Before the sabotage incident, Michael had uploaded all the research data and preprints done so far on the expedition. He also had a crew roster and some background on everyone.

He would start with learning a little more about who Linda Ophir had been and go from there.

RUE WAS RELIEVED to see stars again. She faced away from the long oval habitat she'd dubbed 'the Hive, listening with half an ear as the others exited its rotating airlock. The scientists were all agog at what they had found, which puzzled her since what they had found was absolutely nothing: chamber after paper-wrapped chamber full of nothing. The Hive was just that: a giant, empty wasp's nest awaiting its wasps.

"If the others pan out, then we'll have proven the Hypothesis," gushed Hutcheons. The Hypothesis, Rue knew, had something to do with whether Jentry's Envy had been abandoned or whether it had never been used at all. That didn't really interest her— she knew the answers would present themselves eventually. No, she had entered the Hive again to try to find more supplies of raw materials, like water and oxygen. They had discovered none— just a cloying methane atmosphere, dry as a bone.

She had an inscape spreadsheet open above and to the right in her sensorium at all times; on this spreadsheet, she juggled numbers trying to guarantee their survival until they should reach Colossus. It was a familiar exercise, one she had engaged in over a year ago, the first time they reached the Envy. Max called it obsessive— but then, Max didn't take responsibility for the crew of the Envy or anything else for that matter.

A ghostly circle blotted out some stars in the opposite direction. Evan was repositioning the cache by the lake, now that most of its cargo had been off-loaded at the Banshee. She had begun using it as her crew's primary living quarters, while the scientists had largely moved into the warrens Mike had discovered. Its carrying capacity was written in glaring reds and greens across her spreadsheet— good, but not enough. Whoever had blown up the life-support stacks had better be found by Crisler's boys, because if she got to him first, he would be out the airlock.

"All right, gentlemen, where next?" she asked cheerily as she swung around. The science team were clambering aboard their sled; five helmets swung to face her simultaneously.

"What do you mean?" asked one. "We've been out here for eight hours. We're going home, aren't we?"

"The suits are good for another twelve to fifteen hours and as long as we're out here in them we're not putting a direct drain on the Banshee or the Envy," she said. "We need as much information as we can get as quick as possible. There's a whole bunch of places we could visit before we go back."

There were groans from the team and she sympathized; they must have found it as nerve-wracking as she to spend all day crawling through those chambers, picturing huge dry insect bodies scraping through them, possibly waiting beyond the next door-slit. She no longer believed they would find living aliens on board the Envy, but that didn't prevent the imagination from putting them around every corner.

"How about the Lasa sphere?" Hutcheons suggested hopefully.

"Nope. You remember what Herat said: It's potentially the most fragile find here, so we leave it for him to open. That is, unless we don't find any more water, in which case we'll have to break in tomorrow and clean it out if it's got any.

"Okay, here." She called up an exaggerated inscape view of the other habitats, which seemed to hang like moons at random across the sky. "Somebody pick a direction and let's go! We're wasting air."

"Oh, all right… that one." Hutcheons reached out and in their public inscape, one of the habitats flashed. This one was a big rusty cube, fifty kilometers away.

"Right. Hang on, everybody… away we go."

INSCAPE NORMALLY SHUT down when you closed your eyes. That had puzzled Michael when he was young; his father refused to discuss the subject, so he had asked a teacher at the seminary school. "If I closed my eyes I'd be able to see all the colors and shapes so much clearer! But every time I shut my eyes it goes away."

"They did that because of bad things that happened to people back in the beginning," his teacher told him. "Men and women tried to use inscape to hide from the real world. They spun themselves fantasy worlds and then shut themselves away in little airless rooms, slowly starving to death while they built a false paradise for themselves in the Net.

"After some people died they made it so that you could only take your senses away from reality in special circumstances. Rather than build something that appeared to be a separate reality— but isn't— they decided that everything should appear to be here, in this reality, with us. So the public and private inscapes were developed. Private inscape is made up of those things that only you can see, public ones are the windows and shows that you share with other people. They all reach you by the same means, through the implants in your sensory nerves.

"Now, we believe that this trend has gone too far in the opposite direction; the Rights Economy has layered its version of reality on top of what everyone sees and hears— strictly in the name of economics, they claim, and the alternatives could be far worse. True— they could completely control the appearance of reality if they chose. But as it is, though they think they are being moral, they are godless people, because they have made it appear that the essence of things is money— that a thing only really exists if it can be bought or sold. When you look at a rose, you no longer see the immanence of the thing itself; all you see is a price."

Michael contemplatively turned over the offline datapack he used to store kami. Crisler had neither taken it from him nor wiped the kami already stored in it. He was sure that was deliberate: Crisler was saying more clearly than words could express that he could take the pack away any time he chose.

The kami of Kadesh and the terrifying kami of Dis were still in there. He knew he should erase the kami of Dis, but even with those huge files in the system there was plenty of extra storage space left. Enough for him to try something he had not done since his final days at the seminary.

One of the reasons Dr. Herat encouraged Michael's religious activities was that the kami often revealed insights into alien places and things that Herat himself missed. The professor had a brilliant mind, but not everything could be seen with the rational faculty. On more than one occasion he had called upon Michael to scry an object using the NeoShinto AI— calling up a history half imagined, half inferred. Herat knew that the deepest engines of human thought are unconscious and he respected Michael's ability to tap those powers directly. Michael himself always found the experience disquieting.

He had gotten nowhere with his search of the databases he'd archived from the Banshee. Terabytes of data were arrayed about him in diffuse clouds and he was certain that the right kind of analysis would show a clue as to why Linda Ophir had been killed. If there was no such clue, that was also proof of something— namely that her murder had been one of opportunity.

His analytic powers and even those of the semilegal search tools he'd brought from Kimpurusha, weren't up to the task of finding that clue, or its absence. So he was faced with a choice.

Years ago, when he was testing the limits of his ability to touch the kami, Michael had tried to find the kami of inscape. He had no doubt that they were there; everything that came to human consciousness as a presence held kami. So one night he had sat down in the middle of a marble floor under the wan light of Kimpurusha's faint ring and summoned the kami of Data.