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  To Rashida:

  with loving thanks for her indispensable help

  To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.

  —Richard Feynman, citing a Buddhist proverb

  BOOK ONE

  EARTH

  MESA VERDE, COLORADO

  Para watched the young man intently as the two of them stood at the edge of the huge alcove in the cliffside, and gazed at the ancient buildings.

  Outwardly, Trayvon Williamson looked like a typical young postdoc student, handsome in an earnest, eager sort of way. Actually, he was well past one thousand years old, in conventional age, but much of that time had been spent in cryonic suspension as he rode the starship Saviour to the Raman star system.

  Para’s sensors registered Trayvon at a shade over 1.8 meters tall. He was slim and lithe as a young sapling, his handsome face tanned by the sun. But there was something in his dark blue eyes that betrayed … what? Not fear, exactly. Not depression, nor anger.

  The android’s optronic brain circuits ran through the possibilities at nearly the speed of light.

  Trayvon Williamson’s eyes smoldered with the knowledge of death. Those eyes had seen his two thousand shipmates torn apart and burned to death in a heartbeat’s span, and the memory haunted him. It was guilt that blazed in his eyes.

  Why me? he was asking himself. Why did I survive while all the others were killed? Why did Felicia have to die and not me?

  It took Para’s delicate sensors mere nanoseconds to confirm its analysis. Trayvon’s heartbeat, his breathing rate, his eyeblink tempo and even the way his fingers jittered all spoke volumes. The young man was haunted by what had happened out in space on the ill-fated mission of the starship Saviour.

  Trayvon and Para had climbed up the steep steps carved into the cliff face thousands of years ago, and now stood in the shade of the overhanging rock. Standing side by side at the lip of the huge niche, they turned to look down at the green fields that stretched below them out to the horizon.

  “How old did you say this city is?” Trayvon asked, in his clear tenor voice.

  Para accessed the history records. “At least five thousand years,” it replied. “This complex was already a thousand years old when the first Europeans reached this area.”

  “And it was abandoned.”

  “Yes. It had been deserted for at least several hundred years when the first Spanish explorers reached this far.”

  Tray nodded, then turned back and looked into the gigantic niche in the cliff’s stone face. A city of two-and three-story adobe structures spread across the alcove in the rock wall for hundreds of meters: silent, empty except for the two of them—and the ghosts of the past.

  “The builders created all this and then they just walked away from it,” Tray said, as much to himself as to Para.

  “They were driven away,” his android guardian replied, “by climate shift. The natives moved down into the basin below, to better-watered lands where they could grow their crops.”

  “Despite their greater vulnerability to attack by hostile tribes down in the basin?”

  “Apparently so,” answered the android.

  Para was a hair’s breadth shorter than Trayvon. Completely human in appearance, the android wore a rough-looking hiking jacket of light tan and durable trousers of a slightly darker shade, much the same as Tray himself. Their boots were nearly identical, parceled out to them at the lodge at the base of the trail, far below.

  Para’s face was bland, its skin a shade lighter than Tray’s, smooth and unwrinkled. Its hair was trimmed down to a reddish-brown fuzz, its smile mild and inoffensive. Tray was fascinated with the android’s eyes: gray-green optronic visual sensors that could see far into the ultraviolet and infrared ends of the optical spectrum. They could spot a coiled rattler several hundred meters away.

  “Have you seen enough?” Para asked.

  Tray shook his head. “Can we go into some of the buildings?”

  “There’s nothing to see inside them. They were all emptied centuries ago.”

  “Still … I’d like to see what they’re like inside.”

  Para gestured with one hand. “This way, then.”

  It led Tray between two of the structures and through a doorway in the side of one of them. They both had to duck slightly to get through.

  “They must have been pretty short,” Tray said.

  “Average height among them was slightly less than one hundred and fifty centimeters.”

  They stepped into a roughly square room, completely empty, its floor swept clean of dust and detritus.

  “Not much here,” Tray admitted.

  “I am curious,” Para said. “Why did you want to see this complex?”

  The beginnings of a smile crept across Tray’s face. “I didn’t think curiosity was built into you.”

  “It’s not,” Para answered easily enough. “I merely used the phrase as an introduction to my question.”

  Tray spread his arms as he said, “This is one of the oldest human structures in North America. Why shouldn’t I want to see it?”

  “You are curious.”

  “I guess I am.”

  “Interesting.”

  Tray almost laughed. “They say that curiosity killed the cat, but in my case it saved my life.”

  “And you feel grateful for that?”

  “I feel guilty,” Trayvon admitted.

  Para made a very human nod. But it said, “We’ve spent just about as much time here as we can. We should be getting back to Denver for your meeting tomorrow with the psychotechnical staff.”

  A NEW LIFE

  While the sun slipped down toward the distant horizon, Para led Tray back down the narrow precipitous steps to the floor of the valley and the aircar they had left there.

  As they climbed into the sleek, bright-skinned vehicle, Tray said, “I’ve always wanted to fly one of these birds.”

  Para shook its head. “The passengers do not operate this vehicle. It is operated by the control center, nearly a thousand kilometers away from here.”

  Tray nodded resignedly. “So I couldn’t kill myself even if I wanted to.”

  “Do you want to?” Para asked, without the slightest hint of alarm.

  Shaking his head, Tray replied, “Hell no. I’m not crazy.”

  As Para swung the car’s hatch shut and pressed the button that indicated they were ready for flight, the android said, “Sometimes people who have escaped a tragedy that killed everyone they knew eventually try to commit suicide.”

  “Not me,” said Tray.

  “They feel guilty that they survived when so many others died.”

  “Not me,” Tray repeated, mo
re emphatically.

  Para fed the young man’s response into its data file and leaned back in the softly enfolding seat. Sitting beside the android, Tray leaned back too, seemingly relaxed.

  The aircar buzzed to life, rose some ten meters above the grassy valley floor, then accelerated gently into a climbing curve that aimed it slightly east of due north, above the bare granite peaks of the Rockies, toward the Greater Denver complex.

  Folding its hands on its lap, Para said gently, “The visual sensors in your bedroom show a good deal of REM movement in your eyes while you are sleeping. You appear to be dreaming quite a bit.”

  Gazing down at the bare gray-brown peaks below them, Trayvon said, “I have dreams, yes.”

  “Recurring dreams?”

  Tray turned and looked at the android. It appeared perfectly human, relaxed, but something in those calm gray-green optronic eyes spoke silently of a purpose, a goal, a reason behind its bland questioning.

  Almost, Trayvon smiled to himself. Para’s a machine. It’s doing what it’s been programmed to do. Don’t get angry at it.

  “The dreams aren’t all the same,” he said calmly. “Not recurring. But they all deal with my life aboard the Saviour. And the ship’s destruction.”

  “A swarm of micrometeors,” Para said.

  Knowing the android was pumping his memories, Tray nodded. “Micrometeors, yes. That’s the most popular theory for the cause of the explosion. Supposedly they were moving so fast, and there were so many of them, that they overwhelmed the ship’s shields.”

  “And destroyed it.”

  “And killed everyone aboard … except me.”

  “You weren’t aboard the ship.”

  “I was in a pod on the other side of the star system. I was being punished.”

  Para fell silent.

  It already knows the whole story, Tray told himself. It’s just trying to get into my mind, trying to learn how I feel about it, how I’m handling the guilt.

  * * *

  In his mind’s eye Trayvon saw once again the star Raman blazing like a blue diamond against the darkness of space. Eleven planets circled the star, the farthest of them the home of an intelligent species that was in danger of being destroyed by the wave of lethal gamma radiation hurtling outward from the core of the Milky Way galaxy at the speed of light. The starship Saviour had been sent from Earth to bring them shielding that would save them from the approaching Death Wave.

  Trayvon was among the starship’s crew, an astronomer whose assignment was to map the fields of asteroids that orbited between the system’s major planets: tiny pieces of rock and ice, most as small as pebbles, a few the size of mountains.

  But Trayvon had run afoul of the captain’s inflexible ideas of discipline and was undergoing punishment by being assigned to a lonely one-man scoutship sent to the opposite end of the star system to map one of the asteroid swarms swinging out in the lonely darkness, far from the one world that harbored an intelligent species.

  From across the diameter of the Raman system Tray saw the Saviour ripped apart, apparently by a swarm of micrometeors that he had not yet mapped, all its crew slaughtered.

  Centuries later a new starship had returned to the Raman system and found Trayvon still aboard the scoutship, frozen in cryonic suspension by the vessel’s automated systems. He was revived and returned to Earth, slightly more than a thousand years after he had originally departed.

  After nearly a year of intensive psychotherapy, Trayvon was released from clinical psychological treatment and given to the care of a therapeutic android: Para.

  * * *

  At last Para asked, “Why were you being punished?”

  It’s all in the ship’s log, Tray wanted to reply. The ship’s log was transmitted back Earthward on a nanosecond-by-nanosecond basis. They already knew the whole story. Resentment smoldered inside Tray. Why are they putting me through this again?

  With a bitter smile, Trayvon answered, “I’ve always considered myself something of a musician. The captain forbade me from touching my musical instruments. I used them to compose on my own time, in my own quarters. He found out about it and punished me.”

  “And that’s why you were at a safe distance when the Saviour was destroyed.”

  Tray was surprised to find that his voice would not work. All he could do was nod mutely.

  Para smiled wisely. “So here you are, alive and well. A new life.”

  Tray nodded again. But he asked himself, What happens next? What am I supposed to do with my new life? Alone. A thousand years distant from my original life.

  An eternity away from Felicia.

  PSYCH STAFF

  At precisely nine o’clock the next morning, Para rapped gently on the front door of Trayvon’s apartment. Tray opened the door immediately, wearing a relaxed outfit of creaseless tan slacks and a long-sleeved pullover sweater of a slightly darker brownish hue.

  Smiling brightly at the android, Tray announced cheerily, “I’m ready to have my brain picked!”

  Para made a smile in return. It could see past the young man’s bravado. Tray’s eyes were darting nervously; there was a hint of perspiration on his forehead.

  “Let’s go, then,” said the android.

  “Let’s,” Tray agreed.

  * * *

  The medical complex’s psychotechnical staff was housed on the fifty-second floor of a tower that stood a mere five minutes’ stroll from Tray’s apartment building. Side by side they walked along the crowded broad avenue, rode the express elevator, and entered the anteroom of Dr. Kimbal Atkins’s suite, where a robotic assistant silently led them into the inner office.

  The office had no desk, no conference table, no trappings of bureaucratic power. Just a scattering of comfortable-looking armchairs with a low coffee table in their midst.

  Two men and a woman rose to their feet as Tray and Para were ushered into the office by the compactly built robot.

  “Mr. Williamson,” said the elder of the two men.

  Tray gaped at him. Dr. Kimbal Atkins was old, the oldest human being Tray had ever seen. He was no taller than Tray’s shoulder, stocky and big-bellied. His head was completely bald except for a few wisps of dead-white hair. He wore an old-fashioned three-piece suit of cheerless gray. His face was spiderwebbed with thin wrinkles, his deep brown eyes were watery, but focused squarely on Tray.

  Extending his slightly trembling hands, he advanced on Tray, saying in a soft, whispery voice, “I’m so glad you could come to talk with us.”

  Tray knew that an invitation from the head of the Psychotech Department was more like a court summons than a request, but he said nothing as Atkins led him gently to a comfortable armchair next to the bare coffee table. Para remained by the door, seemingly frozen into immobility.

  Atkins introduced, “My colleagues: Dr. Jerome Ferguson—”

  Tray shook Ferguson’s extended hand. He was a handsome man, nearly two meters tall, with a warm, disarming smile.

  Para flashed a condensed biography to Tray’s implanted communicator. Ferguson was a New Zealander, one of the world’s leading experts in treating phobias.

  “And this,” Atkins continued, “is Dr. Lakshmi Ramesh.”

  A small, slim dark-skinned woman, Tray thought she’d look more at home in a colorful sari than in the severely tailored russet pants suit she was wearing.

  “Hindu,” Para flashed to Tray’s communicator. “Nobel Prize laureate for her work in trauma eradication.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” Tray said as he took her extended hand.

  “And I you,” Dr. Ramesh replied, with a smile that gleamed in her dark face.

  Atkins gestured for them all to sit down. As he did so, Tray saw that his chair had been placed at the focal point of the other three. Atkins was on his right, Ferguson on his left, and the attractive Dr. Ramesh sat directly in front of him.

  For an instant no one spoke. Then Atkins said, “Now then, what are we to do about your condition, Mr. Williams
on?”

  With a smile that was only partially forced, Tray replied, “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  Dr. Ferguson leaned forward slightly in his capacious armchair, a friendly grin on his narrow-featured face. “We’ve gone over your record quite exhaustively.”

  “And?”

  Her lovely face utterly serious, Dr. Ramesh said, “Memory erasure is indicated.”

  Tray felt his breath catch. “Memory erasure? Sounds serious.”

  Dr. Atkins reached out and patted Tray’s knee. “It’s nothing to be frightened of.”

  “It’s a treatment that’s been done safely for more than a century,” said Dr. Ferguson, his smile somewhat dimmer than a few moments earlier.

  “There is hardly any risk at all,” Dr. Ramesh said.

  Tray heard himself repeat “Memory erasure.” He didn’t like the sound of it.

  “Let me explain,” said Dr. Atkins, in his soft, whispery voice.

  Tray nodded at the old man.

  “Psychological traumas are rooted in memories that are stored in the brain. Erase those memories and the trauma can be eradicated.”

  “Eradicated,” Tray echoed.

  “Quite completely,” said Dr. Ramesh.

  “And what gets eradicated with the trauma?”

  MEMORY WIPE

  “Practically nothing!” Dr. Ferguson replied.

  Tray stared at the man. He looked honest enough, eager to convince Tray there was nothing dangerous about the procedure. Which was what he believed, obviously.

  But Tray wasn’t convinced.

  Atkins understood Tray’s reluctance. “Back in the old days,” he explained, “when we had to depend on chemical injections to inhibit memories, there were more than a few cases of overdoses, near-fatal memory loss.”

  “But that was before we met the Predecessors,” Ferguson interrupted.