Nguyen watched him leave with a detached air of amus.e.m.e.nt. I turned on him. "What's that smirk about. You look like you're hatching an egg."

"He likes you, Liz."

"Right."

"Liz, when avatars are well done-and remember, it took some time to get yours exact-they're more than just mirrors or puppets. They're out there doing what people are normally too busy to do anymore-playing. Experimenting with possibilities. So these two fell in l.u.s.t with one another. You can ignore it completely, or you can take note of it-maybe your avatar is telling you something you ought to know. Personally, the chance that that might happen is what's kept me from having one. I'm sure there are some things about myself I would rather not discover."

He took another sip of champagne. "Now, a.s.suming this press conference gets the reporters off our necks for a while, what we need to talk about is how we are going to get Queen Jolly Freeze up and flying before the convergence happens."

On the pix, "Cobble" put her hand up to touch "Wetherall" on the arm.

By that end of the day everybody in the world knew that the Chinese, Ethiopian, Chilean and Aussie s.h.i.tdogs were tunneling to Stateline. Seismologists rushed equipment to Nevada to try to antic.i.p.ate their arrival. It was generally believed that Thorp's estimate for a simultaneous arrival in fifteen days was ludicrous; reasonable numbers ranged from eighteen to twenty-eight days.

There were calls in Congress to ban everyone from Stateline except for military, but the governor of Nevada-whose hand was, no doubt, deep in Wetherall's pocket-made fiery speech about states' rights. The reporters vowed to stay right where they were to cover what many claimed was the biggest story in history. Perversely, Wetherall found himself allied with the media against the government in the effort to maintain civilian access to the s.h.i.tdog site.

Ten days after the convergence had begun, Nguyen had the house ready for flight. There would be no test: this was the official launch even though the mobile base wouldn't be ready for another week. Wetherall had insisted, over Nguyen's objections, that we use the makeshift base we had driven on our s.h.i.tdog-wrangling test. Queen Jolly Freeze had to be up and running before the rest of the s.h.i.tdogs arrived.

"When you're ready, Wetherall." The pix softened Nguyen's voice to a whisper.

Overnight the crew had tested all systems and inflated the balloons with helium. In the dawn light, through the skylight, I had watched them swelling over us like huge tumors. Now Wetherall and I were in the control room of Queen Jolly Freeze. Below us, Nguyen in the base directed the ground crew as they worked the mooring lines that had kept the house stable through the inflation. Wetherall's liftmansion was a brobdignagian version of Laputa, an elongated octagon rather than a disk, with four levels, an encircling balcony (despite Wetherall's acrophobia), a small gym, sauna, even a hot tub. Every room had its own escape hatch and ladder.

Wetherall decided that none of the crew was necessary. He knew as much about his house as anyone. This was to be a test run for his elusive solitude as well as for Queen Jolly Freeze. I was surprised when he invited me along.

Wetherall was as bright and excited as a kid with seventy million dollars worth of balloons. "I'm going to retract the boom now," he said.

"Go," Nguyen replied from the pix.

The stair boom detached from the base and retracted into the house. The mooring lines fell away. There was an initial jerk as the lifthouse broke free and found its equilibrium. It hovered, neither rising nor falling, ten meters above the base.

"Neutral ballast achieved," Nguyen said. "Electromagnetic tether engaged."

"I'm going to take it up to half alt.i.tude," Wetherall said. His hands moved over the controls. Through the observation floor I watched the base gradually shrink below us.

Wetherall stopped the house at sixty meters. In the light northerly breeze, it moved off thirty meters south of the base. The shadows of the big balloons, in the early morning light, were cast against the foot of Pile B a kilometer away.

"Let's have a look at the jewels," Wetherall said.

"Up there you see jewels," Nguyen grumbled. "Down here all I see is s.h.i.t." He started the base crawling over the salt flats. As the wind was at its back, the house drifted into the lead. Wetherall peered intently at the piles ahead. I retreated to the observation deck on the opposite side of the house to watch for s.h.i.tdogs.

It was almost over now, and looking down from the balcony, I thought about what the last months had meant. Since that night on the salt flats, Wetherall had treated me with punctilious correctness, retreating into formality like a hurt child. I didn't know why that should have bothered me. But it did.

It was a little chilly outside, and the wind blew back my hopeless hair.

Of course, the media had noticed the lifthouse taking off. They scrambled a dozen copters in pursuit. Wetherall's private little launch party was going to be live on the net, very shortly. But I didn't have the chance to tell him. Below, a pair of s.h.i.tdogs appeared, loping after the base. Nguyen began to turn away from it and the piles but then two more s.h.i.tdogs approached from the west. Nguyen spotted them, sped up and veered back left. As he did, the left side treads of the base skipped a little ahead, spinning faster than the right ones, though the crawler didn't seem to speed up when it did. The ma.s.s of the house, in occasional gusts of wind, was threatening to pull the base off the salt flats. Nguyen had been right; the base wasn't ma.s.sive enough for Queen Jolly Freeze.

I wondered about the way the four s.h.i.tdogs had come at us from opposite directions. It was almost as if they were acting in concert. But that didn't make sense, because the effect of their actions was not to chase us away but to steer us toward the piles. Just then I noticed a cloud of dust being kicked up off toward the press encampment. Several vehicles had crossed the property line and were closing on us.

"Wetherall, we've got company," I said.

"I know. There's nothing I can do about the copters, but I'm having security turn those buses around."

"They better. You realize that if we make any sudden turns, your house is going to yank the base off the ground like Piglet in a windstorm."

"What about that, Nguyen?"

He sounded calm. "I told you the ma.s.s of this base was inadequate. Of course, a collision with either a s.h.i.tdog or a bus voids your warranty. However, the s.h.i.tdogs seem to be dropping back. As long as the wind doesn't pick up, we should be all right. But no heavy breathing, you two."

Copters hovered around Queen Jolly Freeze like gulls around a beached whale. I could see a commentator talking excitedly into his throat mike. I ran out to the rec room and turned on the pix. " . . . Floating pleasure-palace drifts toward the largest of the alien piles . . . " A telephoto close-up showed Wetherall at the controls; it made him looked goofier than he really was. ". . . ident.i.ty of the woman is still unknown. We have unconfirmed reports that it's pix flame Daphne Overdone, spirited away from the set of the interactive spectacular Madonna by special black operatives of Allweather Security, Wetherall's Jolly Freeze subsidiary. . . ."

"Whoa, Nguyen!" said Wetherall. "This is close enough."

The base skidded slowly to a halt. I ran back to Wetherall. We floated alongside pile B. The air was thick with the smell of strawberries and chocolate. Outside the window of the observation deck, twenty meters away, were the jewels that crowned the s.h.i.tpile.

I hadn't been this close to a cl.u.s.ter since we had decapitated Pile A four years ago. Since there's no way to quantify beauty, scientists are supposed to ignore it. But the view of the jewels took my breath away.

There were three main groups. Each consisted of hexagonal rhombohedrons, the largest over three meters in length and almost half a meter in diameter. But the surface of each of the larger jewels was fixed with a myriad of smaller rhombohedrons, and each of those with still smaller ones, in a kind of fractal dance. The colors ranged from the liquid red of garnet, through a fiery gold, to azure, tourmaline and indigo. The morning sunlight reflecting off and refracting through them threw a thousand brilliant highlights.

"This is why I built this house," Wetherall said quietly. "I'm sorry I had to push you around to do it."

"They're beautiful," I said.

Wetherall was silent for a long time. I sat beside him and the two of us watched the jewels bloom as the sun rose. I wondered whether they had any intelligible purpose at all, or were just some chance production of a heap of alien s.h.i.t. It would be a good joke on all of us-but no more than the beauty of a spiral galaxy, or of the pattern of seeds in a sunflower. Was all this sound and fury, my career in the university, Thorp's career in the media, Nguyen's architectural commission and Wetherall's billions put in service of it, justified by a calm ten minutes at the apex of Pile B? In the end, Wetherall was a pretty sad character. And if he was sad, then what was I, with my academic infighting, the "s.h.i.tdogs studies community" and coffee for Saintjohn Matthewson?

The light seemed to dance in the corner of my eye and I started to feel that odd feeling again, like I was standing next to myself. As I looked at Liz Cobble, I saw a woman who was very plain indeed-n.o.body special. It made me ashamed to realize that I had spent my life tarnishing the brilliance I'd been born with. I did not shine. Who would ever be dazzled by me?

Of course, I knew exactly when it had all begun. At the nurse's station in the ICU of St. Anne's hospital. The smiley nurse with the hair thick as rubber bands wanted to give me a lollipop. I didn't want a lollipop. I was eight years old and my mother was dying and I was going to have to live the rest of my life with my two aunts, who dressed strange and smelled funny and never had anything to eat in their house.

"Here, take it honey," the nurse said. It was purple. Of course she didn't know that I hated purple lollipops. "We only give them to special little girls."

"I don't want to be special," little Lizzy Cobble had said. "I want to go home."

She was such a stubborn little girl.

"Liz, does it seem to you that they're glowing?"

Wetherall's words roused me from my orgy of self-reproach. At first I thought it was just the angle of the sun, then I realized that Wetherall was right. The jewels were beginning to glow.

"Has anyone spotted this phenomenon before?" Wetherall asked.

"It's not in the literature," I said. "We need to get closer. This could be a breakthrough."

"You think it's some sort of radioactivity?"

"I doubt it. There's nothing in their chemical composition that . . ."

Nguyen interrupted us.

"Wetherall, we've got problems."

"What?" Wetherall asked.

"Actually at least a hundred problems. Thorp has come to visit-with some friends."

I ran out to the balcony to see. One of the buses had gotten through and had pulled up beside the base. A crowd was boiling out. People threw themselves on the ground in front of the treads of the base. Thorp, wearing a severe black suit and a wide straw hat, directed them with a bullhorn. When the base was surrounded on three sides he turned the horn up toward Queen Jolly Freeze.

"WETHERALL!" his amplified voice boomed. "MAKE THIS FOOL PULL YOUR HOUSE BACK FROM THE JEWELS. YOU DON'T REALIZE THE DANGER YOU'RE PUTTING US ALL IN-THE WHOLE HUMAN RACE! YOU WERE CRAZY TO TRY TO REPLACE ME WITH THAT WOMAN-SHE DOESN'T KNOW A THING ABOUT THESE CREATURES. PULL BACK BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!"

Nguyen had climbed down from the cab of the base to argue with Thorp. He gesticulated wildly, pointing off across the flats where the fifth s.h.i.tdog had joined its four fellows. They crouched all in a line; I had never seen anything like it. Their pattern seemed deeply meaningful.

The copters dropped down low. Their backwash jostled the Queen Jolly Freeze. I could see telephotos on Thorp. This was his moment in the sun; I hoped the old loon was sweating.

Wetherall switched on the house's PA system and leaned into the microphone. "Dr. Thorp, you are trespa.s.sing on private property. Gather your people together and leave before we call in the authorities."

"YOU'RE TOYING WITH DISASTER. ALREADY, BECAUSE OF YOUR ACTIVITIES, s.h.i.tDOGS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD ARE GATHERING HERE. NOW YOU'RE GOING TO SET OFF THE BEACON, AND BEFORE YOU KNOW IT THE BIG DOGS WILL BE HERE!".

I leaned over and grabbed the microphone. I decided not to mention anything about the jewels beginning to glow. "Thorp, you microcephalic poser! What are you babbling about? If you think-"

"Liz," said Wetherall. He pointed.

Thorp, and Nguyen and the crowd of protesters all turned their heads in the same direction, as if they were connected to servos. The effect was impressive. Once they saw the five s.h.i.tdogs that were marching in a line toward the base, however, the illusion of unity vanished.

Nguyen dashed for the cab. A dozen protesters did the same, crowding in with him as Nguyen tried to get the thing moving again. Those who didn't fit hung off the sides. But most of the others were still lying on the ground, and there was no room to maneuver. Thorp stood calmly in place while the panic-stricken swirled around him. He raised the bullhorn. "DON'T WORRY." His voice crackled. "THEY MEAN US NO HARM. THIS IS PART OF THE PLAN."

"What is he doing?" I asked Wetherall. "I'm going down there."

"With those lunatics? No. Besides we're too high."

"Then reel in the tether. I need to get down, Wetherall. Right now!"

"No, Liz."

I stared at him. Who did he think he was, telling me what to do? I ran down to the bottom floor, overrode the locks and popped the hatch. Thanks to the breeze, the house was floating to the south of the base, and forty meters below lay the edge where the castings pile met the salt flats. Off to the north thirty meters, the protesters boiled around the base truck-most of them. Here and there in the crowd was one who stood stock still, like Thorp, as if dazed.

I threw the emergency ladder over the edge and it unrolled to within a couple of meters of the ground. Close enough-I swung my legs over the edge, and, clutching the ladder white-knuckled, began to climb down.

"Liz, no!" I heard Wetherall shout from above me.

Derring-do is harder in real life than in the gropies. Looking down made me want to throw up, so I didn't. I tried to fix on the horizon. The breeze caught the ladder and I began to describe a long, lazy ellipse approximately ten stories off the ground. Meanwhile, the shifting of my weight as I moved from rung to rung made the ladder twist. I began to wonder if maybe I was as crazy as Thorp. At least he had two feet on the ground. A copter came over to watch me and my clothes flapped like angry birds. The base moved a few meters and then jerked to a stop.

I almost lost my grip. "Nice driving, Nguyen." I muttered, and looked down. Only it wasn't Nguyen driving at all. He had been thrown from the cab by protestors and was only now scrambling back on.

Just in front of the base truck, a circle of the salt flat was boiling and churning. The center of the patch fell away, and a pair of blue legs poked out. It was a s.h.i.tdog, hatching from the desert like a baby dinosaur. But that was impossible; all five s.h.i.tdogs were marching in formation on the stranded base.

I froze on the ladder. I was suddenly dizzy, and it wasn't only because I was doing a high wire act without a net.

Another pair of claws burst through the salt crust, then another. All around the piles s.h.i.tdogs erupted from the desert.

Someone had forgotten to give them a copy of the schedule. Convergence was happening early. Within minutes we would be dealing not just with five s.h.i.tdogs, but with twenty-five.

Most of the protestors broke ranks now, scattering in every direction, throwing themselves onto the base, although quite a few still remained by Thorp's side. The base was backing away, or attempting to, its treads spinning against the resistance of the ma.s.sive lifthouse. The ladder twisted and jerked. I wrapped my legs around the rung and twisted my arms in the rope, clinging for my life like Dejah Thoris, six stories above an approaching horde of alien creatures that smelled like lilacs. But the thing that surprised me the most was that I wanted to climb down more than ever. It was as if the s.h.i.tdogs were calling me.

I wondered how long it would take before whoever was driving the base realized the only way they were going to get moving would be to kill the electro-magnetic tether.

Not long at all.

The house shot up about ten meters before it re-established neutral ballast. I yo-yoed beneath it on the ladder. We were drifting with the wind over the s.h.i.tpile. Below, the a.s.sembled s.h.i.tdogs bellowed up at me, and radiated in toward the pile.

"Hang on, Liz!" Wetherall's voice boomed from the house's loudspeakers. I looked up and saw him out on the balcony. He had gotten out his smart la.s.so and was twirling it over his head, legs bent and braced. The jewels were glowing so brightly now that it was hard to look at them. In the shadow of the house's roof, Wetherall's face was awash in their light. He threw the la.s.so at the jewels and missed, falling short by a meter or two. The electric rope snapped itself upward and hovered in the air like a cobra, awaiting its next command. The wind was blowing us away from the s.h.i.tpile. Wetherall tried again, and this time the la.s.so caught the jewels. He lashed the other end of the smart rope to the railing of the house, and dashed inside, to reappear at the open hatch.

Wetherall gulped, then slid awkwardly over the edge and started down to me. His eyes were the size of eggs. I couldn't watch him watch the ground so I looked down again. All twenty-five s.h.i.tdogs had formed two roughly concentric circles beneath me. A target. And they were calling to me. They wanted me, Liz Cobble, the queen of s.h.i.tdog studies.

"Liz, don't move." Wetherall called. "I'm coming."

The only thought in my head was, he's trying to stop me. I had to get away from him. I made myself move down the ladder.

The base scuttled across the flats under a black swarm of protesters. Thorp's bus was gone, leaving a score or more protesters behind, among them Thorp. One of the pix copter pilots, braver than the others, landed and waved to the stragglers to jump aboard. But they ignored him. Thorp turned the bullhorn on him. "THAT'S OKAY. WE HAVE EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL," he said. Then he dropped the bullhorn at his feet, and he and the others started toward the gathering s.h.i.tdogs.

I saw him brush a hand along a aquamarine-colored flank, and I was jealous. It wasn't fair! Heedless now of the risk of falling, I scrambled down. Wetherall was shouting at me. I don't even know what he said.

Thorp came to the center of the s.h.i.tdog formation, held his arms out and turned around twice, as if to embrace them all. A s.h.i.tdog approached him and then settled back on its haunches. He walked toward it, smiling. The jewels were glowing so furiously now that their prismatic colors rained down on the the s.h.i.tdogs and Thorp's followers like G.o.d's own grace. My head swam with the scent of roses. G.o.d-d.a.m.ned Thorp! Tears welled in my eyes. I had looked into the jewels' heart. The s.h.i.tdogs had called to me.

I was supposed to be special.

I was about to let go of the ladder and drop to the ground when Wetherall reached me and seized my arm.

The lead s.h.i.tdog lifted up its front legs. Its arms extended outwards in an embrace, claws sliding from its feet like those of a cat. The embrace took in Thorp, who stood, arms lifted. Clumsy as a baby, the s.h.i.tdog grabbed Thorp between its paws, lifted him to its mouth and bit his head off.

All I could think of was how lucky he was.

Thorp's followers were going where their leader had gone before them, falling into the eager embrace of the s.h.i.tdogs, being torn to pieces and eaten. I struggled to get free of Wetherall, but he wrapped his legs around me and would not let me go. We twisted on the ladder. The wind bore the house around to the side of the castings pile, the ladder jerked downward, and Wetherall and I dropped the last few meters to the salt flats. I tried to get free of him, but was knocked dizzy by the fall. By the time I got my wind, the s.h.i.tdogs were done feeding.

The jewels stopped glowing.

When I shook my head, little black mites twirled into nothingness. For a moment I couldn't remember who I was or why I was there. I watched uncomprendingly as the s.h.i.tdogs settled down among the b.l.o.o.d.y sc.r.a.ps of Thorp's followers and went to sleep.

"Liz, are you okay?" said Wetherall.