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still ambiguous. As she watched, rows of figures were updated, the sprinkling of points on half a dozen charts grew denser, curves shifted slightly. Cass knew where every number and every curve was heading; it was like watching the face of a long-awaited friend materialize out of the darkness, having pictured the reunion a thousand times. And if the face might yet turn out to be a stranger's, that had nothing to do with the way she felt. There was pleasure enough in anticipation; she didn't need to conjure up traces of doubt just to savor the added suspense.
    “What we're doing isn't all that unusual,” Darsono mused. “I think everyone lives in at least two time scales: one of them fast and immediate, and too detailed to retain in anything but outline; the other slow enough to be absorbed completely. We think our memory has no gaps, we think we carry our entire past inside us, because we're accustomed to looking back and seeing only sketches and highlights. But we all experience more than we remember.”
    “That's not true of everyone,” Bakim countered. “There are people who record every thought they have.”
    “Yes, but unless every part of that record has the potential to be triggered automatically by subsequent thoughts and perceptions—which no one ever allows, because the barrage of associations would drive them mad—it's not true memory. It's just a list of all the things they've forgotten.”
    Bakim chortled. “‘True memory’? And I suppose if I perceive something with so much spatial resolution that I can't give immediate, conscious attention to every last detail simultaneously, it's not a ‘true’ perception—it's just a cruel taunt to drive home all the things I've failed to perceive?”
    Cass smiled, but stayed out of the argument. With certainty ? Probably not. But it was pointless dwelling on every potential branching; if and when she experienced something unpleasant, firsthand, or did something foolish herself, she could regret it. Anything else was both futile and a kind of masochistic doublecounting. (And she would not start wondering if that resolution was universal—a constant across histories, an act of inevitable good sense—or just the luck of one branch.)
    Livia said, “I don't understand what's happening with the energy spectrum.” In the feigned weightlessness of the chamber, she appeared upside down, her face at the upper edge of Cass's vision. “Does that make sense to anyone?”
    Cass examined the histogram showing the number of particles that had been detected in different energy ranges; it did not appear to be converging on the theoretically predicted curve. She'd noticed this earlier, but she'd assumed it was just an artifact of the small sample they'd collected. The histogram's rim was quite smooth, though, and its overall shape wasn't fluctuating much, so its failure to match the curve really didn't look like an accident of noise. Worse, all the high-powered statistics beneath the chart suggested that there was now enough data to give a reliable picture of the underlying spectrum.
    “Could we have miscalculated the border geometry?” Rainzi wondered. The particles they were seeing reflected the way the novo-vacuum was collapsing. Cass had first modeled the process back on Earth, and her calculations had shown that, although the border's initial shape would be a product of both pure chance and some uncontrollable details of conditions in the Quietener, as it collapsed it would rapidly become spherical, all quirks and wrinkles smoothed out.
    At least, that was true if some plausible assumptions held. She said, “If the converted region had a sufficiently pathological shape to start with, it might have retained that as it shrank. But I don't know what could have caused that in the first place.”
    “Some minor contaminant that wasn't quite enough to wreck coherence?” Ilene suggested.
    Cass made a noncommittal sound. It would be nice to have a view from several