That’s why I asked Murdoch . . . where is Murdoch? The gargoyle clones were all around her now and she tried to focus on them. Her eyes were not tracking. Someone grabbed her left arm. Painful.

“Let go of me, you. . . .”

She rippled her arm and heard the grunts of surprise. Peculiar things were happening to her sense of time and the awareness of her own flesh. Blood welled up on her arms and she had no memory of how it got there. And her body—it was naked. Her muscles corded reflexively and she crouched in defense.

What is happening to me?

More hands—rough hands. She responded in a slow-motion flex of power. And she distinctly heard someone screaming. How odd that no one responded to those screams!

Chapter 33

Chapter 33

Humans spend their lives in mazes. If they escape and cannot find another maze, they create one. What is this passion for testing?

—Kerro Panille, Questions from the Avata

RAJA THOMAS awoke in darkness and it was like that most recent time, awakening in hyb. He found himself disoriented in darkness, waiting for dangers he could not locate. Slowly, it came to him that he was in his groundside cubby . . . night. He glanced at the luminous time display beside his pallet: two hours into the midnight watch.

What awakened me?

His cubby was eight levels under the Pandoran surface, a choice location cushioned from surface noises and perils by numerous color-coded passages, locks, hatches, slide-tubes and seemingly endless branchings. The Ship-trained found no difficulty recording mental maps of such layouts, the more remote the address the better. Thomas resented being buried in these depths. Too much travel time to places which demanded his attention.

Lab One.

He had gone to sleep while wondering about that restricted place. The source of so many odd rumors.

“They’re breeding people who’re faster than the demons.”

That was the popular story.

“Oakes and Lewis want nothing but servile zombies!”

Thomas had heard that story from one of the new militants, a fiery young woman associate of Rachel Demarest.

Slowly, he sat up and tried to probe the darkness around him.

Odd I should awaken at this hour.

He touched the light plate on the wall beside his head and a dim glow replaced the dark. The cubby appeared boringly normal: his singlesuit draped over a slideseat . . . sandals. Everything as it should be.

“I feel like a damned Spinneret down here.”

He spoke it aloud while rubbing his face. Presently, he summoned a servo, then slipped into his clothing while waiting for it. The servo buzzed his hatch and he stepped out into an empty passage lighted by the widely spaced ceiling bulbs of nightside. Seating himself in the servo, he ordered it to take him topside. He felt oppressed by the travel time, the weight of construction overhead.

I never needed open spaces shipside. Maybe I’m going native.

The servo emitted an irritating hum full of subsonics.