“No. You shook my hand. I’m solid flesh, mortal…in a fashion.”

“How did you come back?”

“Not by the shortest route.” He grinned hesitantly and set his stick down in the grass beside Lanier’s boulder, then sat. Mirsky—if indeed it was Mirsky, something Lanier was not willing to concede—looked across the valley with its movements of sheep and cloud shadows, and said again,

“I must speak to Korzenowski and Olmy. Can you take me to them?”

“Why not just go directly?” Lanier asked. “You’ve made it this far. Why come back here?”

“Because I think in some respects, you are even more important to me than they are. We must all meet and talk. How long since you last spoke with them?”

“Years,” Lanier admitted.

“There is a crisis coming in the government.” Mirsky glanced up at Lanier, face calm, serious. “The Way is going to be opened again.”

Lanier didn’t react. He had heard rumors, but nothing more. Still, he had isolated himself from Hexamon politics.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said.

“No, it is not, actually,” Mirsky replied matter-of-factly. “Either physically or politically. It is like a drug, that kind of technology, that kind of power. Even the pure of heart cannot hold their convictions forever. Will you arrange a meeting?”

Lanier’s shoulders slumped. He felt defeated, too weak to muster up the proper words and defend his sanity. “I have a radio, a communicator, in my house,” he said, “down in the valley.” He straightened his back. “You’ll have to prove you are who you say you are.”

“I understand,” Mirsky said.

6

Thistledown

Olmy sat before a personal quarters library terminal in Alexandria, the second chamber city, in a district not yet repopulated. He had installed the terminal just a jew days before, in the apartment where he had spent his later childhood—and where Korzenowski’s unassembled partials had been hidden, all that had been left of the Engineer after his assassination centuries before. Olmy had located those partials as a boy, and had later been responsible for reassembling and reincarnating Korzenowski, with the help of Patricia Vasquez.

In this obscure location, on a supposedly untraceable private terminal, Olmy received a message from an old acquaintance. The picts, loosely translated, read:

“Have something for you. Crucial to your work.”

The message was completed by coordinates for an abandoned station in the fifth chamber and a time for meeting—“Alone,” the picts strongly implied. It was signed with the chop of Feor Mar Kellen.