But distance has no meaning to her now. With the thought she is there, the Paha Sapa rising jagged up out of the plain, the place of her people’s beginnings. Here we came forth. Here we became human, came forth to live in the light of Wiyo on the surface of Ina Maka.

At the foot of the barren slopes lies a stretch of forest. A clearing shows pale where the pines stand back from a ribbon of bright water and a spoked circle of stones laid out on the short grasses. She wills herself downward. A mule deer buck, his antlers still in velvet, browses among the undergrowth. He startles for a moment, then placidly resumes his feeding. In the branches a screech owl stirs, its burbling call blending with the rush of water in the small stream that tumbles down from the bare mountains above. Koda settles in the center of the medicine wheel and waits.

After a time, she hears a thin thread of song. It grows stronger as it approaches, a woman’s voice, chanting in Lakota.

See me.See me.My steps on the EarthAre sacred.

The voice comes nearer, still singing.

Hear me.Hear me.My words to the PeopleAre sacred.

A bright shimmer appears at the northern edge of the clearing. It moves toward her, and as it does, the figure of a woman takes shape within it. Rainbows dance in the light that surrounds her, striking fire from the rock crystal of her headband and armlets, running blue and violet over the fall of her hair.

Understand.Understand.All things in the hand of Wakan TankaAre sacred.

The woman of light halts before her, close enough to touch. She stands tall and slender, eyes great pools of shadow, her skin smooth and unmarked as the new bark of the madrone. A buffalo, worked in beads made from the pearl lining of mussel shells, adorns the white buckskin of her dress. All things, she sings. All that is created, is sacred.

Han, says Koda without sound, her gaze lowered in respect. It is so.

It is so, the woman answers. You know me.

Wohpe, she says. White Buffalo Calf Woman.

Han. You walk the Blue Road, sister.

At that she looks up. I know. She hesitates a moment. Then, Is there—

—another way? But you have seen your body. A gentle regret comes into the sacred woman’s voice. It is past healing. Come. There is one who waits for you.

There is one left behind. Stubborn, her grandfather had called her. Argue with anyone.

It is not her time. The answer is patient, but firm. Come.

Hesitantly, then, Koda takes her hand. It is insubstantial as her own. The forest winks away, and the night closes in again.

*

Kirsten finds herself behind the rainbow shaped work table with no clear memory of having gotten there. Adam stands to her right, hands clasped behind his back, an expression of compassion mixed with relief in his dark eyes. “Doctor….”

“Let’s just get this over with.” Her voice is hollow, bleak, empty as a tomb. Her eyes match the tone, flat and lifeless, as if her spirit has already left and only this shell remains behind.

Adam nods once, then gestures with his chin toward the alien line of code scrolling endlessly, nauseatingly, across the bottom of all the monitors on the work table. “This code, I’ve discovered, is not meant to be read. It is meant to be heard.” He fancies he can see a flicker of interest in her dead gaze at the revelation, then realizes it is nothing but a trick of the increasingly fickle lighting in the office. The building’s circuits, no doubt, are close to being cooked by Dakota’s destructive charges. He can feel some sense of satisfaction in that, and does. Then he continues.

“It is not, however meant to be heard by human ears. Nor even by android ears, I suspect.”

“My implants,” Kirsten states, as interested as if she were talking on a sport in which she had absolutely no interest. Lawn darts, for example.

“Yes. Specifically, your own implants and no one else’s. The code was designed to communicate with, and respond to, the unique variable frequencies in your set of cochlear implants. To anyone else so enhanced, it would sound like gibberish. To the rest of us, there is only silence.”

Though she suspects she should feel at least some sort of surprise (?), shock (?) that Westerhaus somehow had obtained the specific frequencies for her set of implants, implants which had been inserted when they were both still children, she feels nothing but a cottony numbness, as if she’d been given a whiff of light anaesthetic. Another question darts around in the vast empty well that is her mind, asking her why Westerhaus would go to all the trouble of setting up a code only she could undo.

That question, at any other time, would have driven her to distraction. Now, it simply withers and dies, a plant with no rain to sustain it.

Instead, she concentrates what is left of her senses on the code as it dances by in herky-jerky fits and starts, swimming and twisting like some fantastically virile protozoa trying to mate with itself. “Hate to rain on this little parade of yours,” she comments finally, “but I can’t hear shit.”

Adam smiles wanly. “That is because you require these to enhance your abilities.” So saying, he draws an open hand from behind his back. Upon his palm sit two small, wireless earbuds.

Kirsten snatches them from his hand, but makes no move to insert them, her eyes still firmly fixed to the hand held just before her. A coldness washes through her, and slowly, she raises her eyes, her own bottomless wells of swirling emotion. “You’re one of them.” The contempt in her voice is unmistakable, and Adam finds himself, interestingly, wounded by it. He looks down, wincing as he realizes just what it is that she has seen.

His palm looks like any human’s palm, good-sized and well formed, complete with lines and ridges and wrinkles. The skin, he knows, is soft and warm; soft and warm as human skin. Except, of course, where that ‘skin’ has burned away from the heat of the door as he had tried to close it. He damns himself for not noticing it, but realizes there would have been no way to hide it even if he had. The differences between himself and a human are all too readily apparent in the three tiny holes now displayed. “Yes,” he says finally, “I am an android.”

Though her synapses aren’t firing on all cylinders, she can still add two and two. Her voice, when it comes, is the soft whisper of a spring breeze in a meadow. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” She looks up, into the android’s eyes. “Not just any android. Adam. The first of your kind. The first sentient android.”

Adam nods, then looks down, embarrassed and sorrowful even though he knows that the deception was necessary. She wouldn’t have listened to him otherwise, and all would have failed.

“So, this was all a set-up.”

“No. No! Not the way you are thinking,” he protests. “Had I wished to end your lives, I could have easily done so the minute you stepped into the facility. You know this to be true.”

Though she doesn’t want to, she can see the logic in his statement. Besides, she thinks, what does it really matter anyway? What does any of it really matter?

“Why?” she asks finally, simply because there is a part of her that must know.

“Because when Peter Westerhaus created me with a thinking, reasoning brain, he also created something else. Something he was never aware of, not even at the end of his life.”

“What was that?”

Adam straightens, stands tall before her. “A conscience.”

*

The earth falls away beneath her, and for an instant as she turns to look, it hangs like a jewel in space. A shudder passes over her, an old legend remembered. But the wife of Lot looked back, and was turned into a pillar of salt . . .. From here, there is no shadow of the destruction that has swept the world. One side gleams in green and blue, gold and white: forest and sea, desert and cloud. The other lies in darkness, turning now though inexorably toward the light. Abruptly it shrinks to one point of light among nine, the fire of Sun, Wiyo, at their center. Then that, too, is gone, and she moves through the void between the stars with no more effort than a breath. Wohpe walks at an unhurried pace, her hand still within Koda’s, yet they slip past the blue diamond that is Rigel and Sirius, its twin; the ruby flame of Antares; Aldebaran and Capella and Deneb in less time than it takes to name them.

Ahead, Koda can make out the Great Bear—or is a dipper, or a chariot?—its bowl turned down as it swings about the Pole. Grandpa used to say that was a sign of rain. Is he the one who waits for me?

But Wohpe does not answer, only smiles and gives her hand a gentle tug.

Closer to, the dipper’s shape takes on solidity, the four stars at its corners defining the shape of a great longhouse, a lodge such as her people had used before they spread out across the Plains with the coming of the horse. As she nears, she sees that, like Wohpe’s garment, it is made all of white, birch bark bleached and painted with holy signs: Sun and Moon, Thunderbird and Buffalo, a fall of silver stars like snow on snow. The door flap hangs open, and within a council fire burns on the hearth.

She pauses, but Wohpe gestures toward the opening. Be welcome, she says. Share our fire.