“Yes and no,” the picket said.

“That could be a little clearer.”

“It could go either way.”

Despite the unearthly calm Guilford felt a feather touch of dread.

“Depending on what?”

“Luck. Resolve. You.”

“Is this a riddle?”

“No. Just hard to explain.”

They climbed the trails steadily. Ordinarily Guilford would have been winded by the hike, but his lungs worked more efficiently here, or the air was thicker, or he was as invulnerable as a dream. Before long they reached the high summit of the hill. The picket said, “Let’s sit a while.”

They found a mosque tree and put their backs against it, the way Guilford sometimes sat with Nick on a summer night, looking at the stars. Stars in the ocean, stars in the sky. More stars than he had imagined there could be. The stars were visibly rotating — not around the northern axis but around a point directly overhead.

“Those stars,” he said, “are they real?”

“ ‘Real’ is a word that means more than you think, Guilford.”

“But this isn’t really the hill back of my house.”

“No. Just a place to rest.”

This is his ground, Guilford thought. Ghost territory. “How does it feel, being a god?”

“That’s not what I am.”

“The difference is subtle.”

“If you turn on an electric light, does that make you a god? Your own ancestors might have said so.”

Guilford blinked at the vault of the sky. “Hell of a light bulb.”

“We’re inside the Archive,” the picket said. “Specifically, we’re enclosed in a nodular logic packet attached to the procedural protocols of the Terrestrial ontosphere.”

“Well, that explains it,” Guilford said.

“I’m sorry. What I mean to say is, we’re still inside in the Archive — we can’t leave it, at least not yet — but we’re not exactly on Earth.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“I can’t take you out of the Archive, but I can show you what the Archive looks like from the outside.”

Guilford wasn’t sure what he was being offered — and the buried sense of urgency still pricked at him — but since he had no real choice, he nodded. “Show me,” he said.

As suddenly as that, the sky began to shift. It ceased to spin. The stars moved in a new direction, south to north, the southern horizon dropping at a dizzying speed. Guilford gasped and wanted to cling to the ground even though there was no sensation of motion. The breeze persisted, warm and gentle from the sea.

“What am I looking at?”

“Just watch,” the picket said.

More stars scrolled up from the horizon, countless stars, and then retreated at a shocking speed, became blurs and bands of light… the arms, the disk of a galaxy. The starlight stabilized, became a vast and luminous wheel in the sky.

“The Archive’s ontosphere,” the picket said quietly. “It’s isness.”

Guilford couldn’t frame a response. He felt awe like a band across his chest, tightening.

Now the galaxy itself began to blur together, to form an undifferentiated sphere of light.

“The ontosphere in four dimensions.”

And that faded as suddenly. Now the sky was an immensity of rainbow-colored lines on velvet black, iridescent, parallel, stretching in every direction to infinity until he couldn’t bear to look, until looking threatened his sanity—

“The Higgs structure of the Archive,” the picket said, “visualized and simplified.”

Simplified! Guilford thought.

That faded, too.

For a moment the sky was utterly dark.

“If you were outside the Archive,” the picket said, “this is what you would see.”

The Archive: a seamless, sealed sphere of sullen orange light that filled the western horizon and was reflected in the still water of the bay.

“It contains all that the galaxy once was,” the picket said softly. “It did, at least, until the psions corrupted it. That smudge of red light over the hills, Guilford, is all that remains of the original galaxy, with all its stars and civilizations and voices and possibilities — an immense black hole devouring a few lifeless cinders.”

“Black hole?” Guilford managed to ask.

“A singularity, matter so compacted that nothing can escape from it, not even light. What you see is secondary radiation.”

Guilford said nothing. He felt a great fear battering at this envelope of calm which contained him. If what the picket had told him was true then this mass in the sky contained both his past and his future; time all fragile, tentative, vulnerable to attack. That smoldering cinder was a slate on which the gods had written worlds. Misplace an atom and planets collide.

And on that slate they had written Lily and Caroline and Abby and Nicholas… and Guilford. He had been extracted from it, temporarily, a number fluctuating between zero and one.

Souls like chalk dust, Guilford thought. He looked at the picket. “What do you want from me?”

“We talked about this once before.”

“You want me to fight your battle. To be a soldier.”

“Strange as it may seem, there are things you can do in the ontosphere that I can’t. I’m asking for your help.”

“My help!” He stared at the dully radiant image of the Archive. “I’m not a god! Even if I do what you want, what difference can it possibly make?”

“None, if you were the only one. But there are millions of others, on millions of other worlds, and millions more to come.”

“Why waste time on me, then?”

“You’re no more or less important than any of the rest. You matter, Guilford, because every life matters.”

“Then take me home and let me look after Abby and Nick.”

They were all right, weren’t they? He struggled with vague, disquieting shards of memory. Memory like broken glass…

“I can’t do that,” the picket said. “I’m not omnipotent. Don’t make the mistake of thinking so.”

“What kind of a god are you, then?”

“Not a god. I was born of mortal parents, Guilford, just like you.”

“A million years ago.”

“Far more than that. But I can’t manipulate the ontosphere the way you suggest. I can’t rewrite the past… and only you can influence the future.” He stood up. The picket carried himself with a dignity Guilford didn’t recognize as his own. For a moment Guilford seemed to see past him… not through him, but beyond the humble appearance into something as hot and immense as the sun.

This isn’t a human being, Guilford thought. Maybe it used to be a human being; maybe it even used to be Guilford Law. But it was some other kind of creature now. It walks between stars, Guilford thought, the way I might walk into Fayetteville on a sunny day.

“Consider the stakes. If this battle is lost, your daughter will be enslaved and your grandchildren will be used as incubators for something utterly soulless. In a very real sense, Guilford, they will be eaten. It’s a form of death from which there is no resurrection.”

Nick, Guilford thought. Something about Nick. Nick hiding behind the big living room sofa…

“And if all the battles are lost,” the picket said, “then all of this, all past, all future, everything you loved or might have loved, will be food for locusts.”

“Tell me something,” Guilford said. “Just one thing. Please explain why all this depends on me. I’m nothing special — you know that, if you’re what you say you are. Why don’t you go find somebody else? Somebody smarter? Somebody with the strength to watch his kids grow old and die? All I ever wanted — Christ! — is a life, the kind of life people have, fall in love, make babies, have a family that cares enough to give me a decent burial…”

“You have a foot in two worlds. Part of you is identical to part of me, the Guilford Law who died in France. And part of you is unique: the Guilford Law who witnessed the Miracle. That’s what makes this conversation possible.”