He said, “Machinophiles or not, I will spare you. I will protect you and all innocent clients of the Fancy Gap Hibernation Facility, without reservation to the best of my ability, and yes, if there is a way to spare them, I will try to save the guilty clients too—but only if they surrender, and restore each thing they have looted or touched, and only if the persons directly responsible for the deaths of the three black Locusts are executed. Can you deduce my motives now?”

Keirthlin looked at her father.

Keir was scowling darkly. “All you have said is inconsequential. There is no need for vengeance. There will not be any future generations.”

An icicle of dread formed in the pit of Menelaus’ stomach. “What did you see?”

“The First Sweep. Look within. This is a true image.”

9. Raleigh

He seemed to be in midair, and snowy hills, green with pine, were flowing by underfoot. Menelaus said, “This image is coming from the missing wind-craft that Mickey launched.”

Keirthlin’s voice was at his ear. “The serpentine that your friend cycled into its more primitive and self-aware phase of behavior gave out its normal call and response to find other mechanisms loyal to the Machine. Those process codes, being in the public domain of our Noösphere, were part of our Confraternal heritage.”

Kier added, “We violate no precepts by availing ourselves of the information content.”

Menelaus said, “You are telling me that even back in the Witch days, Exarchel had all the ratiotechs bugged?”

She said, “From even earlier. The Gigantic precautions limiting Sylph ratiotechnology to isolated handheld systems were not an overreaction. I will now show you an earlier image.”

The wind-craft hung like a kite over the scene.

Blocks of glacier, hundreds of feet high, reared above a ruined city. Even softened by shapes of snow, the soaring towers and lofty domes of glass gave the metropolis an air of classical beauty. The traces left by boulevards showed a clean gridwork of streets, and four public squares surrounded by a central square. He could see statues hooded with ice and the broken feet of triumphal arches mounded high with snow. He looked closer, and realized that those towers were merely stumps of what must have been superscrapers, and the domes were no more than surface vents for deeply dug geothermal power taps. From the arrangement, he guessed that these were an example of the very pyrohydroponic gardens whose quests to reach ever deeper levels long ago forced Pellucid to sink into ever more cautious secrecy.

Then he realized that the high, square shapes of white looming like titans above the scene were not glacier cliffs, but arcologies: massive, windowless buildings not meant for human life, containing nothing but mostly buried cubic miles of logic crystal. These were the Granoliths Pellucid had mentioned in his final report. These vast rectilinear monasteries represented land-based biological man’s last desperate attempt to understand and control the multiple-minds of the Melusine, semiartificial seagoing creatures apparently constructed from men, sea mammals, and Xypotechs.

The image seemed melancholy, but nothing to put a fright into so stolid a soul as Alpha Captain Daae.

Then he wondered if he was looking at the wrong part of the image. It was not until he turned his head that he realized this image was from a 360-degree camera, a global lens. Turning the goggles brought other parts of the recorded image into view.

Away to the south, past the barren white hills beyond, Menelaus saw what seemed to be giant dark thunderclouds gathered.

Menelaus realized there was something odd about the cloud. There was a band of blue sky (slightly brighter in hue than the sky to the left and right) issuing from the top of the thunderhead. It looked like a blue road, or perhaps a crack, as if the sky were pure blue glass that had developed two perfectly parallel, perfectly vertical fissures several miles apart, reaching directly upward.

Menelaus craned back his head, tilting the view from the goggles upward. The road of lighter blue sky receded in the upper distance. The far ends seemed to converge, the way the parallel rails of a track seem to meet at the horizon. Only here, there was no horizon. Directly overhead, the dome of the sky was cloudless, and the highest midpoint of the dome, the very zenith, was the point to which the lighter blue stripes converged. So the whole atmospheric disturbance or optical illusion or whatever it was looked like a very narrow and very tall triangle, perhaps a few miles wide at its storm cloud base, and hundreds of miles high as it reached to the top of the sky. Because of the fact that, to the human eye, the sky does seem to be a dome, the triangular stripe of lighter blue color seemed to bend like a hook or a claw, as if a Titan with his shoulder at the horizon were reaching a curved arm up and overhead, to place a menacing finger at the zenith.

It was certainly ominous looking, as if an immeasurably immense tower shaped like a half circle were about to topple on the scene.

Keirthlin, who could see him tilting back his head, gave a noise smaller than a sigh, as if anticipating what Menelaus was about to see. That small noise came just as his eyes adjusted, or perhaps his brain, and he realized what he was seeing. Perhaps he consciously noted now how disturbed the thundercloud was, or how large it was, or how far away. Perhaps he glimpsed, where the black clouds parted, the vast and round metallic surface of the lower part of the structure.

It was not blue, not really, any more than mountains seen on the horizon are blue. Mountains seem blue at a distance because of the hue of the mass of the intervening air. When they are closer than the horizon, of course, there is less air, and therefore the color is not as dark.

What he was seeing was a solid object. It was a cylinder, too large and far away for any surface details to be distinguished, reaching from the cloud level, perhaps five hundred feet off the ground, up and up through the atmosphere and stratosphere and perhaps beyond. The clouds parted as it advanced, and the air masses being displaced were condensing into a large hurricane and thunderstorm at the bottom of its foot.

The bottom was a circular plain of metal dotted with irregularities, surrounding the vast emptiness of a portal or mouth opening into the immeasurable cylindrical interior of the structure. Threadlike arms or instruments hung down, looking like the trailing tails of jellyfish.

Minutes passed, and more could be seen. The armored body of the cylinder itself was punctuated here and there with cross-shaped altitude jets, or black dots of weapon ports or antennae or instruments of some sort, about one every five or ten square miles. To be visible at this distance, the rocket cones must have been larger than skyscrapers.

Some segments of the vast curving surface were flat and dark like the oceans of the moon; others were stubbled with a pattern of irregularities, almost invisible at this distance, which may have been buildings, encampments, fortresses, or aerodromes larger than any major metropolis, their towers horizontal rather than vertical. There were some craters large enough to be visible on the sections higher in the atmosphere, or perhaps these were scars from strikes by old nuclear missiles.

With the effortless power and grace of a god, serene as a ship in full sail, the unimaginably titanic artifact moved across the face of the Earth, and the disturbed clouds formed eddies and swirls, larger than provinces, behind it as it came.

A little nimbus of glittering glints fluttered before the mouth of the cylinder, and tiny specks as if something was traveling up through the air into it.

The wind-craft that had recorded the image swooped closer to the city. Menelaus could see something being lifted up from the ground and into the opening of the cylinder.