"I have spent the past year in the Thistledown, at the request of the Presiding Minister," he said. "This Frant accompanied me. Together, we investigated an unusual intrusion. Do we have permission to playback our records and to testify by picting?"

Ram Seija gave his permission.

For each of the senators and corpreps, the seven chambers of the Thistledown were displayed in considerable detail. In a few minutes, they became acquainted with the new human occupants of the Thistledown's chambers. Olmy and the Frant had managed to record some five hundred individuals on their instruments. The compounds were shown, along with a few building interiors. Olmy then demonstrated that the various languages spoken by the new occupants derived from pre-Death Earth.

The point of view of the picted testimony took a dizzying climb up the south polar cap of the first chamber and zoomed down the bore hole. The reactivated rotating docks and staging areas were briefly shown, and then the point of view emerged from the bore hole.

At a distance of some thirty thousand kilometers, the crescent Earth dominated the darkness, the sun emerging from behind its limb in the west.

The reaction in the Nexus chamber was extraordinary. Homiform corpreps gasped; all registered strong emotions in various ways.

Gardner spoke first. "Blessed Konrad," he said. "He found a way to bring us home again."

"Stricken; not testimony," Ram Seija decreed abruptly.

"It is truly Earth," Olmy said. "The Thistledown has returned to its construction orbit, automatically and without our knowledge. The creation of the Way did not remove us from all familiar spaces. It is possible that the Thistledown could have completed its intended journey. It did not. Instead, it sought out the sun and altered its course to return home.

"But we did not escape all effects of the Way's creation. The Thistledown was indeed shifted into a neighboring continuum, but also into the relative past. It entered its current orbit some three centuries before its launch."

The chamber was silent, stunned by the implications of what Olmy was saying.

The picted testimony continued. In less than four minutes, it showed the beginning of the Death and concluded with the spectacle of Earth covered with a thick gray pall of smoke, on the threshold of the Long Winter.

The stillness in the chamber was profound. Olmy quickly pushed on.

"I returned to the city with one of the new occupants, a corporeal woman named Patricia Luisa Vasquez. Subsequently, four others violated the axis flaw by riding a vehicle near the city. They have been acquitted and made guests of Axis Nader. All of them, of course, are corporeal and primitive, of primary form and unsupplemented mentality. They are our pre-Death ancestors."