As I thought about it, I realized the silence in the stairwell felt oppressive. I didn’t hear any ventilation sounds or mechanical hums. There was just our breathing and the faint echo of our voices when we spoke. It felt like the stairwell had been abandoned for centuries.

  I leaned over the railing and looked down. The stairs seemed intact, although they were rust-streaked. There was no debris or bodies, not even the gray dust. Could the stairwell have been sealed since the start of the war?

  “That’s a long walk down and an even more tiring one up,” I said.

  “We’re wasting time,” Philip said. “We should head for the—”

  “Institute portal,” I said, interrupting. “You’ve said that a thousand times already. You know, though, maybe this reaches to the Steel Mother Gorthak talked about.”

  “Undoubtedly it does.”

  “So we could go down and talk to her.”

  “Are you so desirous to commit suicide?”

  I stared at him.

  “Rhea is dead, remember?” he said. “So there would be no point in reaching the Steel Mother.”

  I nodded slowly until it hit me.

  He must have noticed, because he said, “Now what?”

  “Chaunt Two,” I said.

  He shook his hairy head.

  The Chaunt System had been divided into three planets. The middle one—two—had contained the Synthetic Minds, the teleporting robots and most of the military arsenal the Accelerationist side of the Institute had wanted to acquire. The Accelerationists had big plans about using the robots and hardware to conquer Earth and other former Planets of the Harmony. Livi had been with me then, although we hadn’t been married yet. I’d worked with a different Philip clone—A-3—a real rascal I’d first met in Indonesia. I’d learned that these Philips often transferred their memories to the Original, and he would hand certain memoires out like equipment to other Philip clones as needed.

  I looked at the present Philip clone. He’d known about me, meaning he had memories at least of the Philip clone I’d interacted with on Garm, the Planet of the Neanderthals.

  This Philip had been watching me from a stealth sphere. What were the chances he had all the memories of the other Philip clones I’d been with? I was starting to think, pretty good.

  On Chaunt II, Livi, Philip and I had escaped our interrogation by the Synthetic Minds because that Philip clone had a verbal code that put them to sleep.

  “What’s your problem?” Philip said.

  “No problem,” I said.

  “Then quit staring at me so intensely,” he said.

  “You put the Synthetic Minds to sleep on Chaunt Two,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “No, no,” he said. “That wasn’t me in the Chaunt System.”

  “I know it wasn’t,” I said. “But you have access to that clone’s memories. The Institute shares that stuff between clones for efficiency. You told me that once.”

  Philip shook his head. “First off—”

  “No more bullshit,” I said, interrupting.

  He seemed to pant for a moment before he shook his head again and said, “The process of what you’re suggesting is complicated. Memory integration between clones is imperfect. That means—”

  “First,” I said, interrupting him again. “I already told you to quit trying to snow me. You’re such a pathological liar.”

  “Even if that’s true, I’m not lying about this.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  The little hominid stared at me, perhaps seeing the set of my jaw and all that. “Fine, fine, I remember fragments and impressions from the Chaunt mission. But it’s like trying to remember a dream someone else had.”

  He looked very earnest now, but that meant nothing.

  I snapped my fingers. “You must know the sleep codes. That’s how you knew Rhea was telling us the truth when she said she knew them.”

  Did he look guilty? Could a Homo habilis even feel guilt for anything?

  He sighed. “Listen, Bayard, the codes you’re thinking about were specific to the Chaunt System. Those were different Synthetic Minds with different programming architectures.”

  “I don’t believe that. You called them Synthetic Minds then and the same here. That all sounds like basic Harmony of Planets technology to me.”

  His face scrunched up and he began to wave his arms. “This is sheer madness. You would be gambling everything on a mere possibility. Even if I could recall those codes, even if they worked here, we’d still need to reach the Steel Mother’s core systems. She’s not going to just let us walk in and reprogram her.”

  “Rhea thought it might be possible to separate the war functions from the atmospheric processing,” I said.

  “No, she didn’t. Rhea said it was impossible. Don’t you remember anything correctly?”

  I stepped away from the railing and leaned against a wall, feeling the weight of everything as the silence of the stairwell pressed in on me. Somewhere down there, maybe a thousand feet below, was the Steel Mother. She was running her part of the war, running at least one of the atmospheric scrubbers, locked in a cycle that was slowly killing everyone on Tellus.

  “Bayard, are you seriously thinking about walking all the way down there?”

  “Maybe we could rappel down.”

  Philip snorted. “Do you have a thousand feet of rope? Where would we find that? And how would you climb back up? Your arms would give out after the first fifty feet.”

  “What about elevators?” I said.

  “Look at the stairwell, Bayard. Do you see cables or guide rails? This was an emergency set of stairs only. The machines probably used a central shaft, relying on anti-grav units or magnetic climbing to go up and down.”

  I laughed, seeing it, nodding and grinning. “You’re right. Anti-grav belts would make the difference. There must be some around here. We could float down and float back up. We wouldn’t have to exhaust ourselves walking.”

  “Where exactly would we find these anti-grav belts?” he asked. “Even if there are some here, this subterranean complex is massive. We could search for days, weeks even. And that’s assuming such units still work after centuries of disuse.”

  “We have to try,” I said.

  “Why do we?”

  “Are you kidding? We might be able to save this world, and find some weapons to save mine while we’re at it.”

  He snorted again. “You don’t even know if the obelisk works to get you back to Mu. And the Mu obelisks have an injunction regarding the technology they’ll permit onto the planet.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked, suspicious again.

  Did he hesitate? I couldn’t be sure.

  “That’s common knowledge,” he said.

  …Maybe it was. I didn’t know.

  “So we’ll tackle one problem at a time,” I said.

  Philip sat down on the top step, looking exhausted in his bulky EVA suit.

  “You’re spouting madness, Bayard. Even if we found working anti-grav belts—a massive if—we’d be risking our lives going down to the Steel Mother.”

  I looked down the stairwell again. “One hundred to one hundred fifty stories to the bottom?” I asked.

  “That’s at a minimum.”

  “Walking down would take what, an hour?”

  “If we didn’t stop to rest,” he said, “coming back up would take three hours at least. Assuming we had the energy, which I seriously doubt we would.”

  “So we definitely need anti-grav belts,” I said.

  Philip made a frustrated sound.

  “We’re going to at least take a look for them,” I said.

  Philip stared at me and finally nodded, getting his scrawny butt off the step.

  -30-

  We exited the stairwell and walked down to the shallow water. Philip played his flashlight beam across it, and we could hear distant clicks, perhaps the odd pulse rifle shot, but it was hard to tell from which direction the shots came.

  “Are you sure you want to go back into the water?” Philip asked.

  I studied the sluggish water flow. “Give me the flashlight for a second.”

  “It’s mine,” Philip said. “Tell me what you want to see.”

  “Would you just hand it over for a minute?”

  The little Homo habilis shook his head. “Just tell me where to point. I can do that.”

  I reached down and took hold of the flashlight. He tightened his grip.

  “It’s my flashlight, Bayard.”

  I yanked it from him. What was his problem, anyway?

  He seemed ready to start yelling, but something shifted in his eyes. He muttered under his breath before saying, “Give it back when you’re done? How long are you going to use it, anyway?”

  I scowled at him before I started sweeping the beam all over the place, looking at everything. There were handholds and ledges in certain spots, but running water would make it difficult to reach those places. This did not look like an easy search, especially with walkers who knew where.

  “Would you give me my flashlight back?” Philip said.

  “What are you so worried about?” I said, looking at him. I played the light on the little Homo habilis, the five-foot, hundred-pound creature with his ridiculous EVA suit. “Why do you keep wearing that thing?”

  “This?” Philip said, touching his suit. “Because it has kept me dry and I don’t receive as many contaminants or as much radiation as you do. Notice that I did not need to enter the pool, but you did.”

  I nodded, thinking about that. I turned and shifted the flashlight and then turned back to play it on Philip.

  “Would you not shine that in my eyes, please?” Philip said.

  I thought about all the times the little hominid had pulled things out of his EVA suit. “What else are you hiding in there? Is that why you’re not taking it off?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Philip said.

  I was quiet a moment, then turned and looked elsewhere, using the beam. But as I did, I kept thinking about how I’d run into Philip on Tellus. I turned back, although I didn’t shine the light in his face, but at his feet.

  “How is it that you and I just happened to meet up on this planet?”

  “I don’t understand the question,” Philip said.

  “Is that even true?”

  “Are you calling me a liar?” he said.

  I snorted. “Are you kidding me? I’ve been calling you a liar the whole time. I know you’re a liar. You live for lies. That’s your native tongue, in fact.”

  I cocked my head. I’d heard that phrase somewhere before, but I couldn’t remember where. So I focused on the hominid.

  “You came out of the hidden sphere,” I said.

  “Yes, we were observing a combat situation.”

  I frowned. “So why did your stealth sphere happen to be right where I was?”

  Philip shrugged. “Happenstance, circumstance, such things happen all the time.”

  “No…” I said. “It doesn’t happen all the time. Were you spying on me? Is that what you were watching?”

  “Don’t be utterly ridiculous,” Philip said. “That is so patently—” And then he stopped as he looked at the flashlight.

  I looked at it, too, and I noticed the light had changed to a slightly different color.

  “Would you give me back my flashlight?” Philip lunged for it and tried to rip it out of my hand.

  “What the heck?” I pulled it away and held it higher than he could reach. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Now the flashlight buzzed in my hand. I looked up at it. When I looked back at Philip, he was aiming a small tube at me.

  “I demand that you hand me back my flashlight this instant or I shall paralyze you with this,” he indicated the tube.

  I snorted. “I think that’s just a tube and you’re pretending it’s some kind of dart gun. In other words, you’re faking.”

  “Will you obey me or not?” he shouted.

  Then the flashlight buzzed in my hand again.

  “What’s with the flashlight?” I said. “Either you tell me or I’m throwing it far, far away.”

  “No, don’t do that,” Philip said, sounding worried.

  “Why not?”

  “Because… it’s my property,” he said. “That means it belongs to the Institute.”

  I stepped back sharply from Philip, as the pieces seemed to flow together in my mind.

  “The Institute,” I said. “This is all about the Institute. I keep thinking you’re a familiar face, but you’re a clone of the original Philip. And you’re here for some nefarious purpose.”

  “Not nefarious,” he said, talking fast. “I am an observer of this terrible war that we of the Institute wish to stop.”

  “If that’s true, then let’s go down the stairwell and fix things with the Steel Mother.”

  “I don’t want to go down,” he said. “That’s terribly dangerous. I have no desire to reach any of the murderous Synthetic Minds.”

  “You know the sleep code,” I said.

  “That is a slim possibility, although it is highly doubtful it would work. Don’t you understand? The Synthetic Minds are fully awake. The code would merely ensure that walkers would come to investigate and find and kill us.”

  “How could that—?”

  At that moment, I heard a soft buzzing sound. This was not coming from the flashlight, but from behind me.

  I whirled around and saw figures materializing as if from a teleport system. Before I could understand, Philip’s tube hissed and a dart shot at me, sticking in my jacket. It didn’t prick me, however, because this was a good American leather jacket.

  Philip dropped the tube and in the bulky EVA suit, he rushed past me.

  I turned and once more, the flashlight buzzed in my hand and I had a horrible suspicion. I hurled the flashlight as far as I could, and as it spun through the air, it began to dematerialize.

  “Do not move,” one of the new hominids said in horribly accented English.

  But I was already moving. I didn’t pull out the baan because they were behind me, and I didn’t want to help them target me. Instead, I dashed for the stairwell.

  “Stun him, stun him!” Philip shouted. “Don’t let him get away. He’s the primary!”

  They both fired and as I heard the hums, I threw myself flat and saw two purple beams flash over me. Oh man, these were purple taser beams the Krekelens had used to stun me in the past.

  I scrambled up, running, and burst through the hole in the steel door that I’d carved earlier.

  “Get him!” Philip said.

  I dashed for the stairwell as there was a little light from the other Homo habilis agents for me to see what I was doing.

  I realized they’d used some sort of teleport system—maybe one they’d gained in the Chaunt System. The robots there had teleported, and so had I, in the end.

  In the semi-light, I took the steps down fast. I still hadn’t pulled out the baan. I had to get away from these guys and stay hidden, not fight them.

  “Oh, this is terrible, terrible,” I heard Philip saying.

  “We must go now, Superior. There are walkers on the way here. The Synthetic Minds may have detected our teleport beam.”

  “…Very well,” Philip said. “It took you long enough to get here.”

  Then I heard the familiar hum, and I knew that Philip and his rescuers had teleported away, and I was stuck down here without light and with hardly any hope. Walkers were on their way here?

  This was bad, very bad.

  -31-

  I sat on the steps in the pitch dark of a stairwell that led down, down, down. I kept listening for walkers, but so far, I hadn’t heard any approaching.

  If Philip’s information was correct, it was 100 to 150 stories down to the bottom. I didn’t want to descend like that in the dark, nor did I want to use my baan for light.

  Still, in order to avoid any possible Synthetic Mind scouts, walkers in particular, I started down. I planned to descend at least ten floors to one of the landings. That was better than waiting for Philip to return with reinforcements.

  I pinched the end of the little dart projectile and pulled it out of my jacket. I wondered if it was a tranquilizer dart. If so, my jacket had saved me. I tossed the dart and patted my leather jacket, then continued down, listening and moving carefully.

  I didn’t hear another teleport hum. I didn’t see a flashlight beam or a red walker eye-beam pinpointing my position.

  Soon, I reached a landing, feeling my way in the dark. This was taking too long. So, I unhooked the baan from my belt and clicked it on.

  The blue plasma beam extended, and with the light, I looked around. There was a huge, heavy door nearby. How could I have missed it?

  Did that matter?

  No.

  Like before, I used the baan to carve through it.

  Afterward, I entered what looked like a storage corridor, with dusty items stacked neatly. Maybe everything I needed was right here. I started looking, but any food rations had shriveled up and the water had dried out long ago. This looked like electrical equipment. I didn’t see any anti-grav belts, any weapons, any good rations, nothing useful. It was just this storage area with various tools.

  I continued until I found what had to be flashlights. I picked one up and turned it on, or tried. They were all dead, the batteries drained. Then I found what looked like an emergency light. I bent it until it cracked. What do you know green light appeared.

  I switched off my baan and hooked it back onto my belt.

  With the green light, I continued to search. I didn’t find anything more, not a spear or a map—just electrical tools and equipment.

  In the very back, I reached an elevator.

  Huh, that was interesting.

  I pried open the doors. There was no car, but there were cables. I looked down with the green light. I could toss it and see how far it went, but I didn’t like the idea of losing my light.

  I looked up.

  I was able to make out the sickly yellow light of the surface. Maybe the shaft led back up there. Was that the right thing to do, go up?