"There are all kinds of abuse, Siri. Words can hurt more than bullets, sometimes. And child abandonment—"

"He didn't abandon me." He left me with you.

"He abandoned us, Siri. Sometimes for months at a time, and I—and we never knew if he was coming back And he chose to do that to us, Siri. He didn't need that job, there were so many other things he was qualified to do. Things that had been redundant for years."

I shook my head, incredulous, unable to say it aloud: she hated him because he hadn't had the good grace to grow unnecessary?

"It's not Dad's fault that planetary security is still an essential service," I said.

She continued as if she hadn't heard. "Now there was a time when it was unavoidable, when people our age had to work just to make ends meet. But even back then people wanted to spend time with their families. Even if they couldn't afford to. To, to choose to stay working when it isn't even necessary, that's—" She shattered and reassembled at my shoulder. "Yes, Siri. I believe that's a kind of abuse. And if your father had been half as loyal to me as I've been to him all these years…"

I remembered Jim, the last time I'd seen him: snorting vassopressin under the restless eyes of robot sentries. "I don't think Dad's been disloyal to either of us."

Helen sighed. "I don't really expect you to understand. I'm not completely stupid, I've seen how it played out. I pretty much had to raise you myself all these years. I always had to play the heavy, always had to be the one to hand out the discipline because your father was off on some secret assignment. And then he'd come home for a week or two and he was the golden-haired boy just because he'd seen fit to drop in. I don't really blame you for that any more than I blame him. Blame doesn't solve anything at this stage. I just thought—well, really, I thought you ought to know. Take it for what it's worth."

A memory, unbidden: called into Helen's bed when I was nine, her hand stroking my scar, her stale sweet breath stirring against my cheek. You're the man of the house now Siri. We can't count on your father any more. It's just you and me…

I didn't say anything for a while. Finally: "Didn't it help at all?"

"What do you mean?"

I glanced around at all that customized abstraction: internal feedback, lucidly dreamed. "You're omnipotent in here. Desire anything, imagine anything; there it is. I'd thought it would have changed you more."

Rainbow tiles danced, and forced a laugh. "This isn't enough of a change for you?"

Not nearly.

Because Heaven had a catch. No matter how many constructs and avatars Helen built in there, no matter how many empty vessels sang her praises or commiserated over the injustices she'd suffered, when it came right down to it she was only talking to herself. There were other realities over which she had no control, other people who didn't play by her rules—and if they thought of Helen at all, they thought as they damn well pleased.

She could go the rest of her life without ever meeting any of them. But she knew they were out there, and it drove her crazy. Taking my leave of Heaven, it occurred to me that omnipotent though she was, there was only be one way my mother would ever be truly happy in her own personal creation.

The rest of creation would have to go.

"This shouldn't keep happening," Bates said. "The shielding was good."

The Gang was up across the drum, squaring away something in their tent. Sarasti lurked offstage today, monitoring the proceedings from his quarters. That left me with Bates and Szpindel in the Commons.

"Maybe against direct EM." Szpindel stretched, stifled a yawn. "Ultrasound boots up magnetic fields through shielding sometimes, in living tissue at least. Any chance something like that could be happening with your electronics?"

Bates spread her hands. "Who knows? Might as well be black magic and elves down there."

"Well, it's not a total wash. We can make a few smart guesses, eh?"

"Such as."

Szpindel raised one finger. "The layers we cut through couldn't result from any metabolic process I know about. So it's not 'alive', not in the biological sense. Not that that means anything these days," he added, glancing around the belly of our beast.

"What about life inside the structure?"

"Anoxic atmosphere. Probably rules out complex multicellular life. Microbes, maybe, although if so I wish to hell they show up in the samples. But anything complex enough to think, let alone build something like that" — a wave at the image in ConSensus—"is gonna need a high-energy metabolism, and that means oxygen."

"So you think it's empty?"

"Didn't say that, did I? I know aliens are supposed to be all mysterious and everything, but I still don't see why anyone would build a city-sized wildlife refuge for anaerobic microbes."

"It's got to be a habitat for something. Why any atmosphere at all, if it's just some kind of terraforming machine?"

Szpindel pointed up at the Gang's tent. "What Susan said. Atmosphere's still under construction and we get a free ride until the owners show up."

"Free?"

"Freeish. And I know we've only seen a fraction of a fraction of what's inside. But something obviously saw us coming. It yelled at us, as I recall. If they're smart and they're hostile, why aren't they shooting?"

"Maybe they are."

"If something's hiding down the hall wrecking your robots, it's not frying them any faster than the baseline environment would do anyway."

"What you call a baseline environment might be an active counterintrusion measure. Why else would a habitat be so uninhabitable?"

Szpindel rolled his eyes. "Okay, I was wrong. We don't know enough to make a few smart guesses."

Not that we hadn't tried. Once Jack's sensor head had been irreparably fried, we'd relegated it to surface excavation; it had widened the bore in infinitesimal increments, patiently burning back the edges of our initial peephole until it measured almost a meter across. Meanwhile we'd customized Bates's grunts—shielded them against nuclear reactors and the insides of cyclotrons—and come perigee we'd thrown them at Rorschach like stones chucked into a haunted forest. Each had gone through Jack's portal, unspooling whisker-thin fiberop behind them to pass intelligence through the charged atmosphere.

They'd sent glimpses, mostly. A few extended vignettes. We'd seen Rorschach's walls move, slow lazy waves of peristalsis rippling along its gut. We'd seen treacly invaginations in progress, painstaking constrictions that would presumably, given time, seal off a passageway. Our grunts had sailed through some quarters, staggered through others where the magnetic ambience threw them off balance. They'd passed through strange throats lined with razor-thin teeth, thousands of triangular blades in parallel rows, helically twisted. They'd edged cautiously around clouds of mist sculpted into abstract fractal shapes, shifting and endlessly recursive, their charged droplets strung along a myriad converging lines of electromagnetic force.

Ultimately, every one of them had died or disappeared.

"Any way to increase the shielding?" I wondered.

Szpindel gave me a look.

"We've shielded everything except the sensor heads," Bates explained. "If we shield those we're blind."

"But visible light's harmless enough. What about purely optical li—"

"We're using optical links, commissar," Szpindel snapped. "And you may have noticed the shit's getting through anyway."

"But aren't there, you know—" I groped for the word— "bandpass filters? Something that lets visible wavelengths through, cuts out the lethal stuff on both sides?"