Dr. Herat wasn't happy about that, but his excitement about the find completely eclipsed his political sense. — Perhaps that wasn't quite fair; Michael knew the professor trusted him to ferret out such details. But Michael had precious little to go on himself.

The whole situation was troubling and not just politically. A few days ago, Michael had been thinking that their long wandering was finally coming to an end. He regretted it; at the same time, he knew it was past time that he face some issues of his own. Now this cycler artifact had come along and it looked as if he and the professor were about to be flung off on another extended jaunt. Stuck in some balloon habitat next to an alien starship, surrounded only by the military and under radio silence, he would be left to wrestle his own demons. Even now, sitting alone in his cabin while Dr. Herat pored over the cycler photos and chatted with Dr. Ophir, Michael felt restless and unfulfilled. He had no focus for meditation and he was, frankly, afraid to use the AI. That which should have comforted him most had become terrifying to contemplate; he could not close his eyes without the shadow of his revelation at Dis creeping up on him. At times he felt like he was falling; at other times, like a sleepwalker going through the motions of his life.

He tried to focus onto minor interests, such as the prospect of meeting some halo worlders— but there was a troubling aspect to them as well. Thinking about the halo worlds always took Michael back to his childhood.

If he lay back on his cot and closed his eyes, he could summon some inscape images of his home. It was as if he stood in the marble-floored atrium again and he could turn and look out the tall leaded-glass windows to where the sun was turning distant peaks gold and mauve. Memory supplied the rest: The air was crisp and thin, even in the innermost chambers. His family's house adjoined the Permanence seminary and at certain times of the day he could hear the faint sound of the chants that drifted down from its distant windows. The music was ever present during his childhood, a reassuring and peaceful counterpoint to the rising tide of chaos outside the town walls.

He remembered one day running up the street to his house's door and his father shouting. That was the beginning and end of his personal experience of the Reconquista, when the FTL ships from the Rights Economy took the government of Kimpurusha.

When he thought about the Reconquista, he always did so through the lens of another, singular memory:

There was a chair in his home. It was unique in the household— made of rosewood, large and with an embroidered seat and splat, where the other chairs were more utilitarian and factory-made. The legs were carved with intricate floral designs. Michael's toys scaled it and it was the biggest mountain in the world; his dolls sat along its front edge and they were steering it, a cycler, through the deepest spaces between the suns. He built constructions of blocks around the crosspiece between its legs and it was a generating station. For the youngest son of the Bequith household, this chair could become anything, with a simple flip of the imagination.

One day, not long after the running and shouting, a strange man came to the house. He was tall and pale and seemed nervous as he paced through the rooms. In each one he took a canister and aimed it at the furniture and fixtures. A fine smoke puffed out and fell slowly to vanish as it touched things.

"What's that?" he had asked his father.

"Nanotags," said Father, as if it were a curse.

The man entered the hall and puffed smoke on the rosewood chair.

Other men came and Michael had to go with them. They took him to a hospital and made him sleep. When he awoke he could feel the distant roar of inscape in his head, like an unsettled crowd. He felt grown-up, because he knew you weren't allowed to get inscape implants until adulthood and he was only ten years old. The men took him home and his mother cried and it was at that point that he realized something was wrong.

He didn't know what for a while, but the inscape laid its own version of things over his sight and hearing. He would learn to tune it out, he was told; but for the moment, he couldn't.

Now, when he looked at the rosewood chair, all he could see was the matrix of numbers superimposed on it, that told the monetary value of its parts and whole. And so with the drapes, the walls, windows, and the rice as he picked it up with his chopsticks.

He imagined— and he knew it couldn't be so— that the people of the free halo worlds still saw things like the boy before they had put nanotags in every object and inscape in his head. As if a chair could be a mountain or a starship and not just a collection of values and registrations.

To think this way was to miss something he hadn't even known was his when he had it.

He would have paced the halls of the cruiser, except that the inscape illusion limited him to a very few sectors. Instead, he exercised in his room, or tried to read, and most evenings when Dr. Herat didn't need him he ended up lounging on his bed, staring at the blank ceiling, longing for home or something more fundamental.

They entered orbit around Chandaka and Crisler lectured them about not talking to the locals. Michael tuned out and summoned a window to look at the planet. Chandaka was bigger and warmer than Kimpurusha; he looked first for polar ice caps, his habitual metric for judging a world. Chandaka's were tiny, almost an afterthought. It was a wet and blue planet, its seas captured in crescents and circles rimmed with volcanoes— the typical Coronae alternative to plate tectonics. Michael felt his spirits lift at the prospect of walking unsuited in the air and feeling a real sun on his face.

After Chandaka, his future was cloudy. He resolved to experience this world to its full, while he could.

MICHAEL TRACED THE lines of intricate carving that ran along the wall, a legacy of Chandaka's history as a halo world. Hovering on the edges of his vision were tiny lines of text and numerals, inscape tags which named the Rights Owners for this place, as well as its value and history. He tried to ignore them and imagine the carvings as they had originally looked, unsullied by inscape.

This giant building, the arcology known as the Redoubt, was apparently the oldest inhabited structure on the planet. Michael and Dr. Herat had been flown here immediately on landing on Chandaka. They had arrived at night local time— morning, by Michael's circadian rhythms. He wasn't ready to sleep, so Michael wandered the vast echoing corridors of the Redoubt in the wee hours.

The halo-worlders who had boarded and named Jentry's Envy were billeted somewhere within the Redoubt's thousands of rooms and corridors; Michael hadn't caught a glimpse of anyone since he and the professor were shown their rooms.

There had been a hurry-up-and-wait quality to the flight out here. The Spirit of Luna had picked up a number of other researchers on its way. Everyone seemed eager, almost frantic to be gone after the cycler. Yet, until Crisler had all the pieces in place, there was nothing to do.

Michael had done his usual work and made friends among the new scientific staff that Crisler was building. He had learned nothing new about their destination or the reasons for Crisler's urgency and secrecy in assembling the team.

Everyone else had turned in, so Michael wandered, thinking. At the end of one carven and frescoed corridor, huge pressure doors stamped with infinity signs stood open to what looked like an open courtyard or garden. The doors would once have kept the air in before Chandaka's volcanic carbon cycle was kick-started with deliberate meteoric pounding. Michael could smell the new air as he approached the door, and unconsciously walked faster. The breeze tasted wonderful— green and fresh.