“If you looked at our planet from far enough away, that’s all you’d see. Here.” Kai dipped her hand into the pool. Unreality’s cold shot up her arm. The not-water began to unmake her, but she stopped it, seized it, shaped it. The pool’s nonexistent surface rippled. Sparks within drew near, whirled, and assembled into patterns. After a minute’s search she found Seven Alpha, or what remained: torn echo of a great lady, limbs jutting at odd angles from her corpse. “You see.” The words bent in her throat. “One of our idols—under maintenance and re-formation. But if we look at her past—” Seven Alpha’s limbs re-formed, and her eyes burned. “A messenger, that’s what her pilgrims wanted: a being who repaid sacrifices by helping her faithful walk unseen. We built a basic mythology. Messenger gods are often psychopomps, and gods of thieves.” The words came automatically, as she rolled time like a marble in her hand. Roll back far enough, and Seven Alpha was just another manufactured trickster, a few tales about stealing fire and inventing music knit to a whole. But roll forward and Kai saw majesty in her gaze, and a slight smile on her lips.

She had lived. And then she died.

“Or this one, an idol of flight.” Izza had mentioned a red eagle; Kai fixed its shape in her mind. Eight or nine eagle idols arose, but only one matched the painting in the dockside chapel. Dead, as expected. She rolled back again. One year, more, so fast she almost missed the discontinuity, the moment when its wings broke and chest shattered.

“What’s that?” Teo said.

“A problem.” Shift a few days one way or another, and she saw the Eagle change: the wire-frame network fill out, its chest rise and fall. It screeched in the empty places in her mind. And then it died, almost as soon as it woke. Power flowed out, three massive trades that collapsed in sequence, and the Eagle drowned. Like Seven Alpha. “I’m showing you whole lives here, so you can see.”

“That one seemed … vivid. For a second there. So did the first. Is that normal?”

“You have sharp eyes,” Kai said. The Eagle, broken. And the Blue Lady. She’d seen her dying, but she hadn’t been able to compare. “That’s a rare phenomenon. For the most part, our idols spend eternity like this.” She picked two other eagle idols, flat wire cutouts in the black, scintillating and beautiful and still as painted porcelain, and spun them through decades with no change beyond slight flickers as their investments gained and lost value. “More or less static.” So she’d been told. So she’d told herself. “They don’t wake up.”

“Do they ever?”

Damn. “No.” She was slipping—banter wore her down. She needed privacy. “Does this help?”

“It helps.”

“Do you have anything in particular you want to see?”