was tucked behind trees and bushes, bare though they were. Two very large chairs awaited them there, the harshness of the metal-wire shapes softened by wine-red cushioning.

A black-haired woman in a patterned green-and-gold dress, which Bleys believed to be a modern version of an ancient oriental style, was already there, seated in one of the chairs. She stood up as they neared and took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were violet in color, he noted, and they had an epicanthic fold although her skin was pale.

Dahno did not introduce them.

"It's safe," she said to Dahno; as she continued speaking to him, her eyes turned to Bleys.

"All the anti-surveillance gear is working, there's a vapor barrier over the top of the wall to inhibit pressure-sensing devices and blur out optical systems—and all the people at these tables are ours."

"And the staff?" Dahno said. She turned her attention back to him.

"They won't get close to you," she said.

At Dahno's nod, she turned and walked away, gathering up the occupants of the other tables as she went. "And is ^//<?safe?" Bleys said softly.

"Yes," said Dahno. "She's one of the Others I brought with me. You don't know her because she went through training before you did."

"Then why don't I recognize her from our files?" Bleys asked. Dahno grinned.

"She's had her appearance edited," he said.

"All right," Bleys said; and before his brother could act, he took the chair that allowed him to sit with his back to the courtyard wall, allowing him to peer through the branches at the door to the restaurant.

Dahno grinned again, and reached for the second chair, pulling it around the table so that he, too, could sit with his back to the wall.

Are we just squabbling over seats? Bleys wondered. Or is it more than that?

It did not escape his notice that by making them sit side by side, his brother had made it harder for either of them to look, into the other's face.

"I've already ordered for both of us," Dahno said. "I didn't think you'd mind, since this is work, after all, rather than a dining experience."

"Knowing you, it'll be a fine meal in any case," Bleys said. "Did you order juice for me?"

"Several varieties," Dahno said. "You know it won't taste the same, here on Earth. I'd have gotten you Association orange juice, but I don't think anyone here imports it." He laughed.

"I also ordered several wines," he went on. "You can try them or not, as you choose. I know you don't care for alcoholic beverages much, but you might want to taste some of these—this is Earth, after all, where wine was born."

"I've tasted Old Earth wines," Bleys reminded his brother. "I've been on this planet before, remember."

"Right," Dahno said. "That was our meeting in—" He paused. "—you remember. But that was half the world away and years ago."

"Oh, I'll try some," Bleys said, relenting. "In fact, I look for you to give me a recommendation or two."

"Count on it," Dahno said. "I've learned a lot in my year here."

As he spoke a serving cart holding a series of shiny metal coverings was pushed through the restaurant door, to be immediately intercepted by the woman who had just left them. She took its control from the server who had brought it out and began to push it, floating above the grass, toward Bleys and Dahno. She was now wearing a costume nearly identical to that worn by the server she had replaced—black trousers and a frilly white shirt set off by a small black cravat held in place by a pearl stickpin.

By unspoken agreement, Bleys and Dahno suspended meaningful conversation as the woman approached and began serving them, elegantly lifting the shiny covers to reveal two large china plates filled with a breaded meat that had been topped with a brown sauce, along with carrots, broccoli and a white substance that looked almost, but not quite, like mashed potatoes.

"How is Henry?" Dahno asked. "I got your note that Joshua had a daughter some months back, and I've been wondering how Henry reacted to that."

"They named her Miriam, by the way," Bleys said. "But you know Uncle Henry's not much for letting his reactions show." He paused to watch the woman as she reached into the cloth-obscured lower portion of the cart to produce an ice bucket, half a dozen wineglasses of varying sizes and three antique-looking bottles with paper labels.

"He planned to take a week off to go back to the farm," Bleys continued, "but he wanted to wait until Ruth's mother left—she'd come over to help out; there wouldn't have been room otherwise. But that took about a month, and if I didn't know better, I'd say Uncle Henry was on pins and needles the whole time."

"I can't even imagine it," Dahno said.

The woman, Bleys saw, was having difficulty with the corkscrew. It was not surprising; cork was largely unknown on the Younger Worlds, where all bottled products were sealed by molded caps, on which a very different implement was used. Dahno, still cheerful, reached over and gave her a demonstration on how to handle the corkscrew.

When they had been served the woman withdrew with the cart.

"Is there anything else you haven't told me about your organization?" Bleys asked as he took a forkful of the white substance; it was mildly spicy.

"Well, at another level up," his brother said, "we've been cultivating people who already have credentials in the academic and journalistic fields. We've got a few on the payroll already, people who will slant their reports and conclusions just a little to our side, when the time is right for that."

"How far will they go for you?"

"So far—not far," Dahno answered. "But time will pass while they earn their money fairly easily; and eventually they'll find it difficult to cut themselves off when the earning gets harder."

"I suspect there's more to it than that," Bleys said.

"True," Dahno answered. "On the one hand, we're going to have them all make the occasional small statement they wouldn't normally make—not as something we need them to say, but only to make it harder for them to backtrack on their records if the spirit of rebellion ever rises up in them."

He paused to cut off another portion of his entree and raise it to his mouth.

"Of course, people who can be bought so easily have likely been bought, in one way or another, in the past; so we're quietly digging into their histories. I believe we'll eventually have blackmail material on most of them."

"Sometimes blackmail just makes people angry," Bleys said. "That can lead to even bigger trouble."

"I know that," Dahno said, a hint of asperity in his voice. "Blackmail won't even be hinted at, except as a last resort." He paused, thinking as he chewed.

"My own belief," he went on, the touch of emotion gone, "is that people who'd let us influence what they say aren't particularly concerned for the integrity of their work anyway."

"What about my idea of trying to infiltrate the Final Encyclopedia?" Bleys asked.

"It's difficult," Dahno said. "Those people really restrict access." He smiled. "But I did it," he said.

"You!”

"No, I don't mean me personally," Dahno said. "It's not likely I could fool them as to who I was, even with the best phony documentation. But I've got two people in already."

"As staff?"

"No," Dahno said. "I got a couple of our pet academics accepted as visiting scholars."

"That's probably not as useful as a staff position," Bleys said, "but I'm willing to bet anyone who joins that staff is thoroughly checked."

"You know it," Dahno said. "And there's not much turnover, either." He cut into the remains of his veal.

"Your friend Hal Mayne seems to still be there," he said casually.

A bit later Bleys leaned back in his chair. He had tried the coffee Dahno pressed on him, a very different beverage from the coffee he had drunk on this planet before. It was an old regional specialty, his brother had explained, for which he had developed a taste; but Bleys found he did not care for its thick sweetness, and so had been sipping lightly from a glass of a red wine whose name—Chateau La Fleur St. Bonnet—Dahno tossed off lightly.

"The fountainhead of wines, France," Dahno said, apparently in an expansive mood once more.

"Really?"

"No, not really. Not in the sense of—say, having invented the idea. But the French vineyards—some of them—still rate as legendary names."

Dahno was swirling a large amount of cognac in a huge round glass, pausing now and then to raise it before his nose, before taking a small drink.

"You picked out a fine meal, brother," Bleys said now. "I appreciate it. But we need to do some serious talking, including going over our plans in more depth, and I don't feel comfortable talking in the open—do you have a safe place we can go?"

"We could go to your hotel room," Dahno said. He shrugged. "Or we could pick some other hotel... with a random choice of hotels and our technology, we'd be safe enough."

Startled by his brother's sudden casualness, Bleys agreed when Dahno suggested that he, Bleys, go back to his hotel first; Dahno himself had an errand to take care of, he told Bleys, but he would be along shortly.

Bleys had been in his room for more than two hours when the room communicator beeped. It was conveying a printed message from Dahno, saying that something had come up.

"Take a flight to Nairobi," the message said. "There's a room waiting for you in the Sandman Hotel. I’ll come to you there."

With little choice, Bleys did as Dahno directed, pausing only to send a message from a public kiosk in the terminal; but he ended up waiting in his room in Nairobi for nearly a full day, until finally another message appeared, sending him to South America.

CHAPTER 32

The brothers finally came together again three days later, shortly before noon on a thinly grassed plaza set high in the Andes. On three sides of the plaza the gray stones of a small and ancient city's low buildings were forgiven by pastel-washed trimmings and the gaily-colored clothing of the citizens. The fourth side was a laid-stone walkway that overlooked a deep drop to the floor of a valley. From their seats at an elderly wooden table on the grass Bleys and Dahno, protected from the cold wind by a small weather buffer, could look over and beyond that walkway, across the distance-misted valley, at farther ranges of mountains layered blue and purple before the jagged horizon.

"I think this is my favorite spot on the whole planet," Dahno said, his gaze directed out into the great chasm. "Sometimes you can look down on the eagles."

He brought his eyes back to his brother.

"You know about eagles, don't you?" he said. "I know you've always liked to read about Earth's animals. This whole trip ought to be a treat for you."

"It is," said Bleys. "I even went to the animal park outside Nairobi before my shuttle left for Buenos Aires."

"One of the great things about Earth," Dahno said, seeming to have dropped into a more contemplative mood, "is that the animals are different from continent to continent. Africa is famous for its animals, of course, but Asia and the Americas have their own, very different, animal populations. On the Younger Worlds the only variances across planets are climatic."

"Old Earth has the advantage of a biosphere established through millions of years of evolution," Bleys pointed out. "The Younger

Worlds can't match that in only a handful of centuries, particularly when they're limited to the commercially viable breeding stocks that can be transported over interstellar distances."

"I imagine you saw elephants and lions in Africa," Dahno said. "Wait until we get to North America, where you can see a grizzly bear in its habitat—that is the undisputed king!"

Bleys kept up his side of the conversation until they were interrupted by a waiter who came walking over from a small bistro Bleys had not previously noticed, tucked in as it was on the ground floor of one of the elderly buildings on the south side of the plaza. Bleys wondered what security measures Dahno could have taken in this setting; he was sure there must be something—just as he was sure he had his own measures in place.

Once more Dahno displayed an intimate knowledge of the menu and an easy familiarity with the waiter, insisting on doing the ordering for them both.

He's nervous, Bleys thought, as he watched his brother discussing with the waiter minute details of their meals to come. That kind of conversation isn't his style.

The only times Bleys had ever seen his brother act in what could be described as a mercurial fashion had been those periods when Dahno had been under great stress. The spectacle disturbed him: the nervousness he believed he was seeing made him question how well he knew his brother, and that unexpected flaw in his perception, when combined with the fact that there must be something going on to make Dahno act this way... suddenly Bleys found himself in unfamiliar territory.

Abruptly, he was on his feet and striding toward the cliff's edge only a few meters away, leaving Dahno and the waiter deep in the subject of wines. That edge was guarded by a low stone wall, from the top of which a black-enameled iron rail grew to a height just below his waist.

He looked over that edge, as if daring himself to be uncomfortable with the height. Was he becoming nervous himself? he wondered. He had not planned the move that took him away from the table; he had been on his feet and in motion before he thought about it at all. It was unlike him to react like that.

What was he reacting to, after all? He had only been thinking that his brother was acting unusually, but what did that mean? No human being ever really got to know another so well that he could never be surprised.

Behind him, discussion ceased, and Bleys heard the sound of a chair being pushed back. Dahno would be walking up behind him in a moment.

Suddenly, Bleys was very conscious that he was standing at the edge of a great chasm, his back to a brother who had become a stranger. Unbidden, his left hand tightened on the iron railing in front of him ... he could hear steps approaching from behind. . . .

Ridiculously thought; and made himself hold his position.

"It is spectacular, isn't it?" Dahno said, coming up on Bleys' right.

Bleys realized that his eyes were looking out, unseeing, across the great deep drop, at the nearest range of mountains. He slowly tilted his head downward, feeling the muscles around his eyes relaxing as they refocused on the winding silver thread that was a river far below, shrouded in the hazy shadows below the mountains.

He leaned forward a little, to look over the railing and straight down from the edge of the cliff, conscious all the while that his brother's eyes might be on him. The uneven rock face below him was pitted and scarred, and there were remnants of alien-seeming blue, red and white patches, as if someone had once painted some sort of sign on the top of the cliff. Below that, the rock of the mountain bulged outward, blocking his view of the place in the valley below where the river passed closest.

"I've never seen anything like this," Bleys said, still looking down.

Although the food was good—at least to Bleys' indifferent palate— the meal was a disaster. Dahno tried to keep a conversation going, jumping from subject to subject, but well before the after-dinner drinks came he had lapsed into a moody silence.

"I've enjoyed what I've seen of this planet," Bleys said, finally determining to get to the point. "And what you've told me of the projects you've gotten up and running already—it's impressive. You've certainly done exactly what you were sent here to do."

Dahno's head came up, eyes focusing on Bleys. His expression was bleak as he waited for Bleys to continue.

"I think you know what I'm about to ask, brother," Bleys went on. "There's something else going on, that you don't want to tell me about. And it's important enough that you're not your usual self. I think you must know I can see that in you."

Dahno looked back across the table at him for a long, silent moment.

"All right," he said finally, his broad face grimacing in distaste. "All right. I knew you couldn't be easily taken in, but I had to try it." He shrugged. "Because I didn't like any of the other alternatives.

"I guess you could call me a bit of a coward," he went on. "But I've been trying to avoid having to have this discussion. You're the only family I've got, aside from Henry and Joshua, and whether you believe it or not, that's important to me."

"I believe it," Bleys said. "I have similar feelings, I think."

"I know you do," Dahno said. "But I don't delude myself into believing those feelings would keep you from throwing me overboard if your plans required it."

His face had hardened as he spoke, his jaw setting. The hand that had been holding his glass clenched—and then opened spasmodically, the glass dropping to spill its contents on the tabletop.

"Throw you overboard?" Bleys said. "What brought that into your head? I told you, when you signed on with me, that you'd always have a place with me, and that if you didn't want it, you could retire in comfort." He put his own glass down and raised both hands slightly, holding them in the air above the table, demonstrating openness.

"You know about my long-range mission," he went on. "It's all-important, because it's aimed at saving the human race. But you're no threat to that plan, brother—in fact, you've been a great help to me, and still are, as far as I can tell. Why would I want to get rid of you?"

"That's just what I've been wondering," Dahno said. His face was, once more, bleak; and Bleys reminded himself that his brother was a consummate actor.

"I know you believe in your plan—your mission,'''' Dahno went on, speaking before Bleys could respond. He shook his head.

"But I don't believe in it! I don't believe in this danger you see threatening the whole race. And I don't want to die for some theory I don't even believe in."

Bleys looked at his brother for a long moment, before replying.

"Is this because you got hurt on Ceta?"

"No!" Dahno said. He paused.

"No," he said again, more quietly. "Although maybe you could say that injury opened my eyes, made me think a little more. But past is past, and doesn't worry me. The future, though, is another matter."

"And the future now looks different to you? Different from how you used to see it?"

"Yes," Dahno said. "You think long-term—I know that. And I think short- and medium-term—you've always known that."

"But you've gotten more than you ever thought possible—you told me that yourself—by joining me," Bleys said. "And the long-term results you don't believe in can only come about long after we're both dead and forgotten.... It's the chance of war, isn't it?"

"In a way," Dahno said. "I'll admit that when you first estimated that the Exotics would hire the Dorsai to oppose us, it frightened me. But I began to realize you could be right—that the rest of the Younger Worlds could successfully oppose the Dorsai, and possibly Old Earth as well."

"But?"

"But even victory in your war would destroy the whole structure of the Worlds as we know them," Dahno said. He shook his head, as if trying to scatter some haze obstructing his vision.

"I know you probably think I've always been motivated only by money and power," he went on—and then, unexpectedly, he chuckled. "Even I believed that, until I was forced to think about the situation. But I realized, lying there recovering in Favored of God, that I wanted more than that."

"So what else do you want?"

"Do you know—I'm still not sure," Dahno said. His smile became somewhat sheepish. "Put that way, I guess I sound pretty confused. But I'm starting to think I need to find some other purpose in life."

Bleys looked at him for a long moment.

"And my purposes aren't good enough for you?" he said at last. "I just said I don't believe in them!" Dahno said, his smile fading.

"All right, all right," Bleys said, raising a hand as if holding his brother off. "I can't say you didn't give my way a try. So what do you want to do?"

"I want out," Dahno said.

"What does that mean?"

"I just want out of my responsibilities to the Others," Dahno said. "I want to just be able to go off and do whatever strikes me as interesting." He smiled. "And I want to take enough credit to let me do what I want."

His expression became more serious.

"I brought in a lot of that credit, after all."

"Yes, you did," Bleys said. He shook his head, but he did not mean the motion as a negation.

"I think you're making a mistake," he said. "But if that's what you want, I'll go along with it—as long as I can be sure you won't interfere with what I'm doing."

Dahno laughed.

"What could I ever say that would make a guarantee you'd believe?" he said. "You know me better than anyone, after all." Bleys just watched his face.

"But because you know me," Dahno went on, "don't you know that I don't want to play in your league?" Another one of his Old Earth expressions?

"But my 'league,' as you call it, includes everything, don't you see that?" Bleys said. "I can't help that. It's just the way it is."

"But you can leave me alone, can't you?" Dahno asked.

"I said earlier you're no threat to my plans," Bleys said. He shook his head. "I think even if you were trying to oppose me, it wouldn't make much difference."

Dahno raised his head, his eyes narrowing, but Bleys held up a hand to stop him.

"I know how that sounds," he said; "I didn't mean it as an insult. I was speaking in terms of the historical forces—I've told you about them before."

"I know," Dahno said, subsiding. "You're reminding me again that none of us really has much weight when it comes to those forces of yours."

A small bell tinkled from across the plaza, and Dahno raised his head and looked behind him.

"I've got to go," he said, rising abruptly to his feet.

As he strode away he looked back over his shoulder. His face was veiled and distant.

CHAPTER 33

Bleys lay on his bed in a Lima hotel room, in a darkness relieved only by the ceiling's artificial starscape. This ceiling was unusual, because it offered him not just a variety of clear sky settings, but also clouds; and he had chosen a sky that included the planet's moon, Luna, as a thin crescent passing between and behind occasional thin clouds.

This was the kind of sky his distant ancestors had slept under. He wondered what influence skies like this might have had on the way humanity developed; perhaps they encouraged people to wonder, to dream, to imagine.

It didn't help him sleep, though; and after a while he rose. Although his mind was churning with the need to articulate some of his thoughts, he was unable to write. He sat there for a long moment, looking at the piece of hotel stationery before him.

Was someone watching him, even now?

Since the day he realized that anyone with the proper equipment to penetrate his security could read his thoughts in his notes, he had not often indulged his habit of writing notes to his own memory, even though he always coded the notes as he wrote them. Any code could be broken eventually.

Still, the process had been soothing to him, as if it allowed him to get a grasp on situations his mind was having trouble dealing with.

His hand put the stylus back down, atop the paper. All the best hotels pledged that their rooms were checked frequently for spy devices; but hotels were not likely to be watching for someone as clever as Dahno. It did not escape Bleys' memory that it was Dahno who had made all of Bleys' travel arrangements.

Pulling on a casual evening suit, Bleys went down to the street, hoping to elude any surprised pursuit by hypothetical watchers. He pointed his wristpad at an automated taxi just dropping a fare at an entertainment facility down the block, calling it to him; and went to another luxury-class hotel. There he checked into a single room, explaining that his luggage would be along shortly and paying the bill in advance. Dahno would be able to trace his use of the credit chip, but not quickly enough to set up surveillance inside the room.

In the room, with a glass of ginger ale already forgotten at his elbow, he began to write.

I'm surprised to find that I still haven't figured out what Dahno is up to. I came to Old Earth suspecting him of clandestine dealings with some of my Others—dealings perhaps as simple as efforts to safeguard himself from possible future dangers. Those would not concern me overmuch: if Dahno, or others in the organization, want more power, more wealth, it doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't endanger my own plans.

The problem is, I have no way of determining what my brother's motives really are—because I can't rely on anything he lets me see.

I'm used to seeing my brother displaying reactions; in almost every case, they're covering his true motives, his real plans.

He can't ever be completely open—I think because he can never bring himself to trust anyone. His obsession with ensuring his own independence demands that he always have an ace in the hole— which means that no matter what motive or plan he may reveal, there's always a deeper layer.

When he tells me he merely wants to retire, and that he's no danger to my plans, it's only part of the truth. Which may as well be a lie.

He tells me he cares for me, his brother; I know he's telling the truth, but it's not the whole truth—he's shown before that in time of crisis he'll abandon me to save himself.

Bleys paused, rereading his encoded thoughts on the paper before him. He wondered if he had not just written an epitaph for a portion of his life.

For all that he alluded to a need to have some purpose in his life, I don't think Dahno has yet seen that the weakness in his character is that he has no goals, no purpose. In his deep-rooted selfishness, he lives only for the near-term; he thinks farther into the future only in terms of its potential for danger, and he has no room or time or concern for others.

I say this knowing full well that at times he has displayed generosity, and has even risked his life to help someone else. But my brother is a complex person, and while the cheerful, charming Dahno is a real person, so is the Dahno who cares only to get his own way, in everything.

He has always insisted that he's nothing like our mother, but in fact, he's very like her, and only seeks to gratify his own needs.

His needs arc for autonomy, which requires power and wealth, and a challenge, a game he can play to test himself against life. He's too intelligent to be truly sybaritic, to be lured by fame, money, sex, or the more normal vices.

Perhaps it would be accurate to say that he's lured by the feeling that comes when one plays God. But at the same time, he's careful to avoid taking on so great a challenge that he'd be likely to lose. Losing isn't godlike.

In short, Dahno would like to live in a world in which he's perpetually manipulating people, sitting at the center of his spider's web and controlling events by the strings he pulls in secret. And he's too short-sighted to see that even that must grow wearying, eventually— and that there's nothing more behind it.

Without realizing the full implications of what I was doing, when I took control of the organization he had built, I took away his main tool. His only real choices were to contest my control, or move to a new field.

Old Earth may be that new field. He's leaving the Younger Worlds behind.

The problem for both of us is that Old Earth has to be involved in my plans.

Dahno wants his own kingdom of challenges and rewards. He feels like a god, and I'm the other god in the mix (he thinks; he doesn't believe in Hal Mayne). So I must represent a threat to him.

Bleys wrote on, the words pouring out from his subconscious, as if they had been penned in there. The bubbles in the ginger ale were slowing down.

Within his range, my brother is a deep thinker. He'll have planned well, and set up plans and sub-plans, layer upon layer—I may never know all the contingencies he's prepared for, all the details. But I see now why he was so diligent about carrying out that program of disinformation, by which I thought we were deceiving the Exotics, the Final Encyclopedia, and any other interested party, about our true origins and our intentions. Even years ago he was looking ahead, looking at the possibility he might want to bury his past in confusion and start over.

The muscles of his hand were tired and stiff from the precision with which he had formed the block capitals he generally used for his notes. He felt drained, as if he had managed to sweat some fever out of his system.

He leaned back in his chair and reached for the glass of ginger ale. It had gone flat, but he had written so quickly the ice had not completely melted. He drained the glass, feeling its coolness pass down his throat and pool in his stomach.

He rose from the chair and stretched, yawning in a release from tension. Suddenly he felt he could sleep. He fed the sheets of paper into the disposal slot, and turned to leave; and paused—and sat down once more, picking up another sheet.

I've missed writing these notes. Perhaps the stress of being isolated, in a dangerous situation, makes me need to do so again.

Until this evening, I had no trouble suppressing the habit. That may be due to my evolving relationship with Toni: I'm talking with her more and more—and with myself, less and less.

This suggests a potential problem. My resolve has always been that no emotional involvement or other human failing would be allowed to divert me from my life's work. Toni seems to have no intention of diverting me from that purpose, but the danger of that happening really lies less in her than in myself—the danger that I might let myself weaken.

I told her once I had moments of weakening. What I didn't tell her was that she was partly the cause of some of them.

It took this trip, with its separation from Toni, and Henry, and all the others who revolve around me—and the smell of danger—to open my eyes.

I tell myself there's no need to drive any of them away, that I'm strong enough to keep my inner self controlled—but am I deceiving myself with wishful thinking, when I say that?

I can trust Toni, and Henry. I can even trust Dahno, within limits.

It's myself I have to guard against.

Before he left the room, Bleys wrote another, shorter note—one he did not destroy. Rather, he folded it over several times; and then carried it with him as he descended to the street. He made two calls from a public terminal, one of which brought him another automated cab.

Back in front of his original hotel, the folded paper was lying on the floor of the cab as Bleys stepped out; and as he did so, a blond woman in evening dress hurried up to engage the cab. Bleys politely held the door for her before entering his hotel.

When Dahno showed up the following morning, Bleys insisted on going someplace where they could talk safely; and after a certain amount of verbal sparring, Bleys eventually found himself sitting on a patch of bare dirt in a small park, his back to the trunk of a large tree. A small part of his mind registered, and regretted, that it was not a palm tree, but he dismissed the thought.

Two meters in front of him Dahno, still on his feet, leaned against the back of an ancient stone monument, the meaning of which Bleys had not attempted to figure out. At one time the monument might have been the only feature standing out on this piece of ground, but the tree that had gained a start near it now overshadowed it completely, and under its branches, between its trunk and the monument, the brothers were, in effect, in a small room of their own.

Dahno had not been willing to sit on the ground; and in fact, Bleys thought, he looked uncomfortable even standing.

"Thanks for agreeing to talk, brother," Bleys said. "Can anyone overhear us?"

"How can I tell?" Dahno said, apparently sulking. "You insisted on finding a place neither of us could have rigged in advance, but that means none of our security gear is here."

"Except what we're both carrying," Bleys said. "I didn't want to risk trying to bring the Newtonians' bubble device through customs—but you know I was asking who you have out there."

"All right," Dahno said, after a short silence. "I do have people 'out there,' as you put it. I'm not sure how many actually managed to keep up with our movements, but I'm sure some made it, at least." He smiled wryly, and stood upright, as if he had forgotten his discomfort.

"I don't know where they are, though." "Will you send them away?" Bleys asked.

"I don't think so," Dahno said, his eyes narrowing a little. Then he smiled again.

"You wouldn't believe me even if I said I would, so what's the point?" He laughed.

"Any more than I'll believe it if you tell me you don't have anyone out there," he went on, "so why don't we just get to it?"

"Because neither of us wants anyone else to hear what we're going to talk about," Bleys said.

For a long moment Dahno just looked across at Bleys, an abstracted look on his face—behind which, Bleys knew, his brother's mind was racing.

"I don't think I want to hear it," Dahno said, finally. "I don't think you can afford not to," Bleys said. "You're too smart to turn down information." "You've got information for me?" "If you're willing to trade."

"Trade?" Dahno paused. "What do you want to know?" "As a preliminary matter," Bleys said, "what happened to you when we were on Ceta?" "I got shot!"

"I'm not talking about that," Bleys said. "I mean, when that armored car was burned, you tried to get those wounded soldiers out.

And then you came back, into the line of fire to pick up that wounded soldier I'd been helping...."

Dahno was silent.

"Tell me why," Bleys said finally.

"I don't remember why," Dahno said at last. "I barely remember it at all."

In California that night, in a hotel room he had picked, Bleys wrote his mind to himself once more.

He was lying. More to himself than to me.

I thought I knew my brother, and so I tried to pick at the motivations for his humane acts, figuring he might be disarmed, and reveal something more about himself. But there was another layer of him I hadn't seen before. I'd known for years that the Dahno who is a massive, jolly giant who cares for nobody, for nothing, was a mask, and that there were other Dahnos beneath it. But I never realized until today that those other Dahnos are tormented—tormented by the fact that they're /wtthe uncaring giant.

Under stress, Dahno himself saw that the other Dahno was a fraud. And now he's having trouble finding out what he is.

There was no talking to him, after I pressed him.

CHAPTER 34

It was just after two in the morning when the small rivet in the underside of Bleys' wrist control pad extended itself from its socket, to press against his skin. It began to vibrate silently, but did so for less than three seconds before Bleys' right hand had reached across to stop it.

Before the rivet had retracted itself Bleys was moving across the bedroom of his hotel suite, seeing only by the light of the city's sky-glow beyond the windows. He snatched up a small cloth bag with twin handles as he moved through the lounge to the suite's main door.

He paused before the door only long enough to reach up and depress a tiny button on a device he had earlier inserted into the socket of a wall-mounted light. The thin line of light at the bottom of the door vanished; and when he silently opened that door, the hallway was pitch black—not even the emergency lights were on.

He already knew how many paces would take him to the corner to his right; once there he turned and then opened the first door, which let him into the emergency stairwell. He knew that the stairs came down to the landing on one side, and continued downward on the other, but he wasn't concerned with that, but stepped straight forward, cautious in the darkness, until he bumped into the railing that shielded the long drop down the central part of the stairwell.

There he finally stopped long enough to reach into the bag and pull out, and don, trousers and a short-sleeved shirt. From the trouser pockets he pulled out gloves and slippers made of an unusual, plastic-feeling material, and he put them on as well. Slipping his arms through the straps of the cloth bag, so that he wore it like a miniature

backpack, he reached out into the darkness before him and swept with both arms, as if trying to pull the air in toward his chest.

He was immediately rewarded as his right arm brushed something, and he quickly had both gloved hands on a light, thin cord that was dangling down the stairwell. He could not feel the cord itself through the gloves, but they reacted to the cord's touch by generating a sensation like a hot wire.

Bleys pulled the cord in to locate the hardened loop at its end. He gripped the cord with his left hand and pulled at the loop with his right, but he found no hint of weakness. He pulled down on the cord, hard; and got an answering tug.

Imagining the long, invisible drop before him, he refused to let himself pause, but swung his right leg over the railing; and guided his slippered foot into the loop, so that he was standing in it as if it were a stirrup.

Still straddling the railing, he straightened that leg while reaching above his head to twine the still-loose cord about his gloved right hand and through his fingers. As the cord took his weight, he lifted his left leg over the railing; and in a moment he was dangling silently in the darkness.

He reached out with his left hand, to grasp at the cord at a place above his right hand; and plucked at it as if it were a guitar string. The cord vibrated, and he felt the edge of fear; but he clamped down on himself harshly.

With his free left arm he reached out and found the side of the stairs that came down from above; and even as he did so, the stairs began to move upward under his fingers, telling him that the cord had begun to lower him. He had only his body's sense of space to tell him that he was moving, unless perhaps there was some faint passage of air across his skin.

Up to now he had been in constant motion since his abrupt awakening; but now he had nothing to do but hang in the silent darkness, and he found himself possessed by an urge to sneeze, to cough, even to yell—anything to make some kind of impression on the dark nothingness.

His shoulder brushed against something, and he was surprised by the depth of the relief that rose in him, at this fleeting touch of solidity. He realized he must be rotating as he dangled on the cord, and that he had brushed against the side of a set of stairs—but on which side, he could no longer tell.

He was not sure exactly how much open space there was between the courses of stairs that made their way to ground level; but it could not be much. He raised his free left arm again before his blind face, as a man walking in a dark forest at night will instinctively raise an arm to shield his eyes from unseen branches; and slowly extended it.

For a few long moments he felt nothing, and he had to force himself to refrain from lunging outward in an effort to find some sort of solid surface. But after a few more seconds his hand met a downward-sloping piece of metal, which he identified as the railing shielding another course of the stairs.

How far had he come? With the railing to touch, he could gauge his speed as fairly fast: already the rail was gone into the darkness above him, and his hand was grasping one of the vertical members that held it—there was a word for those things, what were they called? But that, too, slipped away from him in the darkness, and his hands bumped the edge of the stair before sliding down its side and finding nothing more to touch in the darkness.

He reached behind himself, somewhat awkwardly, and found an identical-feeling stair on the other side, this one slanting in the opposite direction, but at the same time slipping silently away above him. And so he found a routine, reaching eagerly for each new set of stairs as it rose to meet him; and losing them in the darkness, only to be replaced.

There came a moment when his hand, reaching out in the rhythm he had fallen into, found nothing but air. He reached out farther, thinking he might have twisted as he fell, and swept the hand about him; but there was nothing.

He quelled an impulse to activate the control that would light the face of his wrist control pad, knowing that the pulse he had sent out from his room would have killed the pad. His mind wanted to reproach him for not having brought some non-electronic light source; but he thrust those thoughts from him.

But he could not avoid thinking of the possibility that something had gone wrong, that he was still dangling in the darkness high above the floor of the stairwell. The cord he was suspended on was a monomolecular fiber—so strong it could easily carry his weight, but so thin he had to use the gloves to keep it from slicing through his flesh. Could it have damaged the descent mechanism, somehow?

Or had he reached the bottom? He simply could not tell.

He reached out with his free arm, sweeping it about him; but again he found nothing, and his movements set him rotating and swinging as he hung there, like some great pendulum ... until the absurdity of that image made him control his body's frightened instincts.

—And there came a noise in the darkness, a kind of double-click and a tiny creak; and the stairwell, which up to that point had been totally silent, seemed now to explode into noise.

A door had opened, and through it came a buzz he recognized as the rising and falling of voices—voices that were generally angry, but now and then held a high pitch that spoke of fear.

As if that noise had broken a spell in the stairwell itself, he heard a thump high above him; and more voices began to echo down the stairwell.

Within seconds, more of the stairwell doors were thrown open. He hung in place, furious that he could no longer use his ears to try to discover what was happening about him. The hotel's guests, he supposed—those awake enough to have noticed the outage—had concluded there might be danger in this blackout, or perhaps they had simply been overtaken by an instinctive dread of the darkness. But he now had no way to tell whether the danger he had been signaled to run from might be pursuing him down the stairwell.

The lower half-dozen floors of the hotel were largely given over to businesses, which were presumably closed for the night; so if he had made it to the bottom of the stairwell, he had a few minutes before the guests from above could make their faltering ways down in the darkness.

He heard cries from above, and what sounded like a fight—and then a scream.

He shut his eyes. There was nothing to see in this darkness, but closing his eyes would help him concentrate.

He hung there, trying not to reach out, but only to receive. And in a moment he felt a small stir of pleasure awakening inside him— a pleasure that seemed to radiate from a source outside his body. He recognized it as the kind of reaction his brain had been trained to give when his tactile senses were detecting a nearby heat source.

His brain was registering the heat reaction the cord raised in the glove that held it, but there was another source nearby—a human body, silent in the darkness but surely there. Its presence gave him a reference point against which to gauge his existence.

"Are you all right?" a voice asked softly. He recognized it. As instructed, the man was not using his name.

"Yes," Bleys answered, also keeping his voice low. The voices from higher in the stairwell continued, coming slowly nearer. "I'm not sure how far above the floor I am," he said.

The heat source strengthened on his left side, and in a moment a hand touched his leg.

"You're about a meter above the floor," the voice said. "Put your free foot in my cupped hands and you can step out of the loop and let yourself down."

In a moment Bleys was solidly on the hard floor.

"Now close your eyes," his companion said; and Bleys had barely done so before he heard a small click, and a flash of light penetrated his eyelids like a bright bolt of lightning. Cries sounded from above them.

"I broke the cord's molecular bonds," Bleys' unseen ally said in explanation. "We need to go. I have light-enhancing goggles, but they're not working very well in this stairwell; put a hand on my shoulder and try to stay directly behind me. They'll already be breaking out portable emergency lighting, which may or may not have been affected by the pulse that killed the circuits; it'd be a good idea to pass through the lobby before they do that."

"Do we have to pass through the lobby?" Bleys asked. "There must be an emergency exit opening directly off this stairwell."

"We're heading for a side door," the other said. "We'd been planning on using the emergency exit, but it's too dangerous now."

"What's the danger?"

"Police," the other said. "They were setting out to block the emergency exits just before the lights went out."

"Police?" Bleys said. "Why are they here? Is that the reason for the alarm?"

"We don't know why they came," the other said, "but Henry ordered us to take no unnecessary chances. But please, now—no more talking. I'm going to try to guide us past all the people stumbling around in the darkness, and while it won't surprise anybody to hear someone speaking nearby, your voice is very distinctive."

He chuckled.

"What?" Bleys asked.

"Sorry," the other said. "I was just thinking about all those people out in the lobby, stumbling around in the darkness and cursing—it reminds me of something I heard in church—here's the door: silence, now, unless you have to speak for some reason. And if you do speak, keep your voice as low as possible, and say as little as possible—and here we go."

His companion seemed to be a bit of an apostate, Bleys thought. It reassured him, with its implicit message of confidence.

The door opened.

All artificial lighting was out in a large area around the hotel, but once they were outside there was illumination from the city's lights, still on beyond the affected area. Bleys and his companion were met just outside the hotel. His first guide vanished, and Bleys found himself walking into the darkness between two shadowy forms. He was led away from the hotel through a parking lot and then across grass and between bushes and trees; once his face brushed a branch; he started at the touch, and the person in front of him apologized softly.

Noise was rising behind them, but they were well away from it; and now Bleys could see the lights of vehicles moving in streams on distant streets—vehicles that had evidently been far enough away to not be affected by the electromagnetic pulse, but were now moving into the affected area.

One vehicle turned their way, and Bleys instinctively started to duck to the side.

"It's all right," a voice said; "it's ours."