“They decided to negotiate.”

“Yes. To initiate four-way talks among the Pedestal, the Fulcrum, and the Magisteria.”

“Pardon me, what was that last one?”

“The Magisteria.”

“Meaning—?”

“This happened after you left Arbre. One magisterium is the Sæcular Power. The other is the Mathic world—now the Antiswarm. The two of them together are—well—”

“Running the world?”

“You could say that.” She shrugged. “Until we come up with a better system, anyway.”

“And would you, Ala, be one of those people who is currently running the world?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” She didn’t appreciate my humor.

“As part of the delegation?”

“A wall-crawler. An aide. And the only reason I made the cut was that the military likes me, they think I’m cool.”

I was about to point out a much better explanation, which was that she had been responsible for sending Cell 317 on a successful mission, but she read it on my face and glanced away. She didn’t want to hear it mentioned. “There are four dozen of us,” she said hurriedly. “We brought doctors. Oxygen.”

“Food?”

“Of course.”

“How did you get here?”

“Geometers came down and picked us up. Once we reached the Daban Urnud, we came straight here, of course.”

“Hmm,” I reflected, “shouldn’t have brought up the subject of food.”

“Are you hungry?” she asked, as if it were astonishing that I would be.

“Obviously.”

“Why didn’t you say so—we brought five hampers of absolutely the best food for you guys!”

“Why five?”

“One for each of you. Not counting Jules, of course—he’s been stuffing his face since he got here.”

“Um. Just to prove I don’t have brain damage, would you name the five, please?”

“You, Lio, Jesry, Arsibalt, and Sammann.”

“And—what of Jad?”

She was so aghast that my social instincts got the better of my brain, and I backed down. “Sorry, Ala, I’ve been through a lot of weird stuff, my memory is a little blurry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” she said, “maybe it is a result of the trauma.” She looked a little quivery, scrunched her face, mastered it.

“Why? What trauma?”

“Of seeing him float away. Knowing what happened to him.”

“When did I see him float away?”

“Well, he never regained consciousness after the two-hundred-missile launch,” Ala said softly. “You saw him collide with a payload. He got stuck to it. You made the decision to go after him—to try to help. But it was tricky. The grapnel missed. You were running out of time. Arsibalt was coming to help. But then you nearly got sideswiped by the nuke. Jad drifted away. Re-entered the atmosphere. And burned up over Arbre.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, “how could I have forgotten?” I said it sarcastically, of course. But I was carefully watching Ala’s face as I did. The circumstances of my recent life were such that I was more exquisitely attuned to Ala’s facial expressions than to anything else in the Five Known Cosmi. She believed—better, she knew—that what she’d just reminded me of was true.

There were, I was sure, records down on Arbre to prove it.

All I could think of was getting to the food. First, though, I had to stop being naked. Ala slipped out, as though it were perfectly all right to see me nude, but watching me dress would be indecent. The Arbran delegation had brought us bolts and chords and spheres. The four Geometer races were more or less fascinated by the avout, and might take it the wrong way if we attempted to hide what we were.

Once I got properly wrapped, the hospital staff helped me don a backpack carrying a tank of Arbre oxygen that was connected to the tube beneath my nose. Then I followed a series of pictographic signs to a terrace on the roof of the hospital, where I found Lio and Jesry elbow-deep in their hampers. Fraa Sildanic was there. With a resigned and hopeless air, he cautioned me not to eat too fast lest I get sick. I ignored him as heartily as my fraas were doing. After a few minutes, I actually managed to lift my gaze from my bowl, and look out at the artificial world around me.

The four orbs of a given stack were so close that they almost kissed, and were linked by portals, a little bit like cars on a passenger train. When the Daban Urnud was maneuvering or accelerating, the portals had to be closed and dogged shut, but they were open today.

Laterrans lived in Orbs Nine through Twelve. The hospital was in Ten, not far from the portal that joined it to Eleven. This rooftop terrace, like all other outdoor surfaces, was intensively cultivated. A bit of space had been cleared for tables and benches. The tops of these, though, were slabs of glass, and vegetables grew in trays underneath. Bowers arched over our heads, supporting vines laden with clusters of green fruit. As long as one maintained focus on what was near to hand, it looked like a garden on Arbre. But the long view was different. The hospital consisted of half a dozen houseboats lashed together. Each had three stories below the water-line and three above. Flexible gangways linked them to one another and to neighboring houseboats, which spread across the water to form a circular mat that seemed to cover every square foot of the water’s surface. But because “gravity” here was a fiction created by spin, the surface—what our inner ears, or a plumb bob, would identify as level—was curved. So the circular mat of boats was dished into a trough. Our inner ears told us that we were at its lowest point. If we gazed across it to the other side, rather less than a mile away, our eyes gave us the alarming news that the water was above us. But if we were to make the journey blindfolded, it would feel like walking over level ground—we’d have no sense of climbing uphill.

Of the orb’s inner surface, about half was under water. The remainder constituted the “sky.” This was blue, and had a sun in it. The blue was painted on, but it was possible to forget this unless you looked at the portals to Orbs Eleven and Nine. These hung in the firmament like very strange astronomical bodies, and were linked by cable-chair systems to houseboats below. The sun was a bundle of optical fibers bringing processed and filtered light that had been harvested by parabolic horns on the exterior of the icosahedron. The fibers were fixed in place on the ceiling of the orb, but by routing the light to different fibers at different times of day, they created the illusion that the sun was moving across the sky. At night it got dark, but, as Jules had explained, fiber-pipes were hard-routed to indoor growing facilities in the cellars of many houseboats so that plants could grow around the clock. The system was so productive that these Geometers were capable of sustaining a population density like that of a moderately crowded city solely on what was produced in the city itself.

It was good, in a way, that the view from the hospital roof afforded so many remarkable things to look at and talk about, because otherwise the conversation would have been paralyzingly awkward. Lio’s and Jesry’s faces were stiff. Oh, they had cracked huge smiles when they’d seen me. And I could not have been happier to see them. We’d shared those feelings immediately and without words. But then their faces had closed up like fists, as much as forbidding me to say anything out loud.

We were eating too hard to talk much anyway. Fraa Sildanic and another Arbran medic kept coming and going. And, though I didn’t wish to think ill of our Laterran hosts, I had no way of knowing whether this terrace might be wired with listening devices. Half of the Laterrans were pro-Pedestal. Even the pro-Fulcrum ones, though, might not take kindly to the role we had played in assaulting the Daban Urnud. Some might have had friends or relatives who had been slain by the Valers. To divulge in casual conversation that a Thousander had breached the hull and then vanished would be the worst thing that could happen right now. Once I had sated my hunger a little bit, I began to get physically anxious about it.