There was a door in the cable.

Hama kept Ca-si in custody.

The boy paced back and forth in the small cell Hama had created for him, his muscles sliding beneath his skin. He would mutter sometimes, agitated, clearly troubled by whatever had become of his lost love.

But when Ca-si inspected the Commissary's silvered epidermis and the fish that swam in his chest, a different look dawned on his fleshy, soft face. It was a look of awe, incomprehension, and-admit it, Hama!- disgust.

He knew Arles disapproved of his obsession with this boy.

"The result of your a.s.signment of them to the Cull was satisfactory. Two went out; one came back. What does it matter?"

But Hama pointed to evidence of flaws-the lack of trophies from the body being the most obvious. "All these disgusting drones take trophies from their kills. There's something wrong here."

"There is more than one way of manifesting weakness, Hama. If the other let herself die it is better she is deleted from the gene pool anyhow."

"That is not the strict Doctrine."

Arles had sighed and pa.s.sed a glimmering hand over the silver planes of his cheek. "But even our longevity is a violation of the Doctrine-if a necessary one. It is a hundred thousand years since Druz, Hama. His Doctrine has become-mature. You will learn."

But Hama had not been satisfied.

At last the translation suites cut in, rendering the drones' linguistically impoverished jabber into reasonably acceptable Standard.

Hama faced the boy. He forced his silvered face into a smile. "You have been isolated here a long time.""A thousand births," the boy said sullenly.

That was about right: ten thousand years since the last Commission visit, a thousand of these drones' brief generations. "Yes. A thousand births. And, in enough time, languages change. Did you know that? After just a few thousand years of separation two identical languages will diverge so much that they would share no common features except basic grammatical constructs-like the way a language indicates possession, or uses more subtle features like ergativity, which ..."

The boy was just staring at him, dull, not even resentful.

Hama felt foolish, and then angry to be made to feel that way. He said sternly, "To rectify language drift is part of our duty. The Commission for Historical Truth, I mean. We will reteach you Standard. Just as we will leave you the Memory, with the story of mankind since you were last visited, and we will take away your story to tell it to others. We bind up mankind on all our scattered islands. Just as it is your duty-"

"To death."

"Yes. The machines here watch for the enemy. They have watched for sixty thousand years, and they may watch for sixty thousand years more. If the enemy come you must do everything you can to destroy them, and if you cannot, you must destroy the machines, and the Post, and yourself."

The boy watched him dully, his powerful hands clenched into fists.

Ca-si was no more than a backup mechanism, Hama thought. A final self-destruct, in case this station's brooding automated defenses failed. For this sole purpose, six thousand generations of humans had lived and loved and bred and died, here in the intergalactic waste.

As he gazed at the planes of the boy's stomach, Hama felt an uncomfortable inner warmth, a restlessness.

On impulse he snapped, "Who do we fight? Do you know?"

"We fight the Xeelee."

"Why do we fight?"

The boy stared at him.

Hama ordered, "Look at me." He pulled open his robe. "This silver skin comes from a creature called a Silver Ghost. Once the Ghosts owned worlds and built cities. Now we farm them for their skin. The fish in my belly are called Squeem. Once they conquered man, occupied Earth itself. Now they are mere symbiotes in my chest, enabling me to speak to my colleagues across the galactic Supercl.u.s.ter. These are triumphs for mankind."

The look on Ca-si's face made Hama think he didn't regard his condition as a triumph.

Angry, oddly confused, Hama snapped, "I know you didn't kill the girl. Why did you spare her? Why did she spare you? Where is she?"

But the boy wouldn't reply.

It seemed there was nothing Hama could do to reach Ca-si, as he longed to.

La-ba had been raised into strangeness.

The hollow cable had a floor that lifted you up, and windows so you could see out. Inside, she rode all the way out of the air, into a place of harsh flat light.

When she looked down she saw a floor of churning red gas. Auroras flapped in its textured layers, making it glow purple. When she looked up she saw only a burning, glaring light.The Old Man tried to make her understand. "The light is the sun. The red is the world. The Post floats in the air of the world."

She couldn't stop staring at his face. It was a ma.s.s of wrinkles. He had one eye, one dark purple pit. His face was the strangest thing of all, much stranger than the sun and the churning world.

The cable ended in another giant ball, like the Post. But this ball was dimpled by big black pits, like the bruises left by the heels of her hands in the face of the We-ku. And it floated in s.p.a.ce, not the air.

Inside the ball there was a cavity, but there were no people or Cadre Squares and no Birthing Vat: only vast mechanical limbs that glistened, sinister, sliding over each other.

"No people live here," she said.

He smiled. "One person does."

He showed her his home. It wasn't a dorm. It was just a shack made of bits of shining plastic. There were blankets on the floor, and clothes, and empty food packets. It was dirty, and it smelled a little.

She looked around. "There is no supply dispenser."

"People give me food. And water and clothes. From their rations."

She tried to understand. "Why?"

He shrugged. "Because life is short. People want-"

"What?"

"Something more than the war."

She thought about that. "There is the dance."

He grinned, his empty eye socket crumpling. "I never could dance. Come."

He led her to a huge window. Machines screened out the glare of the sun above and the glower of the overheated planet below.

Between sun and planet, there was only blackness.

"No," the Old Man said gently. "Not blackness. Look."

They waited there for long heartbeats.

At last she saw a faint glow, laced against the black. It had structure, fine filaments and threads. It was beautiful, eerie, remote.

"It is un-black."

He pointed at the sun. "The sun is alone. If there were other suns near, we would see them, as points of light. The suns gather in pools. There are not even pools of suns nearby. The un-black is pools of suns, very far away."

She understood that.

"Others lived here before me," he said. "They learned how to see with the machines. They left records of what they saw." He dug into a pocket and pulled out a handful of bones: human bones, the small bones of a hand or foot. They were scored by fine marks.

"They speak to you with bones?"

He shrugged. "If you smear blood or dirt on the walls it falls away. What else do we have to draw on, but our bones, and our hearts?" He fingered the bones carefully.

"What do the bones say?"

He gestured at the hulking machinery. "These machines watch the sky for the trace of ships.

But they also see the un-black: the light, the faintest light, all the light there is. Some of the lightcomes from the suns and pools of suns. Most of the light was made in the birthing of the universe. It is old now and tired and hard to see. But it has patterns in it...."

This meant nothing to her. Bombarded by strangeness, she tried to remember the Doctrine. "I crimed. I did not death, and I wanted to be deathed. Then you crimed. You could have deathed me. And here-"

"Here, I crime." He grinned. "With every breath I crime. Every one of these bones is a crime, a record of ancient crimes. Like you, I was safed."

"Safed?"

"Brought here."

She asked the hardest question of all. "When?"

He smiled, and the wrinkles on his face gathered up. "Twenty years ago. Twice your life."

She frowned, barely comprehending. She leaned against the window, cupping her hands and peering out.

He asked, "What are you looking for now?"

"Shuttles."

He said gently, "There are no Shuttles."

"The cadre leaders-"

"The cadre leaders say what is said to them. Think. Have you ever known anybody to leave on a Shuttle? There are no Shuttles."

"It is a lie?"

"It is a lie. If you live past age ten, the cadre leaders will death you. They believe they will win a place on the Shuttles. But they in turn are deathed by other cadre leaders, who believe they will steal their places on the Shuttles. And so it goes. Lies eating each other."

No Shuttles. She sighed, and her breath fogged the smooth surface of the window. "Then how will we leave?"

"We un-can leave. We are too remote. Only the Commissaries come and go. Only the Commissaries. Not us."

She felt something stir in her heart.

"The Shuttles are un-real. Is Earth real? Is the war real?"

"Perhaps Earth is a lie. But the war is real. Oh, yes. The bones talk of how distant pools of suns flare up. The war is real, and all around us, but it is very far away, and very old. But it shapes us." He studied her. "Soon the cadre leaders will pluck that baby from your belly and put it in the Birthing Vat. It will life and death for one purpose, for the war."

She said nothing.

The Old Man said dreamily, "Some of the Old Men have seen patterns in the birthing un-black. They have tried to understand them, as the cadre leaders make us understand the Memory images of the war. Perhaps they are thoughts, those patterns. Frozen thoughts of the creatures who lived in the first blinding second of the universal birth." He shook his head and gazed at the bones. "I un-want death. I want more than the war. I want to learn this."

She barely heard him. She asked, "Who gives you food?"

He gave her names, of people she knew, and people she un-knew.

The number of them shocked her.

Hama and Arles Thrun drifted in s.p.a.ce, side by side, two silver statues. Before them, thishot-Jupiter world continued its endless frenetic waltz around its too-close sun. The sun was a rogue star that had evaporated out of its parent galaxy long ago and come to drift here, a meaningless beacon in the intergalactic dark.

Hama was comfortable here, in s.p.a.ce, in the vacuum, away from the claustrophobic enclosure of the Post. Alien creatures swam through his chest cavity, subtly feeding on the distant calls of Commissaries all over the Supercl.u.s.ter. To Hama it was like being in a vast room where soft voices murmured in every shadowed corner, grave and wise.

"A paradox," Arles Thrun murmured now.

"What is?"

"Here we are, peering out at the Supercl.u.s.ter, a cl.u.s.ter of cl.u.s.ters of galaxies ..."

"The drones call it the un-black. The glow of the Supercl.u.s.ter, the relic light."

Arles ignored him. "All across the Supercl.u.s.ter mankind battles the Xeelee, a vast organic war. All that conflict is far from here. But this is a noisy place-the sun, this wretched overheated planet-the noisiest place in all this dreaming gulf. And yet it is here that we established our listening post."

"We had to camouflage it."

"Yes. And we had to provide matter and energy for the humans who would live here. Thus, in all our designs, we compromise with the needs of the human. Isn't that true, Hama?"

Hama glared, sensing an edge in his voice.

Arles said, "You know, your new Raoul rebuilding has extended beyond the superficial.

You have been reengineered, the layers of evolutionary haphazardness designed out of you.

The inner chemical conflicts bequeathed by humanity's past do not trouble you. You do not hear voices in your head, you do not invent G.o.ds to drive out your internal torment. You are the most integrated human being who ever lived."

"If I am still human," Hama said.

"Ah, yes, the great question. Certainly we are needed. It is impossible to begin to grasp the scale and complexity of an intergalactic war in a human lifetime. And yet the brevity of human life is the key to the war; we fight like vermin, for to the Xeelee we are vermin-that is the central uncomfortable truth of the Doctrine. We, who do not die, are a paradoxical necessity, maintaining the attention span of the species ..." "We have no art. We are not scientists. We do not dance." "No," said Arles earnestly. "Our reengineered hearts are too cold for that. Or to desire to make babies to fill up the empty s.p.a.ces. But we know our flaws, Hama. We know that those brutish creatures down there in the Post, busily fighting and fornicating and breeding and dying, they are the true heart of humanity. And so we must defer to them." He eyed Hama, waiting for him to respond.