The better I had come to know Vox Core, the less monolithic it seemed. The five elements of Voxish urban design (Oscar had explained this) were terraces, zones, enclosures, plains, and tiers, each of these terms having a precise technical definition—as I walked and rode that morning I passed through three terraces and an enclosure and caught a glimpse of a plain from a bridge that spanned two tiers. Vox Core ran on a seasonless diurnal cycle, sixteen hours of artificial daylight and eight hours of night, but every sector had its own unique and shifting quality of light. I crossed a terrace in which the light was as diffuse as rainy daylight and I walked through an enclosure illuminated by a point-source as bright as the noonday sun. Come nightfall the busy slopes would glitter like separate cities, while the wooded or grassy plains slipped into silent darkness.

The last time I had come to the ruined sector of the city it had been an ugly and impenetrable mass of debris. Now most of that debris had been collected and recycled or dumped into the sea. Lingering radiation had been “chelated” (Oscar’s word) by some technology I didn’t understand, and the reconstruction was proceeding briskly. The main crater had been retained as a memorial, but it was already scalloped with new slopes and elegantly landscaped terraces.

I met Oscar at a workers’ commissary overlooking the site. The food we were given was good but the portions were small: supplies were low due to the loss of farming manpower after the transit to Earth. We talked a while about Allison. I told him I was worried about her, that her bouts of depression were becoming more frequent and more severe. I mentioned her crying jags, her intermittent crippling anxiety.

“This isn’t unexpected,” Oscar said. He gazed from our table across a low wall and into the crater. Below and aft of us, robotic construction machines were cutting foamed-granite pillars for a new terrace. “The fact is, she simply can’t become what she wants to be—what some part of her mind insists she is. And the conflict is compromising her health and her sanity.”

“All she wants to be is Allison Pearl.”

“Allison Pearl is nothing but an illusion, all inference, synthesis, and ancillary data. Treya’s belief that she is Allison is a symptom of the separation trauma that happened when her link to the Network was broken. I know you’re sympathetic to her, and I understand the source of that sympathy. She’s a connection to your past. That’s what she was meant to be. That’s why we engineered the Allison Pearl impersona in the first place. But she’s not a time traveler from the twenty-first century, Mr. Findley.”

“I know that, but…”

“But?”

“Her hostility to Vox seems pretty authentic.”