It passed. I returned to the living room after washing my face. Ilya, too aware of my hidden emotions, patted the cushions of the couch beside him and hugged me as I sat.

“We have good men, don’t we?” Diane asked.

I put my arm around Ilya and smiled, and Joseph blushed.

I called a conference with the Olympians at Many Hills, two weeks after receiving my enhancement, and revealed my suspicions that not all had been told.

I had not seen Ilya in a week. Criss-crossing Mars, campaigning with and without Ti Sandra, shaking hands and listening earnestly to a thousand well-wishers, ignoring those who simply turned their eyes away and did not offer their hands, I wondered if real life would ever return again, and whether I would recognize it.

We met in the Vice President’s office, just completed — large but not richly furnished, befitting our style.

More than a little dazed, I stared at the full gathering of nine Olympians across a table laden with fresh fruit and grain breakfast goodies. For the first time I met Mitchell Maspero-Gambacorta, blocky and balding, dressed in black, who came from a small Martian BM in Hellas; Yueh Liu, tall and athletic, a mild transform, originally from Earth, who had joined the Olympians two years ago; Amy Vico-Persoff from Persoff BM in Amazonis, a solid-looking young woman with determined features and a quiet, steady voice; and Danny Pincher, a bland-faced man of middle years who seemed unconcerned about grooming or clothes. Charles sat at the opposite end, his expression calm and alert as I told them of reading the presentation papers over again.

“There’s something missing, and it’s important,” I concluded. “You haven’t dropped the other boot.”

Charles looked at me with the glimmer of a smile. “What boot?”

I struggled to find words for what my enhancement had encouraged me to think. “Seven league boots,” I said.

The room fell quiet. Nobody ventured to speak. I marched two stiff fingers across the desk in front of me. “Your equations imply a lot more. That much I’ve been able to puzzle through with the help of an enhancement. And if these things bother me, they surely must bother people on Earth.”

“Nobody on Earth has access to our data,” Charles said.

“How long can a discovery this important be kept secret?” I asked. “Weeks, months? Surely someone on Earth will understand — there are millions of people much brighter than I am — ”

“Maybe in a few years someone will stumble on what we’ve learned,” Leander said, clearly uncomfortable. “A lot of what we’re studying is speculative — ”

“I don’t agree,” said Yueh Liu, stretching his tight-muscled arms over his head. “The implications are clear, as Vice President Majumdar says. We should not be too cautious. I know a lot of our colleagues on Earth, and the whole picture is going to be clear to them sooner than we’d like.”

“The destiny tweak,” I said.

Charles shook his head forcefully. “Forget about that. If means nothing.”

“We should reveal all to everybody and put them on equal ground, Earth and Mars and the Belts,” said Chinjia Park Amoy. “I would feel so much better if we could do that.”

“We’ve already decided on secrecy,” Leander said with a worried frown. He sensed the, group’s cohesion loosening. They all looked uneasy, even frightened. I felt as if I had stuck my hand into a nest of sleeping hornets, waking them all.

“Seven league boots,” Maspero-Gambacorta said. “All the dreams.”

“Enough,” Charles said quietly but firmly, his calm regained, at least on the surface. “What do you think we have left unsaid, Casseia?” He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and stared at me as if I were all that mattered on this world. “You have your enhancement now. Tell us. What do you think?”

“I don’t profess to genius, or to understand it all yet…”

“All the better,” Charles said. “You give us some idea what others will think when they hear about the newest developments. And they will. In time. Tell us.”

I resented Charles’s turnabout questioning. I felt as if I were a student up for an exam. “If you have access to the Bell Continuum — to everything that determines the nature of reality — ”

“All the hidden variables, nothing but,” Nehemiah Royce said. Charles lifted his hand: no interruptions.

“What else can you alter?” I asked. “Descriptors for momentum, angular momentum, spin, charge…” I waved my hand. “All of it. What else can you change or control?”

“Not all descriptors are amenable to tweaking,” Charles said.

“Yet,” Nehemiah Royce said.

Charles barely tilted his head in acknowledgment. “But you’re correct, and it’s interesting you mention seven league boots.”

The hollow in my stomach expanded.

“Your enhancement tells you more than you can consciously express, I suspect,” Charles said. “Others with enhancements have the same problem. It’s a design flaw, I think. Maybe they’ll get better at it soon.”

“Please,” I said.

“We can reach into a particle and tweak the descriptor for its position in space-time. We can change the descriptor and move the particle.”

“Move it where?” I asked.

“Anywhere we want. There’s a problem, however. We haven’t actually moved anything. The fact is…” He looked down at the table. “We can’t move anything small. We don’t understand why, but the Bell Continuum ties a lot of position descriptors together. It has to do with scaling, with the rules that result in conservation of energy. We can’t separate them out, so we can’t access descriptors individually — or in smaller groups — for insignificant objects.” Charles licked his lips and stared at me directly. “But we know how to tweak large numbers of descriptors simultaneously. Right now, we can’t use our theory to move this bowl of rice,” he said, shifting the bowl before him a few centimeters with his fingertip, “but most of us here think we can move a large object, if we’re so inclined.”

“How large?” I asked.

“The parameters are determined by size and density. The minimum we might move is an object of unit density, twenty kilometers in average diameter.”

“We’re ready to try an experiment,” Leander said. The room’s atmosphere had become charged with a wicked kind of excitement. “Phobos is about the smallest local object we can move. Its major axis is twenty-eight kilometers, and its density is two grams per cubic centimeter. We suggest taking a trip on Phobos.”

I stared blankly. Charles leaned his head to one side and lifted an eyebrow, as if to prompt me. “Where?” I asked.

“To Triton, actually,” Charles said. “Around Neptune . Nobody claims Triton. It’s sufficient in size…”

“Why Triton?”

Charles pointed upward. “Volatiles. We could move it and mine it. It could supply Mars for millions of years.”

“We could put it in orbit,” Maspero-Gambacorta said, “and shave ice from it — let the flakes drift into Mars’s atmosphere. In time, the atmosphere would thicken — ”

Leander broke in. “Or we could use it as a vehicle and explore.”

“Why not both?” Royce said, looking at his colleagues with an expression of boyish speculation.

“You’ve all been thinking about this a lot,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell us earlier?”

Royce spoke first. “We haven’t actually done an experiment, of course,” he said. “Until we know for sure — moving something — it’s hard to accept. You understand that.”

I nodded slowly, more dazed than ever. “Then there really is no such thing as distance. Space and time.”

Danny Pincher laughed abruptly. “I’ve been working on the time tweak,” he said. “In theory, of course. The descriptors are tightly bound, co-respondent, as we say. They keep a shell of causality in place. The whole system of descriptor logic is surprisingly classical. But the total bookkeeping leads to enormous complications if you only observe macroscopic nature. Only in the descriptor realm does the whole become simpler.”