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  “And what is his appeal?” Xi said.

  Asha turned to Solomon and told him, in squeal, that now was the time to present the case of his people for Federation membership.

  “We are an ancient people,” Solomon said in halting Galactic Standard, “who find ourselves in difficulties that only the mighty Federation can resolve.”

  “And what are these?”

  Solomon responded as he had learned from his discussions with Asha, and she was proud of his ability to adjust his beliefs to the exigencies of the situation, a flexibility she would not have expected from his attachment to the traditions of his people. “Our world finds itself in a dangerous location, Galaxy Center, with a black hole eating its neighbors and supergiant stars ready to explode. And we, the Squeal people, have responded by turning away, refusing to look, focusing our gaze inward to protect our ability to survive in ignorance rather than suffer the knowledge of imminent destruction.”

  The moment had inspired Solomon to peaks of eloquence, Asha thought.

  “And what,” the Xifor said, “do you expect the Federation to do?”

  “We know your capabilities,” Solomon said. “We throw ourselves on your mercy and pledge our people to Federation goals and principles.”

  “They are a people capable of great contributions to the illustrious history and promising future of the Federation,” Asha said, “to which the reports from the great Dorian Sandor will attest.” If the reports were not what the Xifor had been reading, they soon would appear on his monitor. “But they need to be rescued from the location in which an uncaring universe has placed them.”

  “And you expect the Federation to expend the resources to drag this unpronounceable world to safety?” the Xifor said. Asha could not bring herself to think of him as Xi, no matter the Galactic tradition.

  “It would be a great triumph, for you and the Federation and the great Dorian Sandor,” Asha said, “and the Federation is rich with power. Of course the rescue itself would require many generations, though the honor of initiating the project would accrue immediately, and the power sources available at Galaxy Center, with a base in orbit around Squeal, are inexhaustible. There would be, no doubt, a surplus that could be diverted to other uses.”

  It was a pretty picture, and the Xifor could not resist contemplating it. Even in an alien psyche, Asha could read that much.

  But it did not keep the Xifor from saying, “All that does not change the fact of the false identity for which you must answer.”

  “A simple clerical error, as I said,” Asha replied. “After all, the great Dorian—”

  “I know,” the Xifor said, “Sandor.”

  Perhaps she was overdoing the Dorian connection, but she persisted. “—Sandor validated my identity when he loaned me his Captain’s Barge.”

  The Xifor looked again at the monitor. “Such a validation might take cycles to check. You will be taken to another jurisdiction for a decision far more expeditious.”

  “That—” Asha begin, but the Xifor raised both hands to stop her.

  “The disposition is final. You will go with the guards. Your applicant companion will remain.”

  “I ask for a moment to acquaint my companion with the situation,” Asha said, and turned to Solomon without waiting for permission. “I have to go on alone,” she continued in squeal. “You will be sent elsewhere. Continue your application. Insist on your rights. When you are turned down, as you will be, request transport back to Squeal. They will be forced, by their own regulations, to honor your position and request. Do not despair. Given this avenue, the Dorian ambassador will persist. All will end well, and you will be honored by your people and the Dorian ambassador as the savior of your people.”

  Solomon looked uncertain but determined. “What will happen to you?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Bureaucracies are rigid, but that makes them easily broken.”

  “I could have imagined a better outcome for both of us,” Solomon said.

  “Enough!” the Xifor said.

  The door opened as if from some unseen signal, though Asha suspected it came from a computer, or perhaps the computer at the center of everything. The computer, she thought, that was making the decisions about where she went and whom she saw and what happened to her. The Pedia at the heart of every space-faring world in the galaxy. She turned and made her way out the door and into the custody of the guards who had brought them. They began their long journey back halfway around the world again. This time, however, their jitney took a side corridor to an upper level where the décor and the amenities were a bit better. The food dispensaries offered choices other than gruel and fluids, and there were real restaurants, waste-disposal rooms, and what seemed to be more expansive living areas or apartments. Even in a community of equals, hierarchies of authority and privilege developed.

  Asha tried to engage her guards in conversation, but they ignored her until the Alpha Centauran finally told her to be quiet. She evaluated her chances to escape. She had no doubt that she could deal with the Xifora, who were quick and stealthy but vulnerable, with limbs that detached when under sufficient stress. The barrel-like Sirian was another matter. Only his head offered a target, and it was sturdy. And the birdlike Alpha Centauran was quick with its vicious-looking beak.

  But it was not time for desperation, and she had not yet achieved anything of what had brought her to Federation Central. She had not been exaggerating, for Solomon’s peace of mind, the problems of bureaucracies, and she had not yet learned where her identity creation had gone awry and might be explained away nor what had happened to the human prisoners left behind when she and Ren had escaped with the Adastra.

  The jitney arrived finally in an area of broader corridors, better lighting, and fancier doors, behind which lurked, she had no doubt, fancier offices with fancier bureaucrats. Well, she thought, the fancier the better.

  They waited until finally the door opened. Asha got up slowly, a bit stiff from her long journey, and entered the office, which was, indeed, bigger, with a bigger desk and chairs for people to sit or stanchions for support if they were built to stand. On the wall behind the desk was a screen on which was displayed rolling hills and green valleys that could have come from a hundred different worlds, but clearly from the Earth that she had never seen. Because standing in front of it, with his back to her, was a human, elderly perhaps, with white hair.

  Finally the man turned.

  “Father!” Asha said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Riley maneuvered the spaceship he had just purchased into a spot next to the red sphere. The artifact from the Transcendental Machine people was not only too noticeable, it was the only evidence of what had made them so powerful in their mastery over interstellar travel and potentially the most valuable piece of technology in the galaxy. He might need it as a bargaining chip before his current task was done. He extended the ship’s linkage tunnel to the red sphere, locked it in place, waited while the air from the ship replaced the toxic Alighieri atmosphere, and joined Rory in the ancient vessel.

  The dinosaur was unhappy. That state was difficult to differentiate from his normal condition, but by now Riley had learned how to read Rory’s moods, which varied in a narrow range between annoyed and angry. “Come,” Riley said, and motioned for Rory to follow him through the plastic corridor that formed in front of them, and into the fixed walls of ordinary matter that was the linkage tunnel and then the traditionally organized ship.

  Rory roared at the change. Although the reptilian creature had expressed dislike of the red sphere and dismay at its continually changing substance, the Federation ship, with its hard metal walls and three compact spaces, was just as unfamiliar and unsettling.

  “This will be your new home,” Riley said, “and it will return you to your world when I am finished with what I have come here to do.”

  Rory roared.

  “I know,” Riley said. “You want to go home now, but have a little more pati
ence.” He asked for it without expectations. Patience was not part of Rory’s repertoire. “Now, we’ve got to strap ourselves in for takeoff. No more expecting the walls to take care of us.”

  Riley fastened Rory to a stanchion fashioned for a differently shaped creature but one, like Rory, that did not sit. He was careful to avoid Rory’s fearsome teeth. His reptilian companion had learned restraint during their long voyage, but Rory’s instincts were never far from the surface. They took off for Dante.

  After they had cleared the limited atmosphere and the engine had cut off, Riley released Rory and showed him the tiny galley with its built-in food printer, and showed him how to operate its controls. “See?” Riley said. “When you touch these places on the screen, you get something, well, resembling meat.” And what emerged from the glass door in the wall was a slab of food that in shape, odor, and texture seemed like beef. Rory reached for it hungrily, bit into it, raised his massive head to look at Riley as if to say “this may be meat, but it’s not like any meat I ever ate,” and then swallowed. “It is meat,” Riley said. “It just never grew in an animal.”

  Three more slabs later, Riley took Rory back to the control room. “Look,” he said. “I have put into the machine the instructions that will take you back to your home world. When it comes time, you will only need to push this button, and the ship will do all the rest.”

  Rory looked at Riley with his head cocked to one side and blood from his meal still staining the sides of his mouth.

  “Now, though,” Riley said, “we’re going to another world where I have things that I must do. Then you can go home.”

  “Home,” Rory said.

  “Home,” Riley repeated. He didn’t know what was going to happen to him on Dante or what he was going to discover there, but whatever it was he knew Rory was better off with him than abandoned in the red sphere hidden on Alighieri. Although Rory was with him by impulse and accident, Riley felt something for this primitive carnivore that he had not felt since his boyhood on Mars: a sense of responsibility. He didn’t know whether it was a product of his transcendental transformation or his evolution from the damaged ex-soldier who had joined the pilgrims that boarded the Geoffrey in search of the Transcendental Machine. But it was a burden he would have to live with.

  Half a cycle later they docked at the pleasure-world Dante.

  * * *

  Dante would have looked like any other medium-sized satellite—not as large as Earth’s oversized moon nor as miniscule as Mars’s tiny twin moonlets—were it not for Rigel looming majestically in its sky, even at this distance, and for the ships clinging to docking ports scattered across its scarred and solar-wind-scoured surface. “Stay here,” he told Rory, “and try not to get into trouble.” Dante paid little attention to appearances—a reaction to strangeness was considered actionable, even an excuse for violence—but Rory, with his dinosaur-like power and his massive, tooth-filled jaw, might be an exception.

  At the check-in station just inside the airlock, he registered the identity to which he had transferred his funds, paid his docking fee, established his credit, and passed through into the complex of rooms and temptations that had been carved out of the satellite’s interior. He did not worry here about the information alerting surveillance as had happened on Alighieri. Anonymity was essential to Dante’s services. Not that he wouldn’t be discovered. Total identity protection was a myth; no data was completely immune from discovery, if the motives were strong enough, but discovery could be slowed by the levels of security through which data was screened.

  “Welcome to Dante,” a disembodied voice said. Critics of the pleasure world’s indulgences have said that the greeting should have been “Abandon hope…”

  Riley went into the corridors and facilities that he had come to know so well when he had been there before. The first level was the hospital. Once it had been crowded with the human wounded from the war, the dying and the near-dying. Indeed the entire satellite, all nine levels, had been excavated for the hospital until one by one they were devoted to other uses as the war grew more deadly and few survivors were left, and then, after the war, as people either survived or died, and Dante received only the unusual cases requiring the unusual skills that wartime casualties had developed.

  The walls were antiseptic white and bathed by antibiotic light. Riley felt a sense of déjà vu as he made his way toward the hospital check-in station, although he had been carried in, unconscious, on an automated gurney and confined to a recovery unit until he was released to rehabilitate himself in any of the lower levels that he preferred.

  Riley stopped at the entrance that opened only for patients and workers. A monitor set into the wall beside the door scanned his face as he waited with the patience engendered by a lifetime of experience. The satellite had been given sufficient rotation to simulate the gravity of a larger moon, but the effect on his inner ear took some getting used to. He pressed the back of his hand against the keypad beside the monitor.

  “Greetings,” the monitor said. “What can I do for you?”

  He inserted Sharn’s identity number. He was surprised that he knew it. He must have seen it on one of his medical reports, and it had stuck in his memory, waiting for a newly discovered ability to access anything he had ever observed. “I’d like to speak to this person,” he said.

  “There is no such individual in this facility,” the monitor said in the flat, authoritative, no-nonsense, no-argument-allowed tone standard for Pedia connections.

  “She is a surgeon here,” Riley said.

  “There is no such surgeon in this facility,” the monitor said.

  “Has she been transferred?” Riley considered the possibility that he had made a mistake in the number, but he knew he had not: He could visualize the screen on which Sharn’s identity had been listed.

  “No such individual has ever been in this facility,” the monitor said.

  “Is she somewhere else in Dante?” Riley said.

  “Any such information is confidential,” the monitor said. Dante anonymity at work. But Riley knew what the Pedia would have reported if it had not been restricted by limitations built into its code at the most basic level: “No such individual is in Dante or has ever been in Dante.” Sharn had been wiped from existence, as if she had never been, perhaps because of his connections with her, and in a way that he had thought impossible to accomplish. Pedias might refuse to answer questions or deny the ability to answer questions, but they could not lie. The entire structure of society was built on that one basic truth: Pedias don’t lie. Pedias kept track of everything, including everybody’s credits, debts, obligations, connections, location, history.… If they could be corrupted, the system would topple.

  And yet Riley remembered Sharn clearly, attaching his new arm and coming to his recovery cubicle afterward, checking the connections that monitored his arm and his body and passed healing currents and medications through it. He remembered Sharn talking to him about how he had lost his arm and what he had done in the war in a way that he thought indicated more than the normal interest of a surgeon in her work. And he remembered how she looked and felt later when she came to his bed and they made love.

  He trusted his memory more than he trusted the system, and the fact that the Pedia could be corrupted meant that the entire social order was in greater danger than he had thought. He and Asha had more to do than he had suspected.

  * * *

  Riley waited outside the ramp that led to the lower levels. It was shift-change time, and the attendants and physicians who worked in the hospital would be returning from their off-duty hours in the pleasure levels. There weren’t many who worked in the hospital anymore; most of the medical services were automated; only a few real people were required for servicing, supervision, or emergencies. Finally a technician appeared that he recognized, one who had assisted Sharn with the equipment that Sharn had guided through its complex task of connecting bone, blood vessels, nerves, and skin. Riley stopped the man with a
hand to his arm. The small, dark-haired man had the blank expression and dazed look of someone who had overstimulated his pleasure centers.

  Riley introduced himself as a recovered patient who had returned to thank his surgeon and her assistants for his care. The man’s expression didn’t change, but he didn’t pull his arm away.

  “Could you tell me where I could find Sharn?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Sharn, the surgeon who restored my arm. You were there.”

  “I don’t know any Dr. Sharn,” the man said.

  “Sure you do,” Riley said. He described her: tall, blond, shapely. Friendly.

  “Sounds great,” the man said, his expression clearing, “but I don’t know anybody like that.”

  The man didn’t change his answer and after several more attempts Riley gave up. The technician seemed to believe what he was saying. Riley thanked him and apologized for his mistake. He was turning away when he saw a small cleaning-machine waiting nearby for the humans to get out of its way.

  “Hello, little fellow,” Riley said.

  “Hello,” the machine said in the flat, unmodulated tone of automated equipment that needed little in the way of voice responses or computer power to do their simple tasks. “If you have finished your conversation I will continue with my task.”

  “Have you seen Dr. Sharn?” Riley asked.

  “She is on level nine,” the machine said. Riley felt elated at confirmation of what he had never doubted, Sharn’s existence and that she had never left Dante. And that the people who had tried to wipe her out of memory had overlooked the lowliest creatures on Dante, the machines that didn’t need connection to the central Pedia.

  “Thanks, little fellow,” Riley said, and started down the ramp toward the second level.

  The second level was dusky, with a dim, rosy light pervading everything, and perfumes in the air like aphrodisiacs. Low music throbbed through the closed and open spaces, and bodies writhed on the padded floors and benches in a variety of combinations and contortions. While Riley paused on the landing, remembering his own mindless moments of anonymous passion as he had tried to forget the deaths he had been guilty of and the pain of loss and injury, as well as Sharn’s abandonment. But eventually it had not been enough, and he had gone deeper into Dante’s bowels.