A drumthrob announced a lynk. Drift sensed a serene female presence, and a tall, cinnamon-skinned woman stepped into sight. Sumner recognized her at once from his shadow-shooting: "Assia," he said familiarly as they descended from their hovering.She stopped, startled by her clairvoyant recognition of his face from her vision moments before.Drift took Sumner's hand and approached her. When the ne touched her. its grip was burning holy and golden. The cavepool of her mind stunned into charmed light, and knowing infused her, filling her with all of Sumner's and Drift's memories."You saw me in CIRCLE?" she asked in Esper, and Sumner understood her through his seh."Corby was strong," he affirmed. A moving darkness bent its depths through him as his memories and his kha passed through Drift and into this woman."So much pain." Assia's voice sounded stranded, and the bloodlines of her face darkened. She let their hands go, and leaned against the redwood railing to concentrate herself. When she looked up, everything good was in her face. "You've both come a long way," she said with a wistful smile. "But I feel the harder distance is ahead. I didn't know Rubeus had shut down the Line. That means we re the only people in Graal besides the Masseboth. All the godminds are gone." The dry heat of her mouth thickened, and she paused."What about the eo?" Sumner asked.A sweat skein glinted on her upper lip. "There are no eo. They're not people. They're engrams—the psynergy pat-terns of all the old CIRCLE mantics. They animate orts sometimes, but they're just memory systems. They don't have one shape."They belong to Rubeus?"No. They're personalities in crystal chips. The mantics themselves went vertical ages ago, riding the Line out of here. They left their psyn-patterns behind to do menial men-tal work for the occupants of Graal. In times like this they act as conscience. The eo are just ghosts."The lynk drumthrobbed twice, and two figures stepped around the white ivy partition. One was Jac; the other, a no-face ort, a humanoid with a mirror-blue facepan. Jac's face had the same depth it had had in his youth: fluvial cheek-bones, slim jaw, curved nose, and flaring nostrils, his neck dimpled with boil scars. Assia thanked the ort and sent it back through the lynk."I got lost," Jac said quietly in Esper. "Since last night,I've been forgetting everything." He looked to Sumner and Drift. "Do I know you?"A spelled feeling spun through Jac. Sumner looked ele-mental to him, sundark and secret."What you feel is our shared spirit, Jac," Sumner said. The saline arcs beneath his eyes and the sunscars across his nose brutalized Sumner's appearance, but Jac saw that the man had a gentleness, a shade in the color of his eyes soft as a beginning. "I'm Sumner Kagan. I'm the Delph's fearself. Do you understand that?""Yes, of course." Jac's voice was thin. He did remember Sumner now as the man Rubeus had revealed to him. note 19 He shivered as an effluvium of fear smoked into his chest."Voice?" Assia asked."Yes." The look between them was a wrack of intimacy and shared fear. "It's happening all over again. Twelve hun-dred years have passed, but for me the beginning was yester-day, one night of the mind.""No, Jac, it's ending now," Assia hushed, cossetting the back of his neck. "Rubeus put sky-filters up. Linergy can't touch you. Voice is just residual telepathy. Soon that will pass. You're becoming the self you always were."Drift heard the deep unities of compassion in her voice and knew the woman was joyous and healthy. But the man, this Jac, was unsubstanced—haunted. Through the seams of its blood, the ne sensed Voice, the throe of the Delph's presence within Jac, and it backed away a step."I know who you are," Jac said, looking into Sumner's face as into a flame. "I remember the fear vision as I mounted into godmind. I was afraid of the Others, the beings that came from alien places. But I was wrong about them. They were gentle, creative beings. …" His hands opened and closed, tight with withholdance. "I remember so little. But I know this. My enemies didn't come from out there. They came from inside me. Rubeus is dangerous. Are you?"An oblique smile crossed Sumner's face. "Not always.""Rubeus came to me last night," Jac said. "I'd forgotten who he was. He wants me to go to a sleepod …""Chrysalid," Assia finished. "I know of it. The eo have monitored it since the Delph created it a century ago.""I thought the eo were ghosts?" Sumner inquired."Intelligent ghosts. They're minds without human bod-ies, but they're aware enough to be a threat to Rubeus."Earlier, you called them the "conscience."Assia nodded. "They are. They have human sensibilities. They were people once, and they want the earth to be good for humanity. Their only problem is, they're too humane. There are weapon systems here that could destroy Oxact and free the world from Rubeus' domination, but the eo won't act until they're provoked. And then it will be too late. Rubeus is powerful."You think the ort-lord will attack the eo?"When Jac is safely ensconced in Chrysalid, there will be nothing to stop Rubeus from striking Ausbok."Jac looked shaken. "You sound very sure.""There's no question, Jac," Assia said. "Rubeus was cre-ated by a god. He's convinced of his sovereignty. We're the enemy."A snake of wind coiled through the air plants, and every-one looked out over the river at the troops of milling Masseboth. Jac watched Sumner, feeling a connectedness, a compassion for this being that his fear had created. Reflec-tions wobbled in Sumner's pale eyes, and salt limned his lips like a web. The spell of his long shoulders and the round strength of his back were lined clearly in the sweat dark of his blue shirt.Assia gazed across the river with narrowing eyes. She recalled Anareta's innocent confusion, and her suspicion hard-ened to conviction. Rubeus was hoping to use these humans as a living shield, knowing the eo would be reluctant to strike the ort-lord if people would die. Assia's dread thrummed within her.The ne was squinting into the infrangible sunlight, look-ing at the soldiers, but its mind was aware of the dreamtime opening in Jac's mind. Drift sidled closer, ready to see into this man's mind. Surprisingly, he was a simple-centered being, the sapphires of his thoughts lucid, unclouded by ambitions. Closer, Drift touched a memory that nerved much of Jac's life. Neve. The ne saw her eyes, amber and shining, the puberty-passage in her body's supple lines, and the black brightening of her hair. Loneliness trembled around Jac here, and Drift saw the expression on her face that hot summer morning when her husband told her about the tumor in his brain. That expression had begun a special haunting in this man's life. She had loved him.Hard-cornered grief pushed the seer back into its own senses. Assia had turned her back on the rivershine prisming in the mist. "It's clear what's going on," she said, her voice almost silent with feeling. "This is an ancient war—old as life. It's the battle between history and creativity, reaction and consciousness. Rubeus is a machine, a soulless mind. He's been manipulating events for hundreds of years, consolidat-ing his power. He's going for dominance.""What can we do?" Jac asked.Drift touched Sumner's elbow and pointed to an ice-eyed quetzal bird watching them from the end of the terrace. It felt the bird's machine hollowness and knew it was an ort. Everything we do is monitored."Rubeus isn't a deep," Assia told them fervently. "He can't monitor our symbolife—the psynergy we can draw from our deep selves." Drift, as a seer, understood, but the long ellipsis in Sumner's eyes made Assia explain: "The symbolife means using our consciousness—seeing the world and every-thing that happens to us in it in symbols, as meaning. Living that way, psynergy flows outward into the world instead of simply falling inward with our sensations and making us react. Our deep self—One Mind—can solve this problem with Rubeus if we activate that part of us through our con-sciousness. That's what Bonescrolls was telling you, Sumner, when he said that selfscan wasn't enough. We can't just have the world entering us and be balanced. We must also enter the world."