Paul looked straight ahead at the horizon. "There are ways you can find out. You have to test the cells directly."

"Oh, Ozzie," Corrie-Lyn breathed. Her face had paled.

"We took it out of her and checked. No empryo can survive that kind of test. Fortunately, we were right that time; it was one of them."

"You're not human, no matter what you claim."

Aaron gave her a furious look. She started to say something, then threw her hands up in disgust and walked away.

"Sorry about that," Aaron said. "What happened?"

"Standard procedure in cases when the girl knows she's pregnant, which Imelda did. We can't wipe weeks from their memories; that would be detectable. So we took another ovum from her and fertilized it with Erik's contribution and implanted it. Then they both got a memory wipe for the evening they spent with us. Next morning they wake up with a bad hangover and can't remember what they did. Typical teenage morning after."

"Did it go wrong, then?"

"No, son, everything worked perfectly. Nine months later they had a lovely little girl. A normal one."

"So how was Inigo conceived?"

"Imelda had a sister."

"Sabine."

"Yes. They were twins. Identical twins."

"Ah. I think this is starting to make sense."

"I should have realized. It's every teenage boy's ultimate fantasy; plenty of men, too."

"He slept with both of them."

"Yes. Him and the angel. You just confirmed that for me. Finally. Part of the Protectorate's whole cleanup procedure is to review the angel's memories to find out who it has contaminated. Hacking into its brain is a terrible, terrible thing, one of the greatest abuses of medical technology possible. It takes days to break the protection which biononics provide for the neurons. I used to do it for the team, may God forgive me, but it was necessary. There's no other way of discovering what those devil-spawned monsters have been up to. It's not an exact science, now or then. Minds are not tidy little repositories like a memory kube. I had to merge my mind with its and endure its vile slippery thoughts inside my own skull. When I reviewed its recent memories, I actually experienced coupling with Imelda." He closed his eyes, clearly pained by the fraudulent memory. "Her face was inches from me. She tasted so...sweet. But now, I don't suppose it was all her. Rather, the memories weren't just of her. I couldn't tell the difference between the girls. Damnit, at the time I didn't know there was a difference I should be searching for."

"So Inigo was born as part of a radical Higher infiltration plan."

"Yes. We were shocked when we found out Sabine was pregnant, but that was just before she was due. There were a lot of arguments within my team about what we should do."

"Snatch the baby and test it."

"That was one option. The mild one." Paul looked over at Corrie-Lyn, who was sitting on a low concrete wall outside one of the barns.

"But intervention becomes progressively difficult as time winds away, especially once the child is born. We're not...There's a difference between abortion and infanticide-to me, anyway. And once it was born, it had a legal right of residency. Even if we took it away from the mother and shipped it back to the Central worlds, they'd just send it right back. Legally, it's a mess. Which is why the Protectorate was formed: to stop the whole nightmare scenario before it gets politically complicated."

"So what did you do?"

"I never really believed the girls having a kid two weeks apart was coincidence. In the event, we settled for observation. If Inigo was infected, he'd give himself away eventually; they all do."

"But he didn't."

"No. We monitored him off and on for over twenty-five years. He never put a foot wrong. He was a straight-down-the-line normal human: school, university, girlfriends. Not exceptionally sporting. Got injured when he played football. Had to get a job. Kept out of local politics. Signed up with a rejuve finance company. When he took aerosols, he got high. Took a boring academic position in the state university cosmology department. There was nothing to indicate he had biononics. Right up until you arrived today I'd still have said he most probably didn't. I had come to accept that his birth maybe was coincidence, after all. Believe me, son, if we'd confirmed it when he reached legal age, we would have made a quiet ultimatum."

"Leave or die."

"Yes. There's no other way you can treat them."

"Then he did leave, didn't he? All the way to Centurion Station."

"Yes. And what a goddamned pitiful mess that's turned into. Half the aliens in the galaxy want to shoot us out of space. Who can blame them?"

"It's only the Ocisen Empire."

"You mean they're the only ones who have declared themselves. Don't tell me you think the others are just going to sit back and let us wreck the very stars themselves."

"Who knows? If I can find him, maybe we can put a stop to the whole Pilgrimage."

"I should have killed him in the womb when I had the chance."

"Whatever he is, he's not Higher."

"He might not be polluted with their culture yet, but it will come to him eventually."

"Apparently not. He found an alternative to a route you believed was set in stone. His destiny is inside the Void, not with ANA."

Paul shrugged. "Whichever one it is, it's not a human destiny."

"Our destiny is what we decide to make it. Free choice, remember."

"You're wrong, son. I see you believe in yourself, and I wish you well in that. But you're wrong."

"Okay, we'll just differ on that one. What happened to Erik?"

"Bodyloss." Paul caught Aaron's expression. "Not us; it was a genuine accident. He was working hard to support both girls. A decent lad, I guess. The farmer he was helping out didn't do very good maintenance. The agribot chewed him up something bad. This was maybe six months after the kids were born. His insurance was all paid up, but he'd only just had his memorycell fitted. It's always the same in cases like that. The new body has only a few months of memories, which is never enough to install a decent level of personality. In his re-life state he was very childlike, ironically, because his entire childhood was what he lacked. There was no real emotional connection with the sisters and his two children. Not immediately. Imelda worked hard at correcting that. She did well. They went off together. Sabine and little Inigo got left behind. It kicked off a huge family argument. The sisters never really spoke after that."

"Which is why Aunt Imelda got written out of his official history."

"That's pretty much it. Yes."

"I've never met a more despicable human," Corrie-Lyn said as the regrav capsule lifted from the ranch. "And I include our dear Cleric Conservator in that statement."

"Did you ever meet a Higher angel?"

"No."

"Well, then."

"That's it?" she shouted angrily. "That's your justification?"

"I'm not trying to justify anything. All I'm doing is pointing out that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. What he used to do was part of the era."

"He's a psychopath. Fuck knows how many babies he's killed. He belongs in suspension for the rest of eternity."

"Dead, you mean."

"Whatever!" she snapped, and slumped down into the cushioning, her delicate features set in a furious sulk.

"I told you to leave the talking to me."

"Shut the fuck up."

"Well, at least he helped us."

"How?"

"There, now. You see, if you hadn't gone stomping off in a huff-"

"Screw you. I bet you were Protectorate before the memory wipe. It certainly fits."

"No."

"You can't be certain, though. And how come you have such highly placed contacts in their filthy organization?"

"I simply know who to ask in such circumstances, that's all. Information does not imply compliance, and I don't know where my data originate from."

"Pah!" She turned to watch the desert skim past.

Aaron waited a minute for her to relent. When she didn't, he smiled quietly and said: "Inigo bought a rejuvenation policy."

"So?" She managed to spit it out with more petulance than a tantrumming five-year-old.

"It was part of his attempt to fit in with a normal existence," Aaron continued passively. "No one with biononics needs a rejuvenation treatment; that's strictly for Advancers and normals. Biononics maintain human cells at an optimum state; the body doesn't age biologically after you hit twenty-five. He did it to fool the Protectorate. After all, he knew what his heritage was, which means he knew what they would do to him if he made a slip."

"And that helps us how?"

"It means he had a secure memory store. It probably dates right up to his assignment to Centurion Station."

"I'm so sorry. I didn't realize you were deaf. And that helps us how?"

"Somewhere on Anagaska there's an electronic version of the young Inigo's personality. Alkoff gave me the name of the company he bought the policy from."

"That's not going to-oh, dear Ozzie! You have got to be kidding."

Aaron grinned cheerfully at her. "About time this planet saw a little excitement."

Prior to the Starflyer War, when the Commonwealth was essentially one society comprising predominantly physical citizens, the government created a very senior committee named the ExoProtectorate Council whose brief was to evaluate the threat level presented by each new alien species as it was discovered. After ANA came online and took over design, manufacture, and operation of the Commonwealth Navy's warships, "threat" became something of a nonterm. If the old Commonwealth could defeat the Primes, ANA with its nearly postphysical technology was unlikely to be menaced by anything less than a malevolent postphysical. That was not to say that the remaining physical sector of the Commonwealth could not encounter a whole load of grief out among the stars, and so the ExoProtectorate Council lived on in a modified form inside ANA, operating independently of ANA: Governance.

Its meetings were few and infrequent. Therefore, when Admiral Kazimir Burnelli called for one, every delegate appeared, suspecting the reason. They met in a neutral perceptual reality in a secure location within ANA: an old-fashioned conference room with rather extravagant white-and-orange furniture and a panoramic window showing them the Mollavian plains with their wall of hydrogen volcanoes. Sheets of ice-pebble meteorites sleeted downward, burning crimson contrails, with lightning forks rippling in their wake.

Kazimir activated the perceptual reality and materialized in the seat at the head of the table. Gore flicked in a millisecond later, sitting directly to Kazimir's right. He was followed by Justine. Ilanthe was the next to appear, a delicate-looking woman dressed in a blue and gray leotard. Her dark hair had been cropped short and colored with purple streaks. They did not represent enrichments; they were just highlights-a style Kazimir thought he recognized but could not quite place without running a check through his enhanced neural structure. Ilanthe was not worth the effort; she was the Accelerator Faction's appointment to the Council and enjoyed making mischief where she could. The trick with her was not to rise to the bait.

Crispin Goldreich arrived in the seat next to Justine. Over a thousand years ago, he had been a Senator sitting on the original ExoProtectorate Council; it was an appointment he had maintained ever since. Kazimir and ANA: Governance allowed him to remain because when it came to advising on the political angle of a crisis, there were few better short of a full Governance convocation. Unfortunately, his usefulness was limited by a somewhat xenophobic view of aliens; several members of his family had been lost on Nattavaara during the Starflyer War, and that had shaped his opinion ever since. As such, he was a strong advocate of both the Isolationist and Internalist factions.

The last two were Creewan and John Thelwell, who respectively put forward Custodian and Darwinist faction positions.

"Thank you for attending," Kazimir said. "I have implemented this Council because the situation with regard to the Ocisen Empire has entered a new stage. The navy squadron deployed in the Hancher domain has detected a massive Empire fleet now in flight. Its trajectory is aimed directly at the Commonwealth, specifically the sector containing Ellezelin."

"How many ships?" Justine asked.

"Two thousand eight hundred and seventeen," Kazimir replied.

"Of which nine hundred are their Starslayer class, the biggest, most expensive warships they've ever built. The Empire's economy has suffered a significant downturn over the last forty years in order to facilitate their production. They are armed with warheads similar to quantumbusters. They think we don't know about them, but we detected the trials they conducted forty-five years ago."

"They have quantumbusters?" Crispin asked.

"A variant of them, yes," Kazimir said. "Such a development was inevitable. They make our atom-bomb-era species look like a bunch of pacifists."

"And the navy hasn't bothered to share this with us?"

"The Empire believes their advantage is that we don't know. To make it public knowledge that the Empire possesses a device which the External worlds would regard as a doomsday weapon would be to give away our advantage, not to mention damaging public confidence."

"They must be insane," Creewan muttered. "The Emperor must realize how we'll react to an assault of that nature. They know how strong we are."

"Actually, they don't," Kazimir said. "Nobody outside ANA: Governance and myself knows the exact capability of the deterrence fleet."

"Please tell me it is strong enough to deal with the Ocisen Empire."

"Don't concern yourself on that score. They do not pose any sort of threat."

"Are they alone?" Gore asked. "The ambassador was quite adamant that they'd dug up some decent allies."

"There were no non-Empire ships in the fleet which launched," Kazimir said.

"We'll make a politician out of you yet, my boy. So do we know for sure that the Starslayer class is armed only with quantumbusters, or have they found some nasty leftovers from someone who went postphysical?"

"We'd have to intercept a Starslayer and scan it to be certain of the precise contents," Kazimir said. "I don't advise that. In Ocisen terms that provocation would be a declaration of war. Plus, we'd tip our hand how powerful we are."

"Well, what the hell do you advise?" Crispin asked. "They're going to find out eventually."

"I'd like to avoid that. What I'd like to see applied to the Ocisens is something along the lines of intense diplomatic persuasion that they turn the fleet around and go home."

"Won't happen," Creewan said. "If the Empire has launched what is essentially its entire navy at us, it will be politically impossible for them to return until the Pilgrimage has been halted. Asking them nicely just won't hack it. We'll have to use force."

"What about another, more immediate threat to the Empire?" Justine suggested. "Some unknown ships approaching from another direction? We could deliver that, surely."

"Yes," Kazimir said. "But it simply postpones the inevitable. We can manufacture what appears to be a threat, but if their fleet returns to challenge an intruder, then our bluff will be called. I cannot blow up star systems simply to maintain an illusion. No matter the morality, there is a considerable physical problem with radiation. Our firewall project showed that."

"How long until they get here?" Ilanthe asked.

"Their flight time to Ellezelin is seventy-nine days," Kazimir said. "A significant figure, because the Pilgrimage fleet will not be completed by then. It is reasonable to assume their aim is to hit the Pilgrimage ships while they're still on the ground. If the Living Dream were to get its ships into space, they would be a lot harder to intercept, especially for the Empire."