"I think that I've been through the Grail Brotherhood's ceremony—that my consciousness has been split off somehow, the way they planned to do for themselves. Perhaps it was an accident—I don't know why they would have made a virtual mind for me like they did for all the Grail people. But I think it did happen, and Sellars somehow brought that virtual mind to life. And that second, virtual Paul Jonas . . . is me."

She said nothing, but clutched his arm more tightly.

"So all the things I left behind, the simple, silly things that have kept me going here when I wanted to lie down and die, my flat, my mediocre job, my entire old life . . . they don't belong to me. They belong to the real Paul. The one whose body is in a lab somewhere. Even if that body dies, I can never have them. . . ."

He fell silent for a while. It hurt too much to talk. They walked on along the desolate shoreline.

"What is that line from T. S. Eliot?" he said when he trusted himself to speak. "Something about, 'I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling on the floors of silent seas. . . .' "

She turned her sightless face toward him. "Are you criticizing yourself again?"

"Actually, I was talking about the landscape." He stopped. "It does seem like the kind of place to wait for the end of the world, doesn't it?"

"I am tired of waiting for the end of the world," she said, but her head was cocked at a strange angle.

"Well, I don't think we have a lot of choice," he began. "Dread is still waiting just outside, and even if Orlando took care of the Twins I don't think he's up to dealing with what Dread's become. . . ."

"I suspect you are right. The Other has played its knight and it has bought some time, but nothing else."

"Its. . . ?"

"Its knight. Do you remember the story of the boy in the well? One of his would-be saviors was a knight. I suspect the Other had Orlando picked out for that role from the beginning." She frowned and raised her hand. "Quiet for a moment, please. Stand still."

"What is it?" Paul asked after a short silence.

"The waters are receding." She pointed. "Can you see it?"

"Whatever it is, it's not visible to me." But he wondered if in fact the lights were not already a little dimmer.

"I can feel the whole thing failing," she said distractedly. "Like an engine that has run too long. The end is coming very fast now I think."

"What can we do?"

She listened silently for long moments. "Nothing, I fear. Go back to the others and wait with them." She turned toward him. "But first I must ask you something. Will you hold me, Paul Jonas? Just for a short while? It has been a long time for me. I would not . . . would not like to die . . . without touching someone first."

He put his arms around her, full of conflicted thoughts. She was small, at least in this incarnation; her head fit just beneath his chin, her cheek against his chest. He wondered what her heightened senses would make of the quickness of his heartbeat.

"Perhaps in another world," she said, the words muffled against him. "In another time. . . ."

Then they just held each other and did not speak. At last they let go and went back side by side across the gray dust, toward the fire where their friends were waiting.

NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: Porn Star Ignores Protests Over Planned Children's Interactive

(visual: Violet in excerpt from "Ultra Violet")

VO: Adult interactive actress Vondeen Violet says she doesn't understand the controversy over her intention to produce what she calls "educational interactives" about sex for the under-twelve crowd.

VIOLET: "Kids need to learn and they'll find it out somehow. Isn't it better they learn from a nonviolent interactive where they will participate with trained professionals like myself, instead of getting their information in the schoolyard or on the street? I mean, these things were written by a doctor, for God's sake!"

"I see it," said Catur Ramsey, "but I don't really believe it."

"I am here," Olga told him. "And I'm not sure that I believe it either."

Ramsey sat back and rubbed his tired eyes, half certain that any moment now he would wake up and the whole bizarre day would prove to have been a dream. But when he looked at the screen again the feed from Olga Pirofsky's camera ring still showed the same improbable, fish-eye view.

"It's a forest," he said. "You walk out of the elevator onto the top floor and into . . . a forest?"

"Dead," she said quietly.

"What?"

"Look." The viewpoint swung upward and now Ramsey could see that most of the branches were bare. Even the evergreens were almost all dead, with only a few clusters of brown needles remaining on the skeletal limbs. The camera ring swung down again. Ramsey could see Olga's legs wading through knee-high drifts of brown and gray leaves, squeezing up puffs of dry dust. The picture stopped moving as Olga paused to kick some of the cover aside, then the viewpoint swung across an expanse of black speckled with white,

"What is it?" Ramsey asked. "I can't make it out."

"I think it was a stream," she said. "It's mud now. Almost completely dry." The viewpoint moved closer until Ramsey could see that the white streaks were arranged in familiar shapes.

"Are those fish?"

"They were."

Her tone was conversational, but Ramsey heard something in it he didn't like—something close to despair. "Come down, Olga. I've got Beezle in my other ear telling me they're almost done evacuating the building. We probably only have minutes to get you out."

"I see something." A moment later the camera swung up. Ramsey could see it too, now. It was an even stranger sight on the top floor of a skyscraper than the dead trees and fish skeletons,

"A house? A house?"

"I'm going to go look."

"I wish you wouldn't." Ramsey opened his other line. "I can't get her to leave yet, Beezle. How much time do we have?"

"You're asking me? Sellars set it up so this whole thing would be screwed up on purpose—misleading alarms, rerouted communications, you name it. There's even some kind of reactor alert going out. The army could be there in five minutes or no one may come near the place for days."

"Reactor alert? There's a reactor? Jesus. Just keep letting me know what's happening, will you?"

Beezle snorted. "When I know anything, you'll know it too."

The view on Ramsey's pad screen was too vertiginous to watch just now: Olga's hand was swinging up and down as she pushed her way through the overgrown vegetation. He closed his eyes. "How big is that forest?" he asked her. "Can you see anything else? What's over your head?"

"Nothing. Just a big white ceiling at least fifty meters up." The picture settled as she towered the ring to show him the house, much larger now. "Can you see it?"

"You can't just walk in, Olga. What if someone's in there?"

"You obviously can't see it very well," she said, but didn't explain. Ramsey found himself holding his breath as she made her way across the ragged brown remains of what might once have been a large and very nice garden.

"It is not too American-looking, this house," Olga said. "It looks like a European manor house—a small one. I saw many like it when I was younger."

"Just be careful."

"You worry too much, Mr. Ramsey. No one has lived here for some time, I think." The viewpoint swung forward as she reached for the door. "But who did live here? That is the question."

The door creaked open. Ramsey heard it clearly enough down her channel to know that the silence that followed it was just as real. "Olga? Are you okay?"

"It is . . . quite empty." She moved out of what seemed a narrow hallway and gave him a slow, sweeping view of the front room. The windows were shuttered, the room dark. Ramsey adjusted the brightness and resolution on his picture but still could make out little beyond the broad shapes of antique furnishings.