ALBERT E. COWDREY

CRUX

DYEVA WATCHED THE EARTH revolve beneath her, vanish into banks of icy cirrus,
then emerge as a patchwork of blue sea and immobile, shining cumuli.

Bits of continents poked through the gaps as the airpacket swung out on a
hyperbolic curve. She had a glimpse of North America, with the Appalachian
Islands trailing into the Atlantic and the Inland Sea glimmering under the hot
March sun. Then the sixty-one passengers were shrouded in the lower cloud layer
and reading lights winked briefly on before they emerged again to flit like the
shadow of a storm over the broad Pacific.

A light meal was served, and during dessert the glint of Fujiyama Island on the
right with its attendant green islets announced that they were nearing the
Worldcity. They flashed into the dark red sun and the vast forest of China
leaped out of the glittering wavelets of the Yellow Sea. Fifty-five hundred
clicks was now too fast and one, two, three times the airpacket quivered as the
retros slowed it to a sedate thousand.

They were speeding over the green savannahs of the Gobi, famous for its herds of
wild animals. Of course they were too high and moving too fast to see the herds,
but a mashina in the forward wall of the cabin darkened, glittered briefly with
pinpoints of light, and filled with solid-seeming images of wapiti, elephants,
haknim, sfosura -- animals native and imported from other worlds -- shambling
over pool-dotted green plains where the immortal Khan once ruled.

Dyeva's pale, high-cheekboned face concentrated and her unblinking dark eyes
glinted with reflected images. Nine-tenths of the Earth --humanity's first home
-- was now a world of beasts. The ultimate achievement of the man called
Minister Destruction. Was it for this that twelve billion people had died?

In the sunset glow of Ulanor the Worldcity, Stef sprawled on his balcony wearing
a spotty robe and listening to the cries of vendors and the creak of wheels in
Golden Horde Street. He loved to loll here smoking kif in the last light during
all seasons except the brief, nasty Siberian winter.

A commotion in the street made him swing his bony legs off the battered lounge
chair. He tucked the mouthpiece of his pipe into a loop of hose from the censer
and shuffled in broken-strap sandals to the railing.

Down below, vendors' carts had pulled against the walls and a long line of
prisoners (blue pajamas, short hair, wrists and necks imprisoned in black
plastic kangs) shuffled past like a column of ants. Guards in widebrimmed
duroplast helmets strode along the line at intervals, swinging short whips
against the legs of laggards to hurry them on. The prisoners groaned and
somebody started to sing a prison song in Alspeke, the only language that all
humans knew: Smerta, smerta mi kalla/Ya nut trubna hal syegda...

Death, death, call me, I have nothing but trouble always. Picking up the rhythm,
even the laggards began moving so quickly that the guards no longer had an
excuse to strike.

A good song, thought Stef, lying down again, because it goes in two opposite
directions, endurance and despair. Those are the poles of life, right? Of his
life, anyway. Except for kif, which was close to being his religion, filling him
during these evening hours with a distant cool melancholy, with what the Old
Believers called Holy Indifference --meaning that what happened happened and you
didn't try to fuck with God. And, of course, there was Dzhun. She meant a little
more than lust, a good deal less than love. He whispered her name, which meant
summertime in Alspeke, with its original English intonation and meaning: June.

Then frowned. He was, as usual, out of cash. Kif cost money. Then how was he
supposed to afford Dzhun? He brooded, puffing slowly, letting the aromatic smoke
leak from his nose and mouth. He needed a case. He needed a job. He needed money
to fall on him out of the sky.

Even blase passengers who had seen Ulanor many times, perhaps even had grown up
there, joined the newcomers in staring through the ports at the capital of the
human race.

More than a million people! Dyeva thought. Who could believe a city so vast? Of
course, compared to the world-cities of the gist century, Ulanor was hardly a
suburb. But this could at least give her a glimmering of the wonders that had
been lost -- a revelation of the once land future?) world before the Time of
Troubles had changed everything.

The shuttle was drifting along now, joining the traffic at the fifth level on
the outermost ring, swinging around so that the city with its spoked avenues and
glittering squares seemed to be turning. The copilot (a black box, of course)
began speaking in a firm atonal voice, pointing out such wonders as Genghis Khan
Alice, Yellow Emperor Place where the various sector controllers had their
palaces, and Government of the Universe Place, where the President's Palace
faced the Senate of the Worlds.

"And then the Clouds and Rain District," said a man's voice, and the native
Earthlings all broke into guffaws.

The black box paused politely while the disturbance quieted, then resumed its
spiel. Dyeva had turned a delicate pink. The brothel district (named for a
poetic Chinese description of intercourse, the "play of clouds and rain") had
been denounced in Old Believer churches ever since she could remember. And while
she no longer was a believer herself, she retained a lively sense of the
degradation endured by the women and men (and even children) who worked there.

She reflected that such exploitation formed the dark reverse of the civilization
she loved and hoped to restore. Perhaps after all there was something to be said
for the near-empty Earth of today. Then, impatiently, Dyeva shook the thought
out of her head. This was no time for doubt. Not now. Not now.

Stef was still frowning, with the mouthpiece between his lips, when his mashina
chimed inside the apartment. Irritated because somebody was calling during his
relaxing hour, he padded inside, evading the shadows of junk furniture, stepping
over piles of unwashed clothing. He told the mashina, "Say," and it flickered
into life. Inside the box hovered the glowing head of Colonel Yamashita of the
Security Forces.

"Hal, Korul Yama."

"I need something private done. Come see me now, Gate 43."

No waste words there. The image expired into a glowing dot. Sighing, Stef
dropped his robe among the other castoffs on the floor and plowed into a musty
closet, looking for something clean.

On the roof of the old building a hovercab with the usual black box for a driver
nosed up when Stef pushed a call button. He climbed in and gave orders for the
Lion House, Gate 43.

"Gratizor," said the black box. Thank you, sir. Why were black boxes always more
polite than people?

As they zipped down Genghis Khan Allee, Stef viewed the flood-lit facades of
Government of the Universe Place without much interest. He had long ago realized
that they were a stage set and that all the action was behind the scenes. Bronze
statues honored the Yellow Emperor, Augustus Caesar, Jesus, Buddha, Alexander
the Great, and of course the ubiquitous Genghis Khan. All of them Great Unifiers
of Humankind. Forerunners of the Worldcity and its denizens.

Genghis even had a pompous tomb set amid the floodlights--not that his bones
were in it; nobody had ever found them. But yokels from the offworlds visited
Ulanor specifically to gaze upon the grave of this greatest (and bloodiest)
Unifier of them all.

Near the tomb foreshortened vendors were selling roasted nuts, noodles wrapped
in paper, tiny bundles of kif, seaweed, bowls of miso and kimshi, and babaku
chicken with texasauce. The scene was orderly; people strolled and ate at all
hours and never feared crime. Breaking the law led to the Palace of Justice off
Government of the Universe Place and the warren of tiled cells beneath that were
called collectively the White Chamber. The formidable Kathmann, head of Earth
Security, ruled the White Chamber, and his reputation alone was enough to keep
Ulanor law-abiding.

The cab turned off the main drag, zipped down back alleys at a level twenty
meters above the street, and drew up at a deep niche in a blank white slab of a
building. Stef flashed his ID at the black box and a flicker of light
acknowledged payment. He stepped into the foyer and a bored guard in a kiosk
looked up.

"Hai?"

"Hai. Ya Steffens Aleksandr. Korul Yamashita ha'kalla."

His voice activated a monitor. The guard stared at the resulting picture, then
searched Stef's face as if another, unauthorized face might be concealed beneath
it. Finally he spoke to the security system, which silently opened a
bronze-plated steel door.

In the public areas of the Lion House multicolored marble and crimson carved
shishi were everywhere, but here where the action was the hallways were blank,
slapped together out of semiplast and floored with dusty gray mats. Light panels
glowed in the ceiling; doors were blank, to confuse intruders. Stef, who knew
the corridor well, counted nineteen doors and knocked.

He gasped as a stench that would have done honor to a real lion house hit him in
the face. The door had been opened by a Darksider, and its furry mandrill face
gazed at him with black cat pupils set in huge round eyes the color of ripe
raspberries. The creature had two big arms and two little ones; one big arm held
the door, one rested on its gunbelt, and the two little ones scratched the thick
fur on its chest.

"Korul Yamashita mi zhdat," Stef managed to say without choking. Colonel Yama
awaits me. The Darksider moved aside and he made his way through the dim
guardroom followed by an unblinking red/black stare. He knocked again, and at
last entered Yamashita's office.

"Hal," said Stef, but Yama wasted no time.

"Stef, I got a problem," he began. Everything in the office was made of black or
white duroplast, as if to withstand an earthquake or a revolution. Stef slipped
into a black chair that apparently had been consciously shaped to cause
discomfort.

"Why the animal outside? Can't you afford a human guard?" asked Stef, looking
around for a kif pipe and seeing none.

"Everybody important has a Darksider now. More reliable, even if they do stink.
Now listen. This information is absolutely a beheader, so I hope your neck
tingles if you ever feel an urge to divulge it. For months I been getting vague
reports from the Lion Sector about terrorists who are interested in time travel.
Now something's happened here on Earth. Somebody's pirated a wormholer from the
University."

"Oh, shit." Since Stef hadn't even known that a real wormholer existed, his
surprise was genuine.

"The people who were responsible for the machine are now with Kathmann in the
White Chamber and I assure you that if it was an inside job the Security Forces
will soon know."

"I bet they will."

"I don't have to spell out for you the danger if some glupetz gets at the past.
Ever since the technology came along, assholes have been wanting to go back and
change this, change that. They don't understand the chaotic effect of such
changes. They don't see how things can spin out of control."

Yamashita sat brooding, a man who had devoted his life to control.

"They think they can manage the time process. They don't see how some little
thing, some insignificant thing, can send history spinning off in some direction
they haven't foreseen, nobody's foreseen."

Stef nodded. He was thinking about someone monkeying with the past, suddenly
causing himself, or Dzhun, or the genius who had synthesized kif to wink out of
existence. It was hard to maintain Holy Indifference in the face of
possibilities like that.

"What can I do?"

But Yama hadn't finished complaining.

"Why don't these svini do something useful?" he fretted. Svini meantswine. "Why
don't they try to change the future instead of the past, try to make it better?"

"Possibly because you'd execute them if they did."

Suddenly Yama grinned. He and Stef went back a long way; the academy, service on
10, on Luna. They had been rivals once but no longer. Yama headed the Security
Service at the Lion House, a fat job; the Lion Sector which it administered was
a huge volume of space with hundreds of inhabited worlds stretching up the
spiral arm toward the dense stars of the galactic center.

Meanwhile Stef was out on his ass, picking up small assignments to solve
problems Yama didn't want to go public with. Like the present one: Yama had no
authority on Earth, but suspected a connection between a local happening and one
in Far Space. As an agent, Stef had two great advantages -- he was reliable and
deniable.

"It's true," Yama went on, "I like things as they are. Humanity's been through a
lot of crap to get where it is. We need to conserve what we've got."

"Absolutely."

Yama looked suspiciously at Stef's bland face. He didn't like Stef to say things
that might be either sincere or ironic, or might wag like a dog's tail, back and
forth.

Stef grinned just a little. "Yama, I really do agree with you. Against all logic
I'm happy, and happy people don't want change. Now, how can I find this
wormholer thief?"

Yama was instantly all business again. "I'11 tell you everything you need to
know," he said.

"And not a bit more."

"Absolutely," said Yama, who really did have a sense of humor, colonel of
security or not. He began by transferring 100 khans to Stef's meager bank
account, knowing that Stef would promptly spend it and need more, and his need
would keep him working.

AS YAMA TALKED, across the city in his big, heavily mortgaged house Professor
Yang Li-Qutsai was in his study, lecturing to his mashina under staring
vaporlamps.

His famous course at the University of the Universe, Origa Nash Mir (Origin of
Our World), drew a thousand students every time he gave it. The reason was not
profound scholarship -- Yang plagiarized almost everything he said -- but his
brilliance as a speaker. At times he seemed to be a failed actor rather than a
successful academic. His image included a long gray beard, a large polished
skull, a frightening array of fingernails, and a deep, sonorous voice that made
everything he said seem important, whether it was or not. A memory cube recorded
his lecture for resale to the off-worlds where dismal little academies under
strange suns would thrill to the echoes of his wisdom.

Even as he spoke, lucidly, stabbing the air with a long thin index finger that
ended in nine centimeters of nail, Yang was calculating what resale and residual
rights on the lecture might bring him. Enough to purchase a villa at the
fashionable south end of Lake Bal? Peace at home, among his four wives? At least
an expensive whore?

On the whole, he thought, I'd better settle for the whore. Half of his two-track
mind dreamed of girls even while the other half was retelling the most
calamitous event in the brief, horrid history of civilized man. The first
lecture of his course was always on the Time of Troubles.

"Considering that the Troubles created our world," he declared, "it is shocking
-- yes, shocking -- that we know so little about how the disaster began. In two
brief years (2091-2093) twelve billion people died, with all their memories.
Seven hundred vast cities were obliterated, with all their records; three
hundred-odd governments vanished, with all their archives of hardcopy, records,
discs, tapes and the first crude memory cubes. No wonder we know so little!

"Where and why did the fighting start? The Nine Plagues B when did they break
out? Blue Nile hemorrhagic fever and multiple-drug-resistant blackpox were
raging in Africa as early as the 2070s. Annual worldwide outbreaks of lethal
influenza had become the rule by 2080. It seems that the Time of Troubles was
well under way even before the outbreak of war."

Introductions were always troublesome: students, realizing they were in for a
long hour, began to sink into a trancelike state accompanied by fluttering
eyelids and restless movements of the pelvis. A warning light on the box glowed
green and Yang headed at once into the horror stories that gave the course much
of its appeal.

"But the war of 2091 produced the most spectacular effects: the destruction of
the cities, the Two Year Winter, and the Great Famine. Let us take as an example
the great city of Moscow, where robot excavators have recently given us an
in-depth picture -- if I may be pardoned a little joke -- of the horrors that
attended its destruction. A city of thirty million in 2090..."

Detail after horrendous detail followed: the skeleton-choked subway with its
still beautiful mosaics recording the reign of Tsar Stalin the Good; the dry
trench of the Moskva River whose waters had been vaporized in one glowing
instant and blocked by rubble so that the present river flowed fifteen clicks
away; the great Kremlin Shield of fused silicon stretching over the onetime city
center, with its radioactive core that would glow faintly for at least 50,000
years.

Observing with satisfaction that his indicator light was turning from unlucky
green to lucky red, Professor Yang moved on to the horrors of London, Paris,
Tokyo, Beijing, and New York. Then he spoke briefly about the closed zones that
still surrounded the lost cities, of irradiated wildlife undergoing rapid
evolutionary change in bizarre and clamorous Edens where the capitals of great
empires had stood, only three hundred years ago...

The interest indicator glowed like a Darksider's eye. Professor Yang strode up
and down, his voice deepening, his gray beard swishing in the wind, his long
fingers clawing at the air.

"Precisely how did it happen -- this great calamity?" he demanded. "How much we
know, and how little! Will it remain for the scholars of your generation to
solve these riddles finally? I confess that mine has shed only a little light
around the edges of the forbidding darkness that we call -- the Time of
Troubles!"

As usual, his lecture lasted exactly the time allotted, a one-hundred-minute
hour. As usual, it ended with a key phrase, reminding the drowsy student of what
he had been hearing at the rim of his clouded consciousness.

The power light in the mashina winked off, and Professor Yang shouted: "Tea!"

A door flew open and a scurrying domestic wheeled in the tea caddy, the cup, the
molko, the tins of oolong and Earl Grey.

"Sometimes," muttered Yang, "I think I'll die of boredom if I ever have to talk
about the Troubles again."

"One lump or two?" asked the domestic, and Yang, who drank tea after the ancient
English fashion, turned anxious attention to the small, ridiculously expensive
lumps of natural brown sugar.

"Two, I think," he said.

If residuals from the lecture didn't buy him a girl, at least they would, he
hoped, keep him supplied with sugar for some time to come.

The clocks of the Worldcity were nearing 9.1 when Yamashita, dining comfortably
at home with his wife Hariko, heard his security-coded mashina chime and
hastened into his den to receive a secret report from Earth Security. Somebody
had cracked under interrogation. Yama listened to the report with growing
dismay.

"Shit, piss, and corruption," he growled. "Secretary!"

"Sir?" murmured the box in a soft atonal voice.

"Contact Steffens Aleksandr. If he's not at home -- and of course he won't be --
start calling the houses in the Clouds and Rain District. Make it absolutely
clear that this is a security matter and that we expect cooperation in finding
him."

"Yes, sir. His home is not answering."

"Try Brother and Sister House. Try Delights of Spring House. Try Radiant Love
House. Then try all the others."

"And when I find Steffens Aleksandr?"

"Tell him to wipe his cock and get to my office soonest."

"Is that message to be conveyed literally?"

"Yes!"

Back at the table, he had barely had time to fold his legs under him when Hariko
told him to stop using bad language in the house where the children might hear
him.

"Yes, little wife," said the man of power meekly.

"I suppose you have to go to the office again."

"Yes, little wife. An emergency --"

"Always your emergencies," said Hariko. "Why do I waste hours making you good
food to eat if you're never here to eat it? And why do you employ that awful
Steffens person? He's a disgrace, a man his age who lives like a tomcat. Not
everyone can be as happy as we are, but everybody can have a decent,
conventional life."

Yama ate quietly, occasionally agreeing with her until she ran out of words.
Then he went upstairs, removed his comfortable kimono, and put on again the sour
uniform he'd worn all day.

On the way down, pinching his thick neck as he tried to close the collar, he
stopped in the children's bedrooms to make sure they were all asleep. The boys
in their bunk beds slept the extravagant sleep of childhood. Looking at them,
gently patting their cheeks, Yama reflected that adults and animals always slept
as if they half expected to be awakened -- children never.

Then to the girls' room, where his daughter Kazi slumbered in the embrace of a
stuffed haknim. Yama smiled at her but lingered longest at the bedside of his
smallest daughter. Rika was like a doll dreaming, with a tiny bubble forming on
her half-parted pink lips. He was thinking: if someone changes the past, she may
vanish, never have a chance to live at all. To prevent that, he resolved to
destroy without mercy every member of the time-travel conspiracy.

At the front door Hariko tied a scarf around his neck and gave him a hug; she
was too modest to kiss her husband in the open doorway, even though they were
twenty meters above the street. He patted her and stepped into the official
hovercar that had nosed up to his porch.

"Lion House, Gate 43," he told the black box, and sank back against the
cushions.

AT RADIANT LOVE HOUSE, Professor Yang relaxed from his scholarly labors on one
side of a double divan in the midprice parlor and viewed 3-D images of young
women to the ancient strains of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker.

"Do you see anything that pleases you?" asked the box that was projecting the
images.

"Truly, it is a Waltz of the Flowers," replied Yang sentimentally. The smell of
kif wafted through the room, presumably from a hidden censer.

"The dark beauty of Miss Luvblum contrasts so markedly with the rare --indeed,
unique -- blondness of Miss Sekzkitti," murmured the box, going through its
recorded spiel. "The almond eyes of Miss Ming remind us of the splendor of the
dynasty from which she takes her nom d'amour. Every young lady is mediscanned on
a daily basis to insure her absolute purity and freedom from disease. Miss
Gandhi is skilled in all the acts of the famous Kama Sutra. For a small
additional fee, an electronic room may be rented in which the most modern
appliances are available to heighten the timeless joys of love."

Professor Yang had already halfway made his selection -- the most expensive of
the "stable." Miss Selassie was a tall, slender woman of Ethiopian descent who
had been genetically altered into an albino. The box referred to her as "the
White Tiger of the Nile," and bald, bearded, long-nailed Yang, at ninety-nine
reaching the extreme limits of middle age, found his thoughts turning more and
more to her astounding beauty. Her body is like a living Aphrodite of ancient
Greece, he thought, while her face is like a living spirit mask of ancient
Africa.

"Miss Selassie, how much is she?"

"One hundred khans an hour."

"Oh, dear. And how much for an electronic room?"

Professor Yang rightly believed that all the appliances known to modern science
would be needed if he was to spend his expensive hour doing anything more than
enjoying Miss Selassie's company.

"Fifty khans an hour. However," said the box seductively, "for such a man as
yourself, Honored Professor, the house gladly makes a special price: Miss
Selassie and an electronic room for an hour for the sum total of --"

A brief pause, during which Yang felt himself growing anxious.

"One hundred and thirty-five khans, a ten-percent reduction."

"Agreed," breathed Yang, giving himself no time to think. There was a brief
flutter in the box as his bank checked his voice-print and transferred another
K135 from his already deflated account to one of the bulging accounts of Radiant
Love House.

"You should've asked for twenty percent off," said a voice, making Yang jump.

A long, stringy, bony man holding a kif pipe rose from the other side of the
double divan and stretched and yawned.

"I hope you haven't been eavesdropping," snapped Yang.

"No more than I had to," said Stef in a bored voice. "I've made my selection,
but the selectee is popular and she's busy. I'm just telling you, if you've got
the balls to bargain you can get them down twenty percent, sometimes more if
it's a slow night. The ten percent reduction they offer you is just
merchandizing."

Resentment at the stranger's intrusion struggled with economic interest in
Professor Yang's breast. The latter won.

"Really?" he said.

"Sure. I do it all the time. You could've gotten the whole works for 190."

"Indeed. And the electronic room -- is it really worth it?"

"It is if you have to have it."

Yang was just beginning to get angry when the door opened and a very tall naked
woman entered. Her hair was in a thousand white braids and her eyes were oval
rubies. The aureoles of her taut, almost conical breasts were much the same
color as her eyes. A faint scent of faux ambergris wafted into the waiting room
and mingled with the fumes of kif. Yang sat hypnotized.

"You the customer?" she asked Stef with some interest.

"No, I'm waiting for Dzhun. This guy's your customer."

"Figures," she sighed, and taking Professor Yang's thin and trembling hand in
her own, the White Tiger led him away.

A few minutes later the box made two announcements: Dzhun was ready, and Stef
was to wipe his cock and get to Yama's office soonest. Stef promptly did what he
almost never did -- lost it completely.

"FUCK THE FUCKING UNIVERSE!" he roared in English. The divan weighed a hundred
kilos but he tossed it end over end. At the crash the door flew open and a guard
entered, pulling an impact pistol half as long as her arm. Stef calmed down
instantly.

"Ya bi sori. My deepest and humblest apologies," he said, clapping his hands
together and bowing. "I don't know what came over me."

Stef had seen a number of bodies killed by impact weapons. A body shot usually
left very little except the head, arms and legs, plus assorted fragments.

"Straighten out the goddamn sofa," said the guard, watching him narrowly. She
was Mongol and looked tough. Stef did as he was told.

"Incidentally," he said as he was leaving, "I'll need a raincheck on Dzhun. I
already paid my khans."

"Talk to the front desk," growled the guard.

Outside, Stef took a deep breath and ordered a hovercab. He felt that he now had
a personal score to settle with the svini who had not only stolen a wormholer
but forestalled his session with Dzhun. Since the svini were the only reason he
currently had money enough to buy her time, that was unreasonable. But Stef
wanted to be unreasonable. That was how he felt.

"So the theft was an inside job," he muttered, trying without success to get
comfortable in one of Yama's black chairs.

"Yes. A trusted scientist turns out to belong to a terrorist group that calls
itself Crux. He's been checked a hundred times. Living quietly, no extra money,
no nothing. During lie-detection tests, brain chemicals always indicated he was
telling the truth. Trouble was, the wrong questions got asked. Are you loyal? To
what? He answers yes, meaning loyal to humanity as he understands it. Are you a
member of any subversive group? Subversive in what sense? To the existing order,
or to humanity? He gets by with a false answer again."

"What exactly do these Crux fuckers believe in?"

"Life. The absolute value of human life. The wormholer opens the way to reverse
the worst calamity in human history, the Time of Troubles. Trillions of lives
are hanging on the issue -- not only the lives that were lost in the famines and
plagues and wars but all their descendants to the tenth generation."

Stef growled, scratched himself, longing for kif, for Dzhun. "Bunch of fucking
idealists."

"Exactly. People with a vision, willing to destroy the real world for the sake
of an idea. We've gotta kill them all."

Yama jumped up -- a springy man, muscular, bandy-legged. He was fifty and
nearing middle age, but a lifetime of the martial arts enabled him to bounce
around like a ball of elastoplast.

"Kill them!" he roared, chopping at the air.

Watching him tired Stef.

"And this was what you called me back for?"

"No. Or not only." Yama fell back into the desk chair. "The group that has this
grand vision is, of course, organized in cells that have to be cracked one by
one. But the guy who talked in the White Chamber knew one name outside his cell,
the name of a woman, an offworlder. She's called Dyeva. She's one of the
founders of the movement, and she was supposed to contact him."

Stef sighed. "Anything from IC on her?"

"No," admitted Yama. "No report yet from Infocenter."

"Call me when one comes in," said Stef, rising. "I'm extremely grateful for the
way you took me away from my pleasures to give me information that, as yet, has
no practical significance. Please don't do it again."

Yama saw him to the door, nodding to the Darksider who approached smelling like
the shit of lions, owls and cormorants mixed together. Stef pinched his nostrils
and spoke like a duck.

"I love coming to your office, Yama. The place has a certain air about it."

Half an hour later, Stef was again sprawled in the middling expensive parlor at
Radiant Love House, waiting. Another customer had taken Dzhun while he was away.
Stef spent the time smoking kif and thinking about shooting Dyeva, whoever she
was, with an impact pistol.

"Phut," he said, imitating the uninspiring sound of the weapon. He made his long
hands into a ball and drew them rapidly apart, imitating the explosion inside
the target. Stef had studied wound ballistics and he knew that impact ammo
vaporized in the body and formed a rapidly expanding sphere of superheated gas
and destructive particles. Dyeva v'dtomi sa dizolva, he thought. The svin flies
apart, turns to molecules, atoms, protons and quarks.

"How happy I am," murmured the box, "to inform you, Sir, that the person of your
choice is ready to receive you."

Instantly Stef was up and moving, his bloody thoughts forgotten. At heart he was
a lover, not a killer.

In the blue peace of the electronic room, Professor Yang lay huddled under a
sheet of faux silk.

Beside him, her hand still languidly resting on a gadget called an
erector-injector, lay a statue of living ivory. At least he now knew the White
Tiger's given name. Even if it was only a prost's working name, a nom d'amour,
for Yang it was what the old French phrase meant -- a name of love.

"Selina," he murmured, and she turned her head and smiled at him.

"I'm afraid your time is up," she whispered. "But perhaps you'll come again, my
dear. You were special."

"Selina," he said again. Around him monitors winked and a low electromagnetic
hum soothed with a white sound. Yang was all too conscious of the birth of a new
obsession, one even less affordable than four wives and natural sugar.

"I must see you again," he said.

Detecting the urgent note in his voice, Selina smiled. Ah, that enigmatic
whore's smile! thought Yang with pain in his heart. What did it mean? Pleasure
in you, pleasure in your money, no pleasure at all but mere professionalism? Who
could tell?

Wasn't this how he had happened to marry the most obnoxious of his four wives?

Dyeva sat quietly in the front room of a small but elegant suburban villa.

The windows were open and the morning sun entered through a gentle screen of
glossy leaves thrown out by a lemon tree. The room held all the necessities of
rustic living, bare beams across the ceiling, lounges covered with faux linen, a
glass table bearing apples and oranges and kuvisu fruit, and a mashina half the
length of the wall to entertain the owner, a Professor of Rhetoric whose hobby
was playing at revolution.

Relaxing on the lounges were the other members of the cell: two students and a
dark and tensely attractive woman of middle age who bore a painted mark on her
forehead. The students were still talking about Professor Yang's lecture of last
evening, tailor-made as it seemed for the members of Crux.

"Lord Buddha, but he makes you see it," said the boy, fingering a string of
beads restlessly. He was an Old Believer. Dyeva had noticed years ago that such
people were represented in Crux far beyond their numbers in the general
population.

The girl was lovely: bronzed, yellow-haired, sloe-eyed, the perfect Eurasian.
She called herself Dian and spoke in a throaty whisper that someone had told her
was mysterious.

"Actually, he's a horrible old man. But it's as Kuli says, he has the gift of
making the past live."

"We expect to do more along that line," said the owner of the villa in a deep,
resonant voice, and the two young people laughed happily. All three of them
loved the taste of conspiracy; the older man, whose codename was Zet, earnestly
hoped to seduce Dian. Supposedly nobody in the group knew anybody else's real
name. They had a vast and fundamentally childish panoply of measures to preserve
secrecy--passwords, hand signals, ways of passing information in complicated and
difficult ways. Because cyberspace was a favorite hunting ground for the
supermashini of the Security Forces, they avoided electronic contact whenever
possible. Instead, they had oaths, secret meetings, symbols. Their key symbol
was the looped cross of ancient Egypt, the crux ansata -- the sign of life.

Kuli wore a crux on a cord around his neck; at meetings he took it out for all
to see. The girl, Dyeva noted with amazement, had the symbol tattooed on the
palm of one slender hand. Why didn't the senior members of the cell force her to
have it removed?

People had often told Dyeva that she had icewater in her veins. That wasn't
true: her emotions were intense, only deeply buried. Right now anger and alarm
were stirring deep beneath her masklike face. Did her life, to say nothing of
the lives of trillions of human beings, depend on these amateurs, children?

The dark woman, who called herself Lata, brushed a hand across her brow and
said, "The essential thing is to speed our visitor safely on her way. And I must
tell all of you something I learned last night. The theft of the wormholer has
been discovered and there have been arrests."

"Arrests?" demanded Dian, in a scandalized tone. "Of someone I know?"

She seemed to think that the polizi had no right to arrest members of a secret
organization merely because it was bent on annihilating the existing world.

"No," sighed Lata. "Fortunately for you. That beast Kathmann and the polizi
drugged and tortured both the guards and the people who were responsible for
technical maintenance of the wormholer. Thus they learned that one of the
scientists had been involved in the theft. Thank God, the device had already
been turned over to another cell, and the poor man who talked didn't know their
names or where it is at present."

The two young people seemed paralyzed. Zet was turning his head from side to
side, looking at the furniture, the fresh fruit. Dyeva had no trouble reading
his mind: the glupetz had suddenly realized that he could lose all this by
playing at conspiracy. Some day, she thought, if he thinks about it long enough,
he will realize that he may lose much more.

"I will go with you," said Dyeva, rising and pointing at Lata, apparently the
only one of the gathering with any sense. "You will conduct me. I must not stay
here longer and endanger these heroes of humanity."

Zet looked relieved at the news she'd soon be gone; Kuli and Dian were still
absorbing the news of the arrests. He was stunned, she indignant.

"Oh, but the people who were tortured -- they're martyrs!" she exclaimed
suddenly and burst into tears.

"Yes," said Dyeva, "and by this time they are also corpses. Death is the reward
the technicians of the Chamber hold out to their victims. I will be packed and
gone in five minutes if you will lead me," she said to Lata.

"Of course," said the dark woman, and Dyeva hastened to the room where she had
slept to gather her kit.

Later, in Lata's hovercar, Dyeva asked her how she had come to join the
movement.

"I despise this world," Lata said quietly. "It's a gutter of injustice and pain.
Nothing will be lost if this world suddenly vanishes at the word of Lord
Krishna. Of course, if we manage to undo the Troubles, success will cost us our
own lives. That is the splendor of Crux. If our movement did not demand the
ultimate sacrifice I would not have joined it."

Another Old Believer, though Dyeva, only this time of the Hindu type. And I was
brought up a Christ-worshipper, and the boy Kuli is a Buddhist. Are we all
remnants and leftovers of a dead world? Is that why we wish to restore it?

"What are you thinking?" asked Lata.

"Wondering why the movement contains so many Old Believers."

"Oh, I think I know. It's because we want to undo the death of our faiths. So
many people simply stopped believing after the Troubles. They said to
themselves, There is no God. Or, if there is and he allows this to happen, I do
not care about him."

Dyeva glanced at her curiously. They were entering the air-space above Ulanor
and Lata paid frowning attention to the traffic until a beam picked up her car's
black box. For an instant Dyeva had a powerful urge to continue this
conversation, to talk about things that had real meaning. Then she remembered
that the less Lata knew about her, and she about Lata, the better for both of
them.

"We all come to it for different reasons," she said guardedly, and silence
followed. The little car revolved above the Worldcity, bearing two women who
hoped to change it into a phantasm that never had existed at all.

Stef and Dzhun were having breakfast in a teashop deep in the Clouds and Rain
District. Half the customers seemed to recognize Dzhun, and she waved and blew
kisses to them. She had scrubbed off her white working makeup and with it had
gone her nighttime pretense of lotus delicacy and passivity. She looked and was
a tough young woman to whom life had not been kind.

"Wild turnover last night," she said to a red-haired eunuch who had stopped by
the table to shriek and fondle her. "I did ten guys."

"Oh my dear," said the sisi, "I do ten on my way to work."

"Seems you've got some catching up to do," Stef told Dzhun when the sisi had
moved on.

"Oh, he's such a bragger. And old, too. When I'm his age I'll have my own house
and instead of bragging about doing ten guys I'll be doing one -- the one I
choose."

"And that one will be me."

"Only if you get rich," said Dzhun candidly, buttering a bun. "I'm tired of
being a robotchi, a working stiff. I've got a senator on the string now, Stef,
did I tell you? Soon you won't be able to afford me at all."

She dimpled as she always did when saying unpalatable things.

"Is that why I'm buying you breakfast?"

"Oh Stef, I'm just needling you. I love my poor friends, too. Look, why don't
you take me to Lake Bai for a week or two? Get a cabin. I won't demand a villa.
Not yet."

"Unfortunately, I'm on a big case right now. One that might even save your
life."

Dzhun stopped eating and stared at him. "You're telling the truth?"

"Believe it. When the payoff comes, it'll be as big as the case. Then we'll go
to Bai. Get a villa, not a cabin."

Stef spoke with the calm assurance he employed when he was in a state of total
uncertainty. The investigation was dead in the water. The arrests had not led to
the wormholer. IC still hadn't come up with a make on Dyeva. Mashini were
combing passenger lists of recent arrivals from the offworlds -- voiceprints,
retinographs, DNA samples -- turning up nobody with a record, nobody who fit the
profiles. Stef's local contacts had nothing to offer.

"What's it all about, Stef?" asked Dzhun.

"Never mind. The case is a beheader. It's nothing you want to know about, so
don't ask. It's a security matter and it'd be a hell of a shame if the
Darksiders came and carted off a butt like yours to the White Chamber."

Their voices had fallen to whispers. Dzhun's face was so close that Stef's
breath moved her long eyelashes. A delicate scent clung to her kimono, some
nameless offworld flower, and the drooping faux silk disclosed the roundness of
her little breasts like pomegranates. Stef could have eaten her with a spoon.

"I won't say anything," she promised. "If anybody asks what you're doing, I'll
say that you never tell me anything."

Stef leaned back and sipped the bitter green tea he used to clear his head in
the morning. Effortlessly, Dzhun put her whore's persona on again, screaming and
waving at a friend who had just entered the teashop. Towering over the crowd,
the White Tiger of the Nile headed for their table.

She and Dzhun kissed and Selina sat down, nodding at Stef.

"Hell of a night," she said to them and the world in general. "I did a dozen
guys."

"Oh, Selina," said Dzhun. "Honey, I do a dozen on my way to work."

YAMASHITA CLAPPED his hands and bowed to announce himself to the fromazhi -- the
big cheeses. It was the morning meeting of the Secret Emergency Committee that
had been formed to deal with the wormholer theft.

Yama's boss, Oleary, Deputy Controller of the Lion Sector, grunted a welcome,
adding, "You know these people, I'm sure."

Considering that he was talking about the Solar System Controller, her deputy
the Earth Controller, her Chief of Security, and Admiral Hrka of the Far Space
Service, that was inadequate to say the least.

The SSC was Xian Xi-Qing, a small woman with a parchment face, tiny hands and
dull gold and jade rings stacked two and three to a finger. She was famous for
many things, her three husbands, her stable of male concubines, the ruthlessness
and cleverness that had kept her alive and in power for decades.

She glared at Yama and demanded abruptly, "We've heard from Kathmann. At least
he's caught somebody. What are you doing about this wormholer business? I've
heard rumors the conspiracy originated in your sector."

Yama took his time seating himself on a backless chair known as the shozit, or
hot seat. The grandees faced him behind a Martian gilt table surrounded by an
invisible atmosphere of power. Admiral Hrka, Yama noted, wasn't even wearing his
nine stars. That was the ultimate sign of status. Nobody needed to see his
rating.

Among the bureaucrats, the admiral looked and probably felt out of place. Hrka
usually dealt with the arcane business of moving in Far Space -- using inertial
compensators and particle beam trans-lightspeed accelerators, navigating by mag
space forcelines and staging chronometric reentries where an error of a
microsecond could put him deep inside the glowing core of a planet. He was
accustomed to using atomlasers that could melt steel at half a million clicks,
launching supertorps at near-light velocities and converting the enemies of his
species into plasma thinner than the solar wind.

Now he found himself face to face with a threat that might enable one fragile
human to undo his world and render all his knowledge and bravery pointless. He
looked as if he longed to be in Far Space now, where even if he was a thousand
light years from anyplace he knew where he was.

Seated to one side was Kathmann, Yama's opposite number in Earth Security. He
resembled a files technician, with his pointed head and fat neck. He wore
replacement eyes and the plastic corneas glittered blankly.

Quietly Yama laid out the steps taken so far to locate members of Crux. The
notion that the conspiracy had grown up in the Lion Sector remained unproven,
yet diligent inquiries were underway on all the Sector's two hundred and
thirty-six inhabited worlds. All available mag space transponder circuits had
been cleared for this one task. Enough energy to light Ulanor for six weeks had
already been poured into the message traffic. The whole business was necessarily
slow; even at maximum power, a message routed through mag space from the
farthest planets of the Sector took more than seventy standard hours to reach
Earth.

And so on. Actually he had nothing to report and his aim was to make nothing
sound like something. When he was done the fromazhi, who knew bureaucratic
boilerplate when they heard it, just sat there looking bored. Only Kathmann
spoke up.

"All your inquiries are on offworlds?"

"Certainly. That's where our authority begins and ends."

"You're not invading my territory, using unofficial agents here on Earth?"

Yama was shocked.

"Onor kolleg, eto ne'legalni!" he exclaimed. "Honored colleague, that's
illegal!"

Kathmann raised one fat fist and stared at Yama with eyes like worn silver
half-khan pieces.

"Remember, Colonel, this hand holds the keys to the White Chamber!"

Yams raised his own much solider fist.

"And this one, Colonel Kathmann, has killed a thousand enemies of the State!"

The spat had Admiral Hrka grinning.

"Simmer down, boys," he said, while the Earth Controller, a man named Ugaitish,
muttered into his beard, "Spokai, spokai. Take it easy."

"What I want to know," said Oleary in a fretful tone, "is why anybody built this
goddamn gadget in the first place. If it didn't exist it couldn't be stolen."

"It was some idiots at the University," said Ugaitish. "They just had to see if
the theory worked. They applied for a permit, all very legal, and some minor
official gave them an oke for the materials, which are pretty exotic. There's no
use putting them in the White Chamber," he added, waving a hand to shut Kathmann
up.

Xian agreed. "Typical academics. All they know is what they know. Not an atom of
common sense."

"Besides," Ugaitish added, "the academics were the ones who reported the theft.
Except for that, nobody would know anything about it."

"They should be beheaded anyway," Kathmann growled, "to get rid of the dangerous
knowledge in their brains. A laser can do it in five seconds, and there you
are."

Yama's sharp eyes intercepted the glance that passed among the fromazhi.
Kathmann made them uneasy -- a man who knew too much and executed too readily.
Yama filed away this insight for future reference.

"At this point, beheading is not the issue," declared Hrka. "Let me sum up. A
woman, name unknown, took a commercial ship, probably somewhere in the Lion
Sector -- now there's a big volume of space to cover -- and traveled to Earth,
where she has, perhaps, contacted a group of terrorists who intend to obliterate
our world by changing the past. The group has a functional wormholer, calls
itself Crux, and in the most overpoliced human society since the fall of the
Imperial Chinese People's Republic nobody knows who they are or where they are.
Have I stated the situation clearly?"

Xian glared first at him, then at the two cops in turn.

"You better find them," she said, "or I'll put you both in the White Chamber."

She let that sink in, then said more formally: "Honored security chiefs, we
permit you to go."

When they were gone, Xian told the others, "We need information now. Ugaitish is
putting out a public call for help. We don't have to tell everything, just that
a gang of terrorists called Crux is on the loose, planning to kill many innocent
people."

"Is that wise?" worried Oleary. "Informing the masses seems like an extreme step
to me."

"If we don't, the politicians will. I have to brief the President and the Senate
today, and what do you think will happen then?"

"Much smoke, much heat, no light," said Hrka fatalistically. "Well, we'd better
catch these bastards. The whole world order as we know it exists only because of
the Time of Troubles. Without that, everything would be different."

The fromazhi stared at each other. "Great Tao," said Ugaitish, "if these
scoundrels succeed -- even if we continue to exist at all, we might be anything.
Coolies, prisoners, offworld scum!"

"Ask for help," Oleary told Xian. "If necessary, beg."

After his night in the District, Stef needed sleep. Yet he spent a couple of
hours at his mashina, checking his regular contacts for hints of terrorist
groups. He heard gossip about lunatics who wanted to blow up Genghis' tomb, but
nothing of interest to him. So he went to bed.

The daytime noises rising from Golden Horde Street had no power to keep him
awake. He had slept away too many days, sunk in the half light admitted from the
roofed balcony, embracing rumpled bedcovers in the brown shadows of afternoon.
In a few minutes he drifted off, but not for long.

He woke suddenly thinking he must have shit on himself. He reached for his
pistol just as a crushing furry weight fell on him.

The ceiling light went on and the Darksider rolled Stef over and sat on his
back. For an agonized few moments he couldn't breathe at all, while the
creature, aided by a human Stef never saw clearly, thrust his hands into a kang
and locked the wrists. Then the Darksider rose, bent down over its gasping
victim and lifted him so that the kang could be clamped on his neck as well. A
four-fingered, two-thumbed hand gripped his hair and pulled him to a sitting
position.

Spots drifted before his eyes in a red torrent that slowly cleared. Stef was
sitting naked on the bed with a black plastic kang clamped on his wrists and
neck. His faint hope that this might be a nightmare died. The Darksider was
standing bow-legged by the bed and scratching its chest. The human seemed to be
wearing a polizi uniform; he kept to the shadows just beyond the limits of
Stef's vision. Head immobilized, Stef tried to twist his body to get a view of
his captor, but without success.

"Who the fuck are you?"

"Your guide, Mr. Steffens. I'm here to show you something you never saw before."

"What?"

"The inside of the White Chamber."

At a gesture, the Darksider tossed a sack over Stef's head and pulled a cord
tight around his neck. A hypodermic gun spat at his shoulder and he had a
horrifying sense that his whole body was melting into a cold and lifeless fluid
before darkness descended.

He would have preferred not to wake up, but wake he did. Still in the kang,
still with the sack over his head. Of course you're not comfortable, he told
himself. You're not supposed to be comfortable. He had no idea how long he'd
been here, except that he was thirsty and hungry. No idea where "here" was,
except somewhere in the warrens of the White Chamber.

He had urinated at some point and was sitting in the wet. The cell was so small
that his knees were folded up against his chest. His icy toes pressed against
metal that was probably the door. The cell was narrower than the kang, and Stef
had to sit with his body twisted. There was no way to move, no way to rest. As
the hours passed, agonizing pains began to shoot through his back and side.
Breathing became difficult. He began suffering waves of panic at the thought
that the polizi would leave him here until he slowly suffocated. The panic made
things worse; he started to hyperventilate, and every breath stabbed him like a
knife. He tried to calm himself, counting slow shallow breaths that didn't hurt
so much.

Then voices approached along a corridor outside the cell. Faint hope was
followed by stomach-knotting fear. They might let me go; it was all a mistake;
Yama will get me out. No, Yama doesn't know anything and anyway he doesn't
control the polizi. They're coming to torture me.

The voices came close. Two techs were discussing a "client," as they called
their victims. Voices neutral, atonal like the voices of two black boxes.

"Maybe twenty cc of gnosine would do it."

"I dunno. This client is a tough case."

"Maybe needles in the spinal marrow..."

They were gone. A faint noise in the distance remained unidentifiable until a
door in the corridor slid open. Then Stef heard a whimpering, sobbing sound that
made all the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Extreme agony, he thought --
beyond screaming.

The door slid shut again and the sound became a low meaningless murmur. Human
footsteps approached again. Two voices.

"Just wonderful, Doctor. I never thought she'd break."

"Sometimes a combination of therapies is essential."

They too were gone. Doctors. Technicians. Therapies. Clients. The language of
the Chamber. We are not sadists, we are scientists performing a distasteful but
necessary function in the cause of justice. Try the gnosine, try the needles,
try everything in combination. Promise the clients life; after you've worked on
them for a while, promise them death.

When the polizi came at last, they came in silence. Without the slightest
warning the door clanged open. Somebody yelled, "Get the scum! Get the piece of
shit!"

A Darksider grabbed Stef's legs and dragged him into the hall and the wrench on
his cramped limbs made him scream. Then the animal was dragging him down the
hall by the heels while boots kicked at Stef's ribs and head.

The kang knocked against the walls and floor. A human hand grabbed his testicles
and twisted and he screamed again, louder than before. Then somebody, a crowd of
them, human and inhuman, seized the ends of the kang and dragged him to his
feet.

"Walk! Walk, you piece of shit! Walk!"

He couldn't and fell and somebody kicked him hard in the groin and this time he
did no screaming. He was unconscious.

He woke with intense light in his eyes. He was sitting in a hard duroplast chair
and the sack was off his head. His eyes burned; agony rose in waves from his
groin. Somebody in hard boots stamped on the bare toes of his left foot.

Stef wasn't thinking any longer, he was living in nothing but the conviction
that every second some new pain would strike. What next, what next? Hands seized
the kang and pulled it back. Other hands, some human, some inhuman, grabbed his
ankles and stretched out his legs. In the blazing light he was half blind,
absolutely helpless. Somebody touched his breastbone and he moaned and his
stomach knotted, expecting the blow.

Nothing happened. The light dimmed. Gradually his eyes cleared. A man with a
pointed head was standing before him. The man had plastic eyes that went blank
when he moved his head. There was no crowd of tormentors, only two thuggi from
Earth Central and one Darksider. One of the thuggi gave the other a piece of
candy and they stood there, chewing. The Darksider scratched its furry backside
against a wall.

"Mr. Steffens."

"Yes," whispered Stef.

"I'm sending you home now. For the future, will you remember one thing?"

"Yes."

"From now on, Yamashita will continue to pay you, but in spite of that you'll be
working for me as well as for him, and I'll expect to know everything you do and
everything you discover about Crux."

Kathmann leaned forward and once again tapped Stef's breastbone.

"If you hide anything from me, I'll know it, and I'll bring you back here. Do
you understand?"

"Yes."

"Next time you'll get standard treatment," added Kathman, straightening up. "Not
the grandmotherly kindness you received this time."

To the thuggi he said, "Give him one more."

He left the room and a door closed. Behind the light the room flickered and a
second Darksider Stef hadn't seen before approached him, holding a spiked club
in its paws. But that'll kill me, he thought, and his eyes clamped shut on a
final vision of the new Darksider raising the club for a smashing blow to his
gut.

He sat there blind, waiting. Then he heard them laughing at him. He opened his
eyes as one of the thuggi unlocked the kang. The other was grinning. The
Darksider with the club flickered, evaporated. A three-dimensional laser image,
created, Stef now saw, by projectors mounted high up on the walls.

"The boss likes to have his little joke," the thug explained with a wink. The
real Darksider was still scratching its butt. Insofar as an animal could, it
looked absolutely bored.

Outside was deep night or earliest morning. Wrapped in a blanket and shivering
uncontrollably, Stef rode home in a polizi hovercar. Before dawn he was in his
own bed, wracked by pain from toes to scalp. Yet he slept, and by noon was able
to creep to the balcony, dragging one foot behind him. He walked bowlegged,
because his scrotum was the size of a grapefruit.

Slowly, very slowly, he prepared kif and lay down. He was starving but wouldn't
have dreamed of getting up to look for food.

He smoked and the drug dulled everything, pain and hunger alike, and let him
sleep. In all the world only kif was merciful. No wonder it was his religion.

By nightfall Stef was minimally better. He slept long, despite nightmares that
left him drenched with sweat. By morning he was functional enough to bathe (he
smelled worse than a Darksider by then) and dress. Then he called Yama on his
mashina, hoping the polizi would monitor his call -- he wanted to remind them
that he had powerful friends.

"Stef. What's up?"

"I just wanted you to know that your pal Kathmann had me in the White Chamber.
I'm working for him now, too."

"That son of a bitch. He hurt you much?"

"It wasn't a picnic. But I've been through worse."

"Yeah, I know you're a survivor. Well, I guess we got to share anything we find
out with Earth Central. But I'm going to see Kathmann and tell him if he grabs
you again, I'll send Oleary to see Xian herself. You got anything broken, like
bones?"

"No."

"Well, at least the miserable bastard went light on you."

Stef next called a neighborhood babaku shop and ordered food. Then he found his
pistol, made sure it was loaded, and returned to his kif pipe.

On the balcony he smoked and thought about ways to kill Kathmann. He had two
people on his list now: Dyeva, because she wanted to destroy his world, Kathmann
because he had -- well, not tortured Stef; what had happened was too trivial to
be called torture. No, Kathmann had simply been getting his attention in the
inimitable polizi way.

This wasn't the first time in his life that Stef had been completely abased and
humiliated. But he decided now that it was to be the last. He pointed his pistol
at the wall and said, "Phut."

After Dyeva, Kathmann was next.

THAT EVENING Professor Yang again stood before his mashina, which was set to
Transmit and Record. A memory cube nestled in the queue. Lights arranged by his
servant illuminated Yang against a background of ancient books that had been
imprinted on the wall by a digital image-transfer process. (Real books were too
expensive for a scholar to afford.)

Watching the interest indicator with a sharp eye, Yang launched into the second
lecture of his course, Origin of Our World. His subject today was the response
to the Troubles: the slow repopulation of the Earth by humans and the
reintroduction of hundreds of extinct animal species whose DNA had fortunately
been preserved for low-gravity study on Luna.

He spoke of the first halting steps toward Far Space and of the gradual
emergence of humanity from the cocoon of the Solar System during three hundred
years of experiment and daring colonization. He spoke of the new morality that
emerged from the Time of Troubles, the ecolaws that limited the size of families
and prescribed a human density of no more than one person per thousand hectares
of land surface on any inhabited planet. (Great populations tend to produce
political instability, to say nothing of epidemics.)

He spoke of the Great Diaspora, the scattering of humankind among the stars to
insure that what had almost happened in the past could never happen again. He
spoke of a species obsessed with security and order, and pointed out what a good
thing it was that people had, for once, learned from the past, so that they
would never have to repeat it. He spoke about the liquidation of democracy and
explained the strange term as a Greek word meaning "mob rule." He ended with a
kindly word or two about the friendly aliens like the Darksiders who had now
become part of humanity's march toward ever greater heights of stability and
glory.

All across the city, students were recording the lecture. So were people who
were not students but had a hunger for learning. In his apartment, Stef listened
because he was still recovering from his night in the Chamber and had nothing
else to do. His chief reaction to Yang's version of history was sardonic
amusement.

"Pompous old glupetz," he muttered.

In another shabby apartment, this one opening on a rundown warren of buildings
near the university called Jesus and Buddha Court, Kuli --whose real name was
Ananda -- and the beautiful Dian -- whose real name was Iris -- also listened to
Yang. Their reactions tended less to laughter and more to scorn.

"I liked the bit about the Darksiders," said Ananda, fingering his rosary. "A
bunch of smelly barbarians our lords and masters use as mercenaries to suppress
human freedom." "You're so right," said Iris, shutting off the box. "How I hate
that man."

"Oh well, he's just a professor," said Ananda tolerantly. "What can you expect.
Look, is there a Crux meeting this week?"

"I don't know. Lata will have to message us, won't she? Nobody we know has been
arrested. Maybe the excitement's over," she added optimistically.

"I thought Zet was getting spooked."

"Well, he's old. Old people get scared so easily."

She smiled and sat down on the arm of his chair. Ananda used his free hand to
rub her smooth back. Not for the first time in history, conspiracy had led to
romance. The relationship had begun with talk and more talk; change the past,
restore life to the victims of the Troubles and at the same time erase this
world of cruelty and injustice. Neither Ananda nor Iris could imagine that they
might cease to exist if the past were changed; they thought that somehow they
would continue just about as they were. Maybe better.

Growing intimate, they had told each other their real names; that had been a
crucial step, filled with daring trust and a quiver of fear --somewhat like
their first time getting naked together. The fact that Ananda in the past had
told other girls his name and had tried to recruit them for Crux was something
that Iris didn't know.

Indeed, Ananda had forgotten the others too, for he was floating in his new love
like a fly in honey. In the middle of the disheveled apartment, surrounded by
discarded hardcopy, rumpled bedding, a few stray cats for whom Ananda felt a
brotherly concern, Iris of haunting beauty bent and touched her lips to those of
the ugly young man with the rosary at his belt.

"I'd better go," she murmured. "I've got a lab." Her tone said to him, Make me
stay.

"In a minute," said Ananda, tightening his grip. "You can go in just a minute."

A few streets away, in a less shabby student apartment occupied by four young
women, the mashina was still playing after Yang's lecture, only now switched to
a commercial program.

One of the women was insisting that she needed to make a call, but the other
three were watching a story of sex among the stars called The Far Side of the
Sky and voted her down.

"You can wait, Taka," they said firmly. Taka, who was twenty, had begun to argue
when a news bulletin suddenly interrupted the transmission.

"Suppose I make my call now--" she started to say, when something about the
bulletin caught her attention.

"Hush up," she told the others, who were bitterly complaining about the
interruption of the story just as the hero had embraced the heroine deep in mag
space.

"I want to hear this," said Taka.

After the bulletin the story quickly resumed. Taka thoughtfully retired to her
bedroom and sat down on the floor, folded her slim legs gracefully under her,
and reached for her compwrite. The compwrite transmitted through the mashina in
the other room but gave her privacy to work.

"A letter," she said, "to --"

Who? She wondered. Daddy had always told her to obey the law but have nothing to
do with the polizi, who were, he said, scum, gryaz, filth. How then to get her
information to them without using the boxcode that had appeared on the screen
during the newsflash?

"To Professor Yang, History Faculty," she began, rattling off the university
address code from memory. "Send this with no retur address, oke?"

"I am waiting, O woman of transcendent beauty," said the compwrite. Taka herself
had taught it to say that and was now trying to make it learn how to giggle.

"Honored Professor, I am sending this to you as a person I honor and trust and
admire," she began, laying it on thick.

"I have always been a law-abiding person and there was a news bulletin just now
where the polizi were asking for information about a terrorist group called the
Crooks. Well, a student named Ananda, when he was trying to climb aboard --
scratch that, make love to me a couple of months ago, stated that he belonged to
this group and tried to make it seem incredibly important, though I had never
heard of it myself up to that time. In any case my native dialect is English and
I happen to know what Crooks means and I was angry that somebody would try to
involve me in something criminal.

"Hoping that you will convey this info to the proper authorities, I remain one
of your students choosing to remain anonymous."

She viewed this missive on the screen and then added, "PS, this Ananda is an
ugly guy with a rosary of some kind he wears on his belt. I think he's an O.B.
He is skinny and wears a funny kind of cross under his jacket. He says it is a
symbol of something I forget what."

She added, "Send," and headed back into the front room, where the current
chapter of The Far Side of the Sky had expired in a shudder of Far Space
orgasms.

"Well, I suppose I can make my call now," she said, and did so, setting up an
appointment for tomorrow with the mashina of a depilator who had promised to
leave her arms and legs as smooth as babyflesh, which she thought would look
very nice.

Professor Yang's infatuation with Selina was leading him deeper and deeper into
debt. He tried to stay away from Radiant Love House, but instead found himself
dreaming of the White Tiger all day and heading for the District by hovercab at
least three times a week.

He told himself all the usual things -- that this was ridiculous in a man his
age, that he would lose face if his frequent visits became known, that he
couldn't afford this new extravagance. No argument could sway him; he wanted his
woman of ivory in the blue peace of the electronic room where for an hour at
least he feasted on the illusion of youth regained.

He was again in the middling expensive parlor waiting for the White Tiger when
Stef lounged in and collapsed on the double divan.

Ordinarily, Yang would have ignored the fellow, but when Stef said, "How are
you, Honored Professor?" he felt he had to say something in return.

"Quite well." Brief, cool.

"I watched your last lecture," said Stef, who was inclined to chat, knowing that
as usual he had time to kill before Dzhun could receive him.

"Really," said Yang, thawing slightly. He was paid. 10 khan for every box that
tuned in to his lectures. It wasn't much, but he needed every tenth he could
get.

"Yeah. I'm not a student, but I am ill-educated and I occasionally try to
improve my mind, such as it is."

Stef pulled over a wheeled censer, dumped a little kif into it from a pouch he
carried, and turned on the heating element.

"Inhale?" he asked, unwinding two hoses and handing one to Yang.

"The waiting is tiresome," Yang allowed, and took an experimental puff. Finding
the quality acceptable (local kif, not Martian, but pretty good) he took
another.

"May I ask your profession?"

"Investigative agent. I'm also a licensed member of the Middlemen and Fixers'
Guild."

"Ah." Yang looked at Stef sharply. "Are you good at what you do?"

"Well, I live by it and have for years. Why? Need something looked into?"

"Actually," said Yang slowly, "I received an anonymous letter a few days ago and
I've been wondering how to handle it. It claims to place in my hands certain
information that I, ah, feel somebody in authority ought to know. Yet I have no
way of checking it or naming the sender, who claims to be a student of mine. It
may be worthless; on the other hand, if it's useful, well--"

"You'd like to be paid for it," said Stef promptly. "I can handle that. Insulate
you from the polizi. There are ways to handle it confidentially and at the same
time claim a reasonable reward if the information's good. What's it all about?"

Yang thought for a moment and then said, "It concerns something called Crux."

All of Stef's long training was just barely sufficient to enable him to keep a
marmolitz -- a marble face.

"Ah," he said, clearing his throat, "the thing that was on the box a few nights
ago?"

"Yes."

Briefly he told Stef about the letter, witholding, however, the name Ananda and
his description.

"What do you think it might be worth?"

"How happy I am," interrupted the box in the corner, "to inform you, honored
guest, that Dzhun is now ready to receive you."

"Tell her to wait," said Stef.

To Yang he said, "Let me try to find out if the matter's really important. If
so, I wouldn't hesitate to ask ten thousand khans in return for such
information."

"Ten thousand?"

The kif pipe fell out of his mouth.

"It must be something major," Stef pointed out, "or it wouldn't have been put on
the air. At the same time, I would recommend caution. This is clearly a security
matter, and you certainly wouldn't want to expose yourself to the suspicion of
knowing more than you actually do. That's a short path to the White Chamber.
Luckily, I have a friend on the inside who's not polizi and can make inquiries."

"And your, ah, fee?" asked Yang.

"A flat ten percent of the award. I'm an ethical investigator." "Good heavens,"
said Yang, who was perfectly indifferent to Stef's professional ethics but whose
mind was engaged in dividing K9,000 by 120 to reached the astounding figure of
seventy-five hour-long sessions with the White Tiger in the electronic room.

"What do you need?" he asked.

"Your chop on my standard contract, one sheet of hardcopy with the message, and
about two days."

"You shall, my friend," said Professor Yang rather grandly, "have all three."

YAMA AND STEF sat at the duroplast desk in the Lion House staring at the
hardcopy.

"One name. And what a crappy description. Maybe I should turn Yang over to
Kathmann just to see if he knows anything more."

"An honored professor? Come on, Yama. Stop thinking like a security gorilla for
once. Yang doesn't know a damn thing except that he needs money to rent his
albino. What we need is to find this Ananda."

"How? Call in the polizi?"

"Hell, no. Get the credit yourself. First of all, access the university records.
Tell your mashina to search for Ananda as both a family name and a given name.
Let's say for the last two years. Do you have access to the polizi and city
records?"

"That's Earth Central stuff," said Yama with a cunning look. "It's off limits to
us. Of course I've got access."

"When you get some names from the university, have the box start calling their
numbers and checking the faces of these Anandas. That'll eliminate some -- they
can't all be skinny, ugly guys -- and meanwhile you can be having the names
checked against the polizi records for arrests and against the city records for
everything else -- property ownership, energy payments, tax payments,
everything, Then there's the Old Believer angle --"

Yama was already talking to his box. "I want confidential access to university
records. Now."

He turned back to Stef. "By the way, how much is this costing me, assuming it
leads to anything?"

"If it leads to Crux, I promised Yang fifteen thousand."

"Petty cash," said Yama. "If it leads to Crux."

The box chimed. "Sir, I have accessed the university central administrative
files."

"Search admission, registration and expulsion records for the name Ananda," said
Yama promptly, "especially expulsion." He added to Stef, "Terrorists are often
students, but very few of them are good students."

Dreaming of the money, Stef paced the room impatiently. The university records
were voluminous and ill-kept. There was no Ananda as a family name. Searching
given names was just getting underway -- "This baby does it in nanoseconds,"
promised Yama -- when the whole university system went down. And stayed down.

After more than an hour of waiting and pacing and dreaming of kif, Stef lounged
out, holding his nose until he was past the Darksider, and took a hovercab home.
There he called Earth Central and reported to one of Kathmann's aides that he
and Yama were following down an anonymous tip that a student was a member of
Crux.

Then he called Yang and told him that the money was practically in hand. Yang
was ecstatic.

"You don't know what this means to me, honored investigative agent," he bubbled.
"I've had so many calls on my purse lately."

"I know what you mean."

"What do you think this Crux organization might be?"

"I don't have the slightest idea," Stef lied. "In English the word means, uh,
the essential thing. Like the crux of an argument."

"Of course there's also the Latin meaning."

"What's Latin?"

"It's a dead language. The original source of the word. In Latin it means cross.
Hence the crossroads, the critical point."

"Ananda wears a funny kind of cross," said Stef slowly.

"Yes. My informant thought he was an Old Believer."

"I wonder --"

Stef's box chimed. He quickly made arrangements to bring Yang his payoff and cut
the circuit.

"Say," he told the box.

"Stef, I got the names," said Yama, abrupt as usual. "Got your recorder on? Here
they are. Last year, Govind Ananda, withdrawn. This year, Patal Ananda, Nish
Ananda, Sivastheni Ananda. That's all."

"Boxcodes?"

"Got 'em all except Govind. Like so many of those damn students, he may have a
pirated mashina. I'm having the box call the ones we've got, and at the same
time start running through the city records. Got any more bright ideas?"

"No," said Stef, "except I want a vacation when this is over. And my pay."

"Stop kidding me, I know you'll take your pay out of old Yang's reward money.
Don't try to...wait a minute. Box reports Patal and Sivas-whatever don't
resemble the description. Nish is away from home. Wait a minute again. Govind
Ananda paid the energy bill on No. 71, Jesus and Buddha Court. Didn't the letter
say something about a rosary? And about him being an O.B.?"

"Keep trying Nish, Yama, but send three or four of your thuggi to meet me at J
and B Court. I'm going to try Govind. I like the smell of that address. It's
near the University and the names would echo for an Old Believer."

"You got 'em. Plus a Darksider in case things get rough."

"And a gas mask."

Stef rang off, plunged into a battered Korean-style chest on his balcony and
brought out his one-centimeter impact pistol. He touched the clip control and
chambered one of the fat, black-headed rounds.

Action elated him, freed him from his memories of being beaten, his sense of
uselessness. Suddenly he felt wonderful, better than when he was on kif, better
than when he was drunk, almost better than when he was about to make love. A
flutter of fear in his belly was part of the frisson. So was the taste of iron
filings beginning to fill his mouth.

He rummaged through his closet, dragged out his most ample jacket, tore the
right-hand pocket to give him access to the space between cloth and lining. Hand
in pocket, he pressed the gun against his ribs to hide any bulge and slipped
through the door, listening to it click behind him, wondering if he would ever
unlatch it again. He whispered a goodbye to Dzhun. On the roof he signaled for a
hovercab.

"Jesus and Buddha Court," he said, when one drew up.

The cab's black box said, "Gratizor."

On Lake Bai in the evening the tinkle of samisen music mixed with the thrumming
of a Spanish guitar, the notes falling like lemon and oleander flowers into the
dark, cold water.

Half a click down in the huge lake--really a freshwater inland sea --glacial ice
still lingered, surviving into the heat of an earth warmer than it had been
since the noontime of the dinosaurs. Shrieking happily, goosepimpled swimmers
were leaping into the water from the floating docks of lakeside villas. Further
on, strings of Japanese lanterns illuminated teahouses and casinos and
sliderrinks where the children of grandees cavorted on expensive cushions of
air.

Back in the hills, spotlights illuminated palaces. Bijou villas lined the
shores, and on the veranda of one of the smaller ones Stef and Dzhun idled,
wearing light evening robes and not much else. Dzhun kept returning to Stef's
account of the raid, trying to get the story straight.

"So these terrorists -- did you shoot them?"

"Didn't have to. I've seldom felt like such a fool in my life."

Stef gestured lazily, and Dzhun disturbed herself long enough to pour champagne.
The grapes of Siberia were justly famous, the flavor supposedly improved by the
low background radiation. "The terrorists weren't dangerous?"

"Pair of dumb kids. The boy wearing his funny cross and the girl with the same
symbol tattooed on her hand, if you can believe that. The Darksider smashed the
door in and let out a roar and they both fainted dead away. Then I jumped in
yelling and the thuggi followed, and suddenly the four of us were standing
around waving weapons at two unconscious children. Ridiculous scene.

"I almost puked when I had to hand them over to the polizi. Not that there was
anything else I could do, with the thuggi and the Darksider there. I was sure
Kathmann would tear them limb from limb, but Yama says they woke up spilling
their guts. The polizi have got 'em locked up, of course, but Security got
everything they wanted in the first three minutes."

"Dyeva."

"Absolutely. Iris and Ananda said she'd come in by the Luna shuttle on such and
such a day. That was enough. Kathmann called Yama. Yama has shuttle data at his
fingertips, there were only four females of the right age on that one, and they
all checked out except Akhmatova Maria from a planet called Ganesh, which is,
just like it was supposed to be, in the Lion Sector. She stepped off the shuttle
and vanished.

"So now they got her hologram, plus retinographs, voiceprints, DNA, all that
stuff they take when you get a passport. The kids have positively identified
her. Dyeva's been made, for whatever good it may do us.

"It was an eventful day. The kids had met Dyeva at a villa outside town, so the
polizi descended on that and bagged the owner. He went straight to the Chamber
and promptly gave them the name of another member of the cell, a woman who has
so far evaded capture. A demand for information went out to Ganesh at maximum
power and with the most awful threats that Yama could think of on the spur of
the moment.

"He'd just laid all this information on Oleary's desk when another call comes in
from Earth Central. Kathmann's got the wormholer. Gadget takes a hell of a lot
of juice, so his mashini were watching the Ulanor power grid for unusual current
surges. Well, a surge of the right size occurred, and Kathmann arrived at the
meter with half a dozen Darksiders to find the wormholer standing all by itself
in a deserted warehouse in the northwest quadrant."

Dzhun was frowning. "Then that means --"

"You and I may vanish at any moment," Stef grinned. "Dyeva's presumably in the
21st century trying to prevent the Time of Troubles. I wish her luck. How's she
going to do it?" "And we're here."

"And we're here, relaxing, courtesy of the payoff to Yang. My success in
cracking Crux convinced Yama that I'm the guy to stop Dyeva. He offered me a
hundred thousand to go after her. I laughed in his face."

"Then who'll do the job?"

"Some thuggi from Earth Central who're under military discipline and can't say
no."

"And what'll happen to her?"

"In the 21st century? Probably get killed by the surface traffic. Or catch a
fatal disease. Or get lost in the crowds. I wouldn't trust Kathmann's idiots to
find their peckers when they need to piss. Dyeva's safe enough from them."

Later, he and Dzhun wandered up the shingled beach to a waterside inn that
served caviar and Peking duck and other edibles. People of the upper and
underworld were crowded together at small tables, eating and drinking. Blue
clouds of kif drifted from open censers over the crowd, relaxing everybody.

Dzhun, who had an indelicate appetite, was just piling into her dessert when the
haunting notes of a synthesizer drifted like pollen across vast, cool Lake Bai.
A band floated up in an open hovercar, and a sisi with a piercingly sweet voice
performed a popular air, "This Dewdrop World," whose simple theme was eat,
drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die. The crowd loved it; silver half-khans
and even a few gold khans showered the car. Whenever a coin fell in the water, a
musician would jump in after it like a frog and have to be fished out by his
friends.

It was a fine end to the evening. When Stef and Dzhun left the restaurant the
air had the lingering chill of spring and the scent of lemon groves that were
blossoming in the hills. Dzhun pulled Stef's arm like a scarf around her neck
and started to sing the song again. He leaned over her, hugged her close. It was
at moments like this that he almost envied people who were foolish enough to
fall in love.

"I love that song," she said. "It's so nice to be sad. Sadness goes with joy
like plums with duck."

Didn't statements like that mean that she was, after all, a bit more than just a
whore? Stef hugged her tighter, breathing in her off-world perfume with the
chilly scent of the lemon groves.

They had an amorous night and spent next morning lolling on the deck with their
usual strong green tea. They were supposed to start back to the city today and
Dzhun was looking abstracted.

"Can't wait to get back and go to work?" Stef smiled.

"Stef...there's something I have to tell you."

"What?"

"My senator wants to set me up in a little house in Karakorum. He's jealous, and
it'll be the end for you and me."

That produced silence. Stef cleared his throat, drank tea.

"Ah. So this trip was a kissoff."

"It doesn't have to be."

"Meaning?"

Dzhun said, eyes cast down, "I'd rather live with you. We don't have to marry."

"No," said Stef.

Dzhun sat down, still not looking at him.

"I thought you'd say that. I've never bothered you with my life story because I
thought you'd get bored and angry. But let me tell you just a little. My family
needed money, so they sold me into the District when I was nine. The owner
rented me to one of his customers. The night he raped me, I almost bled to
death.

"By the time I was twelve I was a registered whore, a member of the guild. It
took me three more years to pay off my debts because in the District the houses
charge you for everything, heat, water, towels, mediscanning, almost for the air
you breathe. But I was beautiful and earning good money and I was out of debt by
the time I was sixteen. Now I'm almost eighteen and I'm sick of it all. I don't
want to be a robotchi anymore.

"I hear people talk about going to the stars and I've never been out of Ulanor.
I can barely read and write and if Selina hadn't taught me some arithmetic so
they couldn't cheat me, I wouldn't be able to add two and two. I don't know
anything, all I do is live from night to night -- up at sixteen, to bed at
eight. I've had dozens of diseases -- sida six times -- and the last time it
took me a whole month to recover. The house doctor says my immune system's
collapsing, whatever that means.

"I've got to get out of the life, Stef. I want to live with you, but if you
don't want me I'm going with my senator. He has some funny tastes and three
wives and he's old, but he's also kind-hearted and rich, and that's enough."

She stopped, still looking down at the floor. Stef was staring at Dzhun and
clenching his fists. He felt as if a favorite dog had just bitten him. Twice, in
fact -- once by threatening to leave him, and once by demanding a commitment
from him.

"I don't want anything fancy," Dzhun went on. "I want to live in a house with a
garden. I want to get up in the morning and go to bed at night. I want to go to
school before I'm too old and learn something about the world. I can see you're
angry with me. Well, so be it. If you're too angry to pay my way back to the
city, well screw you. I'll get the shuttle by myself."

She stood up and walked somewhat unsteadily into the house, taking by habit the
little mincing steps they taught the girls -- and the boys as well -- in Radiant
Love House.

Half an hour later she came back out, dressed for the road. Stef was leaning on
the railing, looking down into deep and black Lake Bai.

Stef said, "I'm poor. I'm a loner. I'm a kif head."

"So you can't afford me, don't want me, and don't need me because kif's better.
Right? So, goodbye."

"Can you fend off your senator for a while?"

"Not forever. He can buy what he wants, and I don't want to lose him."

"I guess I could set up housekeeping with a hundred thousand," Stef muttered.
"But maybe I can bargain for more."

Dzhun collapsed rather than sat down and drew the longest breath of her life.
She put her hands over her face as if she was weeping, though in fact she had
stopped crying many years before and her face was hot and dry. Her mind was
running on many things, but chiefly on her friend Selina's brainstorm, the
wonderful invention of the senator, who, of course, did not really exist.

"So you'll do it," said Yama.

"For a million khans. Paid in advance. I want something to leave to my heirs in
the event I don't come back."

"That's a bunch of fucking money."

"There's one more thing I want. Get those two kids I captured turned loose.
Otherwise Kathmann will sooner or later cut their heads off on general
principles."

Yama frowned. "He'll never turn them loose. They're young and the girl's
beautiful, so he'll want to mutilate them. In my opinion, he's saving them for
something special. That's the way Kathmann is -- he's a fucking sadist, as you
of all people ought to know."

"Try anyway."

"It's hopeless. But if I can save them I will."

When Stef had gone, Yama set out to sell his prize agent to the fromazhi. He
expected trouble with Kathmann but none developed; the chief of Earth Security
was assembling an assassination team to kill Dyeva and viewed Stef's mission as
a chance to test the wormholer. Ugaitish, Admiral Hrka, and Xian were ready to
try anything and put their chops on the proposal without a murmur. It was Yama's
own boss, Oleary, who objected because of the cost.

"Why don't you go yourself?" he demanded. "It'd be cheaper."

"Sir, I'll go if you say to. But I got a wife and four kids."

"That's two more than the ecolaws allow."

"I got an exemption."

Oleary stared at Stef's file, frowning.

"What's wrong with this guy? I don't trust him. Why did he have to leave the
service in the first place?"

"Sir, he's a great agent. Brave, quick, adaptable. But he's got a soft spot in
his head. He's sentimental. You can't be a cop and be sentimental. A long time
ago he helped a woman thief who was headed for the White Chamber to escape.
Well, I found out about it, so I did my duty and turned Steffens in."

Oleary kept on frowning.

"If he's sentimental about women, what about when he has to kill, what's her
name, Dyeva?"

"Sir, she's different. She's threatening his whole world, including this little
tart he seems to be in love with."

"Oh, well," said Oleary, shrugging. "Send him, I guess. Can't hurt. But take the
money back if he doesn't succeed. How could I justify a budget item like that
for a failure?"

"You go tomorrow," said Yama. "Here's some stuff to study tonight." Stef took
the packet of copy, caught an official hovercar, and flew straight to Radiant
Love House. The long farewell that followed left Stef weeping, and Dzhun -- once
the door had closed behind him -- smiling at prospects that seemed equally
bright whether he survived his mission or not.

Back home, he settled down on the balcony to study the three items that Yama had
provided him: a hologram of Dyeva, a summary of her life on Ganesh, and a map of
ancient Moscow. The map got little more than a glance; he needed to be in situ
to use it. Dyeva's hologram was another matter. Stef studied it as closely as if
she and not Dzhun was his lover, imprinting on his mind Dyeva's round Tartar
face, high cheekbones and unreadable eyes.

Then he read her biography. To his surprise, the hardcopy with its STATE
SECRET/BEHEADER stamp had been written by Professor Yang. Liking the taste of
polizi money, he'd gone to work for Yama as a volunteer agent, and his first
task had been writing up and annotating Dyeva's life story.

Settlers of the Shiva system had been led by a devout Hindu who had hoped to
establish a refuge for members of all the old faiths --Muslims, Christians,
Jews, and Buddhists as well as his own people --where, far from corruption and
unbelief, peace and justice and the worship of God could reign for all time.

"The actual results of this noble experiment," wrote Yang, "were not without
irony." In the process of settling the system, three intelligent species had
been destroyed, and among the humans religious wars and bitter sectarian
disputes had constituted much of the system's subsequent history.

Akhmatova Maria was born to a devout family on the third planet, Ganesh. They
maintained Christian belief according to the Russian Orthodox rite and hated
both their neighbors of other faiths and the depraved and godless civilization
of other planets. In time she lost her own faith in God but adopted in its place
the religion of humanity. Her private life remained austere; she had neither
male nor female lovers, and the name she took in the movement which she helped
to found, Dyeva, meant virgin in Russian, her native dialect.

She was attending the local academy when news of the technical advances which
allowed invention of the wormholer gave her the great project of her life. She
was one of a group of people loosely connected with the academy who formed a
scheme to undo the Time of Troubles by returning to the past. Some members of
her group transferred to the University of the Universe in Ulanor, where they
made converts to their views and laid plans to build -- later on, learning that
one had already been built, to steal -- a wormholer.

Then came a part of the account that Yama had marked in red. Dyeva's theory that
the Troubles could be prevented rested upon a verbal tradition among the Russian
Christians of Ganesh: that a man named Razruzhenye, the defense minister of
ancient Russia when the troubles began, ordered the first thermo/bio strike upon
China and that this attack launched the Time of Troubles. Killing this one
individual might well prevent the war and undo the whole course of disasters
that followed.

"So," muttered Stef. It seemed a little strange to him that Dyeva, who believed
in the absolute value of life, was returning to the past to kill someone. But
Yang in a footnote pointed out that such things had happened many times in the
past: people who believed in freedom imprisoned freedom's enemies; those who
believed in life murdered anybody who seemed to threaten it.

His study finished, Stef ate a little, then fell into bed. He woke when his
mashina chimed and managed to stumble through a bath. Then he confronted a large
box of ridiculous clothing that had been prepared according to Professor Yang's
designs, based on what men wore in the mosaics of the Moscow subway.

At seven-seventy-five a government hovercar picked Stef off the roof and flew
him to a neighborhood that he knew only too well, a cluster of huge anonymous
buildings with vaguely menacing forms. They descended past the ziggurat Palace
of Justice and the Central Lockup in whose subterranean rooms he had tasted the
joys of interrogation.

This time, however, the huge pentagonal block of Earth Central was the goal. The
hovercar descended through a well in the central courtyard that wits called the
Navel of the Earth. Yama met Stef as he emerged in a sunless court of black
hexagonal stone blocks and led him down one narrow blank corridor after another,
past huge stinking Darksiders armed with impact weapons, into a vaulted
underground room with a gleaming contraption standing in the center of the floor
among a jungle of thick gray cables.

"So that's it," said Stef, interested by his own lack of interest. At the center
of the wormholer was a two-meter cube with a round opening in one side, whose
purpose he could easily guess.

Blue-coated techs helped him into a heavy coat with wide lapels and big pockets,
slipped an impact pistol into the right-hand coat pocket, and slid a black
powerpack with a small control box into the left. Somebody stuck a chilly metal
button into his left ear.

"Pay attention to the control," said Yama. "Take it in your hand. Now. Red
button: job's done, bring me home. Oke? White button: I need help, send backup
now. Black button: hold onto your ass, Dyeva's succeeded and your world is
finished. The powerpack feeds a little tiny built-in mag space transponder that
emits a kind of cosmic squeak for one microsecond. The signal crosses time
exactly the way it crosses space, don't ask me why. That's what we'll be
listening for. Then we have to pull you back, send help, or --"

"Grab your butts. I see. But that also means you could just cut me off, leave me
there, save yourselves a million."

"Yeah, we could, but we won't. Hell with that, I really mean I won't. Not," he
smiled, "for a measly million that isn't even my money."

They stared at each other until Stef managed a weak grin.

"That's good enough. Any problems?"

"Yes," said Stef, "lots. I don't speak Russian. I've got no goddamn idea how to
find Dyeva even if I land in Moscow at the right time. I --"

Yama took Stef's arm and began to walk him toward the wormholer.

"Don't worry about the language. That thing in your ear will translate for you.
And don't worry about the time. A register inside the machine recorded the day
Dyeva chose, the 331st day of 2091. So we're sending you to that same date in
hopes she's close to the point of exit. If she's not, you'll have to find her."

"How?"

"Come on, Stef. I sold the others on you because of your adaptability. This
whole world you're going into vanished in a cloud of dust. How much can anybody
know about it? There's just no way to be systematic."

They stopped beside the huge glittering gadget.

"I really envy you," said Yama in a choked voice. "This is the most crucial
moment in human history. You're the plumed knight of our world, like Yoshitsune,
like Saladin, like Richard the Lion-Hearted."

Yama embaced him. "Take care, my old friend, and kill that fucking virgin.'

An instant later the techs had helped Stef into the wormholer and closed the
heavy door, which looked like a nine-petal steel chrysanthemum. Yama stepped
back, wiping his eyes. Kathmann had now arrived to observe the action and Yama
joined him.

"Well, that's one less friend I got," said Yama. "This job of mine is hell. How
are the preparations going for your assassination team?"

"As fast as possible. Of course they're the ones who'll really do the job."

"There's a chance that Steffens might pull it off alone."

"Yeah," said Kathmann, "and there's a chance I might be the next Solar System
Controller. Svidanye," he added, "see you later. Some more members of Crux have
been arrested and I got work to do in the Chamber."

IN THE WORMHOLER, seated as he had been instructed, knees drawn up, chin down,
arms around his shins, sweltering in the heavy coat, feeling the pistol grate
against his ribs, Stef tried to imagine Dzhun's face, but found that it, like
everything else, was inadequate to explain to him why he was where he was. The
excitement he'd felt earlier was gone, replaced by mere dread. He could only
suppose that his entire life had been leading up to one moment of supreme folly,
and this was it.

Then a great violet-white light flashed through him, he felt an instant of
supernatural cold, and he was sitting on a gritty sidewalk against a damp
stuccoed wall.

He raised his face. The day was overcast, and a restless throng of thick-bodied
people wrapped up against the autumn chill hurried past, not one of them paying
him the slightest heed.

He looked higher. Behind the solid walls of elderly, three-story buildings with
flaking plaster and paint he saw high polished towers of what looked like mirror
duroplast. Immense crimson letters hovered just below the lowest layer of murk.

Since Alspeke was written mostly in cyrillic letters, he had no trouble reading
Moskovskaya Fondovaya Birzha, and when he murmured it aloud a soft atonal voice
in his ear translated: Moscow Stock Exchange. Below the Stock Exchange sign was
a huge blue banner saying "1991-2091 ."

Slowly he got to his feet, staggered, caught himself against the wall. A pretty
young woman paused, stared at him, then drew a pale furry hood around her face
and hurried on.

A couple of teenagers stopped also, looked at him and grinned. They squawked to
each other in seabirds' voices.

"What's this asshole dressed up for?"

"Must think he's Stalin or something. Hey, asshole -- where'd you get that
coat?"

A stout woman stopped suddenly and shook her fist at the kids.

"You leave that man alone! Can't you see he's crazy? He's got troubles enough
without you hooligans pestering him."

A little man in a checkered coat stopped and joined her.

"Show some respect!" he shouted at the kids.

"What, for a guy dressed up like Stalin, for Christ's sake? Hey you," said a
teenager to Stef. "You going to a party?"

Unfortunately, the translator didn't answer questions, and Stef just stared at
him.

"My God, he's deaf and dumb, and you're harassing him," said the woman in
scandalized tones.

By now a little crowd had gathered. Everybody had an opinion. It was the adults
against the teenagers.

"You little bastards got no respect for anybody!"

"Not for you, Grandaddy."

"Call me Grandaddy? Yes, I've got grandchildren, but thank God they're nothing
like you, you little pimp."

In the confusion, Stef managed to slip away, leaving them arguing behind him. In
an alleyway he unbuttoned the coat and stared down at the tunic and coarse
trousers jammed into boots. The clothes were nothing like what people were
wearing on the street. Already the stiff, kneehigh boots of faux leather were
beginning to chafe his toes, and he hadn't walked more than a hundred meters.

Cursing Yang, he tried to decide what to do. While he pondered, he worked his
way from alleyway to alleyway until he suddenly spotted, among the hundreds of
small shops lining the street -- Boris Yeltsin Street -- a shop with a sign that
said Kostyumi. He didn't need the translator for that.

Thirty minutes later, Stef emerged from the costume shop wearing acceptable
clothes, short soft boots, baggy trousers, a faux astrakhan hat, a long warm
padded jacket. In his pockets were thirty ten-ruble notes, the difference
between the value of the handsome and practically new theatrical garb he'd sold
the shop's owner and that of the second-hand, ill-fitting stuff he'd bought from
him.

He slipped into the crowd, which was denser than the center of Ulanor on Great
Genghis Day. The street traffic was noisy and thick, everybody driving headlong
as if their odd, smelly cars were assaulting a position. Above, the air traffic
was thin, almost absent -- a few primitive rotary-wing machines with shapes so
bizarre that Stef thought at first that they were some sort of giant insect
life. Jet trails streaked far above, making him wonder if airpackets already
flew from Luna.

Between street and sky, strung on cables, hundreds of blue banners fluttered,
all saying 1991-2091, and sometimes "100 Years of the Democratic Republic,"
whatever that meant. He could see no mention of Tsar Stalin the Good.

His next stop was in front of a huge window filled with flickerings mashini.
Stef was surprised to see that the images made by the boxes were
three-dimensional -- he had expected something less advanced --though the
technology was crude, merely a rough illusion created on a flat screen. His eyes
roved past a ballet and half a dozen sports programs. Russian futbol teams had
dominated world play in the season just past, but what would the hockey season
bring forth? Young people dashed around on grass or ice while the announcer
talked.

Nobody at all seemed to be thinking about the danger of universal destruction.
Stef shook his head, amazed at the ordinariness of this world, so close to its
end. He moved along, jostling against these people who would soon be dust and
ashes, astonished at their solidity and their obvious confidence that they would
exist for a long time to come.

A single screen was tuned to a news program called Vremya and he stopped to
watch it. A young woman wearing a fantastic pile of yellow hair spoke of the
Russian-led international team now hard at work establishing the Martian colony
and the problems it was facing. People on Mars, needing to communicate despite a
babel of tongues, were developing a jargon all their own; the American members
of the colony called it All-Speak. It was mostly Russian and English, with a
flavoring of words from twenty other languages.

Meanwhile a new condominium development on Luna marked the transformation of
that spartan base, barely seventy years old, into a genuine city, the first on
another world. Space had never looked better; Russia's own program, after a long
eclipse, again led the world. Here on Earth things were not so encouraging.
There were new outbreaks of Blue Nile hemorrhagic fever. The Nine-Years' War
continued in the Rocky Mountains; the weak U.S. central government seemed unable
to conquer the rebels, and United Nations peacekeepers had again been massacred
in Montana.

But the big worry was that border tensions continued to mount in Mongolia, where
Chinese forces had occupied Ulan Bator. The name caused Stef to press his nose
against the glass. He had heard enough of Yang's lecture to know that Ulan Bator
was the origin of the name Ulanor, even though the city the announcer was
talking about was now -- now? --nothing more than a mound on the green forested
banks of the River Tuul.

According to Yang, a few survivors of the Troubles had trekked northward,
bringing the name with them and applying it to a cluster of yurts in an endless
snowstorm. Later, because it had low background radiation, the place had become
the site of the Worldcity -- a strange fate for a Mongol encampment that had
survived the Two Year Winter for no better reason than the sheer unkillable
toughness of its people and an endless supply of frozen yak meat, which they had
softened by sleeping on it and eaten raw for lack of firewood.

Another name caught Stef's attention. "Defense Minister Razumovsky has declared
that Russia, together with its European and American allies, will stand firm
against further aggression by the Imperial People's Republic of China."

Defense Minister Razumovsky? That wasn't the word he had learned, the name of
the man Dyeva was supposed to kill. It was another Raz word, Raz, raz --
Razruzhenye.

He must have said the word aloud without meaning to, for his translator
murmured, "Destruction."

Stef nodded. Sure. In the folk memory, Minister Razumovsky became Minister
Razruzhenye, Minister Destruction. The name was wrong, but the tradition might
still be correct.

Razumovsky suddenly appeared in a clip. He had a wide, flat face like a frog
someone had stepped on. He seemed to talk with his right fist as much as his
mouth, pounding on a podium while he spoke of Russia's sacred borders and of
China's presumption, now that it had conquered Korea and Japan, that all East
Asia belonged to the Dragon Republic.

"They'll find out different if they mess with us!" Razumovsky bawled, and loud
cheering broke out among a crowd seated in something called the Duma. "They
think they can threaten us with their rockets, but our Automated Space Defense
System is the most advanced in the world. I spit upon their threats!" More
cheering.

Then a weighty, white-maned man came on, identified as President Rostoff. His
message was of conciliation and peace. "As the leader of the Western Alliance,
Russia bears a grave responsibility to act with all due caution. Our guard is
up, but we extend as well the hand of friendship to our Chinese brothers and
sisters."

Stef smiled; across the centuries, he recognized without difficulty the ancient
game of good cop-bad cop. He moved on, meditating on a final line from the
announcer: that the debate on the Mongolian situation would continue in the Duma
tonight, and that the President and the cabinet would again be present. Was that
why Dyeva had picked this particular day to return to the past?

He walked down a gentle declivity where the street widened into an avenue called
Great Polyanka and rose to the marble pylons of a new gleaming bridge. Beyond a
small river he saw red walls, gold onion domes, palaces of white stone -- the
Kremlin.

Pleasure boats with glass roofs slid lazily along the river, which was divided
here by a long island. In the boats Stef could see brightly dressed people
dancing. Then the crowd swept him onto the other bank, past the Aleksandrovsky
Gardens and up a gentle rise. Here the throng divided; most people passed on,
but some joined a long queue that had formed at a brick gatehouse.

Stef continued with the majority along the autumnal garden and the crenellated
wall into Red Square. He stared like any tourist at a cathedral like a
kif-head's dream and then, feeling tired and hungry, crossed the square and
drifted into the archways of a huge building that filled the far side, a market
of some sort crowded with shops and loudly bargaining people. At a stall that
sold writing paper, Stef bought a small notebook, an envelope, and an object he
had never seen before-- a pen that emitted ink.

The building held eating places, too. Hungrily, Stef found himself a place at a
small table in one of them and ordered shchi without knowing what cabbage was.
Soon a bowl of hot greenish soup lay steaming before him, along with a sliced
onion and a chunk of dense and delicious brown bread and sweet butter. It was
the first time he'd ever tasted butter from a cow, since all the Earth's cattle
had died in the Troubles. It had a subtle, complex flavor and an unctuous
texture quite different from the manufactured stuff he knew.

He devoured it all, licked his fingers as the other diners were doing, and paid
with a few of his rubles. Then, still sitting at the table, he laboriously wrote
a few lines, tore out the page, and sealed it in an envelope which he addressed
to Xian in care of Yams. He left the eating place smiling grimly; in case
something went wrong, this note was another legacy he hoped to leave behind him.

He returned to Red Square to find that in his absence it had become almost
unbearably beautiful. A light autumn snow had begun to fall, streetlights were
coming on, and the bizarre cathedral of St. Basil floated in its own
illumination, more than ever a dream.

Shadows, light and snow turned everything to magic. Strolling past were young
people with faces as white and pink as dawn clouds, and among them stout men in
astrakahns and elegant women in faux ermine. Old women were selling apples that
could have been plucked from their own cheeks.

A little band began to play somewhere as Stef slowly retraced his steps, out of
the square and up to a floodlit gate in the Kremlin wall. People were streaming
in, all talking excitedly, and Stef followed.

Inside, he moved with difficulty through the throng gathering at a big,
anonymous new building with the words DUMA OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE in gold letters
above the doors. Guards in hats of faux fur were trying to keep a roadway open
here, pushing people back but, to Stef's surprise, using no whips. Considering
what he had always heard about the Tsars, the mildness of this government was
astonishing. He circled the crowd, his mind now centered on Dyeva's hologram,
searching faces of which there seemed no end, countless faces, all different,
none hers.

Away from the Duma the Kremlin grounds were more open. In the last light, huge
rooks wearing gray patches on their wings like shawls flew from one bare tree to
another, cawing their complaints about the human invasion. Stef wandered into a
small church like a glittering lacquered box. Gold-haloed saints ascended every
wall and hung suspended in the red depths of the ceiling; ghostly notes of song
showered down, although he could see nobody singing.

People knelt, prayed or simply stood and looked on. An old woman rose, crossed
herself, and jostled Stef on her way out. Another and younger woman wearing a
fur hat and a long coat rose and turned to go. Either Dyeva or her twin sister
passed so close to Stef that he could have touched her.

AFTER A STUNNED instant of surprise he followed, out into the dry fresh-falling
snow, the lights and shadows of dusk. The rooks had settled into their nests.
She didn't walk, she strode, eyes straight ahead. He followed her along a
winding path, keeping one or two people between them. He was looking for a place
to kill her, a dark corner, a moment of privacy.

Then he realized that he didn't need privacy. Left hand on the red button of the
transponder, he gripped his weapon with his right, raising the barrel a little
in his coat pocket. He would kill her in the open and escape where nobody could
follow. He only had to make absolutely sure that this was his quarry. He stepped
off the path, the dry snow crunched under his boots, he hastened, he was
directly behind her.

She had stopped to watch a wedding party ending a day's celebration here in the
Kremlin at dusk. Holding wine glasses were a pretty girl in voluminous white,
her new husband in an uncomfortable-looking suit of black, and half a dozen
friends. One of the friends stepped forward with a bottle of bubbling wine and
filled their glasses. Everyone was laughing. They had picked up a street
musician someplace, an old man with a primitive instrument of some sort that he
crushed and stretched between his hands. He played wheezy music and the young
people toasted the couple while onlookers clapped, laughed and wept.

"Dyeva," said Stef and she turned her head and looked at him.

Unquestionably it was the Tartar face he knew so well, with the high cheekbones
and the angled eyes. Her face didn't change, yet she knew instantly why he had
come. Instead of pleading for her life, she said in Alspeke, in a low, urgent
voice:

"Look at them! Look at them! Look at this world. Can you really let it destroy
itself to save what we have -- tyrants, fools, Darksiders, the White Chamber?
These people are alive, they're free, they deserve to have a future. Whoever you
are, take just one second before you kill me. Think about it!"

And for a lengthening instant Stef did. In fact, he had been thinking about it
secretly for hours. To be here, now, seeing these people, this world -- it
wasn't theory anymore. Uncounted millions lived and breathed and wanted to keep
on doing so. His own world seemed remote and for the moment unbelievable -- the
broken drains and babaku smells of Golden Horde Street, his dirty apartment and
the kif pipe, Yama and his stinking guardian, his long day in the White Chamber,
Lake Bai and the singsongers on the boat, the synthesizer and the sisi warbling
the melody "This Dewdrop World."

For that instant he could have joined Crux himself. Then he thought of Dzhun and
he was paralyzed by indecision. As he hesitated, Dyeva turned to face him
squarely and he heard the soft sound Phut! as she shot him through her coat.

He felt -- not pain, but an incredible, crushing pressure in his midsection. His
upper body flew backward, almost separated from the rest of him and the back of
his head struck the cold hard snowy ground. A last mechanical contraction of his
right hand fired his pistol, sent the bullet up, up into the darkening overcast
like a tiny missile. His left squeezed the red button, meaning: my job is
finished, I have succeeded. Bring me home.

Dyeva turned and hastened away, boots squeaking in the fresh snow. People were
gawking at the wedding party and almost a minute passed before she heard, by now
far behind her, a single scream. She would never know that the reason was not
only the sight of a dead man lying horribly mutilated in the snow, but the fact
that, even as someone spotted him, he disappeared, evaporated into the gathering
darkness. Yama had kept his word.

She plunged into the crowd before the Duma building, her mind running now on the
scheduled arrival of the President and his cabinet for a debate on the Mongolian
situation. Running also on the fact that such schedules were almost never kept.
Running on the fact that she still had fifteen bullets, and that any one would
be enough. Running on the importance of stopping this Minister Destruction that
she had been hearing people on Ganesh curse since her childhood -- the man who
had given the order that ended their world.

No, she didn't believe in God any longer. But she had had to try once more to
recapture her faith in the Cathedral of the Annunciation. Who could have
imagined that she'd ever have a chance to pray there, in a building long since
vaporized and its atoms embedded deep in the Kremlin Shield?

Well, the experiment had failed; she could not recapture her own faith, but she
would insure that other people kept theirs. She would sacrifice herself as
Christ had for the sins of the world. There was no heaven at the end of it, but
this was how she wanted to die.

She squeezed herself through the crowd, murmuring apologies in her strangely
accented Russian, a kind of Russian that wouldn't be invented, ever, if she
could manage it. She wondered if her parents would still be born and meet and
have a child and call it Maria. No, too unlikely; if they lived at all, they
would meet other people and marry them. Everything would be different. She felt
a strange, dark satisfaction in thinking that she would not merely die here in
the Kremlin; in some sense, she would never have existed at all.

She had reached the front of the crowd, and stood pressed behind a bulky
policeman. Fortunately, when the first gleaming limousine turned in through the
Gate of the Savior and slid to a stop before the Duma, the policeman moved a
little to get a good view of the notables. On the far side of the car, President
Rostoff emerged and turned to wave at the crowd. On this side, a young and
apparently nervous security man emerged and glanced briefly at Dyeva's face.
Other security men appeared too, jumping from cars, stepping briskly through the
snow.

Rostoff, instead of going inside, crossed behind his own car and came to the
crowd, reaching out to shake hands. People were cheering, arms reaching out and
waving like limbs at the edge of a forest in a windstorm. From a second
limousine, Razumovsky approached, also smiling, but keeping a few steps back to
avoid upstaging the President. Dyeva shifted the pistol in the deep pocket of
her coat and prepared to fire.

Then a gaggle of odd-looking people ran up, carrying primitive cameras of some
sort. A sudden spotlight flashed on the crowd and Dyeva was blinded by the
light. The long barrel of the impact pistol slipped through the hole in her coat
made by her last shot. Shielding her eyes, she aimed as well as she could at
Razumovsky. The little sound Phut! vanished in the roar of the crowd.

But the young security man had spotted the gleam of metal, and without the
slightest hesitation he shoved the President the wrong way, into the path of the
exploding bullet. Suddenly half of Rostoff's large body was gone, shredded.

Unaware of the disaster, the security man raised his own right hand, which was
holding the newest M91K police automatic, 7.8 mm and loaded with superteflon
hollowpoints. The first of six bullets hit Dyeva. They were not impact ammo, but
they were sufficient.

She toppled backward, firing a last round that skated upward and blew a
meter-wide hole in the marble facing of the new Duma building. The chips were
still flying as she hit the snow, feeling nothing but a strange lightness as if
she had become a woman of air that would shortly disperse. She looked up into
the faces of the security man and Minister Razumovsky as the two bent over her.

But you're supposed to be dead, she thought. And died.

Razumovsky glared down at her Tartar face.

"The goddamn Chinese did this!" he roared, and turned away.

Half a dozen people in the crowd were down, bleeding and crying for help,
because the young security man and the others who had rushed to help him had
managed to hit not only Dyeva but everyone near her as well. Razumovsky ignored
all that, the screams, the confusion. Roughly he shook off the hands trying to
drag him this way or that way to safety. Alone of them all, he knew exactly what
he wanted to do.

He plunged into the President's armored limousine and shouted to the driver,
"Get me out of here!"

While the driver, weeping and blinded by tears and lights, tried to find the
gate, tried to force a way through the crowd without killing anybody else,
Razumovsky took a key from around his neck and drove it into a lock in the back
of the front seat. A small steel door fell open and he pulled out a red
telephone.

"Razumovsky here!" he roared. "Chinese agents have wounded the President! I
relay to you his exact words: 'We are at war! You will launch now!' Codeword:
Ivan the Terrible."

He sank back on the upholstery and passed a shaking hand over his squashed-frog
face. At least in dying the glupetz Rostoff had inadvertently chosen the right
policy -- for a change. Had he lived, who could tell what might have happened?

"Goddamn," said Oleary. "I still can't believe he managed it, all alone like
that."

The Secret Committee had assembled to hear Yama's final report on Stef's mission
to the past. Xian, Ugaitish, Hrka, Oleary -- they were all there but Kathmann.
Except for Xian -- who already knew the story -- the fromazhi were leaning
breathlessly over the gilt Martian table, listening to the story of how their
world had been saved.

"Well, here's the evidence," said Yama. "First, we recover Stef's body, dead,
obviously shot by a modern weapon, oke? His own gun has been fired once. The
world we live in does not vanish, but on the contrary looks as solid as ever, at
least to me. Just to eliminate any doubts about what happened, we use the
wormholer one more time. We pull back from Moscow, 360th day of 2091, an air
sample which is full of intensely radioactive dust and ice particles.

"Now I ask you, Honored Grandees. What can we conclude, except that Stef and
Dyeva killed each other, that with his last gasp, so to speak, he signaled us to
recover him because his job was done, and that the Time of Troubles proceeded to
happen on schedule?"

Xian turned to Yang, standing in the shadows, deference in every line of his
big, weak body. "What do you think, Honored Professor?"

"I agree. The evidence is absolutely irrefutable, and I have spent my whole life
evaluating evidence."

"Well, I guess we have to accept it," fretted Oleary. He still hoped to take
back Stef's million, but he could see that it would be difficult now.

"I am obliged to add," Yama continued, "that a sealed envelope was found on
Steffen's body containing a note to Solar System Controller Xian."

He glanced at her and she nodded.

"It reads as follows," said Yama, spreading a copy on the arm of the shozit.

Facing death, Dyeva states that Kathmann cooperated in the theft of the
wormholer. He expected to win promotion by crushing the conspiracy afterward,
but Crux was too clever for him. Ever since, he has been desperately trying to
wipe out those few who know of his treason.
Steffens Aleksandr

The fromazhi drew a deep collective breath.

"Is it possible?" demanded Ugaitish. "The head of Earth Security? What could he
hope to gain from assisting a conspiracy, then destroying it?"

"He told me once," said Yama, who had been waiting for this moment for many
years, "that he dreamed of being Solar System Controller."

"Honored grandees," said Xian, "you must know that at first I, too, found this
accusation hard to believe. But the evidence is great. The paper, ink and
handwriting prove that Steffens wrote this note. In his own defense, Kathmann
made the claim that Steffens was seeking revenge because he had been tortured.
But Kathmann's own record of Steffens's interrogation certifies that the
questioning was 'exceptionally gentle.' This was a troubling contradiction.

"We all know that Kathmann, in spite of his many virtues, was too zealous, too
ambitious. I ordered him to bring me the scientist who stole the wormholer for
questioning. The man had been beheaded. That seemed an extremely suspicious
circumstance to me. Was Kathmann trying to ensure his silence? All the builders
of the wormholer were also dead. I questioned the only two Crux prisoners who
were still alive, but they were mere children and knew nothing -- which was
probably why they had kept their heads.

"In the end, to resolve the matter I ordered Kathmann into the White Chamber.
With the needles in his spine, he made a full confession. Every statement made
by Steffens in this note is true. Kathmann knew too many state secrets to be
permitted to live, and so I had him beheaded."

She looked around at the others, as if waiting for a challenge. Yams smiled a
little. Admiral Hrka remarked that he had never liked the fellow. Aside from
that, Kathmann's harsh fate produced no comment whatever.

"Is there any other business, then?" asked Xian, preparing to end the meeting.

Yang had been waiting for this moment to step forward from the shadows. "Now
that Crux is finished, Honored Grandees," he said smoothly, "I would suggest
going public with the story and making Steffens a hero.

"The heroes we honor all lived a long time ago; they are almost mythic figures
-- indeed, some of them, like the Yellow Emperor, are entirely myths. But here
we have a hero of today, one that people can identify with, one who brings the
glory and splendor of the present world order home to the common man. It's true,
of course," he added, "that certain aspects of Steffens's life will have to be
edited for public consumption. But the same could be said of any other hero of
history."

"Superb," cried Xian at once, ending any argument before it began. Raising a
tiny, thin hand that looked with its many rings like a jeweled spider, she
declared: "Steffens will be buried with full honors. Someone with talent will
write his biography and Yang will sign it. Scenes from his life will be enacted
on every mashina. A great tomb will be built --"

"Honored Solar System Controller," muttered Yams, "we've already cremated the
body and disposed of the ashes."

"What difference does that make? Do you suppose Genghis Khan sleeps in what we
call his grave? Now, bistra, bistra! -- quick, quick! Get a move on. Remember
that heroes are made, not born."

Professor Yang, smiling over the adoption of his idea, left the cabinet room
with Yama.

"In some ways," he remarked, "the most intriguing supposition is that the world
we live in has always been the consequence of the Crux conspiracy and its
outcome. Wouldn't it be interesting, Honored Colonel, if time is, so to speak,
absolutely relative -- if this episode has been embedded in the past ever since
2091, and all our world is the long-term result of what, from our point of view,
has only just happened?"

Yama, hurrying to carry out Xian's order, paused long enough to stare at Yang.

"What complete nonsense," he growled.

Pending appointment of a replacement for Kathmann, Yama was combining Earth
Central duties with his own. Most of his day was taken up with Stef in one way
or another. Yama launched the process of glorification, then carried out a more
personal duty: as he'd once promised Stef, he ordered the release of Iris and
Ananda from the White Chamber. He did not see the young people, and so never
knew that their brief stay beneath the Palace of Justice had turned their hair
the same color as the tiled walls of their cells.

Weary and ready to go home, Yama was thinking of Hariko and his children when a
piece of copy containing two lines of script was hand-delivered to his desk.
Thus he learned that the woman Lata, last survivor of Crux on earth, had been
tracked down at a village near Karakorum. She had committed suicide before the
polizi and the Darksiders arrived and had left this note.

"It is all over," she wrote, "and I know it. This world endures as if protected
by a god. But what sort of god would protect this world?"

Yama slid the paper into a port on his mashina.

"Copy, file, destroy," he said.

On the next Great Genghis Day, Government of the Universe Place was crowded with
people. From every flagpole hung nine white faux yaktails in honor of the famous
Unifier of Humankind. But the event of the day was not honoring Genghis --
though President Mobutu burned incense on his grave -- but the dedication of
Stef's memorial.

As the veil over the statue fell, Dzhun and Selina stood together looking at an
idealized Stef striding ever forward, holding an impact pistol in one hand and a
globe symbolizing the world order in the other.

Since Dzhun was only semiliterate, Selina read the epitaph that Yang had
composed: "Like the Great Khan in Courage and Like Jesus in Self-Sacrifice."

"Yang's been made a grandee, you know," Dzhun said. "They needed somebody to
purge subversives from the University, and he just dropped into the slot. We're
lucky to have him for a customer."

She had used the million Stef had left her, not to buy a cottage or get an
education, but to open her own brothel. She called it House of Timeless Love.
With clever Selina to manage it -- and to serve a few select customers, such as
the now famous, rich and powerful Yang -- it had rapidly become the most popular
of the newer houses, with capacity crowds every night.

Selina smiled down at her friend and employer.

"Anyway, the statue's nice. Of course he never walked stiff-legged like that.
Stef just lounged around."

"I think I preferred him as he was," mused Dzhun. "Alive."

"You loved him, didn't you?"

"I guess so. I really don't know much about love. I know that I love you."

She and Selina had been sleeping together for years. Sometimes they made love,
but sex wasn't really the point. After the night's work was done and all the
customers were gone, they lay together for comfort, holding each other close.

"Can I ask you something, Dzhun?"

"Anything. Almost anything."

"How'd you get Stef to leave you all that money? Was it just telling him that
you had a senator on the string?"

"That was part of it. But also I made up a sad story about myself and fed it to
him. You know, in spite of everything he was sentimental. That's why he was
thrown out of the Security Forces. I was working for the polizi then, keeping
them informed about my customers. When I reported that Stef was working on an
important secret project, I got a bonus. Kathmann himself told me about Stef's
weakness," said Dzhun proudly. "Even way back then I had powerful friends,
Selina."

"Tu nespravimy, Dzhun," said her friend, smiling and shaking her head. "You're
incorrigible."

"What's that word mean?"

Selina told her. Dzhun smiled; she liked the sound of it.

"Well, honey, if you ask me, we live in an incorrigible world."