The image folds into itself and fades away. The Consul, Weintraub, and Lamia continue to stare in silence. Martin Silenus stands, throws a handful of sand at the empty air where Gladstone’s face had been seconds earlier, and screams, “Goddamn fatherfucking asshole politician moral paraplegic dipshit drag-queen bitch!” He kicks sand in the air. The others shift their stares to him.

“Well, that really helped,” Brawne Lamia says softly.

Silenus waves his arms in disgust and walks away, still kicking at dunes.

“Is there anything else?” Weintraub asks the Consul.

“No.”

Brawne Lamia crosses her arms and frowns at the comlog. “I forget how you said this thing works. How are you getting through the interference?”

“Tightbeam to a pocket comsat I seeded as we came down from the Yggdrasill,” says the Consul.

Lamia nods. “So when you reported in, you just sent brief messages to the ship, and it sent fatline squirts to Gladstone… and your Ouster contacts.”

“Yes.”

“Can the ship take off without clearance?” asks Weintraub. The older man is sitting, his knees raised and his arms draped on them in a classic posture of pure fatigue. His voice is also tired. “Just override Gladstone’s prohibition?”

“No,” says the Consul. “When Gladstone said no, FORCE set a class-three containment field over the blast pit where we parked the ship.”

“Get in touch with her,” says Brawne Lamia. “Explain things.”

“I’ve tried.” The Consul holds the comlog in his hands, sets it back in the pack. “No response. Also, I mentioned in the original squirt that Hoyt was badly hurt and that we needed medical help. I wanted the ship’s surgery ready for him.”

“Hurt,” repeats Martin Silenus, striding back to where they huddled. “Shit. Our padre friend is dead as Glennon-Height’s dog.” He jerks his thumb in the direction of the cloak-wrapped body; all monitor displays are red.

Brawne Lamia bends closer and touches Hoyt’s cheek. It is cold.

Both his comlog biomonitor and the medpak begin chirping brain-death warnings. The osmosis mask continues to force pure 0² into his lungs, and the medpak simulators still work his lungs and heart, but the chirping rises to a scream and then settles to a steady, terrible tone.

“He lost too much blood,” says Sol Weintraub. He touches the dead priest’s face, his own eyes closed, head bowed.

“Great,” says Silenus. “Fucking great. And according to his own story, Hoyt’s going to decompose and recompose, thanks to that goddamned cruciform thing… two of the goddamn things, the guy’s rich in resurrection insurance… and then come lurching back like some brain-damaged edition of Hamlet’s daddy’s ghost. What are we going to do then?”

“Shut up,” says Brawne Lamia. She is wrapping Hoyt’s body in a layer of tarp she has brought from the tent.

“Shut up yourself,” screams Silenus. “We’ve got one monster lurking around. Old Grendel himself is out there somewhere, sharpening his nails for his next meal, do you really want Hoyt’s zombie joining our happy crew? You remember how he described the Bikura? They’d been letting the cruciforms bring them back for centuries, and talking to one of them was like talking to an ambulatory sponge. Do you really want Hoyt’s corpse hiking with us?”

“Two,” says the Consul.

“What?” Martin Silenus whirls, loses his footing, and lands on his knees near the body. He leans toward the old scholar. “What did you say?”

“Two cruciforms,” says the Consul. “His and Father Paul Duré’s. If his story about the Bikura was true, then they’ll both be… resurrected.”

“Oh, Christ on a stick,” says Silenus and sits in the sand.

Brawne Lamia has finished wrapping the priest’s body. She looks at it. “I remember that in Father Duré’s story about the Bikura named Alpha,” she says. “But I still don’t understand. The Law of Conservation of Mass has to come in there somewhere.”

“They’ll be short zombies,” says Martin Silenus. He pulls his fur coat tighter and pounds the sand with his fist.

“There is so much we could have learned if the ship had arrived,” says the Consul. “The autodiagnostics could have…” He pauses and gestures. “Look. There is less sand in the air. Perhaps the storm is…”

Lightning flashes, and it begins to rain, the icy pellets striking their faces with more fury than the sandstorm had shown.

Martin Silenus begins to laugh. “It’s a fucking desert!” he shouts toward the sky. “We’ll probably drown in a flood.”

“We need to get out of this,” says Sol Weintraub. His baby’s face is visible between the gaps in his cloak. Rachel is crying; her face is very red. She looks no older than a newborn.

“Keep Chronos?” says Lamia. “It’s a couple of hours…”

“Too far,” says the Consul. “Let’s bivouac in one of the Tombs.”

Silenus laughs again. He says:

“Does that mean yes?” asks Lamia.

“That means fucking 'why not?'” laughs Silenus. “Why make it hard for our cold muse to find us? We can watch our friend decompose while we wait. How long did Duré’s tale say it took for one of the Bikura to rejoin the flock after death interrupted their grazing?”

“Three days,” says the Consul.

Martin Silenus slaps his forehead with the heel of his palm. “Of course. How could I forget? How wonderfully fitting. New Testament-wise. In the meantime, maybe our Shrike-wolf will carry off a few of this flock. Do you think the padre would mind if I borrowed one of his cruciforms just in case? I mean, he has a spare…”

“Let’s go,” says the Consul. Rain drips from his tricorne cap in a steady stream. “We’ll stay in the Sphinx until morning. I’ll carry Kassad’s extra gear and the Möbius cube. Brawne, you carry Hoyt’s things and Sol’s pack. Sol, you keep the baby warm and dry.”

“What about the padre?” asks the poet, jerking his thumb in the direction of the body.

“You’re carrying Father Hoyt,” Brawne Lamia says softly, turning.

Martin Silenus opens his mouth, sees the pistol in Lamia’s hand, shrugs, and bends to lift the body to his shoulder. “Who’s going to carry Kassad when we find him?” he asks. “Of course, he could be in enough pieces that we could all—”

“Please shut up,” Brawne Lamia says tiredly. “If I have to shoot you, it will give us one more thing to carry. Just walk.”

With the Consul leading, Weintraub coming closely behind, Martin Silenus staggering along some meters back, and Brawne Lamia in the rear, the group once again descends the low col into the Valley of the Tombs.

CEO Gladstone’s schedule that morning was a busy one. Tau Ceti Center has a twenty-three-hour day, which makes it convenient for the government to run on Hegemony Standard Time without totally destroying local diurnal rhythms. At 0545 hours, Gladstone met with her military advisors. At 0630 hours she breakfasted with two dozen of the most important senators and with representatives of the All Thing and the TechnoCore. At 0715 the CEO farcast to Renaissance Vector, where it was evening, to officially open the Hermes Medical Center in Cadua. At 0740 she ’cast back to Government House for a meeting with her top aides, including Leigh Hunt, to go over the speech she was to give to the Senate and All Thing at 1000 hours. At 0830 Gladstone met again with General Morpurgo and Admiral Singh for an update on the situation in the Hyperion system. At 0845 hours, she met with me.

“Good morning, M. Severn,” said the CEO. She was behind her desk in the office where I’d first met her three nights earlier. She waved her hand toward a buffet against the wall where hot coffee, tea, and caffta sat in sterling silver pots.