The battle wasn’t completely impossible. There were precedents in history, some academics were pointing out. Almost all of history was a carefully constructed mythology for use as propaganda or nation building. The writers of the Gospels had spun out the unpromising story of a Nazarene carpenter-preacher into an instrument to shape the souls of humankind, all the way to and beyond the present day. Shouldn’t the modern U.S. government, with all the techniques and understanding at its disposal, be able to do infinitely better yet?

But Maura had a premonition, deep and dark, that it was a war the present couldn’t win. The artifact on Cruithne, now in irradiated quarantine, and especially the spacetime bubble on the Moon, were there: real, undeniable. And so, in the end, was the truth.

The cops left her.

There was one more report on her desk. She skimmed it briefly, held it out to the incinerator.

Then she put it back on her desk, picked up her phone, and called Dan Ystebo.

“News from the Trojans,” she told him. “One of NASA’s satellites has picked up anomalous radiation. Strongly redshifted.” She read out details, numbers.

My God. You know what this means?

“Tell me”

The squid are leaving, Maura… He talked, fast and at length, about what had become of his enhanced cephalopods. I guess he doesn’t get the chance too often, Maura thought sadly.

We know they ‘ve spread out through the cloud of Trojans. We can only guess how many of them there are right now. The best estimate is in excess of a hundred billion. And it may be they are all cooperating. A single giant school. Do you know why the numbers are significant? A hundred billion seems to be a threshold… It takes a hundred billion atoms to organize to form a cell. It takes a hundred billion cells to form a brain. And maybe a hundred billion cephalopod minds, out in the Trojans, just light-minutes apart, have become something —

“Transcendent.”

Yes. We can’t even guess what it must be like, what they’re capable of now. Any more than a single neuron could anticipate what a human mind is capable of. Space is for the cephalopods, Maura. It never was meant for us.

His voice, his bizarre speculation, was a noise from the past for Maura. It’s all receding, she thought. She sighed. “I think it no longer makes a difference one way or the other, Dan. And you ought to be careful who you discuss this with.”

Yes.

“Where are you working now?”

Brazzaville. I got a job in the dome here. Biosphere recI amation.

“Rewarding.”

/ guess. Life goes on… Those redshift numbers. The cephalopods must be leaving at close to light speed.

“Where do you think they are going?”

Maybe that isn ‘t the point, Maura. Maybe the point is what they are trying to flee.

At the end of the day she sat quietly at her desk, studying the Washington skyline. She snapped off the noise filters, so the chants and banners of the protesters outside became apparent.

There was still much to do. The immediate future, regardless of Carter, was as dangerous as it had ever been. And the temptation many people seemed to feel to sacrifice their freedom to stern Utopians who promised to order that future for them was growing stronger.

Maura, with a sinking heart, thought the loss of significant freedom might be impossible to avoid. But she could strive, as she always had, to minimize the harm.

Or maybe that was a fight too far for her.

If she left Washington now she wouldn’t be missed, she realized. She had few friends. Friendship was fragile here, and easily corroded. Not married, no partner, no children. Was she lonely, then?

Well, perhaps.

For a long time she had been, simply, so busy, even before this Malenfant business had blown up to consume her life, that she sensed she had forgotten who she was. She sometimes wondered what had kept her here for so long. Were her precious values — formed in a place and time far away from here — just a cover for deeper needs? Was there some deeper inadequacy within, a dissatisfaction she had wrestled to submerge with relentless activity all these years?

If that was so, perhaps now, when she was left stranded by age and isolation, she would have to face herself for the first time.

She looked out her window, and there was the Moon in the daylit sky. Beneath her the planet turned; sun and Moon and stars continued to wheel through the sky. She felt lifted out of herself, transcending her small concerns, as if she were a mouse running around some grand, incomprehensible clockwork.

There was a knock on the door.

Maura dispatched the NASA report to the incinerator, and let in the cops once more.

Emma Stoney:

Emma fell into gray light.

Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon. It’s starting —

For a moment — a brief, painful moment — she thought she was with Malenfant. Where? Cruithne?

But she had never been to Cruithne, never left Earth before this jaunt to the Moon to inspect Never-Never Land on Maura’s behalf. And Malenfant, of course, was long dead, killed when the troopers stormed Cruithne.

And the Blue children of the Moon were all around her, clutching her hands and clothes, lifting her.

She started to remember. The German blue helmet, his assault on her. The escape into the children’s electric-blue spacetime anomaly wall.

She looked around for whoever it was who had called out, but she couldn’t see him.

They lowered her carefully — onto what? some kind of smooth floor — and then the children started to move away, spreading out.

She was lying on a plain: featureless, perfectly flat. The air was hot, humid, a little stale. Too hot, in fact, making her restless, irritable.

There was nothing before her: no electric-blue wall, no far side to this unreality bubble, which should have been just a couple of yards away. She reached out a hand, half expecting it to disappear through some invisible reality interface. But it didn’t.

She pushed herself upright. The pain was, briefly, as blackly unendurable as before, and she lay where she was, longing for unconsciousness. But it didn’t come. And the pain, somehow, started to recede, like a tide imperceptibly turning.

The children were scattering over the plain. The grayness and lack of contrast washed out the colors of the children’s skin and clothes and made them look ill. They seemed to be receding from her, remarkably quickly, perspective diminishing them to tiny running figures. Maybe this place was bigger than it looked.

The sky was an elusive grayness, blank and featureless. There was no sense of distance — no sign of stars, of sun or Earth or orbiting spacecraft, no clouds. The light was shadowless, sourceless.

As they moved farther away from her the children seemed to gray out completely, fading to black, as if there were something wrong with the light. There was nothing beyond the children, no fences or buildings, all the way to the horizon. Except there was no horizon. The floor simply merged into the remote grayness of the sky. It was like being inside a huge glass bulb.

Maybe this whole damn thing is some kind of near-death experience, she thought. An illusion.

But it didn’t feel like it. And her restless brain kept analyzing, observing.

There were little piles of gear: bright primary-color plastic toys, what looked like heaps of bedding or clothes, food packets, and water bottles. There was one more substantial structure, a shacklike assemblage of wires and cables and bits of metal: a Tinkerbell cage, a quark-nugget trap. But there was no order, no logic to the layout. Stuff just seemed to have been dumped where it was last used. If it weren’t for the sheer size of the place, it would be a pigpen.