The Bones of Time
       Kathleen Ann Goonan

           3S XHTML edition 1.0
       scan notes and proofing history


                           Contents
                      |Prologue|
|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20|21
                          |

     Tor Books by Kathleen Ann Goonan
     The Bones of Time
     Queen City Jazz
     A Tom Doherty Associates Book
     New York
     This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events
  portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used
  fictitiously.
     THE BONES OF TIME
     Copyright © 1996 by Kathleen Ann Goonan
     All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this
  book, or portions thereof, in any form.
     This book is printed on acid-free paper.
     Map by Ellisa H. Mitchell
     A Tor Book
     Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
     175 Fifth Avenue
     New York, N.Y. 10010
     Tor Books on the World Wide Web: http ://www.
  tor.com
      Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty
    Associates, Inc.
      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
      Goonan, Kathleen Ann.
      The bones of time / Kathleen Ann Goonan.
      —1st ed. p. cm.
      “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
      ISBN 0-312-85916-3
      I. Title.
      PS3557.O628B6 1996 813'. 54—dc20 95_40994
      First edition: February 1996
      Printed in the United States of America


                       For Joseph, again


  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  Mahalo to our friends in Hawaii who graciously allowed us to
stay in their homes while researching this book—Kay and Daniel
Susott, Dan and Keiko Formanek, and Carol and Craig Severance. I
would also like to thank Kam Sung for giving me a copy of the
Permaculture documentary he produced, which introduced me to the
philosophy of primal societies.
  Thanks to Ted White, George Andrews, Richard Moore, Dave
Bischoff, and Steve Brown, who gave valuable feedback not only
regarding the novella from which this book grew, “Kamehameha’s
Bones,” but who immensely improved everything I put through the
group.
  Thanks to Wanda Collins and Pam Noles for critiquing this
manuscript, Bil Click for the first-draft map, and John Gribbin for
granting permission to use a quotation from his book Unveiling the
Edge of Time. David Hartwell also deserves many thanks, for
helping me envision the book within the original material and
helping it come to light.
  Thanks especially to my husband, Joseph, for our times in
Hawaii and for the enthusiasm with which he has supported my
ideas and this Project.
  And finally, thanks to my parents, Tom and Irma Goonan, for
having the courage to move to Hawaii with three small children
when it was a brand-new state.
 I must have been born under an unlucky star, as I seem to have
my life planned out for me in such a way that I cannot alter it.
  —Victoria Kaiulani, Hawaii’s last princess, in a letter to a friend
Jersey, England, 1897
  What matters is that there seems to be nothing in the laws of
physics that forbids travel through wormholes.
  —John Gribbin,
  Unveiling the Edge of Time




                        THE BONES OF TIME




                        PROLOGUE

                          Waikiki, Hawaii
                           February 2, 1887
The first thing Princess Kaiulani saw, as her eyes adjusted to the
dim light in her mother’s sickroom, was the old holy man. The
kahuna.
  Her breath caught in her throat as she paused in the doorway.
  Thin as a barracuda, golden and dry as sand, he looked out of
place, yet stood with grace and authority. Polished Victorian
furniture crowded the large bedroom, a fit setting for the sister of
the king of Hawaii, but the kahuna ignored a cluster of mahogany
side chairs and carefully unrolled a mat he had brought with him
onto the Belgian carpet. He sat cross-legged upon it in a single, lithe
movement.
  Kaiulani had watched the kahuna approach the house from her
second-story window an hour ago. She had been staring across the
tops of the blossom-laden mimosas at the brown, craggy slopes of
Diamond Head, wondering why her mother had chosen to die. How
could anything be more beautiful than the deep blue line of sea, the
sweet scent of pink-spined mimosa fans, and the hush of surf beyond
the narrow tidal swamp? Her mother had said something once, a
few months ago, about old Hawaii vanishing. Eaten by the sharks,
she had said. Who were the sharks? Kaiulani wondered, blinking
against sudden tears, gripping the windowsill as hard as she
wanted to grip the slender thread of her mother’s life and hold it on
this side of death.
  Then the kahuna had emerged from the shade of the long green
lane that led to Ainahau, startling Kaiulani.
   He wore only a loincloth, and his white hair was short. His bare
feet raised puffs of dust from the unpaved drive. In his outstretched
arms he carried with obvious reverence a large, bulky bundle. As he
passed the tortoiseshell carriage with gleaming silver fittings in
which Kaiulani and her mother made their many obligatory social
calls, he seemed a throwback to an ancient world, one which
Kaiulani was young enough to have only glimpsed.
  He stopped before vanishing beneath the porch roof. With
fathomless eyes he had stared up at her as the white curtains
snapped in the wind. She had stared back, wondering what he
thought of her.
  Now, on the threshold of her mother’s room, she did not want to
enter: not with him there. Her father gripped her hand more tightly
when she balked in the foyer like a stubborn horse.
  “What is it?” he asked.
  “What is he doing here?” she asked. Her old Hawaiian nursemaid
told her many frightening stories about kahunas, but she had rarely
seen one, and never close up. This one had been at her aunt
Liliuokalani’s house only two months ago, though. His look an hour
ago had chilled her. Implacable, judging, urging.
  “You must go in,” her father said, voice hoarse from weeping.
“Your mother has been asking for you. She loves you so.”
  Kaiulani felt utterly alone as she stepped inside; the door clicked
shut behind her.
   Neither the new electric light in the wall sconce nor gentle oil
lamps illuminated the room, and the sun was likewise resolutely
excluded. Princess Likelike’s room had been darkened at her request
since she took to her bed after Christmas, though a thin stripe of
light leaked through the curtains and bisected the kahuna’s thin
dour face.
  Kaiulani breathed shallowly, not wanting the camphor-laden air
in her lungs. No wonder her mother was…
  Dying. She said it to herself. Dying.
  Likelike had cut herself off from the outside. From light, from air.
The constant birdcries and the rustle of the botanical paradise her
father created in the Waikiki swamps were muffled by closed
windows. The faint sea-tang that filled the other rooms of the house
was replaced here by the close cloying smell of sickness. The old
Hawaiian nurse turned and set an empty washpan on a table.
Kaiulani jumped at the sudden clink. Open the windows, she
wanted to shout. Let my mother breathe!
  Her mother, a small, shadowed figure on the enormous
four-poster that was swathed in lacy white bedclothes from
England, twisted restlessly, then lifted her head.
  “Come, my keiki,” she said.
   Kaiulani ran and flung herself at her mother, kneeling next to the
bed. She could barely feel the weight of her mother’s hand, light as
a bird’s claw, on her hair. Likelike hadn’t eaten for weeks. It was as
if she had simply decided to die.
   The whispers and gossip of the palace and the servants filled
Kaiulani’s mind. For the past few weeks it seemed as if every Manoa
stream bubbling over the rocks was filled with those whispery
voices, as if each plant rubbing two leaves together in the wind
spoke the same horrible, fatalistic thought: Likelike is being prayed
to death by a kahuna. What else could it be? they asked. The royal
doctors, educated in America and Europe, said nothing was wrong,
and Likelike was only thirty-six years old. And just this morning
word had come that a school of red aweoweo had been spotted
several weeks ago off the coast of Hawaii. Her mother had once been
Governor of that island, and the aweoweo was a portent of death for
the royal family. Had she angered someone there, maybe by
marrying a Scotchman and diluting the royal blood? But many
Hawaiian royals had married haoles in the past fifty years.
Kaiulani had asked her father about it and he had become angry,
for he had no patience with Hawaiian superstitions. One careless
servant had said that she should beware, for it was Princess
Likelike’s own brother, King David Kalakaua, who was behind it.
Kind Papa Moi? Kaiulani couldn’t believe that.
  Kaiulani turned at a deep, hollow sound, almost like bells. She
rose slowly, wiping tears with the back of her hand while the nurse
hastened to hand her a handkerchief.
   The kahuna, leaning forward, was unwrapping his dank bundle,
which smelled of cold dark earth. He had donned one of the
Hawaiian masks that had always frightened Kaiulani when she
was younger. This was a simple one: black on the left side, white on
the right. No snarling teeth, no terrifying frown. The
straightforward, inescapable gravity of day and night, life and
death.
   Kaiulani saw what had to be bones: a pile of enormous bones,
overflowing the woven mat and spilling onto the priceless rug. Too
large to be dog bones, the sacrifice of choice since Kamehameha
forbade human sacrifice a hundred years ago. Her stomach
clenched.
  “What are you doing here?” she demanded, unafraid suddenly.
She was heir to the throne of Hawaii; he was most properly her
subject. “Are you the one who is killing my mother?”
  The nurse turned, shot her a look of raw fear behind the kahuna’s
back, and crossed herself. Likelike opened her mouth, but no words
came out. Kaiulani stood very straight and grasped her mother’s
hand.
  “No,” said the old man, his voice unusually melodious, yet studied
and calm. He beckoned. Kaiulani stayed put.
  “Go,” whispered her mother.
  Kaiulani took one step only toward him.
  “Touch these,” he said. “They are the sacred bones of King
Kamehameha, from whom you are descended.”
  Kaiulani shook her head. Related, and only through
Kamehameha’s cousin. She knew her genealogy well.
   “Do as he says,” Likelike commanded, her voice surprisingly
strong.
   Kaiulani hesitated, then knelt, her full skirts billowing on the
floor. She brushed one of the bones swiftly with her fingertips.
   The kahuna caught her hand and yanked it toward him, pressed
it beneath his onto the jumble of bones and held it down with
surprising strength. The bones were neither warm nor cold to touch.
  “This is your baptism, your initiation,” he said. “Not the haole
one, the Christian one. You are our last hope, the last hope of all
Hawaiians. You are half haole, but you are our last alii, our last
royal child. Our people have a life, which you are bound to preserve.
Our people have a land, which you are bound to preserve for them.”
  Tears glimmered in his dark eyes and he seemed unashamed as
they overflowed and traced glistening trails on his withered cheeks.
The room stilled utterly, as if the ceaseless trades had stopped, as if
time itself were holding its breath.
  And then the cries of the peacocks that roamed the grounds burst
forth, loud and dreadful, even in this closed room.
   Mad, sudden dreams rose all around Kaiulani, rushed toward
her, enveloped her. Foreign cities shimmered, color and sound like a
blow, so strange that she barely grasped that each one was a city
before it faded into the inevitable next: new streets, new canals, new
rushing crowds. Flames, screams and horror; buildings crumbling,
strange gray battleships exploding against the unmistakable
background of the Koolau Mountains, and burning men leaping
from them into the deep, crystal-clear harbor into which the Pearl
River flowed. Festivals of gay music, grim hordes marching. Was
this her world? For an instant a small girl lay gasping for life in
her arms, a red gash in her side soaking her clothing. Small poor
shacks were crowded with ragged beggars next to impossible glass
towers. Between the carnage flashed scenes of sanguine
beauty—billowing green forests, wide, slow rivers weaving through
grassy plains, a small golden island topped with sparkling coconut
palms across a brilliant blue lagoon. Kaiulani was filled with
dazzling light as these visions passed through her one after another
like waves, as if her body were made of light like them, permeable
and fluid, frighteningly without a center, an ocean of time filled
with images and pain without end, without a beginning. She cried
out, but it,was like the voice of someone else, falling on her own ears
like the muffled bird cries outside the sealed windows.
  The kahuna was still holding her hand to the bones when her
mother spoke, and the swirl of images became shadowed. Likelike’s
words fell into the dark room like bright stones tossed into a deep
pool, shimmering then receding into darkness while ripples spread
endlessly outward. She spoke in a harsh whisper; the words were
sharp and precise and offered singly, slowly, charged with
inevitability. “You will live far away,” Likelike said. “You will never
marry. You will never be queen.”
  Shaking, struggling for breath, Kaiulani yanked her hand from
the bones, from the kahuna’s dry strong grasp. She took two steps
across the ornate designs woven into the rug, strange abstract
turrets and passageways that stood out for her somehow in the
slowed and awful moment.
   At her mother’s bedside, she saw the sick woman’s eyes were
closed. Her chest—was it?…
  Yes, it still rose and fell. Barely.
  Barely. Kaiulani touched Likelike’s cheek, but those dear eyes
remained shut. She felt the itch of sweat rolling down her face. She
grasped her mother’s narrow shoulders with both hands. And shook
her. Just a bit. Wake her up. It didn’t work. She shook harder.
“Wake up, Mama. Wake up!”
   “Princess!” shouted the nurse, and Kaiulani struggled against the
strong arm around her waist, hauling her backward. The door
slammed open and her father rushed in, heavy boots thudding.
  “What has happened? Is she… ?” He whirled to face the kahuna,
shouted at him, “Get out of here!”
  Kaiulani had never once heard him shout before.
  The kahuna stood and chanted, in slow, beautiful Hawaiian.
  It was a passage chant, words to build a bridge to the otherworld
for her mother’s spirit.
  She ran from the room and rushed down the wide, polished
hallway, through the great room cluttered with chairs and tables
where her mother had so recently played cards with the German
ambassador and his wife, her shining dark hair piled high and
laced with flowers.
  Holding up her long skirt, Kaiulani burst into the bright
sunshine, ran toward the strip of bright blue ocean that shone at the
end of the leafy lane, away from the terrible visions, the
conflagrations, the barely glimpsed deaths of loved ones, each of
whom went into the fearsome dark alone.
   Princess Likelike, the sister of King David Kalakaua and
Liliuopkalani Dominis, neither of whom had children, died at four
o’clock that afternoon.
  Her daughter Kaiulani, the sole surviving heir of the Hawaiian
royal family, was twelve years old.


                              Lynn
                           Honolulu 2034




                                   1

Lynn Oshima paced, then whirled, short-stepping within a larger
rhythm to leap a pothole. Caught in the endorphin flow of running,
she let every objection to the pain dissolve in pure white energy. She
could forget, when running, that she knew too much about the
illegal genetic work of Interspace—IS—because it was based on
work that she had done. She could forget that she chose to do
nothing about it. She could forget Nana’s constant criticism of her
Zygote Clinic embryo, implanted two months ago.
   And she could almost forget, in the glow that emanated from
everything after the first three miles, that despite her disgust with
IS, she was nevertheless powerfully tempted by the completely
off-the-record offer of her brother James, a top Interspace official, to
fly to Hong Kong and be the liaison in a black-market deal to buy
some of Mao’s bone marrow. James was ignoring a month-old
ultimatum from her that she was through with his shady deals. He
knew that information was an even more powerful addiction for her
than endorphins.
   Downtown Honolulu was glorious this morning. Glass towers,
bathed in golden sunrise, surrounded her. The deep green Koolau
Mountains were suddenly revealed like a vision of paradise as the
morning trades pushed heavy clouds past Hickam Spacebase and
then out to sea. Lynn pulled cool pure air deep into her lungs. A
silent, open maglev coasted past her, and two lawyers getting an
early start stepped out onto the rain-damp street.
  The Chinese flower woman smiled at Lynn as she ran past bright
orange sheaves of bird-of-paradise set in tall black containers. That
gloomy Nana, trying to make her feel bad about deciding to have a
baby! Let her huddle in her ancient Japanese shack, taking her
old-fashioned blood pressure pills instead of getting an implant,
and mutter about how terrible the world had become, and her
son—practically the head of Interspace—and grandchildren along
with it!
  She felt a brief stab of pain but ignored it. She’d feel better in a
minute. She’d left the Zendo because she’d felt sick. She went every
morning at 4:30 a.m., walking down dark Nuuanu to the corner Zen
church, next to the Japanese Embassy. This morning, leaves had
rustled and drops from a sudden shower spat through the screen
next to where Lynn sat, eyes unfocused, erect, as in some utterly new
atmosphere. The shower passed in minutes, and, as always, the
birds took up their chatter ten minutes before the tropical dawn
began to grow.
  Lynn had not reflected on these events; they occurred and were
noted. The old roshi knocked the wooden tima and the chanting
began like some deep, remote, alien energy source and ran through
Lynn’s bones.
   She remembered rising for kinhin, walking meditation, and
stepping slowly around the room. Then her stomach lurched and she
ran down the hallway and out onto the porch. She knew they could
all hear her puking her guts out, all the old men in there who
weren’t even sure they wanted a woman in their midst but taking
her because she insisted, because on community night she went to
archery instead of flower arranging. At least she was entirely
Japanese; probably the only point in her favor. Of course they
thought “nothing,” or else, “woman.”
  “Not-married, disgraceful.” Something like that, as completely
old-fashioned as her father and proud of it. Then they forgot that
thought, and the next, and the next. Lynn’s thoughts stubbornly
stuck to her like grease on dishes. Wiping sweat from her forehead
she had walked over to the drinking fountain and rinsed her mouth.
  And then had she walked the few blocks home? No! The sky was a
brilliant, delicate deep blue, and dawn was so swift, so full, that she
could watch it come and feel a part of full morning and there was
no time for her attention to waver. There was nothing as stunning
as equatorial light. Ignoring the pain, which seemed to be
increasing, she had slipped her sunglasses out of her pocket and
turned on her heel, started to run… that would fix it!
  Was it getting worse? She wasn’t sure. Lynn switched to a
Two-Part Invention with a glance to the upper right quadrant of her
sunglasses, skipping through traditional Japanese music and Billie
Holiday until she reached the Bach, which blended with her stride.
Salty sweat slid into her eyes, and she mopped her forehead with the
bandanna she carried.
   She drank in the scent of plumeria blossoms that were falling in a
breeze-tossed flurry to vine-draped Nuuanu Stream. The stream
roared in her ears, and two young boys zipboarded toward her,
yelling at each other, and parted without a glance at her to pass her
on each side. Nana’s whispery old voice overrode the Bach: “You are
crazy, girl, to run every day with a baby inside you. You were crazy
to put it in you. You picked the father from a catalog? It can’t be a
real baby. Getting your doctorate only made you stupid, I think!
Why don’t you get married and have a real baby? A baby needs a
father. You’re not too old yet to find a man. Thirty-five is not too
old.” Every day, the same thing. But Nana’s acerbity was probably
why she’d lived to be over a hundred. Every day she sharpened her
brain, as if it were a knife, on uncooperative shopkeepers, her
family, and the world at large with absolutely no discrimination.
  Two blocks from Nana’s house, Lynn gasped at sudden,
wrenching pain. She clutched her abdomen and bent over.
   The world seemed to recede. The Korean restaurant across the
street, an old Japanese man carrying a net bag of groceries half a
block ahead of her, the sky-filling mountains rising sharply straight
ahead, the shriek and clatter of the garbage truck were all blurred
and distant. Drenched with sweat, she grabbed at a half-rotten
fencepost next to her, which crunched and gave slightly as she
leaned against it, breathing hard. The pain was like nothing she
had felt before. She saw a line of dark blood running down the
inside of her thigh, below her shorts; one drop fell onto the
sidewalk.
  Almost hidden behind thick mango trees was one of the tiny
frame houses like Nana’s, built ages ago for immigrant workers.
But Nana’s was utterly neat and trim, square and painted gray with
glossy black trim. This one looked haunted—unpainted, with a
crooked porch. The rest of the house was concealed by a tiny, private
jungle. Red and yellow hibiscus rioted through vines that hung from
mimosas, still wet from the morning shower. Not a patch of lawn
was visible.
  Lynn tried to straighten. She pushed open the gate hanging
crooked from the decrepit picket fence and forced herself to walk up
the overgrown concrete walk. She was on the first step when the
screen door swung open and slammed against the house.
  Dizzy with pain, Lynn stared. The Bach was still playing. Lynn
yanked off her sunglasses and threw them down. They clattered on
the steps.
   The beautiful boy seemed so perfect he must be a vision. His skin
was a deep golden brown. His eyes were large and intelligent,
fringed with long black lashes. Curly dark hair framed his oval
face. He wore a pair of loose white shorts and his feet were bare. His
body, too, was perfect—smooth and unblemished, as lovely in
proportion as a living statue, framed by yellow-flowering vines that
wandered across the weathered boards around the door. She thought
he must be fifteen or sixteen.
  His eyes widened as he looked down and saw Lynn’s shoes, now
splattered with blood.
  Her impressions took only seconds. The pain seized her again.
  “Call an ambulance,” Lynn said and sank onto the step. “I’m
having a miscarriage.” When the boy just stood there in seeming
shock she yelled, “Hurry! Is there anyone else here?” She tried to
stand, but could not straighten up and staggered to the door,
shoving the boy aside. She shouted down the dark corridor,
“Anybody home?”
  First an old man, then a younger woman, emerged from different
doors in the hallway. In the dim light, they looked at each other, at
her, and then toward the front door where the boy still stood.
  “Get in here!” the woman said, her black hair falling almost to
the back of her knees, longer than her yellow muu-muu. “What were
you thinking of?” She rushed past Lynn.
  The boy said, “But she’s hurt.”
  “I need an ambulance,” said Lynn. “Please.”
  The man nodded and went back in his room. He emerged in less
than a minute. “It is coming,” he said. “Let me help you out.”
  “I don’t think I can walk,” said Lynn. She was terrified and, to
her horror, began to cry.
  The man, though the hair on his broad chest was white, bent
down and picked her up as easily as if she were a child. Lynn looked
up and down the hall as she tried not to think about what was
happening, what must have already happened, to her.
  “Where is the boy?” she asked.
  “What boy?” the man said.
  “There was a boy here.”
  The man’s stride was long and swift, and the scream of the
ambulance grew. They were only a few blocks from Kapiolani
Women’s Hospital, where the baby was to have been born.
   “Must have been a neighbor boy,” he said. He laid her on the
stretcher and she felt the cool, soothing sensor that monitored vital
signs touch the back of her neck. The man left without another
word.
  As they pulled away the medic put an oxygen mask over Lynn’s
face, but she knew it was too late for anything that would help.
   Against the loss of her fetus, whose name, at two months, had
been Masa Elizabeth Oshima, who had been on the waiting list
already at the exclusive Rainbow Keiki School, Lynn held the face of
the golden boy steady as a long note of music. Like water in a swift
stream her other future rushed away, the one where she magically
changed from a Type A to a Type B personality, composed
synthesizer masterpieces, raised Masa, and lived off the money she
got from her dead mother’s genescan patent—plus the sale of her
Interspace shares when she completely and finally, bravely divorced
herself from that corruption-riddled institution.
  Yes. With the shot of pure oxygen to her brain Lynn knew without
a doubt who that boy was. His picture had burned into her years
ago and had remained all this time.
  She knew he would probably be dead soon, just as the others like
him were dead. Dead like Masa. A wasted child, a wasted life.
  She turned her head aside and felt the tears burn.




                                  2

The old bamboo blinds buzzed in the night wind as Lynn kicked
back in her chair, propped her legs on her desk, and bent over the
pale screen of her small handy. She heard Nana shuffle toward her
half-opened bedroom door past the faded old prints of Himage
Island. Nana’s father had brought them from Japan when he came,
a laborer, in the 1930s, his picture-bride following a year later.
  Nana stood in the doorway, tiny and stern. She would tell no one
how old she was, but Lynn and her brothers had her pegged at
about one hundred and two. Her eyes were black, intense in her
sunken, weathered face. No enhancement for her!
  “You’ve got to get proper rest, young lady,” she scolded. “It’s not
good for you to stay up half the night after being in the hospital.”
Nana hadn’t used the word miscarriage—much too bald.
  Lynn felt something in her chest ease at her grandmother’s voice.
The old woman had been so gentle, never once reprimanding
her—so far. Now things were getting back to normal. This was
home, not the rarefied estate high on Tantalus Drive from which her
father, a top Interspace executive, had ejected her years ago. She had
insisted as a teenager on taking a job playing her own synthesizer
compositions in the Waikiki San Bar, a roofless Tourist Zone
nightclub atop the Princess Kaiulani Hotel. A disgrace to the family
and a waste, he’d proclaimed.
  Lynn still performed occasionally, but genetics, and the
theoretical designing of humans to adapt them to long space
journeys, had seized her imagination years ago. It was like an
entirely new form of music, composing possible humans from the
infinite combinations of the notes of potential physiology.
  “You’re right,” she said, but pushed a few pads on her handheld.
Her small desk holo projector beeped, and she gazed at a
representation in light of a rat brain section from an obscure Czech
study that had just arrived via the web. She touched another pad
several times and watched as different parts of the section were
revealed.
  Nana clucked with disapproval before turning to continue down
the hall. The curtain blew in the slight, fragrant breeze, bisecting
the holo without disturbing it.
   Lynn had always reveled in the freedom she had won and thought
that her half brothers, twins a few years younger than she and
firmly ensconced in Interspace, secretly envied her.
  On her black enameled desk was the note from one of them,
James. Arriving last week via snailmail, unsigned, and coded in a
childhood code, it suggested that she go to Hong Kong and procure
the genetic material of—it was claimed, at least—Mao. One of their
typical black-market schemes. She couldn’t deny she got a kick out
of such transactions. At least she used to.
  Just a week ago, it had been irritatingly tempting. With her
retrieval of the material would come replication and study rights
carte blanche, something to add to her genetic library, which
already contained the DNA of the visionary president of China,
Zhong Chau. She’d been assassinated in 2025. Lynn also had a
collection of once-powerful ayatollahs, which had come in a bundle,
various queens and kings both ancient and recent, Lenin, Indira
Gandhi, Teddy Roosevelt, and a host of other politicians. She also
had libraries of writers, artists, athletes, scientists; and also at her
disposal was the vast computer-held information of the World
Health Organization, in which a drop of blood from every person
born since 2004 was analyzed and cataloged. Whenever anyone had
any interface with the medical community more information was
added. Many genetic problems did not manifest for years and now it
was possible to begin to help those with potential problems when
they were young.
 Mao would be an interesting addition to her library, and one that
was unique. As far as she knew no one had him.
   Lynn pushed aside some papers on her desk and picked up
James’s note, studied it again, then tossed it back down. When she
had first opened it, she had added the passport code he’d included to
her passport—a thin blue pad filled with electronic identification
and records. The code would be activated by the Hong Kong agent
when she got off the plane, and it would tell him everything was
fine.
  Then she had put it into her wallet, proof of her indecision. This
was an addiction, that was all, one she ought to break. Lately she
had entertained the thought of slipping away to a remote Buddhist
monastary somewhere in Cambodia or Japan.
  Right, Lynn.
  She reached across her desk now and picked up her passport,
opened it, and scrolled through the entries. Bangkok. Kathmandu.
Beijing. Narita, Narita, Narita. London. Cairo. Two, three trips a
year. She had to admit that she loved the travel, craved it, no matter
how sad she found the world. An image from Bombay often haunted
her—a shimmering holographic advertisement of a white, blond
family standing in front of a beautiful mansion casting faint
rainbows upon a dark-skinned family begging on the sidewalk
below.
   Well. She couldn’t just mope. It would be something to do. Mao!
Hers, nearly exclusively, at least until she chose to release him to
the public. Just the thing to cheer her up. She pulled her wallet out
of her back pocket, slipped in the passport, returned the wallet to her
pocket. She could give it up later.
  Sure. Stop kidding yourself. But don’t give yourself such a hard
time. Knowledge is neither good nor bad—it’s who uses it and how.
  So who’s using what you learn? How? What for?
   She tried not to think of Masa Elizabeth and looked over at her
hologram. Right now, she was studying the neurochemical
mediators of intelligence in humans and in human development,
linking them to various genetic markers. Or, at least, she had been,
before the miscarriage, and publishing results quite regularly in
various journals. She’d had as little as possible to do with IS in any
direct way for several years, save for her trips. There were things
that she just didn’t want to know. She had IS stock, but she’d quit
attending meetings years ago; her dividends were automatically
reinvested. The less she knew about the murky inner workings on
which her brothers thrived the better she felt. They could not
understand her lack of loyalty to Interspace and blamed it on her
mother, a Japanese scientist, who had died when Lynn was four,
after infusing her with independence. That was a quality the twins
couldn’t fathom.
  Worried about possible uses and ramifications of some of her
research, she had lately filed many experimental conclusions away
without publishing. Sometimes she despised herself for sticking her
head in the sand, but really, what could one person do?
  Nothing, she told herself.
  But was that really true?
  Her field was fairly new and covetously administered by the
genetic engineering department at the University of Hawaii, for all
intents and purposes a branch of Interspace. Her thesis was an
exploration of the physiology of intelligence—whatever that
was—and what that might mean in regard to future space
exploration. One had to have an IS bias here; it was inescapable. It
was impossible to earn a degree at UH without it.
  Child development had come a long way since the gender-biased
educational systems of the late twentieth century had been forcibly
dismantled, administrators and teachers kicking and screaming.
But in Lynn’s opinion, worse things were afoot. While investigating
schools for Masa, she had found that discreet inquiries were made
concerning the addition of Strand X to her fetus’s genetic code.
   Called bionan, the manipulation of minute sequences in the
genetic code was being fiercely litigated in many forms worldwide.
If parents chose to bear a child whose physiology would manifest
mentally or physically crippling traits that could be easily corrected,
was that child abuse? Was it the state’s responsibility to pay for any
extraordinary care or education such children might require?
  But for other children the definition of normality was becoming
ever more finely shaded, as Lynn had found.
  There was nothing written—of course not; but in the interview the
administrator, sitting behind a desk made of opalescent material
that Lynn recognized as the latest space-age breakthrough, said, “Of
course, she’s going to be a happy child?” Her tone of voice gave the
phrase brand-name status.
  “What?” asked Lynn. “I—”
  “Oh,” said the woman, whose myriad degrees and certifications
caught the light behind her on the sun-dappled wall. “I’m sorry, I
forgot if it’s a boy or a—”
  Lynn could forgive her that. But—“I don’t understand. Happy? I
hope so…” Then it dawned on her. “Oh! You mean—”
  “Yes,” said the woman. “I can give you a list of labs that are
qualified to perform—”
  Lynn had stood up, shaking. “That’s completely illegal,” she said.
   “Oh,” said the woman brightly. “Don’t worry—we have close
connections with the state legislature. I have it on the highest
authority that it will be perfectly legal before the year is out.” She
whirled a screen toward Lynn, began punching buttons. “And then
you’ll be glad we insisted that your child got a head start.
Look—you’ll be so pleased with the results. Happy children are able
to learn so much more quickly without all those ridiculous
tantrums. Wait!”
  Lynn had slammed out of the door, out of the school. She strode
across the busy street to a cool, tree-filled park and curled up on a
bench, feeling sick. Later that afternoon she’d filed a complaint with
the board that regulated genetic engineering, but she heard
amusement in the voice of the man who took it.
  That night, she’d tracked down the so-called Happy Child strand.
Carried by a benign virus as was most bionan, it stimulated the
endocrine system to produce soothing hormones when subtle
markers of rage and rebellion appeared in the blood.
  No, Lynn thought, staring at the screen, flooded with despair,
think I’ll have regular kids, thanks all the same. She had a feeling
that those inconvenient tantrums they were wiping out were
necessary for the child to become separate from the parent, to learn
about power and limits. And that was just on the surface. What
other essential function might they serve, and how would the adults
who had not experienced it be crippled later? Intellectually?
Emotionally? Who could tell, now: no one, till they graduated from
Happy Kid Preschool and, later, Happy Kid High School…
   Down the hall Nana shut her bedroom door, bringing Lynn back
to the present. She didn’t have to defend Masa’s genetic and
developmental integrity now.
   She stood, bent backward until her spine cracked, and stretched.
She leaned on the windowsill and looked out over Nana’s precise,
tiny lawn, where no plant dared put out a single untoward leaf to
disturb the otherworldly order. If they did, Nana was there with
clippers instantly, frowning and snipping.
   The dark branch of a plumeria tree slanted past Lynn’s window,
blossoms white in moonlight. Maybe she would climb up on the roof
and look through her telescope for a few hours. She knew that she
wouldn’t be able to sleep. It might be a good night to digiscan the
fitful progress of the generation ship, moving toward swift
completion after a two-year hiatus with a new infusion of money
from Korea. She had been at the ever-so-elegant party at her father’s
estate when Samuel, James’s twin, finally finessed a firm promise
from the Korean ambassador after laying the groundwork for a
year. It was good that the moonbase was being used again for larger
goals than pleasure jaunts.
   She turned from the window. She didn’t care about that right
now. Silly to pretend that she cared about much of anything. She
had rejected the hormone implant advised at the hospital, where the
tech told her that it would take a while for her hormones to
rebalance. She knew how to rebalance them. Running could cure
anything. No matter what Nana left unspoken, Lynn knew that
running hadn’t caused her miscarriage. She had been sick that
morning at the zendo, sick in a different way.
*
  Well. So? It would have happened anyway. Something must have
been wrong with little Masa. Or her. She had blithely disregarded
her tech’s suggestion of various tests. Everything would be fine.
Blind faith. Which was now revealed as stupidity.
   Restless, she felt like running right now, stepping out into the
streets and moving, but didn’t dare. Downtown Honolulu was
dangerous at night, filled with off-duty space-station workers, wild
as any sailors had ever been in the port town of Honolulu.
    She thought of the boy with the golden skin, as she had so often in
the hospital. It was none of her business.
  What is your business then, Lynn?
  She tried to ignore the flashes of dread she felt at the thought of
him, her concern for his almost-certain fate, her certainty that she
knew who he was.
  King Kamehameha’s clone. A perfect genetic copy of an
extraordinary man who had been dead for over two hundred years,
even though human cloning was internationally banned.
  So what? At least 50 percent of Interspace operations fell under
the banned umbrella, as far as she could tell. Genetic manipulation,
bionan, and the routine disposal of the inevitable unsuccessful
experiments, animal or… human… could occur only within strict
limits.
  But those limits were a joke, and a worldwide joke at that. Many
suspected that IS routinely violated the Genetic Conventions, but
few had proof, and those who did were those who benefited most,
through black market sales of genetic or bionan packages. The vast,
enormous underclass of the world wanted perfect vision, wanted to
be disease-free, wanted intelligence—however it was defined.
Resentment against the scientific intelligentsia who had decided, in
2009, to formally withhold all such changes from humankind until
more was known was strong, very strong. The world was divided
more and more sharply into a tiny core of wealth—those who could
afford, for instance, Happy Child modifications with the huge
black-market surcharge—and a vast and primitive third world that
had changed very little in the past hundred years economically or
educationally.
  Lynn touched off her handy. She felt as if the universe had taken
something away, but in place of the lost child had given her the
responsibility for something greater. A crazy thought, she told
herself, jamming her fists into her pockets. You are hardly chosen
one material.
  But the fact was that this kid might be in trouble.
   She turned abruptly and walked through the old house down the
creaking hallway, grabbing a smooth silk sweater and pulling it on
as she walked. She stepped out into the cool night, allowed herself a
glimpse of the star-spattered sky. She turned left, away from
Honolulu.
   She crossed the street. It was late. In the silence, palm fronds
clicked. Mimosas were black silhouettes against the stars, as were
the condos that loomed two blocks ahead.
  The Koolau House, at the top of the hill, was old, but superbly
designed and maintained; the seventy-year-old garden enclaves of
the fifty-story condo were mature, tropical jungles.
  Lynn glanced at the retscan panel and the door buzzed open. She
saw the back of David, the night guard, as he sat in his little office
looking at screens. She raised her hand in greeting and without
turning he waved back. She walked past the hissing fountain and
summoned the maglift with a glance.
  As she opened the door of her apartment on the forty-third floor, it
was like walking into a dream from her high-tech childhood. She
kept her real work here, away from the damp and clutter of Nana’s
old house.
  Laid out before her were the lights of Honolulu, beautiful as stars
through the smartglass that formed the condo’s skin. She walked
over and touched it; the place she touched responded with her
personal preset preferences as to temperature and lighting. She
touched the window icon a few times and all the windows opened.
   Tourist skims with tiny colored lights cruised past Ala Moana on
the dark ocean. The fireworks in the Tourist Zone over by Waikiki,
silent and tiny with distance, were almost over. She was just in time
for the grand finale—the familiar ritual of a solar-sailed ship
disappearing toward the stars, the Interspace logo.
  The vectored room, roughly a trapezoid with a kitchen at the back,
was sparsely furnished: a computer, some pillows scattered across
the carpeted floor, a low black table.
   She dropped onto a pile of pillows in front of a wraparound blank
screen; she preferred holo and used the screen for background. She
touched on her computer and sank into what was the true joy of her
life: information.
   Interior information. The small things. The luminescence of the
twining strands of DNA, the minuscule iota of information that
flooded the electronic journals and the secret reaches of the IS web.
Her screen was a 180-degree arc. She could holo any aspect of it she
wanted, project it from the curve of the screen and make it pirouette.
   Her fingers hovered over the glowing keys as if they were the keys
of a piano that she was going to play, gathering the notes within
her, letting the force of the entire piece fill her being, as her
long-ago teacher had taught her, before her fingers even began to
move.
  She remembered the boy’s face in perfect detail. She shivered, and
considered how best to scramble her tracks in this night’s work.
  Then she began.
  The first, and easiest, thing to do was something she had done
since childhood, a game she had played with her brothers. She
composited the face and told her computer to find it.
   She was not surprised to find it three years ago in an old HV
newscast. Perhaps as a warning to the Homeland Movement,
Interspace had not suppressed the fact that this child—his body, his,
the one Lynn had seen a week ago but reduced by Lynn now
holographically to a six-inch-long body—lay sprawled on the road
out on Hawaii’s North Shore. His head was bent at an angle that
sickened Lynn. Hit-and-run. He was dead.
  Of course, it was not him. This boy, and the one Lynn had seen,
were both clones.
   She quickly moved to hypertext the news. Since she was very
young she had moved through the intricately coded IS web like a
fish through water. It was second nature to her. Lynn brushed her
hair back and leaned forward, arms between her legs, tapping the
keys, surprised when the time floating near her right hand blinked
2:00 a.m., then 3:00. She teased out layer after layer of information.
   Many paths led to Kohala, the great northern peninsula of the Big
Island, where Kamehameha had been born. The Homelanders had
been awarded this land long ago as part of a legal settlement. Lynn
hit a wall every time she ventured near; suddenly an old-time
thatched longhouse would appear, or a brief icon-like movie of a
woman pounding poi—something bland and traditional.
  She caught a glimpse once of a high-tech corridor, and,
disappearing out a door, someone wearing full spacewalk regalia.
But that flashed white and vanished and she couldn’t get it back.
There was some sort of very effective gatekeeper, human or AI.
  Well, anyway, she had other things to find out.
  As her eyes grew heavy, she set up the search, pushed a final key,
then shoved the pillows back on the carpet and lay down with her
head on one of them.
  Morning was wild with birdsong, which woke her, rising in
volume as the dawn grew. Still lying down, she opened her eye.
  The air was filled with something gorgeous. The time elapsed
note showed that it had taken two hours, forty-six minutes, and
twenty-three seconds to find it.
   Lynn sank onto the black cushions in front of the wraparound,
hunched forward, tapped keys through the vee of her knees, long,
slim brown fingers sure and mistakeless despite excitement. Smooth
calmness enveloped her and was echoed in the ageless blue of the
sea beyond a Honolulu muted by forty-three stories, silver-glitter toy
city.
  She enlarged a segment of genescan from a certain Bone
Fragment #4283, Hawaiian, Male.
  What was the marker for navigational capabilities? And,
extrapolating from that, the marker for navigation of mathematical
spaces as well? She switched to a statistical program that analyzed
this pattern, the A,T,G, and C of him.
  Few pure Polynesians left. Yet they were the ones who had
traveled by star, for whom the earth, or sea, truly did stop, while the
stars moved overhead in a time/space reversal that sprang not from
reality but from their minds. In fact, she recalled that one of the old
navigators had hastened to assure a professor doing research that
the sailors knew they were moving, rather than all that was around
them, but that they maintained this state of mind in order to
navigate correctly.
  Yes, here it was. She quickly made some tea, then sat again, lay
one leg flat, bent at the knee, and leaned one elbow on her other
thigh. Her tongue tingled from a sip of bittersweet anquela tea, and
the heavy sweet scent of her neighbor’s plumeria drifted across the
open expanse of her lanai. And still she stared, holding her breath,
as she made the DNA dance before her.
  Why was the marker for creativity—for adventure, for great, open
intelligence, like a solar sail netted and spread to catch the phantom
photons—so often madness and depression?
  For there it was, the drunken sequence, the one that had
dissipated through humankind from some shaman source, the one
that gave chimerical mad beauty; violent, self-inflicted death.
   Her sadness was heavy. She saw Hemingway, after shock
treatments at the Mayo Clinic, proving that he could find the hidden
bullets and unlock the gun cabinet, always in control. Virginia
Woolf, cool and somehow utterly rational, filling her pockets with
rocks and walking into the river. The visionary African web poet
Tunesia Mynen, who thought she might be able to fly from her
window through the streets of Paris shortly after receiving her
Nobel.
   Lynn smiled, felt her mouth twist with bitter wryness. She flicked
a few keys. There. See? She could fix him. Replace that unfortunate
predilection. That, after all, was her illegal specialty.
  Lynn could blot out the hunger for the stars in this fellow’s
genetic template cleanly, precisely, without wrecking the body. That
was the Interspace way. He might be useless for navigation. He
might be just a normal being, without special eyes, without
incredible thoughts.
  For all they would know, anyway.
  She saved the true genescan on a personal sphere, which she
labeled Music. She had a very old one just like it, she was pretty
sure. Saved from several years ago, when she had first seen his face.
Except it had not been the face of this particular child, but another,
now most certainly dead. But maybe not. She knew, for sure, that
one of them was dead, the one on the news. How many had the
Homeland Movement managed to nurture? How many were frozen?
How many had been implanted? Had the women known who they
were carrying?
  She had been barely twenty when the rumor of a live
Kamehameha clone arose. She had electronically attended an
Interspace board meeting where the child was discussed; she still
attended them then, though she couldn’t remember exactly when
she’d stopped. Eight years ago? Ten? When had she realized that she
couldn’t make a difference?
  At that particular meeting it was revealed that a high-level
employee of Interspace, someone with considerable expertise and
access, had added a clone of a human to the bank of animal clones
on which experiments were being run to determine the effects of
space travel on DNA. This was in a little-known in vivo lab, where
creatures entirely spun from human imagination, for an infinity of
reasons, were created in a test tube, then grown, tested, and killed
once the information was stored. Before this human clone was
retrieved, it was discovered.
  It had been a clone of Kamehameha. At least, that was what the
employee, when interrogated, eventually revealed.
  Kamehameha was the first Hawaiian monarch to unite the
Hawaiian Islands under one rule, in the late eighteenth century. His
bones had been hidden at his death in the Hawaiian
manner—probably in some cave high on a crumbly sea cliff.
   King Kamehameha was deified by the Hawaiians, and rightly so.
After uniting the islands through hideous—but typical—Polynesian
warfare, he had calmly and rationally brought Hawaii into the
then-modern age, and strengthened it against outsiders while
engaging in trade and treaties. If he, or someone with his power and
commitment to the Hawaiian people had remained in control of the
Islands, they would probably never have been annexed by the United
States, but remained an independent kingdom. Instead, his direct
line had died out and a line of more distant relatives, eventually
diluted by haole blood, had gained power.
  If Kamehameha’s heirs had been his equals, what might the
course of history have been? At the very least, Hawaiians would
have remained in control of their land and their government.
   Rumor was that Cen Kalakaua, the legendary cosmologist who
had mysteriously disappeared years ago, had found the bones and
left them in the possession of the Homeland Movement.
  Lynn leaned back, remembering snippets of the Kalakaua legend.
   Like Ramanujan, the famous Indian mathematician, Kalakaua
left behind dazzling glimpses of a world of thought still not fully
fathomed by his international peers. The fragments available
pointed to a deep understanding of space-time, ideas that held their
own with those of the greats of cosmology—Carr, the earlier
Gell-Mann, Hawking, even Einstein—with strange and curious new
twists on string theory and quantum reality. But Kalakaua himself
had been both elusive and, if the tales were true, dissolute. He had
disappeared well over a decade ago. For all anyone knew he was
dead. Or living under a bridge somewhere.
  She was ready, with another keystroke, to lose the true records,
send a virus trace through the web. The boy would not change. But
his image would, the record of a particular person.
  She frowned, realizing: they were not really the records of
Interspace anyway. There it was again—the Homelander symbol, a
tiny fleeting icon of the Hawai’i Loa, a replica of the canoes with
which Polynesians had populated the Pacific. These were the
records of some unknown, anonymous user—but still, of course, not
hidden from IS. Nothing was, ultimately. The originator was, she
was sure, from the Homeland Movement.
  Apparently there was a very recent entry concerning this boy.
From whom? Something about Tripler labs?
  But that tag end vanished. She tried to follow it, but hit a brick
wall with every trick she tried. She decided that she must have
imagined it.
   Lynn stood and walked out onto her lanai. The tiles were cold
beneath her bare feet. She leaned on the railing and stared out over
Honolulu, straight ahead, and Hickam Spacebase to the west, Ewa,
just as Diamond Head, from where she was standing, was the
synonym for east. North was mauka, for the mountains behind her,
to tell someone that the place they sought was makai would be to
send them straight ahead toward the ocean. On the other side of the
island, of course, mauka turned into south. She breathed deeply of
the cool, clean air, still damp from the usual skein of cloud that
brushed streets and billowing trees and left them to glitter in
sudden sunlight.
  The Pacific was steely blue in the early morning light, and the
latest tiny portion of the generation ship, assembled baseside in
increments, then taken to the ship for integration, was hidden inside
an enormous blue warehouse with a tarmac-colored roof that was
almost invisible against the sea.
  Not content with Kohala and their other awards, the Homeland
Movement claimed that they owned the land beneath the Spacebase.
Lynn knew that it was true, but Interspace lawyers blocked progress
on the forty-year-old behemoth case at every turn.
  Interspace dreaded the fury of the Hawaiian Homeland
Movement, which had more than once delayed progress on the
generation ship by sabotage both subtle and overt, claiming racism
kept them from being included in any level of the Interspace
program. Interspace simply claimed that any Hawaiian who met
their standards was welcome, but the quiet policy was to exclude
any pure or even part-Hawaiian as a possible double agent. At this
point, Interspace feared bad international press as well, which
might endanger the constant, delicate negotiations that kept the
organization solvent. Homelander leaders were methodically
eliminated whenever possible—intimidated, or even murdered,
Lynn, with her insider’s information, knew. One of the many
reasons Lynn tried to have nothing to do with Interspace. IS had
managed to avoid implication so far, but it danced along a
dangerous edge with an alliance of supersecret intelligence and good
old-fashioned mobsters.
   Not a bad idea for the Homelanders to clone Kamehameha. Keep
a lot of backups handy.
   What a world, Lynn thought, blinking; her eyes burned with
tiredness despite her brief nap. She leaned forward against the
railing; gripped it with both hands.
  Why did she care about this boy?
  How could she help him? And if she could help, how much was
she willing to risk for him?
   She dropped onto a lounge chair and stared down at the house
where he lived. Only two blocks away, and she could tell which one
it was because it was the only one hidden by a dense umbrella of
mimosas.
  If she knew about him, so did Interspace.
  They were just biding their time.
  She yawned again. No sense trying to think straight now. The
chaise looked enormously inviting. She sank down on it, turned on
her side, pulled a pillow beneath her head. Not even the swiftly
increasing sunlight or the beckoning pocket of information that
might soon yield to her probing could keep her awake.
  But before she closed her eyes, she saw movement far below,
through the lanai railing.
  Two men were walking up Nuuanu. They were both wearing
white—white pith helmets, white shorts and shirts. It was still so
early, about six-thirty, that no one else was out.
  She grabbed her binoculars from a chairside table; they
automatically focused on the men as she looked through them.
   The men’s movements were purposeful. They walked quickly,
clearly not just out for a stroll.
   Lynn held her breath when one of them turned onto the
half-hidden sidewalk that led to the boy’s house. In ten seconds he
rejoined the other man. They turned and quickly walked back the
way they came.
   Lynn stopped only to pull on her running shoes, briefly thankful
that she had been so engrossed in her work that she had not
bothered to undress. Rushing into the hallway, she glanced at the
red emergency override scan panel that brought the maglift almost
instantly. Once on the street, she began to sprint, ignoring the ache
from the miscarriage, rushing toward the unruly jungle on the next
block.
  She halted at the crooked gate, in front of the narrow, shaded
sidewalk. The rotting front porch was empty. The door stood
ominously open and the interior was dark.
  She paused, indecisive. Perhaps he had gotten out. If so, no sense
in her risking her life. It was not like IS to be so unsubtle. They
must be afraid. This was her fault, her work of last night. She had
not mentioned an address. But maybe she hadn’t needed to. They
had known. It was the attention, that was all.
  She had only seconds to do something—
  The curtain moved.
   She pounded up the steps, rushed through the door, and turned
right.
  The boy, next to the window, stared at her, a shadow in the dark
room. “What are you doing here? I thought I heard something—”
  She grabbed his arm. “Come on,” she said. “Move!”
  He looked startled, but followed her as she ran down the hallway
toward the back of the house, out onto the back porch. A high
palisade fence surrounded the yard. She looked around helplessly
and he pointed to a gate at the mauka corner.
  “What…” he yelled, as he panted behind her, but she did not
pause. Once through the gate, she flattened herself against the
neighbor’s house and looked around.
  Anyone could be watching, anywhere.
  “Where are your parents?” she asked.
  He stared at her, looked back at the house. “I—I don’t know.”
  And then a wave of heat and sound ripped apart the fence and
sent ragged portions of it hurtling through the air. Smelling her
own singed hair, she watched the wild flames leap.
  He watched too, for about ten seconds, with tears in his eyes and
stolid resignation on his face. Then he grabbed her arm.
  “We’d better get out of here,” he said.
   Ten minutes later they were alone in the mag to the airport. Lynn
did not sit, but held a pole, trembling. The boy perched on the edge
of a blue plastic seat, his face thoughtful.
  “Are you coded?” asked Lynn, stooping to look nervously out the
window as they passed over blocks of small frame houses. Many
people had a lifelong code embedded in their wrist when they were
born— mostly the poor who were ignorant of their right to refuse,
though they were supposed to sign a waiver for themselves or their
children at the time it was implanted. “It can be removed later,”
they were usually told, and many believed that they would not
receive any societal benefits without it. Not true; that was illegal, at
least in the U.S.
  But this boy?
  “No,” he said. “But I have a passport, if that’s what you need.” He
reached into his back pocket and pulled out a flat green wallet,
opened it.
  The old-fashioned electronic passport was the only thing in it. No
money, no game flats, nothing you would expect a regular kid to
have. “If you don’t like that one I have three others.” They were in
his other back pocket. He fanned them out and she took them,
glanced through them.
  “Who gave you these?” she asked.
  “I’m surprised you asked.” He gave her a long look. “Who are you,
anyway?”
  “My name is Lynn,” she said.
  “What happened to you last week?”
   “I was pregnant, but I lost the baby.” She scrolled through the
first one he’d handed her as the mag took a measured curve toward
the airport. “This says that you’re sixteen years old.” How many
clones? she wondered.
  “No. I’m thirteen.”
  “You look a lot older.”
  “I know. That’s why they told me they had to make me older, so
that people wouldn’t wonder.”
  “How would you like to go to Hong Kong?”
  His face had a grayish cast; his lips a blue tinge. He gripped the
edges of his chair and took a deep breath. He appeared to consider
the question, Lynn thought impatiently, as if he really had a choice.
  Finally he shrugged. “That might be a good idea. I can’t go back
there, can I?” Before he turned away his eyes were full of unasked
questions.
  Lynn was sure hers were too.
  The boy looked out the airport window at the Concorde. They were
the last in the boarding line, behind a mob of Chinese tourists. The
two hours of negotiating and waiting had been nerve-wracking for
Lynn. Heat waves rose from the tarmac. A hundred yards away the
blue Pacific shimmered, mesmerizing through the heat waves.
  “That thing looks ancient,” the kid said. “I don’t know if we
should get on it.”
  She didn’t exactly blame him. But she wished he’d take a break.
Every time he opened his mouth he complained and her headache
got worse. Some mother you would have made, she told herself.
   “Look,” she said quietly, though she felt like yelling. “I’ve just
spent forty-five minutes getting us seats. This is a tour plane from
Mainland China, and they can’t really afford the latest thing, but
this group is stopping in Hong Kong and we were lucky to get on.”
Luck had nothing to do with it. Her bribe had been outrageous, but
they couldn’t stay in Honolulu and she needed time to think. And
sleep. “Do you have any better ideas? Anyone you’d like me to call?”
  “No,” he said, frowning. “I guess not.”
  She had bought him a T-shirt and zoris in an airport shop. He
looked pretty normal. She raised her hand to brush back his messy
hair and caught herself. The line shuffled forward.
  At last, they boarded. She let out her breath when the jet left the
ground with a rush, and Honolulu fell away behind them. The
tourists oohed and aahed over the nearby islands the pilot pointed
out, Molokai and Lanai.
   Kauai, about seventy miles to the north, was not visible; neither
was the Big Island of Hawaii, about a hundred miles to the south.
Lynn had never been to the island of Molokai, though it was only
about twenty-five miles from Oahu, the island they had just left.
Forty miles long and ten miles wide, Molokai had remained “the
friendly island,” with a high percentage of Hawaiians, relatively
undeveloped since the 1950s. She’d heard there had never been a
single traffic light on Molokai. The residents had never succumbed
to the temptation of pandering to tourists. A good portion of the
island was National Park, another an International Biosphere
Reserve. The rest of the island was just as low-key, some sort of
model cooperative community based on Hawaiian tradition and the
most up-to-date social theories.
  Molokai was almost the opposite of the Kohala Peninsula on the
Big Island, where the top-secret high-tech enclave of the Homeland
Movement was ensconced. That enclave was the heart and soul of
the Homeland Movement. The elusive leader whose name no one
could seem to pin down, had at various times been rumored dead.
Lynn had seen a short video of him, years ago, his long,
white-streaked hair blowing in the wind as he ran across a road in
about ten seconds before disappearing behind a building.
   Molokai was gone almost the moment she glimpsed it. There
would be nothing out the windows for several hours except relentless
clouds and ocean. Hawaii was the most isolated land on earth.
  Lynn glanced over at the boy. He was asleep already. Poor kid.
  His name was Akamu. Hawaiian, he had told her proudly, for
Adam. One of the first things the missionaries had done when they
arrived was promptly Biblicize Hawaiian names. Adam. Had the
others been Adam too?
  She waved away a drink, then motioned the man to come back
and she took it: cheap whisky. She downed it in a gulp and choked.
She looked out the window and tried to think. The waves were tiny
wrinkles on the ocean far below.
  Adam. No, Akamu, she reminded herself. That’s the name he
went by.
   Lynn tried to stretch out in her cramped seat and hoped they’d
bring something to eat soon. Of course he was big. Kamehameha
was a giant. When Akamu was an adult, he would be almost seven
feet tall.
  Well, now you’ve got yourself in a corner, Lynn. What next?
   One thing she had learned was that it was best to fight fire with
fire.
  She opened the phone holder on the seat back in front of her and
was surprised at how old and grimy the headpiece was. The screen
would not light and that suited her.
  She touched James’s personal code, the same since childhood.
Few people had it. The call went to his Black Point home, and when
the house answered and told her to wait she heard spider monkeys,
his latest affectation, chattering in the background. She was
surprised he’d let them live. On her last visit she and James had
drinks on his lanai, which hung fifty feet above massive waves
smashing onto sparkling black lava rock. When they went inside
after sunset she had burst into laughter while James ran around the
room yelling, arms flailing. The monkeys had methodically ripped
apart his new couch and were throwing stuffing at each other.
  Then she heard James’s voice. “Hello?” He sounded surprised.
“Lynn?”
  “Yes.” Her code was of course on his screen.
  “Ah. No picture?”
  Lynn forced a laugh. “I’m on an old junker.”
  “Oh.” Puzzled tone. He had a private late-model Silence 300. She
could almost hear him thinking, Why suffer? But that’s like Lynn.
  He cleared his throat. “Well. Nana called. She was wondering if
you were with me. She told me that last week—”
  “Never mind,” said Lynn.
  “But you didn’t even tell us you were pregnant.”
  “No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
   “Well,” he said again. “You’re on your way to…” she knew he was
looking at what his screen said “… ah, yes, Hong Kong. Lovely day
to travel.” He sounded surprised. “A sudden decision, though.”
   “Well, it was because of the miscarriage, James,” she said, trying
to be brisk though her voice caught in her throat. Good. “I guess I’m
still a little upset. I just decided this morning that a trip might
help.” Was he really surprised, or just pretending to be? Had anyone
seen her rescue the boy? Someone must have been posted,
somewhere, but they might not know who she was yet, the woman
who had run into the house just before it blew up.
  “I hope it does help.” He sounded sincere. He was very good at
that. “It will certainly be good for—” He was thinking of Mao, and
genetic leadership markers and modified cloning. Lynn could
almost see his calculating smile. But he only said, “Lynn, happily,
you have called when Father is visiting. He wishes to speak to you.”
  She opened her mouth to say no. So many harsh words had
passed between them, and so many silent years.
   Then her father spoke. “Lynn. I am so sorry to hear of your
trouble.”
   The timbre of his voice, which she heard so rarely lately (and is
that really his fault, Lynn?), the unmistakable concern in it, brought
back days of childhood in a rush. Her eyes filled with tears and she
blinked.
  He continued. “Please visit me when you return. I know…” he was
quiet, and static crackled. He left that thought unsaid and cleared
his throat. “Please do. And also call the Colonel, remember? We
visited him when you were six.”
  Lynn remembered. A glorious trip. Just herself and her father.
Before he married the twins’ mother. Before he tried to stop her from
growing up. “He still lives in the same place, up on the Peak. You
can easily find his code. Don’t forget, now. He would be very glad to
see you. You will call him, won’t you? His name is Hawkins. Don’t
forget.”
  “I won’t,” she said.
  He abruptly wished her luck and broke the connection.
  How very strange. She had imagined he would have been coldly
disapproving at her choice to have a child without a proper father.
Her mind filled with memory eddies, pictures and atmospheres that
overlapped like ripples in a pristine, mysterious jungle pool. Yes,
they had been happy, the three of them, before her mother died. Very
happy. That core of happiness, she felt, saved her from being like
her half brothers. Their mother was acutely aware of her exalted
station as the wife of one of the most important men in the world,
always pushing her sons.
   A bowl of cold noodles with vegetables came. Akamu still slept.
Asleep, his face did seem young, maybe even younger than thirteen.
Suddenly her heart ached. What sort of strange life had he led? Did
he know who he was? Did he know what had happened to the other
clones?
  She ripped the wrapper from her chopsticks. If she had just left
and not told anyone where she had gone, they would have been
enormously suspicious. It wouldn’t have taken them long to figure
out everything she had done the night before. This way, she had
bought some time to figure out what to do.
  She hoped.




                                 3

Passport.”
   Lynn’s stomach clenched, even though everything was in order,
cleansed and perfect. No connection to IS would show. She was not
Lynn Oshima, daughter of one of the most powerful men in the
organization.
  She took her passport from her pouch. Akamu waited on the other
side of the entry station. He had had no trouble, much to Lynn’s
relief, and had been waved through without a glance.
  “What is your business in Hong Kong?” the agent asked, while
running the passport through his handheld. He frowned and looked
at her several times, then back at the picture. Agents were always
annoyed when they got one of these.
  “Tourist,” she said.
  “Oh? What do you intend to see?”
  “The night markets,” she said. “Museums. You know.”
   He visually appraised her, and she realized that perhaps she
looked a bit too wealthy, as if she might be intending to exceed legal
spending limits. Must be the haircut, she thought. It couldn’t be the
clothes.
    He frowned at her passport again. She rubbed her neck with the
back of her hand. Well, it was hot. It wasn’t an admission of guilt to
break out into a sweat. Technosmuggling was a serious crime. But
information shouldn’t be limited. It belonged to humankind, and
besides, IS wasn’t stealing it. They were paying a small fortune for
it.
   But they would not get it. She would take it. Somewhere. She
knew that much. She hadn’t even had to decide about it. Somehow,
it would come in handy, when all the pieces came together, when
her head stopped aching. Leverage.
  She studied the agent while he mulled things over, and she
wondered: How would one design a more perfect person for this job?
What qualities were necessary? What limitations? A certain way of
seeing information? And was that, really, what all her work and
research was leading to? She had her own ideas of the possibilities,
could see humans advancing, expanding, growing, moving quickly
beyond her range of vision.
  But that was not the only path this line of inquiry could take.
   There could be orders rolling in to a particular lab for a hundred
workers perfectly tailored for customs duty. For their entire life.
That sort of thing would suit certain people. A very clean bottom
line. No unexpected worker illnesses. No rebellion or choice. They
could be patented, or FDA approved, or strictly black market.
Beyond theory. The reality. And where had all those other grand
technological dreams of the last hundred years gone, anyway? How
little change, how little improvement there was to show for all those
hopes. Because true change was too expensive, sometimes, for those
with a vested interest in the present.
  She usually pushed these thoughts aside. Someone else’s problem.
I must be tired, she thought. I am tired.
  Finally he must have found the right code. His face lit in a
cordial smile. “Sorry,” he said. “Have a good time in the Enclave.”
He returned her passport and waved her through.
  She grinned at Akamu and he grinned back. She was surprised.
He looked excited. “This is a weird place,” he said. “Weird.” He
seemed pleased at the thought.
  So it is, she thought, gazing for a moment at the gleaming,
overwhelming towers of smartglass. Much of Hong Kong was a
gigantic enclosure of vast acreage, with atriums of every style from
medieval Chinese to day after tomorrow blending into interior
gardens stepped throughout, private apartments, shops, restaurants,
all holding the buzz and excitement of one of the richest cities on
earth.
   Lynn hurried him to the head of a line of driverless taxis, pods
iridescent purple, teal, pink. They slid inside; she pressed the
picture of a hotel where she’d stayed before and it confirmed a room
for them, but the car would not move.
  “Must be broken,” she said, and opened the door to go to the next
one back but as she did so a tall, uniformed woman got in on the
other side of the car and nodded.
   “Konnichiwa,” said the woman. She tapped her thigh and Lynn
felt the car silently vibrate beneath her feet. The car moved forward
before Lynn closed her door. The woman did not steer; she just sat
there. Lynn’s door shut itself.
  “What’s the deal?” asked Lynn, apprehensive. “I didn’t need a
driver six months ago.”
   “You didn’t hear?” asked the woman, switching to English. “Riots.
The Human Union is very strong here.” She pulled her cap down
tighter over her long black hair and gazed out the window. Lynn
surmised she had an implant in her thigh that activated the car.
The car moved smoothly along the translucent smarttrack, gripping
it from beneath, occasionally choosing another branch of track from
the many options that sometimes glowed with faint colors to
indicate which part of the city they serviced. Lynn relaxed. The hotel
was in the Green Sector; the cab was making the right choices.
  Advertisements glowed on every interior surface of their cab and
chattered softly in both Japanese and English, the two languages
spoken since the car was activated. The mute button was red. Lynn
pushed it, but the voices continued. She saw that Akamu was
staring through the window at the ads on the corridor of apartments
through which they passed, some buildings only a foot or two from
the side of the magway. The ads appeared and disappeared,
sometimes overlapping, occasionally holoing outward for a few
seconds so the car could pass through them, reminding her that they
were approaching the major trade center of the world, which had
played a huge role in the quiet crumbling of communism in China.
  The people living in the apartments were oblivious to passing
traffic. Lynn saw a family sitting down to eat, and then an old man
undressing, for fractions of a second as they passed. This was the
new workforce, the programmers of clothing, jewelry design, or
legal—and illegal—information replication, those who fought to
keep their jobs against the constant inevitable encroachment of
artificial intelligence. The car released a small ad of intense scent
and said “Nova!” and Akamu sneezed at the cloud of free perfume.
  “I am sorry you have to see this,” said the driver, as the car made
another choice. “They are going to route around this any day. This
sector is going to be demolished.”
  “I’ve seen it before,” said Lynn.
  Many of the windows they passed did not have any glass at all,
only shards. Within the shadowy rooms were derelicts, refugees
unable to find work despite the bright promise of Hong Kong. She
caught a glimpse of a near-naked woman curled in a ratty chair,
staring straight out the window and smoking.
  Then the car took a line that forked to the right, upward, and for
a moment Lynn had a dizzying glance of brilliant blue water
between the mammoth buildings of glittering smart glass. They
looped behind the third tower and swooped into a vast enclosure.
  They debarked in a stunning, elegant lobby, made of smooth light
blocks of marble, one wall a stepwise fountain that held her eye
with visual paradox and soothed her with sound and mist. A
bellhop came and looked for their luggage; she shook her head.
  “Sorry,” she said to the driver. “I haven’t changed money yet.” The
woman smiled. Happy to get American cash, Lynn supposed.
  The cab glided toward a membrane where the almost-invisible
track exited the lobby and went through it.
   The room was sybaritic with fresh shoots of bird-of-paradise and
a huge tub. Web screens were everywhere, even the bathroom. She
checked the window: good. It didn’t look out onto an atrium, nor did
it have lush smartglass visuals disguising no view at all. They had
the most expensive option, an outside window with a view of the
harbor. She got much too antsy without this.
  “Come on,” she said to Akamu.
  Back in the lobby she chose a moving sidewalk from the map. In
ten minutes they emerged from the layers of the human-made world
onto a sunny street.
   Lynn took a deep breath and relaxed, just for an instant. Behind
them were towers of smartglass; in front of them, glimpsed through
twisting streets, was the harbor traced with the vanishing white
lines of jetcats heading to and from Mainland China. The scent of
garlic cooking oil laced the air, mingling with the musty scent of
junk stores and the chemical tinge of clothes fresh from the
factories, heaped on tables that lined the narrow street.
  She bargained and bought Akamu some cheap,
anonymous-looking shirts and pants. “Silk,” she said, letting the
smooth cool shirt shimmer through her fingers before holding up to
him, gray with overlapping designs made up of triangles. “Like it?”
   “It’s okay,” he said, glancing around the street as if he were
searching for something. Suddenly afraid he might bolt she wanted
to grab his hand but thought that might set him off.
  “How are you?” she asked.
  “Starving,” he said.
   They chose food from sidewalk braziers; she had it wrapped—
skewers of grilled, aromatic meat, rice from a big tub. He wore a
watch and she asked the time. He looked at it for a moment,
frowned, then said, “Oh, yeah. It reset from satellite. Two-thirty.”
  “Well,” she said, trying to ignore the nervousness tightening her
stomach, “I’ve got some things to do. I’m taking you back to the
room.”
  He looked like he was going to argue, then his shoulders slumped.
He just looked weary, frightened, and very young, and returned to
the room with her without saying a word, just gazing at the other
people on the moving sidewalk, holding his bundle of new clothes
under his arm.
  He sat at the table by the window and unwrapped the food
immediately when they got back. His was gone in about a minute.
  Lynn said, “You can have mine too. And order more from room
service if you want. I need to go out. You’ll have to stay here alone
for awhile.”
  He didn’t seem surprised and looked only the least bit
disappointed. “Is it all right if I use the web?”
  There was a small, light, flat screen on the bed table that could be
used while sitting on the bed; another on a nearby desk. “I’d rather
you didn’t,” she said and made a note to have it deactivated when
she returned to the lobby. “How about a handy?”
  He shrugged. “Better than nothing, I guess, if I have to sit inside
all day.” Lynn wondered, briefly, how long the shock of having been
almost blown up would hold. He seemed too compliant.
  Like someone at the end of his rope, perhaps?
  “Tomorrow we can go out and really shop,” she said. “They have
the best of everything here. I’m going to need some equipment
myself. That will be fun, won’t it? For now I’ll ask the concierge to
send one up. What would you like? Some games, perhaps.”
  “Just get me SP Three and… I guess SP Five too.”
  “Uh, sure,” she said, and called the concierge.
  “Room eight-ninety-five. Could you please send a handy—”
   “A flat,” he said. Much lighter than an old-fashioned handheld, a
flat was a flexible computer with a very thin keypad and screen that
could be folded or rolled up.
  “A flat,” she corrected. “Um, a Kaiban four-point-three.” The best.
She saw the ghost of a smile cross his face and was pleased. “With
everything, of course. And Standard Packages Three and Five.”
These were hard-core packages. Not for beginners, and not games;
tools for high-level abstract thought.
  She said to Akamu, “They only had Three. She said they’d have
Five in two days. She was extremely apologetic, but she said that the
upgrade was just released last Friday. You’re pretty up-to-date.”
  His eyes asked who are you? He flopped facedown on one of the
beds.
  She waited until the flat was brought up, opened the door a crack,
and took it.
  “Don’t return this,” she said. She didn’t want anyone to see what
he might have done. “It’s yours now. If you get hungry again before I
get back, order anything you want to eat. Anything at all. I’ll be
back as soon as I can. And then we’ll probably go on another trip.”
  “Of course,” he said, and sat cross-legged on the bed. The flat
beeped as he touched it on.
  He didn’t glance up as she left the room.
  Lynn decided it was best to follow the agenda. She spent a
suspicion-free day, what was left of it, set up originally to protect
IS; now she did it to protect herself from IS. She shopped for
jewelry, was measured for new clothing with a brief burst of light in
a tiny crowded shop that smelled of wool and silk and displayed the
Human Union logo. Strong teal silk shorts and a matching jacket
would be ready in two hours, along with a dress and a few shirts,
and a pair of light wool pants. A young man smiled and nodded,
took her deposit, and got the cloth ready to feed into the cutting and
sewing machines.
   Lynn mulled over five brilliant natural emeralds in a hushed
jewelry store that the shopkeeper, a stern-looking woman dressed
impeccably in a black velvet evening gown, displayed in an unfolded
sheet of white paper. Lynn pushed them from side to side, saw them
magnified, smiled and said no. She bought a watch in another shop,
then petulantly returned it an hour later, complaining that it didn’t
have some of the functions she’d been led to believe that it had. And
finally she bought a single black pearl earring at Ocean Riches, a
shop shaped vaguely like the inside of a shell, opalescent walls
softly glowing, the crash and backwash of breakers and distant
insistent gull laughs swirling round her ears, a delicate synthetic
salt scent infusing the cool air. She picked up her new clothing. She
didn’t call the Colonel. She didn’t have time for socializing.
  It was the second day she feared.
  She rose early. Akamu was still asleep, sprawled on his large bed.
Where to next? she wondered, as she dressed. But she had a place in
mind, the perfect place, the perfect refuge for them both. They could
depart from here, once she had what she wanted, and vanish. They
were no longer isolated on a tiny island by thousands of miles of
ocean.
  She ordered rice and miso soup to her room, then looked down at
a park, tiny so far below, and watched the tai chi practitioners move
in slow, balanced precision, part of their meditational mind-set. She
moved with them for fifteen minutes, thinking herself back to
Tantalus. The glimpse of blue bay through skyscrapers pinkened by
dawn steadied her. She let the memory of North Shore surf echo
through her mind and soothe her before she put on her black pearl
earring, quietly closed the door, and stepped into the lift.
  In ten minutes she was standing just outside the Walled City, a
dangerous, exhilarating mixture of medieval streets and
cutting-edge technology, outside the law. In here one could arrange
brain implants, swallow the latest genetic trick, and wonder at the
last second if it would perform as hoped or twist you unpredictably
and irrevocably.
   One moment she was moving with the crowd, and the next she
heard two faint beeps. Left turn, now, into a dark alley. Three beeps,
down the stairs, that’s right, down, down, through four metallic
levels of shops. Right turn, an underground train, one stop only,
then up and out into the blinding sun.
  Tourists slipped in and out of here all the time, of course. Chinese
thugees exacted high taxes from Hong Kong in general, and trade
was so brisk that they got more here, in these few, intense blocks,
than out of the entire regulated sector.
  No record, she reminded herself, that’s why you’re here. Naive,
able to perhaps plead ignorance if somthing goes wrong, once you’re
in.
   But really, only her own greed for Perfect Information fueled her
steps now, on cobblestones that glittered from the morning hosing.
Shopkeepers were setting wares on tables in front of shops. There
were backrooms here, and backrooms to backrooms behind the
awning-festooned streets, beyond the racks of silk ties, bins of
off-brand computer crystals, smiling, round, bargaining men, and
morning braziers fueled and evanescing the scent of roasting meat
and black bean pastries warming in compartments above.
Fortune-tellers sat at flimsy tables reading newspapers; she saw a
small thin girl shove a pile of used newspapers into a recycling slot
and wait a few seconds for the print to be removed, then take the
extruded deposit chit and run into a tea shop. A black dog scattered
a flock of chickens.
  She stopped to examine some cheap ties, jumped at a touch on her
shoulder, felt a rough hand caress the single black pearl.
“Something to match, missy?” asked the man, and beckoned.
  The room was dark; the window was almost completely blocked
with heaps of ties and bolts of silk. Lynn stepped gingerly around a
tower of cloth, afraid she would topple it, and followed the man as
he parted a heavy brocade curtain for her.
  The room was filled with opium smoke. “Sit,” said a tall, thin
woman with white hair. “It is all arranged. Have you breakfasted?”
  Lynn nodded but did not sit. The woman had a Saturn tattoo on
her left cheekbone. A member of a society Lynn knew little about,
and that frightening. She straightened, stood tall as possible.
  “The sequence,” she said. “And the marrow sample itself.”
   The woman smiled. Shook her head. “Anxious, aren’t we?” she
said. “I would see your passport.” Emerald silk swished against
ruby silk as Lynn held it out. Her passport would yield verification
to those with the correct way of looking at what James had given
her. It would also, she knew, electronically transfer whatever
amount of money had been agreed upon. That was of little interest
to her.
  The woman took it, put it into the handheld, frowned. “It is
enough,” she said, “But—”
   “I will give you the activation code when I check the sequence,”
Lynn said. It was just a word James had mentioned in his note. She
tried to keep her mind on what she would do with this, add it to her
growing store of genetic information, aid the world, send humans to
distant galaxies, save Akamu. As if he wanted to be saved. For a
dizzy moment, breathing the opium smoke, she was afraid. I need
air, she thought. How is Akamu doing? She would be back within
an hour. And then they would fly.
  The woman turned and unlatched a small rosewood cabinet. The
double doors opened outward, revealing an interior lined with gold.
She took out what looked like a black pearl earring, then paused.
She bowed her head briefly, held it out to Lynn, who bent her head
sideways, removed her black pearl, and inserted the other.
  Then the shooting began.
  Lynn woke coughing, choked by acrid smoke and a sickening jolt.
  She was hot, sweating, lying in a tangle of sheets.
  And, she realized, she was on a bullet train. A very old bullet
train. She glanced up at the speed panel but it was dark, long
broken, she suspected. Whoever was in charge of this train system
had probably bought it used.
  A wide, dirty window was bisected by a strip of metal where the
top had been lowered to reveal clear blue sky. Hot wind rushed in,
making her feel sticky rather than cooled. One hundred kilometers
per hour, no more, she guessed. Painfully slow, for a bullet. She
raised up on her elbows and glanced away from the window.
   The tall, thin man who was watching her was smoking a
cigarette; an elbow rested on one crossed leg. He wore black pants,
sandals, and a thin white cotton shirt that stuck to his chest in
patches of sweat. His nose was narrow and slightly hooked; his eyes
were slanted and black. He smiled at her and irony filled them, as
if he, she, and the train were some grand joke. He was bald, and his
eyebrows were white.
  Lynn stirred and realized that her right calf was wrapped in a
thick bandage, and that it ached.
  “More opium?” asked the man. He reached over to the wall behind
him, where what looked like a bottle of soda sat in a metal drink
holder, unscrewed the lid, and handed it to her.
  “More?” She tasted the thick, bittersweet liquid, grimaced,
handed it back. “How much have I had?”
  The man shrugged. “I don’t know.”
  She saw rolling dull brown hills outside her window, punctuated
by green fields. Distant mountains edged the horizon. On a road
parallel to the track, two huge trucks lumbered along behind a bus
where people rode on the roof. She raised herself up on her elbows,
chilled.
  Where was Akamu?
  And who was this man?
   He reached into a bucket next to him and pulled out a white cloth;
wrung it. “Lie down and rest some more,” he said. He rose and she
felt the cool rough cloth on her forehead and cheeks. “You’ve been
very ill,” he said. “I was able to find a doctor in the New Territories
to staple the bullet wound, and he gave me some antibiotic patches
and opium for your pain. Things are still very primitive here, of
course. Not like other parts of the world to be sure. Definitely not
like Honolulu! I was able to bribe this private room and they
decided that it wasn’t essential to see your passport.” He grinned.
  “Who are you?”
  “I’ve told you before. I guess you’ve forgotten. Not surprising,
though. Well. You know that your father flew contraband for the
Cambodian underground when he was young.”
  “Supplies. Not contraband.” This man must be as old as her
father, eighty. And fairly wealthy, because he didn’t look it.
  The man smiled once again, and she saw an ironic gleam in his
eyes. “Supplies. Yes. Actually, I was more of a liaison between the
suppliers and the next person on the chain, but I had occasion to fly
with your father more than once.”
  “Colonel Hawkins!” she said. “But—”
  He continued. “He is like a brother to me. We are still very close. I
am honored to see you again. You were such a pretty child, and he
was so unhappy to lose your mother.”
  He reached down, picked up an open bottle of whisky with a
Chinese label from the filthy floor, and drank. He set it back down.
  “There are channels through which your father informed me of
your coming. You didn’t call. I found and followed you. I owed it to
him. You knew the danger, of course.”
  “Yes,” she said. “I guess I didn’t really believe in it though.”
  “Just as well,” he said. “Apparently you were trying to get
something quite rare and valuable.”
   “Yes,” she said. He waited, but she didn’t say anything more,
wondering how she would get back to Hong Kong, and wondering if
Akamu was lost forever. He was infinitely more valuable than her
silly insistence on Mao. Darkness filled her heart and mind, despite
the brightness of the day. How foolish and selfish she had been. She
should have simply taken him and run. Now it was too late. China!
   Beijing, she knew, rivaled Tokyo in sophistication and London in
size. But since 2002, when Communism broke down for good, China
had lurched through several phases. Years of mob-run exploitation
of fragile new businesses, internal wars between this or that ethnic
group, until visionary Zhong Chau united the country in 2019. She
was midwife to a new level of education and scientific endeavor
until her assassination in 2025. Despite that tragedy, the fruits of
her work, the manufacturing and education and trading
infrastructure, were finally beginning to flow across the land. But
not quickly. Bicycles were still the vehicle of choice.
  She smelled a toilet somewhere. Her stomach heaved, but there
was nothing in it. She fell back into the aching edge of pain once
more, realizing that it was pain that had wakened her. She dimly
remembered swigs of opium-laced pop, vivid dreams of brightly
colored helixes swirling through dark space, flames, and beautiful
music. My vision of Mao’s DNA, she supposed wryly, raising her
hand involuntarily to brush the earring.
 “My father didn’t say it was important to call you. I thought it
was just social. I was going to call you later.”
  The Colonel bent over and fumbled in a bag, pulled out a plastic
bottle of water. He uncapped it and handed it to her. “I think he
knew that you might think so. I have some food here. Some fresh
black bean pastries. An apple.”
  Lynn took a drink of water and settled back. She really wanted
some soothing miso. Her head was splitting, but she didn’t want
any more opium. She needed to be able to think. “Any soup?”
   He laughed. “There is a problem. I’m afraid that a lot of what you
find to eat here might make you sick. We’re in the middle of China,
my dear. Your stomach is not exactly adjusted to locust and black
dog stew.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ll be pulling into a small
village in an hour. I can get off then and try to get some sort of
broth. Maybe some noodles, eh? How does that strike you?”
  She nodded and wiped sweat from her face. “Where do I pee?” she
asked.
  He pointed to a curtain fluttering in the wind that cordoned off a
corner.
  Pain shot through her leg as she sat up and shifted to the side of
the narrow bed. She stood with care and found her leg would bear
weight. She felt grateful and with a hobbling step lurched across the
compartment and pulled the curtain aside.
  When she came out, the Colonel was taking another sip of whisky.
“Have some?” he asked.
  She shook her head, then her hand shot out.
  It was rotgut stuff, and she took two swigs that heated her chest
and made her cough. She pushed herself across the cot, leaned
against the wall. She could see the vast, hot plain; the dust-laden
wind tossed her hair. “Is all of this necessary?” she asked. “I mean,
wasn’t there any way to just take me somewhere else?” She still
wasn’t sure if she had been rescued or kidnapped.
  “Let me show you something,” he said.
  He rummaged around in his bag again, setting an apple, then a
melon, on his lap, frowning. He finally pulled out a battered handy
and opened it. He hit a few keys, then turned it to face Lynn.
  Her specs and parameters were there. Name, age, weight. A
picture. Kill on sight, it said.
  “What?” She handed it back to him. “That’s crazy.”
  “Set it there, in the sun,” he said. “It needs to charge.” He lit
another cigarette; Lynn shook her head when he held out the pack to
her.
  “There was some informant in your organization, I think,” he
said. “But who knows. Maybe someone on this side. Anyway, the
Chinese government does not feel inclined to share genome
information with any other nation. They hardly want to admit that
such research is going on. I know that much, you see, about what
you were doing. Of course, that is your father’s branch at IS, isn’t it?
The work is done at such great expense that—well, who is selling it,
anyway? A traitor from one of the Chinese government labs, eh?
Someone very high up, right? You have become part of a web of
conspiracy, my dear. If possible, you might try considering it fun. I
do. I always have.” He coughed, once, and his face creased with
spasms. He glanced up.
  “But,” he said, grinning now like a Cheshire, “you were
successful.” He nodded and looked right at her left ear.
  She let out her breath. He knew—at least something.
  She sat back and looked out the window. They passed a dirt
intersection where three skinny men waited on bicycles to continue
their journey.
   Her father and her brothers differed quite a bit as to goals and
means. Her father often seemed blind to the obvious misdoings of
his sons, preferring to be obliviously proud of them. They were
Good, they hewed to the family mission. Their wives were quiet and
dutiful and had produced children. Her father, though, was really a
straight arrow when it came to legality. She remembered his rage at
finding out about one illegal IS program… but she knew, now that
she was grown, that he hardly knew anything about what was really
going on.
   But she did know one thing: No matter what, her father would
strive to protect her, never mind how angry he had been with her in
the past. She trusted him.
  She did not trust her brothers. She was useful to them, that was
all. And they were useful to her.
  She studied the Colonel, wondering how to find out his agenda—
which might or might not depend on her father’s agenda; and that
would depend on how much he knew. Had he known about Akamu?
Had her brothers known?
   It was all too late anyway. Even if she returned to Hong Kong
immediately, would he still be there in the room, working on the
flat? Not likely.
  “The borders are being watched,” the Colonel told her, “Most
certainly you would be apprehended if you weren’t with me.”
  “So where are we going?”
   “Tibet,” he said, and smiled once more, this time quite happily.
“My favorite part of the world. So high, so grand. So very sad and
poor. Long sacred horns blowing at each meditation. Where there is
electricity, the prayer appears on computer screens in the corner of
homes, It is bizarre, it is wonderful. And eventually I will be able to
put you on a plane to Bangkok, and you will have absolutely no
trouble once you are there.”
  She looked at his face again and saw broad cheekbones and
coppery skin. His face flashed with some odd glow, like a firefly, a
chimera, in tangent with his smile.
   “I see,” she said. “Give me another sip of that whisky, please.” She
settled back, and the broad plains clacked by in the hot Mongol
wind. Maybe when he went for food at the next station she could slip
off and catch the next train back to Hong Kong. But she would need
money… and a new passport…
  “I have something to show you,” he said. He opened the door to the
other compartment. “Come in,” he said. A shadow stirred, then
someone filled the doorway.
  Akamu.


                                CEN
                          Honolulu 2007




                                  4

It was just eight in the morning, but down at Honolulu Harbor next
to the Aloha Tower, eight was hot.
  Cen, wearing a neon green bathing suit and zoris, was covered
with sweat, and his arms hurt from loading crates of iced squid and
mahi from a boat into the back of Lu-Wei’s van, which was more
rust than car. He stopped, wiped his forehead with the back of his
hand, and looked around for a Coke machine.
  Lu-Wei, a short, fat man who spent most of every afternoon
mah-jongg gambling in the seedy Chinese park on Nuuanu, said,
“Hey, boy, I pay you good you do this work not laze around. My
customers pay extra for wild. But not if it ain’t fresh.”
  “Fuck you,” Cen muttered, but went back to get a crate of
yellow-tail, still thirsty. Like hell these were wild, anyway. He
could tell farm-grown even if the customers couldn’t.
  He turned; stopped short. A young girl stood on the dock next to
the boat. She hadn’t been there before.
  She wore a frilly white cotton dress with a large bow tied at the
side of her slim waist. Her chest was still flat, and many fine pleats
ran from her high, lacy collar down to her waist. He’d gone
shopping with Mei once or twice and had never seen anything like
this, not even in the most expensive department in Samson Brothers.
  As he approached, the girl looked at him directly, seriously, with
wonderful, enormous brown eyes, as if taking his measure. Her long
black hair was held back in a ponytail. It frizzed slightly around
her oval, olive-complected face, which was shaded by a parasol held
in her right hand. She wore unscuffed black patent leather shoes
that shone in the brilliant sun. Cen blinked. She looked distinctly
old-fashioned against the backdrop of the generation ship in
Hickam Spacebase across the glittering harbor, the latest
abandoned Interspace project.
  “Hello,” she said. “I’ve been watching you. You are alii, aren’t
you?”
  He laughed with conscious bitterness. “Sure I am. Royal blood,
that’s right, a real prince. My dad, he was a prince too. A great
man.” He rubbed his forehead with his hand as if he could wipe
away the web of red and black that suddenly enveloped him.
  “You remind me of my uncle David,” she said, and he saw
sunlight sparkling on the water once again and clear blue sky above.
  “What you stopping for now, lazy son of bitch,” Lu yelled across
two docks and rapped the side of the Forerunner with his ivory cane.
“Gotta get this stuff to market. Late already.”
  Cen jerked his head back toward Lu-Wei. “Yeah, I’m special.
That’s why I work for that asshole.” Then he was ashamed of saying
asshole in front of this weird girl. He bent and picked up the
yellowtail, walked over, and shoved the flat into the van.
  He wiped his fishy hands on his trunks and turned to wave at the
girl before leaving.
  But she was gone.
  He looked down at the fish he would soon have to gut.
Shimmering red blood would swirl down the drain beneath his
spray; one fish eye would stare at him as he yanked out the guts. He
swallowed bile and climbed into the driver’s seat.
   A young woman from the Marquesas Islands, Mei, had taken Cen
in two years ago, after he’d kicked around Honolulu for a month,
sleeping in doorways and avoiding the cops. She soon stopped
asking him about his past, because he would say nothing. She got
him a job and saw that he kept it, because he helped pay the rent on
their tiny apartment on Hotel Street, where the tall old windows
opened onto the wildest street in the city.
  The first night there he’d lain in bed and tried not to hear what
went on below: shuffling footsteps, “I’m gonna cut you till you
bleed”; the music of smashed bottles blending with the buzzing of
the midnight trades through the pulled blinds.
   Whores had most of the rooms—Mei was one, he soon found
out—and they looked out for him. Mei said he reminded her of her
little brother.
   In the can Cen had taken the night he left home was a photograph
of his great-grandfather.
  The massive, dark man stood erect. A few palm trees cast
shadows across the sand where he stood. He was naked, but his
tattoos— delicate, tiny geometric patterns that didn’t go far above
his hips—gave him a clothed look.
   Cen took the picture to an old-fashioned tattoo artist over on
Queen Street. He gritted his teeth once a week, for months, in that
tiny, hot room that smelled of whisky, until it was complete. That
was how he spent his first money the year he turned thirteen.
  At first he was afraid his father would find him, but after a while
he decided that he wouldn’t even take the trouble to look. After all,
Cen was on the other side of the island now, several hours away by
car. And to most residents of Hawaii, “the other side of the island”
was usually about as close, for some reason, as the other side of the
moon. Certainly Cen’s visits to Honolulu before fleeing there were
fewer than five in twelve years: a field trip to Iolani Palace, a
shopping expedition with his mother, once, and maybe one or two
others that he didn’t remember. The Honolulu side of the island
boasted a population of three million, not an easy place to find
someone who wanted to disappear.
   And soon he was able to forget why, exactly, his father might be
looking for him. The night he had left home had become a blur of
terror for him, something he couldn’t remember very clearly.
  He saw his mother’s face at night when he closed his eyes: her
dead face, covered with blood. He wondered why he never could
remember her alive, but only that last, horrible vision.
  Of the rest of the day, he remembered nothing. The emptiness did
not bother him, because somehow he felt that remembering would
have been worse.
   And everyone had told him he’d be sorry about the tattoos, but
they were wrong. They anchored him to something beyond his own
life. He’d been very pleased with his decision.
  Until now, when he was fifteen.
  He was pretty sure this girl wasn’t the type who liked tattoos.
  Cen was proud of the old brass key he used to get into the two
rooms he shared with Mei. All his friends lived in run-down
high-rises with mag keys, pieces of signal-embedded plastic. The
weight of the key felt good in his hand, cool in evening’s heat that
was held in the high old hallway. Wallpaper peeled next to the door,
and the ceiling was narrow latheboards painted countless times, the
last time tired gray. A plaque downstairs read Mark Twain Slept
Here, and Cen believed it.
   But when he turned the knob, he smelled a difference. Later, he
told himself there was no smell, but he stopped and took a deep
breath and fear held him for a second before he stepped forward and
touched on the light.
   Mei was sprawled across the bed, wearing a white silk nightshirt.
The wide window behind her was fully open, and long curtains
fluttered in the evening trades. Down the street he saw the lights of
the ships in the harbor, heard tourists walking below, slumming
before they would desert the quarter and leave it to the natives
around midnight. The smart ones left a lot sooner. Across the
harbor, the glass tower topped with the IS logo ubiquitous in the
Islands shimmered on the still, dark water: nineteen stars, one for
each participating nation.
  Cen wondered as he took the few steps toward the bed why he was
worrying. She could be napping, sleeping off some sort of weird
binge.
   But he touched her cheek and it was too hot. Her face was
flushed. He shook her and she moaned; he turned her on her back
and a bubble. of saliva formed over her mouth and burst and he felt
a little relief. Alive, okay, she’s alive, now what? He shook her.
“Mei,” he said. “You okay?” He shouted at her, then slapped her face
in desperation, dismayed at the red mark it left on her cheek. “No,”
he breathed. “No.” He ran to the window.
 Huang Po was leaning back against his storefront, as usual,
waiting for a sucker of one kind or another to pass by.
  “Call an ambulance,” Cen yelled out the window. “It’s Mei.”
 A moment later he heard steps pounding down the hallway, and
Huang burst in. “What’s the problem?”
  “Did you call the ambulance?”
  Huang said, “Don’t know if that’s such a great idea. Saw her with
two Interspace people today. A woman and a man.”
  Cen didn’t ask him how he knew. You just did.
   “They were walking her back home, one on each side. I wondered
about it but thought maybe she was just drunk. You know she’s been
doing stuff for them over at the Tripler Lab.” The big pink hospital
on the flank of the mountain, infamous now as the site of rumored
illegal experiments.
  “No,” said Cen. “She didn’t tell me.” She wouldn’t. She knew what
he thought of IS and their biotech experiments. “How long?”
  Huang shrugged. “Couple weeks, I guess.”
   Cen turned from Huang, ran downstairs and punched the white
button, told them the address, heard computer keys click over the
line. “Sorry,” he heard. “No clearance for that person. Mei Fossant.”
  “No,” he said, “it’s not for her, it’s for a Huang Po, a neighbor,”
but he heard a click and knew it was true.
  Huang left muttering “Bad business, bad business,” and Cen
cooled Mei for half the night with wet washcloths until she shivered
and moaned. Then he tossed a sheet over her and nestled close,
hugging her tight, trying to be the bed full of brothers and sisters
she’d grown up with, though she’d never allowed him to touch her
before. “I love you, Mei,” he said over and over, hoping it would get
through to her, hoping that something would pull her back from
whatever edge they’d pushed her to.
  Mei had come to Hawaii, she had told Cen, in hopes of working
for Interspace, the international space consortium that leased the
old U.S. military facilities—more than half of the Islands landwise.
All of the nations that had space programs had agreed in the year
2000 to pool their efforts in one place. By that time grass had
overtaken most of the mainland U.S. facilities, as they were used
only to launch and land the shuttle. Mir too had stagnated. Hawaii
lobbied hard to be the locus of all operations—physical and
scientific—and won. The goal, breathtaking in scope, was
interstellar travel. Hawaii was ideal—the most isolated land on
earth, so that failed launches were less of a liability and microwave
interference was very low. Most important, a vast military
infrastructure had mushroomed since World War II. Hickam Air
Force Base had even been designed and built in the late 1950s with
the landing and launch needs of the future space shuttle in mind,
and that level of planning made the crossover ideal. Top secret
control centers, state-of-the-art communication wonderlands, vast
underground facilities, and sophisticated hardware were all up for
lease since the U.S. military had shrunk, wrecking the economy of
the state. Few people knew that tourism and agriculture ranked
below the military economically in Hawaii, but it was true. Hawaii
hailed the surge of Interspace money into the economy, as well as
the influx of scientists from around the world. Interspace was
multifaceted: visionary, though unrealized, engineering of space
stations and colonies proceeded apace. Nor was the human side of
the equation ignored. Genetic engineering (including, it was
rumored, internationally banned aspects of genetic engineering as
well as bionan) had a strong place in the IS agenda.
   Fuzzy goals, such as intelligence enhancement or the adaptation
of humans to long-term space travel, allowed for a wide range of
research. The dust from a recent genetic engineering scandal within
IS was being energetically swept under the carpet just now. These
illegal experiments were attempts to bypass the internationally
agreed-upon conventions that had been developed to protect
humanity from various hypothetical disasters. Here, the envelope
was pushed. And often, it was suspected, broken.
  Cen himself had sometimes felt a pull toward the wildly
speculative cosmological studies of time and space in which IS
scientists took advantage (unfairly, nonaffiliated astrophysicists
complained) of the Mauna Kea observatory; at least it excited him to
read about it in the paper.
  Only locals felt the unvoiced hysteria that had lately infected
Interspace. Their charter was to be reexamined in two years—every
two years, in fact, from now on—and little actual progress had been
made since the tragic failure of the embryonic Moon colony in 2005.
Shadow cartels within the organization apparently dealt with the
Hong Kong and Japanese underworld, selling information; the
percentage of profits available for reinvestment were thereby
reduced.
   Mei’s had become an old story. The Asiaslums of Honolulu
teemed with people like her: people who flocked to Hawaii hoping to
become a part of Interspace, to get their children on the generation
ship, to benefit from rumored medical and genetic breakthroughs, to
be near the source of illegal experimental informational nans. To
live near the steam vent of Information. They became cheap labor.
The highrise lanais of Honolulu were draped with their laundry,
filled with the cooking smells of chili’d sesame oil, lemon grass,
noodles, steamed fish.
  Downtown, the Oriental Market was open twenty-four hours a
day. Tropical sunlight drenched the crowds by day, and at night the
Chinese computerized tortoiseshell fortune-tellers set up their tables
and waited with high-res screens that employed the algorithms of
complexity theory to foretell the grandeurs of transtime travel,
which would carry their client’s grandchildren to worlds of wild
beauty where there was always plenty to eat.
  Mei’s enormous brown eyes were dull the next morning as she sat
up in the bed sipping strong, steaming Vietnamese coffee he’d run
out for. She tried to smile at Cen, but tears welled from her eyes and
spilled onto her thin, aristocratic face.
  “I’m okay,” she said, and motioned Cen back into the chair where
he’d been watching her take each sip.
  “What happened, Mei?” he asked. “Drink a couple bottles of
tequila or what?” Give her an out if she wants it.
  “Nothing but assholes up there,” she said, her French Polynesia
accent giving even the word asshole charm. “But I was a fool to
think I could get that bionan for free. Well, it’s done now,” she said,
and looked at him with a glimmer of triumph in her eyes.
   “Mei,” he said. “Why?” He imagined her tilting a vial of
bright-colored, sweetened liquid, eyes narrowed in shrewd
anticipation, and tossing it down. The bionan, as far as he knew
from the sketchy information available to the general public,
piggybacked into various parts of the brain or the rest of the body
quite precisely. Or at least, that precision was what they were trying
to achieve.
  She just stared at him. “Don’t you want it?”
  “No,” he said, and that single word was tinged with horror.
  “Ah, it is because you are ignorant,” she said. “But not as ignorant
as many, believe me. You are actually a smart boy, very smart
indeed, I think. But me, I am not, not too really. You live on a small
faraway island, you hear about the wonders of enhancement and
you want it for yourself, I guarantee it, all my brothers and sisters
wanted it but only I was brave enough to come and get it.”
  “Get what?”
   “Information,” she said. “Learning. Wisdom. Ha!” she said,
folding her thin brown legs under her. “It must seem that I’m just a
common prostitute. But I have plans, Cen. It’s just that I need this
in, this doorway. First I’ll probably go back and teach again. I’m a
teacher, you know. Now maybe I’ll have something to teach. It will
be so easy for me to learn,” she said. “I’ll pick things up just
like”—she snapped a thin, brown finger against her thumb—“that!”
Her eyes hooded, and Cen thought she was drifting back to sleep.
  “I hope you’re right, Mei.” He’d heard too many horror stories to
believe that Mei might be a success.
  First she might get an odd twitch, stumble and seem drunk when
she was not.
  Or perhaps she might get to seeing things that weren’t there. The
brain could do funny things. One side of her vision might go, or it
might all reverse so that she could no longer read. And she loved to
read.
   She could possibly develop insights that would leave her
stranded, without tools to express them—without the language, the
mathematics. And go crazy with frustration.
   Cen’s memories of school were fleeting now, but they were good.
He’d found that he knew much, much more about the world, about
literature, mathematics, about the possibilities—than anyone he ran
into down here. He was jeered at for watching the news on Janelle’s
TV instead of “the stories” everyone else seemed to lap up. Every day
when he bought a newspaper he pressed the science button, which
gave him a paper, on thin recyclable material of some sort—he knew
not what— that he could slip back into a slot to be reused.
Sometimes he itched for a computer, for web access. He’d had a
taste of that too. Maybe when he’d saved some money…
  Some people said that there was safe bionan that cost a lot of
money. Cen felt nothing but contempt for IS when he considered
that. Why were they doing things like this, if it were true?
  “Your tattoo, you know,” she said, opening her eyes again. “These
are not so rare where I come from. Many of the old ones have them.
There’s information in them.”
  She leaned toward Cen, who was still sitting next to her, reached
over and traced one of the squares that climbed the side of his waist;
he shivered and pulled away. She usually treated him like a little
brother. He didn’t want that to change. The thought scared him. He
stood up.
  She laughed softly. “Yes, information, you know?” she said.
“That’s what everything is. Beautiful patterns. It… it seems to come
and go. This way of seeing. Like everything is upside down, or
drifting apart, like what it used to mean to me is gone so that I can
really see. I’ll master it more later, of course. That’s what they told
me.” She set the coffee down on the table next to the bed and
yawned. “Have you ever heard of wormholes?”
  “Go back to sleep, Mei,” he said. “You’ll feel better later.”
   “No,” she said. “I mean it. Wormholes. Gateways between
different times. IS didn’t tell me this, of course. One of the girls who
cleans the lab is from my island, we found out once when we were
alone there, and she tried to stop me. So frightened!” Mei laughed,
but her laughter had a kind tone. “She told me about these
wormholes she’d heard them talking about. Like she thought that
might keep me from going through with this, as if I would be
somehow pushed right into another universe! She said that only the
Old Ones had that information, about how to get to the next
universe after death. She still believes in that nonsense. Me, I
believe in science. There is nothing after death. Worm-holes! What
an ugly word. Couldn’t they think of anything more beautiful? I
already traveled out of a different time, a different age, when I came
here. Where I am from is fifty years behind.”
  Cen felt chilled, thinking about the strange girl he had seen, then
dismissed the thought. Nonsense. Wormholes were something that
happened in virtual arcades. A great whoosh, then the challenge of
navigating its swirls, held open by something called exotic matter,
and emerging in another universe, one—what was that word?—one
contiguous with this one.
  But that was just a game and it cost a bunch of yen and you came
back alive even if your ship was crushed.
   “They paid me a lot,” Mei was saying. She leaped out of bed, long
brown legs flashing, and went to her bureau, pulled open the top
drawer, rummaged beneath her underwear, and pulled out a stack
of yen, tossed them into the air, laughing and laughing as they
settled, fluttering in the breeze from the window.
  Then she carefully picked each one up, stacked them neatly, and
buried them again. A fine sweat stood out on her forehead as she
bounced back onto the bed, crossed her legs, and picked up her coffee
cup.
  Cen wondered how he could feel so much older than her, so
weary, so very sorry.
  “I can bring my sisters here now, if I want,” she said. “Or if I go
back, I can put a down payment on a house big enough for all of us.
Because of their silly idea, I am able to have this information.
That’s all everything is! Information! Oh, Cen, it is all so lovely!
The colors are so bright! And the window. Look! All the light
coming in, spreading out so that everything looks so—so white,
and… and coming apart…” Her voice weakened for a moment then
continued, though tears welled in her eyes. Cen could tell she was
trying to make her voice normal and firm. “I’m supposed to tell
them what happens to me, that’s all. Once a week, I go for tests.
That’s all. I…”
  The hand with which she held the coffee stiffened, and then the
cup was flung across the room. Mei’s eyes opened wide, and she
slumped back in the bed.




                                  5

Even on the welfare ward, the corridors at Queen’s Hospital were
broad and white, shining. Cen’s nose stung with the antiseptic tang
of hallways where knee-level bots meandered from wall to wall,
endlessly cleaning the floors.
  Somewhat miraculously, they had told him at the front desk that
Mei was in intensive care. After he found his way there, he was told
by the Samoan nurse that Mei wasn’t allowed any visitors.
  He said, “You just mean you won’t let me in! You don’t like the
way I look? What is it? I’m the one who put her in a cab and got her
here.” Then they hadn’t been able to refuse her. It was against the
law.
  The nurse hesitated, perhaps seeing the steely defiance he felt.
  “It’s not that,” she said, crossing her hefty arms across an even
heftier bodice.
  “Then what?”
  “First of all, only next of kin are allowed.”
  “They’re thousands of miles away. She’s alone except for me. I’m
her next of kin.”
  Her face softened a bit. “I did see that she’s from the Marquesas…
but you’re too young anyway.”
   “I’m fifteen,” he said, with what he hoped was quiet authority. “So
let me in. I have to see her. Look. I brought her some rice candy.” He
pulled the bent cardboard box from his pocket. “She really likes it
Even the silly prize. I thought it might cheer her up.”
  But when he looked into the deep, grave eyes of the nurse, he was
chilled by what he saw.
  “How—how is she?”
  “She’s in intensive care.”
  “I know that—”
  “She’s not conscious,” said the nurse. “It wouldn’t do either of you
any good. In fact, she’s in a totally restricted room—”
  “Please,” he whispered, surprised at the pleading in his voice,
something entirely new for him. “She’s all I have…”
  Something seemed to click in the nurse. She straightened to her
full height, about six feet.
  “We’ll have to wait till the charge nurse goes on break,” she said.
  When she slipped him into the room, he could only stare.
  A large tube entered Mei’s mouth. The breathing tube. It pumped
her chest, tiny beneath the sheet, up and down, up and down,
relentlessly, in an even, dull rhythm. Several IV’s looped around
her, filled with clear liquid. Digital feedback blinked.
  “See?” whispered the nurse. She looked around nervously.
  “Mei!” he cried, the word bursting from him. He stepped to her
side, touched her face…
  She didn’t respond.
 “What’s wrong with her?” he asked, but knew. If not what, then
why.
   “Come on,” said the nurse, and her hand clamped over his arm
like a vise. “I don’t want to lose my job, kid.”
  As she led him out the door, he felt with his other hand the
crumpled box of candy in his pocket. The jellied squares of bland
sweet candy were wrapped in transparent paper that dissolved in
your mouth. He wanted to toss it onto her bed. She might wake and
see it, know that he’d been there. The nurse was looking up and
down the hall. He could do it.
  He didn’t. It would have been childish. It would only get the
nurse in trouble, and no matter how many corny stories they aired
on TV, the box of candy wouldn’t somehow magically wake the thin,
kind, beautiful woman whose head now swam with forbidden
nanotechnology. That thing attached to her head… was that
something sticking into her ear? Was that her blood, pulsing slowly
up one tube, then down another? God!
  The nurse yanked him around the corner. “Satisfied?” He didn’t
realize he was crying until she shoved a wad of tissues into his
hand.
  Cen stood at the window of a Thai carryout pouring sweet
condensed milk into his iced coffee. He felt dazed; maybe the coffee
would help.
  “Hey that’s enough, you greedy pig,” the woman told him, and
snatched the can from his hand. She slammed the window shut.
  Cen smelled the strong, sweet scent of ginger and turned.
  “People are very rude here,” the girl said, but smiled. Her eyes
were mischievous. The sun was directly behind her head and her
face was dark, but the wisps of hair that stood out around her face
were lit like a nimbus.
  “Do you want some?” he asked, confused. Who the hell was she?
  She took it and drank. “Good,” she said, and drank more.
  Cen wished he hadn’t been so generous.
  “Don’t worry,” she said, as if she knew what he was thinking, and
handed it back. “Do you want to go for a walk?”
  What does she want? “Sure.”
  He started to walk toward the deserted pineapple plant, with its
enormous ugly metal pineapple towering above, where the squalor of
the streets reminded him of the punk virtuals down at the arcade,
scumworlds where you had to keep your wits about you to keep from
getting offed. A few Filipino boys had a cockfight every afternoon in
the Mongoose’s packed-dirt backyard; he had a few hundred yen to
blow.
  “No,” she said. “This way.”
  He shrugged. He’d probably just lose his money. “Okay.” They
started to walk toward Diamond Head instead.
  She was wearing the same white dress. You’d think that she’d be
hot, but she looked cool as the white clouds that hid the
mountain-tops. “It’s so strange here,” she said.
  “It is?”
  “I’m getting used to it. I’m not so sad, here. I’m so tired of being
sad.” And she laughed with such hysterical abandon that Cen was
afraid that she was one of Interspace’s bionan crazies and didn’t
press her. He found, to his surprise, that he wanted only to protect
her, give her a feeling of safety.
  To keep her from vanishing as she had before.
  Cen stopped and looked at her. She returned his gaze with the
same intense, liquid, intelligent expression he remembered from the
other time they had met.
  “Who are you?” he asked.
  “My name is Kaiulani.”
  “Where do you live?”
   “My father has a big house down at Waikiki. He would be very
angry if he knew that I was coming over to the harbor. He wants to
keep me all locked up. Safe. But I need to know what my people are
like.”
  “Your people?”
  Serenity and composure blazed from her, yet she answered a bit
impatiently, “Yes. King David Kalakaua is my uncle, and
Liliuokalani Dominis is my aunt. After her I’m next in line for the
throne.” She raised her chin and stared at him.
  “What are you talking about?” And how did she know his last
name, Kalakaua? He had given Lu-Wei, the only person who ever
asked, the name Cen Smith. Panic filled him. Had his father found
him, sent her? No. Impossible…
  “I guess you don’t believe me.”
  He took a deep breath. “Believe what?”
  “That I’m going to be the next ruler of Hawaii.”
   A nut. But a rich nut, obviously. She was very beautiful, frail,
fine-boned. He relaxed. Kalakaua was not an unusual name, after
all. He felt sorry for her. She wasn’t a tourist. She looked Hawaiian,
which was about as rare as the o-o bird. And yet—
  “Your father is right,” Cen said. “You shouldn’t be over on this
side of town. Let me walk you home.” Even if his own father did
find him, what could he do? Cen was almost six feet tall now, and
very strong. He’d beat his father to a pulp and then—
  She frowned. “I can get home by myself, thank you,” she said. “It’s
almost time for tea, anyway, and they become upset if I miss it.”
   Tea? He was so dumbfounded by the whole performance that he
let her walk away. By the time he thought to follow her she had
turned the corner, and when he rushed around Huang Po’s and
looked down King Street, it was empty of people, as it often was this
time of afternoon.
  The street vibrated with her absence.
  His breath came short with terror. “Don’t leave me,” he said,
gazing at the old buildings, suddenly afraid that they might vanish
too and leave him alone in a dark, frightening void with flashes of
red, the nebulous place of his recurring nightmares where nothing
was real, but that was all he had and all he ever would have.
  Score some pakalolo, he told himself. Forget about this girl. Be
stoned all night—you got to work anyway.
   His side job right now was loading dishwashers with the greasy
dishes of rich tourists who stuffed themselves on fish covered with
macadamia nuts, macadamia nut pie, and washed it down with
about ten Blue Hawaiis. He wished he could afford to leave his job
at the fish market. It physically sickened him; he rushed from the
flopping fish and rivers of blood at least once a month to puke in the
bathroom, but Lu-Wei paid surprisingly well, valuing his
dependability, and Cen had vague dreams of going to school. Or
something.
  Stoned, he could dream of it being winter, when the surf would be
big over at Makaha. Life was real then. Lots of dumb tourists came
out there and locked their cameras and wallets in the trunk of their
car, thinking that would keep their stuff from being stolen. Cen
could break into a trunk and be gone with the goods in about ten
seconds flat. Yeah, sure—if he tried, maybe even a street kid like
him could do something besides clean fish and steal. Someday.
  But right now, maybe the Mongoose could help him out. He
usually had a little extra.
   She was back the next day. She just showed up next to him as he
sat in the park, trying out his pakalolo. The cops didn’t care; this
was a park for bums. He felt like a bum. Maybe he’d be a bum. Why
not? Earlier he had walked to the hospital, stood at the door while
people brushed past him unseeing, then turned back. He hadn’t gone
to work. What did it matter? What did anything matter? The world
was a crazed, dark place, and the fear that he always carried with
him, that his father might suddenly show up, seemed like a beast
ready to uncoil and overwhelm him. Nowhere to run. No safe place.
The park was bright, shot with brilliant hot sun that lay across his
shoulders like a soothing protective shield.
  “Have you ever read Robert Louis Stevenson?” she asked.
  His heart beat fast as he turned, recognizing her voice instantly.
Be cool, he told himself. Don’t scare her away.
  “Who’s that?” he asked, only a slight tremor in his voice. He found
he didn’t want to admit to her that he didn’t read much. Reading
reminded him of his mom.
  She smiled at him, her face only inches away. She had a lovely
smile. Her eyes were the kindest he’d ever seen.
   “He’s my friend. He reads with me—Shakespeare and Plato, and
he’s even teaching me Latin. He’s a haku mele.” A poet. She looked
grave again. “You have to know a lot to be a ruler. You have to know
just about everything there is to know. Especially you have to know
a lot about politics and the world and everything. And foreign
languages—French is my favorite. I hate German, don’t you?”
  He liked this crazy girl. “The only foreign language I know is
English,” he said.
  “You mean Hawaiian is your native tongue?”
  My native tongue. “Yeah.” Sometimes, like whenever he went up
into the Waianae Mountains, or rode Jake’s dirt bike around Kaena
Point, where it was so wild, or when he was out on somebody’s
borrowed board, he thought in Hawaiian. “How did you know?”
  “I told you,” she said. “I can tell you’re alii.”
  “That’s crazy,” he said.
  Then he realized: it was not.
   His mother had taught him to recite his genealogy back to the
days of the ancient chiefs, but he hadn’t even remembered that until
just now. Funny what you could forget. If you tried. It had mattered
to her.
  But it was bullshit. It wasn’t important. Not these days, when
they were trying to rebuild the Moon colony and the shuttle roared
in every Wednesday from the space station, where the generation
ship was being built.
  But what could a little pretending hurt, especially in a world
where you could talk to a ghost? He thought of her as one, though
she seemed solid enough. It was just the way she dressed, the way
she just appeared. The mind could do funny things, and what did it
matter? She made him happy. Shouldn’t that be enough?
  “Yeah,” he said, “and I know where Kamehameha’s bones are.”
  He thought she would say, sure you do.
 Instead, she jumped up from the grass and stood in front of him.
Her face had a wild look.
  “Don’t ever, ever, tell anybody,” she said, and kissed him quickly
full on the lips.
  Everything seemed real, though intensified in color by her
presence—especially the touch of her lips on his.
  And what was that about Kamehameha’s bones? It had just
popped out of his mouth. Weird things happened when she was
around.
   He did dream about bones sometimes: yellow and pitted. Scary.
Giving off the awful energy of death. He feared those dreams most
of all. Sometimes he felt that dark power struggling to come into his
world, to leak through the bright buildings of a not-real Honolulu
and sweep him into everlasting night.
  Anyway, Kamehameha had died over two hundred years ago. He
was the first king to unite the Hawaiian Islands. Nobody knew
where his bones were. They were hidden by kahunas—priests—as
soon as he died. But she was right: bones were sacred to Hawaiians.
They had much mana, much power. If your enemies got hold of
them, your bones became fishhooks. It was the ultimate insult.
  He didn’t know why he dreamed about them. He figured he’d seen
them on TV when he was little, or something, and they made a big
impression. He could even hear them, in his dreams. Smooth, dark,
long-fingered hands rolled them into an old piece of tapa cloth, and
they made dry, distant tones as they clanked together and went back
into darkness.
 He could tell already that Kaiulani was nothing like death. She
was like the sun in the park: bright, lifegiving.
  He looked at his joint, tossed it in a far arc across the park. You
never knew what the Mongoose might be lacing through his stuff.
He steeled himself to ask her questions. He didn’t like to think that
he might be crazy, like an old drunk ranting to the air.
  “Why shouldn’t I tell anyone? Who are you? What makes you think
you can tell me what to do?”
  In response to his question, Kaiulani stared at him, and turned
pale. She picked up a ripe mango and threw it right at him. It
splattered against his arm, its overripe tang exploding in his nose.
Well, that was real enough. He watched, amused, as she whirled
and ran, hoisting her long white dress. Then he broke into a run.
  Cen was surprised at how fast she could dart across the broad
green lawn splotched by the short midday shadows of coconut
palms.
  Still, he got close enough in a minute to catch hold of her sash. It
ripped from her dress and she turned, eyes blazing.
  “You don’t do that to a princess,” she said, and slapped him.
  His cheek stung. Angry, he said, “Just tell me about the bones,
then, princess.”
  She stared at him. “You believe me.”
  “Sure,” he said. Maybe.
  “Sit,” she said.
  They sat together and watched surf breaking out on the reef.
  But she was oddly quiet. Finally she spoke.
  “I’ve seen them before. They are kapu. Very bad luck.” She
laughed. “I was cursed, by the power of the bones.” She laughed
again, her voice light and unconcerned. “Silly superstition!”
  She was quiet for a moment and then said, “But still, I need to see
them.”
  “Why?” he asked, in a whisper.
   She stood up and turned to look out at the ocean. A narrow strip
of it was visible through the trees, with its distant edge of white.
Green till it turned deep blue, suddenly, at the reef line.
   “To see… ” her voice broke, but she recovered and went on. “To see
if they are real. To touch them again. To know more. Because I am
to rule this land. And bring justice to it again. They will… remind
me.”
   If anyone else had uttered these words so seriously, he would have
laughed in derision. But she brought dignity to everything she said.
It was easy, very easy, to believe her.
  He felt his whole mind and being spin, then expand, into her
reality, her life. So much more bright than his own. The red and
black heaviness always pressing upon him, and the vision of Mei in
that awful room, dropped as he listened and watched her beautiful,
earnest face. He realized that he had to help her in any way he
possibly could. Nothing was more important than her dream of
justice for Hawaiians. All around he saw his disenfranchised
brothers and sisters, many of them filled with deep, debilitating
anger at the descendants of those who had taken their land and
their country. Still unwilling to adapt, after all these years, to a life
they saw as less holy and less pure than what had been stolen from
them. A hereditary dream handed down to them through the
generations, one that he had always rejected, though he had
nothing, really, with which to replace it. There were at least eight
factions of Homelanders, all with slightly different agendas, all
rabidly sure of their goals. Each claimed to have the true needs of
Hawaiians at heart. He had had some slight contact with more than
one and found them vaguely repulsive.
   Kaiulani stared out at the waves breaking on the reef. Her long
dark hair swept back from her face in the onshore wind. “They’re
talking about sending me to Europe for my education,” she said.
“I’m not supposed to know, but I hear things. I was always supposed
to go, but not until later. But apparently there are all kinds of
things going on downtown.” She frowned. “There are so many crazy
haoles here in Hawaii. And they all manage to get into my uncle’s
cabinet somehow.” She turned and looked directly at him. “Was that
opium you were smoking before?”
  “No,” he said. “That didn’t come from poppies.” Don’t ask her
anything. Keep her talking, remember what she says, use it for
clues…
  Keep her here.
   “That’s my uncle’s latest trouble,” she said. “For a long time it
was illegal for Hawaiians to drink or to smoke opium—only
Hawaiians. It was all right for everyone else. But now he’s sold a
license to a Chinese merchant. That’s a crime in itself, you
understand. I believe he was paid about seventy thousand dollars.
And then he sold the same license to someone else, and told the first
man that it was too bad, but that he was keeping the money! So the
first man went to the papers…” she sighed. “Now it’s coming out
that my uncle—he’s the king, you know—signed the affidavit
because the annexationists paid him to do it, which discredits him
even further. Well, it’s true that he doesn’t seem to have any sense of
responsibility at all. That’s what my father says. Uncle David is my
mother’s brother, of course! He’s like an overgrown child. He sits
there on his houseboat drinking cases of champagne with my friend,
Louis—Mr. Stevenson, that is. Louis isn’t very healthy! But at least
he acts like a grown-up. I have a lot of work to do, Cen. I have a lot
to learn. Everybody complains because Hawaiians don’t work. Of
course they do! How do people think we got along before they
showed up? This is our land! Before the Europeans came, everyone
got along fine. We worked hard when we had to and we played just
as hard. That’s what my old nurse told me, and my aunt
Liliuokalani. If the businessmen want to make a fortune selling
sugar, why should the Hawaiians be serfs on their own land?”
  She turned to Cen, her cheeks red. He didn’t know what to say.
  She was so much more passionate than him. He thought of
Lu-Wei. Lu’s family had owned the stall in the fish market for over
a hundred years. He didn’t want to think about his own family. He
couldn’t. It was like a wall.
   “You’re going to Europe?” he asked gently, wondering why the
words of a ghost could fill him with such desolation. He reached up
and felt his stinging cheek. His brain refused to function. It didn’t
make sense. And what did it matter? She was dead anyway, if the
strange things she was saying were true.
  But it did matter.
  When she was here time was intense, bright, causing the rest of
his life to seem meaningless in comparison. Everything about her
was the opposite of himself, as if they were two sides of the same
mask, dark and light. Why care about why he could see her? It only
mattered that he could, didn’t it?
  No, he was surprised to find himself thinking. It mattered, quite
a bit, why.
  And now she was leaving.
  “I don’t really want to go so far away,” she said. “But it’s for the
good of my people. Yet, to help my people, I need to know everything
about them. Their beliefs. My life is very civilized. I sit in the great
room in the evenings, listening to queens and kings from my own
and other countries speak. The windows are always open and the
breeze blows in from off the sea and rattles the banana trees. All the
foreign ambassadors are friends with my father. They come and
drink gin and play cards. I’m very quiet so they don’t chase me
away. It seems that everyone wants Hawaii—the British, the
Americans, even the Japanese. But we need it for ourselves. After
all, it is ours.”
  She turned to look at Cen. “You are alii, like me. If you know
where the bones are, you must show me. It’s not only the things in
Europe I need to learn. My father is Scots, and that’s what he
thinks— but I think he might be wrong about that. My old nurse
said that the bones give life to the land. Perhaps if I saw
them—touched them—” he saw her shiver “—I would understand
things—my land—better. I would know what it is that I have to do.
They have… information.”
  Cen felt very cold. Information. The same word Mei had used. “I
haven’t seen any bones,” he said. Why had he ever said such a
ridiculous thing?
  “I don’t believe that,” she said, looking straight at him. “I don’t
believe that you would lie to me.”
  You don’t know much about me then, he thought.
  “If you’re really a ghost,” he said, “why can I see you? Touch you?”
  She reached over and brushed his arm with two fingers. “Because
you are special. Maybe that’s the reason I can see you. We must be
uhana make.”
 Friends of the soul. A Hawaiian phrase. But he was shaken. What
was a soul, anyway? Did he have one? What is it like to be dead? he
wanted to ask, but was afraid.
  The genealogy chant his mother had taught him came back to Cen
whole that night, after he woke from a nightmare, in a rush of
bright, linked words. In the torrent of names, he found hers:
Kaiulani. The last princess of Hawaii. Her real name was Victoria
Kawekiu Lunalilo Kalaninuiahilapalapapa Kaiulani. Her claim to
the throne was through her mother, Princess Likelike.
  His hospital visit the next morning was brief and painful. He
wore his most respectable clothes and carefully combed his hair. He
took the nurse a box of candy, which she accepted with bemusement.
She shrugged. “It’s okay, I’ve cleared you. Said you were her brother.
But it’s weird, let me tell you. I guess they don’t know what the
hell’s wrong with her. They seem to have some unusual procedures.
Think you’re up to it?”
  “Sure,” he said, but his voice cracked. He followed her down the
hall to Mei’s room.
  “Wait,” she whispered, catching him just before they went in the
door. “I thought he’d left.”
  Mei was sitting up in bed, wearing a pale blue hospital gown.
Some sort of wire helmet was on her head, like an upside-down
basket. She was looking at a card she held. A man wearing a white
coat sat next to her. Cen couldn’t hear what they were saying, but
they talked; Mei nodded, and the man took away one card and
handed her another. She was too pale, too thin.
  Cen stepped back and from his new angle saw a screen, and on
the screen was a colorful vision of—a brain?
  Mei’s brain. Filled with shifting colors, blossoms of light that
grew and shrank. She looked up, suddenly, perhaps feeling his eyes
on her, and her mouth opened. She smiled; dropped the card,
reached for him—
  “Come on,” said the nurse, who had watched with him. She
pulled him down the hall so fast his feet dragged. She yanked him
into the next doorway, and Cen heard a door slam.
  They were in a room with two empty beds. “Who was that?” asked
Cen. “What were they doing?”
  “Don’t ask too many questions,” she said, and told him to try
again the next day.
  Later on at work he was so nervous he cut himself badly. He felt
completely helpless. Was Mei a prisoner? He knew who those people
were. Or he thought he knew. The same people who had taken her to
Tripler, seduced her with the dream of becoming supersmart. Now
that something was wrong, they didn’t want her associated with
Tripler. If you asked, those people would probably say they were
social workers trying to rehabilitate her or something. Maybe he
should call the police?
  Right. He should call the police. That would be a good move, after
these years of hiding. The first thing they’d want to know was his
name. He wouldn’t do Mei any good if he was in jail. Besides, those
people in there—they were more powerful than the police anyway.
  That evening he walked through dark streets and went to the
Bishop Museum, a vast repository of Hawaiiana. He felt aimless,
anxious. This was something to do, at least.
  The showcases, filled with ancient tools and artifacts of various
Pacific Islanders from prehistory on through the history of the last
Hawaiian royal family, reminded him so much of his mother that
he almost left. Fuck you, he thought to the people he thought were
staring at him as he rubbed tears from his face. He didn’t know why
he felt this way but he hated it.
  He had to ask for help. And after he got it, he hesitated before
opening the faded pictorial of old Hawaii.
  In the index, he found her name. Princess Kaiulani.
  Trembling, he turned dry pages until he came to the right one.
  It was eerie how much the same she looked.
  The photograph, in sepia tones, showed her on the lawn of a
mansion. Ainahau was built by her father, Archibald Cleghorn, at
Waikiki, and everyone ridiculed him for building so far from town
in the middle of a swamp. The tops of a few palm trees were visible
behind the house, and the front yard was deeply shaded by a
massive banyan and lots of mimosas. That would be just about
right; she reminded him of those odd pink flowers, fans of soft,
bright pink spines that floated to earth when the trade winds blew,
filling the air with sweetness.
  Two peacocks strutted in front of her, and she was bending
toward one, laughing, her long black hair loose around her face as
she directly faced the camera.
  “Robert Louis Stevenson, King David Kalakaua, and Princess
Kaiulani,” the caption read.
  He got the feeling that, in the picture, it was almost time for tea.
  He leafed through the book. He found another picture of Princess
Kaiulani. She was a child, standing next to her aunt, Queen
Liliuokalani, on the steps of Iolani Palace. They were watching the
coronation of her uncle, King David Kalakaua, and his wife, Queen
Kapiolani. It was 1882. Her face, even at seven, was grave and
certain.
  That was all. But it was her. Beyond a doubt.
  How?
  The librarian was very helpful. “Kaiulani is quite a favorite,” she
said, and gave him white gloves he had to wear when reading the
fragile letters in which Kaiulani wrote to her papa about her
European studies. He realized that in the museum there were
touchscreens and virtuals that could only be accessed by a library
key. That—the ability to do deep research—cost money. And even if
he had it, the shadowy fear that always hovered around him would
have asserted itself: he had to remain invisible. Outside whatever
system there was. He didn’t want his father to find him.
  He found a cheap little book in the gift shop about Hawaiian
ghosts, and another about Kaiulani, and took them home. He read
them that night in his lonely room, to keep from falling asleep and
having nightmares about what they might be doing to Mei. Kaiulani
had never put in an appearance as a ghost in the old legends, but
after all, she had died after the time of old Hawaii, when they were
so prevalent in the lives of the people.
  Perhaps, he reasoned, she was a new one. They seemed to have
plenty of powers. Traveling through time was only one of them.
They gave advice and warnings. They could envelop people in
dreams and thus influence them. They could transport anyone they
pleased from place to place as easily as the police moved their
“missing” holos around. Pele the volcano goddess was the most
famous, but there were hundreds.
  And, most important to him, they seemed to be strongly associated
with place. As if they were manifested by the land, encountered by
people who happened to walk the same path, perhaps fifty years
after the last spotting, and the ghost would be there, ageless.
  He threw the ghost book on the floor, feeling stupid, and picked
up her biography. The worst part was that she had died so young.
Why did everybody have to die? he thought angrily. He remembered
some of the recent rumors on the street, that an immortal
nan-person had been created, somewhere, in some dark lab. The
thought made him furious. Give me some of that stuff for Mei, he
thought. Some for Kaiulani too… I can slip it into the past and…
   But the more he thought about that, the stranger the idea became.
If I could make her live… what might have happened instead? Mei
might be fine. Or…
  It was too much to think about. And silly anyway.
   It struck him to the heart to turn the last few pages. While she
was in Europe attending expensive schools, all sorts of political
shenanigans went on. Hawaii was up for grabs, too small to defend
herself against greedy haole business interests. Almost all the land
was finagled from the Hawaiians. Kaiulani finally went to
Washington when she was eighteen and met with Grover Cleveland
and his wife in a last-ditch effort to keep the United States from
annexing Hawaii. A self-styled “Provisional Government” composed
of rich American businessman had ousted Kaiulani’s aunt, Queen
Liliuokalani, but as long as Cleveland was president, Hawaii
remained a kingdom. In January, 1895, there was a small rebel
uprising that was quashed by American troops.
   Once Cleveland was out of the White House, the Annexationists
had their way. On August 12, 1898, Hawaii ceased to be a sovereign
country. In January 1899, Kaiulani, while staying at the Parker
Ranch on the Big Island, went for a horseback ride with friends.
Instead of putting on her raincoat during a sudden cold storm, she
said, “What have I got to live for?” She loosed her hair and galloped
off into the tempest. She took cold, worsened, and within weeks was
dead. She was twenty-three years old. There was talk of a kahuna’s
curse.
  Her last years were filled with proud heartbreak and the
desolation of knowing that she was not to fulfill her destiny.
  Kaiulani was so young and beautiful, so full of life and hope. Like
Mei. How could this terrible thing, this untimely death, have
happened? It almost seemed foretold, like the birth of Kamehameha
had been foretold: the kahunas had decided before he was born that
he would be the one to unite the islands.
  The Hawaiians seemed to have a fascination with prophecy, and
with death. Apparently, at the time, people thought that Kaiulani
had been prayed to death like her mother before her. Her mother
had been only thirty-six when she died, after mysteriously taking to
her bed. She had foreseen not only her own death, but had predicted
all the major events in Kaiulani’s life: that she would live most of it
far away, that she would never marry, and that she would never be
queen. What was this terrible vision that Hawaiians had?
  How could he change things for her? If he could see her, touch
her…
  You fool, he told himself. She’s a ghost, and there’s no such thing
as ghosts.
  And yet… He wondered when he would see her next.
  If ever.
  Stevenson had written a poem for her. When she was thirteen, she
was sent to Europe to become educated as befitted a future queen of
a kingdom, and this was his going-away present.
          Forth from her land to mine she goes,
          The island maid, the island rose,
          Light of heart and bright of face,
          The daughter of a double race.
          Her islands here in southern sun
          Shall mourn their Kaiulani gone,
          And I, in her dear banyan’s shade,
          Look vainly for my little maid.
          But our Scots islands far away
          Shall glitter with unwonted day,
          And cast for once their tempest by
          To smile in Kaiulani’s eye.
  Pretty hokey stuff, as far as Cen was concerned. He could
probably do better himself. At least it made him sleepy. The book
dropped from his hand.
  The next morning Huang Po had the nerve to stop him on his way
out and demand the rent, since it was the first of the month. Cen
stalked upstairs, opened Mei’s box of neatly kept papers, and showed
Po the receipt.
  “We’re paid up for the next two months, according to this,” Cen
said, waving it under Po’s nose, pointing out his signature on the
bottom.
  “Oh, yeah, I forgot,” said Po.
  “Right,” said Cen.
   He hurried over to the market. He had overslept. The world was
like a vague skein before his eyes, as if it were a shimmering curtain
he could rend, almost transparent. A wave of dizziness swept over
him as he handed the first bag of mahi to a customer, and he
dropped it and grabbed the counter to keep from falling. Lu-Wei
rushed over, scolding in Chinese, waving his cane. He apologized to
the customer and served her. When she left Lu-Wei turned to Cen
and hollered, “Useless today! Get out! I don’t pay for no sick time.”
  “Fuck you!” said Cen. “I’m not sick!”
  “I think I fire you,” said Lu-Wei. “Here’s your last pay. Get out.”
  Dazed, Cen didn’t argue. He stood while Lu-Wei counted out the
money. Fine. Nasty job anyway.
  Once he was out on the street, the strange brightness took hold of
him again. What was going on? His life was falling apart. Did he
have a fever? He raised his hand to his forehead, but it felt normal.
He realized that he was heading back to the park. She would be
there. She would make everything… fit.
  But she didn’t come, and he fell asleep in the park. When he woke
he hurried to the hospital, but visiting hours were over.
  Heartsick, Cen went out into the evening. He walked slowly, then
faster, until he realized with a start that he was heading back to the
Bishop Museum.
  Why not? He started to run. Toward Kaiulani.
  Once there, he wasn’t sure what to do. He had to see Kaiulani
again; he was possessed of a weird, frantic energy he’d never felt
before in his life. The catalog said that the museum had created a
single virtual of her, based on photographs. It ran for three minutes.
  He carefully watched how the booths were used. There was a
virtual arcade in Waikiki where he’d dropped too many yen. He was
there so much that he could almost tell what virtual somebody was
in just by their dance. But this was more complex: the virtuals were
hypertexed and even getting into the system required some computer
expertise. He’d used computers in preschool, sure. What was
that—ten years ago? Things had changed.
  He jumped at a tap on his shoulder.
  He turned and found himself looking into strange gray eyes.
  The man’s hair was short, light brown with lots of gray.
  “I’ve been watching you,” he said.
  Cen tensed. I’m not doing anything wrong, he told his body, but
years of sneaking and stealing bound his muscles. His heart was
beating fast.
  “You know, it’s not hard to learn the virtuals,” the man said.
  “Who are you?” asked Cen, upset that he sounded so tough and
belligerent.
  The man smiled. “I’m Ross Benet. I’m a mathematics professor at
UH, but I come over here pretty often. It’s a good place to think. You
were here last night, I noticed.”
  Cen didn’t like his searching look. “So?”
  “So I’m impressed. Not many kids are as interested in learning as
you.”
  Not many kids have a uhana make.
   “You’re really missing out on things without the virtuals. I’d like
to teach you how to use them.”
  Cen didn’t trust the guy, but what the hell. He wanted to know
how to hype. He let the guy lead him over to a booth and sat in the
extra chair he pulled up. Ross slid in his key, a flat plastic card
with a magnetic strip, watched as the screen told him it was
accepted, then returned it to his shirt pocket.
  “Helmet,” Ross said. “Gloves.”
  Yeah, and I’m four years old. Cen put them on.
 “Judging by your reading material, you’re interested in
Hawaiiana.”
  Nosy old coot.
  Cen forgave him in the first rush of virtuals.
   Later that night, Cen was in Ross’s living room shouting at him.
“Find yourself another whore,” he yelled. He threw his beer across
the room; it smashed against a black-and-white photograph on the
impeccably white wall. Glass shattered; beer foamed down the wall;
it had arced from the bottle’s mouth while in transit and darkened a
chair covered in a delicate shade of lime green silk.
  “Cen, my dear,” Ross began. He stood in the doorway to the hall
that led from the living room to the bedrooms. Outside, the night
traffic of H-4 in downtown Honolulu a few blocks away was like the
sound of surf; up here on the lower flank of the Manoa Valley,
crickets hummed and the breeze rattled the blinds.
  “I’m not your dear,” yelled Cen. A part of him stood apart, amazed
at his fury. He wondered if this was how his father used to feel.
   “You knew, of course,” said Ross, his face settling in lines of
ironic amusement. He went to the kitchen and came back with a
towel, began to wipe down the wall.
  “I’m sorry,” Ross continued. “You are very attractive, and I
thought—”
  “You thought that since I live on Hotel Street that that’s how I
made my money. I know. You must have followed me home last
night and thought you had it figured out, right? Or maybe tattoos
turn you on?”
  Ross’s silence as he knelt and cleaned the wall answered Cen.
  Ross stood and turned around. “I mean it,” he said. “Forgive me.
You are a very gifted boy—”
  “Yeah,” said Cen. “I’m gifted, all right.”
  Ross sat in the green silk chair and held the wet towel in both
hands, twisted it into a knot. “Look,” he said. “I don’t need you for
sex, Cen, even though you are attractive to me, in many different
ways. In fact I have a steady lover who’d be pretty pissed off if he
knew about this. But it’s true that you’re very bright. I teach. Believe
me, I can tell bright from dull pretty quickly. You deserve to have
the opportunity to learn. To get ahead. To become educated. I can
help you with that. No strings. I promise.” He smiled wryly,
shrugged. “I really am a teacher at heart, Cen. That’s what I’ve
devoted my life to. Working in a fish market—that’s no life for
someone like you. What’s next? Now you don’t even have that.”
  Cen stood in the living room, hands on his hips. He’d told this
guy too much, rattled by everything that was happening—Kaiulani,
Mei—everything. He continued to stare at the man and was
impressed that his eyes held no hint of shame, though apology was
there. He’d lived on the streets for a long time. Nothing was 100
percent right.
   He was tempted to stay. He should take advantage of the
situation. He had to go to school because Kaiulani had. She couldn’t
know more than him! He felt that something had been arranged,
that there was something straight about this weird man and this
weird chance, and that he couldn’t just run from it. “I don’t
know—,” he said, trying to shake the memory of being pulled
toward Ross, and that sudden, searching kiss.
  Ross’s smile was rueful. “I guess I know.”
  “It’s not that I think it’s wrong,” Cen said slowly. “I’m just not
interested. I don’t think I’ll change my mind.”
   He turned and left the house, letting the door slam shut behind
him. The air smelled of sweet plumeria in the dark garden in front
of Ross’s house. It was a very nice place. Idiot, he thought. You have
a few weeks of time left at the hotel and then where will you go? He
had no job. But what the hell did it matter? He hated gutting fish,
hated the demanding customers. The only thing that was ever good
about it, he realized, was making Mei happy that he was making
money.
  He felt again his impotence. Maybe he should just steal her from
the hospital.
   The more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Except that
it was completely ridiculous.
  With a great effort he shook the image from his mind and fixed on
the present as best he could.
  “It’s not that I mind,” Cen said to the air, or Ross, as he walked
downhill through the dark campus. “It’s not that.”
   He allowed Kaiulani to fill his mind, drowning out his inability
to save Mei.
  Kaiulani. She was dead. Yet he’d seen her.
  You nut, he told himself bitterly. Sometimes he wished he had
imagined Kaiulani.
  But he knew that she was very real indeed.
  “Kaiulani,” he whispered, as he stood next to a flood of traffic
waiting for the light to change, “it’s not fair, you know. I can’t see
you when I want.”
   When he thought of her it seemed that he ought to be able to make
time move, to flow like a liquid, like the rush of sparkling turquoise
water in reef pools, ebbing and flowing. Kaiulani was like the little
islands he kayaked to in the Hawaiian virtuals sometimes, ones he
couldn’t see when he started out but could only feel, guess at, and
then they appeared, small dark lines on the horizon, moving toward
him as she had. She was like them, pure and timeless. There, in the
trackless ocean.
  He knew that she couldn’t see him when she wanted to, either.
Otherwise she would come. She would. Of course she would.
  But she didn’t.




                                   6

Cen stepped up to the intercom and said, “Doma.”
  Today’s password swung open the blue, peeling, wrought-iron
gate. As he walked down the rutted driveway, Cen heard it clang
shut behind him.
  To his right was a cinder-block wall. To his left, an ancient house
sagged, probably a hundred years old. A kamaaina—old-timer’s—
house. Wide front porch, tiny parlor, obsolete kitchen. Cen had been
inside and he knew how trashed it was.
  He smelled the stink of the chicken houses before he came around
the house, heard the metal clang of cages being pulled from vans
with no windows. He rounded the house, squeezing the roll of yen in
his pocket. It was all he had left. And he wouldn’t consider touching
the money for which Mei had paid so dearly.
  Haleakala was there. The fighting cock’s brilliant green-and-gold
plumage was set off by red patches around his bold yellow eyes.
Sunita, the owner, set his cage next to the pit, a sheen of sweat on
her brown back and arms, and went back to her van to get another.
Haleakala flapped inside his cage, excited. He knew where he was;
he was eager for the kill.
  Cen remembered exactly how the betting had gone the past ten
times he’d been here—every bird, all the odds, every win, every loss.
He hadn’t been back since Mei had gone to the hospital, since he’d
begun to see Kaiulani, since he’d met Ross. He breathed in the
familiar smells. At least something was the same.
   He’d never been so nervous before. Before, it had just been a game,
one that Mei hated, even when he gave her pretty little presents with
his winnings—a beautiful handmade rice bowl; a pair of jade
earrings. The other guys just didn’t seem very bright when it came
to betting. They seemed to get so emotional and didn’t take any of
the facts into account.
   Well. Fuck Lu-Wei. Like he’d said. At least he didn’t have to gut
fish anymore.
  He felt someone next to him and turned.
  The kid was tall, his lithe body brown and oiled. He looked about
Cen’s age. He wore only black trunks and a headband that held back
a cascade of thick black hair on the right side of his face. His hair
had a white streak in it; Cen wondered if it was fake. A Homeland
symbol was razored from the left side of his hair, which was very
short: the curving lines of Kamehameha’s feather crown. In physical
appearance he could have been Cen’s cousin. Probably was. Pure
Hawaiians were rare and closely knit.
  He was looking straight at Cen.
  Cen felt uneasy. He remembered, now. This guy had come to the
last cockfight he’d been to and had stared at him the whole time.
Some of the guys said that he’d been asking questions about him.
Cen thought he’d even seen him at the virtual arcade he usually
went to.
   The sun was hot and high in the sky when the fighting began.
Cen started yelling with the rest of them, and a frenzy built up
around the ring. Cen doubled his money on the first fight. He was
folding it, relieved, when someone touched him on the arm.
  Cen whirled, knowing who it was. “What do you want?” he asked.
  The kid regarded Cen steadily with liquid brown eyes lit by
amusement, but Cen saw hardness beneath, or thought he did.
  “You look like you’re alii,” the kid said.
  “Crap,” said Cen and stared at him, wondering what he wanted.
  “My name is Maui,” he said.
   “Pleased to meet you Maui,” said Cen. “Nice name. I suppose you
think you’re some kind of god like Maui, eh? Pulled any islands out
of the ocean yet this month?”
  “My mother gave me my name,” said Maui in a level voice, “and I
love it dearly. I do my best to live up to it.”
  “Fine,” said Cen. “So what do you want with me?”
  “What’s your last name?”
   “None of your business,” Cen said, looking at the guy more
closely. Was he from IS?
  “Look,” he said, “what’s the big deal? It’s just that you look like
alii, that’s all. It’s nothing bad.”
  “Why do you keep saying that? What difference would that make?
Are you alii?”
  The boy smiled slightly. “Kind of,” he said. “My family is a line of
kahunas, as a matter of fact.”
  A kahuna.
  The cockfight receded, the sounds and the smells, Cen’s newly
fattened roll of yen that he held inside his pocket, the too-bright sky.
He broke out in a sweat. He wanted to run. Why did that word
bother him?
  “What’s your mother’s name?” Maui asked.
  “My mother’s dead,” Cen said after a long pause. It was very
difficult to think about her, to be reminded of her. This Maui was
really starting to piss him off.
  “I’m sorry,” said Maui. So why did his eyes change? Why did he
get that weird eager look, like he’d just scored big? “We just like to
know who everyone is.”
  “Sure. So does IS,” Cen said.
   “Naa, brah, don’t be haole. Don’t be stupid. You know where I’m
from and who I answer to.”
  Cen saw Maui’s eyes go distant, and he knew the thoughts that
ran through the other’s head: the glory days, of ancient splendor,
when Hawaiians ruled the islands. He answered to the Homeland
Movement; they had his head branded with their mark, and he
thought they would return the islands to an Eden that Cen was sure
never existed in the first place.
   “Ever seen the Bishop Museum virtuals?” Cen asked. Forget
reading. This guy probably didn’t know how. Too haole, and even
among a lot of haoles, reading was considered a passé form of
information exchange. He was feeling more and more like at least
there he could find a little bit of the truth instead of the tourist and
Homeland Movement fairy tales that pervaded Honolulu everywhere
you looked. Except in the Asiaslums—that’s where the IS fairy tale
of other, perfect worlds had its teeth in the throat of the poor Thais,
Burmese, and Laotians.
  All the people like Mei.
   “The Bishop Museum is just full of IS propaganda,” said Maui,
and Cen knew that Maui believed it. He didn’t believe that there had
ever been hunger. He didn’t believe that women and commoners had
chafed, suffered, and often died under the absolute rule of petty
chiefs and black-hearted kahunas—Maui’s own ancestors, most
likely— kahunas who prayed people to death if they felt like it,
chiefs who indulged in frequent war games using their warriors
and villages as meaningless markers.
  No, Maui believed in placid sunny fishing villages, hukilaus
where the village raised its voice in polyphonous song, strumming
ukeleles no doubt. Probably didn’t even know they were a Portuguese
import.
  Cen was surprised when Maui bowed, ever so slightly.
  “See you around,” he said, with that same unsettling look of
gloating success on his face, and left through the iron gate.
  Cen gambled some more but lost heavily, quickly. Disgusted with
himself, he left, banging the gate behind him. Damn that Maui.
  He walked back toward Honolulu on hot, bare sidewalks, past
immense rusting warehouses, through decrepit neighborhoods
where white houses were flanked by scraggly hibiscus. Hot places
with tin roofs where the old folks were hard put to pay their soaring
taxes, but where the new Interspace elite—Germans, Koreans,
Japanese—who forced values up had no intention of buying. He was
grateful when a storm flowed down Nuuanu valley, a gray mist,
and washed the dust from him in a five-minute torrent before
receding once again to wreath the Pali peaks.
  He let himself into his room. Again he dressed, combed his hair,
went to the hospital.
  The regular nurse was not there but they let him in anyway
because he was Mei’s brother.
  Mei was asleep. Her temples were blue and bruised.
  “Oh, Mei,” he said, and touched one of the bruises lightly.
  Her eyes fluttered open and she looked up.
   “Cen?” she whispered. She propped herself up on her elbows.
“Cen, get me out of here, please.” Beneath the covers, she started to
shake. “Everything is so crazy. I just need to go home. Then
everything will be all right. Yes! It will all go back together again
like it’s supposed to.”
  “Mei,” he said, and helped her sit up, pushing her back toward
the headboard, fixing the sheet. “You’re better!”
  She laughed, but it was a sad shadow of her old spirited laugh.
  “Oh, of course, Cen. Much, much better. Look in that closet. Are
my clothes in there? Good! Now, you’ll have to help me.” She swung
her thin legs over the side of the bed, tried to stand, and fell back
onto the bed. “Whoops,” she said.
  “Mei, I can’t steal you from this hospital,” he said. “Let me go tell
them you’re better—”
  “No! No!” she said, her voice rising in terror. “Look,” she said,
breathing hard. “I bet there’s a wheelchair out in the hall. You go
get it. Take your time. Don’t let anyone see you. I’ll get dressed.
Then you come back—”
  The door swung open.
  A woman wearing a white lab coat was standing there. She did
not look like a doctor to Cen. She looked too strange, with her hair
cut in a funny way, like she’d gone to a street-punk place to have it
done. Only a very expensive street-punk place.
  “Hello,” she said. “Who are you?”
  “I’m Mei’s brother, Fred,” said Cen.
  “Oh? I didn’t know she had any brothers.”
  “Well, she does. And I’m taking her home. She’s better now.”
  “No,” said the woman. “She’s not ready to go home yet.”
   “I am!” said Mei, and stood up. She walked unsteadily across the
room, holding on to the bed as she moved, and pulled open the
closet. “I’m going home with Fred. You can’t keep me here. I’m
signing out.”
  The woman looked at Cen, and Cen felt very uneasy. But what
could she do? What?
  She could find out who he really was, for one thing. The police
would probably like to know.
  Well, he’d just have to risk it.
  “She’s going home with me,” he said, and handed Mei her clothes.
“Here you go. Get dressed and I’ll find a wheelchair.” He went over
and pressed the intercom button. “We need a wheelchair, please.”
There was no answer, but he pretended it didn’t bother him.
  Mei emerged from the bathroom looking even more pale, but
dressed. She’d even tried to comb her hair. The woman looked
uncertain. Cen put his arm around Mei and said, “Let’s go, sis.”
  The woman wheeled and walked out of the room in front of them.
Cen saw her stop at the nurse’s station and point to them.
  “Hurry, Mei,” he whispered. She sagged against him, and he
turned to scoop her up when two security guards approached.
  “You’ll have to leave, sir.”
  “That’s what we’re trying to do,” said Cen.
  “Without her,” said the other.
  “She doesn’t want to stay here.” Cen said. “She wants to sign out.
She’s afraid of that woman,” he said, pointing to the woman in the
lab coat.
  The woman walked up to them and stood there with her arms
crossed. “Nonsense,” she said. She looked at Cen with amusement in
her eyes, and Cen hated her deeply.
 “Cen,” said Mei, as one of the guards reached for her. “Please help
me. Don’t let them do this.” She backed away.
  The man took Mei’s arm and, as he did so, Cen whirled and
punched him in the face. Then he staggered backward, surprised at
the pain in his hand.
   Blood spurted from the man’s nose. “You little shit!” he said,
letting go of Mei and staring at Cen. He raised a heavy fist.
  “Kill him, Cen, kill him!” screamed Mei.
  “Mei, run!” yelled Cen as he ducked.
  Mei turned and took a few running steps toward the door to the
stairs. The other guard moved to follow her, and Cen tackled him;
with that, the injured guard let out a roar. Cen’s heart sank; out of
the corner of his eye, he saw the woman grab Mei by the arm. In the
melee he heard Mei scream, “Let me go, you fucking bitch,” and had
a fleeting glance of people standing in their doors before he felt the
slam of the guard’s fist on the side of his head.
  The next thing he knew his ears were ringing as he skidded on his
side across the rough sidewalk in front of the hospital. The guard
kicked him in the back and he gasped at the pain.
  “Don’t fuck with me again, you little prick,” the man said, and
spit. He kicked him again. “I think I lost a tooth. You’re damned
lucky I don’t have you arrested.” Cen heard footsteps recede.
  He lay on the hot sidewalk and felt tears come, not for himself,
but for skinny, frightened Mei, trapped inside.
  He stood slowly, then waited for a wave of dizziness to pass. He
wiped his face and his hand came away bloody. People walking
down the sidewalk gave him a wide berth. The guard was gone.
  He went back through the main doors into the cool, bright
reception area and went to the woman at the information booth. She
had short, frizzy hair and big glasses.
  “Please, can you help me?” he asked.
  “The emergency entrance is on Kuakini Street,” she said.
  “No. My sister wants to leave the hospital. They’re keeping her
against her will.”
  The door on the far side of the room swung open. It was the
guard. “Call the police,” he yelled.
  “Please don’t,” Cen said hoarsely.
  “The police will help her if that’s true,” the woman said primly,
and pressed a button.
  “It’s Interspace,” Cen said. “They’re keeping her. Don’t you
understand? The police won’t listen to me.”
  “Oh,” she said. She looked confused.
  Distant sirens began to wail. Black terror surged through him.
  “Her name’s Mei Fossant,” he said. He turned and ran from the
lobby.
  At the end of the block he stopped running and turned. Two police
were in front of the hospital, braced on mopeds, and the guard
pointed at him.
  He ducked down an alley and ran.




                                 7

The Hai! Virtual Arcade on King Street was one of Cen’s favorite
haunts. He burst into its coolness, covered with sweat, and looked
around in the dim light to see if he could find an unoccupied space.
   He pretty much knew what he craved, just at this moment: old
Hawaii. Maui’s dream visions. A world that wasn’t real anymore, if
it ever had been. He didn’t want to think about Mei and his inability
to help her. He didn’t want to think about being fired. He didn’t
want to think about anything. Not anything.
  Cen realized, despite what he’d said to Maui, how satisfying it
was to believe that royal blood ran in one’s veins and that that made
some sort of difference.
  He was ready to get lost.
  He ran through the pictographs at one of the few slots where a
helmet still hung inside the clear door. Reading was a skill not
assumed; all was done via icons and touchscreens.
   Palm tree. Modified by spear; that meant old-time.
Beginning-of-the-universe time, legend time, time that his aunt used
to chant to him on Molokai as they picked pineapples in dull green
fields that ran down to the sea while the wind rushed by on its way
to China, kicking up red dust.
  He punched it up, the programming lights lit, and the door slid
open.
  Cen put on the helmet and the gloves that hung next to it. He’d
been in this one before, and he particularly loved it.
   The canoe they’d made was almost finished. Cen caught the eyes
of his brother, Aanani, and they both grinned.
  They bent to lash the outrigger on. The coconut hemp was rough
and hot in his hand; his back was seared by the sun. Surf crashed a
few hundred feet away, beyond the expanse of bright gold sand
unmarked by footprints.
   For several months they’d been hacking out the center of the big
felled koa tree—burning it, chipping away, tending the slow fire
that they lit in the widening groove. Then they’d polished and
burnished, shaped the long upturned hull into an elegant curve. Cen
was proud of the lines of the boat. A fishing net rested on the floor of
the canoe, along with some coconuts for drink, an ax, and a knife.
The kahuna had already blessed the boat.
  When they were finished, Aanani and Cen walked up the path to
the taro field. Five of their brothers and cousins were cultivating
lush rows of broad-leaved plants with pointed sticks; when Cen
waved, they threw the sticks down and ran to the beach.
  As a team, they launched the canoe. Cen’s feet dug into the sand
as they ran and pushed, then he and Aanani jumped inside, knelt,
and grabbed the waiting paddles. Their relatives gave a shove, and
the canoe surged forward. They paddled as hard as they could
toward a cresting wave; they had to pass through at just the right
instant. Cen broke their speed at the precise second by turning his
paddle flat, and as the wave curled just behind them he and Aanani
looked at each other and whooped. Then they headed for the break
in the reef.
   Once out on the sea, Cen was lost in the glory of the swells, the
rhythm of the waves. He wished, as always, that he could just
paddle on and on, island to island, stopping only long enough to kill
a few pigs and pull some taro. Aanani was his brother, and they
were of one mind.
  He activated the island-hopping program by moving his eyes
within the helmet, which he’d practically forgotten he was wearing,
and as they paddled the sun set in a swift flare of pink and gold and
the stars of the southern hemisphere unveiled themselves.
 Suddenly a new program kicked in. He went with it, surprised.
Maybe the machine was broken, giving him a little extra.
  The canoe was larger, this time, like the huge sixty-foot canoes
they had models of at the Bishop Museum. A claw-shaped sail was
raised high, majestically filled with wind, so high that he could not
see where it ended. The sky behind it was black, brilliantly starred.
Chanting filled his mind, beneath a woman’s soft voice saying,
“Welcome to the Hawai’i Loa. We are going to travel from Tahiti to
Hawai’i. The journey will take six weeks.”
  An older man stood next to him. “Our etak island now is
Lamotrek. An etak is a reference point. This system of navigation is
polydimensional, involving time as well as direction. It is not static,
but dynamic. I will teach you the kavenga—the star path—that we
will analyze as Lamotrek moves past us.”
  Cen let the immediacy of the experience wash through him, He
relaxed into it, understanding that fixed point, the dynamical
system with which the Polynesians had navigated the vast Pacific.
Why not? This was pure Homelander stuff. He remembered when he
was younger, how eager he had been to win a place on the Hawai’i
Loa, the great canoe that replicated those fit for ocean
voyages—sixty feet long, with a highly sophisticated sail.
  The old man pointed at a low cluster of stars in the sky, and then
punched his arm.
  “You’re in my goddamned space,” he heard someone say.
  It was the cheapest of the cheap, this arcade. Most places had
individual booths.
  “Sorry,” Cen muttered, but his time was about up anyway. He
took the helmet and gloves off and put them away. The plastic door
slid shut.
  He looked around before leaving.
   There were about twenty martial-arts virts, and Cen could
practically tell which one each of the dark dancers were in by the
way they whirled, kicked, and crouched. Most boring were the pilots
of space vehicles, provided with cheap chairs. Their arms moved
with predictable jerks, accompanied by self-satisfied nods as
another nuke burst was avoided, another time warp traversed.
  Damn. Why couldn’t he just have fun like those idiots? That
intruder program brought back memories and, like all his
memories, they were painful.
   He remembered the lift of imagination he’d had when he was a
keiki of six or seven immersed in educational virtuals of navigating
the huge seagoing canoes that sailed the South Pacific along the old
routes. The hunger he’d felt for the stars, for the lift of wind against
the massive woven sail, the satisfaction when virtual land was
sighted after six virtual weeks of sailing. The naive hope that he,
Cen, might one day be chosen for the privilege of actually being one
of the crew; that’s what all Hawaiian children hoped for then. The
virtuals were based on reality; since the late nineties the Bishop
Museum had sent such canoes across the Pacific regularly. The first
had as navigator an old man, Tevake, a Santa Cruz Reef Islander
from Nufilole, a tiny island. Illiterate, he was trained as a
navigator when young. His information, tracked down
painstakingly by scholars and snatched from oblivion at the last
moment, had been a powerful catalyst for the Homeland Movement.
The ancient Polynesians had not used sextants or compasses, but a
concept called etak, in which the navigator imagined himself as a
still point, while all of time and space moved past him. The stars
and information read from swells, currents, birds were melded into
something as precise as a computer program or radio fix.
Everything was memorized.
  An entire generation of Hawaiian girls and boys, himself
included, had vowed not only to make the final cut for one of the
voyages, but to become qualified to navigate a solar-wind-powered
generation ship. The logo for this dream was a vast canoe with a
South Pacific claw-shaped sail, designed to gather or spill wind
with ease. The Southern Cross stood low on the logo’s horizon. This
was when IS was just coming to the islands, amidst the hubbub and
excitement and hope, when it seemed actually possible that the
Polynesian model for traversing vast distances might serve as the
template for multigenerational space travel.
  Then numb disbelief set in and grew when almost everyone
associated with IS was imported. Hawaiians could, of course, work
as janitors, maintenance people, or secretaries. But no matter how
highly educated, it seemed that no Hawaiian ever got an entry-level
position leading to work on the moon, starship design, or crew
status. They were considered troublemakers. And the great canoe
program became a quaint laughingstock. What good was pride in
past achievements, or the self-sufficiency gained during such a
voyage? Sailing thousands of miles across the ocean without
compass or sextant was fun, but that was all it was, a sop for
Hawaiian children.
  “You’re a bunch of idiots!” Cen yelled, but in the din no one
seemed to hear. Cen turned to leave, painfully aware that he was no
longer able to ignore the darkness of the world just by putting some
money into a machine.
  When he emerged into the sunlight, he blinked.
   Was that Maui on that motorcycle, gunning his engine? That was
gutsy of him. Private vehicles were banned in the city. He must have
slipped through the market zone—so crowded and so full of refugees
that the police rarely bothered to go there anyway.
  It was Maui, and he grinned. “I was hoping I’d find you here,” he
yelled. “Hop on. I got something to show you.”
  This guy didn’t give up.
   “Like what?” Cen asked, hoping Maui couldn’t see how he was
itching to get on that machine. He looked it over. Kawasaki.
Vintage. He was cheered in spite of himself.
   “You’ll see. Out past Makaha. Come on, man. You won’t regret it.
What happened to your face? You must have been in one hell of a
fight.”
  Cen shrugged. “Let me drive?”
  Maui smiled faintly. “I knew I’d get you.”
  Cen followed Maui’s directions and they safely left Honolulu.
Then they roared Ewa, the direction opposite Diamond Head, past
Hickam Spacebase, where the Space Hotel Shuttle landed once a
week. Soon the green cliffs of the Koolaus changed to broad, dry
yellow slopes covered with houses so close together you couldn’t even
see the ground. Cen knew their decks stuck out over the roofs of their
neighbors’, and that the richies that lived there sipped drinks and
watched the sun fall into the ocean every night from those decks.
The last of the private houses, and they’d banned high rises out here
with the 2005 construction moratorium. Now that Interspace
controlled most of the islands, including all the bean counters in
local government downtown, only IS got building permits. And IS
only built the spacebase, barracks, and labs.
  The road dipped into the saddle between Oahu’s two halves and
then the sacred Waianae Mountains were on their right. Maui’s
arms gripped his waist tighter as Cen slipped between two cars at a
hundred miles an hour.
  At Nanakuli, at a traffic light, Maui said, “I’ll take it from here.”
  Cen shrugged and they changed places.
  The blue Pacific flashed by on their left through gaps in the old
shacks, the proud and only possessions of the Hawaiian community.
Palms shadowed lots of old rusting cars and barefoot children ran
down the short, unpaved streets. Even IS didn’t mess around out
here, Cen had heard. They were as likely to get offed as not.
Hawaiians were pissed, mostly, always had been, and hated
outsiders.
  “Why you going in here?” shouted Cen when they turned into the
Japanclub. “I don’t have the right genecard to get in, brah.”
  Maui laughed, and the laughter was left behind. Just before the
main entrance, he veered off onto a narrow paved path that wound
up one side of Makaha Valley. About a mile up the path became dirt.
 Maui stopped. “We walk from here,” he said, and pushed the
motorcycle into a little alcove and leaned it against the side.
  They climbed several miles along the edge of a sheer cliff. White
birds wheeled around them, and far below custodial robots scooted
over the green smooth turf of the Japanclub. Cen could just make
out the white line of surf down at Makaha, and the sea was a deep,
even shade of heart-piercing blue. He stopped and washed his face
at a place where water flowed down the side of the rock; it burned,
and Cen remembered his failure.
  After another mile Maui touched his shoulder and they turned
right onto a tiny unmarked trail made muddy by rivulets of water.
They ascended through a forest of majestic koas that stirred in the
wind, lit by shafts of light like an undersea scene, followed a cliff
for another mile, and came to a cave mouth.
  Maui nodded. “You first,” he said.
  Cen searched his face for a derisive grin or the intent to kill but
saw nothing but an odd reverence there that made his face solemn.
Cen shrugged his shoulders and walked inside.
  He stopped in the dark to let his eyes adjust.
  And because he was astonished.
  The cave was spherical and utterly smooth, a womb of black,
polished glass, about forty feet across. The inside of a huge lava
bubble.
  Two feet from the floor, which was covered with bamboo mats, a
row of petroglyphs ran around the cave in a wide border like the
decoration on the rim of a bowl.
  A candle flickered within a single white skull, emitting light
through hollow eye sockets, jaw, ear holes, and sinuses. The spaces
where information had been gathered now gave off light that
flickered across the floor. A kukui torch burned in one corner,
lighting the woman who sat and watched him.
  Her body looked young, supple, with none of the saggings of age
Cen had seen breaking down the bodies of Mei’s friends. Her breasts
were beautiful, full and upturned. She was tall and majestic: pure
Hawaiian, Cen thought. Like his mother.
  She wore a tapa skirt and sat straight upright, legs folded
beneath. Her hands rested in her lap one in the other like stacked
bowls. Shimmering black hair flowed down her back and pooled on
the floor behind her.
  As he stared, he felt that he also was examined, tested, weighed.
  Maui bowed before the woman. Cen did not, even when Maui
kicked him in the ankle.
  He studied her and she watched him with an amused look in her
eyes. But more than amusement was there.
  “Welcome, Cen,” she said, and her voice was deep, grave, and
formal. “We have been waiting for you.”
  “For me?”
   “Sit,” she motioned. He hesitated, then lowered himself onto the
straw mat. Maui had stepped outside; Cen could see him sitting and
gazing across the valley. Lush ferns fringed the mouth of the cave
and the wind was constant, rushing inside occasionally with a blast
that shook the torch’s flame.
   Cen noticed the mask at her side, a typical Polynesian mask,
ferocious and tattooed. She saw he did and smiled.
  “I want to ask you something. About some bones.”
  Her question hit him like a punch in his stomach. Suddenly he
couldn’t breathe.
  “Kamehameha’s bones,” she said. “Where are they?”
  “I don’t know,” he whispered, his voice tight.
  Her face became very earnest. “We know who you are, of course.
At least, I am pretty sure. I think that your mother was Poea
Kalakaua.”
  Cen was aware that tears were rolling down his face, but he
didn’t blink. She blurred in front of him, and for an instant he saw
his mother instead, royal, a princess—a priestess—
  “I don’t know anything about any damned bones,” he yelled, and
the viciousness of his outburst surprised him. He wiped his face
with the back of his hand and got up. He was trembling. “I don’t
know who you people are or what you want, but leave me alone. Just
leave me alone. I don’t want anything to do with being Hawaiian.”
  His fists were clenched. He turned toward Maui, standing in the
doorway of the cave, remembered how strong Maui’s arms were
around his waist on the bike, and didn’t care.
  “Please forgive me.” The woman came up behind him, laid her
hands on his shoulders and spun him around so quickly that he had
no time to resist.
  She embraced him.
  He was tall, but she was taller. Her breasts pressed against him,
but he didn’t feel the desire he felt when he saw Mei’s friends
half-clothed.
  A memory of his mother holding him rushed through his body.
He began to cry, his sobs ragged and rough, and couldn’t stop for a
very long time.
   She helped him sit again when he was through and went back
into the darkness of the cave and brought out a box of tissues. This
struck Cen as funny, and he began to laugh. Maui laughed with
him, and the woman smiled at both of them. He took a deep breath.
  “It’s just that we’re among the very last of the Hawaiians,” she
said, settling back down. “The bones—well, I won’t say anything
more about them. For now. They could be an important totem for us,
but perhaps you were too young. Perhaps she was waiting for a
daughter— a priestess—to pass them to. I don’t know. She was one
of the papa alii kahunas—chiefly kahunas who were alii as well as
priests, the highest melding of bloodlines. She had very special
duties, a high responsibility. Her death saddened me very much.
What happened? The police report says very little.”
   “I don’t know,” he forced out, his whisper harsh. For some reason
he did not trust this woman still, did not like her curiosity. “I—I
ran away.” He was ashamed that he knew so little, and even more
ashamed that he didn’t want to know, didn’t want to even ask her
any questions. He tried never to think about that night, and really
couldn’t, he had found, if he wanted to. There was only a queer,
sick, empty feeling, one of horror. His memories of what he thought
of as his childhood were becoming more vague, more far away, each
day, and he was glad.
  He felt a strong desire to leave, yet he did not. Who were these
people?
  “Your father flew to Las Vegas the night she died, and then he
vanished. I don’t think he’ll ever be back. So we haven’t been able to
get any information from him. But we know that you’re all alone,
Cen.”
  He tried to hide his deep gasps of relief. Thank god, he thought,
thank god.
  “How do you know about my father?” he asked.
  “It’s our business to know,” she said. This was not satisfactory,
but something in her tone of voice precluded further questions.
   Nevertheless, for some reason, he believed her. What would it be
like, to live without being in constant fear of his father finding him?
  She held up the mask. “I want to show you something.”
  He saw, when it caught the light, that the ritualized patterns on
the face were biocircuits, not tattoos.
  She rose, fluid as a dancer, and handed it to him. “Go sit on the
ledge, in the sun,” she said. “It’s solar.”
  He stood and walked outside. Maui was nowhere to be seen.
  He walked up the foot-wide trail a quarter of a mile, making sure
not to slip on the crumbling volcanic pellets, which could easily turn
into a thousand wheels beneath his zoris. The sun struck his left
side.
   The valley curved in and out in lovely undulations, a green lush
wave turned sideways and held still by time’s slow geologic velocity.
A thousand feet below, the floor of the valley lapped at the foot of the
cliff and widened out to meet a brilliant gold fringe of sand, and
then the blue Pacific. The valley had been shaved of trees, though,
and the ovals of sand traps and the cunning little Japanese bridges
and koi ponds of the golf course marred it.
  He thought of his mother briefly: warm brown face, loving brown
eyes, her black hair like this woman’s, loose and beautiful,
comforting when coiled around him as she held him before he fell
asleep at night.
  He sat on the trail next to a tiny waterfall grotto where a million
wild pink and red impatiens carpeted the ground between
protruding rocks. Then he donned the mask.
  The fine web inside it clung to his face lightly as a moth wing.
Synthesized music stirred as if from far away, easing his transition
with a whale call symphony overlaid by deep chanting. The breeze
touched his face through tiny holes that permeated the mask.
  He reached up and felt the raised tattoos with his fingers, pressed
the portion over his cheekbone.
   He was walking through a village where the sandy road was
flanked by thatched longhouses. In the shade, three men were
weaving something from a stack of palm fronds at their side. The
moist steamy smell of roast pig drifted from an imu just ahead.
   Five brown, naked children ran past him, screaming and
laughing, followed by a skinny, barking black dog. Pigs nosed and
grunted in a nearby pen. Cen walked on and saw a green, lush field
of wide flat taro leaves and felt his mouth water at the thought of
poi. There was a feel of lonely wilderness here, despite the people, of
impossible distance like an unheard resonance deep within the
sunny, open scene.
  Enough. I get the picture.
  He pressed the chin section.
  Crouched behind a wooden barricade, he waited. The burned
smell of his destroyed village made him want to retch, because he
smelled cooked meat as well. The horde from Molokai had feasted
on his cousins’ flesh after the battle. He was only six, but he had one
large rock with which to crush the head of a single enemy who
chanced to walk below. He felt its hot, rough surface beneath his
outstretched hands.
  He brushed the portion over his eyelid.
  And released the constellations to his mind.
   He was the navigator. Soundlessly he repeated the chant, handed
down by his master in Tahiti, that would lead him to new land. It
had been cloudy for two days and nights. They had been warned not
to start in winter but they had no choice: leave or have their vast
canoe, their readied stores, their cages of pigs and dogs burned too,
as their village had been. The marauders had heard of their plan
but their warriors who now lay weeks dead behind them had battled
furiously while the ones now with him had hurriedly loaded
whatever they could. They’d risked a stop at one outer island for
water.
  They had been at sea one month.
  Cen willed the clouds to part, and then they did.
   He became lost in the voyage. He found it contained sophisticated
hypertext circuits. This was his calling, what he had been born for:
to steer toward unknown landfall with only memory as a guide. No
sextant, only that dry ancient voice describing the way like the
layers of a complex equation, shooting the information into his mind
like a drug.
  He felt a touch on his chin, and the story changed.
  It was hard to follow because it jumped from scene to scene. The
Hawaiian woman was in an operating room, her head shaved, eyes
open. Calipers held the flesh back from her skull above her forehead.
  Schematics, which he recognized as DNA helixes, flashed quickly
before his eyes. The voice-over came and went like the voice in a
dream and then he thought maybe he was dreaming.
  The visions that came next were much more fleeting. A voice
explained something that he didn’t quite catch, something about
doors in space, about research that touched on the very nature of
time; Cen passed through membranes toward increasing light, each
time seeing things he did not at all comprehend, each time in the
company of Hawaiians, always the same faces, but engaged in
different tasks, scientific in nature. Probing the edges of
information as they had once pushed the limits of oceanic
exploration.
  Groggy, he felt his head sag, and then the mask was removed.
  He saw that it was true night.
  Infinity stretched before him.
   “We wish to go there, too, Cen,” the woman next to him said,
gesturing at the intense stars of the tropical night. “The stars are the
logical extension of our explorations, of the migrations of the
Polynesians. I was worried about you. You’ve been quite a long time.
I think you fell asleep.”
  Cen opened his mouth and closed it without saying anything. She
handed him a bottle and he drank. It was guava juice.
  “Who are you?” he asked.
 “It doesn’t matter. I am here. Our organization is larger than you
might suspect, but we are your ohana, your family.”
  “My family lives on Molokai,” he said, a stubborn sullen edge to
his voice. His mother’s family—aunties, uncles, cousins.
  The moonlight lit her smooth, lovely face and again he thought of
his mother. But his mother he could trust. He didn’t trust this
woman. He didn’t even know her name and knew it wouldn’t be
given if he asked.
  “We would like you to join the Homeland Movement,” she said.
“And—we need the bones.”
  He shivered and his throat tightened. “I don’t want to join. And I
don’t know where they are. You say she was the guardian. That may
be. But I don’t know where they are.” He felt the certainty, the
anger, the darkness, shooting through him again like a big wave
about to drown him, kill him. He didn’t know where they were.
“Why do you keep asking me?”
   She frowned as she sat next to him, her back resting on stone next
to his, her long brown legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles.
Her long hair hid her breasts. “You were really too young when she
died for her to tell you. A child might tell others about it without
realizing the sacredness.” She sighed. “And yet, we hoped.”
  “What would you do with bones?” he asked.
  She looked away, out into the valley, and said, “Perhaps they
could move these stolid people, fire their imaginations. Remind
them that once they were great. And also,” she glanced at him, “we
are gathering genetic information.”
  “You don’t have the capability.”
  “No,” she said, “but IS does.”
  He stared at her outright, shifting his butt and leaning forward.
She was being very frank with him and he wondered why. He was
just a street kid from Honolulu.
  “What are you saying?”
  “Nothing,” she said.
  “Something,” he said. “Like you have members of your movement
inside IS.”
  “I said nothing of the kind,” she replied. “But Interspace is an
international consortium—basically, many factions working
together to promote space travel. Each of these groups has its own
special interests, of course, and information isn’t necessarily
completely shared among them.”
  “These virtual biofeeds are complicated and very new,” he said.
“You must have money.”
 “Oh yes,” she said. “We do. And we are looking for ways to get
more.”
  “Like what?” he asked.
  “No need to go into it very much,” she said. “But of course
everything in Hawaii was portioned out to the people by
Kamehameha II in an effort to keep it in the hands of the
Hawaiians, rather than the haoles whom he realized were stealing
everything.”
  Cen shrugged. “I thought that most of them didn’t really
understand private ownership and sold it cheap to the haoles
anyway. Or the Chinese, or the Japanese.”
  “Much of it was sold,” she said. “But not all. We are very busy
tracking down deeds. All we need is a strategic acre to be able to
shut down their operations until they guarantee us ten full
Hawaiians on the generation ship.”
  Cen was aware that many people, inside IS and outside, here and
abroad, thought the generation ship project an impossible and
absurd money-sucking chimera. But most of the island economy was
based on building it, so the grousing wasn’t too loud locally.
  “Do you believe they’ll really finish that?” he asked.
  She was silent for a moment. “There are many things
happening—technically, scientifically—that most people aren’t
aware of,” she said. “Right now, to be realistic, it does seem
impossible that humans will ever be able to, get very far from the
earth. But to be Hawaiian is to believe in the existence of what has
not yet been found, Cen. The abstract promise of a place that might
not even exist at all is what pulled us here in the first place. It may
not take long at all to get to other stars, Cen, once time is better
understood.”
  Time. Had he not wondered about time? He stared at the woman’s
profile, pale in the moonlight, as she gazed at the beauty that was
spread out before them. How much did she know about him, about
Kaiulani? But she couldn’t know about Kaiulani. He had told no
one. No one at all.
  She stood and gestured outward, into the dark void that was
Makaha Valley, where vertical wilderness rustled in the trades until
the land leveled. The wide sandy beaches at the mouth of the valley
were lit by tiny pools of light; rows of high-rise condos lined the
shore. Brief flashes of white appeared in the darkness beyond—the
mountainous Makaha surf, high now in winter.
  “This is our land,” she said. “Our heritage. We found it. We
settled it. If it is to be used as a springboard into space, then we
deserve to be a part of it, too. Instead, our children remain
uneducated, and we are simply poor laborers, once again aiding, if
we choose to work at all, in the construction of something that will
be of great benefit only to others. We need education. We need a new
vision. Come,” she said, and he followed her down the moonlit trail.
  Maui was waiting by the cave mouth. “He will lead you back,” she
said. “Please let us know if you ever need any help. We will keep in
touch with you. Aloha.” She kissed him briefly on both cheeks and
went inside.
  “She’s really beautiful, isn’t she?” asked Maui, as Cen followed
him carefully down the moonlit path.
  “Hmm,” said Cen, trying to concentrate on keeping to the trail.
  “She’s eighty years old,” Maui said.
  “Sure,” said Cen. “And I guess she’s been living up here in a cave
since 2000.”
  “No. She doesn’t live here. She’s a lawyer. Works for a big
Japanese firm in downtown Honolulu. Made a lot of money, spent it
on lots of experimental gene treatments. Nanotech, too. So far so
good, I guess. It seems like she’s really on the edge of something big.
But she doesn’t tell me. She was pretty glad I found you, though.”
   Cen felt uneasy as he picked his way down the mountain. These
people knew his name, knew more about him than he knew about
them; maybe more than he knew about himself. What were they up
to, really? She hadn’t really said what she wanted, except that she
kept harping on those goddamned bones, insisting that his mother
had known where they were.
  “How do you know she’s eighty years old?” he asked.
  “She’s my grandmother,” said Maui.
  It was chilly by the time they returned to the motorcycle.
  On the way back as cold wind buffeted him Cen suddenly
realized: these people have power.
  Maybe they could help Mei.
  When they stopped in front of his place, Cen told Maui, quickly,
about Mei. “Do you think you can help her? Get her out of the
hospital? If you could, I’d do anything. I’d join.”
  In the streetlight, Maui’s eyes narrowed while he listened to Cen’s
story, seemed to fill with anger. His lips got tight.
  “Of course,” he said. “Maybe we can do something tonight.” He
squeezed Cen’s shoulder. “That’s what we’re for, brah. Exactly.”
  He roared away, and Cen felt infinitely relieved. Two wonderful
things in one day. News of his freedom from his father and help for
Mei. He started for the stairs and Po came out of his room.
  “Cen?”
  Cen stopped on the stairs.
  “Mei is back,” he said. “She didn’t have a key. Just showed up
wearing a robe and no shoes. I let her in. Wanted you to know it
wasn’t them—”
  Cen flew up the stairs and opened the door.
  She was there, lying small on the bed.
  Something about the way she was so still filled him with terror.
Before he reached her, he knew.
  He touched her cheek and it was cold; her eyes were staring
outward.
  “At least you made it home, Mei,” he whispered, and closed her
eyes. He went to the window and stared out. Too late, he thought,
too goddamned late.
  A few minutes later he was outside, in the suddenly alien night.
  He started walking, aimlessly, gradually moved faster, then
shifted gait and was running downhill, and into Honolulu’s
red-light district before he turned toward Diamond Head.
  Images of Mei flowed through his mind, mixed with a trail of
neon lights and the blur of smiling tourist faces as he struggled to
breathe through the pain closing his throat. Stores, restaurants,
bars, milling crowds, block after block after block. It took him
twenty minutes to get to Waikiki and he veered makai; heard surf
hiss as he ran past; saw-hotel lights gleam wave breaks in black
ocean. He passed the zoo, where the raucous descendants of
Kaiulani’s peacocks were silent beneath the click of palm fronds.
Tears wet his face and he didn’t wipe them away. “Let us help you,”
he heard Maui’s grandmother say as he ran, but he didn’t want the
HM to help him, didn’t want their imprint, their mission, their
fanaticism, their superstition.
  Or their strange demands.
  They were the flip side of what had killed Mei.
  Instead, as he ran, a single thought emerged: he wanted to know.
Everything. But not with nan, as Mei had thought necessary.
  He wanted to know with the power of his own mind. And nobody
would tell him what he should and shouldn’t know or what to think
about it. He wanted to know everything about time. Time—the ocean
that separated himself and Kaiulani.
   Turning mauka, toward the dark mountains that hid the
now-starry sky, he headed up the Manoa Valley. Where? Up this
street, around this corner, farther, farther, his legs like rubber now
and his heart pounding as he gradually realized exactly where he
was heading.
  A small but elegant house, trim tropical plants lit with small,
subtle spotlights, the door standing open with only the screen door
shut.
  He ran up Ross’s front steps and pounded on the screen door.
  “No sex,” he said, when Ross came out of the kitchen to see who it
was, wiping his hands on a towel. Cen’s voice was rough and
hoarse. He coughed a few times.
  Ross looked surprised for only an instant, then he nodded firmly.
“No sex,” he agreed. “That’s what I said.”
  Cen looked past Ross into the beautiful, austere room, floored
with thin polished koa, furnished in a way that said this is a
different world.
  “Well, then, come in,” said Ross, his face suddenly filled with
concern. “What’s wrong?”
  Cen stepped over the threshold into the well-lit room.
  He bent over, covered his face with his hands. Rough sobs rose
and shook him.




                                  8

First, the books in Ross’s library caught like wildfire in his mind.
  Gamow, Bohr, Godel. On through Einstein’s explanation of
relativity for lay people and then all the old popular books about
chaos theory and everything Stephen Hawking ever wrote or said.
And beyond. Inflation, and the theory that there are universes
within universes within universes. And what about the
many-worlds theory? Vilenkin, and his principle of mediocrity, in
which Earth was just one of an untold number of planets that had
evolved almost identically. Maybe he would sometime discover the
exotic matter that would hold wormholes open. So he could stay
with Kaiulani, save her. He felt fierce excitement with each new
idea. Others had thought of these things! Ross’s library sparked
weird hope and helped him want to learn how to explore the basis of
such outrageous speculation. Outrageous for most people, he
perceived.
  Not for him.
   Ross was a kind mentor, never pressuring him for sex after that
first time. After all, he had told the truth: a physicist named
Michael, Ross’s lover, dropped by quite frequently.
   Ross’s computer library access had Cen on-line constantly for the
first few weeks, until Ross got the bill, then he told Cen gently that
maybe he ought to do his research on-site. After six months, Ross
tried to send him to school, but Cen refused to have a genescan. But
he passed all the academic tests with flying colors. One day, while
he was pouring juice in the kitchen Cen heard Ross say to someone
on the phone that there was really no reason not to award him his
high school diploma here and now.
  “You know just as well as I do what we have here,” said Ross.
“The kid’s a genius.”
  Silence. Cen left the refrigerator door open and tiptoed closer.
  “Yes, I know he’s Hawaiian. Need I remind you of the
antidiscrimination laws? No, he’s not enhanced in any way. I can
vouch for that.”
  Not that they hadn’t tried, Cen thought. Interspace had labs that
played with strays like himself and Mei, the ones so hungry for the
new hormone washes or endorphin shots that they’d let themselves
be mice for the mongoose. That’s how he thought of IS, a slinky
mongoose, an import that struck and killed the native wildlife, a
furry thief that overran the land in hidden ways, in dark places.
Striking like lightning.
  No, they’d not laid a hand on him. But Mei…
  His chest ached and he blinked back tears.
 He heard Ross hang up the phone and was closing the refrigerator
when he came into the kitchen.
 “I assume you heard that little conversation?” Ross asked. “They
want a genescan. It’s standard, apparently, now, in all schools in
Hawaii, public and private.”
  “No,” said Cen. The sweetness of guava exploded in his mouth. He
took another swig.
  “It’s a gross violation of rights,” said Ross. He sat down at the
table and picked up an apple, tossed it thoughtfully in his hand. “I
wonder why they want them.”
  “I’ll tell you why,” said Cen. “I can’t believe that you don’t know.
They’re trying to get a fix on all the pure Hawaiians. It’s because of
the Homeland Movement. They’re afraid of it.”
  “Why? They seem harmless enough. Demonstrations now and
then. So what?”
  “Well,” said Cen, “what if the Homeland Movement could prove
that their members owned the Spacebase, instead of the U.S.
government?”
  “That seems far-fetched to me, but if so, then I suppose that the
HM would get that lease money—but Interspace has to pay someone,
so why would that make a difference to them?”
  “Lease money would make the HM more powerful all the time,
don’t you think? Next case. What if the Homelanders could prove
that international laws against biological and nanotech experiments
were being violated?” asked Cen.
  Ross was quiet a minute. Finally he said, “Then the HM could
bring the whole thing down on their heads, couldn’t they?” He
looked thoughtfully at Cen. “You’re not involved with them, are
you?”
  “No,” said Cen. “I’m not.”
  Ross gave up on public school, but without a past, Cen couldn’t
attend UH either. Ross solved the problem by arranging for him to
sit in on a wide array of classes at UH without registering. At first
it was just the intro classes, and Ross patiently brought him up to
date in areas where he was weak. One day Cen looked up from his
screen, as they sat at the kitchen table, to see Ross staring at him, a
puzzled look in his eyes.
  “You have a very good grounding in basic math. You’re incredibly
intuitive when it comes to geometry, algebra, trig. I have third-year
students who have a hard time with calculus, but you’re breezing
right through it. Why?”
  Cen shrugged, planted his elbows firmly on the table, and bent
his head over the tilted screen resting in front of him. He hit a few
keys.
   Glimmers of memory shot through his mind when Ross talked
like this. He knew he’d been to school when he was young. It had
been a very good school. A large, open-air room, with showers
pattering down on the wide banana leaves in the garden several
times a day, making walls of water. The latest in educational
equipment, he was sure. He remembered having to be careful to
always shut the door to the air-conditioned room where the
computers were kept, and that the screens were embedded in low
translucent desks and that there had been huge windows looking out
on blue Kailua Bay. He remembered other kids, vaguely, a few his
friends; others, when he got older, snubbed him because he was
Hawaiian. His parents had argued bitterly about the expense,
often…
  He frowned at his screen.
   “Sorry,” said Ross. “Here, let’s see what you’ve done with that new
quantum tutorial that came in the mail last month. It’s good to have
a guinea pig to test all these things on at last. I never knew whether
to let my students loose on them or not.”
  Cen nodded, letting the visions Ross had called up blessedly
recede. He knew that Ross was puzzled and sometimes angry about
his insistence on letting his past be absolutely closed, but he’d told
Ross flatly that he’d leave if Ross ever pestered him about it. If Ross
had turned up anything with his snooping, he hadn’t told him. And
that was just fine with Cen.
  The small frame house seemed empty without Ross. He was in
San Diego at some meeting. It was Saturday morning, and the light
lay long and lonely across the floorboards when it wasn’t raining.
Every once in a while the banana leaves in the yard would register
the patter of drops, then the cloud would blow on down the valley.
   Century sat Zen-style on the pillows Ross kept in front of his
terminal. He touched it on, touched it off, then touched it on again.
  He was awed at the power beneath his fingers. What he could do
with such a system! Through the university, it connected to an
entire world of information. But he was strictly forbidden to log on
when Ross was not there. He’d been working on creating small
virtual segments in his spare time; he’d told Ross that he hoped to
make money, perhaps, creating virtuals for the parlors downtown.
Ross had been amused, but let him play.
  Now, he caressed the keys. He put his hands down at his sides,
took a deep breath.
  Then he reached over and donned the helmet.
  He thought awhile about how best to disguise his path. It wasn’t
too difficult. He felt a twinge of guilt—Ross had taught him
everything he needed to know in order to do that.
  He was soon composing a world of swirling cloud, open sea. The
surge in his mind was as nothing compared to the loosening of his
heart as he worked, but he only realized that later. For now, there
was a path that he could follow, direct, entire.
  He had to find Kaiulani.
  He worked on her for the better part of the day, although time
passed without his realizing it. Her straight nose, her level
eyebrows— he took and discarded a thousand possibilities for each
before he was satisfied, then balanced and rebalanced them as she
took shape.
  He paused when doing her body—he had known her so long, ever
since she was nine, flat-chested as a boy.
  But now, she was almost a woman, and he formed her as such.
  There wasn’t any clothing like hers in the standard icon library,
so he slipped on-line to the Bishop Museum and browsed through
the photos of royalty. Through UH, he accessed a fashion history
course and got her an appropriate wardrobe, down to the
underwear.
  His heart was pounding when he saved her and he lifted the
helmet from his head.
  It was evening. He felt a little dizzy when he stood; he went out on
the lanai and sat on the floral chintz cushion of Ross’s prized
antique wicker chair.
  Hard to believe that this glittering modern city, alight in the
swiftly darkening sky, hadn’t even been here a hundred years ago.
  The trade winds cooled his face, arms, and chest.
  In the darkness, he grinned.
  He had charged the entire web bill for accessing Paris and New
York to an enormously busy IS interchange.
  “Where are you, Princess Kaiulani?” he asked. The churr of
crickets and the skitter of geckos across the ceiling were his only
answer as the stars became visible in black, ever-beckoning space.
  He ascribed the glimmer of an answer that whispered through his
mind to imagination. The world, the stars, the city lights all pulsed
with her presence, and he fell asleep curled on the porch chair, and
his dreams were chaotic and troubled.
   He went back many times after that. Ross brought home a system
that the university was discarding, with an old-style helmet, and set
it up for him. Cen felt better when he was able to modify his
pathways and leave Ross out of the picture. The helmet was a bit of
a toy, not entirely necessary, yet it enabled him to test out new ideas
using three-dimensional models. Slightly lazy, but fun.
  After that first day, he did not bother with creating images,
though he kept what he had made as the intro to his system when he
logged on.
   Instead he wanted to create pathways through time, to somehow
link what he was learning with what he knew was possible. He
could feel when something formerly abstract to him suddenly
clicked, became usable. Gradually he could understand more of
what he read in cosmology and in quantum mechanics. He wasn’t
working blindly, thinking only for the sake of thinking. He had a
target, a vision of someone very dear to him, who was on the other
side of a vast, raging river.
  All he needed to do was figure out how to build a bridge.
  Or find, again, the bridge that had once been open. Kaiulani was
his etak, his reference point, for all that he was learning, pulling it
into a focus that no one else had.
  Cen was sitting on the lanai bent over his handheld.
  The gray posts framed a tropical garden that moved in the gentle
breeze, shot with sun and shade. His favorite gecko, Lizzy, skittered
up a post and vanished on the other side of it. The plumeria tree
was in full bloom and the sweet, heavy scent made Cen sleepy.
  “Cen!”
  He jumped.
  “Be a dear boy and bring us some lemonade, please.”
  “Who does he think I am, his servant?” he grumbled to Lizzy, but
he stood up and ambled into the kitchen.
   As he was taking the glasses out of the cupboard—the best ones,
this was the new guy occupying the rotating chair in the astronomy
department sitting out there in a brand-new stiff aloha shirt—he
listened to them talk.
 “This quadrant shouldn’t be empty, according to my figures,”
Hellman said.
  Cen took the water-beaded pitcher from the fridge and poured
sweet lemonade over the ice. He knew exactly what Hellman was
talking about. Ross had mentioned the problem that a recent
viewing at Mauna Kea had brought up concerning gravitational
lenses—one that he’d been called about, and Cen had thought about
it for two weeks.
  “It isn’t,” said Cen, as he brought the tray in and set it down on
the table. Hellman was a heavy, pale man recently arrived from
Germany. He was sweating slightly as he sat on Ross’s exquisite
bamboo furniture. “Here,” Cen said, and handed the fat man his
lemonade.
  “What do you mean?” asked Hellman.
  “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said Ross. “Thank
you, Cen.”
  “The hell I don’t!” Cen said. He ran out onto the porch through the
French doors and grabbed his handheld.
  “I found him about a year ago,” he heard Ross explaining.
  Cen rushed back into the room, so eager he almost tripped over
his own feet. “Now, take a look at this.”
  “Sir,” said Ross, acknowledging defeat.
  Cen ignored him. “I used Guth’s Constant for these calculations.”
  As he spoke, he could almost feel Kaiulani at his elbow, drawing
his thought further and further on. If only he could get to her, was
always his thought when he approached these problems, as if she
was the problem, her existence, her reality. His files were named
after her, Kaiulani1, Kaiulani2, and his memory of their meetings
was always the springboard from which he departed.
  After twenty minutes, Hellman said, “Why didn’t you tell me you
had a genius on your hands? I thought he was your, ah, I mean…”
  Ross laughed nervously. “He’s just a fanatic, that’s all,” said Ross,
looking proud and worried at the same time.
  “Are you enrolled at the university?” asked Hellman. “You should
really attend my seminar. You look rather young for that, but…”
  Cen glanced at Ross, aware he’d been something of an idiot.
“Uh—” was all he could manage. He shouldn’t have said anything.
But he’d just been so excited.
  “Well,” said Hellman. He stood and slapped Cen on the back,
hard. “You’ve given me a lot to think about. Talk to Ross about it.”
He gathered up his papers and left.
  Ross sat on the couch. He leaned forward, crossed his legs and
stared into space for a few minutes. Cen didn’t interrupt him.
  “Where did you get that information?” Ross asked, finally.
  “I don’t know. I just… thought about it.”
  “You haven’t been talking to anyone? You haven’t accessed the
work I’ve done on it?”
  Cen started to feel annoyed. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Are
you saying that you think that wasn’t my own work?”
  “Keep cool, young man,” said Ross. “I’m just saying that it’s
stunning and excellent, and yes, that I don’t really see how you
could have thought of it. Bright as you are. It’s quite a leap. One
more thing,” said Ross, as Cen grabbed a glass off the table and
swallowed the last of his juice.
  Cen looked at him.
  “It’s about Kaiulani.”
   Cen choked on his drink, gasped for breath. He ran to the kitchen
sink and coughed until tears ran down his face. He turned on the
faucet, bent his head, and splashed his face with cold water. Ross
followed him into the kitchen, sat in one of the painted wooded
chairs by the table, and draped his arm over its back.
  “Mean anything to you?” he asked.
  “What’s it to you?” asked Cen, leaning against the sink, speaking
in a whisper because his throat was raw. “You think I stole it all
anyway.”
  Ross sighed. “I don’t. Not really. It just seems the most sensible
alternative, even given the fact that you’re rather extraordinary. I
really think that’s the approach to take if anyone talks to you about
it. You need to be more discreet. I’m sure that I told you that
everything on my system is open to Interspace. I’ve spent half my life
trying to stay out of their way. Everything has changed since they
came. Everything’s more tense. Nothing here is separate from them.
You’re either in or you’re out. I got tenure by the skin of my teeth,
and there’s no reason why it had to be that way. I had good offers
elsewhere—but Michael is here. IS has a good thing going. And who
can criticize them? They have everyone in the world here who knows
what’s going on. The best and the brightest in the world. Like—oh,
like Los Alamos in 1944. Like the complexity and chaos theorists in
the nineties. And they know that nothing’s happening, that
everything is stalled. That the best minds in the world can’t get
them out of the solar system. And they’ve got a hold on every one of
those people, one way or another. They keep us from organizing.
They have ways of letting you know what might happen to you.
Who’s going to risk that?”
  Cen felt sick. “Why doesn’t everybody just stand up to them at
once?”
  Ross continued, but the anger had gone out of his voice. Cen knew
Ross was just laying out the facts, as if he were a little kid. “It’s
hard to know who to trust. Ah, well, I think it’s going to blow,
eventually. It can’t go on like this forever. I know that you put all
kinds of protection on your work about—what’s her name?
Kaiulani?—but who do you think you are? Don’t you know that
wormhole travel is the hottest thing going right now? It’s their last
resort. If they had any hard information, they’d be on easy street.”
  Wormhole travel. He’d never even said it to himself. But that was
what he was thinking about, working on. If Kaiulani was real, if
their meetings were real, and he thought that they were. “I think I’m
nobody, that’s who,” said Cen, feeling tired and defeated, yet
curiously angry at the same time. “Who cares what I think?”
  “Apparently Interspace does,” said Ross. “They’ve been around,
asking about you. They want to know who you are, where you’re
from. If you’re affiliated with the Homeland Movement. It’s well
known that the HM limits their membership to pure Hawaiians.
But what am I going to do now that you’ve got Hellman interested?
He’s one of their biggies. Anyway, I decided to look into this stuff in
your files they’re so interested in.”
  “You didn’t ask me!” shouted Cen.
  “Sorry,” said Ross.
  “No, you’re not.”
  “Look,” said Ross, “these are really very strange things for
someone your age to be thinking about, much less render into
mathematics.”
  “No, they’re not,” said Cen. “Most mathematicians do their best
work before they’re thirty.”
   “You don’t actually believe in this stuff, do you? I mean, even if
wormholes exist beyond theory, how could they actually be
manipulated? What kind of engineers are you going to find to build
a gate, hold it open, make travel predictable? The old thought was
that it took some sort of what they called exotic matter to hold it
open—a form of matter that might possibly be created by an
advanced civilization in the far future. But if IS—or anyone—could
do something like that now,” he said quietly, almost to himself, “it
would be more dangerous than atomic energy. And if you knew
anything about it—if you could give them just one of the many bits
of information their think tank could use even in the most
peripheral way… you don’t believe in this, do you? And Cen…” Here
he hesitated. “… these are not nice people. Who do you think brought
Hellman to Hawaii, anyway? What do you think the University of
Hawaii is all about, now? He invited himself over here—and maybe
he got what he wanted. Well, I should have known better. If by
wildest chance you do believe in this, you’d give it up, wouldn’t you?
They could twist your whole life, don’t you see?” He sighed. “What
have I gotten you into?”
  Cen could see the concern on his face. Ross had been good to him,
very good. He wanted to say, no, I know nothing, and yes, I could
give it up. Just for an instant, he wanted to.
  But it would be like killing her, killing Kaiulani. He could feel
her sometimes, needing him, counting on him to get back to her. No
matter how long it took.
  Suddenly, as he looked out the open windows at the mango tree,
and the bright orange birds of paradise massed below, he realized
what he was trying to do, despite the careful distance he’d built the
past few years between what he had experienced and what seemed
sensible.
  He was trying to—he wanted to—change the course of her life.
His breath came short as ramifications filled his mind, like flowers
blooming and dying in accelerated motion, as if he could look down
corridor after corridor of possible times and see death at the end of
every one. At the thought of her death (but she’s already dead,
repeated that part of his mind that he hated. Dead!), his chest
contracted and tears began to burn in his eyes.
  As he turned to run from the room, Ross rose more rapidly than
Cen thought possible and grabbed his arm, spun him around. He
stared into Cen’s eyes for a long minute.
  “Yes,” said Ross. “I think you do believe.” He let go.
  Cen staggered backward and slammed into the door frame. The
pain shocked him and he started to cry.
  “I’m sorry,” said Ross. “I didn’t mean—”
  I know, thought Cen as he ran from the house, I know, I know, I
know.




                                  9

By the time Cen was eighteen, he didn’t remember when he had first
begun to wonder whether Kaiulani might be a manifestation of
some sort of time displacement. He only knew that there seemed to
be no spells, no frame of mind, no stance of being that would call
her back to him. He just kept on reading, studying, until all that
energy was used, transformed. Ross had made him the son that he
had never had. Cen still felt cut off from himself, but he accepted it
now. He was somehow incomplete. Kaiulani was missing. He hadn’t
seen her in years. Years!
   One afternoon, Cen climbed the twisty streets that laced the flank
of Punchbowl crater.
  He entered the cemetery with its rows of American graves and
knew that beneath them were the lava rocks of scattered heiaus, the
sacred platforms where kahunas had killed people to please the
gods. The ground was riddled with bones.
  Bones.
  He remembered what Kaiulani had said about Kamehameha’s
bones and smiled. What a serious girl she had been. He shivered
and something dark ran through him, thinking about bones. He
turned instead in thought to her, who was so very bright.
   He was no closer, he realized, to figuring out who or what she
was than he had ever been. He seemed to butt up against mental
barriers whichever way he turned. It was like the Name of God, only
worse. His only hope was to study the limits of time and space
wherever those were—in astronomy, mathematics, physics,
cosmology. And if place had anything to do with it, there was a
simple explanation for why he had not seen her in years. She was in
school in Europe. She was in Berlin, being proposed to by a rich
German count, and turning him down because she didn’t love him.
She was in the south of France, “flirting,” as said in a letter—“better
to have my fling now than later!”
   Looking down the white stepping-stone rows of rectangular
markers set flat in the ground, Cen felt the energy that gave the site
its real name, Hill-of-Sacrifice. The gods had to be appeased, the
gods of the moment, whether they be the gods that lent fury to
Kileauea in fountains of flaming lava or the gods who whipped the
entire world to fury and claimed these rows of bodies as their snack,
their obviation, their very proof of existence. He had lately been
studying history. It made him very sad.
  He gazed over the rim, down the steep brambled hillside, past the
Spacebase at Hickam. At the end of vision, he could see faint Kaena
Point, a gray blur on the horizon, hallowed ground believed by
Hawaiians to be the soul’s departing place. The blue Pacific
ceaselessly caressed the beaches at Ewa, Nanakuli, Makaha.
  The heat-released scent of ginger and garlic drifted upward as
someone prepared dinner in one of the tiny frame shacks that
snugged together below on the steep hillside and were inhabited by
Asians who couldn’t speak English. He wished there were no gods,
but knew there always would be, however they might disguise
themselves. Their horrific grimaces and gaping maws lined with
dog teeth may have found more graceful forms in other cultures, but
Cen thought that maybe the Polynesian expression was in the end
pretty honest after all. Give them all they want, stuff food into their
mouths, keep them off your own back.
  As for him, he had a goddess, one whose civility more than
countered the savagery of centuries spent satisfying the greed of the
Hill-of-Sacrifice.
  He sighed and started back down.
   With Ross next to him in the silent, slow electric jeep, Cen turned
down the fork in the road that would take them to Haleiwa, the
sleepy town that they had to pass through on the way to Oahu’s
North Shore.
  The road was two-lane blacktop; the high golden grasses around
them were occasionally specked by green, waving cane, a remnant of
days gone by, and hummocks of trees were scattered across the
plains that sloped down to the blue sea. To the left, the dry
Waianaes arched over the saddle where eons ago two lava flows had
met. The Koolau Mountains, laced with clouds, were to the right.
  By law, nothing was allowed to change here—to keep it pristine
and old-timey Hawaiian for tourists.
  Until, of course, IS came up with a use for it.
  “Isn’t it a little late in the season for this?” asked Cen.
  A brief smile flitted across Ross’s face.
  He was unusually pale. He’d been sleeping too much lately.
“There must be something wrong with me,” he said now.
   “Yeah, like maybe you should eat more. Maybe you should use a
little common sense. Maybe you should just sit on the beach today.”
  “No,” said Ross. “Wavesporting is one of the things I’m truly good
at. You don’t understand. A good run will be the best thing for me. I
mean, most people my age have been married for twenty years. Dave
and John, Will and Ben—”
  “They don’t seem like the happiest people in the world,” said Cen.
Ross had seemed oddly regretful about his life lately.
   “Well, then maybe I should just have my sequences checked. I’m
tired of living this way. I’m tired of people hating me for no good
reason.”
  Cen shrugged. “It’s your life,” he said.
  “That’s right,” Ross said. “It’s my life.”
  They stopped in Haleiwa for espresso. The sun strengthened. Red,
green, and yellow kites fluttered on the porch of the little store,
along with a row of T-shirts on hangers. Ross wandered next door
and examined a wavesuit. “They’ve really improved the jets on these
new models,” he said.
  “It’s a stupid sport,” said Cen. “Give me an old-fashioned board
any day. I hate to think of you playing with tons of water like that. I
mean, I haven’t even surfed in three years. Not since I saw Kino die.
You kind of lose your nerve.”
  Ross gazed out at the wind-roughened bay. He set his jaw. “Let’s
go down the coast,” he said.
  When they pulled into the parking lot at Waimea, Cen felt
relieved. “The warning flags are up. They won’t let you out.” He got
the cooler full of beer and ice out of the trunk. “Gorgeous day,
though, isn’t it?”
  “They let the surfers out,” said Ross, with resentment in his voice.
  The row of bobbing people sitting on their boards was tiny, half a
mile out in the bay. Whenever a wave swept in, they were briefly
hidden.
  “They’re idiots to go out,” said Cen. “I think those waves are at
least twenty feet.”
   He saw Ross glance at his neon green suit, neatly folded in its
clear bag, wrapped around the aerodynamically powerful fins, the
set of tubes running to the sleek mask.
  The suit used water for its jets, compressed it and squirted it out
in a way that a skilled sporter could manipulate quite finely by
minute flexings of various muscles, the way a surfer flew up and
down across the face of a speeding wave just by a slight shift in
stance. It was an advanced form of bodysurfing. Kids used the suits
in still water or on small waves. People like Ross moved into
ever-heavier surf, seeking the thrill of mastery when they slipped
through a million tons of roiling water in stunning acrobatics.
  Now, the offshore wind kicked spray from the tips of the waves;
that it streamed seaward in frail white banners. “I bet some of those
surf idiots are going to signal for a heli pretty soon,” Cen said. “I
wouldn’t want to come in through this mess.” The wide golden
beach, which slanted steeply down to the place where the powerful
waves sucked at the shore, was filled with spectators.
  “It’s a great day,” complained Ross. They took mats and the cooler
and carried them past the lifeguard stand, where three guards
watched the surf nervously with binocs, radios at the ready.
  They drank beer for about two hours. Cen read, but Ross kept
looking out at the surf, silent. Cen had fallen asleep when he heard
Ross jump up. “They took the flag down,” Ross said.
  “So?” asked Cen.
  Ross was already gone.
   Cen watched him walk down to the shorebreak fully suited ten
minutes later, about a quarter of a mile away. “Idiot,” Cen
muttered. He jumped up and ran down the broad golden slope
awash in deep, surging foam, its pull even here so strong that Cen
had to fight hard to keep his footing. The lifeguard whistled at both
of them. Ross, small in the distance, just smiled, waved, and
plunged into the water. He jetted beneath a run of three and Cen
watched anxiously. Then Ross bobbed up and waved before he
turned and jetted, flowing over the waves like a tiny green fish in
the deep blue sea, cutting across the face of high, translucent waves
just before they broke, crouching, at last, on his heels and hands
before standing as the white breaking crest of a wave chased him
across its face. He then somersaulted in a gorgeous triple spin, head
tucked, arms holding his knees to his chest.
  Cen glanced back and saw that quite a crowd was watching the
show.
   Ross kept it up for forty minutes, dazzling, in top form. When he
finally bodysurfed in on the third giant wave of a set, Cen’s heart
was in his throat as his friend vanished beneath the deep, turbulent
shore-break that was even more sudden than that of Sandy Beach,
known to bodysurfers as The Back-Snapper.
  Then he saw the green suit.
   He waded into the surf, let it pull him right to Ross, helped him
stand and lurch, half running, up the beach. Ross pulled his mask
off and flopped on his back, breathing hard, laughing.
  “Have fun?” asked Cen.
  “What does it look like to you?”
   Cen looked up the coast. Kaena Point was steely gray, shielded by
clouds that swept over it without leaving rain. He felt the menace of
the winter sea in his bones, drifting into his mind again and again
like a series of endless waves.
   “It looked—wonderful,” said Cen. “Let me help you get your suit
off. You shouldn’t go out again until summer, I think.”
  “Summer! It’s flat then,” laughed Ross.
   He went out again the next week, and the next. Once Cen refused
to go with him and felt dismal all day as he waited for Ross to
return. He knew he shouldn’t worry. Ross was championship
material.
  When he did die, it wasn’t from lack of expertise.
  The police found a clogged jet when they examined his suit. That
explained why he’d lost control at a crucial instant on a mammoth
wave and tumbled beneath the tons of roiling water that broke his
back. They ruled it “accidental death.”
  Ross’s affairs were in such disarray that Cen knew that he had no
intention of killing himself.
   When it was all settled, the house went to a sister from Kauai that
Cen hadn’t even known about. She came herself to take possession, a
golden-haired tight-lipped woman with a dark tan and little to say
to Cen. “I’ll give you a week to get your stuff out,” she said. “The
voice-print people will come next Tuesday to change the locks.”
  Cen was a few months from completing his bachelor of science
degree, but he let it drop.
  He found himself taking the magrail out to Makaha more and
more often. Once he even searched for the beginning of the trail up
the mountain but could not find it.
   To his initial surprise, he began to drop into the Pantheon, an old
bar a few doors down from the place he’d lived with Mei. He was
not too concerned when he started to drink, or even when he started
to drink too much, or when he blacked out.
  But the second time that happened he woke up at a trailhead just
below the Pali. It was dawn. He dimly remembered hitching a ride
up here the night before.
  Groggy, he walked into the concealing jungle a few yards,
stripped off his clothes, and soaked in the chill stream until he was
numb. He put his clothes on, looked up the trail, and walked a
quarter mile. But an odd, dark dread overtook him, stopped him
like a wall. Dizzy and covered with sweat, even in the chill morning
air, he turned back, crying.
  That evening, he was back in the bar, nursing his fourth beer. By
the second his lingering headache had been cured. He was going
over some new virtual ideas in his mind while a tourist disdained to
use the correction mode on the karaoke. Onstage, three life-sized
male Tahitian virtuals shimmered. The two women who had
activated them sat on one side of Cen, laughing, with a huge pile of
tokens. Cen looked at the tokens and sighed. It might be a long
night.
  Someone on his other side said, “Buy you a beer?”
  Cen shrugged. Then he glanced at the man, took in the IS look of
him, then said “No thanks.”
  The man ordered it anyway, and it sat at Cen’s elbow getting
warm. “You know who I am,” he said. His head was shaved, and he
looked unnaturally neat and clean.
  “Not interested,” said Cen.
  “Look,” the man said. “You really can’t pass up this deal.”
  “Try me.”
  “We’ll pay for your Ph.D. Anywhere. Anywhere you choose.”
  “Fair exchange for a brain?” asked Cen. But his heart jumped all
the same.
  “Look,” said the man, and Cen could tell that he was making a
big effort to be reasonable, “Your friend Ross really kept us at a
distance for a long time. You really don’t know that much about us,
but we can really help you out. Make your career. He was pretty
damned stubborn about your work, believe me. He wouldn’t tell us
anything, and then he got that lawyer on our case, but—”
  “What?” Cen’s voice came out in a whisper. “What do you mean,
wouldn’t tell you anything? About what? What lawyer?”
 “Come off it. You know what I’m talking about. Your math. He
was the most stubborn person in the world—”
  Without even looking, Cen moved his arm and pushed the beer
into the guy’s lap.
   He shoved his own stool back. He walked across the dark wood
floor, past smiling faces. What the hell did they have to smile about?
What the hell did anyone have to smile about?
  Had Ross died for him?
  He waited impatiently at the Aloha Tower stop for the magrail to
Kailua. He thought he saw Kaiulani appear next to him for a
minute, in one of her white dresses. “You leave me alone too,” he
said, and stepped onto the open train.
   He leaned back in his seat, feeling dreadfully sick. When would
this nightmare end? When would this horrible blackness vanish?
How could what he knew, each wild hypothesis about the
parameters of what he had begun to call the Kaiulani problems, be
of interest to anyone except himself? It was all so absurd, the
craziness of a kid who smoked too much pakalolo. Why should
Ross—good, kind, intelligent Ross—be the victim?
  His sobs were harsh and echoed in the empty car.
   He got off at the Nuuanu Pali stop and walked a hundred yards
down the Kailua side. Just inside the trees, he found the trailhead.
It was narrow, unmarked, overgrown, and faint.
  Yet he knew it was the right one.
  He wondered how he had forgotten for so long. He knelt and
dunked his head in the cold, rushing stream, and when he lifted it,
his mind was absolutely, painfully clear. Clearer than it had been
in years.
  He had been ten, and his mother had walked in front of him, very
quickly.
  Cen took one step, then another. Soon he was moving at a good
pace.
  As he walked he remembered it all.
   Rain swept in a great sheet across the windward side of Oahu
and pattered suddenly on the leaves of the koa forest all around Cen
as he and his mother continued to climb. The gusting wind chilled
him and he hugged himself, keeping a close eye on the slippery rocks
of the trail.
  The shower passed swiftly, leaving the air cold and smelling of
damp earth.
  “When will we be there, Mom?” he asked, panting.
  She walked ahead of him, slim in her khaki thrift shop shorts.
She had knotted her plaid cotton shirt beneath her breasts; her back,
between shorts and shirt, was brown. Her long, straight black hair
was loose and moved with every gust of wind; a few wet strands
stuck to her back. She seemed not to hear him.
 “It’s getting late,” he said, more loudly. His legs ached, but she
was starting to walk even faster. “Won’t Dad be worried?”
  She stumbled, said, “Damn,” then resumed her stride. “No, sweet
kukui, he won’t be worried.”
   But Cen knew that they fought a lot, shouted after he went to bed
almost every night. After he had a few beers, sometimes Dad hit
Mom. At least, Cen was pretty sure he did. Where else did she get
those bruises? Dad never painted like he used to, either—paintings
he had once sold through small galleries in Honolulu. Not since
some haole woman critic made fun of him, called him a “primitive
Hawaiian” in the paper, and made people afraid to invest. Cen had
watched him light that paper on fire and toss it into the air, had
been afraid when the wind wafted it skyward spread-armed, a ghost
that whitened to fragile ash then fragmented as it tipped the banana
tree fronds.
 “We don’t have to go,” he said. “I’m getting cold.” He didn’t know
what she was up to.
  She took a narrow trail that forked to the left. Cen snagged a ripe
yellow guava as he walked and rolled the sweet pink insides around
in his mouth, munched the seeds. He picked a second.
  “Don’t eat too many of them, Century,” his mother said over her
shoulder. She was the only one who called him by his whole name.
“You’ll get sick.” How did she always know what he was doing?
   They walked along the crumbling knife-edge of the peak for
almost a mile, and Cen became terrified he might slip, fall to the
floor of the deep green valley, almost a mile below. Wisps of cloud
floated halfway down the face of the near-vertical ridge that curved
around ahead of them, cloaked in dense green rain forest.
  He concentrated on his breathing and on what he saw so far
below, trying to calm himself.
  The valley below the Nuuanu Pali was crowded. Subdivision
roads etched minute black paths between squares of the plain white
housing where Interspace workers lived; where he lived. A blue tile
roof caught the sun next to Enchanted Lake, where rich Interspace
execs lived.
  Not so scary. Beautiful. Interesting.
  The path dipped and they entered a clearing.
  They were only a hundred feet below the top of the ridge; Cen
decided that rain alone kept a narrow waterfall splashing into the
rocky pool before them. A blast of chilly air bent the ribbon of water
for a moment; then it fell straight once more.
  “They’re back here,” his mother said.
 “What?” he asked, but his question was drowned by the hiss of
water washing stone.
  Cen scrambled after her to a narrow, slippery indentation behind
the waterfall. The scent of cool damp stone mingled with moist,
earthy smells. He copied her handholds as she angled up, ten,
twenty feet, terrified that he would smash into the shallow pool
below.
  He was bleeding from many small lava cuts when she reached a
narrow ledge, sat back on her heels, and pushed aside a thin slab of
stone about a foot high. She reached into the revealed cavity with
both hands and pulled hard; a long, narrow bundle emerged.
  She set it between them.
  It was wrapped in crumbling tapa cloth, made from pounding
roots until they were supple and flat. Her long, brown fingers untied
the gnarled vine that held it together, and unfolded the tapa with
great care.
  Cen’s breath stopped.
  “Bones?” he asked.
   “Go ahead, touch them,” she said. “After me, you’ll be the last one
to know where they are.”
  He stared, uneasy. “Are they human?”
  “Kamehameha’s bones,” she said.
  Cen touched them. They were rough and yellow. He felt kind of
empty and dizzy. It was weird to think that they were once wrapped
in flesh and blood like his.
  “Why do you have them?” he asked. He knew, of course, from the
genealogy chant, that he was descended from Kamehameha on his
mother’s side. Sometimes, when his father was yelling at his
mother, Cen heard him shout “princess,” then laugh, as if it were a
joke.
  “Your grandfather was a kahuna, a priest,” his mother said. “At
least one person has known the secret all these years. These bones
have much mana, much power. At least, that’s what they thought at
the time.” She smiled slightly and glanced at him. “They still do,”
she said. “Someone must know. Later.”
  She was quiet as she enfolded the bones within the tapa, a bundle
more than half as tall as she was. The man must have been a giant.
His bones clunked together in a hollow way. Cen saw that she tried
not to make any new creases in the tapa, because every time she did,
the cloth, which was like fine brown paper covered with tiny, precise
geometric designs, would break.
   She wrapped the old vine around it again and tied it. She shoved
the bundle into the long, dark hole, slid the tall stone back in front
of it, and piled several smaller rocks against that. A bank of ferns
drooped over the place, bright green in the gloom of the rain forest.
  “That’s all,” she said.
  It was a long walk back to the trailhead where they’d left the car,
but she was as quiet as ever. He asked, “What do you want me to do
with them, why did you show them to me?” a couple of times. She
just said, “It’s a sacred duty.”
  His dad was in the tiny kitchen when Cen pushed open the screen
door, rattling jars in the refrigerator and muttering. He pulled out a
beer. The picture of Queen Liliuokalani, some regal-looking old
Hawaiian that his mom kept on the wall, jumped when the old man
slammed the refrigerator door.
  “Hi,” said Cen, and smiled. Sometimes it worked.
  Today it didn’t. “Don’t ‘hi’ me,” the old man snarled. “I want to
know where my dinner is. Where the hell have the two of you been?”
  “We went for a walk,” said his mother, right behind him. “Don’t
worry, it just has to heat up.” She pushed back her hair, started up
the mic, and took some plates from the cupboard.
   “A walk, my ass,” he said, leaning against the doorjamb. “You’ve
got a pretty soft deal here. All you’ve got to do is cook and clean and
spread your legs once in a while. Once a month, if I’m lucky, if you
feel like it. While I’m out fixing those fucking robots every day.” His
dad upended the beer and swallowed half the bottle. Cen wondered
if he should go to his room or just leave the house.
  “I used to work,” his mother said, so quietly that Cen could barely
hear her, “before Interspace brought in the Japanese teachers for the
Japanese, the Korean teachers for the Koreans, the Czech teachers
for the Czechs. You always forget that you didn’t have to have a job
for years. And you don’t seem to remember that I sent you to tech
school, too, and pushed you to get that job. Otherwise all you’d do is
surf and paint and live off my teaching money. Ha! Do I have the
only clear memory around here?” She turned to him, her hands
bristling with chopsticks. Her chin lifted. Her eyes were very black.
  “It must be great to be so good and so very smart, too,” his father
snapped back.
  Cen’s stomach felt funny. It always started this way.
  Maybe if he just acted normal, got some juice out, tried to joke
around, they’d stop. He went to the cupboard and got out a glass.
But he couldn’t think of anything funny to say. His mind always
seemed to get stuck when they fought.
   Cen jumped as his father slammed a cupboard door his mother
had left open. “I guess that’s what you think I did, anyway. Maybe
it’s good you don’t have a job. You spent all the money you made
sending this lazy kid to a fancy school.” His dad’s voice was rising.
“I don’t see what difference it made. He’s pretty dumb, if you ask
me. Nothing special about him. He’s a little hoodlum. Have you seen
that crowd he hangs out with? Smoking pakalolo already.”
  “I wonder where he gets that from?” she asked, setting a dish on
the table with odd care.
  The chill in her voice made Cen feel very bad. He couldn’t deny
the pakalolo. He took a cold bottle of juice out and started to pour it
into the glass he’d set on the counter.
  “And why do you teach him all that stupid Hawaiian stuff
anyway, all those superstitions,” his dad continued, in his low,
grating voice. “No matter who he is, they’re useless. Why don’t you
face it? He’s a bad kid.”
  A vision of Kamehameha’s bones flashed in front of Cen’s eyes.
“Those old superstitions.” Dad would really be mad if he knew what
had made his dinner late. Nervous, he turned too quickly, bumped
his elbow against the counter, and tried to grab the slippery bottle of
juice.
  It smashed on the floor.
  “You stupid bastard!”
  Cen bolted out the door into the rain, ducking under the upraised
arm of his father.
  He cried as he ran down the road to the beach, zoris wet and slick
and slapping his feet, fists clenched. He was only ten, but tall for
his age, and his father was just a little shrimp, living on Primo
beer, dark sweaty quarts of it every day after work, then picking
these fights.
  When he got to the beach park, he was glad the rain had kept
everyone else away. He dived beneath warm small waves and
surfaced further out, lay on his back and kicked hard, staring at the
black hole in the mountain across the bay that was going to be the
maglaunch. He rocked on the gentle swells and rain pecked at his
face. Salt water leaked into his mouth, tasting like tears.
  It was after dark when he started to walk back home, and he
shivered in his wet clothes. Dad would be passed out by now and
Mom would be sitting in the kitchen reading.
  But as he got closer to the house, he heard more shouting.
  The grass he walked across was rough and wet. Cen climbed up
on the cinder block under the kitchen window and peered in through
a crack in the blinds.
  His mother was standing next to the door to the living room,
beside the kitchen table. The glass top was littered with the
remnants of dinner—chunks of rice, a bottle of soy sauce, a few
scattered shreds of bok choy and bean sprouts. The exhaust fan
pushed air out next to him and it smelled like garlic and beer.
  “I’ve been working all these years.” His father. His mother
laughed bitterly, but his dad overrode it. “That’s right. Paying for
the little bastard and you.”
  “Don’t call him a bastard. He’s yours, and he’s alii.”
  “That old crap. Wake up. That means nothing now. Nothing. Less
than nothing. I thought so, and I was wrong. You think it makes a
difference that you’re from a line of kahunas? Oh, sorry, the papa
alii kahunas,“ he said, his voice mincing. ”The chiefly kahunas, the
royal kahunas. So close to Kamehameha.“ Then his voice became
menacing ”So what? What does it matter? You’re dumb as a post.
Why do you fill him with all those superstitions?“
  She laughed gently, but something in her laugh made Cen shiver
even more. Or maybe it was the desperate look in her eyes, which he
could see even from across the room.
  “It does matter,” she said. “It means everything.”
  Her face looked different in the fluorescent light. She looked
older, more regal, her long black hair flowing around her fierce
face, the face of a warrior, he thought. The face of someone he didn’t
even know. Her hand on the table was shaking.
 “You’re crazy,” said his father. “You’ve ruined my life with this
Hawaiian crap.”
  “You believed in it once,” she said. “When we were young—
remember? We believed together. Until you started drinking—”
  “Yeah, sure, it’s always my fault, isn’t it?” Cen couldn’t see his
father’s face, but he knew the sneer—the curled lip, the terrifying,
cold eyes. “I’m sick of you hounding me!”
  He shoved his wife in the chest with the flat of his hand; slapped
her face so hard that the sound hung in the still night.
  Call the police, said the voice in Cen’s head, but he couldn’t
breathe. He tried to shout, but his throat squeezed it to a low, hoarse
sob.
  “Stop it,” she said, her voice ragged. “Stop, I’m warning you, I’ve
had enough!”
  Instead, he took another menacing step toward her.
  She stared at him, her face twisted, tears running down it, and
fumbled in the pocket of her smock.
  Hand shaking, she pulled out the dull black gun they kept in a
dresser drawer.
  “No!” screamed Cen.
   He jumped down and tore around to the front of the house. He
tried to yell for help as he ran, hoping their Russian neighbors
would hear, and that they would understand, but his voice sounded
far away, like somebody else’s.
   He slammed through the screen door and rushed over to his
struggling parents. He leapt onto his father’s back, screaming and
pounding with his fists, then shifted and reached for the gun.
  He managed to get his hand on one of theirs, he didn’t know
whose, and he started shaking it hard, trying to loosen its grasp on
the gun.
  His arm was twisted, then felt as if it had been wrenched off as
the gun exploded.
  His father roared; turned, and with one arm sent him flying
across the room. Cen’s head hit the edge of the table and he lost
consciousness.
  When he opened his eyes, his head hurt like hell and his entire
body ached. Especially his arm. He reached up and felt where it
hurt: sticky.
  He jerked upright.
  His mother was crumpled onto the floor. A halo of blood was
splattered onto the wall around her head.
  He sat up and vomited onto the floor until his heaves brought up
nothing, then leaned back against the cupboard, exhausted, not
looking at his mother but at a pattern on the floor tile—white,
crisscrossed by pink lines that formed diamonds. Blood had
puddled in one of them, and his eyes began to follow the narrow,
twisty convolution of red that led into it.
  Then he hunched forward and hugged his knees.
  He wondered why he felt so calm, and where his father was.
Maybe he thought Cen was dead too. Maybe he’d come back to make
sure. He should run. Now.
   But he didn’t seem able to get up, not just yet. A slight, slow
trembling moved through him, peaked and subsided as if he had
caught a sudden chill.
  He finally rose, covered with goose bumps, and turned on the
faucet. He looked at the water for a minute, trying to remember
why. He flared the stream with one finger.
  Slowly, he washed the place on his head that burned, and his face
until the red rivulets no longer swirled across pitted white
porcelain.
  Face dripping, he reached up and took his mother’s tin box from
the windowsill. She kept a little money in it, and a few other things.
He stared out the window.
  There was no reason to call the police. There was nothing they
could do now.
  The memory of the gun’s coldness flashed through him, and he
realized he didn’t know whether or not it was still there and that he
didn’t care.
   He turned, looking very carefully only at the chipped blue knob on
the screen door. Night sounds filled the house. The ragged banana
trees outside the window clicked in the wind, sounding like rain. He
reached up with his left hand and turned off the light over the sink,
still staring at the doorknob.
  He walked toward it, holding the tin to his chest.
  “Damn you, Kaiulani,” Cen said, his legs aching. He raised his
eyes from the trail and gazed about. He was high on the mountain,
and he didn’t even remember getting here. A cold, misty breeze
ruffled the treetops. He lifted his hand and brushed his face. It was
wet from the last quick shower. Or tears.
  He shivered. His chest hurt. He began to walk, but his legs felt
very heavy. He trudged upward, knowing.
  Knowing that he had killed his mother.
  And knowing that Kaiulani was not real.
   She was not even a ghost. He had made her up entirely, perhaps
from stories his mother told him, perhaps from something he’d
learned when he was in school so long ago. Couldn’t people do that,
split their mind, hallucinate?
   And why should the bones be real, either? He had made that up
like he’d made up Kaiulani, to make himself feel better, to have one
good thing in his life. He couldn’t trust anything he thought he
remembered, could he? He meant to laugh, but it was a harsh
sound, pulled away by the wind: funny how his mind could twist
things around. Yeah, pretty damned funny.
  Except the blood was real, and he had killed his mother.
   All that stuff his father had said, about him not being alii, about
it not mattering—that was what was true. He’d invented that bone
story and hugged it to him, to keep himself from thinking about the
truth. He had made the whole world into a ghost to keep from
remembering. This mountain, this gentle rain, the sweet smell of
hidden jungle flowers—all phantasmas, like old Hawaii. Unreal as
his imagined destination, or all his crazy ideas about time and
space. When he was a kid he’d run around on these mountains like a
wild goat with gangs of childhood friends, playing Hawaiian,
playing Chiefs, playing the Olden Days. That was the only reason
he knew where this trail was, and it led nowhere special. It was
time to go back. Time to get real.
  Then he rounded the bend and stopped.
   A delicate waterfall drifted down the face of a high cliff and
shattered to foam in a tiny pool. White flowers bloomed, fairylike,
from black lava rock.
  He wanted to turn and run.
   What he saw was a shimmering curtain that he could easily rend.
It would all turn to dust if he dared to look too hard, a fragile and
ephemeral decoy of beauty sent by the darkness in mockery of what
he, Cen, really was: a murderer.
  Yet, he realized as he stared, he did remember. For some reason.
This was the place he could come to at night, after he woke sweating
from dreams of blood, and hug to himself. If he dared to go further,
could he bear to lose this solace, this idea that somehow he was
someone?
  Why not?
  He might as well lose everything at once.
  He walked across the clearing and leaned against the wet stone,
pressed his body against it, raised his arms.
 His fingers entered hollows that seemed to reach out for them. He
moved like a spider across the face of the rock.
   The rock was real. He could feel it. Just like he had felt the cold
steel of the gun just before it killed his mother. If only he hadn’t
fought with them—
  He sagged against the rock, nestling himself on a shallow shelf,
and cried.
  He saw his father, cross-legged on the lanai, painting, cursing
when the mimosa flowers littered the air like pink butterflies and
landed on his work. He remembered his proud presentation of
money to Cen’s mother, not once, but for several years. Cen felt the
darkness and alcohol to which he’d retreated when that big shot
New York critic laughed at him and his Hawaiianness, even when
his wife had told him that it was nonsense.
  A sensitive man, Cen realized, his face wet, his cheek pressed
against the rough lava. A bitter man, caught between his wife’s
idealization of old Hawaii, his own artistic dreams, and the
necessity of living in the present the haoles and changing times had
made. Alcohol and ignorance had killed his mother.
   “Not me,” he whispered. That was the darkness that had always
lurked, ready to spring, he realized. Not the fear of his father
finding him. If he had been capable of thinking about it, he might
have realized that his father had known that he’d be quite rightfully
blamed, and vanish.
  No. Cen’s fear had been that, in the melee, it was his fault that
the gun went off.
  It was a thing impossible to know.
  “Not me!” he shouted, and it echoed through the small clearing
and rolled down the mountain into the misty rain forest.
  Cen reached fiercely for the next hollow in the rock. “Not real?” he
muttered, panting. “Just a ghost? Just stupid superstition? We’ll
see, Dad. We’ll see.”
  Excitement and fear filled him like a fluttering of tiny yellow o-o
birds in his stomach as he reached the shelf. The large rock grated
as he pulled it across the stone shelf. The waterfall roared in his
ears. His hands shook as he pushed the rock aside and reached
inside.
  “Alii,” he whispered and slid the rough package out.
  The last hands to touch it had been his mother’s.
  Cen sagged back against the rock, pulled his legs up to his chest.
Gladness filled him like light, and he gasped with laughter and
shook with tears.
  “You were right. Princess Victoria Kaiulani. I did know.”
  He felt as if she were next to him, watching.
  But was it Kaiulani?
  Maybe, instead, it was his mother.
  Maybe she could rest now.
  He unfolded the old tapa cloth and revealed the bones that had
haunted his childhood dreams.
  Time became for him so fluid, and so very beyond anything that
he could possibly comprehend, that he may have stood, holding the
bones as tightly as one would hold one’s last—or first—shred of
reality, for maybe minutes. Maybe hours.
  Perhaps he felt the power coming from them just because they
were real. Maybe it was just that they validated him, made him
strong in a way he never had been before. The past slid in behind
him as if it were an alternate past: the past he had tried so very
hard not to see. Perhaps so hard that it had made him crazy.
  No. For the first time, he thought not.
  For the first time in his life, he felt utterly real.
 He told IS he wanted to study in London. He was not surprised
when they said no problem and made everything easy. He knew he
was going to play a dangerous game. But he didn’t care.
  He only knew that he had a responsibility toward many people
now. His mother. Ross. Maui’s grandmother. She had asked for the
bones, but Cen still thought they should be left in peace, and left
them so, in their ancient place.
  And he knew one other thing. He had to find Kaiulani once again.
Find her and save her. He might even be able to fulfill, eventually,
her childhood demand to see the bones, to touch them.
  He didn’t know how. He just would. And he knew he would see
her in England. He knew it.
  Crazy? No.
  He was whole, now. Anything was possible.


                                 Lynn
                               Asia 2034




                                   10

Each jolt of the bullet train shot curiously distant pain through
Lynn’s leg, and that part lasted forever, and then the jolts shook her
entire body. “Wake up!” she heard in her dream. “We have to get off
here!”
  She did not like waking as that brought the pain closer. She
rolled over to escape the troublesome dream but someone yanked her
from the berth along with the sheet, which was pulled from her
roughly and tossed to the floor.
  “Hold her up, will you?” she heard hissed next to her ear as she
sagged back onto the hard berth and blinked as a pencil flash
caught the side of Akamu’s face; she was suddenly fully awake.
Akamu’s arm came around her awkwardly and steadied her.
  “I’m fine,” she whispered, breaking out in a sweat as nausea
twisted her stomach. “Let’s go.”
  The lev shuddered and hissed to a halt; she reached up and
grabbed a metal bar. In the dim light she saw wiry Hawkins,
wearing a green jacket with many pockets that all bulged. He bent
and hoisted a large straw basket from the marred floor. Lynn had
no idea where they were. It was night; the lights outside the window
were irregularly placed, illuminating a phantasma of jumbled
shapes and a crooked brick-paved street where dim lights burned.
  “Come on,” said Hawkins, and opened the door to their
compartment.
  They moved through an aisle where people dozed upright on both
sides. She stumbled into a wire box holding two chickens and the
birds woke, squawking. Baskets overflowing with lumpy garments
and wrapped packages dangled from overhead hooks. Parcels were
jammed everywhere. One woman, hair tied back in a scarf, stared at
them as they made their way down the aisle.
   Lynn tried to ignore the pain in her leg and the gnawing desire
for more opium. Hawkins touched the platform access button and
machinery whirred. The door stuck halfway open but it was quite
wide enough for them to slip out to where the chill night air woke
Lynn fully. The door slammed shut as if glad to have leave of them.
She’d never seen such a run-down train in her life. It was a far cry
from the modern levs she was used to riding in the sleek rich Pacific
Rim cities where she usually did business.
  As she stepped down to the platform, supported by Akamu, she
leaned on him much more heavily than she had intended because
her leg threatened to buckle. She wished she could go to a clinic, but
if she really was on some sort of high priority wanted list, as
Hawkins claimed—outlandish as that seemed—all it would take
was a drop of blood to identify her.
  So Lynn set her jaw against the message from her troublesome leg
as it briefly bore her entire weight, angry at her helplessness.
Dependent on an old man and a boy and unable to communicate
with anyone else.
  “That’s good, sit her down,” she heard Hawkins direct Akamu
over the vibration of the lev as the boy led her across the concrete
platform to a bench by the wall. Stars flecked the thin slice of sky
between the station overhang and the lev; she shivered and saw her
breath puff out. She hated cold!
  Hawkins hurried over to the lev and said something she couldn’t
understand to a man standing there. Her father’s friend scowled,
then fished something from one of his pockets and handed it to him;
the man nodded and grabbed the metal rail next to the lev steps and
jumped aboard as the lev pulled away from the station. A motion
caught Lynn’s eye. A shade pulled up—someone looking out the
window at them. The woman who had stared at them as they passed
through the aisle.
  “Hawkins—,” she said.
  “Ignore her,” he said tersely. He looked around the empty
platform. “Don’t talk.”
  Then the lev was gone and she saw the town more clearly.
  Across the tracks was a mixture of crooked brick and wooden
buildings, clumped together like town houses, some with four
stories, some with as many as six. The windows were small and
dark. In the streets small tables piled with various goods alternated
with fortune tables, their glow illuminating the faces of those bent
over them. She did not know what time it was but perhaps it was
not yet midnight. She wasn’t sure how big this town was; it looked
fairly small from here. And ancient—settled and lived in since long
past forever. She stirred, nervous, looking around. That woman on
the lev—she could have easily sent some sort of message to someone
by now.
  “What are they doing over there?” whispered Akamu. Hawkins
walked up and down the unlit platform, glancing back and forth
with quick jerks of his head.
   “Fortune-tellers,” she whispered back. Like on the streets of
Chinatown in Honolulu—the tortoiseshell, the coins—though now
chaos-based algorithms generated the cracks in the holographic
turtle shell or the arrangement of the holographic yarrow straws
that appeared after the customer paid to activate the program. The
fortune-tellers usually carried their light tables to a park at the foot
of Nuuanu every evening and did excellent business until after
midnight. She was a bit surprised at Akamu’s question. It meant
that he probably didn’t get out much. But then, many people from
“out country” didn’t venture into Honolulu.
  She jumped at the roar of an engine shifting gears and then out of
the night swung two bright headlights. In their glare she saw
Hawkins’s face soften in relief.
   The truck continued past the station, and she was struck by
irrational disappointment. If she didn’t know herself better, she
would have said she was on the verge of tears. There was nothing
she could do and that was the frightening thing about it all. She
calmed herself in her usual way; she watched her breath, not the
puffing white external breath but the path of her interior breath,
and turned it golden as it went up and down her spine. She noticed
her surroundings dispassionately: long black shadows cast by the
two streetlights across the tracks; green sign telling the name of the
station, she presumed, in Chinese. What did it say? She squinted at
it. Chinese kanjis looked the same as Japanese, but sometimes had a
different meaning. She felt a pang of sadness remembering that
she’d planned intensive language skills for little Masa; her own
inability to master foreign languages had always made her feel
stupid. Well, it looked like the kanji for house, in Japanese, and the
population was 2,723. Or was that the elevation? An old man and
young woman across the tracks conferred for a minute. The woman
gesticulated earnestly; the old man shrugged. She smiled widely,
then they pulled up folding chairs at the table of a fortuneteller.
   Now that the lev was gone the air smelled fresh and calming.
Lynn tried to recall some of her journey and remembered only vivid
colors and that life had seemed quite wonderful, despite the minor
details of sickness, injury, and the need to flee for her life. Great
stuff, that opium. She felt her forehead—hot; did she have a fever?
She remembered her mother, long ago, laughing at her—“You can’t
tell yourself, sweetie.”
  After about five minutes Hawkins motioned to them; she tried to
stand by herself and Akamu caught her before she fell over. “Shit,”
she said, and caught Hawkins’s frown and clamped her mouth shut.
He was right. The less people heard them speak English, the less
trackers would have to go on.
  She hobbled around the side of the station to the back, leaning on
Akamu. Relief spread through her as they rounded the corner, and
she saw the large, ancient truck waiting, lights killed.
  Hawkins looked both ways and motioned to them. He boosted her
up into the cab and shoved her over toward the driver. The seat was
big enough for all four of them and, after a word in Chinese from
Hawkins, the driver shifted into a low, laborious gear and they
rattled into the night.
   They were on a hard-packed dirt road and vibrated along roughly
at about forty kilometers an hour, Lynn guessed, because the speed
panel was just an occasional flash when they went over bumps. Its
flicker illuminated a blank satmap screen, set at an angle for the
driver, pocked with melted-looking black spots and half-filled with
cigarette butts. The truck had started out smart, probably
twenty-five years ago, but had been effectively dumbed down.
  But it still ran.
  The driver was Chinese; he glanced at Lynn once but she couldn’t
read his reaction to her obvious Japanese background. She felt even
more helpless; the traditional enmity between Chinese and Japanese
was very old and very strong—not on her part, certainly, but out
here, who could tell? He wore a flat-looking hat with a short brim
and was not as old as Hawkins but older than she was. He wore
some sort of work jacket and heavy laced boots caked with mud.
  He and Hawkins exchanged a few more words. Lynn looked at
Hawkins, pointed to her mouth, and raised her eyebrows. He shook
his head slightly.
   After they left the tiny town behind, the only thing that kept her
awake was the constant pain of her leg. Hawkins reached into his
pocket and handed her a patch in a packet across the sleeping
Akamu. She wanted to ask him what it was and looked at it. She
didn’t want to take any more pain medication, opium or not; she
was already disoriented enough. But she definitely needed some sort
of antibiotic. She tilted her head questioningly; he pillowed his head
against his hands and closed his eyes—she shook her head and
slipped the patch into her pocket. He shrugged.
   She almost smiled when she thought of all she was doing
without—even the irrelevant detail of her sunglasses, which seemed
magical in this environment. What the hell time was it, anyway?
How could people live like this? The truck sounded as if it might
fall apart any minute; she slipped her hands into her sleeves and
longed for simple heat. The driver glanced at her and pulled a knob
at the dashboard. It came off in his glove and slipped onto the floor,
littered with old newspapers and empty pop bottles. A blast of hot
air hit her in the face. She tried to lean over and find the knob, but
the man touched her shoulder, shook his head, shrugged, and
smiled.
  The Milky Way was amazingly intense, dusted across the sky
without any interference from cities. She could see no glow on the
horizon that might indicate the presence of one. She glanced at
Akamu, thought of the sophisticated flat she had bought him. Did
he still have it? Perhaps, using it, she could get some inkling of
where they were, if Hawkins wouldn’t tell her. It probably had lev
schedules in it. Some geography programs.
  She pushed her hair back; it felt matted and greasy. How long
had she been out? How long had they been traveling? She thought of
the sleeping pills and wondered how necessary they had been for
her— perhaps they had just been a convenience for Hawkins. And
how had he found Akamu? Was Hawkins simply her father’s friend,
with only her welfare at heart? Or was he to preserve the life of
Akamu so he could be used by IS? But for what? Hadn’t IS tried to
kill Akamu a few days ago?
  Well, who else?
  She realized that though that was the most obvious explanation,
she was uncomfortable with it. She had no proof. She was limiting
herself by believing that was the only possibility, and thereby
limiting the chances of their survival. Someone had tried to kill
him, and someone had probably, but not necessarily, tried to kill her
in Hong Kong. That was about all she knew. That and a mixture of
possible motives. She knew nothing about Hawkins’s motives either
and did not know whether he was communicating with her father.
And if Hawkins was in touch with her father, was her father
passing information along to IS or not? It would, actually, be best to
be rid of Hawkins, if possible.
  She stirred, trying to relieve her pain. Now she was drenched in
sweat. She had a fever for sure. And she was starving. What the hell
had she gotten herself into? Nana would surely laugh…
   They were heading north, because to the right, the horizon was
lightening.
  Although the road was a straight line on land flat and relatively
featureless, she saw distant mountains etched in black. She glanced
at Hawkins, but he was sleeping. Where was he taking them? And
why?
  The sunrise was magnificent but immensely different from
tropical dawn. It seemed to take forever, gradually coloring the
horizon with a glow of brilliant yellow that for some reason
reminded her of her mother, long dead. Lynn was surprised; the
second time she had thought of her mother today, when she hadn’t
thought of her for years. Must be getting light-headed. The yellow
intensified for ten long minutes, then flushed to pink as the sun
emerged, a bit of orange that soon was blinding. There were no
clouds to the east, but she saw a front line of high dark cloud
splitting the sky, now a powerful clear blue.
   The driver pulled a thermos from a pocket in his door and opened
it. Steam bore the delicate scent of hot green tea. Her stomach
rumbled. He handed her the thermos and she took a gulp. He gave
her a greasy, crumpled bag, and she opened it. Black bean pastries,
her favorite. She smiled at him and took one, bit into the sweet,
sticky bun. Great. Enough carbohydrates for a whole day—of sitting
in a truck, anyway. Akamu stirred next to her. She thought he
might wake, but instead he settled back to sleep. She jerked her
head up once or twice, then slept herself.
  Lynn was filled with dismay as a great jolt woke her. She saw
that they were entering a disheveled village composed of a row
of—yurts? Yes, yurts. She rubbed her eyes. Was this possible?
Yurts—and prayer flags.
  Akamu was wide awake, staring with his great brown eyes.
Hawkins leaned forward, holding onto the battered dashboard with
both weathered, thin hands, his eyes searching and eager.
   She felt like a child at a carnival, enwrapped in a mad swirl of
color. She gazed in wonder at a million prayer flags, iridescent
silken rainbows, strung between yurts and flying from freestanding
posts, snapping in the wind. The aftermath of the opium seemed a
state where colors were intense and glorious, yet somehow distant.
She rather liked it, except that she still ached all over, and the
jounce of the cab on the rutted dried-mud road did not help.
  Atop a small hill to her right, a geodesic dome perched on a
gleaming foundation of smooth beige plast, pale green hexagons
shimmering like opalescent glass, with small satellite dishes affixed
at the intersection of struts. A path through short golden grasses
went straight up the hill to the dome.
  From the double row of ten or so yurts, which formed a sort of
road between them, emerged people, pointing and waving. Beyond
them, across an expanse of grassy plain, was a permanent village, of
sorts—a brief row of two and three story buildings, glowing white
beneath the midday sun.
   And above those buildings, as incongruous as a great white whale
beached on a mountainside, was an ancient temple that seemed to
radiate energy from its many gilded roofs, emerging from a cliff as
if carved from it. It took Lynn’s eyes a long time to travel across it,
for it was a behemoth, a legacy of the age when lamas ruled Tibet
with their exotic blend of Buddhism, superstition, and raw power. It
seemed quite as splendid as pictures of the Potalaoma in Lhasa, her
archetype of Tibetan architecture. Vast verandas jutted out here and
there, and rows of tall, dark windows like the rectangular hollow
eyes of an immense and powerful god drew horizontal lines across
the temple.
   Sunlight ran along great swooping expanses of electrical lines in
the village, but the lines did not reach the yurts. As the truck jolted
to a halt, she saw that the yurt roofs incorporated photoelectric cells.
   With a last grinding of gears the truck lurched to a halt. The
driver leaped from the cab, leaving the door open so that in the new
silence the prayer flags seemed more insistent, and the cries of
excited children filled the dry air. He went to the back of the truck;
Lynn looked through the small grimy window and saw giant straw
baskets filled with shiny red apples, some sort of hard-looking green
fruit or vegetable she did not recognize, many baskets with lids, and
several large cardboard boxes. Beneath all this she glimpsed a small
stack of lumber and some plywood.
  The driver pulled some ropes free with long backward motions of
his arms. Hawkins yanked on his door handle and heaved at the
door with his shoulder before it popped open; he got out and
stretched. Two men and one woman emerged from the dome and
went to help the driver. They all looked Chinese. The woman and
one man were wearing western clothes; the other man was wearing
a padded silk jacket.
   “I think we’re in Tibet,” said Akamu. “I figured out some vectors
on the lev.” The expression on his face was one of ecstatic
absorption, completely open, all sullenness and confusion gone. He
wants to learn, Lynn thought, with admiration. Where some
children might be terrified and need reassurance, he was excited.
She felt great pity for this intelligent, strange boy. How must it feel
to know that someone had tried to kill you? Well, he seemed to be
coping all right.
  “Tibet? Does Tibet exist?” But of course it must—Hawkins had
said that was where they were going. Lynn realized that her fever
must have broken; she was rather weak, and everything she saw
looked dazzlingly bright. The stage before you die, she told herself
sourly.
  But looking out of the window, she lost her bad mood. The wind
blowing through the cab was chilly but exhilarating. It indeed
looked as if they were on a high plateau. Blue mountains fled
downward toward a distant plain behind them; ahead was a wall of
jumbled peaks faceted brown and white. She must have been
exhausted to have slept while the truck arduously climbed to this
height. The troubles of Interspace, of her brothers, even of her own
obsession with collecting famous DNA, seemed far away. For a
timeless, floating moment, anyway. Then she reached up and felt
the earring. Still there. Her attempt to obtain it had been meant as a
decoy to cover her flight with Akamu; according to Hawkins, it was
the reason that they were being followed.
  She wondered.
  “Well, the Tibetans think Tibet exists,” Akamu said, in a tone of
voice that told her just how uninformed he found her, bringing her
back to the present. “Just like Hawaiians still want the rights and
property stolen from us. I guess it could be confusing. Tibet almost
regained its status as a sovereign country during the Pacific Rim
Alliance Summit in 2007. But China withdrew from the alliance
before the negotiations were complete. Anyway, I think that’s where
we are. We went through two villages this morning, and it looked to
me as if the names were in Tibetan. Old Hawkins doesn’t talk
much. He wouldn’t answer any of my questions. At least he let me
keep my flat. Look, I have the Dalai Lama’s speech here, the last one
he gave before he died—but there are other kinds of lamas, too—” he
pulled out his flat.
  “I believe you,” she said. “Better put it away for now.” More things
she didn’t know. Little things, like world history. How daunting. To
know so much and yet so little. How limited one person was. She
sighed and closed her eyes. Her sustaining vision of humanity
exuberantly cascading into a future where knowledge and
connections endlessly expanded shrank into a small isolated dot.
Then Tibet morphed inside her eyelids from a tiny country on a map
into a man who stood up and stepped on the dot. She opened her
eyes with a start.
  Akamu shoved his flat back into a yellow-and-purple pack and
started walking toward the yurts. She looked at him more closely.
The pack and jacket were new. She looked at herself. Her clothes
were new, too. She hadn’t even noticed before.
  “What day is it?” she asked. But he was too far away to hear.
   Lynn slid gingerly from the high cab and began to follow the
strange entourage down the twisted narrow dirt lane—bulky Akamu
wearing a too-large green jacket and clutching his high-tech
treasure bag, thin mysterious Hawkins of unclear motive, and three
huge black barking mastiffs. But the bobbing of the dogs as they
hurried ahead upset her stomach somehow and then the blue of the
sky overwhelmed her with simple brilliant intensity and she fell. Or
fainted.
   At least she thought, lying a moment later hands stinging, head
ringing as the buzzing dots she saw resolved once again into the
strange yurts, that must be what had happened. Chagrined, she
tried to rise and felt several hands grab her and others dust her off.
Clucks of sympathy filled the air. Akamu stared at her.
Remembering how they had met, she decided that he must think her
a rather weak specimen.
  Testing her leg, she realized that she had simply been too bold
and that lack of sleep and food and whatever was wrong with her
leg had combined to cause her embarrassment. “Help me, if you
don’t mind,” she snapped at Akamu and was then ashamed when he
did not grin sardonically but with gravity stepped forward and took
her arm. “Like this?” he asked.
  “That will do,” she said, relieved that Hawkins, who had turned
at the commotion, did not seem alarmed that they were speaking.
“Thanks.”
  Hawkins vanished into the door of a yurt near the dome, then
emerged leading a tall, thin Tibetan woman wearing jeans and a
jacket composed of beautiful wide bright stripes, yellow and red.
The high leather boots she wore were dark and well-worn,
soft-looking, with a fur cuff at the top. Her long black hair flew
loose on the wind; seeing the long tendrils wave wildly Lynn almost
expected to hear them snap like prayer flags, matching the energy
and intelligence Lynn saw in her face and eyes as she approached.
She held out her hand to Lynn. “Hello,” she said, “I’m Sattva. Come
on down and we’ll have a look.”
   She had an air of quiet authority. For some reason Lynn trusted
her immediately in this strange welter of events, people, and places
she had suddenly become immersed in. She felt insubstantial and
light as a ghost. Or maybe just light-headed, she told herself, as she
hobbled downhill with the help of Akamu.
  The huge black dogs barked and intricately garbed children
watched as they walked through the lengthening shadows of the
yurts.
  Up close, Lynn realized that the yurts were more sophisticated
than she might have guessed. Although from a distance they seemed
made of heavy pounded wool, they actually sparkled with various
filaments woven into the fabric. Smartglass, with all sorts of
communication capabilities.
  She followed Sattva into the fourth yurt on the right, Akamu
trailing behind.
  Inside Lynn wondered what the funny smell was and then her
eyes adjusted to the dim gold light bathing the faces of people sitting
on layers of rugs around a low table. “Butter lamps,” whispered
Akamu next to her, looking around, his eyes filled with amazed
curiosity. She was sure her face held the same expression. “That’s
what smells,” he said.
  “How odd,” she murmured.
   Swathes of azure, yellow, and red silk woven through the ceiling
supports shimmered in the flickering light; two walls of the yurt
were covered with permanent-looking shelving of heavy dark wood.
These were filled with neatly stacked dishes and other household
utensils. In the center of the shelves, on a low table jutting out with
a yellow pillow in front of it, was a holo field. It manifested Tibetan
characters, which flowed in and out of existence smoothly and
swiftly. A variety of systems such as the one she had purchased for
Akamu in Hong Kong lay scattered around, and even several of the
faddish ergs that could be easily molded and remolded for the user’s
comfort. She glanced at Hawkins, but he was crouched next to the
table, holding a cup of steaming liquid, chatting, and appeared not
to notice her.
  “Over here,” Sattva said. To one side was a low bed covered with
a rough blanket. “Take your pants off.”
  Lynn looked over her shoulder and saw that the group of people
about ten feet away around the table were not paying the least bit of
attention to her. What do you care anyway? she thought. Aware that
the last time she had bathed had been god knows how many days
ago, just a sponge bath on the lev and a quick dry-off, she tried to
bend down and open her new cheap running shoes. The shoes
brought back a hazy memory of Hawkins bursting into their
compartment just as the lev left some station, breathing hard,
tossing down an armload of stuff.
  Sattva quickly knelt and unsealed the shoes for her. “Sit,” she
said, and Lynn gratefully sank onto the bed. Sattva removed Lynn’s
shoes and helped her pull off her jeans.
 Lynn saw that her right calf had a nasty, swollen gash, which
was mottled blue and yellow.
  “A bullet?” Sattva asked, feeling up and down her calf gently.
  Lynn winced. “So Hawkins says.”
   Sattva rose and pulled an aluminum basin from one of the
shelves. She walked over to the fire and poured some boiling water
from the kettle that hung over it into the basin. She ripped open a
packet and scattered white powder over the water, took a cloth from
another shelf and wrung it in the steaming water. “This’ll hurt,” she
told Lynn; it certainly did. She bathed the gash made by the bullet
for several minutes. “Should have had stitches,” she said. “Too late
now.” She looked up and grinned at Lynn. “No doubt you can have
the ugly scar taken care of later if you like. Has it been imaged?”
  “No,” said Lynn.
  “Okay. Let’s go.”
  “Let’s go?”
  “Stand up.”
   Sattva helped Lynn up and wrapped a thin blanket around her
like a skirt and tucked in the end. Lynn watched with amusement,
as if this was happening to someone else.
  “We have to go to the dome,” she said. “Mikhel,” she said, raising
her voice, and a burly man sitting with the group at the round table
turned his head. “Think you can carry her?”
  “I can walk,” protested Lynn, but Mikhel strode over and swooped
her up.
  “I can carry you,” said Mikhel, jouncing her up and down, “How
many kilos? Probably about half my weight, eh?” He had very short
brown hair, large, fierce blue eyes. Two earrings of complex
geometric design dangled from each of his ears.
  “Hundred and ten, last time I checked,” she said. “Pounds.”
  In her strange post-opiate state, memories of her father carrying
her rushed into her mind as they stepped out into the chilly
afternoon. How caring he had been, so long ago! The surrounding
peaks seemed to bob up and down with Mikhel’s long stride as he
and Sattva climbed the dirt path to the green dome.
   Sattva opened the door for them, and Mikhel carried her in and
laid her gently on the long flat imagining table that sat to one side.
It was plain and smooth, just a cool slab about seven feet long and
three feet wide.
   Sattva stood for a moment looking at the panel at the foot of the
table. She pressed a few pads and they beeped. “Damn,” said Sattva,
“I can never remember my code.” She pushed more pads then
smiled. “Activate,” she said, and a clear tube slid up and around
from where it was stored in the base. Lynn looked through it at the
rest of the dome.
  There really wasn’t much inside. Black cushions were stacked
neatly in piles of three and four around the walls; the floor was
composed of large, translucent hexagons that looked slightly
yielding. A low counter ran around the perimeter of the dome, and
she saw on it an object that looked like a halo, a head-sized,
glittering circle. At every vortex of the dome itself was a crystal; the
sun came out from behind a brief cloud and scattered tiny rainbows
across the walls and floor and Sattva’s face.
  Sattva said, “Image right calf.”
  Lynn felt rather than heard the low vibration, and Sattva moved
around to study the hologram that Lynn could see hovering next to
her through the clear imaging tube. She couldn’t remember when
she’d last been imaged. Maybe when she had broken her arm when
she was seven.
  “Hmmm. Three-ex,” said Sattva.
  Lynn saw blobs of yellow and red and dark green enlarge fuzzily
for an instant then focus sharply.
  “What do you think?” asked Sattva.
  Mikhel moved closer to the image. “Is that a cracked bone?”
  “Yeah,” said Sattva. “A fracture of the fibula. That’s the small
long bone in the lower leg. I guess the bullet just nicked it. Do you
see a bullet in there, Mikhel?”
   “I guess not,” said Mikhel, shrugging his broad shoulders and
frowning at the image. “I am not into these medical things.”
 “He’s a gravitational lens expert,” Sattva said to Lynn. “From
Moscow.”
  “Oh,” Lynn said.
  “But I think that’s what happened,” Sattva continued. “See? That’s
the small bone. No big deal, but it probably hurts.”
  “It does,” Lynn said. “It seems like a big deal to me.”
  “Oh, sure,” said Sattva. “Off.”
  The clear tube rotated back into the base. Sattva leaned over
Lynn, bracing herself with her arms, and her hair hung down on
both sides of her copper-colored, broad-nosed face. Lynn saw that it
was filled with amusement and compassion, a strange but somehow
appropriate and reassuring mix.
  “What I mean is that I have some stuff here that will fix it, if it
hasn’t gone bad. Let’s see here…”
   Sattva pulled out a drawer and rummaged through it. “Mikhel,
where—oh, here it is. Great, all ready. Hmmm—it expired last
November. But it’s probably all right. I love it when this stuff is
already mixed.” She held a shrink-wrapped package that consisted
of a syringe filled with some sort of white stuff. She unwrapped it
and paused. “Now, how?”
  “That’s mender, right?” asked Lynn.
  Sattva nodded, frowning. “I know I’m supposed to inject it, but…
do I have to touch the bone with the needle? Where is the bone? I
mean how can I tell without the imager…”
   “They used it to fix my broken arm when I was a kid,” said Lynn.
“If you just put it in the general area it migrates to the bone and
bonds with it. Then it crystallizes and mends the fracture.”
  Sattva pushed the makeshift skirt aside and held the end of the
needle against the side of Lynn’s calf, about four inches below her
knee. “Like here?”
  “Looks about right,” said Lynn. “Fire away.” She gasped at the
sharp pain.
  “Okay?” asked Sattva. “I guess I could have numbed you with…
something in here. Sorry.” She tossed the syringe in a small can on
the counter. “Anyway, I think you should wear a removable splint;
that’s supposed to be completely hardened in about twelve hours.
She moved back and turned to her cupboard. ”Here we go. Want
some opium for—“
 “No!” said Lynn, swinging herself around and sitting up. “I mean,
Hawkins gave me some.”
  “Good,” said Sattva. “It’s the best pain reliever you could possibly
have. I don’t know where he got it—the Chinese are pretty
anal-retentive about it, like most of the world, but that’s kind of
historical. It’s not really addictive anymore if you don’t want it to
be. After the pain is gone we just give you some opivert.”
  “That’s okay,” said Lynn. “I’m foggy enough as it is. Maybe I’m at
the opivert stage. Or just past it. Can you tell if that’s infected? I
think I’ve had a fever.”
  Sattva felt the wound. “It’s cool.”
  “Hawkins gave me antibiotics too.”
  Sattva frowned slightly, then said, “Mind if I take a little blood?”
  It was just a little; she touched a tiny vacuum pipette to Lynn’s
finger and released the drop of blood it sucked up it into another
machine on a console that was revealed at a touch of the panel.
  “Ah,” she said. “Hawkins said you were in Hong Kong, right?”
  Lynn nodded.
  Sattva brought up a holographic earth, about a foot in diameter,
which turned slowly. Colors blossomed on its surface and spread,
mingling with other colors, which faded as new eruptions spread
and swirled.
  “This is an epidemiology map,” Sattva said. “All disease
information from every clinic in the system worldwide is constantly
updated and disseminated via satellite.” She spoke a bit louder.
“Hong Kong.”
  “I have something similar for mitochondrial tracking,” said Lynn.
   “Shhh,” said Sattva, with a grin. “I haven’t got this fully trained
to my voice yet. Hong Kong,” she repeated.
   This time when she said Hong Kong a small red dot enlarged to a
circle around Hong Kong. Sattva said, “Fix, match, readout.”
  A calm female voice came from a small speaker in the counter.
“This is a new virus that has arisen in the past two months,
probably originating in Beijing. We project a seven-month trajectory
that will follow the path you see.” The globe rotated slowly, and
purple areas multiplied rapidly, sometimes in seemingly unrelated
places. “Fever, nausea, lasting five to seven days. Complications
unusual in young otherwise healthy victims. Rest and fluid
recommended.”
  “Thanks,” said Sattva. “Off.”
  “I have a virus?” asked Lynn.
  “On top of everything else, yes. But I guess it’s run its course,
pretty much. A bullet, eh? You and Hawkins will have to fill me in.”
  “Um—I guess you’re not a doctor,” said Lynn, as Sattva smeared
the wound with ointment and bandaged it. She wondered how old
Sattva was. Forty? Forty-five? Her long black hair was streaked
with silver. But nowadays it was hard to tell. With the right
treatments, she might be close to eighty and look like this.
  “Not even close. Level-one mountain rescue training. Then I
decided I wasn’t cut out for medicine. I went into particle physics
instead—about as abstract as you can get. One of us is a surgeon,
but she had to go home to Benares because of a family emergency.”
  “So what are you doing here?” she asked, glancing at Mikhel. A
particle physicist and a gravitational lens expert?
  In the pale green light she saw their eyes meet.
  “What’s that over there?” she asked, pointing at the halo.
  “Well,” said Mikhel hesitantly. Sattva opened yet another low,
wide drawer and Lynn saw that it was full of lightweight splints—
Gore-Tex with aluminum ribs. She sorted through them.
  “Arm—arm—wrist—there we go. Leg. Let’s try a medium.” She
unsealed the wrapper, knelt, and Velcroed it around Lynn’s calf.
  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Lynn said, but it
came out sounding annoyed and definitely insincere.
  “It’s not that—,” said Mikhel.
  “It’s not only that,” said Sattva, standing. “I think that splint will
do.”
  “You’re some sort of religious cult, right?” asked Lynn, feeling
more and more rude. This is what happens when you take opium,
she thought.
  Sattva’s laughter was almost as deep and throaty as Mikhel’s;
they were genuinely amused. “No,” said Sattva. “I hope not, anyway.
That’s not what I want. The crystals have nothing to do with
religion. Crystal lattice is an excellent storage and transmission
material.”
  “What are you storing? What are you transmitting?” Lynn stifled
a yawn in spite of herself.
  Mikhel rose from his cushion. “The headpiece picks up, focuses,
amplifies, and relays electrical impulses from the brain. And vice
versa—it can be used rather like an MRI to cause the magnetic
alignment of particles in the brain. And the crystals in the dome
create a constant field that is ten to the eleven hertz.” He moved to
pick her up.
  “But why?” she asked. “That’s pretty low, isn’t it? Not radio or
satellite or anything, right?” She didn’t know a whole lot about such
things. Mikhel slid his arms beneath her legs and behind her back
and picked her up easily; once again she felt like a child. As Sattva
opened the door she talked to Lynn.
  “That halo is just a sample somebody brought back from Hong
Kong a few months ago. It’s not much good to us. It was designed to
initialize a brain to transmit impulses to a quantum computer.” She
laughed. “Benny forgot to pick up one of those.”
  “Does such a thing exist?” asked Lynn.
  “Well,” said Mikhel, “We know of a few. At various universities
throughout the world. They are all different, though. The artificial
intelligence people have been working on them and these computers
are supposed to be extremely fast and small and smart. And not very
stable. But they are coming. They will be the next great
breakthrough.”
  “Hmmm,” said Lynn. The ache in her leg was subsiding to a
numb throbbing. “So what’s the dome about?” she asked, as Mikhel
carried her through the door.
  Sattva latched the door, then followed them. She said, “Some
people used to believe that that particular frequency affects the
micro-tubules in the brain and causes the brain to be in a quantum
state that is unentangled with matter. During that time the wave
function is suppressed,” said Sattva. “These people believed that
unentangled state was what caused the phenomenon of
consciousness. The domes were just a way to finely control a
particular state of consciousness. They’re really kind of an artifact,
actually. We bought this from Oxford; they still have a bunch of
them, apparently, in some warehouse. I was excited to get it and see
for myself what it was all about. It was even pretty interesting to
make it—just a lot of bags of powder we mixed with water and some
forms. It’s come in handy.”
  Lynn thought that the temperature had dropped several degrees
while they were inside—along with the sun. A strange place. At
least she knew what microtubules were. All plant and animal cells
were sheathed with a cytoskeleton made up of microtubules—long
tubes only nanometers in diameter.
  “Let’s see,” said Lynn. “The microtubules are made of… tubular
dimars, right?” Tiny, interlinked peanut-shaped protein units.
   “Yes,” said Sattva, walking next to her. “Well, Penrose postulated
that tubulin dimars actually control the synaptic connections of the
brain in a way that is noncomputational—that is, in a way that
can’t be reduced to mathematical representation. Experiments have
confirmed that the tubular dimars are capable of entering a
Bose-Einstein state, even in a medium as warm as the brain, which
is what happens in superconductivity, where a single quantum state
exists in a large number of particles. The microtubules are actually
full of a special kind of water, absolutely pure.”
  “Right,” said Lynn. It was coming back to her now.
  “When this relatively large-scale quantum coherence is reached,”
Sattva continued, “the strange effects of quantum theory that are
true on a very small scale become possible on a larger, brain-sized
scale. Quantum events cannot be computized—measured—yet they
can be communicated, via the workings of what is called Bell’s
Inequality Theorem where it was proved that every quantum event
has its precise twin nonlocally.”
  “Um… sure,” said Lynn.
  “There’s more,” said Sattva.
  “You can tell me later. I think my tubular dimars just knocked off
work for the day. It’s very beautiful here, isn’t it?”
  “That is one of the things I love about it,” said Mikhel.
   The sky was electric blue, so lucid it almost made her heart ache.
A pale sliver of moon floated just above the Himalayan peaks, which
receded in an endless series of random lines, brown and white when
close, deep azure in the distance. She almost fancied she could tell
that the earth was curved. She jounced toward the row of yurts in
Mikhel’s arms, where the vision of long shadows and blue sky
darkened and she smelled the butter lamps as they reentered the
yurt.
  Everyone was eating dinner, passing plates around a table laden
with large bowls of steaming food. The spicy smell nauseated her.
She saw that Hawkins had a half-empty bottle of golden Scotch at
his elbow. He grinned at her across the room, then returned to
earnest conversation with a man next to him.
  Akamu sat on the floor, cross-legged, in front of the big screen,
holding a control sphere in one hand. Some preferred them to
keyboards. The size of a tennis ball, they responded to complex
combinations of pressures—which children learned easily when
young. Every second or so he executed a new command by touching
a different part of the sphere, emphasized by a slight forward jerk of
his hand. She was at the wrong angle to see what he was doing. He
seemed oblivious to his surroundings.
  “Put her back on the bed,” said Sattva. “Thanks, Mikhel. Hungry,
Lynn?”
   Lynn shook her head. She just wanted to sleep. Mikhel settled her,
and Sattva said, “Put this foot up on a pillow. There.” Lynn felt a
blanket settle over her and sank into the warmth, the low murmur
of the people at the table, the rush of wind pummeling the yurt, the
smell of panting mastiffs and butter lamps, and then strange
dreams.
  When she woke the lamps were still burning but it was
considerably darker. Small circles of golden light illuminated
various areas of the yurt—the now-empty table, the shelves, what
looked like several rows of bunks on the far side, above layers of the
woven rugs that floored the place. What Lynn assumed was Om
Mani Padme Hum rose and fell on the holo platform like waves,
swiftly, in smaller script, as if infected with new urgency. A screen
on one of the shelves blinked a frequency, but the picture and sound
were not turned on.
   The yurt itself was lit like a fairy tale; the delicate filaments
woven into the walls glowed with a warm, dim, yellow light; Lynn
assumed it was infinitely adjustable. She was relieved. Maybe the
strange crew just used butter lamps, like the yurts, for atmosphere.
She couldn’t think of any other reason not to replace them with
something more permanent. Like a bunch of kids playing on the
edge of the world with crystals.
  Just like you play at what you consider the center of the world
with alleles, Lynn thought. Those small bits of the genetic code.
There is no center anymore. Everything is everywhere.
  She sat up and then rose cautiously, testing her leg. It still ached
but held her weight. She felt clearheaded and ravenous. It was a
relief to know that she wasn’t dying, anyway.
  She pulled on her pants and sweater, put on her shoes, feeling
renewed.
  In the kitchen area, the dinner dishes were drying next to a deep
porcelain sink. Running water, even. Racked in front of a
background of rough red and gold cloth, the simple white dishes
looked beautiful. Lynn wondered if Sattva might not have slipped
her some opium after all.
   She sat on a large silk pillow patterned with golden elephants at
the round slate table, where a bowl of small dumplings waited, with
chopsticks. She popped one into her mouth. Inside was curried bean
curd. She dipped the next one into the cool, sweet green sauce in
another bowl. An iron teapot hung over a brazier set into the center
of the table; she saw a pot holder and used it to unhook the teapot
and poured herself steaming tea. She ate and drank until she was
satisfied.
  Outside she heard a distant deep sound, almost like a horn.
Hurriedly she gulped the rest of her tea and stood, ignoring the
twinge in her leg. It wasn’t so bad once she was standing. She
limped across the yurt and grabbed her jacket from next to the bed.
Orange and black. Rather ugly, but probably all they had in
whatever market Hawkins had raided. She shrugged into it, felt in
the pockets, smiled. Thank you, Hawkins. Hat and gloves. Probably
just as ugly. Next to the door was a bamboo cylinder filled with a
variety of carved walking sticks; she gratefully removed one and
pushed through the flap into the night.
  She was hit by a wall of frigid air, and her ears burned before she
pulled on the hat. Above the black jagged rim of mountains flamed a
billion stars. Or so it seemed to her.
   She had rarely seen stars so bright. The lights of the great cities
of the world, where she seemed to spend most of her time,
obliterated them. She gazed at them for a long moment, suddenly
caught by the pure romance of the ostensible goals of Interspace: to
travel there.
  Then she laughed harshly. She believed in the here and now.
Humans had the tools necessary to make the earth all anyone could
ever long for until the distant death of time from heat or cold. And
only human nature stood in the way of near-perfection.
   She laughed again, this time at herself. The Japanese monks had
tolerated her presence at the zendo, as they ought to have. But they
must have been able to tell how very far she was from
enlightenment! Petty, rude, selfish, pampered—who was she to
grumble about humanity in general?
  The very air here was cleansing, almost as if it blew straight
through her, as if she were just loosely assembled particles with
plenty of space between each speck. Lovely, lovely, despite the
cold—maybe, perhaps, because of it. The intense, deep black of
space; the power of the land, so different from that of Hawaii. So
austere.
  She looked away from the near-hypnotic heavens and tried to get
her bearings.
  Fires burned here and there on the plain, near the yurts, in
containers that kept them from being scattered by the wind. But she
saw no people, only a few dogs. Some of the windows in the tiny
town half a mile away were lit.
  Up on the rise, she could also see the dome. Was it—glowing?
  She hiked up the hill, pushing herself with the stick. Her leg
ached but the splint helped enormously. As she approached it, her
interest increased. It was glowing, faint, light green through the
translucent green panels. What the hell was going on in there?
  She reached it, circled around until she came to a door. She
knocked. No answer. She turned the knob and pulled. It swung open
easily, and she stepped over the threshold.
  There was no one inside. She closed the door behind her and
stood in the glow, beneath the high center of the dome, again with
the strange and even more intense sensation that she, herself, was
made of particles, loosely assembled, held together by some amazing
force. Of course, she was. She was a thinking sort of space, that was
all. A part of space gathered together by gravity, informed by a
complex code, that did things.
  A part of space prone to strange thoughts after fever, she told
herself. Would Sattva tell her more about this? Where was everyone?
She turned and walked across the slightly yielding floor. Inside a
lacquer box to one side she found a cloth helmet with electrodes
inside. As she put it down she leaned on one of the floor panels; it
beeped, and one of the wall panels came to life, empty of
information. Waiting.
  She could not resist. She slipped the helmet on.
  The screen was actually a projector; in front of Lynn, the air filled
with holographic images. Images of her brain. She saw a panel
below that would vary the sections with a mouse.
  She could cruise through her own brain. Interesting. But hardly
novel. She wondered what they used it for here.
   She removed the helmet and the images ceased. She carefully
folded it and put it back in the box and closed the lid. She shouldn’t
be here. Then she smiled, realizing that she really wanted to try on
the crystal halo. Yes! Put on the halo and then do some biofeedback
with the brain imager. That would be fun. But Mikhel must have
stowed it somewhere; she didn’t see it.
  The haunting, deep horn sounded again, as if it were the voice of
the sky.
   Electrified, she hurried to the door, stepped outside, turned.
There—at the golden-roofed temple. Now she could see that a few
torches flickered on the terrace and along the steep walkway that led
to the temple.
   It wasn’t far. She wished she had a flash but didn’t know where
to find one and so ventured out beyond the row of fires; her feet
found a hardened path. All she had to do was head straight and
hope there were no crevasses between her and the temple.
  Buffeted and exhilarated by the wind, she hurried, feeling like a
penguin with her stiff gait.
   It didn’t take her long—about ten minutes—to get to the ramp at
its foot. Then it was easy going. She turned onto the smooth paving
stones and held to the railing, limping but determined to get to the
top. As she climbed she became aware of chanting.
  Once at the top she turned toward the temple.
  A vast balcony was empty but for two figures standing at the
door. She recognized tall, thin Hawkins and chunky Akamu, staring
through the open door from which flowed the sound of deep
chanting. Above the lintel were two stone lions with fierce faces, and
the flickering torchlight illuminated a frieze of inlaid turquoise.
Crossing the courtyard, she stopped next to Hawkins and stared
inside.
  On a raised dais sat Sattva, in full lotus, swathed in heavy
embroidered robes and wearing an elaborate headdress. About fifty
people faced her, chanting. The chanting abruptly ceased, and in the
rich silence Lynn’s breath caught in awe.
  She could not see the ceiling for it went beyond the light cast by
the butter lamps. Behind Sattva was a huge sitting Buddha, smooth
and gold, so tall—fifty feet?—that his massive head was lost in the
shadows. Every surface of the room was covered with intricate
design— carvings, inlaid mother-of-pearl, golden visions of demons
and various grades of paradise.
  How many centuries had this place been here?
  She saw an empty cushion. As she moved toward it she felt
Hawkins’s hand tighten on her shoulder but shrugged it off. Not
making a sound, she sat, carefully arranging her injured leg in a
vague semblance of a lotus position, and watched her breath course
golden up and down her spine for what seemed an eternity.
  When Lynn opened her eyes the room was empty of people except
for Sattva, who was once more wearing jeans, boots, and her bright
jacket. Lynn blinked. She could not remember ever having been in so
deep a trance.
  Sattva was watching her, sitting on a cushion, her arms wrapped
around her legs.
  “I wanted to make sure you found your way back,” she said, her
voice low and resonant in the huge room.
  Lynn could not speak for a few moments as she became
reoriented. She didn’t know if she should be here, in this sacred
place. Finally, she straightened her legs and massaged them to
bring back feeling. Sattva helped her stand, and they left the room.
Sattva handed her the walking stick.
  When they were in the vestibule, Lynn asked, “Was that you—?”
  Sattva nodded. “Me.” She stood still, as if awaiting more
questions.
   “I’m just a bit surprised,” she said. “Zen roshis are almost always
men, although there are a few women now. Maybe five percent. And
from what I gathered about Tibetan Buddhism—which isn’t
much—it seemed that there weren’t even any nuns at all.”
  “Pretty much true,” said Sattva. “In the past, but not now. Things
are changing. Everywhere. All kinds of things. Come on. Let’s go.
Pretty soon you’ll realize how tired you are. I was really surprised
you made it all the way up here.”
  As Lynn negotiated the many turns of the high stone ramp, she
realized how right Sattva was. She looked across the plain. The
dome still glowed.
  Lynn woke the next day both puzzled and determined.
  But, she realized, she also felt safe.
  She dressed and stood, testing her leg. Sore, but much, much
better, she realized in relief. The mender must be working.
   A few people around the table were drinking tea, but about five
others sat in one corner conferencing heavily in German around the
large screen, which had lost its mantra and instead had some sort
of fractal display. It leaped from the screen and became
three-dimensional. One of the women did something with her
control sphere. Then she noticed that Lynn was watching, and the
display vanished.
  A digital readout on the wall above the screen said 11:57. So late!
They must think she was a lazy slug. They fell silent as she passed
them on her way outside. Lynn was mildly irritated. What do they
think I am, some sort of spy? And if so, what are they doing?
  The day was again exhilarating and incredibly bright.
  “You’ll need sunscreen if you stay out here too long, paleface,” she
heard, and turned to see Akamu.
  Was it her imagination, or had he changed in the brief time she’d
known him? He seemed taller—was he just standing straighter? His
face looked thinner, more mature. His brown eyes seemed more
aware, as if he were emerging from a deep sleep.
  “I’ll have you know I take quite a nice tan,” she said. “What’s up?”
  Akamu looked around. “This place is weird,” he said. Just a kid,
sounding like a kid. She felt as if she’d had a glimpse of who he was
becoming, not who he was now.
  “Really,” she replied. “How? Besides the obvious fact that they live
in felt tents at an elevation of ten thousand feet?”
   “Eight thousand ninety-four,” said Akamu, pointing at his watch.
“It’s the people.”
  “What about them?” Whom had he known who had not been
weird? she wondered. Even she probably fell into the realm of
unusual, if not weird.
  “Well, they all think that Sattva is going to save the world, for one
thing.”
  “Oh?”
  “Yeah. She’s the new Dalai Lama.”
  “Oh.” Lynn tried to digest this for a moment. It was too boggling,
actually. “The Dalai Lama?”
  “The. Javindi told me.”
  “Javindi?”
  “Yeah, one of the… entourage? Is that the right word?”
  “I suppose.” She had been wondering what to call them herself.
She had studied them for a while before getting out of bed. Young,
mostly—her age. A few older men and women. Most of them looked
Tibetan, but not all of them. Some looked Caucasian; Mikhel, of
course; there was one Indian woman and one African man, at least.
She certainly hadn’t seen everyone. They had an air about them.
Intense, but not frenzied. Focused and precise as they worked with
their computers, as they conferred. And then there was the dome.
  “You missed everything. They got up at four and meditated.”
   “How do they know she’s the Dalai Lama?” She began to walk
slowly back down the long row of yurts, favoring her leg. They were
on a ridge that looked out over endless grasslands. Out in the sparse
pastures she saw yaks and sheep grazing.
  He smiled. “That’s the best part. You know how they used to find
the new Dalai Lama after the old one died? They believed the Dalai
Lama would reincarnate immediately, so they’d go all over the
country with things the old one had used. If a kid could tell which
ones belonged to the old one, they figured that kid must really be the
old one, reincarnated. At least that was one of the things they did.”
  “That’s what they did with Sattva?”
   “Not exactly. She got a bachelor’s degree in Beijing and then got a
scholarship at Harvard. The Dali Lama lived near Boston the last
three years before he died and lots of Tibetans live there. She was
friends with all of them and spent a lot of time at the center, the old
guy’s house. Anyway, she was at the center one day and went in the
library and started pulling books out of the shelves; she didn’t know
why exactly. They bothered her, she said.”
  “She said?”
  “Yeah, I asked her about it. What do you think, this is all on the
system you got me in Hong Kong?”
  “It was expensive enough,” she said, in a teasing tone.
  He smiled a bit smugly. She was glad to see he had a sense of
humor. “Anyway, she put all the books in a big stack and left. A few
days later the people in charge called her.”
  “The people in charge?”
  “Yeah. Whoever they are. People who knew the Dalai Lama. They
wanted to know how she knew that those books had been added to
the library since he died. She said she had no idea. But apparently
she had removed every single one that had been put there, and none
that had belonged to him. So they started to give her all the tests.
They had pretty much given up on finding the new one, I guess. It
had been a really long time since he’d died. She finished her
doctorate and came back here to get her training. She snuck in. The
Chinese don’t know she’s here.”
  Lynn found that hard to believe. She’d never heard anything
about the Dalai Lama having returned to Tibet, but as Akamu had
amply illustrated, she was woefully ill-informed about everything
except DNA.
  “Man, Sattva knows a lot,” continued Akamu.
   “No doubt,” said Lynn. “People who want to change the world
need to.” They had that air here, she realized, that almost fanatic
zeal of disciples, which she disliked. People like that always wanted
to make you into one of them and couldn’t relate to you if you
disagreed even slightly with their dogma.
   “I don’t know if she wants to, but everyone here thinks she’s going
to. That’s what Javindi said.”
   “A slight difference,” conceded Lynn. “I wonder how they’re going
to change the world?”
  “That’s the best part. They’re going to master time by changing
the consciousness of the world.”
  She wasn’t particularly jarred by the statement. She’d practically
been weaned on the idea that IS would someday master time
through faster-than-light travel. She felt like she’d heard every
theory in the book and then some. “The consciousness of the people
in the world,” she told Akamu, in a correcting tone. “That’s what
they want to change.”
  “No! The consciousness of the world, dummy! All the stuff.”
  “All the matter?” she asked, truly curious.
  “I hardly think that Lynn is a dummy,” came a voice from behind
them, and they both turned.
  “Hi, Sattva,” said Akamu. “I was telling Lynn all about you.”
  “So I gathered,” said Sattva, a slight smile on her face. She
reminded Lynn of a Native American woman she’d once
known—coppery skin, high, broad cheekbones. “I’m sure none of it is
garbled.”
  “Oh, Akamu is pretty sharp,” said Lynn. She realized she’d barely
had a moment to talk to him, to decide what to do, to question him,
or anything. That was the next thing to do. That and confront
Hawkins. Who was he with, what were they up to? How had he
known Akamu was with her, and where to find him? And
then—was he telling the truth, part of it, or none of it? The very
familiar feeling of anxiety returned full force. She had to get going!
Whatever that meant in the situation she found herself in here.
  “I guess you’d like me to run along,” Akamu said, looking from
one to the other.
  “No!” said Lynn. “In fact I really need to talk to you—” She
grabbed the sleeve of his jacket but he twisted away.
  “That’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got a lot to do.” He waved and
hurried away, disappearing behind one of the yurts.
  Sattva was quiet for a moment, but looked directly at Lynn. Her
black eyes were amused. “Just what did he tell you?”
  “That you think you’re the Dalai Lama,” Lynn said.
  “Slightly incorrect. I don’t know what to think. All the evidence
says that, yes, and I’m enough of a scientist to be open-minded
enough to believe the theorem until a better one comes along. I’m
deep into the business of changing paradigms, actually.”
  “But others think you’re the Dalai Lama? I mean, the
reincarnation of the Buddha?” Lynn persisted.
   Sattva shrugged. “They do. I certainly don’t consciously remember
having had other lives; they know that I don’t. It’s a bit
disappointing, actually, but that’s the way it goes. I’m not trying to
pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. I try to keep myself as
demythologized as much as possible. I appreciate the spiritual
training. It’s very intense. Unique in all the world. They were quite
chagrined that I put off beginning it until I finished my doctorate,
but I felt I was learning some very relevant things. I don’t blame
them, though, especially now that I’m well into it.” She grinned
again. “Unless I get ahold of some sort of illegal long-term
life-enhancement, I’ll never reach the end of it! But I’m just kidding.
Any change to my physiology would skew everything. Your
body—your body-mind, I suppose—becomes very fine-tuned. The
training has been kept alive here underground for almost a hundred
years now.”
   She took Lynn’s arm. She smiled, and her eyes became dark slits
from which beamed amusement. The wind picked up her hair and
pulled it around her head in long black tendrils. “Let’s walk for a
bit. It will be all right for your leg as long as you have that splint
on, and you need to make sure your muscles don’t atrophy. Let me
know if I’m talking your ear off.”
  As they walked, Sattva waved her hand at the village, gleaming
in the sun, half a mile away, before they took a path that led down
toward a small grassy plateau dotted with grazing yaks. “We
Tibetans are pretty persistent, and our philosophical system is too.
This isn’t the first time the Chinese have tried to smash Tibet, but
Tibetan Buddhism is extremely hardy. It’s survived other eras of
Chinese domination, for longer than this one.”
  “What are they trying to do this time?” asked Lynn.
   “They’re trying to kill us with capitalism.” Sattva’s laugh was a
brief bark of bemusement. “You know that they’re trying to run
China like a huge corporation? The problem is that this approach
isn’t a whole lot different from communism. Decisions are mulled
over by committees who are usually pretty far removed from where
the action is. The heart of true capitalism—the space for business
start-ups, a healthy tax climate, and so on—is stifled by regulations.
Or by violence—one of the side effects of capitalism seems to be a
mafia. Hong Kong—the whole gung-ho entrepreneurial
atmosphere—washed through the government when it was returned
to China and really surprised a lot of people. Zhong Chau was
elected—pro-small business and very Green—but of course was
assassinated; her antitrust stance pissed a lot of people off. Anyway,
they don’t like me much; I’m trying to create a lot of independent
primal societies in Tibet—”
  “It does look pretty primal here,” said Lynn.
  Sattva seemed to do nothing but smile. “No, dear, not primitive. I
can see what you’re thinking, but there’s nothing supernatural about
it. Primal Societies, capitalized. True democracies. Total
information access for everyone on a global scale. The ability to
understand information on many levels—statistically, socially, even
chaotically. Experts who are able to communicate information to
their fellow villagers in a variety of ways, so that people with
different learning styles can see what they’re talking about.” Sattva
tilted her head. “To give you a simple example, some people get a lot
of information from charts and graphs. Others don’t. But once they
have information they can try to make decisions about issues that
will affect their lives. And once this is more widespread, I believe
that the political situation in the world will change dramatically.
It’s very simple, but it depends on education. Now you can get a
first-rate education just sitting at home. It’s tremendous. What is
the world doing about it? Nothing! Countries like China are
actually holding people back. The idea of educating too many people
is always frightening to those in power. It’s a good way to lose it.
Want to sit for a moment?”
  They settled on a large sun-warmed stone. Lynn leaned against
the rough lichened planes and put her arms behind her head,
watched clouds surge across the sky as Sattva continued.
   “As for me being the Dalai Lama, I certainly have a strong sense
of duty toward humanity, in terms of feeling it necessary to help all
people in any way that I possibly can. Of course the traditional role
of the Lamas was to bring all people still living in the cycle of death
and rebirth to enlightenment so that they could forsake that cycle.
But in this age I feel that we’re on the verge of uniting two disparate
poles of human thought—not only the spiritual and the material,
but the very small and the very large. Quantum theory and
gravitational spacetime. Consciousness—and the matter of the mind
through which it arises— is the essential aspect of existence. It
arguably permeates the entire field of being.”
  She leaned forward and clasped her legs close to her chest. “I
believe that we’re coming very close to understanding the true
nature of the physical universe—the very roots of matter, from the
very small to the very large, from the quantum workings within the
very brain to the nature of curved spacetime.
  “You see, a famous mathematician once got this sort of
intellectual bug. He believed that when we understand the nature of
consciousness on a quantum level—or understand quantum
mechanics in enough depth to explain the phenomenon of
consciousness with it, same thing—we will have the tools and the
information we need to understand the rest of the physical
universe—including another of its mysterious manifestations, time.”
  “Are the two necessarily related?” asked Lynn.
  Sattva twisted herself around so that she faced Lynn, crossing her
legs tailor style. The sun was in her eyes and she squinted, but Lynn
could still see the deep earnestness in them.
   “Well, consciousness could be said to create time, since to think of
time without consciousness is meaningless. Time is essentially a
human construct, a somewhat slippery description of the
relationship between ourselves—our consciousness—and matter. Is
it so strange to think that consciousness will eventually be able to
understand the physical nature of the universe, including itself?
And then use that understanding to access, even change, the
physical structure of the universe, much as we’ve been able to
manipulate the physical structure of the human body?
  “All forms of Buddhism have studied consciousness in many ways
for thousands of years. Particle physics is necessarily concerned
with not only the formation of the universe—and therefore, of
course, time—but is concerned with the phenomenon of
consciousness as well. It could be that we, as conscious beings, exist
on the edge of a dynamical system. That time is a fractal.”
  Lynn breathed in the sweet smell of the waving grasses; stared at
the sky. The heat of the rock was pleasant.
  “What would that mean?” she asked. “If that’s true, then we
always have, right?”
  “Well, that’s like saying”—she cast Lynn a shrewd look—“that our
genes have always manifested us, so what’s the point in finding out
more about them, using them in new ways?”
  Sattva slid off the rock and stood with her feet braced and apart;
she stuck her hands in her pocket; it seemed for a fleeting instant to
Lynn that even if she tried very hard to push Sattva over she would
not be able to.
  Sattva’s eyes were bright; her cheeks flushed as she spoke.
  “Lynn, if time is a fractal, perhaps consciousness is the key to
jumping between one area of the metauniverse to the other!”
  Lynn politely repressed a sigh and did not roll her eyes. Her life
had been full of such fanatics. Always wanting more, pushing in
every direction—biological, mathematical, sociological. And what
for? What for? So an innocent boy could be blown up in an old
Nuuanu shack?
  She sat up, ready to blast Sattva for—for what?
  Lynn realized that anger was making her irrational. She took a
deep breath; she did want to know what they thought they were
doing here.
  “The metauniverse?” she asked, trying to arrange her leg so it did
not hurt. On a hill across a deep chasm, a herd of yaks trotted up a
narrow path and disappeared behind a rock outcropping, their
shadows short in the midday sun.
  “Yes,” said Sattva. “Vilenkin came up with the term back in the
nineties. He postulated that thinking of ourselves as one of many
similar civilizations in an infinite metauniverse—or metaverse, as
we call it—is a much more fruitful approach than thinking
ourselves as unique in a universe. He said that it’s much more likely
that we’re average, an average manifestation of what is possible,
and that therefore an infinite number of such universes exist in the
metaverse. He called this the principle of mediocrity.” She laughed.
“Fitting name!”
  “Ah,” said Lynn. “So you’re trying to communicate with them?”
   “Communicate with, or travel to them,” she said. “And according
to the principle of mediocrity, that’s probably what they’re trying to
do as well. I’m really in a unique position. The training I receive as
the Dalai Lama is not just philosophy, not just studying the
scriptures. It involves real physical changes. It’s very exciting,
actually.” She paused. “Sorry. I shouldn’t preach.”
  Lynn tried to say what she thought as politely as possible. “Maybe
I’m just cynical,” she said, “but I’ve lived my entire life around
people who say they intend to change the world but all they really
want is individual profit for themselves at the expense of as many
others as it takes.”
  “You are cynical,” said Sattva. “I’m about ready for lunch, aren’t
you?”
  “Breakfast,” said Lynn, sliding carefully from the rock and
dusting off her pants. They started back toward the yurts.
  “Cynicism is almost essential in a scientist,” said Sattva, then
hesitated for a moment. “I hope you don’t mind him talking about
you, but that’s what Hawkins says you are. I gathered that when you
spoke of mitochondrial tracking yesterday and asked him. He speaks
very highly of you.”
  “Oh, he doesn’t really know much about me,” Lynn said as lightly
as possible. She eyed the dome as they neared it.
  Sattva saw her and smiled. “Later,” she said. “I assure you that
all our secrets will be revealed. In fact, that’s what I wanted to ask
you. I’ve tried to put together a multidisciplinary situation here. A
sort of team that thinks about… well, everything. But in a new way,
informed by fields of knowledge that might not otherwise interface
because most scientists are quite narrowly focused. You’re a
geneticist?”
  “Yes,” said Lynn. “But I’m—” She paused for a moment. How to
say this? I’m running away. I’m taking this kid from the corruption
that science has been used for in IS and fleeing into the wilderness.
I’m not going to do anything for a long, long time. Except…
  Except.
   She thought about the earring but did not touch it. Mao’s genome
could be the definitive factor, the information that, when compared
to that of the other powerful figures she had, might crystallize all
her painstakingly collected information about leadership—the evil
and the good.
  Sunlight washed in great bright sweeps across the mountains,
interspersed with bands of shadow, as she stopped stock-still.
   Why don’t you be honest? she asked herself. It certainly won’t hurt
your research that the person you’re trying to save is the clone of one
of the world’s great leaders. For his own good, of course…
  She frowned and stomped forward for a few steps, but winced.
She’d forgotten her leg.
  Sattva took her arm gently. “Lynn, you don’t have to decide this
very minute. You hardly know us. Let’s have tea.”
  Their yurt was close. It took a few minutes for Lynn’s eyes to
adjust inside the dark yurt. Again the people at the computers
looked at her mistrustfully, but Sattva said, “She’s okay,” and they
went back to whatever they had been doing.
  “I’m surprised about the electric lines here,” said Lynn, as Sattva
whisked powdered green tea into a water-filled iron pot from which
peered the tiny faces of frowning chimeras. “It’s so remote.”
  Sattva said, “That was one of the first things the Chinese did
here, actually. The Himalayas are the birthplace of some of China’s
great rivers. They came in and built small hydroelectric plants
wherever there was falling water. That was what—seventy years
ago? Of course, there was quite a stiff price for that help! For a
while they tried to make the farmers grow wheat instead of barley,
as if they could control the climate and soil as well as people. They
failed in both efforts, of course. But eventually they got the
monkhood pretty much busted up, by killing most of them off or
sending them to China.”
  “Where’s Hawkins?” she asked, as Sattva poured them both tea.
She held the cup with both hands, relaxing into the small bit of
warmth. “I thought he’d be here.”
  “He had some reconnoitering to do. It seems that he wants to get
you into Nepal.” She smiled, but her dark eyes were sad, and Lynn
took the tightening around them, and around her mouth, for
concern.
   “It’s pretty rough there—a lot like here, actually, but without the
Chinese soldiers.” She looked directly at Lynn. “Hawkins is an
extraordinary man. You can trust him with your life. I have. More
than once. He speaks more languages than you can shake a stick at
and seems to blend in everywhere. I met him at a faculty party at
Harvard; he was wearing a suit and tie! He’s a handsome man
when he wants to be. Rough and urbane—but you know all that,
eh?” Her eyes were pensive as she looked toward the door. “I hope
he’s all right,” she said so quietly Lynn almost missed it. “He enjoys
risk too much.”
  “I hope we’re not endangering you by being here,” Lynn said. She
reached for some cakes on the table and tasted one. Meat inside.
   “Take more,” urged Sattva, and she did. “It would be nothing
new,” said Sattva. “I’m sure the Chinese know I’m here, though my
crew seems to want to pretend that we’re all invisible somehow. If
the Chinese have any fears about me I’m sure they’re remote. I
haven’t made any nationalistic moves, though I’m sure that I could.
Probably a lot of people are disappointed that I haven’t. The most
I’ve done is try to get every family their own satlink; pretty radical,
when you think about it, or at least, radicalizing. Of course they
don’t realize that at a certain point the Primal Societies, which they
would find silly if they knew about them at all, will bring about
enormous political change. The problem is actually one of
information now, rather than religion. The Chinese still have a very
tight, closely linked intelligence and scientific community. Of course
they should be—scientific progress is the source of wealth now and,
heavens, we can’t just piss it away, can we! Let’s use it to get richer
than everyone else!”
  Lynn glanced back at the small band of people. “So you’re on the
web?” she asked.
  “Of course,” said Sattva. “In fact, we have our own dedicated
network. But we monitor various scientific work from around the
world. In fact, I just sent a piece to Physical Review. I don’t know if
they’ll take it yet.” She smiled again, took another sip of tea. “It’s
rather strange, but exceedingly well pinned down.”
  “I wonder if you’d mind if I checked up on some things. I might
have some mail.”
  “Depends. I’d have someone monitor everything you do, so you
wouldn’t inadvertently give out information we don’t want anyone to
have. And I wouldn’t want you to send anything. We can keep
anyone from knowing that you checked your mail. If someone was
looking for you they might otherwise be able to trace you here.”
  “Oh—right.” Why tell me anything then? Lynn wondered.
  “Hawkins really gave me no choice,” said Sattva, as if Lynn had
spoken aloud. “He’d only come here in extreme duress. It’s really
quite bizarre. For some reason he thinks that you and Akamu are
essential to what we are doing. Or that you can help somehow. He
wasn’t very clear. He was exhausted. And then he hurried off to
make arrangements for Nepal late last night. He was suddenly in a
great rush. But that’s why… well, the lecture and the invitation. I
trust him completely.” She sighed. “And see him so rarely.”
   Lynn’s uneasiness returned. She just wasn’t sure who had tried to
kill her. What was she doing, anyway? Two things—what was the
important thing? Cataloging DNA, unraveling the evil shadow of
eugenics from hard information insofar as that was possible… and
perhaps it was not possible. Some parties believed that she was
taking a tiny bit of Mao’s DNA from China, to compare it with that
of the other political tycos in her library. And that was true, as far
as it went.
  But maybe Mao’s DNA was supposed to have been just the icing
on the cake to tempt her. Her brothers were certainly not above
using her—it was quite possible that she was transporting
something else for IS. What might that be? She stared at the
flickering butter lamp, aware of Sattva’s eyes on her face.
  She also had Akamu, an illegal clone, created by IS or the
Homeland Movement or someone else—a real, living, extraordinary
boy who had certain human rights; he was not anyone’s property to
create and dispose of as they pleased. Perhaps the attack on her was
related to him; perhaps someone had thought that he was with her
at that time. Lynn felt her face growing hot at the thought of how
he’d been treated.
  And at her own proprietary interest. In which she would not
indulge…
  Each interpretation of events posed its own set of explanations.
  Lynn started at an electronic beep from across the yurt. One
woman stared intently at a screen for a moment, then pressed a key
and ten feet away a paper slid into a basket and a light blinked.
Sattva rose and went over to look at it.
   Lynn continued her musing. As unique as Kamehameha’s clone
was, she failed to see how any aspect of Akamu’s creation or of his
life could further the wedding of quantum theory with Einstein’s
space-time or expose Hawking’s baby universes bobbing like so
many soap bubbles all around them with flickering openings to
other universes that, theorists postulated, must exist. Mao’s DNA
was a toy, really; not much more right now, because of all the
international laws governing genetic research and use of research
results. Still, for her own information, it would be fascinating.
 But was she able, if need be, to let it go? If you’re so idealistic,
why not stop this right now? Throw away Mao, now.
   No. Even hypothetically the idea was abhorrent to her; it went
against everything she’d been working on all her
life—understanding humans at the most basic level possible. She
reached up and brushed the earring lightly, savoring its
smoothness, imagining its content, seeing that information unfurl…
  Besides. She might need it to bargain with her brothers.
  Sattva dropped back onto her pillow. Lynn let go of the earring
and put her hand back in her lap guiltily.
   Sattva said, “I can see you’re still skeptical. Look at it this way—
we’ve mastered one dimension, physical distance, with fast travel
and with telecommunication. Understanding consciousness is the
next step for humankind, the next step in evolution—mindful
evolution, for the first time on earth, at least. All of our AI models
are basically attempts to replicate consciousness, to create it, and
thereby understand ourselves better. First we extended our physical
body with tools, and then mechanically and robotically. So what is
consciousness? What is it good for? How and why did it come into
existence? Is there some sort of evolutionary reason? Like everything
else that exists, it’s an integral part of the universe. Yet it is not
matter, though it springs from matter and influences matter.
Crudely, so far, just through humans thinking about what has to be
done and then doing it—things great and small. Every action of
daily life. The building of all cities. The hydrogen bomb. Space
travel. They were all first only thoughts.”
  “So what’s going on in the dome?” asked Lynn. “I don’t think it’s
just an artifact.”
 Sattva smiled a bit. “You’re not going to let that go, are you?
Okay. We’re using it to work on the ten-dimensional problem.”
  “String theory.”
  “Right. But with a twist. That of consciousness, of course. I
mentioned Penrose. He wasn’t the only one thinking about the
body-mind problem in a scientific way. More and more scientists
believe that understanding the evolution and nature of
consciousness will lay the groundwork for a solution to the big
question—how and where do the laws of quantum mechanics
interface with the laws of space-time? Artificial intelligence is a big
part of it too, because we need to know whether the laws governing
the evolution of artificial intelligence—say, in self-replicating
programs—can serve as a basis for understanding consciousness.
And also of course whether anything that originates in that way and
grows to be more complex can eventually become conscious. We have
various intelligence modules working away, constantly, on
calculations linking consciousness with spacetime. A long shot, to be
sure.”
  “So—the dome?”
   “Well, I mentioned quantum coherence, where the brain is in a
state of superconductivity, and we are trying to pin down and
prolong this state, using the dome, because when it is in this state
the brain is not only linked to quantum events, but might possibly
be able to influence quantum events consciously. But only in ways
regulated by all our physical laws, of course—this doesn’t mean that
we can go out, say, and beam some sort of mindrays around and
change things. But it does mean, perhaps, that we can predict the
location of and travel to other areas of the metaverse. That ability
would have to do with quantum-level oscillations and quantum
nonlocality. We know a lot more that we think we know—for
instance, the eye is sensitive to just one photon of light. So the
human eye has information that quantum theory says is impossible
to know—where one photon is at a particular specific instant. Can
we make this information conscious? Can we use it?”
  She grabbed a dumpling and stuffed it in her mouth. “Oh, Lynn,
sometimes I drown people in gibberish. I have plenty of hard
information to show you, if you’re interested. It’s the numbers that
count, the theorems, the proofs, not these verbal descriptions. Words
just don’t do the job.”
  “So—all these people believe in you?” asked Lynn.
  Sattva smiled. “Well. I hope not me. They are each individuals.
Some of them believe that they will be transmuted into pure
intelligence, via computers, and they’re working to make that
possible. That doesn’t sound too pleasant to me, but different strokes
for different folks. Ingrid over there”—Sattva nodded toward a tall
woman with a short buzz of hair fanning out around her face—“is
an internationally known AI expert. She’s building the various
components she’ll need in order to have her brain read into the web.”
Sattva shrugged. “It seems macabre to me, to tell you the truth, but
she has the soul of a pioneer. She claims that there are already
personalities on the web who no longer have bodies—I mean, not
your standard AI personalities but former humans. We’re just an
odd crew, I guess. We each have something to put into the pot.” She
shrugged. “In my opinion, the answer to the burning question of
consciousness and the exploration of the new frontier of spacetime
will be physical and discrete.”
  Lynn looked at Sattva. “So what about you? Have you negotiated
space-time? In a physical and discrete way, of course?”
  Sattva didn’t reply. This irritated Lynn. Then Sattva said,
quietly, “Hawkins says that your father is the head of Interspace.”
  “Hawkins talks too much.”
  “Is it true?”
  Lynn spoke carefully. There it was. The nugget that Sattva was
after. The only reason they wanted her at all, probably, the reason
Sattva was wooing her this way. An in.
  “He used to have a lot of power, yes, though Interspace is set up as
a board. But now… I think he’s essentially been retired. Pushed
aside. He’s… kind of old-fashioned when it comes to the sort of
decisions that IS is making now.”
  “There were rumors that twenty years ago IS was doing illegal
nanotech experiments that made people think that they could travel
in time. I wonder—do you know if they’ve been continued? Refined?”
  “I need air,” said Lynn, and rose rapidly. Despite sudden
dizziness, she strode outside, grabbing a walking stick at the last
minute before she went through the flap.
  “Goddamn Hawkins,” she muttered under her breath, infuriated.
She glanced back. Sattva wasn’t following her—good! What right
did he have to tell a complete stranger, and a nutcase at that, all
about her? And why would anyone assume that just because she was
her father’s daughter that she would know all sorts of secret IS
information? That was what Sattva was really after. The hell with
that!
  She stumped along awkwardly, favoring her leg, for about five
minutes, fuming. Then she looked up and realized that she was
heading toward the temple. Fine. Good a place to go as any.
  She was sweating by the time she reached the terrace. Panting,
she turned.
   Before her were jagged blue and white peaks. The highest
mountains on earth, and growing an inch every five years. Here had
lived a strange race of people for thousands of years, one of the most
homogeneously religious of all countries, where virtually everyone
believed that various miraculous feats such as the ability to control
one’s body temperature, changing matter just by thinking about it
(but very hard and in just the right way!), and even swimming
through time by living a thousand incarnations, were not only
possible but a reality that overwhelmed the physical world.
  She sat on a carved stone bench and became lost in the fantastic
vista before her. The wind was more chill up here; she zipped her
jacket.
 Sattva’s query had upset her. Why? Old nanotech experiments?
Ha! So many!
  In front of her, to the west, where the sun was beginning its
descent, fierce winds moved clouds swiftly so that—by pieces and
then in its entirety—a previously hidden range of stunning peaks
was revealed beyond the ridge she had taken for the edge of the
world. She inhaled sharply and blinked, for it was as if inner and
outer united, and a long-ago day came into view much as the range
had appeared.
  Lynn grabbed her long black hair back with one hand to keep the
wind from whipping it across her face. Swift sunset turned the blue
Pacific steel gray far below, then fired it with red, gold, and rose.
Within ten minutes, the sky was a deepening shadow filling with
stars.
  A good time for it—the music—to come. The gardeners were gone.
Her brothers were not around. Her stepmother and her father often
sat out here after dinner and heated sake on the little brazier next to
the stone lanai, but tonight they were busy.
  The forest in the gully next to her—a mysterious place of giant
banyans and the sandalwoods environmentalists had
planted—rustled in the evening trades that skimmed the top of
Tantalus. The darkening bulk of the mountain sloped away swiftly,
at the end of the lawn, down to the twinkling lights of Honolulu.
  Then she heard the owl.
  She stood very still, and the deep, hushed call was repeated.
  Lynn stared at the forest, hoping to see a dark shape soaring over
the treetops looking for rats and rabbits. But she saw nothing. The
last light was gone and the moon wouldn’t be up for hours. Still, she
had heard it! She knew that the escaped snowy owl from Honolulu
Zoo would come up here, where it was cool.
  She rushed up the wide, flat stone stairs, through the open sliding
panel into her room, flung some pillows off her futon—then
remembered where her handy was. Probably still under the dining
room table where it had fallen at lunch.
  “Shit,” she said, because she liked to, because it made her nanny
mad, and ran down the polished hallway to the dining room,
skidding to a halt in front of the door.
  She put her ear to the door and heard the murmur of voices.
Another important IS meeting. They were all important. Damn
them! She tried to quietly turn the knob, but it was locked.
   She went around to the side door where they brought the food in.
It was open a crack. She peered inside.
  A small blue-tinged fire crackled in the simple, elegant fireplace
behind her father. The windows were open and it got chilly fast
after sunset. He was seated at the end of the long ebony-black table.
Six people were listening to him, four men and two women. One of
the men was wearing a lovely yellow silk Chinese jacket that looked
like molten gold in the flickering firelight.
   She had seen one of the women once before and had figured out
that Dr. Honsa was her name. Honsa was thirty-two and had a
Ph.D. in genetics, just like Lynn’s real mother. Lynn had ferreted
her file out of the web for fun. Honsa looked furious now, her eyes
slitted and black. Lynn could see beneath the table that she’d made
her hands into fists in her lap.
   Lynn studied the face of the man across the table from her. Long
nose, pinched forehead, deep-set eyes. If she could remember it
closely enough, she could composite it when she got back to her
room and see if she could match that to a name.
   Her father pushed a button and dimmed the chandelier. The
liquid crystal screen between the tall windows lit, and the two
people sitting on that side of the table turned their chairs around to
watch. Now was the time.
  She pushed the door as quietly as she could but her father said,
“Who is that?” his voice angry, as it often was. It didn’t bother Lynn,
though she knew it made her half brothers, the twins, afraid. Lynn
was pretty sure that Alyssa, her American stepmother, was afraid
too, though her face was always expressionless, her voice low,
smooth, and controlled.
  “I need my handy,” she said. “To record the owl—”
  “We’re having an important meeting, Lynn. You are ten. You
should know better than this. Please leave.”
   “Okay,” she said, then ran across fifteen feet of polished teak
floor, crawled under the table between two chairs, and felt around
until she had the handy.
   She shoved herself back out, stood, bowed, and saw smiles tug at
the mouths of a few guests as they inclined their heads in the
flickering light coming from the wall. She retreated backward to the
door, flat sandwiched between her hands at the center of her chest,
gasshoed a few more times for effect, while the voice that went with
the pictures on the screen droned on.
  “Out!” yelled her father, and she slowly stepped back into the hall
as he strode toward her and slammed the door in her face. She
heard the lock click shut, laughed, slipped the handy into her
pocket, and ran back outside.
  Sitting on the lawn, she watched the Tourist Zone fireworks and
waited to hear the owl. A froth of aqua, gold, and white rolled
across the sky, stars peeking through like a part of it. That was The
Wave. Copper for green, cobalt for blue. Fuses remote controlled, the
whole thing precisely packed in clusters by computer.
   While she watched, she heard the twins—still practically babies—
yelling as the nurse got them ready for bed in their wing, and the
night sounds of the mountain enveloped her: soughing trees,
clicking palm fronds.
  Then it began to happen. Notes gathered in her head, as real to
her as the visible world. She allowed their harmonies to converge.
A-flat; she visualized the odd, wild little riff as written music, then
played it again in her mind to check and solidify. She rose as if
holding something very fragile and moved toward the house
carefully as a Zen monk in walking meditation.
  Then she stopped. Her father had locked the piano room this
morning because she hadn’t finished her latest genetic segment of
schoolwork. He’d pulled all dedicated music pads from her room
too, the various-sized flat remote screens where she often doodled
compositions, then touched the sensor to the screen to hear a
synthesized version.
  Her stomach twisted in anger and frustration. Of course she
could write it down, but hearing it was important, and he had no
right; he was always against her music… but before tears could
burn her eyes she took a deep breath, pressed the handy button,
hummed the idea, then relaxed. That would be enough to bring it
back later.
  The fireworks were over. The guests came out and got into the
heli parked away from the house on its pad; it rose swiftly as a
dragonfly, blue and red lights blinking, and ferried them away.
  She’d lost the owl. But it would be back.
  Her sliding doors almost always stood open, though her father
complained that rain swept in. But the low, overhanging eaves kept
all but the windiest storms out. She slipped inside.
  A corner of the room was lit with the glow of her main screen,
and one of the holographic genetic drills that she had to finish by
tomorrow still hovered next to it, a foot-high rainbow DNA helix,
each base a different hue.
  “What is wrong with this person,” she muttered, walked over, and
dimmed it. She couldn’t get rid of it till it was done. She saw that
her nurse had straightened everything. She hated that.
  She flopped onto the futon on her belly and slid back the small
control door on the handy to play back her music.
  But what was all this empty space? She realized that the record
function had been activated when it fell on the floor at lunch. It
wouldn’t bother her bird collection, of course, which was
permanently saved on the silver disk—except for the o-o bird she’d
put in the buffer this morning. They’d released some of the
previously extinct birds two years ago after cloning them from
bones, and that was something she hated to lose.
  Oh, well, might as well see what was on it. Nothing had
happened for most of the day, and it was activated by sound. She
bypassed the chatter of the maids setting up for the evening and
found where the dinner started.
  Dull grown-up talk.
  Then they were talking about nanotechnology experiments. That
interested her. They were illegal.
  She got up and lit some incense, and a thin trail of spicy smoke
hung in the air as she sat cross-legged and listened.
  She’d heard rumors from classmates about failed experiments.
She had just started a new scientific ethics class. It was interesting,
especially since most of the kids were older than she was. “Is
nanobiology ethical?” She didn’t really understand it too well, yet,
but according to one of her new friends the results could be
extremely bad. She’d heard that often nan implants mimicked
various kinds of mental illness, creating the grotesque people they
would never be able to fix who lived in Honolulu, in the old
downtown around Chinatown. Her father said those stories were
nonsense. Someday, she’d decided, she’d just see for herself.
  She recognized her father’s voice. “Dr. Honsa—wasn’t number
forty-seven your responsibility? I’ve learned that this unfortunate
woman was given experimental nans far in excess of what is legal.
Both in scope and in function. Why did you allow this to occur?”
   “Sir,” the woman said, and Lynn visualized her metallic-looking
black hair cut at odd, severe angles, the ugly green eyeshadow, that
tiny tattoo of a single triangle beneath her right ear, on her neck.
“The researchers—”
  “Your researchers, carrying out your directions,” her father
inserted.
  Dr. Honsa’s voice lightened. “Yes. Exactly. They disobeyed my
instructions—”
   “That is not acceptable,” said her father, his voice sharp and
tight. “We are talking about a human life here. Furthermore, I see
that there is evidence that this particular nan may have been
transmittable, at some point.”
   “That window was very small,” said Honsa, her voice dull and
flat. “Please—it’s not a problem—we kept no records.”
  “I know about it,” said Mr. Oshima, quietly. “And an innocent
person has died.” After a silence, he went on. “But I didn’t know
about it soon enough. That was because you knew that I would have
stopped this experiment. This all could have been done with
animals, with simulations—”
   “Mr. Oshima,” said Dr. Honsa, “this is a very complex matter. We
isolated a newly discovered bacteria that grows on electric eels and
that facilitates transmission of their charge. I believe that if we
properly introduce elements of it to the human brain, it will have
precisely the focusing effect on the wave function we have been
seeking. I do not wish to be disrespectful, but there is no way to
obtain the data we need without—”
  Lynn started at a sound and looked up. Her father was sliding
shut the door from the hallway. “Lynn, I’ve told you never to
interrupt— what’s that?” He stared at the handy.
 “You will have to take your questionable morals elsewhere, Dr.
Honsa. Interspace has no use for you,” it said.
  Lynn’s father was wearing a long blue silk robe that shimmered
in the muted light. He walked across the room and grabbed the
handy, flipped it open, and took out the silver disk.
  “No, Dad!” She jumped up and tried to grab it. “My bird
collection!”
  Without a word he bent the small disk over on itself, back and
forth, several times. His face was very pale, and there was sweat on
his forehead.
  “Daddy!” she shrieked, ashamed to be acting like her little
brothers. “Remember? My bird collection!”
  The first recording had been of squawking seagulls on Kaena
Point. She remembered it well. Her mother’s brown, smiling face,
black eyes, and the smooth black hair that never seemed in disarray,
even when blown by the wind. Long, slim fingers pushing the
buttons saying to her father, “Nonsense, of course she can handle
this. It’s old, anyway, old technology, nothing to worry about. This
will be our special project, sweetie. Maybe someday we’ll go all over
the world together, collect them all—loon calls, migrating ducks.
Wild parrots. They squawk!” Her mother’s words had always been
there, her private litany, her under-the-pillow good-night kiss after
she was gone.
  “You didn’t have a backup?” he asked, staring at her. At least he
knows it was important, she thought bitterly. That’s different.
  “No,” she whispered. Somehow she had felt it would never be
right except on this old, obsolete disc, played on the battered handy
her mother had touched and held.
  “Well. I am sorry. I am very sorry. You didn’t hear much, did
you?” His face looked older than it had this morning, the wrinkles
across his forehead and frown lines between his eyes deeper than
she’d noticed before. His narrow eyes flicked down at her, bearing a
hint of apology. She looked away.
  “No,” she lied. “I didn’t hear much.”
  “Good,” he said. “Please, never interrupt again like that.”
  He left.
  She flung herself across the futon.
  She could still hear it all. Waves crashed into crystal pools filled
with crabs, seabird cries swelled and faded; her mother’s laughing
voice said sweetie. She could almost smell the clean salt air of
Kaena, lose herself in the wild, pure blue of sea and sky as she
cried. “The old bastard!” she whispered. Her chest ached. She’d been
meaning to transfer it all into crystals, where it would be safer.
Now it was too late.
  But finally she stopped crying.
  She turned over on her back and stared at the ceiling beams in the
dim light her unfinished homework still emitted. The wind rattled
her bamboo blinds and dried the tears on her face.
  She reached under her bed and pulled out the remote pad she kept
there, touched it on. She couldn’t do music on it, but suddenly that
didn’t matter. She thought for a moment about which web to access.
  What kind of nan experiment had taken her mother’s voice from
her?
  Twenty-five years later and thousands of miles from home, Lynn
huddled inside her jacket. Those experiments—had nanobiology
somehow stimulated the microtubules? Allowed the brain to remain
in an unentangled state? Where a similar universe—or
universes—could somehow be sensed, or even influenced?
   It was very cold up here in the wind. She huddled inside her
jacket. She had always known too much, perhaps. Maybe that was
it. And now, with Akamu, she knew more. Fine, if you were an IS
insider. But a threat to them if you were not. Akamu was, simply,
valuable information. She smiled in spite of herself and sighed.
She’d know a lot more if she ever got a chance to talk to the boy!
Where was he now? He’d run off this morning. How long had she
been sitting here?
  Anyway, these people were nuts. She hoped Hawkins could soon
arrange for them to leave. He’d stranded them here. She was
fascinated by Sattva’s vague premise, but that was all it was, a
vague premise. Never mind that she knew that a fringe element in
IS—one that was essentially invisible, even to the greater IS
organization—was on that same time travel track.
  Yes, there had been experiments. She had the expertise to access
details that she would not have understood, back then. Some
physiological effect, obviously. It’s physical, Sattva had said. No
wonder they wanted her. Lynn tried to remember what she knew
about microtubules but felt tired. The tubular dimars existed in two
planes, one rotated thirty degrees from the other. It seemed probable
that elusive bionan extrapolated from the eels had something to do
with the functioning of the tubular dimars of the microtubules…
  She gripped her walking stick so hard that the carvings bit into
her palm painfully; she laid it across her lap and thought about her
father. What did he know?
  She’d been out of touch with him for more than a few years, hurt
but not surprised at the way he disowned her, emotionally, when
she experimented with a music career. It confirmed the self-doubt
that had grown since her mother died and he remarried: he loved
the twins more. They were so perfect and good and obedient, driven
by their just-as-good and just-as-obedient mother to succeed. Not
like Lynn, with her independent and brilliant mother. Her father
had offered to pay for her education when she tired of singing and
went back to school, but she was too proud for that and of course did
not need it, not with money coming in from her mother’s patents.
She was well-off enough; not wealthy, but quite comfortable if she
managed things intelligently. He sent her proper holiday greetings,
and she went to family functions but kept her distance. Now she
wondered if she had not been, perhaps, too distant. Maybe he had
changed. Maybe he wanted to make things up to her. Despite his
long-lived mother, he was frail. So far from him now, she felt as if
she had been too selfish, too proud. The expansive landscape she
found herself in, this strange unanticipated interlude, seemed to
help her see things more clearly.
   He still maintained his full board position at IS, but the twins
seemed to have quite a bit of power. More than him? Most certainly.
She remembered his outrage at the experiments. They were the kind
of experiments, she knew for certain, that her brothers would not
feel the least qualms about.
  She could claim no moral high ground, though. She had not, she
recalled, discarded James’s invitation to benefit from Interspace’s
machinations, but had recorded the vital information in her
passport in preparation.
  Well, fine, she told herself impatiently. It helped you rescue
Akamu. Quit giving yourself a hard time. Who are you to fight
Interspace? One small woman fighting a many-headed monster.
And it’s not all evil.
  The wind held the scent of snow, up here above the grasses, where
she could belter see the vast snowfields and glaciers that patched
these amazing peaks. Her hands were chilled stiff. Best to get back.
She hoped that Hawkins had returned and that they could get
going, get away from this ethereal nonsense. When she meditated,
she had no particular goal. She certainly had no thought of linking
consciousness with quantum gravity, or saving humanity! She only
knew that she got very restless when she didn’t, just as when she
didn’t run. Like now. She would run, if it weren’t for her leg. Except
she was slightly short of breath up here. She held the stick upright
and thumped the stones a few times. It would be good, wouldn’t it,
to trek out into those mountains! If Hawkins didn’t get back pretty
soon, she’d use their fancy system to get some fancy maps and get
the hell out of here.
  She stood up. She might as well take a look at the temple while
she was here. What a tremendous gift, actually, to be deep in the
heart of one of the essential branches of Buddhism. She wished she
had it in her to feel humble but it wasn’t exactly a part of her
personality. So she would look at it, register it, marvel, and wish
that she had the capacity to feel the awe that she ought to feel.
 What a grump, she thought. Well, blame it on the altitude. She
was starting to get a headache, too. The sooner they left, the better.
  She hobbled toward the open door, dwarfed by its great height.
   Inside, the butter lamps were all lit. She gazed up at the golden
Buddha once again, marveling at the devotion of those who had
built this gleaming edifice to—what? To a state of mind? To a state
of being? To a symbol of a path to other universes? Corridors
beckoned outward; it dawned on her that this was just the entrance
to an enormous maze.
  “Lynn!”
  Startled, she turned. Akamu stepped from the shadows. He
whispered, but his whispers were amplified in the enormity of the
enclosed space.
  “Hi,” she said. Her voice lapped around the vast space. “Where
have you been?”
  “I fell asleep in the dome. Then I came up here to look around.”
  Ha. Sattva’s secret dome. Used for a mundane nap. “It’s beautiful
here, isn’t it?”
  “Kind of scary, really.”
  “Are you scared?” she asked, and walked over to him. On impulse,
she reached out and hugged him close, barely able to reach around
him in his bulky jacket. He clung to her for a moment, then let go.
  “I guess. A little.”
  Then the questions bubbled forth.
  “What are we doing here? Why did the house blow up? Where are
we going?”
  She looked around and saw a little alcove with seats. “Let’s sit
down.”
   They sat facing each other. The lamps warmed one side of his face
to the gold of the Buddha.
  “I really don’t know the answer to any of those questions, I’m
afraid,” she said. “It wasn’t my idea to come here. Hawkins is—an
old friend. Of my father’s. He’s taking us—somewhere—” she
faltered.
  “But why?” he nearly shouted, then looked abashed as his
outburst thundered back.
  She decided, in an instant, that it was best to tell him everything
she could. In case anything happened to her, he needed all the
information he could get.
   “You’re a very special person,” she said. “I believe that you’re a
clone of King Kamehameha.”
  His eyes narrowed. He looked past her for a moment and finally
said, “I don’t believe you. Cloning is illegal. My mother’s name was
Lelani. My father’s name was Don. They died in an accident when I
was real little. So little I don’t remember.” He closed his eyes, then
opened them and continued. “I’ve always lived with my auntie. A
few months ago John and Ellen showed up and my auntie said that
they would take care of me while she was in the hospital. They
wouldn’t let me go out to play or anything. Then the house blew up.
And you took me. Kidnapped me.” His voice became more resentful
with each word.
  “Fine, so you’re not a clone. Where did you live?”
  “I’m not allowed to say.”
  “Who told you that?”
  “My auntie.”
  “Why?”
  “Well… just because.”
  “I’m telling you everything I know. You need to tell me too. You
think it over, Akamu. I can understand you not wanting to think
that you’re a clone. But you know who Kamehameha was, don’t
you?”
   “Of course,” he said, raising his chin. “The first king to unite the
Hawaiian Islands. Back in the late seventeen hundreds. That’s the
first stupid thing. I know that cloning of humans is possible. But
that guy’s been dead for over two hundred years. So what you’re
saying is ridiculous. You must think I don’t know anything.”
   Lynn sat back. Of course, she wasn’t telling him everything. How
could she tell him that his two predecessors—maybe more—had
been murdered? She didn’t know who had done it. It was possible
that the Homeland Movement somehow had the ability to create a
clone, but she doubted it. In her opinion, it had to be IS, for their
own twisted reasons. Maybe just to see if it was possible. That was
reason enough, for them. And her own memories led her to that
conclusion. There might have been something wrong with the
previous versions, or someone might have found out about them, and
IS had had them killed. Maybe they wanted to fool Akamu from the
beginning, make him believe that he was being raised to be the
leader of the Homeland Movement, then, when he was successful,
control him and the movement.
   Actually, her original theory, that the Homeland Movement had
created the clones, made more sense—except that as far as she knew
the only lab facilities with clone capabilities, and with
knowledgeable personnel, belonged to IS. But the hard part was
everything leading to a viable zygote. After that it was just a matter
of implanting it in the surrogate mother.
  And once they had one, they had many, which they could freeze…
  The rumor that Cen Kalakaua had somehow left them the bones
made sense, too. He had been pure Hawaiian. He also, she recalled,
had apparently left them some sort of cockamamy “Kaiulani Proofs”
that IS had been trying to get hold of for the past fifteen years or so,
ever since Kalakaua had vanished. She only knew about the proofs
because of her strong interest in the bones.
  An involuntary shudder ran through her. It all ended, or began,
with this kid in front of her. He was free now. Isolated, but free. He
could live his own life.
  Akamu pulled his legs up to his chest and leaned back, his head
next to that of a stone goddess. He gazed into the meditation room.
Probably thinking at a furious rate, turning over her outrageous
assertion in his mind, trying to bash holes in it. She could see he
was shivering, despite the warm-looking hat someone had provided
him.
  “Akamu,” she said, but as she spoke he leaped up.
  “Listen!” he said.
  The deep horn she’d heard the previous evening began its
haunting call, a subtle undertone to sunset.
  “Now they’ll come!” he said.
  “Maybe we should go back to the yurt,” she said. “You’re cold and
hungry.”
  He shook his head. “They start a charcoal fire on one side and
they told me to sit there this morning. Sattva said that I could
watch. My… auntie used to meditate.” He jumped up and walked
carefully though the rows of cushions and disappeared into the
shadows beyond the Buddha.
  A thin man walked onto the terrace and lit the torches. People
began arriving. The man came to Lynn, and, smiling, motioned to
her to sit on one of the cushions. She accepted.
  She found that her leg was much better. As she settled onto the
cushion, she wondered again if it might not be best for Akamu to be
rid of whatever organization was behind him: Interspace or the
Homeland Movement, what did it matter? He was obviously
intended to be some sort of pawn for one or the other. He should
disappear and be reborn. Learn to use his remarkable intelligence
for his own self-formulated goals.
  As for herself, she felt as if she were emerging from a long tunnel
and realizing that the world was larger and not quite so closely
curved around her as she had always thought.
  In the middle of what she thought of as the sesshin the chanting
was interrupted by a harsh whisper in her ear that she recognized
as Hawkins.
  “Where’s Akamu? We have to leave. Now.”
  Instantly alert, she opened her eyes.
  Around her were dark, chanting figures. The Dalai Lama was on
her dais—behind her the Buddha shone.
  She pulled on her shoes and rose.
  Edging around the periphery of the room, Hawkins behind her,
she passed three alcoves with braziers, but no Akamu. Fighting
panic, she continued. With relief she spotted the boy in the next one.
He saw them as well, for he rose and waited silently for them to
approach.
   Hawkins motioned for Akamu to follow but crouched back into
the alcove as they heard loud, demanding voices speaking in
Chinese. He took a packet from one of his large pockets and pushed
it into Lynn’s hand. He looked around wildly. He leaned close to
Lynn and whispered, “There’s a door back there. Run.”
   Akamu, his face grim and much older than his years, yanked on
Lynn’s arm. He pointed down the corridor. He grabbed Hawkins’s
arm, but Hawkins pushed both of them, his eyes urgent in the dim
light.
  She heard running footsteps and then the sharp close report of
gunfire and a shout that sounded like Hawkins’s—
   She turned without thinking and saw it all in a glance—the
broad, low hallway rough-hewn at the top, damply gleaming in the
light of some sort of lantern at a corner that branched into another
corridor and the great hall; the floor, large blocks of grainy marble
worn down in the center by centuries of footsteps—
  And Hawkins, rolling on the floor, and two men in dark uniforms
running toward him rapidly, still twenty yards away, holding their
weapons in both hands as they ran—
  Akamu grabbed her walking stick and shoved her into a dark
shallow alcove. She thought he would join her there, but he turned
and dashed back toward Hawkins, his bulk transformed to speed
and strength. Lynn watched in terror as he ducked behind a
column.
  He brought the stick down on the first soldier’s head; Lynn heard
a sharp crack as the man dropped to the floor and sprawled, his
weapon sliding into a corner. The other reacted by crouching and
raising his weapon, but with a motion faster than Lynn could follow
Akamu picked up the first soldier’s gun and opened fire.
  The soldier, with a cry, reared backwards, then fell.
  Looping the strap of the gun over his head with a practiced
motion, Akamu grabbed Hawkins’s arms and began dragging him
toward Lynn.
  Her legs were shaking but she forced herself to run over and help
him, pick up Hawkins’s ankles… his face was bloody… she looked
behind but saw and heard only Sattva giving terse directions at the
head of the corridor.
  Then Sattva ran toward them, motioning one of the men to follow
her, her robes billowing out behind her. She tore her headdress off
and tossed it behind her; it bounced once, with a hollow sound.
  “In there,” she shouted. “To your right.” She ran past them and
there was a door, which had simply looked like a part of the
ornately paneled wall. “Inside,” she said. “Quick.” She shut and
latched the door behind them.
  She had the man take Hawkins’s ankles, and they hurried down
the corridor awkwardly, Akamu and the man panting. The hall was
plain and narrow, with a low ceiling and a floor lit by small
phosphorescent lights set into it. The dampness smelled of sunless
centuries.
  Lynn strode behind, her leg forgotten, her mind burning with
questions in the silent urgency of their flight. After about four
minutes of mazelike turns, Sattva opened another door and
motioned them inside.
   The room was not very large—perhaps twelve by twelve feet. It
held a high bed set in an alcove, surrounded by a frieze of wooden
figures. One wall was lined with books—physics and mathematics
tomes, Lynn saw, and rows and rows of what looked like disks of
journal updates. Another was filled with shelves of crumbling
ancient manuscripts, piles of ragged uneven paper that gave the
room a musty smell mingled with spicy incense. The lights were
electric rather than the ubiquitous butter lamps.
 The bed was covered with red silk. “Put him there,” Sattva said.
Her face was streaked with tears.
  Hawkins was breathing, though his face and shirt were covered
with blood. Lynn was astonished when he opened his eyes. “Scalp
wound,” he said, his voice slurred. Sattva said something sharp to
him in Tibetan, Lynn thought, and he replied to her gently, in the
same language, with a brief smile. Sattva squeezed his hand.
  “Akamu killed at least one of the soldiers, so there will be
reprisals, unless we can think of something,” she said. “But we will.
We’re used to taking care of things like this.” As she spoke she
hurried around the small room, her motions grave yet controlled.
She opened a cabinet and got out an oxygen mask and hooked it to a
tank in the corner. She filled a basin with water and washed
Hawkins’s face, her eyes fierce and tender. Hawkins looked up at
her and spoke again. Sattva put her ear close to his mouth and
listened for a moment, nodded. She shot a glance at Lynn after his
next utterance. Then he lifted his hand to his ear and his head
rolled to one side.
  “He’s out,” said Sattva. “Just as well. He said he’s sorry.” She
looked around distractedly and continued as if talking to herself.
“The idiot. Sorry for what? For trying to save the heir to the
Hawaiian throne?”
  Lynn felt shock in the pit of her stomach. “What?”
   Sattva grabbed a basin hung on the wall with a nail and handed
it to Akamu. “Pump some water for me, will you?” She gestured at a
small pump handle next to a stone sink in one corner of the room.
“That’s right, keep pumping. It’ll come out.” Water began to splash
into the basin, and Akamu carried it carefully to Sattva.
   “Set it on that table,” she said. She bathed Hawkins’s head for a
moment then said, “Good. It is just a scalp wound.” Then she went
on, talking now to Akamu. “We Tibetans know what it means to
have someone to look to, don’t we? To have someone almost
mythological to believe in, despite everything. It’s the biggest
responsibility in the world, young man. We understand what it is to
live for centuries under the domination of foreigners. We
understand what it is to long to own the land our ancestors owned,
rather than work it for someone who pays you a pittance. We
understand what it means to have someone to look to, someone to
focus on.” She then deigned to speak to Lynn, meanwhile opening
and slamming cupboards. “You have a heavy responsibility as well.
But it looks as if you may be up to it. Damn, where are those
scissors?”
  She knelt and yanked out a drawer, tossed clothing onto the floor,
grabbed a pair of long scissors, slammed the drawer with her knee,
and leaned over Hawkins. She pulled Hawkins’s jacket open and cut
his shirt up the middle. She sucked in her breath when she saw his
abdomen. “More than a scalp wound here, I’m afraid.” She drew a
long, shuddering breath, and her shoulders sagged. She said to the
man who had helped carry Hawkins, “Put in a call for Madhur. She
can be here in five hours. But that will probably be too late. We
certainly don’t want the Chinese, though.”
  “I already called her,” he said. “She’s coming.”
  “Can I help?” asked Lynn. The air was stifling. Hawkins moaned.
Akamu sat very straight, staring at Sattva. Lynn could tell that he
was as astonished as she was.
   Sattva continued cutting the shirt and then the jacket. “There’s a
first-aid kit in that cupboard over there,” she said.
  Lynn opened the door and found it behind some clothes. “I
thought Hawkins was my father’s friend,” she said. “What does he
know about the Homeland Movement? Why would my father tell
him to help someone associated with it?”
   “We’re in the business of shattering paradigms here, remember?”
Then Sattva’s voice softened. “A lot of the pioneer mathematics on
uniting various theorems that contain higher-dimensional space
was done by a Hawaiian. Cen Kalakaua. I have studied his life, as
I’ve studied the lives of all great mathematicians. I don’t count
myself in their league, of course. But I do know something about the
Hawaiian situation because of him.”
  Akamu said nothing, but his eyes were fierce.
  Sattva finished cutting and tossed the bloody clothes to the floor.
Lynn pulled a wad of gauze from the first-aid kit and Sattva
grabbed it and pressed it to the wound in Hawkins’s side. “I wonder
what’s happened in there.” She turned to the man. “Any sign of more
Chinese?” she asked.
  “Not at the moment,” he said, “but I imagine they’ve been trying to
reach the others.”
  “We’ll have to risk taking him to the dome anyway,” said Sattva.
“We’ll need a stretcher. Send Juan down here immediately and have
him bring whatever he needs to set up an IV line.” The man nodded
and left. Hawkins was no longer conscious, but he was still
breathing.
   Sattva pushed her hair over her shoulder with a bloody hand and
said to Lynn, “It would probably be the biggest help for him to know
that you’ve gotten safely away. He’d arranged for a heli to take you
to Kathmandu, but it won’t be here until tomorrow. I think that the
best thing for you to do is walk to the Nepalese border. It’s only
twenty kilometers. With your leg it will be hard, but certainly
possible. You can get there by morning if you walk all night. From
there you can pay someone to take you to Kathmandu, perhaps
further. The tourist buses stop there. You can just pretend to be a
tourist. They won’t be looking for you until sometime tomorrow
afternoon, I think. The trail starts just behind the temple. Hawkins
suggested taking the Chinese heli, but that would just make them
more angry, I think. That will crash and burn in a crevasse, later
on, with two unfortunate soldiers who got caught in a wind shear.
Wait.” She walked across the room and touched a panel. “Find a
guide for them, and packs and flashlights,” she told someone.
  Sattva took a deep breath; she appeared to be collecting herself.
Then she said, “Oh, we found some mail for you, Lynn.”
  “What do you mean?”
  “Sorry,” Sattva said, “but you are a security risk for us. Of course
we had to know everything about you. This included searching your
web record.“ She rose and opened another door, pulled out a jacket
and shrugged it on.
  “How could you possibly do that?” Lynn felt confused. Sattva had
seemed so friendly. “You don’t even know my password.”
  Sattva said, “Really, Lynn. Anyway, this was from Maui. Ever
heard of him?”
  “Maui?” She saw that Akamu’s eyes had become alert. “Do you
know Maui?” Lynn asked him.
  “No,” said Akamu quickly.
 She let it pass. She didn’t know who he was. “What did the
message say?”
  “Nothing,” said Sattva. “It was just an address. You can get it
yourself when you have time, somewhere. And Hawkins told me
something about your father a moment ago, Lynn.” Sattva paused.
Then she said, “Apparently he died a few days ago.”
  Lynn rose then sat down, dazed. “How?”
  “Hawkins didn’t say.” She washed her hands in the basin. She
looked much older—perhaps, Lynn realized, she looked her real age.
Fifty?
   She turned to Lynn, drying her hands with her shirttail. “I’m very
sorry. Sorry that it happened and sorry that you had to learn about
it here.”
  Lynn nodded, numb, her eyes filled with tears that made
everything look even more surreal than it actually was—glinting
dancing goddesses made wavelike, distorted, as if they danced
before her eyes. No death, no life. Enlightenment, samsara,
reincarnation—which of course is failure except for bodhisattvas.
All that Buddhist crap!
   Akamu took her hand and squeezed it; her tears spilled over. How
strange, she thought, that he should be comforting her! She
squeezed back and wiped her eyes.
   Sattva looked at Hawkins for a long minute. His eyes were closed
and his face looked grayish, but he was breathing peacefully. “Silly
man,” she whispered, touching his forehead. Then she straightened,
brisk. The door opened and someone came in—Juan? with a bag
flung over his shoulder and three other people as well.
  “The guide’s ready,” said the man.
  “Thank you,” said Sattva, and took a last look at Hawkins. “Come
with me.” She pulled open a heavy sliding wood panel that had
looked like part of the wall.
  They walked into a smaller room bathed in dim light; the walls
were entirely lined with inlaid pictures done with gold and
turquoise. A low dais was surrounded by a sort of carved wood
gazebo. Sattva walked over to the dais and flipped up the pillow,
pushed on several tongues of wood that formed the joint of the
platform, seemingly at random. The platform swung upward and
cold air rushed out.
 A short man was waiting there, well bundled, carrying two packs.
He handed one to Akamu and one to Lynn.
  Sattva reached out and touched Lynn with her forefinger, between
her eyes, then put her hands together in front of her chest and
bowed. “Namaste,” she said, and handed her a flash.
  “Namaste,” said Lynn, bowing, but Akamu rushed forward and
hugged the Tibetan.
  Lynn switched on her flash and stepped into the cold, dark
stairway.


                             CEN
                          London 2014




                               11
Laughter-spiked lunchtime chatter rose and fell in the
White Ox. The large room, rustic with exposed beams and
wainscoting, smelled of meat pies and damp wool.
  Cen, however, faced away from the convivial crowd and
          barely registered his surroundings.
     He perched on a stool at a scarred, wooden counter
fronted by thick, wavy glass down which twisted drops of
rain. Small electric cars surged silently round the circus
   beyond like so many multicolored hamsters, a bright
 contrast to the grim stone buildings encircling the road.
   Cen absently washed down the slightly burnt crunch of
 grilled sardines with a swig of warm, bitter ale. When he
 picked up his pen it activated the screen of his notebook,
which flashed once, signaling readiness. Then something
disturbing caught his eye; he glanced through the steamy
                 window and frowned.
   Yes, it was Smith, tromping up the hill with a crowd.
 Everyone in it carried dripping black umbrellas, which
  they folded in decisive unison as they approached the
                         White Ox.
   The heavy wooden door next to him creaked open and
 the laughing, chattering group rushed in with a gust of
wind. Cen turned away and hunched over his screen, but it
                       was no use.
     “Cen!” Smith, blond, tall, and expensively tweeded,
broke from the crowd and squeezed between some tables to
get to him. She was panting slightly and Cen blinked; her
           perfume always made his eyes burn.
             “Join us for lunch, Cen, all right?”
  He gestured toward his empty plate, a sinking feeling in
  his stomach. “I’m about done, Judy. I really have to get
         back.” He pushed back his stool and stood.
     “Oh, nonsense,” she said. She was very attractive,
     actually. She had what Cen believed was called
strawberry blond hair, slightly curly, that gave her bangs
an unruly look. Her complexion was beautifully pale, her
  cheeks invariably flushed beneath large blue eyes. Cen
 had found that she was not at all used to having people
                    disagree with her.
  She glanced at the blank screen. “Thinking hard, I see.”
  Wouldn’t you like to know? Nettled, he reached into his
pocket and tossed some coins on the table. “I’m finished, I
 said.” He swept the notebook into his bag and cinched it
                          shut.
  Judy tilted her head, nodded sharply. “Fine, Cen. We can
do this your way. Please meet me in my office at four-thirty
 this afternoon. I’ll expect a written report and your files
for the last month. Unadulterated, please.” You’re on thin
                       ice, her eyes said.
  Hibritten was at the bar ordering their usual pints. Cen
  glanced over at the large round table where the rest of
 Smith’s group was settling in. Silverstein yanked off her
 gloves and tossed them onto the table, leaned back, and,
        seeing Cen, smiled and motioned him over.
  When he first arrived at Oxford, he loved these informal
 lunch gatherings. Every single one had opened doors in
his mind, showed him new ways to look at the information
   he already had, seemed to be pushing him closer and
  closer toward Kaiulani, toward a way to see her again,
    toward a way to control that experience. Here at the
  center of the world of quantum physics and cosmology,
   Cen had found an undercurrent of quiet, yet powerful
excitement, like the energy of a gathering wave. He began
      to think of his past meetings with Kaiulani like a
 surfboard, a vehicle holding information with which he
     could catch the edge of that wave and ride it with
breathtaking speed, when the moment came, to an entirely
  new shore. There was a greater and greater consensus
   that existence was almost unimaginably strange. The
 question that had run through Heisenberg’s mind, again
 and again, after his many talks with Bohr—“Can nature
  possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in those atomic
        experiments?”—now had a definitive answer.
                             Yes.
  Take just one thing—Bell’s Interconnectedness Theorem,
  which proved that physical reality can only exist in a
         milieu of faster-than-light information.
   And that this milieu is the ordinary world of objects,
which is… created, if you will, by information coming from
  somewhere else… superluminally. Faster than light!
  This fact had not been in dispute for over fifty years. But
                 what did it really mean?
  Cen was convinced that this basic fact had something to
           do with his connection to Kaiulani.
          During the first weeks after his arrival, an
 international conference had been taking place. Cen had
  been delighted when Judy, Dr. Judith Smith, had taken
 him under her wing and made sure that he tagged along.
     He could hardly believe that he was actually in the
 presence of people whose proofs and papers he had pored
   over, some of whom were Nobel laureates. He watched,
  thrilled, as arguments and discussions were punctuated
by cosmological luminaries shoving their dishes aside and
sketching on the tablecloth; after that he’d volunteered his
 spiral notebook whenever he could, and now one precious
 notebook was filled with wild speculation about tachyons
       and how time may have begun—if it ever had…
  That was before he discovered that Judy worked for IS.
    It had been an accident, really. He’d been in her office,
 waiting for her, when the tiny angled screen on her desk
lit with a picture of a man. He said, “Dr. Smith, this is Ed
Nicholman from London Interspace. Please return my call
   as soon as possible.” In the middle of the message she
      entered the room; she pretended that nothing had
            happened, but she knew that he knew.
                  He had felt like an idiot.
    He encoded all the work he did on what he called the
Kaiulani Proofs, of course, but anything encoded could be
decoded. Judy saw his course work, nothing more. He was
  “working” on a doctoral problem that he’d solved long
     ago; he fed her bits of it whenever she demanded
something, but spent all of his time using the magnificent
resources at hand to solve the problem the facts of his own
life posed. He wondered if and when Smith would explode
   and baldly remind him of the deal he’d made with IS.
      He shrugged on his coat, waved at Silverstein,
    shouldered his bag, and walked out into the rain.
 A cold wind whipped it into his face. Poor Kaiulani, sent
 from paradise to this dank climate. No wonder she was
                       always sick.
    She was constantly in his thoughts. He worried about
her as if she were alive, as if worrying might do some good.
 She was homesick. She was asking for a bit more money,
     quite politely. She was writing about her course
work—mathematics, languages, politics, history. She was
  asking about the situation at home, because the letters
  from Hawaii were so strange and cryptic, telling her to
                         trust no one.
       On impulse he turned and walked toward the
   Underground station. Oxford was for all intents and
      purposes a part of London now, linked by the
         Underground and taxed accordingly.
     Cen mused as he walked, splashing through puddles
   heedless of his increasingly soaked feet. He had heard
   rumors that IS had other students at Oxford, too, and
    around the world, working on all sorts of problems.
 Genetic engineering. Nanobiology, nanotechnology. Every
    once in a while he relaxed enough to download some
generic news, where something about the moon colony that
     was getting up and running again was invariably
  featured. The moon colony, and the generation ship that
     would be built from the moon base, was the prize of
     Interspace. There were many investors. And many
      naysaying alarmists. Some argued that it was too
   commercial, with its proposed pleasure and shopping
    dome; they were countered by those showing greatly
 enhanced revenue projections that could be used to speed
 up the progress of the generation ship. Only rarely were
there investigative stories trying to hint at a dark side to
IS. Try following the hypertext links on that and see how
                        far you got!
     At the station he changed his mind suddenly and
  punched the icon for a topside train ticket to Victoria
                         Station.
  “You ought to get yourself a nice warm hat,” scolded the
elderly woman in line behind him. “You’re a fool to go out
             in the rain with a bare head.”
    “You’re right; thank you, ma’am,” he said. I’m a fool
period; you’ve hit the nail right on the head, old lady. The
     British amused him. Always so bossy and sure of
                        themselves.
   He didn’t have long to wait. He munched on a packet of
  spicy dried bananas from a machine and washed them
down with a can of hot, sweet tea. After seven minutes the
  train arrived and he climbed aboard: a local, and very
old. He could only tell that the worn holographic mural on
its side was of Windsor Palace because the title below was
done in stubborn blue paint. At this time of day only a few
         passengers were scattered through his car.
   The train slid through the back gardens of the London
     suburbs, passed through the old stations; he liked
 watching the foreigners who lived in the various rings of
   settlement. They were a different mix than in Hawaii:
Indians, Africans, Slavs, and the ghostly pale native Brits.
 In a neighborhood chiefly distinguished by astonishingly
large piles of broken bottles in the streets he saw a knot of
shiny-jacketed Plastic Lads hanging about beneath a gray
   awning. He stared with interest, but they were too far
  away for him to see if their bodies were as fantastically
  distorted via recreational surgery as the urban legend
  claimed. The train passed World Famous Mod Row—so
   proclaimed by a huge flashing banner—where illegal
shops imitated in schlocky, often deadly ways, the various
 computer-human modifications that were spin-offs of the
 space program; where distant cousins of the bionan that
  had killed Mei, infinite generations ago, and in infinite
 variations, were sought by addicts. Beneath the gray sky,
 the holograms that shimmered in many languages, with
accompanying pictures for the illiterate, were like beacons
 advertising joys and horrors that only religious promises
   could have matched in previous ages. A young woman
     danced in the rain, whirling as ecstatically as any
  dervish, wet face lifted to the rain, eyes closed, long red
  hair swirling about her, her abandoned shirt trampled
     beneath her feet. No one on the street paid her the
     slightest attention. Cen sometimes wondered if the
   previously elite apprehensions of the investigators of
   matter, which seemed more bizarre with each passing
   year, were now a Zeitgeist seeping into society, one of
                  madness, ecstasy, and fear.
    As neighborhoods fanned slowly past, some drab, some
  elegant, the buildings became more massive; the streets
 more stately. Victoria Station swallowed the train at the
  end of the line, ushering it into the Industrial Age. The
station was beautifully restored, though harboring its full
   complement of beggars and crazies. Housed here were
    shops of exclusive clothiers, restaurants catering to
international tastes, vending machines that would charge
 your notebook with any written information in existence,
 in any language, instantly translated to another if you so
 desired, at a speed dictated only by the size of your credit
                           account.
   Cen tried to ignore such things, preferring to try to see
  Victoria Station as Kaiulani may have, as a symbol of
 newness and speed at the apex of the England’s greatest
   power, when she was part of an elite group of people
whose power was about to vanish—the young royalty of the
                        world.
    However, if his theories were correct, it would be far
more difficult for him to ever see Kaiulani in London than
  it had been in Hawaii. Just mapping out the physical
locations where she had been was more complex by many
magnitudes; Honolulu was tiny compared to London, and
Kaiulani had lived in Hawaii for years. She had not been
                  in London all that long.
   He paused for a moment before stepping down from the
  train. One of Kaiulani’s names, Victoria, came from her
mother’s invitation to Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, where she
   had met the queen. Of course, the Hawaiian court had
been perfectly at home in London—for several generations
 Hawaiian royals had been making world tours. But they
particularly liked the British and modeled the Hawaiian
monarchy on the British. Not surprising considering that
 the British presence had been felt strongly in the islands
well before the Americans arrived. How oddly amazed they
   had been to find that the Americans did not play fair.
      They trusted the Americans until it was too late.
  The station was a cauldron of activity, as usual. Trains
  arrived and left constantly, the smells of five kinds of
ethnic cooking mingled in the cool air; a thousand people
   milled about, forming constantly changing currents
    through the crowd, shadows from the complicated
strutworks above falling across it all and train schedules
echoing incomprehensively as ever in English, Japanese,
 German, Mandarin. If someone was following him, Cen
  certainly had no way of telling in this crowded place.
    He stood still in the cavernous steel-strutted station,
aching, short of breath. Kaiulani had most certainly been
  here, many times. She had been quite a traveler. How
 perfect a ruler she would have been—canny and worldly
enough to be an effective stateswoman, at ease with many
cultures, with wide enough vision to see just where Hawaii
    stood in terms of other nations, and how best the land
  could serve the people who had originally settled it. Just
   one visit to President Cleveland, in her Paris gown and
   smart ostrich-feathered hat, where she stated Hawaii’s
 case with erudition and intelligence, filling the papers of
 the time with flowery paens of praise, had been enough to
 stave off annexation until his term ended. Cen thought of
    how the Hawaiians—his people, however much he felt
    removed from the Homeland Movement—now suffered
  under the heel of a new oppressor, IS. Funny how he was
  beginning to feel a kinship with Maui, so far from home.
 He’d expected instead to feel further and further removed
       from that turmoil, from those oblique demands.
    A bagpiper under a stone arch next to Cen began the
     cacophonous prelude to music; his pipes bleated
  mournfully. His beard was long and filled with bits of
 food; his clothes were ragged. As the first skirl got up to
speed and issued from the pipes, Cen turned and thought
                        he saw her.
    A woman in an elegant, old-fashioned hoop skirt was
climbing onto a train. A dainty folded umbrella hung from
 a strap on her wrist. Beneath a sweeping, fanciful green
  velvet hat decorated with several peacock feathers was
    piled dark curly hair, and he caught a glimpse of a
              classic, utterly familiar profile—
    “Kai!” he yelled, and darted down the platform. The
   door slid shut behind her and the train pulled away
 slowly. He ran alongside, tears streaming down his face,
            hoping to see if it was her, really—
  Panting, he slowed. He watched the end of the last car
    recede as it left the station. Then he watched the
 vanishing point of the tracks for a bit longer and might
  have done so for an hour but for an obscuring fog that
                     slowly gathered.
  You are certifiable, he thought, as he trudged back into
the station. Like a touchstone, he retraced the slim strand
of memory that led back to his belief that he had seen her,
 long ago, not just imagined her. How long ago, Century
  Kalakaua? Soon it will be a decade. You’re clinging to
  these beliefs like a child, aren’t you? What’s the point?
     Yet his very presence here in London was proof that
 Interspace did not think his beliefs chimerical. They did
   not know the extent of his madness, of course, or his
 genius, whichever it might be, and he believed the truth
 might lie closer to the former. They did not think that he
 was searching for a passage to his lost love; they did not
believe as he did that it might be possible to transfer from
    one manifestation- of what Vilenkin had called the
metauniverse to another virtually identical manifestation.
  They only wanted to know how to go very far, very fast,
 and how to predict the location of other livable planets.
   But—was that so? This was the main goal of Interspace
 endeavor—of this Cen was sure. Yet—the memory of Mei
   arose, for an instant, the last time he’d seen her alive,
really alive, not the frightened sparrow IS had turned her
into. Her last true words had been of worm-holes, of doors
in space and time. What had become of those in Interspace
       who had believed such things were possible?
  They had sacrificed Mei. And how many others? Where
 were those people now, and how much influence did they
     have? Were they somehow keeping tabs on him?
    He passed the bagpipe man again, pulled his credit
squirt from his pocket—an object the shape of his enclosed
hand, fitting naturally with it, with a separate sensor for
  each fingertip—activated it with his thumbprint, and
  transferred a pound with his index finger to the thick
 bracelet on the man’s wrist across a gap of a foot. A green
jewel on the bracelet flashed and the man glanced down to
 read how much Cen had given him; nodded brief thanks.
  Cen walked on, past the ticket counters and the tourist
bureau, and emerged on the street. Just as in Honolulu, no
      private vehicles were allowed in the city center.
    At least I’m missing my meeting with Dr. Smith, he
  thought. One good thing. He smiled. A very good thing
                         indeed!
   As usual, the London air was chill and dank. The street
was lined with granite edifices, and newer glass towers; a
 few blocks ahead a row of leafless trees traced dark lines
    against the sky. He set himself on wander; he had no
   particular goal. He sneezed several times as he strode
along and pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe
 his nose. He couldn’t remember ever having a cold before
coming here, and now he was constantly sick. In sympathy
   with Kaiulani? He realized that his thin raincoat was
  soaked. Perhaps he should heed his fellow traveler and
buy a hat. Hats! He laughed out loud, drawing glances on
 the crowded street. Yes, she had a hat or two, hadn’t she?
     The finest millinery to be found, the exotic feathers
   fashionable in Thomas Huxley’s time arcing above her
   head, curving around and drawing the eye back to her
      fine face, with those direct dark eyes, lively with
                 conviction and intelligence.
       It had not been the Hawaiians who resented the
 Victorian-like reign of the royal family, back there at the
end of the nineteenth century, he mused, but the American
    businessmen. Iolani Palace, in which they’d isolated
     Queen Liliuokalani after having her arrested on
trumped-up charges, had been a fitting royal palace of its
   time. He well remembered slipping inside with a tour
     group one time, marveling at the imported ornate
 furniture, the crystal chandeliers, the throne room. They
    had probably been the most benevolent monarchs in
history and the most loved. Kaiulani’s aunt Liliuokalani,
  he recalled, had agitated for a transpacific phone line
and bitterly remarked after she was illegally deposed that
 it would not have been to the advantage of the American
businessmen sharking after Hawaiian riches for her to be
in easy contact with Washington when the fate of Hawaii
  was being decided. She had found it necessary to leave
   Honolulu and go to Washington herself several times,
 always traveling in state and staying in the finest hotels;
  her absences from her kingdom had not been beneficial
                           either.
   But—had he actually seen Princess Victoria Kaiulani,
               less than an hour ago?
      Hands in pocket, head bent beneath cold drizzle, he
  walked farther, passing a large park of looping walks
  that vanished into hedges higher than his head. A man
  walking two Russian wolfhounds hurried past, looking
 away from Cen and turning into the park. Cen hoped the
         waterproofing on his bag was as good as the
   manufacturer claimed. He had nowhere to go, really;
 perhaps since he was in London he should go into a pub,
    turn on his notebook, and call up the maps that he’d
     painstakingly composed—maps that showed where
 Kaiulani had been, when, and for how long. The equation
he’d derived from the curve of time and location, including
the times and locations when he’d seen her, was there. But
     it was unfinished, hauntingly open, waiting for the
  addition of more variables before the chaos of it might
   settle into a predictable fractal. But once he had that
                        information…
  Heaven and ecstasy, for him, the byproduct of knowledge
 beyond the wildest dreams of most of the humans on this
                         planet…
  He shook his head as he walked, ridiculing himself. Why
the hell should going to the places where she had once set
foot make a goddamned bit of difference? The worlds had
  whirled through infinities of space since then. Despite
 that, he had traced her path—the theaters chronicled in
    her letters; the museums; even the royal anterooms
available to him via tours… wildly searching faces in all
these places, always with odd despair-tinged hope, black
                       self-ridicule…
  He stopped, suddenly utterly weary. Within his mind the
  world devolved into bizarre topologies, into vibrating
     strings whose evidence of existence was traces of
electromagnetic force left over from the big bang. Now he
 had a phenomenon—his love, no less—that he wanted to
 jam into all the theories that had been floating around
unresolved for almost a hundred years. Theories waiting
for the unifying vision that would actually be able to use
 the information available at last to the conscious mind
    after infinities that lacked the singular, peculiar
              phenomenon of consciousness.
   He realized that he was on a long, lonely, foggy stretch
  of wide stone walk punctuated at precise intervals by
benches and ancient leafless trees that receded into mist.
  Oak, by the look of the brown leaves blown against the
walk’s border in a sodden line. It was utterly hushed here,
  as if far out in the country. No Londoners. The sky had
 come down to earth. He might be in ancient Londinium,
 laid out in the midst of bird-wild marsh, while vengeful
red-haired Queen Boadicea plotted to storm the city and
                    drive the Romans out.
      Boadicea had failed. The Romans had won. The
 Homeland Movement, which he followed hopefully at a
distance in spite of his skepticism, would fail. Conquerors
 conquered; that was their job, their goal, their drive. IS
   would win. They conquered and enslaved. It was the
 human way. And time went one way only; a good thing,
  actually. At least there was something about humans,
  about consciousness, that made it seem so. He, for one,
would certainly not trade all the knowledge he had for the
         chance to live as an ancient Hawaiian.
            But would he trade it for Kaiulani?
   If he made it to her time… what would he know? What
      would he remember? How would he be changed?
      A cold blast of wind hit him, sending a wild shiver
through him. It had not been wise to thumb his nose at Dr.
  Smith. But what could IS do, anyway? They thought his
mind was their cash cow. As long as they were nice to him,
   as long as they had something to offer, like the finest
   education money could buy, he would be around. If he
came to any conclusions, though, he had no real reason to
     turn them over. Were they counting perhaps on his
scientific vanity? Look at me, Cen Kalakaua—I’ve thought
  of this! I want the world to know; I want a soft drink or
    VR game named after me! He had no illusions about
   monetary profits in that situation; the subject did not
  interest him, but IS would claim any and all profits for
                          their own.
       Well, they would continue to be disappointed.
   He paused—did he hear footsteps behind him? Some spy
 of Dr. Smith’s following him? Then he almost laughed out
loud. You are in a public place, idiot! There might be other
                       people around.
  Sometimes he felt as if he was on one side of a very thin
  veil, and that Kaiulani was on the other side, hands
 pressed against some membrane that he could dissolve
with knowledge. Rain swept over him again. Now he was
 utterly soaked. He kept walking, ignoring it. Perhaps he
was in some sort of trough in the unfolding of the complex
   system humans called time. Soon he’d be caught in a
swirling vortex and all things would become clear, during
the infinite instant before he was sucked into a black hole,
           unable to communicate what he knew.
  Ah, shit, he thought, I’m freezing. Just give me a cheap
  hotel, a shot of whisky, and a hot bath. Where did this
 damned mall lead, anyway? Where had he wandered to?
  Into some part of London he’d never been to, he found, as
 shadowy buildings came into view and he walked toward
 them. Not a bit surprising. After all, he’d only been to the
center of what was practically the largest city in the world
                    half a dozen times.
    He should plan to go next to Brighton. After all, that
     was where she had spent quite a bit of her time in
 England, being tutored in languages, mathematics, and
history. Yes, that was it. The information he needed was in
Brighton. London was a dead end. She hadn’t spent much
                    time here, actually.
  But his optimism was utterly shot. This was no way to go
 about things. He was trying to do two different things at
     once—work up a whole new theory of the nature of
  space-time and traipse around Europe searching for a
ghost. But location was an important matrix. Fine, he told
 himself. And after Brighton you can head for Jersey, then
  Paris, Scotland, the south of France, various places in
Germany, all the palaces and fine places where she’d hung
  out with the other royals of the day. Won’t Dr. Smith be
    interested in that! Trips to London wouldn’t arouse
suspicion. But all those other places… that was what had
  been holding him back. Of course, if he and IS weren’t
 playing a shell game he could probably ask for the funds
  to do these things and they would gladly pay. But they
 knew nothing of his real concerns, and he had to keep it
that way. Now he had access to unlimited computer time,
  to luminaries in cosmology, physics, mathematics. The
deal was that he would make all his thoughts available to
 them. He had no qualms about not keeping a deal with
               people he considered killers.
   He felt so dense. What kind of information do you need?
he asked himself. Your definition of the problem is wrong.
  You lack intelligence, the spark that will bring all this
together. He wanted to weep. You’re making yourself sick.
    But—there was a clear record of where she had stayed,
 what she had done. She was forever having fine clothing
 made, but trying to stay within her budget. She had been
 shielded from the political events back home until it was
  revealed to her that her uncle David had died, and that
  perhaps it was best for her to travel to Washington and
 meet President Cleveland, to try to sway him against the
  annexationists lobbying the Congress at that time. Cen
    wondered, not for the first time, if through research
   evidence could be found for the poisoning of the alii of
 Hawaii. It seemed pretty strange to him that not just one
    generation but several—from a two-year-old heir to
  Kaiulani’s mother, many of her cousins, and aunts, and
    uncles—had all mysteriously died within a ten-year
  period. She herself had been only twenty-three when she
       died—of what? Bright’s disease complicated by
self-inflicted pneumonia, as the stories suggested, brought
 on by a wild gallop through a cold storm on Mauna Loa’s
                       wintry slopes?
  So what, Cen? She’s dead. You can’t do anything about
 all that now. If you could, now, just exactly what would
                          you do?
   A street of cozy-looking pubs resolved before him, their
 signs dripping. All bow windows, and dark wood inside,
   he knew, anachronistic as hell. He was caught by a
 sneezing fit and when it was over he was certain that to
avoid pneumonia he had to have a hot bath and go to bed.
    He paced more quickly down the wet street. Gas lamps
 flickered on, or at least good tourist imitations, and their
    lights shimmered on the cobblestones. He checked his
     watch. Well, it was pretty late in the afternoon. His
stipend money should have been transferred to his account
yesterday, and he certainly hadn’t spent much money since
                   he’d arrived in England.
  He passed two small hotels that looked much too elegant
for his budget and went inside the third. It was still costly
 but he realized that he’d better stop or he might become
                         truly ill.
 The room was small, almost stiflingly full of chintz with
monstrous pink flowers. But the bathtub, with dull brass
   fittings he actually had to fiddle with to adjust the
 temperature rather than punching it in digitally, was
large enough for him to stretch out in. He made tea with
  the kettle, put his wet clothes on the towel dryer, and
passed out on the bed with the quilt wrapped round him.
He dreamed, as always, of Kaiulani, and then the dream
 splintered into planes of white light, which changed to
                        particles…
         He was awakened by the sound of sobbing.
    He opened his eyes. First, he thought someone in his
   dream had been crying, but as he lay in the bed, he
realized that the sounds were coming from the next room.
  He heard a muffled knock, the click of a door opening, a
   voice: “No, I’m not coming to dinner tonight. No, I’m
  perfectly fine. Fine! Yes, maybe later.” The door shut.
  He sat up, electrified. It was, without a doubt, Kaiulani’s
         voice, now with a cultured British accent.
 He began to tremble, his mind flooded with implications
 that had not occurred to him when younger. What if he
       saw her and it somehow changed history?
  But he had seen her before, had he not, and as far as he
          could tell, history had not changed.
                If it had, would he know it?
    His clothes were still damp. Fine, he thought, pulling
   them on hastily. Does that mean I’m still in the same
    universe? What would that mean, anyway? Then his
thoughts lost coherence, overwhelmed by immense joy that
 seemed to brighten all he saw—the mundane bed, chair,
  nightstand. Where was he, suddenly? Could it be true?
                   After all these years?
  He stepped into the hall, turned left. His footsteps made
            no sound on the flowered runner.
  He stood in front of her door. He looked up and down the
 hall and saw no one. He raised his hand to knock. It was
shaking. He heard muffled steps on the stairs and quickly
                    rapped on the door.
   There was no answer. The steps rounded the landing
and began on the next flight. He knocked again, this time
                      more boldly.
  The door opened a crack, and Kaiulani looked straight
                     into his eyes.
  Her face was tilted upward, her exquisite golden skin a
bit more pale than he remembered, her cheeks a delicate,
natural pink. Dark curls fell across her forehead. “Yes?”
  “Kai,” he whispered and grabbed her; he held her close
 and before even thinking kissed her wildly, quickly, and
               she was kissing him back—
  He pulled her inside and shut the door, then was filled
 with an instant’s confusion—perhaps she had no idea of
 who he was—perhaps she thought him someone else? He
             was a man now; not a boy.
                  He needn’t have worried.
   “Cen!” Her voice was low and unsteady as she drew
 away. “What are you doing in London? Where have you
                 been all these years?”
     In another universe, of which there are an infinite
                  number, he thought.
         He let go and stepped back, looked at her.
    She was wearing a fine black silk dressing gown
 wrapped tight around her tiny waist. Her black, kinky
 hair hung loose around her shoulders, and caught the
                lamplight in soft glints.
             “How—how old are you?” he asked.
  She looked at him strangely. “Seventeen,” she said. “But
you are much older…” She took another step back. “What
   is happening? Sometimes I’ve thought I must have
                 imagined… I’m sorry…”
   This was exactly what he had feared. “I’m not sure,” he
 said. The truth! “How are you?” His mind did not seem to
function. A small coal stove in the corner of her room gave
off an acrid smell that mingled with the scent of roses in a
  vase on a table next to the bed. A small card had been
    tossed down next to the vase; Cen wanted to open it.
                           Who…?
  She thrust her hands into the large pockets of her robe
   and spoke; her voice a woman’s now, deeper, more
                      melodious.
    “It’s horrible here,” she said. “I want so badly to go
 home. It’s terribly cold and always raining. The people
  here are very kind, but I’ve gotten such strange letters
 from home from Uncle David, warning me to be careful
and to trust no one. No one! Do you know how difficult it is
  to be suspicious of everyone around you, the people who
   are supposed to be your friends? And today we went to
  that wretched Tower of London. I’ve been there before.”
   She walked across the room and stood by the window
 looking out. “I don’t understand how these people can be
so proud of it. Everyone trying to poison each other! Spies!
 Those poor princes! People were tortured there for years!
                       Executed! Cen!”
    She whirled, her eyes bright. “I know that Hawaiians
  sacrificed people. They’ve been cruel—utterly cruel and
  warlike, in the past. Kamehameha killed multitudes in
    order to unite Hawaii under his rule. But since him,
because of him, things have changed. We all work together
    now, for our country and for each other. We’ve built
    schools and hospitals and fine homes—even a royal
palace. Not as big as Buckingham Palace, but beautiful in
every detail, as beautiful as some of those German castles
that Ludwig built! These people celebrate cruelty. They’re
  proud of it.” Her tears spilled over and she wiped them
 away angrily. “And what are you doing here? Where have
     you been? I’ve wanted to see you so often… Cen…”
    She dropped into a chair, leaned forward with her
hands in her lap. He went and sat in the facing chair, in
the window alcove. He wanted to take her hands but was
 afraid. He should leave. Now. She fixed her eyes on his.
  “Cen, I remember. The towers made of glass, all around
      Iolani Palace. The fast carriages. The statue of
 Liliuokalani with some… some dates on it…” She took a
 deep breath. “How is this possible?” She reached for his
       hands, touched them, and he swallowed hard.
                    “I—I can’t say, Kai.”
  The strangeness of it was overwhelming. The little room
 swam before his eyes and only her face held steady. Only
     her great brown eyes. He rose. “I’ve got to go.”
       “No! Please don’t go, Cen! I’m begging you!”
                   “I can’t—I can’t stay!”
   Weird visions coursed through his mind—visions of IS
  people walking in through the very door he’d entered
by—maybe even Dr. Smith, smirking, thinking about how
  to invest her money when she won the Nobel Prize in
                        physics…
       He was putting Kaiulani in terrible danger.
 He tore himself from her, rushed to the door, and ran out
  into the corridor, slamming the door behind him. He
heard the knob rattle, and running steps on the stairs, as
    he rushed into his door and locked it behind him,
             trembling, sick to his stomach.
      He looked around. He was in his modern room.
    He stood there for a moment. His clothes were still
                         damp.
                  She had touched them.
 Could she walk out into the corridor and into his room?
      He took a deep breath and just stood, silently.
          Something clicked deep in his mind.
  At last, was all he thought, at least in English. For his
  mind was aswirl with numbers, ideas that were like
                shapes, like pure energy…
  He picked up the phone. He was surprised when a real
                   person answered.
 “Room service? I want a pot of coffee. No, not tea. Very
  strong coffee. Can you do that? A steak, rare. Yes,
whatever comes with it. A bottle of single-malt whisky. I
 don’t know. Is that a good one? Oh, of course—sorry.”
  He turned up the heat, took off his clothes, and donned
the robe hanging behind the bathroom door. He sat down,
  took out his notebook, found it dry despite the rain. His
food and drink came, and he ate absently. Two hours later
       he heard the door slam next door. He tensed.
  “I told you that show would be a waste of money. But you
          never listen to what I say.” A man’s voice.
    A woman replied. “I rather enjoyed it. I’m sorry you
                        didn’t.”
                 “You know I hate musicals.”
  Cen let his breath go, filled with loss and relief. Then his
                        fingers flew.
                       If he was right…
                       If he was right.
   It was a fine line, the if-he-was-right problem, he soon
realized. If he was right, he had to keep it a secret. At the
  same time, to fuel his work he had to learn even more.
  The entire, exciting world of contemporary mathematics
  was open to him. He had never felt so completely alive.
      He walked the drizzly winter campus, and then the
     delicately flowered spring campus, with increasing
       confidence, his mind filled with wonder because
 everywhere he looked it seemed that whatever he needed,
in the next step of his proofs, appeared beneath his nose as
 if the entire world were just one vast field of information
heading directly toward him, from all possible directions.
 It was just necessary for him to sit in the center and take
the next bit of information, fit it in, fiddle and temper and
     stretch, then look round to see what was next. It all
  seemed as clear to him as if he were building an actual,
                       physical edifice.
   He haunted the web constantly, as if cruising down a
   long, fascinating street, stopping to enter first this
     building and that. He devised several disguises for
himself, of course, though he was sure they did not deceive
IS. Still, he wanted his search to appear like the work of a
 dozen different people, unconnected, and therefore of no
  significance. Like a bird building a nest, he took from
 every branch of mathematics and worked it in. And if he
  did not find what he needed he invented it. He did not
want others to make the same links he was making, where
    everything formed itself so beautifully, as if the raw
    essence of existence were declaring itself to him in a
    relationship much like love. He did not question his
feeling that the universe was alive, fluid and magnificent
     and possessed of infinite alluring mystery that he
                   searched daily for clues.
    He drew from a smorgasbord of twentieth- and early
twenty-first-century mathematics as if each system were a
 discrete jewel with its own manifestation of truth, of the
 truth that was indubitably there, the bridge to Kaiulani,
  the exotic matter with which he would enter her world
                        and save her.
    For he did not doubt any longer that he would. Or die
  trying. But time was, in a crazy way, short. For in that
 world where she lived she would die in a matter of years.
 Even if he did manage to go there, though, how could he
save her? That was the next problem. Evidently she’d been
      sick a long time. But he’d deal with that later.
    His exotic matter—that which held this particular
wormhole, or whatever it was, open for him was somehow
 generated by an emotional interaction within his brain,
the very chemicals of love changing something within his
brain. He knew that was crazy but there—he’d thought it.
He didn’t understand it at all on one level yet because of it
he was able to forge the proofs that he knew were true. It
was something new in the universe, a possibility that had
     just evolved, like the human ability to use tools or
     language. It was the conscious ability to affect the
  quantum wave function. Perhaps previous occurrences
    accounted for sightings of ghosts or for mysterious
  disappearances. But he was in the fortunate position of
realizing the possibility, based on the deep structure of the
universe and of time, and of having the tools, after years of
      growing proficiency, to be able to write it down.
    Late at night when he was on the web he could almost
visualize time as something with an ever-changing shape.
    Yet each change created a new, fantastic, incredibly
  intricate pattern, from one point of view, a fractal that
repeated itself from infinitely large to infinitely small, but
 whose inhabitants would always think of themselves as…
 body-sized. He reworked the principle of mediocrity, first
   postulated by Alexander Vilenkin in a brief Physical
                        Review letter.
      Vilenkin, using only known facts about quantum
   cosmology, postulated that we “are one of the infinite
  number of civilizations living in thermalized regions of
 the metauniverse. Although it may be tempting to believe
     that our civilization is very special, the history of
   cosmology demonstrates that the assumption of being
  average is often a fruitful hypothesis.” He had made the
statement decades ago, in Physical Review Letters, volume
                        74, number 6.
       Cen had the paper, with its careful reasoning,
                      memorized.
 Vilenkin dubbed his idea the principle of mediocrity. He
 said that the beauty of his theory was that, since it was
well supported with known facts, if it could be disproved,
        the tools were there to do so. Have at it, he
    challenged—disprove the principle of mediocrity.
     In thirty years, no one had been able to disprove it.
   Assuming the Big Bang was true, and not everyone did,
 then the oscillating patterns within the fractal that was
  time were probably approximately the same age. Since
     Kaiulani’s world was so similar to his, yet almost
  concurrent as she appeared to be a mere hundred years
     behind him, he gradually came to believe that the
    Kaiulani he knew was not from the past of his own
timeline, but another, different one in which she had seen
                            him.
 And from that tiny difference would grow great changes.
    Would a change in one pattern change them all? He
               tried to work out limits.
   And always, he worked for himself only. Anything larger
     was exceedingly dangerous. He was constructing
   something entirely individual, based upon himself, an
 individual. He was digging a small gold mine on his own
stake, and he intended to pull the shorings down over him
   when he left. He wanted the pathways of time to close
 behind him, like a healed wound. He took great pains to
  blunt any possible directions of thought that might help
generalize it for use by others. Selfish, and yet not selfish.
    Protecting the metauniverse from Interspace and its
 insidious philosophy, which had killed Mei and Ross and
     who knows who else. Certainly there were pristine
    unpopulated earthlike worlds. He did not want to be
               responsible for their infection.
   But, he wondered occasionally, surely the principle of
   mediocrity made it probable that someone else in the
 metauniverse was coming to the same conclusions as he
was. He envisioned a sudden new crystallization, a leap in
    consciousness and ability in the living tissue of the
  metauniverse like the amazing leaps in evolution that
 seemed to show up in the fossil record. If physical bodies
 could evolve, could change in such sweeping ways, then
 why not consciousness itself, why not the metauniverse,
                       why not…
                          Why not.
   Despite his pains to disguise himself he became aware
  that he was gaining a reputation in the international
world of mathematics. He received occasional E-mail with
     tidbits that frankly fascinated him; he received
     invitations to speak, which he always declined.
       And once he got a message from someone that he
   followed like a seabird diving for a fish, for it had the
  flavor of home, and he broke through into the amazing
     electronic universe of the International Homeland
   Movement. It seethed with energy and conviction; the
  power of the place amazed him. He could walk through
     communities interacting with people dealing with
problems, describing their community gardens, talking of
   new social paradigms and welcoming all people of the
earth, indigenous and otherwise, to join their new society.
   Their logo was a Pacific voyaging canoe, of Hawaiian
design though each island group had had their own. These
had not really been canoes, but precisely, planked ships up
   to seventy feet long in which they explored the largest
 expanse of water on earth and mapped it in their minds.
 Their international community, where no one’s name was
revealed, was designing its own generation ship. They had
  come quite a long way, he saw, from the days when they
    had pumped their vision into the virtual arcades of
  Honolulu. This was the real thing, with real engineers,
                     real social scientists.
    But, he thought, not real money. Only Interspace had
   that, and they did a good job of sucking in every new
 independent start-up company that had a nifty new idea
     or materials innovation. Cen suspected that their
   spectacular buyout rate had more than a little bit of
strong-arm action to convince these entrepreneurs to sell
 out. But here in the Homeland Web he found the sort of
atmosphere that sparked new ideas—perhaps outlandish
at first, before some genius figured out how to make them
                       actually work.
 Uploading consciousness was a hot topic too. Apparently
some factions claimed they had the hardware to transfer
 the contents of a living brain into crystal matrices. Cen
was amused to see that it seemed difficult for them to find
  volunteers willing to commit their still-living, healthy
 brains to the transfer—what, no faith? Your body would
     die, of course, but what would that matter? Your
 consciousness would live forever. Right. But the debate
                 was lively and interesting.
   Cen went there sometimes, to be refreshed, carefully
avoiding direct contact, marveling at their audacity and
                     inventiveness.
   But mostly he mapped the strange attractor of the vast
fractal humans called time. Sometimes he could only point
 in a certain direction, say, “there,” and that was enough,
     for him. His quest pulled him onward with happy,
   breathtaking speed, with as much intensity as he had
dreamed of, when younger. He was here now, purely, doing
                   what he was born to do:
  Find Kaiulani—fragile, proud, intelligent—and help her
                  fulfill her promise.
            The rest of this world could go hang.
          And for another year, he saw that it did.




                           12
Cen!”
  It was a day of rare blue sky, over a year after he’d seen
 Kaiulani. He’d spent the time since in a blaze of thought
  and research. He felt so close to knowing. Something…
    The great autumn oaks burned red, gold, and yellow
 against the stone buildings of his college. Because it was
 so beautiful, the jolt of irritation that always struck him
  when he heard Dr. Smith’s voice seemed more intense.
  He heard her high heels click behind him; resignedly, he
turned and waited. She always dressed in expensive suits.
  She took herself quite seriously. She seemed to have no
sense of humor. Maybe, thought Cen, if IS wasn’t breathing
 down her neck, she might. She had to be in hock to them,
    there was no other way to think about it. Her sleek,
  expensive steel gray car, the rumors of her fine country
  house, bespoke a deep hole in which she would founder
                     without their dole.
                Cen did not feel sorry for her.
   She arrived next to him slightly breathless. “Mind if I
                     walk with you?”
  What difference would that make? Cen started walking
                   and she did, too.
    “Look, Cen,” she said, “you need to tell me how you’re
                   doing with the data.”
    “I have no experimentally verifiable data,” he said.
    “I think that I’ve been too lenient with you,” she said.
  “You’re touted as some sort of genius, fine. I’ve seen no
evidence of anything of the sort, but all right. You get free
  rein. But you’re supposed to produce something. You’re
supposed to at least be assimilating something. For all we
      know you might be rewriting Winnie-the-Pooh.”
                       “We?” he asked.
    “The cosmology department review board,” she said,
             without a wink of hesitation.
   He stopped, turned and faced her. She almost ran into
        him and stopped, flustered, her eyes angry.
       He said, “You know and I know that you work for
  Interspace, so why don’t we just talk about what’s really
bothering you. You’re supposed to put the squeeze on me to
   perform magical feats of calculation that will create a
    whole new theory of everything, no less, an entire new
    paradigm. I can certainly understand why you might
 think me incapable of doing so. No one else has ever done
this. There might be some vital calculations lurking in the
  history of mathematics that could clarify all this if only
     the right person put it all together. Who knows? I’m
   certainly not just doing rows of arithmetic problems, if
  that’s what you want to know. But I may never have the
     answer. There may be no answer, at least not to this
   problem, at least not one that present-day humans can
            possibly imagine. So just lighten up.”
  Her mouth quivered. She brushed her hair back with one
    hand. After a moment she said, “I think you’ll find,
  Century Kalakaua, that you can’t blow me off quite so
easily.” She turned and hiked back the way they had come.
    Always the diplomat, aren’t you? Cen was not at all
             pleased with what he’d done.
      But he was beginning to realize—and it was a big
  realization for him—that he could do what he needed to
       do anywhere. With web access to journals and
mathematical texts, he could search to his heart’s content.
 Of course, that did take money, and he was sure that his
    web time was monitored; he looked at a lot of totally
   irrelevant things to muddy the waters. The academic
 atmosphere had been wonderful here, the perfect catalyst
to get him up to a certain level, a certain way of looking at
     things, to professionalize his outlook. But now?
  He slung his bag down next to him on the library steps,
pulled out and unwrapped a sandwich. He took a bite, put
                 it back in the bag, rose.
   He had reached a certain point in his calculations. He
 had put it off out of fear of being wrong and of losing his
position here, but he had to face the fact: he was ready for
                             a test.
  It was something he didn’t want to do with IS breathing
                     down his neck.
   Without giving it any more thought, his decision was
                         made.
    Walking through the cool shade cast by ancient stone
buildings, crossing long-preserved green courtyards bright
in the glorious autumn afternoon, he headed back through
   town. Climbing the narrow, crooked stairs to his tiny
   apartment, he was surprised to see the door standing
                           open.
     They wanted him to know that they’d been there.
 The place was just one room, no more. His kitchen was a
  rice steamer, a hot plate, and a small refrigerator. IS
probably would not have believed that he could live on so
 little money. He’d saved over half of every credit dump.
    The place had not actually been ransacked. But he
  always left his computer on; now the screen was dark.
              Damn, Smith had worked fast.
   He tried to contain his rising panic and anger. Don’t
 worry. They can’t make sense out of anything they took.
  There were some parts of his proofs he knew by heart,
    important bridges that he’d never written down.
   As he looked around the room, he realized that he felt
light and free, rather than afraid and cowed, as they’d no
 doubt meant him to feel. He owed them nothing. A small
  shaft of sunlight came through the one high window,
 hitting, as it always did this time of day, one of the few
      personal items he kept, a photograph of Ross.
    How hard it was to control someone who really had
                nothing more to lose, eh?
   He walked over, folded the picture, and stuck it in his
pack. He gathered the CDs of math and physics and chaos
 texts scattered about and put them into a carrying case;
        shoved a few items of clothing into his pack.
  He closed the door behind him and went back down the
                         stairs.
                      Nothing to lose.
                  An entire world to gain.
 Several months later, rain streamed down the window of
  the M Street cafe Cen usually frequented. Washington,
 D.C., was even worse than London. Snow was predicted.
        Cen’s mood was dark. He stared at yesterday’s
 Washington Post’s sketchy science page on his screen; for
 some perverse reason he had not only saved it, but looked
at it every hour or so even though he had it memorized. Dr.
 Judith Smith at Oxford was quoted briefly; word had got
  out about her latest research. Which was, of course, his.
                And what a genius she was!
    Genius. Kalakaua, what a genius you could be if this
  world was all you cared about. He snorted and ordered
another beer. The beer here was very good. The marble bar
 shone dimly, the brass trappings picked up the light and
                          glowed.
     He wondered what he would do next. Smith would
   eventually be proven wrong—that is, if anyone could
   actually figure out exactly what it was that she was
claiming. He was pretty sure she hadn’t the foggiest notion
 of what the information she was parroting might really
                         mean.
   He knew that anything she’d ferreted out and cobbled
     together was wrong because the window he had
  calculated, the point on the jagged fractal he believed
     time might be, had come and gone. Nothing had
                        happened.
   He might have to start from scratch. But that was so
                      depressing.
  The darkness at his core seemed to be intensified by the
relentless winter gloom and bad weather here. Sometimes
  he thought about his mother, and that made it worse.
 Stupid bones. He almost wished he hadn’t found them. If
she hadn’t shown them to him, she wouldn’t have been late
             fixing Dad’s dinner that night…
   He sealed his vest in response to the wave of cold air
that eddied back into his corner as someone came inside,
          and he glanced up briefly, annoyed.
              His glance turned into a stare.
  The woman who had just entered had her back to him
and was folding a bright yellow umbrella decorated with
 green and red parrots. She gave it a brief shake, then
  stuck it in the white plastic tub with the rest of the
                       umbrellas.
  She had attempted to gather her dark, kinky hair into a
 long braid, but much had escaped into a wild halo. Even
 though she was wearing a lime green canvas raincoat, it
was highly tailored, showing a waist exquisitely slim. The
   long white dress with its ruffle at the bottom, and her
boots, which probably required a buttoner to close the row
of about a hundred tiny buttons, did not seem out of place
                      in Georgetown.
  Her face, when she turned and looked at him across the
 crowded cafe, was very dear. And, when she slid onto the
    stool next to him, her smile was decidedly impish.
    “Bonjour,” she said. And then, more softly, “Aloha.”
  Cen lifted his glass, but his hand was shaking. He set it
          down, and beer splashed onto the bar.
   “Well,” she said, “aren’t you even going to say hi?” She
  reached over, touched the hand holding the glass, and
                        calmed him.
  “Aloha,” he said, and all his homesickness welled up in
                      him at once.
   His heart was so full he doubted that he could speak if
he tried. He’d been contorting time and space into all sorts
 of theoretical shapes, trying to prove what he knew had
      happened could happen, trying to fathom why.
 “Did you know that I was exiled?” she asked. “The queen
 told me that it was better if I didn’t come home. That it
would only confuse things for the Royalists and endanger
the Republic and our constitution. But I’m here now. I’m
doing all that’s possible to prevent annexation. May I try
     some of that beer if you’re not going to drink it?”
      “Yes,” he was finally able to make his voice say.
      “I’m staying at the Arlington Hotel, to plead for my
cause, for the cause of the throne and rights for my people.
But I wonder—what are ‘the people?’ ” She looked anxious,
       intense, and spoke as if they were continuing a
 conversation broken by her leaving to use the bathroom,
 instead of an absence of months. He had no idea whether
 or not she remembered their last meeting. He was afraid
  to press her, afraid that she would simply vanish. Don’t
               go, ko’u aloha, my love. Don’t go.
     Then she looked up at him, her eyes lost and dark.
      “Cen,” she whispered, “what am I doing here?”
  “What do you mean?” His voice was high, and he had to
                force himself to speak.
      She blinked, then he saw that she was making an
              intense effort to collect herself.
     “It must be—so you can help me think. Or maybe it’s a
  dream. I’ve been reading lots of philosophy. How would I
  know, really?” Her beautiful, well-modulated voice, with
  its British accent, grew in authority. I’m going to ignore
the strangeness, it said, because I need answers to a larger
  problem. “So tell me this, dream person. When you plead
 for a people, for whom do you plead?” She looked down at
 her white-gloved hands, and Cen saw that the gloves were
fastened by small white pearls that he was sure were real.
   “Do I plead for their—our—bodies, which after all will
die? Of course—for adequate food, clothing, education. But
 that’s the least of it. Do I plead for our body as one entire
    body, one collection of characteristics that makes us
     unique? There are so few Hawaiians left now, since
  smallpox and venereal disease came to the islands. Do I
 plead for our old way of life, which was gone before I was
  born and, from what I can see of it, a good thing, too? It
seems that I must plead for something intangible—the life
     of our soul, as a people—and I don’t know what will
ensure that life. I don’t know what it even is. Everything is
                      changing so quickly.”
  “I don’t know either,” Cen said. Hearing her clear voice,
   full of anguish and conviction, he felt deep shame at
having abandoned the Homeland Movement and Maui. It
     had mattered so much to his mother that she had
 inadvertently died for it. What was wrong with him, he
 wondered? How could he be so cynical in the face of this
wonder? Kaiulani had spent her life learning how best to
serve her people as queen. Why did it seem so necessary to
  him to push those same people and their needs away?
    Tears shone in her deep brown eyes. “It’s not just that
the land is being stolen from us by the haole businessmen,”
   she said. “They did that everywhere they could in the
   entire world, everywhere they went where the idea of
   private ownership was a foreign concept. It’s really a
    battle of ideas, you see. Do you know what makes us
                  unique?” Her eyes blazed.
                     “What?” he asked.
   “We set out for the unknown,” she said. “And we did it
 because of ideas, and because the world was a different
 place for us than for the Europeans. We could navigate,
you see. We latched onto the stars with our minds and they
     pulled us. Are you finished yet? Shall we walk?”
     Cen could barely get his notebook stashed quickly
  enough, wondering how to begin to talk to her. Memes.
 Genes. The ideas she was talking about had no names in
                        her time.
   It was drizzling, but her parrot umbrella, as he held it
                over them, was quite large.
     She was unusually tiny for a Hawaiian, but, after all,
    she was half Scots. He did not miss a single word she
uttered, in her low, cultured voice. She had been tutored in
 the art of being royal from the time she was born. He had
noticed it when she was a child, but he keenly appreciated
it now. She was the only one of their people to go forth and
  survive, to tap the knowledge of Europe for those seven
     long years. It was her own land that had killed her.
   Her hair frizzed more wildly around her face as they
 walked. The wind was sharp and cold and reddened her
  cheeks; it seemed as if the mist was getting more icy.
  “What is it like here, Kaiulani?” he asked. He heard that
his voice was desperate, pleading, and he didn’t care. How
did she get here? Could she even answer that question if he
    asked? He was sure that she could not. What had she
    called it? Friends of the soul. What sort of energy was
 that? How could it be defined, mapped, replicated, used?
   He was tired of strange geometries. He did not want to
solve the mystery of space-time—except so he could see her.
 It was too terrible to see her so seldom. If only he could be
                       with her forever.
    Forever? She died when she was twenty-three. There
             wasn’t much forever left for her.
    “There are so many Hawaiians here that we’re tripping
      over each other,” she complained, in answer to the
    question he’d almost forgotten. “Washington is full of
 half-Hawaiians, haole businessmen, other alii, all trying
 to get things done their way through the newspapers and
 at parties with Congressmen. Some want the annexation
voided, some want Hawaii to be a state, some want it to be
  an independent kingdom again. A lot of them are upset
that I’m here. I met President Cleveland and his wife at a
  White House audience.” He saw her jaw set. “I was bred
     and educated to think and to charm. I did both. The
PGs—the Provisional Government, that’s the name they’ve
given their transparent plot—spread rumors that I was a
  savage.” Her laugh was beautiful as she tossed her head
back; her eyes wickedly amused. “Unfortunately, now that
 I’m here, that’s rather backfired on them.” Cen had read
   the old papers. Her presence—that of an unexpectedly
   intelligent, cultured beauty dressed in the latest Paris
  fashion, discussing politics with reporters—had caused
the New York Times to call for a complete investigation of
   the Hawaiian situation. “They could see for themselves
                   that I was not a savage.”
  Easily, thought Cen, more dazed than he had ever been
    in her presence. Because something had worked.
 Something he had done had been right. Or almost right.
          He was suffused with waves of elation.
   “I’m not sure,” she said. “I could cause a revolution in
Hawaii. I could unite my countrypeople, but to what end? I
 studied the histories of the European countries in great
depth. They were the same as the history of the Hawaiians:
endless wars both petty and grandiose. She sighed. ”I will
 get them the vote. When we are annexed, we will at least
                       have the vote.”
      “I’m afraid most Hawaiians don’t vote,” he told her,
  without thinking, for once, about possible consequences.
   “But then, a lot of Americans don’t vote. Oh, of course,
    there are senators, college professors—a lot of kind,
  educated, and hardworking Hawaiians. But many don’t
participate in the haole society. They fish, they drink, they
collect welfare. The pieces of land Kamehameha II deeded
to them were pie-shaped, remember? To make any kind of
a living you needed the mountain uplands and a stretch of
  ocean too. Some lucky people still have those old deeds,
   and they go to court and fight the big hotels that think
 they own the land now. Sometimes they even win. But not
   all of them… oh, Kai, I shouldn’t have said anything…”
   Tears ran down her face, and he put his arms around
 her, drew her close. She rested her head on his chest and
 whispered, “What can I do now? What should I do?” She
 shook with sobs and he held her tightly, rocked her back
 and forth, but she would not stop crying. “Kaiulani,” he
                  whispered, “I’m sorry.”
     “You’re all I know when I come here,” she said. “I see
 that things are different. I see that. It fascinates me. You
  fascinate me. I know you’re not a dream.” She held him
  tighter and he took a deep breath. “But I can never stay
                   long. Never long enough.”
     When he released her, she looked dazed and said
nothing. She walked another block with him, then said, “I
                      must go now.”
   She whirled and stepped onto a bus whose doors were
                open right next to him.
 Before he could follow, the doors slid shut, and the silent
    electric bus turned the corner and went uptown.
                 Stunned, he watched it go.
  He felt someone rudely jostle him and turned. The man
 seized his upper arm with a hard grasp. “Who were you
                      talking to?”
                         Interspace.
   He didn’t even think. He just laughed in the man’s face,
   with a breath he hoped was sufficiently alcohol-laden
from his earlier beers to knock him over. “Talking? I was
  talking to Ross Benet. I talk to him often. Ever heard of
   him? Heck of a guy! And my friend Mei!” He raised his
voice, and passersby turned their heads and hurried past.
  He slapped the man on the back. “Hey, can I b-buy you a
 drink?” He hoped he was believable. The guy gave a look
 that was tinged with disgust. Then he let go of Cen’s arm
                     and walked away.
   “Hey,” Cen yelled after him. “ ’Nother time, all right?”
    Almost childishly pleased with himself, Cen began to
    spend a lot of time in bars. He found that he did not
    particularly enjoy getting drunk. It was necessary,
  though, at least once or twice, to cause a show. He even
 picked a fight and got arrested. He stopped washing his
hair. He grew a beard and did not take care of it. He saw
   people on the street look at him with disgust and was
 glad. That’s right. I’ve abandoned the world of thought.
I’m in despair. At night he sat and thought, stretched out
in a ratty old chair in his cheap room, the ATV flickering
                       without sound.
        And when the time was right, he left town.
  Cen jerked awake and lay still for a moment, wondering
                what had startled him.
      The faint, gray light of the Berkeley dawn flared
               beneath the heavy curtains.
   Cen heard rain tap the window, reminding him that he
was beginning to hate this sunless, squalid bay, rimmed by
 factories. The smog was a lot worse here than in the city.
 But it was cheaper to live here than in San Francisco. He
  rose and went into the kitchen; the counter was strewn
  with dirty dishes; a cockroach scuttled back the stove.
      Maybe you’re carrying this derelict act a bit far.
    After arriving in California, he realized that he had
       some time to kill—how much, he wasn’t sure.
   He needed to see Kaiulani a few more times. Each time
  he saw her, he was able to predict more accurately the
                      next window.
      So he’d taken a menial job—loading for a moving
company—and found the money good. It left his mind quite
  free. He was definitely off the grid. Once he had undone
 the code that was Maui’s web address, intending to send
him a message. The bones haunted him. Perhaps he should
  give them to Maui. Kaiulani would. But then he had not
  sent the message. He remained curiously suspended. He
      did not want to know what IS had done with the
    information they had. He was surprised that they’d
 allowed Dr. Smith to say anything at all to the press. No
   doubt she’d been cautioned by now. He was pretty sure
 that what he was really doing with this information was
         completely unknown to anyone except him.
  Cen scrubbed the black stuff in the bottom of the frying
 pan with steel wool, then finally gave up. It was as clean
                  as it was going to get.
  He stood at the sink, wondering why he felt this strange
                         lethargy.
          Then he realized. It was the day. It was.
  One single “day” floating in the bizarre debris of the big
  bang. The day that he’d looked forward to for months.
      What if he was wrong? He’d been wrong before.
  A moment’s panic rose in his throat, but he grabbed his
               jacket and pulled it on.
    He took BART across the bay and then walked up and
down the hills of San Francisco. The sky was not clearing;
in fact, it began to rain harder. He settled into trancelike
motion. He allowed the usual thoughts about Kaiulani to
filter through his mind along with his observations of the
         weather. It wasn’t as if he could stop them.
      The great puzzle was her death. Those curses and
     portents couldn’t have helped! It just seemed that
 complete hopelessness had overtaken her. She was like a
fine racehorse, tuned and trained for just one task: to rule
   a country and to rule it well and to do it with all her
           heart. She had simply felt powerless.
  It took five hours of climbing hills to tire him. And there
                           he was.
  In front of the place he had ended up at more than once.
  Reconnoitering. Hoping. This was where Kaiulani had
stayed when she returned to Hawaii from Washington via
  San Francisco after a second visit, after meeting with
   Liliuokalani, who was still fruitlessly attempting to
                change things via legislation.
   A gust of wind made his teeth chatter. He looked at his
   faint reflection in plate glass while standing on the
 sidewalk and realized that, in this bedraggled state, he
probably wouldn’t be welcome in the upscale restaurant or
                   bar, his usual haunts.
 That was all right. Drinking wasn’t in his plans tonight.
This could be the night. He checked in, as he had done on
      several earlier nights. Each time, he had been
                       disappointed.
                       But this time—
   The room he walked into was filled with flowers—the
orange spikes of bird-of-paradise; white, fragrant ginger
     blossoms; Chinese jasmine; and entire bushes of
 bougainvillea—yellow, pink, orange, red. The room was
  immensely old-fashioned, because the Occidental was
 supposed to be utterly authentic, but the wallpaper was
fresh and new and bathed in the gentle glow of gaslights.
Outside it was raining still. He walked to the window and
could not see the spacebase lights, and felt a chill. Maybe
                 they were covered by fog.
     Yet, when he turned and saw her, she was entirely
                        expected.
  Kaiulani shut the door behind her and he saw that her
 eyes were filled with tears. She smiled and they spilled
over. He couldn’t speak. She walked to him and held him,
pressed her cheek against his so that he could feel all her
          yearning, inexplicably focused on him.
 She spoke little that night. Although he tried his best to
  be gentle, he was afraid that she didn’t really enjoy
 making love very much, yet she insisted on continuing
 whenever he stopped and tried to talk about what was
                       happening.
  Of course, she was gone in the morning. Everything was
in the present, the base had reappeared, and the bill was
                  very much present-day.
                    But the sun was out.
  Everything he owned, except his last two day’s pay, was
on him. But even if it hadn’t been, he realized that he still
  would have taken the cab to the airport, as filled with
            hope and excitement as he was.
   On the flight to Hawaii, he felt as if he’d been caught in
strange patterns of energy that he didn’t understand for a
  long time, as if he’d been serving some sort of sentence,
                  and that now he was free.


                          Lynn
                        Asia 2034



                            13
The wind whipping up the pass was frigid as starlight,
laden with snow coldness. Lynn’s pack was heavy and
swayed from side to side as she walked; she stopped,
pulled off her gloves with her teeth, and tried to discover
which of the many straps surrounding her body would
remedy the situation. Ten yards ahead Akamu dipped into
black shadow and out again onto the moon-drenched
trail. Their guide, his smaller pack a hump on his back,
rounded a sharp curve and vanished.
   Lynn took one look behind. They had emerged from a
  door set in a smooth wall of rock reached by walking
 through a narrow damp tunnel. Just visible above the
 wall was the moon-gleamed temple; the roof tiles were
dark, and ragged prayer flags flapped black with distant
snaps. A place of death; she did not like it. Death related
 directly to her—death because of her and a message of
                      death to her.
    She turned away and hastened after the others. She
 gripped her stick firmly, well aware that one slip would
 send her flying into the darkness on her left, and tried to
ignore the constant ache in her leg, remembering from the
 image how thick and sturdy the unbroken bone was. She
told herself that Hawkins was not dead when they left him
 but that did not matter. Sattva could not work miracles.
 Odd, though—two old friends dying at the same time, her
   father and Hawkins. She realized how very little she
               actually knew about her father.
    Despite her leg she felt fit enough; perhaps that was
       because of the exhilarating, knifelike wind.
  In a moment she rounded a curve and saw Akamu and
the guide waiting for her. Moonlight poured down upon a
 broken landscape of ridges and black valleys hinting of
    vast depth. The others turned and began to walk.
  “Akamu,” she said, when she had caught up with him.
 The trail widened into a saddle, where two could walk
                       together.
  “What?” He sounded preoccupied, annoyed perhaps that
            she had disturbed his thoughts.
        “How did you learn how to shoot like that?”
                       “Like what?”
             “Like good enough to kill people.”
     He was quiet for a few seconds. “VR games. I didn’t
  think about killing anybody. Maybe I should have just
                tried to take their guns?”
   “You thought quickly and you were very brave,” said
    Lynn. VR games? It sounded semiplausible—most
 training, from surgeons to soldiers, was done with VR.
 Kids who played such games had demonstrably quicker
                        reflexes.
                 But she didn’t believe him.
 She asked, “What do you think about what Sattva said?”
                       “About what?”
   She gripped her stick more tightly. “About you being
                Kamehameha’s clone.”
                      “What about it?”
 “You do know this Maui, don’t you?” She’d never heard of
       him. But she was pretty sure Akamu had.
    A huge bird let out a squawk and rose with heavy
wingbeats from one of the scrawny pines in the protected
                         saddle.
  “What was that?” Akamu stopped and turned, searched
                       the sky.
   “Maybe an owl,” she said. “Akamu, you can’t sidetrack
  me. My father has died. Do you understand?” Her voice
shook and she tried to control it. She stumbled over a rock
            and caught her fall with the stick.
  “Careful!” said Akamu. The guide turned, saw that they
   were all right, and continued. She could not hear his
footsteps for the wind though he was only ten feet in front
                          of them.
        “You’re crying!” Akamu said, staring at her.
   “Watch where you’re going,” she said, wiping her face.
                 “What do you expect?”
  “I don’t know,” he said dully. Then he added, so quietly
that she had to strain to hear, “I guess I don’t even have a
  father.” He trudged a few more steps and she heard a
 sharp laugh. “Or—I guess he’s been dead a few hundred
                          years!”
   “Maybe you thought Maui was your father,” she said.
 “I never thought Maui—,” he began indignantly, then fell
     silent again. “You tricked me,” he said, finally.
  “Look, kid, why do you think I ran into a building that
                was about to blow up?”
      “How did you know it was going to blow up?” he
                      demanded.
      “Because I was watching. I have a condo on the
         forty-third floor of the Koolau House.”
                    “The Koolau House?”
   “That glass tower up the block from where you were.”
   “Oh.” He trudged a few more feet. “What did you see?”
 “I saw two men walk up to your house and leave in a big
                       hurry.”
     “So? Why would you think anything about that?”
   Lynn found that her heart was beating faster than it
  had been a minute before. He was sharp. You want to
 know about Maui? Tell him everything. Tell him all you
   know. With a name like Maui, it was a good bet her
   mysterious messenger had something to do with the
Homeland Movement. It might even be someone notorious
  who used a code name. Most of them did. Fair trade,
                       wasn’t it?
                      Yet it was hard.
  “Why, Lynn?” He stopped and turned to face her. His face
   was pure and smooth, a child’s face despite his brave
action and intellectual prowess. Children needed love and
security and protection. Below them the guide too stopped
     and motioned impatiently. “Why?” he repeated.
   Lynn took a deep breath and said it. “Because I knew
         that the other clones had been killed.”
  He didn’t even blink. “I knew that too,” he said. “I want
                 to know how you knew.”
        “It’s a long story,” she said. “We’d better—”
  “Fuck you,” he said, startling her. His eyes glittered with
tears in the instant before he turned and rushed down the
 trail. He pushed past the guide, who looked up at Lynn,
        back at Akamu, then took off at a fast trot.
      After an hour the moon vanished and they got out
 flashlights. The guide had firmly put himself in the lead.
   Akamu refused to talk to Lynn, and the trail was too
                narrow to walk beside him.
  The path twisted upward again and she labored, breath
 burning in her throat and her leg throbbing. Finally she
 could go no further. “Wait,” she called, but the other two
had rounded a bend and did not hear. She lowered herself
   onto the trail. Stones poked her butt and her muscles
twitched as they relaxed; drenched with sweat, she began
     to shiver almost immediately as the wind gusted.
    She thought she heard the roar of a river below, or
 perhaps it was just the roar of wind through trees. What
         sort of trees grew in this barren place?
   She wished she could imagine the soul of her father but
  could not. The stars seemed to blaze brighter for a brief
 pulse of time; imagination, she said, but consigned him in
that moment to those stars to which he’d devoted his life to
 reach—not for himself, but for humanity. Lost in thought,
        she was startled to feel Akamu shaking her.
  “Lynn! Did you fall asleep? Were we going too fast? Here.
         Let me help you up. Sorry I got so mad.”
   The guide came back around the bend, frowning. “We
have barely started. Twenty kilometers to go before dawn.
   Miss Sattva said soldiers might follow. I suggest we
 hurry.” He swung his pack around and reached into it.
  “Here,” he said, pushing something into both of their
 hands. He put his pack back on, turned, and hurried up
                        the trail.
           “Great!” said Akamu, ripping it open.
          Lynn fumbled for her flash. “What is it?”
   “A candy bar,” he said. “Hey, put that wrapper in your
   pocket!” But the wind snatched Lynn’s wrapper and
               pulled it into the dark void.
       Somewhere in the middle of the night Lynn was
searching through her pack for more candy bars, pointing
her small flash at Hawkins’s neat packet, and came across
 something she recognized from her hospital discharge—a
packet of pain patches, mixed in with a mishmash of vials
  with directions on them. Gratefully she peeled one open
  and slapped one on her neck. Akamu was acting as if he
 was having the time of his life. Yeah, what an adventure,
she thought. What an adventure. Then he was next to her,
                    settling on the trail.
   “Can you tell me now, Lynn? He said we could rest for
 five more minutes. Tell me how you know all this about
                          me.”
   She told him. She told him, briefly, that her father had
been the head of IS but that she didn’t like them and when
       she grew up refused to get involved with them.
   Nevertheless she had access to everything IS did; her
brothers were now pretty high up in the organization and
  besides that was how she’d grown up. She told him that
 she was an expert on all kinds of things concerning DNA
 and that that was the reason she knew about the clones.
   He was silent the entire time and didn’t ask any more
 questions. Then the guide made them get up and go. She
  was beginning to not care who was chasing them. They
  were lower now and following a creek; there were trees
 and the smooth round stones she saw on the trail looked
 as if they would make comfortable pillows. She stumbled
  and fell once but waved them away, stood up, and kept
walking. After awhile she put on another pain patch. She
 saw her father’s face, wizened and concerned; heard his
     voice telling her to make sure to get in touch with
   Hawkins. What had he and Hawkins been doing? She
itched for it to be daylight and herself rested, so she could
look at everything Hawkins had given her. And she needed
   to squeeze the information about Maui out of Akamu.
   “Maui is my friend,” he’d told her about six times. But
  maybe he’d tell her more now. He’d have to. But she felt
  helpless. She’d never dealt with someone his age before.
    He’d obviously been indoctrinated since young to say
 nothing to anyone. Well, he was alive, wasn’t he, and the
   other Kamehamehas were dead. But he was alive only
  because of a lucky accident. Although he was obviously
  resourceful and had been trained in the use of weapons.
             But why had he been in that house?
   In the packet Hawkins had put together was money:
Chinese, American dollars, plenty of yen, Thai bhat, and a
           good sum of the ubiquitous euros.
    The Nepalese border official in the small hut on the
 south side of an incredibly green and fast river, which
 flowed a hundred feet below through a gorge of white
 cliffs, squinted at both their passports for several long
 minutes, looking back and forth first at Lynn’s, then at
 Akamu’s. Lynn was utterly exhausted. Their guide had
 turned back at first light, saying that now they would
                      have no trouble.
     Everything looked weirdly far away and seemed to be
 happening to someone else, someone rather unimportant.
  The wind whipped her hair back, and Lynn wondered if
its fresh scent was that of glaciers. A few yards away buses
    even more derelict than the truck by which they had
      reached Sattva’s village belched black smoke and
disgorged tourists. Lynn couldn’t hear anything except the
   buses and the bass roar of the river. She leaned on her
    good leg, wishing the guard would hurry. One of the
  drivers she’d talked to from the other side said two were
   going to wait for their passengers to do day hikes in
China; another, filled with trekkers who had just finished
a week’s outing, was supposed to have left ten minutes ago
           and was waiting for her and Akamu.
   “But hurry, miss,” the driver told her after she’d talked
  to him as he ushered his group back into Nepal. “They
have a plane to catch in Kathmandu.” Akamu was sitting.
    He looked asleep, propped against an insubstantial
                          railing.
    The guard looked at Lynn once again. Lynn suddenly
 recognized the expression in her black eyes. Relief surged
   through her. Of course, the virus in the computer chip
    Hawkins had supplied, which straightened out vital
     information in each of their passports quickly and
  without a trace, had worked. One of the trekkers, a tall
white man wearing high-tech trek clothing, got off the bus
and gave the driver a dressing-down, waving his arms and
 shouting. The driver pointed at Lynn. The man shook his
   head. As the driver, standing in the large hard-packed
     patch of bright earth that served as a turnaround
  shrugged and hurried back toward the bus, Lynn pulled
some bills from her pocket. If her mind hadn’t been fogged
  by fatigue they would only have been here a minute. The
           guard was just waiting for her bribe.
    The guard smiled, nodded rapidly. Lynn offered her
local currency, a lot; she frowned. Lynn pulled out twenty
    dollars. The guard took it; still she held on to the
 passports and shifted her gaze to Akamu. Hastily Lynn
 handed her another twenty dollars. Lynn heard a faint
   thump as the driver closed the bus door. The guard
handed her the passports. The bus shifted into gear. Lynn
 shook Akamu who at first scrunched up even more, then
woke, and saw, and stood and ran, shouting and waving
                         like Lynn.
   Together they ran over the hardened lumpy mud of the
    turnaround as the bus vanished around the bend.
Coughing in the dust Lynn stopped. She was too exhausted
 to maintain anger, but just stood there, amazed that the
driver had not been allowed to stop. She realized that her
      leg hurt very badly beneath the overlay of pain
medication. Akamu looked as if he might crumple onto the
ground. The night trek had been grueling and dangerous;
 they might have easily slipped and fallen into a crevasse
          in the darkness after the moon had set.
  Someone tapped her shoulder and she jumped. “Excuse,
                        miss.”
   She turned and stared into the eyes of a man as tall as
 she with a red thika on his forehead. His black hair fell
over his eyes and he pushed it back. He motioned toward a
   car even more derelict than the bus. It looked to be a
 gasoline car, which was good; they wouldn’t have to stop
in a few hours and wait for a charge. She was pretty sure
this guy wouldn’t have a spare battery for an electric car.
  This one had no bumpers and the door to the back was
                   held shut with a rope.
      “I can pass that bus for you, miss,” he said. “No
                        problem.”
   Indeed, the car rose with breathtaking speed out of the
  gorge on hairpin turns with no guardrails. Lynn fished
 out some old ragged seat belts for Akamu but found none
   for herself; he was out the minute he hit the seat. She
   locked her door but that was a joke. The car began to
labor near the summit and the man, who had told her his
 name was Jehu and that he wanted two hundred dollars
American for the trip, pulled over with a casual wrench of
     the steering wheel. He turned and grinned. “Needs
                        adjustment.”
   Lynn had paid him seventy-five dollars, and promised
  him another seventy-five dollars when they arrived; he
  seemed very pleased about it. She blinked blearily; her
    side of the car was on the edge of a sheer cliff; if she
 opened the door and stepped out she would plummet into
a gorge where the river was now just a thin green thread.
Jehu reached under the front seat and withdrew his hand;
    he was brandishing a hammer. Lynn about choked.
 Still grinning, he got out of the car and slid under it; she
heard banging. “I adjusted it, miss, no more trouble now,”
he said, tossing the hammer onto the seat as he slammed
                         his door.
   Indeed, the car performed as if invigorated. They sped
down the mountain into another narrow gorge where bare
terraced fields rose on the left, and a river—the same one?
  A different one? flowed an appreciable distance below.
   Lynn saw a smashed jeep glinting upside down, tiny,
 where it had rolled to rest against a tree near the river.
         “We don’t have to beat the bus,” she said.
    “It’s okay, miss, I never let a bus stay ahead of me. A
 matter of honor.” He unrolled the window and fished in
his shirt pocket; Lynn shivered and zipped her coat. He lit
     a joint and turned around and offered it to Lynn.
                 “Nepalese tobacco, miss?”
 It would probably relax her. The road was so rough that
 she and Akamu bounced on the seat like popcorn. “No,”
                       she said.
    Jehu shrugged and turned. She saw his narrowed eyes
appraising her in the mirror. The bus was a small dot on a
 straightaway. He stepped on the gas; the car belched and
spat acrid black smoke; Jehu carefully put his joint in the
ashtray and leaned forward. He laid on the horn with one
   hand and kept it there; steered with two fingers of the
                        other hand.
  “Slow down!” Lynn yelled but he just hunched forward.
 The bus grew large very quickly. They were at the end of
    the straightaway. In the early morning a man was
plowing a water-filled field with a white water buffalo; a
 woman walked down the road balancing a pile of sticks
  on her head. They passed them and a few bedraggled
wooden buildings in a flash. Jehu wrenched the wheel and
   passed on a blind curve. “See?” he crowed, narrowly
missing a head-on collision with a huge truck. He let up on
             the horn and reclaimed his joint.
               “Let us out!” demanded Lynn.
     Jehu looked abashed. “Sorry, miss. I won’t do that
                       again.”
      “You’d better not,” said Lynn, but was unable to
     ascertain his compliance as sleep overtook her.
   When she opened her eyes she didn’t know where they
                        were.
   It was a small village on a rise. From her window she
 saw the vast, long line of the Himalayas. In front of her,
Akamu was getting out of the front seat. She blinked. They
   must have stopped at least once and she hadn’t even
 known it. Akamu stuck his head in the window. “Jehu’s
                   really cool,” he said.
  Jehu came around to her window. “Hungry, miss?” he
 rubbed his lean stomach. “I have to eat rice every day.”
                  Another happy grin.
   Lynn slowly got out of the car. She felt as if she’d been
beaten with sticks for hours, then thrown in a closet. She’d
used up the pain patches. Akamu danced along, lightly for
his bulk, with a skipping step. He followed Jehu toward a
 place evidently called Mustang. The faded sign had been
   painted ages ago. There were about six ramshackle
  buildings on each side of the dirt road, all with outside
ladders leading to second floor openings. Across the road
   a somewhat mangled and bashed satellite dish was
  planted in the ground; it looked very old. A few people
             lounged on steps, watching her.
       She staggered and grabbed the side of the car,
  wondering how in the world she had managed to walk
  twenty kilometers. She pulled up her pant leg and saw
    that her leg was swollen once again. Her stomach
   rumbled. She hurried after Akamu as best she could,
 carrying her pack. She caught up with him just outside
the door. “Don’t eat anything here,” she said. She reached
  into her pack and pulled out some sort of bar that was
         wrapped in paper with Chinese writing.
  “What’s that?” asked Akamu suspiciously. “I want some
        rice. Jehu said the rice was good here.”
  “I’m afraid it will make you sick,” she said. “Don’t drink
the water either. Here’s some money.” She pulled out a few
     bills. “Bargain for everything. One dollar here is
                       about—oh—”
   “I know what it is,” he said scornfully. “Jehu told me.
  Besides, I can look it up.” He pulled his pack around.
            “And don’t get that out here either.”
   “Don’t do this, don’t do that,” Akamu mimicked. “I’m
 hungry. I’m going to have some rice.” He stumped up the
                          stairs.
   “You’ll be sorry,” said Lynn. She turned and looked at
                      the road. A sign!
    She pulled out the map program Sattva’s friends had
put in the pack. It was just a cheap thing; she’d looked at
   it this morning while waiting in line behind the rude
trekkers. The crude schematics showed roads that did not
  curve but always changed direction in sharp angles. It
  was good because it was easy to read at night. But the
  screen was dark; she flipped the switch back and forth.
 Damn. She must have left it on. She’d have to leave it out
  to recharge. She fished around in the pack. She hadn’t
 had time to really look at what was there; she’d slept the
   whole way. She pawed through it, but didn’t really see
 much that she hadn’t seen before. Except—with relief she
pulled out a paper map that crinkled as she unfolded it. A
small crowd of children rushed up to her, hands outthrust.
      She reached into her pack and gave them each a
 Chinese coin. A good deal of Asia was not linked into the
  web credit system, and she was quite glad to have real
  money. She didn’t usually encourage begging, but felt
reckless. When they ran off she unwrapped one of the bars
Akamu had rejected. Munching on it, holding the map in
her other hand, she walked to a small stand at the side of
 the road and peered inside, bought a strangely flavored
 soda in a clear container, sat in the sun and studied the
                           map.
    They were definitely on the road to Kathmandu. They
had come fifty kilometers. Was that all? Amazing what a
   difference a little cheap technology could make—for
practically nothing she could have picked up a satmap in
  Hong Kong that would have pinpointed their location
 anywhere in the world. But they had something—viable
  cleansed passports, apparently, and money, thanks to
Hawkins. Sattva was right. He was an amazing man. She
   looked at her watch, the ornate old-fashioned beauty
handed down from her mother’s mother that her brothers
made fun of and called stupid when they were teenagers.
 They were right—it was stupid. It did nothing at all but
 tell time. Their watches did everything but cook dinner.
Well, actually, they could send a preset signal from their
             watches to start dinner cooking…
  But at least she could use her dainty watch and the map
  to tell that Jehu must have slowed down after she fell
    asleep. Maybe he’d just been trying to impress her.
          Then it struck her: her father was dead.
    She lowered the map, stared into the bright sunlight
                       unseeing.
    She’d turned his death over and over in her mind for
hours the night before. She again pictured the bright stars
  hemmed by black mountains, heard the trudge of their
boots and the ceaseless thump of her stick on the trail. Her
brothers. Were they capable of murder? Of patricide? How
       could she even think this? They would condone
 experiments that in an oblique way would allow them to
 satisfy their material needs, so much more refined than
   Lynn’s: that necessary house of cool steel and glass on
 Black Point where monster waves smacked the cliff just
     below. That was James. Samuel preferred a tight
high-tech compound in the mountains, with a view of half
the island and as much of the blue Pacific as the eye could
  swallow. Those houses were just the tip of the iceberg.
    They both believed that they deserved these and the
 additional flock of domiciles in strategic countries. One
  couldn’t go to Berlin or London or Perth to do business
   and endure the fatigue and distraction that even the
   finest of hotels might induce; besides, hotels were not
   secure. Add personal tailors, designer wives, spoiled
children, staff and security, and untold accoutrements—it
 was easy to see why they might defend their positions no
                        matter what.
   Lynn’s eyes were dry as she considered the situation.
  Despite their rift, she and her father had always been
 closer than he and the twins. Before he remarried they
 had gone everywhere together, around the world, as he
 conducted business. She dimly remembered the Louvre,
    snow out the train window as they sped through
 Switzerland, a steep, thrilling descent into Rio. But even
more she remembered games at home, and what must have
been his pain at the loss of his beloved wife, when he sat on
   the lanai for entire days staring out at the ocean. His
 second marriage had been different. More of an alliance.
  It had produced two Interspace warriors. Both lawyers.
  Lynn tried to shake the horrible idea but could not. She
 had hoped that it might vanish like a nightmare in the
   light of day but instead was stronger. If Samuel and
  James had killed their own father they would kill her
with a snap of their fingers. Maybe they thought they had;
      or maybe they knew that they had not by now.
    She shivered in the warm sun, refolded the map, and
stood. She wanted to see what else was in the pack, but the
  children standing and staring at her expectantly could
almost be counted on to run off with anything she took out.
 She stood and started to walk back to the car; she’d look
 there, at least until Jehu returned. He’d probably run off
   the road watching her in the mirror if she examined
    anything while he was driving. As she walked, the
      children followed at her heels, chattering, with
                     outstretched hands.
  What about Jehu? Was it just a coincidence that he had
 been there? She couldn’t question Akamu in front of him,
no matter what— he was the type of person who would sell
 anything, including information. She shouldn’t have let
                 Akamu go off with him—
  But assassins sent by her brothers would be much higher
class. And, she thought, as Jehu appeared in the doorway
      of the bleak building, flung his arms out with,
   presumably, rice-induced exuberance, and smiled, he
   would not seem quite so silly. Jehu stepped down and
 Akamu appeared in the doorway; stretched and grinned
                         like Jehu.
  Jehu wanted to take them to the Hilton in Kathmandu,
but she insisted that he let them off in the middle of town.
 She paid him and, as soon as his car turned the corner,
         hurried Akamu through a maze of alleys.
  It was dusk. Akamu was whining about food again, and
  no wonder, being so large. People sat on the sidewalks,
their various wares spread out on blankets. “I want one of
 those,” said Akamu, pointing to a rough-woven wool hat.
  “Later,” she said, then stopped, annoyed, while he paid
                           for it.
        “Where did you get that money?” asked Lynn.
                       He just smiled.
   “You don’t have to pay them what they ask,” she said.
   “I thought we were in a hurry,” he said, pulling it over
        his ears. “But where are we going, anyway?”
    “I’m not sure,” she said. “We need to rest and talk and
 decide.” At least no one would follow them here. Or would
they? If they followed Sattva’s reasoning, this was the most
                    sensible place to look.
    Where to hide? She glanced over at him, and he looked
 absorbed in the sights and sounds. He was still enough of
  a kid, she noticed, to look longingly at the dark doors of
VR palaces, undoubtedly low-res, where boys his age were
hawking and hustling just outside, drawing in marks. But
  he didn’t say anything and walked on by. Maybe reality
       was a bit more interesting than it had been—
                           Where?
    “Akamu, how long have you known that you were a
                  clone?” she asked.
    “We shouldn’t talk about things like that around all
   these people,” he said, and ran suddenly through the
crowd to a little table and bent over it. By the time she got
there he was strapping something onto his wrist. “Look, a
satmap!” he said, eyes gleaming. “Just what we need!” He
   walked, pushing buttons for five minutes, then said,
   “Guess what? We’re on Fourteenth and K Streets in
                    Washington, D.C.”
     “Needs calibration,” said Lynn, trying not to smile.
         “Maybe something’s interfering with it.”
             “It’s junk, that’s all,” said Akamu.
    The streets were mobbed. The air was filled with a
 cacophony of car horns, which did nothing to budge the
   brilliant white water buffaloes wandering at will.
 Vendors were everywhere; rich curry smells wafted from
doorways. They emerged on a huge square and the temple
    before them was white, powerful, and had a face.
                      Or, at least, eyes.
   Lynn was overwhelmed by the brilliance of the flapping
      flags, green, yellow, red, purple, translucent as
   watercolors beneath the sky that was now deepening
 toward evening, intense and luminescent blue. The large
  eyes painted beneath the red tiles that served as a hat
   looked everywhere, uncannily, curling upward at the
                        outer corners.
       Shy mountain people sat on blankets with a few
   thankas, painted pictures of sacred scenes, all demons
    and Buddhas, death and dancing. Buddhists were a
  minority here, about ten percent of the population. The
  majority were Hindus. Lynn felt as if she was in a place
that had not changed since medieval times, and washed as
 clean as if she’d deposited whatever was left of her mind
   and will and strength into the absolute whiteness of a
     water buffalo that stood in the middle of the street
  flapping his ears heedless of traffic, into the colors that
seemed more important than the matter that they defined.
There was barely an overlay of the present age. Even the
stylized golden holograms of Kali, about a foot high, with
which one vender bordered her space, used technology so
         old it was practically from another age.
       At a corner with three monkeys that a man had
apparently trained to pick pockets while onlookers roared
 with laughter, Akamu was standing in front of a woman
  who was selling—what? Computers? Lynn realized she
  was starving and that she simply had to eat very soon.
   Enough of these silly episodes. She had to stay alert.
       But she did not interrupt. Better not to draw any
    attention. Akamu turned from the small table where
luminous laser chips were wrapped in plastic and laid out
 like candy on the rough wood and looked surprised to see
                             her.
                             “Oh.”
                   “What did you buy now?”
                         “Something.”
                         “Like what?”
   “Something to help me do my work,” he said, his voice
       excited. “It’s really weird to find this here.”
                            “What?”
  “Look, I’ll tell you later, all right? I don’t really need it
now, but the system you got me in Hong Kong didn’t have it
  and if I’m lucky this will work. She really didn’t know
        what she had, but I think I figured it out.”
    They were walking away from the bright square, and
 dusk deepened the shadows in the narrow street. Small
  shops advertised hashish, rugs, thankas, cheap cotton
 clothing. The smell of incense alternated with clear cool
       wind. Then Lynn saw the place she wanted.
    It was a small anonymous looking hotel, barely more
  than a guest house despite the sign: The Diamond Hotel.
 The owner showed her up a flight of stairs to a room with
 a linoleum floor, two iron beds, a bare bulb hanging from
the ceiling, and a sink with the toilet down the hall. It was
 very clean. “I’ll take it,” she said, over Akamu’s grumbles.
    “Look,” he said eagerly after the man shut the door.
 “Why don’t we go for a plane ride?” He picked up a card
that was sitting on the table next to some worn brochures.
                     Lynn glanced at it.
                 HIMALAYAN MARATHON
          EXPERIENCED GUIDE * NEW PLANE
             INDIVIDUAL OR GROUP TREKS
          RM 7 DIAMOND HOTEL, KATHMANDU
  “Right,” said Lynn. “Wasn’t the driver from hell enough
  for you?” she shuddered, tossed the card on the table,
 closed the window, and drew the flimsy cotton curtains.
  Akamu looked several shades paler than a moment ago.
  “Where’s the bathroom?” He rushed down the corridor.
  When he returned Lynn handed him a pill from the kit
they’d put in her pack. “Good for what ails you,” she said.
                      “I told you—”
    “Shut up,” he said, swallowing the pill. She grinned.
      “So let’s eat,” he said, his hand on the doorknob.
     “Resilient boy,” she said. “Don’t forget your pack.”
   They ate in a little cafe down the street with dirty walls
and unmatched chairs. It was the closest place, and Lynn
did not feel picky. She was perking up a bit and was ready
to grill the hell out of Akamu after dinner. The place was
 full of Indians, Nepalese, and Tibetans. But since most of
 the Nepalese seemed to speak English, Lynn still did not
        want to talk here. Besides, she was ravenous.
   She listened to Akamu’s beep-beep-beep as he scrolled
through the few offerings on the menu. Finally he held up
             a picture for the waiter. “Pizza.”
   “Maybe you should get something they know how to
 make here,” she said. He glared at her as she ordered a
      curry and a Chinese beer. Then he yawned.
    “I mean, I hope you like it,” she said. “I hope the pill
                          works.”
                  “I’m hungry,” he growled.
 He wrinkled his nose when it came. She struggled not to
smile. Maybe they used yak cheese. “Order something else.
 You don’t have to eat it,” she said. So, of course, he did.
  She shoveled her curry down, finding it excellent. It was
 probably sheer luck that her digestive tract was still in
 order. But she was sure that the place where he’d eaten
 lunch was filthy. The life expectancy in Nepal was only
            forty-five; astounding! Why? Why?
    Because of people like her brothers, and, she had to
   admit, people like herself whose silence and selfish
concentration on their own lives amounted to compliance.
Well, Lynn, she thought, blinking away tears from the fiery
   curry, exactly how would you start your program of
            worldwide social changes anyway?
     Best to start small. She looked across the table at
                          Akamu.
     He was almost finished with what they had called a
 pizza. His large, expressive brown eyes were half-hooded
    and fatigue relaxed his features. His dark skin was
  flushed over his cheekbones. His black, curly hair was
getting quite long, and almost covered his ears; the small
ponytail he’d had when she first met him seemed about an
inch longer. His T-shirt beneath his jacket was extremely
     dirty. Feeling her scrutiny, he looked up. “What?”
  She reached over and shook him gently by one shoulder.
   “I was just thinking about how well you’re doing.”
   “Yeah, I’ve got diarrhea, and I haven’t had a bath in
    over a week. And I’m really behind on my work.”
                  “What work?” she asked.
  “Oh, you know,” he said vaguely, waving a greasy hand
                   in the air. “Work.”
 “That’s what I want to know about. Among other things.
                  Finished? Let’s go.”
    Lynn paid and they stepped out into the dark, twisty
street. A few beggar children followed them then dropped
back. Lynn felt revitalized by the curry and beer but knew
it wouldn’t last. She looked around and saw no one; at the
   end of the street a bustling night market threw light
 across the pavement. Akamu would surely see something
 there he wanted. She took the next right. They’d go in the
                   back way at the hotel.
         “What do you think about it?” she asked.
                       “About what?”
         “About you being Kamehameha’s clone?”
  He didn’t say anything for a long time, and finally Lynn
   realized that he didn’t plan to. She would be more
 aggressive. Tomorrow, when they were rested. She’d get
   the full story and they could make some decisions.
   “Here we are,” said Akamu, after glancing through a
       door in the brick wall bounding the alley.
 Light spilled out of the courtyard of the Diamond Hotel.
She was startled to see a black limo taking up most of it.
Worrywart, she told herself. No one could find you here.
     Not unless there was some sort of tracer in…
   She stopped. Akamu kept walking. Shit, she thought.
   We’re both exhausted and dirty. We need a rest. She
grabbed Akamu’s arm and pulled him back into the alley.
    She tried to turn the situation over in her mind. If
  someone wanted to kill them, would they arrive in so
blatant a fashion? Probably just some… diplomat. Right.
  Staying here. All right then. A dealer in illegal nan.
Advertising his wealth. That made about as much sense.
                      So, then, what?
  She and Akamu were in the shadows. As she watched, a
man she recognized as a colleague of her brothers got out
of the car and swiftly walked to the door of the office and
                       went inside.
  Ah, yes. Of course he had come just to take her home.
 How kind of them, how thoughtful to follow her across
                    half a continent.
                    Think, Lynn, think.
   If they had found Hawkins, of course they could track
   her here. But how in the world could they do so this
                         closely?
            “What’s wrong?” whispered Akamu.
                    “They’ve found us.”
                 “The plane,” said Akamu.
   “How did they find us?” Akamu, she realized, must be
                  bugged in some way.
              He shrugged. “Who are ‘they’?”
 Room 7. She couldn’t really think of anything else. What
            was some place really remote?
                  More remote than this?
 Just a place to breathe. A place to buy a little time. Just
                         a little.
  The man came out of the office. She watched him climb
              the stairs to their room.
      Fine, wait there. Wait there till hell freezes over.
   Room 7 was just a few doors down. She went over and
          knocked on the door, then pounded.
 A little man opened the door, a beer in his hand, dressed
  in underwear. Wild, tinny Hindu music issued from a
                 small radio on a table.
               “Can you fly us to Chaing Mai?”
              He tilted his head. “Where, miss?”
    “Chaing Mai. In northern Thailand.” She’d been there
 years ago. It was one of the most remote places she could
   think of, the least developed, at least then. And it was
closer, closer, to the place where they could truly vanish, a
  few days’ hike into Cambodia, a Buddhist temple she’d
                         visited once…
  “Well,” he said. The dome of his head was bald and the
 fringe of hair around it black. “I am really very tired. I
have been giving tours for days. Everyone who came to the
 Festival of New Stars wanted to go flying. It was crazy.”
     “Can we come in?” She pushed forward and pulled
          Akamu in behind her, shut the door.
  “Chaing Mai,” he said again. “I have flown to Bangkok
  before. But not Chaing Mai. Perhaps we can follow a
  river? You have a satmap? I just do Himalayan tours.
                   Same one, always.”
  “I have one,” said Akamu, and Lynn just looked at him.
                   He shrugged. “I do.”
   “Well.” He took a few sips of beer. “It will be expensive.
             Take a lot of fuel for one thing.”
                        “How much?”
    “Let me think about it. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
                   “We have to go tonight.”
    He smiled broadly. “Well. In that case you must pay
                        double.”
  Double of what? one part of Lynn itched to ask, but she
                       just said,
                     “Can we leave now?”
                      “You have euros?”
                         She nodded.
                   “One thousand to start.”
    Nice round number. She counted it out in fifties. He
  disappeared into the bathroom and was buttoning his
pants as he came out. He picked a shirt up off a chair and
pulled it over his head, then sat to tie heavy boots. “It will
 be extra more than that because you are in some kind of
                          trouble.”
   “We’re not in trouble. My father died and I have to get
                          home.”
     “To Chaing Mai?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
      “Excuse, miss, but you do not look very Thai.”
    “My father was becoming a Buddhist monk. Are you
                        ready?”
  He pulled on a jacket and a hat. “I hope you have warm
 clothes. My heater is broken. Come, we will drive to the
                         airport.”
              “I thought you had a new plane.”
       “Sure, new for me. I just bought it last month.”
      Lynn and Akamu waited in the shadows while he
 brought his vehicle around, a small old-fashioned plastic
town car with many smashes. The limo was still there. She
  could not see who was inside, if anyone. She and Akamu
    could barely squeeze into the car. It was electric and
                    accelerated silently.
 The main street was even more lively than earlier in the
evening. Colored lights glowed around the night market.
Lynn’s mind was a blank. This couldn’t go on. She rested
her arm on the windowsill and absently played with her
                     black earring.
  Her fingers paused. Then, without a conscious thought,
  she pried the back from it and undid the double chain
    which laced through the other hole in her ear as a
                        safeguard.
    She looked at it for a moment—smooth, round, and
                          perfect.
  With Mao’s DNA she could achieve, she knew, important
 breakthroughs. Some of the assumptions the rest of her
collection pointed to would be shattered; others would be
 reinforced; new—perhaps landmark—hypotheses would
                   suggest themselves.
      Lynn closed her eyes, saw a fleeting panorama of
  humanity’s perfection; her dream—the full information
 the human genome could yield concerning qualities like
intelligence, leadership, political vision. Information used
responsibly, with goodwill, to liberate humanity, gathered
 and cataloged painstakingly by people like her. Used by
                       people like—
                        Her brothers.
  Who had of course included a tracer, one rather crude.
              But it had proven effective.
 She rolled down the window. She hesitated a moment. If
 she could smash it open—disassemble the components?
  Problem was, all the encoded information was most
   certainly embedded in the very configuration of the
                       material.
    It seemed to be burning in her hand: her life’s work.
              Her life’s work, or Akamu’s life.
   They were crawling past a cart piled high with what
looked like bolts of silk, across which streetlights danced
in glints of yellow, azure, silver, and a stunning flamingo
pink. The cart was pulled by a water buffalo that stepped
into a pool of light as she watched. The animal shone for
  an instant, almost as if illuminated from the inside, a
dazzling, pure, and intense white. The driver cracked his
           whip and the cart moved to one side.
   As they passed, Lynn flipped the earring into the cart
         and saw it fall between the bolts of silk.
  On the corner where they turned left, a little monkey in
              a suit danced to flute music.
  “Too hot, miss?” asked the man, glancing in the mirror
                   at the open window.
               “No,” she said. “I’m just fine.”
 His name was Hadid, and his plane was indeed old. The
 metal sides looked slightly out of kilter, as if they had
      beaten into shape. It had a propeller. One.
  “This is really incredible,” said Akamu in a worshipful
             tone, looking at it with wide eyes.
    “It really is,” said Lynn, thinking wryly about how
 Akamu had complained about the plane that took them
     from Honolulu to Hong Kong. Now look at him!
 Of course, his personality had taken another turn in her
    mind the night he killed the soldiers. He was more
 enigmatic than ever. The more she knew, it seemed, the
    less she knew. But it made sense that he had such
skills—he’d lived longer than the other clones and quick
reflexes and training probably had something to do with
                            it.
  “This is an excellent plane. Entirely trustworthy, miss,”
said Hadid. “Excuse me. It is after hours. I have to pay my
  friend to turn the runway lights on—I hope you do not
object but it is safer that way—and also pay a special exit
                  tax.” He held out his hand.
                       “Special exit tax?”
      “Special exit tax for people who don’t go through
                     customs,” he said.”
    “How much?” asked Lynn, wondering just how much
 money Hawkins had given her. I haven’t even had time to
count it, she thought. She certainly hadn’t wanted to count
               it in front of Jehu’s sharp eyes.
  Hadid handed the money over to a man who had walked
    out to the plane with them; he counted it, nodded,
                   pocketed it, and left.
   Lynn was a bit relieved when she saw the inside of the
   plane. It was not as decrepit as she had imagined. It
 looked much better than the local cars. The seats were a
soft gray, and the floor in the passenger compartment was
                       even carpeted.
  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Hadid asked, beaming. “Have a seat.
   Any seat.” He stepped into the cockpit and began his
                           check.
                   “How old is it?” she said.
  “That’s the best part,” he yelled through the door. “Only
             thirty-five years old. Like new.”
   “Hmm.” There were six seats altogether, three on each
side of the aisle. Lynn figured she could sleep on the floor.
The cockpit seemed to have the requisite amount of dials.
  She supposed the propeller would twirl. What the hell.
             It had been an exceedingly long day.
   “It’s a Piper Cherokee,” said Akamu, excitement in his
voice. “I passed on this one. In a virtual lesson. Can I fly it?
                           Please?”
     “Why not?” said Hadid, at the same time Lynn said,
   “No!” She reached into her pack and handed him the
      packet of paper maps. “Maybe this will help.”
  “Sit up here next to me, young man,” he said, “and I will
            give you a lesson in reality flying.”
    “Just make sure you know where we’re headed,” said
                         Lynn.
    “No problem,” Hadid and Akamu said together, and
                    Akamu grinned.
  “Smart lad,” she said. “I give up. Don’t bother me now; I
              have a lot of thinking to do.”
  She detached one of the seat cushions to use as a pillow.
  She fell deeply asleep on the carpeted aisle before they
  even taxied for fuel. She didn’t wake until they had a
 bumpy landing and sat up, disoriented, among the dark
          empty seats. The sky was predawn gray.
                  “Where are we?” she asked.
  “Somewhere in India,” said Akamu. “We’re getting more
 fuel. I’m glad you woke up. Hadid said I did so good that
        he’s going to let me take off. Want to watch?”
     “No,” said Lynn, and promptly went back to sleep.
      The mountains they flew over were high and green,
sharp-ridged and covered in jungle. They looked fluffy and
    soft to Lynn as she dropped into one of the seats. She
  would have liked to lie down and sleep on all that green
 fluffiness. It looked a lot nicer than the floor of the plane.
    Hadid had shared out some curried lentils, potatoes,
 and rice a vendor had been selling when they stopped in
  India, and Lynn felt rather sick now, her head pressed
 against the window. She opened her bag and poked her
 hand absently through the bag, searching for the nylon
                     medicine pack.
  Her fingers brushed a hard, flat object and she pulled it
                            out.
    A small snap case. She opened it. Strange. Inside was
just a small postcard, one of the two-by-one-inch cards you
   slipped into a computer slot to display on the screen.
  Iolani Palace. She looked on the back and there was no
 message. That she could see. She hadn’t seen it before. It
 had slipped into the debris of candy wrappers and maps
                 at the bottom of the pack.
    She looked into the cockpit. Hadid and Akamu were
       focused on their chore, exhausted, no doubt.
               “How much longer?” she yelled.
   Hadid turned his head and shouted back. “Ah. You are
      awake, miss. No more than an hour, I think.”
            “Forty-seven minutes,” said Akamu.
  Lynn was stunned by the heat—damp, like a smothering
     hand—as she stood in the doorway of the plane.
            “Let me help you down,” said Hadid.
  She looked around, feeling inexplicably safe and happy.
 She had no idea why. It was silly. Maybe they hadn’t been
     following the earring. Maybe they were following
   something embedded in Akamu. She noticed that the
    mountaintop sloped off in fields of brilliant orange
poppies. She was in a sweat. She ripped off her jacket, hat,
 two sweaters, and stuffed them into her pack. She turned
                         to Hadid.
                        “How much?”
      She counted it out and gave him a tip half again as
 much. He looked startled. “Thank you, miss, thank you so
 much. I think I must rest before I continue back. Your son
  is a good aviator. It is very good to give children lessons
like that.” He walked off toward the open wooden pavilion
that served as a terminal to this airport, which was just a
large, flat field on top of a mountain. The building had a
 high, thatched roof with a very steep pitch. Beer, read a
sign over the stairs, and echoed the sentiment in a variety
                        of languages.
    Beer. Lynn mopped at her forehead. Cold beer? She
looked at Akamu. He looked ready to topple over. She put
                 her arm around him.
  “Come on, your highness,” she said gently, “I bet there’s a
   great place somewhere here to take a nice nap.” They
headed toward the building and climbed the steps. Behind
the bar was a thin, beautiful woman wearing a long dress,
 leaning against a high stool. Her black hair was cropped
  straight beneath her ears. Lynn silently thanked Hadid
           that there were no border formalities.
             “Do you speak English?” she asked.
    “Yes,” she said, with a lisp so it sounded like “yeth.”
           “Do you know of a place we can stay?”
                 “In Chaing Mai,” she said.
  “Fine,” said Lynn, somewhat startled to see her pick up
          a cellphone and push a single button.
     She had two beers while they waited for a ride; they
   seemed to settle her stomach. Akamu took off all his
clothes except his pants and put them on the ground, then
 lay down on top of them, covering his eyes with his arm.
  Hadid drank silently, bleary-eyed, and the wind blew
    through the open walls and rustled the thatch and
    bounced a wall hanging several times. Outside the
 brilliance of the sun seemed magnified a thousand times
         by the bobbing, dancing, infinite poppies.


                          CEN
                       Hawaii 2017
                           14
Cen slept away the Pacific crossing and was roused to fill
out forms just before the islands came into view. He
quickly denied shipping diseased plants or virus-laden
computer chips and eagerly searched the blue sea for
land. His heart lifted at the sight of his green islands
strung out below in the intensely blue sea.
   The Big Island of Hawaii was topped with snow and the
  observatories where he’d spent many happy hours with
 Ross awaiting a coveted minute of telescope time seemed
    to have multiplied to a glittering line of white domes
 before the ridge fell away to vast green and black slopes.
Was that the Parker Ranch, where Kaiulani had spent her
final months? The dry Kona coast showed the endless surf
 line white against the deepest imaginable blue. He gazed
 down upon a patchwork of legal victories. There was the
   Kohala Peninsula, a high-tech wonderland now owned
 entirely by the Hawaiian Homelanders. Legally, it was a
    bit like an old-time reservation except that they had
written their own terms in exchange for ceding land rights
  to a single megaresort below. Monies from other resorts
     now owned by Hawaiians funded homebuilding and
                            schools.
    And, Cen suspected, something much more. If Maui’s
        grandmother had anything to do with it.
    They passed over Haleakala, laced with high clouds.
 Purple shadows swallowed miles of vast slope, then were
  chased by a rapid verge of sunlight beneath which the
   green and gold of forest and field were intensified to
  almost painful brilliance. IS had wanted the crater for
  launches; that had been completely denied by the U.S.
  government, much to the surprise of IS; they’d felt that
 even National Parks should be sacrificed to seeding the
                universe with humans.
   In ten minutes the flight was over the island of Oahu,
just off the coast of Kailua. Cen tried not to see the beach
 where he’d gone swimming the day his mother died, the
 little roads he’d run down, but his eyes were inevitably
          drawn to them, stark and real. His past.
    But in a few moments the plane swept around to the
 other side of the island, the flip side of Cen’s life: lapping
around Diamond Head and far beyond was Honolulu, all
the tight-packed ethnic neighborhoods washed with great
 sweeps of sunlight; the steep, uninhabited summit of the
     deep green Koolau Mountains above shrouded in
                      fast-moving clouds.
 Released from the dark image of his mother’s death, Cen
was free to wonder how long he would have to wait for the
          final, defining information he needed.
                     It might come today.
                   Or it might never come.
  Honolulu proper surprised Cen with its smallness. When
he was a child, the ten square blocks had seemed immense.
 Of course the metropolis of greater Honolulu, which had
     spread out from it long before Cen was grown, was
measured in square miles, but this, his true home, was just
    one of a hundred neighborhoods and seemed so very
   quaint and old now. And much more sleazy than Cen
   remembered. I haven’t been here since I was a kid, he
thought. A kid. How did I survive? Holographic displays of
 prostitutes effervesced on building walls; one had only to
   touch a picture with fingerprint credit to receive an
 assignation; Cen thought of long-dead Mei and wanted to
 weep, but continued down Hotel Street. Customers spilled
  from the ramshackle wooden market with full baskets
  overflowing with exotic vegetables and plastic-bagged
                           fish.
 And the bones of Kaiulani rested five blocks away, at the
 Royal Mausoleum on Nuuanu where that broad avenue
          began its sweep upward to the Pali.
  The thought sickened him. His stomach churned, and he
                       felt faint.
      Then he realized that he was probably hungry. The
    ever-present cloud of dead fish stink was overlaid by
 sizzling teriyaki strips skewered on bamboo cooking on a
 nearby brazier; he stopped and bought a few. After he ate
them he felt much better. He could think of the mausoleum
   without pain: I will meet you previous to that fate, he
      promised her and knew himself to be obsessed yet
completely sane in the midst of the street bustle, the roving
    hordes of tourists, and those who preyed on them. It
  seemed to him that time was pressing in on him like an
  ever-narrowing corridor, as if he was in a train rushing
down an ever-steeper slope, and that he must steel himself
to jump from the train at the last possible instance. And if
         his timing was wrong, they would both die.
     I am counting on you, Cen. You’re the only one I can
 trust now. I don’t know what is really happening to my
people, my kingdom, my life. I don’t know who my enemies
are, or my friends. I haven’t even told my father about you
  and I tell him everything. You understand this? These
     were the words she had spoken that night in San
                         Francisco.
   “I do,” said Cen, and the woman at the flower stand he
   had stopped before said, “What kind, sir, antherium?
                Bird-of-paradise? All fresh.”
  Cen rented a room, one not much different than the one
   he’d shared with Mei so many years ago—wood floors
sagging with age, the bathroom down the hall. He was on
     the top floor, which just cleared the roof of an old
     abandoned customs building. Two large windows
overlooked the bustle of the harbor and the market; below
  mobs of people, mostly Asian, filled the streets each day
 leaving little room for even bicycles. It was a relief to see
   this particular racial mix again; the faces of Korean,
 Japanese, Chinese, and Pacific Islanders welcomed him
  home. The air was filled with the sweet salt smell that
   reminded him, this time pleasantly, of childhood. He
supposed he should be afraid and cautious, because of IS,
but he was not, particularly. His heart was filled with new
 strength, with a strange, unusual confidence. He did not
           know all he needed to know, not quite.
                        But he would.
      The Advertiser and Star-Bulletin were both still
publishing, and at the kiosk he did not customize them. He
 ordered the entire recyclable paper, which took almost a
   minute to print out while the customers behind him
  muttered impatiently, their category codes memorized,
quite limited and always spit forth or transferred to their
           particular receiver in a split second.
  Watching them, he was stunned by the oddness of it all.
 How and why had all of this—conscious existence—come
 about? He was trusting Kaiulani’s life that he had some
inkling, as much as it was possible for the human mind to
     grasp, much less predict and use. The people, the
    buildings, the very sidewalk beneath his feet—how
  insubstantial it all was, how frail and ephemeral! He
could see right through the stuff of the world, or imagined
that he could, its swarming tiny pixilated dots that might
 be the brain’s take on a billion tiny wormholes opening
   and closing in less than an instant on another of the
 infinity of universes with which his place shared points.
He felt a hairbreadth from completely comprehending the
exotic mathematics that would permit him to vanish into
Kaiulani’s time and remain there; the information leading
away would be an entirely new way of seeing the universe.
                 It was a sobering thought.
     He ate at a lunch stand and reveled in the street
 banquet that cemented him in a growing feeling of being
     home. Filipino adobo, Japanese sashimi, strong
 Vietnamese coffee light brown with condensed milk. Poi
and sweet, dried Chinese pork. The harbor was thick with
boats—a New Zealand freighter; a research ship bedecked
  with electronics fresh in, according to the paper, from
                        Antarctica.
  The next morning he was awakened just before dawn by
the cries of the fighting cocks that still rose from Honolulu
   backyards. He sat in the dark by the window, looking
   down at the pawnshop owner hosing his little piece of
 sidewalk, a cigarette dangling from his lip, and thought
            of Maui and that long-ago cockfight.
   Streetlights turned off as he paid for Vietnamese coffee
   and a pastry at a window where no one inside spoke
 English. Thin, delicate Asians filled the streets, on their
    way to work, many of the women obviously lawyers,
formally dressed, their high heels clicking. The young men
  wore suits and ties, doomed to sweat the day away, and
the old men wore thin pale silk shirts that were not tucked
                             in.
      Cen found a bus board. All the island buses were
   driverless, smooth quiet electric cars equipped with
audible multilanguage imprecations, running on tracks of
         light in dedicated lanes. He entered his
 destination—Makaha—and found he had only to walk a
       block and wait ten minutes to catch his bus.
    It was strangely posh, with comfortable, upholstered
seats and fake wood trim, stunningly clean. Two Japanese
 men dozed on the sideways-facing seat, their golf clubs in
                the luggage rack up front.
  Pain and joy, loss and haunting nostalgia clashed with
                      each new vista.
    He saw that IS had built up Hickam Spacebase even
  more—mysterious windowless buildings, tiny satellite
  dishes bristling everywhere. The legendary Room That
    Could Control the World was there somewhere, not
 underground because Hickam was simply built-up coral,
   but a vast bombproof bunker inherited from the U.S.
military. He had read in the paper that IS wanted to build
    a new maglaunch tunnel on the Big Island but that
 negotiations with the Homelanders were slow. There, at
   Kohala, the Homelanders had a thriving, somewhat
  enigmatic enclave; they also owned the land where the
                   tunnel would emerge.
  Cen knew, via the web, that the Homelanders were not
   isolated intellectually. For one thing, Kohala had
exemplary schools that sent graduates to top universities
around the world; many returned to teach. Cen was sure
 that the Primal Societies scattered like so many jewels
throughout the web, virtual communities connected by a
    common philosophy, had their birth in Kohala.
   It was understandable, though, that the upper echelons
   of IS were beginning to object at last to the moonbase
launches taking place so close to their multimillion-dollar
   homes here on Oahu, particularly since debris from a
 recent failed satellite launch had taken out two estates.
   Yeah, let the burning junk fall on the Hawaiians, and
 their uppity pretentious school. Typical. There were also
 serious objections to a Big Island maglaunch because of
  the precarious geophysical nature of the land, prone to
 frequent earthquakes. But the best engineers Interspace
  could muster—or buy off, Cen suspected—insisted that
with new materials and construction techniques all would
   be fine. World-famous Kilauea, with its fountains of
molten lava, had not erupted for ten years because the hot
spot had found a new fissure under the ocean just south of
 the Big Island, and besides, was about a hundred miles
                from the proposed tunnel.
     Cen was pretty sure that this maglaunch tunnel
 amounted to a pork barrel situation—some construction
company had cozied up to the right people at IS and stood
                to make a lot of money.
 Cen knew that Maui had a lot to do with the stupendous
maturing of the Homeland Movement, though he’d had no
      direct contact with him since the night of Mei’s
 death—since that same long-ago day when he’d leaned
   forward into the wind, weaving in and out of traffic,
 flattening the world with speed, along the very line the
              bus rode now, stodgy and sedate.
                That was the day he’d met Maui’s
    grandmother—ushered, he realized now, into the very
  heart of the Homeland Movement with no reservation on
their part. Maui was completely underground now, having
 been target of at least two failed assassination attempts;
   those who hired the hit men had never been uncovered.
Cen had a vested interest in keeping up with the dark side
 of IS activities; there was no telling when they might turn
                            on him.
 The Homelanders had not pressured him in all the years
 since. He realized that they had believed he had totally
                      sold out to IS.
            He had taken a very different path.
   Row upon row of homes, gridded with giant shopping
 malls every few miles, marched up the bare dry Waianae
  slopes. A gap in the mountains revealed another large
valley, site of a dense U.S. military structure taken over by
                   IS, mostly underground.
      Then, on his left, he saw close blue flashes of ocean
 between the condos. Fountains of white foam, sparkling
black lava leaved with bays of gold sand drew his eye and
    heart; refreshed him; recalled his childhood days of
 surfing and seaplay; touched him with Ross’s memory so
that his eyes filled with tears briefly. At every beach park
he saw surfers bobbing far out on the swells, and the tents
  of Hawaiian ohanas, extended families, flapping in the
 constant wind, tangy smoke rising already from the huli
    huli chicken cooking on the grills. The sight of those
   hardheaded surfers made him feel better. At least one
                  thing remained the same.
   As the bus hissed along, the buildings on the sides of the
road became more dilapidated. The Japanese men roused,
        pointed out the window, shook their heads in
   commiseration, and Cen’s face burned. But they were
  right. Nothing much had changed here, except to decay
    even more. It might be the 1990s. No money had been
 invested here; infrastructure was a foreign word. There
  were the run-down sun-bleached shacks surrounded by
  smashed plastic electric car bodies, miles of them, and
 ominous markets with their barred windows, liquor ads,
                     and seedy loiterers.
    The bus turned into the majestic Makaha Valley and
went right up to the gate of the club. A young man met the
golfers, took their bags and loaded them onto a cart, then
 bounced off with the men in the back. The gate slid shut
behind them with a decisive click, safely restoring them to
the privileged side of the twenty-first century. Cen stepped
    down and stood in the cool morning air as the bus
                         departed.
    Surf half a mile away boomed in the otherwise still
morning. Somewhere in those craggy cliffs that rose from
the broad, emerald green valley floor, above tucked-away
  exclusive condos, wound a path steep and dangerous,
where he had followed Maui to a place that had never left
                      his memory.
    Perhaps if he could find that haunting, spherical cave
 where he’d met Maui’s grandmother, he could remember
 how it had been, that day. Perhaps the power of the path
   he’d not taken, the power of ancient seafaring Hawaii,
would help him decide what his responsibility was toward
the world he wished to leave behind. Kaiulani’s passionate
 belief in her responsibility to her world and her people, a
pact she had been unable to fulfill, had given him food for
  thought. He could not face her without knowing that he
                 had done all he could, here.
   He turned and walked past the gate, outside the wall of
the club. After half a mile of searching the brush, speckled
   with empty beer cans and other trash, he found it—an
  overgrown trail—and began the hike. A hundred feet up
 the trail he felt drawn into another age, enfolded into the
land. Unseen doves cooed, and the tall sun-heated grasses
                        smelled sweet.
      The hike did not take anywhere near as long as he
 thought it would, though he soon was breathing hard. He
  judged that he had climbed about three thousand feet,
  and gained a narrow red-soil ledge of doubtful footing,
covered with crumbly rocks that made it quite precarious.
 Someone had bolted a steel cable along a hundred feet of
cliffwalk; he clung to it gratefully. The treetops below him
tossed in the rising wind, a forest of sweet-scented mimosa.
                A waterfall splashed nearby.
       When he got across the cliff face, there it was.
                          The cave.
           Holding his breath, he stepped inside.
                        It was empty.
   He smelled the acrid remains of a fire, mingled with
garbage. Should have brought a light. He fumbled in his
pockets and found some matches he’d taken from a bar.
Striking one, he saw several candles stuck to the floor of
             the cave; he bent and lit them.
              He was sickened by what he saw.
   Apparently it was being used as a drug lair. Nan drugs,
or drugs that claimed to be nan-based but in reality were
various pharmacological mishmashes guaranteed to have
 powerful effects, death frequently among them, were hot
     now. The method of ingestion was really up to the
   marketing ingenuity of the dealer. He saw a couple of
    plastic eye-drop squirts scattered on the floor in the
 flickering glow of the candles. Putting a few drops in the
          eye was popular, he’d read in the paper.
 Obscenities covered the wall along with gang emblems,
neon green and pink against the shiny black wall. A rat
   chittered away into a crack, abandoning a pile of
garbage. At a sound behind him Cen whirled, but saw no
      one. Outside the world was green and fresh.
       Deep within he felt this to be a sacrilege. Silly, he
thought, as he blew out the candles and turned, stumbling
        over some empty drink plastics. Maui and his
grandmother had made it into a holy place, where he had
 felt the power, the mana, which came from the land. His
                             land.
    At the cave mouth he breathed fresh air gratefully.
   He moved downhill unseeingly, as if in a dark dream
from which there was no escape. He had not realized how
bright that single meeting with the still unnamed woman
     had been for him. Odd, since he’d rejected all their
     overtures. Then the true reason bubbled forth from
 long-quiet depths: she had known his mother, named her.
 She alone could tell him stories for which he was hungry,
stories about his mother, her childhood, and the rest of his
   family. When he met her he had wanted only to escape
     from his past, from the blood and screaming, from
  knowing that his mother’s heart and mind were forever
                          silenced.
  Now, he would treasure that connection, if he could find
                          her.
   But how to find Maui without direct web contact that
might endanger both of them and the larger endeavors in
      which they were engaged? Cen was no good at
  cloak-and-dagger stuff. Any sort of veil he thought up
 would either not work or work so well that Maui would
 have no idea who was trying to contact him. He did not
                 feel clever in that way.
   And what could he do, what difference could he make, in
     the face of two hundred years of foreign rule in the
islands? Pausing to look out to sea as he wiped sweat from
his forehead, he gazed at a stunning panorama that made
  him feel almost as if he were flying. So easy to get lost in
   such a beautiful, infinite blue! How many islands had
  Tevake, the old navigator, held in his mind beneath the
   stars, his utterly precise field of reference? The cliffs of
Kaena Point, Oahu’s still-wild shore, were but a few miles
away; after that, the nearest land to the north was Kauai,
 seventy miles away. Beyond, invisible, yet there, known by
   subtle signs that the experienced navigator could read
             from a hundred miles away, the etak.
                  As Kaiulani was his etak.
  Cen was not sure anymore whether the lack of a written
language was truly as backward as most people thought.
    The Polynesian memory was prodigious, filled with
  thousands of stories for which dance, in the form of the
   hula in Hawaii, was the framework for holding those
stories in mind. And writing sprang from the necessity for
   documenting ownership and trade debts. Polynesian
 society had been communal and surely functioned better
 than any Communist regime of the 1900s, and for much,
   much longer. Their community had encompassed the
                   entire Pacific Ocean.
  As Cen gazed at his panorama he could almost see those
 great sailing canoes. He suspected that the Hawaii Loa,
  the great canoe built by the Bishop Museum, in which
Hawaiian children sailed the Pacific and learned the old
navigational skills had made sailed starships interesting
in the minds of IS engineers, who lived in Hawaii after all
and constantly saw the the Hawaii Loa on the news. That
powerful visual image sparked their imagination, so that
 they began to brainstorm and add new technology to the
               old idea of solar-sailed ships.
   Such a ship was now being built in orbit, its sails to lie
dormant as seeds, then grow at just the right time to catch
the particles of light which would push them after ages to
 the next galaxy. It would take, he had read, fifteen years
to build, using the moonbase at last as it was meant to be
  used, a project that would involve all the resources and
                       branches of IS.
          Cen stood up and continued his descent.
     Interspace with its grandiose yet hollow goals was
 simply a version of colonialism. The children who used
that cave behind him were exactly as he had been, left to
   their own devices, not believing that the future held
anything for them, carefully kept from learning anything
  except how to swell the underclass and provide cheap
                           labor.
 And you, Cen, are just one person. What makes you think
           you can change a damned thing?
 His sandals crunched on lava rock. He was almost at sea
   level. Next to him, inside an iron fence, the smooth
 precisely engineered swales of the golf course filled the
valley. The open fence with its stylized art deco dolphin
frieze was replaced by a brick wall, and then he was out
on the highway where heat rose in waves. Several blocks
  away, through clapboard houses, he saw white foam;
dancing sea. He crossed the road and headed toward it.
Maybe he could wash this negativity away, for a time, at
least, the feeling that he was running from a battle that
 was important to fight. But he didn’t know how. What
                     good could he do?
     He stepped off the hot asphalt onto the even hotter
   expanse of unsullied golden sand. Wind-driven grains
stung his face. Beyond was an ever-moving heart-stopping
  shade of aquamarine, edged with white surf. Not many
                      people out here.
  He took off all his clothes except his shorts, folding them
      neatly. He walked down the deep slope until the
thundering waves curled overhead, translucent, shot with
 light, dived suddenly through the massive forces, and let
 the riptide he’d seen smothering the whitecaps to his left
   pull him out. He rode it until it released him about a
 quarter mile out. Someone on one of the huge old buffalo
 boards bobbed on the massive swells nearby; he waved at
   Cen and Cen waved back, was lifted and dropped in a
               soothing monotonous rhythm.
 He turned and looked at the weathered cliffs patterned
with cloud-shadows, and knew, suddenly, floating in this
       light-shot cool medium, what he should do.
   Someone should know where they are, after I am gone.
   His mother’s words, the day she died, talking about the
 bones, still hidden in the Koolau Mountains, on the other
                      side of the island.
   He didn’t think they were important. Not really, not
 compared to the things about which he thought. But his
  mother had died because of them, in a way. Her wish
                  should be respected.
  He had never burned with Maui’s altruistic fire. He had
   kept to his path, steered by the stars of his strange,
 private passion, had **ed and fed his natural cynicism.
                Easy, with IS on your back.
    Now, his entire body tingling in the life-giving ocean
despite the cold with which he was beginning to shiver, he
  felt that fire grab hold and warm him with a blaze he
         hadn’t felt since before he could remember.
                       And was glad.
   While the fan swirled overhead Cen sweated in his small
     room, covering sheets of paper with numbers. He’d
 discovered a strange predilection for the feel of pushing a
  pencil; it seemed to help him think. He did this for three
 days straight but it was no use. He scooted his chair back
from the table abruptly and pressed on his eyelids with his
 palms till the inner blackness was light-shot. He rose and
went to the bathroom sink, poured several glasses of water
   over his head, but it didn’t wash the realization away.
   He would have to log on. Retrace his way through the
web, to the glowing screen holding a particular juncture
 he’d worked on in a London Underground station, at a
  web pay site, when he discovered, in a panic, that his
 notebook was broken, and that he was filled with what
seemed like a minor rush of revelation. He’d made a copy
   of it, of course, but it seemed to have been lost in the
   uproar of his leaving. Certainly, he couldn’t find it.
                     But it did still exist.
   He cursed his ridiculous confidence, his certainty that if
 he came to a conclusion once he owned it forever. If he’d
 ever published it, he could just go to the library and look
    up journals on the computer. Instead, he had to risk
 revelation, use his probably useless disguise, draw down
  the circling sharks of Interspace when they saw that he
was not drinking but thinking—and even worse, show him
          that this chunk was of some importance.
   He locked his door and set out across Honolulu. None of
the web booths in downtown Honolulu were secure, despite
  privacy laws. Some of the ritzier hotels claimed to have
  more private web access; wealthy businesspeople had a
 way of making things unpleasant should their security be
  traceably breached. He headed toward Waikiki, pretty
sure that if he went to the fanciest hotel he could find and
   used one of their booths he would increase the odds of
        keeping the direction of his thoughts secret.
   He took the route past Iolani Palace, past the golden
statue of Liliuokalani, through the small expensive shops
and large breezy restaurants of the tourist zone, past the
                 Princess Kaiulani Hotel.
   As the scene effervesced, he wondered if it was because
 he hadn’t been eating right. A chill ran up his spine and
   then he jumped at the sound of a cannon being shot.
  Ceremonial. Eyes closed, he saw a universe of internal
 stars. He wanted to fix this, somehow. He knew he had
arrived at the nexus of all his thoughts. Here. Where was
                           here?
                       Where, exactly?
        How could he describe the passage and place
                    mathematically?
               How could he stay here forever?
  A breeze cooled his skin. He heard reef-muffled surf and
 the wind-driven rush of a carefully imported botanical
wonderland of leaves. He smelled ginger, heard the sharp
cadence of marching feet and briefly snapped commands.
  He tasted blood and realized he had bitten his lip quite
                         hard.
    The date? It had to be after August 12, 1898. That was
the terrible day when Hawaii was officially annexed. That
 morning at Iolani Palace the Hawaiian flag was lowered
    and the American flag raised. At that moment, the
  Hawaiian musicians threw down their marching band
   instruments midsong and fled in tears, and a sudden
    storm washed over the festivities. That was the day
 Kaiulani’s hopes, and the hopes of the Hawaiian people,
                   were dashed forever.
 He remembered seeing in the Bishop Museum so long ago
the original invitation from the Provisional Government
  extended to Cleghorn and Kaiulani, an invitation to
attend the Annexation Ceremony, R.S.V.P.; beneath that,
   the spidery handwriting of Cleghorn with which he
“necessarily” declined the invitation for both himself and
                      his daughter.
   Cen opened his eyes. Ainahau—green, lush, filled with
      flowers and birds—was across the dirt road.
     And there she was. He stared, heart in his throat.
 A bit beyond the stone wall, Kaiulani’s face was thin and
pale as she bent over a bird-of-paradise plant. Slashes of
bright orange bobbed as she cut several of them and lay
   them on the ground. She wore a voluminous black
 muumuu. A wide-brimmed straw hat shaded her face.
   As he watched, she knelt and pulled a trowel from the
 basket at her side and began poking around in the dirt.
   Behind her, the old mansion was half hidden behind
mango trees and banyans. Her father had built her a new
house in 1897, but Cen didn’t see it—not surprising, seeing
   that the estate was ten acres. The raucous cries of
   peacocks exploded each time the cannon was fired.
   He left the ruckus outside and walked in through the
                           gate.
  The clink of her trowel in the rich dirt mingled with the
rustling of the leaves in the offshore trades. He glanced up
 once to see that American marines were there, dressed in
   uniforms from the past, carrying rifles. Guarding the
                      public from her.
      Oh, Kai, he thought, perhaps you should be more
                       dangerous.
   Kaiulani didn’t look up, so he sat down in front of her,
 cross-legged, on the cool grass. She was only a foot from
him. He reached up with one hand and brushed her cheek.
   She looked up, and her brown eyes were flat and sad.
              “You’re much too thin,” he said.
  Her smile was derisive and did not reach her eyes. She
gestured toward her enormous dress. “You can’t tell,” she
                          said.
      “Your face,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
  She knifed the trowel into the ground and leaned back.
  “Don’t you see the soldiers?” she asked. “I’m a prisoner
  here. I can’t even have a charity event. They think I’m
trying to raise money for the resistance.” As she spoke he
 saw new hollows beneath her cheekbones; dark circles
                      beneath her eyes.
       “Then why don’t you do something?” he asked.
  She shrugged. “Lily—my aunt, the queen—surrendered.
They held her prisoner in the palace. They uncovered some
 sort of plot—so they claimed, but it was only loyal young
Wilcox, doing what was right. She had no knowledge of it.
 There was fighting on Diamond Head. Hawaiians were
   killed. They were going to try her for treason. They
 threatened to kill her. They have threatened to kill me.”
              “Isn’t there anything you can do?”
   “She keeps advising me to do nothing. The Provisional
 Government offered to make me queen, but she says they
 would only use me to bring the Hawaiians into line with
 annexationist plans. And she doesn’t want me to take an
 opposition course and rally the Hawaiians. That would
  only cause more bloodshed. She’s right.” Her voice was
 bitter and old. “I never had any real power. I was never
                         anything.”
              “You’re something to me,” he said.
  She looked up, and he was surprised to see that her eyes
 were filled with gratitude. “Didn’t you know?” he asked.
               “I hardly ever see you,” she said.
  “I’m sorry,” he said, and was suddenly curious. “Look,”
 he said, “how do you think this happens? Us seeing each
                          other?”
   “I think,” she said slowly, “that it has something to do
                      with the bones.”
                        “What bones?”
   “Kamehameha’s bones,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you? I’m
sure I did. The kahuna used them to curse my mother and
she died. He cursed me, the daughter, too. ‘With vision,’ my
  old Hawaiian nurse told me. When my father found out
  that she’d said that—I was very young, you know, but I
remember it—he was very angry and let her go. From then
on he only hired haoles to take care of me. He’s Scotch, you
 know, and he doesn’t believe in any sort of superstition. I
used to laugh about it, too. And then I used to be so happy
that I could see you that I thought, if this is part of a curse
of vision, it’s more of a blessing. Now I don’t know. It only
  makes me terribly sad. Not only you. It’s—other things
 too.” She shivered. “Everything seems so dark. My life is
over, the life I was meant to have. The life of my country is
over. It’s just a colony now, a place to be looted. And I can
never see you if I want. It just happens. Sometimes. Hardly
                       at all, it seems.”
  “It has nothing to do with bones,” he shouted. “It has to
do with you!” It has nothing to do, the subtext in his mind
  ran, with quantum cosmology, the metauniverse, “the
observer,” or branching time. Those were only words. The
    nexus that he’d sought so desperately, he suddenly
realized, had to do with human consciousness, with will,
                        with love.
                           Absurd.
                     Totally unscientific.
    But then, since consciousness and all its attributes,
including emotion, did exist, they must figure somehow in
    the vast equations with which he had so long and
desperately struggled. Words flew from him, even while he
      cringed at how angry and forceful he sounded.
   “It has to do with will! You’re not doing what you were
                        born to do!”
       She stood, eyes blazing. “Are you?” she asked.
  “You don’t know anything about me,” he said. “I know—”
   “Oh, what do you know?” she shouted. “You only think
you know. And don’t tell me what to do or who I am! That’s
               all anyone ever has done.”
   She ran off across the lawn. He followed, grabbed her
 shoulder, whirled her around, and held her. “Don’t go,
Kai,” he whispered. “Please don’t go. Please don’t be angry
with me. I need you more than anything. I need this time. I
                        need you.”
 “Then help me,” she whispered, and he drew her close to
 him and stroked her hair, lowered his head, and kissed
                          her.
   A male voice called out from beyond a screen of green
             foliage, and she jumped away.
  “Vicky! Where are you? Are we going to play cards? The
       others are waiting.” His footsteps receded.
  “Koa,” she said, looking at Cen. “My cousin. He wants to
                        marry me.”
  “You can’t!” he shouted before he even thought about it.
    “Who are you to tell me what I can and can’t do!” she
said, her voice filled with pain. “What else can I do, what
   else should I do, if he’s willing? I care for him. We’ve
always been close. And at least he’s always here, and loves
me no matter what! You have a lot of nerve. Who are you,
 anyway?” She pushed him away, and tilted her head to
regard him with serious eyes that continued the question.
  “Please, Kai,” he said. “I’ll marry you. If that’s what you
                want. That’s what I want.”
      “But—,” she said, her expression one of stunned
                      amazement.
  “Isn’t—isn’t that what you want?” he asked, completely
                 humbled. “If I beg you?”
   “How can you marry me?” she asked, her voice almost
 scathing. “I hate this. I must be insane. You’re not real.
   I’ve always told myself, you can’t be real. But…” she
glanced down at herself“… now I know you’re real. What
      else explains… Cen, I am going to have your …
   And on the cusp of her declaration he fell again into
     darkness, then stood blinking in his own time.
   People were staring at him, moving around him in a
                      wide berth.
   What had she meant to say? Your baby? How else could
                 such a sentence end?
   But she had never had a baby. He must have misheard
                          her.
  He turned and began the long run back to his room, his
 excitement growing. Maybe this last bit of information
was all he needed, the where and when of this appearance.
Late that night he fell asleep over his papers, trying not to
  be disappointed. All the pieces are there now, he kept
    telling himself. Don’t worry. But he was terrified.
    The next morning, he faced the nature of his terror.
   The vague records of the illness that had caused her
 death were quite mixed. “Bright’s disease” was mingled
with reports claiming that “rheumatism had reached her
           heart,” or “she died of pneumonia.”
  If he actually did return, would it be only to stand at her
                         deathbed?
  He couldn’t seem to think about his grand mathematical
edifice with this hanging over his head. He had to find out
 more. And he had to think. He had to get out of his room,
                   away from his papers.
    The freeway he walked beneath was a dull roar of
rumbling wheels. Then he was in one of the neighborhoods
     above Honolulu, walking along Liliha Street.
     He followed some inner magnet as doves hooted and
   filled the morning with primeval mystery despite the
  modern overlay. I crave the past, he thought; I simply
  crave the past, and one woman in that past, Kaiulani.
  But he had to let the information he had settle into some
   sort of coherence before he could fit it with what he
                        already had.
    He hardly dared hope that this meeting was the last
  point to fully define his vision of fractal time, and to
predict the places where the fractals of the metauniverse
 might be jumped, transversed, when the particles that
         were him would be utterly translated…
                  But it was possible. Yes.
     He bought a pack of cigarettes though he had not
smoked in years; Ross had broken him of that habit. When
 he’d smoked half the pack he was in front of the Bishop
 Museum. He threw the rest of the pack in he trash and
 went into the gift shop. As good a starting place as any.
After this he would go to the archives, see if there was any
             definitive medical information…
  Inside was a short row of books about Kaiulani, mixed
in with general Hawaiiana—genealogy, flora and fauna,
navigational feats, recovered chants, and authentic hula
  videos. He pulled one of the books out, but he’d seen it
                before. He’d seen them all.
  “Another Kaiulani groupie?” asked the man behind the
 counter. He wore a brass badge that said his name was
                         Palea.
       Cen turned, the book open. “I guess,” he said.
   Palea, a huge Hawaiian with a long ponytail, smiled.
“They’re in here all the time. Buying holographic posters
  of her. Got a whole society re-creating her clothes and
 stuff. Always making new virtuals. There’s their latest.
  Kaiulani in Jersey.” He pointed at it, shook his head.
      “Well, that’s understandable, I guess,” Cen said.
  “Her granddaughter just passed away last week,” said
 Palea. “Old times gone. Kind of a shame. Of course, she
was less than a quarter Hawaiian. Stubborn old lady, too;
 she had a used-car dealership, so you can imagine. She
         wasn’t at all interested in her ancestors.”
 “What do you mean, her granddaughter?” asked Cen, his
    voice sharp. “Kaiulani didn’t have any children.”
  Palea shrugged. “Probably shouldn’t say anything. My
auntie would kill me—except she’s been dead a long time.
 But you’re Hawaiian, no? I’m surprised you don’t know.
Not that it’s particularly important—but didn’t you have
any aunties? Didn’t you grow up talking story with them?”
     “My mother”—Cen’s voice caught—“my mother died
when I was pretty young. After that I was on my own.” And
  I hated everything Hawaiian—I just didn’t know why.
                     Except Kaiulani.
    “Too bad,” said Palea. “What the hell, all these old
 secrets. Not really secret, not to Hawaiians. You really
 missed out. Well, a lot of kids don’t listen anyway. Yeah,
 she died a few weeks after giving birth. Because of it. It
was all covered up.” He turned to another customer. “Can
                         I help you?”
  Cen just stood there, the book open in his hand. Had he
 already moved, without knowing it, into another world?
  He was sweating. The cigarettes had made him dizzy.
   Palea looked at him with concern. “Hey, brah, you all
                        right?”
   Cen grabbed at the counter. The shop swirled around
                         him.
  Palea’s wooden kamaaina house, an old-timer’s house,
was perched several hundred feet above the Nuuanu Pali
 highway. Traffic rushed past below, distance rendering
  the sound surflike, white noise that blended with the
  rustle of a castlelike banyan whose baby shoots were
    twining around Palea’s precarious porch railing.
    Cen stood on the edge of the wide wooden veranda,
which was cantilevered out over a steep, jungled drop-off.
Sisal mats covered the floorboards, and the outdoor room
 was furnished with an eclectic assortment of tables and
chairs. Rain thrummed briefly on the roof, then the cloud
  passed. Orange, scarlet, and yellow hibiscus pressed
  against the screen. Cen moved to another corner and
   looked down at a precisely rocked pool where water
 paused only for a second before rushing over the lip and
              splashing invisibly far below.
   Palea thrust a cold beer into his hand and flipped a
 switch that turned on an underwater light. “My koi. I’ve
 had most of them for years. See the white one? That’s Ed
              Sullivan. Ever heard of him?”
             “No,” said Cen, opening his beer.
    “The red one is Lucy. I love those old TV shows, man.
Gotta hundred of the CDs. Sure you don’t want something
 to eat? You still don’t look good. I never saw a man faint
     before. Or a woman either, come to think of it.” He
unwrapped a vast sandwich he’d bought on the way home.
                     “Here, take some.”
  Cen did not much care for salty lunch meat but he ate it
  to please Palea, who was a nice man. He felt like he’d
 fallen into a rabbit hole. “So tell me about Kaiulani,” he
                       said abruptly.
     Palea sprawled into a deep bamboo chair, which
 creaked beneath his weight; Cen settled on a matching
                        couch.
    Full night had come, turning the Pali Highway to a
half-hidden river of slow-flowing light. Sweet ginger scent
 came and went as the wind gusted, clacking the banana
 leaves in the darkness. Cen emptied his beer and set the
                can on a small round table.
          “What you want to know?” asked Palea.
     Cen wanted to ask him to cut the crap and speak
   correctly; he’d seen several anthropology degrees in
  Palea’s name on the tatami-matted wall when they’d
 entered. He was always glad his mother had insisted on
 perfect grammar. He thought Palea’s probably had, too.
                  “Kaiulani had a baby?”
    Palea took a pull from his beer can. “Yeah, she did.”
      “Why doesn’t anyone know? I never read about it
                       anywhere.”
   Palea’s face was in the shadows. His words came fast,
  mixed with Hawaiian, sweet as music to Cen’s ears. He
   forgot his problems with Palea’s way of talking and
     focused on what he said as if it were his very life.
  “I’m only telling you this because you’re Hawaiian, brah.
 Nobody cares, of course. She’s been dead over a hundred
years. But yeah, she was pregnant. That’s why she went to
 the Big Island, to get away, while she was pregnant. She
    gave birth on Moloka’i. You know, came back to the
       kahunas at the end. But too late to save her.”
    “What happened to the baby?” asked Cen, his voice a
                   hoarse whisper.
    “After she died, Kaiulani’s father, Cleghorn, told the
  aunties that it would be known as his. I’d say that was
  probably the plan all along anyway. Probably nobody
  outside that room would have questioned it. Kaiulani
grew up with a few half sisters Cleghorn fathered without
  being married before she was born, and I’d say he had
   more after Likelike died. But all those aunties were
surprised as hell. That kid—could have ruled Hawaii, eh?”
   “Could have been killed,” said Cen. “Another threat.”
    He felt, rather than saw, Palea nod in the darkness.
    “Exactly,” he said. “A threat to the new American
  government. It was pretty shaky. Can you imagine the
 riots—the bloodshed, even?—when the people found out
that there was a new heir to the throne, the child of their
beloved princess? And besides that, the kid was all the old
                man had left of Kaiulani.”
                        “Boy or girl?”
                            “Boy.”
                   “Who was the father?”
    Palea did not speak for a moment but the night was
  alive with motion and sound—the shrill of insects, the
  hush of traffic, the roar of a million trees shouting the
                  answer into Cen’s mind.
   Palea said, “Nobody knows. Best bet is Koa, her cousin.
  They were very close. He visited her in England once or
   twice, and when she returned they spent a lot of time
 together. But for some reason they didn’t marry. They felt
like brother and sister toward each other, I think. Just my
 opinion. The aunties said he didn’t know about the child
 until much later, until after she’d died and he’d married
another woman. She kept it secret from him all during her
    pregnancy. Maybe she—she and her father—always
 intended it to be a secret. The Hawaiians didn’t have the
     haole hangup about ownership, about legitimacy.
   But Kaiulani wasn’t really living in a Hawaiian world
              anymore. Maybe she cared.”
   “But why?” asked Cen, his throat aching. “Why did she
die? She was only twenty-three. Did she hemorrhage? Have
     a problem with the afterbirth? What happened?”
     “Bright’s disease.” Palea got up and went inside,
continued talking through the open kitchen window. Cen
heard the refrigerator open and shut. “They didn’t really
    have Bright’s disease pinned down too well. Alice
Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s wife, died the day she gave
                  birth. She had it, too.”
                     “Bright’s disease.”
  “Yeah.” A cupboard door slammed, then another. Palea
muttered something to himself, then continued talking to
Cen. “That’s what they said. Basically some sort of kidney
  problem, maybe the aftermath of a strep infection.”
  All those colds, in Europe. “Why do some of the accounts
                say she died of pneumonia?”
   “Part of the bullshit coverup, that’s all. ‘Oh, she rode off
  in the cold rain.’ I guess they had to think of something.
And who cares, anyway, eh? I think they told her son, when
 he got old enough. They lived in a world of high intrigue,
  those people. Backstabbers, you know? Always fighting
 over who’s who. People still do it. I’m from a kahuna line;
my cousins are all royals. Always lording it over us. Could
be old man Cleghorn was tired of it. Just plain tired. And
  maybe he didn’t want his daughter bad-mouthed by the
  Americans for having a child out of wedlock, especially
  since she was dead.” He came back outside holding two
      beers and a bag of pretzels. “Want another beer?”
          “No,” said Cen. “I think I’ve had enough.”
   “I think so, too,” said Palea, his voice gentle. He peered
     at Cen from across the porch, his large, dark face
     highlighted by the citronella candle. “Who are you
                  anyway? Why do you care?”
   “Why do you?” asked Cen. “How do you know all this?”
    “My uncle had a lot of old tapes he made himself. The
  old aunties used to have a club, Saturday mornings.”
Palea laughed quietly. “The old man said that his mother
used to drag him down there and make him listen. A few
  years later when he was in college he realized that all
   those old ladies had been there and he started going
around and taping them all, asking them questions. They
 were talking story about the old days. The last ones, you
   know? They all had American names because they’d
 married, but they were old aunties. The last of the royal
cousins who’d been born in the late eighteen hundreds and
 early nineteen hundreds. Kaiulani’s story was only one of
  them. Oh, the stories went way back. Way way back. She
 was always just a pawn. I’m sure Cleghorn realized that,
  at the end; there was just no point in telling anyone that
Kaiulani died because of that baby. None of their damned
     business. Why should Cleghorn let another life—the
 child’s—be ruined? And why should he have to give up all
that he had left of Kaiulani to whoever the father was? It’s
 very possible that Kaiulani herself made him promise not
   to say anything. They said she should have trusted the
   kahunas, had a Hawaiian-style healing, and then she
 would have lived. You tell everything you’ve kept hidden,
  get the poisons out. So who knows—maybe the secrecy of
  the pregnancy killed her, kept her from getting the care
  she needed. He sighed. ”Or maybe it was what they said
about her—she had no reason to live. She was not going to
be queen, and now she even had an illegitimate child. She
   would be a disgrace in the eyes of her fancy European
   friends. She gave up. Ah, no wonder. She was only half
  Hawaiian. A wimp. Too pampered. Too damned skinny.
                    But why do you care?”
    Palea had asked a question—why did he care? Cen
didn’t turn his head. He told instead the stars, the stream,
 the river of light, and the overwhelming scent of ginger
 that came rushing from the night, his answer a whisper
                 that Palea could not hear:
                   Because I love you, Kai.
                    “What?” said Palea.
    Cen turned to look at the huge man with concerned
liquid brown eyes that spoke to him of his people and his
         home. Of course he was the one to ask.
        “You know somebody by the name of Maui?”
    The next morning Cen bought a blank book, a spiral
  notebook that artists used for sketching. The notebook
pleased him in some deep way, the white unlined expanse
 of paper. He bought a package of indelible pens because
 he did not want anyone erasing what he did nor did he
want it to fade. It was not yet complete but he could feel its
         energy gathering and wanted to be ready.
 What was in his head was a delicately structured edifice
 of thought. It would soon be complete, he knew; entirely
whole and of a piece and satisfactory; sound as a bell that
 would ring loud as the peals of all the Honolulu church
bells that had rung on the day of Kaiulani’s birth so long
                           ago.
 He waited until the hour was right and went back to the
   museum. Palea ignored him. He saw the only copy of
Death of a Kingdom and took it up to the desk, paid for it.
When Palea raised his eyes they were full of questions but
 he just said, “Thank you, sir,” and gave Cen his change.
The night before Cen had finally convinced Palea that he
  was who he said he was and that Maui would want to
    hear from him. Palea had given him these spylike
 directions. The funny thing was that it was all so crude.
       When he got back to his room he tore out page
ninety-seven and held it over a lit match. A phone number,
   written in broad strokes, became clear. Cen smiled.
   Sometimes the simplest things were the best, eh? He
 memorized it, tore the page to bits, and flushed it down
                         the toilet.
            He was not quite ready to call Maui.
                  But soon, he hoped. Soon.
   He was becoming increasingly polarized by hope, as if
 the one true navigation star was just about to rise above
 the night horizon and create a path across the dark sea.
 He’d known this rising curve of inevitable energy before,
  many times. He would work frenzied, for days, barely
sleeping and eating, while the world seemed infused with
 light and pure purpose, filled with crystalline patterns
             that flowed through his pencil.
   Afterward, he always plunged down the flip side into
 darkness; if it were not for his written record of when he
had thought otherwise, he could easily deny that there was
                     any reason to live.
   This time he aimed to fly right off the curve, into the
  heart of the universe, into the truth of all matter and
                           being.
     Something fell into place that night in the live space
between wakefulness and dream that always seethed with
  thought for Cen. He knew it when it happened; he sat up
  in bed. The sheet fell from his naked body, and he sat on
the edge of the bed for a long time feeling as if he were the
    focal point of a vast field of information that quietly
manifested itself since the beginning of time and was only
waiting with infinite patience for a target. He felt humble
    and deeply grateful while the breeze from the harbor
cooled his body until he began to shiver; then he pulled the
 sheet back over himself and fell asleep, not at all worried
  that he would forget. When he put pen to paper it would
                          all pour out.
   At Ala Moana Park, just past sunrise, coconut palms
      cast long shadows across the soft green lawn.
   Cen had spent an afternoon here with Kaiulani, back
when he was so very young. Now he chose a concrete picnic
table beneath a twisted tree, sat, and opened his notebook.
  The scent of the sea filled his nose and as the park filled
with picnickers and the cries of children, he wrote, caught
on a rising tide of joy. Doves cooed in their hidden owl-like
 way, each sound like a bubble that rose into the day and
 burst against his ear. Everything around him seemed to
        echo the truth of what his pen was saying.
  When he finally looked up, finished, humanity had ebbed
from the park and it was dusk. Light-limned tourist boats
 plied the sea on the other side of the reef and he felt as if
all of existence was one thing, entire and whole: light and
 time, large and small, quanta and gravity, all forces and
 all of their results, one great wide open thing revealed by
                the existence of her, Kaiulani.
     And on the path of her revelation he would travel.
    He sat, dazed, for half an hour, drained and simply
happy. This was the place where she had lived, and within
     a few blocks was the place where she had died.
    The lights of the boats glimmered on dark water, so
close that across the stretch of reef-enclosed sea he could
hear the band on one of them playing steel guitar. In the
            cool night he broke into a sweat.
           It might not work for him. It might not.
         But what did it matter? He could only try.
   He realized now that it was not as precise as he thought
it might be. It was like the difference between looking at a
    map of an intersection and actually being there: the
richness of the description would vary greatly between the
person looking at the map and the person standing in the
    very spot the map described. He could be a bit more
precise than before, and now he had been able to broaden
 certain parameters so that once he crossed over he would
   not be able to return. Perhaps at some time, using his
proofs as a basis, and with massive computer power, more
 precision would be possible. But this was enough for him.
 He could now make projections, and know within certain
 broad parameters the times and places where this would
                         be possible.
  He still had a few things to do, here in this life, before he
                         was ready.
  He had to do not only what Kaiulani would want him to
do but what he now in his heart believed was deeply right.
      And he had to do what he could to save her life.
 He flipped back to the front of his book: in the light from
   a nearby bathroom he could see he’d left no room.
  No matter. He flipped to the back of the book and wrote
                  THE KAIULANI PROOFS
   He closed the book and gripped it tight, looking once
  again at the beautiful electricity. Pearl Harbor, the
Waianae Coast, arced away from him in a great swoop of
land, sprinkled with light as with so many grains of salt.
    At a pawnshop Cen bought a long zippered bag large
 enough to hold several rods and reels. He considered two
rods carefully and chose one, quite heavy, good sturdy ahi
  size, and went to another store before he found a fairly
 good reel and bargained for it, purely to give any IS spies
   who by the slimmest chance might be watching him a
reason for his purchase of this bag. He watched himself do
this from some detached place, savoring each detail. Each
thing he did, every second, brought him closer to Kaiulani.
  Besides, he thought, as he zipped up his new rig, it was
  pretty damned nice. He might just want to actually go
                         fishing.
  At first had been deeply depressed about the truth of her
                 death. Was he the father?
  Given that he believed that he had been with her in San
                     Francisco—yes.
   In the Queen’s Hospital medical library he looked up
Bright’s disease and found that it was a vague diagnosis
   and so was not sure exactly what she’d had or what if
anything in that time could have cured it or kept it at bay
after her dangerous birthing. Perhaps only dialysis might
have helped. Perhaps antibiotics. Perhaps a new kidney.
 It all depended on what the problem had really been. He
wished he knew some doctors who might help, might give
  him advice. Was abstinence the only answer? It was too
    late for that. What then should he take her? A birth
 control patch? Here, my dear, a present from the future?
     He stopped into a free clinic for a while-you-wait
                       vasectomy.
    In the tiny room he sat draped in white paper, and
 questions spun in his mind. Could he possibly, possibly,
change her life? Change her death to life? Could he—what
                           if—
    “Don’t worry, this is an operation you can do on the
 kitchen table. In fact, I’ve done them on kitchen tables,”
  said the jovial doctor as he pulled on his gloves with a
snap. “You know, all the relatives want free jobs. Always
the women want their husbands done. But you don’t look
                          worried.”
    “What?” asked Cen, jolted from his thoughts. “Oh.”
  “I said, never seen any man calm as you while you stare
at these knives,” said the doctor, as the nurse handed him
                            one.
   “Oh,” said Cen again. “I guess that patch worked.” He
didn’t feel the least bit concerned. And he certainly didn’t
               feel any pain. He felt euphoric.
  “Guess so,” said the doctor. “One last chance to change
                       your mind.”
          Cen shook his head and closed his eyes.
    He left with a year’s worth of samples of a powerful
 antibiotic, because he told the doctor he was embarking
  on a long trip to remote parts of China. The doctor’s
  physician daughter was there, too, he told Cen, doing
                volunteer medical work.
    “I’ll give you what she took with her to China, in case
 you have some emergency. Your medical history of kidney
infections could be dangerous if you were in a remote area.
  Still have your appendix? That’s too bad. Try and have
  that taken care of. The receptionist can help you set up
                       arrangements.”
    The doctor emerged from a room holding an envelope
 filled with patches. “You would not believe how effective
these are. These antibiotics are bacteria-sensitive. They’re
 genetically engineered to respond to a broad spectrum of
  bacteria. Perfect for someone in your situation. They’ll
 wipe out things so primitive we haven’t seen them before,
or things so hardened to assault that they’re impervious to
  everything else. An entire new generation of drugs. Not
 FDA-approved yet, but they will be soon.” He lowered his
 voice a bit. “Tell you the truth, they were developed by IS
for their generation ship. If they didn’t work, heads would
                             roll.”
   He paused. “If you’re worried about your kidneys, this is
  slated to be the kidney rebuilder.” He went to a bank of
   drawers and pulled out a sheet of perforated patches,
    carefully labeled a plastic holder, and slipped them
inside, along with some strips that when inserted in urine
 gave precise information about kidney function. He went
over the indications for use with Cen, and said, “The way I
interpret the research— I’m a urologist, by the way, so I’ve
 been following it closely—is that a regrown kidney might
cause problems down the road. But not until the patient is
 pretty old anyway, a lot older than they would have been
        without them. Average old age, you know?”
  Cen thanked him profusely, went back to his room, and
             put the packet in his fishing bag.
    Everything he did now, every motion, every decision,
reminded him of the lucidity of the special quality of light
 here in his home, above the sea and even below it, where
the bustle of the world was gone and fish reflected light in
   slow-moving rainbows and where for fifty feet in all
   directions one could see through the alien medium of
 water. He was preparing to enter an alien medium now
                   deliberately as a diver.
  Cen got on a bus late at night so he would be alone, so he
 could be sure no one was following him. He hoped that IS
had written him off at last, if they even knew he was here,
deciding that the fragments they’d gotten from Smith were
              all that they were going to get.
     With him he had his fishing bag with his new pole
                     zipped inside.
   As he settled into the back, and the bus moved steadily
up the Nuuanu Pali Highway, he was reminded of the trip
 so many years ago on the same line when he had fled his
mother’s death, coming the other way over the Koolaus on
                       this same road.
    At what point had he locked the awful thing that had
 happened deep inside and sealed it into memory? At this
 block, where the lights of an all-night liquor store coldly
   fluoresced? Up here, a mile further on, where, looking
back, he could see the panorama of Honolulu lights spread
  out below him like a shimmering dream of space? Each
 foot gained in elevation as the bus climbed the mountain
seemed to bring him closer to some powerful, fearful place
      in his mind. By the time he reached the Nuuanu
      Pali—“the” Pali, though pali just meant cliff—he
 struggled to pull in each breath against the dark weight
                       gathered there.
   He got out. It was what—3:00 a.m.? He saw one couple
 silhouetted against some rocks, taking in the view, but
            otherwise the place was deserted.
 Buffeted by the constant wind, which legend claimed you
     could sometimes lean against and be supported,
 suspended over the lush green rain-catching side of the
Koolaus, where the valley below was straight down several
   thousand feet, he grabbed a wind-gnarled tree and
       perched dangerously close to the pali’s edge.
      Spread out below was the land of his troubled
 childhood. Kailua Bay, the maglev launch blazing with
            light, was fully defined by lights.
  He raised his eyes to the glowing moon. The colony there
  grew apace. That was the logical place for the seed to
                 spew forth, he presumed.
    But he, Cen, could walk right through. Into another
                    world. One person.
  Perhaps some future mathematicians might extrapolate
    his results to a group of people, even to a field that
   included a ship, maybe even a planet. He might have
              himself, had he remained here.
                 But he did not intend to.
    Kaiulani had gazed upon this view. Much darker at
   night, he surmised, and the stars much brighter, not
drowned by land light. This had been her future kingdom.
 But Hawaii had instead become the last shore on which
Manifest Destiny cast its all-encompassing mantle, which
   had swept her away, into death, on its black tide of
              conquered indigenous peoples.
    He thought of Maui as he looked out over the sparse
 lights below. How was Maui? What was he doing, really?
  Soon he would know. He looked forward to seeing Maui
after so long. Kaiulani had awakened him to Maui’s truth.
   He was in more of a position now to appreciate Maui’s
   grandmother’s intimation that Interspace harbored
        within it Homeland Movement radicals.
   He finally had what he wanted for more than half his
life. He had all the pieces of the puzzle, he was sure. Just
understanding how they fit was enough for him to be able
           to leave. And stay in Kaiulani’s time.
                       Never to return.
   It was odd, this having the pieces to such a very grand
                          puzzle.
   He would not do it for people like those in Interspace.
 There was no reason for them to know these things. Who
          knew what use they might put it to?
    A great gust of wind blasted him, and he had to grab
   hold of his tree to keep his balance. He turned his eyes
upward, with the great sweep of wind, and let the light of
billions of stars fill them. Startled, he realized that he had
completely lost sight of the ostensible, ultimate goal of the
   international Interspace consortium—to travel to the
   stars. Humankind’s first concerted effort as a species,
 globally, to leave the planet. The data from tiny, distant
    robotic probes appeared in a box on page two of the
 Honolulu Advertiser every day. There were many probes,
so the box was never empty. The huge scientific community
              living here noted it with interest.
     But IS was a corrupt and immoral organization. As
  corrupt and as immoral as the Provisional Government,
composed of American businessmen, the members of which
   had seen fit to quietly, gradually, and cannily take the
 land, the vote, and the rule from those whose right it was
   to have those things by forcing Kalakaua to sign what
       became known as the “Bayonet Constitution.”
   He should stay and fight, alongside Maui, in whatever
  way he could. He should. He should stay, and take the
  place he knew would rightfully be his in the annals of
                        science.
            But he would not. No, he would not.
   He was surprised by the lightening of the sky. He had
not realized the time. Hidden within the billowing forest,
 tropical birds greeting the dawn exploded with sound,
 suddenly, and the sky was a sheet of dark orange that
changed in minutes to yellow and then blue and the vast
  ocean beneath was first a great metal-gray sheet that
        relaxed into blue and it was day, full day.
  It was time go. He picked up his bag, strangely untired.
  The trailhead was only two miles away and he walked to
it parallel to the road on a footpath through dense jungle.
   A shower swept across the roof of the forest, pattering
    against the leaves and freshening the air. It did not
penetrate to where he walked among thick-trunked trees.
              It was quiet, away from the road.
  His long bag was well balanced in his hand as he strode
along the narrow trail. He could almost see his mother, a
princess, a priestess of the alii kahuna class, walking in
 front of him, telling him not to eat too many guavas; he
  plucked a yellow, ripe one and bit into the sweet pink
                       flesh, just one.
   When he got to the pool and the waterfall he paused.
 How could anything be so pristine so close to Honolulu?
  Guarded by the spirits in which most Hawaiians still
                      believed, eh?
    He paid them silent homage and put down his bag.
 This was a present to Maui, and to Maui’s grandmother.
 He did not have to give them these things. But it was his
 duty to pass them on and it was quite clear to whom he
                    should pass them.
  For the third time in his life he climbed the cliff behind
    the waterfall and sat on the narrow ledge there.
   Soaked, he reached inside and pulled out the packet of
                         bones.
   He stared at it for a long moment, relieved that it was
actually still here. White birds flitted across the still green
  pool where the long waterfall fell straight as an arrow
 disturbing it as little as a perfect dive. This—this!—was
what his mother had died for—to show him a packet of old
                            bones.
  Perhaps not directly. But if they hadn’t been late getting
back home… his father wouldn’t have been in that mood…
 his mother would not have pulled out the gun over which
              they all, finally, struggled…
   Absurd reasoning! But she had shown them to him on
the day of her death, and because she had taken the time
  to do so, she may well have died, and his own life had
   changed forever. Because of the import of that day,
 because of the intensity of her belief in their sacredness,
  the bones were holy for him. Because of her belief, not
 because of his. He believed in the power of mind, and in
       Kaiulani, and in the truth of what he knew.
  Balancing on the ledge, he unwrapped the bundle. The
tapa crumbled and flaked away, stuck to his hands, as he
                  hastily unfolded it.
  The bones gleamed softly in the muted rain forest light.
  The musty smell of old tapa mingled with the scent of
   spray and the huge, mysterious white flowers that
        cascaded down one side of the waterfall.
   He chose one bone for Maui, a long one that he thought
 might be a tibia. He didn’t really know what they wanted
to do with the bones, but something he faintly remembered
 Maui’s grandmother saying was that it had something to
do with DNA. So one bone was plenty, wasn’t it? He would
 hold the rest back. He might need the bargaining power
 these bones could give him in some unforeseen scenario.
  Because he might, he realized, with a chill that did not
come from his surroundings but from his heart, be back.
He might fail completely, in one of several ways. He might
                  want to come back.
                          He might?
          He turned that thought over in his mind.
  So what if he did want to come back? He probably would
   want to come back, many times. Would he be able to?
   He admitted to himself that he doubted it. He had no
 target here, in this age, nothing or no one that he loved.
             His etak lay beyond this horizon.
                          But still…
   He ran his hand over the rough, pitted bones, thinking.
 If they fell into the wrong hands, or were simply lost, the
        Homelanders would have nothing, after all.
    He needed both hands to extricate the skull from the
welter of bones in the tapa. He looked into the dark, empty
                   sockets for a moment.
  Then he took a portion of the tapa cloth that had broken
   away from the large wrap, rolled the skull in it, and
              thrust it deep inside the cave.
    Then he rewrapped the large bundle and laboriously
climbed down, almost slipping into the pool several times.
   He edged around the water, trying not to trample lush
ferns, holding tightly to the entire bundle. He unzipped the
bag and put the bones in with his fishing rod. It was a very
  tight fit. He struggled with the zipper and finally got it
                             shut.
    Overcome with tiredness, he lay on a soft bed of moss
         clutching the bag like a lover and slept.
   He woke several hours later, startled. Light had fled
from the clearing; it was late afternoon. Soon it would be
dark. He did not want to be on that narrow trail too late.
                Why had he slept so long?
     But something within him had healed as he slept.
  The bones were heavy and awkward on the return hike.
   He deliberately savored each spectacular vista, the
 sunset-colored sea, whenever the trees thinned. Once or
 twice he crouched as the roar of the wind rose, holding
                   onto a rock or tree.
    When he finally got back to his room, it was after
 midnight. He was exhausted. He put the key to the door
   but it swung open and inside was a tall man in the
 darkness bent over the table lighting his notebook—his
             proofs!—with a digiscan light.
  All this registered instantly. Cen rushed the man while
 raising his bag and smashed him in the midsection with
                         the bones.
    The intruder cried out, dropping the camera, which
 clattered on the floor. He bent to grab it with one hand
and reached for the notebook with the other, clutching the
                        open pages.
    Cen kicked the camera from his hand, grabbed the
           notebook and yanked it from him.
  The pages the intruder held ripped. Cen raised the bones
 over his head and brought them down straight. The man
  rolled away, evading the blow; leapt up with one swift
motion and ran out the door. Cen, breathing hard, heard
him pound down the stairs. Cen smashed the camera with
  his foot; fished out the digicard on which the recording
 was done, held it under his lighter flame, and melted it.
   What a fool he’d been, thinking them lulled. No doubt
they’d been in here every time he’d gone out, trying to find
evidence of his work, which they believed they owned, as if
someone could actually own the history of time, the nature
                      of the universe.
   He grabbed the notebook with one hand and the bones
 with the other. Fierceness ran like fire through him and
 he almost wished, as he hurried down the uneven stairs,
 that someone was waiting at the bottom so he could kill
                 them with his bare hands.
      But the dingy foyer was empty, and Cen walked
               unchallenged into the night.




                            15
A brief, characteristic electronic burst told Cen that the
encryption code was working.
  Maui didn’t sound surprised to hear his panicked voice.
 But he did sound rather cold. “I was told you might try
 and get in touch. We can talk safely for a short time. So
           make it quick. What do you want?”
    Cen didn’t blame him for being suspicious. “I have
something for you,” he said. “Something your grandmother
         wanted. I don’t know if she told you—”
   “Oh,” said Maui. His voice grew thoughtful. “I know
 what you’re talking about. What brought this on? You’ve
              been working for IS for years.”
  “I’ve never worked for IS,” said Cen flatly. “I hate them.”
             “Fooled us pretty good,” said Maui.
   “I was trying to fool them,” said Cen. “But I didn’t do
such a great job. Who do you think paid for Oxford? That’s
  where I’ve been. Look, how could I work for them? They
 killed Ross. They killed—they killed Mei. Remember her?
You were going to try to help her out, that day you took me
   to Makaha. But it was too late. That night when you
 dropped me off I went up to my room and she was there.
 Dead. I guess I just went kind of went crazy for a while.”
   Maui was silent for a moment. “I remember. She was
missing from the hospital, it’s true. Go on. Why didn’t you
            call us? We would have helped.”
  For a price, thought Cen. The price of me remembering
    how my mother died. “It upset me to talk about my
mother,” said Cen. Damn Maui. It still did. His voice shook
a bit; he cleared his throat and went on. “I’m just not very
  political. I’m a mathematician.” He realized that that
 would have little impact on Maui. I’ve just been thinking
            all these years. You know. Thinking.
        “So what brought on this change of heart?”
  Cen realized that he didn’t even want to tell Maui about
 Kaiulani. “I’ve been… working on some proofs,” he said,
  realizing that it sounded lame. “They’re important. In
fact, now they’re after me because I won’t hand them over.
 Look, if you don’t want what I have, fine. I didn’t have to
 call you at all!” He stopped just short of saying, The hell
                          with you!
 “Calm down,” said Maui. “Can you meet me in an hour? I
have to check on something. If I’m more than ten minutes
   late, leave.” He gave terse directions, then hung up.
  Cen paced down the concrete wall of the Ala Wai Canal
 in downtown Waikiki. He kept glancing behind him. He
heard only the wash of boats bobbing on ripples. Get out of
    here, his adrenaline insisted. IS heard everything.
 The bare aluminum masts of countless sailboats tangled
in a linear puzzle that glowed in the tall lights lining the
  docks. A fish jumped in the darkness and so did Cen.
  He about died of terror when a heavy hand clapped him
on the back. “Hey, brah,” he heard, a deep, rich, Hawaiian
          voice. He turned and there was Maui.
          Maui embraced him briefly, stood back.
                 Cen blinked. “I thought—”
  “We discussed the situation. We’ll take a chance. In fact,
    we’re very happy to hear from you after so long.”
                            “We?”
                      “We,” said Maui.
   Maui was slightly shorter than Cen—still, of course, a
 very tall man, over six feet—and built more heavily. He
might not become huge as Palea, if he was careful. He did
  look very fit. He wore shorts, a heavy sweatshirt, and
hiking boots. His face was half hidden by a beard, and his
 hair was very long. He still had that white streak in it.
  He looked at Cen’s bag. “Perfect,” he whispered, as if he
          knew what the bag held. “Let’s go.”
   Their steps thudded on the wooden dock. After a few
   turns Maui motioned toward a boat. “There it is.”
    The Lelani was a long, low boat, a little longer and
 lower perhaps than might be good for fishing, though it
   had some of the trappings— outriggers to hold lines,
   though there was no fish-spotting tower, only a low,
  yachtlike cabin. And when Cen stepped down onto the
 polished wooden deck, he saw a glowing bank of digital
readouts complex as those in an airplane. When he set the
 bag down in the cabin he saw a tiny black satellite dish
                    behind the galley.
     Maui didn’t lose an instant, but began to cast off,
motioning to Cen to untie the line from the forward cleat.
Before Cen had finished coiling it onto the deck Maui had
   the engine purring and they were moving wakeless
              through the sleeping marina.
  After a few turns as the canal passed through the streets
 and high-rises of downtown Waikiki, filled with the late
   night shouts of persistent partyers and glowing with
randomly lit windows, they headed out through a channel
 toward the open sea. The white line of surf on the reef on
    both sides of the channel caught the moonlight. Cen
looked back as the engine dug into the growing swells and
 saw lights sweep up the ridges of the university district,
   stopping suddenly on the edges of steep, deep gullies,
   black knives dividing lines of light. Red lights pulsed
slowly across the rooftops of the high-rises. Above, even at
 this time of night, Cen saw planes stacked up in the sky,
                      one after another.
    Maui stood at the wheel, staring straight ahead. The
  waves seemed very large to Cen, occasionally breaking
   onto the deck, foaming at the top and spewing spray
                     before passing on.
   Maui’s long hair flew out behind him. Cen shivered in
      the chilly wind and wished he had a jacket.
   Maui turned. “You haven’t changed much,” he shouted
  over the engine’s roar, after looking Cen up and down.
    “You have,” said Cen, just as loudly. “Where are we
going?” It surprised him, but he felt no need to be chatty
with Maui, or fill in the blanks. It was as if they had seen
                   each other yesterday.
    “Molokai,” said Maui. “Your ohana’s from Molokai,
                        right?”
 “Yeah, my family was from Molokai.” The wind smelled
  good after his years in cities. He gestured toward the
small splatter of lights ahead that marked the tiny town
          of Kaunakakai. “The harbor, right?”
             “We’re not going there,” said Maui.
  The outline of the island gradually grew visible as they
approached. It was only twenty-five miles from Honolulu.
Twenty-five miles and a hundred years. The residents had
their small industries, such as fish and seaweed farming,
that recognized the fragility of the small environment, an
  island only forty miles long and ten miles wide. It was
   quite different from Kohala, the more technological
 Homelander center on the Big Island. Molokai had never
  been wrested from anyone; instead, it had been firmly
                         preserved.
       Maui veered along the coast and headed east.
  Now it was full day. Frame houses formed a rural string
 along the coast road; deep in the Halawa Valley, with its
looming, dark mountains, one of the highest waterfalls in
  the islands fell, a long ribbon of water. This side of the
island sloped gradually to a high plateau that finally rose
    to a plunging ridgeline that effectively isolated the
                        northern cliffs.
      Birds gathered ahead over a spot on the water,
swooping and diving in a frenzy. Flying fish darted ahead,
                     slicing the sea.
 It took quite a while to round the end of the island. Maui
  struggled with the wheel and brought another engine
on-line, but the wind and current from thousands of miles
           of open ocean buffeted the small boat.
   Maui opened an ice chest at his feet and took out two
 sandwiches and two beers. He handed one of each to Cen
 and went to work on his, setting his beer in a gyroscopic
                         holder.
    It was a glorious day. The sun was bright and the sea
around them was gray, turning blue in the distance where
it met the increasingly rugged coast. Dark clouds sat atop
Molokai’s interior mountains, split by deep fissures—rain
forest country, tropical, inaccessible jungle. After they had
   rounded the end of the island and the cliffs filled the
      horizon—the highest sea cliffs in the world, Cen
      recalled—Maui brought the boat closer to them.
   The cliffs undulated to their left. Cen could not see the
     cloud-hidden summit. Crashing waves sent white
 fountains of foam upward forty and fifty feet where they
 met black lava. Four tiny goats leapt upward along the
 cliffs, almost vertically. “Shouldn’t we stay farther out?”
                          yelled Cen.
   Maui glanced at him and smiled briefly, but didn’t say
                       anything.
   They motored along for fifteen more minutes while Cen
 drank in the beauty—the sea caves that honeycombed the
coast, the white birds skimming the sea, two dolphins that
   swam along the side of the boat (with their strangely
  merry faces) before vanishing. The strong morning sun
  made black cartoon doors in the almost vertical wall of
red-scarred green; deep in almost hidden valleys the green
cliffs were laced with scores of waterfalls. Suddenly Maui
    shouted “Hang on!” and wrenched the boat directly
                        toward land.
 Cen was electrified by pure, absolute fear. Maui gunned
 the engine until they actually caught a huge wave and
went surfing on it toward overwhelming black lava rocks,
 Maui laughing like a manic demon, fiercely focused on
               whatever he saw up ahead.
    Cen wildly wished for at least a life jacket. This was
madness. They rose out of the wave and slid down the face
and Cen felt as if the bottom had dropped out of the world.
 With just a tiny loss of balance they would flip end over
end and then they and the bones would be on the bottom of
           these cliffs, thousands of feet below.
  The wave thundered around them and suddenly lost
momentum. Their wave receded, swallowed by the ocean,
        and they coasted into a small cove.
   Cen was shaking. Maui turned to him, an infuriating
               grin on his bearded face.
  They were in a tiny pristine bay, a shimmering turquoise
   pool bordered by a half-moon of white sand fringed by
palm trees. Waves rose and fell, muted, with a quiet slosh.
    This haven had been completely hidden by the surf
   breaking on the reef. Cen realized that the boat could
leave only at high tide, when the rush of an outgoing wave
 could be precisely caught by a skilled boater, which Maui
                      appeared to be.
 He motored into a sea cave. Veins of light danced across
 the ceiling, and the soft slosh of water echoed hollowly
                 once the engine was cut.
  “Tie up over there,” directed Maui, gesturing toward a
                lava knob. “We’re home.”
  Home. Will I ever be home? wondered Cen. The target of
  his heart seemed so unutterably strange. But no more
strange than this place, so far removed from the squalor,
   the garbage-ground-into-cement stench of Honolulu.
 He handed Maui his bag, then accepted Maui’s hand and
 stepped onto a narrow lava ledge that glistened anew
with each wave surge, suffused but not suppressed by the
                       cave wall.
   Maui handed him the bag again, and he was glad to
   take it. Its contents were of infinite value to him.
 This bag held not only bones, but light—light reduced to
 mathematical formulae; light’s inception explored and
mapped as one might explore these sea islands, with their
  exhilarating foam of constant surf breaking outside,
where waves of energy, having passed through particles,
smashed, reformed, and reversed to fan outward in their
               endless voyage of force.
   A wall of lush jungle caught sunlight before them in
ascending levels with leaves of almost infinite shape, and
back in a dark valley a waterfall fell several hundred feet
                    without a break.
     Maui edged along a ledge and Cen followed; they
 emerged in a miniature meadow of tall green and gold
 grass, bent by wind unhindered for thousands of miles.
 Spiked nests of sisal, mysteriously huge, their flowering
  stalks higher than Cen’s head, stood like threatening
                         guardians.
  Cen felt at home, though he hadn’t been to Molokai since
he was a child, visiting his mother’s relatives. But it went
 deeper than that, somehow. Cut free from philosophical
trappings, separate from politics and rancor and history:
this was the essence of his bones and the bones within his
                 bag. Pacific wilderness.
   He gazed out at distant whitecaps. Powerful wind cast
 back spray frail as any lace finery he’d seen in England.
Surf sounded, dissolving barriers between inner and outer
     for him; his essence effervesced into intense color:
aquamarine, teal, deep blue where depth gained mastery.
Salt tang filled his nose and black crabs crawled the lava
     rocks just below, giving them strange motion. The
  near-round succulent leaves of the one low plant whose
  name he knew, naupaka, billowed across the sea slopes,
studded with small white flowers. Their green was almost
 fluorescent, as if the light they drank glowed in those fat
 leaves. The brain within the bones he carried had known
                 this, and land’s glory, too.
  Maui began walking. Cen saw a narrow trail hidden in
tall gold coastal grass. It led upward at a rather painful
 angle. With his load, feet slipping in awkward zoris, he
  soon was sweating in the powerful sun and wished he’d
thought of a better way to pack his burden, but when Maui
      raised his hand to take it Cen shook his head.
 In an hour they were high above the blue Pacific and the
life-threatening monster waves were just wrinkles on the
                    face of the sea.
   All sea sounds had receded. Instead he heard rustling
        grass and cries of birds he could not name.
   Without warning they crossed the knife-edge of one of
 the ridges dropping directly to the sea and were within
 deep jungle. Cen let Maui move swiftly forward while he
              stopped and gazed in wonder.
  The red path was just a mere etching on the steep side of
a cliff where strange trees twisted in shapes fantastic and
 surreal. Their green canopy was far overhead, shielding
 them, suffusing light to dreamlike green. Their bark was
shaggy, striped white and brown. Ahead he saw a clearing
  of tall golden grass deepened by striping shadows of a
                   massive banyan tree.
  Maui paused and was breathing hard when Cen caught
 up with him. He pulled a bottle of water from the small
  green pack he wore, gulped half and offered it to Cen.
After a moment he squatted, staring outward, away from
                Cen, and began to talk.
   “They made this a national park in the nineties. Hasn’t
been touched much since. It’s funny. It’s like space to me. I
 don’t know why. Space is sterile and this is not. Anything
     in space will be something we put there. A million
generations from now it will have mutated so much that it
  will seem as wild as this, just as much sprung from the
forehead of Zeus.” He brushed off his pants and continued
                          upward.
   Startled multicolored goats bounded from their path,
  black and brown and white bullets of startling speed,
 perhaps thinking them hunters. The trail laced through
    sucking black mud verges of fast-flowing streams.
    Cen’s life was a bubble of light effervescing from the
    center of his chest as he gazed outward. There was
nothing but blue whitecapped sea, a curved indigo horizon
 line, and sky. As far as he could see. And this was good;
  infinitely, marvelously, powerfully good, past platonic
              Good in his human imagination.
                    This was perfection.
                     Had Kai seen this?
               Would he be able to save her?
   Though he tried to refuse doubt, it shadowed even this
bright scene with fear. He might die as well. Yet he had no
                    choice except to try.
   He was as sure as he would ever be. Remembering his
 thought about the road map and reality, he hoped that
 he’d taken the right turn. Tonight he would plot out the
   final parameters as exactly as he could, and then…
  He followed Maui to the next tier, drenched by rain that
    came suddenly and vanished just as fast. Then they
     followed a horizontal path that wove in and out of
  miniature jungles fed by plummeting streams. His legs
   ached. He wondered at the flowers he saw—flowering
 orange trees ranging down a hillside; tiny yellow flowers
    low to the ground; small streamside blossoms whose
     names he did not know, birdcalls exotic, haunting,
providing an aural transition between what he thought of
                 as his present and his past.
    He hoisted his bag and followed Maui into a verge of
                     enormous trees.
          When he emerged from them he stopped.
  Above him soared a thousand more feet of vertical pali.
  Below him were black cliffs, blue sea, and birds weaving
 intricate patterns, white, long-plumed, mastering air as
he hoped to master time. Imagine having the courage and
knowledge to dare to cross two thousand miles of this, he
  thought, and admired the hypothetical goals of IS that
                       much more.
  Will I remember IS? he wondered, as he pushed onward.
   Maui had vanished. Before him on the trail a veil of
  hanging vines with huge dark leaves filtered light. He
    parted them as if they were a curtain and paused.
  He saw a prosaic weathered-green clapboard house, set
on a flat bit of land, hidden from air and sea view by trees
                          and vines.
  He’d seen probably thousands of houses like these, with
 their squared oriental roofs and white-limned outlines.
Two large black dogs rushed out from the porch, barking,
teeth bared, till Maui, before him, knelt and they lowered
  their heads, tails wagging furiously, as he petted and
   exclaimed with soft words almost free of consonants.
           A woman emerged from the doorway.
         Of course he’d hoped; expected, but still—
   Maui’s grandmother. Funny. He still didn’t know her
                        name.
  She wore a purple holoku, he could see the color even in
  shade; it covered her feet. When she saw him she broke
into a grin. Her long white hair cascaded over her narrow
                         shoulders.
  “Cen!” she yelled, breaking the deep green silence of the
jungle, and jumped from the porch, stumbled, held up her
             holoku and hurried toward him.
  Deeply honored by her greeting, he felt like kneeling but
stood, straight and tall, lowering his bag in the tall grass.
He briefly registered a clear satellite dish in the meadow’s
   verge, then felt her impact, and her arms around his
 waist. She was sobbing, and laughing, and strangely he
          was too. “Cen,” she said, “my dear Cen.”
    He just hugged her tightly as he dared, imagining the
   frailty of her bones because her hair was so intensely
 white. He raised his eyes and saw Maui’s staring into his
with immense sadness. Cen pushed her hair back from her
                          forehead.
   “I don’t even know your name,” he said, and when she
 smiled the corners of her brown eyes crinkled. “Lelani,”
she said. “A very common name,” and he hugged her again
                    for a long, long time.
            It was something she seemed to need.
  “Thank you, my sister’s grandchild,” she murmured, her
                voice deep and throaty.
             He was not even slightly surprised.
  She let go, turned, and walked toward her house. When
 they stepped onto the porch, furnished only with bright
green silk cushions and a low black table, she turned and
 said, “Sit down and let’s talk story.” Maui took his bag
                          inside.
  And then she told him about his family. “Kamehameha
himself created the line from which you are descended, the
   papa kahuna alii pule—the class of royal, or chiefly,
                   kahunas,” she began.
  The answers to his questions filled an hour, then two. He
 forgot everything else, for the moment. A shower swirled
 round them, almost like mist, glittering in the sunlight.
           Below arced close, intense rainbows.
   “Tea?” she asked finally, and he nodded. On the deep
   porch she lit a Japanese brazier and hung a black
 cast-iron kettle from a hook attached to the ceiling. She
   gathered her wild white mane of hair and abruptly
braided it in an inside-out pattern and tied the braid in a
   knot, then took cups from a small drawer. The dogs
              sprawled on their sides, asleep.
   Rain pattered on the roof, its engendering cloud hiding
   all but the front yard of this strange abode. “This is a
  hanging valley,” said Maui, legs extended on the porch
steps. “Like a little scoop out of the mountainside. Vertical
below and vertical above. Inaccessible, practically. Except
  for local boys,” said Maui, turning and smiling briefly.
      Then his face grew sad as he glanced at Lelani.
  The broad leaves of a banana tree clacked in the gusty
 wind. Cen heard the rush of many streams. The nearby
cliff was laced with white intermingling etches of falling
                          water.
  Lelani poured from the black pot steaming water, which
   swirled into the iron-black cup, obscuring its smooth
                      turquoise bottom.
  Cen sipped bitter tea and finally ventured to ask Lelani,
         “Why? Why did you decide to grow old?”
   She did not seem bothered by the question. “It was time.
   There was the possibility that I would lose my mental
   faculties if I continued. They are not yet sure why this
  happens, as with so much of this tampering, but it does
happen—and quite swiftly after certain warning signs are
observed—in about seventy-five percent of the people who
    have been enhanced for as long as I have been. They
 continue to live and look young, but their minds change.”
  She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around her
  knees. It was raining in earnest now. The wind blew her
hair back from her face. Raindrops danced on the boards
at the edge of the deep, roofed porch. “But I’m not sorry for
   any of it. I’ve lived to do so much; lived to see so much.”
  She paused for a moment, then said, “And it’s not over
                         yet.”
   Cen stood. He took off his zoris and stepped inside the
                    door of the house.
   The interior of Lelani’s home was shadowed because of
   the storm. Sliding screens revealed a futon on tatami
mats. A floor of highly polished red wood was beneath the
 mats, and the room was exquisitely furnished in a simple
Japanese style. A computer sealed in clear plastic blinked
on a low black table with cushions piled in front of it; next
 to that was a rack of CDs and the crystals a lot of people
                      were using now.
    Something that looked like a couch to one side of the
room puzzled him. He decided it was probably an isolation
  tank, where visions of a new, revitalized Hawaii could
  unfurl in Lelani’s mind. He went over and examined it
                       more closely.
   The soft indentation where one’s head would go was a
 mass of sensors embedded in cloth. Hinged to the sides of
this was a U-shaped screen that could be brought down in
front of the user once she was lying down. It looked as if it
 had holographic capabilities. He ran his hand along the
 part that might hold the arms, then the back. It felt the
   same as the hollow for the head—silky—but entirely
covered with, he felt now, those soft sensor nubs just as the
                    head part had been.
  A small, highly polished box of koa sat on the low table
 next to the contraption. Cen opened it and saw several
 crystals, recognizing the new lattice material that was
becoming popular for read-once information, capable of
 holding the Library of Congress in a cubic centimeter.
These were in the shape of the great seagoing canoes like
                     the Hawaii Loa.
    He closed the box, carefully, feeling like a snoop, still
                          puzzled.
  Maui had left his bag next to a pile of pillows. Cen sat on
     them and tried to open it; the zipper stuck, and he
  struggled with it for a few moments, swore, then pulled
 out his pocket knife and cut the side, distantly surprised
                       at his urgency.
  His notebook was squashed onto the top; he pulled it out
and set it aside. He stuffed the bag from the doctor into his
                     roomy shirt pocket.
   His breath catching in his throat, he gingerly reached
  beneath the tapa bundle and tried to pull it out but it
stuck on both ends. He slashed the entire top from the bag
 and was dismayed at how much the tapa had crumbled.
   Peering inside, he thought he recognized vertebrae,
   mixed with a hodgepodge of small bones. He took a
 handful of the smaller bones, several vertebrae, and a
good-sized square of tapa—slipped them all into his shirt
   pocket with the doctor’s packet. Then he carefully
                  buttoned his pocket.
   He stood and tried to scoop the entire bundle out at
 once, but it was quite awkward; some of the bones hung
      from the sides, and he had to gather them up.
   He walked onto the porch, where Lelani and Maui sat,
                   watching the rain.
  “I’ve brought you something,” he said, and laid the bones
                        at her feet.
   Lelani reached for them. Her hands hesitated over the
 bundle. She looked up at Cen. He nodded. “Except—I left
the skull where it was—” He didn’t say anything about the
              bones he’d taken for Kaiulani.
         She unfolded first one side, then the other.
      “Kamehameha’s,” Cen said, knowing that was
  unnecessary but feeling as if he should say something.
    “Mahalo,” said Lelani, laying her hand atop them.
                   “Infinite thanks.”
 Until the sky cleared and darkened and insects shrilled
and stars came out, Lelani sat on her knees and chanted.
 Her deep voice filled the clearing, merged with the wind,
 rose and fell with hypnotic cadence. Cen, his Hawaiian
   rusty but quite functional, was chilled as she moved
  further and further back into time, made the jump to
Tahiti, and continued on. Cen saw that, though the house
had seemed hidden when they approached, it had a full,
wide view of the sea, lit by the path of the moon, and the
      night sky filled with countless burning stars.
  At the end Lelani lifted the bones with great difficulty
and carried them out into the meadow and held them out
         to the sea, the stars, the moon. To time.
                  Past, present, and future.
      “Kamehameha’s birth was foretold, the same as
Christ’s,” Lelani said later, leaning against the side of the
       porch, face drawn but dark eyes quite alive.
   Maui had picked plumeria blossoms from a tree in the
    small meadow and threaded a double lei as she
      chanted—its fragrance was overwhelming.
  “There were astronomical portents, like the Christians’
star. The kahunas knew he would be born, and before his
  birth he had enemies. His mother bore him in a secret
place for this reason, with the help of the kahunas and, of
course, the royal midwives. Then he was hidden away and
   reared until he was older.” She looked at Cen. “Your
 mother chanted that when she received the bones. As the
 guardian of the bones, the kahuna nui priestess, it was
  one of her great responsibilities. Did she teach you the
                          chant?”
   “She… only showed me the bones for the first time the
day she died,” he said, trying to make his voice clear and
strong and failing. He’d never talked to anyone about her
death before and it surprised him how keenly he still felt
    the terror of that night, and the darkness that had
              enfolded him for so many years.
  “I am sorry,” said Lelani, then was quiet. The hum of the
                  night rose around them.
    “I get pretty good service here,” she said later, inside.
  Several candles burned on the low table that served for
dining, but an electric light shone behind a glass sconce in
                         the kitchen.
  She took the iron lid off the rice cauldron, and Cen knew
    it was perfectly ready, to the instant. He hoped he
understood time as precisely as Lelani comprehended the
cooking time of rice. “Helis swoop in every now and then. I
  get vegetables, rice, bean curd. Plenty of fruit around
      here.” She nodded toward a rifle in one corner.
  “Sometimes I shoot goats and pigs. There are mangos,
 papayas, breadfruit, just about everywhere. And I enjoy
    going down to the ocean and gathering seaweed.”
     “Don’t let her kid you,” said Maui. “Her nori comes
straight from Honolulu. First-class stuff, eh? Kona coffee,
too, no?” His smile was gentle, but his eyes were a direct,
teasing challenge. “Wind, water, and solar power. Living
                    off the land, right?”
   She shrugged again, grinning, as she said to Cen, “So
         carry this soup to the table, all right?”
  He picked up the steaming cauldron. “Lelani,” he asked,
        “what are you going to do with the bones?”
  A broad smile lit her face. “We’re going to make clones,”
                         she said.
    Cen almost dropped the soup. Even though he had
   suspected, to hear it so baldly stated was somewhat
shocking. Even now, in this day and age, was such a thing
 possible? Apparently so. But it was surely illegal. He set
    the soup down carefully on the low table. “Why?”
   Her smile became enigmatic. “You’ll see,” she said, and
           firmly declined to discuss it further.
    After dinner they went back onto the porch, where a
citronella candle burned. They each had small glasses of
                        hot sake.
  Cen leaned against some pillows. The night and day had
 taken their toll. He ached all over. He put his sake down
  and fell asleep. Maui woke him and showed him to his
futon. Tomorrow, he thought, falling back into the rush of
rain on the roof, the myriad night insects, the sensibility of
 the ocean so far below, the stars so far above. Tomorrow
         he would ask Lelani about those crystals.
   Tomorrow he would map out the last bend in the road
                that led to Kaiulani.
  And tonight, for the first time in his life, he felt utterly
  at peace, and knew he’d done something right at last.
   The next morning Cen was refreshed but still sore, his
                   mind quite clear.
   It was chilly. He pulled on his shirt and buttoned it,
patting the pocket with the medicines. He hadn’t felt this
way in years. Or maybe, he thought, as he accepted a cup
     of coffee from Maui, he had never felt this way.
     Sunlight fell on the wide koa floorboards in angled
 patterns. Lelani was on the porch, sitting next to the low
table. A bowl held slices of papaya and sweet bread. “Have
 some,” said Lelani, and Cen sat, carefully balancing his
                            coffee.
    Far below them on the lush cliffside the tops of palm
     trees glimmered in the light, tossing in the wind.
 Everything moved—the sea, the forest, the clouds across
the sky, and something within him, rushing as fast as the
                          wind.
  “I heard Kaiulani gave birth here, on Molokai,” he said,
                   his voice catching.
   “It’s true,” said Lelani, looking at him expectantly, her
 voice low. How much did she know about what he’d been
working on? After all, she did know a lot about Interspace,
           probably as much as anyone in IS knew.
               She took another sip of coffee.
 He saw that she’d been looking through his notebook. He
reached across the table and pulled it close. He smoothed
out the wrinkled pages. Three of them had been ripped in
   half. They were gone, clutched in the hand of the IS
 weasel. Only half-lines were left. Relief spread through
                           him.
  “I can rewrite this,” he said. “I can complete it for you.”
    He trusted them, he realized. He knew their dream, he
had eavesdropped on it when in London, via the web. They
had passed through some sort of fire and would know how
to use the proofs. That is, if they were expanded somewhat.
Well, he could do that too, though the thought of legions of
  people fractal-jumping through the metauniverse still
                      frightened him.
      Maui and Lelani smiled at each other; he did not
 understand the look between them. Perhaps they did not
   consider this very important. Certainly it was not as
 important to them as the bones. He would try to impress
   them with the importance of his proofs later. He had
already pleased them immensely. They would make a flock
 of Kamehameha clones. He was not sure how that would
 benefit Hawaiians, but they had clearly given it a lot of
thought and believed in their plan with as much strength
              as he believed in Kaiulani.
         And he had settled the ghost of his mother.
  “Do you know where she gave birth?” he asked, half idly,
 since it seemed absurd that they might know. He turned
 the pages of the proofs, getting ready to find a pencil to
    write down what was already dancing in his mind.
 “Of course,” said Lelani, surprising him. “It’s a very holy
site. Has been for more than a thousand years. She asked
 to come here to give birth. It’s really not far from here.”
                     “Oh,” said Cen. “Oh.”
  He stood up, stretched, shoved his feet into his zoris. The
beauty of the morning seemed like a translucent veil—the
 cliff night-dark in shadow buttressing Lelani’s meadow,
 the distant azure shallows deepening through shades of
aquamarine to midnight blue, the countless trees tossing
               in the wind all around them.
                “Can you tell me where it is?”
  Everything around him seemed to coalesce; the sun rose
 above the cliff and struck him directly in the eyes so that
   he shielded them with his hand as he looked down at
         Lelani, her white hair backlit like a halo.
  “It’s not difficult to find,” she said. “I’ve been there many
     times. It’s a beautiful site. The ridge is almost five
 thousand feet above sea level. You can see all the islands
except Kauai. Of course, she came up from the other side of
 the island. There’s a gradual ascent on a wide trail. She
 was probably carried on a litter. Unless you know exactly
how, it’s very difficult to come back down this way; almost
   impossible. See the trail on that side of the clearing?”
              A door in jungle, leading upward.
  “Take it for a little over a mile. You have a watch? Good.
  Half an hour—it’s a very steep switchback trail. You’ll
 come to a waterfall and a pool. The water spills straight
down out of the pool. There’s an overhang for hundreds of
feet above you, all along the ridge. It will look like there’s
no way up. Stay away from the edge of the pool. The rocks
           are slick, and it’s a long way down.”
   “I will,” said Cen obediently. When Lelani and Maui
laughed, he was startled. He felt so solemn. But of course
             they did not know why, not really.
    “The trail continues across the pool, on the stepping
stones. But you want to go behind the waterfall. There’s a
small cave with steps inside. It’s the mouth of a lava tube.
The tube is about eight feet high and slants quite steeply.
 There are steps inside. Probably more than a thousand
years old. I’ll give you a flashlight, so you can check every
once in awhile, but you’ll need both hands to climb. I hope
you’re not claustrophobic. It’s a very long tube. When you
      come out you’ll be in another clearing, with a
                    grandmother banyan.”
     Cen nodded again, seeing the banyan in his mind’s
eye—maybe fifty feet in diameter, an ancient matriarch of
  the forest, a hundred twining trunks all dropping new
                     ones, constantly.
  “Double back and you’ll see another trail just beyond the
lava rock formation. Follow that trail for ten minutes and
you’re there, at the birthing stones. There’s the remains of
 a heiau. A holy place, a stone platform used for blessings,
      healings, worship. That’s where she gave birth.”
                         “That’s all?”
                         “That’s all.”
   Cen took another piece of nut bread and ate it but did
    not taste it. “I’ll finish those proofs later,” he said,
  gesturing at the notebook. Interspace would kill to get
 that information. Had killed. He would make sure Maui
and Lelani knew all that. But they must know. They knew
                        so much.
  Lelani nodded but did not speak. She stood and hugged
             him, let go, and stepped back.
  “Aloha,” she called, after he crossed the meadow. Maui’s
  deep voice echoed behind hers. He turned and waved.
                          “Aloha.”
                           Aloha.
                           Aloha.
   He climbed through tiny exquisite meadows dotted with
 delicate flowers. Far below pines and palms gleamed in
the sun, and the calls of strange birds rose around him. He
  climbed higher and higher, sweating, reached the pool,
   and stared outward at the ocean far below the narrow
    channel where the water rushed over the lip of rock.
  Soaked by the waterfall, he entered the long dark tube,
    flicked on his light. The steps looked well worn and
seemed interminable; he felt as if everything was pressing
    in on him until he almost might have screamed and
  turned but saw the dot of light above and then emerged
                 onto the knife-sharp ridge.
  Set in the sea like green jewels, the islands of his home,
 the islands his ancestors had found and settled, spread
out all around him, two large perfect volcanoes wreathed
  by clouds, Mauna Loa half hidden by Haleakala, each
   wearing leis of clouds low on their slopes. Joy surged
 through him like a bright tide, as if his veins were filled
with light, as if he glistened and glimmered from within.
  How strong he felt, how fine. Maui and Lelani, and his
past, his entire life, seemed distant as a dream. There was
   the banyan, the columns of its spreading trunk past
  counting, its leaves filtering sunlight in patterns that
shifted constantly in the ever-present wind. The path was
   narrow but visible, flattening the ridge to a width of
several feet. It was not quite like walking a tightwire, but
                           almost.
     But as if his mind was balanced on a tightwire,
something moved within him. He saw that little notebook,
                    on Lelani’s table.
   He had to go back. Not to finish the proofs. To destroy
 them. They were too dangerous. He’d been a fool to write
                       them down.
              He took the first step to return.
    A familiar voice from beyond the veil of the banyan
                       stopped him.
  Realization rose like a translucent aquamarine wave,
   surrounding him, suffusing him, oddly surprising,
comprised of shimmering intensity and a single amazing
                       revelation:
                            Now.
   He took a deep breath, suspended in time; then turned
           and stepped onto the ancient trail.


                         Lynn
                     Thailand 2034



                            16
Lynn sat on the floor at a low wooden table sorting things
from the packet Hawkins had thrust at her.
  The room was plain but beautiful. The varnish on the
wooden floor was dark and worn to a satin sheen. French
 doors stood open to the balcony, a rickety wooden affair
    three floors off street level that quivered every time
     Akamu walked out on it. Beige muslin at the open
 windows turned light gold when the sun was out—which
  was not very often. They seemed to have arrived in the
  rainy season, for warm rain fell ceaselessly, just now a
    skein of sun-shot mist drifting across the close blue
 mountains. The night before she had sat on the balcony,
 watching the endless dissolution of old-fashioned green,
 pink, and orange neon reflected in the vast long puddle
                      that was the street.
    A gust of wind scattered the papers. Lynn reached over
 and picked up a wooden elephant, one of the ubiquitous
tourist totems carved by the hill people, and set it atop the
  paper maps, which were crumpled but folded correctly.
 She had found more maps—almost a continent’s worth of
     maps—in the packet from Hawkins. Clearly he had
  envisioned a far and erratic flight. She’d also found yet
another light, wallet-sized electronic map that covered the
  same territory, in many cases better, in others, worse. It
   also contained instant translations of more languages
      than she’d had time to scroll through in her brief
    introductory foray. Backups. Hawkins had been into
                          backups.
     In the other room, Akamu snored. She could see him
    through the door. He rolled from side to side as she
watched but did not wake. She frowned; he’d been sleeping
  for fourteen hours. Not surprising, she supposed, after
 their ordeal. She’d tried to wake him for breakfast, but
               he’d mumbled and rolled over.
             Well. She went back to her sorting.
   A magnetic key with no markings. Wonderful. What a
           cryptic old bastard he had been.
   Their passports lay on the table next to her; nice pieces
             of work as far as she could tell.
   The wallet, when unfolded, had partitions containing
 currencies that added up to about a hundred thousand
  dollars in various denominations. Someone had deep
 pockets. Her father, of course. In this country, she could
use this to buy them food and lodging for years— probably
               forever. They could disappear.
                            Yes.
                       Well, why not?
   She stood, and walked out on the balcony. The boards
were warped and weathered beneath her bare feet; warm
rain made the red railing she grasped glisten. Disappear,
          let this all die down, whatever it was.
  A part of her said no. That she had to return, that she
 had to find out why her father had died. That if, as she
 suspected, he had been murdered, she should fight and
        expose the cancers at Interspace’s heart.
 But what proof did she have that Interspace had tried to
   kill her and had succeeded in killing her father?
 That one of the stooges she’d seen around Samuel’s house
           had shown up in Nepal, that’s all.
  So? Their father might have died of natural causes. The
attack and pursuit might have come from elsewhere. She
might have been tracked—for her own good, and the man
in the limousine been sent to rescue her, inform her of her
  father’s death, take her home for the funeral. And they
   might have even claimed that. There was also a good
   possibility that this was all being run by the shadow
 intelligence community within IS, and that her brothers
  had no knowledge whatever of her attempted murder.
                           Right.
  The financial situation of IS was enormously cluttered.
She knew that the ship had cost many times what it ought
to have cost. And that certain projects, like the maglaunch
   tunnel on the Big Island, had been built purely to pour
 money through crooked contractors back into the pockets
 of her brothers. Kickback city. She knew, or had access to,
hard information about the details of all that. Yet another
  aspect of IS she had always conveniently ignored, along
       with the bioethical aspects of their endeavors.
           Ah, yes, what can one small person do?
             What can one cowardly person do?
   You can get proof; you know how and they know that,
   whoever they are and whatever they may be doing.
      She was certainly expendable. Though she was an
expert, there was a small cadre of such experts who could
do anything she could do and recreate the work she’d done
toward growing more specialized humans. Infinitely more
    specialized than Akamu, who was, after all, just a
    replication rather than someone as predictable as
 possible. Besides, in her opinion, unpredictability was a
 key ingredient in that nebulous conjunction of inner and
                 outer called intelligence.
    Another strike against her was that she’d made it no
secret that she would fight to the bitter end certain uses of
          some of the information she’d amassed.
   But that wasn’t really what they were afraid of. They
     probably acutely wished to silence the personal
information she had on them— the dirt and where to find
                           it.
     Maui’s message. It was somewhere on the web.
  “Maui”—whoever he was—had something to do with
 Akamu. But he had to know that if she contacted him IS
         would know all that was exchanged.
    Should she, though, pick up the message? She didn’t
want to use Akamu’s flat—once a link was initialized, they
could be traced through that, and she knew Akamu would
not jettison his precious flat. Somewhere, Chaing Mai was
      webbed, in a way she could access anonymously.
   Not this guest house, though. She had chosen it for its
 utterly low-tech allure. Most business seemed absolutely
 local—food, clothing, necessities were all traded in the
    market. Except for the business having to do with
     poppies—it was the most likely to be webbed and
   absolutely high-tech. Though synthetics were widely
  available, and legal in most countries, many addicts
  claimed that “the real thing” was subtly different. Of
 course, the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing
  substitutes kept natural poppy products illegal in as
   much of the world as they possibly could, despite the
availability of opivert. Just another game, rather similar
                   to many played by IS.
   Lynn did not fancy getting in touch with such people.
  And then, there was the money in the pack. Such a large
  amount. It might have been her father’s way of saying
vanish. Forget Maui’s message. Forget it all, for some very
   compelling reasons at which she could only guess. In
 certain countries she could buy a new face, cheaply; she
 could vanish and still, if she wished, make an excellent
                           living.
  On the other hand, it might mean avenge my death. Or,
    it might be expensive but figure it all out and do
  something useful. Without Hawkins, she didn’t know.
     The street she gazed down on was not wide. Electric
 tuk-tuks, small pods containing a driver and room for a
  passenger or two, flowed past below, obligatory bells to
alert pedestrians to their approach a constant jingle. Just
across from her, she saw a noodle shop, an ice-cream stall,
a tailor, and a door with a cross above it. Most of the trade
  seemed to take place in the large green park down the
 road; she could see the border from here. Emerald green,
  its walkways were lined with stalls filled with produce
 and all sorts of clothing—traditional garb, piles of Hong
        Kong seconds, cages of chickens and ducks.
   In front of the park, three monks folded umbrellas and
boarded a bus, their thin orange robes sticking to them in
  dark patches. A vendor fished a floating coconut from a
galvanized tub of ice water that he pulled about on a cart,
 lopped off the top, stuck a straw in it, and handed it to a
                           woman.
             Here, Lynn? You want to stay here?
     Well, so far, at least no one had tried to kill them.
     She heard an odd sound, twice; the second time she
          realized that it was Akamu, moaning.
  She hurried inside, knelt at his bed. He was still asleep.
She shook him. “Wake up, Akamu. You’re dreaming.” Poor
 kid. He definitely had material for some pretty intense
 nightmares. She shook him again, becoming frightened.
   His brown eyes opened. They were full of pain. “Where
   am I?” he whispered. He sat up unsteadily. He was
               sweating. “Who are you?”
  “I’m Lynn,” she told him, a slight flutter of panic in her
gut. “Remember? Your old pal Lynn. You flew an airplane
  from Tibet and brought us here. We’re in Chaing Mai.
                        Thailand.”
              We’re a million miles from home.
  To her relief, it seemed as if his fog cleared. He stared at
   his feet, blinking. “Lynn. Tibet. Right.” But the blank
sadness of his eyes when they met hers was shocking. Then,
  as she watched, his entire expression changed, to one of
   odd triumph. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll get over this
                         pretty soon.”
  She sprang up, poured him a glass of cool water from a
 sweating pitcher. He drank it instantly; he drank three.
  “What do you mean?” she demanded. “What’s going on,
  Akamu? This has happened before?” She grabbed his
  shoulders and barely refrained from shaking him in
          frustration. “You have to tell me!”
  He avoided looking into her eyes. “Don’t get so excited. I
  just meant that it must be the food again. Where’s the
                       bathroom?”
    She took him down the hall. “This is funny,” he said,
     before he closed the door behind him. “No seat.”
  He muttered a little nonsense when he came out, and she
  hustled him down to the street, thinking that maybe he
 needed a little exercise to clear his head. He’s not drunk,
   she told herself, but he sure acts like it—stumbling,
 laughing inappropriately. The rain had stopped for the
 moment and steam rose from the street. She steered him
into the first shop, across from their balcony, sat him at a
bare clean table. He was quite compliant, with a strange,
                   musing look in his eyes.
     The menu was all in Thai. She tried a few words.
Noodles? She tried to remember how her translator, in the
room, said noodles, one of the basic necessary words here.
  She thought she might also know rice, fish, meat, and
        curry, but she wasn’t sure of any of them.
    The woman behind the counter, her face burnished
 brown, broke into a smile from which several teeth were
missing. Lynn’s heart ached for how easy it would be to fix
 everything that was wrong with people everywhere, all
     over the world, then her mind screamed, Stop it!
   The woman gave a brief quick nod, and Lynn saw that
she was amused by her pronunciation. She sang it toward
Lynn, at the same time moving a large lid from a warming
        bin and raising her eyebrows in question.
     Yes! Lynn nodded, tried it again, until finally the
 woman nodded in satisfaction and doled out two bowls.
Lynn took some chopsticks from the glass on the table that
held many and handed a pair to Akamu. The noodles were
          bathed in a sweet, spicy peanut sauce.
  “Don’t eat those,” she said to Akamu, pointing with her
   chopsticks at tiny black bits. “I think they call those
                    mouseshit peppers.”
   Akamu choked. “I think I already did!” His eyes filled
   with tears and his face reddened. The small woman
   rushed over with a pitcher of water and two glasses,
                        laughing.
  The pungent smell of coconut curry and sticky rice rose
  from the warming pans and steamed the inside of the
                     glass counter.
  She wrangled a glass of wine from the woman, too, after
being put through her pronunciation paces. Condensation
 beaded on the glass, and she sipped the sweet pale liquid
   slowly and watched Akamu eat, slowly accepting the
                     inevitable truth.
  Whatever was wrong with him was not something they
could hop a plane and leave behind. It had nothing to do
with his digestive tract. He dropped his chopsticks as she
watched. He had probably been using them since he was a
   toddler. He was having some sort of motor problem.
         No, Lynn, I don’t think you can stay here.
    But where could they go? Death had followed them
                      everywhere.
  The hush of warm rain started again out on the street,
glittering as it passed through the primitive hologram of
  a bicycle above a shop across the street. The road was
  thronged with people carrying umbrellas, along with
                   bicycles and tuk-tuks.
              “Feel better?” she asked Akamu.
  “A little. Can we go back to the room now? Maybe I can
               get some work done. At last.”
  “Work?” she asked, as they left the shop. “What kind of
   work?” She tried to keep sharpness from her voice.
                  “Oh, just work,” he said.
                  “Can you show it to me?”
   “I guess.” They climbed the stairs. He rushed to his flat,
a small, elegant tool for thought, sitting alone on the low
 teak table. He had put it on to charge before collapsing;
  she’d noticed that in his pack he had several different
  adapters that she had not bought in Hong Kong. Odd;
 Hawkins must have provided them. Akamu flipped it on
and got to his destination so quickly his keystrokes were a
                            blur.
  The rain had cleared and twilight was a glow of white
 just above the mountains. As she watched dark clouds
lowered and then it was night. She unrolled the curtains
                 and touched on a light.
          “Akamu,” she said, kneeling next to him.
  He blinked but his fingers did not stop. She was used to
  abstraction, but even if she were a mathematician she
  wondered if she could understand what he was doing.
 “Look,” she said. “We need to talk. Please talk to me, kid.
I want to help you. You know that, don’t you? I think you
need help, but I’m afraid to go back to Hawaii. If I knew
  what’s wrong, maybe I could figure out what to do…”
  “But I’m busy,” he said, giving her just a hairbreadth of
            attention, a flicker of his eyelids.
   “Akamu, people have tried to kill you. Right now they
      are trying to find us. This is because you are
        Kamehameha’s clone, if I’m not mistaken.”
  “You are,” he said. He looked up for a moment, and she
saw an expression she couldn’t fathom in his eyes. “Don’t
you understand, there’s more than one of me. Why kill me
                  when there are more?”
  Lynn let the awful implications rush through her—his
  fatalism, his too-tough stance, the scope of what was
 happening—without reacting, for now. She pressed this
  breakthrough. It was the first time she’d been able to
   squeeze any information out of him. “How many?”
   “I don’t know.” He kept typing, but his fingers faltered.
              “Why don’t you leave me alone?”
  “Akamu, I know you’ve been told and told not to talk to
                   anyone. But—”
       “You’re from IS,” he said, and swallowed hard.
                 “I’m not and you know it.”
  “I don’t know it!” he cried out. “If you were, wouldn’t you
 tell me you weren’t?” His hands clenched. He looked as if
    he wanted to smash his computer. Lynn grabbed his
        wrists, held them gently. She felt him relax.
  “I’m not from IS,” she said. “Ever since I knew about the
 things they do I’ve hated them. I lost”—she paused—“I’ve
 lost my father forever because of that, because I couldn’t
                  forgive his involvement.”
   She should not tell him these things; he was too young.
   Then she remembered his easy facility in killing the
                         soldiers.
                         So tell him.
    “I think my own brothers have been trying to have me
killed. I think that they might have sent someone to follow
 me. I think they killed our father. They are IS, at least an
important face of IS. Do you really think that I could work
 for them?” Well, didn’t you? asked a part of herself. Isn’t
that why you’re here? “Akamu, I want to help you. But you
                   have to tell me more!”
  Akamu turned and hugged her suddenly—hot, sweaty, a
  child of thirteen who weighed more than she did. She
 hugged him back tightly, until he released his grip and
wiped tears from his face with the backs of both hands. “I
guess I’m—afraid. But I have to finish this. I have to finish
                   it before I see Maui—”
   “What is your work, Akamu?” she asked. “And who the
                     hell is Maui?”
 The curtains ballooned gently in the slight breeze, upon
which wafted the smell of sweet coconut curry. He ignored
              her and began typing again.
     The screen glowed with tiny numbers and symbols
  packed together, their simple juxtaposition like some
postmodern work of art. Here and there she saw a word or
                  phrase but not many.
      “Got that?” he asked. “Want to see more?” Without
waiting for an answer he began scrolling through screens,
  stopping at each for a few seconds as if reabsorbing the
    information, nodding occasionally. His cheeks grew
flushed as he read; she heard him began to breathe faster.
  Then there were no more numbers, only a blank screen
                   and a blinking cursor.
 “A couple of pages were missing from Kalakaua’s proofs.
            That’s what I’m trying to fill in.”
                              Oh.
     “Akamu,” she said, her throat tight, “wasn’t Cen
  Kalakaua some sort of genius? And a grown man, too?
 Working on a doctorate? I think that’s what I’ve heard.”
   “Of course,” said Akamu, without a hint of resentment.
“I’m just a kid. I couldn’t possibly start this from scratch.”
He pulled back from the screen, leaned against the bureau
 behind him, and pulled his knees to his chest. In the glow
of the screen his eyes were contemplative. “You really don’t
               know much about me, do you?”
             “I’ve told you all I know,” she said.
   He took a deep breath. “I’ve never had any friends, any
                real friends that lasted.”
   Lynn tried to get past the first flush of anger and just
listen. It seemed inexcusable. Like this kid was just some
 sort of intelligence module in the service of the HM. She
  was now sure they had created him, and they were no
                  better than IS, it seemed.
                 “That’s a shame,” she said.
     He gave his customary shrug. “I’ve been socialized. I
guess that’s what they called it. There was a bunch of kids
 I got to play with when I was little, but the problem was
   that they kept yanking me away. It wasn’t their fault.
 They were just trying to keep me safe. I’ve mostly lived in
 Hawaii. But for a while they sent me to New Mexico. And
    to Alaska, too, and New Zealand. And somewhere in
Russia. And I had a lot of month-long rotations so I could
learn about my shipmates in real time. I guess one thing I
  learned was that Primal Societies really work. I felt at
                     home in every one.”
                     “Your shipmates?”
          “Yeah. The Hawai’i Loa is going to have an
 international crew. We’re all going to work together. It’s
  going to be just like the ancient voyages. Only instead of
finding new islands in the ocean, we’re going to find a new
   world in time. You know,” he said excitedly, “just like
 Maui—not the person Maui I know, but the god Maui, the
   legend. He snared the sun in the sky and made it slow
down so people would have a longer day. We’re going to be
  able to change time, too. And you know how the Maui
legend goes, about how he pulled islands out of the ocean
with fishhooks? That’s kind of like what we’re going to do,
 in the Hawai’i Loa, using the proofs. But I have to know
the proofs. Somebody has to solve them.” He sighed. “But I
                   don’t think I can.”
                     “The Hawai’i Loa?”
       “Oh. I guess it has another name right now. The
 generation ship they’re building in orbit. In fact I think
it’s almost ready. That’s why I have to work fast. We have
                        to beat them.”
                          “Them?”
   “Yeah,” he said, yawning. “IS.” His eyelids drooped, but
he forced them open again. “It has a shape, you know? The
 solution. It’s like the answer is always pressing in on me,
  and I get little bits at a time. You know anything about
 string theory? It’s really weird, thinking about it all the
                   time. I wish I felt better.”
     He grinned a bit wickedly. “I got some stuff out of
Sattva’s system that helped a lot. Guess they didn’t think a
   kid could find out anything. They thought I was just
  playing games. It seems like everything is falling into
  place, faster and faster. It’s grand! It’s so much more
wonderful than I… thought… if only I felt like I usually do,
 and wasn’t so tired…” His head nodded, and his fingers
went slack. She was just about ready to rise and help him
  back to bed when his eyes snapped open again and he
 resumed his work, eyes seeming not to really look at the
                     screen but within.
    She walked out to the balcony, deeply disturbed. So
         much information, suddenly. And Primal
 Societies—hadn’t Sattva called her little organization a
Primal Society? She was beginning to feel even more out of
  touch. It seemed like everyone knew more than she did
   about what was going on. Even Akamu, and she was
                       rescuing him.
                        Or was she?
   And—hadn’t he said something about taking over the
     generation ship? And rechristening it to boot?
    Yes, Lynn. Taking the ship. Just like the haoles took
                       their land.
   She found her throat was tight; she was moved by the
complete audacity of this boy’s vision. Apparently that was
    the plan of the Homeland Movement. How grand!
                      And how absurd.
                         Or was it?
      Steam rose from the street, blurring the green neon
Buddha just across from their third-floor balcony, and the
 letters that Lynn imagined said Emerald Buddha Noodle
  Shop in Thai. Her thin clothes stuck to her as she stared
 across the steam-filled street that bustled now that it was
    night, cooler than day, a good time to shop. As Lynn
watched, the Buddha sharpened in its endless blinking, so
  palpably that Lynn could imagine that it would go past
  mere sharpening and change to a new image altogether,
     grow a deity halo, or whisk the Buddha-pervaded
 inhabitants of the street, and her, and Akamu ceaselessly
   working in the hotel room behind her, to the pure land
  fixed within Akamu’s mind. A sort of symbiosis between
  matter and mind, eh? Between light and bones, between
faster-than-light, if Sattva was right, and the boy who had
     been grown from the DNA in a bunch of old bones.
   She dropped into a frame chair and tipped it forward,
  crossed her arms atop the wet railing. Ubiquitous Thai
   music, phrased like the latest music, sling, but with a
 strange Thai twist that softened and transmuted, blared
from the bar beneath her. She understood his passion; she
had been the same at his age, and as stubborn and alone.
  Akamu did not seem to mind being kidnapped, and that
 was what it was, she supposed, in the guise of protecting
                          him.
   Except, remembering the soldiers, and how resourceful
he was, it seemed more like a decision he’d made. Yeah, I’ll
   go with this lady because she just saved my life, and
    maybe I should get out of here, but I won’t tell her a
  damned thing. If he’d wanted to, he could have left her
 long ago. Surely he could have gotten in touch with this
                  Maui and been rescued.
                 So why hadn’t he done so?
  And what was Akamu here figuring out? He was trying
          to complete the Kalakaua Proofs?
      It was a shame to set a child at such a game. She
 glanced inside, watched Akamu’s earnest head bent over
his computer. He was wearing only white shorts, and some
   sort of decorative plasticky-looking crystal that hung
 around his neck, light against the deep golden brown of
    his chest. Despite the whirling overhead fan, sweat
    sheened his body. She worried—did he have a fever?
 Maybe, but not necessarily. It was damned hot, that’s all.
     Her lurking headache flared, suddenly mature. Her
right temple pounded with so much pain that Mr. Buddha
  seemed to waver but maybe that was just the heat. She
was afraid for the first time in her life and, oddly enough,
 it was not for herself but for Akamu—strange, Hawaiian
                           Akamu.
    The Emerald Buddha was nothing compared to him.
  If she were a Christian talking about Jesus, that might
  be sacrilege, but she was glad that she was what she
 was—some sort of quasi half-assed Buddhist—and that
     her inner vision of Akamu and his powers and his
suffering could flare outward with such intensity and that
   she could feel such compassion and, almost, worship.
        But even more, there was kinship, empathy.
 Not that she was anywhere near as intelligent as he. But
he was different, unique, alone, despite the other clones he
 spoke of, and she knew how that felt—though for her it
   had been more like teenage angst and for him it was
                       utterly true.
   “Buddha help us,” she muttered, and stepped back into
the room, her thin silk pants and shirt light as no clothing
     at all, even cooler when wet, a great boon in this
  incredible heat. She’d never felt anything like the heat.
   Rain sluiced down in a sudden burst of sound, silver;
 and hot, quelling the steam, while umbrellas blossomed
        calmly in the neon-streaked street below.
    The hell with the damned Homeland Movement, she
                        decided.
 They apparently had some sort of vast plot and were just
as willing to sacrifice individuals to it as was Interspace.
    This Maui should be imprisoned for child abuse.
     Any danger contacting him might pose had been
   suddenly canceled, in her mind, by Akamu’s strange
     behavior. She watched him for another minute.
   It seemed probable to her now that the Homeland
   Movement had given him some kind of biological
enhancement. Of which there were hundreds, including
many strange neurochemical twists she couldn’t possibly
                      guess at.
              Maui had a message for her, eh?
                   It was time to collect it.
             And give him a piece of her mind.
   Lynn hurried down the bustling late-evening street,
 concealed beneath a deep just-purchased umbrella, the
  guts of Hawkins’s bag stashed in a small purse she’d
bought this morning at the market. Passport, money, key,
               the mysterious postcard.
    She’d passed two shop windows where thin girls posed,
   numbers on their shirts. Sinuous music emerged from
several bars, always upbeat and in major keys. She passed
    a temple courtyard—smooth ancient paving stones, a
 fountain splashing, a serene oasis—and wished she could
  slip inside, just for a minute, and let timelessness infuse
                              her.
 She hurried on, afraid to leave Akamu alone for long. By
now she’d hoped to find what she was looking for, a large,
  anonymous, modern hotel with some sort of business
  center where she could log on and collect messages.
  One more block. She leaped across a puddle and landed
 in another, her sandals flipping water up on her legs as
she jogged to get out of the path of a taxi. She stopped on
     the corner and looked in all directions. No hotel.
   She stepped into some sort of all-purpose shop and felt
inside her bag for her translator. She could just speak into
 it—Where is the big hotel?—and it would ask the question
  in whatever language she keyed in. Her fingers touched
     Hawkins’s postcard, and she pulled it out instead.
   Ah, yes, Iolani Palace, that Honolulu landmark, symbol
  of the lost kingdom. It was a holo, designed to project a
   three-dimensional image when inserted in one of the
cheap, ubiquitous plastic holders just about everyone had.
 In fact, there had to be one here in this store. She looked
           around and spied the rack of postcards.
  She spun it idly, dropped in one from the rack, admired
  a field of toppled stone Buddhas. The woman hovering
behind her went to help another customer. She dropped in
                      Iolani Palace.
        Across the top of the palace was an address.
                  An address in Bangkok.
                     “Can I help, miss?”
    Well, at least she didn’t need the translator. Lynn’s
   fingers shook as she removed the postcard with the
                 address from the viewer.
                “You want to buy that card?”
                 “Uh—yes. And this viewer.”
                        “Three bhat.”
              “One,” said Lynn automatically.
          “Three,” said the woman disapprovingly.
  Lynn had partitioned off her bhat, and she handed the
woman some coins, turned, and left the store. She did not
   run back through the streets, as she did not want to
attract too much attention, but she walked quite briskly.
She shook the water off her umbrella as she came in the
 door and the solitary woman at the desk gestured at a
    holder made of an elephant foot. Lynn shoved her
umbrella in, hurried back to the room, unlocked the door
with fingers that trembled so much that she dropped the
key once because of the commotion inside. She kicked the
        door open, afraid of what she might find.
   It was as she had feared. Akamu was lying on the floor
 convulsing, flopping around like a fish out of water. His
jerks brought him near the bureau; Lynn rushed over and
pushed him sideways so his head would not hit it. One foot
 kicked the table and his computer went flying; the table
  fell on top of it, crushing the frail flat. Lynn shoved the
  table aside and hoped the commotion wouldn’t attract
 attention and hoped, hoped, that the electrical storm in
     Akamu’s brain would be over quickly. When had it
started? She shouldn’t have left! She poured ice water onto
  a towel and tried to hold it to his forehead. He smashed
 the back of his head onto the floor, hard, twice, then went
                           slack.
  He was still breathing. He had just knocked himself out.
   Waves of fear and anger passed through her body. She
  couldn’t cope with this. An ordinary seizure would, not
     bother her. But this was not an ordinary seizure.
  Rain thrummed on the roof. Akamu lay sprawled at her
                        feet.
      She had no doubt now that this was some sort of
           tampering. Which had gone awry.
  Twenty, thirty specific possibilities rushed through her
 mind, the ragtag ends of various illegal IS experiments
   done for myriad ostensible goals. Many of them had
                     delayed results.
     She remembered the Tripler Hospital glyph on her
screen, back in Honolulu, before it had gone blank. So who
            had done this? Maui or Interspace?
       She knelt next to him and pushed back his hair.
“Akamu?” Foreboding almost overwhelmed her. What was
it, what? Something that was supposed to make him solve
   those goddamned equations, that work he was always
            talking about? He was utterly still.
  “Damn Maui!” she said, and jumped up, wet a cloth, and
            washed Akamu’s face with it.
   His eyes fluttered open. He didn’t say anything. He just
                    stared at the ceiling.
 “Akamu,” she said. “Listen to me. You must know what’s
wrong. You need to tell me. And if you know, I want you to
    tell me what to do about it, and then we’ll do it.”
    He tried to sit up. She grabbed a pillow and stuck it
         under his head. He didn’t say anything.
      “No rush,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go get a doctor.”
   “No!” he said, looking alarmed. Then, “It won’t do any
                          good.”
                          “Why not?”
   “Because… I do know what’s wrong. You can’t help me.
 It’s just starting to work, that’s all. It took longer than I
                      thought it would.”
                         “What is it?”
  His slight smile was ironic, much too old for a child his
           age. “I’m not sure. Don’t you know?”
                             “No.”
  “It’s okay. I feel better now.” He pushed himself up. Lynn
pulled a large soft chair close and helped him into it. She
 opened her mouth, ready to beat him over the head with
  questions, but he saw the crumpled flat and cried out.
      “What happened?” He jumped out of the chair,
 muttering frantically as he felt it all over as if it were a
  small animal with broken bones. “It won’t turn on!”
              “You kicked the table,” said Lynn.
  He hugged it to his chest, collapsed into the chair, and
     began to cry. “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” he keened.
              “Did you back it up?” asked Lynn.
    “Some of it,” he conceded, calming a bit. “But not the
     last part, that I’ve done here. That was the most
  important. Because I feel—I feel—oh, I don’t know.” His
face seemed thinner than just yesterday, and his eyes were
 burning, dark, and fevered. His hands trembled slightly.
 Lynn sat in the chair opposite him. Obviously, she had to
 get him back to the world. To Maui, who had done this
  awful thing to him in order to squeeze the proofs out of
                           him.
   She rose decisively. “All I have is an address in Bangkok
   now. We’ll just have to get there somehow. I think they
have an overnight lev.” Maybe once there she could figure
out how best to get them back to Hawaii in one piece. She
 picked up the ragged Japanese guidebook and opened it
  to the schedule. “This is probably out of date but it says
that one leaves about an hour from now. I want to get out
                of this place. You need help.”
   “I’m fine, I said,” Akamu told her crossly. “I’m not ready
to go back yet. I’ll tell you when it’s time. I feel better now.”
                     “You’re not. Let’s go.”
    He shouted, “I want to stay here and get this fixed! I
             have work to do! I’m all right!”
    The transformation from a relatively pleasant boy to
 this furious screaming monster was somewhat shocking.
   But Lynn was not unfamiliar with such behavior; her
  brothers had occasionally performed this way, and she
   knew that Akamu had a much better reason. He was
operating on some sort of biochemical edge. He was bigger
  and probably stronger than she, so Lynn just stood and
    looked at him with what she hoped were steely eyes.
   “There’s not anyplace here that can fix that, Akamu,”
  she said. “Stow it in your bag, and let’s get out of here.
  Bangkok is a big city. We can just get you a new one. A
                         better one.”
  She did not like the slightly glazed look that came over
his eyes, but it was better than loud defiance at this point.
She helped him into his white silk short-sleeved shirt, but
   he jerked away and said, “I don’t want it buttoned.”
   “Get your zoris. We’re packed.” Lynn stuffed the maps
  into the pack; they stepped into the hallway and went
   down the wide stairway past the check-in girl. Lynn
 stopped for a moment, holding onto Akamu’s arm as she
                  said, “I want to pay.”
   The girl turned to a computer and touched a pad. The
printer whirred, Lynn paid the amount without checking,
yanked her umbrella out of the stand, and hurried Akamu
                      down the steps.
    They were at the station in ten minutes and in their
         private compartment in half an hour.
     Akamu passed out on the bed. Lynn stared out the
window until the lights flashing by gave way to darkness.
She checked the lock on the door and slept fitfully, waking
after a few hours because of a nightmare, heart pounding.
    She sat up, turned on a tiny light. Akamu was still
   sleeping, breathing deeply. Who did these Homeland
             people think they were, anyway?
   She curled up in a chair and watched him a long time
               before falling asleep again.
  She woke with a jerk. Someone was brushing her cheek.
                       She sat up.
   It was Akamu, of course. “Lynn,” he said. “I’m afraid.”
    She got up and moved to the bunk. She put her arm
around him, thinking that the swaying of the train would
  lull him back to sleep again, and turned off the light.
  He began to talk, his voice husky in the darkness. “I’ve
never been away from my ohana—my family—for so long.”
     “I thought you said you went all kinds of places.”
                 “They were all my ohana.”
    “Oh. That’s right. You said something about Primal
                    Societies, right?”
            “It just means the way it used to be.”
  More Homeland golden-age nonsense. “How did it used
                  to be, Akamu?”
  “We all make decisions together. That’s the way we did
things for hundreds of years, before the Tahitians came.”
Lynn decided it was silly to point out to him that the more
 militant Tahitians, who arrived about a.d. 800, and the
    earlier Hawaiians were now seamlessly blended.
  “Sometimes it’s hard,” he said. “There’s lots of arguing.
Maybe for days. But somehow it all works out. It works, I
 mean. Democracy. Look at all we’ve done. We’re almost
ready to go. I’m kind of glad it happened this way, really,
   even though I was so afraid when it happened. It’s
                         working.”
                “What’s working, Akamu?”
     “His eyes fluttered open. ”You really don’t know?”
  “I do know that I think that you’ve been nan-enhanced
                        by Maui.”
           “Maui!” He blinked. Then he laughed.
                     “What’s so funny?”
  “You really don’t know. Huh. I thought you were smart.”
          “That’s what I’ve been saying. I’m not.”
  It was difficult to see him, but then they passed beneath
some lights, his face was swiftly illuminated, and she saw
                    that he was grinning.
        “Well, actually, Maui’s very angry with me.”
                          “Why?”
                         “Because.”
     He started to laugh then, hysterically, choking and
   crying and making such a commotion that Lynn was
afraid he was starting to have another seizure. Finally he
dashed tears away, took a few sobbing breaths, and ended
        with a huge smile. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
   How? Why? “So tell me about it,” said Lynn, trying to
               keep her voice soothing.
                      “It’s a long story.”
              “We’ve got time. Plenty of time.”
   He cleared his throat. “Well. Ever since I was little I’ve
  known that there was this stuff I could take that would
help me do what I have to do. I don’t even remember how I
 found out. One of the big kids told me, maybe, or maybe I
found out about it on the web. Anyway, last year I started
   telling Maui that I wanted some, and he said that we
 didn’t have any and that we wouldn’t have any and that
even if we did I couldn’t have it. Then I found out that one
of the other Kamehamehas died from it and that was why
                     I couldn’t have it.”
    Cold fear spread through Lynn. “Makes sense,” she
                       managed.
    “Well,” said Akamu, his voice rather singsong and
 distant, “I decided that I had to get it anyway. Because
 time is so short now. We can’t fool around. I don’t care
what Maui says. He thinks he’s so smart! So bossy is more
 like it. So I ran away and broke into Tripler and took
                          some.”
    “What!” Lynn sat up abruptly. “How in the world…”
  Akamu smiled sleepily, his eyes closed. “Pretty cool, huh?
 I planned it for a long time, all in my head. I took one of
Maui’s fast boats and made it to Kaaava on Oahu. It’s on
the opposite side of the island from Honolulu, still mostly
Hawaiians—out country, you know? It’s a real quiet place
  to land. Nobody noticed me at all. Then I took a bus to
 Tripler. The yellow line, and I knew the schedule. And I
knew exactly what the stuff was, exactly where they kept
            it, what kind of security it had…”
                           “How?”
  “Think I’ll tell you?” he asked. His voice was teasing, yet
 firm. “Maui was totally pissed. I only talked to him once
 afterward and he was, like, extreme. But that was after
             they caught me, only I escaped…”
     He yawned loudly. “Anyway, yeah, they poked me and
  stuff and took blood and did things like that for about a
few hours. But I guess they thought I was just a stupid kid.
It was pretty easy to get away from them. I’ve been worried
       because all this time it seemed like nothing was
   happening. I guess it took time to work and everything.
 After I got away I knew they’d be looking for me, and I got
 to that safe house on Nuuanu—the place where I saw you.
 I’d just gotten there. We have a network of them on all the
islands. I wouldn’t even let them tell Maui where I was for
   a few days, I was so afraid of how mad he’d be. But they
 told him anyway, I guess. They had to. Interspace decided
that I was really important and they were watching pretty
 close for me. Maui was working out a plan to get me back
                          to Kohala.”
  His voice became troubled. “I don’t know what happened
 to John and Ellen. I guess IS figured out where I was and
tried to kill me. Instead they were killed.” He blinked back
tears. “It was my fault they died. They were so nice to me.”
   Lynn was pretty sure the house had blown up because
she had alerted IS with her night cruise on the Interspace
            web, but she didn’t say anything.
  “So what is this tremendously important thing that you
have to risk death to do, Akamu?” And how will I save you
 from it? What are the parameters of what you’ve done?
 How can I get back into the system and find out without
                  getting us both killed?
  No answer. Try again. “How long have you been working
                       on the proofs?”
  “Since I was really little, I guess. It seems like everything
 I ever learned was a part of it. I had so many cool things
to play with—computers, virtual stuff, special blocks and
    things when I was real little. We have all have been
working on it, I think. Even the ones that died. One of us
solved Penrose’s tile problem when he was seven. We like
  it,” he said, his voice becoming more drowsy. “It’s fun.”
    Well, Lynn told herself wryly, didn’t you have similar
                      plans for Masa?
   Akamu leaned forward, his eyes filled with an earnest,
   happy light, “I only could figure out enough to know
that… well, the only way I know how to explain it really is
with numbers. But there’s going to be a window sometime
  soon. Out there. Far out in space. And I don’t think the
       next one will occur for at least twenty years.”
                         “A window.”
       “A window for the Hawai’i Loa to make the jump.
   Lynn… there are so many places in the metaverse. But
when you calculate where to find a place where the initial
  conditions were such that we could exist there now… it’s
   like the way those old navigators could tell where land
  was, from hundreds of miles out on the ocean. It’s almost
like I’m sailing, and testing the swells, watching the birds,
   except it’s all done with numbers that somehow tell me
things about”—he grabbed the pillow and squeezed it with
  his hand—“this. Matter. Everything. How it flows. It’s a
 fractal. The pattern repeats again and again, infinitely. I
 know exactly what we want—I’m so close to knowing how
to get there! Ever since Tibet it’s gotten stronger—and now
Cen is helping me. He is! Maui told me how it happened to
             Cen. I guess he wanted to scare me.”
                  “What happened to Cen?”
  “Maui told me about some old records that he’d found.
He knew Cen, you know? And he knew that Cen had been
 going to the hospital to see a woman he lived with, Mei.
And Mei was given the same nan. She died from it. It was
   a very strong dose. But Cen had a very minor dose.”
         And you had, possibly, enough to kill you.
  She pushed his hair back from his forehead. “We have to
     get you back right away.” Her mind was racing,
          wondering who or what could stop this.
  “I think… I might need some help,” he said. “It’s kind of
                         scary.”
  “I’ll do my best,” she said, trying to keep grimness from
                          her voice.
            “Okay,” he said, and closed his eyes.
          “Akamu?” she said after a few minutes.
    He was asleep again. She edged out from next to him,
laid him down gently, found a sheet and covered him. She
 went back to her chair, but now she could not sleep, and
    watched the occasional lights from small villages
illuminate his face from time to time throughout the night
                      as she thought.
  She was awakened by a knock on the door. Looking out
 the dirty window, she saw that they were pulling into a
large train station. “Wake up,” she told Akamu, shaking
him until he roused. “Wash your face. We’re in Bangkok.”
                        “Bangkok?”
    She handed him his pack as the lev hissed to a halt.
                      “Come on.”
     She took his arm and led him down the corridor,
following the other passengers as they stepped down into
  the platform. Akamu sagged against her. “I don’t feel
                     good,” he said.
   She fought panic. “I know. But we’ve got to get to this
  place. This address.” She had visions of it. They would
knock on the door. “Hawkins? Hawkins who?” Or the place
    would be empty. Or filled with rather nasty people
                    waiting for them.
   But if they returned to Hawaii the situation would be
                       even worse.
     Hawkins had been in touch with her father. He had
    given her this address. It was a slim connection, but
    something. If it didn’t work she’d try something else.
    Check into a megahotel, the kind with the very best
in-room facilities, go on the web, and really cook, fast and
 fierce, until she figured out what he had and how to stop
              its progress. Without killing him.
   Akamu’s forehead was covered with sweat. He pulled
        from her and sat on a wooden bench.
    The train station was echoing pandemonium. Express
levs were leaving within the hour for Hong Kong, Benares,
  Paris, Saint Petersburg, said a display above them. The
  huge scale of the rainbow arches of steel and darkened
  glass made humans antlike. She almost tripped over a
blond beggar dressed in an impeccable Western suit, a line
 of tiny holograms running down his tie, sitting in lotus in
the middle of an aisle, smiling madly, his credit receiver a
  small green Buddha he grasped in one hand, holding it
             above him in a triumphant gesture.
  Lynn was feeling more and more like she had in Tibet: a
  mere collection of particles with nothing to bind them
together. Coffee. There was a vendor. That would help her
               focus. Then they’d get a taxi.
  A woman on the bench across from Akamu, who looked
 about sixteen, held a sleeping baby on her yellow-sari’d
lap. Her own eyelids kept fluttering downward. Her oval,
     brown face was strikingly beautiful—the large,
   dark-fringed intelligent eyes, the long perfect nose…
     For a moment, Lynn ached to hold the essence of her
      genes in the palm of her hand, the woman’s entire
 explanation, the infinitesimal facts that guided her, that
grew her. She wanted to trade places with her, to give her
   every fine advantage she’d been given, and hope that it
   would not be wasted as she had wasted it. She’d never
    made a difference. Her father had wanted her to, and
   instead she’d run off and performed for tourists. Then,
 even after she’d honored her own intelligence working on
 its growth as hard as she could, she’d turned her back on
  the implications of what she’d been doing, burying it all
like a turtle buries eggs in the sand. Let someone else deal
                          with it all.
   In the echoing train station, just one limited collection
 of particles with a brilliant boy depending on her to save
    his life, she felt helpless, humbled by all around her.
  Sharp voices rose around her, trying to sell things; tiny
holographic people danced or argued on pay platforms in
front of rows of seats; the smell of strange spices from food
                  kiosks rushed into her brain.
   Information spilled in shimmering sheets everywhere. It
 spiraled in and out of existence as if sown by a profligate
 hand. Lynn saw generation upon generation of humanity
 in front of her, humanity that never changed, that never
 grew, but only presented itself and was acted upon. What
had made her different? What lucky accident? Why did she
  have this knowledge, then, if not to use it for the good of
                         everyone?
   And perhaps, she thought, as the woman’s eyes blinked
  open and she glanced across at Lynn and smiled shyly,
this woman thinks of herself as just such a lucky accident.
                      And pities me.
 As if in confirmation, the woman looked directly into her
 eyes and her hand raised in a mudra, a Hindu religious
 gesture the meaning of which Lynn hadn’t the slightest
                          inkling.
  Akamu was mumbling something. “What?” asked Lynn,
            putting her ear to his mouth.
   He sat up, and his eyes were open wide, but looking
  beyond her. “I know! I’m trying!” He nodded his head
                         rapidly.
     “That’s it!” muttered Lynn. Forget the coffee. She
                    grabbed his arm.
                     He yanked it away.
  The beggar smoothed his tie, his mad smile unchanged.
  “Please, Akamu,” she said, “let’s go, okay. I promise I’ll
                  get you help soon.”
  Akamu slumped down in the seat, trembling. He blinked
   a few times. He was covered with sweat. He turned to
  Lynn, looked at her beseechingly. “I’m afraid now. Tell
        Maui I’m sorry. We have to hurry,” he said.
                  “Yes,” she said. “I know.”




                             17
Akamu moaned in the backseat as the taxi jounced over
the bumpy road and the driver turned back, frowning. “He
is sick,” the man said. “I do not like it.”
   “I don’t either,” said Lynn. “I wish you’d drive faster. I
                think you took the slow way.”
         “They are all slow ways. This is Bangkok.”
   They had just pulled out of a forty-five-minute traffic
 jam on a ten-lane-wide city street, out of a crescendo of
   honking and heat and steaming rain. Now a green,
  slow-moving klong was on one side of the road; on the
     other was an endless row of glittering high-rises.
    Hot sun broke through the clouds as they turned a
corner onto a quiet, narrow alley, bordered by white walls
twenty feet high. Trees arched over the utterly clean brick
 pavement, a great contrast to the shacks of corrugated
aluminum and cardboard they’d passed just five minutes
           ago. It was a strange oasis of peace.
      “We are here,” said the driver. “That will be two
                      hundred bhat.”
  “You said a hundred,” she said automatically, thinking,
Stop it, Lynn, just pay the man. “Wait till they answer the
    gate,” she said, “and I’ll pay you two hundred.” He
                scowled, but did not argue.
   “Wake up, Akamu,” she said. She shook him, then got
 out, leaving the door open, and pulled on his arm. With
her foot she kicked at the huge wooden gate, wondering if
           indeed this was the correct address.
  There was a ragged unkempt air about the place. Her
  heart sank. It was deserted. Now what? She pounded
          again, harder, yelling, “Hello! Hello!”
   After a moment the driver said, “There is no one here,
          miss. Can I take you somewhere else?”
                          Where?
  She pushed vines from a brass plaque next to the gate
  and ascertained the address. Beneath it was a name:
                Colonel S. W. Hawkins.
                          The key.
  She fumbled in her pack, found the key, inserted it into
                       the lock.
          She heard a click and tried the handle.
                  The door swung inward.
  She saw a wild, green garden, overgrown with vast thick
vines hanging from trees that spread over all like cooling
umbrellas. Weeds grew between brick pavers. A hot breeze
touched huge leaves to reluctant rustling, then they were
 still again. Two red and yellow parrots flashed through
 the courtyard, their colors echoed by flowers that twined
            in glittering rain-drenched jungle.
  “Hello!” she yelled again, but heard only the wind in the
 leaves, birdcalls, and a monkey chattering from beyond
the high wall. The tall Thai house on stilts towered above
her; the surrounding balcony could be reached by several
  flights of stairs. A bony cat rushed up to her, mewing.
                “Miss, you must pay me now!”
  She took cautious steps further into the courtyard, ready
to bolt. A dead frond crashed suddenly onto the bricks and
                        she jumped.
   Taking a deep breath, she chose stairs that looked as if
they were at the back of the house—heavy stairs, solid. The
  ornately carved railing rippled beneath her hand. She
 ascended into the canopy of trees, and below in the alley
              she glimpsed the roof of the taxi.
            She tried a door, and it swung open.
  She walked through the large, spare house, beautifully
  appointed, with open shelves that held dancing Thai
    statues. The floors were highly polished wood, the
  furniture quite simple. She saw a living room, dining
 room, kitchen. Everything was as neat as if a maid had
just left, though her finger left a trail in the dust on a low
                            table.
    She walked into a study—a large room with many
 windows between which were book-filled shelves. A low
table served as Hawkins’s desk; built into it was the usual
    keyboard that would manifest a screen and a holo
                       platform.
      She walked into the other bedroom and stopped
             suddenly, heart beating loud.
  Hawkins lay on the bed and at first she thought he was
dead. She stepped closer and it was even worse because he
  raised a complicated gun and pointed it right at her
                without opening his eyes.
          “Stop right there,” he said, then blinked.
    “Lynn,” he whispered, and the weapon fell from his
                         hand.
    “Where is the earring?” was the first thing Hawkins
  asked, after she paid the driver and got Akamu inside.
  Akamu was doing a bit better and insisted that he was
fine. She had left him lying on the couch. Lynn knew that
 he would worsen again in another hour, maybe two. She
sat on a chair in Hawkins’s bedroom, ready with her own
                     list of questions.
   “The earring?” she said, at a loss, then remembered.
“There was a tracer in it. I threw it away in Kathmandu.”
 “Oh. Dear,” said Hawkins, and frowned. He was wearing
gray silk pajamas and looked tiny in the center of a huge
futon set on a polished wooden platform. He had pushed
 himself up to a sitting position and was very pale. Lynn
wondered how he had gotten here but decided to ask him
                           later.
  “I’m very sorry that I had you come here, considering the
circumstances,” he said, gesturing at himself. “I am much
worse than I thought. Sattva did not want to let me go, but
since I put all that information in the pack…” He gestured
apologetically with one hand, but Lynn noticed he kept the
                      other on the pistol.
   “We had no place else to go,” said Lynn. “I’m not sure
  what’s going on, who to trust.” She did not want to say
that she didn’t trust Hawkins; she was not entirely sure of
him either. But he had been willing to die to protect them.
“This is”—she had been going to say, better than nothing,
            but finished,—“a beautiful house.”
    “My father owned the entire block,” he said. “My sister
still lives next door, through the gate in the back wall, and
               a cousin lives on the other side.”
  “What are you eating?” Lynn asked Akamu as he walked
   through the bedroom door with a bowl of something.
  “Rice,” he said. “There was some in the refrigerator. I’m
                        starving.”
         “The house sets the cooker,” said Hawkins.
   “I’m sorry I threw the earring away,” said Lynn. “But
   one of Samuel’s stooges showed up in Kathmandu. I
couldn’t figure out any other way he could have found us. I
   guess they really wanted that genome information.”
   Hawkins’s laugh was short and sharp. “They want the
  proofs,” he said, his voice hushed as the rain that had
                     started up again.
  “What?” said Akamu, his chopsticks pausing on their
 way to his mouth. The rice fell back into the bowl. Lynn
            could almost see his eyes bulging.
      “The Kaiulani Proofs,” said Hawkins. “Perhaps
              incomplete, of course, but…”
              “From who?” demanded Akamu.
   Hawkins tilted his head. “Yes, you would be interested,
  wouldn’t you? A private Chinese think tank claimed to
have completed them, based on the Kalakaua Fragments
that have been floating around in the web all these years.
They put out feelers and IS was more than willing to meet
  their price sight unseen, after a few tantalizing hints.”
        “But I thought it was Mao’s DNA,” said Lynn.
      “Of course, my dear. That’s what you were meant to
think. You had proven a reliable courier for your brothers
  in the past, but since you had refused, initially, they had
    just about finished alternate arrangements when they
  found that you were on your way after all. And of course
 they would put a tracer in it! Nothing is secure enough to
 transport information of such immense importance, with
   more potential power than atomic energy. I didn’t have
the capability to separate the tracer from the proofs. I just
  hoped we could stay a few steps ahead of them and get it
  through. The soldiers were not Chinese, you understand.
   After realizing that it was you who had rescued Akamu
 your brothers lost trust in you, for some reason.” Hawkins
   smiled. “I did not count on such serious injury befalling
           myself. Which was very stupid, of course.”
      He shook his head. “Once I woke, and confessed the
contents of the earrings to Sattva—well, let us say that her
   calmness makes the best case for her being the Dalai
 Lama. I was afraid that she would undo all her work by
  killing me instantly. What she had been working on all
 her life literally within reach! She insisted that I was not
well enough to leave but I had no choice. I thought I would
  be well enough to make sure to intercept you before you
  came inside.” He tried to sit up but fell back. “You must
    leave immediately. My sister will help you. I’ve done
 everything wrong. Now the proofs have surely fallen into
                   the hands of Interspace.”
              “What?” said Lynn. “Then who—”
  “My dear,” said Hawkins, the ghost of a grin on his thin
         face, “have you not figured it out yet?”
           “I have,” said Akamu, almost gleefully.
  “You don’t work for Interspace. But I thought you knew
                       my father.”
 “I did,” said Hawkins. “We were very, very close. I would
  have done anything for him. He was one of the most
               honorable men in the world.”
  “We would tend to disagree,” came a voice through the
open window. Lynn did not know that she had such swift
                       reflexes.
  She rushed Akamu and pushed him into the hallway as
        bullets splintered wood next to her head.
    “Run!” she hissed at Akamu. “They must have been
                       waiting…”
                Damn this house on stilts!
  She glanced out a window. A car was by the back gate
 where they had entered. And another, no doubt, at the
                        front.
               What was that about a sister?
    Looking down, she saw several men rushing toward
             Hawkins’s corner of the house.
  It wasn’t much of a chance, but they had to take it. She
             pointed to the house next door.
                 “His sister,” said Akamu.
                  “Let’s try it,” said Lynn.
  They hurried down the stairs at the opposite end of the
house and twisted through the trees. Lynn was glad of the
heavy foliage. If no one had seen them go down the stairs,
            then they could not see them now.
   They ran down the wall, looking for a gate. Lynn was
 terrified. “Here it is!” stage-whispered Akamu ahead of
 her and pushed open a wooden gate that they slammed
behind them. Lynn slid a heavy bar through an iron hasp
 and looked around, panting. “We can’t stay here,” she
 said. “They’ll figure it out pretty fast.” She had left the
 pack with all the money behind. All she had was some
  bhat stuck in her pocket, and they had no passports.
Perhaps Hawkins’s sister might help them but there was
                   really no time to ask.
 She saw an iron gate and through it a busy street. It was
   around the corner from Hawkins’s place; they had
  nowhere else to go and could not dally. She grabbed
  Akamu’s arm and ran into traffic amid honking and
squealing tires that seemed barely to change the level of
cacophony. She waved down an empty tuk-tuk and they
                       jumped in.
               “Where to?” asked the driver.
 Lynn was completely out of ideas. “Take us to the Royal
Hotel,” she said. The name popped into her head from the
guidebook. “Is it far?” she asked, when the driver started
                         to laugh.
  “Maybe a mile,” he said. “But only government workers
                       stay there.”
   She wasn’t sure why he found this so funny but asked,
                     “Only Thais?”
 He nodded his head vigorously. “Yes. I could take you to
                the Intercontinental.”
   “The Royal is fine,” she said. They just needed a lobby
  with a phone. As warm rain fell, Lynn closed her eyes.
 Hawkins was dead for sure now. And if he was working
for, or with, her father, and yet not for IS, then what had
                   her father been up to?
 As she gazed at the side of Akamu’s face, understanding
                        dawned.
   “Can’t you move?” she asked. Traffic held them once
   again in its vise, and they were only a block from
  Hawkins’s estate. A crowd had gathered, apparently
attracted by gunfire. Surely the men would be looking for
                         them—
  “Come on,” she said, grabbing Akamu’s arm. “Let’s get
        out. We’ll have to go faster than this!”
            But he was staring down the street,
      “Maui!” he yelled, and leaped from the tuk-tuk.
    Through the crush of traffic Akamu ran, threading
 through stalled vehicles. He crossed five lanes with the
  speed of a gazelle while Lynn watched in trepidation.
                    Then Lynn saw him.
  A tall, bearded, well-muscled Hawaiian man, his long,
  kinky hair loose—black, with a white streak snaking
                     down one side.
  She had seen him before. In a younger version, in a brief
 news clip. The elusive head of the Homeland Movement,
whose name was unknown, because it had always seemed
to change. He was, she recalled, believed dead. There was
    probably even a death certificate filed somewhere.
    Certainly, he hadn’t been sighted in—oh, ten years?
    He leaned over and embraced Akamu, and his hair
    swirled around the boy like a sheltering curtain.
 As she stared at him Lynn thought, incongruously, What
                    a beautiful man!
                  “Miss?” said the driver.
    She extracted the last of her bhat from her pocket,
  tossed it at the driver, and ran like hell before a new
onslaught of tuk-tuks released by the change of a signal.




                           18
Maui seemed to know the twists and turns of Bangkok’s
back alleys well.
    He never paused while leading their fluid flight. He
rushed into the front of a garish electronics shop, then out
 the back door, always holding Akamu’s hand, glancing
 over his shoulder at Lynn now and then encouragingly,
               including her in their effort.
       When they were well away from the traffic jam
 surrounding Hawkins’s estate they ducked into a closed
 cab with tinted windows and backseats that faced each
other. Maui spoke to the driver in Thai. The driver nodded
            and Maui leaned back in the seat.
   “How did you find us?” asked Akamu, breathing hard.
 He seemed not the least afraid of Maui’s possible wrath,
 and Lynn could easily see why: Maui obviously loved the
boy—treasured him, not for any “work” he thought he was
               doing, but just for himself.
   “What do you care?” asked Maui. “You had me worried
sick. I thought you were dead.” But while he was speaking
   he held Akamu’s face between his hands. “Are you all
                          right?”
  Did I get here in time? his eyes asked Lynn in a fleeting
                          glance.
           “How did you find us?” asked Akamu.
   “Someone named Sattva got in touch with me,” Maui
said. “Which was lucky, as Lynn apparently did not think
                     it important.”
   “Akamu didn’t think it was important,” she said. “Of
 course, I didn’t know who you were, and he wouldn’t tell
  me. He wouldn’t even admit that he knew you. And we
   were rather out of touch for a long time after that.”
  Maui was wearing khaki shorts and a light green shirt
made of rough, raw silk, the kind you could pick up at any
 street stall for a song. He had a scraggly beard. His face
       sagged with fatigue; his eyes were bloodshot.
    He said, “Sattva told me that you might show up at
    Hawkins’s place. I was afraid I would be too late.”
   “You were,” said Lynn. “For Hawkins.” She slumped
 back in her seat and curled up. Another death. And for
        what? She still didn’t know. Not for sure.
         “How are you?” Maui asked Akamu again.
 “Fine,” said Akamu, his limpid brown eyes disingenuous
as he gazed at Maui. Lynn was amazed at these tricks. He
                had not used them on her.
           Because he knew they wouldn’t work.
  “He’s not fine,” said Lynn. “He seems all right now, but I
   don’t think it will last. He needs help immediately.”
  Maui looked at her appraisingly. “Do you think that you
                     can help him?”
                            “Me?”
    “I don’t need help!” shouted Akamu, and the driver
            flicked his eyes across the mirror.
  Maui held both Akamu’s hands. His eyes became serious,
   stern. Lynn was glad she was not the subject of this
    particular gaze. “Akamu, this is dangerous stuff.”
  Akamu stared right back at Maui. “There’s going to be a
  window soon. Everything is ready, isn’t it? By then I’ll
  know the course. In my bones. Deep in my mind. I’ll be
ready to pilot the Hawai’i Loa. But I have to stay this way!
                   I have to keep going!”
   “I can’t let you,” said Maui, looking at him levelly. “Not
 if I have anything to do with it. It’s not that important.”
   “It is and you know it!” Akamu’s eyes filled with tears
 and he began to sob hysterically. “And Lynn threw the
                     proofs away!”
   Maui looked at Lynn. “You had the proofs and threw
                     them away?”
 “At the time I thought they were Mao’s DNA,” she said.
“And I thought that we’d get killed because there was a
                   tracer with them.”
 Maui’s arms tightened around Akamu, and he looked at
Lynn helplessly. “I imagine IS found them, then,” he said,
with resignation. “Another problem. But I’d say it was a
false alarm anyway. Chances are they’re incomplete. I’m
 most worried about Akamu. There must be some way to
    help him. If you don’t want to, I’m sure I can find
            someone.” His voice turned cold.
 “I’ll do all I can,” she said quickly. “I have so far.” She
was rather surprised that he didn’t have more questions
                      about the proofs.
           Because, Lynn, somehow he knows…
   “I’m sorry,” said Maui. “You have.” The corners of his
 large eyes drooped; his dark brown face was furrowed.
 “Mind if I smoke?” he asked and before she answered he
pushed the cigarette pad and an ashtray opened; a small
fan whirled to suck in the smoke. It didn’t work very well
      and when he lit his cigarette her eyes watered.
  Maui rubbed Akamu’s back and murmured, “That’s all
right; rest now, Akamu. Just relax.” Akamu hiccupped a
   few times, and his eyelids fluttered downward. In a
             moment he was breathing deeply.
 Lynn was impressed. “I’m not exactly sure exactly what
     it is that he took, there at Tripler,” she said.
     “Oh, I am,” he said. His voice was grim. “I know
   precisely what it was. And so, apparently, did he.”
                 “What was it?” asked Lynn.
  Maui sighed. It was evening now. His dark eyes caught
the light of an oncoming vehicle and shone for a moment;
                 she saw immense sadness.
  “It’s rather convoluted, but apparently there’s some sort
of bionan that aligns these little—things—that are a part
               of the sheath of brain cells …”
              “The tubular dimars,” said Lynn.
  “Hmmm? Yes, that’s it,” he said, and took a deep drag of
his cigarette. “Well, if they are aligned to certain planes, is
 my understanding of the whole thing, they facilitate the
 brain’s entry into a state of quantum superconductivity.
Something to do with being able to precisely know what is
   happening wherever reality is formed before it comes
  here.” He drew on his cigarette again; in the dim light
       Lynn saw his mouth had a wry twist. “Right.”
  “So you don’t believe this is possible,” said Lynn, feeling
                          relieved.
  “Well,” said Maui, “that’s not entirely true, I’m afraid.
 But I’m pretty sure that whatever they cooked up is still
 not very refined.” He sighed. “Some of this is my fault.”
  “I’d guess the whole damn thing’s your fault,” said Lynn.
   Maui flinched. But his voice was grave and calm. “It’s
             all been a risk, every part of it.”
   “People aren’t just your pawns,” she began, an angry
 edge to her voice. “Even if you’ve—you’ve just made them
                         in a lab!”
   “I agree,” said Maui. “You’ve spent a few weeks with
 Akamu now. Does he act like your standard pawn?” He
      tilted his head and his eyes were questioning.
   Lynn sighed. “He seems a bit—hardheaded,” conceded
                         Lynn.
       “More than a bit,” said Maui. “In fact it’s entirely
possible that we may be his pawns.” A slight, ironic smile
 crinkled the corners of his eyes as he looked at Lynn. “So
 put that in your pipe and smoke it while I take a break.”
He yawned. “You must excuse me if I’m not making sense. I
 don’t think I’ve slept in days. I’ve been doing nothing but
   trying to find Akamu. Well, that and trying to make a
 few… final arrangements, as it were. You’ll be glad a bit
               later that I napped, believe me.”
    He leaned back into the corner of the seat, gathered
   Akamu to his side with one arm, and closed his eyes.
  “Wait a minute,” said Lynn. “I haven’t even started with
                       questions.”
           But she could not wake either of them.
       Dawn above the Pacific was an intense, green,
fast-moving verge of light that Lynn woke to, surprised to
 find herself lying on satin sheets in a tiny, wood-paneled
              bedroom. Then she remembered.
      After Maui fell asleep there was a ride through
 darkening Bangkok alive with lights; a detour around a
   Buddhist Festival of the New Moon—a sinuous line of
    thousands of candles snaking through the streets
surrounding Wat Po, where the famous Reclining Buddha
 reposed, enormous and sublime. So the driver told Lynn.
 “They had last week a festival they’ve never had before,”
the man said. “They called it the Festival of New Stars. It
  was much louder than this one, with a huge dancing of
                         millions.”
                  “Millions?” asked Lynn.
    He shrugged. “It seemed so. They blocked up all the
  streets around the palace and Wat Po with their wild
dancing. I had to drive for many blocks out of my way and
               my passengers complained.”
    Once they were out of the city, Lynn must have dozed,
too, for she was wakened when they left the pavement and
 bumped along and she heard Maui giving directions and
     then she opened her eyes and saw a small airport
            surrounded by many private planes.
  Lynn made a remark about the opulence of the one they
  climbed aboard and Maui only said, “It’s not ours. I’ve
  been wanting to fly it for years and finally had reason
                      enough to ask.”
  Now, the small jet chased the edge of morning. Lynn sat
 up in the bed and looked around. She was not unused to
   private jets but this was really something. High-style
 postmodern decor; subtle waves of wood and metal. And
although the fluffy white tops of the clouds were bathed in
 pink and gold, their night had been quite short. She was
                          still tired.
    She took off her clothes and had a shower; searched
  through the drawers and belted an enormous pair of
  someone’s shorts around her waist. She found a large
     T-shirt that said Ono Restaurant and put it on.
 “Just in time!” Maui said, when she slipped into the seat
 next to his in the cockpit. Akamu was sprawled behind
 them on a couch. “We’ll land in about twenty minutes.”
                    “Where?” she asked.
           “Ah,” he said. “Top secret, you know.”
    “Kohala.” The northern peninsula of the Big Island
     ceded to the Homeland Movement decades ago.
                         “Exactly.”
   “And how do you think I can help Akamu from there?”
  “If anyone in IS knows how to help him you can find out
                       from there.”
          “That’s a rather interesting assertion.”
  “I think you’ll find everything about Kohala immensely
                        interesting.”
  “How could he get away so easily?” asked Lynn. “Doesn’t
             anybody keep an eye on him?”
       Maui leaned forward and made some digital
  adjustments. “Hell no, we just let him do whatever he
 pleases. If he’d told us he wanted to rob a bank, why, we
     would have helped him out. What do you think?”
   Lynn’s rude streak was beginning to surface. “But why
     weren’t you more careful? What about the other
         children—the other clones—who died?”
  He nodded and a muscle in his jaw twitched. “Why don’t
  you think about who killed them,” he said roughly. “We
   didn’t want our clones brought up in some sort of cold
assembly-line way. It could be that we gave them too much
    freedom, made them too vulnerable, but what’s the
   alternative? We wanted them to be a part of a larger
 community. Otherwise what would they care about their
 fellow humans? What would they know? How could they
             choose to take a leadership role?”
   “Could they choose not to?” Lynn asked, her tone acid.
  “Well, one of them shows all the signs of becoming a very
  successful investment banker in Hong Kong, actually,
despite his age. We’ve learned an immense amount about
 humans, about cloning humans and the aftermath, from
this program. We wanted them to grow up as normally as
         possible. There have not been that many.”
    But more than Lynn had known about, she realized.
After a moment she felt incongruously bad about upsetting
    him. She could see a muscle twitching in his cheek.
    “Akamu talked about Primal Societies,” she said, to
                 divert his thoughts.
   “Yes,” he said, as the jet sliced through the cloud layer
       on its descent. “Primal Societies will allow us to
successfully leave this planet and survive in a wide variety
      of circumstances. There is no hierarchy. It’s a true
 democracy, but people have to be learn how to function in
   one. They have to trust that it will work. They have to
learn to trust themselves, they have to know how to access
     information, true information, not just what’s been
handed them. They have to learn how to compromise, how
 to forge a new path, how to formulate goals, how to think
 of a community as a true community and not some sort of
     top-down dictatorship, however benign. It’s a huge
responsibility for the individual. And I have to admit that
 for somebody like—me, for instance—learning to listen is
  one of the hardest parts. But I think it’s the only form of
   government that will really work in the long run. And
   that’s what we’re thinking of—vast amounts of time.”
      He banked the jet sharply over the Kohala coast.
    The sea was translucent turquoise, fringed by a thin,
distant line of wavebreak, white against black lava. Steep
   rain-forested cliffs were fissured by vertical narrow
   valleys. Most of the Big Island was relatively young,
 geologically speaking. As the tectonic plate on which the
Hawaiian Islands sat rotated northward over the hot spot,
 each island in its turn had been formed. Kohala was the
 northernmost point of the Big Island, much, much older
 than the southern part. Now, a new island was forming
             deep under the sea south of them.
     Lynn pointed at a distant plume of smoke. “Is that
     Kileauea? I thought it hadn’t erupted in years.”
  “It hadn’t,” said Maui. “But that was a mere blip of time
  to a volcano, of course. It started up again a few weeks
ago. Its supposed ‘dormancy’ was one of the reasons the IS
   investors could be talked into financing a maglaunch
tunnel on the Big Island.” He grinned as he stared out the
 window, focused on landing. “That’s bad and good. Bad
 for IS, because they literally poured their money down a
 hole. The Big Island is the least seismically stable of all
the islands, naturally. They’ve never used this maglaunch,
  even though it’s pristine, complete, ready to go. It’s too
 risky. They continued using the one over on Oahu for all
                the generation ship work.”
   “But good for the Homelanders,” said Lynn. She knew
         exactly why the tunnel had been built.
   Or thought she had. To funnel money to her brothers
 and others like them. Now—she wondered. “Akamu told
     me about your plans. And his—to be the pilot.”
        “What do you think of all that?” asked Maui.
   “I think you’re crazy. And you’ve driven Akamu crazy,
                            too.”
              “Maybe you’ll change your mind.”
                “So where is the maglaunch?”
    Maui pointed out the window. “The entrance is behind
 the mountains, near Kailua-Kona, where the coast slopes
  down to the sea gradually. About thirty miles away. The
 tunnel angles upward from there, so the vehicle can gain
 momentum. Then it shoots up through the mountain and
leaves from that hole, over there,” he said, and she saw it,
  surrounded by glinting black lava, the spun glass of the
   land, fenced and guarded by tiny doll-like soldiers. It
belonged to Interspace, but the exit bordered on Hawaiian
                        Homeland.
  Maui brought the jet to a delicate landing, and taxied to
a halt. His eyes were Akamu’s, deep brown and large, but
  quite grave, as he turned to her. “As important as this
project is, I’ve just about lost heart over this last thing. IS
 is afraid of us. As indeed they should be. I guess this has
 driven them to use desperate means.” He sighed. “And I
guess it made Akamu think he had to use desperate means
   as well. When you’re young, you don’t think about the
   downside. You think that you’re immortal. But time is
short. We have to win through soon, I think, or maybe miss
  this opportunity forever. Not only for ourselves, but for
everyone.” As he spoke he unconsciously grasped a crystal
         hanging around his neck on a thin, clear
  filament—fishing line? Like Akamu’s. Yes, that’s where
she’d seen it before. She looked at it more closely. It was a
 delicate representation of one of those Polynesian canoes
             that could sail thousands of miles.
     “You see,” he said, “if it weren’t for Akamu, I’d be
ecstatic. All our plans are coming to fruition now. What I
  have worked on for a lifetime. Only a few pieces of the
puzzle are missing.” He looked at her directly. “And one of
                       them is you.”
   “Me! After Akamu is better I’m through with this stuff.
I’m going to become a hermit.” She rose as he did, followed
                     him to the door.
  He turned and put his hand on her shoulder. “Wait and
see,” he said, a bit sadly. “I’m not sure you’ll really be able
to. In fact, I hope not.” He spun the wheel that opened the
door. “You first,” he said, and went back to gather Akamu.
    As always when she returned, Lynn was stunned by the
intensity of colors, the cool purity of the air, as she climbed
 down the stairs from the jet. Palms bobbed tumultuously
 in the morning wind, their fronds shadowy blue-green, in
 a row that bordered the lower verge of a cliff. Vast fields
     of mountain grasses filled her eyes, backed by steep
 rain-forested mountains where, high above, the flowering
    canopies of trees, streaks of brilliant yellow and red,
   tossed in the breeze. Lynn heard only the rush of wind
                  through billions of leaves.
     At the end of the airstrip was a deep country lane
overlaced by the branches of trees centuries old. They were
 probably about a thousand feet above the ocean, and she
  had seen the vertical cliffs that plummeted downward
from here—completely unscalable. Across the blue channel
    was the massive slope of Haleakala, purple in the
                         distance.
  This world hummed with life. How could anyone stand
    to leave it, to agree to enter a lifeless suffocating
 spaceship—no matter how grand—for the rest of their
 days? She did not know; she had never understood that
                             urge.
  An open electric jeep waited. Maui carried Akamu with
seeming ease and laid him in the backseat, got behind the
 wheel, and flicked a switch. They moved silently beneath
 the great trees and birds swooped across the lane before
                           them.
  She didn’t know exactly what she had expected—grass
   shacks? Instead she saw, with a slight shock as they
emerged from the lane, several domes similar to Sattva’s,
 out along the high sea bluffs that drank light from the
  wide sky. Further inland, near waterfalls, were many
 fascinating houses built of glass, wood, and black lava
      rock, utterly modern, blending with the land.
      Maui did not take her toward those, though. After
  speaking briefly to those who had greeted them he took
her arm and led her toward a neat shed. She could feel his
 exhaustion, see it in his eyes, smell it emanating from his
   skin as they crowded into the elevator inside the shed.
           They descended for less than a minute.
    She expected the same coldly gleaming underground
    corridors of Interspace but was happily surprised.
  The door opened onto a cathedral-like space that looked
 natural. Whatever had been caught in the lava flow and
    created this space had long since vanished. Tile and
   polished wood were interspersed as flooring, marking
 areas of use in the vast, lobbylike nexus, which was filled
with palms and other tropical plants, flourishing beneath
  subtle lighting. A small waterfall splashed into a pool.
 Quietly lit corridors with luminescent flooring radiated
  landward from the central atrium, and toward the sea
was a great open place flooding the interior with sunlight.
A woman who was clearly a guard nodded at Maui, and a
  man disappearing down a corridor turned and waved.
     “Have Dr. Konapai come immediately,” he told the
             guard and she nodded again.
    Maui walked them over to an open balcony and Lynn
leaned against the railing, breathing deeply. The balcony
was set in a deep curve of pure black lava that echoed the
 curve of water hundreds of feet below. She looked to the
  right and to the left. Even though she was so close, the
glass set into the cliff on both sides of her for hundreds of
   yards was almost invisible, blending with the lava’s
                        natural glitter.
  The scent of seaweed drying on the rocks, mingled with
salt air, the solid, distant smack of massive waves on rock
   far below, welcomed her. She had missed the intense
                          Pacific blue.
    “Home sweet home,” Maui said. Akamu, lying where
Maui had deposited him on a wide couch, opened his eyes.
 “I want my flat,” he said, reaching out. Maui caught his
           hand, held it tightly for a moment.
   “Rest,” said Maui. “Dr. Konapai will be here in just a
   minute to take care of you.” Lynn was amazed to see
   Akamu close his eyes and snuggle into the cushions.
   Maui turned to Lynn. “Come on. Time to get to work. I
             have something to show you.”
  She followed him to a spacious apartment at one end of
the complex. She glimpsed a bedroom off to one side, nice,
               but impersonal as a hotel.
    In the center of a wall of glass was a spare, elegant
                      virtual system.
    The console was a curved flat, and in front of it was a
chair that looked something like an insect, swooping lines
of thin round metal with a cushion in the center. It was on
   wheels. Maui motioned her into it. It was surprisingly
comfortable. He pulled its twin chair close and sat next to
                            her.
              “Welcome to Interspace,” he said.
                     She looked at him.
                “Go ahead,” he said. “Try it.”
  The helmet was just two curves of crossed metal that sat
on her head; an eye panel lowered when she pushed a pad
by her ear. She twisted in the chair to get comfortable and
          pushed the button on the arm console.
     Lynn Oshima lived in Koolau House. She rapidly
 bypassed the guard and the elevator and walked inside.
   “I took the liberty of putting you right at home,” said
                            Maui.
        “Oh, many thanks,” she said, rather shaken.
   Using the control that nestled beneath her right hand
 she began to cruise through her own system. She saw her
 latest work, several weeks old, where she had wiped the
genescan of Akamu clean. She tried not to be disturbed. It
was rather ironic. This was what she had been doing since
                    she was very young.
  “You’ve been spying on me!” she said, feeling enormously
                       predictable.
  “No, actually, no one has.” She couldn’t see his face, only
hear his voice, quite deep and somehow reassuring. “You
haven’t been of great interest to us, until this. But you see,
we can.” He scooted his chair over to a cabinet and pulled
       out another helmet, put it on. “Now watch.”
    And then they were at IS headquarters. She could
   actually hear people speaking. He moved them to a
  warehouse, ordered an extra zodiac boat for a backup
                     rescue launch.
  In the next twenty minutes he walked her through the
heart and soul of Interspace without a trace of gloating.
          He was absolutely calm and at home.
  It was quite easy to see how Akamu had made his plans
                  to invade Tripler Labs.
   “Think you can find what you need?” asked Maui. “He
    took that stuff—here—” He brought up a calendar,
            touched a day about a month ago.
      “If it’s there, I can find it,” she said. “It’s another
        question as to whether I can do it in time.”
           “Well,” said Maui. “Time is very short.”
                     “That’s what I said.”
   “No,” he said, “I mean—how much did Akamu tell you
                     about our plans?”
   “Well—not a lot. Just that you were going to take over
    the generation ship. It sounds kind of outlandish,
                        actually.”
    Maui leaned back in his chair, his face grim. “I hope
  anyone else who has an inkling about what we’re doing
 thinks the same thing. But we have to do it soon. They’ve
  christened the ship. They’re planning on leaving within
 the month. Right now”—Lynn thought she could hear his
   heart beating with excitement—“right now is our best
chance.” His voice became an intense whisper. “In the next
                         few days.”
   “Days?” she asked. “But I thought—I mean, I think the
        official schedule is another year or so—”
  “No,” said Maui. “It’s all been set in motion. What we’ve
             been planning for fifteen years.”
    She motioned toward the screen. “How long have you
                    been doing this?”
   “Ages,” he said. “Ages.” He stood. “I’m going to check on
   Akamu and get some rest. They know how to get him
 stabilized, at least for a while. Everyone here knows who
you are and why you’re here. If you need anything just ask.
           You saw the international doorway?”
                         She nodded.
  “There are many people there totally willing to help us.
 The Homeland Movement is worldwide. I’m sure you can
  figure out the icons. Oh! I forgot. You’ll probably want
                     something to eat.”
   She leaned back in her chair. “I don’t understand. You
  can obviously control Interspace. What are you doing?”
    “I hope it’s not obvious,” he said. “We don’t want to tip
 our hand too soon. We just keep tabs, and any changes we
    make are absolutely necessary, and very small, even
 though with such a large organization no one would even
  notice substantial changes—they’d just think that they
  were authorized. Let them do all the work. We’re just a
 bunch of scruffy stupid indigent people all wrapped up in
 old legends. With a silly pretentious underground facility
that they think they know everything about.” His voice was
cool, but the expression on his face was fierce. “I just want
                 you to heal Akamu, for now.”
  “Look,” she said, “we’re dealing with very subtle changes
                    in brain chemistry.”
  “So take that away. Make him normal again. Make him
                      what he was.”
                   “He never was normal.”
      “He was a perfectly normal Kamehameha, and
Kamehameha lived to be pretty old. Lynn, I’m not a fool. I
  understand the things people like you can do, maybe
   better than you think. I just can’t do them myself.”
                 “I don’t think you’re a fool.”
  “Maybe I am and I’m just desperate. We have so much to
         do, very little time, and I love Akamu.”
               “Maybe he likes the way he is.”
                 “Do you like the way he is?”
 “Of course not. I’m just telling you that it will break his
heart if he loses the capability to finish working on those
                    proofs. He’ll hate us.”
  “That’s worlds better than the alternative,” Maui said.
        “Aren’t you afraid he might die, Lynn?”
  “I was,” she said. “I still am. But… think about it, Maui.
What if one day you understand these things? They’re like
the air you breathe. The next, it’s like you’re a clod of dirt.
  You can’t even imagine what it was you were thinking
 about. Can’t you see how painful that might be? I’m just
 not at all sure that such fine control as you are talking
  about is possible. I’m saying that I might make things
  worse. That’s very frightening to me, too. He looks very
bad, but rapid brain growth is a phenomenon that upsets
 the entire organism. All sorts of new neural connections
                        are forming.”
    “I don’t know about that,” said Maui roughly. “I just
   don’t know. And the proofs are important, but we’re
 making headway using a lot of other sources. I think the
proofs are kind of like inevitable knowledge, in a way. It’s
   information that exists that we’re finally capable of
  discovering and using. We never were counting on the
  revelations of just one person, much less a child. He’s
                taken all this on himself.”
   “Maybe knowing that he was Kamehameha has given
 him some sense that he is rather important to you,” she
 couldn’t help saying, with some force. “It can’t be easy
  knowing that you were created only because you were
 identical to some wonderful, fabulous, powerful figure
     from the past. And what for? What for, really?”
   Maui spoke slowly. “Cloning Kamehamehas was Lelani’s
 idea, really. My grandmother’s.” His hand dropped to the
   crystal starship, and Lynn remembered their name for
  it—the Hawai’i Loa. “She was a Hawaiian priestess, so
    this was sacred for her. She had a vision of a perfect
Hawaii, of moving to an entirely new world, of having the
leaders necessary to assess a completely new situation, the
  way Kamehameha did when the Europeans showed up,
  and use it to their advantage. We did fine for a hundred
   years, until the last of the Kamehameha line died. But
  diseases, like measles and smallpox, depleted over half
      our population in twenty years. Furthermore, the
  missionaries made it clear that women should not have
       children unless they were married, which was a
 completely alien idea in Polynesia. Marriage existed, but
children… children were special. They were shared by the
 community. It was a common practice for a couple to give
their child to a sister or brother to bring up, and for them
    to in turn bring up others’ children. It cemented the
     community. Children were not ‘owned’; nor was the
 identity of the father of great import—not, anyway, in the
   sense of ‘legitimizing’ children. After the missionaries
 came and foisted their philosophy on everyone, abortions
  and infanticide by women made to be ashamed of their
      own culture depleted the population even further.
      “I think that for Lelani it was kind of like, here is
   something preserved from the days when everything
worked, and these children will be a symbol of everything
 working for us again. But it was much more poetic than
that, I suppose. And she was right. Having these children
 has meant the world to the Homeland Movement. They’ve
 brought it all together. We can use the technology of the
 modern world, just like anyone else. It’s a kind of mana,
   power. We’ve brought three generations of Hawaiian
children here for education, the education the state never
      gave them. Our own private schools. Having the
Kamehameha children—clones if you will, though I’m sure
that’s not at all the way you think of Akamu—has given it
 all a real touch of magic. When Hawaiian children leave
     here to go to college they are confident and proud,
working to the best of their abilities. Many have returned
     to work here, others are working for us in various
     capacities internationally, and many are happily
   pursuing their own normal lives in every imaginable
  profession and capacity. Really, Lynn, who would mind
                         being born!”
      Certainly not an optimist like you, she thought.
   He kept talking. “I grant you that cloning has brought
  problems which we didn’t foresee, but we’ll all have to
 cope with them eventually, so why not now? Now, while
 we’re on Earth. I’ve been here for all of them, every last
   one of them. They’re my children. It’s been absolutely
amazing to me that this kind of thing actually works! It’s
      like a miracle. A miracle,” he said more softly.
  “And now it’s all falling into place.” He sighed. “I know
      you’re tired, and I’ve given you a lot to do—”
 “I’ll do everything I possibly can.” The files of Dr. Honsa,
she was thinking even now. That would be the first place
     to look—long closed… she picked up the helmet.
  “Oh—wait.” Maui pulled open a drawer and took out a
small silver disk. He hesitated for a moment, then handed
                          it to her.
    “I’ve been saving this for you,” he said. “If you think
there’s time, maybe you should look at it first. It won’t take
     long. And if you want more information press the
  newspaper icon in the information corridor.” He patted
    her shoulder as he left. “You got a great write-up.”
    She held the small disk in her hand when Maui left,
               almost afraid to look at it.
  She walked to the bank of windows and was pleasantly
surprised to find that they opened. The wind rushed in, so
     strong that it blew her hair back from her face.
   Hardy green naupaka, with its stubby ovate leaves and
  delicate white flowers, glowed bright green just outside
  the window, growing from gnarled lava. She could not
 help but think, as she watched it shake with each gust of
wind, that it was like the ancient Polynesians, pushing the
 limits, living on the edge, colonizing every bit of possible
 land. She heard the hush of surf hundreds of feet below;
     drank in the very blueness of the sea, like a balm;
 breathed sharp salt air. How she had missed it! And she
                   hadn’t even realized it.
   She stepped back from the window and looked at the
disk. She rather knew what was on it. She returned to the
                        chair.
       But she dallied, accessed the news. Read her own
obituary. A tragic freak fire in a Hong Kong jewelry store.
     Her accomplishments— rather few. Her community
involvement—scanty. Her brothers would be disappointed
  if they had to give her inheritance back to her. She saw
       videos of congratulatory parties celebrating the
 completion of the generation ship, bypassed the doorway
  that would allow her to mingle virtually with a more
     nuanced record of the tremendous celebration.
   Finally, she could put it off no longer. She went back
 and slipped it into the player in the bedroom. She sat on
   the edge of the bed and watched her father speak.




                            19
Lynn,” he began, and she froze it instantly, studying his
face.
                       His dear face.
   It was more wizened than she remembered, though she
   had seen him less than three months ago, at a formal
dinner given by Alyssa, the twins’ mother. She remembered
  how he asked her to stay late and talk, and, when she
 refused, to call him. She felt very bad, remembering. She
 had never called. She was newly pregnant, euphoric. She
did not want to listen to the same negativity she had gone
 through when she had taken her first job as a musician.
Time enough for him to know when she could show him his
                      granddaughter.
       What a difference those few months had made.
  A date blinked in the upper right hand corner. The day
               she had fled with Akamu.
   It was odd, she thought, that his old face glowed with
 happiness. It had been years since she had seen it so. His
 smile touched memories to life; memories of happy days,
                 before her mother died.
           She released the freeze, and he spoke.
 “Lynn,” he said, “I am making this to give to Maui, of the
 Homeland Movement. If you see this it means that I am
dead. But do not grieve. I wish to be buried in the Nuuanu
 cemetery, next to my father and my sister. Your brothers
  know this; and I am sure that they will obey me in this
    matter. I have received threats, but I refuse to be
      intimidated. I know that you will understand.
    “For many years I have become more and more uneasy
with the direction taken by Interspace. I was so proud of
 the organization when it was formed! There could be no
  greater endeavor, I believed, than to take humanity to
space. But one by one those with ideals have mysteriously
resigned or died. Interspace has been gutted from within.
 Not just by one person, but by the complicity that comes
  from a subtle sort of blackmail. Huge profits are being
   taken without keeping enough to do what needs to be
             done, is the simple way to put it.
     “I know that you think the worst of your brothers, but
they are truly not as bad as you believe. They have refused
to listen to my warnings about Interspace, but they are not
  bad people. They have their families to protect and care
    for. And they do not understand that the intelligence
branch of Interspace is ruthless. It is a ruthlessness for its
 own sake. These people do not care about me, they do not
 care about you, and they do not care about your brothers,
 nor will they listen to them. Your brothers will be bitterly
   shocked, I think, at how little power they have in some
  matters.” He shrugged and looked deep into Lynn’s eyes.
Impossible that he was dead. He was right there in front of
                             her.
  “Perhaps any large organization like this where secrecy
  is involved engenders a class of spies, who believe that
  they are above the law,” he continued. He took a sip of
                          water.
   “I have for some time been in touch with the Homeland
    Movement, Lynn. I suppose this will, unfortunately,
  surprise you. I say unfortunately because I realize what
has caused you to draw away from me, and I believe that if
 you knew these things about me you would not… hate me
 so much. But I did not want to endanger you. I certainly
    hope that your brothers are surprised, otherwise my
                     sacrifice is in vain.
   “Those in the Homeland Movement are good people. It
   has eased my conscience to supply them with all the
    information I possibly could. I like them. They are
  everything I hoped Interspace would be. And you know
what, Lynn? I think it quite possible that Interspace might
send this great ship into space knowing that it will end up
nowhere, and everyone aboard eventually dead. They have
   painted themselves into a corner. To save face—and
                   profits—they must go.
   “But the Homeland Movement has other plans. I have
   helped them, I hope, add the necessary components,
 unbeknownst to Interspace, that will actually make the
ship function!” He struck a table out of the viewing angle
 with his fist. His eyes narrowed, as filled with glee as a
                         small boy’s.
   “Lynn! If all goes well, this ship will jump the fractal!”
 He laughed. “Oh, I have had great fun with Maui, during
our few meetings. He has told me all manner of outlandish
things, like jumping the fractal, and he’s given me strange
         things to think about and I believe in him.
      “If you are seeing this, it is because my old friend
   Colonel Hawkins has helped you. You can trust him.”
 Nostalgia rushed across his face. “He would do anything
 for me, and I for him. I would not put him at risk, Lynn,
 except for you. But he undertakes it gladly, I know. He is
 like that. I died a thousand times when I found that you
   were in such danger, but by then it was too late to do
               anything except call Hawkins.”
                   He cleared his throat.
    “Lynn, I have tried to tell you many times how much I
    admire you. I know how difficult it was to lose your
   mother.” He cleared his throat again. “I do not regret
 marrying Alyssa, but I do regret not understanding that
just making her my wife would not give you a mother.” He
sighed. “It is hard to raise a girl! You must admit that you
were very wild.” He smiled into the room at her. “I have all
  the music you ever recorded, my dear. I listen to it quite
  often. It is beautiful. I wish I had helped you more. You
             might have been a great composer.”
    Lynn froze the image, rose, blinked back tears, and
stomped around the room a few times. She wondered why
she felt so angry. She grabbed a tissue and blew her nose,
              then sat and continued the disk.
   He paused for a moment, shifted in his seat. “This is
kind of a funny thing to do, you know. Nothing I ever told
you made any difference. So I certainly can’t give you any
        advice. I can only tell you that I love you.”
    There was silence for another moment. Then he said,
     “Good-bye,” abruptly, and the screen went dark.
    Lynn threw herself down on the bed. She heard great
  fountains of foam splash again and again through the
   cries of the seabirds while the wind washed over her.
 So. The Homeland Movement and Interspace were closer
than she had imagined. Her heart lifted for some reason.
Was the vision of which Akamu had spoken in that little
        room in Chaing Mai actually… possible?
   Hawkins had no doubt meant to deliver the proofs as
      well as Akamu back to the Homelanders.
      The proofs of brilliant, unstable Cen Kalakaua.
     Which Akamu claimed would help him pilot the
    generation ship—the Hawaii Loa, no less—across
                     interstellar space.
                      To another world.
                             How?
   She removed the disk from the player and put it back in
its case. She realized she had nowhere to put it so left it in
  the middle of the bed. The news, Maui had said. But she
   was in no mood for more emotional intensity. She was
keenly aware of Akamu’s suffering, now. She dropped into
       a soft chair, pulled up her knees, and thought.
  There was a way in which a virus could carry new DNA
 into his brain—his own normal DNA. She would have to
take a good look at the nan he carried. Access the records
and find out exactly what he had. Yes. Only then could she
          know for sure if anything could be done.
 Anything? What a thought! Of course something could be
        done. At least some sort of stabilization.
                          She hoped.
    Someone had left a black lacquer box on a table. She
 lifted the lid, drank the miso soup, polished off slices of
 sweet grilled eel with a flash of chopsticks, and finished
                 with a pickle and cold rice.
  Then she sat at her elegant machine and went to work.
    She soon fell into the rhythm of investigation, almost
forgetting the angst engendering her quest. She welcomed
the soothing glow of the virtual corridors but soon forsook
them impatiently—they slowed her down—and entered the
                realm of pure information.
      Date, time, place. Tripler Labs, last month. She
   narrowed it down quite quickly: the Hawaiian male,
     thirteen years, two months. Healthy and hostile.
  Caught with a retscan jammer and a tiny vial of bionan
 in his pocket by a mechanic who had to tackle him. The
   mechanic had suffered a broken rib for his trouble.
                        Stealing fire.
 Apparently he’d already ingested half of the bionan. One
    milliliter was missing. They took the vial back.
     The stuff had no name, only a number. It had been
   refrigerated for years, along with thousands of other
    solutions, each of which induced highly specialized
    changes in brain chemistry for which there were no
     particular uses. That anyone knew of at the time.
  It took them fifteen minutes to figure out who he was. Of
 course, the computer found a quick match with the blood
from the dead clones. No hint of the elation they must have
   felt or the puzzlement either—what the hell was this
          particular kid doing here, of all places?
   They left him alone with a guard who underestimated
                           him.
      He escaped and they didn’t know it for forty-five
                       minutes.
                      Heads had rolled.
               Lynn smiled within her helmet.
            Now. What was it that he had taken?
   Shelled within the report were old records unearthed
    during the investigation related to actual human
      experiments done years ago. Many years ago.
   MRIs of subject’s brain changes; a movie of blossoming
 color and shifting activity. A list of questions the subject
was asked, the tasks she performed; the concurrent movie,
   the delicate, lovely responses of her neurons, of her…
      Lynn stopped it, shifted back. Opened a window.
                          Marveled.
   Here information had been collected that fell into the
  realm of which Sattva spoke, high on that windy cold
Tibetan plain. The micro-tubules. Questions. What do you
 see now? A steady state of ten to the eleventh hertz, the
 oscillation at which Sattva claimed that, possibly, the
         wave function could be kept collapsed.
                No data. No data. No data.
       For five minutes the subject was dead. Right?
      They gave her back her brainwaves. Test over.
   What had happened, then? What had she seen? Where
                   had she been?
              And what had happened to her?
                There was no record of that.
  And why had Akamu gone to all the trouble to get this
                  stuff, anyway?
   Years of research into what made people exceptional
flashed through her mind. She knew how to make people
 special, yes. That was all highly classified information.
   Eugenics pure and simple. To tamper, even with the
     highest of motives, even when shooting for great
 things—great intelligence, in one area or another—was
                         not right.
  But was it really wrong to create, or try to create, those
who might in turn pull us all farther, faster? Those who
 might by God come up with the Grand Unified Theory,
 with the chaotic calculus… with the truth about time?
What was the answer? Allowing adults to make educated
 choices about how to change themselves? But by then it
      was too late. Brain growth was over by then.
 What Akamu was doing—solving the proofs—was deeply
human, entirely natural. From what he had told her, his
   education had been such that he could not help but
 resonate with mathematical genius. It was very easy to
create an environment in which children could reach their
    full potential. They appeared to be geniuses when
 compared to children who had not had their advantages,
                         that’s all.
     But true genius did exist, and she knew it. Had seen
  it—the vast leaps some children were able to make, the
way they seemed to absorb the ability to read, when three
   years old, to do complex mathematics by the time they
 were seven and to revel in it. These were the children she
had studied. Exceptional children and exceptional adults.
      Kamehameha, by all accounts, had been such an
   exceptional person. And Akamu was Kamehameha, at
                     least biochemically.
    The nan program at Interspace had not been exactly
hit-or-miss. Massive research had been done with rats, not
 very well hidden because no one really cared about rats.
  She could access that; look at Honsa’s work—and who
knows what had happened to Honsa, after her father had
 fired the woman. Lynn could track her down. But first…
   Maui had seen to it that blood was drawn from Akamu
as soon as they arrived, and she was grateful, for it meant
  that his genome was available, along with a library of
                 other vital information.
  With expertise drawn from long-honed skills she isolated
the nan in his blood. That she was able to do so meant that
 the nan had settled in his bone marrow and was sending
out a constant stream of modifiers. It seemed that the nan
   was bumping up the production of certain hormones.
   One effect of this was to cause subtle changes in the
 shape of the tubular dimars, which in turn affected the
               angle between their planes.
   There was also in this cocktail a bacterium it took a
 while to find a match for. Eventually, she found that the
research that created a slightly changed version of it had
   actually taken place in Copenhagen years ago. They
 presently had one of the prototype quantum computers
                 Sattva had mentioned.
     This bacterium, isolated from the skin of deep-sea
  electric eels, lived in a symbiotic relationship with the
     eels. Its presence on the skin of the eels evidently
 facilitated their electrical charge. Now the Copenhagen
 subjects were taking a suitably manipulated version in
  order to facilitate their connection with the quantum
                           computer.
  Lynn’s eyes were burning. She fiddled with the lighting
and continued to search, frantically, for information—any
          information—she could possibly use.
    After more sleuthing through dead ends, accessing
   long-sealed records, she found the Honsa work and
compared it to the more recent Tripler experiments. They
   were dovetailed onto something called the Human
  Navigator Project. She marked that as something to
   return to after getting to the root of the immediate
 problem. She was becoming frantic—Honsa’s data were
  filled with generation after generation of dead rats.
    She started over, systematically accessing any and all
 leads that grew out of the data. It was all so dull that she
      was in despair, afraid that she might be missing
  something of importance, lulled by the dryness of it all.
 She would probably have to do the work herself—go down
  into the minute structure of the bionan and see how she
   could disable it without further damaging the delicate
tubular dimars. She thought that she probably could do it,
  though, and decided to abandon this approach and just
             start with the nan she’d isolated.
     Lynn stood, cleared the helmet for a moment, and
    poured herself some coffee from a pot someone had
left—she did not remember when. It was cold. She gulped
              it down. She was exhausted.
   When she returned to visual mode, she saw a tiny icon
she hadn’t noticed before blinking in her upper right hand
   field—a Hawaiian sailing canoe. She punched it up.
       human navigator interface initiator activated
     What? She quickly ran through the informational
                        sidebar.
    It told her that the human navigator interface of the
 generation ship had been undertaken and completed in
 just the past two years. It linked a human to a quantum
  computer. This quantum computer would translate the
  quantum-level brain function of the pilot to the actual,
  constantly changing coordinates of high-level space as
   swiftly as the pilot was able to think. With it, the ship
                      would be able to…
                      Jump the fractal.
  Her father’s signature on this project seemed very clear
                          to her.
     And of course there were no experimental data to
indicate the state of the pilot once this was accomplished.
  However, only someone who had participated in planned
sustained biofeedback during certain phases of enhanced
brain development, which had to be begun when they were
       very young, was a candidate for such a role.
      Bleary-eyed, furious, Lynn ripped off her helmet.
      She tossed the helmet onto the chair and got up.
  She ran out into the main nexus beneath the high, rough
lava roof. Many plants rustled in the wind; flowers scented
  the air. She was chilly. Now, where had his apartment
                            been?
  There was a woman sitting near the door, quite awake,
 at a console; obviously a guard. She waved at Lynn and
Lynn went past her, right into Maui’s apartment without
knocking. It was dark; she went into the bedroom where
 he was asleep in the moonlight, naked. She shook him.
                       “What?” he said.
     “Wake up,” she said. “There’s something you’re not
                       telling me.”
   They walked out into the windy, tropical night. Dark
 haloed clouds scudded across the face of the moon then
 freed it to brilliance again. The constant rustle of leaf
 upon leaf was kicked to greater volume by each gust of
   wind, growing and subsiding, and there had to be
mimosas somewhere as their sweet cloying scent was here,
                            too.
    “Where is that dome?” Lynn asked, looking around.
   “About a twenty-minute walk,” said Maui, moving so
quickly down the moonlit path she practically had to run
                      to keep up.
                       “Can’t we drive?”
     “It’s a twenty-minute walk up a cliff face,” he said.
   “And why did you build it, again?” she asked. “Are you
                    sure he’s there?”
 “Pretty sure,” said Maui, his voice grim. After Lynn woke
him breathing fire and demanded to know where Akamu
  was, Maui had sparked a panic in the infirmary. The
   monitoring machines said that Akamu was there.
                       But he was gone.
  Sensors in a dome showed movement, but there was no
  answer when Maui tried to contact the person inside.
  “You didn’t forget; I haven’t told you,” he said. “They’re
really almost a kind of artifact. I’ll try to explain, but this
     isn’t really my field. My grandmother was deeply
 interested in it, though. She’s the one who set this whole
  program up, really.” They had reached the foot of the
 cliff—black, looming, alive with night sounds. Lynn was
surprised to find that when Maui set foot on the first step,
       the path illuminated with lights set into it.
  He spoke rather breathlessly and coughed now and then
as he climbed. Lynn had to stay right behind him to hear.
 “When all the research was being done on consciousness
  about thirty years ago, one of the theories was that the
understanding of consciousness and the linking of gravity
  with quantum theory would turn out to be one and the
same. I’m not sure why—just perhaps that it was pleasant
   wishful thinking to think that we’d solve two great
mysteries at once. You understand that the collapse of the
  wave function is supposed to admit all possibilities at
                           once.”
     “Yes,” said Lynn. “I don’t know all that much about it
 either. But I do know that a lot of physicists rejected that
 premise with the Copenhagen Interpretation. Or at least,
     they asserted that we couldn’t create what was not
 already there. That is, just thinking can’t make it so. But
   it was a question of access. Possible universes exist all
  around us—within this one—here, now. I think that just
about everyone agrees on this now. The problem is, though,
that the initial conditions of all of them are such that they
are so physically different than ours that we can’t possibly
 comprehend them. They’re meaningless. They’re certainly
                  not possible destinations.”
  “There are other theories, Lynn,” he said. “One of them is
 that we exist in a metauniverse, rather than a universe.
The creation of the metaverse is, like everything, a chaotic
 process that solidifies into order at certain points in its
evolution. During the times when this fractal, if you will,
    crystallizes, there are infinitely repeated identical
                    patterns existing.
   Then, as you said—it’s a question of gaining access.
Wormhole is a rather antique term, but it’s one that people
                  are able to relate to.
     “Your father was very open to these ideas and helped
 initiate work on the generation ship that might possibly
    enable it to access the metaverse. Of course, we were
  helped by some of the top scientists in the world via the
   Homeland Web. You see, even if Kalakaua actually did
prove the existence of the metaverse, higher mathematics
 such as these are noncomputational. That was proved by
Godel. Only a human can truly understand them. But the
 tremendous speeds required to access the metaverse, and
the constant stream of decisions that must be made, mean
  that the quantum computer in the ship must be directly
    linked to the mind of a human who understands the
proofs. That person doesn’t have to necessarily be the one
to solve them—he or she only has to be able to understand
 them on a deep level. That’s what this is all about, Lynn.
        The generation ship was ostensibly built as a
   faster-than-light ship—still exploring our cosmos, and
   what lies beyond. But the quantum computer interface
      your father helped create for the ship will enable
  navigation of a fractal jump. However, we have no idea
  what effect this effort will have on the human involved.
      That’s why I wanted to avoid it. And that’s why I
         absolutely forbade Akamu to pursue this.”
  Lynn was glad when he paused to rest for a moment. He
turned to her and said, “He overheard us talking about all
   of this more than once. It didn’t take much to get him
                     terribly curious.”
  “What is your alternative?” asked Lynn. “I presume that
 you were planning to do the same thing, with someone?”
      Maui shook his head. “We have done something
  analogous, from an AI approach, and we’ve been racing
against the clock to try to develop some sort of safe way for
humans to interface, because our deadline is whenever IS
 decides that the generation ship is ready to go. Once they
found Akamu, I think it tipped our hand. I think—I think
  they killed your father because they figured out what he
    had done with the quantum computer and the human
 navigator. Obviously, they have no one who can navigate
   such a ship. Best to try to kill the only one who possibly
 could.” His laugh was wry. “It’s kind of funny—the larger
 the organization, the easier it is to hide things. Now that
   they’re suspicious, they’re rushing away, in a matter of
 weeks. So our plan has been set in motion, too. Our crew
   members have been arriving in droves. I can only hope
     that IS still doesn’t really know how ready we are.”
  “Your crew?—never mind. We’re in a hurry. What about
                 the AI interface?”
    Maui said, “Well, you could find plenty of people who
would argue that what we will be using will be conscious.”
 He paused for a moment. “In fact, I certainly hope that’s
 true. But if we had decided to go with a living human, he
   or she would have been an adult, someone capable of
  making the decision to be initiated, knowing the risks.”
  “I think that Akamu knows the risks,” said Lynn slowly.
“In fact, that’s why he wanted to stay away from you until
he finished figuring out the proofs. He didn’t want you to
be able to stop this process. But it sounds to me that if you
   are using an artificial intelligence, you’re back to a
  computational basis,” said Lynn. “I don’t understand.”
   “Maybe you will later,” he said. “What about Akamu?
 Have you figured anything out that will help… ease this
            transition, or stop it completely?”
   “No,” she said. “I was just getting ready to start on it
when I saw this Navigator Initiation thing. I think I’ve got
   my breath again. Let’s get going. If something else is
   happening to him then all bets are completely off.”
   She forced her legs to move, and continued talking to
  Maui as they climbed. “Why didn’t you tell me that you
            have a quantum computer here?”
  Maui stopped suddenly and turned. “How do you know?”
  She pushed past him. “I said we have to hurry. I didn’t. I
  know now. My father talked about it on his message.”
   “I didn’t listen to your message, of course,” said Maui.
   “He talked about it being on the ship, not here. But you
    see, in addition to the nan, Akamu has apparently
  ingested something developed much more recently than
the nan, something I think he could only have gotten if you
 were in contact with the people developing the quantum
    computer. Which, according to my father, you are.”
     “Right,” said Maui, huffing and puffing behind her.
“We’ve had this latest prototype for over a year. Hell, Lynn,
if you can figure that out, I think Akamu’s in good hands.”
    “I’m no genius,” said Lynn. “I’m afraid that’s what he
really needs. And he told me that he fell asleep in the dome
     in Tibet. Ha! I wonder what he was really doing?”
    Maui’s footsteps quickened behind her. “There was a
                      dome in Tibet?”
   “Yes. Sattva—the Dalai Lama—is a particle physicist.
             She has one of these domes, too.”
 “No kidding.” Maui was silent for a moment. “She seems
very nice. We didn’t exchange much information. We were
               rather in emergency mode.”
   “I would hope so,” said Lynn. “But yes, I would have to
                 agree. She is very nice.”
              “And very brilliant, apparently.”
   “Hawkins told me that she was furious—in her way, of
  course, very calmly—that he had not told her that the
earring held the proofs. Apparently she’s been working on
                    them all her life.”
      “Really!” he said. He sounded quite excited. “That’s
  another problem. If Interspace got hold of those Chinese
 proofs, and if they were any good… your father was going
 to pass over the Chinese version of the Kaiulani Proofs to
 try to help us. We had no idea, of course, of the true worth
   of their attempt. Kalakaua made many sheer jumps of
  reasoning and left out the scaffolding to begin with. It’s
     quite possible that he didn’t even know that others
   couldn’t follow his reasoning—I think that he believed
that it was all crystal clear. Some of his math is just being
  reinvented. We of course have most of his final proofs—”
               “You do?” asked Lynn, amazed.
  “Yes,” said Maui. “Someone from IS had ripped out some
of them, half pages. I have to hand it to them, it seems to
 me to be an impossible endeavor to re-create the proofs
from a few ripped pages and whatever he left on the web,
               but they’ve tried very hard.”
  “If Kalakaua was the great genius,” said Lynn, “why the
               hell didn’t you clone him?”
  Maui shrugged. “Sheer shortsightedness, I guess. He was
  gone before we realized exactly what he was doing. He
         kept it very close to himself. Lelani—my
 grandmother—really wanted the bones of Kamehameha,
    and thought he knew where they were. He did, and
 eventually gave them to us. We simply had no idea of the
         tremendous import of his life, his work.”
            “So. The dome? Are we almost there?”
 “Just about. It was built a while back. Basically they put
 a human in an environment where they’re exposed to a
constant oscillation of ten to the eleventh hertz. This is to
  help the human mind, which is noncomputational, link
 with quantum events. Without the interface of reasoning.
  Simply on a level of knowing. When humans are in this
state—if the theory is correct—they understand intuitively
  the very nature of the quantum universe. And they are
conscious of it when they’re in that state. They can see the
 openings. It’s like—well, it’s like holding a sphere in your
 hands, feeling it, seeing it. Instead of knowing it through
 mathematical formulae, an abstract picture that only a
          few people can relate to. Bear with me!”
   “I’m trying to,” said Lynn. “Sattva told me about the
same thing. What I really want to know is whether or not
  Akamu spent a lot of time in here when he was little.”
     “Trying to pin me with child abuse again, I suppose.
 Well, I’m guilty. Akamu did spend time here. All the kids
did. After the first few years when it began to seem kind of
 silly, they weren’t even supervised. That’s right! Shocking
    as that sounds! They could just come in here, use the
  biofeedback, and watch MRIs of what was happening to
 their brain. They all seemed to find it great fun. I tried it
 and it didn’t do much for me. I mean, it was relaxing, but
it didn’t seem harmful, and they liked it. So we just left the
                         domes here.”
    “It probably didn’t do anything for you because your
         brain was too old and ossified,” said Lynn.
             “Thank you very much,” said Maui.
  “No, it’s true. All of the incredible informational fields
 and connections are created during the first ten years of
   life or so. And the most powerful are created during
  infancy until the child is five or six. When will we get
                            there?”
                “Just over this rise,” he said.
  They turned a switchback and walked about a hundred
 more yards. Gradually, the roof of a gently illuminated
green dome became visible, and more of it with each step.
  Black palms were silhouetted in front of it. A wash of
 moonlight lay across the tiny, high meadow. Far below,
swells looked like ripples on the pale, glowing face of the
                            sea.
   As Lynn ran across the meadow, the door swung open.
  Akamu stood in the doorway. He seemed to glow in the
                   soft golden light.
     When she was just a few feet away from him, she
                       stopped.
  He was wearing only a pair of black shorts. The small
Hawai’i Loa shone against his chest. A halo of crystals sat
                     on his head.
  There was a small, illuminated inscription panel right
next to him; Lynn’s eyes involuntarily went to it, absorbed
                       it in a second.
     Consciousness would be some manifestation
   of this quantum-entangled internal
   cytoskeletal state and of its involvement in the
   interplay (OR) between quantum and classical
   levels of activity.
     —Penrose, 1995
     She looked back at Akamu. Her heart sank at the
             unmistakable triumph in his eyes.
 “You’re too late,” he said, utterly calm. “Nobody can stop
                         me now.”
        He looked out past them, toward the stars.
            “At last I’m ready to take us there.”
                             20
Maui grabbed Akamu by the shoulders and stared into his
eyes for a long, grave moment. Lynn thought she could see
tears in Maui’s eyes for an instant, but then they were
gone. Akamu’s gaze was steady and calm. Maui let out a
long sigh, dropped his hands, and stepped back.
   “Akamu,” he said, “there was no need for this.” But his
tone of voice held respect as well as anger, as if he realized
            he was no longer talking to a child.
  “I’ve become who I want to be,” Akamu said gently. “It’s
   all right.” He looked up at Lynn. “If you knew it was
          possible, isn’t that what you would do?”
     “I’m afraid I’m nowhere near as brave as you,” she
                         replied.
       “I bet you are!” he said, with great conviction.
   She shook her head silently and walked past him into
                       the dome.
     “Is this where you did the biofeedback?” she asked,
  standing in front of a familiar screen. “This projects a
               hologram of your brain, right?”
   Akamu and Maui came and stood next to her, watched
      “completed” flash a few times on the screen.
  “Isn’t there anything—,” began Maui, his voice agitated,
 the possible consequences of Akamu’s actions apparently
                    striking him anew.
          “No,” Akamu and Lynn both said at once.
         Maui wheeled and stalked out of the dome.
         “Wait!” called Lynn, and started after him.
   Akamu grabbed her arm. “He’ll get over it. Leave him
  alone. You don’t want to talk to him now. Believe me.”
 The night swallowed Maui as Lynn stood in the doorway.
She turned back. “Did you get that bioelectric facilitator
           when you were in Sattva’s dome?”
    “The stuff from the eels?” asked Akamu. He shook his
   head. “I got it here. It came with the rest of this—the
prototype quantum computer and the headpiece. I talked
a long time with the people in Copenhagen about it. Maui
               didn’t know. He’s pretty busy.”
     “But the quantum computer alone wasn’t enough,
                        right?”
    Akamu shook his head. “I need to understand the
  Kaiulani Proofs, too. I thought the bionan at Tripler
would help. I want to be just like Cen Kalakaua. In every
                     possible way.”
  “Why would you want to be just like him? Didn’t he end
                 up a drunk, a bum?”
   “A drunk!” Akamu glared at her. “Cen Kalakaua was
         the most brilliant man in the world!”
                   “Well, I just heard—”
  “You heard the story he wanted Interspace to hear. Ha!
Guess it worked. Lynn, Cen Kalakaua jumped the fractal.”
 A month ago, Lynn realized, she would have laughed in
Akamu’s face, had she understood his assertion. Now, she
               said, “How do you know?”
        “We know by studying his proofs, of course.”
            “You mean, nobody saw him do it.”
     “Not directly. It was on Molokai. He left Maui and
  Lelani—Maui’s grandmother—and hiked up to see the
  place where Kaiulani gave birth, in the International
                      Biosphere Park.”
     “Now, I don’t know all that much about Hawaiian
  history,” she said, “but I don’t think Kaiulani had any
      children. Didn’t she die young or something?”
  “Forget that,” said Akamu. “It’s not important for now.
 But he hiked up to see this place and never came back.”
  “So? Isn’t that rough country?” asked Lynn. “Couldn’t he
                   have fallen off a cliff?”
    “He might have,” said Akamu. “Except that it’s pretty
  clear from the proofs that there was a window right at
that time and place. In fact, until the past few weeks there
    was room for doubt. But I’m positive now.” His face
           flushed with excitement as he spoke.
     “Is that why you called them the Kaiulani Proofs?”
  “That’s what he called them. I’ve seen them, Lynn,” he
 said, with a touch of awe. “I’ve held them in my hands.
They’re just in an ordinary notebook. He wrote the title on
                      the back page.”
  He sat in the low chair in front of the screen. “Here,” he
   said. “I’ll show you what my brain looks like now.”
     Then he looked up at her and his eyes blazed with
                   unmistakable joy.
     “Lynn,” he whispered, “It’s working. Everything’s
  working. It’s like—it’s like long streets of light. A lot of
  them, that I can’t see the end of. Like—oh, I don’t know
              what! But, Lynn, I’m so happy!”
  Kohala erupted into a maelstrom of activity as the sun
came up—frantic, yet controlled. Large trucks kicked up
dust from old cane roads; the airstrip received one small
 jet after another at intervals so close that Lynn afraid
             she’d see a collision any minute.
  She perched on a rock at the edge of the meadow where
the dome sat. Small planes were in a holding pattern out
  over the ocean as far as she could see. A large fleet of
enormous helicopters was added to every fifteen minutes
                          or so.
     Akamu was asleep in the dome, his head on a round
 zabuton, one of the pillows used in Zen meditation. Lynn
 felt strangely at peace concerning him. He had made his
    own decision, and now it was irrevocable. He was a
strange new creature now, taking hold of his destiny with
   both hands no matter what the risk, in order to lead
                humans to a new homeland.
       Lynn stood and stretched. A narrow waterfall
plummeted into a pool on the meadow’s edge. She walked
  over to it; chilly mist filled the air and settled on low
  hummocks of impatiens. She undressed and carefully
 climbed over the slippery rocks to plunge, gasping, into
the pool. She only stayed in for a moment. As she climbed
out she noted that only a puckered scar was left from her
                        bullet wound.
     She waited on a sunny rock until she was dry, then
dressed. She looked in at Akamu but he was deeply asleep;
she pushed his hair back from his forehead with her hand
 and closed the door behind her. As she turned she saw a
   nurse she recognized from the previous night’s furor
                   coming up the path.
  “Maui sent me to stay with Akamu,” he said. “I left my
moped at the bottom of the hill. Maui said you can use it if
                        you like.”
                   “Where is there to go?”
   The nurse looked at her in disbelief. “Everywhere!” he
  said, flinging out his arms expansively. “It’s gorgeous
everywhere you go. But I’d stay off the cane roads. They’re
              moving lots of supplies today.”
    She descended the riprap trail, which was wet and
                   somewhat slippery.
    She told the moped to take her back to her station.
                 She had more work to do.
  No one seemed to notice her as she walked through the
   corridors. Everyone was rushing around like mad.
                   She sat in her chair.
   It took her twenty minutes to set up the bounce. Her
   message would appear to come from Germany. She
          punched in the code she knew so well.
 In a minute James’s face, somewhat bleary, appeared on
      the screen. His eyes widened when he saw her.
  “Lynn! Where are you? We’ve been looking for you. You
       have to come home soon. Father is dead.”
    “I know,” she said. “That’s what I’m calling about.”
        His eyes narrowed. “How did you find out?”
                 “How did he die, James?”
 He took a deep breath. “It was a heart attack, Lynn. You
   know how we kept telling him to get that new—”
    “Bullshit!” Lynn said and thumped her table. She
jumped up and leaned over the screen. “He was murdered!
   He was killed, James. I want to know what you and
               Samuel had to do with it.”
     “You’re not in Munich,” he said. “Where are you?”
       “Why don’t you tell me the truth?” she asked.
 “Why don’t you?” asked James hotly. “You were in it with
        him all along, weren’t you, you little—”
    She severed the connection, switched off the whole
   system, and sat breathing hard for a few minutes.
  Then she switched it on again and began collecting and
 storing data as fast as her fingers could fly. What could
                  one person do? Plenty.
  When she was done it was almost noon. Sleep was out of
the question. She’d never felt more awake in her life. And
                    she was starving.
      She stood and slipped the small silvery disk she’d
created into her shirt pocket and buttoned it securely. She
 glanced out into the corridor and it was even more busy.
  Clearly no one had time to serve her a nice little lunch
    today! She went up top and climbed on the moped.
    “I want to eat,” she told it. “Take me to the nearest
          place. And stay off the cane roads.”
 The computer digested that, probably fixing on a few key
 words and ignoring the rest. Finally it said, in a tinny
             voice, “Take the next right.”
    The moped climbed a narrow road that ran along the
  cliff, apparently a former state highway, though now in
terrible repair. She steered around the potholes and tried
 to ignore the flutter of fear she felt, seeing how far below
  the ocean was now and how steep the cliff that dropped
             into it a few feet from her right side.
   Then she rounded a corner and saw a weathered sign:
                   Ono Restaurant.
   On a picnic table beneath a thatched roof she had some
teriyaki mahi and a beer. The only other person there was
  the cook, and he sat reading the newspaper at the next
                           table.
 “You going?” he asked, as she stood and set her dishes on
                     the counter.
         “Yes,” she said. “Thanks. That was good.”
     “No,” he said. “I mean going. On the Hawai’i Loa.”
 “Good lord, no!” she said. “Are you?” she asked, jokingly.
   “I hope so,” he said gravely. He rose and held out the
paper. “See? It’s ready. I’m nervous. And excited. Nervously
excited.” He laughed tremulously, sat down, ran one hand
  through his hair. “I look around and every day I think
 about how beautiful it is here. But the ship is beautiful,
too. And where we are going, and what we will be doing—
 that’s very important. More important than me staying
                   here and cooking fish.”
                    “I suppose,” she said.
   “Oh, without a doubt! Where would we be if we’d stayed
  in Asia, eh? Where will the earth be if we all stay here?
  Humans are meant to explore, to expand. The earth is
 getting used up. Some of us have to leave. Overcrowding
             leads to war. Innocent lives lost.”
  Lynn found his premise oversimplistic but didn’t argue.
 She held out her hand. “I’m Lynn Oshima. I’m a friend of
                  Maui’s. I just got here.”
  He smiled and shook her hand. “My name is Ken. Maui is
                     a good man.”
                “So you’ve been on the ship?”
   “Oh, of course. In virtual. It’s kind of like being in the
army reserves. We have to spend so many hours a week on
the ship with our ohana. The members are international,
and we rotate constantly so we have experience with many
   different kinds of people. It’s been very exciting this
  week—more and more are arriving here, and I’ve met
   many people I’ve only seen virtually before. We have
     emergency simulations and things like that. It is
 incredible there. So much information, so easy to access.
    Amazing gardens—acres of them. An infinite food
  supply—an ark, really. And very Hawaiian.” The little
man gestured toward the billowing green crevasses of the
   rain forest that covered the mountain behind them.
    “We’ve stocked a lot of the birds from here that were
thought to be extinct at one time. Around the millennium
   many species were found in very remote bioreserves.
Eventually we were able to get the population back up. A
lot of bones were found, too. Some of those birds were our
  first success at cloning from bones. So many species of
flightless birds, plants that had lost their thorns—such a
defenseless place! This is the most isolated land on earth.
           Without predators, without diseases.”
  His smile was shy. “Sorry. I hope I’m not boring you. I’m
an ornithologist; that’s how I got tapped for the ship. I’ve
   been working out just exactly what to take. Can you
      imagine a more wonderful or scary thing? But
sometimes”—he waved his arm in a large arc that took in
the cliffs, the sea, the distant village—“I just want to stay
 here the rest of my days.” He laughed again. “There are
  others who would be happy to take my place! In fact, I
  think they’re arriving now, all the time. They’ve been
         coming all week, from around the world.”
     After leaving the bird man Lynn motored silently
through deep green lanes draped with sun-dappled vines,
 rising along the cliff face on a narrow rutted road that
 did not connect to the rest of the island. The moped told
 her, when she figured out how to ask, that since Kohala
    was internationally recognized as an independent
  political entity, they did not have to comply with U.S.
 immigration laws nor were arrivals and departures on
             record with the U.S. government.
      Far below, green and golden headlands reached
     fingerlike into the ocean, divided by small bays
inaccessible by land because of treacherous cliffs. She was
 turned back at the maglaunch parameter by Interspace
 guards who told her that it was private property. One of
   them was surveying the peninsula with a powerful
     telescope that she thought probably translated
information into several different broadcast mediums. She
wondered what they thought of all the activity and turned
                    the moped around.
  She descended through a golden afternoon. The sea was
aquamarine near the shore, reefs clearly visible through
the crystalline water. White seabirds flurried around the
 tiny islands near shore, catching the sun. She took the
short road back to the village on the advice of the moped,
which told her that it had just enough charge to do that,
             in a rather scolding tone of voice.
 She drove back into the melee. It had not abated; in fact,
               it was even more intense.
     Vehicles were flying to and fro, at a great rate.
Computer terminals had literally risen from the ground,
on heavy posts, completely weatherproof, and she saw a
woman press her hand against it and apparently receive
    an assignment, for she hurried off purposefully.
  Lynn wasn’t sure where to go, though the place wasn’t
very big. Then she saw a red-roofed pavilion with several
picnic tables—Akamu was standing on one of the tables,
                     waving at her.
  The moped rolled reluctantly toward him, filling the air
                with resentful messages.
  “Lynn!” Akamu called, when she got closer. “Lynn, we’re
                leaving! Right away!”
   “What?” she asked, bringing her moped to a halt. “You
         don’t mean—you don’t mean the ship?”
  “Yes, yes,” he laughed and her heart went dark. No more
                          Akamu.
  “You can’t go!” The words burst out of her, even though
                  she know he had to go.
    “Lynn,” he said gently, as if he were much older and
wiser than she, “it’s what I was born for. I feel wonderful
 now. That’s the only place I can really live, I think, the
way I am now. On the ship. The ship is set up for me—or
         someone like me—to interface with it.”
          “I know,” she said, without enthusiasm.
    She saw Maui coming up the hill. He waved, but she
 didn’t. She was too upset. About everything. So soon! She
    thought of the disk in her pocket. At least she had
     something to occupy herself with after they left.
     Maui looked tense and calm at the same time. Alert,
aware, and capable, as if he were holding many threads at
the same time, ready to reweave them at a moment’s notice
                       if necessary.
   “Lynn,” he said. “I was just getting ready to message
that moped. I’m glad you’re back. I didn’t think you’d be
gone so long! We sent our part of the proofs to Sattva this
    morning.” His voice was filled with tremendous
                       excitement.
  “Now you’ve sent them over the web? I thought this was
                top secret and all that.”
    “You wouldn’t believe the people she has over there.
Their encryption changes second by second. Every burst of
 information was in an entirely different frame. At this
point, it’s worth a try.” He seemed like an eager boy, not a
                      middle-aged man.
   “I hope they do it,” said Akamu. “There are so many of
them. There’s only one of me. I think I’ve about reached my
      limits. I only need to be able to understand it.”
  Maui said, “Interspace is getting ready to send up their
  crew, Lynn. They’re actually getting ready to go. For
nothing. They’re making believe that they have some sort
 of destination in mind when they don’t. They’re just not
 ready. But they’re afraid of us. Since your father—well,
they certainly suspect that we’re going to make some sort
                      of move soon.”
    He squinted at the sky. “But they don’t know how or
 when. They might know what, though. So we’ve got to get
out of here right away. In fact, the first helicopter over to
the maglaunch is leaving in about ten minutes. We have a
              crew of five thousand to load.”
                       “Five thousand?”
    “Oh, the launch is capable of carrying the weight. The
       one on Oahu has taken a lot heavier loads for
  construction. We have pretty sophisticated shielding on
the way up, and we have Homelanders in various sensitive
 positions throughout the world who’ll prevent any sort of
     nuclear strike, though I think that’s a very remote
 possibility. Once we dock, there’s nobody there capable of
 putting up any resistance—mostly maintenance people.”
   “They must know you’re getting ready, Maui,” she said.
           “Those guards up at the launch—”
      Maui laughed, shortly. “You could call them double
   agents. They’re with us. They send faked reports to the
surveillance satellites. The people over at the Kailua-Kona
 site where we’ll board the maglaunch are with us as well.
     We haven’t left anything to chance. We have a plan.
     Interspace doesn’t, not really. And they’re going to
sacrifice all those people. I think they’re just going to send
     them on their way with the promise of an eventual
 breakthrough. They can coldsleep their way into eternity.
  Without that breakthrough, they’ll be out on the edge of
    nowhere with their clones, their information banks,
                   forever, a ship of fools.”
             “They don’t have me,” said Akamu.
  “That’s right,” said Maui. “Without precise information
 about the nature of spacetime, they’ll never, ever get to a
 livable environment. The odds are simply totally against
  it. And even if we got all that information and sent it to
   them, they wouldn’t have a pilot. But we’re ready. Our
whole crew is ready. We know exactly how to run this ship.
   Trainees have been doing it virtually for years. All we
need is that final information about where to go and how
 to get there. Lynn, we’re ready to take over the ship!” His
                 voice shook with excitement.
      “Yeah,” she said. “Well, it sounds easy enough.”
    “You’ll see,” he said. “And we’re not quite ready to go.
Yet. To pilot the ship once we get up there. But Sattva was
   stunned to get all of Cen’s proofs, except for the torn
            pages. She said it was like a dream.”
   “Yes, shouldn’t take her long to work everything out,”
  Lynn said in her driest tone. “Maybe an hour or two.”
  “I think she can do it,” said Akamu. “I saw a lot of what
they’d done already. There are a lot of smart people there,
                            Lynn.”
    Maui turned and looked out at the ocean, his hands on
 his hips. He sighed. “But once we’re there, on the ship, no
telling what will happen. The world isn’t going to look too
 kindly on us stealing it, particularly not with Interspace
 raising the battle cry. They need to have their feet kicked
 out from under them somehow. We’ll be like sitting ducks
   for at least a day or two; there are a lot of shakedown
 details to take care of. We don’t want a bloodbath. There
 are bound to be soldiers sent up to get rid of us unless we
     can explain our position and our motivation in a
 worldwide arena. Quickly.” He cleared his throat. “Your
  father was going to give the world our side of the case,
                            but—”
   He put his hands in his pocket and remained with his
   back to them, studying purple Haleakala, across the
                    narrow channel.
                Something clicked in Lynn.
      For a moment, though, she didn’t say anything.
 Visions of earth swept through her, beautiful and green,
                   a planet. Her home.
    Only here could she make her pilgrimage, to that
monastery in Cambodia, down a dusty sun-dappled trail
that led through a vine-draped forest to the place where
           she could learn who she really was.
   But maybe she needed to learn a lot faster than that.
                      Like right now.
    The turmoil of the past month roiled about her, shot
   through with the question What can one person do?
   Well, here was the answer. Staring her in the face. It’s
simple. Sever yourself forever from all you’ve ever known.
  If she didn’t do this, now, she knew that no matter how
long she lived, and no matter where or how, all the white
      water buffaloes in the world couldn’t save her.
  But it was so damned hard. Her throat seemed to close
        in claustrophobia just thinking about it.
       She glanced at Akamu. He was looking at her
                      expectantly.
               I’ve been set up, she thought.
     Never mind. She took a deep breath. Maui turned
                      toward her.
             “I think I can help you,” she said.
   To her surprise, Maui took a step and embraced her
tightly for a moment, then moved away, still holding her
           shoulders, his face strangely happy.
          “I was hoping you’d say that,” he said.
                     “I know,” she said.
     They went in a series of huge helicopters around to
 Kona. “You’ll see,” said Akamu, holding Lynn’s hand so
  tightly she thought he’d break it. “There’s a beautiful
 compartment on the ship just for you! Maui showed it to
me this morning in VR.” He had to shout over the din. “Oh
               he did, did he?” she muttered.
     She hadn’t had much time to ponder her decision.
    Yet it felt right. She’d had trouble staying one step
  ahead of those who wanted to silence her. This was the
            best way to gain an effective forum.
  And she was pretty sure that “her” compartment was to
           have been occupied by her father.
                 That thought steadied her.
    Amazingly, it was as Maui had said, after they swept
    around the mountain and landed. The double-agent
Interspace guards hurried them to the maglev, down long
      escalators that made Lynn feel a bit crazy with
 claustrophobia. Maui was not with them but this had all
 been planned out forever, Lynn guessed, as everyone filed
into assigned seats one after the other with an excited low
 murmur and the sweat of fear that Lynn smelled despite
  the air system. There was an excellent chance that they
              would be blown up at any point.
  But maybe Interspace hadn’t planned for anything quite
  as audacious as this, despite the evidence beneath their
 noses. Lynn remembered, and smiled at, the many parties
she’d attended when the Homeland Movement was the butt
   of hilarious jokes. Last laugh, she thought, as Akamu
  patiently buckled her in, saying, “What’s wrong, Lynn?
              You don’t have to be so nervous.”
  She blacked out during the great rush upward and was
terribly sick during the rest of the flight. Akamu squeezed
her hand anxiously from time to time saying, “Don’t worry,
        Lynn, you’ll feel better once we get there.”
  This is crazy, she was thinking, this is just plain crazy.




                            21
Lynn looked at the prompter, which was ready to go. The
satellite link had been negotiated, and she had spent the
time accumulating even more information; at least enough
to send the top echelons of Interspace to hell for several
thousand years.
    It was as Akamu had said. The ship was beautiful.
    The crew had settled in instantly, going right to their
 places. Maui told Interspace that the ship would depart
  instantly if there were any threats; all was in complete
                     readiness to do so.
     Except for the proofs. Maui didn’t tell them that.
   Lynn had not been there nearly long enough to tour the
  entire ship. That would take months. But she had seen a
 lovely small apartment labeled hers, and that was where
   she had done all of her information gathering. It was
  absolutely incredible that all possible information from
    earth had been replicated aboard the ship, but data
compression and backups and alternates made it possible.
  Maybe Maui was right. It was time. The technology was
here, anyway. And he totally believed in his new/old social
              system. Maybe it would work.
   And according to him, they would only be cruising for
                two years at the most.
  “The idea is,” he told her, taking a moment to drop into
 a chair next to her, “that we will be far in the future. So
  far that we understand exotic matter and can send at
 least messages back to earth. We can tell them where we
 are, how we got there, if we choose to. That’s part of the
         treaty I’m making with them right now.”
   Lynn stared at the blinking red light; as she stared it
    turned yellow and a voice said, “Thirty seconds.”
    She pressed the pad that brought up a screen of the
   points she would cover. She glanced at herself in the
                        monitor.
   Was that her? That thin woman with the pale face and
     shaggy black hair? She was going to be televised
internationally looking like this? It hadn’t occurred to her
until just this second, and then it was the next second, and
                   she was ready to speak.
   Interspace relinquished all claim to the newly named
          Hawai’i Loa shortly after her speech.
 Sattva sent them the finished proofs two days later, with
a congratulatory note, which included thanks for having
 given her group the opportunity to complete one of the
  most important proofs in the history of mathematics.
   The proofs were transferred to the quantum computer
and Akamu studied them; excitement infused the crew and
           increased with each passing hour.
          Lynn was surprised at how free she felt.
    Her only regret was leaving Nana. Somewhere down
 there beneath the swirling clouds was a tiny island, and
on Nuuanu Avenue in a small frame house was an acerbic
old woman who had just lost her son and who would now
                 lose her granddaughter.
      Lynn called Nana, and as they spoke pictured her
sitting in the special chair she used in the hallway just for
  calls, using her old-fashioned cellphone without video.
          “I am going into space, Nana,” she said.
     “What is wrong with here?” Nana’s voice was deeply
  irritated, scathing. “First you left without telling me. I
 was so worried. And now—I always said you were a silly
girl.” Her voice turned pleading, suddenly, and Lynn felt a
pang hearing the old lady’s deep loneliness. “You are all I
             have left now. Please write to me!”
  “Nana, I can’t write to you where I am going,” she said,
            wrenched. “But I’ll think of you.”
  Akamu, newly infused with purpose, seemed to mature
 before her eyes in the final days before departure. They
were only waiting that long for Akamu and the ship to go
        through the final stages of initialization.
    During the departure ceremony, Maui removed the
Hawai’i Loa from around his neck and set it into place on
 his console. Akamu’s, Lynn had learned, was a backup.
      Lynn was there when he did it, as was Akamu.
  Everyone on the ship was standing, waiting, watching a
 video of the event from atriums, bridges, and gathering
                          rooms.
  Maui slid the panel shut, paused. Then he said, his voice
          rather shaky, “Initiate AI interface.”
  There was a moment of silence. Maui’s hand, resting on
                 the panel, trembled.
      Then a woman’s rich, gentle voice filled the air.
  “Hello,” she said. “My name is Lelani.” There was a long
pause, and when she spoke again, her voice was filled with
                          wonder.
                    “I guess… it worked.”
                        —«»—«»—«»—
         [scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
                    [A 3S release - v1, html]
[March 02, 2006]