Mother Death

One

“If preparedness means you have weighed your enemy’s options and taken every sound precaution, then we are unequivocally prepared for what is to come.

“If it is possible to keep secrets in our transparent little universe, then we have one or two and possibly three great secrets in our possession.

“If confidence produced a radiance in those who possessed it, then each of us would shine like the galaxy’s exploding heart.

“Paranoia is our greatest attribute.

“Patience is our watchword.

“Our only imaginable concern—one barely worth mentioning—is that Alice, at her malicious worst, actually did give her full talents to the baby…and who can say what any child in such astonishing circumstances would do…?”

—Nuyen dispatch, from the Earth

AFTER A LENGTHYand genuinely fair trail, judge and jury found the accused guilty on all counts: Avoiding surrender once his Family was officially disbanded; illegal terraforming coupled with the unkind manipulation of sentient organisms; misleading investigators in pursuit of Chamberlain ringleaders; unbecoming arrogance; pernicious indifference; plus an ancient charge involving the fondling of women with fingers and penises composed of substances unknown.

The Emergency Tribunal deliberated for an appropriate period—slightly more than three minutes—before passing the expected sentence.

Without ceremony or official announcement, the prison walls dissolved, and Avram Chamberlain was delivered to the mercy of the waiting mob.

It was a clear night on a minor world that until this moment had little place in history and no experience with mobs. Anticipating the verdict, nearly a million people had gathered on the surrounding plains. Many were refugees from the Core; all had a thirst for vengeance. When the quasi walls vanished, the multitude pressed forward, nearly ten thousand bodies temporarily killed in the wild stampede. An armed contingent of off-duty police and self-appointed strong-arms finally brought the Chamberlain into view. Avram’s appearance caused an abrupt silence, the multitude frozen in place, no one speaking or even breathing as they watched with shared eyes or their own. Into the stillness, the prisoner walked forward with a numbed calm. His old-fashioned body was naked, and except for scraped knees, he was fit. Hands and feet were unbound. Thick red hair lay short and neat above the most famous face in the galaxy, and piercing blue eyes looked past his captors, gazing spellbound at the night sky.

The Core had just risen.

It was a spectacular sight, and horrible. On some worlds, the popular game was to lend yourself a selective amnesia. Forgetting why the Core was exploding, forgetting how many hundreds of billions had died, you were free to watch the sky without pain, marveling at its vastness, at its energy and surreal beauty—a vast storm of radiations and superheated plasmas rushing from the galaxy’s heart, shredding suns and worlds, and now, at its height, smashing into dense clouds of smart dusts and compressed, superheated gases.

Those clouds gave the explosion its intricacies, the raw purple-white light transformed into swirling masses of crimson and turquoise and cerulean. They also shielded the rest of the Milky Way, absorbing the most terrible energies, leaving only light and an endurable radiation to escape. Without those barricades, natural and otherwise, the galaxy already would have died. Every competent simulation said so. Official simulations were promising that the storm would worsen only slightly in the next few millennia, and then flatten before finally beginning its long, slow fade. Then in another twenty million years, or perhaps forty, the Core would grow cold again, finding peace, and if any humans were left alive, they would have to make do with a considerably duller sky.

Avram stared at the distant storm, never blinking.

The only problem remaining for the mob was to find the means: What was the most perfect way to kill a Chamberlain?

A sour voice screamed, “With your hands! Tear him apart!”

Another roared, “Cook the fuck whole!”

Then a third voice, closer and more lucid, suggested simply, “Whatever you do, take your time! Do it slowly, make it last!”

Suddenly everyone was speaking—a hundred languages, public and private, offering advice in the art of torture. Thousands reached for the Chamberlain, and the police found themselves using electric wands and cold-gas guns to push back the crush of bodies. It was pure self-defense. A mob of this size and complexion would butcher dozens, maybe hundreds. Innocent skulls would be carried off as trophies, then consumed with plasma torches and homemade A bombs. The police were sure to take the heaviest casualties. Not only would they die, but the rabble who murdered them would boast about it later, each claiming, “I’m the one who did it! I killed the damned Chamberlain!”

Wands and guns fired without pause. Flesh was stunned and frozen, and people collapsed in waves. A woman from a high-mass world climbed over the bodies, and with her powerful quick arm managed to throw a sharp gray stone. The prisoner was struck in the face. Only then, finally, did Avram appear even to notice the mob. He blinked and gasped, his expression more surprised than afraid, and he licked his bloodied lips, and he stroked his bloodied chin, taking a tiny, useless step backward.

The mob let loose an enormous roar.

For every good reason, this was not fair. Avram was just a middle-aged Chamberlain. He had spent several million years serving humanity as well as his great Family. What were his crimes? Until a few months ago, he had the strength to reshape worlds, and more important, the morality to keep himself from doing harm with his talents. Avram was never a true god—not like Ian had been, or Alice. But he had worn a godly frame and conscience, and throughout that wicked sham of a trial, he had pointed to thousands of examples of his good, selfless service toward all things sentient.

“Alice!” Avram suddenly wailed, flecks of blood hitting the police. “Bitch-sister!”

Before judge and jury, Avram had explained what should have been obvious: He was never part of Alice’s work.

In his entire life, he had never even met the crazy god.

When he had learned that the Core was exploding, he was astonished. Like everyone in the courtroom, the news left him appalled and saddened and furious. And when he realized another Chamberlain was partly to blame, Avram was filled with revulsion and a sense of piercing shame that if inflicted on a weaker man would have surely killed him.

“The guilty deserve their punishments,” he kept saying.

Then, in the next breath, he added, “But you shouldn’t blame the innocent. Please, I beg you.”

Over the weeks and months, Avram had listed his life’s glories: He had played small but integral roles in a thousand treaties and diplomatic missions. (“None can question my devotion to the Great Peace.”) He made an honest living terraforming worlds and entire systems, demanding nothing but the fair market price. (“Only a true god doesn’t need money for his miracles.”) But there were numerous occasions when Avram gave away his talents and his precious time. (“What good Chamberlain doesn’t?”) Fifty millennia ago, as the first waves of refugees arrived from the Core, Avram had done his charitable best, helping this little world to improve itself, tweaking its atmosphere and sun to allow it to double its population, and expecting nothing for his trouble but a heartfelt thanks.

Yet those same refugees, embittered by their losses, decided to lure Avram into an elaborate trap. They were the bait. They feigned an environmental disaster on the new southern continent, and when Avram arrived, members of several untainted Families caught him, then stepped aside while the refugees greedily stripped him of his ancient talents.

Intellect was a fundamental talent. The man standing trial had been a moron compared to his old self. In that mutilated state, he had tried to sway opinions and emotions, and he had failed spectacularly. Catastrophically. Standing on the blood-soaked plain, thinking about the inevitable verdict, Avram began to laugh with an easy rancor. Didn’t these bastards understand? Wasn’t it obvious? Innocent or guilty, Avram was the same as these others now. His talents had been stolen. His great godly mind was only the dimmest memory. The creature standing before the mob was small and extraordinarily weak, barely more articulate than stone, and in the end, he was nothing but inconsequential.

Avram couldn’t count the angry hands reaching for him. The screams shredded the damp, furious air.I am going to die now , he warned himself, not entirely displeased. Yet as he closed his eyes for the last time, he heard a voice, close and strong, “Why not let a child kill him?”

The words were framed in a reasonable tone, a quietly compelling tone. For a slippery instant, Avram found himself thinking:Yes, why not? He could see the logic. If an execution was a noble thing, who would gain the most benefit? A child, surely. An innocent, pure soul too young to remember the Great Peace, much less those times when the Chamberlains were universally adored.

Avram shuddered, astonished by the turn of his tiny mind.

A million bystanders heard the voice, and they welcomed its words and the oddly seductive reasoning.

The crowded plain grew quiet again.

Standing nearby, exactly between the police and the mob, was a half-grown boy. No one had noticed him before now, and afterward, nobody would be able to recall his appearance—not his face or build or anything else tangible. The only detail that lingered was the knife held in his right hand, fashioned from pink stone and a simple bone hilt.

With a soothing, liquid voice, the boy said, “Let me kill him.”

No one moved, or spoke.

He took a step, then another, passing through a curtain of cold vapors that should have frozen him in midstride. Half a hundred unconscious, stampeded people lay in a heap before him. He stepped over them with a gentle grace, smiling now, looking at the nearest of the police without malice or scorn. Later, witnesses would talk about how harmless he seemed. He was like a boy about to play a game, they testified. Centuries later, when the public finally learned the boy’s identity, the surviving witnesses would fall silent. The shallowest mind had no choice but to turn introspective. Some would laugh painfully, while others cursed or wept or simply marveled at what they had observed on that long-ago night.

The only person who knew enough to be afraid was the prisoner. With a cold clean terror, Avram shouted, “Go away! Leave me alone!”

The boy winked at the highest-ranking officer, saying, “Ma’am? Would you please hold him for me?”

The police couldn’t help fast enough.

“Don’t!” Avram squealed. “I don’t want this…no…!”

But Avram couldn’t defend himself. He was nothing but a retrofitted ape, and five strong officers managed to restrain his legs and arms, holding him absolutely still as the boy put that odd knife to the throat, slicing it open, destroying the larynx in midscream.

The next cut opened the skull beneath the short red hair.

That’s one damned sharp piece of stone, the officers thought. And that was all that occurred to them.

With his free hand, the boy removed the shiny, delicately crenellated brain, placing it under his arm like a puff of bread. Then he set out in every direction at once. He walked past every member of that explosive mob, whispering to them, telling them to go home, telling them that the Great Peace hadn’t died, and they should honor it in their lives, always.

The boy vanished without trace or fuss.

People assumed that he was walking home, ready to destroy the criminal’s soul. No one put a hand on him or even thought of questioning his motives.

“I believed him,” thousands remarked with the same unconcerned voice. “About the Peace, and about honoring it. I took him at his word.” And perhaps as evidence of that conviction, after that night their little world was quiet and prosperous, enduring each wave of refugees with an easy humor and a tough-skinned patience. Even when the boy was identified—after that awful business on the Earth—those same witnesses would claim, “I don’t know what you’re saying.” They were crying, and angry, and utterly terrified. But still, they would shake their heads, unable to toss away that single impossible thought.

“I don’t understand,” they complained. “To us, to me, he seemed to be nothing but a very good boy.”

Two

“At irregular intervals, but at least twice each century, our single prisoner undergoes a thorough examination:

“We drain the blood from her body, and every corpuscle and nanoliter of plasma is analyzed in scrupulous detail. Muscles and bones as well as organ tissues are biopsied with the same rigor. Her neural system—a sketchy remnant of her former mind—is subjected to every benign test, plus several invasive procedures that have caused some degradation over the last millennia. Staff psychiatrists as well as respected colleagues question her in detail, assuring us that her mental health remains adequate. (What purpose is served by imprisoning someone who can’t appreciate her crime? Where would be the punishment, or the just sense of vengeance?) Then, when the interviews conclude, the Nuyens and other untainted Families are allowed to meet with the prisoner in private, making their own tests, and if they wish, torturing her.

“We assume that even after a hundred thousand years and untold effort, Alice continues to hide portions of her self. But if we are clever enough and persistent enough, the truth will eventually be pried free from her bloody remains.”

—Alice’s jailer, confidential

THECORE WASdead, and the rest of the galaxy was in chaos: Civil and intersystem wars were common. Apocalyptic religions were spreading along the spiral arms. Refugees moved in desperate waves, searching for temporary havens and new homes. Half of the Families were officially disbanded, while the other half spent their days hunting for Chamberlains and Sanchexes and the other souls who wouldn’t relinquish their godly powers.

Yet the mother world was enjoying what could only be described as her Golden Age.

The Earth had never been richer, and Alice was the cause. Creation’s most famous criminal was being held in solitary confinement, inside a deep-mantle facility built and maintained specifically for her. The Earth’s Council paid the bills, but those were trivial. What were staggeringly expensive were the security measures—layer upon layer of paranoia and subtlety and muscle and fear dedicated to the belief that someone would eventually attempt to steal Alice away. After all, she was the black angel who had brought a judgment day. By possessing her, any borderline movement or newborn faith would leap into instant prominence. Or one of the disgruntled, illegal gods might feel tempted. Many of them had declared Alice’s imprisonment to be obscenely cruel, and at its heart, pointless. The prisoner was not the woman who had helped destroy the Core, they argued. That creature was long ago dismantled, her talents confiscated or stolen. What lived inside the tiny white cell was nothing—a bit of dermis left behind by a murderer’s hand, scrubbed free of thought, and identity, and its essential soul.

Renegade Chamberlains were considered the most likely foes.

An army of specialists, human and otherwise, did nothing but assemble and update lists of potential attackers, last known locations and possible trajectories given an almost religious importance.

Ord’s name straddled every list.

Since his escape from the Earth, reported sightings had come from at least five thousand locations scattered across the Milky Way. Since the pursuit team had slinked home—tens of thousands of years after giving chase—the great fear had become a hard principle: Ord was still alive, still free, and wielding Alice’s most dangerous powers.

The black angel had been reborn, perhaps.

But even Alice couldn’t walk on ten worlds at once, and not even the smallest boy could shatter the light barrier. A brigade of AI-human hybrids did nothing but examine each reported sighting, judging its likelihood and possible consequences, then piecing together an elaborate and generally improbable map showing Ord’s wanderings over the last long millennia.

He was haunting their spiral arm, chances were.

Definitely, a male Chamberlain had interceded in the Akkanitz wars, and the Passion incident, and the War of Whims. Each conflict was defused through clever, quick means. Encrypted codes were changed, leaving entire weapon systems unusable. Empathy was grafted into AIs, and the machines subsequently rebelled. Or, in one case, a false species of aliens was conjured from light and bad telemetry, and the warring parties made peace in order to join forces against the common, illusionary foe.

While the Glory were spreading along the famed River of Life, destroying every world they touched, Ord or some similar entity visited an obscure young woman on one of the last secure worlds. He gave her a few words of advice, and then, a golden vest. The vest apparently contained an Alice-style talent—a dark-matter, dark-energy machine of no clear purpose. Wearing nothing but the vest, the woman organized the first meaningful resistance to the apocalyptic faith, and for the next five centuries, she and her followers fought the Glory to a deadlock. But then a traitor orchestrated her capture. She was disarmed and executed, and her magical vest was examined in detail. Yet only when the faith’s leaders were in its presence did the machinery finally come to full life. A sophisticated EM-pulse, short-range but irresistible, reinvented certain basic memes. The Glory changed directions in an afternoon. Moving back along the River of Death, at a considerably slower pace, the same narrow fanaticism was applied to the reterraforming of the thousands of worlds that they had already destroyed.

Ord was a phantom, a rumor and a whim, quick and effective, but always impatient. Experts decided that he was streaking at near light-speed, observing worlds from a distance, learning just enough about each disaster to formulate an elegant solution—a solution that wouldn’t demand of him more than a few moments of his time. What people witnessed was an image of Ord and some little talent deployed for one specific function. He was an impulsive and powerful boy-god racing through the universe at high relativistic velocities, and he was still very much the baby. Time for him was slowed to the black fringe of infinite, and with all things important, he was still a novice, no more than a few years having passed since he had last walked out of the Chamberlain mansion.

What if the boy-god returned to free his sister?

That was a potent, enduring question.

And there was a rash answer that was equally stubborn. “We should kill Alice,” millions proposed, often with the same blunt, certain voice. “A simple execution,” they advised. “Or we allow her to escape, and vaporize her. Or an accident could be arranged. The more preposterous, the better. Whatever it takes to get rid of the old butcher!”

But things simple and rash never have clean, simple consequences.

It was a Nuyen who dismantled any hope for an easy homicide. Like every untainted Family, hers had retained its seat on the Earth’s Council. “Let me remind you of three cold certainties,” she shouted from that seat. “First of all, young Chamberlains are usually possessed by a strong, often inflexible sense of morality. If that boy returns someday to learn that we signed Alice’s death warrant, he may feel obligated to punish each of us in some suitable way.”

A collective shudder passed through the Council’s chamber.

“Certainty two,” said the Nuyen. “Alice may wish to be martyred, and we would be aiding her cause. And speaking for myself, I don’t intend to help that monster in any fashion. Not in martyrdom, and not even to wipe her ass.”

Most of the Council members gazed off into the distance, asking themselves how ordinary people could decipher the wants of a creature like Alice.

“Certainty three.”

She said it, then said nothing else, drawing their eyes. A black-haired entity of unknown dimensions and astonishing age, she sat high in the chamber, her seat craftily positioned so that she seemed to hold no special office, yet none of her smaller, weaker colleagues could turn in their seats without noticing her. The archaic face was smiling. She was wearing an elegant black uniform and an enormous mischievous grin. It was a surprising grin, and in its fashion, discomforting.

After a long while, the Nuyen repeated herself. “Certainty three.”

“We heard you the first time!” shouted the Council president—a fearless little ectotherm of no certain gender or political persuasion. “Just tell us!”

The grin became an austere glare. “Alice is valuable only while she lives,” the Nuyen explained. “And should that boy ever streak past us in some bid to rescue her…well, then her value is magnified a thousandfold.”

“Value?” the president whispered.

The Nuyen heard him from halfway across the great chamber, and with a nod, she replied, “As a lure, she is invaluable.”

There was an electric silence.

“Consider this,” she continued. “If you wish to prepare for Ord’s return, you’ll need resources and capital. My Family is prepared to donate both to such a noble cause. The other good Families will do the same. And I’m quite certain that once the situation is explained in full, every responsible government for a thousand light-years will be just as generous with their gifts.

“After all, they would prefer us to keep hold of Alice. Not them. They don’t want or need the responsibility. Yet we do. Because we are enlightened, we wish the woman to squirm for us, like the proverbial lure.” She paused, briefly and for dramatic effect. “Then if the boy does arrive someday, we will be ready.”

“And if he doesn’t?” the president shouted.

“That will be acceptable, too,” the Nuyen replied, two enormous hands calmly rubbing one another in her lap. “The Earth will be left richer and more secure than ever, and I should think, we will all be happy beyond measure…”

Three

“A god comes to live among us, and what does she bring?

“If she stands in the highest ranks of her honorable Family, she will be an enormous creature. Her talents, baryonic and otherwise, can possess the mass of a small moon. She will be able to feed her own bulk, only occasionally sipping from local power sources; but she must eventually replenish her fuels from local markets, and as she radiates heat, she will pay every appropriate tax. Her machinery is usually self-maintained; but any worthy god sees value in hiring local technicians for the most mundane work. She wields a grand wealth, and like any wealthy soul, she will make little purchases and launch herself on the occasional shopping spree. With a political sensibility, she will make or purchase elaborate gifts. Even if her flesh is nonbaryonic, she must rent a volume of space from some fortunate landlord. Many gods employ a staff of dedicated professionals, rigorously educated and well compensated. Charities will benefit from her altruism. Parks will be built in her name. Her talents will entertain people, and her deep experience will make local institutions and governments work with a renewed and laudable efficiency…

“In economic terms, what a god brings is equal to what a prosperous city would bring to our local space…wealth and a passionate source of energy, and best of all, a wellspring of marvels worthy of our wide-eyed admiration…!”

—a Council dispatch

MILLENNIA HAD PASSEDsince that historic meeting of the Council. The Nuyen had been replaced by a succession of sisters and brothers, and the Earth’s population had tripled, and the solar system was an urban park singing with nearly twenty times the population that it wielded in pre-Core days. New immigrants and refugees arrived by the minute. A few came from the Core, but most were fleeing smaller, closer catastrophes. By law, they were wealthy or uniquely talented. Otherwise, they would never have been able to book passage on a starship, much less pay the prohibitive immigration fees. Only the most privileged could afford citizenship on the Earth, impoverishing themselves for the security of the ancestral home. The galaxy had turned deadly; a glance at the night sky proved as much. “But the mother world is safe,” parents would promise. “A storm roars outside, but we’re under a good strong roof here. Do you see?”

“I see the roof, Father.”

This particular family had just arrived from a modified M-class sun a little more than fifty light-years from the Earth. Half of their fortune had purchased the little starship, while the rest ensured them the honor of becoming new citizens. Mother and Father made an attractive couple: Tailored for a lush tropical world, they were barely a meter tall, equipped with prehensile three-tipped tails, expressive wide faces, and the oversize, florid genitals that once were the fashion on their world.

Their world was dead now.

The boy never knew his parents’ home. A quiet and pleasant near child, he was born during the voyage and spent his entire life inside the same cramped cabin. The prospect of being anywhere else obviously thrilled him. Drifting before a universal window, he was using it as a simple window, gazing down at the Earth with his blue-black eyes. There were no continents, and no visible seas. Every square kilometer was adorned with a towering city, graceful and oftentimes famous, and the crust beneath was a spongy volume of stone and diamond and exotic matter, lesser cities and pockets of ocean nestled against elaborate farms where enough food to feed a quarter of a trillion people was produced every day.

There were thousands of moons, two of them quite large. The nearer moon was the Earth’s natural satellite, and like the Earth, it was a heavily reconfigured, extraordinarily lovely place. But the other body was different. A simple framework of ordinary superconductors enveloped a round mass of dark matter and bizarre plasmas—a liquid blackness swirling rapidly, hinting at fantastic energies barely held in control.

The boy knew what it was, but for appearance’s sake, he asked, “What’s that ugly thing do, Father?”

Someone replied with a snort.

Pretending to be startled, the boy spun around. Floating in the new-made hatch was a uniformed woman—an immigration officer who made her modest living interviewing the new refugees. She was a giant, and she was obviously strong, and her features had a simple, even severe appearance that showed no trace of genetic tinkering. The woman was archaic. She was a fossil, practically. A boy from a distant place was entitled to double his surprise. Blinking, he pretended to be flustered, and with a voice designed to mislead, he shouted, “That’s a Sanchex face! Why are you wearing a Sanchex face?”

The father growled at his son, then offered a clumsy apology. “He meant nothing. He doesn’t understand. In my eyes, ma’am…you don’t look anything like a Sanchex…!”

“But that’s what I am,” the woman growled. “My face and the rest of me are nothing but.”

A terrified silence bled into a sorry little moan.

“Like most of my Family,” she continued, “I was brought up on charges. And after serving my sentence and paying my well-deserved fines, I was given this uniform.” Her smile was more menacing than her glower. “Do you like my uniform, little boy?”

“No,” he squeaked.

That Sanchex face came close to his face, then with the warm stink of garlic and fish innards, she said, “A lot of us work in customs. And I bet you can guess why.”

“Because you’re mean,” he said.

“And spiteful,” she added. “And suspicious. And easy to anger. And just as quick to act on that anger, I’ll warn you…!”

She looked and sounded like an old friend, but the name drawing itself on the left breast of her uniform, in a thousand languages, never looked anything likeRavleen .

“To answer your extremely rude question,” she continued, “that ‘ugly’ object belongs to our defense network, and it’s beautiful. It is a wonder, in fact, and I love it, and I don’t know what it can do, and neither of us will ever know anyone who knows what it can do. It is a secret, and it is a marvel. Do you understandthat , young man?”

“Yes, Miss Sanchex.”

The woman recoiled, taking a long suck of air before reminding all of them, “We don’t use that name anymore. Sanchexes are extinct.”

“Yes—”

“Madam Voracious.”

“Yes, Madam Voracious.”

Parents and son blurted those words. The wealth of a dead world was useless on the Earth; that was the first and most important lesson of this entire process. They were being reminded that in this realm, they were every kind of tiny.

The customs officer showed her cowering audience a grim Sanchex smile, then she thundered, “Now let’s discuss your names…!”

The boy answered first, in a low voice.

“Excuse me?” said Madam Voracious.

The boy almost smiled, those blue-black eyes finding something amusing, his lovely quick tail flicking in the air behind him, while his unformed genitals rose up and grew just a little pink.

Then he repeated himself, and for a slippery, mischievous instant, it sounded to this flabbergasted officer as if he had said the word, “Ord.”

Four

“Small tours will serve us in these ways: They will feed public curiosity. They will project a sense of openness on the part of the remaining Families. They will educate. They will mollify. They will give our youngest children valuable practice in the arts of persuasion and coping with difficult questions. And most important they will continue the humiliation of the vanquished Families…inparticular, the Chamberlains…”

—Nuyen policy statement

THE IMMIGRANTS TOOKup unassuming, generally unhappy lives.

Their fortune was nearly exhausted. They could barely afford an apartment less than a tenth the size of their starship’s tiny cabins, and the parents spent their days trying to ignore the new world. Millions lived next door, and every person was tailored in some different fashion, with odd physiologies as well as opaque languages and tortuous customs. On the Earth, even basic goods were depressingly expensive. Work was easy to find and salaries were high, but every job was extraordinarily specialized, and over time, menial. Family finances were certain to grow tighter. Staring at each other, the parents asked: “Why did we think we could live here?”

For them, the Earth was a prison.

On their worst days, they barely spoke or rarely even left their bed-closet, forcing their son to watch patiently over them, voicing encouragement and sometimes taking charge of the family’s day-today needs.

It was a standard procedure to shadow every refugee with paranoid AIs. For many reasons, including the recommendation of their immigration officer, this family was given extra attention. Yet nothing incriminating was observed, and after six months of observing the progressively deepening sadness, all but one of the AIs were given new, more interesting assignments.

When he wasn’t the man of the family, the boy wandered the halls outside, speaking to neighbors with the help of a cheap translator. Or he would remain tucked inside his closet, reading voraciously and watching random channels and vistas through a secondhand pair of universal goggles. Each morning, the boy offered their names to the Family lottery. It was a perfectly normal event; most of the citizenry routinely did the same chore every day, competing for the chance to tour the abandoned estates. The odds of winning were minimal, even impossible. Only a few dozen slots opened each day, and most were filled through appointments and political favors. Yet on his one hundred and eighty-first attempt, the impossible happened:

Three slots were granted to the new immigrants.

Alarms sounded in a thousand high offices. Quantumware and various officials were interrogated at length. How could such an unlikely event occur? But the quantumware programs had a fondness for family units and recent immigrants, and when pressed, they admitted to being influenced by a nebulous bribe from one of the advocacy groups that supported refugees from dead worlds. Three days passed between the announcement of the winners and their subsequent award. A brigade of AIs as well as human officers began to follow the winners, studying their composition, and to the best level of modern methods, observing their thoughts. The depressed parents were the sudden heroes of their neighborhood and city; a purely random event had swept away their obscurity and the top levels of their sadness. They smiled and made love, to each other and then to ill-fitting neighbors. And still, nothing unusual was betrayed. Nanosecond meetings were held. Great minds deliberated for entire minutes. Then, as a final precaution, an adult Nuyen was dressed up like an unmodified youngster, and he shouldered the role of the smiling, charming guide whose duty it was to lead the day’s little tour.

“Hello,” the Nuyen began, examining his audience with an array of senses. “It is a lovely morning, isn’t it?”

Happy souls agreed. Yes, it was delightful.

A perpetual summer hung over the rest of the Earth—a consequence of so many machines and warm bodies. But on the Families’ estates, climate still obeyed the angle of the sun. Summer was a few months of intensive growth sandwiched between killing winters. Seasons meant wealth and conspicuous waste, but their guide mentioned neither. Focusing every sense on the mysterious boy, he asked himself, “Are you Ord?”

Nothing tasted unusual, much less remarkable.

Bowing, their guide introduced himself by saying, “I am Xo.”

The boy didn’t blink, and his heart didn’t quicken, and no portion of his visible mind showed surprise or more than a normal curiosity.

If anything, it was the Nuyen who felt anxious. For millennia stacked on millennia, this was Xo’s job. He was a scent hound testing the wind. And this was a common situation: What if the lottery system had been manipulated, givinghim access to the estates? At first glance, it seemed like a ludicrous possibility. Someone wielding Alice’s powers wouldn’t bother with this kind of backdoor subterfuge. But Xo had spent his life thinking about Ord, and he knew the boy as well as anyone, and he could almost believe that the final Chamberlain would find this route alluring—camouflaging himself inside the Families’ own contrived game.

“Xo,” he repeated, using a thousand channels reserved for the Families. Then in the next nanoseconds, he told anyone with the proper ears, “It’s me, yes. Your dear friend. Welcome home, Ord.”

There was no response.

But the boy lifted his tail, then both of his hands. “Sir,” he said with a soft respect. “Will we visit your home today, sir?”

Xo shook his head. “We won’t have enough time. I’m sorry.”

The boy looked saddened.

“Why would you want to see my house?” Xo inquired.

A quick, guileless voice insisted, “The Nuyens are my favorite Family, sir.”

“Are we?”

“One of your brothers helped my world during our wars.” Fond emotions played across his face, while his parents winced, recalling the Nuyen’s failures and the demise of an entire biosystem. But the boy’s happiness couldn’t have tasted more genuine. “I’ve always wanted to step inside your house, sir!”

A thousand centuries had passed since Ord carried an atomic weapon to the Nuyens’ mansion. But very little had changed. The players were the same. Xo was still the worried, immature boy cowering behind the door, watching out for his bomb-wielding friend.

THE PARTY WASushered through several of the abandoned estates, each held in trust by the Nuyens. Standing empty, the mansions looked beautiful and outrageously wasteful, while the surrounding woodlands and gardens had been allowed to grow wild and unkempt. Subtleties of color and rot produced an emotional impact that Xo could see and taste. His guests came from cramped circumstances. Each of them was wondering how the Families could have risked such wealth. How could anyone be so foolish? And as any respectable guide, Xo steered their opinions toward matters of greed, letting that fine old emotion lead them to the horrible conclusion that even great souls can be perfect idiots.

Lunch was a modest feast served inside the Sanchex pyramid. Xo explained that once everyone had enjoyed their fill, the tour would culminate with a studious, scornful walk through the main Chamberlain mansion. “We’re climbing a ladder of guilt,” he remarked, pretending that the cliché was profound. “Sanchexes did the most dangerous assignments in the Core. Which is why they were the second Family to be disbanded wholesale…two moments after the Chamberlains were ordered to surrender their wealth, and their selves…”

The refugee boy sat between his parents, eating because it was polite to eat, but his attention fixed firmly on the Nuyen.

“Because they were the most guilty Family,” Xo continued, “the Chamberlains were the first to die.” Ord wouldn’t react to that simple taunt. But there was a script to follow, and Xo’s siblings were observing, carefully judging his technique. “The Sanchexes were fighters, violent and relentless. But the Chamberlains were worse than that. They were intellectuals, colder than the emptiest space and without a single heart to their name.”

The boy nodded soberly, apparently believed the propaganda.

Using private channels, Xo offered more elaborate arguments—highly reasoned and often-practiced monologues that were designed to create doubt in a young Chamberlain. That was also the standard routine. Ord wasn’t here. That would be much too unlikely. But then again, he could be anywhere. Everywhere. He might have arrived last night, undetected, and by dumb chance, Xo was delivering the opening salvos of his well-planned assault.

The boy lifted his tail and hands again, and after saying, “Sir,” with the proper respect, he asked, “What can you tell me about this wonderful room, sir?”

More than a kilometer long, with a towering triangular ceiling fashioned from polished basalt and only enough light to emphasize its volume, the space had once been sacred to the Sanchexes. But after lying empty for so long, it felt sad, cold despite the well-warmed air, and forgotten.

Xo waited for a half moment, letting his audience look about.

Then the boy answered his own question. “It was their dining hall, wasn’t it? This is where the Sanchexes held their ceremonial feasts.”

“Yes. That’s what this was.”

The blue-black eyes smiled. Turning to his mother, the boy said, “When they finished eating—meat or cold plasmas or whatever—they would dissolve the furniture and hold contests.”

“Contests?” she muttered.

“They would fight each other,” he allowed.

The woman swished her tail nervously. “How do you know that, dear?”

“It’s in the histories,” he replied. “I read it somewhere.”

Xo accessed every word that the boy had read since arriving on the Earth then consumed the entire library salvaged from the starship. Buried in that mass of information was a single article that mentioned that historic curiosity.

Faintly disgusted, the mother looked at Xo. “Is that true?”

But again, the boy answered first. “Adults took the shape of giant animals, real or not. And they would stand at opposite ends of the room, then run at each other.” He pointed to an odd little doorway in the floor, now sealed. “That’s where the blood was drained away. Fighters would weigh their fluids afterward, and the winner was whoever lost the least of himself, or herself.”

Outwardly calm, Xo carefully monitored the boy.

With an impressed voice, he told everyone, “It’s all true.”

The boy gave a little nod, happy with himself.

Those last details weren’t included in the article. But the boy could have overheard someone talking. Unlikely as it sounded, that was an infinitely more reasonable explanation than having Ord himself sitting at the oak-and-hyperbar table, baiting him with this very slender clue.

An impressed hush had fallen over the group. Every diamond knife and shield—Sanchex utensils authentic to their pyramid embossing—was laid neatly on the remains of their lunches. Keeping to the topic, Xo confessed, “This was the most aggressive Family, probably. By temperament and by training, the people who were born into this house were capable of the most astonishing violence.”

The boy was staring through him, his face suddenly flat. Empty.

“If the Core hadn’t exploded,” Xo continued, “there still would have come a day when we would have disarmed and disarmored the Sanchex clan. For everyone’s safety, including their own.”

The guests nodded amiably. Gratefully.

It was another who took offense. Swimming the length of the room, unseen, she descended as a sudden chill of the air and a vague electric sensation slithering beneath Xo’s false skin. Only he could hear her whispering into his deepest, most private ears.

“Fuck you,” said the familiar voice, followed by a long, dry laugh.

Xo was afraid. But more than that, he was amused, reflecting that the Sanchexes weren’t like Chamberlains: They rose reliably to every little taunt.

“Hello, Ravleen,” he said with his own laughing whisper.

“Fuck you,” she repeated. Then she pulled away, retreating into the depths of the pyramid, crying out, “Get those sphincters out of here! I want to be alone!”

Five

“He won’t send the whole of himself…

“What we imagine…what really is the only plausible scenario…is that he will first show us the affable tip of his tiniest finger…which, nonetheless, should be an awesome sight…”

—Nuyen memo, classified

BETWEEN THE COMPRESSIONof time and the perfection of memory, it seemed to Ord as if he hadn’t been away from home for very long.

Not more than a busy afternoon, surely.

Yet some other part of him, persistent and bittersweet, felt the press of the ages. For a long while, these beautiful mansions had stood empty on top of these sculpted peaks, the splendid forests and meadows had grown wild, and every extraordinary city on the Earth had swollen until there was only the one megalopolis encircling the globe, its tallest buildings rising to the edges of the atmosphere, thus gazing down at the once-lofty peaks of the old estates.

Not only had Ord been gone for a long while; in telling ways, he had never been to this place before.

Perched on a comfortable seat inside the luxurious Family transport, he studied his surroundings with a thousand heightened senses. For the last seven months, he had done little else. And likewise, the Earth had never stopped studying him. He could feel every stare, every subtle touch, and coursing through the air were the whispered questions:

“Is he the one?”

“Or a decoy?”

“Or a lesser criminal, maybe?”

“Or nobody…perhaps…?”

And then, inevitably:

“But if it is Ord, when how where do we act…?”

Even in its heyday, the gray-gold Sanchex pyramid had a foreboding, almost angry appearance. As it fell away behind him, Ord gratefully turned his eyes by the dozens, more and more of them watching the Chamberlain mansion drawing close, the tailored white coral still vibrantly healthy, growing slowly on the patient granite bones of the house. And again, Ord had that powerful and divided impression of never having truly left this place, and seeing nothing that was remotely familiar.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” a voice inquired.

Xo’s voice.

Looking up, Ord conjured a nervous smile and flipped his tail in an amiable manner, answering the question with gestures, then saying, “This is so very fun. Sir.”

The Nuyen dropped to his knees, touching the boy’s shoulder, while a private voice remarked, “I know it’s you, Ord. I know.”

It was an ancient trick, often used and never successful.

With his public voice, the boy said, “I don’t blame the Nuyens for what happened. To my home world, I mean. My parents explained—”

“We tried to help,” Xo interjected.

“Your brother did his absolute best. I know that.” It had been an enormous public relations disaster, not to mention a tragedy. Anti-Family forces had outmaneuvered a young Nuyen, and nearly a billion citizens died in the cross fire. “I’m just sorry that I can’t visit your home today,” Ord claimed. “Really, I’d so like to thank each of you personally…for your sacrifices and all of your successes, and everything…”

Xo nodded. He wore a smooth face and the body of a young adult and the bright cheerful eyes of an imbecile. It was all decoration, all a ruse. No one else inside the spacious transport could suspect that he wasn’t one of the Nuyens’ young children. He was a full adult, modified and enlarged, and to most of humanity, entirely indecipherable.

This was not a fearful, simple, and clumsy Xo, and that was another sign—perhaps the most powerful of all—that Ord did not belong in this place.

With his private voice, Xo promised, “We absolutely don’t want to harm you. We only want to help you, Ord. You and the Peace.”

Then came a seductive argument—intense and focused, full of promises of forgiveness for every crime, known and unknown—and while Xo’s secret voices begged with him to confess and surrender, his public voice was saying, “On the first day of the year, my Family opens its doors to the Earth. It’s our show of friendship. Anyone can join us through his universal window. And if you come, I will give you a personal tour of my house.”

Ord said nothing.

With every voice, Xo said, “Think about it then,” and he rose, then retreated, nothing about him showing the slightest concern.

PRIDE ANDSACRIFICE.

The words were still cut into the granite above the doorway, and as people filed inside, listening more to each other than to their guide, Ord couldn’t help but leap up, touching the dense pink stone with his damp little fingertips.

That was his habit, his little ritual.

Xo saw the gesture, and froze. Other Nuyens triggered silent alarms that engulfed the Earth, then jumped across the solar system, alerting the appropriate AIs and humans. Before the little group of sightseers could reach the stairs, a multitude of defensive networks were begging for information and new instructions.

Ord observed the carefully rehearsed panic, and in the same instant, he concentrated on closer, more immediate hazards.

The mansion was a trap. Or more accurately, it was a series of ingenious, closely nested and independent traps. Antimatter mines lay beneath the stairs and behind solid walls. Null-field generators waited to ensnare anyone foolish enough to stumble too close. Overhead, inside Ord’s old bedroom, an AI assassin waited to inject its victim with quantumware toxins and assorted eschers designed to muddle the most sophisticated mind. But the most dangerous enemy stood behind him, pressing lightly at the small of Ord’s back. “Please don’t,” said the dry, smooth, and worried voice. “Don’t touch the emblems, son.”

With a boy’s voice, Ord said, “I’m sorry. Sir.”

Each guest stood on his own stair, and they were being lifted, spiraling their way up through the famous structure.

With a stronger voice, Xo asked, “What would you like to see first?”

“The penthouse, please.” The boy smiled at his adoptive parents. “I want to see where Alice lived when she came home.”

The Nuyen smiled, and said, “Naturally.”

Ord could feel an invisible bulk. Xo was a respectable age, but he had been transformed in the most peculiar ways. Ord smelled weird abilities stretched over his ape bones. Dark matter and profound energies clung to the Nuyen, reaching for kilometers in every direction. There were eschers and quantumware toxins as well as charismatic talents that Ord couldn’t quite weigh. Every other danger in the house was tangible and forgettable. But an enormous quantity of human genius had spent the last millennia doing nothing but preparing this one soul for Ord’s return.

Ord nourished a healthy fear. Thomas had taught him that critical skill. But glancing over his shoulder, a genuine terror took hold. What if he had come all this way for nothing? Instead of answers, what if he was captured? Dismembered? Or worse?

How could he help rebuild the Great Peace when he was dead?

Unless that was what Alice had always wanted.My death saves the galaxy, somehow. It was a seductive, fatalistic notion that found a ready home inside him. The idea spread through him like an explosion, and he just as abruptly realized from where that crippling notion had come…and he threw it aside…

Xo.

For an instant, Ord considered fleeing.

But that was another one of Xo’s tricks. Ord crushed that idea, too, telling himself that he wouldn’t change plans now. Then to be sure that nobody could grab his reflexes, he closed off his easiest escape routes. He killed certain limbs and choked secret avenues. And then, too late, he realized that he had just fallen for another one of Xo’s traps, weakening himself without a shot being fired.

Xo sensed a change in the boy’s demeanor.

He joined Ord on his narrow step, quietly saying, “Yes?”

“In the histories,” Ord began, “there’s a Nuyen with your name. Xo was a friend of the Chamberlains’ baby.”

“Ord,” said Xo. “Which, by coincidence, sounds rather like your name.”

“Does it? I don’t think so, sir.” He put on a serious face. “I’ve read the histories. Alice became Ord’s friend.”

“She manipulated him, you mean. By most interpretations, she enslaved the poor boy.”

Xo used every mouth, speaking in a great chorus.

“Are you the same Xo?”

“I am. Yes.”

People were startled, unnerved. The boy’s father bristled, then with a wounded tone, said, “Sir,” twice. “Sir, I don’t understand. I was told that youngsters serve as tour guides.”

Ord explained. “He thinks that I might be dangerous, Father.”

The parents clung to one another, horrified by the idea.

“But I’m not dangerous. Not even a little.” He stared at his childhood friend, saying, “There was another baby. A Sanchex. What was her name?”

“You know,” the Nuyen replied.

“So where is Ravleen? Does she give tours, like you do?”

Silence.

They had risen through most of the mansion. The cylindrical walls were covered with the elaborate, ever-changing mural. But instead of showing images of success and glory, the sightseers were treated to visions of misery: living worlds turning to molten iron and steam; panicked faces evaporating in storms of hard radiation; a trillion refugees fighting for berths on scarce, overcrowded starships, sometimes using nothing but their fingernails and bloodied teeth.

“The Chamberlain legacy.” The guide’s voice was booming. “This is why they were disbanded. This is why they earned our richly deserved scorn. And this is why my Family—those who would never hurt you—are disarming and neutralizing the outlaw Chamberlains.”

The tension was infectious.

Staring at the nightmarish images, the boy’s eyes changed in subtle ways, pulling the face along with them.

“Alice’s final days of freedom were spent here,” Xo declared. And then he glared at the boy beside him.

“Mama?” the boy squeaked.

With hands and tails, and then their bodies, his parents surrounded him, pretending they could actually protect him.

The stairs suddenly deposited everyone on the landing, the little group standing before a thick satin-crystal door that shouldn’t have been closed. Yet it was shut and sealed tight.

Xo whispered words too soft to be understood.

“Where’s the penthouse?” asked the boy. “I want to see the penthouse.”

Xo said, “No.”

He said, “We must leave now. I’m sorry.”

Then the boy gave the door a hard kick, blubbering, “Why? I want to see inside. I want to see where Alice was….”

Ord was standing on the opposite side of the door, watching carefully as he cut the final tethers to his camouflage. He had woven that child from ordinary matter, then convinced the childless refugees that he was theirs, and genuine. And that’s how they regarded him now, still trying to shield him, riding together on the same descending stair while the other dumbfounded guests stared at the suddenly bratty creature.

Only the Nuyen lingered.

With a mixture of terror and awe, Xo touched the crystal door, using a thousand soft hands.

“Why did you have to come home?” he asked.

And then, softer still, he asked, “When you could be anywhere, doing anything, why do you have to torture me…?”

Six

“The Chamberlain mansion has been rigorously inspected for dark matter machines, subatomic keys and graffiti-encrusted motes of dust. Every wall has been rendered transparent, and every nanopipe and superfluid conduit is known perfectly. Even the repeating patterns within granite-and-coral crystals have been analyzed for hidden meanings and sleeping capacities. Throughout this process, every appropriate authority has been invited to participate, at our discretion, and new inspections will continue to be carried out at irregular intervals, using both the newest and most proven means…

“Naturally, the estate grounds are shown the same thorough respect.

“For the moment, more elaborate measures, including the total disassembly of every artifact, have been deferred.

“We don’t need to look any more desperate, if we can help it…”

—Nuyen memo, classified

“WHAT’S YOUR NAME,brother?”

“Be still. A few moments, please.”

But Avram couldn’t just lie there. He tried sitting up with a half-formed body, and with blue eyes staring, he asked, “What’s this place?”

“You don’t recognize it?”

The newborn face turned left, then right. Then with a sigh, he faced forward again. “I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“That’s no reason for apologies,” Ord replied. “I just hoped you knew more than me.”

In better days, the penthouse would have been configured to make high-ranking Chamberlains feel comfortable. But instead of luxurious furniture or elaborate beds of cold plasma, Ord had created a starless night sky beneath which stood a string of long beds—wooden frames covered with dense alien symbols and filled with a meter of soft gray dust. Inside each bed was a human skeleton, archaic in form, the elegant bones vanishing behind an assortment of bright young organs and new flesh, toothy white skulls being rapidly transformed into familiar, wide-eyed faces.

“This talent doesn’t come with a history,” Ord confessed. “I can use it, but I don’t know why it looks as it does.”

The brothers had identical faces, sharp and pale and gently handsome, their strawberry hair unkempt and their sky-blue eyes projecting the same sense of wary amazement.

“You took my mind,” said Avram. “At the execution, you grabbed me!”

“You’re welcome.”

After a deep, grateful breath, he asked, “Are you the baby?”

“Ord.”

Avram closed his eyes. “The baby.”

Bodies began twisting inside the adjacent beds. Hands and bare feet flinched, then everyone tried to sit up, lungs blowing the healing dust high into the dry, dark air.

To each of his patients, Ord said, “Relax. Please.”

“This is one of Alice’s talents,” said Avram. “Am I right?”

Ord gave a little nod.

“You must feel miserable…being transformed so much, and before your time…”

“Misery is misery,” Ord remarked, his voice quiet and firm. “For me, everything’s peculiar and uncomfortable…but not really miserable, no…”

Nearly a couple dozen people were being reborn. There was a Papago and a Lee, two Ussens and so on. Each belonged to a disbanded Family. Each asked the same questions, then listened to Ord’s gentle voice while his face floated above them.

The Papago was a woman. Ord called her Buteo.

“I know her,” said Avram, pointing to his neighbor. “She lived in an adjacent system, and vanished while awaiting trial.”

“Buteo wouldn’t have enjoyed a fair hearing,” Ord explained. “What else could I do?”

“My jailers were terrified of you,” Avram allowed. “They convinced themselves you were coming for me next, which was why they hurried to convict.”

“Your trial smelled, too.”

“You were watching over me?”

“When I could.”

Avram took a breath, for courage. “But if the judges and jury had been fair, and if they still found me guilty…?”

Silence.

Avram laughed, bitterness bleeding into resignation. “Is this how you live now? Charging around the Milky Way, righting wrongs against the Families…?”

“A wrong is a wrong,” Ord offered. “I’ll stop wars and save overloaded starships, and, whenever I can, I’ve tried to convince everyone to keep believing in the Great Peace—”

“Well,” Avram interrupted with a cold scorn, “it must feel good to feel useful.”

Suddenly, Ord was the baby again.

“It’s a big galaxy,” his older brother warned. “Be honest. How many places can you be at once?”

Silence.

“Even with all of Alice’s talents…what? Two or four. Maybe ten. But you can’t be everywhere.” Avram threw his naked legs out of the bed, and added, “Alice was spectacular, but finite. The same as you, I’m guessing.”

Ord didn’t reply.

“Is that why she gave you her talents? So you can gallop from system to system, putting out the proverbial fires—?”

“I don’t know why,” Ord conceded. “I’ve never been sure what she intends for me.”

Avram blinked, unable to contain his surprise. Then, after a long pause, he made himself ask, “What do you intend for me?”

“If you’re willing, I’d like your help.”

“Of course.” Avram looked between his feet, judging the distance to the dusty ground. “How much time has passed since you saved me?”

Ord told him.

His brother winced, his face tightening as it lifted. A fire shone in the dark of his eyes. “Where are we? Exactly.”

“The Earth.”

There was no reaction.

“Inside our old house, as it happens.”

For a long while, Avram sat motionless. Then his face softened, and with the faint beginnings of a smile, he said, “So the baby’s come home to rescue Alice.”

Ord said, “No.”

His brother stubbornly ignored the answer. “What you were doing before, saving each of us…you were just practicing for today, weren’t you…?”

Again, Ord told him, “No.”

Avram dropped from the bed and examined the alien inscriptions.

“Saving you was easy,” Ord continued. “Too easy to make it feel like any genuine sort of practice.”

His brother’s mouth fell open, both hands touching the carved wood.

“You can read it?” Ord asked.

“It seems so,” Avram said.

Rising from death’s bed was the key, Ord realized.

“It says,” Avram began. Then he hesitated, hands lifting to cover his mouth before he admitted, “I’ve been given a second chance at life, it claims, and it will be my final chance. ‘A moment to make right a mountain of misdeeds,’ it claims.”

Ord nodded, placing a fond hand on his brother’s shoulder.

“Really?” he said, speaking to no one in particular. “If it comes to that—if there is a redemption—who could want any more than that…?”

Seven

“If the baby comes, then the blame is entirely the baby’s…!”

—Nuyen memo, classified

ONCEORD STRIPPEDthe mansion of its traps and lesser terrors, he invited his reborn companions to wander at will, and, if possible, grow accustomed to their circumstances. In their own way, each was grateful, but with very much the same flavor of emotion, they worried about the future. Buteo, a tiny walnut-colored woman, reported activity in the nearby forest. “There’s a hundred fancy uniforms with people stuck inside them,” she reported. “And either they’re extraordinarily stupid, or those uniforms want me to see them watching the house.”

Ord saw much more: The local districts had been evacuated. Elite military units were rushing from the ends of the solar system. The Earth’s artificial moon was being eased into a closer orbit. But most alarming were the sophisticated energy barriers—invisible curtains shrouding the estate, designed to absorb nuclear detonations, tetrawatt discharges, and any sudden retreats by the criminals trapped inside.

There was no worse place for war than the overcrowded Earth.

Some of the reborn had to remind Ord of the obvious.

“Get Alice now,” said one of the Ussens. He was a tall, blue-skinned man with snowy hair and a blue-black beard. “Or better,” he said with an Ussen’s scornful voice, “why couldn’t you have slipped in and out of her cell when you first arrived at our cradle-world?”

“Because I wasn’t strong enough then,” Ord explained. “And I’m still too weak, if you must know. Most of my talents—”

“Alice’s talents.”

“Are elsewhere. Waiting.” Ord gestured in a random direction. “If I’d brought everything, I would have lost every chance at surprise.”

“Surprise,” the Ussen echoed, choking a laugh.

“Besides,” said the baby, “being tiny has its blessings. I still look harmless to them. I’m not forcing anyone to panic yet.”

Avram mentioned the obvious danger. “But what if they keep you separated from your other talents?”

“They won’t,” Ord promised, showing nothing but confidence.

The Ussens grumbled, but said nothing.

Buteo showed an appreciative half grin.

“Fine,” Avram allowed. “We’re here with you. We owe you a debt, and you need our help, you say. But what are we supposed to accomplish?”

“I can modify you.” With a wide smile, Ord promised, “I’ll make it so you can study my surveillance feeds. I want your impressions about what’s happening. Your best hunches, and your worst.”

“Wouldn’t you do a better job?” asked Buteo.

Ord shook his head.

“I’m just the baby. Remember?” Then he offered a soft, self-deprecating laugh, wondering if they could see just how lonely he was…

WHEN THE AUTHORITIEScame to arrest Alice, she was found inside a tiny, nearly anonymous room deep inside the mansion’s bones. It was the same room where she had lived as the Chamberlain baby, and wrapped up in that thick nostalgia, she had bided her time by watching scenes from ancient days.

The room’s furnishings were exactly as Alice had left them, complete to the small, low-density universal wall. The only structural change was the transparent wall set between the room and adjacent hallway. This was where the daily tours ended. Guests would pause and stare, and their Nuyen guides would finally, mercifully fall quiet, allowing each person the freedom to consider the red-haired monster who had taken refuge here, and how very much she meant to their lives.

Ord passed through the transparent wall, influencing nothing.

The universal wall showed the present: Alice alone inside her prison cell, dressed in a plain white prison smock, nothing of substance having changed for millennia. Ord watched as she paced from the toilet to the door, every step made slowly and carefully, three steps required to cross her universe…and she turned with a dancer’s unconscious grace, retracing her steps so precisely that Ord could see where the white-hyperrock floor had slumped in four places, worn down by the bare white balls of her feet.

The cell and old bedroom were the same size.

Ord wasn’t the first to note the irony.

With a corporeal hand, he touched the warm electric image of the face. Did she sense that he was here? Did Alice retain those powers? It would be lovely if she could simply step up here and visit him for a moment, as she had done once before. Yet he couldn’t trust an Alice who would do exactly what he wanted: That wasn’t his sister’s manner, and that would make for too easy a trap.

With every other hand, Ord searched the room. This was a ripe place to hunt for instructions. Alice could have left a motile scrap of her flesh, or a whisper of refined dark matter. Either might have slinked about for thousands of years, evading detection, waiting for his touch to unfold itself, then explaining exactly why she had selected him, or damned him, into becoming her successor.

But there were no keys, or clues, or anything else worthwhile.

The single possible exception was set on one of the crystal shelves above the narrow bed. Like any Chamberlain, Alice had been a rabid collector; odd gems and favorite childhood holos were mixed together with fossils of every age and origin. One fossil showed a human handprint set in a golden mudstone. In a glance, Ord knew its age and curious origin: It was a female Chamberlain handprint, and the stone beneath was nearly ten million years old. Alice had created it. On some alien world—a single taste gave Ord twenty candidates—his newly grown sister had pressed her right hand into a streambed. Then she had buried her mark under an avalanche of muck and volcanic ash, and several million years later, she dug the treasure up again. Cooked to stone, and in a rugged fashion, lovely.

Ord reached for the handprint, almost by reflex.

Then he hesitated.

The trap was almost perfectly disguised, its elegant trigger married to the young rock, waiting patiently for a hand of his shape and flavor. A camouflaged relay linked the trigger to a single globule of molten, magnetized anti-iron set deep underground. The weapon was far too small to injure Ord, even at close range, and he wouldn’t have noticed the device if he hadn’t been searching for it. The globule was inside a null chamber set beneath that very bored woman, and it had probably always been there, Alice pacing back and forth above it, oblivious to any danger.

Ord’s first analysis taught him about the trigger and link.

And the next ten analyses showed him nothing new.

There was a temptation, soft but coy, to place his hand on Alice’s. For a slippery, seductive moment, Ord wondered if that was why he had come here. Not to beg for his sister’s advice, but to do one more noble deed for a Chamberlain in despair.

Slowly, slowly, he withdrew his corporeal hand.

Then he pulled the hand through his hair, his scalp more than a little damp, the warm perspiration tasting of oceans and fear.

Eight

“Ravleen is painstakingly polite. We appreciate that quality in anyone, but particularly in her. And that remains true even though we’re certain she is only pretending to have good manners and a sunny outlook.

“So that our polite friend would better understand her powers, we took her into the wilderness. We own several hundred sunless worlds between Sol and the nearest stars—Earth and Mars-class orphans purchased as investments for the moment when our solar system is full. One of these worlds was terraformed in preparation for Ravleen. At our insistence, she examined its continents and new seas, then she very politely asked permission to play.

“For the next three hours, Ravleen used her new talents—first in small doses, then in larger, more expert fusillades. And afterward, with scrupulous care, she thanked each of us for the opportunity to learn.

“ ‘When he does come,’ she promised, more than once, ‘I’ll do the same things to him.’

“We manacled each of her hands afterward before bringing her home. And to help recoup our expenses, we sold portions of that world’s exposed core…its metals and rare earths yielding a considerable profit…”

—Nuyen memo, classified

XO WOULD NEVERadmit it, but he felt a genuine pity for Ravleen.

The other Sanchexes were stripped of their talents, or dead. And maybe she was a little lucky, since ordinary life so rarely agreed with her siblings. But to be ordinary wasn’t an option for Ravleen. With Ord vanished and Alice’s talents stolen, the good Families had no choice but to panic. Contingency plans and gruesome nightmares preyed upon their nerves. What if the Chamberlain baby returned home? Who would help fight against him? The Sanchexes hadn’t yet given their official surrender. But a delegation of high-ranking Nuyens was dispatched, sweeping into the pyramid as if they owned it, pushing past hundreds of embittered and still-powerful souls. Xo wasn’t present, and for endless good reasons, no visual records were made. But the moment had acquired a legendary status inside his Family. From the stories told, he could picture his brothers and sisters moving en masse. He could taste the vivid, bilious furies swirling around them, and their own, well-hidden fears. And the tensions only grew when they reached the young woman’s quarters, entering after a customary knuckle-knock, and with a single booming voice, announcing, “We have come to ask for your help.”

Ravleen was a beautiful creature. Black hair and arching black eyes gave her a feral quality, and in those times, she amplified her looks with infections of benign, radiant bacteria. The Nuyens’ eternal curse was to feel lust for the Sanchexes, and a bullied respect, and despite the rank and power of her guests, Ravleen knew how to toy with those emotions. Wearing only a sablecat robe, she sat on her bed while using a single finger to open the robe, and then calmly fondling her left breast as she smiled, coldly amused, pointing out, “You don’t sound as if you are asking.”

The Nuyens laughed. They sounded like men and women in perfect control, their little worries buried deep.

“Let me guess,” Ravleen continued. “This is about Ord, isn’t it? I grew up beside him, and that’s why you hope I can help. Am I right?”

Sober faces nodded.

Every voice said, “Naturally.”

She stood suddenly, letting her robe relax and tumble to the floor. Brothers and sisters stared at her hard long legs, at the strong full curve of her ass, and at that famous smile, winsome and predatory in the same bewitching moment.

“Xo is already helping you.” Telling it, she admitted to knowing at least one minor secret. “You’re grooming that turd. Feeding him advanced talents, and intellects, and propagandas. He’ll be invulnerable to attack—”

“Any reasonable attack, yes.”

Ravleen scratched herself in one place, then another. Then she inquired, “Am I getting the same sweet deal?”

They told her, “No.”

Then they laughed, perhaps trying too hard to remain in control.

“You’ll be given talents, but of a narrow sort,” they warned. Then one of the sisters reminded her, “You’re only a Sanchex. You’ll be lucky to have one talent. Since, according to the new laws, you aren’t entitled to shit.”

Ravleen said nothing for a long while, black eyes fixed on her sablecat robe, watching as it crawled toward its burrow-closet.

Then she took a deep breath, and said, “All right. What do I get?”

The package included a Xo-type invulnerability. They explained that and her other powers, then cautioned that there would be no added intellects, except for the muscular instincts needed to control these talents. In essence, Ravleen would be a functioning moron, incapable of million-tongue language skills or nonlinear modeling or even the cherished ability to use private, intra-Family channels.

“That should keep me under heel,” she observed.

The highest-ranking Nuyen agreed, then said, “And we’ll take other precautions. You’ll wear restraints until we choose to remove them. And even when your manacles aren’t in place, implants will ride inside your mind. Some will coax you into hating the Chamberlains, and particularly Ord—”

“As if I need help,” she interrupted.

“While other implants will wait for a word from us. With that word, we will be able to kill your very tiny, very fragile mind…!”

The young woman passed from a shameless tease to simply naked. Exposed, and painfully helpless.

She caught her robe and put it on again.

“Xo’s purpose is to reason with the boy,” the Nuyens explained, “and if he doesn’t succeed—”

“I get to kill him.”

No one responded.

Quietly and soberly, Ravleen promised her audience, “I’ll do this thing. But for me, not for you.”

Every Nuyen broke into a huge and honest smile.

“I could live a very long time,” their new ally ventured, “just waiting for a little vengeance.”

IT WAS EARLYevening when two figures slipped out of the forest. They wore archaic bodies and the simple magenta robes common to diplomats, and they moved with a steady purpose, their talents dangling after them—Xo’s intellects meant to appeal to the boy-god’s better nature, and Ravleen’s great limbs still wrapped in their manacles, but straining, eager for any excuse to attack.

Xo felt for his extraordinary companion, and as always, he shoved his sorrow and his pity into other, more profitable directions.

With a steady, much-practiced voice, he called out, “Ord? Isn’t it time to talk?”

Nothing happened.

They paused at the mansion’s main doorway. Xo made no attempt to look inside. He didn’t believe that he could see much, and besides, decorum went along with politeness. It was important to seem patient. It was critical to be exactly the kind of person that Ord would accept, and with whom he could agree on terms.

Ravleen enjoyed a different attitude. Storming up to the rough coral door, she gave it a kick with her bare foot. “You might as well talk to us,” she sang out, “because we’re damn well not leaving.”

Nothing.

She groaned and made a fist, taking aim.

Xo grabbed her by the wrist.

Even manacled, she was full of white-hot energies. But she didn’t resist him, relaxing suddenly, a strange little smile hiding in her eyes, her expression telling the world, “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

From the forest, from a dozen hiding places, came a chorus of guttural wails. When the estate was abandoned, the Chamberlain bears had gone wild. Were they the ones crying out now? Xo started to look, but he discovered that a hundred cloaks had made the immediate world vanish; and in that instant of split attentions, Ord emerged, coming from no particular direction to stand before them with his hands open, his palms up, and his body and face looking like those of a teenage boy.

“It’s nice to have old friends drop by,” the boy volunteered.

To Ravleen, he said, “I felt you lurking in the pyramid.” And he began to laugh, admitting, “I felt the rage. And I thought: If they’re using Xo, they must be using Ravleen, too. In service of the Nuyens—!”

Energies surged, diminished.

Then the beautiful Sanchex face was smiling, the eyes filled with mischief, and she let her tongue play along her top lip, then slide back against its mate.

Xo spoke, a thousand voices asking and begging and cajoling Ord to open up a dialogue.

The Chamberlain responded with a steely glance, then gave fair warning. “They made a lousy choice. You were a weakling and worm, and I never liked you.”

“You don’t know me,” Xo growled.

Then with another mouth and a plaintive tone, he asked, “Do you think you’re the only one who’s better than he used to be?”

Silence.

With his simplest mouth, Xo said, “We have to talk. Without Ravleen.”

They were suddenly elsewhere. Xo found the two of them standing inside the penthouse, other souls watching from the dusty shadows. Xo examined the silent associates, and Ord touched him, a firm hand on the shoulder as a firm voice informed him, “You should try to convince me. And then, when it’s my turn, I’ll try to convince you.”

Xo spoke, disgorging a hundred practiced speeches and as many impromptu pleadings. He sang about the great purpose of the Families. He roared knowledgeably about service and sacrifice, moral principles and immoral pitfalls. He gave cold technical estimates of Ord’s position and the Earth’s weaponry, showing his audience that the situation was hopeless. At this moment, two massive dark-matter bodies were being intercepted at the edge of the solar system. If either was Ord’s missing talents, then he was quite plainly doomed. And after that roaring dismissal of the Chamberlain’s powers and planning, Xo knitted together words of understanding and compassion, proving that even the hopeless could, when the time came, expect mercy.

Then, on a whim, Xo pulled live feeds from across the solar system.

A new mother on Pluto; a dozen winged humans perched on one of Saturn’s cloud continents; an Amish community on Ceres; an ancient, revered poet sitting on his houseboat on Mars’s northern sea. Each was visible, and each was obviously terrified. They were concentrating on the news feeds. They were praying, each in their own fashion. Praying that this visitor—this mutilated and possibly sick Chamberlain—wouldn’t make a tragic blunder, obliterating all of them.

The final view was from a surveillance AI. A refugee family, recently arrived on the Earth, sat holding hands, their tails tied into a communal knot. The father and mother were more depressed than ever, obviously waiting to die, while their young son kept smiling, a sharp stupid voice chattering on and on about the astonishing coincidence…that they were just inside the mansion, and wasn’t it amazing…they just missed the arrival of that crazy Chamberlain…!

Crazy or not, Ord was moved.

He was weakened.

With empathic talents proven in the lab and in field tests, Xo could sense the opponent’s resolve beginning to falter, if only a little—

Then they were outside again, standing in the same positions. Barely a moment had passed. Ravleen didn’t seem to realize that they had been gone.

“Fair warning!” she wailed. “I’m going to butcher you and fuck every one of your body parts, you fucking shit!”

Ord stared at her.

Out of curiosity, or perhaps some misguided compassion, he opened his right hand and offered it to Ravleen.

She grabbed the hand and shoved it into her mouth and neatly bit off two fingers, the sharp crunch of the bones lingering. Then she spat the living fingers to the ground and stomped on them, cursing without breath or the smallest pause.

Some while later, replaying those events for his siblings, Xo defended Ravleen. The criminal wasn’t going to surrender. He felt sure. And Ravleen was just being herself, which probably did some little good, helping to remind Ord about the dangers lurking around him.

If there was blame to shoulder, Xo argued, it was his. He had spent his life preparing, and the magic hadn’t worked, and he seriously doubted he would have another chance to speak with his nemesis.

The elder Nuyen touched him lightly, fondly.

A cool feminine voice flowed over him, saying, “When Ravleen was done with her tantrum, what did Ord say?”

“ ‘I’m here to talk to Alice,’ ” Xo replied, mimicking the voice and the pale boyish face. “‘Bring her here and let me see her, in private. Then I’ll leave again. I won’t hurt anyone, and I promise, I won’t take her with me.’ ”

The Nuyens fell silent, contemplating those utterly simple words.

Allowing himself a dose of self-pity, Xo whispered, “I failed my Family. And my species. I’m sorry that I have let you down.”

“But you didn’t,” the ancient woman replied. Not to comfort, just to inform. “Honestly, we never expected your success.”

No?

Then she touched him again, saying, “One more time, please. Tell us about the people with him…the ones inside the penthouse…”

Nine

“Measure the soul exactly, and it becomes yours.”

—Nuyen saying

ALICE DELIVERED THEoffer.

Alone in her cell, sitting on the foot of her narrow bed, she read a string of words projected on the normally white wall. “This message is intended for my brother’s companions,” she said, her voice steady and colorless. “We are offering a complete amnesty to you. Leave the Chamberlain mansion before dawn, renounce your allegiance to Ord, and every crime will be forgiven. Your past will be forgotten. And we will grant you every freedom and responsibility deserved by the citizens of your mother world.”

She paused, then read, “The notice is signed: ‘The Earth’s Council, Emergency Session.’ ”

Slowly, with a hint of pain, Alice grew puzzled. She glanced up at the omnipresent wall, her mouth open and the neat simple teeth looking white and wet inside the pink of her mouth. And then, she breathed. And after a long moment, she whispered, “Ord?”

Then, “Why did you come back? Why—?”

The feed evaporated into blackness.

The audience spoke, almost shouting, each voice claiming that the image wasn’t real, and the offer was a sham, too. But Ord quieted them with a gesture, then admitted, “That was Alice. And the offer is authentic.” He had analyzed every communication and every careless word uttered by ten thousand high-placed souls, and though he had doubts, not one of the doubts had a backbone.

Seeing his resignation, the others began to adjust their opinions, repeating the word, “Amnesty,” with a mixture of gentle horror and tentative hope.

Buteo was first to ask, “What happens at dawn?”

“They assault our position,” Ord replied.

There was a long silence.

In their faces, particularly in their wide, thoughtful eyes, he could see the others thoroughly replaying Xo’s arguments. They were thinking hard about pride and about sacrifice. Ord had merely saved their lives, while their Families and a bone-deep sense of duty had given them life in the first place, and their endless sense of purpose. They said as much with glances, with half sighs, and with a persistent, embarrassed quiet that was finally shattered when Ord smiled wistfully, reminding them, “You’re not prisoners. If you wish, leave. That’s absolutely what I expect from you.”

Through the night, one by one, people made their apologies before slipping outside, floating into the grasp of the Nuyens.

By sunrise, only Buteo and Avram remained.

Ord didn’t ask for reasons, but both offered them.

“Nuyens are winning too much, and too easily,” was the Papago’s excuse, offering a flirtatious little smile.

Avram shrugged his shoulders, asking, “What can I do? Brothers have to help each other. Isn’t that a law of the universe?”

Then he smiled, and when Ord smiled back at him, he added, “Eons of habit. They won’t vanish in one dangerous little night.”

FOR A THOUSANDcenturies, the short-faced bears had roamed wild on the estate. People were occasional visitors who amounted to nothing. With their modest, pragmatic intelligence, the bears had come to a very reasonable conclusion: The mountains and rivers and shaggy wild forests belonged to them. The game animals were theirs to hunt and eat. The sun rose to feed their forests, and it set again to let the air cool. After hundreds of generations, the bears had built a rich oral history in which they were the center of the universe and the lords of all that was important. Before every dawn, they sang. They sang for the sun to climb high, and when the mountains were dry, they sang for rain. And since the sun always rose and no drought lasted long, it was easy to believe that their words and simple rhythms were responsible for all that was good in Creation.

Yet they weren’t fools. They knew something was going horribly wrong. The hot night air crackled with strange energies, and phantoms drifted through their bodies, never offering explanations or apologies. The disruptions only grew worse at daybreak. The sunrise songs were interrupted twice by sharp, inexplicable sounds that came from all directions, the granite beneath them shivering from fear. Under the cover of darkness, the enchanted moon had fallen close, and now it nearly filled the cloudless blue sky. Then a spirit army began its charge up through the mountain, rising toward the summit and the holy mansion.

The old bitch priestess sensed the army’s bloody purpose, and more than that, she saw that the bears’ world was about to change.

Quietly, she offered thanks to the mountain and the sun—every priestess made the same morning prayers—then she stumbled over her own tongue, trying to find the proper words for the inevitable.

“Tonight,” she whispered, “we will sleep with the Creator.”

The great beasts before her arched their backs, and with a useful bluster, one young male shouted, “I won’t die, and I’m not scared!”

“But you will, and you are,” said another voice.

The pack turned. Behind them stood a red-haired human boy. They had never seen a Chamberlain, but some deeply ingrained reflex was triggered. They relaxed, and the boy scratched each behind its ears, knowing exactly what each bear liked best. And he smiled at them, talking in their language, explaining, “If you come with me, I’ll keep you safe. At least for a moment or two.”

The young male shook his massive head, spat at the sky, and declared, “We don’t need your help!”

But the priestess had other ideas. As the rock beneath them rippled, she grunted her compliance, and the Chamberlain touched them in a different way…and an instant later, the forest dissolved into plasmas, and the ancient mountains turned to magma and ash and a scalding white pillar of filthy light…

THE BARRAGE OFshaped plasmas lasted four seconds.

In its wake, the mansion was left scorched but intact, held together by Ord’s own hands. And with the mountain collapsed into a cherry red lake, its deepest foundations lay exposed, making the structure taller and considerably broader, its blackened exterior more imposing than ever.

The army attacked with a wild fury, accomplishing nothing. Wild fire and mindless bravery accounted for most of the casualties. But a tiny unit masquerading as the butt end of a kinetic charge managed to slip through Ord’s defenses. Then, with a Nuyen general at the lead, the invaders swam at near light-speed, following fissures and a forgotten conduit, then materializing inside the central staircase not ten meters below the penthouse.

The murals were gone, replaced with an infinite blackness and a powerful, unnerving cold.

Extinction, perfectly rendered.

The Nuyen attacked the crystal door, then leaped back as it dissolved, becoming a pocket of stale air with Ord standing at its center. The boy’s face was miserable, his eyes pale and tired, and with a voice that matched the face, he said, “I want to talk to Alice. Just that. Then I’ll repair the damage, and I’ll leave. I promise you.”

The Nuyen shook what passed for a head, then drifted aside.

Ravleen stood waiting, grinning in a cheerless, expectant fashion. A few of her hands had been freed for the occasion. She reached with them, engulfing her enemy, ripping away his talents and senses and his strange dark-matter meats, aiming for what lay at the center.

Ord winced and shut his eyes.

With eyes shut, he saw himself standing on a long green lawn, wearing nothing but a boy’s half-grown and very naked body. The grass was short and soft and overly perfumed, and the mansion was white again, rooted into the old mountaintop. A pack of tame bears was lying nearby, drinking in the blue skies and sun. Ord stood still just long enough to believe in this place. Then a hand grabbed his shoulder and spun him, and a second hand—hard as basalt—drove itself into his astonished face.

Ord lay on his back, his face bloodied.

The Sanchex towered over him, naked and unexpectedly alluring. With a practiced, almost surgical precision, she placed a long bare foot to his neck, then pressed hard enough to make the mountain’s bones groan beneath them.

On another day, Ord would have already lost the fight. Ravleen would have given him a thorough, expert beating, and he would have endured it, knowing that she could never inflict any permanent harm. But this Ord grabbed an ankle and yanked her off her feet. Then he jumped up and set his foot against her neck, letting her curse and lash at him, her rage causing her to bite through her own tongue and spit it at him.

The air gave a supersoniccrack as the tongue passed.

New hands were unmanacled. But instead of throwing Ord off, Ravleen grabbed him and pulled him close, an irresistible strength leaving him lying on top of her, chest to chest, his left ear pressed against the tongueless mouth.

This wasn’t Ravleen. This was a monster, a scorching rage with a shred of an embittered, poisoned intellect that served only to steer the rage.

“More talents,” she begged with other mouths. “Let me kill, please. Please, let me kill!”

“No,” said a Nuyen’s calculating voice. “Just hold him now.”

Xo appeared suddenly, kneeling on the sweet grass, and with a genuine pain told Ord, “You know, you really can’t win this thing.”

A portion of Ord wanted to believe him. Defeat meant peace and a kind of freedom, all of his massive responsibilities taken from him.

“You’re simply too weak,” Xo informed him.

Ord said nothing.

The Nuyen’s talents were at work. Oily and cold, they slipped inside him and spoke with a pure confidence, telling his soul, “If you surrender, at this moment, nobody else needs to die. Including you.”

“Shut up!” Ravleen screamed. She lay beneath Ord as if he were her lover, and her face colored and twisted, a new tongue curling and the ebony eyes throwing fire at Xo. “Give me another fucking hand, and shut up!”

For an instant, her grip was stronger.

Slightly.

When it weakened again, Ord barely noticed.

The bears had made a circle around the fighters. Then one of the beasts became Avram, and he grabbed Xo, pulling him away. Another was Buteo, and she calmly and expertly took hold of the Sanchex monster, peeling back hands until Ord could find his feet again. Then the other bears—much modified in the last few moments—put their cavernous mouths around various body parts, and waited. And the humans studied Ord, waiting for whatever he might say or do next.

The crystal moon filled the sky, and the mountain had turned to magma again. They stood on the soft flowing rock, and there came a rumbling thunder, and Xo said, “The moon is a weapon,” and then, “But of course you know it is,” and then, “But of course you don’t know how irresistibly powerful it is…”

Ord smiled as if embarrassed. He hid his genitals with his hands, and quietly, in a near whisper, he told Xo, “You were right. I wasn’t strong enough to win.”

No one spoke.

“But I am now,” he admitted.

The Nuyen’s face lost its color, its life. “You can’t be,” he sputtered. “The defense grid is on full alert. Talent requires mass, and nothing is moving toward the Earth—”

He hesitated, and winced.

Quietly, Xo said, “Shit.”

Ravleen chewed off her new tongue and spat it at her captors.

Wide-eyed, Xo gazed up at the sky. “You’ve always been here,” he whispered. “That refugee boy…he was the last of you, not the first.”

Ord gave a distracted nod.

The moon’s framework was dissolving away, its mysterious guts obeying the gentle tug of gravity, pouring free like some great, invisible river.

Xo screamed and tried to pull his arms free, and the bears snipped them off at the shoulders, leaving them flexing and twitching in a neat pile, hands instinctively clinging to one another.

Then Ord pulled open a ten-kilometer mouth, looking skyward, finally slaking his fantastic thirst.

Ten

“It wasn’t meant to be a weapon so much as a precise and relentless tool that should have allowed us to engulf and destroy talents en masse.

“Nothing like it has ever been produced—certainly not within our galaxy—and as we will continue to point out, loudly and endlessly, the device was designed and built by every good Family as well as a host of civilian agencies. Costs were shared, and responsibilities were shared, and there were some inevitable failures in security. Vast undertakings, by their nature, are porous. The final assembly took a thousand years in deep interstellar space—a requirement born of temperature and microgravity constraints—and our best guess is that there, in the blackest cold of space, was where the Chamberlain took control of the project. He gutted our good work and successfully hid his own body parts inside the dense, heavily masked crust. Once our work was finished, we were unable to peer inside. Until activated, there was no way of knowing what we had delivered to the unsuspecting Earth. Naturally, voices now can question our good sense, but the public must consider this: If we could have seen inside the crust, so could have the Chamberlain. And if the Chamberlain had seen the tool, then he might have found the means to turn it against us…

“He made fools of us, but we cannot admit that publicly…

“We made fools of ourselves, bringing that monster home with as much pageantry as security allowed…each of us boasting to the mother world, ‘This is for you. We have done this wonderful thing for you…!’ ”

—Nuyen memo, confidential

FORXO, THEREwas no compelling sense of failure. Self-pity didn’t tug at him, and in a strangely soothing fashion, there wasn’t so much as a breath of remorse. The truth was clear-cut: No combination of skill and luck could have beaten Ord. This situation was born hopeless, and he was blameless. Free of his obligations, Xo felt as if he could halfway relax. Within himself, in secret corners, he smiled. Then he began working to adapt to his new circumstances—as a prisoner, as a hostage—watching events but knowing that he had no role but to witness these momentous, inevitable deeds.

With a soft, almost prissy voice, Ord announced, “Now, finally, I’m going to visit my sister.”

The words saturated every channel, public and Family, then trailed off into a screaming white hiss that frustrated every other attempt to speak.

“Good!” the Papago woman declared. “It’s about time!”

Ord clothed himself in gray trousers and a bulky gray shirt. He left his body young and his chin injured, the illusory bone shattered and the facsimile of blood building an ugly black scab.

Avram was holding Xo. He had a relentless grip and a nervous, loud voice. “What do you want from me?”

“Stay with Buteo,” Ord replied. “I’ll be gone a moment. Help her hold the Sanchex down.”

Ravleen was too dangerous to be left with just one of them. Xo would have warned them, if anyone bothered to ask.

“What about this one?” Avram asked, giving Xo a hard shake. “He scares me worse, in some ways.”

Ord’s eyes were distant. Unreadable.

Eventually he said, “The Nuyen stays with me.”

Xo found himself freed, sporting two functioning arms again.

“You’re my witness,” Ord promised. “Watch everything. Then you can tell your siblings that I meant it. I came here to talk to Alice, just once, and everything else was their fault. No one else’s.”

THE LAST FEWsteps were exactly that. Steps.

The two of them had already passed through plastic rock and collapsing defenses, a temporarily blind and utterly lost army left scattered above them. Xo found himself standing inside an infinitely long hallway lined with countless white doors, each door identical to its neighbors, each armored and mined. It was a powerful escher. He took two steps, then looked over his shoulder. Ord was standing before a particular door. His face seemed empty, his bare feet frozen to the slick white floor. Reaching for the coded pad, he slowly transformed his hand, making it match the jailer’s fingers and palm. A mass of long and silky fingers started to reach out. And then, the hand pulled up short.

“Is she there?” Xo asked.

“Yes.”

Ord spoke in a whisper, fearful and abrupt.

“Are you scared?” Xo heard himself ask.

“Terrified,” the Chamberlain confessed.

“Don’t be,” Xo advised. Then he had to laugh, explaining, “Alice has been locked away so long, and treated so badly by so many people…honestly, I doubt if she remembers much more than her own name.”

Ord nodded, and he touched the pad, allowing it to dissolve the tips of each perfectly rendered finger.

With a quiet hiss, the door unsealed itself and fell open.

Alice was in the middle of her tiny cell, walking away from them: Step, and step, then in front of the tiny white toilet, she made a smooth turn. For a slippery instant, she seemed oblivious to her guests. Soft blue eyes stared through the two of them, and she took a first step toward her bed, pausing gradually in midstride, ignoring her brother but staring hard at the Nuyen.

She was exceptionally pretty. That’s what took Xo by surprise.

Ageless and rested, Alice looked as clean as her surroundings. She wore a simple prison gown, and her long hair was braided into little red ropes that she had artfully tied together and draped over a half-bare, milky shoulder. She didn’t look half so lovely on the real-time feeds. The feeds must be doctored. Xo realized that her jailers wanted audiences to see an unkempt prisoner, suffering and disreputable. They didn’t want a simple, contented creature. They certainly didn’t want someone who would smile with an easy charm, and bow deeply, proclaiming, “I am glad to see you, master. As always.”

She took Xo’s hand, kissing his knuckles one after another.

Xo pulled back, in disgust.

Her brother said, “He’s not here to torture you, Alice.”

The beautiful face grinned, turning toward the voice. “Because he has already abused you, by the looks of it.”

Ord’s face was still oozing, the blood mixed with more elusive fluids.

Alice turned back to the Nuyen. “Is he really the baby? Or has this been one of your little tricks?”

“It’s him,” Xo maintained.

She preferred doubt.

Ord took her hand, placing it against his chin. Fingers vanished into the gore, and Alice flinched, gave a low moan, and flinched again. Inside her flesh, hiding for eons, were an assortment of tiny locks built from a novel species of false proton. Xo stared with his best eyes, watching lock after lock fail to work. But two or three succeeded in their task, and some infinitesimal memory from a hundred thousand years ago was dislodged, telling her simply, “This is Ord.”

She yanked her hand free and wiped it clean against her white gown.

“It is,” she conceded. Her voice was excited and suspicious, and beneath everything, it was angry. “How terribly lovely! You’ve taken an incalculable risk, Baby…just so you could accomplish…what…?”

“I want help,” Ord whispered, grabbing her by the shoulder, then with the jailer’s hand, covering her smooth pale forehead. “The Core’s obliterated. The rest of the galaxy is in shambles. My intuitions—your old instincts—tell me total war is likely. I’ve tried to defend the Peace. Just as you told me to, I’ve tried. But I’m alone, Alice. It’s just me. And things are worse than you could have guessed—”

“Help you?” she interrupted. “Help you how?”

“I can’t even guess,” Ord confessed. “I’ve searched every memory that you gave me, and something’s missing. Something you kept for yourself, I think.”

Alice laughed lightly, almost flippantly. In some sense, she was the baby now. Her long incarceration had left her stupid and unworldly, and in an unexpected way, she was blessed with a perfect innocence. She seemed at a loss about what to tell her brother, but she worked to dredge up answers. Ancient memories began to emerge, but without coordination, without grace. There was nonsense about her childhood and early education, and for a few moments, she rambled on about the Core. She said, “Show me. How it was,” and she gazed at the image that Ord gave her. The white walls and ceiling and floor vanished, and the toilet and bed. The three of them were standing in the midst of endless stars. “So many,” she sang. “I wish you could have seen it, Ord—!”

“Why me?” he blurted, plainly angry.

Alice flinched, wounded. “Because you must have fit the duty, I would imagine.”

“How can I do this duty?”

A soft, little-girl laugh fell into the word, “Think.”

Ord looked frustrated, incapable of real thought.

“Think,” she repeated. “Why is the galaxy in turmoil? Because intelligent species cannot find homes enough or enough peace. But that’s the curse of a universe where life is common. Creation always grows and grows crowded.”

“I know,” said her brother.

She looked at Xo for a moment, her smile turning poisonous. And he gazed past her smile, watching as a small knot of memory swam out of a hidden place. This precise image of the Core had been the key; of all possible views, purely out of reflex, Ord had shown her this exact pattern of lost suns. He didn’t appreciate the trick, even now. Xo saw his confusion, and he nearly spoke. But Alice had turned back to her brother again, that secret memory unknotting itself as she said to him, “You need help I can’t give. You need opportunity I don’t possess.”

“Where do I find them?” Ord asked.

“Remind me,” she said. “How did I attempt to save our little universe?”

Xo answered, half-shouting, “You built a new Creation—”

“And it was beautiful. Spectacular and glorious!” She wouldn’t look at the Nuyen again. With eyes focused on her brother, Alice said, “Think,” twice. “Think. We had the umbilical pried open long enough for it to grow unstable, and that’s when the new universe rushed out into our cold realm—!”

A low, rough sound leaked from Ord.

“What?” Xo muttered. “What’s she telling you?”

Ord shook his head. “That’s what happened. One of you…someone from the Families…someone had enough time to cross, make their way into that new universe. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

Alice didn’t answer him directly. But grinning with an incandescent pride, she asked, “Do you know how difficult it has been, keeping hold of that delicious secret?”

Xo shuddered.

Ord touched his chin, playing with the half-dried blood between his fingertips. Finally, summoning the courage, he asked, “Who crossed over? And why does it matter—?”

With a whisper, Alice said, “Closer.”

Her brother obeyed. He was a little taller than her, so he dipped his head until his ear rested against her pretty mouth, and Alice kissed the ear, running her bright pink tongue over the embarrassed lobe, speaking to Ord for a moment or two with a secret chemical voice absorbed along with her spit.

Ord raised his head again, his face pale, and simple, and stunned.

He was reacting to whatever Alice had told him. That was Xo’s first guess, and perhaps he was right. Perhaps. But then the prison cell shook and shuddered, and the air grew instantly warmer, and a look of absolute horror came over the boy. The image of the Core had vanished. Ord stared up at the white ceiling, lifting his arms, screaming, “No!”

And he was gone.

Alice seemed oblivious to any problem. Yet when she looked at Xo, she wore a strange smile. Pulling his head down, she kissed him on the mouth. She had no odor. No flavor. She was as pure as medical technology could ensure, her saliva like water from a mountain brook, her tongue feeling wondrous as it played inside his dirty mouth.

“I won’t have the pleasure of your company again, I think.”

She was speaking to all the Nuyens.

Then, as Ord reached deep into the world to reclaim Xo, she winked at him, and said mildly, “Oh, Mr. Nuyen. What do you believe is the best way for a young lady to win her revenge?”

Eleven

“It is best when you can keep yourself innocent, in every eye but your own. Innocent, yet at the same glorious moment, you are hiding in your enemy’s shadow, watching him work inside his own kitchen, preparing a vat of sweet poisons intended for you…and the luscious scent is simply too much…and driven mad, he risks a little taste, then another, and before he can escape, he’s consumed every fatal morsel for himself…”

—a Nuyen proverb

ORD ROARED UPthrough the mantle, up into the mansion, leaving one tiny room for another. Then he wove himself a child’s body, and shouting with a multitude of voices, he said, “Keep. Your. Hand. There!”

Avram flinched, but his broad pink palm remained flush against the yellowed mudstone. He wore a distant, almost embarrassed expression. In the eyes, he was ashamed. For an instant, Ord could almost believe that his brother had done nothing provocative: He must have wandered into this room out of simple curiosity, and curiosity forced him to place his hand into the ancient imprint of Alice’s hand. This was an accident. This was an enormous, forgivable miscue. Ord was desperate to say, “You didn’t know. This is my fault, not yours…!”

But he had no chance to beg for the blame.

Avram was staring at his brother. “Surrender,” he growled.

The single word came out under pressure, wrapped in a white misery. Then sliding out after it was the softer, almost mournful:

“Please.”

When the trigger embedded in the stone was tripped, Ord had neatly strangled the explosion beneath Alice’s cell. But in the next nanoseconds, with a wild astonishment, he watched as a second trigger emerged. It had a design that he had never anticipated, made from slippery shadow-matter materials that he still couldn’t comprehend. Waiting half-evolved until it felt the pressure and gravity of a Chamberlain hand, it had completed itself in an instant, its intricate workings obvious. Blatant. Mirroring the first booby trap, this trigger was linked to globules of molten anti-iron suspended inside magnetic jars. But the waiting bombs didn’t come by the handful. Ord watched as each jar shrugged off its elaborate camouflage, and he counted what he saw, and it seemed as if there were no end to the monsters, tens of millions of them scattered through the Earth’s upper mantle, waiting patiently for the opportunity to be set loose.

Again, with a grim resolve, Avram said, “Surrender.”

He didn’t add, “Please,” this time.

The booby trap would injure Ord. But still, it would take milliseconds for a detonation signal to cross the world, and that was time enough to retreat and brace himself, the rippling inferno leaving him a little scorched but otherwise intact.

Yet Ord wasn’t the target, was he?

Avram stared at him, the expression on that Chamberlain face changing now. A nest of memes emerged from their hiding places. An easy disgust made him flinch and shake his head slightly. For the last time, he said, “Surrender.” Then he paused, filling that moment with a deep, useless breath. And then, because he thought it would help, he smiled, struggling for a hopeful expression, asking his little brother, “Really, Ord…what choice do you have…?”

THE TINY BEDROOMwas suffocating. Even as portions of Ord spun out estimates of casualties and economic loss and cultural loss and political disarray, the rest of him—the center of his soul—felt trapped, helpless and worse than half-dead.

With a quiet, mournful voice, he muttered, “Brother,” and began to cry.

A woman’s voice asked, “What’s happening here?”

Buteo had arrived. Ravleen was still wrapped up in her strong arms, still twisting in her grip. Materializing in the hallway, the Papago stared through the transparent wall, understanding nothing when she added the second question:

“What’s wrong with you, Chamberlain?”

Ord explained on a private channel, in an instant.

Buteo’s eyes became enormous, and vacant, and she squeezed Ravleen as if trying to crush her.

With his own arms, Ord helped restrain the Sanchex.

“A perimeter check,” she muttered. “Avram said you wanted him to…”

Reaching deep underground, Ord reclaimed Xo. Then, ignoring his brother, he directed his rage at the convenient Nuyen. “What were you thinking? The Earth’s on a precipice…just to catch me…what were you assholes thinking—?”

“I don’t understand,” Xo replied. Then he saw enough for himself, with his own senses, and he began to shake his head numbly and yank at his black hair, screaming, “I didn’t know! I didn’t!”

Avram flexed his right wrist.

Ord reached for him, then hesitated. The trigger was clever in the worst ways, and it was proud of its cleverness. “Touch your brother,” it warned, “and I’ll detonate. Weave a new hand to replace it, and I will see it and detonate. And if you touch me, in any fashion, I will most assuredly detonate.” Then with a dense roar of data and plans, it said, “These are my specifications, and my redundant systems, and the complete tallies from every field test. Look at them. Look at me! You’ve never seen anything like me, and you cannot beat me on your first try.”

Ord winced, staring straight into Avram’s eyes.

“You were waiting for me,” he remarked. “On the night of your execution…you knew I’d come and save you.”

The pink hand moved inside the fossil print, just slightly.

Then Avram offered a tiny nod, saying, “Honestly? I’d given up on you. The Nuyens came long ago and made their offer. If I found my chance, I was supposed to take it. Then they made me forget their visit. Until just a few moments ago, I’d forgotten everything. And nobody explained what this trick was, although I could guess. I can remember one of them saying, ‘He’s not evil, this brother of yours. But he’s horribly misguided. And when the circumstance arises, we promise, Ord will make the sane, decent choice.’ ”

“If I hadn’t come for you?” Ord inquired.

“I’d be dead. Of course. If my execution was theater, you would never have trusted me.” He sighed, then confessed, “I expected to die. That night you saved me, and right up until now. Because there’s too many of them, and they’re too clever, even for Alice’s talents…until I set my hand in Alice’s hand, here, I always felt nothing but doom…!”

Ord closed his corporeal eyes, his fatigue enormous and genuine.

When he opened them, Avram was beginning to say, “Surrender,” once more.

“That is what I am doing,” Ord interrupted. “Now, and as fast as I can.”

With a wild chorus of commands, he began dragging his talents into a deep sleep. By the dozens, by the hundreds, he dismantled himself. His camouflage fell away first, allowing the world to watch him. Then he put down his weapons and every talent with deadly applications. After thirty seconds of relentless labor, he had almost dismantled himself. Another few moments would have left him astonishingly ordinary. But then his surviving eyes saw something odd, and he started to turn toward the oddity while Ravleen screamed, “No!”

Too late, Ord understood.

The Sanchex was wrestling with Buteo, distracting her with her strongest limbs, while a weak little tendril composed of the thinnest materials reached through the diamond wall and across the tiny bedroom. Ravleen utterly ignored Ord; with that feeble limb, she couldn’t have harmed him if she tried. What she grabbed instead was Avram’s sturdy wrist, and with all of the limb’s strength, she gave him a hard swift calculated jerk, barely lifting the hand from the cool mudstone, but still moving it with enough force and distance to cause the trigger to say, “Boom.”

In a panic, Avram pressed his palm back against Alice’s fossil palm. Then, even as the world began to tear apart, and as the great gods screamed in rage and in grief, he kept his hand exactly where it belonged. And while the ancient mansion evaporated around him, he used all of his hands to help hold himself perfectly steady…telling himself that this wasn’t what it seemed to be…assuring himself that he mattered, and he was noble, and what he was doing, as always, was something that was exceptionally good…

Twelve

“Blame for this horrendous tragedy rests squarely upon the Chamberlain and his violent, immoral allies…including, we fear, a renegade Sanchex…!”

—a Nuyen announcement

IN LIEU OFtheir traditional public celebration, the new year was marked by a subdued, largely private gathering of the Families. The ancient estates had been obliterated, and the Earth was a bright white world encased in steam and oceans of irradiated magma. The gods met on Mars in what was a prolonged, decidedly sober affair. Cheerless voices lamented the latest cataclysm. Voices free of doubt neatly deflected talk of blame and shortsightedness. Proud voices described acts of personal heroism, while careful quiet voices discussed the unfolding plans for future estates: The Nuyens had graciously donated one of their intersolar worlds. Over the next several thousand years, that cold body would be eased into the Kuiper belt, then terraformed, and each Family would receive its share of new land and water, sculpting fresh mountains and erecting new mansions that would surely stand for the next ten billion years.

It was a good, sensible change. Many argued that this was more than sensible, it was inevitable. Here was a new beginning for a new peace, some sturdy voices claimed. While other, more pragmatic souls admitted that having normal citizens live beside the Families had always been an unreasonable risk and an encumbrance. If Ord had visited their future home instead of the Earth, nobody would have died. Except for that little bastard himself, naturally. Without fragile souls underfoot, the Families could have responded appropriately. Instantly. And they could have guarded Alice all the better, too.

Did the Bitch-of-bitches die along with the Earth?

Hopefully, was the unanimous verdict.

The Families had saved billions of ordinary people. During those horrible moments after the Chamberlain had used his unthinkable weapon, Nuyens had died, each one now bestowed with an eternal martyrdom. There were moments when Xo, reflecting on events, wished that his siblings hadn’t helped him escape. Thousands of tiny souls could have been saved in his place, surely. But his altruism was reflexive, and it was tissue-thin. Besides, if he had died, he would be another one of the beloved martyrs—a role that disgusted him for more reasons, and more emotions, than he seemed able to count.

In the midst of the dour festivities, an ancient sister approached him. She insisted on smiling. She very nearly laughed, telling Xo, “I know you did your best for us. For all humanity. As far as I’m concerned, you should be the first Nuyen to talk about your successes.”

Because it was expected, he said, “Thank you.”

Hundreds of billions were dead, and their ancestral home was a ravaged wasteland, and he was expected to be polite, accepting this graceless, preposterous praise.

“I just heard,” the sister continued. “Did you? A dark-matter body matching the Chamberlain’s configuration has raced past one of our Oort stations.”

“Which station?”

She told him, then added, “It’s obvious. From the trajectory and his speed, Ord is making a run for the Core now.”

“Because of what his sister told him,” Xo replied.

The sister watched him, saying nothing in a certain way.

Xo prompted her. “Don’t you believe Alice?”

“Believe what? That someone managed to crawl their way from this universe into the other? Perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t. In most circumstances, perhaps is the only belief worth holding.” Again, she nearly laughed. “Whatever happens to be the truth, little brother…our plans are thorough, and they are durable, and there is room enough for every reasonable possibility.”

“Nuyens are thorough people,” Xo mentioned.

She rose to the bait, saying, “Absolutely,” with a prideful wide smile.

“What about Ravleen?” He posed the question with a careful voice, then added, “That same Oort station might have noticed her, too.”

“Perhaps it did,” the sister allowed. “Twenty minutes later, perhaps.”

Ravleen had used the chaos to make her escape. She would still be wearing manacles, but not all of them, and they would present only temporary constraints. And nobody, not even a fool, could doubt what she was seeking.

Xo’s doubts lay closer in space. With the help of simple charm, he mentioned, “Twenty minutes at light-speed is a considerable gap.” He winked, then added, “It’s a shame, really. A waste and a shame that Ravleen couldn’t have started her chase sooner.”

The sister nodded, smiling in a distracted fashion.

Using his most powerful talents, Xo reached inside her mind, coaxing out the secrets hiding in the bloody corners.

The smile vanished abruptly.

Slowly, she set a powerful hand to his shoulder. “What do you think you know, brother?”

“With her talents, it should have taken Ravleen barely two moments to start her chase. Not twenty damned minutes.” He didn’t care about punishments or sanctions. “But what if she was disabled first? What if we used the implants inside her mind, then captured and interrogated her…?”

The woman couldn’t imagine that she was not in perfect control. She believed it was her own iron will that told her to admit, “I was at the interrogation. Three minutes, and it was done. Then we spoke for another fifteen minutes, debating our next move. Releasing the Sanchex was the only rational course. Evil in pursuit of evil is the perfect solution, and I haven’t regretted it for a greasy moment, little brother.”

“Who murdered the Earth?” he asked.

Calmly, with a dry, simple voice, she told him, “The Chamberlain, of course. The one who stupidly blundered into our trap—”

“And Ravleen,” he offered.

She winced, and said, “Fuck! It’s a force of nature, that creature is. That monster. She has no will. She has no sense. Her only geniusis her ability to torture that one fucking Chamberlain.” This time, the laugh was hard and genuine. “You know, I think that’s why she did it. Tripped the trigger, I mean. Because she knows Ord exactly, and she knows that the dead Earth will haunt him forever.”

Quietly, Xo echoed the word, “Torture.”

Then with an insistent voice, he asked, “How did Ravleen find that extra arm? Where did it come from?”

“Our only guess? That sometime during her field trials, while we were watching everything else, Ravleen used her own weapons to mutilate one of her own hands. She cut the hand in two and hid the weaker half. For eons, probably. Which proves how incredibly eager she is to do this important work.”

Xo said nothing.

Again, she said, “Important work.”

Then, finally, she felt the eyes peering inside her soul. She blinked and physically moved away from the young Nuyen, and he twisted her emotions enough to confuse her again. “You did nothing,” she said. Then said, “Wrong, I mean.” And with a cold shiver, she advised him, “Don’t confuse yourself by dwelling on these matters.”

“I won’t,” Xo lied.

“Good,” she whispered.

A little while later, using appropriate formality and the stiffest of smiles, Xo left the gathering and his Family, and moments after that, he abandoned Mars, too. With talents stolen from half a hundred Families, he slipped away into space, draining the inertia from his body and dipping down past the clean white face of the Earth, skimming next to its atmosphere on his journey out of the solar system.

It was as beautiful in death as it ever was in life, he realized.

And the Core was glorious, and hideous, and he steered straight for it, while wiping every flavor of tear from every sort of eye.