Carnahan thought the hendropod's voice sounded like a woodwind, with melodic inflections. Speechless, he decided to listen.

"He told me what I should think.... He told me God would hurt me if I didn't." Hender's coat sparkled pink and blue as he seemed to laugh.

The cardinal found the staccato vibrations that emanated from the animal's cranial crest shocking and vulgar. "What religion did he represent?" the old man inquired.

"I don't know," Hender said. "What religion do you 'rep-ree-zent'?"

"That's a new word for Hender," Andy explained. "He's not mocking you, Cardinal!"

The old man nodded at Andy. "I represent the Catholic religion. Represent means that I believe in this religion, Hender. I believe it is true. Do you understand?"

"Catholic? OK," Hender said, waving two hands.

The cardinal smiled, though he found himself deeply horrified by the intelligence of the creature before him. "Why do you ask me this question, Hender?" He asked God at the same time.

"It confuses me."

"Why?"

"Because a sel never tells another sel what to think."

The cleric was taken aback. He was clearly dealing with a sophisticated mind and not the primitives he had expected. He dabbed his forehead with his napkin, trying to look into Hender's independently darting eyes. They were huge eyes, the size of guavas, and resembled tiger opals with three horizontal stripes, each of which seemed to have a pupil that looked straight into his soul, no matter which way the eyes swiveled. The cardinal chided himself as he tried to regain the initiative and closed his eyes. "Do you believe in God?"

"What god?" Kuzu's voice rumbled the air like a chain saw being stroked.

Carnahan flinched, startled. "Any god."

"Sels believe different things at different times," Hender intoned, his fur flushing red for a moment as one eye turned to Kuzu. "Long ago, sels tried to make other sels believe. Bad happened."

Joe poured the cardinal more grappa, and the cleric downed it like a tequila shot. The old man smiled then, careful not to show his teeth, and after a long moment Andy wondered if he were in some sort of physical distress, as he seemed frozen.

Kuzu's fur surged with purple and orange streaks as he pushed aside his plate and leaned over the table, his head tilting forward on his stretching neck. In a deep, rumbling voice like an engine, he purred: "Who is your God?"

Cardinal Carnahan seemed suddenly relieved by a question that made sense and that he had an answer for. He answered by reaching down and raising the ornate gold crucifix around his neck toward the alien being.

Kuzu and Hender both examined the golden symbol.

"What's the human doing?" Hender asked.

"Dying," the cleric breathed.

"Why?" Kuzu asked.

"For our sins." Carnahan's heart pounded in his throat.

Hender fluted with a low note. "Why?"

"He is the son of God." The cardinal closed his eyes.

"Why he die?" Kuzu growled.

"For our sins." The old man suddenly looked very fragile and pale, and Andy placed a worried hand on his arm.

Both the sels appeared confused as they glanced at each other with one of their eyes.

Andy waved at Hender to take things down a notch. He had seen the effect of communicating with the hendros on visitors many times and didn't want to have the cardinal taken out on the stretcher they had made handy.

"OK." Hender raised four hands, spreading their three fingers and two thumbs. "This is your religion, Michael Carnahan."

The cleric nodded.

Hender closed all twenty fingers on his four hands and nodded back at him, closing his eyes respectfully.

"Are you planning to have children?" the cardinal asked.

Andy's heart sank at the ominous question.

Hender shrugged his four "shoulders" and spread his long arms in four directions. "Here?" He frowned wryly at the old man.

Kuzu honked what seemed like a rude laugh.

"Well, Your Eminence," Andy interjected. "Who can blame them? This is hardly the place to have children."

Kuzu stretched over the table to the crucifix on the cardinal's chain, pinching it with two fingers and lifting the sacred icon up to one of his colorful eyes. "How God die?"

The cardinal gasped and whispered, "Crucified."

"Cru-ci-fied," the hendro said in a table-vibrating bass, as if memorizing the word. "How old your god?"

"Jesus Christ, our Savior, is immortal."

"He meant how old your religion?" Hender said.

"Two thousand years," the cardinal answered.

"My god is-" Kuzu whistled and buzzed strange sounds.

Hender translated: "Kuzu's religion is thirty-nine million years old."

Kuzu spoke more to Hender again in his language.

Hender said, "Kuzu is ninety-one thousand years old." Hender noticed the human turning red. With one outstretched hand, he patted the human's hand delicately. "OK, OK! So now you want to tell us your religion. Yes?" Hender was alarmed to see Andy display more concern suddenly, which he had learned to read on Andy's face.

"It's interesting to contemplate, Your Eminence," Andy interjected. "Sels have a very long history and culture, which go back well over a hundred million years. I know that's hard to grasp."

"Would you like more grappa?" Joe asked.

"I think dessert is coming right now, actually," Bo said.

Cardinal Carnahan waved them off, bowing his head. "Thank you, no. I believe I've had enough for now." He rose from his seat and steadied himself with his cane. "I'm not sure that there is anything more to discuss, at this time." To the sels, he added with a nod: "It was the most extraordinary moment of my life meeting you. I pray that God blesses you, and me, as well." The cardinal turned and headed for the visitors' air lock, escorted by Bo and Joe.

"Good-bye!" Hender fluted.

Kuzu glowered after him, hunched over the table on four elbows with his wide chin resting on three palms as the hatch closed behind the clergyman.

"Not so good, Kuzu," Hender's lips pursed into a frustrated bunch over his wide jaws. "Humans will hate us now!"

"So?" Kuzu said.

"We are waku to some humans," Hender said. "Humans need to know we mean no harm."

"No harm?" Kuzu asked. "They trap us. They kill us, too, maybe."

"There is no 'they,' Kuzu. There is only one, and one, and one. No 'they.' Remember?"

"That is how you win, Shenuday." Kuzu laughed like a cannonball bouncing down a stairway. "I learn from you!"

"This is not chess," said Hender, referring to Kuzu's favorite human game.

"Yes," Kuzu said. "It is."

Andy could swear Kuzu looked at him with chilling contempt then. The young marine biologist had learned to associate the sels' expressions with their emotions over the last six months. He watched warily as the mighty sel looked meekly out the window then. "Thank you, Joe. Delicious," Kuzu purred. "Love bisque!"

"Yes, thank you," Hender agreed.

"You are both very welcome," Joe said.

"Remember, there are many humans, and they believe many things, Kuzu," Andy said. "You don't have to believe what they believe, OK?"

"We believe you, Andy," Kuzu said.

"Thank you, Kuzu. I'm not perfect. But I'll never lie to you."

"You lie many times." Kuzu fixed one of his eyes on Andy. "But not too bad. Never to hurt."

Andy reached out a hand to Kuzu, and Kuzu grasped the human's hand with his upper right hand and shook it up and down, as was the humans' custom, his foot-wide lips curling up at the corners in an imitation of a human smile. Andy felt the supple filaments of short fur on Kuzu's palm and the rough pads on the digits of his fingers and thumbs as two of the hendropod's hands overwhelmed his. For an instant the crushing power of Kuzu's grip chilled him before Kuzu let his hand go with a tilt of his head.

"All right," Bo said. "Let's all go to bed. We'll all see each other in the morning."

8:48 A.M. KAZAKHSTAN EAST TIME ZONE.

The Gulfstream V jet touched down on a dirt airstrip on a high mountain plain, jolting them awake. Nell and Geoffrey deplaned with Maxim and climbed into a waiting Range Rover that drove them to an empty train stopped on the tracks between stations in the field near the airstrip.

They climbed into the last car, and Maxim disappeared again, going forward and leaving them in the caboose. The train proceeded to pass every station along the way without stopping for the next two hours as it snaked into the mountainous highlands that stacked up against what they deduced was the northern horizon.

Geoffrey and Nell sat upright in the uncomfortable seat of the empty antique train car as they observed the tumultuous landscape piling higher and higher around them until a man finally entered the train through the forward vestibule. He was middle-aged, lithe, and well groomed with elegantly cropped silver hair that matched his expensive dove-gray suit. His sunken face and hollow eyes reminded Geoffrey of Boris Karloff. Maxim entered behind him. "Let me introduce you to my right hand. This is Galia Sokolof. Galia, these are the scientists."

Galia smiled. His cadaverous eyes brightened as he clasped both their hands. "I am so happy you decided to come. It is so very nice to meet you. Now, if you'll excuse us both for a while longer." He and Maxim departed to the front of the train car and spoke to each other in rapid Russian.

"God, I hope we're not crazy, honey," Geoffrey whispered.

"Oh, we're crazy," Nell said. "But that's why I married you, darling." She squeezed his hand.

9:16 A.M.

At last, after a long and circuitous haul up mountain grades past peaks, lakes, rivers, and gorges, the train reached a village named Gursk and exhaled an expulsion of steam as if announcing the town's name. To the left of the tracks, Geoffrey saw a row of shops and restaurants boarded up along the bank of a rushing blue river. To the right, a majestic mountain rose over the town, its peak flashing the sun's rays like a pyramid's capstone. Rusted mining equipment, teetering conveyors, mountains of tailings, and hundreds of dilapidated barracks swathed the foothills of the mighty peak.

The town was a curdled mix of well-preserved ancient and run-down modern buildings, with half-timbered facades next to cinder blocks and tin roofs.

"This is Maxim Dragolovich's city?" Nell whispered.

"Oh, we are definitely crazy, sweetheart...."

9:21 A.M.

They arrived at the train station of Gursk, which blocked off their view of the city and the mountain to the north as they came to a hissing stop. The station was one of those patronized buildings in third-world countries that leap out of their surroundings with fraudulent promise, a chunk of propaganda dropped in like a leaflet from a bomber. The cracked concrete roof was supported by a dramatic colonnade of cement columns with alcoves along a back wall displaying Russian revolutionaries, now chipped and sprayed with graffiti. The bronze lampposts were dark as molasses, their glass domes shattered. The ceiling had dripped rivers of rust across the cracked marble platform.

As they stepped off the train, Maxim waved his arm cheerfully. "This way!"

They followed east along the platform. Nell and Geoffrey could not see anyone inhabiting the town in either direction and wondered if it was abandoned. They breathed the cold fresh air as the chill of apprehension froze into a panic.

Maxim and Galia led them to the east end of the platform, where the roof was missing and heavy pillars reached skeletal hands of rebar into the azure sky. There they turned at a railed-in stairway that descended in the opposite direction. Urging Nell and Geoffrey on, they went down the stairs, at the bottom of which was a steel hatch facing north. Galia produced a key and turned it in the door. Then he cranked a wheel like the ones on submarine hatches, and the stubborn hinges shrieked as he pushed the door open.

Inside, Maxim pulled down a large switch on the wall, and halogen lamps hanging from the ceiling flared to life over what appeared to be a small subway station. An antique subway car sat on rails perpendicular to the tracks of the train station above.

After closing and locking the door behind them, the older man turned to Geoffrey. "All aboard," Galia said, smiling.

"Please, Doctors," Maxim said, climbing into the subway car ahead of them and holding out a hand for Nell.

"OK," said Nell as she climbed in and Geoffrey followed her. Galia headed to the front of the car. The carriage rocked, and they were suddenly zooming forward-and then down. The glazed white tiles lining the tunnel reflected the car's blazing running lights as they accelerated. Geoffrey saw heavy insulated electrical cables running along the tracks to either side as they plunged deeper into the earth and their ears popped.

"Where the hell are we going, Maxim?" Geoffrey blurted.

Nell nodded. "Yeah?"

"You'll see," Maxim said, watching them now with an abstract smile as they rattled through the glittering tunnel, which enlarged suddenly, a sign hanging from the ceiling that answered Geoffrey's question in both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets: POBEDOGRAD.

"Pobedograd," Nell read, noticing the suffix. "A city?"

"You're kidding," said Geoffrey.

The tycoon nodded, laughing deeply as they whooshed down the tunnel.

"What does the name mean?" Nell asked.

"Victory City," Maxim said. "Hold on, now!"

The train clattered down the white wormhole, swerving right, left, left, right, and always down deeper as the temperature rose. At last, a smudge of light at the end of the tunnel resolved into a subway station floating in the black void: "Here we are." Maxim opened a hand at the window as the subway car emerged into a cavern that stretched to their left, containing what seemed to be a train yard. The surreal train depot ahead was crowned with a rococo entablature inlaid with Cyrillic white letters a yard tall: SEKTOP 7.