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Free Pneumase Usage Room 1 is not blank white, like the others. Its walls and ceilings are matte black, lighting courtesy of klieg lights on poles in a regular array along each wall. It’s also huge: the size of a football field, dotted with machines and lab benches. At one end is a raised platform, lit brightly from above, looking for all the world like a theatrical stage.

This platform is shielded off from the rest of the room by an invisible, but very strong, pneumatech barrier. The platform is where you test things that you think might explode, or spawn monsters, to name two of many possibilities. Things like Ratio and Cecelia’s engine, which sits alone in the center of the stage like a piano, indeed the approximate size and shape of a grand piano, a nondescript heap of lab parts jerry-rigged together. The platform’s lights illuminate it mercilessly, as though it were some objet d’art in a museum.

Ratio had been running for shelter when he’d heard the peculiar synth announcement:

All personnel Rank A and above, report to Free Pneumase Usage Room 1. This is an order.

He’d card-swiped his way through the door to find Cecelia already there, near him. They are near the platform, at its right side, from the “audience’s” point of view. They exchange glances.

A ways across the room, closer to the platform’s left side, are Miranda and Hermes Cept, standing together, Hermes wearing . . . one of Miranda’s skirts?!

Well there’s a little bit of private life Ratio didn’t feel he needed to know. But to each their own. Lord knows everyone in the Sphere needs some sort of outlet for their id.

There are others here. James, LUDWIG’s operator, who Ratio doesn’t know well at all. Janelle, the Sphere’s reserve pilot, who he’s never spoken to. Some of the senior scientists and administrators. The door opens in and Ratio steps aside to let a few more people trickle in.

There is an awkward moment. No one wants to approach each other. No one knows what they’re there for.

The door opens a last time, and in rushes Maria, hand in hand with someone Ratio’s never seen, a luminous man with short blonde hair and a gleam in his eye. Ratio immediately feels a little jealous. Just where has Maria been hiding this treasure of a man?

Maria and the stranger run right toward the platform, through the barrier, and take up position by the machine. The man is wearing a suit with a carnation on his breast; he looks less businesslike than princely, an operatic hero on stage with his forbidden lover.

“Welcome, everyone!” he says, and though his voice is not amplified, it is easy for everyone to hear, close as they are to the platform. “Some of you know me. For those who don’t, my name is Martin. And I think the love of my life”—he gestures toward Maria—“needs no introduction.”

Maria looks at once lost and, in some deep way, found. Ratio glances over at Miranda and Hermes, who are both responding with complex emotive gestures that are, at least at this range, incomprehensible.

The room shakes violently.

•

Herm knows this man, and is wary of him. This man, who was always in the background whenever EPRN business was transpiring. This man, who said little, and seemed to know much.

Herm does not know why he has called them here now, to watch this cheesy little performance, while monsters pound at the doors. There is something about him that—yes, that’s it—

This man is the flattest of the flat creatures.

And this is the height of flatness: pure artifice, flamboyant and cheap display of emotion, while all that is serious, dangerous, real, cries out to be heard.

And yet he is buying them time. If the heteropneums manage to destroy the Sphere, the aberration will have been removed, and the flatness will be gone.

Strange.

The man is speaking again. Herm turns away from her thoughts to listen:

“. . . I am here today to show you that there is more we, the human race, can do than you have ever dreamed. Maria and I knew each other, years ago, in a branch lost to the merciless logic of the world-tree, and yet here we are again, together! We no longer need to fear. We no longer need to—”

—the room shakes again—

“—cower before anything. The future is bright, and our dreams will be made real, by the magic of the light in our souls!”

Maria’s face is half-turned toward him, half-turned toward the audience, something like awe playing across it.

What is this nonsense? “The magic of the light in our souls?” The world is wrong. No one speaks like this outside of children’s stories. What on earth is this man talking about? What do his sappy words really mean? What is the salvation he promises?

The room pitches, and Maria nearly falls over, but Martin catches her, and she relaxes in his arms.

•

Miranda thinks she sees Maria, in Martin’s arms, turn to look at her. She thinks she sees a flicker of something like sadness there. But it doesn’t matter. Really, really, it’s never mattered.

Martin has always been there, before everything. He offers this—whatever on earth it is he is offering—and she’s only, in the end, an ordinary woman.

When Miranda signed on to work in the Sphere, she agreed to cope with logics beyond the merely human. So be it.

“Our dreams will be made real!” Martin says again, “and I will show you how!”

Our dreams? All of our dreams?

•

“I’m going to turn this machine on now, Maria,” Martin says. “You’ll be safe. Are you ready?”

“I’m ready,” she says, in a loud, clear voice. A slightly fanatical voice. The flat creatures communicate in broad gestures.

Martin does something to the device, and the results are immediate: Maria begins to glow. Her outline is traced by a purplish-white light. It is somehow too purple: the visual equivalent of a broad gesture. Maria’s eyes grow wide. Martin still holds her, and the aura does not seem to affect him.

The glow expands, and now it is pulsating, cycling through colors, a full rainbow radiating from Maria and extending a full six inches around her on every side. Colors everywhere appear to intensify, grow too vivid: the world has turned technicolor.

A scrambled gibbering scrapes its way across Herm’s mind. Boltzmen. They must be incredibly powerful Boltzmen to manage to get across the shield at all. Herm looks around: everyone else is feeling them too.

And on stage the technicolor drama continues. We have left all real things behind and are now in Oz. Martin, prince of flatness, cradles his radiant princess, and she looks up at him with the devoted expression of every mid-twentieth-century starlet of the silver screen, and she looks like she’s about to speak—

—and of course, yes, here it comes, the line without which no schmaltzy romance would ever be complete—

Maria opens her mouth, and says, loudly, clearly, radiantly:

“I [,,,,] you.”

•

Ratio knows, in theory, how the engine is supposed to work. A soul splits, untagged, and its pieces commingle with the pieces of all souls in the causal vicinity.

He does not know what it is supposed to look like in practice. The aura took him by surprise. He does not know what to make of the word Maria has said, which struck his mind like a Boltzman, filling him with emotions for which he has no words.

Everything is very bright, and very vivid, and Maria is—walking forward—walking through the barrier—the aura pulses—and now she is speaking again, louder than he had ever thought she could speak, yet somehow calm, welcoming—

“i [teem].”

James rushes forward, inexplicably, a look of urgency and terror on his face. He looks like he’s about to tackle Maria. But she extends a radiant arm to touch his shoulder, and immediately he stops.

“let us be [friends],” she says. And James stops, very still, and then he too begins to glow, and everything becomes very confused all at once.

People are rushing about, or not rushing, standing still, fractal ridges of rainbow aura are cutting their way across everything, and then suddenly everyone turns, in eerie unison, to Martin, who has begun to speak again.

“This is the energy source of the heteropneums. This is what will carry us into the bright future.” He looks above him. “LUDWIG, are you capturing this?”

A voice Ratio has never heard before. “Power output is steady and oh so tasty, a food that stands in relation to all prior foods as the continuum stands to the countable! My inner gourmand [teems] with zealous delight!”

“Can we begin now?” Martin asks the ceiling.

“But Martin, you asker of miracles, the sprint you want requires such reserves of ATP that we will still need our reserves of coherence power, which—”

Martin cuts him off.

“Then do it, LUDWIG! Play the symphony!”

•

Yes, we get it, thinks Herm. Very clever. Ludwig like Boltzmann but also like Beethoven. What a hammy actor. And yet, as she thinks this, there is something, something purple, of unspeakable depth, at the edge of her perception, and it speaks to her as if in counter-argument . . .

•

All over the Sphere, in the various shelters, people begin to feel their skin tingle. It is an intensification of something they’d felt earlier in the week. Most of them had chalked it up to sleep deprivation. But now here it is, unignorable, that odd feeling they’d had all week coming up behind them and speaking so that they cannot avoid hearing.

•

Floating in his null sensorium, mind tingling with possibility, LUDWIG notes a spike in power collection. A great deal of coherent pneuma light has appeared in the shelters. He feels with pleasure an instinct, built into his software and never before triggered.

Yes, it is right to begin now.

•

Around the place where the Sphere’s equator meets the ocean floor, a sudden roil of turbulence. Pneuma energy is being transformed into heat, and the suddenly warm water around the Sphere’s base rushes convectively towards the surface.

Slowly, the Sphere begins to rise.

In the pneuma spectrum, things are much more exciting. The Sphere is surrounded with an intense aura of energy, throwing off Boltzmen furiously. In the chasm, the [Teeming] watch the Pneuma Lightshow with pleasure, taking [joy] in the [Unfolding]. They make [friends] with passing Boltzmen. All is well.

The Sphere has broken away from the ocean floor, and now it rises faster and faster, forming a larger and larger bubble of hot water vapor around it. Pneuma energy looking for a home in the whirl of worlds finds its resting place in the simple abode of physics, and the bubble gains kinetic energy. The surrounding waters rush outward faster than any earthly wave, creating a giant depression in the ocean surface, circumscribed by a raging vortex hundreds of kilometers wide.

From out of the center of this great eddy, the Sphere emerges. It floats higher and higher into the air, now glowing with the light of pneuma energy that has found its way into the Maxwell spectrum. In every direction, Boltzmen shriek across the night, bearing the good news.

•

In Free Pneumase Usage Room 1, the walls appear to shift. No one is sure what is going on.

Captured by curiosity, Ratio rushes to look at one of the aberrations. He finds himself looking down, from a great and growing height, at an ocean in frenzied cyclical motion, lit up vividly against a night sky.

Like many rooms in the Sphere, Free Pneumase Usage Room 1 has windows. And now one can see the outside.

Ratio turns from the window. Martin stands on the stage, and Maria and James are now beside him. Everyone else is standing still, as if in prayer. Everything is lit up Christmas-like with day-glo light of every color in the visible spectrum, and some besides. The room is charged, somehow, with hopeful energy.

And inside Ratio’s head, he hears:

When the moon is in the Seventh House

And Jupiter aligns with Mars

Then peace will guide the planets

And love will steer the stars

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius . . .

•

War Conditions Journal, 18/41/3982

Bless this night! Bless Iah, our roiling yawning father!

The Merkabah mystics have had enemies, which is right, for interpreting Iah’s word is not a thing to be done lightly. But tonight, as we looked at the moon from the cape, watching for signs, a great wind struck us, and for a moment our minds were all lost, and we felt not our own thoughts but only divine chaos. And when the moment was over, there was not one moon but two.

The Merkabah has returned! Iah has come to us at last! May we be worthy!

END OF PART 2