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a little uneasily.
    “They frighten me, too,” Neos said softly. Her eyes when she raised them were dark and bright, and she looked at me as though betraying a secret. “I think you would have to be mad, not to be afraid of them.”
    But Aidan only laughed, though Emma’s voice fell off at Neos’s words. John said nothing more, only stared silently at the candle burning down before us….
    Suddenly my reverie was shaken. I heard Kesef’s voice, announcing “Imperator, someone is approaching us.”
    I opened my eyes, blinking at the near-darkness that filled the Gryphon’s tiny cabin. My eyes and my right hand were the only parts of my physical corpus that remained in the shell of plasteel and neural fibers that encased my consciousness. In Araboth I had been regenerated as a rasa, one of the Ascendants’ living corpses; and so I had attained an immortality of sorts, but not one, alas! which offered me any joy. When I glanced out the window of the aircraft, I saw the nemosyne standing at the edge of the tor where we had landed. Night had fallen. She gazed out across the prairie, to where the settlement’s few lights, scarlet and bronze and white, pillaged the sleeping hillsides. For a moment I stared down at her. In the soft darkness she glowed faintly, blue and gold, her translucent skin like a web of water surrounding her frail and complex innards. She was the most beautiful construct I had ever seen, surpassing even the artistry of those Fourth Ascension craftsmen who had used the long-dead coryphées of the twentieth-century cinema as models for the replicants, and gave them such enchanting names: Garbos, Marlenas, Marilyns.
    But you would never mistake Nefertity for a human being. Her face and torso were obviously composed of glass and metal and neural threads, and while her voice was that of the saintly woman who had programmed her, there was a crystalline ring to it, an eerie chill that recalled the songs of those hydrapithecenes the Ascendants call sirens, who seek to lure men and women to their tanks by the purity of their voices and slay them there as they bend to embrace the waiting monsters. I thought of the sirens as I watched Nefertity, the faint glow of her body casting a violet shadow upon the barren earth. After a minute or so I climbed from the Gryphon to join her.
    Outside the air was warm and dry. I could not actually feel it, of course, no longer having any skin except the sturdy membrane of black and crimson resins that sheathed my memories. But I knew this place, knew how the winds swept across the deserted prairie, bringing with them the scent of powdered stone and burning mesquite. Even through an Aviator’s leathers, you always felt that wind leaching away sweat and tears, leaving an incrustation of salt like rime upon your cheeks.
    “I hope they will be safe there,” Nefertity said, her voice dry, nearly emotionless. “The boy wept when I left him.”
    I nodded, walking until I stood beside her at the edge of the cliff. “They will be safer there than anywhere they might go with us.”
    Nefertity said nothing, only stared with glowing emerald eyes into the darkness. She was a nemosyne, a memory unit created as a robotic archive centuries earlier; but she had been imprinted with the voice and persona of a particular woman, the archivist Loretta Riding. She was by far the most eloquent simulacrum I have ever come across. As I said, the Ascendants have androids that cannot be distinguished from humans except in the most intimate situations. Nefertity was not one of these, but sitting here in the dark, listening to her speak, it was only the absence of her breathing that indicated she was a replicant; that and the fox-fire glow emanating from her transparent body.
    “I hope they will be safe,” she repeated at last. “It is a primitive encampment there, and they have been accustomed to the luxuries of Araboth.”
    “They will learn about hardship then,” I replied coolly, “like