There remained the official progress through Tau City. Dom would walk while the others rode, and would wear nothing but the lead and iron chain of office and seven invisible shields of various types, incorporated in the links. Most of the human worlds and one or two alien ones would have the route bugged, of course, and several had bribed Korodore. He ...

... leant forward. Someone had walked into the field of one pinhead and was looking at him. Korodore had an uneasy certainty that the man was laughing. He looked like a man who had laughed all his life.

Korodore thumbed through the guest list. Blue cloak, tall... the man was a minor official at the Board of Earth's agency in Tau City, newly-appointed...

The man in the screen had lifted one foot so that he was balancing on his right leg.

'Madern, get a focus on the guy in the blue cloak. No, better - Gralle, can you get a beam on him?'

'Got it, Ko. Shall I take him out?'

Korodore considered. Earth was still powerful. Standing on one leg wasn't a killing matter per se.

'Hold it.'

The figure had extended its left arm, pointing the first and fourth fingers directly towards, it appeared, the security room. He had closed one eye and was sighting along the extended arm like a weapon.

Let's see how you look without an optic nerve, thought Korodore.

The explosion knocked him sideways. He landed at the crouch, stripper levelled in a reflex action, and dived again as a second explosion and the beginning of a scream marked the weapon control console's transformation into a plume of incandescence.

The guests applauded politely. Dom, at his grandmother's nod, rose a few metres above the ground and said: 'I thank you all. And I ask that the spirit of holy Sadhim and the small gods of all races give me—give me—' he stopped.

A low boom echoed from the home domes.

Dom stared, and heard again in his inner ear the thin crack of a stripper shot in the transparent air around Joker Tower. Images flooded into his mind, with fragments of speech that joined and became coherent, and the memory of the hot pain and the cool green relief of the swamp water ...

A dot in the air grew rapidly. He heard his mother cry out, a long way off.

Korodore dived with his clothes smouldering. Raw blisters were his hands, blood was his face.

He landed heavily by Dom and shouted incoherently at him. Dom nodded, lost in a dream.

The man in the blue robe stepped lightly towards them, and took his theatrical stance. Ig shrilled.

Korodore lurched forward, raised the stripper in both hands, and gave a growl and dropped its smoking butt. In the same motion he flung himself towards the outstretched arm.

The ball of non-light spun up above the blackened lawn and the landscape twisted. See-Why was a bright sun. In the painfully light sky it showed now as a darker speck.

'Understanding is the first step towards control. We now understand probability.

'If we control it every man will be a magician. Let us then hope that this will not come to pass. For our universe is a fragile house of atoms, held together by the weak mortar of cause-and-effect. One magician would be two too many.'

Charles Sub-Lunar, Cry Continuum.

'The fish swims - vsss! The bird flies - rsss! The fungi-squirrel run - gsrss! The wheel turns and All is one. 'I must scream yet I have no mouth. I must run yet I have no feet. I must die yet I have no life. The wheel turns and All is one.'

Funeral song of the Deep Rocky region, Five Islands, Phnobis.

The sound of the sea. Breathe? But he could not breathe.

It came and went like the surf. It was only a sound, but it carried strange harmonies - warmth, and softness.

Dom floated somewhere on the breathing sea.

A man appeared, dressed in the old brown robes of a Sadhimist adept garbed for the ceremonies of Hogswatchnight. The face was familiar. It was his own.

'Don't be so damn silly. I am your father.'

'Hullo, dad. Is it really you?'

John Sabalos gestured aimlessly. 'No, I am an extension of your own deep mind. Hasn't Hrsh-Hgn taught you anything? Chel! Down all the stars, boy, you should be dead. So much for probability math, therefore.'

'Dad, what's happening to me?'

The familiar face faded. 'I don't know - it's your dream,' was left hanging in the air.

Hrsh-Hgn appeared, standing in front of the familiar faxboard.

'In an infinite universe all things are possible, including the possibility that the universe does not exisssst,' he purred, 'Expand this theory, with diagramsss—'

Dom heard himself say: 'That is not a theory. That is a mere hypothesis.'

'Ahh, beware of paradox!' the phnobe shook a finger, 'For once you have a paradox let loose in the universe you have a poiyt.'

'Poiyt?'

'And let uss consider...'

Isaac appeared, doing a soft-shoe shuffle through the mists.

'Goodness, are robots allowed in this dream? Or do they have to sit in the second-class dream at the back? Now here's the plot, boss, see, really you are the hereditary chairman of Earth itself but because of a palace coup you were sent here—'

'No,' said Dom firmly. That wasn't right.

'No, you have this wild talent which is the result of generations of careful breeding and all you have to do is give the word and hordes will—'

'Not me. Try the Infinity next door.'

'No, well, the universe doesn't really exist - we can't hide this from you - except in your imagination, and so this secret organization called the Knights of Infinity, they—'

'Try some other universe, robot.'

'Well, okay, if you want it straight from the shoulder, you are not important at all but you happen to have this magic bracelet which was made by the God of the Universe and He wants it back and you have got to get together a few trusted friends, such as me, and travel many a weary light year to the searing fires of Rigel and—'

'Uhuh.'

'I was only trying to cheer you up, chief,' the robot shed a tear of mercury, 'We Freudian extensions of personality have feelings too, you know!'

Dom.

'Who are you?'

Dom, can yo u hear me?

'I can hear you. What are you?'

Dom, if you can't hear me, what can you seel

See?

He sensed a light above, tinted with green.

Good, Dom, you are in pseudodeath. You do not know what that means. We need your earnest co-operation. We need access to your self-memory. Will you perform these exercises? Good. Now we want you to form a mental picture of yourself. We will show you how ...

A long time passed. Before Dom's mind swam himself, a perfect copy. It danced, and sang, and flexed embarrassing muscles. Then the voice made him go through it all again. And again.

Understanding was allowed into his mind. The voice was that of a googoo tank operator. Or, rather, a series of them.

He had seen the men of the hospital rafts after a hard night with the dagons, grinning foolishly under the pallid nutrient bath as they flexed the muscles of their new green-grown limbs. Googoo was one invention Widdershins hugged to itself. The surgeons said that if no more of a body was left than that tiny sliver of brain they called the mommet, a new body could be ...

No!

Dom thought it again. He could sense the tank man's panic. Dom started to think questions. Darkness fell swiftly, and was replaced by the green light and no desire to ask questions at all. A new voice said: