Crichton continued to look at his watch, as he thought through the implications.

Coyote tried to hold back, but a laugh forced its way out and grew into a guffaw.

Crichton spoke with an arctic voice.

"An exercise in futility. The one-eyes will find every single person you so cruelly exposed to the Allpox. All of them will be cleansed or blanked. All the pages will be destroyed."

"I don't know, sir," said Coyote. "Seems likely you might have a few more Dissenters on your hands before this is through."

"That may be. But the worst ones will have been executed."

Crichton spoke curt orders into his headset that would set into motion a search for the pages. Then he started the procession moving again.

He felt as though he'd just been pushed off a cliff. He'd been poised on it, teetering on it, and Coyote's trick was the final push.

The abyss had first opened when the Enterprise had shown up. An abyss of fiction in his mind, of insane hallucinations. The worst part of it was that he himself appeared in these hallucinations. He was a fictional character among the other fictional characters. A central character. The crazy stories were always about him.

If he had to finally lose his grip and let the fictions run rampant in his mind, he was determined he should not do it here, now. He used his own abhorrence of the Allpox, of its devilry, its obscenity, to push the imaginary world back into his unconscious. G.o.d will help me, he told himself.

He led the procession up a long stair and arrived at the bridge. As they pa.s.sed through the gla.s.s doors and onto the pavement of the bridge, the Dissenters stopped walking.

They had all seen the video reports and knew this was where Odysseus had died.

Crichton saw what was happening and knew he had to keep the procession moving. No time was to be wasted, no change in itinerary allowed.

But the CS guards didn't have to be told. They pulled the Dissenters forward.

The security around CephCom was unprecedented, all as Crichton had ordered. Dozens of hovercraft circled the complex, and one-eyes lined the bridge and hung in rank upon rank in the air farther back, like rows of headstones in a hovering cemetery. Above them, mammoth battlefield one-eyes flew in precise holding patterns. Sharpshooters stood at the corners of every roof. There would be no mistake this time. Nothing would happen that Crichton himself did not order.

Rhiannon watched the backs of the CS officers in front of her. Suddenly she desired a last look at the sky. She turned her head upward as she walked.

Vast gray and white clouds moved in stately unison overhead, dwarfing the complex. A small blue s.p.a.ce had opened up between them, a minor interregnum.

Rhiannon saw a flock of circling birds, nothing more than specks at this distance, high up in the blue gap.

There were no birds on Rampart.

Rhiannon froze in her tracks, causing the CS officer behind to b.u.mp into her. Her face was still upturned, her eyes wide.

"Saushulima," she said to herself.

Now the CS men around her stopped, and looked up as well.

Crichton sensed the break in ranks behind him and turned to ascertain the problem. He followed the many gazes upward and saw the distant flock of creatures.

Now the entire troop had halted. All eyes were turned up toward the inconceivable. Neither Crichton's helmet nor those of the other CS officers were filtering out the sight. The military computers controlling the helmets had identified the airborne creatures as a real threat, which the men needed to see so they could shoot at them.

The haguya pulled into a tight arrow formation, so close they almost looked like one united creature. As they began to dive, their formation changed to three smaller arrow shapes. Their groupings were precise.

As they became more visible, and undeniably, extravagantly alien, Crichton experienced his awakening.

Time slowed down to a stop, as if to help him undergo the process.

The haguya seemed to hang in the air in the middle of their dive. The clouds were a painting, and the people around him were statues.

The other person inside Crichton now awoke from his ten-year sleep. He awoke as if he had fallen asleep only an hour ago. He was Captain Alfred Bowles.

He recognized that the fictions trying to "take over" were not fictions at all. They had all really happened. They were his experiences. His ship, a thing that had dominated his psychotic episodes, a ship he'd regarded as mythical, was in truth his ship after all. It was no science fiction. It was the U.S.S. Huxley.

The personality of Crichton, an artificial construct, folded itself into a corner like a piece of furniture. Bowles was now in control. He still had the memories of what he'd done as Crichton, but he knew that the Crichton persona was not his true self.

Now his sense of time came back to him. The haguya were diving at him. They grew from tiny bird shapes into large animals, living alien airships, dropping with great speed and momentum.

The stunned CS men recovered their wits enough to raise their weapons.

Their motion drew his attention away from the haguya and his own revelations.

He stared at the men for just a second. His Starfleet training took over. The most basic part of the training, how to handle contact with alien life.

"Everybody hold your fire and lower your weapons!" he barked into his headset.

Some of the soldiers obeyed, some didn't. A lot of weapons were still raised.

"Lower them, d.a.m.n you, and keep them down, and move all aircraft back two kilometers. I want no hostile moves of any kind."

Now the haguya's golden falcon eyes and ma.s.sive tendoned wings were clearly delineated against the clouds. They split ranks in a complex maneuver, and with mathematical precision regrouped and finished their dive at an angle, coming straight at the bridge.

With a great rush of wind, they flew directly over the Dissenters and the CS men holding them. Some of the CS men ducked in fright as leathery wings and bony talons whooshed past them.

The haguya turned in the air beyond the bridge and came in for another pa.s.s, even lower this time, specifically targeting the CS men around the Dissenters. The men fell flat on the ground to avoid impact, while the Dissenters shouted exhortations to the flying aliens.

Bowles could see what the alien attack was all about. These Dissenters-who Crichton arrested-were the aliens' friends!

Some of the CS raised their weapons again.

"Put 'em down!" Bowles yelled. "Let go of the Dissenters. Step away from them."

They obeyed.

The haguya flew upward and then began to wheel about in a circle. One glided back down solo and, flapping heavily, braked itself to a landing next to the Dissenters.

Rhiannon ran up to the beast and touched its head. She whispered some words to it, then leapt nimbly to its back.

As it beat its wings and bore the girl aloft, another haguya came in for a landing and took its place. Gunabibi climbed onto its back, and she too was borne skyward.

One by one the other haguya landed and took off until all the Dissenters were riding on their backs, high up among the clouds.

Bowles didn't let the CS soldiers move a muscle or fire a shot during the entire process.

Many of them were too stunned anyway. One soldier named Lieutenant Redman was among the more affected. His training and inculcation had made him fear fiction, but this science fiction in the flesh turned out not to frighten him at all. He thought the haguya were the most beautiful creatures he'd ever seen. However, his aesthetic rapture could not help him retrieve the memories of his previous life as a Dissenter-when he was the son of a CS officer named Powell. Those memories were gone forever.

On the bridge of the Enterprise, Picard, Troi, Riker, and Data watched the viewscreen. Data tabbed his panel repeatedly, choosing between several different views of the CephCom bridge, the haguya, the CS, and the man Troi had just suggested was Captain Bowles, of the U.S.S. Huxley.

"This is all raw feed from their one-eyes and cameras," Data told Picard. "Uncut images being fed into the CS video control room."

"I daresay the CS won't be able to do much with this," said Picard, "unless they want to expose themselves as fools and publicly admit that alien life exists right under their noses. Counselor, can you tell us anything more about these haguya, as you call them?"

"As I said, I could never feel any thoughts or emotions from them. They seemed generally helpful to the Dissenters but I couldn't verify anything beyond that."

"Captain," said Data, "I am separating a component of the audio signal from the video feed. I believe it to be the haguya. Their speech, perhaps."

The android looked at Troi. "You would not have heard it. The frequencies are twenty thousand hertz above your hearing range."

Data looked back at his console. "The sounds are definitely a form of information transfer between them. I estimate the speech to be three times as information-intensive as human language. This is a highly intelligent form of life. It is likely that the frequency of their neural impulses prevented you from sensing their minds empathically, Counselor."

Data's hands danced a pas de deux on the keyboard.

"Sir, I believe that the ship's computer and I will be able to decode this language. We are already detecting a repeated string."

"Perhaps we'll call it Data's Cartouche," said Picard. "The key to your Rosetta Stone."

"The cartouche is already giving up its secrets, sir. The computer has translated it as a string of names. Odysseus, Rhiannon, Gunabibi, Coyote ... there are two dozen of them."

Troi watched the viewscreen as the last of the Dissenters, Amoret as it happened, was borne away from CephCom by the haguya.

"There was one thing the Dissenters told me that I didn't believe at the time," Troi said. "They said the haguya understood human speech and sat around the campfire at night, listening to all the stories. Now I have a feeling that it was no exaggeration."

"It may not have been," said Data. "The patterns of their own communications resemble long stories, like the songs of whales. These haguya could be storytellers themselves."

"Mr. Data," said Picard, "have the computer record as much of the haguya-talk as you can. But let's track our man now."

Data tabbed his keypad.

On the screen, Bowles turned and headed alone into the CephCom building. He seemed to be in a hurry.

"Stay with him, Data."

Data switched between the signals of several cameras, putting the various scenes up on the viewscreen. In a view from a one-eye, looking over somebody's shoulder, a knot of huddled CS men on the bridge talked a blue streak, a torrent of excited confusion in the aftermath of the haguya's appearance. In another view, down on the quadrangle, several CS men could be seen pointing toward the sky.

"I am afraid we will not be able to pick up signals inside the buildings, sir."

"Keep at it," said Picard. Then he turned to Troi.

"Counselor, you still feel strongly that Crichton is Bowles?"

"More than ever. The CS could have brainwashed him. It could have been incomplete-Odysseus told me such things happen. The Bowles Persona could have been waiting for a cue to re-emerge. And we could have been the cue. This incident with the haguya may have pushed him past the critical point. What he did just now, freeing the Dissenters and protecting the haguya, certainly didn't look like the actions of Crichton."

Picard nodded to himself.

"It fits," he said. "His disfigurement could have resulted from the destruction of the Huxley. That crude reconstructive surgery would have kept our computer from recognizing him."

"If we get him back," said Riker, "let's hope he still has some memories about the fate of the Huxley crew."

"Yes, Will, let's not forget we're looking for more than just one crewperson. Worf, what's the status of the Rampartian ships?"

"Holding at a radius of five thousand kilometers, sir."

"Advise the moment you see a more aggressive posture. In the meantime, see if you can hail Bowles. But just say that we want to talk to Director Crichton."

"Aye, sir. Trying ..."

"And please advise Starfleet that we'll be staying here just a bit longer, on my authority."

"Aye, sir. So far we are getting no response from Rampart."

"Captain," said Troi, "they may be too confused by the appearance of the haguya to reply right now. It is also possible they will not allow us to speak to the one they know as Crichton. He could be in danger of arrest. I would guess he has been for a while."

Bowles was acutely conscious of the possibility of arrest as he hurried back to his office.

Crichton's office, actually. Bowles still had all the facts about Crichton and the CS in his memory.

He tried to appear calm as he brushed past CS officers and soldiers in the corridors. He stayed as far as he could from the one-eyes.

He knew what the procedure would be if he were caught. Crichton had ordered such procedures on others many times. The CS didn't bother re-blanking the minds that had already failed the procedure once. They got rid of them the easy way, with a lethal dose of barbiturates.

His hope was that the confusion caused by the appearance of the haguya might supersede reports of his own strange behavior-reports that would eventually be given to the Council of Truth.

The chatter on his headset confirmed his hope. The live sighting of the haguya, and the capturing of the entire incident on videotape, had stunned the entire CS organization. There was no precedent, no prior experience with alien life. The manual didn't say what should be done when confronting the impossible.

He pictured the CS video editors scrambling, impelled by the necessity of presenting something, anything, to the Council of Truth for inspection. No one would dare tell this story to the Council without tape to back them up. It was just too fictional to be believed.

Bowles suddenly realized he couldn't go back to his office. The place was filled with brain wave antennae and camera lenses, and he needed to do some dirty work.

He diverted his steps into a room that had a disk reader and terminal.

His fingers stumbled in their eagerness as he commenced a search in the disk library for the name Alfred Bowles.

There was no such person listed in the regular files, but he had Crichton's knowledge of the system and he could get anywhere, even into the Council of Truth's own files.

He broke into the Council's data base, found that a disk did exist, and retrieved it from the vault.

When he put it on the disk-reader he got a message on-screen: This disk contains mental material from the only surviving crewman of the U.S.S. Huxley, Captain Alfred C. Bowles. Only the material relevant to future conflicts with other hostile expeditions has been saved herein. All information on this disk has been filtered and certified as sanitary.

"Subject's mind was blanked and replenished with filtered memories of James Crichton, CS officer killed in the line of duty on date 7/8/12."

Within a few moments Bowles was watching events from his life as a Starship captain unfold on the little monitor. He found plenty of verification that his "science fiction hallucinations" were real memories, but he noticed that there were no images of alien life on the disk.

The CS saved only the material the computer recognized as factual.