She turned around. On a rickety-looking scaffold emerging from the reeds stood a small, slender brown girl, no more than ten or eleven, naked except for a white cloth tied around her hips. Her hair was done up in many long, close-knotted braids, each tipped with a blue stone. The girl regarded Patricia with slack-jawed wonder mixed with fear.

"Hello!" Patricia called, trudging up the sandy bank. "Do you speak English? Can you tell me where I am?"

The girl turned deftly on the scaffold and fled. For a horrible moment, Patricia wondered if she had slipped several millennia in time. . . if in fact she was in ancient Egypt.

Then she heard a distant rumble and looked up. Her relief was so great she almost whooped. There was an airplane, probably a jet, flying high above the desert.

Walking along the edge of the canal, clutching her clavicle and considering whether or not to reactivate the traction bubble—the sun was becoming uncomfortably hot—Patricia found a road and followed it. Beyond a grove of date palms, she came upon a little, square town made of whitewashed brick, the houses as blocky as benches and about as uniform. Very few people were about; it was just past high noon, and no doubt they were all resting until the day cooled.

Something bothered her. She hadn't thought about it before, but now that she remembered. . .

Putting the clavicle down on the stone roadbed, shading her eyes with both hands, she looked west again. From this vantage, she could see that the pyramids were surrounded by thick groves of trees, she couldn't tell what kind. That didn't seem right. Weren't the Egyptian pyramids in desert?

And how many large pyramids had there been on Earth? Three?

She counted eight smooth-surfaced white pyramids in a row, filing off to the horizon.

"Wrong-o," she said softly to herself.

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Five

Lanier floated in the flawship's prow, alone and content to stay that way for a long time. Kilometer after thousands of incommensurable kilometers flowed by, black and gold and indistinct.

What it had all come down to was that he owed more to Earth than he did to Patricia. And he could not help her complete her journey—see her through safely—because it was not his journey to make.

Did she survive? Reach her destination?

Even if she did, in this half-dream, half-nightmare Way of stacked universes, she was as far from him—and as inaccessible—as if she had died.

Olmy tracted behind him, clearing his throat.

"I'm fine," Lanier said testily.

"That was never at question," Olmy said. "I thought you might wish to know our situation. We're well ahead of the plasma front. The radiation is tolerable—though I'd suggest a thorough physical Talsit session when we arrive."

"What about the precincts?"

"We've communicated with them. As we suspected, they are accelerating toward us now. They've agreed to lift their grips and let us pass through them."