Transcendent

ONE

The girl from the future told me that the sky is full of dying worlds.

You can spot them from far off, if you know what you’re looking for. When a star gets old it heats up, and its planets’ oceans evaporate, and you can see the clouds of hydrogen and oxygen, slowly dispersing. Dying worlds cloaked in the remains of their oceans, hanging in the Galaxy’s spiral arms like rotten fruit: this is what people will find, when they move out from the Earth, in the future. Ruins, museums, mausoleums.

How strange. How wistful.

My name is Michael Poole.

I have come home to Florida. Although not to my mother’s house, which is in increasing peril of slipping into the sea.

I live in a small apartment in Miami. I like having people around, the sound of voices. Sometimes I miss the roar of traffic, the sharp scrapings of planes across the sky, the sounds of my past. But the laughter of children makes up for that.

The water continues to rise. There is a lot of misery in Florida, a lot of displacement. I understand that. But I kind of like the water, the gentle disintegration of the state into an archipelago. The slow rise, different every day, every week, reminds me that nothing stays the same, that the future is coming whether we like it or not.

The future, and the past, began to complicate my life in the spring of 2047, when I got an irate call from my older brother, John. He was here, in our Miami Beach house. I should “come home,” as he put it, to help him “sort out Mom.” I went, of course. In 2047 I was fifty-two years old.

I had been happy in Florida, at my parents’ house, when I was a kid. Of course I had my nose in a book or a game most of the time, or I played at being an “engineer,” endlessly tinkering with my bike or my in-line roller skates. I was barely aware of the world outside my own head. Maybe that’s still true.

But I particularly loved the beach out in back of the house. You understand this was the 1990s or early 2000s, when there still was a beach in that part of Florida. I remember I would walk from our porch, with its big roof-mounted swing chairs, and go down the gravel path to the low dunes, and then on to the sandy beach beyond. Sitting there you could watch space shuttles and other marvels of rocketry from Cape Canaveral rising into the sky like ascending souls.

Mostly I’d watch those launches alone. I was out of step with my family over that one. But once, I believe around 2005, my uncle George, my mother’s brother visiting from England, walked out with me to watch a night launch. He seemed so stiff and old, barely able to make it down to sit on the scrubby dune grass. But I guess he was only in his forties then. George was an engineer, of sorts, in information technology, and so a kindred spirit.

Of course that’s all gone now, thanks to the Warming, the rising sea levels, the endless Atlantic storms; Canaveral is a theme park behind a sea-wall. I guess I was lucky to be ten years old and able to watch such things. It was like the future folding down into the present.

I wonder what ten-year-old Michael Poole would have thought if he could have known what the girl from the future told me, about all those old and dying worlds out there waiting for us in space.

And I wonder what he would have thought about the Transcendence.

I think over those strange events, my contact with the Transcendence, one way or another, all the time. It’s like an addiction, something you’re aware of constantly, bubbling beneath the surface level of your mind, no matter how you try to distract yourself.

And yet I can remember so little of it. It’s like chasing a dream after waking; the more you focus on it, the more it melts away.

Here’s what I make of it now.

The Transcendence is our future — or a future, anyhow. A far future. The Transcendents had made (or will make) themselves into something unimaginably powerful. And now they were on the cusp, the cusp of a step to change into something new altogether.

After this point they would transcend to what we would think of as godhood — or they would subside to defeat, at the hands of a foe I barely glimpsed. Either way they would no longer be human.

But at this point, on this side of the cusp, they were still human. And they were tortured by a very human regret, a regret that had to be resolved now, before they proceeded and shed their humanity for good. This was what I was drawn into, this strange inner conflict.

Everybody knows about my work on the climate disaster. Nobody knows about my involvement in something much larger: the agonies of a nascent superhuman mind of the far future, in the culminating logic of all our destinies.

The future folding down into the present. That ten-year-old on the beach would probably have loved it, if he’d known. It still scares me to death in retrospect, even now.

But I guess even then I had my mind on other things. For the most remarkable thing I saw on that beach wasn’t a spaceship being launched.

The woman who came to the beach was slim and tall, with long, strawberry-blond hair. She would wave and smile to me, and sometimes call, though I could never make out what she said for the noise of the waves and the gulls. She always seemed to stand at the edge of the sea, and the sun was always low, so the sea was dappled with sunlight like burning oil, and I had to squint to make her out — or she would show up in some other equally difficult place, hidden by the light.

When I was a kid she visited occasionally, not regularly, maybe once a month. I was never frightened of her. She always seemed friendly. Sometimes when she called I would wave back, or yell, but the crashing waves were always too loud.

I would run after her sometimes, but running in soft wet sand is hard work even when you’re ten. I never seemed to get any closer, no matter how hard I ran. And she would shrug, and step back, and if I looked away she was gone.

It was only much later that I worked out who she was, how important she would become to me.

Uncle George never saw her, not during his one and only viewing of a spaceship launch from the beach. I wish he had. I’d have appreciated talking it over with him. I didn’t know much about ghosts when I was ten; I know only a little more now. George knew a lot of things, and he had an open mind. Maybe he could have answered a simple question: can you be haunted by spirits, not from the past, but from the future?

For, you see, the mysterious woman on the beach, who visited me intermittently all my young life, was another visitor from the future. She was Morag, my dead wife.

The future folding down into the present.

The girl from the future was called Alia.

She was born on a starship, fifteen thousand light-years from Earth. She lived half a million years after Michael Poole died. And yet she grew up knowing Poole as intimately as any of his family.

She had Witnessed his life almost since her mother and father had first brought her home from the birthing pods, when her hands and feet could grasp nothing but the fur on her mother’s chest, and the world was an undifferentiated place of bright glowing shapes and smiling faces. Michael Poole had been there for her even then, right from the beginning.

But she was thirty-five years old now, almost old enough to be considered an adult. Michael Poole was a relic from childhood, his little life like a favorite story she listened to over and over. She would always turn to him when she needed comfort. But he was a small, sentimental part of her life, his story tucked away in the Witnessing tank, unconsidered for days on end.

What really mattered to Alia nowadays was Skimming.

She met her sister in the Engine Room, the deepest bowel of the Nord, in steel-gray light, where hulking, anonymous machinery loomed. The sisters faced each other and laughed at the delicious prospect of what was to come.

Like Alia, Drea was naked, the best way to Skim. Drea’s body, coated with golden hair, was neatly proportioned, with her arms only a little shorter than her legs, and she had long toes, not as long as her fingers but capable of grasping and manipulation. It was a body built for zero gravity, of course, and for hard vacuum, the natural environment of mankind, but it was believed that this body plan was pretty much the same as that of the original human stock of old Earth.

Drea was ten years older than Alia. The sisters were very alike, but there was more gravity to Drea, a little more levity to Alia. As the light shifted, multiple lids slid across Drea’s eyes.

Drea leaned close, and Alia could smell the sweetness of her breath. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

Drea grasped Alia’s hands. “Three, two, one—”

Suddenly they were in the Nord’s Farm deck.

This was a high, misty hall, where immense ducts and pipes snaked down through the ceiling, lamps shed a cool blue-white glow, and green plants burgeoned in clear-walled hydroponic tanks. The Nord was a starship, a closed ecology. The big pipes delivered sewage and stale air from the human levels above, and carried back food, air, and clean water.

Alia breathed deep. After the cold, static austerity of the Engine Room she was suddenly immersed in the Farm’s vibrant warmth, and the deck plates thrummed in response to the huge volumes of liquid and air being pumped to and fro. Even the quality of the gravity felt subtly different here. Alia had felt nothing of the Skimming: no time passed during a Skim, so there was no time for sensation. But the transition itself was delicious, a rush of newness, like plunging from cold air into a hot pool.

And this was just the start.

Drea’s eyes were bright. “Jump this time. Three, two, one—” Flexing their long toes the sisters sailed up into the air, and at the apex of their coordinated jump they popped out of existence.

On the sisters fled, to all the Nord’s many decks, shimmering into existence in parks, schools, museums, gymnasiums, theaters. In each place they stayed only a few seconds, just long enough to lock eyes, agree the next move, and jump or pirouette or somersault into it. It was really a kind of dance, the challenge being to control the accuracy of each Skim and the mirror-image precision of their positions and movements at each emergence.

Skimming, voluntary teleporting, was so easy small children learned to do it long before they walked. Alia’s body was made up of atoms bound into molecules, of fields of electricity and quantum uncertainty. Alia’s body was her. But one atom of carbon, say, was identical to another — absolutely identical in its quantum description — and so it could be replaced without her even knowing. She was just an expression of a temporary assemblage of matter and energy, as music is an expression of its score regardless of the medium in which it is written. It made no difference to her.

And once you knew that, it was easy to see that she, Alia, could just as easily be expressed by a heap of atoms over there as one over here. It was just a question of will, really, of choice, along with a little help from the nanomachines in her bones and blood. And very little Alia willed was denied her.

Most children Skimmed as soon as they found out they could. Adults found it harder, or gave it up as they gave up running and climbing. But few of any age Skimmed as skillfully as Alia and Drea. As the sisters passed, scattering startled birds, young people watched them with envy, and older folk smiled indulgently, trying to mask their regret that they could never dance so gracefully again.

And at each step, in the instant after the girls had vanished, two clouds of silvery dust could be seen suspended in the air, pale and transparent, still showing the forms of the two sisters. But in the ship’s artificial breezes these chimeras of abandoned matter quickly dispersed.

In one last mighty Skim the girls leapt all the way out of the Nord itself.

Alia felt the tautness of the vacuum in her chest, the sting of hard radiation on her face as delicious as a shower of ice water on bare skin. With her lungs locked tight, and the Mist of biomolecules and nanomachinery that suffused her body eagerly scouring for damage, she was in no danger.

There were stars all around the sisters, above, below, to all sides; they were suspended in three-dimensional space. In one direction a harder, richer light came pushing through the thick veil of stars. That was the Core, the center of the Galaxy. The Nord was some fifteen thousand light-years from the center, about half the distance of Sol, Earth’s sun. Only ragged clouds of dust and gas lay before that bulging mass of light, and if you looked carefully you could make out shadows a thousand light-years long.

Alia looked down at the Nord, her home.

The ship beneath her feet was a complex sculpture of ice and metal and ceramic, turning slowly in pale Galaxy light. You could just make out the vessel’s original design, a fat torus about a kilometer across. But that basic frame had been built on, gouged into, spun out, until its lines were masked by a forest of dish antennae, manipulator arms, and peering sensor pods. A cloud of semi-autonomous dwellings, glowing green and blue, swam languidly around the ship: they were the homes of the rich and powerful, trailing the Nord like a school of fish.

Their hands locked, the sisters spun slowly around each other, their residual momentum expressing itself as a slow orbit. Complex starlight played on Drea’s smiling face, but her eyes were masked by the multiple membranes that slid protectively over their moist surfaces. Alia savored the moment. When they were younger the sisters had been the most important people on the Nord for each other. But Alia was growing up. This was a cusp of her life, a time of change — and the thought that there might not be too many more moments like this made this all the sweeter.

But Alia was distracted by a gentle voice, a whisper in her ear.

Her mother was calling her. Come home. You have a visitor…

A visitor? Alia frowned. Who would visit her that could be important enough for her mother to call? None of her friends; any of them could wait. But there had been a gravity about her mother’s tone. Something had changed, Alia thought, even as she had danced through the Nord. Drea clung to Alia’s hands. Alia felt a surge of love for this sister, companion of her childhood. But Drea’s expression was complex, concerned. She knew something, Alia realized. There was suddenly a subtle barrier between them.

They swam toward each other, and they Skimmed one last time.

Like a clash of cymbals their bodies overlapped, the atoms and electrons, fields and quantum blurrings overlapping. Of course this merging was frowned on; it was a dangerous stunt. But for Alia it was delicious to be immersed in her sister’s essence, to become heavy with her, everything about the two of them merged into a single cloudy mass, everything but some relic trace of separateness in their souls. It was closer even than sex.

But it lasted only a second. With a gasp they Skimmed apart, and drifted side by side. And with that moment of oceanic closeness over, Alia’s niggling worry returned.

Let’s go home, Drea said.

The sisters spiraled down toward the Nord’s bright, complicated lights.

When I flew into Miami, all I seemed to see from the air was water. It was everywhere, the encroaching sea at the coast, and inland shining ribbons that sliced the landscape to pieces. Much of downtown Miami was protected, of course, but outlying districts, even just blocks away, were flooded. I was mildly shocked.

But the place still worked. Impressive causeways linked up the new islands, and I saw pod buses in chains like shining beads, navigating around the new archipelago much as in my childhood you could drive down the Keys from Largo to West.

A dutiful if reluctant son, I was returning to Florida. I hadn’t been back here for, shame to say it, over ten years. That’s a long time these days. It’s a changing world, and over such an interval change heaps up like a head of water behind a sandbank, and then bursts all over you.

Out of the airport, I took a pod bus down to Calle Ocho, 8th Street, and then a ferry. It was a smart, agile airboat, not much more than a sheet of plastic driven by an immense fan. My pilot was a girl, maybe twenty, with not a word of English. She made that little boat skim like a skateboard; it was a fun ride.

We headed into Little Havana. We squirmed through swarms of boats and yachts. There were people on Jet Skis and old Everglades swamp buggies and even battered tourist pedalos, many of them laden with stuff. Along Calle Ocho the boats and junks had been ganged together to make huge, ragtag floating markets: there were cafйs and tabaqueros, and floating stores selling cheap clothes, even bridal wear. Bugs and flies rose everywhere, great clouds of them, far more than I remembered from my childhood. But there were still old men playing dominoes in the Maximo Gomez Park, and in Memorial Boulevard, heavily sandbagged, the Eternal Torch still burned in honor of the Bay of Pigs counter-revolutionaries. All this took place at the feet of the old buildings, many of which were still occupied, in their higher floors anyhow. The aging building stock gleamed silver, coated in smart Paint, as if they had been wrapped in foil. Beneath the tide marks you could see how the water was working away at the stone and the concrete. Barnacles on skyscrapers, for God’s sake.

In places there were cleared-out swathes, great lanes of rubble over which kids and scavengers swarmed. The tracks of hurricanes, probably, gaps in the urban landscape that would never be filled in. A coast is a place of erosion, uncle George used to say to me, a place where two inimical elements, the land and the sea, war it out relentlessly, and in the end the sea is always going to win. One day all these grand old buildings were going to just subside into the ocean, their contents spilling into great mounds of garbage in the patient water.

In the meantime, life went on. My pilot waved at rivals or friends, cheerfully yelling what sounded like obscenities. Everybody had some place to go, just like always. Despite all the dirty water everywhere it was still the Little Havana I remembered, a place I had always found exciting.

When we reached the coast I had the boat drop me at a small ferry stop a couple of kilometers from my mother’s house. I had decided to walk the rest of the way, my pack on my back.

It was the middle of the afternoon. The road, a northwest drag following the line of the coast, was good enough and had been resurfaced recently with a bright central stripe of self-maintaining silvertop. But you could see that the sea sometimes came up this far: there were bits of dried-up seaweed in the gutters, tide marks around the bases of the telegraph poles. There wasn’t a single car to be seen, not one, and the silence in which I walked was dense. That was a jarring discontinuity with my memories of childhood: on a comparable Tuesday afternoon in 2005, say, the cars would have been purring past, an endless flow. The housing stock had changed, too. The timber-frame houses I remembered, each nestling in its half-acre of lawn, were mostly abandoned, boarded up and in various states of decay, or they had gone altogether, leaving vacant lots behind, as if they had been spirited up into the sky. A few had been replaced by squat poured-concrete blocks with narrow windows: the modern style, fortresses against hurricanes, each an integral block, seamless from its roof to its deep foundations.

The air was bright and hazy, and the wet heat settled on me like a blanket. I was soon sweating, and regretting my decision to walk. There was an unpleasant smell in the air, too, a stink of salty decay, as if some immense sea animal was rotting on the beach. But it couldn’t be that, of course; there were no animals in the sea.

At last I bore down on my mother’s house, my childhood home. It was one of the few of the old stock still standing. But it was surrounded by heaps of sandbags, all slowly decaying. Big electric screens shimmered around the yard, designed to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and on the roof a wagon-wheel home turbine languidly turned, barely stirred by the breeze.

And here came my big brother, around the corner of the house, large as life, paintbrush in hand. “Michael! So you showed your face.” Instant criticism, but what could you expect? John wiped his palm ostentatiously on his coveralls, leaving a silvery streak, and held his big hand out to shake mine.

I shook back, cautiously. John was a big man, built like a football player. He always towered over me. A couple of years older than me, he’s balding, and his brown eyes are hard, set in a broad face. My features come from my mother’s side, but where she was always tall, pretty, with gray eyes like smoke, I’m small, round-shouldered, dark. Intense, people sometimes say. I’m more like my uncle George, in fact. My mother always said I reminded her of England. I got her gray eyes, though, which looked good in the fleeting years when I was almost handsome.

John takes after our father. As always, he intimidated me.

“I flew in,” I said lamely. “Quite a journey these days.”

“Isn’t it just? Kind of hot, too. Not good weather to work in.” He clapped me on the back, spreading more Paint and sweat over my shirt, thus messing up my laundry and my conscience. He led me around to the back of the house. “Mom’s indoors. Making lemonade, I think. Though it’s sometimes hard to tell exactly what she’s doing,” he said with conspiratorial gloom. “Say hello to the kids. Sven? Claudia?”

They came running from around the side of the house. They’d been playing soccer in the yard; their ball rolled plaintively along the ground, chiming softly for attention. They faced me and smiled, their eyes blank. “Uncle Michael, hi.” “Hello.”

Sven and Claudia, in their early teens, were tall, handsome, well-fed kids with matching shocks of blond hair. They were the products of John’s second marriage, to a German called Inge, now vanished after a divorce; they had their mother’s coloring, though both had something of their father’s heavyset massiveness. I always thought they looked like Cro-Magnon hunters.

For a couple of minutes I tried to make small talk with the kids about soccer. It turned out Claudia was the keenest, and even had a trial lined up for her local pro club. But as usual the talk was strained, polite,

a formality, as if I were a school inspector.

We were all wary. I’d committed a faux pas a couple of Christmases back when I’d sent them packages addressed to Sven and Claudia Poole. After the divorce my mother had taken to using her maiden name, as had I. But when he left home John switched back to my father’s name, Bazalget — I’d never known why, some row with my mother — and so these two were officially Bazalgets. John had a way of blowing up at me about such things at family occasions, spoiling the day and upsetting everybody.

I’d learned to tread carefully. We are an unusual family. Then again, maybe not.

I remembered how, when uncle George had come visiting, I would go running to him. But then George always brought us gifts. Smart man. Of course it wasn’t my insensitivity as an uncle that made these kids so bland. They were Happy kids, and this was the way Happy kids turned out. I’d never even dared challenge John about his choices over that.

John waggled his paintbrush. “I ought to get on. And you ought to go see Mom,” he said, as if I’d been putting it off.

So I walked back around to the front of the house, picked up my bag, and knocked on the door.

The front door was faded by the relentless sun, and in places the clapboards were peeling back, the nails rusting and coming loose. The place wasn’t in bad shape, however. The coat of Paint that John was busily applying was a silvery scraping over layers of creamy old gloss.

My mother opened the screen door. “It’s you,” she said. She stepped back, holding the door to let me pass, with eyes averted to the floor. I stepped over rotting sandbags and dutifully delivered the kiss she expected; her skin was crumpled, leathery, warm as melted butter.

She said she would make me a cup of tea, and she led me through the hall. We passed the old grandfather clock that had come with her from England. It still ticked away with imperial resolve, even though the world in which it had been manufactured had all but vanished.

My mother was a stick-thin figure, upright and stiff and animated by a fragile sort of energy. She was still beautiful, if any ninety-year-old can be said to be beautiful. She had never dyed her hair, and it had slowly faded to white, but even now, tied back, her hair looked lustrous, soft and full of light.

In the kitchen she had ingredients for fresh lemonade laid out over the working surfaces. She made me tea, hot and strong and laced with milk, English style, and she sat with me at the breakfast table. We sipped our tea in cautious silence. I enjoyed it, of course; it brought back my childhood.

I hadn’t neglected my mother. But I’d mostly seen her when she’d made her occasional, loudly self-sacrificing pilgrimages to come visit me in my home with Morag, or later after Morag’s death in my small apartment in New Jersey, or at holiday times at John’s brownstone apartment behind the Manhattan seawalls. But those trips had got more rare as the years passed; Mother would say she wasn’t sure if it was her getting old, or the world, or both.

She opened hostilities. “I suppose John called you in.”

“He was concerned.”

“You didn’t need to come here.” She sniffed. “Either of you. I’m ninety. But I’m not old. I’m not helpless. I’m not gaga. And I’m not moving out.”

I pulled a face. “You always did get straight to the point, Mom.”

She was neither annoyed nor flattered, and she wasn’t about to be deflected. “You can explain that to your brother. He’s just like your father. And there’s nothing wrong with this house.”

“Needs a coat of Paint, though. You’ll be able to make back the cost by selling solar power to the microgrid. And you have to comply with the sentience laws; a house of this age needs a minimal IQ-equivalent of—”

“I know the damn laws,” she snapped. “Just so we understand each other. I’m not moving out. ”

I spread my hands. “Fine by me.”

She leaned forward and inspected me. I stared right back. Her face was hard, all nose and cheekbones and sunken mouth. It was as if everything else had melted away but this inner core, leaving nothing but her one dominant central characteristic.

But what was that character? Energy, yes, determination, but all fueled by a kind of resentment, I thought. She’d come out of England, heavily resenting her own flawed family and whatever had happened to her there. She certainly resented my dad, and the way their marriage had broken down, and even the fact that he had died leaving her with various complications to sort out, not the least her two sons. She resented the slow drift of the climate, which had left her under pressure here in the family home in which she had always hoped to die. She was one against the world, in her head.

Her eyes, though, her beautiful eyes belied the harshness of her expression. They were clear and still that startling pale gray. And they revealed a surprising vulnerability. My mother had built a kind of shell around herself all her life, but her eyes were a crack in that shell, letting me see inside.

Not that she was about to let up on me. “Look at you. You’re round-shouldered, your hair’s a mess, you’re overweight. You look like shit.”

I had to laugh. “Thanks, Mom.”

“I know what’s wrong with you,” she said. “You’re still moping.” That was the only word she ever used to mean grief. “It’s been, what, seventeen years? Morag died, and your baby son died, and it was terrible. But it was all those years ago. It wasn’t the end of your life. How’s Tom? How old is he now?”

“Twenty-five. He’s in Siberia, working on a genetic sampling of—”

“Siberia!” She laughed. “Could he get any further away? You see, by mourning your dead son, you’ve pushed away the living.”

I stood up, pushing back my chair. “And your amateur psychoanalysis is a crock, as it always was, Mom.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “All right, all right. Your old room is made up for you.”

“Thanks.”

“You might fill a few sandbags. The tide’s out.” She pointed to the cupboard where she stored empty sacks.

“OK.”

“It isn’t so bad here. Even now. We still have doctors and dentists and police. So-Be isn’t a ghost town yet, Michael.” She said absently, “Not to say we haven’t had our problems. You know what the most awful thing was that happened here? In one place the water table rose so high a cemetery broke open. Boxes and bones just came bubbling out of the ground. It was the most grotesque thing you ever saw. They had to bulldoze it all out of sight. And I miss the birdsong. Everywhere you go the birds seem to be missing.”

I shrugged. Birds were bellwethers of the Die-back. In 2047, their vanishing was banal. I said carefully, “Mom, maybe you really should think about moving away.”

She eyed me with a bit of humor in her expression. “You’re claiming it’s any better anywhere else?”

“Not really, no.”

“Then stop wasting time.” She sipped her tea, dismissing me.

My old room was small, but it looked out to sea, and I’d always loved it.

Of course it wasn’t really mine anymore, and yet there had never been a precise date when it had ceased to be mine. I just slept in here less and less frequently, and at some point my parents had had to make decisions about sorting it out without consulting me.

Well, they had stripped it. Now, replacing my turn-of-the-century gadget-age dйcor, it was done up in the faux-naturalistic style that had been so popular in the 2020s, with a bamboo-effect wallcovering and a green carpet of soft-bladed artificial grass. In those days, before I had started to work on the commercial development of Higgs-energy, I was a consulting engineer for the nuclear-energy industry, and I had stayed in a lot of hotels. This style of decoration had been everywhere, endless lengths of tropical-parrot wallpaper and crocodile-skin-effect floor covering, adorning anonymous concrete blocks in Warsaw or Vancouver or Sydney. It was as if we were mourning the loss of all the green stuff, even while the real thing was imploding into the Die-back all around us.

I dumped my bag on the bed and opened the wall cupboards, looking for somewhere to hang my few shirts. But the cupboards were piled high. Some of this was my mother’s clothing. The materials felt brittle to the touch, the clothes very old and rarely worn.

But there was still a relic of my own old stuff stored here. There were no clothes. No doubt they had all disappeared into the maw of charity, and my old T-shirts and trousers might even now be adorning some refugee child from flooded Bangladesh or parched Egypt; it was an age of refugees, plenty needing to be clothed. But there were computer games, books, and a few of my classier-looking models, such as the huge mobile of the International Space Station that had once hung over my bed, now neatly disassembled and stored in bubble wrap. Some toys had survived, mostly tie-in figurines and die-cast models, all carefully stored inside their boxes.

It was, to my eyes, an eclectic mix; parents sorting out their children’s middens are a random filter. It seemed my mother had selected objects not of sentimental value but that might be worth money someday: a toy survived the cull only so long as it was in good condition and if she could find its packaging. But those mint-condition auction candidates, of course, were precisely the toys I had spent the least time with. Still, her eye for value had been good. A lot of the computer games could have raised some cash; there was a whole industry of silicon-chip archaeology turning out readers for such things, gizmos several electronic generations old and yet still precious to sentimental old fools like me.

I did come across one chance fossil that had escaped the cull, despite having no discernible value. It was a small tin, slotted so it served as a money box. Here I found newspaper clippings and collector cards and Internet printouts, mostly to do with the space program, and a little leather pouch full of pennies dated the year 2000, and loose postage stamps, and fast-food stickers and button badges from TV-show promotions, and a tiny travel chess set on which I had taught my brother to play, late at night when we were supposed to be asleep. All of this junk had been handled and pored over endlessly. That little box was a screen grab of my mind aged ten or eleven, the stuff so small and worked over it was almost like scrimshaw. But it was also a little off-putting, grimy with the handling. I probably ought to have got out more, I thought.

I closed the box and put it back on its shelf. But as I did so I was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness. It hit me like a physical blow, a punch in the neck, and I had to sit down. It was just that the kid who had filled that box had gone as if he never existed, the whole rich complicated texture of his life unraveled. Life was so rich, but so transient: that was what made me sad.

But moping over this junk wasn’t filling any sandbags. I closed the cupboard, changed into a T-shirt and shorts, threw on some fresh sun cream and bug repellent, and headed down the stairs.

The porch with the swings was still intact, though it would benefit from some TLC. I walked across the backyard, where John’s kids were still playing. It used to be a lawn; now it was just a concrete slab. The kids gave me polite Happy smiles, and I waved back and walked on, with an armful of empty bags.

From the back gate the old gravel path led down toward the coast, as it always had. But before I got to the dunes I found myself walking across dykes and culverts and drainage ditches, and the rotting remains of many, many sandbags. I imagined my mother laboring here, determined, stubborn. But all her hydrological systems had failed, and when I looked back I could see the lines of sandbags retreating ever further up toward the house. You couldn’t drain away an ocean through a five-centimeter culvert.

I walked through the dunes and came to the shore. There was still a beach here, of sorts, but it sloped sharply away, soon disappearing under the restless sea. The erosion here had been relentless. Even the dunes seemed to have been eaten away. Here and there I saw stretches of a grayer mud, like a stretch of sea-bottom, not a beach at all. Driftwood and scattered bits of plastic garbage littered the shore, and I passed great reefs of dead seaweed, dug out by storms and stranded. The reefs were the source of that salty smell of decay I’d detected earlier. Bugs swarmed everywhere, not just mosquitoes but tiny little bastards that threw themselves at my exposed flesh. Insects, the great winners of the years of the Die-back.

The sea looked beautiful, as it always did, even if, stirred up by the endless storms, it was not quite so blue as it used to be. It was hard to believe the sea had done so much damage.

I found a dune that was resisting the ravages of time with the help of some toughly bound grass. In its shelter the sand was clean and even reasonably dry. I squatted down and began to scoop sand into my sacks. It was late afternoon by now. I was looking into the sun, which was declining to the southwest, to my front right.

That was when I saw her.

It was just something in the corner of my eye, a bit of motion that distracted me. I thought it might be a rare sighting of a seabird, or maybe it was just the sun playing on the lapping water. I stood up to see better. It was a woman. She was a long way down the beach, and the light reflected from the sea behind her was bright and sent dazzling highlights stabbing into my eyes.

Morag?

I was never frightened by these encounters, or visitations. There was no sense of fear, or dread. But there was always ambiguity, muddle, uncertainty. It might have been Morag, my long-dead wife, or it might not.

I also felt a certain irritation, believe it or not. I’d had such visitations all my life, and was used to them. But in recent months the frequency had increased. I’d been plagued by these visions, apparitions — whatever. Their incompleteness hurt me; I wanted resolution. But I didn’t want them to stop.

I took a step forward, trying to see better. But I was holding a three-quarters-full sandbag, and it started to spill. So I bent down to set it on the ground. And then I had to step over the hole I had dug. One thing after another, in my way.

When I looked up again she was still there, bathed in light, though she seemed a bit further away. She waved at me, a big hearty wave, her arm right over her head. My heart melted. There was more warmth in that simple gesture than in any of the responses I had had from John and his Happified kids. It was Morag, dead seventeen years; it could only be her.

Now she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted. But the waves crashed, echoes of some remote Atlantic storm, and only a splinter of sound reached my ears. John, she said. Or it might have been bomb. Or Tom.

“What did you say? Something about Tom? Morag, wait—” I blundered forward. But away from the line of the dunes the sand quickly got muddy, and soon my feet and lower legs were coated in great heavy boots of sticky sea-bottom ooze. Then I came to one of those big reefs of seaweed, piled high and deliquescing to a stinking mush. I cast back and forth, looking for a way through.

When I looked beyond the heaps of rotting weed she had gone.

Back at the house, the kids had gone inside to join in an immersive virtual drama on Grandma’s huge wall-mounted softscreen. The rising tide had caused water to bubble out of the ground around the house and lap over the yard; even their smart soccer ball had been defeated.

As the sun went down, I joined John at his patient Paintwork.

We applied the Paint laboriously. It was heavy, sticky stuff, full of lumps, kind of like Artex, and difficult to work to an even coat. Silver in color, it looked odd on my mother’s clapboard walls, making the house look like a mocked-up stage set. And as we scraped on the Paint it started to thank us, in a whispery voice that wafted from the wall: Thank you, thank you for complying with all local sentience ordinances, thank you…

“Oh, screw you,” said John.

The dubious color scheme was one reason my mother hated this stuff. But it was silver, which deflected much of the sunlight, thereby cutting down on air-conditioning costs, and it was laden with photovoltaic cells to make the whole house a solar-powered sink.

And the Paint was dense in processors, billions of tiny nanofabricated computers each the size of a dust speck and about as smart as an ant. As we applied it the little brains linked up with each other through the conducting medium of the Paint itself, and burrowed their electronic way into the house’s systems,

seeking connectivity with power points and actuator controls. Artificial intelligence in a can: when I was a kid it would have seemed a miracle. Now sentience was a commodity, and this was just a chore.

For a while we worked together in stolid silence, my brother and me. The light leaked out of the sky, and my mother’s porch lanterns, big cool bulbs, popped into life. Mosquitoes buzzed and swarmed.

John made small talk. “So how about the digital millennium, huh? You’re the engineer; tell me if I need to worry.”

I shrugged. “We’ll survive. Just like Y2K. It won’t be so bad. They’ve done a few trial system excavations to check.”

John laughed at my choice of word. Excavation.

It was the latest scare story to sweep the planet. Next year’s date, 2048, was an exact power of two, in fact two to the power eleven, and so it would require an extra binary digit to represent it in the memory of the world’s interlinked computer systems. Nobody quite knew what that was going to do to the “legacy suites,” some many decades old, crusted over with enhancements and embellishments, that still lay at the heart of many major systems, grisly old codes rotting in computer memory like the seaweed on my mother’s beach.

“So,” John said, “just another scare?”

“We live in a time of scares and wonders.”

“It’s not a rational age.” As the Paint continued to thank him, John sighed. “Listen to this damn stuff. Lethe, maybe it’s rational not to be rational.”

Intrigued, I asked, “What do your kids think of the millenium?”

“Nothing, as far as I know. I try to get them to watch the news, but it’s a losing battle. But then, nobody watches the news nowadays, do they, Michael?”

“If you say so,” I snapped back.

This conversation, tense, on the edge of fencing, was typical of us. It was the thin surface of an antagonism that went back to our late teens, when we had started to become aware of the world, and we had begun to shape our attitudes to the future.

I had aimed to become an engineer; I wanted to build things. And I was fascinated by space. After all, when I was ten years old they discovered the Kuiper Anomaly: an honest-to-God alien artifact sitting at the edge of the solar system. For those of us who cared about such things, our whole perspective in the universe had been changed. But we were in the minority, and the world continued to turn, and I was out of step.

John, though, became a lawyer, specializing in environmental-damage compensation suits. I thought he was cynical, but in the wake of the vast political and economic restructuring that had followed the Stewardship program he was undoubtedly successful. By tapping into the vast rivers of money that sloshed to and fro in a destabilized world he had become hideously rich, and was now aiming for greater ambitions — while I, an engineer who built things, could barely pay the bills. That probably tells you all you need to know about the state of the world in those days.

We really got along remarkably bad, for brothers. Or maybe not. But still, this was my brother, the only sane person left who had known me all my life, with due respect to my mother.

And I longed to tell him about Morag on the beach.

I’d never told anybody. Now I felt I should. Who else to tell but my brother? Who else should know about it? He would mock, of course, but it was his job to mock. Standing there working with him, as the lights grew brighter in the gathering gloom, I plucked up my courage, and opened my mouth.

Then the lights fizzed to a silver-gray nothingness. Suddenly John was a silhouette against a darkling sky, holding a useless paintbrush. We heard cries of disappointment from the kids inside the house.

“Damn it,” John snapped.

The house, or anyhow the Paint, was apologizing. Sorry, sorry for the inconvenience.

It was a cooperative brownout, as the sentiences dispersed in the neighborhood houses and bars and shops and streetlamps, and in the water pumps and buses and boats, responded to symptoms of alarm coming from the local power microgrid — usually a glitching in the main supply frequency — and shut themselves off. It was better this way, better than the bad old days of stupid systems and massive blackouts, everybody said. But it was a royal pain in the butt even so.

My mother stuck her head out of the window. “And that’s another reason I don’t like that silver stuff.”

John laughed. “We’ll have to finish tomorrow, Ma. Sorry.”

“You’d better come in; the mosquitoes will be at you in minutes now that the electric fences are down. I’ve got no-brain-chicken slices, and cookies, and cards to keep the kids quiet.” She shut the window with a bang.

I glanced at John. I couldn’t see his face, but glimpsed the whiteness of his teeth. “Gin rummy,” he said. “I always hated fucking gin rummy.”

“Me, too.” It was one thing we had in common, at least.

He clapped me on the back, a bit more friendly than before. Side by side we walked into the house.

That was when I got an alarm call in my ear so loud it hurt.

There had been some kind of explosion in Siberia. Tom, my son, was out of touch, maybe hurt.

As she had grown up and become aware of her world, Alia had always known that the Nord was a ship, an artifact, everything about it made. And that implied it had an origin, of course, a time before which it hadn’t existed. She had never really thought about it. The present was the thing, not some discontinuity in remote history; wherever you grew up you always assumed, deep inside, your world had existed forever.

Nevertheless, it was true. This ship had once been built, and named, and launched, by human hands.

The Nord had once been a generation starship. Crawling along at sublight, it was designed to journey for many generations, after which the remote grandchildren of its builders would spill onto the ground of some new world. It was believed it had been launched from Sol system itself, probably built of the ice of a remote moon, perhaps of Port Sol itself — and perhaps even by the legendary engineer Michael Poole, descended from the subject of Alia’s Witnessing, an earlier Michael Poole who had been doomed to live in a much drabber time.

But that was probably just a story. The truth was the Nord’s port of origin was long forgotten, its intended destination unknown. Nobody even knew who its builders were or what they had wanted. Were they visionaries, refugees — even, it was whispered deliciously, criminals?

Even the ship’s name was a subject of intellectual debate. It might have derived from nautilus, a word from old Earth referring to an animal that lived its life in a shell. Or perhaps it derived from North or Northern, an earthworm’s word for a direction on a planet’s surface.

But whatever its target had been, the Nord had never reached it. Long before it completed its voyage it had been overtaken by a wave of faster-than-light ships, a new generation of humans washing out from Earth and rediscovering this relic of their own past. It must have been a huge conceptual shock for the crew on that day when the first FTL flitters had come alongside.

But when that generation had passed, the crew had accepted their place aboard a bit of bypassed history. They had begun to trade with the passing ships — at first with the Nord’s reaction-mass ice, billions of tons of which still remained, and later with hospitality, cultural artifacts, theater shows, music, elegant prostitution. The Nord was no longer a vessel, really; it was an artificial island, drifting between the stars, locked into a complex interstellar trading economy. Nowadays nobody aboard had any ambition for the voyage to end.

Of course if you lived on a spaceship there were constraints. The Nord’s inner space was always going to be finite, and the population could never grow too far. But two children were enough for most people: indeed most had fewer. Alia knew that she was fortunate to have a sister in Drea; siblings were rare. Her parents, though, had never made any secret of the deep and unusual joy they had derived from their children.

And anyhow if you didn’t like it here in this small floating village you could always escape. You could pay for passage aboard one of the Nord’s endless stream of FTL visitors, and head for any of the worlds of a proliferating human Galaxy. And likewise some of those visitors, charmed by the Nord’s antiquity and peace, chose to stay.

Thus the Nord had sailed on, its crew rebuilding their ship over and over, until it had passed through the dense molecular clouds that shielded the Galaxy’s Core from eyes on Earth, and had broken into a new cold light.

And half a million years had worn away.

The sisters’ home was a cluster of bubble-chambers lodged just underneath the Nord’s ceramic hull. Windows had been cut into that ancient surface, so that from Alia’s own room you could see out into space. The room was small, but it was a pleasant retreat she had always cherished.

But today there was a visitor here. An intruder.

It was a man, a stranger. He stood quietly in the center of the floor, hands behind his back. Her mother, Bel, stood beside the visitor, her hands twisting together.

The stranger was tall, so tall he had to duck to avoid the ceiling. He was dressed in a drab pale gray robe that swept to the ground, despite his angular tallness. His face was long, a thing of planes and hard edges of bone, as if there wasn’t a morsel of spare fat under his flesh. His arms were short, too stiff for climbing; he was a planet-dweller. His expression was kindly, almost amused, as he looked at her. But Alia thought he had an air of detachment, as if she were some kind of specimen. He kept subtly away from the furniture, her bed and chairs and table and Witnessing tank, all heaped with clutter and clothes.

She didn’t like this judgmental stranger in her room, looking at her stuff. Resentment flared.

Her mother’s face was flushed, and she seemed tense, agitated. It took a lot to get a bicentenarian so visibly excited. “Alia, this is Reath. He’s come to see you, all this way. He’s from the Commonwealth. ”

The man, Reath, stepped forward, arms outspread. “I’m sorry to intrude on you like this, Alia. It’s all terribly ill-mannered. And I know this will come as a shock to you. But I’ve come to offer you an opportunity.”

She couldn’t tell how old he was. But then, you couldn’t tell how old anybody was past the age of thirty or so. He was different, however, she thought. There was a stillness about him, as if he had weightier concerns than those around him.

She said suspiciously, “What kind of opportunity? Are you offering me some kind of job?”

“In a sense—”

“I don’t want a job. Nobody works. ”

“Some do. A very few,” he said. “Perhaps you will be one of them.” His voice was deep, compelling, his whole manner mesmeric. She felt he was drawing her down some path she might not want to follow.

Her mother had gone, she noticed, slipped out of the room while Reath distracted her.

Reath turned away and walked around the room, his hands still folded behind his back. “You have windows. Most people would prefer to be hidden away, buried in the human world, to forget that they are on a starship at all. But not you, Alia.”

“My parents chose the apartment,” she said. “Not me.”

“Well, perhaps.” With an elegant finger he traced faint shadows on the wall, a cross-hatching of rectangles, hexagons, ovals, and circles. As the occupancy patterns of the Nord had changed, windows had been cut here, then filled in and cut again, each repair leaving a ghostly mark. “And these usage scars? They don’t bother you?”

“Why should they?” In fact she liked the sense of history the faint scarring gave her, the idea that she wasn’t the first to live here, to breathe this air.

He nodded. “You don’t mind. Even though it must give you a sense of transience, of the evanescence of all things — of youth, of love, even of your own identity. I don’t mean to patronize you, Alia. But I suspect you’re still too young to understand how rare that is. Just as they would prefer to forget where they are in space, most people would rather not think about their position in time. They would certainly prefer not to think about death!”

She felt increasingly uncomfortable. “And that’s why you’ve come here? Because I think too much?”

“Nobody thinks too much. Anyhow you can’t help it, can you?” He approached her Witnessing tank. It was a silvered cube half his height. “May I?”

She shrugged.

He tapped the tank’s surface.

It turned clear to reveal a softly translucent interior, filled with light that underlit the planes of Reath’s face. And through the light snaked a pale pink rope, looping and turning back on itself. If you looked closely you could see that the line wasn’t a simple cable, but had small protuberances and ridges. And if you looked closer still you could just see that it was actually a kind of chain, with its links tiny human figures, one fading seamlessly into the next: there was a tiny baby at one end, fingers and toes pink, and at the other end of the sequence an old man, bent and gaunt.

Reath said, “Your subject is Michael Poole, isn’t it? I envy you. Though it’s no coincidence you’ve been assigned such a significant figure, historically.”

“It isn’t?”

“Oh, no. We — I mean, the councils of the Commonwealth — have had our eye on you for a long time, Alia.”

That chilled her. And she still didn’t know what he wanted.

“I am certainly pleased to see you keep up your Witnessing.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Sadly, no. Even though we all have our duty: to Witness is to participate in the Redemption, which has been mandated by the Transcendence.” When he said the name, Reath bowed his head.

Alia knew this was true. She had always been fascinated by her assigned Witnessing subject; others, even her own sister, thought that was a bit too earnest, and in the interests of popularity she’d learned not to talk about it.

Reath reached into the tank and touched the flesh-colored chain, close to one end. That “link” was cut out, magnified, and became animated, and the tank filled up with the light of a distant sun, a vanished beach. A boy played, throwing brightly colored discs to and fro through the air. There was a contrail traced by a spark of light climbing in the sky, maybe a rocket; the boy quit his playing to watch, his hand peaked over his eyes.

Reath murmured, “My history’s a little rusty. Didn’t this Poole grow up in Baikonur? Or was it Florida? One of those paleological spaceports…”

“I like watching him as a kid,” Alia blurted. “He’s so full of life. Full of ideas. Always tinkering with things. Like those toys. He would cut and shape them, trying to make them fly better.”

“Yes. The shapeless dreams of youth, so soon replaced by the complexities and compromises of adulthood. But his life was so short. By the time he was your age Poole’s life was probably half over. Most of them could only follow one career, make one significant contribution before—” Reath snapped his fingers. “Imagine that! But we, who have so much time by comparison, often choose to do nothing at all.”

He was trying to recruit her, Alia realized. But for what? “Whywould I want to work, for you or anyone else?”

“It’s a valid point,” Reath said. “In our society of limitless material wealth, what rewards can there be? Have you ever heard of money, child?”

“Only historically.”

“Ah, yes.” He turned to her Witnessing tank. “They still had money in Poole’s time, didn’t they?”

“Yes.”

“And Poole himself worked.”

“He was involved in one of the big geoengineering projects—”

“Yes,” Reath said. “The struggles to get past the great Bottleneck of his day. But what motivated Poole, do you think? I’m sure he was paid. But was it just money he wanted?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

She frowned, thinking. “His world was in trouble. Duty, I suppose.”

“Duty, yes. Of course everything is different now. But even though money has vanished, duty remains — don’t you think? And I already know you do your duty, Alia, with your Witnessing. Tell me what you think of Poole.”

“His legacy—”

“Never mind his place in history. What do you think of him?”

She studied the playing boy. To her, Poole was a stunted creature, living in a cramped, dark time. And his mind was only half-formed, his speech a drawl. Why, he was barely conscious most of the time. It was as if he walked around in a dream, a robot driven by unconscious and atavistic impulses. When tragedy hit, when his wife died, he was overwhelmed, quite unable even to comprehend the powerful emotions that tore him apart.

Yet this flawed animal was a citizen of a civilization that was already reaching out beyond the planet of its birth, and Michael Poole himself had a grave, history-shaping responsibility; and yet this man, in a way, would save his world.

Uncertainly she tried to express some of this to Reath.

Reath said, “Just think how you would look to him. Why, you’re a different category of creature altogether. If Poole was standing before you now, I wonder if you’d even be able to talk to each other! You and Poole are as different as two humans could ever be. And yet you have always watched him. Do you think, Alia, that you could ever love him?”

“Love? What are you talking about? What do you want, Reath?”

His eyes were a deep, watery gold. “I have to be sure, you see.”

“About what?”

“If you really are what I’m looking for.” He turned in response to a faint sound. “I think your father is home.”

Alia was happy to run from the room, fleeing from this strange man and his intense scrutiny, seeking her father’s reassurance. But in the end reassurance was the last thing she got from him.

In the apartment’s living room, her mother and father stood side by side. Her sister Drea was here, too. Alia’s attention was distracted by the Witnessing tanks stacked up in one corner of the room, her parents’, and Drea’s. It struck her that she couldn’t remember when the others had done their Witnessing. Maybe Reath was right, she was unusual.

Her family was staring at her.

And then, as if noticing it for the first time, she saw that Ansec hadn’t come home alone. In her father’s arms, fresh from the birthing tanks, was a baby.

Reath followed Alia, and stood discreetly to one side.

Alia found it difficult to speak. “Well,” she said. “Quite a family gathering.”

Her mother was anguished. “Oh, Alia, I’m sorry.”

Ansec, her father, was calmer, though distress showed in his face. “It’s not a crisis,” he said. “At least it doesn’t have to be. An opportunity — that’s what we have.”

Alia turned on her sister. “And you — did you know?”

Drea snapped back, sibling rivalry briefly flaring. “Don’t take it out on me.” She waved at Reath. “It’s you the Commonwealth wants, not me!”

And all the time, in her father’s arms, there was the mute, incontrovertible existence of the baby. Bel’s eyes were shining now. “It’s a boy, Alia, a baby boy!”

Ansec said, “You know how happy this will make us, don’t you? You know how we love children — how we’ve loved having you as you’ve grown.” He cradled the baby. “This is us, Alia. The two of us, Bel and me. Having children. It’s what makes us what we are.”

“And what about me?” Alia said. “It takes two years for a gestation in the tank. So you’ve known this day would come for that long. And you’ve known what would happen then…” It was the Nord’s one iron rule. In its limited space, you were allowed two children; if you wanted a third, one of the others had to leave to make room, leave the ship altogether. “You kept it secret from me. You went to the tank. You planned it all—”

Her mother took her hands. “It’s not like that, Alia, not at all. We weren’t supposed to tell you the Commonwealth was interested in you.”

“Why?”

“In case the Commonwealth didn’t want you after all,” Reath said gently. “You might feel rejected, you see. It is thought to be kinder this way.”

“But we had to plan,” Bel said. “You see that, don’t you? We thought we would lose you. We had to plan for what would follow.”

And Alia saw it all now. “So that’s it. The Commonwealth wants to take me away, and that’s an excuse for you to get rid of me and have a new child. You just assume I’m going to go with Reath. With this stranger. So you can stay home with this baby.”

“But it’s a marvelous opportunity,” her father said. “An honor. Anybody would want to go.”

“You will go,” her mother said. But she glanced at the baby, and there was an edge of panic in her voice.

“Won’t you?”

Reath stood beside Alia, a tall, calm presence. Suddenly she felt closer to him than she did to her own family. He said, “Don’t worry, Alia. It wasn’t supposed to be so difficult. We are all to blame. But I’ve seen enough of you to know that if you come with me you won’t regret it. I’ll take you to places you can’t imagine. The center of the Galaxy — worlds beyond number. You will be trained, your full potential brought out. Your mind will open up like a flower!”

“But what for?”

“Why, haven’t you worked that out yet?” He smiled. “I want you to become a Transcendent, child.”

She gaped. “Me?”

“You’re just the type.”

To be a Transcendent — it was unimaginable. Her heart was tugged by curiosity, pride — and, yes, by awe. But she was afraid, too. “Can I choose to stay?”

“Of course,” her father said. But her mother cast increasingly desperate looks at the baby, and Alia knew there was really no choice, none at all.

The news of the disaster had come to me thirdhand, through a friend of a friend of Tom’s. Arriving out of nowhere, it was a punch in the head.

John acted compassionate and concerned. What a jerk. I always thought that at times of difficulty like this my brother never really got it; he never really felt the deep emotions swirling around, and was never quite capable of understanding what you were feeling. He had a role to play in putting things right, a role he fulfilled. But he didn’t get it.

And nor did his two Happified kids. With their blank, pretty eyes they watched me to see what I would do, as if I were an animal that had been poked with a stick.

My mother was a more complex case altogether. She fussed around making hot drinks for everybody, her self-control absolutely rigid. But she was hollow inside, and fragile, a china doll that had somehow survived nearly a century. John didn’t feel it at all; my mother felt it, but fought it. So who was more screwed up?

Anyhow, I had things to do. I escaped to my room.

I sat on my bed, the bed I’d slept in as a child, the bed Tom had used a few times when he stayed here, and spoke into midair, trying to contact my son.

I couldn’t place a call to Tom’s implants, or to the office he worked out of. The local communications in Siberia were down, and the networks as a whole seemed to be suffering. I imagined a great gouge torn roughly out of the world’s electronic nervous system, waves of pain and shock rippling out, and flocks of counselors, artificial and human, swooping down to help the wounded artificial minds cope with their trauma. Sentience comes as a piece: if you want the smarts you have to accept the self-reflection, the angst.

And it didn’t help that right now, as was patiently explained to me, all available bandwidth was being gobbled up by the news networks. The Siberian disaster, caused by a detonation of something called “gas hydrate deposits” about which I knew nothing, seemed to have all the right hooks for the news: lots of gore, some kind of link to the Warming and therefore a grave if-this-goes-on angle, and, last but not least, the aid workers who had been caught up in the blast, a set of photogenic young western casualties.

But none of that was any use to me. I left my systems trying to make the call to Tom, while I set off more search agents to book a flight.

The cost of a plane ticket to Siberia, even one way, was frightening. In 2047 nobody flew, nobody but the very rich and very important, or if you really had to. It was cheaper to orbit the Earth in a tourist-bucket spaceplane than to fly the Atlantic. Tom, working for his genetic-legacy agency, had traveled out by cruise ship, taking weeks to crawl around the polar ocean, a way of traveling with a much smaller environmental footprint. But that would be too slow for me. The flight to Florida had already cleaned me out, but what else could I do?

Of course booking the ticket was only half the battle. Actually being deemed worthy of a seat came next. The booking system referred me to the airline’s counseling service, a man’s voice sounding older than me, fatherly, stern. “Let’s work out why you really want to fly.”

“My son is hurt!”

“Flying is a generational aspiration, you know. In your youth you probably flew many times, as did your parents. But then you indulged in many unhealthy pursuits in those days. That doesn’t mean you should carry on now.”

“I don’t want to fly. I just want to get there.”

“Is it possible that what you really want is a flight, not to Siberia, but to your past? Is it possible it is not a destination you seek but an escape, a release from the responsibilities of the present?…” And so on.

My phone was implanted; you couldn’t muffle over the handset and say what you really thought. So I let off steam by pacing around the room as this virtual Freud lectured me about the necessity for the “hidden extras” I would be paying for, in terms of environmental-damage costs, and compensation for communities I would disrupt with the noise of the plane, and even clean-up taxes relating to the disposal of the aircraft itself a few years down the line. It was all part of the social-responsibility package the airlines had had to accept years before, to keep flying at all. But it was difficult to wade through.

“I don’t have to justify anything about my relationship with my son to you,” I snapped back.

“Not to me,” the empathist said. “Not to the airline, or even your son. To yourself, Michael.”

“No,” I insisted. “There are times when we need to be with people. It’s a deep primate thing.” I was having trouble keeping my voice steady. “It’s part of my programming, I guess. You ought to understand that.”

“But your son has stated, on record, that he doesn’t need to be with you. ”

Tom had said that, and it wasn’t helping my application. “A child’s whole life after about the age of ten is devoted to establishing his independence from his parents. And in our case our relationship has been particularly strained ever since the death of his mother, in childbirth. Even you must have figured that out.”

“Yes, I—”

You don’t interrupt airline psychoanalytical machines, but I interrupted. “But we need each other. We’re all we’ve got. Tom’s words are only the surface. It’s what we feel underneath that counts. And if you aren’t a complete waste of memory you’ll understand that…” You aren’t supposed to insult the shrink machines either. But I meant everything I said.

I had been with Morag when she died, on that grisly hospital table. And at that instant I had wanted nothing else in the world, nothing, but to be with Tom; it had been as if a steel cable had been lodged in my gut and was dragging me to him. But of course everything quickly became complicated. Tom was only eight; he was too young to deal with his own grief, let alone my own. And in the months that followed, as he watched me sinking into myself, some particle of his mixed-up feelings transmuted into resentment. That awful time had shaped our relationship ever since.

“But that deep feeling remains,” I told the airline machine. “The tie. And I believe that’s true for Tom, too, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. To every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s third law.”

“But, you see, Mr. Poole, that overanalytical remark merely illustrates what I have been saying…”

John came to the door. He leaned against the frame, hands in pockets, watching me pacing. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “The counselor can probably detect your motion. A dissonance between your body posture and your words is a real giveaway.”

“I feel like I’m wading through cotton wool.”

He shrugged. “That’s the modern world. Energy-deprived. Constrained.” He stepped forward. “Let me help.” He reached out his finger toward my ear, my implant.

I flinched; I couldn’t help it.

For once John seemed to understand. “What’s more important, sibling rivalry, or getting through to Tom? Let me win this one.”

I nodded. He touched my face, just in front of my ear, and I felt a slight electric shock as his systems interfaced with mine. He took over my calls, and with a few soft words transferred them to his company in New York.

It took only five minutes or so for his company’s systems to come back with a reply. John, standing easily in the corner of my bedroom, turned to me regretfully. Not even John’s powerful reach could cut through the mush into which a sector of the global communications net had melted, so he couldn’t put me in touch with Tom, and he hadn’t had much more joy with the flights. “No availability until the middle of next week.”

“Next week? Jesus. But—”

He held up his hand. “I can get you a VR projection in twenty-four hours. I think it’s the best we can do, Michael.”

I thought that over. “OK. How much?”

“Let me cover it.”

“No,” I snapped reflexively.

He seemed to suppress a sigh. “Come on, Michael. He’s my nephew as well as your son. Lethe, I can afford it. And you don’t know what you might need your money for in the future.”

I conceded this second defeat. “OK,” I said. “But, John, I still don’t know if he’s alive or dead. I don’t even know that much.” I hated to ask him for more help like this. But he was right. Better to let him win; what did it matter?

He nodded. “I’ll keep trying to get through. Leave it with me.” He walked out to his own room, talking quietly to his own implant.

It was still only ten P.M., too early to try to sleep. I wandered downstairs, where my mother was sitting with the children, watching VR images of a mountainous landscape. “Non-immersive, you’ll notice,” my mother said to me. “Immersion’s bad for them so close to bedtime.”

I told them the news, or nonnews, about Tom. When my mother heard that John was helping me out, she wrapped her thin bird’s-talons fingers around her cup of tea, and raised it to her lips for a cautious sip. She looked satisfied, though she was too smart to say so openly. After we left home she had always tried to encourage her sons to have a close relationship, to keep in touch; she had even tried to engineer ways for that to happen. And even now, even in this awful time when it was possible that her grandson lay dying somewhere, she was calculating how to exploit this latest shift in our relationship.

I watched the VR images with the kids for a while. They were holiday pictures, of a trip the kids had taken with their father, up into the Rockies. It was a beautiful place where whitewater rapids that tumbled into limpid pools, and doll-like VR manifestations of the kids clambered past sheer rocky walls. I remembered some spectacular vacations we had had as kids, when my parents had taken us to the Galapagos Islands, Australia, the African game parks — places full of exotic life-forms that had astounded and excited me. But nobody went in search of wildlife anymore, because it wasn’t there to be found. There were still beautiful places in the world, where rich people went to vacation, but they were inanimate, like this, landscapes of rock and water.

But even dead landscapes had changed. You could see how the faces of the rocks had been fenced off and wired over. Rising temperatures were destabilizing high-altitude rock faces by thawing the deep permafrost beneath them. Climbers were another endangered species nowadays.

I had got lost in thought. Both the children were looking at me, calm concern marking their perfectly smooth faces. They looked as if they had been coached to sit like that.

I got out of the room.

I rattled around the house. Maybe I could call a water cab and go into town for a while. Find a bar, preferably nonfloating. Or maybe just walk the shore. But I didn’t want to stray too far from John and his calls. Even then, even at such a dreadful time in my life, I was in his power, and my mother’s. I was in a kind of prison, I thought, trapped into immobility by all the unspoken rules and treaties that had been laid down in my fifty-two years of life with my family.

Defeated, I trailed back upstairs to John’s room.

He was sitting on his bed, glancing at headlines on a softscreen. “No news.”

“You’ve checked with your office?”

“No need. Feliz is a good guy; he will keep trying until he gets through, and he will call the minute he does. Take it easy. Do you want something? A drink — I brought some beer.”

“No. Thanks.”

Hands in pockets, I mooched around the room. There seemed to be even less of John in here than there had been of me in my room, although John would have systematically stripped the place of anything valuable long ago. But in one shadowed corner I found a small bookcase. “Hey. Here are my old science fiction novels.”

“Really?” He came across to see. We bent down side by side, brothers, two thick-necked middle-aged men, straining to see the titles on cracked and yellowing spines.

I said, “I imagined they had been thrown out. I guess Mother moved them in here in one of her clear-outs.” Which would have been typical of her, I thought sourly; this stuff had been unbelievably important to me as a kid, but she didn’t even know whether it had belonged to me or John.

John ran his fingers over the titles. Some of these books went back to the 1960s or even earlier. They had mostly been gifts from uncle George, who had collected books that had been old when he was a kid. “These might be worth something.”

“They were mine, you know,” I said, too hastily.

He held his hands up, a faintly mocking smile on his face. “I don’t dispute it.” He pulled a couple of copies off the shelves, took them out of their protective Mylar bags, and leafed through them. “Not in great condition,” he said. “See how this is yellowed — too long in the sun.”

I straightened up. “Yeah. But I wouldn’t want to sell them. And anyhow the collectors’ market for this stuff isn’t what it was.”

“It isn’t?”

“Too far in the past. We’re all too old. For every collectible there is a demographic. You’re at your peak as a collector at thirty, forty — old enough to be nostalgic, rich enough to have disposable income, young enough to be foolish about spending it. But science fiction is older than that, long over.”

“It was over even when we were kids,” he said. “I never understood what you saw in the stuff.”

“I know you didn’t,” I said testily. “Which is the difference between us.” I glanced along the shelf and pulled out a novel. “Nobody reads the literature, but there’s still a scholarly tradition around it. And there’s a fascination to it, you know, John. All those lost futures.” When I was a kid the future was still a bright, welcoming place, a place I wanted to live. We might all have been kidding ourselves even then — the Die-back was already under way — but that was how it felt to me. Now, if you thought about the future at all it was as a black place that would erase you, like a hospital, a place you went to die. I put the frail old book back on the shelf. “It’s an anti-progressive viewpoint, almost medieval. We’re regressing, philosophically.”

“But this stuff — fantastic dreams of rocket ships and aliens — it always repelled me. It never seemed real.”

“But the future is real,” I said. “To ignore it is absurd. It’s as if we decided we don’t believe in Mount Everest, or the Pacific Ocean. They are still there, whether we close our eyes to them or not. The future is coming whether we like it or not. The world is changing, and so are we. The future must be different from the past.”

“But nobody cares anymore,” John said brutally. “And what bothers you is that the future turns out not to have a place for people like you. Engineers. People who want to build things. People who want to fly in space! Well, we’re too busy fixing what we broke before to build anything new.”

He was right. The space program had been a big disappointment to me, all my life. Nearly eighty years after Neil Armstrong, still nobody had been to Mars, nobody had left Earth’s orbit since the Moonwalkers. We hadn’t even sent a probe out to the Kuiper Anomaly. The Warming had absorbed all our energies, and the great shock of the Happy Anniversary flash-bombing in 2033 had jolted us even more.

I think John probably knew that I was, in fact, working on a design study for a new generation of spacecraft. But the work paid peanuts, and would most probably never fly — it was a hobby, a paper model as I had once made models of the Space Station of plastic and paint and decals. Maybe that proved his point. We were all too busy fixing things, coping with one set of destructive changes after another, spending all our civilization’s resources just to maintain stasis, to dream of interplanetary adventure.

John sat on his bed and leaned against the wall, his big football player’s hands locked behind his head. “You know, if you were to write a science fiction novel now, I’d be the hero.”

That was outrageous enough to make me laugh. “How so?”

“Because I’m dealing with the future as it exists. And I’m helping people.”

Basically he dealt with compensation for environmental impacts. He had started out representing individuals, people who lost their homes or their health through avoidable toxic spills and the like. He had moved on to advise legislators on adjustments to the tax system on such things as polluting fuels, heat sources, or greenhouse-emission processes.

It was all about a striving for balance, John said; you had to balance the drive for economic development with a need for environmental stability, you had to balance economic efficiency with equity for those impacted. He had even worked on the notion of “intergenerational equity,” in which, rather than ignoring future generations altogether or at best using them as garbage handlers for your waste, you actually paid a “future tax” for any impact you might have on them. John had made something of a name for himself; indeed to my chagrin, he’d appeared on TV a few times as a talking head on the issues.

His first love, though, had always been adversarial law, and in his fifties he had been drawn back to it — but to much larger cases. “Rather than defending the little old lady against the company who is poisoning her drinking water, I’m now, for instance, advising the administration on a massive suit against China.” While the United States had become a leader in global environmental management in the 2020s, China, in a relentless drive for economic growth, had continued to pollute, even to the present day. And then there are redistribution charges…” It was a rule of thumb of the Warming that hot areas lost out while cooler areas won. So, for instance, an Iowa farmer afflicted by increasing aridity lost, while a Minnesota farmer with a longer growing season won.

“Simple equity is the philosophical guide,” John said. “The guy in Minnesota uses his bounty to subsidize his colleague in Iowa. And if things change around in the future, the flow of funds can always go the other way. People accept this, I think; it’s all manifestly fair.” He even said you could extend this on a planetary scale — not through lawsuits, like the United States vs. China, but through “planetary bargaining.” Canada, a winner, could bail out India, a loser, and so on.

A lot of work came John’s way through the various Stewardship agencies. The whole notion of the Stewardship was based on taking responsibility for your actions, on accepting the true cost of what you did, or sharing any benefit. But of course you’d always put “winning” and “losing” in quotes; really it was all simply change, which hit everybody to varying degrees.

But all this equity and balancing and taxing and fairness was just a way of sharing out the impact of the Warming, I thought, not of reducing that impact in the first place. It occurred to me there was a narrow assumption hidden here, that things would carry on much the same as they had for a while — falling apart, maybe, but doing so slowly, staying more or less bearable, manageable. But what if not?…

John started to tell me about a book he was working on.

“Back up,” I said. “A book?”

He grinned smugly. “It’s all about the future of money.”

He was developing an idea that dated back to John Maynard Keynes, an economist who worked in the middle of the twentieth century. “You’d run international trade in a whole new currency which would earn negative interest. So you would naturally spend your diminishing wealth as quickly as possible, which will boost trade and the exports of other nations. It’s a new paradigm,” he said. “A way to avoid the debt mountains of the past, and to boost the global trade on which we rely. Why not? Money is just a mental construct. We can make up its rules any way we want. I have some contacts in the Administration through the China case, and I think I can garner some support…”

And so on. I listened to all this with a sickening feeling. Whereas I, the engineer, was a nineteenth-century relic, a sad Jules Verne character, perhaps my smart-ass brother really was an archetype of our times, a modern hero. “So you’re going to become more prominent than ever,” I said. “I’ll never be able to get away from your face.”

He laughed. There was a grain of sincere bitterness in my harangue; of course he detected it. “I’ll invite you to the launch of the book,” he said.

I managed to sleep that night, but only a little. I got up early and left the house.

I went down to the coast, and walked and walked. I wasn’t going anywhere; I was just trying to escape the contents of my own head, as my airline therapist had so wisely suggested.

Everywhere the angry sea had risen. The water had washed away fences, waves had lapped over lawns, and palm trees sagged over the water, undercut, surely doomed. One guy had built a chicken shack right at the edge of his land, not meters from the sea. When the wind blew the chickens must have got soaked, terrified; I wondered what kind of eggs he got out of them.

It was all depressingly predictable. Florida was always flat and soggy. Human efforts over centuries had pushed the water out of there, and reclaimed much of the land. But now the ocean was coming back. Even the Florida aquifer was contaminated with salt, as well as with industrial spill-off. It wasn’t good news for the flora and fauna, either. The salt water that now pushed inland with every tide had played havoc with freshwater ecologies. The Everglades weren’t a place the tourists went to nowadays; the rotting vegetable matter that clogged the dead swamps stunk to high heaven. It was said the crocs still survived though, living off the rotting detritus around them, surviving this extinction event as they had survived so many others.

The wind changed, to blow off the sea. That ocean breeze smelled foul, a choking smell like rubber burning somewhere. It was a cocktail of toxins that might have blown all the way from the sprawling industrial wastelands of central Europe and Africa or even Asia: some of that crud got very high up, and could even circle the Earth.

I wondered how I would feel about all this if I were Happified, like John’s kids. I had once discussed this with John, the only time I dared, the only time I was drunk enough, with his wife out of the way.

“The pursuit of happiness is our inalienable right, Michael,” he had said. “It says so in the Constitution, remember. Every parent wants their child to be happy, above all. You try to care for them, you give them education, money, to maximize their opportunities to get on in life — but in the end happiness is the final goal. That’s an argument that goes back to Aristotle, actually; he argued that every other good is a means to an end, but happiness is the end.”

“Smart guy.”

“And now we know that at least fifty percent of the likelihood of your happiness is inherited, even without modification. But we can modify. We’re the first generation that can guarantee their kids happiness.”

So you plied your kids with drugs and therapy. Or you spliced their genomes, as John had, to make them happy come what may.

I thought I saw something slithering through scrubby dune grass. It might have been a tree snake, which had come into Florida and other parts of the continental United States from Guam, via Hawaii. Poisonous as hell, and a vicious predator of birds. On the other hand, tree-snake meat recipes were spicing up the menus in Miami restaurants.

They could grow three meters long. Looking at it sliding through the grass made me shudder. I turned back, heading for home.

By the time I got back to the house it was around eight in the morning.

My mother was already out, working on a row of potted plants at the top of the yard, in the lee of the house. She was on her knees on a railed pad, an old lady’s gardening aid. But her bare fingers were crusted with dirt, and she dug away with a vengeance.

I remembered how she had always loved her garden. When we were kids I used to think she loved it more than us. Now, watching her, I wasn’t so sure we had been wrong.

She glanced up irritably as my shadow fell over her. “You missed your breakfast,” she said.

“I wasn’t hungry.”

“I’ll fix you something.” She sniffed. “Better yet, do it yourself.”

“Really, I’m fine.”

“There’s no news. About Tom, I mean.”

“I know.”

“I’m sure everything will be fine. You’d have heard by now if not.”

“You’re probably right.” I sat down beside her on the wooden floor of the porch. She had a jug of lemonade beside her; I accepted a glass.

“I don’t suppose you want to help me with this,” she said.

“Not especially.”

“Where did you walk to?”

“Nowhere particular.”

“Oh, you’re always so vague, Michael, you’re maddening.”

“Mom, the breeze off the sea—”

“I know. The air used to be so clean here. One reason I always loved it. Now it’s like Manchester.”

“Yeah.” I watched her doggedly digging away at the roots of her plants. “It can’t be good for you.”

“My lungs are made of leather. Don’t trouble yourself.”

“They’re evacuating Miami Beach, aren’t they?”

She snorted. “No, they aren’t. Nobody uses that word. There is a program of transfer. Of migration, if you want to put it like that. Evacuation is what refugees do,” she said sternly. “It’s not as if we’ll be underwater tomorrow.”

I knew how painful this was. Since the automobile had vanished from America, this had become an age when you stayed home rather than traveled, an age of villages, of local stuff. And for a close community to be broken up was difficult.

“We have a program of agreements with other population centers,” she said. “In Minnesota, for instance. John has helped negotiate the settlements.” I hadn’t known that. “Seventy-five here, a hundred there. Always family groups, of course.” It had to be planned, she said. You couldn’t let the community left behind just fall into decay. So there were incentive schemes to keep teachers, doctors, civil servants working here, even though there was no long-term career for them. “It’s a long-term program. A cultural achievement, in its way.”

“But Minnesota is a long way from the sea,” I said.

“Well, I know that, but it can’t be helped. What’s worse is that everything is being” — she waved her trowel vaguely — “dispersed. All the history here. The culture.”

“History? Mom, you’re a newcomer here. You’re from England!”

“Yes, but so is everybody a newcomer but the Tequesta Indians. That’s part of the charm of the place. I think it’s important that we stay, you know. We old ones. Isn’t that what old people are, symbols of the past, of continuity? If we go then the place will just die. And what will happen to people then?… It does feel very strange to live in a place which has no future, I admit that.”

“Mom—”

“You know, it’s odd. In my lifetime they’ve taken away so many of the things that used to kill you when I was young. Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, even schizophrenia — allof those chronic diseases turned out to be caused by infection, all of them preventable once we targeted the right virus or retrovirus. Who’d have thought it? So with nothing left to kill you, you just live on, and on. But then they took away the world instead.”

She wasn’t really talking to me, I saw. She continued with her patient gardening, digging and digging.

I found John out back. He was sweeping windblown sand off the porch.

He had a distracted expression. I wondered if he was getting news about Tom. But it turned out he was listening to his personal therapist. He grinned, touched my ear, and I heard a gentle male voice: “John, you’re overly perturbed about a situation you can’t control. You know you have to accept what can’t be changed. Take an hour off, then let me play you some stuff on cognitive feedback which…”

I pulled away.

“You should try one of these things,” John said. “It can even prescribe pharmaceuticals, you know. Spin-off from the space program. Would you like me to set you up?”

“No, thanks.”

He stepped toward me. Our closeness of last night had dissipated back into the usual rivalry; his blocky face, in the slanting morning light, looked ugly, coarse. “You never did accept any drug therapy after Morag, did you? You know, it is possible to block the formation of traumatic memories altogether. You just take the right pill in the hours immediately after the event — you target the formation of proteins, or some such — I guess that’s too late for you now with Morag, but—”

“I suppose you fed pills to your kids after Inge left, did you?”

He flinched at that, but he snapped back, “They didn’t need it. You, on the other hand—”

My anger, frustration, helplessness came boiling out. “You know the trouble with you, John, your whole fucking life? You deal with symptoms, not causes. You fix your kids so they’ll never be sad. You listen to a tin voice in your ear and you pop your damn pills so you don’t carry scars from anything bad, even from your wife dumping you. And your work is all about symptoms, too. The coasts are flooded? Fine, spread what’s left of the wealth around a little more. The Atlantic coast is hammered by a dozen hurricanes a season? Fine, add a couple of zeroes to your lawsuit against the Chinese. You don’t do squat about the root cause of it all, do you?”

“It’s not my job,” he said. His voice was mild, as if I were no more than an irate client, which maddened me even more. “Michael, I understand how you are feeling—”

“Oh, fuck off.” I turned on my heel and stalked off.

He called after me. “If I hear anything about Tom I’ll let you know. Keep your implant switched on…”

I wasn’t even gracious enough to acknowledge that. It was not one of my finer moments. I stomped around the house, trying to calm down.

In the yard, the kids were playing with their smart football again. Both of them wore masks, flimsy transparent things, presumably to guard them against the foul breeze from China. They welcomed me, and I joined in their game, volleying and heading. I was always lousy at football, and I always will be, but they were gallingly kind.

So I was spending time with them, with Sven and Claudia, John’s beautiful kids, my niece and nephew. But I felt uncomfortable.

At one point the ball rolled off the yard’s bare concrete floor and ended up in long scrubby dune grass. You could see it roll back and forth, trying to find its way back to the game, but its rudimentary sensorium was confused by the blades of grass that towered around it. After a time it started to sound its little alarm chime.

Sven and Claudia stooped over the thing as it rolled about. “Look,” Sven said. “When it sees us it comes toward us.”

“Get back out of its sight,” said Claudia. “Let’s see what it does.” They both stepped back out of the way.

The ball resumed its rolling, utterly baffled. There was a fragment of sentience in there, of genuine awareness. The ball could feel pain, the way a simple animal can, perhaps. Why, even the plaintive way it rang its stupid alarm chime was enough to break your heart. But those kids just stepped backward and forward, experimenting with it.

When I looked at Claudia, especially, I always felt a chill. It wasn’t so much what she did but what she didn’t do. There was nothing behind that pretty face, I thought, nothing but emptiness, like the endless black abyssal emptiness that lay between worlds. She made me feel cold, just looking at her.

In the end I picked up the ball myself and threw it back into the yard.

And John came running around the corner, wheezing. His assistant Feliz had called. It was news of Tom. My son was injured but alive.

On this planet the clouds were tall, rising in soft mounds around the equator and gathering in immense creamy swirls toward the poles.

To Alia this was a pretty view, but meaningless. She knew nothing about planets. She had never even visited one before. The only planet she had ever studied in detail was Earth, the root of all mankind, with its layers of archaic planetary defenses, its skim of ocean, its clustering city-covered continents.

But there were no continents here. When the flitter dipped into the atmosphere of this world there was nothing but an ocean, a crumpled silver-blue sheet that spread to the horizon. Above, the clouds were heaped up in a vast three-dimensional array of sculpture. This whole world was water, she thought, nothing but water, water below, water in the air. And under the clouds the prospect was oppressive, gloomy, illuminated only by shafts of sunlight cast through breaks in the cover.

She was here, under this dismal sky, because the Transcendence had willed it.

The Transcendence: the godlike assemblage of immortals at the heart of human society, from whom all political authority flowed. Truthfully, Alia knew little about it, save that it was, so the creepy scuttlebutt had it, a project of ancients, of undying. But what was the Transcendence itself? In her head she vaguely imagined something titanic, superhuman, beyond comprehension, perhaps like the muddled light of the Galaxy Core occluded by its interstellar clouds. Nobody talked about it much.

But now, it seemed, the Transcendence had taken an interest in her own small life. And it had already brought her far from home.

With Reath, agent of the Commonwealth, she had already traveled thousands of light-years. This water-world’s sun was on the fringe of a giant stellar nursery, a huge glowing cloud of roiling dust and ice that was spawning one hot young star after another. The nursery was on the inner edge of the Sagittarius Arm, one of the Galactic disc’s principal star-birthing regions, and the water-world itself was a moon of a massive gas giant. So the sky here was crowded and spectacular — but right now, through those clouds, she couldn’t see a trace of it, not even the primary giant.

“Ah — look at that.” Reath pointed to the horizon, where a column of darkness, writhing visibly, connected the ocean to the sky. “Do you know what that is?”

“Is it weather?”

“Alia, that is a hurricane. A kind of storm, a vortex of air. It is fueled by heat from the upper levels of the sea. It twists and moves, you see — chaotically, but not unpredictably.”

“It is a phenomenon of a water-world.”

“Not just world-oceans. Any planet with extensive seas and a respectable atmosphere can spawn such twisters. Even Earth! If there is land, of course, the storm can track away from the sea.”

Alia had grown up in a bubble of air less than two kilometers wide, every molecule of which was climate-controlled and cleansed by the Nord’s antique, patient machines. She tried to imagine such a monstrous storm slamming into a town or a city on Earth. Her imagination was unformed, filled with images of catastrophic breakdowns of environment control systems. “How terrible,” she said.

“Oh, humans mastered hurricanes long ago. All you have to do is cut off their energy supply before they do any damage. And of course by tracking on to land they detach themselves from the ocean that feeds them, and die of their own accord.”

“But not here, for there is no land.”

“Not here, no. Here a twister can live on and on, sucking up energy, spinning off daughters, tracking around the world. One twister system here — I’m not sure if it is that one — reaches right up to the top of the atmosphere. You can see it from space, like a glowering eye. And it has persisted for thousands of years.”

This was terribly disturbing for a ship-born girl like Alia. She was relieved when the storm receded from sight behind the horizon.

It was a month since she had agreed to follow Reath, to leave her home and begin the program of training that might, ultimately, remarkably, lead to her becoming that unknowable entity — a Transcendent, to become one of the host of godlike post-humans who governed mankind. A month since she had placed herself in the care of an agent of the Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth! Before she had left the Nord it had been little more than a name to her, a shadowy authority that arched over human civilization, as lofty and remote and beautiful as an interstellar cloud, and as irrelevant. Now she was beginning to get a sense of the reality of it — and it was much more than she had ever imagined.

The Commonwealth was based at the most logical place for a Galactic capital: on a cluster of worlds that drifted amid the millions of crowded suns of the Core, where mankind had always anchored its Galactic empires.

The most visible sign of the Commonwealth’s presence was the Clock of Humanity. Lodged in the Core, this was a machine the size of the star. It used the decay of certain types of subatomic particles, called W and Z bosons, to produce pulses of neutrinos. These were the fastest known physical processes; no conceivable clock could be more precise. And as neutrinos passed like ghosts through all normal forms of matter, the pulses washed through the stars and dust of the Galaxy and never occluded or dispersed, so you could pick up the clock’s chiming wherever you were. Once, it was said, human clocks had been devised to fit the natural rhythms of Earth, its days and years. Now humans had scattered over millions of disparate worlds, and so the Clock was calibrated to a standard human pulse rate. Thus a civilization that encompassed a Galaxy marched in step to the rhythms of a human heart.

“And all of it,” Reath told her, “is driven by the Transcendence — a Commonwealth within the Commonwealth, a center within the center, the innermost heart of everything.”

The Transcendence was the source of all authority. As far as she could make out, it was itself a meshing of minds, a titanic superhuman mass around which human affairs pivoted, much as the Galaxy itself wheeled about the unmovable black hole at its very center. But the Transcendence needed agencies to carry out its will in the human world: it was a god embedded in bureaucracy.

The Commonwealth was more than a collection of dusty agencies, though, Reath said. The Commonwealth itself was an aspiration. As it worked on a Galactic scale, bit by bit, humans were drawn closer together, knit more integrally into the whole. Reath liked to say that whether you knew about it or not, if you were of human descent you were a citizen of the Commonwealth already. “And one day, it is hoped,” Reath said, “we will all be drawn in, not just into the Commonwealth, but even into the Transcendence itself — and then a new kind of human history will begin.”

But if it was to achieve such aspirations, the Transcendence had to grow. It had to recruit. Astonishing as it seemed, the Transcendence needed people like Alia.

If her ultimate goal was barely imaginable, Reath reassured her, the training would come in easy chunks. There were three formal stages, which he called Implications: the Implication of Indefinite Longevity, of Unmediated Communication, and of Emergent Consciousness. Needless to say she had little idea what any of these terms might actually mean, though they all sounded scary. But as well as the formal steps they would enjoy some “fun” together, Reath said: notably, travel to exotic worlds like this one.

She wasn’t happy.

It wasn’t the distances that troubled her. To a Skimmer, distance was supposed to be meaningless anyhow. No, it wasn’t the distance but the company she had to keep: her only companion, in his austere, joyless tube of a ship was the silent and watchful Reath.

Reath wasn’t bad company, really. He was attentive to her needs, and tolerated her moods, and much of what he had to say was even interesting. But his face was blank, expressionless, as immobile as if the nerve ends had been cut. He was a walking, talking emblem of the great severance she had undergone, her separation from the Nord, her whole world, and her rejection by her parents in favor of a baby brother she did her level best not to hate.

Reath had done her one great favor, though. He had allowed her to bring along her Witnessing tank.

She could watch Michael Poole any way she pleased. The basic wormlike chain of images, from Poole’s birth to death, was a simple four-dimensional representation, an index. She could allow a scene from his life to unfold inside the tank, with Poole, his family and friends, enemies and strangers, like tiny actors. Or she could magnify it and immerse herself in the scene, an unseen witness.

All of this was utterly authentic, so she understood, though she knew nothing of the technology involved: this wasn’t a reconstruction, this really was the life of Michael Poole as he had lived it, five thousand centuries ago, all of it from birth to death embedded deep in the irrevocable past, and locked up inside her tank for her benefit.

Reath reminded her it was the obligation of every citizen to keep up her program of Witnessing, as ordained by mysterious bodies at the heart of the Commonwealth, which he called “the Colleges of Redemption.” So he allowed her to believe she wasn’t after all being helplessly sentimental in clinging to Michael Poole, her childhood companion; it was her duty. Perhaps he was sparing her feelings, and if so she was grateful for his indulgence. But he did take the Witnessing very seriously indeed, for he said the Redemption was at the heart of the greatest ambitions of the Transcendence.

And so, in the bowels of Reath’s severe ship, as the stars sailed by, she spent long hours immersed in the bright Florida light of Poole’s long-ago childhood. She wished she could be there now, gazing not on this dismal water-world but on the sparkling seas of Earth.

Hundreds of kilometers of featureless ocean passed under the flitter’s prow.

“Reath, what is this world called?”

“Names are relative,” Reath said, smiling. “They depend on your viewpoint.”

Any world had a multiplicity of names, he said. The Commonwealth maintained formal catalogs, numbering every star and planet, comet and asteroid, every object of any significant size in the Galaxy. Some of these catalogs were based on antecedents that went back hundreds of millennia, to the days when the whole Galaxy had been an arena of war. There were other viewpoints, too. Those near enough to see this world’s star in their sky would give it a more formal name, as part of some constellation, say; they might even name the world itself if they could see it. Thus the world might have a dozen, a hundred such names, assigned from different interstellar viewpoints. But a world’s primal name (or names) was that given it by those who lived here.

Alia gazed down at the endless seascape. “So what do the locals call this world? Wet?”

“You’ll see,” he said evasively.

“And why is there no land here?”

He smiled. “Because the ocean is too deep…”

There was no world quite like this one in Sol system. This world was bigger than Earth, six times as massive. It had first formed far from its sun, so far out that water and other volatiles had not been driven off by its sun’s heat as it coalesced. As it cooled it was left with a rocky core about the size of the Earth, but that inner core was swathed in a blanket of water ice.

After its formation was completed, this world had been gathered in as the moon of a gas giant. Thus things might have remained, if not for the fact that the parent Jovian, its orbit impeded by the remnant dust cloud from which it had formed, migrated steadily in toward its sun. And the ice moon began to melt.

“At last almost all the ice went — there’s just a couple of islands of it at the poles now — leaving an ocean more than a hundred kilometers thick, over a remnant ice mantle. That’s, oh, ten times as thick as the oceans on Earth. And then a little outgassing created the atmosphere. Weather started, and—”

“And that’s why there is no land?”

“How could there be dry land, Alia? Even if the seabed was rock, you’d need a mountain a hundred kilometers tall to poke above the ocean surface to make an island. No such mountains are possible on Earth, let alone here, where the gravity is about fifty percent above standard. And besides the seabed is ice, not rock.

“Because of the lack of land, it was difficult for life to get started here. There is life here, though: life that kick-started on other, more hospitable worlds of the system, and drifted here as spores—”

“Panspermia.”

“Yes.” He nodded approvingly. “And then, of course, people came.”

People? But, she wondered, how could they live here?

Reath pointed. “There it is at last. Our destination.”

Adrift in the middle of the endless ocean was a scrap of bright orange — a rectangle, a man-made thing. Alia felt unreasonable relief to see this bit of human engineering in the immense emptiness of the sea.

At first glance the platform seemed to be resting on a narrow stalk that protruded out of the ocean. But it turned out that the platform was studded with antigravity lifters, and the “stalk” was actually a cable anchored in the deep ice, under tension as the lifters endlessly tried to pull the platform into the sky. It struck Alia as a cheap and quick solution to the problem of stability on a watery world.

The flitter slowed, and dipped toward the platform. Alia felt reluctant to Skim; she hadn’t done so since leaving the Nord. So she and Reath climbed down out of the flitter the old-fashioned way, through a door.

The wind was strong and buffeting, and cold on her face, only a little above freezing. Reath seemed unperturbed, though he was so tall and skinny he looked as if he might blow away.

The air was mostly nitrogen and carbon dioxide — scarcely a trace of oxygen; life was rare here. But of course there was Mist in the air, the invisible population of nanomachines and engineered bugs that infested the atmosphere and oceans of every human planet. She stood still to let the Mist suffuse her. Her bones and muscles tingled as they were strengthened to cope with the heavy gravity, and the air she drew into her lungs fizzed with oxygenation. The cold was kept out of her body, but she could taste the salt-laden air in her mouth, the sharp, heavily salted tang of the global sea.

She made her way cautiously to the edge of the platform. There was no rail, no barrier between her and the abyssal ocean. Near the edge the wind grew stronger, and in the ocean below waves growled back and forth.

“I’m glad we’re out of reach of those waves,” Alia said.

“So we are — most of the time. Remember there’s no land here, Alia, nothing to make the waves break. A wave system can just keep on traveling, gathering up more and more energy—”

“Like the hurricanes.”

“But we should be safe from being washed away for today.”

Though the platform was high above the waves it rocked and tipped subtly, its anchoring cable creaking noisily. The motion was slight, but very unsettling.

“Don’t worry,” Reath shouted over the wind, “we’re quite safe. It’s just that there’s a cable a hundred kilometers long beneath us! No matter how strong the tension in it is, you’re going to get vibrations, resonances. The cable is a string plucked by the ocean! Why, if the worse came to the worst and the cable snapped altogether, the antigravity lifters would just take us flying up through the clouds into space.”

“I think I’d prefer it if it did snap,” she said. She looked around the platform. Aside from the sleek form of their flitter, glistening with spray, there was only a huddle of automated sensors. “Reath, why have we come here?”

“Why, for the people,” he said. “Because people are here, we must come here. The Commonwealth, I mean. That is the mandate of the Transcendence.”

“How will they even know we are here? We can’t integrate them if we can’t find them!”

He held a hand to one ear. “Can’t you hear?”

She frowned, concentrating, expanding her hearing range. She made out a deep thrumming, subsonic, far below the standard human range.

“It is a beacon,” he said. “Audible for hundreds of kilometers underwater.”

“They live underwater?”

“Where else, on a world like this? They will come.”

“How? Will they swim here?”

He grinned, his face gleaming with the spray.

She stepped closer to the edge, peering out at the churning sea. But there was no sign of the swimming citizens.

Suddenly I was standing in the open air.

I was on a plain. The ground was scrubby and pocked by pits, some like the holes you leave when you dig out a tree stump, some bigger than that. The sky was a lid of cloud, washed-out gray-white, that seemed to suck all the color out of the landscape. There was a breeze on my face, and I could taste and smell salt, overlaid with a fouler stench of bad eggs, marsh gas maybe. But your senses are always dull in a VR; nobody wants to pay good money for a bad smell, no matter how authentic.

Before me was some kind of industrial plant. It was a collection of squat concrete blocks crenellated by aluminium ducts and fans. A massive, rusting pipeline stalked away on spindly trestles across the landscape. The whole setup was surrounded by a chain-link fence at least twice my height; it looked to be backed up by an electrical barrier. There was no activity, nobody about; the concrete was stained, the buildings looked abandoned. Standing there, a ghost in the landscape, the buildings made me queasy just to look at them, though at first I couldn’t figure why.

This was Siberia, the tundra, and it was spring. The landscape stretched to my left and right, and I had a sense of space, of immensity. This strip of tundra, between the sea to the north and the forests to the south, stretched a third of the way around the pole of the planet. But it was a petrolandscape, littered by oily lakes, pipelines, and rusting derricks.

Because of that breeze, I thought I must be near the sea. Looking away from the factory, I could see a line of iron gray, an ocean horizon. It made sense. This was the Yamal Peninsula, in the northwest of Siberia, maybe five hundred kilometers northeast of the Urals. Here, I had checked, the Arctic Ocean was known as the Kara Sea. Or I could be looking at the vast gulf at the mouth of the Ob River, a huge waterway that drained a continent. There was some kind of activity nearer the shore, low structures I couldn’t make out, people moving urgently around. Was that where Tom was working? I was ashamed that I didn’t know.

I hadn’t approved of him coming to as unstable a part of the world as this, and had hoped that my frosty silence would have deterred him from going. It didn’t. And now the result of my stubbornness was that he was hurt, somewhere in this depressing, worn-out landscape, and I had no idea how he had been injured or how badly, or even where he was.

In a VR projection you were stuck in the presence of your transceiver drone, which the service provider drops in the destination you ask for. Possibly this industrial plant was the nearest location logged in the provider’s database. It had been the time taken to fly my drone from Moscow that accounted for the delay before the link was established. But I saw no activity within the site. There was nobody here, nobody to ask about Tom.

Then I saw that one of those big concrete cubes was leaning. That immense building was tilted maybe ten degrees out of true, and one towering wall was cracked from top to bottom, yielding to the strain. The ground at the base of the tipping building looked as if it had melted, and was piled up in big static ripples, like warm chocolate. Further out, I saw, that pipeline dipped out of its line, too. That was why I felt faintly nauseous. The vast tilting had disturbed my sense of the vertical, already tenuous in my VR state. It was a strange sight, a surreal drunkenness. I imagined the whole plant slowly sinking out of sight, those immense concrete walls cracking and spilling their toxic contents, until the brown earth closed over the ruined buildings like a welcoming sea.

A helicopter flapped overhead, painted bright blue, UN colors. It flew so low it came on me suddenly, making me duck. It was heading toward that township near the coast.

I turned away from the plant and began to walk that way. As I walked the system glitched. The view around me would freeze and shatter into blocks, before reforming again, and I suffered a few strange smells and sounds, a bell-like ringing, and sharp smells of cinnamon or almond: VR synesthesia, bugs in the works. It was a sharp reminder that I wasn’t really here; this was only a phone call with special effects.

I didn’t grow up with immersive VRs. I could never get used to the pale washed-out sensation of the immersion, or the slight mismatch between the impulse to move and the motion itself, and I always imagined I could feel an itch at the top of my spine where data was pouring into my nervous system.

I was restricted to a walking pace, for such were the health and safety rules of the service. In theory you could fly around like Superman, and some people did, but nine out of ten threw up in the process. Cautious, I followed the rules of the game, but it seemed to take me an inordinately long time to tramp across that wounded landscape in search of my son. My anxiety built. It was unreal enough that I felt like I was trapped in a dream, unable to hurry, unable to run. I didn’t want to be here, dealing with this, a faulty VR projection in this awful, desolate, dreamlike place, where buildings melted into the ground.

It was at that low moment that I saw her: a slim figure, a pale dot of a face, a flash of strawberry-blond hair.

She was standing in my path, but ahead of me, perhaps as much as half a kilometer away. She was calling something, and pointing toward the coastal village. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I tried to focus on her, but when I stared straight at her she seemed to disappear, to melt into shadows and clouds; I saw her clearly only when I wasn’t looking at her.

Phantoms weren’t so unusual in VR worlds. Often the system would wipe over something it was not expecting to see, editing it out of its reality altogether. Or, other times, the system would show you something that wasn’t really there, a construct of badly imaged shadows and highlights, an interpretation of objects it couldn’t recognize. She could be an artifact of the visual processing system.

She wasn’t an artifact, though, I knew that deep in my gut. This was Morag. Even in here, in VR reality, she wouldn’t let me alone. But I didn’t have time for this, not now.

I continued to stalk across the landscape. Morag didn’t come any closer, but nor did she walk away from me. She just retreated, her movement subtle, mysterious. “Go away!” I shouted. “I’m here for Tom, not you!” I dropped my head and stared at my VR feet as they padded across the broken ground.

When I looked up again, she had gone.

At last I approached the little township. The place was small, maybe a dozen buildings in all, set out in a rough grid pattern. A few cars were parked on the rutted tracks, big battered four-wheel-drives with minuscule engine compartments that looked like early hydrogen burners, 2020s vintage. No pod-bus service here, I thought.

There were plenty of people around. Some of them moved purposefully between the buildings, talking rapidly in a language I didn’t understand. Others were gathered in little huddles, some of them weeping. They all seemed squat, small, round, and were dressed in heavy coats and boots — bright Day-Glo artificial fabrics, not the seal fur or whatever that I had been expecting. They looked to be a mix of races, some round-faced Asiatic, others more obviously European, even blond and blue-eyed. I vaguely knew that Siberia had been used as a vast slave labor camp by the Soviets in the last century; perhaps some of this mixed population were descended from prisoners or exiles.

They were all hard-faced, weary-looking. And they were all spattered with mud. Though I was cast an occasional glance, there was no curiosity, no welcome. I walked on through the town.

Most of the buildings were wooden-walled huts. But I saw a few rounded tents made of what looked like leather: maybe they were yurts, I wondered, as the Mongols had once built in another part of this great ocean of land. And there were buildings something like teepees, tented poles tied off at the top, walled not with skin but with brush and dried earth. Ribbons dangled from poles: prayer ribbons, I learned later, put up by people who still practiced shamanism and animism, people only a generation or so from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and the idea that the very land is crowded with spirits. If that was so, the spirits weren’t being too propitious that day. Everything was plastered by that gray-black mud. It clung to the walls and roofs in big dollops as if it had been sprayed out of a vast hose. Even on the ground, trampled bare between the buildings, there were splashes and craters, the gray of the mud mixing with the earth’s dark brown.

The strange melted-ground subsidence had affected some of the more solid buildings. One little shack adorned with a cross, perhaps a Christian church, was leaning at a spectacular angle. The yurts and teepee structures looked more or less upright, though. I supposed that if the ground started to give way you could just roll up your home and move to somewhere a bit more stable.

I soon walked right through the township and out the other side, and found myself facing the sea. Perhaps this was a fishing village, but I saw no boats, no harbor. A few hundred meters away the coastline rose up in low sandy cliffs that looked as if they were just melting into the sea. I saw no sign of that chopper; perhaps it had passed on along the coast. The sea itself was solid gray; it looked bitterly cold. And it seemed perilously close; I could see tide marks on doorsteps and around the bases of the houses. It looked to be eating into the shoreline here, the way it was in Florida.

There was one building obviously not owned by the locals. It was a tent in camouflage green, with a Red Cross painted brightly on the canvas. Familiar from too many disaster-zone news reports, it was an ominous sight.

Somebody screamed, so loud it hurt my ears before muffling filters cut in.

A little girl was standing before me. She was just a bundle, almost lost in an oversized parka. Her face was a round, ruddy ball, streaked with tears, and she was staring at my feet. A woman came and scooped her up, glaring at me.

And as I watched the woman walk away I noticed a row of body bags on the ground, all neatly zipped up.

“Hey, you!” It was a crisp summons in an American accent, west coast perhaps.

A woman walked toward me in a space suit — or anyhow that’s what it looked like, a bright blue coverall marked with UN relief agency logos. But she had her masked hood open and pushed back from her head. She was black, late twenties maybe, a severe expression on her small face. “You shouldn’t be out here with so much exposed flesh,” she snapped at me now. “Haven’t you heard of tick-borne encephalitis? And how did you get here anyhow?”

“I’m not really here,” I said. I reached out as if to shake her hand. She responded automatically, offering me her own gloved hand; my hand passed through hers, briefly breaking up into a cloud of boxy pixels, and a protocol-violation warning pinged in my ear.

“Oh, a VR,” she said, her urgency morphing smoothly to contempt. “What are you, some kind of Bottlenecker? A ghoul, come to see the dead people?”

Her words chilled me. “I’m no disaster-tourist—”

“Then show some consideration.” She pointed to my feet.

Looking down I realized what had upset the little girl so much. I was hovering a few centimeters above the ground surface; no wonder the kid was spooked. I hastily issued system commands, and I sank down to the ground.

The soldier turned to go. Evidently she didn’t have time to waste on the likes of me.

I hurried after her. I wished I could grab her arm to get her attention. “Please,” I said. “I’m looking for my son.”

She slowed, and looked at me again. Her name was Sonia Dameyer, I read from a tag on her chest, Major Sonia Dameyer of the U.S. Army. She was a familiar sight, an American soldier dressed in a space suit in some godforsaken corner of the planet, like most of her kind nowadays devoted to rescue work and peacekeeping rather than war-fighting. “Your son was here in person, through the burp?”

“The what?… Yes, he was here. I heard he was alive, but maybe hurt, I don’t know anything else. His name is Tom Poole.”

Her eyes widened. “Tom. The hero.”

She said this gently, but it was not what you want to hear about your missing child. I was dimly aware of my body, my real body, immersed in a body-temperature fluid and mildly anesthetized, churning in the dark, as if I were having a bad dream. “Do you know where he is?”

“This way.” She turned toward that big hospital tent.

I followed. My VR steps felt very heavy.

We walked into the tent. We had to pass through a kind of bubble airlock, inflated from clear plastic. Of course I could just walk through the walls, but Dameyer lifted the flaps for me, and I followed protocol. Inside it was dark; my vision blinked and juddered. But my VR eyes responded to the changed light levels as fast as a camera aperture dilating open.

When I could see, I looked around wildly at rows of fold-out canvas beds. Med robots, clumsy gear-laden trolleys, whirred self-importantly. Most of the patients wore oxygen masks, and drips snaked into arms. I couldn’t see too many signs of traumatic injuries, no broken legs or crushed ribs. They looked like victims of a poisoning, or a gas attack, like the London underground incident in the 2020s. Not that I’m an expert on medical emergencies. The patients were all adults — and obviously not locals; this whole setup was sent in by the Western powers to tend for their own.

My vision shattered again. I shook my head, as if that was going to help. “Damn it.”

“The trouble,” came a weak voice, “is the tent. Partial Faraday cage woven into the fabric. It might be the UN but this is a military operation, Dad…”

I whirled. It was Tom, that familiar face staring up at me from a green military-issue pillow. I could barely even see him.

It was a tough moment. As a VR you can’t cry, not with the cheap software John had hired for me anyway. But I was crying, that overweight, out-of-condition body floating in a tank in downtown Miami like a baby in a womb crying its embryonic heart out. Not only that, my comms link kept crashing, so that Tom’s image would break up into planes and shadows, as if he was the one who wasn’t really there, rather than me. I tried to hug him. I closed my arms on empty air while protocol warnings pinged. How sad is that?

Tom was bound to disapprove of the way I’d come running out here after him. The logic of our father-son relationship would allow nothing less. But, in the gloom of that hospital tent, as I fumbled to make contact with him, his expression was soft — not welcoming, but at least forgiving. In his way, I thought, he was glad to see me.

After a few minutes of this farce, the doctor attending Tom ordered me out of there as I was distracting the other patients. But he took pity on us. Tom’s “dose” had been light, he said, and though Tom still needed bedrest he could leave the field hospital.

So Tom swung his legs out of his bed, and a med-bot helped him pull on his trousers and jacket.

Carrying only a light oxygen pack, with the mask loose around his neck, he limped slowly out of the tent. I longed to support him, but of course I couldn’t. Instead he allowed Major Sonia Dameyer to take his arm.

She walked him all the way to one of those mud-covered teepeelike buildings, and helped him through the low doorway with its leathery flap. Inside, a dirt floor was covered by rugs of some kind of animal skin, very old and worn with use. There were three grass-stuffed pallets, and a stack of cooking pots. The only significant piece of furniture was a big old trunk, firmly padlocked: the family treasure of a nomadic people. My systems brought me a stink of stale cooking fat.

There was one occupant, a local, a boy in a cut-down military-looking parka jacket. Aged maybe twelve, thirteen, he was forking his way through an open tin of baby carrots. When we came in — injured Tom with his oxygen mask, Sonia in her space suit, and me, a VR ghost — the kid, wide-eyed, tried to push past Sonia and run. Tom spoke to the kid softly. The kid answered before running out, though not without another spooked stare at Sonia and me.

Tom eased his way painfully down onto one of the pallets. He clutched his chest as if it hurt. Somewhat to my surprise, Sonia settled down on a pallet near Tom.

I asked, “You two know each other?”

“Not before the burp,” Tom said.

Sonia said, “It’s advisable for Tom to have some protection. Some of the locals take it out on the Westerners. Even aid workers like Tom.”

“Well, you can understand it,” Tom said. He wheezed slightly, as if he’d suddenly turned into a turn-of-the-century heavy smoker; it was a lung rattle you didn’t hear anymore. “The locals have a difficult time of it, Dad. Even before the Warming the industries in the area made a mess of everything. You must have seen the plant a couple of klicks away. Even in the last century you had oil spills, the rivers killed by waste, the ground melting around the factories—”

I wanted to scream at him. “Just for once,” I said, “can’t we talk about you and not the state of the damn planet?”

Tom stiffened. “It’s why I’m here in the first place.”

Sonia Dameyer just watched this exchange, an amused expression on her face.

I backed up and tried again. “Just tell me what happened.”

He took a deep, rattling breath. “I just got a lungful of gas.”

“Gas? Poison gas, nerve gas? What are we talking about here?”

“Dad, take it easy—”

“Not an artificial agent,” Sonia said quickly. “You don’t have to worry about that, Mr. Poole. It wasn’t terrorism, not intentional. The event was natural. The gas was mostly methane laced with carbon dioxide.” She raised her eyebrow at Tom. “But your son got rather more than a lungful. He wouldn’t have got that if he hadn’t gone running into the worst of it to pull the children out.”

So this was his heroism. Tom looked away, embarrassed even by this laconic description, suddenly very childlike.

“Who was that kid?”

“His name is Yuri. He’s in one of my classes, Dad. His parents are, were, putting me up.”

“I didn’t know you spoke Russian.”

He rolled his eyes; Sonia kept a neutral expression. Tom said, “Dad, neither does Yuri. That wasn’t Russian. This is a big country. Most of my students here are locals. Well, it is their ecosystem.”

I said, “Ecosystem? You’re teaching them ecology?”

“Teaching them to save it. It’s a crash program, Dad,” he said. “The ecosystem in this place is falling apart. The permafrost is melting.”

In this place, on the northern edge of the world, the deep soil had never thawed out since the Ice Age: there had been a great cap of permafrost, in some places more than a kilometer thick, and the thin skim of soil on top of the permafrost had been the basis of an ecology — always impoverished, but unique. You had lichen and fast-growing grasses and herbs, and trees that could never grow tall because their roots couldn’t dig into the frozen ground, and so on. There was a unique community of birds and animals here, gulls and lemmings and foxes; there had been reindeer that fed on the lichen, and humans that followed the reindeer herds.

“And now,” I guessed, “it’s all dying back.” The usual story.

“The permafrost is thawing,” he said. “Dad, you’re an engineer; you can imagine the consequences. It’s as if the bedrock is melting.”

I thought of the buildings sinking into the ground, the pits in the landscape. Maybe the rapid coastal erosion was a consequence, too, I mused, if the permafrost had actually been holding the dry land together.

“Even the lichen is dying off,” Tom said. “Without lichen, no reindeer, and without them the people are screwed. Even fifty years ago they were still hunter-gatherers. But now — you must have seen how old the skins they use are, reused and scraped until they are paper-thin, and then used again. And even the land is crumbling away from under their feet.”

I had switched off long ago from thinking about the parlous state of the world. But now, sitting there as a VR projection in that scrappy mud-walled hut, I thought about what lay north of here. I remembered the year it had been reported that the last of the Arctic ice had finally gone, how the final night of extinction had come at last for the polar bears and walruses, the seals and belugas. Now, beyond this coast, there was nothing but ocean all the way to the roof of the world, and the naked oceanic North Pole viewed from space was an alien, eerie image.

And that was why Tom was here supervising genomic grabs.

Taking pity on me, he explained to me what he was doing here.

He had a pack under his pallet; he pulled out a little white-box gizmo the size of his palm. “You like gadgets, don’t you, Dad? Have you seen one of these before? Sonia, do you mind?” He pressed the edge of his gadget against the back of her hand. There was a small flash; she yelped and flinched a little. “Sorry,” Tom said. “Burned off a little body hair. Just give it a minute… There it is.” He showed me the back of the box. I could make out nothing of the diagram it presented — it was cladistic, I learned later, a tree-of-life representation — but I could understand the words below: Homo sapiens sapiens.

“Dad, this is a DNA sequencer,” Tom said. “Sequences a genome in seconds.”

I marveled briefly. I was a kid when the human genome was first sequenced, and that only at summary level, around the turn of the century; it had been a vast multinational effort. Now you could do it in seconds, with a gadget that probably cost less than this VR trip of mine. We’re all used to progress, but every so often something like this hits you in the eye.

Tom was a trained teacher. But teaching had changed a lot since I was young. For any academic subject there were fully interactive VR tutors, available for free to every kid on the planet. Meanwhile flesh-and-blood teachers like Tom had been “released back into the wild,” as he put it. He taught kids by setting up hands-on schemes and letting them learn by doing it for real, rather than lecturing at them. This was the modern way. Tom trained at a college in Massachusetts, and he once proudly showed me its motto: “The only source of knowledge is experience” — Einstein, evidently.

That was the philosophy behind Tom’s work here. He had been working for an international program, sponsored by the Stewardship agencies, under the umbrella title the Library of Life. He had been training local kids to DNA-sequence as many living creatures as they could: the people of their community, the plants, animals, fish of their environment, even insects and bugs. All these genomic grabs, instantly analyzed, were fed back into a massive central archive.

Conservationists had long been trying to preserve threatened species intact, or in frozen store as embryos or seeds or spores, or at least to save a drop of blood or a bit of leaf or bark that would allow analysis in the future. They still did all that, but there had been growing despair at the sheer size of a biosphere that was disappearing faster than it could be mapped, and the impossibility of preserving more than a fraction of it.

The rapid advance of genetic-sequencing technology had offered one solution. With the new kits, as a gene sample was collated with the massive central data stores, linked to a great phylogenetic tree of life, and even given a provisional name within minutes, even an untrained child could “discover” a new species. And once the information was extracted there was no need anymore to worry about storing the long, fragile molecular strings of DNA itself. I’d heard that even fossils barely mattered nowadays, compared to the great flood of data and interpretation now flowing directly from the genes.

It was an eerie thought that even as the real-world ecology died back, a ghostly logical copy was being assembled in the abstraction of cyberspace. But in a very real sense Tom and his kids, and similar volunteers all over the planet, really were saving their ecology for the future.

But none of that mattered to me, not in those awful minutes.

“OK,” I said to Tom carefully. “It’s a worthy goal. But it almost cost you your life.”

“Dad—”

“Tell me what happened.”

He found it painful to talk about, I think; maybe he was in some kind of mild shock. “We were at the coast. Me and a dozen kids. I was actually fifty meters or so back, cross-checking their data streams as they sampled away. Then there was a water spout.”

“A spout?”

“Like an underwater explosion. It was like something from a cartoon, Dad. It must have been a hundred meters tall.”

“Nearer two hundred,” Sonia said dryly.

“At first the kids stood and stared,” he said. “I screamed at them to come away from the ocean. Some ran, others hesitated. Maybe they were too busy watching the spout. I was worried about waves. I didn’t know what was happening; I imagined some kind of tsunami. Then the mud started coming down. Dad, it came in big handfuls, and when it hit you it hurt. All the kids started screaming, and came running from the sea with their hands over their heads.

“That was when I saw them falling, the ones closest to the water. Just falling down as if they’d decided to go to sleep.”

“And you ran toward them,” I said.

“I was responsible for them. What else could I do? I’d only run a few paces before I could smell that rotten-egg stink—”

“Methane?”

“Yes. And then I understood what had happened.”

It had been a “methane burp.” He told me that deep under the Arctic sea floor there are vast reservoirs of trapped gas. Molecules of carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, and methane can be trapped within cages of water-ice crystals — ice formed under extreme conditions of pressure, under the weight of the sea. You can find such stuff in sediments all the way around both poles, immense banks of ice and compressed gas. There is thought to be as much carbon locked up in these reservoirs as in all the world’s fossil fuel stores. Until that dreadful day in Siberia, I had never even heard of them.

And it’s very compressed, at more than a hundred times atmospheric pressure. Any engineer would recognize it’s not too stable a situation. When the “lid” is taken off that pressure vessel — for instance when the permafrost starts to melt, the containing pressure relieved — the eruption can be severe.

I thought it through. “So a pocket of these gas hydrates gave away. The carbon dioxide and methane came gushing up. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, so it would settle back to the surface of the sea and start spreading out…” Choking anything in its path.

Everybody understood the consequences of a carbon dioxide flood. There had been an incident on Cephalonia ten years earlier that had killed thousands, an industrial accident, a carbon-sequestration scheme gone wrong.

All of a sudden Tom broke down. He buried his face in his hands. “I couldn’t get them all out. The stink of the methane drove me back. And I was scared, scared of the cee-oh-two. I couldn’t help them.”

I couldn’t even touch him. I had to sit and watch, frozen, as the competent soldier put her arms around his shoulders. “You couldn’t have done any more,” Sonia said. “Believe me, I saw your medical charts. You went as far as you could.”

“Well, one thing’s for sure,” I said. “You can’t stay here anymore.”

Tom looked up, and anger flared in his tear-streaked face. “You always said I was a quitter, didn’t you, Dad? I’m not going anywhere.”

As I tried to work out what to say, Sonia butted in. “Actually Mr. Poole’s correct. The aid agencies won’t support any more work in this area, Tom. You’re going to have to leave. We can’t get you directly back to the States. But we can chopper you to Moscow, then to a military base near Berlin, and then by civilian charter to London.”

I kept my mouth shut, knowing from long experience that while he might listen to Sonia, he certainly wouldn’t listen to me.

At length Tom said miserably, “All right. But the sequencing project—”

“That will go on,” Sonia said brightly. “They have robots to do this sort of thing now.” She stood up. “I’ll make the arrangements. I’ll, umm, I’ll leave you to it.”

She pushed her way out of the tent, and Tom and I were left together, inarticulate, joined by electronics, separated by more than distance. We started to make plans. I would fly to England to meet him in person, if I could.

But even as we talked it through I was thinking over what had happened here, and in a corner of my mind I wondered what would happen if all those icy methane deposits, all around the poles of the planet, decided to yield up their treasures in one mighty global burp.

On the ocean world, in the shelter of the flitter, Reath continued Alia’s education.

“Have you thought any more about what I’ve told you?”

“You haven’t told me anything,” she said sourly. “Nothing but that list of names. The Implications of This and That—”

He laughed. “Of Indefinite Longevity. Of Unmediated Communication. Of Emergent Consciousness.”

“What am I supposed to think? They’re just names!”

“Isn’t that enough? Alia, do you imagine I have a set of textbooks for you? To become a Transcendent is a process of discovery about yourself.”

“You mean I have to figure it all out?”

“You may discover more wisdom in yourself than you imagine. Let’s start with the first stage, for instance—”

“Indefinite Longevity.”

“What do you imagine that means?”

She thought about it. “Not dying.”

“Why is this important?”

“Because the Transcendence was created by immortals.” Every child knew that, even though it sounded like nothing but a scary story.

“Do you think extreme longevity is possible?”

She shrugged. “On the Nord we expect to live to five hundred or so, barring accidents. In Michael Poole’s day, it was rare to live much beyond one hundred. Surely it would be possible to come up with a treatment to stop the aging process altogether.”

“An immortality pill?”

“Yes.”

“And if I had such a pill, and gave it to you, you would expect to live forever?”

“Not forever. There will always be accidents. This stupid platform might fly up and tip me off into the sea any second.”

He laughed. “Yes. Undying, then, if not immortal. But, statistically, with luck, you could expect a much longer life span. An indefinite life span, in fact.”

“Indefinite Longevity.”

He smiled. “You see, we don’t just pluck these terms out of the air. And how would that make you feel?”

“It would be a wonderful gift. So much extra life—”

“Don’t spout clichйs, child,” he said.

She was taken aback; he rarely snapped at her.

“Think it through,” he said. “Suppose it were true. How would you feel?”

To know you would certainly die one day was one thing. To know that there was at least a chance that you might live on and on and on, without limit, would change everything. How would she feel? “Different.”

“How? What about other people? You’ve just had an almighty row with your family. Would you feel differently about that if you thought that you might face millennia more of life?”

“I wouldn’t have had the row at all,” she said immediately. If her mother were to die before they could be reconciled, Alia would always regret it. And if she lived for tens of millennia or more, that regret would burn away at her soul, irresolvable. “It would drive me crazy, in the end. If I knew I was not going to die I’d try not to do anything I might have to regret forever.”

“You’d become cautious.”

“I wouldn’t make enemies. And I wouldn’t hurt my friends.” But I might not even make friends, she thought, if I knew I might be stuck with them forever — or, worse still, outlive them.

Reath was watching her, as if trying to follow her thoughts. “What else? I know you are a Skimmer. I envy you that! But the real excitement of Skimming comes from the risk, doesn’t it? Now, as things stand, if you were to have an accident, if you managed to kill yourself, you would be giving up a few centuries of life. But what if you were risking millennia — an indefinite future?”

She snorted. “I’d have so much more to lose. You don’t think about that consciously when you Skim, but — if I took your pill I’d never leave my room!”

“Suppose your sister was here with us now, and she fell into the sea. Would you try to rescue her?”

“Yes.”

“You’d risk your own life to save hers?”

“Yes!”

“Even at the cost of a hundred thousand years of existence?”

“I…” She shook her head.

“How do you think other people would feel about you?”

“They would hate me,” she said immediately. “They would envy me — turn against me.”

“For your long life? Even if they knew that your longevity was for a purpose, for their own betterment?”

“Even so. Nobody would see past the fact that I would live on when they were dust. I would think like that. I would have to hide…” She shook her head. “Some gift it would be! I’d be paralyzed by the thought of all that future. I’d have to hide away.”

“I think you’re beginning to understand,” he said. “To be given Indefinite Longevity, to be released from a finite life span, is a step change, like ice turning to water, a total transformation. And you would have to find a way to act, to contribute to the human world, to make a difference, even though this great weight of time was hanging over you.”

“Why must I act?”

“Because longevity is necessary for the greatest projects of all. A human life is just too short to accrue true wisdom. By the time you’ve figured out how things work, you’re aging, losing your faculties, dying.”

“But Michael Poole lived less than a century.”

“True. It’s amazing those poor archaics achieved as much as they did!”

“Reath, if I were to become a Transcendent, what about my family?”

“They couldn’t follow you,” he said gently.

She would be alone, she thought, left stranded by time. One by one her family and friends would turn to dust — even Drea, even her new kid brother. Could she live with that? Only by shutting herself off, by closing down her heart. How could she possibly choose such a path?

“Reath, you said I might discover wisdom within me. I’m not wise at all. I haven’t lived long enough. Ask my mother how wise I am!”

“Your age isn’t the point. If you know you are undying, it’s not your past that gives you wisdom. It is your future — or your awareness of it. And I think you are already starting to acquire some of that awareness. You don’t have to choose now,” he said gently. “We’re only at the beginning, you and I, of our exploration.”

“Reath—” She hesitated. “Are you a Transcendent?”

“Me?” He laughed, brusquely, but he turned away.

An alarm chimed. “Oh!” Reath said. “They’re arriving at last.”

They hurried from the flitter.

At first she could see nothing but the clamor of the waves as they swelled and subsided. But then she saw a sleek shape, pale white, passing just under the surface of the water. Another followed, coming up from the darker depths, and a third, skimming like the first around the platform.

Soon there were a dozen of the creatures, perhaps more. Some of them were smaller — children, perhaps, calves with their parents. They were streamlined and coated with a thick fur; they moved with grace and startling speed. And they swarmed past and over each other, moving with an awareness of each other that seemed uncanny.

Reath peered down, smiling. He was clearly enjoying the sight.

But Alia was ship-born; living things didn’t interest her much. “Very pretty,” she said. “So what? Where are the people?”

He looked at her, raising his eyebrows. “You must learn to see, Alia.”

One of the creatures broke away from the pack and came swimming toward the surface. Now she could see that it had four stubby limbs — four limbs as she had, though these were fins. At the end of each fin was a kind of paddle, webbed with five stubby extensions, perhaps the relics of fingers and toes.

She got the point. That there were four limbs, not two or six or eight, was a clue. A tetrapodal body plan was a hallmark of Earth life, an accidental arrangement that had been settled on early in the development of animals there — including the ancestors of humans — and had been stuck to ever since, even as most of those animals either went extinct or scattered across the Galaxy. But it didn’t have to be that way; six or eight or twelve limbs would have been just as effective. A four-limbed body was a signature: I am from Earth.

The creature broke the surface and lifted its head out of the water. It had a face, with a stubby, smoothed-over nose, and a mouth that gulped at the air. And though its brain pan was flat it had a smooth forehead, a distinct brow — and two eyes, sharp blue, that met her gaze. She felt a powerful shock of recognition, something deep and ancient that joined her to this animal. But those eyes were blank, empty.

The creature broke the brief contact, and dived back beneath the waves and out of sight.

“Remarkable,” Reath murmured. “But now you see why I was evasive about this world’s name…”

“They are human,” she said.

“Well, their ancestors were — and so are these, in the terms the Commonwealth recognizes.

“Their ancestors came here, long ago, at the time of the Bifurcation. They tried to settle. They built rafts, ganged together. They trained their children to fish for the native life-forms — they must have engineered their digestive systems to enable them to eat the fish and crab and eel analogues to be found here.” He shook his head. “But the children and grandchildren took to the water, more and more. The rafts couldn’t be maintained, not in the very long run, for there was no raw material to fix them, and no will to do so either. Soon the ocean closed over the rafts’ last remnants. But the people remained, and their children.”

“And they lost their minds.”

“Well, why not? Alia, big brains are expensive to maintain. If you have an unchanging environment, like this endless ocean, you don’t need to do much thinking. Far better to spend your energy on swimming faster, or diving deeper. A big head would be good for nothing but creating drag! And the adaptation worked.” He stared out. “This ocean could drown ten Earths. There’s no limit to how many of these critters there might be out there. There is room for billions, trillions! Perhaps some of them have adapted further — to go without air, to reach greater depths, even to reach the ice of the sea bed.”

“I never heard of anything like this.”

“You will learn this is a common pattern. Over time humans have been projected into all sorts of environments, and they have adapted. And anywhere the living is stable you find the same phenomenon, an enthusiastic discarding of the burden of thinking.”

She frowned. “The Nord is half a million years old. We were isolated. We could have lost our minds.”

“But you remained a people in transition — never settling, taking your little world with you, rebuilding it all the time. Why, the stroke of genius was to have even your breeding cycle dependent on technology!”

“The birthing pods.”

“Yes. Of course it is possible to retain a technological capability without consciousness — think of the Shipbuilders — but you couldn’t afford to become dumb, for your lives depend on the mechanisms that keep the Nord habitable. For your kind, the trick worked.”

Your kind. I t was a chilling phrase — and an insulting one.

Alia’s people were proud of their pedigree, proud of what they had become. It was a very long time since her remote ancestors had left the home planet, and her physiology, her frame and musculature, were built for low-gravity climbing as much as walking. But after half a million years of selection and purposeful enhancement, in Michael Poole’s terms she was an intuitive genius. But to Reath, it seemed, she was just one of another kind, her people on the Nord and all their rich history just another type of post-human, no better than the mindless creatures swimming in this monstrous sea.

Alia felt resentful, and wanted to have nothing in common with these creatures. “All they do is swim around chasing fish. They are subhuman — aren’t they? If their brains have shriveled, if they have no mind—”

“I always prefer the term ‘post-human,’ regardless of encephalization. Best to avoid value judgments.”

“I can give this world a name,” she said. “Theycan’t.”

“But what need have they of names? Alia, names or not, they were once human. They may have no advanced consciousness now, but they have feelings, sensations, a sensorium probably unlike any other type. They are a thread in mankind’s history, Alia, that must be drawn back into the tapestry. This is why I brought you here. You must learn to see mankind as the Transcendence sees it, without prejudice—”

She hazarded, “And with love?”

“Love, yes! And though we have talked of long loves, time is short — at least, in the longer view of the Transcendence. We are all diverging from each other, we different sorts of humans. There may come a point when we can no longer talk to each other, even recognize our commonality. We have to find our way back together again before we lose each other completely…”

The post-humans, swimming beneath the platform, were baffled. They had responded to the subsonic beacon that drew them there, but there was nothing for them, no food, no mates. Disappointed, in pairs and family groups, they drifted away.

Once I’d surfaced from VR I tried to get down to some work, which I figured was the best way to waste the days I had to endure before I could get into that plane seat. With a fat mug of coffee I went to my mother’s study, which had the best connection and display facilities in the house, and closed the door.

The first thing I did was bring up a VR of the current design-freeze of our space probe. The bulky main body unfolded, bejeweled with lacy antennae, attitude thruster nozzles, and instrument booms, hanging in the air before me like a beautiful toy.

Just looking at the thing was calming. This was my pet starship.

It was called the Kuiper Probe, in the requests-for-tender documents from NASA and the USAF that defined it. If it ever actually got built it would no doubt be given some more exotic name. I inspected the liquid-lead coolant tanks and the neutron shield and the instrument buses, and the suite of tiny probes we planned to drop off on the way out of the solar system, and the Higgs field power plant at its very core.

Strictly speaking it wasn’t really a starship, of course. For one thing it was unmanned, and for another it wouldn’t go to the stars. But it was an “interstellar precursor mission,” in the jargon. It would fly a proving flight for the key technologies that might one day take our machines, or even us, very much further.

Our probe was designed to sail a thousand astronomical units from the sun — that is, a thousand times as far as Earth is from the central star. By comparison the furthest planet, Pluto, is a mere forty AU out, but the nearest star, in the Alpha Centauri system, is more than a quarter of a million AUs away. But our probe’s ten-year, thousand-AU mission would be a first step, a preliminary sail out of the cozy harbor of the inner system. Nothing had traveled further from Earth save the long-derelict Voyagers and Pioneers, planetary probes from the 1970s. And where the Voyagers had had to rely on gravitational slingshots to hurl them so far, we would be going under our own steam, fueled by cosmic might.

There was even good science to do on the way. We would be able to explore the outer solar system, far beyond Pluto, where flocks of ice moons, the Kuiper objects, fly through the frozen dark. Our trajectory would give precise measurements of such huge numbers as the total mass of the solar system. We would pass through the heliopause, where the wind from the sun disperses into the wider interstellar medium, and study whatever strange cosmic particles and radiations from deeper space are blocked from Earth’s view.

And, most significant of all, we could visit the Kuiper Anomaly. That glimmering tetrahedron had continued its own long, aloof orbit around the sun ever since its discovery in the first decade of the century. Now was the time to go confront that strange visitor.

That, in fact, was the reason the USAF was involved. In our little design community there was even a rumor that in among the reserve payload weight, set aside for contingencies and late additions, was an allowance of fifty kilograms or so for a small bomb.

I tried to focus. I had plenty of challenging work to get done; I was in the middle of involved structural analyses of the Probe’s propulsion system. But my concentration wouldn’t gel. Designing a starship as therapy: it often worked, but not today.

I was deeply relieved when Shelley Magwood, my nominal boss, spotted I was online, and logged on to talk to me.

Shelley coalesced in my mother’s study. She was sitting in a fashionable molded-ceramic chair projected from her office in Seattle. She had heard about my troubles. “I don’t know what you’re doing sitting there working on the damn Probe,” she snapped. “The Probe can wait. The Kuiper Anomaly isn’t going anywhere…”

Shelley was thin, intense, with a strong face, high cheekbones, and a Roman nose. Her hair was dirty blond, but I suspected she was already dyeing it, in her thirties. I always thought she worked too hard, burning herself up in her energetic pursuit of too many projects, but there always seemed to be a smile, just behind the door of her face. Nowadays she was more a manager, an entrepreneur, than an engineer, and I suspected she indulged in this deep space probe proof-of-concept project as a sanity release, just as I did. I liked her a hell of a lot.

“You should be with Tom,” she said. “Get your fat backside on a plane.”

“I’ve tried that,” I said. “I have a seat lined up. The protocols—”

“Bugger the protocols. Look, if you need help—”

“Thanks. I just have to be patient.”

“I’m sorry about Tom.”

“Don’t be. The work is helping.”

“Oh, is it?” Through some fancy projection-software interpolation her VR was made to look as if it were peering at the same diagrams I was. “Just sit tight a minute,” she said sternly. “I’ll check over what you’ve done. The state you’re in you’ll probably screw the whole thing.”

“Thanks for your support.”

“I mean it,” she said. No doubt she did. She frowned, focusing on the schematics, and I sat back and waited.

So a kid who had once watched space shuttles launching from his backyard had ended up designing a real-life spaceship, after a fashion. It had been a long journey, though.

My primary ambition, as a small kid, had been to fly in space myself. But as I grew older it quickly became apparent that that would never be possible. Not only were the only manned space missions on the cards endless round-the-block tours on the Space Station, for which there was a whole queue of candidate astronauts lined up before I reached age twelve, but I soon learned that my personal spacesuit, my body, wasn’t up to the task of taking me off the planet.

So my ambitions downscaled a bit. If I couldn’t fly myself, maybe I could be involved in designing the next generation of ships. But even that got compromised.

I majored in math and engineering at college. But when I graduated in 2017, it was quickly apparent that there was no work to be had in designing spaceships. There were only a few proof-of-concept projects sponsored by NASA, ESA, and the other space agencies. But even this was playing; there was no serious money in it. This was not a time for flying into space: it was an age of entropy, when the oil was running out and energy running down, and our attentions were increasingly absorbed by the need to cope with the Warming, and other hazards of the Earthbound future.

But I was an engineer. I wanted to work on something that would get built — and, incidentally, that would pay; I had no ambitions to be poor. So I looked for opportunities.

What was coming up at the time was a new generation of nuclear power plants. Whatever its drawbacks, nuclear power had become fashionable again, as it was not a source of carbon dioxide emissions — and as a source of energy, a lot less problematical than chasing down the world’s remaining oil supplies.

So I went into nuclear engineering. I spent eight years working on a plant that eventually opened in 2027.

It was what we called a fifth-generation design. The core worked at nearly a thousand degrees, a temperature that would have signaled the start of a meltdown in early generations of reactors. Those high temperatures offered much greater efficiency, but to achieve them we had to go through an immense program of research and development, for instance in ultra-hard materials that were resistant to intense heat and neutron bombardment. We actually cooled the thing with a huge vat of molten lead; I learned a great deal about refrigeration principles on that project, principles I applied later to the Kuiper Probe.

When our meltdown-proof, terrorism-proof plant came online and started to feed its first watts into the grid, we were very proud of what we’d achieved. Super-safe and super-clean, we used to say. We even won the economic argument, even though the costs of our competitors, at the time renewables like solar and wind power, were tumbling. That New York station is still operating today, even though its economic justification has gone away a little.

I was thirty-two years old. I was married to Morag, and we had a son, Tom. We were very happy. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I guess that was in some ways the peak of my life. I would never have believed that things would fall apart so quickly.

My work suffered first. I admit I didn’t see the Higgs revolution coming — but then, few others did.

Higgs technology came out of cosmology. The physics of the early universe was exotic. In our era some particles, such as the quarks that make up protons and neutrons, are massive, while photons, particles of light, are massless. It is an elusive critter called the Higgs field that gives objects mass. But when the universe was less than a millionth of a millionth of a second old, and it was still hotter than a certain crucial temperature of a thousand trillion degrees, the Higgs field couldn’t settle. Every particle was massless. The universe was filled with them, flashing across unraveling spacetime at lightspeed. But when the universe expanded and cooled the Higgs field condensed out, like a frost settling on blades of grass. Suddenly everything changed.

And when the Higgs field condensed it released a flood of energy, cosmos-wide. It is just as water freezing to frost must release heat energy: it was a phase transition, as the cosmologists say. And that vast injection of energy powered the universe into a surge of “inflation” that dramatically accelerated its expansion. All this is cosmology; it can be seen written in the relics in the sky — the remnant background Big Bang radiation, the gravity waves that slosh back and forth — a story deciphered when I was a boy.

What changed our world was the development in the 2020s of a new breed of particle accelerator so powerful it was able to emulate, in tiny spaces and brief instants, the tremendous energy density and temperature of the early universe — hot enough, in fact, to drive out the Higgs field from a bit of matter.

And when the Higgs was allowed to recondense, it released a flood of energy — vastly more than the energy input, under the right conditions. If that sounds like something for nothing, it isn’t: it is just as in a fission bomb the relatively small energy of conventional explosives is used to liberate the much greater energies locked up in atomic nuclei.

As soon as control of the Higgs field was achieved, even on a small experimental scale, its potential was obvious. Here was an energy source of much greater density than anything we’d dreamed possible before — and we could tap it, tap an energy that had once driven the expansion of the universe itself. It was even as safe as you could wish, far safer even than our new-generation nukes.

When you try to predict technological trends, it’s easy to follow straight lines. For instance computer power, measured in operations per buck, has been doubling every couple of years since long before I was born, and has continued to follow that trend, more or less, ever since. Maybe you could have foreseen some of the consequences: a world in which a machine equivalent of human-level intelligence has long been passed, a world in which artificial self-awareness has become a commodity, and a part of everyone’s life. What’s much harder to predict is what comes out of nowhere, out of left field. I was still a kid when the great orbital astronomical observatories confirmed the universe’s biography from the Big Bang to the present. And out of that great cosmological revolution has come a new power source for cars and planes and cities — and, maybe, starships. Who’d have thought it?

Not me, that was for sure. In the late 2020s, as I followed these sudden developments in the technical literature, I was alarmed.

In terms of my career, it needn’t have mattered, maybe. We had only just brought that New York station online, and others of the same design were sprouting around the Great Lakes, and in Nevada and California. There is an asset inertia with big technology; you can’t throw away your whole infrastructure just because somebody somewhere has a bright idea.

But the fact was, somebody had had that bright idea.

A new long-term national energy strategy began to emerge, born out of existing trends, notably the painful weaning of America off of oil, and the possibilities opened up by Higgs. “Generation distribution” was the catchphrase. Every block, every home, would be a source of energy, from photovoltaic cells, rooftop wind turbines, maybe even biofuel crops in the backyard. And everybody would be connected into a local microgrid, from which you would draw energy when you needed it, store energy in hydrogen fuel cells in your basement, and even sell power back when you had a surplus. The microgrids would be connected up to larger regional, national, and international grids, supported by key nodes that would, in the first phase, by existing-technology power stations, including old hydrocarbon-burners and our new nukes, but these would be phased out as soon as they paid off their development costs, and replaced by Higgs generators.

It would be distributed, robust at every scale, clean and environment-friendly, and soaked with smartness. The administration began to fast-track enabling legislation, such as to force the utilities to purchase energy from any supplier. It was a great vision.

But in the longest term there was no place for nuke technology, and I knew immediately that my chosen field was a conceptual dead end. Maintenance projects might have seen out my working life, but all the creative energies, and some serious government R D money, would be focused, quite rightly, on the new Higgs-field technologies. Even as it came online my New York station was obsolete — and so, in a sense, was I, in my early thirties. I couldn’t bear it. I wanted to be in the frontline.

I argued with Morag at the time. She pointed out that we had a kid, and plans for more. The world didn’t owe me a living, she said, no matter how hard I chased my dreams.

But I wouldn’t listen. At age thirty-four, I quit my job and took an academic post at Cornell. I would be teaching the fundamentals of physics to reluctant students, while researching the new Higgs-field technologies.

It didn’t work out. There was already a whole generation of grad students armed with a hands-on knowledge of the new prototype unified-field energy systems — I was already too old, at thirty-four. I continued to make a living, but I’d got myself stuck up another blind alley, and was a lot less well paid. I was unhappy. Morag was justifiably unhappy, too, unhappy at my choices, at the way it had worked out. We loved each other, but I guess we took it out on each other. We didn’t mean to hurt Tom, but he was there. Call it friendly fire.

Then Morag got pregnant again. It was actually an accident, we weren’t sure how we could afford it. But we embraced it. It was going to be a new start, we decided, us and the kids. As Morag’s pregnancy developed I started to feel more content than I ever had before. Maybe I was starting to realize that there is more to life than childhood dreams, and whatever disappointment I felt was fading in the light of a richer joy.

And then, and then.

Grief doesn’t begin to describe it. It was like an amputation, maybe, a loss of half of myself. I went through the motions of my life, I ate and slept and rose again and got dressed and worked, but it all seemed purposeless, a charade. And my emotions raged, as uncontrollable and inexplicable as the weather. I even took it out on my memory of Morag, as if she’d somehow rejected me by dying. The ultimate jilting.

Oh, I looked after Tom, materially anyhow. I never disappeared into drink or drugs or VR fantasyland, the way a lot of people expected me to, I think. I kept working, going through the motions of class after class, semester after semester, one faceless cadre of students after another, though I gave up on the idea of any original work. I kept functioning. Maybe it was “stoicism,” as one artificial-sentience therapist assured me. The way I see it, I just kept up the shell.

After Morag’s death, I lost a decade. That’s how I look at it now. Then, one day, I found myself inhabiting my life again.

When I looked around I was suddenly in my forties. Tom, in his late teens, had grown away from me, not surprisingly. And if I thought my career was stuck when I was thirty-four, it certainly was now. It’s a depressing progression. By twenty I knew I would never be an astronaut. By thirty I knew I would never be a brilliant engineer. And by forty-five I was all I would ever be, for the rest of my life.

But I still needed money. I kept up my teaching at Cornell, but I put some feelers out for consultant work.

I got a lucky break when Shelley Magwood contacted me, out of the blue. She was in one of my early cadres of students at Cornell. By age thirty or so she had already made herself rich with shares in a start-up company specializing in aspects of the new Higgs-field technologies.

She carved me out consultancy assignments based on Higgs, and on my deeper experience in the nuclear field. For a transition period the two technologies would have to work together providing power to the common grid, and there were interfaces, protocols, loading balances, and other technical details to be worked out.

So the work kept coming. I did it well enough. Shelley said I had inspired her, as a teacher; without me she wouldn’t have carved out her own successful track, and so forth. I appreciated the morale boost, and the money. But we both knew Shelley was doing me a favor.

Then Shelley drew me into another of her ventures.

“I remember how you always used to throw in space technology applications into your lectures,” she told me. “It was obvious where your heart was. I think you might enjoy working on this.”

When the request-for-proposals for the project that became the Kuiper Probe arrived, Shelley’s consultancy company was small and nimble enough to be able to position itself to grab the work, but smart enough to see the potential for the future. “This is only a paper study,” she told me. “But it might get picked up. And even if not, we’re going to be paid to think about how to use Higgs to drive spaceships. We’ll be like Renaissance shipbuilders, holding a patent on sail technology, just as Columbus is about to embark…”

Shelley quickly put together a team with a number of freelancers, like me, and input from various other companies on specialized aspects. We rarely met; almost everything was done remotely, as Shelley’s “paper” study, actually a software abstraction, was driven to successive levels of design detail.

Kuiper was an obvious application for Higgs technology. But for me, it was no more than a start to use this miraculous energy source as a way to drive steam rockets. In the long-term, I dreamed, control of the Higgs field could give us control of inertia itself: we could banish mass. I imagined a day when vast spaceships would float from world to world, light as thistledown.

My God, I loved the work. It paid pennies, but it kept me sane.

Shelley emerged from her quick review. “So you haven’t screwed up too badly. But your mind must be with Tom. Mine would be.”

I tried to tell her something of my relationship with Tom. “Everything changed the day Morag died,” I said. “I took ten years to get over that. If I ever did. And Tom—”

“Tom thinks you miss the dead baby more than you love him. Is that it?”

That shocked me. “It isn’t true,” I said. “It never was.”

“Maybe not,” Shelley said. “But these things get stuck in your head.”

“How would you know?”

She looked a little uncomfortable. “When I was younger I had a lot of rivalry with my father. He was a tough character. Didn’t suffer fools gladly, he always said. But the trouble was he couldn’t distinguish between a genuine fool and a kid trying to learn.”

I listened to this carefully; she’d told me little about her past. “I think I remember him.”

“Oh, you met him during my college days. Parents and teachers. He was always on his best behavior, at open days and graduation. And he was never cruel. He was loving, but in his own way. But his way was a stream of put-downs. I grew up thinking I could never be good enough for him — until one day I decided I was going to beat him.”

“And that’s why you work yourself to the bone.” We’d had arguments about her work-rate and its effects on her health right back to our college days, when I tutored her.

“Anyhow that rivalry stuck. And then he died, before I had a chance either to beat him or give up the chase… Now I’m stuck with it.” She glared at me. “Nobody gets out of the past without scars. What you have to do is deal with it, and move forward. Right now Tom is all that matters.”

“OK,” I said. “But things may be a little more complicated than that.”

I was thinking of my visitations by Morag.

I felt an impulse to tell her, to confess. I still hadn’t even told John about it. But I was starting to think I ought to open up to somebody about it. But, as well as I knew Shelley, I had no idea what her reaction would be. I guess I was afraid of losing her.

Maybe she intuited some of my confusion, if not the reason for it. She leaned forward. “Focus on Tom,” she said. “The project doesn’t need you right now. But he does.”

I nodded. The moment passed, and my secret stayed intact a little longer.

During their long interstellar jaunts in the monastic silence of his ship, Reath encouraged Alia to study the history of mankind. “If you don’t know where you’ve come from,” he would say, “you certainly don’t know where you’re going.”

And in this study, as he had been throughout her life, it was the small, dark, unhappy form of Michael Poole that was her companion, and her anchor point.

Humanity was thought to be some six hundred thousand years old, six hundred thousand years since the root stock had diverged from still more primitive forms. For the first hundred thousand years, mankind was confined to Earth — a period that had actually ended in Michael Poole’s own lifetime. This era was a lengthy and mostly uninteresting saga of a groping toward rationality and material command, amid endless wars.

“The most interesting thing about mankind in this long Earthbound period is its fragility,” Reath said. “Think about it. Humanity was confined to one rocky world in a remote corner of the Galaxy — indeed, imprisoned in a membrane of water and organics smeared over the planet’s surface. Up to Michael Poole’s time, that was all the life anybody knew about in the whole universe! Why, the slightest disturbance could have wiped us out — destroyed mankind before we got started — and that would have been that.”

The terrible contingency made Alia shudder. “Poole’s generation referred to his time as the Bottleneck.”

“They were right,” Reath said. “But it wasn’t the only age of crisis. There were several points in human history where things went badly wrong. Seventy thousand years before Michael Poole’s time there was an immense volcanic eruption that disrupted the planet’s climatic systems. Even earlier, while mankind was still just a species of upright apes among many others, a plague cut the rootstock down to a few dozen. Mankind reduced to just fifty or so! — think of it. You can see traces of such times in our genetic legacy even now, traces of a dreadful simplifying. The major difference with the Poole Bottleneck was that this was the first anthropogenic crisis — the first caused directly by the actions of mankind.

“It’s no great surprise that as Witnesses we are drawn to bottlenecks. They are the times of maximum danger for mankind, maximum drama — and yet of maximum flux and opportunity.”

Alia stared at Michael Poole, his troubled face trapped in stillness inside her Witnessing tank. In this incident Poole was outdoors, in a strange landscape. In hot dense sunlight, he was climbing over a vast heap of wreckage, of smashed and abandoned machines. “Here he is aged fifty-two,” she said. “He is entering the most critical time of his life.”

“He looks troubled.”

“He often does,” she said wryly. “Poole knew the dangers of his age very well. Most educated people of the time did, I think. But after the danger his son encountered, Poole came to grasp the implications better than most. He worked on a geoengineering project after all.”

“And he was a Poole,” Reath said, somewhat reverently.

“But they were all so limited — all the people of his time, even Poole himself. The best you can say about them is that they were beginning to understand how little they did know.”

“And is it the problems of the Earth that are depressing him so?”

“More than that,” she said. “His own work isn’t going well. And it is a difficult time in his personal life…” She skimmed the projection back and forth; Poole stayed steady at the center of the flickering images while people appeared and imploded around him.

When she was young Alia had focused her Witnessing on the more accessible moments of Poole’s life: his joyous childhood, his discovery of love as a young man. With Reath’s gentle coaxing she had been trying to concentrate on this period, the most difficult time of his life — Poole’s own Bottleneck, perhaps.

But it was very hard for her to get into the head of a fifty-two-year-old man from the middle of the twenty-first century. Everything about his life was so different. Her fifties would be the start of her young adulthood, a time of opportunity and growing command over her destiny. For Poole, more than half his life — and the more productive, enjoyable part — had already gone. He was rapidly running out of future.

Sometimes, when she studied Poole, all she seemed to see was his smallness. He was a dark, unhappy creature, shut in on himself, trapped in a world so impoverished of stimulus and capability it was a wonder people didn’t simply die of boredom and frustration. “He knows so little,” she said. “He will die knowing so little. He suffers so much. And yet he will shape history.”

Reath touched her shoulder. “This is just as Witnessing is meant to be. As you come to understand the life of another embedded in the past, you come to understand yourself better.

“But you must try to keep a sense of perspective, Alia. Mankind did pass through this terrible Bottleneck. And the future of this limited little species was remarkable indeed…”

After its long Earthbound prologue, mankind erupted off the planet, “like a flock of birds lifting from a tree,” said Reath.

There followed a wave of exploration, colonization, and conquest, in which Michael Poole’s descendants played a significant part. But after the startling discovery of a Galaxy full of alien cultures, many of them ancient and malevolent, it was a wave of expansion that was pushed back several times. Once that reverse reached all the way back to Earth itself.

With the alien occupation of Earth overthrown, mankind re-emerged strong, united, focused — pathologically so, perhaps, Reath said. The government of the time, the most powerful central authority ever to emerge in human history, was known as the Coalition. A new expansion, a froth of war, conquest, and assimilation, swept across the face of the Galaxy. It took twenty-five thousand years, but at last the center of the Galaxy itself lay in human hands, and legends of the victorious warriors, the “Exultant generation,” resonated down the ages that followed.

Alia said, “ ‘Pathological’? That’s a strange word to choose.”

“But it was a pathology, of a sort,” Reath said. “Think about it. The Coalition controlled mankind for twenty-five thousand years! That’s a period that was comparable to the age of the species itself, at the time. For all that time the Coalition controlled culture, politics — even the genetic destiny of mankind. The soldiers who finally broke into the Galaxy’s Core were as human as Michael Poole, save for some superficialities. It was unnatural, Alia! That’s why I say it was pathological. A kind of madness gripped mankind, as we became defined solely by the war.”

“But it was a successful madness.”

“Oh, yes!”

When the war was won, the center could no longer control a Galactic mankind. Reath said darkly, “It was as if a truce had been called among humans, for the purposes of the war against the aliens. But with the Galaxy won history resumed — history of the usual bloody sort.”

The great expansion that had climaxed in the Exultant victory had cleaned out or marginalized most nonhuman life-forms, leaving the Galaxy an empty stage for a new human drama. New ideologies emerged, and successor states sprouted like weeds in the rubble of empire, each of them claiming legitimacy from the collapsed Coalition. The long age of conquest had bequeathed a Galaxy well stocked with the machinery of conflict, and the wars that followed, motivated by economics and ideology, glory and ambition, consumed millennia and countless lives.

“It was not a noble age,” Reath said, “though it threw up plenty of heroes. And it was played out in the shadow of the monumental achievements of the Exultant generation. Many were afflicted with a sense of shame at what they had become. But there was always somebody else to blame for the squabbling, of course.

“And time exerted its power. We are fleeting creatures, we humans!”

The river of time flowed on, bloodied by war, thousand-year empires bubbling like spindrift. The Coalition and its works were forgotten. And humans, flung upon a million alien shores, morphed and adapted. This was the Bifurcation of Mankind.

There were still wars, of course. But now different human species confronted each other. Some were so different that they no longer competed for the same resources — “they no longer shared the same ecological niche,” as Reath put it. But a more fundamental xenophobia fueled genocidal wars.

“So much suffering,” Alia said. “How terrible it all was.”

Reath said, “I wonder what Michael Poole would have thought of it all, if he could have looked forward. Was all his struggle worth it, merely to enable so much suffering to follow?”

“Michael Poole gave those who followed the opportunity to live their lives,” she said. “He can’t take responsibility for what they did with that opportunity.”

Reath nodded. “When your children leave home, you can’t live their lives for them. But you always worry.”

Alia wondered briefly if Reath had any children of his own. He said very little about his past — indeed she knew far more about Michael Poole, dead half a million years, than she did about the man who had come to share her life.

The age of Bifurcation ended abruptly.

Ninety thousand years after the time of Michael Poole, genetic randomness threw up a new conqueror. Charismatic, monstrous, carelessly spending human life on a vast scale, the self-styled Unifier saw only opportunity in the fragmentation of mankind. By using one human type as a weapon against another — and, somehow, by inspiring loyalty in soldiers as unlike each other as it was possible to be and yet still be called human — he built an empire. In the end he was defeated by the sheer scale of the Galaxy. One of his many enemies took his life, and his empire disintegrated, evanescent.

And yet the Unifier’s project had a long-lasting impact. If only briefly he had spread a common culture across a significant fraction of the Galaxy’s geography. Not since the collapse of the Coalition had the successors of mankind recalled that they all once shared the same warm pond.

Reath said, “Retrospectively historians call the Unifier’s brief empire the Second Integrality of Mankind — the First being the Coalition. The Unifier planted the seeds of a post-Bifurcation unity. But it took a long time before those seeds took root.”

It was ten thousand years, in fact, before mankind began to act once more with a semblance of unity. And once again that unity required a common cause.

Mankind still controlled the Galaxy. But that Galaxy was a mere puddle of muddy light, while all around alien cultures commanded a wider ocean. Now those immense spaces became an arena for a new war. As in the time of the Unifier, disparate human types were thrown into the conflict; new subspecies were even bred specifically to serve as weapons. This war continued in various forms for a hundred thousand years.

“An unimaginable length of time,” Reath said, shaking his head. “Why, those who concluded the war weren’t even the same species as those who started it! And yet they fought on.”

The war didn’t so much end as fizzle out. Like the Unifier, mankind was defeated by the sheer scale of the arena and, exhausted, fell back to its home Galaxy — though relics were left stranded to fend for themselves, far from home. The long unity of the Third Integrality was lost.

“But we didn’t return to complete fragmentation, not quite,” Reath said. “For now a new force began to emerge in human politics: the undying.”

Almost since the time of Michael Poole, there had been undying among the ranks of mankind. Some of these were engineered to be so, by humans or even by nonhumans, and others were the children of the engineered. Of course none of these were truly “immortal”; it was just that they couldn’t foresee a time when they would die. They emerged and died in their own slow generations, a subset of mankind who counted their lives in tens of millennia or more.

The hostility of mortal mankind to these undying was relentless. It pushed the undying together, uniting them for common protection — even if, often, in mutual loathing. But they were always dependent on the mass of mankind. Undying or not, they were still human; if the rest of humanity were to be destroyed, it was doubtful indeed if the undying could survive long. So while their view of the world was very different from that of the mortals, the undying ones needed their short-lived cousins.

The undying had rather enjoyed the long noon of the Coalition. Stability and central control was what they sought above all else. To them the Coalition’s collapse, and the churning ages of Bifurcation that followed, were a catastrophe.

When, two hundred thousand years after the time of Michael Poole, the storm of extragalactic war at last blew itself out, the undying decided enough was enough. In this moment of human fragmentation and weakness, they began to act. They set about knitting the scattered scraps of mankind into a new Integrality — the Fourth — which they would call the Commonwealth.

The new Commonwealth crept across the bruised stars. It was a slow process. By Alia’s time, since the founding of the Commonwealth three hundred thousand years had worn away; it was a remarkable thought that the great project of the Fourth Integrality had already taken most of human history. But the undying were patient.

And meanwhile they began a program to share their own longevity with as many mortals as possible. Even this was dedicated to the interests of the undying themselves — for, whatever their origins among the multiple subspecies of mankind, the new undying would quickly inherit the values and concerns of those who engineered their emergence.

Reath was enthusiastic. “It’s really a wonderful vision, Alia. The undying are no elite. They are making us like themselves, giving us the gift of their own unimaginably long lives…”

But this cold calculation repelled Alia. It was as if the cold kiss of an undying transformed a mortal into one of them, causing her to become infected with their long inhuman perspectives. It was a plague of nondeath, she thought uneasily.

Reath breathed, “And they conceived of another tremendous project. At the heart of the Commonwealth the undying began to build the Transcendence. The undying dream of a new form of human life, a higher form — the betterment of us all achieved through a new unity. A dream, a wonderful dream!…”

Alia turned back to the Witnessing tank, set to a random moment in Poole’s sixth decade, a three-dimensional slice cut out of his four-dimensional life. How strange it was that she should be united in this way with Michael Poole — he at the very beginning of mankind’s great adventure, and she, perhaps, at its end. But she was not unique. In principle, the Transcendence ordered, every human child must participate in the Witnessing of the past.

It was a strange fact that for most of mankind the business of the Witnessing, and the wider program of Redemption Reath had hinted at, was the most visible manifestation of the nascent Transcendence’s ambitions. But, Alia thought now, how strange it was that the Transcendents, while reaching for the future, should be so obsessed with the past.

She tried to express this to Reath.

“Redemption is the will of the Transcendence,” he said peremptorily. “And so to understand the Transcendence you must understand the Redemption.”

“But what difference does it make? Michael Poole never knew I’ve been watching him all my life.”

“It certainly makes a difference to us, doesn’t it? The only alternative to knowing is not to know, to ignore all the suffering of the bloodstained generations that preceded us. Wouldn’t that diminish us?”

“I don’t know,” Alia said honestly.

“We have time to explore this later.” He stood up. “This has been a rich conversation. You’ve given me much to think about, Alia.”

“I have? But you’re the teacher.”

He smiled. “I keep telling you. The wisdom you need is within yourself, not in me. And I think you’re learning how to find that wisdom very well… Do you feel you are ready for the Second Implication?”

She took a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”

“Tomorrow, then, we will make a new landfall.”

After he left, idly she let the tank projection run forward.

There was Poole, clambering over that strange reef of broken machinery. Hot, dirty, he seemed troubled, agitated; he seemed to be trying to reach something, or someone.

And then he turned and looked up, out of the tank, directly into Alia’s eyes.

She gasped. She clapped her hands, and the Witnessing tank cleared. The image of Poole disappeared, that stern accusing stare evaporating in a blur of cubical pixels.

That was not supposed to happen.

I ordered a pod bus to take me back to the airport.

The pod, not much more than a dozen seats in a gleaming glass bubble and a hydrogen-fuel engine hidden in the floor, rolled silently up to my mother’s front door. There was one other passenger, apparently airport-bound like me. I clambered aboard with my suitcase. Embarrassingly my mother kissed me good-bye on the step. The pod sealed itself up and hissed away.

We worked our way out into the road system, the bus’s own local sentience tying into a system-wide intelligence mediated by a sky full of satellites and an invisible lacing of microwave signals. The traffic gradually built up, until we had in view, oh, at least twenty vehicles whirring away along the silvertop: pod buses like mine, cabs, delivery trucks, transport for disabled people, emergency vehicles like ambulances and fire trucks. My bus, as it swam into this stream, attached itself to more of its kind, nose to tail, until we were in a train of eight or ten pods, rolling easily along the road. I could see the heads of my fellow passengers in the bright blisters of the other pods. Every so often other pods would join us, or the train would crack open, releasing a pod to peel off down a slip road to perform some local pickup or dropoff.

We moved pretty fast on the open road, maybe a hundred kilometers an hour, and in the few busy stretches we could be tailgating the vehicle in front, just centimeters away. It was traffic moving at speeds and with such closeness that would once have scared me to death. But of course nobody was driving, no human being. We passengers in our glass bubbles were precious treasures cradled by metal and ceramic and electronic intelligence, washed along the road system in safety and silence — and with no more pollution than a puff of water vapor here and there, the residue of hydrogen burning in oxygen.

We kept to the silvertop stripe. Painted down the centerline of the old tarmac it was modern smart-concrete, embedded with miniature processors: self-diagnosing and self-repairing, it should need no maintenance for decades. But away from the silvertop whole lanes had been abandoned, and the old tarmac surface was crumbling, the defiant green of weeds pushing through the black, the first stage of nature’s recovery. There was a nostalgic tug when you looked out over those disintegrating acres of black stuff. I imagined the great unending streams of traffic, millions of tons of metal and glass and gasoline, that had once poured along these highways. And off the road you could see more haunting sights: abandoned gas stations and motels and shopping malls, all part of the vast infrastructure that had once sustained that river of traffic, and in turn fed off it.

How strange it is that all the cars have gone!

Of course it was economics, not environmental sensitivity, that killed the automobile.

There was a tipping point in the 2020s. For decades the national economy, and our political freedom to move, had been utterly constrained by our dependence on oil. And now the oil was running out: the engineers had to start fires in the wells to force out the last of the oil, or send down microbes to detach it from pores in the reservoir rocks. At home we were suffering from price spikes, blackouts, sabotage, and we were getting drawn into increasingly messy conflicts over the last dwindling supplies, in the Middle East, Central Asia. And then there was the Warming, whose distressing effects, and link to the carbon economy, were increasingly apparent. In retrospect it was a ridiculous time, a time of hysteria and desperation — and of growing awareness. The coup in Saudi Arabia was the last straw. The non-OPEC oil had long since dried up, and the taps being closed on the world’s largest remaining fields, even briefly, was an economic blow that caused layoffs and stagflation.

Enough is enough, said President Amin, the second woman head of state. By the time she took the White House in 2024, freeing America from its dependence on oil was at last politically possible. Amin, the right woman at the right time, articulated a profound but deceptively simple dream of an America accepting a new destiny — an America that cared about its responsibility for the future of mankind “as far as we, on our shining hill, can see.” One day this vision would lead to the Stewardship.

But first we needed new strategies for energy and transport.

Amin put together the first version of our modern power infrastructure strategy, with distributed generation and a reliance on hydrogen and nuclear power — and the nukes would soon be replaced by Higgs plants. Of course there was resistance. The political highlight of Amin’s first term was a stupendous battle between the legislators and Exxon-Mobil-Shell-BP, the last of the great carbon conglomerates. And as OPEC saw its power base disappearing we faced external threats, too.

And, even more traumatically, we had to be weaned off the automobile.

It turned out to be simple, politically. In the longer term we were to switch to a new transport paradigm based on hydrogen, biofuels, and electric cells. But for now, as we gave up the oil, Amin enforced drastically improved fuel efficiency, and imposed new environmental and future taxes, reflecting the true price of an auto from its manufacture through its injection of carbon into the air. This “Full Social Cost Pricing” as the economists called it, just priced private cars out of reach.

The transition happened overnight, like a change of fashion. It was amazing how, when the cost of gas got high enough, you suddenly discovered you really didn’t need to drive so much after all. Instead you caught the bus and the train, of which there were suddenly plenty, or you walked. You shopped where you lived: there was a revival of “village ethic,” as local clinics and schools and shops started to flourish, providing everything you needed within walking distance. And there was a boom in comms facilities. As our physical transport capacity declined we all engaged in a “virtual economy”: telecommuting suddenly matured.

It felt easy. We were all surprised by how little we actually needed to drive. But of course the dislocation was staggering.

The impact on Detroit alone was bad enough, as the old factories either closed or painfully retooled for the manufacture of a much reduced volume of smart new hydrogen-economy vehicles like pod buses. A whole slew of supplier industries had to pivot or fold. The oil infrastructure had to be renovated or replaced to handle the new hydrogen and biofuel paradigm. Meanwhile there was a massive relocation of businesses out of the city centers, and of people back in. Some more modern communities, such as whole stretches of Greater Los Angeles, were suddenly rendered impractical, uninhabitable without the car; property values went crazy. Agriculture was an industry as dependent on its distribution networks as any other, and food supplies boomed and crashed as we all tried to adjust.

Of course it was a huge risk. The nation as a whole had grown rich and powerful in a world economy built on hydrocarbon fuels; shifting that fundamental basis posed dangers politically and economically. But we had made it through vast economic transitions before, such as when oil had overtaken coal around 1900. After just a few years things began to get better, and the change became so embedded it seemed odd we hadn’t taken the leap much earlier. In the end it was just a matter of will, which Amin managed to assemble.

I was pursuing my nuclear-engineering career through this whole period, and I had to work my way through it. Despite the boom in VR technology I found myself spending a lot more time than I would have wanted to away from home. Maybe that contributed to the crisis my family faced later. Anyhow, we all got through it. I guess it was a necessary adjustment, whatever the cost.

But Amin’s policies, focusing on domestic issues, had a downside. America had turned inward on itself during a particularly nasty decade. It was the Warming, of course. Access to water was the focus of many battlegrounds, from the Nile to the Amazon and even the Danube, but energy wars were also increasingly a hazard. The changing climate wiped out whole nations — even the Netherlands was depopulated. America wasn’t immune; there were droughts in the corn belt, one-off calamities like the New Orleans hurricane. All over the planet there was famine, disease, and desertification, and drifting flocks of refugees. When the oil economy collapsed the petrostates began to implode with startling rapidity, causing a whole new set of problems.

And in all this America, the only nation with the real power to help, obsessing over losing the automobile, did nothing. Our inwardness ended only with the Happy Anniversary flash-bombing of 2033, a real wake-up call. After that came the launch of the Stewardship under Edith Barnette, once Amin’s veep: America’s “Marshall Plan for a bruised world.” It began by us baling out the petrostates as a few years earlier we had baled out Detroit.

By then President Amin had paid her own price, in her assassination a week after she left office. But she had changed the world.

I used to try to explain all this to Tom. He was ten years old when Amin was assassinated; he remembers that trauma even if the greater geopolitical transformations passed him by at the time.

I thought he would want to know about the lost freedoms of the automobile age, a time when you could go where you wanted as fast as you wanted. It had been part of our birthright, we thought. I still remember how proud I was of my first car, a beat-up 2010 Ford, which I used to polish until it shone in the Florida sun. I missed driving — not just the freedom of it, but driving itself, a social interaction of a unique kind you got as you wrestled your way through heavy traffic on a Friday rush hour. Vanished skills, abandoned pleasures.

But Tom would stare at images of the vast streams of traffic that had flowed along the abandoned roads only a few years before, and at the poison that spread out from those crawling rivers of red lights and shining metal, blackening the land and turning the air over the cities the color of a Martian sky. And he would flick on links to accident statistics: how many died every year? No dream of freedom could possibly have seemed worth the price to Tom, who had never owned his own car, and never would.

I only saw one private car during that ride to the airport. I recognized the model. It was one of the new Jeeps, with six tires as tall as I am and a slick waterproof underside, and a little chimney stack from which it would vent its harmless hydrogen-fuel exhaust, water laced with a few exotic hydrocarbon by-products. Its cabin was perched on top of its body, a bright glass bubble. Some of these models had seats that turned into bunks, and little kitchens and toilets, and windows you could opaque to a silvery blankness. You could live in there. I felt an unwelcome stab of envy.

Its driver must have been seventy at least. Perhaps when the final generation of driver-nostalgics died off, I thought, so would the very last of the private cars. In the meantime, that guy was no doubt paying plenty for his fix.

But I still miss that old Ford of mine.

At the airport the check-in process was thorough, with cheek-swab DNA verification tests, neurological scans, and full-body imaging to make sure I wasn’t carrying a pathogen in my bloodstream or a knife in a hollowed-out rib.

I finally got on the plane. The cabin was wide-bodied and fitted out with big fake-leather couches, around which people fussed and planted their in-flight stuff. There were no windows, but every wall surface was smart, although for now tuned to a drab wallpaper. It was like a lounge in some slightly cramped hotel; only the cabin’s inevitable tubular architecture gave away the fact that we were on board a plane. My couch was smart, too. As I sat down I felt pads move silently into place, fitting my body shape and supporting my back and neck and lumbar region. All very civilized, though that cheap-hotel feeling deepened. I settled in and spread my softscreen over my lap.

The plane filled up quickly. The couches were not set in rows but in subtly randomized patterns, so you had at least the illusion of privacy. But still my neighbor, as he settled in, felt like he crowded into my space.

He was maybe forty, a round-faced man sweating so heavily his thinning hair was plastered to his scalp. His belly strained at his shirt. At one time you wouldn’t have glanced at him twice, but in these days when everybody walked everywhere he was bigger than most. He had a lot of stuff, a pack he crammed under his seat, another he shoved into the locker in front of him, and he spread out a softscreen and a pile of papers on his lap.

He caught me watching him. He stuck out his hand. “Sorry to disturb you. The name’s Jack Joy. Call me Jack.”

I shook his hand, powerful but hot and moist, and introduced myself.

He snapped his fingers to summon the steward — a human, a retro symbol of a vanished age. Jack requested a bourbon, and asked if I wanted the same; a bit uncertainly, but feeling crowded by this guy, I agreed.

Slightly breathless, he gestured at the heap of material on his lap. “Look at this crap. Every trip’s the same.” He winked. “But it costs so much to travel nowadays you have to make it worthwhile, even if somebody else is paying, right?” His accent was strong New York.

“I guess so.”

“You fly a lot?”

“I flew out here, to Florida. Otherwise, not for years.”

“It isn’t the unalloyed delight it once was. Watch this.” Without warning he slammed his fist against the fake leather armrest of his seat, making me jump. Immediately a metal band slid out of nowhere and snapped over his arm, and a blue light flashed over his head.

A stewardess came running, fingering the weapon in her holster.

Jack apologized, waving his other hand in the air, sloshing his drink. “Sorry, sorry. A nervous twitch! It always happens to me. What can I say?”

He had to submit to a scan from a handheld sensor. But eventually the stewardess spoke into a lapel mike, and with some reluctance, I thought, caused the restraint to release him and slide back into the body of his seat.

Jack turned to me. “You see that? By the time you get on the plane you’ve been through all the checks and the psycho profiling and all the rest, and you’re in your damn seat, and you think they’ll trust you at last. But no, no. One false move and wham, you’re pinned like a lab rat. I mean, what could you do? Scratch somebody’s eyes out? Lethe, even this shot glass is unbreakable. If I throw it against the wall—” He raised his arm.

“Don’t bother,” I said quickly, “I believe you.”

He laughed and sipped his drink. “It’s the way of the world, Mike — can I call you Mike?”

“Michael.”

“The way of the world, Mike. Lethe, it’s the way of the world.” He settled back on his couch with a grunting sigh, and kicked his shoes off, which did nothing to improve my immediate environment.

Lethe. I’d heard that word used as an oath before, somewhere. John, I thought; John used it sometimes.

That stewardess came by again, checking we were ready for lift-off. She caught my eye sympathetically. You want more privacy? I shrugged, subtly.

The plane surged forward and I was pressed back in my couch; I felt it adjust to accommodate me. I hadn’t even heard the engines start up. With a word I turned my smart wall into a window, and watched the drowned Florida landscape recede beneath me, covered in pools and lakes that shone in the sun like splashes of molten glass.

Once we had settled into the flight I buried myself in a softscreen study of climate change at the poles. It was a dull classroom subject, but after Tom, suddenly it was personal.

It all started with the Warming, of course; all the searches I set off looped back to that. For decades carbon dioxide had been accumulating in the air twice as fast as natural processes could remove it. By 2047 its concentration was higher than at any time in the last twenty million years, an astounding thought. The consequences were depressingly familiar. The ice was melting, the seas rising, ecosystems unraveling. All that heat energy pumped into the air and oceans had to go somewhere, so there were many more hurricanes and storms, floods and droughts than there used to be.

And so on. I skimmed all this, trying to find out about the Arctic.

At the poles the Warming is amplified, it seems. Apparently there is a positive feedback effect; as the ice melts the albedo of the ground is lowered — it reflects back less sunlight — and so the ground and the ocean just soak up more heat. As a result temperatures there have been, at times, rising ten times as fast as in the rest of the world. In the north, the ice was all gone, and strange storm systems came spinning down from that rotating plate of ocean to ravage the land. Once the sea ice actually protected the land from ocean storms and the worst ravages of the waves. Now, all around the Arctic Ocean, coastal erosion was “rapid,” “dramatic,” “traumatic,” so I read. At the same time the permafrost, the deep-buried ice cap, was melting. I’d seen some of this in Siberia; on a ground that undulated like the surface of the sea, roads collapsed, buildings just sank into the ground, and trees all over the immense, world-embracing taiga forests tipped over.

Of course all this hit the people. As Tom had said, even fifty years ago many of the locals in Siberia still lived as hunter-gatherers, following the reindeer around. Ironically the programs to relocate them out of there were paid for by the environment taxes paid by the big oil, gas, aluminium, and logging companies that had done so much damage to the area in the first place.

And then you had the methane.

Right around the poles huge quantities of methane, carbon dioxide, and other volatiles were locked up in hydrate deposits, kept stable by the low ocean temperatures and the pressure of the land and water above. The physics of it seemed simple enough. The peculiar geometry of water molecules makes them difficult to pack into a solid structure when they freeze. So “solid” ice contains a lot of empty space — room enough to trap other molecules, such as methane. And there is a lot of methane to be found on the seabed; there isn’t much oxygen down there, and anerobic decay processes release a lot of the gas.

When the temperature rose, that natural cage was broken open. The consequence was “methane burps” of the kind Tom was unlucky enough to have encountered.

But that was a localized event, I realized, lethal as it was if you happened to be in the way. The Warming, however, was nothing if not global. There was more methane down there in the hydrate layers than in all the world’s fossil fuel reserves, and methane, though it doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere, is in the short term twenty times as potent a greenhouse gas as our old buddy carbon dioxide.

So what would happen, I wondered vaguely, if this went on, if all that methane was released? I tabbed through pages on my softscreen, seeking answers. But my question chains petered out; my softscreen couldn’t answer. I sat back, tugging at a thread of speculation.

I admit I didn’t know much about the Warming, about climate change in the Arctic or anywhere else. Why should I? The planet was warming up, my body was growing older, it was all just part of the world I’d grown up in; you either obsessed about it, or accepted it and got on with your life. And besides, we had dumped the automobile, we had accepted the need to run the Stewardship. We were managing the pain, weren’t we?

But if those hydrate deposits all gave way, instead of the world just becoming slowly shabbier… I thought there was some bad news buried in here. Maybe very bad news. And on some level I just didn’t want to know.

Was there anything to be done about it? I cleared the softscreen, took a stylus, and began to doodle.

I kept being distracted by the environment of the flight.

If I miss driving, I miss flying more. When I was a kid my parents flew all the time. At the peak of their careers they had pretty much sewn up the Miami Beach market for corporate eventing, and scarcely a weekend went by without them managing a sales conference or marketing-strategy session at one resort hotel or another. All that was local, but to set up the deals they had to travel to where the customers were. When they got the chance, they would take us kids, John and me. Our teachers would kick up a stink, as in those days you were still expected to attend school for the regulation five days a week. But for better or worse my parents took the blows, and we flew.

We kids loved seeing the great centers of business across the country, from New York to San Francisco, Chicago down to Houston. A few times we traveled overseas, to Europe and Africa and even Japan once, though my mother worried about the effect of such long-haul trips. The whole thing was a great eye-opener that gave me a real sense of the planet I lived on.

But most of all I just loved to fly. I relished being in a vast machine that had the energy to hurl itself into the sky. I was always fascinated to come into a major airport, and to glimpse all those other sparks of light in the sky, and the mothlike shapes of more planes on the ground; you got a real sense of the millions of tons of metal suspended in the air over the continental United States, a great dome of dynamic engineering speckled with fragile humanity, every minute of every day. All gone now, of course. Now nobody flies — nobody but the very rich. It’s the same logic that took away the automobile: we’ve had to sacrifice some freedom to survive. I accept all that, and most of the time, like everybody else, I don’t think about it. But I still miss flying.

Jack Joy was leaning over to see what I was doing. Some instinct made me blank out the softscreen.

He leaned back with his pudgy hands up. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to pry.”

“It’s OK.”

“Work? Stuff about climate change? That’s your job?”

“No. It’s my son’s, in a way…”

I felt guilty about shutting him out like that. I told him a little about Tom’s work, and the accident.

He nodded. “Good kid. You must be proud.”

“I guess. More relieved he’s still around.”

“And now you’re boning up on global warming?”

“I kind of feel the world has targeted me, or anyhow my son.”

“I get it,” he said. He tapped his nose. “Know your enemy.”

“Not that I want the Earth to be my enemy.”

“Ah.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Neither enemy nor friend. It’s just a stage, right? A stage for us humans to strut our magnificent stuff.” He stuck out his belly as he said this.

I couldn’t help laughing at him. “I don’t know if I’d say that. The Die-back—”

“Who cares about that? You see, there I would take issue with your son. All that DNA cataloguing bullshit? Forget it! Let it happen. Let them all die off. So what?”

I couldn’t believe him. “Are you serious?”

“Of course I am.” He leaned closer, conspiratorially. “Listen to me. The Die-back has been going on for millennia. Ever since the Ice Age. First we wiped out the big mammals. In North America, the mammoths and the cave bears and the lions, pow, whole populations pop like soap bubbles when the first guy with a funny little spear wanders over from Asia. Australia the same. Asia and Africa it’s different, but there the animals evolved alongside us, and had time to get used to us.” He cackled. “I guess they learned to run fast. But now we’re working our way through them, too, and the smaller critters, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, the plants and the bugs. Whatever.”

“And you don’t think that’s a bad thing?”

“Two words,” he said. “Morally neutral.It just happened. There have been mass extinctions before, worse than this mother will ever be. And every time, you know what? Life bounces back. An evolutionary rebound, the biologists call it.” He winked at me. “So you just have to let it fix itself, and in the meantime sit back and enjoy the view. They don’t report this stuff—”

“But it’s true,” I finished for him.

He glanced at me and grinned. “Lethe, you know me already.”

“I don’t often hear people curse like that. Lethe. ”

“You don’t? Actually there’s a scientific hypothesis called Lethe. You’ve heard of Gaia?”

“Sure.” Named for a Greek earth-goddess, Gaia was a model of the Earth’s unified systems and processes, from the rock cycle, to the exchange of gases between air and ocean, to the vast cycling of matter and energy which sustained life, and which life sustained in its turn. All this was the paradigm among biologists, and a staple in Eco 101 for everybody else.

Jack said, “ ‘Lethe’ is the opposite to Gaia. An anti-Gaia, if you will. The Warming isn’t a simple event. Everything is working together, different effects reinforcing — just like Gaia, but now the Earth has begun working to destroy itself, as opposed to sustaining itself. Ask a biologist; you’ll see.

“But you know what Lethe actually means? It’s from Greek myth. Lethe was a river in Hades, which if you drank from it, would wash away your memory. Later on it was used by Shakespeare, to mean ‘death.’ Lethal — you see. But the original meaning kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Forgetfulness.”

“Exactly. So as one species after another turns to dust, Earth is losing its biotic memory: look at it that way. But we, in turn, may as well forget it all, too. I never saw a tiger, and never will, but I never saw T.

Rex either. What difference does it make that one died out thirty years ago and the other sixty-five million? Dead is dead.”

“That’s a brutal viewpoint.”

“Brutal? Realist, my friend. And a realist deals with the world as it is, and not as he wishes it to be. You just have to accept it. In the long-term, from the viewpoint of history, all of this will be seen as an adjustment. It’s just our bad luck to be living through it.” He grinned, wolfish. “Or our good luck. In the meantime, why not enjoy life? Fuck it. I mean, if it’s raining, grab a bucket.”

“So what kind of bucket do you carry?”

“Me? I deal in shit,” he said, evidently enjoying the look on my face.

If a Martian came down to Earth, he said, he might conclude that the main product of mankind was shit. Great rivers of the stuff pour out of our bodies and into the sewers of our towns and cities. In less civilized communities, we just dump it into the sea. In more enlightened places, Jack said, we stir it around and perfume it in sewage plants, and then dump it into the sea.

I could guess where this was going. “Where there’s muck there’s brass.” It was an expression of my mother’s.

Jack grinned. “I like that.” He actually wrote it down on his softscreen. “Muck and brass. But that’s what it boils down to — literally.” Jack worked for a company that sold fancy reactors that treated excrement by driving off the water that formed its bulk, and then extracting various useful hydrocarbons from the residue. “It’s an amazing technology,” he said. “I’ve a brochure you can download if you like.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s all a spin-off from space technology, those closed-loop life-support systems they use up there on the Space Station. Now here we are on Spaceship Earth using the same stuff. Inspiring, isn’t it? Fresh water is short everywhere, and just reclaiming that is often enough to justify the cost of a kit.” He winked again. “Of course we don’t advertise the fact that we’re selling your own shit back to you, but there you go.” He talked about how he sold plants small enough for an individual household, or big enough to handle a whole city block, and then he got on to payment schemes.

I wasn’t very interested, and my attention drifted off.

He glanced at me speculatively. “Here.” He gave me a card. It was black and embossed with silver: THE LETHE RIVER SWIMMING TEAM. “My contact details,” he said. “If you’re interested. It will download into your implant.”

“I don’t understand the name.”

“The Swimming Team is a group of like-minded thinkers,” he said.

“All realists?”

“Absolutely. Listen, I hand out dozens of cards like this. Hundreds. It’s the way we work. No obligation, just like minds on the other end of a comms link. If you ever feel like talking over this stuff, give me a call. Why not?” He eyed me speculatively. “Of course some take the logic a little further.”

Intrigued despite myself, I asked, “They do? Who?”

“I met a guy once, through the Swimming Team. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you his name.” He winked again. “He called himself a Last Hunter. You ever heard of them?…”

The premise turned out to be simple. A Last Hunter aimed to take out the last representative of a species: the last eagle, the last lion, the last elephant of all.

“Think of it,” Jack breathed. His voice was almost seductive. “To be the man to take down the last gorilla, a species that split from humans megayears ago. To end a ten-million-year story, by writing your name across the end of it in blood. Isn’t it a fantastic thought?”

“Are you serious? I’ve never heard anything so immoral—”

He wagged his fingers at me. “Now, let’s not start up on morality again, Mike. Illegal, I grant you. Especially if you have to sneak into a zoo to do it. You see my point, though. Even in a declining world there are ways to make money — a lot of it, if you are smart enough. And, more important, to find meaning — to define yourself.”

I had the feeling he was offering me something. But what? A finger or an ear chopped from the carcass of the last silverback gorilla? I found him overwhelming, disgusting — fascinating.

To my relief a hovering bot approached bearing food and drink, and I had an excuse to switch off. Jack Joy pulled off handfuls of sandwiches and began to feed.

To introduce her to the next Implication, of Unmediated Communication, Reath brought Alia to a new world.

As Reath’s ship slid into orbit, Alia peered down reluctantly. Orbiting a fat yellow star buried deep in the rich tangle of the Sagittarius Arm, this was a rust-brown ball surrounded by an extravagant flock of moons. It was an unprepossessing sight, even for a planet. The air was dense and thick and laden with fat gray clouds; it was like looking into a murky pond. The land was rust-colored and all but featureless, the only “mountains” worn stubs, the valleys the meandering tracks of sluggish rivers. There were oceans but so shallow that the world’s predominant ruddy color showed through. And there were still more peculiar landscapes, such as huge circles of some glassy, glinting material.

There was life, though. It showed up in patches of gray-green flung across the face of the crimson deserts — managed life, as you could see by its sharp edges, and the neat bright blue circles and ellipses of reservoirs. Alia made out the grayish bubbling of urban developments around these agricultural sites.

The planet had a catalog number, assigned to it on its rediscovery by the Commonwealth. And it had a name: Case, a blunt title that, it was said, dated back to the days before the Exultants’ victory, when this place, close to the outer edge of the spiral arm, had been a significant war zone. Alia wondered vaguely if “Case” had been a hero of that forgotten war. But, Reath said, the locals didn’t use either the official name or the catalog number; they just called their world, reasonably enough, the “Rustball.”

As they orbited, Reath patiently taught her to read this planet.

The thick air, and the worn, low mountains, were symptoms of high gravity, he said: though this world was only a little larger than Earth, its surface gravity was much higher than standard, and so it must be denser. And that rust color was the color of iron oxides — literally rust.

If the world looked old, so it was. The Galaxy, mother of the stars, was at its most fecund before Earth’s sun was even formed. So humans moving out from Earth had found themselves in a sky full of old worlds, like children tiptoeing through the dusty rooms of a dilapidated mansion.

As for those glassy plains, said Reath, they were not strange geological features but the relics of war, a bloody tide that had washed over this world again and again.

After a day, a ship came climbing sluggishly out of the planet’s steep gravity well. The shuttle, fat, flat, round, had the rust color of the planet of its origin, and reminded Alia of a huge insect, a toiling beetle. Even before it arrived, Alia felt a deepening disappointment.

The two crafts established an interface, and a tunnel opened up between them. Three men came drifting through into the roomier confines of Reath’s ship. “Welcome to the Rustball,” one of the visitors said. He introduced himself and his companions as Campoc Bale, Campoc Denh, and Campoc Seer. “Reath has asked us to host you.”

Reath nodded.

The Campocs were squat, all of them a head shorter than Alia, with thick, powerful-looking limbs. Though their costumes were a bright blue, their skin seemed to have something of the murky crimson-brown color of the Rustball itself, and their heads were as hairless and round as the planet of their birth. When they smiled Alia saw they didn’t have discrete teeth but enameled plates that stretched around the curves of their jaws.

Alia said, “I’m guessing that ‘Campoc’ is a family name? And so the three of you—”

“Two brothers and a cousin,” Bale said. But he didn’t say which was which. “And I know what you’re thinking. You’ll have trouble telling us apart.”

“Most visitors do,” said Denh.

“But we don’t get too many visitors,” said Seer.

“And don’t worry,” Bale said, “I’ll do most of the talking.”

“That’s a relief.”

In the cluttered cabin, they made a strange collection of disparate human types: the long, elegant frame of Reath, the stubby, hairless Campocs, and Alia with her long arms and golden fur. And yet something united them, Alia thought: a curiosity about each other, a deep genetic kinship.

“So much for the formalities,” Reath said brusquely. He began to shepherd all of them toward the tunnel to the Rustball ship. “Go, go! I’m sure you’ll have much to talk about. As for me I’ve plenty to catch up on here.”

Alia followed the Campocs into their ship. Her luggage trailed after her. Inside, the beetlelike ship was as cramped and unadorned as the outside.

Reath said, “Alia, if you need me, call. But you’ll be fine.”

“We’ll make sure she is,” said Bale.

The shuttle detached itself from Reath’s ship with a noise like a broken kiss, and ducked without fuss into the thick atmosphere of the Rustball.

Alia had never felt so stranded.

On the ground, when she stepped out of the shuttle, the heavy gravity immediately plucked at Alia, and she staggered. The air was thick and hot and smelled of ozone. The clouds overhead were lowering and oppressive. It was like being at the bottom of an ocean; she felt as if she would be crushed. But a couple of moons sailed high, fat matching crescents identical in phase.

Bale was at her side. He took her arm. “Give it a minute,” he whispered. “It will pass.”

So it would. As soon as she had set foot on the planet, the Mist had swarmed into her, through her mouth and nose, and through the pores of her skin. Soon she could feel a subtle tingling in her bones and muscles and lungs, as the pain of existence on the Rustball began to recede.

The Mist lingered on every colonized world. The little creatures who comprised it were neither machine nor living; after half a million years the distinction between biology and technology was meaningless. As she stood here the invisible machines were busily swarming through her body, reinforcing and rebuilding and supplementing, equipping her to cope with the sheer work of survival. Alia didn’t think much about this. The Mist just worked.

The shuttle had landed on an apron of some durable black material, with crimson dust scattered thinly across it. A settlement of some kind clustered at the rim of the apron. Remarkably, the squat buildings seemed to be constructed of sheets of iron. There was dust everywhere, on the ground and on the buildings, even in the air, which had a pale pink hue. The hot air felt dry and prickly, though she suspected precipitation was imminent from those heavy clouds — rain,she thought, digging out the planet-dwellers’ word.

The Campocs were watching her.

Though Alia towered over the Campocs, like an adult among children, these strange little men were not children. There was a calm seriousness about them that was like nothing she had experienced before. It was as if they were listening to voices she couldn’t hear. But then she was here for a purpose: to be made ready for the second stage of her training, the Implication of Unmediated Communication. Though she didn’t yet understand how, these odd little men must have qualities beyond her; they must be at least one step closer to true Transcendence than anybody she had met before.

And beyond that uneasy realization, she thought the three of them seemed calculating as they studied her, as if they had their own purposes for her visit. Bale, especially, stared at her. Bale’s face was like his world, she thought, his nose small, his mouth a colorless line; his eyes, though large and watery, were like waveless pools.

Bale asked, “Do you feel better yet?”

“I think so. She felt uncomfortable to show him weakness, or nervousness. “Are we going to those buildings?”

“Yes—”

“Then let’s do it.” She ran forward, across the apron. To her astonishment she tired within a few paces. She looked back at Bale, baffled.

Gently he told her that she had to learn how to function in a high-gravity field. Here, as on old Earth in fact, gravity was so high that it was actually energetically more efficient to walk, to clump along on one foot after another, than to run. In low gravity it was easier to run, spending most of the time in the air as you paddled across the ground. This struck her as absurd, but she hadn’t had to walk far enough on the water-world to learn this subtle lesson. Bale showed her how to do it, and a few experiments proved he was right.

They walked, then, to the township.

The buildings were just cubes and cylinders, squat and massive as the people who had built them. None of them was large, just collections of a few rooms jammed together. Servitor machines toiled in scraps of garden, bright green amid the predominant rust color. And all the buildings were boxes of iron, mined from the ground.

“Welcome to our home,” Bale said. He pointed at one nondescript building. “That’s where we live, where you will stay.”

Alia had come here to study; she had expected something more formal. “Where’s the seminary?”

“We don’t have a seminary,” Denh said, or maybe Seer.

Bale put a massive fist over his heart. “It’s what’s in here that we’re interested in. Not buildings.”

Alia sighed. “Fine.” She walked forward, trailed by her sluggish baggage, looking for her room. She had to duck to avoid the ceilings.

We flew into Heathrow.

The huge airport was much diminished, as all airports were. Our plane was a gnat flying down onto an immense carpet of tarmac, where once a plane had landed every three minutes, day and night, and now nothing moved but the mice, and the grass in the wind. But on the fringes of the site I glimpsed some construction. The developers were putting up a theme park. Eventually the contents of all Britain’s aviation museums would be emptied out here, Jaguars and Harriers and Tornadoes, venerable World War Two Spitfires and Lancasters and Hurricanes more than a century old but still flying, even a Concorde or two. From the air the old planes looked like birds forever pinned to the ground.

As we made our way through the terminal buildings, and more ferocious security checks by British immigration, Jack Joy approached me. He asked if I’d like to go into London with him; he had a hotel booked, he was sure he could squeeze out another room, maybe we could have a drink or take in a show, and so on. My plan had been just to wait for Tom to fly in — he was due in a couple of days. But now that we had been released from the confines of the plane I was eager to get away from Joy and his “realism.”

And besides, I’d already decided not to stay in London. As I had sat there in the humming quiet of the plane, mulling over past and future, deeper concerns had surfaced. I did take a train into London, but only to cross the city to King’s Cross, one of the big rail terminals for the lines to the north of the country.

I’d decided to go in search of Morag. So I was going to York.

I don’t remember when her visits started.

Maybe she even came when I was very small, a time now lost in the shining mist of childhood memories. She was always just part of my life. I don’t think it was until I was a teenager, thirteen or fourteen, that I realized that other people didn’t have this kind of experience all the time, that it was just me.

When I finally met Morag, I suffered a shock of recognition.

It was during a work trip to England. I was at a party, thrown by an Irish family, old friends of my mother’s. I just made a beeline for Morag, as if drawn by some invisible force. I think I actually frightened her with my intensity.

When I’d calmed down, we got along fine. With a strong streak of Irish in her, she was witty, bright, funny. Even her job was interesting. She was a bio-prospector; she spent her time searching for new species of ascomycete fungi, a key source of antibiotics. It turned out she was actually a friend of John, whose legal career had taken him in a similarly “modern” direction, as he made money from the great shifting of wealth and population caused by the climate change. In some ways Morag had more in common with John; after all at the time I was turning myself into that old-fashioned beast, a nuclear engineer. But Morag was always “greener” than John; later I always thought that side of her had carried on to Tom.

And with that flame of strawberry-blond hair, she was beautiful.

As our relationship developed, she quickly became herself to me: Morag, not the fleshed-out version of my personal ghost. During the years of our relationship I didn’t see any of my apparitions. After a time, and especially after Tom was born, other, more real concerns crowded into my head. I began to dismiss my visions.

I never told Morag about them.

I always meant to. I just never really figured out how to say it without spooking her. How are you supposed to tell your wife that she has haunted you since you were a kid? In the end, as the visions receded in memory, the thought of even trying to talk about it came to seem absurd, and I put it all aside.

Then she died, and it was too late.

And the hauntings began again. The first, cruelly, was in a bleak hospital corridor where I sat with Tom, just moments after we had learned we had lost her, and the baby.

They were infrequent at first, maybe once or twice a year. They still didn’t frighten me. But after I lost her they became unbearably painful.

In the last year or so, in the months leading up to Tom’s jeopardy, they had been more frequent. Just in the last few days I had seen her on the beach in Florida, and even in my VR trip to Siberia. It felt worse than ever to be haunted. Maybe it was my shock over Tom that did it. A lot of stuff, deep disturbed emotions, had come welling up out of the frozen depths of my mind like Tom’s methane burping from its hydrate deposits.

So I’d decided to do something about it before I had to face Tom in the flesh.

The journey was only a few hours. The train was smooth, clean, comfortable. We shuttled through Peterborough and Doncaster and Leeds and a host of lesser places whose names I knew from similar journeys in the past, but about which I knew little or nothing.

The countryside had changed since the last time I made this trip, though. In the vast fields of swaying wheat and rape and gen-enged biofuel crops there was hardly a tree or a bush to be seen; I saw more robot tractors than birds or animals. The biodiversity of countries like England flatlined when I was a teenager, and isn’t likely to recover any time soon.

And then there was the water.

You could see it everywhere, abandoned roads now permanently flooded to serve as drainage channels or as canals, and artificial flood plains that served as makeshift reservoirs. Much of South Yorkshire was now covered by a new lake. As we crossed it on a raised levee, the water receded to the horizon, and the waves that scudded across it were white-capped; it looked more like an inland sea. I could see the roofs of abandoned houses, the foliage of drowned trees, and the unearthly shape of the cooling towers of dead power plants looming above the water line. The sun was setting, and the water glimmered, reflecting the sunlight in gold splashes. It was all so new the lake didn’t even have a name — or maybe giving it a name would somehow confirm its reality. But geese flapped across the water in a neat fighter-bomber V formation. The geese, at least, seemed to know where they were going, and didn’t seem spooked by this new geography.

I glided across that drowned landscape in smooth silence, as if we were riding on the water itself, as if it were all a dream.

By the time we reached York it was growing dark. I joined a line at the rickshaw rank outside the rail station, and soon I was being hauled around the outskirts of the city by an unreasonably athletic young woman. In this post-traffic era, in their wisdom the city authorities had repaved many of the streets with cobbles. It might be fine for pod buses, but by the time we reached my hotel my ass felt like tenderized steak.

The hotel was where I remembered it. It is a small place just off the A-road that snakes south from York toward Doncaster, overlying the route of an old Roman road. The hotel itself is old, some kind of coach house, eighteenth century I think. Because it’s within a reasonable walk of the city center it’s stayed profitable where many similar businesses have folded. It’s modern enough, but there’s nothing glamorous about it. Friendly place, though; the only security check I had to go through was a DNA scan verified by Interpol.

The room I was given was just a bland box with the usual facilities, a minibar and a dispenser for drinks and a big softscreen showing muted news. I couldn’t remember which room we’d taken, back then. Anyhow the interior looked to have been knocked around since those days, nearly thirty years gone. Maybe our room didn’t even exist anymore, in any meaningful sense.

Of course the staff here didn’t know anything about me. I was just some guy who’d called to make a reservation from Heathrow, and I wasn’t about to tell them why I’d come back here, why I remembered the hotel so well: that this was where I had stayed, with Morag, at the start of our honeymoon.

I sat in the one big armchair, with my suitcase sitting unopened on my bed, and meaningless news flickering on the wall. It was late evening, but to my body it was the middle of the afternoon, Florida time. I felt restless, perturbed. I didn’t want to face anybody, not even a room service robot.

Why was I here? For Morag, of course. I had come here, on impulse, to our honeymoon hotel, a place of great significance for the two of us. Fine. Here I was. But what was I supposed to do now?

On impulse I placed a call to Shelley Magwood.

I brought up her image on my big plasma screen. She was in the middle of her working day, but to her eternal credit she took time out to talk to me, a confused loser in a hotel room in England. But as I sat there, awkward, inarticulate, unable to broach the subject that was dominating my mind, she seemed to grow faintly concerned. Her background shifted around her; I saw that she had moved to a private office.

“Michael, I think you’d better come clean. I can see something’s on your mind. So you’re in York, because you had your honeymoon there. Right?…”

I told her about our wedding day. We had married in Manchester, to be close to Morag’s family, and most of my mother’s, too. But her parents were both dead, and only one of her two siblings showed up. On my side my mother was restless; she always felt confined by England, by her past. Uncle George had turned up — but not my mother’s other sibling, my aunt Rosa, whom I’d never met. Still, the day had gone well; weddings generally do, despite the family bullshit that always surrounds them.

And at the end of the day Morag and I headed off to York to begin our honeymoon, a couple of weeks of hopping around some of Britain’s historic sites.

Shelley said cautiously, “I don’t know anything about York. Nice place?”

“Very old,” I said in a rush. “It was a Roman city. Then it was the capital of the northern kings who dominated Saxon England for a while. Then the Vikings came, and this was the last of their kingdoms to fall, as England finally unified politically. And then—”

“I get the picture,” she said dryly.

I forced a laugh. “A good place to come ghost-hunting. Don’t you think?”

She stared at me. She knew me well, but surely she’d never seen me in this agitated state before. “Michael, digging into the past isn’t a bad thing. People do it all the time. Everybody’s family tree is online now, extracted from the big genome databases, all the way back to Adam, and people are fascinated. Who can resist looking on the reconstructed faces of your ancestors? But, well, you can lose yourself in there. Isn’t that true?”

I felt impatient. “That’s not the point, Shell. And that’s not what I’m doing.”

“Then just tell me, Michael. Did you say something about ghosts?”

And I admitted to her, at last, that I’d come here to seek the ghost of Morag, my lost wife. It was a relief to express it all, at last.

Shelley listened carefully, watching my face. She asked a string of questions, dragging details and impressions out of me.

When I’d finished, she said dryly, “And so you thought you’d give me a call. Thanks a lot.”

“I never did have too many friends,” I said.

“Look, I’m honored you told me. I am the first, aren’t I? I can tell. And this is obviously very important.”

“It is?”

“For you, certainly.”

“For me. So you don’t think it’s real. I’m just—” I made scrambled-egg motions beside my head.

She shrugged. “Well, that’s one explanation, and it’s the simplest. But I’ve known you a long time, Michael, and you never seemed crazy to me. An asshole maybe, but never crazy. And what do I know about ghosts? I’ve seen the same movies you have, I guess.”

I’d never discussed the supernatural with Shelley; she was hardheaded and practical, thoroughly grounded in a world she could measure and manipulate. The hypothetical alien builders of the Kuiper Anomaly had generally seemed enough strangeness for her. “Do you believe any of that?”

She shrugged. “The universe is an odd place, Michael. And we see only a distillation of what’s out there, a necessary construct to allow us to function. Nothing is what it seems, not even space and time themselves. Isn’t that pretty much the message of modern physics?”

“I guess so.”

“But it’s a strangeness we tap into, with our Higgs-field drive. Do you ever think of it that way? As if we’re slicing off a bit of God with our monkey fingers, using the Absolute as fuel for our rocket engines.”

No, I never had thought of it that way. But I was starting to realize that my intuition to call her in my confusion had been a sound one. “So there are layers of reality we can’t see. The supernatural. Eternity.”

“Whatever.” She was dismissive. “I don’t think labels help much. Some of our experiences are more profound than others. More significant. Times of revelation, perhaps, when you solve a problem, or when you figure something out, something new about the world — you’re an engineer; you know what I mean—”

“You feel as if you’ve gotten a bit closer to reality.”

“Yes. Something like that. I’m quite prepared to believe there are times when we’re more conscious, more aware than at other times. Especially since the neurological mappers and other bump-feelers freely admit they still have no idea what consciousness is anyhow. And if you follow that logic through,” she said doggedly, “maybe you’d expect to find, umm, hauntings associated with places where high emotions have been experienced.”

“As in classic ghost stories.”

“Yes. Who knows?” She studied me. “So if you really want to confront this ghost you say is stalking you, maybe you’ve come to the right place.”

I nodded. “I sense a ‘but.’ ”

“OK. But you aren’t really here to become a ghost-buster, are you, Michael? You’re here because you want a release from the past. Redemption maybe. And surely there are other ways to do that other than to try to get yourself haunted.”

“I design starships as therapy. Now I’m ghost-hunting as therapy. I must be pretty fucked up.”

She smiled, but her scrutiny was unyielding, intense, a bit intimidating. “Well, aren’t you?”

“I think I have to do this.”

She shrugged. “Maybe. But, look, I’m worried you’re going to come to harm. That you’ll descend into some pit inside yourself that you’ll never come out of.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said.

“Now, why isn’t that reassuring? When you come out the other side of this shit, it’s obvious what you should do.”

“It is?”

She leaned forward, her giant-screen image looming over me. “Talk it over with Tom. Your son. And then get back to work, for Christ’s sake.”

She cut the connection.

Alia woke early, her first morning on the Rustball.

She washed and ate. Swathed by the Mist, which had spared her from the effects of the gravity, she had slept reasonably well, but the air inside the rust-walled little dwelling was just as murky and still as outside. She felt stale and worn down, joyless, just like the planet itself.

Without ceremony Bale invited her to join what he called a “conversation.”

She found herself in a large, plain room. It was all but full. Perhaps twenty people sat on the floor, informally. When Alia asked where she should sit, Bale just shrugged, and she picked a spot at random. The three Campocs sat close to her, giving her a welcome bit of familiarity. The others were more distant, their faces receding into the gloom. The room itself was as dark and enclosing as the whole planet seemed to be — and uninteresting, the strange iron faces of the walls unadorned.

There was a round of introductions. These people, it seemed, were all members of Bale’s extended family: parents, children, siblings, cousins of varying complicated degrees. Alia effortlessly recorded the names, and built up a map in her head of this densely populated family network.

When the formality was done, she asked, “Are we going to start now?”

“Start what?” Bale asked.

“My training. The Second Implication.”

Bale shrugged, his shoulders machine-massive. “We’re just going to talk.”

She said, irritated, “Just as I spend most of my time with Reath, talking.”

“Reath is a good man. But what is the subject of the Second Implication?”

“Unmediated Communication. I’m not sure what that means but—”

“You can’t talk about communication,” Bale said gently, “without communicating.”

She sighed. “So what are we going to talk about?”

“What humans always talk about. Themselves. Each other. You’re a visitor. We’re curious.”

With all those gazes on her, she felt terribly self-conscious. “What can I tell you? I’m ordinary.”

“Nobody is ordinary.”

Somebody spoke up from the back — a great-aunt of Bale’s, it turned out. “Who’s the most important person in your life?”

She said immediately, “My sister. She’s ten years older than me…”

Once she had started she found it easy to open up. These “Rusties,” as they called themselves, were good listeners. And so she talked about Drea.

When Alia was small Drea had taken care of her, as a big sister should. But as Alia had grown that ten-year age gap became less important, and the sisters became more equal friends. Gradually Alia’s interests had come to dominate the time they spent together — especially dancing, especially Skimming.

Drea had always seemed grave to Alia, a bit stolid, a bit dull. Alia was more exotic, perhaps, her mind livelier, her body always a bit more flexible. It had been up to Alia to pull her sister along with her, to involve her in things she mightn’t otherwise have tried. It was a rivalry that added a spark to their relationship.

Gradually warming up, she told this story in anecdotes and in sweeping summaries. Sometimes one of the Rusties would give her something back, tell her a similar story from their own complicated family networks. There was nothing remotely judgmental about their reaction.

But, slowly, Alia began to feel uncomfortable. She wound down.

Twenty pairs of eyes watched her.

Bale said, “Alia, are you well? Do you need a rest — a drink, perhaps, or—”

“What is meant by ‘Unmediated Communication’?”

For an answer, Bale reached out and took her hand. It was the first time any of them had touched her physically; she felt an odd jolt, like a mild electric shock. She pulled back, startled.

Bale said, “Most human communication is symbolic.”

She struggled to regain her composure. “You mean language?”

“Language, art, music. Language is a legacy of our deepest past. With it we envisage past and future, build cities and starships — with language we won a Galaxy. But it is all symbolism. I encode my thoughts in symbols, I transmit them to you, you receive them, and decode them. You can see the limitations.”

She frowned. “Bandwidth problems. Difficulties of translation.”

“Yes. What I say to you can only be a fraction of what I think or feel. But there are modes of communication deeper and more ancient than language.”

Suddenly he snapped his fingers in her face, and she flinched.

“I apologize,” Bale said. “But you see the point. That message was crude, just a gesture of threat. But you reacted immediately, in the deeper roots of your being. And when I took your hand you felt something beneath words, didn’t you? We humans communicate on a tactile level. Even a cellular, even a chemical level…”

“It sounds scary,” Alia admitted.

“You don’t know the half of it,” said Denh.

“What do you mean?”

“Before you can communicate with others, you have to be able to communicate with yourself.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

“When will my treatment begin?”

“It already has,” called Bale’s great-aunt from the back of the room.

She looked around, feeling claustrophobic, helpless, exposed before these drab strangers.

I lay down in the dark and took a pill.

After I lost Morag I was prescribed medication. There were medicines, I was told, that could target the sites in your head where traumatic memories are formed. Something to do with inhibiting the formation of certain proteins. If I only took the pill, I was told, I would still remember Morag and all that had happened, as if I stored a narrative in my head, but I wouldn’t feel it — not the same way, not so much that it would harm my functioning.

John had always pressed me hard to take the medication. For sure it’s what he would have done. But I had refused. Memories are what make up me — even bad memories, dreadful memories. What’s the point of “functioning” if I lose that? When I refused to allow Tom the same treatment I faced a battery of counselors who gravely advised me on the harm I was causing to my helpless son, the hurt I could help him avoid. I stuck to my guns. But sometimes, I admit, when I look back on Tom’s life since, I wonder if I made the right choice for him.

So I refused the “forget” pills. But I did learn that there are also such things as “remember” pills.

By getting glutamate or some such molecule to work more efficiently, there’s a medication that can sharpen memories, rather than dull them. It takes some analysis by various therapeutic machines to figure out what you need, and you have to put up with counseling about the damage that might be done to your personality by too much memory. But it’s over-the-counter stuff. When I found out all this I bought some pills, and put them aside, kept them in my bathroom bag. I’d carried them everywhere since, knowing they were there but not thinking about why I wanted them with me.

Now was the time. I popped my pills, and I lay in that bed, in that small hotel, in the middle of England, and I tried to remember.

Here I had been with Morag, that first night. We had gone to bed early, still full of the bonhomie and speeches, the food and champagne of the wedding. We made love.

But I remembered waking later, maybe three in the morning, the time your body is at its lowest, all your defenses down. She was awake, too, lying beside me, here in this hotel. The booze had worn off by then; I felt mildly hung over. But she was here. As we’d lived together for a year before anyhow I think we’d both imagined the marriage wouldn’t matter. But we’d made a commitment to each other. It did make a difference.

So we came together again, in this hotel, in the dark, right here. I remembered the scent of shampoo and spray on her hair, the softness of her skin, a slight saltiness when I kissed her cheeks — she’d done plenty of crying that day, as brides do. And around us the hotel breathed, centuries old, and beyond its walls the still more ancient pile of the old city thrust its stone roots deep into the ground. Immersed in my pharmaceutically sharpened memories, I remembered it all, as if it were real again. Maybe I cried. Probably. Maybe I slept.

I thought I heard somebody calling.

It was a woman, outside the hotel, calling from the street below, the line of the Roman road. The room felt cold, terribly cold. Listening to that voice, I hugged myself to stop my shivering.

I found myself outside the hotel.

It was nearly dawn, and a blue light leaked grudgingly into the sky, totally lacking warmth. That light was mirrored in a flood that blocked the street, between me and the city center. I was surrounded by the silhouettes of darkened houses. No traffic moved on the road, nobody was out there, nobody awake but me. The flood water rippled languidly, strewn with rubbish. The world seemed a drab, defeated place.

How had I got here? I couldn’t remember dressing, or coming down from my room. I was disoriented, overtired.

Looking along the road toward the city, I saw a shifting shadow — a curve of back, a leg, the faint sound of footsteps.

I turned north, up the road toward the city center. I walked along the middle of the road, trying to catch up with her. But those cobbles were big and smoothed with use and shiny with dew, and I had to watch every step I took in the uncertain light. I tired quickly, mentally as well as physically.

Then I came to that flood. As I approached it I could see water bubbling up out of the drains and around the rims of manhole covers. I vaguely remembered that somewhere near here the two rivers that ran through the city, the Ouse and the Fosse, came to a confluence, and the place was notorious for flooding. The water looked old and dirty, covered with a layer of dusty scum, and with bits of garbage floating in it. I couldn’t see how deep it got toward the center. You get used to these things; once towns like this had probably flooded once a decade, but now it was a rare year when it didn’t flood, and people got worn out with trying to fix things, and just accepted the change.

But the pond was in my way. I walked to the left and right, helpless. There was no obvious way around it. The side streets would lead me away from the direction to the city center, from the way I wanted to go, toward Morag. Everything was mixed up, made chaotic by the water intruding into the land; I was stranded in a strange landscape, a place where nothing worked anymore.

I couldn’t see Morag. Perhaps I had already lost her. I grew panicky.

Lawned gardens lined one side of the street. I decided to go that way. I made for an old, crumbling wall on the right-hand side of the road. It was too high to be easy to climb. I jumped up, and had to use my arms to haul my bulk up so my belly was resting on the wall. Then, with a lot of swinging, I got my right leg onto the lip of the wall, and then the left. I more or less fell down on the other side.

I landed heavily on my side on soft, moist grass, hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I lay there for a few seconds. I could feel dew, or flood water, soaking my face, my jacket, my trousers. There were high-water marks on the wall, and somebody had chiseled dates into the brick beside the higher of them: 2000. 2026. 2032. And I saw a worm, a long earthworm, crawling around on the grass. Maybe the rising water had forced it out of the ground. It looked as bewildered as I did.

I got to my feet. The side of my body I’d landed on felt like one long bruise, and I was wet and cold. I felt very foolish, a fifty-two-year-old man standing in somebody else’s lawn in the dawn light. I had to get on, get out of there.

I stepped forward and walked straight into a tree. I stumbled back and crashed into more foliage. The tree was a fern, no taller than I was, and the foliage around me was bamboo. English gardens aren’t what they were. I pushed away, not sure which way I was facing. I had been turned around in the fall. I stumbled forward again, but tripped on a skinny mound of moist earth sticking out of the lawn. It might have been a termite mound. I felt stupid, befuddled, surrounded by clinging obstacles, and every step I took, everything I tried to do to make progress, just threw up more problems.

Right.The wall had been on the right-hand side of the street, so I should keep the house to my right. I turned and pushed that way. The grass was long and clung to my shoes, and now my feet were soaked through. But I kept going, and I came to a gate that led me back to the road.

I had come far enough to have passed most of the pond in the road, but the water still lapped at my feet.

Ahead, the road rose to cross the river at a bridge. I could see somebody on the bridge, I thought, a pale face looking back at me. She was too far away; her face was just a blur, a coin at the bottom of a pond. I was sure it was her, though. I wanted to shout, but I was aware of the sleeping town all around me, and somehow I couldn’t. Anyhow it would do no good. I had to get to her; that was the thing.

The hell with it. I strode into the water. Soon I was wading. The water didn’t come much up my shins, but there was a lot of mud and garbage gathered in the bottom — maybe the road surface had collapsed here — and it sucked at my feet. Soon I was breathing hard, and my heart was hammering. At last I got out of the water. My feet and legs were soaked and muddy. I was exhausted.

I couldn’t have come more than half a kilometer from my hotel.

I could see the bridge, and the castle mound beyond with the tower on top, the relic of the old Norman castle, a gaunt silhouette against that blue sky. But she had gone from the bridge. Which way had she gone? Had she climbed the mound? If I could reach it maybe I could try to climb up after her.

The bridge was closed at its far end, for some reason. The rivers curled around both sides of the mound, and the water was high, frothing, blue-gray. The bank was eroded and lined with sandbags. Under the bridge itself the water reached almost to the top of the arches.

Maybe I should cross the bridge. Or maybe I should find some way around the other side of the mound. I couldn’t think my way through it.

I couldn’t see her anymore. I just stood there, bruised, my feet sodden, panting.

“Are you OK?”

The voice seemed loud. I turned. I was facing a young man, maybe twenty-five. He was walking his bicycle. Under a fleece jacket he wore some kind of blue uniform; maybe he was a hospital worker on shift.

He was composed as he looked me up and down. “You look as if you’ve had some trouble.” His accent was broad Yorkshire. I could see suspicion in his eyes. Not surprising; I must have looked strange.

I heard a crow calling. I looked up. I could see the bird wheeling over the tower on the mound. Suddenly the sky seemed brighter; high clouds were laced pink.

“Hey…”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You’re American?”

“Yes.” I looked down at myself, at the filthy water leaking from my shoes. I tried to think of something to say, something that would normalize the situation. “Jet lag plays hell with your sleep patterns, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” he replied, doubtful. He turned away, continued walking his bicycle.

I looked up toward the mound. It just looked like a hill now, the castle a ruin, not the center of some kind of maze as it had seemed a moment ago. There was no sign of Morag, but I knew there wouldn’t be.

That young man was still looking back at me. If I didn’t want a police bot to be called out I should get out of there and clean myself up. I turned and faced that flood in the road. In the gathering light it didn’t look so daunting. I walked to the road’s centerline and just strode straight through the water. The road had given way; this pool must have been there a long time. But the water came no higher than my knees, and in a moment I was through it.

When I woke the sun was high. It was around noon local time. I didn’t remember how I had got there, got back into my hotel from the flooded road. The whole thing was like a dream.

But I was lying on my bed, not in it, and though I’d kicked off my shoes my trousers were muddy, my sweater smeared with green grass stains, and debris had rubbed off onto the bed’s top sheet. The management wouldn’t be pleased with me.

Something had happened, however.

A corner of the big wall softscreen was flashing. A message was waiting for me from John.

I showered first, made a coffee, ate a cookie from the minibar. Then I sat in my armchair, faced the wall, and called John. Towering over me on the wall, he was furious — two-dimensional, badly colored, but furious. “Lethe,” he said.

I was struck by his use of that word, but now wasn’t the time to talk about a stranger on a plane. “Lethe to you,” I snapped back. “What’s eating you?”

“You are.” It turned out Shelley Magwood had called him last night.

I felt cold, wondering how much she had told him. “She shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why the hell not? She was concerned, asswipe, not that you deserve it. And wasn’t she right to be?”

He tapped a screen before him, out of my sight.

A corner of my wall filled up with an image, grainy, badly lit. But you could see the castle mound, the flooded street, a figure standing there in muddy water up to his ankles. John had used his contacts to hack into the town’s security cameras. He shouted now, “You call this a responsible way to behave? For this I paid a small fortune to send you to Europe? Are you crazy?”

“If you listened to what Shelley told you,” I said stonily, “you’ll understand that this is about me and Morag. It’s got nothing to do with you. You have to let me work this out my own way, John.”

“Oh, do I?”

I studied him, growing curious. I’d rarely seen him so angry. “What’s eating you? Why are you taking this so personally?”

“I’m not.”

Despite his denial, I could see something was going on here. If I had felt lobotomized last night, today I was sharp. Was he angry I just hadn’t told him about my haunting by Morag first? Or was there something more? “You’re hiding something. Is it to do with Morag? Damn it, John, she was my wife. If you know something you have to tell me.”

He faced me again. “I know I shouldn’t have made this fucking call. Off.” The screen turned to sky blue.

So John had had a connection to Morag I knew nothing about. Another unwelcome ghost from the past, I thought. I sat in my armchair, in my hotel dressing gown, and sipped coffee that quickly grew cold.

On Alia’s second day on the Rustball, Bale took her to the sea.

If they went overland it would take a whole quarter of a day to reach the ocean. Bale offered to Skim there with her if she preferred. But she wanted to see more of this world.

So she rode with him in a ground transport along a road that gleamed, metallic, running straight as an arrow across the gravity-flattened plain. The landscape was all but featureless, the towns they passed identical to the one where the Campocs lived. It was like passing through a sparsely sketched simulation.

Much of what she saw was dictated by geology. When the Rustball had formed it had been a rocky world, rather larger than Earth, with a massive iron core and a mantle of lighter rock. In the usual way of things it had suffered multiple impacts during its formation — including one final collision with a second monstrous proto-planet. Alia learned that Earth itself had suffered a similar collision, a great rocky splash that had resulted in the formation of its Moon. The Rustball had been stripped of most of its rocky mantle, and had been left as a lump of iron as big as the Earth, with a flock of moonlets made of its own mantle rock. But iron was more dense than rock, and so this world was more massive than Earth, its gravity strong.

Over time, comets delivered a skim of water and air, and the naked iron rusted enthusiastically. Without a rocky mantle there was none of the magmatic churning that characterized Earth’s dynamic geology. Still, simple life had come here, brought by the comets, settling into oceans that gathered in impact-basin hollows.

And later, humans arrived.

Alia was discovering she wasn’t interested in planets. She had grown up on a ship, a human-made environment. The Nord was a small, liveable place, built to a human scale, where everybody knew everybody else. And the Nord was fluid, every aspect of its design shaped by human whim. As a small child she had loved to spend time in the Nord’s museum, where there was a display of all the ship’s morphologies since its launch long ago, reconstructed from records, or archaeological traces in the Nord’s fabric. As the millennia ticked by the vessel had mutated and morphed like a pupa writhing in its cocoon, every aspect of its geometry shaped by its crew.

But a world was different, weighed down by its own vast geological inertia. Why, most of its mass was locked up in its interior, useless for anything but exerting a gravity field you could have replicated with the most basic inertial adjustor! And it was static in time. A through-the-ages diorama of the Rustball would have been very dull, she thought: nothing but rocks, broken here and there by the transient flickering of green.

If the Rustball had started out dull, its human colonists hadn’t done much with the place, Alia thought. The plain drabness of the human world here was striking. The different towns, though separated by hours of surface travel, were very similar in their bland, squat architecture; there was no sense of local identity. And there was no art that she could see, nothing beyond the functional.

She probed Bale gently about all this. He would only say: “If everywhere’s the same, why bother traveling?”

“Lethe, I hate planets,” she said. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Bale said blandly.

It was a relief when they reached the ocean.

The water pooled in a complicated multiple basin cut in the iron by a series of impacts. On a shore of hard, red-rusted iron, waves broke; driven by the higher gravity the waves were low but fast-moving.

She was surprised to see people here, gathered in little parties along the shore. Bicycling vendors sold food, water, souvenirs, and simple toys. It was a happy place, as happy as she had seen on the Rustball; people were enjoying themselves. But as she walked through crowds of running children, harassed parents, and languid lovers, something was lacking, she thought. It took her a while to realize that there was no music to be heard, not a single note.

Following Bale’s lead, Alia walked to the edge of the water and stripped down. Alia couldn’t help studying Bale’s body, the broad limbs, the banks of muscles on his belly.

He caught her staring.

“I apologize,” she said. “It’s just that our bodies are so different.”

So they were. She was so much taller and slimmer, her arms almost as long as her legs, and her fur was languid in the heavy gravity. By comparison Bale was squat, broad, shaped by a lifetime of battling the relentless pressure of gravity. His arms were short, massive, but inflexible at the shoulder and joints. His spine was rigid, too, a pillar of bone. This wasn’t a world where you would do much climbing, she thought; Bale was actually more truly bipedal than she was.

“We’re different because we live on different worlds,” Bale said.

“So we do.”

“But Reath sent you here because we aren’t too different, because we are similar.”

“He did?”

Bale smiled. “Unmediated Communication is challenging enough without a dose of alienness on top.”

She wondered, then, about how strange a human could get.

Naked, side by side, they walked into the ocean. The water was fast-moving and turbulent. Her fur, soaked, drifted around her. Alia had swum before, but only in zero-gravity bubbles on the Nord, where it was no more than a hundred meters or so to the nearest meniscus. It was very strange to slide into a body of water orders of magnitude more voluminous, a bottomless pit of it. Bale’s cursory warnings about treacherous currents and undertows did nothing to reassure her. It was an unexpected relief, though, when the water was at last deep enough for her to lift her feet from the bottom and float. She felt her bones, her muscles relax as they welcomed their first respite from gravity since orbit.

All around her the stocky bodies of Rusties, adults and children, bobbed in the water. They laughed and played. Even on this drab world the ocean was a place of pleasure. Perhaps, she thought, even after hundreds of millennia of adaptation, the people’s bodies were responding to deep cellular memories of a primordial ocean that lay far away and deep in time. But when the water got into her mouth, it was very salty, with the bloodlike taste of iron.

Bale floated beside her, watching her.

“Bale, you said you don’t travel much because everywhere is the same. Maybe that’s true, here on the Rustball. But aren’t you curious about other worlds?”

He shrugged. “People are more interesting than worlds. Anyhow, we Witness. We find out about other people that way.”

“Everybody Witnesses, all across the Galaxy. It’s another thing we have in common. It is the mandate of the Transcendence.” This was what Reath had told her.

“Yes.” But Bale was watching her, suddenly intense. “What do you think about the Transcendence?”

“I don’t know enough about it,” she said. “It’s just there. Like the weather, on a planet like this.”

“Yes. And the Witnessing, the Redemption?”

“I don’t know. Why are you so interested in that?”

“There are people,” he said carefully, “who question the value of the Redemption.”

“There are? Do you?”

He studied her a moment more, then seemed to come to some conclusion. “You are innocent. I like that.”

“You do?”

“Yes. And I like Witnessing — the act of it, anyhow, if not the implications of the program. I told you I am interested in people.”

She asked impulsively, “And are you interested in me?”

He smiled. “Sex would not be out of the question. I would take great care not to crush your ribs, snap your limbs, or inflict other harm.”

“I’m sure you would.” She moved toward him, not touching yet, just staring at him, feeling his massive presence in the water. She had been with non-ship-born before. There was always a fascination between different human breeds, a deep longing for some kind of genetic exploration. Or maybe it was just simple curiosity.

She moved closer. He opened his mouth, and she ran her tongue over the edge of his teeth-plate. His arms were as powerful as she imagined, his hands as gentle. And in the water her zero-gravity litheness pleased him.

I booked Tom into a hotel at Heathrow.

A day ahead of his arrival, too anxious to hang around in York anymore, I took a train journey back to Heathrow myself. I was the only passenger in a pod bus that rolled in a stately fashion over abandoned kilometers of roadway. The hotel was a long way out from the terminals, a measure of how busy this airport had once been. The hotel itself was a kind of extension of a vast multistory parking lot dating from the second half of the twentieth century, the age of monumental automotive architecture. It was as if the areas set aside for humans had been an afterthought. Now the cars had gone, but the hotel lingered on.

There were no lines at check-in. I had the distinct impression that I was the only guest. It was an uneasy feeling, as if the whole hotel was a sham, an immense trap for unwary travelers.

The next day I met Tom at the airport.

I held back, unsure how to handle the situation. He seemed angry, at me, at Siberia, at gas hydrates; I supposed that to him this return was a defeat.

He let me hold him. It was like hugging a statue. But then, after a few seconds, he melted. “Oh, Dad—” Suddenly we were embracing properly, all barriers down, no more bullshit, just father and son reunited.

He was grimy, covered in stubble, and exhausted by his long flight. He actually stank a bit. But he was Tom, the reality of him, in my arms. Standing there with Tom in that half-empty airport concourse, I felt as happy as it’s possible for a parent to feel, I think. I guess the genes were calling.

But the moment passed, too quickly, and Tom pulled back. I knew we had words to exchange, words that were going to be like bullets flying. But not now, not yet. I took him to the hotel, checked him in, and let him go to his room alone.

While Tom rested up, I went for a restless walk around the old car lot. It was immense, a cathedral among parking facilities. There were ten, twelve floors, and there was parking space even on the roof. It was an open concrete frame, and from the outside you could look right through it to see daylight coming through from the other side. It was like a huge concrete skull.

I walked inside, past barriers that no longer raised, tollbooths with broken glass and rusting ticket machines. Only a few bays on the ground floor were occupied, by electric utility vehicles nuzzled up against power sockets. The rest were vacant, bay after bay still marked out in fading white paint, all neatly numbered, now plaintively empty. A halfhearted attempt had been made to extend the hotel itself into this vast area, but the conversion had apparently been abandoned.

Once elevators and escalators took you to the higher floors, but they no longer worked, and the stairs smelled of damp and rot. I chose to walk up the ramps which had once borne the cars. It was a long steep walk through that gargantuan architecture, exhausting for a mere human.

On the roof it was breezy, and I approached the edge cautiously. I looked out over the airport. The runways were neat straight-line strips, surrounded by the vaster acreage of the roads. Standing there on that parking-lot roof, I was the only human in sight in square kilometers of concrete and tarmac, stained by rubber and oil, now turning gray-green as it crumbled.

The cars and planes had gone, and I remained; and on the breeze I could smell, not the dense stinks of carbon monoxide, gasoline, and rubber I remembered from my childhood, but the poignant scent of spring grass. One day, I knew, the car lot would vanish, too. The small blind things of nature were already eating into the concrete fabric. Eventually the decay would reach the cables that held together this stressed-concrete structure, and when they gave way the whole place would explode, scattering concrete dust like dandelion thistle.

I turned back and wound my way back down the huge exit ramps, and returned to the hotel.

Tom slept, showered, whatever, for twelve hours. Then he called me through my implant. I went to his room.

He sat in the room’s single armchair. He was bundled up in a tired-looking hotel dressing gown, watching news that bubbled quietly from one wall. His hair had been shaved at some point during his brief hospitalization. He looked cadaverous, ill; he probably looked worse than he was. He had an aspirator in his hand, the only sign I’d seen of continuing medical treatment.

I sat on the bed, and he gave me a whisky from his minibar. It was midnight, but both our body clocks were screwed. With nobody else around, you make your own time.

There we were, the two of us, sitting side by side in an alien country, neutral territory.

“We need to talk,” I said tentatively.

“Yeah, we do.” The words came out as a growl. He leaned over and tapped the wall.

To my surprise, an image of the Kuiper Anomaly came up. It was a tetrahedron, an electric-blue framework that rotated slowly. Every so often starlight caught one of its faces, and it would flare up, iridescent, as if soap films were stretched across the frame.

“What’s this?”

He said, “I’ve been hacking into your logs, Dad. Seeing what you’ve been up to, the last few days.”

“You always did do your homework,” I said.

“Still this shit with you, isn’t it? Starships and alien beings.”

I folded my arms — I know, a defensive posture, but he had gone straight on the attack. “How can you call it shit? Look at this thing, obviously artificial, the only artificial object we know of in the universe not made by human hands. We’re facing the biggest mystery in human history — and the answers may deliver the greatest change in human consciousness since—”

“Since we came out of the caves? Since we walked on the Moon? Since Columbus or Galileo, or the invention of the sentient toilet bowl?”

“But—”

“Dad, will you just stop talking? You’ve been talking all my fucking life. I remember when Mom left you that time. I was six—”

“Seven, actually.”

“She told me why she was taking me away from you for a while.”

“She did?”

“She always talked to me, Dad, in a way you never did. Even though I was only a little kid. She said you had two modes. You were either depressed, or else you were escaping from the fucking planet altogether. We would come back to you, she promised me, and we did, but she needed a break.”

I said grimly, “It might have been better if she’d had that out with me, not you.”

“She’s dead, Dad,” he reminded me. He snapped his fingers, and the image of the Anomaly scrunched up and whirled away. “So you think it would have been better if I’d followed you, and devoted my life to this kind of blue-sky shit rather than the Library of Life?”

I still had my arms folded. “If you had, you wouldn’t have got yourself nearly killed by some burp of toxic gas in a godforsaken place nobody ever heard of. At least I’d know where you were, instead of having to hear that you’d nearly died through some friend of a friend…” I hadn’t meant to say any of that. All this stuff, the resentment, the sense of abandonment, the hurt, was just tumbling out, having been penned up inside me since I’d heard the bad news.

Tom said, “So it’s not the danger to me that bothers you. It’s the effect on you. You’ve always been the same, Dad.”

“Just don’t get yourself killed,” I blurted. “It’s not worth it.”

He looked at me, almost curiously. “Biospheric capture isn’t worth it? Why not? Because we’re through the Bottleneck? Is that what you think, that the worst is over?”

I spread my hands. Here we were, with a kind of dreadful inevitability, arguing about the state of the world, rather than our relationship. “We’re dealing with it, Tom. Aren’t we? We gave up the damn automobile. We gave up oil! Some people will tell you that was the most profound economic transformation since the end of the Bronze Age. And then there’s the Stewardship.”

He actually laughed. “The Stewardship? You think that the Warming, the Die-back, are somehow fixed by that vast instrumentality? Dad, are you really that complacent?”

“Tom—”

“We are fundamentally different people. Dad, you were always a dreamer. A utopian. You dreamed of space and aliens — the future. But I think the future in your head is a lot like the afterlife, like Heaven. Both impossible fantasies of places that we can never reach, and yet where all our problems will just go away. And, like the afterlife, those who believe in the future try to control what we do in the here-and-now. There has always been a kind of future fascism, Dad. But the future is irrelevant.”

“It is?”

“Yes! Not if we can’t get through the present. I’m different from you, Dad. I’m no dreamer. I go out there, into the world, and I deal with it like it is. And that was always beyond you, wasn’t it? You never liked the present. It’s just too complicated, too messy, too interconnected. There’s nothing you can get your engineer’s teeth into. And not only that, it’s depressing.”

He rubbed his bald scalp. “I remember you once worked with me on a homework assignment on cosmology. You always were good at that stuff. Do you remember trying to prove to me that the universe must be finite? You spun me around on an office chair, fast enough for my legs and arms to go rising up. You asked me how I’d know if it was me spinning around in a stationary universe — or if the universe was spinning around me. The two situations seem symmetrical; how could I tell? But if I was stationary, what was pulling my arms away from my body, and making me feel nauseous? It had to be the universe, the whole of it, a great river of matter and energy circling around my body, stars and planets and people, and as it spun it was tugging at my legs, through gravity, relativity, whatever. I thought that was a wonderful thought, how I was connected to everything else.

“But, you said, that showed the universe had to be finite. Because if it was infinite, it would load me down with an infinite inertia. I wouldn’t be able to spin at all. I’d have been trapped like a bug in amber. You see, that’s how I think you are in the world, Dad. You see the complicated real-world problems of ecology and climate and politics and all the rest like an infinite universe that pins you flat. No wonder you’d rather believe it’s all been fixed. By the Stewardship, for God’s sake, the last word in bureaucracy and corruption…”

Well, maybe so. I did wonder if Tom would have preferred me to be a brutal realist like Jack Joy, the Lethe Swimmer.

I got up, walked around a few paces, turned away until I was calmer. “Maybe we ought to keep it down. We might wake the other guests.”

He didn’t smile. “What other guests? Nobody here but us ghosts, Dad. Which reminds me—” Reaching out, he tapped another part of the wall screen.

He brought up a picture of me, standing in that puddle in York in the middle of the night, taken from some security camera. So, suddenly, things had got even more messy.

I sat down. “Who sent you this?”

“Uncle John. Does it matter who? I know what you’ve been doing, Dad. I know about the fucking — ghost.I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

“Believe me,” I said fervently, “it’s not by choice.”

“Oh, isn’t it?” I couldn’t read his mood. He sat back, apparently relaxed. But one fist clenched and unclenched.

And so suddenly my haunting was messing up an already complicated emotional situation. We were entering uncharted territory in our relationship, I thought; put a foot wrong and I could do damage that would last a lifetime. “Tom — I don’t want this. But I see her. Or I see something. I don’t know what to tell you. I’m trying to figure it out myself. But this has been happening to me for a long time…”

“I. Me. Myself.” He said the words in a dead tone, like a metronome, but his gaze was on the floor. “Do you ever listen to yourself, Dad? Do you remember the funeral, when we buried her, and the kid? Did you know I snuck into the church early?”

I hadn’t known.

“I went to her coffin. It was in the aisle, before the altar. I tried to open that fucking box. I wanted to climb in with her. I didn’t want to be left with you. Because I knew that all you would think about was yourself. You even gave more thought to the kid who killed your wife than to me.”

“Tom—” I spread my hands. “Please. I don’t know what to say. Everybody’s fucked up, you know.”

“Oh, I understand that.” He actually smiled. “You know, I forgive you. I’m an adult now, I can see you couldn’t help it. But you should have tried to protect me, even from yourself. You should have tried. ”

“I’m sorry.”

“And now you come to me and tell me you’re being haunted by my mother. No, worse, you don’t even tell me, I have to find it out from somebody else.” He was still, rigid with anger. “How am I suppose to deal with that?”

I had no idea what to say.

At last he sat back. “So what now?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You dragged me home, Dad. You insisted on seeing me, talking to me. Fine. I guess I owed you that much. Have you got what you wanted?”

“I don’t want you to put yourself at risk again.”

He laughed, contemptuous. “You think you can stop me?”

“Not if you don’t want to be stopped. Any more than you can stop me from designing starships…” I shook my head. “You know, the irony is, we’re both right.”

“We are?”

“Sure. I’m right to believe in an expansive future for mankind. The Kuiper Anomaly is proof that it’s possible: somebody else got through their Bottleneck and hung that thing up there. But you’re right to try to deal with the problems of the present, because if we don’t get through the Bottleneck there won’t be any future at all. I’ve had enough of hearing about the differences between us. We should try to find some common ground.”

That took him by surprise. He seemed to think it over. In those few seconds I could feel some of the tension between us drain away. We’d both said what we had come in to say, we had both landed blows.

“All right.” He stood up. “Anyhow, we’ll try not to fight.”

“Amen to that.”

“Dad, I think I need to do some physio, sleep a bit more.”

I took the hint. I stood and headed for the door. “Maybe I’ll see you in the morning?”

“Yeah. Look, Dad — you may be an asswipe, as Uncle John says, but you’re still my dad, and I’m stuck with you.”

“Ditto,” I said fervently.

“But give up on this haunting crap, OK? Get some therapy, for Christ’s sake.”

I sighed. But we had crashed through the barriers to an island of truth; it wasn’t a time for lies or bland reassurances. “You’ll have to tell your mother that. Goodnight, son.”

I closed the door behind me.

On the third day on the Rustball, Alia’s inquisition resumed — for so she had come to think of it.

And today she finally learned what this strange, drab world had to offer her.

She was brought back to that dark, iron-walled room. The three Campocs were here again, Bale, Seer, and Denh, surrounded by a subtly different sample of their relatives. Once again they asked her to talk about her sister. She went back over what she’d said before, and tried to dig out more memories, tease out more meaning.

But the exercise made her feel increasingly uncomfortable. Her jokey stories of how she’d tricked her sister, or out-competed her, or left her embarrassed, no longer seemed so clever.

“There is always a rivalry between siblings,” said Bale’s great-aunt. “It is part of the human condition, no doubt exported from old Earth itself.”

Perhaps. But again and again down the years, Alia had indulged that rivalry at her sister’s expense. It was a kind of bullying, Alia thought now, for Drea had been helpless: Alia was her sister, and no matter what Alia did to her, dear stolid Drea would always come back for more. On some level Alia had known that, and had exploited Drea’s loyalty.

“I’ve been awful,” said Alia.

As she reached this conclusion the Rusties’ faces were watchful, interested, engaged, sympathetic: analytical, not judgmental.

“You’re flawed,” Bale said. “We are all flawed. But it’s best to know about it, to look inward, to see honestly.” There was something intense in the way he said that. He was guiding her, she saw, to a new insight.

Alia looked inward. And she started to understand.

Something was different:something about her perception of herself. Her own memories had never been sharper, more accurate; it was as if she had a scholar inside her head, refurbishing the muddled archives that made up her recollection of the past, her picture of herself. And at the same time she was seeing that picture with a pitiless clarity she had never known before.

She had crashed through a barrier. She had changed, subtly, internally.

“How are you doing this? Is it the Mist? Or some chemical transfer when you touched me—”

Bale said, “Howdoesn’t matter. Anyhow you’re doing it to yourself. Consciousness is the awareness of self, and self is recorded in memory. You are becoming more conscious, for the quality of your awareness is increasing. Your memories are more precise, and your perception of them is clearer.”

“But I hate it! I see myself better than ever before, but I don’t like what I see. I feel like sticking my fingers in my ears, shutting my eyes, turning away. Distracting myself until I forget.”

Bale’s great-aunt said, “We have all been through it.”

She sighed. “But turning away won’t work anymore, will it?”

“No. But,” Bale said, “would you prefer not to know yourself?”

“Right now, yes!”

That night she lay awake, alone in the dark. She had turned away Bale’s gentle invitations to share his bed.

Even hours after the inquisition she couldn’t stop looking inward, couldn’t stop thinking about herself. She tried to immerse herself in her Witnessing, but right now not even Poole’s antics and endeavors seemed able to distract her.

And anyhow she envied him, she realized reluctantly. Poole had been unusually clear-sighted for his time. But even so he had walked around in a kind of dream. Like every human his memories were imperfectly stored in the biochemical mishmash of his nervous system. And he had endlessly edited the story of his life, unconsciously, to make logic out of illogical situations, to put himself at center stage and in control of events. There were sound reasons for this. A human memory had never been meant to be an objective recording system but a support for ego: without the comforting illusion of control, Poole’s mind might have crumbled in the face of an arbitrary universe.

But all that was different now.

Her consciousness had already been superior to Poole’s, even before she had come to the Rustball. A half-million years of evolution and environment had seen to that. And now the subtle re-engineering initiated by the Campocs, as it gently knit and re-knit her neurones, or whatever it was doing in her head, accentuated the gap. Her memory was as perfect a recording instrument as any technology could deliver. And her self-awareness was so clear, the mists banished, that the comfort of delusion was no longer an option.

Her knowledge of herself was accurate, and utterly pitiless.

She called Reath, in orbit.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It isn’t, ah, permanent. You aren’t stuck with this new self-knowledge, any more than you have yet taken what you call an ‘immortality pill.’ I have brought you here so you can feel how it may be to immerse yourself in this Second Implication. But you have taken no irrevocable step on your road to Transcendence.”

“I can see why it’s necessary,” she said. “This cold self-awareness. You can’t make a super-mind out of a crowd of dreamers.”

“But it’s uncomfortable, isn’t it?”

“You’ve no idea.”

“When you see your sister again, what will you do?”

“Apologize,” she said fervently.

“Perhaps that’s enough. Alia, your time on the Rustball is nearly over.”

“It is?” she asked, surprised.

“The Rusties have only one more development to show you — or rather, to help you discover in yourself. But you must decide if you want to take that final step.”

“Is it up to me?”

“It always has been, child. You should know that by now. Try to get some sleep.”

But try as she might, alone with herself in the dark, sleep didn’t come.

Another day — her last day on the Rustball — and another session in the gloomy room with the Campocs and their extended family.

But today it felt different. She gazed around at their faces, which seemed to glow gently in the soft pink glow of the room. They were all turned to her, all their expressions open. They were looking at her, they were thinking about her, and what she had revealed of herself since coming to this community.

And suddenly she was looking back at herself.

It was a view from many angles, as if the eyes around her had turned to mirrors. She had gone through another sharp transition, another expansion of her awareness, as if a door had opened, admitting light. She quailed, battered.

Bale touched her hand. The shock of physical contact was there, but it was not as it had been before, just one more link in a web of connecting. And besides, since her intimacy with him there was tenderness in his touch.

“Do you feel it?” he asked.

“I think so…” As he held her hand the sense of an extended perspective wavered, but did not collapse.

He said, “Now you can see yourself through my eyes. You can look into the memories, even of yourself, stored in me. The others, too. It is as if we are all one mind, in this room, one nervous system united, memory and thought processes distributed and yet joined. You can look at yourself, not just from within your own head, but through the minds of others.”

This was necessary, she was told, necessary for her mind to grow. If her consciousness was founded on the ability to look into herself, now she could see herself through the eyes of others, too — and so her consciousness was enhanced by an order of magnitude.

“It takes some getting used to,” Denh said.

“You can say that again,” said Seer ruefully.

Alia asked, “How?…”

There was a technology, she was told, or perhaps it was a biology, very ancient, that could link humans on some level deeper than words. Some even said this faculty derived from an alien species long assimilated by mankind. But its origin didn’t matter. The communication was not mind to mind, for that was impossible; mind was only an emergent property of the brain, the body. But it was as if the physical barriers between one nervous system and another became irrelevant.

Bale said, “This is Unmediated Communication. There are no symbolic barriers. You will know what I am thinking as I think it — and I will know your thoughts, too, as if they were my own, as direct as an embrace, or a punch in the mouth.” He hesitated. “It is not yet fully developed in you. Even if you go further you will be able to pull back. Do you want—”

“Yes,” she said, not giving herself time to think. “Do it.”

Suddenly the mirror-minds in the room shone bright — all the barriers between them fell away — and she saw herself, not just in this moment, not just physically, but in the Rusties’ deepest perception. She could sense what they were thinking about her. She rummaged through their memories, of how she had been during her conversations with this group. She could see her body language, her shyness slowly giving way to enthusiasm as she talked — and the times when her words hadn’t contained the whole truth, and she had been evasive, breaking eye contact, turning away, laughing unnecessarily, fiddling with her body fur.

She knew what these people thought of her. It was shocking, bewildering.

But, as she looked at herself through her own eyes and others, the self she saw wasn’t so bad. Yes, she had sometimes been spiteful to her sister, driven by rivalry. But such incidents, spiky in memory, had taken up only a small fraction of their relationship. She was just a kid, promising, flawed, unformed. She hadn’t known any better.

And, she realized to her surprise, she forgave herself. Suddenly she was crying, her vision blurred by tears.

An arm spread around her shoulders: Bale’s great-aunt. “There, there,” she said. “We all go through it. Three steps. You have to see yourself; you have to accept yourself; and you have to learn to forgive yourself. But forgiveness is as hard as blame, isn’t it? There, there; this will pass.”

So it would, Alia realized, even as she wept.

This was Reath’s purpose, she saw. The Transcendents were linked as these Rusties were linked. The Transcendence was surely much more than this, in its antiquity, its complexity, its wisdom. But this extraordinary linking was enough for now: one step at a time.

And now she thought she understood the strange community of the Rustball. There was no art, music, expression, individuality, because none were needed. Art was only a form of communication, and a symbolic one at that; who needed the imperfect channels of art or music when you could directly access another’s memories, thoughts, emotions? Why struggle to express yourself if you knew your own mind with a pitiless clarity? And why travel if you knew that wherever you went you would find nothing so fascinating as other people? People are more interesting than worlds: Denh had said it explicitly.

But how limited this community was as a result, she thought. How introverted, how drab their lives were.

Was this really the future of mankind?

Bale watched her, a kindly concern mixed with pride. But, it struck her now, every second they had spent together, even those moments when they had embraced in the water, had been shared in the heads of his brothers and cousins. They had never been alone. She felt a qualm of unease, a stab of revulsion.

Tom and I had twenty-four hours before our flight back to the States. Tom wanted to see London.

I decided to go visit uncle George.

George lived alone in a smallish dormitory town about a dozen kilometers southwest of Manchester. I took the train up from London. On arrival, consulting my softscreen map, I decided to skip the pod buses and rickshaws and walk the couple of klicks to George’s home.

It wasn’t a terribly interesting place.

When I was a kid George was fond of telling me that it’s foolish to imagine that the future is going to be disconnected from the present or the past, as if everything will be ripped down and rebuilt. He was right. In this town, all the old housing stock was still there, the boxy commuter houses crammed side by side into every available square centimeter. But now their wooden doors had been replaced by massive weatherproof steel shutters, their brickwork coated by silvery Paint, their windows bricked up. In the age of the automobile this had become just another dormitory suburb for the nearby big city, its historic roots swamped by residential developments. Now, sensibly enough, if you wanted to work in the city you lived in the city, but that meant places like this had lost what had been their primary function for a century or more.

There was nobody around but me. It was eerie to walk through the quiet streets. Fifty years ago the place would have been carpeted by automobile metal, cars parked in every drive and bumped up on the sidewalks. Now the cars had gone, and the houses with their blanked-out windows were like backs turned to me.

Tom and I had made peace, of a sort. Or we had agreed to disagree. Or something. But now I found myself obsessing about our arguments about the Stewardship.

The Stewardship was a legacy of Amin’s administration, though it was set up after she died. It was a new international body, a “green UN,” assembled with the power and authority of the U.S. government. Its central task, the challenge of the century, was to feed everybody, to raise per capita food production while reducing our consumption of materials and energy.

It had started with simple quick-return initiatives, like buying up land high in ecological value but in danger of overexploitation. Right now the Stewardship was working on two mighty flagship projects: to save what was left of the Brazilian rainforest, a hotspot of biodiversity and evolutionary innovation, and to stabilize China, so parched and overcrowded that the Yellow River was poisoned when it didn’t run dry, and whose vast lowlands were one massive hydraulic engineering project.

But there were plans to go much further, to establish an ethical framework and new economic rules to rebuild the world — the kind of work John was involved in.

It really was a new “Marshall Plan for a bruised world,” a bold interplay of environmental management, economics, diplomacy. Gradually even the religions had come on board, and a decades-long tide of conflict spawned out of aggressive and triumphalist tendencies in all the major faiths had begun to turn. The Stewardship had even been given a limited democratic legitimacy when the rest of the world was allowed to participate in U.S. presidential elections, a “fifty-first state” with as many electoral college votes as California — more than enough to turn close elections.

I believed the Stewardship was the greatest achievement of statesmanship of my adult life. I was able to talk about this passionately. But Tom didn’t appear to agree with me, even about this. How could the two of us be so different?

Well, I told myself, a relationship is a process; you crash through dramatic stages now and then but you never reach a conclusion, not this side of the grave anyhow. But I wasn’t sure how to follow it up with Tom, what to do next. Or what to do about Morag, come to that.

As I walked, all the issues in my life churned around in my head, seeking focus, interconnection: work, the starship, Tom, Morag, the niggling issue of the gas hydrates. Also, though I didn’t quite want to admit it, it was faintly disturbing that everything seemed to center on me.

I think I imagined that talking to George would help me get this straight in my head.

George’s home was just another in a row of boxes of brick.

George had kept a few windows as windows, even if the glass was dusty and his Paintwork, smart or not, had seen better days. And he still had a garden; little sprinklers watered his lupins, asters, and delphiniums. His lawn looked healthy enough, but the holly bushes that had once separated the garden from the sidewalk had been replaced by a line of bamboo.

He took a couple of minutes to answer my ringing. He greeted me with a broad, toothy smile. “Michael! So you turned up.” He led me into his hallway, and through toward the kitchen. “Come in, come in. I’m glad to see you. But then, old people are always glad of visitors. Pathetic, isn’t it?”

The hallway was narrow, the walls coated with yellowing wallpaper, and there was a musty, damp, unmistakeably old-person sort of smell, despite the labors of a spiderlike cleaning robot that scuttled upside down over the ceiling. The place was noticeably flood-proofed. There were no carpets downstairs, just tiles and a few roll-up rugs and mats, and the electricity sockets had been reinstalled halfway up the walls.

George was the same sort of build as me — compact or squat, depending on whether you’re looking out or in. He still moved pretty well, but his upper body was bent over, his neck jutting forward, and there was a kind of uneven fragility in his footsteps.

The kitchen was clean and bright, and I could smell garlic. George once lived in Italy, and he picked up some good cooking habits there. But with its safety-conscious ceramic covers, rounded edges, and bright primary colors the kitchen looked oddly toylike. George had grumbled about that before: “The social workers turn your home into a chuffing nursery,” he would say. But in alcoves on the walls there was a collection of Catholic artifacts, a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, a little plastic bottle labeled “Lourdes Water.” These were relics of George’s parents, I believed, who had been devout.

George was eighty-seven years old. His wife, my aunt Linda, had died a few years earlier. He had actually remarried her after they divorced; at age twelve I was hauled over to England to attend the second wedding — “a joke,” my mother called it, “typical George.” As far as I could tell George and Linda had been happy. But then, a few years back, she had died. “That’s the trouble with happy endings,” he told me after the funeral. “You just live on and on, until you’ve sucked all the juice out, and it turns out not to be so happy after all.”

He sat me at his small breakfast table and began to fuss with a kettle. “So what do you want, tea, coffee? A beer? Have a beer. Go crazy.”

“A beer will be fine.”

He rubbed his hands and cackled, his open mouth revealing even white teeth, probably regrown from buds. He bent stiffly, opened his refrigerator, and hauled out a couple of brown bottles.

The refrigerator protested in a soft whisper. “George, are you sure that’s wise? It’s a little early, don’t you think?”

“Chuff off,” he said cheerfully, and slammed the door shut.

The beer was strong and gritty. I asked, “Wheat beer?”

“The only kind I can afford. The hop harvest never recovered after that milt in the 2030s. Shame. But it’s five percent proof.” He took a long pull. “So,” he said, “tell me about your Kuiper project.”

That was what I always liked about George, even when I was a kid. He never acted like an uncle, never like family. He wouldn’t ask you polite, bored questions about how you were getting on at school. Over the years he developed common interests with us — with me it was spaceflight and all things extraterrestrial — and so when he visited we always had something real to talk about.

Not that my mother appreciated that, I don’t think. “You treat Michael as the son you never had,” she once yelled at him. “Bollocks,” George had replied succinctly, to my huge pleasure.

George always said he was pleased I was working on Kuiper, even if it was just a small-scale design study. He found the Anomaly particularly fascinating, because, he told me, its discovery in the first decade of the century had come at a strange time in his own life. His father had just died, he had gone looking for a sister he had never known he had, and the discovery of Kuiper and the great philosophical transformation it had brought had seemed to him to parallel the upheavals going on in his own heart.

Also, he told me once, it was particularly appropriate that I should work on Kuiper. He didn’t elaborate. George could be a bit mysterious at times. Well, he was a Poole.

As we sat there talking about Kuiper a toy robot came rolling into the room. It was a real antique, all shaped tin and plastic and little glass eyes, and as it rolled along a flywheel sent friction sparks shooting from a grill in its belly.

George snapped at the robot, “What do you want?”

“Well, George, you aren’t following your routines. Normally you take a walk to the shops this time of day. I wondered if you’d forgotten.” The robot’s voice was comically melodramatic, intended to intone interplanetary dangers, devoted to domestic trivia.

George said to me, “You see what I mean? They turn your home into a nursery.” He barked at the robot, “No, I hadn’t forgotten. I’m just not a chuffing robot like you. I have free will.”

The robot said, “Well, so do I, George, but we can discuss philosophy later. Wouldn’t you like to take your walk? Perhaps your new friend could go with you.”

“It’s not a friend, it’s a nephew. And we’re drinking beer and talking. So clear off.” He aimed a kick at the robot. His foot passed clean through it, scattering it to pixels that quickly coalesced. The robot, grumbling, rattled out of the room. “Little prick,” said George.

The design turned out to be a VR copy of a toy from George’s long-gone childhood, a representation of a robot from some forgotten TV show.

“I never imagined you as a nostalgia buff, George.”

“Well, you have to have a personal care assistant, ” George said, spitting out the words. “You should have seen the other designs. But if it didn’t play a mean game of chess I’d have scrambled it long ago. Little prick.”

As we talked, and George made me lunch — a light Italian dish of pasta with baked fish, good if a little heavy on the garlic — the house and its contents continued to fuss around him. George responded to most of this with a cheery curse, but he took his pills and obeyed the rules.

He only had to live like this because the family, I, wasn’t around to look after him any better.

The population of the elderly had hugely expanded during George’s lifetime. He liked to say that the commuters who had once journeyed daily out of here had all come back in their old age, “like a flock of elderly gulls returning to their nesting cliff.” But there weren’t enough youngsters around to look after them all, even if our hearts had been in it. So it was up to the robots. Without artificial sentience, if the machines hadn’t been able to fulfill the state’s duty of care to its citizens, George said he didn’t know how we would all have coped. “Maybe put us all to work, in the Sunny Vales Gulag of the Twilight Years. Although euthanasia would be simpler.”

I was silently thankful for the empathetic intelligence of the designers who had made George’s mandatory companion a chess-playing, bickering toy robot rather than a bland, soulless nurse.

After lunch we took a walk. George said he would show me the new managed forest that was growing up on the outskirts of town. “Off the Stockport Road,” he said. “Only a mile or so. Used to be a golf course. Nobody plays golf anymore.”

So we walked. The day was mild, the sunlight hazy and washed out. The air seemed reasonably fresh, with only a faintly polluted tinge to it, an acidic smell like crushed ants.

The hike wasn’t that easy. The road surface was mostly silvertop to allow the pod buses and rickshaws to pass, but the sidewalks, or pavements, as George called them, were little used: cracked and weed-infested, you had to watch where you stepped. George had been supplied with exoskeletal supports, but he said he had locked the “clanking splinty things” in a spare bedroom. He walked with a stick well enough, however.

That robot tailed us, grumbling to itself.

As we walked our talk gradually spiraled out from my work on Kuiper. I began to tell George about Tom and his accident. Actually George had known all about it. He used his house’s resources to follow news about Tom and other family members; in a wired-up world nobody is far from a camera.

I tried to tell him how we’d got together in that dismal hotel in Heathrow. George listened, and though he didn’t say much he seemed to understand.

He dug into the issue of the waterspout and the gas hydrates. “How are these gases stored? Is there a critical temperature at which they will be released? How much is there exactly?…”

He asked smart questions, having once been an engineer himself. He had worked in software, until he had been made redundant by Moore’s Law, he liked to say, the relentless expansion of computer capacity. His career had spanned the milestone time when the first human-level sentience systems came on the market at a budget an average household could afford. Now, nobody designed software anymore; for many of its generations it had designed itself. And there were no more analysts, programmers, or software engineers; instead there were “animists” and “therapists” who sought to understand the strange new kinds of minds that permeated the world. George had been too old for any of that. But there had been plenty of work for him to see out his career on the “legacy suites,” some decades old, that still lay at the heart of many major systems, and were now threatening us with the digital millennium. As George said, the present is built on the past, even in software; he said he finished his career feeling more like an archaeologist than an engineer.

Soon his questioning about the hydrates exposed the limits of my knowledge. But he agreed with me that Tom’s experience might be a bellwether warning about more serious dangers.

“Michael, if you’re concerned about this, you should go find out what the implications are. I find it hard to believe nobody’s thought of this before.”

“Find out from who?”

He could be sarcastic sometimes. “Forgive me for stating the obvious. But maybe you could start with the Center for Climate Modeling. You’d think they would have some handle on it all since it is their job. They’re based in Oklahoma, aren’t they? We can check it out back at the house.”

“They’ll never listen to me.”

“Oh, I bet I can find a way in. I still have contacts with the Slan(t)ers.” This was a dubious old conspiracy-theory organization, scattered around the planet like a terrorist network, with whom George had had dealings long ago. “Small-world networks,” he would say. “Whoever you’re trying to reach, there is a Slan(t)er who knows another who knows somebody, and so forth. The Slan(t)ers are a bunch of old nuts. But then so am I.”

“But even if the climate modelers are mapping the hydrate issue, if the whole polar ocean is going to blow its lid, what is there to do about it?”

He snorted. “You design chuffing starships. Can’t you think of anything?”

“Not offhand,” I said heavily, “no.”

“Then start thinking. If you do dig into this business of the gas hydrates, if there’s a significant threat and if there is some way to stop it, you might do some good.” He winked at me. “And of course you will be building up a connection between you and Tom. But, you know, I think you ought to find some way of talking to your son other than through mega-engineering… In here.”

We had come to a gate in an iron fence. Beyond lay a park, with trees scattered over a lawnlike expanse.

We walked in, stepping onto the grass. George sighed with a stiff pleasure at the softness of the ground.

Small black shapes moved purposefully through the grass at my feet. They looked like ants, but I saw the flash of metal jaws and even the spark of tiny lasers; they were miniature bots, nano-gardeners, patiently tending the forest of grass around them.

I pointed them out to George. “Nobody cuts the lawn nowadays,” he said. “Pity. I always enjoyed the smell of freshly cut grass…”

We came to the shade of a tree, a sycamore. I helped George to the ground so we could sit for a while, leaning on the bark. George was breathing hard, and I realized with a pang of guilt that the kilometer or so we had walked was a long journey, for him. My feeling wasn’t lightened by the accusing glare of the robot.

The prospect was attractive, just trees and some low bushes and the grass. But further away I saw what looked like fencing, lines of rectangular panels turned to the sun. They were engineered trees. We controlled genomes so exquisitely that we no longer bothered to grow a tree and cut it down and chop it up; we just grew panels that could be snapped off, taken away, and used immediately. I’d read that in Sweden they had developed living houses, just sprouting from the ground with saunas attached. And in one Chinese lab they were growing whole books on trees, complete with text, like bundles of leaves.

When George got his breath back he sang a few lines from a plaintive song. “All the leaves are brown / And the sky is gray…”

“That sounds pretty.”

He shrugged. “This whole place is totally transformed from when I was a kid. See all these trees? They’re sycamore. And the undergrowth is rhododendron and Japanese knotwood.” He pointed with his stick. “There used to be a big old oak tree over there. Edge of the fifteenth green.” There was nothing left now but a hollow in the ground, faintly shadowed. “As a kid I started coming out here to meet a girlfriend who lived nearby. I’d cycle over and sneak in and read in the shade of that old tree. Sometimes I’d pinch golf balls that came sailing by and sell them back to the punters, but that’s another story.

“Well, I came back — Christ, I must have been in my fifties, your age — to clear up some last bits of business after my father’s death. I took a walk out here. And that old tree was dying. I always thought it would live forever, or at least outlive me. But it actually looked like it was bleeding; there was this awful tarry sap leaking out of cankers on its trunk. All the leaves were brown.

“Later I found out what it was. Sudden oak death, they called it. It was a kind of fungus that kills by cutting off the flow of nutrients in the trunk. You get these fungi all over the world, and where they come from they don’t usually do that much harm. But back then we were shipping plants and trees all over the planet, and bringing their pathogens with them. Now you only see oak trees in hothouses in Kew Gardens.” He waved a hand at the sycamore above him. “Instead we have this spindly crap. And all the wildlife you used to get with the old stuff has gone, too, woodpeckers and butterflies and toads. The world seems emptied out.”

I knew what he meant. Monocultural and silent, England was like an abandoned theater stage, the actors all gone. Much of America was the same.

“But when I first noticed that poor bleeding tree all I could think of was that silly old song. All the leaves are brown. But there is no warm L.A. sunshine to escape to, is there?”

“I guess not.”

George leaned back against the tree trunk and sighed. “Listen, Michael. I hate to sound like an old man, but you ought to know this. I’ve been thinking of getting myself written into a tree…”

I’d heard of this. The idea was you would embed a coded version of George’s genome into the DNA of a sycamore, say. It would make no difference to the tree: there were ways to do this without changing the length of the tree gene, or the protein it spelled out. But the tree as it grew would be a kind of living memorial, with every one of its trillions of cells carrying a genetic echo of George himself.

The robot said sourly, “He’s put it in his will.”

“I never thought you’d be so sentimental, George.”

“Sentimental? Maybe. I don’t have any kids, you know.”

That was the selling point, of course. Across Europe and North America childbirth rates were falling, and an increasing number of people faced the prospect of dying childless. So they were being sold other “ways” of having their heritage live on.

“I think it’s some deep genetic thing,” George said, his voice fading a bit. “I don’t have any regrets about not having kids — not for the sake of the kids themselves, because they never existed, and even if they had they’d probably have turned out to be arseholes. But behind me there is a queue of grandmothers and grandfathers going all the way back to some low-browed Homo erectus. Why should that long line end with me? It doesn’t feel responsible that I should let it all just go without a fight.”

On impulse I touched his hand; the flesh was papery, liver-spotted, but warm. “We share a lot of genes, George,” I said. “What, a quarter? You live on through me. And through Tom. But if you want the tree, I’ll make sure you get your tree.”

“Thank you,” George said.

The robot, standing beside us, whirred softly. I wondered what it made of our talk.

“So anyhow,” George said carefully, “it isn’t just Tom and gas hydrates that’s on your mind, is it?”

Immediately I understood what he meant. “John called you, too, didn’t he? He told you about Morag. That asshole.”

“He means well,” George said, a bit dubiously. “At least I think he does. That’s family for you. They can lift you up and smack you in the mouth with the very same gesture.”

“And what about you? Do you think I’m crazy too?” The robot looked at me warningly, and I realized I’d snapped. “Sorry,” I said.

“Of course not,” he said. “I believe you. Why not? The world’s a strange place; I haven’t lived so long and not figured that out. And you always seemed sensible to me. I have some advice, though. Go see Rosa.”

“Rosa?”

“My sister, your aunt. Look, her background is — odd.” He’d once told me how she’d been taken away from home to be brought up by a holy order in Rome, a peculiar, introverted society of matriarchs of some kind; he’d called it a “Coalescence.” “She left it all behind years ago. By the time she got back in touch with me she was ordained, and working as a Catholic priest in Spain.”

“I should go see a priest?”

“You think you’re haunted,” he said. “Who else are you going to consult? Look, I’ll set up the contact for you. She’s family. And I bet yours won’t be the only ghost story she’ll have heard in her life.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, uncertain. “And she’ll be — umm, sympathetic?”

George said ruefully, “We Pooles don’t do sympathy, Michael, even those of us who take holy orders. But you may get some truth from her. If you want therapy, I’ll sell you the robot.”

“You chuffing won’t,” said the robot.

“So,” George said, “how are you feeling now?”

“I have all this stuff swirling around in my head,” I said hesitantly. “Tom. The hydrate deposits. The Kuiper Anomaly. Morag. Each of these seems extraordinary, or tremendously significant, or both. And they are all somehow focusing down on my life. Sometimes I wonder if there is some connection between them.”

His eyes, still the family smoky gray, were bright. “Of course there’s a connection. You. ”

I hadn’t wanted to say it out loud. I looked down at my body, my paunchy belly, my fat legs. “That makes no sense.”

“Actually it’s halfway to madness,” the robot pointed out.

“We aren’t all created equal, Michael. Let me tell you something. You know that the Kuiper Anomaly was discovered in the first decade of the century. But it actually showed up on some old records, images and infrared searches, dating from before the formal ‘discovery.’ It had just never been recognized for what it was. But we have a date, I mean to within a day, when that thing appeared on the edge of the solar system. And you know what that date is?”

Suddenly I felt cold. It was like the feeling I sometimes got before one of Morag’s visitations. “Tell me.”

“The Anomaly appeared on the day you were born. Coincidence?” George leaned back and laughed. “We’re a peculiar lot, we Pooles, a damn peculiar lot. Stuck in history. We can’t help it. Now, are you going to help me up, or do I have to rely on the robot?”

The toy robot watched as I struggled to help him rise, its blank artificial eyes fixed on me suspiciously.

I took the train back to London the next day. I would never see George in the flesh again.

The next day, back aboard Reath’s ship, they prepared to leave the Rustball.

Reath had promised to take Alia back to the Nord. After her disturbing experiences on the Rustball she longed to go home for a spell, back to the familiar sights and smells of the ship, its conceptual freedom compared to the dreadful chthonic rigidity of a world. And she longed to see Drea, above all, to put things right.

But before they left orbit Reath came to her. He seemed uncomfortable. Plans had changed, he said.

The Campocs said they felt she was unready to proceed to the next stage of her Transcendence training. She should see more of the post-human Galaxy, if she aspired to join the body that governed it. So she was to be flown off to some other dismal rocky speck of a world.

Not only that, it turned out, the Campocs wanted to come along, too.

She was bewildered. “Reath, can’t you — I don’t know — appeal to somebody?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Reath said. “I have to accept what the Campocs say. Otherwise there would be no point coming here.”

“But I want to go home.” Alia was embarrassingly aware of the whine in her voice.

Reath sighed. “I know. Everything will be fine, you’ll see.”

She allowed herself to feel reassured.

But as she watched the Campocs’ ugly, beetlelike shuttle climb up out of their planet’s gravity well once more, she thought back over the exchange. Reath’s control of the situation had somehow been challenged by the Campocs, by Bale and the others. What could they possibly want? She worried at this disturbing development, a shifting in the alignment of the unseen powers that had taken over her life.

The planet to which the Campocs directed them orbited an undistinguished star some three hundred light-years closer to the Galaxy’s center than the Rustball.

The journey was uneventful. Alia spent most of her time immersed in the travails of Michael Poole, trying to shut out the unwelcome complexity of her own life. The Campocs weren’t good company; they kept to themselves throughout the trip. In fact Alia was relieved about that. She had felt uncomfortable with Bale ever since she had figured out that their intimacy must have been shared with his kin.

But, faintly suspicious of the Campocs as she had been since she had met them, she tried tentatively to use her new abilities to sense something of their thinking. It felt eerie to probe for the thoughts and feelings of others with no more difficulty than she might grope for an elusive memory inside her head.

But it worked. She could sense a kind of disciplined excitement shared by the Campocs. It was true they had never traveled much before; this jaunt away from the Rustball was a novelty for them. But there was something else under the surface, she thought, something darker she couldn’t bring into focus. It added to her vague sense of unease; the Campocs had had an agenda concerning her since she had arrived, but she still didn’t know what it could be, what they wanted.

No doubt they could sense what Alia was feeling, too. She tried not to think about that.

At their destination, as Reath’s ship entered orbit, they all crowded to the windows to see the view.

This new world was called Baynix II, after its parent star. It had no name of its own. “Or rather,” Reath said mysteriously, “those who live here have never told us what they call their world — if they are still aware they are on a world at all…”

It was another ball of rock and iron, more or less like Earth, with a scattering of oceans, ice caps, clouds. But where the Rustball had been almost all iron, this world was almost all rock, right to its core.

“It is a Dirtball.” Denh snickered.

Reath said, “Another result of the vicissitudes of planetary impact processing.” He speculated that Baynix II was more like the Moon than Earth, a secondary product of a giant collision, sculpted from the mantle of some larger world.

Alia peered down uneasily. All these worlds seemed to be the products of random acts of immense violence. She couldn’t imagine how it must be to live on such battered fragments.

They all crammed into a small shuttle. It parted from its mother ship, and Alia descended into the air of yet another planet.

There were oceans here, delivered as usual by comets, and a layer of air, mostly carbon dioxide. But the land was ancient, littered with the eroded shadows of features billions of years old, palimpsests of craters and mountain ranges. The native life, battered by radiation, had never progressed beyond single cells, hardy little radiation-resistant bugs. The circumstances of the Dirtball’s difficult birth had left it inhospitable: that shrunken core meant no significant tectonic renewal, and no global magnetic field.

And as far as Alia could see, humans had made little impression here. There were no cities, no farms. A couple of automated monitoring stations, themselves unimaginably old, stood silently, eroded and half-covered by drifting sand. And that was all.

“So why are we here?” Alia asked.

Reath grinned, and allowed the shuttle to dip close to the ground. “For them, ” he said, pointing.

Alia thought the formations on the ground were just geological. They were ridges, low, lumpy, and irregular, the same color as the sandy ground from which they rose. Reath gave her no more clues. Irritated by the mystery, and the sense that everybody knew more about what was going on than she did, Alia refused to ask any more questions.

The flitter landed. The gravity was a little less than standard, not uncomfortable. They disembarked, and waited for the local Mist to prepare them. Alia felt filters in her nose and throat close up against the corrosive dust suspended in the air, and oxygen coolly hissed into her lungs.

She walked up to the rocky formations. From the ground they looked like low, eroded ridges, pushing up from the flat earth. There might have been fifty of these features, lying parallel, their worn summits rising some forty meters into the air.

It wasn’t until she was almost climbing on the first of them that she recognized what it was. Suddenly it snapped into focus — that thin ridge that pushed into the ground, those deep craters, the smooth bulge above — this worn morphology wasn’t random at all.

“Lethe,” she said. “It’s a face. A human face.”

The “ridges” were like statues of human forms, fallen statues each two or three hundred meters tall. Tremendous arms, legs, torsos rose out of the dirt. On one especially well-sculpted hand four fingers and a thumb were clearly visible. The drifting sand had half-buried the figures — or perhaps they had been left this way deliberately, for the sculptors’ own unimaginable purpose.

The great face before her was shoved into the dirt, so only one eye, one nostril, half of an open mouth was left exposed. Around half-open lips was a spill of sand of a different color, a denser, blue-purple hue, as if it had been vomited out of that rocky mouth. She could have climbed into the great socket of the one exposed eye. But there was an odd sense of watchfulness about that empty pit, she thought uneasily.

“It’s astounding,” she said.

Bale nodded. “I know.”

“But what is it for?”

Bale only smiled.

Reath seemed less interested in the statues than in the sand in which they lay. He squatted on his haunches and lifted a handful of dirt, letting it run through his fingers. “This was the bed of a lake, once. Or perhaps an ocean. These grains are clearly water-formed — see how they are rounded? But the ocean surely vanished billions of years ago.”

Alia confronted him. “What have these monuments got to do with me?”

“Monuments?” He got to his feet, a bit stiffly. Pooling ocean-floor sand in his palm, he rubbed the rounded grains gently. “Almost all these grains are of silicate materials. Silicon is ten times more abundant than carbon in Earth’s crust, you know — and presumably several times more abundant still here on this ball of sand. Have you ever wondered why it should be the scarcer carbon, then, and not the more abundant silicon, that emerged as the basis of Earth life?”

Alia snapped, “Everybody knows that. Because carbon can form multiple bonds. Carbon can make molecules that are complex enough to store a genetic code.”

“True, true. But you can form complex structures of silicon, at least in its crystalline form…”

“So what?” Alia knocked his hand, scattering the sand grains. “Reath, I’ve had enough of this. What are we doing in this sculpture park?”

Reath’s face was as expressionless as ever, but he seemed a little lost. He looked about at his feet, as if the grains she had spilled were the only ones on the planet. “It was the Campocs who brought you here,” he reminded her.

Alia was distracted by a spark of light that shot over the arc of the sky. It was a ship, she saw immediately. Moving gracefully it descended toward this plain of sand, and as it neared she made out its details, complex, fragile, beautiful.

It was undoubtedly a shuttle from the Nord.

As soon as it landed a hatch popped open and a woman climbed uncertainly out. It was Drea. Alia ran.

Drea stumbled a little in the unfamiliar gravity, and she coughed as the Mist kicked in. But then she ran, too, heavy-footed across the sand toward Alia. The two of them collided in a tangle of limbs, laughing.

Alia felt unreasonably joyful to see her sister. “Thanks for coming all this way,” she said.

“I’m not sure if I had a choice.” Drea smiled. “A summons from Reath is pretty forceful. Anyhow I missed you.”

“And I you. You’ll never know.”

A dusty breeze stirred Drea’s hair; she pushed it out of her eyes. “I’ve got to tell you — on the Nord they’re having a constellation naming ceremony.”

This happened every decade or so, as the stars, slowly shifting across the Nord’s sky by the ship’s sublight crawl, adopted new configurations. The names of the new patterns were chosen by popular votes, amid much friendly rivalry.

Alia winced. “I wish I could be there.”

“They are going to name a constellation for you, Alia! It will be called ‘The Skim Dancers.’ Everybody voted for it.”

Alia grabbed her sister’s hands. “So you’re in it, too!”

“But it’s you they are proud of, Alia. Everybody is. Although nobody’s quite sure what you’re doing out here.” She glanced around. “Not much of a place, is it?”

Alia said, “Mostly I’ve been finding out unpleasant things about myself. I’m sorry.”

Drea looked mystified. “Sorry for what?”

Alia smiled. “For pulling your hair when I was three…”

“And I’m sorry, too.” It was Bale; he had come to stand a couple of meters away from the sisters.

Alia introduced him quickly, and the other Campocs. But the Campocs didn’t acknowledge Drea, who suddenly seemed lost, turned in on herself. Alia’s unease quickly deepened. She glanced at Reath. He looked deeply uncomfortable now, but he stared at the ancient sand at his feet.

She turned back to the Campocs. “What’s going on here, Bale? Why is Drea here? And what are you sorry for?”

His smile was thin. “For what we have to do.”

“What are you talking about?”

Drea staggered.

Alia grabbed her sister’s shoulder to support her. Suddenly it was like handling a doll; Drea’s limbs shook loosely, her head lolled, and a line of spittle leaked from the corner of her mouth.

Alia turned on Bale. “What have you done to her?”

“Alia, you must understand that—”

She hit his shoulder. With her long space-dweller’s arms she was capable of delivering a powerful blow, and she sent him sprawling in the dirt. He gaped up at her, his mouth a round circle of shock.

Denh and Seer came to stand between her and Bale, and stared at her warily. “Don’t hit him again,” Denh said. “She isn’t being harmed.”

“But you’re doing this to her.” This was the other side of their interconnection, she thought, the dark shadow of the cosy family gatherings she had seen on the Rustball — this power to reach into the head of a stranger.

Bale got shakily to his feet. “She’s in there. She’s safe. It’s just that she can’t — connect.”

Alia stared at Drea’s slack face. “Safe? She must be terrified.” She turned on Reath. “Did you know about this?”

He looked shocked. “Of course not. They asked me to bring Drea here, but for you, not for this. I knew of this world, the statues — I thought this would be educational. I didn’t anticipate this!”

For the first time she saw truly how weak he was, and how little help she was going to get from him to resolve this sudden crisis. “Do you know what they intend?”

Reath grimaced. “Don’t you?”

She stared at him. Then she closed her eyes. She was aware of the minds of the three Campocs, but they were closed to her, hard black spheres in her universe of thought. And Drea was there, a tiny bright thing, trapped and struggling in a cage.

She snapped her eyes open and took deep breaths. The Campocs were not Transcendents, but they were powerful beyond her knowledge, and they were malevolent. She was alone here, beyond help from anybody. And all the time she was aware of that frightened, trapped little creature in her sister’s head, who utterly depended on what she did next.

She was trembling, as much from fear as from anger. Some Transcendent she was going to make! But she had to find a way through this. She clung to her anger; it would be more useful than fear.

She glared at Bale. “All right. What do you want with her?”

“Why, nothing. We want you. Or rather we want you to do something for us.”

“Then why not just take me, rather than her?”

“That wouldn’t be enough,” Bale said. “We need you to act freely.”

“I’m not free if you are holding my sister!”

“Then without our conscious commands. You have to want to work for us, Alia.”

“How long are you going to hold her?”

“As long as it takes.”

“For what?”

Reath stepped forward. “I think I see. As long as it takes for you to join the Transcendence, Alia. Do you see? Through your sister they hope to control you, and through you they hope to gain some leverage over the Transcendence itself.”

The thought seemed shocking to Alia, almost blasphemous. “How dare you challenge the Transcendence? And to do it in such a base way, through taking a hostage of a helpless human being—” The contrast between the audacity of their ambition and the shabbiness of their methods was astonishing.

“We have no choice,” Bale said grimly.

“We are frightened,” Denh said.

“By the Redemption,” Seer finished.

“The Redemption? Witnessing? What’s that got to do with anything?” She stared at them, baffled, angry, increasingly scared.

Reath said with a trace of his old firmness, “I think we need to talk this out. But not here, standing in the dirt. Come. Let’s go back to my shuttle.” He looked uncertainly at Drea. “Can she—”

Alia took her sister’s hand; her fingers were limp. “Come, dear. It’s OK.”

Perhaps the Campocs’ grip on Drea’s nervous system relaxed a little. Her gaze was as unfocused as before, but in response to her sister’s gentle pressure she took one step, two, stumbling like a baby. Alia sensed that the trapped creature in its cage was a little calmer, slightly reassured.

But Drea stumbled again. Glancing down, Alia saw urine trickling helplessly down her bare leg, and pooling on the sand of the Dirtball. “I’m sorry,” Alia whispered to her sister as they walked. “I’m so sorry.”

I endured another flight back across the Atlantic, again at John’s expense. This time I mostly slept through the journey, though that seemed a waste of the facilities on offer. Back in Florida I slept off my jet lag over a night in a Miami hotel: rather that than face the family again so soon.

Then I set off on a train journey to Oklahoma City.

I was taking George’s advice. Trying to find out about the impact of gas hydrates, I was going to consult the oracle, which was an artificial sentience called Gea, the “Global Ecosystems Analyzer,” being run out of the University of Oklahoma. Gea was the keystone of the Center for Climatic Modeling, which reported to a Stewardship agency called the Panel on Biospheric Change.

It was a long ride. The train took me across the Oklahoma flatlands, vast stretches of scorched brown earth littered with abandoned farm buildings. Green things grew only where sprinklers sent sprays of water high into the air. This was the twenty-year drought, as the media called it. Old news. I turned away to read a novel on my softscreen.

When I got to the end of the line, I was astonished to find Shelley Magwood waiting to meet me off the train.

I’d booked myself a hotel room, but when I told her the name of the place Shelley tapped her ear, canceled my reservation, and booked me somewhere better at her company’s expense. “Call it an investment,” she said.

At the hotel she gave me an hour to unpack and shower. Then Shelley hired us a big two-person rickshaw and took me through the city.

The center of Oklahoma City turned out to be quite attractive. It was a mixture of lakes, parks, landscaped hills, and quite stylish buildings, all connected at the very center of the city by a peculiarly elaborate system of walkways and tunnels. The place seemed to work on a human scale, which meant that it had survived the disappearance of the automobile pretty well. But many of the buildings were twentieth-century stock, and they showed their age in crumbling concrete and cracked fascias. There was plenty of Paint, too, glittering silver or gold in the sunlight.

And the scouring of the twenty-year drought reached even here, the heart of the state capital. Sprinklers spun and spat, and many of the green spaces were roofed over with filmy plastic envelopes. The city was a vision from an old science fiction novel, I thought, a domed colony stranded on a desert world.

Shelley kept up a kind of tourist patter as we traveled; it seemed she had spent a year here on a consultancy assignment, and she seemed fond of the place. “You ought to go see Route 66,” she said. “Have you ever heard of that? Once the most famous road in America, the Mother Road — who said that, was it Steinbeck? Now stretches of it are an automobile-age theme park.” She grinned. “They actually have working gasoline cars, and motels and roadside diners. They even have halls where they pump in toxic fumes so you can smell how it was when we were kids. It’s a long, thin museum. You have to see it to believe it.”

She took me to a frontier-age restaurant and ordered us T-bone steaks, rectangular stabs of meat so vast they literally covered the plates they were served on. “But don’t worry,” she told me as she dug in. “The cows are cube-shaped and engineered. You can eat this stuff all day and you won’t get fat.”

She was good company, small, neat, bright, her cropped-short dirty blond hair gleaming with gel. Her energy and enthusiasm for her life and her work always lifted me. But she hadn’t answered any of my questions.

“Shelley — what the hell are you doing here? I’m not sorry to see you. But why?”

“What you told me about the gas hydrates made me think. It does sound like we’re all sitting on a time bomb, doesn’t it? I’d like to know what Gea, the big computer suite, has to say about that. I’m curious.” She grinned and wiped her mouth; she’d reduced her steak to a few shreds of gristle. “Also I’d like to see Gea herself.”

“Herself?”

She shrugged. “Her choice to be female, apparently. She, it, is one of the most powerful software suites in the world, after all. Computer science could be revolutionized, if they ever figure out how she works.”

“And that’s all,” I said heavily.

She took a mouthful of her gen-enged steak to stall answering. Then she said, “Well, Michael, there are a lot of people out there concerned for you.”

“Oh.” I sat back. “I get it. The airwaves have been buzzing with chatter about me again. Who called you? John? Uncle George?”

“If you don’t like people talking about you, you ought to make your address books private.”

I felt impatient. “Shelley, I’m not meaning to offend you. Really, I’m glad you’re here. But I’m fifty-two years old, for God’s sake. I don’t need nursemaiding.”

“I’m not offended. If you offended me I wouldn’t be here. OK, your uncle asked me to keep an eye on you. But I wouldn’t have come just to babysit. Anyhow I like the steak,” she said pragmatically.

Hovering trays came scooting silently over the floor, and long killer-robot tentacles snaked out to clear away our plates. Shelley waved her hand over the tabletop; a small embedded softscreen glowed with numerals, showing our tab, and she tapped the screen a couple of times to add a tip.

From the capital we took a pod bus south to Norman, the base of the University of Oklahoma.

On the edge of the campus we were met off the bus by Dr. Vander Guthrie. He was a software animist by profession, and, it turned out, a kind of customer liaison officer for the facility of which Gea was the heart. Aged maybe thirty, he was tall but stocky, powerfully built. He was plainly dressed in a check shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. And he had a startling, completely inappropriate shock of sky blue hair.

Vander embraced Shelley, a bit stiffly. Of course they had worked together before; sometimes I got the impression that Shelley had worked with everybody on the damn planet. Vander led us to a small electric bus that would take us to the computer center.

We crowded into the bus, facing each other, knees touching. The bus jolted forward and carried us through the campus. Vander was nervous, his movements abrupt, even clumsy. But he seemed genuinely glad to see us. It turned out that meteorology had been a specialist study of this place for decades, even before the Warming had kicked in at the end of the twentieth century. Back then they used to think the big problem was tornadoes.

“So this was a logical place to found the world’s premier climate-modeling software suite,” Vander said. “However most of our visitors are politicians looking for an excuse not to sign up to some treaty or other, or else media types looking for yet another gosh-wow end-of-the-world story. Not that we don’t come up with plenty of those here,” he said with bleak humor. “So to have a couple of engineers come visit is a vacation for me.”

Vander Guthrie was a mass of contradictions. When he moved I could see the bones and muscles working under his checked shirt, as if he were some over-engineered simulacrum of a human being. But his diction, vaguely Bostonian, was very precise, academic. And he had that shock of sky blue hair, which I couldn’t help staring at. He was obviously an early casualty of cosmetic genetic engineering.

His eyes darted nervously; his character cowered within that huge body.

If this was a prime choice for a customer liaison worker, I wondered what kind of meatballs they must have behind the scenes here. Some things about software projects never changed, I supposed.

The bus decanted us at a fancy-looking theater. Inside was a brightly lit auditorium, with banks of seats, a deep stage that looked capable of displaying big three-dimensional VRs, and a rich new-carpet smell. “I have to put you through our orientation session,” Vander said apologetically. “Federal law.” He ushered us to the middle of the front row, and with an odd spurt of athleticism he vaulted over the seat backs to take a place in the second row. Then he clapped his hands, and the lights began to dim.

On the stage, a huge imaged-from-space portrait of the Earth assembled, finely detailed, heartbreakingly beautiful. I could see the big swathes of spreading desert around the midlatitudes, the peculiarly spangled effect over much of South America that showed the breakup of the rain forest, and the deep blue of the North Pole, a spinning ocean without a trace of ice. A grave voice began to intone, reeling off statistics about changes in forest cover and ocean temperatures.

“You say it’s the law that we have to sit through this,” said Shelley sarcastically.

“Well, so it is,” Vander said defensively. “For one thing your reactions to the displays are being monitored, noninvasively. There are plenty of crazies out there who seem to think climate change is a good thing, or anyhow something ordained from on high. To them Gea is a kind of quantum-computing Antichrist. Also the indoctrination stuff might actually help you figure out Gea’s results, assuming she actually produces something in response to your query about those methane hydrates.”

“She doesn’t always?”

He seemed offended I asked. “She isn’t a calculating machine, you know. You don’t just turn the crank. Anyhow the overview is often useful. You wouldn’t believe the fantastic ignorance of some of the pols and other celebs we get trooping through here.”

Before us, the automated presentation was getting into its stride.

The Global Ecosystems Analyzer was the pinnacle of efforts to model and predict the Earth’s dynamic natural systems that dated back to various pioneering turn-of-the-century studies. Gea was sponsored and run by a consortium that included the World Resources Institute, the World Bank, and UN development, education, refugee, environment, agriculture, and other agencies. All of this was coordinated by the Panel on Biospheric Change, a central committee of the Stewardship itself.

“The politics behind Gea are a mess,” Vander said ruefully. “It’s nearly as complicated as the climate modeling, and a lot less useful…”

Data poured into Gea from a whole range of sources. There were real-time downlinks from satellites, and from a mesh miniaturized system embedded in the fabric of the planet. “Inside every softscreen sold since 2040,” Vander said proudly, “there is an environmental monitor with a direct link to the Gea suite.” Then there were streams of data, slightly less current but no less vital, on demography, biodiversity, and agriculture. Even relevant peer-reviewed science papers were thrown into the mix. Thus Gea monitored every aspect of the world’s climate and geography, the oceans and atmosphere and the global circulation patterns — and, not least, the impact of humanity.

Vander said, “The trick is to think of the ecosystems as vast machines. Gea captures information on their inputs, such as climatic conditions, geological changes and human-induced changes, and on the outputs they provide for us, such as food, water purification, nutrient cycling, even tourism income — and less direct benefits such as biodiversity. She follows trends as transient as day-to-day fashions for wearing different gemstones in your ear stud, which might impact mining activities, all the way up to the gradual billion-year heating up of the sun, which will — might — one day render the Earth uninhabitable altogether. This is hard science, however. Everything is interconnected, in a messy way.”

I understood what he meant. The science of the very big and the very small are relatively simple: stars and quarks alike are governed by simple laws. It’s in the middle scales that things get tricky. This was why I had always been attracted by engineering. You couldn’t compress life, or indeed the weather, into symbols or codes: the biosphere was its own story — and so it was unknowable to any human mind. Maybe not to Gea, though.

The display moved on to some solutions Gea had already generated. Vander grimaced. “The sales pitch,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe it, but we have to fight to keep our funding up.”

Gea had produced some assessments on what was called a “sub-global” scale. We were shown examples from North America — chosen, no doubt, because we were in an American facility. All over the world glaciers were melting. In the short term the release of huge volumes of pent-up glacier-lake waters could cause catastrophic flooding; that had happened in Peru, Nepal, and northern Italy. But in the longer term the melting was even more disastrous, for the glaciers actually served as frozen reservoirs. The presentation — with pretty images of shrinking patches of old brown ice, floods, dwindling rivers, people queuing at standpipes — told of how Gea’s modeling had helped communities in California adjust to a loss of drinking water, of thirty percent or so over the last decade, without catastrophic dislocation.

The presentation moved on to an even more local problem: the twenty-year drought that afflicted the central plains of America, including Oklahoma. The crucial causative factor was, again, the heat delivered by the Warming. Hotter seas pushed moist air higher than it used to go, causing heavier rain in the tropical regions, but that meant a paucity of rain for a midlatitude belt around the globe. In America this was actually a reversion to conditions that had prevailed eight thousand years ago, when the corn belt had been a “prairie peninsula.” American farmers had it tough, but again warnings by Gea had given them time to prepare. Images of dust bowls and bleached cattle bones from Tajikistan in central Asia showed how bad it might have been.

“Gea can’t solve the climate problems,” Vander said. “That’s not her job. But by showing us the future reliably she can help us cope with the human consequences.”

We listened to this dutifully for a while. It was even well presented. But it was very familiar stuff. And as Shelley whispered to me, “Why is it that the collapse of the environment always reduces to a set of dreary lists?”

Vander Guthrie seemed more interested in the software engineering that lay behind Gea than the climate modeling itself. As the show went on he leaned forward and began to gossip in whispers. “Shelley tells me your uncle worked through the Age of the Help Desks.”

I glanced at Shelley, surprised.

She wasn’t apologetic. “Your uncle George is an old charmer, Michael. He has a lot of good stories about those days…”

Now that we were on his home ground Vander was engaged, even witty. He seemed to have a genuine interest in the history of his discipline, apparently because he was well aware that with Gea he was working on the hottest ticket in the current generation. His job, though, was only a remote descendant of the software analysis George had once made a living out of.

He described for us new design paradigms based on something called “surface binding.” This meant breaking down Gea’s model of the world into self-contained modules, like worlds in themselves. “So Gea has a model of global rainfall patterns, say,” Vander said, “and another on ocean heating. One affects the other, of course. But to figure out how, Gea has to let her model oceans ‘drive’ the rainfall in a realistic way. It’s not a question of software protocols, you see. It’s as if it were real. The communication between sub-models is not symbolic, it’s experiential. And that offers Gea a much greater richness of consciousness and experience than we have. You see? She is like a community of minds, but minds linked by direct experiential channels.”

I exchanged a cautious glance with Shelley, keeping my face carefully straight. The geek with the blue hair was actually something of a mystic, it seemed. However there was something quite moving in the way he described all this, as if he actually envied the complex entity he devoted his life to serving.

And I started to see the reality of Gea through his verbiage. Her elaborate mental model was as real a representation of the Earth and its cargo of rocks, air, water, and life as could be devised, a model that was improving all the time. In a sense that clunky corporate display had shown the truth in that very first image: the whole, spinning Earth was the center of Gea’s consciousness, and her purpose for being. Meeting her would be like meeting Gaia itself, I imagined.

He went on, “Of course design philosophies are only at the bottom level of the creature we know as Gea. You don’t program Gea, any more than your mother programmed you. My job title is animist. Remember we’re dealing with a mind here, a conscious entity. I didn’t design her; none of us did. I can’t even necessarily measure her output. How do you calibrate playfulness, joy, beauty, sorrow, fear?”

“And you can’t control her?” I asked uneasily.

“This is a climate modeling system,” Shelley said scornfully. “She isn’t a killer robot with laser-beam eyes. What harm can she do?”

I shrugged. “Lie to us? If she’s so smart, how would we even know? And then, when we build the flood barrier in the wrong place, or stimulate algal blooms in the ocean when we should be containing them—”

Vander Guthrie smiled, a bit wearily. He’d heard all this before. “The Frankenstein complex? I wouldn’t worry. Gea is actually sentient, remember. And with sentience comes responsibility. Conscience, if you will. And, believe me, for a creature as aware as Gea, that’s a deep inhibitor indeed…”

The image froze. Vander raised a hand to his ear, as if someone had called him. He grinned at us. “She’s ready to see us.”

To reach the Gea facility itself, Vander led us to a broad, empty plaza, eerily bare of trees or benches. At the center of this circle of concrete was set a building, an unprepossessing box, squat and windowless.

Vander talked nervously as he led us to the central blockhouse. “You can see we wrap our baby up pretty tightly. Ideally she would be dispersed, maybe even buried underground. But the logic of her architecture dictates that’s impossible.” With a superpowerful computer, aiming for the highest processing speeds, you always aimed for small distances to minimize lightspeed delays between components. But that very density made for its own problems — notably the production of an immense amount of heat, which was no doubt why Gea’s physical manifestation was stuck out here aboveground. Vander said, “But we’ve done our best. This block is as robust as most nuclear power plants. You could drive a plane into it and we wouldn’t even notice.”

As we hurried across the empty plaza I was aware of camera drones flitting in the air, and before my eyes smaller motes danced in the bright daylight — more security drones, tiny ones. Even the floor beneath our feet looked smart.

I felt terribly exposed out there. But I could see the logic; this open space, saturated by sensors, was so wide it would have been impossible to smuggle across any kind of harm-making device. Vander also warned us that our minds were being monitored for “inappropriate feelings.” I hoped that awe and dread would not be regarded as too “inappropriate.”

We reached the blockhouse. The wall itself sparkled with embedded processors. Vander palmed a control set in the wall, and a door slid aside out of sight. We hurried inside, with Vander waving us in anxiously; a deafening buzzer sounded the whole time the door was open. As the door soughed shut behind us drones clustered in the air around us, glittering with lenses.

Inside, the blockhouse was brightly lit by strips set in the roof. It looked even smaller inside than from outside, and was crowded with scaffolding where technicians in white coats and hairnets labored at terminals or waved their hands in the air to manipulate VR interfaces. Some of them peered down at us suspiciously.

At the center of the room was an installation of support gear and instrumentation. The heart of it was just a sphere, jet-black, only a couple of meters across. The sphere was embedded in a framework of clumsy-looking engineering, ducts and pipes and huge flaring fins. Most of this gear seemed to be refrigeration plant, laboring to keep that central sphere cool. But wires snaked out, and laser light flickered around it, the visible signs of data chattering into and out of the sphere. Was this Gea?

Vander led us to a corner of the blockhouse. A small room, not much bigger than a toilet cubicle, had been partitioned off; a light shone red above the door. Here we had to wait until Gea was ready for us. Vander seemed tense, as if his god was stirring.

At the core of Gea was a quantum-computing processor, he told us. Inside that jet-black sphere, the intertwined strands of possibility that make up our actuality were picked apart, and each separate strand used, remarkably, as a computing channel. The subtle use in computer processors of strange quantum effects like entanglement and superposition had actually driven forward the basic science of quantum physics. But still, nobody really understood how these machines worked — nobody human anyhow.

“Gea and her kin have already far surpassed us in raw intellect,” Vander said worshipfully. “Take mathematics for instance. There hasn’t been a single basic proof achieved by an unaided human in thirty years. Nowadays the computers do the proofs. Our job is to dig into what they’ve discovered and prize out the implications. We are intuitive, emotional; we still have a guiding role to play. But the computers are the intellects now. We will never again be able to grasp what they are doing.”

“Never? That’s a strong thing to say,” Shelley said.

“I mean it. At the heart of Gea’s biospheric modeling is a nonlinear problem with millions of interacting variables. But our brains are hardwired for a world with a mere three dimensions, so we can go no further than problems with a handful of variables, because we can’t visualize the solutions. And that’s our fundamental intellectual limit. Gea can see the qualitative content of an equation: she sees the babbling brook in the equations of fluid mechanics, the rainbow in the formulae of electromagnetism. We just can’t do it.”

“OK,” I said uneasily. “So what’s the future for us?”

He laughed. “Frankenstein again? There’s nothing to be afraid of. I told you. I know Gea as well as anybody can. The smarter you are, the more you comprehend, the more you love.”

“Love?You really think Gea loves us?”

“Oh yes,” said this strange guy with his cowboy body and blue hair and geek-scientist manner. “Gea won’t let any harm come to us, if she can help it.”

Shelley asked, “So what are we waiting for?”

“For Gea’s response.”

I glanced at Shelley, who shrugged. I said, “Vander, are you kidding? You have to wait around until she feels like coming online?”

He looked faintly embarrassed, and he tousled his mop of blue hair. “Gea is, umm, contrary sometimes. There’s a basic contradiction in her existence which torments her, I think. You see, she’s a climate modeler. She knows that heat dumped into the environment worsens the problems the climate faces. But she knows that when she runs, her hardware stratum itself generates a lot of heat. You see the paradox? And therefore—”

Shelley said, “You have to coax her to come online, and as soon as she gets the chance she turns herself off again for fear of making the problems worse. Do I have that right?” She stared at me, and we both burst out laughing.

Vander seemed mortally offended. “Believe me, in the brief fractions she is online she can achieve far more than most minds on the planet, artificial or otherwise—”

The light on the wall flashed red.

Vander whooped and punched the air. “There she is!” He tapped his ear.

Shelley asked, “Is that her? What’s she saying to you?”

He glanced at me. “It’s not me she wants to talk to. Michael Poole — it’s you.” He actually looked jealous.

With a faint horror-movie creak, the door to the little partitioned booth swung open.

Reath set up a low tent alongside his shuttle. Servitor machines brought out seats, and bowls of food and drink.

They sat in the shade: Reath, servant of the Commonwealth, the three Campocs as stolid and alike as the enigmatic statues that lay in the dirt, and Alia and her mind-neutered sister. Alia tried to feed Drea, but the Campocs’ control remained too tight to allow it.

And they talked about the Transcendence of Mankind.

Bale said, “We all do it, you know. Witnessing. Every human in the Commonwealth is a Witness; every child is given a subject, somebody from the past to study. Everybody. This is the law, the mandate of the Transcendence.”

This was a commonplace. “And? So what?”

Bale said heavily, “Have you never wondered why the Transcendence wants us all to peer into the past, Alia?”

She looked uncertainly at Reath, who returned her gaze calmly. She said, “Studying the past helps me understand the present. Michael Poole helps me understand myself—”

Denh guffawed. “You think the Witnessing program — the huge expense of giving every kid in the Galaxy a Witnessing tank — is all for the benefit of you, of us?”

Seer said, “Nothing the Transcendence does is for your benefit, but for its own. You must always remember that.”

Alia frowned. “All right. So why is the Transcendence so interested in the Witnessing?”

“Because,” Bale said, “the Transcendence is tortured by regret.”

The Transcendence was at a cusp in its destiny, they told Alia.

Coalescing out of a gathering of humans, it already soared far above the capabilities, even the imaginations, of its constituent members. This was an extraordinary moment in the evolution of life itself, so it was believed, as the Transcendence looked forward to the possibilities of an unlimited future, to infinity and eternity.

Soon, in any meaningful sense, the Transcendence would become a god.

But not yet. In these final brief moments, the Transcendents were still human. And they were not content.

All this was an abstraction to Alia, a matter of theology. The Transcendence itself was still only dimly glimpsed in her imagination, despite her training with Reath. What could a god want?…

The Campocs thought they knew.

The Transcendence understood the cause of its own anguish very well. It was the past. Of the trillions who had lived, most humans’ lives had been dominated by pain and fear, their only saving grace being that they had been short. But the past was the root from which the mighty tree of the present had grown. So how then could the Transcendence give itself up to the bliss of an unlimited future, while its base was stained with the blood of all those near who went before, and had lived and died in misery? Somehow the past had to be redeemed, for if not the goal of perfect Transcendence could never be reached; there would always be a deep flaw beneath the shining surface, a worm in the apple.

And so, under great programs administered by the Commonwealth’s Colleges of Redemption, every human child was made a Witness, as Alia had always studied the life of Michael Poole. You were assigned one character, one life thread drawn from the tapestry of the past, perfectly imaged with unimaginable technology. Any and every life was available to be remembered in this way — and not just the significant and famous, like Poole. Every last one of them needed to be treasured, and remembered. Every one.

Alia shook her head. “I never thought it through. To catalog the whole of the past, to make everybody a Witness — and to Witness everybody—”

Despite the tension of the situation Reath smiled. “We humans have always been bureaucrats. And the Transcendence must be supreme in this aspect of our nature, as it is in everything else!”

But it was expensive. Though it was far from complete, soon the Redemption program, in all its manifestations, was absorbing a significant portion of the energy budget of the Transcendence itself, and so of the combined powers of mankind.

Bale was watching her carefully. “And that’s what we’re worried about.” He stood up. “I will show you something. Come, we will walk to the statues. Your sister will be safe here, I promise.”

Alia glanced at Reath, who shrugged, out of control of events once more. Drea just sat passively. Reluctantly Alia pushed back her chair.

They returned to the fallen statues. Once more Alia stood before that monumental face.

Bale stepped forward. He bent and gathered up some of the strange bluish sand she had noticed piled by the mouth of the statue, and dug out a little more from its eye socket. “Alia, do you know what this is?”

“Sand,” she said bluntly.

He shook his head. “No. This is breath. And these are tears.”

The fallen forms were more than statues. They were humans.

In the age of Bifurcation that had followed the triumph of the Exultants, most post-human forms had been more or less similar to the basic human stock — like the heavy-gravity forms of the Rustball, or the aquatic creatures of the water-world, even Alia’s own low-gravity design. And rarely had the bounds of carbon-water chemistry been broken.

But in some places even those basic parameters had been ignored.

“Silicon isn’t an ideal information storage medium,” Bale said. “Not as good as carbon molecules. But in its crystalline form you can make complex structures, store as much data as you like. There are ways to copy the lattice structure, so you can reproduce; there can be divergent forms, mutations — evolution. Of course while we breathe out carbon dioxide such creatures would breathe out silicon dioxide — sand.”

Silicon chemistry was not as favorable a substrate for life as carbon. The properties of silicon compounds did not allow for as much complexity of molecular structure as carbon; and silicon did not bond so conveniently into forms that, like carbon dioxide, could be carried in the air or dissolved in the sea. That was why silicon-based life tended not to emerge even in places where there was far more silicon lying around than carbon, such as the crust of the Earth. But in some places, by chance, it did arise, such as here on Baynix II, the Dirtball.

There had been silicon-based life-forms on this silicon-rich world, native forms, long before humans arrived. And when humans came here, they chose to download their children into the silicon, rather than any carbon-chemistry medium: they had made them into these statues.

What a strange thing to do, Alia thought. She stroked the immense sandy cheek of the stone form before her. “Life would be so terribly slow.”

“Oh, yes,” Bale said. “But time is only perception. If you watch them over a century or so you can see them churn around in the sand…”

“Why keep the human form at all?”

Reath shrugged. “Sentiment? We evolved with human morphology, after all; perhaps we are more deeply wedded to it than we know.”

Alia walked around the head of the statue. She felt compelled to keep away from the line of sight of those immense graven eyes, though surely they could not see her; to this chthonic man she would be a flash of motion, gone in an instant. “So now I know what these statues are. I still don’t know why you brought me here.”

Bale regarded her gravely. “These people made their children into crawling things of stone, a form as remote from the basic human as it is possible to imagine. Why do you think they would do such a thing?”

Alia thought it through. “Because they were refugees. They had to hide.”

“Yes. And by abandoning the carbon-chemistry substrate they made themselves all but undetectable, even by a remote sweep for life. Nobody would expect to find humans hiding in stone…”

“Who were they hiding from?”

“Who do you think?” Bale said.

“Oh. Other people.”

Bale touched the huge hand of the statue. “We don’t know why they were fleeing. But after all this time, the desperation remains. Now can you see how much the Transcendence has to regret?”

Yes, Alia thought. And no matter how you try to achieve Redemption — no matter if every human who ever lived from now on spent her entire life on Witnessing, there would always be more pain: a bottomless pit of it.

Bale watched her sharply. “There. You see it, don’t you? The Transcendence is striving for a goal that is unachievable. That’s what we think. Yes, we are suspicious of it — and we aren’t the only ones. More and more of mankind’s resources are being poured into this sink of pointless ambition. Is there no better way to spend our wealth and power?

“And what if full Redemption can’t be achieved — what will the Transcendence do then? Alia, we think the Transcendence is approaching a crisis.”

Reath seemed shocked by this talk. “You must not anthropomorphize in this way. The Transcendence is not human, remember. It is more than human. And it has a cognizance beyond our petty comprehension. Even its regret is superhuman! You must not imagine you are capable of understanding it.”

Bale bowed his head. “Perhaps not. But we fear it. We are all affected by the Transcendence, as a planet is ruled by the power of the sun it circles. And if the sun becomes unstable… We want to know, Alia. We want to know what the Transcendence plans to do next — and perhaps we can have some influence over it.”

Reath said heavily, “And that’s where Alia comes in, is it? You see her as your way into the Transcendence.”

Bale spread his hands, looking helpless despite his squat, powerful build. “We don’t know what else to do.”

Reath stood before Alia, anger flaring in his eyes. “If you become a Transcendent, Alia, it must be for your own purposes, your own desires, not for his. ”

Alia stared at them. Much of this discussion went far above her head, this philosophy, abstraction. But these theological disputes obviously meant a great deal to these men, enough for them to have put her sister’s life at risk.

So what was she supposed to do?

She looked inside herself for guidance — and she thought of Michael Poole, the subject of her own Witnessing. What would Poole have thought if he could look ahead to this strange future of ours? What would he think of us, this obsession with the past — would he think we were insane?

There was only one way she could find out more, perhaps only one way to resolve all this.

She faced Bale and Reath. “I will go forward. I will continue on this path; I will go on to the Transcendence. But you are right,” she said to Reath. “If I do enter the Transcendence it will be for my own purposes, not anybody else’s. Not even yours, Reath.”

He bowed his head.

“Bale, I have listened to what you say. But I will promise you nothing. Nothing. And I will not act under duress. You will release my sister now. ”

He faced her down for a heartbeat. Then he, too, bowed his head.

Alia heard a gasp. In the shadow of the tent, Drea had slumped forward. The Campocs were clumsily attending her.

Alia turned back to Bale. “We were partners. I thought you cared for me. But you betrayed me.”

“Oh, Alia—”

“If you ever harm any of my family again, I will make you pay.”

He said nothing, and he tried to keep his mind closed to her. But she sensed fear. Good, she thought. Perhaps there will be advantages to being a Transcendent after all.

She began to walk back to Reath’s shuttle. “Are we done here? What’s next?”

I peered through the door into darkness.

I glanced back at my companions. Shelley watched me with a lively curiosity, Vander with obvious envy. In their different ways, both of them longed to step through this door. But it was me Gea had asked for.

I stepped through the doorway -

Wham.

I was standing in the open air, beside a riverbank. Under a glaring sun, the ground was crowded with vegetation. It was ferociously hot and humid.

When I looked back, the door and its frame had disappeared. I guessed I was in some kind of immersive VR. But there had been no sense of transition, none of the usual preparation, no lying down in a darkened place or a sensory-deprivation tank. I was simply here. Wherever here was.

I stepped forward, toward the river. My fake-leather shoes slipped on the bare rock, or stuck in patches of mud. Sweating hard, I felt ridiculous in my shirt and jacket, city clothes. I was not equipped for this.

There was nobody about, no sign of buildings or vehicles. As far as I could see nothing moved, no animals crawled; there was no sound but the chirping of some insect. And not a single bird flew in the sky.

The river was broad, meandering, sluggish, working its way through a wide valley littered by marshes and swamps. Vegetation crowded, green and lush, vigorous. But with the shock of my immersion wearing off, I started to tune in to strangeness.

There were lots of mosses and ferns, and lining the riverbank stands of what I thought might be bamboo, but on closer inspection looked more like horsetails. Away from the river itself taller trees crowded in thickets, surrounded by an undergrowth of ferns and mosses. The trees were some kind of fern, I thought, with a woody trunk and leaves clustered in strange starbursts at the ends of their branches. They looked like ginkgoes, maybe. Elsewhere there were patches of scrub, low-lying ferns and something like heather.

The place was oddly drab. Everything was a deep muddy green: there was no other color anywhere, no flowers. And there was no grass, oddly.

I stepped close to the water and squatted down. I rustled at the undergrowth, moving it aside. The leaves and fronds were heavy and damp; if this was VR the detail impressed me.

At last I saw something move. I disturbed plenty of insects: centipedes, cockroaches, beetles. Snails and worms crawled through the mud by the water’s edge, and a dragonfly fluttered into the air on filmy wings. Again I was struck by what was not here: no bees or wasps, no ants, not a single termite mound.

I made out a ripple in the water, a ridged back breaking the surface. It looked like a crocodile — but the head I glimpsed, the tail, didn’t look quite right.

Then something scuttled out from between my legs. I jumped back with a start. It was a little creature no larger than my hand, running on splayed legs. With four legs and a tail, it looked something like a lizard. But the shape of its head and body were subtly off, like a sketch made from memory. It scuttled back into the undergrowth.

And as I stared after the lizard thing, I heard a bellow, a deep, mournful sound. My heart pounding, I turned around.

Animals moved across the landscape, perhaps half a kilometer from me, a dozen of them in a scattered herd. They had massive barrel-shaped bodies, but their weak-looking limbs sprawled out to either side of them, and they moved slowly, clumsily. Their heads were big shovel-shapes with broad mouths. They were the size of cows, although there were a couple of smaller individuals, infants. But on those splayed legs they had a reptilelike gait; they looked like fat, land-going crocodiles.

The cow-crocs gathered around the tree ferns and dragged at their leaves with their big plated mouths. They didn’t seem to have any teeth. My anxiety subsided. Herbivores, then; I should have no trouble with them unless I got in the way of a stampede.

But then I made out a low, lithe shape slinking through the shade of a tree. It was smaller than the cow-crocs, maybe the size of a dog, with a bulky body and stubby tail. It had sideways-askew legs, another variant on the theme of crocodile. But there was nothing sluggish or ungainly about the way this creature moved, nothing stupid about the sharp eyes I could see gleaming in that blunt head.

I stood stock-still. It was foolish to be afraid. This must be a VR, and VRs were full of safeguards; I should have nothing to fear. But this VR was of a density and richness like none I’d experienced before — and it wasn’t under my control.

“Do you know what you’re looking at?”

I was startled. The voice was small, metallic, and it came from near my feet.

A toy robot, fifteen centimeters tall, stood on a patch of bare rock. Its shell was painted gaudy colors, red and blue and yellow, but the paintwork was chipped and scuffed, heavily played with. It had eyes like glass beads that lit up when it talked, and a tiny grill from which its insect-sized voice emanated. It was pointing a ray gun at me, but I didn’t feel too concerned, as the ray gun and the arm that held it were just shaped tin shells. It didn’t even have legs, just molded shapes concealing wheels. It rolled toward me now, and a friction mechanism crackled and sparked.

“I know you,” I said. “You’re uncle George’s companion. His home help.”

“Not quite.”

“What are you doing here?… Oh. You’re Gea, aren’t you?”

“You can think of me as Gea if you like.” She spoke with that ridiculous cod-American toy-robot accent.

“And you chose to manifest yourself as uncle George’s robot?”

“I used a form you are familiar with. What did you expect?” She ran back and forth a little, sparking. “Actually this form does the job. Although it’s sometimes tricky getting around.”

“I bet it is.” I glanced up the valley toward the shambling herd of cow-crocs. “Am I in the past? What are those creatures, dinosaurs?”

“Not dinosaurs. Dinosaurs haven’t evolved, yet.”

That yet chilled me. “They behave like mammals but they walk like reptiles.”

“They are neither. They are a class from which true mammals will one day evolve. The paleontologists call them mammal-like reptiles. The big herbivores are called pareiasaurs. Those you see on the far side of the river” — a huddle of smaller, more nervous-looking creatures — “are a kind of dicynodont. The predator is a type of gorgonospian.”

I glanced at my feet. “And the little lizards?”

“They aren’t lizards. Lizards haven’t evolved yet, either. Some of them are reptiles called procolophonids. Others have no name. Only species which have left a distinguishable trace in the fossil record have names assigned by human paleontologists.”

“So how can you reconstruct them?”

“Extrapolation, from traces in modern genomes, ecological-balance calculations, other sources. I am confident in the veracity of what you see.”

“Oh, are you? Where am I, Gea?”

“You are some two hundred and fifty million years into the past. This is an era known to the geologists as the Permian. If you want more precision—”

Two hundred and fifty million years.“That’s precise enough.”

“Much that is familiar has yet to evolve. The whole hundred-million-year history of the dinosaurs, their rise and fall, follows after this time. There are no grasses yet, no flowering plants, no wasps or bees or termites or ants. There are no birds. And yet there is much that is familiar, deeper qualities.”

“Yes.” I thought it over. “All the animals have four legs, one head, one tail.”

“The tetrapodal body plan is a relic of the first lungfish to crawl out of some muddy river onto the land, a choice once made never unmade; presumably all animal life from Earth will always follow this plan. And there are deeper, persistent patterns in the nature of life: the dance of predator and prey, for instance.”

At the base of this ancient food chain were plants, insects, and invertebrates. Little lizardlike creatures, like my procolophonids, ate the plants and insects, and in turn various carnivores munched on their bones. At the very top of the food chain were the gorgonospians, like the saber-tooth critter I had seen; gorgonospians ate pretty much everything, including each other.

“This is the first complex ecosystem on land,” the robot said. “But it is based on a web of food and energy flows nearly as complex as today’s. For such an ancient scene, it is remarkably rich.” Her tiny voice sounded even more ridiculous when she used words like ecosystem.

“So why are you showing me all this?”

“Because it is about to be wiped out.” The robot rolled backward. Her glass-bead eyes flashed. And the world changed.

I staggered. It felt as if the land surface beneath my feet melted and flowed.

And suddenly it was hot, a sweltering heat much more severe than the tropical humidity I had suffered earlier. It was dry, airless, and I found myself gasping; I tugged at my shirt, ripping buttons to open the neck.

The land had changed utterly.

The basic topography remained, the river and its valley, the eroded hills further away. But the river was low, a trickle in a plain of dried and cracked mud. And the green-brown blanket of life had shrunk back everywhere. The stands of ginkgolike trees were bare trunks, lifeless. Only scattered bushes and low ferns, and smaller undergrowth plants, weedlike, seemed to be surviving. I saw none of the big cow-sized herbivores, or the doglike carnivores that had hunted them. Suddenly this was an empty stage.

But still there was life here. An animal poked its nose out of a burrow, cautiously, like a badger emerging from its set. This was a low-slung reptilian, about the size of a cat, with the characteristic croclike splayed legs and wedge-shaped head of the time. Snuffling, the animal managed to expose a stand of mushrooms, pale and sickly, and it dug its face into their white flesh. There wasn’t much flesh beneath its warty skin, and I could see the bones of its spine and rib cage.

It looked up at me, at the only biped on the planet. Its eyes were glazed, incurious. Then it shambled toward the river, seeking water.

The little robot was still at my feet, her glass eyes blank.

“So what’s happened?”

“There have been major eruptions,” the robot said. “Far from here, in Siberia, too far away to hear or see. But they have had a global influence.”

They had not been volcanoes, I learned. Magma, “flood basalts,” had come seeping from fissures in the ground, and had covered vast areas.

“When the eruptions began the injection of dust into the air caused a snap freeze, a couple of cold summers. But since then the huge flows of basalt have been emitting carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide.”

“Greenhouse gases.”

“Yes. The result is a rise in air temperatures, all around the planet. Life here was always precarious. Even a one-degree rise in temperature has been enough to kill off many plants, and the herbivores that fed off them—”

“And the carnivores that fed off them. ”

“Yes. There have been few actual extinctions yet, but biotas have been disrupted, and populations of plant and animal species have crashed. The creature by the river is a dicynodont. Its habit of burrowing in the ground to estivate has enabled it to ride out the worst of the heat where others have succumbed.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Worse is to come.”

“Yes.”

Another snap transition; I staggered, shocked.

That baking sun had disappeared. Suddenly rain poured out of a cloud-choked sky, hammering on my head and shoulders hard enough to hurt — but then I realized that the water was actually stinging me, like a mild acid. Hastily I dragged my jacket over my head. But there was no relief from the sweltering heat; the air was so humid it was actually difficult to breathe.

The robot stood patiently at my feet, rain splashing from its paintwork.

“Shit,” I shouted. “You might have warned me.” I could barely hear my own voice above the roar of the rain.

“The dicynodonts had no warning.”

“More eruptions?”

“Yes. The basalt traps are pumping out chlorine, fluorine, sulphur dioxide, as well as carbon dioxide. These gases are combining with the high air to form a cocktail of acids, hydrochloric, sulphuric, carbonic—”

“Acid rain.”

“Yes. The last of the trees and the larger plants are now being burned off. Animals are being flayed alive. Those dicynodonts still shelter in their holes, but there is nothing to eat but a few ferns and moss and lichen in crevices by the river.”

“And it’s going to get worse, isn’t it?”

The robot seemed to hesitate. “Would you prefer a warning this time?”

“Just do it.”

Another bewildering change.

The rain had cleared, the sky stripped of clouds to reveal the sun once more. But the sky was tinged a washed-out orange-brown, with barely a scrap of blue. I still stood beside the river valley, but it seemed much broader than before, its banks roughly scoured away. Its floor was littered with boulders and banks of gravel, and further downstream it was incised by channels that cut across each other like braided hair.

The land was bare rock. I couldn’t see a scrap of green anywhere: there wasn’t even soil cover. It was as if a great knife had scraped over the ground, cutting away all the soil and plants and trees, all the animals and insects.

That robot still stood at my feet, unchanged, patient. I felt irrationally angry at her, as if she had caused all this devastation. I took a deep breath — and my lungs ached. “Jesus. I can barely breathe.”

“Actually,” the robot said, “I have used some artistic licence. If you tried to breathe the authentic air of this period you would shortly die of anoxia.”

“What happened, Gea?”

“Gas hydrates,” she said simply.

The carbon dioxide injected into the air by the Siberian volcanic event had caused global temperatures to rise by several degrees. Eventually, at the poles, the ocean margins and tundra began to thaw out. Just as Tom had experienced in 2047, there had been an immense release of the methane and carbon dioxide trapped in the ice — a hundred-fold expansion in volume when that great lid of cold was released. All over the polar regions there had been vast bubbles, water spouts, the very ground crumbling and cracking open as geysers of the stuff spewed into the air. It must have been a hell of a sight.

The effects were disastrous.

Gea said, “The injection of the first of these deposits into the air fed back into the greenhouse cocktail already working in the atmosphere, and warming increased further—”

“Which thawed out more hydrates, which released more gases, which increased the warming effect.” Any engineer would recognize a positive feedback cycle. Around and around it went, getting hotter and hotter, the air filling up with the noxious gas.

When all the hydrate banks had emptied, a violent warming pulse followed. Not only that, there was now so much carbon dioxide in the air that as it seeped around the planet the levels of oxygen were reduced to far below normal.

“The last of the dicynodonts probably suffocated rather than starved,” the robot said. “At least it was quick. The ferns and cycads and other opportunistic species that took the chance to propagate during the warming pulse — even they have gone now. A few plants survive, just weeds, clinging on in pockets of soil.”

I looked around at the barren landscape. “It’s like being on Mars. Nothing but rock and dust.”

“That isn’t a bad comparison,” the robot said. “Look at the river. Can you see the heavy debris, the braiding effect in the channels? There is no life here, nothing to bind together the soil. When the rains came all the remaining soil was quickly washed away, and heavy debris scoured the channels. You can find such braiding in rivers on Mars, which likewise formed their courses in the absence of life.”

The oceans had suffered, too. When the rains came all the dead and stinking vegetation was washed away into the rivers and swept downstream to the sea. Around the mouths of the rivers the seabeds were covered in a carpet of organic matter, the rotting corpses of animals, dead vegetation, all mulching down to a thick black slime that choked the life of the seafloor, the molluscs, shrimps, worms, arthropods. As it decayed this foul stuff drew down yet more oxygen from the air and emitted yet more carbon dioxide and other foul gases. Meanwhile the excess carbon dioxide poisoned the plankton, the tiny organisms that were the basis of all marine food chains. Thus oceanic populations imploded just as those on land had.

Gea said, “Biodiversity was reduced to about a tenth of what it had been before. Ninety percent of all marine species went extinct, seventy percent of land vertebrates. The numbers are approximate, of course; we will never know it all. It was far worse, by an order of magnitude, even than the dinosaur-extinction event. This disaster must have come close to ending the story of multicelled life altogether.”

“But life recovered,” I said. “Didn’t it?”

“Oh, yes. Eventually.”

After this end-Permian extinction event the world was a desolate place, its complicated ecosystems imploded — and its ruins became dominated by a single animal. The lystrosaur, a kind of dicynodont that looked something like a pig, was a chance survivor that took its extraordinary opportunity; soon ninety-five percent of all the animal flesh in the world was lystrosaur meat.

Recovery came as the descendants of such survivors, shaped by time and evolution’s scalpel, diversified to fill all those empty niches. A new world of dinosaurs and pine trees would emerge from the rubble of the old, and at last, after further extinction events, would follow the flowering plants and the grasses and the true mammals, and mankind.

But it took time. For some ten million years the world remained empty, dismal, all its old richness gone. And biodiversity would not recover the levels it had lost for fifty million years.

“Much was never to be replaced at all,” said the little robot. “The old order of the mammal-like reptiles and the spiky trees under which they grazed was lost, gone forever.”

“Why show me this? You aren’t claiming that the eruptions in Siberia are about to kick off again?”

“No. But a similar causative sequence may be unfolding. The root cause of the Permian extinction was the Siberian-trap eruptions. Their emissions of carbon dioxide and methane began a global-warming pulse, but the tipping point came when the temperatures rose so high that polar gas hydrate deposits began to be released. After that a positive feedback effect did the rest.”

“There are no basalt eruptions going on today,” I said. “But instead of the Siberian traps—”

“Mankind,” the robot said. “Your activities, by injecting heat and greenhouse gases into the air over centuries, have had precisely the same effect as the Permian-era eruptions. And similar consequences.” She said this simply.

Standing there on that baked, dead plain, I tried to think it through.

I had grown up with the Warming, laden with guilt over extinctions and environmental degradations that had happened long before I was born. Like most people, I guess I got bored with it, and got on with my life. “It’s like living with original sin,” uncle George once said to me. “We’re all Catholics now, Michael.”

Then along came President Amin. We all went through the great wrench of giving up our automobiles, and we were smugly proud of the Stewardship. The Warming stopped seeming so bad, the Bottleneck not quite such a hazardous highway. Oh, it was a drag for anybody caught in a flood or a hurricane, and I knew we were still at risk. But we were muddling through. So I’d thought. Even the parts-per-million projections of the final greenhousing load of carbon dioxide in the air were starting to fall.

Now here was Gea telling me that I had been fooling myself — that Tom was right. I couldn’t believe it, on some deep intuitive level.

Gea said, “Perhaps you aren’t thinking about the Warming, the Die-back, the right way. Perhaps, deep down, you imagine that the Earth’s processes are linear. That the response from the biosphere will be proportionate to the pushing you give it. But that isn’t necessarily so.

“The Earth’s systems are only quasi-stable. For example the Amazon forests, drought-stricken, are dying back rapidly. The injection of their locked-up carbon into the atmosphere raised temperatures, which will in turn accelerate the dying of the forest. This is biogeophysical feedback. And so it goes, on a global scale, geospheric and biospheric systems flipping suddenly to other states.

“Not only that, the various factors, themselves nonlinear, interact with each other in a nonlinear way: habitat destruction, overpopulation, overharvesting, pollution, ozone destruction, all working together—”

“Lethe.You’re talking about Lethe. The anti-Gaia.”

“There comes a point where if you keep pushing you don’t get more of the same but something new entirely, events of a different quality.”

“You know, I think I imagined that you would be like an electronic Gaia. Here we are talking about death.”

“I contain both Gaia and Lethe, in my imagination,” she said.

“OK.” I had to ask the final question. “And if temperatures were again to reach the point where the hydrate deposits are released—”

“The normal interactions between life and the physical world will break down completely. Gaia will nearly die.”

“The end of the world?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t put it as severely as that! It won’t even be the end of mankind. You are far more widespread than the lystrosaurs ever were; humans are smart and adaptable and able to recover. You are hard to kill off completely — though it is easy to kill vast numbers of you.”

“But our culture will be destroyed. Most of us will die. Billions.”

She rolled back and forth, emitting showers of sparks, her little wheels scraping across a lid of post-Permian bare rock. “You know, it’s a lot easier to move around now that everything is dead,” she said. “No foliage to clog up my wheels, no insects to get in the way or hopping amphibians to knock me over. Perhaps we should give over the world to robots—”

“Shut up,” I said.

She stopped still.

“How long do we have?”

“That’s hard to say. A decade? Probably less.”

“This can’t be allowed to happen.”

“I tend to agree.” A thick bound report popped into existence on the rock surface before her. “I am delivering a definitive study today to all my sponsoring agencies, and all governments and intergovernmental agencies. Not that I expect this to make a difference by itself; people have a tendency to dismiss bad news.”

“Is that why you brought me here?”

“You asked to see me, remember,” she said. “You came to me asking questions about the polar hydrates.”

“OK. But what now? Do you want me to argue the case for you?”

“More than that.”

The tinny voice lacked tone, color. But I knew what she wanted of me.

“You expect me to do something about it, don’t you?…” Was that what this was all about? Did Gea, this superhuman artificial intelligence, expect me to come up with a way to save the world? “Gea, if you’re so concerned why don’t you do something about it?”

The robot rolled back and forth. “I am a biosphere modeler. I have my specified goals. But it is difficult to limit sentience. I am curious. I am concerned not just with my models but their implications. But I cannot initiate any action in the wider world; I have neither the means nor the authority.”

“You need a human to do it.”

“I needed a human to come asking the right questions, yes.”

I said harshly, “What do you care about the destiny of life? You have never been alive yourself.”

“Michael Poole, I am fearful.”

“Fearful? You?”

“I am facing extinction, too, I and the other sentiences you have brought into the world. Hasn’t that occurred to you? Probably not. None of us can survive without the infrastructure of human society. If this goes on, artificial intelligences will be one with the mammoths and the cave bear…”

I thought I saw movement in the corner of my eye — movement, here on this lifeless VR world, inhabited only by me, a tin robot, and lystrosaur bones. I turned.

A human figure, slim and silent, stood at the summit of one of the low, bare hills. She was so far away the Mist obscured her. But I knew who she was.

I whispered, “Do you see her, Gea?”

“You are important, Michael Poole,” Gea said. “Significant.”

“I don’t want to be significant… You see her, don’t you? Tell me. You see Morag. ”

“You stand at a crossroads. A tipping point. The world and its cargo of life faces the gravest danger in human history — perhaps since the Permian. And yet you have strength, unprecedented, greater than at any time in human history.”

“Are you talking about Higgs-energy?”

“One day the future will be as you imagine, Michael Poole. But first you must make the future come to pass.”

“How can I shape the future when I’m haunted by a ghost from the past?”

“But the deepest past and furthest future merge into one…”

Morag stood still, and yet she seemed to be receding from me, sinking deeper into the unreal mist. I longed to run after her, but knew it would be futile.

In this lifeless world, alone with an utterly alien mind and a virtual ghost, I shivered.