THEY CALLED SUCH THINGS OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES. From Quinn's research, he knew them to be illusions. An OBE was the impression of being detached from one's body and seeing it from above, now proved—to the scientifically minded, at least—to be the result of body-related processing in the medial temporal lobe of the brain.

His body was giving him such an illusion now.

He lay on his couch, having fallen asleep there well after midnight, and now awoke to the OBE. A man stood below him, standing on the edge of a platform, looking down. By scrunching forward a bit, Quinn could look over the man's shoulder. His stomach convulsed at the sight of the thirty-thousand-foot plunge to the planet below. Beyond the man's shoulders and fluttering hair, Quinn could see a vast ocean, a gaping maw into which the man might step at any moment. The man was thinking of jumping; the ocean beckoned with silvery indifference.

It was always the same OBE. Quinn knew the next thing he would do was look up. He fought this inclination.

The man below him was himself. Neither of them spoke, by mutual consent or by the rules and vows of this illusory place.

Then he did look up. There, in all its wrongful horror, stretched a river of fire as broad as the world. It must not be there. It must not be silent and stable. But it was. It had eaten the Sun. It was the Sun.

Quinn turned away, facing down—almost as bad. He descended, becoming one with the man standing on the platform. No longer the superior, knowing, separate mind, he now had truly become Titus Quinn, indivisible. And he so wished not to be.

The scene faded, as it always did, leaving him feeling light-headed and disturbed. Was this the phenomenon known as OBE, or had he actually been dreaming? of far more interest: was this a memory? Two years ago he'd known the answer. He'd been someplace, a place that had kept him a long time. He had snippets of memory that amounted to little more than dreamscape images. He didn't know what happened to his wife and daughter. For a few months after he had regained consciousness on Lyra, a settled planet on the rim of known space, he had strongly believed that he'd been in an alternate world. Gradually he'd come to doubt his experience, his shattered memories, though there was no explanation for how he had come to be on Lyra. Ignoring his claims, Minerva treated him like a disoriented survivor of a terrible event, the ship's explosion and the death of its passengers and crew.

Thus it was of the utmost importance whether the vision of the man on the platform between bright ocean and flaming sky was a memory or not. Because if it was a memory, then that was the other place.

He heard noises outside. In an instant he realized it was what had kicked him out of his dream. There were sounds outside, in the yard.

Now fully awake, he sat up, throwing off the coverlet. From the next room, through the kitchen window, he spied one of his defensive lights strobing. Another light caught his eye through the window near the dining room hutch. His feet found his shoes in the dark, a knack carried over from the old days when he had often been summoned to the flight deck in the middle of a sleep shift. He was instantly awake, also a carryover, all senses on alert. As he passed the laser gun propped up against the bookcase, he grabbed it and made for the back door, already fully dressed, having fallen asleep that way.

Outside, the fog dumped a load of moisture onto his warm body, quickly leveling the heat gradient between him and the Pacific Northwest air. He crouched near the door and listened. It was Christmas Eve. A soggy, dangerous one.

The cedar trees dripped rain from limb to limb, a patter so light it might have been the background radiation of the universe. A drift of lavender smoke slid through the woods, like the cremated remains of unwanted visitors. Quinn waited for them to reveal their positions.

It was easier to trespass in a soggy wood than a dry one, since every fallen stick was likely rotted and willing to bend rather than snap. But that very fact would lead people to move too quickly, and sooner or later, Quinn would hear them. A spike of noise off to the left, a chuffing of breath, or the soft scrape of cedar fingers against a wool cap...Quinn rose and, avoiding the squeaky middle plank of the deck, crept down the stairs into the woods.

His falling-down cottage by the sea held little worth stealing. Most of what he had, he'd be happy to give any truly needy burglar. But he would die to protect his trains. He'd spent two years of his life assembling the most intricate standard-gauge model railroad in the history of the bungalow hobbyist. The fact that it was probably worth almost $400,000 was not the point. It was the care with which he had hand-selected every piece, maintained the precious antique system with the sweat of his brow, and the fact that his house without it would be intolerably empty. The idea that someone would break in and summarily dump his Lionel 381 Olympian into a duffel bag filled him with a simmering resentment. He'd show them, by God. Clutching his shotgun, with the dual modes of paint spray and hot laser stream, he crept forward, swiveling his head, listening.

He keyed the gun to view his integrated communications environment protecting his five acres. The system had triangulated the intruder's position through sound patterns. By the graph on his gun's display, he was fifteen yards to the southeast of Quinn's position, moving toward the road. He keyed in the scope, looking in the infrared. Yes, a figure moving.

He advanced. He'd give him a dousing of orange paint to brand him for a guaranteed six days, according to the fabber's warranty.

Carving through the mist came a river of golden smoke, knifing up his nose and tracing a bitter gully down his throat. He couldn't help it; he coughed.

Now the woods grew unnaturally quiet. Even the perpetual dripping of the trees ceased.

Then a block of shadow emerged from the night, moving fast, some thirty feet away. Having given away his position already, Quinn shouted, “Stop where you are. Or you're a dead man.”

Someone laughed.

Then he was crashing after the shadow. As it fled toward the road, Quinn hurdled over fallen logs, propelled by adrenaline. As the moon took sudden command of a blank spot in the canopy, he could see a figure trying to make it up the steep embankment by the road.

“Stop!” he yelled again, and then he brought the nozzle of his gun up, determined to paint the fellow before he got to his car. He pulled the trigger, and by sound, he knew he'd sent off a lethal stream of laser instead of paint. The intruder was down, hit by the mistaken blast of laser, lying wounded, possibly dead. Quinn's heart coiled, and he broke into a sweat that made him simultaneously hot and cold. He saw the end of his life before him: a virtual courtroom, a real-time cell.

Shaking, he came closer to the form, now lying immobile in the rotting leaves. He reached down and flung the body over to face him.

He called for lights, and they bloomed from his hidden illumination network.

Before him lay a girl in city clothes, ripped and dirty. She was staring in consternation at his gun. He'd missed.

“Jesus,” was all he could say. She was young. Maybe fifteen. Lord God, he had almost killed a child. He let the gun fall to forest floor.

“I'm sorry,” she said, and tears were just behind the words.

“Jesus,” he repeated. He was frozen to the spot, unable to move, but not because she looked afraid, but because she looked familiar. Her eyes were dark, with flat slashes of eyebrows pointing to a long straight nose and a wide mouth that looked like it could smile as broad as the world. She looked just like Sydney. Like Sydney would have—if she were still alive. His throat tightened so hard it might strangle him.

He looked down at the shotgun, lying in the rotting leaves. It made him weak to think of it.

The girl stood up, eyeing him warily. Now, as he saw her expression and the blue eyes, she didn't look like Sydney, except insofar as all young people evoked all young people, for those who loved specifically.

At a movement from the road, Quinn looked up. “Your boyfriend's a coward,” he said. “Why isn't he down here helping you?”

She shrugged. “Sorry we bothered you. We just wanted to see...” She paused, and now tears did come. “See you for real.”

“Okay,” he said, surprising himself. “Here I am.” He watched her watch him, imagined what she would be seeing. A guy with rumpled clothes, no space hero.

Maybe she did look like Sydney. That dark hair...But the terrible truth was, he was having trouble remembering what Sydney looked like, except for her pictures.

“So you wanted to see me for real,” Quinn said.

The girl lay inert on the ground, eyes big.

“Thing is? I'm not real. In a sense, I'm not really here at all.” She was watching him with more intensity now that she had concluded he wasn't going to shoot her. “I haven't been here since I got here. Since I got back from that place. And no, I don't know where it was. I'm not holding back secrets. There are no secrets, no conspiracies. I don't remember anything. Sorry to disappoint you. I know you want to believe things.” He held up a hand. “Never mind what it is you want to believe; that's your business. But don't pin it on me. I'm not really here. Anymore.”

She hadn't moved from the hillside, nor did she now.

But she was listening.

“Do you understand?” he asked her, knowing she couldn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about, but needing, suddenly and with a strange intensity, for her to understand.

And then she gave him the gift. She said, “Yes. Yes, I do. I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Quinn.”

He nodded at her, unable to speak. But her words unlocked him. Yes, I understand. The young girl gazed at him with the look of wisdom and blankness that children sometimes had. She knew she was talking to a ghost, a man who had slipped away from himself. Who had almost killed a child.

The girl rose to her feet and, with the swift recovery of the young, scrambled up the embankment.

When the car squealed off down the road, he shouted after her, “And lose that miserable boyfriend of yours, will you? Where was he when you needed him?”

He picked up the gun and trudged back to the house, dousing the tree lights as he went by, feeling dazed by what he'd almost done.

Caitlin, he thought. What's happening to me?

In his bedroom, he felt under his bed for the duffel bag, hauling it out, still packed from the last trip he'd made.

He didn't want Rob's noisy household right now.

But, he was very sure, he needed it.

Past 1:00 AM, Quinn's car sped along the rutted dirt road, murky with coastal fog. Pebbles and rocks kicked up, denting the paint job. But by the time he reached the first Mesh, the dents would be pearling back smooth. He drove fast, eager to be out of the woods, to separate himself from some darkness he could hardly identify. He swung into a curve, accelerating out of it, driving hard before he changed his mind. He conjured up the expression on Emily and Mateo's faces when he showed up for Christmas after all. Maybe even Rob would smile, that brother of his who thought Quinn had squandered his future. Even before the star ship disaster.

Quinn and Rob had both tested at the same time, even though, at eight years old, Quinn was taking the test early. They walked into the test as two bright, active young boys. Quinn walked out as a fast-track boy. A savvy, as the term went. His brother, as a middle-track child. A middie. To his credit, Rob never begrudged his brother's genius-level score. But to Quinn's enduring annoyance, Rob had expected Quinn to do something with it. Quinn could have made his fortune by now, but all he had wanted was to pilot the K-ships. It was the best job in the universe. Johanna had understood that, and never tried to change him. Went along on his trips.

Went along on his trips. He swerved from those thoughts. Reaching the paved road with its smart surface, he floored the accelerator, an action that the car's savant overruled, assuming control, establishing an annoyingly safe speed.

In the darkness, the car headlights created a white tunnel, at the end of which Quinn could now see the Mesh platform, where a platoon of cars was just forming up. At this time of night it was a small fleet that would mesh together for as long a ride as their respective passengers shared common destinations. Joining front to back in the modern—and, in Quinn's mind, damn inferior—version of trains, they'd zoom onto the highways at super speeds, conserving highway space and protecting against highway slaughter with mSap control. Quinn felt the bump of his car as it meshed with the one in front.

As sapient-run transport, PMT—Personal Meshed Transport—was efficient and private. People overwhelmingly preferred personal transport to communal buses—or rail cars for that matter. It was a damn shame. What must it have been like to ride the Southern Pacific's Coast Starlight into Los Angeles, with the porters, dining cars, and the full-length tavern-coach?

Easing into the short queue at the station, Quinn noted that the platform was deserted except for washes of fog and pools of lamplight.

Through one of these pools stepped a woman wearing a black tunic, her hair piled into a holiday coiffure. She ducked into a for-hire PMT in front of Quinn's, eyeing him as she did so, revealing a stark and lovely face. Party over. Going home.

The platoon set off, quickly reaching top speed on the intercorridor between Portland and points west. Now that his vehicle was meshed and his attention to driving was no longer needed, the newsTide streamed onto the dashboard, a recap of the latest protests from South America, where an antitech junta had banished all foreign and domestic Company holdings and proclaimed the people's right to traditional jobs and life off the dole. A Catholic priest in Argentina, Mother Felice Hernandez, was taking things even farther, threatening secession of indigenous peoples from their national governments and proposing a ban on technology imports and even the world tides of news and information.

Poor bastards. Only ten percent of South Americans finished even a sixth-grade education. The vast majority were mired in the twentieth century, maintaining a fatalistic resistance to the data-fed world. They must think their old lives preferable to digital delights and underemployment in the data warrens of South American tronic giants.

Thinking of his brother holding on by the skin of his teeth to just such a life with Minerva, Quinn thought that the United States could use a Mother Hernandez of its own.

He rested his head on the back of the cushioned seat. He could sleep for an hour, except for the fact that he was unnaturally awake. The windows curving in front and back of the cars allowed him to see straight down the platoon, into each car.

Through his forward window, he could see that the passenger in front of him had turned around and was looking at him. Her auburn hair had fallen down to her shoulders, framing her face, giving her a siren beauty.

The woman parted her tunic, baring naked breasts. He reached forward to opaque the window, but stopped, and instead touched her full breasts through the layer of polyscreen. Her eyes closed and she pressed harder into the window. A jolt of erotic energy spiked into him. It surprised him how quickly she had summoned him. Placing his hands on his side of the window, he insisted she look at him. Finally she did, driving up the heat in the car. In her left eye he saw the glint of bioware; she might be recording this for later enjoyment. She was one of those modern women, unafraid of bodily adaptation, insisting on direct access to the tideflow, despite the infamous failures of machine-body interface.

Even so, he wanted her. Even if it was through a window. This was closer than he'd been to a woman in two years, and he was man of appetite, or used to be. Her eyes softened, and he thought that perhaps she too was lonely, locked in her compartment as he was in his.

There was an emergency release on the window. She saw him glance at it, and nodded. They had plenty of time. It wouldn't be rushed. He hesitated. Why not? Why not take some comfort?

Outside, clusters of tract houses sped by, where people lived and made love...but the moment passed. He pulled away from the window, seeing the hurt in the woman's eyes. His lips formed the words I'm sorry. He blacked out the window, leaning back in his seat. At least he still felt something. Even if it was for a stranger. That might be progress if, as Caitlin said, he'd been slipping away.

But there could be no one new, not even like this, for the body alone. He owed Johanna that much, and he meant to stick by it.

Caitlin made up a bed for him on the couch. In her bathrobe, with her hair crunched up by sleep, she looked sweet. And relieved to see him.

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

But then Rob came into the room, shuffling out to see what the commotion was, and Quinn thought that it could wait until morning, because he wanted to talk to Caitlin alone.

He lay down, weary at last.

Caitlin turned at the door, as though she would have said something. But, “Good night,” she whispered, and left him to toss on the hard couch until sleep came.

In the morning, in the children's room, he and Mateo tinkered with a broken savant action figure. The lower-level tronic figure wouldn't activate the battlefield pieces of the invading hordes that Mateo needed as backdrop for his battle queen, the lovely and formidable Jasmine Star.

The kid had imagination to burn. He'd announced at age five that he'd be a virtual environment designer. Quinn didn't know if he had the talent, but Caitlin claimed he did. More to the point, would a Company think so? But the kid was eleven years old. He didn't need to worry about the Standard Test for a couple years.

Emily lolled on the bed on her stomach, watching the proceedings. “I can't step on the battlefield, or my feet will get smuffed.”

Quinn angled the tronic probe into the savant's circuits. “Smuffed?”

Mateo shrugged. “She's been warned.”

Appearing in the doorway, Rob said, “Maybe Santa Claus has some solutions wrapped up under the tree.”

Quinn almost had the kink worked out. “Santa Claus will get smuffed if he tries to fly over this tactical ground.”

“Yezzz,” Mateo said, “tactical ground.”

Rob watched for a few minutes more, and then headed back to the kitchen to help Caitlin with breakfast.

With the smells of real cooking and the quiet play of the children, Quinn felt a pang of envy for this domestic peace. And a decided unease that it might be shattered. At forty, Rob was in no position to start over. Or Caitlin, either. The dole would ensure they'd be warm and entertained, but it was a comfortable hell that Quinn would despise, and so would Rob.

From the lanai of his brother's apartment twenty stories high, Quinn could barely hear the street noises. At this distance, the road grid was lit up, looking christmasy in the white and red lights. From the street, sirens pierced the heights as security converged on some scene of violence. The ground level was no place to loiter, and the higher the apartment, the more expensive it was. Rob and Caitlin had worked their way up as their fortunes improved. But it was still a miserably small four-room hive of a place, one that made Quinn antsy to be gone, even as his mind churned.

They want you to go back, Titus, Lamar had said. They've found it. The other place. And what if they had found it?

Sipping his dessert coffee, he looked across Portland's sprawl, with its ocean of prefabber residential boxes. These boxes might be uniform, but their walls carried the tideflow, bearing virtual schools, markets, information, social contact, entertainment. By the Blix-Poole Act, each citizen was guaranteed a basic standard of living that included housing, food, and EDE, Electronic Domain Entitlements. The Companies paid the taxes that kept the world fed and housed. Educated, if need be. With such deep wealth, they could afford it. They couldn't afford not to, not after the Troubles had brought civilization to the brink of darkness, when the starving told the well-fed that those gradients must pass. So in a way, the dreds—those with IQs of one hundred or less—had changed the world.

Caitlin and Rob lived considerably better than what Blix-Poole managed to dole out. Rob tended savants for Minerva. For now. Quinn looked south, toward the cramped apartment blocks where occupants upgraded the EDE basic services with every piece of gear they could afford. These diversions, selected by each occupant and reinforced by data agents, created a feedback loop that created odd, individual realities. Psychoneurologists claimed that people were unaware of choices—that their subconscious generated the “choices” using its hidden logic. By this theory, people were biological machines, driven by subconscious processes always a half second ahead of what we consciously “chose” to think. So you could walk into any child's bedroom, any couple's parlor and, by seeing their virtual environment, look into the jungle of their minds. Quinn's cottage, though, didn't have live walls, his reality being on hold.

Caitlin opened the sliding door and joined him on the lanai, handing him a glass with an inch of amber in the bottom. “The good stuff,” she said, raising her own glass.

They toasted each other. Behind her in the living room, Rob was settling in to the evening newsTide.

She gestured toward the city. “Not as nice a view as yours, but not bad, for a guy with a master's degree and a wife who likes to stay home.” After a moment she said, “Want to talk about it?”

“About what?”

“About whatever it is that brought you to see us last night.”

“Maybe I came to spread holiday cheer.”

“Try again.”

“To annoy my brother by tinkering with toys?”

“Bingo,” Caitlin said, tossing off her drink. She'd brought the bottle, though.

They settled into two stiff chairs that barely fit on the lanai. “Now, talk. I want to hear what's going on, and I don't want any bullshit this time, Titus Quinn. I don't know who you think you're fooling, but it ain't me.”

“Half my pleasure in life comes from fooling you, Sister-in-law.”

“Half of nothing is still nothing, Titus.”

Quinn held his glass out. Received a splash. “I haven't thrown myself into the surf yet, for God's sakes.” He looked over at her, but she wasn't letting go. Nor would she, now that he'd come to her.

“It's Minerva,” he said. “They're back meddling with me. They said they'll shit-can Rob if I don't do what they say.”

She leaned forward, worried. “What more can they possibly want from you? You've already given them everything.”

“Not quite everything.” He told her about what Minerva claimed to have found, and what they wanted him to do. He didn't know what to make of it. But a needle of hope was thrusting up from his innards, and it was drawing blood as it came. What if they were right?

Caitlin took an angry swig from her glass. “Sons of bitches. This came from Lamar?” He nodded. “You don't believe them, do you?”

He didn't answer. Maybe he did believe it; maybe he needed to believe. But Caitlin would have a hard time accepting the idea. He'd never asked her whether she believed his claims of where he'd been. He assumed she didn't, and he forgave her for that. But he didn't want to hear it outright.

Caitlin stood and went to the railing, gripping it. “Damn, but this makes me mad. Look at you. I see that look in your eyes, Titus, and it makes me real mad. They've done the worst thing to you that they possibly could have done. They've made you hope again.”

Caitlin wrapped her sweater more closely around her in the chill December air. Just when she thought there might be a future for Titus, the past threatened to swallow him up once more. She'd be damned if she'd let that happen.

She went to him, sitting down knee to knee with him and taking his hands in hers. What to say to a man who heard only what he wanted to, whose stubbornness was as strong a legend as his sojourn in another realm?

Taking a deep breath, she said, “I wish I could change things for you. But they're gone, Titus. It hurts so bad, but they're gone for good. I'd jump off this porch for you if I could make it different. But nothing, nothing will bring them back.”

She searched his face for a response, but she was talking to a man who'd piloted star ships. So of course he wasn't listening to cautions. Why should he? Was this safe little apartment with a safe little wife the sum of his dreams? No, not even close. It was what she loved about the man, and what sometimes stirred her to imagine a bigger life, even while fearing it.

She noted his glance as he looked back at Rob in the living room. Pouring another splash, she said, “We'll get by, Rob and me. I've still got a degree in engineering that I can do something with. We'll get by; don't you worry about us.” But Titus's eyes were stoked with some pale fire, and her words slid away from him. “God damn you, Titus, if you go and get yourself killed.”

“Thanks,” he said, eyes mock large.

“Don't get goofy with me, Titus. I mean this.”

“Yes ma'am.”

From somewhere, perhaps the apartment below, came the tinny refrain of a Christmas carol.

Quinn knew she meant it. But the harder she pushed, the more he went opposite, and the more he said to himself, What if they had found the other place? And why was hope the worst thing that could happen to him? Even if it was a mirage, wasn't it better than—than what he had?

She shook her head. “I read you like a book. You aren't listening to me.”

He put a hand on her arm. “I am listening to you, Sister-in-law. But I might not mind what you say.”

She wavered, finally smiling. “No, you never minded. Lamar told me all the stories. You never listened.” She looked more wistful than he'd ever seen her. He didn't like disappointing her, his staunchest ally in his war against, quite possibly, the whole world.

Caitlin vowed not to share the Minerva news with Rob, at least until after Quinn went home. He didn't want to argue with his brother, though he'd have to, eventually. When he and Caitlin entered the parlor, they found Rob asleep in front of the silvered wall.

Then, tiptoeing into the kids' room, Quinn checked on his favorite niece and nephew.

From a dark corner of the room came the voice of the toy savant, Jasmine Star. Her program activated by motion sensors, her mechanized voice exclaimed: “Come to do battle, pagan scum?”

Emily was sleeping with her hands thrown over her head like she was jumping into a lake. Mateo was dreaming hard, twitching.

Maybe it was true that Caitlin and Rob could take care of themselves, as his sister-in-law had said. They didn't need a benevolent brother holding the world off with bloody fists. But what if that brother had brought players onto the field that would never have noticed Rob Quinn, one savant tender among thousands? What if Rob was about to suffer just because of having the wrong brother?

Emily's face had a faint sheen of perspiration, as though dreaming were hard work. The room swelled around him, full of big things like justice and innocence and rage. He was going. Of course he was. The decision felt like fog evaporating off the ocean. He wasn't going to watch this family suffer. He'd walked into the room having decided, but not realizing it. Now, it was clear.

As the breath he was holding left him, he felt weak with relief. He'd wanted to go from the moment Lamar asked him—he'd just hated going at Minerva's request. But the truth was, he'd go any way he had to.

Mateo stirred, knotting his blankets around him like armor.

Okay, then. I'm going.

On his way out of the bedroom, he cast a glance at Jasmine Star, sitting in her cardboard box.

“Yes,” Quinn answered her at last. “Heading into the fray.”

In the darkness, he thought he heard a far-off din, as though he were hearing, across endless plains, a thousand voices raised in a desperate battle.