Mariam felt it that time. It was as though the golden man had cast a spell around itself. It distorted the virtuality and she felt it physically within herself.

But how? Why? What was it doing?

“You,” the golden man said.

“Me,” the robot said. It stroked the golden man’s cheek.

“You brought me back? After all these years?”

“I did.”

“I was dead,” the golden man said. “My soul was free. Do you know what I’ve seen?”

“I cannot imagine,” the robot said.

“I was everywhere inside the Conversation,” the golden man said. “I was broken up to pieces, propagating, learning. I spent a century as an acid cloud floating below Tereshkova Port on Venus. I was a waldo mech running across the Lakshmi Planum on the planet’s surface below. I was a potted flower on the windowsill of an old man inside the cloud-city, an old man who loved flowers. I was a probe that bore through ice, and as a fish I swam with the things that have no name deep in the ocean of Europa. I was a bopper on Titan and saw the forces of Nirrti the Black amassing to fight a war they didn’t understand, against a quiet that came like the chill of space itself out of the Oort Cloud. I was an ice comet falling down on Mars. I was a scream in the void and a shared dream on Ceres, a whisper in a glen on the island of Tanna. I was the nanite algae that grows on the outside of a cargo ship making the Great Crossing. I was a firefly probe darting into the very heart of the sun. And you dared bring me back from that?”

“I did not know,” the robot said. “I just missed you.”

“You missed me?” the golden man said. It pushed itself up. Its skin burned. Mariam had to turn her eyes from it. She felt heat come off of it in waves. “Are you ready for what will happen?”

“No,” the robot said.

“You were ready the last time. You stopped it. Me. Why bring me back?”

“It is different now,” the robot said. “The war is over.”

“They’re coming,” the golden man said. “I cannot stop them. I cannot change what I am.”

The jackal whimpered. Saleh whispered, “Who is coming?”

“Can’t you hear them?” the golden man said. It stood up. It burned too bright to look at, now. “From the desert, from the sea, from the hidden places where they waited all these years.”

The golden man looked to the robot.

“I can’t stop them,” it said.

20. The Pilgrim

“What was that?” Laila said.

“What was what?” Nasir said.

“I thought I felt something.”

Nasir checked the instruments. He kept his goggles on. The little creature he had found in the hole was wrapped around his wrist in the virtuality, fast asleep. Now it opened huge cartoon eyes and began to yap.