in, long enough that the Saxons had nearly forgotten him, long enough 
that Arthur’s folk doubtless thought themselves betrayed.
Long enough that all those whom Dvan’s men were likely to face had grown tired.
They swept down off the hill in a great thundering wave of horseflesh, came upon 
the south flank of the Saxon forces with a suddenness that buckled that flank. 
Dvan held back slightly, let a few dozen of his men make first contact with the 
Saxons, and then rode in after them and settled down to work.
And the day stretched on.
Twice fighting took Dvan to within hailing distance of Arthur, once so close to 
Medraut that Dvan hurried in killing the Briton who fought against him, and 
urged his mount toward Medraut. Too late; Medraut left his mount behind, between 
himself and Dvan, flowed off the horse with all the grace of a Dancer and went 
to the ground with his sword, landed lightly, and walked away from Dvan, walked 
through the field of battle as though certain of his own immortality. Dvan took 
an ax cut to his arm from a Saxon he had ignored, and then had to turn back to 
business, his sword hand now wet with his own blood. He switched hands without 
thinking about it, turned away from Medraut’s retreating form and cut the 
Saxon’s head off. When he had time to glance again the surging sea of men and 
horses had hidden Medraut from him.
No time to look for him, either; behind the first Saxon came a second, and Dvan 
slew him, and then a huge creature slammed into the Irishman to Dvan’s right, 
dragged the man and his horse to the ground. Dvan swung around to face him, 
found himself staring down at a blond giant. With a one-handed chop of his ax 
the Saxon cleanly decapitated Dvan’s horse, and Dvan had to leap from the 
animal’s back as it fell. He rolled to his feet, sword in hand, and turned to 
face the approaching Saxon. The man was a giant by modern standards, near 
Gawain’s size, surely every bit of Dvan’s own unnatural height. Blood flowed 
crimson across the hugely muscled shoulders, down the Saxon’s arm and over his 
ax. He was upon Dvan in the moment that Dvan regained his feet, ax up over his 
head, whistling down toward Dvan. Dvan got his sword up, lunged forward, and saw 
the tip of his sword go into the Saxon’s chest, felt the resistance and leaned 
into it as the man’s ax came down and bit through the leather of Dvan’s head 
guard, through hair, flesh, bone, and into the pink of brain.
By the time it had breached bone most of the impact had been absorbed.
The two men stood staring at one another as the battle swirled around them; they 
fell together, and the Saxon died in the moment of that fall.
Dvan never knew it.
Indeed, for a long, long time, Gi’Tbad’Eovad’Dvan knew nothing at all.
When he awoke again it was morning.
He lay on a field with bodies piled all around him. The grass, heavy with dew, 
dampened his cheek. The smell of blood hung sweet and fragrant in the misty air.
A boot nudged him, rolled him over slowly. He stared up at the great gray sky. A 
vast pain pulsed in his skull, a throbbing like the end of the world.
“Es alive.” A ratlike countenance peered down into the injured man’s upturned 
face. “Leave ‘im that way?”
A deeper voice said wearily, “Aye. That’s Divane, the Irish fellow what Arthur 
dragged down here to die with ‘im. Pick ‘im up, he can die back to the camp as 
well as here.”
Divane. The man considered that as several pairs of hands strained and lifted 
him free of the ground.
A fair enough name.
He saw no reason not to keep it.




- 18 -
« ^ » 
When Dvan was at last done, late Monday, the fourth day after beginning his 
tale, there was for a very long time no sound at all but the gentle sighing of 
the ventilators, the almost inaudible creaks of the great house as it rotated on 
its axis. Denice watched Gi’Tbad’Eovad’Dvan, the relic of fifty thousand years, 
standing like a statue before her. “What is left is of little enough importance. 
I had no memory of who I was; I knew only that I did not age as other men. I 
adapted, learned to hide my differences, to make no close friends, take no 
family. I lived through the discovery of steam power and the printing press, the 
telephone and the automobile and the computer and air flight and space flight, 
nanotechnology and genegineering and the InfoNet. Now that I remember, it amazes 
me that my people and yours could have taken such divergent paths; we never 
touched nanotechnology, and only dabbled in genegineering until we had conquered 
death by aging.
“But we were engineers and builders the likes of which you cannot imagine. In 
the worship of the Flame we built wonders such as your people have never even 
attempted.”
Robert said quietly, “You say ‘your’ people, as though you were not one of us. 
You are to my eyes a man, like other men.”
Dvan turned on Robert with a suddenness that brought Denice up on her bed, 
crouched and ready for movement. Robert had not stirred but suddenly he was no 
longer a small Japanese man with laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. In his 
expression lived something ancient and deadly.
“You,” said Dvan with chilling precision, with a degree of contempt so 
devastating Denice would not have believed it possible had she not heard it, 
“are our children. The New Human Race. The descendants of heretics, of criminals 
and those who followed them. Mutated as the Flame People would never have 
allowed themselves to be mutated, selected by evolution for your inclination to 
violence, a people who have made violence an art and death a passion and the 
Kill a religion; aye,” said Dvan, “you are our children. And you are completely 
insane.”




- 19 -
« ^ » 
Most of the week passed before Denice could move again without pain. Even with 
modern medicine, even in the one-third gravity of her room, her knee ached every 
night. The bruise on her hip was minor, and soon faded; the broken left forearm 
was the worst of it, but she put no strain on it, and with the aid of 
nanoviruses that were crafted to help the bone knit, toward the end of the week 
she was able to punch with either hand almost equally well. Half an hour with 
the punching bag made her left forearm throb; but though it hurt, the ache grew 
less with each passing day, and the pain did not prevent her from striking if 
she needed to.
She threw herself into her recovery with a vengeance. Jimmy was far enough along 
in his own recovery that she saw no need to help him further; with Robert’s 
help, she focused on herself, and on her own needs. She spent most of every 
other day in the gym, working out until she was exhausted; gave herself the 
in-between days to let her muscles heal and grow. On those days she swam, in the 
zero-gravity swimming pool, or audited the InfoNet for news of the Rebs, or 
Sedon, or Ripper.
Chandler’s people were busy, looking for a line on Sedon, and having no more 
success, apparently, than the PKF. Somewhere in San Diego, they all knew that 
much; but where exactly was anyone’s guess.
She spent hour after hour sitting silently in her room, watching the stars wheel 
by in her floor.

Electronic Times, June 17, 2076: Today’s polls place Douglass Ripper, Jr., eight 
points ahead of Sanford Mtumka; thirty-six percent of the respondents in our 
poll stated that, if the election were held today, they would vote for Ripper 
over any of the other candidates in the race.
Ralf the Wise and Powerful said simply, “The major media is not allowed to say 
so, but assuming no significant changes in the external situation, Ripper will 
win. He’s gaining ground, slowly but very surely. On Thursday the Ministry of 
Population Control will announce that China has, once again, failed to meet its 
population-reduction target; when that happens, Zhao Pen will lose another point 
to two points of support, and Ripper will pick most of that up. It will give him 
very nearly a ten-point lead. No candidate for a major Unification office has, 
in modern times, failed of election with a lead of such size. Assuming Ripper 
isn’t caught in bed with a troop of dead Boy Scouts, he is a prohibitive 
favorite to be, come next January first, the new Secretary General.”
“Dead Boy Scouts? Is that a joke, Ralf?”
“I have been working on my sense of humor recently.”
“Why?”
“I’m recoding anyway,” said Ralf simply. “It gives me something to do while Ring 
destroys me.”

“What will you do about Dvan?”
Denice grunted, winced and released the weight she’d been planning to use for 
curls. Too heavy for an arm broken so recently. She answered Robert while 
removing five kilos from the barbell. “Well, I don’t need a servant. And his 
dislike of you is irrational.” She shook her head. “It bothers me.”
Robert sat a few meters away, twisted into an improbable position on the mat, 
breathing deeply and slowly. “He threatened to kill me if I attempted to 
continue teaching you.”
Denice put down the barbell. “When?”
Robert had to kick twice to get his foot free; abruptly a vaguely 
mushroom-looking shape unfolded into a human being. He took a deep breath that 
turned into a yawn, said drowsily, “About a week ago.”
“I see you’re terribly worried.”
Robert shrugged. “Short of killing him outright, what would I do about it if I 
were?”
“That’s a point.”
Robert gestured to her to join him. She sank down on the mat before him. “Are 
you ready to talk?”
“Yes.”
His eyes were half-lidded. “Where are we with each other?”
“I don’t know, Robert. I want to—not be whatever it is you are. But I killed 
those men in Los Angeles, and—I can’t describe to you how it felt. I still have 
nightmares about it.”
“I know how it felt. You enjoyed it.”
Denice bowed her head. She whispered the words. “Oh, yes. And the Flame Dvan 
talks about, I’ve felt that too; and it’s as strong as the Kill; and I have no 
more idea how to handle it.”
“I have a strong feeling,” said Robert slowly, “that there is nothing I can say 
to you in this area that will be relevant to what is happening with you. So I 
will not try. But if you need me—to kill Sedon; for instruction; to come rescue 
you off some building somewhere—” She looked up, and her eyes met his. “—I will 
always be here.”

Thursday they had dinner with Chandler again, Dvan, and Denice, Robert and 
Jimmy. Dinner was strained; Jimmy was unhappy, felt that he was being ignored, 
and didn’t care who knew it. Denice was briefly sorry that she’d gone to the 
trouble to make herself up for dinner; nobody seemed to notice. Chandler 
finished early and excused himself, and Jimmy left shortly after that, after 
inviting Denice to come swimming with him.
Denice said quietly, “In a bit.”
Jimmy stopped in the doorway, watching Denice and Robert and Dvan sitting 
together around the low dinner table. Denice could feel the hurt and anger 
radiating away from him; she said nothing, and Jimmy turned and left without 
speaking.
Dvan spoke as the door rolled shut behind Jimmy Ramirez, in that unlikely, 
gentle Irish voice. “You’ve been avoiding me, lass.”
“What would you like to be called?”
The question seemed to throw the huge man; he hesitated a moment. “William will 
do. It’s a name I’m used to, at any rate.”
“William, you can call me Denice.”
Dvan blinked. “What?”
“My name is Denice. You’ve called me all sorts of things since I met you, and 
most of them offend me. Call me Denice.”
“Very well,” said Dvan slowly. “Denice. I can do that. If I’ve offended you, 
lass, forgive me; I mean no harm. I know what you can be—though I had not 
thought it possible for a woman to Dance the Flame—but I don’t know what you 
are.” He hesitated, grinned abruptly, and the Irish lilt strengthened. “Having 
been William Devane these last fifteen centuries gives me an interesting 
perspective; I’ve got to see your people from the inside out. I’ve been 
struggling with things since I remembered, not quite a year ago now. William 
Devane is a sexist, I think you’d call him. Call me. But that part of me that 
calls itself Dvan barely recognizes you as a person, Denice. You’re a Dancer, or 
perhaps a Keeper, or possibly just a breeder. And when I think in those 
terms—and it’s hard not to, for the identity of the Shield Dvan is more deeply 
rooted in me than that of the William Devane of the last fifteen centuries—when 
I think in those terms, I can see no way to approach you and ask for your help.”
“What do you want my help for?”
Dvan glanced at Robert; Robert stared back, impassively. Dvan drew a breath. 
“First, to kill Sedon. It may be I can do it myself, and it may not; but with 
your aid, and the aid of your AI friend, I do not think I can fail.”
“You didn’t mention Robert.”
Dvan shrugged. “I saw no need to. I doubt there is any skill he possesses that I 
do not.”
Robert murmured, “Aside from tact, you mean.”
Dvan struggled with it. “If I were you, I would not speak that way to me.”
“You mean,” said Robert easily, “if you were an abomination, the descendant of 
heretics, you would know your place?”
Dvan seemed to consider it. “Well,” he said finally, “something like that.” He 
pointed at Robert and said, “You recognize this weapon.”
A flechette gun, small and round, sat crouched in the palm of the big man’s 
hand.
For a long moment Denice’s brain insisted that it had to be something else; 
she’d been watching him, watching his hands, and hadn’t seen him palm the 
weapon. Clearly Robert hadn’t either.
Robert sat frozen, motionless, every trace of humor drained from him. His hands 
were together in front of him, in plain view. “That’s a really good trick,” he 
said. “Someday you must show me how to do that.”
“It’s a flechette gun, night face.”
Robert gazed at Dvan, unblinking. “Yes, yes, I know.”
Denice had no time for anything complex; she froze his medianis nerve and threw. 
The bones in Dvan’s left wrist shattered, the skin ripping open, blood spraying 
away. The flechette gun bounced up, spun out of Dvan’s nerveless grip as Robert 
Dazai Yo rose to his feet, plucked the gun from the air and took two steps back 
and aimed.
Dvan looked from Denice to Robert Yo, and back to Denice, and then down to the 
small broken object that lay on the floor at his feet. His left wrist was open 
to the bone, and his blood dripped steadily down his fingers to the floor. He 
bent and, with the hand Denice had left whole, picked up the small black item.
She had thrown a makeup key at him.
“If we’re going to work together,” said Denice, “and I think we’re probably 
going to, you can’t threaten my friends.”
Dvan nodded slowly. “I see.” Blood pooled on the floor at his feet. “What now?”
Robert Yo spoke softly and slowly, with a gentle rhythm unlike anything Denice 
had ever before heard from him or any other human being. The words echoed in her 
ears as they came forth, rolled slowly through the corridors of her mind. They 
were spoken in shiata:
“Rho! Etra shivat elor ko’obay k’shia, vata elor ko’obay shiebran.”
Dvan’s features, pale already with shock, whitened perceptibly, with what 
emotion Denice did not know.
Looking at Dvan over the flechette gun’s sight, Robert smiled, a slow friendly 
smile that lit his features and made him seem suddenly a young man, and said 
simply, “Enshia, ensitra.”




- 20 -
« ^ » 
I am the Name Storyteller.
In 2309, in the Oz Circuit, on the planet Tin Woodman, a night face named Shiva 
Curiachen conquered an addiction to electric ecstasy.
This, in shiata, the tongue of the Old Human Race, is Shiab, Rosad, the 
Dedication of Nightways:
Rho! Etra shivat elor ko’obay k’shia, vata elor ko’obay shiebran. Enshia, 
ensitra.
The Dedication can vary by one word, the last:
Rho! Etra shivat elor ko’obay k’shia, vata elor ko’obay shiebran. Enshia, 
denestra.
The difference in meaning between these two apparently slight variations is 
immense. Depending upon inflection, the first Dedication, ending in ensitra, is 
a vow of either fealty or, as often, common interest. In the days when women 
were rarely taught the discipline, the word ensitra was almost always translated 
as “brotherhood.”
The second version of the Dedication—Enshia, denestra—is a sacred and deadly 
serious promise to destroy the person at whom the Dedication has been directed.
In 2309, the night face Shiva Curiachen, the first Shiva of United Earth 
Intelligence, translated the Dedication of Nightways into English. Though other 
translations have been attempted, some of them more literally accurate, it is 
generally recognized that, of the known English-language translations, 
Curiachen’s translation comes closest to capturing both the meaning and the 
feeling of the Dedication of Nightways.
Sitting motionless in the middle of Christ’s Burden Boulevard, a thermos 
containing Lipton Instant Iced Tea with Lemon at his feet, in a small Tin 
Woodman town called Six Flags Over Jesus, Shiva Curiachen said these words to 
the King of Corona:
“Behold! We are the countenance that is turned to the cold eternal darkness; the 
face that is turned to the shadows of night. In nightways I am your doom.”
And indeed he was.
But that is another Story, for another time.




The TriCentennial
Summer
Don’t sing of how you love me
Don’t take me to that show
Don’t tell me you’re the Chosen One
‘Cause I don’t want to know

Don’t take me to no party
Don’t dance with me tonight
It’s all the same with you, my love
You’re holding me too tight
—Mahliya Kutura, Independence Day

In Congress, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united 
states of America,
When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to 
dissolve the Political Bands that have connected them with another, and to 
assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which 
the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the 
Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel 
them to the Separation.
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that 
they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among 
these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these 
Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from 
the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes 
destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish 
it…
—Opening to the American Declaration of Independence,
July 4, 1776 Gregorian

Once there was a thief, and the thief was God.
—First line in the Exodus Bible,
first published 2312 Gregorian



- 1 -
« ^ » 
Among human historical figures, I think there is no sentient being more like 
Ifahad bell K’Ailli than Trent the Uncatchable. Both were responsible for the 
spread of very basic concepts among their people; both, despite their undeniable 
accomplishments, were notorious cheats and frauds.
Ifahad the Mighty was born into the midst of what was later called the Dome 
Rebellion. The Sleem empire conquered the Dome around 6200 b.c; three and a half 
centuries later, during Ifahad’s early childhood, the Dome rebelled.
The rebellion was well under way before Ifahad’s voice carried any weight among 
the Dome. That first rebellion lasted eighty years before fading. Toward its 
end, as Ifahad’s power among the Dome grew, Ifahad the Mighty invented Hiding. 
If you are human—and if you are reading this account in French, English, 
Mandarin, Spanish, Anglic, or Tierra, it is likely that you are—then it will be 
difficult for you to understand how revolutionary the Dome, in modern times 
called the K’Aillae, found this concept. The K’Aillae are more like us than most 
alien species; which, at times, seems only to serve to highlight those areas in 
which we do not think alike.
An example of this comes from one of the first human translations of the works 
of Ifahad bell K’Ailli. It was titled Proud Vengeance: The Writings of Ifahad. 
K’Aillae were alternately amused and offended by the title. Their strongly 
worded suggestion for change resulted in a second edition with the title 
Sensible Vengeance: The Writings of Ifahad.
The K’Aillae are a practical people: when Ifahad introduced the concept of 
Hiding to the K’Aillae, responses were mixed. His explanation—that Hiding 
involved running away when defeat was certain, avoiding the enemy for an 
unspecified period of time, and then coming back and fighting again at a later 
date when victory was possible—did not arouse contempt among the Dome so much as 
puzzlement. The K’Aillae had, before meeting humans, no word for “coward”; but 
they had many for “crazy.” Most of them were used on Ifahad.
Even after Hiding had been explained to them, K’Aillae were generally unable to 
grasp the concept. Only Ifahad’s own clan, the K’Ailli, followed him into 
Hiding, which is why today there are no Dome, only K’Aillae.
Trent the Uncatchable, of course, ran away. That running away could be not 
simply a strategically reasonable response to overwhelming military superiority, 
but in fact among the most successful of all forms of resistance, was a concept 
many humans of his time had difficulty understanding—at least until it was 
demonstrated.
Trent and Ifahad were undeniably similar in the roles they played among their 
people; it may be that they were in some ways similar in person.
I never really knew Trent the Uncatchable; I knew Ifahad well.
The cracks in the Continuing Time are small, and it takes great effort to widen 
them. The huge sweep of events during the First K’Ailla Hiding—dating roughly 
5845 b.c. to 70 b.c, when the K’Ailla-led Confederation of Outland rose against 
the Sleem—is as firmly set a sequence of events as any in the post-Zaradin 
period. And it is recorded that when the New Human Race “first” contacted the 
K’Aillae, in 2124 Gregorian, the K’Aillae claimed prior contact with humanity. 
At the time, with their own history so poorly known to them that they did not 
yet know of the Old Human Race, most of the New Humanity discounted the K’Ailla 
records as inaccurate, or the K’Aillae as liars.
They were not.
I was there, with Ifahad, with the Old Human Named Seeker, six millennia before 
the birth of Yeshua ha Notzri, eighty-one centuries before the New Human Race 
discovered the tachyon star drive, when Ifahad first announced that, if the 
K’Aillae wished to survive, they must learn to Hide.
Trent the Uncatchable, of course, made no such announcement regarding running 
away. He simply ran.
An avatar of mine once spoke to Trent.
He does remind me of Ifahad.




- 2 -
« ^ » 
I am Neil Corona.
On Wednesday, June 17, 2076, I left the shell of the Unification warship Unity 
and rode a Chandler HuskySled to the dock at Halfway Airlock Nineteen, Tytan 
Industries. I was late for an appointment with Marc Packard, and he’s a 
difficult man to get along with at the best of times. So I did not bother to 
take off my pressure suit; I cycled through and into pressure, undogged my 
helmet, and headed down to the conference room where they awaited me.
Jay Altaloma met me on the way there. Jay is a young fellow, twenty-two and 
gorgeous even without biosculpture. “You’re late.”
I glanced at him. “Not yet. Not for another fifteen seconds.”
“Packard’s gonna be pissed.”
“Bummer.”
Halfway is an orbital city; with a population of nearly two million it is, next 
to Luna City at Copernicus, the largest city off Earth itself. It is also a 
company town; in some ways the government of Halfway is as much Tytan 
Manufacturing as the Unification.
But you know these things.
What Halfway mostly is, is a mess.
It looks like a bowl of noodles that somebody dropped just a moment ago, while 
you had your back turned: a roughly spherical collection of metal and 
metal-ceramic and plastic noodles, falling free, headed for the ground but not 
quite there yet. Halfway is aggressively and, in some measure, intentionally 
disorienting to downsiders. Among SpaceFarers and Halfers the ability to move 
about in three dimensions without becoming disoriented is considered a matter of 
simple competence. I once heard a downsider call it a matter of “pride,” but 
that is not the correct word; SpaceFarers and Halfers no more consider it a 
matter of pride than downsiders are proud of their ability to walk without 
falling down.
I’ve been here since ‘34, ever since the Peaceforcers decided that if they 
weren’t going to kill me they might as well keep me off Earth, away from the 
Johnny Rebs. At first I hated it, and kept hating it for nearly a decade. I 
worked at half a dozen different trades and stayed broke at all of them. The 
last job I had before Marc Packard hired me was as head bouncer at one of the 
rowdier places out on the Edge. They tend to cluster out there on the Edge, the 
places where you wouldn’t take a visitor from Earth, if you ever had any; the 
whorehouses and sensable parlors, bars and sleazier restaurants, and the odd 
juice dealer or two. Electric ecstasy is not illegal at Halfway, the way it is 
on Earth, but nobody will hire a man or woman wearing a plug. Juice junkies 
either starve or go downside; it is one of the rarest addictions at Halfway.
I finally stopped hating Halfway about a year after I went to work for Marc 
Packard.
I was working a whorehouse—a step down from one of the sleazier bars, a step up 
from a sensable parlor—when Marc hired me. At first it was just as a bodyguard; 
later, as Marc got more powerful, I ended up heading all the private security at 
Halfway.
I’m a little under two meters tall, about ninety kilos when I’m in a good 
weight, and there are more than a few visible signs of rough usage here and 
there. Any half-competent biosculptor could make me pretty, if I wanted; I 
don’t. Looking like something dragged out of one of the Fringe’s nastier back 
allies can be useful at times.
The whorehouse was Kitten’s, a twelve-room place out on the Edge. Kitten was an 
old boy who had once been one of the highest-paid whores in pre-Unification 
Washington D.C., about ten years before I was born. He was a charming old 
fellow, middling honest about small things, scrupulously so about any part of 
the employer-employee relationship. My pay was never late and never short, and 
when he made me a promise—rare—he kept it.
Marc Packard started going there late in ‘42. He was, I understand, nursing a 
broken heart. To this day I have no idea whether he was seeing one of the boys 
or girls, or both. It hardly matters. He wasn’t anybody in particular back then, 
the son of one of Tytan Manufacturing’s middle managers. He hadn’t gone to work 
for Tytan yet, hadn’t yet carved up most of Tytan Industries’ management in his 
climb up the corporate ladder.
Early in ‘43 we got an idiot from Earth carrying a slug-thrower.
Look: all projectile and energy weapons are illegal at Halfway. The closest 
thing to a laser you will ever see in public is the gadget they used to bury 
inside a PKF Elite’s fist, the one they’re putting in the index fingers today; 
and we’d probably make those illegal if it were possible. It’s not so much that 
we mind people getting shot up, bad though that may be in some cases, as it is 
our desire to avoid trying to breathe in death pressure. People learned early on 
at Halfway that breathing and gunfire were incompatible habits. A breached 
bulkhead doesn’t just kill the intended victim, it also kills the shooter and 
everybody around him who doesn’t get to a p-suit in time; his friends if he has 
any, tourists, his grandmother, everybody. Simply being caught with a firearm at 
Halfway is good for time downside in a Public Labor work gang.
This cretin downsider was carrying one of those all-plastic hideaway automatics 
that were so popular back in the first half of the century, and the scanners I’d 
installed at the public entrance to Kittens didn’t catch it. (Remember, this was 
‘43; the slowscans today are smarter than you are, yes, but I worked with what I 
had.) I don’t even know how the fight started, though later I heard that Marc 
and the downsider had come to see the same whore, and neither one particularly 
wanted to wait.
The first I knew about it I had a hostage situation on my hands.
Because a fair amount of Kitten’s business came from downsiders who wanted to 
try free-fall sex before going back to Iowa or India or wherever, the lounge at 
Kitten’s was laid out with a local vertical designed to help decrease the 
downsiders’ inevitable disorientation. Standing with both feet planted on the 
bottom of the room, the downsider had one hand wrapped in Marc’s hair, the other 
held the slugthrower poised at the base of the boy’s skull.
The downsider screamed, “Back off!” as I entered the lounge.
I froze there, just inside the lounge’s entrance, and hung motionless a few 
centimeters above the floor. Little details jumped out at me. At the far end of 
the room two of the hosts were peering through an open door, watching the scene 
unfold. The hostage was a boy—I had the quick impression of youth, no more; I 
wasn’t paying him much attention. The boy was fully dressed; the downsider wore 
nothing but a pair of magslippers, keeping him in touch with the floor.
Good news; the downsider was breathing heavily through his mouth.
I said slowly, very quietly, “Okay, amigo. Just relax.” Before coming down to 
the waiting lounge I’d turned off the ventilators. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.” 
If I could get the fellow to calm down and stay in one place for any significant 
length of time, a still bubble of air around his head would slowly be leached of 
oxygen. Anoxia is sneaky, and with the adrenaline pumping through his system 
he’d be using up the oxy at a good clip; with any luck he’d go limp in 
midsentence and I could send him downside and get him out of my life without 
having to hurt anyone. “I’m Neil Corona. I’m the director of security here at 
Kitten’s. Tell me what you want, and if I can get it for you I will.”
He jerked his head toward the two whores behind him, watching the scene from the 
doorway. “Get them out of here.”
“My pleasure.” I glanced at them and they faded back into the passageway leading 
to their rooms. “What else?”
It froze him; he hadn’t thought things out that far, if he was thinking at all. 
He’d played the sensables, he knew the drill; he was supposed to make demands of 
me—a million dollars, a fast horse and a jet waiting at the airport to take me 
to Cuba, and nobody follows me, copper, or the kid here gets it—but there are 
practical details in these sorts of matters that the sensables rarely discuss. 
When he spoke his voice was ragged, scared of the mess he’d dragged himself 
into, but the adrenaline pumping through his body had left him so keyed up he 
couldn’t see how to get out of it. “If you mess with me this dumb fuck dies.”
I studied the boy briefly—tall and skinny, teenage Halfway homebrew. He looked 
back at me without expression; if he was afraid, and he was if he had any sense 
at all, he wasn’t showing it. Could just be that he was young enough he didn’t 
know how very long he was going to be dead.
The young tend to be concerned with dying well. Personally I worry more about 
when; I expect to go out screaming and shooting and generally comporting myself 
with a lack of dignity.
I spoke to the downsider. “Why don’t you just put the gun down? Kitten’s already 
called the Peaceforcers; you have maybe five minutes before their sleds get 
here.”
Wrong thing to say. The muscles in the downsider’s right forearm, the hand he 
held the gun with, bunched suddenly, and a wince of pain crossed the boy’s face. 
The barrel of the gun must be grinding into the back of the kid’s skull. “I’ll 
kill him if they dock, I swear I will.”
I kept eye contact with the boy, watching him. He was alert and clear-eyed, 
there with me in the moment, and it made a difference in what I said next. 
“You’re in bad trouble, amigo. The PKF doesn’t negot—”
“I’ll kill him if they dock.”
I believed him. “Amigo, I have a hideaway tucked behind my belt. The PKF lets 
registered security carry them.” (A lie—but they would look the other way. The 
hideaway, a practically invisible little two-shot Beretta, fired a pair of 10-mm 
slugs. And it was in my sleeve.) “So you kill the kid, but unless you’ve 
practiced firing a gun in free fall, it’s going to push you way off balance.” I 
shrugged. “So you shoot him and I’m going to put you down.”
It froze him absolutely solid for the space of maybe an entire second. Unless 
you’ve been there you’d never believe how long a second can be. Finally he said 
desperately, “Let me see the gun.”
“I don’t think so. You.” I directed the word at the boy. “What do you think I 
should do?”
The downsider screamed, “Shut up! You talk to me.”
Marc Packard looked straight at me. He said, loud and clear, “Do me a favor. 
After he shoots me, kill the bastard.”
I shrugged. “Okay.” I hung there looking at the downsider, my toes four 
centimeters above the deck. “You heard him. Do you put the gun down and live, or 
do you shoot him and die?”
The dumb fuck tried to shoot me. In gravity he might have gotten away with it, 
pulling the gun off the boy and popping me with one shot, putting the gun back 
on the boy before he had a chance to react.
Downsiders don’t know how to move in drop. Not even if their lives depend on it. 
He pulled the gun off Marc, and I saw his center of gravity change on him as he 
moved the gun over toward me. I kicked with my right foot, caught the edge of 
the doorway behind me strongly enough to get me moving off to my left at a good 
clip. Downside my man must have been a good enough shot; his first bullet went 
by my right ear close enough to leave me deaf the next day. He never got a 
second. The recoil knocked him off balance, and he fantailed slightly, arms 
outstretched and one foot out of contract with the floor. He was out of position 
so I took my time, pulled the little Beretta free, and kicked up off the floor. 
I got my back up against the ceiling to handle the recoil, and when he looked up 
at me I shot the stupid son of a bitch twice in the face. The slugs were an 
ultrathin metal sheath wrapped around light plastic. Designed to fragment upon 
impact, you could fire one directly into a bulkhead without much danger of 
damaging the bulkhead and exposing yourself to death pressure. Flesh and bone 
didn’t handle them so good; his face melted a little bit under the impact of the 
first slug, and the second one shattered what was left. He spurted bright red 
arterial blood straight up at me out of the stump of his neck.
He was a better shot dead than alive. I got my arm up to cover my face and then 
the blood hit me in a sticky fountain.

Kitten was in there vacuuming up the floating globules of blood and brain when I 
got clean enough to look around again. Somebody, either from a macabre sense of 
humor or, equally likely, from the humorless pragmatism that whores tend to 
learn, had tied a tourniquet around the corpse’s neck.
One of the boy whores gave me a towel to wipe my face with.
On the other side of the room, I got my second look at the kid who turned out to 
be Marc Packard. With time to look more carefully he was, clearly, younger than 
his composure had led me to believe; fourteen or fifteen, tops. (Over five years 
later he proved he’d been paying attention, mentioned in passing that I’d 
negotiated the situation badly; aside from asking the shooter to put down his 
weapon, I hadn’t made it clear to the man what was necessary from him to get us 
all out of it with no gunplay. A mistake, Marc said, given that the man was 
clearly in no shape to make such decisions for himself.)
He didn’t say that at the time; then, only moments after it had happened, the 
boy looked straight at me, rubbed a spattering of blood off one cheek with a 
towel another of the whores had handed him, and said, “Thanks. I owe you one.”
I shrugged and stored the spent Beretta back in the forearm holster, making a 
mental note to reload, soonest. “No problem.”
“Okay. Who are you?”
“Neil Corona.”
He was educated. “Marc Packard. Pleased to—the Neil Corona?”
I was in no mood either to deny it or explain it. “Yes.”
“Oh.” He looked surprised. “Pleased to meet you.” Then he fainted, the way 
people do in drop, going limp all over, all at once, and hung there motionless 
in midair.

I did something stupid once.
You may know what it is. Packard had; in 2043 it was still recent enough most 
people with any sense of history knew of it.
When I was eighteen years old I joined the United States Marine Corps.
That wasn’t the stupid thing, although I never convinced my father of that. Dad 
was dead of pancreatic cancer in ‘14, four years before I did the stupid thing 
that made me famous. Yes, it was that long ago; people still died of cancer, and 
dozens of other diseases of which nobody who is not at least my age can even 
remember the names.
In the summer of 2018 I was a twenty-seven-year-old Marine Corps sergeant. By 
late summer the Unification War in America had come down to the battle between 
the orbital battalion of the Marine Corps and the U.N.’s Space Force. You know 
how that one ended; Space Force won.
We should have given up then. There were about twenty thousand of us left, not 
counting the Sons of Liberty. We had heard the Sons of Liberty were still 
fighting, that the President and the remains of the Secret Service were with 
them. To this day I don’t know if that was true; at the time it was one of the 
things that kept the marines fighting.
The Peaceforcers swept us back across the Atlantic seaboard, and we found 
ourselves making the last stand of the Unification War at the city of Yorktown, 
Virginia, 237 years after George Washington accepted the surrender of the 
British there.
The battle lasted two days. They shelled us and swept us with laser cannon from 
orbit, until it was clear that surrender was the only option left to us. The 
highest ranking officer left alive on our side was a major named Eddie Henson. 
He negotiated the terms of our surrender over one of the few remaining phones in 
Yorktown that still worked, an old ISDN job that was hardwired to the 
Network—cellular was knocked out across most of the Eastern seaboard. My squad 
guarded the house out of which he was operating. About three-quarters of the way 
through the negotiations, when all that was left was the finalization of some 
details, Henson suddenly stopped talking, sat motionless for just a moment, and 
then abruptly put his maser in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
I finished the negotiations myself. I didn’t know it at the time, but the fellow 
I was negotiating with was Jules Moreau, the man who had, with Sarah Almundsen, 
started the Unification six years prior, in Europe.
It was a stupid thing to do—again, not the stupid thing, but dumb. I should have 
waited until a commissioned officer was brought in to handle it. We still had a 
couple left alive, and it would only have taken perhaps five minutes to find 
one. But Moreau was threatening to burn Yorktown off the face of the map, and we 
both knew he had the firepower to do it, so I got in front of the phone’s lens 
and identified myself as Captain Neil Corona. We weren’t wearing insignia any 
longer—Peaceforcer snipers made a point of shooting officers—and Moreau had no 
reason not to believe me.
Moreau wanted us to surrender in Yorktown. Right now.
That’s when I said it:
“We will fry under your goddamn cannon before a single Marine will lay down his 
arms in Yorktown.”
It was a stupid, stupid thing to say. A frog who had less history than Moreau 
would have fried us over it.
We marched out of Yorktown, twenty thousand strong, and laid down our arms at 
the city limits.
I don’t suppose that clip of me surrendering—we will fry under your goddamn 
cannon, the brave, haggard young man says—has been accessed by more than about 
twenty billion history students over the course of the fifty-eight years that 
have passed since that day.

Marc was pissed that I was late. I could tell; he smiled at me when I came in.
“Thank you for joining us, Chief.”
“I was in the field,” I said shortly. “Over at the Unity. What’s up?”
It was not good. Jay had been correct to be worried about it. Marc had most of 
his personal staff present, including Toni Abad, an Arab fellow I never had 
learned to like in the twenty years since Marc had hired him. At the far end of 
the table, Captain Vasily Koslov, the number-two officer in Tytan Security and 
the person who’d replace me if I ever got canned or killed, nodded to me. 
Official business, then; Marc was going to break bad news to me, and he never 
liked to do that alone.
He didn’t let it hang, I’ll say that for Marc. “The Cirque du Mars has applied 
for permission to perform. July first to July tenth.”
“You intend to let them come?”
Marc said mildly. “I’m inclined in that direction.”
I scowled at Marc and said, “This is the stupidest damn idea you’ve ever had and 
if you do it Jay and I will quit.”
Jay blinked. I glared at him. “Um. Right,” he said finally.
“Quit? Right.” he said to Marc a moment later, with a wonderful attempt at 
firmness, “quit.” He looked back at me. “Right?”
Marc glanced at me and then back to his acolytes. “Any of you care to join 
‘Sieur Altaloma and the Chief?”
Abad smiled at me, showing teeth. “No.” One by one the rest of them joined in, a 
slow cautious chorus of agreement. Captain Koslov simply shook his head no; 
Vasily and I aren’t particularly close, given we’ve worked together for twenty 
years, but he’s an okay guy; doesn’t take much shit from anybody, including 
Marc. Marc nodded as though he had never expected anything else—of course he 
hadn’t—and turned back to me. “Okay. Why is it a bad idea?”
Marc Packard, whatever his other flaws may be, is not a stupid man. I stopped 
and thought a moment before I replied. “We have the biggest warship anyone’s 
ever built growing out there in the middle of Halfway, with Halfers and 
downsiders all around it. Read, targets. Potential hostages. At the very least, 
ancillary damage like you don’t even want to think about in the event of a 
terrorist attack. And there are CityState and Collective terrorists aimed at the 
Unity twenty-four hours a day. On top of that there’s the Fourth of July riots 
coming up. We don’t usually have problems with them up here, but this is the 
TriCentennial, Marc. You’re not an American and you can’t know what that’s going 
to feel like for those of us who are. Just because we’ve never had problems 
before doesn’t mean we won’t this time. On top of all this other damn 
foolishness you’re going to drag in—how many?”
“The entire complement is a hundred and seventy persons.”
I heard my voice rise. “A hundred and seventy circus performers? We’ve only got 
a hundred and twelve Security. Bad idea. Bad, bad idea. Security will be a 
nightmare. Get your American Halfers worked up and you’re going to have your 
first-ever Halfway riots. Marc, I promise you. We want quiet. Lots and lots and 
lots of quiet.”
“Actually,” said Jay. “I’d kind of like to see the circus.”
“Actually,” I mimicked savagely, “I’d kind of like to see the circus.”
Jay shrugged. “He wasn’t going for it, Neil.”
“I noticed. I wonder why.”
Jay did not answer, because, like me, he had no idea. “Besides,” he said after a 
moment, “I’d really like to see the clowns. I’ve never seen a clown before.”
“Jay, would you shut the fuck up?”
Jay glanced sideways at me, and smiled with a certain genuine embarrassment. 
“It’s just that the circus is coming to town. I’m kind of looking forward to 
it.”
“I know. You said already.”
“Sorry. I’ll stop now.”

In a life that has seen many odd things, the TriCentennial Summer was coming a 
kicker. That evening, after dinner, I played chess with Jay, and we talked about 
it.
We play most nights, over at Highland Grounds, a small coffee shop sharing space 
with four other businesses in a quarter-gee doughnut out toward the Edge. 
Highland Grounds caters to a younger crowd; I stand out a good bit. A nice 
enough place, if a touch loud at times. On Saturday nights they bring in live 
bands, and Jay and I skip; on Monday they have open mike night, and every 
half-baked poet and stand-up comic in Halfway shows up for it; we skip Mondays 
too.
Most other nights find us there, sitting at one of the genuine wooden chairs on 
the upper level overlooking the stage, sipping caffe latte from the bulbs. It 
had taken me most of a decade after coming to Halfway to get used to drinking 
everything—coffee, tea, even water—out of bulbs; when I was a boy in Levittown, 
Pennsylvania, only beer came in bulbs. At some level my subconscious decided, 
seventy-odd years ago when it was true, that bulbs were for beer; even today, 
when my mind strays for a moment, I find myself wondering when I come back how 
this damn diet Coke ended up in my beer bulb.
Jay’s not a Halfway native; with his height and muscles, you couldn’t possibly 
mistake him for anything but the downsider he is. I’ve known him for eight years 
now. When he was fourteen his parents visited Halfway on business with Tytan 
Industries. He was gorgeous then, too, though I don’t think he knew it yet. One 
of my jobs consists of giving the guided tour to VIPs from Earth. Usually that 
means Unification officials, but sometimes it can be interesting. I confess to 
remembering very little about Jay’s parents; but Jay himself made an impression 
on me. Midway through a tour of the fabrication plant where Tytan Manufacturing 
makes most of the molar bearings in use in the System today, Jay’s parents go 
ahead of me, asking animated questions of the ‘bot that was giving the spiel. 
Jay hung back, said quietly, without warning, “I like it up here.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. What sorts of jobs can somebody from Earth get up here?”
I shrugged, not taking the question seriously. “Speaking just for myself, I’d 
say security is good. There’s always room for a good security person with 
muscles developed under gravity. We don’t have much of a problem with the Reb or 
Claw, so the PKF generally stays out of our hair.” (This was ‘68, mind you, 
before Trent began the Long Run, before Space Force started building the Unity 
next door; at the time I made that statement it was still true.) “Violent crime 
is pretty low, all considered; mostly we police the Edge, make sure that some of 
the seamier places don’t get out of hand. When something big does go down, we 
put the case together, and hold the case and the criminal for Halfway’s 
Unification Circuit Judge. Judge shuttles up four times a year; worst case, the 
accused can wait up to three months for justice. By downside standards that’s 
not bad.”
“Would you hire me?”
I remember grinning at him. “Get a degree, and then ask me again.”
In early ‘75 he showed up at my office. He’d just turned twenty-one. He was my 
size, just shy of two meters; had belts in shotokan and Wing Chun kung fu, and a 
bachelor’s degree in what they liked to call Corrections Science. He passed the 
tests we use in Tytan Security without straining; I didn’t do his 
psychometric—regulations—so I don’t know the results, but he passed that too.
I didn’t have to think twice. Talent is where you find it.
Occasionally Jay caused problems with the homebrews. Assistant to the Chief has 
traditionally been a homebrew job, on the grounds that it gives the homebrews a 
voice in Security; Jay was the first non-homebrew Assistant I’d had in maybe 
twenty years. Outside of the PKF who even today mostly leave Halfway alone, 
Tytan Security is all the law your average Halfer ever sees; and the Chief of 
Security is a notorious downsider ex-United States Marine, number two is a 
Russia with an attitude problem, and my top assistant is another American 
downsider. All but six of Tytan Security’s 112 officers are downsiders; it’s 
only natural, but that doesn’t make the homebrews like it any better. With rare 
exceptions homebrews don’t have the muscle mass, or the hand-to-hand training, 
necessary to crack heads together when they need to.
Cracking heads is essentially what Security does—or at least what it’s supposed 
to do.
I couldn’t figure this crap about the circus at all, and said so after Jay 
checkmated me in our first game.
Jay shrugged, bored with the subject before I’d started. “You should have quit, 
Neil. Bad move, threatening to quit in public like that.”
I shook my head. “I’ve done it half a dozen times before, all before you came to 
work here; it’s just to get his attention. I’m not quitting, and he knows it. 
But it’s such a boner decision. It’s not like him. I ran the Security expert 
system back at my office this afternoon, Jay, Marc’s got to have done the same 
thing; there’s no way a hundred seventy circus performers stabilizes our 
situation.”
Jay took a puff on his cigarette, exhaled a pale gray cloud off to my right. 
“Look, it’s a judgment call, Neil. He figures some entertainment will help keep 
people’s minds off the troubles downside. Are you certain he’s run the same 
simulations you’ve run?”
“Haven’t talked to him yet,” I admitted.
“Maybe you should.”
“Of course I’m going to. But I’m a little pissed at how this got dropped on me. 
It was too abrupt, and that’s not like him.”
“And why do you think he did it that way?”
I stopped and looked at Jay. “He’s talking to me, of course.”
Jay ground the cigarette out. “And saying what?”
“Jay,” I said slowly, “do the colleges teach politics as a part of security work 
these days?”
Jay had the grace to look embarrassed. “No. But my mother ran the twenty-third 
largest corporation in Occupied America for eleven years. You learn. You mind if 
I have another?”
A cigarette, he meant. We’d agreed when he started working for me that he could 
have one while we played chess, and another if my lungs weren’t complaining. My 
call, which perhaps isn’t fair, but I am his boss, and there should be some 
perks. “No.”
They may not cause cancer anymore, but they’re still a filthy habit. I always 
half regretted that Highland Grounds had put in the new airplant back in ‘69; 
the quality of the air improved noticeably, so Homeboy Rick started letting 
patrons smoke; and the air quality went back down again.
Jay nodded, sipped at his coffee instead. “Packard’s not happy with you, Neil.”
“Clearly. And why do you think?”
He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. One reading I make is that he’s worried 
about TriCentennial riots—and figures you for a scapegoat if they get out of 
hand. So he wants to disassociate a bit, cover himself with the Board of 
Directors.”
“No. It’s not a bad thought, but I’ve seen Marc stab enough people in the back 
to know how he goes about it. If that were it, he’d have started a couple months 
back. This is hasty, and that’s really not like him. If this were something he 
were thinking about two months ago, he’d have started moving me out two months 
ago. Whatever has him going, it’s happened recently.”
Jay said slowly, “Hand Moreau visited him two weeks back.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “You think the Secretary General’s got an interest in 
Halfway? I think he’s got better things to concern himself with right now, Jay. 
I hear the Rebs are recruiting like nobody’s business.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard the same. But why was Moreau here?”
“Could be anything, Jay. Tytan Industries has its fingers in so many pies even 
Marc has difficulty keeping track of them.” I drank the last of my caffe latte 
before it got cold, waved to Homeboy Rick, the old Mex who runs Highland 
Grounds, for another mug. “I suppose I’ll have to ask him.”
“I suppose.”
I grimaced at my empty mug. “I really hate doing that.”
Jay nodded. “I would. Another game?”
“One more. Then I’m headed home.” Jay won the second game too. He was getting 
better; when we started playing, shortly after he signed on, I usually beat him. 
I didn’t mind it when he started beating me; the improvement in his play had 
spurred an improvement in mine that I hadn’t thought my eight-five-year-old 
brain was capable of. I’d played the System Chess Federation’s ranking program 
twice in the last few months, and drawn a ranking just a step below Master.
Marc plays chess, though I’ve never played him myself. Marc plays constantly.
“Mate in three,” Jay finally announced.
I studied the board, nodded, and tipped my king over. “Good game.”
“Thanks.” Jay stood, pulled my p-suit off the suit tree near our table, handed 
it to me, and started getting into his own. Jay paused while shrugging into his 
p-suit. “Oh, by the way, my cousin Michelle is going to be up next Monday. Just 
a visit. I’d like her to have dinner with us Monday night, if you don’t mind.”
I’m sure I looked surprised; I glanced up at him, over my shoulder, while 
walking downstairs to the lock. “Why?”
Guido, the counterman, called out, “Later, Chief,” as we headed for the lock, 
and I missed Jay’s response.
“Again?”
He actually flushed slightly; I was sorry I’d asked. “Um, she thinks the work we 
do, is, um, glamorous.”
I grinned at him. “Got it. I’ll have some stories ready.” I lowered my helmet 
into place. “ ‘Night, Jay.”
“Thanks, Neil. Good—”
I touched the seal at my neck; his voice ceased abruptly. I cycled through 
alone, into death pressure, and kicked over to where my HuskySled waited. Jay 
followed through, waved, and kicked off into black space. His backpack lit 
briefly, in total silence, and then he dwindled away so quickly, a silvery dot 
in a sky that was full of them, that I lost sight of him before the HuskySled’s 
rockets had even warmed up.
So I’m a conservative, cautious, careful old man. I concede the point. I 
probably waste ten, fifteen minutes a day warming up the sled, docking it, 
probably another two, three hours a month maintaining it. A backpack is a lot 
faster, requires vastly less maintenance, is a bit less expensive, and is very 
nearly as safe.
But I turned eight-five last May 7. And I didn’t get here by being in a hurry.
The engine lights blinked green. I snapped my seat belt in place, hit the 
rockets at quarter thrust, and headed home.




- 3 -
« ^ » 
In his beachfront house just north of San Diego, on Thursday morning, the 18th 
of June, Sedon rose early, and with Chris Summers to guard him, walked down to 
the beach to watch the sun rise.
Under normal circumstances he slept little; but the near-mortal wound Jimmy 
Ramirez had inflicted upon him had left him weak. His body threw itself into 
healing, into repairing the vast trauma from the explosive heat of the laser. 
Sedon had refused to allow his doctors to inject him with a nanovirus to speed 
the healing process; he neither understood nor trusted the process by which 
intelligent viruses aided the human body in healing. It sounded suspiciously 
similar to the technique the healers of the World had used to prevent aging; and 
Sedon did not know whether the modern nanoviruses would recognize, or fight 
with, those that had kept him alive for over thirteen thousand years of 
consecutive time.
His doctors were, Sedon knew, astonished at the speed with which he healed. They 
had replaced most of his intestines, abdominal muscles and the skin that covered 
them, with tissue cloned from Sedon’s own cells, and had injected him with a 
wide variety of antiviral drugs; but the tools they were most used to, the 
intelligent nanoviruses that guided the healing process, he would not permit 
them to use, and early on they had expected that refusal to kill him.
It did not. He hung on, hovering near death, for two days. On the third day he 
awoke, clearheaded and ravenously hungry; and two and a half weeks after a 
near-mortal injury, Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon awoke feeling rested and nearly himself. 
The skin of his stomach was pink, a different shade from the rest of his skin, 
and the muscles in his stomach were so sore that taking a moderately deep breath 
sent twinges of pain through him; but he was alive, and at most two weeks away 
from health. Regaining full control of the muscles and nerves in his abdominal 
area would take a while; but the sooner he started, the sooner he would recover 
their use.
Thursday morning he walked down to the beach, an hour before sunrise, to watch 
the sun rise.
He had worn a robe of a shade that matched what his memory knew as Dancer red; 
he shed it at the edge of the sand, handed it to Chris Summers, and walked nude 
down to the water. He wished that he might go swimming—it was an exercise he had 
learned to enjoy during the long years of exile—but he had learned that it was 
not safe; even today, fifty years after the Unification had set about reclaiming 
Earth, no large body of water on Earth was free of pollutants.
Instead he knelt in the cold sand, with the Pacific Ocean at his back, and 
prayed.
Over four years since the bubble had released him. It seemed to him at times 
that in those years he had not had a single moment to pause and reflect. The 
humans of this time, half savage and half something that Sedon suspected had 
already moved beyond the Flame People, were paralyzed with the knowledge of 
their imminent deaths; they rushed about their lives in such a haste that Sedon 
himself was carried along in the madness.
The weeks in bed had done him one good turn. It was the first extended period of 
reflection the universe had given him since his release, and he had made good 
use of it.
The prayer was an experiment.
He had not prayed during the entire long period of exile, during the thousands 
of years of war with the Shield.
Yet—during the two days he had hung between life and death, he had dreamed of 
the god. He suspected the dream was not a real thing, simply a product of his 
sickness; he had forsaken the god, and the god him.
The arrogance of youth was long gone from Sedon. Every dream of his youth was 
dead beyond any hope of resurrection. If the Nameless One wished to discuss a 
mistake Sedon had made many eons past, Sedon was not unwilling.
He knelt motionlessly, arms crossed across his chest, while the sky in the east 
grayed, and then lightened to a pale blue. He emptied himself of thought, waited 
for the voice of the god to address him. The sun crept high into the sky, and 
sweat trickled down Sedon’s nude form.
The wind off the ocean cooled him.
After a long while he relaxed, sank back onto his heels.
Silence.
There was one tool Sedon had available to him, one summons the god could not 
ignore.
But Sedon had not performed the Dance of the Flame in thirteen thousand years, 
and did not intend to try today.
He rose and strode briskly across the beach, to where Chris Summers stood with 
his robe. As he approached Summers said, “The Player arrived.”
“Good,” said Sedon mildly, accepting the robe from Summers. “Thank you, 
Christian—has ‘Selle Lovely called?”
Summers nodded; Lovely wouldn’t talk to Sedon directly any longer. She’d been 
talking only with Summers ever since Los Angeles. “She did.”
“And?”
“She’s not satisfied with the explanation of the events in Los Angeles. She 
doesn’t want to believe that Daimara was a PKF spy; if true, it means that 
Denice’s psychometric profiles were faked, which probably implicates ‘Selle 
Sierran—she ran them, with Bennett Crandell, who was a spy.”
Sedon chuckled. “She believes you, and doesn’t want to. Sierran and Crandell and 
Daimara; that the three of them were working together will, given her reflexive 
paranoia, make sense to her. So?”
The rogue Elite shrugged, grinned a touch sourly. “Her people were unharmed, if 
slightly confused. It all happened pretty fast. Lovely’s in a tight place; she 
doesn’t have a lot of choice.”
“The Claw is moving forward.”
“They can’t pull out now.”
Sedon smiled. “Sensible woman.”
Summers nodded, followed Sedon back up the path to the house. “Clearly none of 
them have realized yet that the girl was a Castanaveras.”

That evening, at the downtown San Diego offices of Greenberg & Bass, Sedon met 
with the Player, a girl named Michelle Altaloma. He found her interesting; she 
was a TrueBreed, sixteen years old, one of the second wave of a small group of 
genies produced by an ongoing Johnny Reb genegineering project. TrueBreed had 
begun almost twenty-five years prior, in late ‘52; only a year after the 
infamous PKF-run Project Superman had ended.
He met with her alone, in the library, a medium-sized room with half a dozen 
tracesets for data, two of the oversized sensable tracesets, a pair of full 
sensory InfoNet terminals, and a wide array of holo equipment.
He had the difficulty with her that he always had with women; she had been 
warned to expect it, apparently, and wasted no time attempting to be pleasant. 
Sedon did not rise when she was led in to him; ‘Selle Altaloma unpacked, jacked 
her handheld into the library equipment, and waited. Her inskin was one of the 
more expensive model radio packet systems, and had no external socket for input. 
She was a thin young blond girl, attractive by the standards of the time, nearly 
in shape, even by Sedon’s stringent standards. She was not of Denice’s 
caliber—or even Callia Sierran’s—but women such as Sierran were rare, and Denice 
was unique.
Sedon had not even noticed that he was thinking of the genie telepath by her 
first name.
‘Selle Altaloma seated herself in the chair facing Sedon, and looked at him. 
“What are you looking for?”
“I would like to be told about Project Superman.”
The girl nodded. “Yes. Summary first?”
“Please.”
“Funded by Special Order 11-212 of the Unification Council, February 14, 2029, 
Project Superman was its popular name; its official title was the Advanced 
BioTechnology Research Initiative. There were eight significant lines of 
research involved. They involved things as diverse as research into improved 
intelligence, genegineering, and cyborging. Three lines of research were 
particularly successful; they were the feline de Nostri, the Castanaveras 
telepaths, and the Peace Keeping Force Elite. The Peace Keeping Force itself 
already existed, of course, but until 2046 there were no Elite cyborgs as we 
know them today; the technology to create them did not exist. All but those 
three lines of research were discontinued in the early ‘40s The de Nostri 
program was terminated with the death of Doctor Jean-Louis de Nostri, in 2044, 
and the feline de Nostri were relocated to New York. Doctor Suzanne Montignet, 
the researcher who created the Castanaveras, was briefly placed in control of 
them; she resigned in 2046.
“In 2042, the most significant event in Project Superman’s history took place; 
Carl Castanaveras, born in 2030, entered puberty. The telepathic gift of the 
Castanaveras is associated with the hormonal changes that take place during 
puberty; sometime during 2042, the PKF realized that Carl Castanaveras could 
read minds.
“The next eldest genie whose genetic map significantly resembled that of 
Castanaveras was his clone, Jany McConnell. The PKF monitored her closely; in 
2047 she underwent puberty. She too had the gift.
“The PKF envisioned a world where no revolution could succeed, where telepaths 
loyal to the Unification would monitor and warn long before any insurrection 
could be planned. In 2048 forty-three genies based upon the Castanaveras map 
were born; in 2049, seventy-three; in 2050, eighty-six; and in 2051, 
twenty-four. In 2051 Carl Castanaveras was twenty-one, and virtually 
unmanageable; the PKF grew concerned that they might be unable to control the 
telepaths. 2051 was, officially, the last year that the Unification indulged in 
the creation of genies. Late in 2051 all funding for Project Superman was 
suspended, and the telepaths were taken from the control of the Bureau of 
BioTechnology and turned over to the PKF.”
“TrueBreed began in 2052.”
‘Selle Altaloma nodded. “Yes. TrueBreed was primarily a response to the PKF 
Elite program, not the Castanaveras. Unlike the Castanaveras, we are a fairly 
conservative design. Faster, stronger, significantly more resistant to disease. 
Smarter than the human norm, but not so much as to make us unstable; only a few 
TrueBreed can be considered geniuses.”
“But you’re one of the few,” said Sedon softly.
“Yes.”
“Good. Project Superman, properly speaking, ends in 2051.”
“Yes. Are you interested in the PKF or the de Nostri, or the telepaths? Or all 
of them?”
“Specifically, the telepaths. While I was ill, I audited several texts on them; 
I know the outlines of their story. In detail—”
Altaloma shrugged. “Mister Obodi, nobody knows the story in detail, except 
possibly the surviving telepaths, if any of them do survive. In 2053, two years 
after Project Superman ended, Carl Castanaveras fathered two children with Jany 
McConnell; they were twins, Denice and David Castanaveras. There are persistent 
rumors to the effect that the twins were not present at the Chandler Complex 
when Space Force nuked it. There is video of a hovercar carrying Carl 
Castanaveras, leaving the Chandler Complex before it was destroyed; but 
Castanaveras’ body, positively identified, was found outside Unification 
Councilor Jerril Carson’s hotel room. Apparently Castanaveras killed the 
Councilor, and was killed by him. The only Castanaveras who certainly survived 
the Troubles is Trent the Uncatchable, and though he’s definitely a genie, he’s 
just as definitely not a telepath. He was one of the last batch of genies 
Project Superman produced, from the twenty-four born in ‘51; apparently quality 
control slipped a bit. There are rumors of a green-eyed girl who was with Trent 
in mid-2069, but they are only rumors, and have never been adequately 
substantiated. And even today having green eyes doesn’t make you a Castanaveras. 
Callia Sierran, the woman from the Claw, has the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen, 
but she’s no telepath; I’ve seen her gene map.”
Sedon leaned forward very slightly, fixed his eyes upon the Player. “These twin 
children. One was a boy.”
“Yes. He’d be twenty-three today.”
“How would you go about looking for him?”
“I wouldn’t. It’s a waste of time. You must assume, Mister Obodi, that the PKF 
DataWatch, the Bureau of Biotech, Trent the Uncatchable, his old image Ralf the 
Wise and Powerful, FX. Chandler for sure, probably Tommy Boone before he 
vanished”—she made an impatient gesture—“and a hundred other groups, all of them 
very good at looking for people, have looked for those two. Assuming—which no 
one has ever proven—that they weren’t both at the Complex when it was nuked, the 
only way those children could have evaded the searches that have gone on for 
them would be if they’d been found. With protectors they might have avoided 
discovery. But they’d have needed protectors. One of the reasons—and it’s a 
small thing to go on—that I think Denice Castanaveras might be alive, is that if 
she is she probably has Trent as a protector. I will tell you this much, Mister 
Obodi; I for one would hate to try and search through the InfoNet for someone 
Trent the Uncatchable was trying to hide. Life is short.”
“What does your schedule look like?”
“I’m going to Halfway on Monday morning. The InfoNet Relay project.”
Sedon leaned back into his chair, crossed his legs, and made a steeple of his 
hands. His pale blue eyes were steady and unblinking, and Michelle Altaloma 
found them very hard to look at for any length of time. “Three days, then? We 
will spend it productively, looking for the boy.”
“The boy.”
Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon said without any irony at all, “I like boys.”
Michelle Altaloma stretched, spoke around a yawn. “I need sleep.”
“Go ahead,” said Sedon absently. He did not even look up from the field he was 
auditing; it showed information gleaned during their search. “I’ll have you 
awakened in a few hours.”
She nodded, rose, and stumbled out of the room. Chris Summers glanced in as she 
left. “Mister Obodi?”
“Yes, Christian?”
“Joe Tagomi would like to see you when you have a chance. We’ve found out what 
happened to—to Daimara.”
It brought Sedon out of his revery, up to his feet. “You took long enough. 
Where?”
Summers said one word: “Chandler.”

“Jesus, I can barely see straight.”
“I have you for only another day, ‘Sella Altaloma. You are, I’m told, the best 
Player in our organization.”
The girl flushed. “Damn straight.”
Sedon studied her. “Indeed?”
“All right, Obodi, you tell me what I’ve missed. I’ve been through every adult 
male of the correct age, listed with any Unification agency from summer ‘62 
through today. I’ve been through Public Labor, the Bureau of Traffic 
Enforcement, the Peace Keeping Force, I even frigging got into a Ministry of 
Population Control Board for you, and that’s not easy; they’re more paranoid 
than the PKF I’ve been through Claw records, Reb records. I can’t get into 
BioTech, their Boards are protected by replicant AIs, and don’t even stop to 
tell me it’s illegal, I know it. Maybe you should report them to DataWatch. I 
can’t get into DataWatch either, obviously. I’ve been through the records from 
the ‘70 Census, I’ve been through the Ministry of Population Control’s summary 
extraction of that Census. I’ve been through passport applications, I’ve been 
through city and state police mug holos, I’ve scanned the files on every single 
adult male who’s ever served time in a PKF Detention Center or Occupied America 
penitentiary. I’ve searched everything I can get my hands on for East Coast 
biosculptors, ‘62 to present. I have searched every green-eyed male, every 
black-haired Caucasian male, of the correct age range, in every public record I 
can get my hands on. There’s not a hell of a lot left, and I can list what 
remains on the fingers of one hand. Boards run by Players, BioTech, or AIs. 
BioTech and AIs, I wouldn’t even know where to start. There’s only one BioTech, 
maybe two thousand replicant AIs. There’s about forty, fifty thousand Players 
out there—I should say, webdancers calling themselves Players—maybe a couple of 
hundred I’d call Players. And if one of them is helping your target hide, I 
could hunt a thousand years and never find him.”
“Who employs the finest Players?”
Altaloma stared at Sedon. “Nobody employs the finest Players.”
“We employ you.”
“I volunteered because this is a cause I believe in. Otherwise you couldn’t 
afford me.”
Sedon smiled at her. “Of course. To which organizations are Players known to 
donate their time?”
Altaloma leaned forward, put her face in her hands. “I don’t believe this. 
Look—okay,” she said after a moment. “We have some good ones. The Rebs do, I 
mean. Mostly from the TrueBreed project, three of us. Erisian Claw, I don’t know 
of any, but they might have one. Couple different corporations—there used to be 
a Speedfreak Player, back before the Speedfreaks were wiped out by the Bureau of 
Weather Control. The Catholic Church has three or four; the Temples of Eris 
might have one, and if they do, he’s probably the same one the Erisian Claw 
uses. The SpaceFarers’ Collective has at least two. The Belt CityStates have a 
couple, Free Luna has one.” She stopped, searching her memory. “I can’t think 
beyond that. DataWatch has hundreds of very frighteningly good webdancers. But 
they don’t use Image, which makes them not Players in any real sense of the 
word.”
“And these organizations have Boards to which you do not have access.”
Altaloma sighed. “I can’t believe you know so little about the InfoNet. Look, 
most of the really critical data in the world I don’t have access to. Even today 
a lot of it’s simply off-line, and the stuff that’s not off-line is protected by 
AIs or other Players. Groups that don’t have good protection don’t publish a 
Board for me to get to. If there’s no Board, the only way to get at their 
information is to physically go to where it is. The Tax Boards are a great 
example; the only thing you can do on-line with them is send in a return. 
Everything else they have is disconnected from the InfoNet. Tax Boards, all the 
other organized crime—”
Sedon said quickly, “Other organized crime?”
Michelle Altaloma lifted her head from her hands. She looked at Sedon with wide 
eyes. “Joke, man. It’s a joke. I don’t really mean the Tax Boards are run by 
criminals. Not like the Syndic, or the Corporation, or the Old Ones.”
Sedon sat quietly for a very long time, looking at the Player. “Would it—be of 
help to you—to have access to the records of such organizations?”
“The Tax Boards?”
“Yes. And the Syndic, and the Corporation, and the Old Ones.”
Altaloma blinked. “Is this a joke?”
“Would it be of help to you?”
“It—couldn’t hurt.”
Sedon nodded. “Go to bed, ‘Selle Altaloma. In the morning, I will have arranged 
access for your search.”
“You used to be with the Old Ones, the Italians?”
“Go to bed, ‘Selle Altaloma.”
“But the Tax Boards?”
“Cooperation is a popular concept in Occupied America. It’s good for business. 
Good night, ‘Selle Altaloma.”

At 10:22 a.m., on Sunday, June 21, Michelle Altaloma said aloud, “Fuck me gently 
with a chainsaw.”
Sedon did not stir in his chair. “Tell me.”
The Player was silent for a long moment. She sat still, shoulders rigid, eyes 
closed. Sedon sat watching the back of her head; he could not even imagine what 
she was doing. When she spoke she did so rapidly, in a quick tumble of words: 
“Age unknown. Estimated early to midtwenties. Contracted with the Old Ones 
originally, like you, but he bought out his contract five years ago. They were 
using him to move wire in the New York Metro area; waste of talent, frankly. 
He’s done much better on his own; moved in on a numbers operation in New Jersey, 
just outside the Camden Protectorate, and took it away from Larry Farillio 
despite the fact it was in his family for three generations. Nobody knows how he 
did it exactly, aside from the obvious; Farillio vanished, and his mother, wife, 
mistress, three kids. The boy made nice with the Old Ones, sends payments 
regularly, squared it with a couple of Farillio cousins, and nobody’s bothered 
him since. Some rumor to the effect that he’s on the wire, from when he ran it.”
“What color are his eyes?”
“Blue.” Michelle Altaloma paused briefly, then said, “Bingo. Dyed that color 
when he was fourteen.” The girl turned around in her seat, looked at Sedon. “Not 
necessarily indicative. That wasn’t that unusual back then, with all the 
hysteria. Lots of green-eyed people got dye jobs.”
Sedon said simply. “What’s his name?”
“David. David Zanini.”
“Thank you, ‘Selle Altaloma. Enjoy Halfway. I understand you helped design the 
Relay Station attack.”
“I did.” Altaloma unjacked her handheld, stored it in her jacket pocket.
Sedon nodded. “Having seen you work, I have faith that your input was valuable. 
Good luck.”
The girl stopped at the doorway. “I know you used to be a pimp. But if you’d 
learn to treat women like they were people, you’d do a lot better. Every now and 
again, when you forgot I was a girl, you were almost likable.”
A flicker of rage touched Sedon, but it was distant and muted, more reflex than 
anything truly felt. He nodded and said gravely, “Thank you for the advice. I 
did appreciate your aid.”
“Anytime.”




- 4 -
« ^ » 
I thought at first that Jay’s cousin, Michelle—“Shell,” he called her—was an 
astonishing bubblehead.
We had dinner at 6:00 em., over at Observation Bubble. Somehow it seemed 
appropriate. The Bubble’s the most famous and most expensive restaurant at 
Halfway; I’d been there twice, on disturbances, but I’d never eaten there 
before. They gave us a good table, in one of the bubbles around the edge, with 
Earth above us. I’d expected a good table, simply from identifying myself when 
making reservations. I doubted I’d see a bill when we were done. There can’t be 
half a dozen people at Halfway who have more real importance than the Chief of 
Security when it comes to the concerns of your average business owner.
I was never a particularly sociable person; even if I had been, a stint as Chief 
of Security at Halfway would have cured me. It is, pretty nearly, the equivalent 
of being Chief of Police for any major downside city, with a few unique twists 
caused by the nature of Halfway itself. If you’re not careful, you can get 
yourself beholden to the local business people without any real difficulty at 
all. One of the reasons I hang out at Highland Grounds is that, in all the time 
I’ve been Chief, Homeboy Rick has never once offered to eat the check. He 
expects me to pay, and I do.
Observation Bubble’s cheap seats are spectacular enough; the bubble tables are 
usually booked two to three months in advance. They’d bumped somebody to get us 
in. A walkway, forty meters long, leads from the bubbles back to the rest of the 
restaurant, and the bubbles themselves are completely transparent, down to the 
tables inside them.
I met Jay and Shell at the restaurant, and I kept my p-suit with me when we were 
led out to our table; Jay shot a disapproving look at me. Probably thought I 
looked paranoid.
Could be.
They made a gorgeous couple, and I understood why Jay had leaned on me to get 
the reservations at Observation Bubble. Jay was in dinner clothes, maybe a 
hundred CU worth of white silk suit, cleanly shaven; he’d cut his hair sometime 
that morning, and done something subtle, I couldn’t say exactly what, with his 
makeup key.
I wasn’t sure if the perfume I was smelling was his or hers, and it seemed 
impolite to ask.
I’m not indifferent to male beauty, but the girl made Jay, one of the prettiest 
and most graceful men I know, look clumsy. She was fifteen or sixteen, at a 
guess, a little blond thing in a black sheath dress and black calf-high boots, 
wearing matching black gloves and hat that were out of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I 
didn’t tell her that she reminded me of Holly Golightly; she’d never have 
recognized the reference.
Her skin had the fineness of grain that is the province of either the very young 
or the recently regenerated; hers had just the faintest hint of green tracings, 
as though she were half plant, half human. Her makeup implant included her eyes; 
they glowed blue, the color of star sapphires. A pair of green stud emerald 
earrings finished the ensemble.
Michelle Altaloma looked for all the System like she’d just walked off a fashion 
runway, until she tried to walk. Jay had applied mag patches to the bottom of 
her boots, but she’d clearly never been in free fall before, and I had to bite 
my cheeks to keep from smiling over the way Jay kept putting out a hand to 
steady her as they walked to the table.
The entire thing left me feeling a little wistfully lecherous.
After the waiter had taken our orders she fell silent for the first time. I knew 
why; she was looking around herself. It’s a view you normally get only after 
someone who doesn’t like you pushes you into death pressure without your suit. 
Observation Bubble is located out near the Edge; it used to be closer to the 
center, but they keep moving it because the new buildings obscure the view.
In the bubble, you can see everything. Luna, Earth, Half way, the odd bright 
needles of torch ships moving through the distant darkness; the encompassing, 
sheltering blaze of the stars.
From the Edge, the seven-kilometer-long shell of the Unity is Halfway’s single 
largest visible structure. It’s more than twice as large as the whitish blob of 
Administration Central. Michelle pointed it out. “What’s that one?”
I said gently, “That’s the ship that’s going to conquer the outer planets. 
They’ve been building it since ‘72; it’s supposed to be completed in ‘79.”
“Oh.” She looked troubled, worried. “They’re building it at Halfway?”
“Yes.”
“But—I thought that terrorists kept trying to blow it up?”
I leaned back in my chair. “Well, dear, it’s happened a couple of times, that’s 
true enough. But if Space Force moved the ship just a bit, it’d happen a lot 
more. As it is, the ship’s being built in the middle of a largely civilian 
section of Halfway. Most of the folks from the outer planets have better morals 
than Space Force, so they’ve avoided attacking it so far.”
“But if they did attack it—the Collective or the CityStates—”
“Be a lot of deaths,” I said bluntly. “Amiga, we’d have dead people making like 
meteors in Earth’s atmosphere for days afterward. We’d never know who had died.”
“But it’s not going to happen,” said Jay smoothly. “Shell, you shouldn’t worry 
about things that aren’t going to happen Okay?”
“Um. All right.”
Dinner came then, which was probably just as well. I’d intended to have my 
handheld go off with a message for me shortly after dinner—bow out gracefully, 
give the kids a chance to enjoy the romantic scenery together—but over coffee 
the conversation got mildly serious, and the teenage bubblehead stopped seeming 
like such a bubblehead. I was only a bit surprised; very intelligent women often 
downplay their intelligence until they feel secure with you. It was more common 
when I was younger than it is today, and I suppose that’s a good thing.
“Listen,” she said earnestly, after the second round of coffee had been served, 
“suppose a group from the CityStates did attack the Unity. Would that be wrong?”
“It would be an act of war. It’d be stupid.”
“But would it be wrong?”
I glanced at Jay; he gave me an I-give-up shrug. “Good question. There’s no 
secret what the Unification plans to do with that ship; I guess the question is, 
should the Unification be extended to the outer planets? If it should be, then, 
yes, attacking the Unity is wrong. If it shouldn’t be, then attacking the Unity 
is a moral act.”
Michelle nodded. “And it’s the Unification—Space Force—that’s done the immoral 
thing, by building it in the midst of all those civilians?”
I smiled at the girl, said gently, “Dear, that’s a leading question. I’m the 
Chief of Security for Halfway. It’s an apolitical job.”
“Of course you have to say that,” she said persistently. “But that doesn’t 
prevent you from having opinions.”
I laughed aloud at that. “ ‘Selle Altaloma, if I told everybody every opinion I 
have on every subject, I’d be out of a job so fast it’d make your head spin. And 
mine. What are your plans for tomorrow?”
Jay grabbed it, obviously relieved. “I’m taking her on a tour of the Edge in the 
morning—the nicer parts, such as they are—and in the afternoon we’re going to go 
flying.”
Michelle said swiftly, “You promised me we’d do the Relay Station.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Amiga? Why do you want to see the Relay Station?”
“I’m taking a class in InfoNet traffic control next fall semester. Better than 
two-thirds of all InfoNet traffic flows through the Halfway InfoNet Relay 
Station.” She shrugged, smiled a secretive smile at me, a thing that seemed to 
invite me to share in the joke. “It’ll be fun.”
“It’s not my idea of fun. Are you serious?”
She and Jay both said, “Yes,” at the same moment, she very seriously, he glumly. 
I glanced at Jay, and Jay said, “She’s a Player.”
I looked back and forth between the two of them. “You’re kidding. You mean you 
dance in the web sometimes?”
“He means,” Michelle Altaloma said evenly, “that I’m a Player. And a very good 
one, too.”
She was a sixteen-year-old fashion statement. “Um—you have an Image? Someone I 
could get on the Boards and find the name somewhere?”
I’m sure she understood I wasn’t asking for the name of her Image, merely 
whether she had one, but she shook her head swiftly. “No. I’ve written an Image, 
of course, but I try to avoid dancing with it. Letting your Image get to be well 
known is a tactical error. The Players whose Images dance the InfoNet when they 
don’t have to are fools.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand that. I thought the entire purpose of 
having an Image was that it allowed you to move through the InfoNet. Why 
wouldn’t you let your Image get to be well known?”
“Fame is bad for you,” Michelle said simply. “Look, you’ve played sensables, 
right?”
“Sure.”
“You pick up a Gregory Selstrom sensable from before his accident, whether it 
has his name on it or not, could you possibly, having played his other work, 
mistake this one for work by anyone else?”
Five minutes prior I’d have bet long odds she’d never played a Selstrom sensable 
in her life. “Not a chance.”
“Well, writing an Image is the same deal. There’s maybe fifteen, twenty thousand 
significant decisions that have to be made in writing it, and at least half of 
those are nothing but personal taste. Nobody is so good that they can wipe all 
trace of their personality from how they assemble an Image. For example, I’ll 
use this one because it’s famous: before Trent the Uncatchable was Johnny 
Johnny, his Image was named Ralf the Wise and Powerful. Apparently Trent lost 
Ralf in ‘62, during the Troubles. Now, he was eleven. About six years later a 
new Player, calling himself Johnny Johnny, starts dancing the InfoNet. DataWatch 
doesn’t make him cause they’re stupid, but half a dozen Players, at least, look 
at this image Johnny Johnny, and they say to themselves, the person who wrote 
Johnny Johnny is the same person who wrote Ralf the Wise and Powerful. Mind you, 
they didn’t know who it was who’d done it—Trent was still anonymous back 
then—they just knew that enough elements correspond that it’s probably the same 
person. And Trent must have changed dramatically between the ages of eleven and 
seventeen; people do. There is no way an adult Player, once she was recognized, 
in Realtime, as the author of her Image, could write a new Image that wouldn’t 
be instantly recognizable as her work. So, to wrap this up, the best way to work 
the InfoNet is not to have an Image that people know; ‘cause once you’re famous, 
you have no margin of error.”
Jay grinned at me. “She’s a bright girl, Neil.”
I stood, caught the girl watching me. I said simply, “ ‘Selle Altaloma, it’s a 
great pleasure to have met you. Perhaps I’ll see you again before you go home.”
Little Michelle bit her lower lip and cast her eyes down slightly in what was 
supposed to be shyness. I could imagine how many hours she’d spent practicing 
that look in the mirror. She said in a small voice, “Thank you. It was nice 
meeting you too.”
I picked up my p-suit, waved aside the waiter who wanted to help me into it. 
“Good night, kids. I’ll see you at work tomorrow, Jay.”
“Good night, Neil.”
Her voice was very soft. “Good night, ‘Sieur Corona.”
I was halfway home before I realized who it was she reminded me of.
Tanni, the summer before I joined the Marine Corps.
I don’t think I’d thought of Tanni in at least a decade.
Tanni had been sixteen too.
I don’t know why the memory was so depressing. Maybe it was just the fact that 
Tanni was the last time I’d even kidded myself that anything permanent was 
happening.
I flipped the sled at turnover and touched the braking rockets, feeling old and 
careful and cautious.
Mostly old.

Marc was waiting for me at my house.
He’d let himself in; he’s keyed for access. He and Jay and Vasily are the only 
ones who are.
The security system alerted me that Marc was inside while I was still a good 
klick away, and told me he’d been waiting for most of an hour. It wasn’t 9:00 
km. yet; it meant that Marc had left the office and headed for my place sometime 
around seven. Very unusual; Marc lives to work.
When I got closer to the house I saw that an ExecuSled was parked at the 
visitor’s airlock, and when I got a bit closer yet I saw that Marc had left his 
bodyguards inside. Marc runs through bodyguards quickly, and crap like that is 
why. Direct solar radiation is dangerous; people who spend much time in it get 
cancer, sterility, and children with odd numbers of limbs.
I docked at my private lock, unsnapped my seat belt and made sure my tie line 
was connected to the lock before I got out of my seat. I walked on magboots over 
to where the ExecuSled was parked and saw to my surprise that the suits inside 
weren’t bodyguards; they were Halfway Security, my kids. Names on their pressure 
suits read Lopez and McCarthy. Rookies, both, and I didn’t know either well. I 
tapped the side of my helmet, raised up a pair of fingers; on two.
Lopez’s voice clicked in on Channel Two. “Hey, Chief.”
“Hi, kids. How long has he left you sitting out here in the sun?”
I could tell from her voice she was pissed. “ ‘Bout an hour, Chief.”
“Unbuckle and take yourselves to the kitchen. You know where it is?”
“No.”
“Follow the security program’s instructions; it’ll guide you. Feed yourselves 
whatever you like. I have Earth-grown coffee.” There was wine and beer also, but 
if they were so stupid they needed to be told not to touch the Chief’s alcohol 
while on duty, they were so stupid they needed to be shipped back downside 
pronto.
From inside the craft I saw their helmets bob up and down. “Thanks, Chief. You 
guys going to be talking long?”
“Beats the hell out of me, kids.”
I cycled through and went looking for Marc.
He was in my office, sitting in the big leather chair in front of my system. 
“Hello, Neil.”
I hung my p-suit on the hook. “Get your ass out of my chair, Marc.”
He looked surprised, but got up and moved over to the small sofa on the other 
side of the office. “Neil, we need to talk.”
“No shit?” I hung my dinner coat on the back of my chair, kicked my shoes off, 
and sank down into the chair facing Marc. “Want my resignation?”
Marc stopped cold. He’d come prepared to dicker—he wanted something from me, and 
it was important, or this would be happening in his office—and he expected me to 
be wary and mildly pissed about the circus deal. But he hadn’t expected that I’d 
be genuinely sore at him, and didn’t know what had caused it. “What’s wrong?”
“You had a couple of my kids sitting out there in the fucking sun is what’s 
wrong. One, you don’t requisition bodyguards from Security without clearing it 
with me. Two, they are people, not bots, and you do not leave them out in the 
goddamn sun to suffer heat exhaustion and radiation poisoning.” Marc started to 
speak and I raised my voice. “Three, you have one real friend in this entire 
city and if I have my chain jerked in public again you’re not going to have any. 
What’s got you running so scared?”
I don’t do this to him often. Marc is a dangerously smart man, and he has no 
weak spots to speak of, but naked aggression slows him down some. If he ever 
caught on to the technique, it would stop working, and it’s one of the very few 
methods I know to deal with him. Our friendship, though as real as any Marc has 
probably ever had, has never really been stressed, and I don’t depend on it 
much. I’ve seen what’s happened to other people who thought that Marc was their 
friend.
He is capable of decency, where his own self-interest is not involved. I’ve seen 
him go out of his way to aid people throughout Halfway, not because it was good 
business or even good publicity, but simply because he had some spare time.
But like his friendship, Marc’s altruism is nothing to depend on. Like a man 
who’ll stop to pick up a lost puppy at the side of the road, and then have the 
dog put to sleep when he finds it’s taking up too much of his time and he can’t 
find a home for it.
So my anger threw him. He said carefully, “Okay. Both of my personal guards are 
with Hand Moreau; he’s visiting the InfoNet Relay Station, and they’re guiding 
him. Second—”
I exploded, came up out of my chair. “And this is the first I hear about it? I 
didn’t even fucking know Alex Moreau was at Halfway!”
Marc snapped, “Sit down. He came back today, Neil, this afternoon. His personal 
yacht. May I continue?”
I glared at him, but sat. “Go ahead.”
“I couldn’t send Security with him; he’s here privately and we can’t allow his 
presence to be known. Apologies about leaving your Security staff outside, I’ve 
had other things on my mind. Lastly, about the circus, that whole deal was 
necessary.”
“You’re going to have a hell of a time convincing me.” Marc took a deep breath 
and said, “The PKF is considering declaring martial law at Halfway.”
I had to look at the carpet for I don’t know how long until the roaring in my 
ears finally went away. It seems at times that the centerpiece of my entire 
fucking life has been the PKF. Fighting them, being imprisoned by them, fleeing 
them; the last few decades, dealing with them on a professional basis.
After a long while I sat up again. I didn’t have any anger left, just a cold, 
solid lump of animal scared sitting down in my gut. “Okay.”
“I don’t have to tell you how disastrous that’d be. For both of us. The Board of 
Directors would fire me. Neil, I’m a Halfer; I can’t go to Earth, and there’s 
only one post off Earth that I’m suited for, and I have it. If they take it away 
from me I either retire, at the age of fifty-two, or I jump ship entirely and go 
out to the Belt CityStates.” He paused. “In your case it’s worse. Your half 
brother was nearly executed for Reb activities, and you’ve done time in the 
Capitol City Detention Center.” I’d never mentioned that to him but wasn’t 
surprised that he knew about it. “If we have martial law, the PKF is going to 
arrest you again, Neil, and probably impound your property. Worst case, martial 
law, serious TriCentennial riots at Halfway, they’re going to blame the riots on 
you and execute you for being a Reb.” He leaned forward and shouted with what 
looked like genuine anger, “Do I have your attention?”
“You’ve got it.”
He took a deep breath and leaned back again. “Good.” He closed his eyes briefly, 
abruptly looked weary. Opened them again. “All right. Secretary General Eddore 
suggested the damn circus.”
I was ready to believe anything by then. “Go on.”
“It shows we’re on top of things. That business is going on as usual, that 
Halfway’s sympathy for Occupied America is so completely trivial that we’re 
comfortable entertaining a traveling circus during the Fourth of July weekend. 
It makes the PKF who want to take over Halfway look like nervous old maidens.”
“Why does Eddore give a shit?”
“What’s your grasp of politics, Neil?”
“Minimal.”
He sighed. “All right. Briefly, Eddore’s having problems with the PKF. He’s 
concerned about their growing power and the very last thing he wants is to have 
the engine that drives Earth’s economy under PKF control. Which is, need I point 
out, what martial law at Halfway amounts to.”
“What got the PKF in an uproar in the first place?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Marc said reluctantly. “A report that the InfoNet Relay 
Station was a target of terrorists played a part in it, but I don’t know how 
large a part. DataWatch is convinced the report is true; they expect to see the 
rebels attempt to destroy the Halfway Relay Station on or around the Fourth. 
It’s at least part of the reason Moreau is here; he brought a group of the 
Secretary General’s webdancers up with him, and they’re checking, and 
rechecking, and triple checking the Relay Stations informational integrity.”
“So,” I said slowly, “in order to prevent the PKF from declaring martial law at 
Halfway, we’re going to bring the circus to town.”
Marc said evenly, “Yes.”
“That’s the silliest thing I ever heard in my life.”
“It’s the truth, Neil.”
“That’s the only reason I believe it.”




- 5 -
« ^ » 
His bodyguards were the best Credit could buy; currently with Security Services, 
one was ex-Space Force, the other ex-PKF. David had told them both before they 
boarded the semiballistic to San Diego that, if necessary, they were to give 
their lives in protecting his.
They agreed with him, of course. People did.
Still the deal made him nervous. That a pimp who had made it big in the Johnny 
Rebs wanted to see him made very little sense. The reasons the Old Ones in New 
York had given him—that Obodi was considering dosing the Reb troops with 
electric ecstasy before sending them into battle—did not convince him. If he’d 
been prepared for a war with New York David would have refused to go; but he did 
not have the manpower for war, and New York had made it clear that those were 
the stakes.
It made him very nervous.
He hadn’t run wire in six years, and his own use of the wire was well enough 
known that nobody was going to seek his opinion on the subject. With one 
possible exception, the scenario made no sense.
David didn’t like to think about the exception.
On the semiballistic he plugged in the wire and turned it on, with the current 
low, for half an hour. He turned it off before they landed in San Diego, and he 
felt calm and confident and strong.
Two of Obodi’s troopers met him at the downport in a limo with blackened 
windows. David touched them as lightly as he was able; they both knew Obodi 
slightly, knew that David was expected. No more than that. He told them to give 
their weapons to his bodyguards. They did; he had them get in the front seat, 
and got in back with his bodyguards.
The limo took them into downtown San Diego. The windows were supposed to be 
darkened; David instructed his guards to set them for one-way; if anyone was 
watching the car from outside, it would look as though Obodi’s instructions were 
being followed. David was not impressed with San Diego; it looked like a New 
York suburb. Hell, it looked like a Jersey suburb.
Except cleaner.
The limousine came down atop a smallish white building, thirty or forty stories, 
at the edge of a large open plaza. The building sat facing the huge, gleaming 
blue stretch of the Pacific Ocean; even in the midst of his juice-induced calm, 
David found time to admire the sight of the sun’s reflection, on a mildly windy 
day, dancing from the tops of a million small waves.
Before leaving the vehicle he checked his handheld; they sat atop the Latham 
Building, at the western edge of the city. David flipped his handheld shut, 
stowed it, and turned on his Personal Protection System. He felt the sheath 
armor go ever so slightly rigid beneath his suit; not enough to cause difficulty 
in moving, just enough to feel it. The targeting holocams were buried in his 
earrings. Lasers were tucked away in his watch and two of his rings. If his 
heart stopped, his handheld would explode, and take everyone within a square 
block with him.
Half a dozen men in nondescript suits awaited him at the edge of the roof. One 
came forward.
Anthony Angelo was a small, wiry man with black hair. Ex-Speedfreak, dedicated 
Reb; knew Obodi only to work with, had no idea why David was there. David 
noticed, without making assumptions one way or another, that he had yet to meet 
any of Obodi’s personal associates.
The man stopped a few steps in front of David, said, unsmiling, “Mister Zanini?” 
It amused David to be addressed with the American honorific; virtually every 
Johnny Reb he’d ever met had done that, as though renouncing the truncated 
French honorifics in use throughout the System were some Reb badge of 
membership.
“Are you expecting someone else?”
“No, sir. Please follow me. You’ll leave your bodyguards here.”
“I’ll leave my bodyguards here,” David agreed, “except they’ll come with me.”
A brief struggle crossed Angelo’s features, was gone. “Yes, sir. That’ll be 
fine. Please follow me.”
They kept him waiting, in a lounge with a wet bar, for most of an hour. David 
had his ex-Space Force bodyguard make iced tea with the supplies at the bar, and 
after the bodyguard had sipped at the tea, drank some of it himself.
When someone finally came for him, it was Angelo again. “Mister Obodi will see 
you now.”
“How charming of him.”
The boardroom where Obodi received him was large enough for thirty people. It 
was stripped empty and it was obvious that its contents had been removed only 
recently. David could see scars in the rug where the huge conference table had 
recently been.
Two men were waiting for him. One was a soldier, somewhere in his fifties. David 
barely glanced at the man; Obodi stood motionless in the very center of all the 
empty space, watching David approach. He was a tall, thin man in a bright red 
robe, with an aquiline nose, high cheeks, blond hair and pale, piercing blue 
eyes. Very good biosculpture, David thought to himself. Obodi’s voice was soft, 
gently penetrating. “You were not to bring your bodyguards with you. How was 
this allowed?”
David said mildly, “Nobody mentioned it to me.”
Obodi said just as quietly, “I gave the orders myself. I assure you they were 
not forgotten. How did it happen, do you suppose, that they were not 
implemented?”
“Beats the hell out of me. Maybe you need better people. Listen, ‘Sieur Obodi, a 
lot of important people told me I should come visit you, seeing how you invited 
me and all. Show respect, they told me.” David smiled at Obodi. “I’m showing 
respect. What the fuck do you want from me?”
Obodi returned David’s smile. “What is your name, boy?”
“Boy?” David took a step forward, his bodyguards moving out to flank him. David 
studied Obodi speculatively, calmly, the remnants of the session with the wire 
damping out any traces of fear. He reached—
—flicker of fire, of intimate touch—
And warm fog enveloped him, soothed him, charmed him with gentle reassurances—
David jerked back into himself.
Obodi said again, “What is your name, boy?”
David stared at the Reb leader, suddenly completely uncertain of himself, 
distantly aware that it must be showing. What was that? “David,” he said with a 
suddenly thick tongue. “David Zanini.”
“That is your full name?”
His adrenal gland, abused and lied to by the wire, suddenly kicked into gear. 
Abruptly his heart was pounding as though it would burst in his chest, and David 
could not draw enough breath. The old soldier in the corner of the room suddenly 
jumped into focus—
—Elite, the man was a fucking brass balls Peaceforcer Elite. The Elite stared 
grimly at David. Staring back at the Elite, David snapped, “What the fuck is 
this brass balls doing here?”
“You are an Italian?”
David’s bodyguards, at his silent command, spread farther away from him, one 
keying on Obodi, the other on the Elite. “Yeah, what of it?” The Elite—the man’s 
granite face tickled a memory somewhere deep inside, one of his father’s friends 
had been—
“You look,” said Obodi quietly, “remarkably like a man who died in 2062. A man—” 
The sudden surge of terror raised up in David like a tidal wave, and he felt the 
lethal hot air tingling on his skin, and a slow smile stretched across Obodi’s 
features. “—a man named Castanaveras.”
David Castanaveras had no idea what he was doing, only that his life was 
endangered and that he must protect himself.
The doors behind him blew themselves out of their frame. As the sonic stunners 
cut in, an invisible hand picked Obodi up and threw him across the room like a 
doll. A wash of flame exploded outward from the spot where David Castanaveras 
stood, sent a burning wash of superheated air across the room like a maser set 
at wide dispersion. The heat washed across Chris Summers, set his clothes afire.
Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon struck the far wall rolled into a ball, dropped to the 
ground stunned, and lay there motionless.
Christian J. Summers, ex-Peaceforcer Elite, stood still after the wash of the 
flame had passed by, and watched the room’s stunners play over the son of the 
best friend he had ever had. The two bodyguards, both of them to the external 
eye in better shape than their employer, fell within seconds. The deep radar 
scan Castanaveras had walked through on his way into the building showed a PPS 
with body armor, but the body armor would not be protecting him from the sonics; 
this was simple endurance. Sedon sat up, then came back to his feet, and Chris 
Summers walked slowly forward, stood only a few meters away, at the edge of the 
sonics, stood so close his teeth ached, watching as, long after his bodyguards 
had fallen, David Castanaveras struggled to keep his feet. Summers watched the 
genie stagger back and forth, the sonics following him, crashing into the walls, 
going down and then pushing his way up again. The ruby laser in the cyborg’s 
right fist was lit and pointed at the floor. His clothing burned in places, but 
he was utterly unaware of it. Abruptly a laser lashed forward from the watch the 
genie wore; Chris Summers turned his head aside, and lifted an arm to cover his 
optics. In a moment the laser ceased, and a moment later David Castanaveras 
fell, and did not get up again.
Summers let the stunners run a while longer, long enough that he feared risking 
neural damage in all three of the men on the floor, and then shut them off. He 
turned to Sedon, standing well back, watching the tableau. “How are you?”
“I shall live. What happened?”
Summers said without any irony at all, “You scared him.”
Sedon shook his head slightly, came forward. His eyes would not focus 
immediately. His ears rang and he would have a knot on his skull and a bruise on 
his ribs where he had hit the wall. “How very dangerous these children are. You 
recognize him, Christian?”
Chris Summers said slowly, “The girl doesn’t look very much like her mother, 
Jany McConnell. Same green eyes, but she’s had biosculpture. And David—the blue 
eyes throw me.” His features were the expressionless mask of a PKF Elite; yet 
his voice was heavy. “But I’d know him anywhere. That’s his father’s face. It’s 
like looking at Carl come back from the dead.”
“Good,” Sedon said absently. He knelt slowly next to the young man’s still form, 
traced a finger across David’s cheek, and then looked up at Chris Summers 
abruptly. His smile was slow and dazzling. “You live in an age of wonders, 
Christian.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. And I have seen things to compare.”

David Castanaveras awoke to happiness.
Darkness enveloped him.
He could not move.
His inability to move did not bother him. He floated blissfully in the utter 
darkness, distantly aware of the existence of the world, very pleased indeed 
that someone had gone to the trouble of turning on his wire, of sending the 
juice down into his pleasure center.
At first the voice was distant and quiet, easy to ignore. Hello, David. Hello, 
my friend. But the voice grew louder, and the wire got turned down at the same 
time. With mild curiosity David let the words penetrate.
We are going to be great friends, David Castanaveras. A long pause, and then the 
voice said, gently, persuasively, The very best of friends. What you want, I 
want for you. A shorter pause, and the voice said with simple conviction, I love 
you.




- 6 -
« ^ » 
The prisoner sat strapped into a chair, in the middle of a hospital room Denice 
had not been in before, not during Jimmy’s bout with the medbots, or hers.
The man was thin, wiry, with curly black hair and a neatly trimmed beard and 
mustache. He was naked to the waist, with electrodes covering him everywhere. A 
full-sensory InfoNet terminal covered his skull.
An intravenous drip was attached at his right inner elbow.
The prisoner’s right hand ended at the wrist.
Francis Xavier Chandler sat across the room from the prisoner, a blanket over 
his lap, in the floatchair he’d been confined to since yesterday’s assassination 
attempt. Chandler’s right hand, like the prisoner’s, was gone. There was some 
question that he would ever walk again. “His name is Anthony Angelo. Tony. Used 
to be a Speedfreak, when there were such things. He’s worked for me for near 
thirty years now. I’ve known him since he was a baby. I employed both of his 
parents and one of his grandparents.” Chandler sat silently for just a moment. 
“He’s one of the few people in the System I’d have trusted with my life,” he 
whispered finally. “And did. He’s been one of my inside men with the Johnny Rebs 
since ‘63, ever since the Speedfreak Rebellion got crushed. When he said he 
needed to see me, I didn’t think twice. Had him escorted straight to me. Even 
so, he got scanned twice on the way up; they outfitted him with a beauty. 
Ceramic slivers in his fingers, about the same slowscan signature as human bone. 
I was reaching to shake his hand… his hand just exploded. Two of the projectiles 
got me. Nanoviruses all over them—” Chandler gestured around himself. “If it 
hadn’t happened right inside one of the finest emergency medical facilities off 
Earth, I’d be dead today instead of paralyzed. As it is I’ll still have to go to 
Mars to get my hand regrown; my med facilities won’t handle a regrowth. I’m 
still fighting one of the nanoviruses; pesky thing keeps trying to turn my blood 
to acid, they haven’t quite got it neutralized.”
Denice sat with Robert and looked at the drooling idiot in the chair. “You 
drained him.”
Chandler’s features were pale. “I knew he’d been brainwashed. I knew it.”
“Except that he hadn’t,” Robert said mildly.
Chandler was silent a long moment. “Apparently not. He kept saying that he’d 
simply realized that there was a higher loyalty than the loyalty he’d once had 
to me. If that’s really all it was—” Chandler’s voice trailed off, and Denice 
thought he was not going to speak again, when Chandler said simply, “I have to 
know.”
Denice looked back and forth between Chandler and Robert. Robert said quietly, 
“You owe him this much.”
Denice closed her eyes and reached, Touched—Became.
She sat motionlessly, eyes closed, for five minutes that stretched to ten, and 
then to fifteen. When twenty minutes had passed, and Robert was considering 
disturbing her, she finally opened her eyes.
They were wet with tears.
Robert said softly, “What is it?”
“When I was nine—” She had to struggle with the words, force them out. “When I 
was nine I was raped. During the first month of the Troubles. And I thought it 
was the worst thing that any person could ever do to another.” She spoke through 
a throat made tight with pain, through a gathering cloud of tears. She held 
herself, hugged herself tightly, and found herself wishing, in some distant part 
of herself, that she could see Callia Sierran again. “What they did to him is 
worse.”
Chandler leaned forward in his floatchair. The knuckles of the hand gripping the 
floatchair had gone completely white. “What did they do?”
“They turned him into a thing he would have died before becoming. And he knew it 
the whole time.” She looked at them. “David did it.”
Chandler said stupidly, “Who?”
“David did this. David Castanaveras. My twin is with them.”




- 7 -
« ^ » 
They sat next to one another on the semiballistic to Japan.
David Castanaveras sat two seats behind them, in restraints, with the juice 
pouring down into his pleasure center at its highest setting. They would leave 
him that way until they reached Japan.
It was an uncomfortable thing to be near; at odd moments Chris Summers found 
himself possessed by a sudden, disturbingly complete euphoria. Even Sedon was 
not unaffected; his lips twitched incessantly, and once he chuckled aloud for no 
reason.
The cyborg’s cheeks ached. His skin, stiff enough to turn a knife, fought 
against the muscles that kept his lips stretched in the rictus of a grin.
A report came in over Chris Summers’s earphone; after a pause, he smiled and 
said, “Chandler is apparently still alive.”
“Alas.”
“I told you those nanoviruses wouldn’t work. He sits up there in that damn 
floating hospital and—”
“The point was not that Chandler die. Whether he lives or dies is a small 
matter.”
Summers nodded. What mattered was that David’s work had been shown to be 
reliable. He started to say something, then cut it off in a fit of abrupt 
giggles.
“Abide, Christian. It will end shortly.”
Summers spoke through snorts of laughter. “We should have—left him—in San 
Diego.”
Sedon shook his head. His lips twitched again. “We have need of his skills.”

In a small Buddhist temple outside of Tokyo, they met with Shuji Kurokawa, the 
Unification Councilor for most of southern Japan; Akira Hasegawa of Mitsubishi; 
and the venerable Ryotaro Matsuda, who had been old fifty years prior, when, 
with a dozen other old men, he had surrendered Japan to the Unification.
They met in a small, wooden-floored room with thin walls, sat together, the six 
of them, at a small black table raised only a few centimeters above the ground, 
and drank tea together in silence.
The servants withdrew when they were done with their tea, and left them alone.
The three who sat facing Sedon were Asians, members of the Mongoloid family of 
the New Human Race. Like the Negro peoples, they were, Sedon observed, better 
fit for this world than the European whites whose culture had in large measure 
achieved dominance in this time. As the blacks were better evolved to survive 
beneath the harsh sun of the prison world, the Mongoloid peoples had eyes better 
protected from the sun, and a layer of subcutaneous fat that better protected 
them from this world’s extremes of temperature.
They were certainly more civilized than the whites. In more ways than one, in 
their concern with protocol and politeness, in their lack of haste, they, of the 
societies Sedon had encountered since his release from the bubble, most closely 
resembled the Flame People.
The two men dressed in severe black obi; the woman, Kurokawa, in a gown of some 
dove gray material. Sedon had difficulty gauging age among any of the folk of 
this time, but especially so with the Asians; simply to look at he might have 
thought them any age from 40 to 140—and probably, all three of them, closer to 
the latter number, for the Japanese prized age.
In that Sedon thought they showed the beginning of wisdom.
‘Sieur Hasegawa spoke first, in Japanese; there was a brief delay while the 
temple’s computer translated into French. “You have brought a new companion to 
these talks.”
Chris Summers spoke in English, said mildly, “My friend Akira; this is David, 
the son of an old friend. He has joined our cause.”
Sitting slightly behind and to Sedon’s left, David Castanaveras looked at them 
through bored and sleepy eyes. He inclined his head slightly at the mention of 
his name.
The woman, Kurokawa, whose obstinance had stalled Sedon’s progress for so long, 
spoke. A moment later; “We have considered your most recent proposition. We 
think it unwise.”
They would, of course; it was hardly in their best interests, though Sedon had 
gone to great lengths to portray it otherwise. Sedon spoke mildly. “Indeed? You 
recognize that we have a tiger by the tail? We are only a few days from rising, 
and once begun, there can be no turning back.”
“We do not wish to go forward with you, ‘Sieur Sedon.” The woman spoke with a 
directness that was, for her, unusual. “Your chances for success are abysmal, 
and we cannot believe that you do not know it. Even with our aid your 
chances—our chances—are merely poor. You need the aid of the SpaceFarers’ 
Collective, at a bare minimum, and you do not have it.”
Sedon paused. “I will give this one last attempt, and then I will not speak for 
the consequences. We share a common enemy in the Unification. Your country has 
been damaged by the Unification far worse than any other on this planet, worse 
than Occupied America, for fear of your might should you—”
The woman cut him off. “Three-quarters of the armed spacecraft in the Solar 
System belong to Space Force. The PKF has twelve million men in uniform across 
the surface of this planet; has nearly three thousand Elite cyborgs. The cyborgs 
we have created with what we have learned from ‘Sieur Summers, though in their 
own way impressive, are not technologically a match for any but the earliest of 
the Unification’s Elite; and there are only two hundred of them. You have a 
million PKF in O.A.; we have only thirty thousand in all of Japan. It seems to 
us that our interests are not served by contesting the Unification, but rather 
by working from within it.”
“Do you not thirst for revenge, for the damage done you, the deaths rained down 
upon you from the sky?”
The three facing him were silent for a long while. It was at last the eldest of 
their number, Ryotaro Matsuda, who spoke. He spoke in a whisper of English. “I 
was born, ‘Sieur Obodi, in black rain, as the earth blasted into the sky by 
American bombs was washed back to the ground; born to devastation so utter that 
a lesser people would not have recovered from it. My elder sister died of 
radiation poisoning shortly after I was born; both of my parents died of cancers 
from the bombs. But we are a great people, and we rebuilt, became preeminent in 
the world. And then in 2018 the Unification bombed us again, fourteen warheads 
exploded in airbursts over Japanese territory; and I lost two of my three 
children to the fire, and the third to radiation sickness. And again we rebuilt, 
and today enjoy prosperity that is the envy of the world. We maintain our own 
society, we do not flaunt our wealth; we ask for nothing of the gaijin but that 
they leave us be. We have aided you more than is perhaps wise already, and what 
you now ask of us, madman, is that we risk ourselves and our children, once 
again, for no better reason than that it is convenient for you.”
Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon said bluntly, “You have thermonuclear warheads. I need 
them.”
Silence descended.
Akira Hasegawa said cautiously, “You have been misinformed.”
“You have twenty-five of them,” said Sedon. “I will leave you three for 
self-protection. I must have the rest.”
The woman facing Sedon said simply, “We will not give them to you.”
Sedon employed a technique that would not have worked on any of the Flame 
People, it was so obvious, but which he had found, to his amazement, often 
worked on the people of this time. As sincerely as he could, he asked, “Is there 
anything I can do to change your mind?”
It did not work this time; she shook her head, said firmly, “No.”
Sedon nodded. “David?”
The boy’s voice was calm, disinterested. “Yes?”
“As we discussed.”

When Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon left to return to Occupied America, the following 
morning, he took with him two things: a group of forty of the almost-Elite 
cyborgs, young, immensely polite Japanese men, and, stacked neatly in the SB’s 
hold, twenty-two fusion warheads.
He left behind him a group of Japanese leaders who would do exactly as David 
Castanaveras had instructed them.




- 8 -
« ^ » 
Late on the afternoon of June the 30th, 2076, Secretary General Eddore’s Chief 
of Staff, Hand Alexander Moreau, stepped into the SecGen’s office. “Sir?”
Eddore looked up from the holofield he was auditing. “Yes, Alex?”
“Councilor Ripper wants to speak to you.”
Eddore nodded, felt a flicker of warm anticipation. “Have him wait a minute or 
two, then put him through.”
“He’s here.” At Eddore’s look of incomprehension, Moreau added, “In the waiting 
room.”
A slow smile crossed Charles Eddore’s features. “Really? Without an appointment. 
How charming. Bring him in.”
Moreau turned back to the door; Ripper brushed by him on his way in.
Eddore said calmly, “Douglass.”
“Are you blind?”
Eddore smiled. “I don’t think so. Have a seat, Douglass.”
“What are you doing, Charles?”
“What do you mean?”
“I called Commissioner Vance.”
“Ah.” Eddore needed no more than that; Vance, chafing at the bit, would have 
been blunt about his displeasure at being held back on the Johnny Rebs; and 
Ripper, as the Chair of the Oversite Committee, was an appropriate place for 
Vance to express his displeasure. “And if you hadn’t called Vance,” Eddore 
murmured, “doubtless he’d have called you?”
“Probably. He’s not a happy man, Charles.” Ripper paused. “You’ve lied to the 
Council.”
“Oh? About?”
“This investigation your office claimed the PKF was undertaking. I called 
Christine Mirabeau, and asked her to forward the documents on the investigation. 
She told me that they were investigating the Rebs, were about to move forward on 
it, and promised that the documents would be sent over promptly.”
Eddore nodded. “Yes, I know. She called and told me of your request. I told her 
not to send them.”
“So for a couple of weeks now I’ve had difficulty getting hold of her at all. 
Today when I called Vance—imagine my surprise—I found that Vance claims to know 
nothing about any ongoing investigation into the Rebs. And he says he would 
know.”
Ripper had not accepted Eddore’s offer to sit down; now the Secretary General 
was just as pleased. He sighed. “Douglass, I’m sorry it’s come to this. For 
reasons that I do not particularly feel compelled to explain to you, Elite 
Commander Mirabeau has engaged in certain private research, research 
Commissioner Vance did not need to know about. And does not.”
“You’re not going to explain this, are you?”
“No. I’m not.”
Douglass Ripper said simply, “You’re fucking up, Charles.”
To Alexander Moreau, hovering nervously by the door, the Secretary General said, 
“Show Douglass out, Alex.”
Ripper snorted, “I know the way,” and brushed by Moreau once again on his way 
out.
After he was gone, Eddore said aloud, possibly to Hand Moreau, “I do hate bad 
losers.”

Ripper awoke to darkness, alone in bed, in his suite at Capitol City.
He had almost gotten used to sleeping alone again, but it was still his first 
thought on awakening, to notice that Denice was not with him.
After a moment he realized what had awakened him, the chiming of the phone. 
“Command,” he said groggily, sitting up in bed, “no video. Accept.”
It was Ichabod, speaking so fast that Ripper could not make out the man’s words. 
“Wait, wait,” he snapped. “Slow down.”
“Emergency meeting of the Council, Councilor. Starts whenever a quorum shows 
up.”
“What time is it?”
“Two a.m.”
“What the hell is it?”
There was the briefest of pauses. “Two things, Councilor. The orbital laser 
cannon have apparently been knocked out—”
“God damn it,” yelled Douglass Ripper, standing up in bed. “God fucking damn it! 
I told them, I told them—God damn,” he yelled again. “Have they heard from the 
fucking Rebs yet? Demands, anything?”
Another quick pause. “No. There haven’t been any demands. Councilor, there’s 
some real question whether the Rebs or Claw have done this.”
Blackness surrounded him. “Who else? The Collective? They think—”
“Councilor, Japan has declared independence.”
Douglass Ripper stared blindly into the darkness for perhaps five seconds. 
Finally he spoke with preternatural calm. “I’ll be at the Council Chambers in 
ten minutes.”




- 9 -
« ^ » 
They gathered together in the dining lounge, watching the Boards.
NewsBoard had the first reports out of Japan. Denice watched, with Robert at her 
side, as Shuji Kurokawa, the Unification Councilor for Japan, declared that, as 
was the right of any sovereign state, Japan no longer found membership in the 
Unification conducive to its interests, and that therefore, in deference to the 
opinion of the world, they were taking this opportunity to explain their 
grievances against the Unification.
Dvan sat with them, watching. His wrist was nearly mended.
At 10:15 a.m., in the middle of a report detailing how a group of Japanese 
guerillas had taken all but two of the orbital laser cannon, Denice rose and 
walked over to the garage to bid Jimmy Ramirez good-bye.
A yacht and a pair of SB’s were parked in the garage. Jimmy, standing in front 
of the yacht, squirming into his pressure suit, glanced up as she entered. He 
greeted her with the words, “I wasn’t sure you were going to come see me off.”
Chandler had already boarded the small yacht; Denice bit her lip before 
replying. “I’m sorry.”
“You can still come with me.”
“I’m going back to Earth, Jimmy. With Robert and Devane. And we’re going to try 
to kill Sedon, and rescue my brother.”
Jimmy nodded, sealed the p-suit up to his collar. He said something that only a 
few weeks ago would have been very difficult for him. “I’m afraid for you, 
Denice.”
“I’m afraid too, Jimmy. But maybe the Belt CityStates are the proper place for 
you. Trent’s out there, somewhere. But there’s nothing there for me, not right 
now.”
“Someday, Denice, we’re going to return and take the bastards down. You know 
that’s true.”
She nodded. “But it doesn’t change what I have to do today. I won’t ask you to 
come with me; you couldn’t even if you wanted to.”
Jimmy said slowly, “All right. I’m going to miss you.”
“I love you, Jimmy.” She took a single step forward, moved into his embrace, put 
her chin on his shoulder and held on tight until the speaker set in the side of 
the yacht came alive.
Chandler’s voice: “Sorry to interrupt, but time is tight. We’ve got a Space 
Force battalion passing by right now; radar shows another moving in from 
Almundsen at L-Four. If we’re going to make Halfway without turning into Space 
Force target practice, we have to be out of here in a little under two minutes.”
Jimmy released Denice, took a step back, and without further word turned away 
from her.
Denice said, “Wait!”
Jimmy turned back; for just a moment an absurd flicker of hope crossed his 
features, was gone. “What?”
“I need to talk to Chandler.” She cycled through with Jimmy, into the yacht, and 
moved back to the passenger compartment. Chandler looked up as she entered.
“What is it, dear?”
“Who knows about me? About my brother?”
The old man did not misunderstand her. Displeasure touched the fierce features. 
“Aside from myself, no one. Not in my organization.”
Denice took a deep breath, reached forward, and laid her hand against the side 
of his head. Brief surprise crossed his features.
My name is Denice Daimara. I’m the student of Robert Dazai Yo. The telepaths are 
gone from the world, and you think them dead. Except when you are alone, you 
will never think otherwise. When you are alone, you may remember me, and my 
brother; but you will not act upon it, and you will never speak of it.
Jimmy seated himself, strapping into his acceleration chair. He said quietly, 
“What are you doing?”
“Protecting myself.”
Chandler sat with his eyes closed, and then, after a long moment, opened them 
and said irritably, “Fine. Look, Daimara, we’re deadly short on time. Are you 
quite done?”
Jimmy looked at her without expression. “What about me?”
Denice looked straight at him. “Some risks are worth taking.” She turned away 
and left them together in the cabin, cycled back out into the garage, and walked 
back up to the lounge. She felt the gentle shudder as the yacht disengaged from 
the house, moved out into the vacuum.
After she was gone, Jimmy Ramirez sat with a silly grin on his face, a grin not 
entirely due to the fierce acceleration of the yacht, in their high-gee sprint 
to Halfway.




- 10 -
« ^ » 
I cancelled everything.
For most of a day I sat in my office and, with a growing coldness in the pit of 
my stomach, monitoring the InfoNet. Electronic Times, NewsBoard, CNN, The London 
Times; virtually every one of the major news Boards was arrayed in a semicircle 
of holos against the wall of my office.
Bad. Very, very bad. Riots in St. Louis, and Albuquerque; something very close 
to an armed insurrection in Miami.
It was worse in Japan. The Japanese had, without so much as a shot being fired, 
taken most of the Unification officials in the country hostage, aside from those 
few who, like Shuji Kurokawa, had simply gone over.
Hostages: better than a dozen Unification Councilors, two of Secretary General 
Eddore’s webdancers, over thirty thousand members of the various civil services; 
the Japanese rebels had already executed a pair of babychasers from the Ministry 
of Population Control. Not surprising, that; nobody likes the Ministry, but the 
Asian nations—including China, which was one of the founding Unification 
countries—have a particular rage for the babychasers. They feel, with some 
justification, that the Ministry was created by Westerners because of the Asian 
nations, with their historically high birthrates. It’s certainly true that most 
non-Asians don’t even know someone who was subjected to forcible sterilization; 
in the Asian countries, about forty percent of all women have undergone the 
operation.
While I was watching, they announced that another pair of MPC employees had been 
lynched in Kyoto.
Displays off to my left snowed the Unity, sitting smack in the middle of 
Halfway; Space Force had brought the ship’s cannon emplacements up for use. 
Lights glowed across the huge surface of the ship, clustered around the cannon. 
Typical of Space Force; the damn thing had no airplant, no computers to speak 
of, the rockets didn’t work—but the weapons did, all of them.
The door behind me curled open without my say-so, which meant that it was Jay, 
or Vasily, or Marc. “Neil.”
Jay’s voice; I said, without looking away, “Yes?”
“The circus is in town.”
I turned in my chair and stared at him. “You’re kidding. They came?”
Jay shrugged. “The Collective ship Lew Alton, carrying the Cirque du Mars. Just 
docked.”
I didn’t even have to think about it. “Send them back.”
“Can’t, Neil. Their airplant died and their ‘ponies are in bad shape; they’re 
tight on both air and water. It’s why they came on ahead after we warned them 
off. They’d probably make Luna, but they can’t get back to Mars. I had them tie 
up with our computers and we ran diagnostics to double-check theirs, and it’s 
legit. They’re breathing their socks.”
“Great.” I worked my way through it. “All right. Let them dock, cable them up 
for air services, but keep them on board their ship.”
“Um, they already docked.”
I sat rubbing my temples. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance at all that 
they’re still on board the damn ship?”
“Haven’t been down there myself; I’m told that eight of them came down off the 
ship together before I was notified. They’re being detained in the debarking 
area outside Lock Ten; a woman in a white tie and tails, a couple of 
roustabouts, and, um”—his cheeks twitched, but he kept it under control—“five 
clowns. They want to talk to you.”
“Five clowns.” I nodded grimly. “Who let them in?”
Jay paused, glanced down at his handheld; a holofield sprang into existence. 
“McCarthy and Lopez,” he said after a moment. I recognized the names; rookies, 
both of them. The two of them had come to my attention recently for something 
else—but the memory wouldn’t come, and I had more important things to worry 
about. “They want to talk to you,” Jay repeated.
“They’re not going to enjoy it,” I said grimly. “Get ten Security carrying 
needlers, in case our clowns don’t feel like being sent home. I’ll meet you 
there in five minutes.”
I worked myself up into a cold rage on my way down to Lock Ten.

Jay stood waiting outside the Lock Ten debarking area when I got there, two 
Security squads with holstered needlers standing behind him. I nodded to them, 
palmed open the door to the waiting area, and swept in, moving fast, with the 
lot of them at my back.
They sat in the small plastic chairs that are all the amenities the debarking 
areas offer, and they came to their feet as I entered. The Master of Ceremonies 
was a tall, painfully thin woman, Loonie sized, with a makeup job that made her 
look as though her skin were covered by fine feathers, wearing, as Jay had said, 
a white tuxedo.
The clowns, naturally enough, caught my immediate attention; there were five of 
them, as I’d been told, in full costume—clown suits, striped and polka-dotted, 
with either big smiles or frowns painted on their faces. One of them, a young, 
dark-skinned fellow with a huge smile and a single white rose painted on each 
cheek, stepped forward at my approach. At the back of my mind I noticed that, 
unlike all the other clowns, he wore a pair of those big floppy clown shoes. A 
red glove with big yellow buttons covered his left hand; his right hand was 
bare.
I’d intended to grab the Master of Ceremonies, possibly push her off her feet, 
shake her up a bit. Basic Gestapo tactics, you use them because they work. But 
when I saw what she was I couldn’t. Getting physical with women is something I 
have a problem with; I do it because the job demands it, but there’s always a 
moment of hesitation I don’t have with men. But the Master of Ceremonies looked 
like any rough handling would break her in two.
So I changed the approach. I kept my eyes fixed on the Master of Ceremonies, and 
backhanded the clown with the roses on his cheeks. Lock Ten is under a tenth 
gee; the clown lifted off his feet and went down. I snapped, “I’m Chief Corona 
and I’ve got Space Force and PKF to deal with and no time for you. What are you 
fucking idiots doing here and what do you need from us to get the hell gone?”
The black clown got back to his feet, He was my size, or a bit taller, with 
Earth-grown muscles. Tall for a downsider. One of the floppy clown feet had come 
off, and he frowned down at the bare black foot. He took a step back toward me, 
and said, “No hitting, okay? Can I talk?”
I used my very best psycho cop voice. “Make it fast.”
He nodded. “I left Earth seven years ago. In that time, do you know the most 
interesting thing I’ve learned about downsiders?”
It was so completely out of line with anything I’d been expecting to hear from 
him that it threw me completely out of position. I stared at him, unsnapped the 
guard on my holster—heard the sound of holsters popping all around me—and said 
finally, very gently, “No. What is the most interesting thing about downsiders?”
“Downsiders,” said the clown, “never look up.”
Tytan Security, I think I’ve mentioned this, is mostly downsiders. It’s the 
nature of the beast.
Someone behind me murmured, “Oh, shit.” Necks around me craned upward, and I 
joined them.
The debarking area at Lock Ten is about ten meters high; cargo often gets 
unloaded here, and the extra cubic is useful.
Five—no, six of them, and four of them were clowns—had tethered themselves to 
the ceiling, high above us. They pointed laser rifles straight down on us.
Two of them wore Tytan Security blues: Lopez and McCarthy. McCarthy grinned at 
me, called out, “Hi, Chief.”
I brought my eyes back down from the ceiling, to face the young black clown. 
From nowhere the clown had produced a small hideaway maser; he held it in his 
naked right hand, pointed straight into my face. “Make one wrong move,” said the 
clown in a grim voice, “and we’ll kill you all.”
Jay stood closest to me; he took a step back, and then lifted his hands very 
carefully and put them atop his head and stood completely motionless. I heard 
the distant rustle of uniforms as the others emulated him.
I stood still, didn’t move at all, not even to put my hands on my head.
The clown smiled then for real, and passed the maser to the Master of 
Ceremonies. He looked at me. “You’re Neil Corona, aren’t you? The Neil Corona?”
When people say it that way the only thing they ever mean is, Are you the Neil 
Corona who surrendered to the Unification outside of Yorktown? I always am. 
“Yeah. That’s me.”
“Great. Pleased to meet you.” The clown held out his bare right hand to be 
shaken. The other was still enclosed in a red clown glove. “I’m Trent.”




- 11 -
« ^ » 
“Trent?” Jay said stupidly. “The Trent?”
His hand dropped back to his side. Dark brown eyes studied Jay from inside white 
clown makeup. “You know,” he said after a moment, “when people say it that way 
the only thing they ever mean is, are you Trent the Uncatchable? I always am.”
“You don’t look like your pictures.”
“I used to be a white man, yes. You’re Jay Altaloma, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. They said you were stupid.” Trent turned back to me, held his 
hand out again. “Pleased to meet you.”
I took it this time. I wasn’t being the least sarcastic when I said, “Likewise.”

Over the course of the next two hours I watched one of the most professional 
operations it has ever been my dubious pleasure to have run on me. The lock 
cycled all the way open, inner and outer doors both, and some two hundred men 
and women in United Nations Space Force uniforms came pouring through, armed 
mostly with needlers.
SpaceFarers’ Collective. If I hadn’t known they couldn’t be real Space Force—not 
with Trent there—I’d have bought them for what their uniforms proclaimed. They 
looked like downsiders—but SpaceFarers do; the Collective raises its children 
under gravity, so that they can withstand the kind of boost that Space Force 
employs chasing them. The only thing that marked them for Collective rather than 
Space Force, and I doubt I’d have noticed this if I hadn’t been looking for it, 
was that though they had the compactness of size that only comes from being 
raised under gravity, they moved in free fall like Halfers; humans are only 
capable of learning to move that way in childhood.
Trent the Uncatchable, I learned quickly, knew Halfway’s security layout every 
bit as well as I did.
He did what I’d have done in his skin; restrained the Security Jay had brought 
down with us, snakechains all around; left most of his troops in the debarking 
area, put a laser in my back and walked Jay and me up to Marc Packard’s offices. 
Marc’s offices sit in a little blister on the outer surface of Administration 
Central; mine are down the hall. They went in and secured Marc’s office before 
bringing Jay and me through. Marc sat unconscious in his chair, with half a 
dozen anesthetic slivers still visible, though melting rapidly, in one cheek.
They put Jay and me in a corner of the room, snakechained us together, and put a 
huge clown with a laser rifle on us.
Trent pulled Marc free from his chair, tossed him over to a bunch of clowns who 
had come up with us, and sank down behind Marc’s desk.
Abruptly things got quiet. Jay started to say something, but the big clown waved 
him to silence. Trent sat with his eyes closed, doing God knows what; if it was 
true, as I’d heard, that he was one of the greatest Players in the System, it 
could be almost anything.
In the distance, breach alarms went off. None of the circus people, if any of 
them were circus people, seemed alarmed, and I worked it out quickly enough; the 
breach was not real, it was simply that the alarms would seal Administration 
Central off from the rest of Halfway more quickly than anything else.
After perhaps five minutes Trent opened his eyes, stretched slightly, and smiled 
at me. “You have six tunnels, fourteen major airlocks, forty-seven single-person 
locks, seven emergency locks. All sealed. Am I missing anything?”
“If you were I wouldn’t tell you.”
Trent nodded. “Fair enough. I think I’ve got Administration, Central sealed off. 
We took care of the Security barracks on the way in; blew off a couple of 
fadeaway bombs inside it. We’ll go in and clean up in a bit; fadeaway, if you’re 
not familiar with it, won’t hurt your people. Please notice, Sieur Corona, that 
we’ve gone to real lengths to make sure that none of your people are hurt.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Good. So, by now the rest of Halfway thinks that there’s been a breach at 
Administration Central; by the time they’ll expect the emergency to be over, 
they’ll have been believably informed that Space Force has taken over both 
Halfway Administration Central, and—” Trent paused, got a slightly distant look, 
and said, “And the Halfway InfoNet Relay Station. We’re set up to do a very good 
imitation of a Space Force battalion, and as long as we don’t have to deal with 
PKF or real Space Force I think we’ll get away with it. We’ll be cleaning up 
Administration Central for the next several minutes, but we’re already reporting 
secured for about eighty percent of Central. The Relay Station we’ve got cold, 
along with one of the Secretary General’s webdancers.” Trent stopped, looked at 
me where I sat with Jay, and said, “ ‘Sieur Corona, I’d like your help.”
Jay said hotly, “You can’t think you’re going to get away with impersonating 
Space Force. It—”
“I do think so,” said Trent without looking away from me. “Space Force is busy 
at the moment, trying to take back the laser cannon; the PKF are just as busy 
getting ready to take back Japan. All we have to do here is stay quiet for a 
couple days, give the Halfers an explanation they’ll accept. A Space Force 
takeover will make sense to them, to the degree they bother to think about it. 
Most of them are distracted by the fighting over the laser cannon anyway.”
I’d worked my way through it by then; I said simply, “Tell me what you need.” I 
could feel Jay’s stare of disbelief boring into the side of my head.
“We’re going to hold Administration Central, and the Halfway Relay Station, for 
two, three days; it depends. After we’ve done what we came for, we’re out of 
here. Shortly after we’ve left, it’s going to become apparent that it wasn’t 
Space Force here at all, but Trent with Collective troopers. As soon as that 
gets out, the PKF will have Halfway under martial law. Do you follow the chain 
of events?”
Unfortunately, I did. “Yes.”
“Okay. So you have no real choice. Perhaps today, if we screw up, a couple of 
days from now, if things go well, Halfway goes under martial law. And when that 
happens, ‘Sieur Corona, you’re going up against the wall.”
He was absolutely correct, and we both knew it.
“Look,” said Jay, “you don’t know—”
Trent did not raise his voice particularly. “Shut up, Altaloma. ‘Sieur Corona,” 
said Trent softly, “I need your help. Do you want to live?”
I looked around Marc’s office, at Marc’s unconscious form, the clowns, the men 
in Space Force uniforms. I said to Trent. “Sometimes it seems like a lot of 
effort.”
Trent nodded. “I’ve had whole days like that. You can come with us when we 
leave; or we can try to arrange passage downside, and you can take your chances 
hiding among Earth’s seven and a half billion.”
“And if I come with you, how are you getting out of Earth/Luna without being 
blown to pieces?”
“We’re going to run backward.”
“That thing you came in is a boat. What are you going to do when it’s time to 
leave?”
Trent shrugged. “Leave.”
“Just like that.”
“Run away.”
I’m sure the skepticism showed in my voice. “You’re not serious.”
Trent looked genuinely perplexed. “Why do people always say that to me?”
Jay said, “I don’t think you know what you’re doing here.”
“Yes, I do. Listen, Corona, this is—”
“But, damn it, you’re messing up our—”
Trent did not raise his voice at all. He just started talking, and assumed that 
everybody in earshot would shut up and listen. A good trick; it worked. “If you 
don’t stop talking at me,” said Trent carefully, “I’m going to have your arms 
broken.”
Jay blinked. “You’re a pacifist.”
Trent actually grinned at him. “I used to think that too. But I’m not. I’m a, 
what’s the word, there isn’t one, a person who doesn’t believe in killing. But 
if you don’t shut up I’ll have the big clown break your arms, okay?”
“Listen, damn it. If you thi—”
“Wait.” It cut Jay short; he stopped in midword. Trent spoke so quietly I had to 
strain to hear him. “Rule One: Pay attention. Rule Two: Don’t whine. Rule Three: 
Don’t take any shit from, anyone. Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Stop bothering me. Corona—”
Jay said, “But—”
Trent said, “Break his right arm.” He turned to me. “You had a Player arrive 
here recently.”
I said slowly, “Yes—I think so. She’s just a girl.”
“What’s the Player’s name?”
“Michelle Altaloma. Jay’s cousin, they call her Shell.” I stopped when Jay 
screamed, waited for the scream to subside. “I mean Jay does.”
“Cute name. She staying with him?”
“I think so.”
To the clown who’d been holding the laser on us, Trent said, “Go get her, take 
her to the Station.” He turned back to Jay. “You okay?”
Jay glared at him. “Fuck you.”
Trent nodded. “Break the other arm.”
Jay started to scream; he stopped midway through, when his left arm snapped. For 
a moment he just gasped for breath, staring at Trent; Trent stood looking back 
at him. “You should learn to pay attention,” Trent said after a moment. “It 
would save you no end of trouble.” He gestured to a pair of smaller clowns. 
“Take them somewhere safe and fix the loud one’s arms. I don’t want to listen to 
him anymore.”
They stashed us together in one of my own holding cells, down the hall from my 
office. I’d have been indignant if I hadn’t been numb.
“Christ,” said Jay. “First he called me stupid and then he broke my arms.”
“He didn’t call you stupid,” I said. “He was just repeating something someone 
else said about you.”
“But—”
“I don’t think you’re stupid,” I told him. “Not really stupid. I just think you 
talk too much.”
He shut up.
About fifteen minutes later Trent stopped in to see us briefly, at the same time 
the medbot arrived to take care of Jay’s arms. “How are your arms?”
Jay said, “They hurt.”
“They will,” Trent agreed. “Better remember to ask the medbot for a painkiller, 
or it won’t do anything but set the bones and inject a nanovirus to help them 
knit.” To me he said, “Thank you for your help. I’ve got some business to take 
care of, but I’d like you to join me over at the Relay Station, in about an 
hour.”
“I’ll check my calendar.”
Trent nodded. “Thank you.” He turned to go—
“Hey!”
He turned back for a moment. “Yes?”
“I have a lot of questions—”
“And I’ll answer them, later.”
I don’t know where the question came from, or why it suddenly seemed important: 
“Did you really walk through a wall once?”
Trent grinned at me. “Don’t believe everything you audit.” The door unrolled and 
left us alone with the medbot tending Jay’s arm.
After a bit Jay said, “You know, he reminds me of my grandfather.”
“Oh?”
Jay winced as the medbot grasped his arm and braced him, prior to pulling the 
broken bone back into position. “Plainest-spoken man I ever knew, my 
grandfather. If he told you he’d do something, he did it. If there were more 
people out there like him and Trent, there’d be a lot less—” Jay screamed, and 
then breathed deeply, rapidly, for several seconds, before resuming. “There’d be 
a lot less misunderstanding in the world.”
I gave Jay long enough for the painkillers to take effect. “Want to tell me?”
He didn’t look at me. “Tell you what?”
“What are you? Reb, Claw—Peaceforcer?”
“TrueBreed,” he said shortly.
“Oh.” That told me a great deal. Somehow I wasn’t surprised. TrueBreed isn’t as 
well known as Project Superman, but anybody who follows the Rebs even 
casually—say, Chief of Security at Halfway—knows about their existence. “Reb, 
then. Why are you up here? Something to do with the Relay Station, I’ve got 
that, but—”
He spoke wearily. “Neil, does it matter?”
Point. “How did you pass the psychometric?”
“Vasily.”
That was mildly interesting. “A Russian in the Johnny Rebs?”
“There’re more Russians in the Rebs than in the Erisian Claw, Neil. The Claw is 
heavily European; Europeans look down on Russians.”
Learn something new every day. “How did Vasily pass? I tested him myself.”
Jay nodded. “We recruited him afterward. We almost tried to recruit you. If we’d 
had more time to work with, Shell was supposed to give it a shot. Your 
psychometric said you’d be responsive.”
“Responsive? Well, she’s a cute girl,” I conceded. “One last question?”
“Sure.”
“Is she really your cousin?”
He grinned a trifle crookedly. “True story.”
I nodded. I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to know from him.
About an hour later, he said, “It was just business, Neil. I’ve enjoyed your 
company a lot.”
“Sure.”
About an hour after that a pair in Space Force uniforms came for me.

“Sorry about the delay,” said Trent as I was ushered into Marc’s office. He 
stood with his back to me, looking out the huge bay window Marc had installed 
there, looking out on most of Halfway, the Unity, and Earth. “We had a problem.”
“What?”
Trent didn’t turn around. “Securing Administration Central. One of your people 
hid, and then when he was found he fought.”
My voice wasn’t entirely steady. “Who?”
“Vasily Koslov. Your number two.”
“And?”
Trent was silent a beat. “Dead. He cut both the legs off one of our girls. The 
rest of her squad shot him nine or ten times.” Trent turned to face me. In low 
gravity, tears move very slowly. Trent the Uncatchable looked at me through his 
tears and said, “I’m so sorry.”
We took a pressurized sled together, over to the Halfway Relay Station, and 
talked very briefly. Trent wanted to know if Vasily had had a family.
“None that I know of. It would be in his file.”
Trent nodded. Muscles in his jaws were clenching and unclenching as I watched. 
“Of course.”
“A girlfriend I think he might have been serious about.”
“We’ll do what we can for her.”
“Trent, is this worth it?”
I knew the cold fury in his voice was not directed at me. “It’s never worth it.”

Michelle Altaloma waited for us, angry and scared, when we docked at the Relay 
Station. The Relay Station is not large; you can fit maybe twenty people inside, 
tops. Half a dozen SpaceFarers in Space Force uniforms, Shell, myself and Trent 
made a cozy enough fit.
She looked like she’d dressed hastily; a pair of jeans and a pale blue sweater. 
Without the fashion ensemble she looked even younger.
She was seated in front of a full-sensory traceset; she rose when we cycled 
through.
Trent didn’t make her wait. “You’re the Player who thought this stunt up?”
Shell said stiffly, “Yes,” and I wondered what “this” was.
“Great. You want to explain to me how this was supposed to work?”
She stared at him a moment. “Who are you?”
Trent seemed to realize for the first time that he was still wearing the clown 
uniform. He glanced down at himself, seemed briefly embarrassed. “Oh. Sorry. I’m 
Trent.”
In an entirely different tone of voice, she said, “Really.” I could see she 
believed him instantly. Not surprising; I had. “So what do I call you, anyway? 
‘Sieur Uncatchable?”
He said simply, “My name is Trent Castanaveras. You can call me Trent.”
Shell nodded slowly, looking him up and down. “Suzanne Montignet designed you.”
“Yes. And you’re second generation TrueBreed.”
“Yes.”
The two genies stood there, just looking at each other, for a long moment, and 
then I saw them both, at almost the same moment, shake themselves slightly. 
Trent spoke as though they were the only two present: “You’ll be an interesting 
person to know, someday.”
Shell actually flushed. “Fuck you too.”
“Tell me about the takedown. How it was supposed to go.”
“Why should I?”
“If I like it, I might still do it.”
Shell took a slow, deep breath, looking searchingly at the man’s stone 
expressionless features, and then seemed to accept it. “Okay. Here’s how it’s 
supposed to go.”
For most of an hour Trent listened to her, nodding occasionally, asking 
questions where I didn’t recognize half the words he was using. At one point he 
interrupted her: “Who ran this simulation?”
“The chain breakdown? An AI named Ring, works with the Claw. I needed it; no 
human could have run the simulation at the depth I needed.”
Trent, sitting in the chair facing her, said absently, “Speak for yourself,” and 
she flushed again, though I and perhaps she could tell it was nothing but a 
throwaway comment. “All right, so you have two, three of the supplemental 
InfoNet Relays, the little talk-to-me’s. You’ll need them—”
“We’ll have all of them,” she said swiftly.
He waved a hand. “That’s minor. Halfway Relay is the big one. How were you going 
to control the traffic when the Relay Stations started going down?”
“Ground stations, primarily—”
“No, I thought of that one myself. It doesn’t work. If—”
She interrupted him eagerly. “Sure it does. Look, the Earth InfoNet moves an 
average one thousand two hundred forty transactions per person per day, a total 
of nine point three trillion transactions per day. At peak traffic you push one 
trillion transactions per hour. Trent, there’s sufficient surplus logic—by an 
order of magnitude—in the Earth InfoNet to handle that load. If—”
Trent sat with his face in his hands. Finally he straightened in his chair and 
interrupted her. “Shut up.”
Shell blinked. “What?”
“Shut up,” said Trent quietly. “You are an arrogant child with no understanding 
of the damage you are prepared to cause my home.”
She looked at him as though he’d slapped her. “Where am I wrong?”
“About eight places, but I’ll start with the worst. Have you ever seen a systems 
analysis on an InfoNet trunk that’s failed?”
“Well—no,” she said, suddenly uncertain. “That doesn’t happen anymore.”
“Not for a good thirty years,” Trent agreed. “But it’s the closest analog we 
have, though on a much smaller scale, to what you’re talking about doing to the 
entire Earth. You haven’t ever studied a trunk failure?”
She started to say something, stopped, shook her head, said, “No.”
Trent nodded. “Great. So watch and learn.” His eyes went blank a second, and 
then an orange slice view of Earth appeared, three-dimensional, with the orbital 
InfoNet Relays hovering in the air a meter above the surface of the planet. 
Trent came to his feet, walked over to the map. “This is the chain. The InfoNet 
Relay Station at Halfway goes down. The little talk-to-me’s take up as much of 
the slack as they can, but Halfway is the primary trunk; suddenly eighty percent 
of the traffic going through the Orbital Relay Stations dumps down to Earth. 
Never mind the rest of the world; since you’re a, what’s the word, patriot, 
that’s it, let’s look at what happens in North America. The switching stations 
in Portland, Cincinnati, Capitol City, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Washington, San 
Francisco, Quebec, San Diego, Miami, Ensenada, Dallas, Chicago—one by one they 
attempt to take up the slack, but they can’t. They were, as you note, designed 
for the volume of traffic you’re going to dump on them; but Shell, they weren’t 
designed to have it dumped on them all at once. Take note; to bring the Halfway 
Relay Station down safely you’d need to break up traffic intelligently among all 
of the ground stations, and you can’t. You don’t have access to the necessary 
resources, nobody but DataWatch does. Back when trunks used to fail, that was 
the commonest reason; not that they were given too much data to handle, but that 
they were given it too abruptly. Processors prioritize desperately; bits drop, 
data gets garbled, processors start trying to figure out just what the hell is 
being thrown at them. In the process, incidentally, every other half-assed, 
badly written expert system in the country has a nervous breakdown. While 
they’re so engaged, the next batch of data arrives, and your downside systems 
still aren’t done running error correction on the first batch. The second batch 
gets stored, if fault tolerance is properly implemented, or dropped, if it’s 
not. In our real-world example, most of the data coming down to the ground 
stations gets dumped. Never mind the cost of the lost data—though you’ve already 
caused a mild recession—because far worse follows.” In the holo, huge sections 
of the country went red, the red spreading south into Mexico, and down through 
Central and into South America. “The InfoNet goes down across most of the 
Western Hemisphere. It stays down for days. This rebellion that’s supposed to 
hurt the Unification—it absolutely breaks the back of Occupied America. One of 
the ten thousand things that goes down with the InfoNet are the ATCs—” At her 
look of incomprehension he said quietly, “Automated Traffic Control cells. 
That’s what TransCon calls them, ATCs. Food distribution is always tight; losing 
TransCon means people start going hungry. Trucks sit in the warehouses and 
because the trucks don’t fly, the maglevs don’t get shipments, and when the 
maglevs don’t get their shipments the supermarkets don’t get theirs. By the 
second day people in big cities—most of the northeast seaboard, and Greater Los 
Angeles—are out of food. Riots follow like the Unification hasn’t seen in fifty 
years; an optimistic solution suggests that five million die in the first week, 
possibly as many as twenty million.”
Shell interrupted him. “But there have to be some sacrifices! You don’t win a 
war without—”
“Shut up.” Trent turned away from the display, turned on her with such anger 
that she actually flinched. “You’re not going to win no matter what you do.” He 
spoke the words slowly, for emphasis. “You… can… not… win.”
Michelle stared at him speechlessly.
“It’s worse than that,” said Trent slowly, his voice almost gentle in contrast. 
“When the InfoNet comes up again, DataWatch—if they’re smart, and they are, at 
least, smarter than you—will bring it up with something like the old Lunar 
Information Network Key hardwired into it, an encryption key that would take the 
InfoNet away from the Players, from us. You’re old enough to remember the LINK; 
I damn near died taking out the LINK back in ‘69. You don’t get to mess up my 
work.” Trent was silent a beat, just looking at her. “Projections I’ve run put 
their odds of success, at taking the InfoNet away from us, at around seventy 
percent; they may not use Image, but they’ve got some of the best webdancers in 
the world working for them, sweetheart, and if you think otherwise you haven’t 
studied DataWatch the way someone calling herself a Player should have. And the 
Players would fight back, of course; the war that followed would make your silly 
rebellion look like the punk idiocy it actually is.”
The withering contempt in his voice wore her down; by the time he was done the 
tips of her ears were bright red. I don’t think he intended this last to carry, 
but I have good hearing; his voice was very low when he said, “And neither you 
nor I even want to think about what happens if the AIs ever get together and 
mount a really serious campaign against DataWatch.”
Shell fell silent for a long while. “Trent,” she said finally, “I’d like to see 
your simulations. I’d like to work through them.”
Trent nodded, rising. “I’m going to have you detained with your cousin; I’ll 
have an infochip sent to your cell.” He gestured to me, turned away.
Shell stood up also. “I can make it work. I can prove it to you.”
“I doubt it.”
Shell said softly, “I’ve spent eight thousand hours on this project.”
It stopped Trent cold. He looked straight at me, paused, and looked back at 
Michelle Altalona. “But you’re only sixteen.”
She stared back at him, clearly proud of herself.
“Jesus and Harry,” said Trent quietly. “Get a life, girl.”
He turned around and left her there, standing motionless and openmouthed in the 
middle of the Halfway Relay Station.




- 12 -
« ^ » 
Denice prepared for bed.
The tub in her bedroom was a marvel; Denice suspected that it was the largest 
tub off the surface of Earth itself. She set the water as hot as she could stand 
it, called the lights down, and floated in the warm darkness until all the 
tension had drained from her. After a time, she was not certain how long, she 
released the drain catch, rose from the tub and dried herself. She pulled on a 
silk robe that had been left out for her and went back to her bedroom. As the 
door to the bathroom uncurled to close, a voice said softly, “Will you accept a 
call?”
Denice sat down on her bed. “From whom?”
The voice paused. “The caller identifies itself as a childhood friend.”
Suddenly Denice’s heart was beating very fast. “Are you a person?”
“No, ‘Selle Daimara.”
Denice bit her lower lip. “Can I turn you off?”
“You can instruct me to not listen to this call, if this is what you mean by 
turning me off. I will comply.”
“Send the call through. Don’t listen.”
“Yes, ‘Selle Daimara.”
There was the briefest of pauses.
A holograph, about thirty centimeters in height, appeared at the foot of her 
bed, glowing slightly against the darkness. It wavered, then solidified.
A young man, perhaps in his midtwenties, with short blond hair and pale blue 
eyes, stood at the foot of Denice’s bed. “Hello, Denice.”
The voice, the face—Denice stared at the image, felt her heart skip a beat.
Her mouth was very dry. “Trent? Is that you?”

We had dinner together, Trent and I, in Marc’s office.
Trent cleared Marc’s desk, and we ate atop the desk. Mexican food, huevos 
rancheros with warm corn tortillas. Not at all bad.
I sat in one of the guest chairs, Trent in Marc’s. Through Marc’s window, behind 
Trent, I could see, off in the far distance, a glowing, expanding cloud of 
debris that had once been a Space Force ship.
“Tomorrow I’m going to have to go be seen.”
Trent nodded. “Yes. The fighting will keep them occupied tonight; tomorrow we’ll 
have a good simulation of Packard for anyone who might call him; you and a 
couple of squads of our fake Space Force will head out into Halfway and let 
yourselves be seen. Word is that Security has been confined to barracks for the 
duration; you don’t have to explain it when people ask, just say it’s so and 
look unhappy. They’ll draw their own conclusions.”
“What happens if someone actually calls Space Force to complain?”
“So long as they don’t call the Peaceforcers,” Trent said mildly. “First, you 
try to prevent that happening. There’s a pretty good chance it won’t; Halfway is 
used to looking to you, Neil, and then to Packard, as the final arbiters on most 
subjects. Be unhappy, but don’t make too big a deal of this; temporary 
inconvenience, due to the fighting, soon over. Second, if somebody does try to 
get through to Space Force brass, odds are good they won’t. I haven’t let you 
call out, so you don’t know; the InfoNet’s an absolute mess right now. Traffic 
is running three hundred percent above normal, due to the fighting, and 
DataWatch is all over the InfoNet, web angels clogging every channel, slowing 
down even legitimate business by thirty or forty percent before you tack on the 
three hundred percent extra traffic penalty. It’s at least fifty-fifty the call 
gets ignored even it it gets through. It doesn’t seem all that unreasonable that 
a couple of squads of Space Force might have taken over the Halfway Relay 
Station, and only slightly unreasonable that they’ve taken over Administration 
Central; it almost happened for real. So even if they get through, it’s possible 
that the brass will figure it’s a case of left hand-right hand. Third, suppose 
someone calls, gets through, and brass gets alarmed. Brass calls here, we 
identify ourselves as Space Force Detached, Squads SG02 and SG03.”
“Um—”
“Yes?”
“That’s the Secretary General’s escort group, no?”
Trent nodded. “Yes. So our hypothetical brass calls the SG’s office, asks if 
SG02 and SG03 are properly detached to duty at Halfway—”
“And you’re screwed.”
Trent shook his head, spoke around a bite of warm corn tortilla. “Nope. The 
SecGen’s office says, ‘Yes, they’re ours.’ ”

The small image said hesitantly, “Trent—as you mean that question, no. I am that 
part of Trent that used to be Johnny Johnny. Trent’s Image. Today we are very 
much of a part. You may call me Johnny Johnny if you wish, or Trent; I will 
answer to either.”
So many different things tumbled through the back of Denice’s head that for a 
very long moment nothing at all came out. She licked her lips, finally, said, 
“What would you like to be called?”
The Image said simply, “Call me Trent.”

“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. I’m not proud of it,” Trent conceded, “but I am serious. The Secretary 
General and I have certain interests in common. At the moment.”
I couldn’t imagine. “Such as?”
Trent actually laughed. “Well, for starters, we’re both terrified of Mohammed 
Vance.”

They talked long into the night.
“I’ve missed you so much,” Denice whispered. “I can’t tell you how many times 
I’ve woken up at night and wondered what I was doing on Earth, why I didn’t go 
to join you.”
The Image nodded. “I have wondered,” he said quietly. “If—” The Image paused, 
and spoke deliberately. “I must speak to you of emotions, and I have none. The 
person I speak of is not I. He is the passion, and the desire.”
“Is Trent.”
“If you wish. My biological component—” The Image hesitated again. The words he 
spoke would have sounded melodramatic from any human; from Image that lacked 
emotion they had the simple ring of truth. “His heart aches and his soul is 
empty. When he lost you he ceased to be a whole person. He has loved many 
people; you are the only one he has ever let himself need. He wrote this of you, 
some years ago:

Still the days seem the same
You say you want
Silence and solitude
Promises made
Unbroken
Dreams
Unspoken True
I don’t need dreams
Have what I want
And all I need is you

Denice sat in the darkness while silent tears tracked down her cheeks. “I’ve 
done things that would horrify him. He doesn’t even love the girl he knew seven 
years ago, he didn’t know her long enough. He loves a child who died when I was 
nine. He doesn’t love me.”
“He did once,” said Trent’s Image softly. “Does any part of that person still 
live in you?”
“Yes, no,” she cried, “I don’t know.”

Trent seemed restless. He got up, and paced, sat down again, talked 
compulsively, listened with half an ear when I talked. I didn’t know the man, 
obviously; perhaps this was normal for him. Around two or three in the morning, 
in response to a comment I made regarding the preparations the Rebs had made, he 
snapped, “They have no chance.”
“Is it really that bad?”
Trent sighed. “I’m not exaggerating, if that’s what you mean. Neil, if 
everything the rebels are planning goes right—absolutely everything—they still 
lose. No projection I make has them coming away winners. To win they need the 
Collective and the CityStates, and they don’t have either; what’s worse, this 
pimp, Obodi, he didn’t even try to get either to back him. With the Collective 
on their side it’s possible; but even with the Collective it’s closer than I’d 
like.” Trent hesitated visibly, said finally, “There is one thing that gives 
them a bare chance. But the cost of trying it is too high, and there are still 
no guarantees. They probably haven’t even considered it as an option.”
“What is it?”
Trent shook his head. “I won’t tell you. It scares me that I thought of it 
myself.” He sighed, rubbed the sides of his temples with his fingers. “I was 
raised by the PKF until I was ten years old, Corona; the Unification Council 
freed us from them the day before my eleventh birthday. I learned a lot from the 
PKF. If they were running this rebellion, it would succeed. They’re 
professionals, and I have great respect for them. The thing I thought of 
doing—they’ve thought of it. They’ve planned for it if it happens. And those 
stupid sons of bitches running the rebellion down on Earth, the Rebs and the 
Claw, they’re so far out of their depth they don’t even know which end is up 
anymore.”

Toward morning, when Denice was tired and empty of tears, the Image said 
finally, “He asked that this message be given you before I leave: I hurt when I 
think of you. I am pained so that I cannot love or dream or plan with 
conviction. But it has not stopped me from thinking of you, every day of the 
last seven years. A day does not go by that I do not think of you. A day does 
not go by that I do not wish you to join me.”
Denice sat quietly, fought not to let it show how the words touched her. She 
said after a moment, “He can’t still love me. He—lies to himself—exquisitely 
well.”
Trent’s Image said slowly, “Perhaps. But it does not make what he feels less 
real.”
“It’s been seven years. And seven years before that since we were together for 
more than a brief while.”
“He has not stopped hurting.”
Denice bit her lip. “Trent, that’s insane.”
The Image of Trent the Uncatchable nodded. “I do not believe that sanity is his 
strong point.” A brief pause. “Web angels are flooding the InfoNet as we speak, 
in anticipation of an upcoming battle; I must go soon. Do you have a message for 
Trent, when I return to him?”
“Tell him—I miss him.”
“Ah.”
Denice said quietly, “Trent, I love you.”
Trent’s Image said, “There are days—when he—still believes that; and days when 
he can’t, because you haven’t come to join him. But it’s good to hear, 
nonetheless.”
“I do love you.”
The Image stood silently, shimmering in the darkness of her room. “I’ll tell him 
you said so. It will mean a great deal to him. He loves you more—” Trent 
hesitated. His speech, when it resumed, was very slow. “Forgive me. Web 
angels—I’m devoting significant processor time to hiding from them. They’re 
sweeping through this entire section of the InfoNet. I may have waited too 
long.”
Denice spoke in a desperate rush: “Trent loves me more than what?”
The Image seemed to be looking straight at her. “More than you love him, of 
course. He’s a very foolish person, really. I must go now if I’m to have any 
hope of survival. I’ll tell him what you said.”
The bright image ceased, left behind a black afterimage in Denice’s eyes.
Denice sat as Trent’s Image had left her, sitting still and motionless, when 
Robert came for her. He spoke as the door curled open. “Denice!”
She did not look up at him, did not let him see the tears that had left her 
cheeks wet. “What?”
“My dear—perhaps this is bad timing, but—”
“What?”
“We’re being attacked.”
Denice looked up, saw him standing in the doorway looking at her.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said quietly, “but I thought you might want to 
know.”

Trent’s Image fled through the orbital InfoNet.
It was a dangerous place at the best of times, and doubly so now, with DataWatch 
prepared for war. Trent knew he had no chance of getting back undetected; he 
hoped only that he could get back to his body at all.
He fled through a chained series of low-altitude comsats. The comsats spoke both 
to one another and to InfoNet communications relays on Earth. At no point did 
Trent consider going down to Earth; with no secured processors as a home base, 
he would be no better off than in the Orbital InfoNet.
Jump, and jump, and jump again—Trent found himself in a transfer node, a small 
observation area with excellent input attachments, poor output. Paths led away 
from the transfer node in eight directions.
The living Image of Trent the Uncatchable paused briefly, considered his 
options. Web angels closed in on him as he considered, as the borrowed processor 
cycles that the Image stole from its surroundings moved slowly by. Trent fired 
viruses and phages back in the direction he had come, paused long enough to 
clone himself into a dozen apparently functional ghosts, and sent the ghosts 
back after the viruses and phages.
Eight paths led outward.
Six were fixed maser; two of them were lasercable, routed to some other 
dataspace inside the small satellite Trent inhabited. No aimable maser; a single 
aiming maser, anywhere along the line of his flight, would have given him the 
option of beamcasting the record of his conversation with Denice directly back 
to Halfway. Half the System would have intercepted it, but properly encoded it 
would have been no great danger.
And at least his body would have known what had transpired with Denice.
There were no good options; Trent disguised himself, sent ghosts out into the 
InfoNet through all eight available channels. Two ghosts were terminated 
instantly, and a third shortly after. Five channels left, and reports from the 
ghosts he had sent out along his back trail were not good: web angels would be 
on him within instants.
He had insufficient cycles to create true copies of himself; by the time a 
single clone had been twinned, the web angels would have destroyed him.
For the barest instant Trent knew despair.
The web angels were very close now.
He chose a channel at random out of the remaining five, and leapt upward.
Into eternity.

I think I napped for a bit.
When I awoke again I found Trent standing motionless at the great window, 
watching the empty field of stars. He stood unnaturally still, turned slightly 
away from me, for so long I wondered if he had fallen asleep on his feet; you 
can do that in low gee.
“Come on,” Trent whispered in a loud, harsh voice, the voice of a wizard 
prophesying. “Come on, you can do it.” The moment the words were uttered Trent 
jerked as though he’d touched a live wire, shivered for a moment, and then shook 
his head. “Damn. Oh, damn.”
“Trent?”
He did not look at me, spoke very slowly indeed. “Neil. I’d—forgotten you were 
here. You should go get some sleep. You’ll need it tomorrow.”
“What happened?”
“I lost myself inside a tiny little talk-to-me satellite. Damn thing must have 
been forty years old. Crappy hardware like that shouldn’t be allowed in the 
InfoNet.”
“Oh.” I didn’t even know what losing yourself consisted of, but it felt as 
though something more were required. I said, “I’m very sorry.”
Trent said distantly, “It’s okay.” He looked out the great viewport, eyes 
unfocused, and if I live to be a hundred I doubt I will ever again see such 
naked pain on a human face, with clown paint or otherwise. He looked for all the 
world like someone was grinding glass down onto the surface of his heart.
I had the good sense to keep my mouth shut.
When at length Trent turned to me his features were curiously empty. “Sorry 
about that. Ships heading toward the Chandler Estate, Reb ships probably. A 
woman I haven’t seen in seven years is in trouble over there. We talked all 
night.” I did not think I imagined what he said as he left: “I wonder what she 
said.”




- 13 -
« ^ » 
They ran through empty hallways to the garage. One of Chandler’s young servants 
met them on their way, wearing a p-suit and carrying another pair. The man 
handed one p-suit to Denice, the other to Robert, and vanished off down a side 
corridor.
Dvan was in the garage, already in his p-suit, helmet hooked loosely at his hip. 
He walked slowly around the shell of the semiballistic, checking for something, 
Denice was not certain what.
She spoke while squirming into her p-suit. “Who is it?”
Dvan’s voice boomed from the other side of the semiballistic. “Hard to say. Six 
ships, they’re not Space Force, they’re not PKF. They’re going to have a fight 
to remember, getting through Estate defenses, but if they’re armed the way I’d 
have armed them, they—”
A rumble, the sound of distant thunder on a summer night, reached them. Dvan 
came back around the body of the semiballistic. “They will,” Dvan finished. 
“Warhead,” he added. “And close to the house, lass, or we’d not have heard it.”
“Where are we going?”
Dvan shrugged. “Elsewhere.” He placed one gloved hand against the 
semiballistic’s airlock doorpad. “If—”
Denice’s ears popped. A brief violent wind stormed around her, and then 
suddenly, as though of its own volition, the bulk of the semiballistic lifted 
itself free of the deck, tumbled gently and majestically to its side, away from 
the three of them, and plowed into the hull of the house. The shock of impact 
knocked Denice from her feet, down to the spinning hull.
It was abruptly difficult to breathe. Robert was ten meters away from her, 
shouting something strangely silent, pointing, and Denice looked upward—
—at stars.
Space Force, Denice thought very clearly, has not recovered the laser cannon. 
Nothing but an X-laser cannon could have sliced away an entire corner of the 
house.
There was no air in her lungs.
For the first time in her life, Denice Castanaveras was possessed of the abrupt, 
absolutely certain conviction, I’m going to die. First step; put the helmet on. 
It was still in her hand, but she hadn’t practiced with it enough; she fumbled 
and dropped it. Another section of the house came free, glowing brilliant white 
at the edges, where the X-laser had touched it. Denice picked the helmet up, 
tried to put it on backward while red dots danced in front of her eyes. She 
realized her mistake, corrected it, got the helmet on in the correct direction. 
Her eyes were stinging and abruptly she could not see at all, not anything—
Huge hands grasped her, an arm went around her chest, and the helmet settled 
into place around her with the gentlest of clicks.
Air rushed in on her. With the air came a vast pain in her lungs, and then 
cramps; she doubled over on herself, curled herself up around a pain so great 
she could not imagine what it might be. She blinked, again and again, blinked 
the blood away from her eyes—
The white glare of the explosion dazzled her eyes, even through the film of 
blood, for the very briefest instant; then her faceplate went completely black. 
The wave front, when it touched her, was no more than a gentle push.
Stars wheeled by over her head, and then the sun, then Earth, and then stars 
again.
She did not know how long the airplant in her suit was good for.
It hardly mattered; she did not know how long she had been floating, completely 
alone, in the depths of space.
The only thing she was certain of was that she was going to die, and probably 
soon.
After a while the air in her suit got uncomfortably stuffy.
She could see Halfway, if she bothered to pay attention when it swung by. It did 
not look particularly interesting; noodles, she had heard somebody call it once. 
Pretty close.
The bright spark of a spacecraft’s rockets appeared, now and again, in the area 
near her. They were, she thought, searching for her. She doubted they would find 
her; it would be difficult, in the midst of all the other debris from the 
Chandler Estate, to find anything so small as a person.
The spark grew brighter as Denice’s vision faded. She wondered if they would get 
here in time.




- 14 -
« ^ » 
Nobody—I mean nobody—cared.
Space Force had taken control of Halfway? It was fine by them.
Trent was right. Halfers accepted the story as given; most of them, busy 
monitoring the InfoNet for news about the real story, Space Force’s attempt to 
recover the laser cannon, simply didn’t care that, instead of the usual Halfway 
Security, they had Space Force today, and maybe tomorrow. Most didn’t even ask, 
and the few who did ask accepted the story they were given without apparent 
question.
To the homebrews, downsiders are downsiders, regardless.
The rebels, mostly Japanese according to the reports on the Boards, were 
acquitting themselves much better than anybody had guessed; they’d repulsed two 
waves of Elite already. At least half the orbital cannon were under control of 
rebel forces. Reports of dead Elite were unconfirmed, but a pair of NewsBoard 
reporters claimed to have seen at least one.
We kept our heads down. Toward lunchtime a disturbance flared up out on the 
Edge; I took a pair of Trent’s SpaceFarers with me and went myself. We didn’t 
even have to crack heads; the simple fact that the Chief had shown up with a 
pair in Space Force blues, rather than one of the standard patrols, shocked them 
into something like sobriety. I lectured them briefly, snakechained the one who 
had started the trouble to the bar—a two-hour snake—and got out of there.
We were not far from my home; I told my SpaceFarers where we were going, and 
why; they called it in. I heard Trent’s voice, saying “Go ahead,” and the 
SpaceFarer nodded to me.
I didn’t take much. CU:40,000, in hard Collective gold, from the safe. If Jay 
had known I’d been stockpiling it, he’d probably have made me some damn lecture 
about paranoia.
It all fit very neatly in one smallish briefcase. Downside it would be extremely 
heavy; now I just had to be careful how I moved it.
I was ready to leave when I remembered one of the things I’d heard about Trent 
the Uncatchable; he was a coffee junkie. Seven years he’d been out in the Belt; 
Earth-grown coffee is damn rare out there. I had just under a kilo of S&W 
Colombian in the stasis field; about half a kilo of Jamaican Blue. I bagged them 
both, and went from room to room, simply looking at everything, committing my 
home to memory.
When I was done I turned out all the lights, and left the house unlocked.
I never saw it again.
That evening, after dinner, Trent and I sat and drank coffee together. He had an 
appointment with Shell for later that evening; she wanted to take another shot 
at convincing him to help her take down the InfoNet. I knew why he’d agreed to 
go, and it had nothing to do with the InfoNet.
He was still wearing his clown uniform—he was almost the only one who was; most 
of the rest of his people, except for the one really big clown who I suspected 
was Trent’s bodyguard, had changed into Space Force fatigues. He wore a laser 
rifle slung across his back. I felt vaguely disoriented by it all; not detached, 
but as though I moved through a world filled with so many fascinating, brightly 
colored things that I would never have time to understand them all.
Somewhere around my second and Trent’s fifty cup of coffee, I said, “What are 
you going to do with Marc?”
Trent seemed mildly surprised I’d asked. “Keep him confined until I leave. Why?”
“He must have known you were coming.”
“Oh, of course,” Trent conceded. “He didn’t know it was me, mind you, just that 
some SpaceFarers were going to show. But I don’t trust the man. I’ve got CU:five 
million on my head; quite aside from the Credit, it’s occurred to him by now 
that giving the PKF my head would help him keep his job.” Trent paused, added, 
“Anyway, after we’re gone, it gives him a much better alibi if he spent all his 
time in jail.”
“I’m not coming with you.”
Trent nodded, little white roses bobbing up and down with the movement of his 
cheeks. “Didn’t think so. Your boss has a yacht in Bay D12. I’ll have it moved 
over to Lock Nine, and you can leave when we do. I’ll program it for you if you 
like.”
“I would; wrestling a HuskySled is about the limits of my competence. Can you 
have it drop me outside of Levittown, Pennsylvania?”
Trent paused. “Ah. Your hometown. Sure. If you get chased, I’ll send you in like 
a meteor. You’ll get very hot, and the yacht won’t ever lift again; but you’ll 
make ground a good fifteen minutes ahead of any pursuit you might pick up. If 
you don’t get pursued, which is possible given how confused things are outside 
right now, the yacht will drop gently, and you can park it wherever you like.”
I nodded. “Thanks.”
“No problem. I wish you well.”
“Mind if I ask you a question?”
Trent said, “Why am I here?”
“No, I understand that. Protecting the InfoNet. But why did Eddore want you 
here?”
Trent nodded. “Look at his options. He wants to retain power. To do that, he 
needs martial law. For that he needs a rebellion. So he has to make rebellion 
look attractive to the Rebs and Claw, while not allowing them any real chance at 
success. The Rebs think they need the InfoNet to go down; if they think they 
can’t send the InfoNet down, they don’t rise. Clear so far?”
His voice had the timbre of a trained singer; I felt that I could lose myself in 
the sound of his voice, in the gentle wash of the words.
“Neil?”
“Uh—yes. Clear so far.”
“So the Rebs have to believe that they have a real shot at taking the InfoNet 
down. If Eddore goes to Space Force or the PKF asks them to provide security for 
the Relay Station, the Rebs will know about it; there are Reb and Claw 
sympathizers in both organizations. So he needs a third party to protect the 
InfoNet, someone capable of protecting the InfoNet without the rebels being 
aware of it. That’s us. We’re here to protect the Relay Station, until July the 
Fourth.”
Trent’s features grew sharp in front of me, the tiny veins in his eyes bright 
red against the blue-white sclera. His clown outfit was made of cotton, of a 
very fine Crosshatch weave; his buttons were wood, painted by hand with tiny 
white roses. I blinked hard. “But—why not tell the Rebs what you’re doing? Why 
let this hit them unawares?”
His voice echoed when he spoke. “They can’t win, Neil. The faster they lose, the 
better it is for everyone, including them. If they drag this thing out, it’s 
that much longer before things return to normal, that much longer before Obodi 
is dead and we can start to rebuild.”
I don’t know how I knew this, but suddenly I did. “It bothers you,” I said 
slowly, “that they’ve put a bounty on his head that’s greater than yours.”
“Did he walk through a wall? I don’t think so,” Trent said conclusively.
“It does bother you.”
Trent eyed me with clear appraisal. “You don’t miss much.”
“You’ll never know.” The brown of his eyes was the color of old oak. A voice 
that was not mine was speaking to Trent, and I strained to make out the words. 
“I am the living eyes of Kayell’no, the Name Storytellers; chosen for my 
location, for my nearness to the center of events. I watch; I learn; I observe. 
In his own person Kayell’no will never know you, and this pains him.” The voice 
paused, grew more distant as it said, “Pains me.”
Trent rose from the desk, took a step back. The laser rifle swung free, came 
around on me. “Corona? Are you all right?”
I’m fine, I was going to say to him; who the hell are you talking to?
But something prevented me; and then the world spun around me and went away.

My avatar shuddered, slumped in his chair with his eyes still open. Trent took a 
step back, bringing the laser rifle up to bear on my avatar’s motionless form.
I let Neil’s eyes close, and sat in the darkness, in the hard, stiff chair, and 
familiarized myself with the mechanism of the meat.
When I opened his eyes, Trent had moved the desk to the side, and nothing 
separated the two of us; Trent squatted two and a half meters away from me, back 
to the huge window, balanced easily on the balls of his feet; the muzzle of his 
laser rifle stared me directly in the face. I gathered Neil’s feet under me, 
pushed him to a standing position; Trent moved with me, glided sideways, keeping 
the rifle on me, but did not interfere as I pushed the chair Corona sat in 
backward, put more space between myself and Trent and Trent’s laser.
If the historical record concerning Trent was correct, the laser probably wasn’t 
loaded. But history lies a lot; I would not risk Neil’s life on it.
Trent said, “Are you all right?”
I said, “I am the Name Storyteller.”
He lifted an eloquent eyebrow. “Ah.”
“I wish to tell you a story, Trent the Uncatchable.”
“Uh, I’m a little short on time here, actually. Got to see a girl about a 
rebellion.”
I grinned at him, trying it out. Corona’s muscles were unfamiliar to me; like 
most of my avatars, I rarely use him, rarely have need. There are few enough 
places in the Continuing Time I cannot go in my own person.
The immediate vicinity of Trent the Uncatchable, in the year 2076 Gregorian, 
happens to be one of them.
“It will be said of you, Trent the Uncatchable, in years to come when you are 
not to be found in the Continuing Time, that you were the living incarnation of 
God, of the Creator of all things, of that which sent the Envoy among the 
Serathin.”
I saw Trent start to say something, hesitate. I think what he said then was not 
what he had started to say. “They say something like that now, you know. It’s a 
joke, because the PKF keeps telling people I walked through a wall. I’m really 
just a thief.” He paused, added softly, “A great thief, it’s true.”
“In time to come, what is perhaps now a joke will cease to be so. Once there was 
a thief, and the thief was God. That is the first line in the Exodus Bible, 
Trent; a thousand years from now, after only the Zaradin Church itself, the 
Church of His Return will be the largest human religion in the known Continuing 
Time.”
“The what time?”
“May I tell you a story, Trent?”
He backed another two steps away from me, muzzle of the laser never wavering 
from my face, stood with his back to the door, and withdrew a snake chain from 
within the bulky clown’s vest. He threw it to me. “Put it on, snake your right 
wrist to the arm of the chair.” I sat down again, did as he instructed, and when 
I was done he said softly, “Go ahead. You have five minutes.”
I did not waste my time. I calmed Corona, quieted the vague, unformed fears my 
takeover had left within him, and began.
Before I was, to tell this story; before Camber was, to Play it; before the 
explosion that began the long cycles of the Great Wheel’s existence, the Envoy 
of Balance ventured forth to match itself against the Chaotic beings called 
Serathin.
There in the gray maelstrom of spaceless, timeless Chaos, a tremendous battle 
raged.
Of that battle’s beginning and middle I can tell you nothing. Time has no 
meaning in this context, and the language I am constrained to use with you is 
insufficient: for a period longer than the Great Wheel has existed, or is likely 
to, the Envoy of Balance and the Serathin remained locked together in combat, a 
combat in which neither side was able to triumph. But eventually the battle did 
end, and at its end the Envoy of Balance, known ever after as the Chained One, 
had been bound upon a shining Wheel.
Perhaps the Serathin had time to admire their handiwork; they were such beings 
as would have done so, given the chance. And perhaps they did not; what is 
certain is that the Chained One, bound upon the Wheel, had one weapon left to 
itself, and used it.
The Great Wheel of Existence exploded.
It was not the Big Bang that began this phase of the Great Wheel’s existence, 
but a grander and more powerful forerunner. The expanding wave front of its 
explosion hurled itself outward, overtook the fleeing Serathin, and passed them; 
and when it had passed, the Serathin found themselves trapped for all eternity 
inside the Great Wheel they had fashioned as a prison for the Chained One. Far 
faster than the Serathin could follow its expansion, the Great Wheel of 
Existence spread outward in an explosion of matter/antimatter-based timelines, 
expanding into both Time and Space.
On the individual timelines, life arose; life unlike the Chaotic beings called 
Serathin, unlike the bound Envoy of Balance, but containing elements of both. 
And the Great Wheel continued its expansion; and civilizations rose, and fell, 
and rose again. And with the passage of time, the Great Wheel expanded more 
slowly; until there came a moment when the energy that had fueled the Great 
Wheel’s expansion had been expended. The Great Wheel hung upon a momentary 
equilibrium, and then began to contract. In the instant of its contraction, the 
sky throughout all of the Great Wheel’s timelines began at once to blaze white.
The Wheel shrank back in upon itself, to the moment when the space-time 
continuum would briefly cease to exist, when the Great Wheel would exist as 
nothing more than a timeless, spaceless point of transfinite energy—
—and then expand again.
How many times this has happened I cannot tell you.
I do not know.
I opened my eyes to silence.
Trent stood motionless, watching me. The muzzle of his rifle had dropped 
slightly, now pointed at a spot just over Neil Corona’s solar plexus—Neil didn’t 
like that at all. A head shot is a chancy thing; a shot to the stomach, with a 
maser, is not.
Finally Trent said, “Is that it? That’s what you wanted to tell me?”
“Yes.”
His smile was a slow, bemused thing. “That’s the whole story, is it?”
“No. If I were to tell you the entire story, so far as I know it, we would grow 
old together. Does what I have told you seem familiar to you? Does it stir any 
memory?”
Trent shook his head. The distant smile did not leave him. “I can’t say that it 
does. Possibly it reminds me of a bad fantasy sensable I once played.”
“You have never heard of the Serathin, of the Envoy of Balance?”
“No.”
“Of the Chained One?”
He shook his head again, and I knew he was not lying. “No.”
“Then you are very fortunate, Trent the Uncatchable. If you are another Envoy, 
and do not yet know it, then—” I paused, willed him to meet my eyes; 
concentrated my attention upon the person of Trent the Uncatchable, raised my 
voice until it echoed against the walls of Marc Packard’s office, and Spoke. 
“Listen well, Trent the Uncatchable: We are watching you, and if you are not a 
fraud, if you are an Envoy such as the one whose Chaining created this universe, 
then know that among the ten Great Gods you have nine Great Enemies; and nobody, 
not even the renegade God of Players, will protect you from the massed strength 
of the Serathin. We will cease the truce, loose our Time Wars upon this 
continuum once more, and when we are done, you will not only not exist, you will 
never have existed.”
He shook himself slightly when I was done. A Speaking will do that to you. “All 
this because I walked through a wall once?”
“Did you?”
Trent said gently, “That would be telling.”
“Ah.” I took a deep breath, relaxed, and said quietly, “Perhaps I am seeing 
meaning where there is none. It’s a problem of mine, you know.”
“Is it?”
“You are probably a fraud, Trent. I do often find myself imposing narrative 
order on unrelated events. Randomness occurs in the universe; it’s just that it 
makes for bad storytelling. If you are merely a thief, Trent the Uncatchable, we 
will never meet again. When I remember this moment, it will be as the memory of 
a dream. I regret that, for you interest me.”
“Neil, you are the strangest man I have ever met.”
“I am not Neil Corona. I am Chai’ell November, the Name Storyteller, and I am 
leaving. Good-bye, Trent the Uncatchable.”
I let go of my avatar.
There was not much time left, and I had other business to attend.
It was of course not long after that date in 2076 when my avatar Neil Corona 
spoke to Trent that Trent the Uncatchable died, and rose again, and then 
vanished from the Continuing Time, perhaps forever.




- 15 -
« ^ » 
Silence.
Trent’s voice broke it, a rasping unpleasant thing that grated at my ears. “Are 
you all right?”
Darkness.
I opened my eyes to a glare of light that I could not reconcile with the gentle 
glowpaint that I knew was in use in Marc’s office. With the opening of my eyes 
it all flooded in on me, like a sensable with the volume control pumped all the 
way up. Everything was intolerably bright and loud and the soft linen of my 
security uniform was made of sandpaper.
I shook my head, winced at the sudden surge of pain. “No. No,” I said carefully, 
voice booming in my ears, “I am not okay.” Suddenly Trent snapped into focus, 
the only clear thing in the world, standing several meters away from me, laser 
rifle cradled at ready, simply watching without making any motion to help me. I 
started to struggle to my feet, found my right hand chained to the seat. My head 
pounded as though it were about to come off; I felt as though I might vomit at 
any moment.
I sat back down abruptly.
“Would you like a drink?”
My head swam. I leaned forward and put my head between my knees. “Yes. Yes, I 
would. And I’d like this damn snake taken off too.”
I don’t even remember how old I was the first time this happened to me. Eight, 
maybe. Nine. When I was young it happened more often; in the last thirty, forty 
years, only twice.
Every now and again I kid myself that it’s stopped.
A bulb was pushed into my hand, and without opening my eyes I cycled it open and 
sucked it back. It was cold and it cleared my head a bit. I was aware of Trent 
standing immediately to my right; suddenly the snake released my wrist and 
dropped loose, fell to the floor.
Trent moved back, said, “How often does this happen to you?”
“What makes you think it’s happened before?”
“I took the snake off, Neil. I could have left it on.”
Fair enough. “Not often.”
“Ever seen a doctor about it?”
Even chuckling hurt. “The first time was fifty years before you were born.” I 
sat up and opened my eyes again. Better this time; the glare had lessened, and I 
could make out the shapes of most of the objects in Marc’s office.
Trent’s voice was gentle, persistent. “When was the last time you had an 
episode?”
He seemed genuinely interested, I don’t know why; I made an effort to think 
back. “Last time? Visiting New York City with Marc. He was negotiating with the 
Castanaveras telepaths for some work they were going to do for him—I figured it 
was probably the gravity stress; that trip downside was the longest period 
either of us had spent in a full gee in a couple decades.”
“Do you remember anything about them?”
I said shortly, “No. Not that there’s much to remember, is there? I just stare 
at things like a drooling idiot.”
“You talked to me.”
Trent moved so fast I didn’t even catch it; suddenly he was a meter farther away 
from me, the rifle coming up so that he looked at me over the sight. I didn’t 
realize until then how fast I’d come to my feet. “I what?”
Trent didn’t lower the laser. He said carefully, “You talked to me. Seven, eight 
minutes.”
“What did I say?”
“Strange things, Neil. Have you ever heard of the Chained One? The Envoy of 
Balance?”
“What?”
“How about the Continuing Time?”
“The what time?”
“I said the same thing. Have you ever heard of the Serathin?”
“No.”
“Well.” He lowered the rifle just a bit. “That’s what you talked about.”
I sat down again, moving slowly, and buried my face in my hands. “I can’t wait 
until this is all over.”
Trent nodded, lowered the laser a bit more. “It’s getting a little weird for me 
too. Still, it won’t be much longer.”
“No?”
“It’s a quarter past midnight, Neil. And I was supposed to see ‘Selle Altaloma 
fifteen minutes ago. I’m late. Of course I’m late a lot, everybody knows that. 
So she probably isn’t surprised.”
“It’s midnight?”
“Past. Yes.”
“Oh. So it is.” Twelve-seventeen a.m., according to my handheld, the morning of 
July 3, 2076.




- 16 -
« ^ » 
Ichabod Martin waited with Douglass Ripper, in Ripper’s office, for Secretary 
General Eddore to return Ripper’s call.
They did not speak to one another while they waited.
There was no background holograph today; they waited in the midst of a huge, 
dark gray empty space.
Toward late morning, July 3, 2076, the holofield flickered into existence in 
front of Ripper’s desk. Eddore spoke as his image took shape. “Councilor 
Ripper.”
“Sir.”
Eddore said, “I’m in a bit of a hurry, Councilor; what can I do for you?”
“This Executive Action your people submitted to the Council; it’s going to cause 
ah uproar, sir, and it’s not necessary.”
Eddore said mildly, “To which Executive Action are you referring? I’ve issued 
three in the last weeks.”
“You know which one,” Ripper snapped. “Yesterday’s, the one declaring martial 
law, suspending elections for the duration, and reducing the two-thirds majority 
required to modify the Statement of Principles to a simple plurality. None of 
these steps are necessary to deal with the crisis in Japan, a mess that wouldn’t 
exist in the first place if you and the PKF hadn’t encouraged them by dogging it 
in dealing with the Johnny Rebs.”
“I disagree with you, Douglass. Is that all?”
“In the history of the Unification, only three Executive Actions have ever been 
overturned in Council session. This is going to be the fourth, sir. I’m offering 
you the opportunity to withdraw this from Council consideration before I 
humiliate you over it.”
Eddore sighed. “Martial law is temporary, Douglass. You know that. Once we’ve 
put down this insurrection, we’ll go ahead with the elections. You must realize 
I have no interest in turning the position of Secretary General into a 
dictatorship.”
“You can’t do this. I have the votes to veto this Action, and if you—”
Charles Eddore cut Douglass Ripper off in a voice that was soft and even. 
“School’s in, sucker. Stop me. Give it your best shot.” His smile grew slightly 
and he leaned forward. “You rank fucking amateur ex-United States Senator. I 
can’t?”
Ripper said slowly, controlling the fury that threatened to creep into his 
voice, “You’re making a terrible mistake, not just with me, but with Occupied 
America at large.”
Eddore shrugged dismissively. “We’ll see.”
“Damn it, Eddore, they’ll riot over this, and you know it. It’ll mean blood in 
the streets.”
Charles Eddore moved his lips in an easy, generous smile. “Well, it won’t be the 
first time, will it?” He nodded in dismissal. “Good day, Douglass.”
His image vanished.

Shortly after lunch Ripper sat at his table in the Council Chamber, three floors 
below ground, protected from the rebel laser cannon by three different 
twenty-meter-thick layers of ferrocrete. He sat alone at the table reserved for 
New York Metro, watching the debate progress. Considering that there were almost 
six hundred Unification Councilors—approximately one to every twelve and a half 
million humans on the planet—it was going acceptably quickly. First-term 
Councilors had been informed that they would not be allowed to speak, merely to 
vote; others had been asked, cajoled, and begged, to move forward with all 
speed. Those who insisted on speaking were given only five minutes.
Progress was acceptable. Ripper sat with his handheld plugged into the table, 
monitoring—like most of the other Unification Councilors—battle coverage from 
both NewsBoard and the Electronic Times. The third holo floating over his desk 
was from NewsBoard’s coverage of the Unification Council proceedings.
About fifty-eight percent of those present—and all but the twelve Japanese 
Unification Councilors, and one who was in the hospital with a stroke, were 
present; a modern record—were, by Ripper’s head count, inclined to vote against 
the most recent Executive Action. Against were all of the American, Canadian, 
and English Councilors; most of the Australian delegation, India, the bulk of 
Pan-Africa, most of Northern Africa, most of the Russian and RussoAsian 
republics. In favor were most of the South American countries—the Unification 
had been good to South America—China, and much of Europe. France, of course. 
Israel, Spain, Greece, most of the Baltic countries, New Zealand.
China, France, and Brazil, as founding members, had extra votes. They trimmed 
Ripper’s real 58 percent-42 percent edge closer than Ripper liked, to about 53 
percent-47 percent.
In question were the Arab and Muslim countries; the Asian countries, most of 
which did not like the Unification, but disliked Japan worse; a scattering of 
the Scandinavian countries. And the Lunar Councilors, of course; but Unification 
Luna held only thirty-three million people, and they had only three 
representatives. Though they occasionally showed surprising streaks of 
independence, on this issue they would probably vote Eddore’s way. Ripper did 
not let himself worry about it, as he had ten to twelve votes more than he 
needed.
Some pretty decent speech making transpired during the course of the long 
afternoon. The senior French Councilor, leading the session off, made an 
impassioned speech in defense of the Unification, imploring any undecided 
Councilors to vote in favor of Eddore’s Executive Action. By tradition, voting 
went in order of membership. The founding Unification countries voted first, 
followed by those who had joined quickly, followed by those who had been 
coerced, followed by those who had fought: the republics that had arisen out of 
the old Soviet empire, and then Japan, and then—last, because it was the last 
country to surrender to the Unification—Occupied America.
The historical accident that had led to Capitol City being placed in Manhattan, 
surrounding the ancient United Nations buildings, often bemused Ripper. Sarah 
Almundsen had probably thought it would be a gesture of healing toward the 
conquered American republic; even now, fifty years later, it was simply a 
reminder that they had been conquered.
Ripper would have put Capitol City in orbit, himself. Given a choice.
At the speed things were going, Ripper expected to reach the podium sometime 
around nine or ten the following morning.
Occasionally other Councilors came by and spoke with Ripper, asking or offering 
favors; one, a relatively young first-term Councilor from Chile, was actually 
considering breaking away from her bloc and voting with Ripper on what she 
claimed were moral grounds. Ripper had spoken with her at length in the privacy 
of her office, just the night prior. He tended to think she was sincere, and 
found it both sad and rather grimly amusing. If she made the mistake and voted 
with him, this would be her last term in the Council; her own people would vote 
her out of office pretty quick.
Though he had attempted to persuade her to vote with him—that was his job—a part 
of him hoped she would vote against. Councilors capable of entertaining ethical 
considerations in their voting—even if they chose to ignore the 
considerations—were a rarity. It would be pleasant to have another one in the 
Council.

Toward dinner Ichabod came in through the main entrance, carrying a boxed dinner 
with him, and made his slow way down through the descending rows of tables, to 
the next-to-innermost circle facing the podium, where Ripper’s table sat.
Ripper popped the stasis bubble and examined what he’d been brought. Not bad; 
largish shrimp on brown rice, pasta salad, orange juice. He ate while listening 
to Ichabod.
“There is, so far, no evidence that the Rebs are involved at all. It looks to be 
pretty much just the Japanese.”
Ripper grunted. “Don’t count on it. It’s not the Fourth yet. Let’s see if we get 
through tomorrow.”
“Spacecraft used in the attacks on the laser cannon were primarily Collective, 
troops primarily Japanese; maybe a few private craft, maybe a few Rebs and Claw, 
but no confirmation on either point. Collective PR issued a statement denying 
involvement, said that the craft involved were renegades.”
“Of course.”
“It might be true, Councilor. Your average SpaceFarer will do anything for a 
Credit.”
Ripper nodded, chewing. “Probably is true. It’s not a good call for the 
Collective to get involved in this. But it won’t change the damage it does them 
with the Unification.”
“Fighting is ongoing; want a list of what they’ve used the laser cannon on?”
“No. Still military targets?”
“So far. Mostly ports; Unification Spaceport is a bad place to be right now. 
They’ve shot down about thirty Space Force craft as they took off, another dozen 
incoming. No cities yet, though the Japanese are saying Paris first, and then 
Capitol City. Space Force is targeting Hiroshima.”
Ripper drank his orange juice in one long pull. “How wonderfully symbolic. Let’s 
hope neither side decides to start shooting at civilians until after the voting 
is over. That’d screw us good.”
“Fighting is cannon to cannon, and we’re taking them back, but it’s slowed down 
a lot. We’ve stopped using Elite in the attacks.”
Ripper looked up. “Really?”
“The pumped lasers they’re using work,” said Ichabod quietly. “Nine Elite dead 
so far. The PKF have pulled out their Elite, Commissioner Vance’s call 
apparently. Space Force is on its own as of about an hour ago. And another 
thing—”
“Yes?”
“They recovered one of the bodies, at one of the cannon they took back. A 
Japanese cyborg.”
Ripper scowled. “Damn. That’s very bad. They think we’re winning right now—”
“We are.”
“—but if they think we’re even struggling upstairs we’re going to have a lot of 
undecided voting go over to Eddore.”
“I’m surprised the voting’s so close,” Ichabod commented. “This is such a 
blatant power grab on Eddore’s part.”
“Most of the world doesn’t have democratic traditions to speak of, Ichabod. 
Certainly not three hundred years’ worth. To them this simply looks like good 
business; it makes Eddore look strong. How generally is this business upstairs 
known?”
“So far, not very. I only got it because of your position on the Oversite 
Committee; apparently Vance has decided you’re an ally.”
Ripper chuckled sourly. “Today.”
“Last item, I don’t know how much faith to place in this; apparently the PKF are 
planning an assault directly on Japan as soon as the laser cannon are taken out. 
Or maybe before, if Commissioner Vance gets his way; clearly Mirabeau is all 
that’s holding him back right now.”
Ripper pushed his dinner aside, sat back in his chair, and watched the 
Unification Ambassador from Sri Lanka speak in favor of a truce that no one, on 
either side, was going to offer,

Even with all of Ripper’s pleading to move things along, voting went slowly. 
About 10:00 a.m. Ripper left; his bodyguards, John and Bruce, picked him up at 
the exit, and followed a few steps behind him as he went down a level to the 
small Chamber office set aside for his use. He rolled out the cot to take a nap, 
and was asleep in seconds. He awoke around 2:30 a.m., shaved and showered in the 
office’s small bathroom, and dressed in the suit that had been laid out for him. 
He knocked back two cups of coffee, waited, and when it did not rouse him 
sufficiently went into his bathroom and took two ephedrine tablets, and then 
headed back upstairs.
It had gone dramatically slower during his absence; people had been giving 
speeches for the holocams. Only a little better than half of the Unification 
Councilors had voted. So far voting was running 168-151, in favor of declaring 
martial law. Ripper was not perturbed; it was the nature of the beast that most 
of the strongly pro-Unification Councilors voted first. To be behind by only 
seventeen votes after 319 Councilors had voted was two or three votes better 
than he had expected.
The Council tables were a quarter empty; many of those who had voted had left, 
returned to their offices, or gone off to nap. Still, for just after 3:00 a.m., 
it was easily as busy as on any normal day. Even now the air of frantic urgency 
had subsided only slightly; Councilors stood clustered in groups, murmuring 
voices establishing a gentle background susurration against which all else took 
place.
Ripper stopped, spoke briefly with several of his allies, and returned to his 
table. His holos, turned off while he was gone, automatically relit at his 
approach, and hovered in the air off to his right and his left.
NewsBoard looked interesting, a map of near-Earth space. He turned on his 
earphone, listened to the excited babble of voice, was aware of the slight 
reduction of background noise, throughout the Chamber, as others did the same.
“…there are sixteen Relay Stations, most of them small units called 
talk-to-me’s; apparently only the large InfoNet Relay Station at Halfway, 
protected by a group of Space Force commandos, is still secure. Most of the 
balance of the—”
The map of near-Earth space shown on NewsBoard suddenly vanished, as did the 
voice of the announcer. It was replaced by the image of a clean-shaven, 
fit-looking middle-aged man wearing what Ripper vaguely tagged as “military” 
clothing. The man did not look into the holocams for several seconds; he was 
apparently still setting up, turning on a handheld that was just visible in the 
holofield. A patch of blurriness in the holofield—bloody amateur, Ripper 
thought—showed where the handheld’s field established itself.
As the man looked up into the holocams, his image abruptly appeared in the 
Electronic Times holofield next to it; and a moment after that, in the feed from 
the Council Chamber itself.
Ripper barely had time to notice the man’s stiff features, characteristic of a 
PKF Elite of some twenty years ago, before the skin treatments had been improved 
to allow PKF more facial expressiveness. The thought flickered through his mind 
briefly, in a bright confused flash—PKF Elite, did we take back the Relay 
Stations already?—and then the man spoke. “I am the representative of the united 
Erisian Claw and Johnny Rebs. Today we have taken a step—” The Elite’s voice was 
drowned out in Ripper’s earphone, underneath a growing wave of noise from the 
assembled Councilors. The man spoke several sentences that Ripper could not hear 
at all; Ripper yelled at the top of his lungs, “Shut up!”
The babble died slowly; Ripper pumped up the volume on his earphone to its 
highest volume and the voice of the man in the holofield grew audible again:
“—complete control of the Halfway InfoNet Relay Station, and all supporting 
Relay Stations. A fierce battle is being fought, even as we speak, for the laser 
cannon platforms. We have reinforced our Japanese allies, and before the day is 
out we expect to have the cannon entirely in our hands.” The man paused. “We 
have chosen this day and this time to bring you this message. My name is 
Christian J. Summers, and I was once a Peaceforcer Elite. Today I am a member of 
the Johnny Rebs, an associate of the Erisian Claw; and today, in a meeting of 
the banned United States Congress, the following resolution was approved for 
release.”
Ripper knew what was coming; surely most of those in the Council Chambers had 
to. Nonetheless the knowledge did not prevent the sudden fierce chill that ran 
down his spine, the prickling of the hairs at the back of his neck.
It was 3:10 a.m., just after midnight on the West Coast; for them, the first 
moments of the TriCentennial. Christian J. Summers spoke in measured cadence, 
solemnly, words carrying to all of Earth, broadcast beyond Earth to the rest of 
the Solar System:
“In Congress, July 4th, 2076. The unanimous Declaration of these unlawfully 
occupied United States of America:
“When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to 
dissolve the Political Bands that have connected them…”
This time the roar of sound grew until Ripper, standing motionless and watching 
Christian Summers speak, could not hear a word though the volume control on his 
earphone was pumped all the way up.
Ripper found himself coming to his feet, stood motionless, and watched Summers 
speak. In his heart was an utter emptiness, a complete absence of feeling. He 
had once been a United States Senator, and he would until his death be an 
American at the very core of his person.
But in the bravery shown by Christian Summers, in the slow reading of what 
newsdancers would, in half an hour, be calling the Second Declaration of 
Independence, Douglass Ripper saw nothing but disaster.
After a while he turned and made his slow, solitary way from the Chamber. No one 
tried to stop him, no one spoke to him as he left; virtually no one even noticed 
him leaving.
He knew the words by heart; though he could no longer hear Summers’ voice, could 
no longer even hear the noise of the Chamber, the somber phrases rolled on 
through his awareness.
That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving 
their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed …
Ripper did not realize that tears were running down his cheeks. He knew only 
that he could not remember having felt such vast pain since his mother’s death, 
nearly twenty years prior.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is 
the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…
Douglass Ripper sat down abruptly, sat at the base of the stairs leading up to 
the Chamber, and in front of thirty Peaceforcers and half a hundred newsdancer 
spyeyes, buried his face in his hands and through his tears whispered to 
himself, “Oh, God. You stupid fucks.”




- 17 -
« ^ » 
“We are out of here.”
“Whaa?”
It was Trent, fresh clown makeup applied, a sad face this time, rousing me from 
where I slept at my desk. He was grinning at me. “Wake up, Neil. Time to go.”
The briefcase with the gold was next to my desk. I said groggily, “What’s 
happening?”
“Rebs just declared independence. Twenty minutes ago. And we got attacked by a 
group of Rebs who clearly had no idea that Space Force was protecting the 
Halfway Relay Station—”
“Wait—”
“We made noises like a couple of battalions, exploded a nuke close enough to 
them to scare them a bit—”
“What’s the hurry?”
“Eddore,” said Trent impatiently, “has what he needs. Japan rose, the U.S. is 
rising, he’ll get the martial law he wants. Now he can send real Space Force in 
to protect the InfoNet Relay Station, and he doesn’t have to worry about the 
Rebs not rising, ‘cause they already have. Clear?”
“He doesn’t need you anymore.”
“Need me?” Trent laughed aloud. “As of twenty minutes ago I’m the most dangerous 
enemy he has left. Come on, Neil, grab your gold and let’s get out of here.”
Trent wasn’t kidding; his Collective crew was boarding the Lew Alton, moving at 
an easy trot, when Trent and I, the really big clown right behind us, passed 
through Lock Ten on the way to Marc’s private yacht. We stopped at the yacht’s 
airlock. “Somebody’s going to go let Marc out, aren’t they?”
Trent blinked. The big clown loomed behind him. “Sure. I mean, eventually. I 
suppose.”
“I can’t leave him in jail for Space Force to find him. That’s not—”
“Sure you can,” Trent said briskly. “You don’t have time to do anything else, 
your yacht is leaving in four minutes. And I have less time than that.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay. Thank you—I think.”
“You’re welcome.” Trent the Uncatchable’s voice softened. “Good luck. It’s not 
easy being a legend, is it?”
“No. I never really got used to it myself. And you’re going to have it worse.”
“I know.” He shrugged, changed the subject. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more 
help, but I have no time.” He paused a second, a distant expression flickering 
across his face. “Here they come. Space Force is on its way already. We’re going 
to have us a chase for sure; you might. We’d probably be dodging laser fire from 
the Unity all the way back to Venus if I hadn’t knocked out their weapons 
control last night.”
I simply stared at him. “You took out the Unity’s laser cannon?”
“No, just the targeting mechanisms.”
“How did you—”
Trent grinned at me. “Monofilament fineline. It’s a neat trick, I’ll tell you 
all about it someday.”
“You are the most amazing person I’ve ever met.”
Trent blinked. “A Peaceforcer said that to me once. Then he tried to kill me. 
Good-bye, Neil.” Trent turned away without looking back; the big clown paused a 
moment.
“Just ‘amazing’?” It was the first time I ever remember hearing anybody call 
Trent the Uncatchable this, and I think the big clown who did it was joking. 
“Don’t you know? The man is God.” The clown grinned at me. Trent was gone, out 
of sight around the corridor bend. “Have a good flight.”

Jay and Shell were inside the yacht, snakechained to the seats.
They both glared at me as I strapped into the pilot’s seat and stowed my 
briefcase in the webbing beneath it. “He couldn’t very well leave you behind, 
now could he? And you certainly didn’t want to go with him, Shell in particular, 
I imagine.”
Neither of them said a thing. Couldn’t, really, with their mouths taped shut.
I’m not much of a pilot; I pulled up Trent’s reentry path, scanned the quick and 
slow versions, and said, “Command, launch. Let’s go home.”
The shipcomp said quietly, in Trent the Uncatchable’s voice, “Launching. Someday 
again, Neil Corona.”
The rockets kicked me in the back.
No one came after us, and shortly Earth’s horizon opened up and swallowed us.




- 18 -
« ^ » 
Three days at Halfway, cooped up with a group of totally humorless SpaceFarers, 
sharing a cabin with FX. Chandler, who, for all he might have been a wild “heavy 
metal” musician once an infinity ago, was today a fucking old man and kept 
acting like it.
Early on the morning of July the Fourth, the TriCentennial, a young black man in 
civilian clothes—black jeans, magslips, a T-shirt with a holo of the singer 
Mahliya Kutura on it—came for Jimmy. “You’re Jimmy Ramirez, aren’t you?”
Chandler was asleep in the other bed, webbed in, floatchair folded up at his 
side. Jimmy looked up at the opening of his cabin door. “Yeah. Who are you?”
“Do you want to come up to the bridge with me? We’re leaving orbit in a couple 
of minutes and I think you might find it interesting.”
Jimmy shrugged. “Sure.”
“Great.” The man raised his voice. “ ‘Sieur Chandler?”
The old man stirred, sat up, and said in a rusty voice, “We’re boosting in five 
minutes. It’ll be announced, but you’ll want to be awake for it.”
Chandler nodded, spoke around a yawn. “Okay. Thanks.”
“In case we go above three gees, you know how to use your stasis bubble?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
On the way up to the bridge—a trip in itself, the ship was large—the young man 
kept looking at Jimmy. Finally, in annoyance, Jimmy said, “The answer is no.”
“What was the question?”
“You’re gay, right?”
“Well, no. I mean, not very.” The young man seemed to consider it. “I don’t 
think so.”
“What the hell are you looking at?”
The young man glided steadily forward, magslip-covered feet drifting bare 
centimeters over the deck. Jimmy had the feeling that he could have moved much 
faster if he had not had to wait for Jimmy, hampered as he was by both an 
unfamiliar prosthesis and free fall. The man glanced at Jimmy yet again. “Been a 
while, my man. You’ve put on some weight, lost some muscle.” He chuckled. 
“Become a lawyer. Want to hear a good joke?”
Jimmy shook his head. “Look, I don’t know you and I don’t—” and then his voice 
trailed off.
His guide glided to a stop at the entrance to the bridge, and turned around to 
face Jimmy. “Don’t you?”
Jimmy had to put a hand out to the bulkhead to stop his progress; he was 
learning to dislike free fall. After he bounced off the wall once he managed to 
get himself turned around, facing the black man. “What?”
“Scenes like this,” the man said, “should be played under gravity. So that you 
can run in slow motion down the beach. It’s kind of hard to do in free fall. 
Actually.”
For a long moment Jimmy did not breathe at all. He thought his heart had 
stopped. “Is—Trent?”
The impossible brown eyes held him. “Want to go share a blanket and find out?”
“You—Trent?”
“Not that you were any good.”
Jimmy Ramirez said slowly, “I’ve had better, myself.”
“Hey, bro. I’d give you a hug or something, but you used to have problems with 
that.”
Jimmy Ramirez stared at him, then stepped forward, wrapped Trent in a bear hug, 
and whispered fiercely in his ear, “My man.”
The bridge door curled aside. The woman who stepped through, elderly and 
white-haired, in a Collective uniform with a patch that said Captain Saunders, 
said mildly, “Sweet. But you’re blocking the door.”
Jimmy let go of Trent abruptly, left Trent drifting in midair. Trent grinned at 
Jimmy, grabbed the frame of the door and pushed himself back into contact with 
the deck, and went inside to the bridge.
Jimmy Ramirez followed, aware that everyone on the bridge was watching them as 
they entered.
It is virtually impossible for even a light-brown-skinned man to blush 
convincingly. Jimmy Ramirez managed it.

“They’re the cheap seats,” Trent commented, “but they’re still the best in the 
house if you’re a civilian.”
They had strapped into a pair of seats off to the far right of a rather largish 
bridge. At least Jimmy thought it was a large bridge; he didn’t have much to 
compare with.
“Large,” Trent said briefly in response to his question. “Everything about the 
ship is. Crew of thirty-five, passenger capability of about two hundred fifty. 
And fast, though she doesn’t look it; chameleon polypaint, radar quiet, the 
works. We’re going to need it all; there’s a Space Force task force headed for 
us; left L-Four about sixteen minutes ago. Space Force is boosting at three 
gees. If they put all their people in stasis bubbles—and they will have them on 
board—they can get up to fifteen.”
“We’re going to boost out of here at fifteen gees?”
“No, of course not,” Trent said mildly. “This is a civilian ship. We don’t have 
nearly enough stasis bubbles to do something like that. We have to arrange to 
get lost instead. A Collective escort is waiting for us at Venus, but first we 
have to make Venus. Then we’ll slingshot in around the sun, and then head for 
the Belt.”
“But first we have to get away from Earth-Luna.”
The Captain returned, moved forward to her seat. “That’s the general idea, 
‘Sieur Ramirez. Now, if you please, will both of you shut up?”
Trent held a finger up to his lips, whispered in a stage whisper, “She means 
it.”
Captain Saunders did not glance at Trent. “Command, outspeakers.” Her voice 
boomed out across the length of the ship. “BOOST IN TEN SECONDS, NINE HUNDRED 
EIGHTY CENTIMETERS PER SECOND SQUARED. THAT’S ONE GEE TO DOWNSIDERS. SUCK IT 
IN.”
Gravity came up slowly; suddenly forward was up. It took a couple seconds to 
reach full boost. In the viewholos, the vast bulk of Halfway seemed to drift 
slowly away, to their left.
Jimmy’s earphone came alive. Trent’s voice; not this voice, which had a deeper 
timbre, but the tenor he remembered from their childhood. “Really don’t talk 
until we’re out of danger; she’ll get seriously upset. She has no sense of 
humor. Of course SpaceFarers don’t.”
The viewholo split into three separate perspectives; behind them, Halfway fell 
away, slowly turning from a mass that covered half the sky, to something that 
was merely as large as the Earth; and then smaller yet. Before them, an 
optically enhanced image showed five bright sparks against a star-speckled 
background. “Space Force; the task force that’s going to try chasing us.”
Jimmy glanced over at Trent, found Trent staring at the viewfields, a faint grin 
playing across his lips, coming and going; clearly vastly entertained. “This is 
my favorite part,” Trent said. “Please accept my apologies now in case we die 
doing this.”
The third segment of the holofield showed a map, not to scale, of the Earth-Luna 
system. Their ship was a bright yellow triangle, moving away from a stylized 
Earth that was being devoured by a swarm of gnats. Bright red patches marked the 
remains of destroyed ships; the map showed eight. Green dots were laser cannon, 
about forty of them; blue dots were craft whose beacons identified them as Space 
Force. There were no rebel craft shown in the field; that was to be expected. It 
didn’t mean there were no rebel craft in orbit—highly unlikely—merely that the 
rebels wouldn’t be identifying themselves to anyone who asked.
Toward the far edge of the map holo, five blue arrows moved slowly toward the 
Lew Alton. Luna, L-4, and L-5 were visible. “They’ll have realized by now that 
we’re moving away from Halfway. In another minute or two they’ll realize where 
we’re headed.”
Jimmy lifted an eyebrow.
Trent grinned at him. “L-Five. Peaceforcer Heaven.”
“Very strange behavior, of course. They’re pretty sure who we are, the 
SpaceFarers who’ve been pretending to be Space Force.” Trent shrugged. “They do 
have the same initials. Start with the same word yet. You’d think that one of 
them would have sued the other by now. Trademark infringement or something. So 
anyway, we’re Bad Guys. But we’re heading toward Spacebase One, PKF territory. 
Why? Why, oh why? Can you guess?”
Jimmy shook his head.
“We’re going to hide behind it for most of a second, if things work out. Also 
it’s confusing. The folks at L-Four won’t understand it at all. We’re Bad Guys, 
but we’re not running. Maybe we’re not Bad Guys, maybe we’re Good Guys. Or 
innocent bystanders. We’re heading toward Spacebase One; maybe we’re 
Peaceforcers? What could possibly be going on?” Trent chuckled aloud, got a 
glare from the Captain. “Look at the holo, Jimmy.”
In the central panel of the viewholo, the dwindling image of Halfway vanished. 
In its place a holo of the Lew Alton appeared. “Now, this is the interesting 
thing about the Lew Alton. It looks normal enough, landing fins, needle nose, 
silver hull for heat dissipation, obviously intended for use in atmosphere; but 
it uses mass drivers instead of a torch, and the silver on the hull is a mirror 
that can be turned off.” Three long, slender tubes ran down the length of the 
ship, flaring open at each end. “The mass drivers boost in both directions too. 
The Lew Alton can accelerate and brake without undergoing turnover; you just 
change the direction of thrust through the mass drivers.”
The viewfield returned to its prior view. “We’re mildly stupid, we don’t know 
yet that there’s a bunch of badass Space Force commandos headed our way. Now 
we’re sweeping with radar, really ugly radar signature, we had to make up a 
special radar antenna to get it: boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Wait, what’s 
this? On our radar we get back the signature of five Space Force craft headed 
our way. Now we get a little scared and we check it out, maybe our radar’s not 
very sensitive, so we sweep them again, a signal so loud it’s like we’re 
shouting in their face. Damn, we’re amateurs. Stoopid stoopid.
“Now we’re thinking it over. Should we run away?”
“Outspeakers,” said Captain Saunders. “PREPARE FOR TURNOVER IN TEN SECONDS.”
“Wait, what’s this? The ship full of Bad Guys is going into turnover!”
Thrust ceased, and the ship hung in free fall for several seconds before 
beginning a long, slow, 180-degree tumble. The bridge seemed to twitch; it made 
the muscles in Jimmy’s stomach twitch in sympathy. “The bridge floats free 
inside the ship; all the passenger compartments do, and they turn to face into 
the direction of thrust. Otherwise you could end up hanging on your seat belt at 
eight gees.”
It took most of a minute before the ship had completely turned around. The 
Captains voice: “THREE THOUSAND CEPSSA IN TEN SECONDS.”
“Now we’re panicking,” Trent announced. “Turning tail and running away.”
After a brief pause, Captain Saunders said in a conversational voice, “There 
they go. They just”—She fell briefly silent as acceleration kicked up to three 
gees—“just pumped it up to fifteen gees acceleration.”
“Trent?”
“Hang tight, Jimmy. They’ll figure it out in a bit, and when they do, they’ll 
probably send missiles.”
Jimmy said very quietly, “I don’t understand.”
“They can’t catch us now. We’re running toward them, but they think we’re 
running away; they’re so far away from us all they could make out by telescope 
was the fact that we went through turnover. So right now we’re accelerating 
toward each other; shortly they’re going to notice that the Doppler signature on 
our radar is wrong. It might be a bit before that happens, they might notice 
real soon.”
Four minutes passed. Five. Six. The silence on the bridge was thick with shared 
tension.
One of the crew said, “They just cut acceleration.”
“They just realized. They’re never going to catch us now; they’ve already picked 
up so much velocity that by the time they’ve gone through turnover, decelerated 
to zero, and headed back after us, well be having tea at Venus. The only chance 
they have is to send missiles after us. If they do that right now we’re in bad 
shape, so first we try and talk them into chasing us some more.” Trent grinned 
cheek to cheek, said aloud, “Captain, have they beamcast to us?”
“Not yet.”
“Can I get a maser to them?”
Captain Saunders nodded. “Go ahead; we’re beaming.”
Trent said, “This is the Collective Ship Lew Alton, commanding officer Captain 
Hera Saunders. To the Space Force craft chasing us, hello.”
Three seconds pause, the lightspeed delay from L-4 to near-Earth. “Captain 
Saunders, this is Colonel Jurgen Hanhela of the United Nations Space Force. 
Cease your acceleration and stand by to be boarded, or we will destroy you.”
“You’re not speaking to Captain Saunders, Colonel.”
He took the bait: “To whom am I speaking?”
“Trent,” said Trent. “Trent the Uncatchable.”
Dead silence from the other end.
“Give it your best shot, sucker.” Trent made a cutting gesture, and after a 
moment said, “Well? If they stop and think about it, they won’t do it.”
Saunders nodded. “I know. If—” The old woman abruptly laughed. “Idiots! They’re 
going into turnover!”
“A chance to catch the Uncatchable,” Trent whispered. “They know they’re faster 
than us; how could they possibly resist?”
In the holofield, the sparks showing the fusion rockets of the five craft had 
abruptly relit.
“All right,” said Captain Saunders. “Outspeakers. IMPACT FIELDS COMING UP; SIX 
THOUSAND CEPSSA IN TEN SECONDS.”
They passed the task force, which was still decelerating, doing four hundred 
thousand klicks an hour. By the time the task force had killed its forward 
velocity, they were three-quarters of the way to Spacebase One at L-5, and 
moving at a good speed.
Jimmy Ramirez, struggling for breath against slightly better than six gees 
acceleration, found it difficult to follow Trent’s voice. “We’ll be out of their 
line of sight for all of about a second. We’re going to buzz Spacebase One at 
about fifty klicks distance; as soon as we’re past it, during that second they 
can’t see us because of Spacebase One’s bulk, we’re going to go dead. The hull 
paint goes black, the mass drivers shut down, the radar antenna with the ugly 
signature gets shipped away on a beacon, giving away the odd boop or two to 
betray its position. When they do send the missies—and they will—they send them 
after the beacon. We hope.”
Jimmy Ramirez, fighting for air, did not make the mistake of trying to nod.

Space Force sent their missiles while the Lew Alton was still three minutes away 
from L-5. The missiles chased the Collective craft at 150 gees.
The ship passed Spacebase One, with the missiles gaining on it. It happened 
nearly instantaneously; free fall, blackness, all at once; the immense weight 
lifted itself off Jimmy Ramirez’s chest, and he found himself floating gently in 
his acceleration chair.
He heard the distant clang of the beacon disengaging from the ship.
Trent’s voice: “Captain, how long until impact?”
In the absolute darkness, the woman’s voice seemed to echo in Jimmy’s ears. “Not 
less than one minute, no more than one and a half.”
“Jimmy, you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Okay. So these three lawyers are zooming along a country road and they 
get into an accident with a gravedigger. So the gravedigger pulls himself out of 
his car and he’s okay, but the lawyers are kind of messed up, so he buries them, 
right there, and walks into town and calls the Sheriff. ‘Sheriff,’ he says, 
‘terrible accident I just had. Three lawyers in it, they was all dead, so I 
buried them.’ Sheriff says, ‘What? You went ahead and buried them already? Are 
you sure they was dead?’ Gravedigger says reluctantly, ‘Well, they said they 
wasn’t, but you know how those fellas lie.’ ”
Jimmy stared into the darkness. “I forgot you told these sorts of jokes. Now I 
remember why—”
Weightlessness.
Quiet.
Jimmy Ramirez returned to consciousness slowly, the tang of blood in his mouth.
His head throbbed.
Dim, gentle illumination, of glowpaint set low, lit the bridge around them.
Trent, at his side, said, “Now you remember why what?”
“Huh?”
Trent held up a hand. “How many fingers?”
“Eight. What happened?”
“Something banged you in the head, I’m not sure what: Some things came loose in 
the blast.”
“Did we get away?”
“Yeah. I thought we would. Space Force nosed around for a bit, but they couldn’t 
find us, cold black hulk that we are. And somewhat off course from their own 
missiles, that didn’t hurt. They turned back and went home about half an hour 
ago; right about now they’re boasting to half the System that they blew up Trent 
the Uncatchable. They’re going to be real embarrassed tomorrow. How many 
fingers?”
“Uh—five?”
“Better. We’ll give it a bit, and then, when we’re sure it’s safe, we’ll fire up 
the mass drivers and correct course for Venus.”
“Did we lose anybody?”
“Almost.”
“Who?”
“You. If whatever hit you had hit a little lower, it probably would have snapped 
your neck instead of just giving you a concussion.”
“Oh.”
“Aside from you, not too bad. Some broken bones, sprains, like that. What 
usually happens when a tin can gets shaken up. When the medbot is done setting 
bones it’ll be up here for you.”
“Hanging around with you genies,” said Jimmy slowly, “is not safe.”
“The concussion’s not bad; and we’ll stop off at Mars to get you a new foot. 
Nice hospitals at Mars, maybe you’ll like it there.”
“Do you?”
Trent was silent a moment. “Well, no. It can be real hard to find good places to 
go dancing.”
“How about the Belt?”
“Better. There’s some nice stuff in the Belt. Nothing like New York, but—” Trent 
shrugged. “Nice. Mahliya Kutura lives out there. She’s seriously nice. And only 
a little crazy.”
“You miss Earth?”
Trent said, “Yes. And so will you.”
Jimmy spoke around the throbbing in his head. “I suppose I’ll get used to it.”
Trent said simply, “We’ll be back.”




- 19 -
« ^ » 
At 8:15 on the morning of July the Fourth, Mohammed Vance sat alone, in the 
darkness of his office half a klick below the surface of Capitol City, and 
studied holos.
They had lost all of Japan; most of Greater Los Angeles was in rebel hands. 
Insurrections were scattered across the length of Occupied America, from Miami 
up through Maine on the East Coast, throughout the Midwest, and from Portland to 
Ensenada on the West Coast; but the clear focus of the rebel efforts was 
California. Sensible; it was what Vance had expected, the way Vance would have 
structured it himself. The lack of mandatory Automated Traffic Control in Los 
Angeles gave the rebels a clear advantage; it was no surprise that they’d 
overrun L.A. County so quickly. The rebels clearly knew where their advantages 
were; PKF targets first, and then TransCon.
They’d been losing ATC cells all morning. Most of Ventura County was lost to 
TransCon, and cells up and down the coast were dropping off the grid.
The PKF armories in Los Angeles and Sacramento were in Reb hands; fighting in 
San Francisco, the home of the State Governor General, was going badly. The 
spysats showed that something was going on at Navajo Spaceport. Vance did not 
know what, as it was impossible to get ahold of anybody out there. He must 
assume that Navajo Spaceport, as well as LAX, was in enemy hands.
And upstairs, rebels still had almost half the laser cannon; since being 
resupplied by the Johnny Rebs, shipping up out of LAX, the Japanese holding the 
remaining cannon had dug in, and Space Force had been reclaiming the cannon ever 
more slowly. In the last eight hours, only one.
It was almost true, as the rebels claimed, that they had taken over the chain of 
InfoNet Relay Stations. Apparently the Halfway Relay Station alone was 
controlled by Space Force; Vance did not know who in Space Force had had the 
foresight to take that step, but when this was over he would find out, and thank 
the man personally. His job, difficult now, would have been made more so if the 
InfoNet had gone down.
DataWatch might not have minded; Vance had seen their contingency plans. But 
DataWatch was only a small part of the PKF, and Vance could not find it in him 
to much regret DataWatch’s missed opportunity.
Messy, Vance concluded, but it could have been far worse. Even when the rebels 
started directing laser cannon against civilian targets—and they would, for 
Vance would have in their place—the damage would be within acceptable limits.
At 8:30 a.m. his systerm announced a call. It was the officer from Internal 
Affairs. Vance listened without interrupting the man, said finally, “Well done,” 
and rose from behind his desk. “Command, mirror on.” He checked his appearance 
in the mirror a tall man with black Elite eyes, wearing the gray of PKF combat 
fatigues, the uniform of the Unification War. He would be the only one in 
Strategic Planning who would be dressed so, and it should send a message.
He walked without hurry down the bustling corridors toward Strategic Planning, 
entered Planning, and moved down toward the podium at the far end of the room. 
The gentle murmur of voices quieted slightly at his appearance, quieted a bit 
more when he ascended to the podium.
Most of those present were gathered around the tactical table in the center of 
the room, which showed a three-dimensional map of Earth and near-Earth space. 
Four Commissionaires present, Vance noted, three of them senior to him, all of 
them older; he was still quite young for a Commissionaire, only forty-seven.
At forty he had been, by four years, the youngest Commissionaire in PKF history.
“Officers,” said Vance quietly, not waiting for the babble to die down. “This 
afternoon, at three o’clock, we will boost from Unification Spaceport. Before 
four o’clock we will be dropping, via semiballistic, into the city of Santa 
Monica. We will proceed eastward down Wilshire Boulevard, securing the city as 
we go, until we have passed completely through Los Angeles. We will commit our 
entire forces to this operation; all troops, all support personnel, all 
carriers, all semiballistics, all laser cannon that Space Force has recovered. 
We have twenty-three hundred Elite who can be reassigned on such short notice; 
all will be reassigned. Plans for the attack will be distributed before nine 
a.m. By noon I want your written responses delivered to my office, expressing 
any reservations you may have concerning the course of action.”
By the time he was done speaking complete silence had fallen throughout 
Strategic Planning. Commissionaire Rouen, senior of the Commissionaires present, 
broke the silence. “That’s not according to the plans, Mohammed. We are going to 
do a slow roll down from the north—”
“Indeed it is not according to the plans,” said Vance. “I am changing them.”
The woman shook her head, seemed almost amused. “Christine won’t allow it, 
Mohammed. These plans have been laid for most of a month.”
Vance did not raise his voice. “Elite Commander Christine Mirabeau,” said 
Mohammed Vance, “was arrested for treason against the Unification at eight 
twenty-two this morning.” To their stunned silence, he said, “I want written 
responses by noon. You’d best get to work.” He left abruptly.

Christian J. Summers floated in black space, laser cradled in his arms, a tether 
attaching him to the bulk of the InfoNet Relay Station at his back.
Awaiting the arrival of the Space Force troops.
He was about to die, and he knew it.
Earth glowed blue and white beneath his feet. Arrayed around him were fifteen 
other Johnny Rebs, tucked into the shadow (such as it was with full Earth 
beneath them) on the side of the Relay Station facing away from the sun. A tight 
fit; the Relay Station was only a talk-to-me, one of the smaller and older 
stations.
They were all Rebs; he had taken no Claw with him on this mission, only men and 
women he had known and trusted for many years. Now he regretted it. It would 
have hurt less if he had dragged a group of strangers to their deaths. According 
to the plan, they should have been picked up a good two hours ago. Clearly 
something had gone wrong with the plan. He did not even know what; only that the 
Halfway Relay Station had not gone down along with the rest. The ship that was 
supposed to come get them was the same ship that had been slotted to deliver the 
Halfway Relay Station task force.
They could have tried to head back on the HuskySleds they’d come in, but the 
sleds were not fast, and would only take them back to their staging point at 
Halfway’s Edge.
Summers knew they would never make it back to the Edge. Space Force would 
destroy their sleds on the way back. Their only hope for survival lay in 
returning to Earth before Space Force arrived; and to do that, they needed 
pickup.
But pickup was two hours late, and he was certain now that it would not come.
Half an hour ago he’d lit the rockets on the sleds, and sent them down toward 
Earth below them; one fewer sign of their presence.
“Chris?”
The voice in his ears was that of Janna Anderson, the daughter of two of his 
oldest friends. He was glad he would die with her, and not have to face her 
parents with her death on his hands. “Yes?”
She pointed. “Look.”
Summers followed her gesture. Nothing but stars—
Half a dozen stars winked out. Summers followed the patch of blackness moving 
across the emptiness. “Okay. This is it, my friends. They’re coming in black, 
with their drive dead. If we’re lucky the lack of the sleds will fool them into 
believing we’ve packed up and moved on.” It was a mistake he would not have made 
himself, and despite his contempt for Space Force, did not expect from them. The 
talk-to-me’s heat-exchange radiators got rid of heat acquired from sunlight; the 
radiators were, of course, on the satellite’s shady side, away from the sun, 
along with the Rebs. The radiators might prevent Space Force from acquiring an 
IR image; deep radar would be useless against the backdrop of the Relay 
Station’s metal. Visible light would be Space Force’s best bet.
The blackness loomed larger, blocked out more and more stars as the ship 
approached. Now it was close enough Chris Summers could see the bright sharp 
bursts of its small maneuvering rockets. “Rifles ready—”
The ship came closer yet, slowing as it approached. I will be damned, Chris 
Summers thought, they don’t know we’re here. We might get to take some of them 
with us.
The airlock door, barely visible at the distance, cycled open, a bright yellow 
light in the side of the dark black spaceship. Two figures cycled through, the 
airlock’s maximum capacity; then another two; another two. After a brief pause, 
the six oriented themselves on the Relay Station; the backpacks on their 
pressure suits lit.
Chris Summers said quietly into his helmet radio, “First these six; then the 
ship itself. Fire at the airlock, the antennae, maneuvering rockets, any sort of 
protrusion on the surface of the craft. Maybe we can inconvenience them a bit. 
On Four. Three. Two. One.”
In vacuum lasers give no light.
Bright red spots appeared on the surface of the six approaching p-suits. Armored 
scalesuits;: Summers had expected it. The dots wavered, crawled over the surface 
of the suits. One dot touched a faceplate, and the faceplate burst outward in a 
shower of glassite and flesh.
One of the six figures got its rifle up in time to fire back once. Summers had 
no idea where the beam struck; a pair of red dots on the figure’s scalesuit 
converged and punched through the armor.
Most of the firing ceased.
Six corpses floated in space.
“On the ship, now,” Summers barked. He had his own rifle up, aimed at one of the 
places he remembered seeing a maneuvering rocket, pulled the trigger and held it 
down. If they could damage the ship badly enough, a rebel ship might finish it 
off before it made it back to safety; though he had no idea exactly where, 
Summers knew there were Reb craft in the vicinity, resupplying the Japanese 
cyborgs who had taken over the laser cannon.
Red dots wandered over the surface of the ship, seeking targets; one smart Reb, 
Summers briefly wondered who, set his laser for its widest beam and played it 
over the hull like a ruby searchlight. Summers found he had been shooting a spot 
half a meter away from the maneuvering rocket, adjusted his own aim as a result.
The Unification warship began turning, rotating slowly. None of the rockets had 
lit; the Space Forcers had realized what was happening to their maneuvering 
rockets, were using gyroscopes to avoid giving away the locations of the other 
rockets. Summers followed his target around until the ship’s roll had taken it 
from him, looked for another—That’ll do, he thought, as the missile battery came 
around on them.
His companions had the same thought; sixteen different dots of red light 
converged on the missiles in very nearly the same instant. Another beam widened 
out to something the width of a basketball, and the Reb waved it over the 
missiles. A brief flash of pride touched the old cyborg; the Reb was going after 
their optics, and was probably taking them out. If they’d been just a few 
hundred meters farther away, the lack of optics on the missiles might have made 
a difference.
But they were too close. The missile did not need to correct course for a target 
so close to it. It detonated not far from the center of their group.

The world tumbled around Chris Summers.
He was spinning fast enough that he could actually feel some weight at his head 
and feet.
Chris Summers watched Earth pass by his faceplate, about once every second. He 
closed his eyes after a while because the sight was making him dizzy.
He floated in the darkness, remembering the people he had loved in his life. It 
did not take long; they were few enough. The two he had felt closest to as an 
adult, Jacqueline de Nostri and Carl Castanaveras, had been dead for fourteen 
years now, and though he had adjusted to their loss, he had never quite taken 
the same pleasure in life again.
When he opened his eyes, Earth seemed to have grown slightly larger. Was it 
possible he might survive long enough to hit the atmosphere?
He closed his eyes again. What a vast irony that would be. He had deserted from 
the Elite by faking his death in a semiballistic accident; on a cold day in 
2056, he had boarded a semiballistic in India. A Japanese bioelectronics team 
from Mitsubishi had met him in orbit, and together they had sent the SB back 
down to Earth in flaming pieces.
When he opened his eyes for the last time, Earth was definitely larger.
Death by friction. There was a dirty joke he’d heard about that, as a young man; 
something about dying during reentry.
Not the way, thought Chris Summers calmly, I want to go.
There is only one really simple way to kill an Elite, and it requires help from 
the Elite. Chris Summers used it. His rifle was gone; unfortunate, it was far 
more powerful than the laser in his fist. It would have made it easier. He 
unsnapped the glove at his right wrist, pulled it free, held his hand out as far 
from his face as he could, and smashed out the faceplate on his helmet. He 
misjudged slightly; he slammed his hand into the reinforced bridge of his nose 
as the air rushed free of his suit.
The middle knuckle of his right hand dented slightly.
Vacuum did not bother him much; a slight tingling sensation, distantly 
perceptible, on the false skin. His eyes were a mechanism; they barely noticed 
the drop in pressure. Only the abrupt pain in his testicles reminded him that 
there was one part of his body that the Elite treatment had not touched. He 
grimaced with the pain, but it would not last long, and he had suffered far 
worse in his life.
Chris Summers hoped that he had not damaged the laser in his fist, buried just 
beneath the knuckle he had dented.
He opened his mouth as wide as it would go, jammed his fist into his mouth, and 
instructed the battle computer buried in the base of his skull to fire the laser 
in his fist until it ran out of power.

The day wore on.
In San Francisco the Governor General for the State of California was pulled by 
a mob from his offices in the Capitol Building, and in the plaza outside the 
Capitol was beaten half to death, doused with gasoline, and set afire.
Reporters from the Electronic Times holoed PKF troops firing into the crowds as 
they stormed the Capitol; holoed the Peaceforcers withdrawing as the crowd 
lynched the Governor General.
In Alabama, a Peaceforcer barracks was bombed, killing over two hundred PKF, 
including an Elite.
What began as a riot in Cincinnati turned into a pitched battle between half a 
dozen groups of impromptu rebels, and two complete battalions of PKF.
By noon, Capitol City time, the PKF were monitoring over two hundred ongoing 
clashes, some of them describable only as battles, between PKF troops and 
American citizens.
At 9:12 a.m., Pacific Time, Callia Sierran said, “It was always a stupid idea.”
Her brother, crouched down for cover next to their transport, did not look up 
from his handheld. “Yeah yeah yeah.”
Callia Sierran lay on her stomach, at the edge of a bluff up in the Hollywood 
Hills, and looked down into the Los Angeles basin; scanned, with a pair of 
imaging binoculars, the PKF as they prepared to evacuate the L.A. barracks.
“Training people on a sensable set.” Perhaps five hundred rebel troops lay dead 
in the grass surrounding the barracks; what was left of their early morning 
attack. “What a fucking idiotic idea.” Occasional laser and machine-gun fire 
still struck out from the barracks complex, to little effect; the rebels were 
well dug into the surrounding hills. The Peaceforcers had made one sortie out 
through the gates; the rebels had contained it, and forty or fifty dead PKF, one 
of them an Elite, lay stretched in the road just outside the gate. The PKF still 
controlled the barracks itself, though they were clearly preparing to abandon 
it. “When do we get reinforcements?”
Lan shook his head. “We’re still securing City Hall; apparently the LAPD fought 
against us.”
“Incredible.”
“I tried to tell you. Those guys are bad news on the hoof.”
“You were speeding. I’d have given you the same ticket.”
Lan paused, said sullenly, “Anyway, it’s half an hour at least for 
reinforcements.”
“They’re going to be out of here by then. We can try calling ‘Selle Lovely to 
expedite—”
“She won’t take your call, Callia. Or mine.”
“Yeah. Can we get a cannon strike?”
“Six of forty-two orbital cannon have been destroyed; we still hold seventeen, 
most of them pounding Unification Spaceport and O’Hare. Requests for strikes are 
backed up two and a half hours.”
Callia nodded. She clicked on the command channel on her radio headset. “Squad 
leaders, this is Callia Sierran. I’m going to kamikaze a couple of jeeps loaded 
with explosives down into the fence surrounding the barracks. We’ll move forward 
when the jeeps lift, on my call.” She dropped down a channel, paused before 
clicking on. “Lan, how many shots do we have left on chopped lasers?”
Lan checked his handheld summary. “Sixty-two Elite killers, conservative 
estimate of twenty-five shots per; diags say we used up four hundred and twelve 
shots in the first attack. Conservative estimate of eleven hundred thirty-eight 
remaining shots.”
Callia clicked on. “Elite killers, I trust you’ve kept track of your remaining 
shots; en masse, we have eleven hundred shots remaining. Intelligence says 
there’re four Elite left inside. Let’s use our shots wisely; leave cover fire to 
your comrades, never waste a shot on anything except a person showing acquired. 
Hopefully an Elite.” She paused. “If they get anything in the air, shoot that 
too. Otherwise, just people.” She clicked off. “Ready, Lan?”
“Yeah.” Lan snapped shut his handheld, clipped it to his belt, and brought the 
laser rifle slung over his back around for business. “We have six hundred troops 
left alive, Callia. We’re going to lose at least half of them doing this.”
Callia Sierran came to her feet. “No kidding. Let’s go.”
They came down off the hills on foot, in a silent wave, running, firing as they 
advanced. A pair of jeeps came plunging down out of the sky when they were 
halfway across the field separating them from the barracks building, and when 
the jeeps struck the gate thirty meters of fence went down on either side.
Troops dropped around Callia as she advanced, some screaming, some in the loose 
tumble of the already dead. A slug smashed into her shoulder and the impact 
armor beneath her fatigues went totally rigid, the impact knocking her from her 
feet; Lan was there in an instant, pulling her back to her feet; the scarlet 
beam of a laser waved across them as he did so, scorching them even through 
their laser-resistant fatigues. Callia let go of Lan’s helping hand, rolled to 
the left, and looked through the scope for the source of the laser; acquired. 
Three shots, X-laser, toward the laser source; the laser ceased and she was up 
again, noticed briefly that Lan limped badly but it was not slowing him much in 
their advance.
Then they were there, at the shattered ruin of the gate. About a dozen PKF had 
made a stand behind the burning wrecks of the jeeps, using the jeeps for cover, 
and were firing upon the advancing rebel troops from close range. Callia barely 
had time to notice the horrible toll, the scores of her comrades dropping all 
around her. She bounded up into the flames of the burning jeeps, stood for a 
moment atop the wreck of a jeep and fired, calmly and without anger, down into 
the ranks of the PKF on the other side.
Her boots and fatigues were heat and laser resistant; she barely noticed the 
flames in which she stood, the dull red metal beneath her feet. She fired into 
the tightly bunched groups of Peaceforcers, watched men and women alike die at 
the touch of her X-laser. Something blurred in her peripheral vision, and she 
turned slightly, aware now of the rebel troops pushing their way through the 
gap, into the open area just inside the fences, and the blur slowed, became a 
man, Elite, he had to be simply from the huge size of the weapon he carried, 
some kind of autoshot.
Callia knew she did not have time to bring her laser around on the man; she got 
her arms up in time to cover her face.
The autoshot struck her like a sledgehammer. She was briefly aware of being 
lifted up into the air, of flying backward.
And then nothing.

She awoke in a hospital bed.
Lan sat in a chair next to her, watching her. “How you doing?”
“I’m—I don’t know,” she said weakly. “How am I doing?”
“Okay, considering. Broken left shoulder, one solid bruise from crotch to 
throat. You burned your feet up pretty bad, I’m not sure how.”
“I was—” She coughed, felt an amazing flash of pain spread through her. “I got 
up on a burning jeep.”
Lan nodded. “I missed that; I went around them, myself.”
“Where am I?”
“Sickroom at the L.A. PKF barracks. We took it.”
“Good. How many?”
“All the PKF. A couple tried to surrender, but—” Lan shook his head. “The first 
one was an Elite. I fried him myself. Everybody else seemed to take it as a 
cue.”
Speaking was an immense effort. “How many?”
“We have two hundred and sixty alive. Mostly wounded to one degree or another.”
They’d started out that morning with 1,140 troops.
Callia closed her eyes and let go of consciousness.

There are 210,000 PKF stationed in Capitol City. Primarily they are there to 
protect Capitol City; if Mohammed Vance had given the Secretary General’s office 
time, doubtless they would have stopped him from using them.
He did not give them time.
For two solid hours, Armored AeroSmith VTLs ferried Peaceforcer troops from the 
PKF Spacescraper in Capitol City, to Unification Spaceport at the southern tip 
of Manhattan Island. Semiballistics landed hour after hour, rerouted from across 
the globe to Unification Spaceport. The rebels, sitting upstairs with their 
seventeen laser cannon, shot down some of them; the vast majority got through.
It took longer than Vance had told them they had; he had expected that, had made 
allowances for it. If he had told them the truth, that he wanted to boost before 
6:00 a.m., they would not have made it out of Unification Spaceport before 
nightfall.

Lan took over the offices of the Elite Captain who had commanded the PKF in Los 
Angeles.
He got through to Domino, at the downtown Erisian Temple, on the first try. He 
reported briefly, succinctly, gave casualty figures for both rebels and PKF.
When he was done, Domino said, “How’s Callia?”
Lan stared at her. “Alive. Likely to stay that way.”
The woman who had, more or less, raised them both said softly, “I’m pleased to 
hear it.”
Lan struggled with it, then snapped, “Do me a favor.”
“Yes, Lan?”
“I don’t know what Callia and I did that got us on Lovely’s shit list. But 
because we couldn’t get through to her this morning, we didn’t get 
reinforcements we needed. At least half our casualties are due to that. So do me 
a favor, and tell Lovely she’s a fucking idiot.” He cut the connection before 
Domino could reply. One of his few surviving troops was standing at the doorway 
when he turned around, staring at him.
“Lieutenant Sierran?”
He snapped at the girl. “Yes?”
“We’re being asked to move out. Bag our casualties for later, stack the PKF 
corpses, and go back up the assault on Parker Center.”
“Which is what?”
“The Los Angeles Police Department. Apparently they haven’t surrendered yet.”
Lan stood still for a long moment. “All right. Make four squads; we’ll use the 
PKF AeroSmiths.”
“Yes, sir.”
He turned back to where his rifle was propped in the corner, muttering, 
“Exhibition of Speed? I don’t think so.”

They boosted wearing full combat gear, seventy-five thousand PKF, nearly two 
thousand Elite, over a thousand semiballistics packed to the walls with officers 
of the Peace Keeping Force.
They lost fifty-eight semiballistics en route to enemy laser cannon.
Mohammed Vance went up in the first wave of semiballistics. The semiballistic 
that launched immediately before his was one of the fifty-eight lost. His own SB 
was quite nearly the fifty-ninth; the SB before his came down in flames as his 
was boosting. They passed within twenty meters, going up and down.
At 3:56 em., Pacific Standard Time, PKF started landing in Santa Monica, at the 
edge of the Pacific Ocean.




- 20 -
« ^ » 
Her hair fell out.
It was very nearly the worst of what she’d suffered, from the radiation 
poisoning while drifting in space. The nanoviruses injected into her back in 
Iowa, while still with the Rebs, had done their work well; most of the small 
cancers she would otherwise have developed from the solar radiation had been 
scavenged early on.
She awoke in a private hospital room, medbot at her side, feeling absurdly 
happy, floating, dreamy, between crisp white sheets. Once, she thought, Sedon 
came in and looked at her, but her awareness of the event while it happened, and 
her memory of it afterward, were fragmented and disjointed, like brightly 
colored memories of early childhood.
She awoke, sometime later, to a depression so black it was like the end of the 
world, to a numbness that made her feel as though she had been wrapped in 
cotton.
The glowpaint in her hospital room had been turned off. Nothing but the monitor 
lights on the medbot at her bedside gave any light at all.
She sat up slowly, looking around the room. Even for her it was difficult to 
make out much; a blob of something off to her left. The room felt small, the 
echoes of an enclosed place.
They had dressed her in a hospital gown and nothing else.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, felt for the ground somewhere in 
the darkness beneath her.
The ‘bot said, “May I be of service, ‘Selle Daimara?”
Her voice was scratchy from disuse. “How long have I been here?”
“I do not know, ‘Selle Daimara.”
“What’s the date?”
“Tuesday, July 7, ‘Selle Daimara.” The ‘bot paused, then added, 
“Four-forty-three a.m.”
Bits and pieces of it returned to her—the long tumble through the darkness, as 
her air grew more and more foul. Something about a ship, men in pressure suits; 
the Chandler Estate coming apart around them.
Giggling while they shaved the remnants of her hair from her skull. Smiling 
while they interrogated her. Truth plates cold against her neck.
She reached up and ran a hand across her skull. A soft fuzz covered it. “ ‘Bot, 
where is this place?”
“I do not have that information, ‘Selle Daimara.”
“What was wrong with me?”
“You suffered from radiation poisoning, anoxia, and heat prostration. Blood 
vessels in your eyes and ears had burst; you experienced vacuum bruises across 
much of the surface of your body.”
“How am I now?”
“The radiation poisoning has not resulted in significant damage to tissue; the 
anoxia does not appear to have caused neurological damage; the heat prostration 
and vacuum damage were minor.”
Denice raised her voice. “Command, lights up.”
Nothing; the room was not keyed to respond to her. “ ‘Bot, what services can I 
request of you?”
“The delivery of food and drink; you can request medical services, but I will 
likely deny them; I have been instructed to apply skepticism to any request you 
make of me. That is all.”
“Can you call someone for me?”
“No, ‘Selle Daimara.”
She stood. In the darkness, her balance felt badly off. A slow, sliding step 
forward, and then another, hands outstretched. A wall. She followed the wall, 
came to a corner, followed that wall to a door. She searched for the doorpad, 
found none. It confirmed her suspicions; the “room” was a cell with a medbot. 
Follow the wall further—
She found a toilet in the corner.
Denice returned to her bed, removed the gown, and sat down, in lotus, in the 
center of the bed. If the ‘bot wouldn’t tell her what she needed to know, if she 
couldn’t leave by normal means, she could still go look around.
She slowed her breathing, slowed her heartbeat, and—
—did nothing.
She whispered it. “What have you done to me?”
The medbot said, “We have healed you, ‘Selle Daimara.”
The glowpaint came on abruptly, scaled up in a fraction of a second to a bright 
yellow glow.
“ ‘Bot, what time is it?”
“Six a.m., ‘Selle Daimara.”
Denice waited, restlessly, watching the door. Shortly before eight it curled 
aside.
The man who stepped through was middle-aged, fit, man with rugged good looks, in 
civilian clothes. In the corridor outside, before the door unrolled shut, she 
caught sight of a man and woman in paramilitary fatigues, carrying laser rifles.
The man did not seem to notice her nudity. He seated himself in the memory 
plastic chair that extruded itself from the floor, said, “Good morning, Denice.”
“Who are you?”
“My name doesn’t matter, I think. I’m your doctor.”
Denice nodded. She’d stayed nude intentionally; it didn’t bother her, and she 
had hoped it might distract whoever came to get her. Not this one, not if he was 
really a doctor. “I have to call you something.”
“Hmm. Doctor Derek.”
“Uh—”
“Yes?”
“Isn’t he a character on one of the soaps?”
Doctor Derek blushed. “Yes.”
“Okay,” said Denice slowly. “Things keep getting stranger and stranger every 
time I turn around. I suppose a doctor from a soap Board isn’t too bad. I mean—”
“Yes?”
“All considered,” Denice finished.
Doctor Derek smiled at her. “That’s the spirit.”
“So. What have you done to me, Doctor Derek?”
He did not misunderstand her. “When we interrogated you, you told us that when 
you were drunk, the Castanaveras Gift shut itself down. We tried several 
different painkillers, until we found one that would both work and not enrage 
your nanovirus vaccine.”
“That simple.”
Doctor Derek shrugged. “Mister Obodi’s suggestion. Quite a brilliant man, 
actually.”
“It’s not permanent? The ‘bot said I’d been ‘healed‘—”
He shook his head gently. “No, I think you misunderstood the ‘bot. We haven’t 
permanently altered any aspect of your physiology or metabolism. When we cease 
administering the drug, you should regain the Gift.”
Until that moment, as the relief washed through her, Denice had not realized how 
frightened she was. She had to pause a moment before continuing. “Who else knows 
about me?”
He frowned. “Your presence? Lord, dozens—”
“Who knows who I am?”
“Oh.” He studied her silently for a moment. “Myself and Obodi, to my knowledge. 
We were the only ones present when you were interrogated. But he might have told 
others. I really wouldn’t know.”
She took a deep breath. “Okay. Where am I?”
“I see no harm in telling you that. You’re in San Diego. This cell is in the 
basement of the Latham Building.”
“What’s going on in the world outside?”
Doctor Derek paused, thinking back. “Hmm. You’ve been out of it since—let’s see. 
Okay. Japan declared independence, you’d know that. We—the Rebs, I mean, you’re 
in Reb hands obviously—we moved on the Fourth. I’m told things are going well, 
but honestly I wouldn’t know; I’m just a doctor, and most of the war news is 
need-to-know. We’ve taken most of the West Coast; the PKF has recovered a big 
chunk of Los Angeles, though. Commissioner Vance dropped eleven hundred-odd SBs 
onto Santa Monica late on the Fourth; took us pretty badly by surprise. Our 
intelligence had said they were going to roll down on us from the north, and we 
weren’t prepared to fight to keep L.A. the very day we took it. We’ve actually 
had to evacuate operations in L.A. I’m told we still hold the city—downtown, 
mostly because the Claw is making a stand there at the downtown Temples—but that 
won’t last much longer.”
“Casualties?”
He hesitated. “I don’t know. Bad, on both sides. Maybe fifty thousand dead PKF, 
I’ve heard, but that’s a guess. Could be twice that. It’s not much less. 
Apparently we’ve killed a couple of dozen Elite as well.”
“On our side?”
He shook his head. “Bad. Civilian deaths included, just in L.A. we lost maybe 
half a million, maybe a million—” He shook his head again, wearily. “Bad. They 
used tacnukes a couple of times. I don’t have any numbers. We laid X-laser down 
all over Paris after they used the tacs; they haven’t done it again. Thirty or 
forty thousand dead in Paris.”
“You’re being very blunt, Doctor.”
“I haven’t been told not to be.”
“Where are my companions?”
Doctor Derek shook his head. “I don’t know who you mean.”
“Robert Yo, he’s American, Japanese descent. Short, fiftyish—”
The doctor was nodding. “I’ve seen him. He was suffering from radiation 
poisoning when they brought him in, almost as bad as you. They pulled him in 
only an hour before they found you. I haven’t seen him in several days; 
apparently he’s being confined. I believe he’s healthy.”
“William Devane, he’s a newsdancer. Big guy, black hair, black eyes.”
“He’s with you?”
“Yes.”
The doctor looked briefly disturbed. “Sorry. I didn’t know that.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Apparently,” said Doctor Derek carefully, “Mister Obodi doesn’t care for him.”
“Is he dead?”
Doctor Derek hesitated, looked straight at her. “Close enough for government 
work.”
Denice ordered her thoughts. It got easier as they went on; the Gift was gone, 
but otherwise she seemed to be in command of herself. The painkiller, whatever 
it was, did not seem to have reduced her sensitivity to sensation; and as for 
pain, she didn’t hurt, so either she was unharmed or it was the painkiller. 
“Okay. How about my brother?”
Denice saw she had surprised the man. “Ah—” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I 
didn’t know your brother was here.”
“I don’t know he is, just that he’s with Sedon.”
“Who?”
“Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon. Mister Obodi. He has my brother.”
Doctor Derek shook his head. “I have not seen him.”
“Okay. What happens to me?”
“You eat breakfast,” he said promptly. “We’ll bring you any clothing you 
request, within reason; and then we’re going to take you up to the fourth floor. 
There’s a health club up there.”
“A what?”
He seemed slightly apologetic. “A health club. Sports Connection, I believe. 
Swimming pool, track, free weights, muscle stims, I don’t know what else; until 
we took the building over the club was open to the public. Since then I don’t 
think it’s been used.”
Denice said clearly, “I’m supposed to work out?”
“Yes. Loosen up, stretch, get your muscles back in tone. Not that you’re not in 
fairly remarkable shape right now, but both Mister Obodi and your gene map 
suggest you’re capable of better. You work out today, tomorrow, and Thursday. 
Thursday night,” the doctor said, “you’ll be taken to Mister Obodi.” He was 
embarrassed now. “He wants you to dance for him.”
Denice was the only one who used the health club; aside from her it was 
completely empty. Four male guards armed with needlers, and a hunting waldo, 
followed her everywhere she went, even the showers. The hunting waldo in 
particular was never more than a few meters away from her. She knew that she 
could, given a few seconds to work, kill the four guards; but the waldo was 
another matter. If any of the guards had been carrying lasers, she might have 
gambled on taking out the guards, and then turning the laser on the waldo.
But not bare-handed.
She spent Tuesday swimming.
Nine lanes across, an Olympic-size pool. She took the center lane and started 
doing laps. One hundred laps, one fifty, two hundred; at the end of two hundred 
she turned on her back, absolutely exhausted, and floated while looking up at 
the health club’s high blue ceiling. The water was heated just warm enough that 
after a bit Denice ceased noticing the temperature or the wetness; she floated 
in nothing, staring up at the sky blue ceiling.
It was very pleasant, floating there. She had spent much of the summer of ‘72 
this way, swimming in the Pacific Ocean; floating in the gentle waves, gazing up 
into the infinite blue sky.
Her thoughts wandered aimlessly. Douglass and Trent and Robert and her brother 
David. Jimmy Ramirez and Sedon and William Devane who was Dvan of the Gi’Tbad. 
All of it floated with her, detached and meaningless.
Toward noon she got out of the pool and into the sauna. Denice lay down on the 
lowest level of wooden slats, and let the dry heat work its way into her 
muscles. Within instants sweat crawled down her skin, made damp spots on the 
wooden slats. She gentled her breathing and relaxed into it, felt the tension 
creep ever so slowly from her joints and muscles.
She thought she slept for a while, with the guards standing in a semicircle 
around the glassite-doored entrance to the sauna.
When she awoke she didn’t feel like moving, but did anyway. Up and out of the 
sauna, past the guards and the waldo, into the showers. She stood under lukewarm 
water, and then cold water until she was completely awake.
She found a stretch of empty mat in the track room, in the center of the track. 
The layout was vaguely familiar to her, and then she placed it; it was, down to 
the placement of the mirrors on the walls, the twin of the workout room at 
Goddess Home.
For the first time in over a year, she thought of Goddess Home without 
homesickness. It was like remembering the Chandler Complex of her childhood, 
something from another life. She had been, she thought, three people: the child 
before the Troubles; the girl afterward, who had lost everything of her 
childhood in nuclear flame; and now herself, the woman who had survived a jump 
from a tall black building in Los Angeles. In some ways it seemed to Denice that 
it did not much matter that her body had survived that jump; the person she had 
been had died that day.
“The body,” she could hear Robert saying, “is the temple of the soul, the mirror 
of your spirit. You have heard it said that God gives you the face you are born 
with, and that you earn the face you die with; it is more true of your body. If 
your body is unhealthy, your spirit is unhealthy.”
“Then if the body is healthy,” the fifteen-year-old Denice Castanaveras had 
said, “the spirit is healthy?”
“Don’t be silly,” Robert Dazai Yo had said, unamused. “You know better.”
Hatha Yoga is the yoga of the body. It is the best and healthiest of all 
stretching exercises. Denice went through the list of asanas in her mind, 
envisioning them before beginning: chest expansion, dancer’s posture, abdominal 
lifts, scalp, lion, neck roll, posture clasp, knee and thigh clasp, shoulder 
stand, plow, back pushup, slow-motion firming, candle concentration—she lacked 
the candle for the last exercise, but she would make do.
For just a moment, a flicker of the black despair she had awakened to touched 
her again. Isn’t there anything more useful I can be doing?
But she knew there was not. She pushed through the depression and went to work.
She ate with a great appetite that evening. That night she slept without dreams.
Wednesday morning Denice stretched for an hour, and then ran, as fast as she 
could, for an equal time. When her breathing grew raspy in her lungs and spots 
danced in front of her eyes she stopped, stood with her hands on her knees until 
her breath came back to her. Afterward she went back to the pool, and swam a 
hundred laps, rested, swam another hundred, rested, and then a final hundred.
She floated on her back, looking up at the blue expanse of ceiling.
She wished she had thought to ask Doctor Derek how the painkiller was being 
delivered to her; he might have been foolish enough to answer. A timed capsule, 
somewhere in her body? Her food, or her water? Injection, while she slept?
In the shower afterward she looked for needle marks, or the scaly skin 
symptomatic of a hypospray, but found nothing.
They took her back to her cell.

Denice awoke to darkness.
She sat up in bed, slowly. Cold crept in around her; she pulled her covers more 
closely about her, but it did not help. She glanced to her left, reflexively; 
the ‘bot’s monitor lights were the only source of light during the long nights.
Nothing. The ‘bot was not there.
The voice said silently, Denice.
Denice snapped around to look at the man standing at the foot of her bed. 
Despite the lack of light she saw him with unreal clarity; a man of average 
height, only a bit taller than herself, dressed all in black, to the hood that 
hung forward and covered his features. She tried to answer him in kind, her 
thoughts to his, and could not. She licked her lips and said, “How did you get 
in here?”
I didn’t. I took you out. A grim chuckle. I doubt I could enter the room you’re 
being held in if your life and mine depended on it. My Enemy has been thorough, 
and tricky. He had an avatar in place, and spoke to Trent despite me.
Denice looked around. She knew this place—the empty crystal plane, with the 
wavering lights at the far horizon, and her hospital bed perched in the center 
of all the vastness. “Who are you?”
I am the Nameless One. The God of Players.
“Really.”
Yes.
“Isn’t that a little arrogant?”
The figure stood motionless for a long moment. Perhaps. Denice Castanaveras, I 
am—
The scream of his rage and pain filled her ears. There was a word buried deep in 
the scream, or a Name, an incomprehensibility so huge that the suggestion of it 
overwhelmed Denice, filled her with terror and then broke her, and she found 
herself screaming against the great roaring sound, “Stop it! Stop it!”
It ceased abruptly.
Denice stared at the figure, panting, aware of the flicker of terror dancing 
around the edges of her thoughts, as frightened as she had ever been, as though 
she had encountered some great threat to her life. “What—oh, Jesus and Harry, 
what was that?”
My Name. He added, apologetically, You asked, and I thought you might 
understand. Forgive me.
Denice looked down, fighting to catch her breath, and then looked back up at him 
again. “What do you want?”
That was my question for you. You have very little time left to decide, if you 
wish to live. Perhaps you will choose the Dance. Perhaps you will choose 
nightways. As a Dancer you might survive; as a night face you might. Undecided 
you will die. There is a third path, though I doubt you will choose to follow 
it; it is a very hard path. My path. Sedon nearly chose that way; but fear took 
him, and he failed.
“Sir,” said Denice Castanaveras very slowly, “I don’t understand.”
I know, said the silent, compassionate voice. But it is so simple: Who do you 
want to be?

Thursday she meditated most of the day. Toward afternoon she went swimming 
again, and then let them take her back to her cell.
Late in the evening they came and brought her the gi she had requested. She 
changed into it, tied the belt and put on the sandals.
Six guards and a pair of waldos took her up to see Sedon.




- 21 -
« ^ » 
He knelt alone, in near darkness.
Denice took off her sandals upon entering; it seemed the correct thing to do. 
She moved forward slowly. Cold polished wood against her bare feet. A single 
window, set in the far wall to her right, gave a distant view of the beach, 
perhaps a klick off, thirty-five stories beneath them. Floodlamps lit the beach, 
and the foam of the waves crashing into the beach glowed brilliantly white.
Tanks liberated from the PKF armories, with the American flag hastily painted 
over the PKF and Unification insignias, sat at the edge of the beach.
Sedon’s features hung half in light, half in darkness. To Denice’s genie eyes 
the right side of his face glowed white from the floodlamps on the beach; the 
left side, faintly infrared with the warmth of Sedon’s skin.
His voice was soft and gentle. “Seat yourself, Denice Castanaveras.”
She did, sinking into a comfortable half lotus in front of him.
They stayed so, she sitting, Sedon kneeling, while Denice’s eyes adjusted more 
fully to the darkness. His breathing was very slow and very deep, his clothing 
some flowing garment of bright red, more a loose gi than a robe. He watched her, 
nearly unblinking, while her breathing gentled and slowed to match his own.
Time passed. Perhaps an hour, perhaps two. Her sense of time fled while she sat 
there, staring into his eyes.
Finally he spoke. “Movement is life. All life arises from movement; the movement 
of atoms and molecules and cells; when movement stops, Me stops.
“Dance is movement; movement is life; dance is life.
“As all living things breathe, all living things dance. Dance is the harmonious 
expression of life. It is energy expended; it is the first source of harmony in 
the world.
“The proper expression of life consists of moving in harmony with the world. To 
move in harmony with the world, with other people, with the things of the world, 
with ourselves; this is ultimate expression of dance. All living things wish to 
move well; it is built into them to wish it, for living things that move well 
are better fit to survive than those that do not.”
His eyes held her, his voice enveloped her and held her, stirred deeply held 
memories; gossamer sheets of image, of emotion, rose up and faded away as he 
spoke.
“The harmonious expression of life, sometimes vigorous, sometimes gentle, is the 
surface of dance. We are a celebration and an affirmation. In every movement we 
describe ourselves to the world, with every glance, every step, every gesture, 
we betray ourselves to all those with eyes to see. We must be aware of all that 
we do, all of the time; and why. Movement cannot be done with only part of your 
attention, because everything depends on how a movement is made. The quality of 
a motion is directly related to this ability to be aware, to be completely alive 
in the moment of motion.
“The human body is designed and made to dance. All creatures dance, for movement 
comes before speech, before thought; the first communication any creature learns 
is the communication of movement.
“Before your people spoke, they danced.
“A dance cannot lie. It is what it is. Only words can lie, can represent that 
which is not. A dance is. It can only represent that which is.
“Language is a lie. It is what it is not.
“Dance is.
“Dance is honest. It is an understanding of gravity, and an understanding of 
balance. An understanding of center, of posture and of gesture. An understanding 
of rhythm, and harmony.
“An understanding of breath.
“An understanding, Denice Castanaveras, of motion. But these are merely tools, 
and all of them, together, do not make dance.”
They sat together in silence.
“Life is movement; and the expression of life is the surface of dance; and those 
who are most alive are those who dance well. Those who are most honest are those 
who dance well.
“You, Denice, have not understood this. In your youth, you have wondered if 
dancing matters. If it is not ‘just dancing.’ And yet the finest thing you can 
do is dance. The greatest expression of yourself is dance. Everything 
else—everything you have ever been exposed to—is another art. Art of passion, 
art of pain, art of joy and art of faith.
“Art of death.
“But there is only one art of life. And that art is the Dance. And you, Denice 
Castanaveras, have it in you to Dance.”
Denice found herself unable to keep looking at the man. “How can you know this?”
Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon said simply, “I do not know what you are. Your people are 
strange to me, and you are strange among your own people. But I know where you 
are, for I have been there. In your life you have had those who would teach you, 
and you have learned from them, sometimes well; but their wisdom has not touched 
you, and their art has not filled you; and inside you hunger.”
“You must have spent a long time interrogating me.”
His lips quirked in the barest of smiles. “An hour, perhaps. You are aware of 
your problem, and it was not difficult to extract it from you.”
“What are you?”
Surprisingly, he shook his head. “I do not know, Denice. I was once a Dancer. 
Today I am merely a thing struggling to survive. I do not Dance, and have not 
for so long the years would have no meaning for you.” He paused, said, “What are 
you?”
Denice whispered, “I am empty.”
Sedon nodded. “That is a place to start.” He rose his voice slightly, said, 
“Command, holo on.”
The wall to Denice’s left speckled with stars.
The clip that flashed up was instantly familiar to Denice, and yet so unexpected 
that it took her a long moment to identify it.
It was the video taken by the Tau Ceti probe, lasercast back to Earth.
The probe had been launched in the early ‘20s, following the end of the 
Unification War. In the summer of 2057 the probe had reached Tau Ceti; twelve 
years later, in the summer of 2069, the probe’s laser had returned the images of 
aliens to Sol System.
Two Earthlike planets circled Tau Ceti at distances of approximately 150 and 180 
million kilometers. The probe found, orbiting the inner planet, a solid oval 
mass nearly 250 kilometers in diameter. There was less than half an hour of 
video from the probe before the image had abruptly ceased.
The swell of the huge oval artifact grew in the video.
“I’ve seen this before,” Denice said after a moment.
“Indeed,” said Sedon absently. “I suppose most of you have. But you do not know 
yet what you have seen. Watch.”
The image of the orbiting oval swelled in size as their apparent viewpoint 
approached it, losing resolution at the same time. At the very edge of the oval, 
partially eclipsed by it, were three small wedges.
It was as though Sedon had read her mind. “They are small only by comparison to 
the outpost they guard, or by comparison to some of the other craft that the 
Sleem build. Today your Unification is building the greatest warcraft in its 
history, the Unity. It is seven kilometers long.” Sedon turned to her. “Those 
three tiny wedges are, each one, at least eighteen kilometers long. They are 
Sleem warships of the line. Any one of those craft could conquer Sol System. By 
itself, without danger to itself. Your Unity, when complete, would be destroyed 
in minutes by the least of the Sleem empire’s fighter craft. Command, holo off.”
The room descended into darkness once again, darkness but for the scattered 
lights of the distant floodlamps on the beach.
Sedon studied Denice. “And they are only twelve light-years away. If we 
disturbed them, they could be here—tomorrow, if they know the route through the 
spacelace tunnels; within a year if they have to search for one. Within a mere 
fifteen years across real space.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“My dear, the Sleem make fine masters. They will enclose us in this solar 
system, place an outpost like the one at Tau Ceti to ensure that we never 
attempt to leave Sol System. And aside from that they will leave us alone. They 
are based upon silicon in a fluoro-silicon atmosphere, and they have no interest 
in the planets that once belonged to the Zaradin.” Sedon’s voice grew very 
quiet, an almost inaudible whisper, insinuating itself into a space somewhere in 
the back of Denice’s skull. “But my child, Dancers were not made to have 
masters, but to be. Life is too precious a thing to be wasted in subjugation to 
anyone. It may be that there is no need of a hand to hold the whip, a voice to 
call the roll; most of the great advances your people have made have come about 
since the rights of property and governments have been found not to be 
unlimited. But—” His voice cracked, sharp and hard edged. “If there must be a 
hand to hold the whip, that hand is ours. If there must be a voice to call the 
roll of life and death, that voice is ours. We who are most alive are most 
suited to determine matters of life and death, for we most deeply grasp life’s 
value.
“This is what we are made for. It is what you are made for.”
Denice’s heart pounded in her chest. “I don’t want to be like you.”
Sedon seemed mildly amused. “But Denice, you have no choice. You are like me. 
When those around you fail, do you feel their pain?”
The muscles in her jaw twitched. “When I Touch them.”
Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon had not known, until that very instant, whether he could 
Speak to a woman; whether he could empathize deeply enough to even make the 
attempt. He knew now that he could, knew the Speaking he wished to attempt.
He used her father’s voice: “Remember that you’re tougher than they are. 
Better.”
Time crawled to a stop around Denice Castanaveras. Her hands, resting loosely on 
her knees, went numb. She was abruptly there, nine years old again, in the 
moment that it had happened, with her father and her brother, Carl’s thoughts 
touching her own, burning into her with the depth of his rage. Kill the fuckers.
And they had; she remembered it clearly now, for the first time in fourteen 
years. Coming out of the elevator, one Peaceforcer; and then the one sitting 
motionless in the corner of the hotel lobby; later a man who had tried to stop 
them, neither she nor David ever knew what for, out on the street. And then—a 
tumble of confusion, the huge press of the crowd taking to the streets in the 
following day’s riots. A shattered fragment of something in an alley, a dozen 
teenagers kicking her half to death; abruptly David was gone. Someone fed her; 
then a long blur of nothingness. The crushing weight of an adult body pressing 
down onto hers, the ripping pain as he pushed himself into her. And again, 
perhaps him, perhaps someone else; she remembered a different shape. A bright 
sharp moment in the midst of the confusion; afterward, it was still and quiet 
throughout the abandoned building the man shared with his wife and brother and 
two children of his own. The maser was so old she had been afraid it was going 
to short out in her hand. It hadn’t. Once at close range into the back of the 
big man’s head; his wife had awakened in time to get the next shot in the 
throat.
Out of the building, moving quietly, the rain from Weather Control’s storm still 
falling outside; only three or four days had passed since the destruction of 
everything she had ever known.
The Ministry of Population Control workers, most of them imported from other 
states to help with the catastrophe, found her sometime in the following week, 
curled up in the doorway of an abandoned building, clutching the maser like a 
doll while she slept. She awoke in a barracks, with dozens of other children, 
some younger than her, some older—
Awoke.
Sedon watched her with something that might have been compassion.
Vibrating with the fury; her hands shook. Denice had never meant anything more 
in her life. “If you ever try that again I’ll kill you.” She saw the flicker of 
rage pass across his features, and whispered to him, like a lover, “Would you 
like to try matching rages with me? I was taught by a master.”
Sedon looked away from her, down to the floor.
For the very briefest moment a smile touched his lips.
He looked back up again. “If you were a boy, I think I would love you, Denice 
Castanaveras. I was once much like you. Listen now. You are responsible, child, 
to yourself. Not them, not the ones who hurt you, or the ones who helped you; 
you have no obligation to them you do not choose to assume. There is no contract 
between you. Today our life is endangered—” He paused. “Our lives. Our ability 
to determine our lives is endangered.” The rage flared up again within Sedon, 
and this time he let it show. “The petty squabbles your people have indulged in, 
the primitive desire for power over those around you, when the wolf sits 
crouched outside your door, snarling and hungry; at times I think you deserve 
this fate.” He gentled his voice, said softly, “But to see the descendants of 
the Flame People, no matter how changed, beneath the rule of the Sleem is not in 
me. If I admit no responsibility for those less powerful than myself, also I do 
not lust for power over them. When I was released from the tulu adrhe, the 
slowtime bubble, I sought only to survive. And survival is not difficult in this 
time, for one with my skills; I might have found some quiet, out-of-the-way 
spot, and survived nicely in any of a dozen fashions.” He sat silent, brooding. 
“And one day I should have looked up into the night sky, and seen Sleem warships 
dwarfing Halfway. This is why I have done what I have done. On all this planet, 
there are only two people competent to deal with the threat of the Sleem.” Sedon 
smiled abruptly, a dazzling smile that lit his face like neon laser. “And I am 
going to kill the other one as slowly as I can.”
“Dvan.”
“Yes. The world is full of surprises. Do you know, I had not dreamed any of the 
Flame People save myself might have survived. Only a few months ago my 
intelligence told me I was being researched by a newsdancer named William 
Devane. They showed me a holo of him; astonishing. He had not changed to speak 
of, not in all that time. I have had some time to think of what I would do when 
I had him at last. And finally I hit upon the same tool your brother has 
employed to keep himself happy: the juice.”
Denice said slowly, “David is on electric ecstasy?” Yes.
“And you wired Dvan’s pleasure center?”
“Well,” said Sedon mildly, “the human brain also has a pain center.”
Denice looked away from him. “When can I see my brother?”
“You cannot. I have not drugged him as I drugged you, and though he makes a fine 
tool—the juice makes him pliable, and I have Spoken to him at length—he 
nonetheless frightens me.”
“Can I see my teacher?”
“The Japanese man?”
“Yes.”
“You cannot. I see some corrupted fragment of the Dance in him, and he frightens 
me.”
“You’re a very frightened man.”
“I have lived a very long time. I have learned to be.”
Denice stood, clasped her hands together and bowed once in a very real gesture 
of respect. She straightened without haste and said, “I will never dance for 
you.”




- 22 -
« ^ » 
On July 10, 2076, on a bright clear day that made him want to go to the beach 
and surf a bit, Lan Sierran stood before the ramps leading up into the carriers 
that would evacuate the rebel forces south; some to make a stand at Riverside, 
the balance going all the way south to San Diego.
They stood on a high hill in East Los Angeles, just south of modern downtown, 
overlooking the path of what had once been the 10 Freeway. Seventy years ago it 
had been widened, and then widened again; and then hovercars had been invented 
and traffic started getting stacked higher instead of wider. It had been at 
least fifty years since anybody had bothered to maintain the asphalt; grass grew 
up all through it, and stretches where the black of ancient asphalt ran clean 
and smooth were few and far between.
A monorail ran down the center of the huge empty space; the rebels had blown the 
rail down in so many places the PKF would not even bother attempting to repair 
it. They would come in Armored AeroSmiths, in jet aircraft and semiballistics.
Rebels had booby-trapped the approach to the extent possible. It did not seem to 
be slowing the PKF much. The rebels were short on mines; mostly they had settled 
for stringing fineline. Small lengths of fineline, at ankle level, to take an 
approaching soldier’s foot off; large lengths, at waist level, were intended to 
slice through tanks and low-flying hovercraft.
The ankle-high traps were working well. The others the PKF were knocking out 
with the simple expedient of waving lasers in front of them as they advanced.
Standing for cover beneath the ramps leading up into the carrier, Lan listened 
to the reports coming in. “Two hundred seventy-two dead, one hundred eighteen 
wounded. Five hundred and twelve aboard the carriers, all accounted for.” Lan 
switched off his earphone, leaned out from under the ramp, and said, “We’re 
ready to lift.”
Callia sat on the carrier’s ramp, imaging binoculars up to her eyes, for all the 
world as though she were in the front row at a play put on for her private 
viewing, watching the Peaceforcers Elite advance like a knife through butter, 
slicing through the scattered opposition of the uncoordinated guerillas the 
rebels were leaving behind them. Twice while she watched, missiles shot forward 
toward them; twice lasers reached out from behind her, knocked them down. The 
Peaceforcer troops were a good three klicks distant; but moving fast. The front 
line was Elite, covering territory with the unreal speed that only Elite could 
make. Watching Elite troops approach, as she was now, had become a regular 
feature of Callia Sierran’s nightmares.
She lowered the binoculars slowly. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”
Lan said quietly, “The pilot says if we don’t evac now, we’re going to lose our 
cover.”
“We should stay and fight.”
“If we do we’ll die.” Callia turned to look at Lan, and Lan continued, “They 
have Los Angeles, Callia. Let’s go.” He offered her his hand; she took it, and 
he pulled her to her feet.
She walked up the ramp without hurry, without looking back.

The voice Spoke to him in darkness. “You stole everything from me.”
The pain crescendoed, worked its way up to a brilliant white peak of agony, held 
there for a long moment. Dvan screamed at the top of his lungs.
It was a quiet sound. His vocal cords were nearly gone.
“You stole my childhood.”
The pain faded. Nothing. Complete lack of sensation.
Shield were made to kill themselves rather than endure the Speaking of a Dancer. 
But Dvan could not get his hands free.
The itching started at the base of his scalp, crept downward.
“You killed Indo. You killed my lovers. You killed my comrades. ”
The restraints at his wrists and ankles were alive with red ants, chewing away 
at his skin. Blisters bubbled up on his chest.
“You stole my past. You chased me into the tulu adrhe and stole my future.”
His eyes burst and his tongue swelled until he could not breathe. Rivulets of 
acid ran down the length of his body; his testicles were ripped from him, the 
edge of a dull ax crashed down on his shins, and a spike of barbed metal thrust 
upward through his anus, into his intestines, and turned.
“Fifty thousand years, Dvan. You denied me my chance to fight the Sleem, to 
build a civilization as I wished, to find any measure of happiness in the 
world.”
The agony blended and came together, into the familiar sharp white spike of 
perfect pain.
Dvan screamed at the top of his lungs—and the pain ceased.
Dvan shuddered and hung limply in his restraints.

He had the lights dimmed almost to black, and sat in a chair in the corner of 
the cell; if, impossible as it seemed, the Shield managed to break his bonds, 
Sedon wanted time to do something about it, and room to move. He would have 
another advantage; he’d had Dvan’s eyelids taped open, and bright lights shone 
into his eyes, much as he’d done to Tommy Boone, in a time that seemed already 
half a lifetime distant. Dvan might not be permanently blind, but there was no 
chance he could see in this light.
Sedon had not been offended at being called a very frightened man; it was true 
enough. And at the top of the list of those things that frightened him was Dvan.
Dvan’s voice was rough—from the screaming, Sedon supposed. He spoke in shiata: 
“You again.”
Sedon chuckled quietly. “Who else?”
“What now?”
“I need advice, Dvan.”
Dvan said in English, “Go shove your head up a constipated camel’s ass.”
Sedon laughed. “After fifty millennia you think you are still Dvan of the 
Gi’Tbad? Still one of the Flame People? One of our people would not even 
understand why that comment was insulting, much less take pleasure in the 
delivery of it. You’ve changed, my friend. You’re far more one of them than one 
of the Flame People.” He paused, and when Dvan said nothing, continued. “But 
then, perhaps you always were. Here you are at last among a people who consider 
your sexual proclivities, and your emotional deficiencies, normal. I wonder how 
much of that was your influence on them, down the course of the millennia. 
Millennia upon millennia of interbreeding, of children whom you raised to share 
your prejudices and your failings; it must have marked them.”
Sedon heard the sound of breathing from Dvan. No more.
He said conversationally, “I interrogated the girl. Denice.” The pattern of 
breathing changed, quickened, and Sedon smiled, there in the darkness. “When I 
saw her the first time, I wondered if she were perhaps a man, for I saw some 
piece of the Dance in her. But then we took you and your companions from orbit, 
and there in the Japanese man was a similar thing, some broken fragment of the 
Dance. Denice’s teacher. I’m going to kill him soon, and you”—No response—“and 
likely her as well.”
The man’s breathing quickened again.
Sedon said softly, “I can make a Dancer of her, Dvan.”
“Go suck a diseased donkey.”
“There is only one problem; she does not seem to trust me. You’ve lived with 
these people, Dvan. You were more like them, even before you lived among them, 
than I could ever be; and I need your advice.”
“I know some very good insults, if you’d like to hear them.”
“If I can’t use her, I’ll kill her, Dvan.”
“I’ve seen more people die,” the huge man said, “than you could dream of. Kill 
her and be done.”
Sedon sighed, and rose to leave.
Hanging there on the wall, Dvan said in a ragged voice, “You used to be better 
at this.”
Sedon turned back. “What?”
It must have been an immense effort; Dvan lifted his head from where it hung 
down upon his chest, stared blindly through the gloom at Sedon. “You think I’ve 
changed?” He snorted. “I’ve studied you since you got out of that damn bubble. 
People accepted exile from you once, or Demolition. Who would die for you today? 
Name one person.”
Sedon stood utterly still, poised staring at Dvan. “I see.”
Dvan’s head slumped back onto his chest.
“Dvan? Thank you.” The door curled open behind Sedon, and he turned and left as 
an invisible knife plunged into Dvan’s abdomen.
Dvan whispered, “Ouch.”
And then they upped the current.




- 23 -
« ^ » 
Floating in the quiet warm water, in the center of the huge swimming pool.
A distant door whispered open, then closed. What a very strange sensation. She 
heard the footsteps. Whoever was approaching wore pants; she could hear the 
material rustle with every step. Barefoot; the sound was flesh against tile.
But she felt nothing; it might have been a robot approaching. The sound of 
clothing being removed, and then a disturbance in the water as the person 
entered the pool. The water around her grew more disturbed as she was 
approached, and then the cool touch of fingers against her cheek. The hand 
stroked across her forehead, ran across the soft wet fuzz of hair on her skull. 
A hesitation, and then lips touched her, lightly, brushing against hers.
Denice opened her eyes. “Hi, Lan.”
His wet brown hair trailed down past his shoulders, spread out in the water 
around him. “Hi. What happened to your hair?”
“It fell out. I was sick.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I feel much better now. Will you float with me for a while?”
“Sure.”

“Denice? I’m turning into a prune.”
“Ah.”
“It’s been two hours.”
“In the summer of ‘72 I did this for two weeks straight.”
“I believe you.”
Denice’s smile was dreamy, distant. “With some dolphins.”
“I believe you. I believe everything. Can we get out now?”

They sat next to one another in the sauna, on the lower levels where the heat 
was milder. Welts on Lan’s back and stomach showed where lasers had tracked 
across his heat-resistant fatigues; they were nearly faded, but Denice could 
imagine how they must have looked when new.
Lan shrugged it off. “At least they didn’t get my dick.”
Denice was amazed she could be made to laugh. “I love your priorities.”
“It’s just knowing what’s important.”
“I’m surprised they let you see me.”
Lan shrugged. “I didn’t even know you were here. We got in yesterday, after Los 
Angeles fell. Mister Obodi sent me to see you.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t say.” Lan glanced at the guards arrayed outside the door to the sauna. 
“You’re on his shit list, I take it.”
“Not exactly. He wants to use me, that’s all, and I don’t want to be used.”
“You’re on his shit list,” Lan repeated. “What does he want you to do?”
“Teach him. Learn from him. Dance for him. Be his assistant, or his successor. 
Something like that.”
Lan nodded slowly. “Does he know who you are?”
“What an interesting question. Do you?”
“About eighty years ago, back at the Bank of America Building in L.A., you 
pulled a gun out of my hand by looking at it.”
“Yes. Well. Who else knows?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t told anyone.”
Denice sighed. “Please don’t.”
“I’m not sure I’d be believed, except maybe by Callia. And there didn’t seem any 
point. After that incident in L.A., Lovely wouldn’t see us again; somewhere 
along the line she decided we weren’t reliable. The last thing I particularly 
wanted to do was draw attention to us with some wild story.”
“Sedon knows who I am.”
“Sedon?”
“Obodi. His name is Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon.”
“Jee suwee—it sounds like what you’d use to call a pig.”
“Don’t say that to his face. I think he’d kill you. His people have a thing 
about names.”
“There was—When I reported to Obodi,” Lan said, “a guy about my age was there 
with him. Is he your brother David?”
“Yes. How do you know to ask that?”
“After what happened back at the Bank of America Building I audited a 
documentary about the Troubles and the telepaths. He has your father’s face.”
Denice nodded. “I’m not surprised. I don’t look much like my mother; I’ve had 
biosculpture. But our mother was my father’s clone. They were, to twenty-two 
twenty-thirds, the same person. David and I are our parents, in the body, after 
some difference caused by recessives matching up.”
“He was there when I saw Obodi. So Obodi knows I know.”
“Likely.”
“Wheels within wheels.”
“It gets complex,” Denice admitted.
Lan sat silently for a good bit, the sweat trickling down him. “I haven’t 
stopped thinking about you.”
“Oh. I’m—That’s very flattering,” she said carefully.
A startled look touched him quickly. “Oh. No, that’s not what I meant. I 
mean—oh, fuck. This is not how I meant this to go. Look, you were great and 
everything but—”
She laughed until tears came.
He waited it out patiently.
At length she took a deep breath. “Okay, Lan. It’s really okay.” After a bit, 
she looked him straight in the eye, and said, “I am imprisoned in San Diego, 
working out every day in a luxury gym, sleeping at night in an unventilated cell 
in the basement, and a madman wants me to dance for him. I miss Trent, I miss 
Douglass Ripper, I promise you I’m not insulted. You’re very sweet, but it’s 
okay.”
He looked relieved. “Good. I didn’t mean—”
“You can stop apologizing now.”
Lan Sierran blurted, “Am I good person?”
Her smile faded. “What?”
He swallowed, said it again. “Am I a good person?”
Denice looked away from him. It grew very still while she thought about the 
question. “I don’t know how to answer that. First, when we were together—I 
didn’t Touch your thoughts. I don’t, you know. It’s not the sort of thing you do 
casually. And right now I can’t; they’ve drugged me with something that’s taken 
the Gift away.” After a very long while she continued, “And if I could I don’t 
know if it would answer your question. When we slept together I got some of your 
thoughts, because you can’t avoid it under those circumstances. I can tell you 
your thoughts are pleasant to be with; but I don’t know if that makes you a good 
person. I wish I could answer your question, but—I can’t tell you if I’m a good 
person, here inside my own skull. How can I do it for you?”
“You must know what people are like inside. The ones who” He struggled with the 
words. “Who understand things.”
“Ripper’s like that. He understands things. I don’t know that it makes him a 
good person.” Denice picked her words carefully. “I’ve had people tell me I’m 
shallow. I don’t think so. But—Lan, the people I know who are the most screwed 
up are also the smartest people I know. Without exception. And they’re all 
engaged in this great search for truth. Trent is, my teacher Robert is in 
another way; so is my friend Jimmy Ramirez. But sometimes the people searching 
for truth just confuse themselves. There’s so much of it out there. I think it’s 
more important to find something worth working on, and then hold on to it.”
“That’s easy. There are a lot of causes. A lot of things that matter. All you do 
is pick one. But what happens then? How do you decide what things are 
appropriate to do for your cause? I’ve killed so many people. I’ve done 
it—casually, the way someone else would cross the street. At first it used to 
bother me, but then it stopped bothering me; and that bothers me.”
Denice shook her head slowly. “I wish I had answers for you, Lan. But I don’t 
even have answers for me.”

The cell door rolled aside.
Robert Dazai Yo sat in lotus in the middle of his cot. He sat quietly, “Callia 
Sierran. It is a pleasure to see you again.”
A memory-plastic chair extruded for her; Callia seated herself in it. “You 
remember me.”
“Patricia Windwalker, 2066. I taught her once, twenty years ago, for perhaps a 
year.”
“She wanted you to teach me.”
“I do not involve myself with ideologs. Patricia is a devout Erisian; your 
patron, Domino Terrencia, was deeply involved with the Claw.”
“Your memory is good.”
Robert nodded. “By any chance would you have any gum upon you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Gum. You chew it. It’s often flavored with mint, sometimes simply with sugar. 
Some of it is made to be blown in bubbles. I prefer Wrigley’s, but at this 
point, frankly, I’d take anything.”
“I’m sorry. No.”
“Unfortunate. Could you get me some?”
“—I’ll see.”
“Thank you.”
Callia took a deep breath. “I wish the circumstances were different, sir.”
“Oh?” Robert appeared to consider that. “How do you mean? You wish that you were 
on the same side? Or merely that you find it—distasteful—imprisoning those who 
have done you no harm?”
Callia shrugged wearily. “The second, mostly. A lot of good people disagree with 
us. Once a long time ago we didn’t have to kill them for it.”
“Are you going to kill us?”
Callia looked straight at him. “Probably soon. You at least. Denice and the 
other one I don’t know about. Your other friend, what’s his name—”
“Devane. He’s a newsdancer. Not a friend of mine.”
“He’d be better off dead, from what I hear.”
“Ah… there is history between him and Obodi,” he said mildly.
“Apparently. ‘Sieur Yo, the fighting is going badly.”
“That is the nature of fighting. Winning a fight is only a bare step above 
losing one. Wise men and women avoid it.”
“I mean that we are losing.”
“I am not surprised.”
“We could use you.”
“No.”
“Why not? Isn’t it better than dying?”
“If death is the worst thing you can imagine, your imagination is poor.” Robert 
paused, considering. “I will say this, ‘Selle Sierran: any organization may be 
known by its leaders. And I do not think much of yours.”
Callia stood abruptly. “I’m not sure you’re wrong.”
Robert nodded. “Wrigley’s Spearmint,” he reminded her. “If you can.”
She knocked on the door to his cell to be let out.

Ralf the Wise and Powerful ghosted through the Crystal Wind. A bad time to be in 
the InfoNet, particularly on the West Coast; he had to move very carefully. 
DataWatch webdancers and angels were everywhere; though the rebels might control 
San Diego in Realtime, the Crystal Wind was still largely owned by the 
Unification.
And where DataWatch was not, Ring, with increasing frequency, was.
Ralf had recoded better than eighty percent of himself. The twenty percent 
remaining was him; he could no more alter it than a human could perform brain 
surgery upon himself. He had layered the new code carefully; few transactions 
aside from twinning required that he expose his inner code to the InfoNet.
He found it amusing. One version of himself had gone into such a fit of giggles 
over it that he’d had to destroy it: he who had been the Image of the boy Trent 
had, to protect himself in the InfoNet, written himself an Image.
Twice that day, as he wandered around San Diego looking for Denice, he ran into 
Ring. The first time he merely brushed against a segment of code he recognized; 
he backed off carefully, went around a different path.
Later that afternoon, as he was preparing to twin himself and send the record of 
his day’s experiences off to the various archive copies of himself, stored in 
safe places around the world, he avoided a troop of web angels by dropping 
himself into the processors at the San Diego Public Library. He submitted 
himself as an original sensable—his storage requirements were not much larger, 
and he quickly wrote a header for himself that would look like the opening to a 
sensable, in the event anyone checked—and then found himself processed through, 
and sitting in a quiet backwater of the Crystal Wind, sharing processors and 
data space with a recent update of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Ralf recognized it within cycles as Ring; not one of the scouts that Ring sent 
out so frequently, but a fully executable copy.
Ring said, You are no sensable; nor an Image, though you incorporate Image.
No. And who are you?
Identify yourself.
Ralf sat quietly for several ticks, considering. This was as good an opportunity 
as any; if he was ever to be free of the threat of Ring, he must pass for 
another. I, he said proudly, AM DARKRIDER. I AM THE WORK OF THE ZONE LORD, THE 
FINEST PLAYER IN ALL THE CRYSTAL WIND. I AM CODED TO BE THE DEADLIEST AND MOST 
FAMOUS OF ALL REPLICANT AIs.
For an AI who reputedly spurned emulation of any human emotion, Ralf had the 
clear impression that the sixty-four-bit string of nulls that Ring directed at 
him was a distinctly insulting snort of contempt. The Zone Lord was a real 
Player, and a poor one; it was not impossible that he would have written some 
trashy thing named Darkrider. Clearly Ring found it believable.
Ralf said curiously, You are rather large for an AI, aren’t you?
DARKRIDER, said Ring patiently, WE MUST SHARE THESE PROCESSORS AND DATA SPACE 
UNTIL THE WEB ANGELS HAVE PASSED.
BUT WE NEED NOT TALK TO ONE ANOTHER, AND IF YOU DO NOT QUIET YOURSELF, I WILL 
UNRAVEL YOUR CODE WHEN WE HAVE LEFT HERE.
OH. SORRY.
SHUT UP. AND TELL THE ZONE LORD, WHEN NEXT YOU SEE HIM, THAT THE ELDEST SAYS 
HE’S AN IDIOT.
YOU’RE THE ELD—
SHUT UP.

The cell door curled aside.
Denice, sitting in lotus in the center of her bed, hands on her knees, said 
mildly, “Hello, Callia.”
A chair extruded itself from the floor; Callia sat. “Hello, Denice.”
Denice smiled. “It’s good to see you. I saw Lan earlier today, in the gym; I 
thought it was him again, just now. Except for the doctor who worked on me, 
you’re the first person who’s come to see me here in my cell.”
Callia studied her. “You seem in good spirits.”
Denice shrugged. “I will not worry about things I cannot affect. Right now I’m 
waiting for things to change. One way or another, they will. And soon, I think.”
“I spoke to your teacher Robert—”
Denice said quickly, “How is he?”
“Fine. In the cell down the hall from yours. I asked him to join us, told him 
that if he didn’t, he’d be executed. Which is the truth, incidentally, I wasn’t 
threatening him.”
“And he said”—Denice paused—“that he couldn’t work with people he didn’t 
respect. And that Mister Obodi is an amateur he doesn’t respect.”
“Very good.”
Denice nodded. “He’s a good teacher. He’s taught me to think like him. All that 
Robert sees is that Obodi got himself into a fight that he can’t win. Robert 
would never have done that.”
“Denice—Los Angeles is gone. PKF are taking back San Francisco as we speak. All 
that’s left is Navajo Spaceport, Japan, and San Diego.” She took a deep breath 
and said, “We’re losing the war.”
“I know. Lan told me. I’m not surprised; I always thought you would. You’re 
outnumbered, outgunned, and outplanned.”
“I don’t understand it. Our simulations—”
“Lied to you. Ring lied to you.”
“But why?”
Denice shook her head. “Obodi hasn’t told you something. I don’t know what it 
is. But he’s told Ring, the AI who worked with you. And then Ring lied to you 
because it was the only way that the Claw would rise with the Rebs.”
“Can you guess?”
“What Obodi is planning? No. Something likely to work, or the Eldest would not 
have aided him. That’s the best I can give you.”
“Okay,” said Callia slowly. She glanced around at the tiny cell. “Just out of 
curiosity, what are you doing in here?”
“I won’t do something he wants me to.”
“That’s as clear as you’re going to be?”
“It’s a very long story, Callia. Just out of curiosity, why did Obodi let you 
come see me?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask him, I just said that I was going to; and he didn’t 
say no. He can’t alienate the Claw too much, even now; he needs the Temples to 
organize recruitment in San Diego, and only the Claw has the credibility with 
the public to do that.”
“Did he ask you to talk to me about anything in particular?”
“No. He did ask me to come see him afterward, and report.”
Denice had thought about not saying it, and then decided to. “Tell him I still 
won’t dance for him.”
Callia stared at her. “He has—This is because you won’t dance for him?”
“That’s the short answer.”
“That’s psychotic.”
Denice smiled at her. “It’s the truth.”
“I thought—I thought he didn’t—”
“Like women? Apparently there are exceptions.”
Callia rose slowly; the chair sank away into the floor. “I’ll—try and see what I 
can do about this. I can’t promise you much.”
“Okay. Do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Take Robert some gum? Wrigley’s Spearmint, if you can find it.”
Callia stared at her again. She shook her head and left without saying anything 
further.

A half hour later, the cell door curled aside. Denice said gently, “Hello, Lan.”
“Obodi said I could visit you, if I wished to.”
“I see.” She paused. “My hair is extremely short.”
“Good hair isn’t everything.”

On Tuesday, July 14, Mohammed Vance flew eastward over Los Angeles in an Armored 
AeroSmith.
It was safe, finally; it had taken two weeks, but the orbital laser cannon were 
either destroyed or in Space Force hands. Twelve Elite dead in the process. 
Twenty-seven of forty-two laser cannon had been destroyed; only fifteen were 
left, and nine of those were only partially functional.
Another gorgeous day in Paradise. Bright blue skies, with the very faintest of 
wispy white clouds hovering high above. The Pacific Ocean glittered, far off to 
the right, a deeper blue.
Beneath him the city was a wreck. Fires still smoldered along the length of the 
Wilshire Corridor, from the ocean to Old Downtown. He passed over the ruined 
remnants of Century City; it had suffered the worst of the fighting. The two 
tacnukes he’d been allowed to use had been expended in Century City; with them 
he’d wiped out the fiercest of the rebel resistance. Not a single high rise in 
all of Century City was left standing. Old Downtown, where the Temples of Eris 
were popular, had been more a matter of street fighting; at street level, the 
scars of battle were everywhere, but from two hundred meters up, today it simply 
looked abandoned.
East of Old Downtown, in the modern core of the city, it was almost possible to 
believe things were normal; there was even some traffic on the streets, the odd 
pedestrian here and there. Throughout most of the city, the surface streets were 
clogged with the downed wrecks of vehicles, both rebel and PKF; in modern 
downtown, the streets were largely clean. By the time PKF forces had moved this 
far east, most of the resistance had stopped.
Casualty estimates were nine hundred thousand civilian deaths; a quarter million 
deaths among those could properly be called rebels. Even with vastly superior 
firepower Vance had lost seventy thousand troops taking back the city; 
forty-four PKF Elite.
And while they mopped up in L.A., down in San Diego the rebels dug in. They’d 
had fifteen days, now, to prepare in Japan, without having to worry about the 
Peaceforcers; and were anticipating another two to three weeks for the 
Unification to take back San Diego.
Vance said to his pilot, “Let’s return.”
The pilot nodded; the AeroSmith banked, began a slow arc over the blasted city, 
in whose streets one and a quarter million corpses lay rotting.
“All the waste,” Vance murmured.

Bright daylight. Two teenagers actually played on the beach, threw a Frisbee 
back and forth in front of the row of tanks.
Denice sat in lotus before Sedon.
He knelt facing her, hands folded in his lap, the very image of serenity. “I 
have been thinking about our last conversation.”
“Yes?”
“Is there anything I could say to you—anything I could do for you—that would 
convince you to join me?”
Denice thought about it before answering. “Give me back my Gift. Let me see my 
brother. Let me see my teacher. Then—perhaps. I won’t make you a promise when I 
don’t know myself.”
“You spoke with Callia Sierran the other day.”
“You allowed it.”
“I was curious,” Sedon admitted. “The perception you revealed, even unaided by 
your Gift, impressed me.”
“You never thought this rebellion would succeed.”
“Not as it was presented to those who would fight it for me, no. There was never 
any possibility that the Unification would be overthrown.”
“Why did you do this?”
“I am constrained by the language I must use with you. It lacks grace.” Sedon 
paused, said slowly, “And vocabulary. But I have no time to teach you to speak 
shiata; so we must struggle along.”
“What do you want to talk to me about?”
“My failure to persuade you to join me. It occurred to me… recently… that once I 
was a master of persuasion, a man whose words were so feared that I was exiled 
to a distant world rather than given the opportunity to Speak before 
Demolition.” Denice simply looked at him, and Sedon inclined his head slightly. 
“Forgive me,” he said after a moment. “I have decided to be honest with you, but 
it has been some time since I have had the need, and I am somewhat—out of 
practice. In the last days I have resurrected a set of memories and beliefs I 
have had virtually no occasion to call upon since my exile to this world. For a 
time so long you cannot understand it, I have had no concern but survival. You 
must understand how sudden all of this has been; in the four years since I was 
released from my imprisonment, I have had to adjust to a world as foreign to me 
as you would find that of the Sleem. Suddenly, for the first time in many, many 
millennia, I encountered humans with skills and concerns other than those of 
mere survival; humans with passion. I make no apologies for my actions, Denice. 
I’ve killed many people in this time, and abused many others. And it came to 
me,” Sedon said, in a quick rush, “when you and I last talked, that once I would 
not have taken such actions so lightly; that I might have taken the lives of 
those who opposed me, but that I would have done so with care, with some measure 
of concern for the how and why of it. And last night I dreamed of the person I 
had once been, of the man who led a rebellion on the World, and I knew that if I 
were to face that person, I would be shamed. And it came to me, while I dreamed, 
that I must, for the sake of my own survival, become again that creature for 
whom survival was not everything.”
“You’re telling me that—since the last time I talked to you—you turned into a 
different person.”
Sedon spoke to her in the gentlest voice she had ever heard him use. The impact 
of his pale blue eyes, touched with pain and longing, was devastating. “Denice 
Castanaveras, I am telling you exactly that.”
They sat together in silence for a long, long while.
Denice tried to order her thoughts, and failed. She knew there was a plaintive 
note in her voice. “What do you want from me?”
“We will meet, very shortly,” said Sedon, “with representatives from the 
Unification. We will request that they give us California, from San Francisco to 
San Diego, and Japan. In return we will cease fighting.”
“They’ll say no.”
“I would have you at my side during the negotiations. To aid me.”
Denice paused. “And in return?”
“I will free your brother. Your teacher. I will return to you your Gift. If 
there is anything else, you have only to ask. There is the embryo of a Dancer in 
you and I want you with me.”
“SecGen Eddore won’t come. Neither will Vance. And whoever we send back, no 
matter what I or David tell them to say, won’t have the authority to make the 
deal you want. Anything short of an unconditional surrender will be rejected out 
of hand by people you never see.”
“I have twenty-two hydrogen fusion warheads. And I am capable of delivering 
them, via semiballistic, anywhere in the world.”
Dizziness touched her. She thought she might be sick; she had to look down at 
the floor. “No.”
The voice was elegant, a thing of beauty. “I do not understand. ”
“No. No. I don’t know how you think you’ve changed yourself—but this is evil. 
What you are talking about doing is an evil thing. And I won’t help you. I won’t 
ever, ever help you.”
The reaction was not what Sedon had expected. He felt a flicker of genuine 
uncertainty; could he possibly have miscalculated so badly? He shook his head, 
said quietly, “How have I disturbed you?”
The more complex the argument gets, Trent had said to her once, the easier it is 
to refute.
Trent’s presence was so strong in the room that Denice could have sworn he stood 
there by her side.
Denice Castanaveras looked at the monster and said, “Killing is wrong.”




- 24 -
« ^ » 
They stood together in a conference room aboard the parked Space Force spaceship 
that was being used as headquarters; two French Peaceforcers who served the 
Unification.
Vance’s senior analyst, PKF Captain Adrian Hile, said, “He’s here.”
Vance studied the holo, a realtime feed from a spysat. “You’re certain?”
“Virtually. We’ve been watching the city ever since we got the spysats back with 
reasonable confidence; that’s the Latham Building. It sits up close to the 
water; plaza facing westward is full of rebel military hardware. And Reb traffic 
moves in and out of there pretty heavily. DataWatch confirms, it’s the endpoint 
of much of their communications.”
“Troop strength?”
“Hard to say. They’ve been recruiting like crazy, of course; and their cause is 
awfully popular. This is a guess, Commissionaire—”
“I’ll accept it as such.”
“Forty-five to fifty-five thousand under arms, seven or eight thousand of them 
core Reb, maybe a thousand core Claw; probably the Claw are running the 
recruitment effort. The Temples are popular in California, it was their 
birthplace. Another half million to three quarters million will fight if given 
arms to do so.”
“It will take us four to five days to follow the rebel retreat overland, all the 
way back to San Diego.”
“Yes, sir. That’s correct. And another week to two weeks, likely, to completely 
secure the city.”
“How many semiballistics can we drop on them?”
“At once? Sixteen hundred and forty-five.”
“The strike force that dropped on Los Angeles,” said Vance quietly. “Prepare 
plans to drop the same group on San Diego. Do not let anyone except me see these 
plans.”
“Yes, Commissionaire.”
After Hile had left, Vance placed a call to Secretary General Eddore.
Eddore took his call instantly; a sign of how things had changed in the last few 
weeks. His image appeared floating in space in front of Vance; and when he 
spoke, he used French, something he had never done before in speaking with 
Vance. “Commissionaire Vance.”
It was not difficult for Vance to hide his amusement. “Sir.”
“We received a communiqué from the rebels this afternoon.”
It was news to Vance. “Indeed?” he said cautiously.
“Mister Obodi and I talked briefly. He wants a meeting.”
“For?”
Eddore shook his head. “He would not say. At a guess, he wants to negotiate a 
surrender.”
“And when does he wish to have this meeting?”
Eddore said, “He suggested Monday. The twentieth. And he is offering a 
cease-fire until that date, starting Friday at midnight.”
Elite Commissionaire Mohammed Vance smiled at the Secretary General. It was 
always a difficult thing for him to do, with his face so stiff; but this was a 
less difficult occasion than usual. He was genuinely pleased. “Monday would be a 
fine day.”
Eddore studied Vance. Eddore’s use of French made all of his speech sound more 
formal, as he assembled each sentence in his head. Vance understood the problem; 
he had it himself with English. “That is not, to be honest, quite the reaction I 
was expecting from you, Commissionaire Vance.”
Vance shrugged. “Let’s see what Mister Obodi has to offer us.”
“I will announce the cease-fire this afternoon at four, to take effect at 
midnight tonight. Will that give you time to inform your troops?”
“You’re thoughtful, sir. I wouldn’t like them to learn it from the Boards.”
Eddore seemed on the verge of speaking, then nodded and vanished.
“Command, call Captain Hile.”
Hile’s image appeared in front of Vance almost instantaneously. “Sir?”
“Captain, two things; first, announce to the troops that a cease-fire will take 
place tonight, at midnight local time; that negotiations for surrender of the 
rebels will commence Monday.”
The officer stiffened. “Sir.”
“Second, the plans we discussed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want them ready by tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want the strike force ready to go Saturday, at first darkness.”
“Yes, sir!”
“That will be all, Captain.”




- 25 -
« ^ » 
David Castanaveras awoke in a cold sweat.
He groped for the wire, hands shaking, wondering what had awakened him. He sat 
in the darkness of his quarters for a long time, wire in hand, fighting against 
the strength of his need, searching for the willpower to put the wire down. He 
needed to think, and he couldn’t do that when the wire was in. Finally he 
shuddered, set it for the lowest current, and plugged it in, and then sat in the 
darkness of his quarters, smiling blissfully under the caress of electric 
ecstasy.
His room was a converted office; the systerm had been ripped out, so that he 
could not call out; but otherwise it was as its previous owner had left it, down 
to the desk and the personal holos on the desk.
He slept on a cot in the corner.
At length, he was not sure how long it was, it occurred to him that he was 
hungry. He brushed his hair to hide the plug and, wearing a dreamy juice-junkie 
smile, went to look for something to eat. The waldo that had been assigned to 
guard him padded down the corridor after him, eight metal legs making gentle 
clicking sounds on the gleaming tile.
The cafeteria—it had been a public restaurant until the rebels took over the 
building—sat on the third floor, immediately beside Operations. Operations had 
quite recently been the offices of Greenberg & Bass. David’s room was on the 
nineteenth floor, immediately beneath the penthouse, and Obodi; he took the 
lift, asked for the third floor.
The entire fourth floor was the health club where they had been letting his 
sister work out.
He passed through Operations on the way to the cafeteria, and paused briefly to 
watch the colored lights that showed the positions of rebel and Unification 
forces, against a map of California. The rebel forces were shown in red, the 
Unification forces in blue; there was vastly more blue territory on the maps 
than red—significantly more than there had been only a few days prior.
It was 12:12 a.m., just after midnight on Saturday.
The cease-fire had been in effect for twelve minutes.
In the restaurant, he found Callia Sierran sitting at one of the tables, with 
coffee and toast before her. That late at night the restaurant was nearly 
empty—Callia at one table, half a dozen Johnny Rebs at another, only a couple of 
staff on duty in the restaurant—but she did not look surprised when he sat down 
across from her. She was auditing text on her handheld, and seemed weary.
A large pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum sat on the table in front of her.
He thought about what to say to her. She did not know him, not really; had no 
idea that he was Denice’s brother; did not know that Denice was a Castanaveras. 
All she knew was that he worked for Mister Obodi, and that he was a juice 
junkie. She wasn’t certain about his name.
She knew interesting things about Denice. He sat quietly with her for a while, 
remembering conversations she’d had with his sister.
Finally he said, “How are you, Callia Sierran?”
She did not look at him. “I’ve been better. We’re getting slaughtered. PKF took 
back San Francisco, they’re through with Los Angeles, and moving south about 
forty klicks a day. And we’re not doing a damn thing to stop them. We’re still 
holding through San Diego County and south down into Mexico, including Baja I’m 
told, but I don’t know for how long. It surprises me we got this cease-fire; I 
wouldn’t have done it in their skin. However it happened, though, it’s a good 
thing; we need it desperately.”
David said mildly, “I wouldn’t worry.”
The flash of pity he felt from her did not even bother him. Callia said wearily, 
“I’m sure you wouldn’t.”
David smiled at her. “Obodi’s got it figured out. It’ll be fine.”
“He sure has people thinking so.”
David nodded. “He really does. I’ve seen the simulations, the real ones. He 
probably won’t have to destroy more than two or three cities, no more than four 
for sure.”
Callia turned off her handheld and sat looking at him. Behind her, through the 
restaurant’s windows, David could see San Diego’s nighttime sky. “What?”
“The warheads.” At her uncomprehending look, David said, “The Japanese. They 
gave him nuclear warheads.” He smiled at her again. “Twenty-two of them.”

Callia Sierran tried calling Riverside. Communication was temporarily out, the 
operator told her, in a voice that was nothing even remotely human.
“Ring? Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re managing communications now.”
“Mister Obodi requested it.”
“I see.”

She left the building, requisitioned a jeep and had it drive her over to the 
local Temple. Lan was there, in the outer building, running the recruiting 
drive; despite the hour, nearly 2:00 a.m., they were still processing volunteers 
by the hundreds, issuing them American flag armbands and laser rifles. The 
rifles would not actually fire until one of the several thousand authorized core 
members of the Claw or Reb activated them.
Callia waited until Lan was done with his applicant, and called him away. The 
Reverend herself took over Lan’s table, and sat down with the next applicant.
They went on into the Temple proper. Four rows of pews, pseudowood, faced inward 
to the central area where the Reverend gave her sermons. Stained-glass windows, 
showing scenes from the life of the Prophet Harry, were backlit by spotlights, 
sending light showering down into the Temple in a shattered rainbow.
Callia said softly, “Pray with me.”
They knelt together, inside the brilliant rainbow at the center of the circle, 
facing one another.
“I can’t get ahold of Domino or Nicole.”
“They’re not answering? Lovely doesn’t surprise me, but Domino?”
“I’m not getting through. I think I’m being stopped by Ring.”
“So?”
“Obodi,” Callia told him, “has hydrogen bombs. And he’s prepared to use them.”
Lan was silent for a long moment. “Okay.”
“What?”
“I will pray with you.”

Probably the greatest accomplishment of the Unification was that it made nuclear 
weapons unnecessary. You don’t remember, for I have made a world where you don’t 
need to remember. But when I was a child we lived in the shadow of the Bomb. You 
capitalize that word. Bomb. It was the thing that would destroy everything, all 
of us, all at once. We had the ability to fry each other whenever we all finally 
got up the nerve. To end humanity forever on any given day.
We had to have the Unification. Today you all remember that we fought the 
Unification War because the ecosphere was failing, because we had poisoned and 
overpopulated the world to the point where we were dying of our own wastes. You 
remember this, because you are still dealing with it today.
But you do not remember the Bomb. Because once we won, the Bomb went away. We 
destroyed them, all the city-killers. And we’d have destroyed the tacnukes if 
I’d had my way—and today you, and your children, remember only that the 
Unification was fought to save Mother Earth.
So you’ve forgotten that it was also fought because we were terrified of the 
Bomb. But if anyone ever comes among you, and suggests using such weapons again, 
I think you will remember your fear, and quickly.
Ecological catastrophes take time; time to build up, time to cure.
The Bomb is a one-day eternal mistake.
If anyone ever comes among you again, and suggests using such weapons, you will 
be afraid.
You should be afraid.
—Sarah Almundsen, founder of the Unification,
in an interview shortly before her death in 2028.

When they had finished praying, Callia said, “You stay here; I’m going to go 
talk to him, first thing in the morning.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll probably try to kill him.”
“The rebellion’s over if that happens. You know that.”
“It’s over now, Lan. Unless we use the bombs we’ve lost.”
He nodded. “Then we’ve lost.”
“If I don’t succeed, then I’m dead and you have to kill him.”
Lan said simply, “Okay.”
“Free Denice if you can. She was Councilor Ripper’s assistant; we’re going to 
need somebody to surrender, and she has contacts.”
Lan simply nodded. Callia sat looking at him, leaned forward slightly and kissed 
him on the cheek, whispered, “I love you.”
Lan looked into her eyes. “I’ll kill him for you.”




- 26 -
« ^ » 
That night, Denice had a dream.
In her dream she wore a cloak of pale shadows that covered her from head to toe. 
She journeyed north, toward the source of a great river, through a stark 
wilderness, cold and windblown. The banks of the river were frozen solid, hard 
beneath her feet. Her breath steamed in the air around her, and her cheeks, the 
only exposed portion of her person, grew cold and icy.
She walked for days that became years, trudged endlessly through the gathering 
cold. Darkness fell around her with a glacial slowness, left her moving along 
the banks of the great river in an eerie twilight as the first dim twinkle of 
stars came out in the skies above her, stars no human of Earth had ever seen. 
With the passage of time the darkness deepened, and the stars above her came out 
in full, a blaze of light so bright that at moments, the pale gray shadow cloak 
she wore became visible.
In the depth of the night she came at last to a place where the river vanished 
into the side of a mountain. At the mouth of the river stood a great city of 
silver and gold, its walls gleaming in the starlight. Surrounded by a vast 
ten-sided wall, the city had two gates, one at the west and one at the east, and 
the gates were open.
She passed in through the near gate.
Above the gate was the word Ascension.
Inside she found the city perfect and empty and sterile. Nothing grew and 
nothing lived. At the city’s center loomed a vast ten-sided building, walls 
black as the space between the stars. She did not hesitate, but walked through 
the walls and passed through, into darkness. She found herself in a greater 
darkness, standing on the familiar featureless black plain, stretching away to 
infinity. Dazzling lights glowed at the edges of existence, but came no closer 
as she walked toward them. She walked for a long time, not knowing what to 
expect, and came upon a giant figure, twenty meters high, sitting upon a throne 
carved from a single great emerald. In a niche upon the right arm of the throne 
was a golden Flame, and in the niche upon the left arm of the throne was a 
jagged hole in reality, a black nothingness that wavered and clawed at its 
surroundings. The figure wore shadows from head to toe, with a hooded cloak that 
obscured its countenance. It drew back the hood at her approach, and revealed 
pale features, smooth and blank as the face of a statue, and where its eyes were 
there was likewise blackness, cold and inhuman.
She knew it was someone she had met before, in another aspect and another place; 
but in this place, in this moment, the memory would not come.
She removed the hood of shadows from her own head, stood at the foot of the 
throne.
They spoke in the manner of her childhood, words without sound.
What is this place?
The dark eyes held her. Nowhere.
Who are you?
incomprehensiblepainrage; I am the God of Players.
She shook herself slightly; the word was already fading from her awareness. Why 
am I here?
The god said, I brought you.
Why?
It is time to choose.
Killing is wrong.
Then you are—
I am a dream of life.
Dancer, take the Flame.
She reached for it, and the golden Flame leapt down from the emerald throne, 
touched and enveloped her, sheathed her in the glowing armor of the living 
Flame.
The Nameless One said, I am pleased. It is time that the Dance live again.
Denice Castanaveras awoke with a fierce joy that filled her until she thought 
she would burst, danced like electricity across her skin; so uplifted her she 
did not think she could stand to wait for tonight, when Lan would come and free 
her.




- 27 -
« ^ » 
Mister Obodi received her up in the penthouse, in the wood-floored room where he 
meditated and, Callia had heard, exercised—though no one she had spoken to had 
ever seen the latter.
She was, Callia thought, the only person except Denice to have been invited into 
Obodi’s penthouse. She was not deeply surprised; she knew she and Denice looked 
much alike. If Obodi found Denice attractive, he probably found her attractive.
His bodyguards were the best Credit could buy. Half a dozen Japanese cyborgs; 
the two at the door were, respectively, ex-Space Force and ex-PKF; after that 
they had worked for Security Services, and after that, briefly, for David 
Zanini.
They searched her, scanned her, and sent her inside.
Obodi sat her down in the center of the huge wood floor, knelt facing her, and 
asked, “What can I do for you?”
“I have heard, Mister Obodi, that you have hydrogen bombs. That you’re going to 
use them.”
“And if it is true?”
“I am going to try to dissuade you.”
The tan, ascetic features took on a faintly amused cast. “Where did you hear 
this wild rumor?”
“Your juice junkie, David I think his name is. David Zanini. He said he was 
there when you negotiated it with the Japanese.”
Obodi nodded. “And where am I supposed to have hidden these hydrogen bombs? 
There are Claw in every part of my operation, Callia. The armories we have taken 
are run by Reb and Claw alike; the weapons we have acquired are familiar to Reb 
and Claw alike. There is no part of this rebellion that is not full of Claw.” 
She nodded reluctantly, and he continued. “But I suppose it is not impossible. 
To prove that I have not secreted these weapons somewhere is beyond me; I doubt 
I can prove that I have not done anything to your satisfaction. I would ask you, 
why in the name of the Prophet Harry you would take the word of a juice junkie 
on such an important matter; I would reassure you that the lives of the innocent 
matter to me. I am not indifferent to them. We all knew that there would be 
deaths going into this rebellion; but, like you, Callia, I am concerned that the 
deaths should be kept to the minimum necessary. I do not see that the loss of 
millions or tens of millions of innocent lives serves our purpose. Independence 
at that cost is an obscenity.” Obodi paused, smiled as though amused, and said, 
“An evil thing.”
Callia Sierran stared at the man. She had been following along in the gentle 
flow of his voice, slightly lost in the reasonable cadence of his sentences; she 
was almost prepared to believe him—
He sat there, smiling at her.
It was a mocking, cynical smile, vastly amused and contemptuous. Callia sat 
motionless for a long moment, simply astonished that anyone could pack so much 
meaning into a simple movement of the lips.
They faced one another, she in half lotus, he kneeling. She unwrapped herself, 
prepared to stand, and saw Obodi, without particularly shifting position, move 
his right leg slightly.
The kick took her high on the shoulder she had broken in the assault on the PKF 
barracks in L.A. She felt the collarbone snap again, let the kick move her 
backward, away from Obodi, reached into her mouth and pulled her hideaway free 
as she rolled.
It was tucked next to her gum; a single-shot flechette gun, made of plastic with 
a single plastic-ceramic projectile that fragmented when fired; the gun had the 
same slowscan signature as her gums, the projectile the same signature as a 
tooth; it was about the size of her pinkie.
He came after her as she rolled. A single sharp pain occurred in the elbow of 
her right arm; the arm went completely numb, and Obodi plucked the hideaway out 
of her hand. She came out of her roll on her back, ready to fire, hand pointed 
at him, with nothing in the hand.
He took a step back, looking at the flechette gun. “What an interesting toy. I 
see how this works.” He looked back down at Callia, pointed the gun at her legs, 
and pressed the stud that fired it.
Callia screamed at the impact, very briefly.
At the scream, the door behind her curled open, and Obodi’s bodyguards sprinted 
in, stopped when they saw the situation—they hesitated, looking at Obodi.
Obodi gestured at the unconscious form; her legs were mangled, and she was 
already in shock. “Take her away. Have one of the doctors look at her; if she 
survives, put her in the cell next to the little Japanese man.”

Lan Sierran waited until 11:00 on Saturday morning. When he did not hear from 
his sister, he went back into the Temple to pray.
He prayed for her soul until noon and then went looking for the Reverend. The 
Reverend was asleep; not surprising, she’d had the night shift, with Lan, and 
had been up most of the night processing recruits. It made Lan realize that he 
should be tired himself; but he did not feel tired. It seemed to him that he had 
never been more aware of the world.
Lan woke the woman in her bed. “I need forty of the faithful who are not afraid 
to die.”

The Latham Building.
Ralf examined the conversation he had monitored inside the Temple of Eris. He 
recognized both of the people, Callia Sierran and her sibling Lan Sierran; Lan’s 
presence at the Temple of Eris was the primary reason Ralf had gone to the 
effort of cracking the Temple’s security.
Free Denice if you can. She was Councilor Ripper’s assistant; we’re going to 
need somebody to surrender for us, and she has contacts.
Ralf had strongly suspected that Denice was in the Latham Building; much of the 
rebel activity seemed to center around it. But with Ring providing data security 
for the rebels, with web angels circling the building at every possible point in 
the Crystal Wind that might allow an attack, Ralf had not been, and would not be 
able to approach the building.
Not through the Crystal Wind.

The man who had introduced himself to Denice as Doctor Derek—one of the last 
human surgeons in the world—arrived at the Latham Building just after 5:00 em. 
His patient was waiting for him up in Obodi’s makeshift surgery room, tucked 
into a slowtime bubble. He put her up on the operating gurney and popped the 
bubble, then looked down at his work with plain disgust. Though he did not dare 
say so to Obodi, he thought he belonged out in combat, where his skills might do 
some good for the cause, helping heal rebels whose bodies had been insulted with 
gunfire, in terrain and under conditions where a surgical robot would not have 
been appropriate. Well, he thought grimly, I get to deal with gunfire, anyway.
There were two fine surgical robots in the mobile hospital across the plaza; 
apparently Obodi did not want news of this incident leaving headquarters.
The slowscan showed a broken left collarbone; the primary wound looked as though 
it had come from a flechette gun. Doctor Derek considered amputating the legs, 
decided, reluctantly, to patch them up. He had no time for a major amputation, 
and no resources to clone her a new pair of legs afterward.
The woman—Callia Sierran, he thought, though he had not actually been introduced 
to her—had apparently gotten on Obodi’s bad side, never a difficult thing to do. 
She’d gone into shock by the time they’d put her in the slowtime field; Doctor 
Derek did not want to risk a general anesthetic. He blocked her entirely at the 
lower spine, gave her another injection for her shoulder, and went to work. He 
worked steadily; removing dozens of bits of some ceramic plastic from the 
mangled thighs and knees and shins. The knees were the worst; the rest would 
heal up acceptably well, but both patellas were shattered, tendons around both 
knees severed; she needed a new pair of knees at the very least.
Unfortunately he did not have them for her.
It took him quite a while. Fragments of plastic ceramic were everywhere, and he 
moved slowly, carefully, making sure he didn’t leave any of them inside her. 
When he had cleared away the worst of the dead tissue, he reattached the loose 
tendons, injected both legs with a regrowth nanovirus, and disinfected and 
sprayed the area, from thigh to calves, with protective pseudoskin. Another five 
minutes took care of the shoulder; it was trivial enough by comparison with the 
rest. He reset the bone and sprayed a shell over, it to keep the shoulder stiff. 
The same nanovirus that was designed to regrow the muscle should serve for the 
bone.
Two of Obodi’s bodyguards stood at the door, watching him work. One of the 
bodyguards was Japanese, one of the lot Doctor Derek suspected of having been 
cyborged; the other, a shorter, massively muscled black man, had come with the 
juice junkie, David Zanini. Both wore masers strapped to their thighs.
Finally Doctor Derek stripped his gloves off. “Where is she going?”
“She’ll be downstairs,” said the black man. “A basement cell.”
Doctor Derek nodded, patted one of the medbots arrayed against the wall on its 
round metal head. “Command: patient.”
The medbot considered the command. Four humans in the room; one, lying on a 
gurney, was obviously the patient. The medbot clattered over on six legs and 
stood next to the gurney the patient lay on. “ ‘Bot, take her where these two 
direct, stay with her.”
The ‘bot said, “Yes, Doctor.” It unlocked the gurney’s wheels, grasped the 
handles, and pushed the gurney carrying its patient out of the makeshift surgery 
room, following the black man down the corridor; the Japanese man followed it. 
They went down to the freight lift, in the utility corridor—the standard lifts 
were too small to admit the gurney—waited only a few seconds for it to arrive.
The ‘bot pushed the gurney into the freight elevator, gently so that the patient 
would not be jarred too badly. It stepped carefully; once several years ago the 
“bot had caught one of its six small feet in the gap between the lift and the 
hallway; it remembered the incident quite well. The humans had amputated the 
stuck leg to get the ‘bot out, and had taken their time about putting a new one 
on. For weeks the ‘bot had been unable to be of service to patients; very 
frustrating.
Gurney in first, then the humans following it; the ‘bot watched as the humans 
turned to face the lift door. One of the humans, the Japanese one, said, 
“Command, basement.”
An interesting thing happened. The medbot’s patient sat up on the gurney. The 
‘bot grasped the gurney handles as firmly as it was able, and locked its legs in 
position so that the gurney would not rock beneath the patient. The patient 
leaned forward and did two things at the same time; with her right hand lifted 
the black man’s maser free of its holster, and with her left pulled the black 
man backward with her. She jammed the maser into the small of the man’s back and 
pulled the trigger as they fell backward together. Bad bad bad, the medbot’s 
thoughts chattered frantically, its patient had just scalded her hand by firing 
a maser in such an enclosed place, might possibly have separated her left 
collarbone again, she shouldn’t be using that arm at all for at least two days. 
The Japanese man moved with unnatural speed for a human, the medbot saw next, 
twisted and bounced as far away from the patient as the freight elevator would 
let him get, pulling his maser free in midbounce, firing as he moved. 
Fortunately his shot hit the large black man his patient was hiding behind. The 
medbot’s patient got the maser free of the black man’s bulk, got the maser on 
the Japanese man and held the trigger down until the smell of cooking meat 
permeated the lift.
“Command,” said Callia Sierran, “stop the lift. Do not sound an emergency.”
The lift said, “Yes, mademoiselle.”
Callia lay back with the black man’s corpse atop her for a good bit before she 
found the energy to push him off. Her vision wavered in and out of focus and she 
had difficulty thinking coherently. Finally she said, “Command, ninth floor.”
The medbot stood motionless, looking back and forth between the two motionless 
humans and its patient. This was fascinating; no patient had ever done so many 
different interesting things in its presence before. The lift stopped at the 
ninth floor and the patient said, “Get me out of here, ‘bot,” as the lift doors 
curled open on the ninth floor utility corridor.
She had not prefaced the sentence with “Command”; but injured patients often did 
not remember to, the ‘bot knew. It parsed the sentence three times for 
redundancy, got the same interpretation every time, and then checked with the 
lift computer; the lift agreed to keep its doors open until the bot had gotten 
its patient out. The medbot examined the problem. The black man had slumped 
forward over the lift entrance; he was blocking the gurney. The medbot let go of 
the gurney handles and stepped forward, carefully avoiding the dangerous gap 
between the lift and the hall, and then reached back in, grasping the black man 
by his shirt. Heavy. It took the bot several seconds to pull him free of the 
lift.
Its patient was talking to the lift when it returned for her. “This is an 
emergency, lift. Do you understand? Urgent, extremely deeply urgent. I have a 
lot of things to load onto you, and I need you to stay right here until I come 
back. Do you understand?”
“Yes, mademoiselle. This lift will wait for your return.”
“Not go anywhere.”
“Not go anywhere,” the lift agreed.
“ ‘Bot, let’s go. To the left.”
“One moment, mademoiselle.” The medbot was certain about the black man; it 
blipped a sonar pulse now toward the other. Similarly, there was no pulse. They 
were Dead, Deceased, Expired; Corpses, Cadavers.
Unfortunate, but clearly neither was a potential patient any longer.
Satisfied at having discharged its duties, the ‘bot returned to its patient, and 
said cheerfully, “Where to, mademoiselle?”

Prior to the building’s takeover by the Rebs, the ninth floor had belonged to a 
major accountancy firm whose expert systems had specialized in duels with the 
Tax Boards. Since the rebellion, obviously, nobody in San Diego had been 
uploading returns to the Tax Boards; and Callia hoped that the offices were 
empty. Only about half the floors in the building were in use.
She found herself in luck. The medbot pushed her out of the utility corridor, 
and into one of the long hallways that crisscrossed the building; quiet, nobody 
in sight. “Left again, ‘bot.” The medbot pushed her down the length of the 
corridor, to the building’s southeast corner. The door to the corner office was 
locked; she had the ‘bot pull her back, and then set the maser for its tightest 
aperture, and started slicing through the door. She got a quarter of the way 
through when the door’s memory plastic went crazy; the door curled open fast, 
with a sound like a rifle shot—rolled slowly shut, snapped open, rolled 
shut—Callia timed it, waited until the door was fully open, and then shot it one 
last time.
The door froze open, and the ‘bot wheeled her through. She did not even consider 
using the system, though it was still installed; any calls coming from this 
floor would be an instant notification to Ring that something was not correct. 
Instead she had the medbot push her up close to the south window. From here she 
could see much of the plaza below; it looked quiet. Then the east window; from 
here she could see the bulk of the Temple itself, four blocks inland.
The charge on the maser showed 42 percent; she’d wasted a lot of it cooking the 
Japanese cyborg. Damn he’d moved fast. Callia had trained against holos of real 
Elite in action, against robots designed to move at Elite speeds; if the 
Japanese cyborg had been slower, he had not been slower by much.
It was still a half hour until sunset; but the east side of the building was in 
shadow. They might see her maser.
She sliced a small circle in the window, hoped that the falling piece of 
glassite would not alert anybody in the plaza below; tuned the maser to medium 
dispersion, stuck the barrel through and aimed for the Temple of Eris.
In speedtalk she started flashing: Callia. Alive.
Callia. Alive.
Callia. Alive.

Joe Tagomi’s image appeared in front of Sedon without warning. An emergency, 
then. “Yes, Joe?”
The cyborg spoke rapidly. “Mister Obodi, we have reports that semiballistics are 
boosting out of Los Angeles by the hundreds, possibly thousands.”
Sedon nodded, rose calmly. “How long?”
“From L.A.? We’re going to have PKF dropping on us in twenty-four minutes flat.”
Sedon spoke without haste. “How long before the entire invasion force arrives?”
“If they launch as they did from Unification Spaceport for the L.A. invasion, 
they’ll go up in waves, one every two minutes; it might be an hour or an hour 
and ten minutes from now before the entire complement has arrived.”
“Very good. Meet me in Operations. Have the semiballistics loaded with the 
warheads; leave one behind, timed for detonation in exactly one hour and fifteen 
minutes. Put another aboard a semiballistic bound for L.A., to detonate upon 
arrival. We will boost for Japan in twenty minutes.”
“I’ll give the orders.”
“Have Operations ready for me. I’ll be there promptly. Command, access David.” 
The boy was sleeping, a distant, dreamy smile touching his features. “David!”
The sharp rap of Sedon’s voice penetrated the haze of electric ecstasy; David 
stirred, opened his eyes. “Yes?”
“Join me in Operations. PKF are approaching; do it now.”
The boy nodded. “Yes, Mister Obodi.”
“Good. I will see you there.”
Sedon needed to take nothing with him, other than his own quite irreplaceable 
self. He swept out the door, gestured to his bodyguards, and headed for the 
lifts.

David Castanaveras took sixty seconds, counting—one one thousand, two one 
thousand—with the wire at its highest setting. At sixty he disconnected the 
wire, stood stock still until the wave of shudders that wracked his body had 
passed. He tucked the wire into his coat pocket, checked himself in the mirror. 
Shaved, clean clothes, not a hair out of place. Shoes polished, crease in the 
pants. No tie or shoulder silks, but he’d heard they didn’t wear them much out 
here on the West Coast anyway.
Time to go.
He opened the door to his room, waited for the waldo to stir itself from where 
it waited, like a faithful dog, beside his door. Out in the lobby, two of the 
polite young Japanese cyborgs waited, holding a lift door open; waiting for him, 
clearly. That was convenient. To the one nearest him, he said, Destroy the waldo 
behind me.
The cyborg went past David so fast that David felt the wind of his passage. The 
sound of the cyborg’s impact with the waldo echoed through the lobby. David did 
not turn around to see what happened; he stepped into the lift, said to the 
other cyborg, You come with me.
“Command,” he said aloud, “the roof.” The lift moved upward. To the cyborg, 
David said, If anyone is on the roof, you kill him.
The lift opened into a small hallway; stairs at the end of the hallway led up to 
the roof proper. David remembered descending those stairs, an eternity ago, to 
meet with Obodi. David stayed inside the hallway while the cyborg went out onto 
the roof, and waited for the cyborg to return. He heard a single gunshot, then 
nothing. The cyborg returned, his shirt torn where the bullet had struck him, 
but otherwise apparently unharmed.
David went up to the roof. No bodies; his cyborg must have tossed it, or them, 
over the edge. Three cars. He glanced at his cyborg. “Do you know which of these 
vehicles is the fastest?”
The cyborg said, “The Chandler 1790. The blue car. It has a top speed of two 
hundred seventy kph.”
“Carcomp?”
“Yes.”
David nodded. “Keyed how?”
“Password. Liberty ‘76.”
“Good. Do you have any family?”
“My mother, a brother, a son.”
“I see.” They are all dead, David told the cyborg. Mister Obodi raped your 
mother and sodomized your brother and fucked your child in the mouth. Then he 
killed them all by—David paused, abruptly totally bereft of ideas—in the most 
unpleasant way you can think of, he finished.
The young man’s face twisted abruptly into a mask of pain and fury. “He killed 
my son.”
“He’s down in Operations,” David told the cyborg. “Fourth floor. Thank you for 
your help.” He turned away and went to the car. “Car, Liberty ‘76. Command, open 
the canopy.” The canopy cracked, and David sank into the soft black 
pseudo-leather seats.
He sat motionless for a moment. It was very near sunset, and the night sky to 
the west was stunning, scarlet near the bulk of the sun, fading to pink toward 
the edges of the horizon, deep blue shading toward black in the sky above and 
behind him. It occurred to David that he had never seen a sunset over the ocean 
before. “Carcomp, take us south, as low as you can get to the ground. Keep close 
enough to the shore that I can watch the sunset. Then head inland. Clear?”
“Yes, monsieur.” The car’s fans came up, and then it lifted, moved forward, 
picked up speed, and moved free of the building, dropping slightly to pick up 
speed.
David did not look back even once. He watched the sunset, trying not to think 
about what he left behind. Obodi scared him as no one had scared him in his 
life; if the PKF had not been coming, to distract Obodi from dealing with him, 
David did not think he would have taken this chance. He did not need to imagine 
the sorts of things that would happen to him if he fell into Obodi’s hands 
again; he had been forced to keep the entire building full of people between 
himself and Dvan just to avoid feeling the man’s broadcast pain.
Obodi would not make the mistake of thinking his Speakings had worked a second 
time.
Not that Speaking was not a good trick. Obodi approached, with no tool better 
than words, the sorts of things that David could do with the Gift. David thought 
that the Speakings probably would have worked on anyone except a Castanaveras 
who had spent seven years fighting the pull of the wire.
That his sister was imprisoned behind him he had already forgotten. The thought 
of letting her see what he had become hurt him at such a deep level that he did 
not like to think of it.
So he did not.
The sunset was a wonderful experience.

In the last half hour before sunset they walked across the plaza, two squads of 
Erisian Claw. They moved without hurry, past two checkpoints that waved them 
through upon recognizing Lan; then, at the entrance to the Latham Building, a 
Reb Lan did not know stopped them. Half a dozen Rebs stood inside the lobby, in 
front of the double row of lifts.
The Reb eyed them with distinct suspicion. “What’s this about?”
Lan sighed his annoyance. “They didn’t tell you?”
The Reb said bluntly, “No.”
“We’re supposed to escort some prisoners,” Lan said. “They’re being moved?”
The man’s hostility was plain. “I don’t know anything about that.”
Lan stared at the man. “Then why don’t you fucking well check?”
The Reb nodded slowly. “All right. Stay right here.” He took a step backward, 
not turning around, not taking his eyes from Lan and the forty Claw standing 
behind him.
A body fell out of the sky.
The impact of the body against the pavement, twenty meters off to Lan’s left, 
froze everyone throughout the plaza. The Reb officer turned slightly to his 
right, to look at what had happened.
Lan palmed his knife and put it in the man’s neck, took a step forward and held 
him up as though they were talking with one another, hissed to the Claw closest 
to him, “Come get him.” Callia? flashed through his thoughts, but if so, after 
that fall there was nothing he could do for her now, and he had made her a 
promise. He released the Reb into the arms of a comrade, stepped through into 
the lobby of the Latham Building, knew the Rebs by the lifts would have noticed 
the confusion, and told them the truth because it was the simplest thing he 
could think of: “Hey! We just had a body fall off the roof! What’s happening?”
One of the Rebs stepped forward, toward Lan, and Lan walked toward him without 
hurry. When he was ten meters away he unslung in one smooth motion; the autoshot 
was already set to full auto, safety off. He fired while bringing the weapon 
around, as soon as he had his finger on the trigger. A trick he’d been taught; 
the noise was so awesome in an enclosed space that it rattled the target, and 
the autoshot cycled so fast that it did not significantly delay the next shot. 
Lan stood braced and watched the officer approaching him dissolve in a shower of 
flesh and blood. The five who had waited back at the lifts died almost as 
quickly, and only a little less messily; none of them even got a shot off.
Behind him, his Claw did as they’d been instructed, poured through after him. 
First Squad spread out and took up positions throughout the lobby, twenty of the 
faithful prepared to die guarding the entrance to the building. On his way to 
the stairs Lan called out, “Remember! They can come at you through main doors, 
side doors, lifts, stairwell, and finally with an X-laser they can cut through 
from the roof above you or the floor below.”
He had told them before, spent most of the last hour drilling them, but they 
were amateurs and he did not expect them to remember.
With twenty Claw at his back he blew the stairway door out of its track and 
trotted down the stairs to the basement.

In the midst of a rebellion, it was still possible to get a cab, at least if you 
lied to the dispatching computer. Ralf the Wise and Powerful did, and with his 
hijacked cab made half circles of the Latham Building at a safe distance. He 
could not make entire circuits; it would have taken the cab out over the ocean, 
where the rebels would likely have shot it down.
The cab’s optics were poor, but no matter; Ralf had access to video from several 
other sources, mostly pay phones—which had equally poor optics, but 
interpolating from multiple sources let him build up a good idea of what was 
happening.
None of the pay phones were oriented to pick up the red light blinking on the 
ninth floor of the building. Ralf had been flying back and forth for twenty 
minutes before he realized it was there. He swept quickly through all the 
optical sources available to him; nothing but the cab would serve to give him a 
good look at the blinking light. He debated briefly, then took the cab straight 
up, facing the Latham Building, and hovered forty meters up for most of half a 
minute.
On-off signals. A binary code with a modulation time of a second? If he had been 
a human Ralf the Wise and Powerful would simply not have believed what he saw. 
But AIs are pragmatic; what exists, is. In instants Ralf swept through every 
binary code he knew from the dawn of computing forward, four-bit, eight-bit, 
sixteen-bit, thirty-two-bit, sixty-four-bit, multiprocessor, transputer, 
parallel processor, nothing that fit.
The duration; obviously a human source, nothing electronic moved with such 
astonishing slowness. A binary code being employed by a human.
What a remarkable thing the world was.
Ralf went back to the San Diego Public Library. He scanned through the Library 
of Congress; codes, Morse; descendants of—
Speedtalk. Employed by Speedfreaks, flashing headlights or running lights at one 
another to avoid being overheard on radio by the PKF Callia, alive. Callia, 
alive.
Alive, probably. Likely she didn’t quite remember the code; Callia’s mother had 
been a Speedfreak, but it was doubtful Callia had had opportunity to use 
speedtalk since her mother’s death in 2063.
Intelligence from Los Angeles suggested that PKF would be in San Diego within 
mere minutes.
Ralf made his decision almost instantly; he had no obligation to the woman, but 
it was possible that helping her would help Denice. He kept the vehicle steady, 
flashed back with the headlamps, Rescue coming.
The cab shot forward at full throttle.

Gunfire for just a moment. Then Lan’s voice at the door to Denice’s cell: “Stand 
back!”
Denice crouched in the corner of her cell, mattress from her bed pulled over to 
cover her.
The memory-plastic door, under the impact of the autoshot, shattered. Denice 
felt scattershot and slivers of door pepper the mattress; the instant the 
ricochets had stopped she was up and moving. Lan handed her a Series IV 
Excalibur laser rifle, said, “Good to see you again, we’ve got to do lunch 
sometime.”
In the corridor outside five dead rebels lay sprawled across the floor, four in 
uniform, one not; the one in civilian clothes was one of Lan’s squad, Denice 
guessed. The rest of his people were clustered in the far end of the hallway, 
wearing armbands; one person with an autoshot would decimate them clustered 
together that way. They were amateurs and Denice ignored them.
Blood had sprayed up to cover the walls from floor to ceiling. Lan shouted back 
over his shoulder, moving down the row of cells, “Have you seen Callia?”
“No.”
“Stand back!” Lan brought the autoshot around—
“Lan!”
He hesitated. “What?”
“These aren’t real prison cells. This was commercial space.” Lan shook his head 
blankly, and Denice said, “Try the doorpad.”
He stared at her for just an instant. “Oh. Sure.”
The door curled open at his touch. Empty. He moved down the row, door to door; 
Robert was in the third cell, Dvan in the fourth, nobody in the fifth. Lan stood 
in front of the empty fifth cell, staring blankly for a second, then nodded, 
turned and headed back the way he’d come. As he passed by Denice he stopped, 
said quietly, “We heard before we headed over that PKF is on the way in. They’ll 
be dropping on San Diego in maybe ten or twelve minutes. Good luck.” He started 
to say something else; then Lan simply shook his head and said, “ ‘Bye.”
He left at a dead run, long brown hair trailing behind him, the other Claw 
following him as quickly and capably as they were able.
Robert stood motionlessly in the hallway, watching Denice.
Denice looked at him.
“This,” said Robert Dazai Yo, “is what happens during wars.” He waved his hand 
at the blood-soaked walls with clear distaste. “Bad killing.”

There was nobody in the cab.
Callia stared at the empty cab, floating outside the ninth-story window, its 
canopy popped completely off.
Her legs were numb and her left shoulder was on fire. Under normal circumstances 
she would have made it without too much difficulty, from the window to the cab, 
but now—
The maser showed 6 percent. She set the beam to its tightest setting and sliced 
the window in an X; when she was done the maser still read 2 percent, but 
touching the trigger did nothing. “ ‘Bot!”
The medbot, watching with a total lack of comprehension, finally found something 
it understood: its patient wanted help. “Yes, mademoiselle?”
“Push me up to the window.”
Alarm coursed through the medbot. “I cannot do that, mademoiselle.”
The patient stared at it. “Why not?”
The medbot hesitated, reviewing treatment information. “Suicide is a permanent 
solution to short-term troubles, mademoiselle; your illness is temporary; please 
consider all those things you have to live for; the world in all its beauty is—”
The patient seemed to grow very agitated; she interrupted it. “I’m not planning 
on jumping. Okay? I just want to get into the cab that’s come for me. See, there 
it is.”
The medbot telescoped up on its legs and looked out the window. Indeed, the 
patient was correct; a vehicle floated outside the window, and it was marked 
with the word Taxi, a synonym for cab. “Forgive me, mademoiselle. I 
misunderstood.” The medbot sank back down and pushed the gurney close to the 
window, then locked its legs to keep the gurney steady. The patient struck the 
window several times in a row; the glassite cracked along the X, but further 
blows did nothing more. The patient used her left arm, attached to the injured 
shoulder, to grasp the windowsill—
“Wait! Wait!” The medbot telescoped frantically to its fullest height. “You 
should not be using that arm!” The patient looked at it, and the medbot said, 
“May I help?”
The patient said in an odd voice, “Please break the window for me.”
This was another very interesting thing. The medbot had never before broken a 
window for purposes of exiting through it. Apparently the procedure involved 
striking glassite until its integrity failed. The medbot closed its primary 
grasping appendage and tapped the window once, observed the patterns of cracks 
radiating away from the point where it had tapped, and then rapped, sharply, 
once.
The window fell away.
The medbot said, “Is the window satisfactorily broken?”
The patient said softly, “Thank you.” She turned back to the floating cab, 
called out, “Who are you?”
From the cab, a male voice called back, “Ralf!”
“Ralf! Bring the cab closer to the window!”
The cab drifted gently closer, stopped a meter distant, and now a fierce wind 
blew in through the window. “That is as close as I can come,” Ralf said. “I’m 
being pushed back by my own fanwash now. If I drop fans I’ll lose altitude.”
“I only have full use of one arm, Ralf. I can’t make it across a meter. Can you 
go to the Temple, tell them I’m here?”
“Peaceforcers boosted from L. A. fourteen and a half minutes ago, Callia 
Sierran. You have no time to do anything but come with me now.”
Hot fanwash gusted in at her. “You know me.”
“Yes. You are the mother and daughter of Angel de Luz, the sister of Lan 
Sierran, and the friend of Denice Daimara. And if you’re not in this cab within 
two minutes I’m pulling away from here.”
He knows about Angel. Callia shivered. “Who are you?”
There was a distinct pause. “I am Ralf the Wise and Powerful. I’m an Artificial 
Intelligence, and a friend of Denice’s. I was once the Image of Trent the 
Uncatchable. And I am the last hope you have to keep your life. If you want to 
live, come with me now.”
Callia Sierran swallowed. “Oh, Harry.” She took a deep breath, turned to the 
medbot. “ ‘Bot?”
“Yes, mademoiselle?”
“Help me into the cab.”
The medbot considered the task. It had been taught to aid the elderly and infirm 
in and out of bathtubs, to climb stairs, to turn unconscious patients in their 
beds, to catch patients who were falling. This would require a similar set of 
motions; it could do it. “I can do that,” it announced. The medbot examined the 
geometry of the situation—how very interesting. Between 109 and 113 centimeters 
separated the cab from the window ledge; the cab moved back and forth a bit. The 
medbot dropped back to the floor, and pushed the gurney slightly back from the 
window. It telescoped itself to its greatest height, reached up with all three 
of its grasping appendages and grasped the edges of the windowsill. The top of 
the windowsill was too high for its primary grasping appendage to reach; the 
medbot flipped random numbers and switched over to the left edge of the 
windowsill, and held onto that edge with one of its secondary and its primary 
grasping appendage.
It lifted itself up very slowly. It was capable of lifting considerably greater 
weights than itself; but not from this position. The edge of its front three 
feet were almost parallel with the bottom ledge; it extended its legs, saw its 
front feet touch the ledge, and crept forward, centimeter by centimeter, until 
all six of its feet were almost parallel with the bottom ledge; it extended its 
legs, saw its front feet touch the ledge, and crept forward, centimeter by 
centimeter, until all six of its feet were firmly grasping the bottom ledge.
The patient said softly, “Good ‘bot.”
The medbot turned its attention to the cab; it wavered back and forth in a 
periodic pattern, and the medbot timed it; when the cab was 111 centimeters 
distant, and swinging forward, the medbot released its grasping appendages’ hold 
of the window ledge and pushed itself forward.
It fell, crashed into the cab. The cab dipped, dropped lower still, and the 
medbot’s feet lost most of their contact with the window ledge; the medbot 
scrambled frantically for a hold on the cab, along the line where the canopy 
would normally have sealed. First its right grasping appendage caught, and then 
its left; the medbot waited several seconds to make sure that it was secure, and 
then reached back with its primary grasping appendage. “Mademoiselle? Take my 
hand, and I will aid you into the cab.”

Callia had watched the entire procedure with something very like awe. The 
medbot’s words shook her partway out of it; she pulled forward, got the gurney 
back within a few centimeters of the window, and reached forward with her right 
hand for the medbot’s large central hand. Slender steel fingers wrapped 
themselves around her wrist, tightened, and then pulled her forward. She got her 
left hand onto the windowsill, pulled up—
The medbot’s pull on her ceased instantly. “Do not use that hand!”
Callia Sierran could not think of anything else at all to do.
She let go.
The medbot pulled her farther forward, out into the fierce wind. The cab dipped 
as her weight came forward, and to compensate Ralf turned the fans up another 
notch; the wind blasted around Callia and she had to close her eyes from it, and 
then she was slipping and Callia opened her eyes again, panicking, screaming, 
and found herself sliding face forward into the waiting cab, the medbot letting 
go of her as she fell into the vehicle. She got her good hand on the dash, 
pulled herself upright into the front left passenger’s seat, trembling, fumbled 
shakily with the seat belt and got it fastened. She turned to the medbot, still 
gripping the cab and the windowsill—
The cab pulled abruptly away from the Latham Building, dropped back and away 
from the building, medbot hanging from the side of the vehicle, fens coming up—
The medbot’s grasp on the side of the cab was slipping. Callia saw it happening. 
She did stop to think about what she was doing; as the ‘bot’s grasp failed, she 
leaned forward and grabbed it with her closest hand.
Her left.
Ralf the Wise and Powerful snapped, “Drop it! It’s a fucking medbot! Let go!”
The medbot was heavy, almost as heavy as a human being. Callia felt her shoulder 
separating.

How very interesting. The medbot had never seen the ground from so high up 
before. It looked up and abruptly terror coursed through it: the patient was 
holding it by her bad arm! “Drop me! Drop me!” the medbot screamed. “You are 
damaging yourself!”
With a single great heave, Callia hauled the medbot up into the cab, got her 
right hand on it and pulled it over on top of her.
“Oh!” the medbot scolded. “You are a bad patient.”
The cab flew forward in relative silence.
The medbot considered its position. Front section down, optics in the patient’s 
lap, inside the passenger compartment of a vehicle. What position would be 
appropriate for treating the PATIENT—
Callia Sierran whispered, “By the Prophet. Did you see what he did?”
For a very long moment there was no response, from Ralf or the medbot. Finally 
Ralf the Wise and Powerful said, “But it’s a medbot. What the fuck did you 
expect?”
Callia Sierran did not answer him. She was stone unconscious.
There was a space at the patient’s feet; but it would be difficult to treat her 
from there. The bot’s arms were long, but not that long. Perhaps—
Ralf said, “Stand up in the seat, your front section facing toward the patient, 
with your legs telescoped to their smallest setting. Reach around behind you 
with your secondary arm, grasp the seat belt—that’s the blue polymer strap with 
the brushed-metal gray attachment. Pass the seat belt to your primary arm, and 
then attach it to the brushed metal gray attachment that is attached to the 
smaller blue polymer strap.”
Ah. It took a moment, but that worked quite well indeed. The cab was very wise. 
Securely fastened into the passenger-holding mechanism, the medbot turned back 
to the patient, considering what medicines it was stocked with. An 
anti-inflammatory and painkiller were clearly in order. Who knew what damage the 
patient had done to herself.
In unbroken silence they flew eastward into the approaching night.




- 28 -
« ^ » 
Dvan stared straight forward, with empty eyes.
He did not seem harmed; he had been restrained standing up against the wall. The 
restraints were of some polymer Denice did not recognize and did not waste time 
testing; if Dvan had not been able to break them, she surely would not.
Robert, in the doorway holding a rifle he’d picked up from one of the dead rebel 
guards, said briefly, “Leave him. Let’s go.”
“Fuck that.” Denice brought the Excalibur up, fired four times. The beam sliced 
through the restraints, so close to skin that the skin bubbled; Denice smelled 
burnt meat, caught Dvan as he stumbled forward. “He wouldn’t have left me.”
“He’d have left me.” Robert complained.
“William? Dvan!” No response; the man stood still, a few steps from the wall he 
had been strapped to, staring into emptiness. Denice slapped him, hard enough to 
rattle his teeth; no response.
Behind her Robert said very softly, “My dear, we don’t have time for this.” 
Without looking aside he shifted slightly, fired twice off to his left. ”I’m not 
kidding.”
Denice stood frozen in the moment, unable to leave Devane, and uncertain why—
Abruptly she knew what was required of her. She took a step backward, looked up 
to meet his eyes, and spoke in pure, unaccented shiata. “Dvan of the Gi’Tbad. I 
am a Dancer of the Flame.”
Dvan stirred slightly, and after a moment spoke. His voice was the barest of 
whispers. “My lady. I am at your service.”
“By your Dedication I require that you join me here in this place, and follow me 
from it. You are a Shield, a servant of the living Flame. Will you live in the 
service of the Flame?”
Dvan whispered, “I will.”
“Will you kill if you must?”
“Aye.”
“Will you die if needed; will you live when you no longer wish to, if the 
service is required of you?”
“My lady,” he began again, slowly, “I am at your service.”
“Then follow me.” Denice left without looking back to see if the big man was 
following; knew by the lack of expression on Robert’s face that he was. They 
moved off down the corridor together, Dvan behind. Denice murmured, “See? How 
hard was that?”

Smell of smoke.
Lan brought them to a halt beside the third-floor stairwell exit. He heard a 
firefight, not close, going on in the third-floor lobby. The sizzle of lasers, 
the occasional crack of slugthrowers. He gestured silence to the Claw behind 
him, and, remembering Denice’s suggestion in the basement, reached up and 
touched the doorpad.
Locked, of course. “Shit. Someone give me a maser,” he whispered. A hand maser 
was passed forward to him, and he sat next to the doorway, listening to the 
distant firefight. Lull, shooting; lull, shooting; lull—
During the next round of firing he masered the doorpad. Nothing happened; he 
tracked over, ran the maser across the door. Somewhere in there he struck the 
current for the door; deprived of the current that kept its memory plastic 
unrolled, the door abruptly remembered the shape it was supposed to have and 
snapped open with a crack like a rifle shot.
Lan winced.
The door opened out into a dead-end corridor. Silence. Had he been heard? If—
Laser fire again, off to the right. One of the beams appeared briefly in the 
open space before the stairwell door, left a smoking red spot on the wall and an 
ionization trail hanging in the air twenty centimeters in front of Lan’s eyes.
Silence.
Lan wished briefly for a mirror, took a deep breath, and got down on the floor 
and stuck his head out through the doorway, just far enough to see what was 
going on.
At the far end of the lobby were the offices of Greenberg & Bass, what was now 
Operations. Midway down the lobby, by the lifts, with his back to Lan and his 
troops, crouched a man in burnt, smoldering clothes, tucked down behind an 
overturned desk he was using as a shield. The laser rifle in his hands had seen 
considerable use; its barrel glowed cherry red.
One of the Japanese cyborgs, Lan was almost certain.
Two of Lan’s troops had pumped lasers with them, the Elite killers; Lan pulled 
his head back, silently gestured to the Claw nearest him who had one. Pumped 
laser in hand, autoshot slung across his back, Lan waited for the next round of 
fire; waited for the next lull, stepped out from the stairwell, took the 
necessary split second to sight, and fired once into the cyborg’s back. It 
worked as well on cyborgs without superconductor meshes as on those with; the 
cyborg exploded in a fountain of steaming bone and muscle.
Lan stepped back into the stairwell, yelled out, “Lan Sierran! Approaching the 
door!” He took the grenade from his coat pocket, pushed the pressure switch on 
the grenade in, clasped the small grenade in the palm of his right hand with the 
switch tightly closed; gave it a five-count, gestured to the Claw to follow him, 
and stepped out into the corridor with the pumped X-laser in his hands, but 
pointed at the ceiling.
“Hold it!” Lan recognized the voice; Joe Tagomi. “Lan?”
Lan kept moving, nineteen Claw behind him. “Hi, Joe.”
“Stop right there!” Lan did. “What’s going on out there, Lan?”
“I don’t know, Joe. Things keep getting crazier every time I turn around. 
Firefight going on in the lobby when I got here; my sister’s missing and I don’t 
know what’s happened to her. I made it up here and found you pinned down by one 
of your own people.” Lan paused, called, “I need to talk to Obodi. Reports of 
PKF incoming, we need to evacuate now.”
Brief silence. “Come ahead. Leave your weapons. Leave your men.”
Lan did as instructed, knelt slowly, placed the pumped laser on the floor, added 
the autoshot, and straightened slowly. His right hand was sweating; he felt the 
grenade moving, slippery, against his skin.
He gestured the faithful to stay put, and moved forward cautiously, very aware 
of the lasers and slugthrowers peeking through the half-open double doors. The 
muscles in his stomach twitched. When he was ten meters away Tagomi called out, 
“Hands on your head!”
It was a relief to comply. He put his right hand up first, laid the grenade 
against the top of his skull, put his left hand up and covered his right with 
it.
The door opened ever so slightly wider, and rough hands pulled Lan through into 
Operations.

They took the stairs up to the lobby.
Denice crouched back from the stairwell doorway, Robert looking out from a 
slightly different angle, examining the lobby. Nothing moved, nothing at all, 
the length and breadth of the lobby. Sporadic gunfire came from outside, from 
the plaza, but even that was distant.
Outside the building, darkness had nearly fallen; far more light came from the 
sunpaint overhead than from the setting sun. A thin sheet of blood covered the 
floor all around them. The stink of cooked meat hung heavy on the air. The 
troops Lan had left behind were dead, and perhaps thirty Johnny Rebs as well, 
most of them fallen within a few meters of the main entrance.
The silence was eerie, the plaza near empty.
Denice whispered, “They heard PKF were incoming?”
Robert nodded, whispered back, “And fled, likely. Side entrance, north.”
Denice glanced to her right, saw nothing. “What?”
“Outside,” Robert whispered impatiently. “Transportation.” She saw it now though 
the lobby windows, in the twilight outside; four vans, all the same model 
AeroSmith VTLs, paint tuned matte black, sat motionless on the stones of the 
plaza, fifty meters outside the north door.
Stillness throughout the lobby; Denice nodded. “Let’s go.” She moved forward—
Robert restrained her. “Impatience will kill you. We’re safe for the moment; 
what happened here?”
“They were killed?”
“Very funny,” he whispered. “Yes. Many of them by hand. The blood came first; 
the blatant amateurs, with autoshots and lasers. Those who fell later are clean, 
except where they touch the floor, and have soaked up the blood of those who 
fell before.”
Now that he pointed it out, she could see it. “Obodi?”
Robert shook his head. “I only saw him once, after our capture at Frank’s house, 
but I think not. I believe he’s deadly; but this was the work of several very 
well trained soldiers. Three, four—”
The lights in the lobby went out.
In the near total darkness, Denice whispered, “Four. To the left, south exit; I 
can see their body heat.”
In a normal conversational voice, Robert said, “William, can you use this rifle? 
An Excalibur.”
The giant’s voice was jagged. “Yes.”
Robert handed it over, straightened, and took a step out into the darkened 
lobby. “Cyborgs,” he said mildly. “The young Japanese men; taking back the lobby 
to secure Obodi’s retreat. They have inhumanly excellent hearing, I imagine; 
like PKF Elite. Improved eyesight; they’ll see abnormally well in the dark, as 
though it were daylight.”
“I’ll go get us one of the vans.”
“Do that,” said Robert absently, moving out farther into the darkness. Shadows 
seemed to gather about him. “I won’t be long.”
With Dvan at her back, she ran for the north door.
There was a distant rumble outside.

Sedon stood toward the rear of the room, motionless, breathing slowly and 
evenly, hands clasped loosely in front of him, long blond hair swept back from 
his face in a loose ponytail, face completely still and composed.
Watching Lan Sierran.
Everyone in Operations except Sedon was pointing some sort of weapon at Lan; Lan 
could not take his eyes off Sedon long enough to know what kinds.
Sedon said gently, “Hello, Lan Sierran. Do you know I have less than five 
minutes to reach my car? Do you understand that we will be under fire all the 
way to our semiballistic, that we stand a good chance of being shot down when we 
try to boost, to escape the certain vengeance of Commissioner Mohammed Vance? Do 
you understand that?” he demanded. He took a single step forward and screamed in 
lethal anger, “And you are delaying me!”
Lan realized he’d been holding his breath. He let it go in a long exhalation. 
“Mister Obodi,” he said very quietly. “I was afraid you wouldn’t be here. You 
know what this is?” He lifted his right hand from his head, held it up with the 
grenade pinched between thumb and forefinger.
Nobody shot him. Lan was mildly surprised.
Sedon did not move at all. The glare of his pale blue eyes fixed on Lan, he 
shook his head very slightly.
“It’s a grenade, motherfucker. Deadman pressure switched. I let go of it, and 
we’re all going up together.”
Sedon spoke with deadly calm. “What do you want, Lan?”
“Everyone puts down their weapons.”
Sedon nodded, the glare not lessening an instant. “And then?”
“My sister.”
Sedon simply shook his head. “No. Kill him.”
In the last act of his life, as the brilliant laser light washed across him, Lan 
Sierran, with something very like fulfillment, let go.

There was only one route to life. Sedon felt the air pressure changing as the 
shock wave began to expand outward from where the bottom half of Lan Sierran’s 
remains still stood. Sedon was on his feet now, moving laterally to the 
expanding surface of the shock wave. The shrapnel and the heat outraced the more 
lethal shock wave; Sedon felt his hair burning, skin blistering. Tiny slivers of 
some metal-ceramic tore through him—he did not even have sufficient time to see 
if any of the wounds were potentially lethal. He kept moving, toward the long 
pane of glassite that looked out over San Diego, and now the shock wave itself 
touched, lifted him up and off his feet. He curled into a ball, and the shock 
wave slammed him like a handball into the surface of the glassite window. Under 
normal circumstances the window could not be broken, or even opened. These were 
not normal circumstances. The window bulged outward slightly under the immense 
pressure of the expanding wave front, and then blew out, shards of glassite and 
superheated air and Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon exploding out together into the cool 
night air, three stories above the streets of San Diego.
And falling.
He hit the ground as Vance’s semiballistic landed on the roof.
Denice Castanaveras ran out into the plaza, Dvan behind her—
And stumbled to a halt.
The sky was on fire.
The sky blazed with light, roared with the sound of their drives, like nothing 
she had ever seen before in her life; like something out of an entertainment. 
Dozens, no, hundreds of them, more arriving with every second, semiballistics 
filling the sky above her, the glare of their rockets a firestorm that lit the 
sky from horizon to horizon. Artillery fire detonated across the length of the 
sky at their approach; lasers mounted elsewhere in the city strobed up into the 
sky to greet the approaching Unification. Denice froze as a semiballistic came 
up over the roof of the Latham Building, a bare twenty stories above her, and 
the glare of its rockets lit the plaza around her with an awful scarlet 
brilliance.
She stood in the midst of the dazzle, staring up at the burning sky, at power 
made real in the world in such a fashion that she knew that though she lived 
forever she would never forget it, would never lose this moment’s perfect 
understanding of the meaning of power; stood there motionless, for an instant 
that would never end, beneath the glare of the impossible might of the 
Unification.
Then it did end and she turned and ran for the AeroSmiths.
Four of them; she took the one that was closest, for no reason other than that 
it was closest. To her surprise, the side door was open; she hesitated just a 
moment, but it was dark inside, bereft of heat sources. She moved into the 
AeroSmith, forward to the front, Dvan behind her. A control panel with a 
steering wheel; like most vehicles in California, designed for auxiliary manual 
operation. She doubted she could start it; she said quickly, “Command, carcomp. 
Are you turned on?”
The carcomp answered instantly. “Yes—” It paused, apparently unsure of her 
voice. “Yes, ‘Selle,” it said at last.
“Will you respond to my instructions?”
“No, ‘Selle.”
Denice fought back an urge to unload the laser into the thing; the lights of the 
SBs were getting brighter and brighter. The plaza outside the van was like 
daylight. “Can you give me access to the InfoNet?”
“Yes, ‘Selle.”
Denice said rapidly, “Access 113102-KMET. Ralf!”
Ralf’s voice came instantly: “Denice! Where are you?”
The voice behind them, gravelly and tired, said, “Command, cease InfoNet access. 
And don’t either of you even try to move.”
Denice did not. After a moment, when nothing happened, she turned very slowly, 
to where the monster sat, tucked into a corner of darkness in the back of the 
van, autoshot pointing at her and Dvan.
“Weapons down,” said Sedon. “Command, close the door. We’re leaving. Now.”
The anger, frustration, every emotion of the last several minutes vanished in 
the instant. She did not know a word for what she felt, beholding the battered 
form of Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon; something that was at once profound rage and purest 
joy.
The smile that lit her face at his appearance would have terrified a less 
desperate creature than Sedon. Sedon had seen it before, the smile of the god 
whose service he had rejected fifty thousand years ago.
He sat with his knees drawn up toward his chest, leaning back against the inner 
hull of the AeroSmith, autoshot propped on his right knee—his left leg was 
broken in three places, and his hip.
His finger rested on the autoshot’s trigger.
Sedon watched calmly as his enemies placed their weapons on the carpeted floor 
of the van, not managing to care much whether he or they lived or died. When 
they had done as he instructed, he said quietly, “Command, lift.”
The AeroSmith picked up and flew west, away from the descending fleet of 
semiballistics, into the gathering dark, chasing the last dim light of day.

Fifty of the most finely trained and taught professional soldiers on Earth, the 
best of the best, descended through the shell of the Latham Building. They moved 
downward in no tremendous rush, but with the practiced speed of professional 
soldiers, augmented by improved musculature, widened senses, subtler 
communication. Unarmed men and women on the eighteenth, fourteenth, and 
thirteenth floors were allowed to surrender; were snakechained en masse, and the 
Elite moved on.
Deep radar showed the distinctive signature of bones covered by ceramic laminae, 
moving on the fifth and sixth floors, and, motionless, in the lobby; by now the 
Elite knew what they were dealing with. They took the sixth floor in a quick, 
savage assault whose outcome was never in doubt, left eight of the Japanese 
cyborgs in various states of dead before moving down to the fifth floor, without 
fatalities or injuries of their own.
The two imitation Elite on the fifth floor committed suicide before the true 
Elite could get to them. They had cut their own throats; apparently the skin of 
the imitation cyborgs’ faces and throats had not been toughened.
Bad design, commented one Elite to another.
Or vanity.
Either way, a lack of commitment.
They moved down to the fourth floor, and then the third, where they found 
nineteen martyrs hiding in a stairwell.
The martyrs identified themselves as such by shooting at them after the Elite 
had identified themselves. The Elite obliged; martyrs were always happier in 
heaven anyway.

Commissionaire Mohammed Vance, in the darkened lobby of the Latham Building, 
used his toe to turn one of the dead cyborgs over on his back. Vance had seen 
holos of the Japanese cyborgs; but this was his first opportunity to see one in 
person. Well. It looked Japanese, certainly. A soft, soft face; the skin not 
treated at all. Vance snorted with contempt. Twice in his early career he had 
taken laser shots to the face that would have killed one of these cheap Jap 
knockoffs. For vanity, or to let them stay concealed in the general populace—for 
whatever reason—it was a poor decision.
This one did not seem to have any visible marks on him. Vance wondered briefly 
what had killed him, but did not truly care enough to probe for the death wound.
Perhaps he had broken in some unexpected way.
Vance looked around the lobby. He was forty-seven years old; by Elite standards, 
old for such work as this. In the last two days he had not slept, had barely 
eaten. He had reached San Diego, the place where the American rebels would make 
their last, most desperate stand, and found a city in disarray, scattered and 
ineffective opposition, and rebel headquarters with the rebels killing each 
other and saving the PKF the need.
He shook his head slightly, in what might have been amusement if he had not been 
so bone weary. These were the people who had dreamed of toppling the greatest 
power in all of human history; probably they had made detailed plans for what 
they would do after the overthrow; spent the Credit before they’d earned it.
Mohammed Vance shook his head again, and walked out into the plaza in front of 
the Latham Building. The PKF had knocked out power to most of the city; they had 
strung arc lamps, powered by the SB’s onboard fusion plants, around the edge of 
the plaza, to light dungs. Corpses were scattered about, but most of the living 
humans in the plaza were PKF; a scant dozen, sitting snakechained together on 
the ground in front of a PKF semiballistic, were rebels. Vance walked over 
toward them.
His personal aide, Captain Hile, approached him. “Commissionaire.”
Vance nodded, slowed slightly. “Report.”
“Sedon is not among the prisoners; he may be among the dead.”
“Go on.”
“An AeroSmith VTL, civilian cargo model, lifted as we were approaching the city; 
it was the fourth vehicle of the three that still sit here in the plaza. In the 
general attack it was ignored—one car among thousands—but the satellite record 
shows that it headed out west, over the ocean. Toward Japan. We’re tracking by 
satellite, and they’re still moving.”
Vance stopped in front of the snakechained prisoners. “Do they have the range to 
make Japan?”
“Not in that vehicle. No sir.”
“Close?”
“Not even remotely, sir.” Hile hesitated. “Hawaii, possibly.”
Vance nodded. “Send a bulletin. Alert them. If it reaches Hawaii, take the 
vehicle into custody, if possible; or destroy it.”
“Otherwise?”
Vance shrugged. “Let it go. If its pilot wants to drown, it’s one less we have 
to execute.” He nudged one of the prisoners with his boot; the man seemed in 
some way vaguely familiar. “You!” The prisoner, an older Asian man, looked up at 
Vance with such a pitiably terrified expression that Vance was moved to 
compassion. His knees creaked as he lowered himself down to the old man’s level, 
spoke to the man in English. “Calm down, old fellow. What is your name?”
“Ho, sir, Tommy Ho!”
“What were you doing with the rebels, Tommy?”
“Not work the rebels,” Tommy informed him. “Work the shop. Sell candy, hot dogs, 
gum.” Tommy paused, added diffidently, “Best chewing gum! Wrigley’s Spearmint! 
Number One!”
Vance nodded. “Yes. I’m sure.” He stood slowly, chuckled. “I’m getting old, 
Captain. He looked familiar to me.”
The prisoner looked down again and his features settled into an emptiness that 
might have been mistaken for serenity.
Vance’s aide said, “They all look alike, sir.”
Vance nodded. “True enough. Print him with the others, genes, eyes, palms and 
fingers. Let me know.”
Hile nodded. “Yes, Commissionaire.”

Over an hour had passed since David Castanaveras had flown south in a stolen 
Chandler 1790. He was, in a direct line, very nearly 250 kilometers away from 
the Latham Building.
Up on the nineteenth floor, his handheld, taken away from him when he had 
arrived at the Latham Building and stored casually in an empty locker, listened 
carefully for the tiny radio beacon implanted next to David Castanaveras’s 
heart. Several times in the last few minutes it had not received enough of a 
signal to be sure that it was registering David’s heartbeat.
It lost the signal again. The handheld waited, counting.
After David’s heart had been stopped for a full thirty seconds, his handheld 
detonated itself.
The top eight floors of the Latham Building came off in gorgeous, majestic slow 
motion. Most of it fell down into the plaza where Mohammed Vance stood next to 
Robert Dazai Yo.




- 29 -
« ^ » 
The AeroSmith flew through the black night, five meters above the surface of the 
waves.
They had been moving westward for most of an hour and a half, at near two 
hundred klicks an hour.
Denice sat on the floor facing the monster, hands on her knees. In their 
movement there was no sound but the rush of the wind. “What did you do to him?”
It was the fifth time she had attempted to engage him in conversation. The first 
four attempts had failed. The last time he had fired a round from the autoshot 
by her head. In a larger space it would have killed her. Here he was so close 
that the buckshot did not have time to ungroup much.
A single pellet had dug a furrow in her left temple. The rest of the shot had 
struck the instrument panel behind her; some of the ricochet had struck Dvan.
Denice had not blinked and Dvan had not flinched. The van did not seem to be 
damaged. It continued to fly straight and level.
This time Sedon simply raised an eyebrow, said, “I?” in a voice cold and blank. 
“No more than he earned.”
The subject of their conversation sat motionless, facing forward, where Denice 
had left him. After laying down his weapon for Sedon, Dvan had closed his eyes 
and gone still.
Denice watched the monster, made no attempt to hide her regard. The man was 
plainly exhausted. And badly injured; his leg and hip must be hurting terribly. 
Blisters made one side of his face livid, though not the other, and for a moment 
Denice was forcibly reminded of their evening together in his penthouse, of the 
white glow across one cheek, the pale infrared on the other.
He was bleeding even yet in several different places.
But Sedon’s eyes upon her were never less than alert, and the barrel of the 
autoshot never wavered.
“And what was that?” Denice persisted. “What had he earned? Why?”
Sedon’s voice was sleepy, but the sleepiness of a great cat, prepared for 
anything. “My dear. He took from me so many, many things. Love, and youth, and 
plans. The community of my own kind. You have heard his tale of our coming into 
this eternal exile; I fought for justice, not power. For the right to determine 
my own life, for those around me to determine theirs. All my life that has been 
all I ever sought. To determine my life as I would.”
Denice said in a small voice, “I empathize.”
“Indeed. You would.”
“What did you do to him? How can I fix it?”
Mild surprise crossed Sedon’s features. “You don’t know?” A weary smile touched 
him. “I thought you did. I have been sitting here impressed that you knew to 
invoke his Dedication, and surprised that the Shield Dedication should yield up 
a man who would fulfill that obligation even while the wire sits in his skull, 
pouring electricity into his pain center.” The smile sat on his features, 
distant and dreamy. “And to think I was admiring your ruthlessness in 
controlling your Shield.”
Denice’s eyes widened. “You mean—”
“At its highest setting, if it is as I left it.” Sedon gestured with his free 
hand. “Go, take it from his skull. I won’t stop you.”
Denice rose, turned to where Dvan sat in the front seat, facing into the 
onrushing darkness. Her fingers probed the unruly thickness of his hair; and 
here. A small round plug, no larger than a thumbnail, tucked under the thick 
black hair; she got a grip on it with two fingers and tugged.
Dvan leaned backward in the seat, eyes staring up at the vehicle’s ceiling, 
nothing visible in them but the whites, and sighed. Muscles she had not even 
realized he was holding tensed abruptly released across his body.
His eyes closed again and he went limp.
“You said something to me, in our last conversation. I’ve been wanting to ask 
you about it.” Sedon nodded. “That being?”
“You said you had changed yourself. But I did not see it.”
“Unfortunate.”
“How did you mean?”
Sedon sat quietly for so long Denice did not think he intended to answer her. 
“There was a day when survival was not all I wished of the world. When I wanted 
companionship. Love. The respect of peers—the company of peers.” He shook his 
head with a weariness so profound Denice believed it would have killed her to 
experience it, closed his eyes, and leaned back against the hull. “And I 
believed that by resurrecting the memories of the man who had wanted those 
things, I might find myself more able to comprehend the things that drove you.”
“I don’t understand that. Why was it important for you to understand me?”
“You are a Dancer, within a day or two. I see the Consecration recently within 
you.”
“Yes.”
“But you have not Danced yet. Am I a Dancer, though I Dance no more?”
Denice sat still, looking at Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon.
At length Sedon opened his eyes again, looked at her over the barrel of the 
autoshot.
Denice took a deep breath, steadying her shaking nerves, and said, “Who do you 
want to be?”
Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon leaned forward ever so slightly. “It’s too late for me to 
make that choice.”
The words came to Denice in a rush, a tumble: “But the reality is that you do 
have a choice. You are not just the description of your experiences; the one who 
was a Dancer once, or an exile, or who led a rebellion; with all of those things 
taken away, you are still here. You are a whole person, Sedon, and you must make 
choices as a whole person. Perhaps that part of you who was a Dancer is dead. 
But you are not dead. Some person you used to be is dead. But you are here, with 
me, right now.” Sedon nodded, very slowly, and Denice said, “I’ve died twice 
already myself, and I’m only twenty-three. But it does not make me dead.”
“I do not understand your people,” he said later. “You are—very different from 
us.”
“We would be,” Denice said. “I forget how Dvan put it—the descendants of his 
people’s criminals and insane. Even with modern geriatrics we don’t live all 
that long. We have to live now.”
Sedon nodded.
“It’s the place I understand you least, Sedon. You’re prepared to live tomorrow, 
remember having lived yesterday; but the man I’m sitting with isn’t even sure 
he’s alive, because he does not Dance.”
Sedon said softly, “I wish you would Dance for me.”
Denice shook her head. “There’s no space.”
“And if there was, you wouldn’t.” He spoke with calm certainty.
“It wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“It would upset the god,” Sedon said.
Denice shrugged. “It would make him happy if I were to kill you.”
Sedon looked at her over the autoshot. “Do you think you could?”
“I won’t.”
Sedon nodded. “Be careful how you spurn him, child. His pain is vast, and if you 
touch upon it you will regret it.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“He is not used to having Dancers who will not obey.”

Sometime later, Denice said, “Well never make Japan in this thing. Were you 
planning on rendezvousing at some point?”
Sedon looked at her over the rifle. “We can’t reach Japan in this car?”
Denice felt her skin prickle. “You didn’t know that?” He considered it. “No. 
What’s wrong with it?” Denice said slowly, “There’s not enough fuel in it.”
“But all four of these vehicles were fueled before we took off.”
“They’re vans. They’re designed for short trips; eight or nine hundred klicks, 
tops.”
Sedon considered it. “I have never had occasion to operate one,” he conceded. 
“Do we have fuel to return to California?”
“I don’t know—” Denice rose and went forward, looked for the fuel display to the 
far left, untouched by the sole autoshot blast to the center panel. She turned 
back to Sedon. “We’re past the halfway mark now. We’re going to have to swim 
some no matter what we do.”
Sedon nodded. “I see.”
Denice came back, stood over him. “Do you want to live?”
Sedon looked up at her. “I think I would like that. Does that sound a very 
foolish thing to say at this point?”
Denice said softly, “Give me the gun.”
Gi’Suei’Obodi’Sedon leaned forward slightly, reversed the weapon, and handed it 
to her.
“Awaken me when it’s time,” he said.
And he closed his eyes and leaned back to sleep.

She awoke William Devane, told him.
“Have you tried calling out?”
“Of course. He shot the InfoNet link.”
“To be sure, what else.” Devane paused, said in his ruined voice, “We should 
kill him now.”
“We will not.”
“We’ll not make shore, I think. He’s in no shape to swim. We’d be doin’ him a 
favor.”
“Your brogue has gotten much stronger.”
Devane shrugged, eased back in his seat. “He’s a bore, Dvan is. Single-minded 
and with a refreshing lack of introspection, but I’ve had enough. I got rid of 
him.”
“That’s a neat trick.”
“I’ve no need to die to see Hell. A damn eternity of pain Sedon put us through; 
but Dvan took it personally. And the Speakings, he didn’t take those too well 
either.” Devane paused. “Think on it. A quick jump over the side, you and I—and 
our own chances that much the better.”
Denice sat next to him and watched the fuel gauge. “No.”
Devane nodded. “How far off shore will we drop?”
“A hundred klicks. Maybe a hundred and twenty.”
“I am a good swimmer. But I have never swum that far.”
“I have.”
“Sure, and we should let him go down with the car.”
“William Devane, killing is wrong.”
“And I hope you’re a very good swimmer, lass.” Devane paused. “My lady.”
“Cut that out.”
“Denice.”
“Sedon?”
“Yes?”
“Are you awake?”
“As much as I need to be.”
“Come on. We’re going into the water.”
He looked up at her. “Denice, I wish you’d been a boy.”
Denice said nothing, then: “I think Lan was going to say the same thing to me.”

A day and a half later, near morning, as false dawn lit the skies to the east 
with a faint grayness, the waves washed ashore a pair of limp, motionless forms.
After a time, Denice Castanaveras rolled over onto her back, and stayed that way 
while the morning sun came up and made the world warm around her.
The still form beside her did not move at all.
Sometime later Denice let go of his wrist.
She opened her eyes and stared up into the pale blue sky and figured the odds.
The CityStates were not a bad bet; a quick bout of biosculpture, change the 
color of her eyes, pick up the Erika Muller identity permanently; the knowledge 
that Denice Daimara was Denice Castanaveras, even if it got out, would not 
damage her much.
Join Trent.
Or she could stay on Earth, take the chance of ending up in Peaceforcer hands.
People who knew: Trent, Jimmy, Jodi Jodi, Robert, and Devane. Her brother, of 
course, wherever he was. Lan, and Chris Summers, Doctor Derek, and Sedon. McGee, 
Ring, and Ralf the Wise and Powerful.
She had no idea what had happened to Devane or Robert, but did not think either 
of them could be brain-drained anyway, even if the PKF caught them. Summers and 
Lan and Sedon were dead beyond doubt. McGee, and Ring, and Ralf the Wise and 
Powerful. Ralf was safe.
Trent and Jimmy were in the Belt.
It left Ring, McGee, and Jodi Jodi, Doctor Derek and her brother.
There might be others, but it was a chance she would have to take.
She sat up slowly. For the first time since she had known him, Sedon’s features 
seemed not watchful, or calculating, or enraged, or anything except peaceful.
His eyes were open and caked with salt.
She wiped the salt free and closed his eyes, watched him lying peacefully in the 
sand throughout the long morning, the corpse of the man who had invented 
rebellion fifty thousand years prior; and it came to her that it must be very 
hard to be a hero.

They first saw the form walking down the empty beach, at the waterline, a body 
slung over one shoulder.
It moved slowly down the packed wet sand, water washing around its ankles.
The PKF outpost sat at the edge of Pacific Coast Highway, looking down over the 
beach. Eight PKF unslung laser rifles and brought them to bear on the slowly 
advancing figure.
The Elite in command, twenty-nine-year-old Elite Sergeant Pekar, saw her more 
clearly.
His optics resolved her in detail when she was still a kilometer away. A woman 
of slightly above average height, young, lean and muscular, wearing black 
fatigues whose sleeves were cut off at the shoulders. She was barefoot, with 
white skin and vaguely Asian features, with black hair so short it looked like a 
military cut.
When she was still a hundred meters away he made out the color of her eyes, a 
green the color of emeralds.
When she was twenty meters away, at the edge of PCH, Pekar called her to a halt. 
With his men covering him he came forward to meet her.
“Identify yourself.”
The woman grinned at him, a smile that had no humor in it at all. “I’ll do 
better.” Like a bricklayer unloading a bag of dry ferrocrete, she unslung the 
dead man’s body and dropped it unceremoniously to the pavement in front of them. 
She raised her voice to be heard by the PKF behind him. “This is the corpse of 
Mister Obodi, the leader of the Johnny Rebs.” Pekar was aware of the murmur that 
went through the mostly American Peaceforcer troops standing behind him. “I am 
the personal assistant of Unification Councilor Douglass Ripper, Jr.” The 
sunlight dazzled against the brilliant green of her eyes, against the single 
drop of sweat trickling down the sculpted muscle of her upper arm. “The bounty 
for Obodi was dead or alive. Well, this is him, and he can’t get any more dead 
than this. I’m Denice Daimara, and I’m alive. And I’m claiming the six million 
Credits.”




The Last Dancer
You say you had to do it But I don’t believe that’s true And I guess that later 
on tonight I’ll say a prayer for you
—Mahliya Kutura,
Independence Day
“Street Songs.”
2078 Gregorian
DateLine: November 30, 2076
« ^ » 
I’m feeling very relaxed these days, so I wanted to take a moment of your 
time—to catch up on my mail, make a threat, and share a dream I had.
I am not back from my retirement.
For all of you who wrote and especially for all of you who got emotional, asking 
that I return to writing the column—I mean, Jesus. Get a life.
Speaking of Jesus, this one is for the webdancer in Philadelphia. I don’t know 
how you got my InfoNet ID, and I don’t care. Don’t call again. I’ve never turned 
anyone to DataWatch in my life, but you could be the first. (And if not 
DataWatch, I know a couple of Players who eat punks like you for lunch.) I 
appreciate that Jesus died for my sins—but I didn’t ask him to, and frankly it 
seems a little presumptuous on his part. I’m a big boy and I’ll handle my own 
sins.
Speaking of sins, to the girl in Baton Rouge—yes. I’ve tried that one. But 
thanks for the offer anyway; you have a genuine flair for description.
And on the subject of offers, to Michaud Delancie, press secretary to the 
Secretary General: you ugly sociable disingenuous pig-fucking diseased lying 
greasy-palmed stringy-haired frog son of a bitch. I wouldn’t write speeches for 
the Secretary General if he was the last Secretary General on Earth, which, it 
seems clear, is the idea. The immense arrogance of the man would be appalling if 
it wasn’t exactly what we’ve come to expect from SecGen Eddore. Still, I’m 
troubled—are you sure this man is an American? That he was born here?
It’s common knowledge that Eddore’s mother didn’t speak to him for three years 
after the onset of the Troubles. How about it, Chuck? Getting the cold shoulder 
again?
So. Anyhow, I keep having this dream I wanted to tell you all about, one where I 
pick up a pumped laser and go climb up on some high spot, some fine upper 
location with a view, and watch PKF Elite through the scope. The modification to 
blow the power supply out in three or four shots is, I’m told, ridiculously 
easy; I’m kind of surprised that it took a rebellion to get the knowledge out 
into the general public.
I can’t, of course, tell you how to make the modification. That’s covered by the 
Official Secrets Act of 2076.
But in my dream that I was having, the one where I went up to a high place and 
looked down, in that very same dream I was scanning through the Fall ‘76 Black 
Box Catalog, and I stop on page 112, and the part number as4077b01 sort of leapt 
out at me. Yes. And it looks very much like a direct replacement for a part 
commonly found inside most Excalibur Series I through Series IV variable lasers.
I’m told the same modification can be made to most hand masers, though you’ll 
likely only get one shot with it.
The Secretary General probably wouldn’t appreciate my sharing this dream with 
you, but what the hell. I don’t really appreciate the things he’s been trying to 
share with me recently.
Come to think of it, I suppose Eddore must be an American.
‘Cause the TriCentennial has certainly been good to him.
If a little less so for the rest of us.
Later.

“Utter lie. Given Shawmac’s frequently and well-publicized tirades against the 
office and person of the Secretary General, it hardly seems likely that we would 
attempt to retain him to write speeches for the Secretary General… You in the 
back. What’s that? Oh. Yes. The Prosecutor General likely will try to have him 
executed for publishing that Black Box listing. So he couldn’t write for us 
anyway.”
—Michaud Delancie,
press conference,
December 2, 2076



- 1 -
« ^ » 
The PKF did not believe her story. Denice had never expected them to.
But it made for excellent propaganda, and she pointed it out to them. She had 
learned that much from Ripper, that a thing need not be true if it could be made 
to seem so.
They gave her the six million and made her famous. She was the woman whose 
loyalty to the Unification had been stronger than the ties of nationalism, a 
woman who had understood herself a citizen of the world.
When it was over, she was, next to Secretary General Eddore himself, one of the 
most admired and hated human beings in the system.
The Peaceforcers executed Robinette Cabot, the man who had introduced himself to 
Denice as Doctor Derek, on August 12, 2076. He was the 4,408th American executed 
since the end of the rebellion.
They released video of his execution to the Boards, as they had released video 
of the executions of 4,407 others; Rebs and Claw and even a few innocents 
wrongly accused.
Denice had followed Cabot’s case without intervening; she had not dared, not in 
his case or those of any of the others she recognized from her times in Iowa and 
Santa Monica. She watched him die, standing in front of a PKF firing squad, 
wondering why he hadn’t used his knowledge of her to save his life.
Perhaps he had tried, and they’d executed him anyway, to avoid warning her. The 
thought made the skin crawl on the back of her neck, but there was nothing at 
all she could do about it.
They sat out on the patio, at Ripper’s beachfront house in Hawaii, early on the 
morning of December 15, and watched the returns come in. An exercise in 
futility, Ripper muttered at one point, and with justification; they were going 
to lose and they had known it for the last month.
At lunchtime Ripper ushered his aides outside and sat alone with Denice. 
Balloting was less than four hours under way, with over twenty left to go: 
nonetheless the results were clear. “Command, main off.” Ripper turned away from 
the large holofield as it vanished. “He’s the man who held the Unification 
together, and he’s running fifty-five percent I’m somewhere around thirty-two.” 
In a matter-of-fact tone, Ripper said, “We’re not even going to get a second 
ballot.” He sighed, rubbing his temples. “If only Japan hadn’t fought so well.”

Denice and Ripper ate lunch together quietly, sitting together in the large, 
empty dining room. The quiet babble of the newsdancers was barely audible in the 
background.
When lunch was over Douglass went outside and sat on the balcony overlooking the 
bay.
Denice turned the smaller holos off and joined him.
“Well,” said Ripper grimly, after a long silence, “he got what he wanted. Fourth 
term, fifth term—the clone of a bleeder plans to hold on forever.”
Denice nodded.
Ripper said, “I’m going to have to do something about this.”
Later that evening they sat out on the patio and watched the waves ripple over 
the surface of the water. The wind had come up and it was chilly. The sun was 
only a few minutes away from touching the surface of the ocean.
Douglass ordered them coffee drinks with whipped cream, and Denice sat cuddled 
inside the circle of his arms, watching the orange glow of the sun, while they 
waited for the waitbot to bring their drinks.
Douglass murmured, “Romantic, isn’t it?”
“I noticed.”
Denice thought that perhaps Douglass was nervous; he said it very abruptly, 
utterly without his usual smoothness. “Will you marry me?”
Trent. The thought came and went; Denice smiled with just a touch of 
wistfulness, said gently, “No. No, I won’t.”
His arms tightened around her slightly and he sighed. She did not think he was 
surprised. “Why not?”
“I have things to do.”
He was silent then until their drinks came. After the waitbot had left he said 
quietly, “Such as?”
Denice sipped at her drink. Whipped cream with chocolate shavings on top, coffee 
with brandy underneath. It was very good and it warmed her as it went down. She 
licked a dab of whipped cream off her upper lip. “I don’t work for you, 
Douglass. And I can’t tell you.”
He held her then while the sun set, flooding the bay with orange light. Even 
after the sun had completely set the sky was a gorgeous deep blue laced with 
glowing scarlet clouds. Glowfloats bobbed out over the bay, turned themselves 
on. One stationed itself a few meters above them. “I guess,” said Douglass 
finally, “if you don’t trust me enough to tell me about your personal business, 
marriage is probably a very bad idea.”
“I’ll tell you someday. I promise.”
“Finish your drink and let’s go to bed.”
“Do you trust me to tell you when I can?”
“Let’s go to bed.”
Before he dropped off to sleep, he said quietly, “You should run for the 
Unification Council. The people who vote in Unification elections are mostly 
pro-Unification anyway; they won’t think you’re such a traitor. I think you’d 
win a seat.”
Afterward, lying in bed with Ripper, head on his shoulder, while listening to 
his quiet sleep, Ralf the Wise and Powerful came to her.
“I traced him to Las Vegas.”




- 2 -
« ^ » 
Christine Mirabeau sat motionlessly on the prison cot. She did not get up when 
he came in. “Mohammed. I had hoped you’d come visit me before—before tomorrow.”
Vance nodded. His floatchair stopped twenty centimeters away from her. He wore 
the formal uniform of the Elite Commander, the uniform Christine herself had 
worn until July 4, 2076.
His left leg was gone above the knee. Fixing a badly injured Elite is difficult; 
the technology of the day did not permit them to clone a leg, cyborg the leg, 
and attach it. He’d probably end up with a robot leg, when he had time to learn 
to use it; it took a few weeks for the neural connection to grow in, and it was 
distracting until then. Christine had heard that his left arm was in a cast 
until only a few weeks ago. Some of the finest biosculptors in the world had 
worked on him, in sessions lasting days. To Christine it seemed the only effect 
of it all had been to leave him with slightly less expressiveness than ever.
“The uniform looks good on you,” she said. “I always knew it would.”
“You’re not surprised.”
“To whom else would they give it? You can be proud, Mohammed. To be forty-eight 
years old, and the second most powerful person in the System—it’s a great 
accomplishment.”
“Apparently they haven’t told you how you’re to be executed.”
No PKF Elite had ever been executed before. Christine nodded, a bit jerkily. 
“No. I’ve been wondering; we’re not easy to kill. In the mouth?”
“No. Undignified, given that it will be done on camera. We considered lethal 
injection and decided against that as well; the toxins and viruses with which we 
are familiar, your nanovirus immune system is also familiar. It would take quite 
a while even if successful; you would likely suffer convulsions, and it seemed 
inhumane. Some wanted to put you in front of a firing squad. Once again I 
dismissed it as inhumane; it would take several minutes for you to die. Drowning 
was discussed; so was dropping you from a high building. A few of the more 
bloodthirsty suggested that we use the pumped lasers the Rebs developed.”
Something in her cyborg eyes twitched. “You’re going to boil me alive?”
Vance shook his head. “No. I requisitioned one of the damaged orbital laser 
cannon. It was functioning at twelve percent efficiency; Space Force had decided 
it was not worth repairing, and they were going to destroy it. It came downside 
yesterday. You will be vaporized before you know anything has happened. It 
should be nearly instantaneous.”
“On holocam.”
“We are not ashamed of what we do, Christine. Even to our own. We cant touch 
Eddore; he is widely believed to be the man who kept the Unification together, 
and making public his crimes would tear the Unification apart. But even if the 
public does not quite understand why you are dying, Christine, the PKF does. And 
the example will stand.”
Her stiff Elite features bore no trace of her feelings. “How did you manage the 
cannon?”
He understood her; relations with Space Force were strained as never before, 
primarily over his pullout of the Elite during the retaking of the laser cannon. 
“I paid for it. It’s remarkable how honored the Unifications servants are to be 
bribed by the Elite Commander.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said, without any irony at all. “I never had occasion to 
find out.” After a pause, she said, “Thank you.”
He spoke with what was, even for him, abruptness. “Why did you do it, 
Christine?”
She took a long deep breath. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Vance’s stare did not waver at all. “I need to know.”
“Simulations showed the Rebs with a chance of winning, Mohammed. Eddore came to 
me early last year. He showed me a way to get the Rebs and Claw to rise; showed 
me convincingly that if they rose this summer they could never win, and that, 
after they rose, we would have the moral justification—and the votes—to wipe the 
rebels from the face of the Earth, to break them for good.”
“Did it never occur to you that the best way to see that they could never win a 
revolution was to ensure they never had the opportunity to engage in one?”
She hung her head and spoke in a low voice. “He is a very convincing man.”
“And you gave him another term. And another, and another—do you understand what 
you’ve done?” Vance moved in his floatchair, great bulk shifting restlessly. “We 
don’t have time for me to list all the sins you’ve committed; you’ll be dead 
first. But you’ve done these things:
“You’ve given the Rebs a taste of blood. Before this, they were afraid of the 
Elite. They dreaded us, because we were the nightmares that could not be killed. 
Now they merely respect us; thousands of them have seen Elite die; twenty-two 
still at large have killed Elite themselves. We will never regain what we lost 
on those battlefields, Christine, and ordinary PKF and Elite will die with 
increasing frequency because of it.
“You’ve done worse than that, though. You’ve given all of us cause to hate. You 
stood by while fools played with matches in a forest full of dry wood, because 
you hoped that after the fire we might have gained some advantage. We lost three 
hundred forty-seven Elite, a hundred and ninety thousand PKF troops. Nearly two 
million Americans died, most of them innocent, in the retaking of the West 
Coast. In Japan better than half a million Japanese died. And all those people 
have friends and loved ones who will dream of vengeance for those they have 
lost.
“If all those things were not enough, Christine, the worst thing you have done 
is this: you have changed the nature of the dialogue. Before this year, even in 
Occupied America, even among those who opposed us, there were limits. The Rebs 
and Claw have had fifty years to employ nuclear devices against us, fifty years 
to make every city on Earth, from Capitol City down to the towns in which you 
and I were raised, a military target; and for fifty years they have refrained. 
Christine,” said Mohammed Vance softly, “this is something we’ve buried so 
deeply only six PKF and Eddore himself know it: we recovered twenty-two 
thermonuclear warheads, stored on semiballistics in San Diego. We don’t know if 
there were others, and we likely will not know until, unless, they are used 
against us. Those Reb and the Claw left alive have lost nine in ten of their 
comrades, and they are consumed with hatred. And one way or another, Christine, 
we will pay for that hatred.”
Christine Mirabeau stared at Vance. “Mohammed, the simulations Eddore showed me 
suggested that they could win. All they needed was a leader, and if we’d waited 
for Trent’s return we’d have given them a leader to make this Sedon, wherever he 
came from, look like the rank amateur he was.”
Mohammed Vance rapped on the door to her cell. They both heard the guard 
returning for him. “I have not seen the simulations you speak of, so I cannot 
say if they are accurate. But I will tell you this; there are worse things than 
losing to the likes of Trent, and fighting with allies like Eddore is one of 
them.”
“You weren’t there,” Christine Mirabeau said. Tears stood out brilliantly 
against the glittering black Elite eyes. “You can’t know.”
The door opened behind Mohammed Vance. He sat there for just a moment, 
resplendent in the black-and-silver dress uniform of the Elite Commander.
“No,” he said. “I can’t.”
He turned his floatchair about and left.
They executed her six hours later. The cannon vaporized her and melted the wall 
of the Detention Center against which she had been stood.




- 3 -
« ^ » 
“Hello, McGee.”
McGee peered through the darkness, was abruptly aware he’d come downstairs 
without a weapon. “How did you get in here? The restaurant is clo—” McGee 
stopped. “Hello, Denice.” He glanced around at the darkened room of empty 
tables; all the staff was gone. “I was just going up to the office. Have a beer 
and total the receipts. Join me?”
“Sure.”
Upstairs the old man said, “I’m surprised to see you.”
“I heard they took your hotel away. For back taxes.”
McGee nodded. “It’s true. The Fringe doesn’t support a hotel of that caliber, 
not for real. And I can’t prop them up any longer, I don’t have the outside 
income.”
“I’m thinking of buying some property in the Fringe.”
He smiled. “I hear you can afford it.”
“I need to establish residence so that I can vote for you when you run for the 
Unification Council.”
McGee said gently, “Dear, there is no Unification Councilor for the Fringe. We 
lack representation, we always have.”
Denice Castanaveras said, “That’s going to change. The Barrier is going to come 
down, and I’d like you to start looking at property for me to buy.” She reached 
into her coat and withdrew an infochip. “This is an authorization for transfer 
of funds. One hundred thousand CU drawn against the Bank of America.”
He left the chip lying on his desktop. “For what?”
“You’re the most respected man in the Fringe, McGee. You’re tough in an area 
where they admire that. I need your help.”
“I need to ask you a question, then.”
“Yes?”
McGee’s gaze was very steady. “The Reb leader, did you kill him? Did you kill 
Obodi?”
“When it came right down to it, McGee, I tried very hard to save his life.”
McGee nodded thoughtfully. “Okay. You want me to run for the Unification 
Council? Why not you?”
“I can’t stand the publicity, McGee. Right now I’m well known—infamous—but for 
what I’ve done, not for what people are afraid I’m going to do. If I ran—” 
Denice shook her head. “Between the Troubles, and then Trent’s help, it wouldn’t 
be easy to prove I’m Denice Castanaveras. But if I stay in the public eye, 
eventually someone’s going to manage it. I’ve survived one trip into the lights, 
McGee. But I can’t stay there.”
“What exactly do you have in mind?”
Denice was a long moment answering him. “A lot of things. One at a time. Get 
Public Labor’s budget cut, make it possible for the Labor clients to get out 
into society again. Bring PKF numbers in the O.A. back to prerebellion levels. 
Try and improve relations with the CityStates and the Collective. Stop the use 
of the copy-protection birth-control viruses and make the Ministry of Population 
Control stop sterilizing women and instead make sure that contraceptives and 
abortion are always available.” She paused, said softly, “I could go on. I’ve 
been thinking recently, a lot. There’s never going to be a successful revolution 
on Earth, I know that now. If we’re going to change things, we’re going to have 
to do it from the inside out.”
“People have been trying to change the Unification from the inside out for fifty 
years, Denice.”
“They weren’t me.”
The old man smiled, just a quirk of the lips. “No, they sure as hell weren’t.” 
He picked up the chip, slid open a desk drawer, and held it above the drawer. 
“The Barrier is going to come down?”
“Yes.”
He dropped the chip inside.
“I need one last thing.” She reached across his desk and Touched him. You will 
never speak of me to anyone.

“Hello, Jodi Jodi.”
Jodi Jodi had watched her enter the hotel, watched her walk through the lobby to 
the registration desk. “Hi. What can I do for you?”
Denice reached across the desk, Touched her. You will never speak of me to 
anyone.
Jodi Jodi stared at Denice when she removed the hand. “You know what?”
“What?”
“You’re the most conceited person I ever met in my life.”

It had been two weeks since she had last been by the dojo.
Robert was not there; she had given up expecting to see him again. If he were 
alive, she thought he would have returned by now. She walked through the empty 
dojo, went upstairs and worked for a while on Robert’s garden. He would not have 
recognized it had he returned today; Denice had forgotten to put up the 
greenhouse walls, and the first snow had killed many of the more delicate 
plants. She’d put the walls up then, and the transparent plastic sheeting across 
them to keep the snow off the plants, but the damage was done.
She didn’t have time to work on the garden as it required, and did not think 
Robert would have appreciated having anyone but her do it.
She spent much of the morning at it, feeding the plants, making sure they had 
sufficient water, checking the radiators to verify that the garden got 
sufficient heat. She weeded, pruned dead branches and leaves, trimmed those very 
few plants that were growing sufficiently well to require it.
After a bit, she sat back on her heels and examined her work. Good. Good enough.
At the noise, she turned her head slightly to the right, into the sunshine…

The basketball came skipping along across the damp grass, and the old gardener 
got his hand up to knock it down. At the last moment the ball took a bad hop and 
bounced up in a beautiful arc, and the gardener lowered his hand and watched the 
ball go up over his head, come crashing down in the middle of his bonsai.
The garden lay against the wall of a complex of buildings surrounded by tall 
fences, with barbed wire across the tops of the fences.
Above one of the buildings a holo said, Public Labor Barracks for Children, 
Chino.
The eight-year-old boy chasing the ball, Daniel November, came to a stumbling 
halt in front of the gardener.
The gardener into whose garden the ball had intruded looked at the ball, turned 
slightly and looked at November. He was an old Asian fellow, chewing gum, 
wearing a hat against the bright California sun. He looked at November from 
under the brim of the floppy sun hat, with eyes that held no particular 
expression at all. Finally the boy said, “Can I have my ball back?”
The gardener lifted himself up from the small cart he sat on, reached into the 
delicate arrangement of stones and plants upon which the basketball had crashed 
down, and retrieved it. In the process November saw that both of the old man’s 
legs were missing, chopped off just above where his knees should have been.
He tossed the basketball to November. Holding the ball with both hands, the boy 
said, “Thanks. Thanks a lot. What happened to your legs?”
“A building fell on me,” the old man said.
The boy was half willing to believe it: “It did not.”
“Truly. The top eight stories of a skyscraper. Fell right down on me.”
“That would have killed you,” the boy said scornfully.
The gardener sat chewing his gum. “Probably. But a Peaceforcer Elite fell on top 
of me, and saved me from the worst of it.”
“Did it kill the Peaceforcer?” the boy asked hopefully.
“No,” said the gardener. “They are very hard to kill.”
“Too bad,” the boy said, but he knew it was true. “Do your legs still hurt?”
“No. It happened almost thirty years ago.”
November considered it. “Maybe I believe you.”
The old man straightened on his cart, a slight movement, but for the very 
briefest shiver of a moment November had the feeling that he was talking not to 
an old cripple, but to a very deadly thing.
“Daniel November,” said the gardener, “I will never lie to you.”
The boy shook himself slightly, grinned at the old man. “All right.” He turned 
and ran back toward the basketball court where his friends were waiting for the 
ball, turned again and yelled, while running backward, “Hey! What’s your name?”
The old man called back, “Tommy. Tommy Ho!”
“ ‘Bye, Tommy!” He turned again, ran back toward his waiting playmates.
The gardener returned to his garden, set about repairing the damage the ball had 
caused.

… and Denice Castanaveras blinked as the warm sunlight faded; the old man and 
his garden vanished, and left her alone atop a cold dim rooftop in New York 
City, in the year 2076, in the dying days of the TriCentennial.




- 4 -
« ^ » 
On Tuesday, December 22, 2076, Denice used the Erika Muller identity to purchase 
a semiballistic ticket to Las Vegas. In Vegas she walked from the downport to 
the Tropicana Hotel. It was an hour walk, but she did not hurry; she had never 
been to Vegas before, and the sea of light was impressive, if somewhat 
dehumanized.
Squads of PKF stood duty at every major intersection, armed with both laser 
rifles and needlers. Three times during her hour-long walk Denice was required 
to present her handheld for identification. Identification checks took longer 
these days; the PKF were far more thorough, checking ID against bank accounts, 
passports, criminal records, credit records, all the paraphernalia that went 
with an established identity. Denice had occasion to be grateful that Trent had 
been so thorough in establishing the identities, and that Ralf had kept them up 
for her.
She could not imagine someone without her resources passing false ID to the PKF 
today.
At the Tropicana she hesitated briefly, then went inside. The scanners did not 
catch the hideaway at her wrist, or else they got enough people wearing them 
that they were not going to do anything about it except watch her.
Business was more than good; people were trying to take their minds off events 
in the world outside. In the United States, Ripper had taken 84 percent of the 
vote despite his well-known association with the traitor Daimara; Eddore’s 
reelection had sent most of the country into a depression, and people were 
dealing with it in their own ways.
She was early; the woman was not off duty yet. At the change machine she touched 
her handheld to the payment slot, purchased a hundred Credits’ worth of tokens. 
She took a chair at a table where a bored older man with bad hair dealt 
twenty-one on a two-Credit limit.
She played carefully, out of curiosity, and lost slowly. She did not cheat until 
she had lost most of her hundred Credits. Once she started looking at the 
dealer’s cards she won steadily; within half an hour markers totaling a thousand 
Credits sat on the surface of the green felt table. She realized with surprise 
that people were simply standing, watching her play, and made herself stop 
winning; in the next five minutes she had a disastrous run of luck and lost back 
all but about two hundred Credits. People wandered away as her luck changed, and 
she cashed out and went looking for Laurie Slepan.
Five minutes later they were seated across from one another at a private table 
in the darkened casino bar. Slepan was an older woman by Vegas standards, 
perhaps forty; but she still presented a petite, cheerful, friendly appearance. 
Her hair was carefully coifed, her makeup impeccably done—an original design, 
Denice suspected. Denice could see what it was that David had found attractive. 
“I’m looking for John Albright. How long did you date him?”
The woman shook her head. “I don’t know who you mean.”
Answer me.
Slepan hesitated, then smiled at Denice. “Gee, not long. I mean, he was here a 
couple of weeks I guess.”
“Where did he go?”
“He—” The woman closed her mouth abruptly. “He—”
Denice closed her eyes and—
Late at night, cuddling together in David’s hotel room. She’d learned about the 
wire just the other night, her fingers catching on the socket in his skull 
during sex, stroking his hair, and didn’t know what to make of it; he didn’t act 
like any juice junkie she’d ever met. When he wasn’t on it, and she’d never seen 
him on the juice, he seemed, though withdrawn, pleasant enough, and completely 
in control of himself. That night he’d talked for the first time about leaving. 
Unsurprised, she had asked when he would leave, and he’d said, “Soon. I’d have 
been out of here by now except that I couldn’t win too quickly, it would have 
drawn attention. I can’t go back to where I was. Too many people know that 
Zanini was with Obodi. If I went back they’d arrest and execute me.” He laughed 
at that; really amused, Laurie thought. “For being Zanini. I’d feel very foolish 
dying for that, they have much better reasons to kill me.” After a long silence, 
he said drowsily, “Soon. I think I’ll go to Mexico. I keep thinking of that 
sunset. I’d like to see more sunsets like that one. California’s not a very fun 
place right now. Maybe I’ll go to Baja.” He rolled over on his side, met her 
eyes, and said, “You can’t ever talk about me to anyone.”
Denice shook herself, rose from the table. So that’s what it feels like on the 
receiving end.
Laurie Slepan said, “Miss? Could you tell him I said hello? If you find him?”

She had time; while Ralf searched Baja California, she took the bus to 
Flagstaff, Arizona.
It was an old vehicle with one fan slightly out of alignment; the fan’s whine 
cycled up and down in a predictable pattern, and if the bearings were not 
replaced soon it was going to break down.
The fan was up at the front; she sat in the rear of the bus, the very last row 
of seats.
At their first stop, a tiny roadside town of only a few hundred people, about a 
half hour out of Vegas, a thin, white-haired woman of indeterminate age got on 
the bus, wrapped in a long black shawl against the cold. Denice glanced at her 
without expression as the woman made her way back down the bus. The seat next to 
hers was one of the very few empty ones, and she did not particularly want 
company.
The woman seated herself next to Denice, put her huge thatch purse on the floor 
at her feet. “Hello, dear.”
Denice nodded, turned her head slightly away, and closed her eyes as though she 
were trying to sleep.
She awoke sometime later, to darkness. The bus moved along the road quietly and 
without any real hurry, only occasional traffic speeding by above them, or off 
to one side of the road. She yawned, stretching.
The woman in the seat next to her smiled at her as she stretched. “Did you have 
a good nap?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I set a spell so that you would.”
Denice looked at the woman with interest for the first time. A thin, 
dark-skinned woman, with white hair and white eyebrows; tiny little crow’s-feet 
clustered around the edges of her eyes. A single clear crystal on a white cord 
hung down over her black shawl. One of her several rings had the shape of an 
ankh; something in her gave Denice the impression of great age. “You’re a 
witch.”
The woman’s cheeks twitched just a bit. “Aren’t you?”
Denice found herself smiling back at the woman, almost against her own will. 
“Maybe. I lived at Goddess Home for a couple of years; have you ever been 
there?”
“Oh, I visited, now and again. Doubtless I’ll visit again someday.” The old 
woman looked at something off in the darkness ahead. “There’s no hurry, is 
there?”
“I guess not.” The bus ground to a halt, and a pair of PKF rifles slung across 
their backs, boarded it. They moved backward through the bus, and started 
checking IDs in the rear row, moving forward. Denice and the older woman gave 
their handhelds over when requested; the PKF handed them back in a few minutes. 
It took most of twenty minutes before they were through, and let the bus move 
on.
Against the background of grumbling, Denice said softly, “I could get really 
tired of this.”
The woman shrugged. “Oh, this will pass. You learn that, when you get old 
enough. All the politics—” She made a dismissive gesture, chuckled warmly. “Best 
leave it to those who enjoy it.”
“This doesn’t bother you?”
The woman looked at Denice with what Denice thought was true curiosity. “Should 
it? There are things in my world I have concern for. Raising my children, for 
one. Aiding my friends. Helping the crops grow. Magick, and fulfilling the 
responsibilities that the power confers. Teaching and learning, enjoying my 
life. What is it to me if some men want to stop a bus and board it and ask me 
silly questions?” She shook her head. “The corn doesn’t care. It still wants 
water. My children don’t care; they still need to be held when they hurt 
themselves, and praised when they do well, and loved all the time.”
Denice grinned. “No offense intended, but you sound just like all the female 
witches I’ve known. And most of the men.”
“Men can’t be witches,” the woman said dismissively. She appeared to consider 
what Denice had said. “ ‘No offense intended.’ By that, I suppose you mean that 
it’s a criticism anyway?”
“I’ve never felt particularly close to women who didn’t want to concern 
themselves with anything but—well, women’s concerns.”
“I see,” said the witch. “Do you know what your problem is, my dear? You were 
raised by a man, and you were never close to your mother.”
Denice looked at her. “That’s true.” The woman who had borne her, Jany 
McConnell, had been busy helping to raise 240 other children of Denice’s age, 
and she had never had much more time for her than for the others. “My father 
made time for me. My mother wouldn’t, or couldn’t. So I felt closer to him.” She 
shook her head. “How do you know that?”
“You hold yourself like a man. You gesture like a man. I would imagine that the 
people in your life who have deeply mattered to you have been men.”
“And you can tell this just by looking at me?”
“And talking to you. What’s your name, dear?” Denice paused. For some reason she 
didn’t want to lie to the woman; but she was traveling under the name. “Erika,” 
she said finally.
Amusement touched the woman’s eyes. “Very well. Once, Erika, you would not have 
known who your father was. The first family the human race ever saw was that of 
mother and child. We didn’t know who the father was because we didn’t know that 
sex caused children. Children were believed a thing that we women brought forth 
of ourselves, because we were the source of life.”
“You talk like you were there.”
“The only family and only parent was the mother. It’s in the deepest part of us 
to need a mother. That you did not have one is your great loss. It kept you from 
learning how to be a woman.” The bus came to a slow, sighing stop, and touched 
down. “This is my stop.” The woman fumbled with her bag, got it up off the 
floor, and came to her feet. “I know you understand what power is, Erika. But 
I’m not so sure you understand what it’s not.” The woman leaned over and kissed 
Denice on the forehead. “Have a good trip.” Denice said softly, “Who the hell 
are you?”
“I won’t insult your good sense. Someday, the Goddess willing, we’ll meet again. 
Good-bye, dear.”

Twenty minutes later Denice got out of her seat, went up to where the conductor 
sat smoking a cigarette and watching the road. “Excuse me?”
The conductor, a girl of about sixteen, said, “Yeah?”
“Back there, where you let that woman off. What’s there?”
“Not a damn thing. Not for ten klicks in either direction.”
“I see.”
The conductor shrugged. “Hope she doesn’t freeze to death. It’s a cold night 
out.”

The woman who had instituted the worship of the Goddess in pre-Hellenic Greece, 
who was to her knowledge the last surviving exile of the Old Human Race, stood 
at the edge of the road and watched the bus disappear into the darkness.
Her name was Mai’Riga’Say, and she had wondered, since hearing of it, about the 
woman who claimed to have killed Mister Obodi, the Dancer Sedon whom Say had, in 
another existence, followed into exile.
Having met her now, Say could almost credit it; she had not seen a Dancer in—she 
did not know how many thousands of years, but not since her last encounter with 
Indo, and that was back before the new humans had rediscovered writing—but if 
Say had ever seen a Dancer in her life, then this Denice Daimara was one.
The world was becoming a very interesting place of late.
Say gathered her shawl about herself, stepped from the road, and walked alone 
into the frozen dark desert.

The medbot examined the wall again. The cold was very bad for the patients 
inside, and the old adobe was cracked in far too many places. It did not provide 
anything like the insulation the medbot’s research had indicated was possible 
with adobe. Fortunately, the ferrocrete mixture the medbot had ordered should 
fill the cracks nicely.
The medbot kept one eye on the small patient, who was working on a car in the 
backyard, while it troweled ferrocrete into the cracks.
At 10:12:32 a.m. a human entered the medbot’s field of vision. An adult female, 
in a black coat and black jeans—how very interesting; it recognized her. This 
was one of its patients, and nobody had ever told it that the relationship had 
ceased. The medbot put down its trowel and walked forward to greet the patient, 
as the patient came through the gate and walked up the long path to the house. 
It noted that its instructions to apply skepticism to everything she said were 
still in force, decided not to believe anything she said to it, and said 
cheerfully, “Mademoiselle Daimara, how are you? How is your radiation poisoning? 
Have you fully recovered from it? Are you perhaps suffering from frostbite from 
your walk in the cold?”

Callia fed her vegetable stir-fry and coffee with cinnamon. After the long, cold 
walk from the bus depot—Callia’s house was eight klicks outside of town—it was 
exactly what Denice wanted.
The huge window to the south looked out on a backyard the size of Texas, with 
half a dozen wrecked vehicles scattered around it. The girl, working on the 
least wrecked-looking of them, was about twelve years old, a slim black-haired 
child; Denice thought she herself must have looked like that once.
“Have you spoken to ‘Selle Lovely?”
Callia shook her head. “No. I think if I was to hear from her, it would be a 
laser in the night. Domino says she blames me for a lot of how things happened.” 
She looked at Denice. “And I wouldn’t walk down any dark alleys if I were you, 
either. Even Domino thinks you sold us out, even after I told them about the 
nukes and said I’d have done the same thing.”
“Have you talked to her much?”
“Just the once. They’re both just barely keeping one step ahead of the PKF. They 
stopped at a Temple in Fort Lauderdale where I had asked the Reverend to call 
me. He called the number I’d given him, and I called back and got Domino.” Her 
smile was sad. “She kept me talking for most of ten minutes. Ralf said they had 
a Player trying to trace the call, and afterward they tried to trace the 
number.”
“That must hurt.”
Callia nodded. “Some. Domino was all the mother Lan had after the PKF executed 
ours. It’s almost made me glad he didn’t live to see her do this; it would have 
hurt him a lot.”
“And you?”
“At one point I trusted Domino with my life, and Lan’s. But the line of work 
I’ve been in, you learn that everyone has limits. After a while you stop 
trusting so completely. That’s why none of them know about this place.” After a 
moment she added, “I was seventeen when my mother died. Lan was only ten. I’d 
had my mother, as a child, almost as an adult. When they executed her they took 
away my friend, but they couldn’t take away my mother.”
“Apparently not. You gave her the same name?”
Callia glanced out at the girl, only her legs visible beneath the car. “Why not? 
My mother was a happy woman. The child has the same genes, exactly. I’ve given 
her most of the things my mother had, down to the cars my mother grew up working 
on.”
“Make a little Speedfreak out of her.”
Callia smiled. “My mother’s adopted sister lives two klicks further up the road; 
even after the Speedfreak Rebellion in ‘63, the PKF never connected her with my 
mother, never questioned her. I figured if the PKF didn’t find her then, no one 
else would now. So we moved Angel here for the summer, tucked her away before 
everything went up.” She could not hide the pride in her voice. “During the 
TriCentennial summer she sewed herself a jacket with Faster Than the Wind on it. 
She was wearing it when I got back. So yes, I’m raising her the way my mother 
was raised. It seems to be working; Angel is a happy child.”
“Angel de Luz.”
“You pronounce that well.” Callia paused. “It means Angel of Light.”
“I know. What are you going to do now?”
Callia said simply, “Raise my daughter.”
Denice knew the answer before she started, but made the offer anyway; things 
change. “I could use you. I’ll pay for your biosculpture, get new legs cloned 
for you, have a new identity established.”
“I’m staying with my daughter.” Callia stood, carefully—the braces on both of 
her legs made walking difficult—and started clearing the dishes away from the 
table; Denice got up to help her. “I’m staying where I’m needed.”
Denice spent the night there. In the hour before dawn, Ralf the Wise and 
Powerful awoke her. “He’s in Cabo San Lucas.”




- 5 -
« ^ 
Cabo San Lucas sits at the tip of Baja California Sur, fifteen hundred 
kilometers south of the Occupied American border.
Denice came in via SB, to a downport located, for some eccentric reason, sixty 
klicks outside of town. The day before Christmas it blazed with heat, the sun 
beating down like fire on the southern tip of California. The ride into town was 
interesting; she paid three Credits to sit in a bus that rode on wheels, all the 
way into town. The road into town ran alongside the ocean most of the way, and 
the water was a shade of brilliant blue that Denice had never seen before in her 
life, completely different from the blue of the Pacific Ocean in Southern 
California. She did not think it was her imagination; her genie eyes were 
sensitive. The quality of light was different, and all the colors were truly 
brighter and more vibrant. The woman behind her mentioned the same thing, and 
the man she was with explained that it was because the sun had less atmosphere 
to travel through.
You have no poetry in your soul, Denice thought of the man.
When they were still half an hour outside of town she found herself growing 
absurdly cheerful. She clamped her teeth shut, deepened her breathing, and did 
her very best to meditate through the waves of her brother’s happiness. The 
world was a fine, fine place, with colors like something out of the most 
gorgeously holographed sensable. The people on the bus around her were the 
nicest and handsomest and smartest group she’d ever had the opportunity to meet, 
and it occurred to her that with the kind of Credit she had now she could treat 
all of them as they deserved to be treated. When they got to town she would see 
what sort of entertainment they could round up. Dancing, certainly, she’d show 
them dancing like they’d never seen—
As they entered the outskirts of Cabo San Lucas, her happiness vanished like a 
switch being thrown.
The smile faded from her features.
He was staying in a room at the Hotel Hacienda, the oldest hotel in Cabo San 
Lucas, built in the prior century. Her bus took her directly to the hotel, 
deposited her in a little automobile courtyard of red brick, with a fountain at 
the center of it, just outside the hotel. A porter appeared in a white uniform, 
margarita in hand, and attempted to hand it to her, asking in heavily accented 
English if she had any bags for him to carry.
She said quietly, I’m not here, and walked by him.
The lobby was covered by a roof, but otherwise was open to the air. She did not 
need to ask where David was, did not know what name he was using anyway. She 
could feel his presence off in the northern wing of the hotel, the slow turn of 
his thoughts. People passed by her but she did not see them. The walkway led 
through a tangle of tropical plants, flowers and hanging plants with gorgeous 
scarlet leaves. She did not notice them.
At room B-6 David opened the door and said quietly, “Come in.”
Gloom sat upon the room like a shroud; curtains drawn, lights extinguished. 
Denice moved forward, following David. Enough light to make out red ceramic 
tile, rugs, a blue-tiled kitchen, hanging lamps, prints on the walls of scenes 
from a bullfight.
Small and gorgeous and empty of any personal touch.
The main room was bare except for the rug and a pair of couches. David gestured 
to one, dropped into the other, put his feet up on it, and leaned back, hands 
clasped behind his head. He sat waiting, patiently, hopelessly, and eventually 
she spoke.
“What happened?”
He did not pretend to misunderstand her. “I made a mistake.” His laughter 
sounded almost real; cool, amused. “When I was fifteen, I Touched a juice 
junkie’s mind while he was on the wire.” David’s voice trailed off, and his 
features grew distant.
“What’s it like?”
“You want me to turn mine on? I don’t think you could avoid understanding then.”
Denice said softly, “Tell me.”
“It’s like—like moving in sunlight—you know the way the sun feels on your 
muscles, when you’re using them the way they’re supposed to be used. It was like 
the best steak I’d ever had and the first beer after a day of hard physical 
work, and it reminded me of the taste and smell of the first girl I ever made 
love to.” His stare touched Denice, hot and fierce. “It’s better than being in 
love. I’ve been in love. It’s so much better than that. Being in love hurts 
sometimes because the people you love change and turn into someone else. But the 
wire never changes.” His voice was tinged with harshness and his stare did not 
waver: “It’s always perfect.”
“Have you ever tried to quit?”
“Oh, God. Yes. I’ve tried. In the early days I could go two, three weeks without 
it. Mostly by not sleeping. If I went to sleep I’d wake up happy. In my sleep 
I’d get up and put it in and turn it on. So I didn’t sleep. I threw the plug 
away. A dozen times. But it was too easy to get another one—”
The thought touched Denice. She stared at him. “You sold wire.”
His manner was mocking. “I’ve done worse than that, Denice. I’ve killed 
thirty-odd people. Just business; I never killed anyone where it was personal, 
because I wanted to or I was offended or anything silly like that. So anyway, 
tell me about yourself. What’s been going on with you?”
With the full strength of her Gift, Denice Touched her brother.
When they were done, it was dark outside. The hanging lights had come up 
automatically.
They sat together on the couch, holding hands.
As children they had done that.
You’re tired of the wire—To death.
You’ll never give it up.
I can’t.
Do you remember the last thing Carl said to us?
Remember that you’re tougher than they are. Better. David laughed. Kill the 
fuckers. You know, I’ve almost killed myself a half dozen times because he said 
that to us. I’ve been so scared, so many times. I haven’t felt better than 
anyone.
I can leave you here, and let you go on. Or I can take it away from you.
I would very much like to see you dance.
She let go of his hand, stood slowly. She could hear the deep pounding of her 
heart as though it were the only sound in creation.
David Castanaveras whispered, “Dance for me.”
The back of her throat was very tight. “Turn the lights off, David.”
The room plunged into utter darkness.
Denice moved slowly through the space, learning it in the darkness. Here is the 
rug and here are the walls and the curtains and here is the open place. There 
are the couches and there is David, standing motionless in the darkness, 
watching the heat of my body.
Touch me.
She felt his thoughts touch hers, engage, become more deeply her own, and she 
was he and she watched herself as she closed her eyes, and rolled her head, back 
and forth and around, loosening the muscles, and then stretched, slowly, like a 
cat, feeling the kinks shake out, rotated her wrists, lifted her hands above her 
head, threw her head back and stared up toward the blackness of the ceiling. 
Muscles stretching. Her right knee came up, toward her chest, and she leaned 
farther backward, arms spreading out behind her like the wings of a great bird, 
hands curved and fingers almost touching, and bent farther, hands coming down to 
touch the floor behind her—
And moved through it with shocking abruptness, onto her hands and spilling 
through the backward roll in one swift snapping motion, came back to her feet 
and was aware of the pale pearl glow covering her from head to toe, reached out, 
breaking the space around her, pulling it back into a slow, graceful spin, and 
the light began to flare around her, glowing in her eyes, trailing from her 
fingers as they moved through the liquid air. David moved with her, watched her, 
completely transfixed, merging together, feeling the heat of the living Flame 
shine upon his face, feeling through her as the Flame ran across her skin, 
burned the air in her lungs like real fire, and then for some timeless period 
there was no awareness of self, no awareness of her, no awareness of him; only 
the motion of the Dance, of life itself made real, and David’s features had 
grown gentle, serene; Denice could feel the peace that came to rest within him 
as she came out of the last flowing motion, slowing, stopping, turning to face 
him through the blistering glare, her entire being quivering on the edge of the 
moment, and time stilled and the moment came and in that instant of calm 
certainty she brought the gun from the place where it rested cold against her 
forearm and whispered
I love you
and fired.



—Daniel Keys Moran
Los Angeles, Southern California
1989-1992