Briareus moves quickly to the axis of Morality and leaps to the pagoda of Right Speech. Nemes takes the third stairway, the highest, toward the high pavilions of Right Mindfulness and Right Meditation. Her radar shows people in the highest structure. She arrives in a few seconds, scanning the buildings and cliff wall for concealed rooms or hiding places. Nothing. There is a young woman in the pavilion for Right Meditation and for an instant Nemes thinks that the search is over, but although she is about the same age as Aenea, it is not her. There are a few others in the elegant pagoda—a very old woman—Nemes recognizes her as the Thunderbolt Sow from the Dalai Lama’s reception—the Dalai Lama’s Chief Crier and Head of Security, Carl Linga William Eiheji, and the boy himself—the Dalai Lama.

“Where is she?” says Nemes. “Where is the one who calls herself Aenea?”

Before any of the others can speak, the warrior Eiheji reaches into his cloak and hurls a dagger with lightning speed. Nemes dodges it easily. Even without phase-shifting, her reactions are faster than most humans. But when Eiheji pulls a flechette pistol, Nemes shifts up, walks to the frozen man, encloses him in her shift field, and flings him out the open floor-to-ceiling window into the abyss. Of course, as soon as Eiheji leaves her field envelope, he seems to freeze in midair like some ungainly bird thrown from the nest, unable to fly but unwilling to fall.

Nemes turns back to the boy and shifts down. Behind her, Eiheji screams and plummets out of sight. The Dalai Lama’s jaw drops and his lips form an O. To him and the two women present, Eiheji had simply disappeared from next to them and reappeared in midair out the open shoji doors of the pavilion, as if he had chosen to teleport to his death.

“You can’t…” begins the old Thunderbolt Sow.

“You are forbidden…” begins the Dalai Lama.

“You won’t…” begins the woman whom Nemes guesses is either Rachel or Theo, Aenea’s compatriots.

Nemes says nothing. She shifts up, walks to the boy, folds her phase field around him, lifts him, and carries him to the open door.

Nemes! It is Briareus calling from the pavilion of Right Effort.

What? Instead of verbalizing on the common band, Briareus uses the extra energy to send the full visual image. Looking frozen in the sepia air kilometers above them, fusion flame as solid as a blue pillar, a spaceship is descending. Shift down, commands Nemes.

The monks and the old Lama packed us a lunch in a brown bag. They also gave A. Bettik one of the old-fashioned pressure suits of the kind I had seen only in the ancient spaceflight museum at Port Romance and tried to give two more to Aenea and me, but we showed them the skinsuits under our thermal jackets. The twelve hundred monks all turned out to wave us off through the First Heavenly Gate, and there must have been two or three thousand others pressing and craning to see us leave. The great stairway was empty except for the three of us, climbing easily now, A. Bettik with his clear helmet folded back like a cowl, Aenea and me with our osmosis masks turned up. Each of the steps was seven meters wide, but shallow, and the first section was easy enough, with a wide terrace step every hundred steps. The steps were heated from within, so even as we moved into the region of perpetual ice and snow midway up T’ai Shan, the stairway was clear.

Within an hour we had reached the Second Heavenly Gate—a huge red pagoda with a fifteen-meter archway—and then we were climbing more steeply up the near-vertical fault line known as the Mouth of the Dragon. Here the winds picked up, the temperature dropped precipitously, and the air became dangerously thin. We had redonned our harnesses at the Second Heavenly Gate, and now we clipped on to one of the buckycarbon lines that ran along each side of the staircase, adjusting the pulley grip to act like a brake if we fell or were blown off the increasingly treacherous staircase. Within minutes, A. Bettik inflated his clear helmet and gave us a thumbs-up, while Aenea and I sealed our osmosis masks.

We kept climbing toward the South Gate of Heaven still a kilometer above us, while the world fell away all around. It was the second time in a few hours that such a sight had presented itself to us, but this time we took it all in every three hundred steps as we took a break, standing and wheezing and staring out at the early afternoon light illuminating the great peaks. Tai’an, the City of Peace, was invisible now, some fifteen thousand steps and several klicks below the icefields and rock walls through which we had climbed. I realized that the skinsuit comthreads gave us privacy once again, and said, “How you doing, kiddo?”

“Tired,” said Aenea, but she leavened the comment with a smile from behind her clear mask.

“Can you tell me where we’re headed?” I said.

“The Temple of the Jade Emperor,” said my friend. “It’s on the summit.”

“I guessed that,” I said, setting a foot down on the wide step, then raising the next foot to the next step. The stairway passed up and through a rock-and-ice overhang at this point.

I knew that if I turned around to look down, that vertigo might overcome me. This was infinitely worse than the paragliding. “Can you tell me why we’re climbing to the Temple of the Jade Emperor when everything is going to hell behind us?”

“How do you mean going to hell?” she said.

“I mean Nemes and her ilk are probably after us. The Pax definitely is going to make its move. Things are falling apart. And we’re on pilgrimage.”

Aenea nodded. The wind was roaring now, as thin as it was, as we actually climbed into the jet stream. Each of us was moving forward and up with our heads bowed and our bodies arched, as if carrying a heavy load. I wondered what A. Bettik was thinking about.

“Why don’t we just call the ship and get the hell out of here,” I said. “If we’re going to bail out, let’s get it over with.”

I could see Aenea’s dark eyes behind the mask that reflected the deepening blue sky.

“When we call the ship, there’ll be two dozen Pax warships descending on us like harpy crows,” said Aenea. “We can’t do it until we’re ready.”

I gestured up the steep staircase. “And climbing this will make us ready?”

“I hope so,” she said softly. I could hear the rasp of her breathing through my hearpatches.

“What’s up here, kiddo?”

We had reached the next three hundredth step.

All three of us stopped and panted, too tired to appreciate the view. We had climbed into the edge of space. The sky was almost black.

Several of the brighter stars were visible and I could see one of the smaller moons hurtling toward the zenith.

Or was it a Pax ship? “I don’t know what we’ll find, Raul,” said Aenea, her voice tired. “I glimpse things… dream things again and again… but then I dream the same thing in a different way. I hate to talk about it until I see which reality presents itself.”

I nodded understanding, but I was lying. We began climbing again. “Aenea?” I said.

“Yes, Raul.”

“Why don’t you let me take… you know… communion?”

She made a face behind the osmosis mask. “I hate calling it that.”

“I know, but that’s what everyone calls it. But tell me this, at least… why don’t you let me drink the wine?”

“It’s not time for you to, Raul.”

“Why not?” I could feel the anger and frustration just below the surface again, mixing with the roiling current of love that I felt for this woman.

“You know the four steps I talk about…” she began.

“Learning the language of the dead, learning the language of the living… yeah, yeah, I know the four steps,” I said almost dismissively, setting my very real foot on a very physical marble step and taking another tired pace up the endless stairway.

I could see Aenea smile at my tone.