Brother Perfect

One

“Bless the dead!”

—Perfect, in conversation

IT WAS THEultimate toast—“Bless the dead!”—and despite every appearance, the toastmaster was human. His scaly hand clasped hold of a ceremonial mug carved from cultured granite. As he said the word “dead,” he lifted the mug up high, his wide mouth managing both a smile and supreme bitterness. He was a beautiful man, brightly colored and vigorously ancient. His angry voice lingered in the dense, damp air. Long teeth flashed in the very dim light. Then golden viper eyes skipped from face to face, looking hard for something unmentioned.

The patrons repeated his blessing with sloppy, communal voices.

No one needed to ask, “Which dead?”

Opposite the tavern’s bar was a universal wall. Tonight, like every night, it was showing another light-speed feed from the Core, from another doomed world. People watched a new city lying beneath a night sky that should have held a hundred thousand suns, bright and dazzling; but instead of suns, there was only a single blistering smear of white light, every lesser glow washed away by the brilliance. Energies from the baby universe were still seeping into its tired old mother. A thousand supernovas couldn’t match its amoral violence. The explosion’s scorching heat and withering radiations were expanding at a near-light velocity, melting worlds and evaporating every form of life, a century of inexorable growth barely diminishing its absolute fury.

Invisible against that withering light, people were being slaughtered.

And people watched them die—people here on the Earth and throughout the inner reaches of the galaxy. For some viewers this was a new hobby, a grisly but fascinating entertainment: A world at a time, they watched distant skies fill with that terrible light. With a reliable horror, the local colonists would panic. With few starships in port, only the rich and the vicious could escape in time. Although there were moments when luck and charity saved a few good souls, too. Then those left behind would take pitiful steps to brace themselves, or they launched into a wild orgy of rioting and sex—the human animal betraying itself after ten million years of seamless, unrelenting civilization.

But others watched the carnage and felt no thrill. For them, the victims weren’t strangers, and the misery was a burning they felt inside themselves.

The tavern was tucked deep in the Earth’s crust, in one of the poorer, more crowded districts. Its patrons were a local race—human frames embellished with reptilian features and physiologies, a calculated cold-bloodedness allowing them to thrive on impoverished, sporadic meals. Yet they were far from simple people. They had a long and durable and thoroughly shared history. Pooling their meager savings, once they had sent their best to the Core. The Core was still a wilderness, empty and free for the taking. Terraformers built a floating continent on a sunless jupiter, then designed a climate specifically for them—a lizardly eden that these same patrons used to observe with a fond relish. But the jupiter was barely eighty light-years from the explosion’s source, and it was obliterated in a single evening. A great world and a greater people were turned into a single long streamer of enchanted plasmas and highly charged particles, swirling and merging with a murderous storm that wasn’t going to end soon, or maybe ever.

Many of these patrons had watched the cataclysm from this tavern, and out of that awful night came this ritual, this new custom, several minutes of each evening devoted to blessing the dead.

Now, finally, the golden viper eyes found what they were hunting.

The toastmaster’s head locked in place, and he took a slow deep breath, a wry little smile emerging gradually.

“To Alice!” he shouted.

Now the wall changed feeds, suddenly showing what looked like a plainly dressed woman sitting alone in a white-walled prison cell. She was an archaic human, traditional skin topped with short red hair. Otherwise, she was the most ordinary creature imaginable.

In a single ringing voice, the tavern cried out, “To Alice!”

“Give the bitch a long small horrible life,” the toastmaster roared. And with that, he drained his mug, enjoying the raucous approval of his mates.

Others, in drunken tones, roared, “Kill the bitch…!”

It was a delicious, much-practiced game.

But the toastmaster broke tradition by taking a slow step forward, wading into the crowd, and lifting his emptied mug as a clear, almost songful voice shouted, “To the Families!”

“The Families!” people roared, in mocking admiration.

From the back, a shrill voice cried out, “Kill them, too!”

Nobody repeated those dangerous words, but there was a pause, glacial and tense, where no one rose to defend the Families. All the good they had done for humanity, in its myriad forms…and not so much as a kind word was offered. Not as a whisper, not even as a weak reflex.

In this one obscure location, the Ten-Million-Year Peace tottered on the brink of collapse.

Standing among the tightly packed bodies, the toastmaster fixed his gaze on a single man. The man was a stranger—dull black scales fringed with red; a crimson forehead merging with a sharp golden crest; and a small orange throat pouch that implied youth, or an old man trying to look young. Using his free hand, the toastmaster touched the young man, cool fingertips dancing across the short nose and long lower jaw, finally tickling the little pouch.

The young man barely flinched.

“The Families will pay,” the toastmaster hissed. “For every crime, they will pay.”

“Every crime,” was the chorus. “Make the fuckers pay!”

The young man whispered his response, a half syllable slow.

The toastmaster appeared amused, but his voice was like ice, slowly saying, “Make them weak. Weak and poor. Make them the same as us.”

In an instant, the tavern went silent.

The young man straightened his back, the orange plumage along his spine growing stiff as knives. He glanced at the universal wall and Alice, his viper eyes blue and shiny, and sad. Then with a flat voice, he muttered, “Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Make the Families weak, and poor—”

“And give us their god-talents,” the toastmaster added.

With a phrase, he had crossed into heresy. There was no other word for it. Dismantling the evil Families was a justice, but demanding their powers and talents was against every convention, every old law and a multitude of good, honorable judgments.

The young man said nothing.

“Long ago, just once, I had a child,” the toastmaster explained. “One child, because how can a poor man afford two in a crowded world like this? She was a beautiful bright girl, and do you know where she went? Can you guess where she made her nest and gave me five grandchildren?” His eyes remained open, coldly staring at the face before him. “Every night, I watched my daughter and grandchildren from this place. Because I am too poor to afford my own universal wall, of course.” The eyes closed and remained shut. “I was standing here, exactly here, when I watched my entire family die.”

Softly, with feeling, the young man said, “I am sorry.”

A claw-shaped blade struck him from behind, piercing his skin at the neck, effortlessly cutting between the long scales but with no trace of pain. No blood spurted from the surgical wound. The young man felt the pressure and spun around, slapping the knife from the assailant’s hand. But more blades appeared, and picks of scrap diamond, each slicing at his legs and butt and back; and despite strength enough to shatter a hundred arms, Ord stopped resisting, going rigid, standing like a statue while his false skin and the cool meat were peeled away, falling in wet heaps around his ankles.

His archaic body was naked. His true face was suddenly exposed, a hundred little cuts healing in a moment. The Chamberlain face was obvious. The red hair was plastered flat with perspiration, and the warm blue eyes watched the world with amazement and a palpable pity.

No face in the galaxy was better known.

“A baby Chamberlain,” the patrons muttered, in horror and shock and with a rising visceral rage.

Ord lifted his left hand.

With remorse, he cried out, “I am sorry.”

They rushed him. Using knives and picks, stone mugs and teeth, they hacked away at his genuine flesh, ripping it loose from his strong bright bones. Then, with an idiot’s purpose, the mob soaked the still-living bones and brain with the tavern’s inventory, and they sabotaged the fire-suppression system, setting a blaze that was a thousand times too cold to murder the weakest Chamberlain. But it didn’t matter. For years and years that tavern would lie gutted, left as a monument, and people who hadn’t been there would claim otherwise, boasting about how on that night, in a small but significant way, they had helped mete out justice, butchering and cooking one of Alice’s own little brothers…!

Two

“Oh, I can explain your sister to you…

“Every human hope and historic truth, every foible and foolishness you can name, plus even the greenest prehuman emotions…all of them, without exception, have enormous homes inside our Alice’s dear soul…!”

—Perfect, in conversation

“FIRST,” SAID AChamberlain voice. “Before anything else, tell me why this happened.”

The voice had no source. It rose from the warm blackness, sounding a little angry and thoroughly stern. Ord barely heard his own voice replying. “It’s because I left the estates,” he muttered. “That’s why.”

“You did, but that’s an inadequate answer. Think again.”

“Lyman? Is that you—?”

“Try again,” boomed the voice. “Why did this happen?”

Ord remembered the attack and his brief, manageable pains. “They saw through my disguise. I must have made a mistake.”

“Many mistakes, but none of consequence. Your costume was accurate enough, and you were well prepared to wear it.”

“Then what went wrong?”

“I’m asking you. Think now.”

Ord tried to swallow, but he had no mouth. He assumed that he was home again. An attack on him would have caused alarms to sound, and it would have been a simple matter for a brother to recover his parts. Yet what if the alarms had failed? His comatose mind could have been pirated away to someplace secure, unlikely as that seemed. This could be the beginning of a lengthy interrogation, a Chamberlain enemy wanting to pull the Family secrets out of him. But of course, he knew next to nothing. More likely, their enemy simply wished to torture him.

“How did that gruesome drunk find you, Ord?”

“He wasn’t gruesome,” the boy countered. “And I think he was sober—”

“That beautiful prince,” the voice offered. “Why did he even notice you?”

“He was warned,” Ord allowed. “Someone told him to expect me.”

“A sibling, perhaps?”

“Probably not.” Brothers and sisters might have known his plans, but they wouldn’t have let others mete out the punishment.

“And who would have?”

Possibilities swirled in the blackness, one name standing out against the others.

And the brotherly voice announced, “I concur. Yes.”

A moment later, without warning or apparent effort, Ord had a face and eyes. He found himself whole again, new flesh covering his salvaged bones. His body was sprawled out on his own bed. Even with fresh, unfocused eyes, he recognized his own apartment. Floating shelves held an assortment of alien fossils as well as the earthly kind. The universal wall showed shifting, thoroughly random views of the Core. Lyman stood in the doorway; Ord recognized him by his long red hair tied into intricate braids, plus his slump-shouldered, tight-faced appearance. Standing over the bed was an older, unintroduced brother wearing an ageless, somewhat fat body, his hand lifting from Ord’s bare chest, a damp warm discharge making the new heart shudder, then surge.

“It’s been some while since your body last died. Am I correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“An incident in the Salt River. Is that so?”

“I drowned in the rapids, yes.” The brother had surely memorized Ord’s medical history, which meant that questions served as noise. Or they were subtle tests. Or maybe he was pretending that the two of them were on halfway-equal footing, lending his littlest brother a misplaced confidence.

“Well, we pulled you from the ruins.” The Chamberlain face showed a large, self-congratulatory grin. “And we’ve filed criminal charges, plus civil suits. You broke our rules by leaving home, but then again, those people broke everyone’s rules by attempting murder.” A weighty pause, then he asked, “If people maim, shouldn’t they expect retribution?”

“Yes, sir.”

From the doorway, Lyman asked, “So who was it? Who warned the lizard prince?”

It made Ord uneasy, hearing his favorite brother calmly demeaning those odd, sad people.

“We know the culprit well,” said their ancient brother. His expression changed by the moment, bouncing between menace and sharp amusement. “And I’m sure the boy will do what’s necessary, when time is ripe.”

A great black permission had just been given.

Ord gave the tiniest of nods.

Next to this creature, he and Lyman were babies. They were athletic flesh and durable bone, and finite minds and raw potential. But their great brother could be thousands of millennia old, his face composed of substances more intricate than any flesh. Ancient souls like his were coming home again. After millions of years spent wandering the Milky Way, suddenly they had vital work to accomplish here: diplomatic missions; far-reaching planning sessions; the careful allocation of the Family’s enormous resources; and the endless legal wars revolving around the Core’s unfolding tragedy.

Repairing a damaged baby…well, that had to be the most trivial chore imaginable…

“Civil suits,” the ancient Chamberlain repeated, a gleeful laugh coming from some vast, hidden mouth. “I promise, Baby. We’ll teach these people about pain.”

“Don’t,” Ord whispered.

Another laugh followed, muscular and massive.

“I mean it.” Ord forced his new body to sit up. “It was my fault, everything, and I don’t want them hurt.”

“I know you’re being honest,” said his brother. “I’m laughing because you honestly believe you have a voice here. Which you don’t. It has been decided. Our AI lawyers have already set to work, and we’ll squeeze the last cold credits out of those bastards.” He offered a bright little wink. “Someday, Baby, you’ll appreciate our efforts.”

Ord doubted it.

“Now,” said the brother, “thank me for you health.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Rest,” he advised.

Did a creature like him ever rest? Ord doubted that, too. Then he considered asking when, if ever, would he be free to travel the Earth…when would any of the babies be allowed to leave the Family estates…?

But the brother had vanished, melting into the floor without sound or fuss. Or perhaps more likely, he was never actually there in the first place.

Ord glanced at Lyman, and Lyman returned the expression.

They were babies, they agreed.

What could they do?

“IWON’T TELLyou what to do,” Lyman began. “But if you leave the estate again, they’re going to become genuinely angry.”

In other words, an unrepentant Chamberlain might be restricted to even smaller spaces. Like the old mansion, Ord imagined. Or worse, the walls of his own tiny apartment. When he was Ord’s age, Lyman had already traveled considerably farther and broken many more rules. But that was before the Core. “Leaving was brave,” Lyman offered, that trailing word having a calculated feel. “Maybe even noble,” he said, with the same careful tones. “But when you ignore your bravery and your nobility, do you see what’s left? Stupidity. Dumb, dumb, dumb stupidity.”

Ord examined himself. A century ago, whenever a child was temporarily killed—regardless of blame—he was always given some tiny improvement as a salve for any embarrassment. He woke with a more mature blood or some enhanced sense. Perhaps even an enlarged mind. But Ord felt identical to what he had been days ago: an old-fashioned human carriage hardly changed by a century of tragedy and shame.

To a biologist’s eyes, Ord looked like a teenager, complete with the weak beard and bright blue eyes. But he was nearly a century and a half old, and Lyman was several times his senior. His brother’s body was dense as granite and more powerful, his mind prepared to leave home, ready to travel and work in deep space. As a degree-holding terraformer, Lyman was another one of the noble Chamberlains eager to help humanity and rebuild the galaxy…

Yet all new postings were on hold.

“Because of the current situation,” one of their elder sisters had explained. “This is a temporary measure, and a reasonable precaution, and for the next moment or two, you’ll have to be patient, little ones.”

With a bitter, impatient voice, Lyman confessed to Ord, “You’re making it harder for all of us. I appreciate your reasons. You heard about that tavern and the ugly toast, and sure, you wanted to see it for yourself. But eventually, by right, you should also consider your brothers and sisters.”

There were several dozen young Chamberlains forbidden from leaving the estates.

“Do you ever think about us?” he pressed.

Ord said, “Always.”

“And do we count?”

Ord shrugged, seeing no reason to apologize.

“Think of me,” Lyman implored. Then he glanced at the universal wall, and with an inaudible word, he switched the view, leaving the Core for a green view of the world outside the mansion. Sunlight streamed in across both boys, and the one who was standing said, “Think of me.”

“Don’t I?” Ord replied.

“They tell me that I’m responsible for you babies. The elders say they’re too busy, and I have to be your elder.”

“I know that, Lyman.”

“But is that fair?”

“Actually, it probably is.”

A look of genuine disgust passed across his brother’s face.

Ord took a deep breath. New lungs expanded, absorbing air clean as medicine. “If you want, I’ll stay in bed for the next million years.”

“Maybe you should,” Lyman warned him. Then, on that glum note, he turned and walked away, ending their discussion before Ord could spin even larger lies.

The boy climbed from bed, then dressed.

He rode the nearest stairwell to the ground floor. The PRIDE AND SACRIFICE emblem was above the auxiliary door, and he touched it with his palm, then turned and jogged outside.

His bears greeted him. He had always raised tailored brown bears—very friendly, very easy—but for the simple danger, he had recently changed to a resurrected species. They were short-faced bears with minds and muscles thoroughly enhanced. All of them knew Ord by his scent—tiny olfactory markers shouting his identity—and each had to lick his face with a massive pink tongue, tasting him and tasting him until he cried out, “Enough.”

“What fun now?” asked the oldest male, the voice rising from deep inside its throat.

“Riding,” Ord allowed. “Up through the Breaks, maybe.”

“Hunting?” the entire pack asked, in a shared voice.

“But no killing,” the boy warned. “You can chase, but that’s all.”

It was too much of a restriction. The bears took a few steps with him, then gave up. They knew their own nature. They stopped in the middle of the long yard, safely removed from all wicked temptations.

There were stables below the mountaintop and mansion—cavernous buildings, thick-walled and well armored. The atmosphere within was heavy with the stink of fresh hay and fungi, blood stews and cultured blubbers. The resident animals came from far worlds and the best laboratories—Chamberlain laboratories—and the smartest of them called to Ord by name, promising long rides across every fun terrain. And by the way…could they have a little treat before dinner, please…?

The urge to ride faltered, then died.

It was happening more and more. The old joys suddenly lacked their usual vitality. A pleasure was still a pleasure, but it was as much from the memory of old fun as it was from what would happen today or next year.

Past the stables was an empty pen, a great vertical pen, built on a cliff face. An alien species—goatlike beasts with adhesive hooves—had lived there eons ago. But the elders grew tired of rebuilding the children who tried to ride them. In Ord’s life, the pen had always been empty and overgrown. The goats’ feces had been at least as sticky as their hooves, and they carried tough little seeds that came along with the alien fodder. Odd blue bushes and trees grew on the vertical faces. It was an accidental taste of distant worlds. Stepping through the inert fence posts, Ord walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down. Then he allowed his eyes to take in the entire view: Artful mountains and twisted deep valleys had been formed with granites pink as meat, and every lesser slope was covered with forests and lush emerald pastures. Deciduous trees showed the first splash of autumn. Beneath his toes, a rushing river twisted its way down to a distant and enormous gray-as-steel barrier that rose straight into the cloudless sky. The gray portions were hyperfiber, and above that was a curtain of invisible energy, the entire wall bolstered with eagle eyes and paranoid AIs. A few decades ago, not long after Alice’s trial, people had broken into the estates, carrying an arsenal of weapons that couldn’t kill any Chamberlain. Yet the wall was built in the next few days, in a panic, and like anything done in a panic, it was full of flaws.

Intended to keep invaders out, the wall was porous when it came to keeping the clever, bored Family children inside.

Neither Lyman nor that elder brother had asked Ord how he had managed to escape. They knew already and had closed the route, or they knew and were keeping it open, booby traps set to catch whoever tried to repeat his crime.

For every Family, this last century had been terrifying. Yet perhaps more than others, Ord’s family deserved its awful fears.

Chamberlains were unaccustomed to a chronic sense of menace. They found it relentless and unfair, and tiresome. Alice was one of theirs, yes, but there were more than twenty thousand Chamberlains, and only a very few had been involved in the Core’s tragic business. “Why blame us?” was the general chorus. “We aren’t Alice; we’ve accomplished nothing but good for people everywhere. Look at our record! Our history! Our legacy! How, how, how can we absorb the blame meant for one odd and possibly senile sister…?”

Half of the Thousand Families had been poisoned as well, their oldest siblings culpable by helping to build that awful new universe.

Without question, Alice’s arrival was the worst day in Ord’s tiny life.

This was a point of endless debate: Why would one of the most famous and powerful entities in the Milky Way take such an interest in her youngest brother? But really, Alice had done very little with him. They’d had a few meetings, one uncomfortable dinner, and a vision of the baby universe exploding into this cold husk of a Creation. Alice was vast. At least, she had once been enormous. Alice was brilliant to the limits of intelligence, and she had talents beyond number, and whatever attention she showed to the baby Chamberlain, it was nothing. Nothing. It amounted to the same concentration that Ord gave to any one of the solitary blue shrubs on the cliff face beneath him.

Again, he looked at the security wall.

A century of distractions and new revelations hadn’t yet diluted the shock and misery of this mess. This carnage. Alice had given the Chamberlains a new legacy. Suddenly their old name was synonymous with greed, waste, and genocide—every ugly horror they were pledged to fight. And now the Chamberlains—and to a lesser degree, all Families—hid inside their estates, or they traveled with a thousand security systems in tow. But where were they safe? They had billions of angry neighbors on just this one continent. How many local workshops were nuclear-capable? What happened if the weapon-suppression systems were deactivated, then countless crude bombs were heaved over the wall…? What if just one of them went unnoticed by the paranoids…?

“Quit,” Ord muttered to himself.

He started back into the stables, contemplating his choices. There were enemies outside, but there were enemies within, too. Ord knew who had alerted the toastmaster to his presence, and he knew how to prove it. No, he wouldn’t blame the people in the tavern. The malicious act lay elsewhere, and his brother was right: Ord needed to find some reasonable, imaginative revenge.

He paused before an enormous gate of diamond bars and robot sentries with tireless arms linked. What lived in these shadows was a minor mystery. A great old brother had left the beast here—no one seemed sure just when—and despite hours of careful watching, with eyes and with delicate sensors, Ord had never gotten a good look at the creature.

He wasn’t looking into the cage now, thinking hard to himself.

Muttering to himself.

“How can I punish someone?” he asked himself. “When I can’t really hurt them, what can I do?”

From the shadows, over the sour stink of old blood stews, a tiny voice whispered to him, close and earnest.

“Let me show you ways,” it said.

Then, “Tricks. I know tricks.”

Then, “Closer, come. Please, my master. Please?”

Three

“Ian had favorite story about the Nuyens…

“Their Family was founded by a brilliant woman, highly organized, extraordinarily disciplined, and as creative as the proverbial factory-fired brick. That lack of imagination was the source of some good-natured teasing among the half-born gods. But the first Nuyen saw nothing but strength in her apparent weakness. One night, drinking a social beer at some mandatory function, she argued that she was genuinely blessed. Creativity was a distraction and a proven danger, and as her powers grew, she intended to acquire only enough of that deadly talent to accomplish each task, then dispose of it afterward…

“Ian genuinely liked the Nuyens. To his playgrounds, they never went…!”

—Perfect, in conversation

WHERE THE CHAMBERLAINS’estate had always been wild woods and minimal lawns, the Nuyens preferred formal gardens maintained to the limits of the day’s technologies. Their foliage was tailored to the point that every leaf grew to a perfect size and shape and color, or it killed itself, sending its sap to more successful neighbors. Flowers bloomed on tightly orchestrated days, each blossom perfectly in keeping with the rigorously controlled environment. Every shrub and elegant tree, and even the tiniest scab of lichen, had a place to fill in that highly contrived landscape. The pools and great ponds were geometrically pure, the streams and little rivers ran in intricately braided channels, and the clouds of fish and water lilies and king lotuses and little dolphins all wore colors dictated by the season and the surrounding landscape.

The effect couldn’t help but look lovely, and it was relentless, and on most days, Ord grew exhausted with the tight-assed spectacle.

Not today. Ord barely noticed the late-season roses or the giant killifish. He was panting, dragging the homemade bomb up the brick path. The Nuyens’ mansion lay ahead—a sprawling blockish structure adorned with false windows and invisible sentries. Those sentries had already sounded alarms, and AIs had carefully weighed the risks, taking every reasonable precaution. But Nuyens didn’t appreciate the sight of a Chamberlain bringing a weapon to their doorstep. To emphasize their displeasure, a modest-ranked brother emerged from the nearby earth, growling, “What do you want? What are you doing here?”

“I want your brother. I want Xo.”

“Your toy is dead,” said the dark-haired figure.

With powerful arms, Ord lifted the bomb and dropped it on its detonator. It struck the brick walkway with a harshbang , sparks blossoming. Then he grinned, saying, “I guess it is,” while lifting it once again.

The Nuyen shook his head in disgust. “Your friend is on his way,” he reported, and vanished with an intimidating flash andcrack .

Xo hadn’t been a close friend for years. Ord rarely saw him anymore and never with much pleasure. He had mentioned his secret trip to the boy, but only because Xo was a coward, and Ord wanted to wave his bravery under the coward’s nose. “I found a way out of the estates,” Ord had boasted. “Want to come along?”

Of course not, no.

“It’ll be fun.”

“Until it goes wrong,” the coward had muttered enviously.

With a whispered hiss, an auxiliary door opened. A puzzled adolescent emerged, asking, “Have you gone stark raving, Ord?”

Ord flung the bomb down again.

Xo didn’t flinch. He held himself motionless, managing a long thin breath before asking, “Why? It won’t work, and it never could.”

The bomb had a smooth titanium shell and neat little tail fins that served as handles. Ord pointed at each end, saying, “I’ve got more than two kilos of 235 inside here.”

“But the trigger’s shit, and the chemical explosives have been cooked to water and plastic. It can’t detonate—”

Bang. Again.

“Atoms vibrate,” Ord reminded him. “This way, that way.”

Xo had a frail, pitiful face when he wanted. Watching his onetime friend grunt and lift the bomb again, he said, “So what?”

“A few quadrillion uranium atoms could move toward the same point, in the same moment.”

Xo’s eyes grew larger, just a little bit.

“Random vibrations and my pounding, and they just might accidentally reach critical mass.”

“Impossible!”

“Possible,” Ord countered, “but highly unlikely.” Again he dropped the bomb, sparks flying higher. “Unless, of course, someone noticed me standing here, and if that someone didn’t much like Chamberlains. Or Nuyens, for that matter. If they could uncook the explosives and heal my trigger—”

“It won’t happen,” Xo interrupted. “Not with our security—”

“I found your message.”

Xo fell silent.

“In the tavern’s files,” Ord continued. “ ‘The gold-crested stranger is your sworn enemy,’ it reads.”

“That’s a lie!”

Bang. “Why did you want them to hurt me?”

“You’re fine now,” Xo observed.

Again Ord flung the bomb into the unyielding bricks.

In an almost imperceptible fashion, Xo flinched.

“I’ve always tried to be friendly toward you,” the Chamberlain argued. “Even when we aren’t friends, I treat you better than the others do. Better then almost anyone, now that I think about it.”

“What if I sent the message?” said Xo, in a speculative way. “Maybe it isn’t because of you. Maybe it’s your sister. Alice made it so that none of us can leave home, and we never will if you keep sneaking away—”

Again the bomb struck, cracking one of the old bricks.

“How long will you do that?”

“Until it explodes,” Ord promised, his voice level and cool. “I’ll get more 235 when this stuff goes bad, and maybe after ten billion years—”

Xo shuddered and stepped back, closing and sealing the useless door.

The Nuyens tolerated Ord’s presence for a few hours, then sent home a stern warning wrapped within a few concerned words. Lyman was dispatched to retrieve the baby Chamberlain. Ord’s action wasn’t a declaration of war, but it wassomething . As Lyman walked him back to the tube car, the dead bomb thrown over a burly shoulder, he tried to scold the boy. He said all of the best bruising words, in a properly heated tone. Yet his gaze had acquired a new light, a kind of black wonder, and with the most unexpected envy, he gazed at the youngest Chamberlain as if for the first time.

Four

“Last night, for an indeterminate period and through means yet undiscovered, our prisoner escaped. Then, in an act that is perhaps even more impressive, she managed to return again, passing undetected through a security network already perched on full alert. We are struggling to determine her whereabouts and agenda. However, questions directed at our prisoner are being met with amused puzzlement. Alice herself has raised the possibility of a highly selective, rigorously maintained amnesia covering those minutes…an amnesia that undercuts our every attempt at interrogation…

“The lone positive in this ugly business is that the Chamberlain’s escape went unnoticed among casual viewers. Our audience saw an illusionary Alice sitting in her cell, no one guessing that she was elsewhere, and free…”

—Alice’s jailer, confidential

THE TRIAL HADlasted for decades.

Nothing in human history matched its scope, its unrelenting tragedy, or the ultimate anticlimax. Each day, a robotic bailiff recited the names of humans and aliens who had died during the previous twenty-four hours—a powerful white hum of sound embracing as many as ten billion lost souls. Then the defendant would describe her enormous crimes, or experts would sit before the judges, struggling to put a cost to the carnage. Some voices argued that the explosion was nearly finished, the worst now passed. But the majority agreed only that there was no clear end in sight. The Core was being consumed by the firestorm. The baby universe was still bleeding energies through the faulty umbilical. Certain brutal mathematics hinted that no end was coming, that the superheated bubble would grow and grow, and within another million years, the Milky Way would have vanished, its plasmatic ash racing toward the living worlds of Andromeda.

Only one witness defended Alice’s actions. A scholarly god from a minor Family, he spoke with a scholar’s dry voice, arguing that if the fire stopped with the Core, the galaxy would be left enriched by this experience. “Energy is energy,” he pointed out. “Energy is mass, and it brings wealth. Today, billions are dying. But the vast majority of us are quite safe, and when the worst is over, we will witness a wave of star formation unlike anything seen since the earliest days of Creation.”

A grueling cross-examination didn’t shake the witness. With a rationalist’s zeal, he spoke about the ultimate good that would come from this “sad incident.” Chaos was a sweet manure. Carnage was a necessary cost. Unimagined industries and reimagined peoples would replace the dead. Yes, the Great Peace had faltered, but it would recover, in time. The future would dwarf the past. Those were his exact words. “The future will dwarf the past.” Only in the end, as an afterthought, did that little god admit to a minor bias: The Chamberlains had recently paid him a considerable fee for a long-ago consulting assignment.

The uproar was immediate and ugly, the public’s rage rekindled.

Some years later, once the trial was drifting into history, the same witness received a much larger payment that had passed through a hundred masking companies and foundations. His ultimate benefactors remained unnamed, but only because the Chamberlains and Sanchexes put an end to their investigations. Names didn’t matter. In issues of blood, it was better to despise the entire Nuyen clan.

The trial judges came from untainted, impartial Families and the best judicial minds among ordinary humanity, while the jurors were a scrupulously random collection of citizens lent an assortment of powerful mental talents. For those next decades, their borrowed talents helped them navigate through the complex issues of science and economics, and law, and Right. Their unanimous verdict was that the criminal would be stripped of her powers, wealth, and every shred of enhanced intelligence. Whatever remained would be locked inside a tiny cell beneath the Tibetan plateau, and except for special circumstances, the prisoner wouldn’t be allowed contact with the outside world. Then, to ensure that the sentence was being carried out, people throughout the galaxy could watch Alice on their universal walls, watching her sit or sleep, pace or shit. Her old-fashioned body—calcium bones and a poor woman’s minimal immortality—could wear nothing but a thin garment. And as a final note, the cell’s refrigeration would be imperfect, allowing the Earth’s own heat to make her constantly and perfectly uncomfortable.

It was a fair verdict. Perhaps, it was even wise. Yet justice eluded humanity. Thousands had taken part in the universe-building nightmare. Some had died fighting the blast or saving endangered worlds. But what could be done about the other criminals? What if they refused to follow Alice’s example? Plus there were those sticky issues involving civil penalties. Even Alice’s wealth was nothing compared to the damages already done. Some of the jurists, just before they surrendered their borrowed talents, argued that the Thousand Families should make full compensation, using some common pool of cash and sorrow…

But what if the Families didn’t agree to those terms?

And worst of all, what if citizens decided that enough was enough? What if people tried to wrest the godlike powers from those chosen few? The Core’s little bang and misery would be nothing beside that conflagration. The Ten-Million-Year Peace would shatter like tired crystal, following all the ancient lines of weakness.

How could any such war end well?

Alice’s trial was finished, and nothing was finished.

That was the only verdict, it seemed. An anonymous grain of sand had started to roll down the mountainside, and there was no calculating the shape or scope of the avalanche to come.

ORD WAS SITTINGbefore a tablet filled with obscure equations, pretending to study, then he felt the pressure of eyes. Looking up, he discovered a small girl standing in his open doorway. His first thought was that she was a younger sister. He noticed the immature face and body. Adult-sized teeth filled the smiling mouth. Her coppery hair was long and worn simply, and she wore a feminine dress that ended at her knees, shins pale and her pink feet bare. There was a tangible joy that Ord could taste as well as feel. And then she spoke sweetly and quickly, telling him, “Come with me.” Saying to him, “Now, Ord. They’ll notice I’m gone, hurry!”

He rose and followed, and in an instant he dreamed up a little story to explain her presence. The eldest Chamberlains, for reasons simple and complex, had delayed the birth of Ord’s little sister. But what if a sibling hadn’t agreed, finding the means to hide a baby girl? She might be living inside the vast mansion, tucked away in some secret chamber. And maybe she knew about her slightly older brother, and of course she would come see him. Didn’t it make perfect, intoxicating sense?

And yet. How could security nets and watchful elders fail to notice her? And if a little girl was so perfectly protected, then how could she manage to escape long enough to find Ord?

He ran on rising stairs, powerful legs unable to keep pace. The girl looked back at him, her expression disappointed. “I thought you’d be faster by now,” she said, speaking through her thick long hair. Then, with a wink and giggle, she asked, “Why aren’t you faster, Baby? You need to be.”

Only then, finally, did Ord realize how far he had climbed and where she was leading him.

His legs locked up, in terror.

But the stairs kept lifting him, past the intricate, ever-changing murals where the great and glorious Chamberlains reenacted the past. He begged the stairs to stop, but they wouldn’t. His sister was standing on the top landing, facing him for an instant before stepping back and out of sight, and Ord lied to himself, assuring himself that she was just a little girl and that her keepers must have stuck her inside the abandoned penthouse, knowing that no one went there anymore…

Ord was deposited on the landing. The girl had vanished, the massive satin-crystal door stood ajar, and momentum, not courage, carried him through the chill gap between door and jamb.

The room beyond was enormous, hectares of floor beneath a high ceiling, every surface ripped and charred, sagging portions of the ceiling held up with invisible braces and old robots standing motionless, waiting with infinite patience for the order to move again. Ord turned in a circle, with a dancer’s unconscious grace. When the Nuyens and other officials came here, hunting for Alice, they had demolished the place, even when they realized she wasn’t here. This would be the perfect place to hide a secret sister, he told himself. Though he didn’t believe that story anymore, no matter how elaborate he made it. No matter how sweet it seemed.

“Quit thinking, Ord. Come here.”

The red-haired girl stood in the distance, her back toward him and the golden sunlight pouring through a diamond-paned window. Ord picked his way across the battered floor, barely breathing. She seemed to be looking below, drinking in the great estate—a roar of autumn colors at their height, brilliant shades and tones joining into a half-tamed work too large for a boy’s eyes, too intricate for even his augmented mind.

He would always remember the sight of her, her coppery hair, like his, unremarkable against those grand colors. And how the sunlight pierced her dress, revealing her pale new flesh, the body rigorously simple, even plain, sexless and unaugmented, and pure. Why, with everything being possible, did she choose that appearance? For the innocence implied? But who knew why Alice did what she did? Not for the first time, Ord doubted that his sister could identify all of her reasons. She was too large to understand herself, and had always been…and what an astonishing, horrifying curse…!

Alice turned, and in a motion faster than Ord could follow, she pushed something small and soft into his hands. Then with a desperate near gasp, she told him, “You’ve got to save it! They’ll destroy it—!”

What? Destroy what?

“I’m pledged to protect…fragile…it’s nothing but…”

“Protect what?” he blurted.

“Brother Perfect knows. Go find him.” She showed the quickest possible smile, a flash of those bright big teeth, then she closed his fingers around her gift. “This will help you—”

“Brother who?”

“I trust you,” Alice promised, her voice bleak and untrusting. “And Perfect, too. But nobody else, not anymore.”

Then she was gone again, never quite seen and already lost; and for a long, confusing moment, Ord stared out at the vista—at the mountains and deep valleys; at the brilliant pained colors of dying foliage—nearly forgetting how he had come here, barely aware of the heavy little mystery lying invisible in his baby hands.

Five

“Discreet observations of the Chamberlain estate have identified five distinct and powerful anomalous events. Two occurred during Alice’s escape, probably marking her arrival and subsequent departure. Two other events have been linked to the clandestine visit by Chamberlain Fifty-three, presumably on a mission of grand strategy and espionage. But most troubling is the oldest anomaly. It was witnessed several years after our observations began—several years after Alice’s surrender—and perhaps it only signaled the departure of some ancient Chamberlain whose presence was never suspected. Though it could have been an arrival, which leads to a chain of obvious questions: Who arrived? And on what mission? And what is this secret Chamberlain doing now?”

—Nuyen memo, classified

ALICE REMAINED IMPRISONED;Ord could see as much for himself, nothing different about her cell or the simple gray-green dress or the stiff way she sat on the edge of her plain cot. But it had been Alice in the penthouse, or at least some magical, unknown portion of her. Sitting on his own bed, unconsciously mimicking her pose, Ord felt confusion bleed into fascination, and when the jailers abruptly filed into Alice’s cell, the fascination turned to excitement.

The jailers belonged to three high-grav races, each man stout and powerful, all made more impressive by isotropic black uniforms. Wearing an expression that was not entirely relaxed, the largest man gazed up at the universal eye. A stiff, formal voice told the universe, “The prisoner needs to meet with her attorneys, in private. For the next few hours, this line will be terminated. Thank you.”

The wall went dark, and Ord gave a little gasp.

He wasn’t the only Chamberlain watching. An electric murmur passed through the air, pulses marking the passage of invisible siblings. From doorless rooms deep inside the mansion came a piercing series of whistles, then an older sister appeared beside Ord’s bed, weaving a body from light and dust and flakes of his own dead skin.

She stared at her little brother for what felt like an eternity.

“What’s wrong?” Ord finally asked, surprised to sound so convincingly innocent.

Yet the sister should have seen through him, duplicity bright in his panicky glands and the frazzled neurons. And certainly she should have noticed the invisible object lying on Ord’s lap, both of his thighs depressed by its bulk, its plain oddness sure to set off the alarms.

Yet nothing registered in her ice-bound blue eyes. A pause, a prolonged blink. Then her brother asked again, “What is wrong?”

“Many things,” she assured. Then, “Have you seen Alice?”

“On the wall.”

Deeply puzzled, she glanced at the blackness. Confusion didn’t wear on her well.

“Why are Alice’s attorneys visiting her?”

The sister straightened her back, then whispered, “They aren’t. And there lies the trouble.”

He waited.

“We have a report—unconfirmed—that Alice managed to leave her cell for a moment, or two—”

“But she can’t,” Ord sputtered. “She’s practically helpless. I mean, didn’t they take away her powers?”

The sister was eager to agree, and couldn’t. “It’s someone’s error,” she offered. “Someone’s bad joke, perhaps.” Pause. “I wouldn’t worry.” Pause. “And you say you haven’t seen her?”

“Only on the wall,” he told her.

An obvious question begged to be asked: Why was Ord watching Alice at this precise moment? But the old sister couldn’t see the logic or summon the words. Quietly, almost embarrassed, she said, “Well then, good day, little one. I’m sorry to intrude.” And without waiting for his good-byes, she vanished with a sparkle of milky light.

Ord felt alone, and watched. They suspected that Alice would come see him. Yet he wasn’t asked about his visit to the penthouse, while the mystery on his lap might not even exist…unless they were thoroughly aware, watching him out of curiosity or caution. But that didn’t feel likely, either. For no good reason, Ord sensed that he was as safe as possible, under the circumstances.

What now? he asked himself.

A thousand times, perhaps. And only then did he take hold of the wondrous nothing, examining it in earnest.

The object was fashioned in part from some species of dark matter. Its surfaces were imprecise and a little cool, then warm. Its density was rather like gold or palladium, and with each touch it seemed to merge with Ord’s own flesh, for an instant, the sensation rather like a surface felt inside a sloppy dream. Ord walked to the far end of the apartment and set the wondrous nothing in his little swimming pool, on the smoothest water, and not so much as a dimple was made. Yet the object remained where he set it. He could push it back and forth like a balloon, nothing but his own hands aware of its weighty presence.

Natural dark matter didn’t exist in this form. Coagulated; tangible; capable of interacting with visible matter. But with sufficient energies and the proper cleverness, it was possible to make the wild particles behave, making them cling to one another and play games with a baryonic boy. These were great technologies, and Ord knew little beyond that. Dark matter and its sisters, the dark energies, were the basis for much of his siblings’ magic. But even the smartest Chamberlain didn’t know all of their tricks. In a sense, the ordinary baryonic universe was nothing but a thin pollution inside all that was dark and massive. Ninety-nine percent of everything existed in a multitude of useful flavors that Ord could only see in his imagination, and then, just barely.

With care, Ord caressed the gift, fingers discerning tiny crenellations, his mind’s eye building an improving picture. But what it resembled…well, it seemed unlikely at best. A tightly folded cerebral cortex; the undersized cerebellum; and the ancient medulla: It was a brain of the oldest kind, human in proportions but nothing like the tough modern form. Even the lizard-folk, poor as possible, had fancier and much more enduring versions of the ancestral brains. Fatty flesh and acetylcholine had vanished with hundred-year life spans and mental imbalances. Why would Alice give him such a relic? But it wasn’t a relic, he reminded himself. It was as modern in substance as possible; and what did that imply?

An affinity for Ord’s flesh was a clue, and its shape was another clue. An idea came to him. But when he acted on the idea, he was shocked to find it valid. The mysterious nothing approved of his scalp and began to burrow, exotic particles swirling around the bland ones, passing through flesh and the hyperfiber skull, moving just the right little distance, then pausing and aligning themselves with a perfect grace, linking in a multitude of ways with Ord’s own astonished mind.

AN IMAGE APPEAREDbefore him.

It was out-of-focus, but instantly identifiable.

“Am I supposed to go there?” he asked. No answer was offered. Ord put on hiking boots, then noticed a second pair of boots where he found the first pair. Using the stairwell, he passed a dozen siblings—modest-ranking Chamberlains wearing frightened, flushed expressions—and nobody gave him the barest notice. Which was important, since he was forbidden from leaving the mansion, in punishment for the bomb nonsense.

When Ord reached the auxiliary door, he was struck by a cold premonition. Not once, but twice, he reached up and touched the PRIDE AND SACRIFICE sign, the dense granite feeling soft as mud beneath his fingers. Then he passed through the locked door and strolled among his napping bears, scratching their broad heads, the giants sniffing at nothing and moaning at things only they could see.

His destination was a good hour’s run from home, most of it downhill. Wild birds and nervous roodeer didn’t startle when he passed them. Water splashed, and the earth dimpled under him, but each backward glance showed him only a smooth brook and muddy banks without a single bootprint. Ord was a ghost, it seemed. He was exactly like his elderly siblings, composed of nothing but thought, and it frightened him, and it seemed terribly fun…yet he couldn’t make himself hesitate for a moment, much less ask his conscious self if this was what was right…whatever it was that he was doing…

A child’s clubhouse stood on the border of the Sanchex and Chamberlain estates, tucked into the back of a dead-end valley. Built of lumber by boys and girls barely old enough to swing hammers, it had stood empty for almost a century. The Golds disbanded not long after Alice’s arrival. Which was natural, since they’d grown too old for the club’s games. Yet a new generation should have come here to burn down the relic with an appropriate solemnity, then build their own clubhouse somewhere else. Forgotten, the old place had fallen into a dishonorable entropy, its oak roof collapsing, its walnut floor buckling, and the childlike signatures on the far wall turning soft and imprecise, slowly erased by countless species of rot.

Ord barely saw his own name, second in rank.

Ravleen’s signature was on top.

Slowly and for no clear reason, Ord realized that he wasn’t alone. The far end of the clubhouse was newer, better built and infinitely better maintained. Sitting on a carved slab of granite, reading some historical text, sat a half-born god. A monster, and a beauty. A demon and ally, and an occasional close friend.

Ord stepped up to Ravleen, and paused.

She was reading about a long-ago war fought by species rendered extinct by their own terrible fighting. The account was built from careful excavations and loose speculations. Ord glanced at the next few pages, then stared at the Sanchex body. Alone, Ravleen wore nothing. Her clothes lay beneath her, waiting for orders to leap into place. She had the beautiful, freshly formed body of an adolescent girl, her pubic hair black and her nipples even blacker. Page after page flashed before her unblinking eyes. Occasionally, she would take a tiny breath. Then she abruptly stopped reading, blanking the book and lifting her gaze until she looked straight into Ord’s wide eyes.

She did not see him.

He was mostly sure, then he was certain.

With his right hand, Ord reached for Ravleen, touching what he had always secretly wanted to touch.

She was a devil, furious and deadly, and she was as beautiful as any creature ever conceived. And Ord put his hand to her chest, and then inside, discovering that he could feel the curl of her ribs and coursing of her hot, hot blood; and she felt none of it, sitting up straight now and thinking about dead wars, or wars to come; and with his palm and fingers and a curled thumb, he made a cup beneath her heart, its hard humming beat feeling wonderful inside his careful hand.

Six

“We have listed every ancient Chamberlain, living and dead, and after each name you will find every imaginable reason why he or she cannot be the entity who hides among us…

“Nobody is hiding among us, obviously…”

—Nuyen memo, classified

AWOLVERINE EMERGEDfrom a hole in the floor. The thick, low-slung body reminded Ord of a jailer’s body. With a baleful glare, the creature let out a sharphiss aimed straight for him. Obviously, it saw him. Yet Ravleen remained sitting, unconscious of the phantom, her heart holding its smooth, relaxed pace. Ord withdrew his hand from her chest and hissed at the wolverine, and the creature spun around and trotted out the back door, heading for what should have been a high wall of slick granite. But the wall had vanished, replaced with a long valley and a meandering brook and trees not as tall as seemed right, or as healthy, their leaves dressed in autumnal colors but all too drab and haphazard to belong to a Chamberlain wood. One last time, Ord glanced at Ravleen. Then he started to run.

“Hello!”

Birds flew in terror. Save for some odd kind of jaybird that perched on a high branch, cursing the boy for trying to steal its acorns.

“Hello?”

No human answered.

A narrow dung-littered game trail led across the brook, and wherever he stepped, deep bootprints filled with swirling brown water. Now and again he shouted, “Hello!” A noisy indifference filled the woods. Finally, Ord thought to say, “I’m looking for someone,” and then, “I’m hunting Brother Perfect,” and his answer came in the form of a skin-clad figure stepping from the shadows, almost from underfoot.

“And who’s doing this hunting?” the figure asked.

The man was a Chamberlain. There was no telling which brother he was, but it was only a brother, and Ord was disappointed, bursting with doubts.

“And if you don’t know who you are,” the brother continued, “maybe you can recall who sent you here. How about it, my boy?”

“I’m Ord,” he muttered, “and nobody sent me.”

The brother appeared shorter than him, but stocky in a strong, comfortably fattened way, his red hair matted and tied into a ponytail, a thin red-and-snow beard obscuring the famous Chamberlain jaw. It wasn’t an impressive body, conjured or not. But the trousers and heavy vest were remarkable, made from sewn skins and mended with dirty lengths of gut and hemp. A leather belt held several elegant stone tools. One pale hand held a spear by its heavy blond shaft, a long Folsom point drawing jagged stars in the air between them.

“And who are you?” asked Ord.

“You wanted someone named Perfect. Maybe that’s me.”

But no Chamberlain had that name. It would be cruel to saddle one of their own with such an outrageous boast—

“You know every name, do you?”

“In order of birth, yes. And I know some of everybody’s biography.”

“What a gruesome waste!” The stone-age figure broke into a laugh, shaking his head in a blurring motion. “Which anal-retentive child-of-Ian dreamed up that abuse of neural capacities?”

Ord couldn’t guess who.

The brother cursed, laughed, and said, “So. You’re the baby.”

“Pardon?”

“The baby. That’s your nickname.” He paused. “By any chance, are you familiar with the concept of nicknames—”

“Yes.”

“Then you have enough of a clue. Come. Hurry on now, Baby.”

Ord attempted to ask where they were, where they were going, and why the woods looked wrong. But the brother, whoever he was, was bulling his way through the tangled landscape. Ord had to run after him, catching up as they splashed across the muddy brook. “Is Perfect a nickname?”

“Oftentimes.” The left hand gestured, its two smallest fingers missing, the wagging stumps showing no interest in regrowth. “Have you ever known someone you’d like to call Perfect?”

Maybe.

“To make them angry, of course. Am I right?”

Ord ignored the question. “I deserve to know where we are—”

“This is the Chamberlain estate. We’re embedded inside the mountains.” Perfect kicked and stomped his way through a wall of brush, thorns leaving bloody sketches on his exposed arms. “A clever little house of mine, don’t you think?”

“Why am I here?”

“No, Baby. It’s my turn to ask the question.”

He despised that name.

“Humans,” said the brother. “Humans have lived for twenty million years. As apes, then as simple souls. And, finally, less simple. But now, if you were pressed to decide, what moment would you claim was our peak? Our grand climax? Today, perhaps? Last week? When?”

“Who are you?”

The brother offered a sideways glance and grin, then stepped through a wall of gold-and-brown leaves, branches rushing back into place, conspiring to make him vanish.

Ord hesitated, wondering if he should flee.

From behind the leaves, a rough Chamberlain voice said, “Humans. Our summit. Give it a shot, Baby!”

Stepping through the wall, Ord found himself standing before an abrupt hillside and a simple cave worn into its face. The rocks weren’t cultured granite; they were limestone. The limestone was finely grained and encrusted with fossilized crinoids, thousands of the flowery animals laid into the soft dead sediments. This was a caveman’s camp, the air stinking of old fires and tainted game, and the brother seemed at home, setting his spear against the cave’s broad mouth, then turning to say:

“My given name? Thomas. Thomas Chamberlain.”

No. Impossible…!

“And since you won’t guess, I’ll tell you my personal choice for our species’ crowning moment.” Thomas laughed easily, and said, “The final years of the final ice age, when we were expanding across new continents and wild, unmapped seas.” Another laugh. “You look doubtful, Baby. Scornful, even. But consider this: There weren’t many of us, and each of us was important. A few million apes, modified by natural selection and armed with stone and wood implements, and armed with our cunning, and our mobile little cultures…and we came to rule the entire green world…!”

Trembling, Ord stared at his ancient brother.

“And you know what the world was then, don’t you?” Thomas flashed a quick, disarming smile. “It was the universe. It waseverything . A vast globe encompassing every imaginable beauty, and it was set inside a sea of ink and tiny, unimaginable stars. And it was ours.” With a wave of the maimed hand, he said, “Do you see my mind? All the history since, every human venture and accomplishment…everything has been one long and frustrating and wondrously absurd attempt to regain those lost days of glory!”

And with that pronouncement, Thomas broke into a thunderous laugh, a sudden rain of golden leaves falling on them, then swirling, vainly fighting the urge to settle, to die.

Seven

“Alice gave me that lance of a nickname.

“I was a new adult, proud of my augmentation and promise, and she was a very young, relentlessly mouthy child. I would sing at length about all the good I would be doing—for the Family; for all people; for all time—and she would always growl at me. ‘Oh, you think you’re the perfect Chamberlain,’ she snapped. ‘You think you’re the very best. But you’re the same as us, brother. Brother Perfect. Oh, yes, you are. You are, you are…’ ”

—Perfect, in conversation

ALICE—THE GREATand infamous and bankrupt sister—was the twelfth Chamberlain. While Thomas was Ian’s eighth clone, making him Nine, which in turn meant that he was almost exactly as old as Alice and Ord combined. If this was indeed Thomas. But that seemed like a preposterous idea, a thousand history lessons recalled in an instant and this skin-clad, slightly mutilated figure resembling none of them.

In a Family of dedicated terraformers, Thomas was an oddity: He built little but loved to explore—a godlike wanderer whose passion and genius led him to find alien worlds and befriend their sentient species. Alliances and trading links had never interested Thomas. He left those blessings for others. The bloodless Nuyens, for instance. By the time Nuyens were flocking to some distant system that he had charted, Thomas would have struck out into the wilderness again, chasing radio squawks and free-oxygen signatures until he found another wondrous species. Or found nothing at all. Because as any halfway-educated person knew, intelligence was an infrequent event in the universe, and it was born imperfectly, and judging by the thousands of war-killed worlds, intelligence was a fundamentally perishable form of life, too.

But the Milky Way had been thoroughly explored, from the Core to its faint far edges, and Thomas had gone elsewhere. “I know all about Thomas,” Ord told the caveman. “He’s gone now. The Families sent him out to explore Andromeda. His mission left more than a million years ago.”

“A mission left, but did I?” The brother chuckled.

Ord said nothing.

“The truth? At the last possible instant I suffered a chaotic change of desire. Instead of embarking on a great adventure, I decided to chase privacy and self-reflection. Which is my right as a self-aware organism, and don’t give me that disappointed glare.”

Ord didn’t know he was glaring, stumbling into an apology—

But Thomas interrupted, every affront forgotten. A cackling laugh was followed by an offer of meat, dried and hard and frosted with limestone grit. “Mammoth biltong,” he warned. “Chew hard,” he advised. Then, “What’s wrong? Doesn’t the flavor intrigue?”

Not even a little, no. But Ord forced himself to eat, proving his stubbornness. When the last gob of leather was sitting in his belly, dissolving in acids and microchines, the boy found the confidence to say, “I don’t believe you are Thomas.”

“And why not?”

“I’ve been with Alice, and this doesn’t feel the same.” There wasn’t the palpable sense of vast energies and relentless intellect, though Ord mentioned neither blessing by name. Nor did he say that Thomas looked bizarre and acted the same, laughing too often and never with the same sound, the oddest things amusing him without fail.

Like Ord’s doubts.

The brother turned red-faced, cackling for a solid minute. Then he gasped, coughed into his maimed hand, and asked, “How is dear Alice? Is her trial just about finished?”

“You don’t know?”

“On the whole,” he confessed, “current events bore me.”

Incredulous, Ord couldn’t summon any response.

“My guess is that they found her infinitely guilty.”

“Yes.”

“Good for them.” The smile was winsome, bittersweet. “I told her, told her, told her not to fuck around with that nasty business. But you’ve met our sister. You know how she can be—”

“She’s jailed. They’ve stripped her of everything.”

“As is right,” said the possible Thomas.

“But then she escaped—I don’t know how—and came to see me…!”

Delight shone in the blue-gray eyes. “And she wants your help, does she? Some special chore intended just for you?”

“I have to save something. I don’t know what.” He paused, then added, “Brother Perfect is supposed to help me.”

“Oh, is he?”

Ord nodded, unsure how to respond.

“Alice appears out of nothingness, expecting obedience.” A grimace, a leering smile. “What they should have carved off our sister are her bossy pretenses. That’s what I think.”

Perhaps.

“Can you give me one good guess as to your mission?”

“Don’t you know?” Ord asked, in horror.

Thomas stepped closer, his maimed hand lifting, touching the boy on the temple. His intact fingers dipped into the scalp for a chilling instant. Then, with a slow, careful voice, he asked, “Do you wish to help, or don’t you? Yes or no.” A pause. “ ‘Yes’ and we embark. ‘No’ and I send you straight home.”

“Embark to where?”

“All things considered, not far.”

Ord saw a cracked tooth in the narrow smile. “I want to help,” he confessed. Then, “If it accomplishes something good—”

“Tell me yes, tell me no. I’ll leave the worthiness for others.”

Ord said, “Yes.”

He said it three times, his voice strengthening, acquiring something that resembled confidence. But Thomas had turned away with the first ‘yes,’ vanishing into his cave without a sound or a backward glance.

Ord followed.

Thomas was working in the gloomy half-light. A large smoky fire crackled inside a stone hearth. The flanking walls were adorned with charcoal bison and ochre ponies. Ord touched one of the stiff-legged ponies, deciding that with the same crude tools, he would be at least as good a painter as his brother.

Thomas was stuffing gear into a leather knapsack, no room left for the smallest charm. Then, with a creaking of rope and skin, he lifted the pack to his shoulders, making adjustments, grimacing with conviction as he remarked, “You’re better than me at many things, I would think.”

Like Alice, he could read a boy’s mind.

Waving his injured hand, Thomas said, “See? No new fingers growing.”

The stumps were blunt and callused, all right.

“You could make new fingers,” Ord muttered. “With just a thought, you could.”

“Ah, but then I’d forget to be careful when I find a dire wolf hanging in one of my snares.” He gave a wink and rough laugh. “Scars are reminders, Baby. These scars remind me that dire wolves can be tricky bastards.”

An adult Chamberlain could look inside any animal, measuring its health and intentions. Particularly if the animal was part of an elaborate illusion built by that same adult. But what Chamberlain wanted to live inside a smoky cave, much less hunt with snares and spears? Ord’s only reasonable guess was that this caveman existence helped Thomas to mask his presence inside the estate.

“Perfect,” said his brother, again reading thoughts. “That’s Alice’s name for me, and it’s good enough for us.”

A blink and nod. Then Ord said, “But I’m not Baby.”

“Fair enough.” And with that, Perfect strode into the sunshine, stepping at a brisk pace, grabbing up his spear, and singing with a loud, out-of-key wail.

Ord followed, ignoring the landscape. It was all an illusion, and he assumed they were walking to someplace close—as promised—and answers would come in short order. He barely noticed his brother’s sour songs, concentrating instead on his eventual excuses for disappearing. They would send Lyman to interrogate him. Ord practiced a half dozen lies, each involving the old clubhouse. He had sneaked off to meet a girlfriend; why not? He’d already had a variety of adolescent affairs, mostly with girls in the Golds. Wasn’t that kind of subterfuge permitted, even encouraged? For a long happy while, Ord imagined meeting Ravleen at the clubhouse. Sanchexes were relentless lovers, or so he had heard. He remembered her naked body and the feel of her heart; and then the daydream tasted real; and then came the first hint of boredom that always preyed on daydreams.

Thomas—no,Perfect —took them up a long mountainside, through trees noticeably shorter, and barer. The afternoon passed quickly. The summit lay ahead, sharp and raw, no mansion built upon it. They climbed past a single greenish boulder and dropped into a grove of blue-black spruces. With stone blades they cut boughs for bedding. With flint and dried wood they made a sputtering fire, and Perfect held his imperfect hands to the fire, catching some portion of its tiny heat.

Ord asked why he lived this way.

“You sing out of key,” he complained. “You don’t paint all that well. You eat badly, and you let yourself get cold.” He listed the items as if they were diseases. “And you won’t even regenerate a simple finger, will you?”

“I’m not cold,” Perfect protested. “And if I am, I’ll pull my robe out of my pack.”

Ord was comfortable. As the sun set, his flesh generated its own internal fire. Yet he held his hands to Perfect’s fire, remarking, “Alice wouldn’t live this way.”

That brought a laugh, insane and infuriating.

Then, “From what you’ve said, Alice would be thrilled to live this well now.”

That wasn’t what Ord meant, and both brothers knew it.

“Let me tell you about our sister.” Perfect pulled dried meat from his pack, offering none to Ord. “Every fancy skill, every energy source, all that godly garb…Alice wanted them. Always, always. Of course, everyone’s that way, in a fashion. But she’s the worst culprit, I’d like to believe, and with a good Chamberlain modesty, I tell all that I’m the least guilty. I acquire only those talents that I absolutely need, and when the need passes, I give them away. To Alice, in some cases.”

“Augmenting your voice…is that too fancy…?”

“Oh, I sing, and I like singing. And what I hear is nothing but lovely.” Another laugh accompanied his chewing the inedible mammoth. “Everything I do I do with joy and within my limits, and that’s all I want.”

“You didn’t even know about the trial,” Ord complained.

“If something important happens, I hear about it.” He gave a little wink. “But you’re right, I’m not tied to the universal networks. And I don’t know ten million languages. My mathematics is practical, not serene. My senses are good enough, and my strengths fit the job of the moment.” A slow soft laugh, then he added, “In case you haven’t noticed, my humor is simple. Even a little crude. Which suits my needs fine, thank you.”

But why? Ord kept wondering. Why are you different?

“Do you wish to know? My moment of enlightenment?” Perfect waited for his brother’s gaze, then said, “Eons ago, I was sitting beside an alien sea, wearing my best godly garb, and this fellow happened to stroll past. Do you know about the Brongg?”

They were bipeds, vaguely fishlike. Their home world had methane seas and water-ice continents. They were the oldest known intelligent species, and Brother Thomas was the first human to meet them.

“Very good,” the caveman said, offering a little chuckle. “Anyway, this little fellow was walking Brongg-fashion, which is syrupy-slow. Seeing me, he offered greetings and stopped to chat—the Brongg are great talkers—and eventually I learned his identity. He was famous. Ancient beyond belief. I was a baby, barely a million years old, and of all the creatures I’ve ever met, he seemed to be the happiest. A billion years of joy was walking on the beach, carrying nothing but a simple ice lance—he was fishing his native sea, Ord—and I’ve always held that lesson very close to my heart.”

They were a cold, cold species. The Brongg had wondrous technologies, but they did little with them. They traveled sparingly, reproduced slowly, and were as alien and bizarre as any species that humans had ever found. How could they bring enlightenment?

Perfect didn’t answer that thought. Rising, he pulled the promised robe from his pack, its fur thick and glossy, sewn together from the pelts of mink and wolverines and dire wolves, the stitches durable and artless.

“Why did you come back to the Earth?”

His brother lay down beside the fire, a bent arm serving as a pillow. “I was invited,” he muttered. “Someone appeared without warning, gave me my marching orders, then framed it as a request before she vanished again.”

Alice.

Perfect gave a sleepy nod, eyes beginning to close.

But before he could sleep, or whatever state it was, he heard one last question from a confused little brother. “Are we still inside the estate? Because I’m forbidden to leave—”

“Watch the sky,” Perfect advised.

Ord obeyed, his heated breath rising toward the night’s first stars. They were the right stars in the proper places, but where were the planets? And the starships coming and going? Glancing to his left, he saw the green boulder on the summit, then the boulder became a smooth green globe, and the mountain beneath it evaporated, and the stars brightened and multiplied in the sudden vacuum…and a thousand lessons in terraforming told Ord what he was seeing.

Gazing at the green world, he whispered, “Neptune.”

Against all reason, in one afternoon, he and Perfect had hiked their way to the chilled edge of the solar system.

Eight

“You will be stripped of possessions, money, and mind, and each of your works will be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Worlds terraformed in good faith, by legal means, will be spared. But illegal projects will be sought out and destroyed by whatever means are deemed most humane…”

—from Alice’s sentencing

ORD SAT ONthe stony ground, staring at Neptune. Because it was genuine, because no illusions of sight or soul were involved, the boy was enthralled. He felt wonderstruck. Here was one of the first great worlds terraformed by humanity. Alice had done some portion of the work, in her youth. Technical details buoyed up out of Ord’s augmented memory. Slowly, laboriously, the novice terraformers had digested the world’s atmosphere, sequestering the hydrogen deep inside the core while metals and silicates were dredged up in its place. Airborne continents were grown, floating solidly upon rafts of vacuum bubbles. The new atmosphere was nitrogen and helium, sweet oxygen and the vital trace gases. Light and heat came from simple fusion. Rivers ran off the continents’ lips, great waterfalls tumbling into the dense inner atmosphere, then boiling away, returning as soft showers on green woods and green cities. An area many times Earth’s was made habitable, at a profit. This was where Alice made her first fortune. The entire adventure consumed fifty thousand years and the talents of hundreds. Yet today, working alone, a creature of Alice’s capacity could finish the essential work in less than six centuries.

“Why here?” he muttered. “What’s special about Neptune?”

Nobody answered him. And despite his questions and the lousy bed, Ord felt himself drifting away. Sleep claimed him, dark and dreamless; and then he was awake again, the blunt end of a spear jabbing him in the ribs.

“Time to leave,” said a distant voice, with urgency. “They know you’re missing, and you’re making them scared.”

The sky was cobalt blue, another false sun washing away the stars. Spruce trees and bare stone lay on all sides. Ord rose to his feet, attempting to ask every question that he had thought up last night. Words came in a rush, then he faltered. Perfect was walking, and Ord found himself walking beside his brother, step for step; and a sensation, cold and unnerving, made him whisper, “What’s this now? What’s happening to me?”

“You’ve been altered, a bit. Alice began the work, and I did some tinkering last night.” The profile was weathered, sober and calm. “We’ve rebuilt you as quickly as possible, under these circumstances—”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“Wrong? Dear boy, nothing!” A bleak, oversize laugh collapsed into silence. “The truth? Part of you is a starship. You’re built from dark matter and magic, and your heart is an exotic inertialess drive. Your hull is invisible, we can hope. Legs and lungs, and your skin, are projections based on your own expectations.” Again he laughed, but softer, with a glimmer of compassion. “Despite these humble appearances, we’re moving at nearly light-speed.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Which is probably best, all things considered.”

For an instant, Ord could feel the man speaking to him in many voices, most of them using convoluted languages designed to serve a rarefied mathematics. Some new, unsuspected part of him ingested the words without fuss, without hesitation. What made him panic was the sudden sensation of his true self: huge and ghostly, more unreal than real, suffused with liquid energies beyond human experience.

He tried to walk slower, and couldn’t.

“For the moment,” said Perfect, “I’ll operate those legs.”

Ord crossed his nonexistent arms on his facsimile chest. “I want to know where we’re going.”

Perfect squinted, as if he could see their destination. In the illusion, they were marching down a verdant mountainside, birds and other phantoms calling out from the shadows as they passed.

“This is illegal,” the boy gasped.

“Immoral,” his brother agreed. “Not to mention cruel. And dangerous, too.” That brought genuine pleasure, bubbling and warm. “But when a famous criminal came to you, did you tell the authorities? When she slipped you a mysterious object, did you cry out, ‘Look here, everyone! Look what Alice gave me!’?”

Ord was weeping. Sobbing.

“For now,” said Perfect, “we’re traveling toward the Oort cloud.”

“Then where?”

“Let’s reach the cloud first,” his brother replied. “That way if you’re caught, you can claim to have been kidnapped—”

“I am kidnapped!”

“Good attitude. Keep practicing.”

Ord never would have agreed if he’d known…if he had been given any hint of what was involved…crimes accomplished, grave danger implied…an insane journey, fleeing the safety and simple legality of home…!

A five-fingered hand patted Ord on the back.

“A rational boy would have balked, yes.” Perfect’s voice was smooth and untroubled. “If I had been honest to you, you would have said, ‘No.’ But you’d have been acting out of fear and ignorance. That’s why I framed the question as I did: ‘Do you wish to help?’ A person does or a person doesn’t, and both of us know you can’t help but want to help, because that’s the honored old Chamberlain curse.”

The boy tried to collapse. And couldn’t. He felt limp, half-dead and wracked with miseries, uttering a great long sob before asking the perfectly reasonable question, “Why me?”

“My question, too.” There was a weighty pause and another useless pat on the back. “Perhaps Alice wants you because you’re the baby. Perhaps it’s as simple as that.”

Ord barely heard him, his mind collapsing on itself.

“We Chamberlains love closure, that sense of great things beingdone . That’s why we build exceptional worlds. Durable, full-bodied biospheres equal to three billion years of raw evolution.”

What was he saying? Ord could barely hear the disagreeable voice.

“One of the very first Chamberlains sends the last on a great mission.” Perfect clucked his tongue but didn’t laugh. “It’s closure, and it feels right, and maybe that’s all there is to this business. Closure and an instinctive rightness, and as complicated as Alice can be, maybe her plan is just that simple. That brutally narrow. That utterly and perfectly sure.”

Nine

“The boy’s disappearance went unnoticed for several critical hours. Had Alice escaped, and was the genuine Alice sitting inside her prison cell again? Those were the thunderous questions of the moment. Obvious false leads led to more subtle possibilities, equally false. With the event apparently finished, certain key sensors were placed into a diagnostic mode. Perhaps that explains why no new anomalous events were observed. Then the Chamberlains finally realized that the boy was missing, his subterfuge infinitely too advanced to be his own work. A general alarm was sounded. Several thousand contingency plans were unsealed. Gravimetric evidence pointed to a new mass orbiting Pluto. Warnings were sent to appropriate Nuyens and our allies, and a dozen searches found nothing. But afterward, several Families reported major thefts from their Neptune reserves…”

—Nuyen memo, confidential

THEY CROSSED BILLIONSof kilometers, and the landscape, befitting some odd logic, grew colder and drier, the spruce forests replaced with an arctic steppe populated with herds of extinct game. Giant bison and woolly mammoths grazed beneath a weakening sun. In the distance, looming like flat-topped mountains, was a blue-white glacial mass. Ord noticed humans in the middle ground, clad like stone-age hunters, some walking while others stood on a high knoll, hands shielding their eyes and watching the countryside. Watching for us, he realized. They were symbols representing other ships or outposts, but even the nearest hunter barely looked in their direction, completely oblivious to the two passing brothers.

Ord quit crying, forcing himself out of his self-pity. In a choking voice, he asked, “Why do you travel this way?”

“In past days,” Perfect explained, “travelers on board steamships and starships would pin photographs and holos to their cabin walls. To remind them of more comfortable places, I imagine. To give homesick eyes something other than empty water and space.”

Listening, Ord discovered that he was glad for the voice.

“Space bores me,” said his incredible brother. “Hard vacuums and the ancient cold play on my nerves, if you must know.”

Ord felt the vacuum. It was a thin chill stew of cosmic radiation and dust and virtual particles, and it felt like a dry autumn breeze.

He asked, “How long did you hide in the estate?”

“I followed Alice home. But I was a bit slower, by a few years.”

“Because she wanted you to come? Is that the only reason?”

A mild, patient laugh implied wisdom. “You aren’t the only person whom our sister has bewitched.”

Questions, like virtual particles, appeared out of nothing, then vanished again.

“I’ve known Alice for my entire life, nearly.” Perfect paused, waiting for his brother’s eyes. “I don’t need much prompting from her. For many reasons, I behave.”

“If you were at the Core,” Ord remarked, “you could have helped.”

“Build that baby universe? Hardly.” He gave a hard chuckle. “The Core’s a big playground, and I wasn’t particularly close to her or any of them. I was living in seclusion somewhere between Alice and your front door.”

“But you knew what she was doing—?”

“And fought with her whenever she paid me a visit.” A black expression blossomed, sour and wild-eyed. “Oh, I fought with her. I augmented myself with every persuasive skill, and when those skills failed, I made threats. As if they could have done any good.”

Each step took them closer to the high glacial wall. Between them and the ice stood a low moraine, moss forests and lichen jungles growing wherever there was a speck of shelter, and as they climbed the loose slope, their feet made avalanches that destroyed oases and created new ones.

With a quiet voice—a hunter’s voice—Perfect asked, “Do you wonder what they did with all of Alice’s powers?”

“They were stripped away, of course.”

“But what does that mean?” Perfect posed the question, then gave an answer. “Powers have physical sources. Augmented minds need neural nets. Moving a world requires godly muscles. And there are the machines that crack molecules and weave dark matter and build bodies and tear them down again, in an instant.” The healthy hand took Ord by the arm, then squeezed. “I’m talking about Alice’s body and mind. Her copper bolts and rattling microchines. And her antimatter-digesting guts, too.”

“I’ve wondered about them,” the boy confessed.

“A grand secret, they are. And a wrenching problem for the poor officials who need to decipher, then destroy them.”

They reached the moraine’s crest as the sun set behind them. Another day was done; a comforting sense of closure took hold. Perfect dropped his bulky knapsack and sat on it, eating more of his endless dried meat, then gladly sharing it when the boy asked for another taste.

Without daylight, the world shrank, darkness giving the tundra a close, constricted feel. But the glacier seemed to grow, becoming glassy, some subtle inner light betraying networks of fine cracks and deep fissures. Tiny, tiny humans stood at its base. Each held a spear, but the spears represented weapons of an entirely different order. And the ice was nothing at all like ice.

In a whisper, Perfect said, “That creature you met? Our Alice? As powerful as a sun, if the need arose. A hundred suns, if you gave her time. But when she arrived from the Core, a breath slower than light-speed, she had minimal mass. She was a set of instructions and the barest skeleton. Using raw materials kept stored in and around the solar system, for just such occasions, she rebuilt herself.” He paused, biting off another mouthful of dead mammoth. “Most of Alice—the bulk of her memories, her talents—came later. Came slower. That’s how the true giants travel. Think of it like a strange snowfall falling from the Core, snowflakes the size of houses and mountains, each bringing some potent talent, or several talents. This is where they are brought, Ord. Here. Collected and held here. Waiting for someone to find the courage to crack them open and see what there is to see.”

Bright hard stars appeared before them, above and below, flares of soft blue plasma slipping through the glacier’s deep fractures. This was Alice’s dangerous meat, and it was larger than some worlds—

“A morgue, in essence.” The Chamberlain voice was close, softer than any whisper. “Keep still. Keep very still now.”

The moraine had vanished; Ord was in free fall.

“Do you feel sleepy, maybe?”

The boy was extraordinarily tired.

“Good. Try closing your eyes.”

But before he could, Ord said, “Closure,” with a numbed mouth.

“What was that?”

“That’s why she came home,” he muttered. “To die like this, in pieces. She knew it would happen, I think.”

“And she knew she deserved it, too.” Perfect touched him with a thousand hands, and laughed. “Do you know what I like best about humans? How we take whatever happens and dress it up in whatever suit of clothes we want, for any occasion.” The hands were hotter than suns, soothing to the touch and intensely busy. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe closure explains this whole fucking mess.”

Ord’s eyes had pulled shut.

There was a distant black laugh, and Perfect said, “The poetic denouement, and they couldn’t help themselves. Every one of them a god, and everything ugly and everything lovely follows straight from that…”

Ten

“The point begs to be made…we are at a distinct disadvantage here…

“Our oldest, most powerful siblings are scattered across the galaxy. Many of them are only now learning about the disaster at the Core, and it will be tens of thousands of years before they can return home, bringing the greatest of their talents, their vast experience, and the other advantages of age that we sorely miss today…

“We have done our best. Never think otherwise. With only the resources in hand, we have done a magnificent job of making ready for all contingencies…for guessing the mind of a criminal and a Chamberlain…

“That said, we are compelled to admit that despite instant action, the Oort cloud holding facility was infiltrated…certain properties were stolen…

“Analysis is proceeding with all available tools…

“The boy is still being sought…”

—Nuyen memo, confidential

IT WAS LIKEwaking from death again.

There was a voice. Chamberlain, and male. From the living world, he said, “The Brongg home world. Picture it. Walk it with me. A long gentle beach of water-ice sands, the glorious slick sea of liquid methane on our left, and on our right—”

“The Iron Spine.” Ord knew the beach. A thousand eyes seemed to open for him, only four of them mired in his own face. It was another illusion, but of superior quality. He was upright, wearing a new body. Slowly, very slowly, he turned his head until the Iron Spine filled his gaze. Before the first vertebrate evolved on Earth, the Brongg had lowered a nickel-iron asteroid onto their world, resting it upon a stubborn bed of vacuum bubbles. Half a billion years of mining had left it partially hollow, but the exterior and slag piles made for a spectacular sight: a metal mountain floating on the water-ice crust, its flanks covered with a blue-black vegetation that had adapted to the bitter taste of heavy metals.

The weak Brongg sun was rising above the tallest peak. A Brongg day lasted for a full Terran month, Ord recalled, and with that fact came a multitude of ancillary facts and details, making him a helpless expert.

“Today,” Perfect announced, “we will walk the beach.”

The beach was gray with black streaks of organic goo, and it was smooth as pavement, curving out toward a rocky point where a polished black cylinder stood on end, casting a long shadow across the calm and colorless sea. The distances looked trivial, yet with his first laborious step, Ord realized this would be difficult at best. The Brongg nervous systems were built from superconducting proteins, thoughts flowing without resistance, without turbulence; but their physical metabolisms were painfully sluggish, the swift mind able to consider and reconsider every physical act thousands of times before it was attempted, or not.

“Perhaps that’s why this species has lasted so long,” Perfect offered. “Unlike people, they have no choice but to think before they step.”

Turning his head was a struggle—a sobering investment—taking most of a stride. Perfect was a Brongg in body, like Ord. A nude fishy exterior wore thick legs and broad round feet, and his webbed hands held an astonishingly delicate ice lance. But the face was comically Chamberlain, four blue eyes winking now, his human mouth grinning at the world.

“In all,” asked Perfect, “how many living intelligences have I discovered first? Count them for me, please.”

Mouths were only for eating with. The Brongg voice was a radio pulse born from the swift nervous system. In an instant, Ord saw each of his brother’s discoveries, from oldest to newest. He had found one hundred and three examples of intelligence on ninety-one worlds. No human could claim half as many finds. True, most of them were technology-impoverished. But twenty of the species, the Brongg included, had been deemed worthy of diplomats and trade, cultural exchanges and scientific hybridization.

“Now,” said Perfect, “count the failed worlds.”

Again, Ord knew the exact number. Memories encoded in a tireless net flowed into him. He saw Perfect tracking whispers through a wilderness of stars. Some whispers vanished, while some grew stronger, but all ended with a technological world freshly killed. Wars had done the damage, mostly. Sometimes there were accidental plagues or machines run amuck, or a battered ecosystem would collapse back to the microbes. Nothing with a voice remained, save the occasional computer or automated antenna still pointed at the sky, begging the stars for help, for alliances, for second chances, for God.

Counting was easy; remembering took an age.

Images struck at Ord, leaving him spent and sore, and sorry.

And Perfect had suffered far worse. His hopes were ruined each time; nothing but ruin was waiting for him. Armed with a Chamberlain’s skills, he would sift through the gruesome traces—bone shards and burnt cities and oceans of encoded data—then he would build phantoms of the dead, complete with voices and desires, and their telltale flaws. These examples lent insights. Perfect could ask the phantoms why and how they had so willingly pushed their homes into oblivion. Forty-eight worlds, Ord counted, plus thousands more where life began, evolved to some sophisticated, promising level, then was shattered by a comet’s splash or the inevitable detonation of a nearby sun.

Staring at the carnage, Ord asked the obvious, “How does any intelligence survive?”

“Exactly. Exactly!” There was a familiar laugh, if rather bleak, while Perfect took another agonizing step, ice-sands dimpling beneath the naked right foot. “The Bronggs are the elders, but they had it easy. Their solar system has few fissionable materials, and they’re pathologically introspective. Even when they could have augmented themselves, boosting their physical powers, they didn’t. Wouldn’t. Out of fear more than wisdom, I think. There were too many uncertainties, regardless how long they rolled the Sisyphean problem back and forth in their supercooled minds.”

The Brongg were cold, slow, and scarce. Ord had never admired them, and rarely thought about them.

“At the other end of the spectrum, or dangerously near it, are humans. Churning hot whirlwinds, passionate to a fault, aggressive to no good ends, and alive only because we scared ourselves into a state that can be confused for wisdom. Relentless wars led to the Families and the Great Peace, and our little truce has managed to last quite a while. But why shouldn’t it last? As long as everyone felt happy, who cared who rowed the damned boat?”

He gave a long laugh, electric and chilling.

“Millions of years,” said Perfect, “and I’ve studied the dead and the living. Now doesn’t it make sense that I would find patterns? Relationships? Little tendencies, and big fat ones?”

Ord had to agree.

“Tendencies,” Perfect repeated. “And rising from them, conclusions. How would I invent life from nothingness, given my chance? The best of the Brongg married to the bedrock of our own natures. All dropped into a stew with every other successful species, in some realm pure and innocent—”

“And perfect,” Ord said, anticipating the words.

“Now you see why Alice renamed me. I have this wicked flaw. In my deepest soul, I need to chase after perfection.”

Trying to guess the next stage, Ord mentioned the odd, illegal worlds that Alice had built. Novel proteins; toxic solvents. Nothing like them arose in the natural realms—

“Ordinary, ordinary worlds,” was Perfect’s assessment.

“How can you say that? She broke laws to make them, and she hid them away in secret places—”

“And I am telling you that these worlds are fundamentally, unabashedly traditional. I agree. Yes, Alice went to the kitchen and made strange muffins, but the muffins have ingredients you’d expect in a kitchen. Which is why I asked, ‘Where’s the genius, Alice? Why wear that silly pride?’ ”

“You said that to Alice?”

“For a few thousand centuries, and with a loud voice. And she would point out that if I was so clever, I would do better. ‘With your help,’ I would promise. Not being a superior terraformer, I needed hands trained for the big dull ugly work of it. And eventually she agreed to help me, just once. Surprising both of us, I believe.”

Ord felt a sudden chill, a premonition.

“Where are we going?” he asked. “Please tell me.”

Perfect showed him an enormous smile and gestured with vegetable slowness, his ice lance held in his left hand, two of the Brongg’s minor fingers missing. “Down the beach,” he replied, not quite laughing. “We’re walking beside the sea, and it looks as if we’re halfway there…can’t you see…?”

Slowly, slowly, Ord turned his head again.

They were halfway to the black cylinder, and the weak little sun was directly overhead, ruddy black clouds of hydrocarbons forming in the upper atmosphere, a chill shadow falling over them and the flat, rather greasy sea. Two weeks of walking, yet it seemed longer. A few words spoken, but Ord had absorbed volumes, the pace relentless, the demands of this kind of learning beyond his experience or wildest expectations. And it never stopped. Perfect’s memories poured into him even as his brother remarked, “I wish there were more time, Ord. I do.”

Why wasn’t there time?

“Because we’re being pursued. Wolves at our heels, if you will.”

Ord looked over a shoulder, the alien neck as pliable as an owl’s. The beach was empty save for a willowy creature walking in the shallow methane, jabbing with claws, in slow motion, impaling an eel-like creature even more sluggish than itself.

“How fast are we moving?”

“Through space,” Perfect replied, “two whispers under light-speed.”

“Why not one whisper under?”

“Because. This is fast enough. Our destination isn’t equipped to receive us as a rain of instructions. And since you deserve to know, it’s because we’re carrying some possessions that need to be carried as they are, and I promised not to tell you anything more, and that is the simple, simple truth.”

A powerful dread was working on Ord. He gasped with his mouth and unseen gills, then forced himself to ask, “How many pursuers?”

“Two. But presumably others are tucked in their wake.”

“How close are they?”

“On this scale, walking along our little beach…if I displayed them to you, they would be wearing our skins…!”

Ord turned his head again, looking forward. Concentrating on the slick black cylinder, he said, “You’re doing this for Alice. Is that it?”

“Some of this is her plan. Some is not.”

“Why is Alice so important to you?”

“Is she?” Perfect asked, his tone sounding a little sharp.

“No other brother is here,” Ord pointed out. “And you’ve got thousands of sisters. But you’re taking enormous risks for Alice.”

“Don’t you know?” He offered a soft, unreadable laugh. “Haven’t you guessed?”

Ord grappled with the possibilities. Besides their common age, no answer seemed reasonable. They were Chamberlains, but with different interests and opposing philosophies. And even their age couldn’t be the answer, since there were dozens of siblings with their enormous rank.

“Try something unreasonable,” was Perfect’s advice.

Ord imagined several improbabilities, dismissing each one.

“Okay. Now try the unthinkable. Alice and I are close. Why? And now aim for the very last answer that you would hope to find.”

In a whisper, Ord said, “No.”

“Yet you are right, Ord. Congratulations.”

Eleven

“Childhood doesn’t make us.

“The end of your childhood…that’s the only defining moment…”

—Perfect, in conversation

ORD SAW THEChamberlain mansion—the smaller, original incarnation—and an instant later, he was standing on the topmost floor, inside the first penthouse. It was autumn, again. Alice was standing at the window, again. But the mountains were younger, the autumnal foliage was more subdued, and the grounds were empty of auxiliary mansions and the extra stables. The penthouse was intact, but everything about it was primitive, its furnishings barely able to change shape, its luxuries obvious and scarce, and the air itself tasting stale and dry as Ord gave a little gasp.

This Alice didn’t wear a little girl’s body. The brilliant sun pierced her dress, betraying a carriage fully matured, relentlessly feminine…the scene infected with a quality, an emotional core, that caused Ord to squirm and look away for a few uneasy moments.

Alice ignored him. She was standing on her toes, her feet bare, breasts pressed against the diamond pane. Bright eyes were staring down at the world, conspicuously ignoring everything else. Then a figure emerged from the door at the room’s center. He was a tall male Chamberlain of no particular age, wearing a stiff gray uniform that had once meant rank in the postwar government—a creature of status and some influence, yet barely older than Ord. Dangling from his dress shirt was a length of optical cable, one end linked with his nervous system, the other joined to a secured web-box riding upon his belt: a marvel in its day, and now, a set of technologies only slightly more sophisticated than fire and Folsom points.

Ten million years in the past, and the Peace was newborn, and the Families had just begun their long ascent.

The floor was a highly polished, thickly waxed wood, golden and broken up with intricate rugs known as persians. Perhaps for the sake of stealth, Thomas wore neither boots nor socks. His long bare feet had the same pink as Alice’s feet. He was stalking their sister, stepping slowly but without hesitation. Yet she knew he was there. Probably with his first steps, she knew. Through her body and the changing tilt of her head, Alice conveyed a sense of controlled eagerness, calves flexing and fingers spreading and the long red hair swimming across the freckled back of her neck in ways that could only be flirtatious.

Ord could see the sunlight in her ear, making it glow a sweet warm pink.

For a moment, the taste of salt and skin lay against his tongue, making him squirm and avert his eyes.

Alice couldn’t remain passive to the last moment. That would be against her nature. This was the finish of a long and relentless seduction. After decades of wondering, Thomas found the courage or excuse or the simple earnest lust to lift his hands—five fingers on each—and his younger sister decided to take full charge, stealing his momentum, flipping back her autumn hair while a calculated voice told him, “See? You’re not quite perfect after all.”

Thomas hesitated, just for that instant, then he seemingly forced his hands to drop to her shoulders, and she said, “Don’t.”

Then, “I will tell on you.”

Then, with emphasis, “I’ll tell Ian. I’ll tell him everything.”

In those days, the Families looked elsewhere when children played these games. It was assumed they would outgrow incest in the same way they were outgrowing selfishness and cruelty. But Chamberlains held themselves to be better than others. Ian had declared as much. In clear, withering detail, Ord saw his brother’s thoughts…saw several brothers being taken aside by their ultimate father. “Your sisters are taboo!” Ian announced to them. “They’re untouchable! I’d rather see you screwing livestock than them!” Yet with those hard words, he planted some compelling images in each youngster—a miscalculation that the patriarch would repeat for dozens of generations, without fail.

“Everything,” Alice repeated. “I will tell him, and I’ll show him…!”

Brother Perfect believed her. He lifted his hands as if burned, a quick and careless little voice begging, “Don’t tell…anyone…no…!”

Alice found his reflection in the window. Without turning her head, she took the hovering hands with her smaller hands, pulling his arms tight around her shoulders, then around her chest.

The uniformed brother, that man of consequence, whimpered, “Please don’t tell!”

“But I will,” she promised. “Eventually. Regardless. Always.” Then with one hand holding his arms in place, she took her dress with her free hand, by the hem, and lifted it from behind as she made a second promise, a low and roughened voice telling him, “I hope you know. You’re my favorite brother, and you always will be…!”

THE PENTHOUSE DISSOLVEDinto methane. With a perpetual smile and a gently embarrassed laugh, Perfect said, “I know. I paint our sister as conniving and treacherous. Perhaps a little bit evil, even. But those aren’t her only qualities, and they aren’t even her largest. She’s done wondrous things for every fine reason, and we can only hope that’s true for each of us, too.” The incomplete hand touched him again, in a gesture that took hours. And meanwhile, Perfect told story upon story, proving their sister’s innate decency, and in turn, endlessly proving his own undiminished affections.

Feeling the pressure of the central thumb, Ord bristled. “We don’t do that kind of thing anymore,” he muttered.

“You mature differently,” Perfect agreed. “More slowly. With much more and far superior help, too.”

“I’ve never thought of my sisters, that way…!”

“But you appreciate my circumstances,” the ancient man replied. “A profound emotional attachment made in my bedrock years, and I willfully built on that rock. Too much building, I know, but what can I do now?”

Ord struggled to make his legs move faster, accomplishing nothing.

“You should know. Several times, in various cultures on some far-flung worlds, Alice and I have been married. Husband and wife.” A long uncomfortable pause ended when he reminded Ord, “When enough time passes, the unlikely finds some way to become ordinary. The unthinkable, tiresome.”

The boy said nothing, lightning thoughts racing through him.

Perfect respected the silence, holding their pace but never speaking. Never intruding. The sun was dropping, clouds thickening until the air was saturated, a steady slow rain of hydrocarbons and airborne plankton beginning, drops bursting on the sea and lazy fish rising to feed, the business achingly slow, yet by its own count, frantic, the business of life repeating patterns even older than the Brongg.

A moment came when Ord felt a sudden pressure, an inexplicable change of directions. But the ice beach and the hungry world looked the same.

Why would Alice need his help? Closure or no closure, how could Ord accomplish anything worthwhile?

Homesick to tears, Ord closed his eyes and walked blind.

His brother kept his steps true.

And when he couldn’t contemplate his situation for another moment, Ord opened his eyes again, discovering that it was early evening, and they were only a few steps away from their goal. Almost too late, he asked about the ancient times. About Ian, about his first children. And how ordinary people dealt with them, or not.

“Tell me,” Ord begged.

Stories flowed from Perfect, genuine and simple, told with words and direct memories, one arm making the occasional slow flourish as the brothers marched across the last few meters of rain-spattered beach.

Twelve

“Sometimes Alice joined me on my explorations.

“She was more a burden than a help. I was chasing living worlds, while she preferred the sterile. We moved too fast for her to accomplish much, but even on the briefest visit, she gave the dead places little nudges toward life. She warmed their cores or lent their atmosphere a potent gas or two. Another hundred million years, and who knows? Something might sprout on them…

“Yet I wonder:

“Will these worlds be declared illegal, too?

“Will janitors be dispatched, ordered to retrace our steps, scrubbing away all that wicked and treacherous prebiotic slime?”

—Perfect, in conversation

THEBRONGG SUNhad halfway set—a waxy, feeble smear shrouded by clouds and mammoth drops of new gasolines. The tall black cylinder stood before Ord, in easy reach, but when he lifted his arm, it proved to be unreachable, a dreamy, teasing sense of distance only growing as his many fingers unfolded and stretched and strained.

“Step again,” Perfect advised.

When he stepped, as his broad bare toes touched the beach, the Brongg home world evaporated. Ord was in free fall again, and the cylinder covered half the sky—a deep blackness against a bottomless void. He kicked and cried out. He screamed, making no sound. They were streaking toward their destination at a fat fraction of light speed, yet the final plunge took hours. A piece of him—a tiny new subsystem—measured the target’s size, in astonishment, and he pleaded with Perfect, begging for an explanation, or encouragement, or even a few mild lies to mollify him.

Perfect said nothing, and he was nowhere to be seen.

The impact was sudden—a brief biting pain, brilliant light of no color, then a hard and busy long sleep.

When Ord awoke he found himself on another beach. He was dressed in his original clothes, including his favorite boots, and his body was his own, unscarred and excited, his heart humming inside its enduring cage of ribs.

“Oh, you’re whole again. Thoroughly and genuinely.”

The caveman sat beside him, his knapsack serving as a pillow. Again Perfect wore skins and an oversize smile, but the blue eyes seemed distracted, even sad. Callused feet splashed in a deep rocky pool. A warm light fell from nowhere in particular, making his brother’s skin glow, pink with blood and pink with wear. A soft proud voice asked, “What do you think?”

The pool and the sea beyond were filled with a watery fluid.

But it wasn’t water, Ord sensed. The surface wore a thin persistent foam, transparent facets distorting the bottom of the pool, surf-worn stones overlaid with a matted emerald-brown hair. Life, he realized. And as life went, simple. Unsplendid. Even a little disappointing.

“Yet nothing here was remotely this interesting during my last visit,” his brother replied. “A few protocells, all scavengers. Not one honest photosynthesizer among them.”

Ord touched the foam-frosted pool, feeling warmth and a strange lack of wetness. Then he rose to his feet, glad to be quick again. Home in his body again, and whole.

“Look around,” Perfect insisted. “Opinions, please.”

A rocky beach had been shaped by waves and tireless winds. Behind the beach, taller rocks merged into hills, then mountains, then masses too huge and distant to be mere mountains. But at least as astonishing was the sea. Every little agitation, every gust and every insult, caused the foam to rise, flat-and bright-jeweled bubbles refracting light into every possible color. The boundaries between the sea and air were vague. When Ord looked up into the purest air, he saw a brilliance without sun or suns. And when he gazed far out across the flat sea, what wasn’t water turned milky white as each jewel’s color blended into one.

“This is a dyson structure,” Ord muttered, interrupting his own thoughts.

“Cylindrical and spinning. The most ordinary portion of this design, to my mind.”

Reaching into the faraway sky, on his right and left, were hair-thin structures resembling the angled spokes of a crude wheel. Ord imagined that they lent support, and in an instant, some subconscious calculation was delivered to him. He remembered the dyson’s apparent size, which implied a certain length for the spokes, and a diameter, and their thinness was an illusion, much as the giant but distant star will mimic a simple cold point.

“Nobody builds…on this scale…!”

“You were taught,” growled his brother. “You were taught.”

The hairlike spokes were thicker than some worlds. And with that revelation, Ord looked inland again, past the ordinary mountains, eyes lifting as the mind told him that the vast plateau was not what it seemed, that what he saw was the base of the nearest spoke, the rest of it obscured by the glare of the sky.

“This little ocean?” Perfect boasted. “It covers an area greater than a hundred thousand earths, and it’s simply a teardrop. A backwater. Nothing more.”

Numbed, Ord felt his legs tremble, his breath quickening.

“Taste the water,” his brother insisted. “Here. Have a sip!”

It wasn’t water, and it wasn’t wet. It was like a drink taken in a dream, the flavor too delicious to recall after the thirst was slackened. With a weak, quiet voice, Ord asked, “What is it? Tell me.”

“You guess. Go on.”

“You’ve done this with dark matter.” A boy’s best guess, it was correct and too simple by a long ways. “Because this isn’t ordinary…isn’t baryonic…”

“Alice did the magic, mostly. I set guidelines and the fat goals, but she invented the technologies.” He pulled a stone from the pool, complete with its shaggy living carpet, tucking it into a new pouch hanging from the knapsack. “What she did was rework some simple, invisible particles. She coerced them to act like atoms. A positive nucleus, a negative cloud. Then she fabricated a new periodic table—a simpler set of elements—out of the lazy atoms. Much of what you see here is dark matter, which is why it barely reacts with the universe. And that’s why, unless you know precisely what you’re seeking, this vast dyson is wondrously invisible.”

Questions formed.

Ord tried to ask all of them, in a rush.

“Oh, people have attempted dark-matter life,” Perfect explained. “From scratch and with great imagination, and all were failures. You can guess some of the difficulties. But we helped ourselves by inventing new elements, including a superior version of the honored carbon atom. And the scale of our work helps, to a point. And also, we cheated. When we had no choice, we bolstered the system with baryonic matter. A thin but essential scaffolding, if you will.”

The boy took a deep breath, wondering what he was inhaling.

“It feels like a warm day, doesn’t it?” Perfect laughed and shook his head. “The truth? We’re hovering a few degrees above Absolute. The fire above us is chilly. Interstellar hydrogen is captured as it drifts into the dyson, then it’s burned efficiently, to helium and carbon, and eventually, iron. Any energy that escapes is masked, given some natural excuse. And the iron ash isnothing in this volume of cold space.”

Ord swallowed, then swallowed again. “You wanted a better intelligence. But what’s here, in this pool…it can’t have even a stupid thought…”

“I would never, ever presume to dictate the final design to what evolves here.” Perfect paused, nothing funny about this moment. “I set up the broad parameters. Not Alice. I gave life its chance, then broke camp and began walking again.”

Ord watched his brother wade into the sea, submerging for a moment, then emerging with another stone and its gray-green hair. Again, he stuffed his prize into the pouch, no room for it and no trouble making it vanish. Then he straightened, appearing rather pleased with himself.

“How will this intelligence evolve?” Ord asked. “And why won’t it make all our ridiculous mistakes?”

Perfect retrieved his treasured spear, using it to roll a stone on its back. The mud beneath stank of odd rot, implying life. A gob of mud followed the two mossy stones into the pouch, and he said, “There’s nothing like uranium here. For example.”

Ord remembered his own stunt with Xo, a painful shame grabbing him.

“With these synthetic elements,” Perfect continued, “and with the neurons they can build, thought and action will be in balance. I hope, I hope.” The older brother appeared uncharacteristically sober, yet sobriety betrayed a deep and abiding happiness. He was happy stuffing mud into that impossible pouch. He was happy standing again, wiping his dirty hands against his bare stomach, squinting at the sky as he asked again, “What was our golden age?”

“After the glaciers melted,” Ord recalled.When the world was the universe, the stars unimaginable.

“This is the universe.” A skyward thrust of the spear. “What’s born here has no reason or rationale to imagine the stars.”

Ord stared at his brother, waiting.

“Whatever prospers—whatever organism can rule this dyson—is free to call itself the master of creation. And why not? It won’t sound even a millionth as silly as we do when we make the same boasts.”

“I’ve never made that boast,” Ord complained, his whisper building toward anger. “I’ve never even thought those words…!”

“Which is possibly, just possibly, why Alice selected you.”

Ord shut his mouth, remaining silent.

“Do you know what I am? What I most truly am?” Perfect asked the question with a calm, almost distracted air, again wiping the stinking muck from his hands, palms and fingers painting horned smears on his belly. “A master of creation, maybe? Am I?” From everywhere came a thunderous, world-shaking laugh, and then the ancient brother spat, and said, “Bullshit! Bullshit! What I am…I’m a little ape who got lucky…!”

Thirteen

“Maybe our universe is simple as this:

“We are someone else’s dark matter. Protons and electrons have been woven from shadow and dream, then coerced into cooperating, building the baryonic realm. We are a tiny bubble, insubstantial and nearly invisible, drifting through an enormous and dense and fabulously brilliant cosmos that we cannot see, lovely pieces of it passing through us, and only the faintest tug of gravity betraying its presence. But of course that logic implies that this larger universe might itself be a gossamer drop of dark matter drifting inside an even greater universe…which itself amounts to nothing…

“Oh, I’m sorry. I was mistaken. That’s not simple at all, is it?”

—Perfect, in conversation

HOISTING HIS KNAPSACKto his shoulder, Perfect said, “Stay here.”

The boy blurted, “Where are you going?” Then, embarrassed by his own anxieties, he added, “I want to stay with you.”

The answer was a wink and grin, effortlessly charming. Then Perfect picked up his spear with his partial hand, remarking, “I’ve got work, and there isn’t time. Stay. Wait. I’ll be back before too long, I hope.”

“But I’m here to help,” Ord protested. “To do good, right—?”

“Not yet.” Then his brother began to step toward him, and he wasn’t there anymore. The step carried him out of sight, in an instant, and Ord spun and dropped to his butt, feeling chilled. A hundred new questions demanded to be asked, the old ones needing to be asked again, and he felt abandoned, cheated, and in every way, small.

In a whisper, he said, “I’m tired of this family.”

A lazy little wind blew from the sea, cold as liquid helium but warm against his present skin. Other than the wind, nothing moved. No answers presented themselves. The world lay before him like a painting, and an unfinished painting at that. Ord slowly grew sick of feeling sorry for himself, and he made himself stand again, and walk, following the shoreline at his own modest, archaic pace.

There was no sun to set, but there were nights.

Darkness emerged slowly, exposing the illuminated far side of the dyson, and Ord sat on a different beach, bare feet pressing into the warm facsimile of sand, eyes gazing at that remote and enormous, ill-defined terrain. Count every world that the Chamberlains had terraformed, skin each body like an animal and sew the bloody skins together, and the great robe wouldn’t carpet half of this realm.

How did Alice and Perfect manage it, he wondered; and then he knew. It was because dark matter was so abundant and amiable. It was because self-replicating robots had done the largest share of the work. And it was because the dyson’s true mass wasn’t much greater than a single star’s—a wondrous home made from smoke and lit from within by cold candles.

Somewhere inside Ord, out of easy reach, were reservoirs of fact, languid explanations and bottled lectures beyond number.

He practiced pulling up the knowledge as best he could.

There was a text on the Brongg—their immeasurable history, the bulk of it magnificently dull—but its sheer size and sameness was an event, majestic in its own right, and admirable. Sitting on the alien beach, in the dark, Ord found himself lost in the intricacies of a Brongg government born in the Triassic and still thriving today. He barely noticed the dawn. A feeble glow began nowhere, and everywhere. This was a universe without shadows. The boy blinked and looked skyward, wondering how these qualities would affect future psyches…and suddenly an Alice talent was engaged, making a rich stream of projections and guesses that were just as quickly interrupted by a sound, a gentle wrong-pitched splashing, that caused Ord to drop his gaze, focusing on a distinctive beachcomber.

It was Perfect, back again.

Ord was halfway standing when he noticed the clothes, the posture, and the five whole fingers on each open hand.

Hesitating, Ord found that he had no voice.

With a quiet, terrified tone, the other Chamberlain said, “Lyman. I’m just Lyman.”

“Brother…?”

“You remember me, don’t you?” His horror was palpable. His soul was a gray glow easily seen. “They asked me to come, to talk with you, to tell you…offer you…oh, Ord…! Do you know how much trouble you’re in…?”

“WHY WOULDN’TIremember you?”

Lyman straightened, blinked. The answer seemed obvious, which is why he moved to greater questions, explaining events from his point of view.

“You vanished. We thought you were sitting in your room. I even spoke to you, twice, except it wasn’t you. You were gone, and a security sweep sounded the alarm.” Remembering some careful coaching, Lyman smiled urgently. “We searched for you.” The smile brightened. “I went to the stable…I thought you might be hiding…”

“I’m sorry to worry anyone.”

The brother took a deep breath, then exhaled.

“What happened next?”

“Next?” A pained, prolonged swallow. “The Nuyens came for a visit. A high-ranking delegation. They claimed an old Chamberlain had been living under our feet, in secret, for many years—”

“How could they know?”

“They’ve watched us. Better than we watch ourselves, it seems.” Lyman glanced at the enormous sea, but nothing registered in his eyes. “There were long meetings and accusations from both sides—you could feel the tension—then someone broke into a facility in the Oort cloud, and some of Alice’s talents were stolen. After that, you could taste the panic—”

“What talents?”

Lyman shuddered, then wrestled himself back into a half composure. He didn’t know what was stolen. He didn’t want to know. “Of course, they demanded help from someone you would trust,” he admitted. “Which isn’t me, I warned them. I tried to explain it. But you know how the Old Ones can be. They’d already selected me, and I didn’t have any choice—”

“I know the feeling,” Ord volunteered.

Lyman hesitated.

“Who picked you?”

“Everyone.” Finally, Lyman seemed to realize that he was talking too freely. Some force had a grip on his soul, making it scrupulously honest. “There were Chamberlains,” he continued. “Plus Nuyens, and Glosures. Lees, and the other Nuyen allies. Even the Sanchexes were present.” He paused for an instant, shivering, and with a mixture of terror and wonder admitted, “Even Sanchexes were acting scared.”

“How are you going to help them?”

“Like this.” Wasn’t it obvious? “You and a rogue Chamberlain had stolen parts of Alice. That was kept secret from the public, of course. So was the mission to find you. They asked if I’d speak to you, when it was time.”

Ord found himself laughing. A genuine, quiet chuckle ended with a wary shake of the head. “Oh, they asked you, did they?”

Lyman hesitated, attempting a wry smile. “I went to sleep.” He said the words with a longing, as if he wished he were asleep now. “It was a long chase, but here I am.”

“Here you are,” Ord agreed. He had sudden warm feelings for Lyman, and he was sorry to have dragged him into this mess. Was that the logic? Disarm the renegade boy with a pitiful sibling? Or were these feelings entirely his own? “I didn’t steal anything, Lyman. Not from Alice, I didn’t.”

“I knew you didn’t. It was the old Chamberlain’s fault.”

With a graceful ease, Ord refused to think about Perfect. The man’s presence and possibilities never crossed his mind.

“What we could do,” Lyman continued, “is meet the others. You aren’t responsible. You were kidnapped, or whatever we want to call it, and I’ll explain to them—”

“Who’s with you?”

“A sister. Millicent. She was the ranking elder just then.”

The One-Hundred and Eighty-First Chamberlain.

Lyman tried another smile. “See how important you are?”

“Who else?”

“Just one. A Nuyen.” Lyman paused, pretending to deliberate over words already thoroughly practiced. “He is in charge,” said the brother. Then he attempted to lie, adding, “The Nuyen is as old and powerful as Alice.”

Perfect had seen two pursuers. Lyman had been cargo, inert and innocent.

“What do you think of this place?” Ord asked.

Lyman wanted to keep his eyes on his brother. But he glanced at the sea, then toward the mountains. “Lovely,” he blurted, with a surprising conviction.

“But you came here to destroy it, didn’t you?”

“Not me,” his brother sputtered. “But if it’s illegal…if it’s immoral…doesn’t it have to be destroyed…?”

Here was a vast realm that endangered no one—a universe unto itself—and Ord felt a scalding, enormous rage.

He gave a low moan, stepping toward Lyman.

A terrified voice cried out, “No,” as his brother retreated. He was begging, pleading. Hands raised, he said, “Just come with me. We’ll talk to them, and maybe there’s some arrangement or compromise—”

Ord picked up a smooth white stone, for emphasis. “They’re not going to hurt this place—”

And a Nuyen appeared, followed by a Chamberlain sister standing to his left and a half step behind. The Nuyen was an adult version of Xo—simple dark hair; unreadable black eyes; and the barest beginnings of a humorless smile—and with a hard, clean, cutting voice, he said, “You’re a good boy, but be honest. You haven’t any idea what you are doing.”

Ord’s emotions were being tugged and knotted, but he felt utterly confident in his mistrust of the Nuyens. That much was genuine. “Touch nothing,” he warned the intruders, the words sounding like thunderbolts.

The Nuyen tilted his head, a thin amusement showing. “A threat, is it? From a boy?”

The sister—a complete stranger—called to Ord by name, conjuring a face vast and maternal, concern dripping from her soft blue eyes and the very sorry mouth. She was nothing. She was here for show and as an observer, and Ord stared only at the Nuyen, lifting the stone overhead as he cried out, “Leave. All of you, leave.”

The enemy showed no fear or hesitation. But behind the face, in some small way, there was a flicker. A thousand courages were being tested, and Ord saw a handful of them collapse into terror.

With horror and a sweet exhilaration, Ord wondered what parts of Alice he had now. Energies, liquid and hot, surged through him before radiating in every direction. The beach shivered. The great sea threw clouds of jeweled foam high into a brilliant sky. And Ord pictured the Nuyen dying, slowly and miserably dying, his ugly soul drenched in agony to the end.

Ord’s destiny was set. He had to obliterate these enemies, and then fortify and hunker down, and anyone else who came to destroy this place would have to pass through him…!

A voice spoke. Familiar, close.

A lying voice, Ord told himself.

The old Nuyen and sister had retreated in panic, leaving empty bodies standing on the beach. But their souls hadn’t fled far enough. With some newly engaged eyes, Ord saw them, and he measured the distances and velocities, the rock no longer simple and cold, and his hand far more than a hand.

That voice, again.

Was it Lyman? No. Lyman was tucked into a ball, sobbing to himself. Some other voice was singing in his ears, beseeching him to stop.

Ord refused. Following his instincts and anger, he prepared to fling the nonstone, aiming to murder—

A flash came, and a dull white pain.

And he collapsed, giving a miserable low groan.

Piercing his chest, cutting organs and functions he had only begun to feel, was a long blade of razor-sharp flint. Ord saw the Folsom point jutting from his sternum. He was down on his hands and knees, breathing out of habit, little red bubbles detaching from his mouth and drifting on the warm wind. He watched one bubble, something about it enchanting. Weightless, it swirled and rose, then fell again. In its slick red face he could see his own face, for an instant. Then it settled on top of a bare pink foot, and it burst without sound, without fuss. Whose foot? Why couldn’t he remember? But Ord was having trouble thinking at all, and he felt quite chilled, and the bubbles had stopped coming, and he very much missed them…

Fourteen

“…and with my life, my wealth, and my perishable name, I now and always shall defend the Great Peace.”

—from the Families’ pledge

“WHAT POSSIBLE SWEETgood would have come from it,” Perfect began, “if I had stood nearby while you killed them?”

Opening his eyes, Ord found himself sitting on a cave floor, a small fire burning at his feet, his brother illuminated by the golden flames and half-hidden by their swirling, jasmine-scented smoke.

“A rash thought, a crude act, and thenwhat ?”

The boy gasped, a familiar pain battering him. In the center of his chest lay a slick raised scar, white as milk, and aching, and apparently permanent.

Quietly, with remorse, he said, “I am sorry…”

Perfect said nothing for a long while, wiggling his fingers and stumps as they warmed in the fire, his face contemplative and remote.

The cave was constructed from rocks. They were neatly stacked, the facing walls arching toward a shadowy ceiling, each stone adorned with some shaggy life. Handfuls of mud filled the gaps. Every surface glistened, and something that wasn’t quite water trickled and dripped somewhere in the darkness.

Ord shuddered, saying, “I wanted to protect—”

“The dyson, yes.” His brother shook his head, warning him, “First, the project is my responsibility. And second, there were exactly five sentient organisms on board it. Only five. You and myself, and poor Lyman, and your intended victims. You were eager to commit two murders to save a mindless slime, and that’s not the moral, responsible act of a decent soul. Chamberlain or not.”

“How is Lyman?”

“Sleeping on that beach, and safe.”

Ord glanced at his surroundings. “This is your pouch, isn’t it? This is where you’ve been putting the rocks and mud.”

“A representative population, yes. Held in suspended animation.” Perfect tossed a stone chip into the fire, sparks scattering. “That Nuyen and our sister are drifting at a safe distance, awaiting reinforcements. They suspected that I was helping you, but they’re just beginning to guess the powers you hold. Most of Alice’s talents were waiting to be cataloged. They went in hoping to win your surrender, without incident, before dealing with me and my garden.”

“What kinds of powers…?”

A dark, slow laugh ended with a dark voice confessing, “I don’t know exactly what you’re carrying, Ord. I’m very nearly as ignorant as you.”

The boy dipped his head, breathing deeply.

“Before Alice fled the Core, she visited me, warning me about the coming explosion. She made me promise to give the baby Chamberlain certain labeled pieces of herself, and that’s exactly what I did; and then I was supposed to take you to a suitable starting point. Which I have just done, finally.”

Alice had said, “The baby.” Their unborn sister could have been chosen. Or Lyman. Whoever happened to be youngest when Alice arrived at home.

Perfect jumped to his feet, remarking, “Perhaps we should make our escape now. Before those promised reinforcements arrive, that is.”

“To where?” the boy inquired.

“I am leaving on a million-year walk.” The voice was calm, the face resigned. “Out between the galaxies, I should think. Then, in some good cold place, I’ll rebuild this dyson. Stone for stone. And afterward…well, there might be a galaxy or two worth exploring. Who knows?”

“Can I walk with you?”

“Not even one step. No.”

Ord expected that answer, but the words stung nonetheless.

“Alice asked for my help,” his brother explained, “and I gave it. Out of love and trust and habit, and in that order. She has her reasons, we can hope. What those reasons might be, we can guess. Whatever the circumstances, you’re now to help Alice, or not. I won’t presume to tell you which choice to make.”

“She told me,” Ord whispered. “I have to save something.”

Perfect kicked stones and cold embers over the fire’s heart. “I think I know what that something is, and truth be told, I don’t envy you.”

“It’s fragile, and Alice pledged to protect it…”

The maimed hand was offered.

Ord took it, standing. “It could be an illegal world. Is it? One with sentience, maybe?”

“I’ll show you,” his brother promised. “Come.”

The boy’s feet refused to move.

Without firelight, a softer, stranger glow illuminated the cavern. Perfect was a silhouette. His voice was close and warm, coaxing Ord by saying, “It’s not a world, no. Follow me.”

Ord was strong enough to butcher a godly Nuyen, yet his legs were too heavy to lift. He fought with them, shuffling forward, noticing finally that his feet were bare and his only clothes were trousers made from simple skins. Looking at himself in the gloom, he thought of a lucky ape. Then he managed a little step, and another, and he looked up at the sky that he both anticipated and could not believe.

“I took us on a course perpendicular to the galactic plane,” Perfect explained, standing beside him and squeezing his hand. “Up and out, then we danced around a black hole that sent us partway home again.”

Ord was sobbing, tears flowing, tasting like a long-ago sea.

“We walked along that beach, but we also crossed several tens of thousands of light-years. Out, then back again. Which means you can see some of what’s happened since we left.”

The Milky Way covered the sky. With new eyes, Ord could see every sun and every world—every lump of stone bigger than a fist, it seemed—and the Core was the brilliant horror that he expected, its detonation relentless and vast, radiations and expelled wreckage rushing outward in a withering toxic storm. Here was a baby quasar, human-made. Worse than almost every reasonable prediction made during Ord’s long-ago youth.

Here was a tragedy, but a tragedy with calculable, endurable ends.

The greater horrors were smaller, scattered through the galaxy’s broad spiral arms. Ord couldn’t stop seeing them, even when he shut his human eyes. Healthy suns were exploding. Living worlds were being crushed to dust. Unknown powers battered one another with a frantic, relentless violence. The Great Peace was collapsing. Old and fragile, it might evaporate totally before Ord could return home. And to accomplish what…? With or without Alice’s powers, what good could he do…?

With a solemn voice, Perfect said, “Bless the dead!”

At Ord’s feet was a knapsack filled with talents. In his left hand lay a fine new spear, its ash shaft polished smooth and the long Folsom point freshly made. And in his right hand was a simple stone mug, the pungent odor of an old-fashioned liquor pervading the night air.

“Bless the dead,” Ord repeated, with feeling.

The brothers touched mugs with a cool, almost musical ringing.

As Ord drank, Perfect told him, “I want to give you a talent. I don’t have Alice’s magic, but here’s something that you might appreciate.”

Ord’s mug became a nearly spherical ball.

Not heavy, not large.

It was a head. It was a Chamberlain head, male and complete with shaggy red hair and the piercing blue eyes. And as he stared at the gift, the head let loose an enormous laugh, so pure and authentic that Ord couldn’t help but smile for a moment, closing his hand over the sweet gift, knowing what it was and almost saying, “Thank you,” before he realized that no one was standing beside him.

Alone, he squeezed the head until it vanished, becoming part of his immortal flesh.

Again Ord looked at the Milky Way, using every eye, while the new talent reminded him that most of the many billion stars remained at peace, tranquil and inviting by any measure. He even managed to laugh in a quiet, hopeful way.

Picking up his knapsack now.

All things considered,he thought to himself,it is a lovely night for a little walk.