The Swiss from Overhangs arrived on the day before the conference was supposed to begin; people said they had been camped outside in their rovers, waiting for the date specified. They brought with them a whole set of procedures and protocols for the meeting, and as Nadia and Art listened to a Swiss woman describing their plans, Art elbowed Nadia and whispered, “We’ve created a monster.”

“No no,” Nadia whispered back, happy as she looked over the big central park in the third-from-the-south segment of the tunnel, called Lato. The skylight overhead was a long bronze crack in the dark roof, and morning light filled the giant cylindrical chamber with the kind of photon rain she had been craving all winter, brown light everywhere, the bamboo and pine and cypress rising over the tile rooftops and blazing like green water. “We need a structure, or it would be a free-for-all. The Swiss are form without content, if you see what I mean.”

Art nodded. He was very quick, sometimes even hard to understand, because he jumped five or six steps at a time and assumed she had followed him. “Just get them to drink kava with the anarchists,” he muttered, and got up to walk around the edges of the meeting.

And in fact that night, on her way with Maya through Gournia to a canalside row of open-air kitchens, Nadia passed by Art and saw that he was doing just that, dragging Mikhail and some of the other Bogdanovist hard-liners over to a table of Swiss, where Jurgen and Max and Sibilla and Priska were chatting happily with a group standing around them, switching languages as if they were translation AIs, but in every language exhibiting the same buoyant guttural Swiss accent. “Art is an optimist,” Nadia said to Maya as they walked on.

“Art is an idiot,” Maya replied.

By now there were about five hundred visitors in the long sanctuary, representing about fifty groups. The congress was to begin the following morning, so on this night the partying was loud, from Zakros to Falasarna, the timeslip filled with wild shouting and singing, Arab ululations harmonizing with yodels, the strains of “Waltzing Matilda” forming a descant to “The Marseillaise.”

• • •

Nadia got up early the next morning. She found Art already out at the pavilion in the Zakros park, rearranging chairs into a circular formation, in classic Bogdanovist style. Nadia felt a prick of pain and regret, as if Arkady’s ghost had walked through her; he would have loved this meeting, it was just what he had often called for. She went to help Art. “You’re up early.”

“I woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep.” He needed a shave. “I’m nervous!”

She laughed. “This is going to take weeks, Art, you know that.”

“Yes, but starts are important.”