“My god,” I exclaimed. I wasn’t in the habit of using religious oaths, but could think of nothing else strong enough. “The woman in the probe at Orithena—”

“She was my Lise,” said Jules Verne Durand. “My wife. I have already told Sammann.” And then he broke down altogether.

Jules and I were sitting together in the darkened cell, nothing to see by except simulated sunlight, reflecting from a simulated Arbre and a simulated moon. Simulated persons in spacesuits drifted silently around us. He was hunched over sobbing.

I remembered our Messal conversations about how we could interact in simple physical ways with the Geometers even if biological interaction was not possible. I went over and wrapped my arms around the Laterran until he stopped crying.

“He told me,” I said to Sammann later.

He knew immediately who and what I was speaking of. He broke eye contact and shook his head. “How’s he doing?”

“Better…he said something good.”

“What’s that?”

“I touched Orolo. Orolo touched Lise—gave himself up for her. When I touched Jules, it was like—”

“Closing a cycle.”

“Yeah. I told him how we had prepared her body. The respect we showed it. He seemed to like hearing that.”

“He told me on the plane,” Sammann said. “Asked me not to tell the others.”

“You have anyone like that, Sammann?” For in all the time we’d spent together, we’d never broached such topics.

He chuckled and shook his head. “Like that? No. Not like that. A few girlfriends sometimes. Otherwise, just family. Ita are—well—more family oriented.” He stopped awkwardly. The contrast with avout was too obvious.

“Well, in that vein,” I finally said, “could you help me close another cycle?”

He shrugged. “Be happy to try. What do you need?”

“You got a message off to Ala the other day. Just before the plane took off. I was sort of—shy.”

“Because of the lack of privacy,” he said. “Yeah, I could see that.”

“Can you send her another?”

“Sure. But it won’t be any more private than the last.”

I sort of chuckled. “Yeah. Well, considering everything, that’ll be acceptable.”

“Okay. What do you want me to tell Ala?”

“That if I get to have a fourth life, I want to spend it with her.”

“Whew!” he exclaimed, and his eyes glistened as if I’d slapped him. “Let me type that in before you change your mind.”

“All we do now is go forward,” I said, “there’ll be no changing of minds.”

I spent the entire journey to orbit convinced that the rocket had failed and that this was what dying was. The designers hadn’t had time or budget to put in fripperies like windows, or even speely feeds: just a fairing, a thin outer shell whose functions were to shield the monyafeek from wind-blast; to block out all light, ensuring we’d make the trip in absolute darkness and ignorance; and to vibrate. The latter two functions combined to maximize the terror. Think of what you’d feel going down white water in a barrel. Keeping that in mind, think of being nailed into a rickety crate and then thrown from an overpass onto an eight-lane freeway at peak traffic. Now think of putting on a padded suit and being used for stick-fighting practice in the Ringing Vale. Finally, imagine having giant speakers glued to your skull and pure noise pumped into them at double the threshold for permanent hearing loss. Now pile all of those sensations on top of each other and imagine them going on for ten minutes.

The only favorable thing I could say about it was that it was much better than how I’d spent the preceding hour: lying on my back in the dark, wedged and strapped in a fetal position, and expecting to die. Compared to that, actually dying was turning out to be a piece of cake. Most unpleasant—and, in retrospect, most embarrassing—had been the philosophical musings with which I’d whiled away the time: that Orolo’s death, and Lise’s, had prepared me to accept my own. That it was good I’d sent that message to Ala. That even if I died in this cosmos I might go on living in another.

A stowaway hit me in the spine with a pipe. No, wait a second, that was the engine exploding. No, actually it had been the explosive charges blowing off the fairing. A system of cracks split the darkness into quadrants, then expanded to crowd it out. The four petals of the fairing fell aft and I found myself looking down at Arbre. Some of the buffeting’s overtones (aero turbulence) lessened, others (combustion chamber instability) got worse. The acceleration, so far, had not been a big deal compared to the buffeting, but about then it became quite intense for half a minute or so as the missile’s engine concluded its burn. Made it hard to appreciate the view. Another spine-crack told me that the booster had fallen off. Good riddance. It was just me and the monyafeek now. A few moments’ drift and weightlessness came to a decisive end as the steering thrusters got a grip and snapped the stage into the correct orientation with a crispness that was reassuring even if it did make some of my internal organs swap places. Then a sense of steadily building weight as the monyafeek’s engine came on for its long burn. To all appearances—the sky was black—I was out of the atmosphere, and the roof of the gazebo was doing nothing more than blocking my view ahead. But as the monyafeek’s engine pushed me ahead toward orbital velocity, blades of plasma grew out from the roof’s edges and twitched around my shoulders and feet, just close enough to make it interesting. This was the upper atmosphere being smashed out of the way with such violence that electrons were being torn loose from atoms.

At the launch site, just after I’d swallowed the Big Pill (an internal temperature transponder) and donned the suit, the avout who’d been pressed into service as launch crew had mummified me in kitchen wrap, stuffed me into the gazebo, bracing their shoulders against the soles of my feet, and strapped me together with packing tape. They had taken measurements with yardsticks: freebies from the local megastore. More tape work had ensued, until they’d compressed me into an envelope that matched the diagrams on their hastily printed, extensively hand-annotated documents. Then they had converged on me with cans of expanding foam insulation and foamed me into position, being sure to get the stuff between my knees and my chest, my heels and my butt, my wrists and my face. Once the foam had become rigid, someone had reached in and peeled the plastic back from my face shield so that I could see, patted me on the helmet, and stuck a box cutter into my skelehand. The importance of the measurements became obvious during the early minutes of the second stage burn, as I saw those jets of white-hot atmosphere playing within inches of my feet. But they faded as we climbed out of the atmosphere altogether. The entire gazebo sprang off (literally—it was spring-loaded) and drifted away, leaving me as hood ornament. Then I was powerfully tempted to get free of the packing material. But I knew the velocity-versus-time curve of this trajectory by heart, and knew I was still far from reaching orbital velocity. Most of the velocity gain was going to happen in the final part of the burn, when the monyafeek had left in its wake three-quarters or more of its mass in the form of expended propellants. The same thrust, pushing against a greatly reduced burden, would then yield acceleration that Lio had cheerfully described as “near-fatal.” “But it’s okay,” he’d said, “you’ll black out before anything really bad happens to you.”