Behind the partitions she saw a bed, a shower, a small galley with stacked tins. The galley and bathroom looked clean, but the bedding was crumpled, unmade. After checking her telltales, she cracked her face plate and sniffed the air, cautious. There was a faint smell of human, a stale, vaguely unwashed, laundry smell. There was no color or decoration, anywhere. There was no sound, save for the low humming of the data desks, and the ragged breathing of Hassan and Bayliss.

There was one striking anomaly: a disc-shaped area of floor, ten feet across, glowing softly. A squat cylinder, no bigger than her fist, studded the center of the disc. And something lay across that disc of light, casting huge shadows on the curved ceiling.

Drawn, the three of them moved forward towards the disc of glowing floor.

Bayliss walked through the rows of data desks, running a gloved forefinger gently -- almost lovingly -- along their gleaming surfaces. Her small face shone in the reflected light of readouts.

They paused on the edge of the pool of glowing floor.

The form lying on the disc of light was a body. It was bulky and angular, casting ungainly shadows on the ribbed dome above.

It was obviously Marsden.

Bayliss dropped to her knees and pressed an analyzer against the glowing surface. Then she ran a fingertip around an arc of the disc's cloudy circumference. "There's no definite edge to this. The interior is a lattice of bucky tubes -- carbon -- laced with iron nuclei. I think it's some sort of data store. The bucky tube lattice is being extended by nanobots, all around the circumference." She considered. "Nanobots with fusion pulse jaws... the nanobots are chewing up the substance of the floor and excreting the lattice, patient little workers. Billions of them. Maybe the pool extends under the surface as well; maybe we're looking at the top surface of a hemisphere, here."

Chen stepped onto the light and walked to the body. It was face down. It was carelessly bare to the waist, head and face shaven; an implant of some kind was fixed to the wrinkled scalp, blinking red-green. The head was twisted sideways, the eyes open. One hand was buried under the stomach; the other was at the end of an outstretched arm, fingers curled like the limbs of some fleshy crab.

Beneath the corpse, within the glowing floor, light wriggled, wormlike.

He remembered.

With shards of the Cull base floor still glowing faintly around him, he grew once more, biting through postulates, forcing his structure to advance as if by sheer force of will.

He was angry. The cause of his anger was vague, and he knew it would become vaguer yet. But this time it had persisted through the Cull, just as had his awareness. He stared up at the complacent Sky. By the time he got up there, he knew, he would remember. And he would act.

He budded, ferocious. He felt his axiomatic roots spread, deep and wide, pulsing with his fury.