The Algebraist

It was a truism that there was not just one galaxy, there were many. Every variety of widely spread sentient life — plus a few creat categories which were arguably non-sentient though still capable of interstellar travel — and sometimes even every individual species-type tended to have one galaxy to itself. The Faring — a trans-category that covered all such beings able and willing to venture beyond their own immediate first-habitats -were like the citizens of a vast, fully three-dimensional but mostly empty city with multitudinous and varied travel systems. The majority of people were content to walk, and made their slow progress by way of an infinitude of quiet, effectively separate deserted streets, quiet parks, vacant lots, remains of wasteland and an entire unmapped network of paths, pavements, alleys, steps, ladders, wynds and snickets. They almost never encountered anybody en route, and when they got to where they were going, it would be somewhere very similar to the place they had departed from, whether that place had been a star’s photosphere, a brown dwarf’s surface, a gas-giant’s atmosphere, a comet cloud or a region of interstellar space. Such species were generally called the Slow.

The Quick were different. Mostly originating from rocky planets of one sort or another, they lived at a higher speed and could never be content forever plodding from place to place. That they had been forced to do so until a viable wormhole network had been established was regarded as quite bad enough. Wormhole access portals were the pinch-points of the worm-hole system — the city’s underground stations — where people of varying species-types were forced to meet and to some extent mingle, though given the tiny amount of time one spent near a portal or within a wormhole, even this seemingly profound tying-together made very little difference to the ultimate unconnectedness of the many different life-strands, and both before they gathered and after they dispersed, the users of the system still tended to congregate at places specific to their own comfort criteria, usually quite different from those of all the others.

Many people regarded the Cincturia as the equivalent of animals: birds, dogs, cats, rats and bacteria. They too lived in the city, but were not responsible for it or entirely answerable to it, and were often to a greater or lesser degree inimical to its smooth running.

Accounting for the Rest — the non-baryonic Penumbrae, the 13-D Dimensionates and the flux-dwelling Quantarchs — was a little like discovering that the ground, the fabric of the city’s buildings and their foundations plus the air itself were each home to another sort of life altogether.

The Mercatoria — largely but not entirely made up the galaxy’s current crop of oxygen breathers — inhabited its own galaxy, then, as did all the other categories of life, and all these different galaxies existed alongside every other one, each interpenetrating the rest, surrounded by and surrounding the others, yet hardly affecting or being affected by them, except, sometimes, through the inestimably precious and all too easily destroyed wormhole network.

Us? Oh, we were like ghosts in the cabling.

* * *

Slave-children were crawling along the giant blades of one of the Dreadnought’s main propellers, packing welding gear, back-sacks of carbon weave and heavy glue-throwers. The pulsing drone of the vessel’s engines and main propulsion thrummed through the wrap-cloak of brown, billowing mist, filling the slipstreamed gas and the structure of the huge ship with buzzing, building, rising and fading harmonics like a vast unending symphony of industrial sound.

Fassin and the colonel watched from an open gantry overlooking the ring of giant engines as the two teams of Dweller infants crawled along the massive blades to the warped and flapping blade ends.

The starboard-most propeller had been hit by a section of DewCloud root. The root had fallen out of the clouds above, probably from a dying DewCloud floating and decomposing tens of kilometres above. DewClouds were enormous, foamy plants anything up to ten kilometres across and five or six times that in height. Like all gas-giant flora, they were mostly gas -a Dweller in a hurry could probably rip right through the canopy of one, hardly noticing they were in the midst of a plant, not an ordinary cloud. To a human they looked like some monstrous cross between an elongated mushroom and a jellyfish the size of a thunder cloud. Part of an Ubiquitous clade, found wherever Dwellers were, they harvested water condensation out of Dwellerine gas-giant atmospheres, using their dangling, thick and relatively solid roots to exploit the temperature difference between the various atmospheric layers.

When they approached the ends of their lives they floated up to the cold cloud tops and the higher haze layers, and bits broke off. The Dreadnought had prop guards to stop floating\falling\ rising stuff interfering with its main propulsion units, but the section of root had slipped in between the guard and the propeller itself, wreaking brief havoc with the thirty-metre-long vanes before being chewed up and thrown out. Now the child-slaves had to climb out along the blades, from the hubs to the tips, to make repairs. Shaped like slim deltas with thin, delicate-looking tentacles which had to both clamp them on to the still-revolving blades and hold the various repair materials, the infants were making heavy weather of it. Dweller officers in motor skiffs rode nearby, bellowing orders, threats and imprecations at the young.

“They could just stop the fucking propeller,” the colonel shouted to Fassin. The open gantry they were holding on to was four-fifths, of the way back from the bulbous nose of the giant ship, an ellipsoid a little over two kilometres in length and four hundred across the beam. The Dreadnought’s twenty-four giant engine-sets protruded from near its rear in a monumental collar of pylons, wires, tubular prop guards and near-spherical engine pods. The wind howled round Hatherence’s esuit and Fassin’s little arrowcraft.

“Slow them down too much, apparently!” Fassin yelled back.

The Dreadnought’s captain had cut the starboard-most engine-set to quarter-power to give the slave-children a better chance of completing their repairs without too many casualties. The ship’s giant rudders, mounted on the octiform tailplane assembly just aft of the engines, were appropriately deployed to compensate for the resulting skewed distribution of thrust.

Fassin glimpsed an escort cruiser through a short-lived break in the clouds a few kilometres away. Other Dreadnoughts and their escorting screens of minor craft were spread out around them in a front a hundred kilometres across and thirty deep. A slave-child near one of the vane tips lost its grip and whirled off the end with a distant shriek, crashing into the inner edge of the outer prop guard. Its scream cut off and the limp body was caught in the combined prop wash and sent whirling back, narrowly avoiding a further collision with the tail assembly. It disappeared behind a giant vertical fin. When it came back into sight it was already starting to spiral slowly down into the enveloping cloud haze. None of the skiff-riding Dwellers spared it a second glance. The dozens of remaining slave-children continued to inch their way along the giant blades.

Fassin looked at the colonel. “Woops,” he said.

They were hitching a ride to the war zone.

A TunnelCar had taken them from Y’sul’s house — well, two TunnelCars, a second proving necessary to carry all Y’sul’s baggage and extra clothing, plus Sholish — to the Central Station. From there they joined a long-distance train of ninety or so cars making its way towards the border of Zone Zero — the equatorial zone — and Band A, twenty thousand kilometres away. Y’sul spent a large part of the journey complaining about his hangover.

“You claim to have been around in your present form for ten billion years and you still haven’t developed a decent hangover cure?” Hatherence had asked, incredulous.

They’d been floating in a restaurant car, waiting for the galley to figure out the exact chemical composition of oerileithe food.

Y’sul, his voice muffled, issuing from within a translucent coverall that was the Dweller equivalent of dark glasses, had replied, “Suffering is regarded as part of the process, as is the mentioning of it. As is, one might add, the sympathy one receives from one’s companions.”

The colonel had looked sceptical. “I thought you felt no pain?”

“Mere physical pain, no. Ours is the psychic pain of realising that the world is not really as splendid as it seemed the evening before, and that one may have made something of a fool of oneself. And so on. I wouldn’t expect a little dweller to understand.”

They’d detrained at Nuersotse, a sphere city riding mid-altitude in the boiling ragged fringes of the equatorial Belt’s northern limits. Nuersotse was barely thirty kilometres in diameter, relatively dense by Dweller city standards and built for strength and manoeuvrability. High-speed transport craft left in convoys every hour or so, as one of the Band Border Wheels swung near.

They’d crossed on the Nuersotsian-Guephuthen Band Border Wheel One, a colossal, articulated structure two thousand kilometres across held rotating on the border of two atmospheric gas-giant bands, protruding a kilo-klick into each, its whole enormous mass spun by the contra-rotating gas-streams on either side. Band Border Wheels were the largest moving structures most gas-giant planets possessed, if one discounted the globe-girdling CloudTunnel networks. These only moved in the trivial sense of being whisked round the globe at a few hundred klicks an hour like everything else within a planetary band. To a Dweller that was stationary.

Band Border Wheels really spun, transferring transport and materials from one band to another with minimal turbulence and in relative safety, with the added bonus that they produced prodigious amounts of electricity from their spindle drive-shafts. These protruded from the upper and lower hubs, vast hemispheres whose lower rims were pocked with microwave dishes hundreds of metres across, geared up to tear round at blurring, mind-numbing speeds and beaming their power to an outer collecting ring of equally enormous stationary dishes which then pumped the energy into docked bulk accumulator carriers.

The Wheel and the city had been caught in the outer edges of a small boundary-riding storm when they’d arrived, though both were being moved out of the way as quickly as they could be. Everything, from the planet itself to Fassin’s teeth, had seemed to vibrate around them as the turbulence-hardened transfer ship hurried them empodded from the CloudTunnel station to the Wheel, engines labouring, wind screaming, ammonia hail pelting, lightning flashing and magnetic fields making various parts of Y’sul’s baggage and accoutrements buzz and fizz and spark.

Hurled round in the giant centrifuge of the Wheel, stuck against its inner perimeter, the time that they’d spent inside had seemed almost calm by comparison, even allowing for the wild, wavelike bucking as they’d crossed the zone\belt border shear-face itself.

The storm had been affecting Guephuthe more severely than Nuersotse. The outer equatorial ring of the city was spinning hard, parts of its peripheral suburbs and less well-maintained districts coming apart and peeling away in a welter of thrown-out shrapnel. Their transfer had to buck and weave to dodge the wreckage, then take them straight to a TunnelCar marshalling yard beyond the city proper, a splay of cable filaments waving slowly in the gale like a vast anemone.

Another multi-kiloklick CloudTunnel journey through the vastness of Belt A, the Northern Tropical, another Wheel transfer — calmer this time — into Zone 2, and finally, crossing the mid-line of the Zone, they’d started to encounter more military traffic than civilian, the cars and trains packed with people, supplies and materiel all heading for the war.

At Tolimundarni, on the fringe of the war zone itself, they’d been thrown off the train by military police who weren’t falling for Y’sul’s pre-emptively outrage-fuelled arguments regarding the summit-like priority and blatant extreme officiality of an expedition — nay, a quest! — he was undertaking with these -yes, these, two — famous, well-connected, honoured alien guests of immeasurably high intrinsic pan-systemic cross-species reputation, concerning a matter of the utmost import the exact details of which he was sadly not at liberty to divulge even to such patently important and obviously discreet members of the armed forces as themselves, but who would, nevertheless, he was sure, entirely understand the significance of their mission and thus their clear right to be accorded unhindered passage due to simple good taste and a fine appreciation of natural justice and would in no way be swayed by the fact that their cooperation would be repaid in levels of subsequent kudos almost beyond crediting…

They’d floated in the TunnelBud, watching the train of cars pulling out. Sholish had darted around the echoing space trying to round up all the floating and fallen pieces of just-ejected luggage.

Fassin and Hatherence had looked, glowering, at Y’sul.

He’d finished dusting himself down and straightening his clothing, then done a double take at their aggregated gaze and announced, defensively, “I have a cousin!”

The cousin was an engineering officer on the Dreadnought Stormshear, a thirty-turreter with the BeltRotationeers’ 487th “Rolling Thunder’ Fleet. Bindiche, the cousin, bore a longstanding familial grudge against Y’sul and so naturally had been only too happy to accept a great deal of kudos from an inwardly mortified, outwardly brave-facing, hail-cuz-bygones-now Y’sul by doing him the enormous, surely never-to-be-forgotten favour of vouching for him and his alien companions to his captain and so securing passage into the war zone, though even that only happened after a quick suborb flight in a nominally freight-only moonshell pulsed from High Tolimundarni to Lopscotte (again covered by cousin Bindiche and his endlessly handy military connections, said vile spawn of a hated uncle amassing anguished Y’sul-donated kudos like the Stormshear’s mighty capacitors accumulated charge), scudding over the cloud tops, briefly in space (but no windows, not even any screen to see it), listening to Y’sul complain about the uncannily hangover-resembling after-effects of the fierce acceleration in the magnetic-pulse tube and the fact that he’d had to leave behind most of his baggage, including all the war-zone presents his friends had given him and the bulk of the new combat attire he’d ordered.

The slipstream howled and screamed around the Seer and the colonel. They watched the slave-children attempt their repairs. Clustered around the ends of the giant propeller blades, Fassin thought the Dweller young looked like a group of especially dogged flies clinging to a ceiling-mounted cooling fan.

Dweller children had a generally feral and entirely unloved existence. It was very hard for humans not to feel that adult Dwellers were little better than serial, congenital abusers,- and that Dweller children ought to be rescued from the relative brutality of their existence.

Even as Fassin watched, another infant was thrown from one of the giant blades, voice a high and anguished shriek. This latest unfortunate missed the prop guards but hit a high-tension stay cable and was almost cut in half. A Dweller in a skiff dipped back into the slipstream, wrestling with his craft, to draw level with the tiny, broken body. He stripped it of its welding kit and let the body go. It disappeared into the mist, falling like a torn leaf.

Dwellers cheerfully admitted that they didn’t care for their children. They didn’t particularly care for becoming female and getting pregnant, frankly, doing this only because it was expected, drew kudos and meant one had in some sense fulfilled a duty. The idea of having to do even more, of having to look after the brats afterwards as well was just laughable. They, after all, had had to endure being thrown out of the house and left to wander wild when they were young, they’d taken their chances with the organised hunts, the gangs of adolescents and lone-hunter specialists, so why shouldn’t the next generation? The little fuckers might live for billions of years. What was a mere century of weeding out?

The slave-children being used to carry out the repairs to the Stormshear’s damaged propeller would be regarded by most Dwellers as extremely lucky. They might be imprisoned and forced to carry out unpleasant and\or dangerous jobs but at least they were relatively safe, unhunted and properly fed.

Fassin looked out at them, wondering how many would survive to become adults. Would any of these skinny, trembling delta-shapes end up, billions of years from now, as utterly ancient, immensely respected Sages? The odd thing was, of course, that if you somehow knew for certain that they would, they wouldn’t believe you. Dweller children absolutely, to an infant, refused to believe even for a moment, even as a working assumption, even just for the sake of argument, that they would ever, ever, ever grow up to become one of these huge, fierce, horrible double-disc creatures who hunted them and killed them and captured them to do all the awful jobs on their big ships.

· Seer Taak?”

· Yes, colonel?

So they were back to close-communicating, using polarised light to keep their conversation as private as possible. The colonel had suggested coming up here. Fassin had wondered if it was for some private chat. He supposed ordinary talk might have been problematic, given the screech of the slipstream around the gantry and the thunderous clamour sounding from the choir of engines just behind.

· I have meant to ask for some time.

· What?

· This thing we are supposed to be looking for. Without mentioning the specifics, even like this, using whisper-signalling…

· Get on with it, colonel. Ma’am, he added.

· Do you believe what you told us, at that briefing on Third Fury? Hatherence asked. — The one with just yourself, Ganscerel, Yurnvic and myself present: could all that you told us there possibly be true?

The Long Crossing, the fabled “hole between galaxies, the List itself. — Does it matter? he asked.

— What we believe always matters.

Fassin smiled. — Let me ask you something. May I?

· On the condition that we return to my question, very well.

· Do you believe in the “Truth’?

· So capitalised?

· So in quotation marks.

· Well, of course!

The Truth was the presumptuous name of the religion, the faith that lay behind the Shrievalty, the Cessoria, in a sense behind the Mercatoria itself. It arose from the belief that what appeared to be real life must in fact — according to some piously invoked statistical certitudes — be a simulation being run within some prodigious computational substrate in a greater and more encompassing reality beyond. This was a thought that had, in some form, crossed the minds of most people and all civilisations. (With the interesting exception of the Dwellers, or so they claimed. Which some parties held was another argument against them being a civilisation in the first place.) However, everybody — well, virtually everybody, obviously — quickly or eventually came round to the idea that a difference that made no difference wasn’t a difference to be much bothered about, and one might as well get on with (what appeared to be) life.

The Truth went a stage further, holding that this was a difference that could be made to make a difference. What was necessary was for people truly to believe in their hearts, in their souls, in their minds, that they really were in a vast simulation. They had to reflect upon this, to keep it at the forefront of their thoughts at all times and they had to gather together on occasion, with all due ceremony and solemnity, to express this belief. And they must evangelise, they must convert everybody they possibly could to this view, because — and this was the whole point — once a sufficient proportion of the people within the simulation came to acknowledge that it was a simulation, the value of the simulation to those who had set it up would disappear and the whole thing would collapse.

If they were all part of some vast experiment, then the fact that those on whom the experiment was being conducted had guessed the truth would mean that its value would be lost. If they were some plaything, then again, that they had guessed this meant they ought to be acknowledged, even — perhaps -rewarded. If they were being tested in some way, then this was the test being passed, this was a positive result, again possibly deserving a reward. If they had been undergoing punishment for some transgression in the greater world, then this ought to constitute cause for rehabilitation.

It was not possible to know what proportion of the simulated population would be required to bring things to a halt (it might be fifty per cent, it might be rather smaller or much greater), but as long as the numbers of the enlightened kept increasing, the universe would be constantly coming closer to this epiphany, and the revelation could come at any point.

The Truth claimed with some degree of justification to be the ultimate religion, the final faith, the last of all churches. It was the one which encompassed all others, contextualised all others, could account for and embrace all others. They could all ultimately be dismissed as mere emergent phenomena of the simulation itself. The Truth could too, in a sense, but unlike them it still had more to say once this common denominator had been taken out of the equation.

It could also claim a degree of universality that the others could not. All other major religions were either specific to their originating species, could be traced back to a single species — often a single subset of that species — or were consciously developed amalgams, syntheses, of a group of sufficiently similar religions of disparate origin.

The Truth, claiming no miracles (or at least no miracles of proof) and being the work of no individual, all-important prophet (it had arisen, naturally, many times within a multiplicity of different civilisations) was the first real post-scientific, pan-civil-isational religion — or at least it was the first that had not been simply imposed on reluctant subjects by a conquering hegemony. The Truth could even claim to be not a religion at all, where such a claim might endear it to those not naturally religious by nature. It could be seen more as a philosophy, even as a scientific postulate backed up by unshakeably firm statistical likelihood.

The Mercatoria had simply adopted this belief system, properly codified it and made it effectively the state religion of the latest Age.

· You do not believe, Fassin? The colonel put sadness into her signal.

· I appreciate the intellectual force of the argument.

· But it is not held in your mind at all times?

· No. Sorry.

· Be not sorry. We all find it difficult on occasion. We shall,

perhaps, talk further on the matter.

· I was afraid we might.

· To return to my question, then.

· Do I believe all that stuff?

· Correct.

Fassin looked around at the ship beneath them and the great assemblage of roaring engines, whirling blades and supporting structures. The Long Crossing: thirty million years between galaxies.

· The idea that anything built by Dwellers could make a journey of that length does place the credulity under a degree of tension, he admitted.

· The assertion that the outward journey was made so much more rapidly seems no less to belong to the realm of fantasy.

Ah yes, the great and almost certainly mythical intergalactic “hole.

· I would not argue with you, colonel. Though I would say it’s perfectly possible that these are all nonsense, but the specific object we’re looking for still exists.

· It keeps unlikely company.

· Again, I wouldn’t choose to dispute the matter. We are left with the fact that you are a colonel, I am some sort of honorary major and orders are orders.

· How assiduously one attempts to follow one’s orders might be affected by the extent to which one believes they are capable of being carried out successfully.

· There I would completely agree with you. What are you getting at?

· Just calibrating, major.

· Seeing how committed I am? Would I sacrifice my life for our… object of desire?

· Something like that.

· I suspect we’re both sceptics, colonel. Me more than you, I suppose. We also believe in doing our duty. You more than me, perhaps. Satisfied?

· Content.

· Me too.

· I received a communication from the Ocula this morning.

· Really?

And were you always going to tell me, or could I have been even more mission-sceptical during that last exchange, and been told nothing? Or has your “calibration’ meant I’m not going to get told everything now?

— Yes. Our orders remain as they were. There were several more attacks on the system in general at the time of the assault on the Third Fury moon. Further, less intense attacks have continued. The communications satellite system around Nasqueron is being repaired as a matter of urgency. In the meantime a Navarchy fleet is being stationed above the planet, to take the place of the satellites, to provide security and main force back-up for you and me, and to pick us up at the end of our mission, or in an emergency.

Fassin took a moment to think.

· Any word from my Sept, Sept Bantrabal?

· None. There was confirmation that all those on or in Third Fury were killed. I am sorry to report that Master Technician Hervil Apsile is also believed to be dead. There has been no sign of or communication with the drop ship. I have been asked by the Ocula to pass on their commiserations to you regarding all those deceased Seers and supporting staff, to which of course I add my own.

— Thank you.

The colonel might have executed a sort of rolling bow, or it might just have been the effects of the swirling, buffeting slipstream tearing around them.

The slave-children had suffered no further casualties. Their repairs appeared to be working. Even where they had not completed their renovations, the damaged blades were vibrating less, making the rest of the job easier.

— How many ships were they sending to Nasqueron, to do all these things? That one small ship and two puck-sized satel-lites could do?

— This was not mentioned.

Fassin said nothing.

There were some potentially unfortunate consequences implicit in a profound belief in the Truth. One was that there was a possibility that when the simulation ended, all the people being simulated would cease to exist entirely. The sim might be turned off and everybody within the substrate running it would die. There might be no promotion, no release, no return to a bigger and better and finer outside: there might just be the ultimate mass extinction.

Also, back in the (apparently) real world, there was an argument that the Truth implied approval of its own extinctions, that it tacitly encouraged mass murder and genocide. Logically, if one way of upping the proportion of those who truly believed was to evangelise, convince and convert, another was to decrease the numbers of those who steadfastly refused to accept the Truth at all — if necessary by killing them. The tipping point into revelation and deliverance for all might come not at the moment when a sceptic became a believer but at the point that an un-reformable heathen breathed their last.

The Stormshear plunged into a great dark wall of thicker cloud, dimming the view. Lights started to come on, shining from the supporting structure and the Dweller skiffs. Soon they could see little, and the mad, overwhelming cacophony of the slipstream and the droning engines made sonosense near impossible. A methane hail rattled around them in the gathering gloom.

· Time to go in, perhaps, the colonel said.

· Amen.

* * *

The next day brought target practice, as the Stormshear’s weapons and crew were brought up to some form of war-readiness. Y’sul, Hatherence and Fassin were allowed to watch from inside an observation dome right at the front of the ship, a temporary structure protruding from the Dreadnought’s armoured nose like a little bubble of diamond. They shared the place with a few dozen interested civilians, mostly administrators of the various cities where the Stormshear had been paying courtesy calls during the last long period of peace. Uniformed pet-children floated amongst the VIPs, carrying trays of food and drugs.

Ahead, through a ten-kilometre gap in the clouds, they could see an object like a small bright blue ship, a target being towed by another Dreadnought a hundred or more klicks still further ahead.

The Stormshear shuddered mightily and an instant later there came a great blast of noise. Tracks like dozens of vapour trails appeared in the sky beneath and above them, great combs of thin, plaited gas racing in front of them headed by the barely glimpsed dark dots of the shells converging on the target. Screens set into each dent-seat — where working — showed a magnified view of the blue target; it shook as its hollow structure was punctured by the shells, holes appearing briefly on its hull before sealing up again.

A desultory cheer went up from a few of the generally bored-looking Dwellers present. It was drowned out by the clicking of maniple fingers demanding service from the pet-children waiters.

“I never asked,” Hatherence said, leaning close to Y’sul as he snorted up the coils of purple from a fuming stoke-pipe. “What is the war actually about?”

Y’sul turned jerkily and gave the impression of trying to get his outer sensory regions to focus on the colonel. “About?” he said, looking confused. The exhausted stoke-stick attached to the pipe went out with a loud “pop’. “Well, it’s about when two, ah, opposing groups of, ah people, ah, that is to say, Dwellers, in this case, obviously, decide to, umm, fight. Fight! Yes, usually over some issue, and… and they use weapons of war to do so, until one side or other — did I say there are usually just two sides? That’s kind of the conventional number, I believe. Sort of a quorum, you might say. Though—”

“I wasn’t looking for the definition of a war, Y’sul.”

“No? Good. I thought you probably had such things of your own. Most people seem to.”

“I meant, what is the point at issue? What is the cause of the war?”

“The cause?” Y’sul asked, looking surprised. He roted as far back in his dent-seat as he could while the ship shuddered again and another salvo, from each side of the vessel this time, lanced forwards to the distant target. “Well,” he said, distracted by the dancing dots of the shells dragging their gas trails after them. “Well, I’m sure there is one…’ He started mumbling. Hatherence seemed to realise she’d already got as much sense out of Y’sul as she was going to while he was sucking on the stoke-pipe, and settled back in her seat with a sigh.

· Dweller Formal Wars are like duels fought on a huge scale, Fassin told her. The colonel turned fractionally towards him. — Normally about some aesthetic dispute. They’re often the final stage of a planet-planning dispute.

· Planet-planning?

· A common one is where there’s some dispute concerning the number of belts and zones a planet ought to have. Then, the Odds and the Evens are the two sides, usually.

· Planet-planning? the colonel repeated, as though she hadn’t picked up right the first time. — I did not think gas-giants were, well, planned.

· The Dwellers claim they can alter the number of bands a planet has, over a sufficiently great amount of time. They’ve never been reliably observed doing this but that doesn’t stop them claiming to be able to do it. Anyway, it’s not the doing of the thing that matters, it’s the principle. What sort of world do we want to live in? That’s the question.

· Even or Odd?

— Exactly. A Formal War is just the working-out.

Another salvo. The ship really shook this time, and a number of the slave-children yelped at the ragged boom resulting. Combs of gas trails leapt from all sides, a cone defining a tunnel of braided sky in front of them.

· Wars are also fought over disagreements such as which GasClipper ought to be allowed to fly a certain pennant colour during a race.

· A war for this? Hatherence sounded genuinely horrified. — Have these people never heard of committees?

— Oh, they have committees and meetings and dispute proce-dures. They have lots of those. But getting Dwellers to stick with a decision that’s gone against them, even after they’ve sworn on their life beforehand that they’ll abide by it, is not the easiest thing to do, in this or any other world. So disagree-ments tend to rumble on. Formal Wars are just the Dweller equivalent of a Supreme Court, a tribunal of last resort. Also, you have to understand that they don’t really have standing armed forces as such. Between wars, the Dreadnoughts and other military bits and pieces are cared for by enthusiasts, by clubs. Even when a Formal War is declared, all that happens is that the clubs get bigger as ordinary people sign up. The clubs sound and feel like what you or I might understand as proper military authorities but they’ve no legal standing.

The colonel shook as though just confronted with something of ultimate grisliness. — How perverse.

· For them, it seems to work.

· The verb “work’, Hatherence sent, — like so many other common terms, seems to be required to take on additional mean-ings when one talks of Dwellers. How do they decide who’s won one of these bizarre conflicts?

· Occasionally a straight dead-count, or the number of Dreadnoughts destroyed or crippled. More usually there’ll be an elegance threshold pre-agreed.

· An elegance threshold?

· Hatherence, Fassin said, turning to her, — did you do any research into Dweller life? All that time in -

· I believe I encountered a mention of this concept but dismissed it at the time as fanciful. It genuinely counts in such matters?

· It genuinely counts.

· And they can’t agree a workable disputes procedure for what ship flies which colourings without resorting to war, but they can happily agree on that resulting war being decided on a concept as fuzzy as elegance?

— Oh, that’s never disputed. They have an algorithm for it.

Another terrific judder rang the Stormshear like a dull bell. The thin, uncoiling tracks combed the sky ahead of them.

· An algorithm? the colonel said.

· Elegance is an algorithm.

The screens showed the blue target quaking under the impact of a handful of shells. Hatherence glanced at Y’sul, who was trying to blow purple smoke rings and pierce them with a rim arm.

· And it’s all run by clubs, she said. — Of enthusiasts.

— Yes.

· Clubs?

· Big clubs, Hatherence.

· So is all this why their war technology is so awful? She asked.

· Is it?

· Fassin, Hatherence said, sounding amused now. — These people claim to have been around since the week after reionisation and building these Dreadnought things for most of that time, yet that target is less than a dozen klicks ahead, each salvo is thirty-six shells—

· Thirty-three. One of the turrets is out of action.

· Regardless. They are only hitting that effectively unmoving target with every second or third round. That is simply pathetic.

· There are rules, formulae.

· Insisting on ludicrously inefficient gunnery?

· In a sense. No guided shells, all guns and aiming systems to be based on ancient patterns, no jet engines for the Dreadnoughts, no rocket engines for the missiles, no particle or beam weapons at all.

· Like duels fought with ancient pistols.

· You’re getting the idea.

· And this is meant to keep them all in martial trim in case they are invaded by outside hostiles?

· Well, yes, Fassin agreed. — That does begin to look like a slightly hollow claim when you actually see the technology, doesn’t it? Of course, they claim they’ve got star-busting hyper-weapons hidden about the place somewhere, just in case, and the skills are somehow transferable, but…

· Nobody’s ever seen them.

· Something like that.

The Stormshear unleashed its mighty anti-ship missiles, loosing what was probably meant to be a twelve-strong broadside. The eleven tiny, slim projectiles came screaming from all sides of the great vessel — the slave-children yelped again and some dropped their trays — and hurtled out towards the distant blue target drone on smoky, twisting plumes of jet exhaust like deranged darts. Two of the missiles drifted too close to one another; each appeared to identify the other as its intended target and so both swung wildly at their opposite number, missed, twisted round in a sweeping double braid, flew straight at each other and this time met and exploded in a modest double fireball. Some Dwellers in the observation lounge — distracted, perhaps sarcastic — cheered.

A third missile seemed to take the nearby explosion as a sign that it ought to perform an upward loop and head straight back at the Stormshear. “Oh-oh,” Y’sul said.

The oncoming missile settled into a flat, steady course, becoming a small but rapidly enlarging dot, aimed straight at the nose of the Dreadnought.

“They do have destructs, don’t they?” Hatherence said, glancing at Fassin.

Some Dwellers started looking at each other, then made a dash for the access tube to the Stormshear’s armoured nose, creating a jam around the door. Slave-children, also trying to escape, either got through ahead of the rush or were thrown roughly out of the way, yelping.

The dot in the sky was getting bigger.

“They can just order it to blow up, can’t they?” the colonel said, roting backwards. A high, whining noise seemed to be coming from somewhere inside the colonel’s esuit. The yelling, cursing knot of Dwellers round the exit didn’t seem to be shifting. The Stormshear was starting to turn, hopelessly slowly.

“In theory they can destruct it,” Fassin said uneasily, watching the still unshifting melee around the exit. “And they do have close-range intercept guns.” Another frantic slave-child was ejected upwards from the scrum by the door, screaming until it slapped into the ceiling and dropped lifeless to the slowly tilting deck.

The missile had real shape now, no longer a large dot. Stubby wings and a tailplane were visible. The Stormshear continued to turn with excruciating slowness. The missile plunged in towards them on a trail of sooty exhaust. Hatherence rose from her dent-seat but moved closer to the diamond-sheath nose of the observation blister, not further away.

— Stay back, major, she sent. Then a terrific tearing, ripping noise sounded from above and behind them, a net of finger-fine trails filled the gas ahead of the ship’s nose and the missile first started to disintegrate and then blew up. The interceptor machine gun somewhere behind continued firing, scoring multiple hits on the larger pieces of smoking, glowing missile wreckage as they tumbled on towards the Stormshear, so that when the resulting shrapnel hit and punctured the observation blister it caused relatively little damage, and only minor wounds.

The Dreadnought took them as far as Munueyn, a Ruined City fallen amongst the dark, thick gases of the lower atmosphere where slow coils of turbulence roiled past like the heavy, lascivious licks of an almighty planetary tongue, a place all spires and spindles, near-deserted, long unfashionable, a one-time Storm-Centre now too far from anything to be of much interest to anybody, a place that might have garnered kudos for itself had it been near a war zone, but could hope for almost none at all because it was within one. A wing-frigate took them from the Dreadnought and deposited them in the gigantic echoing hall of what had once been the city’s bustling StationPort, where they were greeted like returning heroes, like gods, by the local hirers and fliers. They found a guest house for negative kudos. They were, in effect, being paid to stay there.

“Sir!” Sholish said, rising from the mass of petitioners in the small courtyard below. “A hostelier of impeccable repute with excellent familial connections in the matter of wartime travel warrants beseeches you to consider his proposal to put at your disposal a veritable fleet of a half-half-dozen finely arrayed craft, all in the very best of condition and working order and ready to depart within less than an hour of their arrival.”

“Which will be when, precisely, banelet of my already too-long life?”

“A day, sire. Two, at the most. He assures.”

“Unacceptable! Utterly and profoundly so!” Y’sul proclaimed, frilling the very idea away with a shudder. He was nestled within a dent on a flower-decked terrace outside and above the Taverna Bucolica, close enough to the city’s central plaza to smell the mayor’s desperation. He dragged deep of a proffered pharma cylinder and with the exhalation breathed, “Next!”

Fassin and the colonel, floating nearby, exchanged looks. Hatherence floated closer.

· We could just take off, you and I.

· All by ourselves?

· We are both self-sufficient, we are both capable of making good time.

· You reckon?

The colonel made it obvious that she was looking his arrow-craft over. — I think so.

I think you called up the specs on this thing before we left Third Fury and know damn well so, he thought.

He sent, — So we go haring off into the clouds together, just we two.

— Yes.

· There is a problem.

· Indeed.

· In fact, there are two problems. The first one is that there’s a war on, and we’ll look like a pair of warheads.

· Warheads? But we shan’t even be transonic!

· There are rules in Formal War regarding the speed that warheads can travel at. We’ll look like warheads.

· Hmm. If we went a little slower?

· Slow warheads.

· Slower still?

· Cruise mines. And before you ask, any slower than that and we’ll look like ordinary monolayer float mines.

Hatherence bobbed up and down, a sigh. — You mentioned a second problem.

· Without Y’sul it’s unlikely that anybody will talk to us.

· With him it is unlikely that anybody else will get a word in.

· Nevertheless.

They needed their own transport. More to the point, they needed transport that would be allowed to pass unchallenged in the war zone. Whatever remained of Valseir’s old dwelling lay far enough off the CloudTunnel network to make roting or floating their way there too long-winded. Y’sul had agreed to fix things — with his equatorial, big-city connections, escorting exotic aliens, he was bound to positively exude kudos towards all those who might help him — but then had got caught up in the whole process just due to the numbers of people who wanted to be the ones who helped him, and so became unable, seemingly, to make up his mind. Just as it seemed likely he was about to settle on one outrageously generous offer, another would appear over the horizon, even more enticing, necessitating a further reappraisal.

Finally, after two days, Hatherence could take no more and hired her own ship, on terms slightly better than the ones just rejected by Y’sul.

In their suite at the Taverna, Y’sul protested. “Iam doing the negotiating!” he bellowed.

“Yes,” the colonel agreed. “Rather too much of it.”

A compromise was arrived at. The colonel confessed to their hirer that she was legally unable to commit to a firm contract and Y’sul then remade it on the exact same terms while the appalled shipmaster was still drawing breath to protest. That day, the day the war officially got under way, ceremonially beginning with an opening gala and Formal Duel in Pihirumime, half the world away. A day later they sailed — taking the next downward eddy that also swirled in the right horizontal direction — aboard the Poaflias, a hundred-metre twin-hull screw-burster of unknown but probably enormous age. It boasted a crew of just five apart from its captain and was rotund and slow, but was — for some reason lost in the mists of Dweller military logic — still registered as an uncommitted privateer scout ship and so cleared to make her way within the war zone and, one might hope, liable to pass any consequent challenge save one conducted by opening fire prior to negotiations.

Their captain was Slyne, an enthusiastic youngster barely arrived at Adulthood, still very much a Recent and behaving more like a Youth. He’d inherited the Poaflias on the death of his father. The Dwellers clove to the idea of Collective Inheritance, so that, when one of them died, any private property they could fairly claim to have accumulated went fifty per cent to whoever they wanted it to go to and fifty per cent to whatever jurisdiction they lived within. This was why only one hull of the twin-hulled Poaflias was fully owned by Slyne. The city of Munueyn owned the other half and was renting it to him, accumulating kudos. The less Slyne could actually do with the ship, the more control he would lose, until ultimately the city could reasonably claim it was all theirs; then, if he wanted to stay aboard, he’d more or less have to do whatever the city asked him to do with the ship. This expedition, however, conducted under his own auspices, ought to go a long way towards securing his ownership rights over the whole vessel.

“This is why we are confined to the single hull?” Hatherence asked the captain. They were on the foredeck, a slightly ramshackle sprouting of fibres and sheet protruding over the craft’s battered-looking nose. Y’sul had spotted a harpoon gun on the foredeck and challenged his companions to a coarse shoot the next time they traversed a promising volume. Apparently where they were now, just two days out of Munueyn, constituted just such a happy hunting ground — however, nobody had seen anything worth harpooning so far.

“That’s right!” Slyne bobbed eagerly over the deck. “Less I use the other hull, less I owe the city!” Captain Slyne was hanging on to some rigging, floating above everybody else to get a good view and act as lookout and target spotter. They were making a decent speed through the dim crimson gases. The slipstream would have blown Slyne aft if he hadn’t been holding on. A decent speed in this case meant less than a quarter of the velocity of the Dreadnought Stormshear on cruise, but the gas down here was thicker and the slipstream’s force was all the greater.

“There’s something!” Slyne yelled, pointing up and to starboard.

They all looked.

“No! Wrong,” Slyne said cheerfully. “Beg pardon.” Slyne was taking his captain’s role seriously, accoutred with lots of mostly useless ancient naval paraphernalia like spyglasses, an altimeter, a museum-piece radio, a scratched-looking hail visor, a shining antique holster-cannon and a radiation compass. His clothing and half-armour looked very new but based on designs that were very old. He had a couple of pet foetuses tethered to each of his Hub girdles.

The foetuses were Dweller young who hadn’t even been allowed to progress to the stage of being children. The usual reason they existed was because a Dweller-turned-female of particular impatience had decided she couldn’t be bothered going to full term, and had aborted. The results made good pets. Dwellers could survive on their own almost from conception, they just didn’t progress intellectually and had nobody to protect them while they were completely helpless.

Slyne’s quadruplets — it would have been impolite to inquire whether they were actually his own — looked like little bloated manta rays, pale and trailing almost useless tentacles, forever bumping into their master or each other and getting themselves tangled in their tethers. The effect, for a human, was inevitably slightly grisly, though Fassin had the added, depressing feeling that the foetuses were the equivalent of a parrot in ancient Earth terms.

“There’s something this time!” Slyne shouted, pointing down to starboard. A small, black object was rising from the deep red depths of gas a couple of hundred metres away.

“Ihave it!” Y’sul yelled, bump-kicking the gun platform on its counterweights. It swung up above the deck to an elevation that let him depress the harpoon gun sufficiently.

“A tchoufer seed!” Sholish exclaimed. “It’s a tchoufer tree seed, sir!”

“Wait a moment, Y’sul,” Fassin said, rising from the deck. “Just let me go and check.” He gunned the little gascraft away from the Poaflias, curving out and down towards the still slowly rising black sphere.

“Keep out of the way!” Y’sul bellowed to the human. Fassin had taken a curved course deliberately, having witnessed Y’sul’s marksmanship before.

“Just hold, will you?” he shouted back.

Y’sul gave a shake and sighted the gun on the black sphere, maniples grasping the trigger.

Slyne craned forward in the rigging. Two of the foetuses wrapped themselves round a stay, entangling him. He looked up, tutted, and brought his spyglass up to a receptor-dense portion of his sensory frill, scanning the rising black orb. “Ah, actually—” he began.

Hatherence bobbed up suddenly. “Y’sul! Stop!”

“Ha-ha!” Y’sul said, twisting the trigger and firing the harpoon. The mounting shook, the gun leapt and banged, the harpoon’s own twin rocket motors sprang out and erupted as soon as it was a safe distance away and the thin black line attached to the main body came whipping and whistling out of a locker just beneath the gun mounting. The harpoon rasped through the gas towards where the black object would be in a few seconds’ time. “Hmm,” Y’sul said, sounding slightly surprised. “One of my better—”

“It’s a mine!” Slyne screamed.

Sholish just screamed.

— Fassin, get away from that thing! Hatherence sent.

The little gascraft instantly started to turn and speed up, rotors blurring in the air.

“Eh? What?” Y’sul said.

Slyne drew his holster-cannon and aimed at the harpoon. He got one shot off before the gun jammed.

“Could that be nuclear?” the colonel shouted. A high, keening noise sounded from the colonel’s esuit.

“Definitely!” Slyne spluttered. He shook his gun and cursed, then slapped at his radio. “Engines! Full astern!” He shook the gun again, desperately. “Fucking scrits!”

Hatherence moved quickly to one side.

Y’sul looked out at the harpoon, dropping smoothly right on course for the black ball, then at the gun mounting. “Sholish!” he barked. “Grab that line!”

Sholish leapt for the thrumming dark curtain of cord being jerked from the locker under the gun, caught hold of it and was instantly whipped towards the gunwales, smashing through stanchions and snapping to a stop, tangled in the hawser, before the slipstream brought him thudding back into the deck behind them. Free of the encumbering line, the harpoon just picked up speed, still heading for the mine. Hatherence got clear of the Poaflias. Fassin’s arrowcraft was still turning, still picking up speed, still even closer to the mine than the ship was.

“Oh, fu—” Y’sul said.

A crimson flash seemed to wash out the gas all around them.

Dead, Fassin had time to think.

For an instant, a tight fan of searing pink-white lines joined Colonel Hatherence’s esuit and the full length of the harpoon, which vanished in a blast of heat and light. A visible shock-sphere pulsed out from the detonation, rocking the mine…

… Which seemed to stop and think for a moment, before continuing to ascend smoothly on its way. The shock wave shook them and the ship. Fassin felt it too. He slowed and turned back.

The Poaflias was scrubbing off speed following Slyne’s last order. The slipstream was lessening but still sufficiently strong to clunk Sholish’s battered carapace off the deck as he floated tangled in the dark mass of wire.

Y’sul looked. “Sholish?” he said in a small voice.

“The species of the Faring are more divided by their sense of time than anything else. We Dwellers, being who and what we are, naturally encompass as much of the spectrum of chronosense as we are able, covering most of it. I exclude the machine-Quick.” A hesitation. “You still abhor those, I take it?”

“Yes, we most certainly do!” the colonel exclaimed.

“Positively persecuted,” Fassin said.

“Hmm. They are different again, of course. But even within the limits of the naturally evolved, the manifold rates at which time is appreciated are, some would argue, collectively the single most telling distinction that might be made between species and species-types.”

The speaker was an ancient Sage called Jundriance. Dweller seniority nomenclature stretched to twenty-nine separate categories, starting with child and ending, no less than two billion years later (usually much more) at Child. In between came the short-lived Adolescent and Youth stages, the rather longer Adult stage with its three sub-divisions, then Prime, with four subdivisions, Cuspian with three and then, if the Dweller had survived to that age (one and a quarter million years, minimum) and was judged fit by his peers, Sagehood, which then repeated all the subdivisions of the Adulthood, Prime and Cuspian stages. So, technically, Jundriance was a Sage-prime-chice. He was forty-three million years old, had shrunk to only six metres in diameter — while his carapace had darkened and taken on the hazy patina of Dweller middle age — had already lost most of his limbs and he was in charge of what was left of the house and associated libraries of the presumed deceased Cuspian-choal Valseir.

The view from the house was motionless and unchanging at normal time, a hazy vista of deep brown and purple veils of gas within a great placid vertical cylinder of darkness that was the final echo of the great storm that the house had once swung about like a tiny planet around a great, cold sun. In appearance the house-library complex itself was a collection of thirty-two spheres, each seventy metres or so in diameter, many girdled by equatorial balconies, so that the construction looked like some improbably bunched gathering of ringed planets. The bubble house hung, very slowly sinking, in that great calm of thick gas, deep down in the dark, hot depths only a few tens of kilometres above the region where the atmosphere began to behave more like a liquid than a gas.

“This is his house, then, yes?” the colonel had asked when they’d first seen it from the foredeck of the Poaflias.

Fassin had looked around, using sonosense and magnetic to search for the section of the derelict CloudTunnel that the house had once been anchored to, but couldn’t find it anywhere nearby. He’d already checked the Poaflias’s charts. The stretch of CloudTunnel no longer showed up on the local holo maps, implying that it had either drifted much further away — which was unlikely — or had fallen into the depths.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, looks like it.”

They’d had to turn the Poaflias around and return to Munueyn. Sholish, badly injured, had been taken to hospital. The surgeons had given him an even chance of surviving. He’d heal best left in a drug coma for the next few hundred days. There was nothing more they could do.

Y’sul could have taken on any number of Youths and Adolescents eager to take his crippled servant’s place, but he’d turned them all down — a decision he’d regretted just a day or so later once they’d set out again, when he’d realised he had nobody to shout at.

They’d avoided challenges, other ships and mines of all sorts, finally making the journey in ten days. The Sage Jundriance was attended by a couple of burly Prime servants, Nuern and Livilido, each dressed in fussily ornate and ill-fitting academic robes. They were sufficiently senior to have servants of their own; a half-dozen highly reticent Adults who looked like identical sextuplets. They were big on scurrying but almost autistically shy.

The senior of the two elder servants, Nuern — a mouean to Livilido’s one-rank-more-junior suhrl — had welcomed them, allocated rooms and informed them that his master was engaged in the task of cataloguing the remaining works in the libraries — as Y’sul had warned, a significant proportion of the contents had been given away since Valseir’s accident. Probably only the remoteness of the house had prevented more scholars showing up to pick over the remains. Jundriance was, however, in slow-time, so if they wanted to speak to him they would have to slow to his thought-pace. Fassin and the colonel had agreed. Y’sul had announced he was having none of this and took the Poaflias on a cruise to explore the local volume and see what there might be to hunt.

“Your duty should be to wait for us,” the colonel had informed him.

“Duty?” Y’sul had said, as though hearing the word for the first time.

They had a half-day or so, at least, while Jundriance was informed by a message on his read-screen that he had visitors. If he would see them immediately, they could go in before dark. Otherwise it could be some long time…

“Colonel,” Fassin had said, “we will have to go into slowdown for some time. Y’sul might be as well amusing himself nearby -’ Fassin had turned to look at Y’sul to emphasise the word “- as mooching about this place for who knows how long.”

· He’ll get into trouble.

· Probably. So, better trouble close to home, or trouble further away?

Hatherence had made a rumbling noise and had told Y’sul, “There is a war on.”

“I’ve checked the nets!” Y’sul had protested. “It’s kilo-klicks away!”

“Really?” Nuern had said, perking. “Has it started? The master doesn’t allow connections in the house. We hear nothing.”

“Began a dozen days ago,” Y’sul had told the servant. “We’ve been in the thick of it already. Barely avoided a smart mine on the way here. My servant got himself injured, may die.”

“A smart mine? Near here?”

“You are right to be concerned, my friend,” Y’sul had said solemnly. “The presence of such ordnance hereabouts is another — the real — reason why I’ll take my ship on patrol around you.”

“And your servant, injured. How terrible.”

“I know. War is. Other than that, elsewhere in the hostilities, barely a spineful of deaths so far. Couple of Dreadnoughts crippled on each side. Far too early to tell who’s winning. I’ll keep a fringe cocked, let you know what’s happening.”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all.”

· You’re right, Hatherence had signal-whispered to Fassin as this exchange was taking place. — Let’s just let him go.

· You can signal the ship from your esuit while still in slowdown?

— Yes.

— Okay.

“You will stay nearby?” Fassin had asked Y’sul. “You won’t let the Poaflias venture too far out?”

“Of course! I swear! And I shall ask our two fine fellows here to extend you every courtesy on my behalf!”

They were to be seen at once. Nuern had shown them into one of the outer library pods. The library had a roof of diamond leaf looking directly upwards into the vermilion-dark sky. Jundriance was settled into a dent-desk near the centre of the near-spherical room, facing a read-screen. Around him, the walls were lined with shelves, some so widely spaced that they might have doubled as bunk space for humans, others so small that a child’s finger might have struggled to fit. Mostly these held books, of some sort. Spindle-secured carousels tensioned between the walls and between the floor and a network of struts above held hundreds of other types of storage devices and systems: swave crystals, holoshard, picospool and a dozen more obscure.

They’d joined Jundriance at his desk, floating through the thick atmosphere to his side. Nuern had swung dent-seats into place and they’d both clamped onto one, Hatherence positioning herself with Fassin between her and the Sage. Jundriance, of course, gave no sign of having noticed them.

They’d slowed. It had been much easier for Fassin than for Hatherence. He’d been doing this for centuries; she’d been trained in the technique but had never attempted it for real. The experience would be a jerky, shaky journey for her, at least until they smoothed out at the Sage’s pace.

The day darkened quickly, then the night seemed to last less than an hour. Fassin concentrated on his own smooth slowdown, but was aware of the colonel seeming to wriggle and shift in her dent-seat. The Sage Jundriance appeared to stir. By the next quick morning, something actually changed on his reading screen; another page. That day passed quickly, then the next night went quicker still. The process continued until they were down to a factor of about one-in-sixty-four, which was what they had been told Jundriance had come up to meet them at -he’d been even slower until their arrival.

They were about halfway there when a signal-whisper had pinged into the little gascraft. — You receiving this all right, major?

· Yes. Why?

· I just interrogated the screen reader. It was working in realtime until the Poaflias arrived.

· You sure?

· Perfectly.

· Interesting.

Finally they were there, synchronised to the same life-pace as the Sage. The short days became a slow, slow flicker above them, the orange-purple sky beyond the diamond leaf alternately lightening and dimming. Even at this pace, the great tall veils of gas seemed to hang above them in the sky, unmoving. Fassin had experienced the feeling he always got when he first went into slowdown during a delve, the disquieting sensation that he was a lost soul, the feeling of being in a strange sort of prison, trapped in time inside while life went on at a quicker pace outside, above, beyond.

Jundriance had turned off his read-screen and greeted them. Fassin had asked about Valseir but somehow they’d got onto the subject of life-pace itself.

“One feels sorry for the Quick, I suppose,” the Sage said. “They seem ill-suited to the universe, in a way. The distances between the stars, the time it takes to travel from one to another… Even more so, of course, if one is thinking of travelling between galaxies.”

A hole in the conversation. “Of course.” Fassin said, to fill it. Are you fishing for something, old one? he thought.

“The machines. They were much worse, of course. How unbearable, to live so quickly.”

“Well, they mostly don’t live at all now, Sage,” Fassin told him.

“That is as well, perhaps.”

“Sage, can you tell us any more about Valseir’s death?”

“I was not there. I know no more than you.”

“You were… quite close to him?” Fassin asked.

“Close? No. No, I would not say so. We had corresponded on matters of textual verification and provenance, and debated at a remove on various questions of scholarship and interpretation, though not regularly. We never met. I would not say that that constituted closeness, would you?”

“I suppose not. I just wondered what drew you here, that’s all.”

“Oh, the chance to look through his library. To take what I might for myself. That is what drew me. His servants took some material before they left, others — mostly scholars or those who chose to call themselves such — came and took what they wanted, but there is still much here, and while the most obvious treasures are gone, much of value may remain. It would be derelict to ignore.”

“I see. And what of Valseir’s libraries? I understand you are continuing to catalogue them?”

A pause. “Continuing. Yes.” The old, dark-carapaced Sage seemed to stare at the dark read-screen. “Hmm,” he said. He turned fractionally to look at Fassin. “Let me see. Your use of the word ‘continuing’ there.”

“I understood that Valseir had been cataloguing his libraries Wasn’t he?”

“He was always so secretive. Was he not?”

· I’m getting light-comms leakage here, Hatherence sent.

· Tell me if there’s a burst after this:

“And dilatory. Hapuerele always said that Valseir was more likely to win the All-Storms Yachting Cup than ever finish cataloguing his libraries.”

Another pause. “Quite so, quite so. Hapuerele, yes.”

· Leakage. Hapuerele does not exist?

· Exists, but he had to ask elsewhere just there. Shouldn’t have.

“I would like to take a look round some of the libraries myself. I hope you don’t mind. I shan’t disturb you.”

“Ah. I see. Well, if you think you can be discreet. Are you seeking anything in particular, Mr Taak?”

“Yes. And you?”

“Only enlightenment. And what would it be that you are looking for, if I may ask?”

“Exactly the same.”

The old dweller was silent for a while. In real-time, most of an hour passed. “I may have something for you,” he said eventually. “Would you care to slow down a little more? No doubt this, our present pace, seems surpassing slow to you; however, I find it something of a strain.”

“Of course,” Fassin told Jundriance.

· I’ll have to leave you here, major.

· Lucky you. I’ll try to keep this short.

· Good luck, Hatherence sent.

“However, I shall leave you at this point, sir,” the colonel said to the Sage.

“Pleasant to have met you, Reverend Colonel,” Jundriance told her. “Now then,” he said to Fassin. “Let me see. Half this pace, I think, Seer Taak, would suit me better. A quarter would suit me better still.”

“Shall we try half, then, initially?”

He was back in just three days. Hatherence was inspecting the contents of another library when he found her. The room was almost perfectly spherical, with no windows, just a circle of dim light shining from the ceiling’s centre and further luminescence provided by bio strips inlaid on each shelf, glowing ghostly green. Further stacks of shelves like enormous inward-pointing vanes made the place feel oddly organic, as though these were ribs, and they were inside some vast creature. The colonel was floating near one set of close-stacked shelves near the library’s centre, strips of green light ribbing her esuit.

“So soon, major?” Hatherence said, replacing a slim holocrystal on a shelf half full of them. At the same time as she spoke, she sent: — Our friend had nothing of interest?

“Sage Jundriance gave me so much to think about that I decided I’d better come back to normal speed to think it over,” Fassin replied, then signalled, — The old bastard gave me fuck all; basically he’s trying to stall us.

“Well, I have been studying while you were conversing.”

“Anything of interest?” he asked, floating over towards her.

— There are signs that many more Dwellers were staying here until not long ago. Perhaps only a few days long ago. “The house system seems to think there ought to be a catalogue of cata-logues somewhere. In fact that there ought to be multiple copies of it lying around.”

“A catalogue of catalogues?” Fassin said. — Other Dwellers?

“The first catalogue that Valseir compiled, listing the catalogues of individual works he would then draw up.” — Perhaps as many as ten or twelve. Also, I get the impression Livilido and Nuern are more, or at least other, than they appear.

“One catalogue for everything would be too simple?” Fassin asked, then sent, — I didn’t think they seemed like ordinary servants either. So where are all these multiple copies?

— I suspect they have been removed. They would be the key to beginning a methodical search, the colonel replied, then said, “I gather it seemed to him the logical way to proceed. Certainly there is no shortage of material, even yet, when much of it has been removed. One catalogue would, I suppose, be cumbersome.” The Colonel paused. “Of course, a single giant database with freely dimensioned subdivisions, partially overlapping categories and subcategories, a hierarchically scalable cross-reference hyperstructure and inbuilt, semi-smart user-learning routines would be even more to the point and far more useful.”

Fassin looked at her. “He’d probably have got round to one of those after he’d done what he considered the proper cataloguing — getting everything down in some non-volatile form that can be read without intervening machinery.”

“Our Dweller friends do seem to be remarkably purist about such things.”

“When you live as long as they do, future-proofing becomes an obsession.”

“Perhaps that is their curse. The Quick must endure the frustration of living in a universe with what seems like an annoyingly slow speed limit and the Slow must suffer the frenetic pace of change around them, resulting in a sort of exaggerated entropy.”

Fassin had been floating slowly closer to Hatherence. He tipped to make it clear that he was looking at her as he came to a stop a couple of metres from her. The glowing biostrips on the shelves painted soft lime stripes across the little gascraft. “You all right in there, colonel?” he asked. “I realise it’s very hot and pressured down here.” — Colonel, do you think we are wasting our time here?

“I am fine. Yourself?” — Very hard to say. There is so much still here, so much to be looked at.

“Also fine. Feeling very rested.” — That’s my point. We could be made to waste a lot of time here, looking for something that has already been removed.

“I understand slow-time will have that effect.” — That is a thought. I had the odd impression, from dust marks and so on, understand, that many of the shelves have recently been filled, or refilled. And many of the works seem to make no sense given what I’ve understood of Valseir’s subjects of study. Seemed most strange. Though, if all this is a sort of slow-trap for you and me, then that begins to make sense. But what else can we do? Where else is there to go?

“I’ll have to talk to the Sage again,” Fassin said. “There are many things I’d like to ask him.” — Whereas in fact I’ll do everything I can to avoid talking to the old bore again. We have to get word out to any legitimate scholars who did take works from here, see if any of them have the catalogues, or anything else. There are two dozen separate libraries here; even if they’re only half-full we could be searching them for decades.

“He is a most interesting and wise character.” — Many tens of millions of works, and if most are unsorted, all are. I’ll signal to the Poaflias, have them put out word to the relevant scholars. Who might be trying to put obstacles in our way so?

“Indeed he is.” — I don’t know.

“Well, I think I shall continue to search the shelves for a while. Will you join me?” — Will you?

“Why not?”

They drifted to different but nearby stacks, snicked holocrystal books out of their motion-proof shelves, and read.

“His study?” Nuern asked. A fringe flick indicated a glance at Livilido. They were afloat at table. The two Primes had invited Fassin and Hatherence to a semi-formal dinner in the house’s ovaloid dining room, a great, dim, echoing space strung vertically with enormous sets of carbon ropes, all splayed, separated into smaller and smaller cords and fibres and threads and filaments and then each thin strand minutely and multiply knotted. It was like being inside some colossal, frayed net.

Jundriance was still deep in slow-time and would not be joining them. Special food had been prepared that was suitable for the colonel. She ingested it via a sort of gaslock on the side of her esuit. Fassin, contained and sustained within the arrow-craft, was really only here to watch.

“Yes,” he said. “Where do you think it might be?”

“I thought that Library One was his study,” Nuern said, selecting a helping of something glowing dull blue from the central carousel, and then spinning the serving dish slowly towards his dining companions.

“Me too,” Livilido said. He looked at Fassin. “Why, was there another one? Has a bit dropped off the place?”

Fassin had taken a look round all the library spheres. Library One had always been Valseir’s formal study, where he received fellow scholars and other people, but it hadn’t been his real study, his den, his private space. Very few people were allowed in there. Fassin had felt flattered in the extreme to be invited to enter the nestlike nook that Valseir had made for himself inside the stretch of disused CloudTunnel tube which the rest of the house had been anchored to the last time Fassin had been here, centuries earlier. Library One still looked as it always had, minus a few thousand book-crystals and a big cylindrical low-temperature storage device in which Valseir had kept paper and plastic books. It certainly didn’t look as though the room had become Valseir’s proper study in the interim. And now it appeared as though these people didn’t even know he’d had a more private den in the first place.

“I thought he had another study,” Fassin said. “Didn’t he keep a house in… what city was it? Guldrenk?”

“Ah! Of course,” Nuern said. “That would be it.”

· Colonel, these guys know nothing.

· I had been coming to the same conclusion.

Library Twenty-One (Cincturia\Clouders\Miscellania) had a conceit, a Dweller equivalent of a door made from a bookcase. Valseir had shown it to Fassin after the human had stayed with him for an extended period after their first meeting. It led, inward at first, towards the centre of the cluster of library spheres, through a short passage to a gap between two more of the outer spheres, then into the open gas. The joke — a hidden door, a secret passage — was that the various Cincturia were the outsiders of the galactic community, and the particular bookcase hiding the secret passage was categorised “Escapees’.

After their meal, Fassin gave the impression of shutting himself away in the library for some late-night shelf-scanning. Instead he screened up the house’s system statements and looked back to just after the time of Valseir’s yachting accident and alleged death. He did something unusual, something barely legal by Mercatorial standards and usually pointless on Nasqueron; he speeded up, letting the gascraft’s legal-max computers and his own subtly altered nervous system rev to their combined data-processing limit. It still took nearly half an hour, but he found what he was looking for: the point, a dozen days after Valseir’s accident, when the house recorded a rerouting of power and ventilation plumbing. Its altimeter had registered a wobble, too — a brief blip upwards, then the start of the long, slow descent that was continuing even now.

Then Fassin had to work out where the CloudTunnel segment might be now. It would be beyond the start of the shear zone, past where the whole atmospheric band moved as a single vast mass, down into the semi-liquid Depths. These moved much more slowly than the gas above, the transition levels great turbidly elastic seas being dragged along as though reluctantly after the jet-stream whirl of atmosphere above.

It was all dead reckoning. By the Dweller way of judging such things, the atmosphere was static and the Depths — not to mention the remainder of Ulubis system, the stars and indeed the rest of the universe — moved. With only notionally fixed reference points, finding anything in the Depths was notoriously difficult. After two hundred years the section of CloudTunnel could be anywhere; it might have sunk beyond feasible reach, been broken up or even drifted to the Zone edge and been pulled into another Belt entirely, either north or south. The only thing working in Fassin’s favour was that the length of tube he was looking for was relatively large. Completely losing something forty-plus metres in diameter and eighty klicks long wasn’t that easy, even in Nasqueron. Still, he was relying on the CloudTunnel retaining the usual profile of buoyancy-decay.

The likely volume — though identified with a worrying degree of fuzziness — was about five thousand kilcks away, though coming closer all the time, having been all the way round the planet many times. In a dozen hours it would be almost right underneath the house again. He calculated. It was doable. He pinged a note to the screen on the library’s door saying that he didn’t want to be disturbed.

Fassin let himself out through the hidden door about an hour after he’d entered the library. He let the little gascraft grow, pushing trim-spaces out to create internal vacuums and a larger, near-spherical outer shape so that he fell gently at first, causing as little turbulence as possible beneath the house. Then gradually he heavied, slowly shrinking the arrowhead to its dart-slim minimum, diving unpowered into the dark depths and through the rough boundary of the near-static cylinder of depleted gas that was all that remained of the ancient storm.

He powered up twenty klicks deeper and levelled out, then rose quickly when he was thirty lateral kilometres clear, zooming up through the gradually cooling, slowly thinning gas above until he was through the haze layers and out amongst the cloud tops. Fassin increased to maximum speed, configuring the arrowhead for as stealthy a profile as it could support. The gascraft had never been designed for such shenanigans, but it had been gradually altered over the years by him and Hervil Apsile until — while no match for a genuine military machine -it made less of a fuss moving across the face of the planet than almost anything within the gas-giant’s atmosphere (always discounting the usual preposterous Dweller claims of invisible ships, inertialess drives and zero-point subspacials).

The little craft moved beneath the thin yellow sky, and the stars above seemed to slow down then go into reverse as Fassin flew faster than the combined speed of the planet revolving and the band beneath him jet-streaming in the same direction.

After less than an hour of flight, seeing nothing in the heavens above or in the skies beneath that would have led anyone to think there was life anywhere else in all the universe, he slowed and dropped, a shaftless arrowhead heading straight for the heart of the planet. He let the increasing density slow him further, feeling the resulting friction-heat leak through the gascraft’s hull and into his flesh.

Through the upper shear boundary — only hazily defined, kilometres thick, prone to vast slow waves and unpredictable swells and sudden troughs — he entered the shear zone itself, starting to circle through the crushing fluidity of jelly-thick atmosphere. If the section of CloudTunnel was still in the volume, this was where it ought to be, fallen amongst the depths, making its slow way down to an equilibrium of weight and buoyancy within the gradually thickening press of hydrogen gas turning to liquid.

There was always a chance that it had gone the other way, lifting towards the cloud tops, but that would be unusual. Disused CloudTunnel, ribbed with vacuum tubes, tended to gain gas and therefore additional weight through osmosis over the millennia. When Fassin had been here two hundred years earlier, Valseir was already having to add buoyancy to the Tunnel to keep it from sinking too fast and dragging the whole house and library complex with it. Anyway, if the derelict section had risen it ought to have stayed within the same atmospheric band and so shown up somewhere on the charts of the Poaflias, and it hadn’t.

He went on spiralling, keeping slow, sonosensing only gently so that there would be less chance of anybody who might be listening nearby overhearing him. (Could the colonel have followed him without him being aware of her? Probably. But why would she? Still, he had the feeling he ought to be as discreet as he could.) Light wasn’t much use. CloudTunnel wall would appear almost transparent down here. Probes for magnetic and radiation vestiges were of even less utility, and there would be no scent trace either.

After two hours, near the limit of the time that he thought he could reasonably spend away from the house, and some time after he’d decided the hell with discretion and ramped his active sensors up to maximum, Fassin found one end of the CloudTunnel, looming out of the gel-thick mist like a vast dark mouth. He took the little gascraft into the forty-metre-wide maw, turning up his sonosense now that the signals would be shielded by the walls of the CloudTunnel section itself. He increased his speed, too, barrelling along the great slowly curving tube like the ghost of some Dweller long gone.

The study shell was still there, a hollow sphere almost filling the CloudTunnel tube near the mid-point of its eighty-kilometre length, but it had been ransacked, stripped bare. Whatever secrets it might have held had long since been taken or trashed.

Fassin turned some lights on to check round the place, finding nothing intact, nothing beyond empty shelves and ragged lengths of carbon board, diamond dust like frosted ice and frayed fibres, waving in the turbulence of his passing.

He formed a tiny cavity with his sonosense and watched it collapse instantly, snapped to nothing by the grinding weight of the column of gas above it. A fine place to feel crushed, he thought, then went back the way he’d come and ascended slowly to the house and Library Twenty-One again.

The colonel was there. She looked startled when he appeared from behind the hidden door, even though he’d told her earlier what he intended to do.

“Major. Seer Taak. Fassin,” she said. She sounded… odd.

Fassin looked around. Nobody else here; good, he thought. “Yes?” he said, letting the bookcase door close behind him.

Hatherence floated right up to him, stopping just a metre away. Her esuit showed a uniform dull grey he hadn’t seen her display before.

“Colonel,” he asked her. “Are you all right? Is everything—”

“There is… you must prepare… I… I am sorry to…

There is bad news, Fassin,” she said finally, in a rushed, broken voice. “Very bad news. I am so sorry.”

* * *

The Archimandrite Luseferous did not really buy into the whole idea of the Truth. Of course, when he had been rising within the ranks of the Cessoria he had given every appearance of believing in it, and had been a gifted evangelist and disputer, arguing, many times, with great force, logic and passion for the Church and its views. He had been often commended for this. He could see at the time that his superiors were impressed, see it even when they didn’t want to admit to him or to themselves that they had been impressed. He had a gift for argument. And for dissembling, for lying (if you insisted on using such crude, un-nuanced terminology), for appearing to believe one thing while, at best, actually not caring one way or the other. He had never really cared whether the Truth was true.

The idea of faith interested him, even fascinated him, not as an intellectual idea, not as a concept or some abstract theoretical framework, but as a way of controlling people, as a way of understanding and so manipulating them. As a flaw, in the end, as something which was wrong with others that was not wrong with him.

Sometimes he could not believe all the advantages other people seemed prepared to hand him. They had faith and so would do things that were plainly not in their own immediate (or, often, long-term) best interests, because they just believed what they had been told; they experienced altruism and so did things that, again, were not necessarily to their advantage; they had sentimental or emotional attachments to others and so could be coerced, once more, into doing things they would not have done otherwise. And — best of all, he sometimes thought — people were self-deceiving. They thought they were brave when they were really cowards, or imagined they could think for themselves when they most blatantly could not, or believed they were clever when they were just good at passing exams, or thought they were compassionate when they were just sentimental.

The real strength came from a perfectly simple maxim: Be completely honest with yourself; only ever deceive others.

So many edges! So many ways that people made his progress easier. If everybody he’d ever met and competed with and struggled against had been just like him in these respects he’d have had a much harder rise to power. He might not even have prevailed at all, because without all these advantages it largely came down to luck, and he might not have had sufficient.

In the old days he had once wondered how many of the Cessorian high command, his old bosses, really believed in the Truth. He strongly suspected that the higher you went, the greater grew the proportion of those who didn’t really believe at all. They were in it for the power, the glory, the control and the glamour.

Now he rarely thought about any of that. Now he would just assume that anybody in such a position would be completely and cynically self-interested and be mildly surprised and even slightly disgusted to find that any of them really did have genuine faith. The disgust would come from the feeling that the person concerned was letting down the side, and the suspicion that they would feel they were somehow — perversely — superior to their less-deluded peers.

“And so you really believe in all that? You really do?”

“Sir, of course, sir! It is the rational faith. Simple logic dictates. It is inescapable. You know this better than I, sir. Sir, I think you tease me.” The girl looked away, smiling down, coquettish, shy, perhaps a little alarmed, just possibly even daring to feel slightly insulted.

He reached out and took her hair, swinging her face round to his, a gold-dark silhouette against the sparse sprinkle of distant stars. “Child, I am not sure that in all my life I have ever teased. Not once.”

The girl did not seem to know what to say. She looked around, perhaps at the pale stars through the screen-glass, perhaps at the snow-white tumble of low-gee puff-bedding, perhaps at the shell of screens forming the walls of their little nest, surfaces on which startlingly detailed and inventive acts of sexuality were being enacted. Perhaps she looked at her two companions, both now curled and asleep.

“Well, then, sir,” she said at last, “not teased. I would not say you teased me. Perhaps rather that you make fun of me because you are so much more educated and clever than me.”

That, the Archimandrite thought, was perhaps more like it. But he still was not sure. Did this young thing still carry the Truth inside her, even after all the normal-span generations that had come and gone since he’d formally swept away all this nonsense?

In a way it didn’t matter in the slightest; as long as nobody ever began to use their religion to organise against him he could not care less what people really thought. Obey me, fear me. Hate me if you want. Don’t ever pretend to love me. That was all he asked of people. Faith was just another lever, like sentiment, like empathy, like love (or what people thought was love, what they claimed was love, the fanciful, maybe even dishonest bit that wasn’t lust, which was honest. And, of course, another lever).

But he wanted to know. A less civilised fellow in his situation would have considered having the girl tortured to find out the truth, but people being tortured over something like this soon ended up just telling you what they thought you wanted to hear — anything to get the pain to stop. He’d learned that quickly enough. There was a better way.

He reached for the pod’s remote control and adjusted the spin, creating the illusion of gravity once more. “Go on all fours in front of the window,” he told the girl. “It’s time again.”

“Sir, of course, sir.” The girl quickly assumed the position he wanted, crouched against the oncoming star field, seemingly fixed even though the pod was revolving. The brightest sun, screen dead-centre, was Ulubis.

Luseferous had had his genitals enhanced in all sorts of ways. One improvement was that he carried glands inside his body which allowed him to produce many different secretions which his ejaculate could then carry into the bodies of others (but whose effects he was proof against, obviously), including irritants, hallucinogens, cannabinoids, capsainoids, sleeping draughts and truth serums. He went briefly into the little-death little-trance, the petit mal which allowed him to select one of these, and chose the last-mentioned, the truth drug. He took the girl anally; it was faster-acting that way. And discovered that she really did believe in the Truth. Though it also emerged that she thought he was horribly ancient and weird-looking and a frightening, sick-minded old sadist and she absolutely hated being fucked by him.

He thought about inseminating her with thanaticin, or employing one of the physical options his remade penis made possible: the shaved horsetail, perhaps. Or just ejecting her into the vacuum and watching her die.

In the end Luseferous decided that letting her live with such constant degradation was punishment enough. He’d always said he preferred being despised, after all.

He would make her his favourite. Probably wise to put her on suicide watch, too.

* * *

The Dwellers held that the ability to suffer was what ultimately marked out sentient life from any other sort. They didn’t mean just the ability to feel physical pain, they meant real suffering, they meant the sort of suffering that was all the worse because the creature undergoing the experience could appreciate it fully, could think back to when it had not suffered so, look forward to when it might stop (or despair of it ever stopping — despair was a large component of this) and know that if things had been different it might not be suffering now. Brains required, see? Imagination. Any brainless thing with a rudimentary nervous system could feel pain. Suffering took intelligence.

Of course, Dwellers didn’t feel pain, and claimed never to suffer, except in the trivial sense of suffering fools because they were part of the family, or experiencing the deleterious physical and mental effects of a serious hangover. So, by their own reckoning, they weren’t really sentient. At which point the average Dweller, assuming without question that they were absolutely self-evidently the most sentient and intelligent things around in anybody’s neck of the woods, would just throw their spine-limbs out, shake their mantle ruff and start talking loudly about paradoxes.

He faced to spin, carried in the jet stream at five hundred kilometres per hour. Motionless. He side-slipped, found a small eddy, just a curl, a tiny yellow-white wisp a couple of klicks across in the great empty skies of orange and red and brown. He moved through the gas. It felt slick against the arrowhead’s skin. He let the eddy carry him round in a slow gyration for a while, then pointed down and fell, twisting slowly as he went, down through the hazes and the clouds and the slowly thickening weight and press of gas, down to where the temperature was suitable, where he levelled out and did something he had never done before; he opened the cover of the little gascraft and let the atmosphere in, let Nasqueron in, let it touch his naked human skin.

Alarms were beeping and flashing and when he opened his eyes they stung in the dim orange light that seemed to shine from all around. He still had the gillfluid in his mouth and nose and throat and lungs, though now he was forced to try and breathe by himself, just his chest muscles against the pull of Nasqueron’s gravity field. He was still connected to the gascraft by the interface collar, too, and, when he could not raise himself up from the bed of shock-gel, he made the little arrowhead tip gradually towards its nose, so that he was propped three-quarters of the way towards a standing position.

Blood roared in his ears. His feet and legs protested at the weight as he was slowly forced down through the gel until he was partly standing on the far end of the cramped coffin shape that contained him.

Now he could force himself away from the mould. He used his elbows, forcing himself forward. The stinging in his eyes was making them water. Tears at last. Shaking with the effort, he pulled at one sticky-slippy strand of the gillfluid where it disappeared into his right nostril, and opened his mouth, gulping some of the gas.

Nasqueron smelled of rotten eggs.

He looked around, blinking the tears away as best he could, the interface collar sucking at his neck, trying to keep contact while he tried to look up and out. It was a muddy-looking old place, Nasqueron. Like a big bowl of beaten egg, with a load of liquid shit stirred in and little drops of blood spattered throughout. And sulphurous on the palate. He let the gillfluid snap back, filling his nose, granting him pure oxygen-rich air again, though the stench still lingered.

He was sweating, partly from the exertion, partly from the heat. Maybe he should have chosen to do this a bit further up. Now his nose was tingling, too, as well as his streaming eyes. He wondered if he could sneeze with the gillfluid inside him. Would it come splattering up out of him, some ghastly lung-vomit, ejected, left drooped over the side of the gascraft like some pale blue mass of seaweed, leaving him to gasp and choke and die?

He could hardly see because of the tears now, Nasqueron’s noxious skies finally drawing from him what he had not been able to express for himself.

All of them.

The whole Sept.

They’d made the move to the Winter complex early. The warhead had fallen there, killing all of them: Slovius, Zab, Verpych, all his family, all the people he had grown up with, all those he had known and loved through his childhood and as he had grown, all the people who had made him whoever he now was, whatever he had been, until this moment.

It had been quick. Instantaneous, indeed, but so what? They had felt no pain but they were dead, gone, beyond recall.

Only they were not beyond recall. He could not stop recalling, he could not cease bringing them back to life in his head, if only to apologise. He had suggested to Slovius that they get away from the Autumn House. He’d meant a neutral place, some hotel or university complex, but they’d gone to another of the Sept’s Seasonal Houses instead — a compromise. And that had killed them. He had killed them. His well-meant advice, his desire to care and protect, and to be known to have thought of this, had taken them all away.

He thought of just letting the craft tip further over, beyond ninety degrees, letting himself fall out, jerked down by his own mass, hurtling him plummeting downwards into that great sucking breath of gas-giant gravity, the gillfluid wrenched from him, perhaps taking some parts of his lungs with it as it ripped away, tearing him apart and letting him fill the bloody, ragged remains with alien gas for his last scream — falsetto, like the voice you got when you sucked helium from a party balloon -as he plunged into the depths.

The signals and messages had finally caught up with them round about the time he’d been floating through the wreckage of Valseir’s wrecked study. All the shocked mailings, all the garbled queries, all the official notices, all the messages of support and sympathy, all the requests and follow-up signals asking for confirmation that he was still alive, all the news mentions, all the Ocula’s revised orders: they had all come through in a flood, a great tangled knot of incoming data, held up by the Shrievalty’s default secrecy, especially in a time of threat, the usual chaos of Dweller communications in general and the particular breakdown in the smooth running of signalling protocols transmission that always attended a Formal War, an effect always at its most extreme within the war zone itself.

Dead, all dead. But then, not quite all dead (a Sept was no small thing, and reality was rarely quite so neat). Just as-good-as all. Five junior servants, on leave or errands, had survived, as had one of his second cousins and her infant son. That was all. Enough to make it not a clean break, however awful, sufficient so that he would be expected to keep going, provide leadership, be strong… all that easily said clichéd stuff. His mother, absent, might have survived, but she’d been killed too, in another attack — unrelated, it was supposed, just sheer bad luck — on the Cessorian habitat in the Kuiper belt where she’d been on a Retreat for the last half year.

He supposed he ought to be thankful that Jaal was still alive, that she had not been calling at the Winter House at the time of the attack. Instead he had a succession of alarmed, shocked, plaintive and then numb-sounding messages from her, the last few pleading for him to get in touch if he could, if he was alive, if he was somewhere in Nasqueron and could hear this or read this…

He had been listed as missing by the Shrievalty Ocula after the attack on Third Fury. Officially he still was. They hadn’t been sure that he and Colonel Hatherence were still alive until they’d received her relayed signal days later, and subsequently had thought it best to keep his survival a secret for the time being. His interview with the news service in Hauskip had complicated matters — however, this was already being denounced as a fake even without their intervention, and a degree of confusion had ensued. Listed as missing in action, he was still officially alive and so Chief Seer of Sept Bantrabal. That would not change for at least a year.

The situation in Ulubis system was no less desperate and the importance of what they had been asked to do had if anything increased with the latest hostile actions of the Invader\Beyonders. Even as it all came through, even as the signals downloaded into the gascraft’s memory, with all the codes intact, all the routings displayed, he kept thinking, Maybe it’s all a hoax, maybe it’s all just some terrible mistake. Even when he saw the news screenage of the still-smoking crater where the Winter House had been, in the rolling hills of Ualtus Great Valley, he had wanted to believe it wasn’t true; this was faked, all of it was faked.

It had happened more or less at the same time as the bombardment of Third Fury. The tiny flash he had seen on the surface of ’glantine as they fell towards Nasqueron in the escaping drop ship: that had been the impact, that had been the instant of their deaths, that had been the very second in which he became alone. The earlier Shrievalty message, slipping through before the data jam that had kept them ignorant all these days and recording the organisation’s sympathy for his loss had been referring to this catastrophe as well, not just to the loss of life in Third Fury.

The wreckage of the drop ship had been found, in the upper Depths, the body of Master Technician Hervil Apsile within. It was as though nothing was to be left aside, nothing and nobody saved, nothing, almost nothing, left to him. Some servants he hardly knew and a second cousin he was moderately fond of, plus an infant he couldn’t even picture. And Jaal. But would that — could that — ever be the same now? He liked but did not love her, and was fairly sure she felt the same way. It would have been a good match, but after this he would be different, another person altogether, even if he did return from this idiot adventure, even if there was anything to return to, even if the coming war hadn’t destroyed or altered everything. And would her Sept want her to marry into a Sept that no longer existed? Where was the good match, the wise marriage there? Would even she want to, and if she still did, would it not be out of duty, out of sympathy, out of the feeling that their contract must still be honoured, no matter what? What a formula for future blame and bitterness that would be.

It was almost a comfort to realise that Jaal too would probably be lost to him. It was as though he was hanging over some great drop, about to fall, destined to fall, and the greatest pain came from the act of still hanging on, fingers scraping, nails tearing. Let go of this one last thing to cling to, and the fall itself would at least be painless.

He wasn’t going to kill himself. It was grimly good to know he could do it, but he wouldn’t. From a purely practical point of view, he was fairly certain that Hatherence had followed him, using her esuit’s military capabilities to hide herself from his gascraft’s senses. She’d try to stop him. It could get undignified, and she might even succeed. If he really wanted to kill himself, he was sure there were easier ways. Just heading deeper into the war zone and powering hard straight for a Dreadnought should do the job.

And it would be too easy. It would be selfish. It would be the end to this terrible, gnawing feeling of guilt, a line drawn under that, and he didn’t think that he deserved such an easy way out. He felt guilty? So feel guilty. He had meant no harm — quite the opposite — he’d just been wrong. Feeling guilty was stupid. It was understandable, but it was stupid, just beside the point. They were dead and he was alive. His actions might well have led directly to their deaths, but he hadn’t killed them.

What was left? Revenge, maybe. Though who to blame? If it really had been Beyonders, that made his old treachery (or principled, self-sacrificing stand, depending) look foolish somehow. He still despised the Mercatoria, hated the whole vicious, cretinous, vacuously self-important, sentience-hating system, and he’d never had any illusions about the unalloyed niceness of the Beyonders or any other large group, or thought that a struggle against the Mercatoria would be other than prolonged, painful and bloody. He’d always known that his own end might be painful and long-drawn-out — he would do everything he could to make sure it wasn’t, but sometimes there was just nothing you could do. He had also realised that innocents died just as filthily and in equally great numbers in a just war as they did in an unjust one, and had known that war was to be avoided at almost all costs just because it magnified mistakes, exaggerated errors, but still he’d hoped there would somehow be an elegance about his involvement in the struggle against the Mercatoria, a degree of gloriousness, a touch of the heroic.

Instead: muddle, confusion, stupidity, insane waste, pointless pain, misery and mass death — all the usual stuff of war, affecting him as it might affect anybody else, without any necessary moral reason, without any justice and even without any vindictive-ness, just through the ghastly, banal working-out of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, orbital mechanics and the shared nature of sentient beings existing and contending.

Perhaps he had brought it all down upon them. Never mind advising Slovius to get away from the Autumn House: his delve, his famous delve, the action of meeting Valseir and trading information might have produced all this. It might all be his fault. Taking all he’d been told at face value, it was.

He tried to laugh, but the gillfluid filling his mouth and throat and lungs wouldn’t let him, not properly. “Oh, come on then,” be tried to say into the gassy skies of Nasqueron (it came out as a hopeless mumble), “show me it’s all a sim, prove the Cessona’s right. End run. Game over. Lift me out.”

Still all just a mumble, a gurgling somewhere down in his throat as he half stood, half lay there in his coffin-shaped alcove in the little hovering gascraft, poised within the gas-giant’s atmosphere at a place where a human could expose themselves to the elements and not die too quickly, if they had something to breathe.

Revenge was a poor way out too, he thought through his tears. It was human nature, it was creat nature, it would be in the nature of almost any being capable of feeling angry and injured, but it was nearly as poor a way out as suicide. Self-serving, self-centred, selfish. Yes, if he was set in front of whoever had ordered the lobbing of a nuke at a house complex full of unarmed, unwarned civilians, he’d be tempted to kill them if he could, but it would not bring the dead back.

He never would have the opportunity, of course — again, reality scarcely ever worked that neatly — but if, in theory, he was presented with the chance, the fabled they’re-tied-to-a-chair-and-you’ve-got-a-gun scenario, able to hurt or kill whoever had killed most of those he’d loved, he might do it. There was an argument that it would only make him as bad as them, but then he knew that in a way he was already just as bad as them. The only moral reason for doing it would be to rid the world, the galaxy, the universe of one self-evidently bad person. As though there would ever be a shortage, as though that wouldn’t just leave the same niche for another.

And it would be a military machine, a hierarchy involved here, anyway. The responsibility would almost certainly diffuse out from whoever — or whatever group — had drawn up the relevant strategy through to whoever had given some probably vague order down to whoever had drawn up the general and specific targeting criteria, on down to some schmuck grunt or thoughtless technician who’d pressed a button or tapped a screen or thought-clicked an icon floating in a holo tank. And doubtless that individual would be a product of the usual hammer-subtle military induction and indoctrination process, breaking the individual down and building them back up again into a usefully obedient semi-automatic asset, sentimental towards their closest comrades, loyal only to some cold code. And, oh, how utterly sure you would have to be that they really were responsible in the first place, that you weren’t being fooled by whoever had arranged all this tying-to-a-chair stuff and equipped you with a gun in the first place.

Maybe automatics had slotted in the final target programming. Was he supposed to track down the programmer too and tie him up with whoever had given the attack-authorisation or dreamed up the whole wizzo plan for visiting Ulubis in the first place?

If it had really been Beyonders, it might have been an AI which was responsible for the deed, for who-knew-what reason. Why, he’d have to find it, turn the durn thing off. Though wasn’t the Mercatoria’s murderous attitude to AIs one of the reasons he hated it so much?

And maybe, of course, it had all been their mistake and his fault. Perhaps they’d thought they were going to hit an empty house and only his idiot advice, his meddling, had filled it with people. How to apportion the blame there?

His eyes were bad now, like sand had been thrown in them. He couldn’t really see anything, the tears were so thick. (He could still see via the collar, which was a strange experience, the tipped, clear view of the arrowhead’s senses overlaid on his body’s own.) He couldn’t kill himself. He had to go on, see what could be done, pay tribute, try to make up, try to leave the place even fractionally better than he’d found it, try to do whatever good he might be capable of.

He waited for the Truth to kick in, for the sim-run to end, and when it didn’t — as he’d known it wouldn’t but had almost hoped it would — he felt bitter, resigned and grimly amused all at once.

He told the little gascraft to tip back and seal him in again. The arrowhead angled backwards, closing the canopy and enveloping him once more, the shock-gel already moving to cushion and cosset him, tendrils of salve within it starting to heal and repair his flesh and soothe his weeping eyes. He thought the machine did it all with something like relief, but knew that was a lie. The relief was his.

“Ah, opinions differ as opinions should. Always have, do and will. Might we have been bred? Who knows? Maybe we were pets. Perhaps professional prey. Maybe we were ornaments, palace entertainers, whipping beings, galaxy-changing seed-machines gone wrong (these are some of our myths). Maybe our makers disappeared, or we overthrew them (another myth — vainglorious, overly flattering — I distrust it). Maybe these makers were some proto-plasmatics ? This, must be said, a pervasive one, a tenacious trope. Why plasmatics? Why would beings of the flux — stellar or planetary, no matter — wish to make something like us, so long ago? We have no idea. Yet the rumour persists.

“All we know is that we are here and we have been here for ten billion years or more. We come and we go and we live our lives at different rates, generally slower as we get older, as you good people have seen within these walls, but beyond that, why are we? What are we for? What is our point? We have no idea. You’ll forgive me; these questions seem somehow more important when applied to us, to Dwellers, because we do seem -well, if not designed, certainly, as one might say, prone to persisting, given to hanging about.

“No disrespect, do understand, but the selfsame questions applied to Quick, to humans or even — like-species apologies begged, dear colonel, accept — to oerileithe, have not the same force because you do not have our track record, our provenance, our sheer cussed, gratuitous, god-denying abidance. Who knows? Maybe one day you will! After all, the universe is still young, for all our shared egocentricity, our handed-down certitude of culmination, and perhaps when the Final Chronicles are written by our unknowable ultimate inheritors they will record that the Dwellers lasted a mere dozen billion years or so in the first heady flush of the universe’s infancy before they faded away to nothing, while the oerileithe and humans, those bywords for persistence, those doughty elongueurs, those synonyms for civilisational endurance, lasted two and three hundred billion years respectively, or whatever. Then the same questions might be asked of you: Why? What for? To what end? And — who can say! — perhaps for you, such being the case, there will be an answer. Better yet, one that makes sense.

“For now, though, we alone are stuck with such awkward challenges. Everybody else seems to come and go, and that appears natural, that is to be expected, that is the given: species appear, develop, blossom, flourish, expand, coast, shrink and fade. Cynics would say: ha! just nature, is all — no credit to claim, no blame to take, but I say huzzah! Good for all for trying, for taking part, for being such sports. But we? Us? No, we’re different. We seem cursed, doomed, marked out to outstay our welcome, linger in a niche that could as well fit many — yes, many! — others, making everybody else feel uncomfortable by our just still being here when by rights we should have shuffled off with our once-contemporaries long ago. It’s an embarrassment, I don’t mind admitting. I’m amongst friends, I can say these things. And anyway, I’m just an old mad Dweller, a tramp, an itinerant, a floatful plodder from place to place, worthy of nothing but contempt and handouts, both if I’m lucky, worse if I’m not. I try your patience. Forgive me. I get to talk to so few apart from the voices I make up.”

The speaker was an off-sequence Dweller of Cuspian age called Oazil. To be off-sequence was to have declared oneself -or, sometimes, to have been declared by one’s peers — uninterested in or apart from the usual steady progression of age and seniority that Dweller society assumed its citizens would follow. It was not by itself a state of disgrace — it was often compared to a person becoming a monk or a nun — though if it had been imposed on rather than chosen by a Dweller it was certainly a sign that they might later become an Outcast, and physically ejected from their home planet, a sanction which, given the relaxed attitude Dwellers displayed to both interstellar travel times and spaceship-construction quality control, was effectively a sentence of somewhere between several thousand years solitary confinement, and death.

Oazil was an itinerant, a tramp, a wanderer. He had entirely lost contact with a family he claimed to have anyway forgotten all details of, had no real friends to speak of, belonged to no clubs, sodalities, societies, leagues or groups and had no permanent home.

He lived, he’d told them, in his carapace and his clothes, which were tattered and motley but raggedly impressive, decorated with carefully painted panels depicting stars, planets and moons, preserved flowers from dozens of CloudPlant species and the polished carbon bones and gleaming, socketed skulls of various miniature gas-giant fauna. It was a slightly larger-scale and more feral collection of what Dwellers called life charms compared to the sort of stuff Valseir had worn save when there was some sort of formal event to attend.

When Fassin had first seen the Dweller tramp it had even occurred to him that Oazil was Valseir in disguise, come back in some attempted secrecy to taunt them all, see how they would treat a poor itinerant before revealing himself as the true owner of the house come to reclaim his lost estate. But Valseir and Oazil looked quite different. Oazil was bulkier, his carapace fractionally less symmetrical, his markings less intricate, his voice far deeper and his quota of remaining vanes and limbs quite different too. Most marked of all, Oazil’s carapace was much darker than Valseir’s. The two were of roughly similar age — Oazil would have been slightly junior to Valseir had he still been on-sequence: a Cuspian-baloan or Cuspian-nompar to Valseir’s Cuspian-choal — but he looked much older, darker and more weather-beaten, almost as dark as Jundriance, who was ten times his age but had spent much of his life as a scholar in slow-time, not wandering the atmosphere exposed to the elements.

Oazil towed behind him a little float-trailer — shaped like a small Dweller and similarly bedecked — in which he carried a few changes of apparel, some sentimentally precious objects and a selection of gifts which he had made, usually carved from OxyTreeCloud roots. He had presented one of these, shaped to resemble the bubble house itself, to Nuern, to pass on to Jundriance when next he left his depths of slow academe.

Nuern had not looked especially impressed to receive this small token. However, Oazil claimed that Valseir’s house had been a stopping-off point for him during his peregrinations for the last, oh, fifty or sixty thousand years or so. And there was anyway, especially away from cities, a tradition of hospitality towards wanderers that it would be profoundly kudos-sacrificing to ignore, certainly when there were other guests around to witness the insult.

“Will you stay long, sir?” Nuern asked.

“Yes, will you?” asked Livilido.

“Oh, no, I’ll be gone tomorrow,” Oazil told the younger Dweller. “This is, I’m sure, a fine house still, though of course I am sorry to hear that my old friend is no more. However, I become awkward when I spend too long in one place, and houses, though not as terrifying to me as cities, provoke in me a kind of restlessness. I cannot wait to be away when I am near a house, no matter how pleasant its aspect or welcoming the hosts.”

They were outside on one of the many balconies girdling the house living spaces. They had originally convened for a morning meal to welcome Oazil in the net-hung dining space. But the old Dweller had seemed uncomfortable from the start, edgy and a-twitch, and before the first course was over he had asked, embarrassed and plaintive, if he might dine outside, perhaps beyond a window they would open so that they could still converse face to face. He suffered from a kind of claustrophobia brought on by countless millennia spent wandering the vast unceilinged skies, and felt uncomfortable enclosed like this. Nuern and Livilido had swiftly ordered their younger servants to strike table and set the meal up on the nearest balcony.

They’d all gone outside, and — after voluminous apologies for seeming to force his will upon them — Oazil had settled down, enjoyed his meal, and, subsequent to sampling some aura-grains and timbre-trace from the narcotics in the table’s centrepiece -modelled on a globular university city — he had relaxed sufficiently to share with them all his thoughts on Dweller origins. It was a favourite after-meal topic with Dwellers, and so one there was effectively nothing original to say concerning, though, to give Oazil some credit, the subject had been his academic speciality before he’d slipped the moorings of scholastic life and set float upon the high skies of wander.

Hatherence asked the old Dweller his thoughts on whether his species had always been unable to experience pain, or had had this bred out of them.

“Ah! If we only knew! I am fascinated that you ask the question, for it is one that I believe is of the utmost importance in the determining of what our species really means in the universe…”

Fassin, resting lightly in a cushioned dent across the ceremonial table from the old wanderer, found his attention slipping. It seemed to do this a lot now. Perhaps a dozen Nasqueron days had elapsed since the news of the Winter House’s destruction. He had spent almost all that time in the various libraries, searching for anything that might lead to their goal, the (to him, at least) increasingly mythical-seeming third volume of the work that he had taken from here over two hundred years ago and which had, supposedly, led to so much that had happened since. He looked, he searched, he trawled and combed and scanned, but so often, even when it seemed to him that he was concentrating fully, he’d find that he’d spent the last few minutes just staring into space, seeing in his mind’s eye some aspect of the Sept and family life that was now gone, recalling an inconsequential conversation from decades ago, some at-the-time so-what? exchange that he would not have believed he’d ever have remembered, let alone have found brought to mind now, when they were all gone and he was in such a far and different place.

He felt the welling of tears in his eyes sometimes. The shock-gel drew them gently away.

Sometimes he thought again of suicide, and found himself longing, as though for a lost love or a treasured, vanished age, for the will, the desire, the sheer determination to end things that would have made killing himself a realistic possibility. Instead, suicide seemed as pointless and futile as everything else in life. You needed desire, the desire for death, to kill yourself. When you seemed to have no desire, no emotions or drives of any sort left — just their shadows, habits — killing oneself became as impossible as falling in love.

He looked up from the books and scrolls, the fiches and crystals, the etched diamond leaf and glowing screens and holos, and wondered what the point of anything was. He knew the standard answers, of course: people — all species, all species-types — wanted to live, wanted comfort, to be free from threat, needed energy in some form — whether it was as direct as absorbed sunlight or as at-a-remove as meat — desired to procreate, were curious, wanted enlightenment or fame and\or success and\or any of the many forms of prosperity, but — ultimately — to what end? People died. Even the immortal died. Gods died.

Some had faith, religious belief, even in this prodigiously, rampantly physically self-sufficient age, even in the midst of this universal, abundant clarity of godlessness and godlack, but such people seemed, in his experience, no less prone to despair, and their faith a liability even in its renunciation, just one more thing to lose and mourn.

People went on, they lived and struggled and insisted on living even in hopelessness and pain, desperate not to die, to cling to life regardless, as if it was the most precious thing, when all it had ever brought them, was bringing them and ever would bring them was more hopelessness, more pain.

Everybody seemed to live as though things were always just about to get better, as though any bad times were just about to end, any time now, but they were usually wrong. Life ground on. Sometimes to the good, but often towards ill and always in the direction of death. Yet people acted as though death was just the biggest surprise — My, who put that there? Maybe that was the right way to treat it, of course. Maybe the sensible attitude was to act as though there had been nothing before one came to consciousness, and nothing would exist after one’s death, as though the whole universe was built around one’s own individual awareness. It was a working hypothesis, a useful half-truth.

But did that mean that the urge to live was the result of some sort of illusion? Was the reality, in fact, that nothing mattered and people were fools to think that anything did? Were the choices either despair, the rejection of reason for some idiot faith, or a sort of defensive solipsism?

Valseir might have had something useful to say on the matter, Fassin thought. But then, he was dead too.

He looked at Oazil and wondered if this self-proclaimed wanderer really had known the dead Cuspian whose house this had been. Or was he just a chancer, a blow-hard, a fantasist and liar?

Thinking like this, circling round his studied despair, Fassin only half-listened to the old Dweller with his theories about gas-giant fauna development and his tales of wandering.

Oazil told how once he had circumnavigated the South Tropical Band without seeing another Dweller in all those hundred and forty thousand kilometres, how he had once fallen in with a gang of Adolescent Sculpture Pirates, semi-renegades who seeded public RootCloud and AmmoniaSluice forests, him becoming their figurehead, mascot, totem, and how, many millennia ago in the little-travelled wastes of the Southern Polar Region, he had wandered into a vast warren of empty CloudTunnel. (The work of a troop of rogue Tunnel-building machines since disappeared? An artwork? The lost prototype for a new kind of city? He didn’t know — nobody had ever heard of this place, this thing.) He was lost inside this vast tree, this giant lung, this colossal root system of a labyrinth for a thousand years, exiting eleven-twelfths starved and nearly mad. He had reported the find and people had looked for it but it had never been found again. Most people thought he’d imagined it all, but he had not. They believed him, did they not?

The tapping noise was there again. He had been vaguely aware of it but had ignored it, not even getting as far as dismissing it as some function of the house’s plumbing or differential expansion or reaction to some brief current in the surrounding gas. It had stopped after a while — he had half-noticed that, too, though still thought no more about it. Now it was there again, and slightly louder.

Fassin was in Library Three, one of the inner libraries, speed-reading through the contents of a sub-library that Valseir appeared to have picked up as part of a job lot untold ages ago. From the earliest date that anybody had bothered to note, this stuff had been lying around uncalled-up and unread for thirty millennia, dating from an era several different species of Slow Seers ago, long before humans had come to Ulubis. Fassin suspected this was traded material, data — second-hand, third-hand, who knew how many-hand — dredged from who knew where, possibly auto-translated (it certainly read like it whenever he dipped into the text itself, to make sure that the contents were what the abstracts claimed), bundled and presented and handed over to the Dwellers of Nasqueron by some long-superseded (possibly even long-extinct) species of Seer in return for — presumably — still older information. He wondered at what point most of the data the Dwellers held would become traded data, and if that point had already been reached. He was not the first Seer to think of this and, thanks to the absolute opaqueness of the Dwellers’ records, he would certainly not be the last.

The volumes he was checking were mostly composed of stories concerning the romantic adventures and philosophical musings of some group of Stellar Field Liners, though they were either much-translated or the work of not just another species but another species-type altogether. They seemed fanciful, anyway.

The tapping wasn’t going to go away.

He looked up from the screen to the round skylight set in the ceiling. Library Three, though now surrounded and surmounted by other spheres, had once been on the upper outskirts of the house and had a generous expanse of diamond leaf at its crown, though nowadays — even had the house been situated in less gloomy regions — it would let in little natural light.

There was something small and pale out there. When Fassin looked up the tapping stopped and the thing waved. It looked like a Dweller infant, a pet-child. Fassin watched it waving for a while, then went back to the screen and the not especially feasible exploits of the S’Liners. The tapping started again. He felt himself attempt to sigh inside his little gascraft. He stopped the screen scroll and lifted out of the dent-seat, rising to the centre of the ceiling.

It was indeed a Dweller child: a rather elongated, deformed-looking one, to human eyes more like a squid than a manta ray. It was dressed in rags and decorated with a few pathetic-looking life charms. Fassin had never seen an infant wearing clothes or decorations. It was oddly, maturely dark for one so young. It pointed in at what looked like some sort of catch or lock on the side of one of the skylight’s hexagonal panes.

Fassin looked at the curious infant for a while. It kept pointing at the catch. There had been no sign of pet-children round the house in all the time they’d been here. This one looked entirely like it might belong to Oazil, but he had not displayed any earlier, and hadn’t mentioned owning one. The child was still indicating the pane’s lock. It started to mime pressing and twisting and pulling motions.

Fassin opened the pane and let the creature in. It flipped inside, made a sign that was probably meant to be the Dweller equivalent of “Shh!” and floated towards him, curling and cupping its body so that it formed a sickle shape, just a metre away from the prow of the arrowhead craft. Then, on its signal skin, now shielded from sight in all directions save that Fassin was watching from, it spelled out,

OAZIL: MEET ME 2KM STRAIGHT DOWN, HOUR 5. RE. VALSEIR.

It waited till he light-signalled back OK, then it sped out the way it had come, one slim tentacle staying behind after the rest of it had exited just long enough to pull the ceiling pane shut after it. It disappeared into the night-time gloom between the dark library globes outside.

Fassin looked at the time. Just before hour Four. He went back to his studies, finding nothing, thinking about nothing, until just before five, when he went back to Library Twenty-One and slipped out through the secret doorway again. He dropped the two thousand metres down through the slowly increasing heat and pressure and met the old Dweller Oazil, complete with his float-trailer. Oazil signalled,

— Fassin Taak?

— Yes.

· What did Valseir once compare the Quick to? In some detail, if you please.

· Why?

The old Dweller sent nothing for some time, then, — You might guess, little one. Or do this just because I ask. To humour an old Dweller.

Fassin waited a while before answering. — Clouds, he sent, eventually. — Clouds above one of our worlds. We come and we go and we are as nothing compared to the landscape beneath, just vapour compared to implacable rock, which lasts seemingly beyond lasting and is always there long after the clouds of the day or the clouds of the season have long gone, and yet other clouds will always be there, the next day and the next and the next, and the next season and the next year and for as long as the mountains themselves last, and the wind and the rain wear away mountains in time.

· Hmm, Oazil sent, sounding distracted. — Mountains.

Curious idea. I have never seen a mountain.

· Nor ever will, I imagine. Do you want me to add any more?

I don’t think I recall much else.

· No, that will not be necessary.

· Then?

· Valseir is alive, the old Dweller said. — He sends his regards.

· Alive?

· There is a GasClipper regatta at the C-2 Storm Ultra-Violet 3667, beginning in seventeen days’ time.

· That’s in the war zone, isn’t it?

· The tournament was arranged long before the hostilities were first mooted and so has been cleared with the Formal War Marshals. A special dispensation. Be there, Fassin Taak. He will find you.

The old Dweller roted forward a metre, taking up the slack on the float-trailer’s traces. — Farewell, Seer Taak, he signalled. — Remember me to our mutual friend, if you’d be so kind.

He turned and floated away into the deep hot darkness. In a few moments he was lost to most passive senses. Fassin waited until there was no sign of him at all, then rose slowly back up to the house.

“Ah, Fassin, I understand commiserations are in order,” Y’sul said, floating up to the bubble house’s reception balcony from the Poaflias. Nuern, Fassin and Hatherence had watched the ship motor out of the dim haze, hearing its engines long before they’d seen it.

“Your sympathy is noted,” Fassin told Y’sul. He’d got Hatherence to call the Poaflias the day before and order it back from its hunting patrol. The little ship returned with a modest number of trophies strung from its rigging: various julmicker bladders, bobbing like grisly balloons on sticks, three gas-drying RootHugger hides, the heads of a brace of gracile Tumblerines and — patently the most prized, mounted above the craft’s nose — a Dweller Child carcass, already gutted and stretched wide on a frame so that it looked like some slightly grotesque figurehead, flying just ahead of the ship. Fassin had sensed the colonel’s esuit rolling fractionally back when she’d realised what the new addition to the Poaflias’s nose actually was.

“What is your state of mind, Fassin, now that you have lost so many of your family?” Y’sul asked, coming to a stop in front of the Seer. “Are you decided to return to your own people?”

“My state of mind is… calm. I may still be in shock, I suppose.”

“Shock?”

“Look it up. I have not decided to return to my own people yet. There are almost none to return to. We are, however, finished here. I wish to return to Munueyn.”

He’d told the colonel that morning that he’d discovered something and they needed to leave.

“What have you discovered, major? May I see it?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“I see. So where next are we bound?”

“Back to Munueyn,” he’d lied.

“Munueyn? Our captain will be pleased,” Y’sul said.

They left that evening. Nuern and Livilido seemed relaxed, positively cheered, that they were departing. Y’sul had returned with news of the war, in which two important Dreadnought actions had already taken place, resulting, in one engagement alone, in the loss of five Dreadnoughts and nearly a hundred deaths. The Zone forces were retreating in two volumes at least and the Belt certainly had the upper grasp at the moment.

Fassin and Hatherence recorded short messages of gratitude for Jundriance to read at his leisure.

Nuern asked them if they wanted to take any of the books or other works from the house.

“No, thank you,” Fassin said.

“I found this humorous thesaurus,” the colonel said, holding up a small diamond-leaf book. “I’d like this.”

“Be our guest,” Nuern told her. “Anything else? Diamond-based works like that will burn up in a few decades when the house has dropped further into the heat. Take all you want.”

“Over-kind. This alone is most sufficient.”

“The GasClipper regatta?” Captain Slyne said. He scratched his mantle. “I thought you wanted to go back to Munueyn?”

“There was no reason to let our hosts know where we were really heading,” Fassin told Slyne.

“You are suspicious of them?” Y’sul asked.

“Just no reason to trust them,” Fassin said.

“The regatta takes place around the Storm Ultra-Violet 3667, between Zone C and Belt 2,” the colonel said. “Starting in sixteen days. Have we time to get there, captain?”

They were in Slyne’s cabin, a fairly grand affair of flickering wall-screens and antique furniture, the ceiling hung with ancient ordnance: guns, blaster tubes and crossbows all swaying gently as the Poaflias powered away at half-throttle from Valseir’s old house. So far Fassin had told Hatherence where they were really going, though not why.

Slyne let himself tilt, looking as though he was about to fall over. He did some more mantle scratching. “Ithink so. I’d better change course, then.”

“Leave the course change for a little longer, would you?” Fassin asked. They were only a half-hour away from the bubble house. “Though you might go to full speed.”

“Have to anyway, if we’re to get to that Storm in time,” Slyne said, turning and manipulating a holo cube floating over his halo-shaped desk. The largest screen, just in front of him, lit up with a chart of the volume and quickly became covered in gently curved lines and scrolling figure boxes. Slyne peered at this display for a few moments, then announced: “Full speed, we can be there in eighteen days. Best I can do.” Slyne gripped a large, polished-looking handle sitting prominently on his desk and pushed it, with a degree of obvious relish, if also a little embarrassment, to its limit. The tone of the ship’s engines altered and the vessel began to accelerate gradually.

“We might contact Munueyn and hire a faster ship,” Y’sul suggested. “Have it rendezvous with the Poaflias en route and transfer to it.”

Slyne rocked back, staring at the older Dweller with patterns of betrayal and horror (non-mild) spreading across his signal skin.

“Eighteen days will have to do, captain,” Fassin told Slyne. “I don’t think we need be there for the very start of the tournament.”

“How long do these competitions last, in generality?” Hatherence asked.

Slyne tore his gaze from an unconcerned-looking Y’sul and said, “Ten or twelve days, usually. They might cut this one a little short because of the War. We’ll be there in time for most of it.”

“Good,” Fassin said. “Stay on your current course for another half-hour, if you please, captain. Turn for the Storm then.” Slyne looked happier. “Consider it done.”

Slyne took advantage of a WindRiver, a brief-lived ribbon of still faster current within the vast, wide jet stream of the whole rotating Zone, and they made good time. They were challenged twice by war craft but allowed to continue on their way, and slipped through a mine net, a wall of dark lace thrown across the sky, dotted with warheads. Dreadnought-catcher, nothing to worry them, Slyne assured them. They had, oh, tens of metres to spare on almost every side.

The screwburster Poaflias got to very near the bottom of the Storm called Ultra-Violet 3667 within sixteen days, arriving more or less as the regatta began.

“Keep clipped on! Could get a bit rough!” Y’sul yelled, then repeated the warning as a signal, in case they hadn’t heard.

Fassin and Hatherence had come up on deck when the Poaflias had started bucking and heaving even more than usual. The gas around them, darker even than it had been at Valseir’s house, though less dense and hot, was fairly shrieking through the ship’s vestigial rigging. Ribbons and streaks, just seen coiling briefly round the whole vessel, were then torn away again as the ship plunged into another great boiling mass of cloud.

The human and the oerileithe, still within the relative calmness of the companionway shelter, exchanged glances, then quickly put the crude-looking harnesses on. The colonel’s fitted well over her esuit. Fassin’s-tied tight enough but looked messy, not designed forhis alien shape. Slyne had insisted that everybody should wear the things whenever they went on deck while the Poaflias was at full speed, even though both Hatherence and Fassin — in the unlikely event that they were somehow blown off the deck — could easily have caught up with the ship under their own power.

“What’s going on?” Hatherence shouted as they neared Y’sul, clinging to the rails near the bow harpoon gun. “Going to shoot the storm!” Y’sul bellowed back. “That sounds dangerous!” Hatherence yelled. “Oh, assuredly!”

“So, what does it entail, exactly?”

“Punching through the storm wall,” Y’sul shouted. “Tackling the rim winds. Should be spectacular!” Ahead, a great dark wall of tearing, whirling cloud could be glimpsed beyond the tatters and scraps of gas that the ship was stabbing its way through. Jagged lines of lightning pulsed across this vast cliff like veins of quicksilver.

They were still making maximum speed towards the wall, which seemed to stretch as far to each side as they could see, and up for ever. Downwards was a more swirling mass of even darker gas, boiling like something cooking in a cauldron. The wind picked up, thrumming the rails and rigging and aerials like an enormous instrument. The Poaflias shuddered and buzzed. “Time to get below, suspect,” Hatherence shouted. A julmicker bladder blew off a nearby railing — it looked like it had been the last one left — smacked Y’sul across his starboard side and was instantly lost to the shrieking gale. “Could be,” Y’sul agreed. “After you.”

They watched from the ship’s armoured storm deck, crowded in with Slyne beneath a blister of thick diamond set at midships, looking out across the deck and watching the Poaflias’s nose plunge into the storm like a torpedo thrown at ahorizontal waterfall of ink. The ship groaned, started to spin, and they were all thrown against each other. They disappeared into the wall of darkness. The Poaflias shook and leapt like a Dweller child on the end of a harpoon line.

Slyne whooped, pulling on levers and whirling wheels. Stuck in the far reaches of the ovaloid space, Slyne’s pet-children whimpered.

“This entirely necessary?” Fassin asked Y’sul. “Doubt it!” the Dweller said. A big flat board covered in studs above Slyne started to light up. In the darkness, it was quite bright…

Hatherence pointed at it as dozens more of the studs lit. “What’s that?”

“Damage-control indicators!” Slyne said, still working levers and spinning wheels. They all rose to the ceiling as the ship dropped sharply, then crashed back down again.

“Thought it might be,” Hatherence said. She was thrown hard against Fassin in a violent turn, and apologised.

When the glare started to get too distracting, Slyne turned the damage-control board off.

In the worst of the turbulence, one of Slyne’s pet-children threw itself at its master and had to be torn off and smacked unconscious before being thrown into a locker. It was unclear whether it had been desperately seeking comfort or attacking. Y’sul was sick. Fassin had never seen a Dweller be sick. Stuck to the ceiling again, coated in a greasy film of vomit, Slyne cursing as he tried to keep hold of the controls, his pet-children keening from all sides, somebody mumbled, “Fuck, we’re going to die.” They all denied responsibility afterwards. The Poaflias burst out of the torrent of storm cloud into a vast and hazy calm and started to drop like a lump of iron. Slyne drew in gas to whoop but caught some of Y’sul’s earlier output and just spluttered. Coughing and retching and cursing Y’sul’s lineage to some point only shortly after the Big Bang, he got the ship level and under control, contacted Regatta Control and limped — the ship had lost all its rigging, railings and four of its six engines — to the Lower Marina and a berth in a Storm Repair Facility.

Looking up, into the colossal bowl of the circling storm and on into the haze and the star-specked sky beyond, tiny shapes could be seen, slow-circling against the brassy glare of light.

— The pick-up fleet and relaying craft are all in orbit, Hatherence told him.

They were in a steep-pitched, multi-tiered viewing gallery packed with Dwellers. Protected by carbon ribs ready to be explosively deployed should a competition craft come too close — and attached to the Dzunda, a klick-long Blimper riding just inside the storm-wall boundary — the gallery was a relatively safe place to watch GasClipper races. Giant banner screens could scroll up on either side of the fan of dent-seats to provide highlights of other races and relay events too distant to witness directly.

· The pick-up fleet? Fassin asked.

· That is as it was described to me, Hatherence said, settling into her seat alongside his. Dwellers around them were staring at them, seemingly fascinated by their alienness. Y’sul had gone off to meet an old friend. While he was with them, Dwellers only glanced at Fassin and Hatherence now and again. With him gone, they stared shamelessly. They had both got used to it, and Fassin was confident that, if Valseir was here and looking for him, he wouldn’t have too difficult a job finding him.

· How big a fleet? Fassin asked.

· Not sure.

There were hundreds of accommodation and spectator Blimpers within the storm’s vast eye, scores of competing GasClippers and support vessels, plus dozens of media and ancillary craft, not to mention a ceremonial — and War-neutral — Dreadnought, the Puisiel. This was decked out with multi-tudinous bunting, lines of ancient signal flags and festoons of Dweller-size BalloonFlowers, just so that there’d be no possi-bility of anyone mistaking it for a Dreadnought taking part in the greater and fractionally more serious competition taking place beyond the Storm.

The side screens lit up and they watched some early action from a race which had taken place the day before. Around them, a thousand Dwellers hooted and roared and laughed, threw food, made spoken kudos bets that they would later deny or inflate accordingly, and traded insults.

· Any other news from outside? Fassin asked.

· Our orders remain as they were. There have been more semi-random attacks throughout the system. Nothing on the same scale as the assaults on the Seer assets earlier. The defen-sive preparations continue apace. Manufacturers continue to make heroic efforts. The people continue to make great but willing sacrifice. Morale remains most high. Though, unofficially, people would seem to be growing more frightened. Some rioting. Deep-space monitors have picked up still ambiguous traces of a great fleet approaching from the direction of the E-5 Disconnect.

— How great?

— Great enough to be bad.

— Much rioting?

— Not much rioting.

The Blimper powered up, distantly revving its engines. A ragged cheer resounded around them as the Dwellers realised things were about to start happening.

· Well, major, the colonel sent, signal strength low in the clat-tering hubbub of noise. — We are finally off the ship Poaflias, we are alone, I think it unlikely we can be overheard, and I have built up an extravagant desire to know quite why we are here. Unless you have, in the course, perhaps, of your studies, discov-ered that you are an insatiable fan of GasClippering.

· According to Oazil, Valseir is alive.

The colonel was silent for a while. Then she sent, — You tell me so, do you?

· Of course, Oazil may be mad or deluded or a fantasist or just a mischief-maker, but from what he said he knew Valseir, or had at least been instructed by Valseir on what to ask me to make sure I really was who I claimed to be.

· I see. So, his turning up at the house was not chance?

· I suspect he’d been keeping a watch on it. Or somebody had, waiting for us — for me — to turn up.

· And he told you to come here?

· He did.

· And then?

· Valseir will find me.

Another cheer went up as the Dzunda began to pick up speed, becoming part of a small fleet of similar spectator craft flocking through the gas towards the starting grid of GasClippers arranged a couple of kilometres ahead. This would be a short race, only lasting an hour or so, with turns around buoys set in the Storm Wall. The races would grow longer and more gruelling as the meet progressed, culminating in a last epic struggle all the way round the vast storm’s inner surface.

· So Valseir knew you were or might be looking for him,

and had put in place arrangements to… Hmm. That is inter-esting. Any contact so far?

· Not yet. But now you know why we’re here.

· You will keep me informed?

· Yes. Though you will understand if I have to go off by myself at some point, I hope. Your presence might make Valseir, or whoever, nervous.

The Blimper picked up more speed, still heading towards the storm-inward side of the starting grid. The slipstream started to blow away balloons and trays not secured.

· Nervous? You think this is all that… serious?

· What do you think?

· I think Oazil is probably one or several of the things you thought he might be. However, we are here now and if he was telling the truth no doubt you will be contacted. Of course, the other possibility is that we might have been getting close to something of interest back at Valseir’s house and this was simply a method of getting us out of the way. What exactly did Oazil say to you?

Fassin had kept a record of the conversation he’d had with the wandering Dweller, deep beneath the house. He signalled it across to Hatherence.

The fleet of spectator craft passed by the starting grid like an unruly flock of fat birds. Another great cheer sounded. The GasClippers stayed on the starting plane, awaiting their own signal.

· Still, little enough to go on, major, Hatherence told him. — You should have shared this with me earlier and let me decide on the correct course of action. I may have been overly indul-gent with you. Your loss is still something I appreciate, of course. However, I fear I might have been guilty of dereliction.

· I won’t report you if you don’t, Fassin sent, without humour.

The GasClippers — the larger, plural-crewed versions of the single-Dweller StormJammers — were sharp, angular-looking things, all jag-sails, keel-lode and high-gallants. Fifty metres long — fifty metres in most directions — bristling with glittering sails like enormous blades, they looked like the result of some monstrous permanent magnet being thrown into a hopper full of exotic edged weapons. Pennant sails carried identifying marks, little flowers of colour within the silvery blades, all bright beneath the glittering point of light that was Ulubis.

It was not possible to sail in a single medium. True sailing required a keel (or something like one) in one medium, and sails (or something like them) in another. In a single great stream of gas, you could not sail: you flew. On the edges of two streams, the boundary between a zone moving in one direction and a belt moving in the other, you could, in theory, sail, if you could build a ship big enough. The Dwellers had tried to build ships on that scale that would stay together. They had failed.

Instead, StormJammers and GasClippers exploited the titanic magnetic fields that most gas-giant planets possessed. Flux lines were their water, the place where their steadying keels lay. With a colossal magnetic field trying to move them along one course and the planet-girdling atmospheric bands of a Dweller-inhabited gas-giant expecting them to move along with everything else in a quite different direction, the possibility of sailing arose. And by sailing with sails dipped into the inside edges of giant storm systems, the sport could be made satisfactorily dangerous.

· We must hope that this was not a ruse to get us away from the house, the colonel told Fassin. — And we must hope that Valseir will indeed contact you. If he is alive. We were given no hint that such might be the case. She looked at him. — Were we?

· None.

Almost the entire fleet of spectator craft had passed the starting grid. The GasClippers shook as one, then — bewilderingly quickly, when one knew they had no proper engines -they swung away towards the massive wall of dark, tearing cloud that was the inner limit of the great storm, peeling and jostling, weaving and carving through the gas as they fought for position, using the light breezes and simple gaseous inertia of the medium to allow them to steer while they rode their lines of force towards the storm wall.

— They never did find a body, though. This is right? Hatherence asked.

· That’s right, Fassin told her. — Lost in a squall that could tear apart a StormJammer he wouldn’t have had much of a chance, but he might have lived.

· Yet there is no… water or the like? They cannot drown, and it is not too cold or hot. How do they die, just in a strong wind?

· Ripped apart, spun until they lose consciousness and then just whirled round too fast to hold together. Or left in a coma that means they do drop into the Depths. And they do need to breathe. If the pressure is too low, they can’t.

· Hmm.

The GasClippers swung at the storm’s inner surface, half disappearing as their extending blade-sails cut into the stream of gas. They accelerated hard. Even with their head start and their bellowing engines labouring, even taking a shorter, inner-curve route, the spectator craft began to lose ground to the small fleet of speeding GasClippers.

· It is possible that Valseir somehow arranged the accident? the Colonel asked.

· Possible. He might have arranged to have some friend, some accomplice nearby, to rescue him. It would make surviving likely rather than not.

· Do Dwellers often fake their own deaths?

· Almost never.

· So I thought.

The group of GasClippers was level with the centre of the greater fleet of spectator ships and the shouting and hollering in the spectator craft rose still further in pitch and volume as the whole mass of GasClippers and their accompanying squadrons of Blimpers and ancillary vessels seemed to move briefly as one, the dark storm wall a vertical sea, troubled and tattered, tearing past in front of them. A vast slanting band of shade rose up to meet them all as they moved into the shadow of the storm, the hazy point of Ulubis eclipsed by a roaring circlet of dementedly gyrating gas a hundred klicks high and ten thousand kilometres across.

“Fassin. Made any bets yet?” Y’sul said, settling into his dent-seat alongside. A pet-child in a waiter’s uniform floated with a tray at his side, held back until the older Dweller settled into his seat, then left the tray with its drug paraphernalia clipped to the seat and retreated.

“No. I’d be relying on your kudos, wouldn’t I?”

“Oh! I suppose you would,” Y’sul agreed, apparently only now thinking this through. “Obviously I must trust you subconsciously. Most odd.” He flipped to one side and started rummaging through the various drug works he’d brought back.

“How was your friend?” Hatherence asked him.

“Oh, in very good spirits,” Y’sul said, not looking at her. “Father died yesterday in action. Stands to inherit kudos points for bravery or something.” He kept on rummaging. “Sworn I got some FeverBrain…”

“Good to know he’s taking it so well,” Fassin said.

“Ah! Here we are,” Y’sul said, holding up a large bright orange capsule to take a good look at it. “Oh yes, Fassin: bumped into some youngster who claimed to know you. Gave me this.” Y’sul dug into a pocket in his forebritch and came out with a tiny image-leaf, passing it to Fassin.

The human held it in one of the gascraft’s fine-scale manipulators and looked at the photograph. It was of white clouds in a blue sky.

“Yes, colour’s all wrong, obviously,” Y’sul commented. “Couldn’t help noticing.”

Fassin was aware of the colonel looking at the image too. She sat back, silent.

“Did this person who claimed to know me actually say anything?” Fassin asked.

“Eh?” Y’sul said, still studying the finger-sized orange lozenge. “Oh, yes. Said to take good care of that thing, and that they’ll be in the stern viewing-gallery restaurant if you wanted to see them. Alone, they said. Bit rude, I thought. Very young, though. Almost expect that.”

“Well, thanks,” Fassin said.

“Nothing,” Y’sul said with a wave. He popped the giant pill.

· With your permission, colonel, Fassin sent to Hatherence.

· Granted. Take care.

“Excuse me,” Fassin said as he rose from his dent-seat. Y’sul didn’t hear; two of the leading GasClippers were having a private duel, swerving dangerously close, weaving in and out of each other’s course, trying to tangle field lines, steal wind and so eddy-wake the other into dropping behind or crashing out, and Y’sul was floating high up out of his seat, shouting and whooping with all the other spectators not yet in their own little narcotic world.

The Dweller — a youth by his simple clothing and certainly looking at least that young — intercepted Fassin on the broad central corridor of the Dzunda, falling into pace with him as he made his way towards the rear of the ship. Fassin turned fractionally towards his sudden companion, kept on going.

“Seer Taak?” the youth said.

“Yes.”

“Would you come with me, please?”

Fassinfollowed the young Dweller not to the stern viewing restaurant but to a private box slung low beneath the Blimper. The captain of the Dzunda was there, talking to an old Dweller who looked to be at least early Sage in years. The captain turned when Fassin and the youth entered, then — with a small bow to Fassin — left with the youth, leaving Fassin alone in the round, diamond-bubble space with the aged Dweller. A few screens showed silent views of the race. A float tray to one side carried a large narcincenser, grey-blue smoke uncoiling from it, filling thecabin with haze and scent.

“Is it you, old one?”

“I am still me, young Taak,” the familiar voice said.

The Dweller floated up to him. If it was Valseir, he was no more shrunken but rather more dark than the last time Fassin had seen him. He had lost all the life charms and decorations and was dressed now in severely formal, almost monastic yellow part-robes.

“You have the token I sent?”

Fassin handed over the little image-leaf. The Dweller looked at it, rim mantle rippling in a smile. “Yes, you still wear us away, don’t you?” He handed it back. “Take good care of that. And so, how was Oazil? I take it he found you at the house and you’re not here by coincidence.”

“He was well. Eccentric, but well.”

The old Dweller’s smile grew, then faded. “And the house? My libraries?”

“They are sinking into the Depths. What’s left.”

“What’s left?”

“A bit was missing.”

“Ah. The study”

“What happened to it?”

“The CloudTunnel started to get too heavy to maintain. I had the house decoupled. I cleared the study first. The tunnel section fell into the Depths.”

“And the contents?”

The old Dweller roted back a fraction, creating small roils of smoke in the haze. “You are still testing me, aren’t you, Fassin Taak? You are still not prepared to trust me that I am who you think I am.”

“Who do I think you are?”

“Your — I thought — old friend, Valseir, once choal, now acting like a Sage-child and hoping for the confirmation of my peers if I ever get to come out of hiding. Do you think I will ever get to come out of hiding, Seer Taak?”

“That depends.” Beyond the old Dweller, the GasClipper race continued, well ahead of the labouring Blimper. Screens relaying signals from camera jets showed the action in close-up. The sounds of distant cheers came through the open diamond-pane windows of the private box. “Why did you go into hiding?”

The Dweller switched to signal-whispering. — Because I thought to skim through what I’d traded you for the Expressionist paintings you had brought. I read a certain note at the end of a certain volume. Which reminds me that I must apologise. It was not my intention to seem to fob you off with three different translations of the same volume instead of all three parts of the one work. However, read that note I did, and came to the conclusion that what was being referred to was the sort of information that people die for, and most certainly will kill for. I decided to disappear. I became dead.

“Sorry I doubted you, Valseir,” Fassin said, moving forward and holding out two manipulators towards the old Dweller.

“Suspicious to the last,” sighed Valseir, ignoring the left manipulator and shaking the right with his own extended right hub-arm. “There; how humans greet. Are you satisfied now, Seer Taak?”

Fassin smiled. “Entirely. Good to see you again.”

— You must feel emotional pain, then. I feel sorry for you.

— I am trying not to feel too sorry for myself. Which is helped by getting on with what needs to be done.

Fassin had told Valseir about the attacks on Third Fury and Sept Bantrabal. Valseir had related his life since they had last met, a time dominated by the Dweller List in a way that even Fassin’s hadn’t been until recently. Most of that period he had spent in hiding, after arranging what looked like his own death with the help of Xessife, the Dweller captain whom Fassin had seen briefly earlier. He was an old StormSailor, a Jammerhand and Clipperine with a collection of trophies and medals that outweighed him. Retired now, pursuing a more contemplative course, content to take charge of a Blimper now and again just to stay part of the whole StormSailing scene.

· And what needs to be done, Seer Taak?

· I think we need to find that third volume. Do you still have it?

· I do not. However, it is not the third volume itself that is of consequence in this matter.

· Then what is?

· A note, a brief appendix.

— Do you have that?

— No.

— Do you know where it is?

— No.

· Then we may all, to use a human term, be fucked.

· I do know the direction it went in.

· That could help.

· You agree that it may be that important? That we may all be “fucked’ without it?

· Oh, we may very well all be thoroughly fucked with it, but without it, while people think this thing exists, they will do terrible things to anybody who gets in their way or isn’t being what they regard as a hundred per cent helpful. My minder here, an oerileithe Ocula colonel, tells me there’s a fleet of Mercatoria warships over Nasqueron. The excuse is they’re here to help pick up me and her, but I think they might have another purpose.

· Military intervention?

· The instant they think there might be a firm lead towards the List.

· Well, we must try not to furnish them with one. I must also try not to furnish my fellow Dwellers with an excuse for regarding me as the most terrible traitor for even thinking of passing on anything to do with the thing in question to alien powers, even if my own studies and those of many others indi-cate that the data being sought is hopelessly out of date or a fantasy, or both. However, I do need to tell somebody which direction to point in, or I may have to stay dead for ever.

· Fate seems to dictate that it’s me you tell. Where do I go?

· Ah. Now then. I must explain. When I realised what was being referred to in the note in the first volume, I naturally looked for volume three. Well, at least I did so after spending some days in a state of horror and rage, realising that through no fault of my own — save the usually harmless hobby of biblio-philia — I had potentially unleashed something capable of destroying much, starting with my own quite happy and content life. This episode over, I devoted myself to my search and discovered the volume eventually. I have never had such cause to curse my own lackadaisical approach to cataloguing. The relevant piece was in the form of a separate folder attached within the appendices. I myself took the original of the folder to a friend and fellow collector in the city of Deilte, in the South Polar Region, contained within a safekeep box which I asked him to look after for me, and not to open. In the event of my death, he was to hand the safekeep box on to somebody he in turn would trust not to open the box. A family member or some other trusted person would appear in due course carrying an image-leaf with a particular image in it. The one you now carry. They were to be given the box.

— So would your friend in Deilte have known of your death?

I didn’t.

· Perhaps, perhaps not. He is an antiquarian data-collector like myself, but a recluse. He may have heard through mutual acquaintances.

· Right, Fassin sent. — So I must make for Deilte. What was your friend’s name?

· Chimilinith.

The name was barely out of Valseir’s signal pit when Fassin registered a neutrino burst.

· Any particular part of Deilte? he asked, starting to look round in more detail.

· Chimilinith tended to move his house around. But I imagine the locals will know of him.

· Okay. So, did you take a look at this data? What did it look like?

The diamond-bubble private box was nearly empty: just the two of them, the float-tray and bowl — he’d scanned them automatically when he’d entered and they were just what they appeared to be, no more — and the screens, which also seemed perfectly standard. Who’d be using neutrino comms? From where? Why the sudden burst, just then?

— It looked like algebra.

Fassin scanned Valseir’s simple clothes. No hint of anything high-tech there. The most sophisticated thing in his robes was the weave itself.

— Algebra? he asked.

There was nothing on the inside or the outside surface of the diamond bubble itself. He scanned the access tube. Clear.

— It looked like alien algebra, Valseir told him.

Fassin looked up at the undersurface of the Blimper immediately above, then swept for anything in the clear gas space outside within the same radius. Still nothing. Something further outside, then.

— Alien? he asked, distracted.

There seemed to be nothing nearby. There was the Dzunda, then nothing for a hundred metres or so until the next Blimper, then the other spectator and ancillary craft beyond — with the single accompanying Dreadnought Puisiel a few klicks further up in the atmosphere, easily keeping pace with the spectating fleet — then the GasClippers themselves, currently starting to round the Storm Wall buoy which marked this short race’s first turning point.

· Alien symbology. Though not entirely. I thought I recognised some of the symbols. They looked like a form of Translatory IV, a pan-species type, so-called “universal’ notation dating from perhaps two billion years ago, invented by the Wopuld — long extinct invert spongiforms — though with elements of ancient Dweller icons. I would have made notes, but I thought better of committing any of it to a form I could carry around save what exists — necessarily sketchy — in my own mind. Hence I have not been able to work on it since.

Fassin was taking in what was being said — and recording it on the gascraft’s systems in case he wanted to review it later -but he was still frantically scanning the volume all around them for some form of bug or surveillance device. Another burst of what certainly seemed like neutrino comms registered on the little gascraft’s sensors; a sudden pattern in the general wash of near-massless particle chaos.

The first burst had come immediately Valseir had spoken the name of the Dweller he’d given the folder to. Could it really just have been coincidence? But how could anybody have overheard? They were communicating by whisper signal, coherent light beams flickering from one surface-sunk transceiver pit to another. There was no way to intercept what they were saying unless someone dropped a mirror or some sensor into the beams.

Could it be him? Had the gascraft itself been bugged? Had Hatherence put something on him? He scanned and system-checked, finding nothing.

The Blimper above them ascended quickly and steadily as the GasClippers roared up the sheer face of the storm. The Dzunda rose into direct sunlight.

— So, just a field of equations ? Fassin asked the old Dweller.

The drug-fume haze in the private box was suddenly lit up, resolving into tiny individual particles of vapour, a tiny fraction of them glinting and glittering.

— Possibly just the one long one.

Horrified, Fassin sucked a little of the surrounding vapour into the arrowhead’s high-res analysis unit.

— One piece of algebra? he asked.

The results coming from the gascraft’s high-tech nose looked bizarre, surface receptors seeming to change their mind about what they were smelling. Fassin toggled the analysis down another level of detail to electron microscopy.

— Possibly, Valseir replied.

Outside, towards the Storm Wall, a few tens of metres away, something showed, briefly caught in the slanting sunlight and taking just an instant too long to adapt to the new lighting conditions.

The results from the arrowhead’s internal electron microscope were for a moment baffling. Then Fassin realised what his analysis unit was looking at. Nanotech. A thin soup of tiny machines, receptors, analysers, processors and signallers, small enough to be suspended in the atmosphere, light enough to float in the midst of the drug smoke like particles of the fumes themselves. That was how they’d been bugged. There was something in the gas between them, riding right in the middle of their signal beams and capable of picking up their meaning. Nothing as gross as a mirror or some photon microphone dangling from a wire, just this, just these, just stuff that was supposed to be banned.

— Valseir, he sent urgently. — Who brought this drug bowl in here?

He turned up visual magnification, staring hard at the point in the open gas outside, where something had shown in the sunlight an instant before. There. He up-magged again, almost to the point of graininess.

— What? Valseir said, sounding confused. — Well, it was here when I -

A rough sphere, forty metres away, barely ten centimetres across, almost perfectly camouflaged, like a disc of clear glass in front of the real view. Hint of a comms pit, a tiny crater-like dish, pointing right at them. Fassin swung round to put himself between the tiny, distant machine and the old Dweller, then went right up to him, comms pit to comms pit like amorous Dwellers kiss-signalling.

Valseir tried to rote back. — What the — ?

· We’ve been bugged, Valseir, Fassin sent. — Watched, listened to. The bowl smoke is part nanotech. We need to get out, now.

· What? But -

Another burst of neutrino comms. Now that he knew where to look, it was definitely coming from the camouflaged sphere outside.

— Out, Valseir. Now.

And another burst. This time from above. High above. Valseir pushed Fassin away. — The bowl smoke… ?

— Get out! Fassin sent, pushing the old Dweller towards the access port in the top of the diamond bubble box.

Outside, the little sphere was rushing towards them. Fassin got underneath Valseir and forced him upwards.

— Fassin! All right! Valseir started to rise under his own power, entering the vertical access tube. The little sphere burst through the diamond bubble, shards spraying. It came to a stop just inside the jagged hole, still disguised, just a blur in the air.

“Major Taak!” it shouted. “This is General Linosu of the Shrievalty Ocula. This device is under the control of the Nasqueron Expeditionary Force. Don’t be alarmed. We’re coming down to—”

The voice cut off as the little sphere was pierced by a hair-thin line of cerise light. The noise resounded, sharp and sudden, round the diamond bubble enclosure. Debris flew from the tiny machine, rattling against the far side of the private box. Fassin whirled to see Hatherence dropping down round the side of the Dzunda, carapace silvered. The laser beam had come from her. The little spherical device dropped its disguise, revealing itself as a mirror-finish machine with stubby wings. It had a tiny hole in one flank, a much larger one on the far side, producing smoke. It rolled over in the air, made a crackling noise, then dropped to the transparent floor. Above him, Fassin was aware of Valseir hesitating in the access tube. Slipstream wind whistled in through the hole in the diamond bubble.

The colonel swung quickly in towards them. — You all right, major? she signalled, stopping immediately outside, buffeted by the slipstream. She tipped to look at the device lying rolling on the clear curved floor of the box.

— Shit, she sent. — That looks like one of ours. There was a white flash, as though from everywhere at once, blinding Fassin for an instant. As the light faded Hatherence was already falling away, tumbling like a dropped stone through the gas. Something moved, faster than the GasClippers, across the StormWall face, carving in towards the Blimper.

When the colonel had fallen twenty metres below the private box, a line of searing yellow-white light flicked into existence between the incoming machine and Hatherence’s esuit, which erupted in fire and blew apart. The fast-moving device looked like a small gascraft or missile, sharp and finned. Its exhaust flared bright as it powered round.

Fassin looked down to see Hatherence. She was a dark, ragged manta shape falling, whirling downwards amongst the smoking debris of the destroyed esuit. She seemed to twist in the air, flicking round, something glinting in a stubby tentacle; a violet beam lanced towards the finned craft, missing by a metre. Another white line from the machine speared the colonel, obliterating her in a sun-bright burst of light.

Valseir had cleared the access tube. Fassin blasted up it like a shell up a gun barrel, letting the pulse of down draught tear the diamond bubble box out in a convulsive explosion of wreckage that whipped away from the Dzunda and followed the remains of the colonel and her esuit towards the storm’s concave base and the Depths beyond.

Valseir was waiting in the broad corridor above. “Fassin! What is going on?”

“How do we get off this thing?” he asked, taking the old Dweller by the hub-arm and leading him towards the next vertical access.

“Do we really need to?”

“Something’s attacking us, Valseir.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. So how do we get off?”

“What’s wrong with roting?”

“Bit vulnerable. I was thinking of a craft.”

“Well, I’m sure we can arrange a taxi. Or one of the Blimper’s own skiffs. I’ll ask Captain Xessife.”

“No,” Fassin said. “Not Captain Xessife.”

“Why not?”

“Somebody had to put that drug bowl there.”

They got to the vertical. “But…’ Valseir hesitated. “Wait, what’s that noise?”

Fassin could hear a deep warbling sound coming from various directions. “That could be an alarm.” He indicated the tube above. “After you. Let’s move.”

They were halfway up the vertical to the central corridor when the Dzunda lurched. “Oh-oh,” Valseir said.

“Keep going.”

When they got to the main concourse, the alarm noise was louder. Dwellers were shouting at each other, picking up dropped trays, food and drugs and staring at some of the wall-screens. Fassin looked too. “Oh fuck,” he said quietly.

The screens showed confused pictures of the surroundings, not all the cameras and screens now focusing on the still continuing GasClipper race. One camera seemed to be following a slim, finned craft, the one which had attacked Hatherence, as it circled the Blimper.

Other screens showed ships, dozens of dark ships, dropping from the sky.

They were gas-capable Mercatoria spacecraft, some as little as fifty metres long, others three or four times that size; soot-black ellipsoids with thick wings and sleek but rudimentary tailplanes and engine pods. They were diving towards the Blimper fleet, two or three peeling off every vertical klick or so to circle, guarding. Much higher above — another snatched camera angle, drifting out of focus then snapping clear more slick shapes gyrated above the high haze layer, like scavengers over carrion.

Another screen’s view spun, then settled, jerking, on the spec-tating fleet’s accompanying Dreadnought, the Puisiel, whose turrets were swinging, gun barrels elevating. A yellow white beam flicked on and off, boring straight through the war craft, making it shudder and sending shock waves running along its outer fabric. The beam hit the Storm Wall beyond at almost the same time, raising a dark puff of vapour like a bruise, quickly whipped away. The GasClippers seemed to have disappeared. “What in all the gods’ farts is going on?” Valseir asked. They had come to a stop, transfixed by the screens like most of the rest of the people in the concourse.

The Puisiel’s turrets and guns continued to swing round for a moment, then came to rest, seemingly pointing in random directions.

“Oh, don’t,” Fassin said.

The Dreadnought’s guns flashed, gouting fire and smoke. Smaller shapes dropped away from it at the same time, half obscured by the wreathing broadside smoke clouds, and then pulsed fire and smoke from their rears and started curving up and out towards the dropping spacecraft. Screens blinked. The dark, descending spacecraft glittered with light. Midway between the Puisiel and the scatter of black ships, piercing white lines ended in sudden detonations, filling the gas above and around the spectating fleet with black bursts of smoke.

A screen swung to show one turning spacecraft dropping, trailing smoke. Dwellers started yelling. Trays, food, drugs and pet-children were sent flying, carapace skins blazed naked signals of excitement and fury and whiffs of war-lust filled the air as though a series of tiny scent-grenades had gone off along the concourse. A black dot trailing a haze of exhaust sailed in towards the crippled spacecraft but was picked off from above in a blast of light. Then something still smaller and faster darted across the screen and hit the ship, detonating inside and tearing it entirely in half; the two torn sections flew down towards the Depths, dangled on elongating strings of smoke. The other missiles were picked off even more easily, swatted like slow insects.

Fassin started pulling Valseir away. Dwellers all around them howled and barked at the screens and started taking bets. Distant concussive thumps and longer roars sounded throughout the concourse, bringing the long-delayed battle sounds to accompany the near-instant visuals.

Dark glitterings, everywhere. The Dreadnought lit up all along its length, speckled with fire. The beams lanced it, plunging on into the Storm Wall, freckling bruises across the stir of dark gas. About a third of a last broadside, most of it aimed at where the fallen spaceship had been, punched out from the Puisiel a fraction of a second before the first beams hit. The great vessel shook like a leaf in a storm, then started to drop even as further rays riddled it. A final beam, less bright, much broader, punched through the whole central section, folding the craft about its middle and sending it flowing and spiralling downwards. A few tiny double discs drifted away from the stricken war craft and roted away or just fell, some trailing smoke. Some were hit by further beams of light, vanishing in miniature explosions.

“Valseir, move,” Fassin whispered in the sudden silence. “We have to get away. Just get to the outside.” They were almost level with a 45° up-access tube. Fassin nudged Valseir towards it. “This way.” He didn’t even know if they really should get away. Maybe they were still somehow safer here in the Blimper. At least closer to the outside they might have more choice.

Valseir allowed himself to be pushed towards the slope of the access tube. The lowest part of the fleet of dark ships was now almost level with the top of the spectating fleet. Howls started to fill the concourse. Fassin and Valseir were being held back from the tube entrance by a stream of Dwellers coming in the other direction.

Fassin continued to push the old Dweller, though they both kept looking back at the screens. One of the dark ships circled gradually closer to the Storm Wall. Near its closest approach, a GasClipper came hurtling out of the dark curtain of whirling gas, blade sails extended like a frozen gleaming explosion. It rammed the dark warship amidships, hammering into it and pushing the two craft across the sky in a single tangled flailing mass. Still locked in their terrible embrace, the two craft started to fall away with everything else, heading for the foot of the storm’s great dark well and the hot crush of gas beneath.

More screams and barks of joy echoed round the concourse.

Another camera, another screen: a section of the StormWall was bulging, dark gas streaming around some huge rounded cone forcing its way through the storm as though it wasn’t there.

A huge Dreadnought flowed out of the storm, trailing streamers of gas like vast banners. Shrieks of encouragement and great, air-quaking cheers resounded down the wide tunnel of the concourse, making it resonate like a vast organ pipe. The new Dreadnought silvered in an instant, white beams scattering off it as it flew into the clear gas heart of the storm’s colossal eye.

“Fuck me,” Fassin heard himself say. “They were waiting for them.”

The silver Dreadnought powered straight towards the fleet of dark ships, which, after starting to close in on the spectating fleet, were now swinging and swivelling to reconfigure and face the new threat.

The Dreadnought raced forward, fire bright around its propellerless tail, guns firing and flashing. Its silvery skin, reflecting sky, storm and dark depths, sparkled with jagged scintillations, bouncing beams off in random directions like bright thrown spines. Two more of the dark ships detonated and fell, sending the Dweller screams in the concourse — and the bets -towards even wilder heights.

The Dreadnought tore onwards, shaking under the weight of fire falling upon it. A missile from the fleet of Mercatoria ships slashed across the view, was missed by a fan of interceptor fire from the Dreadnought and slammed into it.

There was just the hint of the start of an explosion, bursting the Dreadnought apart as though tearing open the wrapping round a piece of star, then the screen went utterly white before hazing out completely, blank. Lights in the concourse flickered and went out, came back, then faded again. The warbling sound, there but effectively unheard all this time, cut off, its absence in the sudden silence like a hearing loss. The Dzunda quivered like a struck animal.

Other screens wavered, went black, filled with static. Some screens, now providing the only light in the concourse, remained working. Gradually more light filled the long tube, as low emergency lighting strobed on, caught and held.

A low muttering sound of Dweller trepidation and resentment started to build. One camera swung to show the huge rolling mushroom cloud filling the space where the Dreadnought had been. A few tiny pieces of wreckage fell, far away, thin claws from a tumorously bloated fist. The dark ships started to close in again on the spectator fleet, currently composed of vessels commanded by two sorts of captains: those who thought it best to clump together and those who regarded scattering and even taking their chances with the storm winds as the safer bet.

The stampede of Dwellers from the access tube which Fassin was trying to push Valseir towards was slowly forcing the two of them back into the centre of the concourse. More people were flooding into the wide space from every other access point.

Somebody was screaming, “Look, look!”

One distant screen image was suddenly repeated across several more. At first it looked like a replay of the entrance of the first Dreadnought, the great nose bulging out through, the curtain of streaming cloud, dragging gas like long flags of war. Then the view pulled back and the screen showed the Storm Wall bulging in another place, then another and another and another, until a whole vertical forest of the great ships was visible, hurtling out of the storm and towards the great column of black circling spacecraft hanging like a giant pendulum over the spectating fleet.

The Dzunda shook, rippled and screamed like something alive as the shock wave of the earlier nuclear explosion seemed to pick it up and rattle it. Dwellers swung this way and that across the concourse, banging into each other, walls, floor and ceiling, filling the gas with oaths and debris. Another pair of screens cut out but enough remained to show the closing fleet of mercury-coloured Dreadnoughts livid with fire outgoing and incoming. Lasers sheened off, fans of interceptor projectiles and beams combed the gas and sundered darting, twisting missiles. Two more of the dark ships, then a third, exploded or crumpled and started to fall or spiral down, but two more of the giant Dreadnoughts disappeared in massive, screen-hazing detonations.

A couple more Dreadnoughts were suddenly caught in a fiercely bright beam from immediately above, from out of the clear yellow sky. The beam fell between them, making each massive ship wobble as if stumbling in the gas. Then it split into two parallel shafts, each violet rod narrowing in an instant and chopping through its targeted Dreadnought like an axe through a neck.

The concourse — half dark, filled with wild scents and the frenzied bellowing of Dwellers unsure whether to wail laments or shout huzzahs, lit by the spastic, spasming light of the battle views swinging wildly across the screens — achieved a sort of chaotic transcendence as very loud but defiantly soothing-sounding music started to play, product of some confused automatic guest-management system waking to insanity and trying to spread tranquillity.

“What,” Fassin heard a nearby Dweller say, quite quietly but distinctly through the pandemonium, “the fuck is that?”

(Another dark Mercatorial ship, another silver Dreadnought, ripped to shreds and blossoming in nuclear fire respectively. Another pair of Dreadnoughts shaking in the first beam-fall of the violet ray flicking from on high.)

And on the screen opposite, looking downwards into the wide bowl of the storm’s dead heart, a huge darkly red-glowing globe was rising from the sump gases of the storm floor, dragging a great flute of gas after it like some absurdly steady fireball. It was kilometres across and striated, banded like a miniature gas-giant, so that for one crazed instant Fassin thought he was watching the palace of the Hierchon Ormilla floating smoothly upwards into the fray.

A crumpled scrap falling towards this apparition — a ruined and smoking Mercatoria spacecraft — appeared to lend a scale to the huge sphere, seeming to be about to fall just behind it, making the quickly rising globe three or four klicks across.

The wrecked ship fell in front, instead, and upped that ready estimate by a factor of two.

A couple of filament-thin yellow-white beams suddenly joined with the massive globe and seemed to sink into it without effect. The violet beam from high above swung onto it, spreading briefly as though to measure the full seven or eight kilometres of its diameter before starting to narrow.

A pattern of black dots appeared on the surface of the giant globe.

The Dzunda shook again and again as further blast waves crashed into it. Fassin stared at the great rising sphere even as Dwellers on either side thudded into him and he lost his hold on Valseir.

There were maybe fifty or so of the black spots, spread as though randomly across the upper hemisphere of the huge globe. One appeared to be in the centre of the rapidly narrowing, focusing violet beam. Just as that ray grew too bright to see the ebony dot at its centre, it seemed to pulse and spread. Then it disappeared, just as each spot suddenly became the plinth for an intensely bright, thin column of pure white light. The beams lasted for an eye-blink, disappearing almost as soon as they’d been produced, only their image lasting, burned into any naked eyes and insufficiently buffered cameras trained on them.

Silence, even as another manic convulsion shook the Dzunda, making the whole concourse ripple and creak. More screens went out. The loud soothing music cut off. Two remaining screens nearby showed the dark ships, whole squadrons of them, entire flocks of them, reduced for most of their length to sparkling, wind-blown ash, only the long needle noses and tailed, finned rears remaining intact to fall like meteors, unreeling scrawny trails of smoke into the storm’s tenebrous depths.

The nearest screen showed the camera swinging across the sky, searching for an intact Mercatoria ship, only to find further drifts of smoke, new clouds of ash, already drifting on the wind.

The other screen’s view pivoted to the sky, where something glowing yellow was fading and disappearing as it cooled, at first still keeping station with the scene directly beneath, then starting to drift away to the east.

The huge sphere was still rising, though slowing now, coming gradually level with the remains of the spectating fleet. The remaining two dozen or so mirror-finish Dreadnoughts were decelerating, heaving-to on one side of the clumped and scattered ships.

A bellowing roar of utter — and unexpected — victory built quickly in every Dweller throat along the length of the concourse, swelling to a clanging, thunderous cacophony of mind-splitting, thought-warping sound.

Then a series of crashing, titanic shock waves pummelled the Dzunda like a gale whipping a flag. A barrage of noise like a troop of titans clapping entirely drowned out the hollering Dwellers.

All the screens went dark. The Blimper Dzunda lurched for one last time, then started to fall out of the sky. Those Dwellers not already heading swiftly for the exits immediately began to do so, the ones near Fassin sweeping him along with them, up the access tube he’d been trying to head for originally, out via a wide funnel port into a viewing gallery, through its massively shattered diamond roof and out into the bruised and battered skies of Nasqueron.

“You mean some of your ridiculous fucking fairy stories about secret ships and hyper-weapons are actually true?” Fassin said.

“Well,” Y’sul said, looking round. “So it would appear.”

They were somewhere inside the Isaut, the enormous spherical ship which had destroyed almost the entire Mercatorial fleet — space-based command-and-control plus heavy-weaponry bombardment back-up included — in the space of about half a second. The Isaut was something called a Planetary Protector (Deniable), not that Fassin or, apparently, anybody else rescued from the destroyed and damaged ships of the spectating fleet had ever heard of such a thing. That, as Y’sul had pointed out, was a pretty unarguably convincing brand of deniability.

There had, of course, been rumours and myths concerning secret Dweller martial capability and the general lack of wisdom of getting into a fight with such an ancient and widespread species for as long as people could remember, but — as most of these myths and rumours seemed to be spread by the Dwellers themselves — as a rule nobody ever really took them seriously. The Dwellers spent so much time huffing and puffing and telling people how completely wonderful and brilliant they were — and yet seemed so self-obsessed, so inward-looking and so careless of their distant fellows, so unconnected not just with the rest of the civilised galaxy but with their own vastly scattered diaspora — they were inevitably dismissed as vainglorious fantasists and their vaunted ships and weapons, at best, a sort of folk memory of earlier magnificence, long lost, entirely eclipsed.

Even now, having just seen the results of the Isaut’s intervention with his own eyes — or at least through the little gascraft’s sensors — Fassin could not entirely believe what he’d witnessed.

“Well, this is a strange place to be,” Valseir said, looking about the spherical space he, Y’sul and Fassin had been shown to.

They had rendezvoused quite quickly in the general gas-borne confusion of survivors from the Dzunda. Fassin’s arrrowhead-shaped craft, though smaller than all the surrounding Dwellers, was a sufficiently different shape for Valseir and Y’sul to spot him quite without difficulty and head in his direction.

“Why is everybody else giving me such a wide berth?” Fassin had asked when they’d each drifted up to him in the after-battle calmness. It was true; all the other Dweller survivors were keeping a good fifty metres or so away from him.

“Worried you’re going to be a target,” Y’sul had said, checking his various pockets and pouches to see what he might have lost in the excitement. Around them, various long smoky columns were drifting in the breeze like anaemic stalks rooted in the dark storm base far below, and great dumb-bell-shaped clouds — all that was left of the nuclear explosions — were twisting and slowly tearing apart, their round, barely rolling heads still climbing into higher and higher levels of atmosphere, being caught in differential wind streams and casting vast hazy shadows across the again-quiet skies of the storm’s eye. Hovering to one side, the vast banded sphere which had risen from the Depths floated like a miniature planet caught in the eye of the great storm.

To one side, in the Storm Wall, the GasClipper fleet seemed to be trying to regroup. Tumbling out of the sinking Dzunda with the rest of the survivors, only a lifelong exposure to Dweller insouciance — both congenital and feigned — had prevented Fassin gasping in disbelief at the sound of various people around him quite seriously discussing whether the GasClipper race would just continue, be restarted or declared void, and passing opinions regarding the status of already existing bets in the light of this suite of likely choices.

The less damaged spectating and other craft were picking up the various free-floating Dwellers. Ambulance skiffs from the surviving craft in the silver Dreadnought fleet and hospital vessels from the nearest port facilities were rescuing the more seriously injured and burned individuals.

Fassin had indeed been targeted, but not by weaponry. A trio of skiffs had emerged from the giant sphere and made straight for the little group formed by Fassin and his two Dweller friends. They’d been taken aboard and the skiffs returned immediately to the enormous globe, ignoring the outraged yells of the Dwellers who until moments before had been studiously avoiding Fassin.

The lead skiff, crewed by a jolly pair of remarkably old-looking Dwellers — they didn’t volunteer their names, ranks or ages, but they each looked at least as old as Jundriance — had deposited them somewhere deep inside the giant spherical craft, way down a dark tunnel into a broad sphere of reception space, complete with washing facilities and what Y’sul had taken one look at and sniffily dismissed as a snackateria. Before they’d left again in their skiff, it had been one of these unnamed Dwellers who, in response to a question of Fassin’s, had told them the name and category of the great craft they’d been brought inside. Fassin had warned him that his gascraft had been in contact with Mercatoria nanotech and he might be contaminated, which did not surprise or alarm anybody aboard as much as he’d been expecting. The skiff’s crew scanned the little gascraft and told him, well, he wasn’t contaminated any more.

“Where is your little friend the Very Reverend Colonel?” Y’sul asked Fassin, making a show of looking around the reception space. “She jumped out of her seat and raced off just before all the fun started.”

“She’s dead,” Fassin told him.

“Dead?” Y’sul rolled back. “But she seemed so well armed!”

“She shot what turned out to be a Mercatorial… device,” Fassin said. “One of the first of their craft on the scene seemed to assume this meant she was a hostile and wasted her.”

“Oh,” Y’sul said, sounding downcast. “That was the Mercatoria, was it? Not these Disconnected people. You sure?”

“I’m fairly sure,” Fassin said.

“Damn,” Y’sul said, sounding annoyed. “Might sort of look like I’ve lost a bet, in that case. Wonder how I can get out of it?” He floated off, looking deep in thought.

Fassin turned to Valseir. “You sure you’re all right?” he asked. The old Dweller had looked a little shaken when they’d rendezvoused in the gas above the sinking Blimper, though apart from a few carapace abrasions picked up in the welter of people rushing to escape the sinking ship, he was uninjured.

“I am fine, Fassin,” he told the human. “And you? You have lost your colonel friend, I heard.”

Fassin had a sudden reprise of his last image of Hatherence, that dark manta shape twisting in the air — to a Dweller she would have looked like one of their young — firing a hand weapon at the craft that had ripped her out of her esuit, then dying in the returning splash of fire. “I’m getting used to anybody who gets close to me dying violently,” he said.

“Hmm. I consider myself warned,” Valseir said.

“She was my superior, Valseir,” Fassin told him. “She was my bodyguard but she was also my guard in another sense. I’d be surprised if she hadn’t been given orders to kill me if the relevant circumstances arose.”

“Do you think she would have carried out those orders?”

Fassin hesitated, suddenly feeling bad about what he’d just said, even though he still thought it was the truth. It was as though he’d insulted Hatherence’s memory. He looked away and said, “Well, we’ll never know now, will we?”

A door in the centre of the ceiling swung back. They all looked up. Two Dwellers entered. Fassin recognised one of them as Setstyin, the self-confessed influence pedlar he’d talked to by phone the evening he’d slipped away from Y’sul’s house in Hauskip city. The other Dweller looked very old indeed, dark and small — barely five metres in diameter — and dressed in high-coverage clothes that probably concealed only a few remaining natural limbs and perhaps some prosthetics.

“Seer Fassin Taak,” Setstyin said, roll-nodding towards him. Then he greeted Y’sul and lastly Valseir — as the most senior of the three Valseir came last and got an even more respectful bow. “Y’sul, Valseir: allow me to introduce the Sage-cuspian-chospe Drunisine, Executive Commander of this craft, the Planetary Protector (Deniable) Isaut.”

“A pleasure,” said the dark Dweller in a crisp, dry-sounding voice.

“And for us an honour,” Y’sul said, brushing Fassin out of the way to present himself to the fore and execute an extravagantly complete bow. “If I may say so.”

“Our pleasure, pre-child,” Valseir half-agreed, also roll-bowing, less completely but with more dignity.

“Good to see you, Setstyin,” Fassin said. “And pleased to meet you, sir,” he told the older Dweller.

Drunisine was by far the oldest and most senior Dweller Fassin had ever encountered. As a Dweller — surviving the perils of childhood first, obviously — rose through Adolescence, Youth and Adulthood to attain the life stages called Prime and then Cuspian and then Sage, what they were eventually aiming for — destined for, if they lived that long — was to reach Childhood, the state of utter done-everythingness that was the absolute zenith of all Dweller existence. The stage immediately before this culmination was the one which Drunisine had reached: chospe - pre-child. There was every chance that Drunisine was over two billion years old.

“My name is Setstyin,” the other Dweller said, coming to rest near the centre of the spherical room with the Sage and looking round at the others. “I am a friend of Seer Taak’s here. You are all sufficiently recovered and-or rested, I hope. Because we need to talk.”

They agreed they were capable of talk. Setstyin waved and hammock seats descended from a ring round the ceiling door, which then closed. They settled in.

“Seer Taak,” the ancient Dweller said. “We will need to ensure that all record of the battle just finished is wiped from the memories of that little craft you inhabit.”

“I understand,” Fassin said. He thought about that “(Deniable)’. He called up everything he’d recorded of the battle in the storm’s eye and full-deleted it. He called up a lot of other stored memories and got rid of those too. “It’s done,” he said.

“We will need to check,” Setstyin told him, sounding apologetic.

“Feel free,” Fassin said. “I take it we’re not supposed to say anything about what happened out there. Or about this thing.”

“Say what you like, young sir,” Drunisine told him. “Our concern is with hard evidence.”

“All surviving non-Dweller surveillance systems around Nasqueron have been removed,” Setstyin said, talking to Fassin. “All the transgressing ships which had line-of-sight to the proceedings have already been destroyed. The remains of the Mercatorial fleet are being pursued and dispatched.”

“They are being hunted down like dogs, Seer Taak,” Drunisine said, looking straight at him and using the Anglish word. “Harried, systems jammed, comms disrupted, fates sealed, all so that no direct evidence of this craft or its capabilities, even that garnered second-hand, can escape. I might add that your own summary annihilation was contemplated.”

“I am grateful to have been made an exception,” Fassin said. “Are none of the ships which were above Nasqueron to be allowed to escape?”

“None,” the ancient Dweller said.

“Those who start wars have to accept the consequences,” Y’sul said, rumbling sententiously.

“And after that?” Fassin asked.

“Specify, please.”

“Is this the start of a war with the Mercatoria, at least the part within Ulubis?”

“I don’t imagine so,” Drunisine said, sounding as though this was the first time the thought had occurred. “Not unless they choose to invade us again. Do you think they will, Fassin Taak?”

Fassin had the awful feeling that, given the Dwellers’ irredeemably dismissive approach to intelligence, what he said next might well constitute the single most germane piece of information on the matter that the Dwellers would have to work with and base their decisions on.

“No, I don’t. I think they’ll be sufficiently horrified at the extent of their losses today to think twice about risking any further craft, certainly as long as they have the prospect of invasion to look forward to. If the invasion fails, or the system is finally recaptured, then there might be some attempt to find out what happened and no doubt some people will argue that there should be some form of reprisal. Though, in the shorter term, from what little I’ve heard of the Epiphany 5 Disconnect, there’s a chance they might want to, ah, transgress, too.” He looked at Drunisine and Setstyin, who remained silent. “Though I’m sure you’ll be ready for them.” More silence. “In fact, if the Ulubis Mercatoria work out what’s happened here and realise you don’t regard this as the start of a war, they might even want to suggest that you and they unite to resist the Epiphany 5 Disconnect forces.”

“Why would we wish to do that?” Drunisine asked flatly.

It felt like it had been a long and tiring day. Fassin didn’t really have the energy to start trying to explain. From a creature as old and experienced as Drunisine, the question was probably rhetorical anyway.

“Never mind,” Fassin said. “Act as though nothing’s happened. Signal ’glantine and make some helpful suggestions regarding the re-establishment of a new Seer Shared Facility”

“That’s more or less what we were going to do anyway,” Setstyin said, sounding amused.

Fassin signalled polite mirth in return. He was still struggling to work out what this enormous, fleets-destroyed-in-an-eyeblink craft really meant. Who was responsible for this colossal machine? What sort of previously unknown societal structures and prodigious manufacturing capacity within Dweller civilisation could conjure up something this awesome? Was it a one-off? Was it unique to Nasqueron? Dear grief, was it part of a fleet? Did this mean that all the Dweller claims about secret ships and hyper-weapons were true? Could the Nasqueron Dwellers just swat the E-5 Discon out of the sky if they so desired, saving Ulubis from invasion? Could they feasibly take on the Mercatoria if they could be bothered? Did any of this mean that the Dweller List was now more likely to be genuine rather than some monstrous waste of time or just a joke? How he’d have liked to have had some time alone with Setstyin before this meeting, to find out what had happened since they’d talked last. He’d have to ask some of these questions anyway, given half a chance.

“We come, then,” Drunisine said, “to the question of why the Ulubis Mercatoria Disconnect thought it might be a wise or profitable idea to enter Nasqueron in such a manner and in such numbers in the first place. Any ideas? Anybody?” The ancient Dweller looked round at all of them.

“I think it might have something to do with me,” Fassin admitted.

“You, Seer Taak?” Drunisine asked.

“I’ve been here attempting to track down some information.”

“And you needed the help of a small war fleet to extract it?”

“No. However, they might have thought I was in danger.”

“From whom?”

“I don’t know.”

“So, we are talking about information that the Mercatoria might consider momentous enough to start a war for? When they are already facing an invasion in the next few months or years? This must be information of some importance. Perhaps we can help. What is it?”

“Thank you. However, I think I may finally be close to finding it.”

“Ah,” Valseir said. “About that.”

“What?” Fassin asked him.

“All that stuff about the folder and the safekeep box and taking it personally to Chimilinith of Deilte?”

“Yes?”

“Not entirely true.”

“Not entirely?”

“Not entirely.”

“So how much of it was true?”

Valseir rocked back a fraction, seemingly thinking. Patterns of surprise crossed his signal skin. “Actually, most of it,” he said.

“And the part that wasn’t?” Fassin asked patiently.

“There was no folder in the safekeep box.”

“So Chimilinith hasn’t got the information.”

“Correct.”

“I see.”

“I am still waiting for enlightenment regarding the exact nature of this exemplary, if shy, information,” Drunisine said frostily, looking at Valseir.

Oh shit, Fassin thought, if Valseir tells them what it is, and it really exists, they might just kill us all.

Possibly the same thought had occurred to Valseir. “It allegedly involves a method for travelling faster than light,” he told the ancient commander.

Setstyin’s carapace flashed hilarity, quickly damped. Drunisine looked about as thoroughly unimpressed as it was possible for an elderly Dweller to look. “What?” he said.

“An ancient addition to a still more ancient book — which Seer Taak here traded over two hundred years ago during a ‘delve’, as the Quick call these things — makes mention of a method of achieving FTL travel without recourse to Adjutage and Cannula,” Valseir said, using what Fassin recognised as the Dweller terms for portals and wormholes. Fassin thought — and sincerely hoped — that Valseir had put just the right amount of apology and wry amusement into his voice. “Seer Taak has been sent here to try to find the details of this, ah, unlikely technology.”

“Indeed?” Drunisine said, looking at Fassin.

“Algebra,” he blurted.

“Algebra?” Drunisine asked.

“The data looks like a piece of algebra, apparently,” Fassin said. “It defines some sort of warping device. A way of bending space. Conventional to start with, but using this technique to exceed light speed.” Fassin made a gesture of resignation. He let embarrassment patterns show on his arrowhead’s skin. “Iwas seconded without any real choice into a paramilitary part of the Mercatoria and ordered to undertake this mission. I am as sceptical as I imagine you are, sir, regarding the likelihood of it coming to a successful conclusion.”

Drunisine let the most formal amusement pattern show on his skin. “Oh, I doubt that you are, Seer Taak.”

“What’s going on?”

“I was about to ask you the same question,” Setstyin told Fassin. “Shall we trade?”

“All right, but I asked first.”

“What exactly do you want to know?”

They were still in the reception sphere inside the giant globe. Commander Drunisine had left. Two Adult medical orderlies were dealing with the few small injuries that Y’sul and Valseir had picked up during the battle. “What is this thing?” Fassin asked, gesturing to indicate the whole ship. “Where did it come from? Who made it? Who controls it? How many are there in Nasqueron?”

“I’d have thought the title said it all,” Setstyin said. “It’s a machine to protect the planet. From willed aggression of a certain technical type and sophistication. It’s not a spacecraft, if that’s what you mean. It’s limited to in-atmosphere. It came from the Depths, where stuff like this is usually stored. We made it. I mean Dwellers did, probably a few billion years ago. I’d have to check. It’s controlled by people in the control centre, who’ll be Dwellers with military experience who’ve sim-trained for this sort of device specifically. As to numbers… I wouldn’t know. Probably not the sort of information one’s meant to share, really. No offence, Fass, but in the end you’re not actually one of us. We have to assume your loyalties lie elsewhere.”

“Built billions of years ago? Can you still—?”

“Ah, that would count as a follow-up question,” Setstyin said, chiding. “I think it’s my turn first.”

Fassin sighed. “All right.”

“Are you really looking for this warp-drive FTL technology data? You do realise it doesn’t exist, don’t you?”

“It’s data that the Mercatoria believe might give them a better chance of winning the fight against the E-5 Discon. They are desperate. They’ll try anything. And I have my orders, no matter what I might think about the whole thing. Of course I know independent FTL drives don’t exist.”

“Will you still obey these orders, given the chance?”

Fassin thought about Aun Liss, about the people he’d known in Hab 4409, about all the other people he’d ever known throughout Ulubis system over the years. “Yes,” he said.

“Why do you obey these orders?” Setstyin sounded genuinely puzzled. “Your family and Seer Sept colleagues are almost all dead, your immediate military superior was killed in the recent battle and there is nobody nearby now to take her place.”

“It’s complicated,” Fassin told Setstyin. “Perhaps it’s duty or a guilty conscience or just the desire to be doing something. Can you still make more of these planetary protection machines?”

“No idea,” Setstyin admitted. “Don’t see why not, though. I’d suggest asking somebody who might know, but even if the true answer was no we’d be bound to say yes, wouldn’t we?”

“Was it my call to you that set all this in motion?”

“You’re getting a lot of free questions, aren’t you? However, yes, it did. Though I suspect that watching dozens of recently modified gas-capable warcraft suddenly parking themselves in orbit around us might have started a few alarm bells ringing amongst us even without your timely warning. Still, we’re grateful. I don’t think I’m entirely out of formation in saying that there is a feeling we probably owe you a favour.”

“And if the Mercatoria ever finds out,” Fassin said, “I’ll be executed as a traitor.”

“Well, we won’t tell if you don’t,” Setstyin said, perfectly seriously.

“Deal,” Fassin said, unconvinced.

The great spherical craft Isaut floated deep within a vast cloud of streaming gas, moving swiftly, seeming not to. It had started to submerge into the storm’s curdled floor of slowly swirling gas almost as soon as Fassin and the others had been brought aboard. Sinking, sidling, rising slightly again, it had entered into the Zone 2 weather band, quickly assumed its speed, and was now, in the late evening that was becoming night, half a thousand kilometres away from the storm where the battle had taken place, and adding another three hundred kilometres to that value with every passing hour.

Fassin, Y’sul, Valseir and Setstyin floated over a narrow platform set at the great vessel’s equator, near the body of Colonel Hatherence. A weak light and weaker breeze lent an appropriate atmosphere of quiet gloom to the scene. The colonel’s torn, burned body had been discovered along with hundreds of others, floating at the level at which Dweller bodies usually came to rest. Hers had come to rest a little higher than the others, as would a child’s.

Left to themselves, Dweller bodies degassed and gained density, and abandoned to the atmosphere would eventually disappear completely into the Depths. The respectful convention, however, was either to keep a dead relative in a special ceremonial chamber at home and let them decay until their density would ensure a swift passage into the liquid hydrogen far beneath, or — if time was pressing — to weight the body and consign it to the Depths that way.

Hatherence had no family here. There was not even anybody of her own species in all Nasqueron, and so — as, at least, a fellow alien — Fassin had been declared responsible for her remains. He’d agreed a swift dispatch to the Depths was preferable to keeping her body and handing it back to the Shrievalty or any family she might still have in Ulubis system. He wasn’t even sure why he felt that way, but he did. There was no particular veneration of the remains of the dead in the way of the Truth, and, as far as he knew, no special meaning amongst oerileithe in having their dead returned from afar, but even if there had been, he’d have wanted something like this. For the Dwellers, it was probably just administrative convenience, even tidiness to dispose of her now, like this. For him, it was something more.

Fassin looked down at the alien body — thin and dark, something between a manta and a giant starfish — lying in its coffin of meteorite iron. Iron had always been and, sentimentally, ceremonially, still was a semi-precious metal for Dwellers. That they were burying Hatherence like this was something of an honour, he supposed. In the fading light, her ragged remains, dark anyway, then burned by the beam which had killed her, looked like scraps of shadow.

Fassin felt tears in his real eyes, inside the shock-gel inside the little gascraft that was his own tiny life-coffin, and knew that some deep, near-animal part of him was mourning not so much the fallen Oculan colonel as all the people he knew whom he’d lost recently, lost without seeing them one last time, even in death, lost without fully being able to believe that he really had lost them because it had all happened so far away with so much in between them and him to stop him returning to pay any sort of respects to them, lost in his intellect but not his emotions, because even now, some part of him refused to believe he would never see all those lost ones again.

“I confess,” Setstyin said, “I have no idea what form of words one ought to use on such occasions, Seer Taak. Do you?”

“Amongst some aHumans there is a saying that we come from and go to nothing, a lack like shadow that throws the sum of life into bright relief. And with the rHumans, something about dust to ashes.”

“Do you think she would have minded being treated as a Dweller?” Setstyin asked.

“No,” Fassin said. “I don’t think she would have minded. I think she would have felt honoured.”

“Here, here,” Y’sul muttered.

Valseir gave a small formal bow.

“Well, Colonel Hatherence,” Setstyin said, with what sounded like a sigh as he looked down at the body lying in the coffin. “You ascended to the age and rank of Mercatorial Colonel, which is a very considerable achievement for your kind. We think you lived well and we know you died well. You died with many others but in the end we all die alone. You died more alone than others, amongst people like you but alien to you, and far from your home and family. You fell and were found and now we send you down again, further into those Depths, to join all the revered dead on the surface of rock around the core.” He looked at Fassin. “Seer Taak, would you like to say anything?”

Fassin tried to think of something. In the end he just said, “I believe Colonel Hatherence was a good person. She was certainly a brave one. I only knew her for less than a hundred days and she was always my military superior, but I came to like her and think of her as a friend. She died trying to protect me. I’ll always honour her memory.”

He signalled that he could think of nothing else. Setstyin roll-nodded and indicated the open coffin lid.

Fassin went forward and used a manipulator to close the casket’s iron hatch, then he lowered a little more and together he and Setstyin took one edge of the bier that the coffin lay on. They raised it, letting the heavy container slide silently off, over the edge of the balcony and down into the next bruise-dark layer of clouds, far below.

They all floated over the edge and waited until the coffin disappeared, a tiny black speck vanishing into the darkly purple wastes.

“Great-cousin of mine, diving deep, got hit by one of those once,” Y’sul said thoughtfully. “Never knew what hit him. Stone dead.”

The others were looking at him.

He shrugged. “Well? It’s true.”

Valseir found Fassin in a gallery, looking out at the deep night stream of gas, rushing quietly in infrared as the Isaut powered its way to who knew where.

“Fassin.”

“Valseir. Are we free to leave yet?”

“Not that I’ve heard. Not yet.”

They watched the night flow round them together for a while. Fassin had spent time earlier looking at reports on the storm battle, from both sides. The Dwellers had high-selectivity visuals which made it look like the Dreadnoughts had won the day, not the Isaut. The little he’d got from the Mercatoria’s nets just gave dark hints that an entire fleet was missing, and included no visuals at all. Unseen was pretty much unheard-of. It appeared that everybody had instantly assumed there was some vast cover-up going on. Both sides were downplaying like crazy, implying that some terrible misunderstanding had taken place and they’d both suffered appallingly heavy losses, which was, when Fassin thought about it, somewhere between half and three-quarters true, and hence closer to reality than might have been expected in the circumstances.

“So what did happen to this folder?” Fassin asked. “If there was a folder.”

“There was and is a folder, Fassin,” Valseir told him. “Iheld on to it for a long time but eventually, twenty-one, twenty-three years ago, I gave it to my colleague and good friend Leisicrofe. He was departing on a research trip.”

“Has he returned?”

“No.”

“When will he?”

“Should he return, he won’t have the data.”

“Where will it be?”

“Wherever he left it. I don’t know.”

“How do I find your friend Leisicrofe?”

“You’ll have to follow him. That will not be so easy. You will need help.”

“I have Y’sul. He’s always arranged—”

“You will need rather more than he can provide.”

Fassin looked at the old Dweller. “Off-planet? Is that what you mean?”

“Somewhat,” Valseir said, not looking at him, gazing out at the onward surge of night.

“Then who should I approach for this help?”

“I’ve already taken the liberty.”

“You have? That’s very kind.”

Valseir was silent for a while, then said, “None of this is about kindness, Fassin.” He turned to look directly at the arrowhead. “Nobody in their right mind would ever want to be involved with something as momentous as this. If the slightest part of what you’re looking for has any basis in reality, it could change everything for all of us. I am Dweller. My species has made a good, long — if selfish — life for itself, spread everywhere, amongst the stars. We do not appreciate change on the scale we are here talking about. I’m not sure that any species would. Some of us will do anything to avoid such change, to keep things just as they are.

“You have to realise, Fassin; we are not a monoculture, we are not at all perfectly homogenised. We are differentiated in ways that even now, after all your exposure to us, you can scarcely begin to comprehend. There are things within our own worlds almost entirely hidden from most of us, and there are deep and profound differences of opinion between factions amongst us, just as there are between the Quick.”

Factions, thought Fassin.

Valseir went on, “Not all of us are quite so studiedly indifferent to events taking place within the greater galaxy as we generally contrive to appear. There are those of us who, without ever wanting to know the full details of your mission, in fact knowing that they’d be unable to square knowledge of its substance with their species loyalty, would help you nevertheless. Others… others would kill you instantly if they even began to guess what it was you’re looking for.” The old Dweller floated over, came close to a kiss-whisper as he said, — And believe it or not, Fassin Taak, Drunisine is of the former camp, while your friend Setstyin is of the latter.

Fassin pulled away to look at the old Dweller, who added, -Truly.

After a few more moments, Fassin asked, “When will I be able to follow your friend Leisicrofe?”

“I think you’ll know one way or the other before the night is out. And if we both don’t at least begin to follow Leisicrofe, we may both follow your Colonel Hatherence.”

Fassin thought this sounded a little melodramatic. “Truly?” he asked, signalling amusement.

“Oh, truly, Fassin,” Valseir said, signalling nothing. “Let me repeat: none of this is about kindness.”

* * *

Saluus Kehar was not happy. He had his own people in certain places, his own ways of finding things out, his own secure and reliable channels of intelligence quite independent of the media and the official agencies — you didn’t become and stay a major military supplier unless you did — and he knew about as well as anybody did what had happened during the disastrous Nasqueron raid, and it was simply unjust to blame him or his firm.

For one thing, they’d been betrayed, or their intelligence or signals had been compromised, or at the very least they’d been out-thought (by Dwellers!). And because of that failing — which was unquestionably nothing to do with him — they’d been ambushed and out-outnumbered. Dozens of those heretofore un-fucking-heard-of super-Dreadnought ships had turned up when the incursionary force had been expecting no more than a handful — at most — of the standard ones, the models without the reactive mirror armour, the plasma engines and the wideband lasers. Plus the Dwellers had simply done a very good job of lying over the years — years? Aeons — presenting themselves as hopeless bumblers and technological incompetents when in fact — even if they couldn’t build anything very impressive from scratch any more — they still had access to weaponry of serious lethality.

The military had fucked up. It didn’t matter how good the tool was, how clever the craftsman had been, how well-made the weapon was; if the user dropped it, didn’t switch it on or just didn’t know how to use it properly, all that good work went for nothing.

They’d lost all the ships. All of them. Every single damn one, either on the raid or supporting it from space immediately above. Even a few of the ships not involved at all — those standing guard round Third Fury while the recovery and construction teams worked — had been targeted and annihilated by some sort of charged-particle-beam weapon, with two craft on the far side of the moon each chased by some type of hyper-velocity missile and blown to smithereens as well.

Unwilling to accept that they’d made a complete mess of the operation, the military had decided it mustn’t be their fault. Kehar Heavy Industries must be to blame. There must, to quote an ancient saying, be something wrong with our bloody ships. The sheer completeness of the catastrophe, and the frustrating lack of detail regarding exactly what had gone wrong, actually made it easier to blame the tool rather than the workman. All the ships had been made gas-capable by Saluus’s shipyards, all had been lost on their first mission using their new abilities, so — according to that special logic only the military mind seemed to appreciate — it must be a problem with the process of making them capable of working in an atmosphere that was responsible.

Never mind that the battlecruiser acting as Command and Control for the whole operation and both the Heavy-Armour Battery Monitors had been blasted to atoms just as effortlessly as the ships working in the planet’s clouds, even though they’d never been gas-capabled and were still in space at the time; that little detail somehow got rolled up into greater disaster and conveniently forgotten about in the hysteria.

So now they’d lost Fassin and they’d lost their lead to this Dweller List thing. Worse, they had a serious intelligence problem, because, basically, they’d been duped. The old Dweller Valseir must have suspected something or been tipped off. They knew this for the simple reason that the information he’d provided — almost the last data that had got relayed back to the top brass on Sepekte before everything went haywire — had proved, when checked later, to be a lie. The Dweller he’d told Fassin to look for in Deilte city didn’t exist. For the sake of this they’d lost over seventy first-rate warships for no gain whatsoever — ships they would seriously miss when the Beyonder-Starveling invasion hit home for real — and they’d thoroughly antagonised the Dwellers, who’d never been people it was advisable to get on the wrong side of even before they’d suddenly shown they still packed the kind of punch that could humiliate a Mercatorial fleet. As military fuck-ups went it was a many-faceted gem, a work of genius, a grapeshot, multi-stage, cluster-warhead, fractal-munition regenerative-weapon-system of a fuck-up.

In fact it was only that last item on the long list of calamitous consequences — dealing with the Dwellers’ subsequent actions and signals — that had worked out less badly than it might have. Finally, something positive.

Saluus was in a meeting. He hated meetings. They were an entirely vital part of being an industrialist, indeed of being a businessman in any sort of organisation, but he still hated them. He’d learned, partly at his father’s side, to get good at meetings, working people and information before, during and after them, but even when they were short and decided important stuff they felt like a waste of time.

And they were rarely short and rarely decided important stuff.

This one wasn’t even his meeting. Unusually, he wasn’t in control. He’d been summoned. Summoned? He’d been brought before them. That caught the mood better.

He far preferred conference calls, holo meetings. They tended to be shorter (though not always — if you had one where everybody was somewhere they felt really comfortable, they could go on for ever too) and they were easier to control — easier to dismiss, basically. But there seemed to be this distribution curve of meeting reality: people at the bottom of the organisational pile had lots of real all-sat-down-together meetings — often, Saluus had long suspected, because they had nothing useful to do and so had the time to spare and the need to seem important that meetings could provide. Those in the middle and towards the top had more and more holo meetings because it was just more time-efficient and the people they needed to meet with were of similarly high stature with their own time problems and often far away. But then — this was the slightly weird bit — as you got to the very highest levels, the proportion of face-to-face meetings started to rise again.

Maybe because it was a sign of how much you’d been able to delegate, maybe because it was a way of imposing your authority on those in the middle and upper-middle ranks beneath you, maybe because the things being discussed at high-level meetings were so important that you needed the very last nuance of physicality they provided over a holo conference to be sure that you were working with all the relevant information, including whether somebody was sweating or had a nervous tic.

This was the sort of stuff a good holo would show up, of course, though equally the sort of stuff a good pre-transmission image-editing camera would smooth away. In theory somebody in a conference call could be sitting there sweating a river and jumping like they’d been electrocuted, but if they had decent real-time image-editing facilities they could look the perfect epitome of unruffled cucumber-chill.

Though there was stuff you could do in reality, too, of course. For his thirteenth birthday, Saluus’s father had given his son a surprise party and, later, a surprise present in the shape of a visit to a Finishing Clinic, where, over the course of a long and not entirely pain-free month, they fixed his teeth, widened his eyes and altered their colour (Saluus had been womb-sculpted for the appearance he’d had, but, hey, a father could change his mind). More to the point, they made him much less fidgety, upped his capacity to concentrate and gave him control over his sweat glands, pheromone output and galvanic skin response (the last three not strictly legal, but then the clinic was owned by a subsidiary of Kehar Heavy Industries). All good for giving one an edge in meetings, discussions and even informal get-togethers. And usefully applicable to the art of seduction, too, where one’s blatant proximity to and control over astounding quantities of cash had somehow failed to have the desired effect.

This was a meeting of the Emergency War Cabinet, a high-level top-brass get-together in a klicks-deep command-bunker complex beneath one of a handful of discreetly well-guarded mansions dotted round the outskirts of greater Borquille State.

A high-level top-brass get-together minus the Hierchon Ormilla himself, however. He was patently too grand to attend a mere meeting, even of something as important as the Emergency War Cabinet, even when the fate of the System was in even greater jeopardy than it had been before the disastrous decision to go mob-handed into the atmosphere of Nasqueron the instant they thought they had a firm lead to the — anyway probably mythical — Dweller List.

And why did meetings always make his mind wander, and, specifically, make it wander towards — wander towards? Head straight for — sex?

He looked at women he was attending meetings with and found it very hard not to imagine them naked. This happened when they weren’t especially attractive, but was inevitable and often vivid if they were even slightly good-looking. Something about being able to look at them for long periods when they were talking, he suspected. Or just the urge to shuck off the whole civilised thing of being good little officers of the company and get back to being cave people again, humping in the dirt.

First Secretary Heuypzlagger was wittering. Saluus was confident that he looked like he was hanging on the First Secretary’s every word, and that his short-term memory would snick him back in should he need to return his full attention to proceedings if and when anything else of genuine import stumbled into view. But in the meantime, having already gleaned as much as he felt he was likely to regarding the real state of things from the body language and general demeanour of his fellow meeters, he felt free to let his mind wander.

He glanced at Colonel Somjomion, who was the only woman at this meeting. She didn’t tend to say very much so you didn’t get too many opportunities to look straight at her. Not especially attractive (though he was, he’d been telling himself recently, starting to appreciate women rather than girls, and see past the more obvious sexual characteristics). There was, certainly, something especially exciting about the idea of undressing a woman in uniform, but he’d long since been there and done that and had the screenage to prove it. He thought of his latest lover instead.

Saluus thought of her last night, this morning, he thought of her the night they’d first met, first slept together. He quickly got an almost painfully hard erection. They’d sculpted him to have control over that at the Finishing Clinic as well, but he usually just let things rise and fall of their own accord down there, unless either the presence or the absence was going to be socially embarrassing. Anyway, he’d long since accepted that maybe it was a way of getting back at dear old dad, for forcing all this amendment stuff on him in the first place, however useful it had proved.

He still hated meetings.

Saluus supposed things had gone reasonably well for him in this one so far, considering. He’d had to agree to a full inquiry into the gas-capabling of the ships they’d modified as part of the general investigation into what had gone wrong, but — even allowing for the implied insult and the waste of time, just when they didn’t need it — that wasn’t too terrible. He’d managed to deflect most of the criticism by getting the Navarchy, the Guard and the Shrievalty Ocula representatives to compete for who was least to blame for the whole botched-raid thing.

That had worked well. Divide and conquer. That wasn’t difficult in the current system. In fact it was set up for it. He remembered asking his father about this back when Saluus was still being tutored at home. Why the confusion of agencies? Why the plethora (he’d just discovered the word, enjoyed using it) of military and security and other organisations within the Mercatoria? Just look at warships: there were the Guard — they had warships, the Navarchy Military — they had warships, the Ambient Squadrons — they had warships, the Summed Fleet — obviously they had warships, and then there were the Engineers, the Propylaea, the Omnocracy, the Cessorian Lustrals, the Shrievalty, the Shrievalty Ocula and even the Administrata. They all had their own ships, and each even had a few warships as well, for important escort duties. Why so many? Why divide your forces? The same went for security. Everybody seemed to have their own security service too. Wasn’t this wasteful?

“Oh, definitely,” his father had said. “But there’s opportunity in waste. And what some call waste others would call redundancy. But do you really want to know what it’s all about?”

Of course he did.

“Divide and conquer. Even amongst your own. Competition. Also even amongst your own. In fact, especially amongst your own. Keep them all at each other’s throats, keep them all watching each other, keep them all wondering what the other lot might be up to. Make them compete for your attention and approval. Yes, it’s wasteful, looked at one way, but it’s wise, looked at another. This is how the Culmina keep everything under control, young man. This is how they rule us. And it appears to work, don’t you think? Hmm?”

Saluus hadn’t been sure at the time. The sheer wastefulness of it all distressed him. He was older and wiser now and more used to the way that things really worked being more important than the way they appeared to (unless you were talking about public perception, of course, when it was the other way round).

But they really were facing a mortal and imminent threat here. Was it right to encourage division and enmity between people who and organisations which all needed to pull together if they were to defeat the threat they were faced with?

Oh, but fuck it. There would always be competition. Armed services were designed to protect turf, to engage with, to prevail against. Of course they’d compete with each other.

And, if that supposedly fucking enormous and ultimately powerful Mercatoria fleet wasn’t rushing towards them even now, would not some of the people in Ulubis — maybe quite a lot of the people in Ulubis — be contemplating not resisting the Beyonder-Starveling invasion at all? Might they not, instead, be thinking about how they could come to an accommodation with those threatening invasion?

Despite all the propaganda they’d been subject to, secret polls and secret police reports indicated that a lot of ordinary people felt they might not be any worse off under the Beyonder\ Starveling forces. Some people in power would feel the same way, especially if they were being told to sacrifice property and wealth and even risk their own lives in what might turn out to be a lost cause.

Even some of those round this impressively large round table in this impressively large and cool and subtly lit boardroom-resembling-meeting-chamber might have been tempted to think about ways to cope with the threatened invasion that didn’t involve resistance to the last ship and soldier, if it hadn’t been for the oncoming Mercatoria Fleet.

Saluus supposed they had to assume that the fleet really was on the way. There were other possibilities, and he’d thought them all through — and talked them all through with his own advisers and experts — but ultimately they had to be dismissed. Whether the Dweller List existed or not, everybody appeared to be acting as though it did, and that was all that mattered. It was a bit like money: all about trust, about faith. The value lay in what people believed, not in anything intrinsic.

Never mind. After covering the latest intelligence and his own. shocking remissness in not making the refitted ships invulnerable to alien hyper-weapons, the meeting was finally getting round to something useful.

Back to grisly reality.

“The main thing,” Fleet Admiral Brimiaice told them (the quaup commander was keen on Main Things and In The Ends), “is that the Dwellers don’t seem to want to continue hostilities.”

After their initial, furious take-no-prisoners attack and no-quarter polishing-off of those who’d got away, the Dwellers had just as suddenly gone back to their usual show of Shucks-us? ineptitude, claiming it had all been a terrible mistake and could they help with the Third Fury rebuild?

“And thank fuck for that!” Guard-General Thovin said. “If they did, we’d have absolutely no chance. Facing the Beyonder-Starveling lot and the Dwellers as well! Holy shit! No chance. No chance at all!” Thovin was a dumpy barrel of a man, dark and powerful-looking. His voice was suitably gruff.

“Instead, only almost no chance,” Shrievalty Colonel Somjomion said with a thin smile.

“We have every chance, madam!” Fleet Admiral Brimiaice thundered, banging the table with one tubular armling. His splendidly uniformed and decorated body, like a well-tailored airship the size of a small hippo, rose in the air. “We need no defeatist talk here, of all places!”

“We have seventy fewer ships than we had,” the Shrievalty colonel reminded them, without drama.

“We still have the will,” Brimiaice said. “That’s the important point. And we have plenty of ships. And more being built all the time.” He looked at Saluus, who nodded and tried not to let his contempt show.

“If they work,” muttered Clerk-Regnant Voriel. The Cessorian seemed to have a personal thing against Saluus. He had no idea why.

“Now, we’ve dealt with all that,” First Secretary Heuypzlagger said quickly, glancing at Saluus. “If there are any problems with the ships’ construction, I’m sure the inquiry will show them up. We have to concentrate now on what else we can do.”

Saluus was getting bored. Now was as good a time as any. “An embassy,” he said. He looked round them all. “That’s what I’d like to suggest. An embassy to the Dwellers of Nasqueron, to secure peace, make sure there are no more ‘misunderstandings’ between us and them, attempt to involve them in the defence of Ulubis system and, if possible, acquire from them -with their consent, preferably — some of the extremely impressive weaponry they appear to possess, either in physical or theoretical form.”

“Well,” Heuypzlagger said, shaking his head. “Oh. Now our Acquisitariat friend is a diplomat,” Voriel observed, expression poised between sneer and smile.

“Needing yet more supposedly gas-capable ships to protect it, no doubt!” Brimiaice protested.

“Haven’t we got one already?” Thovin asked.

Colonel Somjomion just looked at him, eyes narrowed.

The meeting only seemed to last for ever. Finally it was over. Saluus met up with his new lover that evening, at the water-column house on Murla, where he’d first really looked at her in the true light of day and decided, yes, he’d be interested. It had been at brunch, with his wife (and her new girlfriend) and Fass and the Segrette Twins, the day after their visit to the Narcateria in Boogeytown.

* * *

The RushWing Sheumerith rode high in the clear gas spaces between two high haze layers, flying into the vast unending jet stream of gas as though trying to keep pace with the stars which were sometimes visible, tiny and hard and remote, through the yellow haze and the thin quick amber clouds scudding eternally overhead.

The giant aircraft was a single slim scimitar of wing pocked with engine nacelles, articulated like a wave, ten kilometres across, a hundred metres long and ten metres high, a thin filament forever jetting like a swift weather front made visible across the waste of clouds beneath. Dwellers, hundreds of them, hung from it, each anchored like refuelled aircraft by a cable strung out from the wing’s trailing edge, riding in a little pocket of calm gas produced by simple shells of diamond, open to the rear and which, to the human eye, were shaped like a pair of giant cupped hands.

In a long-term drug-trance, downshifted in time so that the flight seemed twelve or sixty or more times quicker than it really was — the vast continents of clouds racing beneath like foam, the wash of stars wheeling madly above, wisp-banks whipping towards and past like rags in a hurricane — the wing-hung Dwellers watched the days and nights flicker around them like some stupendous strobe and felt the planet beneath them turn like something reeling out their lives.

Fassin Taak left the jetclipper and flew carefully in, matching velocities, then anchored the little gascraft, very slowly, to the underside of the diamond enclosure holding the Sage-youth Zosso, a slim, dark, rather battered-looking Dweller of two million years or so.

Fassin slow-timed. The wing, the clouds, the stars, all seemed to pick up speed, rolling racing forward like over-cranked screenage. The roar of engines and slipstreaming gas rose and rose in pitch, becoming a high, shrill, faraway keening, then vanishing from hearing altogether.

The Dweller above him, seeming to jerk and quiver in his little retaining harness, waited for him to synch before sending, — And what might you be, person?

· I am a human being, sir. A Seer at the Nasqueron Court,

in a gascraft, an esuit. I am called Fassin Taak, of Sept Bantrabal.

· And I am Zosso, of nowhere in particular. Of here. Good view, is it not?

· It is.

· However, I dare say that that is not why you are here.

· You’re right. It’s not.

· You wish to ask me something?

· I am told I need to make passage to somewhere I’ve never heard of, to follow a Dweller I need to find. I’m told you can help.

· I’m sure I can, if I choose to. Well, that is, if people still take any notice of what a silly old wing-hanger says. Who can say? I’m not sure that I would listen to somebody as old and out of things as I am if I was a young travelcaptain. Why, I think I should say something like, “What, listen to that foolish old—?” Oh, I beg your pardon, young human. I seem to have distracted myself. Where was it you would like to go?

— A place that is, apparently, sometimes called Hoestruem.

Drunisine himself, alone, had come to the quarters that Fassin shared with the two Dwellers, in the mid-morning of the day after the battle in the storm.

“We have delayed you long enough. You may go. A jetclipper is at your disposal for the next two dozen days. Goodbye.”

“Now there,” Y’sul had observed, “goes a Dweller of few words.”

— Hoestruem?” Zosso asked. — No, I’ve never heard of it either.

Night swept over them as he signalled, enveloping.

— In or near Aopoleyin? Fassin sent. — Apparently, he told the old wing-hanger, when the Dweller was uncommunicative for a few moments. — Somewhere associated with Aopoleyin.

All this was on Valseir’s advice. Fassin couldn’t find any mention of anywhere called Aopoleyin in his databases either. He was starting to wonder if the memory-scanning process he’d had to undergo before being allowed to leave the Isaut had scrambled some of the gascraft’s information storage systems.

· Ah, Zosso sent. — Aopoleyin. That I have heard of. Hmm. Well, in that case, if I were you, I’d talk to Quercer Janath. Yes, you’ll need them. I should think. Tell them I sent you. Oh. And ask for my mantle scarf back. Might do the trick. No guarantees, though. Mind.

· Quercer and Janath. Your mantle scarf back.

The old Dweller rolled a fraction, jerkily, and looked down at Fassin. — I’ll have you know it was a very good mantle scarf.

He rolled back, facing again into the never-ending rush of cloud and stars and day and night. — I could do with it up here. It’s windy.