I stripped in the locker room and went down to one of the little chambers. The attendant slapped the drug band on my arm, and helped me into the warm bath. “Lie back and float.” I did, and found it very near weightlessness. The attendant left, and shut the door, the lights went out. It was completely dark, completely silent, odorless, and in the body temperature water I could scarcely feel a thing. I was nothing, it seemed, but my mind. I rested.

The first hallucinations were auditory, as always. I heard faint music in the distance, which gave me the impression of being in a vast open space, and I thought, as I often had before, that if I could remember that music I would be a great composer. Then I heard whispers, from a group of voices around me. As I concentrated they became the choral babble you hear in audiences before a show begins.

Lights bobbed in my peripheral vision. “Hello?” I said aloud, and felt I was in a universe of salt taste. Talking to yourself again? I thought. No answer but the babbling. The lights circled and weaved until they were in front of me, several meters away. When they bobbed up they flashed in my eyes like a security’s flashlight. Then I noticed something in front of the lights, blocking them off. A short figure it was, perhaps human. “Hello?” I said apprehensively.

For a long time I floated, pulsing with my heart, and the voices around me said gudda gudda gudda gudda… The short figure approached me. It said, “I feel (gudda gudda gudda) that you are… (gudda gudda)… afraid.”

“I’m not,” I said, suddenly fearful. Talking to yourself again, I thought, this is silly. But the figure stood before me as real as a bedpost. The circling lights moved like fireflies into my peripheral vision, and bobbed up from time to time, illuminating the figure’s face in quick flashes. A woman. Face thin, eyes and hair brown, a rich brown that I could see, in flashes, as clearly as the lights bobbing to the side, and the black all around.

The anima takes many forms, but I had met this one before. “Emma!” I said, and then, boldly: “I don’t believe in you.”

She laughed, a musical sound that blended in with the background babble, echoed, redoubled on itself, filled space.

“And I don’t believe you,” she said, in a contralto as musical as her laugh. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Yes, but it isn’t you. Who are you, exactly? Where are you now?”

“You always ask the same questions.” She pointed an arm, blocking out the lights behind her. “Come along.”

And then we were both moving, rushing through salt space together, with the voices keening in flight all around us. I felt her hand clasping my wrist, and for a time we conversed soundlessly of matters that were vital, though I couldn’t have said exactly what they were, not aloud.

Then she pulled away from me, and floated over a pulsing black-red plain. I said, “It seems like I’ve been looking for you all my life, but you’re never there. When I was a kid I read your journal and I thought you would be coming out soon. I thought you were hiding, and that any day now you would appear.”

Her clear laugh sounded like a bell and below her the black-red mountains vibrated at the sound. “I was killed after I finished the journal, and left my body. No hiding.”

“Ah,” I said, filling with sadness, and then with dread; I was talking to a ghost, then. “I knew that, though. I shouldn’t be afraid, I knew that, even when I was a kid.”

“But you are afraid.”

“I… maybe. Because it’s not the same now, don’t you see that? The journal… it isn’t yours. Someone else is doing this, you aren’t the woman I thought you were.”

The choral babble rose up around us, the black-red mountains bobbed like a wheat field in the wind, and Emma moved away from me, slowly. The lights blinked behind her, under her arm, she was nothing but a silhouette; and the fear that had been tightly bound in my chest burst through me. “Don’t leave, Emma,” I whispered. “I’m alone, I don’t know why I do the things I do. You could help me.”

“Don’t fret.” Her voice was distant, the chorus grew behind it, roaring like the sound of a sea. “You can’t be helped by what you don’t believe, can you. Look to what you believe in. Look to what you believe in. Look…” Her voice drowned in the babble, gudda gudda gudda. Off among the lights I saw her pass, a tiny silhouette. I tried to follow her and realized I was trapped — that somehow I had been frozen in my tracks. Suddenly I was terrified, the tights swirled and the babble roared and I was out there all alone, thrashing in place… Some part of me remembered the release button in my left palm, and I squeezed it hard, again and again. I felt myself drop; they were draining the tank. They were letting me out. And there far across the blackness, a tiny black figure…

Lights, bumps, the sounds of the attendant unstrapping me, taking me out. I couldn’t look at him. I checked the clock on the wall; two and a half hours had passed. The drugs were still at work, and in the dim red light of the chamber I stood unsteadily, watching the walls pulse in and out. The attendant observed me without much interest. I walked down to the locker room, got dressed, stepped out into the bright lights of Waystation. Silently I cursed myself. What kind of entertainment was that? The stands of walnut and maple waved their arms covered with turning leaves, yellow and red all intermixed, and all sparkling in the light. I cursed again and started to walk it off.

The next time the seminar met, they were ready to go.

Elaine began. “Caroline Holmes visited Terra only once, in 2344. She was part of an archaeological tour, and they visited Mexico, Peru, Easter Island, Angkor Wat, Iran, Egypt, Italy — and Stonehenge and some other British stone circles. She liked ruins.”

“Tenuous stuff,” said April decisively. Elaine looked annoyed.

“Yes, I know,” Elaine replied. “But as we all know, the concerns of youth endure. Anyway, it was a fact that I thought was interesting.”

“Aside from shipping and mining, what has she done with her money?” I asked.

“She started the Holmes Foundation,” April said. “Which gives grants for scientific research of various kinds. In 2605 the Foundation gave a grant to Dr. Mund Stallworth of the University of Mars, who used it to develop the dating method that places the construction of Icehenge around Davydov’s time.”

“Or a little before,” I added.

“Yes. He had had trouble getting the project funded up to that time.”

“Is there anything to indicate that Holmes herself influenced the Foundation’s decision?” asked Elaine.

“Not that I could find,” April said defensively, “although it’s well known she takes a great interest in the Foundation’s work.”

“Pretty tenuous,” Elaine said, drawing the words out.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Yes,” Sean said, with a slight smile at me. “One of Holmes’s companies built the settlement on Saturn Twenty-five, which was intended to be an artists’ colony. Of course very few artists went to live there, and Holmes was ridiculed pretty harshly in the intellectual media for planning to remove artists from the society at large. She was called stupid and vulgar more than once, and it occurred to me that she might have taken offense, and decided to get back at them in a sense.”

“Ah ha,” I said. “Here we get into the curious ground of the mentality of the hoaxer. The motivation for such an act.”

Andrew said, “Something similar to that might be Holmes’s Museum of the Outer Satellites, on Elliot Titania. You know how much critical condemnation that received.”

“This is pretty weak evidence,” April said.

“I know,” I replied. “But they are interesting indications. The question of motivation is a hard one. Olaf Ohman, a nineteenth-century hoaxer, once said, ‘I should like to do something that would bother the brains of the learned.’ I thought that these little incidents might show that Holmes had a similar feeling.”