Part of Brian wanted to deny the possibility while another part of him relished it. This was, after all, an alien planet, and how credulous we were, he thought, to imagine we could simply move in unmolested and conduct our lives as if it were a second Earth.

But the civil authorities, ant-like, methodically cleared the debris and reestablished their pheromonic lines of communication. When he could no longer avoid it Brian drove from his apartment along the smudged avenues to the American district, to the consulate building, to the offices of the Department of Genomic Security, Port Magellan Branch.

He walked past his own office to the door of his immediate superior, a consular legate named Larry Diesenhall. Diesenhall was a fifty-five-year-old career man with a shaved head and eyes so delicately colored they appeared to have been drawn in crayon. Diesenhall looked up at Brian and smiled. "Good to see you back, Brian."

Back at last. The prodigal son. Brian took an envelope out of his jacket pocket and dropped it on Diesenhalls immaculate desktop.

"What's this?"

"Have a look."

The envelope contained a pair of photographs—the photographs Pieter Kirchberg had sent him, extra copies of which Brian had run off on his printer this morning. He averted his eyes while Diesenhall opened the envelope.

"Jesus!" Diesenhall said. "Christ! What am I looking at here?"

The dead, Brian thought. The dead, who are customarily absent from church picnics and polite offices.

He sat down and explained about Tomas Ginn and about Sigmund and Weil and the burning compound in the desert and the four unlucky Fourths who had been found in Turk Findley's aircraft and might or might not have been tortured in an attempt to extract their confessions. On several occasions Diesenhall tried to interrupt, but Brian talked over him, compulsively, a flood of words too powerful to be dammed.

By the time he finished Diesenhall was staring at him, gap-jawed.

"Brian… this is upsetting."

One way of describing it, Brian thought.

"I mean, wow. Do you realize how tenuous your position is here? You come to me with these complaints about Sigmund and Weil, but I don't have anything to do with them. What the Executive Action Committee does is outside the public mandate. Neither you nor I are members of that committee, Brian.

And that community isn't answerable to the likes of us. You had a relationship with a woman who was apparently deeply involved with known Fourths, and for you, and I hope you realize this, the outcome could have been much worse. Questions were asked about you. About your loyalty. And I stood up for you. I was happy to do that. So now you come to me with these allegations and with this—" The photographs. "This obscenity. What do you expect me to do?"

"I don't know. Get upset. Complain. File a report."