“There is plenty of justification for all this surgery and genetic tinkering: the Plenipotentiaries have such responsibility that they need such powers, such dispensations from the Doctrines that are supposed to govern us all. But I hardly think Hama Druz would approve, do you? He would say she is a monstrosity, perhaps. But that monstrosity is what you have been fighting for.”

A monstrosity? Watching the Plenipotentiary, Pirius remembered Nilis’s talk of an eleventh step in human evolution. Were those prostheses no more than cosmetic—or would Doon somehow breed true? Perhaps this extraordinary woman really did represent the future, whether she made him comfortable or not.

They joined Pirius’s friends. Nilis told them high-level gossip he had heard about the impact of the operation on Earth. “Do you know, on Earth, for the first time in millennia the Library of Futures is blank. The future is unknown.” For a moment he sounded almost gleeful. “I hear that a lot of people are very scared. We really have shaken everything up, haven’t we, Pilot? All the way back to the corridors of Earth itself! Who can say what is to come? Oh, we face a great dislocation, of course. I suspect our greatest challenge will be to keep mankind from tearing itself apart, now that it has no one else on whom to vent its anger and frustration. We don’t need warriors anymore, but we do need peacekeepers, I fear!

“But isn’t it refreshing?” he said, and he bounced absurdly on his toes. “Think of it! Can we not now place Hama Druz in the grave which he so richly deserves? Druz in his neurotic terror longed to keep mankind static, unchanging. But that denies the basic creativity of the universe in which we are embedded—a creativity, indeed, which flows from the creatures inside that spectacular artifact you attacked, Pirius. Now we need no longer deny our essential nature: now we can swim with the flow of the universe rather than against it—and perhaps, at last, uncover our true destiny as children of the cosmos.”

All that sounded a bit vague to Pirius.

Enduring Hope said, “But, Commissary, when we get up tomorrow morning—what shall we do?”