'Did you know there's a ruckus starting on Mars now?' I did not.

'They want Earth's dead kept on Earth,' the president said. 'They think it's bad precedent to export corpsicles and make the outer planets responsible for the inner's problems. They think the Moon must be siding with Earth in some fashion to get rid of this problem.'

'It's not a problem,' I said, exasperated. Nobody on Earth has made a fuss about this in decades.'

'So what's causing the fuss now?' she asked.

I tried to think my way through to a civil answer. 'We think Task-Felder is behind it,' I said.

'You accuse me of carrying my BM's interests into the council with me, despite my oath of office?'

'I'm not accusing anybody of anything,' I said. 'We have evidence that the representative, the ... the ... United States national assembly representative from Puerto Rico-' 'Congressional representative,' she corrected.

'Yes ... You know about that?'

'He's a Logologist. So is most of Puerto Rico. Are you accusing members of my religion of instigating this?' She spoke with such complete shock and indignation that I thought for a moment, Could we be wrong? Were our facts misleading, poorly analysed? Then I remembered Janis Granger and her tactics in our first interview. Fiona Task-Felder was no more gentle, no more polite. I was here at her invitation to be raked over the coals.

'Excuse me, Madam President,' I said. 'I'd like for you to get to your point.'

'The point is, Mickey, that you've agreed by coming here to testify before the full council and explain your actions, your intentions, everything about this mess, at the next meeting, which will be in three days.'

I smiled and shook my head, then brought up my slate. 'Auto counsellor,' I said.

Her smile grew harder, her blue eyes more intense.

'Is this some new law you've cooked up for the occasion?' I asked, trying for a tough and sophisticated manner.

'Not at all,' she said with an air of closing claws on the kill. 'You may think what you wish about Task-Felder BM, or about Logologists - about my people - but we do not play outside the rules. Ask your auto counsellor about courtesy briefings and formal council meetings. This is a courtesy briefing, Mickey, and I've logged it as such.'

My auto counsellor found the relevant council rules on courtesy briefings, and the particular rule passed thirty years before, by the council, that mandated the council's right to hear just what the president heard, as testimony, under oath. A strange and parochial law, so seldom invoked that I had never heard of it. Until now.

'I'm ending this discussion,' I said, standing.

'Tell Thomas Sandoval-Rice that you and he should be at the next full council meeting. Under council agreements, you don't have any choice, Mickey.'

She did not smile. I left the office, walked quickly down the hall, avoided looking at anyone, especially the young women still moving files.

'She's snared her rabbit,' Thomas said as he poured me a beer.

He had been unusually quiet all evening, since I had announced myself at his door and made my anguished confession of gross ineptitude. Far worse than being blasted by his rage was facing his quiet disappointment. 'Don't blame yourself entirely, Micko.' He seemed somehow deflated, withdrawn, like an aquarium anemone touched by an uncaring finger. 'I should have guessed they'd try something like this.'

'I feel like an idiot.'

'That's the third time you've said that in the past ten minutes,' Thomas said. 'You have been an idiot, of course, but don't let that get you down.'

I shook my head; I was already down about as far as it was possible to fall.

Thomas lifted his beer, inspected the large bubbles, and said, 'If we don't testify, we're in much worse trouble. It will look as if we're ignoring the wishes of our fellow BMs, as if we've gone renegade. If we do testify, we'll have been manoeuvred into breaking the BMs' sacred right to keep business and research matters private ... and that will make us look like weaklings and fools. She's pushed us into a deep rille, Mickey. If you had refused to go in, and had claimed family privilege, she'd have tried something else ...

'At least now we can be sure what we're in store for. Isolation, recrimination, probable withdrawal of contracts, maybe even boycott of services. That's never happened before, Micko. We're going to make history this week, no doubt about it.'

'Is there anything I can do?'

Thomas finished his glass and wiped his lips. 'Another?' he asked, gesturing at the keg. I shook my head. 'No. Me neither. We need clear heads, Micko, and we need a full family meeting. We're going to have to build internal solidarity here; this has gone way beyond what the director and all the syndics can handle by themselves.'

I flew back from Port Yin, head cloudy with anguish. It seemed somehow I had been responsible for all of this. Thomas did not say as much, not this time; but he had hinted it before. I halfway hoped the shuffle would smear itself across the regolith; that the pilot would survive and I would not. Then, anguish began to be replaced by a grim and determined anger. I had been twisted around by experts; used by those who had no qualms about use and abuse. I had seen the enemy and underestimated the strength of their resolve, whatever their motivations, whatever their goals. These people were not following the lunar way; they were playing us all - all of the BMs, me, Rho, the Triple, the Western Hemispheric United States, the corpsicles - like fish on a fine, single-mindedly dedicated to one end.

The heads were just an excuse. They had no real importance; that much was obvious.

This was a power play. The Logologists were intent on dominating the Moon, perhaps the Earth. I hated them for their ambition, their evil presumption, for the way they had lowered me in the eyes of Thomas.

Having erred on the side of underestimation, I was now swinging in the opposite direction, equally in error; but I would not realize that for a few more days yet.

I came home, and knew for the first time how much the station meant to me.

I met a Cailetet man in the alley leading to the Ice Pit. 'You're Mickey, right?' he asked casually. He held a small silver case in front of him, dangling from one hand. He seemed happy. I looked at him as if he might utter words of absolute betrayal.

'We've just investigated one of your heads,' he said, only slightly put off by my expression. 'You've been shuttling, eh?'

I nodded. 'How's Rho?' I asked, somewhat irrelevantly; I hadn't spoken to anybody since my arrival.

'She's ecstatic, I think. We've done our work well.'

'You're sticking with us?' I asked suspiciously.

'Beg your pardon?'

'You haven't been recalled by your family syndics?'

'No,' he said, drawling the word dubiously. 'Not that I've heard.'

The families were being incredibly two-faced. 'Just curious,' I said. 'What's it going to cost us?,

'In the long term? That's right,' he said, as if the reason for my surliness had finally been solved. 'You're financial manager for the Ice Pit. I'm sorry; I'm a bit slow. Believe me, we're interested in this as a research project, If we perfect our techniques here, we can market the medical applications all over the Triple and beyond. We're charging you expenses and nothing else, Mickey. This is platinum opportunity.,

'Does it work?' I asked, still sullen.

He thumped the case. 'Data right here. We're checking it with history on Earth. I'd say it works, yes. Talking with the dead - I don't think anybody's done that before!'

'Who was it?' I asked.

'One of the three unknowns. Rho decided we'd work with them first, to help solve the mystery. Please go right in, Mickey. Nernst has designed a very nice facility. Ask questions, see what they're doing. They're working on unknown number two right now.'

'Thanks,' I said, wondering what distortion of protocol could lead this man to invite me into my own BM's facility. 'I'm glad it's working.'

'AU right,' the man said, with a short intake of breath. 'Must be off. Check this individual out, correlate ... on our own nickel, Mickey. Good to have met you.'

I stopped at the white line and queried. 'Goddamn it, yes!' William's voice roared from the speaker. 'It's open. just cross the goddamn line and stop bothering me.'

'It's me, Mickey,' I said.

'Well then, come on in and join the party! Everybody else is here.'

William had locked himself in the laboratory. Three Onnes and Cailetet techs were on the bridge, standing well away from the force disorder pumps, chatting and eating lunch. I passed them by with casual nods.

William sounded in no mood for visitors - this time of day was usually his phase of most intense activity. I swung on to the lift and descended to Rho's facility, twenty feet below the laboratory. The Ice Pit echoed with voices from above and below; the sounds seemed to come from all directions as I descended in the open lift, first to the right, then the left, cancelled, returned, grew soft, then immediate. Rho came through the hatch at the top of the chamber and rushed forward excitedly. 'William's pissed off, but we're leaving him alone, mostly, so it will pass.' She fairly brewed over with enthusiasm. 'Oh, Mickey' She threw her arms around me.

'Yes?'

'Did you hear upstairs? We tuned in to a head! It works! Come on in. We're working on the second head now.'

'An unknown,' I said with polite interest, her enthusiasm not infecting me. (How much could I blame her for these problems?)

'Yes. Another unknown. I still can't get a response from the StarTime trustees. Do you think they've lost all their back-up records? That would be something, wouldn't it?' She ushered me down the hatch into the chamber. Within the chamber, all was quiet but for a faint song of electronics and the low hiss of refrigerants.

I recognized Armand Cailetet-Davis, the balding, slightfigured powerhouse of Cailetet research. Beside him stood Irma Stolbart of Onnes, a reputed lunar-born superwhiz whom I had heard of but never met: thirty or thirty-five, tall and thin with reddish brown hair and chocolate skin. They stood beside a tripod-mounted piece of equipment, three horizontal cylinders strapped together, pointed at the face of one of the forty stainless-steel boxes mounted in the racks.

Rho introduced me to Cailetet-Davis and Stolbart. I felt a little thrill of something - a realization of what was actually going on here - penetrating my dark mood.

'We're selecting one of the seventy-three known natural mind languages,' Armand explained, pointing at a thinker prism in Irma Stolbart's hands. She smiled, quick glance at me, at Armand, distracted, then continued to work on her thinker, which was about a tenth the size of William's QL, easily portable. 'We'll test some uploaded data for patterns.-'

'Patterns from the head,' I said, stating the obvious.

'Yes. A masculine individual, age sixty-five at death, apparently in good condition considering the medical standards of the time. Very little deterioration.'

'Have you looked inside?' I asked.

Rho lifted her brows. 'Brother, nobody looks inside. Not by actually opening the box. We don't care what they look like.' She laughed nervously. 'It's not the head, it's what's locked up in the brain.'

A soul, still. Now I was shivering from fatigue, as well as something like superstitious awe. 'Sorry,' I said to nobody in particular. They ignored me, concentrating on their work.

'We find northern Europeans tend to cluster in these three program areas,' Stolbart explained. She showed me a slate screen on which a diagram had been sketched. The diagram showed twelve different rectangles, each labelled with a cultural-ethnic group. Her finger underlined three boxes: Finn, Scand, Teut. 'Mind memory-storage languages are among the genetic traits most rigidly adhered to. We think they change very little across thousands of years. That makes sense, considering the necessity of immediate infant adaptation to its milieu.'

'Indeed,' Rho said, smiling at me, squeezing my arm again gently. 'So he's of northern European stock?'

'He's definitely not Levantine, African or Oriental,' Irma Stolbart said. I watched her curiously, focusing on her face, lean and intent, with lovely, skeptical brown eyes.

'Have you spoken with your syndics?' I asked out of the blue, startling even myself.

Armand had clearly earned his position in Cailetet through quick thinking and adaptability. With no hesitation whatsoever, he said, 'We work here until somebody tells us to leave. Nobody has yet. Maybe you administrators can work it all out in the council.'

You administrator. That put us in our place. Paper pushers, bureaucrats, politicians. Cut the politics. We were the ones who stood in the way of the scientist's goal of unrestrained research and intellection.

'I see a fourteen Penrose cipher trace algorithm in the cerebral cortex,' Irma said. 'Definitely northern European.' Rho looked troubled, examined my face for signs. With a tug of my ear and a gesture up into the air I indicated we should talk. She drew me aside. 'Are you tired?' she asked.

'Dead on my feet,' I said. 'I'm an idiot, Rho, and maybe I've augured this whole thing right into a rille.'

'I have faith in the family. We'll make it. I have faith in you, Micko,' she said, grasping my arm. I felt vaguely sick, seeing her expression of support, her trust. 'I'd like you to stay and watch ... this is really something ... if you're up to it?' 'Wouldn't miss it,' I said.

'It's almost religious, isn't it?' she whispered in my ear.

'All right,' Armand said. 'We have the locale. Let's take a picture, upload into the translator, and see if we can draw a name from the file.'

Armand adjusted the position on the triple cylinders and tuned his slate to their output, getting a picture of a vague grey mass suspended by a thin sling in a sharp black square - the head resting in its cubicle and cradle within the larger box. 'We're centred,' he said. 'Irma, if you could ...'

'Field guide on,' she said, flipping a switch on a tiny disk taped to the box.

'Recording,' Armand said nonchalantly. There was no noise, no visible or audible sign that anything was happening. Squares appeared on Armand's slate in the upper right-hand portion of the mass. I was able to make out that the head had slumped to one side, whether facing us or not, I could not tell. I kept staring at the image, the squares flashing one by one in sequence around the cranium, and I realized with a gruesome tingle that the head was misshapen, that during its decades in storage it had deformed in the presence of Earth gravity, nestling deeper into its sling like a frozen melon.

'Got it,' Armand said. 'One more - the third unknown and we'll call it a session.'

For Rho's sake, I stayed to watch the third head being scanned and its neural states and patterns recorded. I kissed Rho's cheek, congratulated her and took the lift to the bridge. Again, the voices flowed around me, soft technical chatter from the chamber below, the technicians on the bridge above.

I went to my water tank room and collapsed. Strangely enough, I slept well.

Rho came into my room and woke me up at twelve hundred, eight hours after I'd dropped on to my bed. Obviously, she had not slept at all; her hair was matted with finger-tugs and rearrangement, her face shiny with long hours.

'We got a name on the number one unknown,' she said. 'It's a female, not a male, we think. But we haven't done chromosome check through their sensors. Irma located a few minutes of pre-death short-term memory and translated it into sound. We heard...' She suddenly wrinkled her face, as if about to cry, and then lifted her head and laughed. 'Micko, we heard a voice, it must have been a doctor, a voice speaking out loud, 'Inchmore, can you hear me? Evelyn? We need your permission ...'

'That's...' I couldn't find a good word.

'Yeah, amen,' Rho said, sitting on the edge of the bed, 'Evelyn Inchmore. I've sent a query to StarTime's trustees on Earth. Evelyn Inchmore, Evelyn Inchmore...' She spoke the name out loud several more times, her voice dropping in exhaustion and wonder. 'Do you know what this means, Micko?'

'Congratulations,' I said.

'It's the first time anybody has ever communicated with a corpsicle,' Rho said distantly.

'She hasn't answered back,' I said. 'You've just accessed her memories.' I shrugged my shoulders. 'She's still dead.' 'Yeah,' Rho said. 'Just accessed her memories. Wait a minute.' She looked up at me, startled by some inner realization. 'Maybe it's a male, after all. We thought the name was female... But didn't Evelyn used to be a male's name Wasn't there a male author centuries ago named Evelyn?'

'Evelyn Waugh,' I said. 'Long E.'

'We could have it all wrong again,' she said, too tired to build up much concern. 'I hope we can straighten it out before this goes to the press.'

My level of alertness went up several notches. 'Have you told Thomas what's happened?'

'Not yet,' she said.

'Rho, if word gets out that we've already accessed the heads... But who's going to stop Cailetet or Onnes from trumpeting this?'

'You think it would cause problems?' Rho asked.

I felt vaguely proud that finally I was starting to anticipate trouble, as Thomas would want me to. 'It would probably cook off the bomb,' I said.

'AU right, then. I don't want to cause more trouble than is absolutely necessary.' She looked at me with loving sympathy. 'You've been in a rough, Micko.'

'You heard what happened in Port Yin?'

'Thomas talked to me while you were shuttling home.' She pushed out her lips dubiously and shook her head.

'Fapping pol. Someone should impeach her and take away the Task-Felder charter.'

'I appreciate the sentiments, but neither is likely. Could you keep this quiet for a few more days?'

'I'll do my damnedest,' Rho said. 'Cailetet and Onnes are under contract. We control the release of the results, even if they get full scientific credit. I'll tell them we want to confirm with the Earth trustees, back up our findings, analyse the third unknown head ... work on a few known heads and see if the process is reliable.'

'What about Great-Grandmother and Great-Grandfather?' I asked.

Rho's smile was conspiratorial. 'We'll save them until later,' she said.

'We don't want to experiment on family, right?'

She nodded. 'When we're sure the whole thing works, we'll do something with Robert and Emilia. As for me, Micko, in a few minutes I'm going to get some induced sleep. Right after I lay down some rules to the Cailetet and Onnes folks. Now, William wants to talk with you.' 'About the interruptions?'

'I don't think so. He says work is going well.'

She hugged me tightly and then stood. 'To sleep,' she said.

'No dreams, I think...'

'No ancient voices,' I said. 'Right.'

William seemed tired but at peace, pleased with himself. He sat in the laboratory control centre, patting the QL thinker as if it were an old friend.

'It did me proud, Micko,' he said. 'It's tuned everything to a fare-thee-well. It keeps the universe's quantum bugs from nibbling at my settings, controls the rebuilt disorder pumps, anticipates virtual fluctuations and corrects for them. I'm all set now; all I have to do is bring the pumps to full capacity.' I tried to show enthusiasm, but couldn't. I felt sick at heart. The disaster in Port Yin, the upcoming council meeting, Rho's success with the first few heads ...

With a little time to think about what had happened, I reaked now that it all felt bad. Thomas was scrambling furiously to convince the council to reverse its action. And here I was, cut out of the drift of things, watching William gloat about an upcoming moment of triumph. William caught my mood and reached out to tap my hand.

'Hey,' he said. 'You're young. Fapping up is part of the game.'

I screwed my face up at first in anger, then in simple grief, and turned away, tears running down my cheeks. To have William name the card so openly -tapping up - was not what I needed right now. It was neither circumspect nor sensitive. 'Thank you so very much,' I said.

William kept tapping my hand until I jerked it away. 'I'm sorry, Micko,' he said, his tone unchanged - telling it like it is. 'I've never been afraid to admit when I've made a mistake. It nearly drives me nuts sometimes, making mistakes. I keep telling myself I should be perfect, but that isn't what we're here for. Perfection isn't an option for us; perfection is death, Micko. We're here to learn and change, and that means making mistakes.'

'Thanks for the lecture,' I said, glancing at him resentfully.

'I'm twelve years older than you are. I've made maybe twelve times more major mistakes. What can I tell you? That it gets any easier to fap up? Well, yes, it gets easier and easier with more and more responsibilities - but hell, Micko, it doesn't feel any better.'

'I can't just think of it as a mistake,' I said softly. 'I was betrayed. The president was dishonest and underhanded.' William leaned back in his chair and shook his head, incredulous. 'Hay-soos, Micko. Who expects anything different? That's what politics is all about - coercion and lies.,

Suddenly my anger reached white heat. 'Goddamn it, no, that isn't what politics is all about, William, and people thinking that it is has gotten us into this mess!'

'I don't understand.'

'Politics is management and guidance and feedback, William. We seem to have forgotten that on the Moon.

Politics is the art of managing large groups of people in good times and bad. When the people know what they want and when they don't know what they want. 'Cut the politics. - - .' Hay-soos yourself, William!' I waved my arm out and shook my fist in the air. 'You can't get rid of politics, any more than you can...' I struggled to find a metaphor. 'Any more than you can cut out manners and talking and all the other ways we interact.'

'Thanks for the lecture, Micko,' William said, not unpleasantly.

I dropped my fist on the table.

'What you're Saying is, the whole Moon is screwing this up,' William said. 'I agree. And the Task-Felder BM is leading us all into temptation. But my point is, I'm never going to be a politician or an administrator. Present company excepted, I hate the breed, Micko. They're put on this Moon to stand in my way. This council stuff only reinforces my prejudices. So what can you do about it?' He looked at me with frank inquiry.

'I can wise up,' I said. 'I can be a better ... administrator, Politician.'

William smiled ironically. 'More devious? Play their own game?'

I shook my head. Deviousness and playing the Task-Felder game were not what I meant. I was thinking of some more idealistic superiority, playing within the ethical boundaries as well as the law.

William continued. 'We can plan ahead for the worst yet to come. They might cut off our resources, beyond just stopping other BMs from helping us. We can survive an interdict for some time, maybe even forge a separate business 4fimce within the Triple.'

:That would be ... very dangerous,' I said.

If we're forced into it, what can we do? We have business interests all over the Triple. We have to survive.'

The Q-L toned softly on the platform. 'Temperature stability is broken,' it said.

William jerked up in his chair. 'Report,' he said.

'Unknown effect has caused temperature to rotate in unknown phase. The cells have no known temperature at this time.'

'What's that mean?' I asked.

William grabbed his thinker remote and pushed through the curtain to the bridge. He walked out to the Cavity and I followed, glad to have an interruption. The Cailetet and Onnes techs had retired to get some rest; the Ice Pit was quiet.

'What's wrong?' I asked.

'I don't know,' William said in a low voice, concentrating on the Cavity's status display. 'There are drains on four of the eight cells. The QL refuses to interpret temperature readings. QL, please explain.'

The remote said, 'Phase rotation in lambda. Fluctuation between banks of four cells.'

'Shit,' William said. 'Now the other four cells are absorbing, and the first four are stable. QL, do you have any idea what's happening here?' He looked up at me with a worried expression.

'Second bank is now in down cycle of rotation. Up cycle in three seconds.'

'It's reversed,' William said after the short interval had passed. 'Back and forth. QL, what's causing a power drain?' 'Temperature maintenance,' the QL said.

'Explain, please,' William pursued with waning patience.

'Energy is being accepted by the phase down cells in an attempt to maintain temperature.'

'Not by the refrigerators or the pumps?'

'It is necessary to put energy directly into the cells in the form of microwave radiation to try to maintain temperature.' 'I don't understand, QL.'

'I apologize,' the QL said. 'The cells accept radiation to remain stable, but they have no temperature this thinker can interpret.'

'We have to raise the temperature?' William guessed, face slack with incredulity.

'Phase down reversal,' the QL said.

'QL, the temperatures have jumped to below absolute zero?'

'That is an interpretation, although not a very good one.' William swore and stood back from the Cavity.

The QL reported, 'All eight cells have stabilized in lambda phase down. Fluctuation has stopped.'

William went pale. 'Micko, tell me I'm not dreaming.'

'I don't know what the hell you're doing,' I said, starting to become frightened.

'The cells are draining microwave energy and maintaining a stable temperature. Christ, they must be accessing new spin dimensions, radiating into a direction outside status geometry... Does that mean they're operating in negative time? Micko, if any of Rho's outsiders have messed with the lab, or if their goddamn equipment is causing this...' He balled his fists up and shook them at the darkness above. 'God help them! I was this close, Micko... All I had to do was connect the pumps, align the cells, turn the magnetic fields off... I was going to do that tomorrow.'

'I don't think anybody's messed with your equipment,' I told him, trying to calm him. 'These are pros, William, and besides, Rho would kill them.'

William lowered his head and swung it back and forth helplessly. 'Micko, something has to be wrong. Negative temperature is meaningless.'

'It didn't say temperatures were negative,' I reminded him.

'This thinker does not interpret the data,' the QL chimed in.

'That's because you're a coward,' William accused it.

'This thinker does not relay false interpretation,' it responded.

Suddenly, William laughed, a rocking, angry laugh that seemed to hurt. He opened his eyes wide and patted the QL remote with gritted-teeth paternalism. 'Micko, as God is my witness, nothing on this Moon is ever easy, no?'

'Maybe you've got something even more important than absolute zero,' I suggested. 'A new state of matter.'

The idea sobered him. 'That...' He ran his hand through his hair, making it even more unruly. 'A big idea, that.'

'Need help?' I asked.

'I need time to think,' he said softly. 'Thanks, Micko. I need time without interruptions ... a few hours at least.' 'I can't guarantee anything,' I said.

He squinted at me. 'I'll let you know if I've discovered something big, okay? Now get out of here.' He pushed me gently along the bridge.

The Council Room was circular, panelled with lunar farm oak, centrally lighted, with a big antique display screen at one end, lovingly preserved from the year of the council's creation. Politicians like to keep an eye on each other; no comers, no chairs facing away from the centre.

I shuffled in behind Thomas and two freelance advocates from Port Yin, hired by Thomas to offer him extrafamilial advice. Within the Triple it has often been said that lunar advocates are the very worst money can rent; there is some truth to that, but Thomas still felt the need of an objective and critical point of view.

The room was mostly empty. Three representatives had already taken their seats - interestingly enough, they were from Cailetet, Onnes and Nernst BMs. Other representatives talked in the hall outside the room. The president and her staff would not enter until just before the meeting began.

The council thinker, a large, antique terrestrial model encased in grey ceramic, rested below the president's dais at the north end of the room. Thomas nudged me as we sat, pointed at the thinker and said, 'Don't underestimate an old machine. That son of a glitch has more experience in this room than anybody. But it's the president's tool, not ours; it will not contradict the president, and it will not speak out against her.'

We sat quietly while the room slowly filled. At the appointed time of commencement, Fiona Task-Felder entered through a door behind the president's dais, Janis

Granger and three council advocates in train.

I knew many of the BM representatives. I had spoken to ten or fifteen of them over the years while doing research for my minor; others I knew by sight from lunar news reports and council broadcasts. They were honourable women and men all; I thought we might not do so badly here after all.

Thomas's expression revealed a less favourable opinion.

The Ice Pit controversy was not first on the council agenda. There were matters of who would get contracts to parent lucrative volatiles supply deliveries from the outer planets; who had rights in a BM border dispute to sell aluminium and tungsten mining claims to Richter BM, the huge and generally silent tri-family merger that had taken over most lunar mining operations. These problems were discussed by the representatives in a way that struck me as exemplary. Resolutions were reached, contracts vetted and cleared, shares assigned. The president remained silent most of the time. When she did speak, her words were well-chosen and to the point. She impressed me.

Thomas seemed to sink into his chair, chin in hand, grey hair in disarray. He glanced at me once, gave me something like a leer, and retreated into glum contemplation.

Our two outside advocates sat plumbline in their chairs, hardly blinking.

Janis Granger read out the next item on the agenda: 'Inter-family disputes regarding purchase by Sandoval BM of human remains from terrestrial preservation societies.' Societies. That was a subtlety that could speak volumes of misinterpretation. Thomas closed his eyes, opened them again after a long moment.

'The representative from Gorrie BM would like to address this issue,' the president said. 'Chair allots five minutes to Achmed Bani Sadr of Gorrie BM.'

Thomas straightened, leaned forward. Bani Sadr stood with slate held at waist-level for prompting.

'The syndics of Gorrie BM have expressed some concern over the strain on Triple relations this purchase might provoke. As the major transportation utility between Earth and Moon, and on many translunar links, our business would be very adversely affected by any shift in terrestrial attitudes ...'

And so it began. Even I in my naivety could see that this had been brilliantly orchestrated. One by one, politely, the BMs stood in council and voiced their collective concern. Earth had rattled its pocketbooks at us; Mars had chided us for rocking the Triple boat in a time of economic instability, The United States of the Western Hemisphere had voted to restrict lunar trade if this matter was not resolved to its satisfaction.

Thomas's expression was intense, sorrowful but alert. He had not been inactive. Cailetet had expressed an interest in pursuing potentially very lucrative, even revolutionary, research on the deceased; Onnes BM testified that there was no conceivable way these heads could be resurrected and made active members of society within the next twenty years; the technology simply did not yet exist, despite decades of promising research.

Surprisingly, the representative from Gorrie BM reversed himself and expressed an interest in the medical aspects of this research; he asked how long such work might take to mature, in a business sense, but the president - not unreasonably - ruled that this was beyond the scope of the present discussion.

The representative from Richter BM expressed sympathy for Sandoval's attempts to open a new field of lunar business, but said that disturbances in lunar raw materials supply lines to Earth could be disastrous in the short term. 'If Earth boycotts lunar minerals, the outer planets can supply them almost immediately, and we lose one-third of our gross lunar export business.'

Thomas requested time to speak in reply. The president granted him ten minutes to state Sandoval's case.

He conferred briefly with the advocates. They nodded agreement to several whispered comments, and he stood, slate at waist-level, the formal posture in this room, to begin his reply.

'Madam President, honoured Representatives, I'll be brief, and I'll be blunt. I am ashamed of these proceedings, and I am ashamed that this council has been so blind as to make them necessary. I have never, in my thirty-nine years of service to the Sandoval BM, and in my seventy-five years of lunar citizenship, felt the anguish I feel now, knowing what is about to happen. Knowing what is about to be done to lunar ideals in the name of expediency.

'Sandoval BM has made an entirely reasonable business transaction with a fully authorized terrestrial legal entity. For reasons none of us can fathom, Task-Felder BM, and Madam President, have raised a flare of protest and carefully planned and executed a series of manoeuvres to force an autonomous lunar family to divest itself of legally acquired resources. To my knowledge, this has never before been attempted in the history of the Moon.'

'You speak of actions not yet taken, perhaps not even contemplated,' the president said.

Thomas looked around the room and smiled. 'Madam President, I address those who have already received their instructions.'

'Are you accusing the president of participating in this so-called conspiracy?' Fiona Task-Felder continued.

Calls of 'Let him speak', 'Let him have his say'. She nodded and motioned for Thomas to resume.

'I have not much more to say, but to recount a tale of masterful politics, conducted by an extralunar organization across the solar system, in support of a policy that has nothing to do with lunar well-being or business. Even my assistant, Mickey Sandoval, has been trapped into giving testimony on private family affairs, through a ruse involving an old council law not invoked since its creation. My fellow citizens, he will testify under protest if this council so wishes - but think of the precedent! Think of the power you give to this council, and to those who have the skills to manipulate it - skills which we have not ourselves acquired, and are not likely to acquire, because such activity goes against our basic nature. We are naive weaklings in such a fight, and because of our weakness, our lack of foresight and planning, we will give in, and my family's activities will be interfered with, perhaps even forbidden - all because a religious organization, based on our home planet, does not wish us to do things we have every legal right to do. I voice my protest now, that it may be put in the record before the council votes. Our shame will be complete by day's end, Madam President, and I will not wish to show my face in these chambers thereafter.'

The president's face was cold and pale. 'Do you accuse me, or my chartered BM, of being controlled by extralunar interests?'

Thomas, who had sat quickly after his short talk, stood again, looked around the council and nodded curtly. 'I do.'

'It is not traditional to libel one's fellow BMs in this council,' the president said.

Thomas did not answer.

'I believe I must reply to the charge of manipulation. At my invitation, Mickey Sandoval came to Port Yin to render voluntary testimony to the president. Under old council rules, designed to prevent the president from keeping information that rightfully should be given to the council, the president has the duty to request testimony be given to the council as a whole. If that is manipulation, then I am guilty.' Our first extrafamilial advocate stood up beside Thomas. 'Madam President, a tape of Mickey Sandoval's visit to your office is sufficient to fulfil the requirements of that rule.'

'Not according to the council thinker's interpretation,' the president said. 'Please render your judgment.'

The thinker spoke. 'The spirit of the rule is to encourage more open testimony to the council than to the president in private meetings. A voluntary report to the president implies willingness to testify in full to the council. Such testimony must always be voluntary, and not under threat of subpoena.' Its deep, resonating voice left the council room in silence.

'So much for our auto counsellors,' the first advocate muttered to Thomas. Again he addressed the council. 'Mickey Sandoval's testimony was solicited under guise of casual conversation. He was not aware he would later be forced to divulge family business matters to the entire council.'

'The president's conversations on council matters can hardly be called casual. I am not concerned with your assistant's lack of education,' the president said. 'This council deserves to hear Sandoval BM's plans for these deceased individuals.'

'In God's name, why?' Thomas stood, jaw outthrust. 'Who asks these questions? Why is private Sandoval business of concern to anybody but us?'

The president did not react as strongly to this outburst as I expected. I cringed, but Fiona Task-Felder said, 'The freedom of any family to swing its fist ends at our nose. How the inquiry has arisen is irrelevant; what is relevant is the damage that might occur to lunar interests. Is that enough, Mr Sandoval-Rice?'

Thomas sat down without answering. I looked at him curiously; how much of this was show, how much loss of control? Seeing his expression, I realized that show and inner turmoil were one. Only then did I understand, gut-level, that he knew things I did not know, and that our situation was truly desperate. Thomas was a consummate and seasoned professional syndic, a true lunar citizen in the old sense of concerned and responsible free spirit, quickly losing his few illusions as to power and government and lunar politics.

I turned my gaze to the president's dais, to Fiona Task-Felder, feeling for the first time a flash of real hatred. I date my present self to that moment; it was as if I had been reborn, more cynical, more calculating, sharper, no longer young. My hands trembled. I made them still, wiped their dampness on my pants, swiftly calculated what I might give in testimony and what I might withhold.

The representative from Richter BM stood and was recognized by Janis Granger. 'Madam President, I move that we have Mr Mickey Sandoval stand forward and testify, as required by the rules, but that Mr Sandoval's testimony be restricted to those areas that will not reveal information that could adversely affect future profit potential for his family. That is, should this council vote to allow the project to continue.'

Thomas's expression brightened the merest of a mere. I hoped for the president to falter, to acknowledge this limitation to her success, but she hardly blinked an eye before saying, 'Is there a second?'

Cailetet and Nernst reps seconded in unison. A quick vote was taken and the decision was unanimous; even the Task-Felder rep joined the flow.

This was the first block in the path of the juggernaut. It was a small block; it was quickly crushed; but it provided us with an immense amount of needed relief.

I testified, following an outline quickly prepared by Thomas and vetted by the advocates; the council listened attentively. I did not discuss our success in deciphering some of the mental contents of one of the dead.

The Task-Felder rep stood at the end of my testimony and urged the council to vote now on whether our project would continue. The motion was seconded. Thomas did not object or ask for delay.

Cailetet, Nernst and Onnes voted for the project to continue.

The remaining fifty-one reps voted for the project to be shut down.

History was made, political paradigms shifted, all according to the rules.

After adjournment, Thomas and I went out to a Port Yin pub and sat over two schooners of fresh ale, saying very little for the first five minutes.

'Not so bad,' Thomas commented after draining the last of his glass. 'We didn't go down in glorious flames. Bless massive old Richter; draw and quarter us, but leave us our dignity before we're spiked.'

'I don't want to tell Rho,' I said.

'She already knows, Mickey. My office has called the Ice Pit. She wants to talk with you, but I don't want you to talk to anyone until we chat a while. All right?'

I nodded.

'Do I detect a change in your attitudes?' Thomas asked gently.

I smiled. 'Yes. And in yours?'

'I'm not as good a syndic as you might believe, Micko.' He waved off my weak objection. 'Save it for your memoirs. I couldn't stop this. But I can delay the results. The council is going to have to design a plan for us, some way to end the project with minimal loss of resources. That will take a few weeks, and I don't think Task-Felder Fiona or her BM can speed things up. I'll make sure they don't, if I have to resort to assassination.'

He didn't smile. In my present frame of mind, I didn't care whether he was serious or not.

'You know, Micko, I've always had my doubts about this project. I think the reasons we lost in the council are less political and more psychological, perhaps even mystical. Deep down, I think they believe - and maybe even I believe - we're interfering where we shouldn't. If Rho succeeds, it's going to change a lot of things. We're a peculiar kind of conservative lot here on the Moon, spiritually, however much we keep our religious observances to ourselves.'

'She has,' I said.

'She has what?'

'Succeeded. They have, actually.'

'Yes?'

'They've accessed a head. They're working on a second head now. We know their names. We-'

My face contorted and I shivered, cursed, half-stood. Something walked over my future grave; I almost literally saw a ghost sitting beside us at the table, the image of an immensely fat Pharaoh covered with ice, watching us all balefully. Thomas reached out to take hold of my arm and I sat. The ghost was gone.

'Don't lose it now, Mickey,' Thomas said. Other customers stared at us. 'What's wrong?'

'Christ, I don't know. Thomas, I've got to go back. To the

Ice Pit. Something just occurred to me, something really bad.'

'Can you tell me?'

'Hell, no,' I said, shaking my head. 'It's too stupid and wild. But I have to go back.' I stood. 'Please forgive me. It's a hunch, a ridiculous hunch.'

'You're forgiven,' Thomas said, and credited the tab to his personal account.

I caught the regular Ice Pit shuttle; luck and the timetable were on my side. I was in a fever of inspired unease. I could not shake my theory. My head spun with disbelief; this could not be, yet it all fitted together so smoothly, yet again the chances were more than astronomical; and I realized that if I were wrong, and I had to be, no doubt about it, I wouldn't be worthy of my position in the Sandoval BM. I would have to resign. If I played such wild hunches, if I could become so obsessed by them, I was a useless crank.

We flew over the external generation plant, a bright red building against pale grey dust and rock. The shuttle banked over the Ice Pit radiators, hunkering in their shadowy trenches, glowing dull red-orange as they broadcast heat into the darkness of space.

We landed and I disembarked, small case in hand. I was eight hours past reasonable sleep time but did not stop to stimulate or simulate. I barely took time to drop my case off in my water tank.

I rang up Rho, waking her.

'Have they pulled their equipment yet?' I asked.

'Who?' she responded sleepily. 'Stolbart and Cailetet-Davis? No. They're waiting to get orders from their BMs. Thomas said you'd fill me in on some things - he was going to talk with you.'

'Yes, well there are delays, and I have to do some research. Have you accessed the third head yet?'

'We've downloaded some patterns, but they're not translated. This mess has kind of put a crimp in our enthusiasm, Micko.'

'I understand. Rho, get them to translate what you have.' 'You sound a bit crazed, brother. Don't take this personally. This is my screw-up, not yours. Tulips, remember?'

'Just get those patterns translated. Please. Humour me.' I leaned back in my chair, stunned by all that was happening, assessing my position, our position, if my hunch was correct.

Then I began yet more research. There was no way around it - what I needed to know would very likely be found only on Earth, and it would cost me dearly.

I would charge it to my personal account.

I crossed the white line six hours later. I still hadn't slept. My world of warrens and alleys and water tanks and volcanic bubbles and bridges and force disorder pumps was taking on a quality of bitter dream; I do not know why I felt William was the still point in the centre of my life, but he was, and I needed above all else to find out how his project was proceeding. There seemed something almost holy and pure in his quest, above human conflict; I sensed I could take comfort in his presence, in his words.

But William himself was not comfortable. He looked a wreck. He, too, had not slept. I entered the laboratory, ignoring the soft voices from the chamber below, and found him standing by the QL thinker, eyes closed, lips moving as if in prayer. He opened his eyes and faced me with a jerk of his shoulders and head. 'Christ,' he said softly. 'Are they done down there?'

I shook my head. 'I'm afraid I've set them on to something new.'

'I heard you've been checkmated,' he said.

I shrugged. 'And you?'

'My opponent is far more subtle than any human conspiracy,' he said. 'I've gone so far as to be able to switch between plus and minus.' He chuckled. 'I can access this new state at will, but there's real resistance to reaching the no-man's-land between. I have the QL cogitating now. It's been working five hours on the problem.'

'What's the problem?' I asked.

'Micko, I haven't even engaged the force disorder pumps to achieve this new state. No magnetic field cut-off, no special efforts - just a sudden jerk-down to this negative state, absorbing energy to maintain an undefined temperature.'

'But why?'

'The best the QL can come up with is we're approaching some key event that sends signals back in time, affecting our experiment now.'

'So neither of you know what's actually happened?'

He shook his head. 'It's not only undefined, it's incomprehensible. Even the QL is befuddled by it and can't give me straight answers.'

I sat on the edge of the QL's platform and caressed the machine with an open palm as if in sympathy. 'Everything's screwed, top to bottom,' I said. 'The centre cannot hold.'

'Ah, Micko - there's the question. What is the centre? What is this event we're approaching that can reach subtle fingers back and befuddle us now?'

I smiled. 'We're a real pair of loons,' I said.

'Speak for yourself,' William said defensively, prickly. 'I'll solve this dustover, by God, Micko.' He pointed down. 'Solve your little problem, and I'll solve mine.'

As if on cue, Rho stood in the open laboratory door, face ashen. 'Mickey,' she said. 'How did you know?'

The shock of confirmation - and confirmation was not in doubt - made me tremble. I glanced at William. 'A little ghost told me. A fat nightmare on ice.'

'We don't have too much translated,' she said. 'But we know his name.'

'What are you talking about?' William asked.

'Our third unknown,' I explained. 'We have three unknown heads below, three among four hundred and ten. Alleged bad record-keeping.'

'Do you know something, Mickey?' Rho asked.

'There were four Logologists employed by StarTime Preservation between 2079 and 2094,' I said. 'Two worked in records, two were in administration. None were ever given access to the heads themselves; they were kept in cold vaults in Denver.'

'You think they screwed up the records?'

'It was the most they could manage.'

'It's so cynical,' Rho said. 'I can't believe such a thing. It would be like our ... trying to kill Robert and Emilia. It's sickening.'

William uttered a wordless curse of frustration. 'Dammit, Rho, what are you talking about?,

'We know why we're having such problems with Task-Felder. I've hit the jackpot, William. I've brought a real wolf into our fold. I apologize.'

'What wolf?'

'K. D. Thierry,' I said, the breath going out of me. I didn't know whether I might laugh or cry.

'You've got him down there?' William asked.

Rho and I hugged each other and laughed, near hysteria. 'Kimon David Thierry,' Rho said when we had recovered. She wiped her eyes. 'Mickey, you're brilliant. But it still doesn't make sense. Why are they so afraid of him?'

I spread my arms. I couldn't come up with an immediate answer.

'The Logologist himself?' William still couldn't grasp the whole of the truth.

Rho sat and put her legs up on the QL stand. She leaned her head back. 'William, could you get my neck, please? I'm going to twist my head off with a muscle cramp if someone doesn't massage me soon.'

William stood behind her and rubbed her neck.

'What are we going to do, Micko?' Rho asked.

'They're afraid of him because they think we can access secrets, truths,' I said, finally articulating what I had known for hours. 'We can look into his memories, his private thoughts. They suppose if we go far enough, we can access what he was thinking when he wrote their great books, when he organized their faith ... '

'They know he was a fraud,' Rho said. 'They're doing all this because they know they're living a lie. I can't believe how cynical that is.'

'They're managers,' I said. 'They're Politicians, shepherds of their flock.'

'Cut the politics',' William said. 'Rho, you've stirred a snake pit.'

'Ice Pit. Frozen snakes. Heaven save us,' she said, and I think she meant it as a genuine request.

'A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country.' Matthew.' William seemed to surprise himself with his own erudition. 'Do you think Fiona Task-Felder wants Thierry disposed of'

'She may not even know,' I said. 'She's been given orders from Earth. All the puppets are dancing because somebody high in the Church of Logology knew all along where Thierry was, knew that he had had himself frozen by StarTime upon his death... That his cremation was a hoax, not to mention his joining the Ascended Masters as a galaxy roaming spirit.'

'Then why didn't they outbid me on Earth?' Rho asked. 'Why didn't the Logologists buy StarTime decades ago and bury dead meat?'

'You can't buy what somebody refuses to sell.' I took out my slate and scrolled through a list of names and biographies, from public records and old Triple Financial Disclosure files. Any individual or group on Earth who had invested in Triple enterprises in the late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries had had to file extensive disclosures with suspicious and reluctant terrestrial authorities. Those had been the bad old days of embargoes and the Split.

StarTime Preservation Society had maintained a wide folio of investments, including investments in the Triple. 'Here's my prime suspect,' I said. 'His name was Frederick Jones. He was director of StarTime from 2097 until his death four years ago. He was a lapsed Logologist. In fact, he had sued the Church for thirty million dollars in 2090. He lost. Did StarTime select its bidders?'

'They could have,' Rho said.

'Jones probably knew that K. D. Thierry was a member of StarTime. He might not have known where he was, since he seemed at no particular pains to straighten out the records after the Logologist employees scrambled them. Think of what qualms Jones must have had, protecting the man he most hated from his own church ...

'To fulfil the contracts with Thierry, Jones's successors locked the Church out of the bidding, allowing only legitimate concerns. Jones had fought them off for decades. I'd say that eventually the Church just gave up. There didn't seem to be any scientific breakthroughs on the horizon. The heads were just frozen meat. No foreseeable threat. New church directors came into power. Memories lapsed. Then they discovered what had happened. It's all supposition, but it makes sense.'

'Pandora came along,' Rho said. 'Pandora of the tulips. What are we going to do, Mickey?'

'Obviously, we're legally required to defend the interests of these corpsicles - but I'm not sure under what law. Earth law and Triple law don't exactly mesh, let alone Earth law and lunar law.'

'What about Robert and Emilia?' Rho asked. 'If we're forced to divest, what happens to them?'

The QL thinker interrupted us with a gentle chiming. 'William, a comprehensible stability has returned. All cells are stable at ten to the minus twentieth Kelvin. No energy input is required to maintain stability.'

William stopped his massage. 'Don't think me unconcerned,' he said, 'but this means I can get back to work.' 'I haven't even kept track of what you're doing,' Rho told him sorrowfully.

'No fear,' he said, bending over to kiss her on the forehead. I had never seen William more gentle, more sympathetic with Rho, and I was touched. 'So long as I'm left alone most of the time, I'll get my own work done. Save Robert and Emilia. This family is important to me, too.'

I told Thomas about our discovery ten minutes later. He hardly reacted at all - the family meeting was to be that evening, his job was in the balance and he was thinking.

'The family syndics voted full confidence,' Thomas told me over the phone early in the morning. 'They've left this matter entirely in my hands.' He had left his vid off. I interpreted this to mean that he looked too tired, too defeated, to be seen by an underling; his voice confirmed my suspicion. 'I wish to hell they'd kicked me out and taken over, Mickey, but they've got their own work to do at a higher level.'

'That means they have confidence in you,' I said.

'No,' he said slowly. 'Not at all, Mickey. Think. What does it really mean?'

I considered for a moment. 'They think Sandoval BM, under your direction, can't do much more damage than we've already done, and the other family syndics will work behind the scenes with the BMs and the council to patch things up.'

'Give Mickey long enough, and he gets the answer,' Thomas said.

'But that doesn't make sense, not entirely,' I said, my voice rising at this sting. 'Why not tell us to just butt out?'

Thomas suddenly switched on his vid. He looked ten years older and exhausted, but his eyes were twin points of fever brightness. 'I didn't tell them about Thierry, Mickey. We're going to try one more thing. You think the president doesn't know why she's been ordered to shut down our project. Well. why don't we tell her? Better yet, Mickey, why don't you play the cocky little bastard and tell her yourself?'

If he had been in the room with me, I might have reached out and hit him. 'You're the bastard,' I said. 'You're a goddamned sanctimonious and cruel old bastard.'

'That's what I want, Mickey: conviction,' he said. 'I'm putting a lot of faith in you. I think this will shock the lunar Logologists into a useful confusion. The leaders of the Church are counting on our not knowing; if we don't know, Fiona and the lunar branch won't know. Let's upset the balance of ignorance.'

I was still angry enough to keep my finger on the cut-off. But his words and his plan started to become clear to me. 'You want me to play the upstart again,' I said.

'You got it, Mickey. Angry. Insulted. I've just fired you. Tell Fiona Task-Felder that we know we have Thierry, and that we're going to debrief his head unless they back off., 'Thomas, that's ... a little scary.'

'I think it will knock Fiona into a stupor and give us some much-needed time. You know what the next step is, Mickey?'

'We announce it to the solar system.'

Thomas laughed out loud. 'Damn you to hell, my boy, you're getting the hang of it now. We could set the Logologists back fifty years. 'Church seeks to destroy remains of prophet and founder.'' His hands ascribed lit headlines. 'I think Sandoval's directors are correct to leave this to us, don't you?'

I felt like a rat in a hole. 'If you say so, Thomas.'

'We have our orders. Sic her, Mickey.'

I waited thirty hours, just to give myself time to think, to feel my way through to some independence from Thomas. I was not at all sure he hadn't broken under this strain. The thought of calling the president, after my last defeat at her hands, was nauseating. I thought of all the poor idiots throughout human history who had been caught in political traps, logistical traps, traps of any kind; all rats in a common hole.

I felt myself growing older. I didn't see it as an improvement.

And who was behind it all? Whom could I blame?

Ultimately, one man who had started a strangely secular church, attracting people good and bad, faithful and cynical, starting an organization too large and too well financed and organized to simply fade: promulgating a series of lies become sacred truths. How often had that happened in human history, and how many had suffered and died?

I had dipped into records of past prophets during my Earth research. Zarathustra. Jesus. Mohammed. Shabbetai Tzevi, the seventeenth-century Turkish Jew who had claimed to be Messiah, and who in the end had apostatized and become a Moslem. Al Mahdi, who had defeated the British at Khartoum. Joseph Smith, who had read the Word of God from golden tablets with special glasses, and Brigham Young. Dozens of nineteenth and twentieth century founders of radical branches of Christianity and Islam. The nameless, faceless prophet of the Binary Millennium. And all the little ones since, the pretenders whose religions had eventually foundered, the charlatans of small talent, of skewed messages too foul even for human mass consumption. To which rank did Thierry belong?

I swung back from this dark vision, asking myself how much such humans had contributed to human philosophy and order, to civilization. Judaism, Christianity and Islam had ordered and divided the Western world. I myself admired Jesus.

But what I had learned about Thierry made it impossible for me to give him top rank. He had been petty, a philanderer, a malicious prosecutor of those who had fallen from his grace. He had written ridiculous laws to govern the lives of his followers. He had been cruel and intemperate. Eventually, instead of going on a galactic cruise and joining the Ascended Masters, as he had claimed he would do upon 'discorporation', Thierry had been frozen by StarTime Preservation. He had donated his head to the ages, in the hopes of a purely secular immortality.

I visited the Ice Pit and rode the elevator to the chamber. Stolbart and Cailetet-Davis had been recalled, finally, but they had left their equipment in place, since the recall was tentative, pending final disposition of the project.

Rho had been instructed in some of the fundamentals of the instruments. She could play back the recordings already made, and with some effort make crude translations of other patterns.

We sat in the near-silence, squatting on the steel decking. Rho cursed and fumbled her way through the equipment settings.

'I'm going to have to interpret some of this,' Rho said.

'The translations aren't perfect.'

We listened to Kimon Thierry's last few minutes of conscious memory. There were, as yet, no visual translations. The sound that came from the equipment was distorted, human voices barely recognizable.

Mr Thierry, a ... [crackling whicker] longtime friend of Mrs Winston...'

'We think he's talking on the phone,' Rho explained.

'Yes, I know her. What's she want?'

That was Thierry himself, speaking aloud, heard from within his own head: voice deeper and more resonant.

'She's asked about the [something] logos point meeting in January. Is there going to be an XYZ mind discourse?'

'I don't see why not. Who is she? Not another bitch from the Staten Island instrumentality, is she?'

'No, sir She's a platinum contributor. She brought her five children to the Taos Campus Logos in September ...'

'Just day-to-day business,' Rho suggested. She rested her chin in her hands, squatting lotus on the floor, elbows on knees, as I remembered her sitting when she was a young girl. She looked at me with a be-patient expression; more coming.

'Tell her the mind discourse takes a lot of my mental energy. If I'm going to hold an XYZ, we'll need ten new contributors, each at the Platinum level Takes a lot of energy to contact the lost gods. ' Even through his own filter, Thierry sounded more than just physically tired; he sounded like a man trapped in boredom, mouthing the words with no hope for relief 'Can you guarantee contact with them?,

''at in hell kind of question is that?'

'Sir, I mean, do you have the wherewithal? Your health hasn't been that good recently. The last logos point... '

'Tell Mrs What's-her-name I'll have her swimming in Delta Wisdom, I'll have the gods evacuate her mental sinuses back to her conception. Tell her whatever she needs to be convinced to work for us- We need ten new Platinums. What the hell else have you got? I

'I'm sorry to upset you, Mr Thierry, but Id like this to go well-'

'I appreciate your concern, but I know what my strength is now, I rest ... on my own theos charge. What else? Ahhh ..

'Sir?' [Distorted.]

A long groan, followed by sharp clatters, other voices in his immediate vicinity, one female voice coming to the fore, 'Kimon, Kimon, what's wrong?'

No answer from Thierry, just another groan; something like plumbing rattling, fireworks exploding in a muffled room. The same female voice barely audible over Thierry's final memories of a drastically failing body: 'Kimon, what is this-'

And Thierry's final words, issued in a whispered moan,

'Get Peter.'

The translation ended and Rho shut off the tape.

We stared at each other without speaking for a moment. 'I can see ... why some people think this is wrong,' I said quietly. 'I can see maybe why the Logologists on Earth wouldn't want this.'

'It's a real intrusion, not like just opening a diary,' Rho admitted.

'We should seal them off until they can be resurrected,' I said. Rho looked away, at the neat tiers of steel boxes stretching around the curve of the chamber, at the Cailetet and Onnes equipment stacked beside us.

'We have to have courage,' she said. 'And if we're allowed to continue, we have to work out our own ethics. We're the first to do this. It isn't wrong, I think, but it is dangerous.'

'Rho, I'm exhausted by this whole thing. We could call Task-Felder and offer to give them Thierry. Let them have what they want.'

'What do you think they'd do?' Rho asked.

I bit my lower lip and shrugged. 'They'd send him back to Earth, probably. Let the directors decide whether he should be ...'

'Released,' Rho suggested. 'To join the Ascended Masters.'

'He doesn't have any descendants, any family I could discover ... Just the Logologists.'

'And they don't want him,' Rho said.

'They don't want anybody else to have him,' I said.

She unwound from her lotus and got to her knees, turning off the power on the translator. 'Do you agree with Thomas's plan?'

I didn't move or speak for a moment, not wanting to commit myself 'We need the time.' 'Mickey, Sandoval has signed for the whole lot, a binding agreement. We have to protect them, keep them, all of them ... and if there's a way to revive them, we have to do that, too.'

'All right,' I said. 'I don't think I was being serious, anyway.'

'I wish Robert and Emilia had chosen another preservation society,' she said. 'Hell, I wish I'd never heard about StarTime.'

'Amen,' I said.

I hate duplicity. Thomas's plan was the best; at least, I could think of no better. We were being forced to the wall, and desperate measures were necessary, but I didn't like what I was about to do: play the clumsy innocent with Fiona Task-Felder. Smell like meat before the wolf.

Again, I took the shuttle to Port Yin. I did not visit Thomas's offices, however; we had planned things in advance by phone two hours before I left, with contingencies, prevarications, fallbacks.

The first part of the plan was for me to arrive at the office of the president unannounced; defeated and out of a job, straying from the established course of the elders in my family. I mussed my hair, put on a strained look and entered the president's reception area, asking in a halting voice for an audience with Fiona Task-Felder.

The receptionist knew who I was and asked me to take a seat. He did not appear to speak to Fiona or to type anything; I assume she was simply notified there was someone interesting out front and that I was being scanned by hidden camera. I acted my part with some flair, appearing ill-at-ease.

The receptionist turned to me after a moment and said, 'The president will have time to meet with you later this afternoon. Could you be back here by fifteen?'

I said that I could. I lost three hours and returned. This round of the dance was going well; the preliminary steps, the shufflings and determinations of who would lead, who would follow.

I walked the long corridor to the president's inner sanctum. The young women were still shifting files. The replay was hauntingly exact. They smiled at me. I half-heartedly returned their smiles.

The door to the president's office opened, and there sat the fit, blue-eyed Madam President behind her desk, hands folded, prepared to accept surrender and nothing else.

'Please sit,' she said. 'What can I do for you, Mr Sandoval?' 'I'm taking a big risk,' I said. 'You must know that I've been reassigned ... Fired. But I feel there's still some room for negotiation ...'

'Negotiation between who?'

'Myself ... and you,' I said.

'Whom are you representing, Mr Sandoval? Whom do you think I represent? The council, or my binding multiple?' I smiled weakly. 'That doesn't matter to me, now.' 'It matters to me. If you wish to speak to the president of the council, I'm all ears. If you wish to speak to the Task-Felder BM-'

'I want to talk to you. I need to tell you something..

She lifted her eyes to the ceiling. 'You've screwed up before, Mr Sandoval. Apparently it's cost you dearly. Family BMs are dens of nepotism and incompetence. Do you have your syndics' authorization?'

'No, I don't.'

'It does neither of us any good for you to be here, then.' 'You used me before ...' I began. Real anger and nervousness added a conviction to my act I could not have faked. 'I'm trying to redeem myself before our syndics, our director, and to give you a chance, some information you might want to know...'

She looked me over shrewdly, not unkindly, wolf surveying a highly suspect meal. 'Would you be willing to testify before the council? Tell them whatever you're about to tell me?' Thomas was right.

'I'd prefer not to ..'

'I will not listen to you unless you are willing to testify, in open session.'

'Please.'

'That's my requirement, Mickey. It would be best if you consulted with your syndics before you went any further.' She stood to dismiss me.

'All right,' I said. 'I'll let you judge whether you want me to testify.'

'I'll record this as a voluntary meeting, just like the last time you were here.'

'Fine,' I said, caving in disconsolately.

'I'm listening.'

'We've started accessing the patterns, the memories inside the heads,' I said.

She seemed to swallow something bitter. 'I hope all of you know what you're doing,' she said slowly.

'We've discovered something startling, something we didn't expect at all ..

'Go on,' she said.

I told her about StarTime's apparent book-keeping errors. I told her about learning the names of the first two unknowns from short-term memory and other areas in the dead but intact brains.

She showed a glimmer of half-fascinated, half-disgusted interest.

'Only a couple of days ago, we learned who the third unknown was.' I swallowed. Drew back before leaping into the abyss. 'He's Kimon Thierry. K. D. Thierry. He joined StarTime.'

Fiona Task-Felder rocked back and forth slowly in her chair. 'You're lying,' she said softly. 'That is the foulest, most ridiculous story I've... It's more than I imagined you were capable of, Mr Sandoval. I am...' She shook her head, genuinely furious, and stood up at her desk. 'Get out of here.'

I laid a slate on her desk. 'I d-don't think you should d-dismiss me,' I said, shaking, stuttering, teeth knocking together. My own contradictory emotions again Supported my play-acting. 'I've put together a lot of evidence, and I have recordings of Mr Thierry's ... last moments.'

She stared at me, at the slate. She sat again but still said nothing.

'I can show you the evidence very quickly,' I said, and I laid out my trail of evidence. The employment of the Logologists, Frederick Jones's suit against the Church, the three unknown members of the group of dead transported from Earth, our triumph in playing back and translating the last memories of each. I thought there might be facts and remembrances clicking, meshing, in her head, but her face betrayed nothing but cold, tightly controlled rage.

'I see nothing conclusive here, Mr Sandoval,' she said when I had finished.

I played her a tape made by Thierry when he'd been alive, in his later years. Then I played the record of his last moments, not just the short-term memories of sounds, but the visual memories, which Rho had clumsily processed and translated at Thomas's request. Faces, oddly inhuman at first, and then fitting a pattern, being recognized; the memories not buffered by the personal mind's own interpreters, raw and immediate and therefore surprisingly crude. The office where he died, his bulky hands on the table, the twitching and shifting of his eyes from point to point in the room, difficult to follow. The fading. The end of the record.

The president looked down at the slate, eyebrows raised, hands tightly clenched on the desktop.

I leaned forward to retrieve the slate. She grabbed it herself, held it shakily in both hands and suddenly threw it across the office. It banged against a foamed rock wall and bounced on the metabolic carpet.

'It's not a hoax,' I said. 'We were shocked, as well.' 'Get out,' she said. 'Get the hell out, now.' I turned to leave, but before I could reach the door, she began to cry. Her shoulders slumped and she buried her face in her hands. I moved towards her to do something, to say I was sorry, but she screamed at me to leave, and I did.

'How did she react?' Thomas asked. I sat in his private quarters, my mind a million miles away, contemplating sins I had never imagined I would feel guilty for. He handed me a glass of terrestrial madeira and I swallowed it neat, then looked over the cube files on his living-room wall.

'She didn't believe me,' I said.

'Then?'

'I convinced her. I played the tape.'

Thomas filled my glass again.

'And?'

I still would not face him.

'Well?'

'She cried,' I said. 'She began to cry.'

Thomas smiled. 'Good. Then?'

I gave him a look of puzzlement and disapproval. 'She wasn't faking it, Thomas. She was devastated.' 'Right. What did she do next?'

'She ordered me out of her office.'

'No set-up for a later meeting?'

I shook my head.

'Sounds like you really knocked a hole in her armour, Mickey.'

'I must have,' I said solemnly.

'Good,' Thomas said. 'I think we've got our extra time. Go home now, Mickey, and get some rest. You've redeemed yourself a hundred times over.'

'I feel like a shit, Thomas.'

'You're an honourable shit, doing only what others do unto you,' Thomas said. He offered his hand to me but I did not accept it. 'This is for your family,' he reminded me, eyes flinty.

I could not forget the tears coming, the fierce, shattering anger, the dismay and betrayal.

'Thank you again, Micko,' Thomas said. 'Call me Mickey, please,' I said as I left.

Alienation without must be accompanied by alienation within; that is the law for every social level, even individuals. To harm one's fellows, even one s enemies, harms you, takes away some essential element from your self-respect and self-image. This must be the way it is when fighting a full-fledged war, I told myself, only worse. Gradually, by killing your enemies, you kill your old self If there is room for a new self, for an extraordinary redevelopment, then you grow and become more mature though sadder. If there is no room, you die inside or go crazy.

Alone in my dry warm water tank, creature comforts aplenty and mind in a state of complete misery, I played my own Shakespearean scene of endless unvoiced soliloquy. I held a party of all my selves and we gathered to argue and fight.

I felt badly for my anger towards Thomas. Still, the anger was inevitable; he had turned me into a weapon and I had been effective and that hurt. I learned the hard way that Fiona Task-Felder was not a heartless monster; she was a human, playing her cards as she thought they must be played, not for reasons of self-aggrandizement, but following orders.

What effect would our news have on her superiors, the directors of the political and secular arms of the Logologist Church?

If Thomas actually leaked the news to the public of the Triple, what would the effect be on millions of faithful Logologists?

Logology was a personal madness expanded by chance and the laws of society into an institution, self-perpetuating, even growing with time. We could eventually tap the experiences, the memories, of the man at the fount of the madness. We could in time disillusion the members, perhaps even destroy the Church.

None of this gave me the least satisfaction.

I longed for the innocence I had known but not been aware of, three months past.

Ten hours after returning from port yin, I left my water tank to cross the white line.

We had bought our extra time, and here it was; the Task-Felder arm of Logology was quiet. On the Triple nets, there was nary a murmur from the Earthside forces.

William was jubilant. 'You just missed Rho he told me as I entered the laboratory. 'She'll be back in an hour, though. I have it now, Micko. Tomorrow I'll do the trial Everything's stable-'

'Did you find out what caused your last problem?'

William pursed his lips as if I'd mentioned something dirty. 'No,' he said. 'I'd just as soon forget it. I can't the effect now, and the QL is no help, 'Beware those ghosts,' I said mordantly. 'They come back.'

'You're both so cheerful' he said. 'You'd think we were all awaiting doomsday. What did Thomas have you do, assassinate somebody?'

'No,' I said. 'Not literally.'

'Well, try to cheer up a little-I'd like to have both of you me tomorrow.'

'Doing what?, I asked.

'I'll need more than one pair of hands, and I'll also need witnesses. The record-keepers aren't emotionally satisfying. Real human testimony can shake loose more grant money, I suspect, especially if you and Rho are giving the possible financiers.'

We'll be too controversial to squeeze dust from any financiers, I thought. 'Are we going to market absolute zero?'

We'll market something new and rare. Never in the history of the universe - until tomorrow - has matter been cooled and tricked to reach a temperature of zero Kelvin. It make the nets all over the Triple, Mickey. It might even some of the heat off Sandoval BM, if I may pun. But know that; why are you being so pessimistic?'

'My apologies, William.'

'Judging from your face, you'd think we've already lost,' he said.

'No. We may have won,' I said.

'Then cheer up a little, if only to give me some breathing room in all this gloom.'

He returned to work; I walked out on the bridge and deliberately stood between the force disorder pumps to punish my body with their fingernail-on-slate sensation of deep displacement.

Rho and I joined William in the Ice Pit laboratory at eight hundred. He assigned Rho to monitoring the pumps, which he ramped to full activity. I sat watch on the refrigerators. There didn't seem to be any practical need for either Rho or me to be there. It soon became obvious we had been invited more to provide company than to help or witness.

William was outwardly calm, inwardly very nervous, which he betrayed by occasional short bursts of mild pique, quickly apologized for and retracted. I didn't mind facing pique; somehow it made me feel better, took my mind off events happening outside the Ice Pit.

We were a strange crew; Rho even more subdued than William, unaffected by the grating of the disorder pumps; I getting progressively drunker and drunker with an uncalled-for sense of separation and relief from our troubles; William making a circuit of all the equipment, ending at the highly polished Cavity containing the cells, mounted on levitation absorbers just beyond the left branch of the bridge.

Far above us, barely visible in the spilled light from the laboratory and the bridge, hung the dark grey vault of the volcanic void, obscured by a debris net.

At nine hundred, William's calm cracked wide open when the QL announced another reverse in the lambda phase, and conditions within the cells that it could not interpret. 'Are they the same conditions as last time?'

William asked, fingers of both hands drumming the top surface of the QL.

'The readings and energy requirements are the same,' the QL said. Rho pointed out that the force disorder pumps were showing chaotic fluctuations in their 'draw' from the cells. 'Has that happened before?'

'I've never had the pumps ramped so high before. No, it hasn't happened,' William explained. 'QL, what would happen to our cells if we just turned off the stabilizing energy?' 'I cannot guess,' the QL replied. It flatly refused to answer any similar questions, which irritated William.

'You said something earlier about this possibly reflecting future events in the cells,' I reminded him. 'What did you mean by that?'

'I couldn't think of any other explanation,' William said. 'I still can't. QL won't confirm or deny the possibility.' 'Yes, but what did you mean? How could that happen?' 'If we achieved some hitherto unstudied state in the cells, there might be a chronological backwash, something reflected in the past, our now.'

'Sounds pretty speculative to me,' Rho commented.

'It's more than speculative, it's desperate rille dust,' William said. 'Without it, however, I'm completely lost.' 'Have you correlated times between the changes?' Rho asked.

'Yes,' William said, sighing impatiently.

'Okay. Then try changing your scheduled time for achieving zero.'

William looked across the lab at his wife, both eyebrows raised, mouth open, giving his long face a simian appearance. 'What?'

'Reset your machines. Make the zero-moment earlier or later. And don't change it back again.'

William produced his most sardonic, pitying smile. 'Rho, my sweet, you're crazier than I am.'

'Try it,' she said.

He swore but did as she suggested, setting his equipment for five minutes later.

The lambda phase reversal ended. Five minutes later, it began again.

'Christ,' he whispered. 'I don't dare touch it now.' 'Better not,' Rho said, smiling. 'What about the previous incident?'

'It was continuous, no lapses,' he said.

'There. You're going to succeed, and this is a Prior result, if such a thing is possible in quantum logic.' 'QL?' William queried the thinker.

'Time reverse circumstances are only possible if no message is communicated,' it said. 'You are claiming to receive confirmation of experimental success.'

'But success at what?' William said. 'The message is completely ambiguous... We don't know what our experiment will do to cause this condition in the past.'

'I'm dizzy, having to think with those damned pumps going,' I said.

'Wait'll they're completely tuned to the cells,' William warned, enjoying my discomfort. His grin bared all his teeth. He made final preparations, calling out numbers and settings to us, all superfluously. We echoed just to keep his morale up. From here on, the experiment was automatic, controlled by the QL.

'I think the reversal will end in a few minutes,' William said, standing beside the polished Cavity. 'Call it a quantum hunch.'

A few minutes later, the QL reported yet again the end of reversal. William nodded with mystified satisfaction. 'We're not scientists, Micko,' he said cheerfully, 'we're magicians. God help us all.'

The clocks silently counted their numbers. William walked down the bridge and made a final adjustment in the right hand pump with a small hex wrench. 'Cross your fingers,' he said.

'Is this it?' Rho asked.

'In twenty seconds I'll tune the pumps to the cells, then turn off the magnetic fields ...'

'Good luck,' Rho said. He turned away from her, turned back and extended his arms, folding her into them, hugging her tightly. His face shone with enthusiasm; he seemed gleeful, childlike.

I clenched my teeth when he tuned the pumps. The sensation was trebled; my long bones seemed to become flutes piping a shrill, unmelodic quantum tune. Rho closed her eyes and groaned. 'That's atrocious,' she said. 'Makes me want to crap my pants.'

'It's sweet music,' William said, shaking his head as if to rid himself of a fly. 'Here goes.' He beat the seconds with his upheld finger. 'Field ... off.' A tiny green light flashed in the air over the main lab console, the QL's signal.

'Unknown phase reversal. Lambda reversal,' the QL announced.

'God damn it all to hell!' William shrieked, stamping his foot.

Simultaneously with his shout, there came the sound of four additional footstamps above the cavern overhead, precisely as if gigantic upstairs neighbours had jumped on a resonant floor. William held his left foot in the air, astonished by what seemed to be echoes of his anger. His expression had cycled beyond frustration, into something like expectant glee: Yes, by God, what next?

Rho's personal slate called for her attention in a thin voice. My own slate chimed; William was not wearing his.

'There is an emergency situation,' our slates announced simultaneously. 'Emergency power reserves are in effect.' The lights dimmed and alarms went off throughout the lab. 'There have been explosions in the generators supplying power to this station.'

Rho looked at me with eyes wide, lips drawn into a line.

The mechanical slate voices announced calmly, in unison, 'There has been apparent damage to components above the Ice Pit void, including heat radiators.' This information came from auto sentries around the station. Every slate in the station - and emergency speaker systems throughout the warrens and alleys - would be repeating the same information.

A human voice interrupted them, someone I did not recognize, perhaps the station watch attendant. Somebody was always assigned to observe the sentries, a human behind the machines. 'William, are you all right? Anybody else in there with you?'

'Mickey and I are in here with William. We're fine,' Rhosalind said.

'A shuttle has dropped bombs into the trenches. They've taken out your radiators, William, and all of our generators are damaged. Your pit is drawing a lot more power than normal I was worried perhaps-'

'It shouldn't be,' William said.

'William says it shouldn't be drawing more power,' Rho informed the anonymous watch attendant.

'But it is,' William continued, turning to look at his instruments.

'Phase down lambda reversal in all cells,' the QL announced.

'-you folks might be injured,' the voice concluded, overlapping.

'We're fine,' I said.

'You'd better get out of there. No way of knowing how much damage the void has sustained, whether-' 'Let's go,' I said, looking up.

Chunks of rock and dust drifted into the overhead net, making it belly in and out like the upside-down bell of a jellyfish.

'Lambda reversal ending in all cells,' the QL said.

'Wait-' William said.

I stood on the bridge between the Cavity and the disorder pumps. The refrigerators hung motionless in their intricate suspensions. Rho stood in the door to the lab. William stood beside the Cavity.

'Zero attained,' the QL announced.

Rho glanced at me, and I started to say something, but my throat caught. The lights dimmed all around.

Distantly, our two slates said, Time to evacuate ...

I turned to leave, stepping between the pumps, and that saved my life ... or at any rate made it possible for me to be here, now, in my present condition.

The pump jackets fluoresced green and vanished, revealing spaghetti traceries of wire and cable and egg-shaped parcels. My eyes hurt with the green glare, which seemed to echo in glutinous waves from the walls of the void. I considered the possibility that something had fallen and hit me on the head, making me see things, but I felt no pain, only a sense of being stretched from head to feet. I could not see Rho or William, as I was now facing down the bridge towards the entrance to the Ice Pit. I could not hear them, either. When I tried to swivel round again, parts of my being seemed to separate and rejoin. Instinctively, I stopped moving, waiting for everything to come together again.

It was all I could do to concentrate on one of my hands grasping the bridge railing. The hand shed dark ribbons which curled towards the deck of the bridge. I blinked and felt my eyelids separate and rejoin with each rise and fall. Fear deeper than thought forced me to stop all motion until only my blood and the beat of my heart threatened to sunder me from the inside.

Finally I could stand it no more. I slowly turned in the deepening quiet, hearing only the slide of my shoes on the bridge and the serpent's hiss of my body separating and rejoining as I rotated.

Please do not take my testimony from this point on as having any kind of objective truth. Whatever happened, it affected my senses, if not my mind, in such a way that all objectivity fled.

The Cavity sphere had cracked like an egg. I saw Rho standing between the Cavity and the laboratory, perfectly still, facing slightly to my left as if caught in mid-tum, and she did not look entirely real. The light that reflected from her was not familiar, not completely useful to my eyes, whether because the light had changed or my eyes had changed, I do not know. In addition there came from her - radiated is not the right word, it is deceptive, but perhaps there is no better - a kind of communication of her presence that I had never experienced before, a shedding of skins that lessened her as I watched. I think perhaps it was the information that comprised her body, leaching away through a new kind of space that had never existed before: space made crystalline, a superconductor of information. With the shedding of this essence Rho became less substantial, less real. She was dissolving like a piece of sugar in warm water.

I tried to call out her name, but could make no sound. I might have been caught in a vicious gelatin, one that stung me whenever I tried to move. But I could not see myself dissolving, as I saw Rho. I seemed immune at least to that danger.

William stood behind her, becoming more clear as Rho dissipated. He was farther from the Cavity; the effect, whatever it might be, had not worked quite as strongly on him. But he too began to shed this essence, the hidden music that communicates each particle's place and quantum state to other particles, that holds us in one shape and one condition from this moment to the next. I think he was trying to move, to get back inside the laboratory, but he succeeded only in evaporating this essence more rapidly, and he stopped himself, tried instead to reach out for Rho, his face utterly intent, like a child facing down a tiger.

His hand passed through her.

I saw something else flee from my sister at that moment. I apologize in advance for describing this; I do not wish to spread any more or less hope, to offer encouragement to mystical interpretations of our existence, for as I said, what I saw might be a function of hallucination, not objective reality.

But I saw two, then three, versions of my sister standing on the bridge, the third like a cloud maintaining its rough shape, and this cloud-shape managed to move towards me, and touch me with an outstretched limb.

Are you all tight, Micko? I heard in my head if not in my ears. Don't move. Please don't move. You seem to be ...

Suddenly I saw myself from her perspective, her experience leaching from her, passing into me, like a taste of her dissipating self in the superconducting medium.

The cloud passed through me, carried by some unknown inertia of propagation through the bridge rail and out over the void, where it fell like rain. Was I to fade as well? The other images of Rho and William had become mere blurs against the laboratory, which was itself blurring, casting away fluid tendrils.

Oddly, the Cavity containing the copper samples assumed they were the cause of this, their new condition, announced by the QL, zero Kelvin - seemed more solid and stable than anything else, despite the fine cracks across its surface.

Because of my position between the disorder pumps - and I repeat, this is only my speculation - I seemed to have suffered as much dissolution as I was due, whereas everything else became even less real, less material.

The bridge slumped, stretching beneath my weight as if I stood on a sheet of rubber. I performed some gymnastics and caught the rails with both hands. I could not stop the plunge downwards, however. I was dropping towards the lower structure built to hold the heads. I tried to climb but could not gain purchase with my feet.

My descent continued until the bridge and my legs actually passed through the ceiling of the lower chamber. A sharp pain shoved like a spear through both limbs, gouging through my bones into my hips. Looking up for some new handhold, some way of stopping my fall, I saw the laboratory rotating loosely at the centre of the void, shedding vapours. Rho and William I could not see at all.

A sensation of deep cold surrounded me, then faded. The refrigerators fell silently all around me, passing through the chamber and casting up slow ripples of some cold blue liquid that had filled the bottom of the pit. The liquid washed over me.

I describe the rest knowing perfectly well it cannot be anything more than delirium.

How is it that instinct can be aware of dangers from a situation no human being could ever have faced before? I felt a terrified loathing of that wash of unknown liquid, abhorrence so strong I crushed the bridge railing between my hands like thin aluminium. Yet I knew that it was not liquefied gas from the refrigerators; I was not afraid of being frozen.

My feet pulled up from the mire and I hooked one on to a stanchion, lifting myself perhaps a metre higher. Still, I was not out of that turbulent pool, and it seeped into me.

I began to fill with sensations, remembrances not my own.

Memories from the dead.

From the heads, four hundred and ten of them, leaking their patterns and memories across a transformed and crystalline spacetime, the information slumping into a thick lake not of matter, not of anything anyone had ever experienced before, like an essence or a cold brew.

I carry some of these memories with me still. In most cases, I do not know who or what they might come from, but I see things, hear voices, remember scenes on Earth that I could not possibly know. I have never sought verification, for the same reasons I have never told this story until now - because if I am a chalice of such memories, they have changed me, replacing some parts of my own memories shed in the first few instants of the Quiet, and I do not wish that confirmed.

There is one memory in particular, the most disturbing, I think, that I must record, even though it is not verifiable. It must have come from Kimon Thierry himself. It has a particular flavour that matches the translated voices and visual memories I played for Fiona Task-Felder. I believe that in this terrible pond, the last thoughts of his dying moment permeated me. I loathe this memory: I loathe him.

To suspect, even deeply believe, in the duplicity and the malice and the greed - in the evil - of others is one thing. To know it for a fact is something no human being should ever have to face.

Kimon Thierry's last thoughts were not of the glorious journey awaiting him, the translation to a higher being. He was terrified of retribution. In his last moment before oblivion, he knew he had constructed a lie, knew that he had convinced hundreds of thousands of others of this lie, had limited their individual growth and freedom, and he feared going to the hell he had been taught about in Sunday school ...

He feared another level of lie, created by past liars to punish their enemies and justify their own petty existences.

The memory ends abruptly with, I suppose, his death, the end of all recorded memories, all physical transformations. Of that I am left with no impressions whatsoever.

I rose above this hideous pool by climbing up the stanchions, finding the bars stronger the farther from the Cavity they had initially been, stronger but losing their strength and shape rapidly. I scrambled like an insect, mindless with terror, and somehow I climbed the twenty metres to the lip of the doorway in complete silence.

Perhaps three minutes had elapsed since the bombing, if time had any function in the Ice Pit void.

A group of rescuers found me crawling over William's white line. When they tried to go through the door and rescue the others, I told them not to, and because of my condition, they did not need much persuasion.

I had lost the first half-centimetre of skin around my body from the neck down, and all my hair, precisely as if I had been sprayed with supercold gas.

For two months I lay in dreamless suspended sleep in the Yin City Hospital, wrapped in healing liquid, skin cells and muscle cells and bone cells migrating under the guidance of surgical nano machines knitting my surface. I came awake at the end of this time, and fancied myself - with not a hint of fear, as if I had lost all my emotions - still in the Ice Pit, floating in the pool, spreading through the spherical void like water through an eager sponge, dissolving slowly and peacefully in the Quiet.

Thomas came to my room when I had a firmer grasp of who I was and where. He sat by my cradle and smiled like a dead man, eyes glassy, skin pale.

'I didn't do so well, Mickey,' he told me.

'We didn't do so well,' I said in a hoarse whisper, the strongest I could manage. My body felt surrounded by ice cubes. The black ceiling above me seemed to suck all my substance up and out, into space.

'You were the only one who escaped,' Thomas said. 'William and Rho didn't make it.'

I had guessed that much. Still, the confirmation hurt.

Thomas looked down at the cradle and ran his gnarled, pale hand along the suspension frame. 'You're going to recover completely, Mickey. You'll do better than I. I've resigned as director.'

His eyes met mine and his mouth betrayed the presence of an ironic smile, fleeting, small, self-critical. 'The art of politics is the art of avoiding disasters, of managing difficult situations for the benefit of all, even for your enemies, whether they know what's good for them or not. Isn't it, Mickey?'

'Yes,' I croaked.

'What I had you do ..

'I did it,' I said.

He acknowledged that much, gave me the gift of that much complicity but no more. 'The word has spread, Mickey. We really hurt them, worse than they know. They hurt themselves.'

'Who dropped the bombs?'

He shook his head. 'It doesn't matter. No evidence, no arrests, no convictions.'

'Didn't somebody see?'

'The first bomb took out the closest surface sentries. Nobody saw. We think it was a low-level shuttle. By the time we were able to get a search team off, it must have been hundreds of klicks away.'

'No arrests ... what about the president? Who's going to make her pay?'

'We don't know she ordered it, Mickey. Besides, you and

I, we really zapped her. She's no longer president.'

'She resigned?'

Thomas shook his head. 'Fiona walked out of an airlock four days after the bombing. She didn't wear a suit.' He rubbed the back of one hand with the fingers of his other hand. 'I think I can take the blame for that.'

'Not just you,' I said.

'All right,' he said, and that was all. He left me to my thoughts, and again and again, I told myself-

William and Rho did not escape.

Only I remember the pool.

Whether they are dead, or simply dissolved in the Ice Pit, floating in that incomprehensible pond or echoing in the space above, I do not know. I do not know whether the heads are somehow less dead than before.

There is the problem of accountability.

In time, I was interrogated to the limits of my endurance, and still there were no prosecutions. The obvious suspicions - that the bombers had acted on orders from Earth, if not from Fiona Task-Felder herself - were never formalized as charges. The binding multiples wished to return to normal, to forget this hideous anomaly.

But Thomas was right. The story made its rounds, and it became legend: of Thierry's having himself harvested and frozen, an obvious apostasy from the faith he had established, and the violent reluctance of his followers to have him return in any form.

In the decades since, that has hurt the faith he founded in ways that even a court case and conviction could not have. The truth is less vigorous a prosecutor than legend. Neither masterful politics nor any number of great lies can stand against legend.

Task-Felder ceased being a Logologist multiple twenty years ago. The majority of members voted to open it to new settlers, of whatever beliefs; their connections with Earth were broken.

I have healed, grown older, worked to set lunar politics aright, married and contributed my own children to the Sandoval family. I suppose I have done my duty to family and Moon, and have nothing to be ashamed of. I have watched lunar politics and the lunar constitution change and reach a form we can live with, ideal for no one, acceptable to most, strong in times of crisis.

Yet until this record I have never told everything I knew or experienced in that awful time.

Perhaps my time in the Quiet was an internal lie, my own fantasy of justification, my own kind of revenge dreamed in a moment of pain and danger.

I still miss Rho and William. Writing this, I miss them so deeply I put my slate aside and come back to it only after a time of grieving all over. The sorrow never dies; it is merely nacred by time.

No one has ever duplicated William's achievement, leading me to believe that had it not been for the bombs, perhaps he would have failed, as well. Some concatenation of his brilliance, the guidance of the perverse QL and an unexpected failure of equipment, a serendipity that has not been repeated, led to his success, if it can be called such.

On occasion I return to the blocked-off entrance of the Ice Pit. Before I began writing, I went there, passing the stationed sentries, the single human guard - a young girl, born after the events I describe. As director of Sandoval BM, participant in the mystery, I am allowed this freedom.

The area beyond the white line is littered with the deranged and abandoned equipment of dozens of fruitless investigations. I have gone there to pray, to indulge in my own apostasy against rationalism, to hope that my words can reach into the transformed matter and information beyond.

Trying to reconcile my own feeling that I sinned against Fiona Task-Felder, as Thierry had sinned against so many ... I cannot make it sensible.

No one will understand, not even myself, but when I die, I want to be placed in the Ice Pit with my sister and William. God forgive me, even with Thierry, Robert and Emilia, and the rest of the heads ...

In the Quiet.