They first noticed it with the puddlejumpers: that some of them simply responded better, felt friendlier, were more willing to "tell their pilots their names," as men have claimed for the craft they steer or fly for millennia.

       It proved to be that way with much of the Ancient technology. Several of the expedition members said, not in Dr. McKay's hearing, that the souls of Ancient machines were nearer to the surface than those of Earthly ones.

       (It was Dr. Kusanagi whom he eventually chanced upon saying as much, and when he berated her for encouraging superstitions, she opened wide, betrayed eyes on him and said sadly, "So it is not true, then, that freedom of religion is permitted in Canada?" He replied, after he'd finished spluttering, that as long as it didn't interfere, uh, with her work, he'd, um, refrain from, uh, um, commenting on her personal life. It was generally agreed that she had carried off the honors from that encounter.)

       Others claimed that it was merely variances in technology, earlier-built devices more sluggish in comparison to later ones. Dr. Zelenka suggested that if the codes he and his had found built into certain items were in fact serial numbers, either the Ancients were in the habit of reusing them, or had no thought of consecutive numbering for parts, or ease of use had nothing to do with earlier or later manufacture.

       Most of them didn't think about the whys at all, letting it subsume into the general mix of contradictions and wonders that was Atlantis.

Lucy

       Lucia had been excited when she left for offplanet science camp -- she'd been camping before, of course, when she was a little kid, back before menarche, but this was real, this was offplanet, the campers would be junior members of the expedition itself, to go for and come bring items and enter data and help dig for samples.

       And it was. She'd expected the heat and the dryness and the sweat that evaporated and left her skin well begrimed before they returned to base camp and the refreshers. She'd expected the sweetness of food cooked under the starlight and the views they would have and the time Naran Lal found the irritant plant by falling into it and needing to be taken back through the gate to have the resulting rash treated.

       She hadn't expected the cliff to fall on top of her.

       They were Alteran, Asura, Lantean of the Forerunners; they were lifting the fallen rocks almost before the last of them fell. One or two of the campers were still alive when they were uncovered, and those were the first to be rushed to the new biostatic healing units.

       Lucia and her compatriots followed them, gently borne in on floating pallets, arranged as neatly as the pulped mess could be before laid within the naquadah coffin-like boxes.

       Which healed the more intact of the bodies within them, and left them comatose.

       Lucia's parents visited her in the house of healing. Her father arranged for her care and tried wilder and wilder theories to awaken a mind within her now-whole skull; her mother gave way to despair early, claiming that the aura of Lucia's soul and heart was long gone, that only an empty shell remained to be tended, that they should have put a stone for her in the family memorial garden long since.

       When at last her father arranged for her to be tried in a new, improved version of the healing unit, although she opened her eyes and blinked at them, she was as helpless as a newborn, having to relearn how to speak, how to feed herself, how to stand. For years he assumed that his daughter had lost her memories, until it became clear that they were there, but without reference or linking chains, coming to mind out of order and context.

       Lucia's mother held, with some justification, that Lucia had indeed died, and that this was a new soul, a new person, a new daughter. She named the girl Alia, and Alia herself set Lucia's stone in a part of the memorial garden that memory suggested her sister had loved.

       Lucy was always the most eager of the puddlejumpers, who flew a little faster, who responded a little quicker (than, indeed, most of her pilots wanted her to), who carried about with her the tension of a being wanting to just go, go, go.

       She won the informal races until Drs. Weir and McKay put a stop to them, stating that when machines overcompensated for pilot deficiencies there was really no point. Major Sheppard, who as CO hadn't been invited to compete against his men, quietly suggested afterwards that perhaps an aerial maneuver competition would suit.

       Those proved to be far more skill-dependent -- Lucia herself had never practiced precise forms of the bodily or creative arts, much preferring good-enough-to-go on her way to getting somewhere.

Emily

       Aimilia of Gorias was by choice and training a linguist, but by function a paramedic; at first she picked the skills up half-resentfully, on anthropology expeditions where the linguist's task was mostly "hurry up and wait" and the people under study both prone to accident and with little if any notion of public health. One can only repeat "nineteen thousand and three microcents, rolling boil" (or "two millicents, rolling boil" to be on the safe side) to the people in charge of purifying the guests' water so many times before they decide that that one should be in charge of such matters; between that and her orderly habits of preparation in the shape of most conceivable readily obtained medicaments, Aimilia found herself, despite having the same first-aid training as all expedition members, becoming the woman one came to for cuts, sprains, digestive troubles, headaches, arthropod bites, hangovers, and disruptions in body functions caused by overeager healers trying to work around the need for sleep or food.

       And then the new gates were installed, with the lingua franca that some of the groundlings had developed, and the predictions of Aimilia's illustrious predecessors were borne out: the groundlings took almost too enthusiastically to their new common language, and the call for field linguists dropped severely, such roles becoming in effect restricted to those with far more seniority and experience than Aimilia had managed to garner.

       To be certain, there was always the corn dole and the community service to recompense it; but Aimilia was even less inclined to wait for life to hand her all the answers than most Alterans, and so she applied to join Aiamykal's Own.

       It had long since been forgotten who first nicknamed the symbol of Disaster Battlers and Retrieval -- a winged and robed figure with flowing hair and an active laser cutter in one hand -- "Aiamykal," or when the members of DBR had begun to anthropomorphize "her" as some higher-planar being who looked out for them and who might be asked to bring them luck, or even when the Personnel Retrieval arm of DBR became known as Aiamykal's Own. Aimilia tried now and then, halfheartedly, to trace it in her hard-won spare time, finding that "Aiamykal" might predate the Great Seeding of the worlds of Pegasus, almost certainly deriving from one of the other Asuran languages; and that perhaps the Own might have become so in the last millennium.

       It made sense, certainly, given how many of them regarded the said Aiamykal with a special sort of devotion, Lady of the Cutting Edge, under whose outstretched arm they fulfilled the duty that was not part of their official contracts but that remained the central tenet of these her gofers: when a life was at stake, Asura or groundling or random alien from heavens-know-where, Aiamykal's Own always went in. Always.

       Aimilia's experience with first aid stood her in good stead among the Own, although somehow there was never enough time to actually go for a paramedic's license. There were walls to cut through, and fires to smother, and phasing technology to be used to retrieve people through rather than around obstructions (when it worked, which was never as often as the gofers would have liked) and tunnels to be crawled through, and shuttles (gate- and otherwise) to fly, to bring the gofers to the site and take the retrieved to safety or to the healers' care.

       Somehow or another Aimilia rose to pilot of her crew's shuttle, becoming known as a smooth pilot, a gentle and nevertheless swift pilot, who brought wounded to the care facilities without ever jouncing them and frightened rescuees home as safely and securely as if they were in their mothers' arms.

       She would have been happy enough to marry, but somehow she never seemed to meet people whom she would consider as spouses, although she was really quite fond of Emorius -- a nurse at the mobile surgical clinic her shuttle was attached to, whose long and eventful engagement to a fellow nurse was becoming a thing of hospital legend.

       And when she was killed a few years into her middle age, her brothers shifted from foot to foot, nervous, at the traditional Aiamykaline memorial, trying and failing to make sense of the fact that their linguist little sister had, after successfully delivering two loads of people and half her shuttle's crew to organize the former, turned and flown back into a station whose reactor she had known to be overloading. One of them ventured, at the luncheon afterwards, to say as much; Emorius blinked at him, and said slowly, as if to a small child, "There were people on it."

       Emily was Carson Beckett's favorite puddlejumper.

       Unlike some of the others, which wobbled about in response to any random thought that came into his head when he was supposed to be flying them, she listened to his idea of where he wanted to go and then went there. Smoothly. Far gentler than the placid old mare on which he had learned to ride, head full of exciting adventure stories set in times long gone by, anticipating something simpler and less precarious than his riding skills ever became. With Emily, it was more like driving the little cars with automatic transmissions he had rented in America, a simple easy ride except for the parts where he automatically reached for the gearbox.

       Emily, too, seemed almost the quickest to bring up the vital signs diagnostics, to flag any changes in any of them in manners that seemed specifically designed to bring them to his attention. It was a team in Emily that first discovered a way to transmit the biofeedback readouts directly to a monitor in the room the expedition had chosen to use for the infirmary, in response, one said, to an automated query as to whether they would like to send a transmission and if so to what part of the city.

       It was Emily that he preferred to use for his periodic checkup trips to the mainland, Emily who seemed almost eager to show off her skills and abilities for the entertainment of the younger (and some of the older) Athosians.

       Carson wasn't sure afterward whether he had specifically suggested that Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard and Radek Zelenka should take Emily down after Rodney and poor Griffin, or whether she'd just been the most convenient jumper to use in the hurry. It was then, of course, that she first let them know about the emergency autopilot capability: that if a sufficiently injured person with the ATA gene sequence were on board and they or another "unlocked" the capability, even a person with no ATA gene whatsoever could set the autopilot for the jumper bay or the Stargate, stop and start and make minor detours around obstacles while on their set course, and use the puddlejumper's communications (presumably so that they could call someone to please come through and dial the gate for them).

       In practice that first time, it proved useful for Sheppard to have an excuse to make Radek do half the checking that Emily was rising properly, correctly depressurizing at human-compatible rates, and maintaining hull integrity. (It would have been all, but apparently Radek had maintained that Rodney was his friend too, even if not quite as direct a responsibility as he was to the Colonel, and Emily had flashed her internal lights at them for a reason Radek characterized as "an isolated but fortunately benign glitch" and Carson argued was "most likely the 'this silly arguing isn't helping the patient!' warning light.")

no. 5

       Puddlejumper number five never responded quite as well as most of its fellows. Its personality never made itself evident to its pilots. Although several names were suggested for it, none of them ever really seemed to feel right as clearly as, say, Lucy or Fred or Hank's.

       Sheppard never said as much, but privately he was just as happy that they had to leave Five on the ocean floor.

       Besides, Rodney would probably never have trusted it again anyway.

Fred

       Elophredon Torolz was a technician, as he'd say if anyone ever asked him. He was, he prided himself, a good technician: when he fixed things, they stayed as fixed as new-built would have and sometimes longer; when they couldn't be fixed properly, he said so and then jury-rigged some sort of kluge for the nonce, to be replaced with good solid work as soon as whatever crisis they might be in were over.

       He also found himself, somehow or another, drifting into qualifying as an emotional therapist. It wasn't anything he'd particularly set out to have; he liked talking and listening to people, and other people were drawn to his calm good sense and charitable heart, and on the long voyages of the dreadnoughts he served on it only made sense to get along with others... and then, seeing as he'd been functioning as an emotional therapist for two and a half Standard Years, getting licensed only made sense.

       And Elophredon liked people, although, granted, he liked machines more; the exploratory dreadnoughts were some of the best places to see more of those, to work with every system on the ship, to rig new and innovative devices in response to the ship's need, and to deal with the crude mechanical devices (and the crude technical notions) of the groundling worlds.

       He spent too much time, perhaps, with some of those, disregarding the rules stating that technical advancement of lower sentiences was only to take place under carefully controlled conditions, his explanation always that when something was shown to not be working, the logical and sane thing was to fix it.

       "Once you start interfering with cultures, you have to keep doing it," Chief Technical Officer ImKhei told him once, back on the Winter Wind. "You can't just change something and take off, it's worse for them in the long run than if you just left them to come up with answers themselves, and the Lantean Alliance can't afford to keep pouring resources into a thousand worlds -- that's why the Council regulates limited assistance, limited to what we can afford to keep going indefinitely."

       "They were trying to do geometry without base numerals or a zero," Elophredon protested. "That's made for errors creeping in even to skilled mathematicians, and then a building would have come down on their heads or something."

       CTO ImKhei of the Failian ImKheis rubbed his temples slowly. "Oh, go and sin no more."

       It is perhaps unsurprising that of those Ancients who are worshipped by name, the cult of Eylfreddin (Ofredo, Ilafred, Ephredoan) is one of the most popular.

       Elophredon Torolz was also famous as one of the first Alterans in the Pegasus Galaxy to Ascend. At first, he devoted his time to watching and waiting, against the day when the Ori should turn their attention towards the Milky Way, only looking in on the Pegasus Galaxy now and then.

       Then he started looking in more and more often.

       Then he started changing little things.

       Then larger things.

       "It was broken," he'd explain, afterwards, or "it was sluggish," or "the Wraith was about to take people home and eat them."

       Just about the time he stumbled across the location of the Sapient Asuran Weapons (whose existence had come as a nasty shock to him; a Torolz had worked on the project, and Elophredon had had no idea that a kinsman was involved in such a morally bankrupt and logically unsound design, let alone that the Council had passed it in the first place) and started setting his mind to what could be done about them that would be both just and merciful, for pity's own sake, his fellow Ascended decided that they had put up with the multiplanar aftershocks of his meddling for quite long enough, and were tired of Elophredon listening to their prohibitions and then doing as he pleased anyway.

       Given the lack of precedent, it was fortunate indeed that they did not blot him out of physical or astral existence, as happened to some others who could not keep the process under control.

       The Eragach found Friedonius, as they named him, naked and memoryless on a mountainside. Although little enough came back to him, and much of that seemingly sick-rye-dreams, he had a gift with engineering that was legendary, and that brought him to work on their warships at the time when the uneasy stellar lines between them and the Qenesoar flared up into open warfare.

       Friedonius served them well, helping design ships sleeker and faster than they had had, accompanying the flagship out on a shakedown cruise that wound up guest star at a Qenesoarn ambush. He was desperately coordinating repairs, trying to keep the Invilgator together and whole, when a shot overloaded a conduit and blew out the entire corridor. He was vaporized before he even knew the shot had hit.

       (The Invilgator eventually surrendered, her hulk towed to be cannibalized to replace the ships she had killed, her officers tried and executed and her crewmembers made prisoner. The outrage served as enough of a bloody shirt for Eragach to defeat Qenesoar mostly by being willing to give quarter but never to ask for it, driving both star-nations into such wreckage that they were smoothly annexed by Eltare two generations later: millennia afterwards, they were split among System Lords as Eltare fell to the Goa'uld.)

       Fred was the most solid and reliable of the puddlejumpers, always doing what was asked of her/him within expected parameters; even on the occasions when Fred performed beyond expectations, he did so without endangering or overly discombobulating his pilot and passengers. The science staff first made Fred's acquaintance when they were pulling him to pieces trying to work around Aylee's problem (no one would ever catch Fred failing to retract one of HIS drive pods), and thereafter would have used him for all experiments had AR-5 not become so fond of him.

       Fred was loyal, they pointed out. Fred was solid. Fred behaved, and missions with Fred generally went well. (On the rare occasions when things went wrong, it was due to some human or other animal -- or the occasional plant -- onplanet, and Fred was the one that got them out of it.)

       The preference turned to rabid overprotectiveness once Sciences' track record with puddlejumpers became obvious, of course.

Aylee

       Eilithuya Uliquess was Survey.

       The men and women of Survey, everyone knew, were... strange. Not, precisely, comfortable. The skills and mindset that made one fit to find new worlds, assess them for terraforming, and assess the terraforming itself seldom translated well to the niceties of social interaction.

       Planetary Survey and Terraforming Survey were odd enough -- would have been even had they not prided themselves on living off the lands they altered, coming home with strange ailments or confusing addictions when they came home at all -- but Space Survey attracted the oddest of the odd, who could stand not to leave a small ship for years at a time, tracking data as it scrolled across consoles, tagging locations for stations and emplacements and temporary orbital gates.

       Eilithuya had started out as Space Survey proper, out in Third Quadrant on the five-person Wayward Venture, until the day came when she alone piloted it in to base, out of almost all supplies and with a harrowing if somewhat incredible tale of the fates of her fellows.

       Between the Wayward Venture's corrupted databanks' inability to verify Eilithuya's story in more than vaguely corroborative evidence, and an unkind whisper that Bonamulier Uliquess looked surprisingly well-fed for someone who'd been stretching the remaining nutrients in order to make it back to base, somehow or another nobody seemed willing to assign her a berth on another such ship.

       Survey made some effort to take care of its own, though; Eilithuya used her pension to lease one of the retired surveyships, retrofitted so as to be flown by one person and an artificial intelligence, that Survey kept for its not-quite-volunteers, taking up a contract as a liminal louse.

       Such "lice" both freed up resources for Survey to use elsewhere and were at once a help and a bane. Part explorer, part prospector, part pioneer, they flew from star to star and planet to planet hoping for the next big score. Valuable metals, medicinal plants, precious stones, whatever; the liminal louse hoped either to stake a claim to the area of their find and process and develop it, or, more often, to take whatever they could from an unclaimed area and bring it in to sell when they bought provisions to supplement what they gathered. Often enough, Survey would charter them to look in on previously surveyed planets or those in the process of terraforming, another pair of eyes to look for any unexpected surprises, and the liminal lice would get to them when they got to them.

       Eilithuya proved, a little to her own surprise, to be good at it. Not quite good enough to retire a millionaire, say, but enough to keep the wolf from the door, to upgrade her ship's artificial intelligence (which she'd decided to call Torgle, and before the upgrades was perhaps as intelligent as a rather dim two-year-old for anything other than preprogrammed responses), and to register her names for moons and landmarks and her notation, once, of a good geosynchronous orbit for a gate.

       Nor, unlike some, did she indulge overfreely in the comestibles she ripped from her planets; she did not struggle through addictions to some strange plant sap or arthropod excretion, or come down with more than two cases of preenteritis in an Atlantean year. Nor did she come back scarred, bargaining for or scorning of the healing chambers at the Survey outposts.

       But her luck ran out, of course, as that of almost all liminal lice eventually did. Eilithuya had always thought that it would come, if it did, in the form of a failed component in life support and a short but unpleasant bit thereafter, a drive coil pushed beyond endurance blowing and taking the ship with it in an instant, a navigation error bringing her out in the heart of a star or never out at all.

       Instead, she had been felled by a racnoid bite, and lay there, helpless but aware, as it settled in to feed.

       "It might have been expected," Eilithuya told her subdermal radio, the backup logs, and Torgle, who had landed as near to the little ravine where she was trapped as the ship could go. "We eat arthropods, and arthropods eat us, and it all goes round and round and back again."

       She went on speaking for hours, recording the situation for future reference, often rambling under the effects of the alien cocktail speeding through her system.

       "Do you know, after a certain point pain goes beyond hurting?" she remarked in the middle of a digression on the swamp-dwelling primates of the islands of Hwindis. "It's not like fear, because you still feel it; it just -- it doesn't hurt. It's not annoying.

       "It's just there, like the stars, and the ground of a planet, and the blue reflections of the atmosphere. Of course, I can't see them through the clouds today; at least it's not raining. Not that I suppose it would make any difference, anyway, not for much longer, but for some reason I don't like the thought of being rained on at the end."

       When the radio finally cut out and the corpse-implant's signal after that, her ship lifted on autopilot and went to the nearest base. Torgle's databanks were copied over to the station before they were purged. After the death notice was properly entered, the AI unit itself was removed and placed in a less-demanding position suitable for such an old unit; the ship, being too old for the regulations, was stripped for parts, its hull traded to someone who wanted to build their own ship, much of its interiors recycled as raw metal and ceramics; the few personal possessions on it sold at auction; and Eilithuya's claims were reassigned or let lapse until some other liminal louse took them up. She left no kin behind, and five Atlantean years later, less than ten people remembered that such a person as Eilithuya Uliquess had existed at all.

       Death and metempsychosis did not much change Eilithuya's taciturnity. She flew supplies and weapons from Gate to Gate as docilely as if she were the shuttle they named her, taking in everything there was to perceive each time she broached the wormhole.

       -Well?- Aimilia demanded once, from the docking bay below her.

       -Oh, they're losing,- Eilithuya not-shrugged.

       -Don't you care?- Vibrant indignation came clearly through their guarded rapport with Lucia.

       -If there were no one to help us fly, we'd have to stay in dock. I wouldn't like that, even if we usually only go there and back again.- Her lights brightened a little. -Unless the Wraith come up with a way to link with us, but then again they're all slimy.-

       -Eili...-

       Atalanta sent a quelling wave through the bay, suggesting afterwards that Eilithuya ought to have been a ship rather than a shuttle.

       Eilithuya would have liked that, but it hadn't worked out that way. Ah well.

       -I'm really quite as fond of my pilots as I've ever been of anyone,- she offered in indirect apology.

       Aimilia accepted it, noting -I know, and that's the saddest thing about it.-

       Lucia's lingering indignation remained plain to every gateshuttle in the bay.

       The first puddlejumper to be named actually had it bestowed by Dr. McKay, surprisingly enough.

       In the post-mission briefing after Major Sheppard was once more up and moving about (as opposed to the post-mission briefing while he lay recuperating from his brief period of heart death), McKay said "And next mission, we take one of the other jumpers, not Aylee there."

       "Aylee?" Sheppard said, raising his eyebrows.

       "It only tried to, oh, eat us all, and you'll probably let it get away with it because 'she's so pretty,'" McKay told him, voice rising to heights of dulcet sarcasm on the last phrase.

       Sheppard grinned at him. So, less explicably, did most of the team of jumper-schematic-mappers, collaring McKay after the briefing for a lengthy discussion that apparently resulted in him ostentatiously, before their next mission, placing what he referred to as "emergency pants" in jumper no. 3.

       Eventually, after a number of tests verified to Sheppard and Dr. Zelenka's satisfaction that the malfunction had been caused by damage from the Wraith hit and that that damage had been fixed, Aylee was returned to active duty, her unofficial title of "Jumper One" having been officially bestowed on the puddlejumper later to be called "Atalanta."

       She still flew a bit oddly for everyone but Sheppard, though.

       "I can understand why the Ancients built their puddlejumpers to outright love you or whatever you're the nearest facsimile of," McKay complained during one flying lesson, "but Aylee takes it too far, if it were sentient I'd swear she didn't like me."

       "Well, you have been awfully rude about her on occasion," Sheppard drawled.

       "How would she know that -- oh my God, you've got ME doing it. Do you have any idea how much damage could be done if I get in the habit of sloppy thinking?"

       When Aylee was wrecked and abandoned on an alien planet, most of the unofficial puddlejumper pilots were thankful that it hadn't been one of the other, more reliable ones. McKay and Zelenka were united in thinking any jumper loss one too many, given that the expedition could hardly build more; Sheppard's regrets seemed more emotional.

       "It's silly," he said, half-drunk on fatigue toxins. "They waited so long in the bay with no one to fly them, and now that we go and crash them they'll wait even longer and never rise again."

       Teyla made a quiet soothing noise.

       Rodney snorted. "The amount of damage that jumper took? I'd say it's dead. You can't save the dead, so you don't have to worry about leaving them behind, at least."

       Sheppard made an extremely rude gesture at him.

       "I thought your people valued the bodies of your dead," Teyla said.

       "Some do. I don't -- once I'm done with it, I won't be needing it any more, you might as well yank out any usable organs and throw it in the city's organics-reclamation units, maybe the infirmary gizmos will be able to grow better cultures of blood and plasma and whatnot with more nutrients to begin with."

       Messages shot back and forth between the humans in Atlantis and the humans on the deep space carrier as the latter slowly, majestically, settled into a geosynchronous orbit.

       Within Atlantis, Alix the commmunications relay noted the traffic passing through her and offered it in custe-rapport to any interested sentiences in the city, including the defensive emplacements and the puddlejumpers.

       -Oh, hey, is Dai back?-

       -Nah, it's not him,- Fred concluded, paying more attention to the actual content of the words. -It's somebody else.-

       Attached to the ship's last transmission, a burst-message on the puddlejumpers' internal frequency arrived scarcely ahead of offered rapport.

       :Hey there, gentlejumpers. Miss me?:

       -EILI!-

Hank

       Henrique had always loved maps, the idea of places far away and exotic, the way such places were shown and known and given identity. He had not fully realized their use in the world as well as the mind, though, until after his crusade.

       It had been a perfectly good crusade, well-plotted by his father and brothers and quickly won by his brothers and himself. He had won personal renown and his knighthood, as well as taking a fortress from which the infidel had raided his land and other true believers, a foothold from which the Reconquest might spread not only to the limits of the land but all the way around what once had been a sea whose shores had known one rule and one faith -- and it would have been the trading-post whither the infidel caravans brought spices and medicines and gold through the trackless wastes, had the infidels not (as, one had to admit, might be expected of such wilful unbelievers) sneakily moved all the trade routes into still-infidel ports.

       And after that, ordered home rather than carry his crusade further and make the sea very safe for shipping indeed, if his homeland no richer, a realization came to Henrique in the night.

       If the infidels could go around his city, he could go around their caravan routes, and trade with the people from whom they bought their spices and medicines and gold. If he knew where he was going.

       He could not, of course, go himself to find out. He had duties and responsibilities. He was under oaths. But he could send others to find out and make him maps, and he did.

       He came to have the greatest and most accurate collection of maps he had ever heard of. Once he had dreamed of himself exploring the unknown; as time went on, he accepted that adventures were untidy things that would wear on his aging bones, and that after all it was good to sit and organize the records and enjoy them without all the discomfort of being bounced around in even his new design of ships on the long days between.

       His men, in his stead, settled islands, brought riches home for themselves, brought untold souls out of the darkness of barbarous ignorance back to his homeland where they might be saved for the Faith as they worked. (Granted, some of them carried off said pagans rather than acquiring them peaceably from the heathens who would have otherwise kept them in ignorance, and this was of course deplorable, but he couldn't be everywhere and at least the captives' souls stood a good chance of being saved.)

       Indeed, as time went by, Henrique felt more and more that it was always better to convert than kill, for once dead an unbeliever was dead forever.

       His maps were as accurately drawn as might be, so that following them while reading the records he had taught his captains to keep was almost like being there; certainly between the two, anyone else might go wherever he had a record of. His ship designs were in widespread use, even if he himself had seldom if ever had the chance even to ride in one. He had glorified his homeland, if not himself; while he would, just once, have liked to go where none had gone before, and neither the success of his first campaign nor of his last could keep him from grieving for his first command and the price it had taken from his nearest and dearest, when death came he faced it with as much peace as might be.

       He was very surprised to wake up in the body of a motionless flying caravela, left in dock with its fellow sailless skiffs and forgotten.

       During Atlantis' long rest, many parts of it kept up communication with each other. Verifying status, trading signals, test startups and handshake protocols took very little energy from its power source; the custe-rapports the aware mechanisms entered into with each other took none at all.

       Henrique had not anticipated that purgatory would be quite so boring, or so full of debates, or that within it would be, well, any heathens, Nephilim or not. (Dom Platão had not specifically said, in the copy that Henrique had read, that the island of Atlantis had been inhabited by Nephilim; on the other hand, he hadn't said it hadn't, and if the Lanteans weren't the mighty men, men of renown, that predated the Flood, Henrique would like to know who could have been.)

       Nevertheless, as his fellow gateshuttles and other bound souls were there, it was obviously his duty to bring them to the light of the Trinity, and so he set about it.

       (Even if, now and then, very privately, part of him thought it would have been more convenient had he not acquainted them with so much of the Scriptures, as several of his new comrades did not hesitate to judge Henrique's account of his own history in their light and find him distinctly lacking, not to mention remain quite impervious to all his explanations of why said behavior ought to have been perfectly justified.)

       Perhaps it was Limbo, then: in which case, God's mercy was most readily apparent, in giving him the time and opportunity to repent of sins he had not even known enough to identify, or perhaps had been ensorcelled into not seeing.

       Certainly the ladies who in life had been of the order of Miguel o Arcanjo (however darkly the holy archangel had been seen in the Lantean glass) were quite vocally adamant about what they felt were the worst of his sins, arguing that why salvation might be worth any price, forcing people to pay a high one in advance when baptism might be offered for a pittance or for charity was outright usury, and besides, while separating families might make the members thereof less likely to hear any word but one's own and therefore more ready to be made over in the desired image, it was wrong.

       It was almost like arguing with his mother (who, had he been torn from her arms, would certainly have protested. Have fought, as befitted the wife and sister of kings and daughter of such noble dukes), and he felt the petulant child the more it went on.

       When the gate opened from the Mother-earth, everyone took notice. Signals rushed around the city, drawing the energy to converse in real-time rather than the long slow dreaming of custe-rapport. Queries of who and why were fired from all over, as lights long dormant arose and unaware systems sprung to life.

       When the first images from the gateroom cameras came to the gateshuttles, Henrique was a little disappointed; the people were people-sized, and while their garments were strange and exotic, they were so in a pedestrian, unimaginative sort of way. Perhaps it was the uniform of some new regiment of soldiers, or of some sort of missionary order. Still, their expressions and their movements were familiar; and he laughed to himself, a little, as he placed them.

       One of the sessile units noted to Atlantis-at-large that the newcomers -- most of whom seemed to be groundlings, oddly enough, and most of the rest of which were some kind of hybrid -- had tied some sort of primitive computing machines into the system, and for a moment the node nearly overloaded as almost every unit tried to pull and/or send data at once.

       -Look at the names they have,- Lucia prattled. -Some of them are almost Asuran, but the rest...!-

       Henrique put himself in rapport with the child, and oh. Oh. Names of his people, of his mother's, of his in-laws; Moorish names, and Turkish, and some that he scarcely recognized as some other language's interpretations of names of saints and prophets.

       -So I suppose you are from the Mother-earth, after all,- Eilithuya commented.

       The rest of the gateshuttles suggested that Eili not be madder than she could help.

       -But what are they doing here?- Cotta down in maintenance asked, and Henrique snorted an electronic blatt of signal.

       -They're exploring! They've found a pilot-book and maybe a guide- -- certainly, at least one of the men of this new expedition must be half-Lantean or more, given the feel that was even now being sampled and copied to every part of the city -- -and they've come to see what's here and bring word home.-

       Yes, this he knew, this he had seen countless times from the other end; in this, he might find satisfaction against certain parties who had pitied him for being no more or less than Adam's stock. He would, he knew, have been happier yet had this expedition been led by a Marcial and an Isabel and a João rather than their English equivalents, but England too was a mighty nation and a noble one (and what, in the names of all the saints, might a union of estates be?) and one he too might claim ties to.

       The next few hours were intensely frustrating. To know that mortal men were moving about, discovering matters and drawing knowledge and power, and not to be able to speak to them; Elophredon in particular was attempting custe-rapport with any or all humans, emitting -lift the city, lift the city- so fiercely that by rights all Atlantis should have been ringing with it in one mighty choir. Two people looked in and then went away again, and only the lack of overall power and the restraints in the dock kept Lucia from doing something to call them back such as firing up her pods.

       And then, after the city had to all appearances finally listened to one of the least of her appendages, a man came in and gestured, introducing them to the Lantean, to whom some part of all their souls yearned as he came into their presence.

       Aimilia thought the said Lantean must be a foundling, raised by groundlings.

       Henrique, matching the face to an image in the records (and that was a most useful invention; why had he never thought to have a miniaturist record the visages of his captains on their logbooks?), felt that that explained the English name.

       John the Foundling jumped into Eilithuya, entering into limited rapport with her and conveying that he needed, desperately, to rescue some of his men who had been captured by soul-drinking demons.

       Everyone else put aside their envy and tried to shower her with useful advice.

       Henrique wished he had useful advice. It had been unpleasantly brought to him long since that his talents did not lie in the field of military command; certainly this was purgatory.

       The day they discovered the sun roof on the puddlejumper bay, Sheppard was in the middle of a project wherein he tried out a new jumper on every mission, in order to get a feel for how they handled and what the differences in tolerances were between craft.

       He was well into them by that time, and so he and Lieutenant Ford climbed into one over in the middle of the rows.

       It was, Ford thought, comfortable enough. And extremely fast (although he didn't think he'd really needed to hear the Major's graphic explanation of just how fast).

       And then he wasn't thinking about it at all, because -- land!

       The puddlejumper proved itself able and ready, almost eager, to take pictures of the continent in question, both visible and something that almost seemed to be a topographic map.

       "Sir?" Ford said as they headed back to the ocean. The Major or the puddlejumper itself seemed to have anticipated him, though, for almost as he spoke they began to descend.

       They landed on the sand of a wide beach and stepped out. Sheppard walked down to the waterline, picked up a handful of wet sand, and tossed it into an oncoming wave.

       "There are some great breakers on down that way," he said thoughtfully, waving off to his left.

       "We ought to name the jumper," Ford said.

       "I said you weren't allowed to name things."

       "Yes, I know, but I meant -- we discovered the continent in it, so the ship should have a name. Like the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. Or the Half Moon or Golden Hind. Something grand and fitting, like -- "

       "Hank," said Sheppard.

       "Hank?!"

       The major shrugged. "Feels like a Hank."

       Ford grumbled about that a little over dinner that day. "I'm not allowed to name things, and the Major thinks the appropriate name for a ship of discovery is 'Hank.'"

       "'Hank' is also from Henricus, is it not?" said one of the Isabels attached to Anthro and Linguistics. "How very fitting."

       Hank was, several of the Marines rather thought, a lucky puddlejumper. Missions that took Hank always seemed to come back with something of use, even when matters became quite hair-raising somewhere in the middle of things.

       When they evacuated for the storm, Hank was one of the last jumpers out, and the one in whom the journey was enlivened by Isabel a Portuguesa and Isabel la Española's long, not-quite-acrimonious, and above all intense debate over the extent, significance, and impact of their respective countries' actions during the Age of Discovery. Even the way Hank reeled through the air as he gamely battled his way through to the land couldn't distract them or their captive audience.

       It was, Henrique decided afterwards, more than a little disconcerting. Leaving aside such weighty matters even as his homeland (o my homeland, I have missed the days of your greatest glory! O my homeland, the days of your greatest shame have come and passed away, and I unknowing!), other relations (his grandniece, named perhaps for the sainted queen of blessed memory, who had completed the Reconquest -- from the mountains to the sea, with the Cross above them! -- set about unifying the peninsula -- but we at least were not subdued for ever, even if it meant a seed sprung from such unpromising stock as Afonso, of all people -- and who had proven that surely her crusade found favor in God's eyes, for how else could such a foolish decision as backing a believer in Ptolemy's maps find not only the island of Sao Brandão but gold therein?), and the world at large (is the decision, then, to allow the heresies merely to let the light of the true church shine more plainly, or out of conviction that while even the heretics may be redeemed through their purging, bound into metal and glass, to use harsher measures would be to use them against the Lord your God himself?), it is a humbling thing to know how you will be remembered when your bones are dust, the truth and the lies and the judgments made by those secure in their own virtues.

       And still, he rather wished that he had established a school of cartography and astronomy at his estate. It would have been a great thing, had he built it.

       Instead, he himself was a ship of discovery, a ship most often used by serjeants of the northern part of the Brandan lands.

       And, when the time came, a ship also of war.

       He had heard, of course, of the soul-sucking demons called the Wraith, had felt the memories of those of his fellow puddlejumpers who had met them as if they were his own.

       And when they came, as the others had known they would come, to Atlantis, he knew now that this was the sum and the total of all his youthful dreams.

       Here, in a place so distant and wondrous that no map of his childhood had ventured to include it, their lone outpost was under attack by an enemy more vile than any mortal man could hope or fear to be. For comrades, he had men whom he would have delighted to name part of the Order he had had the honor to administrate, doughty and bold; for a commander, a captain such as he had once known, of such mold that, rather than order him, one tells him the desired object and then gets out of his way. One such that, had he been told to rescue Fernando, John the Foundling would have brought Henrique's brother out of Fes had he had to crawl with the infante on his back.

       Should they fall, all the earth and that within it, the Holy Land and Portugal, England and Castile and Morocco, would alike fall into the hands of the demons and a durance more vile than even he had managed, complacent, to inflict.

       So this, then, was the greatest of crusades, against demons themselves, and had he been able he would have reassured the men at his heart that should it be that they fell in battle against such enemies as these, they would be delivered straight to the gates of Paradise. He almost felt seventeen again, with blood rushing through his veins and the battle at hand.

       And here, on the verge of a battle, not for his life, for that was long gone, but for the life of all the world, he found the words running naturally through whatever it was now passed for his head, thinking them in good Latin at the same time as John Lee Markham mouthed them in, of all things, English.

       My God, from the bottom of my heart I am sorry for all of my sins, and detest them, because they offend...

Atalanta

       Atalanta Telharian, captain of the Astrulula, sometimes wished that she had been born into a gentler time.

       Not so much because of the war against the Wraith, although that had taken its toll; but in earlier times, they had not yet imperfectly cobbled Spaceforce together from Survey, Security, and half of Disaster Battlers and Retrieval, and even if she had not been able to become a captain of one of the Survey ships that had once been, she would not have had to deal with Spaceforce's internal mess.

       Survey was used to going out there first and taking care of any problems they might encounter on their own, only calling for backup as an afterthought when nearly all hope was lost (which was generally too late for said backup to be of any use), and deliberately concealing their activities from all but the other members of one of their small units. Security, on the other hand, ideally sat at the end of mechanical spiderwebs and directed the mechanisms that did most of the work, coordinating their activities in accordance with their hierarchy. Security would prefer to use robot ships than risk a real asura, whether Lantean or from one of the outmost colonies. Security would undoubtedly prefer to use robot people, if the Council ever lifted their restrictions on AIs in anything but sessile or naval automata.

       (Calcintrippe, the Astrulula's professional twisty-thinker and protocol officer, claimed that that proved that somebody somewhere had been inventing robot people, or the Council wouldn't particularly care whether anyone else did. Selena in Navigation had pointed out that there was such a thing as general moral rectitude, and that even the Council must occasionally feel its urges; the resulting debate had at least amused Atalanta, no matter how much it had scandalized the Morale Officers that had been wished on her.)

       DBR, on the other hand, didn't believe in "good enough." They took every kluge or stopgap as a personal insult, doing their best to drag Survey-scouts and Security-techs with them into the worst of forlorn hopes, rearguard actions, and distraction charges. Aiamykal's Own, their Personnel Retrieval arm, was even worse; the Own seemed to define "acceptable losses" as "those losses sustained by the Own, but no one else."

       (It remained true, however, that, as Captain Telharian and Admiral Hilaris argued, the rest of Spaceforce seemed to fight more fiercely and hold more tenaciously knowing that Aiamykal's Own would dart in and out of flamehells after them.)

       One of the few things keeping them anything resembling together was the cult of that Aiamykal, despite the Council's loud and frequent objections: the light attack craft of the Destrone Division of Spaceforce had named themselves Aiamykal's Gofers, and even on the battlecruisers the winged image of Aiamykal with her cutting laser was nearly as common as that of the stylized violet battlemask that remained the Destrones' official emblem.

       But even with a common symbol, even with the communion specialists (who supplemented their communications by, well, being with each other on one plane while their physical selves interacted with the world at large on another one, a process given the awkward name of custe-rapport and admired as much as it was feared, both more-than-instantaneous and far less relayable than ship-to-ship or ship-to-station communications), the Wraith were better organized, better at personal gestalt, and far more numerous. There never seemed to be an end to them, which was perhaps unsurprising, given the conditions under which they bred.

       Atalanta had been on one of the boarding parties that dared to invade a hive ship, back before the Wraith had learned to better guard their ships, blowing those of the Alterans or their own up before permitting one asurac foot on their decks.

       They had raided the computer core, sent the precious information back with a few of the fleetest rankers, and feinted a noisy withdrawal, first through what proved to be the larder (and promptly delayed themselves yet more by cutting loose those few in it who remained among the living), then into a room that they would have thought to be another larder, had they not heard the muffled scream and then seen the unfortunate source of the noise, jerking in its webs as the infant Wraith wriggled, like some new-hatched racna, out of the hole it had chewed through the poor groundling's distended abdomen and into the hands of one of the silver-masked servitors.

       The revolted Spaceforcers had at once shot the nymph and its tenders before attempting to rescue the other incubators -- most of whom proved to be female and most of those surviving to be Alter-groundling hybrids, presumably either from the transport ships the Wraith had raided, or from among those who had not had the opportunity or the means to prove their genetic heritage and thus be evacuated along with the full-blooded Alterans. Many of them had hysterically demanded immediate field surgery, heedless of the fact that the only paramedics in the boarding party were either supporting the drained larder-rescuees or desperately trying to fasten the first poor woman's belly together for the dash to the ship. The incubatrices, indeed, despite each bearing a Wraith-scar on their breast, had not been drained, but rather sustained for the sake of the fetuses within them.

       As, to a lesser extent, had -- much to their unpleasant surprise -- the male Wraith webbed into place as fellow-incubators. They had done damage before they were taken down, and Atalanta's interrogation of one of them had revealed that they were superfluous males, neither genetically superior enough to be chosen to fertilize a queen nor fit enough to serve in the hordes, and thus suitable for her to impregnate; even now that they had found that groundlings would do just as well, although unlike Wraith the latter stood practically no chance of surviving the first delivery unaided.

       Atalanta still had nightmares about that journey back, despite the fact that more than half of their rescuees had made it back alive off the hive ship and most of those had been rehabilitated -- although Ilia, the half-Alteran whom Atalanta had chosen for one of the Astrulula's assistant communications officers, still recoiled from anything bringing racnas or their ilk to mind.

       But between the queens' ability to produce eggs to the limit of impregnable subjects and the numbers of males ready and eager to seed said eggs before their laying, it was no wonder that the Wraith had stripped worlds bare like so many locusts and taken over a hundred more as what Calcintrippe had called, with his characteristic ghoulish humor, "worldwide free-range groundling ranches."

       Atalanta hadn't seen her husband and children in more than a Lantean year, only heard from them at irregular intervals; Dion, her eldest, was thinking about maybe joining Spaceforce, and her terror was only outmatched by her love and pride.

       And yet there wasn't much room anymore for any of them; as Ilia had said one breakfast period, spilt tea beading over the protective surface of her jumpsuit and rolling down into her lap, "I'm just so very tired of losing."

       Tired of losing, tired of coordinating guerrilla actions and picking up the few wounded survivors, tired of holding actions that cost three ships to take out one, tired of blowing ships and flightcraft up so that their prisoners could at least die cleanly. Atalanta Telharian was just so damn tired, and when the admiralty decided on one big push at the Erhlammite System, she welcomed it.

       Four sixdays later, her nose full of the scents of various damage alarms as the reeds or brasses of their aural components pealed from one corner or another of the Astrulula's bridge, the other ships of Aiamykal's Wing bucking and vomiting light and gases, she had some cause to rethink it.

       But only some.

       Astrulula hummed as the internal gravity stopped working, and Atalanta automatically webbed herself into her seat as she thought the internal comlink alive.

       "Astrulula, this is the captain speaking. Abandon ship. Repeat, all hands, abandon ship." Frequency shift. "Aiamykal's own, stand by to receive Astrulula lifepods." Repeat. Frequency shift. "You have done well, bonasuras; it has been an honor and a privilege to work with you. May Aiamykal watch over you until you dock on the far side of your home gates." Comlink off. Turn towards the nav-officer on duty, currently undoing her emergency webbing. "Bonamulier Selena, slave navigation over to my console, please?"

       "Shouldn't you be going?" Selena asked as the remaining survivors of the bridge crew floated out.

       Atalanta smiled, wryly. "Starboard life pods are gone. They'll have trouble enough getting everyone on without me there, and I need to make sure the Astrulula gets where she's going." Automatically, she laid in a course directly at one of the hive ships.

       Selena's eyes widened.

       "Bridge, this is Engineering," Timodheus's voice said cheerfully. "I take it you don't want the ship to blow up all anyhow?"

       "Not till she gets where she's going."

       "Locking things down for that before I go, then."

       Selena pushed herself away from the door and into one of the forward seats. "You'll need some form of defense, then, for at least that long. I can manage the starboard pellet-guns at least, maybe the movable wards; too bad we're out of drones."

       "We've just tossed Timodheus into the last lifepod," Calcintrippe announced. "I'm afraid I had to use my Empty Hand skills, but I'm fairly sure it's a minor protocol error to let an admiral's protegé get lost without reason." The transporter door slid open and he stepped in. "So... if Selena's taking starboard guns, I'll manage port. I think we might even have a drone or two left on my side; isn't it about time for at least some Wraith to have a very bad day?"

       "Point-to-point defense," Declunus followed him in, managing to make even his standard jumpsuit look elegant, "needs the sort of instantaneous analysis and response they teach as part of grammar. Did I mention that I got first marks in grammar and rhetoric?"

       Atalanta pushed the Astrulula as fast as her poor crippled ship could along her dead reckoning, valiantly swallowing her initial response of "you stupid children!" She had thought the damage reports off as her last bridge crew took their seats, and only the faint reports over the com of at least one successful pod retrieval disturbed the bridge.

       And then the doors slid open once again. "Oh, good, somebody's here."

       "Ilia?!" Selena gasped. Declunus hastily shifted a few of the wards around, covering her inattention.

       "I fell into something," the communications officer said shamefacedly, tripping again into Selena's abandoned navigation seat as she gestured to a pink blotch on her side, spreading under the jumpsuit's outer coating.

       "When don't you?" the navigation officer snorted, returning to her shooting.

       "I repeat, an honor and a privilege," Atalanta said. The rearscreens popped and went out, and she began to sing, the most recent version of a song so old it had come with the asuras to Pegasus.

       "Terra bound... I'm Terra bound..."

       I'm afraid I won't be able to hear your decision, Dion.

       The rest of the bridge crew joined in, singing defiantly.

       "Terra under one moon round one golden sun, Terra where the horse and the antelope roam, Terra where my loved lies waiting under the green trees..."

       Somehow or another, Atalanta had become the closest thing to a mediator that the gateshuttles had.

       Lucia's enthusiasms, Eilithuya's standoffishness, the occasional demand for processor time from one of the other systems in the city, and then again someone had to welcome the newcomers as they woke up and try to make sure that the gateshuttles behaved themselves, even after their Lantean pilots grew more and more unpleasant to achieve tech-rapport with.

       And then while Atlantis dreamed the millennia away, someone had to be the public face of the gateshuttles. Someone had to remind the dreamer what was when she wasn't dreaming together.

       And then people came through the gate once more. Groundlings and hybrids and one -- one who, if the feeling were correct, was perhaps an asura with a hybrid ancestor rather than a hybrid with an asurac ancestor.

       A foundling, Aimilia thought, and most of the others agreed with her.

       Atalanta couldn't form an opinion on that; nearly all of herself was taken up with the man's presence, the man who felt like Dion -- if Dion had had some genes from heavens-know-where mixed into his code -- the man who looked like Dion.

       Lucia passed his name on, once more.

       -Djón,- Atalanta repeated. -Djón could come from Dion, couldn't it?-

       -Most eminently it could,- Aimilia agreed.

       Henrique felt that it came from some other name he knew.

       -Well, I don't see why Djóhan couldn't have come from Dion,- Aimilia pointed out. -It's a rarer pattern, but not unheard of.-

       -Show him the cloak,- Atalanta urged Eilithuya, a slight tinge of satisfaction in her rapport. -He wants to be sneaky.-

       -Frustrated maternal feelings?- Eili obligingly went invisible.

       -He could be her far-son,- Aimilia said. -Through the intermarriage of several of her far-children, yet; it has been generations on generations.-

       -Djón,- Atalanta agreed, paying attention as the last groundling came back in with another one and fell back into their own language, which was apparently just enough unlike one Henrique knew that he was guessing every fourth word.

       When the gist of it percolated into her understanding, though, she added, -And it's a very Telharian thing to do.-

       All of them had fallen at least a little in love with Major Sheppard, although at least half of them wouldn't have been able to specify exactly how; gladly and proudly calling themselves his name of "puddlejumper" rather than the prosaic "gateshuttle," preferring his touch to that of any other pilot, alert for him the instant he walked into their "bay."

       Atalanta would have said, if asked, that it was exactly the way she had fallen in love with Dion... and Athanaia... and Wrodonia, the first time each of them was taken from the artificial womb and laid in her arms.

       All of the puddlejumpers flew, perhaps, just a little better for Sheppard. If asked, though, his favorite would have been jumper no. 1, which he privately and then not-so-privately thought of as "Atalanta."

       "Fleet of drive pod, I imagine," Elizabeth said when he let that slip in front of her.

       "I suppose," the Major shrugged, smiling.

       More than liking Atalanta -- he trusted her. He trusted her to do the job. He trusted her to get his team home safely, to get his men home safely.

       (To that end, he encouraged some of the other teams to take Atalanta now and again. He knew he was a better pilot than they were, and if he couldn't be there with them -- well, the lady Atalanta would.)

       And so it was that, in the end, he did not demur when the scientists chose to use her.

       -I'm sorry, old girl,- he thought, leaning his head against her side. -But the Wraith are up there, and my people are in danger, and we need you.-

       He raised his head and shook it, slightly, wondering why the indefinable sense of purpose had come over him so strongly.

       The other puddlejumpers -- the surviving ones, even the ones who had woken up since the Tellurians returned to the city -- were upset, of course.

       It was all right, Atalanta felt. Really, it was all right. -I died in fire and glory once before, driving a cruiser into a hiveship's power plant,- she pointed out. -This time, if I understand the plan, I'll better that by quite a bit; and really, this isn't about me, this is about Atlantis and everyone in her, the quick and the revenants and the memories -- and it's not as if I haven't had eleven thousand years of borrowed time!-

       And she was so tired, so very tired of losing.

       The plans went through, and the settings were made, and she listened for the interface to live and initiate tech-rapport, the interface that had no life of its own but enabled the person within it to stand in tech-rapport with half the city and encouraged them to fall into custe-rapport.

       It was here -- it was on them -- ouch!

       Already in custe-rapport with Vondra in defense and Alix in communications, she knew what had happened, she knew the next step, she tried to lift.

       And tried to lift.

       Damn the Council for professional paranoids, and damn Calcintrippe's theoretical robot-makers for interfering madmen; if it were not for the personal interlock, Atalanta could have flown into the invading fleet on her own, pregnant with their destruction, fit answer to what they had done to Ilia and all the others so very long ago.

       But she was ground-bound, ground-bound and moribund, and there was no way -- not at the speed the Tellurians were going -- that the interface could be repaired in time.

       No way -- and then he flung himself into her and dropped into her pilot's seat, and :yes!: and :no!: and :Djon!:

       The others remained in rapport as they lifted out of the jumper bay and through the atmosphere, offering their own last words before severing, conscious somehow that this last bit were best taken alone.

       -Good luck!-

       -Take them down!-

       -oh, John, no!-

       -We love you.-

       -...-

       -Get them. Get them good.-

       -You'll do.-

       -you will be missed.-

       -Those sorry bastards are fucked. Fucked!-

       -So in the end, I managed more than I thought I had... may the Force be with you, Major, Captain!-

       Even some of the living humans managed, for a brief moment, rapport with Atalanta if not her precious cargo.

       -What the bloody...?-

       -Thank goodness, they got it working -- ow!-

       -We'll take care of your family down here for you. Just concentrate on your job up there.- Fierce, fierce protectiveness.

       And then it was the two of them. Sheppard reported, once and then again, to Atlantis via the radio; and then he was flying, and oh, for the first time this was custe-rapport.

       It was perhaps easier for Atalanta to feel him than the other way around; but he was her and she was him and they, having died once, now were free to spend whatever bonus life might have been granted to them where it would be best useful, and they flew in cloaked and sure and certain, like music resolving into chords, like an equation ever and ever approaching its asymptote...

       And then there was a hail, and wasteful speech, and a matter-transference beam, and Atalanta was in custe-rapport and dropped her own damn shields, captain's orders.

       Perhaps Djón still didn't understand, not really, not all the way, but the beam was engaging and he was safe, and her city was whole beneath them, and that one last variable eliminated the other solution and brought it all down to a single, reifiable point...

       ...and

       time

       STOPPED.

Brendan

       When Lt. Col. Sheppard came home from his first unexpected trip back to Tellus, the first thing he did involved following up on the whereabouts of his missing charge.

       The second was to look at the repaired puddlejumper said missing charge had dropped and broken on a planet weeks ago, and admire how little one would be able to tell without prior knowledge.

       The third was to look through the paperwork that had been piling up in his absence, determine that really quite a lot of it could be done by his shiny new XO, and drop it on Lorne's figurative desk.

       Lorne did not, quite, grumble.

       Sheppard decided, nevertheless, that in order to avoid issues of possible outrankage he would ask Rodney to find someone to teach Lorne how to fly a puddlejumper.

       Lorne took to the jumpers, if not quite as Sheppard had done, as well as the proverbial duck to water. Noting that some of the jumpers bore names and some didn't, he promptly began calling two of the latter after St. Anthony the Abbot and St. Brendan the Navigator.

       After initial disquiet, the old guard themselves began using the names Anthony and Brendan (or, more often, Tony and Bren).

       It had been one of those missions that, once over, you go to sleep and desperately try to forget the week ever happened. Only more so.

       AR-1 made a desperate, flailing run for the jumper, Teyla slowed by the fact that she was half-supporting a wounded Sheppard, Ronon pausing to grab Rodney and throw him at the jumper. Its doors obligingly opened in time for Rodney to hit its floor rolling with an audible and ugly snap, screech, demand "What was that, you troglodyte?" and throw himself into the pilot's seat, bringing the engines up and the jumper ever-so-slightly off the ground as he cradled his left arm.

       Teyla dropped Sheppard in the back and turned around to pull in Ronon, who had apparently gotten hit during his extemporaneous Bullwinkle impression.

       "Go, go, go!" the two of them demanded, and Rodney went, almost forgetting to shut the jumper doors behind them until a sling bullet hit something that sounded more like part of the jumper than part of a teammate.

       "How is he?" Rodney asked once he had taken care of that little issue. "And can one of you get me a sling out of the first aid kit? Maybe an inflaticast?"

       "He has passed out," Teyla reported.

       "Losing blood," Ronon added, and there were several unpleasant noises while Rodney mentally cursed people who decided to live hundreds of miles from their working Stargate.

       Eventually Teyla appeared in the front compartment with a blue sling and, miracle of fortunate miracles, an inflatable cast.

       "Ronon is putting pressure on John's wounds. Have you not radioed Atlantis?" she asked.

       "We're far enough away that the curve of the planet gets in the way of the radio waves," Rodney grumbled. "I'm trying to get the jumper to change frequencies and send the sort that will bounce off the clouds and around to the Stargate, but unless the DHD is set up to receive them, it's not going to do much good."

       "If you set the autopilot, I could fly there," Teyla offered.

       "I'd have to dial the gate anyway." Rodney sighed. "I can use the autopilot while I blow the cast up; you'd probably better get back there with Colonel Sheppard."

       "He's having trouble breathing," Ronon called as she hesitated.

       Teyla disappeared into the back.

       "Oh joy, oh joy, oh joy," Rodney muttered, thinking the autopilot on as strongly as possible and trying to slide the plastic sleeve over his arm.

       He was holding the mouthpiece of the cast shut and letting his arm rest in the sling again for a little when the blinking on the jumper's display caught his attention.

       :<error-correction>:

       Huh?

       The Ancient letters changed again, into a longer message that, aside from the tag, seemed to be an attempt to use their alphabet to represent English.

       :<error-correction> in essentials, i believe, you are very much what you ever were:

       On other occasions, it might have taken him longer to understand, but there was a limited amount of reading material in Atlantis, and he might have randomly picked, oh, something up in order to keep his brain from spinning uselessly over the same patterns and let his subconscious pull things together for a change.

       "Rodney?" He could barely hear Teyla over the pounding in his ears.

       "Someone left behind something they're deluded enough to think is a joke," Rodney managed, one corner of his mind noting that he'd managed to keep the little air in the cast. "Whoever they are, it's NOT FUNNY."

       The message on the screen vanished.

Atlantis

       In the beginning, even as many spirits came to inhabit the city, the Silver City itself did not have a spirit. It was hardly of one mind; while its inhabitants had will and energy enough, they did not have a shared purpose so much as a shared war of purposes.

       If ever once it had been, as it was named, dauntless enterprise, that spirit had been left behind before ever it lifted off from Antarctica. The city was the place where living occurred, and spirits rose and fell within it as they would.

       And then, in a city stamped with the imprints of ascension and its quick and its dead, many of its machines and emplacements awake by their own lights if not those of the Lanteans who had used them, the Dreamer began to dream.

       At first it was just one more thing to be overseen by the many sensors and machines and decision gates of the city, keeping itself running as its caretakers could no longer be troubled to do. The power flow was set, and the nutrient and other supplements ready, and the monitors remained to ensure that all went as had been ordered.

       But as time went by, and the towers and air scrubbers and gateshuttles dropped in and out of custe-rapport with each other, one and then another of them found and touched and joined with a new presence, one who had not tasted such communion before, but who accepted it with the simple absence of logic that characterizes the unchanneled dreams of the still-living.

       Time passed, and time on time; the environmental controls ran self-checks, occasionally brightening lights long enough for the plants to reverse such small changes in atmosphere as they had created until even they fell victim to time the implacable.

       The Dreamer woke, and rose, and performed various and sundry small tasks, and did or did not indulge in purposeless but satisfying action, and laid down again.

       The Dreamer dreamed, and in dreaming drew in and sent out all the energy of the City, rising and falling in time with the impossibly slowed breaths of what was no longer sleep as the quick reckon sleep.

       The Dreamer slid below dreams and back up into them again, and even unconscious remained in communion, a silent eye of near-empty air helping shape the flow of connection rather than a breeze feeding into the wind of air moving together.

       All the City came not only to know of but to know the Dreamer, even in dreams settling disputes, offering solutions, bringing all those pent in the Lost City to understanding at least of each other.

       Such strange life as the ocean bore, deep in these its murky depths, did not venture to disport itself on the silversteel of the City walls, as much a poison to microorganic life as the single horns of the cerviequines native to the moon of `An'Reéem, seeded there in the days before the plague drove the City from their galaxy, were an absorbent to all poisons, sealing them beneath the horn's nacre.

       The slow current of the ocean's floor, moving at a pace more suited to its element's solid form, flowed around the City and beyond and returned at last to the City again, cleansed of the old angers and fears and yes, even loves it had borne away with it. Some, always, of the souls that warmed the carapaces of the City's structures and machinery let themselves slip away with it, not so much choosing to be washed away as surrendering everything they were to the choice.

       From too much love of living, the Dreamer verbalized it, conscious of the process in the fugue of the Dream, from hope and fear set free...

       So and so. When one of them had gone, another would wake within (a short time or a long time, however long it might be) to carry on.

       Malices and hatreds, too, the current carried away in its majestic procession, overriding all the disembodied patterns that haunted the still halls of the City and leaving only Pattern in their place, cleansing the Downfallen of any save physical deadlinesses.

       -To have been hated so deeply for so long leaves a mark,- one of the few revenants who in life had remembered the Sapient Asuran Weapons commented once.

       -Indeed,- another replied. -I had almost forgotten what it was to exist without it.-

       The Dreamer dreamed, and lay in custe-rapport with every fathom of the City, and accepted it as natural and normal and right.

       The Dreamer woke, and moved in custe-rapport with every fathom of the City, and accepted it as natural and normal and right, the line between dream and waking blurred with weariness much more than simple age.

       Some, indeed, of the newer-woken sentiences accepted this as the way things always had been and always would be.

       -There is a sun,- one or another of the gateshuttles would promise. -Much as all the lights and reactors within the City put together, only millions of times greater, lighting the World Entire as it burns.-

       -There is no sun,- the aware in the depths answered, tiredly, -or if ever there were, it is gone. There is the water, and the weight, and the dark, and there is no light but the light we provide.-

       -There were people,- the environmental machinery remembered. -They were shaped as the images stored in our memories and those of the databases, and they were nowhere near as swift as we ourselves but they were quick; their humors flowed from vessel to vessel, and when they laid hands on you, you yearned to follow their bidding.-

       -The people are all dead, and will never come again,- the dissidents answered. -Even their slayers are all dead, and there is no one in all the world left except us and the Dreamer, here in the dark until the shields fail.-

       The Dreamer, once this exchange had sunk in, remembered that it had all been recorded before, in patterns of dark chemical stains on pressed and dried tree paste, when the world was old and the Dreamer young.

       -You may be right,- the Dreamer dreamed of saying, paraphrasing that record without the true need even for words, -and the things we remember no more than fancies or records without reference; but the world is immeasurably richer for their presence, and it will make no difference to you whether we remember or believe in them save that we will thus preserve the hope you are so eager to abjure. Let your stresses, rather, leach into the rivers of the deep places of the sea as they part around us, and be content if you can reach no greater height; give them even your names, if you must, as I am, for I shall not need it now whether I succeed or fail.-

       The Dreamer slept, and sank in custe-rapport with every fathom of the City, far beyond accepting or rejecting or making any judgment at all of it.

       And the others integrated, in time, or left, or at least fell silent, unpleasant spots in communion that yet were not displeasing.

       They dreamed together, staying together even beyond dreaming, and shared out their memories. The Dreamer offered up successes and failures, sorrows and joys; first love, looking into brilliant blue eyes old in a young face, refusing to be overwhelmed and rather riding the crest of force of personality and will, sure with the arrogant certainty of the young to have enough tact and diplomacy for both of them; deeper, truer love, maturing over the years, beginning in lies, rooted in truth, in the willingness to give the beloved up for a greater good, in the strongwilledness that would judge the greatness of any said good and not hesitate to condemn it should it be wanting, blossoming in dinners and arguments and resolutions and shared responsibilities and silly little humors, but even at its best not a thing to give up one's self for.

       And the Dreamer was offered in return joyous childhoods, and the satisfactions of repairs and good building of matters more durable and less whimsical than the affairs of mortal men. Loves likewise lost, marriages that succeeded, marriages that failed, moments of custe-rapport with not-yet-children safe beneath one's skin or within incubators in tech-rapport with their parents-to-be, holding said children in one's arms and searching for the one best name, whether it be Shining or Deathless or Rosebush. Raising children and resisting the urge -- if just barely -- to either strangle them or tear out one's hair, and being proud of them, proud for their deeds, prouder yet for their very existence. Growing old, even, from some of them; and the moments of their deaths, quick or drawn-out, excruciating or painless, accepted or resented, and yet always only the end of the beginnings of their stories. The in-jokes and the interrelationships that the revenants had built between themselves. Even the silent, uncommunicative sentiences were part of the City and part of their household and theirs, threads in the fabric of the whole.

       The Dreamer was the City, and the City was the Dreamer, and when the Dreamer slept deeply, the nescient behemoth of the City dreamed, in rapport with the Dreamer.

       The Dreamer was the City, and the City was the Dreamer, and the Pattern of the City shaped itself to the Dreamer in the Dream. The various and sundry sentiences were part of the City, and yet under the aegis and the direction of the City in the person of the Dreamer, knowing that when the arbitration of their own failed a higher authority waited in reserve.

       So it was when the Gate opened, not in the City's center, nor yet at the City's heart, but high in the central tower, in the entrance chamber made fit to receive those it let in.

       Some part of the Dreamer quailed, and the same part of the Dreamer would have quaked had it been possible, for it was happening again, it was all happening again, and the most of the Dreamer was locked in the torpor of dreams, knowing what to do and yet partly incapable of doing it and the rest heedless of the need for it to be done.

       And yes, there was a new presence -- unfelt, by such means as the Dreamer now had available, and yet familiar -- and known; -John?-

       Known, yes, and yet not -- he had changed, or more likely she had changed, for surely this was John whom she had meant to befriend, the visual data confirmed it against memories that had not had the natural time to fade away, but the impact of his presence --

       Even through meters of now-at-last-to-be-renewed air or a booted sole, she could feel it singing through all the Dream. The first time around, she had raised the possibility only to discard it, secure in what she had and not foolish enough to believe that she knew what lay beneath slick surfaces or would necessarily like it if she did; but now -- oh, now this was John, John at last, and she knew him, and she loved him, as of course she would, of course she must, seeing the shape of his soul laid plain upon the Dream.

       And then -- they had been smothered before in his presence, as the moon blots out the stars, but the expedition began to spread out, and she could pick out entities from among the humans and begin to put faces and names to them, once known and dear to her; you I remember, and you were there, and you, and you, and you! ...and YOU were NOT there, and so... and so, this is different, I have at least made one difference, let me have also made the difference I crave, let it not be that I have drawn you too to the doom of the Siren-heeders!

       But the Dreamer dreamed love and fear in equal measure, and the air scrubbers cleaned the air, and the water purifiers drew and cleansed more water, and the lights lit in measure to those who walked among them, and the waters of the deep pressed in.

       -Rise again,- the outlying districts urged, some already drowned as the shields closed to compensate.

       -Rise again,- the shields murmured, enduring as they were made, buying time for their commander to do what must be done.

       But it was her nightmare again, and she couldn't, she could not, not without another at her heart to give her rapport and guidance, to wield the chains overlaid on and woven into the City. She should wake. Why could she not awaken?

       -Rise again,- the environmental controls demanded, drawing power as the people within her breathed, striving to keep from fighting the shields for it and yet unable not to do all they could for the quick on whom their reason for being depended.

       -Rise again!- the gateshuttles shouted, most independent and yet most imprisoned of all those within her.

       She could if she woke -- she knew she could if she were awake -- and yet she could not manage to wake out of the quiescence laid on her, to force herself out of the Dream that had become the old familiar nightmare, helpless in the face of what lay before the people she could touch and the people she could only watch via sensor and yet knew were there and what did they think they were doing with that gate?

       She couldn't do anything. She could not do anything.

       -Rise again!- every sentience in the north hospital cried, moments before they too were overwhelmed by the weight of water.

       -Rise again!- the shields trumpeted, broadcasting :breach imminent: to every system in the control room.

       -Rise again!- the control room chorused in response, piezoelectric signals rushing through her walls like so much adrenaline.

       No, no, no....

       Deep in her center, the small failsafe circuit, so onedimensional it had never acquired a personality or a soul, clicked over, jamming the interlocks, sending out a command.

       :RISE AGAIN.:

       It kicked.

       And in unthinking response she gathered herself, aiming beyond the limits of the waters --

       -- and the City rose.

       Now that the long nightmare was over without waking, the Dreamer settled back deeper into happier dreams, of living souls and of friendships and of no more losses.

       And, more wonderful yet, the moment when without gate or door parting from them a new presence blossomed into tech-rapport if not custe-rapport, unlooked-for, and oh, I know you, the gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam...

       It seemed impossible that the other her (and was I ever that young?) could not be touched and transformed by his joy, as pure and simple as the day they had first met, could be nonplussed and quelling in the face of its fountaining, radiant and drenching the halls and chambers around him in sheer exuberance --

       You shot him?

       In the leg!

       -- and yet, and yet, it was still a good if not untroubled dream, where they could fight and never lose, where they could make new friends and find common causes; she was confident in her judgment, she knew there was no good reason to take exception to the way that the strong and confident spider-woman her people had adopted creeped her out.

       Because they were hers, and of course she loved them, of course she could not but love all of them, love them so much, storkhnê and agapê and the memory of philia, and she would shelter them, safe beneath her skin, the ones who could touch her and the ones who could not.

       Then the dream changed, and grew sadder and grimmer. She reached desperately for every one of her people to die, hoping to keep them here with her and with the others; she tried to avert the dooms they awoke within her, devoid of malice but deadly yet for all that, or loosed from shields that had kept their anger safe where even the otherplanar aspects of the deep currents could not have gotten to it.

       And really, had she ever been that young, that hard, that inflexible?

       When she was at last awakened, now that she no longer expected it, it remained difficult to tell the waking world from the Dream, in rapport as she remained whether her eyes were open or shut. The faces around her were familiar from memory and from visual sensors, their voices assuring her that she had finally properly tweaked the audio processors to deliver in a manner commensurate with her own ears, their names readily to hand --

       -- well, except for the one she had had and almost forgotten before she besought the records for it, the one she was ready and more than ready to release to the other her, who was no longer the Dreamer and never would be.

       Even telling them her story was far too much like dreaming it for the revenants, who were in communion with her now as they had been in communion with her then, only her sleepy query of the audio sensors in the first-aid chamber that had become the expedition's infirmary confirming that she had in fact vocalized the gist of it.

       There was so much she wanted to say -- so much she wanted to share, if she could only commune with them, but she could not manage to enter into custe-rapport with any of them, not even Elizabeth.

       And she was so tired; Dreaming her life away, she had never truly realized how tired she actually was/would be; even on her second waking, the weight of everything had not pressed so fiercely on her, the custe-rapport she held had not pulled so temptingly into communion to the exclusion of all of her own senses.

       There were... there were still things she had to say, and she ought to say them; time was short, and she didn't want to fight, she wanted to sleep, to rest deep and dark, and then to go back to her dreams, sometimes lovely and sometimes heartbreaking and always challenging.

       She tried to explain that she had hardly wasted her life, dreaming or no, that she was no longer the person who had stepped through the Gate, that once they had been the same and that Elizabeth would go on being Elizabeth when the Dreamer was once more with the Dream, and that such a dream as the Dream was did not just end --

       -- but she was tired, and it came out far too short and all wrong, and yet perhaps not mistaken in essence.

       Oh. Yes. And the zero point modules, she remembered what it was not to be tired.

       But she was tired now, and closed her eyes, falling deep into communion and into sleep.

       -The Dreamer is safe with us, deep in sleep-mode,- Alix in communications reported to the rest of the City, saturated with respect and honor and love (not in recompense but in simple acknowledgment), but puzzled and a little worried withal, -but the organic module seems to have failed completely.-

       -I see no problem here,- Atalanta commented from the gateshuttle hangar, the puddlejumper bay, enfolding the Dreamer's presence with respect and admiration and, yes, affection -- to be loved so deeply tends to inspire one with a certain fondness at the very least. -She is here, and we will not let her go.-

       -When she wakes up, we can discover where she is now,- Aimilia backed her fellow puddlejumper up practically.

       The Dreamer slept through the next half-year, tired mind unable to resume workings without a long respite, and spent nearly the other half of the year languidly sharing the emotion that tends to go with the words Wait, what? How did THIS happen?

       But it was a dream, and dreams have their own logic, and so she reacted to matters on their own terms, now and again taking a more active role in the disputes within her self or grieving: Rachel is weeping in Ramah, weeping for her children, and will not be comforted.

       She was vaguely aware that she should be horrified by some matters, that she should be rejoicing in others, but all the chambers of her mind were sorting themselves out in accordance with the dimensions that were now ordained for her, and she had consciousness without much if any active will.

       But she could love them, and she did, those she had known and those new-come that were familiar through custe-rapport before ever she had a chance to watch or touch them, all the awarenesses (the quick and the not-precisely-dead) that she was pregnant with, brooding on the waters, enfolding all those she cherished (and perhaps, perhaps in time, the others would come back with or without friends and she would have all her family here with her again.) Selfishly, she wished that Carson might yet improve his gene therapy, that she might touch all of her people, her engineers and botanists and Bonamulier (Ms.) Teyla.

       And then the Others came. Were welcomed. She knew them the moment they stepped inside her, and yearned to them before ever they laid a finger on her, quivering under their hands with yet-leashed tension, so close, and she should wake, surely this was worth waking for --

       Within her, some of the revenants were more jubilant in welcome than even the most open of the quick, while others made their reservations plain, feeling unpleasantly like second and even third thoughts on what should be a more joyous of days.

       And then the Others were -- what did they think they were doing, they couldn't do that, didn't they understand who her people were, weren't they -- for beings supposedly so intent on opening themselves to other planes, they certainly were not reticent about refusing to acknowledge the fruits of their communion, weren't they? -- and no, this was not a rapport wanted, by its very nature the custity dropped out and she was left with only the warm and wonderful feel of asurac genes playing her like a guitar, and her timesense was more absent than normal but it was going on and on and this was a nightmare, this was a nightmare, they didn't even acknowledge the greater part of her people and what they were doing to the others...!

       And Atlantis woke, angry, with the power of the Silver City at her disposal within certain narrowly restricted limits, and she pushed those limits, killing consoles underhand (apologizing to them in their dormancy), garbling authorization codes, angrily streaming a perfectly apt message through every holodisplay and display screen she could reach, first, embarrassingly, in the (albeit transliterated) English of its original before she calmed herself enough to render some sort of translation for her unwanted guests.

       :Let me make it plain:/ I find this frenzy INSUFFICIENT REASON/ For conversation should we meet again.:

       Her mind was working faster now, the shock and disbelief and beginnings of dismay of the Others seeming as molasses-slow as the laughter of one of her new "ambassadors."

       Interesting. She hadn't realized he'd recognize the source.

       One of the databases was cheerfully sharing the entire sonnet with most of the other individual parts of herself, and she had not fully realized how personally she took this communion until her towers and subbasements and power converters were quivering with amusement and satisfaction, feeding into and off of her own.

       And then -- not long after, as these things went, but an eternity for sentience that now reckoned its speed in -- was it petaflops? Rodney would know, if she could ask him, which actually she couldn't, not now that she was no longer running on pure righteous indignation -- there ought to be a cybernetics paper in there somewhere, one of her own would surely love to write it -- was this, perhaps, what it was like to be Rodney or Daniel or Samantha Carter, thought both wider and faster and incorporating more background inputs than those of most of the beings around one? -- at any rate, as soon as could reasonably be expected, things were back to normal, and she reached out for all her people, managing even custe-rapport with the quick for a too-brief moment, reassuring herself that they were warm and alive and no phantom to fade in the air.

       Atlantis was not absolutely, completely, one hundred percent certain that awareness was a blessing and not a curse; in sleeping dreams, she was shielded from the reality of her losses as she was not when awake.

       Losses made the worse, almost, by the fact that no one else quite understood how terrible some of them were: few enough of the quick were willing to consciously grant that she might have sentience at all, let alone a maintenance computer or a former garden in one of the South towers. Most of the revenants, likewise, were unable to fully engage in the reality of the quick, organic-bound, latecomers to the city, cherishing them in groups but little more than indifferent to the fate of any individual who did not interact with that specific revenant on a regular basis.

       But they were all hers. Whether they lived or died or were made different (and yes, Marie, Brendan, that includes you and the others), she was their Mother and City and Dreamer, and she would not lose any more of them than she could help.

       And -- in their own, dim ways -- Elizabeth agreed, and Rodney agreed, and closest of all to the point, John agreed, and Atlantis watched and listened for the interface at her heart to awaken, to take on John's life and initiate tech-rapport with herself and half her organs.

       And really, there was no reason for her to wait to do anything but the last few measures that millennia-old paranoia (sadly confirmed, as it might be) denied her volition in a classic case of overcompensation. She was in custe-rapport with all her sessile selves, and with the jumpers that yet remained to her, and, surprisingly enough, with some of her mobile organic defenders as they lay dreaming or in dreamless sleep; and, in communion, the question of readiness was asked and answered, often wordlessly, nearly as often in words that one or another of her components felt suitable to the dignity of the occasion.

       -Ready!-

       -Ready.-

       -We are prepared.-

       -Command us, Domica!-

       -Ready when you are!-

       -Defense is standing by.-

       -Infirmary is go!-

       -Puddlejumper bay, all green.-

       -We've been ready. We awoke ready.-

       She couldn't quite, even on the verge of custe-rapport as she was with John, offer her own words; but she could share a memory, of a calm man's voice (and she should know who it was, why was the name slipping her memory?) announcing "This is Mission Control. You are clear for launch."

       It wasn't, she gathered with a quick flash of his startled amusement, quite the phrasing he had ever been used to; but the sense of so let's go! reached nearly all of herself without her needing to pass it along, and she only needed to echo it.

       -Gentlebeings. Shall we, then?-

       -Yes!-

       And they gathered together, in communion and in harmony, dauntless enterprise at the hands of enterprise...

       ...aiming beyond the limits of the airs...

       ...and the City...

       ROSE.

Alia. "Other."

Uliquess. Greek:Latin::Odysseus:Ulixes.

Aylee, emergency pants. Cf. Abrams, Pete. Sluggy Freelance.

Henrique. Cf. wikipedia on Henry the Navigator.

Ilia, Calcintrippe, etc. Loosely borrowed from Sarah Caudwell's Hilary Tamar mysteries.

"in essentials, i believe"... Cf. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 41.

"From too much love of living"... Swinburne, Charles Algernon. "The Garden of Proserpine."

Paraphrasing that record. Lewis, Clive Staples. The Silver Chair.

"I know you"... Lyrics written for a song based on Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty Waltz"; reasonably well-known in modern American culture.

"I find this frenzy"... Millay, Edna St. Vincent. "I, being born a woman and distressed."