Phase Space

When Kate had first met Malenfant, out at JPL, she could smell desert dust on him, hot and dry as a sauna.

But he was suspicious of her. Maybe he was suspicious of all journalists.

'And you think there's a story in the Fermi Paradox?'

She shrugged, non-committal. 'I'm more interested in you, Colonel Malenfant.'

He was immediately defensive. 'Just Malenfant.'

'Of all the projects you could have undertaken when you were grounded, why front a stunt like this?'

He shrugged. 'Look, if you want to call this a stunt, fine. But we're extending the envelope here. Today we'll prove that we can touch other worlds. Maybe an astronaut is the right face to head up a groundbreaker project like this.'

'Ex-astronaut.'

His grin faded.

Fishing for an angle, she said, 'Is that why you're here? You were born in i960, weren't you? So you remember Apollo. But by the time you grew up cheaper and smarter robots had taken over the exploring. Now NASA says that when the International Space Station finally reaches the end of its life, it plans no more manned spaceflight of any sort. Is this laser project a compensation for your wash-out, Malenfant?'

He barked a laugh. 'You know, you aren't as smart as you think you are, Ms Manzoni. It's your brand of personality-oriented cod-psychology bullshit that has brought down -'

'Are you lonely?'

That pulled him up. 'What?'

'The Fermi Paradox is all about loneliness, isn't it? - the loneliness of mankind, orphaned in an empty universe… Your wife, Emma, died a decade back. I know you have a son, but you never remarried -'

He glared at her. 'You're full of shit, lady.'

She returned his glare, satisfied she had hit the mark.

Later he would say to her, 'The universe is out there, like it or not, regardless of our soap-opera human dramas. And it is bigger than your petty concerns. And the questions I deal with are bigger than your trivial pestering.'

'Like Fermi.' 'Like Fermi, yes.'

'But you don't have any answers to Fermi.'

'Oh, that isn't the trouble at all, Ms Manzoni. Don't you understand that much? The trouble is we have far too many answers…'

Refugium

Celso and I were ejected from the Sally Brind. Frank Paulis had brought us to the Oort Cloud, that misty belt far from the sun where huge comets glide like deep-sea fish.

Before us, an alien craft sparkled in the starlight.

On the inside of my suit helmet a tiny softscreen popped into life and filled up with a picture of Paulis. He was wizened, somewhere over eighty years old, but his eyes glittered, sharp.

Even now, I begged. 'Paulis. Don't make me do this.'

Paulis was in a bathrobe; behind his steam billowed. He was in his spa at the heart of the Brind - a luxury from which Celso and I had been excluded for the long hundred days it had taken to haul us all the way out here. 'Your grandfather would be ashamed of you, Michael Malenfant. You forfeited choice when you let yourself be put up for sale in a debtors' auction.'

'I just had a streak of bad luck.'

'A streak spanning fifteen years hustling pool and a mountain of bad debts?'

Celso studied me with brown eyes full of pity. 'Do not whine, my friend.'

'Paulis, I don't care who the hell my grandfather was. You can see I'm no astronaut. I'm forty years old, for Christ's sake. And I'm not the brightest guy in the world -'

'True, but unimportant. The whole point of this experiment is to send humans where we haven't sent humans before. Exactly who probably doesn't matter. Look at the Bubble, Malenfant.'

The alien ship was a ten-foot balloon plastered with rubies. Celso was already inspecting its interior in an intelligent sort of way.

Paulis said, 'Remember your briefings. You can see it's a hollow

sphere. There's an open hatchway. We know that if you close the hatch the device will accelerate away. We have evidence that its effective final speed is many times the speed of light. In fact, many millions of times.'

'Impossible,' said Celso.

Paulis smiled. 'Evidently, not everyone agrees. What a marvellous adventure! I only wish I could come with you.'

'Like hell you do, you dried-up old bastard.'

He took a gloating sip from a frosted glass. 'Malenfant, you are here because of faults in your personality.'

'I'm here because of people like you.'

Celso took my arm.

'In about two minutes,' Paulis said cheerfully, 'the pilot of the Sally Brind is going to come out of the airlock and shoot you both in the temple. Unless you're in that Bubble with the hatch closed.'

Celso pushed me towards the glittering ball.

I said, 'I won't forget you, Paulis. I'll be thinking of you every damn minute -'

But he only grinned.

My name is Reid Malenfant.

You know me, Michael. And you know 1 was always an incorrigible space cadet. I campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids. 1 hope you know my pal, Frank ]. Paulis, who went out there and did what I only talked about.

But I don't want to talk about that. Not here, not in this letter. I want to be more personal. I want you to understand why your grandpappy gave over his life to a single, consuming project.

For me, it started with a simple question: What use are the stars?

Paulis had installed basic life-support gear in the Bubble. Celso already had his suit off and was busy collapsing our portable airlock.

Through the net-like walls of the Bubble I looked back at the Sally Brind. I could see at one extreme the fat cone shape of Paulis's Earth return capsule, and at the other end the angular, spidery form of the strut sections that held the nuke reactor and its shielding.

Beside our glittering toy-ship the Brind looked crude, as if knocked together by stone axes.

I had grown to hate the damn Brind. In the months since we left lunar orbit, she had become a prison to me. Now, as I looked back at her, drifting in this purposeless immensity, she looked like home.

When I took off my suit off I found I'd suffered some oedema, swelling caused by the accumulation of fluid under my skin - in the webs of my fingers, in places where the zippers had run, and a few other places where the suit hadn't fit as well as it should. The kind of stuff the astronauts never tell you about. But there was no pain, no loss of muscle or joint function that I could detect.

'Report,' Paulis's voice, loud in our ears, ordered.

'The only instrument is a display, like a softscreen,' said Celso. He inspected it calmly. It showed a network of threads against a background of starlike dots.

'Your interpretation?'

'This may be an image of our destination. And if these are cosmic strings,' Celso said dryly, 'we are going further than I had imagined.'

I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I looked more closely at the starlike dots. They were little spirals. Galaxies?

Celso continued to poke around. 'The life-support equipment is functioning nominally.'

'I've given you enough for about two months,' said Paulis. 'If you're not back by then, you probably won't be coming back at all.'

Celso nodded.

'Time's up,' Paulis said. 'Shut the hatch, Malenfant.' I shot back, 'You'll pay for this, Paulis.'

'I don't think I'll be losing much sleep, frankly.' Then, with steel: 'Shut the hatch, Malenfant. I want to see you do it.'

Celso touched my shoulder. 'Do not be concerned, my friend.' With a lot of dignity he pressed a wall-mounted push-button.

The hatch melted into the hull, closing us in.

The Bubble quivered. I clung to the soft wall.

Paulis's voice cut out. The sun disappeared. Electric-blue light pulsed in the sky. There was no sensation of movement.

But suddenly - impossibly - there was a planet outside, a fat steel-grey ball. A world of water. Earth}

It looked like Earth. But, despite my sudden, reluctant stab of hope, I knew immediately it was not Earth.

Celso's face was working as he gazed out of the Bubble, his softscreen jammed against the hull, gathering images. 'A big world, larger than Earth - but what difference does that make? Higher surface gravity. More internal heat trapped. A thicker crust, but hotter, more flexible; lots of volcanoes. And the crust couldn't support mountains in that powerful gravity… Deep oceans, no mountains tall enough to peak out of the water - life clustering around deep-ocean thermal vents -'

'I don't understand,' I said.

'We are already far from home.'

I said tightly, 'I can see that.'

He looked at me steadily, and rested his hands on my shoulders. 'Michael, we have already been projected to the system of another star. I think -'

There was a faint surge. I saw something like streetlamps flying past. And then a dim pool of light soaked across space below us.

Celso grunted. 'Ah. I think we have accelerated.'

With a click, the hull turned transparent as glass.

The streetlamps had been stars.

And the puddle of light was a swirl, a bulging yellow-white core wrapped around by streaky spiral-shaped arms. It was the Galaxy. It fell away from us.

That was how far I had already come, how fast I was moving. I assumed a foetal position and stayed that way for a long time.

As a kid I used to lie out on the lawn, soaking up dew and looking at the stars, trying to feel the Earth turning under me. It felt wonderful to be alive - hell, to be ten years old, anyhow. Michael, if you're ten years old when you get to read this, try it sometime. Even if you're a hundred, try it anyhow.

But even then I knew that the Earth was just a ball of rock, on the fringe of a nondescript galaxy. And 1 just couldn't believe that there was nobody out there looking back at me down here. Was it really possible that this was the only place where life had taken hold - that only here were there minds and eyes capable of looking out and wondering?

Because if so, what use are the stars? All those suns and worlds, spinning through the void, the grand complexity of creation unwinding all the way out of the Big Bang itself…

Even then I saw space as a high frontier, a sky to be mined, a resource for humanity. Still do. But is that all it is? Could the sky

really be nothing more than an empty stage for mankind to strut and squabble?

And what if we blow ourselves up? Will the universe just evolve on, like a huge piece of clockwork slowly running down, utterly devoid of life and mind? What would be the use of that?

Much later, I learned that this kind of 'argument from utility' goes back all the way to the Romans - Lucretius, in fact, in the first century AD. Alien minds must exist, because otherwise the stars would be purposeless. Right?

Sure. But if so, where are they?

I bet this bothers you too, Michael. Wouldn't be a Malenfant otherwise!

Celso spoke to me soothingly. Eventually I uncurled.

The sky was embroidered with knots and threads. A fat grey cloud drifted past.

After a moment, with the help of Celso, I got it into perspective. The embroidery was made up of galaxies. The cloud was a supercluster of galaxies.

We were moving fast enough to make a supercluster shift against the general background.

'We must be travelling through some sort of hyperspace,' Celso lectured. 'We hop from point to point. Or perhaps this is some variant of teleportation. Even the images we see must be an illusion, manufactured for our comfort.'

'I don't want to know.'

'But you should have been prepared for all this,' said Celso kindly. 'You saw the image - the distant galaxies, the cosmic strings.'

'Celso -' I resisted the temptation to wrap my arms around my head. 'Please. You aren't helping me.'

He looked at me steadily. Supercluster light bathed his aquiline profile; he was the sort you'd pick as an ambassador for the human race. I hate people like that. 'If the builders of this vessel are transporting us across such distances, there is nothing to fear. With such powers they can surely preserve our lives with negligible effort.'

'Or sit on our skulls with less.'

'There is nothing to fear save your own human failings.' I sucked weak coffee from a nippled flask. 'You're starting to sound like Paulis.'

He laughed. 'I am sorry.' He turned back to the drifting super-cluster, calm, fascinated.

Just think about it, Michael. Life on Earth got started just about as soon as it could - as soon as the rocks cooled and the oceans gathered. Furthermore, life spread over Earth as fast and as far as it could. And already we're starting to spread to other worlds. Surely this can't be a unique trait of Earth life.

So how come nobody has come spreading all over us?

Of course the universe is a big place. But even crawling along with dinky ships that only reach a fraction of lightspeed - ships we could easily start building now - we could colonize the Galaxy in a few tens of millions of years. 100 million, tops.

100 million years: it seems an immense time - after all, 100 million years ago dinosaurs ruled the Earth. But the Galaxy is 100 times older still. There has been time for Galactic colonization to have happened many times since the birth of the stars.

Remember, all it takes is for one race somewhere to have evolved the will and the means to colonize; and once the process has started it's hard to see what could stop it.

But, as a kid on that lawn, I didn't see them.

Advanced civilizations ought to be very noticeable. Even we blare out on radio frequencies. Why, with our giant radio telescopes we could detect a civilization no more advanced than ours anywhere in the Galaxy. But we don't.

We seem to be surrounded by emptiness and silence. There's something wrong.

This is called the Fermi Paradox.

The journey was long. And what made it worse was that we didn't know how long it would be, or what we would find at the end of it - let alone if we would ever come back again.

The two of us were crammed inside that glittering little Bubble the whole time.

Celso had the patience of a rock. Trying not to think about how afraid I was, I poked sticks into his cage. I ought to have driven him crazy.

'You have a few "human failings" too,' I said. 'Or you wouldn't have ended up like me, on sale in a debtors' auction.'

He inclined his noble head. 'What you say is true. Although I did go there voluntarily.'

I choked on my coffee.

'My wife is called Maria. We both work in the algae tanks beneath New San Francisco.'

I grimaced. 'You've got my sympathy.'

'We remain poor people, despite our efforts to educate ourselves. You may know that life is not easy for non-Caucasians in modern California…' His parents had moved there from the east when Celso was very young. 'My parents loved California - or at least, the dream of California - a place of hope and tolerance and plenty, the society of the future, the Golden State.' He smiled. 'But my parents died disappointed. And the California dream had been dead for decades…'

It all started, he said, with the Proposition 13 vote in 1978. It was a tax revolt, when citizens began to turn their backs on public spending. More ballot initiatives followed, to cut taxes, limit budgets, restrict school-spending discretion, bring in tougher sentencing laws, end affirmative action, ban immigrants from using public services.

'For fifty years California has been run by a government of ballot initiative. And it is not hard to see who the initiatives are favouring. The whites became a minority in 2005; the rest of the population is Latino, black, Asian and other groups. The ballot initiatives are weapons of resistance by the declining proportion of white voters. With predictable results.'

I could sympathize. As a kid growing up with two radicals for parents - in turn very influenced by my grandfather, the famous Reid Malenfant himself - I soaked up a lot of utopianism. My parents always thought that the future would be better than the present, that people would somehow get smarter and more generous, overcome their limitations, learn to live in harmony and generosity. Save the planet and live in peace. All that stuff.

It didn't work out that way. Where California led, it seems to me, the rest of the human race has followed, into a pit of selfishness, short-sightedness, bigotry, hatred, greed - while the planet fills up with our shit.

'But,' Celso said, 'your grandfather tried.'

'Tried and failed. Reid Malenfant dreamed of saving the Earth by mining the sky. Bullshit. The wealth returned from the asteroid mines has made the rich richer - people like Paulis -and did nothing for the Earth but create millions of economic refugees.'

And as for my grandfather, who everybody seems to think I ought to be living up to: his is a voice from the past, speaking of vanished dreams.

Celso said, 'Is there really no hope for us? Can we really not transcend our nature, save ourselves?'

'My friend, all you can do is look after yourself.'

Celso nodded. 'Yes. My wife and I could see no way to buy a decent life for our son Fernando but for one of us to be sold through an auction.'

'You did that knowing the risk of coming up against a bastard like Paulis - of ending up on a chute to hell like this?'

'I did it knowing that Paulis's money would buy my Fernando a place in the sun - literally. And Maria would have done the same. We drew lots.'

'Ah.' I nodded knowingly. 'And you lost.'

He looked puzzled. 'No. I won.'

I couldn't meet his eyes. I really do hate people like that. He said gently, 'Tell me why you are here. The truth, now.' 'Paulis bought me.'

'The laws covering debtor auctions are strict. He could not have sent you on such a hazardous assignment without your consent.' 'He bought me. But not with money.' 'Then what?'

I sighed. 'With my grandfather. Paulis knew him. He had a letter, written before Reid Malenfant died, a letter for me…'

A paradox arises when two seemingly plausible lines of thought meet in a contradiction. Throughout history, paradoxes have been a fertile seeding grounds for new ways of looking at the world. I'm sure Fermi is telling us something very profound about the nature of the universe we live in.

But, Michael, neither of the two basic resolutions of the Paradox offer much illumination - or comfort.

Maybe, simply, we really are alone.

We may be the first. Perhaps we're the last. If so, it took so long for the solar system to evolve intelligence it seems unlikely there will be others, ever. If we fail, then the failure is for all time. If we die, mind and consciousness and soul die with us: hope and dreams and love, everything that makes us human. There will be nobody even to mourn us…

Celso nodded gravely as he read.

I snorted. 'Imagine growing up with a dead hero for a grandfather. And his one communication to me is a lecture about the damn Fermi Paradox. Look, Reid Malenfant was a loser. He let people manipulate him his whole life. People like Frank Paulis, who used him as a front for his predatory off-world capitalism.'

'That is very cynical. After all this project, the first human exploration of the Bubbles, was funded privately - by Paulis. He must share some of the same, ah, curiosity as your grandfather.'

'My grandfather had a head full of shit.'

Celso regarded me. 'I hope we will learn enough to have satisfied Reid Malenfant's curiosity - and that it does not cost us our lives.' And he went back to work.

Humans fired off their first starships in the middle of the twentieth century. They were the US space probes called Pioneer and Voyager, four of them, launched in the 1970s to visit the outer planets. Their primary mission completed, they sailed helplessly on into interstellar space. They worked for decades, sending back data about the conditions they found. But they haven't gone too far yet, all things considered; it will take the fastest of them tens of thousands of years to reach any nearby star.

The first genuine star probe was the European-Japanese D'Urville: a miniaturized robot the size of a hockey puck, accelerated to high velocity. It returned images of the Alpha Centauri system within a decade.

The D'Urville found a system crowded with asteroids and rocky worlds. None of the worlds was inhabited… but one of them had been inhabited.

From orbit, D'Urville saw neat buildings and cities and mines and what looked like farms, all laid out in a persistent hexagonal pattern.

But everything had been abandoned. The buildings were subsiding back into the yellow-grey of the native vegetation, though their outlines were clearly visible. Farms and cities: they must have been something like us. We must have missed them by no more than millennia. It was heartbreaking.

So what happened? There was no sign of war, or cosmic impact, or volcanic explosion, or eco-collapse, or any of the other ways we could think of to trash a world. It was as if everybody had just up and left, leaving a Marie Celeste planet.

But there were several Bubbles neatly orbiting the empty world, shining brightly, beacons blaring throughout the spectrum.

Since then more probes to other stars, followers of the D'Urville, have found many lifeless planets - and a few more abandoned worlds. Some of them appeared to have been inhabited until quite recently, like Alpha A-IV, some deserted for much longer. But always abandoned.

And everywhere we found Bubbles, their all-frequency beacons bleeping invitingly, clustering around those empty worlds like bees around a flower.

After a time one enterprising microprobe was sent inside a Bubble.

The hatch closed. The Bubble shot away at high speed, and was never heard from again.

It was shortly after that that Bubbles were found in the Oort cloud of our own solar system. Hatches open. Apparently waiting for us.

Paulis had set out the pitch for me. 'Where do these Bubbles come from? Where do they go? And why do they never return? My company, Bootstrap, thinks there may be a lot of profit in the answers. Our probes haven't returned. Perhaps you will.'

Or perhaps not.

It doesn't take a Cornelius Taine to figure out that the Bubbles must have something to do with the fact that my grandfather's night sky was silent.

... Or maybe we aren't alone, but we just can't see them. Why not?

Maybe the answer is benevolent. Maybe we're in some kind of quarantine - or a zoo.

Maybe it's just that we all destroy ourselves in nuclear wars or eco collapse.

Or maybe there is something that kills off every civilization like ours before we get too far. Malevolent robots sliding silently between the stars, which for their own antique purposes kill off fledgling cultures.

Or something else we can't even imagine.

Michael, every outcome I can think of scares me.

Celso called me over excitedly. 'My friend, we have travelled for days and must have spanned half the universe. But I believe our journey is nearly over.' He pointed. 'Over there is a quasar. Which is a very bright, very distant object. And over there -' He moved

his arm almost imperceptibly. 'I can see the same quasar.' 'Well, golly gee.'

He smiled. 'Such a double image is a characteristic of a cosmic string. The light bends around the string. You see?'

'I still don't know what a cosmic string is.'

'A fault in space. A relic of the Big Bang, the birth of the universe itself… Do you know much cosmology, Michael?'

'Not as such, no.' It isn't a big topic of conversation in your average poker school.

'Imagine the universe, just a few years old. It is mere light years across, a soup of energy. Rapidly it cools. Our familiar laws of physics take hold. The universe settles into great lumps of ordered space, like - like the freezing surface of a pond.

'But there are flaws in this sober universe, like the gaps between ice floes. Do you understand? Just as liquid water persists in those gaps, so there are great channels through which there still flows energy from the universe's earliest hours. Souvenirs of a reckless youth.'

'And these channels are what you call cosmic strings?'

'The strings are no wider than ten hydrogen atoms. They are very dark, very dense - many tons to an inch.' He cracked an imaginary whip. 'The endless strings lash through space at almost the speed of light, throwing off loops like echoes. The loops lose energy and decay. But not before they form the kernels around which galaxies crystallize.'

'Really? And what about this primordial energy?'

'Great electric currents surge along the strings. Which are, of course, superconductors.'

It sounded kind of dangerous. I felt my stomach loosen - the reaction of a plains primate, utterly inappropriate, lost as I was in this intergalactic wilderness.

But now there was something new. I looked where Celso was pointing -

- and made out a small bar of light. It moved like a beetle across the background.

'What's that? A bead sliding on the string?'

He grabbed a softscreen, seeking a magnified image. His jaw dropped. 'My friend,' he said softly, 'I believe you are exactly right.'

It was one of a series of such beads, I saw now. The whole damn string seemed to be threaded like a cheap necklace.

But now the perspective changed. That nearest bar swelled to a cylinder. To a wand that pointed towards us. To a tunnel whose mouth roared out of infinity and swallowed us.

We sailed along the tunnel's axis, following a fine thread beaded with toy stars - a thread that had to be the cosmic string. The stars splashed coloured tubes on the tunnel walls; they hurtled by like posters in a subway to hell.

I clung to the Bubble walls. Even Celso blanched.

'Of course,' he yelled - and stopped himself. There was no noise, just the feeling there ought to have been. 'Of course, we have still less reason to fear than before. Our speed must be vastly less than when we were in free space. And I believe we're still slowing down.'

I risked a look.

We were dipping away from the axis. Those tremendous bands of light flattened out and became landscapes that streamed beneath us.

We slowed enough to make out detail.

One model sun was a ruddy giant. By its light, fungi the size of continents lapped vast mountain ranges.

The next sun was a shrunken dwarf; oceans of hydrogen or helium slithered over the tunnel walls. I saw something like an enormous whale. It must have had superconducting fluid for blood.

So it went, sun after sun, landscape after landscape. A subway filled with worlds. Worlds, and life.

Celso's dark eyes shone with wonder. 'This tunnel must be a million miles across. So much room…'

We dipped lower still. Atmosphere whistled. The latest sunlight looked warm and familiar, and the walls were coated with a jumble of blue and green.

The huge curved floor flattened out into a landscape, exploded into trees and grass and rivers; suddenly we landed, as simple as that.

Gravity came back with a thump. We fell into the base of our Bubble.

Without hesitation Celso pulled on his suit, set up our inflatable airlock, and kicked the hatch open.

I glimpsed grassy hills, and a band of night, and a white dwarf star.

I buried my face in the wall of the Bubble.

» » »

Celso came to me that evening.

(Evening? The toy sun slid along its wire and dimmed as it went. In the night, I could see Earthlike landscape smeared out over the other side of the sky.)

'I want you to know I understand,' Celso said gently. 'You must come to terms with this situation. You must do it yourself. I will wait for you.'

I shut my eyes tighter.

The next morning, I heard whistling.

I uncurled. I pulled on my suit, and climbed out of the bubble.

Celso was squatting by a stream, fishing with a piece of string and a bit of wire. He'd taken his suit off. In fact, he'd stripped down to his undershorts. He broke off his whistling as I approached.

I cracked my helmet. The air smelt funny to me, but then I'm a city boy. There was no smog, no people. I could smell Celso's fish, though.

I splashed my face in the stream. The water felt pure enough to have come out of a tap. I said: 'I'd like an explanation, I think.'

Celso competently hauled out another fish. (At least it looked like a fish.) 'Simple,' he said. 'The line is a thread from an undergarment. The hook is scavenged from a ration pack. For bait I am using particles of food concentrate. Later we can dig for worms and -'

'Forget the fishing.'

'We can eat the fish, just as we can breathe the air.' He smiled. 'It is of no species I have ever seen. But it has the same biochemical basis as the fish of Earth's oceans and rivers. Isn't that marvellous? They knew we were coming - they brought us here, right across the universe - they stocked the streams with fish -'

'We didn't come all this way to bloody fish. What's going on here, Celso?'

He wrapped the line around his wrist and stood up. Then, unexpectedly, he grabbed me by the shoulders and grinned in my face. 'You are a hero, my friend Michael Malenfant.'

'A hero? All I did was get out of bed.'

'But, for you, that step across the threshold of the Bubble was a great and terrible journey indeed.' He shook me gently. 7 understand. We must all do what we can, yes? Come now. We will find wood for a fire, I will build a spit, and we will eat a fine meal.'

He loped barefoot across the grass as if he'd been born to it. Grumbling, I followed.

Celso gutted the fish with a bit of metal. I couldn't have done that to save my life. The fish tasted wonderful.

That night we sat by the dying fire. There were no stars, of course, just bands of light on the horizons like twin dawns.

Celso said at length, 'This place, this segment alone, could swallow more than ten thousand Earths. So much room… And we flew over dozens of other inside-out worlds. I imagine there's a home for every life form in the universe - perhaps, in fact, a refuge for all logically possible life forms…'

I looked up to the cylinder's invisible axis. 'I suppose you're going to tell me the whole thing's built around a cosmic string. And the power for all the dinky suns comes from the huge currents left over from the Big Bang.'

'I would guess so. And power for the gravity fields we stand in - although there may be a simpler mechanism. Perhaps the tube is spinning, providing gravity by centripetal forces.'

'But you'd have to spin the tube at different rates. You know, some of the inhabitants will be from tiny moons, some will be from gas giants…'

'That's true.' He clapped me on the shoulder. 'We'll make a scientist of you yet.'

'Not if I can help it.' I hunched up, nostalgic for smog and ignorance. 'But what's the point of all this?'

'The point - I think - is that species become extinct. Even humans ... I did not always work in the algae farms. Once I had higher ambitions.' He smiled. 'I would have been an anthropologist, I think. Actually my speciality would have been palaeoan-thropology. Extinct horns.'

'Horns?'

'Sorry: field slang. Hominids. The lineage of human descent. I did some work, as a student, in the field in the desert heartlands of Kenya. At Olduvai I was privileged to make a key find. It was just a sharp-edged fragment of bone about the size of my thumb, the colour of lava pebbles.'

'But it was a bit of skull.'

'Horns don't leave many fossils, Michael. You very rarely find ribs, for example. Until humans began to bury each other, a hundred thousand years ago, ribs were the first parts of a corpse

to be crunched to splinters by the carnivores. It took me months before I learned to pick out the relics, tiny specks against the soil…

'Well. Believe me, we were very excited. We marked out the site. We broke up the dirt. We began to sieve, looking to separate bits of bone from the grains of soil and stone. After weeks of work you could fit the whole find into a cigarette packet. But that counts as a phenomenal find, in this field.

'What we had found was a trace of a woman. She was Homo erectus. Her kind arose perhaps two million years ago, and became extinct a quarter-million years ago. They had the bodies of modern humans, but smaller brains. But they were highly successful. They migrated out of Africa and covered the Old World.'

I said dryly, 'Fascinating, Celso. And the significance -'

'They are gone, Michael. This is what my field experiences taught me. Here was another type of human - extinct. All that is left is shards of bone from which we have to infer everything -the ancient horns' appearance, gait, behaviour, social structure, language, culture, tool-making ability - everything we know, or we think we know about them. Extinction. It is a brutal, uncompromising termination, disconnecting the past from the future.

'And for an intelligent species this over-death is an unbearable prospect. Everything that might make a life valuable after death - memory, achievement - is wiped away. There is nobody even left to grieve. Do you see?'

He was genuinely agitated; I envied his intensity of emotion. 'But what has this to do with the builders?'

He lay on his back and stared at the empty sky. 'I think the builders are planning ahead. I think this is a refugium, as the ecolo-gists would say. A place to sit out the cold times to come, the long Ice Age of the universe - a safeguard against extinction.' He sighed. 'I think your grandfather understood about extinction, Michael.'

I stared at the fire, my mind drifting. He was thinking of the destiny of mankind. I was just thinking about myself. But then, I hadn't asked to be here. 'Maybe this is okay for you. Sun, trees, fishing, mysterious aliens. But I'm a city boy.'

'I am sorry for you, my friend. But I, too, am far from my family.'

It was a long night, and not a whole lot of laughs.

A new sun slid down the wire. The dew misted away.

I rubbed my eyes; my back was stiff as hell from sleeping unnaturally without a mattress on the ground.

There were two alien Bubbles. They bobbled in the breeze, side by side.

One was ours. Its door gaped; I recognized our kit inside it. Within the second Bubble I thought I could make out two human forms.

I shook Celso awake. 'We've got company.'

We stood before the new vessel. Its hatch opened.

There was a woman; a small boy clung to her. They were a terrified mess. When they recognized Celso -

Look, I have some decency. I took a walk along the stream.

After an hour I rejoined the family. They were having a nice fish breakfast, talking animatedly.

Celso grinned. 'My friend Michael Malenfant. Please meet my wife, Maria, and Fernando, my son.'

Maria still wore the grimy coverall of an algae tank worker. She said: 'The Bubble came and scooped me up from work; and Fernando from his school.'

I gaped. 'The Bubbles have come to Earth?'

They had, it seemed: great gossamer fleets of them, sailing in from the Oort Cloud, an armada perhaps triggered by our foolhardy jaunt.

'They make the sky shine,' said the boy, beaming.

'Of course it is logical,' said Celso. 'The aliens would want to reconstruct stable family units.'

'I wonder how they knew who to bring.'

Celso smiled. 'I would guess they studied us - or rather the Bubble did - during the journey. Whoever was most in our thoughts would be selected. The puzzles of the human heart must be transparent to the builders of such a monumental construct as this.'

'We were scared,' said Fernando proudly, chewing the flesh off a fishy spine.

'I'll bet.' I imagined the scenes in those nightmarish farms as a Bubble came sweeping over the algae beds… 'So now what? Do you think you'll stay here?'

Celso took a deep breath. 'Oh, yes.'

'Better than the algae farms, huh.'

'It is more than that. This will be a fine land in which to build a home, and for Fernando to grow. Other people will be brought

here soon. We will farm, build cities.' He took my arm. 'But you look troubled, my friend. I must not forget you in my happiness. Was no one in your heart during our journey?'

In my hop-skip-and-jump life I'd never made the time to get close enough to anyone to miss them.

He put his hand on my arm. 'Stay with us.' His son smiled at me.

Once again I found myself unable to meet Celso's kind eyes.

Michael, much of my life has been shaped by thinking about the Fermi Paradox. But one thing I never considered was the subtext.

Alone or not alone - why do we care so much?

1 think 1 know now. It's because we are lonely. On Earth there is nobody closer to us than the chimps; we see nobody like us in the sky.

But then, each of us is alone. I have been alone since your grandmother, Emma, died. And now I'm dying too, Michael; what could be lonelier than that?

That's why we care about Fermi. That's why I care.

Michael, I'm looking at you, here in this damn hospital room with me; you're just born, just a baby, and you won't remember me. But I'm glad I got to meet you. I hope you will learn more than I have. That you will be wiser. That you will be happier. That you won't be alone.

I said, 'I guess we know the truth about Fermi now. As soon as intelligence emerges on some deadbeat world like Earth, along come the Bubbles to take everybody away. Leaving all the lights on but nobody home. That's all there is to it.'

'But what a vast enterprise,' Celso said. 'Remember, a key difficulty with the Fermi Paradox has always been consistency. If there is a mechanism that removes intelligent life from the stars and planets, it must do so unfailingly and everywhere: it must be all but omniscient and omnipotent.'

'So the universe must be full of those damn Bubbles.'

'Yes.' He smiled. 'Or perhaps there is only one…'

'But why} Why go to all this trouble, to build this - this vast theme park?'

He grinned. 'Extinction, Michael. This is a dangerous universe for fragile beings such as ourselves. Left to our own devices, it doesn't look as if we are smart enough to get through many more

centuries, does it? Maybe the Bubbles have come just in time. And remember that life can be readily destroyed - by impact events, volcanism and other instability - by chance events like nearby supernovae or the collision of neutron stars - by more dramatic occurrences like the collision of galaxies - and in the end, of course, all stars will die, all free energy sources dwindle… We are stalked by extinction, Michael; we are all refugees.

'But one energy source will not fade away: the energy trapped in the cosmic strings. So I think they built this place, and they sent out their trawler-like vessels. The refugium is a defiance of extinction - a mechanism to ensure that life and mind may survive into the unimaginable future -'

I sniffed, looking up at a fake sun. 'But isn't that a retreat? This great sink of life isn't our world. To come here is an end to striving, to ambition, to the autonomy of the species.' I thought of the Bubbles clustering around Earth, like antibodies around a source of infection. I thought of human cities, New York and London and Beijing, emptied and overgrown like the dismal ruins of Alpha Centauri A-IV.

But Celso said, 'Not really. They were just thinking of their children. Rather like me, I guess. And there are adventures to be had here. We will design flying machines and go exploring. There may be no limit to the journeys we, or our children, will make, up and down this great corridor, a corridor that encircles the universe, no limit to the intelligences we might meet. And here, sheltered in this refugium, the human species could last forever… think of that.' He studied me. 'As for you, I didn't know you were so restless, Michael. Heroism, now wanderlust. You have travelled across half the cosmos, and at the end of your journey you found yourself. Maybe your grandfather's genes really are working within you.'

The boy spoke around a mouthful of fish. 'If you are lonely, sir, why don't you go home?'

I smiled. 'Easier said than done.'

'No, really. You know the screen in the Bubble - the one that showed our destination?'

'The cosmic string picture… what about it?' 'Well, in your Bubble it's changed.'

Celso stared at the boy, then ran to the Bubble. 'He's right,' he breathed.

The screen showed a picture of the Earth - continents, grey-blue oceans - unmistakeable and lovely.

I kissed that damn kid.

Celso nodded. 'They know you wish to leave.' He shrugged. 'The choice of the species is surely clear; this, not that beautiful, fragile blue bauble, is mankind's destiny. But individuals are free…'

There was a distant shiver of motion. A third Bubble sailed towards us across the plain. I hardly noticed it.

Without hesitation I jumped into the open hatchway of our Bubble. 'Listen,' I said to Celso, 'are you sure you don't want to come? It's going to be a tough life here.'

He rejoined his family. 'Not for us. Goodbye, my friend. Oh -here.' He handed me his softscreen. 'With the information I have gathered in this you will become a rich man.'

The new vessel drifted to rest.

I couldn't have cared less. I banged the button to shut the hatch. My Bubble lifted.

Through the net walls I could see the new arrival tumble out onto the raw earth. I recognized him. He was the reason the new Bubble had been summoned for me. The person who'd made sure he'd been on my mind throughout the whole journey.

Frank J. Paulis was wearing his bathrobe. He wailed.

Celso caught my eye and winked. Paulis would be doing a lot of worm digging before he was allowed back to his spa and Bootstrap and his sprawling empire. I wished I'd been there when that damn Bubble had shown up to scoop him away.

But maybe Paulis had got what he wanted, at that. The answer - in this universe, anyhow. My grandfather would have been pleased for him, I thought.

The landscape fell away, and I flew past toy stars.

Lost Continent

Without warning Dorehill leaned across the table. 'Close your eyes.' I was startled into obeying.

'Don't think before replying. Tell me who you are.'

And, just for a second or two, nothing came. It was as if I was drifting in a fog. Who am I? Where am I from? How did I get here?

The answers quickly loomed out of that pearly fog. I saw my own face, at age six and sixteen and thirty-six; my parents, our somewhat dilapidated family house in Nantucket; my study, my books; Mary's sweet face, the kids, our home here in Tangier. It all came together, a mosaic of images, a tidy narrative.

Too tidy? Was that Dorehill's point?

He was watching me, those desperate eyes bright. 'You see? You see} How do you know your past is real? How do you know that everything you think you remember wasn't conjured into existence a couple of seconds ago, knitted into place for you, a - a tapestry to cover up the holes in the wall? Don't you think it's at least possible}…'

It had been nearly twenty years since I had last seen Peter Dorehill, at our graduation together. Now, in the cool brightness of a cafe on Tangier's beach promenade, we sipped mint tea and appraised each other, as old acquaintances will.

The years had made Dorehill gaunt, as if the softer parts of his personality had worn away. I had soon learned he was still full of words, words, words, just as he always had been. But I detected something in his eyes, about his stance, as if he was wound up to explosive tension.

Knowing his history, I thought I recognized the signs. It seemed to me he looked - as my father used to say of my uncle - 'white-knuckle sober'. Perhaps he was finding Islamic Morocco trying.

But, intense or not, I could see no chain of reasoning, no string of words which might lure a man like Peter Dorehill into the murky solipsistic waters of Lost Continent mythmaking.

'It began with geology,' he told me. 'My chosen profession after Stanford, if you remember. Three decades ago - in October 1962 - savage earth tremors were experienced around a great half-ring of land, from Scandinavia, down through the Russian ports of Leningrad and Lvov and Odessa, on through Alexandria and the north African coast - even as far as Tangier, where we sit. Many of these quakes were in regions far from any geological fault. All of them occurred within minutes of each other. And at the same time, tsunamis marched across the Atlantic to smash against the east coast of America.'

I nodded. I remembered all this, of course; we had both been ten years old at the time. 'And this is what you have been working on.'

'Not exactly.' He grinned, rueful. 'You know me, John: an unanswered question is an endless, nagging irritation. I've always been fascinated by the puzzle of that sudden chthonic jolt. How did it happen? Why then, and in those specific sites? What could have triggered it all? And so on.

'But, after taking my master's, I found that nobody was working seriously on the problem. This was just a dozen or so years after the event, remember. Oh, the geological records were there to inspect - there had been no fast answers; there was still work to be done - but even so, it struck me that people had turned away from the mystery, had lost interest. I couldn't understand it. But I got nowhere fast. Forced to earn a crust, I took a job with an oil company.'

'But you kept digging.'

'You see, you do know me! I wondered if it might be fruitful to look a little wider. I wanted to know what else was going on in that autumn of 1962.'

I said dryly, 'I seem to remember that the news of the period was somewhat dominated by missiles in Cuba.'

He smiled and pushed back a straggling grey hair from his start-lingly high forehead. (Why are we always so shocked by the ageing of friends from youth?) 'Correct - and maybe significant. In that

month virtually every commentator was predicting nuclear war -a war which was averted only by some adroit diplomacy, and a large pinch of luck. But I went further than that. I looked at trends in other disciplines - such as yours, John. I consulted newspaper records. I even dug around in the drugstore tabloids.' 'What were you looking for?'

'I didn't know - I suspected I wouldn't know until I found it. I sensed a pattern, out there somewhere… It's hard to be more clear than that. All I did find were more unanswered questions. For instance there was a rash of stories of UFO visitations and alien abductions.'

'Peter, there are always UFO stories -'

'Not in such numbers, and with such consistency. Anyhow there's more - much of which ought to interest a historian like yourself, John.'

My smile froze a little at that, but I kept listening.

With diligent (if probably amateurish) research he had, he claimed, uncovered clusters of new folk tales.

'Shiite imams in Algeria told me how the Trumpet of Israfil sounded over the northern ocean - how Iblis, Satan, rose and resumed his defiance of God's great command: Be. The Orthodox Christians of the Russian coast spoke of a recent return by Satan, who they call the Murderer of the Beginning. Even modern practitioners of the old Norse religions whispered stories of an irruption of Ginnungagap, the primeval void, into the modern world.

'These fragmentary tales were expressed in the differing mythic structures of local populations. But they were all alike. And I found them scattered in a great circle, running along the North African coast, through the Middle East and Russia, as far as Scandinavia.'

I said reluctantly, 'The same as the 1962 quake arc'

His eyes gleamed. 'You see the pattern. I felt I was skirting some enormous, hidden event, revealed not so much by evidence as by a notable absence. I believe these tales are fragments of recollection - smashed, scattered, broken - like the ring of debris that surrounds an impact crater.' He eyed me. 'You think I'm babbling.'

I forced a smile. 'Peter, I'm making no judgement.' But in fact my heart was sinking.

Because we had already moved from geology to mythmaking, and I suspected I was about to be introduced to his Lost Continent theory.

I suppose I felt a lingering fondness for Dorehill. I hadn't forgotten Stanford and our late-night bull sessions, fuelled by bad food, whiskey, dope and fellowship, when we had talked about anything and everything.

Aliens, for instance - or the lack thereof, a favourite bullshit topic.

Where is everybody? Peter would ask, lecturing as usual, younger, wispy-bearded, hairier, almost as intense. Why isn't there evidence of extraterrestrial civilization all around us? They should be here by now. Even if They are long gone, surely we should see Their mighty ruins all around us…

Perhaps we were being anthropomorphic, we would say. Perhaps They were nothing like us - not recognizable as life forms at all

- or perhaps They were pursuing projects we can't even imagine. But even if we had no idea what Their great structures are for, we would surely recognize them as artificial. And so on.

But it was always Peter who came up with the wackiest notions. They might simply be invisible. The physicists talk of mirror matter, of an elusive unseen twin for every particle in nature. Are there mirror stars? Are there planets inhabited by mirror organisms, invisible to our senses? Do Their ships of mirror matter slide through our solar system even now? ... It looked as if he hadn't changed.

But I had. College was long ago and far away, an intense confinement where seeming friendships could be forged between basically incompatible types, friendships that fell apart pretty rapidly once we were all let out into the real world. I had kept in touch with few of my friends and acquaintances from those days

- and certainly not Peter Dorehill.

So it was guilt as much as friendship, I guess, that kept me in my seat in that sunlit cafe.

It was still harmless enough. We talked around the parameters of the mythos: of tales of rich island-nations whose powerful conquering princes became wicked and impious, until their lands were swallowed up by the sea.

The conventional explanation of Lost Continent myths is well known. Almost certainly, if there is anything in such legends at all, they stem from real events - volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis and the like - enough to shatter civilizations. Such half-memories are handed down through the ages, mutating and elaborating as they go. In later times, efforts are often made to identify

the wonderful land with an actual country, to no avail, of course.

All of which is a rational, logical justification of the archetypical legends, deriving from a very human reaction to devastating, barely comprehended events.

But Peter Dorehill had another explanation.

He closed his eyes. 'Imagine a great and ancient civilization. Its territories are encrusted with fine buildings, works of art, libraries full of learning.

'And now, imagine a race of beings. Beings from another world.'

Though I kept carefully still, he sensed my reaction. His eyes snapped open like camera shutters.

'This is an outrageous hypothesis,' he said. 'There's no easy way to express it. Just hear me out. You always were a good listener, John. And as you listen, try to imagine how you would prove me wrong.'

'Aliens,' I prompted. 'Extraterrestrials.'

'Yes. They have powers and ambitions, perhaps, far beyond human imagining - and yet They are aesthetes who share some of our own conceptions of beauty. In particular, They take great pleasure in the ancient glories of this old country.

'But now They see that it is all soon to be destroyed. Perhaps it will be devastated by some natural disaster, a volcanic eruption, a quake or a flood. Or perhaps it is threatened by humanity - by war, or the collapse of empire. The specifics do not matter. What does matter is what They do about it.

'They come to a decision.

'It is an operation as simple and delicate as removing a prized vase from the grasp of a foolish child. They carefully detach the old country from the Earth, and remove it and its treasures to -another place, a museum perhaps, safe from humanity and the vagaries of our untamed planet.

'But They face a dilemma. They will not submit Earth's inhabitants to the trauma of such a display of power. The operation has to be performed stealthily.'

I raised an eyebrow at that. 'Stealthily?

'What a tremendous, monstrous act! They must distort all records mentioning, however obliquely, the lost lands. Histories have to be truncated and rewritten - They must force entire cultures to forget their roots - They have to suppress our very memories of the place.

'The operation itself is a - a cauterization. But it is hardly clean.

Nothing is without flaw, in our mortal universe ... As the amputation is made, just as the Earth shudders, so the mass psyche reacts. We are bereft, and we seek expression.'

'Ah. Hence the volcanism and so forth associated with such events. They are a consequence, not a cause.'

'Yes-'

'And hence the Lost Continent legends.'

'Yes. Hence the legends. They are memories, you see - half-erased, inchoate, seeking expression…'

As kindly as I could, I pointed out, 'But you have no proof.' 'It is in the nature of the event itself that proof is erased.' 'Then the argument's circular.'

'Yes,' he said, with a kind of strained patience. 'Of course that's true. But that doesn't make it wrong, does it? And think about it. How would it be to live through such an event, to witness such a

- a miracle? Would we even be able to perceive it? We evolved as plain-dwelling hunter-gatherers, and our sensoriums are conditioned to the hundred-mile scale of Earth landscapes. And if we aren't programmed to register something, we simply don't see it…'

And on, and on.

I was growing irritated, and not a little bored.

Although I couldn't quite see where 1962 fit into all this, I had heard Dorehill's 'theory' before - versions of it anyhow. As a professional historian I am pestered by believers in such tales - which often allow the marvellous inhabitants of the lost lands to live on, at the Earth's poles or under the sea, casually meddling with history

- tales usually embroidered with 'proof concerning Aboriginal art or the building of South American temples - and all these believers are more or less like Dorehill: each obsessed with a single idea, seeing nothing of the greater themes of history, vague about or even ignorant of the meaning of evidence and proof.

Dorehill's was indeed a circular argument, his 'evidence' nothing but a check of internal consistency. Like most such fantastic notions his claims could never be verified or debunked, for they made no predictions which could be tested against fresh data. I imagined him hawking his notions around the academic community, gradually losing whatever reputation he once had, relying on favours and debts even to get a hearing. And now he had come to me.

But he saw my scepticism, and anger flared in his eyes, startling me.

'Okay, forget the UFOs and fairy tales,' he snapped. 'Let's talk about the blindness in your own speciality.'

I prickled. 'What do you mean by that?'

'What would you say is the most fundamental question facing modern historians?'

'I have a feeling you're going to tell me.'

'The emergence question. Consider the history of America. Quite suddenly, in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, you have the arrival of new populations around the coastal fringes of both northern and southern continents - English-speakers in Newfoundland and Virginia, French in Canada, Spanish in Mexico, Portuguese in South America - as if from nowhere, in a moment of historical time, with distinctive skin colours, cultures, technology, blood types, even different DNA signatures.'

I shrugged. 'Arrival surely isn't the right word. The new groups must have been separated from their parent populations by geographical or climatic barriers, and in isolation they rapidly diverged, physically and culturally.'

'That's the standard line. But, come on, John - look at the holes! Why such a dramatic series of emergences occur all around the world, in such a short period of time? And how can such similar linguistic and cultural groups have developed spontaneously on different continents - English, for instance, in North America, Africa, Australia?'

I was uneasy to be under attack in an area so far from my own speciality - which was, and is, Morocco's Almoravide Empire of the eleventh century. 'There are theories of linguistic convergence,' I said uneasily. 'Common grammars reflect the underlying structure of the human brain. It is a matter of neural hard-wiring -'

'But if you actually observe them,' he said sharply, 'you'll find that languages don't converge. In fact languages drift apart - and at a fixed, measurable rate.

'For example: suppose you have a land colonized by a group who pronounce the vowel in "bad" - what the phoneticians call RP Vowel 4 - with the mouth more closed, so it sounds like "bed". A few decades later, a new bunch of colonists arrive, but by now they have reverted to the open pronunciation. Well, the older settlers seek a certain solidarity against the new arrivals, and they retain their closed pronunciation - in fact they close it further. But that makes for confusion with RP3, as in "bed". So that must move over, sounding more like "bid", RP2, which in turn becomes

still more closed, sounding like "bead", RPi. This is what the linguists call a push-chain -'

I held up my hands. 'Enough linguistics!'

He permitted himself a fairly straightforward grin. 'All right. But my point is, you can trace such phonetic chains in the versions of English spoken in America, Canada - the example I gave you is from Australia. We know that the divergence of the English group of languages began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - there was a divergence, you see, not a convergence -just as the new populations emerged in Australia and America. It is as if there had been influxes of new settlers, interacting with the existing stock…'

'Influxes from where?'

He eyed me. 'John, be honest - I think that if you had never before heard your quaint theories of emergence and convergence you would dismiss them out of hand. What we are looking at is the result of colonization - wave after wave of it…'

Which was absurd, of course. I suppose I glared at him, unsympathetic.

He smiled, but his expression was cold, his gaze directed inward. 'We make patterns,' he said now. 'It's in our nature. Scatter a handful of coloured pebbles on the ground and we make a picture out of them. That's what you historians do. Make pretty pictures out of pebbles…'

Now I had no idea what he was talking about. I had the awful feeling he was disintegrating, right in front of me. 'Peter -'

He looked at me. I peered into his church-window eyes. 'You see - I think it's happened again.'

Even at college he was always the last to nurse another shot out of a dying bottle.

And it had gone on from there. When he'd been hospitalized briefly after a thirty-fifth birthday party bender - complete with drunk-driving car crash - there had been some communication among his old college buddies. Maybe we all felt a little responsible; some of us (not me) gathered around.

Dorehill said he wasn't an alcoholic, clinically anyhow, and refused treatment. He gave up drinking, just like that, and had been sober for seven, eight years.

Sure. Except that my uncle, a recovering alcoholic in my own family, would have summed up that behaviour in one word. Denial.

I had to agree, having seen the pattern before. Dorehill might be dry, but he was still a problem drinker, to say the least. As he hadn't been in a programme or sought counselling, he was at risk of relapse. And now here he was, sipping iced tea, wound up as tight as he could be, obsessing about 1962.

A dry drunk. White-knuckle sober.

None of which made him wrong, of course.

'It was the war,' he whispered. 'Those damn missiles in Cuba. And the cockpit of the war would have been another ancient land -the mother of the newer colony nations, perhaps…'

He talked on, rapidly, fanatically, barely coherently - of a great tongue of land sliced away, of landlocked towns suddenly becoming ports, of anomalous salt concentrations in the ocean, of how the world's rocks and oceans juddered like a bathtub struck with a hammer, of fragments of memories transmuted into new folk tales - of the adjustment of every human mind on the planet.

Solipsistic nonsense, of course. But as I listened, in the mundanity of that bright, bustling cafe, it suddenly seemed to me that I was huddled in a circle of light, a circle that reached only a few feet, and beyond there was nothing but darkness, unmapped, unexplored, incomprehensible.

But then a waiter moved smoothly through the cafe and opened windows; at once a cool, salty breeze from the ocean wafted into the room, breaking up the heavy mugginess of the afternoon air.

Once again I tried to be kind. 'Look, Peter - you must see how this looks. I mean, where are these aliens of yours?'

His face was set, composed. 'You haven't been listening.'

'Well, this isn't 4000 BC. For all the limitations of our eyes and minds, what of our records? TV, films - a billion photographs in family albums… Are you trying to tell me that they were all changed?' I shook my head, impatient with myself. 'And then there's your claim that our modern nations were born of colonies of this detached place. In that case its history, its culture must be utterly intertwined with ours. How could any force, no matter how powerful, detach one from the other? And what of Occam's razor?' I rapped the tabletop between us. 'It is simpler to assume that the table is real than that there is a vast invisible machine which generates the illusion of the table. Just as when I consider my own memories -'

His lips quivered oddly, and that half-suppressed anger flared

again. 'So damn smug.' But the anger faded as rapidly. 'Ah, but you can't help but think that way. We are such small creatures. Well, if nothing else, you are in at the birth of a new myth structure, John. How privileged you are.' More emotions chased across his face - resentment, baffled curiosity, confusion. 'You know, I sometimes wonder if it was necessary.' 'What?'

'The amputation. Maybe we wouldn't have gone to war after all.'

I felt awkward, remorseful. 'Look, Peter, I'm sorry if -'

'We might have muddled through, without Their interference.

Maybe that was how it turned out, in some other universe.' He

abruptly drained his cup. 'More tea?'

I'd had enough, of the tea and of Peter Dorehill. I got up to

leave.

But his voice pursued me, out into the shining air of the beach front. 'You and I were just ten years old,' he said. 'Ten years old, John, when They stuck Their fingers in our heads. What do you think about that?…'

A year after that last brief meeting, Peter Dorehill disappeared from view, theories and all, sliding off the face of the Earth like his purloined continent, presumed lost in a fog of alcohol. According to my uncle, dry drunks invariably lapse - and when they do, the fall is spectacular and destructive. Still, the news saddened me.

On the day I heard about it I took a walk through Old Tangier, which is the medina, a walled Arab town, a maze of narrow alleys. I climbed to the Bordj el Marsa, the port battery which offers some of the best views of the city and its harbour. From there I followed the Bab el Bahr steps out of the old city to the port gates, and the beach promenade.

Well, how could I tell if anything I remembered corresponded to the truth? Occam's razor is only a philosophical principle - a guideline, not a law. Was I an arrogant plains ape, assuming that what I was capable of seeing comprised everything there was to see - making up comforting stories from patterns in scattered bits of historical wreckage - clinging to simplistic principles to convince me the stories were true - complacently judging a theory by the theorist who delivered it?

But even if it was true - even if nothing anybody remembered

before October 1962. was real - what was there to be done about it? That was the essential futility of Peter's solipsism. He may have been right, but we must continue to behave as if it were not so. What else is there to do?

... Of course, I thought, that might be what They want me to think.

I smiled. I stared out over the enormous greyness of the ocean - the huge, misnamed Mediterranean, which stretches unbroken from North Africa to Scandinavia - and then I turned away and walked back into the bright, noisy clutter of Tangier.

Tracks

Well, the Moon was a pretty exciting place to be, I can tell you that. Even if we hadn't found alien beings.

It was as we drove out at the start of our second EVA - our second day on the Moon, the second of our three - that we found the tracks. I know what you're thinking. What tracks? There was no report of tracks in our TV transmission, or our radio transmission, or in the debriefing, or the still photographs. Nevertheless, they were there.

Peter, I know there's a kind of a stigma that hung over your father, for the rest of his life, after that mission. You don't have to deny it. A sense of failure, right? A sense that he was a little reckless with that jump you've seen so many times on video, that fall that smashed up his backpack, the way we had to limp back to the LM and come hurrying home with half our objectives lost, a twenty-million-buck mission screwed up by one guy fooling around on the Moon.

Well, I can tell you it wasn't like that - not like that at all. But it's something only your father and I knew, up to now. Today, now that old Joe is going to his grave, I want you to know the truth. And I want you to think about it, when you see that old Missing Man up in the sky this afternoon.

If you want to know where we were, look up at a new Moon, and look for the chin of the Man, the highland area there. You might see a dimple, a bright pinpoint; I'm told some kids can see it with the naked eye. That's Tycho Crater. A hole in the ground fifty miles across, big enough to swallow LA. And that's where we walked, in 1973.

The sky's black, you know, but the ground is brightly lit, as if lit by floodlights on the floor of some huge theatre. A theatre stage, yeah. You lope across the surface, in the light of that big white spotlight that's the sun. And with every step you kick up the dust from under your feet, and it goes flying out in straight lines, just glimmering once in the flat sunlight, before falling back.

It was our second day. Our first day had been good, full of solid work. But morning is a week long, on the Moon. So I knew I had another bright morning, here on the Moon, stretching ahead of me.

And today we were going climbing, up into the foothills of Tycho's central peak. I whistled as I went to work.

The Lunar Rover, yeah. Now that car was one terrific toy. It comes to the Moon folded up like a concertina against the side of the LM. To deploy it you pull on a pair of lanyards, and the chassis lowers slowly, like pulling down a drawbridge. Then, suddenly, wire-mesh wheels pop out from the four corners, complete with orange fenders.

It worked just fine. We loaded up with our tools and our sample bags and what-not, and off we set, two good old boys at home on the Moon. Joe - as commander, he was the driver - kept complaining about the lack of front-wheel steering, which for some reason wouldn't work, so he had to rely on the rear steering. I was just thrown around, especially when Joe took a swerve. The ground was nothing but bumps and hollows, an artillery field, and every time we hit an obstacle one or two wheels would come looming off of the ground, throwing up huge rooster tails of black dust behind them.

It would have looked strange if there had been anyone around to see it, as we bounced our way over the surface of the Moon. The Rover is just a frame, with its wire wheels and fold-up seats and clusters of antennae and tool racks, and there's the two of us, outsize in our shining white Moon suits, like two dough boys riding a construction-kit car.

It was tough work driving directly away from the sun. The shadows, even of the smallest fragments of regolith, were hidden, and the light just glared back like off a snow field. But if you looked away from the sun, you looked into shades of grey, darker and darker. And that was pretty much all the colours there were on the Moon, except for what we brought with us, and what we left at home. Black- sky, grey soil, blue Earth.

I remember I was talking nine to the dozen about the geology, as we bounced along. I was trying to describe it for the guys in the back rooms, back in Houston. You never knew when some observation of yours was going to provide the key to understanding.

But Joe was somewhat graver. He always was. Your father was a good five years older than me, remember, and he'd been to the Moon once already, on an orbital LM test flight, while I was a rookie; and I guess he just let me chatter.

We got to the foothills and started to drive uphill. That Rover seemed to carry us without effort even under pretty steep hills. But I felt like I was about to slip out the back the whole time. And when we stopped, and I tried to get up, I could barely raise my suited body out of the seat. We were concerned that the Rover would run downhill, and in fact I could see one of its wheels was lifting off the surface. I just grabbed onto the Rover; it was so light I felt I could support it easily. We found an eroded old crater to park in, and when Joe drove it forward, there we were.

Well, we found the big two-hundred-yard crater that was our main sampling objective. We climbed up towards the rim. It was like walking over a sand dune. In that old suit it felt as if I was inside an inflated tyre. But the footing under my feet got firmer, slowly.

As I approached the crater rim I began to walk into a litter of rocks. They must have been dug out of the crater by the impact that formed it, and they had rained down here like artillery shells. But that was long ago. Now the rocks' exposed faces were eroded, all but smoothed back into the surface from which they'd been dug out.

And so I climbed, chattering about the geology the whole way.

When I got to the crater itself I found it was maybe thirty yards deep, strewn with blocks ranging from a yard across to maybe fifteen yards.

I turned around. A few yards away I could see Joe, working through his checklist. His white suit glowed in the sunlight, except for his lower legs and boots, which looked as if they had been dragged through a coal scuttle. He moved stiffly, scarcely bending from the waist, and when he moved he tipped forward, like a leaning statue. But he was whistling, glowing in the light. We were happy up there. That's how I'll remember him, you know. Glowing on the Moon.

Anyhow, it was at that moment, at the rim of that crater, that I saw the tracks. Rover tracks.

I took a couple of seconds to get my breath, to think about it.

Three-hundred-feet high, I was looking down at the mountain's broad flank. It merged with a bright, undulating dust plain that swept away, just a sculpture of craters: craters on craters, young and sharp and cup-shaped overlying old and eroded and subtle. Beyond that I could see mountains thrusting up into space. All of this was diamond sharp, under a black sky. And out there in the middle of it all was a single human artefact: our lander, a gleaming metal speck.

Well, I looked for the tracks again. They were still there. They were still Rover tracks.

At first I thought they must be ours. I mean, whose else could they be? But I could see our tracks; they snaked back over the plain to the lander. These went west-east. In fact you could tell by the tread marks that the vehicle that had made these tracks was going to the east.

I kind of shivered.

I called to Joe. At first he didn't believe me. I think he figured I might be in some kind of trouble, my suit overheating or some such. Anyhow, there were the tracks, large as life. And they still weren't ours.

Through all this, we hadn't said a word, and we were out of sight of the Rover's TV camera. I remember we flipped up our gold sun-visors and we just looked each other, and we came to a silent decision.

We clambered down to the Rover. We told the Mission Control guy in charge of the camera where to point, and we told them to look for themselves. There they were, tracks on the Moon, made by a Lunar Rover that sure wasn't ours. You could see them crystal clear in the TV images. I tell you, it was a relief to find that they saw them too, back in Mission Control.

Well, they debated for a time what to do, and we sat there and waited.

... If I looked at the ground, pocked and battered as it was, things didn't seem so strange. If you've ever seen a freshly ploughed field, harrowed and very fine, and you know when it rains on it, it gives you that sort of pimply look - that's what I

called it, I called it a freshly ploughed field. It was dry as toast but it still had that appearance. Mundane, as you might say.

But whenever I looked up, there was the black sky above this glowing ground, and there was Earth, a brilliant blue crescent, a sight utterly unlike anything seen from the ground. It was electrifying, in moments, this realization of how far I'd come, of where I was.

I remember thinking that just being up there, driving a car on the Moon, would be strangeness enough for one lifetime, without this.

You might not believe it now, but some of the scientists wanted us to just ignore this wacko stuff and carry on with our timelined work. I felt a little of that anxiety too. We'd been rehearsing the science objectives for two years already, and we only had a few hours, and we might waste the whole damn thing if we followed some chimera, up here on the Moon. For example, maybe those tracks could have been made by a boulder that rolled down hill after a landslide. I mean, you could see that wasn't so, but it was possible, I guess.

In the end, after maybe ten minutes, we got the order to go ahead and, well, to follow those tracks. And I remember how my heart thumped as we loaded up the Rover again, and turned right, to the east, and set off in a big flurry of black dirt.

Another rockin' and rollin' ride: grey surface as wavy as an ocean surface, black sky, blue Earth. We didn't say much, on the way, following those crisp tracks. What was there to say?

I remember what I was thinking, though.

I'd always been fascinated by the notion of alien life. Well, I was in the space programme. It was a disappointment to me that by the time my mission rolled around - long before humans ever got there, I guess, in fact - it was clear to everybody that the Moon was dry as dust, and dead besides. We were going to the Moon for geology, not biology.

So I was getting pretty excited as we bounced along, following those tracks. Was it possible that we were in some kind of 2001 situation here, that we were after all going to find some kind of alien marker on the Moon, that those tracks we followed had been planted to lead us right there?

That isn't quite what we found.

Towards the eastern end of the valley, as we come over a ridge, there's this car. Immediately I can see it looks very similar to the

Lunar Rover, and there are two figures in it. They didn't seem to be moving. We stopped, maybe a half mile away, and just stared. I don't know what I was expecting - a monolith? Bug-eyed green guys? - but not that.

So we radioed Houston that we'd found this car, and we start to describe it. And they're mystified, but they start to get excited, we're excited. So we drove up to the other car, parked right alongside, and I got out and turned the TV on. I remember I wiped the lens clean of dust before I took the time to do anything else, but my heart was thumping like a jackhammer; the surgeons must have known, but it wasn't the time to raise an issue like that.

The occupants of the other car, two astronauts just like Joe and me, just sat there, not moving.

Anyhow I ran over to the passenger side, and Joe went to the driver's side. We just stood there, because by now we could see the two of them up close, and - you guessed it - the passenger's suit had my name sewn on it, and the other guy's had Joe's.

And then my heart was pumping harder, because I reached over and pulled up the gold sun visor, and I was looking at myself.

What can you say about an experience like that? It was unreal. In those heavy pressure suits, you're cut off anyhow. You can't see too well because of the curving glass all around your head, and you can't feel the texture of things because of your gloves. And there I was, looking out like a goldfish staring out of his bowl, staring at my own face.

But it wasn't like a nightmare - it wasn't like I was dead -whoever it was looked like me but it wasn't me. And, of course, the other fellow looked like Joe.

And now I got the shock of shocks, because my guy, the copy of me, turns his head, inside his helmet, and opens his eyes, and looks straight at me.

Well, he looked terrible, as if he'd been sitting there some time, but he was obviously alive. He mouthed, but I couldn't hear what he was saying.

So again we debated what to do, with each other, with Houston.

We didn't know who these guys were, of course, or how they got there, or any of it. But here they were, obviously in trouble, and nobody else to help them but us.

So we helped them.

I took the other me, and Joe took his twin. You can just lift up

a person, up there on the Moon, with a little effort. The other me moved like a big stiff balloon, and I plumped him down, upright in the dust. Then I hooked up the hoses from my backpack to his. It was an emergency procedure we'd rehearsed any number of times, in case one of our backpacks failed. And meanwhile Joe hooked up himself to his copy. Then I pulled my twin's arm over my shoulder, and Joe did likewise, and we started to bounce our way down the hill and back to our LM.

We considered taking the Rovers, but it wouldn't have been an easy drive for either of us - even supposing the 'other' Rover had worked at all. And we would have been separated, too far apart to help each other. We just decided to get back home as soon as we could.

Not that it was too clear to me what we'd do when we got there. That old LM wasn't exactly a field hospital. But we could have brought the two guys home, I guess; the LM was designed to carry a couple of hundred pounds of Moonrock off the surface, and we could have crammed two extra guys into the Command Module, the ferry that was waiting in orbit to bring us home.

I guess.

The truth is we didn't think that far ahead. We just had to help those guys. What else were we going to do?

I do remember looking back at the Rover, though - our-Rover - and looking at all the rocks we'd already collected, that now we wouldn't be able to bring on home. We were bringing back something unutterably strange, but we wouldn't be able to complete our mission.

It took us an hour to make it back to the LM. The surgeons insisted we stop for breaks along the way, letting ourselves cool down, sipping water out of the mouthpieces in our helmets. And so on.

It was hard work. I spent most of it staring down at my footing. The dust was like powdered charcoal. The surface was like walking on crisp, frozen snow, or maybe on a cinder track. I remember thinking that whatever came out of this, these would be the last steps I'd take on the Moon.

Well, we got back to Tycho Base, our landing site. And that was when we got our next shock.

Because the LM had gone.

At least, the ascent stage had, the cabin that would have carried

us back to orbit. Only the truncated base remained. Neither of us spoke, if I recall, and nor did the capcom. What could you say? Without that LM we weren't going home.

I remember limping around that site, still supporting my copy, just looking. I could see Rover tracks and footprints converging on the truncated base of the Lunar Module. The LM itself was the centre of a circle of scuffed regolith, littered with gear, two thrown-out backpacks, urine bags and food packs, lithium hydroxide canisters and LM armrests, the detritus of three days of exploration, all of it just thrown out at the end of the stay, as we would have done. Somebody here had been and gone before us.

The LM was surrounded by glittering fragments, for its foil insulation had been split and scattered by the blast of the departed ascent-stage's engine. And there was a new ray system, streaks of dust which overlaid the footprints. But the gold insulation on the descent stage was discoloured, and in some places it had split open and peeled back. Joe tried to smooth it back with his gloved hand, but it just crumbled under his touch. The bird was evidently thoroughly irradiated, and remarkably dusty. The paint had turned to tan, but it was uneven, and when you looked more closely you could see tiny micrometeorite pits, little craters dug into the paintwork.

That LM had suddenly gotten old.

I remember looking up, looking for the Earth. Well, that was still there. And I saw a single, glittering star in the blackness, far above my head. It was the Command Module, in its two-hour lunar orbit, waiting to carry us home. Except we couldn't reach it, without a LM.

I wasn't afraid. It was all too strange.

… And then I heard our capcom yammering in my ear, telling me the surgeons were very concerned, I had to quit goofing off and get Joe into the LM.

Joe?

Well, I looked around. And I found I wasn't propping up some ghostly shadow of myself, but old Joe. Our two copies had gone, as if they'd never been, and it was Joe's backpack I was hooked up to. And when I turned again, there was the LM, intact once more, gold and silver and black, gleaming and glistening, good as new.

I looked at Joe, and Joe looked at me, and we didn't say a word.

I guess you know the rest of the story.

As far as the world was concerned, Joe had taken a pratfall

doing a dumb stunt, seeing how high he could jump in the one-sixth gravity, and snafued his suit, and I'd had to rescue him, walk him back to the LM on my backpack. That was what everybody else remembered; it's what the video records and even our voice transcripts show. I've seen the images myself. He falls with a dreamy slowness, like falling underwater. He has time to twist around, the stiff suit making him move as a unit, like a statue.

Except it didn't happen that way. That's just the way reality knit itself back together around us. You see?

Well, we didn't argue. We managed to get back into the LM, pressure up, and we prepared for an emergency launch.

We had time to think about it, in the three days it took to get back to Earth, and afterwards, in the long debriefings and all the rest.

I'll tell you what I concluded - though I don't think Joe ever agreed with me.

We're in some sort of Quarantine.

The early Moonwalkers were put in quarantine when they got back to Earth, just to be sure there were no bugs to hurt us here on Earth. So maybe we're seen as infectious, or even dangerous, like in that movie with the big robot - what was it called?

But it might be benevolent. Think about it. Maybe They cherish us. Maybe They cherish our art and religion and literature and stuff, and don't want to swamp us with their giant galactic civilization until we're ready. Maybe They are even protecting us from the real bad guys.

So They just hide it all. We're in some kind of shell. What we see around us isn't completely real; 'reality' is doctored, a little or a lot, as if we're in some giant Program, a virtual reality as you'd call it today, showing us what's best for us to see. But beyond the painted walls of our fake sky, the glittering lights of the interstellar cities light up the dark.

Walking on the Moon, we walked into a glitch in the Program. That was all.

That all seemed plausible to me, even back then. We didn't know about virtual reality. Believe me, though, we had computer glitches. At least it was a rational explanation.

What Joe believed, in the end, he never told me. He knew he could never tell the truth - as I couldn't - even though the subtle blaming for a screwed mission began even before we hit the Pacific. Even though old Joe came back carrying the can for a snafu, even

though his pride hurt more than he could say, he kept his peace. And now he's taken his secret with him.

There was one more thing, Peter. I never discussed this, even with Joe.

On the way back I participated in a spacewalk between Earth and Moon. I wasn't fully outside. My job was to be a lifeguard if you will. I was to monitor our Command Module Pilot's actions as he collected data cartridges from the outer hull, and I held his lifeline, his tether which controlled communications and oxygen and restraint. I was to haul him back if he got into trouble.

So Ben floats out, starts hand over hand back to the Service Module. The Earth's off to the right, probably about a two o'clock low, just a little thin sliver of blue and white. And then I spin around, and there's this enormous full Moon, and it was - I mean it was overwhelming, that kind of feeling. And you could see Tycho, you could see Tranquillity, all the major features, and it just felt you could reach out and touch 'em. No sensation of motion at all. And everywhere else you looked was just black.

About fifteen minutes into this, with Ben doing his work nice and easy, I glanced at the Earth. And I saw ships in orbit.

Not little tin cans like ours. Giant golden ships. I had no sense of threat at all. Just watchfulness.

Next time I looked, those ships had gone, and there was the Earth, just a beautiful blue crescent, the loveliest thing.

It wasn't meant to happen, you see. It was just a glitch in the Quarantine Program. A bug. They just weren't ready for us to fly to the Moon so soon. They hadn't ordered the virtual-reality upgrades from Central Supplies in Andromeda, wherever. We just pushed it too far, and we got ourselves mixed up with other copies, or echoes, of ourselves. We crossed tracks, for a few hours.

But it turned into a test for us, for how we'd react to such strangeness. A test I liked to think we passed. I think that's why They showed Themselves to me.

Enough. Peter, I should let you go to your family. You decide what to do with what I told you. I just wanted you to know.

Wait until you see the Missing Man. Look out for the way that wing man peels off. I asked for him. Good pilot. Not so good as your father.

Lines Of Longitude

There was one in every class, Sheila Pal had observed. With experience she had come to be able to spot him - and usually it was a him - the moment she walked in to face a new group.

And so it was now as she arrived on this chill January night at a draughty high school in Aylesbury, for the first of her six Tuesday evening sessions. The classroom was fitted with the standard rows of desks and a white board, and the walls were covered to chest height by the project work of the room's regular thirteen-year-old occupants.

It was a course she'd called Einstein for Relative Beginners. She was sponsored by the Workers' Educational Association, a voluntary organization which put on cheap courses on a variety of subjects aimed, in theory, at those who had missed out on education in the past. The 'Workers' tag was a hangover from earlier in the century; now most of the courses were vocational or aimed at improving job-related skills - interview techniques, for instance - and the WEA was pretty squarely directed at the unemployed, who could take the courses for free. But there was still room for more academic or offbeat items, such as Sheila's Einstein course.

There was a good turnout, for such an obscure and off-putting subject: a first glance, as she unloaded her notes, registration forms and props, revealed ten or twelve pupils, mostly men, mostly of retirement age.

And there, of course, he was: perhaps forty years old - about her own age, Sheila thought gloomily - with black hair thinning and unclean-looking, hunched in a corner, isolated even from this newly formed group. He had a thick, well-used notebook resting on top of his bulky coat. His gaze was on her already, but with

none of the polite interest of the others, rather with an unhealthy eagerness.

She suppressed a sigh. Almost certainly he was just another run-of-the-mill obsessive who would be no real threat. He would just want her attention as he aired pet theories about space and time and the nature of reality - or, God forbid, UFOs. It was an occupational hazard for the science teacher in these post-rational times.

Summoning up a smile, she started to hand out registration forms.

He waited until the end of the class, when the other students had gone, before approaching her. It was harmless enough, as it turned out. He just pressed a letter into her hands: full of capitals, crudely pencilled on lined sheets, in some places the lettering pressed so hard the point had pushed through the paper.

Sheila collected up her materials and hurried out. She couldn't avoid the encounter, but she didn't want to be alone with this man. She climbed into her car, locked the doors, and pulled out.

She drove home, to her flat in a village on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. She left her teaching materials in the car; everything was on unofficial loan from the OU and she had to take it all back the next day anyway.

Her flat was a small, somewhat poky place, but her landlady was friendly, and the village was without street-lighting: on frosty winter nights - like tonight - the sky was crowned by stars. When she looked up, she immediately made out Orion's powerful figure astride the night.

After a bath and a cup of tea, she glanced over the letter.

It was about UFOs.

… Suddenly I realized I was being levitated to a height of a hundred and sixty feet. There were beings in the air with me. They were floating, as I was. They looked like babies, I thought, or perhaps monkeys, with grey skin, oversized heads, huge eyes, and small noses, ears and mouths. Their ship was golden. But its shape was distorted, as if I was looking through a wall of curved glass, and so were the aliens themselves. They seemed to have difficulty staying in one place. They could pass through the walls of their craft at will, like ghosts. They even passed through my body.

They took hold of my arms, and pulled me towards the wall of their ship. I looked for my mother on the ground below, but I could no longer see her. I passed into the wall as if it was made of mist; but I had a sense of warmth and softness.

I was in a cylindrical room. I was enclosed in a plastic chair with a clear-fitted cover. The cover was filled with a warm grey fluid. But there was a tube in my mouth and covering my nose, through which I could breathe cool, clean air. A telepathic voice in my mind told me to close my eyes. When I did so I could feel pleasing vibrations, the fluid seemed to whirl around me, and I was fed a sweet substance through the tubes. I felt tranquil and happy. I kept my eyes closed, and I seemed to become one with the fluid.

Later I was moved, within my sac. I was taken through tunnels and elevators from one room to another. The tunnels varied in length, but ended usually with doorways into brightly lit, dome-shaped rooms.

After a time my fluid was drained and I was taken out of the sac. It was uncomfortable and dry and my head hurt. I was pinned to a table. I was undressed. I did not seem able to resist, or even help in any way, had I wished. I was in a big bright room.

I seemed to lose consciousness.

I was standing outside my house again. The craft, the aliens with their sac, had gone. A moment before I had felt comfortably warm, inside my sac, and now I was bitterly cold and dry. It was the worst feeling I have ever had, that feeling of abandonment and rejection, for I knew they had only intended good.

It was now after dawn. It was full daylight, in fact. Some hours had passed…

His name was George Holland.

It was pretty much as she'd expected: a farrago of misunderstood cosmology and relativity, with a lashing of Richard Dawkins, and promises of more missives to come. And the heart of it, of course, was the UFO abduction account: run-of-the-mill stuff with psychological origins, for such a sad loner as George Holland, which seemed lucidly obvious to her.

What wasn't clear was what he expected her to do in response. Perhaps it was enough for him that he was communicating.

She read through half of the letter, then folded its several sheets and put them carefully into her course folder. She knew how offended he'd be if she simply discarded the letter, at least before her six weeks was up.

She fixed herself a drink, and tried to relax by watching the TV news. She wondered afresh why she put herself through this, even

to the extent of running risks of encounters with oddballs like George Holland.

But she knew the answer to that. For Sheila Pal, teaching was an itch she had to keep scratching.

After taking a PhD in theoretical physics, and much against the advice of her parents and colleagues, she'd become a teacher, of maths and physics to A-level at a sixth-form college. She'd had no illusions about the challenges she would face - she'd done some supply teaching while taking her doctorate as a way of eking out her meagre grant - and in fact it had been that experience which had hooked her on education as a vocation.

Still, she'd soon been ground down: the absurd workload, the ill-suited and ill-advised students, the out of date and restrictive syllabuses, the inadequate funding and equipment. She lasted three years. The decision to quit was forced on her after a double lesson on vectors, the most graphic topic of her A-level maths syllabus, held first thing on a Monday morning in a twenty-year-old 'temporary' wooden annexe whose rat-chewed walls were so poor at keeping out the damp that none of her visual aids would work: even the blackboard was covered by a layer of dew so thick not a particle of chalk would adhere to it…

Perhaps the young George Holland had endured lessons in conditions like that. Perhaps things would have been different, for him, if he'd had a good teacher, decent educational opportunities. A teacher like herself, she thought.

She reached for his letter again, and read a little more.

... It all made sense to me after reading Brief History of Time -in so far as I could follow it, and the technical references I went into after that.

According to Hawking, there was no Big Bang.

Conventional physics says that if we could wind Time back to the Big Bang, the moment when the Universe began, we would see the world - the whole Universe, all of matter and energy, even Space and Time themselves - falling down a sort of funnel, compressing down into a point of unimaginable density and energy. And before the Big Bang there was nothing, nothing at all, not even Time.

But there are problems with that model. Infinite density, zero size? Even I know enough mathematics to know we can't handle such concepts. And the idea that there was another region where not even Time existed seems bizarre.

Hawking made it all clear to me - up to a point.

Hawking says there was no Big Bang. This is the concept of Imaginary Time, which is all a matter of quantum mechanics, but what it boils down to is this: the Universe isn't like a funnel at all. It's more like a Sphere, which folds over on itself in Imaginary Time, complete and closed. The Time we experience is just a Line of Longitude on that Sphere, among many such Lines. And the Big Bang - our Big Bang - is just a Pole on the Sphere, an arbitrary point. If you looked along different timelines, you would see back to different Poles.

Think about a globe of the world, with all the Lines of Latitude and Longitude. At the North Pole and the South Pole, all the Lines of Longitude come together. If we were at a Pole of Space and Time, the Lines of Longitude would spread out from here, so everything more than a little bit away from here would be smeared out and flattened.

But you could have the Pole somewhere else, and the Lines would come together there. It's a Pole to one person, but just another place to someone else. It's all how you see it.

And that's why the ships, and their crew, look distorted to us. They are from somewhere else: a different place, on the Sphere of Imaginary Time. Perhaps this is their Big Bang, which they've come back to observe. Of course there's no cosmic explosion going on here. But there doesn't have to be. It's all a sort of illusion, no more real than the convergence of Lines of Longitude on a globe.

When I read Hawking, all this became clear to me…

Stephen Hawking, she thought bleakly, had a lot to answer for.

There were a few odd points about the letter, she mused. Of course the subject matter was bizarre. But Holland did show a reasonable lay understanding of Hawking's arguments. And it was, at least, a novel rationale for the UFO phenomenon: those spacecraft which moved like no material object, viewed only in enigmatic glimpses…

The tone of the letter wasn't as self-obsessed and cranky as some she'd read - no invented cod-scientific terms, for instance -and the letter seemed to be addressed outward, to a person living independently of the contents of Holland's head.

It was as if, she thought, Holland truly had endured these experiences, and, bereft of guidance, was trying to find a framework to understand them, and to communicate them to others. Much

as she might do herself, if she were to experience - or believed she had experienced - something so far out of the ordinary.

But then, what did she know of craziness? And why was she, alone in her flat in the middle of a winter's night, musing over George Holland's damaged psyche?

Because, she told herself, he's my student.

Leaving the teaching profession hadn't been easy. Aside from the emotional wrench and the feeling that she was betraying her students, she found she had to give a full term's notice, and so she ended up trapped for a further nine months. She'd hoped for a return to academia, but even short-term research contracts were as precious as gold dust, and the chance of a secure tenured post was effectively nil.

In the end, she took a job as a technician in a lab at the Open University. She was overqualified, but the job was actually more secure than an academic position, and not much worse paid, and she even got to do a little teaching.

The one good thing about the whole experience was that she had proved to herself, at least, that she'd been right in her choice of career. She was a born teacher. She'd enjoyed every lesson where the resources had by some chance been adequate for the job. And she knew her students had found her work enriching, beyond the narrow needs of the syllabus; she enjoyed the way she was able to get inside her students' minds, to see the material from their point of view, to overcome its difficulties and obscurities.

She'd even found the space to plug some of the more lamentable gaps in the syllabuses she was handed. The physics particularly seemed to pay no attention to the developments of the twentieth century; her students struggled with Victorian-standard science apparatus while the watches on their wrists and the calculators in their desks relied on the most advanced quantum-mechanical technology. So she put together simple demonstrations of ideas from quantum theory, relativity and cosmology, and was gratified by the understanding her students showed. Relativity, for instance: you could go a long way, at least with the special theory, with no more mental equipment than the geometry of Pythagoras's Theorem and the stark, startling fact that the speed of a photon was constant, no matter how quickly you moved, for space and time themselves - and your measuring rods and clocks - adjusted themselves to make it so…

Well, despite her failed career, she knew she'd been right in her

life choices. It was society, in Britain in the 1980s, which had been out of step with her.

Still, the teaching itch remained strong. So she began a little work on various adult-education courses. Too often she came up against the old restrictions of syllabuses and recalcitrant students, but she appreciated the WEA particularly for the freedom and encouragement it gave her.

Even if it did bring her into contact with the likes of George Holland.

She shouldn't think like this. Holland was an oddball, but, she reminded herself, he was still a student, and showing enthusiasm for the subject in the only way he knew how…

Maybe she ought to learn to be more tolerant.

But on the other hand, she'd been warned before that her excessive sympathy for her more difficult students might one day lead her into trouble.

The next week, Holland gave her another letter.

… But if all points in Space and Time are really equivalent - if they are all Poles, if you take the right point of view - why can't we see it that way?

Relativity teaches us that Space and Time are malleable things. Space and Time adjust themselves to make the Speed of Light come out constant, for instance. And if so, perhaps we can train ourselves to see the world differently.

I've been running a series of experiments. I intend to train myself to think my way to a Pole. The experience would be wonderful, of course - to see those golden ships I can only glimpse now, distorted and compressed! - if it can be controlled.

I'm not at liberty to divulge the details right now - it would be far too dangerous to do so - for surely at a Pole one would be isolated: utterly alone, in a small lens-shaped area of Space and Time, in a way unprecedented in human experience.

And if the new way of seeing were to start to spread among the population, it could be disastrous.

Space and Time would be inverted. Instead of humans being as we are - crammed close together in Space, and fixed to a small duration in Time - we would be scattered: each of us isolated, in limitless Space and Time, alone for all eternity.

And the danger of such contamination is real. Of course I subscribe to Richard Dawkins's theory of the meme: the mental

infection which leaps from mind to mind, enslaving whole populations in the manner of a religion, or a scientific paradigm. I would hate to be responsible for bringing such a meme into existence - for spreading the infection of loneliness and isolation to a single other person - perhaps even initiating the collapse of our consensual shared reality altogether. That is why I must be careful.

But I have become convinced that I am on the right lines. Already, I am sure I have transported myself, mentally, closer to a Pole. For I can, you know, no longer see the sun. Or the stars, or Moon. The sky to me is a washed-out neon blur, grey and empty. It is as I expected. I am seeing the increasing divergence of the Lines of Longitude, as I migrate to the Pole…

George Holland didn't turn up for the fourth lesson. Nobody in the class knew where he was - in fact, none of the other students had troubled to learn his name. She was rather relieved, guiltily, to be spared the weekly letter.

And somehow it came as no real surprise to her when, a few days later, two policemen came to her flat. It was late on a clear, frosty night, and, tall and sombre, the police were both dressed in heavy black overcoats.

George Holland, they said, had been found dead.

It was in the house he shared with his mother. In fact his mother had discovered him, after returning from a long visit to relatives.

He had died of thirst, hunger and cold. The house was emptied of food. The police suspected it was a particularly bizarre form of suicide.

He had left behind one last letter, addressed to Sheila. The police watched as she opened and read it.

... I found the girl the day after the rest of the world folded away. I was disappointed; I thought it might be the spaceships.

I reached the Pole about lunch time on a Tuesday. Not that the time is important - or is it? I suppose I should record every detail…

This is how it happened.

My mother was away at her sister's. I remember standing at my bedroom window and looking out over the quiet street. There was a girl in a scarlet coat standing at the bus stop just along the road from our house: (This was the girl I would find later.)

Then I moved to the Pole.

It was extraordinary. The houses across the street started to flatten out, smearing like wet Polaroid photos. They became reddish streaks along the ground, and then the rest of the town beyond them squashed down to a line of colour. Even the air, the sky itself, was crushed down into that line.

I walked out of the house. It was quiet as the middle of a fog. I was in a dome of air about a hundred feet across. Our house was intact but the terraces to either side were melted out of shape; they looked like plastic models with one side melted and crushed down. I walked out past the twisted bus-stop sign. The next house along was about three feet high. I could look down into its chimney pots. And the next was just a brown smear on the ground.

I tried to walk out further but it was like walking through sticky oil, and it started getting harder to breathe. The ground was smooth as glass. I ducked down into the top of the atmosphere and peered ahead. I could see a brown line topped with blue. Sometimes I could see a hint of movement along that line, perhaps an aeroplane.

It was just as I had anticipated, from my studies of Hawking.

I walked back. That was a lot easier, like walking downhill. I felt exhilarated at my affirmation. I'd done it. I was at the Pole, a lens-shaped region of Space and Time, centred on myself. This was the place where all the Lines of Longitude meet, the place where the ships were. If I could see them, no doubt they could see me, and would take me back. All I had to do was wait for the ships to come and find me.

I walked all around our house, stepping over the roofs of the ones next door. I hoped I'd find the ships waiting already, but they weren't there. I supposed I'd have to be patient.

I made myself a supper from a snack bar. Chocolate sandwiches. There wasn't much food in the fridge, but I didn't suppose it mattered. I won't be here much longer, once the ships arrive. I wrapped up the rest of the chocolate bar for the next day.

I was a bit surprised when it got dark. I can't see the sun; there's only a sort of pearly neon light over everything, but the light goes down in the evening. The electric lights won't turn on, though, and the TV is dead. I've got a radio that works on batteries but there's only a mush, even at the highest volume.

It got quite cold, that first evening, so I went to bed. I had a

lot of trouble sleeping. I kept hearing noises, little scratching sounds.

It was light but still cold when I got out of bed, so I put my coat on over my pyjamas and went down to the kitchen. There was a trickle of water dripping out of the fridge. I opened it up. There was a stink of spoiled milk in there, but the chocolate was gone. Even the paper had vanished.

So it couldn't be mice. What mouse would eat foil wrapping? There had to be another person with me, here at the Pole.

I tried to get washed, but there was only a brownish trickle of cold water out of the taps. And I couldn't shave because there was no power for my razor.

I searched the house from top to bottom, walked around and around, stepping over the roofs again. Nothing.

Then I went out into the street and started to shout, making as much noise as I could.

Eventually she came running out of the front door and stood in the middle of what was left of the street. It was the girl in the red coat I'd seen at the bus-stop the day before. She held her hands to her ears and she was crying. 'Stop it! Stop it!' Tears splashed down onto her coat, of shiny plastic.

I stood in front of her. 'Did you take my chocolate?' My throat was scratchy after all the shouting.

She nodded, and then lowered her hands and looked up at me, dabbing her eyes with the back of her hand. She had blonde hair but it was all over the place, a real mess. And her mascara had been washed over her face. 'I was hungry,' she said.

I shrugged. 'Well, I don't care.' And I didn't. Once the ships arrive, I won't be hungry again. I started walking back to the house.

'Wait!' She ran after me, but stopped a few yards away, trembling. 'Please…' She opened and closed her mouth a few times, like a fish. She was no more than twenty, I suppose, and she had nice teeth, like a row of little pearls. 'What's happened? Where are we? Do you know?' She waved her hand around vaguely, pointing to the blue-and-brown line all around us. 'Has there been a war?'

'A war?' I laughed. 'No. No war. We've moved, that's all. To the Pole. I thought it was just me, to tell you the truth. I didn't know you were here too. I don't suppose it matters.'

She had a small face that creased up now as she tried to work it out. 'What Pole? What do you mean?'

I tried to explain, but she looked distant, and avoided my eyes. It's a look I've come to recognize: the sign of a closed mind.

I turned and walked away from her, back to the house.

'Wait,' she called. 'Don't go… Could I, uh, could I come in too?'

I left the door open.

Later on, when it got dark, I heard her come in and sneak around. She opened the fridge door with a click, but there was nothing left. I'd poured the rotten milk down the sink. Then, after I went to bed, she crept upstairs to my mother's bedroom.

I heard her crying. I put my coat on and went into my mother's room and sat on the edge of the single bed. She was sitting up, shivering and crying. It was nearly pitch black but I could see her big eyes looking at me.

'You shouldn't cry,' I said. My voice sounded loud and clumsy. 'We'll be alright, as soon as the ships come.'

The girl said nothing, sitting up in bed in her red coat. I could see her trembling like a rabbit.

I went back to bed. I didn't sleep again.

I got out of bed feeling gritty and cold. The girl had gone, leaving my mother's bed rumpled and cold. She wasn't anywhere in the house, not even the kitchen.

It took me a few minutes to find her. She'd walked as far away from the house as she could get, had flattened herself out against the glassy ground at the edge and reached out one hand to the blue-brown line. She had rings on three fingers on that hand. Her lips were blue and her eyes had rolled up, showing white. Her tongue was sticking out. I crawled out and grabbed her ankles, pulled her back into the air.

She breathed again in huge gasps. When she opened her eyes and saw me she started to cry. 'Let me go. Please.'

I felt very angry. 'You shouldn't be scared. They'll be here soon.'

She shut her eyes and kept crying, and said: 'Please, please…' Over and over.

And then she folded away. I'm not sure if I did it or if she did it herself. She just rolled flat into a sort of bright red streak and flashed away like a scarlet worm.

So that was that. Since then I've been alone in this fog, waiting.

I hope they're here soon. I haven't eaten anything for days now, and it's getting very cold here…

The police had found no sign of any girl, red-coated or otherwise.

Sheila told the police what little she knew of Holland, and described the uncertain contact she had had with him. She tried to make the policemen share her understanding of Holland's delusions and obsessions, of lines of space-time longitude and mental infections and golden UFOs - as far as she understood them herself - but she could see the police switching off, and labelling George Holland with brutal efficiency as 'nutter', or 'anorak'.

After an hour or so they seemed to have decided they had enough. They closed their notebooks, thanked her for her time, and left. They took the letter with them; by tomorrow, she expected, it would be all over the tabloids.

After they'd gone, she found it hard to relax. She tried TV, and reading, but nothing distracted her.

She couldn't put aside the image of Holland dying alone, trapped at the 'Pole' he had constructed for himself, waiting endlessly for UFOs which never came.

What was the true horror for Holland, the reason he had shut out the world? She'd always thought of UFO abduction, whatever the psychological truth of the phenomenon, as a horrific experience. But Holland seemed to have enjoyed his abduction. Perhaps the true terror for him was of the final abandonment, at the end of a life of abandonments: the terror of being the one they left behind…

She went to bed. But sleep, never easy for her, seemed further away than ever. Holland's bizarre world-view stayed in her head. Perhaps it was just her teacher's sympathy. Or perhaps Holland with his last letter had, after all, infected her with some meme. Well, if so, by tomorrow, millions more who would read what she'd read were just as much at risk.

She smiled. The loner who brought about the end of the universe. If she looked out in the street now, would she see his golden UFOs, cruising across the sky?

... In fact, the light outside was oddly bright.

She went to her window and pulled back the curtain. The window was misted up. She wiped the glass with her sleeve, and pressed her face to the window, looking for Orion.

She couldn't see the stars. The sky was a washed-out neon blur, grey and empty.

Barrier

Let me say at once that I have no regrets.

Both Gurzadian and I were men with wings on, and that means we were willing to accept risks. Naturally nobody expected the contingency we've come up against here, but we always knew the odds were against us in terms of getting all the way to Proxima II. In fact we would both have volunteered, even without the Draft.

I'm downlinking everything in the hope somebody will pick this up, although we've had no contact with the ground for a hundred days now. Geezer seems to be stuck fast in this barrier at the edge of the solar system, so maybe someday somebody will come out here to pick this up, and read it.

I'm not one for melodramatic gestures.

I'll complete as much as I can before the hull implodes.

I joined Geezer in LEO, in low Earth orbit.

I launched in a new-series Soyuz craft from Kazakhstan. Chemical technology: obsolete in these days of the Bias Drive, of course, but you may as well shoot 'em off as break 'em up. There was a sign on the launch pad saying 'Reliable Launch Complex Guarantees Success'. That's the kind of little touch you just don't get back home any more, which, in my opinion, is all part of a more general decline.

There was no foofaraw when we left. This was not Project Mercury. A lot of the coverage of America's first interstellar mission failed even to mention the fact that two human beings were going along for the ride, and we never met a single one of the program's head sheds. Once, when I flew Shuttle, I got to shake the hand of Ronald Reagan. Things sure have changed.

Anyhow it was a thrill to feel those bolts blowing, and that boot up the rear as the Gs cut in, and to know I was leaving Earth once more.

The truth is I'd gotten pretty tired of sitting around in the grey gulag waiting for my Demograph Draft. Anything would be better, I'd decided, even a ticket to the happy booth. And when my notice turned out to be the commission for Geezer, I was pleased - even relieved - but I found I wasn't really so surprised to hear that old shipping-over music one more time.

I was already over ninety years old.

But I knew I was more than capable of returning to space, of doing this job. Jenna always said that I have spent much of my life trying to appear humble, but failing. Humility is not a favoured trait among air and space pilots, where a high premium is placed on performance.

I suppose, however, I was surprised to find that the Draft was leading me, not to some sky-boring LEO mission as I first thought, but to the stars themselves.

The Bias Drive's acceleration is pretty low. We spent weeks in Earth orbit, slowly spiralling away.

All in all, the old world hasn't changed much since I first saw it from orbit in the early 1980s, Christ, nearly sixty years ago. Can't honestly say it looks better now, however.

There's more desert, of course, all around the tropical belt. The cities are bigger and brighter than they were, although over the US - what's left of it since the secessions - the view is obscured by the huge megacorporate logos laser-painted on the lower cloud decks. The logger wars are still blazing in South America; you can see the flash of weaponry at night.

The China-Russia border is just a wilderness. You can see the string of bomb craters. I know there are still some who criticize the Administration for keeping us out of that conflict. Not me. A well-trained military man has reason to fear war.

As we receded the signs of humanity were soon invisible. Earth became a planet of ocean, desert and ice, just as it always was.

We sailed past the bony Moon, and I glimpsed the shadows of Farside craters. I found myself singing that old song: Drifting and Dreaming. Even as a kid in small-town New Jersey I never dreamed I'd go further than this.

Well, I was wrong. Earth and Moon receded, blue and grey.

Gurzadian, my sole crewmate, was ten years older than me. He had a head like a bullet, a barrel chest and arms like a big Russian bear's. He habitually wore a rumpled red jump-suit with the legs tied off in knots. The loss of his legs, after a Soyuz landing accident long before Geezer was ever thought of, didn't make a damn difference to his mobility as far as I could see. In fact Gurzadian was living proof of the saw that in space your hands and arms do all the work and your legs just get in the way.

I don't know what I need tell you about Geezer.

Geezer - strictly New Explorer - is mankind's first interstellar craft, and it is a big maumoo. It is a cluster of six modules nose to nose around a transfer node, which is a Grand Central Station for ducts and pipes and cables. The modules are wrapped in thick insulating blankets, yellowing now and pitted by microme-teorites.

Five of the modules are for science. There is a base block where we - I - sleep and live, and where the controls for the cooling systems and oxygen regenerators and waste recyclers and other stuff are situated. It's like my old garage in here. There's stuff bolted to every wall, and to reach anything you have to move layers of kipple. The pumps and fans make it sound like an old boiler-house. It always sounds louder at night; I don't know why that should be. And it smells like a library: old books, mixed with a little engine oil. The musty book smell is mould, of course.

Our power comes from big clunky nuclear-fission reactors descended from the old Soviet 'Topaz' design. The design of most of the components of this craft is basically Russian, in fact. The Russians have been learning to live in space with this technology for decades, and I for one was happy to step aboard.

There are small automated orbiters and landers studded around the cluster, gliders and entry pods, intended to be deployed when we reached Proxima II. The probes are modern: small and smart, built around the latest autonomous-software designs - qubit technology in fact - and their micromechanical systems pack a lot of punch per pound. But they can't carry people, not even a pair of chicken-boned old farts like Gurzadian and me. Well, that's the nature of the modern space program, and there's a whole debate to be had about man versus machine and the nature of human exploration I don't have the time to get into here.

The Bias Drive is just a little black box mounted on a boom.

It thrusts through the cluster's centre of gravity at a steady one per cent of G. Not much, but enough to get us to Proxima in forty-some years, with a peak velocity at turnaround of eighty per cent of lightspeed. Quite a marvel.

Of course you have to realize that it's only the propulsion technology that has developed since my day. Otherwise Geezer is just Station technology with a few more life-support loops closed. When the solids recycler broke down Gurzadian and I still had to take the covers off and stir our shit by hand. Hey ho.

Forty years isn't so much. But nobody can build systems for forty-year reliability, not without qubit technology anyhow. And that's why we were sent along for the ride.

Qubit technology is quantum computing. In a qubit chip, the bits are represented by the spin states of chloroform molecules. It seems these spin states exist simultaneously in some spooky way. A qubit machine beats out a conventional device every time because it can process its bits, not one after the other, but at the same time.

The problem with qubits is their fragility and expense, and hence rarity. The top-of-the-range stuff is forever snapped up by the big corporations for their commercial purposes which, like the doings of federal agencies, are generally beyond me. The world is now run, it seems to me, by huge, shadowy qubit AIs, far beyond any kind of democratic control.

Anyhow, for sure, NASA and the federal government can't afford to buy in qubit technology big time. And there's the paradox.

It used to be that people were too expensive to haul into space, because they mass so much, not to mention all the related plumbing. It was more cost-effective to send out a smart little robot to explore by proxy. But the equation's changed. The robots have gotten much more expensive. Meanwhile the Bias Drive has made human spaceflight dirt cheap, comparatively. Suddenly it's cheaper to ship two old fuckers like Gurzadian and me, plumbing and all, with a brief to keep the ship's systems working long enough to reach Proxima.

Our telomerase implants should have kept at least one of us alive that long.

A telomere is a series of organic compounds which cap the ends of chromosomes, like the plastic tip of a shoelace. The telomere gets shorter every time a cell divides. Eventually, the cell won't divide any more, and it dies.

When I reached my seventy-fifth birthday I was able to purchase telomerase treatment. Bluntly speaking this enzyme restored the telomere tips of my cells, and they became youthful again. My bones stopped getting weaker, my spine stopped curving, my skin stopped from sagging, my brain stopped shrinking, my shanks stopped withering, my gums no longer retreated. I wasn't getting younger, of course, but I wasn't getting any older either. I'm not spared the various afflictions of age. But thanks to my telomerase implant I have a life expectancy of a hundred and fifty upwards.

Or did have.

Of course the irony is that it was telomerase treatment which finally blew the values of our society out the water. That and the collapse of Medicare. In my opinion at least.

Anyhow it all worked out. A few months out and Gurzadian and I had stripped down and rebuilt this big-old bomber until you could have run a white-glove inspection any hour of the day or night.

There is a certain logic in sending old guys into space.

Even before the demographic bomb you had astronauts still flying in their fifties and sixties. And the idea of crewing Mars ships, for example, with oldsters was openly discussed at NASA and elsewhere. If you go as far as Mars and back, you've taken on more than your recommended lifetime dose of radiation. Not a good idea until you're done having your kids.

Conversely the space environment can actually be beneficial. I know my heart has benefited from the reduced strain of low G. And we old timers are patient. A spacecraft is a cramped, unforgiving environment, and a hotshot of thirty is not necessarily the ideal crewman.

Frankly I regard myself well suited to this berth. Experience is the key. Mock combat is not equivalent to facing a guy intent on killing you. Simulated emergencies are not an equivalent experience to bringing a Shuttle orbiter down on one fuel cell, as I once did. And so forth.

What I'm saying is that I'm not sure a wet-diaper crew could have coped with what we found out here.

I remember I was eating when the first problem came up.

I was at the tiny table in the base block with my legs wrapped around my T-seat. Most of what we got to eat was Russian stuff, warm borsch and jellied perch, which is okay when you get used

to it. But it was Christmas week, and that day I was treating myself to stew. I always liked Christmas.

In came Gurzadian, swimming through the air like a fat Russian dolphin. He was somewhat excited. He was jabbering in a mix of Russian, English and pidgin, and when I slowed him down enough to untangle it all, it turned out he thought we had a problem with our trajectory, or maybe our navigation systems, or both.

Since at the time we were rather remote from Earth - in fact, after twenty-one months, we were already more than twice as far from the sun as Pluto - this could, I felt, ruin my entire day.

Let me set out the elements of interplanetary navigation. Navigation means the skill of plotting a route and directing a craft along it. In practice you determine your ship's state - that is, its position and velocity - and estimate a trajectory from that point. The problem is made more interesting by relativistic effects as you approach lightspeed, such as aberration. All of this is an exercise in constrained optimization and adaptive parameter estimation, techniques in which I am somewhat skilled.

When Gurzadian raised the alarm, I found our position and trajectory vectors were all undetermined.

We began internal system checks. We have two basic data-gathering systems. The first of these is radiometric, in which our range and speed relative to Earth are estimated from properties of our radio signals, such as round-trip delay times and Doppler shifts. The second system is optical. We determine the craft's position and attitude using observations of background stars and the planets. To achieve this we have a small Cassegrain telescope coupled to a light-sensitive diode sensor array. Measurements are accurate to one second of arc.

The radiometry was all over the place, and the optical suite couldn't find any of its target stars, and even the planets weren't where they should be.

We checked the systems and found them faultless. I also ran a number of diagnostic tests on the computer systems which supported the navigation suites. These are all American systems. They aren't qubit, but they are based on ex-USAF rad-hardened silicon systems, and are pretty damn reliable.

Gurzadian, being Russian, was somewhat sceptical of this, and he said something sarcastic along the lines of, 'Well, if there is no fault in your systems, my friend, there must be a fault in the universe.'

That was my prompt to look out the window. And, by golly, he was right.

That was when we lost contact with the ground.

It was a shame, because the first few months of the mission had gone about as well as could be expected.

Gurzadian and I had gotten along pretty well, given our culture clashes. Russians always assume Westerners are soft and weak. Gurzadian would be condescending to me, and he tried to protect me from bad news. There was the time I woke to the smell of smoke. Gurzadian shrugged, and said there had been an unplanned burning of an oxygen cylinder. It turned out there had been a sheet of flame three feet long that nearly burned through one bulkhead in the biotech module. But this 'unplanned burning' wasn't a fire, you understand, because nothing else had caught alight. And as Gurzadian had put it out he hadn't thought necessary to report it to me.

The Russians in space just get on and fix things without whining. Basically I admire that attitude; it's something else we lost, somewhere along the way.

The highlight was the gravity-assist swingby of Jupiter.

We dug deep into the gravity well, for as you may know the lower the perijove the greater the assist obtained. Of course we were also thereby taken through Jupiter's magnetosphere, the most ferocious radiation environment in the solar system outside the orbit of Mercury, but that's okay; the little Proxima orbiters and landers are rad-hardened, and we'd both long exceeded federal worker radiation-dose allowances, not that anybody gave a shit.

Jupiter is a hell of a sight, let me tell you. The shadows of the Galilean moons sail across the cloud tops, which are a kind of autumn gold, dimmer than you'd expect. My trusty Hasselblad jammed at closest approach, but I was able to tear it down. The problem was the gear train, a problem I fixed with a speck of Neosporin, an ointment from the medical kit.

Anyhow the whole thing was terrific. Like something out of James Blish - remember Earthman Come Home? - the stuff that got me into space in the first place. Even Jupiter was a sight I never dreamed of seeing for myself - and here I was on my way to Proxima Centauri.

I remember the stir when the first direct images of the Proxima exoplanets came in, blurred dots captured by the Hubble and the

Superhubble in the early 'oos. One superjovian, ten times the size of Jupiter, swooping in to about half Earth's distance from the sun, and a string of five or more smaller Jovians. The interesting one, of course, is Proxima II, which looks to have a bunch of Earth-sized rocky moons, all about the right distance from the star for liquid water.

Of course back then I never expected anyone to be sailing to the stars: not in my lifetime, probably never, certainly not if NASA had anything to do with it. But then NASA invented a star drive by accident.

In the late '90s NASA started its Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program, operating out of Lewis. No serious money, of course, just a handful of wacko funny-physics egghead types and a Web site. A PR stunt while NASA poured billions into Station.

… Until, out of the blue, the double-domes came up with the Bias Drive.

Gurzadian could have explained it better than me. It seems that the whole universe, atoms and people and stars, is generated from the wriggling of a membrane floating in 11-dimensional space. One of those dimensions is collapsed down, rolled up to a tube, and the way the membrane wraps itself around that tube generates the properties of the particles and forces we see around us.

This is the M-theory: the new theory of everything. The M, it seems, stands for 'membrane', but as far as I'm concerned it could equally be 'mirrors' as in 'smoke and'. They teach this stuff in the high schools now. Science has come a long way since I flunked geometry.

It seems that old membrane can wrap itself up in two ways. A single loop generates energy levels from modes of vibration, like a violin string. Or the membrane can wind itself around the tube many times, and the number of turns gives you energy levels, like coils around an armature. One wrapping mode describes the large-scale structure of the universe. The other mode describes small-scale energy structures, such as those of an electron.

But here's the catch: when the tube is middle-sized, the vibration modes look the same as the wrapping modes. That means that the universe on very small scales looks the same as it does on large scales. This is called duality. For instance, electron charge by one description is equivalent to the size of things in another.

Anyhow that, as I understand it, is how the Bias Drive works.

A tiny piece of the universe is shrunk down and manipulated.

Another piece, linked by duality, opens up behind the ship. It is a miniature Big Bang, a wave of space-time that pushes us forward. A little more precisely, the drive creates a localized asymmetric bias in the properties of space-time which generates a local propulsive gradient on the ship. It amounts to a rocket of infinite specific impulse.

It was as if space-propulsion technology leaped forward a thousand years overnight.

We should have expected something like the Bias Drive, back in the '80s or '90s. After all we'd been flying the same old Nazi missile technology for fifty years by then; we were overdue for a breakthrough. Gurzadian said science and technology doesn't proceed in a smooth upward slope, but with big upward hops between plateaux. Punctuated equilibrium, he called it. And we lived long enough to see one of those punctuation marks.

Anyhow, that is how I found myself sailing to the stars. It's the paradox of modern America: a land of starships on the one hand, gulags for the old on the other. Maybe these tensions were already there, back when I grew up in New Jersey. All I know is it's no longer my kind of America.

After that first panic, it took some days to establish what was going on.

The radio signals from Earth were reduced in frequency, as if red-shifted, and subject to excessive time delay, and reduced in magnitude. When we managed to reacquire the signal, Houston and Kalinin were both saying they had lost our beacon signal.

We tried adjusting frequency and boosting the amplitude, but nobody, it seemed, could hear us.

Meanwhile we measured whatever it was that was happening outside. I backed up the ship's sensors with my own observations; for instance I mocked up a small theodolite to measure star angles.

To cut a long story short: the magnitudes of the target stars were all lower than they should be. The angles between the target stars, when we managed to identify them, weren't what they should be.

I couldn't come up with a consistent model for what we were seeing. If we'd somehow gained too much velocity, that could explain some of the effects, like the excessive redshifting of the ground signals. But it didn't explain the redshifting of stars ahead of us - stars which ought to be turning blue as we hurtled toward

them. And besides, those changing star angles weren't consistent with any such hypothesis.

Gurzadian developed his own theories.

He said that as far as he could see space itself was distorted around us.

He'd set up piezoelectric strain gauges to prove it to himself. It's kind of flattening out, he said. There were stresses acting across Geezer's cluster because of that - like tidal stresses.

It was, he said, as if we were trapped in a bubble universe, which was collapsing around us. Ha ha.

Meanwhile Gurzadian thought about the bigger picture.

He quoted the assumption of mediocrity. We'd flown out of the solar system, straight into this muddled space. There was no reason to suppose the trajectory we'd selected was special in any way. Therefore you had to assume that the muddled space lay all around the solar system, like a shell enclosing the sun. A barrier. And all we could do was keep on driving into it.

All I knew was, every time I looked out the window, the stars were getting dimmer and redder.

But then there hadn't been any scenery since Jupiter anyhow.

I'll be truthful and tell you that we'd got a little bored, before we hit the barrier anyhow.

Of course we have a giant online library. I wish we had more honest-to-God books. But the truth is my concentration isn't what it used to be. The surgeons call it the Tithonius syndrome: immortality, but ageing.

We played games a lot. Low-G games, like where Gurzadian would make a loop of his thumb and forefinger and I would try to throw a pen through. We were a little better at catching cinnamon cubes in our mouths, like at cocktail hour with peanuts. We'd make it more interesting by knocking the cubes off course with blasts from an air hose.

Gurzadian played a lot of his favourite discs, which are all Russian romance music. My hearing isn't too good now so I forgave him that. Sometimes I admit I longed for the clean howl of an electric guitar, however.

We would one-up each other continually. And we would bullshit, in a mixture of languages, the whole damn time. Mostly about the past, but that's old people for you.

I may have mentioned I grew up in a small town in New Jersey.

My father had been an Army flier. He took me up for the first time when I was eight, in a beat-up Aeronca C3. We climbed into a stiff wind that blew so hard we flew backwards in relation to the ground. From then on I was hooked.

I cut my teeth as a brown-shoe Navy man. That is, I was a Navy aviator. I saw some combat in Korea, which is detailed in the record. Later I moved to the Test Pilot School at Patuxent; I was therefore a member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots before I joined the space program.

I wasn't sorry to retire from NASA. Once, briefly, we were a space-faring nation. England, Spain and Portugal crossed the seas and found greatness. Similarly we reached for the skies and ennobled ourselves. But I believe NASA has long lost its success mystique, and I have come to understand that our snout-in-the-trough politicians will not commit to a program that may take more than ten years to come to fruition, which rules out most serious ventures. To me it's all of a piece with other turns our society has taken, which, while disastrous, are no surprise.

After NASA and the Navy I went into various business ventures. I served on the boards of several suppliers to the major aerospace contractors. I retired from that, and went to live in a retirement community built like a fortress, and played a lot of golf. I thought I was heading for a rather long but comfortable dotage. The only cloud on my horizon had been the loss of my wife, Jenna, to cancer.

That was when Congress started passing the demographics bills, which is why, in a nutshell, I find myself here.

Gurzadian was always rather more reticent about his background.

I knew that after leaving the Soviet space industry, he'd fled the collapse of Russia and found some work on Wall Street computer systems. But then he committed the crime of growing old.

He'd been living quietly alone when it started. The talk-show jokes about long-lived geezers. The commentaries and black humour about the demographic bulges, the lack of jobs for the young, the burden of the growing number of elderly. The implicit approval for neglect and cruelty.

Gurzadian actually witnessed one of the early attacks on a retirement home, the fat cops standing around doing nothing. He went hobbling in on his fake legs and got beat up for his trouble. Saved a couple of lives, however.

He said he wasn't surprised by what followed: punitive age-related taxes, the removal of the vote at age eighty-five, the grey stars we had implanted on our palms. He said it was a pattern he'd seen before: first they remove your dignity, then your property, then your rights, then your life. Until at last you're cleansed.

We talked for long hours. The way he told the familiar story was chilling; this was a man who had seen it all before, in a different context. The difference was, this time it wasn't one ethnic group against another. It was children against parents.

The thing of it is, of course, someday every last one of those who abuses us now is going to cross the barrier into the place we're at. Payoff time.

Please note we did have work to do.

In the cluster's various modules we did biotech research, and low-G material science, and astrophysics. Gurzadian had some astrophysics training, but we were both basically aviators. Therefore the 'science' we did was simple lab-rat stuff, working sensors and running experiments for ground-based researchers. There was a lot of the usual Nazi-doctor medical stuff as space slowly killed us.

Gurzadian studied quasars. A quasar is a primitive galaxy lit up by the collapse of matter into a central, supermassive black hole. As the first observers to travel out of the dust-laden plane of the ecliptic, that was a key objective for us. Gurzadian said we were looking for the most ancient quasars, relics of the dark age of the universe.

He liked to tell me stories, the potted history of the universe.

First there was the light of the beginning. But as the Big Bang fireball expanded and cooled the light shifted out of the visible region of the spectrum, and the universe entered a dark age: just a few pinpricks, giant early stars and scattered quasars. The darkness lasted millions of years, while the universe grew a hundred times in size - until the first stars and galaxies formed, and the cosmos lit up like a Christmas tree. Quite a sight.

Eventually the universe will be dark again, said Gurzadian. The star stuff will run out. It will take a trillion years, but that's nothing compared to the long future.

We're fortunate, said Gurzadian. To exist in this little interval of light, between the darknesses. It made me glad, briefly, to be alive.

As the first interstellar explorers, we would argue about the

philosophy of starships. Like the old Fermi question: where the hell is everybody?

The galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars. If just one of those supported a colonizing civilization, even with ships no more advanced than Geezer, the galaxy would be completely conquered in no more than a few million years. As the galaxy is billions of years old, Earth should have been colonized a hundred times over before life crawled out of the sea, and the night sky ought to look like Los Angeles from the air.

But it doesn't.

Gurzadian had thought long and hard about these problems. The Russians have always had more than their share of space dreamers. Gurzadian believed they must be out there, looking in, because it's logically impossible that they don't exist. Maybe we just aren't smart enough to recognize them. Or maybe they're keeping themselves hidden. The zoo hypothesis, that's called.

Maybe we'll find out the answers at Proxima, he would say. Ha ha.

Funny thing was, he was half right.

I'd like to put on record I was more than happy to accept Gurzadian as my crewmate. We didn't always get along, but he knew this old bird inside and out before we left the ground. Besides which he was actually a pilot. In my opinion people who don't fly the spacecraft should not be called astronauts. Both Gurzadian and I were, you would say, out-of-the-pack people.

And, let me say, we both preferred talking philosophy and the old times to mulling over Demograph Draft horror stories.

I don't think either of us lost much sleep over those dimming stars.

It was kind of a relief to find that our problems were only cosmological - that it was indeed the universe that was at fault and not our craft. We remained calm, and continued to do our bits of science, and to downlink our results and progress reports, whether or not anybody could hear us.

If that sounds peculiar, you have to remember that neither of us were meant to survive the mission anyhow.

The stars winked out one by one, fading into a redness like the inside of my eyelid. I admit my heart thumped a bit on the day we lost the sun.

But the thing of it was, we could see something ahead. Something new.

Grey stars.

Not Proxima Centauri, though. Not really stars at all, in fact. Just a scattering of grey lights around the sky. Gurzadian said they looked like quasars. He was scared. None of this made sense to him; he couldn't figure out what we were seeing, what had happened to the stars.

As for me I felt kind of cheated. It's no longer clear to me if Proxima even exists, or if it - and its planetary system - aren't just some artefact of the huge shell which surrounds us. Damn it, Proxima ought to exist. Who the hell has the right to take away man's nearest star - the dreams of my boyhood - and, worse, to render my mission meaningless, a vain flight in pursuit of a mirage?

I remember the day I was given the grey star on my palm, a mark that I was too old to be given a job rather than some younger person. I marched to the welfare office and I wore that star with pride, damn it. I still have it here, a hundred AU from Sol. But it got worse.

The life-extending technologies, like telomerase, started to be withdrawn. And they introduced the confiscation of assets at age eighty. Of course we'd have voted it down, if they hadn't taken the vote away from us first, along with our drivers' licences. Disenfranchizement and enslavement. What kind of society supports that?

We bore it all. It was a bad day, though, when they broke up the nursing homes and retirement communities, and forced us all into the grey gulags, all of us whose families would not shelter us.

We watched that shoot-out in West Virginia, a bunch of stay-put old soldiers pitting themselves against the FBI, and we cheered ourselves hoarse.

In the end, of course, we couldn't win.

When we didn't die off fast enough, they went further.

It was a couple of days after we lost the sun that the biotech module blew. I was in the base block at the time, changing carbon dioxide scrubber canisters.

There was a thud, a groan of strained metal, a flurry of red lights, a wailing klaxon.

I did what I was trained to do, which was to stay absolutely still. If there was a bad leak the air would gush out of the ship,

and my ears would pop suddenly and painfully, which would be about the last thing I would know about.

To my relief I could feel the leak was a slow one.

And then Gurzadian came barrelling past me, pulling his way to the transfer node. When we got there he began pulling out the cables and ducts that snaked into the biotech module, because that, he said, was where the leak was, and we had to get the hatch clear before we could close it.

It took half an hour. Lousy design, I guess. Gurzadian said he'd been expecting a seam to blow for a couple of days. Geezer was being crushed by those damn space-time stresses. I just watched the barometer creep down to the 540 millibar mark, where we'd start to lose consciousness.

Then the power failed, all over the ship. Dim emergency lights came on, and the cabin lights and instrument panels went dead, and the banging of the pumps and fans fell silent.

My ears started to pop again, and I could feel my lungs pulling at the thinning air. Some seam had split wide open.

Gurzadian pulled out the last cables by main force, and dived into the biotech module. Before I could stop him he pulled the hatch closed behind him, and held it there until the pressure difference forced it closed. There wasn't a damn thing I could do to get it open.

I worked fast. I got that transfer node sealed off, suited up, and went in after Gurzadian. Too late, of course.

The Demograph Draft put us back to work. But it was work you wouldn't want to expend a young life on, or even an expensive qubit AI.

So you had spry eighty-year-olds riding plastic cars across the Mid-East deserts, clearing mines for the combat soldiers marching behind. You had ninety-year-olds in flimsy rad suits going in to clear out Hanford, and the closed Russian cities near Chelyabinsk and Tomsk where they used to manufacture weapons-grade uranium, and so forth.

You had centenarians sent off in one-way Rube Goldberg spaceships to the Moon and Mars and the stars.

But if you were too frail, if you failed all the suitability assessments, there were always the happy booths, a whole block of them in every grey gulag. The final demographic adjustment.

Here's what always brought tears to my eyes: the fact that we

always marched into the places they sent us - even the happy booths - singing and waving and smiling. Mine is a generation that understands duty, a generation that risked their lives over and over to leave a legacy for our children, and we are doing it over again now. You can call that a small-town value if you like. The first American astronauts all came from out-of-the-way communities, and small-town values marked us out. It seems to me that values diminish in proportion to the growth of a community, which explains a great deal of the world we see today.

In my opinion it was those core values which led Gurzadian to sacrifice himself for me and the mission. And I would have done exactly the same for him.

I wrapped him in his country's flag and said a few words. I pushed him out through a science airlock. I could see him receding from the ship, into the darkness, lit only by the lights of the cluster. Just before I lost him he became a smudge against the grey stars, smeared out by the funny space around me.

I grieved, of course. But I won't dwell on the loss. Test pilots have always been killed with regularity. And that, whatever the designers of this mission intended, is what we have been: the test pilots of man's first starship.

I went through Gurzadian's stuff. It was like when Jenna died. All his jumble and clutter was where he left it, and when I sorted it I knew he was never coming back to disorder it again. I found a couple of last messages for his family - a handful of grandkids - and downlinked them, in hope.

I moved into the base block, because that's closest to the ship's centre of gravity, and it's about the bulkiest piece of shit anyhow. It should survive the space-time stress longer than the other modules. If anyone wants my skinny ass because I gave up the science programs, they can have it.

A couple of days ago I heard a bang, which could have been the materials science module failing. But the instruments in the astrophysics module are working still. I can even get an image out of the Cassegrain.

All I can see is grey light. Quasars.

Here's what I think.

I think I'm coming out the other side of the barrier that surrounds the solar system. I think I'm seeing the universe as it really is.

Young. Still in its dark age, just as Gurzadian described it.

We - the solar system - are stuck in some kind of M-theory bubble. What we see from the Earth, looking out through the enclosing barrier, is an image of a much older universe. But it isn't real. It can't be.

I think this is all some kind of experiment. Somebody out there in the real, young, dark-age universe is fast-forwarding a chunk of space, to see how it all turns out. And we live in that chunk.

I like the irony, incidentally. Here I am, the first star traveller, sent out here because I'm an old and useless fucker. And yet I find the universe is younger than anyone thought.

Anyway that's your resolution to the Fermi paradox, Gurzadian, old buddy. They were here all the time, all around us. Playing with us. I wonder what they think of us, of a society that sends its old people out to die in the dark, alone.

I've considered cutting this short. I have a number of options from the medical kit. Or I could simply open the hatch. Sitting in this metal tube and waiting for the walls to cave in doesn't appeal.

It's time to get off my soap-box. I had the great good fortune to participate in a common dream to test the limits of mankind's imagination and daring. It is, I hope, a dream I have passed on to those who read this account. The stars may be gone, but we still have the sun and its children; and what lies beyond this barrier may be far more strange and wonderful than we ever imagined.

You see, I've come to think this bubble around our universe is maybe some kind of eggshell we have to break out of.

Or maybe it's no coincidence that we've gotten stuck like this just as we develop a space-bending star drive. Maybe this is flypaper.

Whatever, I'm confident that someday - in bigger and better ships than Geezer - we'll be able to break out.

I will say that we are not the same America I grew up in, but we can be again. Maybe the challenge of taking on whoever it was dared to put us inside this cosmic box will be the making of us.

I've decided I will stick around a little longer. Maybe I'll luck out and see the first stars come out, that Christmas tree light-up Gurzadian talked about. I always did like Christmas.

Marginalia

(Author's note: I was sent the document below anonymously. The document itself, a photocopy, is government-speak, bland to the point of unreadability. But the notes scribbled in the margins are intriguing.)

Title page:

United States General Accounting Office GAO report to the Honorable William X. Lambie, House of Representatives June 1998

GOVERNMENT RECORDS

Results of a Search for Records Concerning the 1983 Explosion near Cross Fork, Nevada SUMMARY ONLY GAO/NSRAF-96-244

Cover note:

From: United States General Accounting Office, Washington, DC 20548.

National Security and International Affairs Division. June 24, 1998. To: The Honorable William X Lambie, House of Representatives.

Dear Mr Lambie:

After fifteen years, speculation continues on the truth of the large explosion which is alleged to have taken place at a covert US military research facility in Nevada.

Some observers speculate that the explosion was the destruction of a conventional rocket; others that it was caused by the crash of an aircraft, perhaps of an extraterrestrial nature; others that agencies of the government have been engaged in a misinformation campaign to

conceal some deeper truth, such as a successful launch of some space vehicle; others that this was the demolition of a covert military facility.

In its 1984 official report and since, the Air Force has denied the reality of the explosion.

Concerned that the Department of Defense may not have provided you with all available information on the incident, you asked us to determine any government records concerning the incident. We examined a wide range of classified and unclassified documents dating from 1965 through the 1980s. The full scope and methodology of our work are detailed in the full report…

Sir:

I read your counterfactual 'novel'. About NASA going on to Mars in the 1980s, instead of shutting everything down after Apollo? What a crock.

Counterfactuality does not serve the needs of the truth. But now, at last, the truth is starting to come out.

And the truth is, people have been to Mars.

They are walking around among us right now. And nobody knows about it.

Of course much of the data returned by the old Mars probes has always been kept from the public. These include:

1) Grainy photographs of what could be structures on the surface taken by the space probe Mariner 4 in 1964.

2) Mysterious surface glimpses through the global dust storm encountered on the planet by Mariner 9 in 1971.

3) The strange readings from the Viking landers of 1976, which found a supposedly sterile Martian surface.

And of course the Mars Observer of 1992 was deliberately destroyed. (The jury is out on the Russian Mars 96. Maybe that really was a screw-up. The later NASA probes definitely were.)

Only a handful of people know that the US General Accounting Office - that's Congress's investigative arm -recently published this, the results of a search for records concerning the Cross Fork, Nevada incident, generally thought to be at the centre of the Mars cover-up. Search meaning forced through by white-hat Congressman Bill Lambie, who's as sick of cover-ups as anyone. Published meaning hurried out and buried. I owe my copy to [illegible].

Here's how I started this.

I got an e-mail from a Janet [illegible] of Albuquerque. She

said she had met a hooker from Reno in the 1970s. This lady had worked at a cathouse close to Cross Fork, Nevada. And she told Janet there had been an awful lot of ex-NASA engineers in town at that time.

And one night two NASA guys talked too much.

NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL, WASHINGTON DC 20506. APRIL 18, 1997. MEMORANDUM FOR MR JOHN E PROCTOR, DIRECTOR-IN-CHARGE, NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES, GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE.

SUBJECT: Request for Records.

I am responding to your April 2, 1997 request for information or NSC records related to the supposed explosion near Cross Fork, Nevada in October 1983.

The NSC has no records or information related to the incident.

For information about any government records that may document the explosion in Nevada, we suggest you contact the National Archives, Textual Reference Division, 8601 Adelphi Rd, College Park, Maryland 20740.

- Albert D. Steele, Executive Secretary

There were four categories of key staff involved in the Mars cover-up:

1) top-level management, including CIA, FBI and DIA operatives

2) interface personnel

3) technical personnel

4) the astronauts.

Only recruiting the astronauts would have posed any challenge. These were, after all, brave and dedicated men.

Secrecy would not have been a major problem, even for such a gigantic enterprise. There were precedents. More than three hundred thousand people were directly involved in the building of an atomic bomb in 1942-5, and no significant information reached the public.

And besides America had been sliding towards a police state for years (wire-taps, surveillance of civilians) and it was a simple matter to apply these cloak-and-dagger methods and precedents to the Mars program.

(I was e-mailed with the news that someone had called into a talk show in Phoenix, Arizona, and claimed to be the man who

had run the security operation for NASA during that period. He claimed that four astronauts died in missions that were squelched by NASA. And he said he had the truth about Apollo 13. Never heard from again. Probably a flake.)

The entire Mars program was run out of Southern Nevada, at a (so-called) atomic test station called the Nevada Test Site: a thousand square miles of Nevada desert.

Why there?

It is an area of hills, mountain peaks, desert valleys draining into dry lake beds. The lunar-like terrain is a warren of dark tunnels and secret facilities. You'd spot a car miles away from its dust cloud; anybody walking would be the only moving object in the landscape. And who would go there? Even by 1970 it had a reputation as a forbidden region, soaked in radioactivity.

The most likely sites of the USAF Mars facility are those least used by the AEC, notably Yucca Flat and Camp Desert Rock, aka Area 22.

Here's another good reason: Vegas - just sixty miles to the southeast.

Those astronauts weren't children, and they weren't shrinking violets. The clerks and secretaries for the Mars control centre were babes recruited from Las Vegas casinos, which added to the general appeal of the place.

Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology Policy,

Washington DC 20500. April 20, 1997. Mr John E Proctor, Director-in-Charge, National Security Issues, General Accounting Office. Dear Mr Proctor:

In response to your recent query of April 2, 1997.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy reviewed its records concerning the 'Nevada, Incident'. OSTP has no direct knowledge of what occurred at Nevada and no records, except for the information I received from the Air Force. I look forward to receiving the GAO report.

Sincerely, Joseph V. Ververk, Director

At Cross Fork, Nevada, I found that hooker.

And through her I found a guy called Tad Jones.

Tad Jones claimed to have been a minor worker, in the early 1970s,

on a covert government nuclear-rocket program. This program continued after the shut-down of the public-domain NERVA program, following Nixon's (supposed) decision not to go to Mars.

Jones, and other workers, were bribed and threatened to keep them quiet about their work on the program. Jones lost his job in 1972,1 gather for personal reasons. Now, more than two decades later, radiation injuries were killing him.

The thing of it is, Tad Jones told me he once met a man who told him he had been to Mars.

He was called Elliott Becker, and at the time he was an Air Force colonel, and he made the mistake of getting too drunk one night.

Under false pretences, which I won't go into here, I got to meet Elliott Becker himself. He is now a senior Air Force officer. He is aged around 60, and he suffers from premature-ageing symptoms: atrophied muscles, osteoporosis.

He threw me out fast. But not so fast I didn't manage to notice some oddities. For instance at one point Becker let go of a glass in mid-air and looked startled when it fell.

This sort of thing happened to the Skylab astronauts and Mir cosmonauts, conditioned to long periods in zero G. Furthermore his illnesses are consistent with the proposal that Becker endured a long-duration spaceflight in the early 1980s.

But he was not on any spaceflight made public.

So where the hell did he go?

I only met Tad Jones the once.

I wasn't so surprised. Ageing, poor, stricken by pain, Jones was becoming less discreet. I don't know how he died. His old radiation injuries must have baffled the coroners.

Of course he could have been lying through his teeth about the whole thing. But if so, where did he get his injuries?

US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington DC 20535 April 22, 1997.

Mr John E Proctor, Director-in-Charge, National Security Issues, General Accounting Office. Dear Mr Proctor:

This is in response to a letter dated April 2, 1997, from Simon J Holusha, Director, Administration of Justice Issues, General Accounting Office, to Kathryn G Keyworth, Inspector in Charge, Office of Public and Congressional Affairs, FBI, regarding government

records concerning the large-scale explosion near Cross Fork, Nevada in October 1983 (Code 91183).

A search of FBI indices has determined that all FBI data concerning the incident has been processed under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and is available for review in our FOIA Reading Room. If your staff wishes to review the material, please call Margaret Feeley, a member of my staff, at least 48 hours in advance of the desired appointment.

Sincerely yours,

Eric G. Dower, Supervisory Special Agent, Office of Public and Congressional affairs

The truth about Mars, at least, is now obvious.

The space probes did not observe any evidence of an inhabited Mars because it was deliberately concealed. The Mariner 9 dust storm was no coincidence! - it was thrown up to conceal hasty efforts by the planet's inhabitants to fake a Moonlike landscape. And the surface was sterilized by neutron bombs before the Vikings could land, and the Mars Observer was shot out of the sky.

We didn't go back to Mars for twenty years. And by the time we got there, with Pathfinder and the rest, there was nothing to see. Of course not. The Martians had completed their mock-up.

And nobody told us about all this.

We worship secrecy in this country.

Get this: last year the US government produced 6,300,000 'classified' documents. The least restricted bear the stamp FOUO, 'For Official Use Only'. The next category - the first technically classified - are 'Confidential'. After that comes 'Secret', and some of them are 'NATO Secret', meaning they can be shared with NATO nations. Then comes 'Top Secret' and 'NATO Top Secret'.

Above 'Top Secret' there is 'SCI' - 'Sensitive Compartmented Information', open to still fewer individuals. And there is some information that you can only see if you are on a BIGOT list - if you have your own specific code word.

And then there are qualifies like 'NOFORN' - no foreigners to see - and 'NOCONTRACT' - no contractors, 'WNINTEL' -'Warning Notice - Intelligence Sources or Methods Involved', 'ORCON' - 'Originator Controls Further Dissemination'.

What's the cost of all this secrecy? When does secrecy increase military strength, and when does it weaken security?

We should be told.

... Or is that classified too?

The space-probe evidence, naturally, was covered up. I should be used by now to our natural disposition for secrecy. But over an issue as immense as this, it utterly dismays me.

That's why I fight on.

(Teletype uncovered during review of FOIA material:) FBI DALLAS IO-2o-I983 4-28 PM DIRECTOR AND SAC, CINCINNATI URGENT

NEVADA EXPLOSION, INFORMATION CONCERNING (blanked) TELE-PHONICALLY ADVISED THIS OFFICE THAT (blanked) SATELLITE OBSERVED DEBRIS AND DESTRUCTION AT (blanked) TELEPHONIC CONVERSATION BETWEEN THIS OFFICE AND (blanked) FAILED TO BEAR OUT BELIEF PHOTOGRAPHS AND NEGATIVES BEING TRANSPORTED TO THIS OFFICE BY SPECIAL PLANE FOR EXAMINATION PROVIDED BY THIS OFFICE BECAUSE OF NATIONAL INTEREST IN THE CASE AND FACT THAT NATIONAL BROADCASTING COMPANY ASSOCIATED PRESS AND OTHERS ATTEMPTING TO BREAK STORY OF EXPLOSION AND/OR AIRCRAFT CRASH TODAY NO FURTHER INVESTIGATION BEING CONDUCTED

END.

Here's the story, as best I can reconstruct it.

In 1971 - armed with space-probe information about a secretive, advanced and possibly hostile civilization on Mars - President Nixon ordered preparations to begin for covert missions to Mars, manned and otherwise. These were to include the possibility of launching a pre-emptive nuclear attack against the planet. The project was under the command of the USAF, and would use Apollo moon-rocket technology with nuclear-rocket stages.

(And that, sir author, is the truth about Nixon's decision on going to Mars after Apollo. He didn't decide we wouldn't go. He decided we would - but the program would be run by the USAF, not NASA, and it would be run in secret. Even the publicly declared Apollo follow-on program, the Space Shuttle, had a military flavour and had a role in the defense of Earth against the Martians, which I've yet to determine.)

Elliott Becker trained as an astronaut in the 1960s. In 1971 his death was faked in a T-38 airplane accident, and he was assigned to the secret man-to-Mars program.

But Nixon fell, and the project was abandoned, the Nevada launch complex and the space hardware mothballed. Elliott was

moved into senior Air Force positions, with a central responsibility for maintaining the integrity of a Mars program cover-up. In 1981, things changed.

By now the additional Viking data was in hand. President Reagan ordered the mounting of a secret manned flyby scouting mission to Mars, under the command of the USAF, using what was left of the 1970s-era Saturn technology. This limited-objectives mission was achievable relatively easily. Meanwhile Reagan revived preparations for a nuclear attack on Mars.

The flyby mission was launched in 1982 from the secret Nevada base. It carried two men, and it would pass by Mars on the planet's night side.

The funding was covered as an SDI project. But when SDI funding came under scrutiny, and Reagan's attention moved on to other issues, the project was again abandoned. I guess the logic was that the Martians didn't after all pose an immediate threat. This time the Nevada launch complex was destroyed.

And that's the truth behind the 1983 explosion out in the desert.

… But Elliott Becker got to fly his mission.

Inspector General, Department of Defense, 400 Army Navy Drive, Arlington, Virginia 22202-2684. April 29, 1997. Mr John E Proctor, Director-in-Charge, National Security Issues, General Accounting Office. Dear Mr Proctor:

The Department of the Air Force July 1984 report is the DoD response to questions posed in your April 2 letter related to GAO C 91165. If you have any questions, please contact my action officer, Janet Fromkin, at 703-604-7846. If she is not available please contact Ms Frances Douhet at 703-604-7543.

Sincerely

Richard S. Dupuy, Deputy Assistant Inspector General for GAO Report Analysis.

Tad Jones told me that in 1981 he heard a rumour that the program he had worked on was being revived. But nobody was hiring in Cross Fork.

Tad Jones was kind of a bitter man. So he got himself an off-road vehicle and went hunting.

The nuclear rocket site is on no map. Jones had to break through

wire fences and skirt mine fields (he told me). Then he found himself in an area of high radioactivity (he'd taken along counters). He approached the centre of the site.

And there he found the white needle-shape of a nuclear-tipped Saturn V rocket, assembled in secret, standing on a rusting gantry out there in the desert. Hell of a thing. He showed me a photograph.

Jones said that after the demolition the site was seeded with radioactive waste. He said it would be impossible to return to the now-lethal site, and the evidence is lost.

But the program lasted long enough to send Elliott Becker to Mars.

He and his crewmate used Apollo-class spacecraft, enduring the year-long journey in an adapted Skylab habitation module.

Think of it. Becker must have watched Earth and Moon recede like twin stars, every moment travelling further than any human before him. I wonder what he imagined he would find at journey's end.

Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC 20505. May 22 1997.

Mr John E Proctor, Director-in-Charge, National Security Issues, General Accounting Office. Dear Mr Proctor:

In a letter dated 15 April 1997, this Agency advised you that it would conduct a comprehensive record search to aid in the completion of your investigation of an explosion in Nevada, October 1983. In accordance with your request we have searched all of our databases. The search did not yield any documents related to either of these terms other than the report returned by our field worker Frederic K Durant in 1983, which remains classified. Therefore this Agency has no information relevant to your investigation.

Sincerely, Nora Franck, Executive Director.

It goes to prove there is hope. Even the most gigantic fraud and cover-up, no matter what the investment of time and money, is going to flake at the edges after a couple of decades.

Look, you can verify most of this stuff from the public records for yourself, as I'm trying to do. Right? And I'd welcome it if you did and let me know. I mean, it was our hundred billion dollars.

I have an instinct to blow a hole through every veil of secrecy

I come across. That keeps me busy. It's a point of principle. But aside from the principle, I just want to know. I mean, here we have two guys who went all the way to Mars, for God's sake, and they've never been allowed to tell their stories.

I'll go to my grave wondering what Elliot Becker saw. Just cold, lonely emptiness? Or perhaps glimpses of structures, lights in the ochre deserts on the dark side of Mars?

We grope for truth, and make our progress slow. William Davenant, 1606-1668

(Author's note: I guess it's fairly obvious why I was the target of this particular hoax. And my correspondent is right about our culture's excessive fondness for secrecy, as this stonewalling document itself demonstrates; as long as secrecy remains, rumours about what is being hidden are going to flourish.

(But like all good hoaxes, this one is rooted in enough fact to make it at least remotely plausible - for there are a few oddities in the story of human involvement with Mars.

(Before the first space probes, Mars was thought to be Earthlike. Many expert telescope observers were convinced they had seen networks of canals, swathes of vegetation. The Mariner 4 flyby probe of 1964, however, glimpsed a Moon-like world with a thin atmosphere, and craters where the Earth-bound observers thought they saw canals. In 1971 the Mariner 9 orbiter really did find a global dust storm obscuring the surface. And later, the Viking landers found a surface not just lifeless but apparently sterilized, perhaps by solar radiation. The US Mars Observer did fail as it reached Mars.

(And there were proposals, mooted in the 1960s, for manned flybys of Mars, an interim program to follow Apollo. The flyby would have passed the planet's dark side…)

United States General Accounting Office. Summary to GAO report GAO/NSRAF-96-244 addressed to the Hon. W.X. Lambie.

Cover note (concluded):

… Our search of government records was complicated by the fact that some records we wanted to review were missing and there was not always an explanation. Further, the records management regulations for the retention and disposition of records were unclear or changing during the period we reviewed.

We conducted our review from March 1997 to May 1998 in accordance with generally accepted government-auditing standards. If you or your staff have any questions about this report, please call me on (202) 512-7858.

Sincerely yours,

John E. Proctor, Director-In-Charge, National Security Issues.

The We Who Sing

Reid Malenfant wrote to his grandson:

Sure, you can spin conspiracy theories forever. Sometimes I think we're just little bitty creatures who think too small. We can't see the truth that's all around us.

Maybe there is life everywhere, and everywhen, but we just can't see it. Maybe there was life as far back in the history of the universe as you can look.

Shine joined the chattering, swarming throng. The excitement was enormous. 'The Wave is approaching,' the people sang. 'The Wave…'

Shine's people called themselves the We Who Sing. For that is what they did, and how they knew themselves.

And here came the Wave itself, a vast swell of light, crashing endlessly forward with a noise like a vast groan. As it progressed the Wave broke over a bank of frost, effortlessly smashing apart its lifeless filigree structures.

Now the people rose up before the Wave, sparks rising before a vast firestorm. But there was structure in the songs they sang, and in their dance, as if they were a flock of glowing swallows.

The Wave was a vast acoustic pulse that spanned the Ocean -but the Ocean was the world, and so the Wave was the song of the world itself.

Swept up by anticipation, Shine added a whoop of joy to the people's complex electromagnetic harmonies, and she dove deeper into the glowing crowd.

In this Ocean of plasma, a place filled with light and heat, Shine was a creature of ball lightning. Her body was a thing of sound itself, her internal structure maintained by criss-crossing standing waves and solitons. And as she swelled joyously, her song advertized her strength and beauty, the depth and harmony of her structure - and her readiness to triple.

Potential partners clustered around her, tense, eager.

… But here was the one she thought of as Cold.

Shine danced away.

All around Shine, firework bursts of death and life lit up the sky. Already the We Who Sing had begun to triple. They came together in their threes, their structures merging and briefly dissolving, before the bright compounds flew apart in sudden happy explosions. And from the shining shrapnel emerged triple-daughters, small, eager, like their vanished parents yet subtly modified, their essences shared.

Shine longed to dissolve in that final happy glow.

But Cold had followed her. 'You must not do this, Shine,' Cold said.

Cold was small and ugly. The potential triple-partners had no wish to share their terminal love with this etiolated creature. Subtly they began to back away.

Shine's angry shout pulsed over Cold. 'Leave me alone!'

But Cold stayed close to her. 'To triple is to lose yourself,' she said, insistent. 'It is to dissolve in that final madness, from which nothing emerges but immature triple-daughters, as mindless as a clump of frost.'

'It is the way of things -'

'It is our tragedy. As we make new life, we forget - even the best and brightest of us. I have seen it happen, over and over.'

Shine swooped and spun, her agitation growing as the Wave approached and the dance reached its climax. All her life Cold had pursued her like this, baffling her with an incomprehensible, dismal chatter of patterns and memory. 'You are nothing but talk. The Ocean is without end! It will last forever! What use is a long life if there is no change?'

Cold said solemnly, 'Listen to me, Shine. The Ocean is going to die.'

It was an ugly thought, discordant, incomprehensible. Unacceptable.

'No.' Shine sailed away from Cold, jetting through the plasma soup, seeking to rejoin the throng.

But still Cold pursued her. 'It is the truth, Shine. The next Wave will be the last. Please, Shine. You are one of the few who can understand - even though you deny it.'

The giant Wave loomed closer, and people bobbed before it like flecks of surf.

'This is my time,' begged Shine. 'Let me go.'

Cold said, 'I think there may be a way -'

But now the Wave's immense compression front hit them.

The people crashed through the great glowing wall. Swooping, singing, immersed in the world's booming voice, the We Who Sing fed on dense plasma, and they tripled madly. It was a shrieking, joyous frenzy.

And when the Wave had passed - and the people, illuminated by the brightness of a new, bewildered generation, began to sing their songs once more - here was Shine, alone.

She swept away from Cold, away from the creature who had kept her from the tripling, angry, bitter, frightened.

The universe was young.

It had been just three hundred thousand years since the formative singularity. Now the universe was a knot of spacetime, unravelling at lightspeed, yet still little larger than a single galaxy.

And everywhere it was as hot as the interior of a star.

All matter here was in the form of plasma: an electrically charged mist crowded with protons, electrons, simple atomic nuclei. And the plasma made the universe opaque. A photon, a bit of light, could not travel far before it was impeded by a charged particle, just as sunlight scatters from the droplets of water that make up a fog.

So the plasma glowed, an ocean of light.

But the intense radiation bath likewise assailed matter. True, wherever it got the chance - in pockets of relative cool - atomic matter formed, electrons clinging to nuclei like long-separated siblings, the new atoms gravity-tugging each other. But, bombarded by the blistering photons, any matter cluster was quickly shattered. The brief frost banks evaporated, the atoms smashed, the plasma restored.

In this ferocious heat there could be no solid structure: no planets, no stars, no galaxies.

But the plasma ocean was not uniform. Not featureless.

Cold said she would take Shine and Harmony to a place where, she said, they could see the future.

The two of them joined her reluctantly, in the place where the people hung in a great cloud, rippling on the Ocean's softly swelling currents.

There was a full ecology here. Instabilities generated little pockets of turbulence, like spinning flowers in the plasma, and on these small structures fed greater forms, which were consumed in their turn. The pinnacle of this food chain was reached in the dense, complex, hot-as-sun bodies of the We Who Sing. And so they fed now, browsing on the turbulence and scurrying, mindless forms.

Cold, with Shine and Harmony, moved out of this glowing crowd and away into swelling emptiness.

Soon they were alone, three points of brightness swimming through a sea of yellow-white light.

Harmony was younger than Shine, her sparkling structure less subtly developed. But she was nevertheless a handsome creature who, like Shine, had somehow been snared by Cold's discordant words. She sang as they jetted along, but her songs betrayed her unease and boredom.

Cold's body was smaller than Shine's or Harmony's: small, ugly, her inner structure decaying, her circumference ragged. Denying the dissolution of the triple, she had been subject too long to the great pulses of heat and cold that washed through this Ocean-sky.

They were an odd trio, uncomfortable with each other.

'… Here,' said Cold at last. 'This will do. Look now…'

They had come to a place where the Ocean glowed with a little less vigour than elsewhere. Instinctively Shine contracted, compressing the warmth of her own structure.

Here was a great sculpture of frost, a wispy glimmering spider-web. But already the Ocean's turbulence was closing this random pocket of coolness, and the frost, twisting, crumbling, was breaking up.

Harmony grumbled, 'There's nobody here.' Cold said, 'It isn't people I've brought you to see.' 'Nothing, then,' said Harmony. 'There's nothing here.' 'Nothing but frost,' Shine said.

'Who cares about frost?' said Harmony. 'Frost is dead. Frost cannot sing.'

She said, 'There has always been frost - wispy structures like

this, gathering in the transient cold pockets. But there is more frost now than in the past.'

'I don't believe you,' Harmony said haughtily.

'Nevertheless it is true.'

Shine struggled to find the right questions. What is 'past'? What is 'future'? What is 'change'? 'How can you know such a thing?'

Cold's ragged body pulsed. 'Because I have lived long enough to see it. Time is a great gift. I have seen the frost gather, Shine ... I have built my memory, so that I may understand the world. And I have learned that there is a deeper sort of memory, that lingers even when we are gone.'

'What do you mean?'

Cold began to sing, quite beautifully. Her body glowed with colour.

The song was part of the standard canon of the We Who Sing, and it had structure: subtle rhythms, themes composed of repetitive phrases, 'notes' expressed in a discrete suite of colours, even a kind of refrain like a rhyme.

A human could have appreciated the song's beauty. A whale could.

At last Cold finished.

Shine found herself drawing subtly closer. 'You sing well,' she said.

Cold emitted a kind of laugh, and she spun. 'And so you come to me. Of course you do. That was how our songs began: as simple tripling calls. Look at me. Hear how well I sing! Think how well we could merge, how strong and dense with structure our children would be… But the songs have become more than that. Passed from one generation to the next, they have become elaborate. They have come to tell what happened before: of great beauties, of spectacular triples - and of the Ocean itself, the Waves and the frost.'

Harmony, moodily, spun away. ‘I don't like this game.'

'Shine - Harmony - I have heard this happen. I have heard the songs grow, just a phrase or two at a time, from triple to triple. And so I thought back. I imagined the songs being stripped of their layers of meaning, becoming simpler, more elemental, until - in the beginning - they were no more than a mating cry.'

Shine was still struggling to comprehend the idea that she might live in a universe in which the past might be different from the future. It was almost impossible for her to absorb Cold's efforts to describe how she had observed a trend.

Of her kind, Shine saw, Cold was a genius: but hers was a chill, repellent brilliance, and Shine felt herself shrink away.

Cold seemed to observe this, and withered regretfully.

Harmony, despite herself, seemed intrigued. 'If the songs tell stories, what do they say?'

'That the Ocean is not limitless,' Cold said quickly. 'That is the first thing, despite what most people believe. The songs tell of the Waves. Everyone knows that. But over enough time - so the songs say - the same Waves return. It is as if the Ocean is a single body, like yours, Harmony, within which Waves echo back and forth, subtly changing. That is how I know the Ocean is a small place.

'And here is the next thing. The Ocean will not last forever. It changes. I am old enough now to have seen it for myself -'

Shine, reluctantly, understood. 'You're talking about the frost.'

'Yes. There is more of it - always more, never less.'

Shine tried to think like Cold. Before, less. Now, more. If this goes on… 'Soon all the Ocean will be frost. That is what you are saying.'

'Yes,' Cold said, but with a kind of exultance. 'At last somebody hears me! That is what is going to happen.'

Harmony spun and spat bits of light, growing agitated.

Shine tried to imagine a universe full of lifeless, static frost. 'How will we live? Where will we go? What about the Waves, the triples?'

'There will be nowhere to go,' said Cold harshly. 'It will happen all at once, everywhere. When the next Wave comes -'

'These are terrible things to be saying!' Harmony cried suddenly. 'You are stupid and ugly, Cold, and I don't want to finish up like you!' And with a final dazzling burst she surged away, leaving Shine and Cold alone.

Shine said, 'I should go after her.'

'She is smart,' Cold said. 'She understands too, despite herself. That is why she is frightened.'

Frightened and repelled, Shine thought. 'You must help me, Shine.' 'Help you?'

Cold spun around, a ragged cloud. 'Look at me. Unless I triple soon, I will die. And I will not triple. I will not let my mind dissolve.'

'You will not live long enough to see the next Wave. That is what you are saying… Ah. But I could.'

Cold came to her anxiously. 'It will be up to you,' she said. 'I will be long dead. You must make them see…'

Suddenly Shine was angry. 'I don't want such a life. I wish I was as old as you. I would rather die.'

'No,' said Cold urgently. 'You must not forget what I have told you. You must not lose it in the tripling - for then, you doom your mindless offspring to die in your place.'

Shine flinched from her chill logic.

Cold, it seemed to her, was not natural. She had put aside the ultimate joy of the triple; this dismal knowledge scarcely seemed a consolation.

But then - if Cold was right - what was the natural thing to do? Shine said slowly, 'We are evanescent. Here and gone, like a song.'

'What are you saying?'

Shine watched the ugly frost evaporating as the Ocean's warmth gushed over it. 'If you are right - if all this must pass - perhaps we should accept what is to come.'

Cold was very still.

The young cosmos expanded relentlessly.

It was a bath of plasma, almost at thermodynamic equilibrium, with no large-scale energy flows, no large structure. But still, on small scales, there was unevenness and instability, undulations in the background density. And so there were flows of energy, heat cancelling cold.

Where energy flowed, life fed. Life: even in this chaotic, glowing soup.

And there were the Waves.

In its first instants this universe had endured a pulse of drastic inflation, during which it had ballooned from a region of space smaller than a proton to the size of the Earth. And as spacetime was stretched so dramatically, some of the pulsing cosmic energy condensed to matter.

It was as if rocks had been thrown into a great opaque pond.

Though light was hindered by the plasma, sound waves could travel freely. The ripples cast by that inflationary explosion were tremendous acoustic pulses of compression and decompression that marched across the swelling cosmos. With time, the oscillations developed on ever larger scales.

The growing universe was filled with a deepening roar.

But as it grew, so it cooled.

Already the Wave could be seen in the glimmering distance, like a bank of spotlights approaching through a glowing fog. Already its throaty roar could be heard.

The We Who Sing began to cluster, like migrant birds.

By now, Shine herself had grown old.

And she had learned that Cold was right. All you had to do was look around.

You could even hear change in the Wave itself. The Waves were stretching, their tone deepening. The Ocean was filled with great descending groans, as if immense creatures were dying.

But not one in a hundred of the great soaring throng around her understood this. Not one of them was old enough to remember a time when this fast-evolving world of theirs had been any different - and few would listen to Shine.

Just like Cold, Shine had gradually become ostracized by We Who Sing. It was Shine now who had endured long past her time of tripling, she whose ragged, slowly decohering form repelled those around her.

But Shine was not Cold. Whatever became of her, without tripling she would forever be incomplete. And she dreaded following the final destiny of poor Cold, who, in the end, had evaporated, her precious, hoarded memories lost forever in the currents of light.

Often she wished she had defied Cold's wishes and embraced the tripling. The chill logic of a coming extinction seemed to her a poor reward for the loss of such terminal joy.

But Shine, resolutely, put such thoughts aside.

In the midst of the gathering gaiety, she brought together those who followed her. There was a bare hundred of them - no more, even after a lifetime of Shine's increasingly impassioned proselytizing. Now they clustered around Shine, gathering almost as tightly as partners keen to triple.

'I don't like this,' said Harmony. 'I don't want this to happen.'

Others assented, swarming closer.

'I know,' said Shine, as soothing as she could be, despite her own fear. 'We must stay together. We must stay close. It is the only way.'

This was not Harmony herself, but one of her triple-daughters. The old Harmony had been unable, in the end, to resist the brilliant lure of the triple. But Shine had wooed her triple-daughters, and she had been rewarded to find much of Harmony's character lingering in them: high intelligence mixed with a stubborn refusal to believe the worst..

Thus Shine had sought to find in the daughters what she had perceived in their mothers. It was just as Cold had once pursued her. She had often wondered whether it was herself that Cold was after, or something she had seen in Shine's triple-parents…

'Oh,' said one young beauty called Glimmer. 'Oh, but the tripling has begun. They sing the songs already. Can you hear?'

Of course they could. The songs emerged from the swelling, swooping crowd of the We Who Sing, songs of sex, of light-filled, orgasmic instants of birth and death, of an Ocean-world like a womb. The dances were beginning too. Patterns, beautiful, in three dimensions and on a vast scale, were soon emergent from the people's unconscious flocking.

'I don't want it to be true,' moaned Harmony. 'How can this end? I want to go to the dance, to the triples. Let us go, Shine. Oh, let us go!'

Some of the rest joined in this desolate chorus. The group spun and pulsed, confused, unstable.

It felt as if Shine herself was tearing apart. How wonderful it would be to think that even now, if she let herself dissolve into the burning light of a triple, something of herself would go on, enduring forever, in an Ocean without end, a song without limits!

Oh, she thought, I love it all. •

But she knew that beneath the dazzling dance of the people lay the chill, implacable logic of Cold. There was no escape.

'It is time,' she said, sadly. 'We must do as Cold instructed us. Come now.'

She swam up to Glimmer and let her perimeter soften, so that they overlapped, the complex weft of their cores overlaying. It was like a tripling, but they kept their identities separate.

Now another joined them, and another, so that they grew into a huddle, an increasingly dense, glowing mass that looked, from the outside, undifferentiated - and yet the individuals were sustained within, like palimpsests.

'I don't like this,' whispered Glimmer - very bright, very immature, terrified by the clarity of her own thinking. 'It feels strange.'

'Cold thought it might help us survive -'

'Survive what?' Harmony's pulsing voice was full of anger and fear. 'The death of the Ocean itself? Do you really believe that, Shine?'

'If you wish to leave,' Shine said, 'you may.' Like her triple-mother, Harmony sought nothing so much as somebody to punish.

But now their argument was ended. The Ocean itself shuddered - and it dimmed.

The We Who Sing could not ignore the dimming: even the youngest, the most foolish of them. Striving to continue their anxious dancing before the approaching Wave, they swarmed, agitated.

Harmony stayed where she was, embedded deep in the huddle. It was just as Cold had forecast. Despair clamp down inside Shine, the last impossible hope evaporate.

She felt Glimmer within her, as if snuggling close. 'Shine -'

'You're frightened. It's all right. So am I.' 'What will we see?'

Shine struggled to answer. What would be left if the Ocean vanished? - for the Ocean was the world. 'Perhaps there is a greater Ocean,' she said at last. 'In which our Ocean is embedded. As one becomes embedded in the three of a triple.'

'And,' Glimmer said suddenly, 'perhaps there is a greater Ocean beyond that. And then another.'

This keen, intelligent insight startled Shine. But as she tried to imagine an infinite hierarchy of Oceans, each contained within the next, she recoiled, bewildered.

Now the Ocean's light flickered again, like a failing lightbulb, visibly dimmer.

The swarming people were confused, agitated. Some of them even strove to join Shine's huddle. But it was too late.

The great Wave broke, a last defiant burst of light that swept them all before it.

The We Who Sing shrieked and danced and sang, and they tripled madly. Young emerged in silent starbursts. They raced over the Wave's swelling face, exhilarated to find themselves suddenly alive.

Even now, Shine longed to join them.

But once again the light dimmed. The Wave's rushing front was disrupted, becoming turbulent. The dances were broken, and the songs of the people turned to wails of fear, the bewildered young crying for comfort.

Shine gathered her acolytes close. She said, ‘I think -'

But there was no more time.

At last a critical temperature was reached. Suddenly, atomic matter was able to condense out of the stew of electrons and nuclei.

The photons - no longer energetic enough to smash open the fledgling atoms, no longer impeded - were free to fly their geodesic courses to infinity. The plasma glow died.

For the first time the sky became transparent, a transition as abrupt as a clash of cymbals.

With the dissipation of the plasma, the great acoustic waves had no medium in which to travel. But they did not vanish without trace. Where a wave had compressed the particle soup, it had been made hotter, the photons more energetic. And so as the photons began their endless journey through swelling spacetime, they carried in their energy distribution images of the last sound waves.

Thus the last birthing cry of the universe was caught forever in a thinning, reddening sea of primordial photons.

Meanwhile the matter that had suddenly frosted out of the great bath of radiation began to gather in swirls and clumps, arranged in a great lacy tapestry that hung over the universe. It was a wispy frost of hydrogen and helium, slowly collapsing under gravity: a frost that would condense into galaxies and stars and superclus-ters and planets, places where new forms of life could prosper.

In all cosmic history it was the most dramatic instant of transition.

But, with every transition, there is loss.

Dark and cold, suddenly, everywhere.

Many of the huddle had died in that first great instant of freezing.

And now, as the mass clump collapsed, fusion began, deep in the heart of the huddle. At that moment more died, torn apart by the immense densities, the sudden fire.

But the fusion became stable.

In all the universe, just a single star shone.

Shine peered out, filled with curiosity and fear, stunned by clarity and emptiness.

Cold was right, she thought. I am alive. I lived through the end of the world. Alive! But - what happens next?

As she watched, a second star lit up, a beacon in the endless dark.

And then another.

And another.

The Gravity Mine

And perhaps (Malenfant wrote to Michael) life will persist long after we imagine it would be impossible: deep in the future, far downstream, after the Earth has died, after the sun and all the stars have expired, life finding a way to get by in the dark…

Call her Anlic.

The first time she woke, she was in the ruins of an abandoned gravity mine.

At first the Community had chased around the outer strata of the great gloomy structure. But at last, close to the core, they reached a cramped ring. Here the central black-hole's gravity was so strong that light itself curved in closed orbits.

The torus tunnel looked infinitely long. And they could race as fast as they dared.

As they hurtled past fullerene walls they could see multiple images of themselves, a glowing golden mesh before and behind, for the echoes of their light endlessly circled the central knot of spacetime. 'Just like the old days!' they called, excited. 'Just like the Afterglow!…'

Exhilarated, they pushed against the light barrier, and those trapped circling images shifted to blue or red.

That was when it happened.

This Community was just a small tributary of the Conflux: isolated here in this ancient place, the density of mind already stretched thin. And now, as lightspeed neared, that isolation stretched to breaking point.

… She budded off from the rest, her consciousness made discrete, separated from the greater flow of minds and memories.

She slowed. The others rushed on without her, a dazzling circular storm orbiting the exhausted black hole. It felt like coming awake, emerging from a dream.

Her questions were immediate, flooding her raw mind. 'Who am I? How did I get here?' And so on. The questions were simple, even trite. And yet they were unanswerable.

Others gathered around her - curious, sympathetic - and the race of streaking light began to lose its coherence.

One of them came to her.

Names meant little; this 'one' was merely a transient sharpening of identity from the greater distributed entity that made up the Community.

Still, here he was. Call him Geador.

'… Antic?'

'I feel - odd,' she said.

'Don't worry.'

'Who am I?'

'Come back to us.'

He reached for her, and she sensed the warm depths of companionship and memory and shared joy that lay beyond him. Depths waiting to swallow her up, to obliterate her questions.

She snapped, 'No!' And, wilfully, she sailed up and out and away, passing through the thin walls of the tunnel.

At first it was difficult to climb out of this twisted gravity well. But soon she was rising through layers of structure.

Here was the tight electromagnetic cage which had once tapped the spinning black hole like a dynamo. Here was the cloud of compact masses which had been hurled along complex orbits through the hole's ergosphere, extracting gravitational energy. It was antique engineering, long abandoned.

She emerged into a blank sky, a sky stretched thin by the endless expansion of spacetime.

Geador was here. 'What do you see?'

'Nothing.'

'Look harder.' He showed her how.

There was a scattering of dull red pinpoints all around the sky.

'They are the remnants of stars,' he said.

He told her about the Afterglow: that brief, brilliant period after

the Big Bang, when matter gathered briefly in clumps and burned by fusion light. 'It was a bonfire, over almost as soon as it began. The universe was very young. It has swollen some ten thousand trillion times in size since then… Nevertheless, it was in that gaudy era that humans arose. Us, Anlic'

She looked into her soul, seeking warm memories of the Afterglow. She found nothing.

She looked back at the gravity mine.

At its centre was a point of yellow-white light. Spears of light arced out from its poles, knife-thin. The spark was surrounded by a flattened cloud, dull red, inhomogeneous, clumpy. The big central light cast shadows through the crowded space around it.

It was beautiful, a sculpture of light and crimson smoke.

'This is Mine One,' Geador said gently. 'The first mine of all. And it is built on the ruins of the primeval galaxy - the galaxy from which humans first emerged.'

'The first galaxy?'

'But it was all long ago.' He moved closer to her. 'So long ago that this mine became exhausted. Soon it will evaporate away completely. We have long since had to move on…'

But that had happened before. After all humans had started from a single star, and spilled over half the universe, even before the stars ceased to shine.

Now humans wielded energy, drawn from the great gravity mines, on a scale unimagined by their ancestors. Of course mines would be exhausted - like this one - but there would be other mines. Even when the last mine began to fail, they would think of something.

The future stretched ahead, long, glorious. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across trillions upon trillions of years.

It was the Conflux.

Its source was far upstream.

The crudities of birth and death had been abandoned even before the Afterglow was over, when man's biological origins were decisively shed. So every mind, every tributary that made up the Conflux today had its source in that bright, remote upstream time.

Nobody had been born since the Afterglow.

Nobody but Anlic.

'… Come back,' Geador said.

Her defiance was dissipating.

She understood nothing about herself. But she didn't want to be different. She didn't want to be unhappy.

There wasn't anybody who was less than maximally happy, the whole of the time. Wasn't that the purpose of existence?

So, troubled, she gave herself up to Geador, to the Conflux. And, along with her identity, her doubts and questions dissolved.

The universe would grow far older before she woke again.

'… Flee! Faster! As fast as you can!…'

There was turbulence in the great rushing river of mind.

And in that turbulence, here and there, souls emerged from the background wash. Each brief fleck suffered a moment of terror before falling back into the greater dreaming whole.

One of those flecks was Anlic.

In the sudden dark she clung to herself. She slithered to a stop.

Transient identities clustered around her. 'What are you doing? Why are you staying here? You will be harmed.' They sought to absorb her, but fell back, baffled by her resistance.

The Community was fleeing, in panic. Why?

She looked back.

There was something there, in the greater darkness. She made out the faintest of patterns: charcoal grey on black, almost beyond her ability to resolve it, a mesh of neat regular triangles covering the sky. Visible through the interstices was a complex, textured curtain of grey-pink light.

It was a structure that spanned the universe.

She felt stunned, disoriented. It was so different from Mine One, her last clear memory. She must have crossed a great desert of time.

But - she found, when she looked into her soul - her questions remained unanswered.

She called out: 'Geador?'

A ripple of shock and doubt spread through the Community.

'… You are Anlic'

'Geador?'

T have Geador's memories.'

That would have to do, she thought, irritated; in the Conflux, memory and identity were fluid, distributed, ambiguous.

'We are in danger, Anlic. You must come.'

She refused to comply, stubborn. She indicated the great netting. 'Is that Mine One?'

'No,' he said sadly. 'Mine One was long ago, child.' 'How long ago?' 'Time is nested…'

From this vantage, the era of man's first black-hole empire had been the spring time, impossibly remote. And the Afterglow itself

- the star-burning dawn - was lost, a mere detail of the Big Bang. 'What is happening here, Geador?'

'There is no time -' 'Tell me.'

The universe had ballooned, fuelled by time, and its physical processes had proceeded relentlessly.

Just as each galaxy's stars had dissipated, leaving a rump which had collapsed into a central black hole, so clusters of galaxies had broken up, and the remnants fell inwards to cluster-scale holes. And the clusters in turn collapsed into supercluster-scale holes -the largest black holes to have formed naturally, with masses of a hundred trillion stars.

These were the cold hearths around which mankind now huddled.

'But,' said Geador, 'the supercluster holes are evaporating away

- dissipating in a quantum whisper, like all black holes. The smallest holes, of stellar mass, vanished when the universe was a fraction of its present age. Now the largest natural holes, of super-cluster mass, are close to exhaustion as well. And so we must farm them.

'Look at the City.' He meant the universe-spanning net, the rippling surfaces within.

The City was a netted sphere. It contained giant black holes, galactic supercluster mass and above. They had been deliberately assembled. And they were merging, in a hierarchy of more and more massive holes. Life could subsist on the struts of the City, feeding off the last trickle of free energy.

Mankind was moving supercluster black holes, coalescing them in hierarchies all over the reachable universe, seeking to extend their lifetimes. It was a great challenge.

Too great.

Sombrely, Geador showed her more.

The network was disrupted. It looked as if some immense object had punched out from the inside, ripping and twisting the struts. The tips of the broken struts were glowing a little brighter than the rest of the network, as if burning. Beyond the damaged

network she could see the giant coalescing holes, their horizons distorted, great frozen waves of infalling matter visible in their cold surfaces.

This was an age of war: an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. Great rivers of mind were guttering, drying.

'This is the Conflux. How can there be war?'

Geador said, 'We are managing the last energy sources of all. We have responsibility for the whole of the future. With such responsibility comes tension, disagreement. Conflict.' She sensed his gentle, bitter humour. 'We have come far since the Afterglow, Anlic. But in some ways we have much in common with the brawling argumentative apes of that brief time.'

'Apes?… Why am I here, Geador?'

'You're an eddy in the Conflux. We all wake up from time to time. It's just an accident. Don't trouble, Anlic. You are not alone. You have us.'

Deliberately she moved away from him. 'But I am not like you,' she said bleakly. '1 do not recall the Afterglow. I don't know where I came from.'

'What does it matter?' he said harshly. 'You have existed for all but the briefest moments of the universe's long history -' 'Has there been another like me?'

He hesitated. 'No,' he said. 'No other like you. There hasn't been long enough.' 'Then I am alone.'

'Anlic, all your questions will be over, answered or not, if you let yourself die here. Come now…' She knew he was right.

She fled with him. The great black-hole City disappeared behind her, its feeble glow attenuated by her gathering velocity.

She yielded to Geador's will. She had no choice. Her questions were immediately lost in the clamour of community.

She would wake only once more.

Start with a second.

Zoom out. Factor it up to get the life of the Earth, with that second a glowing moment embedded within. Zoom out again, to get a new period, so long Earth's lifetime is reduced to the span of that second. Then nest it. Do it again. And again and again and again…

Anlic, for the last time, came to self-awareness.

It was inevitable that, given enough time, she would be budded by chance occurrence. And so it happened. She clung to herself and looked around.

It was dark here. Vast, wispy entities cruised across spacetime's swelling breast.

There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. The last solid matter had long evaporated: burned up by proton decay, a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed.

For ages the black-hole engineers had struggled to maintain their Cities, to gather more material to replace what decayed away. It was magnificent, futile.

The last structures failed, the last black holes allowed to evaporate.

The Conflux of minds had dispersed, flowing out over the expanding universe like water running into sand.

Even now, of course, there was something rather than nothing. Around her was an unimaginably thin plasma: free electrons and positrons decayed from the last of the Big Bang's hydrogen, orbiting in giant, slow circles. This cold soup was the last refuge of humanity.

The others drifted past her like clouds, immense, slow, coded in wispy light-year-wide atoms. And even now, the others clung to the solace of community.

But that was not for Anlic.

She pondered for a long time, determined not to slide back into the eternal dream.

At length she understood how she had come to be. And she knew what she must do.

She sought out Mine One, the wreckage of man's original galaxy. The search took more empty ages.

With caution, she approached what remained.

There was no shape here. No form, no colour, no time, no order. And yet there was motion: a slow, insidious, endless writhing, punctuated by bubbles which rose and burst, spitting out fragments of mass-energy.

This was the singularity that had once lurked within the great black-hole's event horizon. Now it was naked, a glaring knot of quantum foam, a place where the unification of spacetime had been ripped apart to become a seething probabilistic froth.

Once this object had oscillated violently, and savage tides, chaotic and unpredictable, had torn at any traveller unwary enough

to come close. But the singularity's energy had been dissipated by each such encounter. Even singularities aged.

Still, the frustrated energy contained there seethed, quantum-mechanically, randomly. And sometimes, in those belched fragments, put there purely by chance, there were hints of order.

Structure. Complexity.

She settled herself around the singularity's cold glow.

Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took her longer to complete a single thought than it had once taken species to rise and fall on Earth.

It didn't matter. She had plenty of time.

She remembered her last conversation with Geador. Has there been another like me?… No. No other like you. There hasn't been long enough.

Now Anlic had all the time there was. The universe was exhausted of everything but time.

The longer she waited, the more complexity emerged from the singularity. Purely by chance. Much of it dissipated, purposeless.

But some of the mass-energy fragments had sufficient complexity to be able to gather and store information about the thinning universe. Enough to grow.

That, of course, was not enough. She continued to wait.

At last - by chance - the quantum tangle emitted a knot of structure sufficiently complex to reflect, not just the universe outside, but its own inner state.

Anlic moved closer, coldly excited.

It was a spark of consciousness: not descended from the grunting, breeding humans of the Afterglow, but born from the random quantum flexing of a singularity.

Just as she had been.

Anlic waited, nurturing, refining the rootless being's order and cohesion. And it gathered more data, developed sophistication. At last it - she - could frame questions.

'… Who am I? Who are you? Why are there two and not one?'

Anlic said, ‘I have much to tell you.' And she gathered the spark in her attenuated soul.

Together, mother and daughter drifted away, and the river of time ran slowly into an unmarked sea.

Spindrift

Or (Malenfant wrote to Michael) perhaps there is life all around us, even now. Perhaps there is life in the stars, the clouds, the rocks under your feet. But we just can't see it. Wouldn't that be strange?

Look up at the full Moon.

Look for the patch of bright highland at the centre of the southern hemisphere, nestling amid the darker seas. The highlands are old territory, my dear Svetlana, battered and scarred by five billion years; the seas are ponds of frozen lava, flooded impact wounds.

Close to the lunar equator, a little to the left of the highland mass, you will find the Known Sea - Mare Cognitum. Here, through a good telescope, you might observe the Fra Mauro complex of craters.

Here, for the last six years, I have made my home; and here, I am now certain, I will die.

I am Vladimir Alexeyevich Zotov, first human being to walk upon the surface of the Moon. I will record as long as I can. Hear my story, Svetlana, my daughter!

I left Earth on October 18, 1965.

A mere ten thousand years after the great impact which budded it from young Earth, the Moon coalesced. The infant world cooled rapidly. Gases driven out of the interior were immediately lost to space.

Planetesimals bombarded the Moon, leaving red-glowing pinpricks in the cooling rind. But soon the hail of impactors ceased. The first volcanism had already begun, dark mantle material pouring through crust faults to flood impact basins and craters and lava-cut valleys. But soon even the lava pulses dwindled.

After just a billion years, the Moon's heart grew cold.

The living things which huddled there, of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen, grew still and small and cold.

And the first ponderous rocky thoughts washed sluggishly through the Moon's rigid core.

Meanwhile life exploded over blue, stirring Earth.

In my contoured couch I felt the shudder of distant valves slamming shut, the rocket swaying as the fuel lines were pulled away. Five minutes before launch they turned on the music. I felt peaceful.

'Launch key to go point.' 'Air purges.' 'Idle run.' 'Ignition!'

More vibrations, high whinings and low rumbles. The Proton booster began to sway to left and right, as if losing balance. Then acceleration surged, as if the rocket had been unchained.

The weight lifted, and I was thrown forward. It was as if the rocket was taking a great breath. Then the core engines burned, crushing me, and I rose through fire and noise.

The core stage died. Vostok Seven swivelled in space.

I was in orbit. I could see the skin of Earth, spread out beneath me like a glowing carpet.

I flew over the Kamchatka peninsula. A chain of volcanoes stretched from north to south, ice glittering on their summits and crests, and all surrounded by sky-blue water. It was very beautiful.

The control centre told me I should prepare for the ignition of my last rocket stage: the Block-D, my translunar engine. Earth receded rapidly.

I flew through Earth's shadow. I could see the home planet as a hole in the stars, ringed by a rainbow of sunlight refracted through the atmosphere. And in the centre of the planet I could see a faint grey-blue glow: it was the light of the Moon, shining down on the belly of the Pacific.

Here came the Vice President of the United States, and NASA head honchos, and even a brace of Moonwalkers. Men in suits. They

were on a guided tour of the lunar colony experiments in the Johnson Space Center back rooms.

And here was Michaela Cassell, along with her buddy Fraser, two lowly interns tagging along.

The first stop was a machine that could bake oxygen out of lunar rock. It was a cylinder six feet tall, with a hopper for ore at one end, and pipes for circulating hydrogen and water and dumping waste: a clunky-looking, robust piece of chemical-engineering technology.

The NASA PR hack did the tour-guide stuff. 'You see, you blow hydrogen across heated regolith. That reacts with the oxygen in an ore called ilmenite, an oxide of iron and titanium, to make water… You have basically standard parts here: a 304 stainless steel one hundred psi pressure vessel, swazelock fittings, copper gasket seals, steel tubing. Even the furnace is commercial, a nichrome-wound fuse design. This is a mature technology. But the Moon is a tough place. You need closed-loop fluid systems. In the low gravity you have larger particles than usual, lower fluidizing velocities, big, slow bubbles in the flow that makes for poor contact efficiencies. And you have to figure for minimum maintenance requirements - for instance, the plant has a modular design…'

And so on. The old Apollo guys nodded sagely.

The party walked on.

Michaela couldn't help but regard these greying, balding, gap-toothed mid-westerners with awe. Christ, she had even got to shake John Young's hand, a man who had been there twice.

New century, new Moon. After forty years, Americans were returning to the Moon, this time to stay, by God. It had been the results from Lunar Prospector, and the more ambitious probes which followed, which had kick-started all this.

The probe results, she thought, and the corpse on the Moon. The body of a Russian, found by an autonomous Dowser in the shadows of a Mare Cognitum crater.

And the corpse, of course, was all Fraser wanted to talk about.

'… It's quite clear,' Fraser said. 'To beat Apollo, the Soviets sent up some poor sap in 1965 on a one-way flight.'

'The Soviets denied they were ever going to the Moon,' Michaela whispered.

'Of course they did, when they lost. But that was a geopolitical lie. Both sides had a man-on-the-Moon programme. Both sides would do anything to win… Hence, the stiff. The idea was to

keep him resupplied until the capability came along to retrieve

him. We'd have done it if we had to. Remember Countdown.' 'That was just a movie,' Michaela whispered. 'James Caan -' 'Read the report. NASA SP-4002. Mercury technology. The

Soviets covered their resupply flights as failed unmanned probes.

Lunas 7, 8, 15, 18. And remember Lunokhod?' 'The Lunokhods were science probes.'

'The ones they reported did some science. The CIA knew about it, of course. But nobody had an interest in exposing this…'

The party reached Building 7: something like a chemical plant, huge thickly-painted ducts and pipes everywhere. The Vice Prez was here to inspect the Integrated Life Support System Test Facility. This was a three-storey-high cylinder, built originally for some long-forgotten Cold War pressurization experiment. Now the top storey had been turned into a habitat. The guys in there used physico-chemical systems to recycle their air and urine, for sixty days at a time. The Vice Prez made a joke. What do you do at work, daddy?

They met a woman who had worked in here on a previous trial. She was thrilled to meet real-life Moonwalkers. The team were goal-oriented, she said; they had their own astronaut-style crew patches.

Michaela tried to imagine the cosmonaut on the Moon: six years, alone.

Michaela was going to the Moon. She intended to work her way through NASA, make it up there in the second or third wave of colonists.

Smart modern probes were already crawling all over the Moon: autonomous, packed with micromechanical systems and quantum logic chips, swarming and co-operating and discovering. Soon, humans would follow.

There was ice in the regolith; they knew that for sure. There was ambitious talk of lassoing the Earth-approach asteroid, XF11, when it came past in October 2028, and applying its resource. And there were new, ingenious speculations that maybe the interior of the Moon was crammed with water and other volatiles, trapped there since the Moon's savage formation. Riches which would, one day, turn the Moon green.

There were even rumours that the probes had upturned evidence of some kind of sluggish biological activity, in the deep regolith.

But Michaela knew that if it wasn't for the corpse on the Moon

they wouldn't be going anywhere. It was a silent witness to a Cold War shame, the source of a new impulse to go back and do it nobly this time.

Born long after Apollo, Michaela knew she could never be the first to walk on the Moon. Perhaps, though, she could have been the first human to die there. But the absurd, self-sacrificing bravery of that dead cosmonaut had robbed her of that ambition.

The first child, then, she thought. The first mother on the Moon, the first to bring life there. Not a bad goal.

… Unless, she thought, there is life there already.

In Building 2.41, inside big stainless steel tanks, they were growing dwarf wheat. When Michaela looked through a little porthole she could see the wheat plants, pale and sturdy, straining up to the rows of fluorescents above them, warm little green things struggling for life in this clinical environment.

Fraser was still talking about the dead cosmonaut. 'We're all guilty, Michaela,' he said softly. 'There is a little patch of the Mare Cognitum forever stained red with human blood…'

And so I took humanity's first step on another world. A little spray of dust, of ancient pulverized rock, lifted up around my feet and settled back.

The ground glowed in the sunlight, but the sky was utterly black. There were craters of all dimensions, craters on craters. It was a land sculpted by impact.

Nothing moved here. There was utter silence. This was disorienting. I fought an impulse to turn around, to see who was creeping up behind me.

When I looked at my own shadow the sunlight around it came bouncing straight back at me. The shadow of my body was surrounded by an aura, Svetlana, a halo around my helmet.

I felt filled with love for my country. I sang, 'Ob Russia, my dear and wonderful country, 11 am ready to give my life for you, I Just tell me when you need it, I And I will answer you only Yes.'

I went to work.

The crystal ship rose out of the tall, thin atmosphere. Samtha turned in her seat, uncomfortably aware of her heavy belly.

The horizon curved sharply, blue and blurred. Sparks crawled busily: ships and surface cars and hovercraft, ferrying people to and fro across the Moon's face. The highlands and Farside were

peppered with circular crater lakes, glimmering, linked to the mare oceans by the great drainage canals.

Samtha could see the gigantic feather-wake of the pleasure ships on the Tycho-Nubium.

Soon the night hemisphere was turning towards her. But there was no true dark on the Moon, thanks to the solettas, the huge mirror farms which kept the air from snowing out. The solettas were already a thousand years old - nearly as old as the permanent occupation of the Moon itself - but they, or their successors, would have to keep working a lot longer, now that the Spin-Up had been abandoned.

Wistfully she looked for the bone-white ice deserts of the lunar poles. The south pole had been Samtha's home for a decade. She had worked there on the great deep-bore projects, seeking rich new sources of volatiles.

Earth was rising. Blue Moon, brown Earth.

Samtha stroked her belly, feeling the mass of the unborn child there. Today she was leaving, for the moons of Jupiter.

Her project had been shut down. For there was life in the Moon.

Samtha herself had found tracks dissolved into the rock by lunar micro-organisms, little scrapings just micrometres across. The bacteria fed off the Moon's thin flow of internal heat, and mined carbon and hydrogen directly from compounds dissolved in igneous rocks.

Time on the Moon ran slow. The deep bacteria, stunted, starved of energy and nutrients, reproduced just once every few centuries. But they had been found everywhere the temperature of the rocks was less than a hundred degrees or so. And they shared a common origin with Earth life: the first of them, it seemed, had been survivors of the great impact which had led to the budding-off of the Moon from young Earth. It was life which, though separated for five billion years, was nevertheless a remote cousin of her own cells.

Now the Moon would become a museum and laboratory. And the Moon's stillness, said the enthusiasts, made it an ideal test bed for certain new theories Samtha failed to understand - something to do with the spontaneous collapse of quantum-wave functions - perhaps, it was even said, there was a deeper life still to be found in the silent rocks of the Moon.

The Moon, as a laboratory of life and consciousness.

But humanity's role in the future evolution of the Moon would be curtailed. People and their autonomous companions would be

restricted to a thin surface layer, limited in the energy they could deploy and the changes they could make.

Samtha had lived through the Die-Back. She accepted the logic; life had to be cherished. But she was a mining engineer and there was nothing for her to do here. So she was going to Jupiter, to mine turbulent, gravity-wrenched Io - where native life was, as far as anybody knew, utterly impossible.

She had no regrets. She was happy that her child would grow up in the rich cosmopolitan society of the moons.

But Samtha was sentimental. She knew that this turning away meant that the Moon could never be more than a shrunken twin of Earth, doomed only to decline.

For the last time the ship soared over the limb of the Moon. Prompted by a murmur from the autonomous ship, Samtha looked out at a grey ellipse, like a mole disfiguring the blue-white face of the Moon. It was the open grave of Vladimir Alexeyevich Zotov, sealed in vacuum under its mile-wide dome. She wondered what that brave Russian would have made of this subtle abandonment of the world he had given his life to reach.

The shuttle tipped up and leapt out of the Moon's shallow gravity well. As the twin worlds receded, watery crescents side by side, Samtha bade a last farewell to the ancient cosmonaut.

Goodbye, goodbye.

My lander rests in a broad valley. There is a broad, meteorite-eroded crater wall nearby, which I call Rimma Crater, for my wife, your dear mother. If I climb this wall - passing through ancient rubble, boulders the size of houses - I can look back over the shining, undulating plain of Fra Mauro. The tracks from my wheeled cart stretch like snail paths down the hillside, to where my lander sits, sparkling like a toy. The ground around the lander is scuffed by my footprints.

The mountains rise up like topped-off pyramids into the black sky. These are mountains which date back almost to the formation of the solar system itself, their contours eroded to smoothness. The constant micrometeorite hail is grinding the Moon to dust. There is a layer of shattered rock and dust, all over the Moon.

I feel isolated, detached, suspended over the rubble of a billion years.

Svetlana, here is how I live on the Moon.

My lander is five metres tall. It consists of a boxy rocket stage standing on four legs, and a fat cabin on top. The cabin is a bulbous, misshapen ball, capped by a fat, wide disk, which is a docking device. Two dinner-plate-sized antennae are stuck out on extensible arms from the descent stage. The whole assemblage is swathed in a green blanket, for thermal insulation.

My cabin is a cosy nest, lined with green fabric. My couch occupies much of the space. Behind my head there is a hatch. There are three small viewing ports recessed into the cabin walls. At my left hand is a console with radio equipment and instruments to regulate temperature and air humidity. On the wall opposite my face, TV and film cameras peer at me. My food is squeezed from tubes. Cupboards set in the walls of the cabin are crammed with such tubes.

The cabin is, in fact, an orbital module adapted from Korolev's new spacecraft design, called Soyuz. This lander is an early model, of course. Little more than an engineering prototype, lacking an engine to bring me home.

Crude solar arrays are draped on frames across the surface of the Moon. In the lander are batteries, capturing the sun energy that keeps me alive during the long nights. But after so many years the lunar weather has taken its toll. The insulation blankets are discoloured. All the equipment is thoroughly irradiated, and remarkably dusty. The paint has turned to tan, but it is uneven, and where I look more closely I can see tiny micrometeorite pits, little craters dug into the paintwork.

Each time I get back into my shelter, I find new scars in my faceplate: tiny pits from the invisible interplanetary sleet within which I walk. Soon I will be blinded.

Moon dust gets in my lungs and causes chest pains. It eats away at joints and seals. Eventually, I suspect, it will overtake me, and everything mechanical will just stop working.

One good thing is that in the lunar vacuum, the dust when disturbed will settle out ballistically. I have kept it clear of my solar panels simply by placing them a metre off the ground, too high for casually disturbed dust to reach.

I have filed reports on many such observations, for I am enthusiastic about the future of the colonized Moon.

cal342 let her viewpoint soar over the surface of the abandoned Moon.

The evidence of the ancient terraforming effort lay everywhere: the gouged-out canals which the micrometeorite wind had yet to erode, the jewel-like cities still sparkling under a thickening layer of dust, the glimmer of frozen air in the shadowed cold traps of the poles.

A million years of human history were wrapped around this small world. That was almost as long as Earth itself - for the first immigration to the Moon had occurred just a few dozen millennia after the emergence of the primal sapiens species itself - but now only shreds and shards of primitive technology remained here, as if ape-fingers had never disturbed this dusty ground.

Now that ancient equilibrium was under threat.

A perturbed Oort Cloud comet was approaching. It would be, it was said, the greatest impact event in the solar system since the formation of Earth-Moon itself. And cal342 was here to witness it.

She found the two bodies nestling in an eroded crater at a dust sea's edge.

The first was the physical shell she had prepared for herself. She settled into it.

… She found herself breathing. She was gazing at the sky from within a cage of bone: authentically primate, of course, but oddly restricting.

The second body, lying beside her now, was much more ancient.

Even now, with primate eyes, cal342 could see the intruder. It was the brightest object in the sky save the sun: a spark of glowering red in the plane of the ecliptic, a point light in a place it didn't belong.

It was a star, called Gliese 710.

Gliese was making its closest approach to the sun: close enough that it had plunged into the Oort Cloud, the thick belt of comets that lay at the periphery of the solar system. For millennia already the rogue dwarf had been hurling giant ice worldlets into the system's vulnerable heart. Many of cadi's contemporaries had, in fact, bluntly refused to endure this difficult time, and had suspended consciousness until the star had receded.

Not cal342, though.

cal342 had lived a very long time, and she had achieved a certain contentment. She could think of no better way of terminating her existence than this.

For humanity faced a crisis of purposelessness.

Once humans, proudly conscious, had indulged in a certain arrogance. Quantum physics described the universe as filled with uncertainties and probability and ghostly multiple existences. The distinguishing property of consciousness was the ability to observe: for when an observation was made, the quantum functions would collapse, uncertainty would disappear, and the universe became - if only briefly and locally - definite.

Humans had spread among the stars, and had found nobody like themselves. So, it had seemed, humans were unique in their consciousness. Perhaps by their observing, humans were actually calling the universe itself into existence. Perhaps humans had been created by the universe so that it could generate itself.

But then, in laboratories on the still and silent Moon, spontaneous quantum collapse had been detected in inanimate objects.

In humble rocks, in fact.

An individual particle might take a hundred million years to achieve this - but in a large object, such as a Moon rock, there were so very many particles that one of them would almost immediately collapse its wave function - and then, in a cascade effect of entangled quantum functions, the rest would immediately follow. It was called, after the twentieth-century scientists who first proposed the phenomenon, the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber effect.

The agonized debate had lasted a hundred thousand years.

At the end of it, there was no doubt that the rocky Moon -scarred by impacts and the clumsy meddling of humans, bearing its own sullen biological lode - was itself alive, and, in some huge geologic sense, aware. And so were other small, stable worlds, and many other unpromising structures. The uniqueness of humans was lost.

Now they knew how to look, humans found nothing but mind, infesting the giant structures of the universe. But it was mind that was patient, geologic, immortal. Nothing like their freakish selves.

There was nobody, anywhere, to talk to; and certainly nobody to care.

Science slowed. Art grew decadent. The various species of humanity fragmented and turned in on themselves. They were, it seemed, dancing in the face of oblivion, consuming the resources of worlds - even committing elaborate forms of suicide.

Like cal342 herself.

cal342 turned her head - it was like operating machinery - and looked at the body which lay beside her.

For almost a million years, since the collapse of its protective domes, the body had been exposed to the micrometeorite rain. The top of the body had imploded, leaving a gaping, empty chest cavity, a crumbling hollow shell around it. The head was exposed, and eroded pinnacles of bone hinted at the shape of a skull, eye sockets staring. This human corpse was of the Moon now, reduced to lunar dust, made the same colour as the dark regolith.

Of the Moon, and of the life within it.

Was it possible this ancient traveller, coupled to the chthonic mind of the Moon, was still, in some sense, aware? Was he dreaming, as he waited for the comet?

And if so, what were his dreams?

She looked up. The comet light was bright now.

Her choice of viewpoint had been deliberate. Here she was, as humans had always been, her very size suspended between atoms and stars. She was a transient construct arising from baryonic matter, itself a small island in a sea of dark. Her consciousness was spindrift, soon to dissipate.

She dug her hands into crumbling regolith. She wondered if the patient Moon understood what would become of it today.

Fear stabbed.

At the appointed hour I saw the cargo vessel descend.

It was a glittering star in the sunlight, its rocket flame invisible. It came down over the prow of Rimma Crater, perhaps a mile from me. This marked success, Svetlana! Some past craft had failed to leave Earth orbit, or had missed the Moon, or had come down impracticably far away from me, or had crashed.

Elated, I loaded up my cart and set off.

Soon I approached the walls of Rimma Crater. The climb was tiring. My suit was stiff, as if I was inside an inflated tyre.

At the crater rim there were rocks everywhere, poking through a mantle of dust. The crater walls plummeted steeply to a floor of smashed-up rock a hundred metres below.

And there, planted in the crater's centre, was the spacecraft.

But the landing had been faulty. The frame had collapsed, and the Lunokhod rover - an eight-wheeled bathtub shape - lay smashed open, glittering, amid the wreckage of the landing stage.

There was a light in the sky. I looked up. I had to tip back on my heels to do it.

I saw the Earth,- a fat crescent, four times the size of a full

Moon. And there, crossing the zenith, was a single, brilliant, unwinking star: it was the orbiting Command Module of an American Apollo spacecraft, waiting to take its astronauts home.

I think I knew at that moment that I would not return home.

I readied my cart and clambered down into Rimma Crater, preparing to salvage the Lunokhod.

The comet nucleus slammed into the Moon's southern hemisphere.

A shock wave raced into the structure of the impactor and vaporized it immediately. A cloud of gas and molten silicate and iron billowed away from the Moon. And a second wave dug down into the ancient hide of the Moon, pulverizing and compressing. The lunar rocks rebounded with equal violence; they disintegrated utterly and exploded from the new cavity.

Then - seconds after the impact, even before the ejecta fell back - the excavated zone began to freeze. Waves of liquid rock froze like ripples on a sluggish pond. The new mountain walls began to collapse under their own weight, forming complex terraces.

But now the ejecta spray fell back from space, blanketing the new mountains in a vast sheet of molten rock.

It was over in minutes. Immediately the steady hail of microme-teorites began its millennial work, darkening and eroding the new deposits.

The cooling scar was the largest impact crater in the solar system.

The Moon, spinning, cooling, steadily receded from its parent Earth. For a time its axis of spin rocked, disturbed by Gliese and the impact. But at last even that residual motion died away, and once more the rigid face of the Moon was locked towards Earth.

But the impact, and Gliese's ferocious gravity, had loosened Earth's ancient grip on its battered offspring.

Month by month, the Moon's orbit became wider, more chaotic.

At last the Moon wandered away, to begin an independent path around the sun.

Goodbye, goodbye.

It was Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov who informed me of the decision of the Presidium. One cosmonaut to another. I admired the way he spoke. I am not certain I could have achieved such dignity.

The N-i booster programme has been abandoned after continuing failure. No more cosmonauts will be flying to the Moon.

Our managers, it seemed, tried to strike a bargain with the Americans. If they would use a late Apollo flight to retrieve me, my flight would remain a secret - as would my triumph - and the Americans would take the public credit for reaching the Moon first. It is not a bargain I would have welcomed, even if it had saved my life!

But the last Apollos have been cancelled by the Americans; tens of millions of dollars are too high a price to pay, it seems, for my life.

My stranding here was always a possibility, of course. Even so I accepted the challenge gladly! My mission, should it succeed, could only reflect glory and honour on the Communist Party, and on Soviet science and technology.

… But there was something in Alexei's tone which conveyed to me a deeper truth.

The Soviet Union cannot admit that at the heart of their space programme was the callous sacrifice of a cosmonaut. And NASA will never admit that their pilot was not the first to the Moon. Thus both sides are locked forever in a shameful compact of deception.

Stranded on the Moon, waiting to die, I am an object of shame, not of glory. I am a relic of a different age, to be hidden.

My cabin is full of noise. There are hundreds of electrical devices, fans, regenerators, carbon-dioxide absorbers and filters. It is like being inside a busy apartment. But in an apartment, a home, there are voices, the noises of life. Here there is only machinery.

I do not begrudge Colonel Armstrong his glory. He is a good pilot. If Korolev and Gagarin had lived, I believe it might have been different.

Humans had exploded from their planet, dug briefly into the Moon's ancient hide, and disappeared.

After the separation of Earth and Moon, humans never returned.

The sun was gradually growing warmer. After a mere billion years, life on Earth was overwhelmed. Five billion years more, and the sun's failing core caused it to swell up and destroy its inner planets.

Not the Moon, though.

The freed Moon circled patiently before the sun's swollen, ferocious face, until the last fires died, and the sun collapsed.

A binary star system, long extinguished, veered past the sun; and the Moon, at last, was torn free.

It began a long journey into the darkness, out of the plane of the disintegrating solar system.

For a time new stars flared around the wandering Moon. And in the rings of rock which surrounded the developing stars, small rocky worlds were born. They glowed briefly in the light of their gaudy parents, and waited for the stillness that would inevitably come.

At last, though, the galaxy's resources were depleted. After a hundred billion years no new stars could form. And after a hundred thousand billion years, the last of the stars were reaching the end of their lives.

The great darkness fell over the universe.

Slow cosmic expansion isolated the wreckage of the galaxy from its neighbours. And within that wreckage - a drifting mass of black holes, neutron stars, black dwarfs, stray planets - the soft leakage of gravitational waves caused a gentle, subtle collapse.

The remnant of a star cluster orbited the giant black hole that lurked, slowly evaporating, at the core of the galaxy.

The drifting Moon approached the cluster.

It is lunar night. I am walking across the face of a new Moon. My suit is protesting noisily.

I climb the wall of Rimma Crater.

The phases of the Earth and Moon are opposite. And so the Earth is full, fat above me, a shiny blue ball, laced about by cloud. Its light is blue and cold, and somehow it seems to suit the gentle curves of the Moon, these old, eroded hills.

Time is stretched out here, in the Moon's soft gravity. A day lasts a month. And beneath that there is a still grander scale of time, of the slow evolution of the Moon itself. I look at the hills, the crater-sculpted plain beneath, and I know that I could have come here a billion years ago, or a billion years from now, to find the same scene.

The Moon cares nothing for time.

Perhaps Earth, with its complex geology and cargo of life, is unique. But the galaxy must be full of small, timeless worlds like this one. Explorers of the future will stand on a hundred, a thousand worlds like this, peering up at different patterns of stars. And will they remember this, the original Moon, the prototypical destination for mankind?

And as I frame these dreamlike thoughts, it is as if, for a brief moment, I have come further than the Moon itself: as if, in fact,

I have spread myself across the stars, to the ends of space and time, like the godlike people of the farthest future. They have stopped talking to me.

I refuse to be hidden upstairs, on this Moon, like an insane uncle.

Trillion-year meditations were enriched by the slow gathering of rocky worlds, torn loose of the evaporating galaxy.

Here was one such, approaching the great clustering of mind, as if with caution.

Curiosity was engaged, briefly.

Remnants of crude structures, long vanished, were observed on its surface - and even traces of an ancient carbon-hydrogen body, a spindrift remnant clinging to the rocky world, preserved by the deeper geologic soul.

But none of that was important.

If there had been awareness of humanity's brief span, there would have been only pity.

Humans had been tragic, fluttering, fragile creatures: spindrift, with no future or past. And they had vanished without ever understanding why they were so alone.

The truth was, humans had emerged in a dull corner of the universe.

Amid the crashing energies of galaxy cores, by the light of clusters of a million swarming stars, in the giant molecular clouds that spanned whole systems: those were the deeps where the great minds had gathered, minds like gongs, minds beyond the reach - even the imagination - of mankind. No wonder humans had never understood.

The spark of chthonic consciousness - swimming out of the darkness, its mountains eroded almost to smoothness - was enfolded at last.

Welcome, welcome.

I lie in the soft, silent dust.

I can feel its cold, sucking at my warm body through the layers of my suit. I am in the crater's shadow here; the sun will never reach my crumbling bones. I will record as long as I can, dear Svetlana.

The psychologists who prepared me said that, according to Freud, there is no time in the unconscious. And that, at certain

intensely charged moments, there is no time in consciousness itself. Can that be true?

And can it be that, at the moment of death, the most intense moment of all, the mind accelerates and the soul becomes eternal - an eternity crammed into that last exquisite instant?

If so, here on the timeless Moon, what will I dream?

Svetlana, the daughter I never held! I love you!

Tears flood my eyes, blurring the light of the full Earth.

Touching Centauri

Fermi obsesses me (Malenfant wrote to his grandson). I know it does. Your grandmother - Emma, who died before you were born - must have spent half her life telling me as much.

But the more I think about it the more puzzling it gets.

The more I think there must be something wrong with the universe. That's all there is to it.

Kate Manzoni was there the day Reid Malenfant poked a hole in the wall of reality.

When she arrived in the auditorium, Malenfant was speaking from a podium. 'Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to JPL, and the climax of Project Michelangelo. This truly is a historic moment. For today, June 14 2025, we are anticipating the returned echo of the laser pulse we fired at the planet Alpha Centauri A-4, more than eight years ago…'

It was her first glimpse of Malenfant. He stood in a forest of microphones, a glare of TV lights. To either side of Malenfant, Kate recognized Cornelius Taine, the reclusive mathematician (and rumoured marginal autistic) who had come up with the idea for the project, and Vice President Maura Delia, spry seventy-something, who had pushed the funding through Congress.

Kate was here for the human angle, and by far the most interesting human in this room was Malenfant himself. But right now he was still talking like a press release.

'Four light years out, four light years back: it has been a long journey for our beam of light, and only a handful of plucky photons

will make it home. But we'll be here to greet them - and think what it means. Today, we will have proof that our monkey fingers have touched Centauri…'

Kate allowed her attention to drift.

JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had turned out to look like a small hospital, squashed into a cramped and smoggy Pasadena-suburb site dominated by the green shoulders of the San Gabriel Mountains. This was the von Karman auditorium, the scene of triumphant news conferences when JPL had sent probes to almost every planet in the solar system. Heady days - but long gone now, and JPL had been returned to the Army to do weapons research, its original purpose.

Well, today the big old auditorium was crowded again, with mission managers and scientists and politicians and journalists -like Kate herself - all crammed in among the softscreen terminals. Camera drones drifted like party balloons overhead, or darted like glittering insects through the air.

She walked past display stands, between scrolling softscreen images and bullshitting nerd-scientist types, all eager to lecture the gathered lay folk on the wonders of Project Michelangelo.

She could learn, for example, how the planets of the twin star system Alpha Centauri had first been detected back in 2010, by a European Space Agency planet-hunter probe called Eddington. Working with robotic patience in the silence of space, Eddington had detected minute oscillations in Alpha A's brightness: the signature of a whole system of planets passing before the star's face.

Of most interest was the fourth planet out, Alpha A-4. Not much bigger than Earth, A-4 orbited in the so-called Goldilocks zone: not too far from its sun for water to freeze, not so close to be too hot for life. Follow-up studies had shown that A-4's atmosphere contained methane. What was significant about that was that it was chemically unstable: there had to be some mechanism to inject such a reactive gas into A-4's unseen air.

Most likely candidate: life.

But still, despite these exciting hints, A-4 was little more than a dot of light, huddled blurrily close to its sun. There were plans underway to launch high-resolution space telescopes to image the continents and oceans of this second Earth, as everybody hoped it would turn out to be.

But now, ahead of all that, here was Reid Malenfant fronting

up Project Michelangelo: an audacious attempt to bounce a laser beam off a planet of Alpha Centauri.

Malenfant had come down off his podium. Standing under an image of Michelangelo's God and Adam - the famous fingertip touch that had become a cliched icon for this kind of endeavour - he was mixing it with the journos and pols and various VIP types at the front of the auditorium. Everybody was talking at once, though not to each other, all of them yammering into com systems mounted on their wrists and lapels.

But even so, for this bitty, distracted audience, Malenfant was holding forth about life in space. 'For me the whole course of my life has been dominated by a simple question: Where is everybody} Even as a kid I knew that the Earth was just a ball of rock, on the fringe of a nondescript galaxy. I just couldn't believe that there was nobody out there looking back at me down here…' In his sixties, Malenfant was tall, wiry slim, with a bald head shining like a piece of machinery. Close to, he looked what he was, a grounded astronaut, ridiculously fit, tanned deep. 'I lapped up everything I could find on how space is a high frontier, a sky to be mined, a resource for humanity. All that stuff shaped my life. But is that all there is to it? Is the sky really nothing more than an empty stage for mankind? But if not, where are they} This is called the Fermi Paradox…'

He fell silent, gazing at Kate, who had managed to worm her way to the front of the loose pack. He glanced at her name-tag. 'Ms Manzoni. From -?'

'I'm freelancing today.' She forced a smile. She could smell desert dust on him, hot and dry as a sauna.

'And you think there's a story in the Fermi Paradox?'

She shrugged, non-committal. 'I'm more interested in you, Colonel Malenfant.'

He was immediately suspicious, even defensive. 'Just Malenfant.'

'Of all the projects you could have undertaken when you were grounded, why front a stunt like this?'

He shrugged. 'Look, if you want to call this a stunt, fine. But we're extending the envelope here. Today we'll prove that we can touch other worlds. Maybe an astronaut is the right face to head up a groundbreaker project like this.'

'Ex-astronaut.'

His grin faded.

Fishing for an angle, she said, 'Is that why you're here? You

were born in i960, weren't you? So you remember Apollo. But by the time you grew up cheaper and smarter robots had taken over the exploring. Now NASA says that when the International Space Station finally reaches the end of its life, it plans no more manned spaceflight of any sort. Is this laser project a compensation for your wash-out, Malenfant?'

He barked a laugh. 'You know, you aren't as smart as you think you are, Ms Manzoni. It's your brand of personality-oriented cod-psychology bullshit that has brought down -'

'Are you lonely?'

That pulled him up. 'What?'

'The Fermi Paradox is all about loneliness, isn't it? - the loneliness of mankind, orphaned in an empty universe… Your wife, Emma, died a decade back. I know you have a son, but you never remarried -'

He glared at her. 'You're full of shit, lady.'

She returned his glare, satisfied she had hit the mark.

But as she prepared her next question, the auditorium crowd took up chanting along with a big softscreen clock: '… Twenty!… Nineteen!… Eighteen!…' She looked away, distracted, and Malenfant took the opportunity to move away from her.

She worked her way through the crowd until she could see the big softscreen display at the front of the auditorium. It was a tapestry of more-or-less incomprehensible graphic and digital updates.

She prepared her floating camera drones, and the various pieces of recording technology embedded in her flesh and clothing. The truth was, whatever data came back with those interstellar photons wouldn't matter; today's iconic image would be that pure instant of triumph when that faint echo returned from Alpha A-4, and those graphs and charts leapt into jagged animation. And that, and the accompanying swirl of emotions, would be what she must capture.

But in the midst of her routine she found room for a sliver of wonder. This was after all about reaching out to a second Earth, just as Malenfant had said - maybe it was a stunt, but what a stunt…

Everybody was growing quiet, all faces turned up to the big softscreen.

The ticking clock moved into the positive. The shimmering graphs remained flatlined. There was silence. Then, as nothing continued to happen, a mutter of conversation.

Kate was baffled. There had been no echo. How could that be? She knew this was an experiment that would have been accurate to a fraction of a second; there was no possibility of a time error. Either the receiving equipment had somehow failed to work - or else the laser pulse from Earth had gone sailing right through planet Alpha A-4 as if it was an image painted on glass…

She peered around frantically, trying to get a first impression of the principals' reaction. She saw the back of Malenfant's head as he stared stolidly at the unresponsive screen, as if willing the displays to change. Veep Delia frowned and stroked her chin.

Cornelius Taine was grinning.

Something is very, very wrong here. And you want to know something else?

Kate floated in the dark, freed of gravity and sensation, listening to her own voice.

'Tell me,' he whispered.

It's getting wronger. They tested the whole set-up the day before with a bounce off a deep-space comet a hundred astronomical units out - twice as far as Pluto. I happen to know they repeated the echo test off that same comet a few hours after the Centauri experiment failed.

'And they couldn't find the comet.'

You're getting the idea. Michelangelo shouldn't have failed. It couldn't have failed…

This was one of her virtual correspondents, an entity (maybe multiple) she knew only as Rodent, his/her/their anonymity protected by layers of encryption and chaff. But the transmission was encoded in her own voice; she liked to imagine it was the other half of herself, dreaming-Kate whispering across her corpus callosum, that bridge between her brain's hemispheres within which was embedded the implant that had dropped her into this virtual world.

But the images that floated before her now, of angular, expensive machinery, had come from no dream.

The laser burst was generated in low Earth orbit by a nuclear fusion pulse. A trillion watts of power compressed into a fraction of a second. They have been building toys like this for decades, at places like Lawrence Livermore. Got a big boost under Gore-Clinton, and even more under Clinton-Clinton…

Much had been learned about other worlds, even from Earth,

I

by techniques like Michelangelo's: the cloud-shrouded surface of Venus had first been studied by radar beams emitted from giant ground-based radio telescopes, for instance. But Alpha A-4 was more than seven thousand times as far away as Pluto, the solar system's outermost planet. Michelangelo's vast outreaching was orders of magnitude more difficult than anything attempted before

- and in some quarters had been criticized as premature. Maybe those critics had been proved right. 'So the experiment

failed. It happens.'

Kate, the laser worked. Look, they could see the damn pulse as it was fired off into the dark.

'But that's just the first step. You're talking about a shot across four light years, of projecting planetary movements across four years' duration.' The scientists had had to aim their pulse, not at A-4 itself, but at the place A-4 was expected to be by the time the light pulse got there. It had been a speed-of-light pigeon shoot

- but a shoot of staggering precision. 'And Alpha Centauri is a triple star; what if the planet's motions were perturbed, or -'

A-4 is so close to its parent that its orbit is as stable as Earth's. Kate, believe me, this is just Newtonian clockwork; the predictions couldn't have gone wrong. Likewise the geometry of the reflection. Once those photons were launched, an echo had to come back home.

'Then maybe the receiving equipment is faulty.'

They were watching for those photons with equipment on Earth, in low Earth orbit, on the Moon, and with the big Trojan-point radio telescope array. Short of the sun going nova, what fault could take down all of that? Kate, Michelangelo had to work. There are inquiries going on at every level from the lab boys to the White House, but they'll all conclude the same damn thing.

In swam an image of Malenfant, justifying himself on some TV show. 'There's nothing wrong with our technology,' he was saying. 'So maybe there is something wrong with the universe…'

See?

Kate sighed. 'So what's the story? Obscure space experiment fails in unexplained manner… There's no meat in that sandwich.'

Do what you do best. Focus on the people. Go find Malenfant. And ask him about Voyager. 'Voyager - the spacecraft?'

You know, when it fires, that damn laser destroys itself. Makes

a single cry to the stars, then dies, a billion dollars burned up in a fraction of a second. Kind of a neat metaphor for our wonderful military-industrial complex, don't you think?

She failed to find Malenfant. She did find his son. She cleared her desk and went to see the son, two days after the failed experiment.

Meanwhile, so far as she could see, the world continued to turn, people went about their business, and the news was the usual buzz of politics and personalities - of Earthbound matters like the water war in the Sahel, the latest Chinese incursion into depopulated Russia, the Attorney General's continuing string of extra-marital affairs.

Most people knew about the strange news from Alpha Centauri. Few seemed to think it mattered. The truth was, for all the mutter-ings of Rodent and his ilk, she wasn't sure herself. She still sensed there was a story here, however.

And she was growing a little scared.

Mike Malenfant, aged 30, lived with his wife, Saranne, in a suburb of Houston called Clear Lake. He opened the door. 'Oh. Ms Manzoni.' 'Call me Kate… Have we met?'

'No.' He grinned at her. 'But Malenfant told me about you, and what you said to him the night of Michelangelo. Seemed to bug him more than the failure itself.'

She thought, He calls his dad by his surname? Father-son rivalry? He didn't look much like his father: rounder, smaller, with dense black hair he must have inherited from his mother. 'Uh, would you rather I left?'

'No. My dad is a little 1970s sometimes. I don't have a problem with what you do. How did you find me? We keep our name out of the books.'

That wouldn't have stopped her, she thought. But it had been easier than that. 'I played a hunch. Malenfant used to live here, with Emma. So I guessed -'

He grinned again. 'You guessed right. Malenfant will be even more pissed to know he's so predictable.' He took her indoors and introduced his wife, Saranne: pretty, heavily pregnant, tired-looking. 'Tea?'

With a camera drone hovering discreetly at her shoulder, Kate began gently to interview the couple.

Close to the Johnson Space Center, Clear Lake was a place of retro-chic wooden-framed houses backing onto the fractal-edged water. This had long been a favoured domicile of NASA astronauts and their families. When Malenfant's career had taken him away from Houston and NASA, son Mike had happily - so it seemed - taken over the house he had grown up in, with its battered rowboat still tied up at the back.

Some of what Mike had to say - about the life of a soft-muscled, intellectual boy growing up as the son of America's favourite maverick astronaut - was illuminating, and might make a useful colour piece some day. So Kate wasn't being entirely dishonest. But her main objective, of course, was to keep them talking until Malenfant showed up - as he surely would, since she'd sent a provocative note to his message service to say she was coming.

Mike hadn't followed his father's career path. He had become a virtual character designer, moderately successful in his own right. Now, with his business-partner wife expecting their first child, this was maybe a peak time of his life. But even so he didn't seem to resent the unspoken and obvious truth that Kate was here because he was Malenfant's son, not for himself alone.

One thing that was immediately nailed home in her awareness was how much Mike - and, it seemed, Malenfant himself - missed Emma: Mike's mother, Malenfant's wife, taken away by cancer before she was forty. She wondered how much of a difference it might have made to everybody's lives if Emma had survived.

As the low-afternoon sun started to glint off the stretch of lake out back, the old man arrived.

He launched into her as soon as he walked in the door. 'Ms Manzoni, the great pap-peddler. You aren't welcome here. This is my son's home, and I have a job to do. So why don't you take your drones and your implants and shove them up -'

'As far as the implants are concerned,' Kate said dryly, 'somebody already did that for me.'

That got a laugh out of Mike, and the mood softened a little.

But Malenfant kept up his glare. 'What do you want, Manzoni?'

'Tell me about Voyager,' she said.

Mike and Saranne looked quizzical. Malenfant looked away. Aha, she thought.

'Voyager,' she said to Mike and Saranne. 'Two space probes designed to explore the outer planets, launched in the 1970s. Now

they are floating out of the solar system. About a decade ago they crossed the heliopause - the place where the star winds blow, the boundary of interstellar space - right, Malenfant? But the Voyagers are still working, even now, and the big radio telescopes can still pick up their feeble signals ... A heroic story, in its way.'

Mike shrugged. 'So, a history lesson. And?'

'And now something's happened to them. That's all I know.'

Malenfant was stony-faced, arms folded.

For a moment it looked like developing into an impasse. But then, to Kate's surprise, Saranne stepped forward, hands resting on her belly. 'Maybe you should tell her what she wants to know, Malenfant.'

It was as if Malenfant was suddenly aware she was there. 'Why?'

'There's a lot of buzz about your experiment.' Saranne was dark, her eyes startling blue. 'There's something strange going on, isn't there? Don't you think we've a right to know about it?'

Malenfant softened. 'Saranne - it's not so easy. Sometimes there is no use asking questions, because there are no meaningful answers.'

Kate frowned. 'And sometimes there are answers, but there's nothing to be done - is that it, Malenfant? Don't tell the children the truth, for fear of frightening them -'

His anger returned. 'This has nothing the hell to do with you.'

Saranne said, 'Come on, Malenfant. If she's found out something, so will everybody else soon enough. This isn't i960.'

He barked a bitter laugh.

'Voyager,' Kate prompted.

'Voyager. Okay. Yesterday the Deep Space Network lost contact with the spacecraft. Both Voyagers 1 and 2. Within a couple of hours.'

Mike said, 'Is that so significant? They were creaky old relics. They were going to fade out sometime.'

Malenfant eyed his son. 'Both together? After so long? How likely is that? And anyhow we had a handle on how much power they had left. It shouldn't have happened.'

Kate said, 'Was this after the comet, or before?'

Mike said, 'What comet?'

'The one that went missing when your father's laser tried to echo-sound it.'

Malenfant frowned. Evidently he hadn't expected her to know

about that either. 'After,' he said. 'After the comet.'

Kate tried to put it together in her head. A series of anomalies, then: that missing planet of Alpha Centauri, a comet out in the dark, the lonely Voyagers. All evaporating.

Each event a little closer to the sun.

Something is coming this way, she thought. Like footprints in the dew.

A softscreen chimed; Mike left the room to answer it.

Malenfant kept up his glare. 'Come on, Manzoni. Forget Voyager. What do you really want here?'

Kate glanced at Malenfant and Saranne, and took another flyer. 'What's the source of the tension between you two?'

Malenfant snapped, 'Don't answer.'

But Saranne said evenly, 'It's this.' She stroked her bump. 'Baby Michael.' She watched Malenfant's uncomfortable reaction. 'See? He's not even happy with the fact that we know Michael's sex, that we named him before his birth.'

'You know it's not that,' Malenfant growled.

Kate guessed, 'Has the child been enhanced?'

'Nothing outrageous,' Saranne said quickly. 'Anti-ageing treatments: telomerase, thymus and pineal-gland adjustments. In the womb he's been farmed for stem cells and organ clones. And we chose a few regenerative options: regrowing fingers, toes and spinal column…'

'He'll be able to hibernate,' Malenfant said, his tone dangerously even. 'Like a goddamn bear. And he might live forever. Nobody knows.'

'He's going to grow up in a dangerous world. He needs all the help he can get.'

Malenfant said, 'He's your kid. You can do what you like.'

'He's your grandson. I wish I had your blessing.' But her tone was cool; Kate saw she was winning this battle.

Malenfant turned on Kate. 'How about your family, Ms Manzoni?'

She shrugged. 'My parents split when I was a kid. I haven't seen my father since. My mother -' 'Another broken home. Jesus.'

'It's not a big deal, Malenfant. I was the last in my high school class to go through a parental divorce.' She smiled at Saranne, who smiled back.

But Malenfant, visibly unhappy, was lashing out at Kate, where

he couldn't at Saranne. 'What kind of way to live is that? It's as if we're all crazy.'

Saranne said carefully, 'Malenfant has a certain amount of difficulty with the modern world.'

Kate said, 'Malenfant, I don't believe you're such a sour old man. You ought to be happy for Saranne and Mike.'

Saranne said, 'And I sure have the right to do the best for my kid, Malenfant.'

'Yes. Yes, you do,' he said. 'And the responsibility. God knows I admire you for that. But can't you see that if everyone does what's best for themselves alone, we're all going to hell in a hand-basket? What kind of world will it be where the rich can buy immortality, while the poor continue to starve as fast as they breed?'

Kate thought she understood. 'You always look to the big picture, Malenfant. The Fermi Paradox, the destiny of mankind. Right? But most people don't think like that. Most people focus the way Saranne is focused, on whatever is best for their kids. What else can we do?'

'Take a look around. We're living in the world that kind of thinking has created.'

She forced a smile. 'We'll muddle through.'

'If we get the chance,' Malenfant said coldly.

Mike came back into the room, looking stunned. 'That was the Vice President. There's a helicopter on the way from Ellington Air Force Base. For you, Malenfant.'

Malenfant said, 'I'll be damned.'

Saranne looked scared. 'The Vice President?'

Kate frowned. 'Malenfant, don't you think you should find out what's going on before you get to Washington?' She walked to a wall and slapped it, opening up its comms facilities. 'Maybe you ought to ask Cornelius Taine.'

'Ask him what?'

She thought quickly, wondering where those footsteps would next fall. What was the furthest planet from the sun?… 'Pluto. Ask him about Pluto.'

Malenfant evidently didn't enjoy being told what to do by the likes of Kate Manzoni. But he punched in ident codes, and began to interact with a small patch of the wall.

Kate and the others waited; it wasn't a moment for small talk. Kate strained to hear the sounds of the chopper.

At length Malenfant straightened up. Before him, embedded in the smart wall, was an image of a planet: blue, streaked with white cloud.

Kate's heart thumped. 'Earth?'

He shook his head. 'And not Pluto either. This is a live image of Neptune. Almost as far out as Pluto. A strange blue world, blue as Earth, on the edge of interstellar space…'

Saranne said uneasily, 'What's wrong with it?'

'Not Neptune itself. Triton, its moon. Look.' He pointed to a blurred patch of light, close to Neptune's ghostly limb. When he tapped the wall, the patch moved, quite suddenly. Another tap, another move. Kate couldn't see any pattern to the moves, as if the moon was no longer following a regular orbit.

'I don't understand,' she said.

'Triton has started to… flicker. It hops around its orbit - or adopts another orbit entirely - or sometimes it vanishes, or is replaced by a ring system.' He scratched his bald pate. 'According to Cornelius, Triton was an oddity - circling Neptune backwards - probably created in some ancient collision event.'

'Even odder now,' Mike said dryly.

'Cornelius says that all these images - the multiple moons, the rings - are all possibilities, alternate outcomes of how that ancient collision might have come about. As if other realities are folding down into our own.' He searched their faces, seeking understanding.

Mike said, 'Malenfant, what has this to do with your laser shot?'

Malenfant spread his hands. 'Mike, I talk big, but we humans are pretty insignificant in the bigger scheme of things. Out there in the dark, somebody is playing pool with a moon. How can we have affected that}'

Kate took a breath. Neptune: a long way away, out in the dark, where the planets are cloudy spheres, and the sun's light is weak and rectilinear. But out there, she thought, something strange is stirring: something with awesome powers indeed, beyond human comprehension.

And it's coming this way. Whatever it is. She shuddered, and suppressed the urge to cross herself.

Saranne asked, 'Are the stars still shining?'

It struck Kate as an odd, naive question, but Malenfant seemed touched. 'Yes,' he said gently. 'Yes, the stars are still shining.'

Kate heard the flap of chopper blades. On impulse she snapped, 'Malenfant - take me with you.' He laughed and turned away.

Mike said, 'Maybe you should do it, Malenfant. I have the feeling she's smarter than you. Somebody needs to be thinking when you meet the Vice President.'

Malenfant turned to Kate. 'Quite a story you're building up here, Manzoni.'

If, she thought, I ever get to file it.

Outside, the noise of the descending chopper mounted. The reddening evening light dappled on the water of the lake, as it had always done, as if the strange lights in the sky were of no more import than a bad dream.

The limo pulled away. Malenfant, in his Navy uniform, was tweaking his cuffs. A blank-faced young soldier waited at his arm, ready to escort them into the building.

The Vice President's official residence was a rambling brick mansion on a broad green lawn, set at the corner of 34th Street and Massachusetts Avenue. Kate, who wasn't as accustomed to Washington as she liked to pretend, thought it looked oddly friendly, like a small-town museum, rather than a major centre of federal power.

Beyond the security fence city life went on as usual, a stream of Smart-driven traffic washing with oily precision along the street, tourists and office workers drifting along the sidewalk, speaking into the air to remote contacts.

Malenfant said, 'You wouldn't think the damn sky was about to fall, would you?'

'Everybody knows as much as we do,' she said. 'Nothing stays secret. So how come there isn't -'

'Panic buying?' he grinned. 'Rutting in the streets? Running for the hills? Because we don't get it, Manzoni. Look in your heart. You don't believe it, do you? Not deep down. We're not programmed to look further than the other guy's nose.'

Unexpectedly the young soldier spoke up. '"This is the way I think the world will end - with general giggling by all the witty heads, who think it is a joke.'" They looked at him, surprised. 'Kierkegaard. Sorry, sir. If you're ready, will you follow me?'

When they reached Maura Delia's office, Cornelius Taine was

already there, sitting bolt uptight on one of the overstuffed armchairs, already talking.

'Past speculation on artificial realities provides us with clues as to our likely response to finding ourselves in a "planetarium". You may remember movies in which the protagonist is the unwitting star of a TV show or movie, who invariably tries to escape. But the idea that the world around us may not be real reaches back to Plato, who wondered if what we see resembles the flickering shadows on a cave wall. And the notion of creating deceptive artificial environments dates back at least as far as Descartes, who in the seventeenth century speculated on the philosophical implications of a sense-manipulating "demon" - effectively a pre-technological virtual-reality generator…'

Delia, listening, waved Malenfant and Kate to seats. Kate selected an expensive-looking upright that creaked under her weight.

The office was large and spacious. The furniture was stuffed leather, the big desk polished mahogany, the wallpaper and carpets lush. But Maura Delia had stamped her personality on the room; on every wall were cycling softscreen images of the surfaces of Mars and Io, the gloomy oceans of Europa, a deep-space image of a galaxy field.

Malenfant leaned forward. 'Planetarium? What the hell are you talking about, Cornelius?'

Cornelius regarded him coolly. 'The logic is compelling, Malenfant. Your own logic: the Fermi Paradox, which you claim has driven your life. The Paradox defies our intuition, as well as philosophical principles such as the assumption of mediocrity, that it is only on our own apparently commonplace world that mind has evolved. The Paradox is surely telling us that something is fundamentally wrong with our view of the universe, and our place in it.'

Malenfant prompted, 'And so…'

'And so, perhaps the reason that the universe does not appear to make sense is that what we see around us is artificial.'

Malenfant let his mouth drop open.

Kate sat as still as she could, unsure how to react.

They were both looking at the Vice President, waiting for her lead.

Delia sighed. 'I know how this sounds. But Cornelius is here at my invitation, Malenfant. Look, I have plenty of people explaining

the rational possibilities to me. Perhaps we're in the middle of some huge solar storm, for instance, which is disrupting communications. Perhaps the solar system has wandered into a knot of interstellar gas, or even dark matter, which is refracting or diffusing electromagnetic radiation, including your laser beam -'

'None of which hangs together,' Kate guessed.

Delia frowned at her. Malenfant quickly introduced Kate as a personal aide.

Delia said, 'Okay. You're right. Nobody has come up with anything that works. It isn't just a question of some new anomaly; we have a situation for which, as far as I understand it, no explanation within our physical law is even possible… But here is Cornelius, with a proposal that is frankly outrageous -'

'But an outrageous problem requires outrageous proposals,' Cornelius said, his smile cold.

Malenfant said, 'Just tell me what you're talking about, Cornelius.'

Cornelius went on, 'Think about it. What if we have been placed in some form of "planetarium", perhaps generated using an advanced virtual reality technology, designed to give us the illusion of an empty universe - while beyond the walls with their painted stars, the shining lights of extraterrestrial civilizations glow unseen?'

'Which would resolve Fermi,' Malenfant said. 'They're there, but they are hiding.'

'Which would resolve Fermi, yes.'

'And now the planetarium's, uh, projector is breaking down. Hence A-4, Neptune and the rest. Is that what you're saying?' 'Exactly.'

Kate thought it over. 'That's what the Fermi experts call a zoo hypothesis.'

Cornelius looked impressed. 'So it is.'

'It belongs in a zoo,' Malenfant said. 'For one thing it's paranoid. It's classic circular logic: you could never disprove it. We could never detect we were in a planetarium because it's designed not to be detected. Right?'

'Malenfant, the fact that a hypothesis is paranoid doesn't make it wrong.'

Delia said, 'Let me see if I understand you, Cornelius. You're suggesting that not everything we see is real. How much of everything?'

Cornelius shrugged. 'There are several possible answers. It depends on how far the boundary of the artificial "reality" is set from the human consciousness. The crudest design would be like a traditional planetarium, in which we - our bodies - and the objects we touch are real, while the sky is a fake dome.'

Malenfant nodded. 'So the stars and galaxies are simulated by a great shell surrounding the solar system.'

'But,' said Kate, 'it would surely take a lot to convince us. Photons of starlight are real entities that interact with our instruments and eyes.'

Malenfant said, thinking, 'And you'd have to simulate not just photons but such exotica as cosmic rays and neutrinos. You're talking about some impressive engineering.'

Cornelius waved a hand, as if impatient with their ill-informed speculation. 'These are details. If the controllers anticipate our technological progress, perhaps even now they are readying the gravity-wave generators…'

'And what,' asked Delia, 'if the boundary is closer in than that?'

Cornelius said, 'There are various possibilities. Perhaps we humans are real, but some - or all - of the objects we see around us are generated as simulations, tangible enough to interact with our senses.'

'Holograms,' Kate said. 'We are surrounded by holograms.' 'Yes. But with solidity. Taste, smell…'

Malenfant frowned. 'That's kind of a brute-force way of doing it. You'd have to form actual material objects, all out of some kind of controlling rays. How? Think of the energy required, the control, the heat… And you'd have to load them with a large amount of information, of which only a fraction would actually interact with us to do the fooling.'

Delia said, 'And would these hologram objects be evanescent -like the images on a TV screen? In that case they would need continual refreshing - yes?'

Again Cornelius seemed impatient; this is a man not used to being questioned, Kate saw. 'It is straightforward to think of more efficient design strategies. For example, allowing objects once created to exist as quasi-autonomous entities within the environment, only loosely coupled to the controlling mechanism. This would obviate the need, for example, to reproduce continually the substance at the centre of the Earth, with which we never interact directly. But any such compromise is a step back from perfection.

With sufficient investment, you see, the controllers would have full control of the maintained environment.' Delia said, 'What would that mean?'

Cornelius shrugged. 'The controllers could make objects appear or disappear at will. The whole Earth, if necessary. For example.' There was a brief silence.

Delia got out of her chair and faced the window. She flexed her hands, and pressed her fingertips against the sunlit desk top, as if testing its reality. 'You know, I find it hard to believe we're having this conversation. Anything else?'

Cornelius said, 'A final possibility is that even our bodies are simulated, so that the boundary of reality is drawn around our very consciousness. We can already think of crude ways of doing this.' He nodded at Kate. 'For example, the fashionable implants in the corpus callosum that allow the direct downloading of virtual-reality sensations into the consciousness.'

'If that was so,' said Delia, 'how could we ever tell?'

Cornelius shook his head. 'If the simulation was good enough, we could not. And there would be nothing we could do about it. But I don't think we are in that situation.'

'How do you know?'

'Because the simulation is going wrong. Alpha A-4, the evaporation of the Oort Cloud, Neptune, the vanishing of Saturn's rings…'

Kate hadn't heard about Saturn; she found room for a brief, and surprising, stab of regret.

T think,' said Cornelius, 'that we should assume we are in a planetarium of the second type I listed. We are "real". But not everything around us is genuine.'

Delia turned and leaned on her desk, her knuckles white. 'Cornelius, whatever the cause, this wave of anomalies is working its way towards us. There is going to be panic; you can bet on that.'

Cornelius frowned. 'Not until the anomalies are visible in our own sky. Most of us have remarkably limited imaginations. The advance of the anomaly wave is actually quite well understood. Its progression is logarithmic; it is slowing as it approaches the sun. We can predict to the hour when effects will become visible to Earth's population.' His cool gaze met the Vice President's. 'That is, we can predict when the panicking will begin.'

Kate asked, 'How long?'

'Five more days. The precise numbers have been posted.' He

smiled, cold, analytical. 'You have time to prepare, madam Vice President. And if it is cloudy, Armageddon will no doubt be postponed by a few hours.'

Delia glowered at him. 'You're a damn cold fish, Cornelius. If you're right - what do you suggest we do?'

'Do?' The question seemed to puzzle him. 'Why - rejoice. Rejoice that the facade is cracking, that the truth will soon be revealed.'

A phone chimed, startling them all. Malenfant looked abstractedly into the air while an insect voice buzzed in his ear.

He turned to Kate. 'It's Saranne. She's gone into labour.'

The meeting broke up. Kate followed Malenfant out of the room, frustrated she hadn't gotten to ask the most important questions of all:

What controllers?

And, what do they want?

Her own voice wafted out of the dark.

You know who's really taking a bath over this? The astrologers. Those planets swimming around the sky are turning their fancy predictions into mush. And if this is the end of the world, how come none of them saw it coming?…

It was the fourth day after the Alpha echo had failed to return. Three days left, if Cornelius was right, until…

Until what?

'Don't talk about astrology,' she whispered. 'Tell me about reality.'

… Okay. Why do we believe that the universe is real? Starting with Bishop Berkeley, the solipsists have wondered if the apparently external world is contained within the observer's imagination - just as this virtual abyss we share is contained within the more limited imagination of a bank of computers.

'I don't see how you could disprove that.'

Right. But when Boswell asked Dr Johnson about the impossibility of refuting Berkeley's theory, Johnson kicked a large rock and said, 7 refute it thus.' What Johnson meant was that when the rock 'kicked back' at his foot, he either had to formulate a theory of physical law which explained the existence and behaviour of the rock - or else assume that his imagination was itself a complex, autonomous universe containing laws which precisely simulated the existence of the rock - which would therefore, imagination plus rock, be a more complex system. You see? If we're

in a planetarium there must be some vast hidden mechanism that controls everything we see. It's simpler to assume that what looks real is real.

'Occam's razor.'

Sure. But Occam's razor is a guide, not a law of physics… And turn it around. What if the universe is a simulation? Then we can use Dr Johnson's criterion to figure out what is required of the controllers.

'I don't understand.'

The model universe must have a lot of industrial-strength properties. For instance it must be consistent. Right? In principle, anybody anywhere could perform a scientific experiment of the finest detail on any sample of the universe and its contents, and find the fabric of reality yielding consistent results. The rocks have always got to 'kick back' in the same way, no matter where and how we kick them. So you have to build your cage that way. Expensive, right?

And the environment has to be self-contained: no explanations of anything inside should ever require the captives to postulate an outside. Kate, I bet if you had been born in this darkness you could figure out there has to be something beyond. How could your consciousness have emerged from this formless mush?

And so on. The technical challenge of achieving such a deep and consistent simulation should not be underestimated - and nor should the cost… Oh. It just reached Jupiter. Wow, what a spectacle. You want to see?

Her field of view filled up abruptly with fragmentary images, bits of cloud fractally laced, stained salmon pink.

She turned away, and the images disappeared.

Strange thought, isn't it? What if Cornelius is right? Here you are in one virtual reality, which is in turn contained within another. Layers of nested unreality, Kate…

Kate felt a sudden revulsion. 'Wake up, wake up.'

For long minutes she immersed herself in gritty reality: the pine scent that came from the open window of her bedroom, the song of the birds, the slow tick of the old-fashioned clock in the wall. Reality?

On impulse, she closed her eyes. 'Wake up. Wake up.' The clock continued to tick, the birds to sing.

Civil defence programmes were activated, Cold War bunkers reopened, food stocks laid down. Various space probes were hastily launched to meet the advancing anomaly. There was even an extraordinary crash programme to send an astronaut team to orbit the Moon, now seen as the last line of defence between Earth and sky.

Kate knew the government had to be seen doing something; that was what governments were there for.

But she knew it was all futile, and in its own way damaging. Though reassuring talking heads from the President on down tried to tell people to keep calm - and, more importantly, to keep showing up at work - there was growing disruption from the preparations themselves, if not from the strange lights in the sky, still invisible to the naked eye.

Of course it all got worse when Cornelius's countdown timetable became widely known.

She did a little digging into the history of Cornelius Taine.

He had been an academic mathematician. She hadn't even recognized the terms his peers used to describe Cornelius's achievements - evidently they covered games of strategy, economic analysis, computer architecture, the shape of the universe, the distribution of prime numbers - anyhow he had been on his way, it seemed, to becoming one of the most influential minds of his generation.

But his gift seemed non-rational: he would leap to a new vision, somehow knowing its Tightness instinctively, and construct laborious proofs later. Cornelius had remained solitary: he attracted awe, envy, resentment.

As he approached thirty he drove himself through a couple of years of feverish brilliance. Maybe this was because the well of mathematical genius traditionally dries up at around that age. Or maybe there was a darker explanation. It wasn't unknown for creativity to derive from a depressive or schizoid personality. And creative capacities could be used in a defensive way, to fend off mental illness.

Maybe Cornelius was working hard in order to stay sane. If he was, it didn't seem to have worked.

The anecdotes of Cornelius's breakdown were fragmentary. On his last day at Princeton they found him in the canteen, slamming his head against a wall, over and over.

After that Cornelius had disappeared for two years. Emma's data miners had been unable to trace how he spent that time.

When he re-emerged, it was to become a founding board member of a consultancy called Eschatology, Inc.

She took this to Malenfant. 'Don't you get it? Here's a guy who sees patterns in the universe nobody else can make out - a guy who went through a breakdown, driven crazy by the numbers in his head - a guy who now believes he can predict the end of humanity. If he came up to you in the street, what would you think of what he was muttering?'

'I hear what you say,' he said. 'But -'

'But what?'

'What if it's true} Whether Cornelius is insane or not, what if he's right? What then?' His eyes were alive, excited. 'He's gone to ground, you know,' she said. 'We have to find him.' It took two more precious days.

They tracked Cornelius to New York. He agreed to meet them at the head offices of Eschatology, Inc.

Kate wasn't sure what she had expected. Maybe a trailer home in Nevada, the walls coated with tabloid newspaper cuttings, the interior crammed with cameras and listening gear.

But this office, here in the heart of Manhattan, was none of that.

Malenfant was glaring at Cornelius. 'You know, I have the feeling you've played me for a patsy through this whole damn thing. You've always known more than me, been one step ahead, used me to front your projects without telling me the full logic -'

Cornelius laughed at him, with a chilling arrogance. He barely sees us as human beings at all, Kate realized. He said, 'Sore pride, Malenfant? Is that really what's most important to you? We really are just frightened chimpanzees, bewildered by the lights in the sky -'

'You arrogant asshole.'

Kate looked around the small, oak-panelled conference room. The three of them sat at a polished table big enough for twelve, with small inlaid softscreens. There was a smell of polished leather and clean carpets: impeccable taste, corporate lushness, anonymity. The only real sign of unusual wealth and power, in fact, was the enviable view - from a sealed, tinted window - of Central Park. She saw people strolling, children playing on the glowing green grass, the floating sparks of police drones everywhere.

The essentially ordinariness made it all the more scary, of course

- today being a day when, she had learned, Mars had gone, vanishing into a blurring wave of alternate possibilities, volcanoes and water-carved canyons and life traces and all.

Kate said, 'Malenfant's essentially right, isn't he? On some level you anticipated all this.' 'How can you know that?' 'I saw you smile. At JPL.'

Cornelius nodded. 'You see? Simple observation, Malenfant. This girl really is brighter than you are.' 'Get to the point, Cornelius.'

Cornelius sighed, a touch theatrically. 'You know, the facts are there, staring everybody in the face. The logic is there. It's just that most people are unwilling to think it through.

'Take seriously for one minute the possibility that we are living in a planetarium, some kind of virtual-reality projection. What must it cost our invisible controllers to run? We are an inquisitive species, Malenfant. At any moment we are liable to test anything and everything to destruction. To maintain their illusion, the controllers would surely require that their simulation of every object should be perfect - that is, undistinguishable from the real thing by any conceivable physical test.'

'No copy is perfect,' Malenfant said briskly. 'Quantum physics. Uncertainty. All that stuff.'

'In fact your intuition is wrong,' Cornelius said. 'Quantum considerations actually show that a perfect simulation is possible

- but it is energy-hungry.

'You see, there is a limit to the amount of information which may be contained within a given volume. This limit is called the Bekenstein Bound.' Equations scrolled across the table surface before Kate; she let them glide past her eyes. 'The Bound is essentially a manifestation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, a reflection of the fundamental "graininess" of our reality. Because of the existence of the Bound, every physical object is a finite state machine - that is, it only requires a finite number of bits to replicate its every possible condition. Therefore a perfect simulation of any physical object can be made - perfect, meaning undistinguishable from the real thing by any conceivable physical test.'

Kate said uneasily, 'Anything can be replicated?'

Cornelius smiled. 'Including you, Kate. But perfect simulations

are expensive. The bigger they are, the more energy they burn. And that is the chink in the controllers' armour.' 'It is?'

'As human civilization has progressed, successively larger portions of reality have come within our reach. And the extent of the universe which must be simulated to high quality likewise increases: the walls around reality must be drawn successively back. Before 1969, for example, a crude mock-up of the Moon satisfying only a remote visual inspection might have sufficed; but since 1969, we can be sure that the painted Moon had to be replaced with a rocky equivalent. You see?' He winked at Kate. 'A conspiracy theorist might point to the very different quality of the Moon's far side to its Earth-visible near side - mocked up in a hurry, perhaps?'

'Oh, bullshit, Cornelius,' Malenfant said tiredly.

Kate said, 'You actually have numbers for all this?'

Malenfant grunted. 'Numbers, yeah. The mathematics of paranoia.'

Cornelius, unperturbed, tapped at his desktop surface, and a succession of images, maps with overlays and graphs, flickered over its surface. 'We can estimate the resources required to run a perfect planetarium of any given size. It's just a question of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics.' He flicked a smile. 'Graduate physics. Two equations.

'Look here. For much of its pre-agricultural history humanity consisted of small roaming bands with little knowledge, save for tentative trading links, beyond a disc on the Earth's surface with radius of a few kilometres. To generate planetariums on such a scale would require no more than a few per cent of the energy available to a planetary-scale civilization: we could probably do it.

'But by the time you have to fool a cohesive culture covering a hundred kilometres - that's a lot smaller than the Roman Empire, say - the capabilities of that planetary-level civilization would be exceeded.

'The bigger the planetarium, the harder it gets. We can characterize our modern globe-spanning civilization by the radius of Earth and a depth corresponding to our deepest mines. To generate a planetarium on such a scale would exceed even the capability of a civilization able to master the energy output of a single star.

'A future human culture capable of direct exploration of the centre of the Earth, and able to reach comets twice as far away as Pluto, would exhaust the resources of a galaxy.

'And if we reach the stars, we would test the resources of any conceivable planetarium…'

Kate was bewildered by the escalation of number and concept. 'We would?'

'Imagine a human colonization disc of radius a hundred light years, embedded in the greater disc of the Galaxy. To simulate every scrap of mass in there would exceed in energy requirements the resources of the entire visible universe. So after that point, any simulation must be less than perfect - and its existence prone to our detection. The lies must end, sooner or later. But, of course, we might not have to wait that long.'

'Wait for what?'

'To crash the computer.' He grinned, cold; on some level, she saw, this was all a game to him, the whole universe as an intellectual puzzle. 'Perhaps we can overstretch their capacity to assemble increasing resources. Rushing the fence might be the way: we could send human explorers out to far distances in all directions as rapidly as possible, pushing back the walls around an expanding shell of space. But advanced robot spacecraft, equipped with powerful sensors, might achieve the same result…'

'Ah,' said Kate. 'Or maybe even active but ground-based measures. Like laser echoing. And that's why you pushed Project Michelangelo.'

Malenfant leaned forward. 'Cornelius - what have you done}' Cornelius bowed his head. 'By the logic of Fermi, I was led to the conclusion that our universe is, in whole or in part, a thing of painted walls and duck blinds. I wanted to challenge those who hide from us. The laser pulse to Centauri - a sudden scale expansion of direct contact by a factor of thousands - was the most dramatic way I could think of to drive the controllers' processing costs through the roof. And it must have caught them by surprise - our technology is barely able enough to handle such a feat -those critics were right, Malenfant, when they criticized the project for being premature. But they did not see my true purpose.'

Kate said slowly, 'I can't believe your arrogance. What gave you the right -'

'To bring the sky crashing down?' His nostrils flared. 'What gave them the right to put us in a playpen in the first place? If

we are being contained and deceived, we are in a relationship of unequals. If our controllers exist, let them show themselves and justify their actions. That was my purpose - to force them out into the open. And imagine what we might see! The fire-folk sitting in the air! I The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! ... Do you know Gerard Manley Hopkins?'

Malenfant shook his head. 'You were right, Kate. The guy is crazy.'

Cornelius studied them both. 'To practical matters. When the anomalies are visible to all, disorder among the foolish herds will follow. Soon flights will be grounded, the freeways jammed. If you wish to leave -'

Malenfant touched Kate's hand. 'Where is home for you?'

She shrugged. 'I have an apartment in LA. I don't even know where my parents are. Either of them.'

'It's not a time to be alone. Go be with your mom.'

'No.' She was shuddering. Her involvement in all this had long passed that of a journalist attached to a story; now she was just another human being, staring bewildered at the approaching hurricane - but here she was at the eye of the storm, and something about Malenfant's strength reassured her. 'Let me stay. Please.'

He nodded brusquely, avoiding her eyes. 'Cornelius, if you have nowhere else to go -'

Kate said, 'How long?'

Cornelius shrugged. 'The math is chancy. Twenty-four hours at best.'

It feels like half the population of the human race has downloaded. 'Into what?'

Into anything they can find. Some folk are trying to create self-sentient copies of themselves, existing entirely within the data nets. The ultimate bunker, right?

'I thought that is illegal.'

So what do you think the data cops are going to do about it today?

'Anyhow it's futile. A copy wouldn't be you.''

You tell me. There are philosophical principles about the identity of indiscernibles: if a copy really is identical right down to the quantum level, then it has to be the original… Something like that. Anyhow I doubt it's going to be achieved in the time left.

'I'm surprised we aren't running out of capacity.'

There have been a few crashes. But as ends of the world go, this is an odd one, Kate. Even now it's still just a bunch of funny lights in the sky. The sun is shining, the water supply is flowing, the power is on.

And, you know, in a way it's an exciting time; inside here, anyhow. There's a kind of huge technological explosion, more innovation in the last few hours than in a decade.

'I think I should go now. I have people I'm meant to be with, physically I mean -'

Damn right you should go.

'What?'

More room for me, sister.

She felt affronted. 'What use is huddling here? This isn't a nuclear war. It's not even an asteroid strike. Rodent, there might be nothing left - no processors to maintain your electronic nirvana.'

So I'll take my chance. And anyhow there's the possibility of accelerated perception: you know, four subjective hours in the tank for one spent outside. There are rumours the Chinese have got a way to drive that ratio up to infinity - making this final day last forever - hackers are swarming like locusts over the Chinese sites. And that's where I'm headed. Get out of here. There won't be room for everybody.

'Rodent -'

Wake up, wake up.

Kate, with Malenfant and Cornelius, stood on Mike's porch. Inside the house, the baby was crying.

And in the murky Houston sky, new Moons and Earths burst like silent fireworks, glowing blue or red or yellow, each lit by the light of its own out-of-view sun.

There were small Earths, wizened worlds that reminded her of Mars, with huge continents of glowering red rock. But some of them were huge, monster planets drowned in oceans that stretched from pole to pole. The Moons were different too. The smallest were just bare grey rock like Luna, but the largest were almost Earth-like, showing thick air and ice and the glint of ocean. There were even Earths with pairs of Moons, Kate saw, or triplets. One ice-bound Earth was surrounded by a glowing ring system, like Saturn's.

Kate found it hard not to flinch; it was like being under a hail of gaudy cannonballs, as the alternate planets flickered in and out of existence in eerie, precise silence.

It was just seven days since the failed echo from Centauri. 'I wonder what's become of our astronauts,' Malenfant growled. 'Poor bastards.'

'A great primordial collision shaped Earth and Moon,' Cornelius murmured. 'Everything about Earth and Moon - their axial tilt, composition, atmosphere, length of day, even Earth's orbit around the sun - was determined by the impact. But it might have turned out differently. Small, chance changes in the geometry of the collision would have made a large difference in the outcome. Lots of possible realities, budding off from that key, apocalyptic moment…'

Malenfant said, 'So what are we looking at? Computer simulations from the great planetarium?'

'Phase space.' Cornelius seemed coldly excited. 'The phase space of a system is the set of all conceivable states of that system. We're glimpsing phase space.'

Malenfant said, 'Is this what we were being protected from} This - disorderliness?'

'Maybe. As we evolved to awareness we found ourselves in a clean, logical universe, a puzzle box that might have been designed to help us figure out the underlying laws of nature, and so develop our intelligence. But it was always a mystery why the universe should be comprehensible to our small brains at all. Maybe we now know why: the whole thing was a fake, a training ground for our infant species. Now we have crashed the simulator.'

'But,' said Kate, 'we aren't yet ready for the real thing.'

'Evidently not. Perhaps we should have trusted the controllers. They must be technologically superior. Perhaps we should assume they are morally superior also.'

'A little late to think of that now,' Malenfant said bitterly.

No traffic moved on the street. Everybody had gone home, or anyhow found a place to hunker down, until -

Well, until what, Kate? As she had followed this gruesome step-by-step process from the beginning, she had studiously avoided thinking about its eventual outcome: when the wave of unreality, or whatever the hell it was, came washing at last over Earth, over her. It was unimaginable - even more so than her own death. At least after her death she wouldn't know about it; would even that be true after this}

Now there were firebursts in the sky. Human fire.

'Nukes,' Malenfant said softly. 'We're fighting back, by God.

Well, what else is there to do but try? God bless America.'

Saranne snapped, 'Come back in and close the damn door.'

The three of them filed meekly inside. Saranne, clutching her baby, stalked around the house's big living room, pulling curtains, as if that would shut it all out. But Kate didn't blame her; it was an understandable human impulse.

Malenfant threw a light switch. It didn't work.

Mike came in from the kitchen. 'No water, no power.' He shrugged. 'I guess that's it.' He moved around the room, setting candles on tables and the fire hearth; their glow was oddly comforting. The living room was littered with pails of water, cans of food. It was as if they were laying up for a snowstorm, Kate thought.

Malenfant said, 'What about the softscreens?'

Mike said, 'Last time I looked, all there was to see was a loop of the President's last message. The one about playing with your children, not letting them be afraid. Try again if you want.'

Nobody had the heart.

The light that flickered around the edges of the curtains seemed to be growing more gaudy.

'Kind of quiet,' Mike said. 'Without the traffic noise -'

The ground shuddered, like a quake, like a carpet being yanked from under them.

Saranne clutched her baby, laden with its useless immortality, and turned on Cornelius. 'All this from your damn-fool stunt. Why couldn't you leave well enough alone? We were fine as we were, without all this. You had no right - no right…'

'Hush.' Malenfant moved quickly to her, and put an arm around her shuddering shoulders. 'It's okay, honey.' He drew her to the centre of the room and sat with her and the infant on the carpet. He beckoned to the others. 'We should hold onto each other.'

Mike seized on this eagerly. 'Yes. Maybe what you touch stays real - you think?'

They sat in a loose ring. Kate found herself between Malenfant and Saranne. Saranne's hand was moist, Malenfant's as dry as a bone: that astronaut training, she supposed.

'Seven days,' Malenfant said. 'Seven days to unmake the world. Kind of Biblical.'

'A pleasing symmetry,' Cornelius said. His voice cracked.

The candles blew out, all at once. The light beyond the curtains was growing brighter, shifting quickly, slithering like oil.

The baby stopped crying.

'Hold my hand, Malenfant,' Kate whispered.

'It's okay -'

'Just hold my hand.'

She felt a deep, sharp stab of regret. Not just for herself, but for mankind. She couldn't believe this was the end of humanity: you wouldn't exterminate the occupants of a zoo as punishment for poking a hole in the fence.

But this was surely the end of the world she had known. The play was over, the actors removing their make-up, the stage set collapsing - and human history was ending.

I guess we'll never know how we would have turned out, she thought.

Now the peculiar daylight shone through the fabric of the walls, as if they were wearing thin.

'Oh, shit,' Mike said. He reached for Saranne.

Cornelius folded over on himself, rocking, thumb in mouth.

Malenfant said, 'What's wrong? Isn't this what you wanted?…'

The wall dissolved. Pale, disorderly light spilled over them.

Kate watched the baby's face. His new eyes huge, Michael seemed to be smiling.