“But I’m dead on target?”

<More. He has concluded his negotiations. To gain what he wishes, he needs to trade some items from the ship.>

“Let him. After he’s bargained away the Legacies, why be choosy?”

<The merchants here are avid for information on the clothing and jewelry of the Old Bishops. Their “folk art.”>

“Fashion, huh?”

<It seems a primate preoccupation. Augmenting yourselves with baubles.>

“Hey, you stick on an extra eye or leg fast as I can change my shirt.”

<You seldom change it.>

“Hey! I forget, sure, but—”

<It is not the same.>

Toby didn’t see why, but he felt something in Quath’s manner that made him uneasy. “Why come looking for me, mother of all cockroaches?”

<Your father has finished his trading. Now, to complete his own ends, he needs one thing more.>

Toby kicked at a fallen branch. “Should I care? Let him sell his teeth for it.”

<The important piece only you have.>

“Me? I haven’t got anything.”

<You carry a Personality.>

“Sure, but—say, what’s my dad been negotiating?”

<They have a different way of death here. An institution known as the Restorer, or the Preserving Machine. With a tissue sample and a memory reserve, it can recreate any person who once lived.>

Toby felt cold, sharp horror strike into him. “Shibo.”

<Yes.>

“I don’t like that.”

<I would think it was an issue for the persona herself.>

Toby blushed. He tottered, reeled—and sat down abruptly, head swimming. The air swarmed with blue-white dots. His chest heaved to drag in thick, moist gasps. He knew what Killeen wanted was wrong in some dark, terrible way, but he could not muster arguments. “I . . . I don’t know.”

<If the Shibo persona is to be used to reconstruct the living actual person, I would imagine that her cooperation is necessary.>

“They’ll confer with her?”

<I believe so. But a Personality in a chip cannot speak.>

“Sure, it’ll have to be through me.”

His head pounded and his hands clenched, strangely cold, but he made himself think. He had only to turn his attention inward and Shibo’s Personality rose like a massive stony wedge inside his mind.

It is tempting to go back into all that. I will have to think about it.

“What?” he asked her soundlessly. “But we’re so close. I’ve hardly even started to learn what you’re really like. Your memories, I love them.”

They are digital dust.

“They’re just as real as, as this grass, those trees.”

You do not believe that. Remember the ones who fought the fake animals? They embraced the simulated over the real. You laughed at them.

“But your self, it’ll last forever in chipstore.” He was grasping at straws of logic and hoped she could not sense that.

Nothing replaces life. Still, there are flavors here that you do not taste. Hard to describe, gray and cool and restful.

Craftily he said to her, “Let’s get through this trouble, then talk about this so-called Restorer.”

There is some sense to that, I admit.

“Good. Just let me straighten things out with my dad, just you and me, and—”

I have been thinking. Such a transformation might not make for happiness in myself or in Killeen. He is changed. Harder.

“He is that.”

I treasure this remove. Here I am free of the coarse and momentary, of jars and needs.

Toby caught a sliver of pale spaces, strangely delicious, of smooth surfaces flowing in a timeless place. “I see.”

You cannot. But I thank you for trying.

He gulped, his hands trembling, and gazed defiantly up into Quath’s hovering head. “I . . . I won’t let Killeen have her chip.”

<He is Cap’n. He will take it.>

“I have rights!”

<Not to keep a Personality. He will argue that a Personality should be liberated if it can be.>

He jerked angrily to his feet. “That’s not Family custom!”

<Your Family never had the technology before. With your species, where ability goes, custom follows.>

“Humanity must’ve had this, sometime ’way back, or else these people here wouldn’t have it. But our customs, they’re ancient—and they don’t say anything about bringing Personalities back.”

<This, then, is a measure of how far you have fallen.>

So simply put, the brutality of it was unanswerable. “Look, I still won’t give her up.”

<He will take her. He argues already that Shibo’s talents are needed, for the exploration of this place.>

“Exploration?” Toby could not get his mind off the prospect before him. And something more dried his mouth, tightened his throat—the strange currents running like searing rivulets when he thought of Shibo.

<For Abraham. And else, as well, I believe.>

“I need to think this over.” Toby got up unsteadily. Shibo herself was not causing this seethe inside him. It was something he felt, something about him and Shibo together, that he could not voice. Each time he tried, he felt a sickening churn, a whirlpool of coming nausea.

<I came to warn you. Killeen has ordered a search for you.>

“I won’t go back.”

“Oh yeasay—you will,” his father said.

Toby whirled. “No!”

Killeen and Cermo emerged from the nearby trees, fully suited. His father’s face was lined and drawn, as though he had gone sleepless all these days. “I knew Quath would be better at searching than we are,” he said with a tight smile. “You stepped-down your sensorium so much we couldn’t pick you up on the grid.”

“Dad, don’t do this.”

“I have to.”

“I’m carrying the chip, so Family law says I decide for the Personality.”

“Except when Family survival demands. That’s the law, too.”

Toby thought fast. He had never paid much attention to the endless wranglings of Family law and custom, the adults’ yack-yack and breezy bluster, and now regretted it. “We’re safe here. Nothing’s threatening our survival.”

“Not so. But look, son—I want Shibo back. I think you can understand why.”

“I don’t think it’s for the best,” Toby temporized.

“Nonsense. We’ll be together again, the three of us, a real family.”

Toby shook his head violently. “Not the same, not the same.”

“Sure it will. Shibo, in the flesh—just think of it.” For the first time Toby could remember Killeen’s face lit with joy.

“That’s not why we came here, Dad, and anyway—” He stopped. “No—this was why you came, wasn’t it?”

Wariness swallowed Killeen’s brief delight. “Not the main reason, no, but—sure, I guessed there was something like the Restorer here. The message in that Chandelier, remember? And other old sayings, myths. You should see the real thing, son! Magnificent, huge, flexible glass and metal you can see through, tech that can restore anybody, given enough data. You’ll be—”

“You don’t need her now, Dad. Later, maybe, when we’ve found Abraham, gone—”

“Abraham!” Killeen’s sunny elation returned. “I got his message. He sent coordinates of where he is. They’re not reliable, Andro says, but they’ll get us to the neighborhood. Abraham is alive—here! Somehow he got away from the Citadel. Said to bring you for sure and—”

“Shibo can come after that. She’s personal business, Dad. Abraham, all the rest—that’s Family Bishop business. First deal with that.”

“There’s more beyond to discover, I can smell it. I need Shibo. She was my, my core, son. You can’t understand that, I know, but . . .”

In Killeen’s face unease and uncertainty warred with his set-piece Cap’n’s hard-mouthed mask. Toby realized suddenly how much a shield that calm, resolute image had been, for years now.

“I need her. I want to have her back before we go searching for Abraham. It’s an emergency, so I’m setting aside the usual Family customs—”