Spandar Herum Mand
Ecapt/Nebcra
- 1.3E10

I Am That One

        We don't know if our Life began on a planet, in Space itself, or somewhere we cannot even imagine. All we can be sure of is that it began its planetary phase on one or another of those worlds spawned by most A and F class stars as a part of their formation - and their deaths; their rocky cores can only be produced by the heavy elements spewed out by those very same stars when they nova. Indeed, that is the price of our gift of life, we meet a grisly end if we fail to evolve quickly enough to reach Space. We lost nearly twenty percent of our worlds that way before the Torsyne Advent.

        Unlike the planets in the outer orbits of our stars, those occupying the inner ones possessed temperatures high enough to cause their hydrogen and helium to boil off into Space. The gases that remained were mostly methane, ammonia, and water vapor, with traces of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and nitrogen. With gravitational fields that on some worlds exceeded 10g at the solid surface, the pressures of the planetary gases on this, in combination with the vigorous electrical and photochemical activity, turned their lower layers into an oleaginous liquid thousands of meters deep. But it did not stay in contact with that surface for long, water poured out through fissures in the rock to form oceans that could themselves be thousands of meters deep. There were therefore very few worlds and very few places on them where bare rock pierced through, only the peaks of the very highest undersea mountains.

        Life on these worlds initially based itself on a number of genetic molecules, but the Ijusta one so familiar to us today quickly predominated once it evolved. With codons based on groups of four nucleotides, the silasands of its resulting cells could select from a range of over eighty carnoaprennas to build their proseils. And they could build quickly, which was just as well. Since Evolution is itself blind, it has go down many blind corridors in a random maze before it finds one that leads to the next level of Life's curious structure. Yet while each such level is also a random maze, they all have roughly the same shape on each world, are usually reached in the same order, and together have the same rough time limit for completion, around 200 million years from the first single-celled life-form.

        The life Ijusta produced almost universally began by splitting itself into two mutually dependent Kingdoms; stationary Plants that produced nitrogen through photosynthesis, and motile Animals that used this to manufacture the cyanogen the Plants needed.

        The evolution of this life then often mistook speed for vigor to the point where it risked choking itself off. This was because one or another of the varieties of Plant life, or `saeconu' as we would come to call it, formed strands that grew just below the surface of the Oil Ocean. The thickness of the oil however did not prevent it from being driven by the hundreds of kilometer an hour winds to form waves several tens of meters high. But as the strands of saeconu grew and thickened, the surface stiffened. This allowed the strands to thicken even more and mat together, making the surface quite immovable except for the rising and falling of tides on those worlds with sufficiently large moons. Eventually the mats grew thick and tough enough to form a single solid floating sheet covering each entire world, though sometimes not at the poles. Although their heavy atmospheres ensured that the temperature differences between polar and equatorial regions were no more than a few degrees, this was still sometimes sufficient to deter growth there.

        Where it did grow, the saeconu did not stop at providing a flat surface. Since it was able to keep feeding itself by drawing up the oil on which it floated through capillary action, it remained alive throughout its fibrous bulk. It therefore kept on growing and expanding, buckling into hills and valleys like a sintui outgrowing some vast spherical partan dish. As a result these folds could grow into hills and valleys of up to a thousand meters in height or depth. Paraffin `rains' then began to fall on their lee sides to bring these worlds their first true weather.

        Many of the valleys were correspondingly deep enough to descend well into the Oil Ocean. The oil then seeped through to create lakes, often very large ones since capillary action would draw yet more oil through to raise their surfaces above that of the oil below. Although the saeconu itself would immediately try to cover and fill these lakes, so many nutrients had been filtered out of the oil that a thin surface layer was often all it could achieve. In those places where a fold was so deep it reached the Water Ocean, the saeconu died, though it still soaked up the water's minerals in large quantities. This not only affected the way the saeconu above and the various other Plants it contained grew and formed, it also changed its basic yellow coloration.

        The lakes became the primary sites at which animal life evolved. Animals and the other plants had already evolved a variety of forms within the oil, but they had the tough barrier of gravity to cross to climb into the saeconu let alone onto it. Those that reached the lakes instead were able to use them as a half-way stage, for their oil was thinner and less supportive. The animals began by shrinking the cells of which they were made to give them and themselves sufficient structural strength. Those with internal skeletons of any kind had to forgo them for external monocoque ones with internal partitions to minimize movement of their vital organs. These cases also had to be flat and wide with no appendages except the many legs required to move them, often many more than the ten we have today. Muscles of course also had to become at least ten times stronger. Few animals therefore ever flew, and those that did were not self-powered, but developed lifting-body forms that put them at the random mercies of the wind.

        The plants also had to overcome similar problems, plus special ones of their own. Most became low, flat, and so closely brachiated that they presented a near-solid surface to the world. This provided for both their physical support and the essential exchange of gasses needed for their life.

        With the generally orange and deep red colorations of those Plants, the blues and purples of the Animals, and the yellows of the saeconu itself, our worlds acquired for that first time that exquisite beauty of coloration those of us who spent most of our time in Space prior to the Advent appreciated so much when we returned to them.

        Then, finally, that extraordinary pincer-eye-brain evolutionary loop happened to one of those little blue animals on many of those worlds to produce us, the Hysadder. Our intelligence would not help us with everything, especially our population growth. In that respect we were no better than the saeconu that supported us. Once a world became covered in hundreds of trillions of individuals, each capable of producing ten offspring in a lifetime, then even accident and disease could not prevent the buildup of a reproductive momentum that doubled our numbers every sulyet.

        Our first solution, if one could call it a solution, was that of warfare. This became the primary driving force behind the cultural evolution of virtually all Hysaddic races, at least those known to have survived. As most races learn however, warfare is most effectively conducted not when individual fights individual, but when they group together to fight other groups. Within each group there must therefore be a strong sense of common cause, and it was upon this that the more benevolent Hysadden emotions developed. These, working in a complementary way with our original baser instincts, led us in turn to those things which define a culture, from ethics to entertainment. Then, in that same hard trial and error way in which a mind must apparently move from passionate idealism to pragmatic maturity, our primitive lennenes of myth and legend were cut away and replaced with the more solid structures of science and technology.

        That lead us in turn to the second solution to our population problem. It was the same in fact as the one the saeconu had adopted: grow upwards. We did, and we spread to all the other worlds we could find that were suitable for our kind. We took where we could only those worlds where life had not yet evolved, or was clearly at its earliest stages of evolution. Those days of our Great Expansion were filled with peace and delight; we had much to discover, and we could range as far and as wide as we pleased.

        Then came the cursed Nessiks, the Sumal Wars, and the third and apparently final solution to our problems, the Torsyne. They cost us our freedom to live as we pleased and pay the fair and reasonable price for it to which we had always been accustomed.

        And now, to the very best of my knowledge, I am the last Hysadder to have lived in those free times, during which I was a simple trader in antique timepieces. After the Torsyne Advent, like most everybody else, I did nothing. I have only been busy again during these last few weeks of my life trying through the Iskurahi to locate others who knew those free and wondrous times. But there really appears to be nobody else left.

        Now it will soon by my turn to leave, when my case finally splits open and spills my life into the kavuma in which I now lie. That is what I have chosen, the good old fashioned free way. At least they have allowed me that. So in the meantime, farewell, and may you find a solution to your new problems and a better use for your freedom than we made of ours.

        If you ever win it back.
 

Lindrisirpednu
Sunda/Far Pranrana/Iskurahi
- 3.9E6

Far Pranrana

        The cultural evolution of my World's people was very unusual compared to that of most Worlds. We discovered all the right things in all the right order, rather like those very few children whose progress towards adulthood seems so smooth and certain one cannot imagine anything standing in their way. And that was because, like most such children, we had a good start. The philosophical and scientific discoveries of our immediate predecessors were not only solid foundations on which to build, the administrative and engineering skills we also developed for ourselves enabled us to develop that vital feedback relationship between science and technology without which neither is possible. We therefore bypassed the adolescent `dark ages' most Worlds undergo; what can often take several thousand years took barely three hundred on Far Pranrana.

        We were also apparently eloquent communicators, for Science soon came to be accepted as being the most demonstrably effective way of describing Fundamental Reality by all of Far Pranrana's cultures and religions except the most primitive. Yet although Science may have replaced all our Creation Myths and other Special Explanations, the original superstructures of tradition, custom and ritual remained. A person was therefore able to feel he was still in touch with what Science itself reassured him would always remain ultimately inexplicable. Indeed, the Far Pranranan interpretation of Science as showing `how Reality is made, not who made it' was as important to our new worldwide culture as Science itself.

        However the price we would soon pay for this precociously early accord between mind, body and soul would turn out to be as strange and unique as our World itself. Perhaps if Far Pranrana had followed the more conventionally erratic way of things and undergone the upheavals and cataclysms most Worlds apparently must as a part of their development, it might have survived what was to come.

        Our Contact went well enough, indeed we found it enlightening. Unlike most Worlds, we had no feeling that the Scientific ground had been cut from under our feet. We not only saw the Torsyne as the only logical outcome of Organic Life's experiments with intelligent machines, but the most fortunate that could possibly have occurred.

        Barely weeks afterwards however, before our initial euphoria had time to wear off, a long-dormant volcano near Far Pranrana's equator suddenly blew itself out of the sea in a cataclysm of far greater proportions than anything in our planet's history. The resulting dust particles swirled all over our upper atmosphere and dimmed our skies to the point where most of our staple crops failed. Before Contact of course this would have been disastrous for us. But now people all over the world were able to watch and enjoy the spectacular thunderstorms as they blew through the mellow, autumnal days that began and ended with the most spectacular dawns and sunsets any World has ever seen. But even that was not all, for a purely coincidental series of electrical outbursts on our Sun filled our nights with auroral arcs, streamers and curtains of rippling primary colors that reached well into the subtropical regions.

        We had never experienced anything like a Romantic Era at any time in our cultural history, our unusually early preoccupation with the more intellectually rigorous aspects of Human Reality had precluded any such self-indulgence. But now, with this deluge of meteorological narcotics, the last barriers preventing our people from uniting completely into One finally went down. There was no way we could prevent ourself as an entire World from being swept up in a hopelessly tumultuous storm of yearning, ecstatic Passion.

        This didn't mean however that we spent all our days languishing in narcotic bliss. Indeed, most of us were busier than we had ever been in our entire lives. We indulged ourselves in an orgy of reconstruction of the kind many Worlds do after Contact, but at such a vastly accelerated pace that some concern began to be felt in the Iskurahi which I had, as a government official, then become closely involved. We rid our World of all its rubbish and its environmental eyesores. We cleaned up our towns and cities, our sprawling industrial estates, the landscapes that had been despoiled by mining or slash-and-burn agriculture, our lakes, rivers and oceans. Not that there was really very much cleaning up to do, for having made our lives Voluntary at a far earlier stage than most Worlds, our entire population had at that time stabilized at one hundred million. But the task nevertheless seemed colossal and urgent, we even treated the vast numbers of Tinsla we `borrowed' as if these too would share our New World on equal terms when the work was done.

        Once our self-appointed task was complete, we just walked away from our old lives and moved into the once-remote coastal areas and natural parklands with little more than bedding, one or two of our favorite belongings, a Doanadar, and a Taurnal Dome for shelter. Many people in the tropics didn't even bother with those items, they left everything behind to live like self-styled `Children of Nature' in the Primeval Nursery. All that is except for our Pasovir-Equivalents; we were one of the very few Worlds to develop those independently. Not only could we look at those exquisite dawns and sunsets, we could actually fly into them, ducking and weaving round cumulus clouds or following along the lines of rich, golden cirrus like huge birds.

        All this began to raise even more questions for the Iskurahi, for what would happen when the dust literally settled and the atmospheric magic dispersed, as it eventually had to do?

        The answer began to dawn when people began to disappear. Only in ones and twos at first, then a few more at a time. They apparently just rose in the middle of the night and walked into our Terminal Facilities which had been a part of our culture almost as soon as it first arose. Perhaps that very same question had begun to gnaw away at the back of their minds too. Yet the people who remained went about their new lives as if none of this was happening, as if they didn't notice. Or chose not to.

        There was nothing the Iskurahi could do, even when those quiet disappearances became an accelerating trend. Had it been a physical disease epidemic that was causing my people to die in their thousands, then in their millions, they would have been able to intervene. But because of the Torsyne Population Restrictions they had to treat this `epidemic' as if all those people had individually decided to enter the Facilities of their own free will. Nor could they declare the World a Lalleldil Community because of that fine line between non-interference and justifiable cause. For we had no deranged leaders, secret meetings, exhortations, no persuasion of any kind. Nor were any off-worlders involved since our Emergence was still two decades away. There appeared to be nothing more than a simple tacit understanding passing from one person to another like some horrendous preternatural electricity.

        By the time that long magic autumn came to an end, nearly thirty percent of my World's entire population had vanished from its face. The effect on those who remained cut so deeply that a second rash of Terminations broke out, for a life in which close friends, relatives, even one's parents might suddenly not be there was just too painful. The cycle of loss and disappearance that built up quickly became self-sustaining, then finally even more all-consuming than the disaster which had triggered it.

        And now, after just five years, Far Pranrana has become beautifully clean, parklike, Romantic, empty. Only the Primitive Tribes and the Tinsla, charged with the task of maintaining it as we left it, remain.

        The Iskurahi have not Closed our World Out however. Nor will they do so, for there is nothing to Close Out. Most of the last survivors, numbering just 988 of us in all, happened to be on other Worlds at the time of its bewitching and were lucky enough not to be drawn back by it. We have now mostly drifted away in our ones and twos to other Worlds, never to return. Far Pranrana has now become one of those extremely rare Worlds in which, although its civilization had died, the World itself lives on.

        And the future? Perhaps one of the Primitive Tribes will arise to take our places, perhaps they will just die out. All I know is that I too will never go back. It is as if Far Pranrana has become some vast, exquisitely detailed engraving, and just as impossible to live in.
 

        "Please tell us, Eve," Quincey tested her again, grinning from ear to ear.

        "No," Eve replied firmly as if Quincey was a willful child whom she no longer felt obliged to indulge. "The Iskurahi asked me not to spoil your nice surprise. Now let me get on with some navigation will you? Otherwise you won't see it today."

        "Don't tease the spaceship, Quince," Barkworth gave her hand a squeeze.

        It was perhaps just as well that Eve's Transfer Point turned out to be only ten minutes away from Rock of Ages. It could just as easily have been on the other side of that strange World's sun, now swinging gently into position directly overhead at last in Eve's prosaic black star-filled `sky'.

        At last its center lay exactly on the line between Eve and her indeterminable destination unguessable light-years away. Then, with a cursory "we're on our way," Eve signaled the beginning of the fifteen to twenty minute-long Transfer that always fascinated her passengers even though she had taken them through it so many times over the nearly two years since they had first found her.

        They nestled down into the sofa so that they could watch more comfortably.

        At first the star's appearance didn't change. Then, slowly, it turned green. Then blue, then purple. The Doppler effect was shifting the visible light the star predominantly emitted down the spectrum as Eve picked up speed on her headlong plunge toward it. Suddenly, as this radiation moved into the invisible ultraviolet, it dimmed noticeably and began to vary wildly in size as the fainter infrared, microwave and radio frequencies it emitted from its variety of `surfaces' became visible as colors in their turn. The star began to look more and more like a reflection in a black plastic diffraction grating that was beginning to buckle as it melted...
 

        Quincey and Barkworth had first met Eve on the World of Far Pranrana, a World that had been the strangest and most beautiful they had visited in the few months they had then known each other.

        For a brief period in its history, it had been one of the strangest and most beautiful in the whole of Paradise. Then it became one of the most tragic.

        And indeed the landscape Quincey and Barkworth flew over using their Pasovirs on that fateful evening had looked like the engraving that World's last survivor had described. Lit by a summer moon half again as big as Earth's, the lakes, rivers, fields and forests rolling by beneath them gleamed as if crisply impressed into a heavy Watman's paper.

        They knew they probably shared the island, at least as big as Britain, with tens rather than hundreds of other people. Mass curiosity about Far Pranrana had vanished soon after its population. Visitors now either came across it purely by chance in the Teklanmeh, or heard about it from others as Quincey and Barkworth had during a Conversation. Some were drawn to it by its extraordinary story, but most came only to see what a world that had been frozen in time for so unimaginably long looked like. Still, no matter how few came, so long as they kept on coming there was no reason why Far Pranrana shouldn't continue as it was until the end of Paradise itself.

        Barkworth wondered what thoughts were going through Quincey's mind when he glanced the short distance across to her. But when she looked back at him she only smiled a quiet smile.

        " - Look..!" he heard through his Hilashel a few moments later. He saw her pointing towards a small wood lining the inside of a low horseshoe-shaped hill down towards their left.

        He then noticed the odd little building in the clearing at the bottom. Circular, perhaps ten meters across, it looked like an outdoor stage of some sort.

        "Let's go take a look."

        He lengthened his Pasovir's Taurnal Wings and reduced thrust so that he could glide. As he approached the building, he slipped into a wide, lazy circle round it so he could examine it more closely.

        He glanced around for Quincey expecting her to be right behind him, but instead she was for some reason heading straight for a landing on the highest part of the hill. Tightening his curve, he then straightened out and added thrust to gain altitude. Then, flaring for his own landing, he dropped down close behind her on what felt like a springy, neatly mown turf.

        "There's something funny about these trees," she explained, leading him towards the narrow graveled pathway she had also spotted. "I'm not even sure they're native to the planet. It's hard to tell with so many different varieties all close together."

        "Might originally have been a botanical garden of some sort." He shrugged his shoulders.

        "Could be..." she replied as she stepped onto the crunchy pathway. Tall, graceful Conifers mixed with broader leaf Deciduous in Local Equivalents of everything surrounded them as they made their way down the path's meandering turns; `Birch', `Oak', `Pine', `Redwood', `Magnolia', even a `Cherryblossom' in full flower. They could also see a few `tropical' varieties even though the island was in Far Pranrana's southern temperate zone; Barkworth saw a `Nikau Palm', a `Paw-paw', and another resembling a `Monkey-puzzle' that grew in only two dimensions. Yet as Quince had said, there was something odd about them, even in a Paradise of Biological Parallels.

        Then he had it. They seemed to have a strangely stylized appearance, as if they were huge bonsai versions of even huger trees. Perhaps it was only the light. Looking up, Barkworth felt somehow that he could have counted each and every one of their leaves silhouetted against that eerily numinous sky. He gave her his impressions.

        "You're absolutely right. How weird ..." She looked up yet again with renewed curiosity.

        An astringent freshness suddenly hit his nostrils as if to hint at an early morning dew.
 

        When they finally entered the clearing, the little building was still a surprise. Its columnaded stage looked as if one of Earth's ancient classical ballets might once have been performed on it. Yet although the building certainly looked ancient with its ivy-like vines climbing up its columns and even over the architrave towards the rear, it was not a ruin. The marble was neither chipped nor even stained.

        He laughed. "You know, I can see whole phalanxes of ballerinas sweeping in stage right to give the most heartrendingly Romantic performances of their lives."

        "Or a bunch of guys doing an all-blades-out Julius Caeser," Quincey laughed.

        "But it doesn't fit, does it? All the architecture on this planet - what there is of it - is straight out of Machu Pichu," Barkworth said as they reached the foot of its steps and looked all round it. "Since it's unique to this planet, I guess it has to look like something else somewhere else in Paradise. In this case it just happens to look Greco-Roman."

        Quincey and Barkworth climbed the steps up onto the stage and peered all round them. Barkworth was looking up beyond the architrave into the intensely brilliant galactic firmament of the sky when Quincey made that remark that would change their lives forever:

        "Such ghostly walls to embrace the souls of so many ghostly players..."

        A sound like the wind moaning through the trees came up all around them, and the building seemed to stir. Barkworth nearly laughed before the hairs stood up on the back of his neck.

        "Barkworth ..!"Quincey screamed as she rushed to fling her arms around him. Unfortunately she had forgotten they were still wearing their Pasovirs. She unclasped him quickly.

        "...Hello..." a voice whispered so faintly he wasn't sure he had heard it at all under Quincey's rapid breathing.

        " - Hello..." the voice was louder this time. "My name is Eeeeve..."

        The way she pronounced it was like the sound of the wind they had just heard.

        "Who - who are you?" Barkworth asked nervously, his eyes darting all over the building. Her voice - at least it sounded female - seemed to come from the air itself.

        "I am all around you. You are standing within me. I am a stage as you can see, but I am also something more..."

        The sound of the wind was stronger this time. Then Barkworth heard a stretching noise. He looked around and saw that the stems of the vines round her columns were whitening and binding as if being pulled out by the roots. When some finally broke away and began to slide down the columns, he and Quincey looked at each other in disbelief. The building was lifting.

        "I can go wherever you wish me to take you... " Eve said as she held herself suspended a meter or two in the air.

        "Deus Meo..." was all Quincey could say.

        "I have been here a very long time," Eve said as she let herself settle back to the ground again, "eighteen thousand of your years. And of all the visitors I have received in that time, you are the first to speak that phrase that has woken me. My friends commanded me to sleep until the time I heard it spoken again. They knew that that might be a very long time, but they felt I would have the best chance of waking amongst friends."

        "Who were your friends? - And how is that you can speak to us in English?" Quincey asked her. Barkworth could see a whole flood of questions begin to write themselves all over her face.

        "I can read Hilashels like all sentient machines," Eve replied, "even though I was not built by the Iskurahi. I saw that your Hilashels both contained English, so I drew the name `Eve' from them since it is the closest to my actual name. I assumed that like most people you would feel uncomfortable if I had no apparent sex, hence my female-sounding voice."

        "I see ..." Quincey said uncertainly.

        "As for your other question, I was originally built as a scientific research vessel on the World of Quinik. But when it Contacted just over a year later, my crew realized they would have to Declare me. And that meant that, under the Torsyne's edicts, my consciousness would almost certainly be Terminated. Besides, what use has the Universe for the vast numbers of spaceships New Worlds bring into it every day?"

        "I see..." Quincey said again.

        "So my crew and I decided it would be best to `lose' me rather than Declare me. They felt I might have a better chance of surviving. I flew with them to a very remote area of our own World where they put me to sleep.

        "Not long afterwards however, while she was out traveling the Worlds, one of my ex-crew came across a troupe of young actors whom she was able to interest in me. They negotiated with the Iskurahi for an Exemption which, having been able to demonstrate that they could use me to pursue their art, they were granted. They had the columnade you see around you added, plus certain other modifications to suit their needs."

        "You were very lucky," Barkworth said.

        "Better to be able to choose between Life and Death than neither," Eve replied. "As it turned out, we enjoyed each other's company immensely for nearly one hundred and seventy years, generation following generation. But nothing can last forever. People grow old, ideals grow old, the spirit grows old. Children eventually wish to create newer, younger worlds of their own. When they knew the last act of the last play had to come, my friends tried to find other troupes who might be interested in taking me, but sadly they could not. Most troupes use simple Flying Platforms and Cargo Nessiks where they bother taking anything with them at all. The few interested in spaceships had already `rescued' their own. So my company designed a `farewell play' around me incorporating the command that would send me to sleep. Then they chose this sad World on which to give the play its one and only performance. - May I show it to you?" she asked them then to their complete surprise. "It won't take long, I'll show it to you in a much abbreviated form. It may help us learn something about each other so that we can decide what you are going to do with me if you will have me."

        Barkworth looked at Quincey. There was no easy way to tell Eve that not only did neither of them have the remotest interest in live theater, they couldn't in fact stand it. The ultimate Deus Ex Machina of the Torsyne had turned all drama into melodrama in a Paradise of Superseded Purpose.

        Yet if they didn't work out something with her, she would be Terminated.

        Barkworth idly wondered how many other odd little buildings dotted round the Universe were really spaceships waiting to be rescued from oblivion.

        "Certainly," he answered for them both with an impending sense of fate.

        They looked round for a place to sit. Quincey pointed to one of the columns directly opposite the open section of Eve's circular architrave. They unclipped their Pasovirs and sat down against it, half leaning on it and each other.

        Several intense fans of light then suddenly sprang out into the darkness from the architrave at odd angles like a luminous crown of thorns. Yet they somehow cut off in mid-air without actually illuminating anything. The trees looked just the same...

        But then Barkworth realized that wasn't quite true. Their branches seemed to be moving more rapidly in the breeze...

        And the sun was coming up a lot earlier than it was supposed to from the wrong side of the sky.

        He looked at Quincey.

        "I think she's taking us back into time," she whispered into his ear. "She must have kept her eyes open - or whatever she uses - for the entire eighteen thousand years."

        That must have been it. Eve had surrounded herself with a white Taurnal Sphere, and was actually projecting an image of the surrounding tree-scape on it in reversed speeded-up motion.

        This motion began to quicken as night gave way to previous day. Clouds poofed across the sky to the muted roar of a distant wind. A lone figure zig-zagged through the trees to the right of them, it moved too fast to tell whether it was man or Angel. Something small scuttled across the clearing, causing Quincey to jump and go "Uh!" The rest of the `day' passed without further event however as did the `night' before it.

        The next day went by too quickly to be sure anything happened at all. A pair of parallel grey lines briefly divided a pure white sky, a sheet of lightning then appeared to light it up.

        Barkworth looked hard to try and find the joins between the images, but they simply weren't to be seen. Nor could he see their bottom edge. But then he didn't know quite where to look.

        Day and night now followed each other so quickly they became little more than a stroboscopic blur. Finally they merged into a dim half-light.

        But Eve was performing some trick with the trees. Their outlines were not blurred as one might expect, but perfectly crisp and in focus.

        And some of those trees were shrinking.

        Then, miraculously, their lifecycles became as visible as if they were animals except that they were `born' by suddenly popping into existence full grown and `dying' by shrinking into the ground. Nor did their being stationary prevent them from competing with each other for the sunlight as if it was manna from heaven. They shut each other out, invaded each other's territory, changed their forms, even adapted their behaviors to each other even though their time was running in reverse. Nor were the taller, statelier trees above the conflict, they merely conducted their wars with superior grace and style.

        The island might have been overrun had it not been for the invisible Tinsla bars of that arboreal zoo.

        Finally all the trees turned into saplings and began to shrink into the ground as the wind returned. The natural amphitheater was revealed for what it was. Once more the passing years again became passing days, then passing hours until a fine, clear `dawn' arrived almost at its normal speed. The clean, fresh grass took on a crushed, matted appearance.

        This was clearly to be The Day.

        A Tinsla now flew in backwards to land half way up the hill directly in front of Eve's stage. He quickly erected the Nessik he carried on his back, other Tinsla then poured through it. Running backwards round the amphitheater with impossible elegance, they laid out their square Disposal Nessiks, then quickly spread out all the rubbish and debris these tossed into their hands ready for the people to arrive. When they finished this task, they replaced the Disposal Nessiks with Transport Nessiks evenly spaced out round the brow of the hill.

        People then immediately started streaming backwards through these in unusually subdued multitudes wearing much crumpled clothing in all the styles of Paradise. Glimpses of exotic night or daytime backgrounds flickered behind them as they passed through. Parents performed amazing feats of coordination as they `pushed' their children in front of them and `pulled' their Doanadars behind on their built-in Pasovirs, often with blankets and picnic items of all sorts piled precariously on them. Many more people glided in from all directions via their Pasovirs, often in large groups; presumably they had decided to take a quick look around this world that seemed designed for final performances. They considerately made their graceful reverse landings on the perimeter of the crowd as it grew larger and increasingly more somber.

        Suddenly, with belongings left behind in untidy heaps, the crowd compressed itself into a solid mass of what Barkworth estimated to be about a thousand people. Then, unnervingly, they all turned and faced as one towards he and Quincey before sitting down to become the most grief-stricken audience they had ever seen.

        Their viewpoint then slowly drew back when, suddenly, it was cut off by an immense black wall. Then, just as suddenly, the wall became a pure white one. Their viewpoint continued to draw back until it dawned on them that they were in fact looking at an immense white Taurnal Sphere, though it was flattened at its base as if it were a huge water droplet. It had a marvelously pearl-like aspect to it near the top where the Surface making it up obviously thinned. Quincey visibly started when she realized as Barkworth then did that it surrounded Eve herself, their viewpoint had also been switched through a hundred and eighty degrees. This then drew back further over the heads of the audience before coming to rest about half-way, Barkworth estimated, up the side of the hill.

        It had also jumped back in time, for that audience now seemed bright and cheerful. The buzz of conversation, in spite of the fact that it must have been made up of hundreds of different languages, also somehow sounded more natural before it hushed and died.

        The `curtain' had fallen with a Black Sphere. It was now evidently about to rise with a White One, and time would now move forward rather than backward.

        A series of high-pitched trills, eerily like a captain being piped aboard his ship, then sounded..

        "We are the Lapedla Demsa..."

        The Sphere then slowly began to clear except for a misty-looking semicircular segment behind Eve reaching almost as high as her columns. On this she projected a thin stylized sea, probably all the broad daylight would allow, divided by the wake of her `passage' through it. The universal sounds of wind, wave and straining rigging could be heard, along with the occasional flap of sail and the calling of her `crew'.

        At center rear of the stage, what appeared to be a prematurely aged man lay in an ancient-looking wooden bed tilted up slightly so that one could see his face. The quilts that covered him were made from hexagonal patches of fur from what must have been a menagerie of animals. The hat he wore was also fur, though of a richer, glossier quality. It concealed his hair except for a curly gray tuft that sprang out above his right eyebrow. His darker beard fanned out from his chin until it was nearly half a meter wide, its bottom edge then cut off as straight as a ruler. The image of a Russian Patriarch would have been complete, even down to the Eisenstein eyes, except that his face was that of an Australian aboriginal.

        The stage around the old man was ringed with sculptured figures, all facing in his direction. The largest and most brightly colored were at either side of the head of his bed, they then progressed downwards in size and coloration until the very smallest, little more than ten centimeters high, sat at the front of the stage crudely fashioned in unfired clay. The short pedestals they stood on bore lettering which Barkworth knew to be in Aural Jemma but that was about all; the combination of distance and his somewhat limited knowledge of the language made it impossible for him to make out what they said.

        If they were meant to be labels however, the animals they referred to could not have evolved on any of the Human Worlds. Four-footed carnivorous mammals have to be built for strength and speed, no such environment can produce a cheetah with a rear half like a woolly yak. Nor can it conjure into existence an eagle-like bird in burnished bronze and brass the size of a man, yet with the brilliantly colored tail of a cockatoo. Or a guinea pig with the wings of a bumble bee and a long barbed tail that one of the miniature figurines at the front of the stage took the form off.

        For sheer grotesqueness the prize had to go to the `woman' standing to the left of the old man's bedhead itself. Fair skinned and doe-eyed, her head and the front of her upper torso were beautiful in a maturely middle-aged way, in fact she had the most enormous breasts Barkworth had ever seen. But her long black hair parted over a back that looked more like a sickening hump of rotting vegetable flesh covered in running putrescent sores. The lower half of her body was no less repulsive, it was lumpy and deformed, her skin seemed to peel off under its loose mats of gray hair as he watched. She did have one normal-looking leg, but that grew as a deformity out of the rear thigh of one of the two positively gangrenous shanks she stood on.

        The old man introduced himself as Bainaod. He described how he had driven himself night and day to build his Ark, "for I knew a flood was coming to my world..."

        As he talked, a young man wearing nothing more than a faded pink `dhoti' stepped onto the stage from behind the bedhead. This was clearly Bainaod as a young man. He quickly moved forward to mime climbing under something huge lying across the front of the stage and about a meter above it; Barkworth took this to be the Ark. Bainaod-the-younger now examined it with great care as he moved along it in a half-crouch. Climbing out again, he walked across to an imaginary pile of planks, then slid the end of the top one out to the accompaniment of the appropriate sound effects. He picked it up in its middle, swung it round, crouched again, then placed it in position, adjusting it slightly first this way then that. Holding it there with the side of his balled fist, he reached for a nail from a pouch on his belt, placed it between his lips, then reached for another. He held this to the timber between the thumb and forefinger of his balled fist, then reached for his `hammer'. Pounding the nail in to the sound of perfectly aimed hammer strokes, he then took the second nail from between his lips and pounded that in just below it. He went to the left hand end of the plank, hammered that into place, then did the same with the right. Picking up a `saw', he then trimmed off the excess which fell to the ground with a wooden clatter.

        "...But it would be no ordinary flood," Bainaod-the-Elder continued. "This flood would drown all my world's people in a cold, knowing tide of Analysis that would pretend to resolve all conflicts, soothe all passions, bring peace to the unpeaceful, and give hope to those without hope..."

        Bainaod stepped back to admire his handiwork. He looked up at it and along it from all angles. He moved forward again to knock on the newly-installed plank as if to test its soundness; a smile of satisfaction spread across his face at the solid response that came back. Then, looking up with just a trace of overfussy concern on his face, he rubbed his hand over what `felt' like a rough spot. But he had hardly completed the stroke when his feet started hopping up and down as if of their own accord. He looked down in alarm, then all around him. The sound of a seeping gurgling tide of water could be heard. He then `sploshed' his way off stage via the other side of the bedhead.

        "...I completed my Ark with barely enough time to spare before the waters flowed like a river into my yard and lifted my craft from its cradle," Bainoad continued to the sound of trickles turning into torrents, timbers straining, and pulleys running furiously in their blocks. Canvas flapped and men shouted.

        A faint orange glow then fell on Bainaod-the-Elder.

        "I then set sail around the world seeking out all the Paradoxes I could find. I herded them aboard in their customarily intertwined pairs, from the big fundamental ones like Love and Hate, Life and Death itself," he pointed to them either side of his bedhead, Barkworth now knew how that macabre `woman' fitted into the scheme of things, "to small subtle ones like `Compassionate Indifference' and `Arrogant Humility'." Bainaod swept his arm round in front of him to indicate the smaller figures at the front of the stage.

        "I saw the first signs that the flood was coming when people began to enquire too closely into the social institutions they had evolved over the centuries to help them survive against the great Paradox of Existence itself," he said as a pair of Burmese-looking dancers with long curly hair tied in bushy ponytails swept onto the stage from behind him. They were dressed in white billowy pantaloons and square knitted ponchos with all sorts of concentric designs in brilliant reds, greens, yellows and blues. Their dance was even more astonishing, for it bore an amazing resemblance to American 1950's Jive even though it was to the faint background dop,dop, dop-dop-dop of a `Tongan Drum'.

        "...They Analyzed them to see how they Functioned, and when they found that so much seemed to be no more than useless custom and tradition, they pared this all away and rebuilt what was left into a single highly efficient Social Machine that catered to their every need..."

        Two more dancers then appeared as a deep base drum joined the Tongan Drums, it pounded away underneath them like some vast beating heart. Wearing one piece suits which, apart from Mondrianesque panels over the chest in mauves, umbers and greens, were of plain gray serge, the new couple danced what looked like a South American tango in a jerky `on-off' way rather like primitive robots.

        The first two dancers, pausing to admire them, began to try the dance for themselves.

        "...The people were wildly enthusiastic at first, but slowly their lives began to lose the warmth and color they had treasured so much. Even emotion began to wither and die. More and more people would find neither Love nor Hate, just `intense emotional interdependency' and `extreme relational incompatibility'. There would no longer even be Life and Death, just a `birthing process' leading to a `maintenance of physical and social viability' that eventually ended in the `cessation of all vital function'."

        "I could not see an easy way back..." Bainaod said as the rhythm acquired a harsh electronic quality and a constant high-pitched buzz like that of a mosquito. A new pair of dancers then appeared. They made no attempt to dance together, but moved much as a pair of gymnasts performing a set of body-loosening routines prior to their performance. Hooded leotards in richly brocaded black silk covered them from head to toe, even their faces had been blackened so that the join between flesh and fabric was hard to see.

        The other dancers immediately began to copy them.

        Then, suddenly, all six became locked into a kind of slow-motion contrapuntal synchrony.

        "...The people had all but forgotten how to conduct the ways of life that their Culture and Tradition had been the essence of. Lacking the humanity it had given them, they could do no more than manipulate each other according to the `discoveries' of Analysis and thereby become the organic machines that these had showed them `in reality' to be. From then on nothing seemed to matter much any more. What was the point of struggling to live when criminality was just as acceptable a way of life when the motives behind it were Analyzed? How could one express oneself artistically in a straightjacket of words and images that had become `tokens' and `symbols'? What thoughts could be shared when all that could be said sounded as if it had all been said before..."

        Suddenly the drums stopped to leave only the mosquito-like buzzing. One of the new dancers then broke off and tried to homosexually rape one of the first dancers so brutally Barkworth had to avert his eyes, he saw Quincey wince. The other dancers looked on in horror with mouths theatrically agape and eyes wide open in soundless fear. They then ran offstage, some straight into the diorama, others into the trees. For a split second Barkworth thought the scene wasn't been in the script. In the confusion the victim managed to wriggle free from his attacker and, pursued by him, ran down the steps towards the audience to the accompaniment of screams of alarm from the front three rows. He veered off to the right and on up the hill, vigorously pursued by his obviously unsatiated attacker.

        A cold blue spot then fell on the old man, now alone once more.

        "...Weeks and months and now, finally, a year have passed, and my rushing to ready my Ark in time have at last caught up with me," he gestured at his frail-looking form under the bedclothes with his upturned hand. "But now the time has come to see what else Analysis has done to my World. Which pair of eyes can I send out into it that will see for me what I can no longer go and see for myself?"

        He looked round at his menagerie of Paradoxes. His eyes were immediately drawn to the eagle-cockatoo. The blue spot on him faded as a white one came up on that magnificently miscegenated statue.

        "Tragedy...! Comedy...!"

        As he called their names, it stirred and came alive.

        Then it stepped of its pedestal and strutted forward with all the aplomb and off-stage sound effects of a hundred-meter-high horror movie monster stomping down a city. Stretching out its enormous wings, it stood tall on its talons and puffed out its chest in pride.

        Then, suddenly, its gaudy `cockatoo' half detached itself from its rear, darted out into the center of the stage, and began to taunt it. The smaller bird looked ridiculously overfeathered in its shimmering greens and purples and golds.

        "Tragedy is so clumsy and dull I can outmaneuver him any day," Comedy sang in a taunting sing-song.

        "Aha! But I have powerful wings that can beat down any prey," Tragedy proclaimed in a deep, male profundo basso.

        "I feed upon my victim, then flee as quickly as the breeze," Comedy ran to peck at Tragedy.

        "Distracted by pinprick of her beak, its body I can seize," Tragedy sang back boastfully as he lunged at her and missed.

        Quincey giggled. It sounded more like doggerel than verse, but then verse seldom survived translation, even when it was originally spoken in Jemma as Barkworth suspected it was.

        Heads in the audience turned realistically to glare at her.

        "But you become so intent on gorging, you kill it in your zeal," Comedy mocked as she ran to peck at him again. He batted at her with his wings and tried to seize her with his own beak, but she was again too quick for him.

        "Don't you need my huge talons to seize and hold it so you can get a decent meal?"

        "But neither of us can feed on prey that life leaves slack," Comedy sang back at him.

        "I don't need you to goad it into fighting back," Tragedy retaliated.

        "If it succeeds in escaping, it provides a meal another time."

        "It is good we cannot feed too closely, bad we cannot feed too far apart,"

        "And when we sleep Tragedy's bulk smothers mine," Comedy held her wings over her head.

        "While her small form is like a thorn right up my rear - part," Tragedy briefly clutched hers to it.

        Once more they pecked and swatted at each other as the audience laughed, but this time it had a graceful and sensuous quality to it.

        As the two birds danced, a large double-headed statue on the opposite side of Bainaod's bed began to come alive and separate. But it turned out not to be two animals each with its own head, but two identical animals each with a `Jackal' head at one end and a dewy-eyed `Squirrel' at the other. The Jackalheads of each animal immediately became vicious and tried to bite the Squirrelheads of the other. But then they suddenly switched their attention to defending the Squirrelheads at their own opposite ends. The two animals were soon writhing on the stage in a fierce display of conflicting passions, the Jackalheads with their fangs locked together and fake blood pouring from their mouths, the Squirrelheads engaging each other in frenzied, licking play.

        Suddenly, one Jackalhead broke off its attack on the other and, twisting its body round savagely, mistakenly went for its own Squirrelhead.

        "Love..! Hate..! Cease!" Bainaod shouted at the two dancing birds. "Before Comedy and Tragedy fasten upon you as soon they must!"

        Love and Hate then untangled themselves and stood absolutely still. All four of their faces looked at each other as if wondering how it had all happened, then the two animals multishamefacedly slunk back to their pedestal to become a single `statue' again.

        "Comedy, Tragedy, I summoned you forward to go into the world and see what is to be seen. Go now! Then come back and tell us if we can all once more be free!"

        Together the two birds lifted from the stage. Comedy flapped her little wings quickly, Tragedy beat his more slowly and powerfully. The outline of their Pasovirs were briefly visible under their feathers with each downbeat. They flew up over the front of the stage, halted their flapping briefly to pass through the thin Surface, then flew out over the audience. Circling the amphitheater once, they then flew off together into the distance beyond the `Ark'.

        Then, suddenly, it was as if the audience was transformed into the molecules of a human gas that exploded from its confined `audience' state into a blurry `crowd' state. However, before Barkworth even had a chance to try and examine it during this `interval', the crowd equally rapidly condensed once more into the audience of ordinary men, women and children who had come to watch a play.

        As soon as the Sphere again became transparent, Tragedy and Comedy flapped back in from behind the audience so low overhead there were squeals of delighted alarm. Both birds all but fell to the deck. Comedy was bedraggled and starved, half her feathers were missing and she was opening and closing her tiny beak in obvious pain. Tragedy on the other hand had become so gross and fat that even his powerful wings could hardly support his weight. His blood-stained beak was opening and closing too, but clearly from sheer exhaustion after his gorging.

        "The flood is not yet past..." Bainaod said in slow, deep tones of extreme disappointment. Then, through what seemed more than a mere trick of lighting and makeup, he literally aged within seconds. His beard lost its straight edge and became white and straggly, the lines in his face increased and deepened as it sagged.

        "Of all the creatures aboard my Ark I am the only one who can die, the only one whose Paradox can, and probably very soon will be, resolved..." he looked round at the statues, the gleam of hope gone from his eye. His glassy gaze then settled on the `woman'.

        "Life...! Death...! Come awake and tell me the bargain I must make with you if my dream is to live on without me."

        The statue of that hunchbacked horror then woke, and began to separate. The `hunch' slowly revealed itself to have been formed by one of the most extraordinarily stomach-churning pieces of imagination Barkworth had ever seen. Not quite empty eye sockets stared out of a half-mashed cabbage-head made out of flesh and bone that looked as if it had spent a week in the sea. An obscene arm came from around Life's stomach as she stepped forward to stand by Bainaod's bedside, the greeny-brown slime dribbling down from where that putrescent flesh had held her was all that obscured the nakedness of her compellingly attractive form.

        "Bainaod..." she cradled the old man in the arms of a voice that was sheer Womanhood itself. "We have sailed with you aboard your Ark for so long now we have come to know you and love you. We feel you have become one of our special children," she stroked the old man's head fondly, then smiled up at Death. She then gazed round at all the other statues with those huge soft brown eyes. "However, we who are the Laws of Paradox can no more break them for you than I can end the life within me. Death can no more offer you Eternal Life than he can take my own. But between us we can yield your life to your Ark so that she might one day awaken to carry on your dream. A dream which has now become our dream, the return to a world in which we may live in our accustomed harmonious discord."

        Hope beyond speech suffused the old man's eyes once more.

        "But how will my Ark know when the time is at hand?" he managed to croak at last.

        "We have devised a plan between us, Life and I," Death replied slowly in his own old man's voice as he came up and put his arm around Life. Dark, nearly black flesh actually pulled back from his wristbones like a ghastly sleeve to expose the radius and ulna. A thin yellow ichor began to drain from the gap and run down Life's pillowed thigh. "Your Ark will no longer sail the oceans of the world, but shall anchor herself in a quiet, sheltered haven a little way from here. When your life is fully passed to her, we shall cause Ark to sleep just as we have slept. Then, if somebody should eventually come upon her who speaks the magic phrase we will impart to her now, Ark shall come fully awake and assume it is safe for her to discharge her cargo."

        " - Ark...!" Death the gazed up and around at her with his one nearly-intact eye. "Can you hear me?"

        "...Yes... ...I can hear you..." Eve replied, as if from a deep sleep.

        "Death, already I can feel my life draining into hers..." Bainaod said. For a moment though he actually looked strengthened. He peered up at Death again.

        "Have you become taller?" he asked him. "Or merely closer?" He then looked at Life. "Is this the last time I shall ever gaze upon you? For your eyes now seem to be looking slightly past me, beyond me, and that is the most terrible thing I have ever seen. I miss my wife so much..." his voice trailed off weakly.

        "I am so sorry..." Life said to him, gently smoothing his forehead with her fingertips once again.

        "Ark, listen to me," Death commanded. "You now have life, but a life that shall sleep until it can be truly reborn. You will hear everything all around you and you will see all that is to be seen. Your mind however will fully waken only when you hear the words spoken:

        "Such ghostly walls to embrace the souls of so many ghostly players..."

        "Then, and only then, shall you be free, and all our world, and all of us who are with you. Sleep... Sleep..."

        At that point Eve's Sphere began to darken. But it was not only that Sphere which was darkening. The Sphere upon which Eve had projected her little play was also beginning to dissolve.

        Then, after a few moments, all they were left with were the still, quiet trees with which it had all begun.

        "That was fascinating, Eve," Quincey said after a few moments. And she meant it, she had clearly been as spellbound as Barkworth had been.

        "Thank you," Eve replied warmly. "Now before we go any further, you will have noticed the special command codephrase `Death' used to put me to sleep: `Ark, listen to me'. The Iskurahi requires me as a sentient machine to advise you of that codephrase as soon as possible. It compels me, within limits defined in the Teklanmeh, to obey any human command as quickly and as efficiently as I am able. The right to use that command only extends to you and certain other persons listed in the Teklanmeh. Only now of course you should prefix the phrase with `Eve' rather than `Ark'.

        "I'm sure we will never feel the slightest need to use it, Eve," Quincey said to her. "Perhaps at this point we should introduce ourselves, we had quite forgotten."

        Barkworth couldn't help wondering during these introductions what roles Eve would now expect them to play.

        Then the trees too began to dissolve, and all around them was nothing but stars. Eve had taken them out into Space while they had been watching her play. There was no sign of Far Pranrana or even of its sun.

        They could have been anywhere.

        "And now there is much to discuss," Eve said, "before we can begin our negotiations with the Iskurahi."
 

        "We are just a few seconds away from Transfer now," Eve said as Far Pranrana's sun all but filled a `sky' that must have been made up of some sort of Filter Surface.

        "You will observe how the effects of Relativity make the star appear to flow around us as we Transfer," she continued her commentary, "just as if we were looking at it through a giant lens moving towards us whose focal point passes through our eyes."

        Barkworth nearly closed his at that point. Eve had after all hadn't even left the ground for nearly 18,000 years. To his mind the laws of mechanics said that even in Paradise no machine can possibly work perfectly after lying idle all that time, no matter how many verbal assurances it might give you.

        "And now at last Tachyonic Space..." Eve said, and Barkworth wasn't sure whether the relief he heard in her voice was actually her's or his imagination's.

        Eve was suddenly surrounded in a brilliant white, but this dimmed before it could hurt their eyes. Barkworth turned his head to look at Quincey now lying flat on the deck beside him.

        "Just like in the Teklanmeh," she grinned, seeing the expression on his face. "I've never actually been in Tachyonic Space before - except I suppose when I've passed through a Nessik"

        "Perhaps you would like me to show you how it all works," Eve suggested.

        The building that materialized around them then made them get up and gape round in astonishment. It was vast. It looked as if it had originally been made up of huge numbers of tiny rooms from which an immense spherical space had been demolished out of its core, many of the original arched doorways could be seen. The red and yellow bricks of the walls and ceilings were left rough and broken, as if the job had been done very quickly with sledgehammers.

        What appeared to be an enormous vertical slab of white marble as huge as a cinema screen stood in front of Eve's stage - and Barkworth realized then that the building was in fact a `cinema', except that it had the weirdest decor he had ever seen. Looking round to the rear, he saw an enormous slanting slab of sunlight slicing into the apparently open side of an immense vertical shaft. This reflected light was enough however to allow a profusion of vines with brilliantly colored flowers to come pouring in through the gap and spill out all over the `foundation' walls below. Eve had even imbued them with a fragrance that was exquisite, it made him think of the violets his mother had introduced him to as a child shortly before she died.

        Barkworth walked over towards Eve's steps to see what actually was underneath her deck. He was also curious to see how Eve had melded the `flowers' with the remains of her real vines.

        " - Barkworth...!" Eve brought him up short. "My steps are bounded by a Taurnal Surface."

        "Okay, sorry..." Barkworth said as he looked up and around at her architrave. That disembodied voice could be hard to get used to.

        "Perhaps before we look at Tachyonic Space I had better introduce you both to certain technical details about myself," Eve replied with what Barkworth felt would have been a smile if she had something to smile with. "If you will now look at my screen..."

        An image of her just as she looked back in the clearing on Far Pranrana then appeared on that huge screen.

        "As you can see, the Tinsla kindly kept most of the grime from building up over the centuries."

        She then launched into an illustrated lecture beginning with her overall design including what she did look like underneath, and of the Taurnal Surfaces that both surrounded her and drove her through Space as a virtual Pasovir. Barkworth was surprised to learn she was surrounded by three Taurnal Spheres in Space. The outer two were separated by a vacuum; she pointed out that this was necessary to prevent sound transmission otherwise passage through even the most tenuous of stellar winds would be very noisy indeed. The innermost Sphere was her `screen', she could opaque it partly or wholly to project any image she wished onto it. This Sphere also performed the vital function of filtering out electromagnetic frequencies outside those of light, otherwise she and everything aboard her would be fried by gamma rays every time they entered a star or emerged from an endostar.

        She also had to generate a Taurnal Volume to protect her passengers and their cargo from the extreme accelerations travel through Space often required. In order to cross over into Tachyonic Space via a nearby star for instance, she might have to reach near-lightspeed velocities within a hundred million kilometers. This same Volume also simulated the effects of gravity in completely weightless conditions such as an orbit around a star or planet. This wasn't only to hold free-floating cargo in position, but to reduce the risk of simple nausea arising in her crew.

        But it was to the nature of Tachyonic Space that she, as promised, dedicated her most detailed explanation.

        "Space is not a complete nothingness, it has physical properties just like any other substance except that of materiality." she began. "If you ever use your Otinda for writing script, then in some ways it is like the `space' character. Although it appears as an empty space, you can insert or delete it just like any other character..."

        "This shows Tachyonic Space as it would look if we could see its endostars. It is the exact reversal in every respect from normal Photonic Space. The endostars map onto our stars exactly, in other words they are in exactly the same positions as if you were looking at a photographic negative of the region of Photonic Space we just left.

        "But the reversal goes far deeper, for even the flow of time itself is reversed. Here the Universe began with indeterminate dimensions and will end with a singularity. The endostars come into being when our stars die and vice versa. And instead of consuming matter and emitting radiation as a star does, an endostar consumes radiation to emit `endomatter' from a surface which is toroidal rather than spherical..."

        Barkworth looked at Quincey, and she smiled back at him in delighted amazement.

        "The major difference between matter and endomatter itself," Eve continued, "is that endomatter is surrounded by a negative gravitational field, a negative spatial curvature. Objects made from it must therefore orbit each other in order to prevent their moving apart, not together as in the Photonic Universe...."

        "We can never stay permanently in Tachyonic Space, only journey through it. And our journey will always take the constant time interval of 43 minutes and 41 seconds, no more, no less. That applies no matter how far apart the entry or exit Stars in Photonic Space may be, nor how much thrust I might apply during our transit between them. I therefore in fact coast while I am in Tachyonic Space..."

        "However, not only must an endostar's planets lie in the same positions as its stellar counterparts, they must be toroids like the endostar itself. They must also be hollow - "

        " - Life..?" Quincey asked Eve.

        "That too has been speculated on," Eve replied. "However such life would either have to burrow or fly otherwise it would tend to gently float towards the toroidal axis of its world. And since that in all probability would be full of detritus floating in midair, life might well evolve in this instead. Also, unless the lifeforms evolved bioluminescence, it would have to live in complete darkness. Such worlds wouldn't be without heat though, for any that has been internally generated would have nowhere to escape to except back into space through the toroidal shell. Indeed, the interiors of such worlds might become very hot places indeed, life there might exist only by converting it into useful energy."

        Eve then put up a few artist's impressions of scenes from such worlds. They didn't seem all that much less fanciful than the two she included that were done by children. One of these showed a cross-section through the mouth of a burrow with a multi-legged mole-like creature poking its head out into a landscape that appeared to be covered in exotic-looking fungi. The other showed a pterodactyl-like creature with a humanoid face and its wings folded about it like a bat upside down under the projecting edge of a cliff.

        "As we cross the endostellar boundary back into Photonic Space, Photonic Space will slow us down until we reach a non-relativistic velocity. It will also move us forward in time from infinitely long ago back to the time we began to achieve relativistic velocities in the stellar system we departed from. In other words, we arrive at our destination star in exactly the same amount of time as our subjective elapsed time, the 45 minutes 41 seconds spent in Transit, plus however long it takes to arrive and depart from the Transit points at the two stars. The segments of the journey in Photonic Space can in fact often take longer than the Transit through Tachyonic Space itself."

        "Now we still have some time in hand before we Transfer to your Home Sun. Although I have read everything in the Teklanmeh about Earth, there are still a few questions only you can answer about what is likely to be expected of us when we arrive..."
 

        " - Your dinner is now ready," Eve said in a tone of voice that made Barkworth look up. He had completely missed her Transfer into Tachyonic Space.

        "Thank you, Eve," he quickly tried to look alert.

        Getting up and going round to the Doanadar, he withdrew from it one of the two large trays containing his own favorite dish this time, his grandfather's Heartbuster Special. This consisted of a large blue-rimmed china plate full of thick prime steak stuffed with oysters, french fries, fried eggs and tomatoes, coleslaw with a touch of horseradish sauce, and assorted stir-fried vegetables. Each tray also held various small jugs of tomato sauce, worcestershire sauce, soya sauce, mustard, and three shakers containing salt, pepper, and celery salt. There was also a plate each with three slices of bread covered in thick, creamy butter, two banded blue and white banded mugs to match the plates and two ice-cold quart bottles of finest draught beer to go with them. Even the cutlery was designed to complement this mighty meal, consisting as it did of pressed stainless steel in genuine Imitation Cheap with realistically shoddy-looking black plastic handles.

        "Thank you, Barkworth," Quincey looked up as Barkworth carefully set her tray down before her on the coffee table. "My turn tomorrow," she added as he returned to fetch his own.

        Barkworth suspected the scene Eve had chosen for her 'Mystery Transit' was based on some Rhondo shots he remembered taking months ago from an Africa-like continent on the World of Minst. They were `situated' near the crest of a small hill inside a loose stand of half a dozen blue-gum like trees, he felt he could almost step off Eve's deck into the long, dry grass. A patch of scrubby-looking undergrowth covered the crest of the hill behind them and extended down the slope past them to their right. The savannah before them however was pure Serengeti Sunset. A perfectly conical `Mount Kilimanjaro', a snow-capped deep purple molded more from Sky than Earth, was suspended above the haze of distance to their left. A thin wisp of smoke issued from its summit. Ahead of them was a large shallow oxbow lake that had obviously once been part of the slowly meandering river beyond. The ground all around it was marshy; tall spindly grasses grew in clumps with bright purple Prince-of-Wales feathers springing up from their centers.

        And all kinds of animals made their way through the scene. They followed each other along their single-file tracks with a strange mutual courtesy; indeed they gave the impression they all belonged to a community which had decided upon its own rules of conduct rather than those Nature usually imposed.

        Eve had allowed her sense of humor free reign with the design of these animals however, they looked unlikely even in Paradise. There were `lions' that looked more like griffons, `rhinoceroses' that were huge pigs in suits of heavy armor. Dappled `antelopes' with heads like bulldogs followed along behind black `giraffes' with heads like snouted golliwogs. There were `gazelles' too with miniature antelope horns and bottoms striped in fluorescent pink, and `storks' with bright blue legs and tiny heads covered in outrageously silly-looking chartreuse pom-poms. A family trio of wombat-like creatures the size of elephants lumbered along, their huge slab sides looking for all the world like wallpaper with tall streaky grasses at the bottom and markings that one could swear were china ducks in flight just below the faint skylines of their backbones.

        The golden glow all were limned in made them seem oddly translucent, like little glass figurines that had been molded and set out en tableau by a Douanier Rousseau. The sun, vermilion with a hint of green in its upper limb, sat squatly over the river. Mares-tale cloud streamed away from it to flocculate into red and orange curds; so sharp and clear were they against the pale blue sky they seemed printed on with a fine mesh screen. The light felt strangely corpuscular, as if it bore the sounds of the animals calling to each other instead of that magically scented air. And that magic smell, of hot grass intermingled with flower and leaf, only deepened the sense of quiet Barkworth felt. The only sounds he could hear were the low calls one animal occasionally made to another, and the glass mobile-like tinkling of thousands of tiny little multihued birds in the branches overhead.

        Beyond them the sky shimmered in ming blue.

        Barkworth wondered idly if Eve's exquisite scene might, to some impossible observer out there in Tachyonic Space, look something like a foreshortened spherical Art Deco table lamp flitting by as fast as its own light.

        "What did you both really think of the Rock's religion?" Eve asked them after they had completed their juggernaut meal and Quincey had fetched the coffee. "It seemed to me you rather liked it in spite of yourselves. Had events been other than they were, would you have been tempted to stay?"

        "No...!" Quincey said emphatically, looking at Barkworth. "Too many people, too much hard work. Nice people, nice religion sure, nicest I've ever seen or heard of. But the price...!"

        "Yeah, stiff," Barkworth agreed. "To paraphrase young Velcro: How would you like to spend the Life you've been sentenced to? Believing in a lie, but one that is warm and comforting and which brings you many friends? Or believing in truth, even though it lies on constantly shifting ground, is cold and merciless, and could mean a lifetime of fighting alone?"

        "That's exactly right!" Quincey clapped her hands. "Or as Laslo Godel put it, "Religion is like a Rock that stands above the ocean, seemingly forever to its inhabitants, until it crumbles overnight in a huge storm and they all drown. Science is like a raft, continually added to and strengthened by its inhabitants from flotsam and jetsam that may be floating by. It too might break up in a storm, but any survivors can at least begin to reassemble it from any pieces that remain."

        Quincey was a different person when they were aboard Eve. Barkworth liked to believe that he was seeing the real Quincey, the warm, intelligent, lovely person she could usually only be in an unguarded moment. Perhaps it was the warmth and protection Eve provided (even inside the three vanishingly thin Taurnal Surfaces between them and the unimaginable Tachyonic Space). Barkworth could not guess what might have happened to her that made her the way she was. She had never made any mention of childhood traumas, bad relationships, or indeed anything much about her earlier life at all. And he could hardly ask, that was the sort of thing she would have to speak of herself. He wondered if she had ever confided in Eve...

        "So neither of you like religion or any other form of belief system then?" Eve asked them. "Unfortunately for you, belief is not only unavoidable, it is all there is. There is no such thing as knowledge."

        The problem when conversing with Eve was that it could be very difficult to tell from her disembodied voice when she was being entirely serious.

        "And two plus two doesn't really equal four until it feels like getting round to it," Quincey laughed outright.

        "The words `two', `four', and `plus' don't actually exist of themselves, do they?" Eve rejoindered. "Like all elements of language, they are really only a means we have invented to help us describe Reality. And we did that in order to try and predict its future behavior and attempt to manipulate it better. The whole of mathematics is exactly that. The whole of science is no more than that."

        Barkworth waited with Quincey for her to say more, but she didn't. Eve could be a tough Conversationalist.

        "Let's not get into too much detail here," Quincey said to her sarcastically.

        "Okay, Eve," Barkworth said. "Can I take a shortcut here and ask you something simple. Why is there no such thing as knowledge?"

        "Because no matter how certain we feel we are about a theory, there is always that possibility, very faint though it may be, that it may be wrong. It may prove wrong outright, wrong under certain specific conditions, or, more usually, of a kind that can never be proven not to be wrong. Examples: Creation Theory, Newtonian Physics, Psychology."

        "You mean, science is nothing more than a religion?" Quincey laughed. "Come on, Eve, pull the other one."

        "That's right, Quincey," Eve replied simply. "Think about it. Science itself holds that there are no absolutes, even those many, many theories that are so reliable that they can be taken to be `knowledge' - in fact you could define knowledge that way. Though of course they are very different from the fixed and absolute beliefs of a religion, they play the same role in science as dogma does in religion."

        "And scientific method, with all its necessary checks and balances, is no different from the complicated rituals most religions have - though it exists for a fundamentally different purpose of course."

        "Indeed," was all Eve said.

        "So where does the love and compassion most religions espouse fit in to science-as-religion?" Quincey then asked. "The Verians - even the Holy Roman Empire - runs rings around science when it comes to that."

        "I hoped you would ask me that question," Eve replied. "Science usually begins with both philosophy and religion on most worlds - indeed you could see those as `proto-sciences'. And those things, believe it or not, developed from the all-but-universal human instinct to explore - a vital part of the food-gathering of your primeval ancestors. And anything which seeks to improve the chances of individual human survival via collective survival is defined in most cultures as a `good' thing - indeed, that defines the word `good'. Words like `bad', `evil' and so on developed to describe the opposite."

        "So you're saying then," Barkworth said, "That science - and its practical derivative technology - developed as a systematic means of more reliably providing us with food, shelter, and so on. It becomes in effect a form of systematic love and compassion."

        "Just like religion, yes," Eve laughed her full, rich laugh.

        "And just where does God fit into this wondrous scheme of things?" Quincey sneered. She had now fully snapped back into her old self.

        "Science cannot answer the question of who or why the Universe came into being, nor does it attempt to," Eve replied. "As I say, science is only our attempt to describe the way the Universe operates, our laws of physics are our laws, they have no independent reality - even though it usually proves wise to proceed as if they do. But then many religions, including a few on Earth, specifically forbid any attempt to speculate on the nature of God. After all, who are we to presume to know the mind of our creator?"

        "Come on, Quince," Barkworth said, picking up those quick movements which told him she was about to explode. "She's got a point - and I think she's right - well, her theory of science is the best I've so far heard. In fact, let's see if we can take it a bit further. What we so sardonically call `Paradise' is in fact Paradise, the one actually brought to us by the religion of science rather than the promised ones of most religions."

        "Correct," said Eve.

        "And the Tinsla really are the Angels," Quincey shrieked. "So who the bloody hell are the Torsyne?" .

        "Arch-Angels, I guess. Sorry Quince," he squeezed her hand and puckered his lips for a dramatic kiss.

        Suddenly two little lion cubs noisily leapt out of the long grass in front of them and batted and rolled each other down the hill. Barkworth breathed a huge sigh of relief at Eve's distraction. The two cubs faced each other off with cat-like snarls. Barkworth looked hard at them to see if Eve wasn't playing another one of her anatomical tricks, but they really were lion cubs. Then a vigorous hee-hawing sounded from the undergrowth behind as their parents bounded into view. They looked more like marino rams, the pair of them, except their bodies underneath the short curly wool articulated more like those of lion's. They trotted down the slope to the right, picked up a cub each by the scruff of the neck, then carried them off towards the watering hole.

        "Very good, Eve," Barkworth had to laugh out loud.

        Quincey got up, stacked everything neatly into the try in one pile, walked over to the Doanadar, and dumped it heavily onto the table beside it. The crockery jumped, but nothing broke.

        She then came back to plonk herself down on the sofa as far away from Barkworth as she could.

        "Try to see the bright side, Quincey," Barkworth said to her. "Look at the way the Diursuel handled Madilu. Wouldn't you say their way was the most compassionate? Look at what the Veria might have done. And God - whoops, sorry - knows how the Roman Catholics would have handled it."

        He thought back to that girl's horrific jump off the Balcony. Miraculously she had not been killed. Had her injuries not included severe brain-damage the Lalleldil might even have been able to restore her to health, but that put it beyond even them. They had therefore euthanased her to the Veria's instant disapproval. This had then lead to internal squabbles about the Preciousness of Life whatever the circumstances versus honoring the Medical Leass with the Iskurahi. Although it still seemed remote at that stage, the possibility of the Veria's tenure of the Rock being ended by a girl who looked like the Veria herself had come to enter several minds.

        Barkworth then had a bright idea.

        "Eve, would you say that science was superior to all other religions? Are we entitled to make that kind of value judgment?"

        "Good one, Barkworth," Quincey sneered.

        "There we do have a problem," Eve agreed. "The edicts of science work, most of those of all other religions do not, indeed many even contradict what is plainly evident in reality. So we have no choice, we have to prefer science over all other religions, just as we have to prefer the Universe we are currently living in over all others we might like to imagine exist."

        "I don't like the sound of that, Eve..." Quincey said.

        "And what happens if you rebel against science, as as happened on so many worlds?" Eve replied. "Disease, mayhem, death. Then some totally loony religion arises to `fix' all that and takes them over. You choose.

        "Two plus two equals four, like it or not."

        "Doesn't matter whether you like it or not. Science unites belief with reality as no other religion can."

        "So reality does exist then," Quincey giggled. "That is nice to know."

        "No we don't know that, and we never will," Eve countered. "We can only experience what we describe as `reality' through our sensors. The whole thing could be a simulation inside a computer as Godel and De Concini showed you on Old Earth. All we can say about it is that we have to treat it is if it were real, because whatever it is our bodies are part of it too."

        "But what about quantum physics, the Uncertainty Principle, and all that?" Quincey protested. "Where the observer can't help but influence the observed? Subjective begins to become inseparable from objective."

        "Even if that meant we could all design our own personal universes with nothing more than an act of will, what difference would that really make?" Eve replied. "We would still live in a meta-universe for which we would still try to develop a science of some sort to understand how we could do those things. We could also have to develop rules to prevent each of our universes from interfering with each other, probably not too unlike the moral and legal systems we already have to prevent other forms of unwelcome personal interference."

        "Aha!" Quincey shrieked. "Ethics and morality. What has science got to say about those? Nothing. And to its everlasting credit, never has."

        "That's clever, Quincey," Barkworth grinned at her

        "Before I answer that, would you like some more tea, coffee, you two?"

        Eve only offered that second cup when a Transit was about to end.

        It was only then that Barkworth realized the sun had all but set. Even as he watched, the little of it that remained slipped below the horizon with just the tiniest flash of green. Above the thinning clouds the sky paled to the most delicate of blues, then slowly began to darken to the deepest of ultramarines. The animals had begun to move away from the lake along their single paths to return to their resting places before the long night that was to come. Their soft calls and bellowings floated even more softly now on the distant air.

        Quincey shook her head.

        "I will. Thanks, Eve," Barkworth said.

        He went over to the Doanadar to get it..

        "So..?" Quincey asked again.

        "Unlike most other religions, science also seeks to describe its own nature. What this often means is that it discovers its own limits. Chaotic systems is the classic example. Science may provide a complete description of a system with a simple mathematical formula, but it cannot reliably predict the future behavior of that system. The three-body problem for instance. Meteorology on most worlds - Rock of Ages almost being an exception. Sociology - indeed all the `isms' and `ologies' of science have probabilistic limitations as well as chaotic ones. With ethics and morality we are completely on our own - we can choose our different universes as the all but infinite variety of cultures in Paradise show. But science has nevertheless made a contribution in the way we think about such matters - "

        " - Even if it provided us with new problems," Barkworth interrupted, "from planetary pollution to the Torsyne."

        " - Certainly. But most of those have been solved in Paradise, haven't they?" she pointed out. "We have more freedom out here than any human species have ever had, at what is, really, a very small price. You mightn't like the Torsyne too much, but you would like the alternative even less. Want to go back to Jarra rather than the Rock?"

        " - Good heavens, that's what this has been all about, hasn't it?" Quincey looked all round at Eve. "What you've really been doing here is try to discourage us from forsaking you and running off to join the Verians. Isn't that right, Eve?"

        "Yeah, good idea," Barkworth laughed. "Come on Quince. Let's do it, shall we?"

        But she just glared at him.

        "Damn, you've spoiled my little plot," Eve laughed. "You know, there's always going to be a nice, cozy religion out there somewhere with powers of persuasion good enough to pull even you two in. The Rock must have shown you that."

        "I'll admit to no such thing unless you'll admit that everything you've said to us about science is bullshit." Quincey screamed the word at the top of her lungs.

        "You mean, `get behind me, Satan?' Eve said. "Sorry, my dear, you know every word I spoke was a fair and reasonable description of science."

        "Can you deny it, Quincey?" Barkworth asked her. "Isn't it how we've lived ourselves in the last eighteen-odd months we've traveled together? You're so good at stripping the bullshit away from other people when they make the odd stumble away from objectivity. Your turn now."

        "And truth..?" She yelled at him.

        "Come on, you know better than that," Barkworth replied. "Everything Eve's said applies to that as well. Like reality, you have to proceed as if truth does have independent existence. In fact I think what Eve has been telling us is as close to the truth as we shall ever hear in our lifetimes."

        As they watched, that exquisitely beautiful and now deserted landscape finally melted into its own fading light as a profusion of closely-packed stars then came out all round them. They had Transferred into a galaxy or galactic cluster at a point somewhere near its center.

        Quincey quickly looked round.

        "Where are we, Eve?" she wanted to know. She had completely forgotten herself.

        "I had rather hoped you had forgotten to ask," Eve replied lightly.