"There it is," said Morss, pointing past the aft end of the ship. Livia walked under the hot pinging metal and looked.

A thing like a metal tree sat entirely alone in a fire-blackened plaza a hundred meters away. Instead of branches, the tree thrust blades into the air at all angles; some were visibly red-hot. Several human figures stood about the tree, along with the tanklike shape of a semi-sentient brody. Morss headed in their direction.

Morss shook hands, then Livia stepped up to do likewise. These people were mostly votes, but the Government was here, too, in the guise of a young man with calloused hands. In addition, there was a thing like a swirling cloud of virtual matter, which introduced itself as a Zara — whatever that was — and a pair of otterlike biological beings that might be true aliens.

" ... And here comes Choronzon," said Morss, nodding in the direction of a nearby, half-built colosseum. A tall man was sauntering toward them, dusting off his hands and smiling. As he got closer she found herself staring; he had intense eyes and black hair, and he moved like a panther. His beauty was almost mesmerizing, in fact. Some inscape trick, she told herself, with a twinge of resentment. But she didn't look away.

"Alison Haver, the god Choronzon."

Choronzon grinned at Morss, clapped more dust off his hands and held one out for her to shake. "Nice to meet you," he said in a deep, resonant voice.

Sophia had talked about the gods, but in the manner of distant beings she never hoped to meet. Here was a viable post-human in the flesh — or pseudo-flesh — and he looked like nothing so much as a sim actor.

"So you're our baseline," he said. "I trust Doran's briefed you on what we're doing here?"

"No — yes," she said, and found herself inexplicably blushing. "I'm a bit out of my depth," she admitted.

"That's okay," he said quietly. "So am I."

There was an awkward pause.

"Has it said anything?" Morss asked the Government. They were standing near the metal tree, looking it up and down.

The Government nodded. "It's radiating news stories on all frequencies — thousands of self-serving docudra-mas per second. But that's all reflex action. There's been no communications from the thing's core at all. See for yourself: you can enter its inscape by walking under the, uh, branches there."

Livia regarded the smoking tangle nervously. Six days ago, a Government agent had overflown me coronal to find out what had happened to the people who had won the post-humanist civil war. He had flown in on a stealth-craft and cruised up and down the coronal for days before spotting the tree. By that time he was thoroughly rattled by what he'd seen: cities eaten and regurgitated by architect-dreamer machines; inscape hallucinating entire new civilizations; everywhere the stink of dead plants and animals. The lakes had been drained out and stored as ice on the underside of the coronal, and even the soil replaced by some unknown industrial process. Omega Point couldn't tolerate the idea of any nonconvert coming within a thousand kilometers of this strange metal tree.

"Now that we're all here," said the Government, sounding for all the world as if it were chairing a meeting, "let's go in and see if anybody's home." He turned to Iivia. "Your task lies there." He pointed to the building Choronzon had come from.

"What's there?" She peered nervously in that direction.

"I am," said the Government with a smile, "so don't worry. No, it's just some of the humans who survived the recent war. They wandered into this zone after Choronzon wiped out the Omegans' defenses. They need someone to talk to."

"Talk to?" But the Government and the others, including Morss, had turned and were walking toward the bizarre metal tree. Livia shook her head and walked toward the building.

Doran Morss found himself hovering in an endless sky: the inscape representation of the metal tree's core. Avatars of the other Archipelagics floated nearby. Sourceless illumination lit them a soft, sunset rose color. Choronzon was scratching his head, looking unimpressed.

"Listen to that," said the god. Morss heard nothing. He said as much.

"That's what I mean," said Choronzon. "We're interfaced with a system that's supposed to contain the downloaded minds of millions of people. We've attacked them and knocked out all their defenses, leaving them totally vulnerable to us in the real world. Shouldn't there at least be somebody manning the door?"

They looked around uneasily, but the blue sky went on forever in all directions, empty of promise. Finally the Government said, "All right, nobody's meeting us. Choronzon, you and I will crack the system." The god nodded. Nothing more happened — the two simply stood there on the air, staring at nothing, while presumably their agents made an all-out assault on the information processing systems of the metal tree.

Their distraction gave Doran the chance he'd been waiting for. He quickly muttered a number of commands under his breath — commands that had been given to him by an Omega Point evangelist he'd sheltered, in secret, on board his Scotland. The commands were supposed to unlock a set of interfaces to the core of the tree. If all went well, he should be able to access the genetic code for Omega Point's eschatus machine.

Omega Point had explored many options for self-deification. The eschatus machine was a single-person device, so they had never built it, but had instead elected to implement a collective approach that they claimed would allow all of their members to achieve a state of absolute consciousness. The evangelist had assured Doran that the plans for the eschatus machine were complete, however. Doran had paid the nonhuman brodys to build it and Omega Point had promised to give him the machine's genes if he appealed to the votes on their behalf.

With the eschatus machine, Doran Morss could in one second transform himself into a being like Choronzon — a god.

He had given the passwords. There was nothing to do but wait. If Omega Point believed in his honesty — frankly, if they cared at all at this point — the eschatus machine genes should automatically download into the capacious data store he'd hidden under his shirt. Meanwhile the Government and Choronzon had lost their distracted looks and were frowning at each other.

"What's the matter?" Doran asked innocently. "Can't get through?"

"Oh, we got through all right," said Choronzon. "It was just what I said would happen," he said to the Government. "There was never any other possibility."

"What's going on?" asked a vote.

The Government shrugged. "It was pretty much a foregone conclusion. The fact is, there's no such thing as an ultimate state of consciousness. It's a myth; sentience has meaning only insofar as it's connected into the physical world. We always knew the Omegans were going to be disappointed."

"All a cosmic wank," said Choronzon.

"We have full access to their systems," said the Goveminent. "If you'd like to see it, here's a view of the Omega Point." It gestured to open a large inscape window in the sky. Instantly Doran's head was filled with an un-differentiated roar: white noise matched in the window by endless video snow.

Choronzon laughed. "The more information there is in a signal, the more it resembles noise. You're looking at infinite information density, gentlemen, a signal so packed with information that it has become noise. These idiots pushed so far in one direction that they ended up at the opposite pole. It's not like I didn't warn them."

"Then they're gone?"

The Government nodded. "All gone. Dead."

"You could call it the most elaborate act of serf-entombment in human history," said Choronzon with another laugh. "Come on, let's get out of here so I can dismantle this thing." He vanished from the inscape view. After conferring for a while the votes followed. Doran hung for a while longer in front of the big square of gray snow, listening to the roar of infinite information density. He almost thought he could hear voices in that monstrous basso hiss, but then he'd heard the same in the sighing of the night breeze. Perhaps the fanatics of Omega Point had gotten their wish, but if so they had been mistaken in thinking that the Absolute was something that hadn't been there all along. Absolute meaning, it seemed, was no different from no meaning at all.