The next phase of the journey lasted for several days. It couldn’t have been more different from those first twenty-four hours. We no longer had that high-bandwidth link to the ground. Between that, and the fact that we didn’t have much to do, things got quiet.

The burn that had taken us out from the shelter of the balloon had put us in a predicament, vis-a-vis the Daban Urnud, a little like that of a bird that is on a collision course with an aerocraft. We would definitely reach the Daban Urnud now, but if we didn’t want to end up as a spray of freeze-dried flesh on its rubbly surface, we would need to slow down before we smacked into it.

Any other space mission would have done it with a brief rocket engine burn at the last minute, followed by some nice work with maneuvering thrusters. But since we were trying to sneak up, that wouldn’t work. We needed a way of generating thrust that didn’t involve a sudden brilliant ejaculation of white-hot gases.

The Convox had found the answer in the form of an electrodynamic tether, which was nothing more than a string with a weight on the end, with electricity running through it in one direction. The string was about five miles long. It was slender, but strong—similar to our chords. In order to keep it taut, we had to dangle a weight from the end. The weight turned out to be our spent and now useless monyafeeks, concealed under a smaller and simpler version of the Cold Black Mirror. So our first task, once we’d broken out from the shelter of the balloon, was to lash the monyafeeks together into a compact mass, to deploy another mirror above them, and to attach them to the end of the tether. We waited until Arbre was between us and the Daban Urnud before commencing the most ticklish—verging on insane—part of the operation, which was to throw ourselves into a spin and then use the resulting centrifugal force to pay out the five miles of line. This was sickening and terrifying for a few minutes, until we and the counterweight got a little farther apart. This slowed the rate at which we and the counterweight spun around our common center of gravity, so that Arbre was no longer whipping past us quite so frequently. By the time the counterweight was at the end of the string, the rotation had slowed to the point where we barely noticed it. From now on, we would spin exactly once during each orbit, which simply meant that the counterweight was always five miles “below” us, the string was oriented vertically, and the Cold Black Mirror was always “above” us—where we wanted it. This slow rotation yielded pseudogravity at a level of about a hundredth of what we felt on the surface of Arbre, so we and all of our stuff slowly “fell” upward—away from the planet—unless something stopped us. The something was the frame of inflated tube-struts that helped keep the Cold Black Mirror stretched out flat. We drifted up against it and remained caught there like litter pressed against a fence by an imperceptible breeze.

Shortly after completing this maneuver, we passed onto the night side of Arbre. This afforded us an excellent view when the Pedestal rodded all of the big orbital launch facilities around Arbre’s equator. The planet was mostly black, with skeins and clots of light sprawling across the temperate parts of the landmasses where people tended to live. The incoming rods drew brilliant streaks across this backdrop, as if chthonic gods, trapped beneath Arbre’s crust, were slicing their way to freedom with cutting torches. When a rod hit the ground its light was snuffed out for a moment, then reborn as a hemispherical bloom of warmer, redder light: comparable to a nuclear explosion, but without the radioactivity. We orbited over the very launch pad from which Jesry had begun his first journey into space, and got a perfect view of an orange fist reaching up toward us. Jesry was fussing over the tender at the time, but he paused in his labors for a few minutes to watch as we flew over.

I heard a little mechanical pop, and looked over to see that Arsibalt had just jacked a hard wire into the front of my suit. This was how we’d be talking to each other from now on. Even the short-range wireless was considered too much of a risk. Instead we physically connected ourselves, suit to suit, with wires. Likewise, we no longer had the 24/7 high-bandwidth link to the ground. Instead, Sammann was bringing up some kind of link that squirted information—slowly and sporadically—along a narrow line-of-sight beam that the Geometers would not be able to detect. So if Cell 87 had anything to say to me after this, they’d say it in the form of text messages that would flash up on the virtual screen inside my face-mask—but not immediately. We’d been told to expect delays on the order of two hours. And if we didn’t hard-wire ourselves into the reticule, we’d not be able to send or receive anything.

“It is a high wire act,” Arsibalt remarked. Out of habit I looked at his face-mask, but saw nothing except for the distorted reflection of a mushroom cloud. So I looked down at the screen mounted to his chest and saw his face, staring down at Arbre, then glancing up to make eye contact of a sort.

I collected myself for a moment. This was the first real—that is, private—conversation I’d had in days. Since I’d choked down the Big Pill and climbed into the suit, every sound I’d made, every beat of my heart, every swallow of water I’d taken had been recorded and transmitted somewhere in real time. I’d gotten into the habit of assuming that every word I spoke was being monitored by Panjandrums, discussed in committees, and archived for eternity. Hardly a way to have an honest or an interesting conversation. But I’d very quickly adjusted to not having Cell 87’s voice in my ears. And now Arsibalt and I had the opportunity to talk. No one else was hard-wired to us. We were alone together, as if strolling through the page trees at Edhar.

High wire was a play on words: a literal description of the tether that we had just unreeled. But of course Arsibalt meant something else too. “Yes,” I said, “as we have torn open one payload after another I have been keeping an eye out for anything that would serve as a—” And I checked myself on the verge of lapsing into astro-jargon. I’d been about to say “atmospheric re-entry and deceleration system” but it sounded as wrong here as it would have back among the page trees.

Arsibalt finished the sentence for me: “A way down.”

“Yeah. And now that we’ve unpacked everything, and thrown away most of it—stripped down to the absolute basics—it’s clear that there is nothing here that can get us back to Arbre. Never was.” I thought about it as I watched another mushroom cloud skidding along below us, rapidly diluting itself and paling like dawn in the cold upper atmosphere.

Arsibalt picked up the thread I’d dropped: “So you told yourself that they would send up a re-entry vehicle for us later—launching it from, say, there, or there.” He pointed at the mushroom cloud we’d just passed over, then at another, new one, burgeoning a few thousand miles to the east of it. “Or wherever that’s going.” He was obviously referring to another rod that was just now streaking across the atmosphere below us. I don’t know what it hit. Maybe a rocket factory.

Of course, Arsibalt was making the point that we were all dead now—beyond rescue, unless we could make it to the Daban Urnud. I was irked, just a little, that he’d put this picture together a bit quicker than I had. And I was also thinking, Here we go again, bracing myself to spend the next ten hours hard-linked to Arsibalt, trying to talk him down from a condition of near-hysteria, persuading him to gulp sedatives from the supply that, I presumed, was stored somewhere in the suit.

But he wasn’t being that way at all. He was grasping the truth of our situation as clearly as anyone could—more so than I’d done. But he wasn’t upset. More bemused.