133. Tombstone The path narrowed, twisting through forest now alive with birdcalls, though

133.  Tombstone

The path narrowed, twisting through forest now alive with birdcalls,
though Jayhawk never saw any of the birds.  Above the canopy there was
still a trace of crimson sunlight, but it was rapidly growing dark
below.

She came to a sudden turn, the path veering left and opening into a
bright glade.  A squat slab of granite stood at the turning like a
marker.  She bent to squint at it.  There were words carved deeply into
its surface:

   FOR HER LOVE
   REST IN PEACE
       2023

She thought of Aliantha, who had once told *him* that she loved him.  2023
seemed a reasonable guess for her birthdate.  Three years older than
Jayhawk.  She shook her head, went jogging on into the fading sunlight.

The path ran uphill, cresting a low rise.  She ran faster, enjoying
her tirelessness, trying to outdistance her terror.  She almost ran
headlong into the huge animal that was sleeping just over the lip of the
hill, caught herself ungracefully and hastily drew back.  It was a
huge--she revised her first impression as it put up its head, ears
flattened, and stared at her through slitted eyes.  It was an enormous
cat, sunset-gold, its eyes nearly on a level with her own as it stretched,
stood up.

"Charlotte?" she said tentatively, and went down on one knee, nervously
holding out her hand for inspection.  The great cat padded silently up
to her, sniffed at her briefly, then tilted its head to be scratched.
She buried her fingers in the thick, warm fur behind its ears.  "Will
you take me to *him*?"  Charlotte let out a low, rumbling purr and
levered herself back down to a comfortable sprawl.

Jayhawk got up, walked around her, then turned to look back.  She would
have been glad of company, even Charlotte's.  A rustle behind her caught
her attention.  Something was coming down the path toward her, a blur of
motion.  It resolved into Slim, coming up into a gunman's crouch, a
long-barrelled gun in each hand.  He was as tense as a wire, motionless
except for a barely perceptible trembling, the pulse of blood in the
huge veins visible at his throat.  His skinless flesh was lurid red in
the failing light.

Slowly he relaxed a little, stood up.  The guns didn't waver from her.
"What are you doing here?"

"I've come to talk to *him*."

"Why?"

"I've been told that the only real answers to what's going on are to
heal him or kill him.  I've been working on ways to do that."  She heard
the ambiguity in her words, let it stand.

Slim nodded, slowly holstered his guns.  "You could have had one of those
just by waiting a little longer.  I don't reckon there's more than about
a day left."

"Then I need to act quickly.  That plan has a lot of problems with
it."  Her own death among them, she was coming to realize.  If *he*
truly maintained the Overnet....

"I'm sorry about the reception, ma'am.  I thought *they* might have
managed to get in here."

Were 'they' her friends or the angry ghosts?  "Will you take me, please?
Martha said you could."

"All right, ma'am."  He turned, waited for her to catch up.  "I hear
you've been doing real well."

She had a difficult time taking that as a compliment, coming from him.
"Are things all right for you?"  She was sure they weren't, remembering
his wistful request for fur.  Her plea had been ignored.  Sudden as
wildfire, her hatred for Paradisio came flaring up.  They couldn't even
do that for one of their own.

"Very busy, ma'am, as you might expect."

She had to trot to keep up with his longer legs.  There was a nervous
edge to his bearing that belied his calm words.  Were Duende and the
others going to attack *here*?  Were they making a run against the High
Temple itself?  She hoped not, for their sakes.

"Are they going to approve of what you're doing, ma'am?" Slim cut into
her thoughts with uncanny accuracy.  Did he mean Duende and his allies,
or the ghosts? 

She thought for a moment, came up with an answer that fit both.  "They're
not here.  I am."

Ten minutes' jog brought them to a massive baobab tree.  Slim reached
into a hollow, pulled on something that caused the entire front of the
tree to pivot away, revealing a doorway into bare white corridor. 
Jayhawk stopped short, taken aback.  She knew where she was; within the 
'game preserve' where Charlotte lived, inside the High Temple.  But she'd 
walked here from Anubis.  Were all the gardens one garden, and did that
mean that Anubis was within the High Temple?  Did Martha and her allies
take their rest breaks in the forests that bordered on her sanctum?

No, she assured herself firmly.  She hadn't really been in Anubis when
she met Lefty.  This was a dream, or a place reached by dreaming, not
the reality of her most private sanctuary.

Collecting herself as best she could, she followed Slim through the
tree-door, into the High Temple.

134.  Knight

Jayhawk followed Slim through the featureless corridors of the High
Temple, trying and failing to match them to the map she'd created during
her imprisonment.  After nearly ten minutes they came to a stairway, the 
first she'd ever seen in the complex; it jogged back and forth, climbing
steeply.  More than one level, she guessed.  The corridor into which it
opened was no different than the one it had left, and equally
unfamiliar.

"'Scuse me, ma'am," said Slim suddenly, "but there's a storm coming.  Do
you think you can run?"

"Of course."  Even though she'd encountered them in her journeys,
physical limitations were still foreign to her concept of herself.  Slim 
broke into a fast trot; she followed, trying not to look at the way running 
made his muscles slide across one another, the occasional glimpses of gut 
and bone  and metal beneath.

Something ached in the back of her head, an unexpected persistant pain.
She probed inward to identify it, found that it was coming from outside,
mediated through the part of her that had been Piebald.  A warning of
the storm that Slim had sensed?  She choked back the contact until it
was warning but not pain.  *Not my fault!* said Piebald-within
indignantly.

They took refuge in a bare, cavernous room.  She was not at all tired or
out of breath, to her satisfaction.  Out of the corners of her eyes, she
persistantly saw movement, lights, machinery, but when she looked at them
directly there was nothing.  As before, the life of the High Temple was
hidden from her.

Slim stood quietly, watching the door.  She tried to think of something
to say to him.  "How are the animals doing?" she ventured at last.

He started, obviously distracted from other thoughts.  "Well enough,
thank you, ma'am."  She couldn't nerve herself up to interrupt him
again.

The warning pain subsided, and they went on.  The corridors seemed
endless.  Here, too, she saw flickers of movement out of the corners of
her eyes, but they never resolved into form.  *Was* there life here?  Or
was it an illusion made for Slim and Martha, and not sufficient to fool
her?  The Temple felt strange, both deserted and overwhelmingly
occupied.

Pain screamed suddenly in the back of her mind, in Piebald's voice.
Slim whirled toward her, face contorted with an emotion she couldn't
read, forehead furrowed to the bone.  "Hold on!" he shouted.  "This is
going to be a bad one!"

With a Matrix-runner's instincts, she reached for the wall rather than
Slim, found nothing to cling to in its smoothness.  Around her the
corridor rippled, elongating and contracting, curving madly out of
sight.  A pulse of change erased Slim, leaving a twist of distortion
where he'd been.  Another took away her surroundings entirely, left her
clinging to nothing, in darkness.

Wind, cool and searching.  Grass underfoot.  Stars overhead, and a vast
open expanse around her, carpeted with grass.  Her environment revealed
itself slowly, one step at a time.  She was standing on an open plain,
nothing to be seen for tremendous distances in all directions.  It was
dark beyond any outdoors she had ever experienced, except for the nights
in the jungle beyond the Gate.  There was no glimmer of city-glow
anywhere.

Resolving out of nothingness, as the entire scene had, she saw a
heavily-armored figure on a massive black horse standing in front of
her, about ten meters away.  His armor was entirely black, no glint of
metal, no glitter of eyes through the slitted visor of the helmet.  The
horse was still as if carved of stone, hooves planted in the grass like
the roots of buildings.

"Who are you?" he said in a toneless slow voice.

"Jayhawk," she said simply.  Was he another guardian, another test?  Or
a reflection of *his* madness?

"By whose authority do you come here?"

"By my own."  She had an odd feeling that he was not listening to her
answers; only recording them, perhaps.

"Of what lineage?"

"What?"  That question made no sense to her at all.  "Can you explain?"
He made no reaction.  "I came here by my own choice," she said at last,
guessing.

"Why did you seek initiation?"

She had a sudden image of Aliantha standing where she was standing now,
a step in her own path to power.  The obstacles in her way were part of
an old, elaborate pattern, the challenges to a would-be High Priest--
nothing, really, to do with her.  But she could answer that question, in
her own way.  "For freedom, and wholeness, and power."

"Then, Jayhawk," said the knight formally, "since you claim no other:
you must pass me, or fail."  With a stiff but graceful gesture he drew a
huge, dead-black sword from its sheath on his back, sat at attention on
his motionless horse.

She nodded to herself, began to walk slowly forward, watching him
carefully.  She couldn't fly here, as experiment demonstrated; couldn't
even remember exactly how to begin.  It was like a nightmare she'd once
had in which she needed to run from a pursuer, but found she'd forgotten
how and could only crawl with agonizing slowness.

The ground underfoot gave way suddenly; she flung herself backwards,
barely managed to keep herself from falling.  The bit of grass on which
she'd set her foot had dropped out in a neat hexagonal section, like a
floor tile.  Cautiously she edged up to the hole, looked down.  The
sides were smooth and neat, too neat to be earth, and went down beyond
the limits of her vision.

She reached out with one foot, tapped the grass beside the hole on her
right.  It fell silently out of sight.  The tiles were about a meter
across--jumpable, if the grass on the other side was solid.  But if she
jumbled onto a falling tile, she'd have no way to save herself.  The
loss of flight was suddenly dizzying; she had trouble bringing herself
to move at all, even on ground she knew was solid.  Would it stay solid?

With considerable effort, she managed to pull up a tuft of grass, but it
disintegrated in the air when she threw it across the gap.  She dug in
her belt pouch, came up with a heart-shaped glass bottle, half full of
crimson liquid.  A pity to lose it, but she had to get through.  The
midsummer deadline nagged at her, though she had no sense of the outside
passage of time, cut off from Anubis' clock.  She hefted the bottle,
tossed it underhand.  It landed on the grass across the hole, rolled to
a stop.  With a deep breath, she took three steps backwards, ran toward
the hole.

The armored figure reached behind his back, drew out a huge spear.  As
she leaped he threw it at her.  There was no way to dodge without
falling--she tried to steel herself, hit the ground hard and dug her
hands into it, afraid to roll.  The spear had touched her, she'd seen
it, but she'd felt nothing.  An illusion.  Carefully she climbed to her
feet, looked at the knight.  A meter closer.

She picked the bottle up and went on, walking more carefully, watching
the ground as well as the knight.  Something caught her eye just as she
was bringing her foot down, and for an instant she felt an unnatural
hardness--she jerked her foot back, crouched to stare at the grass.  It
looked subtly different, but she couldn't pin down the reason.  She took
out the bottle again, dropped it onto the suspect patch of grass.

With a silent, almost invisibly-fast movement the grass grew upward to
meet it at a height of twenty centimeters.  The bottle hit the
leaping grass and was knocked sharply aside to land at her feet.  The
grass subsided instantly to its original height of about ten
centimeters.  She bent and picked the bottle up.  The glass was chipped
and scarred.

Very carefully, she lay down on the normal grass, parted it to peer at
the roots of her problem.  From that angle the difference was quite
perceptible; the aggressive grass was black nearly halfway up its shaft,
wearing the green blade like a headdress.  She could reach out and touch
it from this side without danger; it was stiff as wire, and she couldn't
push a finger between the blades.

Her lightblade made no impression on the black grass; it bounced off
with a faint sizzling sound, leaving no trace.

She sat back, looked up at the knight.  He was sitting motionless, head
level; it was impossible to tell if he was watching her or not.

She was afraid to close her eyes with him so close.  She slitted them to
block out distraction, imagined a mowing machine--a self-guided power
mower, like the ones that wandered the University's lawns.  An instant
of closed eyes to fix the visualization, and she opened them again, saw
the machine she had imagined.  It was dark blue with polished silver
blades, resting idly on the very edge of the normal grass.  She hopped
up, turned it on, gave it a forward push.  It began to slice its way
forward, biting into the black grass about two centimeters above the
ground.  She followed it gingerly, but the stubble underfoot was
quiescent.

The knight brought out another spear, threw it--at her, she thought, and
restrained herself from ducking, knowing it as an illusion.  It plunged
into the engine of her mower, which coughed horribly and stopped.
Bereft of power, it melted into nothingness almost at once.  She was
standing on a narrow path amid the black grass.  It didn't reach the end
of the infestation, examination proved.

A bigger, tougher machine?  The image of a thresher, an agricultural
mowing machine, leaped to mind:  with a flash of Piebald enthusiasm she
added a light on top, sirens to impress the spectator, great flailing
appendages to beat down the grass.  She closed her eyes for an instant,
opened them.  A wave of sound and light assailed her, then faded,
hooting mournfully.  The machine slipped from her mental grasp like
water between her fingers.

Frustrated, she looked around for other options, found that the grass
was growing.  It was already a meter high in front of her, and
increasing rapidly.  It seemed to become more clumpy as it grew taller;
she bent cautiously, managed to poke a finger between the wiry blades.
She couldn't think of a way to stop it, though it seemed imperative that
she do so; soon it would be too tall to jump, even if she'd managed to
nerve herself up to it--she had an ugly image of herself impaled on
needle-sharp blades.

The spaces between the clumps were becoming wider and wider as the grass
reached above her head.  She knelt, tried to push two clumps aside, find
a way between them.  It was almost doable.  The grass was tremendously
high now, almost tree-like, each individual clump like a branchless,
many-stemmed tree.  She took a cautious step forward, then another.  The
grass was still growing, a towering forest blocking out the starry sky
overhead.  It was very dark, but not obscuringly so--she wondered
fleetingly whether absence of light could really block her vision.  And
walked forward, hoping the grass wouldn't decide to bend.  It was
dangerously sharp-edged, even at this size.

She expected to reach the knight soon, but she walked forward for five
minutes, realized that something must be wrong.  Either she was lost, or
he'd moved.  There was no visibility beyond the endless aisles of the
grass-forest.  She thought about going back, but it seemed futile.  She
broke into a trot, looking around for any sign of the knight's passage.

Something came crackling and rustling toward her--a furrow in the dark
ground, like the track of a burrowing animal.  It was directly in her
path.  She ran toward it, then at the last moment leaped over it.
Something lunged out at her, moving too quickly to be seen--she had a
dizzy impression of a long, jointed black arm, an insect's arm.  She
threw herself around a grass-tree, managed to avoid it, felt a stab of
fire and ice in her calf.  Another leg had thrust up out of the earth,
laid her leg open from ankle to knee.  It hurt intensely, with a dreamy
nightmarish pain.  Whimpering, she ran from the burrow, hearing it
crackling after her.  The pain dulled with fear, and she left it behind.

There was a break in the grass-forest ahead, something huge and dark.
In an instant she realized where she must be, what had happened, and the
darkness resolved into a hoof a dozen times taller than herself,
something towering up above it too big to see in its entirety.  Even as
she understood what she was seeing it shifted.  She was full-sized
again, standing in front of the knight, and he was raising a huge sword,
nearly the length of her own body, over his head.

She ran, limping a little on her injured leg--not away from him, but
past.  When she heard the air part for the sword's passage she threw
herself down and rolled, came up behind the black horse.  Behind her, he
reined his mount into a rearing, plunging turn, prepared for another
stroke.

"I got past!" she screamed, and ran.  The black horse pounded after her;
it was immediately obvious that she couldn't outrun it.  She pulled a
fence out of the confusion of pain and fear in her mind, a two-rail
fence of steel piping, dropped and rolled under it.  The horse thundered
toward her, gathered itself in a tremendous leap, sailed overhead.  It
hit the ground in a clatter of steel and harness, wheeled to face her
again.  She struggled to her feet, holding the fence for support.  Her
leg was bleeding lavishly, scattering blood onto the dark grass.

"Stop!" she howled.  "I got past, I did what you said, this isn't fair!"
He made no answer, no sign that he'd heard her, only raised the blade
overhead and spurred his mount back toward her.  She clung to the fence.
Running was useless, and anyway this was *wrong*, she shouldn't be
letting him chase her, she'd *won*--

The blade descended, and she closed her eyes, braced for death.  It
won't be the first time, she told her fear.  I can face this.  I've
faced it before.

The fence shifted in her grasp, becoming smooth wall.  She opened her
eyes to sudden, dazzling brightness, found Slim staring at her.  They
were in the fluorescent glare of the High Temple's corridors, now
straight and solid again.

"That was close, ma'am," he said in a tone she couldn't interpret,
something between concern and criticism.

"What do you mean?" she said, wondering if he'd been aware of what
happened to her, or if he meant--what had that been?  A storm?

"You nearly died."

She nodded, wondering if she'd won or lost, passed or failed the test.
Her leg ached with remembered pain, though there was no mark on it.
"Let's go," she said.  "There's not much time left."

Slim tipped his hat back to look at her.  She'd always avoided his eyes
in the past, but they were the most human part of him, soft blue and
oddly sorrowful.  "If you're all right, ma'am," he said gently, and
turned to go.

135.  Charnal

The corridor down which Slim was leading Jayhawk turned abruptly, opening
into a room floored in a harsh, alternating pattern of red and black.
The walls were black too, hung with flayed carcasses; long streaks of
red stained the walls, pooled heavily on the floor.  Jayhawk forced
herself to look around once, quickly.  There were no other apparent
exits.  The bodies might have been human; she wasn't sure.

Slim walked out into the center of the room, boots leaving smudges of
red behind them.  In an unexpectedly harsh voice he said:  "So.  You've
come."

His eyes were not the soft blue that she remembered; they reflected the
black and crimson of the room.

"Do you enjoy the sight of what you've done?" he said, and flung both
arms wide, tendons gliding under their thin sheaths of flesh.
Unwillingly, she looked at the walls.  Piebald's face stared sadly back
at her, upside down, dangling from a hook like an empty sack next to a
bundle of broken flesh.  The skin next to him still held long strands of
black hair.  Angela's, perhaps.  She didn't look closer to identify it.

Choking back nausea, she said, "I came to heal, not to kill.  This is
none of my doing."

"Eater of souls," he said to her, a startling depth of hatred in his
voice, "builder in shit, who will you take next?  How many more will die
for you?"

*Look who's talking!* she wanted to say, remembering all Paradisio's
horrors.  "No one.  I am content with myself--and I've never taken
anyone who wasn't willing!  This is nothing to do with me."  Piebald's
eye stared glassily out at her, its yellow clouding to grey.

"So you say.  What will you do when you fail?"

"If I fail--and I'm not planning to fail--I'll give my support to those
who are trying to destroy *him* and all his works.  Those are the only
choices left.  I can't let things go on as they are."  How many souls
had *he* eaten, how many flayed skins had he left behind?

"Then you pledge yourself to destruction."  There was something else
under the hatred, a terrible weight of despair.

"No," she said simply, "because I'm not going to fail."

He stepped back as if pushed by the weight of her determination, black
eyes fixed on her.  It wasn't Slim, perhaps had never been Slim; an
insight confirmed by his words, emptied now of all expression.  "In that
case, you are right.  You have already passed me."

He vanished, and the room of carcasses with him.  She was standing in a
curving corridor, a door directly behind her.  She recognized it; the
door of her own room, the place where she'd been imprisoned.  The
curving corridor would lead to a dark chamber, a voice whispering of
pain and immortality.

She considered the door in front of her, found that she was afraid to
open it; she might see herself, still imprisoned.  She shook her head to
rid it of that thought, turned away.  There was nothing in there for
her anyway.

136.  Betrayal

Jayhawk walked down the curving corridor, found herself facing a closed
door.  It made no response to her presence until she reached out and
touched it; then it slid reluctantly aside.  There was darkness within,
and a faint sweetish smell, old corruption gone stale.

She walked forward, and when the door slid shut behind her she
visualized a rod of blue crystal, reached down to find it at her belt.
It glowed with a faint sapphire light at her touch, just enough to
illuminate her path.  It revealed nothing.  The sound of her movement
died in a vast emptiness all around her.

Somewhere there would be a center.  She walked through the empty space,
trying to find it.  There were no landmarks, but she fancied that she
had a vague sense of the chamber's shape.  She set the feeling of unseen
walls at her back, walked away from it.

Eventually she felt that she'd come to the center, though there was
nothing to mark it.  She raised the rod overhead, let a little more
light trickle out--she'd made it deliberately dim to spare the eyes of
the one she'd expected to find, but there was no sign of him.  The light
went out from her and encountered vacancy; there was not even a
reflection from the dead-black surface beneath her.  She had a sudden,
dizzying feeling that there *was* no surface, beyond the fiction that
she was creating so that she could walk on it.  She was at the center of
a sphere.

"Hello?" she called out, as loudly as she could bring herself to dare.
There was neither answer nor echo.

Against an incomprehensible and painful reluctance, she called again,
louder:  "Astrachok!"  She would not call him Lord, even now.

After a long moment she saw something approaching.  It was a flat image,
like a primative piece of graphics; a woman--no.  She wasn't sure.  For
a moment she'd thought it was Aliantha.  Closer, it was no one she could
recognize, a vaguely human face blurred beyond identification.  It
seemed to change, though she could never catch it changing.  For an
instant she saw fire, a woman clothed in fire, consuming nothing,
illuminating nothing.  Her light did not shine on it.  It was visible of
itself, like an image projected on her eyelids.  It made no sound.

"Will you take me to him?" she said softly when it had come within a few
meters.

It raised one hand with a dancer's grace.  On its palm was a small, flat
disc, of a color she couldn't resolve between gold and red.  Thin black
letters, a single word:

here

Her nerves prickled.  Here, in this vast emptiness?  Was she too late?
"All right."  A deep breath.  She might be talking to *him* directly, or
some fragment of him; she couldn't tell, decided it didn't matter.
She'd repeat herself as many times as she had to.  "This is what he must do
to be healed.  First, he must call all of those he's taken into himself,
and give them a choice--to go free, to live or die as they may; or to
become part of him, wholly, irrevocably, by their free choice."

The figure tilted its head, stared at her with eyes like fragments of
the Void.  The disc in its hand bore a single word:

why?

"If you make a person out of people who hate each other," she said
carefully, "he'll hate himself.  There's no way to wholeness through
that.  It's a necessary sacrifice."

For an instant she was surrounded by voices, a myriad of voices--as if
the whole sphere, in all its vastness, was filled to overflowing with
people all speaking at once, and all at once falling silent.

Uncertainly, she said, "It might be best to ask them one by one; but he
would know better than I."  What had happened?  What about Martha?

The figure shifted, though she could see no movement.  It seemed male
now, a fair-haired man she didn't know, distorted by the flattening of
the image.  The disc in its hand said:

key?

She put a hand to her belt, hesitated.  She'd clung to it all this time,
afraid that in giving it up she'd give up control, freedom, the
possibility of escape.  *His* key, his gift.  Slowly, she held it out.
The image took it from her, an instant's contact like the touch of
feathers, of frost.  Bending at odd points, not where a human would
bend, it stooped to the floor, spun the key like a top.  It blurred into
a disc of gold, a meter wide.  The figure crouched, beckoned her with an
open palm.

look

She bent to look, saw men in heavy armor moving down a corridor, guns
cradled in their arms.  One supported a smaller figure who was limping
heavily.  After a moment she recognized Duende at the lead--or could it
be another Gatekeeper?  She was seeing the armor, not the man.  No.
There was Yoichi, deck slung at his back in an embroidered band she
remembered.

There were more of them than she would have expected, more than the
eight who'd taken Cavilard Base.

The viewpoint of the golden disc moved, running ahead of them down their
path.  It passed unhindered through a door painted with dully glowing
designs, stopped in a large room filled with boxes and cases.  In the
center, cradled in midnight-black velvet, was something like a
crystalline egg, illuminated with its own inward light.  It drew the
eyes, rendered the rest of the view insignificant; but she could make
out no details, only an impression of brightness, depth, infinite
complexity.

She looked up at the image, who opened both hands to her as if pleading.
The discs on its palms, a color between crimson and black, said:

stop
them

"No!" she said sharply.  "You have no right to ask that of me."

It looked at her with eyes of a color she remembered, the color of the
sun at its death.  There was a disc in its hand, grey as the Overnet.

sacrifice

"That's not how it works.  You can't sacrifice other people; that's a
red herring, it doesn't get you anywhere.  That's the mistake
Paradisio's been making all along."

Two discs, in hands held out palm up like a beggar's:

your
sacrifice

"They're not mine to sacrifice!" she said, pleading in her turn.  "I
don't even think I *can* stop them.  They don't trust me, they won't
listen to me.  They haven't told me their plans."  There was no
response.  "How can anything good come out of betrayal?  Don't ask me to
do this."  Desperate, whispering, "Ask for a sacrifice that's mine to
make, if you must."

It was still, silent, changing only in the instants when she was not
watching it.  Smaller than she, now, fragile as a child.

If she refused, she would fail, she guessed.  She remembered what Martha
had said about Duende's team:  'They're pursuing the one line of attack
which will insure that neither we nor they can win.'  *He* would die, if
he could; Martha would die, fuel for his pyre.  She herself would die
with the collapse of the Overnet, if the djinn had told the truth.  And
probably Duende and the others would be within the conflagration as
well.  Sunflower and fusion fire.  Annihilation.

There had been a time when she would have given up her life to see
Paradisio destroyed.

If she agreed...they might die anyway, at her hand.  She didn't think
that she could stop them by argument or trickery.  Channa would see
through her in an instant, as she always had.

She could try anyway, try negotiating, confront him with her failure.
No.  She felt a dreadful certainty that if she agreed to betray them,
they would be betrayed; she would have no second chance, no opportunity
to weasel her way out.

They would condemn her for what she'd done, if they lived to understand
it.  She remembered Duende's quiet passion, fixed always and wholly on
one cause, his private war with Paradisio.  'I wish to prove to myself
that I am real.  This is the only way I can find to do it.'  Having been
Paradisio's prisoner herself, she understood now why he felt that way.
Her own reality, dreamshadow of *his* making, was so tenuous....

"How can I do this?" she whispered, as much to herself as to the other.
It stooped, showed her open palms:

step
through

"I came to heal, not to kill," she said.  "I will not harm them."  It
made no reply.

With a shiver that ached in her whole body, she stepped into the
key-shimmer, like a pool of gold.  It closed over her, cleared.  She was
standing in the cluttered warehouse-like room that she had seen.  To one
side was the warded door, its inscriptions glowing softly.  Behind her
was the crystal egg.  After one glance in that direction she kept her
eyes away from it.  Like *him*, it was painful in its beauty.

Not thinking about it, only acting on instinct, she walked to the wall
of the room, spread her arms out wide as if to embrace it.  Walked
*into* it, as if into a computer.

Stone, heavy and static, but alive in a way she hadn't experienced
before.  She was not the High Temple, rather to her surprise, but a
lesser structure with deep roots in the earth.  Down one of those
root-shafts she could feel footsteps, light pressures on her body.  She
had no eyes, no ears.  Only touch told her of their presence.  They were
almost at the final door.

On the Matrix, accessing the Overnet, she had been able to create and
destroy connections between nodes.  She was not on the Matrix now,
though she could feel her connection with the Overnet.  In some fashion
she was still in the dark chamber at the Temple's heart.  But the
situation was the same.  She reached out into the living stone that was
herself, set it flowing to unmake the passageway.  With infinite care,
she kept the changes behind the warded door, away from the humans in
their fragility.  It was hard, harder than she'd expected.  The analogy
with the Matrix was not very close, and the stone wanted to shatter
rather than flowing smoothly.  It resisted her, a growing ache in that
part of her great body.

When she was sure the passageway was sealed, ten feet of native stone
between Duende and the object of his search, she let go of her grip on
the building, found herself again in the empty sphere.

137.  Failure

Channa staggered heavily, nearly fell as the stone beneath her
shook violently.  Her husband caught her, braced them both against the
wall as the tremors increased.  The corridor caught the earthquake's
rumbling, echoed and re-echoed it until she remembered the controls in
her helmet, managed to turn off its receivers.  She could still feel the
sound, trembling in the walls, the floor, her very bones.

At last it stopped.  Her companions collected themselves painfully.  She
saw many anxious glances at the ceiling.  No one was sure how far
underground they were, but the weight of earth overhead was suddenly
oppressive, terrible as a great depth.  Had she filtered out the sound
of the passageway collapsing?  Were they trapped here?

At the head of the column, Duende raised a hand, gestured them on.  She
understood his attitude, though it was hard to share.  Don't worry about
the earthquake; it's beyond our capacities to deal with.  Just keep
going.

There were no aftershocks.  Perhaps it hadn't been a natural earthquake,
but explosives, or maybe a spirit.  She unclamped her helmet, despite
Casey's worried look, and tried to see the truth of what was around
them.  As before, the living stone balked her.  It was like being within
a huge beast...one that might at any moment roll over, crushing them....

Stop it, she told herself firmly, and went on.

They came to a door warded with lines of faintly glowing blue, a complex
unfamiliar symbol.  "This is mine," said Alan, squinting at it.  "Why
don't the rest of you back off, in case it lashes."  She hesitated only
a moment, nodded.  Stranger though he was, they'd come too far not to
trust him now; and this was his area of expertese, not hers.

They retreated thirty meters from the warded door, sat to watch Alan.
He only stared at the pattern for long minutes, unmoving.  Then he
reached out one hand, not quite touching it, and made a single, sharp
gesture.  The webwork of blue unwound like a skein of yarn. In the utter
silence she had time to hear his soft gasp of startlement or understanding.
Then the great door exploded off its hinges in a deafening wave of
blue-orange light.  The shock knocked her from her feet, sent her 
tumbling back into her companions.

Nothing but the door had been damaged, they found when they sorted
through the rubble; the explosion had spared the corridor walls.  Alan
had been directly in the path of the blast, and a ton or more of stone
had caught his upper body like a mallet.  There was no question of being
able to help him.

Beyond the broken door was a passageway slanting steeply upwards, light
streaming in from above.  With a sharp order, Duende got them moving
again, leaving Alan's body to lie.  Channa tried not to look at him as
they passed.  It could have been her.  It would be her, the next time.

After a climb that left her dizzy and winded, her head throbbing with
noise and shock and fear, the passage led them out into the tended
meadows where they had begun, five kilometers from the Temple.  Nothing
had changed; the body of the Jaguar Knight they had interrogated still
lay neatly among the flowers.  Channa cast herself down on the grass,
unable to go any further.  It was not just physical exhaustion, though
she was tired and bruised, and the armor was beginning to feel like a
shackle.

It was despair.  They had actually done it, actually fought their way
into the Temple, and for what?  To come out again, via a senseless five-
kilometer bolthole.  Where was the egg that Duende had described?
Somewhere, they must have missed a turning.  Somewhere.  Or perhaps the
whole thing was Paradisio's last and cruellest joke on them.  Lefty
would have been proud.

They'd lost two people already, Kure to the stone snakes, Alan to the
trapped door.  How many more would it be?  She'd thought she was ready
to die, but this long slow dying was proving her wrong.

"Fifteen minutes," said Duende, his voice expressionless through the
speakers of his helmet.

"What then?" said Casey, beside her, the same despair and exhaustion in
his voice.  "What now?"

"We go back in," said Duende.  "There's nothing else to be done."

138.  Choice  

The changing image--it looked like an old man now, dressed in rags of
grey and yellow--bent over the spinning key.  Jayhawk turned away,
unwilling to see.  In the brief glimpse she'd caught, she'd seen Duende
and his allies advancing slowly down the corridor toward the warded
door.  They would be quite a while getting to it.

The image raised a palm to her, a disc on it which was neither white nor
colored:

watch

"No," said Jayhawk harshly.  "There's not much time left.  Don't waste
it."

To her surprise the figure bent, touched the key to make it stop.  It
held it out to her.  She took it clumsily, put it away at her belt.  

"The next thing to do--"  She was painfully uncertain.  What had it
meant, that terrible confusion of voices?  Were they the voices of those
he'd taken, now dealt with?  Or was that still to be done?  She didn't
know, and doubted whether she could find out.  The image lacked
bandwidth for explanations.  There was nothing to do but go on.  "Call
back all the aspects of himself that are scattered across the world, and
offer each one a choice:  to be separate, existing independently
if it can, or ceasing to exist; or part of him, fully accepted, fully
integrated."

The image gave no sign of having heard her.  It turned away, its
flatness very apparent in the gesture, and stared out into the dark.
After a moment she heard soft footsteps, approaching.  She held up her
light to see.

It was Aliantha, though a younger Aliantha than Jayhawk had ever seen,
barely out of her teens.  She walked slowly forward, stood before the
image, hands at her sides.  There was a moment of intense and terrible
silence.  Then she lifted her head, glanced once at Jayhawk, and walked
forward.  The image did not move to embrace her, but she was enfolded in
its shifting outline, and vanished.

After her there were others, one by one.  Jayhawk sat down, legs folded,
and tried to identify them, but most were strangers.  Some gave
themselves to the image; some averted their eyes and dissolved into the
darkness.  A few turned away and walked off in the direction they had
come from.

Two came walking out of the darkness together:  Martha as she had been
at the High Temple, Martha as she had been at the waterwheel.  They
stood together before the image for a long time.  Those it had absorbed
had given it no further solidity.  If anything, it seemed less real, as
if the dissolutions plucked at its fabric.

Jayhawk forced herself to look up, saw both Martha's looking at her.
She could understand nothing from their expressions.  She wanted to say
something, but guilt and shame and a kind of embarrasment held her back.
And anyway, who was she to advise or question them?  She'd said her part
already.

Abruptly, as if an unspoken agreement had been reached, they turned away
together, walked into the dark, out of her sight.  She felt suddenly,
irrationally hurt that they hadn't spoken to her.  None of the
apparitions had spoken so far; she wasn't sure they could.  But somehow
she had hoped that Martha might.

Others came, an endless stream of them.  Though she tried to watch with
attention, the sheer numbers overwhelmed her after a while.  She
contented herself with watching for individuals.  She was afraid to see
Duende, in particular, and know the full extent of her betrayal.

She saw herself; and almost leaped to her feet, dizzy with horror,
before she realized that she was looking at Weasel.  The Paradisian
agent was still a perfect copy of her Matrix image.  She wasn't
sure how she knew it was Weasel, but she did.  Weasel stood before the
image for a moment, a restlessness in her movements which Jayhawk
remembered.  She wanted to ask questions--Why did you impersonate me?
Where is Angela?  She restrained herself.  Weasel turned away with a
disturbingly familiar gesture of defiance, and dissolved into darkness.
A faint glimmer seemed to persist for a moment, or perhaps it was her
imagination.

She never saw Duende, or Lefty.  Perhaps she missed them in the teeming
multitudes.  Perhaps she had never really known what they looked like.

It seemed to her that she was seeing everyone who had ever served
Paradisio.  All, all aspects of *him*?  No wonder Martha had said that
Paradisio would die with his death.

She wondered if she herself would stand before him, at the end.  His
last High Priestess.

At last the slow procession seemed to be over.  She steeled herself as
the image turned to her.  It didn't seem to have changed, not in any way
that she could distinguish from its constant changing.  It said nothing,
only looked at her for a moment and dissolved itself into the darkness.

She was on the Overnet, though she didn't know how she could tell; it
was utterly dark.  A voice spoke to her as if from a great distance.
Like the Hawk's, it was not embodied in sound; it brushed against her in
the fabric of the Overnet itself.

It said:  *Now I must ask you to hold this for me, for where I am going
I cannot hold it for myself.  Will you?*

In the midst of her guilt and pain she laughed aloud, softly, hearing no
echo from the great emptiness around her.  It was the offer that she had
dreamed of and feared while she was thinking of healing him, though she
had never really admitted either to herself.  He meant the Overnet, of
course.  She remembered merging with Anubis.  In her wholeness she had
been able to survive that; but the Overnet was far greater, and *his*.

She remembered the key he had given her.  She had never really
considered refusing it.  "Of course.  Of course I will."

139.  Overnet

*Until dawn,* said the Dragon to Jayhawk.  She could feel his passage 
through the Overnet, to someplace unimaginably far.  He dove from her
perception and vanished.

She laughed weakly.  Dawn in what time zone?  It seemed a ridiculous
concept.

The Overnet spread out around her.  She was in the center, Anubis was;
at the center of something unimaginably vast, but finite.  She could
feel its edges.

The High Temple was nowhere to be found.  She was in its place;
she/Anubis *was* the center of the Overnet.  It appeared to her as a
mist of tiny points which were systems, even tinier threads that linked
them together.  She had never seen the connectivity before, though she
realized now that she'd been navigating, unconsciously, by those
patterns for some time.

She had no attention to spare for any of the individual points.  Out at
the edges, the Overnet was slowly unravelling, connection by connection,
her awareness insufficient to hold it together.  She could feel it as if
it were happening to her, like the progressive degredation of Anubis
during their initiation. Like having bits of her stripped away, though
they were bits she'd never known she possessed until now.  Not Jayhawk's
memories or powers, not yet.

She reached out to a spreading break in the pattern, like a run
propagating through fabric, a virus breaking down a disc.  She didn't
have the control to stop it; or perhaps she could, but if she focused
all her attention on it, the myriad others which she could sense would
propagate unchecked.  She reached out to touch the damaged structure,
realized in the movement how completely she had lost the sense of human
form.  All of the Overnet was within her reach; she knew herself to be at
the center, but there was not even the illusion of a physical entity to
give substance to that knowledge.

She could not protect or prevent, but she could heal.  With an
infinitely delicate touch, she gathered up the fraying strands of
connectivity, drew them together.  There was a memory, in them or in
her--she wasn't certain--a memory in the Overnet of how this piece
should be.  She called that memory into form, impressed it on the break.
It resisted her for a moment, and she felt the tear within herself, the
flaw in the one trying to mend the flaw, and saw that she would
ultimately fail.

Until dawn.  The broken strands fit together again, though not exactly
as they had before.  The printer she'd healed had changed, too.  She
felt a distant echo of the delight mending it had given her, but she had
no leisure to enjoy it.  There were more breaks, crawling inward at a
frightening pace.  Anubis was at the center.  Everything else would go
before she did...but she didn't want to lose any of it.  Dimly through
her preoccupation she could see the totality of the Overnet.  It was
beautiful beyond imagining, like a map of the countries of desire.

Dawn might be forever in coming.  She remembered how Anubis could
stretch her time until minutes became days, became weeks.

She turned and turned, like a prisoner in an ever-shrinking cage, trying
to keep dissolution at bay.  There were dissonances in what she had
remade, constructions that were not quite of a piece with the rest of
the Overnet.  She had nothing to spare for them.

It was in her thoughts as well--that, more than anything else, told her
how far she had spread herself, or how deeply the rot had eaten.  She
percieved the Overnet with touch and the subtle internal senses that had
governed her physical body--temperature, balance, position, movement.
Now her unused vision began to present apparitions, shadows from memory.
They were constructs, IC she had crafted or studied or fought, fragments
of systems she had run.  A great tentacle reached out to caress her,
fell back.  A flight of golden birds flew overhead, vanished.  No
people.  She knew too well that she was alone.

A sudden pain went through her, a tearing wider than flesh and blood
could conceive.  From the outside in, the whole Overnet was falling
apart, tears propagating almost too fast to perceive, the outermost
reaches simply dissolving into the Void she could now sense, dimly,
gnawing inward in its hunger for her existance.

Almost without thought, she took the thread of her life, still wound 
around her, and cast it out over the disintegrating structure.  It was 
a framework to which to bind the fast-unravelling pattern, a single 
coherent strand to knit all the strands together.  It helped, a little. 
She didn't think about what she was doing to herself.  The concept was 
lost in the immensity of unmaking.

The pull from *outside* relented, and she was able to gain a little
ground, binding everything that she could salvage to the matrix of her
own life.  There were mismatches everywhere, but it was better than non-
existance.  A little more.  Something had changed, something beyond the
scope of her perceptions, wide-spread as they were.

She felt a touch on the strands of the Overnet, as something broke
through them from--from below?  She had no name for the direction--and
moved toward her.  She couldn't see it.  Even the apparitions were gone;
she suspected that her eyes were gone as well.

*It is dawn,* said a great voice, rippling across the Overnet, and
everything around her was still, as if listening.

Slowly she found a voice for herself, no more physical than his.  *What's
happened?*  Now that the deed was done, she found herself afraid to face
its consequences.  She was glad of her blindness.

*Everything has changed,* he said to her.  *Yours is the next wave,
Jayhawk.  Ride it well.*

She was caught up in a sudden, terrible certainty of failure.  He was
unbound from mountain and flesh and machine, she guessed, a free spirit
again as he had once been.  He had taken her message and accomplished
its opposite, not integration but rejection.

*What about the machine?* she asked him.  *Have you set it aside?  Have
you denied what you were?*

*I have denied nothing!*  For the first time she felt the passion behind
his words.  It was like fire licking at her, like a lover's touch.  *It
is part of me now, as it is part of you.  Do you not even understand
your own teaching?*  A vast, terrible amusement.  She remembered his
laughter when she had died on his mountaintop.

*What will you do now?*  She contemplated the task of opposing him now,
of destroying him.  It was so far beyond her means as to be ludicrous.

*It seems,* he said more softly, and the emotion behind his words was
something like wonder, *that I will try being human now.  It is
something I have never done.  I wonder what it will be like.*

She caught her breath, amazed, and tried to see him.  For an instant she
saw brightness, a flame that illuminated the Overnet and reached out far
into the Void.  Then it failed her, or her courage did.

*Your lesson, Mistress of the Web.  You have done your work well,* he
said.  With an almost wistful note, *You need no key from me anymore.  
But I will leave it to you, as a gift, if you wish it.*

She could feel the Overnet around her, trembling with his touch.  The
dissolution was checked, never to begin again while she--while she
lived?  It was true, though she could not have said how she knew it.

*What's happened to Martha?*  It was an easier question to face than
what had happened to her.

*Did you not know?*  Amusement again.  *She will be my mother.*

*Is--is she willing to do this?*

*It was her choice.--Goodbye, Jayhawk.  Perhaps in fifty years we will
speak again, you and I.*

*Wait.  Do you...do you feel that you owe me a debt?*

*In a fashion, I do.  As you owe me one.*

What could she ask?  She thought of Duende, but the words didn't come.
He wouldn't want help from the fruits of her betrayal.  She doubted any
of them would want anything from her, once they knew.  *What would a
Dragon need from me?*

*I am not a Dragon.  And I don't think I should answer that yet.*

There was something impossibly familiar about the soundless voice.  "Lefty!" 
she said aloud, finding out in the process that she could.

*Maybe she will have twins.*

She tried a little longer to find a request, but it seemed to her that
there was nothing she could ask from him now.  Many things that she
needed, but nothing she could ask.  *Goodbye,* she said at last, and 
did not try to look as he dove through her web and was gone.

140.  Change

Jayhawk set herself to repairing the damage to the Overnet, and found
that the whole structure was changing around her, motion within motion
like the spheres of an infinitely complex orrery.  The destruction was
not nearly as great as she'd thought.  Perhaps *he* had helped her? 

But the changes didn't feel like his work.  She remembered how Anubis
had shifted when she first attuned herself to it, fitting into the
pattern of her mind and soul like a perfect and necessary complement.
He'd given the Overnet into her care.  It was an idea she had trouble
grasping.

Before going to the High Temple she had sent Avery DeHaviland a message,
a warning to salve her conscience:  Stay off the Overnet on June 21;
anyone on it may be killed when it unravels.  Apparently her advice had
been taken--she'd been alone through the long night.  She wondered if
their ways of accessing it would still work, now.

She didn't want to leave the Overnet while it was in flux.  It was
shaping itself to her, she could see that clearly now, and probably
shaping her to itself as well.  It didn't seem like a process which she
should interrupt.  But she made a link to get at her email, curious and
somewhat afraid to see what had happened in the world outside.

There were two messages from that address, one from the captain of the
Turing Police, and one from Avery himself.  The first pressed her for
details, reasons, explanations.  The second was very simple, and very
short.

>If you need help in some way, you can contact me privately.  I hope
>you're all right.  Avery

It carried an email address she hadn't found in his files.  She filed it
away, pleased and a little bashful.  She must have caused him no end of
grief, disappearing right in front of his eyes as she had--after all,
he'd been assigned to keep tabs on her.

System by system, she rewove the delicate connections, undid the
isolation that the Overnet's near-destruction had caused.  The new links
seemed more substantial than the old, more explicit.  She remembered
hours spent wandering through the grey, trying to find a point, any
point, of connection with the Matrix.  It wouldn't be like that now.

The Gates were gone.  She unknit the traces they had left, wondered at
them.  They seemed impossible--she'd thought she understood Gates, at
least a little bit, but the constructions she was eliminating didn't
look as if they'd ever have worked.  Finally she realized that they had
been designed for an Overnet which no longer existed.  Gates might still
be possible, but they would not manifest as pathways in the Overnet any
longer.  The rules had changed.

Vision returned to her, a startling cascade of new information.  She
hung in a sea of stars, bright as gems against a background of velvet
black.  She knew their names, each one.  Their patterns were not the
pattern of the Matrix; the Overnet was a different mapping, drawn
together not by physical location or even connectivity, but by the
living ebb and flow of information.  *I always thought it should be
black*--she laughed at herself, wondering if it was true, or if she
thought it should be black because it *was* black, now, shaping her
desires to its reality.  It didn't matter.

She crafted new defenses for Anubis out of the new patterns she could
see.  Hers was a responsible position:  she needed to make sure
that no wandering decker--there *were* ways to reach the Overnet now,
though they would always demand initiation, transformation--could bring
the whole bright glory tumbling down.

She searched the Overnet for signs of Paradisio, found only broken
fragments.  The great systems in Argentina and Bangkok still functioned,
but they were quiet and empty.  Even the beacons of their Gates were
gone.  The communications modules embedded in the interface between
Matrix and Overnet were gone too.  She set monitors on news to watch for
signs in the physical world.

She'd never be able to manifest there again.  She had woven her life
into the fabric of the Overnet.  To withdraw it, to try to sustain herself
unconnected, would set it all unravelling, and her with it.  Somehow
that made her sad, which she hadn't expected.  She tracked the emotion
to its source.

If they had survived, she would need to speak to Duende and the others.
(Could Duende possibly have survived?  He was no more real, she guessed,
than any of Paradisio's other creations.  Fragments of *him*, lost and
hurting, even rebelling, but his none the less.)  She wanted desperately
to ask their forgiveness.  And for that, physical form in all its
vulnerability would have been fitting.

She sent Yoichi email instead.

>Yoichi:
>
>Are you all right?  Can we talk?
>
>As far as I can tell Paradisio is dead.  The main systems are unused,
>the Gates are all down, and I can't find any signs of their
>communications.
>
>Jayhawk

For anxious hours there was no response.  A thousand times she replayed
her decision to betray them.  She could find neither alternatives nor
justifications.  It had been necessary, if she wanted to heal *him*.
It had been...unforgiveable?  She could ask them that.

There were no angry ghosts.  Had Ratty done as she asked?  At what cost
to himself?

She couldn't be impatient with the changes; they happened as they
should, with a steady, relentless rhythm--like the pulse of the
dataflow, like the passage of days and nights across the world, reflected
reflected in the currents of the Overnet for her to read.  But it was hard 
to endure the guilt and uncertainty, and wait.

At last there was a message in return:

>I would like to talk to you.  I think the others would too.  I could
>set up some teleconference stuff tomorrow--17:35 PST.

It was not even signed.  She spent a long night and day wondering about
that, a small bitter worry wound into her work until she forced herself
to set it aside, afraid to poison what she was creating.

141.  Forgiveness

Yoichi, Jayhawk found, had rigged a small computer to a camera and
widescreen vid, so she had a clear view of him and the others.  They
were in some kind of vehicle, maybe a motor home.  She recognized Casey
and Channa, though Channa's hair was now dark brown and Casey had a
respectable moustache.  There was a dark-skinned little girl leaning
against Casey's leg, staring at her with wide cool eyes.  And Angela, 
squeezed into a seat next to Yoichi, watching her with short sidelong 
glances.

There was no sign of Duende, Argent, or Grant.  Painfully, she said, "Is 
this everyone?  Duende...."

"Duende is trying to rescue Argent from the awkward place where the Gate
spit him out," said Channa.  "Jayhawk--"  She sounded as if she wasn't
sure she was using the right name.  "What happened last week?"

Slowly, with some prompting from Channa, Jayhawk laid out the story,
arranged in clear neat lines of victory and betrayal.  When she spoke of
reshaping the Temple's stone there was recognition in their eyes.  "I
see," said Channa at last.  "That explains some things, though not what
happened at the end."

"What happened?"

Channa hesitated as if wondering whether to tell her.  "We were
searching the main body of the Temple when there was something like an
explosion--a sudden burst of noise, pressure, flashing lights, cold....I
think I fainted."  She touched her husband's arm gently.

"We were at Cavilard Base," Casey said.  "The Gate was in ruins--the
whole framework had shattered, and there was a deep burn in the wall
behind it.  About half of us were there, that is--no sign of the others.
We got calls from them later.  They were scattered all over the world at
various Gates.  All broken, all the bases completely empty."

"Who was where," said Channa, "even seemed to make a little sense,
except for poor Argent, who is stuck in Antarctica at midwinter."

Casey, hoarsely--now that she looked at him, he looked battered, a heavy
bandage on his head, his skin paler than she remembered--"Do you know
why that happened?  It seemed like the whole Temple, maybe the whole
island, got sucked into the Gate.  But I don't understand why we came
out at all, let alone in Seattle."

Jayhawk hesitated.  "I would have to guess," she said at last,
reluctantly, "that *he* chose to save you.  The Gates wouldn't have done
that without a will behind them.  It wasn't me.  I didn't even know you
were in danger.  And there wasn't anyone else."

"Duende will ask," said Channa very softly.  "Why?"

"The Hawk told me that he respects sacrifice.  You risked everything to
stop him.  I think he might honor you for that.  And maybe...I don't
know.  Maybe he hopes to be forgiven."  His action to save Duende must
have been much more direct, Jayhawk guessed:  the Gatekeeper was no more
real than she was.  But it would be cruel to tell Duende so, though it
pleased her.  She looked down, searching for words.  "I know what a
terrible thing I did to you.  I felt that I had to, that what would
happen if I didn't stop you would be much worse.  I don't expect you to
agree with me, but I hope you can understand...."  *Forgive*, she wanted
to say, but she was afraid to.

"I believe you did what you thought was right," said Angela
unexpectedly, and flushed as all eyes turned towards her.  "I think you
were probably right, too."

"Thank you," said Jayhawk.  "You don't know how glad I am to see that
you're free and safe."

The others were silent.  She tried not to squirm--even without physical
restlessness, it was instinctive.  It felt very strange to be here, on
the Matrix but not away from the Overnet--she would never really be away
from the Overnet again.  She was like the Turing deckers, always enmeshed
in the place from which she came.  It still hurt, not being able to touch 
them.  She watched Angela settle into the curve of Yoichi's protective arm. 
She should have been able to read Angela's expression, knowing her as well 
as she did, but her own emotions were in the way.

Now that she was finally talking to Angela, she could find nothing at all
to say.

"We--" said Channa, and then checked herself.  "I think I understand why
you acted as you did."  Her eyes were shadowed as if by a bitter memory.
"And I may well forgive you for it.  But you need to give me a little
time.  It's too raw right now."

Casey put an arm around her shoulders, said quietly to Jayhawk, "So
what's happened to Paradisio?  Is it really dead?"

"I believe so, though I haven't been able to check on individuals.  But
the bases are all empty, the Gates are gone, the communication network
is gone.  I don't think it will be easy for any survivors to rebuild."

"What are *you* going to do?"

Was that an accusation?  She didn't think she saw hatred in his eyes,
but she might be deluding herself.  "I'm going to watch and wait, and
make sure that no one tries to put the pieces back together.  I'm
responsible for the Overnet now.  I'm going to look after it.  And--if I
can help you in any way at all...."

"You're not coming back," said Yoichi.

"I can't.  This is what I am now, this is my place.  I wouldn't give it
up if I could."

The little girl, in broken but comprehensible English, said, "Do you
answer to him, or only to you?  Will you stop him if he tries to do this
again?"

"I will try," she said.  "I don't think it will happen; but I promise to
watch for it."

"Good."  The child's eyes were like the Hawk's, feral and too wise for
her age.  What had Paradisio cost her?

"Is there anything else--?"  

For some reason, Channa and Yoichi both looked at Angela, who blushed again.
"I don't think so," she said.  "I'm beginning to see that I was mixed up
in something really bad--I don't think I want to go back to that at all,
not even to figure it out.  That person really doesn't exist any more." 
With a defiant pride that Jayhawk understood from within:  "You can call 
me Susan now."

"I could eliminate all records of Angela Whitechapel," Jayhawk offered.
"That would make it a lot easier for you to start over."

Susan hesitated, then nodded.  "Thanks.  That would really help."

"Thank you," said Yoichi somberly.  "I wasn't sure I could pull that
off.  I don't suppose it's very hard for you."  He ran a hand through
lank black hair.  She'd never seen him let it grow so long.  "Jay, I'm
sorry it had to work out like this, but I'm glad you're okay.  And I
think--maybe you're right, and there really wasn't any way we could have
won."

"That's not what I was trying to say.  If you hadn't been there, if you 
hadn't been fighting him, I'm not sure he would have been desperate enough 
to accept what I did.  Martha implied that he couldn't stop you himself, 
and I think she was right, though I don't understand why."

"That's good to know."  He hesitated, said awkwardly, "Maybe we can talk
again sometime, when things have settled down a little.  Right now
Interpol and the Health Service are looking for us, let alone any
Paradisian survivors.  It's going to be hairy."

"What will you do?"

He looked at Channa, who said, "Try to find a safe place, settle down,
start over.  I think we've had enough violence to last most of us a
lifetime.  I'd like to go back to my studies, maybe teach a little."

"Teach them," said Jayhawk impulsively, "the Black Path isn't
necessarily closed any longer.  That division's healed.  It's still
dangerous, but it can be done."

"I'l bear that in mind," said Channa carefully.  And then, with more
warmth than she'd shown before, "Take care of yourself, Jayhawk.
Let us know if there's something we can do to help."

She wanted so badly to say *Forgive me*.  "Thanks, Channa.  You take
care too.  I'll be here if you ever need me."

Yoichi moved a little, and the screen went blank.  She could have kept
the connection alive through the Overnet, but she was done, too.  It was
better and worse than she'd expected.  They didn't hate her; she was
almost sure of that.  But what had been between them was over.  A final
sacrifice for *him*.

She shook herself out of her sorrow, cast herself into the tides of the
Matrix.  It burned around her like a multitude of stars, drowning her
loneliness with its beauty.

142.  Garden

Jayhawk tried to reach the jungle where Martha had lived at the
waterwheel station, and found her way blocked by walls of intricate
code.  She set herself to finding a way through them, in the time she
could spare from tending the Overnet.

It took her eleven months.

During that time she'd created a full security system for Anubis, and
had it tested twice; bargained with the Turing Police; hunted down the
records of Angela Whitechapel in every database she could find, and
deleted them all; taught Forked Lightning a decent amount of decking,
though not the Overnet knowledge he craved; and formed the basis for a
monograph by Gregor McDougal, to be privately published.  She'd also
teased out of her memories the address at which *he* had vanished into the
Matrix.  It was a maternity hospital in Victoria, BC.  Deliberately, she
followed that line no further.

The barrier code was among the most beautiful she'd ever seen.  Its
elegance was finally her key to passing through it; she looked for a
solution of equal beauty, crafted passcodes like diamonds until she
found one which worked.  With a tiny internal wrench, she found herself
circling above the waterwheel station.

The jetpad had been turned into a garden, with flowers and vegetables in
neatly trimmed rows.  The door to the cottage was open; she knocked anyway, 
then sat down on the porch to wait.

Something came diving around the corner of the house in a blur of speed,
came up in a tense crouch.  It was Martha, crimson-tipped gun cradled in
her arms.  Jayhawk sat very still.

"Oh," said Martha.  "I should have realized it'd be you.  I guess the
defenses didn't work."  She was a little thinner than Jayhawk
remembered, and deeply tanned; her hair was tied back in a bandanna, and
there were spots of dirt on the knees of her pants.

"They were superb," said Jayhawk.  "I've been working on them for nearly
a year.  But if I'm intruding, I can certainly leave.  I thought you
might want some company."

This was not the woman she loved.  The distinction seemed strange to
her, but understandable; it would have made sense for someone to love
Caroline and only tolerate Jay, or vice versa.  But she did care what
this Martha thought of her.

Martha frowned at her briefly, then said, "No, now that you're here you
might as well do something useful.  Come help me weed."  She disappeared
into the house, returned with a small shovel which she pushed into
Jayhawk's hands.  Then she turned resolutely and walked back toward the 
garden.

Jayhawk couldn't restrain herself.  "You do it by *hand*?  Here?"

"It's good for you.  I bet you haven't been exercising."

Jayhawk snorted.  "I've been looking after the entire Overnet.  If that
isn't exercise, I don't know what is."

The sunlight was hotter than it was in her own gardens, and the weeds
were stubborn.  For a while she had no breath for talk.  Martha worked a
parallel row, quiet as if engrossed in her own thoughts.  At last she
came to the end, leaned on her shovel to survey their work.  Jayhawk
struggled with a final weed, finally pulled it out with an effort that
sent her tumbling backwards.  The earth was warm too, and felt very
different from her feather-clothed steel.

"How have you been?" Jayhawk said, glad of the opportunity to catch her
breath.  This place was so exasperatingly physical!

"Not too badly.  I've had lots of time to think...and things are coming
up here."  Jay didn't recognize most of the plants, but their pattern
was so neat that the weeds were easily identifiable.  "Yourself?"

"It's going well.  I think the Turing Police may see reason, sooner or
later.  I want the Overnet as neutral territory, like Antarctica.  They
don't like negotiating with a spook, but they're coming to see the
necessity."  Gingerly, feeling her way:  "Can I ask...why you decided to
stay here?"

Martha's eyes were shadowed against the sun.  "I felt I needed some time
to think, some time to rest.  A little privacy."

"I'm sorry if I'm intruding."

She shook her head.  "I thought you might come here, sooner or later.  I
didn't really think I could keep you out."  She began weeding the next
row, working in an easy rhythm which Jayhawk tried and failed to copy.

"It was really hard.  That's beautiful code."

"Thank you."  She went on with her work in silence until she came to the
end of the row.  At last, very softly, "Have you seen *her*?"

"No.  I think she may need some time too."

"I wish I understood...why she chose as she did."

"Maybe you should ask her."

"Maybe I will someday."  She straightened abruptly, surveyed her garden.
"What do you think?"

"It's growing very well," said Jayhawk carefully.  "What are they?"

The names meant nothing to her, but the conversation seemed to please
Martha.  They finished the weeding, went to draw water from the stream.
The waterwheel was no longer turning.

"Is Caroline doing all right too?" Martha said, tipping water into a
furrow between rows of lacy-topped greenery.

"I *am* Caroline.--And Jay."

"Kraken said something like that to me once."

Jayhawk winced.  She had gone back to Westking Enterprises, looking for
the great squid.  It was gone, but there were hints to its nature in the
code that had supported it.  Its author had scattered his soul into his
creations.  "Well, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it."
Martha snorted.  "That sounded really egotistical, didn't it?  I don't
really know how to explain.  Martha, did you know about Angela?"

"Angela?"

"A woman in Seattle who looked a lot like me...."

"Ah.  Yes."  She looked down as if abashed.  "Whitechapel."

"What was going on there?  Why did--was it Lefty?--why did they try to
make me believe I was her?"

"It was Lefty, on the behalf of various factions who thought that you 
were progressing too fast.  A distraction.  I'm glad it didn't work."

"I think they did me a favor without meaning to.  There's some of Angela
in me now, along with Jay and Caroline and Piebald."

"Piebald?"

Jayhawk took on Piebald's shape with a jingle of bells, shook out
his/her three-cornered hat and grinned at Martha.  Martha's eyes
widened.  "That?  Why did you copy *that*?"

"Who am I?"  S/he looked at Martha sidelong, amused and curious and a
very little bit afraid.

"It looks very much like a piece of encrypt/decrypt code I wrote a long
time ago."  She frowned.  "The only copy I know of was at the High
Temple."

Jayhawk blurred back to her own form, realizing that she was upsetting
Martha.  "He was a person, of sorts, when I met him.  At the High
Temple, yes.  So that's where he came from!  I never knew."

"*His* dreams took odd forms at times."

"Yes.  And I was a prisoner, I was looking for someone, anyone who could
help me...it's not too surprising."  She laughed suddenly.  "Encrypt/
decrypt code!  It's no wonder he's such a mystery."  She'd been afraid
to find out that Piebald was...she didn't know what.  But it really
didn't matter.  Whatever her scattered aspects had been, she was one
now, and whole.

They finished with the garden, and went inside to drink tea.  The
interior of the cottage was as she recalled it, except that there were
flowers in vases beside the bed, and fresh vegetables hanging in bundles
in the kitchen.  "What are you going to do now?" said Martha.

"Lots of things.  Hash out this business with Interpol, for one.  Keep
an eye on the Overnet.  Learn some programming--I've gotten behind,
there's all sorts of new stuff cooking out there.  Watch out for
anything Paradisio might have left behind."  She added tentatively, "I
could come visit you sometimes, if you like.  Or would you rather not be
disturbed?"

"I wouldn't mind," said Martha wistfully.  "I wouldn't mind that at
all."

143.  Susan

For three years Susan had kept the address in her mailfile, and never
looked at it; like a bill too long unpaid, or an old love letter.  She
was alone now, in an apartment lit only by the luminous screen, where it
burned like a challenge.  It was a meaningless address; even her limited
skills as a hacker had told her that.  Mail to it should bounce back
within minutes.

She sent the message.

The response was almost instantaneous.  She had a sudden, dismaying
feeling that Jayhawk had spent the last three years simply waiting for
her to write, unwearying and undistracted.  No.  Channa said she was
more human than that, and Channa should know--shouldn't she?

>It's good to hear from you again.  May I use graphics?--Jayhawk

On a hunch, she typed in 'okay' at system level.  Instead of returning
an error message, the screen blanked, then cleared to show an image she
recognized, the Matrix representation of Yoichi's personal system.
A young woman in silver and blue was sitting crosslegged on the 
communications console.

"Hello," said a soft voice from the speaker.  She jumped.  The terminal
itself had no sound; that was Yoichi's stereo system.  But of course it
was tied into the Net for music retrieval.  "Is the volume okay?"

"It's fine."  Could Jayhawk hear her as well?  "Thanks for coming to 
talk to me."

"My pleasure."  Apparently she could.

"I, um, wanted to thank you for helping us ditch those records.  It
looks like we're free and clear.  Thanks."

The image didn't look particularly like her anymore.  Her own hair was
pale blonde like Channa's now--they'd passed for mother and daughter, 
though Channa wasn't really old enough to be her mother.  Her eyes were
blue, but not that blue.  There was something different in the shape of
the face, the set of the eyes.  That was comforting.  She wasn't sure
she could have talked calmly to an exact image of herself.

"You're welcome.  I'm glad it's worked out for you."

Susan felt suddenly as if she'd summoned a demon--what was she going to
say?  Jayhawk would expect her to have had some reason for writing.  She
probably wouldn't go away again without an answer.  "Yoichi and I are
getting married."  She hadn't meant to broach that topic quite yet,
but....

"Congratulations!"

"You don't mind?  It's okay?"

"I don't mind," said Jayhawk gently.  She reached forward, seemed to
touch the screen with her fingertips, a wistful gesture.  "I'll come to
your wedding if you have it on the Matrix.  If you want me to."

Susan brushed the screen with her own fingers, felt only the cold smooth
surface.  "Why did it happen?" she said in a very small voice.  "I've
been trying not to ask that question, but I can't."

"Caroline Davies and Angela Whitechapel were half-sisters, I think.  I
know that's not 'why', but it's part of it.  So Ren'raku's reasearch
team--"

"...looked at my genotype and decided I'd be a good experimental
subject.  I know that part."

Jayhawk's eyes widened a little.  "Our father was something of a
bastard," she said after a moment.  "But you seem to have come out of it
all right.  I've never been sure--Did you do it by rejecting what they'd
given you?  Or coming to an accomodation with it?"

"Accomodation.  I guess that's a good word."  She laughed nervously.  "I
wanted to run the Matrix, but there's no room for more headware.  And I
wasn't willing to pitch...what's in there.  It didn't have any choice in
the matter either, it didn't want to be stuck in my head.  And finally I
remembered..."  She hadn't told anyone, not even Yoichi, the extent of
those memories.  "Remembered running naked on the Matrix, and I said to 
myself, 'Hey, I can do that.'"  Though Channa had probably guessed.
"I can, or we can, I'm not exactly sure which."

"I would like to see you.  I spent a lot of time wondering where you
were, whether you'd be all right."  She dropped her hand, looked down.
"Though I'd understand if you'd rather not."

Susan slowly unwound the dataline from the terminal, fitted it to her
jack.  Would the presence-within cooperate?  Her vision blurred,
steadied.  She was standing in the central node of Yoichi's system,
barely a meter from Jayhawk.  The image was not as clear as the one on
her screen, filtered through a vision too different from hers; Jayhawk's
image was misty with possible interpretations, nuances of program
identification that had no meaning to her.  Not a decker, that she could
see.  The presence-within made one of its rare comments, a flicker of
data almost too fast to follow.  *Virtual system.*

"A different path than mine," said Jayhawk, watching her with a shivery
intensity, "but a good one.  Damn, I'm glad to see that!"  Suddenly warm
arms were around her, and a small voice in her hair, "I was afraid you'd
hate me, or just never remember at all because it hurt too much."

"I didn't for a long time.  But that hurt too."  She hugged Jayhawk
back.  Yoichi would worry if he knew, as he always worried.  But for the
moment she didn't care.  "So we're sisters!  I should have guessed."

"Good luck, little sister," said Jayhawk, releasing her.  "Give my
regards to Yoichi and the others.  Take good care of yourself, and him
too.  I'll be here, if I can help."

"I'm not sure what we could do to help you," said Susan on impulse, "but
if you ever think of anything--let me know."

"I will."  She dissolved in a shimmer of conjecture, the presence-
within's attempt to understand connections and procedures it had never
seen before.  Susan felt its curiosity like a cool, flickering light.
She watched the shimmers until they faded away, let it collect all the
data it could before she went back.  She wasn't sure she wanted to
understand what Jayhawk was.  But it did, and she wouldn't deny it its
chance.

She shook her head, went back to the empty apartment to wait for Yoichi.

144.  Beginnings

Jayhawk paced her workroom, staring at a construct of code like a silver
spider.  A friend had sent it to her for her opinion; she'd almost sent
it back with a snap judgement--trace-and-mark, good code but nothing all
that unusual--but something had nagged her about it.  It didn't access
the Overnet, not in any way that she knew.  But it accomplished effects
that should not have been possible without Overnet access.  And its
programming style struck her as distantly and dangerously familiar.

In the eighteen years she'd been keeper of the Overnet she'd seen
several attempts to revive the Paradisian Matrix-work.  They were
generally recognizable by their choice of symbols--Jaguar Knights and
Feathered Serpents, pyramids and obsidian knives--as well as by the
attempt to use Overnet constructions that predated the transformation of
the Overnet.  She'd watched them carefully, and in one case mentioned
them to Duende.  That installation had shortly ceased to exist.

She had also had vague hints of something far more subtle.  Sometimes
she felt that she was being opposed--or not even opposed, but competed
with--by someone else who could access the Overnet fully.  It was hard
to imagine how that could be.  But she kept seeing small signs, code
that shouldn't quite have been possible, paths of investigation blocked
off so cleverly she couldn't be sure they hadn't just petered out.

The spider had that touch to it, an easy, dangerous competance with
ideas that were just beginning to work their way into top-level Matrix
programming.

A bell chimed, warning her of email.  She compressed the construct into
an inert form, unwilling to allow it to act on Anubis while she was
distracted.  Sometimes she thought it might be *him*, gaming with her
across the great multi-level board of the Matrix and the Overnet.
Sometimes she was sure it was something new, an adversary crafted by the
world for her, as she had been for him.  In any case, she wasn't going
to take chances.

>Jayhawk,
>I would very much like to talk to you.  Can we get together?
>Martha

The address at the end was not the waterwheel station.  It was an
academic machine in Vancouver.

Jayhawk let out a whoop of delight and snapped off a reply:

>Sure!  Name the time and place.

The answer took a few minutes:

>Terrific!  How about the Crystal Palace, 17:20 PST?

She was there early, careful as always of traps.  Not many deckers knew
of her existance, but the ones who did--her students, some of them, and
her students' students--took her very seriously indeed.  It would not
have been the first time she'd walked into a web of code designed to put
her power at someone else's disposal.  It was almost a game, though it
would have become deadly earnest if any of them had ever succeeded.

The Crystal Palace was a stimsense image of a sumptuous restaurant, high
ceilings bedecked with crystal chandeliers, booths of Tiffany glass.  It
had become fashionable in recent years to replicate the material world
on the Matrix, down to drinks that could be tasted, and there were quite
a few deckers drinking and talking here.  Jayhawk walked veiled in her
cloak of bells, trying to avoid being recognized.  She spotted an
Interpol agent, sitting at the bar pretending to be engrossed in his
drink.  If he saw her there would be questions--not a problem for her,
but she didn't want to complicate Martha's life.  If it was Martha.

She'd been planning to hunt Martha down someday, but she'd been resolved
to wait until she was twenty-one.  That resolve seemed silly now.
Jayhawk had been an adult at eighteen, after all.

A tall, think girl was sitting alone in a side booth, chin resting on
hands, trying not to be too obtrusive as she watched the passers-by.
Jayhawk made her way over, slid in on the other side, taking off her 
cloak and spreading it across the side of the booth to give them both 
privacy.  The girl looked up, startled.  She appeared to be about
eighteen, full-grown but not filled out yet.  Hyper-realistic Matrix
images had been all the rage lately.  Jayhawk sent a query winging back
through Anubis to the Net, retrieved the name that went with that image.
Martha Ann Walker, of Vancouver.

"Jayhawk?" she said in a soft musical voice, somewhere between question
and recognition.

"Martha!  It's good to see you again."

"It's good to see you too!  What would you like to drink?"  Her words
came tumbling out.  "How have you been?"

"Tropical Teaser," said Jayhawk at random.  Supplied by the node's
programming, two drinks slid out onto their table from a hidden chute.
For a few months automated waiters had been the rage, until people
noticed that it was all too easy to substitute disguised deckers.
"Things are going pretty well for me.  Lots to do.  I can learn about
new stuff all day and all night and still not keep up with the current
research--it's really an explosion.  How about you?"

Martha looked up shyly.  Her eyes were not the brown Jayhawk remembered;
the expression was almost the same, but this girl had a kind of 
innocence to her, though not a childish one.  "I think I've been a
puzzle to my parents.  Too mature for my age, they always said.  They
blamed it on the Awakening, which is fair, I guess."  Very softly:  "You
know, it almost seemed like a dream, a dream I'd had all my life.  I
didn't know whether to believe you really existed, and then I got your
letter--"

"I really do," said Jayhawk with a delighted smile.  "God, I've missed
you!"

"I've missed you too."  She took a deep sip of the simulated drink.
"I've missed...a lot of things."  There was a hint of red on her high
cheekbones.  "What have you been doing all this time?"

"Keeping an eye on things.  Relearning the Overnet--it's changed quite a 
bit.  Dickering with the Turing Police.  We've been hashing out some legal
issues involving AI citizenship--I'm pretty proud of that.  Teaching...
sometimes that worked out, sometimes it didn't.  Do you remember the 
big panic in '57?"

"I remember hearing about it," said Martha with a trace of embarrasment.
"I wasn't very old then."

"That was a student of mine--and me, trying to catch him before he did
something worse.  I really misjudged him.  But on the whole, things have
been going really well."  She couldn't say how well without bragging.
"Yourself?"

"I've been thinking about the future a lot.  If you're real, that means
the rest of it....It's funny, thinking that in a couple of years...."

"Lots of time yet."  So Martha did know that she was to be *his* mother.
She wouldn't have wanted to break that news.

"That's right," said Martha defiantly, "and I'm going to use it, too.
I've gotten behind in a lot of things.  You weren't kidding about the
research explosion.  And when I *do* become a mother, well, he's going
to get more than he bargained for.  Going to raise him up right, I am.
Teach him a thing or two."

"I bet you will."  She could barely sit still, bubbling over with
excitement.  She'd missed Martha...more than she'd realized.  And the
idea of awakening to find your dreams a reality touched deep chords of
wonder in the part of her that was Angela.  "I don't know whether to
offer to teach you or ask to become your student.  There's so much--"

"Oh, I'm sure you have more to teach me--you've been out there for
eighteen years, after all.  *I've* been stuck in school!  But I'm free
and clear now."  With sudden shyness, "I would like that.  I might be
able to show you a few tricks too."

"I've been visiting, um, the other Martha, at the waterwheel--about once
a month, usually.  We have tea and pull weeds."

Martha glanced down.  "I'm glad to hear that.  Is she doing all right?"

"I think so.  She wonders why you chose as you did."

"I felt that I'd missed out on a lot of things, and I wanted to give
them a try.  A new beginning, maybe."

The idea of Martha's mortality caught Jayhawk suddenly and painfully.
Only a few decades, a century at most....It was a high price to pay even
for rebirth.  But that was Martha's choice, not hers.  And perhaps it
wouldn't come to that.  The dizzing whirl of science might save her.
*He* might.  "She'd like to hear that from you, I think."

"I'll tell her," said Martha, and then in a much smaller voice,
"...someday.  I have a lot to learn, or relearn.  I'm getting the
impression that some of the rules have changed."

"Fair's fair!" said Jayhawk, laughing.  "You guys always changed the
rules on me.  Tell me one thing--I've never been able to get *her* to
explain--How could Paradisio get started so long before the Awakening?"

"What do you think the Awakening was?"

"Magic came back, or at least became a lot more accessable...."

"The Awakening happened," Martha said seriously, "when people realized
that they weren't the only ones out there.  That's it.  It didn't happen
all at once, or at the same rate everywhere.  I was taught in school
that the Awakening began in 2040.  But I died in 2023."  She laughed
suddenly.  "Not that that explains all of the dates, does it?  But some
of them...just got confused.  If you live for thirty years,
subjectively, does it matter that only ten passed on the calendar?  Some
of them decided that it didn't.  Or they may not even have known
anymore."

Jayhawk nodded.  "It's not over yet, is it?  Channa tells me that one of
her students is a mageborn decker, and as far as she can tell he's doing
okay.  The rules keep changing."

"It's not over yet," said Martha, and drained the last of her drink.
"Though it almost was--for us, anyway...."

Jayhawk held out her hand, said with an impish smile, "So!  When I teach
people, I usually start out by trying to find out what they already
know.  Want to go for a jog?"

"I'd love to," said Martha with a smile that made her shiver, and took
her hand.

--

The End

Episode #144 is the last one; campaign and story both end at that point.
A fitting ending, I think, though I'm always sorry to see the last of a
good campaign.

Thanks to everyone who's sent fan mail, encouragement, and requests for
missing episodes. :-)  Missing episodes, incidentally, can be gotten by
anonymous ftp from potemkin.cs.pdx.edu or ftp.white.toronto.edu--and
another thank-you to the archive administrators.

And of course, credit where credit is due to Jon Yamato, the GM for this
campaign, for being infinitely patient with my demands that he remember
year-old details and explain all the intricacies of Paradisio....

Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu

Copyright 1992 Mary K. Kuhner