Prospero shook his head with an anguished expression, as if he'd been misunderstood, but he said, "Yes, a.s.semble your 'Dive team.' Let me speak to them all. I can see how badly I'm needed here!"

Gisela was more bewildered than ever. "Needed? You're welcome here, of course ... but in what way are you needed?"

Cordelia reached over and tugged at her father's arm. "Can we wait in the castle? I'm so tired." She wouldn't look Gisela in the eye.

"Of course, my darling!" Prospero leant down and kissed her forehead. He pulled a rolled-up parchment out of his robe and tossed it into the air. It unfurled into a doorway, hovering above the ocean beside the pier, leading into a sunlit scape. Gisela could see vast, overgrown gardens, stone buildings, winged horses in the air. It was a good thing they'd compressed their accommodation more efficiently than their bodies, or they would have tied up the gamma ray link for about a decade.

Cordelia stepped through the doorway, holding Prospero's hand, trying to pull him through. Trying, Gisela finally realised, to shut him up before he could embarra.s.s her further.

Without success. With one foot still on the pier, Prospero turned to Gisela. "Why am I needed? I'm here to be your Homer, your Virgil, your Dante, your d.i.c.kens! I'm here to extract the mythic essence of this glorious, tragic endeavour! I'm here to grant you a gift infinitely greater than the immortality you seek!"

Gisela didn't bother pointing out, yet again, that she had every expectation of a much shorter life inside the hole than out. "What's that?"

"I'm here to make you legendary!" Prospero stepped off the pier, and the doorway contracted behind him.

Gisela stared out across the ocean, unseeing for a moment, then sat down slowly and let her feet dangle in the icy water.

Certain things were beginning to make sense.

"Be nice," Gisela pleaded. "For Cordelia's sake."

Timon feigned wounded puzzlement. "What makes you think I won't be nice? I'm always nice." He morphed briefly from his usual angular icon - all rib-like frames and jointed rods - into a b.u.t.ton-eyed teddy bear.

Gisela groaned softly. "Listen. If I'm right - if she's thinking of migrating to Cartan - it will be the hardest decision she's ever had to make. If she could just walk away from Athena, she would have done it by now - instead of going to all the trouble of making her father believe that it was his idea to come here."

"What makes you so sure it wasn't?"

"Prospero has no interest in reality; the only way he could have heard of the Dive would be Cordelia bringing it to his attention. She must have chosen Cartan because it's far enough from Earth to make a clean break - and the Dive gave her the excuse she needed, a fit subject for her father's 'talents' to dangle in front of him. But until she's ready to tell him that she's not going back, we mustn't alienate him. We mustn't make things harder for her than they already are."

Timon rolled his eyes into his anodised skull. "All right! I'll play along! I suppose there is a chance you might be reading her correctly. But if you're mistaken ... "

Prospero chose that moment to make his entrance, robes billowing, daughter in tow. They were in a scape created for the occasion, to Prospero's specifications: a room shaped like two truncated square pyramids joined at their bases, panelled in white, with a twenty-M view of Chandrasekhar through a trapezoidal window. Gisela had never seen this style before; Timon had christened it "Athenian Astrokitsch."

The five members of the Dive team were seated around a semi-circular table. Prospero stood before them while Gisela made the introductions: Sachio, Tiet, Vikram, Timon. She'd spoken to them all, making the case for Cordelia, but Timon's half-hearted concession was the closest thing she'd received to a guarantee. Cordelia shrank into a corner of the room, eyes downcast.

Prospero began soberly. "For nigh on a thousand years, we, the descendants of the flesh, have lived our lives wrapped in dreams of heroic deeds long past. But we have dreamed in vain of a new Odyssey to inspire us, new heroes to stand beside the old, new ways to retell the eternal myths. Three more days, and your journey would have been wasted, lost to us forever." He smiled proudly. "But I have arrived in time to pluck your tale from the very jaws of gravity!"

Tiet said, "Nothing was at risk of being lost. Information about the Dive is being broadcast to every polis, stored in every library." Tiet's icon was like a supple jewelled statue carved from ebony.

Prospero waved a hand dismissively. "A stream of technical jargon. In Athena, it might as well have been the murmuring of the waves."

Tiet raised an eyebrow. "If your vocabulary is impoverished, augment it - don't expect us to impoverish our own. Would you give an account of cla.s.sical Greece without mentioning the name of a single city-state?"

"No. But those are universal terms, part of our common heritage - "

"They're terms that have no meaning outside a tiny region of s.p.a.ce, and a brief period of time. Unlike the terms needed to describe the Dive, which are applicable to every quartic femtometre of s.p.a.cetime."

Prospero replied, a little stiffly, "Be that as it may, in Athena we prefer poetry to equations. And I have come to honour your journey in language that will resonate down the corridors of the imagination for millennia."

Sachio said, "So you believe you're better qualified to portray the Dive than the partic.i.p.ants?" Sachio appeared as an owl, perched inside the head of a flesher-shaped wrought-iron cage full of starlings.

"I am a narratologist."

"You have some kind of specialised training?"

Prospero nodded proudly. "Though in truth, it is a vocation. When ancient fleshers gathered around their campfires, I was the one telling stories long into the night, of how the G.o.ds fought among themselves, and even mortal warriors were raised up into the sky to make the constellations."

Timon replied, deadpan, "And I was the one sitting opposite, telling you what a load of drivel you were spouting." Gisela was about to turn on him, to excoriate him for breaking his promise, when she realised that he'd spoken to her alone, routing the data outside the scape. She shot him a poisonous glance.

Sachio's owl blinked with puzzlement. "But you find the Dive itself incomprehensible. So how are you suited to explain it to others?"

Prospero shook his head. "I have come to create enigmas, not explanations. I have come to shape the story of your descent into a form that will live on long after your libraries have turned to dust."

"Shape it how?" Vikram was as anatomically correct as a Da Vinci sketch, when he chose to be, but he lacked the tell-tale signs of a physiological simulation: no sweat, no dead skin, no shed hair. "You mean change things?"

"To extract the mythic essence, mere detail must become subservient to a deeper truth."

Timon said, "I think that was a yes."

Vikram frowned amiably. "So what exactly will you change?" He spread his arms, and stretched them to encompa.s.s his fellow team members. "If we're to be improved upon, do tell us how."

Prospero said cautiously, "Five is a poor number, for a start. Seven, perhaps, or twelve."

"Whew." Vikram grinned. "Shadowy extras only; no one's for the chop."

"And the name of your vessel ... "

"Cartan Null? What's wrong with that? Cartan was a great flesher mathematician, who clarified the meaning and consequences of Einstein's work. 'Null' because it's built of null geodesics: the paths followed by light rays."

"Posterity," Prospero declared, "will like it better as 'The Falling City' - its essence unenc.u.mbered by your infelicitous words."

Tiet said coolly, "We named this polis after elie Cartan. Its clone inside Chandrasekhar will be named after elie Cartan. If you're unwilling to respect that, you might as well head back to Athena right now, because no one here is going to offer you the slightest cooperation."

Prospero glanced at the others, possibly looking for some evidence of dissent. Gisela had mixed feelings; Prospero's mythopoeic babble would not outlive the truth in the libraries, whatever he imagined, so in a sense it hardly mattered what it contained. But if they didn't draw the line somewhere, she could imagine his presence rapidly becoming unbearable.

He said, "Very well. Cartan Null. I am an artisan as well as an artist; I can work with imperfect clay."

As the meeting broke up, Timon cornered Gisela. Before he could start complaining, she said, "If you think three more days of that is too awful to contemplate, imagine what it's like for Cordelia."

Timon shook his head. "I'll keep my word. But now that I've seen what she's up against ... I really don't think she's going to make it. If she's been wrapped in propaganda about the golden age of fleshers all her life, how can you expect her to see through it? A polis like Athena forms a closed trapped memetic surface: concentrate enough Prosperos in one place, and there's no escape."

Gisela eyed him balefully. "She's here, isn't she? Don't try telling me that she's bound to Athena forever, just because she was created there. Nothing's as simple as that. Even black holes emit Hawking radiation."

"Hawking radiation carries no information. It's thermal noise; you can't tunnel out with it." Timon swept two fingers along a diagonal line, the gesture for "QED."

Gisela said, "It's only a metaphor, you idiot, not an isomorphism. If you can't tell the difference, maybe you should f.u.c.k off to Athena yourself."

Timon mimed pulling his hand back from something biting it, and vanished.