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"Why did the Neandertals need to do this?"

"Because of us:
Homo Sapiens,
Malenfant. For a while, after the ice, the Earth was empty. The Gaijin implanted their little pockets of reconstructed prehumans. But then along
we
came, and it all unraveled as it had before, thirty or forty thousand years ago. You've seen how the locals treat the Uprights, the habilines."

"Yes."

"So it was with the Neandertals... except
here.
The Neandertals had their uranium, their radioactivity. They laced water supplies. They tipped their spears... It helped keep back the humans, until a smart human leader -- a predecessor of Mtesa -- came along and struck a deal."

"So Mtesa supplies human slaves to the Neandertals. To maintain the pile."

"Essentially. Makes you think, doesn't it, Malenfant? If only the
true
Neandertals, of our own deep past, had discovered such a resource, perhaps they could have kept us at bay, survived into modern times -- I mean,
our
times."

Malenfant frowned. "It doesn't sound too stable. A nuclear pile isn't much of a weapon... You'd think that Mtesa's soldiers could overwhelm the Neandertals, take what they wanted, drive them out. And the radioactivity -- we're all living on top of a raw nuke pile, here. Even those who don't have to go work in that hole in the ground are going to suffer contamination."

Nemoto grimaced. "You are not living in Clear Lake now, Malenfant. These people accept things we wouldn't have. The Waganda have built a stable social arrangement around their Engine. They keep their bloodlines reasonably pure by stigmatizing any individual showing signs of mutation or radiation sickness. It's a kind of symbiosis. The Waganda use the Engine's energy. But the Engine maintains itself by poisoning a proportion of the Waganda population. Mostly they use Uprights and habilines anyhow; among the humans, only Mtesa's victims finish up in the Engine."

Malenfant said, "Those toys of Mtesa's -- the fountains and the Caesar's Palace trick throne -- can't absorb more than a few percent of the pile's energy... The rest of it runs that Saddle Point gateway. Doesn't it, Nemoto? And
that
is the true purpose of this place.
This is some huge Gaijin project.
"

"I am no tourist guide, Reid Malenfant. I don't know anything." She looked away from him. "Now leave me alone."

Malenfant had trouble sleeping. He felt ill, and at times he felt overwhelmed by fear.

He'd glimpsed a Saddle Point gateway, buried deep in this African hillside. That was where all the power went. And that downward breeze had been air passing through the gateway, a leak in the fabric of the world.

He felt drawn to the gateway, as if by some gravitational field.

I don't want this, he thought. I just wanted to run home. But I brought myself
here.
I chose to come to this place, kept digging until I found
this,
the center of it all. A way back into the game. Just like Nemoto.

A way to fulfill whatever purpose the Gaijin seemed to have for him.

I can't do it. Not again. I just want to be left alone. I don't
have
to follow this path, to do anything.

But the logic of his life seemed to say otherwise.

Spare me, he thought; and he wished he believed in a god to receive his prayers.

Malenfant was woken, rudely, by a shuddering of his pallet. His eyes snapped open to darkness, and he sucked in hot African air. For a second he thought he was in orbit:
a blowout in the shuttle orbiter, a micrometeorite that had smashed through Number Two Window...

He was alone in his villa, and the grass roof was intact. He pushed off his cover and tried to stand.

The ground shook again, and there was a deep, subterranean groaning, a roar of stressed rock. A quake, then?

Through the glassless windows of the villa, a new light broke. He saw a glow, red-white and formless, that erupted in a gout of fire over the rooftops of Rubaga. Grass huts ignited as tongues of glowing earth came licking back to ignite the flimsy constructions. He heard screaming, the patter of bare feet running.

That fount of flame came from the heart of the town, Malenfant saw immediately -- from the well of Kimera, from the pit of that monstrous Engine.

De Bonneville.
It had to be. In some way, he'd carried out his vague threat.

The shuddering subsided, and Malenfant was able to stand. He pulled on his biocomposite coverall and stepped out of the villa.

All of Rubaga's populace appeared to be out in the narrow streets: courtiers, peasants, courtesans, and chiefs, all running in terror. The big gates of the capital's surrounding cane fence had been thrown open, and Malenfant could see how the great avenues were already thronged with people, running off into the countryside's green darkness.

Malenfant set off through the capital toward the center of the plateau. He had to push his way through the panicking hordes of Waganda, who fled past him like wraiths of smoke.

By the time he'd reached the dead heart of the hilltop, even the great grass palace of Mtesa was alight.

Malenfant hurried into the central plain, away from the scorching huts. He reached the blighted zone with relief; for the first time in many minutes, he could draw a full breath.

The fire of Kimera loomed out of the earth before Malenfant, huge and angry and deadly; and all around the rim of the plain he saw the glow of Rubaga's burning huts. Christ, he was in the middle of a miniature Chernobyl. And it scared the shit out of him to think that there was nobody here,
nobody,
who understood what was going on, nobody at the controls.

He walked on, his feet heavy, his chest and face scorching in the growing heat. His hands were burned and tingling, and the light of the fire was brilliant before him. He didn't see how he could get any closer. He began to circle the blaze. He stumbled frequently, and his eyes were sore and dry.

I am, he thought, too fucking old for this.

Then he saw what looked like a fallen animal, inert on the ground. Malenfant braved the fire, sheltering his head with his arms, and approached.

It was de Bonneville. He lay facedown in the barren earth of Rubaga. Malenfant could see, from scrabbles in the dirt, that he had walked away from the pit until he could walk no more, then crawled, and at last had dragged himself by his broken fingertips across the ground.

Malenfant knelt down and slid his arms beneath the deformed torso. De Bonneville was disconcertingly light, like a child, and Malenfant was able to turn him over and lay that balloonlike head on his lap.

De Bonneville's blue eyes flickered open. "Good God. Malenfant. Have you any beer?"

"No. I'm sorry, de Bonneville."

"You must get away from here. Your life is forfeit, Malenfant, if you confront the Breath of Kimera..." His eyes slid closed. "I did it.
I...
"

"The Engine?"

"It was the water," he said dreamily. "Once I made up my mind to act, it was simple, Malenfant... I just blocked the pipes, where they admit the water to the well..."

"You blocked the coolant?"

"All that heat, with nowhere for it to go... You know, it took just minutes. I could hear them crying and screaming, as the burning, popping yellow-cake scorched their bodies and feet, even as they thrust their tree trunks into the heap. It took just minutes, Malenfant..."

De Bonneville, limping on his already damaged legs, had escaped the well minutes before the final ignition and explosion.

"And was it worth it?" Malenfant asked. "You came back from the stars, to do this?"

"Oh, yes," de Bonneville said, his eyes fluttering closed. "For he had destroyed me.
Mtesa.
If I die, his empire dies with me... And more than that." De Bonneville tried to lick his lips, but his mouth was a mass of popping sores.
"It was you,
Malenfant. You, a heroic figure returned from the deep past! From an age when humans, we Westerners, strove to do more than simply survive, in a world abandoned to the Gaijin. You and I come from an age where people
did
things, Malenfant. My God, we shaped whole worlds. You reminded me of that. And so I determined to shape mine..."

He subsided, and his body grew more limp.

Dawn light spread from the east, and Malenfant saw a cloud of smoke, a huge black thunderhead, lifting up into the sky.

It was you,
de Bonneville had said. My fault, he thought. All my fault. I was probably meant to die, out there, among the stars. It should have been that way. Not
this.

He cradled de Bonneville in the dawn light, until the shuddering breaths had ceased to rack him.

The morning after the explosion, Malenfant was arrested.

Malenfant was hauled by two silent guards to Mtesa's temporary court, in a spacious hut a couple of kilometers from Wanpamba's Tomb, and he was hurled to the dust before the Kabaka.

His trial was brief, efficient, punctuated with much shouting and stabbing of fingers. He wasn't granted a translator. But from the fragments of local language he'd picked up he learned he had been accused of causing the explosion, this great epochal crime.

Nemoto stood silently beside the Kabaka while the comic-opera charade ran its course. She did this, he realized. She framed me.

To his credit, Mtesa seemed skeptical of all this, irritated by the proceedings. He seemed to have taken a liking to Malenfant, and was shrewd enough to perceive this as an obscure dispute between Malenfant and the katekiro.
Why are you involving me? Can't you sort it out yourself?

But the verdict was never really in doubt to anyone.

When it was done, the Lords of the Cord came to Malenfant. Rope was looped around his neck, and he was dragged to his feet.

Nemoto walked forward, hunched over, and stood before him. In English, she said, "You're to be treated leniently, Malenfant. You won't be working the Engine. You're to be cast--"

"Into the pit." And then he saw it. "The gateway. You're forcing me to the Saddle Point gateway. That's what this is all about, isn't it?"

"You saw the light,
Malenfant. If I thought that pressure suit of yours would fit me, I would take it from you. I would walk into the Engine of Kimera and confront the enigma at its heart, following those mysterious others who come and go... But I cannot. It is my fate to remain here, amusing the Kabaka, until the aging treatments fail, and I die.

"I had to do this, Malenfant. I could see your reluctance to go forward --
even though you brought yourself here,
to the center of things. I could see you could not bring yourself to take the last step."

"So you pushed me.
Why,
for God's sake? Why are you doing this?"

"Not for the sake of God. For history. Look around you, Malenfant. Look at the huge strangeness of this future Earth. Certainly the arrival of ETs deflected our history -- and those exploding stars in the sky tell of more deflections yet to come. But no human has ever been in control of the great forces that shaped a world, of history and climate and geology; only a handful of us have even witnessed such changes."

"If none of us can deflect history, you're killing me for nothing."

"Ah." She smiled. "But individual humans
have
changed history, Malenfant -- not the way
I
tried to, with plots and schemes and projects, but by walking into the fire, by giving themselves. Do you see? And
that
is your destiny."

"You're a monster, Nemoto. You play with lives. The right hand of this Stone Age despot is the right place for you."

She raised a bony wrist and brushed blood-flecked spittle from her chin, seeming not to hear him.

He was overwhelmed with fear and anger. "Nemoto. Spare me."

She leaned forward and kissed his cheek; her lips were dry as autumn leaves, and he could smell blood on her breath. "Good-bye, Malenfant."

The cords around his neck tightened, and he was hauled away.

The rest of it unfolded with a pitiless logic. As a prisoner, condemned, Malenfant had no choice, no real volition; it was easy to submit to the process, to become detached, let his fear float away.

He was indeed treated with leniency. He was allowed to go back to his hut. He retrieved his EMU, his ancient pressure suit in its sack of rope.

He was taken to the rim of the central desolation.

There was a small party waiting: guards, with two other prisoners, both young women, naked save for loincloths, with their hands tied behind their backs. The prisoners returned his stare dully. Malenfant saw they'd both been beaten severely enough to lay open the skin over their spines.

I've come a long way, thought Malenfant, for this: a walk into hell, with two of the damned.

Once more he descended the crude spiral staircase.

Soon they were so deep that the circle of open sky at the top of the shaft was shrunk to a blue disc smaller than a dime, far above him. The only light came from irregularly placed reed torches. The stairs themselves were crudely cut and too far apart to make the descent easy; soon Malenfant was hot, and his legs ached.

The prisoners' faces shone, taut with fear.

They passed two big exits gouged in the rock wall, one to either side of the cylindrical shaft. The air from these exits was marginally less stale than elsewhere. Perhaps they led to the great avenues from east and west that he'd noticed from outside, tunnels that led into the body of the hillside itself.

A hundred meters down, water spouted from clay founts, elaborately shaped, mounted on the walls. The water, almost every drop of it, was captured by spiral canals that wound around the shaft, in parallel to the stairway. The founts gushed harder as they descended -- water pressure, Malenfant thought -- and soon the spiral canals were filled with bubbling, frothing liquid, which took away some of the staleness of the still air of the well. But the founts and channels were severely damaged by fire, cracked and crudely repaired; water leaked continually.