“Who’s this, Julie?” she asked, mildly, as her pale eyes scanned me from head to toe with what seemed to me to be a practiced sweep. The people under the hoods—one man and one woman, to judge by the contours of their suitskins—didn’t bother to peep out to see what was happening.

“Mortimer Gray,” said Ngomi. “The kid from the valley. Today’s the day he finally grew big enough to complete the climb. About time, considering the number of times he got halfway and chickened out.” The insult was uncalled for, and not entirely defused by the levity of the black man’s tone.

“Congratulations,” said the woman.

“This is Sara Saul,” Ngomi said. “She’s the boss.”

“The chief archivist, you mean?” I said, trying to show that I was on the ball.

They both laughed. “We’re just lodgers,” Ngomi said. “We don’t actually look after the cesspit. To tell you the truth, the cesspit pretty much looks after itself, now that the store is deemed to be full up. Historians crawl over it and scratch its surface now and again, but nobody else pays it much heed. We just rent a few of the leftover nooks and crannies.”

“But you’re not monks,” I said, uncertainly, “are you?”

Mercifully, they didn’t laugh at that.

“After a fashion, we are,” said Sara Saul. “We’re not given to prayer, like the people at the far end of the valley, and we’re not what used to be called chipmonks—VE obsessives, that is—but you couldsay that we’re in retreat, living ascetically for the sake of our vocation. It isa vocation, isn’t it, Julie?”

“Definitely,” said Julius Ngomi.

I knew that they were teasing me, but I had to ask. “What vocation?”

“We’re running the world.” It was Sara Saul who answered.

“I thought that was all done in Antarctica,” I said, lightly. I was determined not to be taken in, although I knew how far out of my intellectual depth I was.

“There’s running and running”Julius Ngomi informed me, unhelpfully. “The UN takes care of all the superficial bureaucracy, and they do a damn fine job. We work at a slightly deeper level—no pun intended. We help control the ebb and flow of the world’s money. You might think of us as one of the fingers of the Invisible Hand.”

Even at the age of fifteen, I knew what the Invisible Hand was.

“I thought the Invisible Hand was supposed to work on its own,” I said.

“That’s the official story,” Julius Ngomi agreed, “but economics is even more fantastic than history. Back in Adam Smith’s time the invisible hand was supposed to be a mere statistical aggregation of the demand generated by the separate pursuit of individual interest by billions of would-be consumers and the supply generated by attempts to meet that demand profitably, but it was never as simple as that. The difference didn’t matter much when even the wealth of nations was beyond the reach of effective management, because no one had the ability actually to calculate the sum and keep track of all its changing terms—but things have changed.

“The only way the economy could be planned in the days of the old Old Human Race was by the exercise of political brute force to override and channel individual interest. Then the supercomputer happened along, and the workings of spontaneous individual interest became something not merely measurable on a day-to-day basis but futuristically calculable. Demand could already be influenced, of course, in all kinds of clever ways, but the influences were as separate and spontaneous as the interests themselves until it became possible to weigh them and balance them and build them into patterns. So the twenty-first century’s best and bravest put their wise heads together and said, Hey, let’s buy up the world and usher in the Golden Age of Planned Capitalism. If we’re clever enough, I bet we could organize the stock market crash to end all stock market crashes and come out of it with enough corners in genemod primary produce to obtain effective commercial control of two-thirds of the world’s surface— and then we can reel in the other third at our leisure, as long as we never let anyone mention the unholy wordTrust. It won’t be as much fun as conquering the universe, but that plan’s on hold for the time being, and this one’ll be a hell of a lot more convenient.So here we are, in the twenty-sixth century, with the effective ownership of the real world in the hands of half a dozen intricately interlinked megacorps, each one dominated by half a dozen major shareholders. Those dominant shareholders have charged their directors and managers with the duty of keeping the economic lifeblood of humankind pumping in an orderly and healthy fashion while its multitudinous heads dream on in the heady clouds of the Universe Without Limits. So that’s what we do.”

“Oh,” I said, while I was trying desperately to think of a question that would sound sufficiently intelligent. All I could think of, in the end, was “Why here? Why not a nice plush officetree in Moscow or Vienna?”

“They’re nice places to work and play,” Ngomi agreed, “but they’re no place to bring up a child. Too many distractions. Even the UN bureaucrats recognize that serious business requires a certain strategic isolation and manifest austerity. You should be grateful that we take our vocation so seriously. It’s yourinheritance, as well as mine, we’re keeping in good order. Think of us as fosterers of your entire generation, of the new New Human Race itself. Even those of us who are only false emortals accept the responsibility of making sure that they hand the world over to the true emortals in the best possible condition. That’s a hell of a lot more than the old Old Human Race did for our grandfathers—a hellof a lot more. Sara and I don’t actually livehere, of course. We just serve our tours of duty once or twice a year. It’s a stressful job, and we need our rest—and it’s also the kind of job that can get awkwardly addictive, so it’s best to spread the work around. Megalomania is sounbecoming.”

His tone was never less than pleasant, but he wasn’t really sharing a joke with me, or even pretending to. He wasn’t testing me to see how much of what he said I could follow. He was just amusing himself:taking the edge off his monkish exile. If anything had showed on the flatscreens Sara Saul was watching from the corners of her eyes that required her finger of the Invisible Hand to twitch, they’d have bundled me out—but for the moment, the finger was poised above the pressure pad, waiting without any sense of urgency. So two bored adults were taking time out to play with the kid from next door.

Even the people who run the world sometimes pause for play—although rumor has it that dear old Julius hasn’t had much free time of late.

“Can I tell my parents what’s really here?” I asked. It seemed only polite to ask the question, even though I knew full well that they couldn’t stop me.

“Why would you want to do that?” the still-young Julius Ngomi asked me. “I bet this is the first real secret you’ve ever had. Why give it away? Everyone ought to have a piggy-bank full of secrets. You cantell anyone you want—but you’d run the risk that they wouldn’t even be interested and that their disinterest would devalue your informational capital. It really is best to plan these things, Mortimer. Today could be an important step in the making of your secret self, the shaping of your unique identity. None of your co-parents is ever going to climb up here to check your story no matter what you tell them, so why not invent your own Shangri-La? Truth is whatever you can get away with.”

“Don’t lead the boy astray, Julie,” said Sara Saul. “Tell your parents what you like, Mortimer. We’re not working in secret—we just don’t advertise our private addresses. Everybody knows we’re somewhere. They’d probably be amused to think of us renting space in a junk mountain—except that it’s not really junk. You have to be careful about taking Julie’s way of telling things too seriously. What’s stored in all these chambers is the real substance of history; the myths spun out in the Labyrinth are just its ghost.”