She glared at Bale. “All right. What do you want with her?”

“Why, nothing. We want you. Or rather we want you to do something for us.”

“Then why not just take me, rather than her?”

“That wouldn’t be enough,” Bale said. “We need you to act freely.”

“I’m not free if you are holding my sister!”

“Then without our conscious commands. You have to want to work for us, Alia.”

“How long are you going to hold her?”

“As long as it takes.”

“For what?”

Reath stepped forward. “I think I see. As long as it takes for you to join the Transcendence, Alia. Do you see? Through your sister they hope to control you, and through you they hope to gain some leverage over the Transcendence itself.”

The thought seemed shocking to Alia, almost blasphemous. “How dare you challenge the Transcendence? And to do it in such a base way, through taking a hostage of a helpless human being—” The contrast between the audacity of their ambition and the shabbiness of their methods was astonishing.

“We have no choice,” Bale said grimly.

“We are frightened,” Denh said.

“By the Redemption,” Seer finished.

“The Redemption? Witnessing? What’s that got to do with anything?” She stared at them, baffled, angry, increasingly scared.

Reath said with a trace of his old firmness, “I think we need to talk this out. But not here, standing in the dirt. Come. Let’s go back to my shuttle.” He looked uncertainly at Drea. “Can she—”

Alia took her sister’s hand; her fingers were limp. “Come, dear. It’s OK.”

Perhaps the Campocs’ grip on Drea’s nervous system relaxed a little. Her gaze was as unfocused as before, but in response to her sister’s gentle pressure she took one step, two, stumbling like a baby. Alia sensed that the trapped creature in its cage was a little calmer, slightly reassured.

But Drea stumbled again. Glancing down, Alia saw urine trickling helplessly down her bare leg, and pooling on the sand of the Dirtball. “I’m sorry,” Alia whispered to her sister as they walked. “I’m so sorry.”

I endured another flight back across the Atlantic, again at John’s expense. This time I mostly slept through the journey, though that seemed a waste of the facilities on offer. Back in Florida I slept off my jet lag over a night in a Miami hotel: rather that than face the family again so soon.

Then I set off on a train journey to Oklahoma City.

I was taking George’s advice. Trying to find out about the impact of gas hydrates, I was going to consult the oracle, which was an artificial sentience called Gea, the “Global Ecosystems Analyzer,” being run out of the University of Oklahoma. Gea was the keystone of the Center for Climatic Modeling, which reported to a Stewardship agency called the Panel on Biospheric Change.

It was a long ride. The train took me across the Oklahoma flatlands, vast stretches of scorched brown earth littered with abandoned farm buildings. Green things grew only where sprinklers sent sprays of water high into the air. This was the twenty-year drought, as the media called it. Old news. I turned away to read a novel on my softscreen.

When I got to the end of the line, I was astonished to find Shelley Magwood waiting to meet me off the train.

I’d booked myself a hotel room, but when I told her the name of the place Shelley tapped her ear, canceled my reservation, and booked me somewhere better at her company’s expense. “Call it an investment,” she said.

At the hotel she gave me an hour to unpack and shower. Then Shelley hired us a big two-person rickshaw and took me through the city.

The center of Oklahoma City turned out to be quite attractive. It was a mixture of lakes, parks, landscaped hills, and quite stylish buildings, all connected at the very center of the city by a peculiarly elaborate system of walkways and tunnels. The place seemed to work on a human scale, which meant that it had survived the disappearance of the automobile pretty well. But many of the buildings were twentieth-century stock, and they showed their age in crumbling concrete and cracked fascias. There was plenty of Paint, too, glittering silver or gold in the sunlight.

And the scouring of the twenty-year drought reached even here, the heart of the state capital. Sprinklers spun and spat, and many of the green spaces were roofed over with filmy plastic envelopes. The city was a vision from an old science fiction novel, I thought, a domed colony stranded on a desert world.

Shelley kept up a kind of tourist patter as we traveled; it seemed she had spent a year here on a consultancy assignment, and she seemed fond of the place. “You ought to go see Route 66,” she said. “Have you ever heard of that? Once the most famous road in America, the Mother Road — who said that, was it Steinbeck? Now stretches of it are an automobile-age theme park.” She grinned. “They actually have working gasoline cars, and motels and roadside diners. They even have halls where they pump in toxic fumes so you can smell how it was when we were kids. It’s a long, thin museum. You have to see it to believe it.”

She took me to a frontier-age restaurant and ordered us T-bone steaks, rectangular stabs of meat so vast they literally covered the plates they were served on. “But don’t worry,” she told me as she dug in. “The cows are cube-shaped and engineered. You can eat this stuff all day and you won’t get fat.”

She was good company, small, neat, bright, her cropped-short dirty blond hair gleaming with gel. Her energy and enthusiasm for her life and her work always lifted me. But she hadn’t answered any of my questions.

“Shelley — what the hell are you doing here? I’m not sorry to see you. But why?”

“What you told me about the gas hydrates made me think. It does sound like we’re all sitting on a time bomb, doesn’t it? I’d like to know what Gea, the big computer suite, has to say about that. I’m curious.” She grinned and wiped her mouth; she’d reduced her steak to a few shreds of gristle. “Also I’d like to see Gea herself.”

“Herself?”

She shrugged. “Her choice to be female, apparently. She, it, is one of the most powerful software suites in the world, after all. Computer science could be revolutionized, if they ever figure out how she works.”

“And that’s all,” I said heavily.

She took a mouthful of her gen-enged steak to stall answering. Then she said, “Well, Michael, there are a lot of people out there concerned for you.”

“Oh.” I sat back. “I get it. The airwaves have been buzzing with chatter about me again. Who called you? John? Uncle George?”

“If you don’t like people talking about you, you ought to make your address books private.”

I felt impatient. “Shelley, I’m not meaning to offend you. Really, I’m glad you’re here. But I’m fifty-two years old, for God’s sake. I don’t need nursemaiding.”

“I’m not offended. If you offended me I wouldn’t be here. OK, your uncle asked me to keep an eye on you. But I wouldn’t have come just to babysit. Anyhow I like the steak,” she said pragmatically.

Hovering trays came scooting silently over the floor, and long killer-robot tentacles snaked out to clear away our plates. Shelley waved her hand over the tabletop; a small embedded softscreen glowed with numerals, showing our tab, and she tapped the screen a couple of times to add a tip.

From the capital we took a pod bus south to Norman, the base of the University of Oklahoma.

On the edge of the campus we were met off the bus by Dr. Vander Guthrie. He was a software animist by profession, and, it turned out, a kind of customer liaison officer for the facility of which Gea was the heart. Aged maybe thirty, he was tall but stocky, powerfully built. He was plainly dressed in a check shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. And he had a startling, completely inappropriate shock of sky blue hair.