"Old-fashioned Olmy," Ram Kikura said, smiling. "I'm afraid I would have done the same thing. And did you see the Death?"

"Yes," he said, staring up into the darkness. He rubbed two fingers along the black fuzz dividing his three bands of hair. "Only by remote at first—there was a battle in the bore hole and I couldn't possibly have gotten through. But after the fighting stopped, I took the ship out and saw."

Ram Kikura touched his hand. "How did you feel?"

"Have you ever wanted to cry?"

She looked at him carefully, trying to gauge how serious he was. "No," she said.

"Well, I wanted to. And I've wanted to many times since, thinking about it. I tried to purge the feeling with Talsit on the way back—quite a few sessions. But Talsit couldn't cure all of it. I could feel our beginnings. . . a smudged, dirty, dead and dying world." He told her about Patricia's grief. Ram Kikura turned away in distaste.

"We cannot release as she did," he said. "It isn't in us anymore, and perhaps that's something else we've lost."

"Grief is not productive. It simply represents an inefficiency in accepting change of status."

"There are orthodox Naderites who still have the capacity," he said. "They find grief a noble sentiment. Sometimes I envy them."

"You were organically conceived and born. You had the capacity at one time. You knew what it was like. Why did you give it up?"

"To fit in," Olmy said.

"You wished to conform?"

"For higher motives, yes."

Ram Kikura shuddered. "Our visitor is going to think us all very strange, you know."

"It's her privilege," Olmy said.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Five

The storm began as a series of accelerated risings and fallings of air, circular cells rubbing against each other and generating a thick, tortured layer of clouds throughout the first chamber. Western bloc scientists in the middle of the chamber along the zero road made quick measurements before retreating to their trucks. Dust and sand were kicked up in immense, slender twisters, which in turn uncoiled and gave way to thick curtains of dust. The dust clouds billowed and spread, bouncing from cap to cap like waves in a channel. Cameras at the bore hole recorded the phenomenon, but there was nothing that could be done to control it. Either the storm was a planned part of the chamber's weather system, or the chamber had no effective weather control. It had not, after all, been a steadily occupied part of the Stone. Weather control might not have been thought necessary.

In the years of the Stone's reoccupation, nothing of this violence and strength had ever happened. The dust clouds covered the valley floor and slowly settled into a soupy, opaque layer a few kilometers thick. Above the dust, water clouds became darker and darker.