We staged the homecoming of Leni Hofmannstahl in Clearing Three, also known as Elysium. I crouched in a stand of meticulous reproductions of young vine maples and studied her ship. It had originally looked like a wingless dragonfly, a slender, ten-meter abdomen hous- ing the reaction engine. Now, with the engine removed, it looked like a matte-white pupa, larval eye bulges stuf- fed with the traditional useless array of sensors and probes. It lay on a gentle rise in the center of the clear- ing, a specially designed hillock sc~slpted to support a variety of vessel formats. The newer boats are smaller, like Grand Prix washing machines, minimalist pods with no pretense to being exploratory vessels. Modules for meatshots. “I don’t like it,” Hiro said. “I don’t like this one. It doesn’t feel right. . . .” He might have been taiking to himself; he might almost have been me talking to myself, which meant the handler-surrogate gestalt was almost operational. Locked into my role, I’m no longer the point man for Heaven’s hungry ear, a specialized probe radio-linked with an even more specialized psy- chiatrist; when the gestalt clicks, Hiro and I meld into something else, something we can never admit to each other, not when it isn’t happening. Our relationship would give a classical Freudian nightmares. But I knew that he was right; something felt terribly wrong this time. The clearing was roughly circular. It had to be; it was actually a fifteen-meter round cut through the floor of Heaven, a circular elevator disguised as an Alpine minimeadow. They’d sawed Leni’s engine off, hauled her boat into the outer cylinder, lowered the clearing to the air-lock deck, then lifted her to Heaven on a giant pie plate landscaped with grass and wildflowers. They’d blanked her sensors with broadcast overrides and sealed her ports and hatch; Heaven is supposed to be a surprise to the newly arrived. I found myself wondering whether Charmian was back with Jorge yet. Maybe she’d be cooking something for him, one of the fish we “catch” as they’re released into our hands from cages on the pool bottoms. I imag- ined the smell of frying fish, closed my eyes, and imag- ined Charmian wading in the shallow water, bright drops beading on her thighs, long-legged girl in a fish- pond in Heaven. “Move, Toby! In now!” My skull rang with the volume; training and the gestalt reflex already had me halfway across the clear- ing. “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn. . . .” Hiro’s mantra, and I knew it had managed to go all wrong, then. Hillary the translator was a shrill undertone, BBC ice cracking as she rattled something out at top speed, something about anatomical charts. Hiro must have used the remotes to unseal the hatch, but he didn’t wait for it to unscrew itself. He triggered six explosive bolts built into the hull and blew the whole hatch mechanism out intact. It barely missed me. I had instinctively swerved out of its way. Then I was scrambling up the boat’s smooth side, grabbing for the honeycomb struts just inside the entranceway; the hatch mechanism had taken the alloy ladder with it. And I froze there, crouching in the smell of plastique from the bolts, because that was when the Fear found me, really found me, for the first time. I’d felt it before, the Fear, but only the fringes, the least edge. Now it was vast, the very hollow of night, an emptiness cold and implacable. It was last words, deep space, every long goodbye in the history of our species. It made me cringe, whining. I was shaking, groveling, crying. They lecture us on it, warn us, try to explain it away as a kind of temporary agoraphobia endemic to our work. But we know what it is; surrogates know and handlers can’t. No explanation has ever even come close. It’s the Fear. It’s the long finger of Big Night, the darkness that feeds the muttering damned to the gentle white maw of Wards. Olga knew it first, Saint Olga. She tried to hide us from it, clawing at her radio gear, bloodying her hands to destroy her ship’s broadcast capacity, praying Earth would lose her, let her die…. Hiro was frantic, but he must have understood, and he knew what to do. He hit me with the pain switch. Hard. Over and over, like a cattle prod. He drove me into the boat. He drove me through the Fear. Beyond the Fear, there was ~ room. Silence, and a stranger’s smell, a woman’s. The cramped module was worn, almost homelike, the tired plastic of the acceleration couch patched with peeling strips of silver tape. But it all seemed to mold itself around an absence. She wasn’t there. Then I saw the insane frieze of ballpoint scratchings, crabbed sym- bols, thousands of tiny, crooked oblongs locking and overlapping. Thumb-smudged, pathetic, it covered most of the rear bulkhead. Hiro was static, whispering, pleading. Find her, Toby, now, please, Toby, find her, find her, find I found her in the surgical bay, a narrow alcove off the crawlway. Above her, the Schone Maschine, the surgical manipulator, glittering, its bright, thin arms neatly folded, chromed limbs of a spider crab, tipped with hemostats, forceps, laser scalpel. Hiliary was hysterical, half-lost on some faint channel, something about the anatomy of the human arm, the tendons, the arteries, basic taxonomy. Hillary was screaming. There was no blood at all. The manipulator is a clean machine, able to do a no-mess job in zero g, vacuuming the blood away. She’d died just before Hiro had blown the hatch, her right arm spread out across the white plastic work surface like a medieval drawing, flayed, muscles and other tissues tacked out in a neat symmetrical display, held with a dozen stainless-steel dissecting pins. She bled to death. A surgical manipula- tor is carefully programmed against suicides, but it can double as a robot dissector, preparing biologicals for storage. She’d found a way to fool it. You usually can, with machines, given time. She’d had eight years. She lay there in a collapsible framework, a thing like the fossil skeleton of a dentist’s chair; through it, I could see the faded embroidery across the back of her jump suit, the trademark of a West German electronics conglomerate. I tried to tell her. I said, “Please, you’re dead. Forgive us, we came to try to help, Hiro and I. Understand? He knows you, see, Hiro, he’s here in my head. He’s read your dossier, your sexual profile, your favorite colors; he knows your childhood fears, first lover, name of a teacher you liked. And I’ve got just the right pheromOne5~ and I’m a walking arsenal of drugs, something here you’re bound to like. And we can lie, Hiro and I; we’re ace liars. Please. You’ve got to see. Perfect strangers, but Hiro and I, for you, we make up the perfect stranger, Leni.” She was a small woman, blond, her smooth, straight hair streaked with premature gray. I touched her hair, once, and went out into the clearing. As I stood there, the long grass shuddered, the wildflowers began to shake, and we began our descent, the boat centered on its landscaped round of elevator. The clear- ing slid down out of Heaven, and the sunlight was lost in the glare of huge vapor arcs that threw hard shadows across the broad deck of the air lock. Figures in red suits, running. A red Dinky Toy did a U-turn on fat rub- ber wheels, getting out of our way. Nevsky, the KGB surfer, was waiting at the foot of the gangway that they wheeled to the edge of the clear- ing. I didn’t see him until I reached the bottom. “I must take the drugs now, Mr. Halpert.” I stood there, swaying, blinking tears from my eyes. He reached out to steady me. I wondered whether he even knew why he was down here in the lock deck, a yellow suit in red territory. But he probably didn’t mind; he didn’t seem to mind anything very much; he had his clipboard ready. “I must take them, Mr. Halpert.” I stripped out of the suit, bundled it, and handed it to him. He stuffed it into a plastic Ziploc, put the Ziploc in a case manacled to his left wrist, and spun the com- bination. “Don’t take them all at once, kid,” I said. Then I fainted.