“That was nicely done,” Vail said. “And we’ve almost completed our programming.”

Welles made puppy eyes. “Does that mean I can start killing them? Please, sir. Just a few of ‘em. For their own good.”

He drank in haste, then called up an image from the Tunnels, the subterranean world beneath the Gaming areas. A cluster of uniformed men and women were working hydraulic lifts, switching supports and props under the Gamers so that they could make their ascent.

“I still can’t believe how many Gamers don’t care how we do it.”

Vail sipped his brew, watched the screen, lips curled with gentle humor. “I’ll bet you read magic books when you were a kid, and told everybody how the lady turns into a tiger.”

“Better. There was an old magician in town. He put on shows in a magic shop, and on Saturday night, he’d get drunk. He’d screw up his timing, and you could see the rabbit peeking out of his coat. I loved it.”

“The fact that the old man had lost it?”

Welles took another drink. “Is that wrong? He’d lost it just enough so that I could see how the miracle was done. Maybe some of the other people laughed, but I thought: ‘He used to be great. Now he’s just good.”

He drained his beer and tossed it. “Hell. Anybody can be good. It only takes practice. But looking at that old man, for the first time in my life I thought that maybe I could be great…” He rubbed his eyes, then looked at Vail with sudden suspicion. “Are you working on my Psych evaluation?”

“Tut-tut,” Vail said innocently. “Just curious. Just curious.”

Max looked down through the water, and he saw Her.

Sedna. Eskimo, or Inuit, and beautiful. The encrustations around her face were cracking and chipping away, revealing smooth brown flesh beneath.

She was still burdened by her load of sins, but many of them were breaking free, unable to maintain their hold.

Sedna had a chance. The universe was coming back into balance. The Paija beaten, the angakoks could cleanse Sedna if the road remained clear…

Above them, far above them, light sparkled and shimmered on the surface of the water.

Chapter Twenty-Two

SKYHOOKS

A rocket rose up the sky… up the dome of Gaming A, off to Alex Griffin’s left. At first the launch looked normal enough. But stratospheric winds twisted the vapor trail into a bizarre knot of subliminal skywriting, and the oversized Phoenix craft still hadn’t tipped over to make orbit. It was roaring straight up. The flame died, but the tiny silver dot kept rising. if something else didn’t happen it would presently come roaring straight down.

Alex had come in in the middle of something. Seeking enlightenment, he plucked earphones from a rack.

“ Rockets are inefficient. Even fusion rockets, even antimatter rockets are wasteful compared to most of the machines in common use.. to a zapcar, for instance. A zapcar uses only stored electricity. Its reaction mass is the road beneath the wheels and the planet Earth beneath the road.

“ There are ways to send spacecraft into the solar system without burning tremendous masses of onboard fuel. Collectively these devices are called ‘skyhooks.’ None have been built. Some of them won’t work. But we only need one that does…”

Ten-person carts were available, but not many were in use. The majority of guests were spaced around the rim of the dome in little clumps, watching, but also pressing the flesh, meeting contacts, making deals.

High on the dome, the rocket was still rising.

Peripheral vision caught something coming from Alex’s right. It drifted across the sky toward the rising spacecraft, like a widemouthed predator of the deep, long and narrow like an eel, with luminous markings… no. He could see stars through it. The crisscrossed lines he had thought were markings were it. It was just a net, a net of superconducting wire, shaped by magnetic fields into a bizarre large-mouthed eel drifting on great square fins that must be solar power collectors.

“ The Starwhale is no more than an orbiting rail gun, but it will serve our purpose. To put a spacecraft into orbit costs fuel. We’d find it much cheaper merely to fire a craft two hundred miles straight up. At that point-”

The Starwhale ate the spacecraft.

The ship was tiny. It entered the mouth of the net at tremendous speed… at five miles per second or better, if the Starwhale was in orbit. The Starwhale was much bigger than Alex had thought, and moving much faster.

The ship slowed and came to a halt before it reached the tail. “ We can catch it, accelerate it to orbit, and leave it there. Or we can continue accelerating the ship-” It sped back toward the mouth of the beast. “- up to another five miles per second, to send it to the moon, or Mars, or the asteroids.

“ Of course we must steal kinetic energy from the Starwhale. But if we can catch incoming ships to decelerate them-”