There was a cabin on the edge of the clearing that looked at first glance as if it must have been two hundred years old if it were a day—but Damon saw as soon as he approached it that its “logs” had been gantzed out of wood pulp. He judged that its architect had been a relatively simple-minded AI. The edifice probably hadn’t been there more than a year and shouldn’t have been there at all. Given that the nearest road was halfway to Fillmore, though, it was certainly private; it probably had no electricity supply and no link to the Web. It was a playpen for the kind of people who thought that they could still get back in touch with “nature.”

The man who was waiting for Damon stayed inside until the helicopter had risen from the ground, only showing himself in the doorway of the cabin when no one but Damon could see his face. Damon saw immediately that he was an oldman, well preserved by nanotech without being prettified by rejuve cosmetology. His hair was white and he was wearing silver-rimmed eyeglasses. Nobody had to wear spectacles for corrective purpose anymore, so Damon assumed that he must have become used to wearing them in his youth, way back in the twenty-first century, and had kept them as a badge of antique eccentricity.

“Are you the Mirror Man?” Damon asked as he approached.

The ancient shook his head. “The Mirror Man’s off the project,” he said, evidently untroubled by the admission he was making in recognizing the description. “I’ve been appointed in his stead, to tidy things up—and to calm things down. Come in and make yourself at home.” He pronounced the final phrase with conscientiously lighthearted sarcasm.

“I’m a prisoner,” Damon pointed out as the other stood aside to let him pass, “not a guest.”

“If you’d only paused to listen to what the man had to say,” the old man replied mildly, “we’d have offered you a formal invitation. I think you’d have found it too tempting to refuse. You can call me Saul, by the way.” It wasn’t an invitation to intimacy; Damon guessed that if the man was called Saul at all it would be his surname, not his given name.

“Stay away from the road to Damascus,” Damon muttered as he surveyed the room into which he was being ushered. “Revelations can really screw up your life.”

The cabin’s interior was more luxurious than the exterior had implied, but it had a gloss of calculated primitivism. Authentic logs were burning within the proscenium arch of an inauthentic stone fireplace set upon a polished stone hearth. There were three armchairs arranged in an arc around the hearth, although there was no one waiting in the cabin except the old man.

There was a stick of bread on the table, together with half a dozen plastic storage jars and three bottles: two of wine, one of whiskey. Damon almost expected to see hunting trophies on the wall, but that would have been too silly. Instead there were old photographs mounted in severe black frames: photographs taken in the days when the wilderness had only been half spoiled.

“Are we expecting somebody else?” Damon asked.

“I hope so,” said Saul. “To tell you the truth, I’m rather hoping that your father might drop by. If he’s still on Earth, he’s had time to reach the neighborhood by now. If he’s stranded out in space, though . . . well, we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Damon didn’t bother with any tokenistic assertion of his father’s membership of the ultimate silent majority. Instead, he said: “Nobody came in response to your other invitations. Why should anyone come now?”

“Because the cat’s out of the bag,” the old man told him. “Eveline Hywood hurried the announcement through, in spite of everything. When the grim satisfaction has worn off, though, she’ll remember that this is only the beginning. Your father’s shown us that he won’t be bullied, and that he’s more than willing to fight fire with fire, tape for tape and appearance for appearance—but he can’t move to the next stage of his plan without clearing it with us because he now knows that we know what that next phase will be—and that if we think it’s necessary, we’ll close the whole thing down.”

“Who’s we?” Damon wanted to know—and was optimistic, for once, that he might be told.

“All of us. Not just PicoCon, by any means. Your father may think that he made the world, and we’re prepared to give him due credit for saving it, but we’re the ones who ownit, and we’ve already made ourpeace. If he’s absolutely determined to return to the days when we were all on the same side, that’s fine by us—just so long as it’s ourside that everybody’s on.”

Damon pulled one of the armchairs back from the fire before sitting down in it. He’d thought that he had recovered well enough from the shot in the back, but once he’d taken the weight off his feet he realized that nobody could get shot, even in today’s world, without a considerable legacy of awkwardness and fatigue. He stirred restlessly, unable to find a comfortable posture.

Saul drew back the neighboring chair in the same careful manner, but he went to the table instead of sitting down. “You want food?” he said. “You haven’t eaten in quite a while.”

Damon knew that he was being offered waiter service, but he didn’t want to take it. “I’ll help myself, if you don’t mind,” he said.

“Somehow,” said the old man, peering over the rim of his spectacles, “I just knewyou were going to say that.”

Twenty-six

I

never delivered your message,” Damon said when he’d finished licking his fingers. He was sitting more comfortably now—comfortably enough not to want to get up for anything less than a five-star emergency. Saul was still standing up, hovering beside the table while he finished his own meal.

“Yes, you did,” the old man countered. “Hywood’s more sensitive than you give her credit for. You got through to her, far better than you got through to Kachellek.”

“Is Karol really dead?”

“I honestly don’t know. I doubt it very much. The business with Silas Arnett took us aback a bit, but I sincerely hope that it was merely a matter of playing to the grandstand: tape for tape, as I said, appearance for appearance. Ourfake body’s better than yourfake body andwe got our tape to Interpol while you let yours go astray, so up yours. That hasto be your father, don’t you think? Eveline’s as clever as she’s stubborn, but she isn’t angry or vengeful. But you’dhave done it all, wouldn’t you? You’d have lashed out as soon as you came under attack—and even when you thought you’d won, you’d still have put out one last kick in the head for good measure. You’re Conrad Helier’s son all right.”

“The only father I ever had was Silas Arnett,” Damon said, trying to sound offhanded about it. He sipped from his glass. It was only tap water; he’d thought it best to avoid the whiskey and the wine.

“Was it Silas you ran away from?” Saul countered. “Is it Silas you’re still kicking against? I think he’s just your big brother, who happened to baby-sit a lot. Dead or not, in thathousehold Conrad Helier was always your one and only father. He still is.”

That was too near to the knuckle to warrant any response.

“Why would you send the hired help to invite me up here?” Damon asked. “You already had me not forty-eight hours ago and you threw me back into the pond. You didn’t reallyneed me to get your message across to Eveline.”

Saul smiled. “The Mirror Man thought that we did,” he said. “In any case, we had to let you go before we could invite you to join us in a suitably polite fashion. We areinviting you to join us, by the way. Partly because it would give us a link to the Lagrange-Five biotech cowboys, but mainly because we think you’re good. Now you’ve seen what virtual reality technics can really do, it’s time for you to get properly involved, don’t you think?”