A few minutes later, Hunt stood near the heap of dirt, shovel in hand, staring down into the open grave at the small, sheet-wrapped bundle there, and tried to think of something to say. Hunt had been at numerous state memorial services, had even written Gladstone’s eulogies for some of them, and words had never been a problem before.

But now nothing came. The only audience was the silent Shrike, still back among the shadows of the cypresses, and the sheep with their bells tinkling as they moved nervously away from the monster, ambling toward the grave like a group of tardy mourners.

Hunt thought that perhaps some of the original John Keats’s poetry would be appropriate now, but Hunt was a political manager—not a man given to reading or memorizing ancient poetry. He remembered, too late, that he had written down the snippet of verse his friend had dictated the day before, but the notebook still lay on the bureau in the apartment on the Piazza di Spagna. It had been something about becoming godlike or a god, the knowledge of too many things rushing in… or somesuch nonsense. Hunt had an excellent memory, but he couldn’t recall the first line of that archaic mishmash.

In the end, Leigh Hunt compromised with a moment of silence, his head bowed and eyes closed except for occasional peeks at the Shrike, still holding its distance, and then he shoveled the dirt in. It took longer than he would have imagined. When he was done parting down the soil, the surface was slightly concave, as if the body had been too insignificant to form a proper mound. Sheep brushed by Hunt’s legs to graze on the high grass, daisies, and violets which grew around the grave.

Hunt might not have remembered the man’s poetry, but he had no trouble remembering the inscription Keats had asked to be set on his headstone. Hunt clicked on the pen, tested it by burning a furrow in three meters of grass and soil, and then had to stamp out the tiny fire he had started. The inscription had bothered Hunt when he first heard it—the loneliness and bitterness audible beneath Keats’s wheezing, gasping effort to speak. But Hunt did not think it was his place to argue with the man. Now he had only to inscribe it in stone, leave this place, and avoid the Shrike while trying to find a way home.

The pen sliced into stone easily enough, and Hunt had to practice on the back side of the headstone before he found the right depth of line and quality of control. Still, the effect looked ragged and homemade when Hunt finished some fifteen or twenty minutes later.

First there was the crude drawing which Keats had asked for—he had shown the aide several rough sketches, drawn on foolscap with a shaking hand—of a Greek lyre with four of its eight strings broken.

Hunt was not satisfied when he was done—he was even less of an artist than a reader of poetry—but the thing was probably recognizable to anyone who knew what the hell a Greek lyre was. Then came the legend itself, written precisely as Keats had dictated it:

There was nothing else: no birth or death dates, not even the poet’s name. Hunt stood back, surveyed his work, shook his head, keyed the pen off but kept it in his hand, and started back for the city, making a wide circle around the creature in the cypresses as he did so.

At the tunnel through the Aurelian Wall, Hunt paused to look back.

The horse, still attached to its carriage, had moved down the long slope to munch on sweeter grass near a small stream. The sheep milled about, munching flowers and leaving their hoofprints in the moist soil of the grave. The Shrike remained where it had been, barely visible beneath its bower of cypress branches. Hunt was almost sure that the creature still faced the grave.

It was late in the afternoon when Hunt found the farcaster, a dull rectangle of dark blue humming in the precise center of the crumbling Colosseum. There was no diskey or punchplate. The portal hung there like an opaque but open door.

But not open to Hunt.

He tried fifty times, but the surface was as solid and resisting as stone.

He touched it tentatively with fingertips, stepped confidently into and bounced off its surface, threw himself at the blue rectangle, lobbed stones at the entrance to watch them bounce off, tried both sides and even the edges of the thing, and ended up leaping again and again at the useless thing until his shoulders and upper arms were masses of bruises.

It was a farcaster. He was sure of it. But it would not let him through.

Hunt searched the rest of the Colosseum, even the underground passages dripping with moisture and bat guano, but there was no other portal. He searched the nearby streets and all their buildings. No other portal. He searched all afternoon, through basilica and cathedrals, homes and huts, grand apartment buildings and narrow alleys. He even returned to the Piazza di Spagna, ate a hasty meal on the first floor, pocketed the notebook and anything else he found of interest in the rooms above, and then left forever to find a farcaster.

The one in the Colosseum was the only one he could find. By sunset he had clawed at it until his fingers were bloody. It looked right, it hummed right, it felt right, but it would not let him through.

A moon, not Old Earth’s moon judging by the dust storms and clouds visible on its surface, had risen and now hung above the black curve of the Colosseum wall. Hunt sat in the rocky center and glowered at the blue glow of the portal. From somewhere behind him came the frenzied beat of pigeons’ wings and the rattle of a small rock on stone.

Hunt rose painfully, fumbled the laser pen out of his pocket, and stood, legs apart, waiting and straining to see into the shadows of the Colosseum’s many crevices and arches. Nothing stirred.

A sudden noise behind him made him whirl and almost spray the thin beam of laser light across the farcaster portal’s surface. An arm appeared there. Then a leg. A person emerged. Then another.

The Colosseum echoed to Leigh Hunt’s shouts.

Meina Gladstone had known that as tired as she was, it would be folly to nap even as long as thirty minutes. But since childhood, she had trained herself to take five-to fifteen-minute catnaps, shrugging off weariness and fatigue toxins through these brief respites from thought.

Now, sickened with exhaustion and the vertigo of the previous forty-eight hours’ confusion, she lay a few minutes on the long sofa in her study, emptying her mind of trivia and redundancies, letting her subconscious find a path through the jungle of thoughts and events. For a few minutes, she dozed, and while she dozed she dreamed.

Meina Gladstone sat upright, shrugging off the light afghan and tapping at her comlog before her eyes were open. “Sedeptra! Get General Morpurgo and Admiral Singh in my office in three minutes.”

Gladstone stepped into the adjoining bathroom, showered and sonicked, pulled out fresh clothes—her most formal suit of soft, black whipcord velvet, a gold and red Senate scarf held in place by a gold pin showing the geodesic symbol of the Hegemony, earrings dating back to pre-Mistake Old Earth, and the topaz bracelet-cum-comlog given to her by Senator Byron Lamia before his marriage—and was back in the study in time to greet the two FORCE officers.

“CEO, this is very unfortunate timing,” began Admiral Singh. “The final data from Mare Infinitus was being analyzed, and we were discussing fleet movements for the defense of Asquith.”

Gladstone ordered her private farcaster into existence and gestured for the two men to follow her.

Singh glanced around as he stepped through into gold grass under a threatening bronze sky. “Kastrop-Rauxel,” he said. “There were rumors that a previous administration had FORCE:space construct a private farcaster here.”