“Coryphaeus” was the word scholars had chosen to translate a concept for which there was no English equivalent. In the ancient dictionaries it was defined as a noun from classical Greek: the leader of a chorus, a choirmaster. In Vox it referred to the nest of feedback loops and functional algorithms that regulated the input and output of the community’s neural nodes. It was the emotional heart of the Network—Allison had called it “the parliament of love and conscience.”

Solitary grief (like guilt, like love) was an inescapable part of the human condition, or at least it once had been. We had endured it for most of our tenure as a species. I guessed it wasn’t a bad thing to be able to share that burden in a way that lessened the pain, and maybe there was something admirable in the willingness of the people of Vox to shoulder their countrymen’s burden of tears. But the price of that anodyne was reckoned in personal autonomy; it was reckoned in privacy.

I tried to give Oscar the impression that I was sympathetic and even curious. That, too, was part of the plan.

*   *   *

As soon as we were released from quarantine I hurried back to the quarters I shared with Allison. She ran to me as the door slid open and came shivering into my arms.

We couldn’t say any of the things we wanted and needed to say. We settled for a few self-conscious endearments. After a while we fixed a meal in the kitchen dispensary and Allison accessed (clumsily, with a manual interface) a video stream that was the local equivalent of a newscast. The final images from the vanguard expedition were playing on a loop, slowed down so that events happened as if in an underwater ballet. The glassy butterflies dropped out of the darkness and settled like lethal snowflakes on the soldiers and technicians; the human figures froze in astonishment, then jerked and danced like unstrung marionettes as they were systematically swarmed and killed.

The loop ran for two cycles before I asked Allison to turn it off.

After the disaster a drone aircraft had been sent to survey the site from a safe distance. But by daybreak there was no sign that anything unusual had happened—no human bodies, no trace of the analytical gear or of the crystalline insects that had destroyed it. Nothing but the immense and indifferent Hypothetical machines, patiently grinding across the Antarctic wasteland.

2.

Soon, Allison had whispered to me at the aircraft docks, which meant I had to cultivate Oscar’s confidence despite what had happened in the Wilkes Basin. I arranged to meet him on a platform overlooking the nuked sector of Vox Core—I wanted to see how the reconstruction work was going. I left early for the appointment and took a roundabout route.