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apocalyptic.
    "What is this place?"
    "The first hit by the Slow Wave."
    "The thing that killed the Forts did this?"
    "No." He shakes his head. "We did—humans in a panic when the old regime fell. This is our real enemy, Jasper: chaos, fear, mistrust, decay. That's what I'm fighting, because if we backslide any further, we'll lose everything. Piece by piece, the great works we accomplished will crumble to dust—and if we're unlucky or particularly stupid, we'll all follow. So I've set myself up as a symbol of hope—a rallying point for those who want the same things as me, and a threat to anyone standing in our way. That's why I have to come down hard on those who don't buy the act. It's not because I'm afraid you'll expose the truth. It's because everyone already knows the truth, but as long as no one speaks it aloud we can get on with the business of rebuilding."
    "It's utter fantasy," I tell him. "Group hypnosis. Hysteria. And you have the gall to call me delusional."
    "Indeed I do. Because what I do helps people. We are rebuilding. We are making progress. What are you doing but sitting on your arse in your backward corner of the universe, contemplating your own centre of gravity? Tell me what good that is doing the galaxy!"
    "God moves in mysterious ways, Bergamasc. Those words are older than either of us."
    "Utter nonsense." He sticks his fingers into his hair and grips his skull as though in agony. "Sometimes I wonder if we'll ever agree on anything."
    "Why do we have to? Creation is large enough to accommodate our differences."
    "Not while you refuse to give me the Earth."
    The illusion dissolves around us. I am back in my plastic cell. My ear itches where the message mosquito bit it. I am assaulted physically, mentally, and emotionally.
    Bergamasc is no longer in the cell with me. I don't watch him as he paces like a tiger on the wrong side of the cage, but I can hear him. The rhythm now seems more hesitant than martial, limping along to an uncertain destination. I wonder if he will bring in Helwise again, to do that which he himself can't stomach.
    "Earth will never be yours," I tell him. "Not while I live."
    "So why don't I just pull out a pistol right now and shoot you dead?"
    There it is: the first uttering of the threat he will one day make real.
    "You can't do that," I say, thinking of the days in his future that I've yet to see.
    "Why not? All that's stopping me is my inclination to keep you alive, not your so-called divinity. Only a foolish man would rely on the permanence of that impulse."
    It's too difficult to explain to him. "Anything born can die," I concede.
    "You were born, then?" He waits for an answer, then persists. "I've shown you where I came from. You could return the favor."
    I don't answer because I don't need to. He finds the place in his own time. That I know for certain.
     
    A pink dawn shines on the tip of a cast-iron arrow, upthrust by a seventeen-meter-high statue of the Roman god Vulcan. Sunlight and metal, fire and forge—this is the first thing I ever saw, and the image haunts me still. In my ears rang the words of a man I closely resembled, as though he had spoken them just moments before:
    "A civilization able to envision God and to embark on the colonization of space will surely find the way..."
    To do what? To where? The thought was unfinished. I could sense its incompleteness hanging in the air of the pine forest crowding the base of the sandstone tower on which the mighty statue stood, arrow in one hand, hammer in the other. By Vulcan's left foot rested—and still rests, I hope—the anvil of his craft. Armorer of the gods, builder of the thrones of Mount Olympus, patron deity of the alchemists, he gazed not at me but at the sky, as though waiting for something to come out of it.
    A god, perhaps. A gods' god, clad in fire and steeped in the ages. A human god cut loose of the shackles of causality and free to wander the eternity of time...
    "Hello, Jasper," spoke a voice into