He stood and stretched his muscles and joints. His body still felt young, fully capable. His mind was equipped with sufficient implant memory and processing modules to house several human personalities beside himself; he hadn’t used the excess since he had carried Korzenowski, prior to the Engineer’s reincarnation four decades ago. But it was still available. There were few people on Thistledown or anywhere else who matched Olmy’s potential either physically or mentally.

Given a few weeks, he could probably riddle the buried chambers and discover how to use the equipment properly. But why would he do that?

For the same reasons he had spent the last few years studying all that was known about the psychology of non-human intelligences. The Terrestrial Hexamon, after decades of concentrating on very different problems, was not prepared strategically or tactically to return to the Way.

Yet they would almost certainly do so. He could feel the pressure of history; a familiar pressure.

If Olmy could give them expert advice, the Hexamon might survive its own foolishness. And of all the beings most likely to confront them in the re-opened Way—

The Jarts were the most formidable. Even captured, imprisoned, quiescent for centuries, somehow they could still kill.

It was essential that Olmy extract what information he could from this source, at any personal cost.

With a grin, he realized much of his rationalizing was to hide a basic truth. He did not trust the present leadership. They condescended to the past rather than understanding it. His ingrained sense of soldier’s superiority had finally triumphed over his faith in the rightness of the command structure.

“I’m going rogue, myself,” he confessed to the Jart’s ancient corpse. “Damn it all to hell.”

10

Gaia

Alexandreia was a lot filthier than she remembered from her visits years past; it seemed to wear a cloak of smoke and soot as protection against its many troubles. The fabulous marble causeways were pitted with decay. Many of the statues had been shrouded in great sheets of oilcloth.

The representatives of the bibliophylax, the director and archivist of the Mouseion, hurried her and her luggage off the street before the Mouseion’s famous Eastern Stoa, then put her in a rickety cart, insisting that she ride rather than walk.

The women’s residence hall was a brick and stone two-story block dropped inauspiciously in a dusty, treeless corner of the Mouseion grounds. Rhita’s heart fell when she saw it; Lugotorix, riding beside the driver on the cart, gave a low whistle of contempt.

They pulled into the broken brick and pounded-dirt courtyard. An elderly woman in a black shawl swept dust and sand half-heartedly in the shade of the inset double doorway, giving them barely a glance. The door opened and a blond, matronly young woman about the same age as Rhita stepped out with hands clenched over her head in greeting.