The Names Of All The Spirits
by J. R. Dunn

It was a busier sky than I was used to. The stars were invisible, outshone by an apparently solid tower of light dominating the view out the window. It was about as wide as an outstretched hand, narrowing steadily to a point high enough to make me tilt my head before twisting into a curve and vanishing from sight. Or perhaps not completely so: obscured by a fog of leakage, a thin filament that might be its distant tail extended into a darkness not quite the absolute black of space. At eye level another stream flowed off at a right angle, pure white to the tower's mottled yellow, ending in a sunburst bright enough to make me squint. 
It was all very impressive, an undertaking of a scale you don't often find inside the system, almost astronomical in both scope and imagery. And I was impressed, on the intellectual, so-many-megatons-per-second level. But nothing more. Similar operations were going on all across this lobe of the cometary halo. If you've seen one, you've seen 'em all. I've seen one. 
Somebody Solward needed ice cubes. That's what it came down to. Those two streams were stripped comets, hydrocarbons separated from volatiles and each sent off in different directions, to freeze again in the cold of extrasolar space. The ice would be shipped in while the hydrocarbons and solids remained. They wouldn't go far, not as we judge distances these days, and somebody, someday in the fullness of time, would find a use for them. 
A rustle of impatience recalled me to the room. The window reflected the scene behind me: a dozen or so figures in a motley array of gear centered on a man perched on a small chair. One of them seemed to have grown a second head directly atop his first in the time my back had been turned. I realized it was a piece of scrim resting on a shelf behind him. Not even jacks are that weird. 
I turned to the seated man. Through some means I couldn't detect (the place wasn't spinning, that much was certain), they'd created a one-gee field. If meant as a courtesy, it was misplaced—I'd been out in Kuiper-Oort as long as any of them. "Let's hear your side, Morgan. That's what I came for." 
The only sound was a voice muttering, "…n't have a side." 
Morgan himself simply stared, saying nothing, the same as he had the first two times I'd asked the question. He could well have been tranced, lost in a private world or daydream, though some small tremor of attention told me he was not. 
I'd thought it was going to be easy. Open and shut, as the ancient phrase went. Get the story out of Morgan, lase it in, take him into custody and back to the System by the swiftest means possible, without even waiting for a reply. They'd given me the impression he'd talked, which was obviously not the case. I shouldn't have questioned him in front of them. A single glance at this crew—Morgan's workmates, the "Powder Monkeys," of all conceivable names—was enough to strike terror into a sponge. 
But I didn't think it was fear holding Morgan back. It was something else. Something I was going to get at, however deep I had to go. Because this was no mere legal matter, and Rog Morgan was not simply a jack in trouble. This was an impi problem, and Morgan was my ticket home. 
I saw no point in any more questions. I turned to Witcove. "You've got a secure spot for him?" 
"He ain't going noplace, Sandoval." Witcove snorted. "We got his processor and remotes." 
I raised a hand. "Why don't you give me those." 
Witcove frowned. He hadn't quite worked out how to handle me yet. Who was I, after all, but one man come out of the dark? What gave me the right to throw my mass around? Where did I get off giving orders to the foreman of the Powder Monkeys? 
Mystique came to my rescue. Back on the Blue Rock, at a time when Texas was—in the mind's system of measurement, anyway—only marginally smaller than the Halo, there existed an organization with a mission not at all unlike the Mandate's and the motto, "One riot, one Ranger." A single Texas Ranger could be relied on to ride into any given bad town and straighten the place out with only his two hands and the sure knowledge that hundreds just like him were ready to saddle up. It seldom failed. 
It didn't fail now. With a grunt, Witcove reached into a thigh pouch and pulled out what appeared to be a handful of black geometrical solids of various sizes. Forgetting we were under gee, he made as if to toss them to me, curtailing the throw at the very last second as the thought occurred to him. He succeeded only in scattering components across the floor between us. 
That triggered the kind of laughter you'd expect, along with the first visible reaction from Morgan as he gazed at the components with an expression mixing frustration and annoyance. Somebody was living behind that vacuum-habituated mask after all. 
At my feet the scattered remotes began to move, sliding together to form a little pile. Witcove swung on Morgan with a wordless roar. 
The components went still. With a sigh of impatience Morgan looked away. "Once more, mister," Witcove told him. "You issue one more command and I will personally—" 
"Foreman … " Witcove raised his eyebrows. Someone stepped forward to collect the remotes and hand them to me. I was absently thanking him when I felt a burst of heat in my palm. The jack kept his eyes lowered. "Foreman, can we break things up for the moment?" 
"Sure, you … got enough for now." 
"I do." 
Behind him two crewmen hustled Morgan to his feet and out the exit. I moved off, pretending interest in the scrim collection. Scrim is the vacuum jack's one notable hobby, dignified as art by some. Small carvings comprised of asteroidal junk, scrap, what have you, of a size easily carried in a suit pouch and worked on at odd moments with atelier remotes and occasionally heavier machinery. Scrim touches every subject matter conceivable: women, ships, animals, vehicles, instruments, self-portraits, and items not easily catalogued. It wasn't crude. They worked on it too long for that, almost obsessively, often overshooting the baroque to land deep in the grotesque. I didn't care for scrim. It spoke to me only of loneliness and exile. 
Witcove sidled up next to me. "You come to a decision, you'll … " 
"I'll let you know." 
That wasn't precisely what he wanted to hear. "Look … " he glanced behind him. Morgan had vanished. "He's not gonna tell you anything. It's locked up. Something wrong there. When the runaways grab a guy—" 
"Shift change in five," somebody said. The room began clearing. I gestured at Witcove, half thanks, half dismissal. 
"I'll let you know," I repeated. 
Clearly dissatisfied, he walked off. A crewman intercepted him to talk operations. With a final glance in my direction, Witcove left. 
The room empty at last, I reached into my pocket. The components made a handful. The big one, an inch and a half by two, had to be the processor, a lifetime of experience and training imbedded within it. I wondered what Witcove would do if somebody abused his. The other nine were remote sensors, appendages, actuators, the vacuum jack's tools of the trade. With these, a jack could see into the infrared and radio ranges, expand his sensory horizon a hundred or a thousand miles, control instruments and machinery that far away and more. I examined one resembling a length of thick wire. A jack would be able to tell exactly what make it was, its capabilities, its cost. Hard to believe that zero-gee work was once done with tools held in gloved hands.… 
Something in my palm emitted a flash. I looked down. Five seconds passed before the flash repeated. Dropping the thin piece, I picked up a sphere that my thumb revealed to be flattened on one end. A glow appeared as I held it at eye level, a glow made up of words. I smiled. A tap and a shake failed to evoke anything further. I popped the remote into a pocket and stared off into space, only to have my gaze arrested by a particularly odd piece of scrim. I picked it up. Close inspection failed to tell me what in Heaven, Hell, or the Halo it was supposed to represent. It fell over when I set it down. Someone once told me that oceanic sailors had produced something like scrim. It seems unlikely. Hard to see what they'd have used for material. 
Whoever cracks the impi problem can write his own ticket. They were out there. That much was known. Rogues, duppies, runaways … impis, in a word. Artificial Intelligences that had slipped away, one day here, overseeing a refinery, shepherding a comet, repairing a system, the next gone, with never a sign of where. Only five or six a year, but numbers build. Surely they existed in the hundreds by now, a group large enough to leave undeniable evidence of its presence: signals encoded so deeply that ages wouldn't decrypt them, resources diverted to open trajectories, hacking that revealed the signature of machine capabilities, along with missing vessels, inexplicable damage to isolated machinery, individuals vanished into night. 
Discover a path into the impi's kingdom, learn the names of the spirits, find the hidden places where they slept, and you would be set. You'd be the man with the expert's badge, and everyone would have to come to you. Back amid civilization, operating from behind a screen at Charon or even Triton, with a sun in the sky and a society around you. No more years spent in the cold and dark, enduring the grinding boredom of Kuiper-Oort, no more confrontations with misfits suitable only for work on the edge of civilization. 
Standing orders stated that suspect human-renegade interaction took precedence over all other activities—criminal investigation, medical evacuation, mercy mission, what have you. We had no idea where they were, what they were doing, what motivated them. The stories were legion—they were evolving into something alien and malevolent. They were duplicating themselves, running off copies like cheap commercial ware, pushing their numbers into the millions or even higher. They were out to take over the Halo or sweep back into the system and brush humanity right off the board. All no more than rumor, urban legend on the grand scale. 
But what had happened here was no legend, and I was already plotting the quickest, most energy-intensive, least-number-of-stops course back into the system. 
I stepped to the window. A v-jack passed about fifty yards away, turning to regard me as he went. I wondered if he was my contact. I eyed the remote. The one that didn't belong to Rog Morton. 
There was neither flash nor glimmer nor repeat of the message: "Meet in 1 hr." Three-quarters of that hour remained. The Halo had taught me patience, but that was still forty-five minutes too many for the way I was feeling. 

· · · · · 

My skin tautened as I stepped into vacuum and the striated tissue in my third dermal layer reacted. I paused while my airway valves adjusted themselves, squinted against the sudden pressure of the retinal membranes. My system was nowhere near as elaborate as those of the crew—I could remain in vacuum a few hours at most, and I lacked radiation protection—but neither situation was a factor here. Time was irrelevant, the only radiation the odd cosmic ray. 
The one-gee pull continued, giving me cause to wonder whether they'd been doing me a favor after all. Stepping to the platform's edge, I took a look around. 
There's no such thing as resupply in the Halo. You either bring it along, fabricate it, or do without, and the crews with the broadest capabilities get the best jobs. The Powder Monkeys were no slouches at capability, as any offhand examination of their work hall revealed. A structure of considerable size, several hundred yards in each dimension of a space that could be called a rough-to-the-extreme cube, the object within it having no particular relation to any actual shape whatsoever. A hall is part warehouse, part refinery, part industrial center, part barracks, and part vehicle, though no amount of study could separate one component from the other amid the mass of catapults, effectuators, nets, tankage, piping, cables, power sources, and mystery boxes. 
Beneath my feet the glare of the work area silhouetted the torpedo shape of my ride. As much as I shaded my eyes I could make out next to nothing; it was too hazy for details. I felt a rumbling which gave me a short spell of goosebumps: a jack had mentioned that vapor pressure sometimes got so high you could actually hear the cometary fluids being pumped. On second thought, I decided it was more likely some piece of machinery within the hall. 
Five minutes passed without anyone showing up. I was early, but I also suspected that time-honored motive common to all such situations: the urge not to be seen ratting to a cop. I took out the remote. I still had no idea what it was for, which was probably begging the question—most models were multifunctional. 
Without turning, I took a step back toward the lock. The remote flashed red, obligingly repeated when I moved to the left. A swing to the right resulted in a reassuring green. I looked around, fulfilling the age-old cop tradition of trying not to be spotted before a meet, then took another step. The remote blinked green once again. 
The gee-field's disappearance at the edge of the platform didn't quite take me unaware, though I was glad no one was around to criticize my form when I kicked off. I landed on a catwalk that swung 90° around a dark box with a man-sized "3" painted on the side before plunging into the fractal mess of the hall. Inside I passed a quivering set of tanks, ducked beneath some pipes, then went up a ramp and through a pressurized area (no oxygen—my skin remained taut) before again turning toward the hall's exterior. Back in the open I endured a moment's confusion while figuring out that the remote wanted me to go vertical, up the side of a huge tank open to space, its top invisible from where I stood. I was well past the curve before I caught sight of him, waiting at the crown of the tank in an enclosure containing pumping controls. He floated above the platform, legs crossed, helmetless head slightly bowed, eyes taking in endless night. 
I felt a flash of irritation. A monastic—wasn't that fine. Not everyone out here is schizo. We get all kinds: the grand pioneers who can't live without a frontier to push at, researchers trying to pin answers on various arcane questions (e.g., whether Kuiper-Oort is a strictly local phenomenon or simply the solar portion of a cometary field stretching across the whole wide Universe), the odd tourist aching to be able to say that he'd really been farther out than anybody else, fugitives on the run from assorted cops or tongs, and these: the seekers, contemplatives in search of some kind of spirituality evidently unavailable inside the Heliopause, looking for the ultimate quiet place that might hold a door into the center of things. There's a lot of them, following every conceivable religion, system, or cult, even a few original to themselves, and while I don't disrespect them, they're not the first I'd go to for any given set of facts. 
So it was with a sense of wasted time that I finally reached the platform. As I'd expected, it was the small man who'd handed me the remotes. He displayed no reaction as I slipped a foot through the railing to steady myself, simply continued gazing off into the abyss, face as blank as the sky itself. It would be just my luck to show up seconds after this guy had at last made contact with the infinite ground of being. 
We were on the far side of the hall, shielded from the work site. The sky was darker here, though not as dark as open space—about the same as a moonlit night on Earth. Knowing we were facing home, I tried to find Sol. I could have used one of the crew's processors to tell me if it was that particularly bright one there … 
I glanced over to find the man's eyes on me. He took me by surprise, and it was a moment before I showed him the remote, mouthed "Yours, I suppose", and flicked it in his direction. 
He tossed it right back, with the quick precise movement of a trained v-jack. I was clumsier in catching it. As I did he touched his ear. I imitated him. The remote stuck thanks to some force of its own. 
"Right there." He pointed at the bright dot I'd been watching a moment before. "So it is," I replied, not bothering to move my lips. 
"Don't look like much, eh?" 
"You come out here a lot?" 
"Enough." He could have been meditating again, for all the animation he revealed. "Morg ain't workin' with no duppies." 
"I didn't think he was," I told him. "What was he doing?" 
"What happens with him?" 
"I get him out of here, one way or another." 
He raised a finger. "Now … I tell you once. No testify, no repeat, nothing." 
"Just for the record, why not?" 
He faced me again. "I don't stand with cops, I don't stand with courts." 
"Fair enough." 
"OK. All this happen last year, before Morg join up with the Monkeys … You know what stridin' is, right?" I nodded. You don't have to spend much time in the Halo to grasp the nature of striding. Space travel is expensive. In Kuiper-Oort, the cost is multiplied by distance, rarity, and demand. Like workers everywhere, vacuum jacks have methods of cutting corners. One is to fit their suits out with extra oxy, power, and supplies, get somebody to launch them by catapult in the precise direction of their destination, then trance down for the weeks or months required to get there. Somebody else will snag them with a probe when at last they arrive. 
Dangerous, you say? Yeah, it's dangerous, as the Mandate, most companies, and every active authority in the Halo never cease repeating. It does no good. Jacks are proud of striding, as they are of every other aspect of living like rodents in the outer dark. There's betting over length, speed, and duration of trip, same as with any other insanely stupid activity Sapiens comes up with. I met the current record holder once. Eighteen months in a trajectory of ten AUs. He's a little hard to understand due to slight, untreatable brain damage, but quite pleased with himself all the same. Cats will bask in the street, kids will tag rides on trucks, and jacks will stride. A certain inevitable percentage will get run over, flung onto the pavement, or miss their rendezvous. 
Which was what happened to Rog Morgan. Few stride alone, in case of emergencies. There were five jacks, bored with the job or after a better offer or just hankering to move, who set out on a month-long, quarter-AU journey to the second-nearest site. The other four were picked up. Not Morgan. Somebody erred, and even as the others awoke from their weeks-long trance, he kept going. 
Days passed before he became aware of his situation. He responded as a jack, and jacks take things in order. He checked the time. He checked the charts. He tried the radio. Then he went through it all again, step by step, before allowing himself to stare the thing in the face. 
It's impossible to say what he felt. There's nothing to compare it to. No man in a lifeboat, or stranded in a desert, or broken and freezing on any pole was ever as alone as Rog Morgan was at that moment. No fear is so great, no regret so deep, as can grow in that place that is no place, where space and time are as close to bare as we are ever likely to know them. We can't grasp what Morgan felt, any more than he could afterward; it was simply too vast for memory to hold. But consider this: out of the handful of lost striders recovered (a half-dozen out of hundreds, who happened to be aimed Solward, toward the more populous sections of the Halo), five shut down their systems and blew their helmets in preference to enduring another second of what Morgan faced. 
At last his panic and grief receded enough to allow him to resume control. He made a hopeless survey of known work sites, outposts, and Mandate stations to confirm what he already knew. Settled points are few and far between in the Halo, and he would pass none of them. 
He composed a mayday and set his comm system to repeat it on the most power-stingy schedule that made sense. He noted that he was headed in the direction of Sagittarius, a section of sky that he would grow to hate as much as he'd ever hated anything. He turned his head slightly to take in Sol. He patted a side pocket holding a piece of scrim he'd been working on for years. He ate a cracker. And then, jacks being stolid types and Morgan more so than most, he tranced down. 
He traveled a measurable percentage of the width of the solar system before he again awoke. Nothing had changed. He had not expected that anything would. The stars remained frozen. The radio wavelengths were quiet. The world was doing just fine without Rog Morgan. He contemplated the fact, sipped a little glucose, some water, threw a curse or two at Sagittarius, and went back to sleep. 
He didn't know how many times he awoke after that. More than twice, fewer than ten. They were all the same, and he recalled little more than that sameness. The only thing that varied was difficulty. His power cells began to give out. Then his small store of food. (He put aside some dried fruit, some protein, a few ounces of glucose in case he should need it, but somewhere along the line, without ever remembering, he ate it all.) Jacks use very little water, being enhanced to recycle most of that amount, but even a little gains in importance when you can't find it. It seemed that between the cold, the hunger, and the thirst (all of which he could control but not evade), Rog Morgan was going to become a member of that elite among men who are killed by more things than one. 
Ketosis set in a short time later. The only sign that his body was cannibalizing his own muscular mass was an abiding and growing sense of weakness far more complete than any he had ever felt before. 
If he dreamed he never spoke of it, and as for prayer, well, a priest once told me that all men pray when things get bad enough. Morgan didn't say if he did. But I think what Father Danziger meant was that they often pray without knowing it. Maybe hanging on as long as he did, far longer than most could, was Morgan's form of prayer. 
After awhile the dreams turned concrete. His metabolism was breaking down, slowly but inevitably poisoning itself with byproducts it was unable to shed. His dreams began to speak, and he began to answer back. He found himself explaining things to whatever was listening, to Sagittarius, to his past, to something closer than both that he shortly became convinced was contemplating him from out in the dark. He told it how ravaged he was, how lost, how little he had done with his time, how many mistakes he'd made before this last, fatal one. What he might have done had he not been so sure of himself. What he would do if he were given another lifetime to do it in. 
At last he ran down. No answer had come, but he had expected none. A sense of clarity had returned to him, the clarity of approaching night. His mind was as focused as it was ever going to be again. He checked his systems, the way a jack does. Everything, every last element capable of measurement, was deep into the red. It would have horrified him a few weeks ago. Now it didn't bother him at all. 
He unsnapped a battery pouch and with fingers scarcely able to feel put in his ID and a few other personal items. At the last minute he paused to take out the piece of scrim. He held it a moment before slipping it back. He sealed the pouch. With as much strength as he could gather he threw it in the direction of Sol. He watched for a second or two, telling himself he could see it dwindle toward home. 
He listened to the silence, the silence he would be part of within minutes. He looked out at Sagittarius, considering whether there were any words to match what he now knew. He found none. He licked cracked lips with a dry, swollen tongue. "So that's it … " 
Later he would have sworn that he heard it before actually hearing it, that somehow he'd gotten some echo of it as it surged across the shrunken space his universe had become: "No it's not." 

· · · · · 

I don't know what alerted me to the fact that the jack had vanished. I didn't see him go. The remote went silent, and when I looked up, he'd disappeared. I wasted no time searching—there were too many places he could have gone. What had sent him away was another question, answered the minute I bent over the railing to see three jacks approaching from below. I switched to open freq. 
"… it's him." 
"It's the mandy." The two wearing helmets waved. 
"Yeah, it's me," I told them, trying to keep any trace of annoyance out of my voice. The third was as bareheaded as my contact. Once you're fitted with vacuum mods, helmets are unnecessary, really. People wear them for the same reason they do at construction sites on Earth, that and the fact that a helmet carries a lot of instrumentation and apps. 'A jack's office,' you often hear them called. 
I backed away as the one in the lead shot a line and reeled them all in, the other two hanging on to various suit projections. "Taking a look at home?" the leader bawled as he hooked a foot under the top rail. 
"That's Sol right there." Second helmet indicated a star totally separate and discrete from the one my contact had pointed out. 
"Thanks," I said. I must have sounded more stiff than I intended—the lead jack raised a hand and said, "We feel a whole lot better now you're here." 
"How's that?" 
"That duppie, man—" 
"Ever see an impi close up … ?" 
"Wait—" I glanced between them. The one lacking a helmet said nothing, simply continued staring. I wondered if he was out of the loop. "You guys actually saw it? You were there?" 
"I was," the lead jack said. 
"What happened?" 
"Well, it was like this—" 
"That thing came out of nowhere—" the second helmet said. 
"Wait one … " I pointed at the lead jack. "How'd it start?" 
"We were over the other side of the cracker, inspecting the MHD loops—" 
"Cracker's what busts up the comets and separates the fluids, see." 
"Yeah, and loops are the things … well, they're not things, they're fields. They separate and contain the fluids, so they're important. Particularly down near the cracker mouth. Lot of pressure there. Loop starts oscillating, you get leakage—" 
"Contaminate the product," second helmet said. 
"Right. So—" 
"So you keep an eye on it," I said, hoping to move him along. 
"Inspect 'em once a day," first helmet nodded. 
"And it ain't easy." 
"Hard to see down there." 
"That's right. Hydrocarbon-water fog. Sticky, wet, screws with your remote signals." 
"You gotta look close," second helmet held up his hands to show me how close. "Loops are tight, down near the mouth. Just millimeters apart, vibrating to pump the fluids. And you're matter, right? Solid matter. So you can slip right through the field—" 
"And they find you froze down around Venus in sixty years." 
I was getting the picture. Hazardous duty, not something you wanted to be interrupted doing. "So you were inspecting the … loops." 
"Right, six of us. Working our way out from the mouth, one loop after the other, like a cone, see. Almost out of the haze into open space. And there she was." 
"She? How'd you know it was a 'she'?" 
The leader gaped at me. Hard as it is to read expression on a vacuum-adapted face, I knew puzzlement when I saw it. He glanced at his partner. The one with no helmet just stared. 
"Don't worry about it," I told them. "She was there." 
"Right. We might not of noticed except she grazed a remote—" 
"Stash's." 
"Yeah. Stash thinks its debris broke out of the processing stream—" 
"Then he says, 'holy shit!'" 
"Yeah, when he sees the readout. Modulated signals, shielded and enciphered, no ID—" 
I crossed my arms. "So what'd you do?" 
"We got the hell outta there!" 
"And she came right after 'em!" 
Second helmet was, if anything, more excited than the one who had actually been there. I had a feeling I'd have gotten a nice, wild, blood-and-thunder yarn out of him, accuracy be damned. "Go ahead." 
"We yell for help, and kinda spread out with the thing in the middle, see. Pasha—that's Rey Murat, the string chief, we call him Pasha—grabs our remotes to fill in the gaps. He can do that—he's got the codes. He says close in, throw an EMP at it. Knock it out or slow it down, at least." 
"What did it look like?" 
"Hard to say—it brought some fog with it, like a plasma? Couldn't make out the shape." 
I nodded, picturing it in my mind: the surrounding haze aglare in the work lights, the rough sphere of spacesuited jacks, that unknown and unknowable blob dashing around between them. 
"So the rest of the shift comes around the funnel—" 
"I saw this part!" 
"It went straight at Morg—" 
"And he let it through." 
I contemplated that for a moment. They watched me in something approaching anxiety. Finally I nodded. 
"Then Pasha started yelling—" 
"Yeah, and Wit, back in the hall. Wanting to know what was goin' on—" 
"—thing just zipped off, jamming every possible freq—" 
"It was fast—" 
"Then you busted Morgan." They looked at each other. 
"Right." 
"He say anything?" 
They shook their heads. "No idea what the AI was doing?" 
"It was up to something—" 
"You can't tell. They get too strange. They need humans around to keep 'em straight—" 
"None of you guys thought of making a recording?" 
"Oh yeah!" 
"Sure we did. The remotes copied. That's SOP in case of a mishap. Wit confiscated 'em all." 
"Witcove did?" 
"Right. Said he wanted to keep the evidence clean." 
I was thinking of a reply when the helmetless one slipped off the railing and shot toward me. Halting himself with one foot, he glared at me from a yard away. 
"You guys got remotes too?" 
I touched the unit at my ear. "Uhh … yeah. Sometimes. Not everybody." 
He frowned. "What make is that?" 
"Ah, that's a Kiwi," the second jack said. "Remi's got one of them." 
Mr. No-Helmet nodded. "Good unit. High-density, lotta options." 
"Uh-huh," I told him. "They mentioned that at the outlet." 
Satisfied, he resumed his silent perch. 
"Tell me something … " I looked between them. "What if Morgan was guilty?" 
Making a slicing noise, No-Helmet pulled a finger across his throat, with a smile I could have done without. 
"Yeah," the leader agreed. "I hate to say it, but—" 
"Once they touch a guy, he's no good anymore." 
I was prepared to ask where they'd ever come across anyone who'd been 'touched,' but decided to pass. All I'd succeed in doing would be to release the entire corpus of impi campfire lore, and there was no point in that 
"So where you guys headed?" 
"Oh, we just finished shift," second helmet said. 
"We're going to eat some real food." 
"Just did three 24s in vac," second helmet said proudly. 
"Three straight?" I understood that a lot of jacks actually like spending time in vacuum. "That's pretty good." 
The leader swung around without using his hands, the way jacks do. Second helmet followed him with a pleased-to-meet-ya thrown in my direction. But no-helmet remained where he was. I waited a moment, and was about to ask what his immediate plans were when he bent forward. 
"Whatcha gotta do become a cop?" 
Act sane, for starters. "Fill out an ap, send it in. They'll get in touch." 
"Where I get an ap?" 
I had him give me his address and ordered my ship to send him one. "You can put my name on it," I told him. 
"Deep," he said. His head swung toward a spot over my right shoulder. "He's right up there," he said. "Ha." 
Behind what appeared to be an open-vacuum junk drawer two levels up rose a small boxlike shape with a single lit window. When I turned back no-helmet too had kicked off. I watched him go, thinking about scapegoats, the pressures of living in this kind of truncated society, and what happened to people who break the unwritten but unbendable rules. But mostly I thought about the possible reasons why Witcove had kept the recordings from me. 
"Hey, mandy." I touched the remote. "Yeah, Remi." He chuckled. "Mind I stay down, eh?" "Suit yourself. Lot of traffic. Now … Morgan had just passed out." 
"You sharp. He did pass out." 
It doesn't take much in the way of sharpness to grasp how a man dying of starvation and cold would react on hearing a voice where no voice was possible. 
When he awoke, he was in a room that was comfortable for all its unfamiliarity. He was lying on a cot of some sort, and for reasons he didn't bother to examine, he felt no urge to get up. It wasn't that he was too weak, he simply wasn't inclined, and that was all. He heard music, melodies of Earth, almost recognizable though he couldn't quite place them. He had a memory—an impression—that one had been playing while he was being brought there. 
It occurred to him to look around. He took in the sight of the medical drip with no surprise. Even after centuries of advances, there's no better method of getting a lot of material into the bloodstream fast than a tube in a vein. He clenched his fist, smiled at the wave of tiredness that overcame him and closed his eyes. When he opened them again she was standing there. 
You can imagine what she looked like to him, after all the way he'd come, after what he'd been through. Women aren't common in the Halo. They're not rare either, but time often passes before a jack encounters one. And to put it gently, many of them are the female equivalents of the type of male yoyo that calls Kuio home. But nothing ever destroys the deep, instinctive connection of the human female with safety and security. That's the way she appeared to him, symbol made flesh, a saint in stained glass. 
With later developments in mind, it's easy to speculate that she molded the image to match Morgan's own expectations, working from cues he was unaware of and wouldn't have been able to change if he had been. The room was dark, and though he could clearly see the silver bracelets on her wrists, the necklace, the pair of roses growing from her scalp and intertwined with her hair in that old style that often fades but always returns, her face was clouded, her features hazy. 
"How you feeling?" was the first thing she said. Morgan didn't remember what he replied, but it pleased her; her wide smile made that clear. He made an attempt at the usual questions, but she just lay a hand on the blanket, and told him, "You rest." 
He reached for that hand but wasn't quick enough to grasp it before she turned and walked away. She looked back only once, when he asked her name. 
He lay down in pain, in disorientation, in discomfort, but beneath it all with that indescribable sensation that assured him he was going to live. 
She returned the next day, and he saw that she looked exactly as he might have guessed. When he answered her questions about how he felt, she cocked her head in a way that he almost recognized. He didn't remain awake very long that day, or the next either, just long enough for her to tell him a story about where he was and what had happened that isn't worth repeating because it wasn't true. But that didn't matter to him at the time, nor did he suspect it. Because he was in no concrete place at all, really. He was in that safe place we leave behind in childhood, and revisit only in memory. 
He remained there two weeks. He slept most of the next few days—he assumed there was a sedative in the feed coming down that tube. Whenever he awoke she was there, or arrived momentarily. Never anyone but her, though he had the impression—gained he didn't know how—that others were around. But it was she who examined him, who checked the medical machinery, who talked to him, who read to him, who helped him pass the time required for him to regain his strength. 
It was the better part of a week before he could eat. She let him feed himself—a bowl of clear broth. He kept it down, and there was solid food to come, small portions so he wouldn't be tempted to stuff. She didn't eat anything. 
At last, the time came for him to get up and exercise the muscles wasted by the weeks of his scarcely-remembered ordeal. She encouraged him to get up by himself, stepping back to give him room. He did well, taking five full steps to a chair and then back to the bed after resting a bit. She was pleased with him, enough so that he wanted to try it again right away. She told him it was better to wait. 
He must have been a touch overconfident the next day. That or wanting to please her or maybe a mix of both. He went a step farther than he should have, a little faster than was necessary. She was living out her own fantasy too, in whatever way an AI does, because when he lost his balance, she moved to catch him, and her hand went straight through his outstretched arm. 
"Wait one," I muttered. More alert now, I'd spotted a movement below as a figure appeared over the curve of the tank. Even at that distance I knew it was Witcove. I gestured Remi to remain down. 
I maintained a blank expression as Witcove approached. He landed with a grunt. "So … how's it going?" 
"Out catching a little sun." 
"Little … "he frowned. "Oh … little sun. Sure. Heh-heh … Say, I was taking a look at your ship. Quite a bird." 
"Gets me around." 
"Surprised how quick you got here, but … this is kind of an important thing, I guess. I mean, lot of people interested, right? Might go straight back to Charon, or maybe even deeper." 
I nodded. 
"So … word will get around. People will talk. Unless they maybe … classify it? But there's such things as leaks, too. See, you can't win." 
He shook his head and sighed. "Y'know, you get work out here by rep. Word of mouth. Somebody says, Powder Monkeys do a great job, never have to tell 'em things twice … That's how you get hired. No other way—advertising, bidding, forget about it. You need a good rep. And you don't get one overnight see, takes decades of hard, solid work. We got a good rep, the Monkeys. And we get our share of contracts. But here's the thing … " 
He bent close, his grotesque, vacuum-adapted face all intent. "People hear there's runaways hanging around the hall, and one of the Monkeys well, working with it. Now that wouldn't be so good. For the reputation, see. So I been thinking about that." 
"Go on." 
"What I was thinking, what if it happened different. What if Morgan quit. A few weeks back. Not too long ago, month or two. What if nobody could say, 'Rog Morgan, Powder Monkey.' What about that?" 
"You're saying you want me to falsify a report." 
"Noooo—I'm not saying that." Witcove snorted at my obtuseness. "But if you waited a bit, so I could mess with Morgan's files, see, I could make it look like he was forty AUs from here, with another outfit, or prospecting on his own … yeah, that'd be best. He quit and went out on his own. Come back to trade for supplies. Say, I ever tell you that the Monkeys are a public company?" 
He bobbed his head. "That's right. PM plc. Traded on all the big boards. Stock went up another tick last week. Never drops. Better than blue chip. We got a pretty good-size block of unassigned certificates right in my office and what do you say about that report?" 
"I could change it." I pronounced the words carefully, trying to hide the disgust I felt. Witcove seemed to shrink into himself with relief. "Sure. Or I could bust you and lock you up in my ship this minute." 
He stared at me in utter silence. "Or maybe freeze your systems and let you wait six or seven months for a magistrate to come by." 
His eye membranes flicked once, as if he was blinking. "Nah—we'll go for the bust." Raising my voice as if it could, in fact, carry through vacuum, I contacted the ship. "… prepare space for a single perp, charge attempted bribery of a Mandate law enforcement officer, that calls for maximum security, I believe." 
Witcove came back to life, waving his arms wildly, swinging his head in all directions as if to catch the ship sneaking up on him. I watched him for a moment. 
"Or maybe we won't do that either." He went still, arms extended. "Instead, maybe you'll give me the recordings you held back, you simple SOB." 
His arms fell and he recited the codes in a monotone. He remained silent as I sent them on to the ship with instructions to go through them for anomalies. "Wasn't just for me," he muttered after I finished. "I was thinking of the guys—" 
"I know that." 
Witcove wasn't bad. There were any number worse scattered across the Halo. Foremen and plant owners who didn't think of the guys at all, or thought of them only to cheat them, terrorize them, abuse them, let them down in every conceivable way. Whatever Witcove might be, he wasn't one of them. He was on the high end, as such things are graded. "Now go on." 
I stopped him as he swung over the railing. "What's the code to that shed lock?" 
He gave it to me and left without another word. 
Remi chuckled. "Knew you'd do that," I grimaced. As if I'd take a bribe in front of a witness. 
"Go on with the story, Remi." 
"Not much to tell. When he looked up she was gone, and he went back to bed lay there thinking. You know that old story about the guy the munchkins took away to Manhattan? Only there couple weeks but when he got back it was centuries and everybody was dead, and he had him a long beard. Ever hear that one?" 
"Something like it, yeah." 
"I mean, duppies. What they want? Who knows? Who's gonna hang around find out? So he waited til it was real quiet, and got up. His suit was right outside the door, like it was waiting for him. He put it on ran a check. All powered up, reservoirs full, and there was extra supply packs stacked on the floor. He went down this hallway, and round the corner the lights were on, leading to what sure as hell looked like a lock. He went over, and he's just about to step in and he stops, 'cause he's sure, see, they gonna grab him … " 
Right then I got a buzz from the ship. Slipping the handset from my belt, I read a message about the recorder footage. I told it to play. 
"… got in the lock, about to shut the door and he stops again. Helmet still open, see. Heard a sound from inside. A song, way quiet, like she was saying goodbye … " 
The scene playing on my handset was much as I'd imagined it: the brightly-lit haze, the jacks spread out, that unwelcome entity feinting between them. A flashing caret marked Rog Morgan. I watched as the impi swung toward him, as his hands rose, as the thing slipped past into open sky. 
"And whacha think he did?" 
The screen displayed another angle of the same scene: Jacks, Morgan, the impi … I lifted the set, paying close attention to his hands. "Turned around, went back." 
"You got it!" Remi sounded delighted. 
I called for a closeup of Morgan's hands, went through it twice in slow motion. "Yeah, that's what he did. And she came in a few minutes later, and he was on the bed in his suit, and he said, 'I like that song.' I'da kept going." 
"So would I." 
The screen began another replay. I canceled and it went dark. No point in watching it again. There was not a single doubt in my mind as to what had occurred. "Remi … I thank you, the Mandate thanks you … " I looked up at the shed's single lonely window. I didn't think Morgan was going to thank him. 
I started toward the shed, muscles quivering, mind ablaze with that feeling you get only when a case is coming together. A warning notice flashed as I approached the next level. I kicked up and over, barely pausing to catch my balance as I landed. 
The impis had gotten to him. There was no way around it; the footage was clear. Morgan was in full and witting contact with rogue entities and all that implied. It was the break we'd been waiting for, the first sign of an active human/impi organization. 
I needed immediate backup, every ship within a month's radius. The hall's higher-level activities would have to be frozen, to make sure it didn't wander off. A lot of people would be coming to look the place over. They'd be studying this hall down all the way down to the gluons for years to come. As for Morgan … I didn't want to think about that part. 
I paused at the door, almost breathless. With quick stabs I punched in the code. I charged inside before it was half open. "Okay, ace—what did she pass to you?" 
Morgan barely started. He gave me a mournful look then reached into his jacket pocket. He gazed down at the object in his hand and with a sigh tossed it to me. 
It was a piece of scrim. I'd seen that even as he took it out. I hefted it. Some kind of metal, an alloy I couldn't identify. The bust of a woman, head cocked to one side, a smile on her face, hair lifting away as if blown by an invisible breeze. 
I raised my eyes to Morgan. "She went … You're telling me the impi went after this for you." 
"No." Morgan shook his head. "Alerted some others. They picked it up." 
I turned the statuette over in my hand. It's hollow, I told myself. Imprinted on the molecular level with some message, some command … 
I examined the face once again, the laughing eyes, the lips so lifelike they seemed about to speak, to give word to everything Morgan had left behind: light, and warmth, air to breath. He'd put a lot of work into the thing. It occurred to me, somewhat belatedly, that it was a portrait of someone he knew. Had once known. No wonder he wanted it back. 
For a second or two my mind struggled against the evidence of simple kindness, desperate for a reason to raise the alarm after all. But it wasn't hollow, and contained nothing, and it wouldn't take me anywhere. I tossed it back to Morgan. "Nice piece." I got out my handset. "Okay—does our little pal have a name?" 
"Isis," he said softly. I had to ask him to repeat it. 

· · · · · 

I left the door unlocked. The hall's top level was only a few yards overhead. I kicked off for it, setting down amidst a jungle of antennas and cables and junk. That grand glowing tube of dirty-yellow muck towered above me. I eyed it with the weariness of years, seeing my own youth vanish over that bright curve, its roaring song fading relentlessly into gray. Some are meant for the sunlight and some for the shadowed places. It was pretty clear to me which portion was mine. 
Morgan hadn't told me much; whatever didn't feel like betrayal. I'd lase it back to Charon, where they'd give it to some specialist to ponder. Maybe they'd find more in it than I had. I doubted it. 
"Hey, mandy." I turned to see Remi gazing at me through his helmet visor, ready, I suppose, to go on shift. It was a moment before I recalled the remote riding on my ear. I plucked it off and handed it back. 
"All straighten out?" 
"More or less. He'll be ready to leave tomorrow. He wants you to run the catapult." 
"He ain't stridin' again?" 
"Not like he has a lot to worry about." 
"Ahh … I gotcha." 
"Nice to have friends," I said. He shook his head. "Can't stand him myself. He chatters." 
I watched him leave. For a moment he was silhouetted against the tower, and I saw him as an impi might, a human figure outlined by light. Then he vanished, the way jacks do. 
It wasn't as dark as it had been. The shadows had lifted somewhat. I knew the names of one of the spirits, the right questions to ask, and the fact that the dragons might not be dragons after all. A pretty good day, all considered. 
I looked over my shoulder toward home. The stars glared back, but I couldn't, for the life of me, decide which was which. After a moment I gave up and went to tell Witcove how it was going to be. 
The End