Shareem looked at the thrix again, popped it into her mouth. She wasn’t worried. Aleytys would come up with something. She looked around her at the debris of the meal, then tapped the caller, summoning the Ikanom to clear up the mess. She wiped her mouth on a napkin, dropped it, drew her legs up and sat with her back against one of the boulders scattered about the wild garden, watching Aleytys wander about. What’s she going to do after this is over? Stay here? Not likely. She’d be bored to stone here. Wolff? Probably. If young Shadith—how good was she?—found Grey and got him loose from Kell’s trap. Grey. She winced. But he was a short-life, a mayfly, nothing to worry about. She watched her daughter fondly, dreaming of times to come when they could be together, passing the decades, the centuries together, as she and Ianna might have done if Kell had given them the chance. A long gentle dance of friendship, visiting each other, going their ways, coming together again. Aleytys was a shadow drifting through shadows. I should be terrified, Shareem thought, but I’m not. Not anymore. Funny. Me and that dirt-grubber—what did he call himself?—that Azdar. We produced her. It doesn’t seem possible. She settled back against the boulder while Ikanom directed kitchen androids that were clearing the grass of the supper leavings, a tall silent graceful male figure, burnished bronze, the light of Minhas sliding along the wonderfully crafted face whose shifting planes and hollows could be remarkably expressive. I never knew Synkatta. Wish I had. The man who built those androids and that house … She made a mental note to ask Ikanom about him when there was time.

  Minhas swam full overhead through cottony clouds while Araxos was a fat crescent low in the east. The house was a complex burr-edged blotch in the darkness, silent and drowsy in the cooling night. Aleytys sat slumped on a wooden bench by a small rambling stream, rubbing bare feet over the grass, waiting with a mixture of impatience and reluctance for Harskari to come out of her retreat. Nothing Aleytys could think of stood up to critical evaluation, developing large uncomfortable holes as she tried playing out the line of action. She stirred restlessly on the bench. “What am I doing here?” she said aloud. “I should be getting Grey loose.”

  Harskari’s eyes came open. *Shadith is quite competent, Aleytys. You can’t do everything.*

  I could try. She laughed, but quit that when it started getting out of hand. *Sure Shadith is competent, but she’s not me. I know what I can do, I need to get my hands on things ….* She opened and closed her hands, wanting Kell in those hands right now; she wanted to pound Grey’s location out of him. She gripped the edge of the bench. Did you come up with something?

  Yes.

  Well?

  The amber eyes slitted, Harskari projected an intense reluctance.

  Well? Aleytys knew Harskari wouldn’t be hurried, but she couldn’t help prodding a little.

  *You’ve thought about passive detection.*

  You know I have, but …

  *You couldn’t see a way to make it work without first knowing what you’d be using it to find out.*

  Yes.

  *The diadem phases in and out of this reality depending on the pressures you put on it. There’s no way anyone these days can detect it when it’s phased out—*

  Aleytys interrupted her. *The RMoahl. They’ve never had the least difficulty keeping track of me.*

  Innate sense, I think. Harskari made an impatient sound. *Kell’s no RMoahl. Where was I? Oh, yes, no one but the Rmoahl can detect the diadem when it’s phased out, yet Swardheld, Shadith and I are able to touch you, use you in spite of being an inseparable part of that concatenation of forces. I’ve had a long time to study it and intimate knowledge of it; it was constructed by one of my people, a product of our common skills and the uncommon skills of Traivenn. I think I know a way to tie your body temporarily to the diadem so you can phase out with it. In a sense you join me in this parody of existence. You should be able to pass through ordinary matter without disturbing it. I’ve considered all the possibilities I can think of. Seems to me the one place he could put the bomb—I think it’s probably a bomb—where kephalos couldn’t detect it is inside kephalos. Out of phase, you should be able to pass into kephalos without registering on any of its sensors or alerting the psi detectors. Once we find the thing, I can half-phase you and hold it in stasis until you can disarm it. That’s why I wanted you to eat and rest. Isn’t going to be easy on either of us.*

  Aleytys wrinkled her nose. Pass through matter. Hunh. What happens if I start sinking slowly and inexorably into the center of the world and stay there as ash for eternity when our strength gives out? She thought a moment. Or go floating off and end up an icicle in the gas cloud up there? She waved a hand at the silver mist making shimmery background for the moons.

  *Aleytys, don’t be silly.*

  I feel silly. She sighed and reached for the symbolic power river, tapped into it and drew as much of the energy into herself as she could hold without burning to the ash she’d mentioned a moment before. *I’m ready. Let’s try it.*

  The diadem chimed. She felt the familiar weight on her head, then a strange chill passing through her body, starting at her feet, going up through a suddenly tight throat; it made the back of her eyes itch and shivered the roots of the hair at the crown of her head. An odd fluttery feeling like wings beating inside her. The garden and the house fluttered like the wings within. The air got darker as if the gas cloud were quenched and the two moons had gone dark. Then it seemed she pushed through a membrane like that of the field that guarded the househeart and found Harskari standing beside her, a tall and slender woman with white hair and dark skin, wearing a slim dark robe embroidered in jewel colors with designs that seemed oddly, disturbingly familiar, though Aleytys knew she’d never seen them before. She knew she was seeing Harskari’s memory of her former self, yet the figure seemed real. Solid. There was a sourceless thick light around her. There was color, rich color darker and more saturated than the colors she remembered in the garden; the foliage was green ultramarine, stone and earth and wood were dove-gray, russet and tawny, the textures about her mostly visual but no less rich for that, like those in a brocade print made from forty blocks. No smells. And after a short while longer in that eerie state, she was startled to find she wasn’t breathing. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the shadow she cast in this other reality wasn’t breathing. The relation between the sensing shadow and the body she could no longer feel was something she didn’t understand and only made her head ache—her shadow head—when she tried to work it out. Weird, she thought. Weird.

  Harskari controlled her impatience and waited for Aleytys to grow accustomed to this state.

  Aleytys turned her head. Her shadow head turned and she supposed her body’s head turned too. She saw, somehow, the garden around that body, the house, and grew confused about just who or what was doing the seeing. I’m here … whole … inside my own head. She willed herself to stand and sensed that she was moving. Felt as if she was operating something made of marshmallows and gristle. Enough body-sense left to let her move. Frightening not to know exactly where her real hands and feet were. Frightening to have so little sense of her own reality. Do ghosts feel like this? If so, I’d rather never be one. So I’d better get busy. She willed herself to walk. Felt herself bouncing on ground that was rather like good-quality foam rubber.

  Harskari beckoned to her, turned and glided away.

  For a moment Aleytys felt like a centipede deciding what foot to start off on, then she was gliding after Harskari, not precisely walking; it felt rather like the times in the fall before the worst of the snows when the children in the vadi Raqsidan made ice slides and wore the bottoms off their boots.

  The house looked solid. Dauntingly so. The texture of the stones was powerful before her.

  Harskari—or her dream form—walked into that wall. As if it were no more solid than a heavy fog.

  Aleytys followed, found herself struggling to breath; she scolded herself, telling herself she hadn’t been breathing for … how long? Impossible to say. The wall had the rubbery feel of the earth, it made little resistance to her passing, but she was very glad when she emerged into the book room. The things in the room had a strong presence, unreal, yet at the same time their surfaces were energized, solid. As if they were finely made holographic images that were perfect and at the same time obviously what they were. She was gliding through a hologram, gliding through the dreams that the floor and the walls and the furniture were dreaming.

  She followed Harskari along the flow-ways as she’d followed Hyaroll, down and down through the cellars with their racks of wine bottles, jars of preserves, past the shrouded machines in the workshop that seemed to exist beneath every Vryhh house. None of these dusty, nothing ever seemed to get dusty in these domes, pity the poor android with its endless dustmop rounds. Down yet further through the open maze—she found the fuss of threading through the thing so annoying she left it undeployed, though Shareem scolded her about that. Through the membranes without the membranes noticing her.

  Through the face of kephalos.

  Into another sort of maze. Snapping neurons of woven wire and silica flakes and painted panels and a shimmer of continuous happenings, almost visible thoughts. Kephalos dreamed too, hummed and sang conundrums to itself, needing to use the parts of its enormous capacity that defense and the care of the house and grounds left unused.

  During the past four days she’d gotten used to the aspect of kephalos that communicated with her, but what she perceived now was so much greater that she faltered, disoriented, almost lost herself. Harskari came back to her, touched her arm. Calmness and assurance flowed hand to arm. She looked at Harskari and thought: I love her. This is my true mother, the mother of my soul.

  On and on. Growing astonishment at the sheer size of kephalos; Growing sense of personhood about her. Kephalos as something far beyond machine. Not it, yet not him not her. Kephalos thinking, dreaming. Then …

  Darkness thick, massive, ugly.

  Tumor on the brain.

  Death embodied in darkness, waiting.

  She felt it before she saw it.

  She knew it before she saw it.

  When she saw it, it flooded her with fear.

  Harskari moved to it, stood beside it, her hand on it.

  Aleytys shuddered. Felt herself shudder. Like touching suddenly and without warning a slug, feeling it pulse alive under your fingers.

  Harskari’s voice came like another shock. “Hurry, Lee. Look at it. Know it. Time runs away.”

  She had to force herself to move closer to the thing. She put her hand on it. Holograph hand, hollow and insubstantial. Hand sliding over it. It was heavy, dark and solid even in this reality. Warm and vibrating, purring along, not a real sound, but something slipping through the whole of the body she was beginning to feel again as if the bomb was so powerfully present in both realms that it gave a sort of reality to her dreamform, though she also knew that was Harskari bringing her up to half-phase so she could handle materials in the outside world. Harskari’s hand warm on her shoulder, she touched and traced, found the psi alarms and pulled their sensor flakes, found the electromagnetic sensors and pinched them free to hang dangling down the sides of the bomb, found the tremblers, the scaly patches of the other alarms, and peeled them loose, felt out the internal mechanisms of the bomb and found what she thought was the ultimate detonator. Once again she began the slow tracing of connections. Heat gathered in her. At first she didn’t notice it, then she ignored it, then it was an agony that she couldn’t ignore, but she kept on with her slow, thorough trace. Harskari drained off some of the heat accumulating in her, but couldn’t do that much.

  The bomb began to change. The heat seemed to be forcing her into phase with it, or maybe the weight and malevolence of it was changing her angle to reality. She muttered a quick warning to Harskari, not knowing if the old one heard her, then began untangling and undoing all the traps, concentrating fiercely, little strength in her hands and a clumsiness that gave her fits. The bomb was reacting to her while she worked, arming itself, her work was a race against that, a race where she had a slipping edge. Her fingers fumbled on, she sobbed, felt rather than heard herself, drew on the remnants of her strength, removed a section of the bomb’s skin, set the plug on the floor by her feet, then began pulling flakes in the sequence she’d determined. Hands trembling, no feeling in her fingers, every movement guided only by the sense that was not sight. Until she finally bared the detonator and pulled it with an ease that seemed to make a mockery of her pain and terror.

  The bomb died.

  She felt it die under her shaking hands.

  She felt a great numbing release; her body quit on her as her will quit. Harskari slapped her, shouting: “Quitting, are you? Lying down on me. Letting Shareem down. Finish or it’s all for nothing. Finish. On your feet or kephalos dies too. Take the detonator farther away from the bomb. I can’t do it. I’m a phantom even here. Your hands are the only ones can do it. Move, Lee. Move!” The last word was a shriek, Harskari’s eternal irritating calm shattered at last. It broke Aleytys out of her lethargy, prodding her to one last effort.

  She pushed onto hands and knees, felt about for the detonator, twisted some broken wires tight about her wrist. She stayed there awhile, her mind drifting off whenever she tried to focus on anything. Harskari’s hand came warm on her shoulder, guiding her, comforting her. Dragging the detonator, she crawled under the maze of kephalos, nothing in her mind but slide her knees, move her arms, slide-slide the knees, pat-pat the hands, hear the detonator scraping, tumbling along beside her. On and on. No sense of time passing. Slide-slide the knees. Pat-pat the hands. One-two. One-two. A warmth on her forehead, a pressure halting her. “Lee. Lee. Lee.” For a moment she couldn’t make sense of the sounds. Lee? Oh. My name. Yes. My name. She lifted her head. “Lee, you can rest now. I’m phasing you back. It’s over. You’ve done the job. Rest now.”

  A wrenching and a twisting of her body, a flash of fire over her skin, a pain more intense than any she’d known before. She was briefly aware of a small dusty room. Dust? A cold stone floor. Real darkness. Thick. Almost tangible. Weariness swept in waves over her. She plunged into a deep dreamless sleep.

  Loppen Var On Sakkor

  Vrithian

  WITNESS [3]

  A SHEPHERD IN EXILE/LOPPEN VAR

  My name is Hattra lu Laraynne. As you see I am reduced to the company of beasts. Look at them. My gettesau. More hair than wits, like a lot of people I know. The scars on my face? Brands. Oncath on the right, Path on the left. They stand for Oporlisha Faerenos (rebel traitor). Well, I was no beauty to begin with. I sound bitter? I’m not, you know, just without hope for my people and my land. Our undying has proclaimed that change will not happen. The Matriarch leans on that; she will continue to rule and pass that rule to the daughter who’s deft enough to poison her and disappear the other claimants. The T’nink Intel (Temple of Nothingness) will not loose its hold. Our religion, you see. We worship Nothing with great fervor. If you knew it, you would realize I have just blasphemed sufficiently to get my tongue torn out. The god-concept is Nothingness. You see the importance of the—ness, the vast difference between Nothing and Nothingness? Ah, how blissful is the unknowing mind, what joy to be ignorant of itchy slippery letters. Do you know what brought me these brands? Stupidity. No, I didn’t do anything drastic or even particularly courageous; I taught my son to read. Yes, that’s all. Well, you see, that’s anathema here. As a matter of policy only certain people can learn to read, the priests for the t’ninks around the country, the scribes for the Matriarch and the trader families. Right. If you run a business, you must have a t’nink-taught scribe to keep your records and write your contracts and you live in an often vain hope that he won’t sell you down the drain accepting bribes from everyone about. But the lu Laraynnes have always been rebels. Oh, not overt rebels—that trait vanished quickly from Loppen Var. Anyone who stuck her head up was killed. Among other things we did, mother taught daughter to read, this from way back in the mists of forgotten times. Because of this lu Laraynne prospered, though we let ourselves be cheated now and then for the look of it; word got around we were lucky. I don’t mind telling you all this; the line is wiped out. Cousins, aunts, grandmothers, mothers, all gone. Our undying, our living god Avagrunn, she saw to that. She wants no changes in the rules she set down for us. For longer than anyone can remember, she comes down from her dome when there is unrest and adjusts the folk to suit her pleasure, slaying the intransigent, punishing the others. Why am I alive? I don’t know. A sign perhaps of the consequences of rebellion. Not much of a sign. I seldom go near other folk, only go into the village when I need something I can’t make for myself. Don’t talk to anyone, no one talks to me. Why did I do it? Ah, if you’d seen him, you’d know. My firstborn, a beautiful loving boy, gentle and kind, but with a hunger in him to know things. His father? You really don’t understand how things work here, do you? Nothingness. He came out of nothingness, a gift of the Great Nothing. What that means is pubescent girls go to the t’nink in their town when they are ready for children and their mother allows it. They spend thirty days there doing t’nink service in the day and lying with whoever comes to their rooms at night. The priests? Didn’t I make it clear the priests and scribes are always women? No. Every thirty days a levy is made of village men in the middle range of ages, they do heavy work for the t’nink in the day and go to the rooms appointed them at night, a different room each night so no one, not even the priests, knows who sired what child. Afterward? Well, associations do form between men and women, though they are not supposed to. As long as there are no children of that association, no one says anything. My son, my Juranot. I tried to keep him on one of the family farms, gave up my place on the ruling board to stay with him. He didn’t mind, he had a deep and abiding love for wild plants and animals, he made sketches of them in a little book I had bound for him. And kept notes in that book about their habits. It was dangerous, but I could not deny him that gift. Then priests came and took him away, took him to do his service in the village t’nink. I warned him to say nothing about the reading when I taught him. I had just time to warn him again when they took him away. I wasn’t terribly afraid for him; he was quick and wary when he had to be. But ah, he was beautiful.