It was Jillan, by herself.

“Where’s Paul?” he shouted at her, but Jillan kept coming without answering, and that silence chilled him, intimating that something dire had happened—Jillan, without Paul.

Her face was dreadful when they met, her eyes vast and shadowed, and again the illogicity of themselves overwhelmed him, that whatever they were could suffer— Have we flesh of a kind,he wondered, bodies somewhere, beyond this dark? Metal bodies standing in a row or going through pointless motions? O Paul, Jillan—

“Where’s Paul?” he asked his sister.

“R-r-r-aaa-ffe,”the lips shaped, a hoarse, rasping effort with Jillan’s voice. It reached for him.

“O God. God, no!” He flung himself back and ran with all his might.

He hit a barrier, not a hard one, but a slowing of his force until he could not move more than a few feet in any direction. He felt a touch on his shoulders. He turned and met Jillan’s eyes, encountered its embrace.

It was strong, stronger than he was by far. “Let me go,” he cried, and struck at this thing, beyond any fear of harming Jillan. “Let her go, damn you!”

It hugged him to its heart. “R-r-raaa-ffffe,”it said, handling him with irresistible force, as if he had been a child in Jillan’s arms.

He screamed, yelled out names—his own was one— “Rafe!”as if his other self could hear him, help him, at least know that he was lost.

Jillan carried him some distance and stopped at last, just stopped, and let him go. Free,he thought, having wild hope of escape. He flung himself away as she winked out, but he came up against a barrier, solid as a wall.

Pain hit, and he screamed and went on screaming, from shock at first, and then because he could not stop.

“Rafe,” he heard Jillan say out of a vast void darkness; and he waked again, blind and numb at first, lying on nothing, face up? face down?

Then Jillan was by him, kneeling there bright with gold-green glow, with seeming tears glistening in her eyes and spilling down her face. He felt her hands as she shook at him. “Come on, Rafe, wake up, you’ve got to wake up, hear me?”

He moved: he could, and writhed out of her reach, sat there shivering and staring back at her.

“Paul’s lost,” she said in a hoarse and hollow voice.

He shivered then, not for Paul, whose fate seemed a thousand years ago to him; but for himself, for the inexplicable that happened to him and went on happening in this blind dark.

“We’ve got to get back,” he said at last, for it was truly Jillan. He convinced himself it was. He forced sense past numb lips, going on living, desperately ignoring memory as something unmanageable. “We’ve got to get back to the ship, tell him—” as if his living half would know what to do, would have some holistic view he lacked. He no longer trusted himself or anything he saw. He had dreamed his kidnapping. He had dreamed the pain. He wanted to believe in none of it. “Jillan—how did you find me?”

“I just kept walking back,” she said. “Paul’s lost.He’s out there somewhere and he’s not answering or something’s happened to him—”

Something happened to me,he started to tell her, facing her hysteria; and some reticence held the truth dammed up. It was Jillan. He kept looking for flaws and cracks, but it was indeed his sister. He had to believe it was. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, not wanting to be touched by her, not wanting to look in her eyes. Have you met something too?he wanted to ask. Have you already met it?

Is it somewhere still inside you?

Is it alive in me?

“I’ve tried to get out,” she said.

“What do you mean, tried to get out?”

She nodded toward the dark in general, or in a particular direction. “A few paces off—there’s just a wall.” She hugged her knees against her, tight, muscles rigid in her arms. “It’s got us penned here. That’s what.”

He stood up and tried, all round, but it was like hitting some painless wall of force, insubstantial and absolute at once. He battered it with his fist, and his arm simply stopped short, impotent and forceless.

“Aaaaaaiiiiiieeeeeee!”something wailed, just the other side.

“God!” he said, and staggered back, crouched down in primate tuck, shoulders hunched, facing the barrier with Jillan at his back. He felt vulnerable so, deliberately kept staring into the dark, determined to believe in her, that it wasJillan behind him.

Sister,he thought, sister.They had called him the Old Man, she had. Paul had. The thinker, captain, planner, head-of-family, for all he was only twenty-two. He had outright failed them, all down the line; and he saw it now, how they had looked to him, Paul in his way, Jillan in hers, because he told her he could do it all for her and Paul, and she trusted that he could. She handed her life and future to him— Here, brother, I’ve got what I need; I’ve got Paul: you take us, and do something, make something of yourself and us——

—merchanter-man, who was nothing without his ship, his sister to give it children—

He was not sure of Jillan now. He was not sure of Paul. If Jillan was truly gone nothing mattered, not even Paul.

But he would, he discovered, go on fighting, as long as it was not Jillan herself who struck the blow. Being a merchanter brat, he had a certain stubbornness: that was all he could call it at this point, a certain rock-hardness at the center that did not know where to quit.

Not revenge. That was nothing. It was Murray-stubbornness, that lasted through the War, the mines, Lindy’s making, the Belt. He had always wondered if there was anything in him but Jillan.

Now he knew.

And he was, he thought with a jolt that ached, only the merest shadow of the man. The real substance of him was back in the lighted corridor, waiting for him, depending on him.

Two of us,he thought, and it occurred to him that, being Old Man, he still had one living crewman to protect. He was father to one at least. Himself.

“Rafe’s our business,” he said to Jillan at his back. “You understand me. Not me-Rafe. The other one. They can still hurt him. We’ve got to do something.”

“You got an idea?” she asked. No protest. That other Rafe was her brother too, the living one. “You got an idea?”

“No,” he said, “just a priority. Paul’s no worse off than we are. No better either. But our brother—” It was easier to think of Rafe that way. “They’re going to some trouble in his case. They saw to it that we found him. Didn’t they? That wasn’t accident.”

“There’s still the outside chance, like Rafe says—they’re not altogether hostile. Maybe we can’t figure the way they think. Maybe they’re too different.”

He twisted on his knees and looked back at her, snatching up a hope from that innocence of events. “I met one,” he said. “It wore your shape.”

Jillan blinked rapidly in shock, stared at him, seeming then to put things together.

“I figure you’d better know that,” he said, “so you don’t trust everything you see. It hurt. Quite a bit. Like at the beginning. It’s still got us here, wherever here is.”

The shock was real in her eyes. He saw that.

“Paul and Rafe,” she said, putting that together too. “It can get at them that way.”

<> was pleased in <>’s acquisition. It had been a question whether to shock Rafe Two with any kind of contact, any apprehension at all of his circumstances before securing his template, but <> had decided in the affirmative. The second Rafe-mind’s difference was precisely, after all, its knowledge, its adjustment to the environment more extensive than Rafe One’s. And the Jillan-face provided a certain insulation in the contact.

<> tried out what <> had gained, this Rafe with a little bit of knowledge where he was and what he was. The flexibility was greater. <> had hoped for that.