won’t bite on an empty hook.”
“Could you possibly mix that metaphor up a little more?” Amalie said.
“Oh, cut it out, you know what I mean! But it’s true.”
Dev rubbed his face. “All right,” he said. “Have you spoken to Tau about this?”
“About three this morning.”
“What did he say?”
“He said it was okay,” said Darlene.
“He said he’d be clearing it with you this morning after he talked to Jim and got the money end green-lit,” said Giorgio.
Dev suddenly flashed on Lola saying to him, with one of those winning smiles, “But Mama said I could!” And it was always a judgment call whether Mama really had. It wasn’t that Lola lied, precisely, but she so much wanted her version of reality to be true sometimes . . .
Nonetheless . . . it sounds like something Tau would have okayed: it has that reckless braininess about it. Dev sighed. “Okay,” he said, “let me get out of here: I’ve got at least as many things to do as you guys have. Just keep up the good work. I’ll talk to Tau later. Make sure you add anything new to your notes for him before we meet.”
“To hear is to obey, O Mighty One,” Giorgio said.
“Right. System? My door, please.”
It appeared in the air nearby. “And guys?” Dev said. “Good work. Keep on it. We’re all gonna have a big party when everything calms down.”
“Boss!” Giorgio said. “This is a big party. But we’ll come to yours.”
Dev smiled, waved at them, and stepped through the door.
Back in his virtual office, he stood silent for a moment, looking down through the darkly transparent floor at the Ring of Elich and thinking over what the Princes of Hell had told him. “Management?” he said then.
“Here, Dev.”
“Give me access to the CO routines.”
“What mode?”
“The same as last night.”
The view through the floor changed, showing him the rings of glowing trees as seen from thirty or forty feet above the base level and the floor opened, the stairway building itself again downward beneath him. Dev headed down the stairs.
Once down on the island that held the circle of a hundred and twenty-one trees, Dev paused on the shore, looking down into the roil of green light representing the CO routines. He reached into the air, pulled out the Sword of Truth, and stood there for a moment, considering the lines of code tangling and rolling liquidly at his feet.
Then he shook his head. “System management?”
“Here, Dev.”
“Is Tau viewing the CO routines at the moment?”
“No, Dev. Tau is in the Castle in consulting suite five, in conference with Cleolinda.”
“All right.” Still, he was feeling a little paranoid this morning, so—“Are any other Omnitopia personnel viewing the CO’s outrider programs?”
“The shuntspace staff on duty have a window open, but none are observing.”
“Good,” Dev said. “Alert me if either they or Tau begin observations.”
“I will, Dev.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Paradigm shift, please. Personal CO idiom—”
“As requested,” said the control voice.
The light changed, the landscape shifted. Suddenly the island looked like a real island—rushes and cattails down at the water’s edge, verdant sward underfoot: a clear sky above, with a big moon hanging low and silver in it. The forest of code behind him now looked like a real forest, the massive rough-barked trunks rearing up behind him, stretching out vast branches, every leaf of the overshadowing canopy edged with the silver of moonlight. In front of him, the liquid shift of the CO routines was now expressing itself as water, rippling pewter and silver under the moon, stretching away to the horizon in all directions.
Dev went down to the water’s edge and just stood there for a second, listening to the wind. Then he reared back and threw the Sword of Truth upward and out over the water.
It spun in the moonlight, fell toward the surface, but never had a chance to strike. White in the silvery light, a slender arm thrust up from the water and caught the sword by the hilt. For a moment the arm simply held it so: then water rippled as what held the sword started to move closer to the shore. More of the arm showed, and white silk fell back from it, shimmering in the pallid light as the shape to which the arm belonged made her way up toward the shore with the Sword of Truth in her hand.
She looked like Mirabel, but a different version of her: as fair as Mirabel, but instead of his wife’s blonde good looks, the woman