Pav couldn’t imagine being in a situation where he would pull that trigger, knowing he would be killing himself dead dead dead.

Even if, as it turned out, it was not so permanently dead.

Then, to wake up…where? In some kind of alien cocoon?

Pav wanted to vomit in sheer sympathy.

“Here,” Zhao said, offering Yvonne the water bottle—which still had a couple of centimeters of water in it! He’d been holding out on them. Fucking figured.

Rachel was rubbing Yvonne’s back, looking and acting very grown-up. It was fascinating how different this teenage girl turned out to be. She wasn’t completely a brat, anyway.

“This is so…strange,” Yvonne said. “One second, I was…fighting off Downey. Then…I’m in some vat of some kind, trying to breathe—”

“We know,” Rachel told her.

“How can you know?” Zhao said. “None of us can know what this is like!”

“I talked to my mother after she came back,” Rachel said, suddenly sounding like someone twice her age. “I haven’t had the experience, okay, but I’ve been thinking about this for days now.”

“It’s not just…coming back,” Yvonne said. She was steadier on her feet now. “It feels as though I just saw that timer count down to zero about fifteen minutes ago. I was there, then I was nowhere.” She forced a smile. Then she pointed to Pav. “Then you tackled me. Why’d you do that?”

“To save you,” Rachel said, “from a cat’s-eye.”

“Which is what?” Before Pav could venture an explanation, which was sure to be argued by Zhao, Yvonne waved her hand. “Never mind about that. I think I could ask a million questions and still not run out.” She raised her eyes to the unfamiliar structures around them. “What happened to me, where we are. And what the hell you people are doing here.”

Rachel’s account of the twin vesicle/Objects, their launch at Bangalore and Houston, and their “collection” of almost two hundred humans, took several minutes. It would have been completed more quickly, but Yvonne kept interrupting. She was especially troubled by the connection between her detonation of the nuke aboard Destiny and the launch of the Objects. “So you’re saying I caused it? Nobody has any idea what was going on there…what my orders were! I mean, look at this place! Are they saying I was wrong?”

“Nobody is making any judgments,” Zhao said. Fair enough; in Pav’s view, based on subsequent events, the Coalition and NASA would have been better off staying away from Keanu—or, if they had to land, bombarding the place. “Everyone understands that you were only following instructions.”

“Shit, yeah! They should ask the White House or headquarters. They could ask my father about my instructions.”

Mention of Gabriel Jones caused Rachel and Pav to look at each other. Zhao knew of the relationship between the JSC director and Yvonne, too. He gestured to Rachel. “Go ahead, tell her.”

“Tell me what?” Yvonne said.

“Your father was one of the Houston people who got scooped,” she said.

“He’s here? My father is here?”

Pav thought Yvonne was about to collapse. He and Zhao took her arms, but she steadied. “Okay, okay.” She was shaking her head, as if recovering from a punch. “The others in the crew? Tea, Zack. The Brahma guys…”

“Tea, Taj, Lucas, and Natalia went home on Destiny,” Pav said.

“On Destiny?” Pav had to explain the bizarre “snowplow” landing the orbiting Destiny had made on Keanu’s surface.

“Where’s Zack Stewart?”

“With us,” Rachel said. “Well, with the others back in the habitat.”

“Good. He’s a good guy.” Yvonne still looked uncertain. “You know, as we talk, I’ve got another input. It’s sort of a voice, but not a voice.”

“In your head?” Pav said.

She nodded. “It’s like having…sound and some kind of video streaming right past your ears and eyes.”

“What about?” Zhao asked.

Yvonne closed her eyes and put her hands over her ears.

“Yvonne,” Rachel said, only to have Yvonne flap her hands and shush her.

“Let me think! Jesus!” She walked away.

Rachel turned to Pav. “Did you ever see Cowboy?”

He wanted to laugh; with all this, the girl thought about the dog. “No.” Just the one sea of plasm was large enough that it was possible the dog had splashed down some distance away, unseen but still safe. It could have hit another lake.

But the animal could just as easily have slammed into one of these buildings. “We can start looking whenever we—”

Yvonne suddenly returned, all business. “Okay,” she said. “I think I’m getting used to what’s going on. Somebody or something is telling me or making me feel things. And they can make it kind of urgent. Right now they or it are telling me there’s something we all need to see.” She looked up, then scanned the tops of the buildings. “It’s that way,” she said nodding forward.

Zhao was shaking his head. “We have no time for sightseeing. We need to find a way back to our habitat.”

Yvonne turned to look at him. She was taller than Zhao and loomed over the Chinese spy by half a head.

Her expression was odd, too. “We said, you need to see this.”

We? Pav looked at Rachel, then Zhao. Suddenly none of them felt inclined to argue.

JAIDEV

From the time Jaidev was seventeen until he was fired by Vikram Nayar, his life had consisted of work or furtive sex. Money, status, none of those had mattered. It was all about doing the work and finding a partner for the night. Or the hour. Or the next hour. So far, life here in the Keanu habitat had been much the same.

Minus the sex.

In the few moments in which he was not consumed with the giant toy store that was the Temple and all its wonders, Jaidev tried to prepare himself for a celibate life among the Houston-Bangalores.

Now, basic demographics suggested that a group of 180 or so humans, all but a few of them adults, would have at least three dozen gays, if you believed the information so widely believed in the community. Other studies might drop that number to ten or so.

That was hardly a dating pool, at least by Jaidev’s standards. Especially when you had to allow for the fact that some or half of those in the community might be women.

Of course, Jaidev was well aware that he might not be facing old age—or a life span that stretched more than a few days or weeks.

Thank God he had the work. Having Nayar and the other leaders kissing his ass, having Daksha to boss around—priceless additions.

And not only were they making real progress in learning how to operate the Temple’s marvelous 3-D printing system, they were branching out into other areas. “These bugs,” as Daksha called them.

“What about them?” Jaidev said, snapping. He was midway through a tricky assembly sequence, hoping to replicate the functions if not the design of a Slate or cell phone battery, something that would have almost as much value as food or water, and much like trying to rearrange a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded. In short, he was unhappy about the interruption.

“They’re intelligent, I think,” he said.

“They’re not much bigger than mold!”

“Intelligence is not related to physical size.”

“Let me know when you find an intelligent molecule.” He turned away. It was fun having a serf; less fun having to pretend to care what he had to say.

“Assemble a few molecules in the right sequence, and you have an entity capable of processing information and duplicating itself. Aren’t those the definitions of life?”

“Life, not intelligence. Can’t you be precise?”

“Whatever,” Daksha said, throwing up his hands. “They’re trying to communicate with us.”

“Fine,” Jaidev said. “I’ll allow the speculation; how do you know?”

And, to his surprise, Daksha related a whole series of not entirely unintelligent tests he had conducted on the Woggle-Bugs, from changing their environment (covering the habitat, for example) to bombarding them with sound at a variety of frequencies, and basic imagery.