The flap was loose and Lizzy could tell from the way his shadow was moving that utThalé had his back to her. There were several other shadows in the inner chamber but they were odd and Lizzy struggled to understand what they represented. One other, freely roaming, figure, she took to be kiJonsde. He might be able to see her if she opened the flap but she would have to trust him to keep quiet. She got down on one knee and leaned into the flap and moved it in the smallest of ways to allow her a view of the interior.

What she saw took a bit of processing. utThalé stood off to the left, facing a wooden rack, as tall as him and a couple of cubits wide, its shelves filled from top to bottom with clay pots laid on their sides. Some of them were sealed but others had the lids removed to show ancient papyral scrolls within. utThalé was dressed in some kind of ceremonial robe, with big golden tassels at the shoulders and a tesselated pattern down the back. He was holding a scroll and started reading from it in a language Lizzy didn't know. It sounded like an old language but she recognised some of the gutteral flourishes which had made their way into modern day ceremonial language. She wasn't a big churchgoer but she recognised it from the few Gnostic funerals she'd been to. Flaft was standing at the other side of the room, in the corner where tarp met bare rock. He was looking on somewhat disdainfully.

''This isn't going to work either,'' he said. ''It needs a scientific approach.''

Between the two of them, at right angles to the rock wall directly opposite Lizzy, the same kind of nanosteel bench she was standing next to. Except, constructed around this bench, in a rather ad hoc manner, was the Exotic. It appeared to be made from spare parts and although she couldn't quite put her finger on what it was that made it so, it seemed intrinsically dhôlmen, as well as profoundly spiritual in nature, like an altar. It was divided into three sections, one at either end of one side of the bench and the third between them on the opposite side. Each section was defined by a half-shell type of structure which formed a backrest attached to the bench. Although each of these shells had the same curvature and were built to the same dimensions, they were constructed out of different materials. The closest one, the one which Lizzy could see most clearly, had been put together entirely out of motherboards while the one opposite seemed to be made from wheelnuts. The pods shimmered in the lamplit gloom.

This thing hadn't been made in the past couple of days. The wind-up mechanism alone must have taken the four dhôlmen attached to the device a while to build. It was difficult to see how things worked beneath the bench seat but Lizzy could just make out a rotating armature which was hinged in such a way that, with the mechanism in operation, the end of it was able to travel between the legs of each dhôlman successively. She didn't see what was attached to the end of the armature but she did notice a rise in the pitch of the song each time the cycle was completed. This was a piece of engineering genius. utThalé must have found them here, close to the anomaly some time ago and built the marquee around them. It could only have been him that provided the nanosteel workbench.

Laid across the bench, between the three pods, a dhôlmam, with not even a rag to cover her, made intricate signs in the air with her hands and fingers as the occupants of the pods - the three males - touched and stroked her in various places. It seemed to Lizzy that the operating system, or mind, of the Exotic, which Riverdolly had described as 'organic', was derived from these movements, which fed back on themselves as the complex system of cogs and armatures beneath the bench made different movements according to the dhôlmam's symbolism. Fascinating as it was, Lizzy couldn't see how she was going to get Riverdolly inside that particular system.

Each of the three male dhôlmen appeared to be reaching orgasm in a staggered way, to keep a steady flow of semen dripping into the receptacle attached to the edge of the bench. As Lizzy was trying to work out how to transpose Riverdolly into the Exotic, one of the dhôlmen climaxed.

''There you go,'' said utThalé. He stopped reading and rolled the papyral, placing it back in its clay jar. He replaced the half-filled container with an empty one. As he removed the first container, Lizzy noticed an underlying shelf beneath the bench which it had been hiding. This narrow shelf was designed for electronic components and there were two nanosteel boxes fastened to the rack. The first had a transmitter nodule and a little green light. The second had knobs and switches and a readable sound and light meter. Input and Output. She had to get Riverdolly into the Output unit so that she could reclaim her people.

Lizzy ducked back into the first chamber to commune with Riverdolly. arKhana quietly tried to get her attention but she raised her hand, requiring patience. She asked Riverdolly a couple of questions and between them they worked out how to get into the system. Riverdolly had done a textual analysis on the ibKnockian texts which utThalé had been reading from and were a matter of public record. She thought she could come up with the right language to inveigle herself into the mind of the Exotic, based on the changes in rhythm of the clockwork she had detected during utThalé's previous reading. Lizzy just had to get close enough to the machine so that the dhôlmam could hear Riverdolly speaking from the phone, at the same time keeping utThalé quiet. This sounded to Lizzy like an obscure and crazy plan but it was the only one they had so she rolled with it. She went back to the flap to take another peek.

utThalé had replaced the second canister. He was over by the clay pots, fiddling, in a slow, priestly way to provide a little gravitas, with a canvas structure buckled to the tarp partition. This structure contained three pockets, each itself containing an empty canister, except for the third, which was labelled dhôlman. This was where the empty canister had come from that he had attached to the machine. The other two pouches were labelled Pure and Mutattë. Lizzy made a mental note not to tell arKhana about this particular detail. Or any of it, really, it was simply too bizarre a story to tell.

utThalé placed the half-full container in the pocket and read to it from one of the scrolls. As he read, Lizzy watched the machine. Its occupants, in various post or pre-orgasmic states, began to change the rhythms of their groping while the dhôlmam provided increasingly complex symbols with her arms, torso, head, feet and legs. The clockwork mechanism beneath the bench whirred and clicked in response.

utThalé then removed the canister from its pouch and, with some ceremony, he took off the lid and had a good smell. He strode purposefully over to the rock wall, the other side of the Exotic, nudging Flaft kiJonsde out of the way.

utThalé chanted the following lines of text, in modern Gnostic:

blood perfect, water next to wine,
distilled from universal foam,
pressed between the folds of time
to nurture barren planetary loam;
blood perfect, thou purity of spirit
make passage for this soul to roam!

And with that he flicked the contents of the canister at the rock wall where, if you looked closely enough, you could just about make out the circular impression of a former fractal portal which had been back-filled. If you looked even closer you could make out the splatters of two previous attempts. Flaft had, against his own better instincts, become so involved in the proceeding, he jumped when the jysm hit the wall in a shower of fizzing sparks.

The portal opened.

utThalé's Gnostic-blue eyes went dark with anger: ''It's the dhôlmen!'' he said, facing them.

''They don't know what you're talking about,'' said Flaft, becoming agitated. He glanced towards Lizzy.

Lizzy saw that the opening led to a tunnel, which didn't make sense as there was a huge void on the other side of that wall.

''We are the chosen,'' utThalé stated. ''This makes no sense.''

utThalé picked up his blaster and moved towards kiJonsde.

kiJonsde raised his hands, ''I don't know!''

utThalé looked dazed, as though his soul had just fallen out of his body. He aimed his blaster at kiJonsde.

Flaft looked again at Lizzy, expecting help.

This time utThalé, facing him, followed his look. He didn't have time to do much apart from register surprise before Lizzy lasered him with her finger-weapon. She was a good shot and the light burned a hole in utThalé's thumb, cauterizing the wound all in one. He yelped and dropped his blaster which kiJonsde quickly retrieved. Lizzy entered the inner sanctum.

utThalé's eyes darted between kiJonsde and Lizzy.

Lizzy's eyes darted between kiJonsde and utThalé.

kiJonsde glanced at utThalé and pointed his blaster at Lizzy.

Lizzy rolled her eyes. ''Dickhead,'' she said, searing the webbing between his second and third fingers.

kiJonsde dropped the blaster and raised his hands.

She addressed utThalé: ''The battle upstairs - for the reactors. It was just a diversion all along?''

''Baby,'' said utThalé, ''this whole fucking war's just a diversion.''

''What for? What do you mean?''

''There's something coming,'' said utThalé. ''An eighth of a span, quarter if we're lucky. We still have time to stop it.''

''What the fuck are you on about?''

''Apocalypse, my dear. The wrath of Godh. It's on its way.'' utThalé started chanting in the ancient tongue. The dhôlmen in the Exotic did their thing.

Lizzy was a bit confused but behind that confusion she registered noises building on the other side of the canvas partition.

utThalé continued chanting.

''If you're going to do something,'' said arKhana, loudly, from next door, ''now would be a good time!''

Lizzy's phone buzzed maniacally in her pocket. The droids were on the move.