PETRA STOOD ON THE SIDEWALK WITH Elizabeth Irons, a block from the Bartholemew Building in downtown Central, as Dexta, Imperial, and local security forces swarmed around the area. The immediate neighborhood had been evacuated, not that it would make any difference if a quadrijoule plasma bomb detonated. Somewhere high in the building, Whit Bartholemew was surrounded, with no way out, and Spirit knew what he might do.

She wondered how long she had known the truth and refused to recognize it. That moment of enlightenment in the hotel had not come out of nowhere. No one else had seen the truth, either, but no one else had been as close to the investigation or as close to Whit. She could hardly have been closer; just hours ago, he had been inside her, a welcome presence in her body and her life. Even now, she regretted that there would be no trip to Belairus, no more nights of angry lovemaking.

People stared at her, as if they knew what she had been doing; she felt their eyes on her all-but-naked body. She wished that she had taken the time to change her clothes in the suite, but her internal mood somehow matched her external appearance. She was emotionally naked, too, with no fig leaves of rationalization left to hide the truth: She had been passionately involved with a man who was a mass murderer. Something to put on her résumé.

“He wants to see you.”

Petra noticed that Irons was staring at her. “What?” she asked.

“I just got word on the comm that Bartholemew wants to see you,” Irons said. “He’s holed up in his office, and apparently has a detonator switch that he says will set off the plasma bomb. You need to go up there.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Petra said. “I guess I do.”

“A hundred million people could die if he sets off that bomb. We can’t evacuate the city—it would be foolish to try. I’d give you a weapon of some kind, except that you have nowhere to hide it, and he’d probably insist on a strip search anyway. But if you get the chance to disarm or disable him…”

“I know a little Qatsima,” Petra said. Very little, she silently added.

Irons nodded. “Don’t take any unnecessary risks. Keep him talking as long as you can. We have teams searching his properties around the city, and every other likely location. With luck, we’ll find the bomb before he can detonate it.”

“Yes, ma’am. And if I could suggest something, maybe you should try to find his mother.”

“Already in the works, Ms. Nash. But you’re the one he wants to see. Good luck.” Irons offered her hand, and Petra shook it.

All was silent, except for the click of her high heels on the pavement, as she walked the block to the Bartholemew Building. The light breeze felt cold on her exposed flesh, and she fought off a shudder. Uniformed Bugs and cops stared at her as she passed, and the high gravity of this world had never seemed higher. The entire planet pulled at her.

She entered the building and was shepherded to the elevator. A Bug she didn’t know joined her on the ascent. “He has a little switch in his right hand,” he said. “If he puts it down for any reason, just hit your wristcom’s transmit button, and we’ll be in the office a second later. But whatever you do, don’t try to take the switch away from him.”

They reached the floor of Bartholemew’s office, and the Bug guided her out of the elevator, past dozens of tense security people. He pointed toward the door to the inner office and said, “We’re all counting on you, Ms. Nash.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

Bartholemew was waiting for her, seated behind his big desk. In his neat, dark business suit, he didn’t look much like an anarchist. He smiled at her, and Petra couldn’t help returning it. She stopped a few feet in front of his desk and waited.

“So, you figured it out, did you, Petra Nash?”

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Petra asked him.

Bartholemew made a little head motion. “Perhaps,” he said.

“I should have realized sooner. All that radical rhetoric. And dragging me out of the Old Annex just before you blew it up. And then insisting that we leave on the trip Sunday morning, just before the Emperor’s speech. You couldn’t have been more obvious if you’d left a trail of bread crumbs, but I was too dumb to see it.”

“Not so dumb. I mean, here we are, aren’t we? The fate of millions riding on our every word, perhaps the very future of the Empire itself hanging in the balance.”

“I think the Empire will survive, no matter what happens.”

“Your precious Empire will collapse of its own weight,” Bartholemew said, letting his familiar anger show. “If not now, then later. I’m merely giving it a timely shove. Even if I don’t get the Emperor himself—thanks to you—I’ll still get my saintly old grandfather and half the bureaucratic offal in the Quadrant. People will see that there is nothing inevitable about Imperial rule.”

“And they’ll rise up and spontaneously overthrow their oppressors?” Petra asked.

“With a little help and guidance,” Bartholemew replied. “Operatives from PAIN are on half the planets in the Quadrant, ready and fully capable of providing a revolutionary vanguard to lead the uprising.”

“Maybe,” Petra said, “but they’ll have to do it without all those weapons you’ve got on GAC 4367. I found them, Whit. That’s where Gloria is right now.”

Bartholemew frowned. He seemed genuinely and unpleasantly surprised. Then he nodded and said, “That B & Q data?”

“That’s right. It took some work, but eventually I figured out where that Savoy shipment had to have gone. And then I used the same process to track that freighter you leased in November. That’s when you brought the bomb and the other weapons to New Cambridge.”

“Right again,” Bartholemew acknowledged. “That idiot Quincannon gave you everything you needed.”

“And that’s why you killed him?”

“One of the reasons,” Bartholemew said.

Petra closed her eyes for a moment and saw, again, the battered corpse in the dark, old office. “You did it yourself?” she asked him.

“With my own two hands,” he said, a note of satisfaction in his voice. “What’s more, I personally set the grenades in the Old Annex building. I had some help for the others, of course, but I’m not one of those delegate-everything leaders. I wasn’t afraid to get blood on my hands—literally, in the case of Quincannon. I did my share of the killing. A necessary overture to the symphony of destruction to follow. Anticipation is an essential element of terror, you see. Spreading fear and a sense of helplessness, underlining the authorities’ impotence—it all contributes to the final result.”

“More than two hundred people died that night, Whit,” Petra said.

“And a hundred million more will die if—when—I flick this switch,” he said, holding up the tiny device between his right thumb and forefinger.

“And you’ll be one of them. So will I. So will your mother.”

“An unfortunate but necessary sacrifice. We might have avoided that if you hadn’t been such a dedicated little bureaucrat.”

“Do you really want to kill them, Whit? Do you want to kill your mother? Do you want to kill me?”

“No,” he said, “truthfully, I don’t. Not you, not Mother, nor any of those faceless millions. Quincannon’s another story. But I honestly have no desire to kill all those people.”

“Then why do it?”

“Historical necessity. We anarchists understand that destruction is really the most profound act of creation. Did you know that a hundred million sperm cells die in order to fertilize a single egg? Today, a hundred million people will die to fertilize the egg of revolution.”

“Bullshit!”

Bartholemew tilted his head to one side. “Yes,” he said, “I suppose that one was a bit of a reach, wasn’t it? They can’t all be gems. But the point remains, and it is not merely bullshit. From the collision of opposing forces, new worlds are born. Better worlds. That is the inevitable result of the historical dialectic.”

“If it’s inevitable,” Petra said, “then why do this? Why not let history work things out for itself?”

“Fabian heresy!” Bartholemew cried out in mock horror. “Like the benighted masses themselves, you lack the ideological underpinnings necessary to appreciate the beauty and necessity of revolutionary acts. History requires human agents to work its will. A few people among trillions understand that and have the courage and selflessness to make themselves into such agents. We offer ourselves as necessary sacrifices upon the altar of history.”

“Oh, brother.” Petra sighed. “Courage! Self-sacrifice! My goodness, I never knew you were such a great man, Whit. Here I thought you were just a bitter, resentful, angry, and confused guy who was pissed off at his father.”

“Well…that, too,” Bartholemew conceded, offering Petra a crooked smile. “Individuals have histories, no less than empires. I admit, if I’d had a happy home life, I probably wouldn’t have spent twenty years working to build up PAIN, diverting funds, providing safe houses, and so on. It was the dialectic applied to the Bartholemew family, I suppose. The father works to build an empire, of sorts, and the son devotes himself to destroying it. Tell me, is that Hegelian, or merely Oedipal?”

“It’s just sick, if you ask me. All this bullshit about historical forces—Spirit, Whit, do you really believe any of that stuff? Or is it just something you tell yourself to justify your fantasies?”

Bartholemew was silent a moment. Then he said, “Sometimes I believe it.”

“And sometimes you don’t?”

“Sometimes it’s historical, sometimes it’s personal. I admit the possibility that I’m wrong about the history. It’s a big subject, after all, and it’s possible that no one really understands it. But I believe that history requires us to act, in spite of our doubts and reservations.”

“Did history require you to beat Jamie Quincannon to death with your bare hands?” Petra asked him. “He was a nice old man, Whit. I saw what you did to him.”

“But you never saw what he did to me,” Bartholemew said. His ruddy face darkened, and he looked down at his desk for a moment.

“What do you mean?”

“About forty years ago,” he said, lifting his gaze to meet hers, “I was entrusted to the care of that nice old man. And he took me up to that office—the very same office where I killed him—and…and he did things. Hateful things.”

“He molested you?”

“He did. Even then, I knew it was wrong, somehow. And I desperately wanted to tell someone. But my mother…somehow, I knew she wouldn’t have understood. Or wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. I knew I needed to tell my father, but I couldn’t. Quincannon was my father’s partner, you see, and I was only his son. I didn’t want to force him to choose between the two of us, because I knew what his choice would have been. So I never told anyone…until this very moment, Petra Nash. Since we are both about to die, it seems appropriate. Anyway, I grew up feeling as if I had done something shameful and unforgivable. Eventually I realized how foolish I had been, but by then, it was too late to change anything. The child I was had grown to be the man I am.”

“I’m sorry, Whit,” Petra said. “That must have been awful for you. But do a hundred million people have to die just because you had a terrible childhood?”

“You think it’s infantile revenge?”

“Isn’t it?”

“If it were no more than that, you’d have a point.” Bartholemew spent a moment staring at the device in his hand, then looked back at Petra. “I told you once that my father and I never really talked. But when he knew he was dying, he wrote me a letter that I received after his death. It was mostly just an exercise in self-justification, a litany of excuses for all his parental failures. Exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a man like that to say under the circumstances. But it also contained a few revelations that gave me a new resolve. You might say it was that letter that put this switch in my hand.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dear old Dad tried to explain to me how it came to pass that he married my mother. It seems that my grandfather had made a big mistake. Details were not specified, but I gather that it was one of those grand, history-altering mistakes. Anyway, Norman Mingus, being intelligent, resourceful, and altogether unscrupulous, called upon Whitney Bartholemew to help him cover up that mistake. My father, you see, had the means available to help my grandfather dispose of the evidence.”

“The Savoy shipment?”

“Precisely. Father’s letter was unclear about exactly what happened and why, but he was explicit about the price he demanded in return for his help. The price was my mother, the lovely young Saffron Mingus. She was the belle of the Quadrant in those days, and she was engaged to Cornell DuBray, my grandfather’s faithful assistant. But young Whitney Bartholemew had desired her from afar, and now he seized his opportunity to have her for his own. And my grandfather obliged him, gave him what he wanted. Again, details were lacking, but he promptly delivered my mother to my father as if she were…a shipment of arms.”

Bartholemew smiled—to himself, it seemed to Petra. She realized that his words were for himself, as well. He had wanted her here merely as a sounding board, an audience for his final soliloquy.

“In the process of all this self-revelation,” Bartholemew went on, “my father revealed to me the whereabouts of that Savoy shipment. He said that he had kept his part of the deal with my grandfather and had never attempted to move or sell those weapons. Mingus had apparently hoped that he would simply destroy them, but never really inquired. But old Bart was no fool, and knew that those weapons might give him considerable leverage if it ever became necessary to strike another deal with Mingus, who soon became Secretary of Dexta. I gather that he never had to use them for that purpose, but the potential was always there. Anyway, as a final gesture of filial affection, dear old Dad passed the secret on to me, his only begotten son. He figured that I could use that knowledge to extort Mingus for any favors that I might need in the future. A wonderful gesture, don’t you think? Except that Father never realized that I might think of another use for those weapons. I doubt that he even thought of them as weapons, per se, merely as potential blackmail material. But to me, they were precisely what they were intended to be—weapons that might be used against a powerful enemy. Like the greasy little criminal he was, Dad always thought too small. He thought he might use those weapons to blackmail Mingus and figuratively destroy him. I’ll use them to destroy him physically, and much else. Perhaps even the Empire itself.”

“And me,” Petra added quietly. “And your mother.”

“I’m truly sorry about that, Petra Nash.”

“I don’t want to die, Whit,” she said. But she was certain now that she would. Her chin trembled and her eyes filled with tears.

“You’re not going to cry, are you? I hate it when women do that. It’s so terribly unfair.”

“What were you going to do with me if I’d gone to Belairus? Keep me captive? Hold me hostage?”

Bartholemew shook his head. “I’d simply have loved you, as well and as truly as I could,” he said. “I’d have run my various enterprises from there, of course, and continued helping PAIN as the revolution unfolded around us. But you would have been safe. And happy, I’d like to think.”

“I don’t think so,” Petra said.

“Who can say?” Bartholemew asked. “But I wanted you to be happy, if that means anything. You made me happy, at least. No one had ever really done that before. Oh, now, stop that crying! I told you, it isn’t fair.”

“But it’s fair for you to kill me? Forget about the other hundred million people, Whit. You’re killing me!”

“I’m sorry. But I no longer have any choice.”

“Of course you do, Whit! The choice has always been yours! Put it down, Whit! Put down your anger—and for Spirit’s sake, put down that damned switch!”

“You heard her, dear. Put it down. I’m not ready to die yet, either.”

Bartholemew looked up and Petra looked behind her. Saffron Mingus Bartholemew had entered the office, looking solemn and gravely beautiful. She stared at her son with loving, disappointed eyes.

“Put it down, Sonny,” she said softly. “Put it down now. Make your mother happy.”

Bartholemew looked at her, his eyes bright and shining. At last, he said, “Yes, Mother.”

And he put it down.