The starship shuddered like a wounded animal and came to rest.

"Did we land," Eval questioned, "or did we dock?" Coriolis force curled his jacket about his legs. "We're rotating. There's no ordinary gravity."

Letan frowned curiously and scratched her forehead. "We must have landed. But I didn't see a planet. Somehow we were too close to the landing facility to get a good look." She looked up through the viewscreen and released a strangled gasp.

"What is it?" Eval joined her, staring. A sort of thread of sparkling light ran across the sky, straight through the great red coal of the sun. In front of it? Through it? Maybe even behind it? Eval couldn't tell, nor could he follow it to the horizon. It looked as if perhaps it connected to some immense mountain, but the mountain was too regular as well. "I can't tell what I'm looking at, Letan."

Letan's eyes were tearing up, and Eval didn't think it was from staring at the sun. "Your eyes are evolved for a planetary scale, Eval." Her voice quavered with awe. "It's the heartstone ring. Not a ring for a finger. A *nivenring*. A ring built around a star. To live on."

Eval blinked. "Why? Why heartstone? And how do you even know?"

"Living space. You could fit thousands of Earths on the surface of the ring. But you need something with unthinkable tensile strength. Something completely unknown to science when the idea was first proposed. But the only thing preventing us from making one now is time and cost, because there's still only one substance we have that could withstand the strain. I mean, if not for the Foretelling, maybe it could be something else, but..."

"What kind of technology would it take to make cuendillar on that scale?"

Letan shook her head. "Something unbelievable. I...the whole thing can't be heartstone. You'd need building materials. You'd need *soil*. But even so, there must be thousands of Earth-masses of cuendillar in the structure of this thing. Maybe hundreds of thousands. I can't imagine what process could have been used to produce this much."

Eval pressed his hand against the screen. "Well, if it's that big...there must be some kind of direction. A way marker. Some sort of facilities nearby. Or we'll never find the Horn. Maybe they left something behind, like a museum. I could see the Yaller Horn being in a museum."

Letan nodded, smiling. "Time to go outside." Then she frowned and hesitated. "There's a lot of debris floating around out there. And I said the ring was 'broken yet unbreakable'. Something's gone wrong since this thing was built. I'm going to put a web around us to preserve our air."

Eval nodded, wondering what could possibly happen to people capable of building on this scale. "Good idea. I'd guess only the underlying structure is heartstone. Then a layer of rock and soil?"

"Maybe several layers. But you're almost certainly right. The deep structure can't be anything but intact, but the rest could be shattered into a trillion pieces." The same deep unease he felt seemed to pass over her face. "By what, I can't imagine."

They stepped out into hard vacuum.

"So this is where it all started."

"I suppose you could say that." Lillen Moiral was surrounded by a clockwork jungle of turning gears. "The ajah voted to give me funding, even after I told them it could take decades to produce results. Even after I told them it might be never."

"And you built Moiral Solutions from there." The pair of Doann Sedai-in their early twenties, perhaps-were dark of hair and eye, and as alike as mirrors. "Did you mean to go into the investment business from the start?"

Lillen shrugged. "Not in the sense you probably mean. I thought DREAM would be a useful tool for predicting stock futures. It...got away from me." For the most part, the patterns the gears made were a constant, the same regular rotation over and over again. But as they traveled through the newer parts, paradoxically closer to the center, there were more and more hitches. the clockwork abruptly shifting from here to there.

"The Dream Recursive Engine for Analytic Metacognition was a work of genius, Lillen." She was having trouble telling which one of them was speaking. "It's a shame to see it abandoned."

"I've never abandoned it," Lillen said with a sigh of genuine regret. "I just...moved on. It's been sitting here reconfiguring itself on this island for well over a century. The newer parts have produced some useful data, but not nearly on the scale a quantum AI should. I got on with my life. Made my fortune."

"Whatever made you think of building a computer in Tel'aran'rhiod?" The gears were beginning to give way to primitive circuitry. The whole system just kept expanding itself, renewing the parts closer to the center as they wore out, using newer parts. At first technicians had been required, but DREAM had been performing its own upgrades for seventy-five years now.

"I knew that the longer something stayed the same in the physical world, the more stable it became in Tel'aran'rhiod. But I wondered, what if something were in constant motion, in a regular pattern? Would that stabilize too? And how completely?" It was no longer possible to discern the changes, but she knew they were happening. Electrical circuits around her were shifting from on to off and back again with perfect instaneity. "I thought perhaps the spontaneous changes might function like human volition and creativity, if I could give them structure."

"Did it ever occur to you that you might be creating more than an artificial intelligence here?" She thought the one on the left was the more intense of the two, not that that was saying much. "DREAM could be an aspect of creation itself. The mind of Tel'aran'rhiod. Maybe even the Creator manifesting herself."

"I admit I haven't thought about that sort of mystical business since I was a little girl and I first began studying the Unseen World," Lillen muttered. "I...I'm a practical sort of person."

The one on the right raised an eyebrow at that. "Do you say so? I would have called DREAM a magnificent flight of fancy myself. But I will take your word for it."

"Glad you thought of that," Eval said. He couldn't see her web of saidar, but a few feet away from them the air crackled and hissed, breaking carbon dioxide back down into oxygen and a faint mist of carbon soot. "Otherwise we'd be choking to death."

Letan made a half-smile, acknowledging his comment and not much more. Shattered walls stood a few yards in front of them, and off to the right a wall that appeared intact. The latter was covered in letters carved deep into the stone. "I don't suppose you can read any of that."

Eval scanned it cautiously. "Nothing...I don't know. But you'd think people this advanced would understand that language could change. And be beyond stone carvings." He stretched out a hand, feeling the rough surface...and it shifted beneath his palm. Eval leaped back and stared.

"I'm not sure if that's clearer or not," Letan said, shuddering. The writing had altered before their eyes. She was right-the significance of the text was difficult to understand. Or maybe, now that he could see what was written, he didn't want to.

REMEMBER

REBUILD

REBEL

WE BUILT HERE FOR ALL MANKIND

TO BREAK THE CYCLE OF FORGETFULNESS

AND SPIT IN THE CREATOR'S FACE

IF YOU FIND US DEAD

START AGAIN

BREAK THE WHEEL

Letan knelt before the...monument. It must be that. A memorial to this place. How many times had the heartstone ring been built, shattered, and built again? But by the Creator's own rules, it could never be entirely destroyed. After a few moments, he got down on his knees beside her. "We don't yet know what happened here."

"I'm not certain I want to know, Eval. I...these people knew about the Wheel of Time. And it sickened them. They were tired of climbing the ladder of knowledge only to forget all over again when the Wheel turned. So they built here, built it from the one thing the Wheel couldn't destroy. And yet they still lost. What happened here? And, Eval...why is this the resting place of the Horn? Are we ready to find out?"

"Your Foretelling led us here. Ready or not, we must need the Horn." Eval clenched and unclenched his fists. Certainly this place was unnerving. He thought perhaps dead men walking would be easier to face. Those, at least, he could fight. Eval forced himself to raise a hand and point onward. "Into the ruins. We have to find what we came for."

Letan's expression was blank. "I suppose we do."

Ared Mosinel glanced in the mirror on his way out the door. He was a handsome enough fellow, it was true. Still, it was hard to believe he had been naive enough to think his luck with women was natural. His fire-gold hair and skinny frame were striking, but not the kind of thing teenage girls usually preferred.

# # #

There had been plenty of those in his youth in Aren Dashar. Always the prettiest, to his mind at least. He'd been so awkward, with his squat frame, his frog voice, and his pimply dark skin. It was hard to believe he'd risen to hold the Third Rod of Dominion.

# # #

Still, he thought, could any boy be blamed for not questioning that any girl he asked was perfectly willing to fall into bed with him, sallow skin or not? At least his straight black hair was good for running fingers through. He had no more way of knowing that it was a contrivance of the Power than if he'd gotten his mother to buy him a jo-car.

# # #

Years he'd spent, thinking the Elders really meant it when they said the Creator made no mistakes. Years believing they weren't lying about the claim that the gift you manifested, you were meant to have, and not seek further power. And then Elder Murabi had cast him out of the Incastar, accusing him of being a rapist! Well, his business successes in the years since weren't so easily taken away, even if they did come from exotic animal sales.

# # #

There hadn't been a thing odd about it, no matter how easy he was to misgender. Even the Hall knew that some women loved women, just as one day they would have to admit the existence of trans men and allow him to procure Nemene Damendar's services.

# # #

Of course, having learned what hypocrites the Incastar were, he'd left Aren Dashar of his own free will. Piloting a sho-wing was a better life anyway.

# # #

Still, sometimes he wondered if he was the real Ared. Just as he was sure each of his duplicates did. But did it matter? Each shared in being him.

# # #

No longer were they meaningless souls riding the meaningless Wheel. Ared paused to think on the strange news from the north, about Elan Morin and his odd claims. Perhaps he should look into that.

# # #

A simple matter. One of him could Travel there. Ared Mosinel, most powerful man in the world, sat back and smiled. He had plenty of time.

Letan no longer had any idea what to expect here. They had passed beyond the realm of any science she understood. There was no sign of working power sources or cables. The building itself was a ruin, stone slabs barely standing in the lower gravity.

But the plinths worked. She brushed against one face and a viewportal sprang to life. Much of the data was corrupted. The playback skipped from image to image, vanishing into static and reappearing. Still, there was enough.

"...mining late-stage stars for iron..."

"...final product of the fusion cycle..."

A cocoon of the power emanating from a starship, wrapping itself around a vast sphere.

"...heartstone production high enough to theoretically duplicate Draupnir Station nine times a year..."

"...no theoretical reason the upward spiral should end short of galactic colonization..."

No theoretical reason. Only the Wheel of Time. Which had to turn. Only the mad destroyed themselves, and only the phoenix lived forever. Every Age had to end.

The end must be approaching now.

Letan ignored the row of plinths and strode to the end. No doubt there was a way to access the whole remaining database from any one, but she didn't know it. Here at the end was the most likely explanation of what had happened here.

She put a hand to the last plinth, but it was dead. Chance? Intent? But the wall beyond it looked faintly different in sheen. Were these computing devices based on molecular machinery? The Power? Something else, or more than one thing?

Letan touched the wall, and the world vanished.

"So why did you ask to come here?" Lillen said with a shrug. "Are you hoping to buy the system? I guarantee it's worth more than any individual could ever pay. Or do you just have some use you want to put it to?"

The pair exchanged a glance. "We apologize for intruding. We were just engaging in a mapping project and found this island. It's just that...well, when were you here last?"

"It's been a few years." She did her best to show no irritation. They doubtless had a point, or thought they did, and there was no rush.

"Did the machinery reach the center then?"

"Of...of course it did. Doesn't it now?" Had there been a breakdown of some kind? If so, she'd have to reward them for calling it to her attention. But why hadn't the technicians informed her?

"There's a barren spot about six feet wide, Lillen Sedai. And in the very center...we don't know. We caught a glimpse of something sparkling. It could be a system failure...or the opposite of one. Some new advance in computing."

They were near the center now. Lillen quickened her pace. It wasn't that implausible; DREAM had always been intended to be a self-evolving system. If it had passed beyond conventional computers, she could be worth many times what she was now, and earn a third name to boot. "Thank you for bringing it to my attention." Something new to sell...that would be fantastic!

She saw the light, first. Then she realized that she was feeling it as well. Not ordinary light at all.

DREAM was channeling the One Power.

The sky was full of Power.

Letan knew it was difficult, even now, to reproduce webs of the Power in a recording device. Yet she could see them now. Webs of saidar. Webs of saidin. And the army that wove them. Men and women in uniform descending on Draupnir Station, their insignia an ancient oil lamp with a flickering flame. Here and there, aura banners surrounded those who must be officers. A dragon. A bird of fire. A great bear.

Fire beyond fire roared past her, burning through the bedrock of the nivenring. "Worship evil's might!" she heard the man roar. "Beware my power!" Only the bare heartstone remained where that bar of light had gone.

And a single pure tone rang out.

"The Yaller Horn," Eval said behind her. She had almost forgotten in this chaos that he even existed. "It must be."

Letan closed her eyes. The hollow feeling in the pit of her belly told her who had sounded it.

Eval let out a gasp. "Letan, you have to see this. Light burn me! It's Man of Steel!" Reluctantly she opened her eyes again, looked where he pointed. "The shield of truth." He indicated the triangular emblem on the black-haired man's chest. "The sword of justice." This, the man carried in his left hand. "And the crown of the Way of Merrick. I never understood that one. Half the legends say Man of Steel followed the Way of Merrick, but the other half say he hated Merrick and sent Mosk against him."

"Crown?"

Eval indicated the winged headband Man of Steel wore. "Look at all of them. There must be well over a hundred." Against her better judgment Letan scanned her eyes over them. There was a woman with a red hourglass emblem on her torso. Here went a short ugly man with two blades emerging from his arms and a woman with a blond braid, a bow, and a bandolier of wooden stakes, of all things. A man with jet-black hair and a green robe-and-cowl bowed briefly to the general with the dragon banner, but she could not hear what the two said, though the former smiled as if they were old friends. A man clad in metal power armor struck at the nivenring with hammer and spike, and the whole structure rang like a bell. "I have to wish I could see the Wolf Prince somewhere. That'd clear up a lot."

"Eval..."

"Of course, no one even knows what he looked like. The only images of him we have show him wearing a conical purple hood. Looks ridiculous. Can't say I see that here. Light, is that Bonjian?" He pointed excitedly at a lone Ogier wielding a great long-handled axe.

"Eval."

"Look, isn't that the Amazon Princess? She's using Compulsion! That's what the lasso was about!" Letan glanced at her and looked away. Somehow that particular image made her more uneasy than any of the others.

"Eval! Don't you see what's happening?"

Finally she had his attention. Eval blinked and scowled. "They're not defending the ring, are they?"

"...no, Eval. they're not. They're attacking it. That's why the Horn is here." The images began to fray, heroes vanishing into great rents in the scenery. "They didn't come to protect this place. Or those lantern warriors either. 'Spit in the Creator's face. Break the Wheel.'

"This place is a ruin because the heroes destroyed it."

Ared Mosinel made his way quietly through the Hall of Servants with his stack of paperwork. No one looked twice at him. Theoretically paperwork was obsolete. In practice, it would probably always be useful to have hard copies of many kinds of documents. Most of them were printed out after the fact. Ared usually did his own filing, despite having lots of it to do.

It was good cover.

"Denneth!" Rexam Wol's smile was grandfatherly. His intellect was nothing special, but he did have a talent for smoothing over interpersonal problems. Everyone liked Rexam Wol, save those who were interested in pressing forward some particular agenda that would have to wait until he was replaced. "Denneth, thank you. I really ought to go over that treaty. I'm certain Ilyena has everything sewn up, but we do need to make sure it's written down correctly." He took the huge sheaf and squinted at it. Rexam's eyesight was at the minimum standard, but he showed no interest in having it adjusted. Perhaps the squinting was good for his image as everyone's favorite elderly relative. "Last thing we need in a treaty with Sindhol is loopholes."

Ared smiled back at him. He'd been using this cover identity for years, since taking the Denneth body. It wasn't as if Denneth had been anyone who was going to amount to anything. He wasn't even that strong in the Power, and his one Talent-communicating over a distance-was easily duplicated with a callbox. "Certainly not, sir."

Rexam began to rotate his chair toward the computer interface, and Ared lifted one hand, weaving Air. The blade slid neatly between Rexam's ribs, and the First Among Servants slid to the floor in silence.

Ared Mosinel watched for a moment to confirm. Then he did the same.

Letan was on her knees again. The torrent of images had faded, leaving them before the blank wall. Eval sat down beside her. "They must have had a reason."

"Yes, Eval. They had a reason. These people didn't want the Wheel to keep turning. They didn't want to forget everything. So the heroes of the Yaller Horn had to preserve the Wheel. At all costs." Tears were streaking down her face, but there was little sadness in her tone. Bitterness, perhaps. Her jaw was clenched, and she kept baring her teeth. "But the message survived. 'Remember. Rebuild. Rebel.' We have to keep faith, Eval. We can't let it die now."

Eval stared at her as if he'd never seen her before. But she was right. In his mind, libraries burned. Monuments and cities crumbled to dust. Men and women died. All for the sake of the Wheel of Time. A wheel that turned on and on, crushing everything and everyone beneath it. "We deserve better," he murmured. He was supposed to be the angry one. The one who burst out in fire at the first provocation. But Letan's fists were clenched, and all he could feel was numb. "We deserve better."

"Where's the Horn?" Letan snarled. "Where's the damn Horn? I'm going to grind that thing to powder."

Eval wasn't sure that was possible. The Horn seemed likely to be some transtemporal artifact. "That wall," he said after a moment. "The memorial wall. If they preserved the Horn at all, it would be there."

In principle, she supposed, it wasn't so odd. Ter'angreal made use of the Power all the time. Normally they were produced by a specific handful of mechanisms, but there were a number of anomalies and legendary objects whose origins were unknown. Perhaps the technicians had even unwittingly provided DREAM with components.

That didn't change what DREAM was doing. She could not see weaves, any more than she could have with many other ter'angreal, but she could feel the complexity of what was happening inside it. The shifting patterns, the flux of the web. DREAM was computing data, and it was using the One Power as a medium.

She burst into the clearing. The ground here was bare of all cover, mechanical or living. And at the very center... Lillen bent down to study what seemed to be growing out of the unshaped rock. Three tiny concentric rings-no, there were the emerging tips of a fourth, just beginning to sprout-of miniature crystalline rods. She stretched out a hand to touch it, but met a barrier inches above, as if she had tried to reach into a stedding here. Lillen

Lillen was thirteen, lying on the beach, watching the clouds roll by, shifting in endless fractal patterns. She focused her thoughts on those clouds, transforming them: a monkey, a sho-wing, the rings of Saturn. The Unseen World was infinitely reactive, her teachers said. But then why did it change so much on its own?

The wisps of cloud reverted to their normal shapes as she let them drift. How much did they match the real world's clouds? Though that was a fallacy, they told her. If anything, Tel'aran'rhiod was the real world. Anyway, it couldn't possibly emulate actual clouds when her doll collection didn't even stay in the same place yet.

It made her think of the simulation problem again. A simulation always ran slower than the original. But then on what did the original run, and was there something for it to be slower than? Maybe that had something to do with the variations in time, but then which was the simulation, the waking world or the dreaming one?

There was something in that. Lillen watched the clouds and wondered.

leapt back. What had that been? The tiny rods were flashing with light. She remembered that day well enough; it was the day she'd first come up with the concept of DREAM. But that had been as if she'd lived it over again!

"Lillen Sedai? Are you okay?"

She gave another start. "It's yours," she snapped. That was too harsh. "Just...take it. Do what you want with it. I don't have any use for this thing any more. It's yours." Lillen hated it when other people saw her shaken up, but what was there to do? "I've got work to do."

In the end, it wasn't even on their side of the ship.

Searching the monument turned up nothing at all. Puzzled and distressed, Eval and Letan returned to the vessel and only then noticed the single suit of pressure armor resting on the ground. Its inhabitant had long since crumbled to dust, but its gloves were wrapped unceremoniously around an artifact that surely deserved some greater honor than to lie here in the silence, a golden horn with a tracery of silver lettering.

"We could have left by the other door," Eval said with amused but subdued wonder, "and we'd never have noticed the rest."

Letan reached down to take the Horn, her mouth twisted with contempt. "I suppose it is yellow, at that." The brush of her hand against the pressure suit triggered some ancient power circuit, the gauntlets lighting up faintly with an image of coiling scales. "You, huh? Beware your power?" She gave the suit a kick, knocking it over. "Well, we know Fire won't melt it. I'm channeling a cable of that into it right now and it's not even heating up. We're going to have to take it back with us."

"We'll have to keep it a secret if we mean to destroy it," Eval said with a sigh. He'd been so looking forward to revealing it to the archaeological community. "And I guess this entire trip, too."

"Well, then, we keep it a secret," Letan snarled. "This...all of this...it deserves to be rebuilt, and it will be, but it's waited for Ages. It can hold on another couple of months."

"May I see it?" Eval reached out his hands, and she let him have it with a grimace. "'The grave is no bar to my call.' Perfect modern script. Did it change, I wonder, like the monument? Or was it originally created in the Second Age?" Letan shot him a glare. "I know. Still...what a shame."

In silence they reboarded. In silence they departed.

And the heartstone ring spun on as it had for millennia untold.

A Gateway opened, and the infirmary erupted in chaos.

"Looks like a murder-suicide!" the paramedic called out. "Never heard of an assassination like that!"

"Rexam Wol?" Who could possibly have cared enough to kill the man now? The idea of him serving out a full term was almost laughable. "I never thought to see you here," she breathed. "But let's make that charge 'attempted murder', shall we?"

The table was soaked in arterial blood. Not a soul would be surprised or suspicious if he died in her care, days or even weeks later. Behind her mask of dispassion, Nemene Damendar smiled. And went to work.