I am here. This is real.

"You bet your life," she whispered. Inside the tent, a complex of partitions and tarp floors covering about a hundred square meters, Farley and Chang were speaking Chinese in muted tones.

The first few hours in the chamber, while they had arranged a cubicle in the tent for her and prepared for a cookout, Patricia had been hyperactive, darting about like a moth, asking questions that sometimes made little sense. Lanier had watched her glumly for a while; she had felt she was somehow disappointing him. But later he had joined the others in laughing at her—with her—and had produced a surprise bottle of champagne. "To christen your new self," he had said.

On the first round, they had tried to find something more fitting in the way of names for what everyone had, heretofore, referred to simply as the "seventh chamber," or "the corridor."

"Spaghetti world," Farley had suggested. No, Wu countered—more like macaroni world, hollow in the middle. Chang tossed in pipe world. "Tube" and "tunnel" had already been appropriated for other parts of the Stone; the words and shapes seemed to echo against each other, a sexually charged confusion of fittings-within-fittings.

A couple of glasses of champagne and Patricia had become desperately drowsy. They had barely set up a cot under the awning before she was sound asleep.

She stretched and propped her head on her elbow, looking across the scrub and sand, and up at the enormous cylinder of land stretching into the haze. Farley came out of the tent and sat beside the cot.

"Dreaming?"

"No," Patricia said. "Musing."

"When Garry gave us the grand tour, a year and a half ago, I thought I'd go crazy. What's your opinion of the indoctrination? I mean, it's really just beginning for you, but. . .” She trailed off, regarding Patricia with very blue eyes. Farley was perhaps ten years older than she, and there was humor evident in the lines around her lips and eyes. She had a demanding directness in her manner—almost a female version of Lanier, Patricia thought.

"Seeing is not quite believing," she answered. "So just hearing about it certainly wouldn't be enough."

"After a while, we tend to become complacent," Farley said, staring down the gray-green road. "It worries me sometimes. When new people arrive and see what we see every day, we're shaken back into realizing how strange it really is. Sometimes I feel like a beetle crawling through a fusion power plant. I can feel a certain amount, see a certain amount, but I sure as hell don't understand everything." She sighed. "I'm not sure Garry approves, but I think you should be warned about the boojums."

"He mentioned them. What are they?"

"Some of us have seen boojums. Spooks. I haven't, and none of our group have. The consensus is they're psychological, a sign of the strain. There haven't been any really clear sightings, photographs or anything. So be wary of what you see. And be doubly wary—no one has proven that the Stone or the corridor is completely deserted. We're just too few to adequately explore and police all the chambers. So if you see anything, report it, but don't believe it." She smiled. "Does that make sense?"