Jack widened his eyes. "What a wonderful concept!"

One good cliche deserves another, he thought, and suppressed a smile as he remembered Abe's variation: Teach a man to fish and you can sell him rods and reels and hooks and sinkers.

"Yes. That is the Dormentalist way. You can rest assured that any contributions you wish to make to the Church will go directly toward helping the less fortunate."

"That sounds like a fine idea. You know, I don't think I'll wait till I take my father's place. I'd like to start right now. As soon as we're through here I'm going to contact my accountant."

Brady's smile was beatific. "How kind of you."

4

Luther Brady tapped his fingertips on his desktop as Jensen stood at attention on the far side. He'd known the Grand Paladin's first name once, but had long forgotten it. He wondered if even Jensen remembered.

Not that it mattered. What did matter was Jason Amurri and how he seemed just a little too good to be true.

He wanted Jensen's opinion but decided to have a little fun while he was at it.

"What does your xelton tell you about Jason Amurri?"

Jensen frowned. His answer was delayed, and drawn out when it came.

"It's suspicious. It finds inconsistencies about him."

Watching Jensen's shifting gaze, Brady wanted to laugh at his obvious discomfort talking about the perceptions of his Fully Fused xelton. He should be uncomfortable: Jensen's xelton wasn't FF. In fact, he didn't even have a xelton. No one did!

But no one—not Jensen nor any members of the HC—would admit it. Because each of them thought of himself as the sole Null among the elite FFs. Each hid their Sham Fusion because admitting to Nullhood would mean they'd have to leave their posts in disgrace.

Oh, it was rich to listen to them talk about levitating or leaving their bodies to wander among the planets and stars, almost as if they were engaged in an unspoken contest. And since Luther had made it implicitly clear all along that to exercise one's FF abilities in front of others was bad manners—tantamount to trivializing the wonders of FF by cheap exhibitionism—no one had to back up his or her wondrous claims.

That way, no one could say the emperor had no clothes.

"My xelton feels the same way, but for some reason it cannot pierce through and contact Amurri's. And we know what that means, don't we."

Jensen nodded. "Amurri is probably a Null."

"And that," Brady sighed, "is always tragic. I pity Nulls, but I pity even more the poor Null who's deluded himself into Sham Fusion."

He watched Jensen blink and swallow. He could almost read his mind: Why 5 he saying that? Does he suspect? Does he know?

"So do I," Jensen rasped.

"I'm sure there are members with SF in the temple, but one must restrain one's xelton from piercing their veil. That would be too much of an invasion. And unnecessary because, as you know, sooner or later all Nulls betray themselves." He cleared his throat as if clearing his mind. "But back to our friend Jason…"

Yes, Jason Amurri… after the Reveille Session was over and Amurri gone, Luther realized that he didn't know a damn thing that he hadn't known at the outset. Perhaps the man was just naturally reticent, but Luther had an uneasy feeling that he might be hiding something.

"Since our xeltons cannot yet contact his," he went on, "perhaps you had better pry a little more deeply into his background."

"I'm already on that."

Brady raised his eyebrows. "Oh?"

"My, um, PX doesn't think he acts like a rich boy. Doesn't move like one."

"And your xelton knows how the rich move?"

"I agree with my PX. I know people who move like Amurri and they're not rich. They're dangerous."

"But it's not like he showed up claiming to be Jason Amurri. He tried to hide that."

"Yeah, I know. That's the only thing that doesn't fit. But then again maybe he planned it that way all along—gave an obviously phony name and then—"

Luther laughed. "That's pretty convoluted, don't you think?"

Jensen shrugged. "My PX thinks there's more to him than meets the eye."

"I think you give him too much credit."

"Maybe. But if I can find just one picture of Jason Amurri, I'll feel a whole lot better."

"Knowing you, Jensen, if you found one, you'd wonder if it had been planted."

A rare flash of white teeth in Jensen's dark face—he almost never smiled. "That's my job, right?"

"Right. And one you do so well." Time to end this. He waved his hand at Jensen. "Keep checking on him. But if he shows up tomorrow with a six-figure donation, then stop. Because who he really is will no longer matter."

As Jensen walked out, Luther pressed the button under the edge of his desktop. The panels rolled back, revealing the Opus Omega globe.

He'd felt like a stunned fish when he'd walked in earlier and found the panels open with Amurri standing before it. He'd been about to shout for Jensen when he noticed that Amurri made no attempt to hide what he was doing. His lack of furtiveness had allayed Luther's suspicions. And his open curiosity about the meaning of the lights on the globe had seemed genuine.

Obviously he had no idea of the apocalyptic significance of what he'd seen.

Luther's thoughts slipped back to that late winter day in college when he first saw the globe. It had existed only in his mind then. He'd been a frosh, away from his strict Scottish-American home for the first time in his eighteen years, and making the most of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the early seventies. He was into his first tab of acid, with a couple of more experienced guys guiding him through the trip, when the globe had appeared, suspended and spinning in the center of the room. He remembered pointing it out to the others but he was the only one who could see it.

Not a Rand McNally globe, but a battered, pockmarked sphere with brown, polluted oceans ancl bilious chemical clouds shrouding the land. As he'd watched, red dots began to glow on all the continents and oceans, and then glowing red lines arced out from each to connect with the others, creating a globe-spanning network of scarlet threads. And then black circles appeared at some of the intersections of those threads. Soon after, the black circles began glowing white, one by one, and when all were lit, the globe glowed red, then white hot. Finally it exploded, but the scattered pieces returned and reformed into a new world of fertile green continents and pristine blue oceans.

The vision altered the course of Luther's life. Not immediately, not that night, but in the weeks and months afterward as it returned on a nightly basis, with or without chemical enhancement.

At first he was uneasy, thinking it was a recurring flashback and that he'd really screwed up his head. But after a while he got used to it. It became part of his quotidian existence.

But he was terrified when he first heard the voice. Never during his waking hours, only in his sleep, only during the vision. He began to think he might be schizophrenic.

At first it was an indistinct muttering—definitely a voice, but he couldn't understand a word. Gradually it grew louder, the mutterings progressing to distinguishable speech. But although he understood the individual words, they seemed disjointed and he could make no sense of them.

That too changed and by his senior year he came to understand that this world, the ground on which he stood, was destined to change and merge with a sister world in another space-time continuum. Those here who helped speed the fusion would survive the transition from a polluted planet to paradise; the rest of humanity would not. The voice told him to find the places designated by the white lights, to buy the land there, and wait.