Bale put down his drink and leaned forward. “Drea, you’d better say what you have to say. Are you accusing us of something?”

“You bet I am,” Drea said fervently. “You set up Alia’s election to the Transcendence so you could use her as a tool to study the Redemption. Then you kidnapped me and threatened my life to force her to go on. And now she wanted to come home; you knew she was thinking about abandoning the whole cosmic mess. So you acted again, in your clumsy, vicious way—”

Alia put her hand on her sister’s arm. “Drea, please.”

Drea turned to her. “Don’t you see? The Redemption is about regret, about loss. So the Campocs have engineered this whole incident. They wanted to inflict loss on you, Alia. They wanted to give you something to regret. They took away your mother and your brother, to make you go back into the Redemption.”

Alia felt bewildered. “But how—”

“The Campocs led the Shipbuilders to the Nord.”

It seemed unbelievable. Alia looked to Reath for support, but his face was expressionless. If it were true -

Rage exploded in Alia. She stood and loomed over Bale, her fists bunching. “Is she right? Tell me. Lethe, I took you into my bed. If you have done this for your own twisted purposes, the truth is the least you owe me.”

Bale met her gaze calmly. She thought he seemed calculating, but his thoughts were seamlessly closed to her. “Maybe we did, maybe not. You’ll never know, will you? If I tell you it’s true, you might think I’m just trying to manipulate you. And if I deny it, you won’t believe me.”

Alia turned to Reath. “Do you think they did it? Did they lead the Shipbuilders here?”

“I don’t know,” Reath said reluctantly. “But whether they did or not, they have worked out how to use it against you, haven’t they?”

Bale said heavily, “But, whichever way — this is all your fault,Alia.”

She gasped; she felt as if she had been punched. “My fault?”

“You are the Transcendent-Elect. We are mere instruments. If not for you, none of this would have happened.”

She remembered her own musings of the night before, her own deep hunger to know what might be found at the higher levels of the Redemption. Surely Bale saw this in her; all his scheming wouldn’t work unless there was something in herself that wanted this, too.

She already knew far more about the Redemption than Bale ever had. She had seen the ultimate logic of the Restoration, the madness of infinity: if Bale was concerned that the Redemption would consume the resources of mankind in a vast but futile quest, he was right to doubt the Transcendence. She doubted, too. She was driven by curiosity and doubt — and, perhaps, by a hunger to know if the Redemption was possible after all, if it could somehow be achieved. And so she knew that she would do as Bale planned; she had no choice. She hated him for it.

“You are monsters,” Drea said to the Campocs.

Seer actually grinned. “Ah, but we’re charming monsters. Don’t you think?”

Alia loomed over Bale. “Very well. If the Transcendence is what you want, let’s call it now.” He quailed, but she descended on him. With a strength fueled by anger she grabbed his shoulders and hauled him to his feet.

And she slammed her awareness into his mind. He cried out, but he could not escape. Her force of will poured along the interconnections to his relations’ consciousnesses, and they screamed and writhed. Peripherally she was aware of Reath and Drea pulling away, shocked.

With the minds of the Campocs wrapped around her own like a cloak, she called for Leropa. “Take me back. I need you now. Oh, take me back!”

A month after George’s funeral, Ruud Makaay announced that he believed that the trial hydrate stabilization project off Prudhoe Bay was “mature” enough to be presented to the world’s decision-makers. A day was set.

It would be a key moment for us. After weeks of construction and development we now had a properly interconnected prototype network, dug out by the moles and extensively tested. All that remained to do was to start pumping liquid nitrogen through the veins we had burrowed into the methane-laden sediments of the seafloor: all we had to do, in other words, was switch on, and we ought to be able to reduce the temperature of Arctic seafloor strata across a rough circle kilometers across. “Serious chilling,” as Shelley Magwood said.

And we were going to do it in the full glare of media attention, and in the presence of every key agency of governance from the state government of Alaska up to the Stewardship itself. I tried to be confident. I’d pored over EI’s test results, analyses and modeling. I saw no reason why anything serious should screw up. I was optimistic; I usually am. And I expect people to behave rationally and for the common good. John always said I was an idealist, and he meant it as an insult; he was probably right.

For sure I was wrong to be confident, that particular day.

In a way, it all started to go wrong the moment I saw Morag.

On the morning of Makaay’s sales pitch I was late rising. Still staying in that dreadful sanatorium-like hotel in Deadhorse — and now plagued by visitations — I hadn’t slept well. Alone, I took a pod bus from the hotel, and rode in silence to the coast.

The layout at Prudhoe Bay was much as it had been before, when Makaay had tentatively launched the project’s integration stage before a crowd of engineers, employees, and one former vice president. You had the rig out at sea, clearly visible under a very pale, very cold blue sky, and on the shore once more EI had set up a marquee for the visitors. But the marquee was much larger and grander than the tent they had put up the last time. When I stepped inside into dry air-conditioned warmth, I was immediately immersed in a pleasant buzz of noise, of crowds. Somewhere music discreetly played, a warm bath of sound.

The marquee was actually several stories tall, like a transparent apartment block, its walls so clear you could barely see them except when the wind off the sea made them ripple. There was a fine view of our rig, and of the other old oil facilities that littered this part of the coast. The floor was carpeted wall to wall with a pale green-brown weave, colors sympathetic to the tundra colors of the North Slope. Above my head flags hung, a Stars and Stripes, the UN flag, banners bearing the EI logo and the cradled-child symbol of the Stewardship. All very classy: the EI folk had a lot of experience of this sort of event, and they knew how to impress without overwhelming.

There were cameras, microphones, and other sensors everywhere, and as I walked in big drones descended on me, and an animated cloud of electronic dust swirled around. Given there were plenty of VIPs, it was faintly disturbing such a chunk of that electronic attention was turned on me. I was one of the movers of the project, one of the faces that EI had presented to the public, so I suppose I should have expected it. But it was an eerie feeling to be so watched, as if I was stuck inside a giant eyeball.

And I tried not to think about George’s speculations that I might be under even more intense scrutiny by a curious future.

We had attracted quite a crowd. Throughout the marquee expensively dressed people mingled confidently, and there was a hubbub of loud conversation as acquaintances were made and renewed,

and, no doubt, deals were done, few of which would have anything to do with our hydrate project. Serving bots hovered in the air, bearing trays of drinks and exotic-looking snack foods. Here and there I saw subtle imaging imperfections: expensively shod feet suspended mysteriously a centimeter or so above the carpet, a gown billowing in a non-existent breeze, a shadow across a beautiful face cast by an invisible light source. I imagined only ten percent or so of these movers and shakers were here in person.