The image collapsed to a spinning sphere of white while transmission codes ended their crawl.

“Response?” queried the transmitter’s computer.

“Message acknowledged,” said Gladstone. “Carry on.”

Gladstone stepped out into her study and found Sedeptra Akasi waiting, a frown of concern on her attractive face.

“What is it?”

“The War Council is ready to readjourn,” said the aide. “Senator Kolchev is waiting to see you on a matter he says is urgent.

“Send him in. Tell the Council I will be there in five minutes.”

Gladstone sat behind her ancient desk and resisted the impulse to close her eyes. She was very tired. But her eyes were open when Kolchev entered. “Sit down, Gabriel Fyodor.”

The massive Lusian paced back and forth. “Sit down, hell. Do you know what’s going on, Meina?”

She smiled slightly. “Do you mean the war? The end of life as we know it? That?”

Kolchev slammed a fist into his palm. “No, I don’t mean that, goddammit. I mean the political fallout. Have you been monitoring the All Thing?”

“When I can.”

“Then you know certain senators and swing figures outside the Senate are mobilizing support for your defeat in a vote of confidence. It’s inevitable, Meina. It’s just a matter of time.”

“I know that, Gabriel. Why don’t you sit down? We have a minute or two before we have to get back to the War Room.”

Kolchev almost collapsed into a chair. “I mean, damn, even my wife is busy lining up votes against you, Meina.”

Gladstone’s smile broadened. “Sudette has never been one of my foremost fans, Gabriel.” The smile disappeared. “I haven’t monitored the debates in the last twenty minutes. How much time do you think I have?”

“Eight hours, maybe less.”

Gladstone nodded. “I won’t need much more.”

“Need? What the hell are you talking about, need? Who else do you think will be able to serve as War Exec?”

“You will,” said Gladstone. “There’s no doubt that you will be my successor.”

Kolchev grumbled something.

“Perhaps the war won’t last that long,” said Gladstone as if musing to herself.

“What? Oh, you mean the Core superweapon. Yeah, Albedo’s got a working model set up at some FORCE base somewhere and wants the Council to take time out to look at it. Goddamn waste of time, if you ask me.”

Gladstone felt something like a cold hand close on her heart. “The deathwand device? The Core has one ready?”

“More than one ready, but one loaded up on a torchship.”

“Who authorized that, Gabriel?”

“Morpurgo authorized the preparation.” The heavy senator sat forward. “Why, Meina, what’s wrong? The thing can’t be used without the CEO’s go ahead.”

Gladstone looked at her old Senate colleague. “We’re a long way from Pax Hegemony, aren’t we, Gabriel?”

The Lusian grunted again, but there was pain visible in his blunt features. “Our own damn fault. The previous administration listened to the Core about letting Bressia bait one of the Swarms. After that settled down, you listened to other elements of the Core about bringing Hyperion into the Web.”

“You think my sending the fleet to defend Hyperion precipitated the wider war?”

Kolchev looked up. “No, no, not possible. Those Ouster ships have been on their way for more than a century, haven’t they? If only we’d discovered them sooner. Or found a way to negotiate this shit away.”

Gladstone’s comlog chimed. “Time we got back,” she said softly. “Councilor Albedo probably wants to show us the weapon that will win the war.”

It is easier to allow myself, to drift into the datasphere than to lie here through the endless night, listening to the fountain and waiting for the next hemorrhage. This weakness is worse than debilitating; it is turning me into a hollow man, all shell and no center. I remember when Fanny was taking care of me during my convalescence at Wentworth Place, and the tone of her voice, and the philosophical musings she used to air: “Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”

Oh, Fanny, if only you knew! We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like the young Spartan thief hiding a wolf cub so it can eat away our insides. What other creature in God’s wide domain would carry the memory of you, Fanny, dust these nine hundred years, and allow it to eat away at him even as consumption does the same work with its effortless efficiency?

Words assail me. The thought of books makes me ache. Poetry echoes in my mind, and if I had the ability to banish it, I would do so at once.

Martin Silenus: I hear you on your living cross of thorns. You chant poetry as a mantra while wondering what Dante-like god condemned you to such a place. Once you said—I was there in my mind while you told your tale to the others!—you said:

“To be a poet, I realized, a true poet, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity.

“To be a true poet is to become God.”

Well, Martin, old colleague, old chum, you’re carrying the cross and suffering the pangs, but are you any closer to becoming God? Or do you just feel like some poor idiot who’s had a three-meter javelin shoved through his belly, feeling cold steel where your liver used to be? It hurts, doesn’t it? I feel your hurt. I feel my hurt.

In the end, it doesn’t matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn’t matter a damn bit.

We’re no avatars, no sons of god or man. We’re only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone.

Goddamn it hurts. The urge to vomit is constant, but retching brings up bits of my lungs as well as bile and phlegm. For some reason it’s as difficult, perhaps more difficult, this time. Dying should become easier with practice.

The fountain in the Piazza makes its idiot sounds in the night.

Somewhere out there the Shrike waits. If I were Hunt, I’d leave at once—embrace Death if Death offers embrace—and have done with it.

I promised him, though. I promised Hunt I’d try.

I can’t reach the megasphere or datasphere without passing through this new thing I think of as the metasphere, and this place frightens me.

It is mostly vastness and emptiness here, so different from the urban analogy landscapes of the Web’s datasphere and the biosphere analogs of the Core’s megasphere. Here it is… unsettled. Filled with strange shadows and shifting masses that have nothing to do with the Core Intelligences.

I move quickly to the dark opening I see as the primary farcaster connection to the megasphere. (Hunt was right… there must be a farcaster somewhere on the Old Earth replica… we did, after all, arrive by farcaster. And my consciousness is a Core phenomenon.) This then is my lifeline, my persona umbilical. I slide into the spinning black vortex like a leaf in a tornado.

Something is wrong with the megasphere. As soon as I emerge, I sense the difference; Lamia had perceived the Core environment as a busy biosphere of AI life, with roots of intellect, soil of rich data, oceans of connections, atmospheres of consciousness, and the humming, ceaseless shuttle of activity.

Now that activity is wrong, unchanneled, random. Great forests of AI consciousness have been burned or swept aside. I sense massive forces in opposition, tidal waves of conflict surging outside the sheltered travelways of the main Core arteries.