But music was music, and you didn’t need training to be attracted to shiny toys, Rachel realized. Especially when you were miserable.

Finally leaving Remilla, she went off to find Yahvi, Pav, and the others.

First met as a creature, too-tall Frankenstein

You died for the third or tenth or a hundredth time

Yet in my wanderings I hear you feel you

Surrounding me

LINES CARVED ON FACTORY HABITAT WALL BY DALE SCOTT,

2015–2018

DALE

As he approached the Temple with Harley and Sasha, Dale said, “Do the lights ever go out?” He gestured toward the “ceiling” a thousand meters up, where snakelike “glowworms” provided daytime illumination for half the day, powering down to half-light at “sunset” and “dawn,” and even lower levels for ten hours of human “night.” “Ever have any droughts?” Rain inside the human habitat was benign, short, sweet, nocturnal. It reminded Dale of the old song from Camelot about rain falling only after sundown. Like that song, Keanu’s systems frequently created a morning fog for plants and crops. It always dissipated by “full morning.”

“Why do you ask?” Harley said.

“Why do you care?” Sasha snapped.

He chose to answer Sasha. “I’ve been in the other habitats and seen that there are hiccups in their daily weather.”

“Like a system rebooting?” Harley said.

“God, Harley,” Sasha said, “you don’t have to discuss these things with him!”

The rebuke was enough to stop Harley from answering . . . and just enough to confirm what Dale had suspected, that Sasha Blaine was still his enemy, and that all might not be paradise in Keanu.

The flatness of the terrain made it difficult for Dale to see much more. There were new buildings, of course, all small, no more than two stories, and largely clustered at the opposite end of the habitat, beyond the Temple structure, which still dominated the “skyline.” It seemed that a gate of sorts had been built in the entrance at the far side . . . with some kind of tram or train line extending from it and running toward one cluster of buildings. But all of that was still too far away.

Still, he was amazed at the changes just in the Temple. Formerly, and for years after their arrival, it had been a big, barnlike place with upper floors that resembled a college chemistry lab.

Someone with a sense of design had smoothed out the rough exterior, landscaped the approach, and performed a major renovation on the first-floor atrium—even planting flowers. It now reminded Dale of the lobby of a big-city bank, right down to a reception desk. The walls were white and gray, the furnishings black and chrome. The only feature that reminded Dale of the old atrium was the ramp that led to the upper floors.

Even that had been “improved” by the addition of a conference table in one corner, with more chairs, not just for the table but for spectators.

Harley and Sasha led Dale to that corner. The other humans in the Temple “lobby” turned to stare. Well, Dale thought, they didn’t see many strangers.

Waiting for Dale in the conference corner was Jaidev Mahabala. The ISRO engineer, master of manufacturing, had not changed in a decade, to Dale’s eyes. He was still small, dangerously slim, permanently nervous.

And of all the HBs who were not Dale Scott fans, Sasha Blaine included, Jaidev was number one.

“Let’s get this over with,” Sasha said.

“Where’s Makali?” Dale said. “And Zhao? I would have thought they’d be part of any council.”

“Zhao is a valued member of the council,” Sasha said.

“But not so valued that he can’t show up?” Dale said. “Or is it me? Never mind . . . Makali is a friend. Was a friend.” The Australian-born exobiologist, brilliant and dogged, and attractive as well, had been part of the pioneering Keanu trek team. She and Dale had quarreled then but had seemed to be growing closer in the year afterward.

Makali was just the kind of person to do her own exploring, too. Maybe—

“She’s busy at the moment,” Harley said, as if that explained anything.

It was clear to Dale that Harley and Sasha were both waiting for him to lay his data cards on the table.

A transparent curtain emerged from both walls, enclosing them in a conference space. “What’s this for?” Dale said.

“The Temple is our city hall,” Harley said. “This room is the city council chamber. Even if we have to have private conversations, anyone who wants can sit out there and see us.”

“So generous.”

Never known for his patience, Jaidev gestured toward the table. “Sit.” Without waiting, he took the chair at the head. “Why are you back?”

Jaidev was several decades younger, yet he made Dale feel like a student reciting for an aged, ill-tempered professor. Just for a moment, Jaidev’s attitude made Dale so angry that he almost stormed out. But, no, that was twenty-years-in-the-past Dale. “As I told Harley and Sasha,” he said, trying to keep calm, “I have learned that the Reivers are on Earth, as we suspected.

“They control something like forty percent of the planet, including all the best manufacturing and high-tech facilities outside China, primarily in the United States.

“Here’s the worst of it: They are hard at work on some large project that will be bad for organic life, which is no surprise, given that everything the little bastards do is bad for organic life . . . but this might also be fatal for Earth as a planet.

“More to the immediate point, they know where Rachel and the others are. They will never allow them to visit the U.S. They tried to kill them once; they’ll try to do it again.”

Jaidev closed his eyes and drummed his fingers. That wasn’t the extent of his twitchiness—he also tapped a foot. “And how do you know these matters?”

With a great deal of pride—no other human had managed to reach such a lofty level of communion with Keanu—he told them.

Beginning almost two decades ago, four habitats had turned out to be off-limits to Dale. Human, Sentry, Skyphoi, and the blasted one.

Reachable, however was a fifth . . . the Factory habitat, a genuine cityscape that filled a volume larger than any two of the others.

It was here that Dale spent ten years wandering, exploring, probing, and in some cases, defacing . . . entirely alone. The Factory was a fascinating place if you craved solitude and the company of exotic ten-thousand-year-old machines doing God knows what for who knows what reason.

But he believed that he had learned some of the Factory’s secrets, and one of the most important was accessing its amazing data intercept and retrieval systems.

Dale knew that in their first years on Keanu, Jaidev and Sanjay and that bunch had made several trips to the surface to erect communications dishes that they’d fabricated with Keanu’s nanotech goo—Substance K. But, given the other priorities—food, habitation, immense numbers of other needed items—there had been little time for them to pursue what was seen as a hobby.

And Keanu’s trajectory away from Earth, and soon the Sun, made signal intercepts difficult; the NEO was literally flying at right angles “south” from the solar ecliptic plane. While many terrestrial signals propagated in an expanding sphere, others—usually the most interesting—had been confined to fiber-optic networks or transmitted in tightly directed beams. There were also signals that were too weak to be detected at any distance.

At least by the equipment humans would possess in 2019, and especially the equipment that could be knocked together by ill-equipped refugees of that era.

Keanu’s systems were a hundred times better. “You won’t believe what Keanu itself has been able to pick up.”