Xeelee: Endurance

AD 978,225

1

‘Massive sensor dysfunction!’

This time his own shout dragged Coton out of his dreams. He lay on his pallet, gasping, sweat coating his face.

‘It’s all right.’ Here was his grandmother, Vala, in her night robe, her round, calm face shadowed in the glow cast by a single hovering light globe. Above him loomed the frame of Vala’s house, a tetrahedron of metal bars and panels hung with musty tapestries, cosy and cluttered and mundane. ‘You woke yourself up.’

‘And you. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be.’ She sat on his pallet and passed her hand over his brow. Her fingertip traced the tattoo there, an inverted black tetrahedron, like her own. ‘It’s why you came here, in a way. So I can help you cope with the nightmares.’

‘But it wasn’t like my other dreams.’ He’d had plenty of nightmares of flight. It was only a month since the ships of the Second Coalition had appeared in the skies of Centre, and the officials and the troops had landed to impose their curfews and tithes and evacuations – and the population, enraged, had turned in on itself, and Weaponised families like Coton’s had become targets of hate and frustration. Only a month since he’d had to abandon his parents, and his world, at the age of seventeen.

‘But this was different.’ He clenched his fists and huddled them into his chest. ‘I couldn’t move. As if my arms and legs had been cut off. I could see and hear, but there was something wrong with my head. I was floating in this big sky, a red sky that was full of glowing shapes, like light globes – or stars. But I hated it, for it was wrong.’

‘Wrong?’

‘I shouldn’t have been there. It was my duty to get everyone out – to get them home. But I couldn’t move.’ He twisted, as if wrapped up.

She took his hands. ‘There could be another cause. Your parents would have explained all this, one day . . . You know we’re Adepts, Coton, don’t you? And young Adepts sometimes have dreams – we call them gravity dreams. It might be nothing to do with the pogroms back on Centre . . . But dreams of immobility are common even among normals, I think. These things are subtle, indirect. Your dream could be a sign that you’re healing, in some way. The waking mind trying to reconnect with the body.’

‘What did I say?’

‘When you woke up? Not words I recognised. Mas-eef . . . Can you replay?’

Coton’s own voice came echoing out of the air, the sound shaped by the smart systems that pervaded Vala’s environment. ‘Ma-seef senss-or dees-funx-eon.’

‘Doesn’t mean anything,’ Coton said.

‘Perhaps not. The words sound archaic. It might be interesting to check.’

That was just like his grandmother, whose scholarship, according to his own mother, had made her a cold parent, and caused them to fall out. Her own world, this world, after all, had no name but a numbered label – Delta Seven – and Vala referred to it, not as home, but as ‘the college’. Now he was stuck here with her, and she was studying his dream as if it was an academic puzzle.

He felt a surge of resentment. He needed to move, to blow away the last dark shreds of his nightmare. He pushed aside the sheets and rolled off his pallet, his bare feet on the cool floor.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I need some water.’

He shoved his way out through the thick woven flap that was the door of the house, and emerged into cavernous gloom. ‘Lights.’ A sprinkling of globes lit up and revealed the expanse of this Map Room, the shining floor, the complicated walls with their reefs of shelving, and the alcoves folding off into the dark like suppressed memories.

He made for a bathroom block, a neat cube a hundred paces away. Here there were spigots and low sinks. He bent, and the water, flowing without a command, poured into his mouth, cool and clean.

When he was quenched he stood back, and found himself staring at the spigot.

Vala walked to his side, wrapped in a black cloak, evidently uncertain of his mood. She saw what he was staring at. ‘You know, that spigot was put here for the scholars who once worked in this chamber. Now the students are long gone. But the spigot itself, the tip of a vast self-maintaining system, doesn’t care whose thirst it quenches; it just does its job, millennium after millennium. I’m sure there’s a lesson for us all in that . . .’

He glanced back at her shack, sitting squat on the shining floor of this immense building. ‘Long gone?’

‘Oh, yes. It’s obvious my house is much more recent than the Map Room itself. When I first moved in I could even see traces of a hearth. Somebody had been building fires, here on the floor of the Room. That’s how badly things fell apart, when the last unified government collapsed. And this is what the worlds of mankind are like, all across the Galaxy – or at least the part of it we still inhabit. We are a lesser generation, squatting in the ruins of a greater past. Lighting fires on the marble floors of libraries.’

They walked together across the gleaming floor, their voices small in the huge hall. ‘What did they study here?’

‘You know, you’ve been here a month, and this is the first time you’ve shown any real curiosity about this place. I think that’s a good sign, don’t you?’

But he had no wish to be analysed, and he kept silent until she answered his question.

‘The truth is, I’m not sure. The archives have been very damaged. The college probably served two main purposes. First it was a branch of the Library of Futures. The architecture is similar to the central Library on Earth.’ She waved a hand. ‘Once, you know, the air in here, those alcoves and shelves, would have been full of Virtual images of space battles, ships hurling themselves against the enemy in sheaves of unrealised possibilities!’

He barely understood this, but it was a thrilling vision. ‘What enemy?’

‘The Xeelee, of course. What other enemy is there? As for the second function – if I’m to show you that, you’ll have to come outside, just briefly.’

She linked her arm in his, and led him to a walkway that jolted into motion, making Coton stagger. They were swept towards a blank wall at alarming speed. Coton tried not to show his nervousness. All this was grander than anything he was used to on Centre, and more ancient, and he couldn’t help wondering what would happen if the power were to choose today to fail. Vala seemed quite unconcerned.

In the very last instant the wall puckered and opened, to reveal a gleaming corridor. The walkway swept them inside, and Coton tried not to flinch. They passed along the corridor, and emerged in the open air, on a parapet that rimmed this cubical building, under a star-filled sky. Coton’s bare feet were cold.

He hadn’t been outside since he’d been dumped here from the Coalition scow – he did recall it had been night then, always night here on this sunless world – and he only vaguely remembered the landscape, the city. Buildings stood proud as far as he could see, most of them intact, in rows and crescents and great overlapping circles. It was like a museum of architecture. But, under a sprinkling of light globes, most of the buildings were dark, and here and there fires flickered. And between the buildings, though some of the moving walkways evidently still ran, vegetation had broken through the ancient pavement and flourished green and black and purple.

Vala said, ‘You must imagine this university-city as it was in its day, when these lanes were full of flitters and ground vehicles, and Commissaries crowded in their black robes. What a sight it must have been! The college was surely a strategic anchor of the Library of Futures, in this corner of the Sagittarius Arm. And the other purpose was – that!’ She pointed into the sky.

There was nothing much to be seen just where Vala was pointing – but what a sky it was, Coton thought. Stars hung like crimson lanterns before a veil of wispy, glowing gas, where dense knots told of new stars struggling to shine. But behind all that lay a deeper darkness, a profound night that spanned half the sky. That was the signature of the Xeelee – of the Scourge.

‘Do you recognise what you’re seeing? Which way is Sol, for example?’

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, away from the Scourge darkness. ‘That way.’

‘Yes. About nine thousand light years away, in fact. Sol is in the next spiral arm out from the centre of the Galaxy – and opposite the Scourge, the darkening of the stars. The Xeelee are only a few hundred light years out from us now, and they’ll be here in a millennium or so. Before they pass on towards Sol itself.’

‘Not if the Second Coalition can stop them. The Marshals have a plan. The crew told me on the freighter.’

She snorted. ‘I’d like to hear it . . . As for the young stars, we’re in the Carina nebula, one of the Galaxy’s great stellar nurseries.’

‘They won’t last long—’

‘No. Even the youngest star in the Galaxy is infested by photino birds. And it is the action of the photino birds that was, I believe, the second subject of the college’s study . . .’

Photino birds: creatures of dark matter that swarmed in the hearts of stars, subtly manipulating their evolution. Subtly killing the light. Meanwhile the Xeelee, creatures of the light themselves, were opposing them, or trying to. Throughout human history, and for long ages before, a war in heaven had raged, all unobserved by mankind.

Vala pointed again. ‘Up there is a neutron star. When it was discovered by astronomers on Earth, it was one of the brightest stars in the Galaxy – as massive as a hundred Sols, and a million times as luminous. Its catalogue number was HD93129A.’

‘It must have imploded. A supernova—’

‘Yes. But it popped too quickly. The photino birds had tinkered! And under the old Coalition, the college was established here to study how that supernova process differed from the usual, whatever might be strange about the remnant neutron star, and whatever could be learned of the birds themselves.’ She smiled, and the coal-black tattoo on her forehead glinted in the red starlight. ‘What a sky! I sometimes think you can see all of human history summarised from this spot – and our future.’

‘So why are you here now? You and those you work with.’

‘We’re still studying the neutron star – but from a different point of view. We’re looking for relics of a later age.’

‘Relics?’

‘Weaponised. In the course of the Xeelee war, a post-Coalition government called the Integrality threw a breed of Weaponised humans into neutron stars, so they could turn those stars themselves into engines of war. Direct their flight, so they became like huge cannonballs. There are some in our neutron star, we think.’

Weaponised people – as Coton was, and his grandmother. ‘What will you do when you find them?’

‘Try to save them.’ She smiled. ‘We Weaponised must stick together. There are many of us here – a few Adepts like us, and other kinds on this world – even a few exotic types around the neutron star—’

‘Around it?’

‘As knots in the magnetic field. When it came to creating human-analogues as weapons of war, the Integrality was nothing if not ingenious. We’ve organised ourselves for the rescue work; it is a project run by Weaponised for the benefit of Weaponised. No government supports us, and nor would we want it. We consult, trade, research, even farm, to support those who do the work of rescue; some local populations even pay us a tithe, for they recognise the worth of what we’re doing. I’ll show you what we’re planning for the Starfolk – the inhabitants of the neutron star. We’ve even created a vivarium to hold them, when we retrieve them.’

‘A vivarium?’

‘A tank of neutron superfluid . . . The Starfolk are creatures of nuclear forces, Coton, and they scale accordingly. To them we’re misty giants.’

He rubbed the inverted-tetrahedron tattoo on his own forehead. ‘You know, I’ve grown up knowing I’m Weaponised. But I never knew what our special skill was supposed to be.’

‘It was bred out of us – though some of us still have gravity dreams, when young. It’s generally thought best if children don’t know. They get into less trouble that way.’

She led him back into the building, along the corridor with its eerily dilating doors, and to the Map Room.

‘I know you didn’t want to leave home, Coton. You didn’t want to come here. But you understand there was no choice.’

‘My parents spent all they had keeping me out of the labour colonies.’

‘Yes. But now you’re here, and there’s work to do. What do you think?’

His head whirled, full of new ideas and images and the lingering shadow of his nightmare. ‘I think I’m tired.’

She laughed. ‘Back to bed for both of us, then. We’ll talk more in the morning.’ She led him to their tetrahedral shack.

He lay down in his pallet. Soon his thoughts were dissolving into sleep.

But he was woken by Vala, outside the shack, murmuring questions. ‘Ma-seef senss-or dees-funx-eon. Seek possible translations and date the language. And keep the noise down . . .’

A solemn synthesised voice murmured a reply.

And Vala asked, ‘How old?’

He was next woken by the tumbling crash of supersonic flight, a noise too familiar from Centre. Without dressing, without looking for Vala, impatiently waiting for the walls to open, he rushed out of the building.

The sky was full of Second Coalition warships.

2

Massive sensor dysfunction!

Sometimes Lura thought that if she could only understand that strange complaint of the Mole, she would be able to make much more sense of the machine itself, her mother’s strange bequest. On the other hand, if it just kept quiet she wouldn’t have to fret so much about hiding it. Nothing was ever simple!

But right now she had other problems, for her tree wasn’t happy. Lura could feel it, even hanging as she was in her fire pod, dangling from the central trunk of Tree Forty-Seven.

She had spent her shift as tree pilot artfully shaping the screen of grey smoke beneath the tree, and so she looked up at it now through billowing, sooty clouds. The tree was a wheel fifty paces across, its twelve radial branches fixed to the stout trunk at the centre. And that wheel turned, ponderously graceful like all of its kind, the light of the endlessly falling stars casting subtle shades and blood-red highlights, and she could feel the downwash created by its shaped branches as they bit into the air. Tree Forty-Seven was at the bottom of the great stack of the Forest, layer upon layer of straining trees all tethered by their long cables to the kernel far below her – the husk of a burned-out star, no wider than the tree, pocked and hollowed-out and rusted the colour of blood.

And she could sense her tree’s unhappiness in the faint shudders that rustled those banks of leaves as it turned, and a groan of wood on wood as the massive bolus counterturned within the hollow trunk. She knew what was wrong, but there was nothing she could do about it, not for now.

It was a relief when she heard the whistles and rattles sound all across the Forest, calling the shift change.

Sweating, her bare arms covered in soot, her lungs full of smoke and her eyes gritty, she swarmed up the rope from the fire-pot through her smokescreen. Passing through the blade-like branches, with disturbed skitters spinning up around her, she picked up her pack of rope and food where she had left it hooked on a stubby branchlet.

She stroked the trunk’s hard surface. ‘Well, you’ve a right to be unhappy, Forty-Seven,’ she said. ‘Stuck down here as you are.’ She didn’t agree with the Brothers’ policy of ‘punishing’ ill or poorly performing trees by marooning them at the base of the Forest stack – she’d argued over this with Brother Pesten, her own old tutor, many times. The tree had a subtle gravity sense and would be well aware of the pull of the kernel – very strong down on its surface, and still a perceptible drag here, two hundred paces or so up. Trees were creatures of the open air, and sought to flee deep gravity wells – which, of course, was the instinct their human masters exploited to put them to work. Lura, eighteen thousand shifts old, understood that to be unable to escape this deep well for shift after shift was torture for Forty-Seven. So she patted the tree’s trunk, and put her cheek to its rugged surface and felt the mass of the bolus spinning in its confinement within. ‘I’ll see if those idiots in the pilots’ conference will allow me to move you—’

‘You still talking to the trees, Lura?’ The coarse voice of Ord was loud in the branches above her. He came swinging down through the turning branches, and settled his webbed feet on a trunk gnarl near her. He was her replacement as tree pilot for the next shift. A thousand shifts older than Lura, he was a big man, strong, clumsy-looking, but graceful enough when he moved in the shifting gravity fields of the Forest.

‘Oh, leave me alone, Ord.’

He swung closer, and she could feel the half-gee drag of his heavy body. He pulled his goad from his belt, a stabbing-spear of fire-hardened wood. ‘This is all you need to make a tree do what you want it to do.’

She kicked away from the trunk and settled on a branch. ‘You stink. You’re so fat you trap your own foul air in your gee-well.’

‘That’s my manhood you’re smelling, little girl,’ he said, and he waggled his goad. ‘Rumour is you’ve still never lain with a man. Maybe you should carve this tree a dick. Then you wouldn’t have to bother with people at all.’

‘Sooner that than lie with you.’ She grabbed her pack and swarmed up through the tree’s patiently turning branches, leaving Ord’s coarse shouts behind her.

She climbed easily up through the stacked Forest, pulling herself through one turning tree after another or swinging on tether cables, and as she rose further out of the kernel’s gravity well the climbing got easier still. She was making for Tree Twenty-Four, at the very apex of the stack, where she had hidden the Mole – and she was glad of an excuse to get as far as possible from Ord and his crude advances.

People lived in the Forest. Houses of wood and woven bark dangled in the air, fixed to tether cables that spanned the tiers of the turning trees, and the air was full of smoke from the fire-pots – the trees fled from shade as much as from gravity and could be controlled that way. Here folk lived and died, ate, slept and played, and worked with their trees, encouraging them in the generations-long task of feeding star kernels into the unfillable maw of the Core of Cores. Right now it was shift-change time, and people were in motion everywhere, the adults making their way to and from their assignments, the Brothers letting the children out of their classes.

She passed one party laden with baskets of food. You couldn’t eat the substance of the trees themselves, neither the skitters, which were the trees’ tiny spinning seeds, nor their round, pale leaves. But you could eat the fruit and berries and fungi that colonised the trunks and branch roots, and trap the various species of rat that fed off those growths in turn. Some said that the existence of the fruit and the rats proved that humans were part of this world, as much as flying trees and whales and the Core of Cores, and stars that fell through the air. Others clung to a legend that humans had come to this place from somewhere else – ‘Humans don’t belong here’, went the slogan – and held that the rats and the fungi and the rest, everything people could eat, had come out of the Ship that had brought the people here, the Ship itself long since lost.

But all around her people swam in the air, their webbed feet kicking, and children played complicated aerial games of chase, dancing through each other’s pinprick gravity wells with unconscious confidence. Lura felt a surge of joy as she watched the children – and envy for their carefree play. Wherever people had originally come from, this had been the reality of life for uncounted generations.

At last she’d climbed up through the forest to the highest tree in the stack: Twenty-Four, broad and handsome, its number etched into its bark. The pilot conference held that the trees were smart enough to respond to the lead of the strongest among them, and Lura wasn’t about to say they were wrong. Clambering easily up Twenty-Four’s tether, she swept with a smile past old Jorg, the tree’s pilot this shift, with his battered fire-pot and grimy blankets. And, once up in the tree itself, she made her way to the trunk, scattering clouds of skitters that spun briefly before nestling back in their parent tree’s leaves. For here, at the very crown of the trunk in a knot of immature branches, she had hidden the Mole.

She set down her rope and pack, anchored herself with her bare legs, dug her arms into the branches, and gingerly lifted out the Mole. It was a box about the size of her head, roughly square-edged. But it wasn’t made of wood or whale cartilage or any substance she recognised, but of something pale and shiny, and the hide was punctured by holes within which some other substance glimmered, hard and transparent. You could see that the Mole had once been part of something else, for stubs of cut-off panels and bits of pipe stuck out of its sides, and scorch marks showed that great heat had been used to cut this remnant out.

Cautiously she whispered, ‘Mole. Status.’

‘Massive sensor dysfunction. Massive sensor dysfunction—’

Its voice was blaring, grating, not like anything human at all. She always found it oddly upsetting. ‘Hush, Mole.’

‘Massive sensor dysfunction—’

‘Stop it! Stop talking!’ She found it hard to think, and to remember the phrases her mother had taught her. ‘Mole. End report.’

The voice cut off in mid-phrase. Lura heaved a sigh of relief, hugged the box to her chest, and settled back in the branches of Twenty-Four.

From up here, at the top of the Forest stack, her view of the sky she floated in was unimpeded. The air of the nebula was, as always, stained blood-red, and littered with clouds like handfuls of greyish cloth above and below her. Stars fell in a slow, endless rain that tumbled down to the nebula’s misty core. Their light cast shifting shadows from the clouds, and the wild trees, and huge misty blurs that might be whales. Beyond this nearby detail she could see the greater expanse of the spaces beyond the sky: the knotty patches of light that marked other nebulae, and the brilliant pink pinpricks of the big-stars, all of them orbiting the Core of Cores, a sullen, dark mass.

She was relieved nobody had found the Mole. Her mother had told her it must be kept hidden, especially from the Brothers, for it was her family’s oldest secret. For a time she had kept it tucked away inside the cabin she had shared with her parents. But when it had started squawking she could think of nowhere else to keep it but here, as far from the mass of people as she could find. Her mother’s sole legacy was nothing but a hassle.

She thought about the playing children. How she had loved being little, and carefree, and cherished! But one day her father had been killed when he had descended to the kernel to fix a loose cable; in the powerful gravity field of the burned-out star a simple fall had broken his back. Then her mother, always weak, had fallen to a condition of the lungs. And Lura, burdened with care, was a child no more.

Sometimes, in fact, she thought she had grown up too quickly. She always seemed to see dark shadows in the Forest’s daily bustle – the etiolated condition of some of the trees’ leaves, and the pale faces and straining chests of the weaker children, unable to keep up with the others. The nebula air wasn’t as rich as it used to be, the old folk said, it was smoky and made you gasp – and perhaps it had killed her mother. It was said that humans had come to this nebula from another that was dying. Well, it might be true, even if she had never heard anyone explain how people had hopped through the airless void from one nebula to another. But the trouble was, as she could see at a glance from here, even if that was possible, no nearby nebula was much healthier than this one – a healthy cloud being blue and full of bright yellow suns, and scattered with the greenery of trees. Every nebula she could see was a cramped red mass.

If all the nebulae were dying, then where were the people to go?

The Mole was certainly no help. She stared at its ugly hide, the stubby cut-offs. ‘Mole, you are strange and useless and nothing but trouble. And if you hadn’t meant so much to my mother I’d pitch you out of the tree—’

‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’

Startled, she scrambled in the foliage, and nearly lost her hold.

Brother Pesten hovered before her.

Pesten wore the simple dyed-black shift of the Brotherhood of the Infrastructure, and soft sandals on his feet. Tall and stick-thin, he was bald, with a fringe of unruly greying hair. He held himself oddly rigid as he hung in the air, with one steadying hand on the tree trunk. He had always seemed old to Lura, even when he had been her tutor, and now, of course, he was older still – perhaps as much as fifty thousand shifts. The tree pilots resented the Brothers. Nobody grew as old as a Brother, they muttered, because everybody else had to work too hard. But when Pesten smiled at Lura, a little bit of her softened, as it always had.

She clutched the Mole. ‘Who told on me?’

‘How do you know I didn’t just find the gadget for myself, shouting away in this treetop as it was?’

‘I remember you, Brother, and you were never one for climbing any further than you had to. Who told? Ord, I bet, that fat rat’s arse – no, if he’d found it he’d have blackmailed me for whatever he could get.’

‘Ord isn’t so bad. He’s never actually harmed you, has he? He just doesn’t know how to approach you.’

She couldn’t have cared less about that. ‘If not Ord then who?’

‘Old Jorg. Chief pilot of the Forest’s fulcrum tree.’

‘Jorg! I trusted him.’

‘You still can. He’s our most senior and experienced pilot, and he’s no fool. And when he saw you creeping around his tree with your gadget, he was concerned for you, for what you might be getting yourself into. So he came to me. Where did you get this thing?’

‘From my mother,’ she said ruefully. ‘We call it a Mole. I don’t know why. Handed down from her mother, and hers before her . . . I let them all down, didn’t I? The Mole was kept secret by my family for generations, and now I’ve had it for a few dozen shifts and the whole Forest knows about it.’

‘Don’t blame yourself. Something about the Mole may have changed. I can’t believe it can have been so noisy before and escaped detection. May I?’ He reached out. Reluctantly she handed him the Mole. He hefted it, feeling its mass, turned it over in his hands, and rapped its hull. ‘Do you know what it’s made of? No? It’s a kind of metal, I think. Like kernel iron, but processed . . . Do you know what it is?’

‘I know what my mother said it is.’

‘Tell me.’

She took a deep breath, for she was about to speak heresy to a Brother. ‘Part of the Ship. Maybe the last surviving part. My mother said there was a big argument long ago. Some people wanted to forget about the Ship. Others wanted to remember. Humans don’t belong here – that was their slogan. So when remembering the Ship was banned by the Brothers, and any remnants of it were destroyed, this Mole was saved, and hidden.’

‘If it came from the Ship, do you know what it’s for?’

She shrugged, reluctant to be drawn, unsure what kind of trouble she was in. She waited for the rebukes, the condemnation, the accusations of heresy.

But none of that came. Instead Pesten turned the Mole over in his hands. He said, ‘I can make an educated guess. It’s probably a transport machine – or the clever part. All the working parts were cut away long ago.’

She was bewildered. ‘The clever part?’

‘Like a brain. A brain without a body – but perhaps these little holes are its eyes and ears. After all, it responds when you speak to it, doesn’t it?’

‘Brother – what are you saying? That this is actually from the Ship?’

He sighed. ‘The Brotherhood doesn’t believe in the Ship. But the Ship, nevertheless, existed.’ He smiled. ‘And, yes, you have a piece of it here, preserved through the generations.’

She was astonished by these admissions. ‘You’ve been lying to us!’

‘“Lie” is a hard word,’ he said mildly. ‘The Brothers only want what’s best for everybody. I know we have our faults, Lura, but you have to believe that much.’ He gestured at the tree, and the panorama of the Forest below. ‘Look – you understand what we’re doing here, with all these trees?’

She felt faintly insulted he’d asked. ‘We pull at the star kernel. Eventually we’ll make it fall out of the nebula, and all the way down into the Core of Cores.’

‘And why would we want to do that?’

‘Because in response the Core of Cores produces gushes of fresh air. You Brothers say it harbours gods that do that.’

‘Yes. Air with oxygen, and other gases we need to breathe . . . Lura, a kernel is a massive object, and it takes a lot of pulling to deflect it from its trajectory, which, with the rest of the nebula, is a decaying orbit around the nearest big-star. And we only have the trees to pull it with. It takes whole generations to move a single kernel. But when this one falls we will cut the trees loose and move to another kernel, and we’ll start all over again.

‘This is what we do. This is all we can do, hauling kernels across the sky, trying to coax more air out of the Core of Cores. So what good is it for people to fill their heads with dreams of another world, and of a Ship that might have brought them here? Best for them to forget it all, and make do with what they have.’ He lifted the Mole before his face. ‘I’ll regret destroying this, for it is a rarity – I have seen other fragments – I never heard of one that spoke before. Remarkable. But it must go, of course.’

‘You have no right.’

‘Of course I do,’ he said gently.

‘Will I be punished?’

‘No. I think losing this will be punishment enough, won’t it? I’ll dispose of it, don’t worry any more. Let’s go down and have something to eat, and hope that the next shift turns out to be a bit more straightforward than this one.’

A shadow crossed the sky behind him.

She pointed. ‘I think they might have something to say about that.’

He turned to see.

Out of the sky’s crimson gloom a flock of whales came swimming, their massive tails beating at the air, human riders standing on their translucent backs. Humans with weapons.

Suddenly the Mole spoke again. ‘Massive sensor dysfunction! Massive sensor dysfunction!’

3

Vala received two contradictory summonses. They came two standard days after the arrival of the Second Coalition flotilla.

Grumbling, she showed the Virtual messages to Coton. One, heralded by a trumpet blast, was an order to attend a Marshal Sand, evidently the senior military figure on the planet and now the ‘interim governor’. The second was an order to go to a ‘processing’ centre, along with all the Weaponised on Delta Seven. Vala snorted. ‘Typical of this sort of strutting ninny – fanfares and petty cruelty, and sheer incompetence to boot. Which shall I attend, eh? Even if you try to do what these people want it’s impossible to get it right. Curse them!’

As she ranted Coton stood back, rubbing the black tattoo on his forehead.

At last she noticed. ‘Oh, child – I haven’t been thinking of you. Don’t be afraid.’

‘This is how it started on Centre.’

‘I know, I know.’ Gently she pulled his hands away from his forehead. ‘Look at this ludicrous mark – it’s all out of shape. They apply them to babies, you know, and then when you grow . . . Look, they haven’t even mentioned you in the summonses. They probably don’t even know you’re here.’

‘Are we going to have to run again, grandmother?’

‘We’re not running anywhere. The work we’re doing here is much too important.’

‘The Starfolk?’

She squeezed his hands. ‘Not just that. It’s this business of your dreams – if that’s what they are. I’ve been doing some research on those words you keep repeating . . . Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be mysterious. We’ll talk properly later. Well, we must obey one of our summonses, but which? We’ll go see this Marshal character, shall we? At least she’s the superior officer. Let’s both go, and you can demonstrate your existence.’

The city was in chaos. The streets were crowded with Coalition soldiers and functionaries and their transports, and with citizens, some trying to go about their business, some laden with luggage and wandering anxiously. Many buildings had been requisitioned by the new authorities and displacing their inhabitants, so that heaps of furniture and other detritus were piled in doorways amid crowds of the evicted. One sector, an avenue lined by huge college buildings, had long been given over to a market. This morning the vendors were short of supplies, and the lines of would-be buyers were long and fractious, shabby people with bags and packs, holding unhappy children by the hand.

Vala snorted her contempt as she pushed her way along with Coton. ‘The mighty hand of the Second Coalition at work! Refugees lining up to buy food that doesn’t exist. This is what happens when a new authority tries to take control. They’ll have carved up the region with new boundaries, cutting trading links, forcing people out of their homes to be relocated according to one grand scheme or another . . . Oh, I dare say it will sort itself out. But in the meantime we’ll all go short.’

Coton didn’t feel so judgemental. ‘It’s not just the Coalition’s fault, grandmother. The Scourge is advancing, a curtain of darkness. Whole worlds are thrown into chaos. People abandon their homes, their planets, and fall as refugees onto those further out. We have to expect this over and over in the coming years as the Scourge looms ever closer, driving people ahead of it.’

Vala grimaced. ‘A cold analysis, but probably an accurate one.’

They came to a pencil-slim building, its face adorned by light globes.

‘This is it. Once the Chancellor’s residence. Come on! If we follow the directions we’ve been given, we have to climb all the way to the roof.’

Much of the building was dark. The elevators were working, but patchily, and, comically, they had to break their journey around the middle of the ascent to cross corridors and climb three flights of stairs, transferring from one elevator shaft to another. At last they emerged through another dilating door, and Coton found himself on the roof of the building – and not a pace from the edge, which wasn’t in any way fenced off.

Vala laughed. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that! Jump off and the inertial nets will trap you. It’s quite impossible to come to any harm . . . It’s rather obvious where we’re supposed to go, isn’t it?’ She pointed at a space-going military flitter that sat square in the centre of the roof, adorned with flags bearing a bright green tetrahedral logo. She marched forward. ‘Typical of such people to grasp at the symbols of a better past . . .’

Despite her sparky self-confidence, they were held up by armed guards before being allowed to enter the flitter. Vala had to give both their names, and the guards, in bright green uniforms, eyed their Weaponised identification tattoos suspiciously, and checked their identities against scrolling lists. It didn’t help that Coton wasn’t included in the summons, and they had to refer to an off-world database.

Then they were made to walk through a kind of open framework. When it was his turn Coton felt a kind of tingling, a heat that penetrated to his core.

The troopers puzzled over the resulting Virtual images of his head and Vala’s – and Coton stared, astonished, at the sponge-like structures they had detected, meshed within the frontal lobes of both of their brains.

Vala had no patience with this procedure. She tapped the tattoo on her forehead. ‘Don’t you recognise this? We’re Adepts. And Adepts are born with technology in their heads, just as you see here. Check your databases, man. We’re known. We’re harmless!’

While the man checked, Coton murmured to his grandmother, ‘Technology? What technology?’ Even though he had known he was an Adept, he’d had no idea that he had a head full of technology; his parents had told him nothing of this. It was another unwelcome surprise.

And Vala winked. ‘Only the best. Alien expertise. Silver Ghost technology . . .’

The Ghosts: ancient enemies of mankind, long extinct. And he’d been born with their stuff inside his head? Coton, shocked, couldn’t take it in.

It took a while longer, and another referral to the superior, before they were allowed to pass.

The flitter itself was expensive-looking, but heavily armoured. Once inside they were led down a short corridor to an expansive cabin. Here an officer sat behind a desk, with images flickering in the air around her head in response to her murmured commands. She wore a uniform of electric-blue fabric adorned with gold lacing, and a peaked cap sat on the desk beside her. This, evidently, was Marshal Sand. The cabin was functional; there was a cot folded up against one wall, and what looked like a small galley at the back behind the desk. An aide stood at Sand’s side, a tough-looking soldier with a gun cradled in his arms.

While the guard didn’t take his eyes off Vala and Coton, Sand didn’t look up, or acknowledge them in any way. There were no seats, so they had to stand before the desk. Vala, irritable all morning, grew impatient quickly. Coton, aware of the guard’s glare, longed for her to stay quiet.

At length the Marshal snapped her fingers, and her Virtual displays folded away and winked out of existence. She looked up at Vala. She had grey-blonde hair shaved short, and her features were strong, symmetrical. She might have been forty. ‘I apologise for keeping you waiting—’ She turned her head, and a Virtual copy of Vala’s summons popped into the air before her. ‘Academician Vala. Ah, yes, the Starfolk scholar.’ She glanced at Coton. ‘And this is your grandson.’

Vala snapped, ‘Do you not have chairs for your guests?’

Sand seemed amused. ‘You aren’t guests. And meetings with me generally don’t last long enough for chairs to be necessary.’ She eyed their tattoos. ‘I did not realise you were Weaponised, however.’ She checked over the Virtual summary. ‘Adepts. Both of you? Your talent is inactive—’

‘We are born with the hardware in our heads, but not the ability. Not for generations.’

‘Of course.’

‘We had another summons that clashed with yours. To be “processed” with the other Weaponised.’

‘You did?’ Sand prodded the air, in the middle of the Virtual. ‘There. I’ve rescheduled your processing, with a note that you’re a special case, Academician.’

‘Thank you,’ Vala said acidly. ‘And what does this “processing” entail?’

‘These are times of turbulence,’ the Marshal said. ‘Of huge population movements – the coming of the Scourge sees to that. Times of fear and suspicion. We’re taking steps to ensure the Weaponised and other minorities are protected. Useful roles will be found for them—’

‘Ghettos? Forced labour?’

‘The policy is not mine. I just implement it, as efficiently as I can. In any event, it will not affect you. Academician, let’s get to the point. I need to discuss your work.’

‘Do you indeed? You might find it’s a short conversation.’

Sand held Vala’s gaze, evidently weighing her up. ‘You’re not the first scholar I’ve spoken to, here on this world of universities and museums – in this bubble of privilege. Well, we of the Second Coalition, dealing with the issues of the real world, are only human. But you will learn that we are in fact mankind’s last hope against the Scourge. Which is why I need to speak to you.’

Vala stood up straight, a small, frail woman in this military ship. ‘You think a lot of yourself, don’t you? Are you going to send me to the front against the Xeelee?’

‘Not you,’ Sand said, unfazed. ‘Your Starfolk.’ She snapped her fingers to summon up more Virtuals.

And they spoke of the Scourge.

It was a story that stretched back nearly half a million years.

From out of the dark aftermath of the Qax Occupation, the Interim Coalition of Governance had turned mankind into a colonising, appropriating force that had ultimately, in the form of the Exultant generation, driven the Xeelee themselves out of the heart of the Galaxy. That had taken twenty thousand years. And then the expansion had continued, deeper in time, beyond the Galaxy.

But the superhuman unity of the Transcendence, half a million years after the Qax terror, had proved the high water mark of humanity’s achievement. When the Transcendence fell, man’s ultimate enemies stirred.

Though they were always distracted by their cosmic war against a greater foe, the star-infesting photino birds, the Xeelee had not forgotten their defeats at the hands of humans. Their vengeance, the Scourge, was a simple strategy, but relentless. One by one the worlds of humanity fell dark, their stars cloaked in an impenetrable shell of the Xeelee’s fabled construction material. And humanity was beaten back.

Sand said, a cold anger in her voice, ‘Here they are, back in the Galaxy the Exultants won from them. Here they are, sweeping through the plane of the disc, and on the verge of crossing into the spiral arm containing Sol. It will take millennia more. But they will, in the end, take Earth itself – unless we make a stand.’

Coton found himself oddly stirred by her words. ‘Make a stand? Where?’

‘Have you ever heard of the Orion Line, lad? One of the most famous sites in human history – the inner edge of the Orion Arm, which contains Sol. Here the great human expansion across the Galaxy was held up for centuries by resistance from a species called the Silver Ghosts. Well, we won that war, and now nothing remains of the Ghosts.’

But Coton exchanged a glance with his grandmother, for now he knew that wasn’t true, that the Ghosts, in some way, lived on in his own head, and in Vala’s.

‘After the collapse of unified government, mankind suffered hundreds of millennia of bifurcation. Even speciation, which the First Coalition would never have allowed. But now – in the coming centuries – a new unified government, the Second Coalition, intends to make its own stand on the Orion Line.’

‘How?’ Vala snapped. ‘What bright new weapon do you have that could possibly stop the Xeelee?’

‘Oh, nothing new,’ Marshal Sand said. ‘You know the nature of the age we live in better than most, I’m sure. A million years after mankind first left Earth, anything you can dream of has been invented before, and forgotten, a dozen times: archaeology is a better bet than innovation. And our own clever scholars have dug up a weapon we can use against the Xeelee.’

‘The Weaponised?’ Vala asked. ‘The Starfolk? Are you going to start hurling neutron stars around the Galaxy again?’

‘Not that, Academician. We have a much grander vision . . .’

And, with another Virtual display, she demonstrated the Coalition’s dream.

The plan was simple and breathtaking: to turn back the Xeelee with supernovas, detonated in a wall thousands of light years long, right along the inner edge of the spiral arm.

‘You’re as insane as the Integrality.’ Vala sounded stunned.

‘Quite possibly,’ Sand conceded.

‘And it won’t work. Only the most massive stars go supernova,’ Coton put in. ‘Everybody knows that. And besides, most of the Galaxy’s stars have had their fusion processes tinkered with by the photino birds anyhow.’

Sand regarded him. ‘But that’s what we plan to do – tinker with the stars to suit ourselves. We’ll send in the Starfolk through microscopic wormholes, just as in the past. They’ll be equipped to adjust the fusion processes in a star’s core. The physicists promise that a star of only one or two solar masses could be induced to deliver a good enough detonation for our purposes.’

‘Many of those stars must have worlds. People.’

‘Not by the time the stars are detonated,’ Sand said. ‘Remember, lad, the Scourge will be closing.’

Vala asked, ‘And will you abandon the Starfolk to their fate?’

‘Of course not,’ Sand said evenly. ‘They’ll be retrieved in each case. There will inevitably be losses—’

‘She won’t do it,’ Coton burst out.

Sand looked at him in surprise.

Vala said, ‘Coton, hush—’

‘My mother taught me that what was done to us Weaponised was wrong, and it’s been a wrong that’s lasted generations. Vala’s here to help the Starfolk, not exploit them. She won’t help you. Tell her, Vala.’

Sand glanced at Vala. ‘Academician?’

And, to Coton’s horror, Vala hesitated.

4

As the whale flotilla closed in on the Forest, alarm whistles blasted and wooden rattles were spun. Lura crouched down in the lead tree’s foliage with the Mole tucked under her belly. Pesten was beside her, and old Jorg came scrambling up the tether from his fire-pots. But Lura felt very exposed up here.

Twenty-Four gave a great wooden groan, and shuddered and strained. It was a standard tactic to cut a few trees loose when a raid came, to provide platforms for counter-attacks, and Twenty-Four, with the rest, was adjusting its spin and angle to take up the greater burden that was left.

And now the whales were here, sooner than Lura had expected, looming out of the crimson sky.

One slid by her position, only the diameter of the tree away. It was a rough sphere as much as fifty paces across, with tremendous paddle-like flukes turning at the back, and three misty eyes in the ‘face’ at its front, the whole swathed in ropes and ragged nets for its riders to cling to. Its skin, cartilage covered by a soft foamy layer, was translucent, and inside she could see the shadows of internal organs. The riders on the whale’s flanks, clinging to the nets, leaned over, whooping and shaking spears – naked, pumped up and exhilarated, and ready for the fight. One man saw Lura and grinned, showing sharpened teeth. She yelled obscenities back, until the tree’s rotation took her away.

Further down the flank of the Forest, the whale riders were making their attacks. Looking down through the foliage Lura saw spears being thrown from whales into the Forest, and in response arrows shimmered in clouds from the trees. But the whale riders were already leaping across the void to take on the Forest folk, and the cries of battle rose up – and the screaming began. Twenty-Four’s shuddering worsened as the ongoing battle interfered with the work of the tree pilots, and the trees began to grow as confused as their occupants. All this evoked deep primal fears in Lura; the Forest hadn’t been raided like this since she was a child.

‘You need to get down from here,’ Jorg said to Lura. ‘We’re vulnerable – the lead tree always is.’

‘I agree,’ said Brother Pesten sternly.

‘All right. But I’m not leaving the Mole behind.’

‘Here.’ Pesten took his rope belt from his waist. ‘Make a harness out of this. Be quick.’

But even as she started fumbling with knots, Jorg cried, ‘Here they come!’

That whale came in again, much closer now, rising up over the rim of the tree. Lura found herself looking directly into its huge, misty face, those three great eyes swivelling to fix on her as the whale rolled on its axis, its body counter-turning to the rotation of the flukes. The face was vast, each eye alone as big as a person. There was nothing remotely human about the whale – it wasn’t even as much like a human as a rat, say. Humans don’t belong here. But she thought she read something in those eyes – pain, perhaps, or pity.

And now the whale’s roll brought a party of riders up above the tree rim, half a dozen of them, all armed, all naked and smeared with some kind of oil. Their faces were twisted into masks of bloody anticipation and there was the man with the sharpened teeth, now sporting an erection.

‘By the Bones!’ Jorg cried. With startling strength he ripped a slice of wood from the leading edge of the nearest branch, threw it as an improvised spear, and put his other gnarled hand on Lura’s head and tried to push her deeper into the foliage. But the riders dodged the splinter easily, laughing; it stuck harmlessly in the hide of the whale. Two of them let fly with their own spears at Jorg, one after the other. He dodged the first – but the second skewered his chest. Jorg clutched the spear, trying to speak, and a hissing gurgle came from the wound. Lura reached for him. But he went limp and fell back, floating down through the turning branches of his tree. Lura was horrified by the skill and efficiency with which his long life had been ended.

And, unopposed, the whale riders sailed easily across the gap.

Lura, still holding her Mole, scrambled to find something to fight with, anything. She felt she was moving as slowly as an old woman; the riders were so much faster, so much more determined.

They came plummeting down out of the sky.

One landed on Lura’s back, pushing her over, flattening her face down against the branch. Pinned by huge strength, she managed to twist her head. She saw that Pesten was on his back, trying to fight. But he had no weapons, and when he tried to grab one of the riders his hands slid over slick, oily skin.

Already it was over.

5

Vala had requested an hour’s break to gather more data, and her thoughts, before she made any decision. She rushed off, leaving Coton in a small cabin aboard the Marshal’s flitter – so small it was like a cell, he thought, and sparsely furnished.

When she returned to collect him, they had to wait once more, outside the Marshal’s cabin, while Sand completed yet another meeting.

Vala looked at Coton, agonised. ‘I came here with no idea what this Marshal wanted of me. Now I see I have some leverage with our new overlords. And I have a chance to save you – and, perhaps, for us to achieve much more together. Later we’ll discuss it properly—’

‘You always say that. You never do. You haven’t discussed any of this with me. Nobody told me I had this alien thing in my head—’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Sincerely. But events press, Coton. You have to take opportunities when they come.’

A guard beckoned them back into Sand’s cabin.

Marshal Sand still sat behind her desk. As Vala entered she looked up, faintly amused. ‘You again.’

Vala marched up to her desk. ‘Marshal, I’ll not waste time. I’ve come to a decision. I’ll work with you—’

‘Grandmother!’

‘On one condition,’ Vala said, facing Sand. ‘Let him go. The boy. Spare him your “processing”.’

Coton cried, ‘No!’

Marshal Sand said evenly, ‘How can I bargain with you, woman? If I make an exception for him it’s going to be rather visible, isn’t it? I do have a duty to maintain order.’

Vala sounded desperate. ‘It’s not just that he’s family. It’s more than that. I think he could turn out to be important – very important.’

Coton was frightened and bewildered. ‘What are you saying?’

Vala turned to him. ‘I hoped it wouldn’t come to this. We haven’t even had time to discuss it ourselves . . . It can’t be helped, and here we are. Coton – tell the Marshal about your dreams.’

‘Dreams?’ The Marshal glanced at her Virtual displays again. ‘You mean visions? Your kind of Weaponised are precognitive, aren’t you? Or were. Has that somehow switched itself back on in this boy’s head?’ She eyed Coton, interested. ‘Are you seeing the future, child?’

‘The future?’ He looked at his grandmother, still more bewildered.

Vala took his hand in hers. ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘They bred it out of us. Coton, you were born hamstrung but the modifications are still in your head, the technological relic. They feared us, child, and hate us still. Because we could see what is to come . . .’

The Adepts’ precognitive ability had always been limited. They could see only a few minutes, or less, into the future, and only aspects of it that concerned their own surroundings – their own destiny. Beyond that, quantum uncertainty led to a blurring of competing possibilities.

‘But that few minutes’ edge made our ancestors formidable soldiers,’ Vala said. ‘Just enough to let us get out of the way of the next bullet.’

‘The Adepts were among the more effective of the Integrality’s Weaponised types, in fact,’ Sand said, checking her archives as they spoke. ‘But they were more useful in policing activities than against the Xeelee.’

‘We were used against humans,’ Vala said. ‘No wonder we were feared, and hated. When the Integrality fell we were rounded up, though we were as hard to catch as we were to kill. And those who survived were genetically modified.’

Sand regarded Coton analytically. ‘You never knew this, did you, boy? Never knew what your Weaponisation entailed.’

‘He would have been told, if his parents had lived. It’s our way to keep it from the children, for if they blurt it out to normals the fear starts up again. Coton, I would have told you,’ Vala insisted.

Sand watched them, judgemental. ‘I’ve always found truth the best policy myself. So is this stunted precog now seeing the future after all?’

‘Not that,’ Vala said. ‘I think he’s seeing another universe entirely.’

The Marshal just stared. Then she rubbed her eyes. ‘Is that supposed to make sense, Academician?’

‘It’s the way our talent was engineered into us,’ Vala said. ‘May I use your display facilities?’

Access to the future depended on paths in spacetime called closed timelike curves – faster-than-light transitions. Humanity’s hyperdrive warships had routinely travelled faster than light, and, at the height of the Exultant war, had just as routinely shown up scarred by battles that hadn’t yet been fought. The First Coalition’s Commissaries had learned to harvest such information, and, in suites like Vala’s own Map Room, they had charted the outlines of the war’s future progress.

‘But there are other sorts of closed timelike curves,’ Vala said. ‘Marshal, our universe of three space dimensions floats in a greater space, which the physicists call the Bulk, of many extra dimensions. There are many universes’ – and she held her palms together – ‘floating parallel to each other in the Bulk, like pages in a book. You can reach these other universes through engineering, like wormholes—’

‘Like Bolder’s Ring.’ The most titanic Xeelee construct of all, at the heart of the galactic supercluster.

‘Yes – and I’ll come back to the Ring. But there are also certain sorts of leakages between the universes. Most particles are bound to spacetime, but some wash out into the Bulk – especially gravitons, which mediate gravity. Now, if our universe is folded in the Bulk – or if the Bulk itself is distorted – these particles can take shortcuts through the Bulk from one point in our spacetime to another.’

‘Thus creating closed timelike curves.’

‘Exactly.’ Vala turned to her grandson. ‘Coton, in your head there is a sort of transmitter-receiver of gravitons. You can sense gravitons coming via the Bulk from events a few seconds or minutes ahead of us in time, and your brain processes them into sound or vision.’

‘But,’ Sand said, ‘you said this facility has been bred out.’

‘No,’ Vala said with strange patience. ‘The mechanism is still there, growing in each child’s head; it’s the faculty to process the data that’s been turned off. As if Coton had healthy eyes but lacked the cortical equipment for his brain to process the information from those eyes.

‘But you’re dealing with biology, Marshal, and a very ancient modification. Things drift with the generations. Many of our young have always had gravity dreams, as we call them, dreams of other places and times – even of the future. Residual perception. They usually grow out of it. And we don’t announce it to the world. Would you? In Coton’s case it may be something to do with the proximity of the neutron star – spacetime is grossly distorted hereabouts, and the graviton flux—’

‘Get to the point, Academician.’

‘Marshal, I believe my grandson is receiving a graviton signal, not from any future event in our own universe, but from another universe entirely – a universe where the descendants of the crew of a warship, which sailed there through Bolder’s Ring, have been stranded for several hundred thousand years. Coton, you’re picking up a distress call! And the first thing you must do is respond . . .’

6

The man with the sharpened teeth anchored his feet in the tree’s foliage and stood straight. His short hair was shaved into elaborate patterns, Lura saw, and a crude zigzag tattoo had been carved into his belly. He leered in triumph. ‘Take the girl,’ he said, his language coarse and heavily accented but recognisable. ‘She looks worth a hump.’

‘You’ll have to kill me first,’ Lura spat.

The rider kneeling on her back, a woman, laughed. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t give old Otho ideas like that, little girl. It only makes him hornier.’

Otho laughed in turn, showing those gruesome teeth. ‘She’ll keep. Just sit on her, Anka. Kill the old man, he’s no use.’

Pesten roared his defiance, and struggled with his captors, but he couldn’t get a fist free. A rider held his spear over his chest.

‘No!’ Lura yelled. ‘Don’t kill him.’

The leader, Otho, bent down so his face was close to hers. His breath stank of blood. ‘And why not? Will you be nice to me if we let him live, little girl?’

‘He’s a Brother,’ she snapped. ‘Look at his robe. The Brotherhood of the Infrastructure will pay you ransom to get him back.’

‘She’s right,’ said the woman Anka, still on Lura’s back. ‘Might save a bit of fighting, Otho.’

‘But I like fighting . . . Oh, very well, bring him. Tie him first.’

They got Pesten up on his knees and stripped him of his robe, leaving him naked, and tore lengths off the robe to truss him up. Pesten kept struggling throughout. ‘You’ll get no ransom for me!’ He was silenced by a punch in the mouth by Otho, a sickening impact that cracked teeth. They got Lura up too, and tied some of the strips from Pesten’s robe around her body. She still had hold of the Mole, which Anka, a red-haired woman with a body like a whip, eyed curiously. But the riders were rushing too much to do anything about it for now.

Hurriedly, they ransacked the tree for anything they could steal – the dead pilot’s scraps of food, a water skin, spare clothing, even the tipped-out fire-pot.

Then they lined up with their trussed-up prisoners at the tree’s rim. The whale, its huge eyes mournful, beat its flukes and approached the tree again. Timing their jumps to match the spin of tree and whale, the riders started to cross, leaping confidently through the air.

And, Lura realised with mounting horror, she was going to have to make that leap herself.

Otho and Anka got hold of Lura’s arms, one to either side. Lura could feel the tide-like tug of their bodies’ gravity fields, and Otho’s free hand roamed over her buttocks and thighs, though she squirmed to get away.

And they leapt with her, still holding her, with the whale seeming very far away.

In the air, she looked down at the expanse of the aerial Forest, and she saw the fighting everywhere, the whales skirting the turning trees, the riders dwarfed by their rolling animals. One tree came wheeling out of its formation, foliage ablaze, and as she watched its rim and branches began to disintegrate, and flaming chunks spun off into the air.

And, just before she landed on the whale, another tree rose up in the air above her, and she heard a man roar – Ord! She’d know that voice anywhere. He ran around the rim of his turning tree, throwing spears down at the riders. One spike caught Otho in the leg. He let Lura go, yelling his anger and agony, and without hesitation ripped the spear out of his flesh and muscle, braced and threw it back at Ord, who ducked. All this in mid-air, before Otho completed his leap and landed on his back on the whale’s flank.

Lura and the woman followed him down, hitting hard.

Soon all the riders were down, clinging to ropes to keep from being thrown off by the whale’s spin. Lura, beside Pesten, had ended up on her back in the whale’s dry, foamy outer flesh, and was held down by Otho’s massive arm.

But Ord, in his tree, wasn’t done yet. He held up his fire-pot, a wooden bowl from which flames still licked. The riders scrambled away, around the whale’s hull.

Lura yelled, ‘Do it, Ord! Burn these bastards!’

With a mighty throw Ord hurled down the pot, and he disappeared backwards, shoved away by the recoil. The pot splashed against the whale’s flank, spilling fire. Swathes of outer flesh caught fire and burned off in sheets, and the whale rolled and spasmed, its agony obvious. The riders clung to their ropes.

‘We need to get inside,’ Anka yelled at Otho. ‘We’ll be thrown off.’

He nodded. ‘Hold this she-rat.’ Leaving Anka with Lura, he wrapped his feet in the netting, blood still streaming down his leg from his wound. He took a wooden knife from his belt, braced himself, and slashed down through the whale’s skin and into the layer of tougher cartilage beneath. Then he backed up, dragging his blade through one pace, two, and foul, hot, moist air spilled out of the lengthening wound. He tucked away the knife and forced his arms into the slit he’d created, pushing the flanges apart. ‘In. Fast.’

One by one the riders piled through the orifice and into the whale’s body cavity. It got easier as the first of them made it inside, and were able to help hold the breach open.

Lura was shoved through, head first and bound up. The air within was foul and hot and stank of sweat.

Once inside she was rolled over away from the hole, onto a slick, moist surface. Pesten was dragged through the orifice as unceremoniously as she had been, and dumped beside her. Now the whale’s spin, instead of threatening to throw them off the outer skin, kept them pinned in place.

And Lura lay on her back, exhausted, shocked, breathing hard. She was inside the whale, and its translucent skin was a great shell all around her, with the riders’ clothing and blankets and weapons and spoil from the raid heaped up on its floor of flesh. The beast’s internal organs were massed around a digestive tract that spanned its diameter, from the face at the front to an anus at the back end, where lumps of muscle worked the great flukes, dimly seen from within the body. And at the front Lura found herself looking out through the whale’s huge face, an inverted mask that dwarfed the rider who worked there, held in place with a harness, jabbing goads into a tissue mass.

Otho stood over her, tying a strip of cloth around his wounded leg. ‘You caused us a lot of trouble, little girl. Took a spear for you. Time for Otho’s reward.’ He ran his tongue across his sharpened teeth. The others laughed, even the woman, Anka. He reached down.

She struggled against her bonds. ‘Leave me alone, you savage.’

‘Savage is right,’ he said. He rummaged at the strips of cloth that held her and pulled out the Mole. ‘So what’s this?’ He turned it around and spun it in the air, and he licked its casing. ‘Can’t eat it, that’s for sure.’

‘Leave that alone!’

Anka approached him, curious. ‘Never saw anything like it.’ She rapped the box with her knuckles. ‘Maybe we could smash it up. Make knives.’

‘No.’ Otho grinned down at Lura, who struggled against her bonds. ‘It’s driving her crazy. Let’s just throw it out of the whale. I like them wild.’

Pesten, bound and naked, glared at him. ‘You don’t know what you’re dealing with.’

‘Don’t I?’ Otho casually kicked Pesten in the kidney.

The Brother groaned and rolled, but he twisted his head and spoke again. ‘I mean it—’

Lura called clearly, ‘Status!’

‘Massive sensor dysfunction.’

Otho yelled and dropped the box; it fell and bounced on the resilient floor. ‘What did you do?’

‘Untie me or I’ll have my magic box kill you,’ Lura snarled, as confidently as she could. When they didn’t move, she called again, ‘Mole! Status!’

And, to her astonishment, the Mole replied with a phrase she’d never heard before. ‘Incoming signal received.’

7

‘My name is Coton. Can you hear me?’

‘Yes! You’re talking out of the Mole. But all the Mole ever said before was “Massive Sensor Dysfunction”. You’re not in the Mole, are you?’

‘No. I am speaking through the – what did you call it? The Mole? I am human, like you.’

‘Are you a man or a woman?’

‘I am a boy. Coton. What is your name?’

‘Lura! My name is Lura! I was born about eighteen thousand shifts ago.’

‘Shifts? . . . Please wait. Lura, we think a shift is about a third of a standard day. An old Integrality navy term. Very ancient! So that makes you . . . about sixteen years old.’

‘Years?’

‘You’re a bit younger than me.’

‘Are you talking to other people there? Are you asking them questions?’

‘Yes, there are people here. My grandmother, Vala. And we have other machines that help us understand what you say. Actually there are lots of machines, talking to each other in a kind of chain. Your language and mine were once the same, but that was a long time ago.’

‘Am I talking to you out of a machine too?’

‘No. Yes . . . In a way. Lura, the machine is in my head.’

‘How strange. Does it hurt?’

‘No. Well, I don’t think so. I don’t like it much.’

‘You said your grandmother is there. Where are your parents?’

‘Not here. We were moved. My father spent all he had sending me to safety. Not that I feel very safe where I am now . . . An enemy was coming. Well, it still is coming. Everybody had to move. What about your parents, Lura?’

‘They both died.’

‘Are you with friends? At home?’

‘It’s difficult. I can’t talk about it.’

‘We’re in such different places. But we don’t have easy lives, do we?’

‘Different places? Coton, I don’t understand any of this. I know you’re speaking to me through the Mole. I don’t know where you are.’

‘Where do you think I could be?’

‘In another of the nebulae that are orbiting the big-star. But there are lots of big-stars orbiting the Core of Cores. Perhaps you’re closer to one of them. Are you on a tree, or in a whale?’

‘I don’t understand much of that. No, Lura, I’m not in any of those places.’

‘Are you further away, then?’

‘Lura, I’m in another universe.’

‘A what? Another everything? What does that mean?’

‘I think sometimes the translation isn’t very good. Maybe you don’t have the word in your language. I’m in the place people originally came from. Your people. Your ancestors went through a kind of gate, and ended up where you are. They couldn’t get back. Everything is different here. The stars, the stars are bigger than you can imagine—’

‘Humans don’t belong here.’

‘What?’

‘My parents taught me that when I was small. They said it’s the most important thing people should remember. The Brothers would punish you if they caught you saying it. But you can’t do that now, can you, Pesten? Humans don’t belong here! It’s true! Here’s the proof!’

‘You haven’t forgotten, then. After all this time. In a way, your Mole never forgot either. It must have been a component of the original ship—’

‘The Ship! We have stories about the Ship – some of us. People lived on it for a while, and then they made the Raft out of it, but they had to give that up too.’

‘And in the end the Mole called. I managed to hear it . . . It’s complicated.’

‘Why did it call?’

‘Because it thinks you need help, Lura. All of you, in that universe.’

‘I like talking to you, Coton.’

‘And I like talking to you. Tell me what you see.’

‘The air is red and filled with stars, all falling down . . .’

8

Coton lay on his pallet, propped up on pillows, outside Vala’s tetrahedral house. His talks with Lura were draining, and after a half-hour session he always felt as if he hadn’t slept for days.

Meanwhile Sand and Vala argued over their data, their interpretations, their Virtual reconstructions. They were using facilities loaned by the local Second Coalition authority and imported into this ancient Map Room – and, remarkably, the Marshal herself had invested the time to come here in person.

What they were discovering was remarkable, inspiring, haunting. Vala had actually found a scrap of a log fired back by the crew of the Integrality’s Constancy of Purpose as the warship, its engine blazing, had fallen through Bolder’s Ring, an immense Xeelee artefact under assault from human fleets – fallen into a new universe . . .

The ship imploded, and fell into a compact, glowing nebula. Crew members hurried through the corridors of their failing vessel. Smoke filled the passageways as lurid flames singed the air. And then the hull was breached. The raw air of the nebula scoured through the cabins, and through rents in the silver walls the crew saw flying trees and huge, cloudy whales, all utterly unlike anything in their experience . . .

‘It’s a miracle anything survives at all,’ Vala said. ‘It’s nearly nine hundred thousand years since this ship was lost! A date, incidentally, we confirmed from the linguistic drift between Lura’s tongue and our own.’

‘Perhaps you could skip the self-congratulation, Academician—’

‘Gravity!’ Vala said forcefully. ‘That’s the key to universe Beta – which is what the Integrality archivists of the time called it.’

‘Our own universe being Alpha, I suppose,’ said Sand drily.

Vala smiled. ‘Gravity in Beta is a billion times stronger than in Alpha – you understand I mean the fundamental force, the magnitude of the constant of gravity. Other physical constants, the speed of light for instance, are the same.’

‘Then everything is different there,’ Sand said, pondering. ‘If Earth was projected into universe Beta—’

‘It would have a surface gravity of a billion gees – but it would implode in an instant. Even a mass as small as a human body would have a perceptible gravity field. In Beta, you could make a “star” with the mass of a small comet, say; that would give enough pressure to initiate fusion in the core. Stellar masses scale inversely as the gravity constant raised to the power of three over two . . . Other cosmic objects scale similarly – neutron stars, black holes.

‘The cosmology in Beta, reconstructed from what Lura has been able to tell us, is quite unlike our own. Well, you’d expect that.’

She conjured up a Virtual that looked to Coton like a false-colour sketch of a Solar System, with a dark, brooding sun at the centre, around which orbited bright pinprick ‘planets’, and around these in turn circled glowing clouds of crimson gas, speckled with sparks. A strange orrery, Coton thought. He saw how the light of the Virtual stars reflected from the sheen of the Marshal’s electric-blue jacket.

Vala said, ‘We don’t think Beta has galaxies of the kind we have here. Primitive gas clouds would implode violently and fragment, and you would quickly end up with massive black holes and an undergrowth of miniature stars. So you get a different sort of clustering, different hierarchies.

‘The centre of the system Lura sees is this mass they call the Core of Cores. We suspect this is an extremal black hole – a black hole of the largest possible mass.’

‘I didn’t know there was a limit,’ said Sand.

‘The larger a hole the more eagerly it consumes infalling matter, crushing it in the process. You reach a point where the resulting radiation blasts away any more infall. That limit’s pretty high, at around fifty billion solar masses in our universe – a good fraction of a galaxy’s mass. In universe Beta you’d expect to find many holes pushing at that limit. Here such a hole would span the Solar System, out to the comets. In Beta, an extremal hole is only a few hundred kilometres across. Lura is pretty far out, on the fringe of the gravity well.

‘Star formation probably starts with interstellar birth clouds of the same sort of mass and density as here – like the Carina nebula. But instead of Sol-sized stars spaced a few light years apart, such a cloud will collapse into many more comet-mass stars, as close to each other as the planets in the Solar System. We think these are the “big-stars” Lura sees orbiting the Core of Cores.

‘Such stars don’t have planetary systems like ours. Instead you have these quite dense gas clouds – nebulae, Lura calls them – orbiting each star, and centred on their own smaller black holes.

‘The nebulae are held together by gravity balanced by internal heat, generated by lesser stars inside the nebulae – the ones Lura sees falling through the air. We call them “flare stars”. They seem to be mountain-mass splinters, but with stellar fusion going on in their cores. The flares form at the edge of a nebula and then fall inward, as you see. Whereas the big-stars and the Core are analogues of objects in our universe, scaled according to the gravity constant, the flare stars aren’t like anything we have. Well, you’d expect some exotic objects.

‘The nebulae themselves can be full of heavy elements. In Beta, stellar evolution proceeded fast, and churned the primordial hydrogen and helium through fusion processes much more rapidly than here. And the flare stars do more processing in turn. Marshal, those nebulae contain oxygen. You could breathe the air!’

Marshal Sand seemed unimpressed. ‘Well, of course. Otherwise the crew of the Constancy could not have survived.’

‘No indeed. They fell through Bolder’s Ring into air they could breathe, and adapted, and survived, and spread through the nebula . . .

‘Marshal, I believe that because of its ferociously strong gravity, Beta’s cosmogony must be accelerated. If the initial Big Bang singularity was like ours, a great spewing of hot hydrogen and helium, gravity would have started to compete with the universal expansion much earlier. Massive stars and huge black holes must have formed quickly, and churned through the raw material of the interstellar medium. And the cosmos itself is ageing much more rapidly too. In Alpha the smallest stars, with a mass of perhaps a tenth of Sol – red dwarfs – are the longest-lived. They may last a hundred trillion years, perhaps ten thousand times longer than a medium mass star like Sol.’

‘The photino birds may have something to say about that picture.’

‘Oh, the photino birds seem to like red dwarfs . . . The point, Marshal, is that in universe Beta a Sol-mass star’s lifetime would not span five billion years but a mere five years.’

Sand stared. ‘It’s barely believable.’

‘Yes. But it’s simply a matter of proportion. A star’s lifetime scales inversely as the gravitational constant. And even the most parsimonious red dwarf would last only perhaps a million years – which is thus, I believe, roughly the span of Beta’s stelliferous age.’

‘A million years, and then the stars die,’ the Marshal pondered. ‘But Lura’s people have already been in there about that expanse of time.’

‘Quite. They were lucky, Marshal; their ancestors stumbled into Beta when that universe was very young.’

‘You’d think people would know they didn’t belong there,’ Coton blurted. ‘They wouldn’t have to remember by repeating nursery rhymes.’

‘How so?’ Sand asked.

‘Because they can’t eat the native life, for one thing. Lura told me. And then there’s evolution.’ He glanced at Vala, uncertain, but she nodded encouragement. ‘It took billions of years for complex life to evolve on Earth. But if universe Beta is only a million years old, there hasn’t been enough time for humans to evolve.’ Another thought struck him. ‘Or the trees, or the whales. Where did they come from?’

Vala smiled. ‘Good thinking, grandson! Of course you’re right. I can only conclude that the whales and the trees and whatnot are refugees like the humans – not from our universe, but from others linked by wormholes to Beta, from universes Gamma and Delta and Epsilon! Beta is a particularly porous place, I suspect. Gravity has surely twisted it up on a cosmological scale, and torn holes in it everywhere . . . Perhaps it’s no surprise that it was Beta that the Constancy crew fell into; in the greater Bulk of universes this sponge-like cosmos must be something of a sink. That’s not to say Beta couldn’t host native life of its own,’ she mused. ‘Fast-living creatures of exotic physics, perhaps, down in the highly stressed spacetime around those big black holes. Lura says there have been observations of something like that. But not biochemical like our own.’

‘And still the castaways linger on,’ Sand said. ‘A minor, but remarkable, story of human endurance. Perhaps after all this time we should leave them be. Beta is, by now, their home . . . Ah, but it is dying.’

‘I’m afraid so. They have surely had to flee before, within Beta – Lura has told us fragmentary tales of stars dying and nebulae becoming exhausted. But when the last stars go out there will be nowhere left to run.

‘And things may get worse yet, and quite quickly. Unlike our universe, which seems destined to endless expansion, Beta, dominated by gravity, will collapse back to a Big Crunch. I don’t know when this will be – we need better data and subtler modelling – but not long! Not compared to our own cosmological timescales.’

‘So is it a coincidence that we have made contact with Lura just as her universe is failing?’

‘No,’ Vala said. ‘Remember, it was the Mole that called us. A component of the starship. Despite its own “massive sensor dysfunction” it seems to have perceived the problems ahead.’

‘And it sent a distress message out of its own universe? That seems quite a conceptual leap.’

‘Actually it seems to have sent its messages inwards towards the Core of Cores. That’s where local spacetime is most distorted, and the machine’s message had the best chance of leaking out into the wider Bulk.’ She coughed. ‘There are more speculative possibilities. As I said there may be concentrations of complex matter there, around the Core of Cores. Maybe there is life there – even intelligence—’

Sand dismissed that. ‘Idle guesswork. The point is this Mole did manage to get its message out, to be picked up by the alien thing in your grandson’s head.’

Coton thought he felt that phantom ache deep in the core of his brain.

‘The question now is how we proceed,’ Vala said.

Sand frowned. ‘Proceed to do what?’

‘Why, to help them, of course. They are humans, Marshal Sand, whose ancestors became castaways following their duty!’

‘Their “duty” was to a government that has long vanished, in a long-forgotten war—’

‘Against the same enemy,’ Vala said quietly.

The Marshal stared at her. Then she paced, impatient, one hand slapping her hip. ‘All this is a . . . curiosity. I can see your motivation, Academician. You have spent your life trying to save other relics of dead wars, such as the Starfolk. But what, in the end, can you actually do for these people? They are in another universe – and I have other priorities. I’m under pressure to tidy up here—’

‘“Tidy up”?’

‘I’m aware of the cultural and historical sensitivities,’ Sand said wearily. ‘But the military priority is to fall back to the Orion-line Wall zone, before the pressure of the Scourge in this region becomes overwhelming. And at the Wall itself, where the demarcation lines are being drawn, there is already some trouble among the displaced, the refugees . . .’ She took off her elaborate peaked cap and rubbed her stubbly hair. ‘Yet I am not without compassion, Academician. And curiosity. You may continue with this, for now. But whatever you intend to do, get it done quickly.’ And she placed her cap back on her head and walked out.

Vala sighed. She came to sit beside Coton. ‘Well, we’re going to have to get on with it – and so are Lura and her people.’

‘Get on with what?’

Vala smiled and stroked his cheek. ‘To retrace their steps through Bolder’s Ring is out of the question . . . I suppose teleportation is a possibility. I’ll have to look into it. Go poking around the museums again . . . Do you feel up to talking to the castaways some more? Whatever we do is going to depend on having some kind of anchor at their end. They need to get hold of more high technology, more relics of the ship. There must be some. Perhaps they can find this “Raft” Lura spoke of—’

He cut through the torrent of words. ‘Grandmother, I don’t understand. Are you going to save the people in Beta?’

She smiled. ‘Of course I am. What else?’ She stood up. ‘I’ve a lot to do. You rest, and when you feel up to it try to contact Lura again.’ She patted his shoulder and walked off across the floor of the Map Room.

Wild ideas whirled in his head.

9

As the shifts had worn away the whale riders hadn’t disturbed Lura’s lengthy conversations with her machine, and the eerie figures it seemed to speak for. Lura supposed they were kept back by superstition or fear – as she felt only a little less, she suspected. But the riders were becoming increasingly disturbed by the Mole’s pronouncements. They went off towards the whale’s vast inverted face, so they could talk away from their captives.

But Lura was confused too. In the course of his latest conversation, Coton had told them they needed to find the Raft. It was as if they had been told to chase a fantasy from a child’s bedtime story!

Lura and Brother Pesten sat side by side, somewhere near the whale’s midriff. They had been left unbound for a few shifts now, and Pesten had been given a coarse, ill-smelling blanket to cover his nakedness. They drank water from sacks made of the skin of sky wolves. The Mole sat on the slippery skin-floor between them, silent for now, its transparent ‘eyes’ gazing out at what they had learned to call universe Beta.

The whale itself appeared to be feeding. Lura could see a series of ill-defined lumps passing down the huge digestive tract that spanned its diameter, from face to anus, passing above their heads.

And Lura watched the whale riders. The effective gravity imparted by the whale’s spin was weakest near its axis, and as Anka and Otho and the other half-dozen riders argued, they drifted in the air and spun around, clustering together under their mutual gravity and pushing each other away. They were like squabbling children, she thought.

In the shifts since they’d been taken she had seen something of how the riders lived. All she’d known of them before was their ferocity during raids. Now she had watched them eat, sleep, laugh, squabble, shit – they respected the whale, and kept their waste in containers that they dumped out through hull lesions. They lived naked, for the whale’s body cavity was too hot for them to need clothes. Their life seemed shabby, featureless, unfulfilled between bouts of raiding one Forest or another, and when they weren’t attacking somebody else, it seemed, they’d fight each other. Otho, who seemed a deeper-thinking individual than she’d imagined, sometimes broke this up, but not always; maybe he liked to keep his riders combat-ready.

And they rutted, coupling randomly, in shadowed corners of the whale’s body cavity. There seemed little tenderness in the sex. Lura wondered what became of their children.

Now Coton’s mention of this ‘Raft’ had sent the whale riders into a spin.

Pesten said, ‘I wonder if they regret taking us in the first place. We’ve brought them nothing but trouble.’

Lura murmured, ‘Do you believe all it says? The Mole. About the other “everything”, and all the people there—’

‘Well, I have no idea how it is saying these things to us – how your friend Coton can use it to speak to us at all – but, given all that, I don’t see why anyone would go to all that trouble to lie to us. And it does fit what we know of our history. Humans don’t belong here.’

‘A history you Brothers have been beating out of us for generations. You know, my uncle used to argue with my father. He used to say that we know mankind evolved here because our gods are here, living in the Core of Cores.’

He winked at her. ‘That was a particularly good lie, wasn’t it? Silenced a lot of doubters, such as your uncle . . .’

Thinking of her father and uncle reminded her how far she was from home. She glanced around, at the smoky sky that rotated grandly around the spinning carcass of the whale. ‘I wonder if I’ll ever see the Forest again.’

The Brother took her hand. ‘You will. If only because the riders will have to go back there if they’re to ransom me. I’ll make sure you get off when I do—’

The blunt end of a spear slammed down between them, and they flinched away. Anka loomed over them. ‘Making promises you can’t keep, Brother, to add to a lifetime of lies?’

‘Oh, leave them alone, Anka.’ Otho and some of the others came towards them, moving with big low-gravity footsteps.

Anka ground her spear butt into the floor. ‘Maybe we should truss them up again. What could your boyfriend Coton do about that, Lura? Oh, come on, Otho, enough of this. It’s all just some kind of trick. A voice in a box!’

‘It’s more than that,’ said one of the other riders – a woman who looked away from Lura and Pesten as she spoke. Most of the riders kept their distance from them, evidently spooked by the Mole. Even after so many shifts since her capture, Lura didn’t know their names. The woman said now, ‘If it’s just some trick, why would it tell us to go to the Raft? No tree pilot or kernel-grubber has ever seen the Raft. It’s just a story to them.’

Pesten frowned. ‘Wait – no one from the Forest has ever seen the Raft. Are you saying you’ve seen the Raft for yourself?’

‘I saw it,’ Otho said. ‘Long ago – as a kid.’ He waved a hand vaguely. ‘In a dead nebula, choked up, a few whale hops away from here.’

Lura tried to take this in. She really had always imagined the Raft was just another legend, a detail in the half-mythic saga of the Ship and its crew. ‘So when Coton said we should go there – you could take us?’

Anka loomed again. ‘What right have you got to make demands? What do you woodentops know about riders, and how we live?’

It all swirled inside Lura, her anger and fear, the strangeness of the words that had come out of the Mole – the extraordinary suggestion that the whole universe was dying. And on top of all that she had to deal with this ridiculous woman. She snapped back, ‘Oh, we know all we need to know about you and your kind.’

Pesten murmured, ‘Lura—’

‘Enough, Brother! Let her kill us if she wants – it can’t be worse than hearing her droning voice. While we work to feed the Core of Cores, you prey on us like rats, or fleas that bite the skin. That’s all you are – rats and fleas.’

‘Why, you—’ Anka raised her hand. ‘Otho, is she to speak of us like that?’

‘Oh, shut up, Anka, and let me think,’ Otho said, and he jammed his fists against his temples.

‘Of course you’re right, Lura,’ Pesten murmured smoothly. ‘The riders do prey on the Forest folk. And so they need us. But here’s another unwelcome truth. We need them.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘It’s true. When this nebula dies we’ll have to abandon it for another, as we have many times before. The only way we know to do that is to ride the whales, for the whales can pass through the airless spaces between the nebulae, as we can’t. Then we’ll need the whale riders’ skills, as we did before – and forgot!’ He shook his head. ‘Maybe it’s always like this. Riders and Forest folk fighting out the generations, until it’s time to move again, and they remember how to cooperate. What a depressing picture of humanity. But we don’t forget – we Brothers. And I think you haven’t forgotten either – have you, Otho?’

‘Perhaps it will be different this time,’ snarled Otho. ‘Perhaps we’ll leave you behind, to choke.’

‘No, you won’t. What will you eat? How will you live? And who will take your babies?’

Otho turned away, and Lura saw, at last, what became of the children of whale riders. This place, this violent arena, was no nursery, no place for children. They must drop them off in communities like the Forest – and they made up their numbers through abductions, from those same communities. No wonder they were so savage, she thought, with a stab of pity.

Pesten shifted so he was kneeling with his blanket around his shoulders, and he gazed at Otho, intent. ‘And there’s more. Think about what Coton has told us, about the end of the universe. You must have seen it. You must have travelled to the edge of the nebula, and maybe beyond. I know you riders take your whales between the star clouds, once or twice a generation – else you would forget how it’s done, when it’s needed. I think you have seen that Coton is right.’

‘The stars are going out,’ Otho said bitterly. ‘The nebulae are all choked. You hardly ever see the yellow spark of a new star . . . Even in Atma’s day it was different. Atma was boss before me. So he said before I killed him. It’s true enough.’

‘Coton is right,’ Pesten repeated. ‘And we have to do what he says. We have to go to the Raft – for in the end it’s our only hope. And you could do it, couldn’t you? Oh, come on,’ he said, grinning. ‘I’ve spent my life watching you people control these beasts – and envying you, if you want to know.’

Lura said, ‘Pesten!’

‘I wasn’t always a dried-up old scholar, you know. And there is a certain romance about the whale riders.’

‘You don’t know what you’re asking, Brother,’ Otho said. ‘You’re talking about a dive deep into the nebula – to the very core, where we’ll scoot around the black hole. It’s dark and hot and thick down there. Half the whale’s flesh burns off, and it shits away a chunk of its mass to drive itself out of the gravity well, and it doesn’t care if we live or die in its gut or not. And then we’ll have to plunge into another nebula, and do it all over again.’

Anka said, her anger nearly choking her, ‘I can’t believe I’m listening to this. Otho, you only brought these two in for a quick shag of her, and a fat ransom for him. And now it’s all this.’

Pesten sat back on his heels. ‘Well, I’ve said all I can. What’s it to be, Otho? Steep yourself in blood and die with the rest of us – or live on, a hero?’

Otho growled, ‘I’d shut up if I were you, Brother, before you go too far.’ But he hesitated, his face twisted, and Lura could see Pesten’s persuasion was working. At last he snapped, ‘Let’s do this, and get it over, and we can get back to what we’re good at – riding and robbing. Start the singing, Anka.’

‘You can’t be serious.’

He held her gaze for long heartbeats. Lura wondered if Anka was deciding whether to challenge him, as he had once challenged Atma. Then she broke away.

And she began to sing, a wordless melody, and walked back towards the whale’s face. One by one the others walked with her and joined in, repeating the melody in an overlapping round. By the time they had reached the inside-out face of the whale the song was eerie, discordant, but it pulsed with a compelling rhythm.

‘Some say this is how the riders really control their whales,’ the Brother said, fascinated. ‘With song – not with goads. Once there were no riders, just hunters who learned to call the whales down from the sky. Some say the whales can read our minds . . .’

The riders gathered behind the whale’s eyes, and sang on and on. Lura and the Brother could do nothing but sit and listen.

And the whale turned. Lura could feel the shifting acceleration, and the shuddering of its skin as the great flukes beat at the air.

10

Croq, a small, plump, confident man, was Vala’s contact at the Palace of the Assimilation.

‘Welcome to our Palace, Academician, Marshal! I regard myself as something of a scholar though I have no formal qualification, but I could hardly do my job without acquiring a little learning . . . Come, come, follow me.’

Coton, Vala, Sand and a single Coalition guard followed him into the grounds of the ruined complex. The Palace of the Assimilation had been built on a massive tetrahedral frame, as had many of mankind’s greatest buildings. Though the frame survived, much of the facing, a kind of foam-concrete with a golden patina, had crumbled to leave huge gaps open to the sky, and where the weather had got in the internal partition walls and floors had rotted away. The ground floor was littered with chunks of debris and choked with weeds, and Coton could see people inhabiting lean-tos and shacks in the lee of the surviving walls. Some even had fires burning on the remnants of the polished floor. Vala, picking her way through the rubble, looked faintly embarrassed.

Croq had his own staff here, younger men and women in purple robes similar to his own, with weapons at their waists and antique-looking data slates under their arms. They nodded to Croq as he passed.

‘You can see we have taken in our share of the dispossessed, just as the rest of the planet,’ Croq said. ‘Well, they do no harm here, for little has survived of the Palace’s treasures above ground level. Let them stay, as long as they don’t disturb the customers!’ And he smiled, showing gappy teeth.

Marshal Sand strode impatiently, her head swathed in a Virtual bubble with update reports scrolling in the air. Coton was surprised to find Sand spending so much time on Vala’s projects, which were surely peripheral to her main objectives, yet here she was. Her guard kept a heavy rifle cradled in his arms – or hers; it was impossible to tell the sex under the gleaming green body armour.

Coton, meanwhile, was fascinated by Croq. He was bald with a thick black beard, and his sweeping purple robe, ancient and much patched, was a kind of imitation of Vala’s Academician robe – which was itself a homage to the learning of the past, especially the famous Commission for Historical Truth of the First Coalition. But Croq’s purpose was not scholarship but selling. Coton thought he had seen his type in the markets of Centre, smiling, hustling, dealing. But those vendors of bread and second-hand shoes would have looked crude beside this man, who clearly had expensive wares to sell to a much more discerning set of customers.

They came to a small cylindrical chamber that stood directly under the pinnacle of the main tetrahedral frame, Coton saw, looking up. A couple of Croq’s assistants waited here, weapons visible, evidently keeping the refugees out. Croq waved his party inside the chamber. They filed in, the door closed, and a single light globe lit up the space.

Coton heard the hum of ancient engines, felt a subtle acceleration. Sand grunted her annoyance as her Virtuals flickered.

‘An elevator,’ Vala murmured. ‘Evidently.’

Croq said, ‘Since the Palace was first built, whole civilisations have washed over it like breaking waves. I’m afraid that it’s only in the deepest basements, tucked away in caches, hidden purposefully or simply lost, that you’ll find much of value nowadays. Of course it gives you some idea of just how much was piled up here that there is still something left, even after all this time.’

Sand banged her gloved fist on the wall. ‘And this still works.’

‘Oh, yes. They built their infrastructure well, the ancients.’

Still the descent went on, smooth, its speed undetectable, and Coton, who in his short life had learned to be suspicious of elderly technology, wondered just how far they were falling. He tried to mask his gnawing anxiety.

At last the doors slid open, and Croq led them out into a long, sweeping corridor, illuminated by sparse light globes and curving in the far distance. Coton saw that the walls were shelved, and doors and side branches led off into more shadowy spaces. Croq let them pause as they passed shelves crowded with artefacts – gadgets, what looked like biological samples in specimen jars, even shimmering Virtuals. Coton stared at one beautiful image of another tetrahedral form with a densely structured surface that appeared to have been constructed around a star. He understood nothing of what he saw.

‘It would take me a day to explain the provenance of any one of these wonders,’ Croq said smoothly. ‘And of course the physical artefacts stored here are only a small percentage of the Palace’s holdings; far more is stored as data in the archives – what survives of them, anyhow.’

‘This is the fruit of the Assimilation,’ Marshal Sand said. ‘I studied the period at military school. It was an age that has some similarities with our modern times, this era of the Scourge – save then it was not the Xeelee burning their way across the Galaxy, but humanity.’

Vala looked up at her. ‘You’re certainly a more complex character than I once thought, Marshal. You’re a soldier who sounds as if she regrets the Assimilation.’

Sand shrugged. ‘What’s done is done. It would have been fascinating to travel the Galaxy before humans consumed its diversity, however.’

‘Do you believe in guilt, Marshal Sand? Do you believe that humanity is now being punished for our actions in the past? Whole religions have been built upon the premise.’

‘I know. Even in the military there are sects who worship the Xeelee as cleansing gods. I’m not a Transcendent, Academician. I don’t believe in the guilt of mankind – or in the possibility of the redemption of the species, as they did. But I do believe that if you waste any more time on analysing my personality—’

‘Quite, quite,’ Croq said nervously. ‘Let’s get to the point, shall we?’

He hurried them along a side corridor, and then into a room equipped with modern-looking Virtuals and data desks. This room, long and narrow, was dominated by two pieces of equipment, rather like upright coffins, Coton thought, made of some featureless grey material, and facing each other along the length of the floor. A couple of assistants, young, bright-looking, but nervous and subservient, huddled in the room’s corners.

Croq watched his party keenly, constantly aware of shifting moods and changing expressions. He really was a salesman, Coton thought. ‘I can see you’re impressed by the equipment we’ve assembled here. We’ve worked hard to get this right for you, Academician, and I believe we’ve found exactly what you required.’

Vala grunted, and flicked one of the coffin-boxes with a dismissive fingernail. ‘This, I presume?’

‘Academician, this is a teleport.’

Marshal Sand seemed intrigued, if unimpressed. She shut down her Virtual displays and stalked around the coffin-boxes, pacing out the distance between them. ‘A teleport, eh? And dug up out of the past – what did I tell you, Academician? No doubt teleports of one kind or another have been invented over and over.’

‘Indeed,’ said Croq. ‘And many alien variants were retrieved during the Assimilation.’

‘But it’s not a technology humans ever used much,’ Vala said. ‘Essentially you convert any object you’re sending – even human beings – into a stream of data to be transmitted. But that stream can be blocked or corrupted or illicitly intercepted. And the process is always expensive, as usually you have to destroy the rest mass of the object you wish to send.’

Sand nodded. ‘Because quantum information laws forbid the making of true replicas.’

Croq said, ‘Nevertheless, Academician Vala, I’m convinced this is your solution. As long as you have a communications link of some kind to your parallel universe out in the Bulk, you can use it to send a teleport signal. In fact I found a variety of suitable technologies in the archives – but I chose this, as I thought there was a certain poetic logic to it.’

Sand arched an eyebrow. ‘Poetic?’

‘This is Silver Ghost technology! And you Adepts are crucial to this process, aren’t you?’ He stepped up to Coton and gazed into his eyes, as if they were windows into Coton’s skull. ‘You actually have Silver Ghost material growing inside your heads. Remarkable! As if you are Ghost-human hybrids.’

Vala looked furious. ‘So you have known this of us all along.’

Coton felt like punching him.

But he said smoothly, ‘Of course we have, madam. There are no secrets to be kept from archivists such as ourselves.’

Sand said, ‘Get to the point, salesman. How does this work?’

And Croq described how the Silver Ghosts, notorious tinkerers at the fringe of physics, had meddled with the values of fundamental constants. ‘An object’s quantum wave function describes the probability of finding it at any particular location. But that function is given its scale by a number called the Planck constant. And if you increase the value of that constant, if only locally, then the probability of the object being found over there rather than here is increased. Then all you have to do is pluck the apple from the tree on which you wish to find it, so to speak: there rather than here. The engineering details are a little complex—’

Sand held up her hand. ‘I don’t care how the thing works. No more words. Show us.’

‘If I may have a test object – perhaps your hat, Marshal?’

Sand’s glare was incendiary.

Coton hastily slipped off his jacket. ‘Here. Use this.’

Croq opened up one of the boxes. Featureless inside, it was easily large enough to accommodate a standing human. Carefully Croq folded the jacket and set it down on the floor of the box, and closed up the door. He nodded to his assistants, who murmured to each other and manipulated Virtual displays. Coton thought he heard the hum of some engine gathering its energies, and an ozone, electric smell in the air.

‘It will take a few minutes to prepare . . .’ Croq looked at Vala. ‘This is a proof of concept. We will have to consider the specific details of your project. For instance, the senders in your universe Beta will need access to some kind of technology capable of quantum-level scanning.’

Vala nodded. ‘The ship that stumbled into Beta was equipped with devices to fabricate food and air – even human skin for grafts. They were clearly capable of quantum-level manipulation. We’re hoping that if the folk in Beta can find one of those machines, and if it’s still working, we can download instructions to adjust its function to our purposes.’

‘But then there’s bandwidth. As I understand it the intercosmic signal is transmitted by a stream of gravitons and neutrinos. The greater the flux the faster and more reliable the transmission.’

‘I’m thinking about that,’ Vala said. ‘We should set up a receiving station deep in the gravity well of the neutron star, where spacetime stress is greatest.’

‘And whose ships will you use to do that?’ Sand asked. ‘Ours, I suppose?’

Vala waved that away. ‘You will need access to the gravity well anyhow if we are to help you use the Starfolk. Our projects complement each other, Marshal.’

‘And of course,’ Croq said, ‘you will also need to consider the capacity of the receiver.’

Coton was aware that the salesman was deliberately not looking at him. Vala said nothing. And Coton felt a deep dread. For, of course, that ‘receiver’ was embedded inside Coton’s own head: indeed, it was part of him.

The machine’s low humming continued, and the assistants fussed at their controls.

‘Not much longer,’ Croq said, soothing. ‘Would you like to sit? Something to eat or drink? Of course, Marshal, there may be other facilities we could offer that might be of interest to you as you embark on separate projects—’

Marshal Sand looked down on him. ‘Your manner doesn’t impress me. You’d be surprised how often I come across people like you, salesman – petty and avaricious, grubbing for profit in the misery and ruin the Scourge brings, as humanity flees in a great wave.’

Croq laughed, and Coton grudgingly admired his defiance. ‘What refreshing honesty! Well, I note your contempt, Marshal, but it will not prejudice me against accepting payments in the new Coalition scrip. You disapprove of me selling off bits of the past, do you? But look in the sky. The Scourge is coming, despite your schemes and your strutting and your rather magnificent uniform. So you see, Marshal, I may as well sell off our past, for we humans have no future – eh?’ And he laughed again.

There was a soft chime. One of the assistants hurried to the second coffin-box, opened it, and drew out a jacket. This was unfolded and brought to Coton to inspect. It was undoubtedly his; it fitted when he put it on, and he recognised tears and other minor flaws. Yet it stank slightly of ozone, and was warm to the touch.

The teleport was ready. They were, it seemed, committed.

And now Vala and Sand, together, quite gently, began to tell Coton what they needed of him. Or, more specifically, the alien thing in his head.

11

The Raft was an oval shadow against dull crimson.

The whale plummeted blind, through dead air. Since crossing the void between the nebulae the animal had become a slender missile, its deflated flesh a smooth casing around its internal organs. Even the great eyes had closed. At times Lura had thought it was asleep, or dead, but it continued to respond to the handling of its master – Otho himself worked the goads. Now the whale’s great flukes were beating at the air, and its body was counter-turning, so that the Raft rotated in her view as they approached, close enough now for Lura to see detail, how the light shone through rents in that great floor in the sky.

‘Not long now,’ said Pesten.

Otho snapped, ‘Then hope we find what we came here for, and that it makes this jaunt worthwhile.’ He hauled on his harness. The whale shuddered, and a deep bass groan filled its cavernous interior.

Pesten gave Lura a small smile. They had spoken of how Otho seemed to care for his whale more than he cared for his riders, or himself, and now he demonstrated that. He was a bandit, a killer and a rapist, yet he was a competent leader and capable of sentiment – complicated, like all humans.

As the whale spun closer, the Raft grew until it blocked out half the sky. In the light of a big-star somewhere beyond, it cast a diffusing shadow far down through the dusty air. Otho stopped the whale’s spin, and let it drift in slowly for its final approach. Now, as they floated up towards the rim, the Raft foreshortened into an elliptical patchwork of battered deck plates. Lura could see the sooty scars of welding around the edges of the nearer plates, but as her eye tracked across the ceiling-like surface, the plates crowded with distance into a blur.

At last the whale rose up above the rim, and the upper surface of the Raft opened out below them, an enormous dish, full of complexity. The deck, which itself looked knife-thin, was studded with buildings, constructed of wood panels or metal and jumbled together like toys. The surface was damaged everywhere, tears and holes ripped through it, and at the very heart of the Raft a long rectangular gash lay open like an unhealed wound. And on the farside rim tall machines hulked, silent guardians.

They were all silent before this tremendous unfolding spectacle.

Pesten murmured to Lura, ‘Just remember it’s worse for these whale riders than for us. They live in a world of animals, where nothing humans make is much bigger than those goads Otho is sticking into his poor beast’s nerve stumps. We couldn’t make anything like this, but it isn’t so strange to us. Look, that floor is made of iron that probably came from some star kernel or other – although it looks to have a different texture towards the centre. It’s big – what, a thousand paces across? – but it isn’t so big, our Forest wouldn’t be dwarfed. And this is ours, remember – made by our ancestors, and inhabited for generations, and only abandoned when this nebula ran out of air to breathe.’

The whale continued to rise up over the Raft. Otho looked back at Lura and Pesten. ‘What now?’

Pesten said, ‘Coton told us to look for something big, bigger than a human. And obvious.’ He pointed. ‘What about those structures on the far rim?’

Lura peered that way. ‘They look like a row of broken teeth. But they’re big enough, aren’t they?’ She drifted up to the whale’s translucent skin. ‘Mole—’

‘Massive sensor dysfunction!’

‘Shut up.’ She held it up to the skin, with the small apertures facing out. ‘Are those machines over there what you’re looking for?’

The Mole hesitated, and not for the first time Lura wondered what strange parodies of thought went on inside its cool shell. Then: ‘Confirmed.’

‘Let’s get it done,’ Otho grunted. He braced in the harness, and pressed the goads hard.

The whale’s flukes beat, its collapsed skin rippled, and it groaned. Even Lura could sense the animal’s unhappiness as it was forced to swim down towards the vast, strange surface. Apparently unconsciously the riders held each other’s hands and murmured one of their strange, rhythmic, cyclical songs, trying to reassure the beast.

The Raft became a floor that fled beneath them. Pesten lay down on his belly, peering through translucent flesh at the panorama passing below, and Lura joined him, face down, her elbows tucked under her. As they moved in from the rim they passed over an area of big blocky structures, clean-edged. Lura made out cones set in the surface, evidently firmly anchored, some of which had cables trailing from their upper points. But whatever those cables had once been attached to was long gone.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ Pesten said. He pointed excitedly. ‘Look at that! See the way the buildings are tipped over, away from the centre? And those rows of terraces?’

She frowned. ‘No, I don’t see.’

‘Well, think about the Raft’s gravity – how the mass of this vast, thin dish would tug at you if you stood on it. At the edge, you’d feel as if you were being pulled towards the centre of mass, as you walked in it would feel as if you were standing on a tipped-up plate. But at the centre you’d be pulled straight down, as if that big plate was level. So they’ve built their houses here on a slant, to make it feel as if they are locally vertical. And the terraces, I suppose, are to stop you rolling all the way down to the centre if you fell over.’

She hadn’t had a Brother’s education, but she sensed the ingenuity of the design. It was somehow reassuring to think that the builders of the Raft really had been human, thinking about the needs of the people who would inhabit it.

As they headed to the centre they crossed a different zone, of smaller, more open buildings with doors and windows.

‘Houses,’ Pesten said. ‘This is where people lived. Look at all those houses, stuck to the plate in rows . . .’

Lura said, ‘Coton told me this is how people live in his universe. On surfaces, the surfaces of planets.’ Another Coton-word. ‘Not floating around in the air, as we do.’

‘We’re designed to live that way, after all. Walking around on the ground of planets, I mean.’ Pesten slapped his thin thighs. ‘That’s why we have legs. But it’s a long time since anybody lived here. And it doesn’t look like they finished their time peacefully.’

He was right. Lura saw the evidence of fires, in burned-out buildings and scorched deck plates. And – ‘Oh, Pesten, look.’

The bodies were human, one large, one small, huddled up on the floor, spooned together with the adult sheltering the child. They were still clothed, and scraps of skin clung to their bones, withered and dried.

Pesten reached out and took her hand. ‘Long dead. Perhaps these were among the last – when there was nobody left to take care of the bodies.’

And, she thought grimly, in this lethal air there were not even any rats left to consume the flesh, or worms or bugs.

The whale groaned again, and shuddered under them.

Braced in his harness, Otho called, ‘We’re being drawn into the Raft’s own gravity well. In the middle it’s going to be a good fraction of a gravity, I guess, and she doesn’t like it . . .’

Pesten, peering down, ignored him. ‘We’re approaching the centre of the Raft. It’s different again here.’

These buildings were grander, Lura thought, bigger and more elaborate, with fancy colours and decorations, carved doorways and window frames.

‘But if anything, the evidence of burning is even worse,’ Pesten said. ‘Maybe this is where the bosses lived. They’ll have taken the blame when people got angry and frightened. And look at the floor, the texture. That’s different too . . .’

Where the deck further out seemed to have been assembled from sheets of rusted iron, here the material shone, gleaming and rust-free, though it was still a patchwork, and in places was marked with a kind of decoration, markings of black and green on a white surface.

‘Look, the plates curve,’ Pesten said, growing excited. ‘There, and there . . . And that plate looks like it’s been beaten flat. I think this was once some curved surface that’s been cut up and put back together to make this floor.’

‘The hull of the Ship,’ Lura breathed. ‘The stories say it was a great cylinder. Is it possible? And those markings—’

‘I think I recognise numbers,’ the Brother said. ‘Look – that’s a four, I think, and that’s part of a seven. But if the Ship’s name is written here, it must be cut up and fragmented.’

And Lura, who could read nothing but the numbers pilots etched on their flying trees, could not have recognised the letters of the name anyhow.

Now they reached the very centre of the Raft, where a jagged hole perhaps a hundred paces long had been cut into the floor. Pesten said, ‘It looks as if something was fixed here, and was just ripped out. But how, or why?’ He sighed. ‘There’s so much we’ll never know.’

Lura spotted another body. It was small and naked, its withered skin bare – it must have been another child. It was suspended in the centre of the hole, bobbing up and down through the plane of the Raft, held there, she supposed, by the great artefact’s own gravity field.

To the whale riders, passing the rent in the deck marked the halfway point in this strange journey across the Raft. Encouraged, they sang louder, and Otho worked his goads.

Once past the centre, the whale crossed over the Raft’s concentric zones again, the rich central area, the cruder living spaces beyond, the more functional outer rim. They saw more burning and destruction, and a few more bodies. But Lura saw no movement, nothing that looked fresh – no sign that anybody or anything had lived here for a very long time.

At last the whale hovered before one of the big structures at the very edge of the deck. The machine was an irregular block as tall as two humans. Outlets pierced its broad face, and on the far side a nozzle like a huge mouth strained outwards at the atmosphere of the nebula.

‘Coton said it might be like this, remember,’ Pesten said. ‘He said the Raft must have had machines that drew in stuff from the air and turned it into food and water for the people. Doesn’t that look right?’

Yes, Lura thought; it wasn’t hard to imagine the machine taking giant breaths through those metal lips. On a whim she held up the Mole so it could see. ‘Can you identify that?’

Without hesitation it called loudly, ‘Supply Machine, Deck Seven, Sector Twelve, Model 4-X-7-B, Integrality’s Constancy of Purpose. Report status!’

To Lura’s astonishment a panel on the front of the Raft machine lit up, and she heard a voice, carried through the thick dead air, muffled by the whale’s skin: ‘Operational.’

The riders quailed back in superstitious awe.

Otho looked back at Lura. ‘Well, here we are. What now?’

Pesten said, ‘Coton said we have to work on the machine. How can we get to it?’

Lura said, ‘If we go outside—’

‘You’ll be dead in heartbeats,’ Otho said. Lura saw a kind of resentment cloud his face. ‘I’ll have the whale swallow the machine. Then, when it’s sealed up in her gut, we’ll cut it out. This is going to hurt her. You’d better hope it’s worth it, tree girl, because if it’s not, I’ll cut you. Come on, baby. It won’t be so bad.’

He worked his goads, and the whale groaned and shuddered as its face was driven towards the strange old machine.

12

‘We’re in the Marshal’s flitter, deep in the system of the neutron star, Lura. There isn’t much to see. The neutron star is a dull ember, but its huge density twists space. Vala said that if you tried to measure pi by dividing the star’s circumference by its diameter, you’d be out by about ten per cent. I’m not sure what that means . . . We’ve already done some close passes around the star. I thought I could feel the tides, and the hull groaned—’

‘That’s gravity, Coton!’

‘Yes. Which shapes your world. It’s all so strange. When I look at the neutron star I can’t believe that there are people down there, inside it – or anyhow, Vala says, they feel like they’re people, even though they are made of nuclear material and you could fit thousands of them on your thumbnail.

‘But there’s more, Lura. There is life outside the star too, in knots in the magnetic field, blobs of plasma with internal structure. You can barely see them with the naked eye, but they’re very clear in Vala’s instruments. They’re yet another kind of Weaponised people. Nobody knows why they were spun out of magnetism. Vala says maybe they came here as a refuge. When we make our approaches they cluster close to the ship, and they send signals – a kind of screech, which Vala hasn’t managed to decipher yet. They’re trying to talk to us.’

‘Can you help them?’

‘I don’t know. Not today.’

‘And how are you, Coton? Are you sleeping well?’

‘The gravity dreams are too vivid for that. Spacetime is stretched here, and my brain is bathed in gravitons and sterile neutrinos . . . It’s better to stay awake, if I can. And when I do, I can hear you so clearly now.’

‘Coton – are you afraid? After all, it’s your head they’re going to use, if I understand you, to save me. And then those who will follow me. The thing in your head, the only machine they have that’s powerful enough to bring me across . . .’

‘I try not to be afraid. I trust my grandmother.’

‘If all this fails – or if you decide you don’t want to do this after all, Coton, and I’ll understand – it will still have been worth it. Even if we can’t come home, at least you’ll know our story.’

‘Yes.’

‘And we’ll still be able to talk, won’t we?’

‘Until I grow out of my dreaming faculty – yes. I’ll try as long as I can. Vala is waving at me. I think she wants me to rest.’

‘We’ll talk later. One way or another.’

‘Yes. One way or another. Goodbye, Lura . . .’

13

Coton at last drifted to sleep.

Vala returned to the Marshal’s cabin. Fold-out seats had been set up by the main observation window, and Sand sat there, cradling a cup of hot tea, Virtual status displays hovering around her head.

Behind a partition Sand’s crew controlled the flitter with military competence. And in another cabin Croq the antiquarian was adjusting his ancient Ghost teleport equipment, complaining about the challenge of interfacing systems from technological traditions separated by hundreds of thousands of years. But in this lounge the atmosphere was calm.

Vala sat down with Sand and picked up her own cup – which, when it sensed her presence, began to fill up with tea, a minor miracle bequeathed by some long-dead engineer of the deep past.

Sand asked, ‘Is the boy sleeping?’

‘Badly. The dreams—’

‘How sweet it is to hear their conversation,’ Sand said. Vala had arranged a pickup so that Coton’s sub-vocalising of Lura’s speech could be heard. ‘Boy chatting to girl, an eternal story. They aren’t so far removed in age, are they, Academician? Maybe if this girl is successfully retrieved through your lashed-up teleport, they’ll fall in love! How fitting that would be. If she isn’t turned into some grotesque protoplasmic mass, or if a million years in Beta’s super-gravity hasn’t turned her kind into monsters. And if the process doesn’t burn out his frontal lobe. Does Coton fully understand the risks for himself, by the way? I imagine not – I imagine you haven’t fully informed him – for Coton might have refused, and then you might have had to face the inconvenience of forcing him to obey your will. That wouldn’t fit your image of yourself at all, would it, Vala, as an Academician or a grandmother?’

Guilt swirled in Vala, under a crust of denial. But she had lived a long time and was in control of her emotions, she believed; and she clung to the principle that higher purposes sometimes required sacrifices. Yes, she thought. If she’d had to force her grandson into this, she would have done it. ‘Does it give you pleasure to jab at me in this way, Marshal?’

‘I am interested in people. I could hardly fulfil my role otherwise. And you are quite an extraordinary specimen, Academician. So much conflict! You seethe with ambition and resentment.’

‘Resentment? I am a Weaponised, Marshal Sand. And I am highly educated. The more a Weaponised learns of her own past and the past of her kind, the more resentment deepens, I would say. A natural reaction.’ She savoured her anger, as she savoured the tea’s exotic flavour on her tongue. ‘Why, we Weaponised don’t need the Xeelee Scourge. We have you normals, and that’s enough.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Vala. You have hardly been persecuted, have you? You make an inappropriate martyr! And besides – what is “normal”? Humanity has been engaged in interstellar war for a million years. After such a history perhaps we are all Weaponised. It’s just that with some of us it isn’t so obvious—’

A faint alarm chimed, and Sand pointed to one of the Virtuals fluttering around her head. It expanded to show a schematic of the ship, with lenticular forms sweeping around it.

‘The mag-field creatures again,’ Vala said.

‘Yes. They don’t seem able to keep away. They beat against the hull like butterflies battering against a window.’

Vala wondered what this stern Marshal knew of butterflies. ‘Military goals were rarely achieved with these projects, you know. The Weaponising. When you read the records of that period, you sometimes think the Integrality scientists created such beings simply because they could . . . And certainly little thought was given to those abandoned when the military projects were over.’

‘How do we look to them, do you imagine, the mag-field butterflies?’

Vala shrugged. ‘Cages of electromagnetic and molecular forces. Perhaps like themselves, but made of clumsy, dense stuff, rather than their own graceful plasma wisps. That’s if they perceive such different creatures as ourselves as intelligent entities in the first place. It’s interesting – there may be forms in universe Beta that don’t exist here, that perhaps we would have trouble recognising as sentient, or even alive. Like the “beasts of gravitic chemistry” that supposedly swarm in accretion surfaces surrounding their great black holes . . .’

‘All that complexity. And all implicit, I suppose, in the knotted-up strangeness that was the universe Beta Big Bang – as our own existence was implicit in our own singularity.’ Sand studied her own hand, and the Virtual displays’ green and red light reflected in her clear eyes. ‘How strange it all is.’

Vala realised she knew nothing of Sand’s background. Did she have children of her own, for example? ‘You are in a reflective mood today, Marshal. I’ll admit that you are not the person I took you for, when we first met in this very flitter down on Delta Seven.’

‘Well, there you are. How can we expect to make sense of the universe if we can’t understand each other – eh, Academician?’

‘I haven’t wished to push the issue, for fear it would drive you off. But I’m not sure I understand why, in the end, you’ve diverted resources to support this project of mine. Unlike the Starfolk, I can’t see that the Beta castaways will be of any use to you as a weapon.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’ Sand gestured, conjured another Virtual, and with a wave sent it spinning through the air to Vala. ‘Here’s a conceptual study on how we might use Beta itself as a source of gravitons, perhaps of gravity waves . . . After all, the ancient starbreaker weapon is essentially a gravity wave cannon. Could Beta work as a universal energy source for such weapons? Or, as you said yourself, Beta is a messy, porous spacetime. Perhaps it could be used as some kind of cosmic interchange, a wormhole junction. The Xeelee might use it that way already. Maybe we could even tap into the energies of Beta’s Big Crunch, which is coming soon.’

Vala smiled. ‘You would weaponise an entire cosmos? You think big, for a soldier.’

‘We are fighting a big war.’

‘But I don’t buy any of that as a personal motive for attempting this rescue, of Lura and her people. What is it, Marshal? Humanitarianism?’

Sand shrugged, unperturbed. ‘Call it that if you want. We are a species who once won a Galaxy. I believe that even now we should aspire to do more than simply retreat – that even as the darkness closes in, at least we can help each other.’ She was looking steadily at Vala, with a hint of that cold humour in her eyes. ‘And what about you, Academician? I hardly think you’re here for reasons of warmth and kindness. Oh, it might have started out that way, when you first heard of the plight of these Beta castaways through the mouth of Coton. But it’s gone beyond that now, hasn’t it? The risk you’re prepared to take with Coton has convinced me of that.

‘You scientists are all the same. You don’t want to make this transfer to save the castaways. You want to do it because you think you can. And the cost is irrelevant. Why, you’re as bad as the Weaponeers of the Integrality, who made your ancestors and whom you affect to despise. You’re nothing but a crucible of ambition. And into this crucible your own grandson, young and smiling, is to be thrust.’

Vala glared at her. But she was the first to turn away, her face hot. The Marshal laughed.

Another alarm sounded, a gentle chime.

Croq rapped on the door and opened it. ‘The Beta castaways have powered up their booth. We’re ready to attempt the transfer.’

Sand looked Vala in the eye, and the Academician knew what she was thinking. Last chance to back out.

Vala stood. ‘Let’s do this.’

14

The whale ploughed steadily towards the Core of Cores. The crew huddled behind the whale’s face, singing their eerie repetitive chants.

Lura sat looking out through the whale’s scarred hide. Her Mole was in her arms, and the great Supply Machine that the whale had literally bitten off from the perimeter of the Raft was lying on its back beside her. On its far side Brother Pesten sat, long since awed into silence.

The whale shuddered and shook, and let out another deep, agonised groan. Well might it groan, Lura thought, for it had been many shifts since Otho and his crew had forced it to leave the last rich nebula where it had been able to feed, and it had begun this appalling dive deep into the heart of the tremendous gravitational system in which they were all embedded. Otho had said his whale would never recover from this ordeal – and Lura sensed that he would never forgive her for that, whatever the outcome of this strange adventure.

Yet here they were, plunging into the Core of Cores, at the behest of a boy from another universe.

For some shifts the whale had ploughed through layers of the thick black debris cloud that surrounded the Core itself. But now things were changing. Sombre clouds parted before them, and the debris began to show depth and structure. A pale, pinkish light shone upwards, and veils of the stuff of shattered stars and nebulae arched over the whale, dwarfing it.

Then, abruptly, the clouds cleared, and they were sailing over the Core of Cores itself.

‘By the Bones,’ Pesten muttered, an ancient, un-Brother-like curse. ‘It’s like a planet.’

The Core of Cores was a compact surface clustered about the massive black hole at its heart, a flattened sphere that would have taken hundreds of shifts to walk across – if you could have withstood the gravity. It was by far the largest organised object any of them had ever seen or heard of.

And it was indeed like the ‘planets’ Coton had described in his own universe, a planet rendered in shades of red and pink against charcoal grey and black. There were ‘oceans’ of some quasi-liquid material, thick and red as blood; they lapped at ‘lands’ that thrust above the general spherical surface. There were even small ‘mountain ranges’, like wrinkles in the skin of a soured fruit, and clouds like smoke that sped across the face of the seas. There was continual motion: huge waves crossed the seas, and the mountain sheets seemed to evolve endlessly, and the coasts of the strange continents writhed.

Pesten was ecstatic. He peered through the whale skin as if he wished he could climb through it. ‘It is more like an Alpha world, as Coton described them, than anything we’ve seen before. More like Earth itself than anything we’ve ever seen! Perhaps it’s the largest-scale structure to be found in Beta. Yet even this is much smaller than a trivial Alpha world.

‘You understand that we’re seeing a kind of shell containing the black hole itself. It represents a balance between the influx of material from the debris cloud, and the radiation from the accretion around the black hole itself. It is not as Coton described the environment of Alpha black holes; this has much more structure, and apparently a greater density. And it is held together by something else unique to Beta – gravitic chemistry!’

‘You sound as if you’re proud of it.’

‘Well, why shouldn’t I be? There is no spectacle like this in Alpha.’

‘But it has nothing to do with us,’ Lura murmured.

‘Yes, yes . . . You have your Mole? We must send images of what we’re seeing through to Alpha.’

The crew muttered. Lura saw that they were silhouetted against a new, paler glow, and they were pointing. Lura turned to see. At the centre of one of the strange continents was a grid of pink-white light, etched into the surface like a vast game board.

‘Look,’ Pesten breathed. ‘Look!’

Ideas crowded into Lura’s mind. ‘Life,’ she whispered.

‘And intelligence. Two staggering discoveries in a single glance.’

‘How is this possible?’

‘Well, why should it not be so? Life feeds on sharp energy gradients, places where structure emerges out of chaos and organisation arises.’

Not for the first time Lura wondered how much of the ancient learning he repeated he really understood.

And now she saw more gridworks. Some covered whole continents, and lines of light arrowed around the globe, and embedded in the lattice Lura thought she saw individual structures: pyramids, tetrahedrons and cubes.

‘But we knew they were here,’ she said. ‘Didn’t we, Brother? That was the whole point of our endless labour to shift the star kernels, and drop them into the Core of Cores. These were our gods, the inhabitants of the Core. And they rewarded us with oxygen, pumped out into the veil of nebulae . . .’

The Mole murmured, ‘This is Coton, speaking for Academician Vala. She says she’s surprised to find evidence of intelligence here, despite your beliefs. She thought you were just being superstitious about gods in the Core of Cores.’

Pesten flared. ‘Primitive we may be compared to you – we have forgotten much in this hostile place – but we are not fools!’

‘No, no . . . She apologises . . . That’s not the point she was trying to make. She imagined the oxygen venting was unrelated to your kernel-dropping. Like praying for rain, she says. Now she’s not so sure. However, she says it’s unlikely that whatever intelligence resides here needs your lumps of iron. Look at the scale of this Core; think of the masses involved. She thinks that the intelligences of the Core most likely took the infall of your star kernels as a signal that life persisted in the clouds of nebulae surrounding the Core – chemical life, like yours. And as long as it did, the Core beings have tried to support you. As if your kernels were messages, cries for help hurled into the Core. You were right that there were mighty minds in the Core, protecting life in your cosmos. It’s just that they weren’t gods . . .’

Lura was stunned by these ideas.

Pesten said, ‘To think of it – that creatures of this scale, and so different in every way, should take any notice of us.’

‘Empathy seems to be universal,’ said Coton, through the Mole. But Lura wasn’t sure what that word meant. ‘In the end, however, Vala says, this experiment in symbiosis will end. Symbiosis, grandmother, what does that mean? For the nebulae, all of them, are dying, as your stars go out.’

Lura knew this was true. But long after the trees and whales and sky-wolves were extinct, and all the stars and nebulae were dark, and the people were all gone, the gravitic entities would still swarm over their roiling black hole world. These creatures were the true denizens of this Beta cosmos; humans, soft, wet, dirty and flabby, were mere transient interlopers.

Of course when the ‘Big Crunch’ Coton had described came to this universe, even the gravitic gods of the Core of Cores would not survive.

There was a soft chime. Coton called through the Mole, ‘The spacetime stresses – the graviton flux—’

Pesten said, ‘Just tell us!’

‘My grandmother says we’re ready to try the transfer.’

Lura quailed from the metal box that lay beside her.

The engineers in universe Alpha had found a way to modify the Raft Supply Machine.

They had had Pesten connect it to the Mole with bits of wire pulled out of the stumps of one machine and thrust into orifices in the other. This had been enough, it seemed, for information to be sent chattering from universe Alpha via the Mole into the Supply Machine.

And then, under instruction from Alpha, the Supply Machine had rebuilt itself. Lura had seen waves of sparking light pass through its carcass, and a ripple of tiny adjustments, like muscles flexing under skin. Coton had told her that the machine had smaller machines inside, most too small even to see, that were intended to repair minor flaws – as the body of a human or a tree could heal its own petty injuries. Now, via the Mole, the engineers had subverted these little mechanisms and had ordered them, not to fix the Supply Machine, but to turn it into something else entirely.

Of all the changes made, Lura had understood very few – but the most obvious had been the growth of a seam along the side of the Supply Machine’s carcass, complete with thick metal hinges. Now Pesten and Otho got their fingers under the lip of this seam and lifted. The lid of the great box rose slowly, for it was very massive, but at last it flipped back and fell away. And in the interior you could clearly see a space hollowed out from the nest of components that had been crammed in there – a nest the size and shape of a human body.

Lura felt Pesten’s hand slide into hers; his palm was clammy, as if he was more afraid than she was.

Otho glared at her. ‘So you’re going to climb into this thing, and the Brother and I will close the lid on you, and some kind of little knives are going to come out and chop you up—’

‘Not knives,’ Pesten said.

‘Then what? There won’t be anything left of her. That’s what they said.’

‘It’s been turned into a quantum-level scanner . . .’ But Pesten fell silent.

Lura knew he understood little. It may as well be knives, she thought.

‘You’re afraid,’ Otho said, watching her.

‘Of course, I’m afraid,’ she snapped. ‘Wouldn’t you be? But there will be somebody on the other side of this door who knows me, and will help me.’

‘You really believe that?’

‘If it was all fake, why would Coton and his people go to all this trouble?’ She looked at him closely, the sharp, intelligent eyes, the brutalised features. ‘You helped us get this far. You could have just killed us, as Anka always seemed to want you to do. But you didn’t. You believe in what we’re doing.’

‘This machine’s old. And now it’s been fooled around with. Suppose it breaks down before the rest of us can get through?’

‘So what are you saying? That you want to go first? If so, help yourself.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘I’d rather be second, after I see it work, and I hear you call back through that Mole box.’ He moved closer, and she could feel the gravitational tug of his body, still massive and powerful despite the rationing they had all endured during the whale’s strange odyssey. ‘Or, I’ll tell you a little idea I dreamed up. Suppose I knocked you up, and then sent you through? If you made it, and even if nobody else got through, at least a little piece of me would survive in universe Alpha.’

Lura faced him. ‘You try it and I’ll rip your seed out of my body with my bare hands – in this universe or any other.’

He grinned. ‘Just a thought, tree lady. Just don’t make me regret letting you go.’

‘It’s time, it’s time,’ wheezed the Mole. ‘Lura? This is Coton. Can you hear me? It’s time . . .’

Regretfully she handed the Mole to Pesten. ‘You’d better take this.’

Pesten cradled it. ‘This little box has worked hard.’

‘Yes. Massive sensor dysfunction. Do you think it’s been suffering – cut up, and unable to do its job – for all this time, since the Ship crashed?’

‘Maybe when you’re gone, it can rest at last. I’ll take care of it.’

‘Oh, Pesten—’ Something broke, and she threw herself at him, and they embraced. ‘I’ll see you in Alpha,’ she said.

He pulled back. ‘But will I still be me, after such a strange passage? Will you be you?’ He drew back and eyed the Supply Machine, and Lura saw how terrified he was of it, for all sorts of deep reasons other than the obvious danger.

The Mole murmured, ‘Lura, please . . .’

No more time. She jumped, lifted her legs, and let herself drift down into the body-shaped cavity, where she lay with arms at her side and legs out straight. Immediately, machine components bristled over her bare flesh.

Pesten loomed over her. ‘How does it feel?’

‘Like I’m lying on rough bark. Not so bad.’

‘Lura, I—’

‘Close the lid, Brother. It’s all right.’

The lid descended. Pesten’s face and Otho’s, illuminated by the pinkish light of the Core of Cores, were the last she saw of universe Beta.

She was alone in the dark and silence.

Now the machine’s components closed in on her from above and below and to either side, rough, scratching, some jabbing hard enough to hurt. She was uncomfortably reminded of Otho’s jibe about knives. But she sensed a gathering energy, and she could smell a sharp electric scent, and the hairs on her skin stood on end.

Coton had tried to describe the process to her. This Supply Machine, designed to manufacture food and drink, was scanning her body, quantum function by quantum function. She understood little beyond the Alpha-language phrases, but she knew that before she saw the light again, the numbers that defined her would be stripped out and read off and sent through the space between the universes – and, in the end, lodged safely in the head of her friend. When she thought of that, and conjured up Coton’s face as she imagined it, she relaxed and smiled . . .

Her awareness sparkled and subsided.

And she was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions that encompassed all the universes slid past her like stars streaming from the edge of an unseen nebula, and her eyes were filled with the grey light that shone beneath reality, the light against which all phenomena are shadows.

Time wore away, unmarked.

And then—

15

Marshal Sand stood before the coffin-box, set on end in the flitter cabin, which would serve as the terminal of the transfer. An armed guard stood by.

And Coton writhed on his couch, trying to scream around the gag in his mouth. His head was swathed in a silvery helmet, and the air sparkled with Virtual read-outs. Two crew members hovered over him, evidently anxious, and they tucked a med blanket over his slight body.

Vala stood back, helpless, trying not to tremble. ‘How much longer, Croq?’

But Croq, studying Virtuals that scrolled and danced in the air before his face, had no answer.

‘I wouldn’t worry, Academician,’ Sand said calmly. ‘The alien thing in his head can be used for more transfers, even if this first experiment kills him.’

‘Have some pity, Marshal—’

Now Croq gasped. ‘It’s working! But it shouldn’t be. In the end the graviton flux just isn’t sufficient. Or it wasn’t. Something is boosting it, like an amplification. Otherwise we’d be losing the data, too much of it . . .’

‘Something,’ Sand said. ‘What something?’

‘I think I can guess,’ Vala said. ‘The gravitic creatures in the Core. What else could do this? They saw what we were trying to do. They helped! They amplified the flow—’

‘Why should they?’

‘As you may open a window to release a butterfly, Marshal. A trivial kindness.’

The door of the coffin-box creaked open, just a crack in the seal. There was a smell of smoke, Vala thought – of meat, of sweat. Croq gasped and stepped back.

But Sand held her ground. ‘Well, let us see what it is they have been kind to.’ She stepped forward, and her guard followed, weapon ready. Sand faced the coffin-box, dug the fingers of one gloved hand into the seal of the opened door, and pulled it back.

A girl fell out.

The Marshal caught her in her uniformed arms. Limp, the girl wore a dirty tunic of what looked like plaited tree bark, and her grimy hair was tied back. She was too tall, too spindly, her stick-thin legs didn’t look as if they would support her, Vala thought, and her head lolled on a skinny neck. It was a paradox that the creatures of a high-gravity universe spent most of their lives in effective freefall. And she had distinct webbing on her toes – an adaptation for swimming in the air?

Sand lowered her to the deck. But the girl struggled, and tried to raise her head, and spoke in a scratchy voice. ‘Ma-seef senss-or dees-funx-eon . . .’

Sand stared at her. ‘By Bolder’s ghost. I think she made a joke!’

The girl tried to speak again, and the flitter’s Virtual suite translated for her. ‘Coton? Where is he?’

Vala had not thought of her grandson since the coffin-box had cracked open. She whirled.

Coton lay immobile on his couch. The crew members worked on him frantically. But, one by one, the Virtual lights hovering around his head were turning red.