She tried to keep the conversation going. “But you weren’t with Percell when…”

“When he made his fatal error? Those poor monstrosities? No. Perhaps I should have been. I might have done more good than I did by going back to Haifa to join the struggle. By then it was too late, of course. The old Sabras and the kibbutzim had risen, and been crushed by the Levites and their ‘peacekeeping’ mercenaries. Miriam and the little ones…”

The sudden wash of feelings was overpowering and direct. Virginia ’s eyes fluttered and teared as she remembered scenes of grisly horror…seemed almost to see burning settlements, forests in flame… felt the thalamic surge of anguish and guilt.

Furious, she commanded JonVon to stop creating these images. The machine had no business interfering like this!

JonVon announced coolly over their private channel, dryly delivering news that stunned her even more than the glittering scene of a temple rising on an ancient hill. Virginia ’s mouth was suddenly dry. But…

Her hands clenched and unclenched spasmodically, forcing the machine to automatically disable her fingertip controls. Her breath came in ragged, audible gasps as the truth struck hard.

“He nalulu ehaeha!”

Distantly, she felt the waldo gloves being pulled from her hands, her shoulders lifted in strong arms.

“Are you all right, Virginia ?” Saul was speaking aloud. “I didn’t mean to come on so strong. I thought you did this sort of thing all the time.”

She blinked, looking up at his concerned face. “Y-you knew what I was up to?”

He laughed. “Who wouldn’t, with you and your cybernetic familiar skulking around at the edges of my mind, poking and probing?”

He shook his head. “Honestly, Virginia, what you’ve done here is astonishing. It felt… direct! I Thought-to-thought contact. It’s been in so many stories and films, even after Margan supposedly proved it impossible, years ago, but…”

Virginia was still numb. “It is. It’s supposed to be… impossible, I mean. I use JonVon to mediate, to guess and pattern, to simulate. But I never expected…”

Now Saul’s expression was serious. “You mean that was your first time?”

Virginia had to smile. “Yes, my first. But don’t worry, Saul. You were a perfect gentleman.”

That did it. He rocked back and howled, and she joined in. They laughed together. The tension seemed to evaporate and for a long moment neither of them seemed to take any notice of the fact that he was still holding her.

This feels so good, she thought at last.

“Hmmm?” he said, tapping his helmet. “I only got a little of that, but I’m pretty sure I agree with whatever it was.”

She looked up at him. “Oh, Saul. I’d known you had a sad life. But it’s different feeling it, almost remembering it myself.”

Yet another image flickered at the edge of vision, a woman. She was no great beauty, certainly—mousy dark hair framing an ordinary face—but her smile was warm, and there was a brimming glow. Behind her were two smaller faces, a boy and a girl.

Miriam? Your children?

Yes. A pain softened by time. Love undiminished.

And in her own heart, another pain, still fierce. Love unanswerable.

“You don’t hate me… for what the gene treatments did to you?” Saul asked.

Virginia looked up quickly and met his eyes. She shook her head. “I did, long ago. You and Simon Percell. Then I met some of the other Percells… those for whom your lupus cure worked completely.

“I studied. I learned that without the treatments I would have been stillborn or horribly crippled… not merely—lacking. It was just the luck of the draw that I…”

“It’s all right.” Saul drew her near and she closed her eyes. “We both still have our work now. Good work. And that does give us a piece of the future too, Virginia.”

“Yes, our work… and maybe a little more.” She felt warm. Virginia lifted her face to him. Saul had to push aside the wires of his helmet in order to kiss her.

I’ve never done anything like this while linked, before. She thought amid the tidal swell of feeling. I wonder what Jon Von will make of it.

Above them, unheeded, the simulation had panned back again, taking in a wall of clay and a salty, electric-bright current.

Bright shapes had begun emerging from the rust-colored crevices. They flitted about in the hot stream—now coated and armored against the battering molecules—and set out into a multicolored world, consuming one another, growing, and making little replicas of themselves.

At first he thought it was nothing important.

Carl wiped the green and brown gunk off the distillation pipes and moved on. The gas-gathering zone of Shaft 3 was a long dark tunnel, its phosphors giving everything a lime-green cast.

The plumbing looked okay—magnetic motors humming, pipes gurgling, a smell of rotten eggs from the sulfur compounds. Excess vapors were condensed here from the miles of tunnels now threading Halley Core. Bioinventory showed a surplus of useful fluids and was talking about storing it. The boiloff would probably lessen as the more-volatile ices were used up, and also there would be less heat-making activity during the long cruise out. Everything looked pretty damn good.

But there was brown sticky stuff in the filters. Shit. It’s everywhere. Carl cleaned them carefully with a water jet and flushed his covered bucket into the outbound tube—one-way flash vaporization that dumped directly into free space.

This odd-looking mess wasn’t supposed to be here. Prefilters should take out the big stuff and sift it for useful solids. These backup filters should catch impurities and crystallize them.

Maybe there was something special about this particular sticky stuff. He filled a sample bottle—the bio types nagged him incessantly for traces of anything odd—and kicked off toward sleep slot 1. Malenkov should have a look at this.

Cycling through the big lock into Central Complex, he realized that he missed Jeffers. The founding crew were all safely slotted now, making things a bit lonely for the First Watch. Captain Cruz had made him senior petty officer, which merely meant he roamed more than the others, checking—but the minor honor pleased him.

He liked working alone, anyway—gliding smoothly and surely through the locks and shafts with Bach or Mozart weaving in his ears. Maybe I’m a natural hermit, he thought. I wonder if the crew selection people could tell that from their psychoinventory tests. He had hardly seen anyone these last few days.

When he entered the aft port of Life Sciences the first thing he heard was loud talking.

“He goes in now! I make no compromises,” Nikolas Malenkov’s gravelly voice cut through.

“I want a sample to study,” Saul persisted.

“I have taken samples.” Malenkov put his hands on his hips and leaned forward menacingly. “Epidermis and fluids only.”

“I’ll need more than that to find out what—”

“No! Later, we revive him, maybe! When we know what killed him. If you take samples from internal organs, that will make it harder for us to bring him back later.”

Carl frowned. “Hey, what’s—”

Saul wiped his nose with a handkerchief, ignoring Carl, and said, “You can’t cure him unless you know what killed him!”

“You have smears from throat, urine, blood samples—”

“That might not be enough. I—”

“Hey!” Carl cut in. “Will someone tell me what’s going on?”

Malenkov noticed Carl for the first time. His expression suddenly changed from tight-lipped rage to sad-eyed dejection. “Captain Cruz.”