When Rosa finished, he carried her downstairs. He and Lizzie lived in a classic Georgian town house in London's Holland Park district. It had been restored three hundred years before, using modern techniques to preserve as much of the old fabric as possible without having to resort to stabilizer fields. Lizzie had overseen the interior when they moved in, blending a tasteful variety of furniture and utility systems that dated from the mid-twentieth century right up to the twenty-seventh, when ANA's replication facilities effectively halted human design on Earth. Two spacious subbasements had been added, giving them an indoor swimming pool and a health spa, along with the tanks and ancillary systems that supplied the culinary cabinet and household replicator.

He took Rosa into the large iron-framed conservatory where her toys were stored in big wicker baskets. February had produced its usual icy morning outside, sending broad patterns of frost worming up the outside of the glass. For now, the only true splash of color to enjoy in the garden came from the winter-flowering cherries on the curving bank behind the frozen fishpond.

When Lizzie came downstairs an hour later, she found him and Rosa playing with glow blocks on the conservatory's heated flagstone floor. Tilly, who was seven, and Elsie, their five-year-old, followed their mother in and shouted happily at their younger sister, who ran over to them with outstretched arms, babbling in her own incomprehensible yet excited language. The three girls started to build a tower out of the blocks; the higher they stacked, the faster the colors swirled.

He gave Lizzie a quick kiss and ordered the culinary cabinet to produce some breakfast. Lizzie sat at the circular wooden table in the kitchen. An antiquities and culture specialist, she enjoyed the old-fashioned notion of a room specifically for cooking. Even though there was no need for it, she'd had a hefty iron range cooker installed when they had moved in ten years earlier. During winter its cozy warmth turned the kitchen into the house's engine room, and they always gathered there as a family. Sometimes she even used the range to cook things that she and the girls made out of ingredients produced by the culinary cabinet. Tilly's birthday cake had been the last.

"Swimming for Tilly this morning," Lizzie said as she sipped at a big china cup of tea that a housebot delivered to her.

"Again?" he asked.

"She's getting a lot more confident. It's their new teacher. He's very good."

"Good." The Delivery Man picked up the croissant on his plate and started tearing it open. "Girls," he shouted. "Come and sit down, please. Bring Rosa."

"She doesn't want to come," Elsie shouted back immediately.

"Don't make me come and get you." He avoided looking at Lizzie. "I'm going to be away for a few days."

"Anything interesting?"

"There's been allegations that some companies on Oronsay have gotten hold of level-three replicator tech," he said. "I'll need to run tests on their products." His current vocation was to monitor the spread of Higher technology across the External worlds. It was a process the Externals got very sensitive about, with hard-line Protectorate politicians citing it as the first act of cultural colonization, deserving retribution. However, industrialists on the External worlds constantly were seeking to acquire ever-more-sophisticated manufacturing systems to reduce their costs. Radical Highers were equally keen to supply it to them, seeing it precisely as that first important stage for a planet converting to Higher culture. What he had to do on ANA: Governance's behalf was determine the intent behind supplying replicator systems. If Radical Highers were supporting the companies, he would disable the systems subtly and collapse the operation. His main problem was making an objective decision; Higher technology inevitably crept out from the Central worlds in the same way that the External worlds were always settling new planets around the edge of their domain. The boundary between Central and External was ambiguous, to say the least, with some External worlds openly welcoming the shift to Higher status. Location was always a huge factor in his decision. Oronsay was over a hundred light-years out from the Central worlds, which effectively negated the chance that this was simple technology seepage. If there were replicators there, it was either Radicals or a very greedy company pushing them.

Lizzie's eyebrows lifted. "Really? What sort of products?"

"Starship components."

"Well, that should come in handy out there right now; very profitable, I imagine."

He appreciated her guarded amusement. The last few days had seen a rush of starship company officials to Ellezelin, eager to do deals with the new Cleric Conservator.

The girls scuttled in and settled at the table; Rosa clambered onto the twenty-fifth-century suede mushroom that was her tiny-tot seat. It morphed around her, gripping firmly enough to prevent her from falling out, and expanded upward to bring her level with the tabletop. She clapped her hands delightedly to be up with her family.

Elsie solemnly slid a bowl of honey pops across, which Rosa grabbed. "Don't spill it today," Elsie ordered imperiously.

Rosa just gurgled happily at her sister.

"Daddy, will you teleport us to school?" Tilly asked, her voice high and pleading.

"You know I'm not going to," he told her. "Don't ask."

"Oh, please, Daddy, please."

"Yes, Daddy," Elsie chipped in. "Please t-port. I like it. Lots and lots."

"I'm sure you do, but you're getting on the bus. Teleport is a serious business."

"School is serious," Tilly claimed immediately. "You always say so."

Lizzie was laughing quietly.

"That's diff-" he began. "All right, I'll tell you what I'll do. If you behave yourselves while I'm gone, and only if, then I'll teleport you to school on Thursday."

"Yes, yes!" Tilly exclaimed. She was bouncing up and down on her chair.

"But you have to be exceptionally good. And I will find out; your mother will tell me."

Both girls immediately directed huge smiles at Lizzie.

Half an hour later the bus slipped down out of the sky, a long turquoise regrav capsule that hovered just above the greenway outside the house where the road had been centuries before. The Delivery Man walked his daughters out to it, both of them wearing cloaks over their red blazers, the protective gray shimmer warding off the cold damp air. He checked one last time that Tilly had her swimwear, kissed them both goodbye, and stood waving as the bus rose quickly. The whole idea of riding to school together was intended to enhance the children's sense of community, an extension of the school itself, which was little more than an organized play and activities center. Their real education would not begin until their biononics became active. But it still gave him an emotional jolt to see them vanishing into the gloomy horizon. There was only one school in London these days, south of the Thames in Dulwich Park. With a total population of barely a hundred fifty thousand, the city did not need another. Even for Highers the number of children was low, but then, Earth's natives were notoriously reserved. The first planet to become truly Higher, it had been reducing its population steadily ever since. Right at the beginning of Higher culture, when biononics became available and ANA went online, the average citizen's age was already the highest in the Commonwealth. The elderly downloaded, and the younger ones who were not ready for migration to a postphysical state emigrated out to the Central worlds until they chose to conclude their biological lives. The result was a small residual population with an exceptionally low birth rate.

The Delivery Man and Lizzie were a notable exception in having three kids. But then, they had registered a marriage as well and had had a ceremony in an old church with their friends witnessing the event; a Christian priest had been brought in from an External world that still had a working religion. It was what Lizzie had wanted; she adored the old traditions and rituals. Not enough to actually get pregnant, of course; the girls had all been gestated in a womb vat.

"You be careful on Oronsay," she told him as he examined his face in the bathroom mirror. It was, he acknowledged, rather flat with a broad jaw and eyes that crinkled whenever he smiled or frowned no matter how many anti-aging techniques were applied to the surrounding skin areas, Advancer or Higher. His Advancer genes had given his wiry muddy-red hair a luxuriant growth rate that Elsie had inherited. He had modified his facial follicles with biononics so that he no longer had to apply shaving gel twice a day, but the process wasn't perfect; every week he had to check his chin and dab gel on recalcitrant patches of five o'clock shadow. More like five o'clock puddles, Lizzie claimed.

"I always am," he assured her. He pulled on a new toga suit and waited until it had wrapped around him. Its surface haze emerged, a dark emerald shot though with silver sparkles. Rather stylish, he felt.

Lizzie, who never wore any clothes designed later than the twenty-second century, produced a mildly disapproving look. "If it's that far from the Central worlds, it's going to be deliberate."

"I know. I will watch out, I promise." He kissed Lizzie in reassurance, trying to ignore the guilt that was staining his thoughts like a slow poison. She studied his face, apparently satisfied with his sincerity, but that only made the lie worse. He hated these times when he couldn't tell her what he actually did.

"Missed a bit," she announced spryly, and tapped her forefinger on the left side of his jaw.

He peered into the mirror and grunted in dismay. She was right, as always.

When he was ready, the Delivery Man stood in the lounge facing Lizzie, who held a squirming Rosa in her arms. He held a hand up to wave as he activated his field interface function. It immediately meshed with Earth's T-sphere, and he designated his exit coordinate. His integral force field sprang up to shield his skin. The awesome, intimidating emptiness of the translation continuum engulfed him, nullifying every sense. It was this infinite microsecond that he despised. All his biononic enrichments told him he was surrounded by nothing, not even the residual quantum signature of his own universe. With his mind starved of any sensory input, time expanded excruciatingly.

Eagles Harbor flickered into reality around him. The giant station hung seventy kilometers above southern England, one of a hundred fifty identical stations that together generated the planetary T-sphere. ANA: Governance had fabricated them in the shape of mythological flying saucers three kilometers in diameter, a level of whimsy it wasn't usually associated with.

He emerged into a cavernous reception center on the station's outer rim. There were only a couple of other people using it, and they paid him no attention. In front of him, a vast transparent hull section rose from the floor to curve away above, allowing him to look down on the entire southern half of the country. London was almost directly underneath, clad in slowly moving pockets of fog that oozed around rolling high ground like a white slick. The last time he and Lizzie had brought the kids up there had been a clear sunny day when they'd all pressed up against the hull while Lizzie pointed out historical areas and narrated the events that made them important. She had explained that the ancient city was now back down to the same physical size it had been in the mid-eighteenth century. With the planet's population shrinking, ANA: Governance had ruled there were simply too many buildings left to maintain. Just because they were old didn't necessarily make them relevant. The ancient public buildings in London's center were preserved, along with others deemed architecturally or culturally significant. But as for the sprawl of suburban housing, there were hundreds of thousands of examples of every kind from every era. Most of them were donated or sold off to various individuals and institutions across the Greater Commonwealth, and those which were left simply were erased.

The Delivery Man took a last wistful look down at the mist-draped city, feeling guilt swell to a nearly painful level. But he could never tell Lizzie what he actually did; she wanted stability for their gorgeous little family, and rightly so.

Not that there was any risk involved, he told himself as each assignment began. Really. At least, not much. And if anything ever did go wrong, his faction probably could re-life him in a new body and return him home before she grew suspicious.

He turned away from London and made his way across the reception center's deserted floor to one of the transit tubes opposite it. It sucked him in like an old vacuum hose, propelling him toward the center of Eagles Haven, where the interstellar wormhole terminus was located. The scarcity of travelers surprised him. He had expected to find more Highers on their inward migration to ANA. Living Dream certainly was stirring things up politically among the External worlds. The Central worlds regarded the whole Pilgrimage affair with their usual disdain. Even so, their political councils were worried, as demonstrated by the number of people joining them to offer their opinion.

It was a fact that with Ethan's ascension to Cleric Conservator, the ANA factions were going to be maneuvering frantically for advantage, trying to shape the Greater Commonwealth to their own visions. He couldn't work out which of them was going to benefit most from the recent election; there were so many, and their internal allegiances were all so fluid, not to mention deceitful. It was an old saying that there were as many factions as there were ex-physical humans inside ANA, and he never had encountered any convincing evidence to the contrary. That resulted in groupings that ranged from those who wanted to isolate and ignore the physical humans (some antianimal extremists wanted them exterminated altogether) to those who sought to elevate every human, ANA or physical, to a transcendent state.

The Delivery Man took his assignments from a broad alliance that was fundamentally conservative, following a philosophy that was keen to see things keep running along as they were, although opinions on how that should be achieved were subject to a constant and vigorous internal debate. He did it because it was a view he shared. When he eventually downloaded, in another couple of centuries or so, that would be the faction with which he would associate himself. In the meantime he was one of its unofficial representatives to the physical Commonwealth.

The station terminus was a simple spherical chamber containing a globe fifty meters in diameter whose surface glowed with the lambent violet of Cherenkov radiation emanating from the exotic matter used to maintain the wormhole's stability. He slipped through the bland sheet of photons and immediately was emerging from the exterior of a corresponding globe on St. Lincoln. The old industrial planet was still a major manufacturing base for the Central worlds and had maintained its status as a hub for the local wormhole network. He took a transit tube to the wormhole for Lytham, which was one of the Central worlds farthest from Earth; its wormhole terminus was secured at the main starport. Only the Central worlds were linked by a long-established wormhole network. The External worlds valued their cultural and economic independence too much to be connected to the Central worlds in such a direct fashion; with just a few exceptions travel between them was by starship.

A two-seater capsule ferried the Delivery Man out to the craft to which he'd been assigned. He glided between two long rows of pads where starships were parked. They ranged in size from sleek needle-like pleasure cruisers to hundred-meter passenger liners capable of flying commercial routes as far as a hundred light-years. There were no cargo ships; Lytham was a Higher planet and did not manufacture or import consumer items.

The Artful Dodger was parked toward the end of the row. It was a surprisingly squat chrome-purple ovoid, twenty-five meters high, standing on five tumorlike bulbs that held its wide base three meters off the concrete. The fuselage surface was smooth and featureless, with no hint of what lay underneath. It looked like a typical private hyperdrive ship belonging to some wealthy External world individual or company or to a Higher council with a diplomatic prerogative. An ungainly metal umbilical tower stood at the rear of the pad, with two slim hoses plugged into the ship's utility port, filling the synthesis tanks with baseline chemicals.

The Delivery Man sent the capsule back to the rank in the reception building and walked underneath the starship. His u-shadow called the ship's smartcore and confirmed his identity, a complex process of code and DNA verification, before the smartcore finally acknowledged he had the authority to take command. An airlock opened at the center of the ship's base, a dint that distended upward into a tunnel of darkness. Gravity eased off around him and then slowly inverted, pulling him up inside. He emerged into the single midsection cabin. Inert, it was a low hemisphere of dark fabric that felt spongy to the touch. Slim ribs on the upper surface glowed a dull blue, allowing him to see. The airlock sealed below his feet. He smiled as he looked around at the blank cabin, sensing the power contained behind the bulkheads. The starship plugged into him at some animal level, circumventing all the wisdom and cool of Higher behavior. He relished the power that was available, the freedom to fly across the galaxy. This was liberation in the extreme.

How the girls would love to ride in it.

"Give me something to sit on," he told the smartcore. "Turn the lights up and activate flight control functions."

An acceleration couch bloomed up from the floor as the ribs brightened, revealing a complex pattern of black lines etched on the cabin walls. The Delivery Man sat down. Exoimages flipped up, showing him the ship's status. His u-shadow cleared him for flight with the spaceport governor, and he designated a flight path to Ellezelin, two hundred fifteen light-years away. The umbilical cables withdrew into their tower.

"Let's go," he told the smartcore.

Compensator generators maintained level gravity inside the cabin as the Artful Dodger rose on regrav. At fifty kilometers altitude, the limit of regrav, the smartcore switched to ingrav, and the starship continued to accelerate away from the planet. The Delivery Man began to experiment with the internal layout, expanding walls and furniture out of the cabin bulkheads. The dark lines flowed and bloomed into a great variety of combinations, allowing up to six passengers to have tiny independent sleeping quarters that included a bathroom formation, but for all its malleability, the cabin was basically variations on a lounge. If you were traveling with anyone, he decided, let alone five others, you'd need to be very good friends.

A thousand kilometers above the spaceport, the Artful Dodger went FTL, vanishing inside a quantum field interstice with a photonic implosion that pulled in all the stray electromagnetic radiation within a kilometer of its fuselage. There were no differences perceptible to ordinary human senses: he might have been in an underground chamber, the gravity remaining perfectly stable. Sensors provided him with a simplified image of their course as it related to large masses back in spacetime, plotting stars and planets by the way their quantum signatures affected the intersecting fields through which they were flying. Their initial speed was a smooth fifteen light-years per hour, near the limit for hyperdrive, which the sophisticated Lytham planetary spacewatch network could track out to a couple of light-years.

The Delivery Man waited until they were three light-years beyond the network and told the smartcore to accelerate again. The Artful Dodger's ultradrive pushed them up to a phenomenal fifty-five light-years per hour. It was enough to make the Delivery Man flinch. He had been on an ultradrive ship only twice before; there were not many of them, as ANA had not released the technology to the Central worlds. Exactly how the Conservative Faction had gotten hold of it was something he studiously avoided asking.

Two hours later he reduced speed back to fifteen light-years an hour and allowed the Ellezelin traffic network to pick up their hyperspatial approach. He used a TransDimensional (TD) channel to the planetary datasphere and requested landing permission for Riasi spaceport.

Ellezelin's original capital was situated on the northern coast of Sinkang, with the Camoa River running through it. He looked down on the city as the Artful Dodger sank down toward the main spaceport. It had been laid out in a spiderweb grid with the planetary parliament at the heart. The building was still there, a grandiose structure of towers and buttresses made from an attractive mixture of ancient and modern materials. But the planet's government now was centered in Makkathran2. The senior bureaucrats and their departments had moved with it, leading a migration of commerce and industry. Only the transport sector remained strong in Riasi. The wormholes that linked the planets of the Ellezelin Free Trade Zone together were all here, incorporated into the spaceport, making it the most important commercial hub in the sector.

The Artful Dodger landed on a pad little different from the one it had departed from barely three hours before. The Delivery Man paid a parking fee for a month in advance with an untraceable credit coin and declined an umbilical connection. His job here was finished. His u-shadow called a taxi capsule to the pad. While he was waiting for it, the Conservative Faction called him.

"Marius has been seen on Ellezelin."

It was the second time that day the Delivery Man flinched. "I suppose that was inevitable. Do you know why he's here?"

"To support the Cleric Conservator. But as to the exact nature of that support, we remain uncertain."

"I see. Is he here in the spaceport?" he asked reluctantly. He wasn't a frontline agent, but his biononics had very advanced field functions in case he stumbled into an aggressive situation. They ought to be a match for anything Marius could produce-although any aggression would be most unusual. Faction agents simply did not settle their scores physically. It wasn't done.

"We don't believe so. He visited the Cleric Conservator within an hour of the election. After that he dropped out of sight. We are telling you simply so that you can be careful. It would not do for the Accelerators to know our business any more than they want us to know theirs. Leave as quickly as possible."

"Understood."

The taxi capsule took him over to the spaceport's massive passenger terminal. He checked in for the next United Commonwealth Starlines flight back to Akimiski, the closest Central world. All the time he waited in the departure lounge overlooking the huge central concourse, he kept his scan functions running, checking to see whether Marius was in the terminal. When the passengers boarded forty minutes later, there had been no sign of him or any other Higher agent.

The Delivery Man settled into his first-class compartment on the passenger ship with a considerable sense of relief. It was a hyperdrive ship that would take fifteen hours to get to Akimiski. From there he would make a quick trip to Oronsay to maintain his cover. With any luck he'd be back on Earth in less than two days. It would be the weekend, and they'd be able to take the girls to the southern sanctuary park in New Zealand. They would enjoy that.

The Rakas bar occupied the whole third floor of a round tower in Makkathran2's Abad district, just as the same building in Makkathran itself had a bar on the third floor. From what he had seen in Inigo's dreams, Aaron suspected the furniture here was better, along with the lighting, not to mention the lack of the general dirt that seemed so pervasive in the original city. Rakas was patronized by a lot of visiting faithful who perhaps were a little disappointed by how little space the nucleus of their movement took up in comparison to the prodigious metropolises of the Greater Commonwealth.

There was also a much better selection of drinks than the archetype boasted. Aaron presumed that was the reason ex-Councillor the Honorable Corrie-Lyn kept returning there. This was the third night he had sat at a small corner table and watched her knocking back an impressive amount of alcohol at the counter. She wasn't a large woman, though at first glance her slender figure made her seem taller than she was. Ivory skin was stippled by a mass of freckles whose highest density was in a broad swath across her eyes. Her hair was the darkest red he had ever seen: depending on how the light caught her, it varied from shiny ebony to gold-flecked dark auburn. It was cut short, which, given how thick it was, made it curl heavily; the way it framed her dainty features made her appear like a particularly diabolic teenager. In reality she was a three-hundred-seventy-year-old. He knew she wasn't Higher, so she must have a superb Advancer metabolism, which presumably was how she could drink any bad boy under the table.

For the fourth time that evening, one of the faithful but not terribly devout went over to try his luck. After all, the good citizens of Makkathran had very healthy and active sex lives; Inigo showed that. The group of guys he was with, sitting at the big window seat, watched with sly grins and minimal sniggering as their friend claimed the empty stool beside her. Corrie-Lyn was not wearing her Cleric robes; otherwise he never would have dared to go within ten meters. A simple dark purple dress slit under each arm to reveal alluring amounts of skin wound up the lad's courage. She listened without comment to his opening lines, nodded reasonably when he offered to buy a drink, and beckoned the barkeeper over.

Aaron wished he could go over and draw the lad away. It was painful to watch; he had seen this exact scene play out many times over the last few nights. The barkeeper came over with two heavy shot glasses and a frosted bottle of golden Adlier 88Vodka; brewed on Vitchan, it bore no real relation to original Earth vodka except for the kick. Adlier produced a liqueur that was eighty percent alcohol and eight percent tricetholyn, a powerful narcotic. The barkeeper filled both glasses and left the bottle.

Corrie-Lyn lifted hers in salute and downed it in one shot. The hopeful lad followed suit. As he winced a smile against the burn of the icy liquid, Corrie-Lyn filled both glasses again. She lifted hers. Somewhat apprehensively, the lad did the same. She tossed it down straightaway.

There was laughter coming from the group at the window now. Their friend slugged back the drink. There were tears in his eyes; an involuntary shudder ran along his chest as if he were suppressing a cough. Corrie-Lyn poured them both a third shot with mechanical precision and downed hers in a single gulp. The lad gave a disgusted wave with one hand and backed away to jeering from his erstwhile pals. Aaron wasn't impressed; the previous night one of the would-be suitors had kept up for five shots before retreating, hurt and confused.

Corrie-Lyn slid the bottle back along the countertop, where the barkeeper caught it with an easy twist of his wrist and deposited it back on the shelf. She turned back to the tall beer she'd been drinking before the interruption, resting her elbows on either side of the glass, and resumed staring at nothing.

Watching her, Aaron acknowledged that cultivating Corrie-Lyn was never going to be a subtle play of seduction. There was going to be only one chance, and if he blew that, he would have to waste days finding another angle. He got to his feet and walked over. As he approached, he could sense her gaiafield emission, which was reduced to a minimum. It was like a breath of polar air, cold enough to make him shiver; her silhouette within the ethereal field was black, a rift into interstellar space. Most people would have hesitated at that alone, never mind the Adlier 88 humiliation. He sat on the stool the lad had vacated. She turned to give him a dismissive look, eyes running over his cheap suit with insulting apathy.

Aaron called the barkeeper over and asked for a beer. "You'll excuse me if I don't go through the ritual degradation," he said. "I'm not actually here to get inside your panties."

"Thong." She took a long drink of her beer, not looking at him.

"I...what?" That was not quite the answer he was prepared for.

"Inside my thong."

"I suddenly feel an urge to get ordained into your religion."

She grinned to herself and swirled the remains of her beer around.

"You've had enough time; you've been hanging around here for a few days now."

His beer arrived, and Corrie-Lyn silently swapped it for her own.

Aaron raised his finger to the barkeeper. "Another. Make that two."

"And it's not a religion," she said.

"Of course not; how silly of me. Priest robes. Worshipping a lost prophet. The promise of salvation. Giving money to the city temple. Going on Pilgrimage. I apologize; easy mistake to make."

"Keep talking like that, offworlder, and you'll wind up headfirst in a canal before dawn."

"Headfirst or headless?"

Corrie-Lyn finally turned and gave him her full attention, her smile matching her impish allure. "What in Ozzie's great universe do you want?"

"To make you very rich indeed."

"Why would you want to do that?"

"So I can make myself even richer."

"I'm not very good at bank heists."

"Yeah, guess it doesn't come up much at priest school."

"Priests ask you to have faith. We can take you straight to heaven; we even give you a sneak preview so you know what you're getting."

"And that's where we come in."

"We?"

"FarFlight Charters. I believe your not religion is currently in need of starships, Councillor Emeritus."

Corrie-Lyn laughed. "Oh, you are dangerous, aren't you?"