In the faint, centrifugal tug of the gravity wheel, Ould-Harrad seemed to lose the strength to stand. He sagged into a web-chair.

“But the leader of the New Sanhedrin is of your Cohen priestly clan! And the Lead Temple Attendant is a Levite… The Pope’s Legate, the other Christians and Muslims, must take second place to the oldest faith’s precedence!”

Ould-Harrad shook his head. “My comrades objected to that humiliation—and to the removal of the beautiful mosque that stood where the temple was to go—but I don’t understand what the Jews had to complain of. Was not two millennia of prophecy being fulfilled at last?”

Saul did not answer immediately. He looked across the room, where the picture wall depicted the onion domes of old Kiev. Sunset flared brilliant tints across the steppes beyond the city walls. New gilt crosses once again topped the tower peaks, signifying Great Russia’s return to its mystical past.

Ten years, he thought. And still it seems impossible to make anyone understand.

Perhaps he owed it to the man, out of charity, to try. But how could one explain that Judaism had changed over two thousand years of exile, since the Romans burned the Temple of the Maccabees to the ground, slew the priests and scattered the people to the winds?

The remnants had wandered to strange climes, adopted alien ideas. Gradually, Hebrew farmers who pioneered the Polish and Russian plains were crowded by later peoples into cramped cities to become an urban folk. The priestly family lines—the Cohens and Levites—lost their influence. For how could they perform their rituals with no central site from which to make sacrifices to appease a terrible godhead?

Spiritual leadership fell upon the rabbi—the teacher—a role one did not inherit, but earned through learning and wisdom.

A role described in detail by Jesus, if the truth be told. Only he, too, had those who prophesied in his name. He, too, was followed by priests.

After a hundred years of strife and accomplishment, the alliance led by Israel had finally begun fraying during Saul’s youth. The Hell Century took its toll even in the belt that folk called “The Green Land.” Prophets appeared on street corners, and cults proliferated.

Islam, too, had suffered a hundred schisms, and Christianity was battered, divided.

Then someone had a bright idea… an obvious solution. And, like so many obvious solutions, it was disastrously wrong.

The Diaspora changed us, Saul thought. In exile, we became individualists, a people of books, and not of sacrifices on golden altars. We mourned the Temple. But wasn’t its burning a sign that it was time to know God in other ways?

How would Ould-Harrad ever understand that no modern Jew wanted anybody to intercede for him? Everyone had to come to his car her own understanding with God.

Ould-Harrad looked down at his hands. “When the conspirators blew up the Al Aqsa Mosque in protest, it was intended that the Levites take the blame, not the kibbutzim. The plan… they never wanted a bloodbath…”

He seemed unable to continue. Saul realized that the man was haunted by guilt and also, perhaps, by a dread that he might not ever even understand the role he had played.

Saul blinked away a memory of smoke over the Judean hills. He shook his head, knowing that there was no way he could help this man.

“I’m sorry,” he began softly. Then he cleared his throat. “Is that all, Colonel? If you’re finished, I have some important experiments under way.”

The black spacer looked up and nodded curtly. “I will report the situation under control.”

Saul had already turned back to his microscope when he heard the door hiss behind him. He tried to return to the business that had been interrupted, first by Joao Quiverian’s persistent questioning, and then by the dolorous Ould-Harrad, but his hands seemed locked over the controls.

“Room environment, dim lights by half,” he commanded aloud and the laboratory darkened in response.

Work, he knew, was a way to take himself away from the memories. “Sample AR 71B dash 78 S, on screen twelve,” he said to the ever listening, semi sentient lab computer. “Let’s see if those inclusions look as suspicious now as I thought they did before Joao stank up the place.”

The last part was not for the computer. And although he hunched over the holistank to immerse himself in mysteries, Saul found that he did not really mind at all the faint scent of ice and almonds in the air.

She tapped tentatively. Then, when no muffled answer came, a harder rap. This brought forth a faint, querulous grunt. When the panel finally hissed open, Virginia stepped through and stood barely inside, feeling the door suck shut behind her.

She said diffidently, “You had sample breakage?”

It seemed a good opening. The danger—if any—was well past before she had heard. Saul had already left the planetology department, where the sample broke, and come down here to his own bio lab. But the ripple of concern among the crew had made her at last muster the courage to seize a pretext.

“Ummm?” Saul was studying his screens, making tiny notes in a small ledger with an old-fashioned pencil. She wondered at this eccentricity; the expedition used standard electronic markers and memory pads. He must have brought a packet of notebooks in his own small, personal weight allotment. She had heard of bringing vintage cabernet and caviar, but not pencils, for heaven’s sake.

And look at me, she thought ruefully. I used up most of my mass-carry lugging along computer hardware everybody Earthside has given up as hopeless, a dead end.

She said nothing. Better to let him work a few moments, float up from the deeps. She walked among the tangle: twisted translucencies, shining chem lines, retorts, knots of cabling, a gurgle and rush of microbio diagnostics. I’m glad I’m not a chemist. Chilled electrons are simpler to move around.

“A few more minutes, Virginia. I’ll be right with you.”

Saul did not even look up as he jotted, thumbed his scanner, frowned. She strolled down one long lane, trying to read the indices on counters and follow the compact, involuted logic of the lab. Here Saul could dismantle genes like Tinkertoys, shuffle molecules like floppy cards. It always struck her as bizarre, how such innocent looking tubes and solutions could reach out, pluck human lives into new paths, seal off others. As if this sleeping machinery hid a monstrous, weighty force.

We keep doing that. Humans imbued their own devices with a separate presence and power, ceaselessly projecting their emotions onto inanimate templates. Illogical—and the worst sinners in this were the supposedly objective, dispassionate scientists.

Look how I shape my software to resemble my thought processes, she mused. Imprinting myself in JonVon’s chilled organic lattices.

Making tier way here this afternoon. she had been struck by how the expedition was like this—separate rooms, immensely powerful ideas sealed off from each other, all contributing yet each isolated. Men and women pocketed into cylinders and cubes and spheres. They moved through the silent, cramped geometry of the Edmund, eager to go down and burrow their own niches in another hollowed world.

She wondered if the crew would communicate any better once they were down in Halley Core. Many of them had been working during the entire year-long cruise out, but she had been sleep slotted for ten months. Before launch, funding problems had cut the staging schedule for the expedition down to the bone; there hadn’t been time to know or even meet most of the crew.

She had studied the siting plans for Halley Core. It looked fine as a schematic, a diagram, an Earthside blueprint—but soon now they would each live in a Euclidean maze, encased. The faint grumbling of the G-wheel only underlined their impacted artificiality. She felt deeply these insides and outsides, sections and barriers.