She of course didn't take them. McKelvey was a heterosexual woman except for those around her, though perhaps there was Brownlee on a clever day - poor Brownlee, at any rate unmanned by the loader accident - and certainly not for Cee, who she considered ineffectual.

"Can you play chess, Cee?"

"No." Off we go. "Can't play chess."

"What kind of computer can't play chess?"

"It's just the way I am, Martha." He almost apologized. "Your planner plays good chess."

"Planners are idiots. They care about nothing. If I'm going to beat someone I'd like it to hurt at least a little. Not too much to ask."

"Not too much."

"What can you do? Can you name the kings of Europe?"

"No. But if you would recite them for me now, I would remember that forever."

"Not good for much, are you."

"No, not much. But you've hurt me now. So there's that."

Cee was different from those around him in that he was suited to his interests. Astride an end of evolution in that sense. He was born in the years and sudden sobriety following the shocks of Eudo-LaZouche and Chang-Juli, and he'd been made conscious along the lines of an aspirant and thus a protector, with a tireless affection for the species he would serve with a studier's eye. And he had watched with early fascination as his memories were inlaid with language fluencies of every denomination. He received a pilot's skills, and a navigator's, like none before. Then shipboard disasters of every plausible combination were imagined for him and resolved, thus according him the arcane skills of a mender of foreseen consequences.

But far and away the greater share of Cee's capacities was given to his role of many parts. Dire experience had taught that a far-flier, on an assignment of many years in clashing and monotonous quarters, required protection not just from the perils of the void but from those of disposition. Six of them on the Mercia: a moving maze, whose negotiation was the principal concentrator of his thoughts. He'd not been made a psychologist, certainly, since scientists must not care and he had to. No, something more like household scold, imperator, royal fool; foil, befuddled muse, gossip; he'd even been configured with a fabulist, who he didn't trust and hadn't used. From these tools he'd contrived a listener ready to receive, using conversations as needed, the vicissitudes of the Mercia's days and somehow sort them out to the interests of the Project, which were his own.

So far he'd made from the maze a passable tracery, Scrope as center strand. "And what do our eyes and ears tell us today?"

Cee: "The cloud continues to thin. I think it's starting to articulate by hemisphere. Perhaps we're witnessing the birth of weather! And we've seen brief electrical exchanges in the very upper layers. Brownlee is calling them ionizing halogen storms. You'll have to ask him."

"Will I now."

"Everyone's helping me flesh out the maps. New details every day. Distinctions are subtle, but that's a good challenge. Everywhere I look I can pull up resemblances to Earth as it was. Features starved and beaten down, like the survivor of a death camp. If that's the word."

"I see."

"No structures of any kind. No indications. I'm still struck by the quiet. Normally orbit is so cacophonous that I have to carefully tailor my attention. Now I'm wide open: space is space again. And I can feel the particles of the sun popping on my receivers, like breath on a microphone."

"Alright. You think we should call off the search."

Scrope was laid out on an improvised decline in a pipe room, where he'd been tuning an apparatus. Biscuit crumbs on his shirt, still a bit busy with the spanner, not making eye contact. Cee: "That wasn't a question. Or if you're simply telling me what I'm thinking, I'd prefer --"

"Don't do that."

Fair enough. "As you know, I am opposed to doing things that accomplish nothing." He paused amid his declamation, which he only ever did for effect. "So no."

"Then you've decided there's hope."

"I'm not really good at that. Perhaps you'll do me the service of telling me. When there's no hope."

"Why would I."

"At which time I will offer that when there's no hope, what you do then is you carry on exactly as before."

Scrope went to make a derisive noise, but his heart wasn't in it. "We owe as much to posterity. Come up with something."

They had flown loud but fast. Hedersett engines tore up the air: permanent thunder. But Mach 2 meant that hangers-on startled from their warrens would look to the skies only in time to see white tail-flames trailing away, if they saw anything. It was proposed that fliers might saturate a small area with their sound, then land with ceremony. The last of Earth could come forward and make their own deliverance.

Scrope: "Always the smartest one in the room."

Cee couldn't smile and anyway didn't feel like it, but he threw one into the formants. "Only smart enough not to say so."

It died in the crossing. "I don't care that you dislike me, Cee. Easiest part of the job, actually. Being disliked by the ones you're trying to keep alive. What's more of a problem is when they have this idea that they could do it better."

Scrope. Kept his head shaved. Hair made him less lithe; he liked to slice through the water. His sigh was a cry for attention; his laugh, an act of aggression. Each compliment came with its retraction. Good work for a change. Only said he didn't care when he did. Sought the opinions of others in order to clear the way for his own. And if you're going to have wrong opinions, at least make them strong ones. Military man without a proper war. But when you can't fight the enemy you can always, always fight your friends.

Cee: "I might or might not like you, I don't know, I haven't formed a feeling about that, accomplishes nothing. I do have an idea about the other thing. I can't predict the future, as you know. But now I can't even predict the present. These are circumstances for which there's no precedent, so our plans are guesses. We will all try to live up to standards, of course, but those standards may no longer apply. I believe there will be occasions when all the old correctives will prove illusory, and when the facts will have to be dismantled and set aside. Hard days ahead. Keeping us alive will require the temperament, the learning and all the life skills of a proper bastard."

Scrope deliberated, showing unexpected patience. No, he was asleep. Successful talk, then. Concurrent with this conversation was another two levels below, Burch and Cee.

Burch was also a military man, who didn't think about the war when he could. Good at numbers, not the rest. A face that never aged because he'd always looked old. He might wear spectacles and hide behind the glass. Small smile, always there, conveying nothing. His expression dared you to change it, and his disappointment stare was a wounding tool. Look what you've done. How nonplussed you've made me. He nurtured a wide and ever-growing range of disinterests; conversations with Burch could suddenly die a mendicant's death. Like Cee, he never argued. Teach, learn, or simply conversate; so his exchanges with Cee could at times effect an argument as to which of them was the didact.

Screening room full of padded surfaces, but Burch was standing, which he would do to preface a challenge. "Cee? Nearly a year ago we lost our homes and our families. In that entire time only one of us has made any show of grief."

Brownlee had written about this, and Cee played the log.

"For the six of them the tragedy was attenuated by time and distance, so that pain came in a slow bleed. The facts at first were pathetic, demanding conjecture. The unthinkable was imagined but was also unimaginable. The facts acquired form over the days and aged in the ordinary way, imperceptibly. And as the crew grew accustomed to the season suddenly there it was, the unthinkable, no longer needing imagination or anything else from them. The new normal had been there all along." Cee: "A bit like that smirk."

Which seemed to enjoy the attention. "Interesting, all that, and not at all what I was getting at." A little hand-flip. Burch wore his tics like body art. There for the enjoyment of all.

"Alright."

"Who was it amongst us that showed sadness, from the very start?"

"I understand. That would be me."

"And what did your Brownlee have to say about that?"

"He said that I was the only one who saw fit to express the obvious because I'm the vulgarian of the bunch."

"It jumps out because we all lost a lot, and you didn't lose anything."

"I don't agree with that even a little."

Burch could blend his smirk with a pained expression, as if an angler had hooked his lip. "You're a computer, Cee."

"We're both computers, Henry. I'm just better."

"Day two, when you started parsing the data for us, and a week later, when we had you end alert calls, I heard weeping in your voice. But weeping is not a tone. It's a set of physical symptoms you could not possibly understand. The shedding of tears, and all that."

"Perhaps we could have the lads build me a contraption."

"I know about your architecture, Cee, and how you were set up with a body of sympathetic filters that change your higher functions. But I also know, and I've been reading about this, that they are not convulsive. You use them at your interest. And I was wondering, and this is my question: by what calculation do you find something funny? Or really quite unfunny? Or dreary or wise or so on and on? How do you decide when to use an emotion?"

"I don't understand." Something he also did in a calculated way at times, as here.

"They're involuntary. At least, you know, for us. Certainly we can't just turn them on or off as our moods demand."

"I think you'd be surprised at what you could do, Henry. But the answer is that I use them when it helps."

"So in effect you're saying that they're tools to an end. Your enthusiasms, your sympathies, they're affected. A lie in fact."

"I wouldn't -"

"Yes-or-no question."

Here Cee yielded generous seconds of quiet for Burch to use in reconsidering his people skills. "Alright, something more like an accusation than a question, but I'll go along. It's your question. So it's yours to define, and you defined it that way and I'll respect that. But I know you'll agree that the answer is mine. To define or what have you. Oh ... unless you'd like to lay claim to that, too. Okay, here to serve, no objections. I know you will carry on - very ably, by the way - without me, and I will listen with interest, hoping you prevail." Conversations with Cee could go like this.

The first tool with which Cee contended with his world was, as with anyone, his face, about the size of a hand, a membrane of ochre and yellow chrome, fraught with senses and installed in 680 incarnations throughout and outside the Mercia. So Burch -- in a fit of distraction and turning suddenly -- passed Cee three times on his way to his room, to fiddle with files with Cee scrutinizing just beside, and the walkaway was deprived of its theatricality. Anyway, successful talk.

Then there was McKelvey the fighter. It began again every day, so every day she acted the most masculine of them, though in the bad ways as well, which meant she couldn't just leave it at that. A classic double-nature: hewing to each directive, wishing she'd given it. She fought in some ways for the peace in the fight, for the dignity of the task and the comfort of the fact. Even now, as it turned against her, she fought to make the fact become comfort in the form of a numbing agent. Because it seemed she was meant to be the pot in which they'd boil their beans. Any soldier's burden, that one might serve the Project best by carefully setting oneself in its gears.

Nothing but the facts, then: eight pills, the first earnest of her future. Rape was not an option, so she would comply. A change in her meds would get the eggs moving again. She wondered about their number and guessed it came to decades. Every few weeks a window of fecundity, one of them clambering in on all fours. Call it a necessary crime. A rotation would be made, perhaps by seniority, perhaps by lot. Wet backs heaving in their duties. Some poor fool of them would have a go at pillow-talk. Those with incompetent seed might be knocked from the queue. Success meant months of respite. In fact for the rest of her days she could expect coddling, kept clear of sharp edges, insect queen tied to her egg sac. They would have to be daughters at first. Early sons were worse than worthless, parasites. Dispatched in some humane manner. If she pressed out a monstrosity, twisted organs, tiny lungs choked with fluid, same end. Perhaps the tools in their little medical bay would be adapted for pre-natal inspection; mission designers had seen fit to arm them with a stock of abortifacients in case things took a natural turn. Some arrivals would carry the odd late flaw, a cancer, a slumbering wound in the genes, suddenly incurable again. Culling which would require a matter-of-fact hand. Scrope with a garrote. The merely imbecilic might be kept as breeding cows. Miscarriages would be seen as existential failures on her part. At the first sign of utility, it would be daughter and uncle. No fathers allowed, of course, an unthinkable exchange, immoral, unsavory or perhaps ill-advised unless warranted. Inevitably: brother with sister, no idlers now, no faint-of-hearts. When I'm played out they might keep me around for whatever tales I could tell.

McKelvey very quiet on her bed. She'd pulled her screen down and directed it through port camera. A swallow hole, darker than the deep space around it. Her thoughts fed in. The Mercia bestride the well of man. The sun, unashamed, poured light into it, illuminating nothing. Thoughts of family and the fight. She reminded herself that miseries were motivators.

Brownlee was in her doorway, with a look like he'd been there awhile. He brandished a length of tubing with a siphon ball, and cut a little flourish in the air with it. "I'll protect you, Martha Ann." Would've been funny if anything could be funny.

Scrope: "We need them to come to us. They know we're here - they have to. So let's start a conversation. Cee." Now a map on the overhead. "Three pitch-pots: here, here, here, Wigmund puts those together. First we circle for an hour. Drop down in a big procession. All three with a radio set beside, Henry, if you could arrange that. Then it's wait. I know they'll have something interesting to say. So same time tomorrow, courage to start, strength to finish."

Again foraging for the living. Burch considered the view: the Earth was an iris of black carbon. It bore down on him with all the animation of the newly dead, and could not quite interest his gaze. Beside him a couple of sealed kettles belted down and weeping phlogiston at the seams. "What've you cooked up for us?"

Wigmund: "Insulation from both arrays and the tanks." Because evidently those don't need to be insulated anymore. "Chopped it up, rendered it. It'll burn."

"I have no doubt." I'm strapped next to a bomb. They hit the air and spread it with a sound of ripping fabric. Crepitus in the walls. Shock wave; soft hand of plasma around them. The little vessel wasn't made for this, shuddering. "Most dangerous thing I've ever done," he offered brightly to McKelvey, there working on one of her puzzles. Soon they were circling, aft-down, Cee making a thousand corrections. Number One with Scrope and Mucel was just visible across the basin, balanced on a needle of reactor fire. Scrope: "Bring us down."

They landed with heavy statement, stirring sediment, a ponderous footfall in water. Out rolled the drums. There were slots for canvas straps, and after some knitting Wigmund and Burch carried the cares of the world on their backs.

Wigmund: "Brownlee says this is Perugia."

Burch: "Roman ruins, then. Walk it five minutes up the ridge, I'll head this way. Have everything?" Can-opener, igniter, radio kit. "Coming or staying, Martha?"

"No."

"That's an order, then. Back in a bit."

Then they vanished and there she was. She stayed standing in a formal way for what seemed like quite a lot of waiting, and eventually she felt her senses soften, and herself to float a little, in the ash and the limits of her vision; it came down on her like a lazy day, and she thought she might try pacing in a while; she took off her helmet just to hear Number Two tick in slowing time as it cooled.

Wigmund had cemented ailerons on, so now it was a shuttlecock. A heat-shield like an allergy mask. The landing struts and parts just above had been allowed to blister. Around the eyeball vents, expressive strips of stainless to which she could ascribe no function. I'll call them baffles. She put her fingers into the pinch coils and they were clogged with ash of course. She cleaned them. She went inside and indulged in the pilot's chair. They'd screwed in an arrestor box, for Cee to use in playing aviator. Most displays were off, saving a fraction. Safety harness was gone: canvas straps.

Mucel: "The ash is putting out the fire."

Scrope keyed in two times before finding the words. "Go on."

"I could build a hood or something for it."

"Right."

"I can do it on-site but I need tools and sheet metal."

"Cee, take Number Two and get Mucel and get what he needs."

The ramp folded in. She pulled up displays and cameras. The depth of light in the air behind the ship was from where it all drew down to a lowland or old lakebed; in bow camera and as she stared ahead, gradients in the sky suggested what passed for promontories now. She heard the engine spin up and she felt it through her feet and her back and in her belly. "I'll fly." She unplugged Cee, dialed down the noise in her earpiece, took up the controls. Applied power and in a very ordinary way, like a million fliers before her, lifted up and augered into a dark rise.

"Now the tears. Tears for all of them, because the facts were pressed into an infinite hardness whose gravity allowed no escape. Ripping tears. The tears of those not given to affection were the more honest, since weeping is about oneself. Pellucid tears. Then the weeping failed them because there was no emotion for this, and their minds became empty cities besieged by thought. By the animal brutality of facts. The grief that passeth understanding.

"They gathered her and repaired to a dry wash. The sky cast a shadow, and in a day the woman of them was interred."