I felt I knew why. Because, though I was exhilarated from what I’d learned, I was also shocked and wounded. The idea of the “Realm of Worlds” deliberately fomenting suffering on Earth and planting the idea that suffering had value, the idea of the “Realm of Worlds” actually using this suffering as a form of energy, was more ghastly than anything I could ever have imagined.

“You need to rest now,” said Amel, “and to be alone and to talk amongst yourselves. I will give you passes that provide unlimited access to every plant, factory, Creative laboratory, or compound. You’d be welcomed in most of these places anyway, but the passes will assure you of welcome. Study what we do with luracastria, the many uses we have put it to and our continuing explorations with luracastria. Watch the workers who are experimenting with it, and its extraordinary properties.”

“I want to do this above all!” I said immediately.

He drew the “passes” out of his pocket, four small disks engraved with a pictograph on one side and his face on the other, and he put these in our hands. The disks shone like gold, but were obviously made of something much lighter.

I found myself staring down at his image on the disk, the long-haired, square-faced image of a human—a human face with a faint smile to the lips and large inviting eyes.

“And when you’ve done that,” Amel went on. “When you’ve roamed and studied and seen the unlimited possibilities, you come back to me. Come back anytime that you wish. You’ll be received and brought up here to me. And when the time is right, I will invite you to meet the other Replimoids who have come over to me. I will bring you together with them. And we will all talk again together.”

“One last question,” I said. He nodded. “Have you attempted to build Replimoids yourself?”

“I have,” he said. “Until recently it wasn’t remotely possible but I have attempted it and I have not been successful. I have infused a few human beings, human beings who were willing, with luracastria as a step towards the building of some sort of Replimoid, but this was not successful. These subjects were of course dying of diseases I couldn’t cure, but still, it was death to them when I injected luracastria into them. And I have no knowledge even in my wildest dreams of how to quicken a Replimoid into conscious life. Perhaps the perfect biology and chemistry will inevitably generate the conscious life. But I’ll tell you—if the Bravennans have in fact done this, well then, I will someday be able to do it. But it must serve human beings when I do it; it must be for the good of human beings to make such creatures, and there are many reasons to be cautious.”

“Why do you say ‘if’?” asked Garekyn. “Aren’t all the Replimoids from Bravenna proof that they can make Replimoids? I don’t understand.”