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  She saw that Pek Sikorski was awake, quietly listening to them. Enli broke free of Calin and knelt by her pallet.

  “Pek Sikorski, it happened. Shared reality stopped.”

  “Are people locking themselves away in fear? And crying and wailing?”

  How had she known? “Yes. But that’s not what I came to tell you. Something else, something very important. You cannot tell Voratur, or anyone, that shared reality stopped because of Terrans. If you do—”

  “If I do, they’ll decide I have no soul and kill me.”

  Enli said in astonishment, “You know that?”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Then why didn’t you go away with the other Terrans? With your mate, Pek Gruber?”

  “I couldn’t,” Pek Sikorski said, and Enli understood the deep sadness but not the reasoning. She would never grasp a Terran reality whole. Never. Pek Sikorski continued, “I have to explain now to Pek Voratur what happened. He’s a rich and powerful man. He can help keep people calm, keep them from rioting.” The word was Terran.

  “Yes, but … all right. Tell Pek Voratur that something has happened to the manufactured object that perfumed the air with shared reality, and that we must learn to live without it. But don’t tell him the Terrans took the object Say that the Terrans just saw—” she had an inspiration, “—saw with a big telescope, much more powerful than the one Pek Kaufman traded to Pek Voratur, they saw the object … die. Say it was a … a…” What would sound important and strange enough for the First Flower to have created? “… a living rock. Not a manufactured object, but a living rock, which the Terrans saw die. And that’s why shared reality is gone.”

  Pek Sikorski said bleakly, “Would you prefer that? Would that be easier for Worlders to accept?”

  “Yes,” said Enli, and wondered if it were true. She looked at Calin. His skull ridges creased again. “Enli—you are telling this Terran to say unreal things.”

  “Yes.” And there was no head pain—not now, and not when Pek Sikorski eventually talked to Pek Voratur. Enli saw Calin, dismayed, realize this. No head pain. “But it is for everyone’s good.”

  “But anyone can say anything now! Even if it is unreal!”

  “Yes,” Enli said again.

  “I don’t want to go with you to Pek Voratur to say this,” Calin said abruptly. “I am going back to Gofkit Jemloe. I must see that my sister’s soil stays rich, and my mother’s.”

  Enli stood. “I will give you that bicycle, Calin.”

  “I don’t want a bicycle from you.” His eyes grew darker. “Maybe shared reality is gone. Maybe anyone can say anything. But people should still say what is real. You should, Enli.”

  He turned abruptly and left. Enli stood rooted to the floor. If she moved, she thought, she would shatter. No pain from unshared reality could have rivaled this one.

  Pek Sikorski put her hands over her face.

  * * *

  They told Pek Voratur, deep in his personal rooms with his ailing wife Alu, his children, and an elderly cousin. Pek Sikorski told him the reality she had unfolded, the untrue reality, that the Terrans had seen a great living rock die in the Neury Mountains. Pek Voratur listened carefully, and Enli saw relief spread over his fleshy, well-oiled face. Here was something he could understand. A sacred rock, created by the First Flower—and what could the First Flower not create, having created the World? A sacred rock, now dead as all living things must die, and so the perfume of shared reality gone.

  “Yes, we must get sunflashers to tell everyone on World. Yes, yes. I will see to it. Pek Treenifil!” he bellowed for his household steward.

  “Shared reality will be gone forever?” Alu Pek Voratur asked falteringly from her sickbed.

  “Yes,” Pek Sikorski said, and Alu Pek Voratur pulled the blanket over her face.

  It proved difficult to find a sunflasher; they, too, cowered in their homes. The village had come to a standstill. No cookfires in the communal hearths, no herders with their jikib, no children racing between bicycle sheds and gardens. But eventually Pek Voratur, walking fearlessly through the stillness, found a sunflasher prostrate before his flower altar.

  The sunflasher towers averaged seven cellib apart, circling all of World at the equator, where its principal landmass lay. The towers were constantly staffed on all sunny days. If the weather cooperated, any message could travel halfway around World from dawn to sunset, and all the way around the next day. Branch towers spread to the north and south, after which bicycle messengers took the information to remote villages. Although it was seldom used all at once, the whole sunflasher system could reach everyone on World. Reluctantly, the Gofkit Jemloe sunflasher mounted his bicycle and rode to his tower, set on the highest hill some distance away. Later, Enli and Voratur and Pek Sikorski saw the bright glints from his tilting mirror. Over and over the message glinted. Later still, the sunflasher rode back to Gofkit Jemloe.

  “Pek Voratur, there is no answer. The other sunflashers have abandoned their towers, too. I cannot share anything with anybody.”

  Enli, Pek Voratur, and Pek Sikorski looked at each other. Silently they made their way back to the Voratur household.

  The gate servant was not at her post. Someone had broken the delicate wood carving on the gate: smashed it to pieces, senselessly, in rage.

  “So it starts,” Pek Sikorski said wearily in Terran. Pek Voratur looked at her blankly, but Enli realized, in grief, that she knew what Pek Sikorski meant.

  * * *

  Then, next morning, it was over.

  Enli was the first awake, very early, heavy-eyed from poor sleep. There was a foul taste in her mouth. She had slept in Voratur’s personal room, along with many others. Pek Voratur seemed to have decided, since the smashing of his gate, that it was better to have many people around him who would not smash anything. Thirty householders crowded together in pallets on the floor. She staggered from the room out to the piss closet off the garden and made her morning stream.

  A man waited outside the piss closet for his turn. Enli didn’t recognize him; he wasn’t one of the people who’d spent the night in Pek Voratur’s room. In fact, he didn’t wear the tunic of the Voratur household at all. His hands were rough. A laborer who did not belong here.

  Roughly he pushed Enli out of the way. She was wearing a neckfur ornament Pek Voratur had given her. He spied it and grabbed it off her, pulling her neckfur so hard it hurt.

  Her head pained.

  So, she saw, did his. He dropped the ornament, clutched his head, and staggered away. In a corner of the garden, he was sick.

  Enli leaned against the wall, gasping. It was back. Shared reality was back. How? Had the Terrans brought the manufactured object back? Why? And what would happen now?

  * * *

  Fifty thousand kilometers above them, Capelo said, “Now.”

  From the bridge the exec’s voice repeated the command to the gunnery officer: “Commence firing.”

  A proton beam flashed from the Alan B. Shepard to the planet. It was aimed at a site in the Neury Mountains kilometers away from where the artifact again resided. A weak beam, to be sure, but it should have resulted in blowing up a lot of rock. Sensors had been affixed to the site, to surrounding mountains, to low-orbit probes, to the artifact itself. Kaufman leaned toward the displays.

  “Nothing,” Rosalind Singh said. “Hal?”

  “Nothing.”

  From the bridge came the exec’s voice, “Colonel Kaufman, the beam did not hit. Disappearance of the beam matches disappearances recorded during failed attacks on Faller ships equipped with their beam-disrupter shield.” The words were formal, but the exec’s voice betrayed his excitement. They had the equivalent of the enemy defense.

  Kaufman said into his comlink, “Dieter? Report in.”

  Gruber, on the surface, said, “Nothing! I could stand right on the target and not be touched! It is the shield, Tom, as you said. It protects the entire planet!”

  “We don’t know that yet,”
Capelo said. “Bridge, fire on increased strength.”

  “Commence firing,” said the exec.

  No response on the planetary sensors, orbital sensors, bridge equipment. Gruber witnessed nothing. My God, Kaufman thought, we’ve got it. The shield that protects the Faller ships, at a setting that protects a planet. That protected World from the wave-effect that killed Syree Johnson and fried Nimitri. We’ve got it.

  “We haven’t got it yet,” Capelo said.

  They spent the next two days firing on the planet. The ship fired every weapon it had, in varying strengths. It fired at the same side of the planet as the artifact, and at the opposite side, and at both poles. Each time the effect was exactly the same: nothing. The planet wasn’t touched, and the beam disappeared as if it had never existed.

  On the third day, they dropped a nuclear bomb over the great northern sea. Internal sensors indicated that the detonator fired and the chain reaction began. But no energy was released. Nothing happened.

  There came to Kaufman a piece of some ancient religion he couldn’t identify, or maybe it was a piece of the physics history he’d read so much of: “I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds.” No, he thought. No. We have become the savior of worlds, or at least of Earth. An entire planet. He felt himself smiling.

  Savior of Worlds.

  * * *

  They threw a party. Everyone came, scientists and techs and officers. Even Grafton showed up, reserved but pleasant to everyone but Kaufman, whom he avoided. Kaufman understood. Marbet was still in the brig, and the POW was still secured in his cell, but Grafton wasn’t sure what Kaufman would try next. Neither was Kaufman. He’d told everyone that Marbet was in quarantine with a newly detected version of the Ballinger retrovirus.

  He made the obligatory toasts to his team, to the ship, to the unknown vanished master race that had left them both the artifact and the space tunnels. It turned out to be a wonderful party. There were only two unhappy people at it, and they both left early.

  Dieter Gruber had not been able to persuade his wife to rejoin the team aboard ship. He would say only that she was still doing research. Gruber drank too much and then retired to his quarters to argue again with Ann by comlink.

  The other grim face was Capelo’s. Kaufman, who had fences to mend there anyway, waited until Capelo stood alone in a corner. He didn’t have to wait long; Capelo was not enough of an addition to the party that people lingered near him.

  “Tom. How is your little girl? Have her nightmares stopped?”

  “No. They’re worse.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. But I also want to congratulate you on your brilliant scientific work. This is an amazing find for us.”

  Capelo looked at him bleakly. “Do you really think it’s amazing, Lyle? In fact, do you really think it’s science? All we’ve done is find a black box and try various things to see how it reacts. We still haven’t the faintest idea of why. I have no theory, no equations, no models, not even a single worthwhile insight. Somehow I don’t think Einstein, Bohr, or Yeovil feel threatened.”

  Kaufman refused to pick up the gauntlet. “I wanted to ask you something about that. What we have now for the artifact is this: setting prime one: a local weapon. Prime two: a local shield. Prime three: a wider-scale local weapon. Prime five: a planetary shield. Do you think prime seven will be a weapon, following the pattern?”

  “Yes. I think setting prime seven will fry an entire planet through destabilizing the strong force.”

  “And settings prime eleven and prime thirteen?”

  “If the pattern holds, prime eleven might protect an entire star system. Prime thirteen will fry an entire star system, like Syree Johnson’s artifact fried this one. Except for World.”

  Capelo said it so quietly that Kaufman felt chilled. Fry an entire star system … I am become Shiva …

  “Of course,” Capelo said bleakly, “this is all theory. We can’t test setting prime thirteen at all, unless you plan on destroying a spare star system somewhere. Lyle, what are you soldiers planning on doing with this thing? The Fallers have beam-disrupter shields on more than one of their ships, so obviously they’ve been more successful than I have at figuring out how it works, at least enough to build more. You’ve only got one. Do you set it up to protect Sol system? Do you take it to the Faller home star and set it off at setting prime thirteen, untested, in hopes it will cause their entire star system to irradiate itself?”

  “That’s not for me to decide,” Kaufman said.

  “Right. So you’ve got no opinion at all, soldiers obey orders not think them through, nobody here but us chickens.”

  “Tom-”

  “I have an opinion. Take the artifact to their home star and blow the entire system and every bastard Faller in it.”

  Kaufman realized, for the first time, that Capelo had been either drinking or doing fizzies. The physicist undoubtedly believed what he was saying, but under other circumstances he might not have said it. Or not said it like that.

  Capelo seemed, belatedly, to realize this. “Excuse me if I find this celebration a little flat. I’m going to read my daughters a bedtime story.” He left.

  Kaufman stood alone, sipping his drink. Capelo still puzzled him. So much tenderness in the man toward his tiresome little girls, so much raw ability, so much clear-sightedness on some things. And so much blindness on others, along with so much anger and bitterness. Tom Capelo was a man full of too much.

  More practically, Capelo regarded himself as the only one capable of seeing the implications of his team’s work. But it was Capelo who couldn’t see far enough. The Fallers already had an artifact like this one, plus facsimiles of at least setting prime two. They could theoretically do everything Capelo had mentioned, including fry the entire Sol system. So why hadn’t they?

  No answer. Unless it lay locked up in the Faller prisoner. If so, Kaufman had disabled Marbet, their only key, and Grafton would make sure she stayed disabled. Kaufman’s mistake, and a very bad one. I am become …

  Two of the techs, laughing with drunken high spirits, made their stumbling way toward Kaufman. He put on a welcoming smile.

  TWENTY-TWO

  GOFKIT JEMLOE

  Enli sat outside the village of Gofkit Jemloe, on a hard rock in the gathering twilight, and listened to Pek Sikorski talk on her comlink to Pek Gruber. Enli didn’t want to listen. She rose to leave, but Pek Sikorski grasped her wrist and pulled on it, so Enli sat again and stared into the gathering darkness.

  It was a beautiful sunset, the red and gold sky seeming to sweeten the air as much as the tiny wild mittib under her feet. She could see the villagers gathered on the green, between the still-glowing embers of the communal cookfires. Children chased each other, weaving among the adults. It almost looked like any evening in Gofkit Jemloe. The difference lay in the way the adults stood in huddles instead of dancing, the reluctant way the huddles changed members, the overly frenzied shouts of the underdisciplined children.

  “I asked you how long, Dieter … Don’t lie to me, please. I can bear anything but that.”

  On the far end of the comlink, somewhere in the red-and-gold sky, Pek Gruber answered. Enli couldn’t distinguish his words.

  Pek Sikorski said, “You’ve finished all the testing you can do while the artifact is back down here, haven’t you? Or else you’re close to it. When do you lift it off-World again?”

  More indistinguishable words, and Pek Sikorski’s tense body went still.

  Enli watched a figure detach itself from the huddles on the green and stride toward them.

  “No,” Pek Sikorski said, very low, “I will not. Leave without me. There has to be somebody here to explain to these poor people … Don’t try to feed me that shit, Dieter! I won’t help you murder this civilization! I won’t!”

  The figure resolved itself into Soshaf Pek Derilin. No, not Derilin—among the great households, it was becoming fashionable for the oldest son to take his father’s name, not his mother’s. A shift in r
eality. Pek Voratur, dressed in a magnificent tunic embroidered with flowers, carried a lantern. His bright silky neckfur rippled in a night breeze. A handsome man, Enli thought impersonally, and her heart hurt all over again. Calin …

  Pek Sikorski said, “Never. Good-bye, Dieter.” She broke the link. Immediately the comlink rang again with its peculiar mechanical noise, so unlike a real bell. Pek Sikorski did something that made the ringing stop.

  “May your gardens bloom forever, Pek Sikorski, Pek Brimmidin,” the young Pek Voratur said. He held out an orange blossom.

  “May your ancestors rejoice in your flowers,” Enli said, when it became apparent that Pek Sikorski was not going to speak. The Terran’s face looked, to Enli, like someone dead: skin even paler than usual, temples tight, eyes flat. Enli saw despair, but she knew Soshaf Pek Voratur did not. Not without creased skull ridges, drooping neckfur, folds of skin around dark eyes. Pek Voratur was not experienced enough with Terrans to see Pek Sikorski’s despair, and so was saved the head pain that now pierced Enli. Reality was not shared among the three of them, but only she knew it.

  Pek Voratur said to Pek Sikorski, “My father asks the gift of talk with you, Pek.”

  She looked at him in sorrow and pain. He didn’t see it. And that’s the way it will be soon for all of us, Enli thought, when the Terrans again lift the artifact into the sky. None of us will know what others feel.

  “I will come,” Pek Sikorski said listlessly. Pek Voratur smiled and lifted his lantern against the growing dark. Inside its glass, the small deep pan of oil sent up a sudden flame. Then it went out. While Pek Voratur struggled to light it again, Enli whispered to Pek Sikorski.

  “When will they take shared reality away again?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Forever?”

  “Forever.”

  “There,” Pek Voratur said with satisfaction, “it’s lit. Just follow me, Peks.”

  On the green the dancing had resumed, but it was tentative, fearful. Enli could feel the difference. But at least it was shared tentativeness, shared fear. She turned her head away and followed Soshaf Pek Voratur in silence.