Nilis breathed, “My eyes — that I should live to see such a thing! You know, those stars won’t last long here. But their intense solar wind sweeps this Cavity clear of gas and dust. And when it hits Chandra—”

Cohl said, “The Xeelee are closing, Pirius.” She downloaded tactical Virtuals to Pirius’s station, so the pilot could see what she saw.

More Xeelee had come out of nowhere. Suddenly they were surrounded, trapped.

Pirius cursed. Another misjudgment. He snapped, “Options.”

“Pray,” said Hope morbidly.

Cohl had nothing to say.

Pirius tried to think. The plan had always been to fly through the gap between the star nursery and the central Chandra system itself, get through to the relatively flat space beyond, and then make another massive jump back to East Arm, their route home. But they hadn’t banked on being alone, with no cover, and with forewarned Xeelee rising. It was unlikely that they could survive another FTL jump all the way out, not from here.

But, unexpectedly, Nilis had an idea.

The Commissary sounded dry, calm, as if he had moved beyond fear. “Make for IRS 7.”

Pirius quickly called up another map. IRS 7 was a star, lost in the Cavity: it was a red giant, and it trailed an immense comet-like tail. “It’s only half a light-year away.”

“Lethe,” said Hope, “its tail is longer than that. What use is it to us?”

“A place to hide,” said Nilis. “And we could make it in a single, short FTL jump… Couldn’t we, pilot?”

“Too risky,” Cohl said.

“Every jump in this environment carries risks. A short jump is more survivable.”

“It will be no use, even if we live through the hop,” Cohl said. “The Xeelee are on to us. FTL foreknowledge—”

“Then we throw them off,” Nilis said.

“I’m amazed how calm you are, Commissary,” Pirius said.

“We can discuss my personality later. I suggest we get on with it.”

A wand of starbreaker light waved through space, above Pirius’s head. The nightfighters were finding their range; one touch of that pretty light and his life would be over. No more time for debate.

He waved his hand at his Virtual displays. “We need to make the hop anti-Tolman, if we can. Come on, Cohl, work with me.”

Nilis said, “A lot of people have died to get us this far. We have to get through, complete our mission.”

“We don’t need to be told, Commissary. Navigator?”

“I have a tactical solution. It’s a botch.”

“Lay it in. On my mark. Three, two—”

In the last second the Other Claw shuddered. And then Chandra’s shining astrophysical architecture vanished.

They came out tumbling. Pirius fought to stabilize the ship.

Nilis peered out curiously. They were immersed in a uniform crimson glow that utterly lacked detail, as if they had hopped into the interior of an immense light globe.

Pirius snapped, “Engineer. Report.”

Enduring Hope called, “We were hit, half a second before the hop. Bad luck… the weapons bay took it.” He laughed. “I don’t think we hit a single Xeelee. But the weapons bay soaked up the energy of that shot, and saved us.”

“Other systems?”

“The sensor pod is intact,” Nilis said. “We didn’t lose any data. And now we’re in the tail of IRS 7?”

“I think so.”

The “tail” was the remnant of the outer layers of the hapless red giant, blasted away by the ferocious stellar wind generated by the blue star cluster at the center. Pirius said, “We aimed for the root, where the tail meets the surviving envelope.”

“So we’re actually inside the body of a star… Good piloting.”

“We’re still alive. So, yes, it was good enough.”

“And the Xeelee?”

“No sign that they are on to us yet.” Pirius glanced at his displays. “I’ll wait a couple of minutes. Then we’ll work our way along the tail, a series of short hops. And once we’re out of there, if we’re lucky—”

Nilis nodded. Pirius studied him cautiously. Still he seemed remarkably calm, and Pirius thought his face seemed smoother, as if lacking some character, some detail. “Commissary, are you all right?”

Nilis smiled at him. “As perceptive as ever! I could never pass this on to him, you know.”

“Who?”

“Nilis — ah, Nilis Prime. My original. He must get the data, of course, and my analytical impressions. But I think I should keep back the rest. The emotions. I’ve already begun the process of deletion.”

“You’re a Virtual. It’s against your programming to edit yourself.”

Nilis shook his head. “You can’t hand out sentience without enabling choice.” His smile faded. “It feels… odd, though. To be closing down sections of my mind. Like a partial suicide. But it’s necessary. He wouldn’t go on, you see, with the Project, if he knew.”

“Knew what? The fear?”

“Oh, not that. Fear is trivial. Pirius, at most only three of our eight ships will make it home. No, not fear: the horror of seeing those around you die, and die for your ideas. Nilis has never really confronted this, you know, sitting in his garden on Earth, immersed in his studies. And he won’t be strong enough. I know, because I’m not. But he must go on; he has to complete Project Prime Radiant, for all our sakes.”

“Commissary—”

“I’m all right. I’ve already cut it out of myself, you see.” Nilis lifted his Virtual face, red-giant light casting subtly shifting shadows from the lines of his expressionless face. “Shall we go home?”

Chapter 33

Nilis stayed at Saturn, studying the material Pirius had retrieved from configuration space, which appeared to be a spec for a weapon system. But, apparently plagued by guilt, he sent Pirius Red back to Earth, ordering him to rest up. Pirius didn’t like the idea, but he didn’t protest.

The rest cure didn’t work out, though. Pirius Red was alone again, alone in Nilis’s apartment, aside from a few bots.

Of course here he was on Earth itself, surrounded by a vast population, a population of billions: a greater crowd than any other human world, save only the pathological Coalescent communities. Somehow that made it worse than in the Venus habitat.

He tried walking in the Conurbation’s teeming corridors and parks. He even dug out one of the Commissary’s old robes so he wouldn’t stand out from the crowd so much. But he had nothing in common with these chattering, confident swarms with their rich, intricate social lives, their baffling business, their soft hands and unmarked faces. They were so remote from everything he knew from his origins in the Core that he may as well have been from a separate species.

And even if he could stand the openness outdoors, even if he could tolerate the people, he was still on Earth. Every time the sun went down, the sky glowed bright in the lights of the Conurbations, and beyond the glow strode the immense, arrogant engineering of the Bridge to the Moon, around which interplanetary traffic crawled constantly. It was like being trapped in some vast machine.

So his days were troubled. And when he lay alone in the dark, his thoughts were drawn back to Callisto, over and over.

He didn’t understand it. Why should he feel so disturbed? All he had done was walk through a doorway. He was the Pirius who had walked out unharmed; it was not him who had been mapped to a new level of reality, with no hope of return, to be leached of his humanity. He despised himself for his weakness.

But if he didn’t think about Callisto, images of the hive in Olympus came into his mind — or of the strange immortal, Luru Parz — or, worst of all, the Silver Ghosts on Pluto, and the shameful, helpless way he had reacted, like a machine. He felt as if his mind was becoming like Callisto, ancient and battered. And he feared that if he looked too hard, he would find deep inside it the kind of strangeness Luru Parz had uncovered in that ice moon.