Herat laughed. "You're one of a kind, Henry."

It continually astonished Michael how men like Katz and Herat could completely fail to notice their environment. They crouched now in a long, rectangular chamber, a meter and a half high, its perimeter stacked with boxes. Fine: But every time Michael really looked at his surroundings, his breath caught. This was what Rue Cassels called "the creeps" and over years spent with Dr. Herat, Michael had learned what caused it. It was the sensation you got when the wind took an inanimate object, say, a shirt and for a moment made it flap its arms and reach for you. It was the sensation he'd had on their one visit to Earth, when he had stood at Stonehenge and found that the stones looked simultaneously natural and artificial; his mind couldn't reconcile the two.

This place was deliberately designed and yet no human person had ever stood here. Human instinct reacted just as though these walls had fitted themselves and the lights assembled from nothing and lit on their own. In a sense they had; an independent inhuman part of the universe had created Jentry's Envy and perceiving this, the part of the human mind that once saw spirits in stones awoke.

"No, don't put that there, we're going to partition that corner for the toilet," Katz shouted. "These jarheads," he muttered. "We're well rid of them. Told one to put up some numbers on the doorways and he just slapped numbers and letters up randomly. Just not thinking."

Two marines shuffled the boxes over to where Michael was standing. "Excuse me, Father," said one; they both laughed and one or two of the scientists hid smiles.

Everybody knew about Michael's NeoShinto activities. Apparently, he was a joke now.

"Ah," said Katz. "Here, look at this. Team B is inside the Hive."

He waved to a large inscape window; several members of the science team were clustered around it, including Dr. Herat, who would obviously have preferred to have been at the Hive than here. The image showed a gray oval blob; Michael couldn't make head or tail of it until a space-suited figure crawled into view, providing scale. The image shook and moved and the blob took on dimension: It was a sort of oblong chamber. The chamber was a little more than a meter high and twice that long, more like the inside of a large cocoon than a room.

"Captain Cassels told us that they'd visited only one other habitat before reaching Chandaka," Katz said. "That was the Hive. They didn't take any photos because, as she so eloquently put it, they 'freaked. I can see why."

The camera moved through a narrow slit in the papery end of the cocoon and emerged into another identical space.

"That's the fifteenth of these in a row," somebody said. Michael could hear a faint chatter of voices coming from the window, including Rue Cassels's.

"No, left, left!" said Herat. "Ach, idiot, wait, I'm coming over."

"We're not waiting for you," said Rue. "You have to give us some autonomy, Professor."

She and Herat proceeded to descend into an argument over procedure. Rather than get drawn into that, Michael left the room through its wide door (labeled with a big sticky "I") and looked for the steep ramp he had first come up when he'd found these chambers. Maybe the feelings this place awoke in him had always been illusions, creations of his own that he used to fill a void in his life. Maybe this really was just a thing, magnesium alloy and aerogel filling, no more or less significant than any rock. It had been created by blind evolutionary fate, as had he; he wasn't going anywhere but where his genes led him; nor was the human race going anywhere. Herat had proven that— they were at the top of the evolutionary arc, with nowhere to go now but down. So all this investigation was futile. You could already see the seeds of decay in the inequities of the R.E. itself.

He found the ramp (labeled N) and headed down. He found he had to crab walk because of the steepness of the descent. Michael wasn't sure why he was coming this way, but maybe it was because the chambers above were no longer his— Katz and his troupe were taking the heart-pounding excitement of Michael's discovery and transforming it into a hotel.

Not that Herat wasn't excited. Proof that somewhere, some when, alien life had banded together in the same spirit of oneness that humanity took as its own essence… well, that had always been Herat's dream. And now it had come true.

Michael reached the bottom of the ramp. Here was the little round room he had climbed to— exactly as it had been, save for the letter taped by the entrance: P.

Whoever put down these letters must have been more than half asleep, Michael thought idly as he walked around the magnetic airlock. The randomness of the lettering seemed apt somehow— it was like this whole place, a purposeless jumble.

He sat down by the airlock and rested his gloved hand on it. Soon enough they would get the air balance right and then he could take this suit off and feel these walls himself. He wasn't completely here yet, insulated as he was by the suit.

After an empty moment Michael snatched his hand back. He knew what he was feeling: The kami of the place were calling to him— or, at least, that was how he'd been trained to describe the feeling. As a child he'd thought this feeling to be simple loneliness and maybe he had been more right then than now. But if he was going to escape the feeling, whatever its name, he no longer felt that the kami were the way.

Which left him back where he'd started.

The monks of Kimpurusha had their psychology; Dr. Herat had his. If Herat ever felt down he would just do something— anything, from reorganizing his files to taking a walk. Dr. Herat was rarely unhappy for long and maybe there was a lesson in that.

Thinking of the professor reminded Michael of the explosion and before that, the murder of Dr. Ophir. And there, of course, was something he could do.

He glanced around the chamber. If he sat down here and started to meditate, would Crisler see and send someone after him? Probably not; although the sensor clip was still on Michael's ear, there was no evidence that anyone was actually watching what he did through it. Maybe no one was; maybe the clip was inactive, just a cruel joke by Crisler— like the fact that Michael's offline datapack had not been tampered with.

Crisler could probably monitor anything Michael did in the public inscape network through that clip. But there was no way he could monitor the private loop-back network made possible by Michael's NeoShinto implants.

He sat down in full lotus, facing the corridor and called up his private inscape foyer.

Instantly he was surrounded by dozens of iconic objects, slowly rotating photos and control surfaces. These would not normally be visible to anyone else, but his suspicion of inscape ran all the way back to his childhood and Michael had spent a long time adding various semilegal privacy devices to the foyer. They were stored, with the rest of his private data, in the data chip in his skull. He had novels in there, hundreds of hours of music, movies, and all the reference material he might ever need in his work. All that storage was too cramped to accommodate even a single NeoShinto kami, of course.

With luck, Crisler's sensors would not be able to tell his connection to this data from ordinary meditation. If they could… well, he would find out when they came to arrest him.

He sat for a while, wondering where to start. If Linda Ophir's murder had not been a crime of opportunity committed by someone still on Chandaka, then it was safe to assume that the perpetrator was also Banshee's saboteur. In that case, there were two likely motives for her murder: She'd found him out, or she knew something else that he couldn't allow anyone to learn. Michael had wondered all along what she had been about to tell him, when she asked to see him that day.