Plastic tubes containing thick luminescent soups of bacteria, known as light-snakes or glow-worms, wound through the Wald, each a meter thick and sometimes half a kilometer long. In glades, they would macrame across one side in dazzling bright patterns, proximity making some glow peach and red, others dull down to a rich dark gold. Homorphs often gathered in the glades to bathe in the light from the patterns; Olmy barely glanced into the few glades he passed, intent on his steady progress down the shaft.

It took him twenty minutes to reach the Presiding Minister's quarters. He left the main path by way of a narrow fork, and drifted through the flowering hoops formed by a tormented root. The quarters floated in the middle of the P.M.'s private glen.

The residence was designed like an old eighteenth-century terrestrial English manor house, with many modifications to allow for the lack of up and down. There were three roofs, and ways to enter the house from six different angles. Bay windows opened on three axes. Geometric cypress growths screened one window against a glow-worm pattern at the far end of the glen.

Monitors flew up to him as soon as he emerged from the flowering hoop tunnels and identified him positively, retreating to their other duties: hedge trimming, insect watch and keeping track of the P.M.'s pets.

The house voice welcomed him and requested he enter by the bright door, facing the glow-worm pattern. The P.M. would be with him directly.

Olmy braced himself into a dormier and watched with a mix of condescension and boredom a brief picting of the household's recent activities. When the pictor cleared, he saw an unfamiliar neomorph preceding the P.M. into the waiting room. The neomorph—vaguely fish-shaped, limbless—regarded Olmy with a crystalline fox face and picted casual greetings, but no ID. Olmy returned the greetings with a similar deletion, recognizing one of Toller's aides. The neomorph exited through the bright door, surrounded by its own midge-cloud of compact monitors.

"Getting more and more daring, aren't they?" the P.M. asked, extending his hand. Olmy shook it. "Now I ask you—would you trust somebody you can't shake hands with?"

"I've not trusted many I could shake hands with," Olmy said.

The P.M. regarded him with a mixed expression of humor and not-quite-hidden irritation. "You've come to brief me on our newest ancestral guest." He ushered Olmy into his broad duodecahedral internal office. The P.M.'s round desk gimbaled on the single rod at the center; seven of the walls were covered by rootword cases containing antique books and message blocks. Other walls held fine illusart and false windows opening onto time-delayed scenes of other rooms in the house, edited to take out whatever occupants were in them.