"Don’t worry," he assured her, "you won’t be hangingaround waiting. And you won’t be disappointed. The femtomachine willonly start up on a definite signal from the Quietener; if there’snothing, it won’t ever be run."

Cass protested, "Aren’t you telling the wrong person?" Hemight have mentioned this before she’d been split.

Rainzi shrugged. "To the clone, it will be self-evident.If it gets the chance to think anything at all."

If the vacuum at the heart of the Quietener changed, herother self would wake, watch the whole event unfold in slow motion,bifurcate a million times, then vanish, before Cass had even noticedthe good news. Neither the price nor the payoff were part of her ownfuture, now.

Yet they would all be one person: awake, asleep. Thedream she would not remember would be her own.

Here and now, though?

She would have to make do with whatever glimpses shecould steal.

She turned to Yann. "Freeze me. One last time."

Chapter 3

Cass looked around the simulated chamber. The display onthe wall was densely inscribed with new data, but nothing else appearedto have changed. The Mimosans were the usual icons drawn by herMediator; she still had no hope of perceiving them as they perceivedthemselves. The structures in her mind where sensory data wasrepresented hadn’t changed; they simply weren’t coupled to genuinesense organs anymore. It was only the touch of Rainzi’s nonexistentskin against her own — a translation interacting with a simulation — thatproved she’d stepped from her world into his.

Or rather, they’d both stepped together into a new world,from which neither of them could hope to emerge.

Cass felt no anxiety, just a bittersweet sense ofeverything her newfound freedom did and didn’t mean. If she’d abandoned