“Unfortunately, Ser Olmy does not answer his messages. I suspect he is on Thistledown, but I don’t know where. I’ve sent a partial to locate him and tell him the circumstances. He may or may not join us. I’d like to hear your story as soon as possible.” Korzenowski sat and pulled one of the white lumps into his lap, kneading it between his hands.

Mirsky stared at the spotless floor for a moment, then sighed. “I will begin. Telling it all with words would be painfully slow and clumsy. May I borrow one of your projectors?” “Certainly.” Korzenowski ordered a traction beam to lower the nearest projector. “Do you require an interface?”

“I don’t think so,” Mirsky said. “I’m somewhat more than I appear.” He touched the teardrop-shaped device with a single finger. “Pardon me if I don’t completely reveal myself to your apparatus.”

“Quite all right,” Korzenowski said, with absurd cordiality. Lanier’s body hair tingled again. “Do begin.”

The quarters interior vanished, replaced by something difficult for Lanier to comprehend at first—a condensed representation of the Way, the Axis City, Mirsky’s first few days in the forested Wald of the Central City, the journey down the Way, accelerating along the flaw…

The projected information spun and dazzled. All sense of present time ended. Mirsky told his story in his own way. Korzenowski and Lanier lived it.

Call it escape or the grandest defection of all time. Running from the horrid past, my own death, the death of my nation, the near-death of my planet. If you can refer to as “running” the flight of half a city, filled with many tens of millions of souls and perhaps a dozen million corporeal human beings, down an infinite tunnel in space-time, fleeing through the fury of a star’s heart on the rail of an elongated “knot,” an umbilicus of impossibilities…

The tunnel itself an immense tapeworm curling through the guts of the real universe, pores opening onto other universes equally real but not our own, other times real and equally real…Those pores cauterized by our passage, the tunnel itself changing or having changed because of our flight, warping and expanding from the moment it was made with the prior knowledge of our escape; how do you explain this to an unaugmented human being?

You cannot.

I had to change to know all this, and change I did, many times across decades and centuries of flight. I became many people, and sometimes one of me would hardly know another until they could mesh with each other, exchange personal gossip. I was no longer the Russian Mirsky—had not been perhaps since my assassination in the Thistledown library—but an inhabitant of the Geshel neighborhoods of Axis Nader and Central City. A citizen of a new world, adapting to it’s unlikely environment. We were no longer masters of all we surveyed, as the Axis City had once nearly been…