“We’d be delighted,” Lanier said. “We leave in the morning to visit Oregon, then fly on to Melbourne and back home, New Zealand…Christchurch. We haven’t much time.”

From the front porch, they saw the sun decline in splendor beyond the palms and beach, setting the slopes of Barber’s Point aflame with a gentler fire than that area and its Naval Air Station had known during the Death. A Japanese graveyard lay just west of the senator’s property, behind fresh-painted white picket fencing; Suli Ram Kikura stood there now, Karen beside her, examining the carved lava pagoda-shaped headstones and crosses.

“There’s something the old Axis City lacked,” Lanier said.

“What’s that?”

“Graveyards.”

“Far too many here,” Kanazawa said quickly. “Many things must be different up there—we have such close ties, and yet, I sometimes think, so little understanding of each other. I wish I were not so afraid of space travel. My only trip was the last time we met. My weeks in the Burleigh cured me of cramped quarters, I suppose. I left the ship when we beached her at Waimanalo, and I swore I would never sit in an iron tube again. I flew up there sedated.”

Lanier smiled sympathetically.

“You’ve worked with them—hell, Garry, you were one of the first to meet them. Surely you understand what motivates them.”

“I can guess.”

“Why suddenly consider us weak partners, when this could affect all of humanity?”

“We are weak partners, Senator.”

“Not as weak or naive as they must think. We can encompass many strange things before breakfast.”

“I think the quote is more like, ‘believe six impossible things before breakfast.’”

“Impossible things! That we have a man returned from the dead, or very nearly…”

“We’ve had lots of those,” Lanier said. “I’ve even helped resurrect people. Mirsky is something much stranger than that.”

Kanazawa turned his back on the twilight. The flames past Barber’s Point had died to purple dream-tones. Sunsets were not as spectacular now as they had been for years after the Death, but in Hawaii, they were still memorable. “All right. Perhaps we are naive. Does she accept such a thing?”

“Karen, or Ram Kikura?”

“Ram Kikura.”

“I think she accepts it one way, and finds it difficult to accept another way…. She accepts that we have to act on what Mirsky says. But she deeply regrets his return. She believes he catalyzed this whole mess, which of course he did; it would have happened anyway, however.”

“Spreading word across the Earth can only increase resentment, however many believe you,” Kanazawa said. “We resent our saviors. We resent having our childhood stolen from us.”

“I’m not sure I understand, Senator. Surely the Death did that.”