“Why?” asked Olhado.

“Because– because I–”

“Nobody ever started. It's always been going on. I mean, if it weren't already going on, it couldn't start. Outside where there aren't any patterns, it would be impossible to conceive of a pattern. They can't act, by definition, because they literally can't even find themselves.”

“But how could it always have been going on?”

“Think of it as if this moment in time, the reality we live in at this moment, this condition of the entire universe– of all the universes–”

“You mean now.”

“Right. Think of it as if now were the surface of a sphere. Time is moving forward through the chaos of Outside like the surface of an expanding sphere, a balloon inflating. On the outside, chaos. On the inside, reality. Always growing– like you said, Valentine. Popping up new universes all the time.”

“But where did this balloon come from?”

“OK, you've got the balloon. The expanding sphere. Only now think of it as a sphere with an infinite radius.”

Valentine tried to think what that would mean. “The surface would be completely flat.”

“That's right.”

“And you could never go all the way around it.”

“That's right, too. Infinitely large. Impossible even to count all the universes that exist on the reality side. And now, starting from the edge, you get on a starship and start heading inward toward the center. The farther in you go, the older everything is. All the old universes, back and back. When do you get to the first one?”

“You don't,” said Valentine. “Not if you're traveling at a finite rate.”

“You don't reach the center of a sphere of infinite radius, if you're starting at the surface, because no matter how far you go, no matter how quickly, the center, the beginning, is always infinitely far away.”

“And that's where the universe began.”

“I believe it,” said Olhado. “I think it's true.”

“So the universe works this way because it's always worked this way,” said Valentine.

“Reality works this way because that's what reality is. Anything that doesn't work this way pops back into chaos. Anything that does, comes across into reality. The dividing line is always there.”

“What I love,” said Grego, “is the idea that after we've started tootling around at instantaneous speeds in our reality, what's to stop us from finding others? Whole new universes?”

“Or making others,” said Olhado.

“Right,” said Grego. “As if you or I could actually hold a pattern for a whole universe in our minds.”

“But maybe Jane could,” said Olhado. “Couldn't she?”

“What you're saying,” said Valentine, “is that maybe Jane is God.”

“She's probably listening right now,” said Grego. “The computer's on, even if the display is blocked. I'll bet she's getting a kick out of this.”

“Maybe every universe lasts long enough to produce something like Jane,” said Valentine. “And then she goes out and creates more and–”

“It goes on and on,” said Olhado. “Why not?”

“But she's an accident,” said Valentine.

“No,” said Grego. “That's one of the things Andrew found out today. You've got to talk to him. Jane was no accident. For all we know there are no accidents. For all we know, everything was all part of the pattern from the start.”

“Everything except ourselves,” said Valentine. “Our– what's the word for the philote that controls us?”

“Aiua,” said Grego. He spelled it out for her.

“Yes,” she said. “Our will, anyway, which always existed, with whatever strengths and weaknesses it has. And that's why, as long as we're part of the pattern of reality, we're free.”

“Sounds like the ethicist is getting into the act,” said Olhado.

“This is probably complete bobagem,” said Grego. “Jane's going to come back laughing at us. But Nossa Senhora, it's fun, isn't it?”

“Hey, for all we know, maybe that's why the universe exists in the first place,” said Olhado. “Because going around through chaos popping out realities is a lark. Maybe God's been having the best time.”

“Or maybe he's just waiting for Jane to get out there and keep him company,” said Valentine.

It was Miro's turn with Planter. Late– after midnight. Not that he could sit by him and hold his hand. Inside the cleanroom, Miro had to wear a suit, not to keep contamination out, but to keep the descolada virus he carried inside himself from getting to Planter.

If I just cracked my suit a little bit, thought Miro, I could save his life.

In the absence of the descolada, the breakdown of Planter's body was rapid and devastating. They all knew that the descolada had messed with the pequenino reproductive cycle, giving the pequeninos their third life as trees, but until now it hadn't been clear how much of their daily life depended on the descolada. Whoever designed this virus was a coldhearted monster of efficiency. Without the descolada's daily, hourly, minutely intervention, cells began to become sluggish, the production of vital energy-storing molecules stopped, and– what they feared most– the synapses of the brain fired less rapidly. Planter was rigged with tubes and electrodes, and he lay inside several scanning fields, so that from the outside Ela and her pequenino assistants could monitor every aspect of his dying. In addition, there were tissue samples every hour or so around the clock. His pain was so great that when he slept at all, the taking of tissue samples didn't wake him. And yet through all this– the pain, the quasi-stroke that was afflicting his brain– Planter remained doggedly lucid. As if he were determined by sheer force of will to prove that even without the descolada, a pequenino could be intelligent. Planter wasn't doing this for science, of course. He was doing it for dignity.

The real researchers couldn't spare time to take a shift as the inside worker, wearing the suit and just sitting there, watching him, talking to him. Only people like Miro, and Jakt's and Valentine's children– Syfte, Lars, Ro, Varsam– and the strange quiet woman Plikt; people who had no other urgent duties to attend to, who were patient enough to endure the waiting and young enough to handle their duties with precision– only such people were given shifts. They might have added a fellow pequenino to the shift, but all the brothers who knew enough about human technologies to do the job right were part of Ela's or Ouanda's teams, and had too much work to do. Of all those who spent time inside the cleanroom with him, taking tissue samples, feeding him, changing bottles, cleaning him up, only Miro had known pequeninos well enough to communicate with them. Miro could speak to him in Brothers' Language. That had to be of some comfort to him, even if they were virtual strangers, Planter having been born after Miro left Lusitania on his thirty-year voyage.

Planter was not asleep. His eyes were half-open, looking at nothing, but Miro knew from the movement of his lips that he was speaking. Reciting to himself passages from some of the epics of his tribe. Sometimes he chanted sections of the tribal genealogy. When he first started doing this, Ela had worried that he was becoming delirious. But he insisted that he was doing it to test his memory. To make sure that in losing the descolada he wasn't losing his tribe– which would be the same as losing himself.

Right now, as Miro turned up the volume inside his suit, he could hear Planter telling the story of some terrible war with the forest of Skysplitter, the “tree who called thunder.” There was a digression in the middle of the war-story that told how Skysplitter got his name. This part of the tale sounded very old and mythic, a magical story about a brother who carried little mothers to the place where the sky fell open and the stars tumbled through onto the ground. Though Miro had been lost in his own thoughts about the day's discoveries– the origin of Jane, Grego's and Olhado's idea of travel-by-wish– for some reason he found himself paying close attention to the words that Planter was saying. And as the story ended, Miro had to interrupt.