Father to the Man

One

“I was searching your memories, and this was waiting for me:

“You were a young girl. You were still the baby. One morning, unannounced, Ian appeared in your room. ‘Alice,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’ You followed, but leaving distance between you and him. The mood was serious, almost grave, and I think you were a little worried, although if you told this story, I suspect you’d confess only to skeptical curiosity. Our father was a distant man, and a stranger. Ian was famous, and powerful, and what was probably most important at that age, he was much larger than you. The man was two meters tall and then some, and he was thick-boned and deliberate. His augmented body made the most intriguing sounds, tiny pumps sucking and odd machines humming while his ordinary human legs climbed the central staircase, one wide hand riding the inner banister, the golden oak shiny and slick beneath his thick pink fingers.

“You watched that hand; I don’t know why, but you seemed genuinely fascinated by it.

“In those days, our stairs were rigid. Even a god had to use his own legs and breathe with his own lungs. And pausing on the landing before the long climb to the penthouse, Ian looked back at his little daughter with an indecipherable expression.

“You assumed the penthouse was your destination. That’s where our father lived whenever he came home for a visit. Like any child, you were hoping he had brought you a special gift. Then he was climbing again, leading you again—on iron steps now, bolted into the cylindrical stairwell—and that’s the first time that you saw the half-finished mural. Ian had painted it on the ceramic wall. He’d always been something of an artist, even before he was a god. Neural implants and practice had given him a genius, and you thought it was all very beautiful. You said so. He explained that he was creating a mural to show key moments from the Chamberlains’ history. You stopped a few steps below him, grabbing the black cold iron of the railing. The nearest image portrayed Ian standing on a high black ridge of razored rock, staring into infinity, watching a scene yet to be painted. ‘What will be there?’ you asked. ‘A new world? Some-great battle? What?’

“Ian smiled. It was a rare moment to see him smile.

“ ‘What do you want me to paint?’ he inquired.

“ ‘I get to choose?’ you asked.

“ ‘As long as it’s a genuine moment from our history,’ he replied.

‘Yes. You can choose.’

“ ‘I want me,’ you blurted. ‘Please, Father. Paint me!’ ”

—Ord, in conversation

ORD PLUNGED TOWARDhis target, nothing remaining now but a few picked talents and some patchwork armor, and his little self, and a decidedly simple faith that everything would happen as promised, as planned.

A focused, fierce blast slashed past him, uncapping the wormhole.

“Easy,” he whispered, to himself. “This will be—”

Motion through the universe means passing through space and through time. In that sense, a wormhole is no different. Take a step, and you find yourself inside a new moment and a fresh place. Make another step, and again everything is different. But where did he actually cross? Wrapped in an envelope of roaring white chaos of hard radiation and heat, Ord did not feel the wormhole. He couldn’t decide where he had crossed over. With each successive nanosecond, nothing felt new. Nothing had changed. Then he plunged into a smothering blanket of black dusts. A trillion trillion impacts bled away his fantastic momentum. A cocoon of plasmas shrouded him, and blinded him. Had he missed his target? Was he falling back into Xo’s cloud, broken now and lost? The questions posed themselves, then a brilliant white light blinded him in new ways. The wormhole had grown unstable. Shattering at a point of intentional weakness, it was designed to spew the bulk of its energies into the future. Had it? Wherever Ord was, and whenever he was, the blast was angry enough to make him tumble and burn, peeling away much of his remaining armor, and wringing from him a long, sharp scream.

Again, the black dust wrapped itself around him, choking and slowing him, diminishing his velocity to a modest fraction of light-speed.

A whisper came from somewhere close, too soft to comprehend.

Then Ord suddenly broke free of the dust, plunging into a chilly vacuum and a fantastic cold light. Surrounding him were suns upon suns upon suns. The largest suns were old red monsters, and there were blue stragglers born when the old monsters merged, new hydrogen burning inside the shared cores. Plus there were countless yellow and orange suns spawned in the metal-rich clouds, in natural congregations and otherwise. A few planets circled those suns—colony worlds built by humans and other species. But the bulk of the cold bodies wandered free, dragged away from their old solar systems by the jostling dance of so many masses. A few possessed their own light and a delicious heat. Obviously, terraformers had been busy here. Great hands and small ones had built a remarkable place. The core of the Milky Way lay on all sides of him; here existed a density of energy and light, of simple life and roaring genius, unparalleled in human experience. Peaceful, and lovely, and doomed, all this was.

“But not doomed anymore,” Ord whispered with a solemn voice.

With every surviving mouth, he shouted, “Can you see me? Hello! I’m here to warn you! Chamberlains! Sanchexes! All of you…! Stop the work! This instant! Because if you don’t, everything’s going to be shit and death—!”

He fell silent.

The nearest world was a retrofitted brown dwarf. Hyperfiber scaffolding held up an artificial, only partially completed crust. Each portion of the new crust was larger than a hundred earths, and each was walled around its edges, the upper surface painted with shallow seas and deep, warm atmospheres. Some of those airborne continents lay in night, while most basked in a self-made day. Ord could see only a few details with his remaining eyes, but he intercepted a burst of laser light—one of the transmissions endlessly sending images to universal walls at every end of the galaxy. In his mind’s eye, he stared at a vividly green, newly made wilderness, and a small town of happy colonists, and in the town’s center stood a statue of no great size—a statue made from living pearlwood, red air-algae serving as hair, and a crust of delicate parasites that helped define the grinning lips and blue eyes and the telltale freckles of a god worthy of a people’s earnest devotion.

Alice, he saw.

Then Ord glanced at the world-code, recognizing it instantly. And really, he wasn’t at all surprised. This was the world Alice showed him on that horrible night in the penthouse, when the Core died. She had made him sit with those dead children, watching the peaceful night sky, everyone quietly and innocently talking about the greatness of Alice.

No, he wasn’t surprised. After all, his sister had lured him into the wormhole, and she did nothing without reason. Alice had known that he would emerge in this place and see this world first, and in the next instant, his fear would leap to another, even more miserable peak.

Again, the boy screamed.

“Alice!” he roared at the stars.

“Alice!” he wailed.

“Can you hear me, sister?”

Two

“Your long climb ended with a sack of feathers.

“ ‘I’d imagine you were hoping for a gift,’ Ian remarked, amused to know the mind of a little girl. ‘And you’re correct,’ he added. ‘Here. Take any feather. With your forefinger and thumb. Just one now. Just like this.’

“The two of you stood on the landing outside the penthouse, the black-iron railing coming up to your chest. Mimicking our father, you picked up a feather by its rachis. The feather was long and downy, and it was deeply red with a sharp blue eye at its center. ‘Now drop it,’ he instructed. ‘Down the stairwell…let it fall, Alice…’

“You obeyed, watching that bit of fluff dance in the air, twisting and skating as it gradually dropped from view.

“ ‘Now,’ said Ian. ‘Pick a second feather. And release it from exactly the same point in space. Yes, like that. And watch its motion again. Do you see?’

“You saw everything, and nothing.

“ ‘Again,’ our father urged. ‘And three more times, again. But make sure that each feather starts from the same point. Are you sure?’

“You were being very careful. But you were also growing bored with this pointless game.

“ ‘Every feather is identical to the others,’ Ian mentioned. ‘Atom for atom, each is a precise duplicate of the ones that went before.’ Then he laughed gently, chiding, ‘But these feathers keep falling along different courses. Obviously, Alice…you need to be more careful…’

“ ‘I am being careful,’ you argued. Then you doubled your efforts, and quadrupled your concentration. Yet the damned feathers insisted on taking odd turns, falling quickly, then slowly, and when least expected, floating back up to the landing or even higher, a warm gust of air letting them fly.

“ ‘Stop,’ Ian said at last. ‘That’s enough, Alice.’ Then he placed his big hand over both of your little hands. It may have been the first time he actually touched you, and what surprised you wasn’t the heat of his hand, which was staggering, but it was the slick plastic feel of the flesh. Ian was wearing a primitive prosthetic that began just beneath his elbow. You didn’t know that, until then. And looking up into that great face, you watched our father explain, ‘There are hundreds of thousands of identical feathers here. And if you could actually drop all of them from the same precise starting point…if that were even remotely possible…you still wouldn’t see any two fall along the same precise course.’

“That moment, that lesson, might have been your first contact with the pitfalls and possibilities of Chaos.

“ ‘And it’s the same with Chamberlains,’ our father assured. ‘We’re very nearly identical to each other. If not atom for atom, at least gene for gene. Yet each our lives is guaranteed to follow a different and unique course.’

“You absorbed that revelation in a long moment. But you didn’t speak until you had some telling, Alice-like observation to offer. Grabbing the entire sack, you poured its contents into the stairwell, the air filling with blue-eyed red feathers…and with a stubborn, overly smug voice, you exclaimed, ‘But you see! You see! They all fall, and every one of them ends up in the same fat pile…!’ ”

—Ord, in conversation

ORD BUILT Abody, and a path.

The body was boyish and small, barefoot and dressed in animal skins. His own skin was decorated with an assortment of old and important scars. The path beneath him was made of alternating blocks of yellow limestone and bluish shale. He pulled each stone out of a Thomas sack and carefully fitted it against the last stones. Each little slab represented several million kilometers, and each also marked a beacon that would help any watchful eye notice his passage, and eventually find him.

Ord was removing a fresh stone when the voice ambushed him.

Quietly, from somewhere close, the voice suggested, “Look over your shoulder.”

Too late, he glanced back along the path. The dusts around the dead wormhole were absorbing the fantastic energies, reradiating them as heat and X rays, and as a bruising shower of gamma radiation. Stepping out of that brilliance was a figure. Closing on him, the figure whispered, “My good dear friend. Is it you, Ord?”

It was a Nuyen’s voice.

Quietly, on a private channel, Ord whispered, “Xo? Is it?”

“It is,” the voice replied. Then Xo’s face appeared, smiling brightly as he called out, “I followed you through. It was close, but I made it.”

“You did make it,” Ord agreed. “Good.”

The visitor was moving much faster, and that translated into a faster gait for the Nuyen’s body. He was practically running, following the path, the face ignoring the close-packed suns and worlds, staring only at the boy.

Again, Ord said, “Xo? Is it—?”

The impact was sudden, and jarring.

Too late, Ord realized his mistake. Ravleen had stripped herself down to almost nothing, and slicing through the dusts, she had managed to retain most of her velocity. Without a thought for her own safety, she struck him like a cannonball, their momentum married, then she grabbed hold of him, and with every little weapon at her disposal, she tried to murder him.

Ord absorbed the first impact, and the next thousand. The path and both bodies vanished, leaving him drifting through the cold bright vacuum. He was faster now, but not much. Most of Ravleen must have been trapped on the far side of the wormhole. That fierce little last piece of her didn’t have enough mass, much less muscle, to cause lasting harm. Even her mouths were oddly weakened, cursing him in a near whisper, repeating the same few insults with a washed-out fury.

“You’re a stupid fuck, and I’m going to kill you now,” she promised. “You’re an ugly fuck, and I’m going to skin you and wear you like a fucking mask.”

Ord weathered the abuse without comment.

Another voice intruded. “What do you mean?” it asked with an inky smoothness. “Whom do you wish to kill, Ravleen?”

Xo. Finally.

Using a soothing voice, the Nuyen said, “You’re a little stupid, I think, and ugly-spirited, and whom exactly do you want dead?”

Ravleen felt the words, and paused. She seemed to be examining her battered self. The collision with Ord had left her grievously injured. Her most fragile, intricate organs lay exposed. Baking in the radiation, they were dying. She was dying. A look of supreme fatigue washed over her. Ord saw it in the angles of her body, and he heard it in the depth of her silence. And because it was the right thing to do, he deftly positioned his own body between her and the wormhole, using his shredded armor and slight bulk to absorb the worst of the poisons.

Xo drifted closer, whispering, “You aren’t the same monster. Are you, Ravleen?”

She said nothing.

“I can tell,” he assured.

Ravleen flexed her muscles, accomplishing nothing.

With a grave wonder, Xo said, “To catch us, you had to leave everything else behind. Including your hatred, didn’t you—?”

“I kept enough!” she sputtered. “You prick!”

Ord broke into a low, happy laugh.

“A kind of redemption,” he exclaimed. “Like it or not, Ravleen…that’s what you’ve found…!”

Three

“A wilderness of infinite potential…avastness bursting with wealth and promise…a golden realm where you might live nearly forever as the God of Gods…

“Is it the Core?

“The baby universe?

“Or maybe I’m teasing…maybe this boundless marvel is the mind and soul of Alice Chamberlain…?”

—Ord, in conversation

THREE BODIES HUDDLEDin the vacuum, limbs tied together in elaborate knots, their armor gradually searing in the fading glow of the spent wormhole. Ord had never stopped calling for help, and now Xo joined in, lending his energy and mouths. Yet nothing seemed to notice their pleas. The nearest worlds remained stubbornly remote, and the surrounding space tasted perfectly clean. Unnaturally clean, Ord decided. Save for the dust suspended above the wormhole and the occasional photon bound for better places, the three of them were drifting across a nearly perfect vacuum. Unlike the rest of the Core, there was no fog of hydrogen and were no little icy worlds moving without suns. Ord couldn’t even find a mountain-sized rock or thumb-sized pebble. A volume better than ten light-years in every direction had been scrubbed and scoured, filtered pure again and again. Here lay an unexpected wonder: A gigantic and pure region, clean as any laboratory—a seamless perfection that could only have been produced by the most feverishly efficient and anally focused gods.

“We’ve got an unlikely trajectory,” Ord whispered. Comparing internal maps to what he saw, he admitted, “The central black hole is exactly on the other side of the wormhole. That’s where they’ll be waiting. I’m sure.”

“So they won’t find us here,” Xo offered.

“In time they will.”

“But they’ll be watching for something enormous. Someone like them.” Xo kept shouting for the stars to take notice, but he confessed to his companions, “They’ll look and miss us the first thousand times…and you know what’s going to happen…? They’ll logically assume that the wormhole went unstable by itself. A random act, and inevitable…”

“No,” Ord countered.

Ravleen said nothing.

“They’re going to find us,” Ord muttered. “Because we’re twists of dirt wandering around inside their very clean room.”

“But in time?” asked Xo. “Will they actually find us while it still means something?”

Ord answered with silence and a purposeful glance at the stars. Then he resumed to shout and holler, switching channels and volumes according to custom, then doing it randomly, always sandwiching the name, “Alice,” between the other names drawn from the five hundred Families who had come to the Core.

The days passed.

Long cold weeks were crossed.

It was just the three of them, and the vacuum. A routine quickly formed. Xo occasionally spoke to Ord—usually about nothing of consequence, just to pretend conversation—and Ord might answer in the same frothy light vein. Ravleen never uttered a sound, never moved. Meanwhile, in code, the two friends discussed their contingencies for likely futures, and sometimes they talked about their nightmares. What if they didn’t reach the Great Ones? What if every risk and every victory meant nothing in the end? And then they would plunge back into a sober, introspective silence that would last for ten or twenty endless seconds.

Then Xo started to say, “Do you remember…when we first joined the Golds…do you remember…?”

His voice fell away.

“What?” Ord started to ask.

But then he hesitated, sensing what Xo had already felt, letting it interrupt his fragile concentration, too.

There were four of them now.

With most of his talents ruined or left behind, Ord could feel the visitor only as a presence—a black chill carefully licking at his fringes. The brightest stars faded just slightly. Then came the mild and irresistible tug as a great mass swung near before pulling away again. Someone was studying them. A thousand sensors and eyes and fingertips too delicate to be seen were playing across their bodies, then poking around inside their superchilled minds. When he guessed that the time was ripe, Ord opened a Chamberlain channel. He didn’t whisper, but he didn’t shout, either. Without a trace of fear and only a minimal respect, he said, “Hello to you. Whoever you are. Hello.”

Silence was the reply.

A delicious urge struck. Ord told the darkness, “If you’re injured, we can help you. Do you need help, friend?”

In a private whisper, Xo warned, “I smell mistrust. And muscles.”

The Nuyen had kept more of his talents. On the premise that his ally could read the visitor’s thoughts, Ord let himself wonder, “Which Family?”

Xo whispered, “Sanchex.”

“You’re sure?”

“The mind’s efficient, and relentless,” Xo warned. “And everywhere I look, I see muscles.”

Ord broke into a quiet laugh, relieved finally to come across something that was at least a little bit familiar.

Only then did Ravleen sense their visitor. Limbs kicked, and from her strongest mouth she cried out, “Whoever you are! These criminals are holding me against my will—!”

A thunderous voice descended on a Sanchex channel.

“What should I do about them, little one?”

“Kill them,” Ravleen barked. “If you can.”

There was a momentary pause, then a face and naked body were conjured from compliant light. They saw a male body, muscular and dark, and in the depths of its eyes lay an even greater darkness. The handsome face grinned with a practiced malevolence. There was a laugh not unlike the collapse of a mountain. Then a quiet, massive voice whispered in each of their ears, warning, “Oh, I could kill them. Easily. And I could butcher you in the same breath, little one.”

Ravleen fell silent.

“Who are you?” Xo asked.

In an offhand fashion, the newcomer said, “My name is Marvel.”

The First Sanchex.

But if Ravleen was impressed, she kept her emotion well hidden. “You might think that’s who you are,” she said, suddenly kicking and squirming. “To me, you’re just a voice and a put-on face…and even if you are, you don’t scare me! Do you hear me, Father? Do you?”

Four

“ ‘Who crossed over?’ I will ask you.

“Spellbound.

“ ‘Into the baby universe…who…?’

“And very softly, you’ll say to me, ‘Closer.’

“So I’ll dip my head, and listen, and you’ll offer me two of the most simple words…two incredible, impossible words…and about that subject, you will never utter a third word, even in the most offhand fashion…”

—Ord, in conversation

THEIR BODIES WERErobbed of their inertia, then accelerated, and, without warning, the three of them were unknotted and rudely yanked apart.

Ord found himself alone. He discovered himself sitting inside what seemed to be a typical Chamberlain apartment. There was a spacious bed beneath him and a bath on his left, and on his right was a swimming pool stocked with dragonfly larvae and rainbow worms, and beside it, a very long universal wall that refused to work. The atmosphere was oxygen, intended for him, and someone had knitted together a meat-and-blood Chamberlain body. Ord was still linked to his battered machinery and talents, but what he saw with his immediate eyes was naked and pale, freckled and unscarred. This body was a kindness, and a symbol. He left it entirely alone, except to touch himself where the ribs joined at the sternum, causing a treasured scar to rise up and grow pleasantly slick.

Nothing about the room reminded him of a prison cell. Yet Ord understood that he couldn’t leave and should never try. He was expected to play the patient role while he was carried to somewhere else. The Great Ones were being summoned, and long swift tangling conversations would be held, giving them time to discuss the possibilities, arriving at a quiet state that could be confused for a consensus. And only then would they wish to speak directly with him.

Quietly, Ord said, “Alice.”

He said, “I’m your baby brother.”

Strolling up to the universal wall, he squinted, peering into the blackness. Twenty requested views failed to appear. But was the wall dead? “Is this the Core’s black hole, Alice? Is that what you want to show me?”

Silence.

“I know what you’re doing here,” he continued. “You and the other Great Ones…I know why you’ve gathered, and what you’re hoping to build, and I know what a selfish mess you’re going to make of everything…”

The silence gained a sturdy indifference. Otherwise, it was a seamless quiet, untroubled by the messenger in its midst.

Ord couldn’t help but feel surprised and hurt. He knew that he shouldn’t worry about prosaic business like wasted time and the unfathomable stakes involved, but he was worrying quite a lot. Alice was arrogant and stubborn—a consequence of being half as old as her species—and Ord always assumed that her peers were exactly the same, if not worse. But he kept telling himself that none of those ugly traits made them into fools. No matter how mammoth their powers, no matter how sweeping their gaze, didn’t reason and right still have to rule their enormous souls?

With a shrill desperation, Ord started to call out, “Alice—”

A doorway blossomed in what had been a wall of living coral. The doorway opened outward, riding on what looked to be great brass hinges. Beyond lay nothing but a deep grayness, and from the grayness came a sudden cool wind that combed Ord’s shaggy hair. With old-style nostrils, he smelled perspiration. He smelled lingering aromas that could only remind him of himself. Calling him were a few dozen genetic markers, ancient and deeply buried, meaning Chamberlain. He sniffed a second time and showed his guest a wide smile, and said, “Alice,” with an eagerness that he’d hoped to keep hidden.

From the grayness stepped a figure clothed in the same grayness. There were long slippers and tight trousers rising up into a roomy gray blouse that shimmered in the room’s yellowy light. A taut black band was worn around the forehead. The face beneath looked as young as Ord’s, and as masculine, and it smiled in the same relentless fashion. But this wasn’t just some clever reflection. Those eyes were not Ord’s. Yes, they possessed the same blue-white color, and they had a brightness and a genuine eagerness. But beneath their surface lay a different quality—a sense of great mass, a hint of supreme age—and beyond the eyes was a sadness both profound and appealing.

Ord recognized the sadness.

“Where have I seen you?” he whispered.

The creature before him shrugged gamely, then stepped into the doorway, admitting, “You’ve seen me many times, I should hope.”

Loudly, Ord asked, “Which brother are you?”

“None,” said the young face. Said the ancient eyes.

“No,” Ord growled. There was no sense of surprise, but he felt a pure, instinctive anger. Then, revulsion. He shook his head defiantly, saying, “You can’t be. You aren’t. You died eons ago—”

“Who’s dead?” the visitor inquired.

“My father,” Ord said to the impossibility.

“The father of the Chamberlains,” he muttered to nobody.

“Ian?” he squeaked.

Those ancient blue eyes pulled shut, and with a practiced bow that was both formal and devoid of humility, the visitor announced, “In the service of the Great Peace, I am. Yes. Ian Chamberlain.”

Five

“You’ll say, ‘Closer.’

“So I’ll dip my head and listen, and you’ll offer those two incredible, impossible words…

“ ‘Your father,’ I will hear.

“Which will be too much said, I think…”

—Ord, in conversation

“IAN’S DEAD.”

It was true enough to deserve repetition. Three more times, Ord uttered that simple declaration. “Ian is dead.” Yet he wasn’t truly surprised. Alice had given him a curt warning, and the long journey allowed him time to chew on her odd words. He had a mountain of explanations at the ready, each offering strategies and a certain face. Surprise chose Ord. His eyes grew huge with amazement, and his mouth fell wide, and with an incredulous voice, he said, “I don’t believe you.”

Angry now, he snarled, “That’s bullshit!”

The visitor seemed amused by the outburst. He stepped a little closer, growing taller while he smiled, and with a quiet, dry voice, he said, “Tell this old ghost, if you would. How did Ian die?”

“A starship was crippled,” Ord explained. “There were eighteen hundred human colonists and an AI crew. They were drifting, passing too close to a binary system. An aging star was dropping its skin on the surface of a neutron star, and once enough mass had gathered, the supernova would erupt. In a matter of a few years—”

“Nineteen years, plus a few days,” the apparition offered.

Ord looked at the black universal wall. “Ian was the only soul near enough to help,” he continued. “The Great Peace was barely a million years old. Talents were much more limited then. Even the First Chamberlain could do only so much. When he arrived, it was too late to save everyone. He could save the ship, or save himself. But there wasn’t any choice. Ian clothed the ship in his own armor and engines, and he accelerated those people out of the gravity well, and the neutron star detonated on schedule, and he was granted a hero’s death.”

The smile broadened. “You learned that story, did you? As a boy?”

“As a boy, and since,” Ord responded.

Then he continued, explaining, “I was promised—in my crib, practically—that if I was very lucky, I’d die like Ian. A perfect, selfless death…”

The visitor’s response was an apparently humble, much-practiced bow.

“I suppose,” Ord continued. “History could be wrong. It often is. Witnesses and sensors could have made the same string of mistakes. It wasn’t Ian who saved those people, or maybe he escaped the catastrophe, or he survived it. Somehow. And later, when he learned about his heroic death, he might have decided to let the story stand.” Ord set that explanation between them, as if offering a gift. “Being invisible, he gave his children a hero worthy of their love.”

The smile broadened, and the blue eyes narrowed. “Perhaps,” said the apparition. “Just perhaps, this is what really happened.” Then came a big conspiratorial wink. “As you say, this was long ago. Your father had to expend fantastic energies to reach those stranded people. Talents were bulky. Inelegant. Even clumsy. More than today, there were some rather brutal limits to motion and magic.” The smile brightened. “What if Ian broke one good law—abandoning functioning pieces of himself—in order to achieve a higher good? What if when he heard about the disaster, he flung aside all the machines and talents that he didn’t absolutely need? He sent them racing along one vector, and lighter for his sacrifice, he managed to reach the disabled ship in ample time. Then the star exploded, and yes, he died. What was Ian was definitely killed. But those functioning talents continued following the same course, and after an age, they managed to knit themselves together and build a shared self, an identity and a consciousness. A soul in its own right was born. Then the newborn entity took control of its motions, its actions. And realizing that it was living outside the strictest laws, it decided, quite reasonably, to keep its existence more secret than not.”

A pause.

“What do you think of my story, little one?”

Ord shook his head, and a harsh loud laugh bubbled out of him.

The Chamberlain acted offended, but then laughed in exactly the same fashion. “From what I’ve heard,” he warned, “both of us are entitled to our doubts.”

“What do you mean?”

For the first time, the man called him Ord.

Then he said, “Your companions, particularly that creepy Nuyen…they paint vivid, and frankly, rather incredible portraits of your last few thousand years…”

Ord remained silent.

With a snort and a vigorous shake of the head, the Chamberlain exclaimed, “This is all such a peculiar business.”

Silence.

“When we envisioned who would emerge from our wormhole…well, I’ll give you fair warning…we didn’t anticipate the likes of you…”

“You’re not imaginative enough,” Ord suggested.

Unperturbed, the Chamberlain said, “Obviously. But isn’t that the universal failing? The mind’s eye is always behind when it comes to seeing.”

Ord turned away.

Quietly, fiercely, he asked, “Is this the Core’s black hole?”

“Sagittario? Yes, of course.” The Chamberlain strolled over to the universal wall, and with a touch of a finger, he enlarged the center of the image. More than a million solar masses created a seamless and elegant mass with no true size, its event horizon embracing a volume twenty million kilometers across. Against that perfect blackness was a speck of matter racing at a healthy fraction of light-speed. It was a pluto-sized chunk of machinery, one of the tools that had once helped make the Core safe for protoplasm. But now the machine was sleeping, tending to its critical parts, probably dreaming of a dangerous future when its powers would be needed again.

Quietly, Ord asked, “Where’s Alice?”

“Everywhere,” the Chamberlain replied. Then he laughed heartily, shaking his ruddy face, adding with a measured delight, “If I know my daughter, she’s everywhere and trying to do everything herself.”

She didn’t mention you, except once, thought Ord.

The Chamberlain saw his thoughts, or guessed them. And with a sturdy tsk-tsk, he admitted, “That’s probably best. Since I don’t exist anymore.”

Ord watched the machine cross the screen, vanishing for a moment, then appearing on the other side, racing once again across his field of view.

“This is where my talents finally settled,” the Chamberlain confessed. “There. On that small, cold body.”

Ord touched the rapid speck, and the image changed. Suddenly he was looking up from the platinum-clad surface, staring into the great curtains of stars that moved about Sagittario in longer, slower orbits. With large enough eyes, he could have gazed past the curtains, past the walls of cold dust and hot dust and swirling gases and newborn suns. Thirty thousand light-years away was the sturdy yellow-white light of Sol. In time, Ord might fashion an army of eyes, and if he were patient and precise, he would eventually see the light of his home. Thirty thousand years before his birth, that feeble glow had begun its march. Here, in this place and this time, Ord was nothingness. He was a possibility, unborn and unimaginable. And with that insight, he decided the entity standing nearby could well be Ian Chamberlain. After all, the two of them were much the same: a pair of ghosts trying to climb their way out of oblivion.

He let his father hear those bittersweet thoughts.

And Ian let himself laugh, then patted his son on the small of the back. With a paternal warmth, he told his youngest, “My talents worked alone. For the next few million years, they laid the groundwork for creating a new universe. Here.” Again, he gave a soft pat. “Eventually, your sister and the others found me. They’re the ones who conjured my old personality and flesh, using shared recollections and my surviving diaries. And when I explained what I was attempting, they decided to help.” He shook his head appreciatively. “Honestly, they’ve done a world of work, compared to my little efforts. But they have better talents, and the raw knowledge. Mostly, I’ve given nothing but my sturdy, unflagging approval.”

“Father,” whispered Ord.

He asked, “Are you, or aren’t you?”

“This is what I have learned,” said the entity beside him. “We are nothing but talents, really. We are genius and power and focus and skills beyond number. These faces we wear? And these bodies of convenience? In every consequential way, they’re nothing…nothing but clothes donned for the narrowest of occasions…”

Ord remained silent.

“Nothing about us is human anymore,” he heard. “Except for a thin, perishable skin, that is.”

Maybe you are my father, thought Ord, in a secret place.But I don’t much like what you are …

Six

“When Alice arrived home, she mentioned to me that she liked you, and she respected you and your Family, and she seemed to imply that I should do a better job of appreciating your very difficult legacy, Ravleen.

“Buried in all the other strangeness, I barely noticed those few words.

“Yet since then, and now…I think about what she told me. Not about liking you, or respecting you. I can, and I sometimes I do. And your difficult legacy is obvious and awful. No, what gnaws at me is this sense…this insistent, powerful feeling…that what she really said was, ‘I feel sorry for that poor, pitiful child…!’ ”

—Ord, in conversation

ONE MOMENT,RAVLEENwas perched on a hard bed, sitting inside what looked like any apartment lost inside the Sanchex mansion. She was looking in no particular direction, speaking to Marvel, relating the highlights of the last thousands of years. Just telling it made her angry. She felt her heart humming faster, pushing the hot blood around and around her new body. She felt her voice rise in pitch and volume, and she heard it rise, and she discovered that her hands were trembling. Even when she grabbed the muscled tops of her thighs and held tight, those silly hands trembled. But she pushed through her rage, ignoring the acidic tears and the slicing pressure of her clenched fingernails, blood running now in ten distinct streams, slowly soaking the bristly wool blanket beneath her.

“Then I went through the wormhole,” she reported. “I caught Ord and tried to kill him. Again. And then you found me. Whatever you are. Marvel Sanchex, or whatever. You found us and brought me here.” Her heart was screaming, and the pressurized blood began to spout. In a wild, scorching voice, she said, “The fucking Chamberlains…that bitch Alice…leading us into a trap here, in the Core, with the fucking Nuyens sitting on the side, waiting for the trap’s jaws to drop…!”

“Stop,” said a voice.

She couldn’t see Marvel. Somewhere in the midst of her telling the story, he had vanished. But his voice returned now, warning Ravleen, “I don’t fall into traps. Not a Chamberlain’s. And certainly not one of the Nuyens’.”

“Our Family’s dead—!” she cried out.

“Am I dead?”

“To me,” she answered. “Yes.”

“Look at me, Ravleen.”

She was staring at her bloodied legs. Against a great, unexpected weight, she managed to lift her eyes, her face following slowly after them. The apartment had vanished. The bed beneath her had turned into a hard stool made of gray-white bone. She was sitting in one corner of a fighter’s square ring. Marvel, or someone, was sitting in the opposite corner, wearing a Sanchex body. Besides the ring and themselves, there was nothing to see. A bluish white light came from everywhere, making her squint. Marvel looked like a young man. He looked fit and lean, and strong, regarding her with an inky gaze that made her uneasy, and she returned that look with the hardest stare she could manage.

“Do you know this place?” he asked.

A familiarity teased her. The ring was built from human shards and scraps. The four posts were bone, each topped with a fleshless skull. The skulls were bone patched with crude pieces of metal and bone white ceramics, and each skull showed scars partly healed and the wounds that had killed their owners. The ropes strung between the posts were knitted together with human sinews and tendons, and in places, long fingers curled and frozen, then used as simple hooks.

“You don’t remember the story,” Marvel remarked. “Do you know about our Family, Ravleen?”

She could almost remember, almost, but each time she came close, the truth would skitter out of her view.

“Ravleen?”

Again, she had to force her eyes to lift. She had to work like a demon to keep her massive head level, sitting upright on that hard bone stool.

“This is what I did,” said Marvel. “When I was boy, and when I had to make any kind of living—”

“I know,” she said. “I remember.”

“You don’t remember,” he cautioned. “I don’t think you realize just how mangled you are, daughter.”

“That fuck Ord,” she began.

“Not all of it is his fault,” he countered. “Not in what I see now. And what I don’t see.” He rose from his own stool. He wore silky trunks and battered shoes, and on each hand was a glove. The right glove was covered with a titanium mesh, while the left glove was smaller, bristling with the canines of hyenas and dogs.

“Are we going to fight?” she asked.

He actually laughed. “Why? Do you want to dance for a round or two?”

But she had no gloves, or shoes. She was suddenly wearing nothing but a woolen dress streaked with her own cooling blood.

“No, I don’t want to fight you,” said her father.

Then he said, again, “This is where I made my living when I was a boy.”

“I remember now,” she lied.

He didn’t correct her again. Instead, he strolled into the middle of the ring. The flexing surface beneath him was a durable beige leather made from layers upon layers of human skin. “I was born on Lantana’s World. A high-grav colony world—”

“I know that much!” she interrupted.

“Lantana kept bouncing from misery to misery. Wars and several man-made plagues, and there was an ecological collapse, followed by an ugly recovery. Populations expanded again. The economy soared along some very narrow lines. There was a good living to be made for strong young people who would willingly climb into a tiny ring and beat the shit out of strangers.”

Ravleen watched him, and listened.

“I was fifteen, and very talented, and exceptionally cruel.” He came close to smiling, just for that instant. “That’s when the Council came to Lantana. They came and met with our government, explaining that they were searching for a few special people. Only sixty million humans lived there. The chance that one of us would prove worthy…well, it was very unlikely. But the government did everything possible to sway the testers. Fifty thousand people, young and with connections, were taken aside and trained while the Council made its preparations. But you couldn’t train for those tests, and you certainly couldn’t cheat them. That was their beauty. Each person was inflicted with a different set of conditions and questions, and each reaction and answer caused the test to jump into some new, unexpected avenue.

“You don’t how beautiful it is. Even now, gazing at the algorithms and protocols, and the bottled genius…well, I have to marvel at the elegance and pragmatic beauty of it all…

“My given name wasn’t Marvel. That was my fighting name. ‘Gene’ wouldn’t put the proper fear into my opponents, you see.”

He laughed gently, for a moment.

“Eventually, I was tested. The first questions and a couple AI interviews led to more tests, which was an encouraging sign. About a thousand times, I was asked, ‘Do you want to be endowed with godlike powers?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And sometimes, for whatever reason, I said, ‘No, never.’ I didn’t know it, but I gave the best answer at each turn. That’s why they said, ‘Okay, Mr. Sanchex. You have one last test. Are you ready?’

“I wasn’t, and that wasn’t the point. Of course.

“They put me into this ring. They didn’t give me instructions, even when I demanded them. Then they threw an opponent in here to fight me.

“It was me. At least in a sense, it was me. An android with my face, my reflexes. My basic strengths. We shared the same nervous system, by the way. The first time I struck him, up here on the arm, I felt the impact. The first time he cracked me in the jaw and got my lip bleeding, he tasted my blood.

“Fight that fight for two little minutes, and believe me, you’ll never forget the experience.

“We fought for hours. We hammered and kicked, eroding each other down to pulp and fatigue toxins, then the bell would scream and we’d crawl back to our corners and drink water and broth, scraping together enough energy to crawl back into the middle and batter each other again.

“This is a test, I kept thinking.

“I was in the greatest fight of my life, and I wouldn’t quit. I decided that I could outlast anyone, including a machine. Hit the soulless little bastard often enough and hard enough, and I’d come out on the end of this nightmare with the universe at my feet.

“Then I got sloppy, and the machine knocked me down, and it dropped in misery, and watching it writhe on the skin beside me, a different possibility presented itself. What if this wasn’t a robot? What if this was a human being? Hell, what if that was me, and I was the robot, and think what that poor son of a bitch was going through?

“That’s when I said, ‘Enough. I give.’

“My testers came over the ropes and started to patch me up, and they removed the robot’s battered head, folding up the arms and legs, making ready to carry the machine to the scrap heap. ‘So I’m the real one,’ I muttered. They pretended not to understand me. ‘How did I do? Did I pass?’ I asked. Then this little woman looked hard at me, and without blinking, she said, ‘You weren’t even fucking close to passing.’

“I was devastated.

“I was relieved.

“Weeks later, healed up and feeling perfect again, I stepped back into the ring. The Council had abandoned Lantana’s World. Nobody had been selected, and nobody would be. To help heal that wounded civic pride, a huge prize was offered to whoever beat the reigning champion, and since I was a young stallion, and lucky, I got the first chance.

“He was an asshole, the champ was. A murderer and a monster.

“In a cruel business, he was much too cruel. He had killed half a hundred men in the ring. In fact, he’d murdered two of my best friends. These two skulls here, as it happens.” Marvel pointed at two of the battered, infinitely dead shells. “That helped my concentration. The son of a bitch needed to be hurt, or worse. And I came out with every trick ready, getting cheap shots and free shots, pushing the rules until my sworn enemy was starting to get sloppy, and tired, pulling his feet along the skin without lifting them, looking out at me with a sick horror that told me that I’d won. In everything but name, I was the reigning champ now.

“I stopped fighting.

“Really, I couldn’t have told you why I stopped. Not then, and maybe not for a couple hundred years. But instead of killing that cocksucker with my hands and feet…instead of delivering the vengeance he so richly deserved…I let my arms drop, and in a bloody voice, I said, ‘Enough.’

“Unfortunately, you couldn’t just surrender from this ring.

“I had to let him have his way with my face, my ribs. My groin. And then because I was obviously giving up, the audience got into it. They felt cheated, and they decided that a payment must have been made for me to throw the fight like that…and the riot that followed very nearly killed me. The way I heard it, the Council had to insert soldiers into the mayhem, just to save the father of the Sanchex Family from the clutches of that mob…!”

AGAIN,RAVLEEN WASsitting on a bed, sitting inside a Sanchex apartment.

She was still wearing the wool dress, but her wounds and the blood had vanished. And Marvel was dressed in a dark suit, watching her with a mixture of malice and curiosity. “Tell me your story again,” he coaxed. “But slower this time.”

He said, “We have plenty of time. Don’t worry.”

Then when she didn’t make any sound, he said, “The Earth. That’s the part that really interests me. Describe how you moved a single hand, and tripped an awful trap, and murdered our mother world.”

“There’s a lot more to the story,” she warned. “A lot more than the Earth.”

“Really?” Marvel gave her a strange hard smile, adding, “I’m a tough soul. Yes, I am. But, daughter, I think one dead world is just about as much as I can stomach just now…”

Seven

“If I’d brought every last one of your talents…if circumstances had been that generous…we would have been, in effect, two Alices. More than a match for every obstacle stupid enough to stand in our path…

“But in the end, what I dragged here is almost nothing.

“Here is what I can offer you…

“Although I think there might be some secret intuitions…notions you hid inside my unconscious self…memes with the mass of a few tamed electrons, and the irresistible power of a collapsing sun…”

—Ord, in conversation

IAN SAID,“WITHme. Come.”

Ord stepped toward the wall, then the wall was behind them. Suddenly they were plunging, streaking toward the platinum-clad machine. It remained tiny and distant, and swift, but he tasted the first wisps of a deep, deep atmosphere. Unlike any other atmosphere, this was: an invisible but increasingly dense accumulation of dark-matter talents and plasmatic talents and baryonic talents made transparent and permeable, each talent carefully aligned with its neighbors, cooperating with its neighbors, set together like the elaborate pieces of some grand, secret puzzle.

They were diving into an enormous and perfectly clear ocean.

Ord was a twist of life swimming inside the enormous and tireless bodies of the Great Ones.

He could taste and smell several thousand distinct entities, each packed as close to its siblings and peers as possible. Less important talents lay on the surface, while the essentials of each soul were as close as possible to the sleeping machine. And still Ord plunged deeper, the ocean growing dense and fiercely warm, with little pockets of absolute cold slapping against his face.

What looked like a pink mountain was erected on the machine’s northern pole, and straddling the peak was a cylindrical white building of no special size or obvious importance. It was the Chamberlain mansion. Not the fat modern structure that Ord knew, but the modest five-story house that the oldest, greatest Chamberlains had known.

Again, Ord asked, “Where is Alice?”

“Close,” Ian admitted. “Remarkably close.”

Two granite bears flanked the main doorway. One bear sat, while the other stood on its hind legs, one massive paw raised in what might be taken for a greeting. Passing between the statues, Ord mentioned, “That’s wrong.”

“What is?”

“Bears don’t wave that way.”

“But statues do,” his father reminded him. Then he touched the boy on the back, urging him forward, and with another step, they had passed through the suddenly open doors.

The cylindrical house looked small from outside, but stepping inside triggered an elaborate set of illusions, cheats, and embedded talents. With his second step, the front room and surrounding hallways exploded outward. Everything except for Ord was enormous. With his third step, it felt as if he were a fleck lost inside some immeasurable vastness. A new set of tricks was stacked upon the last. He allowed his surprise to seep out where it could be admired—earning a knowing nod and wink from the man walking beside him, smiling like his finest friend, a strong warm arm thrown casually around Ord’s trembling shoulder.

Softly, the boy asked, “How?”

“Galloping cleverness,” Ian replied. “That and catastrophic expense.” Another wink. Then he said, “What’s a shabby mansion on the outside is a shabby mansion within. But our laboratory hides at the center. Remember, this is fabulously delicate work. For good technical reasons, everything here, including you and me, needs to be even tinier before we can proceed.”

Again, tricks were unleashed.

Fifty meters felt like fifty light-years. Together, they soared through the front room and down a hallway that led into the central stairwell. Except the stairs were missing. They passed into a cylindrical chamber that seemed to be kilometers across, and kilometers tall, and lit in the most haphazard fashion by softly glowing orbs that seemed to float where they wanted, in clusters and twos and sometimes alone.

“There’s a poetic sensibility in this smallness,” Ian assured. “What is the universe if it isn’t something born fantastically tiny, yet bursting with infinities…?”

Ian was a glowing sphere, smooth and radiant, and relentlessly ethereal. But not Ord. He still wore a boyish body dressed in decidedly ordinary trousers, even though his body had been compressed into a hyperdense fluid no larger than a fat bacillus. His remaining talents stretched behind him like a great thin tail. Helpless, he was towed to the chamber’s center, and on slippered feet, he found himself perched on a platform in front of what looked to be a giant chambered nautilus. The nautilus had a thousand tentacles fashioned from normal sorts of matter, baryonic and dark, while the coiled shell itself was fashioned from strange matter and dark energies—a silvery, impossibly strong shell forged on the lip of the great black hole.

Ord felt the crackle and spark of energies flowing into the shell, spiraling deeper, conspiring with quantum mechanics, hunting the brink of the Planck realm, hoping for a baby universe worth snaring.

He stared at the machinery.

But the strange matter was perfectly opaque, and his best senses had been left at the door. He felt half-blind. He was carefully maimed. And to one degree or another, it was the same for everyone else, too. Smallness was demanded here. Speed was essential. Bulky talents and patient talents couldn’t be allowed anywhere near such an elegant, delicate business.

Someone said, “Ord.”

A Nuyen was standing near him. Xo was standing there. Like him, Xo wore trousers and slippers and a boy’s unfinished body. But what Ord stared at was the smear of light behind his friend. In an instant, the light turned into a Chamberlain. A sister. A sister extruding a confidence and pride that Ord recognized immediately.

“Alice?” he sputtered.

Xo gave him a hard look, shaking his head.

“No,” he whispered.

With a tangible despair, he warned, “This one is Adelaide.”

Eight

“She’s our Two: the first child and favorite daughter of Ian Chamberlain, according to the recollections Alice left for me. Adelaide is exactly the same as Alice, except for the raging differences. Never as powerful, and maybe half as bold. Which makes her more conservative. More perfectly attuned to what is expected and normal. Since Ian’s death, she’s served as the official leader of our Family—a duty and burden that has shaped every last one of her talents. Nine million years as our matriarch, and until I had Alice’s memories to pick through, I’d never heard even a trace of dissent about the great old woman.

“How many of Alice’s complaints are real, and how many ride on a younger sister’s envy…?

“I can’t say, Xo.

“But if you meet my sister, be careful. She’s a god drawn with the most ordinary lines…”

—Ord, in conversation

“WHY THIS?” XOhad asked. Descending on the moon-sized machine, he had looked at the mansion standing on that granite mountain, and with a faint little laugh, he’d admitted, “This is something of a surprise.”

With a sideways grin, Adelaide inquired, “What mansion do you see?”

“The Nuyens’,” he answered. Then he clarified, adding, “The original brick building. Fourth Millennia Gothic.”

“Maybe you are,” she allowed.

“What am I?”

“A genuine Nuyen.” The Chamberlain wore an old face, a little fat and very sure of itself. She was touching him by many means, not all of them subtle. The examination had begun long ago, but neither of them had mentioned it. Until this moment, they had said very little, and every word had been polite, and empty, dancing carefully around the important subjects at hand.

“You see the old Chamberlain mansion,” Xo guessed.

“Each sees her own, or his own.” She led him to the front door and paused, standing on what to Xo looked like a wide brick path covered with a dusting of early-winter snow. “Frankly,” she announced, “I didn’t think any Nuyen would visit us here. Your Family has a dim view of this work.”

“Not dim,” he corrected. “They have a very clear and calculated perspective.”

“I can agree with that,” she said.

They remained in the open, carefully assessing one another.

She told Xo, “There are some peculiar talents still attached to you.” Then with a cool smile, she admitted, “I don’t recognize most of them.”

“These talents haven’t been invented yet,” he confessed.

“They haven’t been needed,” she said, correcting him. “I’m sure some soul, in some remote part of the galaxy, has dreamed them up.”

Xo said nothing.

“Maybe I should try to remove them,” she remarked. “Before we continue…would you like me to do that…?”

He said, “You can try.”

“But?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I’d be interested to see if you could cut me loose from them. Frankly, I wouldn’t know how to manage it.”

“Exactly. That’s what I guessed.”

Then they stood motionless for another long moment, ghostly probes trying to decipher Xo’s possibilities.

“You hate Nuyens,” Xo mentioned.

“That’s not true,” she countered. “I respect your Family. I understand them. Better than most Chamberlains, I possess a good appreciation of you and your history.” Then with a calm laugh, she said, “Hatred is just a small component of my feelings. A spice to the more reasonable emotions.”

“But your father despised us.”

“Again, that’s an inadequate word.” She seemed to attempt a smile, then thought better of it. “What he despised were the tricks employed to make you into a Family. To ensure that you would fool the test-givers.”

“Nobody was bribed,” Xo countered.

“I know that, yes. And all those nagging rumors about blackmail and incompetent AI judges are just rumors. Just noise. The evidence is so paltry, particularly after so many eons and so many opportunities to destroy any graceless evidence—”

“My First didn’t cheat,” Xo said, using a bristly little voice.

“Again. I agree.”

He pretended to care deeply, putting on a tidy rage while telling her, “The test had rules, and the rules were adhered to. Tell me where the testers, or anyone, was fooled by what happened.”

“As I said, I agree with you.” She began to pull back now, reassured by Xo’s responses. “The despot ruling a colony world learns about the coming test. And of course he wants to wear those godly powers. No expense is too much. So he clones himself. He impregnates millions of women with his seed, in most cases against their will. It was a horrible crime, but who was the guilty party? Not his offspring, surely. When the testers from the Council arrived, they decided it was safe to ask the same-faced boys and girls their questions. They believed that none of them would pass, having inherited their father’s viciousness and vulgarities…

“But one young girl did match every expectation, or exceeded them.

“One girl, different because of mutations and because of her upbringing…a poor girl raised by moral, decent colonists…she passed every test, and what choice did the Council have? One Nuyen had played the rules to perfection, allowing his clone-daughter to win, and the Council couldn’t simply ignore a candidate for that reason. It would have bankrupted the entire process if they had…”

“You don’t hate me?” Xo asked, his voice soft and sorry.

“I only mistrust you.” She smiled with a flickering warmth. “I know your Family and your basic nature, and from this point on, I have to keep a very firm hold on you. Do you understand?” Then she shook her head, adding, “But you came through our wormhole, which means there might actually be a Nuyen who has something important to tell me.”

“I do,” he told her, using a multitude of coaxing voices.

But Adelaide surrendered to a different logic.

“And who am I to turn you away?” she asked. “Just because you don’t have the face that I expected to see?”

Nine

“I understand…

“In the end, what happens happens fast…!”

—Ord, in conversation

ASUDDEN PRESENCEemerged to Ord’s left, accompanied by a harsh, exhausted gasp.

He glanced sideways. Ravleen was a silhouette, slender when set against a blazing white light. Then the light clotted and collapsed, becoming Marvel. Her father set both hands on Ravleen’s shoulders, apparently holding her in place, quietly growling, “Remember now. Behave yourself.”

Her face was lean and hard, the body emaciated. Saying nothing, she gave Ord a wide-eyed stare, trembling as if cold.

The other immortals now dressed themselves in polite bodies and dated clothes. Thousands floated in space, creating a gently bowed wall before the nautilus. Ord searched for the Chamberlain faces. Excluding Ian, there’d be eleven of them. But it took several desperate moments to find the right face. She was high up and near the back—a late arrival yanked away from some critical task. That had to be Alice. He recognized her eyes. Bright and strong and exceptionally smug, those eyes couldn’t belong to anyone besides Alice. Yet it was just one face among many, one soul almost invisible, swallowed in that ocean of talent and arrogance, and bounded rationality, and boundless dreams.

Adelaide touched him on the shoulder, lightly. “Tell us,” she said. “Every way you wish, tell what you came to tell.”

Then she called him Ord.

Suddenly, he wasn’t afraid, or sad, or haunted by doubt. This was where he belonged, and he took a bold, micron-long step forward, and with a variety of mouths, he told the Great Ones about the murder of the Core, the ruin of the Peace, the mangling of their lives and good names, and finally, the collapse of their honored Families. If they continued with their perilous work, that was what would happen. He promised them. Then he sighed and shook his head, telling his own story while showing them everything his eyes had seen of death and despair, hatred and revenge. Disaster lay upon disaster, and the miseries still hadn’t yet run their course when he abandoned the future, escaping to here. To now.

“You have to end this work,” he told them.

Again, and again, in endless new ways, he hammered them with that extraordinarily simple message. He showed casualty figures. He danced with tales of economic collapse and social ruin. He flooded the room with visions of war and wastelands. Then, with a perfect scorn, he looked at each face in turn, promising, “Adelaide will die. Marvel with die. And you will die. And you. And you.” Every famous name deserved to be shouted. “Death, death, death!” he promised. “That’s what is coming for each of you now.”

Carefully, relentlessly, Ord worked his way through the audience, climbing up and around to the face that mattered most.

Finally, with a sudden quietness, he said, “And you.”

He said, “Alice.”

He told her, “For you, it’s everything but death.”

She was staring at him—she had never been anything but watchful—her blue eyes bright and unblinking. Was she impressed? But she had to be enthralled. Any sentient mind would have to be impressed, even if it was just a little boy telling the epic.

At least one soul had to believe, What a brave, noble young brother…

In a fashion, these dense moments felt easy. Anticlimactic, if anything. Ord reminded himself that he was speaking rationally to reasoning beings, and emotionally to human souls, and how could they resist him? Yet when he paused, there was only a glacial silence punctuated with just enough nodding faces to warm him. He smiled in turn, and because there was nothing else for him to do now, he let himself enjoy the luxury of an unfettered optimism.

Adelaide spoke again.

“You tell it now,” she said to another visitor. Her heavy round and excessively calm face said, “Mr. Nuyen.”

Xo looked like a youngish man. Like any Nuyen, his face held a simplicity meant to fool observers. But in his voice, there were currents. There were great irresistible pushes of emotion wrapped around armored logic. Xo told the same story, but from his peculiar vantage point. And he admitted what everyone saw for themselves: He had been radically modified, given weapons of mind and spirit in order to subdue the baby Chamberlain.

“But my heart changed,” he confessed. “I got sick of the cheating and death, and I joined your camp. Your fold.”

“Good,” a thousand voices declared.

Then Adelaide waved an arm, saying, “Thank you,” to put an end to the speech.

Xo dipped his head, nothing more worth saying.

“And now, you…Madam Sanchex?”

Marvel shook his daughter, as if she needed to be awakened. Then with a low thunder, he told her, “Honest, and quick. Spare nothing!”

A withered, devastated Ravleen stared at the Great Ones. For what felt like an age—barely a microsecond, at most—she appeared helplessly lost, nothing left of the great warrior but a terrified splinter, a dried piece of husk. But then a tight little laugh began to slide out of her half-closed mouth. A look of bitterness and cold amusement brightened the face, and the swayed back straightened to where she was nearly as tall as her father. She spread her shoulders while the laugh gained a muscular strength that sounded very much like Ravleen. But it wasn’t exactly the same. “You’ve never seen a worse monster,” she promised her audience. “In your tiny lives, you’ve never dreamed of anything half as awful as me.”

It could have been Ravleen’s voice. But missing from that simple declaration was the cocky pride, the self-congratulatory joy.

“I murdered the Earth,” she confessed. “And I’ve murdered other worlds and millions of souls. Why, I don’t know. I remember hating this Chamberlain boy. Like you’ve never hated anything, I loathed him. More than you’ve ever loved, I adored the simple idea of torturing Ord until he was insane.” She stared at him, suddenly and defiantly. The black eyes were bottomless, and the face was beautiful again. But the voice was lashed tight to a wild grief, and the eyes were weeping now. She sputtered, “I’m the worst fucking nightmare you can imagine.” With her fists, she smacked the flat of her belly. “But I’m nothing compared to you,” she cried out, looking at the Great Ones, practically glaring at them. “One wrong move, and you stupid arrogant shits-of-god are going to be worse monsters than anything I ever was…!”

Marvel shook his daughter. But he didn’t say a public word, and the simple physical punishment was more like a reflex, a mandatory deed.

Again, there was a silence.

Then Ian placed himself in front of Ord, and with an irritated tone, he remarked, “You didn’t mention one critical detail, son.”

Ord knew what he wanted.

But quietly, affecting confusion, he asked, “What detail?”

“Since you’ve dropped out of the future,” said Ian. Then he added, “Apparently,” with a darkness wrapped around the word. And with a weary shake of the head, he said, “You should know the technical particularities. If only to prove that you’re genuine, you should have learned them.”

Ord looked straight ahead.

“Tell us,” Ian told him. Then he put on a smile, asking, “What exactly did we do here, and what went wrong, and to the best of your knowledge, why did it go wrong?”

The great nautilus loomed overhead.

“Or,” Ian continued, “would you rather not share those gruesome details with your elders?”

In his most secret mind, Ord thought,No, don’t. Don’t do this!

But there was no choice. In his public mind and with every voice, he described the dense and exceedingly obscure details that Alice had given him. Even now, he barely understood the bones of this science. There were monumental equations, more strange than compelling. Capturing the baby universe was just the smallest part of the magic. Crossing over into the Baby brought the gravest risks. Opening an umbilical wide enough for a soul to pass through, but allowing nothing of the new universe to gush into this realm…that’s what these entities had attempted, and that’s where the calamities lay in wait…

Ord recited everything, including data accurate to a fraction of a femtosecond and to the brink of Planck space, and at every critical junction, he gave the names and failings of those gods most directly in charge. And when he finished, the blame focused and delivered, he again felt a wave of optimism, confident for every good reason. At long last, his quest had come to its just and inevitable end.

Hope died a swift death.

The briefest silence ended with a sudden, “Thank you,” from Ian. From Adelaide. From perhaps another thousand voices scattered about the great chamber. Then it was Ian who showed him a wide grin, clapping his hands onto the boy’s shoulders and shaking him with a friendly violence, telling Ord, “Well, now. Now we know.”

To everyone, he exclaimed:

“From this point on, we’ll be sure to dance around those little difficulties!”

Ten

“When I meet you for the first time, you’ll seem so large and impressive…my fantastically powerfully, unimaginably ancient sister…

“Yet when I saw you just now…when I found your face, finally…you couldn’t have looked more tiny, standing in that crowded place, shoulder to shoulder with all those elderly gods…”

—Ord, in conversation

XO SPOKE.

With a fierce outrage, he asked, “You still want to finish it? The Baby? Knowing the whole ugly mess?”

Happily, with a calculated and buoyant indifference, Adelaide explained, “Not only will we finish our work, but we will finish it now. Now that we’ve been shown what cannot succeed, we’ll push past to the logical ends—”

“No!” Ord cried out.

Ian set a hand on his shoulder.

“You can’t believe this…it’s insane to even hope it—!”

“Quiet,” Ian cautioned. “Be quiet, son.”

With a booming voice, Adelaide asked, “Why did we build the wormhole?” Then she answered her own question. “The wormhole gives us fair warning. It’s a portal to the future that allows escape from the inescapable trap. Which in turn lets us do what’s best, in the finest way, leaving the galaxy wealthier and happier because of us. Us.”

“No,” whispered Ravleen.

“Imagine,” Adelaide continued. “In another little while, we’ll be able to create new universes by the thousands. And eventually, by the billions. Souls born in every portion of the galaxy will live long happy lives, accruing wisdom and maturity and a certain small wealth, and then they’ll make pilgrimages to this place.” Vivid images accompanied the hopeful words, building a tidy portrait of that very distant future. “Each pilgrim will walk through an umbilical, striding into a universe meant only for him. Each of our children, our neighbors and friends, will inherit their own infinite realm where they rule as they choose, as the forces of Nature, as the irresistible Will of God.”

Quietly, angrily, Ravleen sobbed again, and screamed, “No!”

Ord glanced at her. For an instant, he believed that she had managed to retain some hidden weapon. That was her habit, after all. Always hold some little terror in reserve; that was the way of every Sanchex. In a moment or two, Ravleen would shake off her father’s grip and, with a thought, or the flick of some secret limb, obliterate the experiment, this laboratory, and every last one of these idiot-souls.

But Ravleen just dropped her head, and shivered.

What others were thinking, Ord couldn’t guess. Contrived faces showed precisely what their owners wished to show, and for the moment, they wore a seamless, invulnerable resolve. Even Alice, standing among her peers and superiors, wore an exterior of perfect contentment—immune to any moral judgment delivered by mere children.

“And now,” Ian declared, “let’s finish our good work.”

Hundreds of voices said, “Yes. Finish!”

But what Ord heard best were the little knots and twists of silence. A half-born doubt was simmering, perhaps.

Ian placed both hands on Ord’s shoulders. “Would you like to remain with us, son? We’d certainly allow you to watch.”

Ord whispered, “Alice.”

With a caring, benevolent voice, the ancient man remarked, “We’ve asked and asked. But it seems your sister wants nothing to do with you.”

Louder, Ord called out, “Alice!”

Xo straightened his back, telling Adelaide, “I’ll stay here.”

“But only here,” she warned. “No closer.”

“I want to watch,” Ravleen remarked. She gave Marvel a blistering stare, adding, “I want a good laugh when you fuck it all up again!”

One last time, Ord shouted, “Alice!”

He was staring up at the nautilus shell—that intricate contrivance of genius and dream. “I have a private, personal message for Alice! From Thomas Chamberlain. From Brother Perfect.”

Murmurs passed along a thousand channels. Old gossip was remembered, and enjoyed. Rumors of incest were a pleasant diversion, shattering a tension that Ord had only just begun to feel.

Ian heard the gossipy whispers.

“Enough!” he growled. “She says she doesn’t wish—!”

“Wait,” said a new voice. Then a third hand dropped on the boy’s shoulder. It was smaller than Ian’s, and warmer, and even relaxed, the grip was fabulously strong.

Ord closed his eyes.

“What’s this message?” Alice inquired, using a private channel.

“Not here,” he replied. Using his old-style mouth.

Ian gave a low snort.

But Alice seemed to laugh, savoring that whiff of parental disapproval. “Where would you like to be, little man?”

On a private channel, he suggested a place.

“Why there?” Alice blurted. But then she dragged him across a phenomenal distance, and she made them enormous again, and together, sister and brother stepped inside an obscure storeroom tucked into the basement of the resurrected mansion.

Eleven

“My favorite sister—before I met you, and maybe now, too—was one of the other children living in the mansion. Her name was Maroon. Centuries older than me, she wore a young body and a girlish face. I don’t think she wanted to grow up. Like me, she loved the mansion and forests and the churning rivers, and, whenever possible, Maroon avoided the not so gentle tugs of convention and expectation. Really, she loved being a little girl.

“Maroon told me an odd story about our father. A story you know, I’m sure. But then again, maybe you told it differently in your time.

“ ‘What was our father before he was our father?’ she asked me. ‘Before the Families, I mean. Before the Council agents tested him and found him to be one of the most qualified souls that they’d ever encountered.’

“ ‘He was a clerk,’ I boasted. Because Ian was our father, and great beyond all measure, I imagined that a clerk had an incredibly difficult and remarkable job. ‘He belonged to one of the old governments,’ I explained. ‘He was very much honored for his long, selfless service.’

“ ‘Do you know what selfless means?’ she asked. Then she instantly forgot her question, telling me with a secretive little voice, ‘That’s all true, Ord. But it doesn’t tell half the story.’

“ ‘What story?’ I asked.

“ ‘The Council agents went everywhere to find the Thousand Families. To every colony world and green comet, and even to Minnesota.’

“ ‘What’s Minnesota?’ I asked.

“ ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Maroon told me. ‘What’s important was a woman living alone in an isolated district. The wars had scorched the forests and boiled away the lakes, but a few people still lived there. She was the oldest. She was barely two hundred, but in those times, that was practically ancient. The testers did their magic with her, and then one of them spoke when he shouldn’t have. He admitted that her scores were very good, if not good enough. She had a decent, caring soul and a natural empathy—’

“ ‘I know what “empathy” means,’ I interrupted.

“ ‘Which is the easy part of it,’ Maroon admitted. Then she went on with her story. The old woman had nodded and grinned. Being a good person, she could accept that she wasn’t going to be tested any further. She slowly climbed to her feet, and the testers assumed that she would now show them to the door. But no, she shuffled to a lift that led underground, down into a deep bunker. Bunkers were common during the wars, and in most cases, they were useless. But hers had survived half a hundred bombardments. The testers accompanied her into the crust. She asked if this talent of hers was a little bit genetic, and they admitted that many ethical factors depended on a person’s DNA. She said she had a relative. No, she didn’t know him personally, but everyone and her parents had said that Ian was always decent and sweet, and smart. He was the sort of man to cry at sunsets, although he could also be very tough-minded when it suited him.

“Of course, the testers referred to the census records, and when they couldn’t find any Ian Chamberlains, each decided that the old woman was confused, or worse. But by then, they were inside the bunker and saw the freezer standing in one corner, more ancient than the old woman but still operating in a noisy, durable fashion. She shuffled up to the thick white door, and putting an insulated glove on a withered hand, she asked if they wanted to look at her great-great-great-grandfather.

“Sometimes people from the deep past—those who lived and died before the worst of the wars—did remarkably well with the Council’s tests. They weren’t hardened by misery and death. They weren’t sickened by the idea of machines being grafted into their bodies. Innocent, these occasional dead souls had often fallen just short of being taken as one of the Thousand Families.

“ ‘Do you want to see Ian?’ the old woman inquired.

“Of course they did. ‘Please—!’

“She opened the massive door, brittle hinges creaking. The freezer’s interior was filled with severed heads, most of which had a passing resemblance to the old woman. With an easy indifference to death, she grabbed one of the frozen heads and, according to what Maroon told me, informed the testers, ‘He was a clerk, from what I can remember.’

“ ‘What kind of clerk?’ one fellow inquired.

“ ‘He sold these little things called stamps,’ she offered. ‘I don’t know why, but they were pretty pieces of paper, and they helped carry all sorts of things into all sorts of places…’ ”

—Ord, in conversation

“IUSED TOwander into this closet,” Alice admitted. “Now and again. When I was a girl, and thought I wasn’t supposed to be here.”

In a sense, it was just the two of them. But Ord could feel talents pressing down on them, shifting positions like arms hunting for comfort, titanic masses flowing around one another and through the stale, darkened air. A curved plaster wall lay on his left. A tighter curve lay to his right, wrapped around the central staircase. Every wall was obscured behind cabinets and portraits and shelves and the innumerable heirlooms that made the room feel smaller than it was. Everything about the place was exactly as Ord remembered it, except that each item appeared shiny and new, as perfect as the day it was set into this forgotten place.

Ord asked, “Did you rebuild the old mansion?”

“Ian did,” Alice mentioned. “With Adelaide’s considerable help.”

He stepped out of her grip and turned, taking a first close look at his sister. Alice was wearing a youngish face and a stocky body, her red hair shaggy and a little unkempt, her clothes comfortable to the point of being baggy—an ensemble of flesh and fabric that would suit any artist working on her masterpiece.

“More than anyone,” he began.

“More than anyone…what…?”

“This project is yours,” he remarked. “Every success felt your hand, and what follows is yours.”

“Good,” she replied.

Her face appeared unimpressed, even bored.

“Yet,” he added, staring at the bright blue eyes, “you don’t have a monopoly on being special. A tweak here, an inspiration there. Somebody else could have accomplished all of this. In another day or another million years. What does it matter?”

“To me, it matters.”

Her bored face lifted, staring at a certain portrait. On a sunny day, Ian had posed outside the Chamberlain home, wearing a suit of fine fabrics and what could only be called a forced smile. That long-ago Ian looked weary, and sad, and Ord could almost hear the painter begging him to smile. “The warm smile of a hero,” the painter might have said. “Please, sir. Will you?”

For the world, Ian had tried to look like a man worth trusting. With your life, and your children’s lives, and the unborn souls of trillions. And he had been a good, caring person—exactly the kind of soul that should have inherited godly powers. Without question, he helped end the wars that plagued humanity from its inception. He hammered out the Great Peace. And then, on an empty afternoon, the hero had stood in the sunshine, wearing the suit and an honest face, its sad expression centered on a weary, anemic smile.

“Is it our father?” Ord asked.

Alice understood his question, his intent. She shrugged as if the question couldn’t be more trivial, observing, “You really insist on being surprised. Why? Didn’t I warn you he was here?”

“You might have implied it,” he admitted. “But I didn’t notice, and I didn’t want to believe it.”

She acted deaf, and indifferent, and relentlessly bored. With the pale tips of two fingers, she touched their father’s portrait. A thick thread of instantly hardened paint emerged from behind Ian’s simple gray tie. The old-style optical cable dangled in the sunshine, its roots buried next to his heart, and its sudden appearance, vulgar and honest, served neatly to spoil the illusion of unalloyed humanity.

“That’s exactly what you did before,” Ord mentioned. “I thought you were being exceptionally rude, vandalizing the memory of our great father.”

His comment won a half laugh.

Alice turned to face her brother, admitting, “You’re a genuine puzzle. You and your little friends.”

“But I know you’ve worried about some horrible futures,” he offered. “The galaxy in ruins, and nobody left to sound the warning but some children.”

“I’ve envisioned every contingency,” she purred. “At least once. At least long enough to discount the impossible and put the unlikely in their cages.”

Ord was silent.

“And you brought along that Nuyen,” she added, her tone disapproving. Disgusted. “For every reason, his Family wants nothing to do with our work. They think it’s dangerous. And they hope it is astonishingly successful, since they’ll be first in line to inherit their own universes. But if we stumble here…well, they’ll be ready for that brutal future, too…”

“Xo,” he said. “His name is—”

“A born liar with some very peculiar talents. I wish I had time. I wish I could autopsy these odd little skills of his.”

“Do you think we’re lying?” Ord asked.

Then he answered his own question, saying, “No.” He stared at her, and said, “You believe. You have no other choice.”

“Nothing but success, this time.” She said the words by a hundred means, and then with her old-style mouth told him, “Thank you. For your sacrifices, Ord. And your selfless help. Thank you for all of that.”

“And if the umbilical fails this time?”

She offered the obvious. Quietly, she said, “The wormhole still exists. Its future end has just roared past Sagittario, accelerated to the brink of light-speed, and if the future is ugly enough, then someone else will return here. Some new incarnation of yourself, perhaps. He’ll burst into our time, and we’ll make every new correction, all the new refinements, and when they don’t work exactly as planned, you’ll return again, and again…”

“Forever,” he muttered.

“Just once,” she corrected. “But you’ll always return.”

Her voice was confident. Defiant, almost. Yet Alice allowed him to glimpse something else…a little fear lurking in the blue of her eyes.

“I could have failed,” Ord reported.

No reaction.

“Next time, the Nuyens might catch me.”

But Alice had already considered every possibility. Even the obscure and unlikely had been recognized, and she would keep playing with those elaborate models until the fun was wrung out of them.

“Maybe you’re the last messenger,” she offered. “Maybe we’ve stumbled across the proper way to give birth to a new Creation! The first of millions! Trillions! Until every citizen of the Milky Way can inherit her own infinite realm…!”

Ord began to cry.

“You brought me here,” Alice reminded him. “Why?”

Shuffling up to one of the tall cabinets, he opened a heavy crystal door and reached past a glittering globe of the old Earth. When his hand emerged, he was clutching a mug carved from pink granite. Quietly, he said, “Thomas gave this to me.”

“A talent, is it?”

When he placed the mug in Alice’s hands, it turned into a small human head. There was a Chamberlain face and shaggy red hair, and the face laughed until she closed her fingers around it, and suddenly she was laughing in the same boisterous way. Then she fell silent. Looking at Ord with a mixture of disdain and puzzlement, she admitted, “I already have this little talent. It makes you see what’s good and funny, even in the middle of a catastrophe.”

She asked, “Is this it? Is this Thomas’s important, wondrous message?”

Again, the invisible masses slipped around them and passed through them, followed by a fat pulse of energy flowing to where it was needed.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he assured her.

“You’d like to believe that,” said Alice.

Then, after a pause, she prompted him, “So tell me. What runs through my mind now?”

“You’re counting the worlds that you’ve terraformed. The nearest worlds, and others scattered through the Core. You’re weighing the colonists living on them. You’re playing with the numbers. How many people can die before you grow uneasy? How many worlds vanish before you feel sick? And when does the ruin become so horrible that even someone as strong as you…as proud and perfect as you…has no choice but to try and stop what’s gone wrong…?”

Alice opened her mouth, and closed it.

“You came back to the Earth,” he said. “Alone. No other Chamberlain, or Sanchex…or anyone else…willingly shouldered the blame. Not like you did, Alice. So I have to ask: Why aren’t you doing everything to stop this mess—?”

“Maybe I am,” she interrupted.

With a baleful look, she said, “During these last moments, I’ve pleaded with the others. I’ve admitted that I don’t agree with Ian, or Adelaide. The risks are too great. We need to dismantle the Womb now. And afterward, destroy all of the machinery that feeds it.” With a grimace, she said, “I’ve proposed that we finish the work elsewhere. Maybe inside an old globular cluster safely removed from the galactic plane. It would delay our success by a few million years, and the logistics for the pilgrims would always be cumbersome—”

“Or you could stop the work completely,” he muttered.

Alice closed her mouth. Then, in a near whisper, she admitted, “I’m not the only doubter.”

Another invisible mass drifted around them, then hovered.

“But these are my peers,” she warned. “My equals and friends and lovers for the last ten million years. If I can’t get enough of them stirred up, then what genuine choice is left me?”

With his most private voice, Ord offered a last detail. “I didn’t mention this? And maybe you don’t care. But if events play out in the same way…if the umbilical turns unstable…then one ofthem is still going to slide into the baby universe, abandoning ours when we need him most…”

“Who?” asked the blue eyes.

“Ian,” he replied.

“You’re certain?”

Ord told what he knew and nothing more.

Again, Alice looked up at the portrait. Her face passed through every emotion, her mouth tightening and relaxing again while the bright blue eyes filled with tears, then dried themselves, finding a new resolve. She was in misery. She was perfectly focused. Then she reached past her feelings and found a serene pleasure that won a narrow, wise smile—a smile that could mean anything to anyone who was watching. Then Alice lifted her free hand and, with a touch, wiped away the damage that she had done to their father’s portrait.

Ord couldn’t stop weeping.

Without looking at his face, she handed back the granite mug. “Here. I don’t need this.”

A surge of energy, unexpected and scalding, ran up along his arm.

“Do you know me at all?” she muttered, looking everywhere but at Ord’s teary face. “Apparently not, little brother!”

Twelve

“I might as well be you…

“I’ll wear your talents across thousands of light-years, swimming your oceans of memory every moment…making myself intimate with your desires and curiosities and very occasional fears, and that boundless fierce hot pride of yours…

“Honestly, Alice…there will be long reaches of space where my closest, finest companion will be your pride…!”

—Ord, in conversation

AGAIN,ORD STOODbefore the Womb.

He found himself with Xo, with Ravleen, lost among a legion of entities endlessly jostling—massive and far-flung entities working to place as much of themselves as close to the event as possible. It was exactly like being jammed inside a closet with an army of eager, graceless children. It was claustrophobic and embarrassing, and Ord wanted to be excused from this shameless mayhem. He hungered for solitude, for the chance to watch as much as he could bear from some great distance where he might beg Chance or some far-flung Creator finally to take pity on his siblings.

But when Ord gazed at the nautilus, he discovered new eyes. In this compressed, rapid environment, he saw what the Great Ones could see. The careful, exhaustive preparations had been finished. The coiling shell was nothing now but an inert and convenient vessel helping to protect the delicate business within. And, miraculously, he could see that business. Nestled at the center of the nautilus was a simple, spherical vessel built from some ultimate species of strange matter. There lay a machine forged on the brink of a black hole. Infinitely strong, and nearly infinitely small, but dense, the machine was incapable of leaking light or any other flavor of information. Yet his new eyes peered inside. He gazed at Planck space—that frothy, furious realm where existence and nonexistence shared a perpetual dance. Here was a fantastic wilderness of potential and relentless chaos, and Ord could do nothing but stare, transfixed by the simple, astonishing vision.

At the sphere’s center: the Baby.

A single newborn universe lay waiting, indistinguishable from trillions of its siblings and, according to the dreamy geometries, more remote to Ord than the ends of his own universe. Yet he could see it plainly. The Baby was brilliant beyond measure, possessing no recognizable size, or mass, or anything that could be considered an existence. And swirling about its brilliance were fleets of tiny strange-matter machines, each devised and constructed to do some narrow and precise and instantaneous job, laying the careful groundwork for the umbilicial.

Someone whispered, “Beautiful.”

Xo.

As they watched, spellbound, a thousand baby universes blinked into existence and vanished instantly into the hyperverse. Every universe began with an inflationary burst and ended with an absolute chill or some grand collapse. And between birth and death, what? Not life, Ord knew. In these wild universes, life and sentience and all the blessings and curses that came with them were among the rarest birds. Ord’s universe was the grand exception: one creation out of a trillion trillion trillion utter failures. A universe where energy and space were in perfect balance. Where the physical laws not only allowed for life, they demanded it. And where the first slime had time and the means to evolve into other flavors of slime that would eventually accomplish every great thing, and every awful thing, too.

“Closer,” someone whispered.

Alice.

Ord obeyed, slipping between half a dozen souls. He was dressed in a boy’s body and a boy’s simple clothes. He put himself a micron closer, if that, and he realized that he could count the slow, steady passage of the nanoseconds. Here time was an extraordinarily slow business. Whatever was to happen would be history long before the next heartbeat, and the drama would unfold in a space that could hide inside a single proton.

Thinking that, he turned toward Alice, ready with a sly comment…some easy noise about how little time it takes to ruin a lot of people’s very nice day…

But Alice had vanished.

He recognized the only Nuyen face, and he saw the glowering face of Ravleen. But his sister had vanished, or she had never been close. And that’s when the obvious struck him, and he realized that the voice urging him to move forward didn’t belong to her.

“Closer,” he repeated, reaching for the others.

Xo glanced at Ord, then gazed up at the Baby again.

Ravleen was drifting behind an ancient fleck of light. But not a Sanchex. Marvel had vanished, too. And unencumbered by her father’s grip, Ravleen slid herself through the body of the near god, leaving it more embarrassed than injured.

“Careful,” the entity growled.

Ravleen gave a snorting laugh and took Ord by his offered hand, squeezing until what passed for bone splintered.

Ord winced, and grinned.

Healing the hand before anyone noticed, he looked back into the staring, compressed bodies. He found Ian. He saw Adelaide beside him—the dutiful, relentless daughter. Both were using every eye to stare at the Womb. Three tiny children could not matter less. Keep still, and quiet, and they might be forgotten here.

Herewas among the closest of the close, the nautilus hanging over them now—a silvery leviathan larger than some mansions and smaller than an ameba.

“What now?” someone asked.

Xo.

“I don’t know,” Ord thought. But he felt as if he were lying, so he peered inside himself, every explanation waiting there.

“Something’s different,” Xo whispered. “About you.”

Then, “What did Alice give you?”

Thomas’s stone mug. But something else had been tucked inside the mug. He discovered a package of small potent talents, each of them instantly familiar. He had carried them before, but never used them. He was holding the tools necessary to manipulate things too small to be real. Tools perfectly ordinary here. Tools that few would notice, that nobody would question. And with them came the perfect grace necessary to wield them in very novel ways.

Ord started to reply, but Xo was speaking again, almost amused when he said, “Ravleen? You smell different, too.”

Ord asked, “What did your father give you—?”

“Everything,” Ravleen said, with a smug whisper and a matching grin. Then she opened her hands, staring at them while saying, “Everything,” once again. “Plus some very sweet and very potent weapons.”

FOR THE NEXTfew nanoseconds, they remained unnoticed, and free, and with various secret voices, Ord shared Alice’s plan.

But was there time enough?

The Baby was growing, expanding and brightening as vast sums of energy were extracted from the rawest nothing. And the umbilical was growing beside and within it, striving to link the Baby with this frigid, nearly empty universe…the machinery as delicate as it was sturdy, and blindly persistent in its duties, every critical event happening too quickly even for the best eyes to follow…

“Now,” said Ord.

Said Alice.

And like that, a hundred scattered entities were in motion. The children were nearest, and smallest, accelerating to the brink of light-speed and slamming into one of the tentacular conduits, exactly where the nautilus’s shell was thinnest. Ord unleashed an elaborate pick that produced a flaw that allowed a quantum fluke to appear. It was a gap that couldn’t remain stable for a fraction of a nanosecond. But it was large enough and persistent enough for the others to follow. And as each slipped inside, Ord unleashed another one of Alice’s talents, leaving them even more compressed. A hundred white-hot flecks suddenly tiny, almost invisible, were darting around the interior of the shell’s outermost chamber, their shared light barely able to fill the suddenly enormous volume.

Ord’s pick dissolved, leaving the wall with no memory of a hole.

Marvel shouted, “With me! Sanchexes!”

Ravleen joined her father and siblings, following the coil as it turned and turned, leading toward the center. Toward the Baby.

Alice was beside Ord. There were no other Chamberlains. Just them. She had a few talents, and she dressed herself in a human form, a half smile showing on a thinner, grimmer face. The hair was short and dense. The clothes were simple trousers and a blouse woven from gold-white light. She delivered a serious stare from those infinite eyes. Then with a human voice, she told him, “I’m not going to congratulate you.”

She said, “Let’s see if we can do any good, first.”

For a moment, the nautilus shivered, as if some great hand had carefully taken hold of it.

Then, nothing.

An odd thought occurred to Ord.

“I’ve been here before,” he confided to his sister.

She looked surprised, then intrigued. “What do you mean?”

“When you came home,” he said. “When you visited the Earth to find me, and to confess.” Why even bother mentioning this? “I was beginning a war game. The Golds were defending a snow fort from the Blues.”

“My Golds—?”

“You helped me win that war.”

Alice almost laughed.

“Did I?”

What a ridiculous, stupid thing to mention. Ord would have apologized for wasting the time, but an apology would waste even more.

Yet Alice found some reason to say, “Tell me about it.”

“About what?”

Her face softened, and her red hair brightened. She touched him. Her flesh was hotter than the interior of a sun, but the hand felt cool, like snow against Ord’s forearm, and her strong certain voice forced him to relax.

“Humor me,” she told him.

“The history of that little war,” she said. “Tell it to me, brother.”

Thirteen

“Maroon told how our father was discovered inside that forgotten freezer, and how the Council’s testers had to rebirth him before they could judge his soul’s promise. Growing a new body and transferring the surviving mind into that body…well, it wasn’t routine work in those days, and except for someone like you, it’s never been easy. Our sister explained that to me, impressing me with the astonishing luck that carried us from frozen trash to the most powerful Family in the galaxy.

“Eons later, the Nuyens told me their version of that noble story.

“It seems Ian’s mind had degraded over time, an atomic creep distorting the glassy ice of his neocortex. Repairs had to be made. Guesses had to be made. But the testers wanted success, and they knew what they needed…and that need almost surely influenced their work…

“The Chamberlain Family was based on a pernicious cheat, according to the Nuyens…a point that they made again and again, trying hard to insult me…”

—Ord, in conversation

THE NAUTILUS SHIVEREDagain.

Lightly.

Then the Great Ones wrenched open holes in the chamber wall, using the same kind of pick that Ord had wielded. It was a simple and blunt and artless attack. There wasn’t time for cleverness, or the need. The besieged rebels were scarce, and without Sanchexes standing on the front lines, they were missing their sharpest and quickest teeth.

Ord raced across his little parcel of wall, patching holes until there were too many to patch. Then he unsheathed a simple device designed to motivate hyperdense twists of matter. It was a weapon now, blunt and cruel. Effervescent bodies crawled out of the holes, and he jabbed them, cooking their senses and what passed for flesh. Dozens writhed, and retreated. For a slender instant, they were soulless monsters deserving every misery. Then one of the invaders managed to slip past, vast and cloudlike until it compressed itself into a quark-dense body like his. A face appeared. She was female, from a minor Family, her features twisted by a searing pain. An illusion? Or a calculated bid for sympathy?

Reaching for Ord, she begged, “Stop, please! Will you—?”

He eased his weapon into her exposed belly and flung her back through the tiny hole.

Twenty more like her emerged instantly, and chasing them were hundreds more.

From behind, Alice called out, “Retreat!”

Ord grabbed a thread of hypermatter, riding it deeper into the curling shell. The first chamber ended with a slick curved wall smaller than the last, and at its precise center, a doorway had been wrenched open. He dove through, and all but one or two defenders escaped with him. Then Alice cut the thread behind them and erased the door, the thread collapsing upon itself, turning unstable, then dissolving into hard radiations and a scorching heat.

Like the head of a beaten drum, the wall shook.

Then it grew still again.

The new chamber was smaller, with a smaller outer wall begging to be defended. The second assault was delayed while the attackers repaired themselves and made ready to pry open new holes and charge again. But when they emerged, it was the Chamberlains who led the way. There were ten brothers and sisters, plus Ian, shoving their way through the tiny holes. They wore suffering Chamberlain faces and angry voices, begging for reason. They demanded obedience. They promised Alice forgiveness for every crime. To Ord, they mentioned the pitfalls of youth and doubt.

“Son,” Ian moaned. “My son. Consider these stakes. That’s all I want. Stop and consider where you are leading us.”

Time was a luxury, and a wasteful temptation.

Ord slashed at them, and mangled them, and inside that next endless femtosecond, he was winning. Then others burst through too many holes, and again, Alice cried out, “Retreat.”

They dove into the next chamber, again.

Again, Ord held his post until the fight was lost.

And he retreated with a practiced precision. Most of his talents remained far behind, drifting outside the enormous nautilus. They were alone now. They were lonely. Nobody was trying to steal them away. That chore would have consumed entire seconds, and in this realm, that was the same as centuries. And at these distances, a trusted talent couldn’t help him, and he couldn’t even pretend to control any of them. They were severed limbs drifting in a faraway solar system, flailing and grasping out of simple habit.

Fight, and retreat.

Rest, and fight, and retreat again.

With grim precision, Ord tallied the lost chambers. They managed thirty retreats, then another twenty. Each attack came faster than the last, but every victory won less space for the time spent. But every retreat meant another ally or two left behind—slow souls too dispirited or exhausted to make the next escape. Every failure meant another partial turn along the shrinking shell. And then at long last: a moment when the attackers seemed to pause, and Ord could count the remaining bodies. Only a dozen of them commanded a chamber no bigger than a ghostly electron, and behind their backs lay very little else.

Xo managed a human face, glancing at Ord with an odd, almost mournful expression before the face collapsed into scorching white fire.

Marvel rejoined them.

With a roar, he announced, “I need help. I need new hands.”

Alice wore a colorless face and flat, colorless hair. “I need more fighters,” she countered.

“Take this daughter,” Marvel offered. “Her temperament’s wrong for the work.”

Alice regarded Ravleen for a moment.

“Xo,” she said. “Help the Sanchexes.”

But Xo hesitated. A sorrowful face appeared, and a matching voice said, “I don’t think—”

“Yes,” Alice cried.

“It would be better, maybe—”

Marvel grabbed him and yanked, dragging the Nuyen down through a fresh hole that vanished in another bite of time.

Ravleen showed the defenders a wide sneer.

“What do you darlings know about fighting?” she asked. Then, with a mixture of rage and serene joy, she reminded them, “I’ve killed more worlds than you’ve built, you sorry piss-filled apes!”

THE NEXT ATTACKdidn’t bother opening holes. This time, the entire wall was demolished, a flash of gamma radiation evaporating every barrier, a chaotic melee erupting and ending almost before any time could be measured.

Ord attempted another retreat.

Ravleen was beside the open doorway, wielding a strange-matter drill. With a clean and happy and much-practiced efficiency, she turned the weapon on anyone foolish enough to come close. For a little instant, it looked as if she might win the war herself. The chamber was suddenly choked with stunned near gods, and wailing voices, and Ord squirmed past them, and paused. He had to pause. Ravleen maimed everything moving, cursing with joy, and at least three blows from elsewhere descended on her together, pushing her into the tiny doorway, leaving it momentarily blocked.

Ord screamed and flung himself forward.

Ravleen gazed out at him with empty black eyes.

Behind her was Alice. She stared at Ord with a longing, with a massive sense of loss. Then she grabbed the Sanchex and yanked, and the door was no more. The wall had no memory of an opening. A thousand bodies grappled for Ord, and they stunned him, and he wailed, “No,” then began to cry again.

He stopped crying when Ian’s voice was close, warmly assuring him, “This is for the very best, son.”

Then an unwelcome arm was thrown across the gray sketch of a shoulder, and Ian hugged him hard, as if they were the absolute best of friends.

WITH A PRECISEfury, the Great Ones made ready to obliterate the next wall. They were going to press the advantage, bringing this war to its logical, inevitable conclusion.

“The umbilical is nearly finished,” Ian reported.

He was speaking to Ord.

“Marvel can’t stop it now,” he remarked, speaking to everyone stuffed into those cramped surroundings. “The Baby and our connection with the Baby…they’ve reached the point where all of us, working together, would find it impossible to stop their formation…”

Ord was silent, glancing at the white-hot faces.

Adelaide was close. She looked like a drab, distracted version of Alice. She looked old, and tired, and in ways that he could just feel, she was sickened by these awful last turns.

“But that’s not what Marvel’s doing,” Ord reported.

His voice was quiet, and respectful.

No one seemed to hear him, or care. But then Adelaide glanced in his direction, as if by chance, and with her own quiet voice, she asked, “What do you mean? What’s Marvel attempting to do in there?”

Ord opened his hands and said nothing.

Then he dropped his face, looking perfectly embarrassed.

“Answer me,” she pressed. “What’s Marvel doing now?”

Ord straightened, and hesitated. “The Sanchexes don’t have the proper talents,” he confessed. “Not to stop an umbilical, no.” Another pause. “But there’s someone else who’s carrying a considerable talent. A narrowly designed skill that can ruin the umbilical, easily and catastrophically…”

A panic began.

It was a deeply buried, extraordinarily private panic. What faces showed gave away nothing of their true emotions. But Ord felt the Great Ones discussing this odd possibility, guessing its source and every possible counter. Given time, they would have seen the obvious. But there was no time. The bulk of their intelligence was light-seconds removed from them, which might as well have been at the far reaches of the universe. What they had brought into this realm were those fragments of their intellect and experience that they could never throw away. They were simple souls, again. They were a little stupid and very scared, and into that extraordinarily human terrain, Ord reached.

With borrowed hands, he grappled with one soul.

“Think,” he said aloud, in a thunderous whisper.

“Of the most awful imaginable deceit…think…”

Fourteen

“Tricks trick because they are beautiful…because we love them so much…”

—Ord, in conversation

“THERE’S ONLY ONEpowerful Family missing here,” Ord began.

The Nuyens.

“But they’re extremely interested in your work. You know they are. If the Baby slips free—if the Core explodes again—they are willing and ready to ruin you. They’ll gut your wealth and eat your good names, and for the foreseeable eons, there won’t be a stronger Family. If this explodes in your face, they win. Everything in their grasp is theirs.” Ord paused, a sad and embarrassed look filling the boyish face. “But these are Nuyens. They don’t trust easily, and they certainly don’t have much faith in your incompetence. So what if they dreamed up a plan to ensure that the umbilical will fail, and fail catastrophically…?”

A perfect silence descended.

“Xo,” he whispered. “The Nuyen boy. His siblings enlarged him and twisted him with an assortment of new talents. Then he rebelled against them. Alone, he followed me to the Core, and in countless ways, with every chance, he has helped me. I believe he did everything willingly. No, I won’t doubt his sincerity, or his friendship. But what if his brothers and sisters had hidden one more talent inside him? What if they created a single tiny tool that would cripple the umbilical, if it ever found itself close enough—?”

“You know this?” Adelaide inquired, her tone impatient. Skeptical.

“We suspect it,” Ord replied. “Xo was injured in the chase to the wormhole, and when he repaired himself, he discovered the talent. By the purest chance. He’s studied it ever since, and he’s made his guesses, and I don’t know how many times he’s tried to pry it loose, intending to throw it away. But it’s too deeply buried. Whatever this tool is, it’s fused to his basic soul. It’s with him now. And when Marvel realized that he couldn’t stop the umbilical, he had Xo join him. They’re huddled around the Baby right now, and if they can’t control the talent—if it doesn’t neatly cut the umbilical—then it may well wrench it open too far—”

“Ridiculous,” Ian snorted. “They wouldn’t take that risk!”

But Adelaide saw a possibility. Her Chamberlain face suddenly seemed to be carved from pale white butter, its flesh soft and slick, and tired, and the blue of her eyes had drained away. What should have been bright red hair was now a dull, defeated gray. Adelaide was defeated. She knew it and spent the next little moment accepting her defeat. Then with a public voice, she asked, “What do you want from us?”

“Your surrender,” said Ord.

Then he added, “And your help. Now, this instant. Come help try to squeeze off every link with the Baby—”

“No,” Ian blurted.

“Maybe we should reconsider,” Adelaide conceded. “In light of what we know—”

“Reconsider nothing!” Ian shot over to Adelaide, a booming voice telling everyone, “In a thousand ways, we’ve nearly reached our goal. We have no right—none—to lose our way now!”

Adelaide stared through him.

Quietly, fighting to sound reasonable, she admitted, “This is nothing but wrong. If it’s true, and if Marvel and the boy do this—”

“I know Marvel,” Ian blared. “I’ve known him from the beginning. He’s smart and honorable, and he couldn’t be that reckless!”

“But this isn’t your decision,” she interrupted. Then she tried to gain the upper hand, dismissing Ian by saying, “You don’t know Marvel. And you’re not my father. Strictly speaking, you’re a conceit, an embellishment we added to some lost talents…because it seemed like an appropriate show of respect…”

Ian’s face betrayed nothing.

But the eyes brightened, and a sputtering voice emerged from deep inside him. “I am Ian Chamberlain. As much as you’re my loyal, loving daughter!”

A silence.

“Although it wasn’t real respect,” Adelaide muttered. And with a great sadness, she admitted, “Mostly, it was just easy. Making you Ian again.”

“I’ve always been Ian!” he cried out.

She stared at him, her eyes blue again. A cold, cobalt blue.

“You know what’s true,” he claimed. Then he hesitated, feeling the slightest tug of doubt. But the emotion arose from a place without significance. He dismissed his misgivings with a snort and hard laugh. “When I supposedly died? When I flung myself at those poor colonists? What I gave them was my least consequential part. I was saving what was vital, and rescuing those incompetent children cost me nothing. Nothing but a few scraps of dead skin from the end of my least important finger.”

A cold, bottomless silence fell over the scene.

Ian didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he cocked his head as if he heard a great crescendo of applause. Briefly, he attempted to smile. Then, with a sturdy and reasoned tone, he said, “We aren’t going to fall for your threats, Ord.”

To everyone else, he said, “We need to take our positions and make ready—”

A sound intruded. It came from nowhere before finding its source in Adelaide. The ancient and honorable and perfectly devoted daughter was screaming, leaking an incoherent rage, her face twisted in obvious pain…a living, fierce redness making the face shine…and she placed her hands against Ian’s chest, red against the deep gray of his make-believe blouse…and with a desperate anger that must have surprised her as much as anyone, she told him, “I won’t let you. There’s too much at risk—”

Ian made a little gesture.

He had a tool. It was the kind of sharp implement that a man who wants to carve off his humanness would create, and hold close. And for the second time in its existence, he used the tool.

With a calm, surgical skill, Ian sliced away everything that was human from Adelaide. He took away her face, her apparent skin and hair, and the eyes. The human voice vanished, and the ancient protoplasmic memories. Deep-buried instincts, and moralities learned as a girl, and even the name itself. Adelaide. Then he said the name to the incandescent ball that lay before him. “Adelaide,” he said, with a measured fondness. “This should teach you.” And in the next moment, he used a second tool, and she was no more.

Adelaide was dead.

“But she isn’t,” Ian remarked, showing a human smile as he stared at the other eyes and the hard-set mouths. “Dead, I mean. She endures quite well. Her talents stretch out for a billion kilometers. Everything important and useful about my daughter is alive still. Eager still. And she always will be.”

The silence was hot. Opinions lay perched on a high, narrow peak, no way to know who would tilt which direction and how many would fall together.

Oblivious to the revulsion, Ian turned to face the chamber wall.

With the strong, certain voice of a onetime general, he announced, “We need to make our next push. Get ready now. This is the perfect moment.”

There was no dissent, or even a flicker of genuine anger. But the Great Ones had to stare at the creature that was trying to lead them, their long, glorious lives arriving at this instant and this conundrum…and for entities accustomed to an infinite genius, they seemed to be remarkably confused…

“Obliterate the wall,” Ian called out.

Nothing happened.

“Do I need to do everything?” he asked.

The audience stirred.

Ord tasted shame, and the strangest little beginnings of fear.

Again, Ian said, “We need to make our final push—”

Then the chamber wall evaporated, and for the first moment, it must have seemed to Ian that he had won everything. A consensus had been reached. The attack was under way. But why was that wave of radiation pushing into his face? Had someone done the job badly, the wall imploding by mistake?

Too late, everyone understood.

The chamber wall had been obliterated from within; the defenders were now on the attack. Pouring out of a smaller chamber—from the very edge of the Baby’s tiny womb—were Alice and Marvel, and Ravleen, and the other rebels, pressing hard with weapons and relentless, rational voices.

“There’s no time!” they called out.

“One choice left!” they promised.

“Help us!”

Then Alice grappled with Ian, shaking him and cursing. Which made him growl back at her, threatening, “I’ll do to you what I did to your sister.”

“What?” She looked at Ord. “What did he do?”

Ord didn’t have to speak.

Alice yanked the tool from among her father’s talents, and in a frantic blur, she carved off what was human about him. And to that gray shred, she said, “Stay with me. Watch! I want you to see it. Feel it. Whatever happens, I want you to know…you sorry old shit…!”

Fifteen

“When I was a boy, and seamlessly predictable, I had a favorite door. Every time I stepped inside the Chamberlain mansion, I’d reach high and gently touch the words carved into a slab of granite.

“PRIDE AND SACRIFICE.

“It was a tradition of mine, and a habit, and usually the gesture was done without any more thought than you’d put into the blink of an eye. But sometimes I’d wonder about my brothers and sisters, about those great souls who’d walked here before me. Perhaps a few of them, like me, had reached up to feel the cool hard stone. I was touching those other hands, in a fashion. There was honor in the gesture. Honor, and a joy. I belonged to a vast and great and enduring thing. That’s what I might tell myself, and that’s what I would believe.

“It was a silly thought.

“Not because our Family’s honor is feeble. And not because our greatness will eventually be gutted and left for dead.

“No, what’s silly was the sense of belonging to something enduring. Chamberlains have existed for only a few million years, and that’s not a particularly long time. What I belonged to, and what I always will be part of, is far more enduring than any family name.

“But you know that, Alice.

“The ancient protoplasm in my hand.

“The eternal genetics buried within.

“As old as any stone, this life of ours is…and a good deal tougher than most everything else in this hard cold beautiful universe…”

—Ord, in conversation

THE BATTLE REMAINEDas vicious and desperate as any fistfight, but the blows were delivered as salvos of potent memes and elaborate plans wrapped inside confidence and bluster and attitudes less pretty. The chamber trembled with piercing shouts and screamed pleas for cooperation. Everyone spoke about the need to act reasonably and morally. Yet all combatants, in one fashion or another, seemed to do their best to ignore everything but their own considerable pain.

Time continued to move in tiny bites, and the Great Ones were busy bickering among themselves.

Xo fought his way close to Ord.

“Thanks,” Ord offered.

Xo had given him a talent and a lie. A potent weapon, and simple, the talent did nothing but a fill a soul with the need to be honest, then act on that irresistible honesty. And the lie had been horrible, and believable. Ord still watched his friend, wondering if there was a secret saboteur buried in his nature.

With huge, sorry eyes, Xo regarded the mayhem. And almost embarrassed, he admitted, “I’m trying. But I can’t make them cooperate…can’t fool them, or coax them…there are too many minds to play with here…”

Ord scanned the fiery minds.

“Too many,” his friend repeated.

“Try something small,” Ord suggested. His voice was calm and sure, and swift, telling Xo exactly what he wanted.

In that next instant, the same simple question occurred to everyone. Each found it inside him and her, asking, “Whose voice don’t I hear?”

Alice’s voice.

As a body, they felt her conspicuous absence. Each allocated senses to find the Chamberlain, and all failed in that next fraction of a nanosecond. Then in the wake of their first sickly panic, they realized Marvel was missing, too. Two critical voices, both silent. And together, in a rumbling whisper, everyone asked the obvious question:

“What is Alice doing?”

She wasn’t inside the next chamber.

But where the nautilus made another complete turn, wrapping itself inward to the final chamber on the very brink of the Baby, there was someone. Foul souls. Better senses than Ord’s spied them. Then it was a sprint across a distance too small to be measured, in the briefest fragment of an instant that wasted even more time. But Ord had already guessed where she was. He moved first, and fastest, plunging into the bizarre, ill-behaved terrain on the frothy edge of Planck space; yet instead of strangeness and serene mathematics, he found himself racing across a familiar if utterly contrived landscape.

He ran beneath a sky of seamless white clouds, running hard across a pasture covered with the most perfect snow. In the middle of the pasture stood a white structure. Not the Chamberlain mansion, no. It was simpler—a cylinder built from tidy, regular blocks of snow. It was like a fort that children would build, then happily fight over.

A tunnel-like gate led into the interior.

To the Baby.

Two figures waited in the open. Each was dressed in white and carved from snow. Like Ord was. He stopped just short and looked at the Sanchex faces, and he glanced at his own cold little hands, and something that could have been Ravleen’s voice asked, “Do you know this place?”

She said, “It’s my idea. Making it appear this way.”

He started to say, “Of course I know it.”

Then the Great Ones marched onto the pasture, shoving against each other until no room was left in this pretend world, and nowhere else to move. And in a shared voice, they shouted toward the fort, calling out, “Alice.”

Alice crawled from the tunnel.

She emerged from the mostly completed umbilical, and stood up. And of all expressions, she decided on a snowy smile, remarking in a mild, but determined, voice, “There’s no more time, and this is what we’ll do…”

“I’LL TRY TObreak the umbilical. Now.” Alice said it, then added, “I count three weaknesses. Three opportunities still to come. That’s my analysis, and there’s no time to debate my math.”

Alice was as expert as anyone, or more so.

“And there’s no time to calculate odds.” She mashed the snow beneath her right foot. “We need to be ready. If it looks as if the Baby’s loose, we’ll have to absorb the blast for as long as possible.” Again, she kicked at the ground. “We need to set up a barricade here. A black hole. If I fail, we can absorb the early leakage. With a black hole serving as our cork—”

“Built how?” a thousand voices asked.

Sagittario was too distant to help.

“We make our own hole!” Marvel roared.

“With what?” the others wondered.

And then they saw what was obvious, and painful. Each winced in some deeply felt, entirely fresh way. And in that next little instant, several hundred of the Great Ones began retrieving those little pieces of themselves, yanking free of the deepest portions of the Womb. They began hauling the pieces out and merging them with the rest of their talents, preparing for that final instant when they would turn around completely, faces pointed at the innocent stars, and with every last wisp of muscle at their disposal, they would run.

They would flee.

Cowards, and criminals. But by all definitions, alive.

The rest of their brothers and sisters continued packing talents into a tighter and tighter and tighter mass, mashing themselves together, all of that genius turned to raw mass, their boundless strength pushing until they were teetering on the brink of collapse—the relentless hand of gravity ready to drive them into an endless, dimensionless hole.

“I’m going back in,” Alice announced.

Great masses shifted behind Ord, while other masses carefully held themselves in place.

A new figure appeared beside Marvel. Ian, judging by his appearance, and the disgusted way that the old Sanchex held him tightly around the neck. The ancient, once-dead man sobbed, his human face twisted with misery and remorse. His final mouth was speaking, making no sound. “…no no no,” he kept saying. “…no no no.”

“Make your good-byes,” Alice said.

Ord thought she wanted everyone’s good wishes. But she was looking only at him, speaking only to his face, telling him, “Long ago, I loaned you some odd talents. You’ve got them here with you, and I don’t have time to tease them free.”

Alice began to kneel, saying, “I need your hands, Ord. So take this instant, and say your good-byes.”

Ord looked abruptly at Xo.

At Ravleen.

They weren’t children anymore, and neither was he. But swirling inside their galloping emotions were qualities that neither time nor any grand annihilation could change. Ravleen was still the feral girl, her soul blessed with a rage that couldn’t be dismantled or defeated. And Xo was still the boy perfectly able to cheat anyone, on any occasion. Which was why he was here now. Only a Nuyen had enough treachery to turn traitor against his entire Family.

Ord whispered, “Good-bye.”

The oddest thought suddenly struck him.

“Be careful,” Xo advised.

Then Ravleen said, “Fuck careful. Be brave!”

Alice had already vanished into the umbilical.

Ord knelt and crawled. The snow had no discernible temperature, and he couldn’t feel it with any hand. He crawled forward, then hesitated, looking back over his shoulder at the image of a weepy, guilt-ripped Ian. Then to Xo and to Ravleen, he said, “There’s this old expression. Have you heard it?”

A strange unease passed through him.

“ ‘The child is father to the man,’ ” he offered.

Xo gave a little nod, pretending to understand.

Ravleen just snorted, and with the meat of an illusionary foot, she kicked him in the ass, causing him to plunge toward the fragile, failing umbilical.

Sixteen

“My life…my entire existence…is built around meeting you, Alice…

“Four times in my little life, our paths have crossed, and each time remakes me, changing my nature and all that I believe…each brings the same insistent epiphany: I don’t know you. I can’t know you. And the hand I’m touching is being offered for the first time…”

—Ord, in conversation

ORD ANDALICEjourneyed to the edge of their universe.

There wasn’t room for illusions here. They weren’t inside any tunnel, and the whiteness surrounding them didn’t resemble snow, and what passed for their own bodies—compressed to the brink of nonexistence—had nothing left that resembled limbs or hearts or any sort of mouth. But Ord could imagine Alice walking beside him, her red hair long and begging to be combed, her clothes disheveled and artistic, and when her words found him, he imagined a solid and buoyant voice. The fate of worlds was dangling over the maelstrom, but always some piece of Alice felt nothing but thrilled: thrilled by what they were seeing, and by everything they were doing, and how very honored, and blessed, the two of them were.

Stop, she said.

Ord imagined himself walking, then, standing still.

What is it? he asked.

Here, she told him. Reach here.

What passed for her hand guided what served as his. Then she explained how to use her little talent, and when.

In a sense, his hand was jabbed deep into the umbilical’s wall.

Waiting.

On schedule, a critical system popped out of nonexistence, suddenly slipping through his fingers, and he closed his hand and yanked and felt the hand dissolve. Lost now. Nothing good had been accomplished.

He told Alice, Sorry.

It’s all right, she said.

She admitted, Success is a pretty unlikely bird. But I promise. We’ll have a much better chance at our next station.

Ord imagined himself walking again. He had a boy’s body and a boy’s simple clothes. In his chest beat an old-style heart—young muscle driving a cool thick blood down rubbery arteries, pushing it through pink lungs, then through the rest of his living body. He was exceptionally fond of that heart. He felt tiny and sad, and sorry in all the old ways, and he imagined himself crying as he walked beside his ancient sister, one of his cool little hands of blood and bone wiping at the salty tears, trying to push them back into his eyes.

Perhaps Alice felt him crying.

Everything will work out for the best, she promised. If not at this next station, then at the third. Or if not today, then you’ll come back through the wormhole again, and we’ll try again.

If it doesn’t work today—? he began.

She said, Ord.

She confessed, I’ve left myself an escape route. Which shouldn’t be any surprise, should it? And I promise, I’ll hurry back to the Earth and meet you, and we’ll put everything back into motion again—

Will it be me? he asked.

The universe was built on innumerable quantum events, each too tiny to be observed completely. Yet their cumulative effects left every detail of the future unknown. Unknowable. Suddenly, asking the question, Ord found himself wielding a talent that explained quantum magic fully and simply. And bringing that abrupt expertise to play, he asked again, Will that Ord be me?

Stop here, said Alice.

He tried to visualize sunshine and green meadow and Alice standing close to him, her nearest arm thrown over his shoulder, lending comfort. But meadows and sunshine were wonders that he couldn’t remember anymore. Even the colors of the sky and the sky-fed grass were beyond him now.

Here, she told him.

Ord was standing in the umbilical’s path. A trivial, short-distance talent tried to disrupt another key system. And for an instant, the attempt seemed to be working. Success was inevitable. He felt the system pushing against him, then pausing when it met resistance. But his talent had limits, and the umbilical was eager to finish its own construction. The system realigned itself, neatly and swiftly, and Ord was shoved aside. Which was when he discovered another new, unsuspected talent. One of Alice’s talents was talking to him, too.

We aren’t going to succeed, he said to Alice. Not today.

I know, she replied.

We can walk down this umbilical a trillion times, he explained. And we might stop its formation once. If we are very lucky.

Alice said nothing.

Ord was moving again, dwelling on the enormity of things, and the relentless impossibilities.

Alice caught him again and said, It won’t be you. The next time. There have to be little differences in experience, and memories, and in personality, too. But he’ll be your age and have your face. And without question, the boy will be a Chamberlain.

At the end of the umbilical lay nothingness.

Ord didn’t need to be told what to do. He already knew. But they had arrived before the window opened, and they had no choice but hold their ground, waiting for the narrow opportunity to present itself.

Ord looked for his sadness.

Where was it?

Then Alice was close to him. She was close enough that he couldn’t be certain what was him and what was her. And one of their voices was whispering, asking the other voice, Do you know what I thought when I saw you? This time, I mean. After you popped out of the wormhole.

Quietly, Ord admitted, I don’t have any idea. What?

That you were a brave, splendid young man, she said.

The words felt warm and slippery and sweet. New talents were being spliced into Ord’s nature. They didn’t belong to Alice. They were part of the umbilical, knitted into its matrix while it was being created…meant to be claimed by whichever entity came through here…on his way…

On his way.

Where?

Ord looked for his sadness, but instead found an enormous, almost crushing fear.

If I had the honor of building a new universe, said a voice. Said Alice. If I was that lucky person, do you know what I would make sure of?

What?

Very little, said Alice.

And she was laughing. Gently.

But there’s one vital thing that I would do, she added. My creation would be enormous and wondrous, full of delicious, unexpected avenues. Of course. But I’d also make certain…make it inevitable…that its inhabitants could marshal the energies and skills necessary to build more living universes like itself. But that power would come at a cost. An enormous and unavoidable, even damning cost. And do you know why, Ord?

He knew why.

But she was already saying it.

To create a new universe…that’s an exercise that shouldn’t be done without horrific consequences. Otherwise, every half-sentient soul would cobble them together. In their private shops, during their spare evenings, and with as much thought as any hobby deserves. Think of the horrors we’ve inflicted on our little galaxy, then imagine trillions of universes built by every sort of god…

Ord remained silent.

Thinking.

Maybe this is how it works in our universe, she continued. We’re destined to build Babies, and the umbilicals always fail us. But each catastrophe still manages to give birth to a new universe, and each universe is inherited by some good soul that desperately wants to fashion a better Creation.

Ord remained silent, waiting for the window.

Maybe that’s why you found your way back through time, Alice continued. Despite some very long odds, you reached this place…you found me…because the soul that invented our universe pre-ordained such perfect things…

Unless it’s even simpler than that, Ord suggested.

How simple?

You’re the only reason, Alice. You built the Baby, and you manipulated the Great Ones, and you always allow the Core to explode…and then you run off to the youngest Chamberlain and dress him up in your clothes…in your glories…and you orchestrate everything to bring him back here again…you place him where I am so that you can inject him into the latest in an infinite series of Babies…

Alice waited an instant before asking, Why would I do all that?

She was giggling.

Because, Ord said. Inside this loop of time, a trillion of your little brothers are going to inherit a trillion universes, and each of us has no choice but to worship you, Alice…worship you for all time…

That would make me extraordinarily cynical, she allowed.

If it were true, she added.

Is it? Ord whispered.

She didn’t answer.

Instead she said, Xo. And Ravleen.

What about them?

When I leave—before I race off toward the Earth—I’ll carry their souls to Thomas. I’ll tell him to set them on a quiet backwater world. He knows backwaters better than anyone. He’ll give them good anonymous lives, as rewards for their considerable help.

Thank you, Ord said.

Then he asked again, But am I right? Is all of this your game? Is the Milky Way revolving around nothing but you?

Suddenly he imagined her face—freckles and windblown hair wrapped around an infectious smile—and with a mixture of joy and sadness, she admitted, “I’m just Alice. Just Alice. Whatever that means, that’s all I am.”

The fear had drained out of Ord, leaving nothing but a strange weepy joy that kept building and twisting inside him.

Maybe he would stop the umbilical, this time.

“Perhaps you will,” Alice said agreeably.

They stood together, perched beside the nothingness, feeling the Baby clawing at its cage…and once again, at the last possible instant, Ord tried to imagine the touch and heat of a hand…and Alice took hold of him, and squeezed, and then the nothingness began to melt away…

the last touch of his life

two hands gently holding on to one another

and then

and then

and then, everything.