... and then each of us was one of those points of light, dancing in a place where there were no chairs or pools or gravity or bodies to be affected by it .. .

... a boundless place where we could touch/join/feel/ learn at will, without fear or embarra.s.sment or hindrance .. .

... a peculiar pocket universe where a hundred soundless voices could all speak, be heard and be understood simultaneously .. .

... where distance between minds did not exist, and misunderstanding was no longer a viable strategy, and defensive armor was not even a concept .. .

This is it/here it is/oh I remember now/YES/we're back/we're here/it's still here/it was always here/we made it/it made us/how could we have forgotten?/how could we have remembered?/Ready?/I'll never be ready/I've always been ready- {Then LET'S GO!} I am he as you are he as you are we and we are all altogether together in the altogether, so gather ye chestnuts Willie Mays me when you say the word and yule bee free for all good men to come in an aide of the party animal instincts to high heaven help the guy wire the money lenders from the temple to the bridge of the nose candy cane and able to leap from tall bildungsroman Empire State of the art for art's sacrum and c.o.ke deal gone sour you doing these dazed and confused into a single elemental patients is a virtual environment to say that if you're everly brothers' keeper or toss her backgrounded for a weak signal to the public offering a bell tower above the rest room to move your asterisk everything on one role-playing game warden off a cold front tooth and nothing b.u.t.t the two things I hate the worst case of beer should be enough of this chit for the chatroom service industry standard deviation from the norman mailer-daemon knight Gracie Mansion family doctor the book's a trip and a half, isn't it, man?

{see? everybody can keep up. take a solo, long-drink!} -Tristram Shandy, Amos & Andy, and Mahatma Gandhi were readin' CANDY, so they all got randy and had a brandy with a girl named Mandy who was fairly handy, and her legs were bandy but her top was glandy; her hair was sandy, like Jessica Tandy {dandy, grandee! double bill, blow a chorus for us!} -He was a straight head. He was straight ahead. His head was straight, and if you was too straight to GET straight, he was the head could STRAIGHTEN you, see what I mean, if you was in dire straits, didn't matter in the dire front or in the dire rear, he was the straight goods, too first-rate to frustrate, and that's the straight of it, straight up, we straight on that? Right on {okay, round the circle now, everybody take a lane:} Afghanistan banana-stand A Ceylonese camel with A Balinese gamelan Mandalay Brahmin an' a Ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong Bing bong Ping Pong King Kong Donkey Dong Cheech 'n Chong in Hong Kong Sing along a strong string single with a dingleberry jingle got to mingle Kriss Kringle on a shingle as a polonaise mammal Colonel Rommel had to pummel on the pommel for a Simulated summer as a Ceylonese camel with A Balinese gamelan Mandalay Brahman an' a Ram-a-lam-a-dung-dang .. .

{okay. we're in. we're on. we're networked. good connection. excellent bandwidth. now:} {enough words.} {enough thoughts.} {enough selves.} {no more words.} {no more thoughts.} {no more self.} {close ranks.} {those of you who know about no-thought, teach the rest of us. let us be one, and be still.}

Sssshhhhhhhhh- Mmmmmmmmmmmmm

A hundred twenty-seven minds hugged.

A million years pa.s.sed.

Then another.

No problem. In company like this, I could do another billion standing on my head.

Or anybody's, for that matter.

I (wildly misleading term) was from time (as it were) to (so-called) time briefly aware (without ever thinking about it) that large (but not important) portions of what it amused us to consider Jake Stonebender's brain were being put to strenuous use by a two-year-old supergenius, processing zeros and ones at such a stupefying rate of speed that they blurred, superimposed, and became spoked wagon wheels spinning faster than hard disks ... and every (let's call it) time I did (metaphorically speaking) come to that (for lack of a better term) awareness, I (also metaphorically speaking) always turned around and went the other way, like a first-cla.s.s pa.s.senger avoiding the engine room. That was someone else's pidgin. And besides, all the brains here were doing that... .

Another million years.

And another, marinating in the warm embrace of nearly everyone on earth I cared about {jaymie, acayib, merry, check my figures. everyone else, hold on, please.}

Three or four aspects of myself went somewhere else for a while. The rest of me continued to bask. But only millennia later,

{we've got an answer. time to put our selves back on and go use it. thank you all....}

"-AAOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMM".

My lungs empty, I drew in another deep breath ... and let it out slowly. The Om came to a gently ragged ending. There was silence save for the subsonic rumble of Fantasy Fest a few blocks distant. We were back. I was being me again-so convincingly that within seconds I had even me fooled.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n it," Long-Drink murmured blissfully, "one of these days we have got to try that when we have time to stay there for a while. Maybe just a week or so to start, and then build up-"

"Did it work, princess?"

Everyone fell silent for the answer.

"I think so, Daddy. I've got a solution in which we have a high degree of confidence. If I've made the correct a.s.sumptions, and Pixel observed the time accurately, I think I know where Mom was when she rematerialized, close enough to exactly that with a little luck, I should be able to rescue her."

A ragged cheer went up. I was glad I was sitting down; n.o.body knew how close I came to pa.s.sing out.

"How far away are we talking about?" I asked, when I could speak again. "Orbit of Mars? Oort Cloud?"

"Oh, G.o.d, no!" she said. "Sorry, I thought you knew. I could have given you an approximate answer hours ago. It had to be roughly 68,400 miles from where she started. Nine-teen miles per second times sixty times sixty. That's, like, a quarter of the distance from here to the moon."

"Ah," And Erin had been to the moon. Well, once, anyway. I felt a little bit better.

"Of course, that was seven hours ago-so from here, I've got to Transit roughly seven times that far. A little over half a million miles."

I felt a little bit less better. "Ah. And you're confident?"

She smiled. "Hit a target half a million miles away, with an error no bigger than a few hundred yards? NASA was doing that back in the Seventies, Daddy. Are you saying I'm not smarter than NASA?"

"As long as you're luckier," I said, and then wished I'd bitten my tongue off instead. At that point in history NASA was having some of its worst luck since the Challenger Tragedy: a run of maddening disasters like that Mars lander that went silent only seconds before touchdown.

Our luck had generally been notoriously good in the past. But then, in the past we'd often had considerable help in that direction, from the paranormal powers of our friend the Lucky Duck, who is the mutant offspring of a Fir Darrig and a pooka. Unfortunately the Duck had dropped out of sight without warning a few years back, leaving us a brief note in which he explained that right now Ireland needed him more than we did. I can't say I disagree. But d.a.m.n I missed him that night.

"Okay," Herb said. "We have a good target. Now did I hallucinate it, or did we all formulate an actual plan together while we were in rapport? For what you're going to do to find and rescue Zoey once you finish the jump, I mean."

"We'd better have," Omar said. "She's only going to get the one chance. With a window twenty seconds wide."

"I think so," Erin agreed. "I'll be right back."

Pap. She was gone.

"She's just gone up to t.i.tusville to do a little shopping," Acayib a.s.sured me.

There's a guy just off Route 1 up in t.i.tusville, whom you could call a fanatic collector in the same sense that the Great Rift Valley is an interesting geological feature; he specializes in esoteric radio and aeros.p.a.ce stuff, and his collection covers over a dozen acres along the side of the highway. Double Bill calls it the Surplus Store of the G.o.ds: there you can find everything from eight-foot dishes on tracking mounts to a complete three-story optical tracking station blockhouse to-I swear, he took me there and showed me once-an honest-to-G.o.d t.i.tan booster. We've had occasion to shop there in the past, and Erin has always maintained a good relationship with Gordon.

Pip. A piece of gear appeared on the poolside concrete next to Erin's empty chair. Pop. She was back, too. "This is the best I could find," she said, and Acayib, Doug, and Herb began inspecting the device together. It looked to me like an unpainted Magic 8 Ball with an antenna and a few other bits sticking out of it, with its own remote control.

"That's a Zoey-detector?" I asked.

"Close enough," Acayib said. "It's a programmable IR scanner with telemetry." He shut up and started working on it.

"Zoey is small, dark, soft, and nonmetallic," Doug said, watching over his shoulder. "For purposes of detection in free s.p.a.ce, the only good thing she is now is warm. Erin is going to teleport this ahead of her, to a point a few feet from her own arrival point, programmed to look for warm things.

Once she gets there, she'll have the scanner zigzag via teleportation jumps every second or so along a search trajectory. In twenty seconds ... Merry, you were in my head watching as I did the math; do you check my figures?"

"Yes," she said. "If Zoey is anywhere within a cubic mile of Erin, the device should locate her within twenty seconds."

"Once it does, I'm there," Erin said. "Then I use this."

"Jesus!" She was holding up an odd-looking pair of scissors. "What for?"

"Well, I thought of bringing along some kind of pressure bubble and stuffing Mom into it-NASA has developed some prototypes I could borrow. But neither Mom nor I has had any experience with them at all, and I'm really dubious about my chances of getting her into one and sealing it within twenty seconds. She's likely to be in a state of panic when I get to her. So I think the best way to go is, once I locate Mom, I Transit to her side and just teleport her back home ahead of me-well, to some location above Earth but within atmosphere, after which I can take her the rest of the way back down to the ground in safe easy hops. But to teleport her ahead of me, she has to be naked. So the scissors are to get her that way in as few seconds as possible."

"Remember," Herb said, joining the scanner's telemetry readout and the scissors together with a pair of rubber bands. "When you arrive, first thing, locate this stuff-and for Christ's sake hang on to it! After that, you look around for your mom."

"Right."

I had a sudden horrid thought. "Holy s.h.i.t, don't forget to take off her wedding ring!" I said. I felt a twinge of regret at its loss, but I'd have given a thousand rings to have my Zoey back; I could always buy her another.

"I won't," she a.s.sured me. "Good thing she doesn't wear earrings or a watch; that'll save seconds."

"And listen-the release for that belt is right on top, in front. You'll see it. Just pull up on it and the belt opens right up. I suggest you leave it there in s.p.a.ce."

"I will," she said. "Thanks."

"Excuse me," said a quiet voice from outside the circle. We turned and there was Field Inspector Ludnyola Czrjghnczl, looking embarra.s.sed but determined. Now? I thought. "Yes, ma'am?" Erin said.

"Do I understand this correctly? You intend to be exposed to hard vacuum yourself, for the entire twenty seconds of your search window? Because it seems to me that with your smaller size, decompression would kill you faster than it would her."

I stared at her. I should have thought of that.

Erin smiled at her and nodded. "It would-but no, I won't be exposed continuously. I'll have the IR scanner spinning so that it'll take it about two seconds to complete a 360-degree scan; that's the fastest it can process the data. Then I just keep skipping forward two seconds at a time and looking at the readout until I get a hit. Or don't. My total max exposure should be under five seconds."

"Ah," said the bureaucrat. "Thank you."

"No, thank you," Erin said.

"Yes, thank you," I heard myself say.

Ms. Czrjghnczl started to say something in reply, then changed her mind and stepped silently back into the shadows again.

I could feel my heart hammering. "Okay. When will you do it?"

"Right now, Daddy," she said. "Every second I waste is another nineteen miles I'll have to Transit. And I'll never be any readier."

I closed my eyes. A theologian would probably quarrel if I said I prayed, since I wasn't aiming it at any particular being. Say I wished real hard, if you like.

"Okay, everybody," I said, raising my voice, "we're ready to do this thing."

More than a hundred voices all wished Erin well at once, and then fell silent.

Time seemed to come to a halt for me. All my senses became enhanced. I could hear cicadas, and my friends breathing, and two drunks arguing with a cop up near Duval Street, and some boatman having trouble with his engine somewhere off in the Gulf of Mexico, and a single-prop plane of some kind lining up for its approach to Key West airport, and the hammering of my own heart in my chest. I could smell the sea, coffee from The Machine behind the bar, islands food cooking over in Bahama Village, fried food from Duval, a car with bad exhaust going right by outside, and my own armpits reeking with fear. I could see all around me over a hundred well-known faces filled with concern and support, and all around them the splendid home Zoey and I had built for them and ourselves down here among the palms and poincianas at the end of the world. I could feel air rushing down my windpipe, and blood racing through my veins, and feces making its slow way through the middle of me; I could have sworn I felt my hair growing all over me. I had been frightened every single second since midnight. Now all at once I was so terrified, I wanted to vomit my heart.

I showed my daughter my teeth. I tried to say, "Go get her, honey," and discovered I couldn't trust myself to speak. Instead I nodded, touched her cheek one last time, and stepped back.

She smiled back. That smile had had all its teeth for only a few months, now, I recalled. "Don't worry, Daddy," she said. "I won't," I lied hoa.r.s.ely.

Pip. The Magic 8 Ball and its remote vanished.

"I'll be right back."

Pop.

And of course she was.

Idiotically, I had for some reason expected that there would now be an interval of nerve-racking suspense that, whatever its actual duration, would seem to take years. Call it proof that I wasn't thinking clearly. When she reappeared right where she had just disappeared like the Cheshire cat changing its mind, the scanner once again at her feet, there was a split second during which I was relieved, grateful to be spared the burden of waiting even one more second on tenterhooks.

Then I saw that she was still alone.

Then the expression on her face registered.

She drew in a gasping, shuddering breath. "Oh, G.o.d, Daddy," she said hoa.r.s.ely, "she wasn't there."

I heard a roaring in my ears, and I started to faint. But my sobbing daughter literally climbed up me into my arms, and I knew this was not a good time to drop her on concrete and fall on top of her. I locked my knees, locked my arms around her, and promised myself that I would become unconscious just as soon as I got a chance.

"Okay, don't panic," Acayib called sharply. "Remember our initial a.s.sumptions. Zoey either jumped one hour, or twenty-four. We've eliminated the first one. Now we try the other, that's all."

Of course! We'd failed to find Zoey at 8:03 this evening .. . but for all we knew we might still find her at 7:03 tomorrow evening. All was not lost- Erin's skin felt feverishly hot against mine. Moments ago she had been in s.p.a.ce, twice as far away as the orbit of Luna. "You don't understand," she said. "It's not just a matter of multiplying everything: by twenty-four! Slippage we could neglect for a span of one hour, effects we could safely ignore get too big to ignore over that long a time-and too slippery to pin down precisely."

"So we'll do another brain orgy," I said.

She shook her head. "Even if we could get everyone back in rapport now that we're all this agitated-and I doubt we could-it wouldn't help. She looked up at me with those huge eyes. "It's just not the kind of thing that more calculating time will improve. It's ... it's indeterminacy. The part that can't be computed."

"But you're gonna try."

"Of course I am, Daddy! And it may work."

"It may," Doug agreed.

"But the odds are way lousier than they were for a one-hour jump."

"They are," said Doug.

I felt a powerful impulse to rip my beard out of my face. Instead I sighed deeply and looked at my watch. "Okay, 7:03 P.M. this evening is more than twelve hours away, pumpkin. Do you want to take a break before you try again? Use the toilet? Eat something? Nap a few hours?"

She shook her head. "Let's just do it. Put me in my chair."

Deep breath. "Okay." I set her down before her two computers, and her fingers flew over the keys for a minute or so. Then she looked at the figures on the screens for ten long seconds, took in a long deep breath, and shut off both machines.