Wednesday leaned against the wall. “What? But you’re the Eschaton!”

“Not quite. It is true that I am a component of the ensemble intelligence referred to as the Eschaton.” Herman’s voice had gone very flat, as if to emphasize the fact that any color in its tone was simply a modulation trick. “The Eschaton preserves global causality within a realm approximately a thousand parsecs in radius. It does so by recursively transmitting information back in time to itself, which is used to allow it to edit out temporal anomalies. Such temporal paradoxes are an inevitable side effect of permitting faster-than-light travel, or of operating an ensemble intelligence employing timelike logic mechanisms. I receive orders from deep time and execute them knowing that in doing so I ensure that the descendant state vector is going to exist long enough to issue those orders. If I do not receive such orders, then it may be that the events are not observable by me. Or my future state vector. This situation may occur if the Eschaton is disrupted or edited out of the future of this time-line. I am advising you, Wednesday, that I should have prevented the destruction of Moscow. That I failed to do so raises questions over my future survival.”

“Oh fuck! You’re telling me—”

“There appears to be a complex play in progress against me, executed by a party or parties unknown. I revise my previous estimate that the threat was emergent from the ReMastered. Their desire to destroy me is well understood, as are their capabilities, and countermeasures have been in place for some time. This threat emerges from a higher realm. The possibility of a hostile Eschaton-equivalent intelligence existing in the future of this light cone must now be considered. It is possible that a ReMastered faction is being manipulated by such an external entity. My ability to project ahead has therefore been called into question. Fallback logic modules employing neo-Bayesian reasoning suggest that when you return to the ship they will send a team of agents after you, but this is a purely speculative assumption. You must be on your guard at all times. Your job is to draw out the hostile proxies and expose them to me, starting at the embassy memorial ceremony. If you fail, the consequences could be far worse than the destruction of a single planet.”

Click. “Oh shit.” For a moment she thought she was going to be all right, but then her stomach twisted. She barely made it to the bathroom in time, holding back the dry heaves until she was over the toilet bowl. Why me? How did I end up in this mess? she asked the mirror, sniffing and trying to dry her eyes. It’s like some kind of curse!

Fifty minutes later, it was a shaken but more composed Wednesday who climbed the two steps down from the space elevator capsule into a concrete-and-steel arrivals hall, presented her passport to the immigration official, and staggered blinking into the late-afternoon sunlight on New Dresden.

“Wow,” she said softly.

Her rings vibrated for attention. She sighed. “Cancel block.”

“Are you feeling less stressed?” asked Herman, as if nothing had happened.

“I think so.”

“Good. Now please pay attention to where we are going. I am adding your destination to the public geotracking system. Follow the green dot.”

“Green dot — okay.” A green dot appeared on the floor, and Wednesday followed it passively, feeling drained and depressed. She’d almost psyched herself into looking forward to the reception, but Herman’s news had unhinged her again, bringing her tenuous optimism crashing down. Maybe Frank would be able to cheer her up, but just then she wanted only to go back to her luxury suite and lock the door and get stinking drunk.

It took another three hours of boredom, dozing in the seats of a maglev capsule hurtling at thousands of kilometers per hour through an evacuated tunnel buried deep under oceans and continents, before she arrived in the capital. Typical, why couldn’t they build the beanstalk closer to the main city? Or move the city? she sniffed to herself. Getting around on a planet seemed to take a very long time, for no obvious reason.

Sarajevo was old, with lots of stone buildings and steel-and-glass skyscrapers.

It was badly air-conditioned, with strange eddying breezes and air currents and a really disorienting, upsetting blue-and-white fractal plasma image in place of a decent ceiling. It was also full of strange-looking people in weird clothes moving fast and doing incomprehensible things. She passed three women in fake peasant costume — New Dresden had never been backward enough to have a real peasantry — waving credit terminals. A bunch of people in rainbow-colored luminous plastic gowns roller-bladed past, surrounded by compact remotes buzzing around at ear level. Cars, silent and melted-looking, slunk through the streets. A fellow in grimy ripped technical mountaineering gear, bubble tent folded at his feet, seemed to be offering her an empty ceramic coffee cup. People in glowing glasses gesticulated at invisible interfaces; laser dots all over the place danced ahead of people who needed guidance. It wasn’t like Septagon, it was like -

It’s like home. If home had been bigger and brasher and more developed, she realized, tenuously making a connection to her memories of their last family visit to Grandma’s house.

One thing pricked her attention: it was the lack of difference. She’d been worried at first about going down-well wearing a party costume she’d have been comfortable with back home. “Don’t worry,” Herman told her. “Moscow and Dresden are both McWorlds — the original colonists had similar backgrounds and aspirations. The culture will feel familiar to you. You can thank media diffusion for that; it will not be like the New Republic, or Turku, or even as different as Septagon.” And indeed, it wasn’t. Even the street signs looked the same.

“And we were nearly at war with these people?” she asked.

“The usual stupid reasons. Competitive trade advantage, immigration policy, political insecurity, cheap slow transport — cheap enough to facilitate trade, too expensive to facilitate federalization or the other adjustments human nations make to minimize the risk of war. The McWorlds all took something from the dominant terrestrial globalized culture with them when they were settled, but they have diverged since then — in some cases, radically. Do not make the mistake of assuming you can discuss politics or actions of the government safely here.”

“As if I would.” Wednesday followed her green dot round a corner and up a spiraling ramp onto a road-spanning walkway, then into a roofed-over mall. “Where am I supposed to be meeting Frank?”

“He should be waiting for you. Along this road. There.”

He was sitting on a bench in front of an abstract bronze sculpture, rattling away on his antique keyboard. Killing time. “Frank, are you okay?”

He looked up at her and pulled a face — a grimace that might have been intended as a smile but succeeded in doing nothing to reassure her. His eyes were red-rimmed and had bags under them, and his clothing looked as if he’d been living in it for a couple of days. “I, I think so.” He shook his head. “Brr.” He yawned widely. “Haven’t slept for a long, uh…” He trailed off.

Party overload, she thought dispassionately. She reached out and took his hand, tugging. “Come on!”

Frank lurched to his feet and caught his balance. The keyboard concertinaed away into a pocket. He yawned again. “Are we in time?”

She blinked, checking her timepiece: “Sure!” she said brightly. “What have you been doing?”

“Not sleeping.” Frank shook himself. “I’m a mess. Mind if I freshen up first?” He looked almost apologetic.

She grinned at him. “That looks like a public toilet over there.”

“Okay. Two minutes.”