"But you haven't been here," he said quietly. "You've never seen it up close. You're here now—does it seem like there's intelligence to this?" He waved his hand at the ragged grass.

"I don't know what you see when you look at it," Marya said. "Maybe it's because you've been on worlds where life just is, like Earth. Where nothing maintains it. But everything around us is artificial, Axel. The soil: there may be a thousand years of mulch here," she kicked at it, "but there's meters of soil beneath that, layer upon layer of fertile ground underneath what's been laid down since Ventus came to life. Every single grain of that was manufactured, by the Winds.

"Look at the grass! I know it looks like Earth grass, it's uneven in height, looks randomly patched over the hillside. Maybe in the past few centuries things have settled down to the point where it can be allowed to spread on its own. But I doubt it. The grass has been painted on, by the nano. Look at the clouds. They look like the clouds I see in videos of Earth. But if the Winds weren't busy sculpting them right now, do you think they would look like that? Axel, Ventus is not like Earth. Its sun has a different temperature, it's a different size, the composition of the crust is different, so the mineral balance in the oceans is—was—totally different. As a result the composition of the atmosphere, and its density, are naturally very different. This weather is not natural." She held her hand up to the breeze. "The air's been made by the Winds, and Axel, they have to keep making it. The instant they stop working, the planet will revert, because it's not in equilibrium. It's in a purely synthetic state.

"You don't honestly think the distribution of bugs, mice, and birds around here is natural, do you? It's planned and monitored by the Winds, on every square meter of the planet. Bits of it are constantly going out of wack, threatening the local and global equilibrium. The Winds are constantly adjusting, thinking hard about how to keep the place as Earth-like as possible. It's what we made them to do."

He shook his head. "Well, exactly. It's a complex system, but it's still just a big machine."

"Surely you've wondered why the Winds don't acknowledge the presence of humans?"

"The Flaw? Sure, whole religions exist here to try to answer that," he laughed. "You think you know?"

"I think I know how to find out. Listen, in your last report to us before the Heaven hooks incident, you said that Controller Turcaret claimed to be able to hear the Winds."

He glared at her. "Not claimed. He did hear them." Calandria still didn't believe that part of the story, and it obviously annoyed Axel.

"We've heard of people like that," said Marya. "But we've never been able to verify a case. If we had one to study, I'm sure we could crack the problem."

He laughed shortly. "Too bad Turcaret's dead."

"I'm not sure that's a problem," she mused. "As long as there's bits of him left..."

She heard the grass rustle; Calandria was returning. Marya saw the woman's eyes glinting like two coals in the darkness, and shivered. "We go after Armiger," said Calandria. "You know we must."

"No," said Axel. "We can return with reinforcements. I'm going to keep signalling for a ship, Cal. You can't stop me."

There was silence for a while. Then Calandria shrugged. "You're right, I can't stop you."

The atmosphere around the fire suddenly seemed poisonous. Marya stood up quickly.

"Think I'll turn in," she said, smiling at them both.

Across the fire, Calandria nodded, her perfect face still as carven stone in the firelight. Her eyes betrayed nothing, but Marya thought she could feel the woman's gaze on her back as she knelt and made her bed.

Marya dreamed about home. Outside her window she could see the gently upcurving landscape of Covenant, her colony cylinder. Sunlight streamed through a thousand lakes and pools, turning the hills and cities into translucent lace and backlighting the spiral of clouds in the center of the cylinder. As always, thousands of winged human figures drifted in the air between her and those clouds.

She walked the deep moss carpets of home. She breathed the warm honeyed air, felt it drift over her limbs finer than any cloth as she passed through room after room of her parents' apartment. Her family were here, she knew, in other rooms she had yet to reach. Then, in the back of her own bedroom, she found a door she had never seen before.

She waved the door open, and gasped to find herself in a giant library. She recognized paper books, had held a few in her hand as a student, feeling then the tremendous age and dignity of pre-space knowledge. It was this sense of ancient dignity that had driven her to anthropology.

Here were thousand upon thousand of bound books, arrayed in shelves that towered to an invisibly distant ceiling. Marya walked reverently among them.

She stumbled, knocking over a side-table. The echoes of its fall went on and on, almost visibly reaching into every distant crevice between the volumes. When it finally died, she heard a growing rustle, as if the books were rousing from slumber.

A voice spoke. "You've done it now."

"What have I done?" she asked, tremulously.

"You've got to make a choice," said the voice. "You woke us. Now you have to choose whether you want us to become a part of you, as memory; or whether you want us to become people, with whom you can speak."

She looked up at the towering wisdom, and felt a sudden love for it—as if these books were family. "Oh, please become people," she said.

But even as Marya spoke she remembered she wasn't on Covenant any more. She was on Ventus. As grim men with swords stepped out of the walls, she screamed, for she had chosen wrongly.

The sound of Axel cursing woke Marya. She groaned and tried to roll over. Her eyes felt pasted shut, for all that she had slept badly. Her back seemed to have been remade in the shape of the stones she had lain on, and the cold had entered through every chink in the blanket.

Axel was using some language Marya didn't know, but it was plain he was upset. Too bad; but couldn't he be quieter about it?

"Damn it, get up, Mounce! She's gone!"

Marya opened her eyes. Grey clouds had taken over the sky while she slept. The fire was out. She levered himself up on one elbow, fought a wave of dizziness, and blinked at two horses where there should be three. The beasts were staring at Axel wide-eyed.

"She snuck off! I can't believe this! What a bitch! 'We'll talk about it in the morning.' Ha! She never could trust anything past her own nose. Damn damn damn damn!" He kicked the log he'd sat on last night, then kicked it again twice as hard. "I'll crack her skull, I'll, I'll boil her alive! Damned, arrogant..." he groped for words.

Marya tried to say, "We can probably catch her," but her voice came out as a croak. Damn this planet! Every bone in her body ached, as if she were a tree slowly freezing up with the onset of winter. And her skin—it itched from the fabric touching her as if a thousand fire ants were biting her.

Axel made a chopping motion with his hand. "To hell with her. We'll find Jordan. We know where she's going. She's going to face down Armiger herself. Of all the arrogant..." Again, he seemed to lose his vocabulary. He switched languages, maybe to disguise the hurt tone that had crept into his voice.

Marya levered herself up. Axel had started jamming things into his pack, pausing now and then to stare down the road. He looked down, muttered, "She never really trusted me," in an unbelieving tone, and then shook himself.

"All right, Marya," he said. "Let's go."

With an effort, she transcended her discomfort. "Where?" she asked, squinting at him.