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work is all about symptoms, too. The coasts are flooded? Fine, spread what’s left of the wealth around a little more. The Atlantic coast is hammered by a dozen hurricanes a season? Fine, add a couple of zeroes to your lawsuit against the Chinese. You don’t do squat about the root cause of it all, do you?”
    “It’s not my job,” he said. His voice was mild, as if I were no more than an irate client, which maddened me even more. “Michael, I understand how you are feeling—”
    “Oh, fuck off.” I turned on my heel and stalked off.
    He called after me. “If I hear anything about Tom I’ll let you know. Keep your implant switched on. . . .”
    I wasn’t even gracious enough to acknowledge that. It was not one of my finer moments. I stomped around the house, trying to calm down.
    In the yard, the kids were playing with their smart football again. Both of them wore masks, flimsy transparent things, presumably to guard them against the foul breeze from China. They welcomed me, and I joined in their game, volleying and heading. I was always lousy at football, and I always will be, but they were gallingly kind.
    So I was spending time with them, with Sven and Claudia, John’s beautiful kids, my niece and nephew. But I felt uncomfortable.
    At one point the ball rolled off the yard’s bare concrete floor and ended up in long scrubby dune grass. You could see it roll back and forth, trying to find its way back to the game, but its rudimentary sensorium was confused by the blades of grass that towered around it. After a time it started to sound its little alarm chime.
    Sven and Claudia stooped over the thing as it rolled about. “Look,” Sven said. “When it sees us it comes toward us.”
    “Get back out of its sight,” said Claudia. “Let’s see what it does.” They both stepped back out of the way.
    The ball resumed its rolling, utterly baffled. There was a fragment of sentience in there, of genuine awareness. The ball could feel pain, the way a simple animal can, perhaps. Why, even the plaintive way it rang its stupid alarm chime was enough to break your heart. But those kids just stepped backward and forward, experimenting with it.
    When I looked at Claudia, especially, I always felt a chill. It wasn’t so much what she did but what she
didn’t
do. There was nothing behind that pretty face, I thought, nothing but emptiness, like the endless black abyssal emptiness that lay between worlds. She made me feel cold, just looking at her.
    In the end I picked up the ball myself and threw it back into the yard.
    And John came running around the corner, wheezing. His assistant Feliz had called. It was news of Tom. My son was injured but alive.
    Chapter 6
    On this planet the clouds were tall, rising in soft mounds around the equator and gathering in immense creamy swirls toward the poles.
    To Alia this was a pretty view, but meaningless. She knew nothing about planets. She had never even visited one before. The only planet she had ever studied in detail was Earth, the root of all mankind, with its layers of archaic planetary defenses, its skim of ocean, its clustering city-covered continents.
    But there were no continents here. When the flitter dipped into the atmosphere of
this
world there was nothing but an ocean, a crumpled silver-blue sheet that spread to the horizon. Above, the clouds were heaped up in a vast three-dimensional array of sculpture. This whole world was water, she thought, nothing but water, water below, water in the air. And under the clouds the prospect was oppressive, gloomy, illuminated only by shafts of sunlight cast through breaks in the cover.
    She was here, under this dismal sky, because the Transcendence had willed it.
    The Transcendence: the godlike assemblage of immortals at the heart of human society, from whom all political authority flowed. Truthfully, Alia knew little about it, save that it was, so the creepy scuttlebutt had it, a project of ancients, of
undying.
But what was the