“What kind of people make up the Arbran delegation?” Lio asked. Who’s got his finger on the Everything Killers’ trigger?

“Quite a funny mix, if you ask me. Leaders of Arks. Entertainers. Captains of commerce. Philanthropists such as Magnath Foral. Avout. Ita. Citizens—including a couple well known to you.” This was directed at me.

“You’re kidding,” I said, momentarily forgetting about all of the grim subtext. “Cord and Yul?”

He nodded. “Because of their role during the Visitation of Orithena—watched by so many on the speely that you, Sammann, put on the Reticulum—it was seen as fitting that they come here, as representatives of the people.” The politicians are pimping them to the mass media.

“Understood,” said Lio. “But among all of those pop singers and witch doctors, there must be at least some actual representatives of the Sæcular Power?”

“Four of the military, who strike me as honorable.” Not the ones who will trigger the EKs “Ten of the government—including our old friend Madame Secretary.”

“Those Forals really get around,” I couldn’t help saying. Sammann raised an eyebrow at me. Jules went on to rattle off a list of the names and titles of the Sæcular Power contingent, going out of his way to identify some of them as mere aides. “…and finally our old friend Emman Beldo, to whom, I sense, there is more than meets the eye.” He’s the one.

Whatever praxis would be used to trigger the EKs, it would be advanced, possibly nothing more than a prototype. It would have to be disguised as something innocuous. They would need someone like Emman to operate it. And he would take his orders from, presumably, the highest-ranking Panjandrum in the delegation. Not Ignetha Foral. She was here on Lineage business, of that I had no doubt. Whatever her nominal title and brief might be in the Sæcular Power, she and her cousin—or whatever he was—Magnath had not come all this way to follow the whims of whatever Panjandrum happened to have most lately gained the upper hand in the infinite clown-fight that was Sæcular politics.

Did the Forals know about Fraa Jad? Were they working with him? Had they framed a plan together during our stay at Elkhazg?

There was so much to think about that my mind shut off, and all I did for the better part of the next half-hour was take in new sensations. I had turned into Artisan Flec’s speelycaptor: all eyes, no brain. With my Eagle-Rez, my SteadiHand, and my DynaZoom, I dumbly watched and recorded our discharge from the hospital. Paperwork, it seemed, was one of those Protic attractors that remained common and unchanged across all cosmi. We were given over into the care of a squad of five nose-tube-wearing Troans in the same getups as the goons who had assaulted me and Jad in my dream, hallucination, or alternate polycosmic incarnation. Lio ogled their weapons, which tended toward sticks, aerosol cans, and electrical devices—apparently, high-energy projectiles were frowned on in a pressurized environment. They gave us a good looking-over in return, paying special attention to Lio—they’d been doing research on who was who, and some of the Valer mystique had rubbed off on him.

Two of the soldiers and Jules went ahead of us, three followed. We crossed a gangplank into someone’s garden and I looked through an open window, from arm’s length away, at a Laterran man washing dishes. He ignored me. From there we crossed into a school playground. The kids stopped playing for a few moments and watched us go by. Some said hello; we smiled, bowed, and returned the greeting. This went over well. From there we crossed to a houseboat where a couple of women were transplanting vegetables. And so it went. The community did not waste space on streets. Their transportation system was a network of rights-of-way thrown over the roofs and terraces of the houseboats. Anyone could walk anywhere, and a social convention dictated that people simply ignore each other. Heavy goods were moved around on skinny, deep-draught gondolas maneuvering through narrow leads of open water—whose existence came as a surprise, because they tunneled under flexible bowers, and so, from the hospital terrace, had looked only like dark green veins and arteries ramifying through the town.

In a few minutes we came to a boat that served as the terminal of the cable-chair system. We rode up to the hole in the sky two by two, each Arbran accompanied by a Troan soldier, until all had collected in the portal that joined Ten to Eleven. The wind was blowing in our faces strongly enough to sting our eyes and whip our bolts around.

While waiting for the others to catch up, I stood in the portal and looked at the theatrical machinery behind the blue scrim of the fake sky, the bundles of glass fibers that piped in the light. The sun was bright, but cold; all the infrared had been filtered out of it. Warmth came instead from the sky itself, which radiated gentle heat like an extremely low-temperature broiler. We felt it strongly here, and were glad of the wind.

Then another chair ride down to Orb Eleven’s houseboat-mat, a walk across, and a similar ride up to the next portal and into Orb Twelve: the highest-numbered, farthest-aft of the four Laterran orbs. Hence, there was no next portal; we had reached the caboose. But the sky supported a tubular catwalk-cum-ladder that took us “up” and around to a portal in the “highest” part of the sky—the zenith. Gravity here was noticeably weaker because we were closer to the Core. We tarried on the ring-shaped catwalk below the portal, which, down to the last rivet, was just like the one in Orb One where Fraa Jad had taken a shotgun blast. I looked around and saw details I clearly “remembered,” and I perched my butt on the railing to check it against my “memory” of being knocked over it.

Jules had to identify himself at a speely terminal and state his business to someone in a language that I assumed was Urnudan. The leader of the soldiers chimed in with bursts of gruff talk. We five had to take turns standing in front of the machine and have our faces scanned. While we waited, we examined the ball valve, which felt, and therefore looked, as if it were in the ceiling, straight above our heads. It was old hat to me. In its design I recognized the massive, thunderous praxic style—call it Heavy Intercosmic Urnudan Space Bunker—that dominated the look of the ship as seen from the outside and the Core, but was mercifully absent from the orbs.

That great steel eye would not open for us today. Instead we would use a round hatch just wide enough to admit Arsibalt, or a Troan grunt in his cumbrous gear-web. This eventually swung open by remote command, and we queued up to climb through it.

“A threat,” Jesry snorted, and nodded at the colossal ball valve. I knew his tone: disgusted that he’d been so long figuring it out. I must have looked baffled. “Come on,” he said, “why would a praxic design it that way? Why use a ball valve instead of some other kind?”

“A ball valve works even when there is a large pressure difference between its two sides,” I said, “so the Command could evacuate the Core—open it to space—and then open this valve and kill the whole orb. Is that what you’re thinking?”

Jesry nodded.

“Fraa Jesry, your explanation is unreasonably cynical,” said Arsibalt, who’d been listening.

“Oh, I’m sure there are other reasons for it,” Jesry said, “but it is a threat all the same.”

One by one we ascended a ladder through the small side hatch, up a short vertical tube, and through a second hatch—an airlock—and collected on another ring-catwalk on the bore of the vertical shaft that rose twelve hundred feet “above” us to the Core. I checked out the keypad: just where I remembered it.

Lio had passed through first, and was donning a sort of padded blindfold. Jules handed them to the rest of us as we emerged from the airlock. “Why?” I asked sharply.