"Hmm." Sagan is busy with a mouthful of delicious tetrodotoxin laced meatballs. "It's clearly a Kardashev type-III civilization, harnessing the energy of an entire galaxy. What else?"

Gregor smiles. "Ah, those Russians, obsessed with coal and steel production! This is the information age, Dr. Sagan. What would the informational resources of a galaxy look like if they were put to use? And to what use would an unimaginably advanced civilization put them?"

Sagan looks blank for a moment, his fork pausing halfway to his mouth, laden with a deadly promise. "I don't see-ah!" He smiles, finishes his forkful, and nods. "Do I take it that we're living in a nature reserve? Or perhaps an archaeology experiment?"

Gregor shrugs. "Humans are time-binding animals," he explains. "So are all the other tool-using sentient species we have been able to characterize; it appears to be the one common factor. They like to understand their past as a guide to their future. We have sources that have . . . Think of a game of Chinese whispers. The belief that is most widely held is that the disk was made by the agencies we see at work restructuring the galaxy, to house their, ah, experiments in ontology. To view their own deep past, before they became whatever they are, and to decide whether the path through which they emerged was inevitable or a low-probability outcome. The reverse face of the Drake equation, if you like."

Sagan shivers. "Are you telling me we're just . . . memories? Echoes from the past, reconstituted and replayed some unimaginable time in the future? That this entire monstrous joke of a cosmological experiment is just a sideshow?"

"Yes, Dr. Sagan," Gregor says soothingly. "After all, the disk is not so large compared to an entire galaxy, don't you think? And I would not say the sideshow is unimportant. Do you ever think about your own childhood? And wonder whether the you that sits here in front of me today was the inevitable product of your upbringing? Or could you have become someone completely different-an airline pilot, for example, or a banker? Alternatively, could someone else someone else have become have become you you? What set of circumstances combine to produce an astronomer and exobiologist? Why should a God not harbor the same curiosity?"

"So you're saying it's introspection, with a purpose. The galactic civilization wants to see its own birth."

"The galactic hive mind," Gregor soothes, amused at how easy it is to deal with Sagan. "Remember, information is key. Why should human-level intelligences be the highest level?" All the while he continues to breathe oxytocin and other peptide neurotransmitters across the table toward Sagan. "Don't let such speculations ruin your meal," he adds, phrasing it as an observation rather than an implicit command.

Sagan nods and returns to using his utensils. "That's very thought-provoking," he says, as he gratefully raises another mouthful to his lips. "If this is based on hard intelligence it . . . Well, I'm worried. Even if it's inference, I have to do some thinking about this. I hadn't really been thinking along these lines."

"I'm sure if there's an alien menace, we'll defeat it," Gregor assures him, as Sagan masticates and swallows the neurotoxin-laced meatball in tomato sauce. And just for the moment, he is content to relax in the luxury of truth: "Just leave everything to me, and I'll see that your concerns are communicated to the right people. Then we'll do something about your dish, and everything will work out for the best."

POOR PROGNOSIS

Maddy visits John regularly in hospital. At first it's a combination of natural compassion and edgy guilt; John is pretty much alone on this continent of lies, being both socially and occupationally isolated, and Maddy can convince herself that she's helping him feel in touch, motivating him to recover. Later on it's a necessity of work-she's keeping the lab going, even feeding the squirming white horror in the earth-filled glass jar, in John's absence-and partly boredom. It's not as if Bob's at home much. His work assignments frequently take him to new construction sites up and down the coast. When he is home they frequently argue into the small hours, picking at the scabs on their relationship with the sullen pinch-faced resentment of a couple fifty years gone in despair at the wrongness of their shared direction. So she escapes by visiting John and tells herself that she's doing it to keep his spirits up as he learns to use his prostheses.

"You shouldn't blame yourself," he tells her one afternoon when he notices her staring. "If you hadn't been around, I'd be dead. Neither of us was to know."

"Well." Maddy winces as he sits up, then raises the tongs to his face to nudge the grippers apart before reaching for the water glass. "That won't"-she changes direction in midsentence-"make it easier to cope."

"We're all going to have to cope," he says gnomically, before relaxing back against the stack of pillows. He's a lot better now than he was when he first arrived, delirious with his hand swollen and blackening, but the aftereffects of the mock-termite venom have weakened him in other ways. "I want to know why those things don't live closer to the coast. I mean, if they did, we'd never have bothered with the place. After the first landing, that is." He frowns. "If you can ask at the crown surveyor's office if there are any relevant records, that would help."

"The crown surveyor's not very helpful." That's an understatement. The crown surveyor is some kind of throwback; last time she went to his office to ask about maps of the northeast plateau he'd asked her whether her husband approved of her running around like this. "Maybe when you're out of here." She moves her chair closer to the side of the bed.

"Dr. Smythe says next week, possibly Monday or Tuesday." John sounds frustrated. "The pins and needles are still there." It's not just his right hand, lopped off below the elbow and replaced with a crude affair of padding and spring steel; the venom spread and some of his toes had to be amputated. He was having seizures when Maddy reached the hospital, four hours after he was bitten. She knows she saved his life, that if he'd gone out alone, he'd almost certainly have been killed, so why does she feel so bad about it?

"You're getting better," Maddy insists, covering his left hand with her own. "You'll see." She smiles encouragingly.

"I wish-" For a moment John looks at her; then he shakes his head minutely and sighs. He grips her hand with his fingers. They feel weak, and she can feel them trembling with the effort. "Leave Johnson"-the surveyor-"to me. I need to prepare an urgent report on the mock-termites before anyone else goes poking them."

"How much of a problem do you think they're going to be?"

"Deadly." He closes his eyes for a few seconds, then opens them again. "We've got to map their population distribution. And tell the governor-general's office. I counted twelve mounds in roughly an acre, but that was a rough sample, and you can't extrapolate from it. We also need to learn whether they've got any unusual swarming behaviors-like army ants, for example, or bees. Then we can start investigating whether any of our insecticides work on them. If the governor wants to start spinning out satellite towns next year, he's going to need to know what to expect. Otherwise, people are going to get hurt." Or killed, Or killed, Maddy adds silently. Maddy adds silently.

John is very lucky to be alive: Dr. Smythe compared his condition to a patient he'd once seen who'd been bitten by a rattler, and that was the result of a single bite by a small one. If the continental interior is full of the things, what are we going to do? If the continental interior is full of the things, what are we going to do? Maddy wonders. Maddy wonders.

"Have you seen any sign of her majesty feeding?" John asks, breaking into her train of thought.

Maddy shivers. "Turtle tree leaves go down well," she says quietly. "And she's given birth to two workers since we've had her. They chew the leaves to mulch, then regurgitate it for her."

"Oh, really? Do they deliver straight into her mandibles?"

Maddy squeezes her eyes tight. This is the bit she was really hoping John wouldn't ask her about. "No," she says faintly.

"Really?" He sounds curious.

"I think you'd better see for yourself." Because there's no way in hell that Maddy is going to tell him about the crude wooden spoons the mock-termite workers have been crafting from the turtle tree branches, or the feeding ritual, and what they did to the bumbler fly that got into the mock-termite pen through the chicken-wire screen.

He'll just have to see for himself.

RUSHMORE

The Korolev Korolev is huge for a flying machine but pretty small in nautical terms. Yuri is mostly happy about this. He's a fighter jock at heart, and he can't stand Navy bullshit. Still, it's a far cry from the MiG-17s he qualified in. It doesn't have a cockpit, or even a flight deck-it has a is huge for a flying machine but pretty small in nautical terms. Yuri is mostly happy about this. He's a fighter jock at heart, and he can't stand Navy bullshit. Still, it's a far cry from the MiG-17s he qualified in. It doesn't have a cockpit, or even a flight deck-it has a bridge bridge, like a ship, with the pilots, flight engineers, navigators, and observers sitting in a horseshoe around the captain's chair. When it's thumping across the sea barely ten meters above the wave tops at nearly five hundred kilometers per hour, it rattles and shakes until the crew's vision blurs. The big reactor-powered turbines in the tail pods roar, and the neutron detectors on the turquoise radiation bulkhead behind them tick like demented deathwatch beetles: the rest of the crew are huddled down below in the nose, with as much shielding between them and the engine rooms as possible. It's a white-knuckle ride, and Yuri has difficulty resisting the urge to curl his hands into fists because whenever he loses concentration his gut instincts are telling him to grab the stick and pull up. The ocean is no aviator's friend, and skimming across this infinite grey expanse between planet-sized landmasses forces Gagarin to confront the fact that he is not, by instinct, a sailor.

They're two days outbound from the new-old North America, forty thousand kilometers closer to home and still weeks away even though they're cutting the corner on their parabolic exploration track. The fatigue is getting to him as he takes his seat next to Misha-who is visibly wilting from his twelve-hour shift at the con-and straps himself in. "Anything to report?" he asks.

"I don't like the look of the ocean ahead," says Misha. He nods at the navigation station to Gagarin's left: Shaw, the Irish ensign, sees him and salutes.

"Permission to report, sir?" Gagarin nods. "We're coming up on a thermocline boundary suggestive of another radiator wall, this time surrounding uncharted seas. Dead reckoning says we're on course for home, but we haven't charted this route, and the surface waters are getting much cooler. Anytime now we should be spotting the radiators, and then we're going to have to start keeping a weather eye out."

Gagarin sighs: exploring new uncharted oceans seemed almost romantic at first, but now it's a dangerous but routine task. "You have kept the towed array at altitude?" he asks.

"Yes, sir," Misha responds. The towed array is basically a kite-borne radar, tugged along behind the Korolev Korolev on the end of a kilometer of steel cable to give them some warning of obstacles ahead. "Nothing showing-" on the end of a kilometer of steel cable to give them some warning of obstacles ahead. "Nothing showing-"

Right on cue, one of the radar operators raises a hand and waves three fingers.

"-Correction, radiators ahoy, range three hundred, bearing . . . Okay, let's see it."

"Maintain course," Gagarin announces. "Let's throttle back to two hundred once we clear the radiators, until we know what we're running into." He leans over to his left, watching over Shaw's shoulder.

The next hour is unpleasantly interesting. As they near the radiator fins, the water and the air above it cool down. The denser air helps the Korolev Korolev generate lift, which is good, but they need it, which is bad. The sky turns grey and murky, and rain falls in continuous sheets that hammer across the armored bridge windows like machine-gun fire. The ride becomes gusty as well as bumpy, until Gagarin orders two of the nose turbines started just in case they hit a downdraft. The big jet engines guzzle fuel and are usually shut down in cruise flight, used only for takeoff runs and extraordinary situations. But punching through a cold front and a winter storm isn't flying as usual as far as Gagarin's concerned, and the one nightmare all ekranoplan drivers face is running into a monster ocean wave nose first at cruise speed. generate lift, which is good, but they need it, which is bad. The sky turns grey and murky, and rain falls in continuous sheets that hammer across the armored bridge windows like machine-gun fire. The ride becomes gusty as well as bumpy, until Gagarin orders two of the nose turbines started just in case they hit a downdraft. The big jet engines guzzle fuel and are usually shut down in cruise flight, used only for takeoff runs and extraordinary situations. But punching through a cold front and a winter storm isn't flying as usual as far as Gagarin's concerned, and the one nightmare all ekranoplan drivers face is running into a monster ocean wave nose first at cruise speed.

Presently the navigators identify a path between two radiator fins, and Gagarin authorizes it. He's beginning to relax as the huge monoliths loom out of the grey clouds ahead when one of the sharp-eyed pilots shouts: "Icebergs!"

"Fucking hell." Gagarin sits bolt upright. "Start all boost engines! Bring up full power on both reactors! Lower flaps to nine degrees and get us the hell out of this!" He turns to Shaw, his face grey. "Bring the towed array aboard, now."

"Shit." Misha starts flipping switches on his console, which doubles as damage control central. "Icebergs?" "Icebergs?"

The huge ground-effect ship lurches and roars as the third pilot starts bleeding hot exhaust gases from the running turbines to start the other twelve engines. They've probably got less than six hours' fuel left, and it takes fifteen minutes on all engines to get off the water, but Gagarin's not going to risk meeting an iceberg head-on in ground-effect. The ekranoplan can function as a huge, lumbering, ungainly seaplane if it has to; but it doesn't have the engine power to do so on reactors alone, or to leapfrog floating mountains of ice. And hitting an iceberg isn't on Gagarin's to-do list.

The rain sluices across the roof of the bridge, and now the sky is louring and dark, the huge walls of the radiator slabs bulking in twilight to either side. The rain is freezing, supercooled droplets that smear the Korolev Korolev's wings with a lethal sheen of ice. "Where are the leading-edge heaters?" Gagarin asks. "Come on!"

"Working, sir," calls the number four pilot. Moments later the treacherous rain turns to hailstones, rattling and booming but fundamentally unlikely to stick to the flight surfaces and build up weight until it flips the ship over. "I think we're going to-"

A white and ghostly wall comes into view in the distance, hammering toward the bridge windows like a runaway freight train. Gagarin's stomach lurches. "Pull up, pull up!" The first and second pilots are struggling with the hydraulically boosted controls as the Korolev Korolev's nose pitches up almost ten degrees, right out of ground-effect. "Come on!"

They make it.

The iceberg slams out of the darkness of the storm and the sea like the edge of the world; fifty meters high and as massive as mountains, it has lodged against the aperture between the radiator fins. Billions of tons of pack ice has stopped dead in the water, creaking and groaning with the strain as it butts up against the infinite. The Korolev Korolev skids over the leading edge of the iceberg, her keel barely clearing it by ten meters, and continues to climb laboriously into the darkening sky. The blazing eyes of her reactors burn slick scars into the ice below. Then they're into the open water beyond the radiator fins, and although the sea below them is an expanse of whiteness, they are also clear of icy mountains. skids over the leading edge of the iceberg, her keel barely clearing it by ten meters, and continues to climb laboriously into the darkening sky. The blazing eyes of her reactors burn slick scars into the ice below. Then they're into the open water beyond the radiator fins, and although the sea below them is an expanse of whiteness, they are also clear of icy mountains.

"Shut down engines three through fourteen," Gagarin orders once he regains enough control to keep the shakes out of his voice. "Take us back down to thirty meters, lieutenant. Meteorology, what's our situation like?"

"Arctic or worse, Comrade General." The meteorologist, a hatchet-faced woman from Minsk, shakes her head. "Air temperature outside is thirty below, pressure is high." The rain and hail have vanished along with the radiators and the clear seas-and the light, for it is now fading toward nightfall.

"Hah. Misha, what do you think?"

"I think we've found our way into the freezer, sir. Permission to put the towed array back up?"

Gagarin squints into the darkness. "Lieutenant, keep us at two hundred steady. Misha, yes, get the towed array back out again. We need to see where we're going."

The next three hours are simultaneously boring and fraught. It's darker and colder than a Moscow apartment in winter during a power cut; the sea below is ice from horizon to horizon, cracking and groaning and splintering in a vast expanding V-shape behind the Korolev Korolev's pressure wake. The spectral ruins of the Milky Way galaxy stretch overhead, reddened and stirred by alien influences. Misha supervises the relaunch of the towed array, then hands over to Major Suvurov before stiffly standing and going below to the unquiet bunk room. Gagarin sticks to a quarter-hourly routine of reports, making sure that he knows what everyone is doing. Bridge crew come and go for their regular station changes. It is routine, and deadly with it. Then: "Sir, I have a return. Permission to report?"

"Go ahead." Gagarin nods to the navigator. "Where?"

"Bearing zero-it's horizon to horizon-there's a crest rising up to ten meters above the surface. Looks like landfall, range one sixty and closing. Uh, there's a gap and a more distant landfall at thirty-five degrees, peak rising to two hundred meters."

"That's some cliff." Gagarin frowns. He feels drained, his brain hazy with the effort of making continual decisions after six hours in the hot seat and more than two days of this thumping, roaring progression. He glances round. "Major? Please summon Colonel Gorodin. Helm, come about to zero thirty-five. We'll take a look at the gap and see if it's a natural inlet. If this is a continental mass, we might as well take a look before we press on for home."

For the next hour they drive onward into the night, bleeding off speed and painting in the gaps in the radar map of the coastline. It's a bleak frontier, inhumanly cold, with a high interior plateau. There are indeed two headlands, promontories jutting into the coast from either side of a broad, deep bay. Hills rise from one of the promontories and across the bay. Something about it strikes Gagarin as strangely familiar, if only he could place it. Another echo of Earth? But it's too cold by far, a deep Antarctic chill. And he's not familiar with the coastline of Zemlya, the myriad inlets off the northeast passage, where the submarines cruise on eternal vigilant patrols to defend the frontier of the Rodina.

A thin predawn light stains the icy hilltops grey as the Korolev cruises slowly between the headlands-several kilometers apart-and into the wide-open bay beyond. Gagarin raises his binoculars and scans the distant coastline. There are structures, straight lines! "Another ruined civilization?" he asks quietly.

"Maybe, sir. Think anyone could survive in this weather?" The temperature has dropped another ten degrees in the predawn chill, although the ekranoplan is kept warm by the outflow of its two Kuznetsov aviation reactors.

"Hah."

Gagarin begins to sweep the northern coast when Major Suvurov stands up. "Sir! Over there!"

"Where?" Gagarin glances at him. Suvurov is quivering with anger, or shock, or something else. He, too, has his binoculars out.

"Over there! On the southern hillside."

"Where-" He brings his binoculars to bear as the dawnlight spills across the shattered stump of an immense skyscraper.

There is a hillside behind it, a jagged rift where the land has risen up a hundred meters. It reeks of antiquity, emphasized by the carvings in the headland. Here is what the expedition has been looking for all along, the evidence that they are not alone.

"My God." Misha swears, shocked into politically incorrect language.

"Marx," says Gagarin, studying the craggy features of the nearest head. "I've seen this before, this sort of thing. The Americans have a memorial like it. Mount Rushmore, they call it."

"Don't you mean Easter Island?" asks Misha. "Sculptures left by a vanished people . . ."

"Nonsense! Look there, isn't that Lenin? And Stalin, of course." Even though the famous moustache is cracked and half of it has fallen away from the cliff. "But who's that next to them?"

Gagarin brings his binoculars to focus on the fourth head. Somehow it looks far less weathered than the others, as if added as an afterthought, perhaps some kind of insane statement about the mental health of its vanished builders. Both antennae have long since broken off, and one of the mandibles is damaged, but the eyeless face is still recognizably unhuman. The insectile head stares eyelessly out across the frozen ocean, an enigma on the edge of a devastated island continent. "I think we've found the brother socialists," he mutters to Misha, his voice pitched low so that it won't carry over the background noise on the flight deck. "And you know what? Something tells me we didn't want to."

ANTHROPIC ERROR

As the summer dry season grinds on, Maddy finds herself spending more time at John's home-cum-laboratory, doing the cleaning and cooking for herself in addition to maintaining the lab books and feeding the live specimens. During her afternoons visiting in the hospital she helps him write up his reports. Losing his right hand has hit John hard: he's teaching himself to write again, but his handwriting is slow and childish.

She finds putting in extra hours at the lab preferable to the empty and uncomfortable silences back in the two-bedroom prefab she shares with Bob. Bob is away on field trips to outlying ranches and quarries half the time and working late the other half. At least, he says he's working late. Maddy has her suspicions. He gets angry if she isn't around to cook, and she gets angry right back at him when he expects her to clean, and they've stopped having sex. Their relationship is in fact going downhill rapidly, drying up and withering away in the arid continental heat, until going to work in John's living room among the cages and glass vivaria and books feels like taking refuge. She has taken to spending more time there, working late for real, and when Bob is away she sleeps on the wicker settee in the dining room.

One day, more than a month later than expected, Dr. Smythe finally decides that John is well enough to go home. Embarrass ingly, she's not there on the afternoon when he's finally discharged. Instead, she's in the living room, typing up a report on a subspecies of the turtle tree and its known parasites, when the screen door bangs and the front door opens. "Maddy?"

She squeaks before she can stop herself. "John?" She's out of the chair to help him with the battered suitcase the cabbie half-helpfully left on the front stoop.

"Maddy." He smiles tiredly. "I've missed being home."

"Come on in." She closes the screen door and carries the suitcase over to the stairs. He's painfully thin now, a far cry from the slightly-too-plump entomologist she'd met on the colony liner. "I've got lots of stuff for you to read-but not until you're stronger. I don't want you overworking and putting yourself back in hospital!"

"You're an angel." He stands uncertainly in his own living room, looking around as if he hadn't quite expected to see it again. "I'm looking forward to seeing the termites."

She shivers abruptly. "I'm not. Come on." She climbs the stairs with the suitcase, not looking back. She pushes through the door into the one bedroom that's habitable-he's been using the other one to store samples-and dumps the case on the rough dressing table. She's been up here before, first to collect his clothing while he was in hospital and later to clean and make sure there are no poisonous spiders lurking in the corners. It smells of camphor and dusty memories. She turns to face him. "Welcome home." She smiles experimentally.

He looks around. "You've been cleaning."

"Not much." She feels her face heat.

He shakes his head. "Thank you."

She can't decide what to say. "No, no, it's not like that. If I wasn't here I'd be . . ."

John shuffles. She blinks at him, feeling stupid and foolish. "Do you have room for a lodger?" she asks.

He looks at her, and she can't maintain eye contact. It's all going wrong, not what she wanted.

"Things going badly?" he asks, cocking his head on one side and staring at her. "Forgive me, I don't mean to pry-"

"No, no, it's quite all right." She sniffs. Takes a breath. "This continent breaks things. Bob hasn't been the same since we arrived, or I, I haven't. I need to put some space between us, for a bit."

"Oh."

"Oh." She's silent for a while. "I can pay rent-"