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Delia sat up and smiled. “See if this jogs more memories: Every point on a one-dimensional line can be reached from a two-dimensional plane without crossing any other linear point. Any point on a plane can be touched from three-dimensional space without passing through any other point on the plane. And so on up the dimensional ladder.”
“I know,” Virgil said. “I know it without knowing how I know it!”
Delia nodded with enthusiasm. “Jord understood the fundamentals of dimensional topology, though Valliardi’s Proof was too much for him. He could push the right buttons, though, and was the finest test pilot we had. After a dozen successful robot flights, he performed the first human test. He traveled from lunar orbit to Jupiter in an instant.”
Ki
“You mean,” he said, “that you’ve developed instantaneous teleportation?”
“Almost. The trip took only a subjective instant for him. For us, it was as if he’d disappeared for over half an hour. When he reached Jovian orbit, a laser beacon switched on automatically. It was another half an hour before we received that beam, so we know that he was literally outside the universe for that length of time.”
Virgil’s stare turned solid. “Where was he?” Half an hour away from Master Snoop? Away from Nightsheet? Time spent out from under the prying eyes of God?
Delia gently brushed her long fingernails against the coil of black hair wrapped around her neck. “Nowhere, apparently. The experiment turned out to be the vindication of Einstein. Even if we use the Valliardi Transfer to travel instantly from here to there, the traveler is still out of the universe for exactly the length of time it would take for light to travel that distance. It would take you an instant to transfer to Alpha Centauri, but when you arrived, the universe would be four years older. Or you could transfer to the center of the galaxy like that”- she snapped her fingers-“and the rest of the universe will have aged twenty-six thousand years.”
Virgil stared at her. “A one-way time machine,” he whispered in awe. Unconsciously, his thin, bony fingers reached down to touch below his waist.
Delia gazed in puzzlement at the swelling flesh Virgil grasped in his hand.
Chapter Two
30 March, 2107
She can’t expect me to do it. She can’t. What do I know about these things?
Virgil lifted his head to look around, then dropped it back to the cushions. He enjoyed the exercise, the fresh air, the bulk-building food. Four meals a day. Real food. Steak from the Saharan grasslands. Fresh fruit from the vast orchards of Paine, the rich farmland on the Potomac created from the ruins of the old imperial Capitol. Huge vegetables dropped from Cornucopia Orbital. Vitamins and brain-food drugs from the vast chemical labs just south of Iverson, Earthward Luna.
He exercised in the spacious seventh level sky lobby on the four hundredth floor of the Bre
The lessons and tests he had received over the last three weeks surprised him. He knew far more than the calculus of his youth. And every unlearned memory came to him at just the moment he needed it. What other bits of Jord Baker, he wondered, lurked inside his head, dormant for now?
The steady, machinelike rhythm of the equipment soothed Virgil by blanking out other sounds: the whisk of elevator doors, the rustle of clothing and scrape of shoes of the people who walked through the lobby, the subsonic rumble of the wind-compensating pendulum near the top floor.
As he built up his body, his mind grew in strange and unan
ticipated ways. Quietly. U
Pilot a spaceship? I’d be a man in a can, really. Just put in the coordinates they give me and punch one button. And if I put in the wrong coordinates, I appear in something solid maybe, and kapow! Like an atom bomb. He smiled.
“It’s today, Virgil.”He turned. Delia Trine stood in the door of the access shaft.
Death Angel’s hair still tries to strangle her. Lovely Death Angel, I know you work for Nightsheet…
“The test?” he said. “I’m ready?”
“As ready as you’ll ever be.”
She’s right. The roar that clouds my mind fades with every moment. I crack all ciphers I hear. I’ve almost cracked Death Angel’s code, too.
“All right.” He wiped a handful of hair from his eyes. “Big question: why did you pick me? Out of all the billions in the solar system, why choose someone who’s been locked up for over a decade? You don’t do this every day. I know what you had to do to Baker’s body to get the RNA after he killed himself. The fall must have mashed him up a bit, but you had to mince him into strawberry jam to get that stuff.”
Delia looked at him, considering. “Let’s go.”
The lift descended. “Jord was mentally well-balanced,” she told him. “Cool, level-headed, not the sort to panic under any circumstance. When a man most people would call normal suddenly decides to kill himself after testing the Valliardi Transfer, something’s wrong-and not with Jord. We picked you because your psychological profile is the opposite of Jord’s. You behave in an unstable ma
Do you have any memory of what happened on Jord’s flight?”
Virgil leaned against the rear of the lift. “No. All I feel are snatches of images that are not part of my own memory. Aircraft and spacecraft, mostly. Views from on high.” He stared with an eerie fixedness at Delia. “And women.”
Her gaze broke away from his. She cleared her throat to say: “Our floor.” They stepped out into the ground level atrium. Port Velasco lay only a short flyer-hop south.
The Bre
Ki
He hesitated at the entrance hatch.
“What’s wrong?” Delia asked.
“I’ve never gone orbital before.”
She placed a gentle hand against his back. “It’s less scary than a flyer. Come on.”
He stepped over the threshold. The flight deck contained plush sudahyde acceleration couches arranged in a circle, feet toward the central structural column, heads under windows in the tapering nose cone. I have no memory of this, yet I know that the pilots sit in that pie-wedge section to the left and that the safest place to sit is the seat next to the hatch. Baker-ghost in my head-are you watching?
A portly man in gray and umber reclined in the first couch. Ki
“What’re you staring at?” the man asked.
“You’re in my seat,” Ki
“Says who?”
Ki