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“Enough,” said Donovan, rising. He started to turn, checked himself, faced the question he had been avoiding. “What happened to Ravn … and the rest?”

Sadness overcame the face of Gidula. “Alas, the Ravn is no longer with us.”

Donovan knew bleakness in his heart. He was not sure he had come to like his kidnapper, but he had certainly grown used to her sassy presence. There had been a mischievousness to her that he had found appealing. “She was always cheerful,” he said.

“Yes,” said the Old One, “but she was working on that and making great improvement. As for Oschous, he fled to Old Eighty-two, along with Big Jacques. Manlius and Dawshoo had already gone to the Century Suns by prearrangement. They intend to … What do you Terrans say?”

“Lie low.”

“Yes. Such a colorful ‘lingo.’”

“It’s a patois. A synthesis of a dozen different tongues. The ancient tongues—”

“Is it.” Gidula was not really interested. “Oschous told me that Domino Tight survived the assassination attempt—he was not clear how—and has agreed to enter San Jösing and set up safe houses. Everyone is recruiting new magpies. So the team we agreed would infiltrate the Secret City remains nearly intact. Like you, Big Jacques must recover from his wounds. We are going to make contact with Little Jacques, who will meet us on Terra.”

“On Terra.” The name went through Donovan like the slice of a sword and cut short all his thoughts.

“Why, yes,” said Gidula. “I thought I had told you. My offices are on Terra.”

“The Taj…,” whispered the Fudir, slowly sinking back into his seat. Oh, to see the green hills, to walk the holy soil of Vraddy and bathe in the sacred Ganga … To see Zhõgwó. And Vrandja, where the Yurpans lived; and Murka—and walk the fabled streets of Pree and Mumble, Vayshink and Ũāvajorque.

And Iracatanam Antapakirantamthe, the Capital of All the Worlds.

The Fudir fought to keep the emotion from his voice. “When,” he said, “do we arrive?”

“In four standard days. Ekadrina used you ill, and it wanted all this time to restore you. Work with Five. Get your strength and endurance back up.” He rose and took Donovan by the elbow and bowed him toward the door. “The time has come to bury all pretenses. You really must remember the way into the Secret City. It is essential to our plans, and I propose to do all in my power to aid your recollection.”

Somehow, that last was not a comfort to Donovan buigh.

V. The Pasdarm at the Iron Bridge

Terra. The world from which once set forth the great star-captains of old: Yang huang-ti, Chettiwan Mahadevan, and all the rest—to conquer worlds and write their names in glory. Later generations, lacking their vigor, mocked their outsized exuberance. Glory? They could not have been serious! But mockery has always rung false and uncertain from the lips of those to whom no statues would ever rise.

The ships had gone out at first looking for life, confident that they would find it in abundance. They recited a mantra called the Prayer of Drake. But they found no answer to their prayer save the lichens of Dao Chetty or the worms of Yuts’ga, and some torpid seas soupy with eukaryotes. On a few scattered worlds, they discovered the indecipherable evidence that Others had once walked there in times forgotten. Where are they? Where are they?

Nowhere, it seemed. And so, deprived of true aliens, the men of Terra had fashioned their own. The great science-wallahs of old who had touched the genes of plants and of animals touched even those of men themselves, transforming disappointments to joy and shaping each new world to their partiality. New kinds of men arose and dreamed new kinds of dreams. They scattered Arks before them like dandelion seeds to quicken worlds they themselves would never live to tread.

For a time, great fleets of suspension ships sought to relieve population pressures at home by carting off the excess. That did not work. A vigorous age reproduces with vigor; as those whose cradles are barren are also barren in other ways. Elsetime did people search out nooks where they would be free to live as they wished. That did not work, either, for men bring oppression with them wherever they go and those who find their dreams will press them upon their children. At still other times, they had been forced out against their will for reasons economic, political, or judicial.

In the end it was sheer osmosis that populated the Spiral Arm, a complex stew of curiosity, greed, displacement, persecution, and deliberate exploitation. It was a thin gruel. A random sampling of stars would find nothing, not even death, for a thing must live before it can die. Not every star is caressed by the tendrils of Electric Avenue, and so their worlds spin forever beyond reach, no matter how close they might lie as the crow does fly. And even within the network are worlds untouched by the Arks: worlds in eddies and cul-de-sacs and whorls or up blind alleys, worlds so unpromising, so meanly endowed with even the inanimate, that there was little point to sprinkling the animate upon them: superjovians whirling like dervishes about a fire; marsbodies too weak to retain their warming blankets; worlds wrapped so tightly that their very air pressed and crushed and incinerated even the hope of life. But here and there: oases that could be nurtured and cultivated into suitable—sometimes barely suitable—homes. Out into this vast, untouched, and untouchable desert, mankind spread through the creases of space. They went sometimes with heads cocked high, sometimes in shackles. Sometimes because they had everything to gain, sometimes because they had nothing to lose.

But they went.

* * *

All his life—to the extent he remembered a life—the scarred man had dreamed of Terra. It was the grail of all those huddled in the Terran Corners of the Periphery; those who had not forgotten the days of old, who preserved the languages and lore in their Terran Schools when everyone else had forgotten, who loved the memory of a world they had never seen. Man was at home on a thousand planets, but only one was the home of man.

Every Terran yearned to make the hajj, and “Next year on Terra” was a common valediction among them. The Brotherhood schemed and plotted to return all Terrans to the home-world. Some few thought to reignite past glories in the face of the Names, but more simply desired to nestle in the mother world’s arms: to see “the Taj and the Wall and the Mount of Many Faces,” to visit the Monument of the Lions in the pass of Jelep La, or the wreckage of the Beanstalks brutally scythed by the conquering Names of Dao Chetty. “Twelve-gated Terra,” she had been called, for a dozen of these massive elevators had girdled the globe and had perceptibly slowed the world’s rotation. Most of alclass="underline" to visit Iracatanam Antapakirantamthe, the Capital of All the Worlds.

As Gidula’s ship crossed the orbits of High Wonsing and Tin Wonsing and passed within distant sight of the glorious rings of Tousing and the somber-striped king of planets, Muksing, the scarred man found his breath growing shorter and his heart beating stronger. He knew these worlds by older names—Ketu and Raku, Cani and Viyazan—and the Pedant mulled names older still, bestowed by cultures near forgotten. At times, the feelings welled up uncontrollably and he would break into tears.

His companions, far from laughing, often wept with him. He had found them easily moved, as often by others’ emotions as by their own. Just as a play in shaHmat might inspire them to sudden rage, so a homecoming could induce sudden tears. And so a mood at once festive and romantic suffused the staff and crew of White Comet. Five recalled a woman he had known in Ketchell; Twelve spoke longingly of sailboats on Lake Montang. Twenty-four remembered hang gliding in the Angies. Even Gidula grew wistful and from time to time pulled a small box from the recesses of his clothing and inspected within it a lock of hair.