For Andrej, thought Isaac suddenly, without warning or reason. He listened again.

There was much more. There were languages he did not speak. He recognized Perrickish and Fellid, the intricate cadences of Low Cymek. And others.

He did not want to leave.

Isaac sighed and turned back into the room. Lin squirmed on the floor in sleep.

He looked at her, saw her breasts pushing at her torn shirt. Her skirt rode up her thighs. He looked away.

Since recovering Lin, twice he had woken with the warmth and pressure of her against him, his prick erect and eager. He had rubbed his hand over the swell of her hips and down into her parted legs. Sleep had rolled off him like fog as his arousal grew and he had opened his eyes to see her, moving her beneath him as she woke, forgetting that Derkhan and Yagharek were sleeping nearby. He had breathed at her and spoken lovingly and explicitly of what he wanted to do, and then he had jerked backwards in horror as she began to sign babble at him and he remembered what had happened to her.

She had rubbed against him and stopped, rubbed him again (like some capricious dog, he had thought, appalled), her erratic arousal and confusion absolutely clear. Some lustful part of him had wanted to continue, but the weight of sorrow had shrivelled his penis almost instantly.

Lin had seemed disappointed and hurt, then she hugged him, happily and suddenly. Then she curled up in despair. Isaac had tasted her emissions in the air around them. He had known she was crying herself to sleep.

Isaac glanced out at the day again. He thought of Rudgutter and his cronies; of the macabre Mr. Motley; he imagined the cold analysis of the Construct Council, cheated of the engine it coveted. He imagined the rages, the arguments, the orders given and received that week that cursed him.

Isaac walked over to the crisis engine, took brief stock of it. He sat down, folded paper in his lap, and began to write calculations.

He was not worried that the Construct Council might mimic his engine itself. It could not design one. It could not calculate its parameters. The blueprint had come to him in an intuitive leap so natural that he had not recognized it for hours. The Construct Council could not be inspired. Isaac’s fundamental model, the conceptual basis of the engine, he had never even had to write down. His notes would be quite opaque to any reader.

Isaac positioned himself so that he worked in a shaft of sunlight.

The grey dirigibles patrolled the air, as they did every day. They seemed uneasy.

It was a perfect day. The wind from the sea seemed constantly to renew the sky.