I kept descending.

I was crouching atop a giant steel navel with my head between my knees, trying not to pass out.

Fraa Jad was punching numbers into a keypad mounted to the wall.

The sphere began to rotate beneath me.

“How did you know the code?” I asked.

“I selected a number at random,” he said.

I’d heard only four beeps from the keypad. Only a four-digit number. Only ten thousand possible combinations. So if there were ten thousand Jads in ten thousand branches of the worldtrack…and if I were lucky enough to be with the right one…

Sunlight was shining through the bore of the valve. I flattened myself on it and gazed down on open water, vegetation, and buildings from an altitude of half a mile.

This time, the bore of the valve had ladder-rungs on it. We climbed down them even as the valve was snapping to its final position, and exited onto a ring-shaped catwalk hung from the ceiling of the orb, surrounding the aperture—the oculus at the top of a vast spherical dome, a little sky above a little world. A stairway led up to it. Men with weapons were running up the stairway, intent on saying hello to us. Fraa Jad, seeing this, pulled off his respirator. No point in maintaining the disguise now. I did likewise.

Two soldiers, peering down shotgun barrels, reached the catwalk. One of them moved aggressively toward Fraa Jad. I stepped forward, instinctively, holding up my hands. My attention was drawn to a small silver object in Fraa Jad’s hand—like a jeejah, of all things! The other soldier pivoted toward me and swung the butt of his weapon around, catching me in the jaw. I toppled backward over the rail and felt my old friend, zero gravity, taking me back into its embrace as I went into free fall down the middle of the orb. Something went extremely wrong in my guts. A moment later I heard the boom of a shotgun. Had I been shot? Not likely, given my situation. My vision whited out again, and my viscera caught on fire and melted.

They had shot Fraa Jad. The Everything Killers had been turned on. I had become a nuclear weapon, a dark sun spraying fatal radiance onto the dwellings and cultivated terraces of the Urnudan community below.

We had accomplished our mission.

“We have come,” said the man in the robes. “We have answered your call.” He was speaking Orth. Not as well as Jules Verne Durand, but well enough to make me think he had been studying it for almost as long. As long as we didn’t snow him with arcane tenses and intricate sentence structures, he would be able to keep up.

I say “we,” but I didn’t expect to do much talking. “Why am I here?” I’d asked Fraa Jad, as we had approached the gate of the building that floated in the center of Orb One.

“To serve as amanuensis,” he had replied.

“These people can build self-sufficient intercosmic starships, but they don’t have recording devices?”

“An amanuensis is more than a recording device. An amanuensis is a consciousness-bearing system, and so what it observes in its cosmos has effects in others, in the manner we spoke of at Avrachon’s Dowment.”

“You’re a consciousness-bearing system. And you seem to be much better at playing this polycosmic chess game than I am. So doesn’t that make me exiguous?”

“Much pruning has taken place in recent weeks. I am now absent in many versions of the cosmos where you are present.”

“You mean, you’re dead and I’m alive.”

“Absent and present express it better, but if you insist on using those terms, I won’t quibble.”

“Fraa Jad?”

“Yes, Fraa Erasmas?”

“What happens to us after we die?”

“You already know as much of it as I do.”

About then the conversation had been interrupted as we had been ushered into the room featuring the man in the robes. Knowing nothing of Urnudan culture put me at a disadvantage in trying to puzzle out who this man was. The room offered no clues. It was a sphere with a flat floor, like a smallish planetarium. I guessed that it was situated near the geometric center of the Orb. The inner surface was matte, and glowed softly with piped-in sunlight. The circular floor had a chair in the middle, surrounded by a ring-shaped bench. A few receptacles, charged with steaming fluids, were arranged on the bench. Otherwise the room was featureless and undecorated. I felt at home here.

“We have answered your call.”

What was Fraa Jad going to say to that? A few possible responses strayed into my head: Well, what took you so long? or What the hell are you talking about? But Fraa Jad answered in a shrewdly noncommittal way by saying, “Then I have come to bid you welcome.”

The man turned sideways and extended an arm toward the circular bench. The robes unfurled and hung from his arm like a banner. They were mostly white, but elaborately decorated. I wanted to say that they were brocade or embroidery, but life among bolt-wearing ascetics had left me with a deeply impoverished vocabulary where the decorative arts were concerned, so I’ll just say that they were fancy. “Please,” the man said, “we have tea. A purely symbolic offering, since your bodies can do nothing with it, but…”

“We shall be pleased to drink your tea,” Fraa Jad said.

So we repaired to the circular bench and took seats. I let Fraa Jad and our host sit relatively close, facing each other, and arranged myself somewhat farther away. Our host picked up his teacup and made what I guessed was some kind of polite ceremonial gesture with it, which Fraa Jad and I tried to copy. Then we all sipped. It was no worse and no better than what “Zh’vaern” used to eat at Messal. I didn’t think I’d be taking any home with me.

The man drew some notes from a pocket in his robe and consulted them from time to time as he delivered the following. “I am called Gan Odru. In the history of the Daban Urnud, I am the forty-third person to bear the title of Gan; Odru is my given name. The closest translation of Gan into Orth is ‘Admiral.’ This only approximates its meaning. In our military system, one class of officers were responsible for the trees, another for the forest.”

“Tactics and strategy respectively,” Fraa Jad said.

“Exactly. ‘Gan’ was the highest-ranking strategic officer, responsible for direction of a whole fleet, and reporting to civilian authorities, when there were any. Command of specific vessels was delegated by the Gan to tactical officers with the rank of Prag, or what you would call a captain. I apologize for perhaps boring you with this, but it is a way to explain the manner in which the Daban Urnud has behaved toward Arbre.”

“It is in no way boring,” said Fraa Jad, and glanced over my way to verify that I was doing my job: which as far as I could tell was merely to remain conscious.

“The first Gan of the Daban Urnud was entrusted with the responsibility to establish a colony on another star system,” Gan Odru continued. “As links to Urnud became more tenuous with distance, his responsibilities grew, and he became the supreme authority, answerable to no one. But he was a strange kind of Gan in that his fleet consisted of but one ship and so his staff consisted of but one Prag, and inasmuch as the Prag had no real tactical decisions to make—as the war had been left far behind—the relationship between Gan and Prag became unstable, and evolved. A simple way to express it is that the Gan became somewhat like your avout, and the Prag like your Sæcular Power. This state of affairs came about over the course of but a single generation, but proved extraordinarily stable, and has not changed since. The clothing that I wear is but little changed from the formal dress uniforms worn by the Gans of Urnud’s ocean-going fleets thousands of years ago. Though, of course, they did not wear them aboard ship, since it is difficult to swim in robes.”