But Tain was also her weakness: Tain had not known how far Memnanan had allegiances elsewhere. Tain had not known how much a man could love a wife, that a man could have a friend against his own interests. There was Tain’s downfall, in every canny truth he thought he knew, in every lesson he had tried to teach his son about the world.

Kaptai, against all odds, had taught him otherwise.

His head throbbed. Pain shot through his ears and eyes. It might have been a skirmish his makers had just won. Or lost.

One au’it among the lot of aui’it, perhaps their own, wrote and wrote. He was aware of the movement. The drip of water. The rumble of thunder.

And he became aware of Hati, of Hati and Norit, near Memnanan, and he saw a vision, Tofi struggling to heat a pan of water.

Hati’s impatience came through. And Norit’s.

They were not in his war. They had Luz’s makers in them. And he heard them, saw them.

They shoved Tofi sharply aside.

“Push,” the women cried together. “Push! Now! Now, woman!”

Came a woman’s shout, then, and cries from the others, and then from the men.

A newborn baby cried protest, newly arrived, as the heavens poured.

“A boy!” Memnanan’s mother cried above a crack of thunder. “My son has a son!”

Chapter Twenty-Five

« ^ »

Things change. That is what I arrange to happen. In a limited system, in an alien environment, that means frequent intervention, with only my returning nanoceles to report on the local health of the system. That means I am the living template, and in my own cells I assure a standard. Whenever I am tempted to create a match for myself, I ask myself whose would be the standard then? And would they understand at all what I have done, and why I have done it, even if I told them?

—The Book of the Ila

Visions ceased, the providers of visions grown exhausted, and resting. The dark lost all feature except a red glow that pulsed, more and less, more and less, like the fire that burned through his veins.

Marak lay still, measuring his breaths until the pain became bearable. He heard thunder. The rush of wind.

But the tent ropes held. The canvas did.

Marak, the voices whispered, wanting his attention, and visions claimed him.

It seemed the stars came out in this vision. Then a strange thing appeared in the night, white, and looking like a village from a distance.

He drifted closer.

It glittered with lights, some that blinked, others that lit its walls.

And this place, above all visions he had seen, was ominous to him. He had no trust in Luz, that the vision would prove harmless.

Ondat, his voices said to him.