Hyaroll took the metal strip that slid out of a slot under the sensor panel, stepped back. “It’s yours now. Or will be once I’m outside the dome.” He gave her the finger-length strip of bluish metal. “Hang onto this. It’s your key if you have to leave the dome. Come.” He started for the membrane, waited for her without trying to pass through it. “Up to you now,” he said. “Order kephalos to let me through.”

  “How?”

  “Say the words.”

  “Aloud?”

  “If you want. Or subvocalize.”

  “I hear you.”

  He put his hand out, tested the membrane, started off at a much faster pace than he’d used coming here. Swearing under her breath, she ran after him.

  In the baronial great hall with its massive door, its playful windows that were abstract patterns in crimson-and-sapphire stained glass, its rugged ceiling beams and huge fireplaces, its rows of chandeliers, Aleytys, feeling like the heroine in some ancient melodrama, caught his arm. “Wait.”

  He walked three steps more, dragging her along, then turned to scowl down at her. “What?”

  “Why are you doing all this?”

  “Finishing something.”

  “What?”

  “My business.”

  “Mine as well since it involves me. This isn’t idle curiosity, anaks. I’ve a hard fight ahead. The more I know the better I fight. I don’t understand you. I need to.”

  He stared at her a moment, then shifted his gaze to look past her at one of the bright windows. To her surprise, he smiled—a twist of his large mouth, a glint in narrowed green eyes. The glint faded, his face sagged, there was nothing left. “Blood,” he said. “Promised her mother I’d take care of Shareem. Ianna, her name was, Shareem’s mother. Promised her that after she pried Reem loose from Kell. Knew he’d go after her, wanted her to stay with me. She wouldn’t. You’re a lot like her, Lee; saw that soon’s I saw you. Did the best I could for Shareem after Ianna was killed. Reem’ll never amount to much. No, no, don’t argue, girl. She’s not the worst, cares a lot about you, that’s something.” He put his hand under her chin, tilted her face into the red-and-blue light. “You’re a good child, Aleytys; you hurt when you see hurt. Shareem showed us. Proud you’re my kin.” The words were fine, made her glow, but there was so little feeling behind them that she ached for him. He must have seen something of this, because he backed away a step, hand dropping to his side. “Say it one more time. You shouldn’t have come, this world is too small to fit you. I wind down to nothing, entropy embodied, soon unbodied.” Another step away from her. He caught hold of the door’s latch. “You’re too full of life, girl. Like sandpaper on an ulcer. Don’t call me again.” He tripped the latch, pulled the door open and stalked outside.

  By the time she followed he was halfway to his flier. She stood in the doorway watching until the lock closed behind him, then walked across to join Shareem and Loguisse by the fountain, the rising whine from the flier drowning the water’s laughter. The flier rose and hovered just below the apex of the dome, waiting.

  Aleytys looked at the strip of metal in her hand. “What do I do now?”

  Loguisse blinked, squinted up at the flier, shading her eyes with both hands. “Tell kephalos to open the dome.”

  “Then whoever is out there waiting lobs an egg through and boom.”

  “Warn kephalos that you expect trouble, that the defenses are to be at maximum alert. They should be adequate—Har set them up.”

  “Thanks.” She thought a moment, getting the phrasing right, then reached for kephalos as she had when she let Hyaroll out of househeart, gave the order.

  Hyaroll’s flier shot up and darted away, taking out a missile that pounced on it the moment it left the protection of the dome, and kephalos ashed a pair that streaked for the hole. Then the flier was gone, the dome was intact, and the fountain was playing its comic song loudly enough to be heard over the wandering breeze and the very faint popping noises as the remnants of the missiles hit the dome and sizzled down its sides.

  Aleytys ran her thumb across the featureless strip of blue metal. “Will this work for anyone who holds it?”

  “No. Your brain and body patterns are coded into it. Holder has to match those. As long as you’re alive. Once you’re dead, anyone can use it.”

  “Right. If I lose it when I’m outside, I can’t get back in?”

  Loguisse looked thoughtfully at her. “You?” Her eyes crinkled with her silent laugh. “The rest of us would have to find someone we trusted to make a duplicate, not something especially easy on this world.” She sobered. “If you lose it, come see me. I’ll make the duplicate.”

  “That’s a relief.” She looked up at the last faint sparks of the debris. “That was rather obvious of him.”

  “Don’t disdain the obvious.”

  “But don’t employ it.” She reached out a hand to Shareem. “Let’s go back now, if you don’t mind. The sooner I learn all there is to know about this dome, the sooner we’ll stop making a target of you.”

  She stood alone in one of Loguisse’s gardens, a fantasy of crystal and steel, three tall spindly trees with whippy limbs and diamond-shaped leaves, a small crystalline fountain in the center, the water making spare, simple music as it fell onto crystal leaves and ultimately into a shallow crystal basin. The late-afternoon sun was low in the west, the tree shadows were long scrawls across the short grass, dark wavery bars across the fountain.

  Stuffed into her head, outlined on a handful of flakes in her belt pouch, she had all that Loguisse saw fit to tell her of the general functions of the kephalos in each dome and instructions about how she could probe her own kephalos to find out its idiosyncrasies, since the kephaloi were programmed according to the whim of their masters and creators, so that they all had surprises set up to trap the wariest of intruders. Loguisse was terse about this, and Aleytys didn’t push her. Her head ached already with the heavy dose of Vrithian’s history, sketchy though it was, covering the ten millennia Loguisse and the other Vrya had lived here, even sketchier when it came to the hapless Vrithli used by the undying as toys to enliven the endless march of days. She’d been given a skip-stone look at the two species native to this world, their various cultures, and how those cultures had been distorted by the presence and interference of the Vrya. It wasn’t a pretty story. It infuriated her, though she said nothing of her feelings to Loguisse. Because the Tetrarch’s interests were so detached from experimentation and ordinary life, she allowed the Yashoukim within the boundaries of her domain to develop as they chose, only emerging from her retreat when the intrusions of neighboring domains grew too blatant, too annoying. Other Vrya, with less to occupy hands and minds, kneaded their Vrithli like clay, punching and pulling them into the shape they chose by whim or curiosity or obscure internal needs, ruthlessly squashing or lopping off any attempt of those Vrithli to grow in forbidden directions.

  After watching the water for a while as it shot up and fell back on the crystal leaves, a pleasant soothing sound, she dropped to the grass and sat dreaming for a while more, listening to the water and the breezes teasing the pale green leaves at the end of threadlike black stems. Kell first, no choice there, then …. She yawned and smiled. Just as well Loguisse didn’t know about her plans or she might change her mind about who’d disrupt Vrithian most, she or Kell. She watched the water falling, changing color with the sky about the setting sun, and felt a relaxing, pervasive relief, a sense that an immense weight had rolled off her shoulders; she had discovered a task important enough to keep her working for those uncounted years that lay ahead of her, something to keep back the tides of entropy that had eaten Filiannis and Hrigis empty, that was turning Hyaroll to dead stone. Prying Vryhh fingers loose from Vrithli lives. She had no illusions about the transcendent joys of such freedom; most Vrithli were probably quite satisfied with their lot and would be extremely unhappy if they were forced to think for themselves. Too bad. They’d just have to learn. Let them make a few tyrants of their own and learn how to pull those down. I’ll be taking away their certainties and their security. Not kind. Not even doing it out of moral outrage. Using them like the rest of my folk have used them, entertainment. She smiled drowsily. Not so bad as it might be. Maybe just as well I’m not going at this filled with moral outrage and sure my way is right. Results of that kind of mindset aren’t so good. Some outrage, yes. Can’t get calloused or complacent. Long hard job, and isn’t that nice. She stretched and yawned, looked around, oppressed by the lack of color. Even the varied greens after a while lost vitality and might have been only shades of gray. Everything in the dome was exquisite, and after the first glance boring. Aphorism, she thought, unrelieved elegance is ultimately boring. Loguisse wouldn’t notice; when she was here she evidently spent most of her time talking with kephalos, going endlessly though esoteric concepts Aleytys found incomprehensible and as boring as the landscaping. More boring. When Loguisse tried to describe one of her current obsessions, Aleytys waved her to silence. You lost me with the second word, don’t bother going on, she said. Loguisse sighed, her momentary vivacity fading. Pity, she said. Aleytys nodded, understanding well enough. There must be very few people she could talk with about the things that interested her most. She bent over, pulled loose a blade of grass and began tearing it into thin strips. Loguisse misses conversation, I miss Wolff. Her friends there, her house, her horses, she missed most of all unplanned accidental color, bright and dark, pale and saturated, and the ebb and flow of people with all their ragged edges. Maybe if she lived as long as Loguisse, she’d change her tastes, but she doubted that. Maybe Loguisse had started out like her, relishing the variety of life. She doubted that too. Ten thousand years. Impossible to say what a world would be like after such a time, even more impossible to tell how a person would change after that much time, though that person was yourself.

  She sat awhile longer, listening to the water and the leaves, curbing her impatience to be on her own again. That meant she’d be hauling Shareem about—no big problem; she liked her mother and was occasionally amazed at her flashes of courage, staying here when she could so easily by somewhere else. Aleytys sighed, feeling guilty because she was irritated by that courage, that effort. Everything would be so much simpler if Shareem would just take off and let her get on with the fight. Unfortunately that sensible course would destroy Shareem. Destroy. Melodramatic word, but I can’t think of another that would fit. Well, once this is over, she’ll go her way, maybe visit me now and again. The world will weigh lighter on both of us.

  She got to her feet, brushed herself off and went inside for the last uncomfortable meal in Loguisse’s dome.

  While Aleytys spent hours down in the heart room, plugged into kephalos, Shareem moved about the whimsical house of Synkatta. Bedrooms sitting like oranges impaled on thick stalks, reached by clear glass tubes extruded from the greater mass of the house; an infirmary like a soap bubble painted with mirrors, filled with light inside, the outside reflecting everything that fluttered past; and when you were tired of whimsy, sedate and comfortable rooms of stone and wood and leather: a reading room filled with books from a thousand worlds, a fieldstone fireplace, a sturdy desk of some light tan wood with a tight grain; a music room; a kitchen filled with stainless steel, more practical than aesthetic; that baronial great hall with its rough-hewn beams and colored windows; a house that was an absurdity of allusion and metaphor and with all that, comfortable. Shareem explored it, happy to have something to do, opening the sealed rooms, bringing life back into the emptiness, activating the androids, designing the meals (when she could pry Aleytys loose from Kephalos long enough to eat anything besides sandwiches and cha), feeling cozily domestic, content to do this minor bit of mothering. She knew she was playing games with herself, but she was also happier than she’d been in a long time.

  Each day the flying bombs struck at them, others came digging at them from beneath, but kephalos ashed the fliers and melted the diggers, filtered out clouds of corrosive gas. At Aleytys’s instructions, kephalos had warned the local Vrithli that absence was the safest defense in this war between two undying. The fishing village was deserted, the farms were left with their crops going to weed, the livestock was gone with the farmers. All the Vrithli left without argument; they’d heard too many grisly tales about those caught up in a death duel.

  On the fourth day after their second arrival Shareem lay stretched out on the grass staring up at the cloudless sky, hands clasped behind her head. She winced as the daily missile whipped down at the dome, dissolving as always before it came close enough to bother anything. Same time as yesterday, same two prongs air and earth, same everything. Every day she expected Kell to try something more complex, more inventive, expected him to use the pattern he was establishing to catch them off guard, but each afternoon, the same time, the same spot, the diggers came digging, the missiles came arching in; each afternoon both prongs were as routinely destroyed. She frowned. Loguisse could say don’t condemn the obvious, but it wasn’t like Kell to be that obvious. He could be patient, that was certainly true; he’d waited ten years to go after her mother. He might be counting on using up their supplies, then overwhelming them with an all-out attack. But that would take years, and Aleytys wouldn’t give him those years, he had to know that; besides, the Tetrad would resupply her if she asked. There had to be something else he was after.

  She grimaced and forced herself to think carefully and seriously about her mother’s death. All these years she’d fled from taking a close look at it, reacting to grief, to guilt for being the survivor, to a fear that thinking about it too much would force her to challenge him or forfeit her last shreds of self-respect. Ianna and she had been closer than most Vrya and their children, Ianna had carried her to term, though most Vryhh females decanted their fetuses into android wombs and left the children’s care and education in the cold capable hands of their androids. Ianna had given birth to her in the old old way, had suckled her and kept her close until she was old enough to go into intensive training in the labs and automated factories that turned out the starships and other equipment the Strays needed and the Stayers coveted. Close. They fought a lot and laughed a lot. And that day she stood with Hyaroll looking down on the desolation that had been her home, feeling … well, it was certainly a good thing Hyaroll was there with her.

  She didn’t remember much after that. There was a time, part of it in the autodoc, part being coddled by androids, when she was only loosely connected with her body, a time after that when Hyaroll put her to work in his manufactury. She was better at model-making than he was, neater-fingered. The work helped her regain her confidence. Later he took her out on his collecting runs, got her fascinated with the cultures he inspected, the people he snatched. Took a long time … she was startled by how long. Nearly two hundred years until she could stand on her own. She gradually drifted away from him, understanding finally how relieved he was to see her go, though he’d never said anything about her leaving. That still hurt. Her father. He’d never said it. Never. Even now he said nothing to her, though he’d named Aleytys his granddaughter. For a shaming moment she was jealous of her daughter, hated her a little, then she pushed the feeling aside and scratched irritably at her arm. She didn’t like feeling uncomfortable. No help for it. Ianna’s death. It made her queasy to think about it. Abruptly she knew as surely as if he’d flashed the diagrammed plan in front of her eyes, that he’d set a trap for Ianna, a trap in her homeheart where she’d be most off her guard, set that trap in those quiet years before she knew he was coming after her. He hid the bomb or whatever it was years before he called challenge to a death duel. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way, it wasn’t supposed to be so unfair a fight, but Kell was … was contemptuous of any rules he hadn’t made. I ought to know, she thought, I ought to have seen this centuries ago. I didn’t think ….

  She sat up, sick with sudden fear. All those stupid missiles banging away that couldn’t hope to get through, all those diggers slagged, those gas clouds rendered harmless … misdirection. The magician’s stock. Look over here so you don’t see what I’m doing over there. Distractions from a danger already planted within the dome. To be activated when they were lulled by the futility of his attacks. Thirty years, more, time when he knew Aleytys would be accepted, time to watch Hyaroll. She knew how Hyaroll worked; who could know him better? A putterer. Off and on, as his interest waxed and waned. How many years to put Synkatta’s dome in order for Aleytys? How many years was it vulnerable before Hyaroll did his final checks? Twelve years, and more, when Kell knew what Aleytys was and was becoming, time enough to learn to fear her. To learn her weaknesses as well as her strengths. A dozen years to make his final plans. Probably discounting Shareem. He knows me too, he knows how futile I’d be in this fight. She sat up, her skin crawling, shrinking from the lightest touch. If she could have floated in midair, she’d have felt marginally safer. What was waiting for them? Bomb? Most likely. Disease? Fire? Poison? He had a universe to draw on. She got to her feet, moving as slowly and delicately as she could. She couldn’t float, that was dreamwork, she had to walk, her feet had to come down on the ground, had to bear her weight. She had to breathe, though each warm ragged exhalation might be the key to set the thing off. Whatever it was. Whatever gods there be, please please please don’t force me to be the one who kills my child. She walked slowly stiffly impossibly into the house, hesitating for an agonizing time before she worked the latch; she had to get to Aleytys, had to warn her, warn her of what? Kell, Kell, always Kell. She left the door open, but that might be the cue, closing it might be the cue, who could tell, walked across the shining parquet floor—which one of those inlaid bits of wood might be the trigger? where did I walk before? should I pass that way again, is it safe, or should I take another way? She crept along the flow-way to the reading room, remembering pain, remembering the hard, bard birth, remembering the baby dark against her breast, her tiny golden baby with a mass of bright red curls, stubborn even then, even when she was a few days old, demanding, small fists kneading her breast as the baby sucked with such unconquerable determination—all the memories she’d shut away so many years ago. She reached for the sensor plate to open the door of the reading room, a comlink in there tied to the heartroom. She hesitated—is this the one?—palmed the plate and walked inside with that same slow stiff eggshell walk.