“Rafe,” Jillan cried as they waked together in this dark place, and Rafe stared at her, leaning backward on his arms, seeming unable to do more than shiver. “There was—” he said, started to say, and cried out and fell back.

“Rafe!” she cried, and shook at him, but he was loose as if someone had broken him, and then he went away, just vanished, as if he had never been.

“Rafe!”she screamed at the vacant air, at the ceiling, and the dark. “Paul!”She scrambled up and threatened the invisible with empty hands and great violence.

It would fight, this Jillan-mind. <> learned that. The passengers who hovered near to witness this were profoundly disturbed.

“<> is taking risks again,” </> whispered in far recesses of the ship. “One day <> will miscalculate. Remember = = = = before = = = = turned cannibal? <> did not foresee that either.”

<> ignored these whispers, being occupied with <>’s insertion into the Jillan-mind.

Who are you?Jillan-mind asked <>. She wept; she fought the intrusions and when she no longer could do that she took in the flood with the peculiar strength she had and started trying to bend it to her shape.

She looked at </>, which had come to hover near, and bent <>’s thoughts to notice the observer in the dark.

“I don’t trust that one,” she declared, and <> laughed for startlement, in the rest of <>’s mind, which went on seeing things from outside, and managing <>’s body, and doing the other things <> did in the normal course of <>’s existence.

Then <> moved in Jillan-mind abruptly and without gentleness. <> brushed aside defenses and began to take what <> wanted. Jillan screamed at <> in anger and in pain and finally, because <> filled all the pathways of her mind at once and ran out of storage, the scream changed character and reason.

<> meddled with this state for a moment, adjusting this, tampering with that. <> had known already that the storage was not adequate and now <> formed strategies, knowing the dimensions of what <> had. The pain went on, while <> probed connections and relationships.

Jillan stabilized again, regarded the dark and welcomed it with fierce enthusiasm and hunger.

<> erased her then abruptly, for she had gotten far from the template, and ceased to be instructive. Or safe. In any sense.

<> made a second, fresher copy. <> could do that endlessly, in possession of the templates <> had made.

<> began again, with a surer, more knowing touch.

“Is it worth it?” <*> asked, straying close. “Let this creature go.”

<> turned the Jillan-face toward <*>’s undisguised self and felt a jolt of horror and of sound.

“That was unkind,” <> said, and destroyed her yet again.

“You’ll have to wait,” Rafe said, in their trek through endless corridors of endless green-gossamer and lumpish contours. Nothing had changed. They discovered nothing but endless sameness. He sank down, resting his back against the wall, and shut his eyes—opened them again for fear of finding himself alone, but the images stayed with him. They had sat down as if they needed to, Rafe Two foremost, always closest to him. He heaved a breath, felt his bruised ribs creak, felt thirst and hunger. Tears leaked unwanted from his eyes, simple exhaustion, and horror at the sameness and the sight that kept staring back at him.

Ghosts. Solemn Rafe; Jillan being nonchalant; Paul glowering—they frightened him. He could not touch them. He could not hug them to him, ever again. He knew those looks—Paul’s when he had an idea and would not let it go, Jillan’s when she was on the edge, and tottering.

“Come on,” he said, “Jillan. Swear. Do something. Don’t be cheerful at me.”

Her face settled into something true and dour. She looked up at him, thinking—

—thinking what? he wondered. Seeing aliens behind his eyes? Or feeling her own death again?

“You all right?” he asked.

“Sure, sure I’m all right,” Jillan said, and looked about, redirecting what got uncomfortable. “Whatever designed this place was crazy, you know that?”

“Whatever keeps us here sure is,” Rafe Two said.

“It’s kept me alive,” Rafe answered the doppelganger. He wiped at his mouth, looked up and down the windings of the corridor—they had gone down this time, if the large chamber had been up. “That it leaves me alone, you know, is something encouraging.”

“There’s another place,” said Rafe Two. “It’s dark, and nothing, and if that’s its normal condition, that thing’s nothing like us at all.”

“It’s playing games,” Paul said; and Rafe looked at him with some little hope— it, then; Paul had stopped throwing that itat him, had perhaps reconceived his situation. “There’s no guarantee it has a logic, you figure that?”

“It’s got math; math’s logic,” Jillan said.

“A lunatic can add,” Paul said, gnawing at his lip. “I don’t get tired. You’re sweating and I don’t get tired.”

“Dead has advantages, it seems,” Rafe Two said.

“Shut up!”

“Try thinking,” Rafe said, shifting to thrust a leg between his doppelganger and Paul’s image. “Try thinking—how we go about talking to this thing. It tried to talk to us. Back there—at Endeavor, it made an approach. Maybe taking us was a mistake in the first place.”

“Come on,” said Jillan harshly. “It knew we were there, knew how small we were. We couldn’t support jump engines. It damn well knew.”

He blinked at his sister, felt the sweat running in his eyes, mortality that she was beyond feeling. “I’ll find a way to ask it,” he said. Of a sudden he wanted to cry, right there in front of them, as if the jolt had just gotten through to him, but all he managed was a little trickle from his eyes and a painful jerk of breath. “I’ll tell you this. If it turns out the way you think and you can’t get your hands on it, I’ll get it. I’ll go for it. You can believe I will.”

“I’ve thought of something else,” said Rafe Two.

“What’s that?”

“That offending it might turn us off. That it can do that anyway when it wants.”

“What he’s saying,” Jillan said, “is that it has us for hostages. And maybe it’s not being whimsical with us. Maybe it’s looking to learn—oh, basic things. Like how we build; what our logic’s like—”

“—from Lindy’s wire and bolts,” Rafe scoffed. “Lord, it’ll wonder how we got to space at all.”

“—our language; our little computer, simple as it is—”

“—how our minds work,” said Paul. “They’ll start prodding at us. They’ve kept us too—you figure that, Rafe? They’ve gone to a lot of trouble.”

“It still could be,” Rafe said, “what you might say ... humanitarian concern. Maybe they panicked and bolted and we were an unwanted attachment.”

“How long were you awake?” Paul asked. “I died.” His voice went faint; the muscles of his insubstantial face shook and jerked with such semblance of life it jarred. “I am dead.Isn’t that what you’ve been insisting? I remember what it did. I remember the pain, Rafe. And it wasn’t any damn humanitarian concern.”

Rafe sat and stared at him, looked away finally, for Paul had begun to cry and to wipe his eyes, and finally faded out on them.

Jillan went after that, just winked out.

“How do you do that?” Rafe asked his double, hollow to the heart. “Where do you go when you go out? That dark place?”

“Don’t get superstitious about it. It’s just a place, that’s all. You think hard about it—I think we’ve got a simple off-on with a transmitter somewhere.”

“It wouldn’t be simple.”

“Bad choice of words.”

“Dammit, I don’t like arguing with you. It gives me the shakes.”