In the centre of the chamber stood Yishna and Rhodane. With them were the Polity man McCrooger and two quofarl clad in bulky cooling suits, who stood guard over a prosaic-looking chest. Despite the nervously anticipated presence of his two sisters, Orduval found his attention immediately fixed on McCrooger. The man looked very different indeed from how he had appeared in those early broadcasts from the ship that transported him insystem. Now he was rail-thin, sickly-pale, and hardly able to support his own weight. Obviously he had suffered wounds, judging by the dressings covering his arm and one shoulder. Could the Brumallians have tortured him?

Orduval finally turned his attention to his two siblings. He wanted to go over and greet them, but something about Rhodane checked him and his grin disappeared as suddenly he felt a deep and puzzling distrust of her.

"Would that be the evidence you have brought us?" Duras indicated the chest with a wave of his cane.

"It is," said McCrooger, stepping forward with an invalid's care.

"Then," announced Duras, "after I have taken a look around this ship here, we must take it across to the incident vehicle, where you can present it to Parliament."

Abruptly the floor juddered, and behind them the hatch shut with a huffing sound. Recovering his balance, Orduval looked up to see that a projection hovered in the air immediately over their heads. It looked familiar, like some kind of animal, though seemed unable to hold its shape for long and kept collapsing formlessly like a blob of mercury floating in zero gravity.

"Orduval, I was wrong," said a mechanistic voice. Amber eyes blinked within the metallic mass, then faded. "You caused your own fits…to escape…" The shape disappeared.

The news hardened something inside Orduval. Into the stunned silence that followed he said, "That was Tigger telling me…" but somehow he could not go on.

Duras turned to gaze at him curiously. "Telling you what?"

"Telling him how he escaped the grip of the Shadowman," said David McCrooger. "And why he is once more in its grip."

McCrooger

I glanced round at Rhodane and Yishna, and saw that both of them looked slightly ill. Well they might feel so, since their superb intellects were in conflict with something they registered unconsciously but could not allow themselves to know. Of course they probably did not feel quite as bad as I did. It seemed to take all my will to prevent my legs from shaking and I felt ready to vomit. I even wondered if I was about to bring up that mutualite I'd swallowed earlier. Also the temperature inside the ship was rising, and though the Sudorians here seemed to be enjoying this and the two quofarl were protected from it, I was sweating heavily. And if that wasn't enough discomfort, there was that continuous weird distortion of my perception, and hints of dark figures lurking at the periphery of my vision.

"Once more in the grip of the Shadowman?" Duras repeated. "An interesting conjecture."

"Do you dream of the Shadowman?" I asked him. "Do all of you?" I turned to the soldiers in the room. They all looked slightly unnerved by my question.

"I have nightmares," admitted Duras, "which get worse if I don't take my medication. It is a common complaint."

"Yes, very common, I gather. So many of you are now on medication, aren't you? Or in asylums? You're all drowning so deep in this that you cannot see the surface." I then wondered if the distortion I was aware of all the time was what they had come to view as normality, the younger of them having grown up with it and the older having lived with it for thirty years.

"What do you mean by that?" Duras huffed.

I held up a hand, but snatched it back down when I noticed it shaking. "Please, bear with me," I said, and turned to Yishna. "Yishna, what exactly is an information fumarole breach?"

"I beg your pardon?"

I didn't reply, since she'd heard me plain enough. As I awaited her reply, she smoothed her hands down her body—something she usually did when aiming to be seductive, but now just a nervous reaction. Realising this unconscious gesture, she snapped her hands down by her sides. They too were shaking.

"I cannot discuss such critical Combine research so publicly," she reproached me.

"A fumarole breach is more than just a power surge," Orduval intervened blandly. "I know that now. Why else did Fleet ships take the equipment damaged by fumarole breaches and drop it into the sun?"

I glanced at him, saw his thoughtful and pained look. He nodded to me as if he knew where I was going but found it difficult to help me. Turning back to Yishna, I began, "Let me guess. An information fumarole breach is when, somehow, equipment is infected by informational viruses or by nanotechnology. And you and your three siblings were apparently conceived during such a breach."

There had to be more to it than the coincidental timing—something I didn't know.

Orduval came to my rescue with, "We were actually conceived inside the Ozark Cylinder in which the breach took place." So, that was how the Worm's nanotech got to Elsever's womb. I watched Orduval for a moment, hoping he would add something more, but it seemed as if just saying that had required a huge amount of effort, and he now looked utterly weary.

Yishna looked pained, but remained silent.

I went on, "Perhaps then you can tell me about bleed-over? That's much more in the public domain, and there seems less secrecy about it."

"Bleed-over is a U-space effect generated by the Worm," she finally replied.

"And those experiencing bleed-over, what do they feel?"

Almost with gratitude, since it took them away from the other subject, Yishna explained about the feelings of anger and other emotions that had quite possibly resulted in the Exhibitionists and other strange cults developing aboard Corisanthe Main. I waited for her to understand the most obvious implication of what she was telling me, but it seemed to have completely passed her by.

I tried again: "There's things you need to understand about U-space, Yishna," I began. "It requires a huge amount of energy to actually penetrate that continuum but, once there, small amounts of energy to cover huge distances relative to realspace. If bleed-over is a U-space effect generated by the Worm, it could just as easily also be present anywhere within a few light years of here as on Corisanthe Main itself." I spread my hands to encompass the group. "You are all suffering from bleed-over. I am suffering from bleed-over."

"I had thought something…" Yishna began, then trailed off.

She still wasn't getting it. She, and it seemed all the scientists on Corisanthe Main, had been assiduously measuring and cataloguing bleed-over and fumarole breaches, yet utterly failing to understand what they were. As far as I gathered from the research I had managed to conduct while here in the Sudorian system—mostly through the console Yishna had given me—only the cultish elements of the major station had come close to understanding, with their concept of telepathic inductance.

"What does this all mean?" Duras interrupted.

"It means that you are feeling what the Worm feels, it having been broken into four and held confined for decades. It means that an alien entity utterly incomprehensible to you is attempting to influence you, maybe even manipulate you, and the Shadowman is just one aspect of that influence. Is it any surprise your asylums are so packed?"

Yishna made a sound that seemed to begin as a denial then just trailed away.

"Why is this so important now?" asked Duras, getting right to the point.

I replied, "Because quite evidently it has increased its influence. Somehow, through an information fumarole breach, it has fashioned four instruments to do its bidding. They are called Yishna, Rhodane, Orduval and Harald."