Baby’s Fire

One

“I can tell you the absolute, undeniable instant when I realized that I was a god…

“As the sole patient of a small Family-owned clinic, I was barely a thousand years old and still very much resembled a human being. A morning of enlarging surgeries became an afternoon where I was left conspicuously alone, free to adjust to my new self. The clinic was set on a recently terraformed pluto. That little world’s crust had been melted with a star-drive sun. A deep and warm atmosphere rose up for hundreds of kilometers, and the newborn sea was dotted with floating islands of sculpted black plastic and comet-born soil. Inside my archaic body, I went for a lazy stroll. Since I wanted to someday terraform worlds, I took careful notice of the towering, half-grown jungle. It really was a shambles, that place. Lush, but ordinary. Colorful, but artless. Every species had been woven from existing species—variations thrown like saddles on top of clichés. I told myself that a million years of indifference might make this biosphere interesting, the elegance and chaos of natural selection capable of achieving wonders. But I promised myself that when I rebuilt entire worlds and wove life upon them, I would do things unique and spellbinding. That’s what I was thinking as I bounced my way down to the sea.

“No, that isn’t my moment of realization. That’s just a cocky little girl, and some things are eternal…”

—Alice, in conversation

EVEN CAGED, THECore was a gorgeous, soul-wrenching spectacle.

“Speed up, Baby! Faster—!”

Ord ignored the taunting voice. The majority of his eyes and enormous ears reached ahead, absorbing the dust-blunted light and the wide booms and crackles of EM noise, measuring their blistering energies, scrupulously noting every variation, every flavor of change. Harsh flashes, quick to flicker and swell, betrayed massive black holes feeding happily on slow plasmas and shattered worlds. According to his count, a thousand such monsters lived inside the barricades. A slow white scream would sometimes leak through every obstruction, its roar peaking, then collapsing again at a predictable pace. Ord listened carefully, replaying the screams in his mind until he understood what he had heard and from where each had come. Bathed by gamma radiations, healthy suns were detonating at a devastating rate. Neutron suns were absorbing mass until they were fat, then they would supernova. But even exploding suns weren’t bright enough to be seen. The cumulative light and heat, along with fierce energies spewed from the monster black holes, fueled this cataclysm now. Strange as it seemed, the baby universe had vanished. Ord felt certain now. Sifting the data, he couldn’t find any telltale trace of the flawed umbilical. What had been extraordinary and exotic had finally degraded into an enormous but otherwise conventional, even prosaic, wildfire.

“Speed up,” said the tireless voice. “Move your ass! Are you listening, Ord? If you can’t run faster than this, I’ll catch you. Do you hear me?”

He always heard, and he never responded.

What Ord did, constantly and desperately, was think: He contemplated everything that he had heard and seen. He digested Alice’s memories, looking for fresh clues about her dense, secretive plans. And he gazed obsessively at the physics that had started all of this. Yet even with his overly augmented mind, the equations were unreal—open-ended, exotic abstractions, comprehensible only as symbols drawn on the blackest screen imaginable. Even if he had tools and the opportunity, Ord couldn’t have duplicated the work by himself. Even if he had possessed most of Alice’s schematics, what was missing was essential. He could never succeed on his first attempt, and probably not in the next million tries, either. And that incompetence was a comfort, and a blessing. Knowing he couldn’t accomplish such wonders, Ord didn’t feel the thinnest temptation to try.

Was that why Alice hadn’t given him the essential knowledge? To keep him innocent, and safe?

Or was it simply to frustrate their enemies? If Ord was captured, and if they tore into her memories…well, she wouldn’t want their enemies knowing how to build everything from nothing…again…

Relentlessly, feverishly, the boy contemplated everything of clear importance. A hundred thousand years after Alice had returned home, Ord was making the same journey, in reverse. The ironies were easy to see. Like Alice, he was moving within a whisper of light-speed. But where she brought little with her, allowing her massive talents to follow at a slightly lazier pace, Ord had consumed enormous energies, accelerating his entire body as well as his soul. In reverse, he watched the same suns that she had watched—red-shifted and blue-shifted by his own enormous velocity. He studied the living worlds that passed by and counted the long, dead stretches. A hundred thousand years ago, their little galaxy had been growing crowded with people and other sentients; that was one ready excuse to build new universes. Yet now the sky was peppered with empty, war-ravaged bodies of iron and ice, and for the next ten million years, and perhaps longer, there would again be ample room for expansion.

“See?” said a quieter, closer voice. “Our plan worked. We created a universe with endless room!”

Ord ignored that voice, too.

Concentrate, he told himself.Now .

His inheritance included an enormous mind, powerful and swift. But there was too much data to digest and too many possibilities growing from that data, most of which needed to be conspicuously ignored. Worse still, time was short. At this fantastic velocity, the universe was a rapidly changing, brazenly unstable maelstrom. Ord would spy some sweet blue world up ahead, and, in the proverbial blink, something would go wrong. A war would erupt. A god would fight some pursuing god. Or the simple weight of too many refugees would cause its biosphere to collapse, and the blue world would turn milky white as its oceans boiled.

With every glance, millions died.

Every tiny tick of time meant another century had passed, and the Great Peace remained in shambles.

Ord watched everything, and he cried endlessly. Sometimes he forced himself to gaze back into the constricted, red-shifted past, staring at the dead Earth until even his finest eyes couldn’t see anything but the faint glare of Sol. He listened to transmissions coming from the new Council on Mars, absorbing news already ancient; and with less success, he intercepted coded signals from the Nuyens, feeding them into three separate talents of Alice’s, each talent using a different configuration of quantum computers to make a trillion trillion calculations in the smallest gasp of time…and declaring, with certainty, that the codes were unbroken and would remain so for the next hundred billion years.

But absorbing those transmissions meant they would be a little weaker when they reached their destinations.

And into that weakness, Ord could insert his own signal, masking it to look official, then stuffing it with a variety of eschers that would bruise the AIs that received them, and better still, piss off the various Nuyens…

“You’re pissing me off!” Ravleen shouted. “Hey, little Ord. You can’t outrun me, and you can’t beat me, and I’m not going to fail. So why not act smart and surrender?”

The voice was behind him, and not far behind. Built from dark matter and the darkest energies, Ravleen was near enough that he sometimes felt the hot touch of what passed for fingers, claws reaching out to tickle what passed for Ord’s own toes.

“Run faster,” she would say, a million times every second, her voice possessed by a narrow, unalloyed fury. Ravleen could never stop chasing him. Until he had died in some horrible fashion, or she had died, she would keep after him. Or the universe would expand and grow chilled around them, and after a trillion years it, and they, would quietly pass away.

“Say something, coward! Anything!”

Since escaping from the Earth, Ord had not once responded to her insults, or the wild threats, or even those moments when Ravleen managed to bruise his conscience. His pain and endless shame were far worse than anything she could inflict. Yet Ord was able to function, shoving his miseries aside, endlessly reminding himself that nothing mattered but that he somehow found his way through the dusty barricades, reached the burning Core, where he would then—

No, don’t think it.

Don’t even bring it to mind, ever.

“I promise, little Ord. Let me grab you. I’ll kill you quickly. Neatly, and forever. If you’d just let me—”

Ord contemplated everything else that mattered.

“I know where you’re going!” Ravleen roared, using a million channels and enough energy to sear unprotected ears.

Then, for emphasis, she spat at him, a blob of coherent X rays slashing into his weakest systems.

Ord absorbed the energies, healed most of his injuries, and what couldn’t be healed was mercifully shut down and dismantled, the talents’ dead mass retained as propellant for the next tiny adjustments in his course.

“I know where you’re going,” Ravleen repeated.

Do you? Ord didn’t reply.

Then with her most merciless voice, she said, “You are going into my mouth. One bloody, hurting piece at a time!”

Two

“I continued my lazy stroll.

“Beyond the jungle was a narrow and rather steep beach built from salmon-sands. I kicked the sand into the warm turquoise surf and watched the bright pink grains sprout little tails and swim frantically back to where they began. The morning’s work at the clinic had enlarged my senses. Not only could I tell every grain from its neighbors, I could also feel the vibrations of each tail, and hear their plaintive little voices, and every airborne molecule carried with it a vivid, unnameable and always delicious odor.

“It was my good fortune that a whale had died—a sulfur-backed cetacean of spectacular size—and the current had thrown its carcass against the beach. Dead for days, its blubber and muscle and deep organs were rotting in the tropical heat. I stared at that putrid mass, my new eyes reaching inside, caressing the great white bones, marveling at the intricate, relentless dance of feasting bacteria. And beyond the murmur of the soft warm surf, I could hear the plaintive, despondent cries of the poor whale’s wife. ‘Where are you?’ she asked. ‘Can you hear me, love?’ And then, after an anguished pause, she asked, ‘Is it happy, this realm past life?’

“I took a breath, a deep breath, absorbing the roaring stink…and its stench was, without question, lovely. Rich and elaborate, and lovely. Without doubt, this was a golden, spiritual moment. Where a human would have retreated in agony, I was joyously intoxicated…so much so that I found myself pressing my human face into the gore, sniffing again, and again, then opening wide my tiny archaic mouth in order to take a bite of that very sweet treasure.

“That’s when I knew what I was…!

“When every corner of the universe smells delicious, and every sight looks beautiful…that’s when you know that you have become something else…that you are a god…and it is time to be exceptionally careful…!”

—Alice, in conversation

AMOMENT LIVED;a century crossed.

And then, another.

The Core was beautiful, and horrific, capable of wringing awe from any lucid mind. But it wasn’t just the fierce fire that impressed, it was the great cage that held that fire in check. With little time and desperately few resources, armies of humans and aliens, gods and machines, had built a wondrous set of barricades. Comets and plutos had been pulverized, then refined into an especially pure dust that served as a growth medium for nanochines, and those tiny wonders had colonized every mote, replicating themselves and reconfiguring their homes, armoring and ionizing the dusts, electromagnetic rivers shepherding them wherever they were needed most.

The barricades were thickest along the galaxy’s waist. There the dust lay in dense and radiant crisscrossing bands, each mote just far enough from its neighbor to maximize the cumulative effects. Each was a tiny world bristling with a nation of machines that lived to do nothing but absorb, dilute, and deflect the relentless energies. Few would have imagined that humans, or anyone, could have built such a vast contraption. Until the Core exploded, no sane mind would even have kissed the possibility. But the impossible inspires the impossible. The unthinkable disaster swept away convention and sloth, and within a few centuries, in countless places, the barricade was being erected by separate geniuses, each trying to save his or her own little world. Within just a few tens of thousands of years, it grew to become the largest artificial structure inside the galaxy, and perhaps anywhere in Creation.

Without barricades, the Core’s beauty would be unveiled, and it would shine a hundred times brighter than now, and the Milky Way would be an empty, sterile realm out to its thin, thin edge.

But with the barricades, life could thrive even here. Floating against the glowing dust were dozens of neat dark clumps. They were little bodies, mostly. A light-week across, or less. Most were solar systems nestled inside their own secondary barricades. Others were simple clouds of fresh, well-rested dust, coaxed out of the way, waiting to fill unexpected breaches. The smallest clumps were outposts shielding engineers and administrators and fleets of starships ready to carry those important souls into danger, or back out of it again. Here and everywhere, the future of the galaxy depended on circumstances and on luck, and mostly, it hinged on the character of the men and women, gods and machines living on the brink of this incredible blaze.

Several of those black blotches lay in Ord’s path.

Not far from the largest blotch, almost unnoticed against the golden blaze, was a pair of neutron stars. Like identical twins, they orbited in close formation, each superfluid body deformed by its sibling’s enormous gravity. If Ord held his course, he would slip past the pair at a whisper more than three light-years, and in another thirty light-years he would crash into the barricades’ first walls. And then Physics, the greatest god, would doom him. Ord’s body would lose its hard-won momentum, slamming into the countless stubborn particles. Following in his dust-impoverished wake, Ravleen would gain on him, reaching out with her killing hands, then her mouths, making every violent promise come true.

For the entire journey, Ord had weighed his prospects, again and again, and finally he had reached that invisible mark where lasting decisions needed to be made.

“I’m here!” screamed Ravleen, again. “Don’t forget me, you fucking shit!”

After all this time, the baby Chamberlain finally allowed himself the simple pleasure of shouting back at his pursuer.

“You dear little bitch!” he cried out.

They were light-seconds apart, but the pause seemed to stretch for hours. The monster had heard him, and for a slippery little while, she was stunned.

Into the confused silence, Ord said, “Stay with me, Ravleen.”

He said, “Please.”

Then he used a fat slice of his reserves, jettisoning systems and talents that would never help him. What remained dove hard toward the twin neutron stars, and he drew himself into a snug ball, and from both of the dying suns, he stole momentum and an unexpected new course.

With a thousand tongues, Ravleen cursed him.

With every long-range weapon in her arsenal, she assaulted both targets. The orphaned talents couldn’t defend themselves; they were vaporized or compressed, left useless and dead. The rest of Ord suffered deep wounds that would demand hours of surgery and precious resources to heal. But the maneuver seemed to catch Ravleen by surprise, and she ended up following a different, much sloppier trajectory, falling a little farther behind.

Slipping past the neutron stars, Ord shoved and squirmed, putting himself on the best available course.

Several billion kilometers in the rear, and still enraged, the monster swung low over the fierce surface of one star. Then for no rational reason, she spat out a huge gob of antimatter, letting it plunge into the sun’s twin. She was punishing the stars; that was Ord’s reflexive first thought. She was doing something vast and rash, and the resulting explosion was sure to cripple a few, or most, of her talents.

What was she thinking?

In a terrible instant, Ord understood. He saw the flash and tasted the raw light boiling out of the wound, one of his surviving systems doing the fierce calculations. Those suns were already close to touching. Another thousand years, and they would have touched. But that one tiny nudge, delivered in the worst possible location, had killed enough momentum to bring them together now, to make them kiss, and in the very near future, embrace.

The collision would take the next few weeks, local time.

For the travelers, it would require a half instant.

Already Ravleen was weaving a sail from armor and coherent plasmas. When the stars collided, merging into a single black hole, she would gracefully ride the gamma pulse outward, regaining most of the lost distance…and more horrible still, every living creature within several hundred light-years was certain to die, or beg for its death.

Ord found himself staring along his new course, studying those little black smears where a few million or billion sturdy citizens led their important lives. They weren’t ready for this disaster. It was coming too soon, too sudden. Of course he sent a brief, vivid warning; but he was the famous criminal, the greatest renegade of all, and they wouldn’t believe his declaration. Even as Ord described this little apocalypse, he knew that some fraction of them would suspect a trick and delay their preparations too long, and that’s why they would perish.

Thinking along the same sad lines, Ravleen said, “You see? You see? You are a complete and helpless idiot.”

“Yes, I am,” Ord replied, throwing up his incorporeal hands.

Three

“A young Nuyen is approaching your district.

“His name is Xo, though he is unlikely to mention that identity. He is moral and good, as all Nuyens are. There is no reason for desperate measures. But you should be aware that the boy is rather young and possibly misguided, and he has a few novel talents that are completely harmless but can render him rather difficult to control.

“If you see our little brother, do not speak directly to him.

“Be advised: If he happens to make contact with you, at a distance or particularly in person, there is a small if not negligible chance that your judgment will be impaired. He may not resemble a Nuyen, and he may choose to look other than human. Your security systems may also be at risk during the visit, and afterward. And your memories of the incident should never be completely trusted.

“Naturally, we would appreciate news about our brother’s whereabouts.

“You can help poor Xo by coaxing him to remain in one place long enough for us to reach him. You have our blessing to use any available means. And afterward, you will have our thanks…and eventually, a financial prize based upon your hardships as well as your ability to keep this unfortunate business politely and eternally confidential…”

—a Nuyen communication

FOR THE LASTtwenty millennia on the galactic standard calendar, Xo had worn the gleaming hull and scrubbed interior of an empty star-liner. His voice and manner were that of an AI pilot searching for paying passengers. Since few refugees remained near the Core, it was perfectly acceptable to ask the whereabouts of other ships and objects that might have been ships. He was a business and an investment, and paying customers meant everything to him. And since gossip is the hallmark of any social intelligence, Xo gossiped with every local AI, as well as human voices, and alien voices, and a multitude of competing and inadequate news services.

“I’m hunting for two old friends,” he never admitted.

“Have you seen them?” he never asked.

Yet every word he spoke was wrapped around that purpose and single question, and every word and cold number and complicated digital image that came back to him was dissected for even the most obscure clue.

Slower than his quarry, Xo was more than a hundred light-years behind when the neutron stars collided. His armor and simple distance kept him relatively safe. Steering toward the piercing glare of the blast, he survived the radiations and wild heat, suddenly slipping into a great bubble of sterilized vacuum where a fleet of disaster ships had already assembled. Once again, living worlds were boiling away. Millions of dying voices begged for help. But the ships had no choice: They ignored the pleas, streaking for the Core and the damaged barricades. If the Core’s searing fires could punch through the dusts, then countless more worlds would perish.

Xo embellished his disguise. Suddenly he was an AI free spirit simply glad for this chance to leap into the mess, and grateful souls didn’t question him too thoroughly. They let him travel deep into the barricades, repairing and repositioning the dust clouds while he hunted for signs of Ord’s passing. But there were none. He couldn’t find tracks of plasmas or debris fields left from a great duel. Xo resorted to coaxing the other ships and crews into speaking honestly. It was an ancient Brongg captain, suddenly drunk, who admitted seeing a pair of masses streaking past her ship, moving at very nearly light-speed, one mass following the other so closely that it was difficult to think of them as separate.

Xo’s quarry must have taken a new, unexpected trajectory, charging along the dusty fringe of the Core. That hundred-light-year gap had doubled, and Xo had no hope of catching the Chamberlain. But when he thought about his choices, he saw only the one, and that was to follow, ignoring odds and practicalities, every reason and good sense surrendered to this one consuming mission.

The renegade Nuyen skimmed past dozens of colony worlds. On each, he borrowed the faces and lives of useful citizens. One night, he was a president’s trusted wife. In the morning, he was an even more trusted mistress. He turned himself into various addicts and poets who were free to sit in every sort of public place, listening to the important whispers. He gave himself the rank and angry bearing of a notorious field marshal. With the breasts and penises of a local sex symbol, he holo-touched thousands. Plus he was an AI advocate, a wealthy personality sculptor, a simpleton custodian, and for one long afternoon, everyone’s favorite golf pro.

Gradually, gradually, he pieced together Ord’s whereabouts.

Most witnesses believed the two passing masses had belonged to the ruling Families. “The good Families,” they would add with a make-believe confidence. But a few worriers mentioned the renegades—the last Chamberlain and his Sanchex lover. “You know,” they muttered, a look of easy disgust building. “It’s those monsters who destroyed our mother world…”

Xo nodded with every face, saying nothing.

But when pressed for reasons, they admitted, “No, it probably wasn’t those monsters. Just a pair of Nuyens off on one of their fantastic errands, probably.”

“Do you see many Nuyens?” Xo would inquire.

“Plenty,” they boasted. “Huge and old and very important Nuyens.”

Skimming along the barricades, Ord had continually tweaked his course, and with every nudge, Xo wasted time and distance finding the new trajectory. But he remained a Nuyen, perniciously thorough in nature, studying every problem from all angles, leaving Chance no place to hide.

One dense black bubble protected a neat green world reserved for the wealthiest humans. Passing nearby, a tiny wisp of Xo dropped to the world’s surface. Quietly, he acquired the handsome face and smooth reflexes of a professional golfer. The sport was tedious and elaborate, and densely ritualistic, and it was slow. Xo’s clients were trillionaires, and he confidently coached them on their swings and personal problems and the philosophies and faiths of human history, helping his paying friends to find the easy course through their own immortal, burden-free existences. Each hole took a full day to complete, and each hole existed for only that day—a unique assemblage of emerald green turns and flowery obstructions and blue lakes and chaotic winds. The balls were small and hard and nearly as complicated as worlds. Each was a mother-mote taken from the barricades. On each ball, billions of nanochines went about their rapid existence, oblivious to the tiny forces ushering them from place to place. Playing with mother-motes was a local wrinkle, and every player worked through the day for the chance to watch his mote hit the slick-grass green just so and then drop into the tiny cup with that delicious, eternalka-plunk .

One of the three wealthy golfers was a buoyant giant, both physically and in terms of his mountainous wealth. Prior to the Core’s disaster, he was a minor billionaire with a fleet of aging starships. The great exodus gave him his fortune, the refugees paying everything for the chance to put their disembodied, comatose brains into one of his cargo holds. A grand tragedy was the same as a stroke of incredible fortune, and from it an empire had evolved, encompassing entire worlds and a fleet of swift new starships.

The man was happy, and he spent his happy days dreaming about new triumphs. Xo watched the selfish daydreams, and in revenge, he made the big hands flinch, an easy ten-meter putt missed. Then, as he bent over the mote to putt again, Xo remarked, “It must make you guilty, knowing how you made your money.”

The trillionaire had never felt the tiniest guilt. But at that instant, an incredible anguish swept over him. Blinking back tears, he looked up at the face of the golf pro, and sobbed, and said nothing.

Xo said, “Guilt,” once again.

The tears poured past the furiously blinking lids.

“What can I do?” he begged. “I feel…so bad…!”

“To fix your guilt?” Xo continued. “I don’t know what to suggest. That’s for you and your conscience to decide.”

The man wailed and glanced forlornly at his utterly embarrassed friends.

“But tell me this,” Xo continued. “Your fleet of ships…I bet they see some very unusual things…”

“Unusual?” the golfer muttered.

“Dark-matter ships. Mysterious flashes between the stars.” But neither brought a reaction, which was when he asked, “Or any odd artifacts, maybe?”

The man didn’t belong to any Family, but to keep track of his far-flung holdings, he had amassed some considerable and legally questionable talents. The implanted guilt had disabled most of his security systems. Xo’s question caused a reflexive search of records, which in turn allowed Xo to peer into that elaborate crush of files and digitals and routine flight manifests.

Xo saw what he wanted.

“There’s this one thing,” the sobbing man replied, unaware of any intrusion, believing that this memory had dragged itself into the fading light of the day. “One of my AI captains was cutting distance, clipping the Kuiper belt beside a red dwarf. And its sensors found a hot spot. On a pluto-class world, there was a few kilometers cooking at nearly 260 Kelvin, and someone had given that ground hills and trees. On the tallest hills was a big house. Of all things, it looked like the old Chamberlain mansion—”

“What’s that?” blurted another golfer.

“What?” said the first golfer. Irritated now, he dug at his eyes with his increasingly dampened hands. “I was just telling a story.”

“What story?” asked the third golfer.

“I don’t remember.” He blinked. It was just the three of them standing on the flat and perfumed and perfectly round green. Why should it be anything but the three of them? And why was he crying like this? Gazing down, he blinked and sniffed, staring at the black mote, and he found himself thinking about the billions of tiny machines fixed to its surface. Like its own world, it was. And if every one of the machines was a person, and he could save all of them and make them as happy as he used to be…

“Shut up!” he wailed, although no one was talking.

Then to the ball, he said, “Quiet. Everybody keep quiet so I can make this damned shot!”

THECHAMBERLAIN MANSIONhad been resurrected, complete with a reef’s worth of cultured coral, and it rose on the high hill, nearly as white as the snow that stretched out on all sides.

Beneath the mansion were two figures. Approaching on foot, Xo thought he understood. The figures were child-sized, and proportioned like children, and fighting. One lay helpless on the ground, while the other stood over him, kicking his ribs and face and smacking him between the useless legs. Other than the terrific thud of flesh impacting on bone, silence reigned. A trickle of blood ran off into the snow, pooling in a thick frozen black-iron lake at the bottom of the hill. Judging by the flow and the lake’s considerable depth, this beating had continued, without interruption, for the last two centuries.

What passed for Xo’s heart quickened as he approached.

The scene was lit by the Core’s angry fires. The boy lying on his back, enduring that fantastic abuse, was a young Chamberlain. He had the red hair and the proper build, and those were Chamberlain teeth scattered about in the glittering drifts. The other figure was Ravleen. Obviously. These had to be slivers of their original selves, portraits left in their wake as they raced through the universe. How many of these horrific little dramas lay scattered from here all the way back to the dead Earth?

Unless these were his lost friends, finally and unexpectedly found.

If this was Ravleen, then Xo was committing suicide. But he discovered that he didn’t care. With a corporeal hand, he grabbed the bully by the shoulder and gave her a hard, swift jerk, and with a thousand toxic eschers ready to assault her higher functions, he ripped away the simple golden mask, finding an unexpected face staring at him.

Shaggy red hair framed a male Chamberlain’s craggy features.

It was a more mature face than the one lying in the bloody snow. And if anything, it was harsher in appearance, the bright pale eyes miserable in a deeper, more piercing fashion.

A moment passed.

Another.

Then together, with a shared amusement, both apparitions said, “Xo.”

A strange and sad laugh followed, and the Chamberlain voice told the dumbfounded newcomer, “Goodness, you certainly took your time!”

Four

“Without question, we have imagined the essential heart of whatever scheme the baby Chamberlain is unfolding before us…but we have also envisioned another fifteen hundred and twenty-two general plans, each with its own muscular credibility as well as myriad variations and elaborations and opportunities for sweeping inspirations. Separating the genuine from the possible will be daunting. All that is certain is that Ord/Alice’s attentions are focused on the Core, and it is in our Family’s best interest to stop him.

“His motivations are secondary.

“If it matters, we can establish his intent once he is dead…securely and eternally out of our way…”

—a Nuyen communication

“ARE YOU ANuyen? Or do you simply like that face?”

“I am, and I don’t,” he replied. “My name is Xo.”

The woman showed him an impossibly bright smile, then, after too long a silence, she made sure to tell him, “I have always admired your Family.”

“That’s gracious of you,” Xo replied, focusing his senses on the bureaucrat. “And may I say, I’ve always been fond of your Family, as well.”

“Why, thank you…”

She was an Echo. Until recently, hers was among the least consequential of the Thousand Families. Like the Nuyens and Chamberlains, the original Echo was chosen with care, augmented with care, and cloned; then throughout the Great Peace, those clones had done a very small part in exploring and settling the galaxy, preferring to use their careful powers to manage the civilized regions.

Echoes were pathologically cautious. That’s why they had no great history, no natural flair for invention or business, and a deep distaste for politics. Compared to most Families, they were an impoverished clan, worth pity and charity and little more. They never terraformed worlds at the Core, and naturally, they weren’t invited to help build the baby universe. As a consequence, they could claim a perfect, laudable innocence once the Baby had turned on its old mother.

Their lack of ambition made others sleep easy.

This particular Echo helped administrate every facet of life in her district. Local humans and most aliens respected her. During her tenure, the district had felt like a prosperous backwater, quiet and calm if not entirely at peace.

Out of respect for the Nuyen, or perhaps out of local fashion, she wore the simple archaic face and body of a mature woman. Echo women were small and round, dark everywhere but in the deep green of their eyes. With those eyes and her careful words, she admitted, “I feel uneasy. You’ve applied for permission to terraform a local world—”

“Is there a problem?”

“A small difficulty, yes.” She sighed and shrugged her shoulders. “I’m sorry to bring this up, and I don’t know how else to broach the subject…but according to my records, you aren’t supposed to be here…”

“Where do I belong?”

“On the Earth,” she replied. “It’s your last official residence.”

Xo was wearing a Nuyen’s body. His straight black hair framed bright dark eyes, the simple mouth locked into a perpetually superior smirk. Through that smirk, he pointed out, “The Earth is no more.”

“Which I know, sir. Yes.”

Xo watched as the Echo accessed every available file. She wasn’t particularly talented at her work, and she acted oblivious to the fact that he could see everything in her gaze, as well as terrains of data too secret for a lowly bureaucrat.

“I was there,” he confessed.

“Pardon me?”

“When our home world died.” With his Nuyen face, he showed his anguish, his guilt—unalloyed, and pure, and wrenching. “I don’t mean that I was on the Earth. No, I was standing beside the Sanchex…the one who actually murdered those billions.”

“I see,” she managed.

She had no choice but to believe him.

With the subtlest touch, Xo adjusted her emotions. Then, with a soft, grave voice, he told her, “I feel responsible for what happened.”

“For what the Sanchex did?” she countered.

“A creature conditioned and armed by my Family, yes. I could have anticipated her act, and with one hand, I might have stopped her.”

She was embarrassed, and sorrowful. “But I’m sure you’re not responsible. Otherwise—”

“I’d be languishing in prison. Wouldn’t I?”

She stared at him, waiting. Her home was a crystalline moon orbiting a superterran world. The Core’s fires seeped through the barricades and through this solar system’s defensive grid, then pushed their way into this modest, somewhat stuffy room. With those fires reflecting in her wide wet eyes, she said, “Prison, yes. I suppose you would be enjoying some kind of captivity, yes.”

Already knowing the answer, Xo asked, “What’s my official status?”

“Your Family feels concern. They’ve sent general pleas to all local administrators, with some rather vague warnings attached.”

“Do you want to arrest me?”

“No,” she blurted. “Goodness, no!”

He showed an appreciative smile, then asked, “What are you going to do, Madam Echo? Tell me.”

“I am supposed to contact the Nuyens. And if possible, detain you.”

“Do it.”

“Pardon?”

“Both duties. You should do them.”

She tried. An encoded message was sent nowhere, and when the Echo’s compromised systems sang out that all was well, she allowed herself to smile at Xo. It was a nervous, vaguely hopeful smile. “Don’t leave us,” she advised.

“I won’t be any trouble,” he promised. “My intention is to remain here and work on my little project, and to the best of my ability, keep out of public view. When my Family wishes, it can come gather me up.”

“That would be best,” she admitted.

“We have an agreement?”

The round face tightened. Finally, she told him, “There is a second issue.”

“Is there?”

“This project. You wish to terraform a local world. But as far as I can determine, you lack the essential skills.” She winced, as if expecting a fist or a blistering insult. When neither came, she made herself say, “Sir,” again. “We have rules. Much as I’d love to see our little portion of the galaxy thoroughly settled and green, we have standards to uphold, codes of conduct and craftsmanship to be honored.”

“I intend to purchase the proper talents.”

The green eyes grew larger. “I am so glad to hear that, sir.”

Xo told her exactly what she wanted to hear. Then with each smooth word wrapped inside a comforting escher, he asked, “Madam Echo, do you have any idea what kinds of talents I’m wielding right now?”

The eyes were too large, and in a pained way, awed.

“At any moment,” he assured, “I can cause any entity to believe whatever suits me. Or I could tie her soul into an elaborate knot, leaving it tiny and insane for the next million years.”

From deep within, the Echo admitted, “I believe you.”

“Two choices are offering themselves.” He touched the back of her hand, lightly. “I get what I want, or I manipulate you into fulfilling my needs.”

“Don’t,” she squeaked. “Don’t hurt me.”

“I won’t. If you will allow me the privilege of begging.” Xo clasped his hands together, then knelt on the slick and perfectly transparent floor. With a voice that couldn’t have been more plaintive, he said, “I saw the Earth die. Barely yesterday, it seems like, and I can still hear the screams, and smell all that useless, useless death…”

She could see his nightmares, too.

“I want to make amends, Madam Echo. In a small way, obviously. Perhaps in a pathetic way. But at least I can begin.” Xo had never been more honest or more certain. “Let me build a special world. A unique world. I will put it here, if you let me, and if we are lucky, it will be a piece of artwork that will endure for the ages.”

Quietly, the woman cautioned, “Your Family…it isn’t known for its terraforming skills or its artistry…”

“And your Family has always been frightened little shits,” he replied. “Yet here you are, a wealthy despot ruling several thousand worlds.”

She gave a tiny nod.

“Point taken,” she whispered. Then with a drop of bile, she added, “Sir.”

“Do we have an agreement?”

“I’ll be watching you, sir. Always.”

“An agreement?”

She tried to laugh, and failed, and, placing her face into her cupped hands, muttered, “As if I have any choice…”

Five

“Why do we make such marvelous terraformers…?

“The other Families have the same essential technologies. They can dress up in any proven talents, wielding the same fantastic energies, every eye clear and dry, while each hand is moved by a keen, quick intelligence. Yet their works never quite match our better works, and in every case, they fall woefully short of our best…

“I know what you’ll say: Real talent isn’t something worn, but it’s a quality deeply embedded in our Chamberlain genes. And it is an integral part of our ancient, prideful culture. From the first breath, you have been taught that it is your duty and destiny to carpet dead worlds with life. Nothing else matters as much or for as long. And should the self-expectation weaken, then a thousand sisters and brothers will cuff you on the ear, telling you to return to your ultimate course.

“These are all good reasons to avoid the obvious: Chamberlain voices are those who most often judge what is beautiful and best about a terraformed world. And we are the ones who decide what is unseemly. And we are the judges who skate upon the slippery laws of possession, deciding what is actually ours…!”

—Alice, in conversation

THE WORLD HADfew charms.

Sunless and metal-poor, it was a full earth-mass drifting unclaimed on the dusty edge of the barricades. Judging by the physical evidence, someone had long ago attempted to make the world habitable, and they had botched the job. A rugged little continent had been thrown up through the ice, its stony bones built from cultured basalt. The toxic beginnings of an atmosphere lay everywhere as a young white snow. But the vanished terraformer had left a half-assembled sun in close orbit, which was a blessing. Plus there was enough Bose-condensed antimatter to fuel a modest biosphere.

Xo completed the sun and ignited it, and to hurry the world’s transformation, he injected fingers of antimatter into the frozen crust.

Ice became a warm, filthy ocean.

The reborn atmosphere was thick and agitated, gales slamming against the land, threatening to gnaw it down to nothing.

Xo briefly abandoned his world.

Twenty light-years removed from the barricades, orbiting close to a young blue-white star, was a warehouse. A sophisticated array of diamond scaffolding and shadow matter held every flavor of treasure, sorted and labeled and set in stasis. Most of the treasures had been yanked from the Core before the fires consumed them. In most cases, the owners were dead or unknown, and once the pesky legalities were addressed, the properties would gratefully belong to men and women who had saved them. But there were also items left over from criminal proceedings. Talents wrested from defunct Families. Talents that a Nuyen could rightfully purchase, or in special circumstances, rightfully steal.

“Terraforming,” said Xo. “Do you have anything that can help with a little terraforming?”

“No,” the governing AI reported, point-blank. “I am sold out.”

Terraforming skills were always in demand. Xo shrugged and turned to the other items on his enormous shopping list. Some proved available, and cheap, while many items were in stock but unavailable.

The AI explained the obvious. “We’re waiting for their legal owners.”

“I only wish to touch them,” Xo countered.

“You cannot,” he was told.

“Not for a simple second? What would be the harm in touching?”

“There wouldn’t be any harm,” the machine admitted. Then, with confidence, it said, “No harm at all.”

“Then may I?”

Xo made his request, and he touched the AI’s most intimate places.

“Do what you want,” it replied.

Xo put everything in his hand, then asked, “Just how long is a second?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the AI replied. “I can’t remember.”

“But I know how long it is. Trust me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Xo assembled the treasures, then mentioned, “I need to carry everything home. I want to wrap each of these inside a dark matter envelope.”

“Of course, sir. How much do you need?”

Xo answered.

The machine had a cranky laugh, but its voice was calm and reasoned. “That’s far more than you need,” it told this most difficult customer. “It is everything that I have in stock, sir. My entire inventory.”

“Fine. I’ll purchase it.”

The AI meant to say, “No,” but heard itself say, “Yes.”

Xo wrapped his purchases inside four envelopes of refined, compliant dark-matter. The other thousand-plus envelopes were tied behind like the tail of an invisible kite. Then he returned to the AI, asking again, “Are you certain that you don’t have an old terraformer’s talents?”

The machine felt itself being manipulated. It was a hard touch, this time. But with a rigorous honesty, it explained, “This is a depopulated district, and terraforming is much in demand.”

“Who buys these talents?”

Names and locations flowed.

Xo had more journeys and more stealing ahead of him. With a worried resignation, he returned to the head of the kite tail, ready to pull that massive load back across twenty light-years. But the obvious found him. Returning to the facility once again, he said, “All right. Show me everything that might be a talent. But it’s broken. You can’t get it to work well enough even to describe itself.”

“There is one small something,” the AI allowed. “A talent, perhaps.”

“Then I’ll take it, too.”

“But it’s quite useless. Believe me, sir.”

For the bulk of a second, Xo said nothing.

That great silence gnawed at the AI. Finally, it conceded, “There’s no reason you can’t have it, I should think.”

“Thank you.”

They moved into the deepest storage berths, and while the AI’s hands sorted through labeled masses of dark matter and baryonic matter, it mentioned, “This talent comes from a Chamberlain.”

Feigning surprise, Xo said, “Really?”

“One of the first renegades to be captured and tried.” Hands created for this single task brought out what looked to be a long, long piece of obsidian, whittled by another stone to form a double-edged blade. “When she was ordered to surrender her talents, the Chamberlain managed to damage this one beyond repair.”

“The bitch,” said Xo.

“Exactly,” the machine agreed.

With the blade held close, Xo returned to his new world. It was a slow, exhausting voyage, but it gave him time enough to sort through his new belongings and make his first inadequate attempts to identify the mysterious talent. A hundred years later, he finally arrived home. In his absence, the gales had worsened, and the atmosphere had thickened and turned violently acidic, and worse still, Xo’s arrival brought so much matter that tides were raised, stirring the young ocean, its icy basement tearing loose, continent-sized bergs joining in with the mayhem.

Xo set everything in a high orbit and began to work, desperately fighting to rescue his world.

“Don’t,” said a quiet, certain voice.

A woman was speaking with a Chamberlain mouth.

The stone blade had become a red-haired woman, nothing but flesh and bone and the simplest of minds staring at him. With amusement, it seemed.

“Everything’s a mess,” he protested.

“Leave it alone,” she advised.

“But my plan—!”

“Is shit,” she warned. “Which isn’t too surprising, considering you’re nothing but a baby Nuyen.”

The simple mind wasn’t. Xo looked inside, finding unsuspected depths.

“But I have a wonderful plan,” he complained.

“Don’t scare me,” she teased, laughing fearlessly at everything. “I’m here to help you. And my helpful advice is for you to do nothing.”

Xo watched the angry white bergs rise from the boiling sea, tidal waves sweeping across the raw land. Then, finally, glaring at the blue-eyed talent, he asked, “Which Chamberlain did you belong to? Do you remember?”

“I guess I should say Alice.”

Xo said nothing.

“Isn’t that the right answer?” she said. “After all, that’s who I am.”

Six

“A Sanchex is a wild bear shoved inside a mouse’s cage, abused until it becomes helplessly compliant, and then force-fed a diet of intelligence and cold civility.

“Which is the same for all of us, of course.

“But you know what I mean…”

—Alice, in conversation

RAVLEEN WAS POSSESSEDby a glorious, perfect rage.

As she chased her quarry, her intellect constantly practiced her hatred, making sure it was perfectly pure. Anything tasting of doubt or mercy was cast aside. Sometimes it was an act of will, but often it was a plainly physical deed. She would discover a shred of her soul that didn’t exist for the sake of killing Ord, a talent whose existence wasn’t spent dreaming of the horrible and prolonged and painful end that would come to that Chamberlain boy. With a righteous scorn, she would rip that worthless mass loose from her body and fling it away. Oftentimes she would aim at some inhabited place, then watch the impact with a cold satisfaction. Streaking at near-light velocities, a kilogram of useless talent could make a considerablewhump , slamming into someone’s green comet or asteroid with a fierce bright flash.

Cleverness and stupid luck were the boy’s only allies. On the Earth and again on the edge of the barricades, Ord had just managed to keep alive, maintaining his very slender lead over a vengeful, righteous angel.

That was the only way that Ravleen could think of herself.

She was a hard-fought, bloodied, and worn-down angel, but she still wielded a potent array of weapons and a fabulous set of muscles, and those colliding suns had helped increase her already terrific velocity. The gap between prey and predator was steadily and deliciously shrinking. They were still skating close to the barricades, and Ord was obviously terrified. Ravleen could taste the fear leaking from him. She saw it in his increasingly desperate maneuvers, watching him dive past suns and little worlds. The Chamberlain used those simple masses to twist his course, keeping himself near the Core. Obviously, he couldn’t leave this place. Like the idiot moth, he was circling its magnificent light, and like any moth, he wouldn’t quit until he had plunged to his death.

Frantically, uselessly, Ord would toss aside his own talents and machinery—Alice’s legacy—trying to gain any tiny advantage.

“You fuck!” Ravleen screamed. “You can’t escape me!”

Ord said nothing.

“Give it up!” she cried out. Then, with a softer, nearly patient voice, she added, “If you were moral, you’d surrender. You’d have no choice. Your fate’s set. Prolonging this business is just adding to the costs. A moral shit would have no choice but to give up…!”

“What are you saying?” her quarry whispered.

“Watch,” Ravleen advised.

With the equivalent of a thumb and forefinger, she flicked away a shard of worn-out armor, aiming for a passing sun. Moving at its fantastic velocity, the shard slashed past an inhabited world, missing it by less than a light-second. Then with her quietest voice, Ravleen asked, “Did you watch?”

Silence.

“Did you see the big eyes on those little faces?”

With his own quiet voice, Ord said, “You’re the one who should give up. You know I won’t let you win, and when you lose, it’s going to be worse than any death for you.”

She laughed. Cackled. At his audaciousness, she howled.

Thirteen light-years later, she threw another chunk of armor at another living world. But it was a more distant target, and, to impress her quarry, Ravleen aimed to miss by even less. There was room for error, but not much. Yet the idiot inhabitants—a warm, passive species who lived nowhere else—tried to defend their home world with an inadequate defensive network. Lasers boiled away just enough armor to hurl the rest into the atmosphere, into the crust, then deep into the cherry red mantle. That hard splinter of Ravleen’s body turned instantly into heat and hard radiation, and one hundred million perished as their continent was ripped apart and liquefied, irradiated and flooded by the boiling seas.

In agony, Ord screamed.

Ravleen laughed again. And with a mocking tone, she asked, “Were you watching?”

Yet somewhere, she felt sorrow.

A secret, unexpected portion of Ravleen was angry with Ravleen.

Suddenly a constellation of little empathies exposed themselves, glimmers of guilt that had always been lurking just out of sight.

Where were the traitors? Even as she laughed at the dead and suffering, Ravleen began searching herself, examining every subsystem and transitory thought, hunting for the rootstock of this nagging remorse. When no part of her soul confessed, she began interrogating herself. She isolated her most suspicious areas, and she tortured them and, as a precaution, purged every high function that she couldn’t utterly trust.

Strong again, she promised Ord, “I’ll kill the next world we pass by. And the next after that. And I’ll keep up this slaughter until you surrender. That’s my policy. Look inside me, and you’ll see: Only one of us can change his mind and do the right thing, finally.”

There was a long, pained silence.

Ravleen let the boy broil in his weakling’s guilt.

Finally, Ord let out a low moan and changed course. He was panicking, she assumed. He was beaten.

To help fuel his panic, Ravleen spliced together her longest arms, and she reached for him. She bridged the gap and, for a delicious instant, could feel living pieces of the boy. Then he shattered the limb and kicked it back to her, and again, from some hidden reserve, he found the strength to accelerate, pressing against his own swollen, stubborn mass.

Hugging the barricades, scattered by nature as well as by need, were the black-hole graves of thousands of dead suns. Half-tamed and fed measured doses of matter, the black holes helped supply the fantastic energies necessary to keep the barricades in place. The nearest hole was sleeping, for the moment. AI keepsafers squirted warnings to the intruders, telling them, “This is a restricted zone. You are not permitted. A civil suit is assured. We very much mean business—!”

For a wrenching microsecond, Ravleen believed that the Chamberlain was committing suicide. He was robbing her of her vengeance, in the end, and she wailed out in misery.

But no, Ord was going to miss that irresistible mass.

In a maneuver old as starflight and always spectacular, he allowed the hole’s gravity well to grab him and bend his trajectory, the perfect altitude and velocity assuring that he would rise out of the well very nearly along his old course.

A 188-degree spin-around was achieved.

Picture a forefinger and thumb touching at their tips, with the black hole set inside that teardrop gap. That was Ord’s course. And where the finger and thumb touched was exactly where Ravleen would be if she did nothing.

She did nothing.

Ord yanked his body into a denser mass, pushing what was strongest and superfluous to the front.

In her fashion, Ravleen did the same.

In those superluminal moments, Ravleen discovered another sick emotion lurking in her depths, unexpected and unwelcome.

Fear.

Black, and wild, and hot.

She shoved the fear forward, pinning it to her hull, and for reasons good and otherwise, the Sanchex screamed…and then came a misery vaster than any pain she could ever have imagined…

Seven

“A Nuyen who listens to a Chamberlain…I never thought I’d live so long…!”

—Alice, in conversation

“IFOUND MYSELFnearby and curious. Do you mind?”

“I do.”

“If you’d rather be alone—”

“No, stay. I have nothing to hide here.” Xo showed a loner’s uncomfortable grin, then added, “My work is rather preliminary, still.”

The Echo woman nodded. “I agree.”

Together, they dropped to the smooth blue surface of the ocean, and in a small diamond-and-teak yacht built for the occasion, they sailed along the edge of the continent. The world’s gravity was stronger than anticipated, but Xo’s guest never mentioned the vast quantities of dark matter taken from the warehouse. She stared at the expanses of raw basalt split by the occasional river bringing grit and thin muds from the interior. Occasionally, she would dive into the warm acidic water, acquiring the body of a small whale, and she would fill her new stomach with ocean water or ingest random stones and sands.

“Nothing is alive,” she warned him.

“It’s too soon,” he replied.

But she had a different philosophy, and she insisted on sharing it. “Microbial bugs are still the best tools to prepare a world. They aren’t as quick as microchines, granted. But they have a legacy and a beauty, I think.”

Xo showed her a patient grin, saying nothing.

The woman clothed herself in an old-fashioned body, nothing on her warm flesh but a glistening sheen of sterile water. Then, with too much force, she smiled, salty nipples and her wide, wide pelvis beckoning.

Xo’s grin became less patient.

“Your Family are on their way,” she reported. “How they learned about your presence here, I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you tell them?”

“At one time, I believed so.” She was intrigued and frightened, and in surprising ways, she felt courageous. “But you probably already knew they were coming. I think you know exactly when they’ll arrive.”

He shook his head, saying, “I wish I knew everything,” and let the subject fall away.

“What will they do to you?”

Xo studied her face, her posture. He stared into her swirling mind. “They’ll send my oldest, most powerful brothers and sisters. I don’t think they’d ask help from their allies; I am too large an embarrassment. And when they finally get here, they’ll no doubt try to gather me up.”

If anything, she was spellbound.

With a whispering voice, she asked, “Are you dangerous?”

He gave a little nod. Then the wind gusted, and he pulled his hand through his blowing hair, asking the Echo, “Did they send you instructions?”

She started to say, “No.”

Xo lightly stroked her mind, and she told the truth.

“I’m to keep my distance. I can watch you and keep a tally of your crimes, but I’m not supposed to interfere with you in any fashion.” With the gleeful thrill of confession, she admitted, “I’m definitely not supposed to be here.”

“Now that you are here,” he began. With a narrow smile, Xo asked, “Is there anything about this place that troubles you?”

The Echo took a deep breath, telling him, “Nitrogen but no oxygen, with argon and much too much carbon dioxide. This all tastes very similar to the Earth’s prebiotic atmosphere.”

“That’s troubling?”

“This is supposed to be a tribute to our dead mother world,” she reminded him. “Is sterility part of your tribute?”

He said, “No.”

She waited for a full explanation.

Instead, he asked, “Why would I build a living world? If it’s sure to be destroyed in the near future…why would I be so recklessly cruel…?”

She looked across the blue water. “Will your Family destroy this?”

Xo let her believe it. He touched her mind with delicate fingers, and in the next instant, he caused her nipples to soften and baked her loins dry. When she was absolutely certain that she felt no interest in him, Xo told her, “Stay.”

“What—?”

“Live with me. Will you?” Into her ear, he whispered, “We’ll be lovers. Together, we will fight whoever comes…!”

The Echo gave the softest little squeak.

Then, without fanfare or good-byes, she launched herself into space, streaking back toward home.

Eight

“I was a young girl when I met my father. Ian, I mean: The noble, incorruptible rootstock of the infamous Chamberlains had just returned home from some little early venture to the stars.

“Conjured by a world of blended races and synthetic genes, Ian had the hearty pale features of an unreformed European. Like a king, he held court over his children. Like a saint, he acted utterly indifferent to the rest of us. Like a dandy, he had a love for fine clothes and seamless grooming. Yet my first thought was that he seemed quite old, and exceptionally tired. But then again, I was the baby…and everything around me appeared ancient and spent…

“I remember his voice booming, telling me, ‘And you are Alice.’

“ ‘I know that already,’ I informed him.

“With that tired white face, he attempted a smile. With an easy scorn, he said, ‘Oh, that’s right. I’ve been warned about you, Alice.’

“ ‘That’s so funny,’ I replied brightly. ‘Nobody says much about you.’

“Or maybe I didn’t say those words. At this point, memory and hope have become such a miserable tangle…!”

—Alice, in conversation

FINALLY, FINALLY, THEworld was terraformed.

What was stone remained barren, and what was water still waited for its first bacterium. But there was a second realm built entirely from a highly refined, highly compliant species of dark matter—a deep ocean and small continent with very much the same shape and textures of the baryonic realm. Whispery plankton lived in that invisible ocean, feeding on the occasional reaction with gamma radiations and neutrinos. The plankton, in turn, fed a variety of small, slow, waferlike fish. Then the fish spawned on the continent’s shores, which was where the ghosts would snare them, using bare hands and eating their catch headfirst and whole.

Two hundred billion ghosts lived along the shore, sitting naked on the rocky beaches and young river deltas, making love in the perpetual darkness while quiet voices traded gossip and little else. Their metabolisms were slow and undemanding. Their intelligence was compressed and very much streamlined. Alice had helped conceive their physiologies as well as this simple, sturdy biosphere. But Xo was responsible for each face, plus everything behind their grateful eyes. Borrowing from census records and security reports, stolen memories and easy conjectures, he had woven a false soul representing each human who died on the Earth. Every phantom believed that he or she was so-and-so reborn inside a great sanctuary, surrounded by friends and family, and pleasant strangers, and with a frothy joy, they did nothing but eat the occasional sweet fish and make love and tell the same well-polished and tireless stories about their lost, immortal lives.

Whenever visiting the ghosts, Alice insisted on sex.

Xo submitted, which the old woman seemed to appreciate. They were just another pair of spirits engaged in that most ancient, life-born business. Then afterward, together, they would walk the beaches, human feet treading on real rocks while their dark-matter selves waded through the murmuring, copulating bodies.

To baryonic eyes, there was the golden sun revolving around the world, and when it set, the Core above was a thin, ruddy glow. Xo had erected an intricately layered barricade around his world. It was dense and excessive and exceptionally durable. The barricade’s dusts let in only the most useful or determined portions of the spectrum, and, just as important, it kept curious outside eyes from watching over them.

In the ghosts’ realm, the sky was a frigid and seamless and endless array of ebony spheres marching to the ends of Creation. This was the genuine universe, Xo would remind himself. Almost everything that existed was dark matter and dark energies, with a trace of baryonic ash thrown into the otherwise pure stew. Gravity was the only force shared, and it was pathetically weak. Only the most fierce, Core-born particles could touch the ghosts’ synthetic molecules. If not for that occasional touch and the soft tug of moving masses, the place would be its own universe, tiny and undeniably simple, utterly immune to the great dramas swirling around it.

On occasion, Xo admitted envying the ghosts. “I wish I were as ignorant, if I could pick the ways.”

With amusement and scorn, Alice stared at him, and sometimes she would laugh, and she always made a point of asking her lover, “How do you know you’re not? Ignorant, I mean. And maybe you’ve even picked your own foolishness. How in hell would you know for sure?”

Little remained of the original woman. There were a few minor talents that Ord must not have needed; but in most ways, Alice was nearly as simple as the ghosts around them. Stripped of her talents and her grand intelligence, then imprisoned in a tiny cell for thousands of years…the cumulative effects of that abuse and boredom made her appear small, and predictable, and for long stretches, nearly unremarkable…

But then she would offer some observation or give Xo a slicing look, and suddenly he would recall which of them was the child.

“Maybe the ignorance isn’t yours, little man. Maybe our universe is a puddle, and we can’t see the darkest matter and blackest energies because of this great sweeping ignorance. Not in our minds, no. But a selective stupidity on the part of protons and such.”

Not a purely original thought, but from Alice, it sounded new and true.

Sometimes Xo would ask what she had told her little brother. “Just before the Earth died,” he reminded Alice, “you whispered into his ear.” Then he would delicately tickle her simple, tiny mind, trying to make it disgorge its remaining secrets. “Why is it so important for Ord to reach the Core?”

She wouldn’t tell him. Perhaps she didn’t remember why. But she still had the poise to wink at Xo, assuring him, “Ord knows why. Just as he knew that you’d follow us. From the instant he left the Earth, my little brother was sure that you would trail after him. In a day or a thousand years. But eventually, and all this way…”

“How did he know?”

But again, she seemed to have forgotten. When she shook her head, her red hair would chase her scalp like a tide. Then, with a wise, crafty smile, she would promise, “It’ll all work out fine. Fine.”

“How do you know?”

“Everything ends for the best. Haven’t you noticed?”

With distant eyes, in the time it took a heart to beat once, Xo counted a thousand distant wars. “I haven’t noticed. No.”

“Patience,” she advised.

“Patience,” he repeated, always.

Then with a wink and a flirtatious grin, she would assure him, “If you wait long enough, every problem becomes too small to be seen.”

ONE NIGHT, INthe silence that always followed her blissful advice, Xo heard a whisper fall from the dark, dark sky. Barely a word, and encrypted, and probably misunderstood. Yet when he tested what he had heard, he couldn’t disprove its validity. His baryonic body stiffened, and Alice noticed, turning toward him and pressing her fleshy self against his narrow frame, asking, “What’s wrong now?”

He was busy. Frantically, relentlessly busy.

Again, she asked, “What’s wrong with you, Nuyen?”

Over the last millennia, everything done had been done at Ord’s behest. Those two figures fighting in the snow had given Xo specific instructions, plus some powerful, left-behind talents. The instructions ended with the simple words:

“Then just wait. Wait.”

Except there were more demands lurking inside that first message. He hadn’t noticed them until now. He couldn’t see them until the whispered word fell from the sky, dislodging the messy lot of them.

To himself, Xo said, “Shit.”

Alice grinned with delight, and asked, “Is it my brother? Is he coming?”

“Not precisely.” Xo absorbed the simple, straightforward plan. Knowing what he had built here, he had foreseen this circumstance. But many options had been possible, and some seemed much more likely. That’s why he felt a numbing shock, and that’s why he found himself searching for anything that might be confused for a real choice.

“What is it?” asked the ancient woman. “Precisely, or otherwise.”

Xo didn’t reply.

Instead, he fashioned a simple, compelling message that he sent to the Echo woman. He told the Earth’s ghosts to fall into a deep sleep, and he reached into the sky and grabbed the artificial sun, putting it into another kind of sleep. Then he yanked hard, causing the sun’s machinery to plunge into the ocean and plastic mantle, merging it with a camouflaged stardrive waiting at the world’s core. Within the hour, his world was accelerating, throwing its stone and water backward at a fantastic velocity. The continent was on the bow, and Xo’s barricade expanded in all directions, its leading edge striking the Core’s barricades, infecting the intricate dusts with a new, more compelling set of instructions.

He was stealing a tiny portion of the barricades.

Gazing straight ahead, Alice said, “This is it then. It’s finally happening.”

“Back to the scene of your crime,” Xo offered.

But she shook her head and smiled, pointing out, “That’s one possibility. Out of many, many, many.”

Xo didn’t bother asking what she meant. Suddenly, he couldn’t be more tired of their very silly game.

ACENTURY LATER,the Echo’s response arrived.

Xo and the remnants of his world were plunging deeper into the Core’s barricades. The message was brief and furious, and in a grudging fashion, it was grateful. The woman was sitting in her crystalline office. She said, “Thank you,” as if cursing him. She said, “You shit,” with affection. Then she reported, “I’m doing exactly what you suggested. Every world and every inhabited structure in my district is being abandoned. Hopefully, there’s time. Hopefully, you won’t steal too much from the barricades, and we can patch the damage before the other districts are butchered. And maybe, maybe, we can keep the death toll under a few million. Which wouldn’t be too miserable, you shit.”

Xo considered a reply to her message, then thought better of it.

“You manipulated every part of me, didn’t you?” said the Echo.

With a tangible, painful shame, she said, “I was helpless. I can’t be blamed. What you did to me you could have done to anyone. Isn’t that right?”

The image enlarged, allowing him to view the others drifting inside the room. He counted a dozen Nuyens, high-ranking and powerful and absolutely certain about their emotions. A fiery brother said, “Xo,” with a booming voice.

Then the others, speaking in a shared shout, assured him, “You’re the worst monster. As cruel as Ravleen, and even more gullible than Ord. Pathetically, horribly gullible. What good can you possibly do here? What makes all this waste and sacrifice worthwhile, little brother?”

“Your rage,” Xo whispered, and with every mouth, he grinned. “Pissing you off…that’s reward enough, thank you…!”

Nine

“We journeyed to the Core to create a new universe.

“And by every measure, we succeeded.

“We attempted to ease one of our own down its narrow, narrow umbilical.

“And again, without question, we found nothing but success.

“If we had made any large mistake, the whole of our galaxy would have been obliterated, and as the devastation spread outward at the velocity of light, much of the universe would have been consumed.

“But the leakage was minimal.

“We succeeded in containing the damage, keeping casualties to less than a trillionth of what was possible.

“Yes, I’m trying to scare you, little brother. Not with the potential for cataclysm, but with my own personal capacity to accept every consequence. I was enormous and powerful, clever and farseeing. In the grand scale of Everything, there was a tragic but endurable event that was quickly contained…a corrupt old order was set on its proverbial heels…and when tragedy is balanced against the scale of laudable accomplishments, wasn’t this work of mine very much a fantastic success…?”

—Alice, in conversation

AWIDE PORTIONof the barricades had been ripped loose and dragged inward, creating a whirlpool two hundred light-years wide and half again as deep. The Core’s fires were blue-shifted and became brighter as Ord peered into the swirling depths of the hole. Then at the very bottom, where the funnel gave a last little twist, lay a speck of perfect blackness. The stolen dust had been gathered up, then squashed into a single cloud, inky dark and fabulously dense, and at that cloud’s tiny center was a world-sized ship that the baby Chamberlain couldn’t quite see, even when he used every surviving eye.

Xo’s contraption had to be waiting there. Ord wouldn’t let himself think any other way.

A bright raw vacuum engulfed him. Stars and worlds formerly buried inside the barricades had been exposed. The whirlpool itself was filling with repair vessels—armadas of modified comets and plutos, each sporting tools more powerful than even this sort of titanic work demanded. And lurking at respectful distances were dark masses—ancient, high-ranking souls; most likely Nuyens—revealed only by the tweaking and twisting of the background radiations, and their encoded, conspiratorial whispers.

Ravleen remained on his heels.

Since their collision, the she-monster hadn’t said one comprehensible word. Her only sound was an incoherent, raging wail, and she hadn’t stopped wailing since Ord’s body had pushed through hers, leaving her gutted. Alive still, and still powerful, yes. But in critical ways, crippled.

Could Ravleen fight?

There were reasons, slippery good reasons, to hope she had a few teeth and claws left to use.

Ord spent the last of his discretionary mass, boosting his velocity again. Then he stared along his trajectory, trying to identify everything that lay ahead. At exactly the point where an ambush would be easiest, he found a pluto dressed up in armor and potent EM shields. It was probably already spewing out antimatter mines and the anchor strands for a coherent plasma web. As a precaution, Ord pulled himself back into a denser, more enduring body, his surviving armors aimed at the most likely dangers. To the stationary observer, the work took years. For him, minutes. Then he invested a full hour of his compressed time, busily transforming what remained of his body, dressing himself in chilled dark matter, borrowing those forms that would be least impressed by these fantastic energies.

A voice whispered, “Ord.”

It said, “Thank goodness.”

He recognized the voice instantly, and with a giddy surprise, he realized that it was coming from beside him. From somewhere close.

“Xo?” he blurted.

The voice sprang from a dense, almost unnoticed mass barely one light-month away. The two of them were plunging together toward the bottom of the whirlpool. And with Xo’s voice, it sent a prear-ranged, deeply encrypted reply that perfectly matched his expectations.

“What are you doing here?” Ord asked.

And he waited.

Xo’s reply was an apology wrapped in assurances and a thorough, seamless explanation.

“I’m sorry,” he declared. “But I was scared. For you, and for me, too. You should have been here by now, and you weren’t. I guessed you were hurt, and you are. So I let our ship accelerate without me. I came back here with extra fuel. The fuel is yours, if you need it. Do you need it? And maybe I can help you fight that bitch Sanchex, or at least make her quit that damned screaming.”

“Come closer,” Ord invited. “If you can maneuver, come here.”

The mass obeyed. A light-month’s separation was gradually halved, then halved again. The pace of their conversation lifted accordingly.

“You look worn-out,” Xo observed. “But it’s good finally to see you again, friend.”

“I feel beaten,” Ord admitted. “And it’s a wonderful surprise to see you here. I’m glad you took the initiative.”

“Everything’s gone perfectly. Nearly.” His companion told him stories about his long search, and the Echo woman whom he had used, and the carefully refitted world that was now a starship. Then he thanked the baby Chamberlain for leaving behind those talents. “They made the difference!” Xo proclaimed. “We’re on our way now! From here, it’s a straight line to the Core!”

“To the Core,” said Ord.

The astonished, worshipful voice said, “If I hadn’t chased you exactly when I did, leaving Mars the minute that I did…and if I’d ever made even one wrong turn…I wouldn’t be here now, waiting for you…I have to ask, Ord…how did you know so precisely what I would do, Ord? How?”

“Didn’t she explain the plan to you?”

The voice admitted, “She didn’t, no.” Then it asked, “Are we talking about Alice? Because I can’t shake any specifics out of her. She’s awfully stubborn, when she wants to be…”

Ord laughed loudly, asking, “Are you lovers?”

The voice said, “Yes.”

“Tell me,” said the baby Chamberlain. “What’s the exact pattern of freckles on her favorite face?”

Without a shred of hesitation or self-doubt, his companion sent a map of that face. It was precise and thorough, exactly matching the face of the woman once imprisoned inside the Earth, and in so many ways, it was utterly wrong.

Ord said, “Very good, my friend!”

Here was the Nuyens’ trap. In front of him and beside him, the trap was preparing to slam shut.

Ord manipulated his course a last little bit. Then he looked back at Ravleen, and with a quiet, thoughtful voice, he told her, “I’m going to let them kill me. There’s a Nuyen crawling at me, and ahead, there’s that ugly pluto. Plus, there are probably teeth I can’t see yet. At close range, working together, they’re going to obliterate me. And what do you think about that?”

The she-monster’s wail rose to a higher pitch, then abruptly quit.

For the first time in ages, Ravleen had fallen silent.

With a child’s voice, Ord asked, “Do you remember when we were little, Ravleen? When we played together in the snow?”

Ravleen was manipulating her own body now, marshaling weapons and redistributing her armors.

“Do you remember snowballs, Ravleen?”

Ord spun a ball of white ice, exactly the size that a boy’s chilled hands would fashion, and after wrapping the snowball in a secure stasis, he flung it back at his pursuer, watching its whiteness diminish; then, as it smacked against the she-monster’s armor, there came a bright and soundless little flash accompanied by an inconsequential glimmer of soft heat.

Ten

“I was a young girl, and for a year or two, perhaps three, my best friend was a Sanchex boy. He was older than me by a decade, which was an enormous span in the Familes’ early hours. Age made him rich with strength and difficult wisdoms. Using nothing but cultured granite and hand-hewn oak, plus the brittle steels that he smelted in his own furnace, he could build an array of powerful weapons. Like every Sanchex, he was an avid hunter, provided that his quarry was strong and intelligent and capable of inflicting tremendous pain. He taught me the skills of tracking and ambushing and killing efficiently. In the midst of mayhem, he would smile and tell me that I amused him, that he’d never known a Chamberlain with such a taste for blood sports. Just once, he smiled before we actually began our hunt. It was a different smile. ‘Bring your favorite weapon and a short length of locking cord,’ he instructed. ‘Tonight, we’re going into the Canyon of Lush. To hunt sabercats.’ Then with a wink, he added, ‘I think you’re ready, Miss Chamberlain.’

“But I wasn’t ready, of course.

“He had selected a glade sure to be lit by the green light of the moon. I secured one end of the cord to a substantial boulder and began fitting the other end around my left ankle. I would be the bait; that was my usual role. The cord was merely a symbol, unless I panicked, in which case it would hold me in place for a moment longer. I reached the point of putting a knife to my wrist, preparing to send my blood scents out into the evening air. But the Sanchex said, ‘Wait.’ He laughed and unfastened the cord, saying, ‘Tonight, I’m the bait. You’re the one sitting in the blind.’

“I was honored, naturally. And I was terrified. And without question, I knew that when the critical moment found me, I would do what was necessary.

“What was right.

“The old sabercats were simple beasts. They couldn’t speak and lacked for culture. But they were tailored to be passionate and shrewd—a relentless force of nature balanced upon four paws, each the size of my chest. Several grown cats could taste the Sanchex’s fierce blood, then spend hours circling the glade, sniffing and watching, arguing about which of them most deserved this wicked meal. A giant male won the right. I’m sure he knew we had set a trap, but he was intoxicated by the simple idea of consuming one of his godly owners.

“When the attack came, I felt alert. I was focused and clear-headed and utterly ready.

“But as I stared down at my bleeding friend, down into that pool of green moonlight, the cat scaled my tree—in one graceful bound—and slashed into my blind, four lightning white sabers sinking into my chest and belly. Instead of misery, I felt the warm, almost pleasant numbness that comes to any hapless victim. I never heard the discharge of the Sanchex’s weapon. But I was aware of falling, and tasting blood not my own…and then my good friend was kneeling over me, laughing at me, telling me, ‘You should see the expression on your very foolish face…!’ ”

—Alice, in conversation

ORD WATCHED HISsnowball burst against Ravleen.

She responded instantly, wiping off a dozen flavors of camouflage to expose a body far larger than he had imagined, then she spat out twin shots, each more powerful than anything he could have mustered. One blast of coherent plasmas missed Ord by nothing. The other was focused on the Xo pretender. Together, those terrific bolts of energy caused the she-monster to lose momentum, the distance between them suddenly doubling, and she careened sideways, following a separate trajectory as they plunged deeper into the sprawling hole.

The Nuyen absorbed the second blast. Armor was splintered, then scattered. What passed for flesh was seared, falling away from a dark-matter skeleton writhing in agony. A great sweet scream rose, piercing and wildly frightened. Then the scream fell away, and gradually, gradually, a thin, dying voice buried in the dying roar called to him.

“Ord,” the boy heard.

“We know what you’re doing,” the Nuyen promised. “And it’s not possible, what you want. It’s just another one of Alice’s shitty jokes…”

A trailing blast struck the Nuyen.

With a clean bright flash, everything that resembled a voice was extinguished, and a lacework of degenerate matter swept through the body, erasing every trace of the skeleton, the vacuum filled with hot ash and a blue-white glow.

“No!” someone roared.

Ravleen.

“You promised me!” she shrieked. “A million times, you promised! No one else gets the Chamberlain! He’s mine!”

The armored pluto was a warm point of light lying almost straight ahead. Ord was diving for it, closing on it, then the world grew brighter. Ravleen’s first blast had reached its surface, the crust melting, then boiling away as wormy plasmas found every weakness, cutting down to the mantle. Great geysers of methane and water exploded outward. Surgical eschers convinced stocks of antimatter to burst free from containment, then detonate, yanking the mantle off the melting core. But the weapon arrays had already made their shots, and enough plasma cannons and gamma-ray lasers survived to send off new volleys. Ord fought his momentum. He adjusted his forward-facing armor, and he was struck—a peppering of wild energies leaving him stripped and naked, then, reaching deep, his own incandescent agony making him wail.

Again, Ravleen cried out, “Nuyens! You promised me!”

She fired again, fired backward, aiming at those faceless dark masses that were following them, and increasing her velocity again, slightly.

A dozen ancient Nuyens were wounded. Pieces of them were butchered and killed, and other pieces fled from the battlefield, trying to find somewhere to die in shameful peace.

Ord jettisoned his ruined armor and organs, flinging them backward, each slapping against Ravleen.

At the bottom of the great hole, where the barricades were thinnest, the tar black mass of dust was moving faster by the instant. And as it accelerated, it compressed itself into a tighter, more durable mass. The timing would be tight, at best. Ord sensed it, then made delicate calculations that stretched out for thirty digits, proving nothing but that this was one astonishing long shot, and if it failed, he would have absolutely no reason to feel surprised.

Behind Ord, over the course of decades and light-years, the battle raged. Nuyens fired at him, but Ravleen was near enough and large enough to absorb the worst of their blows. She wouldn’t let anyone steal the pleasure of her revenge. Besides, every blow lent her momentum. She invited the terrific hits, each moving her closer to him again, close enough that she could tickle Ord’s bloodied toes as they rushed together toward that slowly closing target.

In desperation, Ord borrowed Thomas’s favorite trick. He pictured himself with a child’s body, shredded clothes and gaping wounds decorating his corporeal flesh. The cold vacuum became a deep, deep snow, white and featureless, roaring of EM winds, and he drew himself standing on a long steep angry hill, in the night, frantic legs carrying him toward sanctuary.

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Ravleen. She was a stride behind him, if that. Like him, she was badly bloodied, her black hair streaked with gore, that perpetually strong, strangely lovely face as grim and certain as any face could be. He could nearly see her thoughts, the endless rage compounded with a fresher, more urgent despair. Then he looked forward again, up the long slope. Upon the summit was the Chamberlains’ cylindrical house, but instead of white, it was blacker than any night. It was his goal. It was his only thin hope. But the house seemed to pull away now, burrowing through the last shreds of the barricades, and as its velocity rose, Ord found it increasingly difficult to close even a single step.

The hill grew steeper; the snow turned to a milky ice.

Around the sharp fringes of the house, a light burst forth. The barricades had been punctured. A blistering, blinding glare appeared as the Core’s fires flooded into the galaxy. Ord bent low, keeping himself in the trailing shreds of shadow. And Ravleen screamed and bent lower still, using Ord’s body to protect herself.

Together, they gradually halved the distance to the towering black house. But the pitch of the hill doubled, and Ord’s legs turned impossibly heavy.

Behind him, the universe was consumed by flame. Worlds burned, and vanished. And brave souls perished, their last years spent yanking at the edges of the barricades, fighting to close the gaping hole.

Ord discarded talents, and his corporeal body shriveled, and with an achingly slow step, he crossed another half meter of ice.

Just out of reach stood a door. Save for its blackness, the door was utterly familiar, fashioned from living corals and with that slab above, the PRIDE AND SACRIFICE emblem teasing him now.

Ord, the inheritor of Alice’s talents and great powers, was little more than a child again, streaking deeper into this hellish realm.

Because everything was an image—a symbolic estimate of what was real and staggeringly vast—he stopped his feet and turned his battered self, looking back at Ravleen. As always, he was mystified by his feelings of infatuation. It was just a Sanchex face. Even for her Family, it was a severe face, and furious, incapable of love or the smallest charity. And yet…and yet…and yet…

That lovely wild face grimaced against the fierce glare.

If she fired her weapons and didn’t kill Ord with the first awful blast, she would push him through the door, to safety. So crippled hands reached toward him, wrists thickening with muscle and the surviving fingers growing long and razored, a glimmer of poison making the new blades shine.

“You can’t reach me,” he whispered, not knowing if that was true.

But it was true. Even after such an enormous chase, Ravleen was still a light-second out of range. The hands reached for the last knots of armor riding on his back, and they stopped short by what seemed like a centimeter, collapsing back into the body again. Then Ravleen spun some elaborate calculations, and in response to the numbers, she began to manipulate her form again. Watching her slow, purposeful metamorphosis, knowing exactly what she was doing, Ord guessed how long it would take, and he turned again and gazed up at the PRIDE AND SACRIFICE emblem as he quietly, quietly said, “Xo.”

He said, “Alice.”

In the barest murmur, he announced, “I’m here…”

Eleven

“At some watershed in your evolution, you will apprehend that cleverness is everything. That if the godly soul is sufficiently ingenious, it can achieve what simple moral goodness and unalloyed selfishness cannot, ever…

“Naturally at some later point you will be sickened by this awful insight.

“Perhaps in the very next instant.

“Although in my case, let’s be honest, I’m still waiting for that instructive and most delicious horror…”

—Alice, in conversation

“I’M HERE,” XOheard.

Barely.

The Core was a frantic, furious maelstrom, ionized gases and plasma jets punctuated with dying suns and world-sized blobs of boiling iron. A wild, white EM roar fell from everywhere, telling Xo next to nothing. He felt half-blind and utterly deaf. Ancient instincts grappled with his will, begging him to turn and flee. Yet the great ship maintained its course, plunging for the Core’s center, shouldering aside the debris and that scorching wash of radiations. But the hazards thickened. The protective envelopes of smart dusts were eroding. A red dwarf sun passed nearby, tides lifting the dust, leaving a gaping hole that Xo patched badly, shoving a portion of his reserves into the breach with his quickest, sloppiest hands. Then he began again, repairing his repair, and that’s what he was doing when the whispered voice announced, “I’m here.” That’s why it took him several moments to respond, eyes set on the brink of the barricade gazing back at the source of that very tiny voice, staring hard at a fiery point in space that slowly, slowly, revealed what might be another starship, or a suspiciously tiny Chamberlain.

Xo almost spoke, then found the trailing shape, enormous and treacherously close.

From that looming shape came a second voice, not loud but at least as furious as the Core.

“And here I am!” it screamed. “You fucks, I have arrived!”

Ravleen was barely inside the ship’s shadow, its umbra, protected from the worst of the radiation. Moment by moment, her shape changed, transforming itself in profound and complicated ways that Xo couldn’t begin to decipher.

His instincts begged him to panic.

“Alice?” Xo whispered.

“What’s wrong?” she replied.

Xo found her lying naked on the dark-matter beach, toes dipping into the simple, frothy sea. The ghosts flanking her were awake, standing elbow to elbow, chattering with excitement. Their black sky had filled with a dim ruddy glow—the Core’s fantastic energies were just visible, just real. Sometimes the ghosts felt the tickling touch of the radiations. Their faces were nervous and happy, and more than Xo had ever seen, they were smiling. Alice was smiling, too. But it was a different expression—sober and scared, and very much unsurprised.

“Has Ord found us?” she inquired.

“Yes.”

Then before he could explain, she asked, “Who else is here? That Sanchex girl?”

“Right behind him, yes. Always.” Xo nodded glumly and looked between his feet. The baryonic meat of this world had been ripped away. It was fuel and reaction mass, and it was spent. All that remained was the dark-matter skeleton and the stardrives and talents that could only be baryonic, plus just enough antimatter to power the systems that held the dust in its place. He gave Alice the eyes to observe their visitors, and after a moment’s contemplation, he confessed, “I don’t know what to do. Your brother didn’t leave instructions.”

She lifted her face, not smiling now.

“Maybe,” she said. “Just maybe, Ord guessed that you wouldn’t need the most obvious instructions.”

He absorbed the criticism without complaint.

“If you were having his lousy day,” she asked, “what would you hope for?”

“Help,” he admitted. Then with a shy wince, he asked, “Is that the answer?”

“To many circumstances, yes,” the simple, ancient woman told him, “ ‘Help’ is a perfectly good response.”

WITH TALENTS ANDample fuel, Xo eased his way backward toward the baby Chamberlain, slipping through dense blankets of stolen barricades with a minimum of disruption—for the ship’s sake as well as to hide his own shadowy presence.

Every few moments, Ord whispered, “It’s me.”

He sounded small, exhausted, and absolutely terrified.

Even inside the umbra, the radiations were blistering. Piercing the last ragged layers of dust, Xo began to reach for Ord, then, at the last moment, hesitated. What if there was no Ord? What if Ravleen, or some other demon-agent, was offering this body and scared voice as bait? But if this was a trap, then Xo was already the fool. He was doomed and dead. Which was why he kept extending his hands, and after them, his tentative soul.

Mutilated fingers were waiting for his hands.

Xo felt their embrace and found himself drawn into a false, familiar landscape. The black mansion stood behind him. The snow was bright and scorching. Ord knelt beneath him, his boyish little body in shreds, every limb shattered, and a matching voice weakly asking, “Did you give up on me?”

“I didn’t,” Xo replied. “I never believed in the first place.”

A thin little laugh leaked free.

Then Ord whispered, “My sister?”

“Is well. Is waiting to see you.”

“Who controls the ship?”

“She does. At this distance, I couldn’t react fast enough to keep the barricade intact.” With his own talents, Xo embraced the boy and began making repairs. “When you’re strong enough,” he promised, “I’ll carry you inside. I built a durable little world for us. I’ve been eager for you to see it.”

In a particular way, Ord said nothing.

Xo said, “What? What’s wrong?”

A Chamberlain face stared up at him. Except for the architecture of the bone and projected flesh, nothing about it reminded him of Alice’s face. The eyes were fearful, the mouth sorry and mute.

Again, Xo asked, “What is wrong?”

“Ravleen.”

She was still transforming herself. On this false landscape, she looked like a tall, tall human, her limbs twisted together, tying themselves into an elaborate knot. Against the raw light of the Core, nothing about her was human: She resembled a vast machine that was rebuilding itself, making itself ready for a single, obvious purpose.

“Ravleen’s merging her weapons,” Ord whispered. “When she’s ready, she’ll kick herself out of the umbra, and she’ll feed on all that free energy, and just before she bursts, she’ll fire. Once. And she’ll kill us and everything, if we let her…”

“We won’t let her,” Xo muttered, in reflex. But when there wasn’t any agreement, he changed topics. Quietly, secretively, he said, “Your sister explained something to you. Something about the Core. That’s why you’re here, and why I followed. I couldn’t stay loyal to my Family. I had to know. Why is this worth so much? We’ve killed millions, and we haven’t even reached the baby universe yet. And when we do reach it, what? The umbilical has closed, and we can’t get inside…can we…?”

“No,” the boy agreed. “We can’t go inside.”

“Then why go there?”

Now he looked like Alice. A sly delight slipped into the blue eyes, then into the narrowing mouth. And with an encrypted tongue, he suggested, “Maybe the Baby isn’t our destination. Have you ever considered that?”

“What is then?”

“No,” said Ord.

He said, “I need one more favor from you, friend. Will you?”

Xo muttered, “Anything. I’ll do anything.”

“Can you still manipulate minds? Because I need Ravleen teased, her thoughts bent just right—”

“I can’t,” Xo blurted. “No escher can soften her pissed off will.”

Ord nodded, and sighed.

Then, with a Chamberlain’s gift for the unexpected, he said, “I didn’t make myself understood. I am sorry, Xo. What I want is for you to make certain that she kills me. Can you do that for me…?”

Twelve

“We were infinitely clever souls laboring on the nearly impossible task…a task laced with danger and eager for disaster…but since we were clever and so sure of ourselves, we could see the obvious…a means to let us avoid every pitfall…

“All that was required was accomplishing a second, equally impossible piece of magic…!”

—Alice, in conversation

THENUYEN’S VOICEwas soft, and close.

“We need to speak,” he told her, each word using a different Sanchex encryption. Then he said, “Ravleen,” with a traitor’s too-familiar tone. And when she failed to respond, the Nuyen added, “We have been fooled. We’re fucked. It isn’t the Core that he’s chasing. I just got Ord to admit his real goal to me.”

She could see the Chamberlain plainly. He was battered, but healing. In a moment, he would be strong enough to drag himself inside the dusts. But just before that happened, Ravleen would fall back and eat some of the Core’s vast energies, then everything in her reach would be wiped from existence.

“Can you hear me, Ravleen?”

“No,” she growled.

“Alice and the other criminals…do you know what they did…? When they grew the baby universe, they grew a second marvel, too. Using the same talents, the same impossibly strong materials. Do you understand me, Ravleen?”

“I’m not an idiot!” she roared.

“Yes, you are. We’re both idiots here.”

Ravleen examined herself, expecting to find traces of Xo’s dangerous touch. But nothing in her mind was amiss. Nothing about her resembled doubt. Her heart was a blue-black mass encompassing and nourishing the most perfect hatred ever fashioned by Man, and she clasped a thousand bloodied hands around it, remembering every wrong done to her and to her Family.

“Look at me, Ravleen.”

Xo had maneuvered to a point not quite between her and her quarry. Her remaining senses could see talents and unspent fuel, but no weapons that would cause real trouble. Yet just to be sure, she told him, “Hold your distance.”

“I will,” he promised.

In the next moment, the great orb of dust changed course, slowing its motion. Obviously, another desperate scheme was beginning.

“Alice and the others found a wormhole,” said Xo. “They found it in Planck space and yanked it out of the quantum foam. Then they inflated it and strengthened it enough to make it stable, and because they didn’t want just anyone using it, they worked like demons to camouflage their little friend. They created what to the eye and mind looks like every other small, anonymous black hole.

“That was before the baby universe was born, Ravleen.

“One end of the wormhole was sent away, accelerated to near light-speed, while the other was permanently rooted in their time and their space. If disaster struck—if the universe-building went wrong in important ways—some future soul would come back and give the warning. Then the Chamberlains and Sanchexes would know better than risk building their baby—”

“I don’t believe you!” Ravleen spat.

As if he heard nothing, Xo continued. “That’s what Alice explained to Ord. The wormhole. A moment before the Earth died, she taught him where to find it and how to use it. And that’s the only reason we’ve come this far.” A soft, bitter laugh was wrapped around each word. “Like always, the Chamberlains found the means to cheat Nature…!”

The blue-black hatred felt itself being threatened. A thousand protocols were launched, and her rage swelled while her senses narrowed down the keenest, coldest of edges.

“Let Ord go,” the Nuyen purred.

Xo said, “Let him leave us, and the Core’s saved. The Earth never dies. The Sanchexes remain a powerful Family, and your life is as ordinary and as splendid as you believed it should be.”

Abruptly, the baby Chamberlain started to move, crawling his way forward, pathetically struggling toward the barricade.

Seething, Ravleen cried out, “No!”

Like a syrup, the dust flowed before Ord, pulling aside to create a tiny hole. A doorway.

Again, “No!”

She slowed herself, and before she was perfectly ready, Ravleen fell out of the shadowy umbra, dropping into the searing radiations, her vast new surface absorbing the energy even as her flesh shredded into plasmas and heat. The simple brilliance diminished her senses, but she didn’t lose track of Ord. The Nuyen, yes. He had vanished. Where was he? With too few eyes, she searched the umbra, then the surrounding maelstrom, and just as she spotted that slippery presence, Ord accelerated, trying to make a last sprint for that very tiny hole—

Somehow, Ravleen’s anger found the strength to swell again, her rage clean, and brilliant, and sweet, and perfect.

With a wild screech, with all of her carefully sequestered energies, she spat at her nemesis, gutting herself in the process…a great numbing pain surging through an evaporating body…her last few eyes watched in horror as Ord, knowing exactly when she would fire, leaped aside, allowing the fantastic cake of gamma radiations and plasmas to pass by and enter the new hole, vanishing, then impacting on an invisible target set at the orb’s exact center…

Xo’s great ship was destroyed, at least.

And Ravleen discovered that she was still alive. Barely conscious, but able to crawl back into the protection of the umbra. With a weak, happy voice, she told the Chamberlain, “You’re still fucked…deep inside the Core, your ship left as shit…!”

The dense dusts began to glow in the infrared, absorbing a wild array of unexpected, unexplainable radiations.

A voice, warm and much too close, whispered, “Vacuum fluctuations.”

It told her, “From the wormhole, they’re coming.”

It explained, “Your hammerblow uncapped it, and now every photon that enters the hole is magnified. Doppler effects. Doubling effects. All the ugly feedback dangers that make this work nearly impossible…”

Again, Ord leaped sideways.

Then he dove into that little, little hole.

With a wary delight, Xo said to Ravleen, “Thank you. We could have done this ourselves, but you made it easy.”

Ravleen lashed out with her last hands, grabbing nothing.

The Nuyen plunged into the same gap in the dust.

Ravleen wasn’t too stupid to know that she was stupid. She had been a fool from the beginning, and for a slender delicious moment, she was glad to be dying. But then some little talent—more instinct than conscious thought—found a simple, workable answer to this damning mess.

In a wild instant, she stripped herself to nothing.

She peeled away her exhausted limbs and charred flesh and all of her surviving senses. But she wasn’t tiny enough yet. She wouldn’t be fast enough. Nothing remained of her but her soul and some minimal talents, plus that great blue-black hatred, and without hesitation, she abandoned what she loved most. She left her heart behind. Suddenly as simple and small as a newborn, she aimed by memory, flinging herself forward, and she pulled herself into the tiniest possible shape, accelerating into that shriveling hole, too blind to see even the searing white light that was climbing up to meet her.

Thirteen

“I know stories.

“Of course I can’t feel certain which of these stories are true. Or if anything I say has the tiniest toehold on fact. What matters is that you believe me. What matters is that I believe me. What matters—more than anything, this matters—that the universe Itself, in some important fashion or another, believes what it hears bubbling out of my little mouth, and acts accordingly…!”

—Alice, in conversation

THE DENSE SPHEREof hyperactive, ultraloyal dusts fulfilled its crude purpose, absorbing the furious radiations as they boiled out of the freshly uncapped wormhole. What the ball couldn’t absorb, it transmuted into more benign forms. Then the engineered limits were reached, and the sphere abruptly split wide, the explosion brighter and far hotter than any supernova, and thankfully, quicker to fall away again. Alice and her phantom friends rode out the blast, then watched gratefully as the sky darkened again, returning to the blood-tinged glow that was, in her friends’ eyes, a warm, reassuring presence.

Little remained to be done.

Alice was free to walk the edge of the continent, following the beaches and low cliffs, quietly speaking to her two hundred billion companions. She was a shadow and a whisper floating amidst their gossipy chatter. Ignoring the gossip, she would tell the entire glorious story, from its arbitrary beginnings to that obligatory final scene. Then she would begin again, knowing the ghosts wouldn’t remember her words after just one telling, or twenty. Perhaps they would never learn. But simple pride and the sturdy sound of her own familiar voice served to keep her company, and perhaps more important, it helped fill this sudden and unnerving wealth of time.

“I took our ship’s helm and moved us,” she reported. “At the very last moment, I spent the last of our fuel, slowing us as we approached the wormhole. Since before the Core exploded, the wormhole has been moving daisy fashion, skimming past suns and genuine black holes in order to remain in the Core. Hiding. Then I opened the barricade in its bow, engulfing the wormhole, and I forced our dark little world to dance with it, the wormhole’s apparent mass helping fling us off in an entirely new direction.

“We’ve moving perpendicular to the galaxy, my friends. My friends. Racing into the ultimate cold. Our stardrives and other machinery are ruined, left behind. We have only the barest residual capacity to make energy. But then, how much power does a world of ghosts require?”

Asking the question, Alice always paused, giving her audience the opportunity to offer answers. Right answers or wrong, it didn’t matter. She only wanted some sign that some other mind was finally, in some pitiful form, awakening.

She ended her silence, always, with a bold warning.

“We’re doomed, my friends. Utterly, eternally doomed. If the baby Chamberlain is successful, our very existence could evaporate. Depending on your personal reading of quantum gravity and the true nature of time, we might very well have already been erased. And everything you see here is what nonexistence looks like. Dim and peaceful, with an occasional fish for the eating.”

She laughed, then continued.

“But if things go wrong for poor Ord, we will continue on. We’ll leave the Milky Way entirely, haunting the deepest regions of space until finally, as our meager energies fail and our false molecules fall to pieces, we’ll perish.

“Together, we shall perish. I promise you!”

Then, for a brief while, Alice would stop walking, staring at the vague faces and bodies, unable to remember even one of their names.

At that point, the same furious insights would pounce on her.

Suddenly she would ask herself: What if the universe—this glorious and inflated and utterly spellbinding creation—was the same as this little ghost world? What if Reality was some clever soul’s device built with whatever tools were on hand, its creator trying to model something much grander, but in some great tragedy, lost? That would explain why so much of the universe was dark and simple, and why the universe, given all this space and its great reaches of time, insisted on repeating the same few building blocks—the protons and galaxies, the stars and the twisted, tragic souls.

That would explain everything.

Just contemplating the possibility made Alice shiver.

Then as Alice began to walk again, telling her story again from its arbitrary beginning, the second insight would attack. She would wonder if this was how the Creator lived: A lonely soul whispering to ghosts of her own making, trying to force their dim little minds to accept what couldn’t be more obvious or important?

But Alice was too small and stupid to answer such a grand question.

She always had been too limited to comprehend such matters, and for that she was thankful, and for that she had always felt infinitely, perfectly blessed.