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with greenery.”
    Gorky was back. He said, “Seven’s not getting anywhere. Leave it.”
    Pilgrim Eleven rolled out of a sandstorm and found a smooth stone wall. It rolled placidly along the wall, seeing nothing.
    Pilgrim Eight rolled among low red hills toward cloudless blue sky. A dark vertical line appeared intermittently when the Pilgrim was looking up. Some flaw in the camera? Ra Chen went into fast-forward and they bore the motion sickness as Pilgrim Eight rolled out of the hills and down toward intersecting canals. A town looked to have grown up around the base of what was no longer a vertical thread, but a slender pillar in pale brown.
    â€œIt’s a tree,” Svetz said.
    The Heads turned full around. Ra Chen barked, “Svetz, are you sure?”
    â€œI’ve seen trees.”
    And so had any of the few allowed into Waldemar Eight’s Garden, but Svetz had seen them by hundreds and thousands, dozens of kinds of trees—“Most of them branch out like a family lineage diagram, you know? But a few just keep going up and up. Ash does that. Redwoods … you can’t hold it in your head. It’s like they’re holding up the sky. Can you make the Pilgrim look straight up? How tall is that thing?”
    Miya’s grip was a vise on Svetz’s wrist. “Hanny! Not just a tree. Willy! ”
    Noises outside: limousines. Then chaos rolled into the theater and everything came to a stop. Gorky’s guards were followed by twenty conspicuously armed giants in United Nations Security uniforms. They searched the viewing room and strip-searched its occupants and threw half of them out before they let the Secretary-General enter.
    Svetz saw a crown or headdress rising above the guards. It was all Svetz could see of the Secretary-General. The middle of the front row was a kind of throne, and the space in front of it had been cleared.
    Waldemar the Eleventh sat down. His voice held absolute confidence and a bit of a stutter. “Willy, s-show me what you’ve got.”

9
    Its roots, trunk and branches bind together Heaven, Earth and the Netherworld.
    â€”“The Ash Tree,” from Mattioli’s Commentaires, Lyons, 1579
    Â 
    Pilgrim Eleven rolled along a wall painted with nightmare figures faded to ominous shadows. The wall curved away; glass towers poked above its rim, barely glimpsed as the Pilgrim rolled into wilderness.
    Pilgrim Four’s last moments showed alien shapes on alien riding beasts, and hacking silver blades. United Nations guards shrank closer around Waldemar the Eleventh.
    A slender vertical thread became an impossibly tall pillar, the center of a township of tall, spindly towers. Pilgrim Eight rolled past, many klicks wide of the town and the great pillar. Ra Chen froze the frame.
    Waldemar the Eleventh asked, “How tall is that?”
    Gorky relayed the order down. “Ra Chen, we need a better view of that.”
    Ra Chen said, “Formulate your instructions for the Pilgrims and we’ll send ’em. Do you know what to tell the Collector probe? Do you know what samples you want sent back to Earth?”
    Gorky said, “We need a view up. I’d think we want seeds, if it makes seeds, and a lot more information.” His eyes flicked toward the Secretary-General. He would speak on any subject the SecGen raised first.
    Pilgrim Eight ran straight to a canal, paused, then rolled in. Finding no easy way out, it followed the canal, sending out its light-enhanced viewpoint. Eyeless things fled from motion or the taste of metal. Queer near-human skeletons in skimpy armor, and far-from-human exoskeletons enhanced with miniature frescoes and artificial ribbing, lay intermingled along more than a klick of canal bottom.
    Pilgrim Nine reached the northern ice and froze up. Gorky felt Ra Chen’s eyes on him and said, “We weren’t expecting significant ice.”
    Pilgrim Ten rolled northeast until a canal blocked its