Order and cold, heat and politics. The imposition of wrong order: anger, death, suicide and destruction. I lost loved ones, lost my illusions and went through mental and physical hell, but what still haunts my dreams, thirty years after, are the great silvery refrigerators four storeys tall hang motionless in the dark void of the Ice Pit; the force disorder pumps with their constant sucking soundlessness; the dissolving ghost of my sister, Rho; and William Pierce's expression when he faced his lifetime goal, in the Quiet ...

I believe that Rho and William are dead, but I will never be sure. I am even less sure about the four hundred and ten heads.

Fifty metres beneath the cinereous regolith of Ocean Procellarum, in the geographic centre of the extensive and largely empty Sandoval territories, the Ice Pit was a volcanic burp in the Moon's ancient past, a natural bubble almost ninety metres wide that had once been filled with the aqueous seep of a nearby ice fall.

The Ice Pit had been a lucrative water mine, one of the biggest pure water deposits on the Moon, but it had long since tapped out.

Loath to put family members out of work, my family, the binding multiple of Sandoval, had kept it as a money-losing farm station. It supported three dozen occupants in a space that had once housed three hundred. It was sorely neglected, poorly managed, and worst of all for a lunar establishment, its alleys and warrens were dirty. The void itself was empty and unused, its water-conserving atmosphere of nitrogen long since leaked away and its bottom littered with rubble from quakes.

In this unlikely place, my brother-in-law William Pierce had proposed seeking absolute zero, the universal ultimate in order, peace and quiet. In asking for the use of the Ice Pit, William had claimed, he would be turning a sow's ear into a scientific silk purse. In return, Sandoval BM would boast a major scientific project, elevating its status within the Triple, and therefore its financial standing. The Ice Pit Station would have a real purpose beyond providing living space for several dozen idle ice miners masquerading as farmers. And William would have something uniquely his own, something truly challenging.

Rho, my sister, supported her husband by using all her considerable energy and charm - and her standing with my grandfather, in whose eyes she could do no wrong.

Despite Grandfather's approval, the idea was subjected to rigorous examination by the Sandoval syndics - the financiers and entrepreneurs, as well as the scientists and engineers, many of whom had worked with William and knew his extraordinary gifts. Rho skilfully navigated his proposal through the maze of scrutiny and criticism.

By a five-four decision of the syndics, with much protest from the financiers and grudging acceptance from the scientists, William's project was approved.

Thomas Sandoval-Rice, the BM's director and chief syndic, gave his own approval reluctantly, but give it he did. He must have seen some use for a high-risk, high-profile research project; times were hard, and prestige could be crucial even for a top-five family.

Thomas decided to use the project as a training ground for promising young family members. Rho spoke up on my behalf, without my knowledge, and I found myself assigned to a position far above what my age and experience deserved: the new station's chief financial manager and requisitions officer.

I was compelled by family loyalties - and the pleas of my sister - to cut loose from formal schooling at the Tranquil and move to the Ice Pit Station. At first I was less than enthusiastic. I felt my calling to be liberal arts rather than finance and management; I had, in family eyes, frittered away my education studying history, philosophy and the terrestrial classics. But I had a fair aptitude for the technical sciences less aptitude for the theoretical - and had taken a minor in family finances. I felt I could handle the task, if only to show my elders what a liberal mentality could accomplish.

Ostensibly I was in charge of William and his project, answerable to the syndics and financial directors alone; but of course, William quickly established his own pecking order. I was twenty years old at the time; William, thirty-two.

Inside the void, foamed rock was sprayed to insulate and seal in a breathable atmosphere. I oversaw the general clean-up, refitting of already existing warrens and alleys, and investment in a relatively spartan laboratory.

Large refrigerators stored at the station since the end of ice mining were moved into the void, providing far more cooling capacity than William actually needed for his work.

Vibration is heat. The generators that powered the Ice Pit laboratory lay on the surface, their noise and reverberation isolated from the refrigerators and William's equipment and laboratory. What vibration remained was damped by suspension in an intricate network of steel springs and field levitation absorbers.

The Ice Pit's heat radiators also lay near the surface, sunk six metres deep in the shadow of open trenches, never seeing the sun, faces turned towards the all-absorbing blackness of space.

Three years had passed since the conversion. Again and again, William had failed to meet his goal. His demands for equipment had become more extravagant, more expensive, and more often than not, rejected. He had become reclusive, subject to even wider mood swings.

I met William at the beginning of the alley that led to the Ice Pit, in the main lift hollow. We usually saw each other only in passing as he whistled through the cold rock alleys between home and the laboratory. He carried a box of drinker files and two coils of copper tubing and looked comparatively happy.

William was a swarthy stick of a man, two metres tall, black eyes deep-set, long narrow chin, lips thin, brows and hair dark as space, with a deep shadow on his jaw. He was seldom calm or quiet, except when working; he could be rude and abrasive. Set loose in a meeting, or conversing on the lunar corn net, he sometimes seemed contentious to the point of self-destruction, yet still the people closest to him loved and respected him. Some of the Sandoval engineers considered William a genius with tools and machines, and on those rare occasions when I was privileged to see his musician's hands prodding and persuading, seducing all instrumentality, designing as if by willing consensus of all the material parts, I could only agree; but I loved him much less than I respected him.

In her own idiosyncratic way, Rho was crazy about him; but then, she was just as driven as William. It was a miracle their vectors added.

We matched step. 'Rho's back from Earth. She's flying in from Port Yin,' I said.

'Got her message,' William said, bouncing to touch the rock roof three metres overhead. His glove brought down a few lazy drifts of foamed rock. 'Got to get the arbeiters to spray that.' He used a distracted tone that betrayed no real intent to follow through. 'I've finally straightened out the QL, Micko. The interpreter's making sense. My problems are solved.'

'You always say that before some new effect cuts you down.' We had come to the large, circular, white ceramic door that marked the entrance to the Ice Pit and stopped at the white line that William had crudely painted there, three years ago. The line could be crossed only on his invitation.

The hatch opened. Warm air poured into the corridor; the Ice Pit was always warmer than ambient, being filled with so much equipment. Still, the warm air smelled cold; a contradiction I had never been able to resolve.

'I've licked the final source of external radiation,' William said. 'Some terrestrial metal doped with twentieth-century fallout.' He zipped his hand away. 'Replaced it with lunar steel. And the QL is really tied in. I'm getting straight answers out of it - as straight as quantum logic can give. Leave me my illusions.'

'Sorry,' I said. He shrugged magnanimously. 'I'd like to see it in action.'

He stopped, screwed up his face in irritation, then slumped a bit. 'I'm sorry, Mickey. I've been a real wart. You fought for it, you got it for me, you deserve to see it. Come on.'

I followed William over the line and across the forty-metre-long, two-metre-wide wire and girder bridge into the Ice Pit.

William walked ahead of me, between the force disorder pumps. I stopped to look at the ovoid bronze toruses mounted on each side of the bridge. They reminded me of abstract sculptures, and they were among the most sensitive and difficult of William's tools, always active, even when not connected to William's samples.

Passing between the pumps, I felt a twitch in my interior, as if my body were a large ear listening to something it could barely discern: an elusive, sucking silence. William looked back at me and grinned sympathetically. 'Spooky feeling, hm?'

'I hate it,' I said.

'So do I, but it's sweet music, Micko. Sweet music indeed.' Beyond the pumps and connected to the bridge by a short, narrow walkway, hung the Cavity, enclosed in a steel Faraday cage. Here, within a metre-wide sphere of perfect orbit-fused quartz, the quartz covered with a mirror coating of niobium, were eight thumb-sized ceramic cells, each containing approximately a thousand atoms of copper. Each cell was surrounded by its own superconducting electromagnet. These were the mesoscopic samples, large enough to experience the macroscopic qualities of temperature, small enough to lie within the microscopic realm of quantum forces. They were never allowed to reach a temperature greater than one-millionth Kelvin.

The laboratory lay at the end of the bridge, a hundred square metres of enclosed work space made of thin shaped steel framing covered by black plastic wall. Suspended by vibration-damping cords and springs and field levitation from the high dome of the Ice Pit, three of the four cylindrical refrigerators surrounded the laboratory like the pillars of a tropical temple, overgrown by a jungle of pipes and cables. Waste heat was conveyed through the rubble net at the top of the void and through the foamed rock roof beyond by fle3dble tubes; the buried radiators on the surface then shed that heat into space.

The fourth and final and largest refrigerator lay directly above the Cavity, sealed to the upper surface of the quartz sphere. From a distance the refrigerator and the Cavity might have resembled a squat, old-fashioned mercury thermometer, with the Cavity serving as bulb.

The T-shaped laboratory had four rooms, two in the neck of the T, one extending on each side to make the wings. William led me through the laboratory door - actually a fle3dble curtain - into the first room, which was filled with a small metal table and chair, a disassembled nano-works arbeiter, and cabinets of cubes and disks. In the second room, the QL thinker occupied a central platform about half a metre on a side. On the wall to the left of the table were a manual control board - seldom used now - and two windows overlooking the Cavity. The second room was quiet, cool, a bit like a cloister cell.

Almost from the beginning of the project, William had maintained to the syndics - through Rho and myself; we never let him appear in person - that his equipment could not be perfectly tuned by even the most skilled human operators, or by the most complicated of computer controllers. All of his failures, he said in his blackest moods, were due to this problem: the inability of macroscopic controllers to be in sync with the quantum qualities of the samples.

What he - what the project - needed was a quantum logic thinker. Yet these were being manufactured only on Earth, and they were not being exported. Because so few were manufactured, the black market of the Triple had none to offer, and the costs of purchasing, avoiding Earth authorities and shipping to the Moon were vast. Rho and I could not convince the syndics to make such a purchase. William had seemed to blame me personally.

Our break came with news of an older-model QL thinker being offered for sale by an Asian industrial consortium. William had determined that this so-called obsolete thinker would suit our needs - it was suspiciously cheap, however, and almost certainly out of date. That didn't bother William.

The syndics had approved this request, to everybody's surprise, I think. It might have been Thomas's final gift and test for William - any more expensive requisitions without at least the prospect of a success and the Ice Pit would be closed.

Rho had gone to Earth to strike a deal with the Asian consortium. The thinker had been packaged, shipped, and had arrived six weeks before. I had not heard from her between the time of the purchase and her message from Port Yin that she had returned to the Moon. She had spent four weeks extra on Earth, and I was more than a little curious to find out what she had been doing there.

William leaned over the platform and patted the QL proudly. 'It's running almost everything now,' he said. 'If we succeed, the QL will take a large share of the credit.' The QL itself covered perhaps a third of the platform's surface. Beneath the platform lay the QL's separate power supplies; by Triple common law, all thinkers were equipped with supplies capable of lasting a full year without outside replenishment.

'Who'll get the Nobel, you or the QL?' I asked. I bent to the QL's level to peer at its white cylindrical container. William shook his head.

'Nobody off Earth has ever gotten a Nobel, anyway,' he said. 'Surely I get some credit for telling the QL about the problem.' I felt the most affection for my brother-in-law when he reacted positively to my acidulous humour.

'What about this?' I asked, touching the interpreter lightly with a finger. Connected to the QL by fist-thick optical cables, covering another half of the platform, the interpreter was a thinker in itself. It addressed the QL's abstruse contemplations and rendered them, as closely as possible, in language humans could understand.

'A marvel all by itself.'

'Tell me about it,' I said.

'You didn't study the files,' William chided.

'I was too busy fighting with the syndics to study,' I said. 'Besides, you know theory's never been my greatest strength.'

William knelt behind the opposite side of the table, his expression contemplative, reverent. 'Did you read about Huang-Yi Hsu?'

'Tell me,' I said patiently.

He sighed. 'You paid for it out of ignorance, Mickey. I could have misled you grievously.'

'I trust you, William.'

He accepted that with generous dubiety. 'Huang-Yi Hsu invented post-Boolean three-state logic before 2010. Nobody paid much attention to it until 2030. He was dead by then; had committed suicide rather than submit to Beijing's Rule of Seven. Brilliant man, but I think a true anomaly in human thought. Then a few physicists in the University of Washington's Cramer Lab Group discovered they could put Hsu's work to use solving problems in quantum logic. Post-Boolean and quantum logic were made for each other. By 2060, the first QL thinker had been built, but nobody thought it was successful.

'Fortunately, it was against the law by then to turn off activated thinkers without a court order, but nobody could talk to this one. Its grasp of human languages was inadequate; it couldn't follow their logic. It was a mind in limbo, Mickey; brilliant but totally alien. So it sat in a room at Stanford University's Thinker Development Center for five years before Roger Atkins - you know about Roger Atkins?' 'William,' I warned.

'Before Atkins found the common ground for any functional real logic, the Holy Grail of language and thought ... his CAL interpreter. Comprehensible All Logics. Which lets us talk to the QL. He died a year later.' William sighed. 'Swan song. So this,' he patted the interpreter, a flat grey box about fifteen centimetres square and nine high, 'lets us talk to this.' He patted the QL.

'Why hasn't anybody used a QL as a controller before?' I asked.

'Because even with the interpreter, the QL - this QL at any rate - is a monster to work with,' he said. He tapped the display button and a prismatic series of bars and interlacing graphs appeared over the thinker. 'That's why it was so cheap. It has no priorities, no real sense of needs or goals. it thinks, but it may not solve. Quantum logic can outline the centre of a problem before it understands the principles and questions, and then, from our point of view, everything ends in confusion. More often than not, it comes up with a solution to a problem not yet stated. It does virtually everything but linear, time's arrow ratiocination. Half of its efforts are meaningless to goal-oriented beings like ourselves, but I can't prune those efforts, because somewhere in them lies the solution to my problems, even if I haven't stated the problem or am not aware that I have a problem. A post Boolean intelligence. It functions in time and space, yet ignores their restrictions. it's completely in tune with the logic of the Planck-Wheeler continuum, and that's where the solution to my problem lies.'

'So when's your test?

'Three weeks. Or sooner, if there aren't any more interruptions.'

'Am I invited?'

'All doubters, front row seats,' he said. 'Call me when Rho gets in. Tell her I've got it.'

My office lay along a north warren, in an insulated cylindrical chamber that had once been a liquid water tank. It was much larger than I needed, cavernous in fact, and my bed, desk, slate files and other furnishings occupied one small section of about five metres square near the door. I entered, set myself down in a wide air-cushion seat, called up the Triple Exchange - monetary rates within the Greater Planets economic sphere of Earth, Moon and Mars - and began my daily check on the Sandoval Trust. I could usually gauge the Ice Pit's annual operating expenses by such auguries.

Rho's shuttle landed at Pad Four an hour later. I was engrossed in trust investment performances; she buzzed my line second. William was not answering his.

'Micko, congratulate me! I've got something wonderful,' she said.

'A new terrestrial virus we can't set for,' I said.

'Mickey. This is serious.'

'William says to tell you he's very very close.'

'All right. That's good. Now listen.'

'Where are you?'

'In the personnel lift. Listen.'

'Yes.'

'How much extra cooling capacity does William have?'

'You don't know?'

'Mickey ...'

'About eight billion calories. Cold is no problem here. You know that.'

'I have a load of twenty cubic metres coming in. Average density like fatty water, I assume. What would that be, point nine? It's packed in liquid nitrogen at sb4 K. Keeping it colder would be much better, especially if we decide on long-term storage ...'

'What is it? Smuggled nano machines to liberate lunar industry?'

'You wish. Nothing quite so dangerous. Forty stainless steel Dewar containers, quite old, vacuum insulated.' 'Anything William would be interested in?' 'I doubt it. Can he spare the extra capacity now?' 'He's never used it before, even when he was close, very close. But he's in no mood for-'

'Meet me at home, then we'll go to the Ice Pit and tell him.'

'You mean ask.'

'I mean tell,' Rho said.

The Pierce-Sandoval home was two alleys south of my office, not far from the farms, off a nice double-width heated mining bore with smooth white walls of foamed rock. I palmed their home doorplate a half-hour later, allowing her time to freshen from the Copernicus trip, never a luxury run.

Rho came out of the bathnook in lunar cotton terry and turban, zaftig by lunar standards, shook out her long red hair, and waved a brochure at me as I entered.

'Have you ever heard of the StarTime Preservation Society?' she asked, handing me the ancient glossy folio.

'Paper,' I said, hefting the folio carefully. 'Heavy paper.' 'They had boxes full of these on Earth,' she said. 'Stacked up in a dusty office comer. Leftovers from their platinum time. Have you heard of it?'

'No,' I said, looking through the brochure. Men and women in cold suits; glass tanks filled with mysterious raist; bare rooms blue with cold. A painting of the future as seen from the early twenty-first century; the Moon, oddly enough, glass domes and open-air architecture. 'Resurrection in a time of accomplishment, human maturity and wonder...'

'Corpsicles,' Rho explained when I cast her a blank look.

'Oh,' I said.

'Society capacity of three hundred and seventy; they took in fifty extra before close of term in 2064.'

'Four hundred and twenty bodies?' I asked.

'Heads only. Voluntarily harvested individuals. Each paid half a million terrestrial US dollars. Four hundred and ten survivals, well within the guarantees.'

'You mean, they were revived?'

'No,' she said disdainfully. 'Nobody's ever brought back a corpsicle. You know that. Four hundred and ten theoretically revivable. We can't bring them back, but Cailetet BM has complete facilities for brain scan and storage ..

'So I've heard - for live individuals.'

She waved that off. 'And doesn't Onnes BM have new solvers for the groups of human mental languages? You study their requests from the central banks, their portfolios. Don't they?'

'I've heard something to that effect.'

'If they do, and if we can work a deal between the three BMs, just give me a couple of weeks, and I can read those heads. I can tell you what their memories are, what they were thinking. Without hurting a single frozen neuron. We can do it before anyone on Earth - or anywhere else.'

I looked at her with less than brotherly respect. 'Dust,' I said.

'Flip your own dust, Micko. I'm serious. The heads are coming. I've signed Sandoval to store them.'

'You signed a BM contract?'

'I'm allowed.'

'Who says? Christ, Rho, you haven't talked with anybody ---'

'It will be the biggest anthropological coup in lunar history. Four hundred and ten terrestrial heads ...

'Dead meat!' I said.

'Expertly stored in deep cold. Minor decay at most. 'Nobody wants corpiscles, Rho-,

'I had to bid against four other anthropologists, three from Mars and one from the minor planets.'

'Bid?'

'I won,' she said.

'You don't have that authority,, I said.

'Yes I do. Under family preservation charter. Look it up- 'All family members and legal heirs and - etc., etc. - free hand to make reasonable expenditures to preserve Sandoval records and heritage; to preserve the reputations and fortunes of all established heirs.''

She had lost me. 'What?'

Her look of triumph was carnivorous.

'Robert and Emilia Sandoval,' she said. 'They died on Earth. Remember? They were members of StarTime.'

My jaw dropped. Robert and Emilia Sandoval, our great-grandparents, the first man and woman to make love on the Moon-; nine months later, they became the first parents on the Moon, giving birth to our grandmother, Deirdre. In their late middle age, they had returned to Earth, to Oregon in the old United States, leaving their child on the Moon.

'They joined the StarTime Preservation Society. Lots of famous people did,' she said.

'So ... ? I asked, waiting for my astonishment to peak.

'They're in this batch. Guaranteed by the society.'

'Oh, Rhosalind,' I said, as if she had just told me someone had died. I felt an incredulous hollow sense of doom. 'They're coming back?'

'Don't worry,' she said. 'Nobody knows but the society trustees and me, and now you.'

'Great-Grandpa and Grandma,' I said.

Rho smiled the kind of smile that had always made me want to hit her. 'Isn't it wonderful?'

William came from an unbound lunar family, the Pierces of Copernicus Research Centre Three. A lunar family even then was not just those born of a single mother and father, but tight associations of sponsored settlers working their way across the lunar surface in new-dug warrens, adding children and living space as they burrowed. Individuals usually kept their own surnames, or added surnames, but claimed allegiance to the central family, even when all the members of the central family had died, as sometimes happened.

As with our own family, the Sandovals, the Pierces were among the original fifteen families established on the Moon in 2019. The Pierces were an odd lot, unofficial histories tell us - aloof and unwilling to pull together with the newer settlers. The original families - called primes spread out across the Moon, forming and breaking alliances, eventually coming together, under pressure from Earth, into the financial associations later called binding multiples. The Pierces did not bind with any of the nascent multiples, though they formed loose alliances with other families.

The unbound families did not flourish. The Pierces lost influence, despite being primes. Their final disgrace was cooperation with terrestrial governments during the Split, when Earth severed ties with the Moon to punish us for our presumptuous independence. Thereafter, for decades, the Pierces and their kind were social outcasts.

By contrast, the allied superfamilies handily survived the crisis.

The Pierces, and most unbound families like them, driven by destitution and resentment, contracted their services in 2094 to the Franco-Polish technological station at Copernicus. They became part of the Copernicus binding multiple of nine families and finally joined the mainstream economy of the Post-Split Moon.

Still, the Pierces' descendants faced real prejudice in lunar society. They became known as a wild, churlish lot, and kept to themselves in and around the Copernicus station.

These difficulties had obviously affected William as a child, and made him something of an enigma.

When my sister met William at a Copernicus mixer barn dance, courted him (he was too shy and vulnerable to court her in turn) and finally asked him to join the Sandoval BM as her husband, he had to face the close scrutiny of dozens of dubious family members.

William lacked the almost instinctive urge to unity of a BM-bred child; in an age of rugged individuals tightly fitted into even more rugged and demanding multiples, he was a loner, quick-tempered yet inclined to sentimentality, loyal Yet critical, brilliant but prone to choosing tasks so difficult he seemed doomed to always fail.

Yet in those tense months, with Rho's constant coaching, he put on a brilliant performance, adopting a humble and Pleasant attitude. He was accepted into the Sandoval Binding Multiple.

Rho was something of a lunar princess. Biologically of the Sandoval line , great-grandchild of Robert and Emilia Sandoval, her future was the concern of far too many, and she developed a closeted attitude of defiance. That she should reach out for the hand of someone like Pierce was both expected, considering her character and upbringing, and shocking.

But old prejudices had softened considerably. Despite the doubts Of Rho's very protective 'aunts' and 'uncles', and the strains of initiation and marriage, and despite his occasional reversion to prickly form, William was quickly recognized as a valuable adjunct to our family. He was a brilliant designer and theoretician. For four years he contributed substantially to many of our scientific endeavours, yet adjunct he was, playing a subservient role that must have deeply galled him.

I was fifteen when Rho and William married, and nineteen when he formally broke through this more or less obsequious mask to ask for the Ice Pit. I had never quite understood their attraction for each other; lunar princess drawn to son of outcast family. But one thing was certain: whatever William did to strain Rho's affections, she could return with interest.

I walked to the Ice Pit with Rho after an hour of helping her prepare her case.

She was absolutely correct; as Sandovals, we had a duty to preserve the reputation and heirs of the Sandoval BM, and even by an advocate's logic, that would include the founders of our core family.

That we were also taking in four hundred and eight outsiders was quite another matter... But as Rho pointed out, the society could hardly sell individuals. Surely nobody would think it a bad idea, bringing such a wealth of potential information to the Moon. Tired old Earth didn't want it; just more corpsicles on a world plagued by them. Anonymous heads, harvested in the early twenty-first century, declared dead, stateless, very nearly outside the law, without rights except under the protection of their money and their declining foundation.

The StarTime Preservation Society was actually not selling anything or anyone. They were transferring members, chattels and responsibilities to Sandoval BM pending dissolution of the original society; in short, they were finally, after one hundred and ten years, going cold blue belly up. Bankruptcy was the old term; pernicious exhaustion of means and resources was the new. Well and good; they had guaranteed to their charter members only sixty-one years (inclusive) of tender loving care. After that, they might just as well be out in the warm.

'The societies set up in 2020 and 2030 are declaring exhaustion at the rate of two and three a year now,' Rhosalind said. 'Only one has actually buried dead meat. Most have been bought out by information entrepreneurs and universities.'

'Somebody hopes to make a profit?' I asked.

'Don't be noisy, Micko,' she said, by which she meant incapable of converting information to useful knowledge. 'These aren't just dead people; they're huge libraries. Their memories are theoretically intact; at least, as intact as death and disease allow them to be. There's maybe a five per cent degradation; we can use natural languages algorithms to check and reduce that to maybe three per cent.' 'Very noisy,' I said.

'Nonsense. That's usable recall. Your memories of your seventh birthday have degraded by fifty per cent.'

I tried to remember my seventh birthday; nothing came to mind. 'Why? What happened on my seventh birthday?' 'Not important, Mickey,' Rho said.

'So who wants that sort of information? It's out of date, it's noisy, it's going to be hard to prove provenance ... much less check it out for accuracy.'

She stopped, brow cloudy, clearly upset. 'You're resisting me on this, aren't you?'

'Rho, I'm in charge of project finances. I have to ask dumb questions. What value are these heads to us, even if we can extract information? And' - I held up my hand, about to make a major point - 'what if extraction of information is intrusive? We can't dissect these heads - you've assumed the contracts.'

'I called Cailetet from Tampa, Florida, last week. They say the chance of recovery of neural patterns and states from frozen heads is about eighty per cent, using non-intrusive methods. No nano injections. Lamb shift tweaking. They can Pinpoint every molecule in every head from outside the containers.'

However outlandish Rho's schemes, she always did a certain amount of planning. I leaned my head to one side and lifted my hands, giving up - 'All right,' I said. 'It's fascinating. The possibilities are-'

'Luminous,' Rho finished for me.

'But who will buy historical information?'

'These are some of the finest minds of the twentieth century,' Rho said. 'We could sell shares in future accomplishments.'

'If they're revivable.' We were coming up to the white line and the big porcelain hatch to the Ice Pit. 'They're currently not very active and not very creative,' I commented.

'Do you doubt we'll be able to revive them someday? Maybe in ten or twenty years?'

I shook my head dubiously. 'They talked revival a century ago. High-quality surgical nano wasn't enough to do the trick. You can make a complex machine shine like a gem, fix it up so that everything fits, but if you don't know where to kick it... Long time passing, no eyelids cracking to light of a new day.'

Rho palmed the hatch guard. William took his own sweet time answering. 'I'm an optimist,' she said. 'I always have been.'

'Rho, you've come when I'm busy,' William said over the COM.

'Oh, for Christ's sake, William. I'm your wife and I've been gone for three months.' She wasn't irritated; her tone was playfully piqued. The hatch opened, and again I caught the smell of cold in the outrush of warm.

'The heads are ancient,' I said, stepping over the threshold behind her. 'They'll need retraining, re-everything. They're probably elderly, infle3dble... But those are hardly major handicaps when you consider that, right now, they're dead.' She shrugged this off and walked briskly across the steel bridge. She'd once told me that William, in his more tense and frustrated moments, enjoyed making love on the bridge. I wondered about harmonics. 'Where's the staff' she asked.

'William told me to let them go. He said we didn't need them with the QL in control.' We had been working for the past three years with a team of young technicians chosen from several other families around Procellarum. William had informed me two days after the QL's installation that these ten colleagues were no longer needed. He was coldly blunt about it, and he made no dust about the fact that I was the one who would have to arrange for their severance.

His logic was strong; the QL would not need additional human support, and we could use the BM exchange for other purchases. Despite my instincts that this was bad manners between families, I could not stand alone against William; I had served the notices and tried to take or divert the brunt of the anger.

Rho cringed as she sidled between the double toruses of the disorder pumps, whether in reaction to her husband's efficiency or the pumps' effect on her body. She glanced over her shoulder sympathetically. 'Poor Micko.'

William opened the door, threw out his arms in a peremptory fashion, and enfolded Rho.

I love my sister. I do not know whether it was some perverse jealousy or a sincere desire for her well-being that motivated my feeling of unease whenever I saw William embrace her.

'I've got something for us,' Rho said, looking up at him with high-energy, complete-equality adoration.

'Oh,' William said, eyes already wary. 'What?'

I lay in bed, unable to get the noiseless suck of the pumps out of my thoughts, purged from my body. After a restless time I began to slide into my usual lunar doze; made a halfawake comparison between seeing William embrace Rho and feeling the pumps embrace me; thought of William's reaction to Rho's news; smiled a little; slept.

William had not been pleased. An unnecessary intrusion; Yes there was excess cooling capacity; yes his arbeiters had the time to construct a secure facility for the heads in the Ice Pit; but he did not need the extra stress now, nor any distractions, because he was this close to his goal.

Rho had worked on him with that mix of guileless persuasion and unwavering determination that characterized my sister. I have always equated Rho with the nature-force shakers of history; folks who in their irrational stubbornness shift the course of human rivers, whether for good or ill perhaps not even future generations could decide.

William had given in, of course. It was after all a small distraction, so he formally admitted; the raw materials would come out of the Sandoval BM contingency fund; he might even be able to squeeze in some mutually advantageous equipment denied him for purely fiscal reasons. 'I'll do it mostly for the sake of your honoured ancestors, of course,' William had said.

The heads came by shuttle from Port Yin five days later. Rho and I supervised the deposit at Pad Four, closest to the Ice Pit lift entrance. Packed in cubic steel boxes with their own refrigerators, the heads were slightly bulkier than Rho had estimated. Six cartloads and seven hours after landing, we had them in the equipment lift.

'I've had Nernst BM design an enclosure for William's arbeiters to build,' Rho said. 'These'll keep for another week as is.' She patted the closest box, peering through her helmet with a wide grin.

'You could have chosen someone cheaper,' I groused.

Nernst had gained unwarranted status in the past few years; I would have chosen the more reasonable, equally capable Twinning BM.

'Nothing but the best for our progenitors,' Rho said. 'Christ, Mickey. Think about it.' She turned to the boxes mounted in a ring of two crowded stacks in the round lift, small refrigerators sticking from the inward-pointing sides of the boxes. We descended in the shaft. I could not see her face, but I heard the emotion in her voice. 'Think of what it would mean to access them...'

I walked around and between the boxes. High-quality, old-fashioned bright steel, beautifully shaped and welded. 'A lot of garrulous old-timers,' I said.

'Mickey.' Her chiding was mild. She knew I was thinking.

'Are they labelled?' I asked.

'That's one problem,' Rho said. 'We have a list of names, and all the containers are numbered; but StarTime says it can't guarantee a one-to-one match. Records Were apparently jumbled after the closing date.'

'How could that happen?' I was shocked by the lack of professionalism more than by the obvious ramifications.

'I don't know.'

'What if StarTime goofed in other ways, and they really are just cold meat?' I asked.

Rho shrugged with a casualness that made me cringe, as if, after all her efforts and the expenditure of hard-earned Sandoval capital, such a thing might not be disastrous. 'Then we're out of some money,' she said. 'But I don't think they made that big a goof.'

We slowly pressurized at the bottom of the shaft, Rho watching the containers for any sign of buckling. There was none; they had been expertly packed. 'Nernst BM says it will take two days for William's machines to make this enclosure. Can you supervise? William refuses ...'

I pulled off my helmet, kicked some surface dust from my boots against a vacuum nozzle, and grinned miserably. 'Sure. I have nothing better to do.'

Rho put her gloved hands on my shoulders. 'Mickey. Brother.'

I looked at the boxes, intrigue growing alarmingly. What if they were alive inside there, and could - in their own deceased way - tell us of their lives? That would be extraordinary; historic. Sandoval BM could gain an enormous amount of publicity, and that would reflect on our net worth in the Triple. 'I'll supervise,' I said. 'But you get Nernst BM to send a human over here and not just an engineering arbeiter. It should be in their design contract; I want someone to personally inspect upon completion.'

'No fear,' Rho said. Gloves removed but skinsuit still on, she gave me a quick hug. 'Let's roll!' She guided the first cartload of stacked boxes through the gate into the Ice Pit storage warren, where they'd be kept for the time being.

The first sign of trouble came quickly. Janis Granger, assistant to Fiona Task-Felder, visited barely six hours after the unloading of the heads.

I had neglected to inform Rho about what had happened in lunar politics since her departure to Earth: Fiona Task-Felder's election to president of the Multiple Council, something I would have said was impossible only a year before.

Janis Granger made a meeting request through the Sandoval BM secretary in Port Yin. I okayed the request, though I didn't have the slightest idea what she wanted to talk about. I could hardly refuse to speak with a representative of the council president.

Her private bus landed at Pad Three six hours after I gave permission.

I received her in my spare but spacious formal office in the farm management warrens.

Granger was twenty-seven, black-haired with Eurasian features and Amerindian skin - all tailored. She wore trim flag-blue denims and a white ruffle-necked blouse, the ruffles projecting a changing pattern of delicate white-on white geometries. Janis, like her boss and 'sister' Fiona, was a member of Task-Felder BM.

Task-Felder had been founded on Earth as a lunar BM, an unorthodox procedure that had raised eyebrows fifty years before. Membership was allegedly limited to Logologists nobody knew of any exceptions, at any rate - which made it the only lunar BM founded on religious principles. For these reasons, Task-Felder BM had been outside the loop and comparatively powerless in lunar politics, if such could be called politics: a weave of mutual advantage, politeness, small-community cooperation in the face of clear financial pressures.

The Task-Felder Logologists tended their businesses carefully, Played their parts with scrupulous attention to detail and quality, and had carefully distributed favours and loans to other BMs and the council, working their way with incredible speed up the ladder of lunar acceptance, at the same time believing six impossible things before breakfast.

'I have the BM Project Status report from the council Janis Granger said, seating herself gracefully in a chair across from mine. I did not sit behind a desk; that was reserved for contract talks or financial dealings. 'I wanted to discuss it with you, since you manage the major scientific project undertaken by Sandoval BM at this time.'

I had heard something about this council report; in its early drafts, it had seemed innocuous, another BM mutual-activity consent agreement.

'We've gotten a consensus of the founding BMs to agree to consult with each other on projects which may affect lunar standing in the Triple,' Granger said.

Ny hadn't she gone to the family syndics in Port Yin? Ny come all this way to talk with me? 'All right,' I said. 'I assume Sandoval's representative has looked over the agreement.'

'She has. She told me there might be a conflict with a current project, not your primary project. She advised me to send a representative of the president to talk with you; I decided this was important enough I would come myself.'

Granger had an intensity that reminded me of Rho. She did not take her eyes off mine. She did not smile. She leaned forward, elbows still on the chair rests, and said, 'Rhosalind Sandoval has signed a contract to receive terrestrial corpsicles.'

'She has. She's my direct sister, by the way.' Granger blinked. With any family-oriented BM member, such a continent would have elicited a polite 'Oh, and how is your branch?' She neglected the pleasantry.

'Are you planning resuscitation?' she finally asked.

'No,' I said. Not as yet. 'We're speculating on future value.'

'If they're not resuscitated, they have no future value.'

I disagreed with a mild shake of my head. 'That's our worry, nobody else's.'

'The council has expressed concern that your precedent could lead to a flood of corpsicle dumping. The Moon can't possibly receive a hundred thousand dead. It would be a major financial drain.'

'I don't see how a precedent is established,' I said, wondering where she was going to take this.

'Sandoval BM is a major family group. You influence new and offshoot families. We've already had word that two other families are considering similar deals, in case you're on to something. And all of them have contacted Cailetet BM. I believe Rhosalind Sandoval-Pierce has tried to get a formal exclusion contract with Cailetet. Have you approved all this?' I hadn't; Rho hadn't told me she'd be moving so quickly, but it didn't surprise me. It was a logical step in her scheme. 'I haven't discussed it with her. She has Sandoval priority approval on this project.'

This seemed to take Granger by surprise. 'BM charter priority?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

I saw no reason to divulge family secrets. If she didn't already know, my instincts told me, she didn't need to know. 'Business privilege, ma'am.'

Granger looked to one side and thought this over for an uncomfortably long time, then returned her eyes to me. 'Cailetet is asking council advice. I've issued a chair statement of disapproval. We think it might adversely effect our currency ratings in the Triple. There are strong moral and religious feelings on Earth now about corpsicles; revival has been outlawed in seven nations. We feel you've been taken advantage of.,

'We don't think so,' I said.

'Nevertheless, the council is considering issuing a restraining order against any storage or use of the corpsicles.'

'Excuse me,' I said. I reached across to the desk and brought out my manager's slate. 'Auto counsellor, please,' I requested aloud. I keyed in instructions I didn't want Granger to hear, asking for a legal opinion on this possibility. The auto counsellor quickly reported: 'Not legal at this time' and gave citations.

'You can't restrain an autonomous chartered BM,' I said. I read out the citations, 'Mutual benefit agreement 35 stroke 2111, reference to charter family agreements, 2102.'

'If sufficient BMs can be convinced of the unwisdom of your actions, and if the financial result could be ruinous to any original charter BM, our council thinker has issued an opinion that you can be restrained.'

It was my turn to pause and think things over.

'Then it seems we might be heading for council debate,' I said.

'I'd regret causing so much fuss,' Granger said. 'Perhaps we can reach an agreement outside of council.'

'Our syndics can discuss it,' I allowed. My backbone was becoming stubbornly stiff. 'But I think it should be openly debated in council.'

She smiled. If, as was alleged by the Logologists, their philosophy removed all human limitations, judging by Janis Granger, I opposed such benefits. There was a control about her that suggested she had nothing to control, neither stray whim nor dangerous passion; automatonous. She chilled me.

'As you wish,' she said. 'This is really not a large matter, It's not worth a lot of trouble.'

Then why bother? 'I agree,' I said. 'I believe the BMs can resolve it among themselves.'

'The council represents the BMs,' Granger said.

I nodded polite agreement. I wanted nothing more than to have her out of my office, out of the Ice Pit Station.

'Thank you for your time,' she said, rising. I escorted her to the lift. She did not say good-bye; merely smiled her unrevealing mannequin smile.

Back in my office, I put through a request for an appointment with Thomas Sandoval-Rice at Port Yin. Then I called Rho and William.

Rho answered. 'Mickey! Cailetet has just accepted our contract.'

That took me back for a second. 'I'm sorry,' I said, confused. 'What?'

'What are you sorry about? It's good news. They think they can manage it. They say it's a challenge. They're willing to sign an exclusive.'

'I just had a conversation with Janis Granger.'

'Who's she?'

'Task-Felder. Aide to the president of the council,' I said. 'I think they're going to try to shut us down.'

'Shut down Sandoval BM?' Rho laughed. She thought I was joking.

'No. Shut down your heads project.'

'They can't do that,' she said, still amused.

'Probably not. At any rate, I have a call in to the director.' I was thinking over what Rho had told me. If Cailetet had accepted our contract, then they were either not worried about the council debate, or ...

Granger had lied to me.

'Mickey, what's this all about?'

'I don't know,' l said. 'I'll field it. The new council president is a Task-Felder. You should keep up on these things, Rho.' 'Who gives a rille? We haven't had any complaints from other BMs. We keep to our boundaries. Task-Felder. Dust them, they're not even a lunar-chartered BM. Aren't they Logologists?'

'They have the talk seat in council,' I said.

'Oh, for the love of,' Rho said. 'They're crazier than mud. When did they get the seat?'

'Two months ago.'

'How did they get it?'

'Careful attention to the social niceties,' I said, tapping my

Palm with a finger.

Rho considered. 'Did you record your meeting?'

'Of course.' I filed an automatic BM-priority request for Rho and transferred the record to her slate address.

'I'll get back to you, Mickey. Or better yet, come on down to the Ice Pit. William needs someone besides me to talk to, I think. He's having trouble with the QL again, and he's still a little irritated about our heads.'

My brother-in-law was in a contemplative mood. 'On Earth,' he said, 'in India and Egypt, centuries before they had refrigerators, they had ice, cold drinks, air conditioning, All because they had dry air and clear night skies.'

I sat across the metal table from him in the laboratory's first room. Outside, William's arbeiters were busily, noisily, constructing an enclosure for Rho's heads, using the Nernst BM design. William sat in a tattered metal sling chair, leaving me the guest's cushioned armchair.

'You mean, they used storage batteries or solar power or something,' I said, biting on his nascent anecdote.

He smiled pleasantly, relaxing into the story. 'Nothing so obvious,' he said. 'Pharaoh's servants could have used flat, broad, porous earthenware trays. Filled them with a few centimetres of water, hoping for a particularly dry evening with clear air.'

'Cold air?' I suggested.

'Not particularly important. Egypt was seldom cold. Just dry air and a clear night. Voilà. Ice.'

I looked incredulous.

'No kidding,' he said, leaning forward. 'Evaporation and radiation into empty space. Black sky at night; continuous evaporation cooling the tray and the liquid; temperature of the liquid drops; and given almost no humidity, the tray freezes solid. Harvest the ice in the morning, fill the tray again for the next night. Air conditioning, if you had enough surface area, enough trays, and some caves to store the ice.' 'It would have worked?'

'Hell, Micko, it did work. Before there was electricity, that's how they made ice. Anyplace dry, with clear night skies ...'

'Lose a lot of water through evaporation, wouldn't you?' William shook his head. 'You haven't a gram of romance in you, Micko. Not at all tempted by the thought of a frosty mug of beer for the Pharaoh.'

'Beer,' I said. 'Think of all the beer you could store in Rho's annex.' Beer was a precious commodity in a small lunar station.

He made a face. 'I saw the record of that Granger woman. is she going to give Rho trouble?'

I shook my head.

'Serves Rho right,' William said. 'Sometimes...' He stood and wiped his face with his hands, then squeezed thumb and pointing finger together, squinting at them. 'You were right. A new problem, Micko, a new effect. The QL says the disorder pumps have to be tuned again. It'll take a week. Then we'll hit the zeroth state of matter. Nothing like it since before we were all a twinkle in God's eye.'

We had been through this before. My teasing seemed a necessary anodyne to him when he was bumping against another delay. 'Violation of third law,' I said casually.

He waved that away.

'William, you're an infidel. The third law's a mere bagatelle, like the sound barrier-'

'What if it's more like the speed of light?' William shut one eye halfway and regarded me balefully. 'You've laid out the money this far. If I'm a fool, you're a worse fool.'

'From your point of view, I wouldn't find that reassuring,' I said, smiling. 'But what do I know. I'm a dry accountant. Set me out under a clear terrestrial night sky and my brain would freeze.'

William laughed. 'You're smarter than you need to be,' he said. 'Violating the third law of thermodynamics - no grief there. It's a sitting duck, Micko. Waiting to be shot.' 'It's been sitting for a long time. Lots of hunters have missed. You've missed for three years now.'

'We didn't have quantum logic thinkers and disorder Pumps,' William said, staring out into the darkness beyond the small window, face lit orange by flashes of light from the arbeiters at work in the pit below.

'The pumps make me twitch,' I confessed, not for the first time.

William ignored that and turned to me, suddenly solemn. 'If the council tries to stop Rho, you'd better fight them with all You've got. I'm not a Sandoval by birth, Mickey, but by

God, this BM better stand by her.'

'It won't get that far, William,' I said. 'It's all dust. A burble of politics.'

'Tell them to cut the damned politics,' William said softly. The rallying cry of all the Moon's families, all our tightly bound yet ruggedly individual citizens; how often had I heard that phrase? 'This is Rho's project. If I - if we let her have the Ice Pit for her heads, nobody should interfere. Damn it, that's what the Moon is all about. Do you believe all you hear about the Logologists?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'They certainly don't think like you and me.' I joined William at the window. 'Thank you,' I said.

'For what?'

'For letting Rho do what she wants.'

'She's crazier than I am,' William said with a sigh. 'She says you weren't too pleased at first, either.'

'It's pretty gruesome,' I admitted.

'But you're getting interested?'

'I suppose.'

'The Task-Felder woman made you even more interested?'

I nodded.

William tapped the window's thick glass idly. 'Mickey, Rho has always been protected by Sandoval, by living here on the Moon. The Moon has always encouraged her; free spirit, small population, place for young minds to shine. She's a little naive.'

'We're no different,' I said.

'Perhaps you aren't, but I've seen the rough.'

I leaned my head to one side, giving him that much. 'If by naive, you mean she doesn't know what it's like to be in a scrap, you're wrong.'

'She knows intellectually,' William said. 'And she's sharp enough that that may be all she needs. But she doesn't know what a dirty fight really is.'

'You think this is going to get dirty?' 'It doesn't make sense,' William said. 'Four hundred heads is gruesome, but it isn't dangerous, and it's been tolerated on Earth for a century ..

'Because nothing ever came of it,' I said. 'And apparently the toleration is wearing thin.'

William rubbed thumb and forefinger along his cheeks, narrowing his already narrow mouth. 'Why would anyone object?'

'For philosophical reasons, maybe,' I said.

William nodded. 'Or religious reasons. Have you read Logologist literature?'

I admitted that I hadn't.

'Neither have I, and I'm sure Rho hasn't. Time we did some research, don't you think?'

I shrugged dubiously, then shivered. 'I don't think I'm going to like what I find.'

William clucked. 'Prejudice, Micko. Pure prejudice. Remember my origins. Maybe the Task-Felders aren't all that forbidding.'

Being accused of prejudgment irritated me. I decided to change the subject and scratch an itch of curiosity. He had shown the QL to me earlier, but had seemed to deliberately avoid demonstrating the thinker. 'Can I talk to it?'

'What?' William-asked, then, following my eyes, looked behind him at the table. 'Why not. It's listening to us now.

QL, I'd like to introduce My friend and colleague, Mickey Sandoval.'

'Pleased to meet you,' the QL said, its voice gender-neutral, as most thinker voices were. I raised an eyebrow at William. Normal enough, house-trained, almost domestic. He understood my expression of mild disappointment.

'Can you describe Mickey to me?' he asked, feeling challenged now.

'In shape and form it is not unlike yourself,' the thinker said.

'What about his extensions?'

'They differ from yours. Its state is free and dynamic. Its fink with You is not Primary. Does he want controlling?' William smiled triumphantly. 'No, QL, he is not an instrumentality. He is like myself.'

'You are instrumentality.'

'True, but for convenience's sake only,' William said.

'It thinks you're part of the lab?' I asked.

'Much easier to work with it that way,' William assured Me.

'May I ask another question?'

'Be my guest,' William said.

'QL, who's the boss here' '

'If by boss you mean a node of leadership, there is no leader here. The leader will arise at some later date, when the instrumentalities are integrated.'

'When we succeed,' William explained, 'then there will be a boss, a node of leadership; and that will be the successful result itself.'

'You mean, QL thinks that if you achieve absolute zero, that will be the boss?'

William smiled. 'Something like that. Thank you, QL.' 'You're welcome,' the QL replied.

'Not so fast,' I said. 'I have another question.' William extended his hand, be my guest.

'What do you think will happen if the cells in the Cavity reach absolute zero?'

The interpreter was silent for a moment, and then spoke in a subtly different voice. 'This interpreter is experiencing difficulties translating the QL thinker's response,' it said. 'Do you wish a statement in post-Boolean mathematical symbols by way of direct retinal projection, or the same transferred to a slate address, or an English interpretation?' 'I've already asked this question, of course,' William told me. 'I have the mathematics already, several different versions, several different possibilities.'

'I'd like an English interpretation,' I said.

'Then please be warned that response changes from hour to hour in significant ways,' the interpreter said. 'This might indicate a chaotic wave-mode fluctuation of theory within the QL. In other words, it has not yet formulated are adequate prediction, and cannot. This thinker will present several English-language responses, but warns that they are inadequate for full understanding, which may not be possible for organic human minds at any rate. Do you wish possibly misleading answers?'

'Give us a try,' I said, feeling a sting of resentment. William sat at the manual-control console, willing to let this be my own contest.

'QL postulates that achievement of absolute zero within a significant sample of matter will result in a new state of matter. Since there is a coupling between motion of matter in spacetime and other forces within matter, particularly within atomic nuclei - the principle upon which the force disorder pumps operate - then this new state of matter may be stable, and may require substantial energy input to return to a thermodynamic state. There is a small possibility that this new state may be communicable by quantum forces, and may induce a similar state in closely associated atoms.'

I glanced at William. 'A very small possibility,' William said. 'And I've protected against it. The copper atoms are isolated in a Penning trap and can't come in contact with anything else.'

'Please go on,' I told the interpreter.

'Another possibility involves a hitherto undiscovered coupling between states of spacetime itself and thermodynamic motion of matter. If thermodynamism ceases within a sample, the nature of spacetime around the sample may change. Quantum ground states may be affected. Restraints on Probabilities of atomic positions may induce an alignment Of virtual Particle activities, with amplification of other quantum effects, including remote release of quantum information normally communicated between particles and inaccessible to non-communicants.'

'All right,' I said, defeated. 'William, I need an interpreter for your interpreter.'

'What the math says,' William said, eyes shining with what must have been joy or pride, it could not have been sadness, 'is that a kind of crystallization of spacetime will occur.'

'So?,

'Spacetime is naturally amorphous, if we can poetically use terms reserved for matter. Crystallized space would have some interesting properties. Information of quantum states and positions normally communicated only between particles - through the so-called exclusive channels - could be leaked. There could even be propagation of quantum information backwards in time.'

'That doesn't sound good,' I said.

'It would be purely local,' William said. 'Fascinating to study. You could think of it as making space a superconductor of information, rather than the highly limited medium it is now.

'But is it likely?'

'No,' William said. 'From what I can understand, no QL prediction is likely or unlikely at this point.'

The Ice Pit farms and support warrens occupied some thirty-five hectares and employed ninety family members. That was moderately large for an isolated research facility, but old habits die hard - on the Moon, each station large and small is designed to be autonomous, in case of emergency, natural or political. Stations are more often than not spread so far apart that the habit makes hard sense. Besides, each station must act as an independent social unit, like a village on Earth. The closest major station to us, Port Yin, was six hours away by shuttle.

I had been assigned twelve possible in-family girlfriends at the age of thirteen. Two resided at the Ice Pit. I had met one only casually, but the other, Lucinda Bergman-Sandoval, had been a love friend since we were sixteen. Lucinda worked on the farm that grew the station's food. We saw each other perhaps once a month now, my focus having shifted to extra-family women, as was expected when one approached marriage age. Still, those visits were good times, and we had scheduled a chat dinner date at the farm cafe this evening.

I've never cared much what women look like. I mean, extraordinary beauty has never impressed me, perhaps because I'm no platinum sheen myself. The Sandoval family had long since accepted pre- and post-birth transforms as a norm, as had most lunar families, and so no son or daughter of Sandoval BM was actively unpleasant to look at. Lucinda's family had given her normal birth, and she had chosen a light transform at age seventeen: she was black-haired, coffee-skinned, purple-eyed, slender and tall, with a long neck and pleasant, wide face. Like most lunar kids, she was bichemical - she could go to Earth or other higher-gravity environments and adjust quickly.

We met in the caf6, which overlooked the six-hectare farm spread on the surface. Thick field-reinforced windows separated our table from high vacuum; a brass bar circled the enclosure to reassure our instincts that we would not fall off to the regolith or the clear polystone dome below.

Lucinda was a quiet girl, quick and sympathetic. We talked relationships for a while - she was considering an extrafamily marriage proposal from a Nernst engineer named Hakim. I had some prospects but was still barn dancing a lot.

'Hakim's willing to be name-second,' she said. 'He's very generous.'

'Wants kids?'

'Of course. He told me they could be ex-utero if I was squeamish.' Lucinda smiled.

'Sounds rad,' I said.

'Oh, he's not. just ... generous. I think he's really sweet on me.'

'Advantages?'

She smirked lightly. 'Lots of advantages. His branch controls Nernst Triple contracts.'

'Nernst's done some work for us,' I said.

'Tell,' she instructed me softly.

'I probably shouldn't. I haven't even thought it through ... '

'Sounds serious.'

It could be, I suppose. The council president may try to stop something my blood-sister is doing.'

Lucinda raised her wide, thin eyebrows. 'Really? On what grounds?,

'I'm not sure. The president is Task-Felder ...

'So?'

'She's a Logologist.'

'Mm hmm. So? They have to play by the rules, too.'

'Of course. I'm not making any accusations ... But what do you know about Logologists?'

Lucinda thought for a moment. 'They're tough on contracts. Daood - that's Hakim's brother - he administered a design contract to the Independence Station near Fra Mauro. That's a Task-Felder station.'

'I know. I was invited to a barn dance there last month.'

'Did you go?'

I shook my head. 'Too much work.'

'Daood says they rode the Nernst designers for eight weeks, jumped them between three different specs. Seemed to be a management lag - Task-Felder niggles from the top down. No independent thinking from on-site managers. Daood was not impressed.'

I smiled. 'We've upset some Nernst people ourselves. Last year, on the refrigerator repairs and radiator upgrades.' 'Hakim mentioned that ... Daood said we were saints compared to Task-Felder.'

'Good to know we're appreciated by our brother BMs.' She mused for a moment. Our food came on an arbeiter delivery cart. 'I've heard about Io, of course. That was hard to believe. Have you read any of Thierry's works?' Lucinda asked. 'They were popular when we were kids.'

'I managed to avoid them,' I said. K. D. Thierry, an Earthborn movie producer who called himself a philosopher and acted like a dictatorial guru, had founded Chromopsychology in the late twentieth century, and then had spun it off into Logology.

'He must have written about three hundred books and LitVids. I read two - Planetary Spirit and Mother Mind? They were pretty strange. He tried to lay down rules for everything from what to dream to toilet training.' I laughed. 'Why did you read them?'

Lucinda shrugged. 'I used to scan a lot of LitVids. They were in the library. I called them up, paid the fee - about half what most LitVids cost. Lots of pretty video stuff. Sparkling lakes and rivers on Earth ... pictures of Thierry riding his solar-powered yacht around the world. That sort of thing. All very attractive to a Moon girl.'

'Did you read anything that explained what happened on

Io?'

'I remember something about Thierry being told by an angel that humans were the spawn of warring gods, superbeings. They lived before the birth of our Sun. He said that deep within us were pieces of the personalities of some of these gods.'

'I'll buy that,' I said.

'The rest of the gods' minds had been imprisoned, buried by their enemies under sulphur on the 'Hellmoon'. They were waiting for us to liberate them and join with them again. Something like that.' She shook her head.

I knew the rest of the story; it was in files on recent history I had studied in secondary. In 2090, Logologists on Mars had taken out a thousand-year development lease on Io from the Triple; violent, useless Io, visited only twice in history by human explorers. The new leaseholders set up a human-occupied station on Io in 2100. The station was lost with all occupants during the formation of a new Pelean-class sulphur lake. Seventy-five loyal Logologists died and were never recovered; they are still there, entombed in black sulphur.

The Logologists had never admitted to looking for lost gods.

I shuddered. 'I didn't know what they were after. That's interesting.'

'It's spooky,' Lucinda said. 'I stopped reading him when I realized he thought he was writing history. These folks think he's practically a god himself.'

'They do?'

'You're dealing with them, and you don't know what they think?'

'My shortcomings are legendary,' I said, raising my hands.

'What kind of god?'

'They say he didn't die, that he was in perfect health. He just left his body behind like a husk. Now he's supposed to advise the Logologists through spiritual messages to his chosen disciples, each generation. He anoints them with blue cold, they say. Whatever that is. So what does Rho want to do that they don't like?'

'My lips are sealed. Rho gives the press conferences around here.'

'But the president knows?'

'I presume she must.'

'Thanks for trusting me, Micko.' She gave me a narrow grin to let me know she was teasing. Still, I felt uncomfortable.

'I can say I don't like any of it,' I confessed. 'It makes things a lot more complicated.'

'Better get on with your homework, then,' she advised.

The deeper I dug into Logology, the more fascinated I became. And repelled - though fascination won out in the end. Here was a creed without a coherent philosophy - a system without a sensible metaphysics Here was puerile hypothesis and even outright fantasy masquerading as revealed truth. And it was all based on a single supposed insight into the human mind, something so audacious - and so patently ridiculous - that it was fascinating.

K.     D. Thierry had exploited everybody's deeply held wish to participate in the unfolding of a Big Event. In this he was little different from other prophets and messiahs; the real differences lay in how much we knew about Thierry, and how ridiculous it seemed that a man such as he could be vouchsafed any great truth.

Thierry had been an actor in his youth. He had played small roles in bad chemstock films, one or two tiny appearances in good ones. He was known to film buffs but not to many others. In time he found his real strength lay in putting together deals, and so he began to produce and even direct films.

By the late 1980s he had made a reputation as the director of a series of bizarre mystery films in which a peculiar flavour, half lunacy, half ironic humour, attracted a faithful following. He began to lecture at colleges and universities. He allegedly once told a screenwriter in New York that 'Movies are a weak shadow. Religion is where we ought to go.'

And so he went. Not an uneducated man, he joined the chorus then intent on knocking the last crumbling chunks of Freudian doctrine from its pedestal. He tried to add all the rest of psychology to the scraps; his first wife had been a psychotherapist, and the parting had been memorably cruel to both.

Then, when he was forty-three years old, came a night of revelation. Sitting on a beach near the California city of Newport, he was confronted - so he claimed - by a massive figure, tall as a skyscraper, who gave him a piece of rock crystal the size of his fist. The figure was female in shape, but masculine in strength, and it said to him, 'I don't have much time. I've been dead too long to stay here and talk to you in person. This crystal tells the entire story.'

Thierry surmised that the huge figure was a hologram - which seemed to me to be primitive technology for a god to use when manifesting herself, but then, Thierry's imagination was limited by his times, and to reach his presumed audience of scientific naives he used the jargon and concepts of the 1990s.

He stared into the crystal, wrote down what he saw in a series of secret books not published in his lifetime, and then produced an epitome for public consumption. That epitome was called The Old and the New Human Race, and in it he revealed the cosmic science of Chromopsychology.

The enormous hologram had been the last of the True Hunians, and the crystal she had given him had helped him unlock the power of his mind.

He published and promoted the book personally. It sold ten thousand copies the first year, and five hundred thousand copies the next. Later editions revised the name and some of the doctrines of the cosmic science: it became Logology, his final break with even the word psychology.

The Old and the New Human Race was soon available not just in paper, but in cube text, LitVid, Vid and five interactive media.

Through a series of seminars, he converted a few disciples at first, then multitudes, to the belief that humanity had once been godlike in its powers, and was now shackled by ancient chains which made us small, dependent on our bodies, and stupid. Thierry said that all humans were capable of transforming themselves into free-roving, very powerful spirits. The crystal told him how to break these chains through a series of mental exercises, and how to realize that humanity's ancient enemies - all but one, whom he called Shaytana - were dead, powerless to stop our self-liberation. All one's personal liberation required was concentration, education and discipline - and a lifetime membership in the Church of Logology.

Shaytana was Loki and a watered-down Satan combined, too weak to destroy us or even stop strong individuals from breaking free of the chains, wily enough and persistent enough to convince the great majority of humans that death was our destiny and weakness our lot.

Those who opposed Thierry were dupes of Shaytana, or willing cohorts (as Freud, Jung, Adler and all other psychiatrists and psychologists had been). There were many dupes of Shaytana, including presidents, priests, and fellow prophets.

In 1997, Thierry tried to purchase a small South Pacific island to create a community of Unchained. He was rebuffed by the island's inhabitants and forced to move his seedling colony to Idaho, where he started his own small town, Ouranos, named after the progenitor of human consciousness. Ouranos became a major political centre in Idaho. Thierry was in part responsible for the separation of the' state into two sections in 2012, the northern calling itself Green Idaho.

He wrote massively, still made movies occasionally. His later books covered all aspects of a Logologist's life, from pre-natal care to funeral rites and design of grave site. He packaged LitVid on such topics as world economics and politics. Slowly, he became a recluse; by 2031, two years before his death, he saw no one but his mistress and three personal secretaries.

Thierry claimed that a time of crisis would come after his own 'liberation', and that within a century he would return, 'freed of the chains of flesh', to put the Church of Logology into a position of 'temporal power over the nations of the Earth'. 'Our enemies will be cinderized,' he promised, 'and the faithful will see an aeon of spiritual ecstasy.'

At his death, he weighed one hundred and seventy-five kilograms and had to move with the aid of a massive armature, part wheelchair, part robot. Press releases, and reports to his hundreds of thousands of disciples in Ouranos and around the world, described his death as voluntary release. He was accompanying the spirit who had first appeared to him on the beach in California on a tour of the galaxy.

His personal physician - a devoted disciple - claimed that despite his bulk, he was in perfect health, and that his body had changed its internal constitution in such a way as to build up massive amounts of energy necessary to power him in the first few years of his spiritual voyage.

Thierry himself they called the Ascended Master. Allegedly he had made weekly reports to his mistress on his adventures. She lived to a ripe old age, eschewed rejuvenation legal or otherwise, grew massive in bulk and, so the story went, joined her former lover on his pilgrimage.

A year after his death, one of his secretaries was arrested in Green Idaho on charges of child pornography. There was no evidence that Thierry had ever participated in such activities; but the ensuing scandal nearly wrecked the Church of Logology.

The Church recovered with remarkable speed when it sponsored a programme of supporting young LitVid artists. Using the programme as a stepping stone to acceptance among politicians and the general public, Logology's past was soon forgotten, and its current directors - anonymous, efficient and relatively colourless - finished the job that Thierry had begun. They made Logology a legitimate alternative religion, for those who continued to seek such solace.

The Church prospered and made its beginning moves on Puerto Rico. Logologists established a free hospital and 'psychiatric' training centre on the island in 2046, four years before Puerto Rico became the fifty-first state. The island was soon controlled by a solid sixty per cent majority population of Logologists, the greatest concentration of the religion on Earth. Every Puerto Rican representative in the United States Congress since statehood had been a Logologist.

The rest was more or less familiar, including an in-depth history of the lo purchase and expedition.

When I finished poring over the massive amounts of material, I was drained and incredulous. I felt that I understood human nature from a somewhat ' superior perspective as someone who was not a Logologist, who had not been taken in by Thierry's falsehoods and fantasies.

I dreamed that night of walking along an irrigation canal in Egypt. Dawn came intensely blue in the east, stars still out overhead. The canal had frozen during the night, which pleased me; it lay in jumbled cubes of ice, clear as glass, and the cubes were rearranging themselves like living things into perfect flat sheets. Order, I thought. 7he Pharaoh will be pleased. But as I looked into the depths of the canal, I saw fish pinned in by the layers of cubes, unable to move, gills flexing frantically, and I realized that I had sinned. I looked up to the stars, blaming them, but they refused to accept responsibility; then I looked to the sides of the canal, among the reeds, and saw copper double toruses on each side, sucking soundlessly. All my dream-muscles twitched and I came awake.

It was eight hundred hours and my personal line was blinking politely. I answered; there were two messages, one from, Rho, left three hours earlier, and one from Thomas Sandoval-Rice, an hour after hers.

Rho's message was voice only, and brief 'Mickey, the director wants to meet with both of us today in Port Yin. He's sending an executive shuttle for us at ten hundred.'

The director's message was extensive text and a vocal from his secretary. 'Mickey, Thomas Sandoval-Rice would like you to meet with him in Port Yin as soon as possible. We'd like Rhosalind to be there as well.' Accompanying the message was text and LitVid on Logology, much of the same material I'd already studied.

I arranged my affairs for the day and cancelled a meeting with family engineers on generator maintenance.

Rho was uncharacteristically sombre as we waited in the Pad Four lounge. Outside, it was lunar night, the brilliant glow of field lights blanking out the stars. Earth was at full above us, a thumbnail-sized spot of bluish light through the overhead ports. All we could see through the lounge windows was a few hectares of ashen churned lunar soil, a pile of rubble dug out from the Ice Pit warrens decades before, the featureless grey concrete of the field itself.

'I feel like they're pushing my nose in the dust,' Rho said. The fights of the executive bus became visible above the horizon. 'This is pretty fancy treatment. The director has never paid us so much attention before.'

I tried to reassure her. 'You've never reeled in Great-Grandma and Grandpa before,' I said.

She shook her head. 'That isn't it. He sent a stack of research on Logologists.'

I nodded. 'Me, too. You've read it?'

'Of course.'

'What did you think?'

'They're odd people, but I can't find anything that would make them object to this project. They say death isn't liberation unless you're enlightened - so frozen heads could just be more potential converts ..

'Maybe Thomas knows something more,' I said.

The bus landed, sleek and bright red, an expensive full pressure, full-cabin late-model Lunar Rover. I had never ridden on the Sandoval limo before. The interior was very impressive; automatic adjustment seats, restaurant unit - I regretted I'd already eaten breakfast, but nibbled on Rho's eggs and mock ham - and complete communications centre. We could have called Earth or Mars or any of the asteroids using Lunar Cooperative statites or even the Triple satellites if we'd wished.

'Makes you realize how far out of the Sandoval mainstream we are at the Ice Pit,' I said as Rho slipped her plate into the return.

'I haven't missed it,' she said. 'We get what we need.'

'William might not agree.'

Rho smiled. 'It's not luxury he's after.' Port Yin was Procellarum's main interplanetary commerce field and largest city, hub for all the stations in the ocean. Procellarum was the main territory of Sandoval BM, though we had some twenty stations and two smaller ports in the Earthside highlands. Besides being a transportation hub, Port Yin was surrounded by farms; it fed much of the Earthside Moon south and west of the ocean. For lunar citizens, a farm station of sufficient size also acts as a resort - a chance to admire forests and fields.

We passed over the now opaqued rows of farm domes, thousands of hectares spaced along the southeast edge of the port, and came in at the private Sandoval field half an hour before our appointment. That gave us little time to cross by rail and walkway through Yin City's crowds to Centre Port.

The director's secretary led us down the short hall to his small personal office, centrally located among the Sandoval syndic warrens. Thomas Sandoval-Rice was trim, resolutely grey-haired, with a thin nose and ample lips, a middling seventy-five years old, and he wore a formal black suit with red sash and mooncalf slippers. He stood to greet us. There was barely room for three chairs and a desk; this was his inner sanctum, not the show office for Sandoval clients or other BM reps. Rho looked at me forlornly as we entered; this did indeed seem like the occasion for a dressing-down.

'I'm pleased to see both of you again,' Thomas said as he offered us chairs. 'You're looking well. Mickey, it's been three years, hasn't it, since we approved your position at the Ice Pit?' 'Yes, Sir, ' I said.

Thomas looked at Rho's wary face and smiled reassurance. 'This is not a visit to a dental mechanic, he said. 'Rho, I smell a storm coming, and I'd like to have you tell me what kind of storm it might be, and why we're sailing into it.,

'I don't know, Sir,' Rho said steadily.

'Mickey?'

'I've read your text, Sir. I'm puzzled, as well.' 'The Task-Felder BM is behind all this, everybody's assured me of that. I have friends in the United States of the Western Hemisphere Senate. Friends who are in touch with California Logology, the parent church, as it were. Task-Felder BM is less independent than they want to appear; if California Logology nods its hoary head, Task-Felder jumps. Now, you know that no lunar BM is supposed to operate as either a terrestrial representative or to promote purely religious principles ... That's in the Lunar Binding Multiples Agreements. The constitution of the Moon.'

'Yes, Sir,' I said.

'But Task-Felder BM has managed to avoid or ignore a great many of those provisions, and nobody's called them on it, because no BM likes the image of making a council challenge of another fully chartered BM, even one with terrestrial connections. Bad for business, in brief. We all like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists, family first, Moon second, Triple third ... and to hell with the Triple if push comes to shove. Understood?'

'Yes, Sir,' I said.

'I've served as chief syndic and director of Sandoval BM for twenty-nine years, and in that time, I've seen Task-Felder grow powerful despite the distaste of the older, family-based binding multiples. They're sharp, they're quick learners, they have impressive financial backing, and they have a sincerity and a drive that can be disconcerting.' 'I've noticed that, Sir,' I said.

Thomas pursed his lips. 'Your conversation with Janis Granger was not pleasant?'

'No, Sir.'

'We've done something to offend them, and my sources on Earth tell me they're willing to take off their gloves, get down in the dust and spit up a volcano if they have to. Mud, mud, mud, crazier than.'

'I don't understand why, Sir,' Rho said.

'I was hoping one or both of you could enlighten me. You've gone through the brief on their history and beliefs. You don't find anything suggestive?

'I certainly don't,' Rho said.

'Our frozen Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa never did anything to upset them?'

'Not that we know of.'

'Rho, we've got some two-facing from our fellow family BMs, haven't we? Nernst and Cailetet are willing to design something for us and take our cash, but they may not stand up for us in the council.' He rubbed his chin for a moment with his finger, making a wry face. 'Is there anybody else interesting in the list of heads, besides Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa?'

'I've brought along my files, including the list of individuals Preserved by StarTime. There's a lacuna I was not aware of, Sir - three viable individuals - and I've asked StarTime's advocate in New York for an accounting, but I haven't gotten an answer yet.

'You've correlated the list?'

'Pardon?' Rho asked.

'You've run cross-checks between Logology connections and the list? In history?'

'No.'

'Mickey?'

'No, sir.'

Thomas glanced at me reproachfully. 'Let me do it now, then,' he said. He took Rho's slate and plugged it into his desktop thinker. With a start, I realized this small green cube was Ellen C, the Sandoval thinker, advisor to all the syndics. Ellen C was one of the oldest thinkers on the, Moon, somewhat obsolete now, but definitely part of the family. 'Ellen, what do we have here?'

'No interesting strikes or correlations in the first or second degree,' the thinker reported. 'Completed.'

Thomas raised his eyebrows. 'Perhaps a dead end.' 'I'll look into the unnamed three,' Rho said.

'Do that. Now, I'd like to rehearse a few things with you folks. Do you know our weaknesses - your own weaknesses? And the weaknesses of the lunar BM system?'

I could not, in my naivety, come up with any immediate response to this question. Rho was equally blank.

'Allow an older fool to lecture you a bit, then. Grandpa Ian Reiker-Sandoval favoured Rho, doted on her. Gave her anything she wanted. So Rho has the man she wanted, someone from outside who doesn't meet the usual Sandoval criteria for eligible matches. Still, William has done his work admirably, and we all look forward to a breakthrough. However-'

'I'm spofled,' Rho anticipated him.

'Let's say ... that you've had a rich girl's leeway, without the corruption of free access to fabulous wealth,' Thomas said. 'Nevertheless, you have substantial BM resources at your disposal, and you have a way of getting us into trouble without really seeing it coming.'

'I'm not sure that's fair,' I said.

'As judgments go, it's extremely fair,' Thomas said, staring at me sharply. 'This is not the first time ... or are memories short in the younger Sandovals?'

Rho looked up at the ceiling, then at me, then at Thomas. 'The tulips,' she said.

'Sandoval BM lost half a million Triple dollars. Fortunately, we were able to convert the farms to tailored pharmaceuticals. But that was before marriage to William, and it was minor ... although typical of your early adventures. You've matured considerably since then, as I'm sure you'll both agree. Still, Rho has never been caught up in a freefall scuffle. She has always had Sandoval BM firmly behind her. To her credit, she's never brought in the kind of trouble that could reflect badly on the BM. Until now, and I can't pin the blame on her for this, except to say she's not terribly prescient.'

'You blame her for any aspect of this?' I asked, still defensive before Thomas's relaxed gaze.

'No,' Thomas said after a pregnant pause. 'I blame you. You, my dear lad, are a focused dilettante, very good in your area, which is the Ice Pit, but not widely experienced. You don't have Rho's ambition, and you haven't shown many signs of her innovative spark ... You've never even taken advantage of your Earth sabbatical. Micko, if I may be familiar, you've done the job of managing the Ice Pit well enough, certainly nothing for us to complain about, but you've had very little experience in the bigger arena of the Triple, and you've grown a little soft sitting out there. You didn't check out Rho's scheme.'

I straightened in my chair. 'It had BM charter-'

'You should still have checked it out. You should have smelled something coming. There may be no such thing as prescience, but honed instincts are crucial in our game, Micko.

'You've cultivated fine literature - terrestrial literature fine music and a little history in the copious time you've had between your bursts of economic activity. You've become something of a lady's man in the barn dances. Fine; you're of an age where such things are natural. But now it's time that You put on some muscle. I'd like you to handle this matter as my accessory. You'll go to the council meetings - one is scheduled in a couple of days - and you'll study up on the chinks in our system's armour.'

I settled back, suddenly more than just uneasy, and not about my impending debut in larger BM politics. 'You think we're approaching a singularity?'

Thomas nodded. 'Whatever your failings, Micko, you are sharp. That's exactly right. A time when all the rules could fail, and all our past oversights come back to haunt us. It's a good possibility. Care to lecture me for a minute?' I shrugged. 'Sir, I-'

'Stretch your wings, lad. You're not ignorant, else you wouldn't have made that last remark. What singularity faces the BMs now?'

'I can't really say, sir. I don't know which weakness you're referring to, specifically, but-'

'Go on.' Thomas smiled like a genial tiger.

'We've outgrown the lunar constitution. Two million people in fifty-four BMs, that's ten times as many as lived on the Moon when the constitution was written. And actually, it was never written by an individual. It was cobbled together by a committee intent on not stretching or voiding individual BM charters. I think that you think Task-Felder isn't above forcing a constitutional crisis.'

'Yes?'

'If they are planning something like that, now's the time to do it. I've been studying the Triple's performance for the past few years. Lunar BMs have gotten increasingly conservative, sir. Compared with Mars, we've been...' I was on a nervous high; I waved my hands and smiled placatingly, hoping not to overwhelm or offend.

'Yes?'

'Well, a little like you accuse me of being, sir. Selfcontented, taking advantage of the lull. But the Triple is going through a major shake-up now, Earth's economy is suffering its expected forty-year cyclic decline, and the lunar BMs are vulnerable. If we stop cooperating, the Moon could be put into a financial crisis worse than the Split. So everybody's being very cautious, very - - conservative. The old rough-and-tumble has given way to don't-prick-the-seal.'

'Good,' Thomas said.

'I haven't been a worm, sir,' I said with a pained expression.

'Glad to hear it. And if Task-Felder convinces a significant number of BMs that we're rocking the boat in a way that could lower the lunar rating in the Triple?'

'It could be bad. But why would they do that?' I asked, still puzzled.

Rho picked up my question. 'Tom, how could a few hundred heads bring this on? What's Task-Felder got against us?'

'Nothing at all, dear daughter,' Thomas said. BM elders often referred to family youngsters as if they were their own children. 'That's what worries me most of all.'

Rho returned to the Ice Pit to supervise completion of the chamber for the heads; I stayed behind to prepare for the council meeting. Thomas put me up in Sandoval guest quarters reserved for family, spare but comfortable. I felt depressed, angry with myself for being so vulnerable.

I hated disappointing Thomas Sandoval-Rice.

And I took no satisfaction in the thought that perhaps he had stung me to get my blood moving, to spur me to action.

I wanted to avoid any circumstance where he would need to sting me again.

Thomas woke me up from an erratic sleep of one hour, post twelve hours of study. My head felt like a dented air can. 'Tune to general net lunar news,' he said. 'Scroll back the Past five minutes.'

I did as he told me and watched the LitVid image.

News of the quarter-hour. Synopsis: Earth questions jurisdiction of Moon in Sandoval BM buy-out of StarTime Preservation Society Contract and transfer of corpsicles.

Expansion 1: The United States Congressional Office of Triple Relations has issued an advisory affiance alert to the Lunar Council of Binding Multiples that Sandoval BM purchase of preservation contracts of four hundred and ten frozen heads of deceased twenty-first-century individuals may be invalid, under a late twentieth-century law regarding retention of archaeological artifacts within cultural and national boundaries. StarTime Preservation Society, a deceased-estate financed partnership group now dissolved on Earth, has already transferred 'members, chattels, and responsibilities' to Sandoval BM. Sandoval Chief Syndic 'Thomas Sandoval-Rice states that the heads are legally under control of his binding multiple, subject to ...

The report continued in that vein for eight thousand words of text and four minutes of recorded interviews. It concluded with a kicker, an interview with Puerto Rican Senator Pauline Grandville: 'If the moon can simply ignore the feelings and desires of its terrestrial forebears, then that could call into question the entire matrix of Earth-Moon relations.'

I transferred to Thomas's line. 'It's amazing,' I said.

'Not at all,' Thomas said. 'I've run a search of the Earth-

Moon LitVids and terrestrial press. It's in your hopper now.'

'I've been reading all night, sir-'

Thomas glared at me. 'I wouldn't have expected any less. We don't have much time.'

'Sir, I'd be able to pinpoint my research if you'd let me know your strategy, your plan of battle.'

'I don't have one yet, Micko. And neither should you. These are just the opening rounds. Never fire your guns before you've chosen a target.'

'Did you know about this earlier? That California would tell Puerto Rico to do something like this?'

'I had a hint, nothing more. But my sources are quiet now. No more tattling from Earth, I'm afraid. We're on our own.'

I wanted to ask him why the sources were quiet, but I sensed I'd used up my ration of questions.

Never in my fife had I faced a problem with interplanetary implications. I finished a full eighteen hours of research, hardly more enlightened than when I had started, though I was full of facts: facts about Task-Felder, facts about the council president and her aide, yet more facts about

I was depressed and angry. I sat head in hands for fully an hour, wondering why the world was picking on me. At least I had a partial answer to Thomas's criticisms - short of actual precognition, I didn't think anybody could have intuited such an outcome to Rho's venture.

I lifted my head to answer a private-line call, routed to the guest quarters.

'I have a live call direct from Port Yin for Mr Mickey Sandoval.'

'That's me,' I said

The secretary connected and the face of Fiona Task-Felder, president of the council, clicked into vid. 'Mr Sandoval, may I speak to you for a few minutes?'

I was stunned. 'I'm sorry, I wasn't expecting ... a call. Not here.'

'I like to work direct, especially when my underlings screw up, as I trust Janis did.'

'Do you have a few minutes?'

'Please, Madam President ... I'd much rather hold this conversation with our chief syndic tied in - - .'

'I'd rather not, Mr Sandoval. just a few questions, and maybe we can patch all this up.'

Fiona Task-Felder could hardly have looked more different from her aide. She was grey-haired, in her late sixties, with a muscular build that showed hours of careful exercise. She wore stretch casuals beneath her short council collar and seal. She looked vigorous and friendly and motherly, and was a handsome woman, but in a natural way, quite the reverse of Granger's studied, artificial hardness.

I should have known better, but I said, 'All right. I'll try to answer as best I can ...'

'Why does your sister want these heads?' the president asked.

'We've already explained that.'

'Not to anybody's satisfaction but your own, perhaps. I've learned that your grandparents - pardon me, your great-grandparents - are among them. Is that your sole reason?,

'I don't think now's the time to discuss this, not without my sister being available, and certainly not without our director.'

'I'm trying hard to understand, Mr Sandoval. I think we should meet casually, without any interference from aides and syndics, and straighten this out quickly, before somebody else screws it up out of all proportion. Is that possible?'

'I think Rho could explain-'

'Fine, then bring her.'

'I'm sorry, but-'

She gave me a motherly expression of irritation, as if with a wayward son - or irritating lover. 'I'm giving you a rare opportunity. In the old lunar spirit of one-on-one, and cut the politics. I think we can work it out. If we work fast.'

I felt way out of my depth. I was being asked to step outside of formal procedures ... to make a decision immediately.

I knew the only way to play that game was to ignore her unexpressed rules.

'AU right,' I said.

'I have an appointment available on the third at ten hundred. Is that acceptable?'

That was three days away. I calculated quickly; I'd be back in the Ice Pit Station by then, and that meant I'd have to hire a special shuttle flight. 'I'll be there,' I said.

'I'm looking forward to it,' Task-Felder said, and left me alone in the guest room to think out my options.

I did not break the unexpressed rules of her game. I did not talk to Thomas Sandoval-Rice. Nor did I tell Rho what I was doing. Before leaving Port Yin for a return trip to the Ice Pit, I secretly booked a non-scheduled round-trip shuffle, spending a great deal of Sandoval money on one passenger; thankfully, because of my position at the station, I did not have to give details.

I doubted that Thomas or Rho would look for me during the time I was gone; six hours going, a few hours there, and six back. I could leave custom messages for whoever ;night call, including Rho or Thomas or - much less likely William.

To this day I experience a sick twist in my stomach when I ask myself why I did not follow through with my original thought, and tell Thomas about the president's call. I think perhaps it was youthful ego, wounded by Thomas's dressing-down; ego plus a strange gratification that the council president was going to see me personally, to put aside a block of her time to speak to someone not even an assistant syndic. Me. To speak to me.

I knew I was not doing what I should be doing, but like a mouse entranced by a snake, I ignored them all - a tendency of behaviour I have since learned I was not unique in possessing. A tendency common in some lunar citizens.

We habitually cry out, 'Cut the politics.' But the challenge and intrigue of politics seduces us every time.

I honestly thought I could beat out Fiona Task-Felder.

As our arbeiters executed the Nernst design, the repository for the heads resembled a flattened doughnut lying on its side, a wide circular passageway with heads stored in seven tiers of cubicles around the outer perimeter. It would lie neatly in the bottom cup of the void, seven metres below the laboratory, out of range of whatever peculiar fluctuations might occur in the force disorder pumps during William's tests, and easily connected to the refrigerators. Lunar rock would insulate the outer torus; pipes and other fittings could be neatly dropped from the refrigerators above. A small elevator from the side of the bridge opposite the Cavity would give access.

It was a neat design, as we expected from Nernst BM. Our arbeiters performed flawlessly, although they were ten years out of date.

Not once did anyone mention problems with the council.

I started to feel cocky; the plans I'd had of talking to Thomas about the visit with the president faded in and out with my mood. I could handle her; the threat was minimal. If I was sufficiently cagey, I could drop right in, leap right out, no ham although perhaps no benefits, either.

The day after I finished oversight and inspection on the chamber, and received a Nernst designer's inspection report, and after the last of Rho's heads had been installed in their cubicles, I stamped my approval for final payment to Nernst, called in the Cailetet consultants to look over the facilities, packed my travel bag, and was off.

There is a grey sameness to a lunar ocean's surface that induces a state of hypnosis, a mix of fascination at the lifeless expanse, never quite encompassed by memory, and incredible boredom. Parts of the Moon are beautiful in a rugged way, even to a citizen. Crater walls, rilled terrain, even the painted flats of ancient vents.

Life on the Moon is a process of turning inwards, towards interior living spaces, towards an interior you. Lunar citizens are exceptional at introspection and decoration and indoor arts and crafts. Some of the finest craftsmen and artists in the solar system reside on the Moon; their work commands high prices throughout the Triple.

Two hours into the journey, I fell asleep and dreamed of Egypt again, endless dry deserts beyond the thin green belts of the Nile, deserts populated by mummies leading camels. Camels carrying trays of ice, making sounds like force disorder pumps ...

I awoke quickly and cursed William for that story, for its peculiar fascination. What was so strange about space sucking heat from trays of water? That was the principle behind- our own heat exchangers on the surface above the Ice Pit. Still, I could not conceive of a Sky on Earth as black as the Moon's, as all-forgiving, all-absorbing.

The shuttle made a smooth landing minutes later at Port Yin, and I disembarked, part of me still believing I would go to Thomas's office first, an hour before my appointment.

I did not. I spent that hour shopping for a birthday present for a girl in Copernicus Station. A girl I was not particularly courting at the time; something to pass an hour. My mind was blank.

I walked and took the skids, using the time to prepare myself. I was not stupid enough to believe there was no danger; I even felt with one part of my mind that what I was doing was more likely to turn out badly than otherwise . But I skidded along towards the council president's offices regardless, and in my defence I must say that my self-assurance still overcame my doubts. On the average, I felt more confident than ill-at-ease.

It was politics. My entire upbringing had ingrained in me the essential triviality of lunar politics. Council officers were merely secretaries to a bunch of congenial family businesses, dotting the 'i's and crossing the 't's of rules of cooperation that probably would have been followed anyway, out of simple courtesy and for the sake of mutual benefit.

Most of our ancestors had been engineers and miners exported from the Earth; conservative and independent, suspicious of any authority, strongly convinced that large groups of people could live in comparative peace and prosperity without layers of government and bureaucracy.

My ancestors worked to squash the natural growth of such layers: 'Cut the politics' was their constant cry, followed by shaking heads and raised eyes. Political organization was evil, representative government an imposition. Why have a representative when you could interact personally? Keep it small, direct and uncomplicated, they believed, and freedom would necessarily follow.

They couldn't keep it small. The Moon had already grown to such a point that layers of government and representation were necessary. But as with sexual attitudes in some Earth cultures, necessity was no guarantee of responsibility and planning.

From the beginning, our prime families and founders including, I must say, Emilia and Robert - had screwed up the lunar constitution, if the patched up collations of hearsay and station charters could even be called such.

When complex organization did come, it was haphazard, unenthusiastically organic, undisciplined. When the Split broke our economic supply lines with Earth, and when the first binding multiples came, the Moon was a reservoir of naively amenable suckers, but blessedly lucky - at first. The binding multiples weren't political organizations - they were business families, extensions of individuals, the Lunars said. Lunar citizens saw nothing wrong with family structures or even syndicates; they saw nothing wrong with the complex structures of the binding multiples, because somehow they did not qualify as government.

When the binding multiples had to set up offices to work with each other, and share legal codes written and unwritten to prevent friction, that was not government; it was pragmatism. And when the binding multiples formed a council, why, that was nothing more sinister than business folks getting together to talk and achieve individual consensus. (That oxymoron - individual consensus - was actually common then.) The Council of Binding Multiples was nothing more than a committee organized to reduce frictions between the business syndicates - at first. It was decorative and weak.

We were still innocent and did not know that the price of freedom - of individuality - is attention to politics, careful planning, careful organization; philosophy is no more a barrier against political disaster than it is against plague.

Think me naive; I was. We all were.

The offices of the council president were located in the council annex to Port Yin's western domicile district; in the suburbs, as it were, and away from the centre of BM activity, as befitted a political institution. The offices were numerous but not sumptuous; the syndics of many small BMs could have displayed more opulence.

I entered the reception area, a cubicle barely four metres square, with a man behind a desk to supplement an automated appointments system.

'Good day,' the man said. He was perhaps fifty, grey-haired, blunt-nosed, with a pleasant but discriminating expression.

'Mickey Sandoval,' I said. 'I have an invitation from the president.'

'Indeed you do, Mr Sandoval. You're about three minutes early, but I believe the president is free now.' The automated appointments clerk produced a screenful of information. 'Yes, Mr Sandoval. Please go in.' He gestured towards a double door on his left, which opened to a long hallway. 'At the end. Ignore the mess, please; the administration is still moving in.'

Boxes of information cubes and other files lined the hallway in neat stacks. Several young women in Port Yin drabs - a style I did not find attractive - were moving files into an office along the hallway by electric cart. They smiled at me as I passed. I returned their smiles.

I was full of confidence, walking into the attractive, the seductive and yet trivial inner sanctum. These were all doubtless Logologists. The council presidents could choose all staff members from their own BM if they so desired. There would never be any accusations of nepotism or favouritism in a political climate where such was the expected, the norm.

Fiona Task-Felder's office was at the end of the hall. Wide lunar oak doors opened automatically as I approached, and the president herself stepped forward to shake my hand.

'Thanks for shuttling in,' she said. 'Mr Sandoval-' 'Mickey, please,' I said.

'Fiona to you, as well. We're just getting settled here. Come sit; let's talk and see if some sort of accommodation can be reached between the council and Sandoval.'

Subtly, she had just informed me that Sandoval was on the outs, that we somehow stood apart from our fellow BMs. I did not bristle at the suggestion. I noted it, but assumed it was unintentional. Lunar politics was almost unfailingly polite, and this seemed too abrupt.

'Fruit juice? That's all we're serving here,' Fiona said with a smile. She was even more fit-looking in person, solid and square-shouldered, hair strong and stiff and cut short, eyes clear blue and surrounded by fine wrinkles, what my mother had once called 'time's dividends'. I took a glass of apple juice and sat at one end of the broad curved desk, where two screens and two keyboards waited.

'I understand the installation is already made, and that Cailetet is beginning its work now,' the president said.

I nodded.

'How far along?' she asked.

'Not very,' I said.

'Have you revived any heads?'

That set me aback; she knew as well as I, she had to know, that it was not our plan to revive any heads, that nobody had the means to do so. 'Of course not,' I said.

'If you had, you'd have violated council wishes,' she said.

From the very beginning, she had me off balance. I tried to recover. 'We've broken no rules.'

'Council has been informed by a number of BMs' syndics that they're concerned about your activities.'

'You mean, they think we might try to bring more corpsicles up from Earth?'

'Yes,' she said, nodding once, firmly. 'That will not be allowed, if I have anything to do with it. Now, please explain what you plan to do with these heads.'

I was aghast. 'Excuse me? That's-'

'It's not confidential at all, Mickey. You've agreed to come here to speak with me. A great many BMs are awaiting my report on what you say.'

'That isn't what I understood, Fiona. I tried to keep my voice calm. 'I'm not here testifying under oath, and I don't have to reveal family business plans to any council member, even the president.' I settled more firmly into my seat, trying to exude the confidence I had already scattered to the winds.

Her face hardened. 'It would be simple courtesy to your fellow BMs to explain what you intend to do, Mickey.'

I hoped to give her a tidbit sufficient to put her off. 'The heads are being preserved in the Ice Pit, in the void where my brother does his work.'

'Your brother-in-law, you mean.'

'Yes. He's family now. We dispense with such modifiers.' Ken talking with outsiders,' I might have added.

She smiled, but her expression was still hard. 'William Pierce. He's doing BM-funded research on extremely low temperatures in copper, no?'

I nodded.

'Has he been successful?'

'Not yet,' I said.

'It's simple coincidence that his facilities are capable of preserving the heads?'

'I suppose so, yes. However, my sister probably would not have brought them to the Moon otherwise. But I think of it more as opportunity than coincidence.'

Fiona instructed the screens to bring up displays of lunar binding multiples who were pushing for an investigation of the Sandoval corpsicle imports. They were platinum names indeed: the top four BMs, except for Sandoval, and fifteen others, spaced around the Moon, including Nernst and Cailetet. 'Incidentally,' she said, 'You know about the furore on Earth.' 'I've heard,' I said.