“Not at all,” Olmy said. “You’re more complex and organized than either of us. You’re the best of both of us. My absence is not disapproval, and it is not…what I would choose.”

Tapi listened, smiling.

“My consent for incarnation is on record,” Olmy said. “I’ve assumed responsibility in the Hexamon for your actions. Your mother has done the same.”

Tapi was suddenly solemn. “Thank you. For your confidence.”

“You are no longer our creation,” Olmy said, following the long-established ritual. “Now you make yourself. I’ll recommend a commission in the defense forces. And I’ll try to visit you…” Honesty, he thought, would be the best policy. “But that’s probably not going to be often.”

“I will do you honor,” Tapi said.

“I have no doubt.” Olmy glanced around the decor. “Now, I’m interested in these Mersauvin structures. Let’s quiet this place down a bit and I’d like you to show me how you reached your conclusions.”

Tapi set about eagerly to do just that.

Olmy departed from Axis Euclid within six hours, one of three passengers in a shuttle to Thistledown.

He didn’t feel like conversing. The other passengers were too self-absorbed to pay him much attention.

5

Earth

Lanier sat on the edge of the bed to put on his hiking boots. He allowed himself a small grimace as he bent over to tie the laces. It was nine o’clock in the morning and a brief squall had passed over the mountains, dropping a freshet of rain and casting a sweet draft of wind from the sea. The bedroom was still chill. His breath condensed in front of his face. Standing, stamping his boots on the worn rug to settle them, testing the tightness on his ankles, he frowned again at a different kind of ache, another memory he could not blank.

Donning his jacket by the broad window in the living room, he looked over a few hedges and tall ferns at the green and craggy hills beyond. He knew his route through those hills; he had not walked there for years, but today seemed like a good day to reacquaint himself. He sought no panacea, no rigorous exercise to bring back a youth he had rejected; merely a diversion from his thoughts, which of late had been particularly bitter.

Three months had passed since Heineman’s funeral.

Karen had not said goodbye before leaving on an errand to Christchurch. She had taken the new Hexamon five-wheel truck; the roads were still rugged in the wet, and the old truck was not always up to country barely fit for horses. Someday, he thought, he would become ill in this house, and it would be a half hour or more until an emergency vehicle would reach them, and then, like Heineman, he would be dead.

One way to rid himself of the bad memories.