“That doesn’t look so efficient,” I began.

She cut me off. “There’s stuff you don’t know. Each of the others in your cell has to follow a different route to a different payload. This one is optimized to minimize interference.”

“I stand corrected.”

A flashing red box appeared about halfway along my route. “What’s the red thing?” I asked.

She conferred with someone in the equipment shed, then answered, “One of the payloads has a sharp corner you’ll want to avoid. No worries, we’ll talk you through it.”

“Gosh, thanks.”

Rustling papers, she announced, “I’m going to talk you through the process of unstrapping yourself from the S2-35B.”

“Up here, we call it a monyafeek.”

“Whatever. Move your right hand up to the buckle above your left collarbone…”

I’ll describe what we did next as if we’d just done it. In the act, though, it was—as the old joke goes—a whole hour’s work packed into just one twenty-four-hour day.

It would have been twenty-four days, though, if not for our support cells on the ground, keeping track of what we were doing and coming up with ways to make it easier. During rest breaks—ruthlessly enforced by our private physicians—I learned that Arsibalt’s support cell was in a drained swimming pool in a Kelx parochial suvin, and Lio’s was on an unmarked drummon parked at a maintenance depot. And as slowly became plain, each of these cells was in turn being supported by networks of other cells out there in the Antiswarm.

Work began with disentangling and sorting the goods we’d hauled in during that first, feverish twenty minutes. Suur Vay tended to Jules Verne Durand and to Fraa Jad. Both ended up being fine. The Laterran was weak from lack of nutrition, and had suffered more from the ride up to orbit. It simply took him longer to become himself again. It wasn’t really clear what had happened to Fraa Jad. He was unresponsive for a while, though his vital signs were in acceptable ranges and his eyes were open. Eventually, he requested that Suur Vay leave off pestering him. Then he dropped off the reticule and did nothing for an hour. Finally he began to move, and to take part in the unpacking. I wondered who was in his support cell.

The fuzz-balls we stripped off, wadded up, and got out of the way. The payloads we strapped together with poly ties, just so they wouldn’t drift out from the shelter of the balloon and give away our position. We rigged the payload-cluster to a monyafeek, and used its thrusters for station-keeping. The balloon’s low mass and high drag made it inevitable that we’d drift out from under its shelter unless we tapped the thrusters every so often to slow ourselves down. If we did this for more than a couple of days, we’d re-enter the atmosphere along with the balloon, and there would be a sort of race to see whether incineration or crushing deceleration would kill us first. But we had no intention of hanging around that long.

Arsibalt, Osa, and I assembled the decoy while the rest of Cell 317 assembled the Cold Black Mirror.

The decoy was erected on a base consisting of seven monyafeeks lashed together in a hexagonal array. We scavenged propellants from the blue payloads just as Suur Esma had earlier done with water, and loaded it into the decoy’s tanks.

That took care of propulsion. On top of this platform we attached what looked like a big unruly wad of fabric—it was an inflatable structure—that had come up as a separate payload. There was a zipper in its side. We opened it, and stuffed in everything we didn’t need: nets, leftover packing material, parts of other monyafeeks. Also there were four manikins dressed in coveralls. We closed the zipper to prevent all of that junk from drifting out, and opened it from time to time as members of the other team came to us with stuff they wanted to get rid of. But we didn’t inflate it yet, because space on this side of the balloon was tight, and getting tighter as the Cold Black Mirror took shape.

My description of the Cold Black Mirror might make it sound heavy, but like everything else up here, it weighed practically nothing because it was slapped together of inflatable struts, memory wire, membranes, and aerogels. It was square, fifty feet on a side. Its upper surface was perfectly flat (it was a membrane stretched like a drumhead between knife edges) and perfectly reflective. It was made of stuff that would reflect not only visible light, but microwaves—the frequencies that the Geometers used for radar. When we ventured out from behind the balloon, we would keep it between us and the Daban Urnud, but angled, like a shed roof, so that their radar beams, as they swept across our vicinity, would be bounced off in some other direction. We’d still make a big echo, but it would never come anywhere near the Daban Urnud, and never show up on their screens.

As long as we were careful about which way the mirror was pointing, we would not be visible against the backdrop of space, because the mirror would be reflecting some other part of space, and all space looked more or less the same: black. If they just happened to zoom in on us with a really good telescope they might happen to notice a star or two in the wrong place, but this was unlikely.

When we passed between the Daban Urnud and the luminous surface of Arbre it would be a different matter, but we were hoping that a fifty-by-fifty-foot snatch of absolute blackness might go unnoticed on a backdrop eight thousand miles across. It would be like a single bacterium on a dinner plate.

If the mirror were permitted to get warm, it would emit infrared light that the Geometers might notice, and so most of the ingenuity that had been spent on its design had been devoted to keeping it cold. It was laced with solid-state chillers that were powered by the nuke. The nuke, as Jesry had mentioned, produced a lot of waste heat. This would show up like a casino on infrared, if we were dumb enough to shine it at the Daban Urnud, but as long as we kept the radiators hidden beneath the Cold Black Mirror and pointed in the direction of Arbre, the Geometers would not have a line of sight that would make it possible for them to see it.

Propulsion was, to get us started, three scavenged monyafeeks, and (for later) a reel of string. Our spacesuits would serve as living quarters, beds, toilets, Refectories, drugstores, and entertainment centers.

But not as cloisters. Space travel had any number of interesting features, but quiet contemplation was not among them. During Apert, and later when we had been Evoked, the worst part of the culture shock had been the jeejahs. There was no estimating how many times I’d said to myself Thank Cartas I’m not chained to one of those awful things! But this was like living inside of a jeejah: a super-ultra-mega jeejah whose screen wrapped all the way around my field of vision, whose speakers were jacked into my ears, whose microphone transmitted every word, breath, and sigh to attentive listeners on the other end of the line. Part of it was even inside of me: that huge temperature transponder.

We were only allowed to work for two hours before a mandatory rest break kicked in. And, as I began to suspect, round about the second or third such break, it wasn’t so much to give our bodies a rest as it was to rest our souls from the bewildering, overwhelming, irritating barrage of information being pumped into our ears and eyes.

Strangely, when I got a moment’s peace, I only wanted to talk to someone. In a normal way. “Tulia? You there?”

“I am shocked you haven’t fallen asleep!” she joked. “You’re behind schedule—get cracking and relax!”

I laughed not.

“Sorry,” she said, “what’s up?”

“Nothing. Just thinking, is all.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Are we the right people, out of all Arbre, to be up here doing this?”