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TWENTY-FOUR

Kawashita lay in the dark, watching Anna sleep, watching the play of lights on the ceiling—designed to soothe warping passengers—and thinking about his fiancée's family. He closed his eyes and tried to picture his first fiancée—an eighteen-year-old girl from Nagasaki, with smooth, pale skin and eyes like a flinching doe's. But there were only bits and pieces left. At any rate, there was no comparison. Anna, if less beautiful to a Japanese, was certainly more dynamic and suited to him now.

But what price her energy? Born in the Greater Magellan, tens of thousands of parsecs from the nearest human outpost, she'd been raised among her family and the crews of the exploratory ships. Her mother, Juanita Sigrid, a cultural biologist hired by Anna's grandfather, had fit into the unusual family as well as could be expected. Anna had assumed some of her traits: empathy, a certain cynical view of things, which masked uncertainty, and a touch of bitterness. For when the family broke up, Anna's father and mother went separate ways, and Juanita Sigrid got the worst of everybody's opinions. Traicom Nestor, Anna's grandfather, regarded her as a traitor to the son he didn't quite trust himself. When she remarried, she broke all ties with the past—including her daughter.

Anna's father was now head of an independent consolidation. He seldom communicated with Anna, but she felt a great deal of affection for him. Her mother she felt less regard for.

Behind them all, like the background of a complex painting, was the Greater Magellan. Juanita Sigrid had found her job cut out for her.

On the near side of the cloud of stars they'd discovered an abandoned artifact—the largest structure ever found. It interconnected three stars a parsec distant from each other and contained the mass of seven rocky planets. Like an old spiderweb strung across the light-years, spun from carbon and silicon and coated with a thin film of metal, it had been abandoned long before. Without extensive energy to hold it together, it had separated into a fine cloud of debris. But that cloud still retained a haunting shape—a cupped disk with three triangular wings, aimed at the center of the Milky Way—or where the center had been forty million years before. Two worlds in the area had once supported life, and there was ample evidence that beings on both worlds had supported each other in the project. They'd apparently never developed warp technology. Their greatest effort had been spent on easing their loneliness, trying to communicate with unknown beings, for unknown reasons.

Beneath the shallow seas of one world, in ruins scattered by geological forces, the expedition managed to piece together glimpses from the distant past. Then, in a near miraculous find, they rescued a few metal tetrahedrons from deep trenches that had once been the coast of a continent. Stored in the atoms of the tetrahedrons were the histories of both civilizations.

The Nestors selectively sold the information for a dozen years after their return.

But the financial angle didn't interest Kawashita. He wondered how the two species had felt, locked in by the agonizingly slow means of traveling between their three stars. He wondered if they'd succeeded. If they had, where did they go? And if they hadn't, did they die a natural death or commit suicide?

He couldn't sleep. His head was filled with visions. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't dispel the notion that all of space and time was haunted, that every centimeter of every parsec, in all directions, was filled with kami, watching and listening.

And at this moment, stretched through some higher space that was making his deepest thoughts scatter back and forth like rain in a storm, they were traveling to see the creations of still more kami.

Everyone was foolish not to see it. Everything was wrapped in plan and deceit. He couldn't begin to guess where he fit in. but he knew his role was far from minor. And he had failed. Once he knew why, he had two choices—the same choices he projected onto the builders of the Web as they faced their success or failure. He had lived a very long time. Not even his love for Anna could color his decision.

For that reason he stayed very quiet now and put on the masks of knowledge, acculturation, matrimony. He hoped they would come off easily when the time came.

 

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Framed