The two spindles were hazily transparent. An aircar—Hansen’s own aircar, torn but upright again—drifted along behind the creatures, a hand’s breadth above the pavement.
No one was aboard the vehicle. Krupchak, the driver, gaped at Hansen from beside the personnel of Pink Two.
“Commissioner Hansen, please get in the car,” said the mechanical voice.
It sounded exactly as it had before, even though Hansen was no longer wearing his helmet.
“I had the authority at this site,” Hansen said hoarsely. “You have no grounds to remove me without a hearing.”
The spindles moved to either side of him. Hansen’s skin tingled. Close up they still looked transparent, but he thought he saw something in the black tendrils as well as between them.
The vehicle’s power door opened. “Commissioner Hansen,” the voice repeated, “please get in the car.”
Hansen obeyed, shifting his foot slightly so that he didn’t scuff the pistol. One of his people would take care of it. . . .
Fifty meters away, Chief Holloway licked his lips. He looked as though he were watching a pornographic display.
The door shut after Hansen. The two spindles drifted through the plastic panels, into the driver’s compartment. Hansen didn’t see them fold or shrink, but their peaks didn’t quite brush the vehicle’s blast-pocked headliner.
“Sir, should we—” shouted one of the Special Units personnel as he leaned from a roof with his plasma weapon half-pointed.
“No!” Hansen cried. He stuck his head out the shattered side window and shouted, “No, everybody get on with your duties.”
He didn’t know what was going on, but he knew that it wouldn’t be helped if his own people started shooting.
The aircar slid in a tight circle and accelerated as it started to rise.
“I have full authority from the Consensus for everything I’ve done here,” Hansen said, knowing that in truth, he’d always claimed whatever authority he needed to get a job done and trusted that he could make it stick after the fact.
That had always worked. Until now.
“The Consensus is not interested in your actions here, Commissioner Hansen,” said the voice. The words sounded in the Commissioner’s mind, seeming to have nothing to do with the creatures which were escorting him. “The Consensus has need of you on a planet called Northworld.”
The car had risen to 300 meters and was moving at a speed that made the wind howl through the many shrapnel holes. Other air traffic was avoiding their arrow-straight rush.
Hansen frowned. “What’s Northworld?” he muttered.
The creatures—or the voice—must have been able to hear him despite wind noise, because Hansen’s mind rasped with the words, “The Consensus will inform you of what you need to know, Commissioner Hansen. In good time.”
For the first time in his life, Commissioner Nils Hansen realized that there might be more to the Consensus of Worlds than simply the bureaucracy of control of which he himself was a part.
Chapter Two
North came out of the Matrix, gasping and wheezing as he always did.
Hanging in the Matrix, the world that connected the Eight Worlds, was like drowning in ice water. The infinite series of minute events forced itself into his being, through him; chilling his flesh, freezing him, threatening to grind him out of existence in an avalanche of nine-times-simultaneous discrete realities.
It would almost be better not to be a god.
“But that is a lie, North,” said Dowson with the dry precision which was all that remained to him since emotion had been cut out of him with his body.
“Who are you to speak of truth and lies, Dowson?” North said. “All you know are facts.”
“Facts are all there is to know, North,” replied the disembodied brain suspended in a vat of nutrient. The words washed across North to ring coldly within his skull, but they were not as cold as the Matrix. . . .
He shuddered again and looked up at the roof of his palace, shards of sunlight frozen into groins and vaulting that could cover an army.
“There’s another one coming,” North said. “From outside, from the Consensus.”
The liquid flowing through Dowson’s vat kept up the same soft susurrus it had whispered for ages. “What will you do with these?” asked the non-voice as colored waves which sprang from a cone of ice beside the vat. “Find them a plane of their own?”