Prolog:

Four Beginnings

One

Christmas Eve 2000 New York City

“It’s going into a wide elliptical Earth orbit,” Judith Hoffman said.

“Perigee about ten thousand kilometers, apogee about five hundred thousand. It’ll make a loop around the moon every third orbit.” She pulled back from the video screen to let Garry Lanier have a look from where he sat on the edge of her desk. For the time being, the Stone still resembled a baked potato, with no meaningful detail.

Outside the door to her office, the noise of the party was a distant reminder of ignored social obligations. She had brought him into the office just a few minutes before.

“That must be an incredible fluke.”

“It’s not a fluke,” Hoffman said.

Tall, with close-cut dense, black hair, Lanier resembled a pale-skinned Amerindian, though he had no Indian blood.

Hoffman found his eyes particularly reassuring—gently scrutinizing, the eyes of a man used to seeing across great distances.

She did not put her trust in people on the basis of looks, however.

Hoffman had taken to Lanier because he had taught her something. Some had called him bloodless, but Hoffman knew better. The man was simply competent, calm and observant.

He had a kind of blindness to people’s foibles that made him peculiarly effective as a manager. He seldom seemed to recognize petty insults, bitchiness or backbiting. He saw people only in terms of their effectiveness or lack of it, at least as far as his public reactions showed; he cut through their surface dross to find the true coin beneath. She had learned some interesting things about several people by observing their reactions to Lanier. And she had adapted her own style, picking up on his finesse.

Lanier had never been in Hoffman’s at-home work area before, and now, in the video’s cool light, he inspected the shelves of memory blocks, the broad, empty desk with its basic secretary’s chair, the compact word processor beneath the video.

Like most of the party-goers, he was a little in awe of Hoffman.

On the Hill, she was called the Advisor. She had acted in official and unofficial capacities as a science expert for three presidents. Her video programs reviving and re-exploring science had been popular in the late 1990s, in a world just recovering from the shock of the Little Death. She had served on the board of directors of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and now ISCCOM—the International Space Cooperation Committee. Though she could not disguise her solid build, her taste in clothes was immaculate. There was a conscious limit to her style, however; her, fingernails were short and unpainted, well-manicured but not elegant, and she wore little makeup. She allowed her brunette hair to find its own shape with a minimum of interference; it tended to make a nimbus of fine curls around her head.

“You must be on the Drake Hookup,” Lanier said.

“I am, but this is a Deep Space Tracking picture. The Drale is still locked on the Perseus Gemstar.”

“They won’t turn it on the Stone?”

She shook her head, grinning wolfishly. ”Feisty old bastards are on a tight schedule—won’t turn it around even for a look at the biggest event of the twenty-first century.”

Lanier raised an eyebrow. The Stone, as far as he knew, was just an asteroid. The oblong chunk wasn’t going to hit the earth, but if it was going to orbit, it would be in perfect position for scientific probes. That was interesting, but hardly worthy of so much enthusiasm.

“Twenty-One isn’t until next month,” he reminded her.

“And that’s when we’ll be getting busy.” She turned toward him and folded her arms. ”Garry, we’ve been working together for some time now. I trust you a lot.”

He felt a tightening at the base of his spine. She had seemed tense all evening. He had dismissed the fidgeting as none of his business.

Now she was making it his business.

“What do you know about the Stone?” she asked.

He thought a moment before answering. ”DST located it eight months ago. It’s about three hundred kilometers long, a hundred kilometers across at midsection. Medium albedo, probably a silicate body with a nickel-iron core. It had a kind of halo around it when first spotted, but that’s dissipated, That made a few scientists speculate it was an exceptionally large old comet nucleus. Some conflicting reports on low density revived the old Shklovskii Mars-moon speculation.”

“Where did you hear the density reports?”

“I don’t remember.”

“That reassures me a little bit. If you haven’t heard much more than that, probably no one else has, either. DST had a leak, we’ve plugged it now.”

Lanier had entered her circle while working as a public relations manager for AT&T Orbicom Services. Before being employed by Orbicom, he had spent six years in the Navy, first as a fighter pilot, then flying high-altitude tankers. He had flown the famous Charlie Baker Delta route over Florida, Cuba and Bermuda during the Little Death, refueling the planes of the Atlantic Watch whose vigilance had played such a crucial role in limiting thee war.

After the armistice, he had received an OK from the Navy to take his expertise in aerospace engineering over to Orbicom, which was tuning up its world-wide civilian Mononet.

There had been a few calls at first to Orbicom headquarters in Menlo Park, California, then requests for help on position papers, then an abrupt and unexpected transfer to the Orbicom building in Washington, which he later learned had been engineered by Homan. There was no question of romance —how often had he quelled that rumor?—but their ability to work together was remarkable in a Washington atmosphere of perpetual partisan bickering and funding squabbles.

“Why the secrecy?” he asked.

“DST has been ordered to mask all data given to the community.”

By which she meant the scientific community.

“Why in hell should they do that? Government’s relation with the community has been awful the last few years. This certainly won’t help.”

“Yes, but I concur this time.”

Another chill. Hoffman was very dedicated to the community.

“If there’s a blanket over everything, how do you know?”

Lanier asked.

“Connections through ISCCOM. I’ve been put on oversight by the President.”

“Jesus.”

“So while our friends are partying out there, I need to know if I can rely on you.”

“Judith, I’m just a second-rank PR type.”

“Bullshit. Orbicom thinks you’re the best personnel coordinator they have. I had to wrestle Parker for three months to get you transferred to Washington. You were lined up for a promotion, know that?”

Truthfully, he had hoped to avoid another promotion. He felt he was getting away from the real work, higher and higher up the tower of power. ”And you got me transferred, instead?”

“Pulled enough strings to look like the puppet master I’m supposed to be. I may need you. You know I don’t pick candidates unless I’m sure they’ll yank my ass out of the fire later.”

He nodded. To be part of Hoffman's circle was to be groomed for importance. Until now, he had tried to overlook that as a truism.

“Do you remember the supernova sighted about the same time as the Stone?”

Lanier nodded; it had made a brief splash in the journals, and he had been too busy to find that low-profile coverage odd.

“It wasn’t a supernova. Just as bright, but it didn’t match any of the requirements. In the first place, it was first recorded by DST as an infrared object just outside the solar system. Within two days, the flare became visible, and DST detected radiation of frequencies associated with every atomic transition. The flare temperature started at a million degrees Kelvin and peaked at just over one billion degrees. By that time nuclear explosion detectors on satellites—the new GPS supervel—were picking up thermally excited gamma rays from nuclear transitions. It was clearly visible in the night sky, so DST had to make up a cover story, and that was the discovery of a supernova by space defense installations. But they didn’t know what they had.”

“And?”

“The display went out, everything got quiet and then a visual sighting was made in the same portion of the sky. It was the Stone. By that time, everybody knew they weren’t dealing with a simple asteroid.” The video pictures flickered and a chime sounded.

“Well, here it is. Joint Space Command has taken over the Drake and rotated it.”

The Drake was the most powerful orbiting optical telescope.

There were bigger instruments being built on lunar farside, but none yet in operation matched the Drake. It had no Defense Department connection. Joint Space Command legally had no jurisdiction—except in time of national security crisis.

The Stone appeared on the screen greatly enlarged and cradled in numbers and se4ence data graphs. Much more detail was evident big crater at one end of the oblong, smaller craters all over, a peculiar band running latitudinally.

“It still looks like an asteroid,” Lanier said, his voice lacking conviction.

“Indeed,” Hoffman said. ”We know the type. A very large mesosiderite. We know the composition. But it’s missing about forty percent of its mass. DST confirmed that this morning. That chunk’s profile through the center resembles a geode. Geodes don’t occur in space, Garry. The President has already accepted my recommendation that we organize an investigation. That was before the elections, but I think we can push it with the new administration—cracker-barrel mentality or not.

Just as a precaution, we’re scheduling six orbital transfer vehicle flights before the end of February. And I’m laying my bets down early. I think we’re going to need a science team, and I’d like you to coordinate for me. I’m sure we can arrange something with Orbicom.”

“But why the secrecy?”

“Why, Garry, I’m surprised.” She smiled warmly at him. “When the aliens arrive, the government always goes in for secrecy.”

Two

August, 2001

Podlipki Airfield, near Moscow

“Major Mirsky, you are not concentrating on your task.”

“My suit is leaking, Colonel Mayakovsky.”

“That is irrelevant. You can stay in the tank for another fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Now pay attention. You must complete this maneuver.”

Mirsky blinked sweat from his eyes and strained to see the American-style docking hatch clearly. The water was already up to his knees in the pressure suit; he could feel the stream entering through the seam at his hip. There was no way of telling how copious the flow was; he hoped Mayakovsky knew.

He had been instructed to wedge the bent metal bar into the two sensor ports. To get the necessary traction to jam it home, he hooked his ankle and fight wrist to the circular lip of the hatch, using the I-shaped attachments on his boots and glove.

Then with his left hand —(how they had tried to discourage him in school in Kiev, now gone, all of his teachers and their nineteenth-century ideas; how they had tried to get him to use his right hand exclusively, until finally, in his late teens, an edict had come down officially pardoning gauche children)—Mirsky slammed the bar.

He unhooked his wrist and ankles and pushed back.

The water was up to his waist.

“Colonel—”

“The hatch will pause before opening. Three minutes.”

Mirsky bit his lip. He twisted his neck around within the helmet to see how his teammates were doing. The five lined-up hatches were manned—two men and Yefremova. Where was Orlov?

There—pushing his helmet back, Mirsky saw Orlov being hauled to the surface of the tank, three wet-suited, scuba-equipped divers assisting him to shadowy obscurity. The surface, the lovely surface, sweet air and no water streaming in. He couldn’t feel it now. The level was above his hip.

The hatch began to move. He could hear the mechanism whining.

Then it stopped, only one-third open.

“It’s stuck,” he said, stunned. He was reasonably sure the exercise was supposed to be over as soon as he could enter the hatch, and the hatch was supposed to be foolproof, it was supposed to open when properly jimmied. American word, American technology, reliable, no?

“Loosen it. Your bar is obviously not positioned properly.”

“It is!” Mirsky insisted.

“Major—”

“Yes, yes!” He jammed the heel of his heavily gloved hand against the bar again. He hadn’t hooked his ankles and right wrist; he floated away from the hatch and had to waste precious seconds reeling in his line and dragging himself back.

Hook. Pound. Unhook. No result.

Water up to his chest, cold, slopping past his neck seal into his helmet when his angle shifted. He swallowed some accidentally and choked. There. Colonel will think I’m drowning and show mercy!

“Jiggle it,” the colonel suggested.

His gloves were almost too thick to reach into the groove where the bar now resided, held in place by the partly open hatch. He pressed, his sleeves filled with cold and his fingers numbing. He pressed again.

His suit was no longer neutrally buoyant. He was starting to sink.

The bottom of the tank was thirty meters below, and all three of the divers had accompanied Orlov. There was nobody between him and drowning if he could not make it to the simulated Soviet hatch on his own power. And if he did not leave now—but he didn’t dare. He had wanted the stars since adolescence, and panicking now would put them out of his reach forever. He screamed in his helmet and slammed his glove tip into the groove, causing a sharp freezing jolt of pain to go up his arm as his fingers crammed into the inner fabric and Casing.

The hatch began to move again.

“Just jammed,” the colonel said.

“I’m drowning, goddammit!” Mirsky shouted. He hooked his wrists onto the lip of the ring and sputtered water from his mouth. The suit’s air entered and exited just above the neck ring of his helmet, and he could already hear the suck and gurgle.

Floodlights came on around the tank. The hatches were suspended in watery noon brightness. He felt hands under his arms and around his legs and saw the three other cosmonaut trainees vaguely from the corners of his foggy faceplate. They kicked away from the hatch complex and hauled him higher, higher, to his grandmother’s archaic and welcome heaven.

They sat at their special table away from the two hundred other recruits and were served fine thick sausages with their kasha. The beer was cold and plentiful, if sour and watery, and there were oranges and carrots and cabbage cores. And for dessert, a big steel bowl of fresh-made, rich vanilla ice cream, unavailable for months while they trained, was set before them by a smiling mess officer.

When dinner was over, Yefremova and Mirsky strolled across the grounds of the Cosmonaut Instructional Center with its hideous black steel water tank half-buried in the ground.

Yefremova came from Moscow and had a fine eastern slant to her eyes; Mirsky, from Kiev, could as easily have been German as Russian.

Still, coming from Kiev had its advantages.

A man without a city: this was something Russians could sympathize with, feel sad about.

They spoke very little. They thought they were in love but that was irrelevant. Yefremova was one of fourteen women in the Space Shock Troops program. Her femaleness kept her even busier than the men. She had trained as a pilot in the Air Defense Forces before that, flying Tu 22M training bombers and old Sukhoi fighters. He had come into the military after graduating from an aerospace engineering school. His deferment had been most fortunate; instead of being inducted into the army at eighteen, he had qualified for a New Reindustrialization scholarship.

In the engineering school, he had gained excellent marks in political science and leadership, and they had earmarked him immediately for the difficult position of Zampolit in a fighter squadron in East Germany, but then had transferred him to Space Defense Forces, which had only been in existence for four years. He had never heard of it before the transfer, but such a stroke of luck ... He had always wanted to be a Yefremova’s father was a high-ranking Moscow bureaucrat.

He had put her into what he thought would be a safe military training program rather than let her run wild with Moscow’s infamous Young Hooligans. She had turned out to be very capable and very bright; her future was promising, though not what her father had expected.

Their backgrounds were worlds apart, and chances were they would never even have a chance to date, much less conduct an affair or get married.

“Look,” Yefremova said. ”You can see it clearly tonight.”

“Yes?”

He knew immediately what she meant.

“There.” She leaned her head close to his and pointed above the summer’s long blue twilight to a tiny spot of light just beside the full moon.

“They will get there before we do,” Yefremova said sadly. “They always do, now.”

“So pessimistic,” Mirsky said.

“I wonder what they call it,” she said. ”What they will name it when they land.”

“Not ‘the Potato,’ surely!” Mirsky chuckled.

“No,” Yefremova agreed.

“Someday,” Mirsky said, squinting to make the Spot out more clearly.

“Someday what?”

“Perhaps the time will come when we will take it away from them.”

“Dreamer,” Yefremova said.

The next week, a two-man vacuum chamber imploded on the outskirts of the airfield. Yefremova was testing a new suit design in one half of the chamber. She was killed instantly.

There was great concern about the political repercussions of the accident, but as it turned out, her father was not unreasonable.

Better to have a martyr in the family than a hooligan.

Mirsky took an unscheduled day’s absence with a bottle of brandy smuggled in from Yugoslavia. He spent the day alone in a Moscow park and did not even open the bottle.

After a year, he finished his training and was promoted. He left Podlipki and spent two weeks in Starry Town, where he visited Yuri Gagarin’s room, now a kind of shrine for spacefarers. From there, he was flown to a secret facility in Mongolia, and then ... to the Moon.

And always he kept his eye on the Potato. Someday, he knew, he would go there, and not as an ISCCOM exchange Russian.

A nation could only stand so much.

Three

Christmas Eve 2004

Santa Barbara, California

Patricia Luisa Vasquez opened the car door to release her seat harness. She was anxious to get into the house and start the festivities. The psychological testing at Vandenberg the past few days had been exhausting.

“Wait,” Paul Loper said. He put a hand on her arm, then stared at the dashboard. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons played on the ca stereo. ”Your folks aren’t going to want to know—”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, pulling back a strand of very dark brown, almost black, hair. The lower half of her round face was illuminated by an orange streetlight, light olive skin pink’ in the sodium glow. She regarded Paul solicitously, tying her hair into two braids parted in the middle. Her square, intense eyes reminded him of a cat’s gaze just before pouncing.

“They’ll love it,” she said, laying hand on his shoulder and stroking his cheek. ”You’re the first non-Anglo boyfriend I’ve ever introduced them to.”

“I mean, about us rooming together.”

“What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

“I feel a little awkward. You keep talking about your parents being old-fashioned.”

“I just wanted you to meet them, and to show you my home.”

“I want that, too.”

“Listen, with the news I have tonight, nobody’s going to worry about my maidenhood. If Mom asks how serious we are, I’ll let you answer.”

Paul grimaced. ”Great.”

Patricia pulled his hand toward her and made a rude sound against the palm with her lips, then opened the door.

“Wait.”

“What now?”

“I’m not ... I mean, you know that I love you.”

“Paul ...”

“It’s just ...”

“Come on inside and meet my family. You’ll calm down. And don’t worry.”

They locked the car door and opened the trunk, pulling groceries out of the back. She huffed up the front walk with a box, her breath clouding in the cold night air. She wiped her feet on the front step mat, swung the screen door wide, caught it with her elbow and shouted, “Mama! It’s me. And I brought Paul, too.”

Rita Vasquez took the box from her daughter’s arms and laid it down on the kitchen table. At forty-five, Rita was only slightly plump, but the clothes she wore invariably conflicted with even Patricia’s rudimentary sense of fashion.

“What is this, a care package?” Rita asked. She held her arms out and folded Patricia in them.

“Mama, where did you get that polyester suit? I haven’t seen one of those in years.”

“I found it in the garage, packed away. Your father bought it for me before you were born. So where’s Paul?”

“He’s carrying in two more boxes.” She removed her coat and savored the smells of tamales steaming in corn husks, baking ham and sweet potato pie. ”Smells like home,” she said, and Rita beamed.

In the living room, the aluminum tree was still bare—decorating the tree on Christmas Eve was a family tradition—and a gas log burned brightly in the fireplace. She reacquainted herself with the old plaster bas-reliefs of grapes and vines and leaves beneath the cornice, and the heavy wooden beams across the ceiling. She smiled. She had been born in this house. Wherever she went, however far, this would be home to her. ”Where are Julia and Robert?”

“Robert’s been stationed in Omaha,” Rita answered from the kitchen. “They can’t make it this year. Be out in March, maybe.”

“Oh,” Patricia said, disappointed. She returned to the kitchen.

“Where’s Papa?”

“Watching TV.”

Paul came in the kitchen door heavily loaded. Patricia took one of the boxes from him and laid it on the floor next to the refrigerator for unloading. ”We were expecting an army, so we brought lots of stuff,” she said.

Rita pushed through layers of food and shook her head.

“It’ll get eaten. We’re having Mr. and Mrs. Ortiz from next door, and cousin Enrique and his new wife. So this is Paul?”

“Yup.”

Rita hugged him, her arms barely meeting around his back.

She took hold of both his hands and stood away, surveying. He smiled.

Tall, thin Paul, with his brown hair and light skin, looking more Anglo than the others. Still, Rita smiled as they talked. Paul could hold his own.

She walked down the hall to the den where her father would be sitting in front of the television. They had never been well-off, and the TV was a twenty-five-year-old model that made a rainbow ghost whenever it received 3-D transmissions.

“Papa?” Patricia said quietly, sneaking up behind him in the half-dark.

“Patty!” Ramon Vasquez looked around the rear cushion of his chair, a big grin lifting his pepper-gray mustache. He had been partly paralyzed by a stroke three years before and even with surgery hadn’t fully recovered. Patricia sat on the divan “I’ve brought Paul home with me,” she said. ”I’m sorry Julia can’t be here this time.”

“Me, too. But that’s air force.” Ramon had been in the air force for twenty years before retiring in 1996. Except for Patricia, the family was enmeshed in the air force. Julia had met Robert at a party on March Air Force Base six years ago.

“I’ve got something to tell everybody, Papa.”

“Oh? What’s that?” Had his speech improved since they last talked face to face? It seemed so. She hoped so.

Rita called out from the kitchen. ”Daughter! Come help me and Paul put away this stuff.”

“What’re you watching?” Patricia asked, reluctant to leave.

“News.”

A commentator—and his scarcely less formidable ghost—was leading into a story about the Stone. Patricia lingered despite her mother’s second call.

“As more and more personnel are sent to the Stone, citizen and scientific groups are asking for an open forum. Today, in the fourth year of a joint NATO-Eurospace investigation, the cloak wrapped around the Stone is as impenetrable as ever.” So it was no news after all.

“—Russian participants are particularly unhappy with the requirements for secrecy. Meanwhile, protestors from the Planetary Society, the L-5 Society, the Friends for Interstellar Relations and other groups have gathered around the White House and around the so-called Blue Cube in Sunnyvale, California, protesting military involvement and alleging a cover-up of major discoveries within the Stone.” An earnest, clean-cut and conservatively dressed young man appeared on the screen. He stood in front of the White House and spoke with exaggerated gestures. ”We know it’s an alien artifact, and we know there are seven chambers inside—huge chambers. We didn’t put them there. There are cities in every chamber—deserted cities—all but the seventh. And there’s something incredible there, something unimaginable.”

“What do you think it is?” the interviewer asked.

The protestor flung his hands up. ”We think they should tell everybody. Whatever’s there, we as taxpayers have the right to know!”

The commentator added that NASA and Joint Space Command spokespersons had no comment.

Patricia sighed and placed her hands on Ramon’s shoulders, automatically rubbing his muscles.

Paul watched her closely at dinner, waiting for her to find the right opportunity, but she didn’t. She felt uncomfortable with the friends and neighbors present. This was something only her immediate family should know, and she couldn’t tell even them as much as she wanted.

Rita and Ramon seemed to accept Paul. That was a plus.

Eventually, they would have to know about the living arrangements if they hadn’t figured it out already: that Patricia and Paul were more than just dating acquaintances, that they were living together in that haphazard way reserved for coed dormitories.

So many secrets and discretions. Perhaps they wouldn’t be as shocked as she expected—wanted?—them to be. It was a little disturbing to think that her parents might regard her as a grown-up, sexual being.

She was not nearly as open about it as most of her friends and acquaintances.

Eventually, she and Paul would be married, she was sure.

But they were both young, and Paul was not going to ask until he felt he could support them both. Or until she convinced him that she could—and even with her doctorate, that wasn’t likely for several more years.

Not counting, of course, the pay she would receive from Judith Hoffman’s group. That money would go into a separate security account until her return.

When the dishes were cleared and everyone had gathered around the tree, family and friends helping to decorate, she signaled her mother that they had to talk in the kitchen. ”And bring Papa.” Rita helped Ramon into the kitchen on his aluminum crutches and they sat around the battered wooden table that had been in the family for at least sixty years.

“I have something to tell you,” Patricia began.

“Oh, madre de Dios," Rita said, clasping her hands and smiling rapturously.

“No, Mama, it’s not about Paul and me,” she said. Her mother’s face stiffened, then relaxed.

“So what, then?”

“Last week, I received a phone call at school,” Patricia said. ”I can’t tell you all about it, but I’m going to be gone for a couple of months, even longer. Paul knows about it, but I can’t tell him any more than I’ve just told you.” Paul entered the kitchen through the swinging doors.

“Who was it called you?” Ramon asked.

“Judith Hoffman.”

“Who’s that?” Rita asked.

“The woman on television?” Ramon asked.

Patricia nodded. ”She’s an advisor to the President. They want me to work on something with them, and that’s as much as I can tell you.”

“Why should they want you?” Rita asked.

“I think they want her to build a time machine,” Paul said.

Whenever he had said that before, Patricia had become angry, but now she shrugged it off.

She couldn’t expect Paul to understand her work. Very few people did—certainly not her parents and friends. ”Paul has some other crazy theories, too,” she said. ”But my lips are sealed.”

“Like a clam,” Paul said. ”She’s been hard to live with the past few days.”

“If you wouldn’t keep trying to get me to talk!” She sighed dramatically—she was doing a lot of that lately—and looked at the cream-colored ceiling, then turned to her father. ”It’s going to be very interesting. Nobody will be able to reach me directly. You can send mail for me to this address.” She drew the phone pad across the table and wrote down an APO address.

“Is this important to you?” Rita asked.

“Of course it is,” Ramon answered.

But Patricia didn’t know. It sounded crazy, even now.

After the guests had left, she took Paul on a nighttime tour of the neighborhood. For a half hour, they walked in silence, passing from one streetlight glow to the next. ”I’m coming back, you know,” she said finally.

“I know.”

“I had to show you my home, because it’s very important to me. Rita, Ramon, the house.”

“Yes,” Paul said.

“I think I’d be lost without it. I spend so much time in my head, and what I do there is so different ... so bizarre to most people. If I didn’t have a center, a place to return to, I’d get lost.”

“I understand,” Paul said. ”It’s a very nice home. I like your folks.”

She stopped him and they faced each other, holding hands at arm’s length. ”I’m glad,” she said.

“I want to make a home with you, too,” he said. ”Another center, for both of us to come back to.”

Her expression was so intense she seemed about to leap on him.

“Cat’s eyes,” Paul said, grinning.

They circled back and kissed on the front porch before going in to join her parents for coffee and cinnamon cocoa.

“The last pit stop,” she said as they prepared to drive back to Caltech.

She walked down the hall to the bathroom, past the graduation pictures and the framed contents page of the issue of The Physical Review her first paper had appeared in.

She stopped in front of the cover and stared intently at it.

Suddenly, her heart seemed to miss a beat, leaving a peculiar hollow in her chest, a brief, almost pleasant sensation of falling, fading, then returning to normal.

She’d felt it before. It was nothing serious, just a cold wind down the middle of her chest, every time she truly accepted the idea of where she was going.

Four

1174, Journey Year 5

Nader, Axis City

The Presiding Minister of the Axis City, Ilyin Taur Ingle, stood in the broad observation blister, staring out across the Way through the city’s blue glow at lanes bright with the continuous flow of traffic between the gates.

Behind him stood two assigned ghosts and a coporeal representative of the Hexamon Nexus.

“Do you know Olmy well, Ser Franco?” the Presiding Minister picted, using graphicspeak.

“No, Set Ingle, I do not,” the corporeal representative replied, “though by reputation he is famous in the Nexus.”

“Three incarnations, one more than law allows because of his extraordinary service. Olmy is one of our oldest citizens still corporeal,” the minister said. ”An enigmatic personality. He would have long since forfeited his majority rights and retired to City Memory if it wasn’t for his usefulness to the Nexus.” The P.M. instructed a sprayer to release his special variety of Talsit. The mist filled a cubic area surrounded by faintly glowing purple traction fields. Ingle entered the field and took a deep breath.

The ghosts hadn’t moved, their images fixed until called upon, visible only to indicate their City Memory personalities were tuned in to the chamber, listening and watching.

“He is of Naderite background himself, I believe,” the corporeal assistant said.

“Yes, he is,” the minister said, nodding. ”But he serves the Hexamon regardless of who is in power, and I have no doubt where his loyalties lie. A most unusual man. Tough, in the old sense of the word—a man who has lived through great changes, great pain. ’I’ve had him recalled from one point three ex nine. He’s been supervising our preparations for the Jart offensive. But he can be of more use to us here. He is the one to send now. Axis Nader can’t disagree with him or accuse us of partisan assignment; his reports to them are always detailed and accurate. Inform the President that we are accepting the task and sending Olmy.”

“Yes, Ser Ingle.”

“I believe the ghosts have their questions answered, now?”

“We listen,” said one ghost. The other did not move.

“Fine. Now I will meet with Ser Olmy.”

The ghosts faded and Corprep Franco left, fingering his neck torque to pict a flag of official business over his left shoulder.

The P.M. turned off the traction fields and the chamber became smoky with more Talsit. The smell was disconcerting, sharp like old wine, as Olmy entered.

He approached the minister quietly, not wishing to interrupt his reverie.

“Forward, Ser Olmy,” the minister said. He turned as Olmy walked up the steps to the blister platform. ”You’re looking fit today.”

“And you, ser.”

“Men. My wife made me a wonderful forgetting last turn. Removed much unpleasantness from my twentieth year. That was not a good year, and the loss was a relief.”

“Excellent, ser.”

“When will you marry, Olmy?”

“When I find the woman who can purge my twenty-first year, first incarnation.”

The minister laughed heartily. ”I hear you keep a fine advocate company in Axis Nader. What’s her name?”

“Suli Ram Kikura.”

“Yes, of course ... She’s been active smoothing things between the Nexus and the Korzenowski hot heads, has she not?”

“Yes. We seldom discuss it.”

The minister sucked in his breath, looked concerned and stared down at the platform. ”Well, just so, then. I have a difficult mission for you.”

“My joy to serve the Hexamon.”

“Perhaps not this time. No mere investigation of illegal gate commerce. Every few years, we send someone back to the Thistledown to check stability. But we are doubly motivated this time. The Thistledown has been reoccupied.”

“Someone crossing the Forbidden Territories?”

“No. More puzzling. Nothing has disturbed our sentries at the first barrier. Apparently the occupants have entered the Thistledown from outside; perhaps more startling, they are human. Not in great force, but they’re organized. There’s no use speculating where they come from; the information is too equivocated. You’ll have authority, of course, and the necessary transportation. Ser Algoli will inform you about the other requirements. Understand?”

Olmy nodded. ”Ser.”

“Good.” The minister leaned over the railing and peered at the surface twenty kilometers below. A maelstrom of lights swirled around several of the lanes. ”There appears to be a jam-up at that gate. Ah, it’s the season for worries. The month of the Good Man.” He turned to Olmy. ”Good luck. Or, as the Eld put it: Star, Fate and Pneuma be kind.”

“Thank you, ser.”

He stepped back from the platform and left the chamber, taking the lift up the long, slender pylon to the Central City, where he arranged his affairs for a protracted absence.

The assignment was a privilege. Return to the Thistledown was forbidden for any purpose not essential to the Nexus.

Olmy hadn’t been there for well over four hundred years.

On the other hand, of course, it could be a very dangerous mission—especially with information so equivocated. He could help ensure his mission’s success by bringing along a Frant.

If there were humans in the Thistledown, and they weren’t city renegades—the most likely explanation—then where did they come from?

Far too narrow and equivocated for his ease.