“Did you see what happened to her?” Stephen asked.

“She was in the observation blister. She’d pulled back the armor and she was looking outside. I caught a glimpse and turned away. It felt like knives.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Leander said.

“You look at her, then,” Hergesheimer said angrily. “Talk to her. You pull her out.”

When I returned to the control chamber, Charles had unstrapped from his couch and exercised slowly, pressing feet against one wall, hands against an adjacent wall. The optic cables to his head had been disconnected. He turned to me as I came in and said, “It truly won’t happen again.”

“ Galena ’s in bad shape,” I said. “What can we do for her?”

“Bad information,” he said, pressing until he grunted. “Bad paths.” He floated free and fell slowly to the deck, landing on flexed knees. “She took in outside information without prior processing. We saw it through viewers that can’t convey the fullness. She’ll have to sort it out.”

“How could what she sees hurt her?” I asked.

“We assume certain things are true,” he said. “When we have visual proof they are not true, we become upset.”

“Hergesheimer says she’s totally unresponsive.”

“She’ll just have to find her way back.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“I have the interpreter modeling a human response to the QL’s re-creation of what was outside. Maybe that will tell us more. If we had stayed in that condition more than a few seconds, we would all have ceased to exist.”

“We can’t move Mars,” I said. “I won’t take the responsibility.”

“It won’t happen again. The QL was badly upset. It won’t look at those truths again.”

My frustration and anger peaked. “I will not send my people into a place like that! I don’t know what you’re talking about, ‘truths’ and that shit. The QL is too damned unreliable. What if it decides to do something even more dangerous and incomprehensible? Was it experimenting on us?”

“No,” Charles said. “It found something it hadn’t noticed before. It was a major breakthrough. What it found answers a lot of questions.”

“Shooting us off into an alternate universe — ”

“There are no alternate universes,” Charles said. “We were in our own universe, with the rules changed.”

“What does that mean?” My breath came in hitches and my hands opened and closed reflexively. I hid my hands behind me, clamping my jaw until my teeth ached.

“The QL discovered a new category of descriptors and tweaked one. This category seems to co-respond directly with every other descriptor on the largest scale. Wholeness. The destiny tweak. We changed the way the universe understands itself. Builds itself.”

“That’s stupid,” I said.

“I don’t understand it yet, myself,” Charles said. “But I don’t deny it.”

“What happened to the old universe?” I demanded.

“The new universe couldn’t conduct any business. It didn’t fit together. Rules contradicted and produced nonsense nature. Everything reverted to the prior rules. We came back.”

“The whole universe?” I folded myself up beside him, hugging my knees. “I can’t absorb that. I can’t take it in, Charles,” I said.

“I think Galena will be all right in a few hours,” Charles said. “Her mind will reject what she saw. She’ll return to what she was before.”

“What happens if we touch that descriptor again?” I asked.

“We won’t. If we did, we’d get another incomprehensible universe, and it would revert. The problem is for us, for now. The rules of our universe were created by countless combinations and failures. Evolution. We’d have to learn how to design all the rules to interact and make sense. That could take centuries. We don’t know anything yet about creating a living universe from scratch.“

“But we could do it, someday?”

“Conceivably,” Charles said.

The way he looked at me, the way he spoke — reluctantly, afraid of hurting or disappointing me — made me, if such a thing was possible now, even more uneasy. I had been badly frightened just when I thought I was beyond caring for my personal existence.

I wondered what would have happened if we had died before the rules reverted.

Suddenly Charles seemed unspeakably exotic: not human, intellectually monstrous. “Can we go back?” I asked.

“I’ll hook up again in a few minutes. The interpreter should be finished and the QL should have sorted itself out. I’m sorry, Casseia.”

I stared at him owlishly, my neck hair pricking. “Why do you always feel the need to apologize to me?”

“Because I keep shoving bigger and bigger problems on your back,” he said. “All I really want to do is make things easier for you, take care — ”

“Christ, Charles!” I unfolded and tried to kick away, but he reached out like a cat and grabbed my ankle, bringing me down in an ungentle arc. I bumped against the chamber floor, but he had saved me from a serious head blow against the ceiling.

With a creeping horror I was immediately ashamed of, I kicked loose.

He shrank back, eyes slitted. Then he returned to his chair and attached the optic cables to his head. By now, he had become expert and did not need any help.

Charles took us home, putting Phobos into its old orbit around Mars, as if nothing had happened. By direct link, we were given a new landing site at Perpetua Station, five hundred kilometers east of Preamble, below the Kaibab plateau.

Charles asked for medical help to be ready to receive Galena Cameron and deactivated the tweaker equipment in preparation for leaving the old Phobos base.

Still ashamed of what had happened earlier, I helped him undo his cables and carry the thinker and interpreter to the shuttle. We said little. Galena ’s eyes focused on me as Leander and I guided her limp body to the shuttle. She stiffened slightly when we buckled her into her couch, then asked, “Have my eyes changed color?”

I really did not remember what color her eyes had been, but I said no. “They’re fine,” I said.

She shivered. “Is Dr. Hergesheimer alive?”

“We’re all fine, Galena ,” Leander said.

Hergesheimer leaned over her couch, hanging from the top of the passenger compartment. “We’ve been worried about you.”

“I don’t think I’ve been here very long,” she said, still shivering. “I know I wasn’t asleep. Did we get anything?”

“We got what we went there for,” Hergesheimer said. Then, looking at me, he added, “It was a wild goose chase. We can’t go back.”

“Because of me?” Galena asked, distressed.

“No, dear,” I said. “Not because of you.”

Ti Sandra Erzul and the Presidential entourage — all those privy to our plans — came to Kaibab and Preamble, and Charles, Leander, Hergesheimer and I made our personal presentations in the lab annex. Ti Sandra sat on the left side of the table, flanked by a medical arbeiter and three heavily armed security guards. Twelve kilos lighter than when I’d last seen her, the President appeared alert but distant. On the way into the annex, she had said, “I’ve been close to the reaper, Cassie. Saw his eyes and played a little canasta with him. Don’t blame me for being ghost-eyed.” I let Hergesheimer speak first. He presented a sadly glowing picture of the new stellar system. “It’s a beautiful choice,” he concluded. “A planet placed between these two apopoints,” he highlighted points interior and exterior to an elliptical shaded band, “would receive enough light and warmth to become a paradise. Even Mars.”

Faces became more and more grim as I described the difficulties of the second passage. Ti Sandra shuddered. “Charles gives me reassurance that such a thing will never happen again, but I take a more cautious view.”

Ti Sandra nodded reluctantly.

“Whatever our problems with Earth, in my opinion, we can’t take the extreme solution,” I concluded. “We have to find another way.” Leander looked down at the floor and shook his head.