Rhita knew where she was now. Patrikia had described many of these things—though not these patterns or colors. Above their bubble stretched the wide band of the plasma tube, much fainter now, and the impossible region called the flaw, the singularity. Perhaps the prism rode the flaw, like the Hexamon’s flawships.

She was seeing the Way.

40

The Hawaiian Islands

The Terrestrial Senate was in recess, its members scattered around the Pacific Rim. One influential Terrestrial senator had remained in Honolulu, however, and Garry Lanier arranged for a meeting with him.

Suli Ram Kikura and Karen accompanied Lanier to Earth; their object was sabotage.

Lanier knew Robert Kanazawa, senior senator from the Pacific Nations, from fifty years before; they had met as young officers in the Navy. Kanazawa had gone on to become a submariner, Lanier a pilot; their ways had parted until the Recovery, when they had met again in a Nexus plenary session on Thistledown. They had managed to cross paths every few years until Lanier’s retirement. He deeply respected Kanazawa; the man had survived the Death in a U.S. Navy submarine, had worked in California to reestablish civilian authority, and had become senior senator twenty years before.

During the Death, around the world, Allied and Warsaw Pact military facilities had been targeted repeatedly. Yet due to some vagary in Soviet planning, or wholesale missile failures, Pearl Harbor had been hit by only two warheads. Other bases on the islands had been struck by one warhead, some by none at all. Honolulu had suffered widespread damage from the Pearl Harbor attack; still, as a city, it had not been obliterated.

After the Sundering, as Hexamon investigators—Lanier among them—chose sites from which to begin the Recovery, the islands had offered themselves as a prime location for mid-Pacific support services. The weapons used there had been relatively clean; the radiation, after five years, was not especially dangerous, and could certainly be countered by Hexamon medicines and treatments.

In ten years, the lush growth of Oahu’s jungles and grasslands returned. Cities rose again, feeding both on the Hexamon activity and on trans-Pacific trade between New Zealand, North Australia, and Japan and Indochina.

Because Hexamon communications did not make geographic position crucial to centers of Recovery Government, the Terrestrial Senate had established its capitol on Oahu, at the site of old Honolulu. There had been a hint of power and privilege in this decision, but the Nexus overseers did not attempt to change it; they knew that few terrestrials would participate in such an unpleasant task as leading the Recovery without substantial perquisites.

Kanazawa lived in a long wood-frame and stone house a mile from the fused glass shore of Waikiki. With a moist, warm southerly breeze rustling palm fronds overhead, Karen, Garry and Ram Kikura walked up the pumice path to be greeted by a Nexus security device, a long polished white tube about a meter long and fifteen centimeters wide, floating beside the porch.