Araminta laughed. "And I have absolutely no idea how to go about this. The first three apartments will be ready in another week. I've accepted a deposit on the fourth."

"Congratulations."

"But until I've completed it and the tenants are in, I won't see a profit. I need money to buy bodies."

"Not as expensive as you might think. A friend, one of us, runs a clinic expressly for that purpose. She always gives a discount to a first expander."

"Okay." She took another drink to calm her shudders. It was momentous, sort of like accepting two proposals at once.

The young Celtic one squeezed her arm. "You all right?" he asked, all full of sympathy.

"I guess so." She knew she was smiling like an idiot. But this does feel right.

Two of hims came hurrying out of the house. One of them who seemed about seventeen went down on his knee beside her. A slim athletic build, she saw, with a wild shock of blond hair. He proffered a small box, which opened to show her an antique diamond engagement ring.

"I bought it just in case," he told her.

Araminta slipped it onto her finger, then dashed away the tears.

"Oh, come here," the youngster exclaimed.

His arms went around her, hugging her tight, and she was laughing through the tears. "I haven't seen you before."

"I'm a slavedriver to me."

She put her palms on his cheeks and kissed him thoroughly. "I would like you to be one of tonight's."

"My considerable pleasure."

"I believe you said I still have several of yous to get to know."

"Oh, trust me, you'll know all of mes before our wedding day."

"And I don't mind and won't complain about other women until I have enough bodies to cope. Just...I don't want to meet them."

"I'll try to keep it to a minimum, I promise."

"Thanks," she whispered gratefully.

"Now, what sort of bodies are you going to go for?"

"Gosh, I hadn't thought about that," she admitted. "What do you like?"

"Got to be a tall blond Amazon type. Always popular."

"Oh, and very black as well. Let's cover all the old ethnicities, I have-almost."

"And one of you has to have huge breasts."

"More than one!"

She slapped at him, feigning shocked dismay. "You're appalling. I'm not doing anything like that."

"That's not what you usually say in bed."

Araminta laughed. She really had missed this. I made the right decision.

Araminta lay on the big bed, listening to three of hims sleeping. Two on the bed with her and one on the couch, curled up in a quilt, all breathing softly, not quite in sync. This time she had refused any aerosols, wanting to try out Likan's program to make sure it worked with other people, that he hadn't loaded in a hidden expiry key.

It worked.

And how.

Mr. Bovey had been surprised and then very appreciative at how much more responsive her body had become. As she had suspected, a night in bed with hims had been a lot better than it had been with Likan and the harem. Always nice to have confirmation.

Now she could not sleep. Not that she wasn't tired, she grinned to herself, but she couldn't stop thinking about the engagement and embracing a multiple lifestyle. It was such an upheaval. Everything was going to change for her, so much so that she was more than a little apprehensive. Her mind was churning over the same questions again and again, unable to find answers because she didn't actually know about being multiple. The only way to find out was to become one.

She turned her head to look at the young red-haired him who was nestled cozily beside her. He'd help her through the transition, she knew. Mr. Bovey loved her. That was enough to take her through the next few months. They hadn't set a date. He had said he would like at least two hers to register the marriage with him, which was fair enough. She really needed to finish the apartments. This day's events had made that even more urgent.

Araminta settled back onto the soft mattress and closed her eyes. She used the program to still her whirling thoughts, emptying her mind. Her body started to calm as she found and slowed its natural rhythms, cycling down. Instead of sleep, the emptiness opening within made her aware of the images that lurked just below conscious thought. There was not just one but a whole range, all tasting and feeling very different. They twisted out of the infinite distance, a connection she now finally understood belonged to her. Instinctively she knew how to focus on whichever images she wanted. Some were Mr. Bovey's dreams; she was familiar enough with him to recognize his mental scent. She sighed fondly as she experienced his presence; part of his mind was so wound up, the poor man. She also felt his happiness-her own face slithered in and out of his thoughts. One of the connections was completely alien yet comfortably warm in the way a parent was with a child. Her lips lifted in a serene smile. The Silfen Motherholme. So Cressida had been telling the truth, in which case that oh-so busy chorus of multicolored shadows must be the gaiafield.

Araminta embraced the quiet one, the most tenuous connection of all, and found herself gliding through space far from any star. The Void's nebulae glimmered lush and glorious behind her as she rose to the darkness of the outer regions.

"Hello," she said.

And the Skylord answered.

Justine had expected to feel a lot of excitement as her starship, the Silverbird, descended toward Centurion Station. Five hundred hours alone in a small cabin with no unisphere connection had left her unexpectedly strung out. Intellectually, she knew it was nonsense, a quirk of her primitive body's biochemistry and neurological weakness. But it was still real.

Now here she was, at her destination, and all she could think about was the identical boring trip back. I must have been crazy to do this.

The Silverbird touched down on the lava field that acted as a spaceport for the human section of Centurion Station. Five other starships were sitting there, all of them bigger than hers. The smartcore reported several discreet sensor scans probing at the ship. The tall Ethox tower was the worst offender, using quite aggressive quantum signature detectors. More subtle scans came from the dour domes of the Forleene. There was even a quick burst of investigative activity from the observatory facilities in the human section. She smiled at that as her thin spacesuit squeezed up against her body, expelling all the air pockets to form an outer protective skin. She locked the helmet on.

It was a short walk over the sandy lava to the main airlock. Justine needed it for the sense of space and normality it gave her. She could not believe how much she felt reassured by the sight of a planetary horizon, even one as drab as this. When she stopped to look up, angry ion storms fluoresced the sky for light-years in every direction: pale mockeries of the nebulae inside the Void.

Director Lehr Trachtenberg was waiting for her in the reception hall beyond the airlock, a formidably sized man who reminded her of Ramon, one of her old husbands. Standing in front of him, shaking his hand in greeting, and tipping her head back to see his face was another reminder of how negligible her physical body was. Of course, that Ramon connection did shunt her mind back to the possibility of sex.

"This is a considerable honor," Lehr Trachtenberg was saying. "ANA has never sent a representative here before."

"Given the political circumstances back in the Commonwealth, it was deemed appropriate to examine the data from the Void firsthand."

The director licked his lips slowly. "Distance makes no difference to data, Justine. We do send the entire range of our findings directly back to the navy's exploration division and the Raiel."

"Nonetheless, I'd like the opportunity to review your operation."

"I wasn't about to refuse you anything, especially after the trip you've just made. To my knowledge no one has ever traveled so far by themselves. How did you stand the isolation?"

She suspected that he suspected the Silverbird had an ultradrive but chose to gloss over the actual journey time. "With difficulty and a lot of sensory dramas."

"I can imagine." He gestured at the five-seater cab that was waiting at the end of the reception hall. "I've assigned you a suite in the Mexico accommodation block."

"Thank you."

"I'm also throwing a welcome party for you in three hours. Everyone is very keen to meet you."

"I suppose they are," she said. "Fine. I'll be there. I could do with some company after that trip."

They climbed into the little cab, which immediately shot into the transport tunnel. "I should warn you that nearly a third of our observation staff are Living Dream followers," the director said.

"I reviewed personnel files before I came."

"As long as you know."

"Is it a problem?"

"Hopefully not. But as you implied, it's a volatile situation right now."

"Don't worry, I can do diplomatic when I have to."

Her suite was equal to any luxury hotel she had stayed in. The only thing missing was human staff, but the number of modern bots more than made up for it. The navy clearly had spared no effort in making the station as cozy as possible for the scientists. The main room even had a long window looking out over the alien sections of the station. Justine stared at them for a while, then opaqued the glass. Her u-shadow established itself in the room's net. "No visitors or calls," she told it.

Justine settled back onto the bed and opened her mind to the local gaiafield. The darkened room filled with phantoms, with their colors glinting amid the deeper shadows. Voices whispered. There was laughter. She felt drawn to various emotional states that promised to immerse her in their enticing soulful sensations.

Resisting temptation, she focused her attention on the source of the whimsy: the confluence nest itself, a quasi-biological neural module that simultaneously stored and emitted every thought released into its field. It had memories like a human brain, only with a much, much larger capacity. Justine formed her own images, offering them up to the nest. It responded with association. Naturally, it contained every one of Inigo's dreams; Living Dream had made sure of that. She ignored the vivid spectacle of the Waterwalker's life, brushing those memories aside as she refined her own fancy for a different recollection of life inside the Void. The nest was full of enigmas, the mental poetry left behind by observers baffled by the terrible dark heart of the galaxy. There were compositions of how a life might be lived for anyone fortunate to pass inside-wish fulfilment, easy to differentiate from the real thing. They were the promise-prayers that Living Dream's followers made every night to their mystic goal. All were imprinted on the nest, but nothing else: no other glimpse into another life lived on Querencia, no grand mellow thoughts originating from a Skylord.

The garden dome at the middle of the human section boasted trees over two hundred fifty years old. Oaks with thick trunks sent out thick crinkled boughs, acting as lush canopies above the tables where the station staff was gathering. Up on a rustic tree house platform, an enthusiastic amateur band was playing songs from different eras stretching back across several centuries and was keen for requests. It was dusk inside, allowing the sharp violet light of the Wall stars to dominate the sky overhead.

Justine admired the broad patch of eye-searing scintillations with the kind of wariness she reserved for dangerous animals. Her arrival in the garden dome had created quite a ripple of interest. She liked to think that was due at least partly to the little black cocktail dress she had chosen. It certainly seemed to have the required effect on Director Trachtenberg, who was becoming quite flirtatious as he fussed around, offering her various drinks and selections of the finger food.

Everyone she was introduced to was keen to know exactly what ANA's interest was in them at this time. She repeated the official line a dozen times: She was visiting just to ascertain the current status of the observation.

"Unchanged," complained Graffal Ehasz, the observation department chief. "We don't learn anything these days apart from ion storm patterns in the gulf on the other side of the Wall stars. That tells us nothing about the nature of the beast. We should be trying to send probes inside."

"I thought nothing could get through the barrier," she said.

"Which is why we need a much more detailed study. You can't do that with remote probes fifty light-years away."

"The Raiel don't like us getting closer," Trachtenberg said.

"When you get home, you might ask ANA why we still need their permission just to fart around here," Ehasz said. "It's fucking insulting."

"I'll remember," Justine said. The party was only twenty minutes old; she wondered how many aerosols Ehasz had inhaled.

The director took her by the arm and politely guided her away.

"Sorry about that," he said. "There's not a lot of opportunity to blow off steam around here. I run a pretty tight schedule. This is an expensive installation and phenomenally important. We need to extract the best information we can with what we've got."

"I understand."

"It's Ehasz's third stint out here. He tends to get frustrated by the lack of progress. I've seen it before. First time you're all swept along by the wonder of it all. Then, when that fades away, you begin to realize how passive the observation actually is."

"How many times have you been here?"

He grinned. "This is my seventh. But then, I'm a lot older and wiser than Ehasz."

"So would you like to join the Pilgrimage?"

"Not really. As far as three hundred years of direct observation has shown us, you touch the barrier, you die. Actually, you die a long time before you reach the barrier. I just don't see how they hope to get through."

"Somebody did, once."

"Yeah, that's the really annoying part."

"So what do-" Justine stopped as the ground heaved, almost knocking her feet out from under her. She tensed, dropping to a crouch like just about everyone else. Her integral force field came on. The local net was shrieking out all sorts of alarms. The huge oak boughs creaked dangerously, their leaves rustling as if tickled by a gust of wind.

"Hoshit," Trachtenberg yelped.

Justine's u-shadow established a link to the Silverbird's smartcore. "Stand by," she told it. "Keep a fix on my position." When she scanned the dome, it was still intact. Then she looked at the horizon, which appeared to be perfectly level. She had been expecting big cracks to be splitting the lava plain open at the very least. The ground tilted again. Nothing moved! "What is happening?" she demanded aloud. Some kind of quake? But this planet was a dead husk, completely inactive in any respect.

"I'm not sure." The director waved an annoyed hand to shush her.

The members of the band were clambering down out of the tree house as fast as they could go, jumping the last meter off the wooden steps. They had abandoned their instruments. Justine stared at the drink in her hand as the ground shifted again. The wine sloshed from one side of the glass to the other, yet she was holding it perfectly still.

"Holy Ozzie," Trachtenberg exclaimed. "It's gravity."

"What?"

"Gravity waves. Fucking colossal ones."

Ehasz hurried over to them, swaying badly as the ground seemed to tilt again. "Are you accessing the long-range sensors?" he yelled at Trachtenberg.

"What have they got?"

"The boundary! There are distortion ripples light-years long moving across it. And the damn thing is growing. The sensors in the gulf can actually see it move. Do you realize what that means? The expansion is superluminal. This is an Ozzie-fucking devourment phase."

The ground quivered badly. Water running along the little streams sloshed about, shooting up small jets of spray. For a moment, Justine actually felt her weight reduce. Then it came back, and the neat stacks of crockery and glasses on the tables crashed onto the grass. She stumbled away from the oak tree as it emitted a nasty splintering sound. Emergency force fields were coming on, reinforcing the dome. Around the rim, the doors to safety bunkers rippled open.

"I want everyone to move to evacuation stage one," Trachtenberg announced. "Navy personnel, report direct to your ships. Observation team, I need a precise picture of what is happening out there. We probably don't have much time, so we must do as much as we can before we're forced off." He flinched as another gravity wave crossed the station. This time the upward force was so strong that Justine felt like she was going to lift off.

"Is that gravity coming from the Void?" she asked. The prospect was terrifying, as they were hundreds of light-years away.

"No," Ehasz cried. "This is something local." He looked up, studying the intricate luminescent sky above the dome. "There!"

Justine watched two azure moons traverse the sparkling smear of Wall stars. They were in very strange orbits and moving impossibly fast-actually accelerating. "Oh, my God," she gasped. The Raiel's planet-size DF machines were flying into new positions.

"The Raiel are getting ready for the last fight," Ehasz said numbly. "If they lose, that monster will consume the whole galaxy."

This can't be happening, Justine thought. Living Dream hasn't even begun the Pilgrimage yet. "You can't!" she shouted up at the ancient invisible enemy as human hormones and feelings took complete control of her body and mind. "This isn't fair. It's not fair!"