GREG BEAR

Born in China of parents defected from England, her capacity for wonders might be increased by a different attitude toward reality. At least, she had never seemed quite as culture-shocked, future-shocked, as Lanier had felt. She had accepted the inevitable and undeniable with calmness and pragmatism.

Lanier knuckled his closed eyes and turned over, trying to find elusive sleep. Now that he could not possibly see her, he realized he missed Karen. Even with the hidden bitterness of their last few years together, they shared something with her when they were together: a common link with the past.

Was it that he was simply too from to accept these new realities? Would pseudo-Talsit help, or a cleansing of his mental channels through a new youthfulness?

He swore under his breath and started to get out of the bunk, but there was no place he could safely go in the compound, no place where he was unobserved. And he needed isolation now, needed darkness and freedom from stimulus. He felt like a transported animal clinging to the security of an enclosed cage. Opening the door, he might be assaulted by another barrage of impossibilities.

While Lanier tried to sleep, Korzenowski was arranging a meeting with the president and several key corpreps. There was a good possibility that Judith Hoffman, Lanier's boss and mentor four decades ago, would be present.

Lanier had not kept up with her activities for years. He was not surprised Page 169

to learn she had undergone pseudo-Talsit and transplant rejuvenation, but it came as something of a shock when Korzenowski informed him she was leading the Thistledown faction that supported reopening the Way.

The trains between Thistledown's chambers were as efficient as ever, sleek silver millipedes gliding at several hundred kilometers an hour through their narrow tunnels. Lanier sat beside Mirsky, and Korzenow-ski sat opposite, all lost in silence.

Theirs was a cosmic shyness with little room for small talk not after what Mirsky had showed them. Mirsky took the silent treatment stoically, peering through the windows at the surrounding tunnel darkness and the sudden explosion of cityscape as the train emerged into tubelight.

The third chamber metropolis, Thistledown City, had been designed and built after the asteroid's launch, taking advantage of lessons learned in the construction of Alexandria in the second chamber. Its enormous towers rose from slender bases to wide tops five kilometers above the