"So what would !Xabbu do? Even in the midst of horror and despair, I smiled at the thought. What would !Xabbu do? He would open himself. He would let what was around him speak and he would listen without prejudice instead of trying to force the information into some orderly, preconceived scheme.

"I tried to do the same.

"The first thing I discovered was that I was still terrified despite my outward show of calm. My heart was speeding, and the sound of Paul Jonas taking a startled breath as the guards seized him was still fresh in my thoughts, as though the echo of it were immortalized within our prison cell. That thought gave me another idea, which I put aside for a moment, concentrating instead on calming and clearing my mind. I did my best, but I am far too weak to learn that kind of serenity in a matter of minutes.

"It was difficult to lose the idea of the cell walls and in fact the entire temple as a real and solid thing. I suppose that for mystics and scientists it takes a similar effort of will to perceive the physical world as only a coherence of energy. I had dim inklings of what lay beyond our prison-sound information, smells—and to me they were already more significant than they would have been for any of my companions, but I needed more than that. I had to let myself feel them as equally significant to the things happening within the cell itself, until the walls began to blur into insignificance, until the signature of the simulated obstacles was only another piece of information. I had to learn to look through the walls, not at them, to put it in the language of the seeing.

"It took a long time, but when it happened, it was quite sudden—a single twist of perception, then I could feel the information arrayed in front of me, layer upon layer, the information of the guards in the corridor outside just as significant as that of my companions in the cells. One of them was scratching his head. I laughed. It felt a bit like discovering a trick, like that childhood day when I first learned to ride a two-wheeled bicycle. I moved cautiously to expand my survey, tracing the knitted expression of the wall-information on the corridor's far side, then sliding through it, as it were, to examine other corridors and rooms.

"This ability is not by any means limitless. The farther from myself I aim my perception, and the more barriers I penetrate, the less reliable the information. A hundred meters away from our cell the signature of a person—a sim pretending to be a person, that is—was little more than a humanoid shape, identifiable mostly because of movement. Twice that distance and only movement itself was noticeable. As my attention roved, I found several clusters of human shapes and movement, any one of which might have been Paul and his captors, but they were too far away for definite identification.

"I let my perceptions travel farther outward, looking for the energy-shadow of a gateway, the thing that lingers even when the gateway itself is closed. I found one at last which seems to be just at the edge or just outside of the temple-palace, but by this time my head was pounding. I surfaced, returning to the cell and my companions, and told them what I had discovered. I asked Nandi a few questions, and his answers confirmed Orlando's description of him as an expert on the network's internal travel mechanisms. Armed with this extension of my own investigations of the gateways, I let myself reach out to find the gateway again.

"It was more difficult this time. I was weary and my head ached, but I needed to examine the gateway to make sure it was functioning. Strangely, although it seemed open and in working order, I could not access the usual gateway information. But at least it seemed like it would take us somewhere else, and right now, that is our main need.

"I barely had time to explain this to the others before exhaustion pulled me down and I slept like a dead thing. When I woke, perhaps an hour later, the tiny bit of good cheer my news had roused in the others had turned back into a miserable silence, since as long as we were trapped in a cell, even a nearby gateway might as well have been on the moon.

"Despite feeling like my skull was made of old, brittle glass, I decided to try something different. Time was running out—time is running out. I could not afford to wait until I felt better, since Dread might appear at any moment, but I did not want to raise anyone's hopes either.

"In fact, although I experienced some success with this last attempt, there is still little about which to be hopeful.

"Again I let myself open. For a moment I feared I had lost the knack, that the walls would remain solidly impenetrable, but I thought of !Xabbu and calmed myself and at last the shift came. I reached out, not in any one direction, but generally, letting my attention flow diffusely outward through the information patterns. I was looking for something less specific than the signature of a gateway, and the farther away from the cell I went exploring, the harder it was to sift through the information.

"I had nearly given up when I found something that seemed a possibility. It was a nested confusion of signatures, of small movements, on the far side of the temple. From what I could discern it was located in a sort of alcove, perhaps a niche behind a cloth hanging, which was worrisome. The second and less-formed part of my plan would be very difficult if it was.

With the location fixed in my mind I surfaced again. My head was throbbing even more painfully now, but I had only to consider what Nandi and Bonnie Mae Simpkins had endured, and what we all could still expect, to drag myself up off the floor and move toward the door of the cell, where I lay down with my face against the open space at the bottom.

" 'What are you doing?' Florimel asked worriedly. 'Are you having trouble breathing?'

" 'I need silence now more than ever!' I told her. 'Please, just be patient for me. Try not to move if you can help it.'

"I turned my ear to the crack under the door and listened. I listened in the same way I had let all my senses roam, but with a narrowing of focus. All I wanted now was sound, in any form I could perceive it. I imagined the temple as a two-dimensional maze and did my best to locate and chart the movement of air currents, following back along the track I had navigated earlier until I could detect the quiet rustle and murmur from the alcove. Describing it, I make it easier than it was, not out of false modesty—it was astoundingly difficult—but because I am running short of time to describe what happened.

"Once I had heard the excruciatingly faint sounds I sought, I began the hardest part of all. I turned my face and spoke a soft, almost silent word to the crack under the door, then followed its progress. The coherence of the wave of sound dissipated quickly, vanishing into diffused silence by the end of the corridor.

"Someone, I think it was T4b, moved behind me, and to my fiercely-straining senses it was like the roar of the ocean. It was all I could do not to scream at my companions. Instead, I tried again.

"It took me the better part of two hours, and could have taken forever if I had not had the wonderful luck that the corridors I was using were mostly deserted. It was like plotting the most complicated billiard shot in the universe, trying to move a small sequence of sound from one end of the temple to the other—bouncing off walls, caroming around corners, all dependent on nearly microscopic differences in the initial direction and on excellent guesses about the swirl of air currents. Still, for all my painstaking care, the fact that I eventually succeeded was mostly luck.

"It was easier to hear the reply, although it took some moments drifting back, No one but me could have heard it—in fact, the sound wave was so small I was not really hearing it, but reading it.