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“Why are we—? We can’t keep
this
a fucking secret,” Shanti muttered, so they walked out onto the deck of the
merchant’s ship again.

“Yeah, he has to kill off their
leadership,” said George. He laughed again, a little more hysterically this
time, and put his hands to his head.

“
Fuck!
” he yelled, making
Shanti and Philippe jump.

They all started to laugh, shakily.
It quickly stopped, but something, some part of the tension, had been released.

“Yeah,” said Shanti. “He’s a hell
of a guy, and he’s got a hell of a second.” She put her hands to her head, too,
and then dropped them, as though too spent to even attempt to ease the pain.

She turned to Philippe, looking at
him like a child. “Philippe, what the fuck is going to happen? You all saw what
I did, right? Endless Courage, like, totally fucking fried his buddy to save
his own ass. He’s a lying asshole.”

Philippe shrugged his shoulders. He
was spent—too spent to play the good dad, too spent to come up with some
soothing half-truth that would put everyone at ease.

“And now, with his help, the Magic
Man is going to wipe out the Cyclopes’ leadership,” Shanti continued. “God only
knows how many people that’s going to be. But I’m sure Endless Courage will be
sitting pretty at the end of it—the Magic Man’s right-hand man, ready to take
over. Christ! What a fucking asshole!”

“It’s terrible, yeah,” Philippe
said. “But, honestly, sometimes the assholes are your best bet. Their
self-interest makes them pragmatic.”

They fell silent. They were all
just too wiped out, too tired.

We just want to go home,
Philippe
thought.

Their ship began moving toward the
portal, which had been hurriedly marked out by the barest clutch of lights.
I
wonder how long it will take the Hosts to rebuild?
thought Philippe.

Despite his fatigue, he realized
that his question applied to more than just the wreath of lights. A prophecy
that had given structure and meaning to the Hosts’ lives for the past 850 years
had just been fulfilled. What were they going to do now?

They moved closer to the lights,
and Philippe’s anxiety over the future was suddenly replaced by a gripping fear
that the portal would not work, that he would never see home again—not the
station, not Titan, not Earth.

He tried to calm himself. The
portal
had
to work this time. It had
just
worked, for an entire
fleet of Cyclopes ships. And the Magic Man had promised to destroy the
faster-than-light technology (the technology itself, Max and Philippe had
ascertained, not necessarily the people who made it), so the portal couldn’t
shut down again, right? Right?

Philippe thought about his previous
trips through the portal. The problem was that the successful trips through the
portal hadn’t really differed from when they couldn’t go through. He wouldn’t
know if the portal was working or not because there hadn’t really been anything
that stood out about the non-journey, aside from the result.

Which was weird, right?

“Hey, Shanti,” he said. She and the
doctor had wandered up to the front end of the ship, some distance ahead of
Philippe. She turned around to face him. “Why is it that, when you see a ship
go through a portal, it disappears bit by bit—you know first the front end and
then the back end—but when you’re actually on the ship, even if you’re in the
back, it’s not like the front end vanishes or anything—it all looks normal? Is
it because you’re closer to the portal or something?”

“How the fuck should I know?”
Shanti replied.

Well, that was predictable,
Philippe
thought.

They were almost at the portal now.
Philippe decided to watch carefully, in hopes that he could see something,
anything, that would indicate that they were actually going through. He focused
directly at the front of the ship, which was just about to pass through the
area marked by the lights.

At first he saw nothing, but then
he saw a small, shimmering oval forming between where he was standing and where
Shanti and George were. It appeared to be about waist high. Philippe blinked,
but it was still there.

Am I the first to see this?
he
wondered.

The oval got rapidly bigger. Then
two shimmering spots appeared below it, and a moment later, the three spots
grew and connected. The single large spot began to shrink, and then to grow.

Philippe started: It was coming at
him.

Philippe took a step back. “Magic
Man?” he asked, alarmed. “Hello?”

It came faster. He backpedaled some
more, but it was gaining on him, getting bigger and smaller and bigger again.
How
close are the crates behind me?
he thought.
Am I trapped?

Some
thing.

Some
nothing.

There was a calculation of angles
and speed, a determination of the force necessary to move a body of a
particular size a certain minimum distance without causing injury to said body.

Underneath that, there was a
mission, something that defined and was not merely done:
Protect.

Underneath that, there was love.

There was shock, discomfort, the pain and constriction of
the body, the astonishment that there was a body to be pained and constricted.

Underneath that, there was a lesson,
learned the hard way, again and again:
Do not dare to hope.

Underneath that, there was hope.

There was satisfaction, smug satisfaction, the sense of a
plan finally completed, the pleasure of coming out on top.

Underneath that, there was a
desire: To be rid of the task once and for all, to tie off the annoying loose
ends, to throw out the garbage and never think about it again.

“You don’t have the survival
instincts God gave a fucking walrus. If it’s coming at you, go to the fucking
side,” Shanti said, rolling off him. She was breathing hard and her voice was distracted—she
was hectoring him out of some sense of duty, but he could tell that her heart
wasn’t in it.

Philippe lay on his back, too
shocked to answer.

George suddenly loomed into his
field of vision.

“Wow!” he said, the old enthusiasm
back in his voice. “
That
was
cool!
”

“You saw that?” asked Shanti.

“I saw a thread—no, a band—a band
of, like,
invisibility
pass through you two,” George said, excitedly.
“You froze for a second, and it went
whoop
.” He held up his index finger
and passed it across his face, right to left.

“You’re taking it well,” Shanti
muttered.

“It’s damned interesting!” George
snapped the fingers of both hands and pointed at them both as they lay on the
ground. He was beaming. “When we get back—medical examinations all around!”

Philippe looked past George,
through the clear roof of the spaceship, and realized that he was looking at
the pure darkness that surrounded the diplomatic station.
We made it
through,
he thought.

Then he brought himself up to his
elbows, and what he saw made him want to lie back down and close his eyes for
the rest of his life.

There was a Host standing where
Philippe had just been. He was glancing around him jumpily, and he looked as
alarmed as it was possible to look.

He was no longer glowing, but he
was decidedly golden in color, especially when compared to the other Hosts on
the ship. The other Hosts stared at him, and after a long moment’s pause, they
began thrumming.

The noise startled him anew. He
looked awfully confused and unhappy—as well as awfully familiar.

It’s time to go back to work,
thought
Philippe. He smiled and waved from the floor.

“Did you guys hear that?” Shanti
barked. “He doesn’t want to go through any more portals! God only knows what
will happen to him if he does.”

Creepy looked like he was ready to
crawl out of his own skin. Philippe reached out and patted one of his legs, not
sure if the Host would find the gesture calming or menacing. He wished for a
moment that he could thrum.

“I know that last trip was pretty
rough,” he said. “You, um, you look healthy, at least.”

Creepy stared at him for a moment.
“Do I appear healthy?” he finally asked.

Philippe looked over the Host.
Creepy looked fine to him—especially for someone who was almost a millennium
old and had spent most of that time disembodied.
But, really, what do I
know?
Philippe wondered.

“This man,” he said, pointing to
George, “is a physician. Let’s hear what he thinks.”

George shrugged. “Can you walk?” he
asked the Host.

Creepy slowly walked around in a
small circle. He came to a stop and looked up. “I can walk,” he said,
astonished. “I can indeed walk. Despite the long period of being incorporeal
and unable to walk, I can walk now as well as I walked in the past.”

He suddenly pulled his body up and
stood on his two back legs, then lowered himself and stood on his two front
legs, and then settled back down onto all six. He looked delighted.

“So, it looks like you’ve got good
strength and balance,” said George. “I’m a little concerned about your color,
though—I’ve never seen a yellow Host before.”