Resplendent

AD 5420-24,974

I

Twenty days before the end of his world, Rusel heard that he was to be saved.

‘Rusel. Rusel…’ The whispered voice was insistent. Rusel rolled over, trying to shake off the effects of his usual mild sedative. The room responded to his movement, and soft light coalesced around him. His pillow was soaked with sweat.

His brother’s face was hovering in the air at the side of his bed. Diluc was grinning. The Virtual image made his face look even wider than usual, his nose more prominent.

‘Lethe,’ Rusel said hoarsely. ‘You ugly bastard.’

‘You’re just jealous,’ Diluc said. ‘I’m sorry to wake you. But I just heard – you need to know—’

‘Know what?’

‘Blen showed up in the infirmary.’ Blen was the nanochemist assigned to Ship Three. ‘Get this: he has a heart murmur.’ Diluc’s grin returned.

Rusel frowned. ‘For that you woke me up? Poor Blen.’

‘It’s not that serious. But, Rus – it’s congenital.’

The sedative dulled Rusel’s thinking, and it took him a moment to figure it out.

The five Ships were to evacuate the last, brightest hopes of Port Sol from the path of the incoming peril, the forces of the young Coalition. But they were slower-than-light transports, and would take many centuries to reach their destinations. Only the healthiest, in body and genome, could be allowed aboard a generation starship. And if Blen had a hereditary heart condition—

‘He’s off the Ship,’ Rusel breathed.

‘And that means you’re aboard, brother. You’re the second-best nanochemist on this lump of ice. You won’t be here when the Coalition arrives. You’re going to live!’

Rusel lay back on his crushed pillow. He felt numb.

His brother kept talking. ‘Did you know that families are illegal under the Coalition? Their citizens are born in tanks. Just the fact of our relationship would doom us, Rus! I’m trying to fix a transfer from Five to Three. If we’re together, that’s something, isn’t it? I know it’s going to be hard, Rus. But we can help each other. We can get through this…’

All Rusel could think about was Lora, whom he would have to leave behind.

The next morning Rusel arranged to meet Lora in the Forest of Ancestors. He took a bubble-wheel surface transport, and set out early.

Port Sol was a planetesimal, an unfinished remnant of the formation of Sol system. Inhabited for millennia, its surface was heavily worked, quarried and pitted, and littered by abandoned towns. The Qax had never come here; Port Sol was a museum, some said, of pre-Occupation days. But throughout Port Sol’s long human usage some areas had been kept pristine, and as he drove Rusel kept to the marked track, to avoid crushing the delicate sculptures of frost that had coalesced here over four billion years.

And visible beyond the close horizon of the ice moon was a squat cylinder, a misty sketch in the faint sunlight. That was Ship Three, preparing for its leap into the greater dark.

This was the very edge of Sol system. The sky was a dome of stars, with the ragged glow of the Galaxy hurled casually across its equator. Set in that diffuse glow was the sun, the brightest star, bright enough to cast shadows, but so remote it was a mere pinpoint. Around the sun Rusel could make out a tiny puddle of light: the inner system, the disc of worlds, moons, asteroids, dust and other debris that had been the arena of all human history before the first interplanetary voyages some three thousand years earlier, and still the home of all but an invisible fraction of the human race. This was a time of turmoil, and today, invisible in that pale glow, humans were fighting and dying. And even now a punitive fleet was ploughing out of that warm centre, heading for Port Sol.

The whole situation was an unwelcome consequence of the liberation of Earth from the alien Qax, just thirteen years earlier. The Interim Coalition of Governance, the new, ideologically pure and viciously determined central authority that had emerged from the chaos of a newly freed Earth, was already burning its way out through the worlds and moons of Sol system. When the Coalition ships came, the best you could hope for was that your community would be broken up, your equipment impounded, and that you would be hauled back to a prison camp on Earth or its Moon for ‘reconditioning’.

But if a world was found to be harbouring anyone who had collaborated with the hated Qax, the penalties against it were much more extreme. The word Rusel had heard was ‘resurfacing’.

Now the Coalition had turned its attention to Port Sol. This ice moon was governed by five ‘pharaohs’, as they were called locally, an elite group who had indeed collaborated with the Qax – though they described it as ‘mediating the effects of the Occupation for the benefit of mankind’ – and they had received anti-ageing treatments as a reward. So Port Sol was a ‘nest of illegal immortals and collaborators’, the Coalition said, and dispatched its troops to ‘clean it out’. It seemed indifferent to the fact that, in addition to the pharaohs, some fifty thousand people called Port Sol home.

The pharaohs had a deep network of spies on Earth, and they had had some warning of the coming of the Coalition. As the colonists had only the lightest battery of antiquated weaponry – indeed the whole ice moon, a refuge from the Occupation, was somewhat low-tech – nobody expected to be able to resist. But there was a way out.

Five huge Ships were hastily thrown together. On each Ship, captained by a pharaoh, a couple of hundred people, selected for their health and skill sets, would be taken away: a total of a thousand, perhaps, out of a population of fifty thousand, saved from the incoming disaster. There was no faster-than-light technology on Port Sol; these would be generation starships. But perhaps that was as well. Between the stars there would be room to hide.

All these mighty historical forces had now focused down on Rusel’s life, and they threatened to tear him away from his lover.

Lora was waiting for him at the Forest of Ancestors. They met on the surface, embracing stiffly through their skinsuits. Then they set up a dome-tent and crawled through its collapsible airlock.

In the Forest’s long shadows, Rusel and Lora made love: at first urgently, and then again, more slowly, thoughtfully. In the habs, inertial generators kept the gravity at one-sixth standard, about the same as Earth’s Moon. But there was no gravity control out here in the Forest, and as they clung to each other they drifted in the tent’s cool air, light as dreams.

Rusel told Lora his news.

Rusel was an able nanochemist, he was the right age for Ship crew, and his health and pedigree were immaculate. But unlike his brother he hadn’t been good enough to win the one-in-fifty lottery and make the cut to get a place on the Ships. He was twenty-eight years old: not a good age to die. But he had accepted his fate, so he believed – for Lora, his lover, had no hope of a berth. At twenty she was a student, a promising Virtual idealist but without the mature skills to have a chance of competing for a berth on the Ships. So at least he would be with her, when the sky fell in.

He was honest with himself, and unsentimental; he had never been sure if his noble serenity would have survived the appearance of the Coalition ships in Port Sol’s dark sky. And now, it seemed, he was never going to find out.

Lora was slim, delicate. The population of this low-gravity moon tended to tallness and thin bones, but Lora seemed to him more elfin than most, and she had large, dark eyes that always seemed a little unfocused, as if her attention was somewhere else. It was that sense of other-world fragility that had first attracted Rusel to her.

With blankets bundled over her legs, she took his hand and smiled. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

‘I’m the one who’s going to live. Why should I be afraid?’

‘You’d accepted dying. Now you’ve got to get used to the idea of living.’ She sighed. ‘It’s just as hard.’

‘And living without you.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘Maybe that’s what scares me most. I’m frightened of losing you.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

He gazed out at the silent, watchful shapes of the Ancestors. These ‘trees’, some three or four metres high, were stumps with ‘roots’ that dug into the icy ground. They were living things, the most advanced members of Port Sol’s low-temperature aboriginal ecology. This was their sessile stage. In their youth, these creatures, called ‘Toolmakers’, were mobile, and were actually intelligent. They would haul themselves across Port Sol’s broken ground, seeking a suitable crater slope or ridge face. There they would set down their roots and allow their nervous systems and their minds to dissolve, their purposes fulfilled.

Rusel wondered what liquid-helium dreams might be coursing slowly through the Ancestors’ residual minds. They were beyond decisions now; in a way he envied them.

‘Maybe the Coalition will spare the Ancestors.’

She snorted. ‘I doubt it. The Coalition only care about humans – and their sort of humans at that.’

‘My family has lived here a long time,’ he said. ‘There’s a story that says we rode out with the first colonising wave.’ It was a legendary time, when the engineer Michael Poole had come barnstorming all the way through the system to Port Sol to build his great starships.

She smiled. ‘Most families have stories like that. After thousands of years, who can tell?’

‘This is my home,’ he blurted. ‘This isn’t just the destruction of us, but of our culture, our heritage. Everything we’ve worked for.’

‘But that’s why you’re so important.’ She sat up, letting the blanket fall away, and wrapped her arms around his neck. In Sol’s dim light her eyes were pools of liquid darkness. ‘You’re the future. The pharaohs say that in the long run the Coalition will be the death of mankind, not just of us. Somebody has to save our knowledge, our values, for the future.’

‘But you—’ You will be alone, when the Coalition ships descend. Decision sparked. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

She pulled back. ‘What?’

‘I’ve decided. I’ll tell Pharaoh Andres, and my brother. I can’t leave here, not without you.’

‘You must,’ she said firmly. ‘You’re the best for the job, believe me; if not the pharaohs wouldn’t have selected you. So you have to go. It’s your duty.’

‘What human being would run out on those he loved?’

Her face was set, and she sounded much older than her twenty years. ‘It would be easier to die. But you must live, live on and on, live on like a machine, until the job is done, and the race is saved.’

Before her he felt weak, immature. He clung to her, burying his face in the soft warmth of her neck.

Nineteen days, he thought. We still have nineteen days. He determined to cherish every minute.

But as it turned out they had much less time than that.

Once again he was woken in the dark. But this time his room lights were snapped full on, dazzling him. And it was the face of Pharaoh Andres that hovered in the air beside his bed. He sat up, baffled, his system heavy with sedative.

‘—thirty minutes. You have thirty minutes to get to Ship Three. Wear your skinsuit. Bring nothing else. If you aren’t there in thirty minutes, twenty-nine forty-five, we leave without you.’

At first he couldn’t take in what she said. He found himself staring at her face. Her head was hairless, her scalp bald, her eyebrows and even her eyelashes gone. Her skin was oddly smooth, her features small; she didn’t look young, but as if her face had sublimated with time, like Port Sol’s ice landscapes, leaving this palimpsest. She was rumoured to be two hundred years old.

‘Don’t acknowledge this message, just move. We lift in twenty-nine minutes. If you are Ship Three crew, you have twenty-nine minutes to get to—’

She had made a mistake: that was his first thought. Had she forgotten that there were still sixteen days to go before the Coalition ships were due? But he could see from her face there was no mistake.

Twenty-nine minutes. He reached down to his bedside cabinet, pulled out a nano pill and gulped it down dry. Reality bleached, becoming cold and stark.

He dragged on his skinsuit and sealed it roughly. He glanced around his room, at his bed, his few pieces of furniture, the Virtual unit on the dresser with its images of Lora. Bring nothing. Andres wasn’t a woman you disobeyed in the slightest particular.

Without looking back he left the room.

The corridor outside was bedlam. A thousand people shared this under-the-ice habitat, and all of them seemed to be out tonight. They ran this way and that, many in skinsuits, some hauling bundles of gear. He pushed his way through the throng. The sense of panic was tangible – and, carried on the recycled air, he thought he could smell burning.

His heart sank. It was obviously a scramble to escape – but the only way off the moon was the Ships, which could take no more than a thousand. Had the sudden curtailing of the time left triggered this panic? In this ultimate emergency had the citizens of Port Sol lost all their values, all their sense of community? What could they hope to achieve by hurling themselves at Ships that had no room for them, but to bring everybody down with them? But what would I do? He could afford the luxury of nobility; he was getting out of here.

Twenty minutes.

He reached the perimeter concourse. Here, surface transports nuzzled against a row of simple airlocks. Some of the locks were already open, and people were crowding in, pushing children, bundles of luggage. His own car was still here, he saw with relief. He pulled open his skinsuit glove and hastily pressed his palm to the wall. The door hissed open.

But before he could pass through, somebody grabbed his arm.

A man faced him, a stranger, short, burly, aged perhaps forty. Behind him a woman clutched a small child and an infant. The adults had blanket-wrapped bundles on their backs. The man wore an electric-blue skinsuit, but his family were in hab clothes.

The man said desperately, ‘Friend, you have room in that thing?’

‘No,’ Rusel said.

The man’s eyes hardened. ‘Listen. The pharaohs’ spies got it wrong. Suddenly the Coalition is only seven days out. Look, friend, you can see how I’m fixed. The Coalition breaks up families, doesn’t it? All I’m asking is for a chance on the Ships.’

‘But there won’t be room for you. Don’t you understand? And even if there were—’ There were to be no children on the Ships at launch: that was the pharaohs’ harsh rule. In the first years of the long voyage, everybody aboard had to be maximally productive. The time for breeding would come later.

The man’s fist bunched. ‘Listen, friend—’

Rusel shoved the man in the chest. He fell backwards, stumbling against his children. His blanket bundle broke open, and goods spilled on the floor: clothes, diapers, children’s toys.

‘Please.’ The woman approached him, stepping over her husband. She held out a baby. ‘Don’t let the Coalition take him away. Please.’

The baby was warm, soft, smiling. Rusel automatically reached out. But he stopped himself cold, and turned away.

He pushed into his car, slammed shut the door, and stabbed a preset routine into the control panel. The woman with the baby continued to call after him. How could I do that? I’m no longer human, he thought.

The car ripped itself away from the airlock interface, ignoring all safety protocols, and began to haul itself on its bubble wheels up the ramp from the under-the-ice habitat to the surface. Shaking, Rusel opened his visor. He might be able to see the doomed family at the airlock port. He didn’t look back.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Andres’s Virtual head coalesced before him. ‘Sixteen minutes to get to Ship Three. If you’re not there we go without you. Fifteen forty-five. Fifteen forty…’

The surface was almost as chaotic as the corridors of the hab, as transports of all types and ages rolled, crawled or jumped. There was no sign of the Enforcers, the pharaohs’ police force, and he was apprehensive about being held up in the crush.

He made it through the crowd and headed for the track that would lead through the Forest of Ancestors to Ship Three. Out here there was a lot of traffic, but it was more or less orderly, everyone heading out the way he was. He pushed the car up to its safety-regulated maximum speed. Even so, he was continually overtaken. Anxiety tore at his stomach.

The Forest, with the placid profiles of the Ancestors glimmering in Sol’s low light, looked unchanged from when he had last seen it, only days ago, on his way to meet Lora. He felt an unreasonable resentment that he had suddenly lost so much time, that his careful plan for an extended farewell to Lora had been torn up. He wondered where she was now. Perhaps he could call her.

Thirteen minutes. No time, no time.

The traffic ahead was slowing. The vehicles at the back of the queue weaved, trying to find gaps, and bunched into a solid pack.

Rusel punched his control panel and brought up a Virtual overhead image. Ahead of the tangle of vehicles, a ditch had been cut roughly across the road. People swarmed, hundreds of them. Roadblock.

Eleven minutes. For a moment his brain seemed as frozen as Port Sol ice; frantic, bewildered, filled with guilt, he couldn’t think.

Then a heavy-duty long-distance truck broke out of the pack behind him. Veering off the road to the left, it began to smash its way through the Forest. The elegant eightfold forms of the Ancestors were nothing but ice sculptures, and they shattered before the truck’s momentum. It was ugly, and Rusel knew that each impact wiped out a life that might have lasted centuries more. But the truck was clearing a path.

Rusel hauled at his controls, and dragged his car off the road. Only a few vehicles were ahead of him in the truck’s destructive wake. The truck was moving fast, and he was able to push his speed higher.

They were already approaching the roadblock, he saw. A few suit lights moved off the road and into the Forest, to stand in the path of the lead truck; the blockers must be enraged to see their targets evade them so easily. Rusel kept his speed high. Only a few more seconds and he would be past the worst.

But there was a figure standing directly in front of him, helmet lamp bright, dressed in an electric-blue skinsuit, arms raised. As the car’s sensors picked up the figure, its safety routines cut in, and he felt it hesitate. He slammed his palm to the control panel, overriding the safeties. Nine minutes.

He closed his eyes as the car hit the protester.

He remembered the blue skinsuit. He had just mown down the man from the airlock, who had been so desperate to save his family. He had no right to criticise the courage or the morals or the loyalty of others, he saw.

We are all just animals, fighting to survive. My berth on Ship Three doesn’t make me any better. He hadn’t even had the guts to watch.

Eight minutes. He disabled the safety governors and let the car race down the empty road, its speed ever increasing.

He had to pass through another block before he reached Ship Three – but this one was manned by Enforcers. They were in an orderly line across the road, dressed in their bright yellow skinsuit uniforms. Evidently they had pulled back to tight perimeters around the five Ships. At least they were still loyal.

The queuing was agonising. With only five minutes before Andres’s deadline, an Enforcer pressed a nozzle to the car’s window, flashed laser light into Rusel’s face, and waved him through.

Ship Three was directly ahead of him. It was a drum, a squat cylinder about a kilometre across and half as tall. It sat at the bottom of its own crater, for Port Sol ice had been gouged out and plastered roughly over the surface of its hull. It looked less like a ship than a building, he thought, a building coated by thick ice, as if long abandoned. But it was indeed a starship, a ship designed for a journey of not less than centuries, and fountains of crystals already sparkled around its base in neat parabolic arcs: steam from the Ship’s rockets, freezing immediately to ice. People milled at its base, running clumsily in the low gravity, and scurried up ramps that tongued down from its hull to the ground.

Rusel abandoned the car, tumbled out onto the ice and ran towards the nearest ramp. There was another stomach-churning wait as an Enforcer in glowing yellow checked each identity. At last, after another dazzling flash of laser light in his eyes, he was through.

He hurried into an airlock. As it cycled it struck him that as he boarded this Ship, he was never going to leave it again: whatever became of him, this Ship was his whole world, for the rest of his life.

The lock opened. He ripped off his helmet. The light was emergency red, and klaxons sounded throughout the ship; the air was cold, and smelled of fear. Lethe, he was aboard! But there could only be a minute left.

He ran along a cold, ice-lined corridor towards a brighter interior.

He reached an amphitheatre, roughly circular, carpeted by acceleration couches. Andres’s voice boomed from the air: ‘Get into a couch. Any couch. It doesn’t matter. Forty seconds. Strap yourself in. Nobody is going to do it for you. Your safety is your own responsibility. Twenty-five seconds.’ People swarmed, looking for spare couches. The scene seemed absurd to Rusel, like a children’s game.

‘Rus! Rusel!’ Through the throng, Rusel made out a waving hand. It was Diluc, his brother, wearing his characteristic orange skinsuit. ‘Lethe, I’m glad to see you. I kept you a couch. Come on!’

Rusel pushed that way. Ten seconds. He threw himself down on the couch. The straps were awkward to pull around the bulk of his suit.

As he fumbled, he stared up at a Virtual display that hovered over his head. It was a view as seen from the Ship’s blunt prow, looking down. Those tongue ramps were still in place, radiating down to the ice. But now a dark mass boiled around the base of the curving hull: people, on foot and in vehicles, a mob of them closing in. In amongst the mass were specks of bright yellow. Some of the Enforcers had turned on their commanders, then. But others stood firm, and in that last second Rusel saw the bright sparks of weapon fire, all around the base of the Ship.

A sheet of brilliant white gushed out from the Ship’s base. It was Port Sol ice, superheated to steam at tens of thousands of degrees. The image shuddered, and Rusel felt a quivering, deep in his gut. The Ship was rising, right on time, its tremendous mass raised on a bank of rockets.

When that great splash of steam cleared, Rusel saw small dark forms lying motionless on the ice: the bodies of the loyal and disloyal alike, their lives ended in a fraction of a second. A massive shame descended on Rusel, a synthesis of all the emotions that had churned through him since that fateful call of Diluc’s. He had abandoned his lover to die; he had probably killed others himself; and now he sat here in safety as others died on the ice below. What human being would behave that way? He felt the shame would never lift, never leave him.

Already the plain of ice was receding, and weight began to push at his chest.

II

Soon Port Sol fell away, and even the other Ships were lost against the stars, and it was as if Ship Three was alone in the universe.

In this opening phase of its millennial voyage Ship Three was nothing more than a water rocket, as its engines steadily sublimated its plating of ice and hurled steam out of immense nozzles. But those engines drew on energies that had once powered the expansion of the universe itself. Later the Ship would spin up for artificial gravity and switch to an exotic ramjet for its propulsion, and its true journey would begin.

The heaviest acceleration of the whole voyage had come in the first hours, as the ship hurled itself away from Port Sol. After that the acceleration was cut to about a third standard – twice lunar gravity, twice what the colonists of Port Sol had been used to. For the time being, the acceleration couches were left in place in that big base amphitheatre, and in the night watches everybody slept there, all two hundred of them massed together in a single vast dormitory, their muscles groaning against the ache of the twice-normal gravity.

The plan was that for twenty-one days the Ships would actually head towards the sun. They would penetrate Sol system as far as the orbit of Jupiter, where they would use the giant planet’s gravity field to slingshot them on to their final destinations. It seemed paradoxical to begin the exodus by hurling oneself deep into the inner system, the Coalition’s home territory. But space was big, the Ships’ courses had been plotted to avoid the likely trajectory of the incoming Coalition convoy, and the Ships were to run silently, not even communicating with each other. The chances of them being detected were negligible.

Despite the wearying gravity the first days after launch were busy for everybody. The Ship’s interior had to be rebuilt from its launch configuration to withstand this high-acceleration cruise phase. And the daily routines of the long voyage had to be set up – the most important of them being cleaning.

The Ship was a closed environment and its interior had plenty of smooth surfaces where biofilms, slick detergent-proof cities of bugs, would quickly build up. Not only that, the fall-out of the Ship’s human cargo – flakes of skin, hair, mucus – were seed beds for bacterial growth. All of this had to be eliminated; Captain Andres declared she wanted the Ship to be as clean as a hospital.

The most effective way to achieve that – and the most ‘future-proof’, in Andres’s persistent jargon – was through the old-fashioned application of human muscle. Everybody had to pitch in, even the Captain herself. Rusel put in his statutory half-hour per day, scrubbing vigorously at the walls and floors and ceilings around the nanofood banks that were his primary responsibility. He welcomed the mindlessness of the work; he continued to seek ways in which to distract himself from the burden of thought.

He was briefly ill. In the first couple of weeks, everybody caught colds from everybody else. But the viruses quickly ran their course through the Ship’s small population, and Rusel felt obscurely reassured that he would likely never catch another cold in his life.

A few days after launch Diluc came to find him. Rusel was up to his elbows in slurry, trying to find a fault in a nanofood bank’s waste vent. Working non-stop, Rusel had seen little of his brother. He was surprised by how cheerful Diluc appeared, and how energetically he threw himself into his own work on the air cycling systems. He spoke brightly of his ‘babies’, fans and pumps, humidifiers and dehumidifiers, filters and scrubbers and oxygenators.

In their reaction to the sudden severance of the launch, the crew seemed to be dividing into two rough camps, Rusel thought. There were those like Diluc who were behaving as if the outside universe didn’t exist; they were bright, brash, too loud, their laughter forced. The other camp, to which Rusel felt he belonged, retreated the other way, into an inner darkness, full of complicated shadows.

But today Diluc’s mood seemed complex. ‘Brother, have you been counting the days?’

‘Since launch? No.’ He hadn’t wanted to think about it.

‘It’s day seven. There’s a place to watch. One of the observation lounges. Captain Andres says it’s not compulsory, but if…’

It took Rusel a moment to think that through. Day seven: the day the Coalition convoy was due to reach Port Sol. Rusel flinched from the thought. But one of his worst moments of that chaotic launch day was when he had run down that desperate father and driven on, without even having the courage to watch what he was doing. Perhaps this would atone. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.

Ship Three, like its four siblings, was a fat torus. To reach the observation lounge the brothers had to ride elevators up through several decks to a point in the Ship’s flattened prow, close to the rim. The lounge, crammed with Virtual generation gear, was already configured for the spin-up phase to come, and most of its furniture was plastered to the walls, which would become the floor. It was big enough for maybe fifty people, and it was nearly full; Rusel and Diluc had to crowd in. Pharaoh Andres – now Captain Andres, Rusel reminded himself – was here, sitting in a deep, heavy-looking chair, front and centre before an immense, shining Virtual.

A ball of ice spun grandly before their eyes. It was Port Sol, of course; Rusel immediately recognised its icy geography of ancient craters, overlaid by a human patterning of quarries and mines, habitats and townships, landing ports. In the inhabited buildings lights shone, defiantly bright in outer-system gloom. It was a sculpture in white and silver, and it showed no sign of the chaotic panic that must be churning in its corridors.

The sight took Rusel’s breath away. Somewhere down there was Lora; it was an almost unbearable thought, and he wished with all his heart he had stayed with her.

The Coalition convoy closed in.

Its ships materialised from the edge of the three-dimensional image, as if sliding in from another reality. The fleet was dominated by five, six, seven Spline warships. Confiscated from the expelled Qax, they were living ships each a kilometre or more wide, their hulls studded with weapons and sensors and crudely scrawled with the green tetrahedron that was the sigil of liberated humanity.

Rusel’s stomach filled with dread. ‘It’s a heavy force,’ he said.

‘They’ve come for the pharaohs,’ Diluc said grimly. ‘The Coalition is showing its power. Images like this are no doubt being beamed throughout the system.’

Then it began. The first touch of the energy beams, cherry-red, was almost gentle, and Port Sol ice exploded into cascades of glittering shards that drifted back to the surface, or escaped into space. Then more beams ploughed up the ice, and structures began to implode, melting, or to fly apart. A spreading cloud of crystals began to swathe Port Sol in a temporary, pearly atmosphere. It was silent, almost beautiful, too large-scale to make out individual deaths, a choreography of energy and destruction.

‘We’ll get through this,’ Diluc muttered. ‘We’ll get through this.’

Rusel felt numbed, no grief, only shame at his own emotional inadequacy. This was the destruction of his home, of a world, and it was beyond his imagination. Worse, Port Sol, which had survived the alien occupation of the solar system, was being devastated by humans. How could such things happen? He tried to focus on one person, on Lora, to imagine what she must be doing if she was still alive: perhaps fleeing through collapsing tunnels, or crowding into deep shelters. But, in the ticking calm of this lounge, with its fresh smell of new equipment, he couldn’t even picture that.

As the assault continued, numbers flickered across the status display, an almost blasphemous tallying of the estimated dead.

Even after the trauma of Port Sol, work had to continue on booting up the vital systems that would keep them all alive.

Rusel’s own job, as the senior nanochemist on the Ship, was to set up the nanofood banks that would play a crucial part in recycling waste into food and other consumables like clothing. The work was demanding from the start. The banks were based on an alien technology, nano-devices purloined from the occupying Qax; only partially understood, they were temperamental and difficult.

It didn’t help that of the two assistants he had been promised a share of – most people were generalists in this small, skill-starved new community – only one had made it onto the Ship. It turned out that in the final scramble about ten per cent of the crew had been left behind; conversely, about ten per cent of those who actually were aboard shouldn’t have been here at all. A few shame-faced ‘passengers’ were yellow-uniformed Enforcers who in the last moments had abandoned their posts and fled to the sanctuary of the Ship’s interior.

The work had to get done anyhow. And it was urgent; until the nanofood was available the Ship’s temporary rations were steadily depleting. The pressure on Rusel was intense. But Rusel was glad of the work, so hard mentally and physically in the high gravity he had no time to think, and when he hit his couch at night he slept easily.

On the fifteenth day Rusel achieved a small personal triumph as the first slab of edible food rolled out of his nano-banks. Captain Andres had a policy of celebrating small achievements, and she was here as Rusel ceremoniously swallowed the first mouthful of his food, and she took the second. There was much clapping and back-slapping. Diluc grinned in his usual huge way. But Rusel, numbed inside, didn’t feel much like celebrating. People understood; half the crew, it was estimated, were still in some kind of shock. He got away from the crush as quickly as he could.

On the twenty-first day the Ship was to encounter Jupiter.

Captain Andres called the crew together in the acceleration-couch amphitheatre, all two hundred of them, and she set up a Virtual display in the air above them. Few of the crew had travelled away from Port Sol before; they craned to see. The sun was just a pinpoint, though much brighter than seen from Port Sol, and Jupiter was a flattened ball of cloud, racked with storm systems like bruises – the result, it was said, of an ancient battle.

The most intriguing sight of all was four sparks of light that slid across the background of stars. They were the other Ships, numbers One, Two, Four and Five; the little fleet would come together at Jupiter for the first time since leaving Port Sol, and the last.

Andres walked though the crowd on their couches, declaiming loudly enough for all to hear, her authority easy and unforced. ‘We pharaohs have been discussing destinations,’ she said. ‘Obviously the targets had to be chosen before we reached Jupiter; we needed to plan for our angles of emergence from Jupiter’s gravity well. The Coalition is vindictive and determined, and it has faster-than-light ships. It will soon overtake us – but space is big, and five silent-running generation starships will be hard to spot. Even so it’s obviously best to separate, to give them five targets to chase, not just one.

‘So we have five destinations. And ours,’ she said, smiling, ‘is the most unique of all.’

She listed the other Ships’ targets, star systems scattered through the disc of the Galaxy – none closer than five hundred light years. ‘All well within the Ships’ design parameters,’ she said, ‘and perhaps far enough to be safe. But we are going further.’

She overlaid the image of the shining Ships with a ruddy, shapeless mass of mist. ‘This is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy,’ she said. ‘Twenty-four thousand light years from Sol. It is the closest of the satellite galaxies – but it is beyond the main Galaxy itself, surely far outside the Coalition’s grasp for the foreseeable future.’

Rusel heard gasps throughout the amphitheatre. To sail beyond the Galaxy?…

Andres held her hands up to quell the muttering. ‘Of course such a journey is far in excess of what we planned. No generation starship has ever challenged such distances before, let alone achieved them.’ She stared around at them, fists on hips. ‘But if we can manage a thousand years of flight, we can manage ten, or fifty – why not? We are strong, we are just as determined as the Coalition and its drones – more so, for we know we are in the right.’

Rusel wasn’t used to questioning the pharaohs’ decisions, but he found himself wondering at the arrogance of the handful of pharaohs to make such decisions on behalf of their crew – not to mention the generations yet unborn.

There was no serious protest. Perhaps it was all simply beyond the imagination. Diluc muttered, ‘Can’t say it makes much difference. A thousand years or ten thousand, I’ll be dead in a century, and I won’t see the end…’

Andres restored the images of the Ships. Jupiter was expanding rapidly now, and the other Ships were swarming closer.

Andres said, ‘We have discussed names for our vessels. On such an epic voyage numbers won’t do. Every Ship must have a name! We have named our Ship-homes for great thinkers, and great vessels of the past.’ She stabbed her finger around the Virtual image. ‘Tsiolkovsky. Great Northern. Aldiss. Vanguard.’ She looked at her crew. ‘And as for us, only one name is possible. Like an earlier band of pilgrims, we are fleeing intolerance and tyranny; we sail into the dark and the unknown, carrying the hopes of an age. We are Mayflower.’

You didn’t study history on Port Sol. Nobody knew what she was talking about.

At the moment of closest approach Jupiter’s golden-brown cloudscape bellied over the upturned faces of the watching crew, and the Ships poured through Jupiter’s gravity well. Even now the rule of silence wasn’t violated, and the five Ships parted without so much as a farewell message.

From now on, wherever this invisible road in the sky took her, the second Mayflower was alone.

III

As the days stretched to weeks, and the weeks to months, Rusel continued to throw himself into work – and there was plenty of it for everybody.

The challenges of running a generation starship were familiar to the crew to some extent, as the colonists of Port Sol had long experience in ecosynthesis, in constructing and sustaining closed artificial environments. But on Port Sol they had had external resources to draw on, the ice, rock and organic chemistry of the ice moon itself. The Ship was now cut off from the outside universe.

So the cycles of air, water and solids would have to be maintained with something close to a hundred per cent efficiency. The sealing of the Ship against leakages was vital, and so nano-machines laboured to knit together the hull. The control of trace contaminants and pests would have to be ferociously tight: more swarms of nano-bots were sent scurrying in pursuit of flakes of hair and skin.

Not only that, the Ship’s design had been hastily thrown together, and the vessel wasn’t even completed on launch. The construction had been a hurried project anyhow, and the shaving-off of those final ten or twelve days of preparation time, as the Coalition fleet sneaked up in the dark, had made a significant difference. So the crew laboured to complete the ship’s systems in flight.

The most significant difficulty, Rusel believed, was the sudden upping of the design targets. A thousand-year cruise, the nominal design envelope, was one thing. Now it was estimated that, cruising at about half lightspeed, it would take Ship Three fifty times as long to reach Canis Major. Even relativistic time dilation would only make a difference of a few per cent to the subjective duration. As a consequence the tolerances on the Ship’s systems were tightened by orders of magnitude.

There was yet another goal in all this rebuilding. A key lesson of ecosynthesis was that the smaller the biosphere, the more conscious control it would require. The Ship was a much smaller environment than a Port Sol habitat, and that presented problems of stability; the ecological system was poorly buffered and would always be prone to collapse. It was clear that this small, tight biosphere would always have to be consciously managed if it were to survive.

That was manageable as long as the first crew, educated on Port Sol, were in command. But to ensure this in the long term the Ship’s essential systems were to be simplified and automated as far as possible, to reduce the skill level required to maintain them. They couldn’t foresee all that might befall the Ship, and so they were trying to ‘future-proof’ the project, in Andres’s jargon: to reduce the crew to the status of non-productive payload.

As Diluc put it with grim humour, ‘We can’t allow civilisation to fall in here.’

Despite the horror of Port Sol, the hard work, and the daunting timescale Andres had set – which Rusel suspected nobody believed anyhow – the rhythms of human life continued.

Diluc found a new partner, a plump, cheerful woman of about thirty called Tila. Diluc and Tila had both left lovers behind on Port Sol, and Tila had been forced to give up a child. Now they seemed to be finding comfort with each other. Diluc was somewhat put out when they were both hauled into Andres’s small private office to be quizzed about their relationship, but Andres, after much consulting of genetic maps, approved their continuing liaison.

Rusel was pleased for his brother, but he found Tila a puzzle. Most of the selected crew had been without offspring, back on Port Sol; few people with children, knowing they would have to leave them behind, had even offered themselves for selection. But Tila had abandoned a child. He saw no sign of this loss in her face, her manner; perhaps her new relationship with Diluc, and even the prospect of more children with him in the future, was enough to comfort her. He wondered what was going on inside her head, though.

As for Rusel, his social contacts were restricted to work. He found himself being subtly favoured by Captain Andres, along with a number of others of the Ship’s senior technicians. There was no formal hierarchy on the Ship – no command structure below Andres herself. But this group of a dozen or so, a meritocracy selected purely by proven achievement, began to coalesce into a kind of governing council of the Ship.

That was about as much social life as Rusel wanted. Otherwise he just worked himself to the point of exhaustion, and slept. The complex mass of emotions lodged inside him – agony over the loss of Lora, the shock of seeing his home destroyed, the shame of living on – showed no signs of breaking up. None of this affected his contributions to the Ship, he believed. He was split in two, split between inside and out, and he doubted he would ever heal. In fact he didn’t really want to heal. One day he would die, as so many others had, as Lora probably had; one day he would atone for his sin of survival in death.

Meanwhile there was always the Ship. He slowly widened the scope of his work, and began to develop a feel for the Ship as a whole. As the systems embedded, it was as if the Ship was slowly coming alive, and he learned to listen to the rhythm of its pumps, feel the sighing of its circulating air.

Though Andres continued to use the fanciful name she had given it, Rusel and everybody else thought of it as they always had: as Ship Three – or, increasingly, just the Ship.

Almost a year after Jupiter, Andres called her ‘council’ of twelve together in the amphitheatre at the base of the Ship. This big chamber had been stripped of its acceleration couches, and the dozen or so of them sat on temporary chairs in the middle of an empty grey-white floor.

Andres told them she wanted to discuss a little anthropology.

In her characteristic manner she marched around the room, looming over her crew. ‘We’ve had a good year, for which I thank you. Our work on the Ship isn’t completed – in a sense it never will be completed – but I’m now satisfied that Mayflower will survive the voyage. If we fail in our mission, it won’t be the technology that betrays us, but the people. And that’s what we’ve got to start thinking about now.’

Mayflower was a generation starship, she said. By now mankind had millennia of experience of launching such ships. ‘And as far as we know, every last one of them has failed. And why? Because of the people.

‘The most basic factor is population control. You’d think that would be simple enough! The Ship is an environment of a fixed size. As long as every parent sires one kid, on average, the population ought to stay stable. But by far the most common causes of mission loss are population crashes, in which the number of crew falls below the level of a viable gene pool and then shuffles off to extinction – or, more spectacularly, explosions in which too many people eat their way to the hull of their ship and then destroy each other in the resulting wars.’

Diluc said dryly, ‘Maybe that proves it’s just a dumb idea. The scale of the journey is just too big for us poor saps to manage.’

Andres gazed at him challengingly. ‘A bit late to say that now, Diluc!’

‘Of course it’s not just numbers but our population’s genetic health that we have to think about,’ pointed out Ruul. This lanky, serious man was the Ship’s senior geneticist. ‘We’ve already started, of course. All of us went through genetic screening before we were selected. There are only two hundred of us, but we’re as genetically diverse a sample of Port Sol’s population as possible. We should avoid the founder effect – none of us has a genetically transmitted disease to be spread through the population – and, provided we exert some kind of control over breeding partnerships, we should be able to avoid genetic drift, where defective copies of a gene cluster.’

Diluc looked faintly disgusted. “‘Control over breeding partnerships”? What kind of language is that?’

Andres snapped, ‘The kind of language we’re going to have to embrace if we’re to survive. We must control reproductive strategies. Remember, on this Ship the purpose of having children is not for the joy of it or similar primate rewards, but to maintain the crew’s population levels and genetic health, and thereby to see through our mission.’ She eyed Diluc. ‘Oh, I’m not against comfort. I was human once! But we are going to have to separate companionship needs from breeding requirements.’ She glanced around. ‘I’m sure you are all smart enough to have figured that out for yourselves. But even this isn’t enough, if the mission objectives are to be ensured.’

Diluc said, ‘It isn’t?’

‘Of course not. This is a desperately small universe. We will always rely on the Ship’s systems, and mistakes or deviances will be punished by catastrophe – for as long as the mission lasts. Non-modified human lifespans average out at around a century; we just haven’t evolved to think further. But a century is but a moment for our mission. We must future-proof; I’ve said it over and over. And to do that we will need a continuity of memory, purpose and control far beyond the century-long horizons of our transients.’

Transients: it was the first time Rusel had heard her use that word.

He thought he saw where all this was leading. He said carefully, ‘Port Sol was not a normal human society. With respect. Because it had you pharaohs at its heart.’

‘Yes,’ she said approvingly, her small face expressionless. ‘And that is the key.’ She lifted her hand before her face and studied it. ‘Two centuries ago the Qax Governor made me ageless. Well, I served the Qax – but my deeper purpose was always to serve mankind. I fled Earth, with others, to escape the Qax. Port Sol was always a refuge for the undying. Now I have had to flee Sol system itself to escape my fellow human beings. But I continue to serve mankind. And it is the continuity I provide, a continuity that transcends human timescales, that will enable this mission to succeed, where even Michael Poole failed.’

Diluc pulled a face. ‘What do you want from us – to worship you as a god?’

There were gasps; you didn’t speak to a pharaoh like that. But Andres seemed unfazed. ‘A god? No – though a little awe from you wouldn’t come amiss, Diluc. And anyhow, it probably won’t be me. Remember, it wasn’t a human agency that gave me my anti-ageing treatments, but the Qax…’

The Qax’s own body architecture had nothing in common with humanity’s. They were technically advanced, but their medicinal manipulation of their human subjects was always crude.

‘The success rate was only ever some forty per cent,’ Andres said. She inspected her hand, pulling at slack skin. ‘Oh, I would dearly love to live through this mission, all fifty millennia of it, and see it through to its conclusion. But I fear that’s unlikely to happen.’ She gazed around at them. ‘I can’t do this alone; that’s the bottom line. I will need help.’

Diluc suddenly saw it, and his mouth dropped open. ‘You aren’t serious.’

‘I’m afraid so. It is necessary for the good of the mission that some of the people in this room do not die.’

Ruul the geneticist unfolded his tall frame from his chair. ‘We believe it’s possible. We have the Qax technology.’ Without drama, he held up a yellow pill.

There was a long silence.

Andres smiled coldly. ‘This is no privilege. We can’t afford to die. We must remember, while everybody else forgets.

‘And we must manage. We must achieve total social control – control over every significant aspect of our crew’s lives – and we must govern their children’s lives just as tightly, as far as we can see ahead. Society has to be as rigid as the bulkheads which contain it. Oh, we can give the crew freedom within limits! But we need to enforce social arrangements in which conflict is reduced to negligible, appropriate skill levels kept up – and, most importantly, a duty of maintenance of the Ship is hammered home into every individual at birth. That is why a long-lived elite must ensure perfect continuity and complete control.’

Rusel said, ‘Elite? And what about the rights of those you call the transients? We pharaohs would be taking away all meaningful choice from them – and their children, and their children’s children.’

‘Rights? Rights?’ She loomed over him. ‘Rusel, a transient’s only purpose is to live, reproduce and die in an orderly fashion, thus preserving her genes to the far future. There is no room on this Ship for democracy, no space for love! A transient is just a conduit for her genes. She has no rights, any more than a bit of pipe that carries water from source to sink. Surely you thought this through. When we get to Canis Major, when we find a world to live on, when again we have an environment of surplus – then we can talk about rights. But in the meantime we will control.’ Her expression was complex. ‘But you must see that we will control through love.’

Diluc gaped. ‘Love?’

‘The Qax technology was based on genetic manipulation. We pharaohs were promised that our gift would be passed on to our children. And we had those children! But we pharaohs rarely bred true. I once had a child myself. She did not survive.’ She hesitated, just for a second. Then she went on, ‘But by now there are genes for immortality, or at least longevity, scattered through the human population – even among you. Do you see now why we had to build these arks – why we couldn’t flee and abandon you, or just take frozen zygotes or eggs?’ She spread her hands wide. ‘Because you are my children, and I love you.’

Nobody moved. Rusel thought he could see tears in her stony eyes. She is grotesque, he thought.

Diluc said carefully, ‘Pharaoh, would I be able to bring Tila with me? And our children, if we have them?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said gently. ‘Tila doesn’t qualify. Besides, the social structure simply wouldn’t be sustainable if—’

‘Then count me out.’ Diluc stood up.

She nodded. ‘I’m sure you won’t be the only one. Believe me, this is no gift I’m offering you. Longevity is a heavy burden.’

Diluc turned to Rusel. ‘Brother, are you coming with me?’

Rusel closed his eyes. The thought of his eventual death had actually been a comfort to him – a healing of his inner wounds, a lifting of the guilt he knew he would carry throughout his life. Now even the prospect of death was being taken away, to be replaced by nothing but an indefinite extension of duty. But he had to take it on, he saw. As Lora herself had told him, he had to live on, like a machine, and fulfil his function. That was why he was here; only that way could he atone.

He looked up at Diluc. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Complex emotions crossed his brother’s face: anger, despair, perhaps a kind of thwarted love. He turned and left the room.

Andres behaved as if Diluc had never existed.

‘We will always have to combat cultural drift,’ she said. ‘It is the blight of the generation starship. Already we have some pregnancies; soon we will have the first children, who will live and die knowing nothing but this Ship. And in a few generations – well, you can guess the rest. First you forget where you’re going. Then you forget you’re going anywhere. Then you forget you’re on a damn ship, and start to think the vessel is the whole universe. And so forth! Soon nothing is left but a rotten apple full of worms, falling through the void. Even the great engineer Michael Poole suffered this; a fifteen-hundred-year generation starship he designed – the first Great Northern – barely limped home. Oh, every so often you might have a glorious moment as some cannibalistic savage climbs the decks and peers out in awe at the stars, but that’s no consolation for the loss of the mission.

‘Well, not this time. You engineers will know we’re almost at the end of our GUTdrive cruise phase; the propellant ice is almost exhausted. And that means the Ship’s hull is exposed.’ She clapped her hands – and, to more gasps from the crew, the amphitheatre’s floor suddenly turned transparent.

Rusel was seated over a floor of stars; something inside him cringed.

Andres smiled at their reaction. ‘Soon we will leave the plane of the Galaxy, and what a sight that will be. In a transparent hull our crew will never be able to forget they are on a Ship. There will be no conceptual breakthroughs on my watch!’

IV

With the ice exhausted, the Ship’s banks of engines were shut down. From now on a dark matter ramjet would provide a comparatively gentle but enduring thrust.

Dark matter constituted most of the universe’s store of mass, with ‘light matter’ – the stuff of bodies and ships and stars – a mere trace. The key advantage of dark matter for the Ship’s mission planners was that it was found in thick quantities far beyond the visible disc of the Galaxy, and would be a plentiful fuel source throughout the voyage. But dark matter interacted with its light counterpart only through gravity. So now invisible wings of gravitational force unfolded ahead of the Ship. Spanning thousands of kilometres, these acted as a scoop to draw dark matter into the hollow centre of the torus-shaped Ship. There, concentrated, much of it was annihilated and induced to give up its mass-energy, which in turn drove a residuum out of the Ship as reaction mass.

Thus the Ship ploughed on into the dark.

Once again the Ship was rebuilt. The acceleration provided by the dark matter ramjet was much lower than the ice rockets, and so the Ship was spun about its axis, to provide artificial gravity through centrifugal force. It was an ancient solution and a crude one – but it worked, and ought to require little maintenance in the future.

The spin-up was itself a spectacular milestone, a great swivelling as floors became walls and walls became ceilings. The transparent floor of the acceleration-couch amphitheatre became a wall full of stars, whose cool emptiness Rusel grew to like.

Meanwhile the new ‘Elders’, the ten of them who had accepted Andres’s challenge, began their course of treatment. The procedure was administered by geneticist Ruul and a woman called Selur, the Ship’s senior doctor. The medics took the process slowly enough to catch any adverse reactions, or so they hoped. For Rusel it was painless enough, just injections and tablets, and he tried not to think about the alien nano-probes embedding themselves in his system, cleaning out ageing toxins, repairing cellular damage, rewiring his very genome.

His work continued to be absorbing, and when he had spare time he immersed himself in studies. All the crew were generalists to some degree, but the ten new Elders were expected to be a repository of memory and wisdom far beyond a human lifespan. So they all studied everything, and they learned from each other.

Rusel began with the disciplines he imagined would be most essential in the future. He studied medicine; anthropology, sociology and ethics; ecosynthesis and all aspects of the Ship’s life-support machinery; the workings of the Ship’s propulsion systems; techniques of colonisation; and the geography of the Galaxy and its satellites. He also buttonholed Andres herself and soaked up her knowledge of human history. Meanwhile, Qax-derived nano-systems were so prevalent throughout the Ship that Rusel’s own expertise was much in demand.

His days passed in a dream, as if time itself flowed differently for him now. His major goal continued to be to use up as much of his conscious time as possible with work. The studying was infinitely expandable, and very satisfying to his naturally acquisitive mind. He found he was able to immerse himself in esoteric aspects of one discipline or another for days on end, as if he was an abstract intellect, almost forgetting who he was.

The Elders’ placid lives were not without disturbance, however. The Qax biotechnology was far from perfect. In the first year of treatment one man suffered kidney failure; he survived, but had to be taken out of the programme.

And it was a great shock to all the Elders when geneticist Ruul himself succumbed to a ferocious cancer, as the technological rebuilding of his cells went awry.

The day after Ruul’s death, as the Elders adjusted to the loss of his competence and dry humour, Rusel decided he needed a break. He walked out of the Elders’ huddled quarters and through the body of the Ship, heading for the area where his brother had set up his own home with Tila.

On all the Ship’s cylindrical decks, the interior geography had been filled by corridors and cabins, clustered in concentric circles around little open plazas – ‘village squares’. Rusel knew the social theory: the Ship was supposed to be loosely partitioned into village-sized communities, but he quickly got lost in the detail; the layout of walls and floors and false ceilings was changed again and again as the crew sorted out their environment.

At last he came to the right doorway on the right corridor. He was about to knock when a boy, aged about five with a shock of thick black hair, rocketed out of the open door and ran between Rusel’s legs. The kid wore a bland Ship’s-issue coverall, long overdue for recycling judging by its grime.

This must be Tomi, Rusel thought, Diluc’s eldest. Child and Elder silently appraised each other. Then the kid stuck out his tongue and ran back into the cabin.

In a moment Diluc came bustling out of the door, wiping his hands on a towel. ‘Look, what in Lethe’s going on—Rusel! It’s you. Welcome, welcome!’

Rusel embraced his brother. Diluc smelt of baby sick, cooking and sweat, and Rusel was shocked to see a streak of grey in his brother’s hair. Perhaps Rusel had been locked away in his studies longer than he had realised.

Diluc led Rusel into his home. It was a complex of five small interconnected cabins, including a kitchen and bathroom. Somebody had been weaving tapestries; gaudy, space-filling abstract patterns filled one wall.

Rusel sat on a sofa adapted from an acceleration couch, and accepted a slug of some kind of liquor. He said, ‘I’m sorry I frightened Tomi. I suppose I’ve let myself become a stranger.’

Diluc raised an eyebrow. ‘Two things about that. Not so much “stranger” as “strange”.’ He brushed his hand over his scalp.

Rusel involuntarily copied the gesture, and felt bare skin. He had long forgotten that the first side-effect of the pharaoh treatment had been the loss of his hair; his head was as bald as Andres’s. Surrounded all day by the other Elders, Rusel had got used to it, he supposed. He said dryly, ‘Next time I’ll wear a wig. What’s the second thing I got wrong?’

‘That isn’t Tomi. Tomi was our first. He’s eight now. That was little Rus, as we call him. He’s five.’

‘Five?’ But Rusel had attended the baby Rusel’s naming ceremony. It seemed like yesterday.

‘And now we’re due for another naming. We’ve missed you, Rus.’

Rusel felt as if his life was slipping away. ‘I’m sorry.’

Tila came bustling in, with an awestruck little Rus in tow, and an infant in her arms. She too seemed suddenly to have aged; she had put on weight, and her face was lined by fine wrinkles. She said that Tomi was preparing a meal – of course Uncle Rusel would stay to eat, wouldn’t he? – and she sat down with the men and accepted a drink.

They talked of inconsequentials, and of their lives.

Diluc, having stormed out of Andres’s informal council, had become something of a leader in his own new community. Andres had ordered that the two-hundred-strong crew should be dispersed to live in close-knit ‘tribes’ of twenty or so, each lodged in a ‘village’ of corridors and cabins. There were to be looser links between the tribes, for such purposes as finding marriage or breeding partners. Thus the Ship was united in a single ‘clan’. Andres said this social structure was the most common form encountered among humans ‘in the wild’, as she put it, all the way back to pretechnological days on Earth, and was the most likely to be stable in the long run. Whether or not that was true, things had stayed stable so far.

Andres had also specified the kind of government each tribe should aspire to. In such a small world each individual should be cherished for her unique skills, and for the value of the education invested in her. People were interdependent, said Andres, and the way they governed themselves should reflect that. Even democracy wouldn’t do, as in a society of valued individuals the subjection of a minority to the will of a majority must be a bad thing. So Diluc’s tribe ran by consensus.

‘We talk and talk,’ Diluc said with a rueful grin, ‘until we all agree. Takes hours, sometimes. Once, the whole of the night watch.’

Tila snorted. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t like it that way. You always did like the sound of your own voice!’

The most important and difficult decisions the tribe had to make concerned reproduction, Most adults settled down into more-or-less monogamous marriages. But there had to be a separation between marriages for companionship and liaisons for reproduction; the gene pool was too small to allow matings for such trivial reasons as love.

Diluc showed Rusel a draft of a ‘social contract’ he was preparing to capture all this. ‘First, on reaching adulthood you submit yourself to the needs of the group as a whole. For instance your choice of career depends on what we need as much as what you want to do. Second, you agree to have kids only as the need allows. If we’re short of the optimum population level, you might have three or four or five, whether you want them or not, to bring up the numbers; if we’re over the target, you might have none at all and die childless. Third, you agree to postpone parenthood for as long as possible, and to keep working as long as possible. That way you maximise the investment the tribe has made in educating you. Fourth, you can select your own breeding-spouse, who may be the same as your companionship-spouse—’

‘We were lucky,’ Tila said fervently.

‘But she can’t be closer than a second cousin. And you have to submit to having your choice approved by the Elders. That’s you.’ He grinned at Rusel. ‘Your match will be screened for genetic desirability, and to maximise the freshness of the gene pool – all of that. And finally, if despite everything you’re unlucky enough to have been born with some inheritable defect that might, if propagated, damage the Ship’s chances of completing its mission, you agree not to breed at all. Your genetic line stops with you.’

Rusel frowned. ‘That’s eugenics.’

Diluc shrugged. ‘What else can we do?’

Diluc hadn’t studied Earth history, as Elder-educated Rusel now had, and without that perspective, Rusel realised, that word carried for him none of the horrific connotations it had once borne. As Diluc had implied, they had little choice anyhow given the situation they were in. Besides, eugenics through arranged couplings was lower-tech than genetic engineering: more future-proofing.

Rusel studied the draft contract. ‘And what happens if somebody breaks the rules?’

Diluc was uncomfortable; suddenly Rusel was aware that he was an Elder, as well as this man’s brother. ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ Diluc said. ‘Look, Rus, we don’t have police here, and we don’t have room for jails. Besides, everybody really is essential to the community as a whole. We can’t coerce. We work by persuasion; we hope that such situations will be easily resolved.’

Diluc talked of personal things too: of the progress of his boys at school, how Tomi had always hated the hour’s wall-cleaning he had to put in each day, while little Rus loved it for the friends he was making.

‘They are good kids,’ Rusel said.

‘Yes. And you need to see more of them,’ Diluc said pointedly. ‘But, you know, Rus, they’re not like us. They are the first Shipborn generation. They are different. To them, all our stories of Port Sol and Canis Major are so many legends of places they will never see. This Ship is their world, not ours: we, born elsewhere, are aliens here. You know, I keep thinking we’ve bitten off more than we can chew. For all Andres’s planning, already things are drifting. No wonder generation starships always fail!’

Rusel tried to respond to their openness by giving them something of himself. But he found he had little to say. His mind was full of studying, but there was very little human incident in his life. It was if he hadn’t been alive at all, he thought with dismay.

Diluc was appalled to hear of Ruul’s death. ‘That pompous geneticist – I suppose in a way it’s fitting he should be the first to go. But don’t let it take you, brother.’ Impulsively he crossed to Rusel and rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder. ‘You know, all this is enough for me: Tila, the kids, the home we’re building together. It’s good to know that our lives serve a higher goal, but this is all I need to make me happy. Maybe I don’t have much imagination, you think?’

Or maybe you’re more human than I am, Rusel thought. ‘We must all make our choices,’ he said.

Diluc said carefully, ‘But you can still make a different choice.’

‘What do you mean?’

He leaned forward. ‘Why don’t you give it up, Rus? This crappy old Qax nano-medicine, this dreadful anti-ageing – you’re still young; you could come out of there, flush the shit out of your system, grow your hair back, find some nice woman to make you happy again…’

Rusel tried to keep his face expressionless, but he failed.

Diluc backed off. ‘Sorry. You still remember Lora.’

‘I always will. I can’t help it.’

‘We’ve all been through an extraordinary experience,’ Tila said. ‘I suppose we all react differently.’

‘Yes.’ Tila, he remembered, had left behind a child.

Diluc looked into his eyes. ‘You never will come out, will you? Because you’ll never be able to cast off that big sack of guilt on your back.’

Rusel smiled. ‘Is it that obvious?’

Tila was a gracious hostess. She perceived his discomfort, and they began to talk of old times, of the days on Port Sol. But Rusel was relieved when Tomi came in to announce that the meal was ready, relieved to hurry through the food and get away, relieved to shut himself away once more in the bloodless monastic calm of his studying.

V

He would remember that difficult visit again, much later, when a boy came to find him.

As time passed, the Elders withdrew further from the crew. They requisitioned their own sealed-off living area. It was close to the Ship’s axis where the artificial gravity was a little lower than further out, a sop to muscles and bones expected to weaken with the centuries. Andres humorously called this refuge the ‘Cloister’. And the Elders were spared the routine chores, even the cleaning, to which the rest of the crew were subject. Soon it was hard to avoid the feeling that the crew were only there to serve the Elders.

Of course it was all part of Andres’s grand social design that there should eventually be an ‘awe gap’, as she put it, between Elders and transients. But Rusel wondered if a certain distancing was inevitable anyhow. The differential ageing of transients and Elders became apparent surprisingly quickly. When an Elder met a transient she saw a face that would soon crumble with age and vanish, while the transient saw a mysteriously unchanging figure who would see events that transpired long after the transient was dead. Rusel watched as friendships dissolved, even love affairs evaporated, under this stress.

However the increasingly isolated Elders, thrown on each other’s company, were no chummy club. They were all bright, ambitious people; they wouldn’t have been filtered out for Andres’s inner circle otherwise, and there was always a certain tension and bickering. Doctor Selur remarked sourly that it was like being stuck with a bunch of jealous academics, for ever.

But the Elders were also cautious of each other, Rusel thought. Always at the back of his mind was the thought that he would have to live with these people for a long time. So he strove not to make any enemies – and conversely not to get too close to anyone. Eternity with a lover was one thing, but with an ex-lover it would be hellish. Better that things were insipid, but tolerable.

Life settled down. In the calm of the Cloister, time passed smoothly, painlessly.

One day a boy came knocking timorously, asking for Rusel. He was aged about sixteen.

Rusel thought he recognised him. He had spent a long time on his own, and his social skills were rusty, but he tried to focus and greet the boy warmly. ‘Tomi! It’s so long since I saw you.’

The boy’s eyes were round. ‘My name is Poro, sir.’

Rusel frowned. ‘But that day I came to visit – you made us all a meal, me and Diluc and Tila, while little Rus played…’ But that was long ago, he told himself, he wasn’t sure how long, and he fell silent.

The boy seemed to have been prepared for this. ‘My name is Poro,’ he said firmly. ‘Tomi was—’

‘Your father.’

‘My grandfather.’

So this was Diluc’s great-grandson. Lethe, how long have I spent inside this box?

The boy was looking around the Cloister. His eyes were unblinking, his mouth pulled back in a kind of nervous grin. None of the Elders was hot on empathy, especially with transients, but suddenly Rusel felt as if he saw this place through this child’s eyes.

The Cloister was like a library, perhaps. Or a hospital room. The Elders sat in their chairs or walked slowly through the silence of the room, their every step calculated to reduce the risk of harm to their fragile, precious bodies. It had been this way since long before Poro had been born, these musty creatures pursuing their cold interests. And I, who once loved Lora when she wasn’t much older than this child, am part of this dusty stillness.

‘What do you want, Poro?’

‘Diluc is ill. He is asking for you.’

‘Diluc…?’

‘Your brother.’

It turned out that Diluc was more than ill; he was dying.

So Rusel went with the boy, stepping outside the confines of the Cloister for the first time in years.

He wasn’t at home out here any more. The original crew had died off steadily, following a demographic curve not terribly different to that they would have endured had they remained on Port Sol. Rusel had grown used to seeing faces he had known since childhood crumple with age and disappear before him. Still, it had been a shock when that first generation reached old age – and, since many of them had been around the same age at launch, their deaths came in a flood.

He knew none of the faces of the younger transients. Everything about the new generations was different: the way they rebuilt the Ship’s internal architecture, their manner with each other, the way they wore their hair – even their language, which was full of a guttural slang. The transients knew him, though, even the youngest. They stared at him with curiosity, or irreverence – or, worst of all, awe.

The basic infrastructure of the Ship itself, of course, remained unchanged. In a way he came to identify with that level of reality much more than with the flickering, fast-paced changes wrought by the transients. Though his senses were slowly dulling – the Qax treatment had slowed his ageing but not stopped it entirely – he felt he was becoming more attuned to the Ship’s subtle vibrations and noises, its mechanical moods and joys. Transients came and went, fiddling with the partitions, and the other Elders were awkward old cusses, but the Ship itself was his constant friend, demanding only his care.

As they walked he saw that the boy had a bruise on his forehead. ‘What happened to you?’

‘Punishment.’ Poro averted his eyes, ashamed. One of his teachers had whacked him with a ruler for ‘impudence’, which turned out to mean asking too-deep questions.

A paradox was emerging in the philosophy of education aboard the Ship. It had been quickly found that learning needed to be restrictive, and that curiosity couldn’t be allowed to go unchecked. The students had to be bright and informed enough to be able to maintain the Ship’s systems. But there was no room for expansion or innovation. There was unusually only one way to do things: you learned it that way.

It was necessary, Rusel knew. You couldn’t have people tinkering. So you learned only what you needed to know, and were taught not to ask any more, not to explore. But he didn’t like the idea of battering students into submission for the ‘crime’ of curiosity. Perhaps he would have a word with Andres about it, get a new policy formulated.

They reached Diluc’s corridor-village.

Before he could see his brother he had to be met by a series of tribe worthies. Burly men and women in drab Ship’s-issue clothing, they gathered with solemn expressions. Their greetings were lengthy and complicated. The transients seemed to be evolving elaborate rituals to be used on every social occasion: meeting, parting, taking meals. Rusel could see the value of such rituals, which used up time, and reduced social friction. But it was hard to keep up with the ever-changing rules. The only constant was that these politeness games always got more elaborate – and it was very easy to get something wrong and give offence.

The worthies looked concerned at the prospective loss of Diluc, as well they might.

Andres’s imposition of ‘rule-by-consensus’ had been less than effective. In some of the Ship’s dozen or so tribes, there was endless jaw-jaw that paralysed decision-making. Elsewhere strong individuals had begun to grasp power, more or less overtly. Andres wasn’t too concerned as long as the job got done, the basic rules obeyed: whoever was in command among the transients had to get the approval of the Elders anyhow, and so Andres and her team were still able to exert a moderating influence.

The situation in Diluc’s tribe had been more subtle, though. As the brother of an Elder Diluc had had a unique charisma, and he had used that power to push his peers to conclusions they might not otherwise have reached. He had been a leader, but of the best sort, Rusel thought, leading from the back, invisibly. Now he was about to be taken away, and his people knew they would miss him.

With the worthies out of the way, the Elder was presented to Diluc’s children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. All of them went through more elaborate transient-to-Elder rituals, even the smallest children, with an unsmiling intensity Rusel found disturbing.

At last, with reluctance, he entered Diluc’s apartment. The rooms were much as he remembered them, though the tapestries on the wall had changed.

Tila was still alive, though she was bent, her hair white, and her face a crumpled mask. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she whispered, and she took Rusel’s hands in her own. ‘There are so few of us left, you know, so few not Shipborn. And he did keep asking for you.’

Rusel pressed her hand, reserved, awkward. He felt out of practice with people, with emotions; before this broken-hearted old woman he felt utterly inadequate.

Diluc himself lay on a bed, covered by a worn blanket. Rusel was shocked by how his brother had imploded with age. And he could see, even through the blanket, the swelling of the stomach tumour that was killing him.

He had thought Diluc was sleeping. But his brother opened one eye. ‘Hello, Rusel,’ he said, his voice a croak. ‘You bastard.’

‘I’m sorry—’

‘You haven’t been here in fifty years.’

‘Not that long.’

‘Fifty years! Fifty years! It’s not as if—’ He broke up in coughing. ‘As if it’s that big a Ship…’

They talked, as they had talked before. Diluc told rambling anecdotes about his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all properly genetically selected, all wonderful kids.

Rusel had to tell him of a cull of the Elders.

It had had a variety of causes, according to Doctor Selur, but Andres had sniffed at that. ‘I’ve seen it before. Call it a death wish,’ she had said. ‘You reach an age where your body knows it’s time to die. You accept it. Maybe it’s some kind of neural programming, a comfort as we face the inevitable.’ She cackled; she was ageing too, and was now toothless. ‘The Qax treatments don’t do anything about it. And it carries away more would-be immortals than you’d imagine. Strange, isn’t it? That longevity should turn out to be a matter of the mind as much as the body.’

Rusel had spent some years in faint trepidation, wondering if and when his own dark-seeking mental programming might kick in. But it never did, and he wondered if he had some unsuspected strength – or, perhaps, a deficiency.

Now Diluc grimaced. ‘So even immortals die.’ He reached out his hand. Rusel took it; the bones were frail, the flesh almost vanished. ‘Look after them,’ Diluc said.

‘Who?’

‘Everybody. You know. And look after yourself.’ He looked up at his brother, and Rusel saw pity in his brother’s eyes – pity for him, from a withered, dying man.

He could bear to stay only a few minutes more. He would never see his brother again.

He tried to talk over his feelings about Diluc’s death with the Captain. But Andres was dismissive. ‘Diluc was a coward who shunned his duty,’ she said. ‘Anyhow, better when the first crew have all gone. They always saw us as peers, to some extent. So they resisted our ideas, our leadership; it was natural. We’re totally alien to the new sort, and that will make them more malleable.

‘And the new lot never suffered the trauma of seeing Port Sol trashed before their eyes. The psychological trauma ran deep, Rusel; you aren’t the only one … This new batch are healthier, adjusted to the environment of the Ship, because they’ve known nothing else. When there’s only them left, we’ll be able to get things shaken down properly around here at last. You’ll see.’

With relief Rusel returned to his studies, away from the complications of humanity. Once more time flowed smoothly past him, and that difficult day receded down the dimming corridors of his memory.

No more relatives came to see him, ever again.

VI

‘…Rusel. Rusel!’ The voice was harsh – Andres’s voice.

Sleep was deep these days, and it took him an age to emerge. And as he opened himself to the light he swam up through layers of dream and memory, until he became confused about what was real and what wasn’t. He always knew where he was, of course, even in his deepest sleep. He was on the Ship, his drifting tomb. But he could never remember when he was.

He tried to sit up. The Couch responded to his feeble movements, and its back smoothly lifted him upright. He peered around in the dim, golden light of the Cloister. There were three Couches, great bulky mechanical devices half bed and half medical support system: only three, because only three of the Elders stayed alive.

Somebody was moving around him. It was a transient, of course, a young woman, a nurse. He didn’t recognise her; she was new since he’d last been awake. She kept her eyes averted, and her hands fluttered through an elaborate greetings-with-apology ritual. He dismissed her with a curt gesture; you could eat up your entire day with such flim-flam.

Andres was watching him, her eyes sharp in her ruin of a face. She looked like a huge bug in her cocoon of blankets.

‘Well?’ he snapped.

‘You are drooling,’ she said mildly. ‘Not in front of the transients, Rusel.’

Irritated, he wiped his chin with his sleeve.

‘Oh,’ she said, her tone unchanged, ‘and Selur died.’

That news, so casually delivered, was like a punch in the throat. He turned clumsily, weighed down by blankets and life-sustaining equipment. The doctor’s Couch was surrounded by transients who were removing her mummy-like body. Working in silence, cautiously, reverently, they were trembling, he saw dimly.

‘I never did like her much,’ Rusel said.

‘You’ve said that before. Many times.’

‘I’ll miss her, though.’

‘Yes. And then there were two. Rusel, we need to talk. We need a new strategy to deal with the transients. We’re supposed to be figures of awe. Look at us. Look at poor Selur! We can’t let them see us like this again.’

He glanced cautiously at the transient nurses.

‘Don’t worry,’ Andres said. ‘They can’t understand. Linguistic drift. I don’t think we should allow transients in here any more. The machines can sustain us. Lethe knows there are enough spare parts, now we have so many empty Couches! What I suggest is—’

‘Stow it,’ he said crossly. ‘You’re always the same, you old witch. You always want to jam a solution down my throat before I even know what the problem is. Let me gather my thoughts.’

‘Stow it, stow it,’ she parroted, grotesquely.

‘Shut up.’ He closed his eyes to exclude her, and laid back in his Couch. Through the implant in the back of his skull he allowed data from his body, the Ship, and the universe beyond filter into his sensorium.

His body first, of course, the slowly failing biomachinery that had become his prison. The good news was that, more than two centuries after his brother’s death, his slow ageing had bottomed out. Since he had last checked – Lethe, all of a month ago, it seemed like yesterday, how long had he slept this time? – nothing had got significantly worse. But he was stuck in the body of a ninety-year-old man, and a frail old man at that. He slept almost all the time, his intervals of lucidity ever more widely separated, while the Couch fed him, removed his waste, gently turned him to and fro and manipulated his stick-thin limbs. Oh, and every few weeks he received a blood transfusion, an offering to the Elders from the grateful transients outside the Cloister. He may as well have been a coma victim, he thought grumpily.

His age was meaningless, his condition boring. Briskly he moved on.

His Virtual viewpoint roamed through the Ship. Despite the passage of centuries, the physical layout of the corridor-village that had been Diluc’s was the same, save for detail, the same knots of corridors around the ‘village square’. But the people had changed, as they always did, youth blossoming, old age crumbling.

The Autarch he remembered from his last inspection was still in place. He was a big bruiser who called himself Ruul, in subtle defiance of various inhibitions against taking the name of an Elder, even one long dead. He at least didn’t look to have aged much since Rusel’s last inspection. Flanked by two of his wives, Ruul received a queue of supplicants, all seeking the Autarch’s ‘wisdom’ concerning some petty problem or other. Ruul’s judgements were brisk and efficient, and as Rusel listened – though the time-drifted language was hard to decipher – he couldn’t spot any immediate errors of doctrine in the Autarch’s summary harshness.

He allowed his point of view to move on.

He watched the villagers go about their business. Four of them were scrubbing the walls clean of dirt, as they took turns to do every day. Two plump-looking worthies were discussing a matter of etiquette, their mannerisms complex and time-consuming. There were some new bits of artwork on the walls, many of them fool-the-eye depth-perspective paintings, designed to make the Ship’s corridors look bigger than they were. One woman was tending a ‘garden’ of bits of waste polymer, combing elaborate formations into it with a small metal rake. These transients, Shipborn for generations, had never heard of Zen gardens; they had rediscovered this small-world art form for themselves.

A little group of children was being taught to disassemble and maintain an air-duct fan; they chanted the names of its parts, learning by rote. They would be taught nothing more, Rusel knew. There was no element of principle here: nothing about how the fan as a machine worked, or how it fitted into the greater systems of the Ship itself. You only learned what you needed to know.

As he surveyed the village, statistics rolled past his enhanced vision in a shining column. Everything was nominal, if you took a wider perspective. Maintenance routines were being kept up satisfactorily. Reproduction rules, enforced by the Autarch and his peers in the other villages, were largely being adhered to, and there was a reasonable genetic mix.

The situation was stable. But in Diluc’s village, only the Autarch was free.

Andres’s uncharacteristically naïve dream of respectful communities governing themselves by consensus had barely outlasted the death of Diluc. In the villages strong characters had quickly taken control, and in most cases had installed themselves and their families as hereditary rulers. Andres had grumbled at that, but it was an obviously stable social system, and in the end the Elders, in subtle ways, lent the Autarchs their own mystical authority.

The Autarchs were slowly drifting away from their subject populations, though.

Some ‘transients’ had always proven to be rather longer-lived than others. It seemed that the Qax’s tampering with the genomes of their pharaohs had indeed been passed on to subsequent generations, if imperfectly, and that gene complex, a tendency for longevity, was gradually expressing itself. Indeed the Autarchs actively sought out breeding partners for themselves who came from families that showed such tendencies.

So, with time, the Autarchs and their offspring were ageing more slowly than their transient subjects.

It was just natural selection, argued Andres. People had always acquired power so that their genes could be favoured. Traditionally you would propagate your genes by doing your best to outbreed your subjects. But if you were an Autarch, in the confines of the Ship, what were you to do? There was obviously no room here for a swarm of princes, bastards or otherwise. Besides, the Elders’ genetic-health rules wouldn’t allow any such thing. So the Autarchs were seeking to dominate their populations with their own long lives, not numbers of offspring.

Andres seemed to find all this merely intellectually interesting, a working-out of genetic games theory. Rusel wondered what would happen if this went on.

He continued his random wandering. Everybody was busy, intent on their affairs. Some even seemed happy. But it all looked drab to Rusel, the villagers dressed in colourless Ship’s-issue clothing, their lives bounded by the polished-smooth bulkheads of the Ship. Even their language was dull, and becoming duller. The transients had no words for ‘horizon’ or ‘sky’ – but as if in compensation they had over forty words describing degrees of love.

He allowed his consciousness to return to his own body. When he surfaced, he found Andres watching him, as she so often did.

‘We need a new way to interface with the transients,’ she said again. ‘Some of the Autarchs are tough customers, Rusel. If they start to believe we’re weak – for instance, if we sleep for three days before delivering the answer to the simplest question—’

‘I understand. We can’t let the transients see us.’ He sighed, irritated. ‘But what else can we do? Delivering edicts through disembodied voices isn’t going to wash. If they don’t see us they will soon forget who we are.’ ‘Soon’, in the language of the Elders, meaning in another generation or two.

‘Right,’ she snapped. ‘So we have to repersonalise our authority. What do you think of this?’ She gestured feebly, and a Virtual coalesced in the air over her head.

It showed Rusel. Here he was as a young man, up to his elbows in nanofood banks, labouring to make the Ship sound for its long journey. Here he was as a young-ish Elder, bald as ice, administering advice to grateful transients. There were even images of him from the vanishingly remote days before the launch, images of him with a smiling Lora.

‘Where did you get this stuff?’

She sniffed. ‘The Ship’s log. Your own archive. Come on, Rusel, we hardly have any secrets from each other after all this time! Pretty girl, though.’

‘What are you intending to do with this?’

‘We’ll show it to the transients. We’ll show you at your best, Rusel, you at the peak of your powers, you walking the same corridors they walk now – you as a human being, yet more than human. That’s what we want: engagement with their petty lives, empathy, yet awe. We’ll put a face to your voice.’

He closed his eyes. It made sense, of course; Andres’s logic was grim, but always valid. ‘But why me? It would be better if both of us—’

‘That wouldn’t be wise,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want them to see me die.’

It took him a while to work out that she meant that she, Andres, the first of the Elders, was failing at last. Rusel found this impossible to take in: her death would be to have a buttress of the universe knocked away. ‘But you won’t see the destination,’ he said peevishly, as if she was making a bad choice.

‘No,’ she said hoarsely. ‘But the Mayflower will get there! Look around, Rusel. The Ship is functioning flawlessly. Our designed society is stable and doing its job of preserving the bloodlines. And you, you were always the brightest of all. You will see it through. That’s enough for me.’

It was true, Rusel supposed. Her design was fulfilled; the Ship and its crew were working now just as Andres had always dreamed they should. But only two hundred and fifty years had worn away, only half of one per cent of the awesome desert of time he must cross to reach Canis Major – and now, it seemed, he was going to have to make the rest of that journey alone.

‘No, not alone,’ said Andres. ‘You’ll always have the Ship…’

Yes, the Ship, his constant companion. Suddenly he longed to escape from the endless complications of humanity and immerse himself in its huge technological calm.

He lay back in his Couch and allowed his mind to roam once more. This time his awareness drifted away from the bright warm human bubble at the Ship’s heart, out through the crowded torus of the hull to the realm of the pulsing ramjet engines, the wispy gravitational wings behind which the Ship sailed, and the vast spaces beyond. The Ship had covered only a fraction of its epic journey, but already it was climbing out of the galactic plane and the Core, the crowded heart of the Galaxy, rose like a sun from the dust-strewn lanes of the spiral arms. It was a stunning, comforting sight.

By the time he came back from his intergalactic dreaming, Andres was gone, her Couch disassembled for spare parts, her body removed to the cycling tanks.

VII

Rusel was woken from his long slumber by the face of a boy, a face twisted with anger – an anger directed at him.

In retrospect Rusel should have seen the rebellion coming. All the indicators had been there: the drift of the transients’ social structures, the gathering tensions. It was bound to happen.

But it was so hard for him to pay attention to the brief lives of these transients, their incomprehensible language and customs, their petty concerns and squabbling. After all, Hilin was a boy of the forty-fifth generation since launch: forty-five generations. Lethe, nearly a thousand years…

The exploits of Hilin, though, forced themselves on his attention.

Hilin was sixteen years old when it all began. He had been born in Diluc’s corridor-village.

By now the Autarchs of the different villages had intermarried to form a seamless web of power. They lived on average twice as long as their subjects, and had established a monopoly on the Ship’s water supply. A water empire ruled by gerontocrats: their control was total.

Hilin was not one of the local Autarch’s brood; his family were poor and powerless, like all the Autarch’s subjects. But they seemed to accept their lot. As he played in corridors whose polymer floors were rutted by generations of passing feet, Hilin emerged as a bright, happy child. He seemed compliant when he was young, cheerfully swabbing the bulkheads when it was his turn, and accepting the cuffs of his teachers when he asked impudent questions.

He had always been oddly fascinated by the figure of Rusel himself – or rather the semi-mythical presence portrayed to the villagers through the cycling Virtual storyboards. Hilin soaked up the story of the noble Elder who had been forced to choose between a life of unending duty and his beloved Lora, eventually becoming an undying model to those he ruled.

As he had grown, Hilin had flourished educationally. At fourteen he was inducted into an elite caste. As intellectual standards declined, literacy had largely been abandoned, and ancient manuals had anyhow crumbled to dust. So these monkish thinkers now committed to memory every significant commandment regarding the workings of the Ship and their own society. You would start on this vital project at fourteen, and wouldn’t expect to be done until you were in your fifties, by which time a new generation of rememberers was ready to take over anyhow.

Rusel dryly called these patient thinkers Druids: he wasn’t interested in the transients’ own names for themselves, which would change in an eye-blink generation anyhow. He had certainly approved of this practice when it emerged. All this endless memorising was a marvellous way to use up pointless lives – and it established a power-base to rival the Autarchs.

Again Hilin had flourished, and he passed one Druidic assessment after another. Even a torrid romance with Sale, a girl from a neighbouring village, didn’t distract him from his studies.

When the time came, the couple asked their families for leave to form a companionship-marriage, which was granted. They went to the Autarch for permission to have children. To their delight, it turned out their genetic make-ups, as mapped in the Druids’ capacious memories, were compatible enough to allow this too.

But even so the Druids forbade the union.

Hilin, horrified, learned that this was because of the results of his latest Druidic assessment, a test of his general intelligence and potential. He had failed, not by posting too low a score, but too high.

Rusel, brooding, understood. The eugenic elimination of weaknesses had in general been applied wisely. But under the Autarch-Druid duopoly, attempts were made to weed out the overbright, the curious – anybody who might prove rebellious. So, if you were bright, you mustn’t be allowed to breed. Rusel would have stamped out this practice, had he even noticed it. If this went on, the transient population would become passive, listless, easily manipulated by the Autarchs and the Druids, but useless for the mission’s larger purposes.

It was too late for Hilin. He was banned from ever seeing his Sale again. And he was told by the Autarch’s ministers that this was by order of the Elder himself, though Rusel, dreaming his life away, knew nothing about it.

After that Hilin spent long hours in the shrine-like enclosure where Rusel’s Virtuals played out endlessly. He tried to understand. He told himself the Elder’s wisdom surpassed his own; this severance from his lover must be for the best, no matter what pain it caused him. He even tried to draw comfort from what he saw as parallels between his own doomed romance and Rusel and his lost Lora. But understanding didn’t come, and his bewilderment and pain soon blossomed to resentment – and anger.

In his despair, he tried to destroy the shrine of the Elder.

As punishment, the Autarch locked him in a cell for two days. Hilin emerged from his confinement outwardly subdued, inwardly ready to explode.

Rusel would later castigate himself for failing to see the dangers in the situation. But it was so hard to see anything at all now.

His central nervous system was slowly deteriorating, so the Couch informed him. He could still move his arms and legs – he could still walk, even, with a frame – but he felt no sensation in his feet, nothing but the faintest ache in his fingertips. As pain and pleasure alike receded, he felt he was coming loose from the world. When he surfaced into lucidity he was often shocked to find a year had passed like a day, as if his sense of time was becoming logarithmic.

And meanwhile, as he became progressively disconnected from the physical world, his mind was undergoing a reconstruction of its own. After a thousand years his memories, especially the deepest, most precious memories of all, were, like the floors of the Ship’s corridors, worn with use; he was no longer sure if he remembered, or if he only had left memories of memories.

If he couldn’t rely even on memory, if he came adrift from both present and past, what was he? Was he even human any more? Certainly the latest set of transients meant less than nothing to him: why, each of them was made up of the atoms and molecules of her ancestors, cycled through the Ship’s systems forty times or more, shuffled and reshuffled in meaningless combinations. They could not touch his heart in any way.

At least he thought so, until Hilin brought him the girl.

The two of them stood before Rusel’s Virtual shrine, where they believed the Elder’s consciousness must reside. Trying to match the Elder’s own timescales they stayed there for long hours, all but motionless. Hilin’s face was set, pinched with anger and determination. She, though, was composed.

At last Rusel’s lofty attention was snagged by familiarity. The girl was taller than most of the transients, pale, her bones delicate. And her eyes were large, dark, somehow unfocused even as she gazed into unseen imaging systems.

Lora.

It couldn’t be, of course! How could it? Lora had had no family on the Ship. And yet Rusel, half-dreaming, immersed in memory, couldn’t take his eyes off her image.

As Hilin had planned.

And as Rusel gazed helplessly at ‘Lora’s’ face, the uprising broke out all over the Ship. In every village the Autarchs and their families were turned out of their palatial cabins. The Autarchs, having commanded their short-lived flocks for centuries, were quite unprepared, and few resisted; they had no conception such an uprising was even possible. The old rulers and their peculiar children were herded together in a richly robed mass in the Ship’s largest chamber, the upturned amphitheatre where Rusel had long ago endured the launch from Port Sol.

The revolt had been centrally planned, carefully timed, meticulously executed. Despite generations of selective breeding to eliminate initiative and cunning, the transients no longer seemed so sheepish, and in Hilin they had discovered a general. And it was over before the Elder’s attention had turned away from the girl, before he had even noticed.

Now Hilin, king of the corridors, stood before the Elder’s shrine. And he pulled at the face of the girl, the Lora look-alike. It had been a mask, just a mask; Rusel realised shamefully that with such a simple device the boy had manipulated the emotions of a being more than a thousand years old.

A bloody club in his hand, Hilin screamed his defiance at his undying god. The Cloister’s systems translated the boy’s language, after a thousand years quite unlike Rusel’s. ‘You allowed this to happen,’ Hilin yelled. ‘You allowed the Autarchs to feed off us like [untranslatable – body parasites? ]. We wash the decks for them with our blood, while they keep water from our children. And you, you [untranslatable – an obscenity? ] allowed it to happen. And do you know why?’ Hilin stepped closer to the shrine, and his face loomed in Rusel’s vision. ‘Because you don’t exist. Nobody has seen you in centuries – if they ever did! You’re a lie, cooked up by the Autarchs to keep us in our place, that’s what I think. Well, we don’t believe in you any more, not in any of that [untranslatable – faeces? ]. And we’ve thrown out the Autarchs. We are free!’

‘Free’ they were. Hilin and his followers looted the Autarchs’ apartments, and gorged themselves on the food and water the Autarchs had hoarded for themselves, and screwed each other senseless in blithe defiance of genetic-health prohibitions. And not a single deck panel was swabbed down.

After three days, as the chaos showed no signs of abating, Rusel knew that this was the most serious crisis in the Ship’s long history. He had to act. It took him another three days to get ready for his performance, three days mostly taken up with fighting with the inhibiting protocols of his medical equipment.

Then he ordered the Cloister door to open, for the first time in centuries. It actually stuck, dry-welded in place. It finally gave way with a resounding crack, making his entrance even more spectacular than he had planned.

But there was nobody around to witness his incarnation but a small boy, no more than five years old. With his finger planted firmly in one nostril, and his eyes round with surprise, the kid looked heartbreakingly like Tomi, Diluc’s boy, long since dead and fed to the recycling banks.

Rusel was standing, supported by servomechanisms, gamely clutching at a walking frame. He tried to smile at the boy, but he couldn’t feel his own face, and didn’t know if he succeeded. ‘Bring me the chief Druids,’ he said, and a translation whispered in the air around him.

The boy yelled and fled.

The Druids actually knelt before him, covering their faces. He walked very cautiously among them, allowing them even to touch his robe. He wanted to be certain they accepted his reality, to smell the dusty tang of centuries on him. Maybe in their hearts these monkish philosophers, like Hilin, had never really believed in the Elder’s existence. Well, now their messiah had suddenly reincarnated among them.

But Rusel himself saw them as if through a flawed lens; he could hear little, feel less, smell or taste nothing. It was like walking around in a skinsuit, he thought.

He was an angry god, though. The rules of Shipboard life had been broken, he thundered. And he didn’t just mean the recent mess. There must be no more water empires, and no knowledge empires either: the Druids would have to make sure that every child knew the basic rules, of Ship maintenance and genetic-health breeding.

He ordered that the Autarchs should not be returned to their seats of power. Instead, the governing would be done, for this generation, by a Druid – he picked out one terrified-looking woman at random. As long as she ruled wisely and well, she would have the Elder’s backing. On her death the people would select a successor, who could not be more closely related to her predecessor than second cousin. No more dynasties.

The old Autarchs and their brood, meanwhile, were to be spared. They would be shut away permanently in their amphitheatre prison, where there were supplies to keep them alive. Rusel believed they and their strange slow-growing children would die off; within a generation, a tick of time, that problem would go away. He had done his share of killing, he thought.

Then he sighed. The worst of it had still to be faced. ‘Bring me Hilin,’ he ordered.

They dragged in the corridor king, tied up with strips of cloth. He had been assaulted, Rusel saw; his face was battered and one arm seemed broken. This erstwhile rebel was already being punished for his blasphemy, then, by those who sought the favour of the Elder. But Hilin faced Rusel defiantly, strength and intelligence showing in his face. Rusel’s scarred heart ached a little more, for strength and intelligence were the last features you wanted in a transient.

Hilin had to die, of course. His flayed corpse would be displayed before the shrine of the Elder, as a warning to future generations. But Rusel didn’t have the courage to watch it done. He remembered the man in the electric-blue skinsuit: he always had been a coward, he thought.

As he returned to his Cloister, he looked back once more. ‘And clean up this damn mess,’ he said.

He knew it would take a long time, even on his timescales, before he managed to forget the contemptuous defiance on Hilin’s young face. But Hilin went into the dark like all his transient ancestors, and soon his siblings and nieces and nephews and everybody who looked remotely like him went too, gone, all gone into the sink of time, and soon only Rusel was left alive to remember the rebellion.

Rusel would never leave the Cloister again.

VIII

Some time after that, there was a decimating plague.

It was brought about by a combination of factors: a slow unmonitored build-up of irritants and allergens in the Ship’s environment, and then the sudden emergence of a latent virus in a population already weakened. It was a multiple accident, impossible for the pharaoh designers of the Ship to plan away, for all their ingenuity. But given enough time – more than five thousand years now – such low-probability events inevitably occurred.

The surviving population crashed to the threshold of viability. For a few decades Rusel was forced to intervene, through booming commands, to ensure that the Ship was maintained at a base level, and that genetic-health protocols were observed and breeding matches planned even more carefully than usually.

The low numbers brought benefits, though. The Ship’s systems were now producing a large surplus of supplies, and there was no possibility of any more water empires. Rusel considered, in his glacial way, establishing a final population at a lower level than before.

It intrigued him that the occurrence of the low-probability plague mirrored the restructuring of his own mental processes. The day-to-day affairs of the Ship, and the clattering of the transient generations, barely distracted him now. Instead he became aware of slower pulses, deeper rhythms far beneath any transient’s horizon of awareness.

His perception of risk changed. His endless analysis of the Ship’s systems uncovered obscure failure modes: certain parameter combinations that could disrupt the governing software, interacting failures among the nano-machines that still laboured over the Ship’s fabric inside and out. Such failures were highly unlikely; he estimated the Ship might suffer significant damage once every ten thousand years or so. On Earth, whole civilisations had risen and fallen with greater alacrity than that. But he had to plan for such things, to prepare the Ship’s defences and recovery strategies. The plague, after all, was just such a low-risk event, but given enough time it had come about.

The transients’ behaviour, meanwhile, adjusted on its own timescales.

Once every decade or so the inhabitants of Diluc’s corridor-village would approach the shrine of the Elder, where the flickering Virtual still showed. One of them would dress up in a long robe and march behind a walking frame with exaggerated slowness, while the rest cowered. And then they would fall on a manikin and tear it to pieces. Rusel had watched such displays several times before he had realised what was going on: it was, of course, a ritualised re-enactment of his own last manifestation, the hobbling leader himself, the manikin poor overbright Hilin. Sometimes the bit of theatre would culminate in the flaying of a living human, which they must imagine he demanded; when such savage generations arose, Rusel would avert his cold gaze.

Meanwhile, in the village in which Hilin’s doomed lover Sale had been born, the local transients were trying another tactic to win his favour. Perhaps it was another outcome of Hilin’s clever exploits, or perhaps it had been inherent in the situation all along.

Girls, elfin girls with dark elusive eyes: as the generations ticked by, he seemed to see more of them running in the corridors, making eyes at muscular wall-scrubbing boys, dandling children on their knees. They were like cartoon versions of Lora: tall Loras and short, thin Loras and fat, happy Loras and sad.

It was selective breeding, if presumably unconscious, people turning themselves into replicas of the images in the Virtual. They were appealing directly to his own cold heart: if the Elder loved this woman so much, then choose a wife that looks like her, if only a little, and hope to have daughters with her delicate looks, and so win favour.

Rusel was simultaneously touched, and appalled. But he did not interfere. They could do what they liked, he told himself, as long as they got their jobs done.

Meanwhile in the old amphitheatre, on the other side of the barricade he had erected, the Autarchs and their long-lived families had not died out as Rusel had expected – indeed hoped. They had lived on. And as they inbred ferociously, their lives were stretched out longer and longer.

Again this made sense in terms of their heredity, he thought. In their cordoned-off compartment there was simply no room to expand their population. So the genes’ best bet of propagating themselves into the future, always their only objective, was to stretch out the lives of their carriers. Adults in there now lived for centuries, and for the vanishingly few children born, childhood lasted decades.

Rusel found these creatures, with their blank eyes and wizened-faced children, peculiarly disturbing. On the other hand, he still couldn’t bring himself to kill them off. Perhaps in them he saw a distorted reflection of himself.

There was one constant throughout the Ship. On both sides of the barrier the transients were clearly getting dumber.

As generations passed – and by now, for fear of repeating Hilin’s fate, potential mates were repelled by any signs of higher-than-average intelligence – it was obvious that the transients were breeding themselves into stupidity. If anything the Autarchs’ environment was less stimulating than that of their cousins in the rest of the Ship, and despite their slower generational cycle they were shedding their unnecessary intelligence with even more enthusiasm, perhaps a response to sheer boredom.

The transients kept the Ship working, however, and in their increasingly brutish liaisons followed the genetic-health mandates scrupulously. This puzzled Rusel: surely by now they could have no real understanding of why they were doing these peculiar things.

But he observed that when it came time to attract a mate the most vigorous deck-swabbers and cousin-deniers stood out from the crowd. It made sense: after all, a propensity to please the undeniable reality of the Elder was a survival characteristic, and therefore worth displaying if you had it, and worth preserving in your children’s heredity. He filed away such observations and insights.

By now, nothing that happened inside the Ship’s hull interested him as much as what happened outside.

He was thoroughly wired into the Ship, its electromagnetic and other equipment taking the place of his own failed biological senses. He cruised with it through the intergalactic gulf, feeling the tingle of dark-matter particles as they were swept into the Ship’s gut, sensing the subtle caress of magnetic fields. It fascinated him to follow the million-year turning of the Galaxy, whose brilliant face continued to open up behind the fleeing Ship. Even the space between the galaxies was much more interesting than he had ever imagined. It wasn’t a void at all. There was structure here, he saw, a complex webbing of the dark stuff that spanned the universe, a webbing in which galaxies were trapped like glowing flies. He learned to follow the currents and reefs of the dark matter which the Ship’s gravitational maw greedily devoured.

He was alone with the galaxies, then, and with his own austere mind.

Once, just once, as he drifted in the dark, he heard a strange signal. It was cold and clear, like the peal of a trumpet, far off in the echoing intergalactic night. It wasn’t human at all.

He listened for a thousand years. He never heard it again.

IX

Andres came to him. He could see her face clearly, that worn-smooth expressionless skin. The rest of her body was a blur, a suggestion.

‘Leave me alone, you nagging old witch,’ he grumbled.

‘Believe me, that would be my choice,’ said Andres fervently. ‘But there’s a problem, Rusel. And you need to come out of your damn shell and sort it out.’

He longed for her to leave him, but he knew that wasn’t an option. In a corner of his frayed mind he knew that this Virtual projection of his last companion, a synthesis of his own reflection and the Ship’s systems, was an alarm, activated only when absolutely necessary.

‘What kind of problem?’

‘With the transients. What else? You need to take a look.’

‘I don’t want to. It hurts.’

‘I know it hurts. But it’s your duty.’

Duty? Had she said that, or had he? Was he awake, or dreaming? With time, everything blurred, every category, every boundary.

He was far beyond biology now, of course. It was only technology that kept him alive. With time, the Ship had infiltrated its treatments and systems deeper into the shell of what had been his body. It was as if he had become just another of the Ship’s systems, like the air scrubbers or the water purifiers, just as old and balky, and just as much in need of endless tender loving care.

The decay of his central nervous system had proceeded so far that he wasn’t sure if it returned any signals to the hardening nugget of his brain; he wasn’t sure if he perceived the outside universe unfiltered at all. And even the walls of his consciousness were wearing away. He thought of his mind as a dark hall filled with drifting forms, like zero-gravity sculptures. These were his memories – or perhaps memories of memories, recycled, reiterated, edited and processed.

And he was here, a pinpoint awareness that flitted and flew between the drifting reefs of memory. At times, as he sailed through the abstraction of emptiness, free of memory or anticipation, indeed free of any conscious thought save only a primal sense of self, he felt oddly free – light, unburdened, even young again. But whenever that innocent point settled into the dark tangle of a memory reef, the guilt came back, a deep muddy shame whose origins he had half-forgotten, and whose resolution he could no longer imagine.

He wasn’t alone, however, in this cavernous awareness. Sometimes voices called from the dark. Sometimes there were even faces, their features softened, their ages indeterminate. Here was Diluc, his brother, or Andres, or Ruul or Selur or one of the others. He knew they were all long dead save for him, who lived on and on. He had vague memories of setting up some of these Virtual personas as therapy for himself, or as ways for the Ship to attract his attention – Lethe, even as company. But by now he wasn’t sure what was Virtual and what was a dream, a schizoid fantasy of his rickety mind.

Lora was never there, however.

And Andres, the cold pharaoh who had become his longest-enduring companion, was his most persistent visitant.

‘Nobody ever said this would be easy, Rusel.’

‘You said that before.’

‘Yes. And I’ll keep on saying it until we get to Canis Major.’

‘Canis Major?…’ The destination. He’d forgotten about it again, forgotten that an end to all this even as a theoretical possibility might exist. The trouble was, thinking about such things as a beginning and an end made him aware of time, and that was always a mistake.

How long? The answer came to him like a whisper. Round numbers? Twenty thousand years gone. Twenty thousand years. It was ridiculous, of course.

‘Rusel,’ Andres snapped. ‘You need to focus.’

‘You’re not even Andres,’ he grumbled.

Her mouth was round with mock horror. ‘Really? Oh, no! What an existential disaster for me.’ She glared. ‘Just do it, Rus.’

So, reluctantly, he gathered his scattered concentration, and sent his viewpoint out into the body of the Ship. He was faintly aware of Andres riding alongside him, a ghost at his shoulder.

He found the place he still thought of as Diluc’s village. The framework of corridors and cabins hadn’t changed, of course; it was impossible that it should. But even the non-permanent partitions that had once been built up and torn down by each successive generation of transients had been left unmoved since the last time he was here. Building things wasn’t what people did any more.

He wandered into the little suite of rooms that had once been Diluc’s home. There was no furniture. Nests were crammed into each corner of the room, disorderly heaps of cloth and polymer scraps. He had seen the transients take standard-issue clothing from the Ship’s recycler systems and immediately start tearing it up with hands or teeth to make their coarse bedding. There was a strong stink of piss and shit, of blood and milk, sweat and sex, the most basic human biology. But the crew remained scrupulously clean. Every few days all this stuff would be swept up and carted off to the recycler bins.

This was the way people lived now. They nested in starship cabins.

Outside, the walls and partitions were clean, gleaming and sterile, as was every surface he could see, the floor and ceiling. One partition had been rubbed until it was worn so thin the light shone through it: another couple of generations and it would wear away altogether, he thought. The crew still kept up their basic duties; that had remained, while so much else had vanished.

But these latter transients were not crewing the Ship as his own generation once had, for conscious purposes. They were doing it for deeper reasons.

The transients competed in how well they did their chores in order to attract mates, and these selection pressures had, given time, sculpted the population. By now the transients were maintaining a starship’s systems as bees had once danced, stags had locked antlers, and peacocks had spread their useless tails: they were doing it for sex, and the chance to procreate. As mind receded, Rusel thought, biology had taken over.

As long as they were doing it in the first place, Rusel didn’t care. Besides, it worked in maintaining the ship. Sexual drivers seemed very effective in locking in behaviour with the precision required to keep the Ship’s systems functioning: you could fix a ceiling ventilation grille with a show-off flourish or not, but you had to do it exactly correctly to impress the opposite sex, even if you didn’t understand what it was for. Even when mind was gone, you had to do it right.

He heard weeping, not far away.

He let his viewpoint drift along the corridor, following the sound. He turned a corner, and came on the villagers.

There were perhaps twenty-five of them, adults and children. They were all naked, of course; nobody had worn clothes for millennia. Some of them had infants in their arms or on their backs. Squatting in the corridor, they huddled around a central figure, the woman who was doing the weeping. She was cradling something, a bloody scrap. The others reached out and stroked her back and scalp; some of them were weeping too, Rusel saw.

He said, ‘Their empathy is obvious.’

‘Yes. They’ve lost so much else, but not that.’

Suddenly their heads turned, all of them save the weeping woman, faces swivelling like antennae. Something had disturbed them – perhaps the tiny hovering drone that was Rusel’s physical manifestation. Their brows were low, but their faces were still human, with straight noses and delicate chins. It was like a flower bed of faces, Rusel thought, turned up to his light. But their mouths were pulled back in fear-grins.

And every one of them looked like Lora, more or less, with that delicate, elfin face, even something of her elusive eyes. Of course they did: the blind filter of natural selection, operating for generations on this hapless stock, had long determined that though mind was no longer necessary, to look this way might soften the heart of the wizened creature who ruled the world.

The strange tableau of upturned Lora-faces lasted only a moment. Then the transients took flight. They poured away down the corridor, running, knuckle-walking, bounding off the walls and ceiling.

Andres growled, ‘I’ll swear they get more like chimps with every generation.’

In a few seconds they had gone, all save the weeping woman.

Rusel allowed his viewpoint to swim towards the woman. He moved cautiously, not wishing to alarm her. She was young – twenty, twenty-one? It was increasingly hard to tell the age of these transients; they seemed to reach puberty later each generation. This girl had clearly passed her menarche – in fact she had given birth, and recently: her belly was slack, her breasts heavy with milk. But her chest was smeared with blood, shocking bright crimson in the drab, worn background of the corridor. And the thing she was cradling was no child.

‘Lethe,’ said Rusel. ‘It’s a hand. A child’s hand. I think I’m going to throw up.’

‘You no longer have the equipment to throw up. Take a closer look.’

A white stump of bone stuck out of a bloody mass of flesh. The hand had been severed at the wrist. And two tiny fingers had been almost stripped of flesh, ligament and muscle, leaving only tiny bones.

‘That wrist,’ Andres said pitilessly, ‘has been bitten through. By teeth, Rusel. And teeth have been at work on those fingers as well. Think about it. With a bit of practice, you could take one of those little morsels between your incisors and just strip off the flesh and muscle—’

‘Shut up! Lethe, Andres, I can see for myself. We always avoided cannibalism. I thought we beat that into their shrinking skulls hard enough.’

‘So we did. But I don’t think this is cannibalism – or rather, whatever did this wasn’t her kind.’

Rusel elevated the viewpoint and cast around. He saw a trail of blood leading away from the woman, smeared along the walls and floor, quite unmistakable, as if something had been dragged away.

Andres said, ‘I think our transients suddenly have a predator.’

‘Not so suddenly,’ Rusel said. A part of his scattered consciousness was checking over the Ship’s logs, long ignored. This kind of incident had been going on for a couple of centuries. ‘It’s been rare before, once or twice a generation. Mostly it was the old who were taken, or the very young – vulnerable, dispensable, or replaceable. But now they seem to be upping the rate.’

‘And making a dent in the transients’ numbers.’

‘Yes. You were right to bring me here.’ This had to be resolved. But to do it, he thought with a deepening dread, he was going to have to confront a horror he had shut out of his awareness for millennia.

‘I’m here with you,’ Andres said gently.

‘No, you’re not,’ he snapped. ‘But I have to deal with this anyhow.’

‘Yes, you do.’

His viewpoint followed the bloody trail as it wound through the corridor-villages of the transients. Broken in places, the trail slinked through shadows or through holes worn in the walls. It was the furtive trail of a hunter, he thought.

At last Rusel came to the bulkhead that cut the Ship in two, marking the limit of his transients’ domain. He had long put out of his mind what lay beyond this wall: in fact, if he could have cut away the Ship’s aft compartment and let the whole mess float off into space he would long ago have done so.

But there was a hole in the bulkhead, just wide enough to admit a slim body.

The bulkhead was a composite of metal and polymer, extremely tough, and a metre thick; the hole was a neat tunnel, not regular but smooth-walled, drilled right through. ‘I can’t believe they have tools,’ he said. ‘So how did they get through?’

‘Teeth,’ Andres said. ‘Teeth and nails – and time, of which they have plenty. Remember what you’re dealing with. Even if the bulkhead was made of diamond they’d have got through eventually.’

‘I hoped they were dead.’

‘Hope! Wishful thinking! That always was your weakness, Rusel. I always said you should have killed them off in the first place. They’re just a drain on the Ship’s resources.’

‘I’m no killer.’

‘Yes, you are—’

‘And they are human, no less than the transients.’

‘No, they’re not. And now, it seems, they are eating our transients.’

His viewpoint drifted before the hole in the wall. Andres seemed to sense his dread; she didn’t say anything.

He passed through the barrier.

He emerged in the upended chamber he still thought of as the amphitheatre, right at the base of the Ship. This was a big, bare volume, a cylinder set on its side. After the spin-up it had been used to pursue larger-scale reconstruction projects necessary to prepare the Ship for its long intergalactic voyage, and mounted on its floor and walls were the relics of heavy engineering, long abandoned: gantries, platforms of metal, immense low-gravity cranes like vast skeletons. Globe lights hovered everywhere, casting a yellow-white light complex with shadows. It was an oddly magnificent sight, Rusel thought, and it stirred memories of brighter, more purposeful days. On the wall of the chamber, which had been its floor, he could even make out the brackets which had held the acceleration couches on launch day.

Now, every exposed surface was corroded. Nothing moved. And that upturned floor, which Andres had turned transparent a mere year after the launch, was caked by what looked like rock. It was a hardened pack of faeces and cloth scraps and dirt, a wall of shit to block out the Galaxy.

At first, in this jungle of engineering, he couldn’t make out anything living. Then, as he allowed the worn-out ambience of the place to wash over him, he learned to see.

They were like shadows, he thought, slim, upright shadows that flitted through the gantries, furtive, cautious. At times they looked human – clearly upright, bipedal, purposeful – though their limbs were spindly, their bellies distended. But then they would collapse to all fours and lope away with a bent gait, and that impression of humanity vanished. They didn’t seem to be wearing clothes, any more than the transients did. But unlike the transients their bodies were coated with a kind of thick hair, dark brown, a fur.

Here and there hovering drones trailed the shambling creatures, carrying food and water. The creatures ignored these emissaries of the Ship that kept them alive.

Andres said grimly, ‘I know you haven’t wanted to think about these relics, Rusel. But the Ship has watched over them. They are provided with food, of course. Clothing, blankets and the like – they rip all that up to serve as nesting material, like the transients. They won’t go to the supply hoppers as the transients will; drones have to bring them the stuff they need, and take out their waste. But they’re really quite passive. They don’t mind the drones, even when the drones clean them, or tend to wounds or sicknesses. They are used to being cared for by machines.’

‘But what do they do all day?’

Andres laughed. ‘Why, nothing. Nothing but eat the food we give them. Climb around the gantries a little, perhaps.’

‘They must have some spark of curiosity, of awareness. The transients do! They’re people.’

‘Their ancestors used to be. Now they’re quite mindless … There. Look. They are gathering at one of their feeding places. Perhaps we’ll be able to see what they do.’

The feeding site was a shallow depression, worn into a floor of steel. Its base was smeared green and brown. A drone had delivered a cache of food to the centre of the pit, a pile of spheres and cylinders and discs, all sized for human hands, all brightly coloured.

From around the amphitheatre the animals came walking, loping, moving with the slow clumsiness of low gravity – and yet with an exaggerated care, Rusel thought, as if they were very fragile, very old. They gathered around the food pile. But they did not reach for the food; they just slumped down on the ground, as if exhausted.

Now smaller creatures emerged from the forest of gantries. They moved nervously, but just as cautiously as the larger forms. They must be children, Rusel thought, but they moved with no spontaneity or energy. They were like little old people themselves. There were far fewer children than adults, just a handful among perhaps fifty individuals.

It was the children who went to the food pile, broke off pieces of the brightly coloured fodder, and carried it to the adults. The adults greeted this service with indifference, or at best a snarl, a light blow on the head or shoulder. Each child servant went doggedly back to the pile for more.

‘They’re not particularly hygienic,’ Rusel observed.

‘No. But they don’t have to be. Compared to the transients they have much tougher immune systems. And the Ship’s systems keep the place roughly in order.’

Rusel said, ‘Why don’t the adults get the food themselves? It would be quicker.’

Andres shrugged. ‘This is their way. And it is their way to eat another sort of food, too.’

At the very centre of the depression was a broad scar stained a deep crimson brown, littered with lumpy white shapes.

‘That’s blood,’ Rusel said, wondering. ‘Dried blood. And those white things—’

‘Bones,’ said Andres evenly. Rusel thought she seemed oddly excited, stirred by the degraded spectacle before her. ‘But there’s too much debris here to be accounted for by their occasional raids into transient country.’

Rusel shuddered. ‘So they eat each other too.’

‘No. Not quite. The old eat the young; mothers eat their children. It is their way.’

‘Oh, Lethe…’ Andres was right; Rusel couldn’t throw up. But he was aware of his body, cradled by the concerned Ship, thrashing feebly in distress.

Andres said dispassionately, ‘I don’t understand your reaction.’

‘I didn’t know—’

‘You should have thought it through – thought through the consequences of your decision to let these creatures live.’

‘You are a monster, Andres.’

She laughed without humour.

Of course he knew what these animals were. They were the Autarchs – or the distant descendants of the long-lived, inbred clan who had once ruled over the transients. Over nearly twenty thousand years selection pressure had worked relentlessly, and the gene complex that had given them their advantage over the transients in the first place – genes for longevity, a propensity injected into the human genome by the Qax – had found full expression. And meanwhile, in the sterile nurture of this place, they had had even less reason to waste precious energy on large brains.

As time had passed they had lived longer and longer, but thought less and less. Now these Autarchs were all but immortal, and all but mindless.

‘They’re actually rather fascinating,’ Andres said cheerfully. ‘I’ve been trying to understand their ecology, if you will.’

‘Ecology? Then maybe you can explain how it can benefit a creature to treat its children so. Those young seem to be farmed. Life is about the preservation of genes: even in this artificial little world of ours, that remains true. So how does eating your kids help achieve that? … Ah.’ He gazed at the hairy creatures before him. ‘But these Autarchs are not mortal.’

‘Exactly. They lost their minds, but they stayed immortal. And when mind had gone, natural selection worked with what it found.’

Even for these strange creatures, the interests of the genes were paramount. But now a new strategy had to be worked out. It had been foreshadowed in the lives of the first Autarchs. There was no room to spread the genes by expanding the population – but if individuals could become effectively immortal, the genes could survive through them.

Andres said, ‘But simple longevity wasn’t enough. Even the longest-lived will die through some accident eventually. The genes themselves can be damaged, through radiation exposure for instance. Copying is safer! For their own preservation the genes need to see some children produced, and for some, the smartest and strongest, to survive.

‘But, you see, living space is restricted here. The parents must compete for space against their own children. They don’t care about the children. They use them as workers – or even, when there’s an excess, as a cannibalistic resource … But there are always one or two children who fight their way through to adulthood, enough to keep the stock numbers up. In a way the pressure from the adults is a mechanism to ensure that only the smartest and strongest of the kids survive. It’s a mixed strategy.’

‘From the genes’ point of view it’s a redundancy mechanism,’ Rusel said. ‘That’s the way an engineer would put it. The children are just a fail-safe.’

‘Precisely,’ Andres said.

It was biology, evolution: the destiny of the Mayflower had come down to this.

Rusel had brooded on the fate of his charges, and had studied how time had always shaped human history. And he had decided it was all a question of timescales.

The conscious purpose of the Ship had sustained its crew’s focus for a century or so, until the first couple of generations, and the direct memory of Port Sol, had vanished into the past.

Millennia, though, were the timescale of historical epochs on Earth, over which empires rose and fell. His studies suggested that to sustain a purpose over such periods required the engagement of a deeper level of the human psyche: the idea of Rome, say, or a devotion to Christ. If the first century of the voyage had been an arena for the conscious, over longer periods the unconscious took over. Rusel had seen it himself, as the transients had become devoted to the idea of the Ship and its mission, as embodied by his own Virtual. Even Hilin’s rebellion had been an expression of that cult of ideas. Call it mysticism: whatever, it worked over epochs of thousands of years.

That far, he believed, Andres and the other pharaohs had been able to foresee and plan for. But beyond that even they hadn’t been able to imagine; Rusel had sailed uncharted waters.

And as time heaped up into tens of millennia, he had crossed a span of time comparable to the rise and fall, not just of empires, but of whole species. A continuity of the kind that kept the transients cleaning the walls over such periods could only come about, not through even the deepest layers of mind, but through much more basic biological drivers, like sexual selection: the transients cleaned for sex, not for any reason to do with the Ship’s goals, for they could no longer comprehend such abstractions. And meanwhile natural selection had shaped his cradled populations, of transients and Autarchs alike.

Sometimes he felt queasy, perhaps even guilty, at the distorted fate to which generation upon generation had been subjected, all for the sake of a long-dead pharaoh and her selfish, hubristic dream. But individual transients were soon gone, their tiny motes of joy or pain soon vanishing into the dark. Their very brevity was comforting.

Of course, if biology was replacing even the deepest layers of mind as the shaping element in the mission’s destiny, Rusel’s own role became still more important, as the only surviving element of continuity, indeed of consciousness.

Whatever, there was no going back, for any of them.

Andres was still watching the Autarchs. ‘You know, immortality, the defeat of death, is one of mankind’s oldest dreams, But immortality doesn’t make you a god. You have immortality, Rusel, but, save for your crutch the Ship, you have no power. And these – animals – have immortality, but nothing else.’

‘It’s monstrous.’

‘Of course! Isn’t life always? But the genes don’t care. And in the Autarchs’ mindless capering, you can see the ultimate logic of immortality: for an immortal, to survive, must in the end eat her own children.’

But everybody on this Ship was a child of this monstrous mother, Rusel thought, whose twisted longings had impelled this mission in the first place. ‘Is that some kind of confession, pharaoh?’

Andres didn’t reply. Perhaps she couldn’t. After all this wasn’t Andres but a Virtual, a software-generated comfort for Rusel’s fading consciousness, at the limit of its programming. And any guilt he saw in her could only be a reflection of himself.

With an effort of will he dismissed her.

One of the adults, a male, sat up, scratched his chest, and loped to the centre of the feeding pit. The young fled at his approach. The male scattered the last bits of primary-colour food, and picked up something small and white. It was a skull, Rusel saw, the skull of a child. The adult crushed it, dropped the fragments, and wandered off, aimless, immortal, mindless.

Rusel withdrew, and sealed up the gnawed-through bulkhead. After that he set up a new barrier spanning the Ship parallel to the bulkhead, and opened up the thin slice of the vessel between the walls to intergalactic vacuum, so that nothing could come through that barrier. And he never again gave any thought to what lay on the other side.

X

Twenty-five thousand years after the end of his world, Rusel heard that he was to be saved.

‘Rusel. Rusel…’

Rusel wanted the voices to go away. He didn’t need voices now – not Diluc’s, not even Andres’s.

He had no body, no belly, no heart; he had no need of people at all. His memories were scattered in emptiness, like the faint smudges that were the remote galaxies all around the Ship. And like the Ship he forged on into the future, steadily, pointlessly, his life empty of meaning. The last thing he wanted was voices.

But they wouldn’t go away. With deep reluctance, he forced his scattered attention to gather.

The voices were coming from Diluc’s corridor-village. Vaguely, he saw people there, near a door – the door where he had once been barrelled into by little Tomi, he remembered, in a shard of bright warm memory blown from the past – two people, by that same door.

People standing upright. People wearing clothes.

They were not transients. And they were calling his name into the air. With a mighty effort he pulled himself to full awareness.

They stood side by side, a man and a woman – both young, in their twenties, perhaps. They wore smart orange uniforms and boots. The man was clean-shaven, and the woman bore a baby in her arms.

Transients had clustered around them. Naked, pale, eyes wide with curiosity, they squatted on their haunches and reached up with their long arms to the smiling newcomers. Some of them were scrubbing frantically at the floor and walls, teeth bared in rictus grins. They were trying to impress the newcomers with their prowess at cleaning, the only way they knew how. The woman allowed the transients to stroke her child. But she watched them with hard eyes and a fixed smile. And the man’s hand was never far away from the weapon at his belt.

It took Rusel a great deal of effort to find the circuits that would allow him to speak. He said, ‘Rusel. I am Rusel.’

As the disembodied voice boomed out of the air the man and woman looked up, startled, and the transients cowered. The newcomers looked at each other with delight. ‘It’s true,’ said the man. ‘It really is the Mayflower!’ A translation whispered to Rusel.

The woman scoffed. ‘Of course it’s the Mayflower. What else could it be?’

Rusel said, ‘Who are you?’

The man’s name was Pirius, the woman’s Torec.

‘Are we at Canis Major?’

‘No,’ Pirius said gently.

These two had come from the home Galaxy – from Sol system itself, they said. They had come in a faster-than-light ship; it had overtaken the Mayflower’s painful crawl in a few weeks. ‘You have come thirteen thousand light years from Port Sol,’ Pirius said. ‘And it took you more than twenty-five thousand years. It is a record for a generation starship! An astonishing feat.’

Thirteen thousand light years? Even now, the Ship had come only halfway to its intended destination.

Torec cupped the face of a transient girl in her hand – Lora’s face. ‘And,’ Torec said, ‘we came to find you.’

‘Yes,’ said Pirius, smiling. ‘And your floating museum!’

Rusel thought that over. ‘Then mankind lives on?’

Oh, yes, Pirius told him. The mighty Expansion from which the Mayflower’s crew had fled had burned its way right across the Galaxy. It had been an age of war; trillions had gone into the dark. But mankind had endured.

‘And we won!’ Pirius said brightly. Pirius and Torec themselves had been involved in some kind of exotic combat to win the centre of the Galaxy. ‘It’s a human Galaxy now, Rusel.’

‘Human? But how are you still human?’

They seemed to understand the question. ‘We were at war,’ Pirius said. ‘We couldn’t afford to evolve.’

‘The Coalition—’

‘Fallen. Vanished. Gone. They can’t harm you now.’

‘And my crew?’

‘We will take them home. There are places where they can be cared for. But, ah—’

Torec said, ‘But the Ship itself is too big to turn around. Too much mass-energy. I’m not sure we can bring you back.’

Once he had seen himself, a stiff ageless man, through the eyes of Diluc’s great-grandson Poro, through the eyes of a child. Now, just for an instant, he saw himself through the eyes of Pirius and Torec. A wizened, charred thing suspended in a webbing of wires and tubes.

That didn’t matter, of course. ‘Have I fulfilled my mission?’

‘Yes,’ Pirius said gently. ‘You fulfilled it very well.’

He wasn’t aware of Pirius and Torec shepherding the transients and Autarchs out of the Ship and into their own absurdly small craft. He wasn’t aware of Pirius’s farewell call as they shot away, back towards the bright lights of the human Galaxy, leaving him alone. He was only aware of the Ship now, the patient, stolid Ship.

The Ship – and one face, revealed to him at last: an elfin face, with distracted eyes, He didn’t know if she was a gift of Pirius or even Andres, if she was outside his own head or inside. None of that seemed to matter when at last she smiled for him, and he felt the easing of a tension twenty-five millennia old, the dissolving of a clot of ancient guilt.

The Ship forged on into the endless dark, its corridors as clean and bright and empty as his thoughts.

I knew Andres. I knew about the five Ships that sailed from Port Sol. I always wondered what happened to her.

Some of the Ships sailed on to even more exotic fates than her Mayflower’s. But that’s another story.

The conquest of the Galaxy was perhaps humanity’s finest hour. The ministers, generals and Commissaries at the heart of the Coalition looked back on the immense achievement of their ideological government with, perhaps, justifiable pride.

But it was an irony that as soon as the victory was won, the Coalition lost its purpose, and its control.

And it was an irony, I thought, that a crude faith of child soldiers, outlawed by the Coalition, should not only outlive the Coalition itself but even shape the history that followed its demise.

AD 27,152

I

‘She wants to go home,’ said the starship Captain.

‘But she can’t go home,’ said the acolyte. Futurity’s Dream was baffled by the very request, as if the woman who had locked herself inside a starship cabin, with a bomb, was making a philosophical mistake, a category error.

Captain Tahget said, ‘She says she needs to speak to her daughter.’

‘She hasn’t got a daughter!’

‘No, not according to the records. A conundrum, isn’t it?’

Captain Tahget sat very still, his glare focused unblinking on the young acolyte. He was a bulky man of about forty, with scar tissue crusting over half his scalp. He obviously had military experience, but his unadorned body armour, like the bare walls of his private office, gave away nothing of his character; in these fluid, uncertain times, when sibling fought sibling, it was impossible to tell who he might have served.

Before this monolithic officer Futurity, just twenty years old, felt nervous, ineffectual – not just weak, but like a shadow, with no control over events.

Futurity lifted his data desk and checked the Ask Politely’s manifest again. The passenger’s name stood out, highlighted in red: MARA. No mention of a daughter. ‘She’s a refugee. Home for her is Chandra. The black hole at the centre of the Galaxy.’

‘I know what Chandra is.’

‘Or rather,’ Futurity said nervously, ‘home is, or was, Greyworld, a worldlet in orbit around a satellite black hole, which in turn orbits Chandra—’

‘I know all this too,’ said the Captain stonily. ‘Get on with it, acolyte.’

Tahget had been hired by Futurity’s boss, the Hierocrat, to come to this processing station in orbit around Base 478. Here he was to pick up Mara, and other refugees displaced by the Kardish Imperium from their homes in the Galaxy’s Core, and then carry them on to Earth, where the ruling Ideocracy had pledged to welcome its citizens. But Mara had refused to travel on. Because of her, the ship had been held in orbit around the Base, and the other refugees had been evacuated and sent back to holding centres on the surface.

And now it was up to Futurity to sort this mess out. He had no idea where to start.

Futurity licked his lips and looked again at the glowing cube on the Captain’s desk. It was a fish-tank monitor, a Virtual realisation of the interior of the woman’s cabin. Mara sat on her bunk, as still, in her way, as Tahget. She was slim, her head shaved; aged thirty-six, she looked modest, sensible, undemanding. Her small suitcase sat unopened on top of the low dresser that was the cabin’s only other significant piece of furniture. The locked door was blocked by an upturned chair, a trivial barricade.

And before her on the floor was the reason she had been able to impose her will on a starship Captain, hundreds of refugees and at least three interstellar political entities. It was a blocky tangle of metal and polymer, an ugly sculpture quite out of place in the mundane shabbiness of the cabin. You could clearly see where it had been cut out of the weapons pod of some wrecked ship. It was a bomb, a monopole bomb. Dating from the time of the Coalition and their galactic war, it was at least two thousand years old. But the Coalition had built well, and there was no doubt that the bomb could destroy this ship and do a great deal of damage to Base 478 itself.

Futurity didn’t know where the bomb had come from, though after millennia of war 478 was famously riddled with weapons caches. And he had no idea how the bomb had been smuggled on board the Ask Politely, this starship. But the Hierocrat had made it clear that Futurity didn’t need to know any of that; all Futurity had to do was to resolve this messy situation.

‘But she can’t go home,’ he said again feebly. ‘Her home doesn’t exist any more, legally speaking. And soon enough it won’t exist physically either. She’s a refugee.’ Futurity didn’t understand anything about this situation. ‘We’re trying to help her here. Doesn’t she see that?’

‘Evidently not,’ Tahget said dryly. Tahget didn’t move a muscle, but Futurity could sense his growing impatience. ‘Acolyte, none of the politics of the Galaxy, or the geography of the black hole, matter a jot to me.’ He stabbed a finger at the fish-tank. ‘All I care about is getting that woman away from that bomb. We can’t disarm the thing. We can’t force our way into the cabin without—’

‘Without killing the woman?’

‘Oh, I don’t care about that. No, we can’t get in without setting the thing off. Do you need to know the technical details, of Virtual trip-wires, of dead man’s switches? Suffice it to say that force is not an option. And so I turn to you, acolyte. 478 is your church’s world, after all.’

Futurity spread his hands, ‘What can I do?’

Tahget laughed, uncaring. ‘What you priests do best. Talk.’

The dread weight of responsibility, which had oppressed Futurity since he had been ‘volunteered’ for this assignment by the Hierocrat and projected into orbit, now pressed down on him hard. But, he found, his greatest fear was not for his own safety, nor even for the fate of this poor woman, but simply that he was making a fool of himself in front of this dour captain. Shame on you, Futurity’s Dream!

He forced himself to focus. ‘How do I speak to her?’

The Captain waved a hand. A Virtual of Mara’s head coalesced in the air, and Futurity saw a miniature of himself pop into existence in the little diorama of her cabin. So he had been put in contact with this bomber.

He tried to read her face. She looked younger than her thirty-six years. Her face was a neat oval, her features rather bland – her nose long, her mouth small. She would never be called beautiful, though something about the shape of her skull, exposed by the close shaving of her hair in the Ideocratic style, was delicately attractive. As she studied him, evidently without curiosity, her expression was clear, her brow smooth. She looked loving, he thought, loving and contented in herself, her life. But tension showed around her eyes, in hollow stress shadows. This was a gentle woman projected into an horrific situation. She must be desperate.

A smile touched her lips, faint, quickly evaporating. She said to him, ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

The Captain rolled his eyes. ‘Our terrorist is laughing at you! Good start, acolyte.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Futurity blurted. ‘I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just that I’m trying to get used to all this.’

‘It’s not a situation I wanted,’ Mara said.

‘I’m sure we can find a way to resolve it.’

‘There is a way,’ she said without hesitation. ‘Just take me home. It’s all I’ve asked for from the beginning.’

But that’s impossible. Futurity had never negotiated with an armed fugitive before, but he had heard many confessions, and he knew the value of patience, of indirection. ‘We’ll come to that,’ he said. ‘My name is Futurity’s Dream. I live on the planet below, which is Base 478. Our government is called the Ecclesia.’

‘You’re a priest.’

He said reflexively, ‘Just an acolyte, my child.’

She laughed at him openly now. ‘Don’t call me a child! I’m a mother myself.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. But in his peripheral vision he checked over the manifest details again. She was travelling alone; there was definitely no mention of a child either on the ship or back at Chandra. Don’t contradict, he told himself. Don’t cross-examine. Just talk. ‘You’ll have to help me through this, Mara. Are you of the faith yourself?’

‘Yes,’ she sniffed. ‘Not of your sort, though.’

Since the fall of the Coalition, the religion Futurity served, known as the ‘Friends of Wigner’, had suffered many schisms. He forced a smile. ‘But I will have to do,’ he said. ‘The Captain turned to my Hierocrat for help. Mara, you must see that to sort out this situation you will have to talk to me.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I have to talk. That’s obvious. But not to an acolyte. Or a priest, or a bishop, or a, a—’

‘A Hierocrat.’ He frowned. ‘Then who?’

‘Michael Poole.’

That ancient, sacred name shocked Futurity to brief silence. He glanced at Captain Tahget, who raised his eyebrows. You see what I’ve been dealing with? Perhaps this woman was deluded after all.

Futurity said, ‘Mara, Michael Poole is our messiah. In the age of the First Friends he gave his life for the benefit of humanity by—’

‘I know who he was,’ she snapped. ‘Why do you think I asked for him?’

‘Then,’ he said carefully, ‘you must know that Poole has been dead – or at least lost to us – for more than twenty-three thousand years.’

‘Of course I know that. But he’s here.’

‘Poole is always with us in spirit,’ said Futurity piously. ‘And he waits for us at Timelike Infinity, where the world lines of reality will be cleansed.’

‘Not like that. He’s here, on Base—’

‘478.’

‘478. You people keep him locked up.’

‘We do?’

‘I want Michael Poole,’ Mara insisted. ‘Only him. Because he will understand.’ She turned away from Futurity. The imaging system followed her, but she covered her face with her hands, so he couldn’t read her expression.

Captain Tahget said dryly, ‘I think you need to talk to your Hierocrat.’

II

The Hierocrat refused to discuss such issues on a comms link, so Futurity would have to return to the surface. Within the hour Futurity’s flitter receded from the starship.

From space the Ask Politely was an astonishing sight. Perhaps a kilometre in length it was a rough cylinder, but it lacked symmetry on any axis, and its basic form was almost hidden by the structures which plumed from its surface: fins, sails, spines, nozzles, scoops, webbing. Hardened for interstellar space the ship shone, metallic and polymeric. But it had the look of something organic rather than mechanical, a form that had grown, like a spiny fish from Base 478’s deep seas perhaps, rather than anything designed by intelligence.

There was something deeply disturbing about the ship’s lack of symmetry. But, Futurity supposed, symmetry was imposed on humans by the steady straight-up-and-down gravity fields of planets. If you swam between the stars you didn’t need symmetry.

And besides, so the seminary gossip went, despite the controlling presence of Tahget and his command crew, this wasn’t really a human vessel at all. It certainly didn’t look it, close to.

Futurity was relieved when his flitter pulled out of the ship’s forest of spines and nets and began to swing back down towards Base 478.

478 was a world of ruins: from the high atmosphere the land looked as if it had been melted, covered over by a bubbling concrete-grey slag. Once every resource of this world had been dedicated to the prosecution of a galactic war. Base 478 had been a training centre, and here millions of human citizens had been moulded into soldiers, to be hurled into the grisly friction of the war at the Galaxy’s heart, from whence few had returned. Even now the world retained the number by which it had been registered in vanished catalogues on Earth.

But times had changed. The war was over, the Coalition fallen. Many of those tremendous wartime buildings remained – they were too robust to be demolished – but Futurity made out splashes of green amid the grey, places where the ancient buildings had been cleared and the ground exposed. Those island-farms laboured to feed 478’s diminished population. Futurity himself had grown up on such a farm, long before he had donned the cassock.

He had never travelled away from his home world – indeed, he had only flown in orbit once before, during his seminary training; his tutor had insisted that you could not pretend to be a priest of a pan-Galactic religion without at least seeing your own world hanging unsupported in the Galaxy’s glow. But Futurity had studied widely, and he had come to see that though there were far more exciting and exotic places to live in this human Galaxy – not least Earth itself – there were few places quite so orderly and civilised as his own little world, with its proud traditions of soldiery and engineering, and its deeply devout government. So he had grown to love it. He even liked the layers of monumental ruins that plated over every continent, for in the way they had been reoccupied and reused he took a lesson about the durability of the human spirit.

But a world so old hid many secrets. After his flitter had landed – and as the Hierocrat led him to a chamber buried deep beneath the Ecclesia’s oldest College – Futurity felt his soul shrink from the suffocating burden of history.

And when Michael Poole opened his eyes and faced him, Futurity wondered which of them was the most lost.

The room was bare, its walls a pale, glowing blue. Its architecture was tetrahedral, a geometry designed respectfully to evoke an icon of Michael Poole’s own past, the four-sided mouths of the wormholes the great engineer had once built to open up Sol system. But those slanting walls made the room enclosing: not a chapel, but a cell.

The room’s sole occupant looked up as Futurity entered. He sat on the one piece of furniture, a low bed. Futurity was immediately reminded of Mara, in another plainly furnished room, similarly trapped by her own mysterious past. The man was bulky, small – smaller than Futurity had imagined. His hair was black, his eyes dark brown. He looked about forty, but this man came from an age of the routine use of AntiSenescence treatments, so he could be any age. The muscles of his shoulders were bunched, and his hands were locked together, big, powerful engineer’s hands. He looked tense, angry, haunted.

As Futurity hesitated, the man fixed him with an aggressive gaze. ‘Who in Lethe are you?’ The language was archaic, and a translation whispered softly in Futurity’s ear.

‘My name is Futurity’s Dream.’

‘Futurity—?’ He laughed out loud. ‘Another infinity-botherer.’

It shocked Futurity to have this man speak so casually heretically. But he had had enough of being cowed today, and he pulled himself together. ‘You are on a world of infinity-botherers, sir.’

The man eyed him with a grudging respect. ‘I suppose I can’t argue with that. I didn’t ask to be here, though. Just you remember that. So I know who you are. Who am I?’

Futurity took a deep breath. ‘You are Michael Poole.’

Poole raised his hand, and turned it back and forth, studying it. Then he stood up and without warning aimed a slap at Futurity’s cheek. Poole’s fingers broke up into a cloud of pixels, and Futurity felt nothing.

‘No,’ Poole murmured. ‘I guess you’re wrong. Michael Poole was a human being. Whatever I am it isn’t that.’

For a second Futurity couldn’t speak. He tried to hold himself together against this barrage of shocks.

To Futurity’s surprise, Poole said, ‘Sorry. Perhaps you didn’t deserve that.’

Futurity shook his head. ‘My needs don’t matter.’

‘Oh, yes, they do. Everything goes belly-up if you forget that.’ He cast about the tetrahedral cell. ‘What’s a man got to do to get a malt whisky around here? … Oh. I forgot.’ He looked up into the tetrahedron’s squat spire, and held out his hand, cupping it. In a moment a glass appeared, containing a puddle of amber fluid. Poole sipped it with satisfaction. Then he dipped his fingers in the drink, and flicked droplets at Futurity. When they hit the acolyte’s cassock, the droplets burst apart in little fragments of light. ‘Consistency protocols,’ Poole murmured. ‘How about that? Why am I here, Futurity’s Dream? Why am I talking to you – why am I conscious again?’

Futurity said bluntly, ‘I need your help.’

Poole sat down, sipped his drink, and grunted. ‘More of your decadent dumb-ass theology?’

‘Not theology,’ Futurity said evenly. ‘A human life.’

That seemed to snag Poole’s attention. But he said, ‘How long this time?’

Futurity, briefed by the Hierocrat, knew exactly what he meant. ‘A little more than a thousand years.’

Poole closed his eyes and massaged his temples. ‘You bastards,’ he said. ‘I’m your Virtual Jesus. A simulacrum messiah. And I wasn’t good enough. So you put me in memory store, a box where I couldn’t even dream, and left me there for a thousand years. And now you’ve dug me up again. Why? To crucify me on a wormhole mouth, like the first Poole?’

Futurity was growing irritated. ‘I know nothing of Jesus, or crucifying. But I always thought I understood Michael Poole.’

‘How could you? He’s been dead twenty millennia.’

Futurity said relentlessly, ‘Then perhaps I misjudged his character. We didn’t bring you back to harm you. We didn’t bring you back for you at all. You’re here because somebody in trouble is asking for your help. Maybe you should think about somebody other than yourself, as Michael Poole surely would have done.’

Poole shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it. Are you trying to manipulate me?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it, sir.’

Poole sipped his unreal whisky. Then he sighed. ‘So what’s the problem?’

III

Poole had no physical location as such; he ‘was’ where he was projected. It would have been possible for him to be manifested aboard the Ask Politely by projection from the Ecclesia’s underground caches. But Poole himself pressed for the data that defined him to be downloaded into the ship’s own store, as otherwise lightspeed delays would introduce a barrier between himself and this fragile woman who was asking for his help.

What Poole wanted, it seemed, Poole got.

It took a day for the Ecclesiast authorities to agree transfer protocols with Captain Tahget and his crew. Futurity, no specialist in such matters, found this delay difficult to understand, but it turned out that Poole’s definition was stored at the quantum level. ‘And you can transfer quantum information,’ Poole said, ‘but you can’t copy it. So your monks can’t make a backup of me, Futurity, any more than they can of you. Kind of reassuring, isn’t it? And that’s why the monks are twitchy.’ But Poole was furious that the Ecclesiasts ensured that Tahget understood they owned the copyright in him and would protect their ‘intellectual property’ against ‘piracy’. ‘Copyright! In me! What do they think I am, a worm genome?’

Meanwhile, Captain Tahget was insulted by the very suggestion of piracy, and he complained about the delays for which nobody was compensating him, not to mention the risk of allowing the unstable situation of a woman with a bomb aboard his ship to continue for so long.

These transactions seemed extraordinary to Futurity, and terribly difficult to cope with. After all, when he had first gone up to the orbiting starship, Futurity hadn’t even known this simulacrum of Michael Poole existed.

Virtual Poole was the deepest secret of the Ecclesia, his Hierocrat had said. Indeed, an acolyte as junior as Futurity shouldn’t be hearing any of this at all, and the Hierocrat made it clear he blamed Futurity for not resolving the starship situation without resorting to this: in the Hierocrat’s eyes, Futurity had failed already.

It had begun fifteen hundred years ago. It had been an experiment in theology, epistemology and Virtual technology, an experiment with roots that reached back to the establishment of the Ecclesia itself.

Poole himself knew the background. ‘I – or rather, he, Michael Poole, the real one – has become a messiah figure to you, hasn’t he? You infinity-botherers and this strange quantum-mechanical faith of yours. You had theological questions you thought Poole could answer. Your priests couldn’t dig him up. And so you made him. Or rather, you made me.’

Technicians of the ancient Guild of Virtual Idealism had deployed the most advanced available technology to construct the Virtual Poole. Everything known about Poole and his life and times had been downloaded, and where there were gaps in the knowledge – and there were many – teams of experts, technical, historical and theoretical, had laboured to extrapolate and interpolate. It had been a remarkable project, and somewhat expensive: the Hierocrat wouldn’t say how much it cost, but it seemed the Ecclesia was still paying by instalments.

At last all was ready, and that blue tetrahedral chapel had been built. The Supreme Ecclesiarch had waved her hand – and Michael Poole, or at least a Michael Poole, had opened his eyes for the first time in more than twenty thousand years.

The whole business seemed vaguely heretical to Futurity. But when Poole popped into existence in the Politely’s observation lounge, surrounded by the gaping crew and nervous Ecclesiast technicians, Futurity felt a shiver of wonder.

Poole seemed to take a second to come to himself, as if coming into focus. Then he looked down at his body and flexed his fingers. In the brightness of the deck he seemed oddly out of place, Futurity thought – not flimsily unreal like most Virtuals, but more opaque, more dense, like an intrusion from another reality. Poole scanned the crowd of staring strangers. When he found Futurity’s face he smiled, and Futurity’s heart warmed helplessly.

But Poole’s face was dark, intent, determined. For the first time it occurred to Futurity to wonder what Poole himself might want out of this situation. He was a Virtual, but he was just as sentient as Futurity was, and no doubt he had goals of his own. Perhaps he saw some advantage in this transfer off-world, some angle to be worked.

Poole turned and walked briskly to the big blister-window set in the hull. His head scanned back and forth systematically as he took in the crowded view. ‘So this is the centre of the Galaxy. You damn priests never even let me see the sky before.’

‘Not quite the centre. We’re inside the Core here, the Galaxy’s central bulge.’ Futurity pointed to a wall of light that fenced off half the sky. ‘That’s the Mass – the Central Star Mass, the knot of density surrounding Chandra, the supermassive black hole at the very centre.’

‘Lethe, I don’t know if I imagined people would ever come so far. And for millennia this has been a war zone?’

‘The war is over.’ Futurity forced a grin. ‘We won!’

‘And now humans are killing humans again, right? Same old story.’ Poole inspected the surface of the planet below. ‘A city-world,’ he said dismissively. ‘Seen better days.’ He squinted around the sky. ‘So where’s the sun?’

Futurity was puzzled by the question.

Captain Tahget said, ‘Base 478 has no sun. It’s a rogue planet, a wanderer. Stars are crowded here in the Core, Michael Poole. Not like out on the rim, where you come from. Close approaches happen all the time.’

‘So planets get detached from their suns.’ Poole peered down at the farms that splashed green amid the concrete. ‘No sunlight for photosynthesis. But if the sky is on fire with Galaxy light, you don’t need the sun. Different spectrum from Sol’s light, of course, but I guess they are different plants too…’

Futurity was entranced by these rapid chains of speculation and deduction.

Poole pointed to a shallow crater, a dish of rubble kilometres across, gouged into the built-over surface. ‘What happened there?’

Futurity shrugged. ‘Probably a floating building fell, when the power failed.’

Poole laughed uncomfortably. ‘Layers of history! I don’t suppose I’ll ever know the half of it.’ Now he took in the Ask Politely’s bubbling organic form. ‘And what kind of starship is this?’ At random he pointed at hull features, at spines and spires and shields. ‘What is that for? An antenna, a sensor mast? And that? It could be a ramjet scoop, I guess. And that netting could be an ion drive.’

There was a stirring of discomfort. Futurity said, ‘We don’t ask such questions. It’s the business of the Captain and his crew.’

Poole raised his eyebrows, but he got only a blank stare from Captain Tahget. ‘Demarcation of knowledge? I never did like that. Gets in the way of the scientific method. But it’s your millennium.’ He clapped his hands. ‘OK, so I’m here. Maybe we should get to work before your fruitcake in steerage blows us all up.’

The Ecclesia technicians muttered among themselves, and prepared Poole’s relocation.

Futurity watched the scene in Tahget’s fish-tank Virtual viewer. Mara’s cabin looked just as it had before: the woman sitting patiently on the bed, the dresser, and the bomb sitting on the floor, grotesquely out of place. All that was different was a tray on top of the dresser with the remains of a meal.

Poole appeared out of nowhere, a little manikin figure in the fish-tank. Mara sat as if frozen.

Poole leaned down, resting his hands on his knees, and looked into her face. ‘You’re exhausted. Your eyes are pissholes in the snow.’ Nobody in Tahget’s office had ever seen snow; the translation routines had to interpret.

Poole snapped his fingers to conjure up a Virtual chair and sat down. Mara bowed down before him. ‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to dry my feet with your hair.’ Another archaic reference Futurity didn’t understand. ‘I know I’m tangled up in your myths. But I’m just a man. Actually, not even that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Mara said thickly, straightening up.

‘For what? You’re the real person here, with the real problem.’ He glanced at the sullen mass of the bomb.

Mara said, ‘I made them bring you here. Now I don’t know what to say to you.’

‘Just talk. I don’t think anybody understands what you want, Mara. Not even that bright kid Futurity.’

‘Who? Oh, the acolyte. I told them, but they didn’t listen.’

‘Then tell me.’ He laughed. ‘I’m the sleeping beauty. Lethe knows I’ve got no preconceptions.’

‘I want to go home. I didn’t want to leave in the first place. They evacuated us by force.’

He leaned forward. ‘Who did?’

‘The troops of the new Kard.’

‘Who … ? Never mind; I’ll figure that out. OK. But home for you is a planetoid orbiting a black hole. Yes? A satellite black hole, born in the accretion disc of the monster at the heart of the Galaxy.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Quite a place to visit. But who would want to live there?’

Mara sat up straighter. ‘I would. I was born there.’

It had been a project of the first years after mankind’s victory in the centre of the Galaxy, Mara told him. With the war won, the ancient Coalition, the government of a united mankind, abruptly crumbled, and successor states emerged across the Galaxy. A rump remnant of the Coalition that called itself the Ideocracy had clung on to Earth and other scattered territories. And at the Core, the scene of mankind’s greatest victory, a new project was begun. Ideocrat engineers had gathered asteroids and ice moons which they had set spinning in orbit around the satellite black holes which studded Chandra’s accretion disc. One such was the rock Mara called Greyworld.

‘You say you were born there?’

‘Yes,’ Mara said. ‘And my parents, and their parents before them.’

Poole stared at her. Then, in Futurity’s view, Poole’s little figure walked to the edge of the fish-tank viewer, and stared up challengingly. ‘Hey, acolyte. Help me out here. I’m having a little trouble with timescales.’

Futurity checked his data desk. Under the Ideocracy, these accretion-disc colonies had been in place for two thousand years, almost since the final victory at the Galaxy’s Core.

Poole, a man of the fourth millennium, seemed stunned. ‘Two thousand years?’

Captain Tahget leaned forward and peered into the fish-tank. ‘Virtual, we once fought a war that spanned tens of thousands of light years. We learned to plan on a comparable scale in time. During the war there were single battles which lasted millennia.’

Poole shook his head. ‘And I imagined I thought big. I really have fallen far into the future, haven’t I?’

‘You really have, sir,’ Futurity said.

Poole sat down again and faced Mara. ‘I can see why you didn’t want to leave. Your roots were deep, on your Greyworld.’

‘Time was running out,’ she said. ‘We knew that. Our black hole was slowly spiralling deeper into Chandra’s accretion disc. Soon the turbulence, the energy density, the tides – it would have been impossible for us to hang on.’

‘Although,’ said Poole, ‘the black hole itself will sail on regardless until it reaches Chandra’s event horizon.’

‘Yes.’

Poole said, ‘I still don’t understand. If you knew your world was doomed, you must have accepted you had to evacuate.’

‘Of course.’

‘Then what—’

‘I just didn’t like the way it was done.’ Her face worked, deep emotions swirling under a veneer of control. ‘I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.’

‘Who to?’

‘Sharn. My daughter.’

Poole studied her for a moment. Then he said gently, ‘You see, you’re losing me again, Mara. I’m sorry. According to the ship’s manifest you don’t have a daughter.’

‘I did have one. She was taken away from me.’

‘Who by?’

‘The Ideocrats.’

‘But you see, Mara, there’s my problem. I saw the records. Once the evacuation was done, there was nobody left on Greyworld. So your daughter—’

‘She wasn’t on Greyworld.’

‘Then where?’

‘She lives in the satellite black hole,’ Mara said simply. ‘Where the Ideocrats sent her.’

‘In the black hole?’

‘She lives in it, as you, Michael Poole, live in light.’

‘As some kind of Virtual representation?’

Mara shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t explain it better. We aren’t scientists on Greyworld, like you.’

He thought that over. ‘Then what are you?’

‘We are farmers.’ She shrugged. ‘Some of us are technicians. We supervise the machines that tend other machines, that keep the air clean and the water flowing.’

Poole asked, ‘But why are you there in the first place, Mara? What did the Ideocracy intend? What is your duty?’

She smiled. ‘To give our children to the black hole. And that way, to serve the goals of mankind.’

Futurity said quickly, ‘She’s probably doesn’t know any more, Michael Poole. This was the Ideocracy, remember, heir to the Coalition. And under the Coalition you weren’t encouraged to know more than you needed to. You were thought to be more effective that way.’

‘Sounds like every totalitarian regime back to Gilgamesh.’ Poole studied Mara for a long moment. Then he stood. ‘All right, Mara. I think that’s enough for now. You’ve given me a lot to think about. Is there anything you need? More food?’

‘I’m tired,’ she said quietly. ‘But I know if I lie down that Captain or the acolyte will sneak in here and disarm the bomb, or hurt me, and—’

Poole said, ‘Look at me, Mara. Things will get flaky very quickly if you don’t sleep. Nobody will hurt you, or change anything in here. You can trust me.’

She stared at his Virtual face. Then, after a moment, she lay down on her bunk, her knees tucked into her chest like a child.

Poole’s fish-tank representation popped out of existence.

Poole, Tahget and Futurity faced each other across the table in Tahget’s office.

Tahget said, ‘We need to resolve this situation.’

Poole had another glass of Virtual whisky in his hand. ‘That woman is determined. Believe me, you don’t separate a mother from her child. She’ll blow us all up rather than give in.’

Tahget said coldly, ‘Then what do you suggest we do?’

‘Comply with her wishes. Take her back to Chandra, back to the centre of the Galaxy, and to her black hole Garden of Eden. And help her find her kid.’

Futurity said, ‘There is no child. She said the child lives in the black hole. That’s just impossible. No human being—’

‘Who said anything about it being human?’ Poole snapped. ‘I’m my mother’s son, and I’m not human. Not any more. And black holes are complicated beasts, Futurity. You’re a scholar; you should know that. Who’s to say what’s possible or not?’

‘Actually I don’t know anything about black holes,’ Futurity said.

‘You know, you’ve got a really closed mind,’ Poole said. ‘You Ecclesiasts have origins in an engineering guild, don’t you? But now you want to be a priest, and the whole point of being a priest is to keep your knowledge to yourself. Well, maybe you’re going to have to learn to think a bit more like an engineer and less like an acolyte to get through this.’

Tahget was glaring at Poole. ‘If you insist on this absurd chase to the centre of the Galaxy, Michael Poole, you will have your way. You are accorded respect here. Too much, in my opinion.’

Poole grinned. ‘Ain’t that the truth?’

‘At least it will buy us time,’ Futurity said, trying to reassure Tahget. ‘But you must hope to resolve this situation before you reach Chandra, where you will find there is no magical child in the singularity, and the woman’s condition will veer from denial to desperation.’

‘Or it all works out some other way,’ Poole said evenly. ‘Don’t prejudge, acolyte; it’s a nasty habit. One condition. I’m coming along too.’

They both looked at him sharply.

Futurity said hesitantly, ‘I don’t think the Hierocrat would—’

‘Into Lethe with your bishops and their “copyright”! I didn’t ask them to bring me back from the dead. I only want to see a little of the universe before I get switched off again. Besides, right now I’m the only sentient creature poor Mara trusts. I think you need me aboard, don’t you, Captain?’

Futurity opened his mouth, and closed it. ‘As the Captain said, if you ask for that I imagine it will be granted, though the Hierocrat’s teeth will curl with anxiety.’

Tahget growled, ‘Your Hierocrat will have more to think about than that.’ He grabbed Futurity’s wrist in one massive hand. ‘If Michael Poole is joining this cruise of ours, so are you, acolyte. When this Virtual fool starts to cause trouble, I want somebody I can take it out on.’

Futurity felt panicked; for a boy who had never been further than low orbit before, this was becoming a daunting adventure, out of control.

Poole laughed and rubbed his hands together. ‘Great! Just leave a piece of him for the Hierocrat to gnaw on.’

Tahget released Futurity. ‘But I have a condition of my own.’ He waved his hand over the table, and its surface turned into a schematic of the Galaxy. ‘Here is our original route, planned but now abandoned.’ It was a simple dotted line arcing from Base 478 in the Core out to the sparse Galactic rim, where Earth lay waiting. There were a few stops on the way, mostly at nominal political borders. One stop was at a flag marked ‘3-Kilo’, outside the Core, and Tahget tapped it with his fingernail. ‘This is the Galaxy’s innermost spiral arm, the 3-Kiloparsec Arm. Whatever our final destination, we go here first.’

Futurity didn’t understand. ‘But that’s the wrong way. 3-Kilo is outside the Core.’ Leaving the Base was bad enough. His dread deepened at the thought of being taken out of the brightly lit Core and into the sparse unknown beyond. ‘If we’re aiming for the centre of the Galaxy, we’ll have to double back. And the bomb – the additional time this will take—’

‘I know the urgency of the situation,’ Tahget snapped.

Poole said, ‘So why do you want to go to 3-Kilo?’

‘I don’t,’ Tahget said. ‘The Ask Politely does. On a ship like this, you go where it wants to go.’ Tahget blanked the table display and stood. ‘There is much you will never understand about this modern age, Michael Poole. Even about this ship. This meeting is over.’ He walked out.

Futurity and Poole stared at each other. Poole said, ‘So it isn’t just a cutesy name. On this ship, you really do have to ask politely.’

Futurity peered into the fish-tank display of Mara’s cabin, where the woman hadn’t moved since she lay down in Poole’s presence.

IV

The Ask Politely spent another day in orbit around 478. Then the ship slid silently away into deep space.

Futurity stood alone in the observation lounge, watching his home planet fold over itself until it became a dull grey pebble, lost against the glare of the Galaxy Core. He really was heading out into the cold and the dark. He shivered and turned away from the blister-window. It would be three days’ travel to 3-Kilo, said Tahget, with much delay at border posts as they cut across the territories of various squabbling statelets.

Futurity spent most of the first day alone. The bare corridors echoed; a ship meant to carry a hundred passengers seemed empty with just the three of them, counting Poole.

He quickly found his range of movement was limited. He had access to corridors and rooms only over two decks, confined to a lozenge-shaped volume near one end of the ship’s rough cylinder. The corridors were bleak, panelled with bare blue-grey polymer, with not a bit of artwork or personalisation in sight. Even within the lozenge many rooms were closed to him, such as the bridge, or just plain uninteresting, such as the refectory, the nano-food banks and the air cycling gear.

The lozenge of access spanned no more than fifty metres, on a craft a kilometre long. In fact this whole pod of habitation was like an afterthought, he started to see, an add-on bolted onto Ask Politely, as if these corridors and the people in them were not the point of the ship at all.

And nobody would speak to him. Tahget and his crew were busy, and as a mere earthworm, as they called him, they just ignored Futurity anyhow. The woman Mara slept throughout the day. Michael Poole stayed in the Captain’s office. He appeared to sit still for hours on end, immersed in his own deep Virtual reflections. Futurity didn’t dare disturb him.

Futurity thought of himself as disciplined. He wasn’t without inner resource. He had been assigned a cabin, and he had brought a data desk and other materials. So he sat down, faced his data desk, and tried to pursue his seminary studies – as it happened, into the divine nature of Michael Poole.

The Wignerian faith was based on the comforting notion that all history was partial, a mere rough draft. It was all based on quantum physics, of course, the old notion that reality is a thing of probabilities and might-bes, that collapses into the real only when a conscious mind makes an observation. But that conscious mind, with all its observations, in turn wasn’t realised until a second mind observed it – but that second in turn needed a third observer to become real, who needed a fourth…

This paradoxical muddle would be resolved at the end of time, said the Wignerians, when the Ultimate Observer, the final Mind, would make the last Observation of all, terminating chains of possibilities that reached back to the birth of the universe. In that mighty instant the sad history of the present, with its pain and war, suffering and brief lives and death, would be wiped away, and everybody who ever lived would find themselves embedded in a shining, optimal history.

This was the kernel of a faith that had offered profound hope during the last days of the Coalition, when the whole Galaxy had been infested with human soldiers, many of them not much more than children. The faith had always been illegal, but it was blind-eye tolerated by authorities and commanders who saw the comfort it brought to their warriors.

And when the Coalition fell, the faith was liberated.

The Ecclesia of Base 478 had its origins in the Guild of Engineers, an ancient agency that had itself participated in the founding of the Coalition. The Guild had survived many political discontinuities in the past. Now it survived the fall of the Coalition and proved its adaptability again. The Guild took over an abandoned Coalition training base, 478, and set up an independent government. Like many others, it fully accepted the newly liberated Wignerian faith, seeing in the religion a short cut to power and legitimacy. Soon its Master of Guild-Masters proclaimed herself Supreme Ecclesiarch, announcing that she alone owned the truth about the faith – again, like many others.

The Guild-Masters, following their old intellectual inclinations, developed an interest in the theological underpinnings of their new faith. Their Colleges on Base 478 quickly developed a reputation even among rival orthodoxies as hosting the best Wignerian thinkers in the Galaxy.

But in those heady early days of theological freedom, there had been constant schisms and splits, heresy and counter-heresy, as the scholars debated one of the religion’s most fascinating and difficult elements: the strange career of Michael Poole. This entrepreneur, engineer and adventurer of humanity’s remote history had, it was said, projected himself into the far future through a collapsing chain of wormholes. He had done this in order to save mankind. Poole, a redeemer who had confronted Timelike Infinity, came to embody and humanise the chilly quantum abstractions of the faith. He was a Son of that aloof Mother that was the Ultimate Observer.

There seemed no doubt that Poole really had existed as an historical figure. The question was: what was his relationship to the Ultimate Observer? Was Poole just another supplicant, if an extraordinary one, his life just one more thread in the tapestry contemplated by the Wignerian godhead? Or, some argued further, perhaps Poole and the Observer ought to be identified: perhaps Michael Poole was the Observer. The trouble with that argument was that Poole was undoubtedly human, whatever else he was, though his achievements had been anything but ordinary. So could a god be made incarnate?

It was an issue that had always fascinated Futurity. Indeed, it had so intrigued some of his predecessors that they had commissioned the Virtual Poole from the Idealists so they could ask him about it: it was a rough-and-ready engineer’s approach to a deep theological question.

But oddly, with the real thing – or at least a disturbing simulacrum – just down the corridor of this ship, Futurity’s dry scholarship seemed pointless. He found it hard to believe Poole himself would have any time for this dusty stuff.

After a couple of hours Futurity gave up. He left his cabin and went exploring again.

As he roamed the corridors he watched the crew at work. They all seemed to be command staff, aside from a few orderlies who performed such chores as serving the Captain his meals and shifting furniture around to set up passengers’ cabins. It was puzzling. Futurity had no experience of life aboard starships, but he could not see how the crew’s complicated discussions and endless meetings related to the ship’s actual operations. And he never spotted an engineer, a person who might be in charge of the systems that actually made the ship go.

He was probably reading the situation all wrong. But Michael Poole, who had once built starships himself, also concluded that there was something very odd about this ship.

On the second day he talked it over with Futurity. Tahget had given Poole some limited access over where he could ‘pop up’, as he put it, and he had been able to roam a bit wider than Futurity had. But not much further. His own internal-consistency protocols, designed to give him some anchoring in humanity, made it impossible for him to roam into areas that would have been hazardous for humans. And when the Captain had spotted that Poole was hacking into access-denied areas, such privileges had quickly been locked out.

‘I saw a few sights before they shut me down, though,’ Poole said, and he winked. ‘We’re not alone on this ship. It’s a big place, and we’re confined to this little box. But in the longer corridors on the fringe of our cage, I saw things: shadows, furtive movements. Like ghosts. And if you look too closely what you see disappears into the shade.’

Futurity frowned. ‘You’re not saying the ship is haunted?’

‘No. But I think there is, um, a second crew, a crew beneath the crew, who are actually flying the damn ship. And it’s presumably to serve their needs that we’re all jaunting out to 3-Kilo, because for sure it isn’t for us. What I haven’t yet figured out is who those people are, why they’re hiding from us, and what their relationship is to Tahget and his bunch of pirates. But I’ll get there,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ll tell you something even odder. I’m not convinced that the squat little folk I glimpsed were even wearing clothes!’

Futurity never ceased to marvel at Poole. He was a tourist in this twenty-eighth millennium, a revenant from the deepest past. And yet he was finding his way around what must be a very strange future with far more confidence than Futurity felt he could muster in a hundred lifetimes.

By the morning of the third day the Ask Politely had swum out of the Core, and Futurity was growing disturbed by the sky.

They were still only a few thousand light years from the centre of the Galaxy, and behind the ship the Core was a mass of light, too bright to be viewed by a naked human eye. But Futurity could already tell he was in the plane of a galactic disc: there were stars all around, but they were more crowded in some directions than others. If he looked straight ahead the more distant stars merged into a band of light that streaked across the sky, a stellar horizon, but if he looked up or down, the stars scattered to thinness, and he could see through the veil of light to a sky that was noticeably empty – and black.

Futurity had never seen a black sky before. He felt as if his own mind was crumbling, as if the bright surface of reality was breaking down, to reveal an abyssal darkness beneath. He longed to be back on 478, where the whole sky was always drenched with light.

But Poole was animated. ‘What a tremendous sky! You know, from Sol system you can make out only a few thousand stars, and the Galaxy is just a ragged band of mushy light. The Core ought to be visible from Earth – it should be as bright as the Moon – but the spiral-arm dust clouds get in the way, and it’s invisible. Futurity, it was only a few decades before the first human spaceflight that people figured out they lived in a Galaxy at all! It was as if we lived in a shack buried in the woods, while all around us the bright lights of the city were hidden by the trees.’

Poole had a kindly streak, and was empathetic. He sensed Futurity’s discomfort, and to distract him he brought the acolyte to the Captain’s office, and encouraged him to talk about himself. Futurity was flattered by his interest – this was Michael Poole! – and he responded with a torrent of words.

Futurity had always been cursed with a lively, inquisitive mind. As a young boy on the family farm, surrounded by the lowering ruins of war, he had laboured to tease healthy plants from soil illuminated by pale Galaxy-centre light. It had been fulfilling in its way, and Futurity saw with retrospect that to spend his time on the processes of life itself had satisfied some of his own inner spiritual yearnings. But the unchanging rhythms of the farm weren’t sufficient to sustain his intellect.

The only libraries on Base 478 were deep underground, where Ecclesiast scholars and scribes toiled over obscure aspects of Wignerian theology, and the only academic career available to Futurity was in a seminary. In fact, on a priest-run world, to become an Ecclesiast of some rank or other was the only way to build any kind of career. ‘On 478 even the tax collectors are priests,’ as Futurity’s father had said ruefully.

So the boy said goodbye to the farm, and donned the cassock of a novice. He gave up his childhood name for a visionary Wignerian slogan: Futurity’s Dream.

The study was hard, the rule of the Hierocrats and tutors imperious and arbitrary, but life wasn’t so bad. His intellect had been fully satisfied by his immersion in the Ecclesia’s endless and increasingly baroque studies of the historical, philosophical and theological roots of its faith. He recoiled with humility from the pastoral side of his work, though. It mortified him to hear the confession of citizens older and wiser than he was. But that very humility, one discerning Hierocrat had once told him, might mark him out as having the potential to be a fine priest.

Anyhow now, seven years later, his seemingly inevitable career choices had led him to this extraordinary situation.

‘And who are these “Kards”?’ Poole asked.

‘The Kardish Imperium is a new power that has risen in the Core,’ Futurity told Poole. ‘Named after a famous admiral of the Core wars. Expansive, aggressive, intolerant, ambitious—’

‘I know the type.’

The Kards were on the march. There was only one state, in a Galaxy quilted with petty statelets, capable of resisting the Kards – and that was the Ideocracy, the rump of the collapsed Coalition.

So far the Ideocracy had been as aloof concerning the Kardish as it was about all the successor states, which it regarded as illegal and temporary secessions from its own authority. But the Kards’ challenge was profound. Earth, base of the Ideocracy, was the home of mankind. But the Galaxy Core had been the centre of the war, and more humans had died there, by an order of magnitude, than all those who had lived and died on Earth before the age of spaceflight. The Core was the moral and spiritual capital of Homo galacticus, said the new Kard. The question was, who was the true heir to the Coalition’s mantle, Imperium or Ideocracy? The reputation of the Coalition still towered, and its name burned brightly in human imaginations; whoever won that argument might inherit a Galaxy.

This was the terrible friction that had rubbed away the life of Mara, and countless other refugees.

‘And now,’ Futurity said, ‘they are cleaning out the last Ideocracy enclaves in the Core.’

‘Ah. Like Mara’s world.’

‘Yes. There isn’t much the Ideocracy can do, short of all-out war. As for us,’ Futurity went on, ‘the Ecclesia is just trying to keep the peace.’ Through their faith the Ecclesia’s acolytes and academics had links that crossed the new, shifting political boundaries. ‘Michael Poole, the Wignerian faith was never legal under the Coalition, but it spanned the Galaxy, and in its way unified mankind. It survived the Coalition’s fall. Now, despite our fractured politics, and even though the faith itself has schismed and schismed again, it still unites us – or at least gives us something to talk to each other about. And it provides a moral, civilising centre to our affairs. If not for the faith’s moderating influence, the fall of the Coalition would have been much worse for most of humanity.’

Mara’s fate was an example. Wignerian diplomatic links had been used to set up a reasonably safe passage for Ideocracy refugees from the Core. Thus at places like Base 478 refugees like Mara were passed off from one authority to another, following a chain of sanctuaries out of the Core to their new homes in the remote gloom of the rim.

Poole seemed cynical about this. ‘A service for which you charge a handsome fee, no doubt.’

Futurity was stung. ‘We’re not a rich world, Michael Poole. We rely mostly on donations from pilgrims to keep us going. We have to charge the refugees or their governments for transit and passage; we’d fall into poverty ourselves otherwise.’

But Poole didn’t seem convinced. ‘Pilgrims? And what is it those pilgrims come to see on Base 478? Is it the shrine of the great messiah? Is it me? Have you dug up my bones? Do you have some gibbering manikin of me capering on a monument, begging for cash?’

Futurity tried to deny this: not literally. But there was truth in Poole’s charge, he thought uncomfortably. Of course Poole’s body had been lost when he fell into the wormhole to Timelike Infinity, and so he had been saved from the indignity of becoming a relic. But as the Wignerian religion had developed the Ecclesia had mounted several expeditions to Earth, and had returned with such treasures as the bones of Poole’s father Harry…

Poole seemed to know all this. He laughed at Futurity’s discomfiture.

The Captain called them. They had arrived at 3-Kilo, and Tahget, in his blunt, testing way, said his passengers might enjoy the view.

Poole was charmed by the clustering stars of 3-Kilo. To Futurity these spiral-arm stars, scattered and old, were a thin veil that barely distracted him from the horror of the underlying darkness beyond.

But it wasn’t stars they were here to see.

Poole pointed. ‘What in Lethe is that?’

An object shifted rapidly against the stars of 3-Kilo. Silhouetted, it was dark, its form complex and irregular.

Poole was fascinated. ‘An asteroid, maybe – no, too spiky for that. A comet nucleus, then? I spent some time in the Kuiper Belt, the ice moon belt at the fringe of Sol system. I was building starships out there. Big job, long story, and all vanished now, I imagine. But a lot of those Kuiper objects were like that: billions of years of sculptures of frost and ice, all piled up in the dark. Pointlessly beautiful. So is this a Kuiper object detached from some system or other? But it looks too small for that.’

Futurity was struck again by the liveliness of Poole’s mind, the openness of his curiosity – and this was only an incomplete Virtual. He wondered wistfully how it might have been to have met the real Michael Poole.

Then Poole saw it. ‘It’s a ship,’ he said. ‘A ship covered with spires and spines and buttresses and carvings, just like our own Ask Politely. A ship like a bit of a baroque cathedral. I think it’s approaching us! Or we’re approaching it.’

He was right, Futurity saw immediately. He felt obscurely excited. ‘And – oh! There’s another.’ He pointed. ‘And another.’

Suddenly there were ships all over the sky, cautiously converging. Every one of them was unique. Though it was hard to judge distances and sizes, Futurity could see that some were larger than the Ask Politely, some smaller; some were roughly cylindrical like the Politely, others were spheres, cubes, tetrahedrons, even toroids, and some had no discernible regularity at all. And all of them sported gaudy features every bit as spectacular as Politely’s. There were immense scoop mouths and gigantic flaring exhaust nozzles, spindly spines and fat booms, and articulating arms that worked delicately back and forth like insect legs. Some of the ships even sported streamlined wings and fins and smooth noses, though none of them looked as if they could survive an entry into an atmosphere. These glimmering sculptures drifted all around the sky.

Poole said, ‘Quite a carnival. Look at all that crap, the spines and spikes and nets and fins. It looks like it’s been stuck on by some giant kid making toy spaceships. I can’t believe there’s any utility in most of those features.’

Futurity said, ‘It’s also ugly. What a mess!’

‘Yes,’ said Poole. ‘But I have the feeling we’re not the ones this stuff is supposed to impress.’ He pointed. ‘And that one looks as if it wants to get a bit more intimate than the rest.’

A huge ship loomed from the crowd and approached the Ask Politely. It was a rough sphere, but its geometry was almost obscured by a fantastic hull-forest of metal, ceramics and polymers. Moving with an immense slow grace, it bore down on the Ask Politely, which waited passively.

At last the big sphere’s complex bulk shadowed most of the observation lounge’s blister. A jungle of nozzles and booms slid across the window. Futurity wondered vaguely how close it would come before it stopped.

And then he realised it wasn’t going to stop at all.

Captain Tahget murmured, ‘Brace for impact.’ Futurity grabbed a rail.

The collision of the two vast ships was slow, almost gentle. Futurity, cupped in the Ask Politely’s inertial-control field, barely felt it, but he could hear a groan of stressed metal, transmitted through the ship’s hull. Two tangles of superstructure scraped past each other; dishes were crashed and spines broken, before the ships came to rest, locked together.

Translucent access tubes sprouted from the hulls of both ships, and snaked across space like questing pseudopodia, looking for purchase. Futurity thought he saw someone, or something, scuttling through the tubes, but it was too far away to see clearly.

Poole gazed out with his mouth open. ‘Look – here’s another ship coming to join the party.’

So it was, Futurity saw. It was a relative dwarf compared to the monster that had first reached Ask Politely. But with more metallic grinding it snuggled close against the hulls of the two locked ships.

Poole laughed. ‘Boy, space travel has sure changed a lot since my day!’

Captain Tahget said, ‘Show’s over. We’ll be here two days, maybe three, before the swarming is done.’

Poole glanced at Futurity questioningly. The swarming?

Tahget said, ‘Until then we maintain our systems and wait. Let me remind you it’s the night watch; you passengers might want to get some sleep.’ He glanced at Poole. ‘Or whatever.’

Futurity returned to his cabin, and tried to sleep. But there were more encounters in the night, more subtle shudderings, more groans of stressed materials so deep they were almost subsonic.

This experience seemed to him to have nothing to do with spaceflight. I am in the belly of a fish, he thought, a huge fish of space that has come to this place of scattered stars to seek others of its kind. And it doesn’t even know I am here, embedded within it.

V

During the 3-Kilo lay-off Captain Tahget had his crew scour through the ship’s habitable areas, cleaning, refurbishing and repairing. It was make-work to keep the crew and passengers busy, but after a few hours Futurity conceded he welcomed the replacement of the ship’s accumulated pale stink of sweat, urine and adrenaline with antisepsis.

But the continuing refusal of Mara, reluctant terrorist, to come out of her cabin caused a crisis.

‘She has to leave her cabin, at least for a while,’ Tahget thundered. ‘That’s the company’s rules, not mine.’

‘Why?’ Poole asked evenly. ‘You recycle her air, provide her with water and food. Give her clean sheets and she’ll change her own bed, I’m sure.’

‘This is a starship, Michael Poole, an artificial environment. In a closed, small space like that cabin there can be build-ups of toxins, pathogens. And I remind you she is sharing her cabin with a monopole bomb, a nasty bit of crud at least two thousand years old, and Lethe knows what’s leaking out of that. We need to clean out her nest.’

Poole’s eyes narrowed. ‘What else?’

‘That woman needs exercise. You’ve seen the logs. She only gets off her bed to use the bathroom, and even that’s only a couple of times a day. What good will it do anybody if she keels over from a thrombosis even before we get to the Chandra? Especially if she’s got a dead man’s switch, as she claims.’

‘Those are all reasons for separating Mara from her bomb, despite your promises to the contrary. I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you, Captain. And if I don’t, how can Mara?’

Captain Tahget glared; he was a bulky, angry, determined man, and his scar was livid. ‘Michael Poole, my only concern is the safety of the ship, and everybody aboard – yes, including Mara. I am an honourable man, and if you have half the intuition for which your original was famous you will understand that. I give you my word that if she is willing to leave her room, briefly, for these essential purposes, Mara’s situation will not be changed. When she is returned, everything will be as it was. I hope that we can progress this in a civilised and mutually trusting fashion.’

Poole studied him for long seconds. Then he glanced at Futurity, and shrugged. ‘After all,’ Poole said, ‘she’ll still be able to detonate her bomb whether she’s in the cabin with it or not.’

So Mara emerged from her room, for the first time since before Futurity’s first visit to the ship.

A strange procession moved around the ship, with Tahget himself in the van, and a handful of crew, mostly female, surrounding the central core of Poole, Futurity and Mara. Mara insisted that Poole and Futurity stay with her at all times, one on either side, and she brought a pillow from her cabin which she held clutched to her chest, like a shield. Futurity couldn’t think of a thing to say to this woman who was holding them all hostage, but Poole kept up a comforting murmur of mellifluous small-talk.

Futurity saw that the crew checked over Mara surreptitiously. Maybe they were searching for the devices that linked her to her bomb. But there was nothing to be seen under her shapeless grey smock. Surely any such device would be an implant, he decided.

The peculiar tour finished in the observation lounge, where the view was still half obscured by the hull of an over-friendly ship that had sidled up to the Ask Politely. Further out, nuzzling ships drifted around the sky, like bunches of misshapen balloons.

Mara showed a flicker of curiosity for the first time since leaving her cabin. ‘The ships are so strange,’ she said.

‘That they are,’ Poole said.

‘What are they doing?’

‘I don’t know. And the Captain won’t tell me.’

She pointed. ‘Look. Those two are fighting.’

Futurity and the others crowded to the window to see. It was true. Two ships had come together in an obviously unfriendly way. Both lumbering kilometre-long beasts, they weren’t about to do anything quickly, but they barged against each other, withdrew, and then went through another slow-motion collision. As they spun and ground, bits of hull ornamentation were bent and snapped off, and the ships were surrounded by a pale cloud of fragments, detached spires and shields, nozzles and antennae and scoops.

‘It’s a peculiar sort of battle,’ Futurity said. ‘They aren’t using any weapons. All they are doing is smashing up each other’s superstructure.’

‘But maybe that’s the point,’ Poole said.

‘So strange,’ Mara said again.

Captain Tahget blocked her way. ‘But,’ he said, ‘not so strange as the fact that you, madam, were able to smuggle a monopole bomb onto my ship.’

The mood immediately changed. Mara, obviously frightened, shrank back against Poole, coming so close she brushed against him, making his flank sparkle with disrupted pixels.

Poole said warningly, ‘Captain, you promised you wouldn’t interfere with her.’

Tahget held up his big hands. ‘And I will keep my word. Nobody will touch the bomb, or Mara here, and we’ll go through with our flight to Chandra as we agreed.’

‘But,’ Poole said heavily, ‘you had an ulterior motive in getting her out here, despite your promises.’

‘All right,’ Captain Tahget snapped. ‘I need some answers. I must know how she got us all into this situation.’

Futurity asked, ‘Why?’

Tahget barely glanced at him. ‘To stop it happening again.’ He glared at Mara. ‘Who helped you? Somebody must have. You’re nothing but a refugee from Chandra; you came to 478 with nothing. Who helped you smuggle a bomb on board? Who equipped you with the means to use it? And why? I know what you want – I don’t understand, but I’ve heard what you said. What I don’t know is what your benefactors want. And I need to know.’

She returned his stare defiantly. ‘I want to go back to my cabin.’

But Tahget wouldn’t back down. The stand-off was tense, and Futurity, his heart pumping, couldn’t see a way out.

Poole intervened. ‘Mara, it may be best to tell him what he wants to know.’

‘But—’

‘Telling him who helped you will make no difference to you. You aren’t going to come this way again, are you? And I can see the other point of view. Captain Tahget is responsible for his ship.’ Mara hesitated, but Poole continued to reassure her. ‘I believe he’ll keep his word. Just tell him.’

She took a deep breath. ‘Her name is Ideator First Class Leen.’

Tahget growled, ‘Who?’

But Futurity was shocked. He knew the name: the person who had helped Mara set all this up was a priest belonging to the Guild of Virtual Idealism.

Poole’s jaw dropped when he heard this. ‘My own makers! How delicious.’

Mara began to explain how the Ideator had helped her smuggle the bomb and other equipment aboard, but Tahget waved her silent. ‘If that bunch of illusionists was involved, anything could have been done to us and we wouldn’t know it.’ His suspicious frown deepened. ‘And then, once you were aboard, you asked for Poole himself. So was that part of the scheme?’

‘No,’ she insisted. ‘The Ideator did tell me Michael Poole had been reincarnated on 478. But it was my idea to ask for him, not hers.’

Poole shook his head. ‘I’m not part of this, captain, believe me. I’m a mere creature of the Idealists – rather like Mara here, I suppose.’

Now the Captain’s ferocious stare was turned on Futurity. ‘And you,’ Tahget snarled, his scar livid. ‘What do you have to do with it? The truth, now.’

Futurity, flustered, protested, ‘Why, nothing, Captain. You know why I was brought in – to negotiate with Mara. You asked for the Ecclesia’s help! And I don’t understand why you’re even asking me such a question. I’m an Engineer, not an Idealist.’

Tahget snorted. ‘But you’re all alike, you Guilds. All of you clinging to your petty worldlets, with your stolen fragments of the soldier’s faith, your saintly relics and your shrines!’

Futurity was shocked. ‘Captain – believe me, Engineers and Idealists would never cooperate on a scheme like this. It’s unthinkable.’ He hunted for the right word. ‘We may seem alike to you. But we are rivals.’

‘Maybe that’s the point,’ Poole said smoothly. ‘Acolyte, I imagine the Idealists have their own flow-through of pilgrims, along with their money.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

‘What, then, if Mara’s bomb goes off? What will be the impact on the Ecclesia’s trading?’

‘We don’t think of it as trading but a duty to helpless—’

‘Just answer the question,’ Tahget growled.

Futurity thought it through. ‘It would be a disaster for us,’ he conceded. ‘A refugee makes her journey only once in her lifetime. She brings her children. If she can choose, nobody would come to a place so unsafe as to allow something like this to happen.’

‘No more refugees with their meagre savings for you to cream,’ Poole said, watching Futurity’s reaction with a cold amusement. ‘No more pilgrims and their offerings. Your rivals would have struck a mighty economic blow, would they not?’

Tahget said, ‘My company certainly wouldn’t touch your poxy little globe with a gloved hand, acolyte. Perhaps we won’t anyhow.’ A vein throbbed in his forehead. ‘So we are all puppets of those illusionists. And there’s not one of them within light years, whose head I can crack open!’

Mara had listened to all this. Now she said, ‘None of this matters. What does matter is me, and my daughter.’

‘And your bomb,’ said Poole softly.

‘Take me back to my cabin,’ she said. ‘And don’t ask me to leave it again before we get to Chandra.’

With a curt nod, Tahget dismissed her.

Futurity went back to his own room. He was relieved the little crisis was over, but his cheeks burned with shame and anger that this whole incident had been set up to get at his own Ecclesia – that another Guild should be responsible – and it had taken Poole to see it, Poole, a Virtual designed by the Idealists themselves!

But as he thought it over, he did see how alike the two Guilds were. And, he couldn’t help wondering, if the Idealists were capable of such deception, could it be that his own Ecclesia would not be above such dirty tricks? It was all politics, as Poole would probably say, politics and money, and a competition for the grubby trade of refugees and pilgrims. Perhaps even now the Ecclesiasts were plotting manoeuvres just as underhand and unscrupulous against their rivals.

An unwelcome seed of doubt and suspicion lodged in his mind. To burn it out he took his data desk and began furiously to write out a long report on the whole incident for his Hierocrat.

But before he had completed the work he was disturbed again. This time it wasn’t Mara who was causing trouble for the crew, but Poole – who had gone missing.

Tahget met Futurity in the observation lounge.

Futurity said, ‘I don’t see how you can lose a Virtual.’

Tahget grunted. ‘We know he’s being projected somewhere. We can tell that from the energy drain. What we don’t know is where. He isn’t on the monitors. We’ve checked out all the permitted zones by eye. What’s he up to, acolyte?’

Once again Futurity found himself flinching from Tahget’s glare. ‘You know, Captain, the way you use your physical presence to intimidate me—’

‘Answer the question!’

‘I can’t! I’m on this voyage because of Poole – believe me, I wish I wasn’t here at all – but I’m not his keeper.’

‘Acolyte, if you’re hiding something…’

Futurity was aware of a shadow passing over him. He turned.

There was Poole.

He was outside the hull, standing horizontally with his feet on the window’s surface, casting a diffuse shadow into the lounge. He was dressed in a skinsuit, and he looked down at Futurity with a broad grin, easily visible through his visor. The Virtual rendition was good enough for Futurity to see the pattern on the soles of Poole’s boots. Behind him, entangled ships drifted like clouds.

Futurity gaped. ‘Michael Poole! Why – how—?’

‘I can tell you how,’ Tahget said. He walked up to the window, huge fists clenched. ‘You hacked into your own software, didn’t you? You overrode the inhibiting protocols.’

‘It was an interesting experience,’ Poole said. His voice sounded muffled to Futurity, as if he was in another room. ‘Not so much like rewriting software as giving myself a nervous breakdown.’ He held up a gloved hand. ‘And you can see I didn’t do away with all the inhibitions. I wasn’t sure how far I could go, what was safe. Futurity, I think it’s possible that if I cracked this visor, the vacuum would kill me just as quickly as it would kill you.’

Futurity felt an urge to laugh at Poole’s antics. But at the same time anger swirled within him. ‘Poole, what are you doing out there? You’re the only one Mara trusts. All you’re doing is destabilising a dangerous situation, can’t you see that?’

Poole looked mildly exasperated. ‘Destabilising? I didn’t create this mess, acolyte. And I certainly didn’t ask to be here, in this muddled century of yours. But given that I am here – what do I want out of it? To find out, that’s what. That’s all I ever wanted, I sometimes think.’

Tahget said, ‘And what did you go spacewalking to find out, Poole?’

Poole grinned impishly. ‘Why, Captain, I wanted to know about your Hairy Folk.’

Futurity frowned. ‘What Hairy Folk?’

Tahget just glared.

Poole said, ‘Shall I show him?’ He waved a hand. A new Virtual materialised beside him, hanging in the vacuum. Its fragmentary images showed shadowy figures scurrying through the ship’s corridors, and along those translucent access tubes that snaked between the intertwined ships.

At first they looked like children to Futurity. They seemed to run on all fours, and to be wearing some kind of dark clothing. But as he looked closer he saw they didn’t so much crawl as scamper, climbing along the tube using big hands and very flexible-looking feet to clutch at handholds. There was something odd about the proportions of their bodies too: they had big chests, narrow hips, and their arms were long, their legs short, so that all four limbs were about the same length.

‘And,’ Futurity said with a shudder, ‘that dark stuff isn’t clothing, is it?’

For answer, Poole froze the image. Captured at the centre of the frame, clearly visible through an access tube’s translucent wall, a figure gazed out at Futurity. Though this one’s limbs looked as well-muscled as the others, it was a female, he saw; small breasts pushed out of a tangle of fur. Her face, turned to Futurity, was very human, with a pointed chin, a small nose, and piercing blue eyes. But her brow was a low ridge of bone, above which her skull was flat.

‘A post-human,’ Futurity breathed.

‘Oh, certainly,’ said Poole. ‘Evidently adapted to micro-gravity. That even-proportioned frame is built for climbing, not for walking. Interesting; they seem to have reverted to a body plan from way back in our own hominid line, when our ancestors lived in the trees of Earth. The forests have vanished now, as have those ancestors or anything that looked like them. But a sort of echo has returned, here at the centre of the Galaxy. How strange! Of course these creatures would have been illegal under the Coalition, as I understand it. Evolutionary divergence wasn’t the done thing in those days. But the Galaxy is a big place, and evidently it happened anyhow. She doesn’t look so interested in the finer points of the law, does she?’

Futurity said, ‘Captain, why do you allow these creatures to run around your ship?’

Poole laughed. ‘Captain, I’m afraid he doesn’t understand.’

Tahget growled, ‘Acolyte, we call these creatures “shipbuilders”. And I do not allow them to do anything – it’s rather the other way around.’

Poole said cheerfully, ‘Hence the ship’s name – Ask Politely!’

‘But you’re the Captain,’ Futurity said, bewildered.

Poole said, ‘Tahget is Captain of the small pod which sustains you, acolyte, which I can see very clearly stuck in the tangle of the hull superstructure. But he’s not in command of the ship. All he does is a bit of negotiating. You are all less than passengers, really. You are like lice in a child’s hair.’

Tahget shrugged. ‘You insult me, Poole, but I don’t mind the truth.’

Futurity still didn’t get it. ‘The ships belong to these Builders? And they let you hitch a ride?’

‘For a fee. They still need material from the ground – food, air, water – no recycling system is a hundred per cent efficient. And that’s what we use to buy passage.’

Poole grinned. ‘I pay you in credits. You pay them in bananas!’

The Captain ignored him. ‘We have ways of letting the Builders know where we want them to take us.’

‘How?’ Poole asked, interested.

Tahget shuddered. ‘The Shipbuilders are nearly mindless. I leave that to specialists.’

Futurity stared at Poole’s images of swarming apes, his dread growing. ‘Nearly mindless. But who maintains the Ask Politely? Who runs the engines? Captain, who’s steering this ship?’

‘The Hairy Folk,’ Poole said.

It was all a question of time, said Michael Poole.

‘In this strange future of yours, it’s more than twenty thousand years since humans first left Sol system. Twenty thousand years! Maybe you’re used to thinking about periods like that, but I’m a sort of involuntary time traveller, and it appals me – because that monstrous interval is a good fraction of the age of the human species itself.

‘And it’s more than enough time for natural selection to have shaped us, if we had given it the chance. The frozen imagination of the Coalition kept most of humanity in a bubble of stasis. But out in the dark, sliding between those islands of rock, it was a different matter: nobody could have controlled what was happening out there. And with time, we diverged.

‘After the first humans had left Earth, most of them plunged straight into another gravity well, like amphibious creatures hopping between ponds. But there were some, just a fraction, who found it preferable to stay out in the smoother spaces between the worlds. They lived in bubble-colonies dug out of ice moons or comets, or blown from asteroid rock. Others travelled on generation starships, unsurprisingly finding that their ship-home became much more congenial than any destination planned for them by well-meaning but long-dead ancestors. Some of them just stayed on their ships, making their living from trading.’

‘My own people did that,’ Futurity said. ‘So it’s believed. The first Engineers were stranded on a clutch of ships, out in space, when Earth was occupied. They couldn’t go home. They survived on trade for centuries, until Earth was freed.’

‘A fascinating snippet of family history,’ Tahget said contemptuously.

Poole said, ‘Just think about it, acolyte. These Hairy Folk have been suspended between worlds for millennia. And that has shaped them. They have lost much of what they don’t need – your built-for-a-gravity-well body, your excessively large brain.’

Futurity said, ‘Given the situation, I don’t see how becoming less intelligent would be an advantage.’

‘Think, boy! You’re running a starship, not a home workshop. You’re out there for ever. Everything is fixed, and the smallest mistake could kill you. You can only maintain, not innovate. Tinkering is one of your strongest taboos! You need absolute cultural stasis, even over evolutionary time. And to get that you have to tap into even more basic drivers. There’s only one force that could fix hominids’ behaviour in such a way and for so long – and that’s sex.’

‘Sex?’

‘Sex! Let me tell you a story. Once there was a kind of hominid – a pre-human – called Homo erectus. They lived on old Earth, of course. They had bodies like humans’, brains like apes’. I’ve always imagined they were beautiful creatures. And they had a simple technology. The cornerstone of it was a hand-axe: a teardrop-shape with a fine edge, hacked out of stone or flint. You could use it to shave your hair, butcher an animal, kill your rival; it was a good tool.

‘And the same design was used, with no significant modification, for a million years. Think about it, acolyte! What an astonishing stasis that is – why, the tool survived even across species boundaries, even when one type of erectus replaced another. But do you know what it was that imposed that stasis, over such an astounding span of time?’

‘Sex?’

‘Exactly! Erectus used the technology, not just as a tool, but as a way of impressing potential mates. Think about it: to find the raw materials you have to show a knowledge of the environment; to make a hand-axe you need to show hand-eye coordination and an ability for abstract thought; to use it you need motor skills. If you can make a hand-axe you’re showing you are a walking, talking expression of a healthy set of genes.

‘But there’s a downside. Once you have picked on the axe as your way of impressing the opposite sex, the design has to freeze. This isn’t a path to innovation! You can make your axes better than the next guy – or bigger, or smaller even – but never different, because you would run the risk of confusing the target of your charms. And that is why the hand-axes didn’t change for a megayear – and that’s why, I’ll wager, the technology of these spiky starships hasn’t changed either for millennia.’

Futurity started to see his point. ‘You’re saying that the Shipbuilders maintain their starships, as – as—’

‘As erectus once made his hand-axes. They do it, not for the utility of the thing itself, but as a display of sexual status. It’s no wonder I couldn’t figure out the function of that superstructure of spines and scoops and nozzles. It has no utility! It has no purpose but showing off for potential mates – but that sexual role has served its purpose and frozen its design.’

Futurity recalled hearing of another case like this – a generation starship called the Mayflower, lost beyond the Galaxy, where the selection pressures of a closed environment had overwhelmed the crew. Evidently it hadn’t been an isolated instance.

As usual Poole seemed delighted to have figured out something new. ‘The Ask Politely is a starship, but it is also a peacock’s tail. How strange it all is.’ He laughed. ‘And it would appal a lot of my old buddies that their dreams of interstellar domination would result in this.’

‘You’re very perceptive, Michael Poole,’ the Captain said with a faint sneer.

‘I always was,’ said Poole. ‘And a fat lot of good it’s done me.’

Futurity turned to the Captain. ‘Is this true?’

Tahget shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have put it quite so coarsely as Poole. We crew just get on with our jobs. Every so often you have to let the Builders come to a gathering like this. They show off their ships, their latest enhancements. Sometimes they fight. And they throw those tubes between the ships, swarm across and screw their heads off for a few days. When they’ve worn themselves out, you can pass on your way.’

Futurity asked, ‘But why use these creatures and their peculiar ships? Look at the detour we have had to make, even though we have a bomb on board! Why not just run ships under human control, as we always have?’

Tahget sighed. ‘Because we have no choice. When the Coalition collapsed, the Navy and the state trading fleets collapsed with it. Acolyte, unless you are extremely powerful or wealthy, in this corner of the Galaxy a ship like this is the only way to get around. We just have to work with the Builders.’

Futurity felt angry. ‘Then why not tell people? Isn’t it a lie to pretend that the ship is under your control?’

Tahget blinked. ‘And if you had known the truth? Would you have climbed aboard a ship if you had known it was under the control of low-browed animals like those?’

Futurity stared out as the Shipbuilders swarmed excitedly along their access tubes, seeking food or mates.

VI

With the encounter at 3-Kilo apparently complete, the Ask Politely sailed back towards the centre of the Galaxy. To Futurity it was a comfort when the ship slid once more into the crowded sky of the Core, and the starlight folded over him like a blanket, shutting out the darkness.

But ships of the Kardish Imperium closed around the Ask Politely. Everybody crowded to the windows to see.

They were called greenships, an archaic design like a three-pronged claw. Part of the huge military legacy of the Galaxy-centre war, they had once been painted as green as their names – green, the imagined colour of distant Earth – and they had sported the tetrahedral sigil that had once been recognised across the Galaxy as the common symbol of a free and strong mankind. But all that was the symbology of the hated Coalition, and so now these ships were a bloody red, and they bore on their hulls not tetrahedrons but the clenched-fist emblem of the latest Kard.

Ancient and recycled they might be, but still the greenships whirled and swooped around the Ask Politely, dancing against the light of the Galaxy. It was a display of menace, pointless and spectacular and beautiful. The Politely crew gaped, their mouths open.

‘The crew are envious,’ Futurity murmured to Poole.

‘Of course they are,’ Poole said. ‘Out there, in those greenships – that’s how a human is supposed to fly. This spiky, lumbering beast could never dance like that! And this “crew” has no more control over their destiny than fleas on a rat. But I suppose you wouldn’t sign up even for a ship like this unless you had something of the dream of flying. How they must envy those Kardish flyboys!’

Futurity understood that while the Politely had fled across the Galaxy there had been extensive three-way negotiations between the Ideocracy, the Imperium and the Ecclesia about the situation on Politely. All parties had tentatively agreed that this was a unique humanitarian crisis, and everyone should work together to resolve it, in the interests of common decency. But Earth was twenty-eight thousand light years away, and the blunt power of the Kard, here and now, was not to be denied.

So, with its barnstorming escort in place, the ship slid deeper into the crowded sky. The whole formation made bold faster-than-light jumps, roughly synchronised. Soon they penetrated the Central Star Mass.

Futurity found Poole in the observation lounge, staring out at the crowded sky. The nearest stars hung like globe lamps, their discs clearly visible, with a deep three-dimensional array of more stars hanging behind them – stars beyond stars beyond stars, all of them hot and young, until they merged into a mist of light that utterly shut out any disturbing darkness.

Against this background, Poole was a short, sullen form, and even the Mass’s encompassing brilliance didn’t seem to alleviate his heavy darkness. His expression was complex, as always.

‘I can never tell what you’re thinking, Michael Poole.’

Poole glanced at him. ‘That’s probably a good thing … Lethe, this is the centre of the Galaxy, and the stars are crowded together like grains of sand in a sack. It’s terrifying! The whole place is bathed in light – why, if not for this ship’s shielding we’d all be fried in an instant. But to you, acolyte, this is normal, isn’t it?’

Futurity shrugged. ‘It’s what I grew up with.’

He tried to summarise for Poole the geography of the centre of the Galaxy. The structure was concentric – ‘Like an onion,’ Poole commented – with layers of density and complexity centred on Chandra, the brooding supermassive black hole at the centre of everything. The Core itself was the Galaxy’s central bulge, a fat ellipsoid of stars and shining nebulae set at the centre of the disc of spiral arms. Embedded within the Core was the still denser knot of the Central Star Mass. As well as millions of stars crammed into a few light years, the Mass contained relics of immense astrophysical violence, expanding blisters left over from supernovas, and tremendous fronts of roiling gas and dust thrown off from greater detonations at the Galaxy’s heart. Stranger yet was the Baby Spiral, a fat comma shape embedded deep in the Mass, like a miniature galaxy with its own arms of young stars and hot gases.

And at the centre of it all was Chandra itself, the black hole, a single object with the mass of millions of stars. The Galaxy centre was a place of immense violence, where stars were born and torn apart in great bursts. But Chandra itself was massive and immovable, the pivot of vast astrophysical machineries, pinned fast to spacetime.

Poole was intrigued by Futurity’s rough-and-ready knowledge of the Core’s geography, even though the acolyte had never before travelled away from 478. ‘You know it the way I knew the shapes of Earth’s continents from school maps,’ he said. But he was dismayed by the brusque labels Futurity and the crew had for the features of the centre. The Core, the Mass, the Baby: they were soldiers’ names, irreverent and familiar. In the immense glare of the Core there was no trace of mankind’s three-thousand-year war to be seen, but those names, Poole said, marked out this place as a battlefield – just as much as the traces of complex organic molecules that had once been human beings, hordes of them slaughtered and vaporised, sometimes still detectable as pollutants in those shining clouds.

Something about the location’s complexity made Poole open up, tentatively, about his own experience: the Virtual’s, not the original.

‘When I was made fully conscious the first time, it felt like waking up. But I had none of the usual baggage in my head you carry through sleep: no clear memory of where I had been when I fell asleep, what I had done the day before – even how old I was. The priests quizzed me, and I slowly figured out where I was, and even what I was. I was shocked to find out when I was. Let me tell you,’ said Poole grimly, ‘that was tougher to take than being told I was worshipped as a god.’

‘You can remember your past life? I mean, Poole’s.’

‘Oh, yes. I remember it as if I lived it myself. I’m told they didn’t so much programme me,’ said Poole wistfully, ‘as grow me. They put together as much as they could about my life, and then fast-forwarded me through it all.’

‘So you lived out a computer-memory life.’

Poole said, ‘My memory is sharp up to a point. I remember my father Harry, who, long after he was dead, came back to haunt me as a Virtual. I remember Miriam – somebody I loved,’ he said gruffly. ‘I lost her in time long before I lost myself. But it’s all a fake. I remember having free will and making choices. But I was a rat in a maze; the truth was I never had such freedom.

‘And the trouble is the records go fuzzy just at the point where my, or rather his, biography gets interesting to you theologians. What happened after I lost Miriam isn’t like a memory, it’s like a dream – a guess, a fiction somebody wrote out for me. Even to think about it blurs my sense of self. Anyhow I don’t believe any of it!

‘So I was a big disappointment, I think. Oh, the priests kept on developing me. They would download upgrades; I would wake up refreshed, rebooted. Of course I always wondered if I was still the same me as when I went to sleep. But I was never able to answer the theologians’ questions about the Ultimate Observer, or my jaunt through the wormholes, or about what I saw or didn’t see at Timelike Infinity. I wish I could! I’d like to know myself.

‘In the end they shut me down one last time. They promised me I’d wake up soon, as I always had. But I was left in my Virtual casket for a thousand years. The bastards. The next thing I saw was the ugly face of your Hierocrat, leaning over me.’

‘Perhaps they did crucify you, in the end.’

Poole looked at him sharply. ‘You’ve got depths, despite your silly name, kid. Perhaps they did. What I really don’t understand is why they didn’t just wipe me off the data banks. Just sentimental, maybe.’

Futurity said, ‘Oh, not that.’ The Hierocrat in his hurried briefing had made this clear. ‘They’d worked too hard on you, Michael Poole. They put in too much. Your Virtual representation is now more information-rich than I am, and information density defines reality. You may not be a god. You may not even be Michael Poole. But whatever you are, you are more real than we are, now.’

Poole stared at him. ‘You don’t say.’ Then he laughed, and turned away.

Still the Ask Politely burrowed deeper into the kernel of the Galaxy.

VII

At last the Ask Politely, with its Kardish escort, broke through veils of stars into a place the crew called the Hole. Under the same strict guarantees as before, Poole brought Mara to the observation deck.

The ship came to a halt, suspended in a rough sphere walled by crowded stars. This was a bubble in the tremendous foam of stars that crowded the Galaxy’s centre, a bubble swept clean by a black hole’s gravity. Captain Tahget pointed out some brighter pinpoints; they were the handful of stars, of all the hundreds of billions in the Galaxy, whose orbits took them closest to Chandra. No stars could come closer, for they would be torn apart by Chandra’s tides.

When Futurity looked ahead he could see a puddle of light, suspended at the very centre of the Hole. It was small, dwarfed by the scale of the Hole itself. It looked elliptical from his perspective, but he knew it was a rough disc, and it marked the very heart of the Galaxy.

‘It looks like a toy,’ Mara said, wondering.

Poole asked, ‘You know what it is?’

‘Of course. It’s the accretion disc surrounding Chandra.’

‘Home,’ Poole said dryly.

‘Yes,’ Mara said. ‘But I never saw it like this before. The Kardish shipped us out in their big transports. Just cargo scows. You don’t get much of a view.’

‘And somewhere in there—’

‘Is my daughter.’ She turned to him, and the washed-out light smoothed the lines of her careworn face, making her look younger. ‘Thank you, Michael Poole. You have brought me home.’

‘Not yet I haven’t,’ Poole said grimly.

The Ask Politely with its escort swooped down towards the centre of the Hole. That remote puddle loomed, and opened out into a broad sea of roiling gas, above which the ships raced.

Infalling matter bled into this central whirlpool, the accretion disc, where it spent hours or weeks or years helplessly orbiting, kneaded by tides and heated by compression until any remnants of structure had been destroyed, leaving only a thin, glowing plasma. It was this mush that finally fell into the black hole. Thus Chandra was slowly consuming the Galaxy of which it was the heart.

Eventually Futurity made out Chandra itself, a fist of fierce light set at the geometric centre of the accretion disc, so bright that clumps of turbulence cast shadows light days long over the disc’s surface. It wasn’t the event horizon itself he was seeing, of course, but the despairing glow of matter crushed beyond endurance, in the last instants before it was sucked out of the universe altogether. The event horizon was a surface from which nothing, not even light, could escape, but it was forever hidden by the glow of the doomed matter which fell into it.

Poole was glued to the window. ‘Astounding,’ he said. ‘The black hole is a flaw in the cosmos, into which a Galaxy is draining. And this accretion disc is a sink as wide as Sol system!’

It was Mara who noticed the moistness on Poole’s cheeks. ‘You’re weeping.’

He turned his head away, annoyed. ‘Virtuals don’t weep,’ he said gruffly.

‘You’re not sad. You’re happy,’ Mara said.

‘And Virtuals don’t get happy,’ Poole said. ‘It’s just – to be here, to see this!’ He turned on Futurity, who saw anger beneath his exhilaration, even a kind of despair, powerful emotions mixed up together. ‘But you know what’s driving me crazy? I’m not him. I’m not Poole. It’s as if you woke me up to torture me with existential doubt! He never saw this – and whatever I am, he is long gone, and I can’t share it with him. So it’s meaningless, isn’t it?’

Futurity pondered that. ‘Then appreciate it for yourself. This is your moment, not his. Relish how this enhances your own identity – yours, uniquely, not his.’

Poole snorted. ‘A typical priest’s answer!’ But he fell silent, and seemed a little calmer. Futurity thought he might, for once, have given Poole a little comfort.

Tahget said grimly, ‘Before you get too dewy-eyed, remember this was a war zone.’ He told Poole how Chandra had once been surrounded by technology, a net-like coating put in place by beings who had corralled a supermassive black hole and put it to work. ‘The whole set-up took a lot of destroying,’ Tahget said evenly. ‘When we’d finished that job, we’d won the Galaxy.’

Poole stared at him. ‘You new generations are a formidable bunch.’

There were stars in the accretion disc. Tahget pointed them out.

The disc was a turbulent place, where eddies and knots with the mass of many suns could form – and, here and there, collapse, compress and spark into fusion fire. These stars shone like jewels in the murky debris at the rim of the disc. But doomed they were, as haplessly drawn towards Chandra as the rest of the disc debris from which they were born. Eventually the most massive star would be torn apart, its own gravity no match for the tides of Chandra. Sometimes you would see a smear of light brushed across the face of the disc: the remains of a star, flensed and gutted, its material still glowing with fusion light.

Some stars didn’t last even that long. Massive, bloated, these monsters would burst as supernovas almost as soon as they formed, leaving behind remnants: neutron stars – or even black holes, stellar-mass objects. Even Chandra couldn’t break open a black hole, but it would gobble up these babies with relish. When a black hole hit Chandra, so it was said, that immense event horizon would ring like a bell.

It was towards one of these satellite black holes that the Ask Politely now descended.

Dropping into the accretion disc was like falling into a shining cloud; billows and bubbles, filaments and sheets of glowing gas drifted upwards past the ship. Even though those billows were larger than planets – for the accretion disc, as Poole had noted, was as wide as a solar system itself – Futurity could see the billows churning as he watched, as if the ship was falling into a nightmare of vast, slow-moving sculptures.

The approach was tentative, cautious. Captain Tahget said the Shipbuilders were having to be bribed with additional goodies; the swarming creatures were very unhappy at having to take their ship into this dangerous place. This struck Futurity as a very rational point of view.

In the middle of all this they came upon a black hole.

They needed the observation lounge’s magnification features to see it. With twice the mass of Earth’s sun, it was a blister of sullen light, sailing through the accretion clouds. Like Chandra’s, the dark mask of its event horizon – in fact only a few kilometres across – was hidden by the electromagnetic scream of the matter it sucked out of the universe. It even had its own accretion disc, Futurity saw, a small puddle of light around that central spark.

And this city-sized sun had its own planet. ‘Greyworld,’ Mara breathed. ‘I never thought I’d see it again.’

This asteroid, having survived its fall into Chandra’s accretion disc, had been plucked out of the garbage by the Ideocrats and moved to a safe orbit around the satellite black hole. The worldlet orbited its primary at about the same distance as Earth orbited its sun. And Greyworld lived up to its name, Futurity saw, for its surface was a seamless silver-grey, smooth and unblemished.

To Mara, it seemed, this was home. ‘We live under the roof,’ Mara said. ‘It is held up from the surface by stilts.’

‘We used to call this paraterraforming,’ Poole said. ‘Turning your world into one immense building. Low gravity lets you get away with a lot, doesn’t it?’

‘The roof is perfectly reflective,’ Mara said. ‘We tap the free energy of the Galaxy centre to survive, but none of it reaches our homes untamed.’

‘I should think not,’ Poole said warmly.

‘It is a beautiful place,’ Mara said, smiling. ‘We build our houses tall; some of them float, or hang from the world roof. And you feel safe, safe from the violence of the galactic storms outside. You should see it sometime, Michael Poole.’

Poole raised his eyebrows. ‘But, Mara, your “safe” haven is about as unsafe as it could get, despite the magical roof.’

‘He’s right,’ said Tahget. ‘This black hole and its orbital retinue are well on their way into Chandra. After another decade or so the tides will pull the planetoid free of the hole, and after that they will rip off that fancy roof. Then the whole mess will fall into Chandra’s event horizon, and that will be that.’

‘Which is why Greyworld had to be evacuated,’ Futurity said.

‘The latest Kard is known for her humanitarian impulses,’ Tahget said dryly.

Poole said, ‘All right, Mara, here we are. What now? Do you want to be taken down to Greyworld?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘What would be the point of that?’ She seemed faintly irritated. ‘I told you, Michael Poole. My Sharn isn’t on Greyworld. She’s there.’ And she pointed to the glimmering black hole.

Tahget and his crew exchanged significant glances.

Futurity felt a flickering premonition, the return of fear. This journey into the heart of the Galaxy had been so wondrous that he had managed, for a while, to forget the danger they were in. But it had all been a diversion. This woman, after all, controlled a bomb, and now they approached the moment of crisis.

Poole drew him aside. ‘You look worried, acolyte,’ he murmured.

‘I am worried. Mara is still asking for the impossible. What do we do now?’

Poole seemed much calmer than Futurity felt. ‘I always had a philosophy. If you don’t know what to do, gather more data. How do you know that what she wants is impossible?’ He turned to Tahget. ‘Captain, how close can you take us to the satellite black hole?’

Tahget shook his head. ‘It’s a waste of time.’

‘But you don’t have any better suggestion, do you? Let’s go take a look. What else can we do?’

Tahget grumbled, but complied.

So the ship lifted away from Greyworld, and its retinue of Kardish greenships formed up once more. Mara smiled, as if she was coming home at last. But Futurity shivered, for there was nothing remotely human about the place they were heading to now.

Slowly the spiteful light of the satellite black hole drew closer.

‘Acolyte,’ Poole murmured. ‘You have a data desk?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then start making observations. Study that black hole, Futurity. Figure out what’s going on here. This is your chance to do some real science, for once.’

‘But I’m not a scientist.’

‘No, you’re not, are you? You’re too compromised for that. But you told me you were curious, once. That was what drove you out of the farm and into the arms of the Ecclesia in the first place.’ He sighed. ‘You know, in my day a kid like you would have had better opportunities.’

Futurity felt moved to defend his vocation. ‘I don’t think you understand the richness of theological—’

‘Just get the damn desk!’

Futurity hurried to his cabin and returned with his data desk. It was the Ecclesia’s most up-to-date model. He pressed the desk to the observation lounge blister, and checked it over as data poured in.

‘I feel excited,’ he said.

‘You should,’ Poole said. ‘You might make some original discovery here. And, more important, you might figure out how to save all our skins, my Virtual hide included.’

‘I’m excited but worried,’ Futurity admitted.

‘That sounds like you.’

‘Michael Poole, how can a human child survive in a black hole?’

Poole glanced at him approvingly. ‘Good; that’s the right question to ask. You need to cultivate an open mind, acolyte. Let’s assume Mara’s serious, that she knows what she’s talking about.’

‘That she’s not crazy.’

‘Open mind! Mara has implied – I think – that we’re not talking about the child in her physical form but some kind of download, like a Virtual.’

Futurity asked, ‘But what information can be stored in a black hole? A hole is defined only by its mass, charge and spin. You need rather more than three numbers to define a Virtual. But no human science knows a way to store more data than that in a black hole – though it is believed others may have done so in the past.’

Poole eyed him. ‘Others?…’ He slapped his own cheek. ‘Never mind. Concentrate, Poole. Then let’s look away from the hole itself, the relativistic object. We’re looking for structure, somewhere you can write information. Every black hole is embedded in the wider universe, and every one of them comes with baggage. This satellite hole has its own accretion disc. Maybe there ...’

But Futurity’s scans of the disc revealed nothing. ‘Michael Poole, it’s basically a turbulence spectrum. Oh, there is some correlation of structure around a circumference, and over time tied into the orbital period around the black hole.’

‘But that’s just gravity, the inverse square law, defined by one number: the black hole’s mass. All right, what else have we got?’ Inexpertly Poole tapped at a Virtual clone of Futurity’s desk. He magnified an image of the hole itself. It was a flaring pinprick, even under heavy magnification. But Poole played with filters until he had reduced the central glare, and had brought up details of the background sky.

A textured glow appeared. A rough sphere of pearly gas surrounded the black hole and much of its accretion disc, and within the sphere a flattened ellipsoid of brighter mist coalesced closer to the hole.

‘Well, well,’ said Poole.

Futurity, entranced, leaned closer to see. ‘I never knew black holes had atmospheres! Look, Michael Poole, it is almost like an eye staring at us – see, with the white, and then this iris within, and the black hole itself the pupil.’

Tahget listened to this contemptuously. ‘Evidently neither of you has been around black holes much.’ He pointed to the image of the accretion disc. ‘The hole’s magnetic field pulls material out of the disc, and hurls it into these wider shells. We call the outer layers the corona.’

Futurity said, ‘A star’s outer atmosphere is also a corona.’

‘Well done,’ said Tahget dryly. ‘The gas shells around black holes and stars are created by similar processes. Same physics, same name.’

Poole said, ‘And the magnetic field pumps energy into these layers. Futurity, look at this temperature profile!’

‘Yes,’ said Tahget. ‘In the accretion disc you might get temperatures in the millions of degrees. In the inner corona’ – the eye’s ‘iris’ – ‘the temperatures will be ten times hotter than that, and in the outer layers ten times hotter again.’

‘But the magnetic field of a spinning black hole and its accretion disc isn’t simple,’ Poole said. ‘It won’t be just energy that the field pumps in, but complexity.’ He was becoming more expert with the data desk now. He picked out a section of the inner corona, and zoomed in. ‘What do you make of that, Futurity?’

The acolyte saw wisps of light, ropes of denser material in the turbulent gases, intertwined, slowly writhing. They were like ghosts, driven by the complex magnetic fields, and yet, Futurity immediately thought, they had a certain autonomy. Ghosts, dancing in the atmosphere of a black hole! He laughed with helpless delight.

Poole grinned. ‘I think we just found our structure.’

Mara was smiling. ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘And that’s where my daughter is.’

VIII

It took a detailed examination of the structures in the black hole air, a cross-examination of Mara, input from the experienced Captain Tahget, and some assiduous searching of the ship’s data stores – together with some extremely creative interpolation by Michael Poole – before they had a tentative hypothesis to fit the facts about what had happened here.

Like so much else about this modern age, it had come out of the death of the Interim Coalition of Governance.

Poole said, ‘Breed, fight hard, die young, and stay human: you could sum up the Coalition’s philosophy in those few words. In its social engineering the Coalition set up a positive feedback process; it unleashed a swarm of fast-breeding humans across the Galaxy, until every star system had been filled.’ Poole grinned. ‘Not a noble way to do it, but it worked. And we did stay human, for twenty thousand years. Evolution postponed!’

‘It wasn’t as simple as that,’ Futurity cautioned. ‘Perhaps it couldn’t have been. The Shipbuilders slid through the cracks. There were even rumours of divergences among the soldiers of the front lines, as they adapted to the pressures of millennia of war.’

‘Sure.’ Poole waved a hand. ‘But these are exceptions. You can’t deny the basic fact that the Coalition froze human evolution, for the vast bulk of mankind, on epic scales of space and time. And by doing so, they won their war. Which was when the trouble really started.’

The heirs of the Coalition were if anything even more fanatical about their ideology and purpose than their predecessors had ever been. They had called themselves the Ideocracy, precisely to emphasise the supremacy of the ideas which had won a Galaxy, but of which everybody else had temporarily lost sight.

In their conclaves the Ideocrats sought a new strategy. Now that the old threat had been vanquished, nobody needed the Coalition any more. Perhaps, therefore, the Ideocrats dreamed cynically, a conjuring-up of future threats might be enough to frighten a scattered humanity back into the fold, where they would be brought once more under a single command – that is, under the Ideocrats’ command – just as in the good old days. Whether those potential threats ever came to pass or not was academic. The cause was the thing, noble in itself.

The Ideocrats’ attention focused on Chandra, centre of the Galaxy and ultimate symbol of the war. The great black hole had once been used as a military resource by the foe of mankind. What if now a human force could somehow occupy Chandra? It would be a hedge against any future return by the Xeelee – and would be a constant reminder to all mankind of the threat against which the Ideocracy’s predecessor had fought so long, and on which even now the Ideocracy was focused. A greater rallying cry could hardly be imagined; Ideocracy strategists imagined an applauding mankind returning gratefully to its jurisdiction once more.

But how do you send people into a black hole? Eventually a way was found. ‘But,’ Poole said, ‘they had to break their own rules…’

Far from resisting human evolution, the Ideocrats now ordered that deliberate modifications of mankind be made: that specifically designed post-humans be engineered to be injected into new environments. ‘In this case,’ Poole said, ‘the tenuous atmosphere of a black hole.’

‘It’s impossible,’ said Captain Tahget, bluntly disbelieving. ‘There’s no way a human could live off wisps of superheated plasma, however you modified her.’

‘Not a human, but a post-human,’ Michael Poole said testily. ‘Have you never heard of pantropy, Captain? This is your age, not mine! Evolution is in your hands now; it has been for millennia. You don’t have to think small: a few tweaks to the bone structure here, a bigger forebrain there. You can go much further than that. I myself am an example.

‘A standard human’s data definition is realised in flesh and blood, in structures of carbon-water biochemistry. I am realised in patterns in computer cores, and in shapings of light. You could project an equivalent human definition into any medium that will store the data – any technological medium, alternate chemistries of silicon or sulphur, anything you like from the frothing of quarks in a proton to the gravitational ripples of the universe itself. And then your post-humans, established in the new medium, can get on and breed.’ He saw their faces, and he laughed. ‘I’m shocking you! How delicious. Two thousand years after the Coalition imploded, its taboos still have a hold on the human imagination.’

‘Get to the point, Virtual,’ Tahget snapped.

‘The point is,’ Mara put in, ‘there are people in the black hole air. Out there. Those ghostly shapes you see are people. They really are.’

‘It’s certainly possible,’ Poole said. ‘There’s more than enough structure in those wisps of magnetism and plasma to store the necessary data.’

Futurity said, ‘But what would be the point? What would be the function of these post-humans?’

‘Weapons,’ Poole said simply.

Even when Greyworld was ripped away and destroyed by Chandra’s tides, the satellite black hole would sail on, laden with its accretion disc and its atmosphere – and carrying the plasma ghosts that lived in that atmosphere, surviving where no normal human could. Perhaps the ghosts could ride the satellite hole all the way into Chandra itself, and perhaps, as the small hole was gobbled up by the voracious central monster, they would be able to transfer to Chandra’s own much more extensive atmosphere.

‘Once aliens infested Chandra,’ Poole said. ‘It took us three thousand years to get them out. So the Ideocrats decided they were going to seed Chandra with humans – or at least post-humans. Then Chandra will be ours for ever.’

Captain Tahget shook his head, grumbling about ranting theorists and rewritings of history.

Futurity thought all this was a wonderful story, whether or not it was true. But he couldn’t forget there was still a bomb on board the ship. Cautiously, he said to Mara, ‘And one of these – uh, post-humans – is your daughter?’

‘Yes,’ Mara said.

Tahget was increasingly impatient with all this. ‘But, woman! Can’t you see that even supposing this antiquated Virtual is right about pantropy and post-humans, whatever might have been projected into the black hole atmosphere can no more be your daughter than Poole here can be your son? You are carbon and water, it is a filmy wisp of plasma. Whatever sentimental ties you have, the light show in that cloud has nothing to do with you.’

‘Not sentimental,’ she said clearly. ‘The ties are real, Captain. The person they sent into that black hole is my daughter. It’s all to do with loyalty, you see.’

The Ideocrats, comparative masters when it came to dominating their fellow humans, had no experience in dealing with post-humans. They had no idea how to enforce discipline and loyalty over creatures to whom ‘real’ humans might seem as alien as a fly to a fish. So they took precautions. Each candidate pantropic was born as a fully biological human, from a mother’s womb, and each spent her first fifteen years living a normal a life – normal, given she had been born on a tent-world in orbit around a black hole.

‘Then, on her sixteenth birthday, Sharn was taken,’ Mara said. ‘And she was copied.’

‘Like making a Virtual,’ Poole mused. ‘The copying must have been a quantum process. And the data was injected into the plasma structures in the black hole atmosphere.’ He grinned. ‘You can’t fault the Ideocrats for not thinking big! And that’s why there are people here in the first place – I mean, a colony with families – so that these wretched exiles would have a grounding in humanity, and stay loyal. Ingenious.’

‘It sounds horribly manipulative,’ said Futurity.

‘Yes. Obey us or your family gets it…’

Mara said, ‘We knew we were going to lose her, from the day Sharn was born. We knew it would be hard. But we knew our duty. Anyhow we weren’t really losing her. We would always have her, up there in the sky.’

‘I don’t understand,’ groused the Captain. ‘After your daughter was “copied”, why didn’t she just walk out of the copying booth?’

‘Because quantum information can’t be cloned, Captain,’ Poole said gently. ‘If you make a copy you have to destroy the original. Which is why young Futurity’s superiors were so agitated when I was transferred into this ship’s data store: there is only ever one copy of me. Sharn could never have walked out of that booth. She had been destroyed in the process.’

Futurity gazed out at the wispy black hole air. ‘Then – if this is all true – somewhere in those wisps is your daughter. The only copy of your daughter.’

Poole said, ‘In a deep philosophical sense, that’s true. It really is her daughter, rendered in light.’

Futurity said, ‘Can she speak to you?’

‘It was never allowed,’ Mara said wistfully. ‘Only the commanders had access, on secure channels. I must say I found that hard. I don’t even know how she feels. Is she in pain? What does it feel like to be her now?’

‘How sad,’ Poole said. ‘You have your duty – to colonise a new world, the strange air of the black hole. But you can’t go there; instead you have to lose your children to it. You are transitional, belonging neither to your ancestors’ world or your children’s. You are stranded between worlds.’

That seemed to be too much for Mara. She sniffed, and pulled herself upright. ‘It was a military operation, you know. We all accepted it. I told you, we had our duty. But then the Kard’s ships came along,’ she said bitterly. ‘They just swept us up and took us away, and we didn’t even get to say goodbye.’

Tahget glared. ‘Which is why you hijacked my ship and dragged us all to the centre of the Galaxy!’

She smiled weakly. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

Futurity held his hands up. ‘I think what we need now is to find an exit strategy.’

Poole grinned. ‘At last you’re talking like an engineer, not a priest.’

Futurity said, ‘Mara, we’ve brought you here as we promised. You can see your daughter, I guess. What now? If we take you to the planetoid, would you be able to talk to her?’

‘Not likely,’ Mara said. ‘The Kardish troops were stealing the old Ideocracy gear even before we lifted off. I think they thought the whole project was somehow unhealthy.’

‘Yes,’ said Poole. ‘I can imagine they will use this as a propaganda tool in their battle with the Ideocracy.’

‘Pah,’ spat Tahget. ‘Never mind politics! What the acolyte is asking, madam, is whether you will now relinquish your bomb, so we can all get on with our lives.’

Mara looked up at the black hole, hesitating. ‘I don’t want to be any trouble.’

Tahget laughed bitterly.

‘I just wish I could speak to Sharn.’

‘If we can’t manage that, maybe we can send a message,’ said Michael Poole. He grinned, snapped his fingers, and disappeared.

And reappeared in his skinsuit, out in space, on the other side of the blister.

Captain Tahget raged, ‘How do you do that? After your last stunt I ordered your core processors to be locked down!’

‘Don’t blame your crew, Captain,’ came Poole’s muffled voice. ‘I hacked my way back in. After all, nobody knows me as well as I do. And I was once an engineer.’

Tahget clenched his fists uselessly. ‘Damn you, Poole, I ought to shut you down for good.’

‘Too late for that,’ Poole said cheerfully.

Futurity said, ‘Michael Poole, what are you going to do?’

Mara was the first to see it. ‘He’s going to follow Sharn. He’s going to download himself into the black hole air.’

Futurity stared at Poole. ‘Is she right?’

‘I’m going to try. Of course I’m making this up as I’m going along. My procedure is untested; it’s all or nothing.’

Tahget snorted. ‘You’re probably an even bigger fool than you were alive, Poole.’

‘Oh?’

‘All this is surmise. Even if it was the Ideocracy’s intention to seed the black hole with post-humans, we have no proof it worked. There may be nothing alive in those thin gases. And even if there is, it may no longer be human! Have you thought of that?’

‘Yes,’ Poole said. ‘Of course I have. But I always did like long odds. Quite an adventure, eh?’

Futurity couldn’t help but smile at his reckless optimism. But he stepped up to the window. ‘Michael Poole, please—’

‘What’s wrong, acolyte? Are you concerned about what your Hierocrat is going to do to you when you go home without his intellectual property?’

‘Well, yes. But I’m also concerned for you, Michael Poole.’

Poole did a double-take. ‘You are, aren’t you? I’m touched, Futurity’s Dream. I like you too, and I think you have a great future ahead of you – if you can clear the theological fog out of your head. You could change the world! But on the other hand, I have the feeling you’ll be a fine priest too. I’d like to stick around to see what happens. But, no offence, it ain’t worth going back into cold storage for.’

Mara said, her voice breaking, ‘If you find Sharn, tell her I love her.’

‘I will. And who knows? Perhaps we will find a way to get back in touch with you, some day. Don’t give up hope. I never do.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Just to be absolutely clear,’ said Captain Tahget heavily. ‘Mara, will this be enough for you to get rid of that damn bomb?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mara. ‘I always did trust Michael Poole.’

‘And she won’t face any charges,’ Poole said. ‘Will she, Captain?’

Tahget looked at the ceiling. ‘As long as I get that bomb off my ship – and as long as somebody pays me for this jaunt – she can walk free.’

‘Then my work here is done,’ said Poole, mock-seriously. He turned and faced the black hole.

‘You’re hesitating,’ Futurity said.

‘Wouldn’t you? I wonder what the life expectancy of a sentient structure in there is … Well, I’ve got a century before the black hole hits Chandra, and maybe there’ll be a way to survive that.

‘I hope I live! It would be fun seeing what comes next, in this human Galaxy. For sure it won’t be like what went before. You know, it’s a dangerous precedent, this deliberate speciation: after an age of unity, will we now live through an era of bifurcation, as mankind purposefully splits and splits again?’ He turned back to Futurity and grinned. ‘And this is my own adventure, isn’t it, acolyte? Something the original Poole never shared. He’d probably be appalled, knowing him. I’m the black sheep! What was that about more real?’

Mara said, ‘I will be with you at Timelike Infinity, Michael Poole, when this burden will pass.’

That was a standard Wignerian prayer. Poole said gently, ‘Yes. Perhaps I’ll see you there, Mara. Who knows?’ He nodded to Futurity. ‘Goodbye, engineer. Remember – open mind.’

‘Open mind,’ Futurity said softly.

Poole turned, leapt away from the ship, and vanished in a shimmering of pixels.

After that, Futurity spent long hours studying the evanescent patterns in the air of the black hole. He tried to convince himself he could see more structure: new textures, a deeper richness. Perhaps Michael Poole really was in there, with Sharn. Or perhaps Michael Poole had already gone on to his next destination, or the next after that. It was impossible to tell.

He gave up, turned to his data desk, and began to work out how he was going to explain all this to the Hierocrat.

With the Shipbuilders swarming through their corridors and access tubes, the ship lifted out of the accretion disc of Chandra, and sailed for Base 478, and then for Earth.

In the end the Ideocracy and the Kardish Imperium inevitably fell on each other.

Such wars of succession consumed millennia and countless lives. It was not a noble age, though it threw up plenty of heroes.

But time exerted its power. The wars burned themselves out. Soon the Coalition with all its works and its legacies was forgotten.

As for the Wignerian religion, it developed into the mightiest and deepest of all mankind’s religions, and brought consolation to trillions. But in another moment it too was quite forgotten.

And humans, flung upon a million alien shores, morphed and adapted.

This was the Bifurcation of Mankind. How it would have horrified that dry old stick Hama Druz! There were still wars, of course. But now different human species confronted each other, and a fundamental xenophobia fuelled genocides.

As poor Rusel on the Mayflower II had understood, human destiny works itself out on overlapping timescales. An empire typically lasts a thousand years – the Coalition was a pathology. A religion may linger five or ten thousand years. Even a human subspecies will alter unrecognisably after fifty or a hundred thousand years. So on the longest of timescales human history is a complex dissonance, with notes sounding at a multitude of frequencies from the purposeful to the evolutionary, and only the broadest patterns are discernible in its fractal churning.

You learn this if you live long enough, like Rusel, like me.

The age of Bifurcation ended abruptly.

Sixty-five thousand years after the conquest of the Galaxy, genetic randomness threw up a new conqueror. Charismatic, monstrous, carelessly spending human life on a vast scale, the self-styled Unifier used one human type as a weapon against another, before one of his many enemies took his life, and his empire disintegrated, evanescent as all those before.

And yet the Unifier planted the seeds of a deeper unity. Not since the collapse of the Coalition had the successors of mankind recalled that their ancestors had shared the same warm pond. After ten thousand more years that unity found a common cause.

Mankind’s hard-won Galaxy was a mere tidal pool of muddy light, while all around alien cultures commanded a wider ocean. Now those immense spaces became an arena for a new war. As in the time of the Unifier, disparate human types were thrown into the conflict; new sub-species were even bred specifically to serve as weapons.

This war continued in various forms for a hundred thousand years. In the end, like the Unifier, mankind was defeated by the sheer scale of the arena – and by time, which erodes all human purposes.

But mankind didn’t return to complete fragmentation, not quite. For now a new force began to emerge in human politics.

The undying. Us. Me.

Since the time of Michael Poole, there had been undying among the ranks of mankind. Some of us were engineered to be so, and others were the children of the engineered. We emerged and died in our own slow generations, a subset of mankind.

The hostility of mortals was relentless. It pushed us together – even if, often, in mutual loathing. But we were always dependent on the mass of mankind. Undying or not, we were still human; we needed our short-lived cousins. We spent most of our long lives hiding, though.

We undying had rather enjoyed the long noon of the Coalition, for all that authority’s persecution of us. Stability and central control was what we sought above all else. To us the Coalition’s collapse, and the churning ages that followed, were a catastrophe.

When, two hundred thousand years after the time of Hama Druz, the storm of extragalactic war at last blew itself out, we decided enough was enough. We had always worked covertly, tweaking history here and there – as I had meddled in the destiny of the Exultants. Now it was different. In this moment of human fragmentation and weakness, we emerged from the shadows, and began to act.

We established a new centralising government called the Commonwealth. Slowly – so slowly most mayflies lived and died without ever seeing what we were doing – we strove to challenge time, to dam the flow of history. To gain control, at last.

And we attempted a deeper unity, a linking of minds called the Transcendence. This superhuman entity would envelop all of mankind in its joyous unity, reaching even deep into the past to redeem the benighted lives that had gone before. But the gulf between man and god proved too wide to bridge.

Half a million years after mankind first left Earth, the Transcendence proved the high water mark of humanity’s dreams.

When it fell our ultimate enemies closed in.

At first there was a period of stasis – the Long Calm, the historians called it. It lasted two hundred thousand years. The stasis was only comparative; human history resumed, with all its usual multiple-wavelength turbulence.

Then the stars began to go out.

It was the return of the Xeelee: mankind’s ultimate foe, superior, unforgiving, driven out of the home Galaxy but never defeated.

It had been thought the Xeelee were distracted by a war against a greater foe, creatures of dark matter called ‘photino birds’ who were meddling with the evolution of the stars for their own purposes – a conflict exploited by Admiral Kard long ago to trigger the human-Xeelee war. The Xeelee were not distracted.

It had been thought the Xeelee had forgotten us. They had not forgotten.

We called the Xeelee’s vengeance the Scourge. It was a simple strategy: the stars that warmed human worlds were cloaked in an impenetrable shell of the Xeelee’s fabled ‘construction material’. It was even economical, for these cloaks were built out of the energy of the stars themselves. It was a technology that had actually been stumbled on long before by human migrants of the Second Expansion, then rediscovered by the Coalition’s Missionaries – discovered, even colonised, but never understood.

One by one, the worlds of man fell dark. Cruellest of all, when humanity had been driven out, the Xeelee unveiled the cleansed stars.

People had forgotten how to fight. They fled to the home Galaxy, and then fell back further to the spiral arms. But even there the scattered stars faded one by one.

It took the Xeelee three hundred thousand years, but at last, a million years after the first starships, the streams of refugees became visible in the skies of Earth.

But the photino birds had been busy too, progressing their own cosmic project, the ageing of the stars.

When Sol itself began to die, its core bloated with a dark-matter canker, suddenly mankind had nowhere to go.