Analog SFF, December 2009

Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Our January/February 2010 “double” issue marks the 80th anniversary of this magazine, the oldest of its kind and still a leader in its field. We mark the occasion with a special essay by Ben Bova, the only being in the Universe (literally!) who progressed from being a regular reader of Astounding (as it was known for its first 30 years), to writing for it, then editing it (to wide acclaim), and then returned to being a writer and reader—so he has a genuinely unique perspective. And, of course, we celebrate with an extra-generous dose and wide variety of fiction, including three of the big pieces that are hard to fit in a regular issue. All of those are new entries in popular series—Richard A. Lovett's “Floyd and Brittney,” H. G. Stratmann's “Paradise Project” on Mars, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch's “Retrieval Artist"—but all also break substantial and thought-provoking new ground. We'll also have stories by other authors both new and familiar, including Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Michael F. Flynn, Mike Resnick (with collaborator Lezli Robyn), and Eric James Stone.

The extra room in the double issue also lets us do extra things in the nonfiction area: two fact articles (on the nature of culture and the non-identical nature of twins), and two special features (Ben Bova's aforementioned memoir, and another of Richard A. Lovett's helpful bits of advice on the art of storytelling). All of which makes a package with plenty for everybody.




Serial: TO CLIMB A FLAT MOUTAIN: CONCLUSION by G. David Nordley
* * * *

Illustration by Vincent Di Fate
* * * *
Even in a place as bizarre as Cube World, the worst problems humans face are likely to come from other humans.
* * * *
Part I synopsis

Jacques Song wakes up from cold sleep to find himself underwater looking up through the transparent cover of his cold sleep unit (CSU) at a large predatory fish with a huge parrotlike beak. He went to sleep in a hotel room expecting to wake up at a base in the Kuiper Belt of the 36 Ophiuchi system. There he was to take part in a huge expedition to liberate a colony taken over by a cult nasty enough to justify an attempt at interstellar warfare. Something had gone very wrong.

The CSU's computer has only limited knowledge of what has happened and no knowledge of why. Jacques’ starship, the Resolution, failed to engage its deceleration pellet stream at 36 Ophiuchi and had spent the last thousand years decelerating by other means, losing the last of its velocity by crashing into the atmosphere of the only habitable planet it could reach and dumping its cargo of CSU stored passengers into and around a volcanic crater lake. Running out of power, the CSU has revived Jacques to fend for himself.

With an emergency kit nobody thought would ever have to be used and no source of power, Jacques must escape the lake floor, evade the predatory fish, and reach shore. All the electronics in the emergency kit are dead. Fortunately, the skin-tight all-purpose survival suit is powered by his body heat and motion and works perfectly. Enclosed in his suit, Jacques is able to flood the CSU, pop the lid, evade the fish, reach the surface, and navigate through huge but gentle waves to a black sand beach. In this effort, he finds himself feeling exceptionally strong and vigorous.

The world's gravity, it turns out, is about equal to that of the Moon. Still, the feeble stellar wind from its old red dwarf star has apparently been insufficient to blow the atmosphere away. Indeed, where Jacques has landed, the pressure appears to be several times that of Earth's atmosphere. The partial pressure of oxygen also seems greater, accounting for some of his endurance and strength.

Jacques will attempt to rescue other survivors, but first he has to assure his own survival. The vegetation inside the caldera is sparse, so he sets out over the crater rim to find what he can on the exterior slopes. At the rim of the crater-lake caldera, Jacques discovers three impossibly huge distant mountains right, left, and in front of him whose perfect triangular peaks and connecting ridges seem to rise above the atmosphere.

Descending into the forest below the ridge, Jacques manages to find sustenance among the native life, though he comes close to the end of his emergency rations. He has close calls with huge creatures that resemble a cross between a kangaroo and a dinosaur and with batlike scavengers the size of a small airliner. With no recorder or even paper and pencil, Jacques is reduced to scratching short notes in stone to record his progress. He leaves these on cairns that he builds at his various campsites.

On his way back to the crater-lake, he discovers a windblown page from the diary of a woman he knew briefly in training—Ascendant Chryse. Arriving at the rim in evening, Jacques finds a lava tube for shelter. Rising before sunrise, he spots the shrunken, distorted constellation of Orion. It is still recognizable because the Resolution had come from that direction. But just off to the side is an intensely bright red star. It can only be Antares—which means the Resolution had bypassed the supergiant star and they were now farther from Earth than it was. Jacques’ stargazing is then interrupted by a hungry megabat and he must hide deep in his cave.

After sunrise, Jacques decides to build a raft for the rescue effort. He goes back into the forest to get logs and twine. There he establishes “Forest Camp” and commutes back and forth to Second Landing beach carrying one log at a time. On his last logging trip, he stumbles on Ascendant Chryse's CSU just in time to watch a “megabat” break into her CSU and carry away her body. On reaching the CSU and her camp, he finds that she had been murdered when someone, or something, turned off the power to her CSU while she slept, trapping and suffocating her. He finds her diary and on its last pages reads that someone on the ship had sabotaged its deceleration mechanism. He takes her diary and the memory module from the CSU and holds a brief ceremony for her that night in his shelter.

Back at his crater-lake shore camp, “Second Landing,” Jacques builds a raft, the Resolution II, and is able to find and rescue three people: Submahn “Soob” Roy, a former park ranger and logistics expert; Collette Obota, an expedition policewoman; and Dr. Yu Song-Il, a psychiatrist they call “Doc.” The raft almost falls apart during the trip and they barely reach shore alive.

Needing more food and a bigger raft, the group of four set out for the other side of the Caldera Rim. While Soob and Doc are bringing back the hollow logs packed with food, Jacques and Collette stop by the Ascendant Chryse site to salvage more electronics. On the way back to the rim they are hailed by a large man draped, Robinson Crusoe-like, in a kangasaur skin tunic.

His name is Gabe Eddie, a psycho-warfare expert from a Baptist space colony, New Jerusalem, in the Solar System. He tells them his CSU landed in the forest and he found them by following Jacques’ cairns. To save their survival suits and keep comfortable in the hot, high-pressure climate, Jacques and the others have gone naked. This bothers Eddie, as do Collette Obata's assertiveness and questions. In turn, she and Jacques find Gabe's answers and manner a little hard to believe.

Once back at Second Landing, they rebuild the raft and rescue Edith Lu and Maria Lopes from CSUs. When they get back to camp they find that Leo Suretta, Evgenie Malenkov, and Arroya Montez have joined the group, apparently walking in from the forest. These tend to side with Gabe on several issues.

One more rescue voyage is attempted, which finds physicist Helen Gorgos and Dominic Oporto. The small community now sends out foraging expeditions. Jacques and Collette go on one and in addition to supplies, salvage more of Ascendant's CSU. Jacques is able to get some of the equipment working and discovers that a shuttle from the Resolution apparently survived reentry and is somewhere west of them. They suspect Gabe and Leo, at least, have not been fully honest.

They also have a close encounter with another megabat and by necessity discover that they can jump on the creatures, ride them, and even steer them somewhat by pulling on their ears. They get a great view of the geography of their planet and decide that what they can see is a square, and suspect the entire world may be cube shaped.

When they return, they find things have been heating up, physically and politically. Gabe and Leo have staged a sort of coup. Forest fires have broken out, and Gabe decides the group should remain at the lake, while Jacques and others think they would starve there and opt for escaping to the sea surrounding the volcanic island, as most other large animals seem to have done. No agreement can be reached and the community splits acrimoniously, with Jacques, Collette, Soob, Doc, and Helen striking out for the coast.

The small breakaway group crosses the rim and heads toward the coast as fast as they can. They barely survive the fire sweeping the island by staying close to Deliverance Creek. Exhausted and hungry, they manage to jump on a megabat feeding on a kangasaur carcass. It doesn't stop at the coast; it carries them west toward the unknown slopes of the great flat mountain on the other side of the sea.

* * * *
Chapter 12

At the Edge of Forever

Hours passed and the western shore came into view, then passed beneath them. The land, so flat from a distance, was anything but as they neared it—filled with terraces, gulches, waterfalls, and ridges. Their approach was disorienting. Their eyes told them the megabat was diving down into a roughly flat landscape, while all their other senses told them it was flying level.

"Keep thinking ‘mountainside,'” Doc said. “Or you could get sick. Look at the angle the trees make with the land."

That helped quiet Jacques’ stomach, at least. But the fact that they could see individual trees also rang an alarm bell. Whether descending or flying into a mountainside, they were rapidly approaching the end of their flight.

"We need to get ready to get off!” he shouted. “We'll need to run for the trees, or someone will be its next snack."

Though famished, everyone was well rested. They quickly untied the lines, stowed them, and helped each other strap on their kits. The megabat settled down in the tree-crowned top of a huge pillar that had become slightly detached from a terrace cliff. As it settled down in a clearing, a number of much smaller versions of itself—each still twice as large as a person—came hopping out of the surrounding wood to greet it. That proved more than enough distraction for the humans to jump off and run for shelter.

"Okay, gang,” Collette said, on catching her breath. “We've eaten one tiny meal in two days and we're trapped on a sky island plateau filled with huge predators. Why do I feel like I just got out of school?"

"Stress relief,” Doc said. “We still have big problems, but they aren't immediate problems."

Everyone laughed. Something scurried away—a hirachnoid.

"Dinner, anyone?” Soob asked.

"We need a place to sleep and I don't see anything resembling a cave,” Collette observed.

"The trees are different here,” Jacques noted, thinking aloud. “They have more branches and a wider crown. There might be a place to build a platform. Over there.” He pointed to a tree with wrinkled gray bark and two lower branches that came out at almost the same level, about three meters up. “Okay. Soob, Collette, and Doc, why don't you forage. Helen and I will try to make a platform for us."

As the hunter-gatherers left on their mission, Jacques and Helen constructed the nest, using the nearly indestructible line from Helen's emergency kit to make a web between the branches. They filled that web with whatever branches they could find lying around and secured those with a local vine that, while not green twine, served almost as well. Helen called it pseudotwine. Jacques left the construction to Helen while he gathered material.

"Come on up,” Helen said, throwing down a psuedotwine vine tied to an overhead branch. He pulled himself up easily hand over hand in the low gravity and lowered himself onto the platform; it was springy, but didn't feel like it was going anywhere.

Still, he felt better sitting down. Helen had resumed her customary state and stowed her shipsuit in her kit, which was hanging from an overhead branch. She waved at it, saying, “Save the suits for when we need them."

Despite having gone unclothed, or nearly so, in for over a month, having been clothed for a few hours had put Jacques back into another cultural mode, and he hesitated. With a sly smile, Helen reached over and, starting at his collar, began to peel his suit off like a banana skin.

When she got it off him, she began to cuddle. “Time for dessert,” she said.

He laughed and gently pushed her away. “Too tired, Helen. I'm just too worn out."

They spent the next few days resting, hiding from megabats, and foraging. The clear day of their arrival proved a fortunate rarity; more typical were misty mornings and gentle midday showers. It was more temperate here, with daytime temperatures in the high 20s; air pressure was down to around 3,000 millibars and more variable than at New Landing. The view from the tree was spectacular, but a week after their arrival, they were rested and provisioned; it was time to move on.

They packed up camp at noon the next day, with the megabats safely in their daily slumber, and explored the western edge of their sky island, looking for a way across the gap.

"It's like Meteora, in Greece,” Helen said. “Except ten times bigger. People built monasteries on top of natural pillars like this; they looked impossible to get to. The megabats keep their chicks here for the same reason, I think. But there is usually a back way, a thin bridge or connection with the rest of the plateau; not an easy way, but much more negotiable than the sheer fronts and sides. We just have to find it."

Jacques spotted it on the second day of looking, toward the south side of the pillar. About three hundred meters below the plateau, flutes from the pillar and plateau extended to meet each other. Almost. There was a gap of perhaps ten meters, with a treacherous narrow ridge leading to it on either side.

"Everyone. Over here,” he called.

"An easy jump in this gravity,” Soob said as he arrived, surveying the gap. “But staying where you land, maybe not so easy."

"There's a tree about four meters up,” Colette said. “I was a long jumper in college. I think I can make it with a rope around my waist."

"Remember the air is three times thicker here,” Doc said. “You'll lose speed quickly."

"What about a bridge?” Helen asked. “There are logs long enough, and we have line."

"Hmmm,” Jacques said.

It was, possibly, the first suspension bridge on the planet; certainly the first human-built one. They used two twelve-meter logs; the first was erected vertically on the sky island side, set in a hole and held in place by rocks piled around it. A line, anchored to a tree, went over its top and was tied to the far end of the other log. This they pushed out over the gap, playing the line out as it went until it hung swaying over the far end. They anchored the near end with a pile of rocks, then raised and lowered the far end onto the far side of the chasm until it had pounded a secure groove for itself in the loose soil there. The party crossed one at a time, with lines around their waists in case they slipped.

To get up the gravel on the other side, they made a human road to the nearest tree. Doc lay down on the slope with his feet securely on the log. Jacques crawled up over him and, with Doc's help, placed his feet on Doc's shoulders and lay down, extending the human road another meter and a half. Helen followed, then Collette with a line that she tied to the tree toehold on the plateau. Using the bridge and ropes, they got their gear across the gap and up to the level part of the plateau. It took them most of the day. They made camp on a secure flat near the edge of the cliff. It was somewhat risky, but they were beyond tired and the view of sea cliffs below, the sea, and the top of the mist-shrouded island they'd fled was to die for.

"It's like we're on the edge of forever,” Doc said.

The next morning, Jacques put up a cairn and on the more or less flat face of a rock, scratched their names and:

Day 54. Camp Edge of Forever.

* * * *
The plateau proved to be one of the terraces Jacques had seen from the far shore; three kilometers in, they were faced with a kilometer-tall rock face.

"In this gravity, a piece of cake,” Collette said, looking at the rough, crevice-filled rock face. She showed them how to jam flute plant stems in cracks as big, ersatz pitons and they scaled the thing in a couple of hours.

They had enough provisions for three days’ climb, which took them up over a half dozen “terraces.” Jacques welcomed the break from breaking trail through the forest and the view at the top of each cliff. If they found an exceptionally tall tree at the top of a cliff, they would climb it and look back. The ocean would cover the eastern horizon, perhaps slightly bowed upward as it conformed to gravity and not the flat topography. In the far east, they could see a dark smudge, so small now that they could cover it with a hand. Smoke still rose from it like a strange plant with wispy gray leaves reaching impossibly high into the sky.

Jacques assembled his electronic gear and waited for the sun to peek through the clouds and provide the power he needed. When they got another bearing to the shuttle, it was west and south of where they were. The signal had increased in strength, but not as much as he would have expected from the ocean crossing.

Each day Jacques took readings; a hundred meters left, a hundred right. They were headed toward the shuttle, but the signal was not getting much stronger.

Meanwhile, the flora and fauna changed. The broad fleshy-leafed bitterwood tree was giving way to a very tall tree with a rough yellowish bark that covered its trunk and limbs like scales. Its foliage seemed to come from a simple modification of the bark; the scales appeared to curl into finger-sized hollow tubes.

Helen picked a leaf up from the forest floor. “The underside's translucent,” she noted. “I'll bet it's a good insulator."

"Winter adaptation?” Soob asked.

Jacques nodded and stretched his hand out and covered their sun with his thumb. In the week since arriving at Camp Edge of Forever, the star had gotten noticeably smaller. “Our sun is shrinking."

"Apastron?” Collette asked.

Jacques frowned. He didn't think they'd reached the farthest point of their planet's orbit yet, but it was hard to tell how long it would be. “Not yet, but we're well past periastron now. It's not just the gain in altitude that's making us chilly."

Soob nodded. “We'll need to find a good campsite, one where we can settle long enough to make some winter clothes."

Helen laughed, then looked very thoughtful. At length she said, “We all still hope to find the shuttle, recover all our technology, and continue our mission. But it might not work out that way."

"You're suggesting we locate a permanent settlement here?” Doc asked.

Helen nodded. “At least a base camp. We'll need to stop at a place that's survivable with what we have."

"We still have a mission,” Colette said.

The quiet that ensued spoke of the elephant in the room. The urgency of the quest to find the shuttle had, necessarily, abated and he imagined that everyone was thinking like he was, though not saying it. Those that had stayed behind had either survived or not—either way, they would hardly need rescuing now. Building a new starship was a very long-term project—and they had been striving for all they were worth for almost a month now. It was time to scale back to a sustainable pace.

"Maybe the next likely place after a week's climb?” he said. “That will give us a week to get ready for apastron, and the season will likely lag."

There were assents all the way around.

* * * *
Chapter 13

Eagle's Nest

They had settled into a routine, gaining about twelve kilometers a day horizontally and four vertically. At first light they were up, ate a hearty breakfast, and packed away the remaining food. Then they did four terraces, with a water break after scaling the second cliff of the day. During the break, they would recharge their electronics. The hard part of the day was the next two traverses and climbs. They would take a long rest after the fourth climb, then build camp and forage. After the sun went down, they'd have a light dinner by the fire and go to sleep, taking watch shifts.

Jacques had just gone over the top of the fourth terrace on the day's climb. The trees he saw seemed larger and farther apart than below; the effect was almost parklike. He gazed up at one giant that came up from near the terrace edge; it seemed almost twenty meters across and actually vanished into a wisp of cloud above him.

Trying to find its top, he wasn't looking where he was going and about thirty meters in from the terrace edge, he saw a small pit too late and felt the sandy ground give way under him. He tried to scramble back, but the ground gave way faster. “Falling! Belay!” he yelled as he slipped beneath the surface. His belay line pulled taut, and he soon found himself dangling about five meters below the surface in a huge cave. Below him was a pile of sharp rocks, many as big as small houses. Lava tube, he thought, when he stopped shuddering. The ceiling must have caved in here a long time ago—forest debris had almost filled in the hole. As his eyes adapted to the light, he could see that the volume around him was immense; the cave must have been a hundred meters across in places. He could hear a small stream running through it.

Water supply, drainage, shelter, defendable ... he ticked through various pluses. “Soob,” he yelled. “Soob. I think I've found it!"

When the group all reached the hole, they descended on ropes and explored the cave. It led toward the face of the terrace, and as it did, the floor became smoother, like the dried bottom of a creek. The creek itself ended in a pool.

Helen shook her head. “I can feel wind. The terrace face must be within a few meters of us."

Colette nodded. “The pile of dirt across the pool—it's not lava. It looks like it came this way, inward from the face, not down the tube.” She waded through the pool and climbed up it, toward the cave roof. Suddenly she thrust her arm into the wall and brought it back holding a large white flower. “We have a window!"

They built “Eagle's Nest” over the next week, enlarging the silted-up window and leveling the floor behind it until they had an opening ten meters long and a meter high toward the east. For in the morning, the rising sun, if visible, would fill the cave with light back to the skylight fall. They built a rough stone wall at the edge of that, for defense and to keep from falling off; the terrace edge was slightly undercut, and the drop to the next level must have been a kilometer.

On the second day, Soob and Jacques were hunting. The hirachnoids were larger at this altitude, with thicker legs, though Helen thought they weren't as sweet as on the island. Jacques had a couple of sets of legs in his bag when he noticed the smell.

"Jacques, something's dead,” Soob said.

"I'd say so."

"Hirachnoids are scavengers,” Soob added.

"I was afraid you would mention that."

Following their noses, they found a megabat carcass, maybe three days old. Hirachnoids were going in and out of its cloacal opening, now somewhat enlarged, covered with little bits of what had been inside.

"I'm going to be sick,” Jacques said, and turned to retch. When he was over it, he turned back to see Soob busy slicing away the webbing of the carcass's right wing.

"Fur coats,” Soob said. “I don't think it's been above ten Celsius since we got here."

Disgust aside, Jacques realized that fate had handed them a treasure trove. He quickly went to help. Soon, they had all the wing web pelt they could carry. Just as well, he thought, with a glance at one of the large, glistening hirachnoids.

They dug an outlet for the pond and rigged a floodgate for it. All that nice, smooth silt had come from somewhere, and they didn't want to be washed away by the next rainy season. They found a “bottomless” crack near the cave mouth across the pond from their camp. With a short stone wall for privacy, it would now have its share of bottoms.

It snowed on the morning of the third day, in huge flakes as big as their hands. Almost ten centimeters of soft white snow built up in about no time, but it quickly melted. The storm did show them that the cave was too drafty, so they wove a barrier out of yellowbark branches that they could use to cover the entrance at night.

The long days were full of unending labor; every fallen log from several kilometers around found its way down the skylight. Everything edible they could find went into the hole, too. Jacques figured they had about fifteen days of supplies when winter hit in earnest.

It snowed heavily on the fourth day of occupying Eagle's Nest, gusts of wind bringing flakes through the cave. Despite their barrier, the freezing wind found its way to them and they huddled close in their blankets. They fed the fire frugally and waited, then finally arranged a fire watch, using a crude water clock as a timer—it let a stone fall when the cup became too light—and slept.

Jacques had the first shift and spent much of it in wonder at how he'd gone from a reasonably prosperous childhood on Cislunar L5 Grissom to his present circumstances. He wondered about his mother and father: Where were they now? They'd certainly have given him up for dead and had likely passed on one way or another themselves.

Did they keep their religion to the end, he wondered. Did they ever regret the beatings? How could one profess love one minute, then scream and hit the next? He had never married; what happened to him ran in families and he had vowed it would end with him. He was going to have to have an honest talk with Collette.

The rock dropped, surprising him. He put another piece of wood on the fire and blew the embers until it caught, then went to wake Soob for the next shift. He snuggled under his blankets and thought about humankind expanding through the galaxy, wondering how long it would take for them to get this far.

Jacques felt a gentle shaking, opened his eyes, and saw Collette, who planted a quick kiss on his cheek.

"It's morning,” she said, nodding to the pale light from the cliff face window. “The wind's stopped."

Jacques yawned and pushed himself up. She reached for his hand and he found himself in her arms, naturally, unbidden. Their embrace lasted as long as it needed to—no urgency to it, but a bond renewed. They had become special to each other. Not intentionally, but it had happened. He felt comfortable, warm, and at peace in her arms. The conversation could wait, he thought.

"Let's check the entrance,” she said.

Jacques smiled, wondering if it was an excuse to get away from the others.

"There's hardly a breeze,” she said. “It might be blocked."

Situation awareness, Jacques thought, getting his head back to reality. They were in a survival situation on an alien world. He nodded. “Yeah. We should check."

The vertical entrance was, indeed, completely blocked, a pillar of compressed snow like a white trumpet, bell down, rising from the gnarly cave floor to its ceiling. Only the cliff-face window remained open. They were in for the season, it seemed.

* * * *
They settled into a routine of sleeping by the fire, eating, and working on small projects. They found a large piece of obsidian, with an edge of about ten centimeters width, that they could use to shave bitterwood logs. They could write on the shavings with wet charcoal, not very finely, but good enough for some haiku and other short poems.

They peeled apart the megabat web skin pelts, scraped away the small amount of flesh between the skin layers, soaked them in water and ash, rinsed them in the pool, then suspended them over the fire until they steamed, hopefully killing any decay-causing bacteria and preserving them for use. They smelled better, anyway.

Cut and folded, with a hole in the center for someone's head and a strip of skin for a belt, the megabat skins made passable ponchos. They were almost impermeable, and the short fur, turned inside, made them comfortable to wear.

They made plans for the next summer's exploration, learned each other's personal histories, and spun many untestable, unobservable theories about Cube World's origins. Doc carved a passable model of the world, complete with the slight bulges for oceans on each face.

Soob made a chess set and became their local grand master, though Jacques wondered if he would have succeeded so well if Helen had participated in his tournaments. She claimed to not know how to play, but Jacques thought she watched the board with more than casual interest.

Helen spent her time making a wooden necklace of interlaced rings, carved from a single piece of bitterwood branch. It was a topological marvel they all admired.

Many years ago, Jacques had taught himself how to play a Peruvian flute: a simple tube with a slanted notch and holes for an octave's worth of notes. He'd had that in the back of his mind when he named the “flute plant.” It was a project, with some cut-and-try to get the intervals right, but finally they had four passable flutes, two bass and two tenor. Helen, Soob, and Collette learned to play, and they eventually managed a truncated, ersatz performance of the New World Symphony, with Doc playing a batskin drum and singing “going home."

They gossiped about their days in training and various couplings imagined and real.

"Evgenie told me he had a hard time making up his mind about Ascendant,” Helen said.

"I thought he was soft on Arroya,” Doc said. “And he was dating you too?"

Helen laughed. “I was his safety valve! I'm a good listener and was obviously not looking for an exclusive relationship."

"When we split,” Jacques said, “she was looking at you—almost fearfully, I thought. Any history there?"

Collette shook her head. “Maybe she doesn't like cops. What about Leo?” she asked. “Was he involved with anyone?"

Helen shrugged. “He didn't seem interested in anyone, that I could see."

"Not even you?” Collette smiled when she said that.

Helen laughed. “The lack of interest was mutual. There's something about him ... maybe it's stature compensation."

"A Napoleon complex?” Doc offered. “He seems content to let Eddie take the lead. Anyway, I saw him on a Chesapeake Bay cruise with Maria Lopes. She touched him in a pretty friendly fashion. Eddie was there, too, if I recall."

Jacques looked over at Collette, who looked back and frowned. They'd been thinking in terms of one saboteur and murderer; they hadn't considered more than one.

* * * *
Ten days from becoming snowbound, Jacques, trailing a tether, squeezed through the narrow horizontal crack of the window, stuck his head out into a freezing wind and looked up fifty meters at an overhang of ice-covered rock, and down to the snow-covered terrace, a kilometer below. To his right there was the bare hint of a ledge, covered with snow—which probably covered ice—that slanted down and then up in the distance toward a notch in the ledge.

It was, he realized, less dangerous than his Earth-gravity-trained intuition told him. But without an ax, crampons or pitons, it was still a suicidal traverse. He wiggled himself back in, and for a moment, the erstwhile cold damp air of the cave felt warm and inviting.

"I think,” he told the assembled group, “we're better off attacking the snow pillar."

Three hours later, using the light of improvised torches, they stared up at the barely visible mountain of snow that had drifted down into, and eventually sealed off, the “skylight” entrance to Eagle's Nest. Somewhere in there was the rope they had used to come in and out.

Soob attempted climbing up the snow hill and sank up to his crotch. As he attempted to extricate himself, he triggered a small avalanche that picked him up and flung him against a rock headfirst. Helen tried to move to him and was overwhelmed herself and buried.

"Hang on,” Jacques yelled to everyone left. “Let it play out!"

When the snow stopped sliding down, he began moving toward Helen, half wading, half swimming through the snow. The footing was treacherous—he found he made the best progress by lying down on the snow and pushing against the rocks with his feet while doing something like a butterfly stroke with his hands until he got to where he thought Helen lay.

Meanwhile, Collette mimicked him in an effort to reach Soob from the other side of the avalanche.

Helen was nowhere to be seen, so Jacques felt around with his feet.

Something or someone grabbed his leg and started climbing up him. Jacques cried out in startlement before he realized it had to be Helen. He reached down into the snow, found a hand, and pulled her up. Her face was ashen white, and she coughed in great hacking spasms that gradually decreased in frequency and harshness.

"Don't try breathing snow,” she choked out as the coughs subsided.

"Can you make it out?” Jacques asked.

"What about Soob?” Helen asked, followed by another fit of coughing.

"We're looking. I'm not sure when this will let go again.” Jacques tossed his head in the direction of the snow pile. “I don't want to lose all of us."

"Yeah. Okay."

"Watch your step."

She nodded and began to pick her way out of the avalanche area.

Jacques resumed “swimming” toward where he thought Soob's last position was. Despite the cold of the snow, he was sweating with effort. Soon, he and Collette met in the middle without having found Soob.

"It may have carried him downhill a ways,” Collette said. “Let's stay in contact so we don't miss anything."

They did, slowly feeling their way through the snow shoulder-to-shoulder, foothold by foothold, steadying each other when the other slipped.

"Jacques!” Collette said at last. “I don't think this is a rock."

Quickly, they dug down with their hands and found the still form of their comrade. They brushed the snow away from his head with their bare hands. He had bled from a scalp wound, but not, it seemed, profusely. Collette tried to take his pulse and shook her head.

"Get him free first,” Doc called. “The cold may reduce his life signs. We're trying to make a smooth area for him to lie down, clear of the avalanche danger."

"Yes,” Jacques said, and bent to the task of extricating Soob's limp, motionless body.

In one gravity, it would have been impossible, but the gentle pull of Cube World made them supermen and superwomen. Jacques and Collette finally freed him and built a ramp of compressed snow to pull him up to the surface. There, they dragged him as if he were a toboggan toward the edge of the avalanche. Doc and an apparently recovered Helen took over then as Jacques and Collette collapsed in the snow in exhaustion.

"The good news,” Doc proclaimed at length, “is that he isn't dead. Unfortunately, that may be the bad news as well. I wish I had the resources of a hospital..."

* * * *
Two days later, they were near the end of their food. Soob was still unconscious, and though they'd managed to get some water into him, they had no IV or liquid nourishment. He could, Jacques realized, be the first to starve to death.

"It's got to be apastron,” Helen said. “The weather should start to moderate. Half rations may give us four days. We could just go hungry for another five or six. Spring should come quickly."

"Not quickly enough for Soob, I fear,” Doc replied.

"I think we need to try again,” Collette said. “Try smarter."

Jacques reviewed events in his mind. “I could try to trigger another avalanche."

"Risky.” Doc said.

"Yeah. I'll need some kind of headgear and a long tether. If I get buried, pull me out."

That was greeted with silence. Everyone realized the risk involved. But they were not going to sacrifice one of their own. One for all, all for one, Jacques thought. The beau geste. The stuff of legends. He looked around and everyone nodded.

They had one log left—in a small blessing, they'd needed less fire to keep warm than initially anticipated. Jacques planned to use it to put some distance between himself and what he thought would be the most unstable snow.

They planned it like a military campaign, beating a packed snow path between rocks to the target area. With a rope around his waist, Jacques advanced. As he approached the center, however, the path gave way, and he found his boot in water. Apparently, a melt creek was forming beneath the snow.

He extricated himself, made a “dry” snow path around the hole, and trudged on.

Then he was there. He made his way up the snow as high as he could, then used the log to bludgeon the snow above him. Nothing. He whacked it again with similar results, then he pushed the log into the snow and tried to lever some out of the pile. He was doing this again when Colette shouted.

"Jacques, above you! Look out!"

He glanced up the snow hill and saw the avalanche coming. He backed off as quickly as he could without abandoning the log—they would need it for fuel—and avoided the worst of the oncoming snow. The tether, pulled by all his companions, moved him out of the deluge.

When things settled down, there was a gap above the snow hill and the skylight, filled only by the rope they had left a couple of weeks earlier. And above that was daylight.

They tested the rope with their total weight and found it had not gone rotten. Climbing it in the low local gravity was no problem and soon Jacques and Doc reached the snowy surface. Doc, whose voice carried farther, yelled down the hole to let them know they were out. Then they put on improvised snowshoes and headed for the forest.

The landscape had been transformed; snow weighed much less here than on an Earth-gravity world and compressed much less under its own weight. Drifts towered around them, and the lava tube had been a ridge to start with.

As they neared the forest, they noticed the snow under the trees pockmarked with holes about a hand's width wide.

"Somebody's out of hibernation, I think,” Doc said.

"Somebody edible, I hope,” Jacques answered. He had put hunger out of his mind, but with the prospect of food nearby, he felt almost irrationally famished.

With a whoosh, the something fell by Jacques, nearly hitting him on the head, punched a hole deep in the soft snow, and stopped with a sort of distant plopping sound. He looked up just in time to avoid getting hit by the next one.

"Bitterwood fruit, high-altitude version,” Doc said, looking up.

"Hard to find down there,” Jacques said, looking down the hole, hungry.

"Keep looking up,” Doc said. “Come on now..."

He didn't have to wait long. A faint crack and rustle and he shuffled under the next one before it completed its 300-meter fall. With the expertise of an American-rules football receiver he plucked it out of the sky before it hit the snow. Wordlessly, they split it, cleaned it, and ate it immediately.

"Not too much more, right away,” Doc said.

Jacques nodded. They caught a dozen more and headed back to the cave, somewhat lightheaded. They had survived the apastron winter and could get back to the business of finding the shuttle, or establishing a settlement.

Doc rigged a tube from the shells of hirachnoid legs and some of their precious tape to get soup into Soob's stomach. They took turns watching him, feeding him, cleaning him, and finally, a week after the accident, he began to regain consciousness. But he wasn't really lucid and couldn't care for himself.

The snow melted and their sun was approaching its maximum size.

Temperatures climbed above freezing all day, snow melted, and the forest filled with bizarre critters and alien fragrances, as their sun approached.

Three days before periastron, they experienced a small earthquake, a thud followed by rumbling and groaning for about twenty seconds. Stones rocked around them, but nothing fell from the ceiling.

The next day, it hit 15 Celsius, and Helen went for a short swim in a small lake near the terrace edge. There were no other takers, but her joy in being bare and wet again, temperature be damned, made them all feel a bit warmer. They had a picnic in front of a low concave ridge of bare red rock by the lakeshore that sheltered them from the breeze and reflected the feeble sunlight on them. It was pleasant—even warm—there.

Helen picked up a rock and showed it to Jacques. “Geologically speaking,” she said, “we're on a lava field between two volcanoes. I'll bet it slides down over millions of years and subducts just beyond the edge of the ocean."

"Then gets recirculated?” Doc asked.

Helen nodded. “I expect so, if this configuration is more or less stable over eons."

"What powers it?” Doc asked. “A world this small should lose heat faster than radioisotopes make it."

"Tides, maybe.” Helen shrugged. “I wish I could do a simulation."

"There needs to be another world, farther out, to keep the orbit eccentric,” Doc offered. A Neptune-mass giant, maybe."

"We haven't seen one,” Collette said. “I think we would have."

Jacques nodded. “That's true, though I haven't looked carefully."

Helen said, “It might be dimmer than you think. Given the air pressure and temperature, I'm thinking we get half or something less of solar insolation here. But the primary is an M dwarf, so the visual light is maybe a tenth ... half of a tenth ... the amount of visual light one gets on Earth, and maybe a sixteenth of that at the nearest plausible giant planet orbit."

Jacques agreed. “Yes. A Jupiter equivalent would be something like an eightieth as bright. That's third or fourth magnitude here—visible but not really noticeable."

"Or,” Doc said, “the planet could be closer to the star and too hard to see in the twilight."

Another, lesser quake interrupted the discussion.

"We can't stay forever,” Jacques said, voicing what they all thought, staring up at the lava tube ceiling. “We're apparently still some distance from the shuttle. The season is getting on."

"We're about forty-eight kilometers above sea level now,” Helen said. “I'm not sure it would be wise to winter at any higher altitude. What we could do is lay out supply caches at higher altitudes this summer, then make a dash up the following year."

"I should stay with Soob,” Doc said.

"We should have two able-bodied people here,” Jacques countered.

"We can rotate placing the caches,” Collette offered. “You and me, Helen and me ... you and Helen."

Did she sound just a bit hesitant about the last pairing? Jacques wondered. Helen's approach to the three men, two women thing, was to spread her attention around more or less equally. Collette had not really tried to keep up; though she had genuine affection for Soob and Doc, she had taken a proprietary interest in Jacques. This flattered and excited Jacques, but the long-term implications also worried him. Taking care of human needs was important, he thought, but in their present circumstances “keeping it professional” might be the best policy. Helen was having none of that, of course. Still, he had no complaints from others. The discussion went on to the more comfortable subject of logistics and schedule.

The result of all this was that, on what he had determined to be periastron, midsummer's day, he and Collette set out, loaded up with as much as they could carry.

* * * *
Chapter 14

Jacob's Ladder

Up and down, up and down the crews went. They could go up three terraces and back in a day, and it generally took two trips to set enough supplies for a trip to a higher stage—though on the first two stages, they found they could stretch things by foraging. As summer drew to a close, they reached the tree line at forty-eight kilometers altitude, where it was only above freezing for a few hours a day. A hardy form of tanglegrass kept on over the next three terraces, and this was grazed on by a four-footed relative of the kangasaur about six times the size of an African elephant. It didn't have a prehensile nose, though, and made do with only one flat tusk growing from the lower jaw and a talented tongue.

These were far too big to think about killing, but the “hairadactyls” that tended them were another matter. These were eagle-sized and pigeon-brained, so the staging crews came back with as much as they took up.

The terraces changed; the higher ones were no longer sheer cliffs, but more rounded and slumped, often with natural ramps on which herds had beaten paths from one level to another. Climbing cliffs became easier, but to make up for that, the slopes between them became steeper.

With the first chill of winter in the air, Jacques and Helen set out for the last foray until the next summer. They passed five depots, at fifty-six, sixty, sixty-four, sixty-eight, and seventy-two kilometers altitude—as estimated from the wrist comp's barometric readings—on the way up, overnighting in a tiny log lean-to on permafrost. They established a depot at seenty-six kilometers in a small cave on a rare outcropping of rock in a field of ice. By eighty-three kilometers the ice was gone; they'd found a small lava tube, however, and the rock below it was still warm. Wrapped in their batskin sleeping rolls, with a tiny fire guarding the entrance, Jacques felt downright cozy.

"What do you think?” Helen asked. “Only thirteen kilometers up to the one bar level.” She snuggled up to him, as natural and unconcerned as ever.

On Earth, Jacques thought, thirteen kilometers altitude gain would be ridiculous for an up-and-back. But with the gravity being only about an eighth of Earth's at this altitude, and the terrain now simply rolling hills paved with smooth pahoehoe lava, it was probably doable.

"The oxygen partial pressure is going down,” Jacques said. “It's harder to start a fire. We're still above Earth normal pressure, about 1,200 millibars, but oxygen partial pressure must be less than Earth's."

"Time to put the shipsuits on?” she asked.

Jacques thought about it. Their carefully preserved shipsuits had hoods, transparent in front, that could be sealed airtight. They were intended to serve as emergency vacuum suits on spacecraft. They could easily hold a few hundred millibars of pressure differential. They used the heat of their wearers’ bodies to power the efficient nanosystems that removed carbon dioxide, but...

"They still need an air supply, and we don't have one. Maybe we can rig up some kind of bellows for next year. But we can wear them for warmth tomorrow, along with our batskins."

"Our Cube World language is evolving."

"Huh?"

Helen laughed. “You dropped the ‘mega.’ So I'm wearing ‘batskins.’ Its a better word."

"Yeah. If Gabe and company have made a similar discovery, they'll call it dragonskin, or something like that. Then we'll argue about it."

"If we ever see them again. Or maybe if our descendants meet theirs."

He tried to envision some future Cube World with two independent cultures, not speaking the same language, not having the same values, possibly even going to war with each other. The prospect made him shudder.

"No descendants. No. We're leaving this place. We're going to recover our technology, get robots working, make spaceships and a starship, and go home."

"That's a long-term dream,” Helen said. “In the meantime, we need to settle in, build a town with enough room in it for children. We don't have robots, at least not yet. So we need more people.” She grinned at him. “I've never been pregnant before. I'm looking forward to it."

He looked at her in abject horror. “With Soob down, we can't afford to have another person disabled."

She shook her head. “Then we'd best get on with it now before we lose someone else. I don't want to spend eternity being the last person on this planet. Yes, I've opened my tubes and I'm giving it my best shot."

"You're making a big decision for all of us."

She nodded and smiled cheerfully. “I didn't think I'd win a vote. You want to kick me off the planet? It's my body."

"You're not already..."

"Could even be yours. It's hard to tell just yet.” She snuggled up to him. “Don't worry. I can't get more pregnant."

"Hey, if you aren't I don't want to...” he said.

But she sealed his mouth with a kiss and biology took over.

Afterward, as afterglow faded into sleep, he wondered about man's ability to rationalize in the face of a determined womanly assault. Helen, he realized, was probably in charge here, preferring to lead from behind him, almost as Collette thought Leo might have led Gabe. In an era of genetic engineering leveling, she was still clearly smarter than anyone else in their small team, but her sexuality made some people forget her mind. She was Helen Athena, all-powerful, leading him on, enticing him. Then she became Collette and they lay down together. Then Collette became Ascendant Chryse and they decided to make babies and fill this planet with them. Then they could outvote Gabe Eddie and Leo. They needed to do it quickly before Leo stopped them.

Helen woke him up with a kiss before the dream reached its climax.

"Time to get going."

* * * *
They had their tiny camp packed before sunrise and set out upward under starlight, probing ahead of themselves with their flute plant walking sticks.

Antares alone provided enough light for them to find their way.

"It's much brighter than Venus, up here,” Helen said. “I'd say about minus sixth magnitude."

"Hmm, maybe brighter than that. Almost like a crescent moon. I'll give it minus seven."

"Maybe. Lets say that's a maximum. Split the difference; since it's something like first magnitude from Earth, that would put it about 7.5 magnitudes, or a factor of 1,000 brighter than Earth. So it's thirty-some times closer, at least. Only five parsecs or so."

"About the same distance between 36 Ophiuchi and Earth,” Jacques said. “You can barely see 36 Ophiuchi at that distance; this star casts shadows."

"I wonder what happens here when it goes supernova."

"Whoever build this place may have taken that into consideration,” Jacques said, struggling to keep his mind on putting one synapse in front of the next. “Maybe they have predicted the date."

The terraces were gone, along with any hint of water. The lava field looked flat, except that they were bent over at almost forty-five degrees to the surface. Part of that was the slope of the mountain to the gravitational field and part of it was the wind they were slogging into. It was dry and cold, but Jacques thought it might change as day came. Footing was treacherous; the lava was covered with a loose grit that could slide underfoot, and thin spots in the lava could give way without warning, leaving one's foot dangling in a lava tube.

That said, they were able to maintain a fairly brisk pace without their packs, about three meters a second, Jacques thought. We're putting some distance behind us. He looked back over the featureless landscape and realized he couldn't recognize anything.

"Whoa, Helen. I can't see our camp!"

"Can you see the horizon against the mist?"

"Okay. Yes, I can see it. The bulge."

"If we've been headed directly uphill, the camp should be just below the bulge. We haven't gone too far to find it again, I think. But we should build a cairn here. A big one."

It was easier said than done. Portable rocks were hard to find in a pahoehoe field, but by stomping around they were able to collapse a small lava tube and use the pieces of its roof to build an upright pillar. ‘Upright’ proved to be about thirty-degrees to the local slope, so they called it “the leaning tower of pieces."

They found they would hike upward for about an hour before it became hard to see a cairn, so that became their routine. As dawn came, they could see farther, but could also see better and move faster, so the hour interval remained about the same. Six cairns and an hour into the trip, they realized the ground was getting warm. An incongruous cloud lay ahead of them.

"Jacques, I don't think we should try to build a cairn here,” Helen said. “Look."

He turned to where she pointed and saw a piece of lava fall with a crunch into a new hole. A river of brilliant orange light shone through it.

They went quickly right until the steam cloud was no longer in front of them, and the ground seemed cooler to the touch. Some experimental stomping found them shards for the cairn.

Jacques found he was a little short on breath, and hooked his wrist comp to the solar array. The air near the lava surface was about zero C, but if he held the wrist comp high over his head, it recorded minus twenty-five. Atmospheric pressure was down to 998 millibars.

"Up ahead ... I think the lava field stops beyond that ridge."

Jacques saw and nodded. “I don't think we can go too much farther...” He stopped to breathe deeply. “...without more oxygen. I'd guess we're getting about half what we should, partial pressure around a hundred millibars."

Helen nodded. “Just a little farther. I want to see where the lava comes from."

They pushed on for another thirty minutes and arrived at the ridge. Above the lava was a smooth band of material that looked vaguely like concrete. Beyond that, uphill was a featureless plane of gray. He boosted Helen up over the “concrete” and she pulled him up afterward. It was absolutely flat.

"Is the shuttle still there?” Helen asked.

Jacques checked. “Yes, it has a somewhat stronger signal, but...” The reading was coming from directly in front of him, but he was standing at about a thirty-degree angle, which meant that the signal was coming from below Cube world's surface. “It's below us, Helen. Ahead and somehow below—a radio propagation trick?"

"I'm not sure, but I wouldn't think so.” She pulled out the binoculars and scanned the horizon. “I can't see anything here. Maybe it's on the other side of the ridge. On the other face."

"How far to the ridge, do you think?” Jacques asked.

"Maybe a thousand kilometers. At five kilometers an hour, maybe two hundred hours."

"A week. We'd need enough oxygen for a week."

"Next year, if we can figure out how to store it,” Helen said. “I want to stand on the ridge and look at both faces."

"While breast-feeding?” Jacques quipped, and instantly regretted it.

But Helen just laughed. “There will be time."

"Time to go home now."

He saw it out of the corner of his eye when he turned around to retrace their steps. It was just a bump in the otherwise geometrically smooth curve of the lava source ridge, an indeterminate distance away.

"Binoculars, Helen. Over there—a bump on the lava source ridge."

She pulled the binoculars from her belly kit, plugged them into the solar array, and sighted in on it. “It looks like a shelf sticking out of the plain. The top is probably level, gravitationally, the front, vertical. Like a dormer window. Four and a fraction klicks distant."

"We should go for it. It probably has something to do with this place.” He stomped his foot on the surface for emphasis and almost lost his footing on the slope.

"We'd be finding our way home in the dark."

"We left that way."

They stared at each other. It was clearly more of a risk than Helen wanted, but Jacques weighed that against the potential for a breakthrough. It was a discovery that emphasized the differences in their attitudes: Helen for accepting a long stay and adapting to the world, Jacques putting almost all of his efforts into finding a way out.

"Okay,” Helen said at length. “But let's go down to the lava source ridge—it's almost level on top—easier to walk on. It looks like the front of the structure is just a few meters back from the ridge."

They reached the structure well past local noon, but Jacques figured they still had seven hours plus twilight to return and find their camp. Helen was nervous, and he had picked up the pace as much as his oxygen-starved lungs would let him. The structure proved large—maybe twenty meters tall in front—and featureless as they approached from the side. But when they got to the front they saw a huge black rectangle about twenty meters by ten in the wall in front of them.

"I'd say it's a door,” Helen said in wonderment. “A great big garage door."

They got a greater shock as they approached and it opened by simply vanishing.

* * * *
Chapter 15

Behind the Curtain

"And there we were,” Helen told the assembled group, “inside this enormous, enormous room with great curving arches, huge pillars—of solid diamond, I'd guess—catwalks the width of airplane runways, huge machines rolling around without making any sound whatsoever."

"It was lit inside?” Collette asked.

Jacques nodded. “There were point sources every few kilometers, I'd guess. They looked like stars, but much brighter. In the distance they kind of merged into a general glow. We only took half an hour inside—it was too cold to stay overnight and we had to get back to camp. But it looks like there's a road through to the other side of the ridge. Which is where my readings indicate the shuttle is."

He looked around the group. Soob nodded and smiled at him; he wasn't able to speak or walk without assistance, but at least the higher functions of his mind hadn't been too badly damaged by his near-suffocation. Doc said he was getting better every day.

If they had all been healthy, they might have tried for the other side immediately, but they didn't want to do that with only two people, gone into an unknown environment for the entire winter, and they couldn't bring Soob in his present state. So Eagle's Nest was getting ready for their second winter. Provisions were piled high in the ice cave. Partitions of flute plant mats broke the wind through the cave and gave them private bedrooms.

"Did anyone, or anything, notice you were there?” Collette asked. “Seems like pretty loose security to me."

"Whatever guards the door apparently didn't see us as a threat,” Jacques said. “The way it just vanished ... and it was solid before. I touched it."

"It could be some form of programmable matter,” Helen said. “People have been working on it forever. Send it one signal and it's a solid wall, send it another and it's just dust in the air."

"Which we breathed,” Jacques added. “Without, apparently, any ill effects."

"So you have alien nanites running around inside you,” Doc concluded.

Soob grunted and reached for his slate, wrote and handed the slate to Collette.

"All of us since arrival. Place is managed!” she read.

"Okay,” Helen said in a loud voice. “Whoever you are, you can stop playing with us. We have better things to do with our lives."

There was, of course, no response, and the group had a nervous laugh.

* * * *
The winter passed, if not comfortably, with much less difficulty. They had enough food. Jacques rigged a system to keep the top entrance open, and they even managed a few trips to the first two stage camps, bringing more provisions and creating more living room.

On one trip, they saw a megabat crash into the snow. Why it did so, they couldn't guess, but its carcass yielded a fresh supply of batskin and more meat than they could eat in years. What they brought back to the cave with them became frozen steaks and jerky for next summer's expedition.

Finally the snow melted and Jacques finished his carved stone marker, following their names with: Eagles Nest. Days 72-195

They had to travel light, of course, and left countless things they had made over the two winters. They told themselves they would be back again someday, knowing it would be unlikely. They imagined tourists going through their cave in some ten thousand years, looking at their carvings, primitive furniture, stone kitchenware, and all.

Helen had tears in her eyes as she left. She had hoped to raise a child there. Soob touched her arm. He walked well enough, now, but still could not talk. What memories Eagle's Nest must have for him! But with last looks back, they were on their way, with full packs, along a now well-beaten trail to Tree Line Camp.

They reached the maintenance entrance a week later, quite prepared for it to not open for them. But it did, and in they went, with Collette, Doc, and Soob making appropriate sounds of wonder at the network of roadways, braces, and catwalks between great vertical tubes that climbed from far below to far above. Here and there, Jacques thought he could see robots moving around on huge catwalks on the inside of the mountain surface, many kilometers away. The place was obviously being actively maintained.

They had, nominally, forty days’ provisions with them; Jacques thought two weeks would get them through the 1,000 kilometers to the other side. If they found no exit at the other end, they could conceivably retrace their steps on short rations. Shortcut though it might be, it was a long, cold, hard walk through a complete desert. There was nothing to be done about disguising their presence and they had to litter the clean roadway with hirachnoid limb shells and worse.

On the flat, hard surface, however, they found they could half walk, half jog in a kind of long loping stride that saved their feet and ate up the kilometers. They took turns holding Soob's hand—his legs were strong enough, but his coordination wasn't fully back yet. It was a bit embarrassing for him, but he bore it with good grace. Going by the increase in signal strength, they managed between sixty-one and seventy-two kilometers the first day, and between fifty-five and sixty-seven, the second.

On the first break of the third day, Helen announced, “We're going downhill!"

They all looked at her. The road had seemed level when they started, but now, though it was hard to tell in the low gravity, they indeed seemed to be leaning back a bit.

Doc groaned. “Of course, of course. This is a brace as well as a road. To be in compression—not supported by the vertical members, it has to come closer to the planet at its center than the ends—as an interior buttress, it's almost straight."

"Downhill!” Collette exclaimed, “Then we'll need to push it a little more now to compensate for being slower later on. But we'll get more oxygen as we go lower."

So they took to loping a little faster—almost a low-gravity jog—and covered around eighty kilometers in two seven-hour sessions that day. The next day was close to eighty kilometers as well, but the apparent downward slope gradually lessened, and by the fifth day they were more or less level and probably approaching the lowest point of the road. From then on, it would be uphill.

Soob's balance was improving every day, and by the time they started going uphill, he'd felt comfortable without a hand-holder, though he kept his flute plant walking stick.

They made camp on the fifth day on the road, in good spirits. They each carried a double-thickness batskin sack.

On the sixth day, they noted that their road was joined on the right from below by an arch, the top of which was another road.

"That looks like a constant-radius road,” Helen said. “With its own support system. It's not hanging from a shell support column. “It would be nice to avoid the climb and end up somewhere that wasn't an Antarctic dry valley."

Collette shook her head. “How would we get to the surface? It's covered with rock. We'd be risking too much."

They were about to give up when Jacques remembered the network of catwalks just under the surface that he'd seen when they entered. “If we can't get out, we can climb up on the inside. We'll have saved enough time for it, I think."

"Just barely,” Helen said. “We'd be putting our contingency plan in jeopardy."

"But if it works,” Doc said, “we'd save several days and end up where we can forage. We'd be in much better shape."

"The shuttle is powered and active,” Jacques said. “We must assume someone is using it. We must also assume that someone saw us go in the mountain. If we come out at a different altitude, that could be a surprise. It could be our only advantage."

"We were put here by an ideology-blinded fanatic,” Collette said. “The bad guys aren't usually geniuses—we need to be wary, but let's not fail to give them a chance to make a mistake."

"I think we should give it a shot. What do you think, Soob?” Doc asked.

Their hunter smiled and pointed down the curved path.

* * * *
Longer and gravitationally level, it took them six days to traverse the constant radius path. It ended in a T intersection with a straight catwalk, four meters wide, on the inside surface of the mountain. Jacques could see nothing that looked like an entrance.

Soob grunted and pointed above them. A tube hung down from the inside surface of the mountain, like a stalactite, with what looked like a flat, black circular face. It was about ten meters above them, and there was no ladder. A robot on top of one of the big machines that rolled around the catwalks wouldn't need one, of course.

So near yet so far, Jacques thought. But then he spotted an interior catwalk passing near the upper end of the tube.

Jacques imagined a line running from that catwalk to their catwalk at just the right angle to touch the tip of the downward-projecting tube. He quickly explained what he had in mind to the group. They had two long lines, and tied them end-to-end. Jacques found a brace that led to the upper catwalk and pulled himself up, hand over hand, careful not to look down until he was securely on the walkway. There were no rails, of course, for infallible machines.

But the catwalk had to be supported. He found a brace projecting from the inside surface of the mountain and managed to loop the line around that, then threw the other end down to Collette. She walked the end of the line along the lower catwalk until the middle of the line touched the end of the projecting tube. Secured with a loop of tanglegrass rope, Jacques wrapped his legs around the line and eased himself down, sloth-style, until he was below the tube.

It was about a meter wide and remained resolutely closed. He put a hand on it and pushed. Solid. Just for the hell of it, he shouted “Open!” at it. That did nothing.

Something had to make it open. The other door had responded to their presence, not some external computer demand. That bespoke a distributed, semi-autonomous systems approach to Cube World—far more efficient and robust than a top-down control pyramid. The door-opening trigger should be local.

Maybe they would have to wait for a maintenance robot to roll by. That could be a long time—things seemed to last in here. Or maybe they could simulate one.

"Everyone!” he shouted. “I want you to walk directly beneath me and jump up and down. I'm hoping there's a mass or weight sensor on the catwalk."

"Say again,” was Collette's distant response.

He yelled again, louder, and got an okay back. The group walked beneath him and, in a surreal sort of dance, jumped up and down in time. Nothing happened.

In frustration he slammed the palm of his hand at the surface above him.

And it vanished, rewarding his effort with a shower of dust. There was a circular shelf a few centimeters wide around the opening. He grabbed that with one hand and held on, hoping that would keep the door open, and then pulled his head inside. Inside the tube was a robust skeleton of truss work and tracks; apparently some fairly heavy equipment could use this passage. Boring machines? If so, he hoped they had done their job.

"I'm in!” he shouted down to the rest of the party. He used a length of green twine to tie his line securely to the inner framework of the tube. In the low gravity, the rest of the group would be able to pull themselves up, hand over hand. But first he needed to make sure there was an exit. “I'm going to see if there's a way out.” He estimated the length of the tube. “I'll be back in about an hour."

Jacques climbed up the inner bracing of the tube. Up and up, he went, mostly by feel. Just before he thought he would need to drop back to the opening to make his self-imposed deadline, he emerged in what appeared to be a lava tube cave, not unlike the one they'd used for Eagle's Nest. He could feel a slight breeze and smell fresh air.

* * * *
The cave exit proved to be a three-kilometer scramble over rocks in the dark. About halfway, they encountered a stream and a hundred meters or so down from that, enough dry silt that they could lie down. With nobody making an objection, they simply made camp there and slept for twelve and a half hours. Feeling optimistic, they decided to make breakfast double rations, and didn't start out again until they all felt ready.

Helen was in the lead as they reached the mouth of the cave. She scrambled over some rocks that partly blocked the exit and vanished from Jacques’ view.

"Oh my God!” she yelled from somewhere outside. “They're alive!"

* * * *
Chapter 16

The Other Side of the Mountain

Everyone else started forward, but Collette held them back. “Weapons,” she said. “Whatever we have."

Jacques and Collette strung their bows while Soob and Doc pulled the covers off their spears.

"Helen,” Jacques yelled, “are you okay?"

There was a pause. “Yes. No danger so far. I don't think they've noticed me.” The last was choked out in a kind of hysterical giggle.

The rest of the party climbed out, one by one. Little rock was visible in a forest of plants that had stems like blackwood trees but had huge, fleshy, triangular yellow leaves. Over them, a sparse canopy of trees of some unimaginable height dominated the landscape. Some of these were vaguely palmlike while others seemed to be more stalklike, with only a hint of foliage around the upper stem. They were spaced far apart in the near field but merged in the distance to look like a solid line of wood. They swayed in the soft breeze.

Rather, some of them swayed, mainly the ones absent luxuriant palmlike crowns.

"Oh my God!” Collette echoed Helen.

"I don't think that's possible,” Helen said. “Even as I see it, it can't be! The heat-rejection problem..."

Confused, Jacques scanned around at the distant waving stalks and watched one of them touch the crown of a leafy tree and, apparently, come away with some of the leaves. A sense of disquiet rose within him. Plants feeding on other plants?

He scrambled up higher on the rocks of the cave mouth to where he could see down slope over three terraces, a distance of about eleven kilometers, at least, on the other side of the ridge. If that held here—he was looking at trees almost two hundred meters tall.

He craned his head up to find one of the nearer stalk trees and started to follow it down.

It moved as he did so, not swaying, but moving laterally with slow, infinite patience. A massive leg swung ponderously clear of undergrowth forest, tall as any of the triangle-leaf trees.

"Oh my God!” he said.

The beast, for that was what it was, moved with what seemed a glacial pace, an illusion of scale, he realized. It may have taken seven seconds for that leg to swing forward, but the footprints would be something like eighty meters apart. He could not have outrun it. The foot set down gently, not thunderously.

"Its head must be 160 meters high,” Jacques said, a touch of awe in his voice.

"I'm not sure it's a head,” Doc answered. “It may be more like a trunk with sense organs. I think that bulge above the shoulders is more likely the true head."

The skin on the creature's sides seemed loosely hung, like overlapping drapery. As it moved, there was a whooshing sound Jacques could hear, even a third of a kilometer or so away.

"It has gills?” Helen said softly, in wonder.

"Exhaust,” Doc said. “It's about eight times the dimension of a large sauropod dinosaur from Earth's past. Everything else being more or less to scale, it would have some 500 times as much volume and mass, but only...” he laughed at the irony of “only,” “...about sixty-some times the surface area with which to reject heat. It must blow a tremendous volume of air through itself with every step."

Soob scratched on his slate and gave it to Helen.

Don't/do want see what eats it.

Finding what they could eat was the first order of business. Nothing looked familiar to Jacques, or rather some of it did; the grasses were uncannily terrestrial looking. The triangle-leaf trees had a pulpy pumpkin-sized fruit that was either out of reach, or hit the ground with a forceful splat even in the low gravity. They found a bamboolike middle canopy plant; young shoots were an acceptable substitute for flute plant, but the fernlike fronds were inedible. In sunny patches of ground, they found a low plant with leaves shaped like pentagonal snowflakes.

Making a virtue of necessity, Doc made a kind of pudding of fall-mashed triangle-leaf tree fruit. It proved to be a good diuretic. Cooking it didn't improve matters.

The white part of the grass roots could be nibbled, but it would take a huge amount of grass to make a meal. None of the leaves would stay down.

"We're just damned lucky we haven't seriously poisoned ourselves,” Doc said on the morning of the third day. We need to think about going back."

"We'll be starved by the time we get there,” Jacques said.

Doc nodded. “Uncomfortable to be sure, but we should survive. Another day or two and one or more of us might not make it."

"We can try for the shuttle now,” Jacques said. “At least take time to get a fix. It may be near."

The shuttle, if they could gain control of it, would solve the food problem. But taking any time away from exploratory foraging now could put them in severe difficulty later.

Soob wrote: “Go for it."

"Come on, Collette, let's find some food,” Helen said.

Doc patted Jacques on the back and went with them.

Jacques and Soob found a gap in the tree cover where sunlight fell and set up the solar cells and plugged in. The shuttle signal was very strong. He looked around and saw trees and a few “dinotowers."

"It's around here somewhere, Soob. Maybe we can get one of those guys to tell us,” he joked, pointing at a dinotower a few hundred meters away.

Soob nodded, seriously it seemed, and motioned to Jacques that he wanted to go to the dinotower. Soon they were at the rear leg of one of the monsters. Soob tried to climb it, but the thick skin proved impossible to grip.

Jacques went to the tail and back along it until he reached where it rested on the ground. It was as thick as he was tall, but with measured jump, he was able to land on top of it. Soob followed him. They began walking up the giant's back; its head was actually lost in a low mist.

"I hope it doesn't decide to swat a fly, just now,” he said back to Soob.

Soob gestured for him to keep moving, faster, and Jacques picked up the pace.

The huge body moved under them as they reached its hips and they fell, spread-eagled on its rump. Jacques looked over to Soob, who looked back at him, wide-eyed. He pointed to something behind Jacques.

Jacques turned and saw a huge head descending from the mist. It was vaguely frog-like, and almost two meters wide, with eyes as big as basketballs, and a small central crest. As it came toward him, the mouth opened, revealing broad, sharp teeth that looked like human incisors as much as anything.

He thought about jumping, but they were too high—even in the low gravity, the fall would lead to serious injury. He tried waving at it.

"Hi."

The head stopped. He could see the long neck now; the mists were clearing. The huge eyes focused on him. Scale matters, Jacques thought. While the head in front of him was a ridiculously tiny part of the dinotower's bulk, it probably contained a brain several times the size of the one on his shoulders.

Jacques tried to pantomime looking. Soob got up and joined him. The creature watched them for a while, then laid its head on its back in front of them.

"I think,” Jacques said, with more than a little awe in his voice, “that we're being offered a ride."

He and Soob hopped up on the broad, flat head and hung onto the narrow crest as the dinotower's head whooshed back up through the mist to its usual height.

Then, with a gentle rocking motion, the beast began to move out toward the edge of the terrace, about as fast as a man could run, in Jacques estimation. In the denser Cube World air, this made for a significant wind of passage, and he had to hang on tightly.

They hadn't gone far when the head began to drop down through the mists again, down and down, like a huge, fast elevator. Suddenly, in front of them, about fifty meters through the trees, was the shuttle.

"It must have seen men before, with it. It's putting us back where we belong,” Jacques said.

The head reached ground, and they hopped off. For a moment, human and dinotower stared at each other, then the dinotower raised its head through the clouds and began to glide back to its feeding ground.

Jacques turned his attention to the shuttle, a big, blunt upside-down ice-cream cone, its gray lines blending in with the triangle-leaf tree trunks like it was designed to do so. Soob immediately gestured for him to get down. Of course. If they could see it, it could see them, and it probably had instructions of a kind not anticipated by its AI programmers. Jacques thought furiously. No, there was nothing to do but try contacting it and go from there. It would better be a collective decision, but there it was now and it might fly away. He touched the transmit icon on his wristcomp screen and began talking.

"This is Engineering Officer Jacques Song. We have..."

The shuttle sounded a warning tone.

"Duck! Now!” Jacques said as he pushed Soob to the ground. “It's lifting off!"

With a roaring cascade of exhaust, the shuttle leaped skyward and was already hundreds of meters overhead and shrinking as the wave of hot air rolled over them.

Jacques stared up, helpless. Then he collapsed onto a log and put his face in his hands, tears flowing freely. Everything over the last few months went by in his mind—the parrot-beaked fish, the rescues, the split up, the escape from the fire, the winter in the cave ... all the work, all the effort. Gone. All his efforts fruitless, leaving them with the prospect of retreat, starvation, and living out their lives as savages.

Helen may think that worthwhile, Jacques thought. But he wasn't sure he did. He didn't think he could face an eternity of the kind of labor and striving it had taken them to survive for the last three months, and if he ended his existence now, there would be one less mouth to feed.

Soob was trying to get his attention, shoving his slate at him. With a groan, Jacques took it.

Not out of range. Keep talking!!

Jacques hurriedly turned back to the wristcomp, pointing its directional antenna at the tip of the ascending contrail, said everything he planned to say, and added, “We are at the end of our food supply. If you leave us you may be responsible for human deaths.” If there was anything left of the higher functions in its AI, Jacques thought, that should do it.

The shuttle did not deviate from its upward path, and its contrail ended where it left the atmosphere.

Then Jacques looked down at his wristcomp screen. The “message received” telltale glowed. Pure automation, he supposed, but one microscopic step above complete hopelessness. At least he had the energy to trudge back to camp with Soob, following the swath cleared by the dinotower.

When they got there, Helen, Collette, and Doc all had big grins on their faces, and their arms filled with big thick roots of some kind. Presumably, that meant a respite from the starvation part of his bleak scenario. He wanted to go back into the cave and lie down and leave the explanations to Soob, but, of course, that was impossible. He decided on the short and sweet version.

"We found the shuttle. It flew away. I'm not feeling so good right now, I just..."

"Try some of this and you'll feel a lot better,” Doc said, laughing.

"It's really ... I can't describe. Just wow!” Collette said.

Despite the near-freezing temperatures, Helen discarded her clothes and started dancing, holding a morsel of the root out to Jacques. “Come on, lover boy, cheer up,” she said.

Collette was going after Soob, in a somewhat less spectacular, though equally determined manner.

Why not? Jacques thought. Why the hell not?

Because if they all went crazy, they would all die, not just him. He knocked the piece of root out of Helen's hand.

She looked confused. “Jacques, honey, it's all right. We're just a bit giddy. We're okay. We're due for a party."

"You're intoxicated. You're not thinking right,” he said, suspecting that reason would be futile while they were under the influence of whatever it was.

Something went crunch in the nearby underbrush. Jacques turned and found himself facing what appeared to be a close cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex, except it had a beak instead of teeth, and four tiny arms instead of two.

It didn't seem to know what to make of them. He grabbed his flute plant staff.

"Soob, get everyone in the cave,” he yelled, as he tossed his bag of electronics to the hunter and stood to face the beast.

Everyone was not going to the cave. Helen was behind him saying, “Hey, that's a big dinosaur, isn't it? Maybe it would like some candy. Give the dino some candy."

"What it would like is you,” Jacques snapped. “But it isn't sure yet. Get in the cave!"

"You're no fun! Hey, Soob, where are you going with my roots? Come back here."

Jacques risked a quick look back. Soob had grabbed all the roots and was taking them into the cave. The other three, complaining, were going after him. Nothing wrong with that part of Soob's brain, Jacques thought.

The “tyrannoparrot” began rocking back and forth, looking at him and the people disappearing into the cave mouth. Why had it not attacked? Maybe, Jacques thought, with his staff, he looked approximately like something it hadn't seen yet that was dangerous, poisonous, or both. They must have stood there, tiny human staring down a three-story monster, for almost fifteen minutes. Then, abruptly, the tyrannoparrot turned and strode off into the forest.

He had a feeling of déja vu about this, something he'd read or viewed. Lewis and Clark. One of them had faced down a grizzly bear in the middle of a river with a staff like his. Someday, he told himself, he should find out why the monster had spared him. But for now, it was interesting to note how the adrenaline had set aside his depression. When it came down to it, in spite of everything, he still very much wanted to live.

He joined Soob at the cave and they started a fire at the mouth. The other three had fallen into a deep sleep, so there were no protests as into the fire went the big thick tubers. The gentle breeze out of the cave mouth kept the fumes from going in, while Soob and he pulled shifts to keep the fire and their friends alive through the night.

* * * *
Jacques awoke to find Doc poking around the fire.

"Doc?” he said, fearing the worst. He put some more wood on the fire.

"We should have a sample,” he said. “Imagine a raw potato, but already a little buttery. The drug affect didn't set in until half an hour after ingestion. I suspect it's a chemical given off by a bacterialike bug and not the root itself."

He finally came up with a short segment of charred root and handed it to Jacques.

"Try a very small piece. We'd each eaten maybe a hundred grams, and if I'm right about the bacterium, the fire will have killed it and degraded the toxin. But, I'm not sure I trust myself."

Jacques held the charred morsel in his hand, feeling very uncertain.

"It is the only edible thing we've found here,” Doc said, looking down at the ground. “We don't have much choice, and, by the way, thank you for saving my life again.” He said the last in a whisper and with a slight bow.

Jacques touched him on the shoulder for a moment.

Then, with a wry smile, Jacques took a bite of the root, still warm from the fire. It did taste like buttered potatoes, and, irrationally, he wished for some salt. Or maybe not irrationally. They probably weren't getting quite enough salt. He swallowed and waited to go crazy.

"Half an hour, you say?"

Doc nodded.

Jacques unfolded their little solar array, plugged in the wrist comp, and sat down in front of the fire. “Do you remember what I said about the shuttle?"

"It flew away. I'm sorry I wasn't in a state of mind to appreciate that news, or, maybe I'm not so sorry. Pretty disappointing, that."

"Yeah."

Doc shivered and covered himself with his batskin sleep sack, even though the fire was going strong. “We'll need to move to a lower altitude for a permanent camp."

"Or go back to where we know the territory better."

Doc nodded. “A little easier, if cooking this root works."

They continued to talk until Collette, Soob, and Helen joined them.

"I wish I didn't remember everything so well,” was Helen's only comment.

"We need a name for this stuff,” Collette said. “It should be a warning, like ‘crazyroot.'” “I'll go with crazyroot,” Jacques said, “and, by the way, am I crazy yet?"

"We accidentally cooked some, and he's tried that,” Doc explained.

"You sound okay to me, Jacques,” Collette said.

Soob tried to talk. It came out something like, “Yuh-uh,” but those were his first words since almost suffocating in the snowdrift.

Doc cut another piece off the cooked ‘crazyroot’ and popped it in his own mouth. “Okay. I think it would be best if Jacques and Soob gather the next batch. I don't want to be tempted. It felt good, way too good."

"We can't stay here,” Helen said. “I mean, the temptation would always be there."

She wasn't one to resist sensual temptations, Jacques thought. But at least she knew herself.

"I wouldn't want to raise children with that kind of temptation around, either,” Collette said. “And I think the megabats are probably easier to deal with than the tyrannoparrots."

"There are four other faces on this cube that we haven't seen,” Doc said. “It's probably premature to say which is best for us."

Soob grunted and tried to speak, then shook his head and pulled his slate from his shoulder bag and scratched, R we welcome anywhere?

Jacques thought about the huge maintenance operations in the hollow ridge behind him. This immense, self-perpetuating operation had to be controlled by a high-grade artificial intelligence.

"I think so. Of course, something is clearly in charge here. But it has made no effort to communicate, to wipe us out, nor to help us, at least as far as we can tell."

"Maybe it's not aware we're here, like you're not aware that a specific microbe is on or in your body,” Doc said. “Our impact, so far, could be well under its threshold."

"I don't know,” Collette said. “If we made something to manage this, it would be very concerned with biological contamination."

Helen laughed. “We've become like Gabe. He knows there's a god, or at least says he does, but what does it want, what does it expect of him? When it doesn't say, he makes up answers or quotes others who made up answers."

"Then that becomes doctrine, regardless of any later evidence,” Collette said.

Doc chortled. “People like Gabe have evolved an ability to withstand a level of cognitive dissonance that would be fatal to ordinary mortals. We may make up answers, but we test them."

Soob scratched furiously on his slate. “People make this? Four hundred years."

Jacques shivered. Yes, a thousand years in time, but only six hundred or so in space; the Resolution could easily have been passed by human descendants during its long slowdown from relativistic velocities. Before they left, the potential of self-replicating robots to make megastructures in decades or even years had just begun to be used: the solar power stations of the interstellar transport complex, the Venus sunscreen, and the beginnings of the Mercury sphere. What could they do in this age?

"They may feel we aren't ready to handle the shock of what humanity has become,” Helen said quietly. “They could be right."

Collette shook her head. “So they let us starve to death? That doesn't make sense. Anyway, we need some food.” She began poking around the fire, apparently hoping to find some cooked crazyroot missed in earlier searches. “We'll also need weapons."

Jacques wondered what sort of weapon would deter a tyrannoparrot, but after reflection decided something would be better than nothing. They made long spears, sharpening the ends of the “neobamboo” with a diagonal cut and fire-hardening them. Then they set out.

A couple of hours later, burdened with roots and almost back to the camp, Jacques thought he heard a distant hissing noise, something between a waterfall and an angry cat. It seemed to be coming above him. He looked around. They were too high and too cold for something like a megabat, he thought.

Helen was looking too. “The shuttle! Everyone, the shuttle is coming back!"

* * * *
Chapter 17

Lost and Found

"Captain Song,” it said as they approached, “I have determined that you are correct. As senior surviving crewmember, command devolves on you. It was necessary to preserve life, get confirmatory data, and preserve the ignorance of the unauthorized users to carry out one more scheduled supply run. The Resolution shuttle Fortitude is now under your command. I will need your assistance to recover much of my memory."

Jacques looked at the shuttle, then back to Helen and the others, dumbfounded. Less than a Cube World day ago, he had hit rock bottom, contemplating suicide. Now, he had apparently succeeded in everything. Oh, there was still a lot to do, decisions to be made, questions to ask and have answered. But with the shuttle's replicator, they could do everything they wanted.

"We'll be on that in a moment,” he said, softly, then turned to the party. “I, I have a hard time believing this, but I think we're over the hill here."

"We can move to better quarters, anyway,” Doc said.

As it sank in, Jacques found himself emotionally unprepared for success. It was as if all the stress of the last few months had spilled out and left him as empty as a deflated balloon. He collapsed onto a nearby log, eyes moistening. “I just want to go home. I want to go home."

"Jacques,” Helen answered. “We can't. Home is a thousand years in the past, sixteen hundred counting travel time. Whatever the Solar System has become, it's not home anymore. That's only in memory."

She was right, of course. They had all signed up for what was to have been a significant hunk of time displacement to go on the initial mission, but that was tiny compared to what they now contemplated. She led the way to the shuttle lock. “Permission to board, Captain?"

* * * *
The shuttle had been hobbled. The wireless data links it used to communicate with its robots had been removed. Its primary memory slots had been vacated, except for one card; clearly a “Trojan card” inserted by the saboteur. What the saboteur apparently did not know was that there was a backup executive agent program in the engineering node, a limited AI but with the basic security protocols and Asimovian restraints. Absent a higher authority, this had followed the primary card, but Jacques’ statements had created a conflict, eventually resolved in Jacques’ favor.

The shuttle had been used by Gabriel Eddie, Leo Suretta, Arroya Montez, and Evgenie Malenkov. No surprise there, Jacques thought. Gabe and eleven others had been revived and assigned to shuttles by the ship before its final crash into Cube World's atmosphere. They were supposed to recover CSUs that survived atmospheric entry—but that mission had to be postponed. The Shuttle Fortitude had come down on another face of Cube World. It had taken Gabe some time to discover Jacques’ group—which he'd done from the air.

"According to the log, he'd only just arrived when we met him,” Collette said. “The Robinson Crusoe get-up was a ruse."

Doc nodded. “When he found us, he kept the shuttle a secret, apparently seeing an opportunity to become the dictator of a new accidental colony. He knew there was no danger in staying at New Landing—no wonder he was so adamant."

"If he'd only just gotten there, he couldn't have killed Ascendant Chryse,” Helen observed.

Jacques stated the obvious. “We're missing a lot of information."

After mining what data they could from the saboteur's card, Jacques replaced it with a set of backup cards, in storage since before the Resolution left the Solar System. Then he went to work on the wireless system, and after an hour of testing, locating replacement parts, and plugging them in, he was rewarded by a small crablike maintenance robot showing up, ready to work.

"Soup's on,” Helen's voice rang down the narrow corridor to the engineering section. Jacques left the cleanup to the robot and pulled himself up the passageway.

By twenty-third-century starship standards, the shuttle's berths, tiny mess, and compact flight deck were cramped and utilitarian. But compared to how Jacques and company had been living for the last six months, they were the height of luxury.

Everyone but him had cycled through the tiny shower and gotten fresh shipsuits. Even Helen was wearing hers—she hadn't left all the cooking to the robotics.

"Go have your shower. It'll wait ten minutes,” she said, and he complied. The head was an oval cross-section marvel of spatial efficiency, with an improbably tiny combination commode and washbasin in one end and the shower in the other. He removed his clothes, stood on the grate, and let the doors close around him. Almost immediately, a warm hurricane descended on him, followed by a short needle spray that emerged from every direction, reached every crevice of his body, and was quickly sucked away. The cycle repeated twice automatically, and he had it repeat again. He emerged clean, dry, and somehow feeling both stimulated and exhausted.

When they all got together, before they dug in to a meal of real replicated Earth food, Helen said, “We've been really lucky. I'd like to do something to commemorate this. Maybe sing?"

Soob quickly scratched something on his slate and handed it to Helen.

"Amazing Grace,” she read. “Very appropriate, I think. Do we all know it?"

Everyone nodded, and they began, led by Doc's deep baritone. Somehow, while he still couldn't talk, Soob was able to sing along, surprising himself as much as everyone else. Afterward, however, he still couldn't talk. They held off business until after their meal of gyros and white wine; everything replicated, of course, but it tasted wonderful. Finally they sat and stared at each other.

"We still have a lot of work to do,” Helen started. “We need a base of operations. We need to decide what to do about Gabe's group."

"We have a huge crime to deal with,” Collette said, “dozens of dead or deprived...” She had difficulty finishing the sentence. “...of the lives they knew."

"Whoever the conspirators are, there are innocent people with them,” Jacques said.

Helen looked as hard as he had ever seen her. “Just how innocent are the ones that chose to stay with Suretta and Eddie? Misogynist power-hungry charlatans. Anyone should see that. And how do you have a trial in a community this small, especially when you're a minority? They made their choice. Leave them to live, or die, with it."

"We haven't determined who was controlling the shuttle,” Collette said, “nor if he, or she, or they were the saboteurs, nor if a saboteur was who murdered Ascendant Chryse. We probably need to do that, if we can, before contacting the rest of the survivors. And we need to keep up the shuttle deliveries of critical nutrients to avoid suspicion."

Doc chuckled. “Perhaps we simply see who's been meeting the shuttle."

Soob wrote, “Secure base first, take risks second."

Helen nodded. “It will be risky to make any deliveries at all; whoever did this may have a contingency plan."

Collette shook her head. “There is some risk, but to effectively execute all of them? That's more than I want on my conscience. Besides, I want to know what happened."

"How much time do we have?” Jacques asked. “When is the next resupply flight?"

"Resupply flights have been at random intervals, generally from six to ten days,” the shuttle AI responded.

"Who orders them?” Collette asked.

"The identifier is: A5428C42."

"We need to see one of those meetings,” Collette said. “I wonder if the security means they are guarding against us or each other."

Helen laughed. “Somehow, I don't see Gabe anticipating that we'd tunnel through to where he's been hiding the shuttle."

"It might not be Gabe. Leo's more the type. Or maybe even one of the women, staying in the background. What are you thinking, Jacques?” Doc asked.

He was thinking they needed more time and less risk. “We could set up a minimum stand-alone facility at Eagle's Nest—we can get there if things go sour with the shuttle. Then let things proceed until we have more information. When we know what we're dealing with and have a good fallback, we can decide the next step."

"To Eagles Nest!” Doc said.

"Not so fast,” Jacques said. “If I was able to track the shuttle's position, whoever's been using it will as well. We shouldn't use it for transportation until we're ready."

* * * *
It was a good concept, Jacques thought, but it gave them only about five days to replicate the replicator. They stayed at “Tunnel's End” for the time being while the shuttle essentially “printed” three-dimensional objects on a five-by-five centimeter stage. The device itself, with its power supply, input matter processor, cooling connections, and so on was almost half a cubic meter. That had to be “broken down” into five-centimeter cubed sections, and it wasn't designed that way. The AI helped, but it was well into the third day before the parts started coming out.

When the call came on the afternoon of the fourth day, it caught them unprepared.

"A5428C42 has directed a flight,” Fortitude announced on Jacques’ wristcomp; only he and Soob were in the vicinity. They quickly helped the robots get their things off.

The Fortitude came back, a day later, to everyone's relief, especially Helen's.

"I got my necklace back!” she beamed.

But when they played back the recording of who was meeting the shuttle, they got a surprise. It was a tiny kangasaur that came aboard and picked up the bottle of nutrient powder from the replicator stage, then hopped away.

"Trained?” Doc speculated.

"Cute, anyway,” Collette said. “I think it's a robot. Nobody would notice it, and our perp wouldn't need excuses for occasional long absences. But a robot is unlikely to command the shuttle to do anything different, nor notice that the Trojan memory chip is no longer in charge."

"We need to proceed quickly; they're bound to be suspicious, eventually."

After two weeks working with the newreplicator, they had a ten-kilowatt boron-proton power plant and a collapsible electric cart to make the trip back to Eagle's nest in a couple of days. Knowing what to look for, they found a vertical maintenance access to the Eagle's nest lava tube.

Another week gave them a second working replicator with a larger assembly platform at Eagle's nest. Tools, sanitary facilities, beds, and small robots soon followed.

On the fourth return of the shuttle, they felt ready to visit the New Landing community. Soob got a dinosaur-capable tranquilizer dart gun. Collette got herself a complete police officer's kit. Everyone else got tranquilizer flechette pistols.

The call for the next shipment of nutrient powder came, and they all got aboard.

The view of Cube World from space was spectacular and bizarre. At the high point of their trajectory, they could see three faces, each with green, blue, and green concentric circles at its center.

"You're not wearing your necklace,” Collette said to Helen as deceleration began. “Edith would love to see it!"

Helen beamed. “I'll get it right now so I don't forget it."

At a quarter gee, the deceleration provided no real hindrance to moving around the shuttle. They were almost down when she reemerged on the control deck.

"I couldn't find it,” she said, deliberately. “Must have left it at Camp Fortitude."

Camp Fortitude? Jacques was suddenly alert—they'd never named any place Camp Fortitude.

He turned and looked at her. Her eyes were wide and her face was grim. She raised a finger to her lips. Helen hadn't left her necklace anywhere but on the shuttle. On the shuttle Fortitude.

Which wasn't this; there were three to start with—identical, of course.

He looked at the others to see if they'd gotten the clue and was answered by grim faces and grave nods. They had. They would have only seconds before this shuttle's hobbled brain realized they knew and disabled them. Soob took his slate and scratched on it: “gas hoods."

The shipsuits had hoods with clear visors packed in their collars. They would provide protection against a knockout gas, if that was what was intended for them. A quick look at the environmental systems display panel showed fan level at max—something was being blown into the command deck as fast as the shuttle's systems could send it. Without delay, Jacques released his hood, pulled it over his head, and sealed it at the neck. Soob had his on, too, as did Collette.

Doc and Helen weren't quite in time, and slumped, unconscious, in their seats as the spacecraft settled to the ground.

Collette was at the command deck hatch in a flash, and cranked it shut manually, while Jacques and Soob finished getting the hoods over Helen and Doc.

"This is Resolution Shuttle Intrepid. You are under arrest by order of the President of Providence. It is a crime to resist this order. It is also impossible as you will eventually run out of air. You must submit to the authority of Captain Suretta, who will bring you into Providence."

* * * *
Chapter 18

On Being Born Again

"Not in your cybernetic life,” Jacques said, and jumped over to the primary memory panel. It was locked, but he now had a laser tool and quickly cut through its thin composite material. The sound of a torch working on the much more solid material of the command deck hatch reached him. He only had a few seconds.

He fumbled with the panel.

"I think we have about twenty seconds,” Collette said, as she motioned the others into defensive positions. They would block the door as long as they could. Helen had found a roll of space tape and taped over the cut as the robot cut it. It would take the torch only seconds to cut through that “repair,” but those would be precious seconds.

Jacques turned back to his work and focused. Like the Fortitude, the Intrepid had been hacked with a single ersatz memory module. His fingers were like thumbs; the damn thing was stuck in, not budging. His fingers slipped off it, time and time again.

Screwdriver! He fumbled to find it in his tool kit. The torch stopped, followed by loud bangs.

"Jacques,” Collette yelled.

He had the screwdriver and pried at the module, ignoring thumps and curses behind him.

Then it broke free, and Jacques yanked it out.

Silence fell on the command deck. He turned to find his comrades covered with three or four maintenance robots each, stuck to them like crabs, covering their faces and hands. He felt something on his own back; he hadn't noticed it before. It had been that close.

"Intrepid, this is Jacques Song...” he said, beginning the same routine he'd used on the Fortitude. When he finished, the maintenance robots meekly abandoned their positions and skittered back to their stations. He found the backup modules, rebooted the AI, and summoned up a view of the shuttle's exterior.

Leo was standing near the entrance hatch. He obviously knew something was amiss; he had a gun out and was looking at his wrist comp and talking.

Collette stared at him. “Three shuttles. Of course. We knew that. We should have been asking ourselves where the others were."

"Just blast off right now and we solve a whole bunch of problems,” Helen said.

"Uh-uh,” Collette said. “Bring him in. I've got a lot of questions."

"I think what Helen means,” Doc said, “is that the whole question of governance, and thus the authority of anyone to imprison or try anyone else is very murky in these circumstances. The legal tradition is for settlements to elect their leadership. We, in essence, lost that election."

"This is not a colony or an intentional settlement.” Collette responded. “However removed, we are still part of a Solar System expedition, under the authority of the government that sent it."

Jacques watched Leo outside, pacing with increasing restiveness. Might he try to shoot his way in? “People, the alternative to us taking charge appears to be to allow mass murderers to run things. For now, Mr. Suretta waits outside with a gun. As Helen points out, to simply blast off with him in his present position would solve a lot of things. I'm not sure the shuttle AI will do that, however. Does anyone have any ideas about how to disable Mr. Suretta without doing him great bodily harm?"

"Do we still control Fortitude?" Helen asked. “Could its robots do something?"

"In an hour or so,” Doc said. “It's on one of the other Cube World faces now."

Soob wrote furiously.

"We have one robot outside now,” Helen read, with a puzzled look.

Doc laughed. “Of course!"

Half an hour later, they watched Leo Suretta collapse from a dart fired by a tranq gun held by the miniature kangasaur that had been unloading the nutrient shipments.

Leo couldn't see both sides of the shuttle at once, and they'd gotten the tranq gun out a maintenance door just big enough for Helen's arm, after they'd removed the intervening equipment.

With Lt. Collette's prisoner secured in one of the Intrepid's berths, they lifted off for New Landing, or “Providence” as Gabe had apparently renamed it. For good measure they contacted the Fortitude and had it join them. The Resolution's shuttles set down on the beach on the north side of New Landing.

The place had grown, with several huts on stilts near the cave mouth, fish and laundry drying on lines, and a faint whiff of untreated sewage.

One would expect that two spaceships landing at this settlement of some stranded astronauts would have attracted some attention, Jacques thought. And it did. Everyone was open-mouthed except for Gabe. He sat down and cradled his head in his hands. Then he focused on Jacques.

"Where's Leo?” he asked, simply.

"In custody,” Collette answered. “What was your role in all this?” she asked with a wave toward the shuttles.

"Leo woke me up before we hit this planet's atmosphere. He told me to be on the Fortitude," Gabe said, “and said the ship would notify the others. Look, this was a chance to go back to Eden. To get everything right. To live the way..."

"What others?” Collette demanded.

"I'm sorry about not telling you about the shuttles, but if y'all knew, you wouldn't have formed the community. You all would just try and build a starship to go back to something that was over and done with thousands of years ago. There's a way people were meant to be, and that's not part of it any more than what those New Reformationists were doing."

"What others?” Collette repeated.

"Leo, Evgenie, and I were on one. There's a group over on the face east of here from the Intrepid. They're the control group; they know about the shuttles. The third shuttle crashed."

"Control group? You were running an experiment?” Doc sounded incredulous.

"I had some ideas about how to ease the New Reformationists back into the fold. I sort of adapted them to the situation."

"Which you helped engineer,” Collette stated.

Gabe shook his head. “No, no. We were already here when Leo woke me up. We discussed how to handle things. He'd just found out and had some good ideas about how to handle this.” He looked around at a sea of stony faces. “At least I thought so."

"Then it was Leo who disabled the homing lasers,” Collette said, looking at her copcom.

She could probably tell if he believed what he was saying, Jacques thought.

Gabe looked absolutely miserable. “I don't know that for a fact."

"Let's say I believe you. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming."

"Leo sabotaged the deceleration mechanism at 36 Ophiuchi?” Maria Lopes questioned. “He wouldn't do that! He's a good man! Where is he?"

No one said anything for several minutes. This was going to be very difficult, Jacques knew.

"He's in custody,” Collette said. Slowly and carefully, she took Maria through everything Leo had done, from the initial sabotage and his efforts to see that only a select group of reliable people were on the shuttles to keeping their existence from the rest of the survivors at the price of letting Jacques’ group go off to what they thought would be certain death.

"How are you going to have a trial?” Gabe asked. “What are you going to do, hang him?"

"Maybe we'll think of something,” Doc offered. “What about Ascendant's murder?"

Gabe wasn't looking at him. He was looking up at the path down from the Rim and pointing with a shaking finger at the end of a shaking arm. A lone woman in what looked to be a shipsuit was walking down the path from the rim.

"Do you believe in ghosts?” Gabe asked, pointing to a woman walking down the path. Then he laughed hysterically. “'Cause if you do, you all can ask her."

The woman descending the path looked exactly like Ascendant Chryse.

* * * *
Chapter 19

Beyond Crime and Justice

"There's nothing to fear,” she said as she reached the group and touched a shuddering Gabe. “I'm flesh and blood, nothing supernatural."

"Whoever built this world ... rebuilt you?” Doc asked.

"I'm not a robot, Doc. The caretaker's nanites recorded my brain and my DNA. Its replicators are somewhat more advanced than ours.” She grinned. “I'm missing some memories, some scars, and I'll need to work on a tan."

"But you are a mind reader, now, it seems,” he said, smiling slightly.

"I made a good guess,” she answered. “Though the latter is possible, if we want to do it."

We. Jacques shuddered. Whatever ran this place apparently could replicate whatever it chose, which did not surprise him too greatly, and had the willingness to use it in this fashion, which did.

"Are you really Ascendant Chryse?” he asked.

"I certainly feel like me, but thanks for saving the diary, Jacques. I went to sleep in my CSU and woke up at Rim Camp. But, and this will be difficult to explain, I'm much more than me."

"More? Who or what are you ... now?” Doc asked.

"On a time scale of milliseconds, my awareness extends to this entire world; on a time scale of hours, this entire planetary system; on a time scale of decades, all the stars human beings have settled; on a time scale of millennia, a part of an arm of the Milky Way and the wisdom of ten thousand races; and on a time scale of hundreds of millennia, the collective culture of our galaxy.

"But there's more. I compass a heritage of races including some now beyond the horizon of space and time—though, and I can only explain this in metaphor, the far horizon is quite misty."

"Intelligent life may be the Universe's way of becoming conscious,” Collette said in hushed tones. “Or something like that. I can't remember who said that—hundreds of years ago."

"Carl Sagan, on Earth. Also by millions of other beings on millions of other planets,” Ascendant said.

Soob pulled his slate out of his bag, scratched on it, and showed the others what he wrote: Did you meet God? He handed it to Ascendant.

Ascendant smiled and kissed Soob on the forehead. “Feel better?"

"Very much,” Soob said. “Oh, my..."

"God,” she said. “The word ‘meet’ doesn't quite do justice to my present circumstance. Tell me, does it make a great difference to you that I did this with nanocells rather than some supernatural force?"

Soob took a long time to respond. “In a philosophical sense, a very profound difference; in a practical sense ... perhaps none at all."

Gabriel Eddie sat on a rock and covered his face with his hands. Evgenie, Arroya, Maria, and Dominic gathered around him. Edith stood, staring at Ascendant.

"There's a net here?” Doc asked. “I don't sense anything."

"Different frequencies and protocols,” Ascendant said. “We'll fix that later."

"Are you an individual or part of a collective mind?” Helen asked.

"The question itself assumes categories that don't really apply,” Ascendant answered. “Our language requires me to use singular or plural pronouns, thus misleading you greatly. The sort of isolation that you experience, and I did, before my ... change ... is a very primitive characteristic by galactic standards, a stage that many races went through and most passed beyond."

"When we left the Solar System,” Collette said, “most philosophers ascribed the lack of contact with other civilizations to a very strong quarantine, an ethic much like that of our own environmentalists that forbids interference with nature."

Ascendant smiled. “But that can't go on forever, can it?"

Jacques nodded. “Eventually, we would start impacting other civilizations. We've probably screwed things up here, ecologically, haven't we? As I'm sure you know, that was not the choice of any of the individuals here."

"You have killed sentient beings to keep your individual selves alive. In most of the galaxy, that would be regarded as a very primitive characteristic in a spacefaring race. As people, we are still driven by emotions, needs to dominate, reproduce, preserve ourselves. Most of the Universe has moved beyond that."

"So, the caretaker of this world does nothing? Just watches us suffer?"

"Think of all the life forms that feel, hurt, need, and suffer and all the gradations of awareness. Suffering can't all be banished, but it can have meaning from what comes later. We were left—allowed—to solve our problems by ourselves."

"What changed? Why were you resurrected? Why contact us now?"

Ascendant giggled. “I'm still human enough to enjoy this. Dear, dear Jacques. We, the human race, solved our problems. We're out of the cradle and off the rug, so to speak. Just taking baby steps, mind you, but it's time for humanity to learn the rules."

"Humanity?” Doc asked. “Does your, uh, expanded awareness have some news from the Solar System?"

She nodded. “There's a lot to talk about. Have you seen the new star in the sky?"

"Near Antares,” Jacques said. “We have to catch it just before Antares rise, or the glare hides it."

"It's a starship decelerating. The Solar System has found you. They'll be here in a few months."

* * * *
It was a clear, still, dry evening and exceptionally cool for their altitude. The women of Providence, perhaps sensing that their way of life was to change unalterably again, made the best of things by putting on a feast around the campfire. The shuttles replicated some wine and beer, the first spirits anyone had tasted for six subjective months, or a thousand years of real time.

So fortified, with Ascendant's help, they caught up, at least to circa 2800 ce. Earth still maintained a stable constitutional monarchy, but that was for tradition and show; AIs did everything and the only person with a real job was the Empress. The ancient effort to rescue the 36 Ophiuchi colony had been successful, if one could call the thousands of deaths that involved a success. It was the last such effort ever attempted.

Human-derived colonies still, occasionally, did some horrendous things, but the Universe had better ways of dealing with that. Nanites invaded bodies and changed minds.

Humans had made a black hole, and now had hundreds of them powering space colonies, performing physics experiments, and generally being useful. The initial effort had drawn the attention of passing spacefarers of an ancient but conservative-by-choice branch of a civilization of flying aliens. Not long after that, a galactic library node had been discovered in Neptune's moon, Proteus. So, well before the Resolution hit Cube World, humanity had found its way into the galactic community.

Ascendant concluded by saying that she might very well be a common example of the human-descended beings they would encounter in the Galaxy today, but the variety was wide.

Gabe said, “I knew we'd be a group of Rip van Winkles, but this ... this will take a whole lot of digesting."

Ascendant laughed, as did a number of others, at first timidly, then heartily. What Ascendant was telling them was hard to grasp, but Gabe was clearly finding it harder than most. Jacques added, “And we are still six hundred years behind the times."

"Or ahead of them, depending on which way the information is flowing,” Helen noted. “I imagine this story will still make a splash on Earth!"

"Are we welcome here?” Arroya Montez asked. “Do we have to go back? I have a very simple, stable life here, with Evgenie. My knowledge is all out of date, and I would have no place on Earth now."

Ascendant smiled at her. Jacques thought there might have been something like recognition in her expression. But she gave no hint of it as she answered Montez's question.

"This world is an experiment in evolution. Six identical environments and with identical seed stock, constructed by beings not too unlike your kangasaur about half a billion years ago, a race not entirely given to theory and abstractions.

"What, they wondered, if one reran evolution for real; would the Universe produce anything like them again? So they put it to the real test. It's been running about two hundred fifty million years. The cube shape is a bit of whimsy, or art. But it's also functional; the biospheres remain isolated and the long slide of basalt down the cube face edges drives the tectonics that recycle this world's carbon."

"Our landing must have upset things,” Doc said.

"Like the KT impact on Earth?” Soob remarked. “Contingencies, like us, are what drive evolutionary change."

Ascendant laughed. “Yes, all grist for the mill. The caretaker takes it in stride."

"We aren't going to get kicked off?” Dominic asked. “We can stay here?"

"It is a bit unusual. In the quarter billion years Cube World has existed, only 1,728 other intelligent races have stumbled upon it before their incorporation into galactic society. Twenty-three hundred years is the longest any of them have stayed. The resurfacing time is about fifty-seven thousand years. Now, the beings Jacques calls dinotowers have long memories, but there is no other trace of these visitations in any of the biospheres. You're welcome to stay a while as long as you control your numbers."

Gabe shook his head. “Do we want to? My God says I shall have no other gods before ‘im. I'm not sure where alien planet-ruling machines fits into that."

"You'd probably find Earthmind quite a shock, then,” Ascendant said. “It's a virtual universe for people who tire of biology."

"Oh, Lord,” Gabe sighed. “Were we wrong? Or ... were we right?"

Ascendant smiled. “Here, you'll be left alone as much as you wish, while you figure that out."

"Maybe that's good for now, Gabe,” Maria said.

"We still have some formalities of justice to consider,” Collette declared.

"Judge not,” Gabe said softly, “lest ye be judged."

Everyone was silent.

"What does justice mean now?” Soob finally asked. “What purpose is there in punishment? I suppose one wants to do something to ensure that a perpetrator doesn't act obnoxiously in the future. Even if murder, or should I say attempted murder, is futile here, I would think it would still be quite an inconvenience. The whole point of this galactic ethical structure seems to be that beings, as collective races, I suppose, have a right to seek their own destiny."

Ascendant laughed. “Not badly put. While I am very comfortable with who I am now, it is true that I would not have chosen this experience for myself. But as for what you do about Leo, we human beings can be human beings as long as we don't ... greatly inconvenience ... others."

"Or until we decide to be something else?” Helen asked.

Ascendant nodded. “It seems fairly certain that you will, eventually. But there's no hurry and there will certainly be no coercion."

"I'd always feel someone is watching over my shoulder,” Helen said.

"A new feeling for an atheist, I'd guess,” Gabe said, reviving a bit.

"Did Leo kill you, Ascendant?” Doc asked.

She smiled with a shake of her head. “Not for lack of trying. Leo Suretta, or Leo Syrtis, as he was named at birth on Mars, was the New Reformation's agent on the Resolution. It was supposed to be a martyrdom mission, for him, murder for the rest of us—or perhaps an act of war. But I was up and managed to restore the AI and wake the command team in time to devise and implement the contingency plan. We found this place, so Leo saw an opportunity to create another authoritarian culture.” Ascendant sighed. “He arranged for people he thought would make the kind of society he wanted to be on the shuttles."

"The CSUs were safer,” she concluded. “There was no guarantee the shuttles would survive the hundred-kilometer-per-second crash into Cube World's atmosphere. One of them, the Purpose, did not. Leo thought the gamble was worth it. A megalomaniac's collateral damage."

Maria sobbed.

"But,” Collette said, diverting attention from her, “Leo's sabotage didn't kill Ascendant, and neither did Gabe—they hadn't arrived on our island when that happened. Her CSU log wasn't wiped until later, right, Gabe?"

Gabe nodded. “Leo didn't want problems about how we got here confusin’ people about what to do now that we were here."

"Ascendant, do you know who turned off your CSU power, while you slept?"

"Actually, I don't. We are all scanned, but only every few nights. The caretaker didn't happen to be watching."

"No matter. I think I know. There were two shuttles,” Collette said. “Leo and Gabe were on one, and on the other..."

Arroya Montez quietly tried to slip away from the fire, thus assuring that all eyes fell on her. Evgenie got up to go after her.

"Arroya,” Ascendant called after her “I'm not dead, so there is no murder, and I assure you I am no danger to your happiness with Evgenie. Be at peace. I forgive you."

Gabe groaned, “Now come on, you're tryin’ to sound like..."

Their eyes locked and Gabe's face lost its color. Very slowly, he asked, “That whatch-youcallit, library node, they found in the Solar System. It hasn't been there three thousand years or so, has it?"

"More like three million, Gabe.” Ascendant wasn't smiling.

Gabe fell silent. Jacques imagined an orchestra playing Also Sprach Zarathustra.

"How far back does the oldest part of you go?” Doc asked. “When did the Universe become conscious?"

"The eldest we know of came from a planet about a star much like this one in a dwarf galaxy now beyond the universal expansion event horizon. They were much closer nine billion years ago and spread their—I think ‘culture’ would be the best word—far and wide. Their ethics became the model for everyone since, though great minds have thought alike in this area.

"Speaking of ethics, Jacques, Leo should be here."

Jacques nodded, contacted the Intrepid and directed that its robots bring Leo to the gathering, unrestrained. No one had anything to fear from him, not ever again.

When he arrived, he looked at Gabe, Jacques, and then, tight-lipped, at Ascendant.

"I'm Ascendant Chryse,” she said.

"The shuttle told me.” Leo's voice was tense, his tone defiant.

"We know everything,” Collette said.

"You may forgive yourself, in time,” Doc said.

Leo snorted. “Forgive myself? I'm proud of what I tried, damn it. I tried to save mankind from this damned, banal, inhuman fate. I tried at 36 Ophiuchi and I tried here. You aren't human, Chryse. You're not more than human, you're less. You're an abomination. An alien puppet."

Leo pulled out a gun; he apparently had a stash of them somewhere, Jacques realized.

Doc laughed. As the others realized the futility of Leo's weapon they began to laugh as well. Except Ascendant, who looked very sad.

"Yeah, real funny.” Leo said. “Well, I'm betting you aliens are just too damned civilized for eternal torture. I quit."

He turned the gun on himself. Nobody made a move or said a thing to stop him. He managed to fire five times before collapsing.

Everyone looked at Ascendant. She had a tear in her eye. “I could have done something, but I am informed that wisdom lies in respecting his wishes. He won't be revived; that would be torture."

* * * *
Chapter 20

As in the Beginning

Before they left for the Solar System, Jacques and Collette visited Face One a last time. With power-assisted wings, they covered the distance in three days, reliving adventures and overnighting at Rim Camp and River Camp, before ending up at Ascendant Chryse's lodge near Eagle's Nest. Soob, Helen, Doc, and their children were there. The oldest, Athena, was now approaching puberty, and as clever as her mother.

"Are you sure?” Jacques asked Ascendant.

Ascendant put her arms around him, acknowledging that in some alternative existence, and perhaps some future one, they were soulmates.

"This is where I belong now,” she said. “We need to develop a different view perspective of time; by Galactic standards, I am really not so far away. Besides, I'm pregnant!"

Soob was grinning ear from ear. “I'm going to enjoy exploring the other cube faces and renewing acquaintances with other resurrectees."

"And someone needs to keep the fear of god in Gabe,” Helen added.

Doc chuckled. “Gabe enjoys leading, and the people with him enjoy being led. Their first generation is just coming of age. I'll enjoy watching them rebel."

"The galactic data base here is larger than the library node in the Solar System,” Helen said, “and with my family, I'm really happy. So come back in a couple of millennia!"

Then they said their farewells, Collette took his hand, perhaps a bit firmly, and led him back to the Fortitude. Hours later, with them aboard, Resolution III picked up the beam to Earth.

Within a day, Cube World's star shrank noticeably. When it dimmed to about the same apparent luminosity as Antares, they made love once more, then entered their CSUs. Years later, they revived briefly to gape at the glowing red mist of the supergiant star as its gravity bent them toward Earth. But it too dwindled, and Jacques made one last check of his enhanced emergency kit and permitted the CSU's transparent lid to settle down over him for the six-hundred-year journey. For him, the thirty-third century had ended, and the thirty-ninth would soon begin.