“Uh, that decision has been made, and the answer is yes.”

“But how did it get made? Wait a minute, I know: Ala rammed it through some committee.”

“Maybe it wasn’t so much a ramming kind of thing,” Tulia said, and I had to smile at the distaste in her voice. “But you’re right that Ala had a lot to do with it.”

“Fine. No ramming. But I’ll bet it wasn’t all sweet persuasion either. Not all rational Dialog. Not with those people.”

“You’d be surprised how far rational Dialog goes with wartime military.”

“But the military must have been saying ‘look, this is obviously a job for our guys. Commandos. Not a bunch of avout, a renegade Ita, and a starving alien.’”

“There was—is—a backup team,” Tulia allowed. “I think it’s all military. Same training as you guys.”

“Then how did the decision get made to give us the suits, the monyafeeks—”

“Partly a language issue. Jules Verne Durand is a priceless asset. He speaks Orth. Not Fluccish. So the team would have to be at least part Orth-speaking. To make it bilingual would pose all sorts of problems.”

“Hmm, so we were probably the backup option until Jules fell into our laps.”

“He didn’t fall into your lap,” Tulia reminded me. “You went out and—”

“Be that as it may, I still find it amazing that the Panjandrums would even entertain the idea, given that they have commandos and astronauts who know this kind of thing cold.”

“But Raz, you are educable, you can learn ‘this kind of thing,’ if by that you mean how to maneuver an S2-35B and how to assemble a Cold Black Mirror. You’ve spent your whole life, ever since you were Collected, becoming educable.”

“Well, maybe you have a point there,” I said, remembering the hitherto inconceivable sight of Fraa Arsibalt powering up a nuclear reactor.

“But the clincher—and here I’m just imagining how Ala would have framed the argument—is that the whole mission, the journey you and the others are going on, isn’t going to be just this. When you get where you’re going, who knows what you’ll be called upon to do? And then you’ll have to draw on everything you know—every aptitude you’ve ever acquired since you became a fid.”

“Since I became a fid…now that seems like a long time ago!”

“Yeah,” she said, “I was thinking about it the other day. Finding my way through that labyrinth. Coming out into the sun. Grandsuur Tamura taking me by the hand, making me a bowl of soup. And I remember when you were Collected.”

“You showed me around the place,” I recalled, “as if you’d lived there for a hundred years. I thought you were a Thousander.”

I heard a sniffle on the other end of the link, and closed my eyes for a minute. The suit was built to handle just about every excretory function except for crying.

How could I ever have been so stupid as to think I could be in a liaison with Tulia? Now, that would have been a mess.

“You ever talk to Ala? Are you in touch with her?” I asked.

“I probably could if I had to,” she said, “but I haven’t tried.”

“You’ve been busy,” I said.

“Yeah. When your cell got shot into space, it made her really important. Really busy.”

“Well…I hope she’s busy figuring out what we’re going to do when we get there.”

“I’m sure she is,” Tulia said. “You can’t imagine how seriously Ala takes her responsibility for what she’s—for what happened.”

“In fact, I have a reasonably good idea,” I said, “and I know she’s worried we’re all going to get killed. But if she could see how well the cell is working together, she’d take heart.”

We dropped behind Arbre yet again. I’d lost track of how many times we had swung in and out of the Daban Urnud’s line of sight. The others were strapping themselves down to the thrust structures under the Cold Black Mirror. I was up underneath the decoy, running through the final seventeen items on a checklist that was two hundred lines long.

“Pulling the inflation lanyard,” I proclaimed, and did. “It’s done.” I couldn’t hear the hiss of escaping gas in space, but I could feel it in the hand that was gripping the frame of the decoy.

“Check,” Lio said.

“Monitoring inflation process,” I said, numbly reading the next line of technobulshytt. The listless wad of painted fabric, which we’d been using as a garbage receptacle for the last day, stirred, and began to show some backbone as internal struts filled with gas and began to stiffen. For a while I was afraid it was failing—not enough gas, or something—but finally, over the course of a few seconds, it snapped open.

“Status?” Lio demanded. Down under the mirror, he could see nothing.

“The status is, it’s so beautiful I wish I could climb into it and go for a ride.”

“Check.”

“Commencing visual inspection,” I said. I spent a minute clambering over the thing, admiring its origami “attitude thrusters,” its paper-light, memory-wire-and-polyfilm “antennas,” its hand-painted “scorch marks,” and other marvels of stagecraft that Laboratoria at the Convox must have toiled over for weeks. I found a “thruster” that had failed to unfold, and popped it loose with my skele-fingers. Whacked on a creased strut until it inflated itself properly. Flicked off a clinging stripe of kitchen wrap. “It’s good,” I announced.

“Check.”

The remaining items on the list were mostly valve openings and pressure checks down among the engines. I was conscious that a plumbing failure here would kill me, but had to get on with it.

“Ten minutes to line of sight.”

The final step was to set a timer for five minutes, and to start the countdown. Lio’s final “Check” was still in my ears when I felt a mighty yank on my safety line: Osa hauling me in. A few seconds later I was down beneath the Mirror and the others were strapping me down as if I were a homicidal maniac at the end of a day-long chase. All communications had devolved to a series of checklist items and clipped announcements.

“Eight minutes to line of sight.” My suit’s airbags inflated. Light flared as the Mirror’s engines came on, and I felt the thrust against my back. As usual our faces were aimed in the wrong direction, so we could not see that anything was happening. But this time around, we had a speely feed to watch, so we were able to see the balloon and the decoy dwindling into the distance. By the time that the five-minute timer expired, the decoy was so far away that we could see nothing of it except for a single blue-white pixel as its engines fired.

A few minutes into its burn, the Geometers could see it too. Because by then the Daban Urnud’s orbit had taken it back into line of sight.

Our engines had performed their mission of kicking us into a new trajectory that would get us up to the same altitude as the Geometers. We’d never use them again. So we were back in free fall. The in-suit airbags deflated.

I loosened a couple of straps and twisted around so that I could see the decoy. Its engines continued to burn for another minute or so, as if it were making a spirited attempt to climb up out of low orbit and get on an intercept course with the Daban Urnud.

Then it blew up.

It was supposed to. Rather than wait for the Pedestal to do something about it—something we couldn’t predict, something that might have unwanted side-effects on us—the designers of the mission had deliberately programmed the engines to open the wrong valve at the wrong moment. So it flew apart. There wasn’t much in the way of fire, and obviously we couldn’t hear the boom. The thing just turned into a rapidly expanding mess of smithereens, and ceased to exist. Only a few minutes later, we began to see streaks of fire drawn across the atmosphere below us as chunks of it began to re-enter. The Pedestal, we hoped, would think that our pathetic gambit had failed because of a malfunctioning rocket engine—which was all too plausible—and would put all of their sensors to work snapping pictures of the debris, greedily vacuuming up all the intelligence they could get before it was engulfed and burned by the atmosphere. The Cold Black Mirror they would not see.