“That’s a breaker,” he said, “a circuit-valve. One-way flow only. I’m cutting the Council off from this lot.” He patted the various pieces of the crisis engine. Derkhan nodded slowly. The sky had grown nearly completely dark. Isaac looked up at her and set his lips.

“We can’t let that fucking thing get access to the crisis engine. We have to stay away from it,” he explained as he connected the disparate components of his machine. “You remember what it told us—the avatar was some corpse pulled out of the river. Bullshit! That body’s alive . . . mindless, sure, but the heart’s beating and the lungs breathe air. The Construct Council had to take that man’s mind out of his body while he was alive. That was the whole point. Otherwise it would just rot.

“I don’t know . . . maybe it was one of that crazy congregation sacrificing himself, maybe it was voluntary. But maybe not. Whichever, the Council don’t care about killing off humans or any others, if it’s . . . useful. It’s got no empathy, no morals,” Isaac continued, pushing hard at a resistant piece of metal. “It’s just a . . . a calculating intelligence. Cost and benefit. It’s trying to . . . maximize itself. It’ll do whatever it has to—it’ll lie to us, it’ll kill—to increase its own power.”

Isaac stopped for a moment and looked up at Derkhan.

“And you know,” he said softly, “that’s why it wants the crisis engine. It kept demanding it. Made me think. That’s what this is for.” He patted the circuit-valve. “If I connected the Council direct, it might be able to get feedback from the crisis engine, get control of it. It doesn’t know I’m using this, that’s why it was so keen on being connected. It doesn’t know how to build its own engine: you can bet Jabber’s arse that’s why it’s so interested in us.

“Dee, Yag, d’you know what this engine can do? I mean, this is a prototype . . . but if it works like it should, if you got inside this, saw the blueprint, built it more solidly, ironed out the problems . . . d’you know what this can do?

“Anything.” He was silent for a while, his hands working, connecting his wires. “There’s crisis everywhere, and if the engine can detect the field, tap it, channel it . . . it can do anything. I’m hamstrung because of all the maths. You’ve got to express in mathematical terms what you want the engine to do. That’s what the programme cards are for. But the Council’s whole damn brain expresses things mathematically. If that bastard links up to the crisis engine, its followers won’t be crazy any more.

“Because you know they call it the God-machine . . . ? Well . . . they’ll be right.”