Stories

Alastair Reynolds (www.members.tripod.com/~voxishj lives in Noordwijk, Holland, and worked for ten years for the European Space Agency before becoming a full-time writer in 2004. He is one of the new British space opera writers to emerge in the mid and late 1990s, in the generation after Baxter and McAuley, and originally the most “hard SF” of them. His first novel, Revelation Space, was published in 1999. He is growing fast as an SF writer in this decade. His last two novels are Century Rain and Pushing Ice. His first short story collection, Galactic North, collecting pieces in the RS universe, is out in 2006.

“Beyond the Aquila Rift” was published in Constellations. There is an echo of Philip K. Dick’s classic, “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts.” A ship is marooned outside the galaxy by an alien wormhole transportation system that everyone uses but no one really understands. Reality is not what it appears to be.

Greta’s with me when I pull Suzy out of the surge tank.

“Why her?” Greta asks.

“Because I want her out first,” I say, wondering if Greta’s jealous. I don’t blame her: Suzy’s beautiful, but she’s also smart. There isn’t a better syntax runner in Ashanti Industrial.

“What happened? “ Suzy asks, when she’s over the groggi-ness. “Did we make it back?”

I ask her to tell me the last thing she remembered.

“Customs,” Suzy says. “Those pricks on Arkangel.”

“And after that? Anything else? The runes? Do you remember casting them?”

“No,” she says, then picks up something in my voice. The fact that I might not be telling the truth, or telling her all she needs to know. “Thorn. I’ll ask you again. Did we make it back?”

“Yeah,” I say. “We made it back.”

Suzy looks back at the starscape, airbrushed across her surge tank in luminous violet and yellow paint. She ‘d had it customized on Carillon. It was against regs: something about the paint clogging intake filters. Suzy didn’t care. She told me it had cost her a week’s pay, but it had been worth it to impose her own personality on the gray company architecture of the ship.

“Funny how I feel like I’ve been in that thing for months.”

I shrug. “That’s the way it feels sometimes.”

“Then nothing went wrong?”

“Nothing at all.”

Suzy looks at Greta. “Then who are you?” she asks.

Greta says nothing. She just looks at me expectantly. I start shaking, and realize I can’t go through with this. Not yet.

“End it,” I tell Greta.

Greta steps toward Suzy. Suzy reacts, but she isn’t quick enough. Greta pulls something from her pocket and touches Suzy on the forearm. Suzy drops like a puppet, out cold. We put her back into the surge tank, plumb her back in and close the lid.

“She won’t remember anything,” Greta says. “The conversation never left her short term memory.”

“I don’t know if I can go through with this,” I say.

Greta touches me with her other hand. “No one ever said this was going to be easy.”

“I was just trying to ease her into it gently. I didn’t want to tell her the truth right out.”

“I know,” Greta says. “You’re a kind man, Thorn.” Then she kisses me.

I remembered Arkangel as well. That was about where it all started to go wrong. We just didn’t know it then.

We missed our first take-off slot when customs found a discrepancy in our cargo waybill. It wasn’t serious, but it took them a while to realize their mistake. By the time they did, we knew we were going to be sitting on the ground for another eight hours, while in-bound control processed a fleet of bulk carriers.

I told Suzy and Ray the news. Suzy took it pretty well, or about as well as Suzy ever took that kind of thing. I suggested she use the time to scour the docks for any hot syntax patches. Anything that might shave a day or two off our return trip.

“Company authorized?” she asked.

“I don’t care,” I said.

“What about Ray?” Suzy asked. “Is he going to sit here drinking tea while I work for my pay?”

I smiled. They had a bickering, love-hate thing going. “No, Ray can do something useful as well. He can take a look at the q-planes.”

“Nothing wrong with those planes,” Ray said.

I took off my old Ashanti Industrial bib cap, scratched my bald spot and turned to the jib man.

“Right. Then it won’t take you long to check them over, will it?”

“Whatever, Skip.”

The thing I liked about Ray was that he always knew when he’d lost an argument. He gathered his kit and went out to check over the planes. I watched him climb the jib ladder, tools hanging from his belt. Suzy got her facemask, long black coat and left, vanishing into the vapor haze of the docks, boot heels clicking into the distance long after she’d passed out of sight.

I left the Blue Goose, walking in the opposite direction to Suzy. Overhead, the bulk carriers slid in one after the other. You heard them long before you saw them. Mournful, cetacean moans cut down through the piss-yellow clouds over the port. When they emerged, you saw dark hulls scabbed and scarred by the blocky extrusions of syntax patterning, jibs and q-planes retracted for landing and undercarriage clutching down like talons. The carriers stopped over their allocated wells and lowered down on a scream of thrust. Docking gantries closed around them like grasping skeletal fingers. Cargo handling ‘saurs plodded out of their holding pens, some of them autonomous, some of them still being ridden by trainers. There was a shocking silence as the engines cut, until the next carrier began to approach through the clouds.

I always like watching ships coming and going, even when they’re holding my own ship on the ground. I couldn’t read the syntax, but I knew these ships had come in all the way from the Rift. The Aquila Rift is about as far out as anyone ever goes. At median tunnel speeds, it’s a year from the center of the Local Bubble.

I’ve been out that way once in my life. I’ve seen the view from the near side of the Rift, like a good tourist. It was about far enough for me.

When there was a lull in the landing pattern, I ducked into a bar and found an Aperture Authority booth that took Ashanti credit. I sat in the seat and recorded a thirty-second message to Katerina. I told her I was on my way back but that we were stuck on Arkangel for another few hours. I warned her that the delay might cascade through to our tunnel routing, depending on how busy things were at the Aperture Authority’s end. Based on past experience, an eight-hour ground hold might become a two day hold at the surge point. I told her I’d be back, but she shouldn’t worry if I was a few days late.

Outside a diplodocus slouched by with a freight container strapped between its legs.

I told Katerina T loved her and couldn’t wait to get back home.

While I walked back to the Blue Goose, I thought of the message racing ahead of me. Transmitted at lightspeed up-system, then copied into the memory buffer of the next outgoing ship. Chances were, that particular ship wasn’t headed to Barranquilla or anywhere near it. The Aperture Authority would have to relay the message from ship to ship until it reached its destination. I might even reach Barranquilla ahead of it, but in all my years of delays that had only happened once. The system worked all right.

Overhead, a white passenger liner had been slotted in between the bulk carriers. I lifted up my mask to get a better look at it. I got a hit of ozone, fuel, and dinosaur dung. That was Arkangel all right. You couldn’t mistake it for any other place in the Bubble. There were four hundred worlds out there, up to a dozen surface ports on every planet, and none of them smelled bad in quite the same way.

“Thorn?”

I followed the voice. It was Ray, standing by the dock.

“You finished checking those planes?” I asked.

Ray shook his head. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. They were a little off-alignment, so—seeing as we’re going to be sitting here for eight hours—I decided to run a full recalibration.”

I nodded. “That was the idea. So what’s the prob?”

“The prob is a slot just opened up. Tower says we can lift in thirty minutes.”

I shrugged. “Then we’ll lift.”

“I haven’t finished the recal. As it is, things are worse than before I started. Lifting now would not be a good idea.”

“You know how the tower works,” I said. “Miss two offered slots, you could be on the ground for days.”

“No one wants to get back home sooner than I do,” Ray said.

“So cheer up.”

“She’ll be rough in the tunnel. It won’t be a smooth ride home.”

I shrugged. “Do we care? We’ll be asleep.”

“Well, it’s academic. We can’t leave without Suzy.”

I heard boot heels clicking toward us. Suzy came out of the fog, tugging her own mask aside.

“No joy with the rune monkeys,” she said. “Nothing they were selling I hadn’t seen a million times before. Fucking cowboys.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’re leaving anyway.”

Ray swore. I pretended I hadn’t heard him.

I was always the last one into a surge tank. I never went under until I was sure we were about to get the green light. It gave me a chance to check things over. Things can always go wrong, no matter how good the crew.

The Blue Goose had come to a stop near the AA beacon which marked the surge point. There were a few other ships ahead of us in the queue, plus the usual swarm of AA service craft. Through an observation blister I was able to watch the larger ships depart one by one. Accelerating at maximum power, they seemed to streak toward a completely featureless part of the sky. Their jibs were spread wide, and the smooth lines of their hulls were gnarled and disfigured with the cryptic alien runes of the routing syntax. At twenty gees it was as if a huge invisible hand snatched them away into the distance. Ninety seconds later, there’d be a pale green flash from a thousand kilometers away.

I twisted around in the blister. There were the foreshortened symbols of our routing syntax. Each rune of the script was formed from a matrix of millions of hexagonal platelets. The platelets were on motors so they could be pushed in or out from the hull.

Ask the Aperture Authority and they’ll tell you that the syntax is now fully understood. This is true, but only up to a point. After two centuries of study, human machines can now construct and interpret the syntax with an acceptably low failure rate. Given a desired destination, they can assemble a string of runes which will almost always be accepted by the aperture’s own machinery. Furthermore, they can almost always guarantee that the desired routing is the one that the aperture machinery will provide.

In short, you usually get where you want to go.

Take a simple point-to-point transfer, like the Hauraki run. In that case there is no real disadvantage in using automatic syntax generators. But for longer trajectories—those that may involve six or seven transits between aperture hubs—machines lose the edge. They find a solution, but usually it isn’t the optimum one. That’s where syntax runners come in. People like Suzy have an intuitive grasp of syntax solutions. They dream in runes. When they see a poorly constructed script, they feel it like a toothache. It affronts them.

A good syntax runner can shave days off a route. For a company like Ashanti Industrial, that can make a lot of difference.

But I wasn’t a syntax runner. I could tell when something had gone wrong with the platelets, but otherwise I had no choice. I had to trust that Suzy had done her job.

But I knew Suzy wouldn’t screw things up.

I twisted around and looked back the other way. Now that we were in space, the q-planes had deployed. They were swung out from the hull on triple hundred-meter long jibs, like the arms of a grapple. I checked that they were locked in their fully extended positions and that the status lights were all in the green. The jibs were Ray’s area. He’d been checking the alignment of the ski-shaped q-planes when I ordered him to close-up ship and prepare to lift. I couldn’t see any visible indication that they were out of alignment, but then again it wouldn’t take much to make our trip home bumpier than usual. But as I’d told Ray, who cared? The Blue Goose could take a little tunnel turbulence. It was built to.

I checked the surge point again. Only three ships ahead of us.

I went back to the surge tanks and checked that Suzy and Ray were all right. Ray’s tank had been customized at the same time that Suzy had had hers done. It was full of images of what Suzy called the B VM: the Blessed Virgin Mary. The BVM was always in a spacesuit, carrying a little spacesuited Jesus. Their helmets were airbrushed gold halos. The artwork had a cheap, hasty look to it. I assumed Ray hadn’t spent as much as Suzy.

Quickly I stripped down to my underclothes. I plumbed into my own unpainted surge tank and closed the lid. The buffering gel sloshed in. Within about twenty seconds I was already feeling drowsy. By the time traffic control gave us the green light, I’d be asleep.

I’ve done it a thousand times. There was no fear, no apprehension. Just a tiny flicker of regret.

I’ve never seen an aperture. Then again, very few people have.

Witnesses report a doughnut shaped lump of dark chon-drite asteroid, about two kilometers across. The entire middle section has been cored out, with the inner part of the ring faced by the quixotic-matter machinery of the aperture itself. They say the q-matter machinery twinkles and moves all the while, like the ticking innards of a very complicated clock. But the monitoring systems of the Aperture Authority detect no movement at all.

It’s alien technology. We have no idea how it works, or even who made it. Maybe, in hindsight, it’s better not to be able to see it.

It’s enough to dream, and then awake, and know that you’re somewhere else.

Try a different approach, Greta says. Tell her the truth this time. Maybe she ‘II take it easier than you think.

“There’s no way I can tell her the truth.”

Greta leans one hip against the wall, one hand still in her pocket. “Then tell her something half way to it.”

We unplumb Suzy and haul her out of the surge tank.

“Where are we?” she asks. Then to Greta: “Who are you?”

I wonder if some of the last conversation did make it out of Suzy’s short-term memory after all.

“Greta works here,” I say.

“Where’s here?”

I remember what Greta told me. “A station in Schedar sector.”

“That’s not where we’re meant to be, Thorn.”

I nod. “I know. There was a mistake. A routing error.”

Suzy’s already shaking her head. “There was nothing wrong ...”

“I know. It wasn’t your fault.” I help her into her ship clothes. She’s still shivering, her muscles reacting to movement after so much time in the tank. “The syntax was good.”

“Then what?”

“The system made a mistake, not you.”

“Schedar sector ...” Suzy says. “That would put us about ten days off our schedule, wouldn’t it?”

I try to remember what Greta said to me the first time. I ought to know this stuff off by heart, but Suzy’s the routing expert, not me. “That sounds about right,” I say.

But Suzy shakes her head. “Then we’re not in Schedar sector.”

I try to sound pleasantly surprised.

“We’re not?”

“I’ve been in that tank for a lot longer than a few days, Thorn. I know. I can feel it in every fucking bone in my body. So where are we?”

I turn to Greta. I can’t believe this is happening again.

“End it,” I say.

Greta steps toward Suzy.

You know that “as soon as I awoke I knew everything was wrong” cliche? You’ve probably heard it a thousand times, in a thousand bars across the Bubble, wherever ship crews swap tall tales over flat company-subsidized beer. The trouble is that sometimes that’s exactly the way it happens. I never felt good after a period in the surge tank. But the only time I had ever come around feeling anywhere near this bad was after that trip I took to the edge of the Bubble.

Mulling this, but knowing there was nothing I could do about it until I was out of the tank, it took me half an hour of painful work to free myself from the connections. Every muscle fiber in my body felt as though it had been shredded. Unfortunately, the sense of wrongness didn’t end with the tank. The Blue Goose was much too quiet. We should have been heading away from the last exit aperture after our routing. But the distant, comforting rumble of the fusion engines wasn’t there at all. That meant we were in free-fall.

Not good.

I floated out of the tank, grabbed a handhold and levered myself around to view the other two tanks. Ray’s largest BVM stared back radiantly from the cowl of his tank. The bio indices were all in the green. Ray was still unconscious, but there was nothing wrong with him. Same story with Suzy. Some automated system had decided I was the only one who needed waking.

A few minutes later I had made my way to the same observation blister I’d used to check the ship before the surge. I pushed my head into the scuffed glass halfdome and looked around.

We’d arrived somewhere. The Blue Goose was sitting in a huge zero-gravity parking bay. The chamber was an elongated cylinder, hexagonal in cross-section. The walls were a smear of service machinery: squat modules, snaking umbilical lines, the retracted cradles of unused docking berths. Whichever way I looked I saw other ships locked onto cradles. Every make and class you could think of, every possible configuration of hull design compatible with aperture transitions. Service lights threw a warm golden glow on the scene. Now and then the whole chamber was bathed in the stuttering violet flicker of a cutting torch.

It was a repair facility.

I was just starting to mull on that when I saw something extend itself from the wall of the chamber. It was a telescopic docking tunnel, groping toward our ship. Through the windows in the side of the tunnel I saw figures floating, pulling themselves along hand over hand.

I sighed and started making my way to the airlock.

By the time I reached the lock they were already through the first stage of the cycle. Nothing wrong with that—there was no good reason to prevent foreign parties boarding a vessel—but it was just a tiny bit impolite. But perhaps they’d assumed we were all asleep.

The door slid open.

“You’re awake,” a man said. “Captain Thomas Gundlupet of the Blue Goose, isn’t it?”

“Guess so,” I said.

“Mind if we come in?”

There were about half a dozen of them, and they were already coming in. They all wore slightly timeworn ochre overalls, flashed with too many company sigils. My hackles rose. I really didn’t like the way they were barging in.

“What’s up?” I said. “Where are we?”

“Where do you think?” the man said. He had a face full of stubble, with bad yellow teeth. I was impressed with that. Having bad teeth took a lot of work these days. It was years since I’d seen anyone who had the same dedication to the art.

“I’m really hoping you’re not going to tell me we’re still stuck in Arkangel system,” I said.

“No, you made it through the gate.”

“And?”

“There was a screw-up. Routing error. You didn’t pop out of the right aperture.”

“Oh, Christ.” I took off my bib cap. “It never rains. Something went wrong with the insertion, right?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows how these things happen? All we know is you aren’t supposed to be here.”

“Right. And where is ‘here’?”

“Saumlaki Station. Schedar sector.”

He said it as though he was already losing interest, as if this was a routine he went through several times a day.

He might have been losing interest. I wasn’t.

I’d never heard of Saumlaki Station, but I’d certainly heard of Schedar sector. Schedar was a K supergiant out toward the edge of the Local Bubble. It defined one of the seventy-odd navigational sectors across the whole Bubble.

Did I mention the Bubble already?

You know how the Milky Way galaxy looks; you’ve seen it a thousand times, in paintings and computer simulations. A bright central bulge at the Galactic core, with lazily curved spiral arms flung out from that hub, each arm composed of hundreds of billions of stars, ranging from the dimmest, slow-burning dwarfs to the hottest supergiants teetering on the edge of supernova extinction.

Now zoom in on one arm of the Milky Way. There’s the sun, orange-yellow, about two-thirds out from the center of the Galaxy. Lanes and folds of dust swaddle the sun out to distances of tens of thousands of light-years. Yet the sun itself is sitting right in the middle of a four-hundred-light-year-wide hole in the dust, a bubble in which the density is about a twentieth of its average value.

That’s the Local Bubble. It’s as if God blew a hole in the dust just for us.

Except, of course, it wasn’t God. It was a supernova, about a million years ago.

Look farther out, and there are more bubbles, their walls intersecting and merging, forming a vast froth-like structure tens of thousands of light-years across. There are the structures of Loop I and Loop II and the Lindblad Ring. There are even super-dense knots where the dust is almost too thick to be seen through at all. Black cauls like the Taurus or Rho-Ophiuchi dark clouds or the Aquila Rift itself.

Lying outside the Local Bubble, the Rift is the farthest point in the galaxy we’ve ever traveled to. It’s not a question of endurance or nerve. There simply isn’t a way to get beyond it, at least not within the faster-than-light network of the aperture links. The rabbit-warren of possible routes just doesn’t reach any farther. Most destinations—including most of those on the Blue Goose’s itinerary—didn’t even get you beyond the Local Bubble.

For us, it didn’t matter. There’s still a lot of commerce you can do within a hundred light-years of Earth. But Schedar was right on the periphery of the Bubble, where dust density began to ramp up to normal galactic levels, two hundred and twenty-eight light-years from Mother Earth.

Again: not good.

“I know this is a shock for you,” another voice said. “But it’s not as bad as you think it is.”

I looked at the woman who had just spoken. Medium height, the kind of face they called “elfin,” with slanted ash-gray eyes and a bob of shoulder-length chrome-white hair.

The face hurtingly familiar.

“It isn’t?”

“I wouldn’t say so, Thom.” She smiled. “After all, it’s given us the chance to catch up on old times, hasn’t it?”

“Greta?” I asked, disbelievingly.

She nodded. “For my sins.”

“My God. It is you, isn’t it?”

“I wasn’t sure you’d recognize me. Especially after all this time.”

“You didn’t have much trouble recognizing me.”

“I didn’t have to. The moment you popped out, we picked up your recovery transponder. Told us the name of your ship, who owned her, who was flying it, what you were carrying, where you were supposed to be headed. When I heard it was you, I made sure I was part of the reception team. But don’t worry. It’s not like you’ve changed all that much.”

“Well, you haven’t either,” I said.

It wasn’t quite true. But who honestly wants to hear that they look about ten years older than the last time you saw them, even if they still don’t look all that bad with it? I thought about how she had looked naked, memories that I’d kept buried for a decade spooling into daylight. It shamed me that they were still so vivid, as if some furtive part of my subconscious had been secretly hoarding them through years of marriage and fidelity.

Greta half smiled. It was as if she knew exactly what I was thinking.

“You were never a good liar, Thorn.”

“Yeah. Guess I need some practice.”

There was an awkward silence. Neither of us seemed to know what to say next. While we hesitated, the others floated around us, saying nothing.

“Well,” I said. “Who’d have guessed we’d end up meeting like this?”

Greta nodded and offered the palms of her hands in a kind of apology.

“I’m just sorry we aren’t meeting under better circumstances,” she said. “But if it’s any consolation, what happened wasn’t at all your fault. We checked your syntax, and there wasn’t a mistake. It’s just that now and then the system throws a glitch.”

“Funny how no one likes to talk about that very much,” I said.

“Could have been worse, Thorn. I remember what you used to tell me about space travel.”

“Yeah? Which particular pearl of wisdom would that have been?”

“If you’re in a position to moan about a situation, you’ve no right to be moaning.”

“Christ. Did I actually say that?”

“Mm. And I bet you’re regretting it now. But look, it really isn’t that bad. You’re only twenty days off schedule.” Greta nodded toward the man who had the bad teeth. “Kolding says you’ll only need a day of damage repair before you can move off again, and then another twenty, twenty-five days before you reach your destination, depending on routing patterns. That’s less than six weeks. So you lose the bonus on this one. Big deal. You’re all in one shape, and your ship only needs a little work. Why don’t you just bite the bullet and sign the repair paperwork?”

“I’m not looking forward to another twenty days in the surge tank. There’s something else, as well.”

“Which is?”

I was about to tell her about Katerina, how she’d have been expecting me back already.

Instead I said: “I’m worried about the others. Suzy and Ray. They’ve got families expecting them. They’ll be worried.”

“I understand,” Greta said. “Suzy and Ray. They’re still asleep, aren’t they? Still in their surge tanks?”

“Yes,” I said, guardedly.

“Keep them that way until you’re on your way.” Greta smiled. “There’s no sense worrying them about their families, either. It’s kinder.”

“If you say so.”

“Trust me on this one, Thorn. This isn’t the first time I’ve handled this kind of situation. Doubt it’ll be the last, either.”

I stayed in a hotel overnight, in another part of Saumlaki. The hotel was an echoing multilevel prefab structure, sunk deep into bedrock. It must have had a capacity for hundreds of guests, but at the moment only a handful of the rooms seemed to be occupied. I slept fitfully and got up early. In the atrium, I saw a bib-capped worker in rubber gloves removing diseased carp from a small ornamental pond. Watching him pick out the ailing metallic-orange fish, I had a flash of deja vu. What was it about dismal hotels and dying carp?

Before breakfast—bleakly alert, even though I didn’t really feel as if I’d had a good night’s sleep—I visited Kolding and got a fresh update on the repair schedule.

“Two, three days,” he said.

“It was a day last night.”

Kolding shrugged. “You’ve got a problem with the service, find someone else to fix your ship.”

Then he stuck his little finger into the corner of his mouth and began to dig between his teeth.

“Nice to see someone who really enjoys his work,” I said.

I left Kolding before my mood worsened too much, making my way to a different part of the station.

Greta had suggested we meet for breakfast and catch up on old times. She was there when I arrived, sitting at a table in an “outdoor” terrace, under a red-and-white striped canopy, sipping orange juice. Above us was a dome several hundred meters wide, projecting a cloudless holographic sky. It had the hard, enameled blue of midsummer.

“How’s the hotel?” she asked after I’d ordered a coffee from the waiter.

“Not bad. No one seems very keen on conversation, though. Is it me or does that place have all the cheery ambience of a sinking ocean liner?”

“It’s just this place,” Greta said. “Everyone who comes here is pissed off about it. Either they got transferred here and they’re pissed off about that, or they ended up here by routing error and they’re pissed off about that instead. Take your pick.”

“No one’s happy?”

“Only the ones who know they’re getting out of here soon.”

“Would that include you?”

“No.” she said. “I’m more or less stuck here. But I’m OK about it. I guess I’m the exception that proves the rule.”

The waiters were glass mannequins of a kind that had been fashionable in the core worlds about twenty years ago. One of them placed a croissant in front of me, then poured scalding black coffee into my cup.

“Well, it’s good to see you,” I said.

“You too, Thorn.” Greta finished her orange juice and then took a corner of my croissant for herself, without asking. “I heard you got married.”

“Yes.”

“Well? Aren’t you going to tell me about her?”

I drank some of my coffee. “Her name’s Katerina.”

“Nice name.”

“She works in the department of bioremediation on Ka-gawa.”

“Kids?” Greta asked.

“Not yet. It wouldn’t be easy, the amount of time we both spend away from home.”

“Mm.” She had a mouthful of croissant. “But one day you might think about it.”

“Nothing’s ruled out,” I said. As flattered as I was that she was taking such an interest in me, the surgical precision of her questions left me slightly uncomfortable. There was no thrust and parry, no fishing for information. That kind of directness unnerved. But at least it allowed me to ask the same questions. “What about you, then?”

“Nothing very exciting. I got married a year or so after I last saw you. A man called Marcel.”

“Marcel,” I said, ruminatively, as if the name had cosmic significance. “Well, I’m happy for you. I take it he’s here too?”

“No. Our work took us in different directions. We’re still married, but ...” Greta left the sentence hanging.

“It can’t be easy,” I said.

“If it was meant to work, we’d have found a way. Anyway, don’t feel too sorry for either of us. We’ve both got our work. I wouldn’t say I was any less happy than the last time we met.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said.

Greta leaned over and touched my hand. Her fingernails were midnight black with a blue sheen.

“Look. This is really presumptuous of me. It’s one thing asking to meet up for breakfast. It would have been rude not to. But how would you like to meet again later? It’s really nice to eat here in the evening. They turn down the lights. The view through the dome is really something.”

I looked up into that endless holographic sky.

“I thought it was faked.”

“Oh, it is,” she said. “But don’t let that spoil it for you.”

I settled in front of the camera and started speaking.

“Katerina,” I said. “Hello. I hope you’re all right. By now I hope someone from the company will have been in touch. If they haven’t, I’m pretty sure you’ll have made your own inquiries. I’m not sure what they told you, but I promise you that we’re safe and sound and that we’re coming home. I’m calling from somewhere called Saumlaki station, a repair facility on the edge of Schedar sector. It’s not much to look at: just a warren of tunnels and centrifuges dug into a pitch-black D-type asteroid, about half a light-year from the nearest star. The only reason it’s here at all is because there happens to be an aperture next door. That’s how we got here in the first place. Somehow or other Blue Goose took a wrong turn in the network, what they call a routing error. The Goose came in last night, local time, and I’ve been in a hotel since then. I didn’t call last night because I was too tired and disoriented after coming out of the tank, and I didn’t know how long we were going to be here. Seemed better to wait until morning, when we’d have a better idea of the damage to the ship. It’s nothing serious—just a few bits and pieces buckled during the transit—but it means we’re going to be here for another couple of days. Kolding—he’s the repair chief—says three at the most. By the time we get back on course, however, we’ll be about forty days behind schedule.”

I paused, eyeing the incrementing cost indicator. Before I sat down in the booth, I always had an eloquent and economical speech queued up in my head, one that conveyed exactly what needed to be said, with the measure and grace of a soliloquy. But my mind always dried up as soon as I opened my mouth, and instead of an actor I ended up sounding like a small time thief, concocting some fumbling alibi in the presence of quick-witted interrogators.

I smiled awkwardly and continued: “It kills me to think this message is going to take so long to get to you. But if there’s a silver lining, it’s that I won’t be far behind it. By the time you get this, I should be home in only a couple of days. So don’t waste money replying to this, because by the time you get it I’ll already have left Saumlaki Station. Just stay where you are, and I promise I’ll be home soon.”

That was it. There was nothing more I needed to say, other than: “I miss you.” Delivered after a moment’s pause, I meant it to sound emphatic. But when I replayed the recording it sounded more like an afterthought.

I could have recorded it again, but I doubted that I would have been any happier. Instead I just committed the existing message for transmission and wondered how long it would have to wait before going on its way. Since it seemed unlikely that there was a vast flow of commerce in and out of Saumlaki, our ship might be the first suitable outbound vessel.

I emerged from the booth. For some reason I felt guilty, as if I had been in some way neglectful. It took me a while before I realized what was playing on my mind. I’d told Kate-rina about Saumlaki Station. I’d even told her about Kolding and the damage to the Blue Goose. But I hadn’t told her about Greta.

It’s not working with Suzy.

She’s too smart, too well-attuned to the physiological correlatives of surge tank immersion. I can give her all the reassurances in the world, but she knows she’s been under too long for this to be anything other than a truly epic screw-up. She knows that we aren’t just talking weeks or even months of delay here. Every nerve in her body is screaming that message into her skull.

“I had dreams,” she says, when the grogginess fades.

“What kind?”

“Dreams that I kept waking. Dreams that you were pulling me out of the surge tank. You and someone else.”

I do my best to smile. I’m alone, but Greta isn’t far away. The hypodermic’s in my pocket now.

“I always get bad dreams coming out of the tank,” I say.

“These felt real. Your story kept changing, but you kept telling me we were somewhere ... that we ‘d gone a little off course, but that it was nothing to worry about.”

So much for Greta’s reassurance that Suzy will remember nothing after our aborted efforts at waking her. Seems that her short-term memory isn’t quite as fallible as we’d like.

“It’s funny you should say that,” I tell her. “Because, actually, we are a little off course.”

She’s sharper with every breath. Suzy was always the best of us at coming out of the tank.

“Tell me how far, Thorn.”

“Farther than I’d like.”

She balls her fists. I can’t tell if it’s aggression, or some lingering neuromuscular effect of her time in the tank. “How far? Beyond the Bubble?”

“Beyond the Bubble, yes.”

Her voice grows small and childlike.

“Tell me, Thorn. Are we out beyond the Rift?”

I can hear the fear. I understand what she’s going through. It’s the nightmare that all ship crews live with, on every trip. That something will go wrong with the routing, something so severe that they ‘II end up on the very edge of the network. That they’ll end up so far from home that getting back will take years, not months. And that, of course, years will have already passed, even before they begin the return trip.

That loved ones will be years older when they reach home.

If they ‘re still there. If they still remember you, or want to remember. If they ‘re still recognizable, or alive.

Beyond the Aquila Rift. It’s shorthand for the trip no one ever hopes to make by accident. The one that will screw up the rest of your life, the one that creates the ghosts you see haunting the shadows of company bars across the whole Bubble. Men and women ripped out of time, cut adrift from families and lovers by an accident of an alien technology we use but barely comprehend.

“Yes,” I say. “We’re beyond the Rift.”

Suzy screams, knitting her face into a mask of anger and denial. My hand is cold around the hypodermic. I consider using it.

A new repair estimate from Kolding. Five, six days.

This time I didn’t even argue. I just shrugged and walked out, wondering how long it would be next time.

That evening I sat down at the same table where Greta and I had met over breakfast. The dining area had been well lit before, but now the only illumination came from the table lamps and the subdued lighting panels set into the paving. In the distance, a glass mannequin cycled from empty table to empty table, playing Asturias on a glass guitar. There were no other patrons dining tonight.

I didn’t have long to wait for Greta.

“I’m sorry I’m late, Thom.”

I turned to her as she approached the table. I liked the way she walked in the low gravity of the station, the way the subdued lighting traced the arc of her hips and waist. She eased into her seat and leaned toward me in the manner of a conspirator. The lamp on the table threw red shadows and gold highlights across her face. It took ten years off her age.

“You aren’t late,” I said. “And anyway, I had the view.”

“It’s an improvement, isn’t it?”

“That wouldn’t be saying much,” I said with a smile. “But yes, it’s definitely an improvement.”

“I could sit out here all night and just look at it. In fact sometimes that’s exactly what I do. Just me and a bottle of wine.”

“I don’t blame you.”

Instead of the holographic blue, the dome was now full of stars. It was like no kind of view I’d ever seen from another station or ship. There were furious blue-white stars embedded in what looked like sheets of velvet. There were hard gold gems and soft red smears, like finger smears in pastel. There were streams and currents of fainter stars, like a myriad neon fish caught in a snapshot of frozen motion. There were vast billowing backdrops of red and green cloud, veined and flawed by filaments of cool black. There were bluffs and promontories of ochre dust, so rich in three-dimensional structure that they resembled an exuberant im-pasto of oil colors; contours light-years thick laid on with a trowel. Red or pink stars burned through the dust like lanterns. Orphaned worlds were caught erupting from the towers, little spermlike shapes trailing viscera of dust. Here and there I saw the tiny eyelike knots of birthing solar systems. There were pulsars, flashing on and off like navigation beacons, their differing rhythms seeming to set a stately tempo for the entire scene, like a deathly slow waltz. There seemed too much detail for one view, an overwhelming abundance of richness, and yet no matter which direction I looked, there was yet more to see, as if the dome sensed my attention and concentrated its efforts on the spot where my gaze was directed. For a moment I felt a lurching sense of dizziness, and—though I tried to stop it before I made a fool of myself—I found myself grasping the side of the table, as if to stop myself falling into the infinite depths of the view.

“Yes, it has that effect on people,” Greta said.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Do you mean beautiful, or terrifying?”

I realized I wasn’t sure. “It’s big,” was all I could offer.

“Of course, it’s faked,” Greta said, her voice soft now that she was leaning closer. “The glass in the dome is smart. It exaggerates the brightness of the stars, so that the human eye registers the differences between them. Otherwise the colors aren’t unrealistic. Everything else you see is also pretty accurate, if you accept that certain frequencies have been shifted into the visible band, and the scale of certain structures has been adjusted.” She pointed out features for my edification. “That’s the edge of the Taurus Dark Cloud, with the Pleiades just poking out. That’s a filament of the Local Bubble. You see that open cluster?”

She waited for me to answer. “Yes,” I said.

“That’s the Hyades. Over there you’ve got Betelguese and Bellatrix.”

“I’m impressed.”

“You should be. It cost a lot of money.” She leaned back a bit, so that the shadows dropped across her face again. “Are you all right, Thorn? You seem a bit distracted.”

I sighed.

“I just got another prognosis from your friend Kolding. That’s enough to put a dent in anyone’s day.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“There’s something else, too,” I said. “Something that’s been bothering me since I came out of the tank.”

A mannequin came to take our order. I let Greta choose for me.

“You can talk to me, whatever it is,” she said, when the mannequin had gone.

“It isn’t easy.”

“Something personal, then? Is it about Katerina?” She bit her tongue “No, sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It’s not about Katerina. Not exactly, anyway.” But even as I said it, I knew that in a sense it was about Katerina, and how long it was going to be before we saw each other again.

“Go on, Thom.”

“This is going to sound silly. But I wonder if everyone’s being straight with me. It’s not just Kolding. It’s you as well. When I came out of that tank I felt the same way I felt when I’d been out to the Rift. Worse, if anything. I felt like I’d been in the tank for a long, long time.”

“It feels that way sometimes.”

“I know the difference, Greta. Trust me on this.”

“So what are you saying?”

The problem was that I wasn’t really sure. It was one thing to feel a vague sense of unease about how long I’d been in the tank. It was another to come out and accuse my host of lying. Especially when she had been so hospitable.

“Is there any reason you’d lie to me?”

“Come off it, Thom. What kind of a question is that?”

As soon as I had come out with it, it sounded absurd and offensive to me as well. I wished I could reverse time and start again, ignoring my misgivings.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Stupid. Just put it down to messed up biorhythms, or something.”

She reached across the table and took my hand, as she had done at breakfast. This time she continued to hold it.

“You really feel wrong, don’t you?”

“Kolding’s games aren’t helping, that’s for sure.” The waiter brought our wine, setting it down, the bottle chinking against his delicately articulated glass fingers. The mannequin poured two glasses and I sampled mine. “Maybe if I had someone else from my crew to bitch about it all with, I wouldn’t feel so bad. I know you said we shouldn’t wake Suzy and Ray, but that was before a one-day stopover turned into a week.”

Greta shrugged. “If you want to wake them, no one’s going to stop you. But don’t think about ship business now. Let’s not spoil a perfect evening.”

I looked up at the stars. It was heightened, with the mad shimmering intensity of a Van Gogh nightscape. It made one feel drunk and ecstatic just to look at it. “What could possibly spoil it?” I asked.

What happened is that I drank too much wine and ended up sleeping with Greta. I’m not sure how much of a part the wine played in it for her. If her relationship with Marcel was in as much trouble as she’d made out, then obviously she had less to lose than I did. Yes, that made it all right, didn’t it? She the seductress, her own marriage a wreck, me the hapless victim. I’d lapsed, yes, but it wasn’t really my fault. I’d been alone, far from home, emotionally fragile, and she had exploited me. She had softened me up with a romantic meal, her trap already sprung.

Except all that was self-justifying bullshit, wasn’t it? If my own marriage was in such great shape, why had I failed to mention Greta when I called home? At the time, I’d justified that omission as an act of kindness toward my wife. Ka-terina didn’t know that Greta and I had ever been a couple. But why worry Katerina by mentioning another woman, even if I pretended that we’d never met before?

Except—now—I could see that I’d failed to mention Greta for another reason entirely. Because in the back of my mind, even then, there had been the possibility that we might end up sleeping together.

I was already covering myself when I called Katerina. Already making sure there wouldn’t be any awkward questions when I got home. As if I not only knew what was going to happen but secretly yearned for it.

The only problem was that Greta had something else in mind.

“Thom,” Greta said, nudging me toward wakefulness. She was lying naked next to me, leaning on one elbow, with the sheets crumpled down around her hips. The light in her room turned her into an abstraction of milky blue curves and deep violet shadows. With one black-nailed finger she traced a line down my chest and said: “There’s something you need to know.”

“What?” I asked.

“I lied. Kolding lied. We all lied.”

I was too drowsy for her words to have much more than a vaguely troubling effect. All I could say, again, was: “What?”

“You’re not in Saumlaki Station. You’re not in Schedar sector.”

I started waking up properly. “Say that again.”

“The routing error was more severe than you were led to believe. It took you far beyond the Local Bubble.”

I groped for anger, even resentment, but all I felt was a dizzying sensation of falling. “How far out?”

“Farther than you thought possible.”

The next question was obvious.

“Beyond the Rift?”

“Yes,” she said, with the faintest of smiles, as if humoring a game whose rules and objectives she found ultimately demeaning. “Beyond the Aquila Rift. A long, long way beyond it.”

“I need to know, Greta.”

She pushed herself from the bed, reached for a gown. “Then get dressed. I’ll show you.”

I followed Greta in a daze.

She took me to the dome again. It was dark, just as it had been the night before, with only the lamp-lit tables to act as beacons. I supposed that the illumination throughout Saumlaki Station (or wherever this was) was at the whim of its occupants and didn’t necessarily have to follow any recognizable diurnal cycle. Nonetheless, it was still unsettling to find it changed so arbitrarily. Even if Greta had the authority to turn out the lights when she wanted to, didn’t anyone else object?

But I didn’t see anyone else to object. There was no one else around; only a glass mannequin standing to attention with a napkin over one arm.

She sat us at a table. “Do you want a drink, Thorn?”

“No, thanks. For some reason I’m not quite in the mood.”

She touched my wrist. “Don’t hate me for lying to you. It was done out of kindness. I couldn’t break the truth to you in one go.”

Sharply I withdrew my hand. “Shouldn’t I be the judge of that? So what is the truth, exactly?”

“It’s not good, Thorn.”

“Tell me, then I’ll decide.”

I didn’t see her do anything, but suddenly the dome was filled with stars again, just as it had been the night before.

The view lurched, zooming outward. Stars flowed by from all sides, like white sleet. Nebulae ghosted past in spectral wisps. The sense of motion was so compelling that I found myself gripping the table, seized by vertigo.

“Easy, Thom,” Greta whispered.

The view lurched, swerved, contracted. A solid wall of gas slammed past. Now, suddenly, I had the sense that we were outside something—that we had punched beyond some containing sphere, defined only in vague arcs and knots of curdled gas, where the interstellar gas density increased sharply.

Of course. It was obvious. We were beyond the Local Bubble.

And we were still receding. I watched the Bubble itself contract, becoming just one member in the larger froth of voids. Instead of individual stars, I saw only smudges and motes, aggregations of hundreds of thousands of suns. It was like pulling back from a close-up view of a forest. I could still see clearings, but the individual trees had vanished into an amorphous mass.

We kept pulling back. Then the expansion slowed and froze. I could still make out the Local Bubble, but only because I had been concentrating on it all the way out. Otherwise, there was nothing to distinguish it from the dozens of surrounding voids.

“Is that how far out we’ve come?” I asked.

Greta shook her head. “Let me show you something.”

Again, she did nothing that I was aware of. But the Bubble

I had been looking at was suddenly filled with a skein of red lines, like a child’s scribble.

“Aperture connections,” I said.

As shocked as I was by the fact that she had lied to me—and as fearful as I was about what the truth might hold—I couldn’t turn off the professional part of me, the part that took pride in recognizing such things.

Greta nodded. “Those are the main commerce routes, the well-mapped connections between large colonies and major trading hubs. Now I’ll add all mapped connections, including those that have only ever been traversed by accident.”

The scribble did not change dramatically. It gained a few more wild loops and hairpins, including one that reached beyond the wall of the Bubble to touch the sunward end of the Aquila Rift. One or two other additions pierced the wall in different directions, but none of them reached as far as the Rift.

“Where are we?”

“We’re at one end of one of those connections. You can’t see it because it’s pointing directly toward you.” She smiled slightly. “I needed to establish the scale that we’re dealing with. How wide is the Local Bubble, Thorn? Four hundred light-years, give or take?”

My patience was wearing thin. But I was still curious.

“About right.”

“And while I know that aperture travel times vary from point to point, with factors depending on network topology and syntax optimization, isn’t it the case that the average speed is about one thousand times faster than light?”

“Give or take.”

“So a journey from one side of the Bubble might take—what, half a year? Say five or six months? A year to the Aquila Rift?”

“You know that already, Greta. We both know it.”

“All right. Then consider this.” And the view contracted again, the Bubble dwindling, a succession of overlaying structures concealing it, darkness coming into view on either side, and then the familiar spiral swirl of the Milky Way galaxy looming large.

Hundreds of billions of stars, packed together into foaming white lanes of sea spume.

“This is the view,” Greta said. “Enhanced of course, brightened and filtered for human consumption—but if you had eyes with near-perfect quantum efficiency, and if they happened to be about a meter wide, this is more or less what you’d see if you stepped outside the station.”

“I don’t believe you.”

What I meant was I didn’t want to believe her.

“Get used to it, Thorn. You’re a long way out. The station’s orbiting a brown dwarf star in the Large Magellanic Cloud. You’re one hundred and fifty thousand light-years from home.”

“No,” I said, my voice little more than a moan of abject, childlike denial.

“You felt as though you’d spent a long time in the tank. You were dead right. Subjective time? I don’t know. Years, easily. Maybe a decade. But objective time—the time that passed back home—is a lot clearer. It took Blue Goose one hundred and fifty years to reach us. Even if you turned back now, you’d have been away for three hundred years, Thorn.”

“Katerina,” I said, her name like an invocation.

“Katerina’s dead,” Greta told me. “She’s already been dead a century.”

How do you adjust to something like that? The answer is that you can’t count on adjusting to it at all. Not everyone does. Greta told me that she had seen just about every possible reaction in the spectrum, and the one thing she had learned was that it was next to impossible to predict how a given individual would take the news. She had seen people adjust to the revelation with little more than a world-weary shrug, as if this were merely the latest in a line of galling surprises life had thrown at them, no worse in its way than illness or bereavement or any number of personal setbacks. She had seen others walk away and kill themselves half an hour later.

But the majority, she said, did eventually come to some kind of accommodation with the truth, however faltering and painful the process.

“Trust me, Thom,” she said. “I know you now. I know you have the emotional strength to get through this. I know you can learn to live with it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me straight away, as soon as I came out of the tank?”

“Because I didn’t know if you were going to be able to take it.”

“You waited until after you knew I had a wife.”

“No,” Greta said. “I waited until after we’d made love. Because then I knew Katerina couldn’t mean that much to you.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck me? Yes, you did. That’s the point.”

I wanted to strike out against her. But what I was angry at was not her insinuation but the cold-hearted truth of it. She was right, and I knew it. I just didn’t want to deal with that, any more than I wanted to deal with the here and now.

I waited for the anger to subside.

“You say we’re not the first?” I said.

“No. We were the first, I suppose—the ship I came in. Luckily it was well equipped. After the routing error, we had enough supplies to set up a self-sustaining station on the nearest rock. We knew there was no going back, but at least we could make some kind of life for ourselves here.”

“And after that?”

“We had enough to do just keeping ourselves alive, the first few years. But then another ship came through the aperture. Damaged, drifting, much like Blue Goose. We hauled her in, warmed her crew, broke the news to them.”

“How’d they take it?”

“About as well as you’d expect.” Greta laughed hollowly to herself. “A couple of them went mad. Another killed herself. But at least a dozen of them are still here. In all honesty, it was good for us that another ship came through. Not just because they had supplies we could use, but because it helped us to help them. Took our minds off our own self-pity. It made us realize how far we’d come and how much help these newcomers needed to make the same transition. That wasn’t the last ship, either. We’ve gone through the same process with eight or nine others, since then.” Greta looked at me, her head cocked against her hand. “There’s a thought for you, Thom.”

“There is?”

She nodded. “It’s difficult for you now, I know. And it’ll be difficult for you for some time to come. But it can help to have someone else to care about. It can smooth the transition.”

“Like who?” I asked.

“Like one of your other crew members,” Greta said. “You could try waking one of them, now.”

Greta’s with me when I pull Suzy out of the surge tank.

“Why her?” Greta asks.

“Because I want her out first,” I say, wondering if Greta’s jealous. I don’t blame her. Suzy’s beautiful, but she’s also smart. There isn’t a better syntax runner in Ashanti Industrial.

“What happened?” Suzy asks, when’s she over the groggi-ness. “Did we make it back?”

I ask her to tell me the last thing she remembered.

“Customs,” Suzy says. “Those pricks on Arkangel.”

“And after that? Anything else? The runes? Do you remember casting them?”

“No,” she says, then picks up something in my voice. The fact that I might not be telling the truth, or telling her all she needs to know. “Thom. I’ll ask you again. Did we make it back?”

A minute later we ‘re putting Suzy back into the tank.

It hasn ‘t worked first time. Maybe next try.

But it kept not working with Suzy. She was always cleverer and quicker than me; she always had been. As soon as she came out of the tank, she knew that we’d come a lot farther than Schedar sector. She was always ahead of my lies and excuses.

“It was different when it happened to me,” I told Greta, when we were lying next to each other again, days later, with Suzy still in the tank. “I had all the nagging doubts she has, I think. But as soon as I saw you standing there, I forgot all about that stuff.”

Greta nodded. Her hair fell across her face in dishevelled, sleep-matted curtains. She had a strand of it between her lips.

“It helped, seeing a friendly face?”

“Took my mind off the problem, that’s for sure.”

“You’ll get there in the end,” she said. “Anyway, from Suzy’s point of view, aren’t you a friendly face as well?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But she’d been expecting me. You were the last person in the world I expected to see standing there.”

Greta touched her knuckle against the side of my face. Her smooth skin slid against stubble. “It’s getting easier for you, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You’re a strong man, Thom. I knew you’d come through this.”

“I haven’t come through it yet,” I said. I felt like a tightrope walker halfway across Niagara Falls. It was a miracle I’d made it as far as I had. But that didn’t mean I was home and dry.

Still, Greta was right. There was hope. I’d felt no crushing spasms of grief over Katerina’s death, or enforced absence, or however you wanted to put it. All I felt was a bittersweet regret, the way one might feel about a broken heirloom or long-lost pet. I felt no animosity toward Katerina, and I was sorry that I would never see her again. But I was sorry about not seeing a lot of things. Maybe it would become worse in the days ahead. Maybe I was just postponing a breakdown.

I didn’t think so.

In the meantime, I continued trying to find a way to deal with Suzy. She had become a puzzle that I couldn’t leave unsolved. I could have just woken her up and let her deal with the news as best as she could, but this seemed cruel and unsatisfactory. Greta had broken it to me gently, giving me the time to settle into my new surroundings and take that necessary step away from Katerina. When she finally broke the news, as shocking as it was, it didn’t shatter me. I’d already been primed for it, the sting taken out of the surprise. Sleeping with Greta obviously helped. I couldn’t offer Suzy the same solace, but I was sure that there was a way for us to coax Suzy to the same state of near-acceptance.

Time after time we woke her and tried a different approach. Greta said there was a window of a few minutes before the events she was experiencing began to transfer into long-term memory. If we knocked her out, the buffer of memories in short term storage was wiped before it ever crossed the hippocampus into long-term recall. Within that window, we could wake her up as many times as we liked, trying endless permutations of the revival scenario.

At least that was what Greta told me.

“We can’t keep doing this indefinitely,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Isn’t she going to remember somethingl”

Greta shrugged. “Maybe. But I doubt that she’ll attach any significance to those memories. Haven’t you ever had vague feelings of deja vu coming out of the surge tank?”

“Sometimes,” I admitted.

“Then don’t sweat about it. She’ll be all right. I promise you.”

“Perhaps we should just keep her awake, after all.”

“That will be cruel.”

“It’s cruel to keep waking her up and shutting her down, like a toy doll.”

There was a catch in her voice when she answered me.

“Keep at it, Thorn. I’m sure you’re close to finding a way in the end. It’s helping you, focusing on Suzy. I always knew it would.”

I started to say something, but Greta pressed a finger to my lips.

Greta was right about Suzy. The challenge helped me, taking my mind off my own predicament. I remembered what Greta had said about dealing with other crews in the same situation, before Blue Goose put in. Clearly she had learned many psychological tricks: gambits and shortcuts to assist the transition to mental well-being. I felt slight resentment at being manipulated so effectively. But at the same time I couldn’t deny that worrying about another human being had helped me with my own adjustment. When, days later, I stepped back from the immediate problem of Suzy, I realized that something was different. I didn’t feel far from home. I felt, in an odd way, privileged. I’d come further than almost anyone in history. I was still alive, and there were still people around to provide love and partnership and a web of social relations. Not just Greta, but all the other unlucky souls who had ended up at the station.

If anything, there appeared more of them than when I had first arrived. The corridors—sparsely populated at first—were increasingly busy, and when we ate under the dome—under the Milky Way—we were not the only diners. I studied their lamp-lit faces, comforted by their vague familiarity, wondering what kinds of stories they had to tell, where they’d come from home, who they had left behind, how they had adjusted to life here. There was time enough to get to know them all. And the place would never become boring, for at any time—as Greta had intimated—we could always expect another lost ship to drop through the aperture. Tragedy for the crew, but fresh challengers, fresh faces, fresh news from home, for us.

All in all, it wasn’t really so bad.

Then it clicked.

It was the man cleaning out the fish that did it, in the lobby of the hotel. It wasn’t just the familiarity of the process, but the man himself.

I’d seen him before. Another pond full of diseased carp. Another hotel.

Then I remembered Kolding’s bad teeth, and recalled how they’d reminded me of another man I’d met long before. Except it wasn’t another man at all. Different name, different context, but everything else the same. And when I looked at the other diners, really looked at them, there was no one I couldn’t swear I hadn’t seen before. No single face that hit me with the force of utter unfamiliarity.

Which left Greta.

I said to her, over wine, under the Milky Way: “Nothing here is real, is it?”

She looked at me with infinite sadness and shook her head.

“What about Suzy?” I asked her.

“Suzy’s dead. Ray is dead. They died in their surge tanks.”

“How? Why them, and not me?”

“Something about particles of paint blocking intake filters. Not enough to make a difference over short distances, but enough to kill them on the trip out here.”

I think some part of me had always suspected. It felt less like shock than brutal disappointment.

“But Suzy seemed so real,” I said. “Even the way she had doubts about how long she’d been in the tank ... even the way she remembered previous attempts to wake her.”

The glass mannequin approached our table. Greta waved him away.

“I made her convincing, the way she would have acted.”

“You made her?”

“You’re not really awake, Thorn. You’re being fed data. This entire station is being simulated.”

I sipped my wine. I expected it to taste suddenly thin and synthetic, but it still tasted like pretty good wine.

“Then I’m dead as well?”

“No. You’re alive. Still in your surge tank. But I haven’t brought you to full consciousness yet.”

“All right. The truth this time. I can take it. How much is real? Does the station exist? Are we really as far out as you said?”

“Yes,” she said. “The station exists, just as I said it does. It just looks ... different. And it is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and it is orbiting a brown dwarf star.”

“Can you show me the station as it is?”

“I could. But I don’t think you’re ready for it. I think you’d find it difficult to adjust.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Even after what I’ve already adjusted to?”

“You’ve only made half the journey, Thom.”

“But you made it.”

“I did, Thom. But for me it was different.” Greta smiled.

“For me, everything was different.”

Then she made the light show change again. None of the other diners appeared to notice as we began to zoom in toward the Milky Way, crashing toward the spiral, ramming through shoals of outlying stars and gas clouds. The familiar landscape of the Local Bubble loomed large.

The image froze, the Bubble one among many such structures.

Again it filled with the violent red scribble of the aperture network. But now the network wasn’t the only one. It was merely one ball of red yarn among many, spaced out across tens of thousands of light-years. None of the scribbles touched each other, yet—in the way they were shaped, in the way they almost abutted against each other—it was possible to imagine that they had once been connected. They were like the shapes of continents on a world with tectonic drift.

“It used to span the galaxy,” Greta said. “Then something happened. Something catastrophic, which I still don’t understand. A shattering, into vastly smaller domains. Typically a few hundred light-years across.”

“Who made it?”

“I don’t know. No one knows. They probably aren’t around anymore. Maybe that was why it shattered, out of neglect.”

“But we found it,” I said. “The part of it near us still worked.”

“All the disconnected elements still function,” Greta said. “You can’t cross from domain to domain, but otherwise the apertures work as they were designed. Barring, of course, the occasional routing error.”

“All right,” I said. “If you can’t cross from domain to domain, how did Blue Goose get this far out? We’ve come a lot farther than a few hundred light-years.”

“You’re right. But then such a long-distance connection might have been engineered differently from the others. It appears that the links to the Magellanic Clouds were more resilient. When the domains shattered from each other, the connections reaching beyond the galaxy remained intact.”

“In which case you can cross from domain to domain,” I said. “But you have to come all the way out here first.”

“The trouble is, not many want to continue the journey at this point. No one comes here deliberately, Thorn.”

“I still don’t get it. What does it matter to me if there are other domains? Those regions of the galaxy are thousands of light-years from Earth, and without the apertures we’d have no way of reaching them. They don’t matter. There’s no one there to use them.”

Greta’s smile was coquettish, knowing.

“What makes you so certain?”

“Because if there were, wouldn’t there be alien ships popping out of the aperture here? You’ve told me Blue Goose wasn’t the first through. But our domain—the one in the Local Bubble—must be outnumbered hundreds to one by all the others. If there are alien cultures out there, each stumbling on their own local domain, why haven’t any of them ever come through the aperture, the way we did?”

Again that smile. But this time it chilled my blood.

“What makes you think they haven’t, Thom?”

I reached out and took her hand, the way she had taken mine. I took it without force, without malice, but with the assurance that this time I really, sincerely meant what I was about to say.

Her fingers tightened around mine.

“Show me,” I said. “I want to see things as they really are. Not just the station. You as well.”

Because by then I’d realized. Greta hadn’t just lied to me about Suzy and Ray. She’d lied to me about the Blue Goose as well. Because we were not the latest human ship to come through.

We were the first.

“You want to see it?” she asked.

“Yes. All of it.”

“You won’t like it.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“All right, Thom. But understand this. I’ve been here before. I’ve done this a million times. I care for all the lost souls. And I know how it works. You won’t be able to take the raw reality of what’s happened to you. You’ll shrivel away from it. You’ll go mad, unless I substitute a calming fiction, a happy ending.”

“Why tell me that now?”

“Because you don’t have to see it. You can stop now, where you are, with an idea of the truth. An inkling. But you don’t have to open your eyes.”

“Do it,” I said.

Greta shrugged. She poured herself another measure of wine, then made sure my own glass was charged.

“You asked for it,” she said.

We were still holding hands, two lovers sharing an intimacy. Then everything changed.

It was just a flash, just a glimpse. Like the view of an unfamiliar room if you turn the lights on for an instant. Shapes and forms, relationships between things. I saw caverns, wormed-out and linked, and things moving through those caverns, bustling along with the frantic industry of moles or termites. The things were seldom alike, even in the most superficial sense. Some moved via propulsive waves of multiple clawed limbs. Some wriggled, smooth plaques of carapace grinding against the glassy rock of the tunnels.

The things moved between caves in which lay the hulks of ships, almost all too strange to describe.

And somewhere distant, somewhere near the heart of the rock, in a matriarchal chamber all of its own, something drummed out messages to its companions and helpers, stiffly articulated antlerlike forelimbs beating against stretched tympana of finely veined skin, something that had been waiting here for eternities, something that wanted nothing more than to care for the souls of the lost.

Katerina’s with Suzy when they pull me out of the surge tank.

It’s bad—one of the worst revivals I’ve ever gone through. I feel as if every vein in my body has been filled with finely powdered glass. For a moment, a long moment, even the idea of breathing seems insurmountably difficult, too hard, too painful even to contemplate.

But it passes, as it always passes.

After a while I can not only breathe, I can move and talk.

“Where ...”

“Easy, Skip,” Suzy says. She leans over the tank and starts unplugging me. I can’t help but smile. Suzy’s smart—there isn’t a better syntax runner in Ashanti Industrial—but she’s also beautiful. It’s like being nursed by an angel.

I wonder if Katerina’s jealous.

“Where are we?” I try again. “Feels like I was in that thing for an eternity. Did something go wrong?”

“Minor routing error,” Suzy says. “We took some damage and they decided to wake me first. But don’t sweat about it. At least we’re in one piece.”

Routing errors. You hear about them, but you hope they’re never going to happen to you.

“What kind of delay?”

“Forty days. Sorry, Thorn. Bang goes our bonus.”

In anger, I hammer the side of the surge tank. But Kate-rina steps toward me and places a calming hand on my shoulder.

“It’s all right,” she says. “You’re home and dry. That’s all that matters.”

I look at her and for a moment remember someone else, someone I haven’t thought about in years. I almost remember her name, and then the moment passes.

I nod. “Home and dry.”

The Big Hello!

Welcome aboard! If you are in receipt of this message (and if you’ve succeeded in understanding it, of course) then you’ve already passed the hardest test! You’ve attained a basic competence in physics and engineering, coupled with enough of an understanding of the universe you live in, to intercept and decode signals from the Galactic Information Network!

Congratulations! This is already more than most cultures achieve, so you’re already well ahead of the pack! Give yourselves a pat on ... whatever it is you guys pat yourselves on!

The next step, should you choose to take it, is to participate in the Galactic Information Network by replying to this message! It’s easy—all you have to do is generate a modulated gravity wave signal with a source strength of around four billion billion Megawatts! That may sound a lot, but it isn’t really—it’s only one percent of the energy output of the G-type star your planet orbits! Go on—you won’t miss it!

But wait! Before you launch into a reply (and we’re really keen to hear from you!) there are a few things you might want to keep in mind! Call them rules, call them guidelines, call them Good Old Common Sense—we don’t care, as long as you obey them without question!

Only kidding! But there are still a few little things you might want to bear in mind, if only to avoid wasting expensive Galactic bandwidth! To assist in this, we’ve supplied a few tips that you may find useful!

Firstly, most new cultures want to know a bit about the wider Galactic Community—and who can blame them! It’s a big old Galaxy out there and you’ve just joined the party! Right now, though, all you need to know is that you are one of the more junior members of the inhabited Galaxy, and that there are a few tests you have to pass before you can ascend to the second level of sentience! Don’t be disheartened, though—you’ll get there in the end if you stick at it! All it takes is intelligence, determination, and maybe a short extension on the Main Sequence lifetime of your star! In the meantime, we’ve prepared a Primer Package to get you started! There’s a lot of information in the Primer Package—far too much to squeeze into a gravitational wave signal! So what we’ve done is pre-install the Primer Package on the metallic hydrogen ocean of your system’s largest Gas Giant planet!

That’s right—it’s already there!

And if you’d already found the Primer Package and were wondering what that meter-wide grey ball was actually for—well, now you know! Just be careful opening it—or did you find that out already?! Well, it was a nice Gas Giant while it lasted!

Only kidding! But one of the things you’ll notice about the Primer Package is that it doesn’t say anything about faster than light travel! A lot of new species are really keen to learn about this, for some inexplicable reason! All we can say is that by the time you’ve ascended to the second level of sentience, you will find the question of ‘faster than light travel’ about as interesting as ‘faster methods to cure animal skins’, or ‘faster ways to ferment mammalian lactic fluid’! Trust us! We were the same, once upon a time! (And no, we didn’t believe it either!)

All the same, the Primer Package should answer a lot of your basic questions—and more! Most likely, though, you’ll only end up with more questions that you want answering! We don’t mind—that’s what we’re here for! But before you go firing off a bunch of random queries, have a quick glance at the following! It’ll save your time—and ours!

First, make sure your query isn’t covered by the Primer Package! It sounds obvious—and it is—but you’d be amazed how many cultures don’t seem to have read their Primer Package all the way through! Remember that the Primer Package is highly nested, and that some content layers may not be accessible given your current spatio/temporal perception horizon! Just be patient!

Secondly, there are a few topics covered by the Primer Package that—while they may seem to lead to interesting follow-up questions to a level one culture, are a tiny bit passe where we’re concerned! Frankly, we’re just a little fed up with going over the same ground over and over again!

Some, but not all, of these topics include questions related to Supreme Beings, the Birth, Life, Death and Afterlife of the Universe, the Possibility of Other Universes, the official explanation for the Great Void at z=10, and the unscheduled downtime of the Orion Arm Router during Galactic rotation cycle 15, and its possible implication in the Ninth Mass Extinction (and the ensuing cover-up)!

If you could steer away from these topics, guys, that would be great!

Also, please don’t reply to any transmissions originating from the M13 globular cluster in Hercules—and never, ever send them unsolicited messages! Especially not radio—they hate radio! Also beware of messages claiming to originate from ascended level 3 cultures, especially those which offer suspiciously cheap Dyson conversions of your solar system! Believe us—they are too good to be true! You’ll also want to keep away from any entities posing as the legal heirs of the capital assets of the fallen level 2 culture on the edge of the Cygnus Loop—and you definitely don’t want to give them the coordinates of your system!

Oh, and before we forget—never, ever ask what happened to the humans! Unless you want to find out!

PS—When appending content to incoming messages, please do not top-post.

Diamond Dogs

2001

One

I met Childe in the Monument to the Eighty.

It was one of those days when I had the place largely to myself, able to walk from aisle to aisle without seeing another visitor; only my footsteps disturbed the air of funereal silence and stillness.

I was visiting my parents’ shrine. It was a modest affair: a smooth wedge of obsidian shaped like a metronome, undecorated save for two cameo portraits set in elliptical borders. The sole moving part was a black blade which was attached near the base of the shrine, ticking back and forth with magisterial slowness. Mechanisms buried inside the shrine ensured that it was winding down, destined to count out days and then years with each tick. Eventually it would require careful measurement to detect its movement.

I was watching the blade when a voice disturbed me.

“Visiting the dead again, Richard?”

“Who’s there?” I said, looking around, faintly recognizing the speaker but not immediately able to place him.

“Just another ghost.”

Various possibilities flashed through my mind as I listened to the man’s deep and taunting voice—a kidnapping, an assassination—before I stopped flattering myself that I was worthy of such attention.

Then the man emerged from between two shrines a little way down from the metronome.

“My God,” I said.

“Now do you recognize me?”

He smiled and stepped closer: as tall and imposing as I remembered. He had lost the devil’s horns since our last meeting—they had only ever been a bio-engineered affectation—but there was still something satanic about his appearance, an effect not lessened by the small and slightly pointed goatee he had cultivated in the meantime.

Dust swirled around him as he walked towards me, suggesting that he was not a projection.

“I thought you were dead, Roland.”

“No, Richard,” he said, stepping close enough to shake my hand. “But that was most certainly the effect I desired to achieve.”

“Why?” I said.

“Long story.”

“Start at the beginning, then.”

Roland Childe placed a hand on the smooth side of my parents’ shrine. “Not quite your style, I’d have thought?”

“It was all I could do to argue against something even more ostentatious and morbid. But don’t change the subject. What happened to you?”

He removed his hand, leaving a faint damp imprint. “I faked my own death. The Eighty was the perfect cover. The fact that it all went so horrendously wrong was even better. I couldn’t have planned it like that if I’d tried.”

No arguing with that, I thought. It had gone horrendously wrong.

More than a century and a half ago, a clique of researchers led by Calvin Sylveste had resurrected the old idea of copying the essence of a living human being into a computer-generated simulation. The procedure—then in its infancy—had the slight drawback that it killed the subject. But there had still been volunteers, and my parents had been amongst the first to sign up and support Calvin’s work. They had offered him political protection when the powerful Mixmaster lobby opposed the project, and they had been amongst the first to be scanned.

Less than fourteen months later, their simulations had also been amongst the first to crash.

None could ever be restarted. Most of the remaining Eighty had succumbed, and now only a handful remained unaffected.

“You must hate Calvin for what he did,” Childe said, still with that taunting quality in his voice.

“Would it surprise you if I said I didn’t?”

“Then why did you set yourself so vocally against his family after the tragedy?”

“Because I felt justice still needed to be served.” I turned from the shrine and started walking away, curious as to whether Childe would follow me.

“Fair enough,” he said. “But that opposition cost you dearly, didn’t it?”

I bridled, halting next to what appeared a highly realistic sculpture but was almost certainly an embalmed corpse.

“Meaning what?”

“The Resurgam expedition, of course, which just happened to be bankrolled by House Sylveste. By rights, you should have been on it. You were Richard Swift, for heaven’s sake. You’d spent the better part of your life thinking about possible modes of alien sentience. There should have been a place for you on that ship, and you damned well knew it.”

“It wasn’t that simple,” I said, resuming my walk. “There were a limited number of slots available and they needed practical types first—biologists, geologists, that kind of thing. By the time they’d filled the most essential slots, there simply wasn’t any room for abstract dreamers like myself.”

“And the fact that you’d pissed off House Sylveste had nothing whatsoever to do with it? Come off it, Richard.”

We descended a series of steps down into the lower level of the Monument. The atrium’s ceiling was a cloudy mass of jagged sculptures: interlocked metal birds. A party of visitors was arriving, attended by servitors and a swarm of bright, marble-sized float-cams. Childe breezed through the group, drawing annoyed frowns but no actual recognition, although one or two of the people in the party were vague acquaintances of mine.

“What is this about?” I asked, once we were outside.

“Concern for an old friend. I’ve had my tabs on you, and it was pretty obvious that not being selected for that expedition was a crushing disappointment. You’d thrown your life into contemplation of the alien. One marriage down the drain because of your self-absorption. What was her name again?”

I’d had her memory buried so deeply that it took a real effort of will to recall any exact details about my marriage.

“Celestine. I think.”

“Since then you’ve had a few relationships, but nothing lasting more than a decade. A decade’s a mere fling in this town, Richard.”

“My private life’s my own business,” I responded sullenly. “Hey. Where’s my volantor? I parked it here.”

“I sent it away. We’ll take mine instead.”

Where my volantor had been was a larger, blood-red model. It was as baroquely ornamented as a funeral barge. At a gesture from Childe it clammed open, revealing a plush gold interior with four seats, one of which was occupied by a dark, slouched figure.

“What’s going on, Roland?”

“I’ve found something. Something astonishing that I want you to be a part of; a challenge that makes every game you and I ever played in our youth pale in comparison.”

“A challenge?”

“The ultimate one, I think.”

He had pricked my curiosity, but I hoped it was not too obvious. “The city’s vigilant. It’ll be a matter of public record that I came to the Monument, and we’ll have been recorded together by those float-cams.”

“Exactly,” Childe said, nodding enthusiastically. “So you risk nothing by getting in the volantor.”

“And should I at any point weary of your company?”

“You have my word that I’ll let you leave.”

I decided to play along with him for the time being. Childe and I took the volantor’s front pair of seats. Once ensconced, I turned around to acquaint myself with the other passenger, and then flinched as I saw him properly.

He wore a high-necked leather coat which concealed much of the lower half of his face. The upper part was shadowed under the generous rim of a Homburg, tipped down to shade his brow. Yet what remained visible was sufficient to shock me. There was only a blandly handsome silver mask; sculpted into an expression of quiet serenity. The eyes were blank silver surfaces, what I could see of his mouth a thin, slightly smiling slot.

“Doctor Trintignant,” I said.

He reached forward with a gloved hand, allowing me to shake it as one would the hand of a woman. Beneath the black velvet of the glove I felt armatures of hard metal. Metal that could crush diamond.

“The pleasure is entirely mine,” he said.

Airborne, the volantor’s baroque ornamentation melted away to mirror-smoothness. Childe pushed ivory-handled control sticks forward, gaining altitude and speed. We seemed to be moving faster than the city ordinances allowed, avoiding the usual traffic corridors. I thought of the way he had followed me, researched my past and had my own volantor desert me. It would also have taken considerable resourcefulness to locate the reclusive Trintignant and persuade him to emerge from hiding.

Clearly Childe’s influence in the city exceeded my own, even though he had been absent for so long.

“The old place hasn’t changed much,” Childe said, swooping us through a dense conglomeration of golden buildings, as extravagantly tiered as the dream pagodas of a fever-racked Emperor.

“Then you’ve really been away? When you told me you’d faked your death, I wondered if you’d just gone into hiding.”

He answered with a trace of hesitation, “I’ve been away, but not as far as you’d think. A family matter came up that was best dealt with confidentially, and I really couldn’t be bothered explaining to everyone why I needed some peace and quiet on my own.”

“And faking your death was the best way to go about it?”

“Like I said, I couldn’t have planned the Eighty if I’d tried. I had to bribe a lot of minor players in the project, of course, and I’ll spare you the details of how we provided a corpse ... but it all worked swimmingly, didn’t it?”

“I never had any doubts that you’d died along with the rest of them.”

“I didn’t like deceiving my friends. But I couldn’t go to all that trouble and then ruin my plan with a few indiscretions.”

“You were friends, then?” solicited Trintignant.

“Yes, Doctor,” Childe said, glancing back at him. “Way back when Richard and I were rich kids—relatively rich, anyway—with not enough to do. Neither of us were interested in the stock market or the social whirl. We were only interested in games.”

“Oh. How charming. What kinds of game, might I ask?”

“We’d build simulations to test each other—extraordinarily elaborate worlds filled with subtle dangers and temptations. Mazes and labyrinths; secret passages; trapdoors; dungeons and dragons. We’d spend months inside them, driving each other crazy. Then we’d go away and make them even harder.”

“But in due course you grew apart,” the Doctor said. His synthesized voice had a curious piping quality.

“Yeah,” Childe said. “But we never stopped being friends. It was just that Richard had spent so much time devising increasingly alien scenarios that he’d become more interested in the implied psychologies behind the tests. And I’d become interested only in the playing of the games; not their construction. Unfortunately Richard was no longer there to provide challenges for me.”

“You were always much better than me at playing them,” I said. “In the end it got too hard to come up with something you’d find difficult. You knew the way my mind worked too well.”

“He’s convinced that he’s a failure,” Childe said, turning round to smile at the Doctor.

“As are we all,” Trintignant answered. “And with some justification, it must be said. I have never been allowed to pursue my admittedly controversial interests to their logical ends. You, Mister Swift, were shunned by those who you felt should have recognized your worth in the field of speculative alien psychology. And you, Mister Childe, have never discovered a challenge worthy of your undoubted talents.”

“I didn’t think you’d paid me any attention, Doctor.”

“Nor had I. I have surmised this much since our meeting.”

The volantor dropped below ground level, descending into a brightly lit commercial plaza lined with shops and boutiques. With insouciant ease, Childe skimmed us between aerial walkways and then nosed the car into a dark side-tunnel. He gunned the machine faster, our speed indicated only by the passing of red lights set into the tunnel sides. Now and then another vehicle passed us, but once the tunnel had branched and rebranched half a dozen times, no further traffic appeared. The tunnel lights were gone now and when the volantor’s headlights grazed the walls they revealed ugly cracks and huge, scarred absences of cladding. These old sub-surface ducts dated back to the city’s earliest days, before the domes were thrown across the crater.

Even if I had recognized the part of the city where we had entered the tunnel system, I would have been hopelessly lost by now.

“Do you think Childe has brought us together to taunt us about our lack of respective failures, Doctor?” I asked, beginning to feel uneasy again despite my earlier attempts at reassurance.

“I would consider that a distinct possibility, were Childe himself not conspicuously tainted by the same lack of success.”

“Then there must be another reason.”

“Which I’ll reveal in due course,” Childe said. “Just bear with me, will you? You two aren’t the only ones I’ve gathered together.”

Presently we arrived somewhere.

It was a cave in the form of a near-perfect hemisphere, the great domed roof arching a clear three hundred meters from the floor. We were obviously well below Yellowstone’s surface now. It was even possible that we had passed beyond the city’s crater wall, so that above us lay only poisonous skies.

But the domed chamber was inhabited.

The roof was studded with an enormous number of lamps, flooding the interior with synthetic daylight. An island stood in the middle of the chamber, moated by a ring of uninviting water. A single bone-white bridge connected the mainland to the island, shaped like a great curved femur. The island was dominated by a thicket of slender, dark poplars partly concealing a pale structure situated near its middle.

Childe brought the volantor to a rest near the edge of the water and invited us to disembark.

“Where are we?” I asked, once I had stepped down.

“Query the city and find out for yourself,” Trintignant said.

The result was not what I was expecting. For a moment there was a shocking absence inside my head, the neural equivalent of a sudden, unexpected amputation.

The Doctor’s chuckle was an arpeggio played on a pipe organ. “We have been out of range of city services from the moment we entered his conveyance.”

“You needn’t worry,” Childe said. “You are beyond city services, but only because I value the secrecy of this place. If I imagined it’d have come as a shock to you, I’d have told you already.”

“I’d have at least appreciated a warning, Roland,” I said.

“Would it have changed your mind about coming here?”

“Conceivably.”

The echo of his laughter betrayed the chamber’s peculiar acoustics. “Then are you at all surprised that I didn’t tell you?”

I turned to Trintignant. “What about you?”

“I confess my use of city services has been as limited as your own, but for rather different reasons.”

“The good Doctor needed to lie low,” Childe said. “That meant he couldn’t participate very actively in city affairs. Not if he didn’t want to be tracked down and assassinated.”

I stamped my feet, beginning to feel cold. “Good. What now?”

“It’s only a short ride to the house,” Childe said, glancing towards the island.

Now a noise came steadily nearer. It was an antiquated, rumbling sound, accompanied by a odd, rhythmic sort of drumming, quite unlike any machine I had experienced. I looked towards the femoral bridge, suspecting as I did that it was exactly what it looked like: a giant, bio-engineered bone, carved with a flat roadbed. And something was approaching us over the span: a dark, complicated and unfamiliar contraption, which at first glance resembled an iron tarantula.

I felt the back of my neck prickle.

The thing reached the end of the bridge and swerved towards us. Two mechanical black horses provided the motive power. They were emaciated black machines with sinewy, piston-driven limbs, venting steam and snorting from intakes. Malignant red laser-eyes swept over us. The horses were harnessed to a four-wheeled carriage slightly larger than the volantor, above which was perched a headless humanoid robot. Skeletal hands gripped iron control cables which plunged into the backs of the horses’ steel necks.

“Meant to inspire confidence, is it?” I asked.

“It’s an old family heirloom,” Childe said, swinging open a black door in the side of the carriage. “My uncle Giles made automata. Unfortunately—for reasons we’ll come to—he was a bit of a miserable bastard. But don’t let it put you off.”

He helped us aboard, then climbed inside himself, sealed the door and knocked on the roof. I heard the mechanical horses snort; alloy hooves hammered the ground impatiently. Then we were moving, curving around and ascending the gentle arc of the bridge of bone.

“Have you been here during the entire period of your absence, Mister Childe?” Trintignant asked.

He nodded. “Ever since that family business came up, I’ve allowed myself the occasional visit back to the city—just like I did today—but I’ve tried to keep such excursions to a minimum.”

“Didn’t you have horns the last time we met?” I said.

He rubbed the smooth skin of his scalp where the horns had been. “Had to have them removed. I couldn’t very well disguise myself otherwise.”

We crossed the bridge and navigated a path between the tall trees which sheltered the island’s structure. Childe’s carriage pulled up to a smart stop in front of the building and I was afforded my first unobstructed view of our destination. It was not one to induce great cheer. The house’s architecture was haphazard: whatever basic symmetry it might once have had was lost under a profusion of additions and modifications. The roof was a jumbled collision of angles and spires, jutting turrets and sinister oubliettes. Not all of the embellishments had been arranged at strict right angles to their neighbors, and the style and apparent age of the house varied jarringly from place to place. Since our arrival in the cave the overhead lights had dimmed, simulating the onset of dusk, but only a few windows were illuminated, clustered together in the left-hand wing. The rest of the house had a forebidding aspect, the paleness of its stone, the irregularity of its construction and the darkness of its many windows suggesting a pile of skulls.

Almost before we had disembarked from the carriage, a reception party emerged from the house. It was a troupe of servitors—humanoid household robots, of the kind anyone would have felt comfortable with in the city proper—but they had been reworked to resemble skeletal ghouls or headless knights. Their mechanisms had been sabotaged so that they limped and creaked, and they had all had their voiceboxes disabled.

“Had a lot of time on his hands, your uncle,” I said.

“You’d have loved Giles, Richard. He was a scream.”

“I’ll take your word for it, I think.”

The servitors escorted us into the central part of the house, then took us through a maze of chill, dark corridors.

Finally we reached a large room walled in plush red velvet. A holoclavier sat in one corner, with a book of sheet music spread open above the projected keyboard. There was a malachite escritoire, a number of well-stocked bookcases, a single chandelier, three smaller candelabra and two fireplaces of distinctly gothic appearance, in one of which roared an actual fire. But the room’s central feature was a mahogany table, around which three additional guests were gathered.

“Sorry to keep everyone waiting,” Childe said, closing a pair of sturdy wooden doors behind us. “Now. Introductions.”

The others looked at us with no more than mild interest.

The only man amongst them wore an elaborately ornamented exoskeleton: a baroque support structure of struts, hinged plates, cables and servo-mechanisms. His face was a skull papered with deathly white skin, shading to black under his bladelike cheekbones. His eyes were concealed behind goggles, his hair a spray of stiff black dreadlocks.

Periodically he inhaled from a glass pipe, connected to a miniature refinery of bubbling apparatus placed before him on the table.

“Allow me to introduce Captain Forqueray,” Childe said. “Captain—this is Richard Swift and ... um, Doctor Trintignant.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said, leaning across the table to shake Forqueray’s hand. His grip felt like the cold clasp of a squid.

“The Captain is an Ultra; the master of the lighthugger Apollyon, currently in orbit around Yellowstone,” Childe added.

Trintignant refrained from approaching him.

“Shy, Doctor?” Forqueray said, his voice simultaneously deep and flawed, like a cracked bell.

“No, merely cautious. It is a matter of common knowledge that I have enemies amongst the Ultras.”

Trintignant removed his Homburg and patted his crown delicately, as if smoothing down errant hairs. Silver waves had been sculpted into his head-mask, so that he resembled a bewigged Regency fop dipped in mercury.

“You’ve enemies everywhere,” said Forqueray between gurgling inhalations. “But I bear you no personal animosity for your atrocities, and I guarantee that my crew will extend you the same courtesy.”

“Very gracious of you,” Trintignant said, before shaking the Ultra’s hand for the minimum time compatible with politeness. “But why should your crew concern me?”

“Never mind that.” It was one of the two women speaking now. “Who is this guy, and why does everyone hate him?”

“Allow me to introduce Hirz,” Childe said, indicating the woman who had spoken. She was small enough to have been a child, except that her face was clearly that of an adult woman. She was dressed in austere, tight-fitting black clothes which only emphasized her diminutive build. “Hirz is—for want of a better word—a mercenary.”

“Except I prefer to think of myself as an information retrieval specialist. I specialize in clandestine infiltration for high-level corporate clients in the Glitter Band—physical espionage, some of the time. Mostly, though, I’m what used to be called a hacker. I’m also pretty damned good at my job.” Hirz paused to swig down some wine. “But enough about me. Who’s the silver dude, and what did Forqueray mean about atrocities?”

“You’re seriously telling me you’re unaware of Trintignant’s reputation?” I said.

“Hey, listen. I get myself frozen between assignments. That means I miss a lot of shit that goes down in Chasm City. Get over it.”

I shrugged and—with one eye on the Doctor himself—told Hirz what I knew about Trintignant. I sketched in his early career as an experimental cyberneticist, how his reputation for fearless innovation had eventually brought him to Calvin Sylveste’s attention.

Calvin had recruited Trintignant to his own research team, but the collaboration had not been a happy one. Trintignant’s desire to find the ultimate fusion of flesh and machine had become obsessive; even—some said—perverse. After a scandal involving experimentation on unconsenting subjects, Trintignant had been forced to pursue his work alone, his methods too extreme even for Calvin.

So Trintignant had gone to ground, and continued his gruesome experiments with his only remaining subject.

Himself.

“So let’s see,” said the final guest. “Who have we got? An obsessive and thwarted cyberneticist with a taste for extreme modification. An intrusion specialist with a talent for breaking into highly protected—and dangerous—environments. A man with a starship at his disposal and the crew to operate it.”

Then she looked at Childe, and while her gaze was averted I admired the fine, faintly familiar profile of her face. Her long hair was the sheer black of interstellar space, pinned back from her face by a jewelled clasp which flickered with a constellation of embedded pastel lights. Who was she? I felt sure we had met once or maybe twice before. Perhaps we had passed each other amongst the shrines in the Monument to the Eighty, visiting the dead.

“And Childe,” she continued. “A man once known for his love of intricate challenges, but long assumed dead.” Then she turned her piercing eyes upon me. “And, finally, you.”

“I know you, I think—” I said, her name on the tip of my tongue.

“Of course you do.” Her look, suddenly, was contemptuous. “I’m Celestine. You used to be married to me.”

All along, Childe had known she was here.

“Do you mind if I ask what this is about?” I said, doing my best to sound as reasonable as possible, rather than someone on the verge of losing their temper in polite company.

Celestine withdrew her hand once I had shaken it. “Roland invited me here, Richard. Just the same way he did you, with the same veiled hints about having found something.”

“But you’re ...”

“Your ex-wife?” She nodded. “Exactly how much do you remember, Richard? I heard the strangest rumors, you know. That you’d had me deleted from your long-term memory.”

“I had you suppressed, not deleted. There’s a subtle distinction.”

She nodded knowingly. “So I gather.”

I looked at the other guests, who were observing us. Even Forqueray was waiting, the pipe of his apparatus poised an inch from his mouth in expectation. They were waiting for me to say something; anything.

“Why exactly are you here, Celestine?”

“You don’t remember, do you?”

“Remember what?”

“What it was I used to do, Richard, when we were married.”

“I confess I don’t, no.”

Childe coughed. “Your wife, Richard, was as fascinated by the alien as you were. She was one of the city’s foremost specialists on the Pattern Jugglers, although she’d be entirely too modest to admit it herself.” He paused, apparently seeking Celestine’s permission to continue. “She visited them, long before you met, spending several years of her life at the study station on Spindrift. You swam with the Jugglers, didn’t you, Celestine?”

“Once or twice.”

“And allowed them to reshape your mind, transforming its neural pathways into something deeply—albeit usually temporarily—alien.”

“It wasn’t that big a deal,” Celestine said.

“Not if you’d been fortunate enough to have it happen to you, no. But for someone like Richard—who craved knowledge of the alien with every fiber of his existence—it would have been anything but mundane.” He turned to me. “Isn’t that true?”

“I admit I’d have done a great deal to experience communion with the Jugglers,” I said, knowing that it was pointless to deny it. “But it just wasn’t possible. My family lacked the resources to send me to one of the Juggler worlds, and the bodies that might ordinarily have funded that kind of trip—the Sylveste Institute, for instance—had turned their attentions elsewhere.”

“In which case Celestine was deeply fortunate, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t think anyone would deny that,” I said. “To speculate about the shape of alien consciousness is one thing; but to drink it; to bathe in the full flood of it—to know it intimately, like a lover ...” I trailed off for a moment. “Wait a minute. Shouldn’t you be on Resurgam, Celestine? There isn’t time for the expedition to have gone there and come back.”

She eyed me with raptorial intent before answering, “I never went.”

Childe leant over and refreshed my glass. “She was turned down at the last minute, Richard. Sylveste had a grudge against anyone who’d visited the Jugglers; he suddenly decided they were all unstable and couldn’t be trusted.”

I looked at Celestine wonderingly. “Then all this time ...?”

“I’ve been here, in Chasm City. Oh, don’t look so crushed, Richard. By the time I learned I’d been turned down, you’d already decided to flush me out of your past. It was better for both of us this way.”

“But the deception ...”

Childe put one hand on my shoulder, calmingly. “There wasn’t any. She just didn’t make contact again. No lies; no deception; nothing to hold a grudge about.”

I looked at him, angrily. “Then why the hell is she here?”

“Because I happen to have use for someone with the skills that the Jugglers gave to Celestine.”

“Which included?” I said.

“Extreme mathematical prowess.”

“And why would that have been useful?”

Childe turned to the Ultra, indicating that the man should remove his bubbling apparatus.

“I’m about to show you.”

The table housed an antique holo-projection system. Childe handed out viewers which resembled lorgnette binoculars, and, like so many myopic opera buffs, we studied the apparitions which floated into existence above the polished mahogany surface.

Stars: incalculable numbers of them—hard white and blood-red gems, strewn in lacy patterns against deep velvet blue.

Childe narrated:

“The better part of two and a half centuries ago, my uncle Giles—whose somewhat pessimistic handiwork you have already seen—made a momentous decision. He embarked on what we in the family referred to as the Program, and then only in terms of extreme secrecy.”

Childe told us that the Program was an attempt at covert deep space exploration.

Giles had conceived the work, funding it directly from the family’s finances. He had done this with such ingenuity that the apparent wealth of House Childe had never faltered, even as the Program entered its most expensive phase. Only a few select members of the Childe dynasty had even known of the Program’s existence, and that number had dwindled as time passed.

The bulk of the money had been paid to the Ultras, who had already emerged as a powerful faction by that time.

They had built the autonomous robot space probes according to this uncle’s desires, and then launched them towards a variety of target systems. The Ultras could have delivered his probes to any system within range of their lighthugger ships, but the whole point of the exercise was to restrict the knowledge of any possible discoveries to the family alone. So the envoys crossed space by themselves, at only a fraction of the speed of light, and the targets they were sent to were all poorly explored systems on the ragged edge of human space.

The probes decelerated by use of solar sails, picked the most interesting worlds to explore, and then fell into orbit around them.

Robots were sent down, equipped to survive on the surface for many decades.

Childe waved his hand across the table. Lines radiated out from one of the redder suns in the display, which I assumed was Yellowstone’s star. The lines reached out towards other stars, forming a three-dimensional scarlet dandelion several dozen light-years wide.

“These machines must have been reasonably intelligent,” Celestine said. “Especially by the standards of the time.”

Childe nodded keenly. “Oh, they were. Cunning little blighters. Subtle and stealthy and diligent. They had to be, to operate so far from human supervision.”

“And I presume they found something?” I said.

“Yes,” Childe said testily, like a conjurer whose carefully scripted patter was being ruined by a persistent heckler. “But not immediately. Giles didn’t expect it to be immediate, of course—the envoys would take decades to reach the closest systems they’d been assigned to, and there’d still be the communicational timelag to take into consideration. So my uncle resigned himself to forty or fifty years of waiting, and that was erring on the optimistic side.” He paused and sipped from his wine. “Too bloody optimistic, as it happened. Fifty years passed ... then sixty ... but nothing of any consequence was ever reported back to Yellowstone, at least not in his lifetime. The envoys did, on occasion, find something interesting—but by then other human explorers had usually stumbled on the same find. And as the decades wore on, and the envoys failed to justify their invention, my uncle grew steadily more maudlin and bitter.”

“I’d never have guessed,” Celestine said.

“He died, eventually—bitter and resentful; feeling that the universe had played some sick cosmic trick on him. He could have lived for another fifty or sixty years with the right treatments, but I think by then he knew it would be a waste of time.”

“You faked your death a century and a half ago,” I said.

“Didn’t you tell me it had something to do with the family business?”

He nodded in my direction. “That was when my uncle told me about the Program. I didn’t know anything about it until then—hadn’t heard even the tiniest hint of a rumor. No one in the family had. By then, of course, the project was costing us almost nothing, so there wasn’t even a financial drain to be concealed.”

“And since then?”

“I vowed not to make my uncle’s mistake. I resolved to sleep until the machines sent back a report, and then sleep again if the report turned out to be a false alarm.”

“Sleep?” I said.

He clicked his fingers and one entire wall of the room whisked back to reveal a sterile, machine-filled chamber.

I studied its contents.

There was a reefersleep casket of the kind Forqueray and his ilk used aboard their ships, attended by numerous complicated hunks of gleaming green support machinery. By use of such a casket, one might prolong the four hundred-odd years of a normal human lifespan by many centuries, though reefersleep was not without its risks.

“I spent a century and a half in that contraption,” he said, “waking every fifteen or twenty years whenever a report trickled in from one of the envoys. Waking is the worst part. It feels like you’re made of glass; as if the next movement you make—the next breath you take—will cause you to shatter into a billion pieces. It always passes, and you always forget it an hour later, but it’s never easier the next time.” He shuddered visibly. “In fact, sometimes I think it gets harder each time.”

“Then your equipment needs servicing,” Forqueray said dismissively. I suspected it was bluff. Ultras often wore a lock of braided hair for every crossing they had made across interstellar space and survived all the myriad misfortunes which might befall a ship. But that braid also symbolized every occasion on which they had been woken from the dead, at the end of the journey.

They felt the pain as fully as Childe did, even if they were not willing to admit it.

“How long did you spend awake each time?” I asked.

“No more than thirteen hours. That was usually sufficient to tell if the message was interesting or not. I’d allow myself one or two hours to catch up on the news; what was going on in the wider universe. But I had to be disciplined. If I’d stayed awake longer, the attraction of returning to city life would have become overwhelming. That room began to feel like a prison.”

“Why?” I asked. “Surely the subjective time must have passed very quickly?”

“You’ve obviously never spent any time in reefersleep, Richard. There’s no consciousness when you’re frozen, granted—but the transitions to and from the cold state are like an eternity, crammed with strange dreams.”

“But you hoped the rewards would be worth it?”

Childe nodded. “And, indeed, they may well have been. I was last woken six months ago, and I’ve not returned to the chamber since. Instead, I’ve spent that time gathering together the resources and the people for a highly unusual expedition.”

Now he made the table change its projection, zooming in on one particular star.

“I won’t bore you with catalogue numbers, suffice to say that this is a system which no one around this table—with the possible exception of Forqueray—is likely to have heard of. There’ve never been any human colonies there, and no crewed vessel has ever passed within three light-years of it. At least, not until recently.”

The view zoomed in again, enlarging with dizzying speed.

A planet swelled up to the size of a skull, suspended above the table.

It was hued entirely in shades of grey and pale rust, cratered and gouged here and there by impacts and what must have been very ancient weathering processes. Though there was a suggestion of a wisp of atmosphere—a smoky blue halo encircling the planet—and though there were icecaps at either pole, the world looked neither habitable nor inviting.

“Cheerful-looking place, isn’t it?” Childe said. “I call it Golgotha.”

“Nice name,” Celestine said.

“But not, unfortunately, a very nice planet.” Childe made the view enlarge again, so that we were skimming the world’s bleak, apparently lifeless surface. “Pretty dismal, to be honest. It’s about the same size as Yellowstone, receiving about the same amount of sunlight from its star. Doesn’t have a moon. Surface gravity’s close enough to one gee that you won’t know the difference once you’re suited up. A thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, and no sign that anything’s ever evolved there. Plenty of radiation hitting the surface, but that’s about your only hazard, and one we can easily deal with. Golgotha’s tectonically dead, and there haven’t been any large impacts on her surface for a few million years.”

“Sounds boring,” Hirz said.

“And it very probably is, but that isn’t the point. You see, there’s something on Golgotha.”

“What kind of something?” Celestine asked.

“That kind,” Childe said.

It came over the horizon.

It was tall and dark, its details indistinct. That first view of it was like the first glimpse of a cathedral’s spire through morning fog. It tapered as it rose, constricting to a thin neck before flaring out again into a bulb-shaped finial, which in turn tapered to a needle-sharp point.

Though it was impossible to say how large the thing was, or what it was made of, it was very obviously a structure, as opposed to a peculiar biological or mineral formation. On Grand Téton, vast numbers of tiny single-celled organisms conspired to produce the slime towers which were that world’s most famous natural feature, and while those towers reached impressive heights and were often strangely shaped, they were unmistakably the products of unthinking biological processes rather than conscious design. The structure on Golgotha was too symmetric for that, and entirely too solitary. If it had been a living thing, I would have expected to see others like it, with evidence of a supporting ecology of different organisms.

Even if it were a fossil, millions of years dead, I could not believe that there would be just one on the whole planet.

No. The thing had most definitely been put there.

“A structure?” I asked Childe.

“Yes. Or a machine. It isn’t easy to decide.” He smiled. “I call it Blood Spire. Almost looks innocent, doesn’t it? Until you look closer.”

We spun round the Spire, or whatever it was, viewing it from all directions. Now that we were closer, it was clear that the thing’s surface was densely detailed; patterned and textured with geometrically complex forms, around which snaked intestinal tubes and branching, veinlike bulges. The effect was to undermine my earlier certainty that the thing was non-biological.

Now it looked like some sinewy fusion of animal and machine: something that might have appealed in its grotesquerie to Childe’s demented uncle.

“How tall is it?” I asked.

“Two hundred and fifty meters,” Childe said.

I saw that now there were tiny glints on Golgotha’s surface, almost like metallic flakes which had fallen from the side of the structure.

“What are those?” I asked.

“Why don’t I show you?” Childe said.

He enlarged the view still further, until the glints resolved into distinct shapes.

They were people.

Or—more accurately—the remains of what had once been people. It was impossible to say how many there had been. All had been mutilated in some fashion: crushed or pruned or bisected; the tattered ruins of their spacesuits were still visible in one or two places. Severed parts accompanied the bodies, often several tens of meters from the rightful owner.

It was as if they had been flung away in a fit of temper.

“Who were they?” Forqueray asked.

“A crew who happened to slow down in this system to make shield repairs,” Childe said. “Their captain was called Argyle. They chanced upon the Spire and started exploring it, believing it to contain something of immense technological value.”

“And what happened to them?”

“They went inside in small teams, sometimes alone. Inside the Spire they passed through a series of challenges, each of which was harder than the last. If they made a mistake, the Spire punished them. The punishments were initially mild, but they became steadily more brutal. The trick was to know when to admit defeat.”

I leaned forward. “How do you know all this?”

“Because Argyle survived. Not long, admittedly, but long enough for my machine to get some sense out of him. It had been on Golgotha the whole time, you see—watching Argyle’s arrival, hiding and recording them as they confronted the Spire. And it watched him crawl out of the Spire, shortly before the last of his colleagues was ejected.”

“I’m not sure I’m prepared to trust either the testimony of a machine or a dying man,” I said.

“You don’t have to,” Childe answered. “You need only consider the evidence of your eyes. Do you see those tracks in the dust? They all lead into the Spire, and there are almost none leading to the bodies.”

“Meaning what?” I said.

“Meaning that they got inside, the way Argyle claimed. Observe also the way the remains are distributed. They’re not all at the same distance from the Spire. They must have been ejected from different heights, suggesting that some got closer to the summit than others. Again, it accords with Argyle’s story.”

With a sinking feeling of inevitability I saw where this was heading. “And you want us to go there and find out what it was they were so interested in. Is that it?”

He smiled. “You know me entirely too well, Richard.”

“I thought I did. But you’d have to be quite mad to want to go anywhere near that thing.”

“Mad? Possibly. Or simply very, very curious. The question is—” He paused and leaned across the table to refill my glass, all the while maintaining eye contact. “Which are you?”

“Neither,” I said.

But Childe could be persuasive. A month later I was frozen aboard Forqueray’s ship.

Two

We reached orbit around Golgotha.

Thawed from reefersleep we convened for breakfast, riding a travel pod upship to the lighthugger’s meeting room.

Everyone was there, including Trintignant and Forqueray, the latter inhaling from the same impressive array of flasks, retorts and spiraling tubes he had brought with him to Yellowstone. Trintignant had not slept with the rest of us, but looked none the worse for wear. He had, Childe said, his own rather specialized plumbing requirements, incompatible with standard reefersleep systems.

“Well, how was it?” Childe asked, throwing a comradely arm around my shoulders.

“Every bit as ... dreadful as I’d been led to expect.” My voice was slurred, sentences taking an age to form in whatever part of my brain it was that handled language. “Still a bit fuzzy.”

“Well, we’ll soon fix that. Trintignant can synthesize a medichine infusion to pep up those neural functions, can’t you, Doctor?”

Trintignant looked at me with his handsome, immobile mask of a face. “It would be no trouble at all, my dear fellow ...”

“Thanks.” I steadied myself; my mind crawled with half-remembered images of the botched cybernetic experiments which had earned Trintignant his notoriety. The thought of him pumping tiny machines into my skull made my skin crawl. “But I’ll pass on that for now. No offense intended.”

“And absolutely none taken.” Trintignant gestured towards a vacant chair. “Come. Sit with us and join in the discussion. The topic, rather interestingly, is the dreams some of us experienced on the way here.”

“Dreams ...?” I said. “I thought it was just me. I wasn’t the only one?”

“No,” Hirz said, “you weren’t the only one. I was on a moon in one of them. Earth’s, I think. And I kept on trying to get inside this alien structure. Fucking thing kept killing me, but I’d always keep going back inside, like I was being brought back to life each time just for that.”

“I had the same dream,” I said, wonderingly. “And there was another dream in which I was inside some kind of—” I halted, waiting for the words to assemble in my head. “Some kind of underground tomb. I remember being chased down a corridor by an enormous stone ball which was going to roll over me.”

Hirz nodded. “The dream with the hat, right?”

“My God, yes.” I grinned like a madman. “I lost my hat, and I felt this ridiculous urge to rescue it!”

Celestine looked at me with something between icy detachment and outright hostility. “I had that one too.”

“Me too,” Hirz said, chuckling. “But I said fuck the hat. Sorry, but with the kind of money Childe’s paying us, buying a new one ain’t gonna be my biggest problem.”

An awkward moment followed, for only Hirz seemed at all comfortable about discussing the generous fees Childe had arranged as payment for the expedition. The initial sums had been large enough, but upon our return to Yellowstone we would all receive nine times as much; adjusted to match any inflation which might occur during the time—between sixty and eighty years—which Childe said the journey would span.

Generous, yes.

But I think Childe knew that some of us would have joined him even without that admittedly sweet bonus.

Celestine broke the silence, turning to Hirz. “Did you have the one about the cubes, too?”

“Christ, yes,” the infiltration specialist said, as if suddenly remembering. “The cubes. What about you, Richard?”

“Indeed,” I answered, flinching at the memory of that one. I had been one of a party of people trapped inside an endless series of cubic rooms, many of which contained lethal surprises. “I was cut into pieces by a trap, actually. Diced, if I remember accurately.”

“Yeah. Not exactly on my top ten list of ways to die, either.”

Childe coughed. “I feel I should apologize for the dreams. They were narratives I fed into your minds—Doctor Trintignant excepted—during the transition to and from reefersleep.”

“Narratives?” I said.

“I adapted them from a variety of sources, thinking they’d put us all in the right frame of mind for what lies ahead.”

“Dying nastily, you mean?” Hirz asked.

“Problem-solving, actually.” Childe served pitch-black coffee as he spoke, as if all that was ahead of us was a moderately bracing stroll. “Of course, nothing that the dreams contained is likely to reflect anything that we’ll find inside the Spire ... but don’t you feel better for having had them?”

I gave the matter some thought before responding.

“Not exactly, no,” I said.

Thirteen hours later we were on the surface, inspecting the suits Forqueray had provided for the expedition.

They were sleek white contraptions, armored, powered and equipped with enough intelligence to fool a roomful of cyberneticians. They enveloped themselves around you, forming a seamless white surface which lent the wearer the appearance of a figurine molded from soap. The suits quickly learned how you moved, adjusting and anticipating all the time like perfect dance partners.

Forqueray told us that each suit was capable of keeping its occupant alive almost indefinitely; that the suit would recycle bodily wastes in a near-perfect closed cycle, and could even freeze its occupant if circumstances merited such action. They could fly and would protect their user against just about any external environment, ranging from a vacuum to the crush of the deepest ocean.

“What about weapons?” Celestine asked, once we had been shown how to command the suits to do our bidding.

“Weapons?” Forqueray asked blankly.

“I’ve heard about these suits, Captain. They’re supposed to contain enough firepower to take apart a small mountain.”

Childe coughed. “There won’t be any weapons, I’m afraid. I asked Forqueray to have them removed from the suits. No cutting tools, either. And you won’t be able to achieve as much with brute force as you would with an unmodified suit. The servos won’t allow it.”

“I’m not sure I understand. You’re handicapping us before we go in?”

“No—far from it. I’m just abiding by the rules that the Spire sets. It doesn’t allow weapons inside itself, you see—or anything else that might be used against it, like fusion torches. It senses such things and acts accordingly. It’s very clever.”

I looked at him. “Is this guesswork?”

“Of course not. Argyle already learned this much. No point making exactly the same mistakes again, is there?”

“I still don’t get it,” Celestine said when we had assembled outside the shuttle, standing like so many white soap statuettes. “Why fight the thing on its own terms at all? There are bound to be weapons on Forqueray’s ship we could use from orbit; we could open it like a carcase.”

“Yes,” Childe said, “and in the process destroy everything we came this far to learn?”

“I’m not talking about blowing it off the face of Golgotha. I’m just talking about clean, surgical dissection.”

“It won’t work. The Spire is a living thing, Celestine. Or at least a machine intelligence many orders of magnitude cleverer than anything we’ve encountered to date. It won’t tolerate violence being used against it. Argyle learned that much.

“Even if it can’t defend itself against such attacks—and we don’t know that—it will certainly destroy what it contains. We’ll still have lost everything.”

“But still ... no weapons?”

“Not quite,” Childe said, tapping the forehead region of his suit. “We still have our minds, after all. That’s why I assembled this team. If brute force would have been sufficient, I’d have had no need to scour Yellowstone for such fierce intellects.”

Hirz spoke from inside her own, smaller version of the armored suit. “You’d better not be taking the piss.”

“Forqueray?” Childe said. “We’re nearly there now. Put us down on the surface two klicks from the base of the Spire. We’ll cross the remaining distance on foot.”

Forqueray obliged, bringing the triangular formation down. Our suits had been slaved to his, but now we regained independent control.

Through the suit’s numerous layers of armor and padding I felt the rough texture of the ground beneath my feet. I held up a thickly gauntleted hand and felt the breeze of Golgotha’s thin atmosphere caress my palm. The tactile transmission was flawless, and when I moved, the suit flowed with me so effortlessly that I had no sense of being encumbered by it. The view was equally impressive, with the suit projecting an image directly into my visual field rather than forcing me to peer through a visor.

A strip along the top of my visual field showed a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view all around me, and I could zoom in on any part of it almost without thinking. Various overlays—sonar, radar, thermal, gravimetric—could be dropped over the existing visual field with the same ease. If I looked down I could even ask the suit to edit me out of the image, so that I could view the scene from a disembodied perspective. As we walked along, the suit threw traceries of light across the scenery: an etchwork of neon which would now and then coalesce around an odd-shaped rock or peculiar pattern of ground markings. After several minutes of this I had adjusted the suit’s alertness threshold to what I felt was a useful level of protectivity, neither too watchful nor too complacent.

Childe and Forqueray had taken the lead on the ground. They would have been difficult to distinguish, but my suit had partially erased their suits, so that they seemed to walk unprotected save for a ghostly second skin. When they looked at me they would perceive the same consensual illusion.

Trintignant followed a little way behind, moving with the automaton-like stiffness I had now grown almost accustomed to.

Celestine followed, with me a little to her stern.

Hirz brought up the rear, small and lethal and—now that I knew her a little better—quite unlike any of the few children I had ever met.

And ahead—rising, ever rising—was the thing we had come all this way to best.

It had been visible, of course, long before we set down. The Spire was a quarter of a kilometer high, after all. But I think we had all chosen to ignore it; to map it out of our perceptions, until we were much closer. It was only now that we were allowing those mental shields to collapse; forcing our imaginations to confront the fact of the tower’s existence.

Huge and silent, it daggered into the sky.

It was much as Childe had shown us, except that it seemed infinitely more massive; infinitely more present. We were still a quarter of a kilometer from the thing’s base, and yet the flared top—the bulb-shaped finial—seemed to be leaning back over us, constantly on the point of falling and crushing us. The effect was exacerbated by the occasional high-altitude cloud that passed overhead, writhing in Golgotha’s fast, thin jetstreams. The whole tower looked as if it were toppling. For a long moment, taking in the immensity of what stood before us—its vast age; its vast, brooding capacity for harm—the idea of trying to reach the summit felt uncomfortably close to insanity.

Then a small, rational voice reminded me that this was exactly the effect the Spire’s builders would have sought.

Knowing that, it was fractionally easier to take the next step closer to the base.

“Well,” Celestine said. “It looks like we’ve found Argyle.”

Childe nodded. “Yes. Or what’s left of the poor bastard.”

We had found several body parts by then, but his was the only one that was anywhere near being complete. He had lost a leg inside the Spire, but had been able to crawl to the exit before the combination of bleeding and asphyxiation killed him. It was here—dying—that he had been interviewed by Childe’s envoy, which had only then emerged from its hiding place.

Perhaps he had imagined himself in the presence of a benevolent steel angel.

He was not well-preserved. There was no bacterial life on Golgotha, and nothing that could be charitably termed weather, but there were savage dust-storms, and these must have intermittently covered and revealed the body, scouring it in the process. Parts of his suit were missing, and his helmet had cracked open, exposing his skull. Papery sheets of skin adhered to the bone here and there, but not enough to suggest a face.

Childe and Forqueray regarded the corpse uneasily, while Trintignant knelt down and examined it in more detail. A float-cam belonging to the Ultra floated around, observing the scene with goggling arrays of tightly packed lenses.

“Whatever took his leg off did it cleanly,” the Doctor reported, pulling back the tattered layers of the man’s suit fabric to expose the stump. “Witness how the bone and muscle have been neatly severed along the same plane, like a geometric slice through a platonic solid? I would speculate that a laser was responsible for this, except that I see no sign of cauterization. A high-pressure water-jet might have achieved the same precision of cut, or even an extremely sharp blade.”

“Fascinating, Doc,” Hirz said, kneeling down next to him. I’ll bet it hurt like fuck, too, wouldn’t you?”

“Not necessarily. The degree of pain would depend acutely on the manner in which the nerve ends were truncated. Shock does not appear to have been the primary agent in this man’s demise.” Doctor Trintignant fingered the remains of a red fabric band a little distance above the end of the leg. “Nor was the blood loss as rapid as might have been expected given the absence of cauterization. This band was most likely a tourniquet, probably applied from his suit’s medical kit. The same kit almost certainly included analgesics.”

“It wasn’t enough to save him, though,” Childe said.

“No.” Trintignant stood up, the movement reminding me of an escalator. “But you must concede that he did rather well, considering the impediments.”

For most of its height Blood Spire was no thicker than a few dozen meters, and considerably narrower just below the bulb-like upper part. But, like a slender chess piece, its lower parts swelled out considerably to form a wide base. That podium-like mass was perhaps fifty meters in diameter: a fifth of the structure’s height. From a distance it appeared to rest solidly on the base: a mighty obelisk requiring the deepest of foundations to anchor it to the ground.

But it didn’t.

The Spire’s base failed to touch the surface of Golgotha at all, but floated above it, spaced by five or six clear meters of air. It was as if someone had constructed a building slightly above the ground, kicked away the stilts, and it had simply stayed there.

We all walked confidently towards the rim and then stopped; none of us were immediately willing to step under that overhang.

“Forqueray?” Childe said.

“Yes?”

“Let’s see what that drone of yours has to say.”

Forqueray had his float-cam fly under the rim, orbiting the underside of the Spire in a lazily widening spiral. Now and then it fingered the base with a spray of laser-light, and once or twice even made contact, skittering against the flat surface. Forqueray remained impassive, glancing slightly down as he absorbed the data being sent back to his suit.

“Well?” Celestine said. “What the hell’s keeping it up?”

Forqueray took a step under the rim. “No fields; not even a minor perturbation of Golgotha’s own magnetosphere. No significant alterations in the local gravitational vector, either. And—before we assume more sophistication than is strictly necessary—there are no concealed supports.”

Celestine was silent for a few moments before answering, “All right. What if the Spire doesn’t weigh anything? There’s air here; not much of it I’ll grant you—but what if the Spire’s mostly hollow? There might be enough buoyancy to make the thing float, like a balloon.”

“There isn’t,” Forqueray said, opening a fist to catch the cam, which flew into his grasp like a trained kestrel. “Whatever’s above us is solid matter. I can’t read its mass, but it’s blocking an appreciable cosmic-ray flux, and none of our scanning methods can see through it.”

“Forqueray’s right,” Childe said. “But I understand your reluctance to accept this, Celestine. It’s perfectly normal to feel a sense of denial.”

“Denial?”

“That what we are confronting is truly alien. But I’m afraid you’ll get over it, just the way I did.”

“I’ll get over it when I feel like getting over it,” Celestine said, joining Forqueray under the dark ceiling.

She looked up and around, less in the manner of someone admiring a fresco than in the manner of a mouse cowering beneath a boot.

But I knew exactly what she was thinking.

In four centuries of deep space travel there had been no more than glimpses of alien sentience. We had long suspected they were out there somewhere. But that suspicion had grown less fervent as the years passed; world after world had revealed only faint, time-eroded traces of cultures that might once have been glorious but which were now utterly destroyed. The Pattern Jugglers were clearly the products of intelligence, but not necessarily intelligent themselves. And—though they had been spread from star to star in the distant past—they did not now depend on any form of technology that we recognized. The Shrouders were little better, secretive minds cocooned inside shells of restructured spacetime.

They had never been glimpsed, and their nature and intentions remained worryingly unclear.

Yet Blood Spire was different.

For all its strangeness; for all that it mocked our petty assumptions about the way matter and gravity should conduct themselves, it was recognizably a manufactured thing. And, I told myself, if it had managed to hang above Golgotha’s surface until now, it was extremely unlikely to choose this moment to come crashing down.

I stepped across the threshold, followed by the others.

“Makes you wonder what kind of beings built it,” I said. “Whether they had the same hopes and fears as us, or whether they were so far beyond us as to seem like Gods.”

“I don’t give a shit who built it,” Hirz said. “I just want to know how to get into the fucking thing. Any bright ideas, Childe?”

“There’s a way,” he said.

We followed him until we stood in a small, nervous huddle under the center of the ceiling. It had not been visible before, but directly above us was a circle of utter blackness against the mere gloom of the Spire’s underside.

“That?” Hirz said.

“That’s the only way in,” Childe said. “And the only way you get out alive.”

I said, “Roland—how exactly did Argyle and his team get inside?”

“They must have brought something to stand on. A ladder or something.”

I looked around. “There’s no sign of it now, is there?”

“No, and it doesn’t matter. We don’t need anything like that—not with these suits. Forqueray?”

The Ultra nodded and tossed the float-cam upwards.

It caught flight and vanished into the aperture. Nothing happened for several seconds, other than the occasional stutter of red light from the hole. Then the cam emerged, descending again into Forqueray’s hand.

“There’s a chamber up there,” Forqueray said. “Flat-floored, surrounding the hole. It’s twenty meters across, with a ceiling just high enough to let us stand upright. It’s empty. There’s what looks like a sealed door leading out of the chamber into the rest of the Spire.”

“Can we be sure there’s nothing harmful in it?” I asked.

“No,” Childe said. “But Argyle said the first room was safe. We’ll just have to take his word on that one.”

“And there’s room for all of us up there?”

Forqueray nodded. “Easily.”

I suppose there should have been more ceremony to the act, but there was no sense of significance, or even foreboding, as we rose into the ceiling. It was like the first casual step onto the tame footslopes of a mountain, unweighted by any sense of the dangers that undoubtedly lay ahead.

Inside it was exactly as Forqueray had described.

The chamber was dark, but the float-cam provided some illumination and our suits’ sensors were able to map out the chamber’s shape and overlay this information on our visual fields.

The floor had a metalled quality to it, dented here and there, and the edge where it met the hole was rounded and worn.

I reached down to touch it, feeling a hard, dull alloy which nonetheless seemed as if it would yield given sufficient pressure. Data scrolled onto my visual readout, informing me that the floor had a temperature only one hundred and fifteen degrees above absolute zero. My palm chemosensor reported that the floor was mainly iron, laced with carbon woven into allotropic forms it could not match against any in its experience. There were microscopic traces of almost every other stable isotope in the periodic table, with the odd exception of silver. All of this was inferred, for when the chemosensor attempted to shave off a microscopic layer of the flooring for more detailed analysis, it gave a series of increasingly heated error messages before falling silent.

I tried the chemosensor against part of my own suit.

It had stopped working.

“Fix that,” I instructed my suit, authorizing it to divert whatever resources it required to the task.

“Problem, Richard?” asked Childe.

“My suit’s damaged. Minor, but annoying. I don’t think the Spire was too thrilled about my taking a sample of it.”

“Shit. I probably should have warned you of that. Argyle’s lot had the same problem. It doesn’t like being cut into, either. I suspect you got off with a polite warning.”

“Generous of it,” I said.

“Be careful, all right?” Childe then told everyone else to disable their chemosensors until told otherwise. Hirz grumbled, but everyone else quietly accepted what had to be done.

In the meantime I continued my own survey of the room, counting myself lucky that my suit had not provoked a stronger reaction. The chamber’s circular wall was fashioned from what looked like the same hard, dull alloy, devoid of detail except for the point where it framed what was obviously a door, raised a meter above the floor. Three blocky steps led up to it.

The door itself was one meter wide and perhaps twice that in height.

“Hey,” Hirz said. “Feel this.”

She was kneeling down, pressing a palm against the floor.

“Careful,” I said. “I just did that and—”

“I’ve turned off my chemo-whatsit, don’t worry.”

“Then what are you—”

“Why don’t you reach down and see for yourself?”

Slowly, we all knelt down and touched the floor. When I had felt it before it had been as cold and dead as the floor of a crypt, yet that was no longer the case. Now it was vibrating; as if somewhere not too far from here a mighty engine was shaking itself to pieces: a turbine on the point of breaking loose from its shackles. The vibration rose and fell in throbbing waves. Once every thirty seconds or so it reached a kind of crescendo, like a great slow inhalation.

“It’s alive,” Hirz said.

“It wasn’t like that just now.”

“I know.” Hirz turned and looked at me. “The fucking thing just woke up, that’s why. It knows we’re here.”

Three

I moved to the door and studied it properly for the first time.

Its proportions were reassuringly normal, requiring only that we stoop down slightly to step through. But for now the door was sealed by a smooth sheet of metal, which would presumably slide across once we had determined how to open it. The only guidance came from the door’s thick metal frame, which was inscribed with faint geometric markings.

I had not noticed them before.

The markings were on either side of the door, on the uprights of the frame. Beginning from the bottom on the left-hand side, there was a dot—it was too neatly circular to be accidental—a flat-topped equilateral triangle, a pentagon and then a heptagonal figure. On the right-hand side there were three more figures with eleven, thirteen and twenty sides respectively.

“Well?” Hirz was looking over my shoulder. “Any bright ideas?”

“Prime numbers,” I said. “At least, that’s the simplest explanation I can think of. The number of vertices of the shapes on the left-hand frame are the first four primes: one, three, five and seven.”

“And on the other frame?”

Childe answered for me. “The eleven-sided figure is the next one in the sequence. Thirteen’s one prime too high, and twenty isn’t a prime at all.”

“So you’re saying if we choose eleven, we win?” Hirz reached out her hand, ready to push her hand against the lowest figure on the right, which she could reach without ascending the three steps. “I hope the rest of the tests are this simp—”

“Steady, old girl.” Childe had caught her wrist. “Mustn’t be too hasty. We shouldn’t do anything until we’ve arrived at a consensus. Agreed?”

Hirz pulled back her hand. “Agreed ...”

It took only a few minutes for everyone to agree that the eleven-sided figure was the obvious choice. Celestine did not immediately accede; she looked long and hard at the right-hand frame before concurring with the original choice.

“I just want to be careful, that’s all,” she said. “We can’t assume anything. They might think from right to left, so that the figures on the right form the sequence which those on the left are supposed to complete. Or they might think diagonally, or something even less obvious.”

Childe nodded. “And the obvious choice might not always be the right one. There might be a deeper sequence—something more elegant—which we’re just not seeing. That’s why I wanted Celestine along. If anyone’ll pick out those subtleties, it’s her.”

She turned to him. “Just don’t put too much faith in whatever gifts the Jugglers might have given me, Childe.”

“I won’t. Unless I have to.” Then he turned to the infiltration specialist, still standing by the frame. “Hirz—you may go ahead.”

She reached out and touched the frame, covering the eleven-sided figure with her palm.

After a heart-stopping pause there was a clunk, and I felt the floor vibrate even more strongly than it had before. Ponderously, the door slid aside, revealing another dark chamber.

We all looked around, assessing each other.

Nothing had changed; none of us had suffered any sudden, violent injuries.

“Forqueray?” Childe said.

The Ultra knew what he meant. He tossed the float-cam through the open doorway and waited several seconds until it flew back into his grasp.

“Another metallic chamber, considerably smaller than this one. The floor is level with the door, so we’ll have gained a meter or so in height. There’s another raised door on the opposite side, again with markings. Other than that, I don’t see anything except bare metal.”

“What about the other side of this door?” Childe said. “Are there markings on it as well?”

“Nothing that the drone could make out.”

“Then let me be the guinea pig. I’ll step through and we’ll see what happens. I’m assuming that even if the door seals behind me, I’ll still be able to open it. Argyle said the Spire didn’t prevent anyone from leaving provided they hadn’t attempted to access a new room.”

“Try it and see,” Hirz said. “We’ll wait on this side. If the door shuts on you, we’ll give you a minute and then we’ll open it ourselves.”

Childe walked up the three steps and across the threshold. He paused, looked around and then turned back to face us, looking down on us now.

Nothing had happened.

“Looks like the door stays open for now. Who wants to join me?”

“Wait,” I said. “Before we all cross over, shouldn’t we take a look at the problem? We don’t want to be trapped in there if it’s something we can’t solve.”

Childe walked over to the far door. “Good thinking. Forqueray, pipe my visual field through to the rest of the team, will you?”

“Done,”

We saw what Childe was seeing, his gaze tracking along the doorframe. The markings looked much like those we had just solved, except that the symbols were different. Four unfamiliar shapes were inscribed on the left side of the door, spaced vertically. Each of the shapes was composed of four rectangular elements of differing sizes, butted together in varying configurations. Childe then looked at the other side of the door. There were four more shapes on the right, superficially similar to those we had already seen.

“Definitely not a geometric progression,” Childe said.

“No. Looks more like a test of conservation of symmetry through different translations,” Celestine said, her voice barely a murmur. “The lowest three shapes on the left have just been rotated through an integer number of right angles, giving their corresponding forms on the right. But the top two shapes aren’t rotationally symmetric. They’re mirror images, plus a rotation.”

“So we press the top right shape, right?”

“Could be. But the left one’s just as valid.”

Hirz said, “Yeah. But only if we ignore what the last test taught us. Whoever the suckers were that made this thing, they think from left to right.”

Childe raised his hand above the right-side shape. “I’m prepared to press it.”

“Wait.” I climbed the steps and walked over the threshold, joining Childe. “I don’t think you should be in here alone.”

He looked at me with something resembling gratitude. None of the others had stepped over yet, and I wondered if I would have done so had Childe and I not been old friends.

“Go ahead and press it,” I said. “Even if we get it wrong, the punishment’s not likely to be too severe at this stage.”

He nodded and palmed the right-side symbol.

Nothing happened.

“Maybe the left side ...?”

“Try it. It can’t hurt. We’ve obviously done something wrong already.”

Childe moved over and palmed the other symbol on the top row.

Nothing.

I gritted my teeth. “All right. Might as well try one of the ones we definitely know is wrong. Are you ready for that?”

He glanced at me and nodded. “I didn’t go to the hassle of bringing in Forqueray just for the free ride, you know. These suits are built to take a lot of crap.”

“Even alien crap?”

“About to find out, aren’t we?”

He moved to palm one of the lower symmetry pairs.

I braced myself, unsure what to expect when we made a deliberate error, wondering if the Spire’s punishment code would even apply in such a case. After all, what was dearly the correct choice had elicited no response, so what was the sense in being penalized for making the wrong one?

He palmed the shape; still nothing happened.

“Wait,” Celestine said, joining us. “I’ve had an idea. Maybe it won’t respond—positively or negatively—until we’re all in the same room.”

“Only one way to find out,” Hirz said, joining her.

Forqueray and Trintignant followed.

When the last of them had crossed the threshold, the rear door—the one we had all come through—slid shut. There were no markings on it, but nothing that Forqueray did made it open again.

Which, I supposed, made a kind of sense. We had committed to accepting the next challenge now; the time for dignified retreats had passed. The thought was not a pleasant one. This room was smaller than the last one, and the environment was suddenly a lot more claustrophobic.

We were standing almost shoulder to shoulder.

“You know, I think the first chamber was just a warm-up,” Celestine said. “This is where it starts getting more serious.”

“Just press the fucking thing,” Hirz said.

Childe did as he was told. As before, there was an uncomfortable pause which probably lasted only half a second, but which felt abyssally longer, as if our fates were being weighed by distant judicial machinery. Then thumps and vibrations signaled the opening of the door.

Simultaneously, the door behind us had opened again. The route out of the Spire was now clear again.

“Forqueray ...” Childe said.

The Ultra tossed the float-cam into the darkness.

“Well?”

“This is getting a tiny bit monotonous. Another chamber, another door, another set of markings.”

“No booby-traps?”

“Nothing the drone can resolve, which I’m afraid isn’t saying much.”

“I’ll go in this time,” Celestine said. “No one follow me until I’ve checked out the problem, understood?”

“Fine by me,” Hirz said, peering back at the escape route.

Celestine stepped into the darkness.

I decided that I was no longer enjoying the illusion of seeing everyone as if we were not wearing suits—we all looked far too vulnerable, suddenly—and ordered my own to stop editing my visual field to that extent. The transition was smooth; suits formed around us like thickening auras. Only the helmet parts remained semi-transparent, so that I could still identify who was who without cumbersome visual tags.

“It’s another mathematical puzzle,” Celestine said. “Still fairly simple. We’re not really being stretched yet.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll settle for not being really stretched,” Hirz said.

Childe looked unimpressed. “Are you certain of the answer?”

“Trust me,” Celestine said. “It’s perfectly safe to enter.”

This time the markings looked more complicated, and at first I feared that Celestine had been over-confident.

On the left-hand side of the door—extending the height of the frame—was a vertical strip marked by many equally spaced horizontal grooves, in the manner of a ruler. But some of the cleanly cut grooves were deeper than the others. On the other side of the door was a similar ruler, but with a different arrangement of deeper grooves, not lining up with any of those on the right.

I stared at the frame for several seconds, thinking the solution would click into my mind; willing myself back into the problem-solving mode that had once seemed so natural. But the pattern of grooves refused to snap into any neat mathematical order.

I looked at Childe, seeing no greater comprehension in his face.

“Don’t you see it?” Celestine said.

“Not quite,” I said.

“There are ninety-one grooves, Richard.” She spoke with the tone of a teacher who had begun to lose patience with a tardy pupil. “Now counting from the bottom, the following grooves are deeper than the rest: the third, the sixth, the tenth, the fifteenth ... shall I continue?”

“I think you’d better,” Childe said.

“There are seven other deep grooves, concluding with the ninety-first. You must see it now, surely. Think geometrically.”

“I am,” I said testily.

“Tell us, Celestine,” Childe said, between what was obviously gritted teeth.

She sighed. “They’re triangular numbers.”

“Fine,” Childe said. “But I’m not sure I know what a triangular number is.”

Celestine glanced at the ceiling for a moment, as if seeking inspiration. “Look. Think of a dot, will you?”

“I’m thinking,” Childe said.

“Now surround that dot by six neighbors, all the same distance from each other. Got that?”

“Yes.”

“Now keep on adding dots, extending out in all directions, as far as you can imagine—each dot having six neighbors.”

“With you so far.”

“You should have something resembling a Chinese chequer board. Now concentrate on a single dot again, near the middle. Draw a line from it to one of its six neighbors, and then another line to one of the two dots either side of the neighbor you just chose. Then join the two neighboring dots. What have you a got?”

“An equilateral triangle.”

“Good. That’s three taken care of. Now imagine that the triangle’s sides are twice as long. How many dots are connected together now?”

Childe answered after only a slight hesitation, “Six. I think.”

“Yes.” Celestine turned to me. “Are you following, Richard?”

“More or less ...” I said, trying to hold the shapes in my head.

“Then we’ll continue. If we triple the size of the triangle, we link together nine dots along the sides, with an additional dot in the middle. That’s ten. Continue—with a quadruple-sized triangle—and we hit fifteen.” She paused, giving us time to catch up. “There are eight more; up to ninety-one, which has thirteen dots along each side.”

“The final groove,” I said, accepting for myself that whatever this problem was, Celestine had definitely understood it.

“But there are only seven deep grooves in that interval,” she continued. “That means all we have to do is identify the groove on the right which corresponds to the missing triangular number.”

“All?” Hirz said.

“Look, it’s simple. I know the answer, but you don’t have to take my word for it. The triangles follow a simple sequence. If there are N dots in the lower row of the last triangle, the next one will have N plus one more. Add one to two and you’ve got three. Add one to two to three, and you’ve got six. One to two to three to four, and you’ve got ten. Then fifteen, then twenty-one ...” Celestine paused. “Look, it’s senseless taking my word for it. Graph up a chequerboard display on your suits—Forqueray, can you oblige?—and start arranging dots in triangular patterns.”

We did. It took quarter of an hour, but after that time we had all—Hirz included—convinced ourselves by brute force that Celestine was right. The only missing pattern was for the fifty-five-dot case, which happened to coincide with one of the deep grooves on the right side of the door.

It was obvious, then. That was the one to press.

“I don’t like it,” Hirz said. “I see it now ... but I didn’t see it until it was pointed out to me. What if there’s another pattern none of us are seeing?”

Celestine looked at her coldly. “There isn’t.”

“Look, there’s no point arguing,” Childe said. “Celestine saw it first, but we always knew she would. Don’t feel bad about it, Hirz. You’re not here for your mathematical prowess. Nor’s Trintignant, nor’s Forqueray.”

“Yeah, well remind me when I can do something useful,” Hirz said.

Then she pushed forward and pressed the groove on the right side of the door.

Progress was smooth and steady for the next five chambers. The problems to be solved grew harder, but after consultation the solution was never so esoteric that we could not all agree on it. As the complexity of the tasks increased, so did the area taken up by the frames, but other than that there was no change in the basic nature of the challenges. We were never forced to proceed more quickly than we chose, and the Spire always provided a clear route back to the exit every time a doorway had been traversed. The door immediately behind us would seal only once we had all entered the room where the current problem lay, which meant that we were able to assess any given problem before committing ourselves to its solution. To convince ourselves that we were indeed able to leave, we had Hirz go back the way we had come in. She was able to return to the first room unimpeded—the rear-facing doors opened and closed in sequence to allow her to pass—and then make her way back to the rest of us by using the entry codes we had already discovered.

But something she said upon her return disturbed us.

“I’m not sure if it’s my imagination or not ...”

“What?” Childe snapped.

“I think the doorways are getting narrower. And lower. There was definitely more headroom at the start than there is now. I guess we didn’t notice when we took so long to move from room to room.”

“That doesn’t make much sense,” Celestine said.

“As I said, maybe I imagined it.”

But we all knew she had done no such thing. The last two times I had stepped across a door’s threshold my suit had bumped against the frame. I had thought nothing of it at the time—putting it down to carelessness—but that had evidently been wishful thinking.

“I wondered about the doors already,” I said. “Doesn’t it seem a little convenient that the first one we met was just the right size for us? It could have come from a human building.”

“Then why are they getting smaller?” Childe asked.

“I don’t know. But I think Hirz is right. And it does worry me.”

“Me too. But it’ll be a long time before it becomes a problem.” Childe turned to the Ultra. “Forqueray—do the honors, will you?”

I turned and looked at the chamber ahead of us. The door was open now, but none of us had yet stepped across the threshold. As always, we waited for Forqueray to send his float-cam snooping ahead of us, establishing that the room contained no glaring pitfalls.

Forqueray tossed the float-cam though the open door.

We saw the usual red stutters as it swept the room in visible light. “No surprises,” Forqueray said, in the usual slightly absent tone he adopted when reporting the cam’s findings. “Empty metallic chamber ... only slightly smaller than the one we’re standing in now. A door at the far end with a frame that extends half a meter out on either side. Complex inscriptions this time, Celestine.”

“I’ll cope, don’t you worry.”

Forqueray stepped a little closer to the door, one arm raised with his palm open. His expression remained calm as he waited for the drone to return to its master. We all watched, and then—as the moment elongated into seconds—began to suspect that something was wrong.

The room beyond was utterly dark; no stammering flashes now.

“The cam—” Forqueray said.

Childe’s gaze snapped to the Ultra’s face. “Yes?”

“It isn’t transmitting any more. I can’t detect it.”

“That isn’t possible.”

“I’m telling you.” The Ultra looked at us, his fear not well concealed. “It’s gone.”

Childe moved into the darkness, through the frame.

Just as I was admiring his bravery I felt the floor shudder. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flicker of rapid motion, like an eyelid closing.

The rear door—the one that led out of the chamber in which we were standing—had just slammed shut.

Celestine fell forward. She had been standing in the gap.

“No ...” she said, hitting the ground with a detectable thump.

“Childe!” I shouted, unnecessarily. “Stay where you are—something just happened.”

“What?”

“The door behind us closed on Celestine. She’s been injured ...”

I was fearing the worst—that the door might have snipped off an arm or a leg as it closed—but it was, mercifully, not that serious. The door had damaged the thigh of her suit, grazing an inch of its armor away as it closed, but Celestine herself had not been injured. The damaged part was still airtight, and the suit’s mobility and critical systems remained unimpaired.

Already, in fact, the self-healing mechanisms were coming into play, repairing the wound.

She sat up on the ground. “I’m OK. The impact was hard, but I don’t think I’ve done any permanent damage.”

“You sure?” I said, offering her a hand.

“Perfectly sure,” she said, standing up without my assistance.

“You were lucky,” Trintignant said. “You were only partly blocking the door. Had that not been the case, I suspect your injuries would have been more interesting.”

“What happened?” Hirz asked.

“Childe must have triggered it,” Forqueray said. “As soon as he stepped into the other room, it closed the rear door.” The Ultra stepped closer to the aperture. “What happened to my float-cam, Childe?”

“I don’t know. It just isn’t here. There isn’t even a trace of debris, and there’s no sign of anything that could have destroyed it.”

The silence that followed was broken by Trintignant’s piping tones. “I believe this makes a queer kind of sense.”

“You do, do you?” I said.

“Yes, my dear fellow. It is my suspicion that the Spire has been tolerating the drone until now—lulling us, if you will, into a false sense of security. Yet now the Spire has decreed that we must discard that particular mental crutch. It will no longer permit us to gain any knowledge of the contents of a room until one of us steps into it. And at that moment it will prevent any of us leaving until we have solved that problem.”

“You mean it’s changing the rules as it goes along?” Hirz asked.

The Doctor turned his exquisite silver mask towards her. “Which rules did you have in mind, Hirz?”

“Don’t fuck with me, Doc. You know what I mean.”

Trintignant touched a finger to the chin of his helmet. “I confess I do not. Unless it is your contention that the Spire has at some point agreed to bind by a set of strictures, which I would ardently suggest is far from the case.”

“No,” I said. “Hirz is right, in one way. There have been rules. It’s clear that it won’t tolerate us inflicting physical harm against it. And it won’t allow us to enter a room until we’ve all stepped into the preceding one. I think those are pretty fundamental rules.”

“Then what about the drone, and the door?” asked Childe.

“It’s like Trintignant said. It tolerated us playing outside the rules until now, but we shouldn’t have assumed that was always going to be the case.”

Hirz nodded. “Great. What else is it tolerating now?”

“I don’t know.” I managed a thin smile. “I suppose the only way to find out is to keep going.”

We passed through another eight rooms, taking between one and two hours to solve each.

There had been a couple of occasions when we had debated whether to continue, with Hirz usually the least keen of us, but so far the problems had not been insurmountably difficult. And we were making a kind of progress. Mostly the rooms were blank, but every now and then there was a narrow, trellised window, panelled in stained sheets of what was obviously a substance very much more resilient than glass or even diamond. Sometimes these windows opened only into gloomy interior spaces, but on one occasion we were able to look outside, able to sense some of the height we had attained. Forqueray, who had had been monitoring our journey with an inertial compass and gravitometer, confirmed that we had ascended at least fifteen vertical meters since the first chamber. That almost sounded impressive, until one considered the several hundred meters of Spire that undoubtedly lay above us. Another few hundred rooms, each posing a challenge more testing than the last?

And the doors were definitely getting smaller.

It was an effort to squeeze through now, and while the suits were able to reshape themselves to some extent, there was a limit to how compact they could become.

It had taken us sixteen hours to reach this point. At this rate it would take many days to get anywhere near the summit.

But none of us had imagined that this would be over quickly.

“Tricky,” Celestine said, after studying the latest puzzle for many minutes. “I think I see what’s going on here, but ...”

Childe looked at her. “You think, or you know?”

“I mean what I said. It’s not easy, you know. Would you rather I let someone else take first crack at it?”

I put a hand on Celestine’s arm and spoke to her privately. “Easy. He’s just anxious, that’s all.”

She brushed my hand away. “I didn’t ask you to defend me, Richard.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Never mind.” Celestine switched off private mode and addressed the group. “I think these markings are shadows. Look.”

By now we had all become reasonably adept at drawing figures using our suits’ visualization systems. These sketchy hallucinations could be painted on any surface, apparently visible to all.

Celestine, who was the best at this, drew a short red hyphen on the wall.

“See this? A one-dimensional line. Now watch.” She made the line become a square; splitting into two parallel lines joined at their ends. Then she made the square rotate until it was edge-on again, and all we could see was the line.

“We see it ...” Childe said.

“You can think of a line as the one-dimensional shadow of a two-dimensional object, in this case a square. Understand?”

“I think we get the gist,” Trintignant said.

Celestine made the square freeze, and then slide diagonally, leaving a copy of itself to which it was joined at the corners. “Now. We’re looking at a two-dimensional figure this time; the shadow of a three-dimensional cube. See how it changes if I rotate the cube, how it elongates and contracts?”

“Yes. Got that,” Childe said, watching the two joined squares slide across each other with a hypnotically smooth motion, only one square visible as the imagined cube presented itself face-on to the wall.

“Well, I think these figures ...” Celestine sketched a hand an inch over the intricate designs worked into the frame, “I think what these figures represent are two-dimensional shadows of four-dimensional objects.”

“Fuck off,” Hirz said.

“Look, just concentrate, will you? This one’s easy. It’s a hypercube. That’s the four-dimensional analogue of a cube. You just take a cube and extend it outwards, just the same way that you make a cube from a square.” Celestine paused, and for a moment I thought she was going to throw up her hands in despair. “Look. Look at this.” And then she sketched something on the wall: a cube set inside a slightly larger one, to which it was joined by diagonal lines. “That’s what the three-dimensional shadow of a hypercube would look like. Now all you have to do is collapse that shadow by one more dimension, down to two, to get this—” and she jabbed at the beguiling design marked on the door.

“I think I see it,” Childe said, without anything resembling confidence.

Maybe I did, too—though I felt the same lack of certainty. Childe and I had certainly taunted each other with higher-dimensional puzzles in our youth, but never had so much depended on an intuitive grasp of those mind-shattering mathematical realms. “All right,” I said. “Supposing that is the shadow of a tesseract ... what’s the puzzle?”

“This,” Celestine said, pointing to the other side of the door, to what seemed like an utterly different—though no less complex—design. “It’s the same object, after a rotation.”

“The shadow changes that drastically?”

“Start getting used to it, Richard.”

“All right.” I realized she was still annoyed with me for touching her. “What about the others?”

“They’re all four-dimensional objects; relatively simple geometric forms. This one’s a 4-simplex; a hypertetrahedron. It’s a hyper-pyramid with five tetrahedral faces ...” Celestine trailed off, looking at us with an odd expression on her face. “Never mind. The point is, all the corresponding forms on the right should be the shadows of the same polytopes after a simple rotation through higher-dimensional space. But one isn’t.”

“Which is?”

She pointed to one of the forms. “This one.”

“And you’re certain of that?” Hirz said. “Because I’m sure as fuck not.”

Celestine nodded. “Yes. I’m completely sure of it now.”

“But you can’t make any of us see that this is the case?”

She shrugged. “I guess you either see it or you don’t.”

“Yeah? Well maybe we should have all taken a trip to the Pattern Jugglers. Then maybe I wouldn’t be about to shit myself.”

Celestine said nothing, but merely reached out and touched the errant figure.

“There’s good news and there’s bad news,” Forqueray said after we had traversed another dozen or so rooms without injury.

“Give us the bad news first,” Celestine said.

Forqueray obliged, with what sounded like the tiniest degree of pleasure. “We won’t be able to get through more than two or three more doors. Not with these suits on.”

There had been no real need to tell us that. It had become crushingly obvious during the last three or four rooms that we were near the limit; that the Spire’s subtly shifting internal architecture would not permit further movement within the bulky suits. It had been an effort to squeeze through the last door; only Hirz was oblivious to these difficulties.

“Then we might as well give up,” I said.

“Not exactly.” Forqueray smiled his vampiric smile. “I said there was good news as well, didn’t I?”

“Which is?” Childe said.

“You remember when we sent Hirz back to the beginning, to see if the Spire was going to allow us to leave at any point?”

“Yes,” Childe said. Hirz had not repeated the complete exercise since, but she had gone back a dozen rooms, and found that the Spire was just as co-operative as it had been before. There was no reason to think she would not have been able to make her way to the exit, had she wished.

“Something bothered me,” Forqueray said. “When she went back, the Spire opened and closed doors in sequence to allow her to pass. I couldn’t see the sense in that. Why not just open all the doors along her route?”

“I confess it troubled me as well,” Trintignant said.

“So I thought about it, and decided there must be a reason not to have all the doors open at once.”

Childe sighed. “Which was?”

“Air,” Forqueray said.

“You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

The Ultra shook his head. “When we began, we were moving in vacuum—or at least through air that was as thin as that on Golgotha’s surface. That continued to be the case for the next few rooms. Then it began to change. Very slowly, I’ll grant you—but my suit sensors picked up on it immediately.”

Childe pulled a face. “And it didn’t cross your mind to tell any of us about this?”

“I thought it best to wait until a pattern became apparent.” Forqueray glanced at Celestine, whose face was impassive.

“He’s right,” Trintignant said. “I too have become aware of the changing atmospheric conditions. Forqueray has also doubtless noticed that the temperature in each room has been a little warmer than the last. I have extrapolated these trends and arrived at a tentative conclusion. Within two—possibly three—rooms, we will be able to discard our suits and breathe normally.”

“Discard our suits?” Hirz looked at him as if he were insane. “You have got to be fucking kidding.”

Childe raised a hand. “Wait a minute. When you said air, Doctor Trintignant, you didn’t say it was anything we’d be able to breathe.”

The Doctor’s answer was a melodious piped refrain. “Except it is. The ratios of the various gases are remarkably close to those we employ in our suits.”

“Which isn’t possible. I don’t remember providing a sample.”

Trintignant dipped his head in a nod. “Nonetheless, it appears that one has been taken. The mix, incidentally, corresponds to precisely the atmospheric preferences of Ultras. Argyle’s expedition would surely have employed a slightly different mix, so it is not simply the case that the Spire has a long memory.”

I shivered.

The thought that the Spire—this vast breathing thing through which we were scurrying like rats—had somehow reached inside the hard armor of our suits to snatch a sample of air, without our knowing, made my guts turn cold. It not only knew of our presence, but it knew—intimately—what we were.

It understood our fragility.

As if wishing to reward Forqueray for his observation, the next room contained a substantially thicker atmosphere than any of its predecessors, and was also much warmer. It was not yet capable of supporting life, but one would not have died instantly without the protection of a suit.

The challenge that the room held was by far the hardest, even by Celestine’s reckoning. Once again the essence of the task lay in the figures marked on either side of the door, but now these figures were linked by various symbols and connecting loops, like the subway map of a foreign city. We had encountered some of these hieroglyphics before—they were akin to mathematical operators, like the addition and subtraction symbol—but we had never seen so many. And the problem itself was not simply a numerical exercise, but—as far as Celestine could say with any certainty—a problem about topological transformations in four dimensions.

“Please tell me you see the answer immediately,” Childe said.

“I ...” Celestine trailed off. “I think I do. I’m just not absolutely certain. I need to think about this for a minute.”

“Fine. Take all the time you want.”

Celestine fell into a reverie which lasted minutes, and then tens of minutes. Once or twice she would open her mouth and take a breath of air as if in readiness to speak, and on one or two other occasions she took a promising step closer to the door, but none of these things heralded the sudden, intuitive breakthrough we were all hoping for. She always returned to the same silent, standing posture. The time dragged on; first an hour and then the better part of two hours.

All this, I thought, before even Celestine had seen the answer.

It might take days if we were all expected to follow her reasoning.

Finally, however, she spoke. “Yes. I see it.”

Childe was the first to answer. “Is it the one you thought it was originally?”

“No.”

“Great,” Hirz said.

“Celestine ...” I said, trying to defuse the situation. “Do you understand why you made the wrong choice originally?”

“Yes. I think so. It was a trick answer; an apparently correct solution which contained a subtle flaw. And what looked like the clearly wrong answer turned out to be the right one.”

“Right. And you’re certain of that?”

“I’m not certain of anything, Richard. I’m just saying this is what I believe the answer to be.”

I nodded. “I think that’s all any of us can honestly expect. Do you think there’s any chance of the rest of us following your line of argument?”

“I don’t know. How much do you understand about Kaluza-Klein spaces?”

“Not a vast amount, I have to admit.”

“That’s what I feared. I could probably explain my reasoning to some of you, but there’d always be someone who didn’t get it—” Celestine looked pointedly at Hirz. “We could be in this bloody room for weeks before any of us grasp the solution. And the Spire may not tolerate that kind of delay.”

“We don’t know that,” I cautioned.

“No,” Childe said. “On the other hand, we can’t afford to spend weeks solving every room. There’s going to have to come a point where we put our faith in Celestine’s judgement. I think that time may have come.”

I looked at him, remembering that his mathematical fluency had always been superior to mine. The puzzles I had set him had seldom defeated him, even if it had taken weeks for his intensely methodical mind to arrive at the solution. Conversely, he had often managed to beat me by setting a mathematical challenge of similar intricacy to the one now facing Celestine. They were not quite equals, I knew, but neither were their abilities radically different. It was just that, thanks to her experiences with the Pattern Jugglers, Celestine would always arrive at the answer with the superhuman speed of a savant.

“Are you saying I should just press it, with no consultation?” Celestine said.

Childe nodded. “Provided everyone else agrees with me ...”

It was not an easy decision to make, especially after having navigated so many rooms via such a ruthlessly democratic process. But we all saw the sense, even Hirz coming around to our line of thinking in the end.

“I’m telling you,” she said. “We get through this door, I’m out of here, money or not.”

“You’re giving up?” Childe asked.

“You saw what happened to those poor bastards outside. They must have thought they could keep on solving the next test.”

Childe looked sad, but said, “I understand perfectly. But I trust you’ll reassess your decision as soon as we’re through?”

“Sorry, but my mind’s made up. I’ve had enough of this shit.” Hirz turned to Celestine. “Put us all out of our misery, will you? Make the choice.”

Celestine looked at each of us in turn. “Are you ready for this?”

“We are,” Childe said, answering for the group. “Go ahead.”

Celestine pressed the symbol. There was the usual yawning moment of expectation; a moment that stretched agonizingly. We all stared at the door, willing it to begin sliding open.

This time nothing happened.

“Oh God ...” Hirz began.

Something happened then, almost before she had finished speaking, but it was over almost before we had sensed any change in the room. It was only afterwards—playing back the visual record captured by our suits—that we were able to make any sense of events.

The walls of the chamber—like every room we had passed through, in fact—had looked totally seamless. But in a flash something emerged from the wall: a rigid, sharp-ended metal rod spearing out at waist-height. It flashed through the air from wall to wall, vanishing like a javelin thrown into water. None of us had time to notice it, let alone react bodily. Even the suits—programd to move out of the way of obvious moving hazards—were too slow. By the time they began moving, the javelin had been and gone. And if there had been only that one javelin, we might almost have missed it happening at all.

But a second emerged, a fraction of a second after the first, spearing across the room at a slightly different angle.

Forqueray happened to be standing in the way.

The javelin passed through him as if he were made of smoke; its progress was unimpeded by his presence. But it dragged behind it a comet-tail of gore, exploding out of his suit where he had been speared, just below the elbow. The pressure in the room was still considerably less than atmospheric.

Forqueray’s suit reacted with impressive speed, but it was still sluggish compared to the javelin.

It assessed the damage that had been inflicted on the arm, aware of how quickly its self-repair systems could work to seal that inch-wide hole, and came to a rapid conclusion. The integrity could be restored, but not before unacceptable blood and pressure loss. Since its duty was always to keep its wearer alive, no matter what the costs, it opted to sever the arm above the wound; hyper-sharp irised blades snicked through flesh and bone in an instant.

All that took place long before any pain signals had a chance to reach his brain. The first thing Forqueray knew of his misfortune was when his arm clanged to his feet.

“I think—” he started saying. Hirz dashed over to the Ultra and did her best to support him.

Forqueray’s truncated arm ended in a smooth silver iris.

“Don’t talk,” Childe said.

Forqueray, who was still standing, looked at his injury with something close to fascination. “I—”

“I said don’t talk.” Childe knelt down and picked up the amputated arm, showing the evidence to Forqueray. The hole went right through it, as cleanly bored as a rifle barrel.

“I’ll live,” Forqueray managed.

“Yes, you will,” Trintignant said. “And you may also count yourself fortunate. Had the projectile pierced your body, rather than one of its extremities, I do not believe we would be having this conversation.”

“You call this fortunate?”

“A wound such as yours can be made good with only trivial intervention. We have all the equipment we need aboard the shuttle.”

Hirz looked around uneasily. “You think the punishment’s over?”

“I think we’d know if it wasn’t,” I said. “That was our first mistake, after all. We can expect things to be a little worse in future, of course.”

“Then we’d better not make any more screw-ups, had we?” Hirz was directing her words at Celestine.

I had expected an angry rebuttal. Celestine would have been perfectly correct to remind Hirz that—had the rest of us been forced to make that choice—our chances of hitting the correct answer would have been a miserable one in six.

But instead Celestine just spoke with the flat, soporific tones of one who could not quite believe she had made such an error.

“I’m sorry ... I must have ...”

“Made the wrong decision. Yes.” I nodded. “And there’ll undoubtedly be others. You did your best, Celestine—better than any of us could have managed.”

“It wasn’t good enough.”

“No, but you narrowed the field down to two possibilities. That’s a lot better than six.”

“He’s right,” Childe said. “Celestine, don’t cut yourself up about this. Without you we wouldn’t have got as far as we did. Now go ahead and press the other answer—the one you settled on originally—and we’ll get Forqueray back to base camp.”

The Ultra glared at him. “I’m fine, Childe. I can continue.”

“Maybe you can, but it’s still time for a temporary retreat. We’ll get that arm looked at properly, and then we’ll come back with lightweight suits. We can’t carry on much further with these, anyway—and I don’t particularly fancy continuing with no armor at all.”

Celestine turned back to the frame. “I can’t promise that this is the right one, either.”

“We’ll take that chance. Just hit them in sequence—best choice first—until the Spire opens a route back to the start.”

She pressed the symbol that had been her first choice, before she had analyzed the problem more deeply and seen a phantom trap.

As always, Blood Spire did not oblige us with an instant judgement on the choice we had made. There was a moment when all of us tensed, expecting the javelins to come again ... but this time we were spared further punishment.

The door opened, exposing the next chamber.

We did not step through, of course. Instead, we turned around and made our way back through the succession of rooms we had already traversed, descending all the while, almost laughing at the childish simplicity of the very earliest puzzles compared to those we had faced before the attack.

As the doors opened and closed in sequence, the air thinned out and the skin of Blood Spire became colder; less like a living thing, more like an ancient, brooding machine. But still that distant, throbbing respiratory vibration rattled the floors, lower now, and slower: the Spire letting us know it was aware of our presence and, perhaps, the tiniest bit disappointed at this turning back.

“All right, you bastard,” Childe said. “We’re retreating, but only for now. We’re coming back, understand?”

“You don’t have to take it personally,” I said.

“Oh, but I do,” Childe said. “I take it very personally indeed.”

We reached the first chamber, and then dropped down through what had been the entrance hole. After that, it was just a short flight back to the waiting shuttle.

It was dark outside.

We had been in the Spire for more than nineteen hours.

Four

“It’ll do,” Forqueray said, tilting his new arm this way and that.

“Do?” Trintignant sounded mortally wounded. “My dear fellow, it is a work of exquisite craftsmanship; a thing of beauty. It is unlikely that you will see its like again, unless of course I am called upon to perform a similar procedure.”

We were sitting inside the shuttle, still parked on Golgotha’s surface. The ship was a squat, aerodynamically blunt cylinder which had landed tail-down and then expanded a cluster of eight bubbletents around itself: six for our personal quarters during the expedition, one commons area, and a general medical bay equipped with all the equipment Trintignant needed to do his work. Surprisingly—to me, at least, who admitted to some unfamiliarity with these things—the shuttle’s fabricators had been more than able to come up with the various cybernetic components that the Doctor required, and the surgical tools at his disposal—glistening, semi-sentient things which moved to his will almost before they were summoned—were clearly state of the art by any reasonable measure.

“Yes, well, I’d have rather you’d reattached my old arm,” Forqueray said, opening and closing the sleek metal gauntlet of his replacement.

“It would have been almost insultingly trivial to do that,” Trintignant said. “A new hand could have been cultured and regrafted in a few hours. If that did not appeal to you, I could have programd your stump to regenerate a hand of its own accord; a perfectly simple matter of stem-cell manipulation. But what would have been the point? You would be very likely to lose it as soon as we suffer our next punishment. Now you will only be losing machinery—a far less traumatic prospect.”

“You’re enjoying this,” Hirz said, “aren’t you?”

“It would be churlish to deny it,” Trintignant said. “When you have been deprived of willing subjects as long as I have, it’s only natural to take pleasure in those little opportunities for practice that fate sees fit to present.”

Hirz nodded knowingly. She had not heard of Trintignant upon our first meeting, I recalled, but she had lost no time in forming her subsequent opinion of the man. “Except you won’t just stop with a hand, will you? I checked up on you, Doc—after that meeting in Childe’s house. I hacked into some of the medical records that the Stoner authorities still haven’t declassified, because they’re just too damned disturbing. You really went the whole hog, didn’t you? Some of the things I saw in those files—your victims—they stopped me from sleeping.”

And yet still she had chosen to come with us, I thought. Evidently the allure of Childe’s promised reward outweighed any reservations she might have had about sharing a room with Trintignant. But I wondered about those medical records. Certainly, the publicly released data had contained more than enough atrocities for the average nightmare. It chilled the blood to think that Trintignant’s most heinous crimes had never been fully revealed.

“Is it true?” I said. “Were there really worse things?”

“That depends,” Trintignant said. “There were subjects upon whom I pushed my experimental techniques further than is generally realized, if that is what you mean. But did I ever approach what I considered were the true limits? No. I was always hindered.”

“Until, perhaps, now,” I said.

The rigid silver mask swivelled to face us all in turn. “That is as maybe. But please give the following matter some consideration. I can surgically remove all your limbs now, cleanly, with the minimum of complications. The detached members could be put into cryogenic storage, replaced by prosthetic systems until we have completed the task that lies ahead of us.”

“Thanks ...” I said, looking around at the others. “But I think we’ll pass on that one, Doctor.”

Trintignant offered his palms magnanimously. “I am at your disposal, should you wish to reconsider.”

We spent a full day in the shuttle before returning to the Spire. I had been mortally tired, but when I finally slept, it was only to submerge myself in yet more labyrinthine dreams, much like those Childe had pumped into our heads during the reefersleep transition. I woke feeling angry and cheated, and resolved to confront him about it.

But something else snagged my attention.

There was something wrong with my wrist. Buried just beneath the skin was a hard rectangle, showing darkly through my flesh. Turning my wrist this way and that, I admired the object, acutely—and strangely—conscious of its rectilinearity. I looked around me, and felt the same visceral awareness of the other shapes which formed my surroundings. I did not know whether I was more disturbed at the presence of the alien object under my flesh, or my unnatural reaction to it.

I stumbled groggily into the common quarters of the shuttle, presenting my wrist to Childe, who was sitting there with Celestine.

She looked at me before Childe had a chance to answer. “So you’ve got one too,” she said, showing me the similar shape lurking just below her own skin. The shape rhymed—there was no other word for it—with the surrounding panels and extrusions of the commons. “Um, Richard?” she added.

“I’m feeling a little strange.”

“Blame Childe. He put them there. Didn’t you, you lying rat?”

“It’s easily removed,” he said, all innocence. “It just seemed more prudent to implant the devices while you were all asleep anyway, so as not to waste any more time than necessary.”

“It’s not just the thing in my wrist,” I said, “whatever it is.”

“It’s something to keep us awake,” Celestine said, her anger just barely under control. Feeling less myself than ever, I watched the way her face changed shape as she spoke, conscious of the armature of muscle and bone lying just beneath the skin.

“Awake?” I managed.

“A ... shunt, of some kind,” she said. “Ultras use them, I gather. It sucks fatigue poisons out of the blood, and puts other chemicals back into the blood to upset the brain’s normal sleeping cycle. With one of these you can stay conscious for weeks, with almost no psychological problems.”

I forced a smile, ignoring the sense of wrongness I felt. “It’s the almost part that worries me.”

“Me too.” She glared at Childe. “But much as I hate the little rat for doing this without my permission, I admit to seeing the sense in it.”

I felt the bump in my wrist again. “Trintignant’s work, I presume?”

“Count yourself lucky he didn’t hack your arms and legs off while he was at it.”

Childe interrupted her. “I told him to install the shunts. We can still catnap, if we have the chance. But these devices will let us stay alert when we need alertness. They’re really no more sinister than that.”

“There’s something else ...” I said tentatively. I glanced at Celestine, trying to judge if she felt as oddly as I did. “Since I’ve been awake, I’ve ... experienced things differently. I keep seeing shapes in a new light. What exactly have you done to me, Childe?”

“Again, nothing irreversible. Just a small medichine infusion—”

I tried to keep my temper. “What sort of medichines?”

“Neural modifiers.” He raised a hand defensively, and I saw the same rectangular bulge under his skin. “Your brain is already swarming with Demarchist implants and cellular machines, Richard, so why pretend that what I’ve done is anything more than a continuation of what was already there?”

“What the fuck is he talking about?” said Hirz, who had been standing at the door to the commons for the last few seconds. “Is it to do with the weird shit I’ve been dealing with since waking up?”

“Very probably,” I said, relieved that at least I was not going insane. “Let me guess—heightened mathematical and spatial awareness?”

“If that’s what you call it, yeah. Seeing shapes everywhere, and thinking of them fitting together ...”

Hirz turned to look at Childe. Small as she was, she looked easily capable of inflicting injury. “Start talking, dickhead.”

Childe spoke with quiet calm. “I put modifiers in your brain, via the wrist shunt. The modifiers haven’t performed any radical neural restructuring, but they are suppressing and enhancing certain regions of brain function. The effect—crudely speaking—is to enhance your spatial abilities, at the expense of some less essential functions. What you are getting is a glimpse into the cognitive realms that Celestine inhabits as a matter of routine.” Celestine opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off with a raised palm. “No more than a glimpse, no, but I think you’ll agree that—given the kinds of challenges the Spire likes to throw at us—the modifiers will give us an edge that we lacked previously.”

“You mean you’ve turned us all into maths geniuses, overnight?”

“Broadly speaking, yes.”

“Well, that’ll come in handy,” Hirz said.

“It will?”

“Yeah. When you try and fit the pieces of your dick back together.”

She lunged for him.

“Hirz, I ...”

“Stop,” I said, interceding. “Childe was wrong to do this without our consent, but—given the situation we find ourselves in—the idea makes sense.”

“Whose side are you on?” Hirz said, backing away with a look of righteous fury in her eyes.

“Nobody’s,” I said. “I just want to do whatever it takes to beat the Spire.”

Hirz glared at Childe. “All right. This time. But you try another stunt like that, and ...”

But even then it was obvious that Hirz had come to the conclusion that I had already arrived at myself: that, given what the Spire was likely to test us with, it was better to accept these machines than ask for them to be flushed out of our systems.

There was just one troubling thought which I could not quite dismiss.

Would I have welcomed the machines so willingly before they had invaded my head, or were they partly influencing my decision?

I had no idea.

But I decided to worry about that later.

Five

“Three hours,” Childe said triumphantly. “Took us nineteen to reach this point on our last trip through. That has to mean something, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Hirz said snidely. “It means it’s a piece of piss when you know the answers.”

We were standing by the door where Celestine had made her mistake the last time. She had just pressed the correct topological symbol and the door had opened to admit us to the chamber beyond, one we had not so far stepped into. From now on we would be facing fresh challenges again, rather than passing through those we had already faced. The Spire, it appeared, was more interested in probing the limits of our understanding than getting us simply to solve permutations of the same basic challenge.

It wanted to break us, not stress us.

More and more I was thinking of it as a sentient thing: inquisitive and patient and—when the mood took it—immensely capable of cruelty.

“What’s in there?” Forqueray said.

Hirz had gone ahead into the unexplored room.

“Well, fuck me if it isn’t another puzzle.”

“Describe it, would you?”

“Weird shape shit, I think.” She was quiet for a few seconds.

“Yeah. Shapes in four dimensions again. Celestine—you wanna take a look at this? I think it’s right up your street.”

“Any idea what the nature of the task is?” Celestine asked.

“Fuck, I don’t know. Something to do with stretching, I think ...”

“Topological deformations,” Celestine murmured before joining Hirz in the chamber.

For a minute or so the two of them conferred, studying the marked doorframe like a pair of discerning art critics.

On the last run through, Hirz and Celestine had shared almost no common ground: it was unnerving to see how much Hirz now grasped. The machines Childe had pumped into our skulls had improved the mathematical skills of all of us—with the possible exception of Trintignant, who I suspected had not received the therapy—but the effects had differed in nuance, degree and stability. My mathematical brilliance came in feverish, unpredictable waves, like inspiration to a laudanum-addicted poet. Forqueray had gained an astonishing fluency in arithmetic, able to count huge numbers of things simply by looking at them for a moment.

But Hirz’s change had been the most dramatic of all, something even Childe was taken aback by. On the second pass through the Spire she had been intuiting the answers to many of the problems at a glance, and I was certain that she was not always remembering what the correct answer had been. Now, as we encountered the tasks that had challenged even Celestine, Hirz was still able to perceive the essence of a problem, even if it was beyond her to articulate the details in the formal language of mathematics.

And if she could not yet see her way to selecting the correct answer, she could at least see the one or two answers that were clearly wrong.

“Hirz is right,” Celestine said eventually. “It’s about topological deformations, stretching operations on solid shapes.”

Once again we were seeing the projected shadows of four-dimensional lattices. On the right side of the door, however, the shadows were of the same objects after they had been stretched and squeezed and generally distorted. The problem was to identify the shadow that could only be formed with a shearing, in addition to the other operations.

It took an hour, but eventually Celestine felt certain that she had selected the right answer. Hirz and I attempted to follow her arguments, but the best we could do was agree that two of the other answers would have been wrong. That, at least, was an improvement on anything we would have been capable of before the medichine infusions, but it was only moderately comforting.

Nonetheless, Celestine had selected the right answer. We moved into the next chamber.

“This is as far as we can go with these suits,” Childe said, indicating the door that lay ahead of us. “It’ll be a squeeze, even with the lighter suits—except for Hirz, of course.”

“What’s the air like in here?” I asked.

“We could breathe it,” Forqueray said. “And we’ll have to, briefly. But I don’t recommend that we do that for any length of time—at least not until we’re forced into it.”

“Forced?” Celestine said. “You think the doors are going to keep getting smaller?”

“I don’t know. But doesn’t it feel as if this place is forcing us to expose ourselves to it, to make ourselves maximally vulnerable? I don’t think it’s done with us just yet.” He paused, his suit beginning to remove itself. “But that doesn’t mean we have to humor it.”

I understood his reluctance. The Spire had hurt him, not us.

Beneath the Ultra suits which had brought us this far we had donned as much of the lightweight versions as was possible. They were skintight suits of reasonably modern design, but they were museum pieces compared to the Ultra equipment. The helmets and much of the breathing gear had been impossible to put on, so we had carried the extra parts strapped to our backs. Despite my fears, the Spire had not objected to this, but I remained acutely aware that we did not yet know all the rules under which we played.

It only took three or four minutes to get out of the bulky suits and into the new ones; most of this time was taken up running status checks. For a minute or so, with the exception of Hirz, we had all breathed Spire air.

It was astringent, blood-hot, humid, and smelt faintly of machine oil.

It was a relief when the helmets flooded with the cold, tasteless air of the suits’ backpack recyclers.

“Hey.” Hirz, the only one still wearing her original suit, knelt down and touched the floor. “Check this out.”

I followed her, pressing the flimsy fabric of my glove against the surface.

The structure’s vibrations rose and fell with increased strength, as if we had excited it by removing our hard protective shells.

“It’s like the fucking thing’s getting a hard-on,” Hirz said.

“Let’s push on,” Childe said. “We’re still armored—just not as effectively as before—but if we keep being smart, it won’t matter.”

“Yeah. But it’s the being smart part that worries me. No one smart would come within pissing distance of this fucking place.”

“What does that make you, Hirz?” Celestine asked.

“Greedier than you’ll ever know,” she said.

Nonetheless we made good progress for another eleven rooms. Now and then a stained-glass window allowed a view out of Golgotha’s surface, which looked very far below us. By Forqueray’s estimate we had gained forty-five vertical meters since entering the Spire. Although two hundred further meters lay ahead—the bulk of the climb, in fact—for the first time it began to appear possible that we might succeed. That, of course, was contingent on several assumptions. One was that the problems, while growing steadily more difficult, would not become insoluble. The other was that the doorways would not continue to narrow now that we had discarded the bulky suits.

But they did.

As always, the narrowing was imperceptible from room to room, but after five or six it could not be ignored. After ten or fifteen more rooms we would again have to scrape our way between them.

And what if the narrowing continued beyond that point?

“We won’t be able to go on,” I said. “We won’t fit—even if we’re naked.”

“You are entirely too defeatist,” Trintignant said.

Childe sounded reasonable. “What would you propose, Doctor?”

“Nothing more than a few minor readjustments of the basic human body-plan. Just enough to enable us to squeeze through apertures which would be impassable with our current ... encumbrances.”

Trintignant looked avariciously at my arms and legs.

“It wouldn’t be worth it,” I said. “I’ll accept your help after I’ve been injured, but if you’re thinking that I’d submit to anything more drastic ... well, I’m afraid you’re severely mistaken, Doctor.”

“Amen to that,” Hirz said. “For a while back there, Swift, I really thought this place was getting to you.”

“It isn’t,” I said. “Not remotely. And in any case, we’re thinking many rooms ahead here, when we might not even be able to get through the next.”

“I agree,” Childe said. “We’ll take it one at a time. Doctor Trintignant, put your wilder fantasies aside, at least for now.”

“Consider them relegated to mere daydreams,” Trintignant said.

So we pushed on.

Now that we had passed through so many doors, it was possible to see that the Spire’s tasks came in waves; that there might, for instance, be a series of problems which depended on prime number theory, followed by another series which hinged on the properties of higher-dimensional solids. For several rooms in sequence we were confronted by questions related to tiling patterns—tessellations—while another sequence tested our understanding of cellular automata: odd chequerboard armies of shapes which obeyed simple rules and yet interacted in stunningly complex ways. The final challenge in each set would always be the hardest; the one where we were most likely to make a mistake. We were quite prepared to take three or four hours to pass each door, if that was the time it took to be certain—in Celestine’s mind at least—that the answer was clear.

And though the shunts were leaching fatigue poisons from our blood, and though the modifiers were enabling us to think with a clarity we had never known before, a kind of exhaustion always crept over us after solving one of the harder challenges. It normally passed in a few tens of minutes, but until then we generally waited before venturing through the now open door, gathering our strength again.

In those quiet minutes we spoke amongst ourselves, discussing what had happened and what we could expect.

“It’s happened again,” I said, addressing Celestine on the private channel.

Her answer came back, no more terse than I had expected. “What?”

“For a while the rest of us could keep up with you. Even Hirz. Or, if not keep up, then at least not lose sight of you completely. But you’re pulling ahead again, aren’t you? Those Juggler routines are kicking in again.”

She took her time replying. “You have Childe’s medichines.”

“Yes. But all they can do is work with the basic neural topology, suppressing and enhancing activity without altering the layout of the connections in any significant way. And the ‘chines are broad-spectrum; not tuned specifically to any one of us.”

Celestine looked at the only one of us still wearing one of the original suits. “They worked on Hirz.”

“Must have been luck. But yes, you’re right. She couldn’t see as far as you, though, even with the modifiers.”

Celestine tapped the shunt in her wrist, still faintly visible beneath the tight-fitting fabric of her suit. “I took a spike of the modifiers as well.”

“I doubt that it gave you much of an edge over what you already had.”

“Maybe not.” She paused. “Is there a point to this conversation, Richard?”

“Not really,” I said, stung by her response. “I just ...”

“Wanted to talk, yes.”

“And you don’t?”

“You can hardly blame me if I don’t, can you? This isn’t exactly the place for small talk, let alone with someone who chose to have me erased from his memory.”

“Would it make any difference if I said I was sorry about that?”

I could tell from the tone of her response that my answer had not been quite the one she was expecting. “It’s easy to say you’re sorry, now ... now that it suits you to say as much. That’s not how you felt at the time, is it?”

I fumbled for an answer which was not too distant from the truth. “Would you believe me if I said I’d had you suppressed because I still loved you, and not for any other reason?”

“That’s just a little too convenient, isn’t it?”

“But not necessarily a lie. And can you blame me for it? We were in love, Celestine. You can’t deny that. Just because things happened between us ...” A question I had been meaning to ask her forced itself to the front of my mind. “Why didn’t you contact me again, after you were told you couldn’t go to Resurgam?”

“Our relationship was over, Richard.”

“But we’d parted on reasonably amicable terms. If the Resurgam expedition hadn’t come up, we might not have parted at all.”

Celestine sighed; one of exasperation. “Well, since you asked, I did try and contact you.”

“You did?”

“But by the time I’d made my mind up, I learned about the way you’d had me suppressed. How do you imagine that made me feel, Richard? Like a small, disposable part of your past—something to be wadded up and flicked away when it offended you?”

“It wasn’t like that at all. I never thought I’d see you again.”

She snorted. “And maybe you wouldn’t have, if it wasn’t for dear old Roland Childe.”

I kept my voice level. “He asked me along because we both used to test each other with challenges like this. I presume he needed someone with your kind of Juggler transform. Childe wouldn’t have cared about our past.”

Her eyes flashed behind the visor of her helmet. “And you don’t care either, do you?”

“About Childe’s motives? No. They’re neither my concern nor my interest. All that bothers me now is this.”

I patted the Spire’s thrumming floor.

“There’s more here than meets the eye, Richard.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Haven’t you noticed how—” She looked at me for several seconds, as if on the verge of revealing something, then shook her head. “Never mind.”

“What, for pity’s sake?”

“Doesn’t it strike you that Childe has been just a little too well prepared?”

“I wouldn’t say there’s any such thing as being too well prepared for a thing like Blood Spire, Celestine.”

“That’s not what I mean.” She fingered the fabric of her skintight. “These suits, for instance. How did he know we wouldn’t be able to go all the way with the larger ones?”

I shrugged, a gesture that was now perfectly visible. “I don’t know. Maybe he learned a few things from Argyle, before he died.”

“Then what about Doctor Trintignant? That ghoul isn’t remotely interested in solving the Spire. He hasn’t contributed to a single problem yet. And yet he’s already proved his value, hasn’t he?”

“I don’t follow.”

Celestine rubbed her shunt. “These things. And the neural modifiers—Trintignant supervised their installation. And I haven’t even mentioned Forqueray’s arm, or the medical equipment aboard the shuttle.”

“I still don’t see what you’re getting at.”

“I don’t know what leverage Childe’s used to get his cooperation—it’s got to be more than bribery or avarice—but I have a very, very nasty idea. And all of it points to something even more disturbing.”

I was wearying of this. With the challenge of the next door ahead of us, the last thing I needed was paranoiac theory-mongering.

“Which is?”

“Childe knows too much about this place.”

Another room, another wrong answer, another punishment.

It made the last look like a minor reprimand. I remembered a swift metallic flicker of machines emerging from hatches which opened in the seamless walls: not javelins now, but jointed, articulated pincers and viciously curved scissors. I remembered high-pressure jets of vivid arterial blood spraying the room like pink banners, the shards of shattered bone hammering against the walls like shrapnel. I remembered an unwanted and brutal lesson in the anatomy of the human body; the elegance with which muscle, bone and sinew were anchored to each other and the horrid ease with which they could be flensed apart—filleted—by surgically sharp metallic instruments.

I remembered screams.

I remembered indescribable pain, before the analgesics kicked in.

Afterwards, when we had time to think about what had happened, I do not think any of us thought of blaming Celestine for making another mistake. Childe’s modifiers had given us a healthy respect for the difficulty of what she was doing, and—as before—her second choice had been the correct one; the one that opened a route back to the Spire’s exit.

And besides ...

Celestine had suffered as well.

It was Forqueray who had caught the worst of it, though. Perhaps the Spire, having tasted his blood once, had decided it wanted much more of it—more than could be provided by the sacrifice of a mere limb. It had quartered him: two quick opposed snips with the nightmarish scissors; a bisection followed an instant later by a hideous transection.

Four pieces of Forqueray had thudded to the Spire’s floor; his interior organs were laid open like a wax model in a medical school. Various machines nestled neatly amongst his innards, sliced along the same planes. What remained of him spasmed once or twice, then—with the exception of his replacement arm, which continued to twitch—he was mercifully still. A moment or two passed, and then—with whiplash speed—jointed arms seized his pieces and pulled him into the wall, leaving slick red skidmarks.

Forqueray’s death would have been bad enough, but by then the Spire was already inflicting further punishment.

I saw Celestine drop to the ground, one arm pressed around the stump of another, blood spraying from the wound despite the pressure she was applying. Through her visor her face turned ghostly.

Childe’s right hand was missing all the fingers. He pressed the ruined hand against his chest, grimacing, but managed to stay on his feet.

Trintignant had lost a leg. But there was no blood gushing from the wound; no evidence of severed muscle and bone. I saw only damaged mechanisms; twisted and snapped steel and plastic armatures; buzzing cables and stuttering optic fibers; interrupted feedlines oozing sickly green fluids.

Trintignant, nonetheless, fell to the floor.

I also felt myself falling, looking down to see that my right leg ended just below the knee; realizing that my own blood was hosing out in a hard scarlet stream. I hit the floor—the pain of the injury having yet to reach my brain—and reached out in reflex for the stump. But only one hand presented itself; my left arm had been curtailed neatly above the wrist. In my peripheral vision I saw my detached hand, still gloved, perched on the floor like an absurd white crab.

Pain flowered in my skull.

I screamed.

Six

“I’ve had enough of this shit,” Hirz said.

Childe looked up at her from his recovery couch. “You’re leaving us?”

“Damn right I am.”

“You disappoint me.”

“Fine, but I’m still shipping out.”

Childe stroked his forehead, tracing its shape with the new steel gauntlet Trintignant had attached to his arm. “If anyone should be quitting, it isn’t you, Hirz. You walked out of the Spire without a scratch. Look at the rest of us.”

“Thanks, but I’ve just had my dinner.”

Trintignant lifted his silver mask towards her. “Now there is no call for that. I admit the replacements I have fashioned here possess a certain brutal esthétique, but in functional terms they are without equal.” As if to demonstrate his point, he flexed his own replacement leg.

It was a replacement, rather than simply the old one salvaged, repaired and reattached. Hirz—who had picked up as many pieces of us as she could manage—had never found the other part of Trintignant. Nor had an examination of the area around the Spire—where we had found the pieces of Forqueray—revealed any significant part of the Doctor. The Spire had allowed us to take back Forqueray’s arm after it had been severed, but it appeared to have decided to keep all metallic things for itself.

I stood up from my own couch, testing the way my new leg supported my weight. There was no denying the excellence of Trintignant’s work. The prosthesis had interfaced with my existing nervous system so perfectly that I had already accepted the leg into my body image. When I walked on it I did so with only the tiniest trace of a limp, and that would surely vanish once I had grown accustomed to the replacement.

“I could take the other one off as well,” Trintignant piped, rubbing his hands together. “Then you would have perfect neural equilibrium ... shall I do it?”

“You want to, don’t you?”

“I admit I have always been offended by asymmetry.”

I felt my other leg; the flesh and blood one that now felt so vulnerable, so unlikely to last the course.

“You’ll just have to be patient,” I said.

“Well, all things come to he who waits. And how is the arm doing?”

Like Childe, I now boasted one steel gauntlet instead of a hand. I flexed it, hearing the tiny, shrill whine of actuators. When I touched something I felt prickles of sensation; the hand was capable of registering subtle gradations of warmth or coldness. Celestine’s replacement was very similar, although sleeker and somehow more feminine. At least our injuries had demanded as much, I thought; unlike Childe, who had lost only his fingers, but who had appeared to welcome more of the Doctor’s gleaming handiwork than was strictly necessary.

“It’ll do,” I said, remembering how much Forqueray had irritated the Doctor with the same remark.

“Don’t you get it?” Hirz said. “If Trintignant had his way, you’d be like him by now. Christ only knows where he’ll stop.”

Trintignant shrugged. “I merely repair what the Spire damages.”

“Yeah. The two of you make a great team, Doc.” She looked at him with an expression of pure loathing. “Well, sorry, but you’re not getting your hands on me.”

Trintignant appraised her. “No great loss, when there is so little raw material with which to work.”

“Screw you, creep.”

Hirz left the room.

“Looks like she means it when she says she’s quitting,” I said, breaking the silence that ensued.

Celestine nodded. “I can’t say I entirely blame her, either.”

“You don’t?” Childe asked.

“No. She’s right. This whole thing is in serious danger of turning into some kind of sick exercise in self-mutilation.” Celestine looked at her own steel hand, not quite masking her own revulsion. “What will it take, Childe? What will we turn into by the time we beat this thing?”

He shrugged. “Nothing that can’t be reversed.”

“But maybe by then we won’t want it reversed, will we?”

“Listen, Celestine.” Childe propped himself against a bulkhead. “What we’re doing here is trying to beat an elemental thing. Reach its summit, if you will. In that respect Blood Spire isn’t very different to a mountain. It punishes us when we make mistakes, but then so do mountains. Occasionally, it kills. More often than not it leaves us only with a reminder of what it can do. Blood Spire snips off a finger or two. A mountain achieves the same effect with frostbite. Where’s the difference?”

“A mountain doesn’t enjoy doing it, for a start. But the Spire does. It’s alive, Childe, living and breathing.”

“It’s a machine, that’s all.”

“But maybe a cleverer one than anything we’ve ever known before. A machine with a taste for blood, too. That’s not a great combination, Childe.”

He sighed. “Then you’re giving up as well?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Fine.”

He stepped through the door which Hirz had just used.

“Where are you going?” I said.

“To try and talk some sense into her, that’s all.”

Seven

Ten hours later—buzzing with unnatural alertness; the need for sleep a distant, fading memory—we returned to Blood Spire.

“What did he say to make you come back?” I said to Hirz, between one of the challenges.

“What do you think?”

“Just a wild stab in the dark, but did he by any chance up your cut?”

“Let’s just say the terms were renegotiated. Call it a performance-related bonus.”

I smiled. “Then calling you a mercenary wasn’t so far off the mark, was it?”

“Sticks and stones may break my bones ... sorry. Given the circumstances, that’s not in the best possible good taste, is it?”

“Never mind.”

We were struggling out of our suits now. Several rooms earlier we had reached a point where it was impossible to squeeze through the door without first disconnecting our airlines and removing our backpacks. We could have done without the packs, of course, but none of us wanted to breathe Spire air until it was absolutely necessary. And we would still need the packs to make our retreat, back through the unpressurized rooms. So we kept hold of them as we wriggled between rooms, fearful of letting go. We had seen the way the Spire harvested first Forqueray’s drone and then Trintignant’s leg, and it was likely it would do the same with our equipment if we left it unattended.

“Why are you doing it, then?” asked Hirz.

“It certainly isn’t the money,” I said.

“No. I figured that part out. What, then?”

“Because it’s there. Because Childe and I go back a long way, and I can’t stand to give up on a challenge once I’ve accepted it.”

“Old-fashioned bullheadedness, in other words,” Celestine said.

Hirz was putting on a helmet and backpack assembly for the first time. She had just been forced to get out of her original suit and put on one of the skintights; even her small frame was now too large to pass through the constricted doors. Childe had attached some additional armor to her skintight—scablike patches of flexible woven diamond—but she must have felt more vulnerable.

I answered Celestine. “What about you, if it isn’t the same thing that keeps me coming back?”

“I want to solve the problems, that’s all. For you they’re just a means to an end, but for me they’re the only thing of interest.”

I felt slighted, but she was right. The nature of the challenges was less important to me than discovering what was at the summit; the secret the Spire so jealously guarded.

“And you’re hoping that through the problems they set us you’ll eventually understand the Spire’s makers?”

“Not just that. I mean, that’s a significant part of it, but I also want to know what my own limitations are.”

“You mean you want to explore the gift that the Jugglers have given you?” Before she had time to answer I continued, “I understand. And it’s never been possible before, has it? You’ve only ever been able to test yourself against problems set by other humans. You could never map the limits of your ability; any more than a lion could test its strength against paper.”

She looked around her. “But now I’ve met something that tests me.”

“And?”

Celestine smiled thinly. “I’m not sure I like it.”

We did not speak again until we had traversed half a dozen new rooms, and then rested while the shunts mopped up the excess of tiredness which came after such efforts.

The mathematical problems had now grown so arcane that I could barely describe them, let alone grope my way towards a solution. Celestine had to do most of the thinking, therefore, but the emotional strain which we all felt was just as wearying. For an hour during the rest period I teetered on the edge of sleep, but then alertness returned like a pale, cold dawn. There was something harsh and clinical about that state of mind—it did not feel completely normal—but it enabled us to get the job done, and that was all that mattered.

We continued, passing the seventieth room—fifteen further than we had reached before. We were now at least sixty meters higher than when we had entered, and for a while it looked like we had found a tempo that suited us. It was a long time since Celestine had shown any hesitation in her answers, even if it took a couple of hours for her to reach the solution. It was as if she had found the right way of thinking, and now none of the challenges felt truly alien to her. For a while, as we passed room after room, a dangerous optimism began to creep over us.

It was a mistake.

In the seventy-first room, the Spire began to enforce a new rule. Celestine, as usual, spent at least twenty minutes studying the problem, skating her fingers over the shallowly etched markings on the frame, her lips moving silently as she mouthed possibilities.

Childe studied her with a peculiar watchfulness I had not observed before.

“Any ideas?” he said, looking over her shoulder.

“Don’t crowd me, Childe. I’m thinking.”

“I know, I know. Just try and do it a little faster, that’s all.”

Celestine turned away from the frame. “Why? Are we on a schedule suddenly?”

“I’m just a little concerned about the amount of time it’s taking us, that’s all.” He stroked the bulge on his forearm. “These shunts aren’t perfect, and—”

“There’s something else, isn’t there?”

“Don’t worry. Just concentrate on the problem.”

But this time the punishment began before we had begun our solution.

It was lenient, I suppose, compared to the savage dismembering that had concluded our last attempt to reach the summit. It was more of a stern admonishment to make our selection; the crack of a whip rather than the swish of a guillotine.

Something popped out of the wall and dropped to the floor.

It looked like a metal ball, about the size of a marble. For several seconds it did nothing at all. We all stared at it, knowing that something unpleasant was going to happen, but unsure what.

Then the ball trembled, and—without deforming in any way—bounced itself off the ground to knee-height.

It hit the ground and bounced again; a little higher this time.

“Celestine,” Childe said, “I strongly suggest that you come to a decision—”

Horrified, Celestine forced her attention back to the puzzle marked on the frame. The ball continued bouncing; reaching higher each time.

“I don’t like this,” Hirz said.

“I’m not exactly thrilled by it myself,” Childe told her, watching as the ball hit the ceiling and slammed back to the floor, landing to one side of the place where it had begun its bouncing.

This time its rebound was enough to make it hit the ceiling again, and on the recoil it streaked diagonally across the room, hitting one of the side walls before glancing off at a different angle. The ball slammed into Trintignant, ricocheting off his metal leg, and then connected with the walls twice—gaining speed with each collision—before hitting me in the chest. The force of it was like a hard punch, driving the air from my lungs.

I fell to the ground, emitting a groan of discomfort.

The little ball continued arcing around the room, its momentum not sapped in any appreciable way. It kept getting faster, in fact, so that its trajectory came to resemble a constantly shifting silver loom which occasionally intersected with one of us. I heard groans, and then felt a sudden pain in my leg, and the ball kept on getting faster. The sound it made was like a fusillade of gunshots, the space between each detonation growing smaller.

Childe, who had been hit himself, shouted: “Celestine! Make your choice!”

The ball chose that moment to slam into her, making her gasp in pain. She buckled down on one knee, but in the process reached out and palmed one of the markings on the right side of the frame.

The gunshot sounds—the silver loom—even the ball itself—vanished.

Nothing happened for several more seconds, and then the door ahead of us began to open.

We inspected our injuries. There was nothing life-threatening, but we had all been bruised badly, and it was likely that a bone or two had been fractured. I was sure I had broken a rib, and Childe grimaced when he tried to put weight on his right ankle. My leg felt tender where the ball had struck me, but I could still walk, and after a few minutes the pain abated, soothed by a combination of my own medichines and the shunt’s analgesics.

“Thank God we’d put the helmets back on,” I said, fingering a deep bump in the crown. “We’d have been pulped otherwise.”

“Would someone please tell me what just happened?” Celestine asked, inspecting her own wounds.

“I guess the Spire thought we were taking too long,” Childe said. “It’s given us as long as we like to solve the problems until now, but from now on it looks like we’ll be up against the clock.”

Hirz said: “And how long did we have?”

“After the last door opened? Forty minutes or so.”

“Forty-three, to be precise,” Trintignant said.

“I strongly suggest we start work on the next door,” Childe said. “How long do you think we have, Doctor?”

“As an upper limit? In the region of twenty-eight minutes.”

“That’s nowhere near enough time,” I said. “We’d better retreat and come back.”

“No,” Childe said. “Not until we’re injured.”

“You’re insane,” Celestine said.

But Childe ignored her. He just stepped through the door, into the next room. Behind us the exit door slammed shut.

“Not insane,” he said, turning back to us. “Just very eager to continue.”

It was never the same thing twice.

Celestine made her selection as quickly as she could, every muscle tense with concentration, and that gave us—by Trintignant’s estimation—five or six clear minutes before the Spire would demand an answer.

“We’ll wait it out,” Childe said, eyeing us all to see if anyone disagreed. “Celestine can keep checking her results. There’s no sense in giving the fucking thing an answer before we have to; not when so much is at stake.”

“I’m sure of the answer,” Celestine said, pointing to the part of the frame she would eventually palm.

“Then take five minutes to clear your head. Whatever. Just don’t make the choice until we’re forced into it.”

“If we get through this room, Childe ...”

“Yes?”

“I’m going back. You can’t stop me.”

“You won’t do it, Celestine, and you know it.”

She glared at him, but said nothing. I think what followed was the longest five minutes in my life. None of us dared speak again, unwilling to begin anything—even a word—for fear that something like the ball would return. All I heard for five minutes was our own breathing; backgrounded by the awful slow thrumming of the Spire itself.

Then something slithered out of one wall.

It hit the floor, writhing. It was an inch-thick, three-meter-long length of flexible metal.

“Back off ...” Childe told us.

Celestine looked over her shoulder. “You want me to press this, or not?”

“On my word. Not a moment before.”

The cable continued writhing: flexing, coiling and uncoiling like a demented eel. Childe stared at it, fascinated. The writhing grew in strength, accompanied by the slithering, hissing sounds of metal on metal.

“Childe?” Celestine asked.

“I just want to see what this thing actually—”

The cable flexed and writhed, and then propelled itself rapidly across the floor in Childe’s direction. He hopped nimbly out of the way, the cable passing under his feet. The writhing had become a continuous whipcracking now, and we all pressed ourselves against the walls. The cable—having missed Childe—retreated to the middle of the room and hissed furiously. It looked much longer and thinner than it had a moment ago, as if it had elongated itself.

“Childe,” Celestine said, “I’m making the choice in five seconds, whether you like it or not.”

“Wait, will you?”

The cable moved with blinding speed now, rearing up so that its motion was no longer confined to a few inches above the floor. Its writhing was so fast that it took on a quasi-solidity: an irregularly shaped pillar of flickering, whistling metal. I looked at Celestine, willing her to palm the frame, no matter what Childe said. I appreciated his fascination—the thing was entrancing to look at—but I suspected he was pushing curiosity slightly too far.

“Celestine ...” I started saying.

But what happened next happened with lightning speed: a silver-grey tentacle of the blur—a thin loop of the cable—whipped out to form a double coil around Celestine’s arm. It was the one Trintignant had already worked on. She looked at it in horror; the cable tightened itself and snipped the arm off. Celestine slumped to the floor, screaming.

The tentacle tugged her arm to the center of the room, retreating back into the hissing, flickering pillar of whirling metal.

I dashed for the door, remembering the symbol she had pressed. The whirl reached a loop out to me, but I threw myself against the wall and the loop merely brushed the chest of my suit before flicking back into the mass. From the whirl, tiny pieces of flesh and bone dribbled to the ground. Then another loop flicked out and snared Hirz, wrapping around her midsection and pulling her towards the center.

She struggled—cartwheeling her arms, her feet skidding against the floor—but it was no good. She started shouting, and then screaming.

I reached the door.

My hand hesitated over the markings. Was I remembering accurately, or had Celestine intended to press a different solution? They all looked so similar now.

Then Celestine, who was still clutching her ruined arm, nodded emphatically.

I palmed the door.

I stared at it, willing it to move. After all this, what if her choice had been wrong? The Spire seemed to draw out the moment sadistically while behind me I continued to hear the frantic hissing of the whirling cable. And something else, which I preferred not to think about.

Suddenly the noise stopped.

In my peripheral vision I saw the cable retreating back into the wall, like a snake’s tongue laden with scent.

Before me, the door began to open.

Celestine’s choice had been correct. I examined my state of mind and decided that I ought to be feeling relief. And perhaps, distantly, I did. At least now we would have a clear route back out of the Spire. But we would not be going forward, and I knew not all of us would be leaving.

I turned around, steeling myself against what I was about to see.

Childe and Trintignant were undamaged.

Celestine was already attending to her injury, fixing a tourniquet from her medical kit above the point where her arm ended. She had lost very little blood, and did not appear to be in very much discomfort.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“I’ll make it out, Richard.” She grimaced, tugging the tourniquet tighter. “Which is more than can be said for Hirz.”

“Where is she?”

“It got her.”

With her good hand, Celestine pointed to the place where the whirl had been only moments before. On the floor—just below the volume of air where the cable had hovered and thrashed—lay a small, neat pile of flailed human tissue.

“There’s no sign of Celestine’s hand,” I said. “Or Hirz’s suit.”

“It pulled her apart,” Childe said, his face drained of blood.

“Where is she?”

“It was very fast. There was just a ... blur. It pulled her apart and then the parts disappeared into the walls. I don’t think she could have felt much.”

“I hope to God she didn’t.”

Doctor Trintignant stooped down and examined the pieces.

Eight

Outside, in the long, steely-shadowed light of what was either dusk or dawn, we found the pieces of Hirz for which the Spire had had no use.

They were half-buried in dust, like the bluffs and arches of some ancient landscape rendered in miniature. My mind played gruesome tricks with the shapes, turning them from brutally detached pieces of human anatomy into abstract sculptures: jointed formations that caught the light in a certain way and cast their own pleasing shadows. Though some pieces of fabric remained, the Spire had retained all the metallic parts of her suit for itself. Even her skull had been cracked open and sucked dry, so that the Spire could winnow the few small precious pieces of metal she carried in her head.

And what it could not use, it had thrown away.

“We can’t just leave her here,” I said. “We’ve got to do something, bury her ... at least put up some kind of marker.”

“She’s already got one,” Childe said.

“What?”

“The Spire. And the sooner we get back to the shuttle, the sooner we can fix Celestine and get back to it.”

“A moment, please,” Trintignant said, fingering through another pile of human remains.

“Those aren’t anything to do with Hirz,” Childe said.

Trintignant rose to his feet, slipping something into his suit’s utility belt pocket in the process.

Whatever it had been was small; no larger than a marble or small stone.

“I’m going home,” Celestine said, when we were back in the safely of the shuttle. “And before you try and talk me out of it, that’s final.”

We were alone in her quarters. Childe had just given up trying to convince her to stay, but he had sent me in to see if I could be more persuasive. My heart, however, was not in it. I had seen what the Spire could do, and I was damned if I was going to be responsible for any blood other than my own.

“At least let Trintignant take care of your hand,” I said.

“I don’t need steel now,” she said, stroking the glistening blue surgical sleeve which terminated her arm. “I can manage without a hand until we’re back in Chasm City. They can grow me a new one while I’m sleeping.”

The Doctor’s musical voice interrupted us, Trintignant’s impassive silver mask poking through into Celestine’s bubble-tent partition. “If I may be so bold ... it may be that my services are the best you can now reasonably hope to attain.”

Celestine looked at Childe, and then at the Doctor, and then at the glistening surgical sleeve.

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Only some news from home which Childe has allowed me to see.” Uninvited, Trintignant stepped fully into the room and sealed the partition behind him.

“What, Doctor?”

“Rather disturbing news, as it happens. Not long after our departure, something upsetting happened to Chasm City. A blight which afflicted everything contingent upon any microscopic, self-replicating system. Nanotechnology, in other words. I gather the fatalities were numbered in the millions ...”

“You don’t have to sound so bloody cheerful about it.”

Trintignant navigated to the side of the couch where Celestine was resting. “I merely stress the point that what we consider state of the art medicine may be somewhat beyond the city’s present capabilities. Of course, much may change before our return ...”

“Then I’ll just have to take that risk, won’t I?” Celestine said.

“On your own head be it.” Trintignant paused and placed something small and hard on Celestine’s table. Then he turned as if to leave, but stopped and spoke again. “I am accustomed to it, you know.”

“Used to what?” I said.

“Fear and revulsion. Because of what I have become, and what I have done. But I am not an evil man. Perverse, yes. Given to peculiar desires, most certainly. But emphatically not a monster.”

“What about your victims, Doctor?”

“I have always maintained that they gave consent for the procedures I inflicted—” he corrected himself “—performed upon them.”

“That’s not what the records say.”

“And who are we to argue with records?” The light played on his mask in such a fashion as to enhance the half-smile that was always there. “Who are we, indeed.”

When Trintignant was gone, I turned to Celestine and said, “I’m going back into the Spire. You realize that, don’t you?”

“I’d guessed, but I still hope I can talk you out of it.” With her good hand, she fingered the small, hard thing Trintignant had placed on the table. It looked like a misshapen dark stone—whatever the Doctor had found amongst the dead—and for a moment I wondered why he had left it behind.

Then I said, “I really don’t think there’s much point. It’s between me and Childe now. He must have known that there’d come a point when I wouldn’t be able to turn away.”

“No matter what the costs?” Celestine asked.

“Nothing’s without a little risk.”

She shook her head, slowly and wonderingly. “He really got to you, didn’t he.”

“No,” I said, feeling a perverse need to defend my old friend, even when I knew that what Celestine said was perfectly true. “It wasn’t Childe, in the end. It was the Spire.”

“Please, Richard. Think carefully, won’t you?”

I said I would. But we both knew it was a lie.

Nine

Childe and I went back.

I gazed up at it, towering over us like some brutal cenotaph. I saw it with astonishing, diamond-hard clarity. It was as if a smoky veil had been lifted from my vision, permitting thousands of new details and nuances of hue and shade to blast through. Only the tiniest, faintest hint of pixelation—seen whenever I changed my angle of view too sharply—betrayed the fact that this was not quite normal vision, but a cybernetic augmentation.

Our eyes had been removed, the sockets scrubbed and packed with far more efficient sensory devices, wired back into our visual cortices. Our eyeballs waited back at the shuttle, floating in jars like grotesque delicacies. They could be popped back in when we had conquered the Spire.

“Why not goggles?” I said when Trintignant had first explained his plans.

“Too bulky, and too liable to be snatched away. The Spire has a definite taste for metal. From now on, anything vital had better be carried as part of us—not just worn, but internalized.” The Doctor steepled his silver fingers. “If that repulses you, I suggest you concede defeat now.”

“I’ll decide what repulses me,” I said.

“What else?” Childe said. “Without Celestine we’ll need to crack those problems ourselves.”

“I will increase the density of medichines in your brains,” Trintignant said. “They will weave a web of fullerene tubes, artificial neuronal connections supplanting your existing synaptic topology.”

“What good will that do?”

“The fullerene tubes will conduct nerve signals hundreds of times more rapidly than your existing synaptic pathways. Your neural computation rate will increase. Your subjective sense of elapsed time will slow.”

I stared at the Doctor, horrified and fascinated at the same time. “You can do that?”

“It’s actually rather trivial. The Conjoiners have being doing it since the Transenlightenment, and their methods are well documented. With them I can make time slow to a subjective crawl. The Spire may give you only twenty minutes to solve a room, but I can make it feel like several hours; even one or two days.”

I turned to Childe. “You think that’ll be enough?”

“I think it’ll be a lot better than nothing, but we’ll see.”

But it was better than that.

Trintignant’s machines did more than just supplant our existing and clumsily slow neural pathways. They reshaped them, configuring the topology to enhance mathematical prowess, which took us onto a plateau beyond what the neural modifiers had been capable of doing. We lacked Celestine’s intuitive brilliance, but we had the advantage of being able to spend longer—subjectively, at least—on a given problem.

And, for a while at least, it worked.

Ten

“You’re turning into a monster,” she said.

I answered, “I’m turning into whatever it takes to beat the Spire.”

I stalked away from the shuttle, moving on slender, articulated legs like piston-driven stilts. I no longer needed armor now: Trintignant had grafted it to my skin. Tough black plaques slid over each other like the carapacial segments of a lobster.

“You even sound like Trintignant now,” Celestine said, following me. I watched her asymmetric shadow loom next to mine: she lopsided; me a thin, elongated wraith.

“I can’t help that,” I said, my voice piping from the speech synthesizer that replaced my sealed-up mouth.

“You can stop. It isn’t too late.”

“Not until Childe stops.”

“And then? Will even that be enough to make you give up, Richard?”

I turned to face her. Behind her faceplate I watched her try to conceal the revulsion she obviously felt.

“He won’t give up,” I said.

Celestine held out her hand. At first I thought she was beckoning me, but then I saw there was something in her palm. Small, dark and hard.

“Trintignant found this outside, by the Spire. It’s what he left in my room. I think he was trying to tell us something. Trying to redeem himself. Do you recognize it, Richard?”

I zoomed in on the object. Numbers flickered around it. Enhancement phased in. Surface irregularity. Topological contours. Albedo. Likely composition. I drank in the data like a drunkard.

Data was what I lived for now.

“No.”

Eleven

“I can hear something.”

“Of course you can. It’s the Spire, the same as it’s always been.”

“No.” I was silent for several moments, wondering whether my augmented auditory system was sending false signals into my brain.

But there it was again: an occasional rumble of distant machinery, but one that was coming closer.

“I hear it now,” Childe said. “It’s coming from behind us. Along the way we’ve come.”

“It sounds like the doors opening and closing in sequence.”

“Yes.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Something must be coming through the rooms towards us.”

Childe thought about that for what felt like minutes, but was probably only a matter of actual seconds. Then he shook his head, dismissively. “We have eleven minutes to get through this door, or we’ll be punished. We don’t have time to worry about anything extraneous.”

Reluctantly, I agreed.

I forced my attention back to the puzzle, feeling the machinery in my head pluck at the mathematical barbs of the problem. The ferocious clockwork that Trintignant had installed in my skull spun giddily. I had never understood mathematics with any great agility, but now I sensed it as a hard grid of truth underlying everything: bones shining through the thin flesh of the world.

It was almost the only thing I was now capable of thinking of at all. Everything else felt painfully abstract, whereas before the opposite had been the case. This, I knew, must be what it felt like to an idiot savant, gifted with astonishing skill in one highly specialized field of human expertise.

I had become a tool shaped so efficiently for one purpose that it could serve no other.

I had become a machine for solving the Spire.

Now that we were alone—and no longer reliant on Celestine—Childe had revealed himself as a more than adequately capable problem-solver. Several times I had found myself staring at a problem, with even my new mathematical skills momentarily unable to crack the solution, when Childe had seen the answer. Generally he was able to articulate the reasoning behind his choice, but sometimes there was nothing for it but for me to either accept his judgement or wait for my own sluggard thought processes to arrive at the same conclusion.

And I began to wonder.

Childe was brilliant now, but I sensed there was more to it than the extra layers of cognitive machinery Trintignant had installed. He was so confident now that I began to wonder if he had merely been holding back before, preferring to let the rest of us make the decisions. If that was the case, he was in some way responsible for the deaths that had already happened.

But, I reminded myself, we had all volunteered.

With three minutes to spare, the door eased open, revealing the room beyond. At the same moment the door we had come through opened as well, as it always did at this point. We could leave now, if we wished. At this time, as had been the case with every room we had passed through, Childe and I made a decision on whether to proceed further or not. There was always the danger that the next room would be the one that killed us—and every second that we spent before stepping through the doorway meant one second less available for cracking the next problem.

“Well?” I said.

His answer came back, clipped and automatic. “Onwards.”

“We only had three minutes to spare on this one, Childe. They’re getting harder now. A hell of a lot harder.”

“I’m fully aware of that.”

“Then maybe we should retreat. Gather our strength and return. We’ll lose nothing by doing so.”

“You can’t be sure of that. You don’t know that the Spire will keep letting us make these attempts. Perhaps it’s already tiring of us.”

“I still—”

But I stopped, my new, wasp-waisted body flexing easily at the approach of a footfall.

My visual system scanned the approaching object, resolving it into a figure, stepping over the threshold from the previous room. It was a human figure, but one that had, admittedly, undergone some alterations—although none that were as drastic as those that Trintignant had wrought on me. I studied the slow, painful way she made her progress. Our own movements seemed slow, but were lightning-fast by comparison.

I groped for a memory; a name; a face.

My mind, clotted with routines designed to smash mathematics, could not at first retrieve such mundane data.

Finally, however, it obliged.

“Celestine,” I said.

I did not actually speak. Instead, laser light stuttered from the mass of sensors and scanners jammed into my eyesockets. Our minds now ran too rapidly to communicate verbally, but, though she moved slowly herself, she deigned to reply.

“Yes. It’s me. Are you really Richard?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I can hardly tell the difference between you and Childe.”

I looked at Childe, paying proper attention to his shape for what seemed the first time.

At last, after so many frustrations, Trintignant had been given free rein to do with us as he wished. He had pumped our heads full of more processing machinery, until our skulls had to be reshaped to accommodate it, becoming sleekly elongated. He cracked our ribcages open and carefully removed our lungs and hearts, putting these organs into storage. The space vacated by one lung was replaced by a closed-cycle blood oxygenating system of the kind carried in spacesuit backpacks, so that we could endure vacuum and had no need to breathe ambient air. The other lung’s volume was filled by a device which circulated refrigerated fluid along a loop of tube, draining the excess heat generated by the stew of neural machines filling our heads. Nutrient systems crammed the remaining thoracic spaces; our hearts were tiny fusion-powered pumps. All other organs—stomach, intestines, genitalia—were removed, along with many bones and muscles. Our remaining limbs were detached and put into storage, replaced by skeletal prosthetics of immense strength, but which could fold and deform to enable us to squeeze through the tightest door. Our bodies were encased in exoskeletal frames to which these limbs were anchored. Finally, Trintignant gave us whiplike counterbalancing tails, and then caused our skins to envelop our metal parts, hardening here and there in lustrous grey patches of organic armor, woven from the same diamond mesh that had been used to reinforce Hirz’s suit.

When he was done, we looked like diamond-hided greyhounds.

Diamond dogs.

I bowed my head. “I am Richard.”

“Then for God’s sake please come back.”

“Why have you followed us?”

“To ask you. One final time.”

“You changed yourself just to come after me?”

Slowly, with the stone grace of a statue, she extended a beckoning hand. Her limbs, like ours, were mechanical, but her basic form was far less canine.

“Please.”

“You know I can’t go back now. Not when I’ve come so far.”

Her answer was an eternity arriving. “You don’t understand, Richard. This is not what it seems.”

Childe turned his sleek, snouted face to mine.

“Ignore her,” he said.

“No,” Celestine said, who must have also been attuned to Childe’s laser signals. “Don’t listen to him, Richard. He’s tricked and lied to you all along. To all of us. Even to Trintignant. That’s why I came back.”

“She’s lying,” Childe said.

“No. I’m not. Haven’t you got it yet, Richard? Childe’s been here before. This isn’t his first visit to the Spire.”

I convulsed my canine body in a shrug. “Nor mine.”

“I don’t mean since we arrived on Golgotha. I mean before that. Childe’s been to this planet already.”

“She’s lying,” Childe repeated.

“Then how did you know what to expect, in so much detail?”

“I didn’t. I was just prudent.” He turned to me, so that only I could read the stammer of his lasers. “We are wasting valuable time here, Richard.”

“Prudent?” Celestine said. “Oh yes; you were damned prudent. Bringing along those other suits, so that when the first ones became too bulky we could still go on. And Trintignant—how did you know he’d come in so handy?”

“I saw the bodies lying around the base of the Spire,” Childe answered. “They’d been butchered by it.”

“And?”

“I decided it would be good to have someone along who had the medical aptitude to put right such injuries.”

“Yes.” Celestine nodded. “I don’t disagree with that. But that’s no more than part of the truth, is it?”

I looked at Childe and Celestine in turn. “Then what is the whole truth?”

“Those bodies aren’t anything to do with Captain Argyle.”

“They’re not?” I said.

“No.” Celestine’s words arrived agonizingly slowly, and I began to wish that Trintignant had turned her into a diamond-skinned dog as well. “No. Because Argyle never existed. He was a necessary fiction—a reason for Childe knowing at least something about what the Spire entailed. But the truth ... well, why don’t you tell us, Childe?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Celestine smiled. “Only that the bodies are yours.”

His tail flexed impatiently, brushing the floor. “I won’t listen to this.”

“Then don’t. But Trintignant will tell you the same thing. He guessed first, not me.”

She threw something towards me.

I willed time to move more slowly. What she had thrown curved lazily through the air, following a parabola. My mind processed its course and extrapolated its trajectory with deadening precision.

I moved and opened my foreclaw to catch the falling thing.

“I don’t recognize it,” I said.

“Trintignant must have thought you would.”

I looked down at the thing, trying to see it anew. I remembered the Doctor fishing amongst the bones around the Spire’s base; placing something in one of his pockets. This hard, black, irregular, dully pointed thing.

What was it?

I half remembered.

“There has to be more than this,” I said.

“Of course there is,” Celestine said. “The human remains—with the exception of what’s been added since we arrived—are all from the same genetic individual. I know. Trintignant told me.”

“That isn’t possible.”

“Oh, it is. With cloning, it’s almost child’s play.”

“This is nonsense,” Childe said.

I turned to him now, feeling the faint ghost of an emotion Trintignant had not completely excised. “Is it really?”

“Why would I clone myself?”

“I’ll answer for him,” Celestine said. “He found this thing, but long, long before he said he did. And he visited it, and set about exploring it, using clones of himself.”

I looked at Childe, expecting him to at least proffer some shred of explanation. Instead, padding on all fours, he crossed into the next room.

The door behind Celestine slammed shut like a steel eyelid.

Childe spoke to us from the next room. “My estimate is that we have nine or ten minutes in which to solve the next problem. I am studying it now and it strikes me as ... challenging, to say the least. Shall we adjourn any further discussion of trivialities until we’re through?”

“Childe,” I said. “You shouldn’t have done that. Celestine wasn’t consulted ...”

“I assumed she was on the team.”

Celestine stepped into the new room. “I wasn’t. At least, I didn’t think I was. But it looks like I am now.”

“That’s the spirit,” Childe said. And I realized then where I had seen the small, dark thing that Trintignant had retrieved from the surface of Golgotha.

I might have been mistaken.

But it looked a lot like a devil’s horn.

Twelve

The problem was as elegant, Byzantine, multi-layered and potentially treacherous as any we had encountered.

Simply looking at it sent my mind careering down avenues of mathematical possibility, glimpsing deep connections between what I had always assumed were theoretically distant realms of logical space. I could have stared at it for hours, in a state of ecstatic transfixion. Unfortunately, we had to solve it, not admire it. And we now had less than nine minutes.

We crowded around the door and for two or three minutes—what felt like two or three hours—nothing was said.

I broke the silence, when I sensed that I needed to think about something else for a moment.

“Was Celestine right? Did you clone yourself?”

“Of course he did,” she said. “He was exploring hazardous territory, so he’d have been certain to bring the kind of equipment necessary to regenerate organs.”

Childe turned away from the problem. “That isn’t the same as cloning equipment.”

“Only because of artificially imposed safeguards,” Celestine answered. “Strip those away and you can clone to your heart’s content. Why regenerate a single hand or arm when you can culture a whole body?”

“What good would that do me? All I’d have done was make a mindless copy of myself.”

I said, “Not necessarily. With memory trawls and medichines, you could go some way towards imprinting your personality and memory on any clone you chose.”

“He’s right,” Celestine said. “It’s easy enough to rescript memories. Richard should know.”

Childe looked back at the problem, which was still as fiercely intractable as when we had entered.

“Six minutes left,” he said.

“Don’t change the fucking subject,” Celestine said. “I want Richard to know exactly what happened here.”

“Why?” Childe said. “Do you honestly care what happens to him? I saw that look of revulsion when you saw what we’d done to ourselves.”

“Maybe you do revolt me,” she said, nodding. “But I also care about someone being manipulated.”

“I haven’t manipulated anyone.”

“Then tell him the truth about the clones. And the Spire, for that matter.”

Childe returned his attention to the door, evidently torn between solving the problem and silencing Celestine. Less than six minutes now remained, and though I had distracted myself, I had not come closer to grasping the solution, or even seeing a hint of how to begin.

I snapped my attention back to Childe. “What happened with the clones? Did you send them in, one by one, hoping to find a way into the Spire for you?”

“No.” He almost laughed at my failure to grasp the truth. “I didn’t send them in ahead of me, Richard. Not at all. I sent them in after me.”

“Sorry, but I don’t understand.”

“I went in first, and the Spire killed me. But before I did that, I trawled myself and installed those memories in a recently grown clone. The clone wasn’t a perfect copy of me, by any means—it had some memories, and some of my grosser personality traits, but it was under no illusions that it was anything but a recently made construct.” Childe looked back towards the problem. “Look, this is all very interesting, but I really think—”

“The problem can wait,” Celestine said. “I think I see a solution, in any case.”

Childe’s slender body stiffened in anticipation. “You do?”

“Just a hint of one, Childe. Keep your hackles down.”

“We don’t have much time, Celestine. I’d very much like to hear your solution.”

She looked at the pattern, smiling faintly. “I’m sure you would. I’d also like to hear what happened to the clone.”

I sensed him seethe with anger, then bring it under control. “It—the new me—went back into the Spire and attempted to make further progress than its predecessor. Which it did, advancing several rooms beyond the point where the old me died.”

“What made it go in?” Celestine said. “It must have known it would die in there as well.”

“It thought it had a significantly better chance of survival than the last one. It studied what had happened to the first victim and took precautions—better armor; drugs to enhance mathematical skills; some crude stabs at the medichine therapies we have been using.”

“And?” I said. “What happened after that one died?”

“It didn’t die on its first attempt. Like us, it retreated once it sensed it had gone as far as it reasonably could. Each time, it trawled itself—making a copy of its memories. These were inherited by the next clone.”

“I still don’t get it,” I said. “Why would the clone care what happened to the one after it?”

“Because ... it never expected to die. None of them did. Call that a character trait, if you will.”

“Overweening arrogance?” Celestine offered.

“I’d prefer to think of it as a profound lack of self-doubt. Each clone imagined itself better than its predecessor; incapable of making the same errors. But they still wanted to be trawled, so that—in the unlikely event that they were killed—something would go on. So that, even if that particular clone did not solve the Spire, it would still be something with my genetic heritage that did. Part of the same lineage. Family, if you will.” His tail flicked impatiently. “Four minutes. Celestine ... are you ready now?”

“Almost, but not quite. How many clones were there, Childe? Before you, I mean?”

“That’s a pretty personal question.”

She shrugged. “Fine. I’ll just withhold my solution.”

“Seventeen,” Childe said. “Plus my original; the first one to go in.”

I absorbed this number; stunned at what it implied. “Then you’re ... the nineteenth to try and solve the Spire?”

I think he would have smiled at that point, had it been anatomically possible. “Like I said, I try and keep it in the family.”

“You’ve become a monster,” Celestine said, almost beneath her breath.

It was hard not to see it that way as well. He had inherited the memories from eighteen predecessors, all of whom had died within the Spire’s pain-wracked chambers. It hardly mattered that he had probably never inherited the precise moment of death; the lineage was no less monstrous for that small mercy. And who was to say that some of his ancestor clones had not crawled out of the Spire, horribly mutilated, dying, but still sufficiently alive to succumb to one last trawl?

They said a trawl was all the sharper if it was performed at the moment of death, when damage to the scanned mind mattered less.

“Celestine’s right,” I said. “You’ve become something worse than the thing you set out to beat.”

Childe appraised me, those dense clusters of optics sweeping over me like gun barrels. “Have you looked in a mirror lately, Richard? You’re not exactly the way nature intended, you know.”

“This is just cosmetic,” I said. “I still have my memories. I haven’t allowed myself to become a—” I faltered, my brain struggling with vocabulary now that so much of it had been reassigned to the task of cracking the Spire; “a perversion,” I finished.

“Fine.” Childe lowered his head; a posture of sadness and resignation. “Then go back, if that’s what you want. Let me stay to finish the challenge.”

“Yes,” I said. “I think I will. Celestine? Get us through this door and I’ll come back with you. We’ll leave Childe to his bloody Spire.”

Celestine’s sigh was one of heartfelt relief. “Thank God, Richard. I didn’t think I’d be able to convince you quite that easily.”

I nodded towards the door, suggesting that she sketch out what she thought was the likely solution. It still looked devilishly hard to me, but now that I refocused my mind on it, I thought I began to see the faintest hint of an approach, if not a full-blooded solution.

But Childe was speaking again. “Oh, you shouldn’t sound so surprised,” he said. “I always knew he’d turn back as soon as the going got tough. That’s always been his way. I shouldn’t have deceived myself that he’d have changed.”

I bristled. “That isn’t true.”

“Then why turn back when we’ve come so far?”

“Because it isn’t worth it.”

“Or is it simply that the problem’s become too difficult; the challenge too great?”

“Ignore him,” Celestine said. “He’s just trying to goad you into following him. That’s what this has always been about, hasn’t it, Childe? You think you can solve the Spire, where eighteen previous versions of you have failed. Where eighteen previous versions of you were butchered and flayed by the thing.” She looked around, almost as if she expected the Spire to punish her for speaking so profanely. “And perhaps you’re right, too. Perhaps you really have come closer than any of the others.”

Childe said nothing, perhaps unwilling to contradict her.

“But simply beating the Spire wouldn’t be good enough,” Celestine said. “For you’d have no witnesses. No one to see how clever you’d been.”

“That isn’t it at all.”

“Then why did we all have to come here? You found Trintignant useful, I’ll grant you that. And I helped you as well. But you could have done without us, ultimately. It would have been bloodier, and you might have needed to run off a few more clones ... but I don’t doubt that you could have done it.”

“The solution, Celestine.”

By my estimate we had not much more than two minutes left in which to make our selection. And yet I sensed that it was time enough. Magically, the problem had opened up before me where a moment ago it had been insoluble; like one of those optical illusions which suddenly flip from one state to another. The moment was as close to a religious experience as I cared to come.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I see it now. Have you got it?”

“Not quite. Give me a moment ...” Childe stared at it, and I watched as the lasers from his eyes washed over the labyrinthine engravings. The red glare skittered over the wrong solution and lingered there. It flickered away and alighted on the correct answer, but only momentarily.

Childe flicked his tail. “I think I’ve got it.”

“Good,” Celestine replied. “I agree with you. Richard? Are you ready to make this unanimous?”

I thought I had misheard her, but I had not. She was saying that Childe’s answer was the right one; that the one I had been sure of was the wrong one ...

“I thought ...” I began. Then, desperately, stared at the problem again. Had I missed something? Childe had looked to have his doubts, but Celestine was so certain of herself. And yet what I had glimpsed had appeared beyond question. “I don’t know,” I said weakly. “I don’t know.”

“We haven’t time to debate it. We’ve got less than a minute.”

The feeling in my belly was one of ice. Somehow, despite the layers of humanity that had been stripped from me, I could still taste terror. It was reaching me anyway; refusing to be daunted.

I felt so certain of my choice. And yet I was outnumbered.

“Richard?” Childe said again, more insistent this time.

I looked at the two of them, helplessly. “Press it,” I said.

Childe placed his forepaw over the solution that he and Celestine had agreed on, and pressed.

I think I knew, even before the Spire responded, that the choice had not been the correct one. And yet when I looked at Celestine I saw nothing resembling shock or surprise in her expression. Instead, she looked completely calm and resigned.

And then the punishment commenced.

It was brutal, and once it would have killed us. Even with the augmentations Trintignant had given us, the damage inflicted was considerable as a scythe-tipped, triple-jointed pendulum descended from the ceiling and began swinging in viciously widening arcs. Our minds might have been able to compute the future position of a simpler pendulum, steering our bodies out of its harmful path. But the trajectory of a jointed pendulum was ferociously difficult to predict: a nightmarish demonstration of the mathematics of chaos.

But we survived, as we had survived the previous attacks. Even Celestine made it through, the flashing arc snipping off only one of her arms. I lost an arm and leg on one side, and watched—half in horror, half in fascination—as the room claimed these parts for itself; tendrils whipped out from the wall to salvage those useful conglomerations of metal and plastic. There was pain, of a sort, for Trintignant had wired those limbs into our nervous systems, so that we could feel heat and cold. But the pain abated quickly, replaced by digital numbness.

Childe got the worst of it, though.

The blade had sliced him through the middle, just below what had once been his ribcage, spilling steel and plastic guts, bone, viscera, blood and noxious lubricants onto the floor. The tendrils squirmed out and captured the twitching prize of his detached rear end, flicking tail and all.

With the hand that she still had, Celestine pressed the correct symbol. The punishment ceased and the door opened.

In the comparative calm that followed, Childe looked down at his severed trunk.

“I seem to be quite badly damaged”, he said.

But already various valves and gaskets were stemming the fluid loss; clicking shut with neat precision. Trintignant, I saw, had done very well. He had equipped Childe to survive the most extreme injuries.

“You’ll live,” Celestine said, with what struck me as less than total sympathy.

“What happened?” I asked. “Why didn’t you press that one first?”

She looked at me. “Because I knew what had to be done.”

Despite her injuries she helped us on the retreat.

I was able to stumble from room to room, balancing myself against the wall and hopping on my good leg. I had lost no great quantity of blood, for while I had suffered one or two gashes from close approaches of the pendulum, my limbs had been detached below the points where they were anchored to flesh and bone. But I still felt the shivering onset of shock, and all I wanted to do was make it out of the Spire, back to the sanctuary of the shuttle. There, I knew, Trintignant could make me whole again. Human again, for that matter. He had always promised it would be possible, and while there was much about him that I did not like, I did not think he would lie about that. It would be a matter of professional pride that his work was technically reversible.

Celestine carried Childe, tucked under her arm. What remained of him was very light, she said, and he was able to cling to her with his undamaged forepaws. I felt a spasm of horror every time I saw how little of him there was, while shuddering to think how much more intense that spasm would have been were I not already numbed by the medichines.

We had made it back through perhaps one third of the rooms when he slithered from her grip, thudding to the floor.

“What are you doing?” Celestine asked.

“What do you think?” He supported himself by his forelimbs, his severed trunk resting against the ground. The wound had begun to close, I saw, his diamond skin puckering tight to seal the damage.

Before very long he would look as if he had been made this way.

Celestine took her time before answering, “Quite honestly, I don’t know what to think.”

“I’m going back. I’m carrying on.”

Still propping myself against a wall, I said, “You can’t. You need treatment. For God’s sake; you’ve been cut in half.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Childe said. “All I’ve done is lose a part of me I would have been forced to discard before very long. Eventually the doors would have been a tight squeeze even for something shaped like a dog.”

“It’ll kill you,” I said.

“Or I’ll beat it. It’s still possible, you know.” He turned around, his rear part scraping against the floor, and then looked back over his shoulder. “I’m going to retrace my steps back to the room where this happened. I don’t think the Spire will obstruct your retreat until I step—or crawl, as it may be—into the last room we opened. But if I were you, I wouldn’t take too long on the way back.” Then he looked at me, and again switched on the private frequency. “It’s not too late, Richard. You can still come back with me.”

“No,” I said. “You’re wrong. It’s much too late.”

Celestine reached out to help me make my awkward way to the next door. “Leave him, Richard. Leave him to the Spire. It’s what he’s always wanted, and he’s had his witnesses now.”

Childe eased himself onto the lip of the door leading into the room we had just come through.

“Well?” he said.

“She’s right. Whatever happens now, it’s between you and the Spire. I suppose I should wish you the best of luck, except it would sound irredeemably trite.”

He shrugged; one of the few human gestures now available to him. “I’ll take whatever I can get. And I assure you that we will meet again, whether you like it or not.”

“I hope so,” I said, while knowing it would never be the case. “In the meantime, I’ll give your regards to Chasm City.”

“Do that, please. Just don’t be too specific about where I went.”

“I promise you that. Roland?”

“Yes?”

“I think I should say goodbye now.”

Childe turned around and slithered into the darkness, propelling himself with quick, piston-like movements of his forearms.

Then Celestine took my arm and helped me towards the exit.

Thirteen

“You were right,” I told her as we made our way back to the shuttle. “I think I would have followed him.”

Celestine smiled. “But I’m glad you didn’t.”

“Do you mind if I ask something?”

“As long as it isn’t to do with mathematics.”

“Why did you care what happened to me, and not Childe?”

“I did care about Childe,” she said firmly. “But I didn’t think any of us were going to be able to persuade him to turn back.”

“And that was the only reason?”

“No. I also thought you deserved something better than to be killed by the Spire.”

“You risked your life to get me out,” I said. “I’m not ungrateful.”

“Not ungrateful? Is that your idea of an expression of gratitude?” But she was smiling, and I felt a faint impulse to smile as well. “Well, at least that sounds like the old Richard.”

“There’s hope for me yet, then. Trintignant can put me back the way I should be, after he’s done with you.”

But when we got back to the shuttle there was no sign of Doctor Trintignant. We searched for him, but found nothing; not even a set of tracks leading away. None of the remaining suits were missing, and when we contacted the orbiting ship they had no knowledge of the Doctor’s whereabouts.

Then we found him.

He had placed himself on his operating couch, beneath the loom of swift, beautiful surgical machinery. And the machines had dismantled him, separating him into his constituent components, placing some pieces of him in neatly labeled fluid-filled flasks and others in vials. Chunks of eviscerated bio-machinery floated like stinger-laden jellyfish. Implants and mechanisms glittered like small, precisely jewelled ornaments.

There was surprisingly little in the way of organic matter.

“He killed himself,” Celestine said. Then she found his hat—the Homburg—which he had placed at the head of the operating couch. Inside, tightly folded and marked in precise handwriting, was what amounted to Trintignant’s suicide note.

My dear friends, he had written.

After giving the matter no little consideration, I have decided to dispose of myself. I find the prospect of my own dismantling a more palatable one than continuing to endure revulsion for a crime I do not believe I committed. Please do not attempt to put me back together; the endeavor would, I assure you, be quite futile. I trust however that the manner of my demise—and the annotated state to which I have reduced myself—will provide some small amusement to future scholars of cybernetics.

I must confess that there is another reason why I have chosen to bring about this somewhat terminal state of affairs. Why, after all, did I not end myself on Yellowstone?

The answer, I am afraid, lies as much in vanity as anything else.

Thanks to the Spire—and to the good offices of Mister Childe—I have been given the opportunity to continue the work that was so abruptly terminated by the unpleasantness in Chasm City. And thanks to yourselves—who were so keen to learn the Spire’s secrets—I have been gifted with subjects willing to submit to some of my less orthodox procedures.

You in particular, Mister Swift, have been a Godsend. I consider the series of transformations I have wrought upon you to be my finest achievement to date. You have become my magnum opus. I fully accept that you saw the surgery merely as a means to an end, and that you would not otherwise have consented to my ministrations, but that in no way lessens the magnificence of what you have become.

And therein, I am afraid, lies the problem.

Whether you conquer the Spire or retreat from it—assuming, of course, that it does not kill you—there will surely come a time when you will desire to return to your prior form. And that would mean that I would be compelled to undo my single greatest work.

Something I would rather die than do.

I offer my apologies, such as they are, while remaining—

Your obedient servant,

Childe never returned. After ten days we searched the area about the Spire’s base, but there were no remains that had not been there before. I supposed that there was nothing for it but to assume that he was still inside; still working his way to whatever lay at the summit.

And I wondered.

What ultimate function did the Spire serve? Was it possible that it served none but its own self-preservation? Perhaps it simply lured the curious into it, and forced them to adapt—becoming more like machines themselves—until they reached the point when they were of use to it.

At which point it harvested them.

Was it possible that the Spire was no more purposeful than a flytrap?

I had no answers. And I did not want to remain on Golgotha pondering such things. I did not trust myself not to return to the Spire. I still felt its feral pull.

So we left.

“Promise me,” Celestine said.

“What?”

“That whatever happens when we get home—whatever’s become of the city—you won’t go back to the Spire.”

“I won’t go back,” I said. “And I promise you that. I can even have the memory of it suppressed, so it doesn’t haunt my dreams.”

“Why not,” she said. “You’ve done it before, after all.”

But when we returned to Chasm City we found that Childe had not been lying. Things had changed, but not for the better. The thing that they called the Melding Plague had plunged our city back into a festering, technologically-decadent dark age. The wealth we had accrued on Childe’s expedition meant nothing now, and what small influence my family had possessed before the crisis had diminished even further.

In better days, Trintignant’s work could probably have been undone. It would not have been simple, but there were those who relished such a challenge, and I would probably have had to fight off several competing offers: rival cyberneticists vying for the prestige of tackling such a difficult project. Things were different. Even the crudest kinds of surgery were now difficult or impossibly expensive. Only a handful of specialists retained the means to even attempt such work, and they were free to charge whatever they liked.

Even Celestine, who had been wealthier than me, could only afford to have me repaired, not rectified. That—and the other matter—almost bankrupted us.

And yet she cared for me.

There were those who saw us and imagined that the creature with her—the thing that trotted by her like a stiff, diamond-skinned, grotesque mechanical dog—was merely a strange choice of pet. Sometimes they sensed something unusual in our relationship—the way she might whisper an aside to me, or the way I might appear to be leading her—and they would look at me, intently, before I stared into their eyes with the blinding red scrutiny of my vision.

Then they would always look away.

And for a long time—until the dreams became too much—that was how it was.

Yet now I pad into the night, Celestine unaware that I have left our apartment. Outside, dangerous gangs infiltrate the shadowed, half-flooded streets. They call this part of Chasm City the Mulch and it is the only place where we can afford to live now. Certainly we could have afforded something better—something much better—if I had not been forced to put aside money in readiness for this day. But Celestine knows nothing of that.

The Mulch is not as bad as it used to be, but it would still have struck the earlier me as a vile place in which to exist. Even now I am instinctively wary, my enhanced eyes dwelling on the various crudely fashioned blades and crossbows that the gangs flaunt. Not all of the creatures who haunt the night are technically human. There are things with gills that can barely breathe in open air. There are other things that resemble pigs, and they are the worst of all.

But I do not fear them.

I slink between shadows, my thin, doglike form confusing them. I squeeze through the gaps in collapsed buildings, effortlessly escaping the few who are foolish enough to chase me. Now and then I even stop and confront them, standing with my back arched.

My red gaze stabs through them.

I continue on my way.

Presently I reach the appointed area. At first it looks deserted—there are no gangs here—but then a figure emerges from the gloom, trudging through ankle-deep caramel-brown flood-water. The figure is thin and dark, and with each step it makes there is a small, precise whine. It comes into view and I observe that the woman—for it is a woman, I think—is wearing an exoskeleton. Her skin is the black of interstellar space, and her small, exquisitely featured head is perched above a neck which has been extended by several vertebrae. She wears copper rings around her neck, and her fingernails—which I see clicking against the thighs of her exoskeleton—are as long as stilettos.

I think she is strange, but she sees me and flinches.

“Are you ...?” she starts to say.

“I am Richard Swift,” I answer.

She nods almost imperceptibly—it cannot be easy, bending that neck—and introduces herself. “I am Triumvir Verika Abebi, of the lighthugger Poseidon. I sincerely hope you are not wasting my time.”

“I can pay you, don’t you worry.”

She looks at me with something between pity and awe. “You haven’t even told me what it is you want.”

“That’s easy,” I say. “I want you to take me somewhere.”

Dilation Sleep

Spacers tell people that the worst aspect of starflight is revival. They speak the truth, I think. They give us dreams while the machines warm us up and map our bodies for cell damage. We feel no anxiety or fear, detached from our physical selves and adrift in generated fantasies.

In my dream I was joined by the cybernetic imago of Katia, my wife. We found ourselves within a computer-constructed sensorium. An insect, I felt my six thin legs propelling me into a wide and busy chamber. Four worker ants were there, crouched in stiff mechanical postures. With compound vision I studied these new companions, observing the nearest of them deposit a pearly egg from its abdomen. A novel visceral sense told me that I, too, contained a ready egg.

“We’re gods amongst them,” I told my wife’s imago.

“We are Myrmecia gulosa,” she whispered into my brain. “The bulldog ant. You see the queen, and her winged male?”

“Yes.”

“Those maggoty things in the corner of the cell are the queen’s larvae. Her worker is about to feed them.”

“Feed them with what?”

“His egg, my darling.”

I rotated my sleek, mandibled head. “And will I also?”

“Naturally! A worker’s duty is always to serve his queen. Of course ... you may exit this environ, if you choose. But you’ll have to remain in reefersleep for another three hours.”

“Three hours ... might as well be centuries,” I said. “Then change it. Something a bit less alien.”

My imago dissolved the scenario, the universe. I floated in white limbo, awaiting fresh sensory stimulus. Soon I found myself brushing shimmering vermilion coral with eight suckered arms, an octopus.

Katia liked to play games.

Eventually the dreams ceased and I suddenly sensed my body, cold and stiff but definitely anchored to my mind.

I allowed myself a long primal scream, then opened my eyes. The eyes I opened were the eyes of Uri Andrei Sagdev, who was once a mainbrain technician at the Sylveste Institute but who now found himself in the odd role of Starship Heuristic Resource, a crewperson.

Under different circumstances, it is not a role I would otherwise have chosen. I was alone, the room cold and silent. My five companions remained in reefersleep around my own capsule; only I had been revived. I sensed, then, that something must be wrong. But I did not query Katia, preferring to remain in ignorance until she saw fit to enlighten me regarding our situation.

I hauled myself from the open reefer and took falterng steps out of the room.

It was several minutes before I felt confident to do anything more ambitious than that. I stumbled to the nearby health bay and exercised with galvanic activators, pushing my muscles beyond the false limits of apparent exhaustion. Then I showered and dressed, taking the expediency of wearing a thermal layer beneath my overalls. Breakfast consisted of fried ham and Edam slices, followed by garlic croissants, washed down with chilled passion fruit and lemon tea.

Why was I not concerned to discover our difficulty? Simply because the mere fact of revival told me that it could not be compellingly urgent. Any undesirable situation upon a light-skimming starship that does not instantly destroy it—probably in a flash of exotic bosons—will act on such an extended timescale that the mainbrain-crew overmind will have days or weeks to engineer a solution.

I knew we were not home, and that therefore something was wrong. But for a moment it was good simply to lie back in the kitchen and allow the music of Roedelius to envelop me, and to revel in this condition called life. To simply suck air into my old lungs.

I who had been dead, or near death, for so long.

“Some more, Uri?” asked my wife’s imago.

I was alone apart from a servitor. It was a dumb-bell shaped drone hovering on silently energised levitation fields above the metal floor. Extruding a manipulator from the matt-gold surface of its upper spheroid, it offered me the jug of pale juice.

With a well-practised subvocal command, I enabled my entoptic system. The implant supplied the visual and tactile stimuli necessary to fully realise the imago, the simulation of Katia, drawing it from the ship’s mainbrain. Bright grids and circles interrupted my ocular field, then meshed and thickened to form my wife, frozen and lifeless but apparently solid. Copyright symbols denoting the implant company flashed, then faded. I locked her entoptic ghost over the dull form of the servitor, its compact size easily concealed within her body-space. Her blunt silver hair fell around a narrow pale face, black lips pursed like a doll’s and eyes staring right through me. Her clasped hands emerged from a long hooded scarlet gown inlaid around the shoulder with the insignia of the Mixmaster geneticists, a pair of hands holding a cat’s cradle of DNA. My wife was a geneticist to the marrow. On Yellowstone, where cybernetics was the primary creed, it made her a virtual pariah.

As the mainbrain-generated program took hold she grew vivacious and smiled, and her hand appeared now to grasp the jug.

“I was tiring of storage, my darling.”

“I’m not comfortable with this,” I admitted. “Katia—my actual Katia—despised the whole idea of you. This illusion would have especially sickened her.”

“It doesn’t sicken me,” Katia said.

“It ought to,” I said. “Aren’t your personalities supposed to be the same?”

She smiled, as if the point were settled. So infuriatingly like her original.

“I see that,” I said dubiously. The imago had been against my actual wife’s wishes. When the Melding Plague hit us I saw my chance of escape via this craft. Katia was unable to become a crewperson, so I surreptitiously set about digitizing my wife’s personality. The implant did all the hard work. It had assembled a behaviour map of Katia whenever we were together, studying her through the conduits of my own senses. The simulation grew slowly, limited by the memory capacity of the implant. But each day I downloaded more of her into an Institute mainbrain, performing this routine for weeks on end. I have no doubt that Katia suspected something, although she never made any mention of it.

Having completed my clandestine work, I then grafted the copy over the mind of the ship. It lacked her memories, of course, but I went to the expense and danger of having my own trawled and substituted instead, using software routines to perform the gender inversion. Katia’s personality only assumed dominance when I was in rapport with the vessel. There was no doubt in my mind that the other crewpersons had also arranged for their own fictitious companions. They too would speak to their loved ones, or some idealised fantasy of a lover, when they addressed the ship.

But I preferred not to think about that.

A lie, then. But my entire life had been a lie, Katia’s imago simply the most recent aspect of it. But why had she awoken me? Or rather: why had the ship chosen to awaken me, and not one of the others? Janos, Kaj, Hilda, Yul and Karlos still remained in reefersleep, displaying no signs of imminent thaw.

I upped from the table decisively. “Thank you, Katia. I’ll take a stroll, admire the view.”

“I must discuss something with you,” Katia said. “But I suppose it can wait a few minutes.”

“Ah,” I said, grinning. “You want to keep me in suspense.”

“Nothing of the sort, darling. Is the music fine?”

“Music’s fine,” I answered, leaving the kitchen.

I entered a curving hexagonal corridor, bathed in dull ochre light. A node of Roedelius chased me, humming from piezoacoustic panels in the walls. The gravity that held me to the floor arose from our one-gee thrust, and not from the centrifugal spin of the lifesystem, otherwise the vertical and horizontal axes would have been interchanged. This fact told me that we were not at home; not approaching the cluster of carousels and asteroids called Shiphaven, in the Trojan point that trailed Jupiter. We were still on stardrive, still climbing up or down from the slowtime of light-speed.

We might be anywhere between Epsilon Eridani and Solspace.

My stroll carried me away from the core of the vessel to her skin, where the hot neutron sleet wafted past us. The parts of the vessel through which I travelled grew darker and more machinelike, colder and less familiar. Irrationally, I began to imagine that I was being pursued and observed.

I have never enjoyed either solitude or the dark. I was a fool, then, to address this fear by turning around. Yet the hairs on my neck were bristling and my sweat had become chilled.

Most of the radial corridor was dark, apart from the miserly locus of light that had followed me like a halo. Nonetheless, it was still possible to make out a darker thing looming in the distance, almost lost in the convergence of the walls.

I was not alone.

It was a figure, a silhouette, regarding me. Not Katia’s imago, for sure.

I felt a brief terror. “Katia,” I croaked. “Full lights, please.”

I jammed my eyes shut as the bright actinics snapped on. Red retinal ghosts slowly fading, I reopened them, not much more than a second later. But my watcher had gone.

I slowly emptied my lungs. I was wise enough not to leap to conclusions. This was not necessarily what it appeared. After all, I had only just emerged from reefersleep, after several years of being frozen. I was bound to be a little jittery, a little open to subconscious suggestion.

It seemed I was utterly alone. I vowed, shakily, to put the experience immediately out of mind.

Ten minutes later I had reached the outer hull, and was in naked space—or rather, seeing through the proxy eyes of a drone clamped on the outside with spidery grappling feet. The machine’s camera head was peering through a porthole, into the room where I sat. I looked pale and strained, but I did not have company.

I looked away from the porthole, towards the bow of the ship. The vessel, the Wild Pallas, was a ramliner—a nearlight human-rated starship. Most of what I saw, therefore, was very dense neutron shielding. The vessel required protons for its bosonic drive process. Ahead, a graser beam swept space and stripped deuterium nuclei into protons and neutrons. Our gauss scoop sifted free the protons and focused them into the heart of the ship. The neutral baryons were channelled around the hull in a lethal radiative rain, diverted clear of the lifesystem and its fragile payload of sleepers. The drone sensed the flux and passed the data to me in terms of a swirling roseate aura, as if we were diving down the gullet of the universe.

To the rear, things were eclipsed by the glow of the exhaust. Gamma shields burned Cherenkov-blue. Within the ship, the proton harvest was extremely short-lived. Fields targeted the protons into a beam, lancing through a swarming cloud of heavy monopoles. The relativistic protons were decelerated and steered into the magnetic nodes. Inside each monopole was a shell of bosons which coaxed the protons to disintegrate. This was the power source of a ramliner.

I had studied all the tech before signing up for the overmind partnership, the human-cybernetic steering committee that commanded this vessel. When I say studied, I mean that I had downloaded certain eidetic documents furnished by the Macro that owned the ship. These eidetics entered my memory at an almost intuitive level, programmed of course to fade once my contract expired. They told me everything I needed to know and little else. We carried nine hundred reefersleep passengers and we crew comprised six humans, each of whom was an expert in one or more areas of starflight theory. My own specialties were scoop subsystems—gauss collimators and particle-ablation shields—and shipboard/in-flight medicare. The computer that wore the masque of Katia was also equipped for these zones of expertise, but it was deficient—so the cybertechs said—in human heuristic thought modes. Crewpersons were therefore its Heuristic Resources—peripherals orbiting the hard glittering core of its machine consciousness.

Crewpersons thus rode at a more reduced level of reefersleep than our passengers: a little warmer, a little closer to the avalanche of cell death that is life. The computer could interrogate us without the bother of complete revival. Our dreams, therefore, would be dreams where matter and number flowed in technological tsunami.

I altered the drone’s telemetry so that the neutron wind became invisible. Looking beyond, I saw no stars at all. Einsteinian distortion was squashing them up fore and aft, concealed by the flared ends of the ship. We were still accelerating towards light-speed.

“Well?” I asked, much later.

“As you know, we’ve yet to reach midpoint. In fact, we will not reach home for another three years of shiptime.”

“Is this a technical problem?”

“Not strictly. I’m afraid it’s medical, which is why I was forced to bring you out of reefersleep between systems. Like the view, my darling?”

“Are you joking? An empty universe with no stars? It’s the gloomiest thing I can remember.”

I was back in the coldroom where the six crew reefers were stored. Katia’s data ghost stood at my side, and Mozart warmed our spirits. Mozart’s joyous familiarity drowned out all the faint, distant sounds of the ship, and the frank necessity of this annoyed me greatly. I was not normally prone to nervousness.

“Janos is sick,” explained Katia. “He must have contracted the Melding Plague on Yellowstone. Unless we act now he won’t survive the rest of the journey. He needs emergency surgery.”

“He’s sick?” I shrugged. “Too bad. But SOP on this is clear, Katia. Freeze him down further, lock the condition in stasis.” I leaned over the smooth side of Janos’s reefer, examining the bio-med display cartouche under its coffin-lid rim. The reefer resembled a giant chrome chrysalis or silver fish, anchored by its head to a coiled nexus of umbilicals. Within this hexagonal fluted box lay Janos. His inert form was dimly visible under the frosted clear lid.

“Normally, that would be our wisest course of action,” Katia said. “Earthside med skills will certainly outmode our own. But in this instance the rules must be contravened. Janos can’t survive, even at emergency levels of reefersleep. You know about the Melding Plague.”

I did. We all knew about it only too well, for it had crippled Yellowstone. The Melding Plague was a biocybernetic virus, something new to our experince. Yellowstone’s intensely cybernetic society had crumbled at the nanomolecular level, the level of our computers and implants. The Melding Plague had caused our nanomachinery to grow malign.

I permitted Katia to explain, walking to the kitchen and preparing salami rolls, stepping briskly through the dim corridors.

All crewpersons were fitted with such implants. Through these data windows we interfaced with the machinery of the reefers and the mainbrain of the ship as the ramliner cruised from star to star. Janos’s virus had attacked the structure of his own implants, ripping them apart and reorganizing them into analogues of itself. From one implant node, a network of webbed strands was spreading further into his brain, in an apparent attempt to knit together all the infected locales.

“The experts on Yellowstone soon learned that cold does not retard the virus significantly—certainly not the kind of cold from which a human could ever be revived. We must therefore operate immediately, before the virus gains a stronghold. And I’m afraid that our routine surgical programs will fail. We can’t use nanomachinery against the virus; it will simply subsume whatever we throw against it.”

I gobbled my rolls. “I don’t know neurosurgery; that wasn’t on the skills eidetic.” I brushed crumbs from my stubbled chin. “However, if Janos’s life is in danger—”

“We must act. How are you feeling now?”

“A little stiff. Nothing serious.” I forced a very stiff grin. “I’ll admit, I was a little jumpy early on. I think those ants gave me the creeps.”

Katia was silent for a few seconds. “That’s normal,” she eventually said. “Get plenty of rest. Then we’ll examine the surgical tools.”

I went jogging. I mapped a sinuous, winding path through the lifesystem, feeling the megaton mass of the ship wheel about my centre of mass. I was ruthless with myself, deliberately selecting a route that took me through every dark and shadowy region of the lifesystem I could think of. I silenced Mozart and forbade myself the company of Katia, disabling my imago inducer.

My thoughts turned back to the figure I imagined I had seen. What kind of rationale had flashed through my mind in the few seconds when I permitted the figure to exist outside of my imagination? Perhaps one of the sleepers might have thawed by accident and was wandering the ship in dismay. That hypothetical wanderer would have been equally surprised by my own presence. Ergo the person was now hiding.

Of course, the figure was undoubtedly a hallucination. One need not be drooling at the mouth to hallucinate—indeed, one could easily retain enough facilities to recognise the experience as being totally internalised. After the uneventful hours of wakefulness that had subsequently passed, I was anxious to dismiss the whole incident.

I jogged on, my shoes slapping the deck. I was approaching the nadir of my journey, the part of the ship that until now I had studiously avoided. Sensing my nearing footfalls, cartwheel-shaped airlocks dilated open. I panted through an antechamber, into the vast room where nine hundred slept.

The chamber had the toroidal shape of a tokamak. Nine hundred deep-preservation reefers lined the inner and outer walls, crisscrossed by ladders and catwalks. I set about circumnavigating the chamber, to finally purge my mind of any stray ghosts. Hadn’t that always been my strategy as a child: confront my fears head on? I suspected that the boy in me would have been richly amused by my motives here. Nonetheless I insisted on this one ridiculous circuit, convinced it would leave me eased.

Most of these sleepers would stay aboard when we arrived in the Earth system. They were refugees from the Melding Plague, seeking sanctuary in the future. At the nearlight speeds this vessel attained between suns, large levels of time dilation would be experienced. Our clocks would grind to an imperceptible crawl. After thirty or forty years of shiptime, a mere six or seven hops between systems, more than a century would have elapsed on Yellowstone, enough time for eco-engineers to exorcise the biome of the Melding Plague. The sleepers we carried had elected not to risk spending the time in the planet’s community cryocrypts; in dilation sleep the effective time spent in reefers was less, and therefore their chances of completely safe revival were enormously increased.

I was jogging slowly enough to read the glowing name panels imprinted on each reefer. Men, women, children ... the rich of my world, able to pay for this exorbitant journey into a brighter future. I thought of the less wealthy, those who could not even afford spaces in the cryocrypts. I thought of the long queues of people waiting to see surgeons, people like Katia, anxious to lose their implants before the disease reached them. They would pay with whatever they could: organs or prosthetics or memories. Or if they chose not to pay they might consider becoming crew. My people made good crew-fodder. It called for a certain degree of yearning desperation to accept direct interfacing with the main-brain. The hard price of our bargain was the simple fact that our reduced state of reefersleep meant we would continue to age as we slept away the years.

That was not a bargain Katia had felt she could make. And I had known that I could not stand to lose my implants. Thus the Melding Plague touched us.

I felt bitterness, and this was welcome to me. I was happy to find familiar anxieties polluting my thoughts. I cast a dismissive glance over my shoulder, back along the curving ranks of sleepers I had already passed.

I was being followed.

The shadow was pounding along the walkway, halfway around the great curve of the chamber. I could barely see it, just a man-shaped black aperture in the distance.

I quickened my pace. Only my feet thudded in the silence. Yet my chaser was also running faster. I felt sick with fright. I summoned Katia, but after alerting her was unable to grasp a sentence, a command, anything. The faceless silhouette seemed to be gaining on me.

Faceless was right. It had no features, no detail. Eventually I reached an exit. The airlock sequence amputated the chamber from me. I did not stop running, even when I realised that the doors behind me were remaining closed. The shadow-man remained with the sleepers.

But I had seen enough. It was not human. Just a man-shaped hole, a spectre.

I found the quickest route back to the command deck of the Wild Pallas. Immediately I ordered Katia to begin a rigorous search for intruders, though I knew of course that no intruder could have escaped her attention thus far. My Katia was omniscient. She would have known the exact location of every rat, every fly, aboard the craft; except that aboard the ship there were no flies, no rats.

I knew that the shadow was not a revived sleeper. None of the reefers had been opened or vacated. A stowaway was out of the question—what was there to eat or drink, apart from the supplies dispensed by the computer?

My mind veered towards the illogical. Could someone have entered the ship during its flight—someone dressed as a chameleon? That imagined intruder would have somehow had to achieve invisibility from Katia’s eyes. Clearly impossible, even disregarding the unlikely manoeuvres required to match our velocity and position undetected.

I chewed on my lip, aware that each second of indecision counted against Janos. For my own defence, Katia would permit me access to a weapon, provided of course that the existence of the intruder was proven. Alternatively, I might best confront the situation by not confronting it. I could perform surgery on Janos without straying into those regions of the ship that the intruder had apparently claimed as its haunt. In a day or so, therefore, this ordeal might be over, and I could re-enter reefersleep. The most faceless, inhuman entities I would have to contend with upon my next revival would be Solpace Axis customs officials. Let them worry about the unseen extra passenger. Hadn’t the shadow permitted me safe slumber so far?

I chuckled, though to my ears it sounded more like a death-rattle. I was still frightened, but for once my hands had stopped playing arpeggios on the keys of an invisible piano.

I absorbed myself in technical eidetics outlining the medical systems Katia and I were about to employ. The gleaming semirobotic tools were the culmination of Yellowstone’s surgical sciences. Even so, they would undoubtedly appear crude by Earthside standards. This dichotomy galled me. Even if Janos would necessarily worsen by the time we arrived, how could we be certain that we were not reducing his chances with our outdated medical intervention? Perhaps Earth would have accelerated so far beyond our capabilities that the equation was no longer balanced in our favour.

Yet Katia would have weighed the issue minutely before selecting the appropriate course of action. Perhaps, then, it was best simply to silence one’s qualms and do whatever was required.

Drones assisted me in carrying the medical machinery into the crew reefer room, where my five colleagues lay in frozen sleep. I wore a facemask and a gloved jumpsuit, inwoven with a heating circuit. Katia would lower the room’s temperature before slightly increasing Janos’s own.

“Ready, Uri?” she asked. “Let’s start.”

So we commenced, my eyes constantly flicking to the open reefer I hoped soon to re-enter. The room rapidly chilled, lights burning frigid blue from the overheads.

Janos’s reefer cracked open with a gasp of release cold. I looked at Janos, still and white and somehow distant. Let that distance remain, I prayed. After all, we were about to open his head.

Katia, in fact, had already performed some preliminary surgery. The skull had been exposed, skin pulled back as if framing the white pistil of a flesh-leaved flower. Slender probes entered the scalp via drilled holes, trailing glowing coloured cables into a matrix of input points in the domed head of the reefer. The work was angstrom-precise, rendered with a robot’s deadening perfection. I had been briefed: those cables were substituting for the cybernetic implants within his brain that had fallen victim to the Melding Plague.

“When you have the top of the skull free you should feed it back along the cables,” Katia told me. “It’s crucial that we don’t lose cyber-interface with Janos.”

I prepped the mechanical bone-saw. “Why? What use is he to us?”

“There are good reasons. If you’re still interested we can discuss it after the operation.”

The saw hummed into life, the rotary tip glinting evilly. Katia vectored the blade down, smoothly gnawing into the pale bone. Little blood oozed free but the sound struck an unpleasant resonance with me. Katia made three expert circumferential passes, then retracted. I took a deep breath, then placed gloved fingers on the top of Janos’s head. The scalp felt loose, like half of a chocolate egg. I eased the section of skull free with a wet sucking slurp, exposing the damp pinkish mass of dura and gyrus, snuggling in the lower bowl of the skull. I took special care to maintain the integrity of the connections as I separated the bonework. For a while, humbled, I could only stand in awe of this fantastic organ, easily the most complex, alien thing my eyes had ever gazed on. And yet it managed to look so disappointingly vegetable.

“Husband, we must proceed,” warned Katia. “I have warmed Janos to a dangerously high body temperature, whilst not greatly increasing his metabolic rate. We don’t have time to waste.”

I felt sweat beading my forehead. I nodded. Inward, inward. Katia swung a new battery of blades and microlasers into play.

We operated to the music of Sibelius.

It was intriguing and repellent work.

I succeeded in detaching my mind to some extent, so that I was able to regard the parting brain tissue as dead but somehow sacred meat. The micro-implants came out one by one, too small for the naked eye to discern detail, barbed hunks of corroded metal. The corrosion, observable under a microscope, was the external evidence of the cybervirus. I studied it with rank feelings of abstract distaste. The virus behaved like its biological namesake, clamping onto the shell of the nanostructure and pulsing subversive instructions deep into its reproductive heart.

After three hours my back boiled with pain. I leaned away from the reefer, brushing a sleeve against my chilled forehead. I felt the room swimming, clotting with blobs of muggy darkness. For an instant I became disoriented, convinced that left was right and vice versa. I braced myself against the reefer as this dizziness washed over me.

“Not long now,” Katia said. “How do you feel?”

“I’m fine. And you?”

“I’m ... fine. The op’s proceeding well.” Katia paused, then stiffened her voice with iron resolve, businesslike detachment. “The next implant is the deepest. It lies between the occipital lobe and the cerebellum. We must take care to avoid lesion of the visual centre. This is the primary entoptic infeed node.”

“In we go, then.”

The machinery snicked obediently into place. Our ciliated microprobes slid into the tissue, like flexible syringes slipping into jelly. Despite the cold I found myself hot around the collar, iced sweat prickling my skin. Another hour passed, though time had ceased to have very much meaning.

And I froze, conscious of a presence behind me, in the same room.

Compelled, I turned. The watcher was with me.

I saw now that it could not be a man. Yet it did have a humanoid form, a humanoid of my build and posture.

A sculptor had selected ten thousand raven-black cubes, so dark that they were pure silhouettes, and arranged them as a blocky statue. That was the entirety of the watcher: a mass of black cubes.

As I turned, it swung towards me. None of the cubes from which it was formed actually moved; they simply blipped out and reappeared in an orchestrated wave, whole new strata of cubes forming in thin air. They popped in and out of reality to mould its altering posture. To my eyes the motion had a beguiling, digital beauty. I thought of the coloured patterns that would sweep across a stadium of schoolchildren holding painted mosaic cards to image some great slogan or emblem.

I raised my left arm, and observed the shadow repeat the action from its point of view. We were not mirrors of one another. We were ghosts.

My terror had reached some peak and evaporated. I grasped that the watcher was essentially motiveless, that it had been drawn to me as inevitably as a shrinking noon shadow.

“Continue with the operation,” insisted Katia. I noticed hesitancy in her voice, true to her personality to the end. She liked games, my Katia, but she was never a convincing liar.

“Lesion of the visual centre, you say?”

“That is what we must be careful to avoid.”

I grimaced. I had to know for sure.

I scooped up one of the detached nanoprobes. In reality, the drones mimicked my intentions with their own manipulators, picking up the nanoprobe’s platonic twin ... Then I jammed it recklessly into Janos’s head, into his occipital lobe.

This reality melted and shattered, as if a stone had fallen into and disturbed the reflections on a crystal-mooth lake.

I knew, then.

My vision slowly unpeeled itself, returning to normality in strips. Katia was doing this, attempting to cancel the damage in my visual centre by sending distorted signals along the optic infeeds. I realised that I no longer had control of the surgical tools.

“I am the patient,” I said. “Not Janos. The surgeon is the one who needs surgery. How ironic.”

“It was best that you not know,” Katia said. And then, very rapidly, she herself flickered and warped, her voice momentarily growing cavernous and slurred. “I’m failing ... there isn’t much time.”

“And the watcher?”

“A symptom,” she said ruefully. “A symptom of my own illness. A false mapping of your own body image within the simulation.”

“You’re a simulation!” I roared. “I can understand your image being affected ... but you—yourself—you don’t exist in my head! You’re a program running in the mainbrain! “

“Yes, darling. But the Melding Plague has also reached the mainbrain.” She paused, and then, withut warning, her voice became robotically flat and autistic. “Much of the computer is damaged. To keep this simulation intact has necessitated sacrifices in tertiary function levels. However, the primary goal is to guarantee that you do not die. The operation-in-progress must be completed. In order to maintain the integrity of the simulation, the tuple-ensemble coded KATIA must be removed from main memory. This operation has now been executed.”

She froze, her last moment locked within my implant, trapped in my eyes like a spot of sun-blindness. It was just me and the computer then, not forgetting the ever-present watcher.

What could I do but continue with the surgery? I had a reason now. I wanted to excise the frozen ghost of Katia from my mind. She was the real lesion.

So I survived.

Many years passed for us. Our ship’s computer was so damaged by the Melding Plague that we could not decelerate in time to reach the Earth system. Our choice was to steer for 61 Cygni-A, around which lay the colony Sky’s Edge. Our dilation sleepers consequently found themselves further from home both in time and space than they had expected. Secretly we cherished the justice in this, we who had sacrificed parts of our lives to crew their dream-voyage. Yet they had not lost so very much, and I suppose I would have been one of their number had I had their power. Concerning Katia ...

The simulation was never properly reanimated.

The shipboard memory in which it lay fell prey to the Melding Plague, and much of its data was badly corrupted. When I did attempt to recreate her, I found only a crude caricature, all spontaneity sapped away, as lifeless and cruelly predictable as a Babbage engine. In a fit of remorse I destroyed the imago. It helped that I was blind, for even this façade had been programmed to exhibit fear, programmed to plead once it guessed my intentions.

That was years ago. I tell myself that she never lived. And that at least is what the cybertechs would have us believe.

The last information pulse from Yellowstone told me that the real Katia is still alive, of course much older than when I knew her. She has been married twice. To her the days of our union must seem as ancient and fragile as an heirloom. But she does not yet know that I survived. I transmitted to her, but the signal will not reach Epsilon Eridani for a decade. And then I will have to await her reply, more years still.

Perhaps she will reply in person. This is our only hope of meeting, because I ...

I will not fly again. Nor will I sleep out the decades.

Feeling Rejected

NaturePublishingGroup

Alastair Reynolds lives in the Netherlands. He worked at the European Space Agency for 12 years on a variety of astronomical projects before turning to full-time writing. His latest book is Century Rain (Orion, 2004).

World beater

Report on the paper “Analysis of the gravitational signals from a newly discovered Kardashev II civilization in the Sombrero Galaxy: Part 1 by Whimbrel et al.”, submitted to the Journal of Xenoastronomical Studies.

The authors present an analysis of gravitational signals of intelligent origin arising in the Sombrero Galaxy, detected in publicly available archival data from the System-Wide Imaging Network for Exoastronomy (SWINE). The transmitting culture, which has not been the subject of an earlier paper, is shown to be a type II civilization on the Kardashev scheme, by which it is understood that they have the means to tap the entire energy output of their star. This classification is made partly on the basis of the strength of the SWINE signal (which in itself implies a basic competence in stellar husbandry) and partly on the basis of the cultural information embedded in the data themselves. This assessment is probably correct, but given the likelihood that both typeI and type III civilizations may occasionally emulate type II civilizations for their own purposes (see, for instance, Chukar, Francolin and Dickcissel, 2051), a word of caution might well have been in order.

The species is shown to have originated on a rocky terrestrial planet about the size of Mars, and to have followed an evolutionary pathway that is well approximated by the uppermost track on the three-parameter model of Bataleur and Becard (2049). In their unmodified form, adult members of this species are 3-metre tall hexapodal oxygen-breathers with a DNA-based reproductive system. The species has a well-developed central nervous system with marked hemispheric asymmetry.

The authors apply standard analysis tools and methods to extract cultural information from the intercepted signal.

Given the absence of anything startlingly new in their approach, the amount of space that the authors spend discussing this process is puzzling. It might havebeen better simply to reference one of the many review papers on the matter, such as the recent and comprehensive overview of analysis methods given in [omitted].

The authors then move on to the main part of their paper: a lengthy discussion of the information content of the decoded message. They summarize the nature of the transmitting civilization, the physiology and evolutionary background of the inhabitants, their technology and culture.

Although broadly satisfactory in its details, this section would benefit from shortening. As an example, the authors dwell on the construction methods used in the Dyson sphere that the aliens have erected around their star, despite the fact that broadly similar planet-dismantling, reforging and gravity-control methods have been used by at least 138 other Kardashev II cultures (see, for instance, Takahe and Smew, 2045). In the very first sentence of subsection 3.2, the authors state that there is “nothing particularly novel about the construction methods”, before nevertheless embarking on a blow-by-blow account of those selfsame methods. I agree with the first sentence.

They conclude this section by presenting, in excerpted form, several images and texts deemed to be of high significance within the culture. These include 18 ‘stanzas’ of a much longer epic ‘poem’ written in commemoration of the collapse of part of the polar region of their Dyson sphere about 1.2 million years ago, an accident that resulted in the deaths of 5.6 x 10¹² sentient beings. Although undoubtedly touching, it is not clear that a great deal is gained from the inclusion of this somewhat taxing material.

The authors conclude their paper by moving on to a wider discussion of the significance of their newly found civilization against the known sample of other intelligent alien species. Here the authors place (in my view) undue emphasis on the position of their civilization in the ‘cultural H–R diagram’ (Wonga and Grebe, 2044), in which the total information capacity of a transmitting culture, measured in bits, is plotted against the light-crossing time in light-seconds of their total colonized space.

On the basis of Figure 8, the authors claim that their culture lies significantly to the right of the ‘asymptotic singularity branch’, which on the face of it would suggest that the culture had avoided a singularity despite occupying a total volume only 72,000 light-seconds in diameter. If true, this would extend the total number of known collapse-resistant cultures to eight.

The evidence, however, is very much less compelling than the authors claim. Close examination of their statistical sample shows it to be derived from the Third Gonolek catalogue,which is now known to be afflicted by serious sampling errors. Visual inspection would suggest that a more reliable sample—such as that of [omitted]—would either bring their civilization into line with the singularity branch, or reveal it as no more than a mild outlier.

In short, although the new civilization undoubtedly provides a useful new datum point, I remain unconvinced that it merits an entire paper, and certainly not the multi-paper saga that the authors clearly have in mind. Thanks tothe torrent of data supplied by SWINE, and the planned Obscenely Large Gravity Array (OLGA), we are fast moving into the era of statistical xenoastronomy—one in which the study of individual extraterrestrial civilizations has much less to offer than a global, survey-based approach. The authors might therefore be advised to wait until their archival enquiries have turned up several dozen such cultures, and then gather these results into a single paper.

Otherwise, I fear, they may be open to accusations of [omitted] the [omitted].

Other matters:

Fig. 6 was incorrectly labelled (see Fig. 5).

This text has been swept by Semantic Anonymity Preserver Version 5.1—certain stylistic or cultural markers may have been altered or removed. Complete legibility is not guaranteed.

The Fixation

For Hannu Blommila

Inside the corroded rock was what looked like a geared embryo—the incipient bud of an industrial age that remained unborn for a millennium. (John Seabrook, The New Yorker, May 14, 2007)

KATIB, THE SECURITY guard who usually works the graveyard shift, has already clocked on when Rana swipes her badge through the reader. He gives her a long-suffering look as she bustles past in her heavy coat, stooping under a cargo of document boxes and laptops. “Pulling another all-nighter, Rana?” he asks, as he has asked a hundred times before. “I keep telling you to get a different job, it?.”

“I worked hard to get this one,” she tells him, almost slipping on the floor, which has just been polished to a mirrored gleam by a small army of robot cleaners. “Where else would I get to do this and Actually get paid for it?”

“Whatever they’re paying you, it isn’t enough for all those bags under your eyes.”

She wishes he wouldn’t mention the bags under her eyes—it’s not as if she exactly likes them—but she smiles anyway, for Katib is a kindly man without a hurtful thought in his soul. “They’ll go,” she says. “We’re on the home stretch, anyway. Or did you somehow not notice that there’s this big opening ceremony coming up?”

“Oh, I think I heard something about that,” he says, scratching at his beard. “I just hope they need some old fool to look after this wing when they open the new one.”

“You’re indispensable, Katib. They’d get rid of half the exhibits before they put you on the street.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself, but ...” He gives a burly shrug, and then smiles to let her know it isn’t her business to worry about his problems. “Still, it’s going to be something, isn’t it? I can see it from my balcony, from all the way across the town. I didn’t like it much at first, but now that’s up there, now that it’s all shining and finished, it’s starting to grow on me. And it’s ours, that’s what I keep thinking. That’s our museum, nobody else’s. Something to be proud of.”

Rana has seen it too. The new wing, all but finished, dwarfs the existing structure. It’s a glittering climate-controlled ziggurat, the work of a monkish British architect who happens to be a devout Christian. A controversial choice, to be sure, but no one who has seen that tidal wave of glass and steel rising above the streets of the city has remained unimpressed. As the sun tracks across the sky, computer-controlled shutters open and close to control the flood of light into the ziggurat’s plunging atrium—the atrium where the Mechanism will be the primary exhibit—and maintain the building’s ideal ambient temperature. From afar, the play of those shutters is an enchanted mosaic: a mesmerizing, never-repeating dance of spangling glints. Rana read in a magazine that the architect had never touched a computer until he arrived in Greater Persia, but that he took to the possibilities with the zeal of the converted.

“It’s going to be wonderful,” she says, torn between making small talk with the amiable Katib and getting started on her work. “But it won’t be much of an opening ceremony if the Mechanism isn’t in place, will it?”

“Which is a kind way of saying, you need to be getting to your office.” He’s smiling as he speaks, letting her know he takes no offense. “You need some help with those boxes and computers, my fairest?”

“I’ll be fine, thanks.”

“You call me if you need anything. I’ll be here hrough to six.” With that he unfolds a magazine and taps the sharp end of a pencil against the grid of a half-finished puzzle. “And don’t work too hard,” he says under his breath, but just loud enough that she will hear.

Rana doesn’t pass another human being on her way to the office. The public part of the museum is deserted save for the occasional cleaner or patrolling security robot, but at least the hallways and exhibits are still partially illuminated, and from certain sightlines she can still see people walking in the street outside, coming from the theater or a late restaurant engagement.

In the private corridors, it’s a different story. The halls are dark and the windows too high to reveal anything more than moonlit sky. The robots don’t come here very often and most of the offices and meeting rooms are locked and silent. At the end of one corridor stands the glowing sentinel of a coffee dispenser. Normally Rana takes a cup to her room, but tonight she doesn’t have a free hand; it’s enough of a job just to shoulder her way through doors without dropping something.

Her room is in the basement: a cool, windowless crypt that is half laboratory and half office. Her colleagues think she’s mad for working at night, but Rana has her reasons. By day she has to share her facilities with other members of the staff, and what with all the talk and interruptions she tends to get much less work done. If that’s not enough of a distraction, there is a public corridor that winds its way past the glass-fronted rooms, allowing the museum’s visitors to watch cataloging and restoration work as it actually happens. The public make an effort to look more interested than they really are. Hardly surprising, because the work going on inside the offices could not look less interesting or less glamorous. Rana has been spending the last three weeks working with microscopically precise tools on the restoration of a single bronze gearwheel. What the visitors would imagine to be a morning’s work has consumed more of her life than some relationships. She already knows every scratch and chip of that gearwheel like an old friend or ancient, bitter adversary.

There’s another reason why she works at night. Her mind functions better in the small hours. She has made more deductive leaps at three in the morning than she has ever done at three in the afternoon, and she wishes it were not so.

She takes off her coat and hangs it by the door. She opens the two laptops, sets them near each other, and powers them up. She keeps the office lights low, with only enough illumination to focus on the immediate area around her bench. The gearwheel is centermost, supported on an adjustable cradle like a miniature music stand. On either side, kept in upright stands, are various chrome-plated tools and magnifying devices, some of which trail segmented power cables to a wall junction. There is a swing-down visor with zoom optics. There are lasers and ultrasound cleaning baths. There are duplicates of the gearwheel and its brethren, etched in brass for testing purposes. There are plastic models of parts of the Mechanism, so that she can take them apart and explain its workings to visitors. There are other gearwheels which have already been removed from the device for restoration, sealed in plastic boxes and racked according to coded labels. Some are visibly cleaner than the one she is working on, but some are still corroded and grubby, with damaged teeth and scabrous surface deterioration.

And there is the Mechanism itself, placed on the bench on the far side of the gearwheel she is working on. It is the size of a shoebox, with a wooden casing, the lid hinged back. When it arrived the box was full of machinery, a tight-packed clockwork of arbors and crown wheels, revolving balls, slotted pins and delicate, hand-engraved inscriptions. None of it did anything, though. Turn the input crank and there’d just be a metallic crunch as stiff, worn gears locked into immobility. No one in the museum remembers the last time the machine was in proper working order. Fifty years ago, she’s heard someone say—but not all of the gearing was in place even then. Parts were removed a hundred years ago and never put back. Or were lost or altered two hundred years ago. Since then the Mechanism has become something of an embarrassment: a fabled contraption that doesn’t do what everyone expects it to.

Hence the decision by the museum authorities: restore the Mechanism to full and authentic functionality in time for the reopening of the new wing. As the foremost native expert on the device, the work has naturally fallen to Rana. The authorities tried to foist a team on her, but the hapless doctoral students soon realized their leader preferred to work alone, unencumbered by the give and take of collaboration.

Share the glory? Not likely.

With the wall calendar reminding her how few weeks remain to the opening, Rana occasionally wonders if she has taken on too much. But she is making progress, and the most difficult parts of the restoration are now behind her.

Rana picks up one of her tools and begins to scrape away the tiniest burr of corrosion on one of the gear’s teeth. Soon she is lost in the methodical repetitiveness of the task, her mind freewheeling back through history, thinking of all the hands that have touched this metal. She imagines all the people this little clockwork box has influenced, all the lives it has altered, the fortunes it has made and the empires it has crushed. The Romans owned the Mechanism for 400 years—one of their ships must have carried it from Greece, perhaps from the island of Rhodes—but the Romans were too lazy and incurious to do anything with the box other than marvel at its computational abilities. The idea that the same clockwork that accurately predicted the movements of the sun, moon, and the planets across an entire Metonic cycle-235 lunar months—might also be made to do other things simply never occurred to them.

The Persians were different. The Persians saw a universe of possibility in those spinning wheels and meshing teeth. Those early clocks and calculating boxes—the clever devices that sent armies and navies and engineers across the globe, and made Greater Persia what it is today—bear scant resemblance to the laptops on Rana’s desk. But the lineage is unbroken.

There must be ghosts, she thinks: caught in the slipstream of this box, dragged by the Mechanism as it ploughed its way through the centuries. Lives changed and lives extinguished, lives that never happened at all, and yet all of them still in spectral attendance, a silent audience crowding in on this quiet basement room, waiting for Rana’s next move.

Some of them want her to destroy the machine forever.

Some of them want to see it shine again.

Rana doesn’t dream much, but when she does she dreams of glittering brass gears meshing tight against each other, whirring furiously, a dance of metal and geometry that moves the heavens.

SAFA DREAMS OF numbers, not gears: she is a mathematician. Her breakthrough paper, the one that has brought her to the museum, was entitled “Entropy Exchange and the Many Worlds Hypothesis.”

As a foreign national, admitted into the country because of her expertise in an exceedingly esoteric field, Safa has more rights than a refugee. But she must still submit to the indignity of wearing a monitoring collar, a heavy plastic cuff around her neck which not only records her movements, not only sees and hears everything she sees and hears, but which can stun or euthanize her if a government agent deems that she is acting contrary to the national interests. She must also be accompanied by a cyborg watchdog at all times: a sleek black prowling thing with the emblem of the national security agency across its bulletproof chest. At least the watchdog has the sense to lurk at the back of the room when she is about to address the gathered administrators and sponsors, at this deathly hour.

“I’m sorry we had to drag you out here so late,” the museum director tells the assembled audience. “Safa knows more than me, but I’m reliably informed that the equipment works best when the city’s shutting down for the night—when there isn’t so much traffic, and the underground trains aren’t running. We can schedule routine jobs during the day, but something like this—something this delicate—requires the maximum degree of noise-suppression. Isn’t that right, Safa?”

“Spot on sir. And if everyone could try and hold their breath for the next six hours, that would help as well.” She grins reassuringly—it’s almost as if some of them think she was serious. “Now I know some of you were probably hoping to see the Mechanism itself, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you—positioning it inside the equipment is a very slow and tricky procedure, and if we started now we’d all still be here next week. But I can show you something nearly as good.”

Safa produces a small white pottery jug that she has brought along for the occasion. “Now, you may think this is just some ordinary old jug I found at the back of a staff cupboard ... and you’d be right. It’s probably no more than ten or fifteen years old. The Mechanism, as I am sure I don’t have to remind anyone here, is incomparably older: we know the ship went down around the first half of the First Century BC. But I can still illustrate my point. There are a near-infinite number of copies of this object, a lid they are all the same jug. In one history, I caught a cold and couldn’t make it today, and someone else is standing up and talking to you, holding the same jug. In another, someone took the jug out of that cupboard years ago and it’s living in a kitchen halfway across the city. In another it was bought by someone else and never ended up in the museum. In another it was broken before it ever left t he factory.”

She smiles quickly. “You see the point I’m making. What may be less clear is that all these copies the same jug are in ghostly dialogue with each other, linked together by a kind of quantum entanglement—though it’s not really quantum and it’s not exactly entanglement.” Another fierce, nervous smile. “Don’t worry: no mathematics tonight! The point is, no matter what happens to this jug, no matter how it’s handled or what it comes into contact with, it never quite loses contact with its counterparts. The signal gets fainter, but it never goes away. Even if I do this.”

Abruptly, she lets go of the jug. It drops to the floor and shatters into a dozen sharp white pieces.

“The jug’s broken,” Safa says, pulling a sad face. “But in a sense it still exists. The other copies of it are still doing fine—and each and every one of them felt an echo of this one as it shattered. It’s still out there, ringing back and forth like a dying chime.” Then she pauses and kneels down, gathering a handful of the broken pieces into her palms. “Imagine if I could somehow take these pieces and get them to resonate with the intact copies of the jug. Imagine further still that I could somehow steal a little bit of orderedness from each of those copies, and give back some of the disorderedness of this one in return—a kind of swap.”

Safa waits a moment, trying to judge whether she still has the audience’s attention. Are they following or just pretending to follow? It’s not always easy to tell, and nothing on the administrator’s face gives her a clue. “Well, we can do that. It’s what we call Fixation—moving tiny amounts of entropy from one world—one universe—to another. Now, it would take a very long time to put this jug back the way it was. But if we started with a jug that was a bit damaged, a bit worn, it would happen a lot quicker. And that’s sort of where we are with the Antikythera Mechanism. It’s in several pieces, and we suspect there are components missing, but in other respects it’s in astonishing condition for something that’s been underwater for two thousand years.”

Now she turns around slowly, to confront the huge, humming mass of the Fixator. It is a dull silver cylinder with a circular door in one end, braced inside a massive orange chassis, festooned with cables and cooling ducts and service walkways. The machine is as large as a small fusion reactor and several times as complicated. It has stronger, more responsive magnets, a harder vacuum, and has a control system so perilously close to intelligence that a government agent must be on hand at all times, ready to destroy the machine if it slips over the threshold into consciousness.

“Hence the equipment. The Mechanism’s inside there now—in fact, we’ve already begun the resonant excitation. What we’re hoping is that somewhere out there—somewhere out in that sea of alternate timelines—is a copy of the Mechanism that never fell into the water. Of course, that copy may have been destroyed subsequently—but somewhere there has to be a counterpart to the Mechanism in better condition than this one. Maybe near-infinite numbers of counterparts, for all we know. Perhaps we were the unlucky ones, and nobody else’s copy ended up being lost underwater.”

She coughs to clear her throat, and in that instant catches a reflected glimpse of herself in he glass plating of one of the cabinets in the corner of the room. Drawn face, tired creases around the mouth, bags under the eyes—a woman who’s been working too hard for much too long. But how else was an Iranian mathematician supposed to get on in the world, if it wasn’t through graft and dedication? It’s not like she was born into money, or had the world rushing to open doors for her.

The work will endure long after the bags have gone, she tells herself.

“The way it happens,” she says, regaining her composure, “is that we’ll steal an almost infinitesimally small amount of order from an almost infinitely large number of alternate universes. In return, we’ll pump a tiny amount of surplus entropy into each of those timelines. The counterparts of the Mechanism will hardly feel the change: the alteration in any one of them will be so tiny as to be almost unmeasurable. A microscopic scratch here; a spot of corrosion or the introduction of an impure atom there. But because we’re stealing order from so many of them, and consolidating that order into a single timeline, the change in our universe will be enormous. We’ll win, because we’ll get back the Mechanism as it was before it went into the sea. But no one else loses; it’s not like we’re stealing someone else’s perfect copy and replacing it with our own damaged one.”

She thinks she has them then—that it is all going to go without a hitch or a quibble, and they can all shuffle over to the tables and start nibbling on cheese squares. But then a hand raises itself slowly from the audience. It belongs to an intense young man with squared-off glasses and a severe fringe.

He asks: “How can you be so sure?”

Safa grimaces. She hates being asked questions.

RANA PUTS DOWN her tool and listens very carefully. Somewhere in the museum there was a loud bang, as of a door being slammed. She is silent for at least a minute, but when no further sound comes she resumes her labors, filling the room with the repetitious scratch of diamond-tipped burr against corroded metal.

Then another sound comes, a kind of fluttering, animal commotion, as if a bird is loose in one of the darkened halls, and Rana can stand it no more. She leaves her desk and walks out into the basement corridor, wondering if someone else has come in to work. But the other rooms and offices remain closed and unlit.

She is about to return to her labors and call Katib’s desk, when she hears the soft and feathery commotion again. She is near the stairwell and the sound is clearly coming from above her, perhaps on the next floor up.

Gripping the handrail, Rana ascends. She is being braver than perhaps is wise—the museum has had its share of intruders, and there have been thefts—but the coffee machine is above and she had been meaning to fetch herself a cup for at least an hour. Her heart is in her throat when she reaches the next landing and turns the corner into the corridor, which is as shabby and narrow as any of the museum’s non-public spaces. There are high, institutional windows on one side and office doors on the other. But there is the machine, standing in a pool of light two doors down, and there is no sign of an intruder. She walks to the machine, fishing coins from her pocket, and punches in her order. As the machine clicks and gurgles into life, Rana feels a breeze against her cheek. She looks down the corridor and feels it again: it’s as if there’s a door open, letting in the night air. But the only door should be the one manned by Katib, on the other side of the building.

While her coffee is being dispensed Rana walks in the direction of the breeze. At the end the corridor reaches the corner of this wing and jogs to the right. She turns the bend and sees something unanticipated. All along the corridor, there is no glass in the windows, no metal in the frames: just tall blank openings in the wall. And there, indeed, is a fluttering black shape: a crow, or something like a crow, which has come in through one of those openings and cannot now find its way back outside. It keeps flinging itself at the wall between the windows, a gleam of mad desperation in its eyes.

Rana stands still, wondering how this can be. She was here. She remembers passing the machine and thinking she would take a cup if only she were not already staggering under her boxes and computers.

But there is something more than just the absence of glass. Is she losing her mind, or do the window apertures look narrower than they used to do, as if the walls have begun to squeeze the window spaces tight like sleepy eyes?

She must call Katib.

She hurries back the way she has come, forgetting all about the coffee she has just paid for. But when she turns the bend in the corridor, the machine is standing there dark and dead, as if it’s been unplugged.

She returns to the basement. Under her feet the stairs feel rougher and more crudely formed than she remembers, until she reaches the last few treads and they start to feel normal again. She pauses at the bottom, waiting for her mind to straighten itself out.

Down here at least all is as it should be. Her office is as she left it, with the lights still on, the laptops still aglow, the gearwheel still mounted on its stand, he disemboweled Mechanism still sitting on the other side of the desk.

She eases into her seat, her heart still racing, and picks up the telephone.

“Katib?”

“Yes, my fairest,” he says, his voice sounding more distant and crackly than she feels it should, as it he is speaking from halfway around the world. “What can I do for you?”

“Katib, I was just upstairs, and ...”

But then she trails off. What is she going to tell him? That she saw open gaps where there should be windows?

“Rana?”

Her nerve deserts her. “I was just going to say ... the coffee machine was broken. Maybe someone could take a look at it.”

“Not until tomorrow, I am afraid—there is no one qualified. But I will make an entry in the log.”

“Thank you, Katib.”

After a pause he asks, “There was nothing else, was there?”

“No,” she says. “There was nothing else. Thank you, Katib.”

She knows what he must be thinking. She’s been working too hard, too fixated on the task. The Mechanism does that to people, it’s been said. They get lost in its labyrinthine possibilities and never emerge again. Not the way they were, anyway.

But she thinks she can still hear that crow.

“How CAN I be so sure about what?” Safa asks, with an obliging smile.

“That this is going to work the way you say it will,” the intense young man answers.

“The mathematics is pretty clear,” Safa says. “I should know; I discovered most of it.” Which comes less modestly than she had intended, although no one seems to mind. “What I mean is, there isn’t any room for ambiguity. We know that the sheath of alternate timelines is near-infinite in extent, and we know we’re only pumping the smallest conceivable amount of entropy into each of those timelines.” Safa holds the smile, hoping that will be enough for the young man, and that she can continue with her presentation.

But the man isn’t satisfied. “That’s all very well, but aren’t you presupposing that all those other timelines have order to spare? What if that isn’t the case? What if all the other Mechanisms are just as corroded and broken as ours—what will happen then?”

“It’ll still work,” Safa says, “provided the total information content across all the timelines is sufficient to specify one intact copy, which is overwhelmingly likely from a statistical standpoint.

Of course, if all the Mechanisms happen to be damaged in exactly the same fashion as ours, then the Fixation won’t work—you still can’t get something for nothing. But that’s not very likely. Trust me; I’m very confident that we can find enough information out there to reconstruct our copy.”

The man seems to be content with that answer, hut just when Safa is about to open her mouth and continue with her speech, her adversary raises his hind again.

“Sorry, but ... I can’t help wondering. Does the entropy exchange happen uniformly across all those timelines?”

It’s an odd, technical-sounding question, suggesting that the man has done more homework than most. “Actually, no,” Safa says, guardedly. “The way the math works out, the entropy exchange is ever so slightly clumped. If a particular copy of the Mechanism has more information to give us, we end up pumping a bit more entropy into that copy than one which has less information to offer. But we’re still talking about small differences, nothing that anyone will actually notice.”

The man pushes a hand through his fringe. “But what if there’s only one?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I mean, what if there’s only one intact copy out there, and all the rest are at least as damaged as our own?”

“That can’t happen,” Safa says, hoping that someone, anyone, will interrupt by asking another question. It’s not that she feels on unsafe ground, just that she has the sense that this could go on all night.

“Why not?” the man persists.

“It just can’t. The mathematics says it’s so unlikely that we may as well forget about it.”

“And you believe the mathematics.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Safa is beginning to lose her patience, feeling cornered and put upon. Where is the museum director to defend her when she needs him? “Of course I believe it. It’d be pretty strange if I didn’t.”

“I was just asking,” the man says, sounding as if he’s the one who’s under attack. “Maybe it isn’t very likely—I’ll have to take your word for that. But I only wanted to know what would happen.”

“You don’t need to,” Safa says firmly. “It can’t happen—not ever. And now can I please continue?”

HER FINGER STABS down on Katib’s button again. But there is nothing, not even the cool purr of the dialing tone. The phone is mute, and now that she looks at it, the display function is dead. She puts the handset down and tries again, but nothing changes.

That’s when Rana pays proper attention to the gearwheel, the one she has been working on. There are thirty-seven wheels in the Antikythera Mechanism and this is the twenty-first, and although there was still much to be done until it was ready to be replaced in the box, it now looks as if she has hardly begun. The surface corrosion that she has spent weeks rectifying has returned in a matter of minutes, covering the wheel in a furry blue-green bloom as if someone has taken the artifact and dipped it in acid while she was out of the office. But as she looks at it, blinking in dismay, as if it is her eyes that are wrong, rather than the wheel, she notices that three teeth are gone, or worn away so thoroughly that they may as well not be there. Worse, there is a visible scratch—actually more of a crack—that cuts across one side of the wheel, as if it is about to fracture into two pieces.

Mesmerized and unsettled in equal measure, Rana picks up one of her tools—the scraper she was using before she heard the noise—and touches it against part of the blue-green corrosion. The bloom chips off almost instantly, but as it does so it takes a quadrant of the wheel with it, the piece shattering o a heap of pale granules on her desk. She stares in numb disbelief at the ruined gear, with a monstrous chunk bitten out of the side of it, and then the tool itself shatters in her hand.

“This can’t be happening,” Rana says to herself. Then her gaze falls on the other gearwheels, in their plastic boxes, and she sees the same brittle corrosion afflicting them all.

As for the Mechanism itself, the disemboweled box: what she sees isn’t possible. She can just about accept that some bizarre, hitherto-undocumented chemical reaction has attacked the metal in the time it took for her to go upstairs and come down again, but the box itself is wood—it hasn’t changed in hundreds of years, not since the last time the casing was patiently replaced by one of the Mechanism’s many careful owners.

But now the box has turned to something that looks more like rock than wood, something barely recognizable as a made artifact. With trepidation Rana reaches out and touches it. It feels fibrous and insubstantial. Her finger almost seems to ghost through it, as if what she is reaching for is not a real object at all, but a hologram. Peering into the heart of the Mechanism, she sees the gears that are still iii place have fused together into a single corroded mass, like a block of rock that has been engraved with a hazy impression of clockwork.

Then Rana laughs, for the pieces of the puzzle have just fallen into place. This is all a joke, albeit—given the pressures she is already under—one in spectacularly bad taste. But a joke all the same, and not a marker of her descent into insanity. She was called upstairs by a noise—how else were they going to get into her office and swap the Mechanism for this ruined half-cousin? The missing windows, the panicked bird, seem like details too far, random intrusions of dream-logic, but who can guess the mind of a practical joker?

Well, she has a sense of humor. But not now, not tonight. Someone will pay for this. Cutting off her telephone was the last straw. That was nasty, not funny.

She moves to leave her bench again and find whoever must be spying on her, certain that they must be lurking in the shadows outside, maybe in the unlit observation corridor, where they’d have a plain view of her discomfort. But as she places her hand down to push herself up, her fingers slip into the smoky surface of the bench.

They vanish as if she were dipping them into water.

All of a sudden she realizes that it was not the Antikythera Mechanism that was growing insubstantial, but everything around her.

No, that’s not it either. Something is happening to the building, but if the table were turning ghostly, the heavy things on it—the Mechanism, the equipment, the laptops—would have surely sunk through It by now. There’s a simpler explanation, even if the realization cuts through her like a shaft of interstellar cold.

She’s the one fading out, losing traction and substantiality.

Rana rises to her feet eventually, but it’s like pushing herself against smoke. She isn’t so much ... standing as floating with her feet in vague contact with the ground. The air in her lungs is beginning to feel thin, but at the same time there’s no sense that she is about to choke. She tries to walk, and for a moment her feet paddle uselessly against the floor, until she begins to pick up a deathly momentum in t he direction of the door.

The corridor at the base of the stairs was normal when she returned from her visit to the next floor, hut now it has become a dark, forbidding passageway, with rough-formed doorways leading into dungeon-like spaces. Her office is the only recognizable place, and even her office is not immune to he changes. The door has vanished, leaving only a sagging gap in the wall. The floor is made of stones, unevenly laid. Halfway to her bench the stones blend together into something like concrete, and then a little further the concrete gains the hard red sheen of the flooring she has come to expect. On the desk, her electric light flickers and fades. The laptops shut down with a whine, their screens darkening. The line of change in the floor creeps closer to the desk, like an advancing tide. From somewhere in the darkness Rana hears the quiet, insistent dripping of water.

She was wrong to assume that the things on the desk were immune to the fading. She began to go first, but now the same process of fade-out is beginning to catch up with her tools, with her notes and the laptops and the fabric of the bench itself. Even the Mechanism is losing its grip on reality, its gears and components beginning to dissolve before her eyes. The wooden box turns ash-gray and crumbles into a pile of dust. A breeze fingers its way into the room and spirits the dust away.

The Mechanism was the last thing to go, Rana realizes: the tide of change had come in from all directions, to this one tiny focus, and for a little while the focus had held firm, resisting the transforming forces.

Now she feels the hastening of her own process of fade-out. She cannot move or communicate. She is at the mercy of the breeze.

It blows her through the cold stone walls, out into the night-time air of a city she barely recognizes. She drifts through the sky, able to witness but not able to participate. In all directions she sees only ruin and desolation. The shells of buildings throw jagged outlines against the moonlit sky. Here and there she almost recognizes the fallen corpse of a familiar landmark, but so much is different that she soon loses her sense of direction. Even the shape of the river, shining back under moonlight, appears to have meandered from the course she remembers. She sees smashed stone and metal bridges that end halfway across to the other bank. Crimson fires burn on the horizon and flicker through the eyeholes of gutted buildings.

Then she notices the black machines, stalking their heir way through the warrens and canyons between the ruins. Fierce and frightening engines of war, with their turreted guns swiveling into doorways and shadows, the iron treads of their feet crunching down on the rubble of the pulverized city, the rubble that used to be dwellings and possessions, until these juggernauts arrived. She does not need an emblem or flag to know that these are he machines of an occupying force; that her city is tinder the mechanized heel of an invader. She watches as a figure springs out of concealment to lob some pathetic burning torch at one of the machines. The turret snaps around and a lance of fire stabs back at the assailant. The figure drops to the ground.

The wind is gusting her higher, turning the city into a map of itself. As her point of view changes direction she catches sight of the building that used to be the Museum of Antiquities, but what she sees is no more than a shattered prison or fortress, one among many. And for an instant she remembers that the shell of the museum was very old, that the building—or a succession of buildings, each built on the plan of its predecessor—had stood in the same location for many centuries, serving many rulers.

In that same instant, Rana comes to a momentary understanding of what has happened to both her and her world. The Mechanism has been wrenched from history, and accordingly—because the Mechanism was so essential—history has come undone. There is no Museum of Antiquities, because there is no Greater Persia. The brilliant clockwork that dispatched armies and engineers across the globe simply never existed.

Nor did Rana.

But the moment of understanding passes as quickly as it came. Ghosts are not the souls of the dead, but the souls of people written out of history when history changes. The worst thing about them is that they never quite recall the living people they used to be, the things they once witnessed.

The wind lofts Rana higher, into thinning silver clouds. But by then she no longer thinks of anything at all, except the endless meshing of beautiful bronze gearwheels, moving the heavens for all eternity.

Fresco

On the day that the blue ones stopped transmitting, the caretaker was doing its rounds of the Eye, humming and pottering among the other, duller maintenance robots.

Then, when the news came in, it stopped humming.

Near the heart of the Eye—the vast radio telescope floating beyond the orbit of Jupiter—was a gigantic spherical tank which had once been used to store the water the humans had needed during the construction. They had lived in it, too—dwelling in pressurized cabins surrounded by water, shielded from radiation.

Now they were gone—long gone—but the midnight blue tank remained.

Like, the caretaker had thought one day, a huge blank canvas.

III

Until the coming of the Eye, no radio telescope had been sensitive enough to pick out signals of intelligent origin from the mush of cosmic background noise. But then the feast had begun: a tsunami of knowledge almost beyond human comprehension. Yet the messages showed that humanity was still fundamentally alone. All the signals had originated in other galaxies, often at distances that bordered on the cosmological. They had been sent hundreds of millions of years ago, when the dinosaurs were still evolution’s cool new idea.

But there was a more disturbing thing even than the loneliness.

At any one time the Eye was picking up the messages from about a hundred civilizations, but each only stayed active for a few centuries before falling silent. The net number stayed roughly constant because new species were always popping up and discovering radio astronomy, but they too would be doomed to spend only a relatively short amount of time among the hundred. For a few glorious centuries they would broadcast their cultural legacy into the sky; enriching the knowledge of the other listening cultures.

But then—it was often around the time they started discovering some of the more interesting things that could be done with subatomic particles—they would stop sending.

Usually without much warning.

III

It shouldn’t have bothered the caretaker.

But in tending the Eye it found that it became quite attached to some of those transmitting cultures. It became absorbed in their histories; fascinated by their biologies and outlooks.

It hummed their music and pondered their art.

And waited with deep, mounting sadness for the day it always knew would come; the sudden, roaring silence from that part of the sky.

III

It moved to the part of the Fresco which recorded the senders in a distant galaxy in the constellation Sculptor.

The caretaker had marked the tank with faint lines of celestial latitude and longitude. At the precise co-ordinates of the transmitting civilization, it had painted a spiral galaxy much like our own; an impressionistic swirl of white and ochre. It was one of the first galaxies that the caretaker had painted, and while it had gained proficiency since—there were better ones dotted all around the Fresco—there was a certain charm to this effort which appealed to it.

Two thirds out from the core, the caretaker had marked the location of the transmitting culture’s solar system.

It thought of them: blue, tentacled aquatic beings with a reproductive system so intricate it had taken the caretaker decades to work out how many sexes they had. Their music had been even trickier; sounding at first pass like synchronized drowning. But the caretaker had persisted, and after a while it had even caught itself humming some of the more accessible bits.

But they were gone now.

Silent.

III

Nothing for it, then.

With sadness in its heart—but at the same time emboldened by the execution of a solemn task it knew must be done—the caretaker prepared the precise shade of midnight blue it needed. When it was ready, it carefully stippled the galaxy into oblivion, like a master picture restorer removing a blemish. The caretaker was very good at its work, and when it was done there was no sign that the galaxy had ever existed.

The Fresco was up-to-date, but it would not be long before it had to be changed again.

Art is long, it thought. And life short.

Galactic North

Persistence can be a virtue, but perhaps—as in the breakneck, relentlessly paced, gorgeously coloured story that follows, which sweeps us along on a cosmic chase across thousands of lightyears of space and millions of years of time—it can sometimes be taken a bit too far ...

New writer Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone, and has also sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction and elsewhere. A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he comes from Wales, but lives in the Netherlands. His first novel, Revelation Space, already being hailed as one of the major SF books of the year, has just appeared in Britain. His story “A Spy in Europa” appeared in our Thirteenth Annual Collection.

Luyten 726-8 Cometary Halo—AD 2303

The two of them crouched in a tunnel of filthy ice, bulky in spacesuits. Fifty metres down the tunnel the servitor straddled the bore on skeletal legs, transmitting a thermal image onto their visors.

Irravel jumped whenever the noise shifted into something human, cradling her gun nervously.

“Damn this thing,” she said. “Hardly get my finger round the trigger.”

“It can’t read your blood, Captain.” Markarian, next to her, managed not to sound as if he was stating the obvious. “You have to set the override to female.”

Of course. Belatedly, remembering the training session on Fand where they’d been shown how to use the weapons—months of subjective time ago; years of worldtime—Irravel told the gun to reshape itself. The memory-plastic casing squirmed in her gloves to something more manageable. It still felt wrong.

“How are we doing?”

“Last teams in position. That’s all the tunnels covered. They’ll have to fight their way in.”

“I think that might well be on the agenda.”

“Maybe so.” Markarian sighted along his weapon like a sniper. “But they’ll get a surprise when they reach the cargo.”

True: the ship had sealed the sleeper chambers the instant the pirates had arrived near the comet.

Counter-intrusion weaponry would seriously inconvenience anyone trying to break in, unless they had the right authorization. And there, Irravel knew, was the problem; the thing she would rather not have had to deal with.

“Markarian,” Irravel said. “If we’re taken prisoner, there’s a chance they’ll try and make us give up the codes.”

“Don’t think that hasn’t crossed my mind already.” Markarian rechecked some aspect of his gun.

“I won’t let you down, Irravel.”

“It’s not a question of letting me down,” she said, carefully.

“It’s whether or not we betray the cargo.”

“I know.” For a moment they studied each other’s faces through their visors, acknowledging what had once been more than professional friendship; the shared knowledge that they would kill each other rather than place the cargo in harm’s way.

Their ship was the ramliner Hirondelle. She was damaged; lashed to the comet for repair. Improbably sleek for a creature of vacuum, her four-kilometer-long conic hull tapered to a needlesharp prow and sprouted trumpet-shaped engines from two swept-back spars at the rear. It had been Irravel’s first captaincy: a routine 17-year hop from Fand, in the Lacaille 9352 system, to Yellowstone, around Epsilon Eridani—with 20,000 reefersleep colonists. What had gone wrong should only have happened once in a thousand trips: a speck of interstellar dust had slipped through the ship’s screen of anti-collision lasers and punched a cavernous hole in the ablative ice-shield, vaporizing a quarter of its mass. With a massively reduced likelihood of surviving another collision, the ship had automatically steered toward the nearest system capable of supplying repair materials.

Luyten 726-8 had been no one’s idea of a welcoming destination. No human colonies had flourished there. All that remained were droves of scavenging machines sent out by various superpowers. The ship had locked into a scavenger’s homing signal, eventually coming within visual range of the inert comet which the machine had made its home, and which ought to have been chequered with resupply materials. But when Irravel had been revived from reefersleep, what she’d found in place of the expected goods were only acres of barren comet.

“Dear God,” she’d said. “Do we deserve this?”

Yet, after a few days, despair became steely resolve. The ship couldn’t safely travel anywhere else, so they would have to process the supplies themselves, doing the work of the malfunctioning surveyor. It would mean stripping the ship just to make the machines to mine and shape the cometary ice—years of work by any estimate. That hardly mattered. The detour had already added years to the mission.

Irravel ordered the rest of her crew—all 90 of them—to be warmed, and then delegated tasks, mostly programming. Servitors were not particularly intelligent outside of their designated functions. She considered activating the other machines she carried as cargo—the greenfly terraformers—but that cut against all her instincts. Greenfly machines were Von Neumann breeders, unlike the sterile servitors. They were a hundred times cleverer. She would only consider using them if the cargo was placed in immediate danger.

“If you won’t unleash the greenflies,” Markarian said, “at least think about waking the

Conjoiners. There may only be four of them, but we could use their expertise.”

“I don’t trust them. I never liked the idea of carrying them in the first place. They unsettle me.”

“I don’t like them either, but I’m willing to bury my prejudices if it means fixing the ship faster.”

“Well, that’s where we differ. I’m not, so don’t raise the subject again.”

“Yes,” Markarian said, and only when its omission was insolently clear did he bother adding:

“Captain.”

Eventually the Conjoiners ceased to be an issue, when the work was clearly under way and proceeding normally. Most of the crew were able to return to reefersleep. Irravel and Markarian stayed awake a little longer, and even after they’d gone under, they woke every seven months to review the status of the works. It began to look as if they would succeed without assistance.

Until the day they were woken out of schedule, and a dark, grapple-shaped ship was almost upon the comet. Not an interstellar ship, it must have come from somewhere nearby—probably within the same halo of comets around Luyten 726-8. Its silence was not encouraging.

“I think they’re pirates,” Irravel said. “I’ve heard of one or two other ships going missing near here, and it was always put down to accident.”

“Why did they wait so long?”

“They had no choice. There are billions of comets out here, but they’re never less than light-hours apart. That’s a long way if you only have in-system engines. They must have a base somewhere else to keep watch, maybe light-weeks from here, like a spider with a very wide web.”

“What do we do now?”

Irravel gritted her teeth. “Do what anything does when it gets stuck in the middle of a web. Fight back.”

But the Hirondelle’s minimal defences only scratched against the enemy ship. Oblivious, it fired penetrators and winched closer. Dozens of crab-shaped machines swarmed out and dropped below the comet’s horizon, impacting with seismic thuds. After a few minutes, sensors in the furthest tunnels registered intruders. Only a handful of crew had been woken. They broke guns out of the armoury—small arms designed for pacification in the unlikely event of a shipboard riot—and then established defensive positions in all the cometary tunnels.

Nervously now, Irravel and Markarian advanced round the tunnel’s bend, cleated shoes whispering through ice barely more substantial than smoke. They had to keep their suit exhausts from touching the walls if they didn’t want to get blown back by superheated steam. Irravel jumped again at the pattern of photons on her visor and then forced calm, telling herself it was another mirage.

Except this time it stayed.

Markarian opened fire, squeezing rounds past the servitor. It lurched aside, a gaping hole in its carapace. Black crabs came round the bend, encrusted with sensors and guns. The first reached the ruined servitor and dismembered it with ease. If only there’d been time to activate and program the greenfly machines—they’d have ripped through the pirates like a host of furies, treating them as terraformable matter.

And maybe us too, Irravel thought.

Something flashed through the clouds of steam; an electromagnetic pulse that turned Irravel’s suit sluggish, as if every joint had corroded. The whine of the circulator died to silence, leaving only her frenzied breathing. Something pressed against her backpack. She turned slowly around, wary of falling against the walls. There were crabs everywhere. The chamber in which they’d been cornered was littered with the bodies of the other crew members; pink trail of blood on ice reaching from other tunnels. They’d been killed and dragged here.

Two words jumped to mind: kill yourself. But first she had to kill Markarian, in case he lacked the nerve himself. She couldn’t see his face through his visor. That was good. Painfully, she pointed the gun towards him and squeezed the trigger. But instead of firing, the gun shivered in her hands, stowing itself into a quarter of its operational volume. “Thank you for using this weapon system,” it said cheerfully.

Irravel let it drift to the ground.

A new voice rasped in her helmet. “If you’re thinking of surrendering, now might not be a bad time.”

“Bastard,” Irravel said, softly.

“Really the best you can manage?” The language was Canasian—what Irravel and Markarian had spoken on Fand—but heavily accented, as if the native tongue was Norte or Russish, or spoken with an impediment. “Bastard’s quite a compliment compared to some of things my clients come up with.”

“Give me time; I’ll work on it.”

“Positive attitude—that’s good.” The lid of a crab hinged up, revealing the prone form of a man in a mesh of motion-sensors. He crawled from the mesh and stepped onto the ice, wearing a spacesuit formed from segmented metal plates. Totems had been welded to the armour, around holographic starscapes infested with serpentine monsters and scantily-clad maidens.

“Who are you?”

“Captain Run Seven.” He stepped closer, examining her suit nameplate. “But you can call me

Seven, Irravel Veda.”

“I hope you burn in hell, Seven.”

Seven smiled—she could see the curve of his grin through his visor; the oddly upturned nostrils of his nose above it. “I’m sensing some negativity here, Irravel. I think we need to put that behind us, don’t you?”

Irravel looked at her murdered adjutants. “Maybe if you tell me which one was the traitor.”

“Traitor?”

“You seemed to have no difficulty finding us.”

“Actually, you found us.” It was a woman’s voice this time. “We use lures—tampering with commercial beacons, like the scavenger’s.” She emerged from one of the other attack machines, wearing a suit similar to Seven’s, except that it displayed the testosterone-saturated male analogues of his space-maidens; all rippling torsos and chromed codpieces.

“Wreckers,” Irravel breathed.

“Yeah. Ships home in on the beacons, then find they ain’t going anywhere in a hurry. We move in from the halo.”

“Disclose all our confidential practices while you’re at it, Mirsky,” Seven said.

She glared at him through her visor. “Veda would have figured it out.”

“We’ll never know now, will we?”

“What does it matter?” she said. “Gonna kill them anyway, aren’t you?”

Seven flashed an arc of teeth filed to points and waved a hand towards the female pirate. “Allow me to introduce Mirsky, our loose-tongued but efficient information retrieval specialist. She’s going to take you on a little trip down memory lane; see if we can’t remember those access codes.”

“What codes?”

“It’ll come back to you,” Seven said.

They were taken through the tunnels, past half-assembled mining machines, onto the surface and then into the pirate ship. The ship was huge: most of it living space. Cramped corridors snaked through hydroponics galleries of spring wheat and dwarf papaya, strung with xenon lights. The ship hummed constantly with carbon dioxide scrubbers, the fetid air making Irravel sneeze. There were children everywhere, frowning at the captives. The pirates obviously had no reefersleep technology:

they stayed warm the whole time, and some of the children Irravel saw had probably been born after the Hirondelle had arrived here.

They arrived at a pair of interrogation rooms where they were separated. Irravel’s room held a couch converted from an old command seat, still carrying warning decals. A console stood in one corner. Painted torture scenes fought for wallspace with racks of surgical equipment; drills, blades and ratcheted contraptions speckled with rust.

Irravel breathed deeply. Hyperventilation could have an anaesthetic effect. Her conditioning would in any case create a state of detachment: the pain would be no less intense, but she would feel it at one remove.

She hoped.

The pirates fiddled with her suit, confused by the modern design, until they stripped her down to her shipboard uniform. Mirsky leant over her. She was small-boned and dark skinned, dirty hair rising in a topknot, eyes mismatched shades of azure. Something clung to the side of her head above the left ear; a silver box with winking status lights. She fixed a crown to Irravel’s head, then made adjustments on the console.

“Decided yet?” Captain Run Seven said, sauntering into the room. He was unlatching his helmet.

“What?”

“Which of our portfolio of interrogation packages you’re going to opt for.”

She was looking at his face now. It wasn’t really human. Seven had man’s bulk and shape, but there was at least as much of the pig in his face. His nose was a snout, his ears two tapered flaps framing a hairless pink skull. Pale eyes evinced animal cunning.

“What the hell are you?”

“Excellent question,” Seven said, clicking a finger in her direction. His bare hand was dark skinned and feminine. “To be honest, I don’t really know. A genetics experiment, perhaps? Was I the seventh failure, or the first success?”

“Are you sure you want an honest answer on that?”

He ignored her. “All I know is that I’ve been here—in the halo around Luyten 726-8—for as long as I can remember.”

“Someone sent you here?”

“In a tiny automated spacecraft; perhaps an old lifepod. The ship’s governing personality raised me as well as it could; attempted to make of me a well-rounded individual.” Seven trailed off momentarily. “Eventually I was found by a passing ship. I staged what might be termed a hostile takeover bid. From then on I’ve had an organization largely recruited from my client base.”

“You’re insane. It might have worked once, but it won’t work with us.”

“Why should you be any different?”

“Neural conditioning. I treat the cargo as my offspring—all 20,000 of them. I can’t betray them in any way.”

Seven smiled his piggy smile. “Funny; the last client thought that too.”

Sometime later Irravel woke alone in a reefersleep casket. She remembered only dislocated episodes of interrogation. There was the memory of a kind of sacrifice, and, later, of the worst terror she could imagine—so intense that she could not bring its cause to mind. Underpinning everything was the certainty that she had not given up the codes.

So why was she still alive?

Everything was quiet and cold. Once she was able to move, she found a suit and wandered the

Hirondelle until she reached a porthole. They were still lashed to the comet. The other craft was gone; presumably en route back to the base in the halo where the pirates must have had a larger ship.

She looked for Markarian, but there was no sign of him.

Then she checked the 20-sleeper chambers; the thousand-berth dormitories. The chamber doors were all open. Most of the sleepers were still there. They’d been butchered, carved open for implants, minds pulped by destructive memory-trawling devices. The horror was too great for any recognizable emotional response. The conditioning made each death feel like a stolen part of her.

Yet something kept her on the edge of sanity: the discovery that 200 sleepers were missing.

There was no sign that they’d been butchered like the others, which left the possibility that they’d been abducted by the pig. It was madness; it would not begin to compensate for the loss of the others—but her psychology allowed no other line of thought.

She could find them again.

Her plan was disarmingly simple. It crystallized in her mind with the clarity of a divine vision. It would be done.

She would repair the ship. She would hunt down Seven. She would recover the sleepers from him. And enact whatever retribution she deemed fit.

She found the chamber where the four Conjoiners had slept, well away from the main dormitories, in part of the ship where the pirates were not likely to have wandered. She was hoping she could revive them and seek their assistance. There seemed no way they could make things worse for her.

But her hopes faded when she saw the scorch marks of weapon blasts around the bulkhead; the door forced.

She stepped inside anyway.

They’d been a sect on Mars, originally; a clique of cyberneticists with a particular fondness for self-experimentation. In 2190 their final experiment had involved distributed processing—allowing their enhanced minds to merge into one massively parallel neural net. The resultant event—a permanent, irrevocable escalation to a new mode of consciousness—was known as the

Transenlightenment.

There’d been a war, of course.

Demarchists had long seen both sides. They used neural augmentation themselves, policed so that they never approached the Conjoiner threshold. They’d brokered the peace, defusing the suspicion around the Conjoiners. Conjoiners had fuelled Demarchist expansion from Europa with their technologies, fused in the white-heat of Transenlightenment. Four of them were along as observers because the Hirondelle used their ramscoop drives.

Irravel still didn’t trust them.

And maybe it didn’t matter. The reefersleep units—fluted caskets like streamlined coffins—were riddled with blast holes. Grimacing against the smell, Irravel examined the remains inside. They’d been cut open, but the pirates seemed to have abandoned the job halfway through, not finding the kinds of implants they were expecting. And maybe not even recognizing that they were dealing with anything other than normal humans, Irravel thought—especially if the pirates who’d done this hadn’t been among Seven’s more experienced crew members; just trigger-happy thugs.

She examined the final casket; the one furthest from the door. It was damaged, but not so badly as the others. The display cartouches were still alive, a patina of frost still adhering to the casket’s lid. The Conjoiner inside looked intact: the pirates had never reached him. She read his nameplate:

Remontoire.

“Yeah, he’s a live one,” said a voice behind Irravel. “Now back off real slow.”

Heart racing, Irravel did as she was told. Slowly, she turned around, facing the woman whose voice she recognized.

“Mirsky?” she said.

“Yeah, it’s your lucky day.” Mirsky was wearing her suit, but without the helmet, making her head seem shrunken in the moat of her neck-ring. She had a gun on Irravel, but the way she pointed it was half-hearted, as if this was a stage in their relationship she wanted to get over as quickly as possible.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Same as you, Veda. Trying to figure out how much shit we’re in; how hard it’ll be to get this ship moving again. Guess we had the same idea about the Conjoiners. Seven went berserk when he heard they’d been killed, but I figured it was worth checking how thorough the job had been.”

“Stop; slow down. Start at the beginning. Why aren’t you with Seven?”

Mirsky pushed past her and consulted the reefersleep indicators. “Seven and me had a falling out.

Fill in the rest yourself.” With quick jabs of her free hand she called up different display modes, frowning at each. “Shit, this ain’t gonna be easy. If we wake the guy without his three friends, he’s gonna be psychotic; no use to us at all.”

“What kind of falling out?”

“Seven reckoned I was holding back too much in the interrogation; not putting you through enough hell.” She scratched at the silver box on the side of her head. “Maybe we can wake him, then fake the cybernetic presence of his friends—what do you think?”

“Why am I still alive, if Seven broke into the sleeper chambers? Why are you still alive?”

“Seven’s a sadist. Abandonment’s more his style than a quick and clean execution. As for you, the pig cut a deal with your second-in-command.”

The implication of that sunk in. “Markarian gave him the codes?”

“It wasn’t you, Veda.”

Strange relief flooded Irravel. She could never be absolved of the crime of losing the cargo, but at least her degree of complicity had lessened.

“But that was only half the deal,” Mirsky continued. “The rest was Seven promising not to kill you if Markarian agreed to join the Hideyoshi, our main ship.” She told Irravel that there’d been a transmitter rigged to her reefersleep unit, so that Markarian would know she was still alive.

“Seven must have known he was taking a risk leaving both of us alive.”

“A pretty small one. The ship’s in pieces and Seven will assume neither of us has the brains to patch it back together.” Mirsky slipped the gun into a holster. “But Seven assumed the Conjoiners were dead. Big mistake. Once we figure a way to wake Remontoire safely, he can help us fix the ship; make it faster too.”

“You’ve got this all worked out, haven’t you?”

“More or less. Something tells me you aren’t absolutely ready to start trusting me, though.”

“Sorry, Mirsky, but you don’t make the world’s most convincing turncoat.”

She reached up with her free hand, gripping the box on the side of her head. “Know what this is?

A loyalty-shunt. Makes simian stem cells; pumps them into the internal carotid artery, just above the cavernous sinus. They jump the blood-brain barrier and build a whole bunch of transient structures tied to primate dominance hierarchies; alpha-male shit. That’s how Seven had us under his command—he was King Monkey. But I’ve turned it off now.”

“That’s supposed to reassure me?”

“No, but maybe this will.”

Mirsky tugged at the box, ripping it away from the side of her head in curds of blood.

Luyten 726-8 Cometary Halo—AD 2309

Irravel felt the Hirondelle turn like a compass needle. The ramscoops gasped at interstellar gas, sucking lone atoms of cosmic hydrogen from cubic metres of vacuum. The engines spat twin beams of thrust, pressing Irravel into her seat with two gees of acceleration. Hardly moving now, still in the local frame of the cometary halo, but in only six months she would be nudging lightspeed.

Her seat floated on a boom in the middle of the dodecahedral bridge. “Map,” Irravel said, and was suddenly drowning in stars; an immense 30-light-year-wide projection of human settled space, centred on the First System.

“There’s the bastard,” Mirsky said, pointing from her own hovering seat, her voice only slightly strained under the gee-load. “Map; give us projection of the Hideyoshi’s vector, and plot our intercept.”

The pirate ship’s icon was still very close to Luyten 726-8; less than a tenth of a light-year out.

They had not seen Seven until now. The thrust from his ship was so tightly focused that it had taken until now for the widening beams of the exhaust to sweep over Hirondelle’s sensors. But now they knew where he was headed. A dashed line indicated the likely course, arrowing right through the map’s heart and out towards the system Lalande 21185. Now came the intercept vector, a neartangent which sliced Seven’s course beyond Sol.

“When does it happen?” Irravel said.

“Depends on how much attention Seven’s paying to what’s coming up behind him, for a start, and what kind of evasive stunts he can pull.”

“Most of my simulations predict an intercept between 2325 and 2330,” Remontoire said.

Irravel savoured the dates. Even for someone trained to fly a starship between systems, they sounded uncomfortably like the future.

“Are you sure it’s him—not just some other ship that happened to be waiting in the halo?”

“Trust me,” Mirsky said. “I can smell the swine from here.”

“She’s right,” Remontoire said. “The destination makes perfect sense. Seven was prohibited from staying here much longer, once the number of missing ships became too large to be explained away as accidents. Now he must seek a well-settled system to profit from what he has stolen.”

The Conjoiner looked completely normal at first glance—a bald man wearing a ship’s uniform, his expression placid—but then one noticed the unnatural bulge of his skull, covered only in a fuzz of baby hair. Most of his glial cells had been supplanted by machines which served the same structural functions but which also performed specialized cybernetic duties, like interfacing with other commune partners or external machinery. Even the organic neurones in his brain were now webbed together by artificial connections which allowed transmission speeds of kilometres per second; factors of ten faster than in normal brains. Only the problem of dispersing waste heat denied the Conjoiners even faster modes of thought.

It was seven years since they’d woken him. Remontoire had not dealt well with the murder of his three compatriots, but Irravel and Mirsky had managed to keep him sane by feeding input into the glial machines, crudely simulating rapport with other commune members. “It provides the kind of comfort to me that a ghost limb offers an amputee,” Remontoire had said. “An illusion of wholeness—but no substitute for the real thing.”

“What more can we do?” Irravel said.

“Return me to another commune with all speed.”

Irravel had agreed, provided Remontoire helped with the ship.

He hadn’t let her down. Under his supervision, half the ship’s mass had been sacrificed, permitting twice the acceleration. They had dug a vault in the comet, lined it with support systems, and entombed what remained of the cargo. The sleepers were nominally dead—there was no real expectation of reviving them again, even if medicine improved in the future—but Irravel had nonetheless set servitors to tend the dead for however long it took, and programmed the beacon to lure another ship, this time to pick up the dead. All that had taken years, of course—but it had also taken Seven as much time to cross the halo to his base; time again to show himself.

“Be so much easier if you didn’t want the others back,” Mirsky said. “Then we could just slam past the pig at relativistic speed and hit him with seven kinds of shit.” She was very proud of the weapons she’d built into the ship, copied from pirate designs with Remontoire’s help.

“I want the sleepers back,” Irravel said.

“And Markarian?”

“He’s mine,” she said, after due consideration. “You get the pig.”

Near Lalande 21185—AD 2328

Relativity squeezed stars until they bled colour. Half a kilometre ahead, the side of Seven’s ship raced toward Irravel like a tsunami.

The Hideyoshi was the same shape as the Hirondelle; honed less by human whim than the edicts of physics. But the Hideyoshi was heavier, with a wider cross-section, incapable of matching the

Hirondelle’s acceleration or of pushing so close to C. It had taken years, but they’d caught up with

Seven, and now the attack was in progress.

Irravel, Mirsky and Remontoire wore thruster-pack-equipped suits, of the type used for inspections outside the ship, with added armour and weapons. Painted for effect, they looked like mechanized Samurai. Another 47 suits were slaved to theirs, acting as decoys. They’d crossed

50,000 kilometres of space between the ships.

“You’re sure Seven doesn’t have any defence?” Irravel had asked, not long after waking from reefersleep.

“Only the in-system ship had any firepower,” Mirsky said. She looked older now; new lines engraved under her eyes. “That’s because no one’s ever been insane enough to contemplate storming another ship in interstellar space.”

“Until now.”

But it wasn’t so stupid, and Mirsky knew it. Matching velocities with another ship was only a question of being faster; squeezing fractionally closer to lightspeed. It might take time, but sooner or later the distance would be closed. And it had taken time, none of which Mirsky had spent in reefersleep. Partly it was because she lacked the right implants—ripped out in infancy when she was captured by Seven. Partly it was a distaste for the very idea of being frozen, instilled by years of pirate upbringing. But also because she wanted time to refine her weapons. They had fired a salvo against the enemy before crossing space in the suits, softening up any weapons buried in his ice and opening holes into the Hideyoshi’s interior.

Now Irravel’s vision blurred, her suit slowing itself before slamming into the ice.

Whiteness swallowed her.

For a moment she couldn’t remember what she was doing here. Then awareness came and she slithered back up the tunnel excavated on her fall, until she reached the surface of the Hideyoshi’s ice-shield.

“Veda—you intact?”

Her armour’s shoulder-mounted comm laser found a line-of-sight to Mirsky. Mirsky was 20 or 30 metres away, around the ship’s lazy circumference, balancing on a ledge of ice. Walls of it stretched above and below like a rockface, lit by the glare from the engines. Decoys were arriving by the second.

“I’m alive,” Irravel said. “Where’s the entry point?”

“Couple of hundred metres upship.”

“Damn. I wanted to come in closer. Remontoire’s out of line-of-sight. How much fuel do you have left?”

“Scarcely enough to take the chill off a penguin’s dick.”

Mirsky raised her arms above her head and fired lines into the ice, rocketing out from her sleeves.

Belly sliding against the shield, she retracted the lines and hauled herself upship.

Irravel followed. They’d burned all their fuel crossing between the two ships, but that was part of the plan. If they didn’t have a chance to raid Seven’s reserves, they’d just kick themselves into space and let the Hirondelle home in on them.

“You think Seven saw us cross over?”

“Definitely. And you can bet he’s doing something about it, too.”

“Don’t do anything that might endanger the cargo, Mirsky—no matter how tempting Seven makes it.”

“Would you sacrifice half the sleepers to get the other half back?”

“That’s not remotely an option.”

Above their heads crevasses opened like eyes. Pirate crabs erupted out, black as night against the ice. Irravel opened fire on the machines. This time, with better weapons and real armour, she began to inflict damage. Behind the crabs, pirates emerged, bulbous in customized armour. Lasers scuffed the ice; bright through gouts of steam. Irravel saw Remontoire now: he was unharmed, and doing his best to shoot the pirates into space.

Above, one of Irravel’s shots dislodged a pirate.

The Hideyoshi’s acceleration dropped him towards her. When the impact came she hardly felt it, her suit’s guylines staying firm. The pirate folded around her like a broken toy, then bounced back against the ship, pinned there by her suit. He was too close to shoot unless Irravel wanted to blow herself into space. Distorted behind glass, his face shaped a word. She got in closer until their visors were touching. Through the glass she saw the asymmetric bulge of a loyalty-shunt.

The face was Markarian’s. At first it seemed like absurd coincidence. Then it occurred to her that

Seven might have sent his newest recruit out to show his mettle. Maybe Seven wouldn’t be far behind. Confronting adversaries was part of the alpha-male inheritance.

“Irravel,” Markarian said, voice laced with static. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

“Don’t flatter yourself you’re the reason I’m here, Markarian. I came for the cargo. You’re just next on the list.”

“What are you going to do—kill me?”

“Do you think you deserve any better than that?” Irravel adjusted her position. “Or are you going to try and justify betraying the cargo?”

He pulled his aged features into a smile. “We made a deal, Irravel; the same way you made a deal about greenfly. But you don’t remember that, do you?”

“Maybe I sold the greenfly machines to the pig,” she said. “If I did that, it was a calculated move to buy the safety of the cargo. You, on the other hand, cut a deal with Seven to save your neck.”

The other pirates were holding fire, nervously marking them. “I did it to save yours, actually.

Does that make any sense?” There was wonder in his eyes now. “Did you ever see Mirsky’s hand?

That was never her own. The pirates swap limbs as badges of rank. They’re very good at connective surgery.”

“You’re not making much sense, Markarian.”

Dislodged ice rained on them. Irravel looked around in time to see another pirate emerging from a crevasse. She recognized the suit artwork: it was Seven. He wore things, strung around his utility belt in transparent bags like obscene fruit. She stared at them for a few seconds before their nature clicked into horrific focus: frozen human heads.

Irravel stifled a reaction to vomit.

“Yes,” Run Seven said. “Ten of your compatriots, recently unburdened of their bodies. But don’t worry—they’re not harmed in any fundamental sense. Their brains are intact—provided you don’t warm them with an ill-aimed shot.”

“I’ve got a clear line of fire,” Mirsky said. “Just say the word and the bastard’s an instant anatomy lesson.”

“Wait,” Irravel said. “Don’t shoot.”

“Sound business sense, Captain Veda. I see you appreciate the value of these heads.”

“What’s he talking about?” Mirsky said.

“Their neural patterns can be retrieved.” It was Remontoire speaking now. “We Conjoiners have had the ability to copy minds onto machine substrates for some time now, though we haven’t advertised it. But that doesn’t matter—there have been experiments on Yellowstone which approach our early successes. And these heads aren’t even thinking: only topologies need to be mapped, not electrochemical processes.”

The pig took one of the heads from his belt and held it to eye-level, for inspection. “The

Conjoiner’s right. They’re not really dead. And they can be yours if you wish to do business.”

“What do you want for them?”

“Markarian, for a start. All that Demarchy expertise makes for a very efficient second-incommand.”

Irravel glanced down at her prisoner. “You can’t buy loyalty with a box and a few neural connections.”

“No? In what way do our loyalty-shunts differ from the psychosurgery which your world inflicted on you, Irravel, yoking your motherhood instinct to 20,000 sleepers you don’t even know by name?”

“We have a deal or not?”

“Only if you throw in the Conjoiner as well.”

Irravel looked at Remontoire; some snake part of her mind weighing options with reptilian detachment.

“No!” he said. “You promised!”

“Shut up,” Seven said. “Or when you do get to rejoin your friends, it’ll be in instalments.”

“I’m sorry,” Irravel said. “I can’t lose even ten of the cargo.”

Seven tossed the first head down to her. “Now let Markarian go and we’ll see about the rest.”

Irravel looked down at him. “It’s not over between you and me.”

Then she released him, and he scrambled back up the ice towards Seven.

“Excellent. Here’s another head. Now the Conjoiner.”

Irravel issued a subvocal command; watched Remontoire stiffen. “His suit’s paralysed. Take him.”

Two pirates worked down to him, checked him over and nodded towards Seven. Between them they hauled him back up the ice, vanishing into a crevasse and back up into the Hideyoshi.

“The other eight heads,” Irravel said.

“I’m going to throw them away from the ship. You’ll be able to locate them easily enough. While

I’m doing that, I’m going to retreat, and you’re going to leave.”

“We could end this now,” Mirsky said.

“I need those heads.”

“They really fucked with your psychology big-time, didn’t they?” She raised her weapon and began shooting Seven and the other pirates. Irravel watched her carve up the remaining heads; splintering frozen bone into the vacuum.

“No!”

“Sorry,” Mirsky said. “Had to do it, Veda.”

Seven clutched at his chest, fingers mashing the pulp of the heads, still tethered to his belt. She’d punctured his suit. As he tried to stem the damburst, his face was carved with the intolerable knowledge that his reign had just ended.

But something had hit Irravel too.

Sylveste Institute, Yellowstone Orbit, Epsilon Eridani—AD 2415

“Where am I?” Irravel asked. “How am I thinking this?”

The woman’s voice was the colour of mahogany. “Somewhere safe. You died on the ice, but we got you back in time.”

“For what?”

Mirsky sighed, as though this was something she would rather not have had to explain this soon.

“To scan you, just like we did with the frozen heads. Copy you into the ship.”

Maybe she should have felt horror, or indignation, or even relief that some part of her had been spared.

Instead, she just felt impatience.

“What now?”

“We’re working on it,” Mirsky said.

TRANS-ALDEBARAN SPACE—AD 2673

“We saved her body after she died,” Mirsky said, wheezing slightly. She found it hard to move around under what to Irravel was the ship’s normal two and a half gees of thrust. “After the battle we brought her back on board.”

Irravel thought of her mother dying on the other ship, the one they were chasing. For years they had deliberately not narrowed the distance, holding back but not allowing the Hideyoshi to slip from view.

Until now, it hadn’t even occurred to Irravel to ask why.

She looked through the casket’s window, trying to match her own features against what she saw in the woman’s face, trying to project her own 15 years into Mother Irravel’s adulthood.

“Why did you keep her so cold?”

“We had to extract what we could from her brain,” Mirsky said. “Memories and neural patterns.

We trawled them and stored them in the ship.”

“What good was that?”

“We knew they’d come in useful again.”

She’d been cloned from Mother Irravel. They were not identical—no Mixmaster expertise could duplicate the precise biochemical environment of Mother Irravel’s womb, or the shaping experiences of early infancy, and their personalities had been sculpted centuries apart, in totally different worlds. But they were still close copies. They even shared memories: scripted into Irravel’s mind by medichines, so that she barely noticed each addition to her own experiences.

“Why did you do this?” she asked.

“Because Irravel began something,” Mirsky said. “Something I promised I’d help her finish.”

Stormwatch Station, Aethra, Hyades Trade Envelope—AD 2931

“Why are you interested in our weapons?” the Nestbuilder asked. “We are not aware of any wars within the chordate phylum at this epoch.”

“It’s a personal matter,” Irravel said.

The Nestbuilder hovered a metre above the trade floor, suspended in a column of microgravity.

They were oxygen-breathing arthropods who’d once ascended to spacefaring capability. No longer intelligent, yet supported by their self-renewing machinery, they migrated from system to system, constructing elaborate, space-filling structures from solid diamond. Other Nestbuilder swarms would arrive and occasionally occupy the new nests. There seemed no purpose to this activity, but for tens of thousands of years they had been host to a smaller, cleverer species known as the Slugs.

Small communities of Slugs—anything up to a dozen—lived in warm, damp niches in a

Nestbuilder’s intricately folded shell. They had long since learned how to control the host’s behaviour and exploit its subservient technology.

Irravel studied a Slug now, crawling out from under a lip of shell material.

The thing was a multicellular invertebrate not much larger than her fist; a bag of soft blue protoplasm, sprouting appendages only when they were needed. A slightly bipolar shadow near one end might have been its central nervous system, but there hardly seemed enough of it to trap sentience. There were no obvious sense or communicational organs, but a pulsing filament of blue slime reached back into the Nestbuilder’s fold. When the Slug spoke, it did so through the

Nestbuilder; a rattle of chitin from the host’s mouthparts which approximated human language. A hovering jewel connected to the station’s lexical database did the rest, rendering the voice calmly feminine.

“A personal matter? A vendetta? Then it’s true.” The mouthparts clicked together in what humans presumed was the symbiotic creature’s laughter response. “You are who we suspected.”

“She did tell you her name was Irravel, guy,” Mirsky said, sipping black coffee with delicate movements of the exoskeletal frame she always wore in high gravity.

“Among you chordates, the name is not so unusual now,” the Slug reminded them. “But you do fit the description, Irravel.”

They were near one of the station’s vast picture windows, overlooking Aethra’s mighty, roiling cloud decks, 50 kilometres below. It was getting dark now and the storm players were preparing to start a show. Irravel saw two of their seeders descending into the clouds; robot craft tethered by a nearly invisible filament. The seeders would position the filament so that it bridged cloud layers with different static potentials; they’d then detach and return to Stormwatch, while the filament held itself in position by rippling along its length. For hundreds of kilometres around, other filaments would have been placed in carefully selected positions. They were electrically isolating now, but at the stormplayer’s discretion, each filament would flick over into a conductive state: a massive, choreographed lightning flash.

“I never set out to become a legend,” Irravel said. “Or a myth, for that matter.”

“Yes. There are so many stories about you, Veda, that it might be simpler to assume you never existed.”

“What makes you think otherwise?”

“The fact that a chordate who could have been Markarian also passed this way, only a year or so ago.” The Nestbuilder’s shell pigmentation flickered, briefly revealing a picture of Markarian’s ship.

“So you sold weapons to him?”

“That would be telling, wouldn’t it?” The mouthparts clattered again. “You would have to answer a question of ours first.”

Outside, the opening flashes of the night’s performance gilded the horizon; like the first stirrings of a symphony. Aethra’s rings echoed the flashes, pale ghosts momentarily cleaving the sky.

“What is it you want to know?”

“We Slugs are among the few intelligent, starfaring cultures in this part of the Galaxy. During the

War against Intelligence we avoided the Inhibitors by hiding ourselves among the mindless

Nestbuilders.”

Irravel nodded. Slugs were one of the few alien species known to humanity who would even acknowledge the existence of the feared Inhibitors. Like humanity, they’d fought and beaten the revenants—at least for now.

“It is the weaponry you seek which enabled us to triumph—but even then only at colossal cost to our phylum. Now we are watchful for new threats.”

“I don’t see where this is leading.”

“We have heard rumours. Since you have come from the direction of those rumours—the local stellar neighbourhood around your phylum’s birth star—we imagined you might have information of value.”

Irravel exchanged a sideways glance with Mirsky. The old woman’s wizened, age-spotted skull looked as fragile as paper, but she remained an unrivalled tactician. They knew each other so well now that Mirsky could impart advice with the subtlest of movements; expression barely troubling the lined mask of her face.

“What kind of information were you seeking?”

“Information about something that frightens us.” The Nestbuilder’s pigmentation flickered again, forming an image of—something. It was a splinter of grey-brown against speckled blackness—perhaps the Nestbuilder’s attempt at visualizing a planetoid. And then something erupted across the surface of the world, racing from end to end like a film of verdigris. Where it had passed, fissures opened up, deepening until they were black fractures, as if the world were a calving iceberg. And then it blew apart, shattering into a thousand green-tinged fragments.

“What was that?” Irravel said.

“We were rather hoping you could tell us.” The Nestbuilder’s pigmentation refreshed again, and this time what they were seeing was clearly a star, veiled in a toroidal belt of golden dust.

“Machines have dismantled every rocky object in the system where these images were captured;

Ross 128, which lies within eleven light-years of your birth star. They have engendered a swarm of trillions of rocks on independent orbits. Each rock is sheathed in a pressurized bubble membrane, within which an artificial plant-based ecosystem has been created. The same machines have fashioned other sources of raw material into mirrors, larger than worlds themselves, which trap sunlight above and below the ecliptic and focus it onto the swarm.”

“And why does this frighten you?”

The Nestbuilder leant closer in its column of microgravity. “Because we saw it being resisted. As if these machines had never been intended to wreak such transformations. As if your phylum had created something it could not control.”

“And—these attempts at resistance?”

“Failed.”

“But if one system was accidentally transformed, it doesn’t mean ...” Irravel trailed off. “You’re worried about them crossing interstellar space, to other systems. Even if that happened—couldn’t you resist the spread? This can only be human technology—nothing that would pose any threat to yourselves.”

“Perhaps it was once human technology, with programmed limitations to prevent it replicating uncontrollably. But those shackles have been broken. Worse, the machines have hybridized, gaining resilience and adaptability with each encounter with something external. First the Melding Plague, infection with which may have been a deliberate ploy to by-pass the replication limits.”

Irravel nodded. The Melding Plague had swept human space 400 years earlier, terminating the

Demarchist Belle Epoque. Like the Black Death of the previous millennium, it evoked terror generations after it had passed.

“Later,” the Nestbuilder continued, “it may have encountered and assimilated Inhibitor technology, or worse. Now it will be very hard to stop, even with the weapons at our disposal.”

“An image of one of the machines flickered onto the Nestbuilder’s shell, like a peculiar tattoo.

Irravel shivered. The Slug was right: waves of hybridization had transformed the initial architecture into something queasily alien. But enough of the original plan remained for there to be no doubt in her mind. She was looking at an evolved greenfly; one of the self-replicating breeders she had given

Captain Run Seven. How it had broken loose was anyone’s guess. She speculated that Seven’s crew had sold the technology on to a third party, decades or centuries after gaining it from her. Perhaps that third party had reclusively experimented in the Ross 128 system, until the day when greenfly tore out of their control.

“I don’t know why you think I can help,” she said.

“Perhaps we were mistaken, then, to credit a 500-year-old rumour which said that you had been the original source of these machines.”

She had insulted it by daring to bluff. The Slugs were easily insulted. They read human beings far better than humans read Slugs.

“Like you say,” she answered. “You can’t believe everything.”

The Slug made the Nestbuilder fold its armoured, spindly limbs across its mouthparts, a gesture of displeased huffiness.

“You chordates,” it said. “You’re all the same.”

Interstellar Space—AD 3354

Mirsky was dead. She had died of old age.

Irravel placed her body in an armoured coffin and ejected her into space when the Hirondelle’s speed was only a hair’s breadth under light. “Do it for me, Irravel,” Mirsky had told her, towards the end. “Keep my body aboard until we’re almost touching light, and then fire me ahead of the ship.”

“Is that what you want?”

“It’s an old pirate tradition. Burial at C.” She forced a smile which must have sapped what little energy she had left. “That’s a joke, Irravel, but it only makes sense in a language neither of us have heard for a while.”

Irravel pretended that she understood. “Mirsky? There’s something I have to tell you. Do you remember the Nestbuilder?”

“That was centuries ago, Veda.”

“I know. I just keep worrying that maybe it was right.”

“About what?”

“Those machines. About how I started it all. They say it’s spread now; to other systems. It doesn’t look like anyone knows how to stop it.”

“And you think all that was your fault?”

“It’s crossed my mind.”

Mirsky convulsed, or shrugged—Irravel wasn’t sure. “Even if it was your fault, Veda, you did it with the best of intentions. So you fucked up slightly. We all make mistakes.”

“Destroying whole solar systems is just a fuck-up?”

“Hey, accidents happen.”

“You always did have a sense of humour, Mirsky.”

“Yeah; guess I did.” She managed a smile. “One of us needed one, Veda.”

Thinking of that, Irravel watched the coffin fall ahead, dwindling until it was only a tiny mote of steel-grey, and then nothing.

Subaru Commonwealth—Pleiades Cluster—AD 4161

The starbridge had long ago attained sentience.

Dense with machinery, it sung an endless hymn to its own immensity, throbbing like the lowest string on a guitar. Vacuum-breathing acolytes had voluntarily rewired their minds to view the bridge as an actual deity, translating the humming into their sensoria and passing decades in contemplative ecstasy.

Clasped in a cushioning field, an elevator ferried Irravel down the bridge from the orbital hub to the surface in a few minutes, accompanied by an entourage of children from the ship, many of whom bore in youth the hurting imprint of Mirsky’s genes. The bridge rose like the stem of a goblet from a ground terminal which was itself a scalloped shell of hyperdiamond, filled with tiered perfume gardens and cascading pools, anchored to the largest island in an equatorial archipelago.

The senior children walked Irravel down to a beach of silver sand on the terminal’s edge, where jewelled crabs moved like toys. She bid the children farewell, then waited, warm breezes fingering the hem of her sari.

Minutes later, the children’s elevator flashed heavenward.

Irravel looked out at the ocean, thinking of the Pattern Jugglers. Here, as on dozens of other oceanic worlds, there was a colony of the alien intelligences. Transformed to aquatic bodyplans themselves, the Subaruns had established close rapport with the aliens. In the morning, she would be taken out to meet the Jugglers, drowned, dissolved on the cellular level, every atom in her body swapped for one in the ocean, remade into something not quite human.

She was terrified.

Islanders came toward the shore, skimming water on penanted trimarans, attended by oceanforms, sleek gloss-grey hybrids of porpoise and ray, whistlespeech downshifted into the human spectrum. The Subaruns’ epidermal scales shimmered like imbricated armour: biological photocells drinking scorching blue Pleiadean sunlight. Sentient veils hung in the sky, rippling gently like aurorae, shading the archipelago from the fiercest wavelengths. As the actinic eye of

Taygeta sank towards the horizon, the veils moved with it like living clouds. Flocks of phantasmagoric birds migrated with the veils.

The purple-skinned elder’s scales flashed green and opal as he approached Irravel along the coral jetty, a stick in one webbed hand, supported by two aides, a third shading his aged crown with a delicately water-coloured parasol. The aides were all descended from late-model Conjoiners; they had the translucent cranial crest through which bloodflow had once been channelled to cool their supercharged minds. Seeing them gave Irravel a dual-edged pang of nostalgia and guilt. She had not seen Conjoiners for nearly a thousand years, ever since they had fragmented into a dozen factions and vanished from human affairs. Neither had she entirely forgotten her betrayal of Remontoire.

But that had been so long ago.

A Communicant made up the party, gowned in brocade, hazed by a blur of entoptic projections.

Communicants were small and elfin, with a phenomenal talent for natural languages, augmented by

Juggler transforms. Irravel sensed that this one was old and revered, despite the fact that

Communicant genes did not express for great longevity.

The elder halted before her.

The head of his walking stick was a tiny lemur skull inside an eggsized space helmet. He spoke something clearly ceremonial, but Irravel understood none of the sounds he made. She groped for something to say, recalling the oldest language in her memory, and therefore the one most likely to be recognized in any far-flung human culture.

“Thank you for letting us stop here,” she said.

The Communicant hobbled forward, already shaping words experimentally with his wide, protruding lips. For a moment his sounds were like an infant’s first attempts at vocalization. But then they resolved into something Irravel understood.

“Am I—um—making the slightest sense to you?”

“Yes,” Irravel said. “Yes, thank you.”

“Canasian,” the Communicant diagnosed. “Twenty-third, twenty-fourth centuries, Lacaille 9352 dialect, Fand subdialect?”

Irravel nodded.

“Your kind are very rare now,” he said, studying her as if she was some kind of exotic butterfly.

“But not unwelcome.” His features cracked into an elfin smile.

“What about Markarian?” Irravel said. “I know his ship passed through this system less than 50 years ago—I still have a fix on it as it moves out of the cluster.”

“Other lighthuggers do come, yes. Not many—one or two a century.”

“And what happened when the last one came through?”

“The usual tribute was given.”

“Tribute?”

“Something ceremonial.” The Communicant’s smile was wider than ever. “To the glory of Irravel. With many actors, beautiful words, love, death, laughter, tears.”

She understood, slowly, dumbfoundedly.

“You’re putting on a play?”

The elder must have understood something of that. Nodding proudly, he extended a hand across the darkening bay, oceanforms cutting the water like scythes. A distant raft carried lanterns and the glimmerings of richly painted backdrops. Boats converged from across the bay. A dirigible loomed over the archipelago’s edge, pregnant with gondolas.

“We want you to play Irravel,” the Communicant said, beckoning her forward. “This is our greatest honour.”

When they reached the raft, the Communicant taught Irravel her lines and the actions she would be required to make. It was all simple enough—even the fact that she had to deliver her parts in

Subarun. By the end of evening she was fluent in their language. There was nothing she couldn’t learn in an instant these days, by sheer force of will. But it was not enough. To catch Markarian, she would have to break out of the narrow labyrinth of human thought entirely. That was why she had come to Jugglers.

That night they performed the play, while boats congregated around them, topheavy with lolling islanders. The sun sank and the sky glared with a thousand blue gems studding blue velvet. Night in the heart of the Pleiades was the most beautiful thing Irravel had dared imagine. But in the direction of Sol, when she amplified her vision, there was a green thumbprint on the sky. Every century, the green wave was larger, as neighbouring solar systems were infected and transformed by the rogue terraforming machines. Given time, it would even reach the Pleiades.

Irravel got drunk on islander wine and learnt the tributes’ history.

The plots varied immensely, but the protagonists always resembled Markarian and Irravel; mythic figures entwined by destiny, remembered across 2,000 years. Sometimes one or the other was the clear villain, but as often as not they were both heroic, misunderstanding each other’s motives in true tragic fashion. Sometimes they ended with both parties dying. They rarely ended happily. But there was always some kind of redemption when the pursuit was done.

In the interlude, she felt she had to tell the Communicant the truth, so that he could tell the elder.

“Listen, there’s something you need to know.” Irravel didn’t wait for his answer. “I’m really her; really the person I’m playing.”

For a long time he didn’t seem to understand, before shaking his head slowly and sadly.

“No; I thought you’d be different. You seemed different. But many say that.”

She shrugged. There seemed little point arguing, and anything she said now could always be ascribed to wine. In the morning, the remark had been quietly forgotten. She was taken out to sea and drowned.

Galactic North—AD 9730

“Markarian? Answer me.”

She watched the Hideyoshi’s magnified image, looming just out of weapons range. Like the Hirondelle, it had changed almost beyond recognition. The hull glistened within a skein of armouring force. The engines, no longer physically coupled to the rest of the ship, flew alongside like dolphins. They were anchored in fields which only became visible when some tiny stress afflicted them.

For centuries of worldtime she had made no attempt to communicate with him. But now her mind had changed. The green wave had continued for millennia, an iridescent cataract spreading across the eye of the Galaxy. It had assimilated the blue suns of the Subaran Commonwealth in mere centuries—although by then Irravel and Markarian were a thousand light-years closer to the core, beginning to turn away from the plane of the Galaxy, and the death screams of those gentle islanders never reached them. Nothing stopped it, and once the green wave had swallowed them, systems fell silent. The Juggler transformation allowed Irravel to grasp the enormity of it; allowed her to stare unflinchingly into the horror of a million poisoned stars and apprehend each individually.

She knew more of what it was, now.

It was impossible for stars to shine green, any more than an ingot of metal could become greenhot if it was raised to a certain temperature. Instead, something was veiling them—staining their light, like coloured glass. Whatever it was stole energy from the stellar spectra at the frequencies of chlorophyll. Stars were shining through curtains of vegetation, like lanterns in a forest. The greenfly machines were turning the Galaxy into a jungle.

It was time to talk. Time—as in the old plays of the dead islanders—to initiate the final act, before the two of them fell into the cold of intergalactic space. She searched her repertoire of communication systems, until she found something which was as ancient as ceremony demanded.

She aimed the message laser at him, cutting through his armour. The beam was too ineffectual to be mistaken as anything other than an attempt to talk. No answer came, so she repeated the message in a variety of formats and languages. Days of ship-time passed—decades of worldtime.

Talk, you bastard.

Growing impatient, she examined her weapons options. Armaments from the Nestbuilders were among the most advanced: theoretically they could mole through the loam of spacetime and inflict precise harm anywhere in Markarian’s ship. But to use them she had to convince herself that she knew the interior layout of the Hideyoshi. Her mass-sensor sweeps were too blurred to be much help. She might as easily harm the sleepers as take out his field nodes. Until now, it was too much risk to contemplate.

But all games needed an end.

Willing her qualms from mind, she enabled the Nestbuilder armaments, feeling them stress space-time in the Hirondelle’s belly, ready to short-circuit it entirely. She selected attack loci in Markarian’s ship; best guesses that would cripple him rather than blow him out of the sky.

Then something happened.

He replied, modulating his engine thrust in staccato stabs. The frequency was audio. Quickly Irravel translated the modulation.

“I don’t understand,” Markarian said, “why you took so long to answer me, and why you ignored me so long when I replied?”

“You never replied until now,” she said. “I’d have known if you had.”

“Would you?”

There was something in his tone which convinced her that he wasn’t lying. Which left only one possibility: that he had tried speaking to her before, and that in some way her own ship had kept this knowledge from her.

“Mirsky must have done it,” Irravel said. “She must have installed filters to block any communication from your ship.”

“Mirsky?”

“She would have done it as a favour to me; maybe as an order from my former self.” She didn’t bother elaborating: Markarian was sure to know she had died and then been reborn as a clone of the original Irravel. “My former self had the neural conditioning which kept her on the trail of the sleepers. The clone never had it, which meant that my instinct to pursue the sleepers had to be reinforced.”

“By lies?”

“Mirsky would have done it out of friendship,” Irravel said. And for a moment she believed herself, while wondering how friendship could seem so like betrayal.

Markarian’s image smiled. They faced each other across an absurdly long banquet table, with the Galaxy projected above it, flickering in the light of candelabra.

“Well?” he said, of the green stain spreading across the spiral. “What do you think?”

Irravel had long ago stopped counting time and distance, but she knew it had been at least 15,000

years and that many light-years since they had turned from the plane. Part of her knew, of course:

although the wave swallowed suns, it had no use for pulsars, and their metronomic ticking and slow decay allowed positional triangulation in space and time with chilling precision. But she elected to bury that knowledge beneath her conscious thought processes: one of the simpler Juggler tricks.

“What do I think? I think it terrifies me.”

“Our emotional responses haven’t diverged as much as I’d feared.”

They didn’t have to use language. They could have swapped pure mental concepts between ships:

concatenated strings of qualia, some of which could only be grasped in minds rewired by Pattern

Jugglers. But Irravel considered it sufficient that they could look each other in the eye without flinching.

The Galaxy falling below had been frozen in time: light waves struggling to overtake Irravel and

Markarian. The wave had seemed to slow, and then halt its advance. But then Markarian had turned, diving back towards the plane. The Galaxy quickened to life, rushing to finish 30,000 years of history before the two ships returned. The wave surged on. Above the banquet table, one arm of the star-clotted spiral was shot through with green, like a mote of ink spreading into blotting paper. The edge of the green wave was feathered, fractal, extending verdant tendrils.

“Do you have any observations?” Irravel asked.

“A few.” Markarian sipped from his chalice. “I’ve studied the patterns of starlight among the suns already swallowed by the wave. They’re not uniformly green—it’s correlated with rational angle.

The green matter must be concentrated near the ecliptic, extending above and below it, but not encircling the stars completely.”

Irravel thought back to what the Nestbuilder had shown her.

“Meaning what?” she asked, testing Markarian.

“Swarms of absorbing bodies, on orbits resembling comets, or asteroids. I think the greenfly machines must have dismantled everything smaller than a Jovian, then enveloped the rubble in transparent membranes which they filled with air, water and greenery—self-sustaining biospheres.

Then they were cast adrift. Trillions of tiny worlds, around each star. No rocky planets any more.”

Irravel retrieved a name from the deep past. “Like Dyson spheres?”

“Dyson clouds, perhaps.”

“Do you think anyone survived? Are there niches in the wave where humans can live? That was the point of greenfly, after all, to create living space.”

“Maybe,” Markarian said, with no great conviction. “Perhaps some survivors found ways inside, as their own worlds were smashed and reassembled into the cloud ...”

“But you don’t think it’s very likely?”

“I’ve been listening, Irravel—scanning the assimilated regions for any hint of an extant technological culture. If anyone did survive, they’re either keeping deliberately quiet or they don’t even know how to make a radio signal by accident.”

“It was my fault, Markarian.”

His tone was rueful. “Yes ... I couldn’t help but arrive at that conclusion.”

“I never intended this.”

“I think that goes without saying, wouldn’t you? No one could have guessed the consequences of that one action.”

“Would you?”

He shook his head. “In all likelihood, I’d have done exactly what you did.”

“I did it out of love, Markarian. For the cargo.”

“I know.”

She believed him.

“What happened back there, Markarian? Why did you give up the codes when I didn’t?”

“Because of what they did to you, Irravel.”

He told her. How neither Markarian nor Irravel had shown any signs of revealing the codes under Mirsky’s interrogation, until something new was tried.

“They were good at surgery,” Markarian said. “Seven’s crew swapped limbs and body parts as badges of status. They knew how to sever and splice nerves.” The image didn’t allow her to interrupt. “They cut your head off. Kept it alive in a state of borderline consciousness, and then showed it to me. That’s when I gave them the codes.”

For a long while Irravel said nothing. Then it occurred to her to check her old body, still frozen in the same casket where Mirsky had once revealed it to her. She ordered some children to prepare the body for a detailed examination, then looked through their eyes. The microscopic evidence of reconnective surgery around the neck was too slight to have ever shown up unless one was looking for it. But now there was no mistaking it.

I did it to save your neck, Markarian had said, when she had held him pinned to the ice of Seven’s ship.

“You seem to be telling the truth,” she said, when she had released the children. “The nature of your betrayal was ...” And then she paused, searching for the words, while Markarian watched her across the table. “Different than I assumed. Possibly less of a crime. But still a betrayal, Markarian.”

“One I’ve lived with for 300 years of subjective time.”

“You could have returned the sleepers alive at any time. I wouldn’t have attacked you.” But she didn’t even sound convincing to herself.

“What now?” Markarian said. “Do we keep this distance, arguing until one of us has the nerve to strike against the other? I’ve Nestbuilder weapons as well, Irravel. I think I could rip you apart before you could launch a reprisal.”

“You’ve had the opportunity to do so before. Perhaps you never had the nerve, though. What’s changed now?”

Markarian’s gaze flicked to the map. “Everything. I think we should see what happens before making any rash decisions, don’t you?”

Irravel agreed.

She willed herself into stasis; medichines arresting all biological activity in every cell in her body. The ‘chines would only revive her when something—anything—happened, on a Galactic timescale. Markarian would retreat into whatever mode of suspension he favoured, until woken by the same stimulus.

He was still sitting there when time resumed, as if only a moment had interrupted their conversation.

The wave had spread further now. It had eaten into the Galaxy for 10,000 light-years around Sol—a third of the way to the core. There was no sign that it had encountered resistance—at least nothing that had done more than hinder it. There had never been many intelligent, starfaring cultures to begin with, the Nestbuilder had told her. Perhaps the few that existed were even now making plans to retard the wave. Or perhaps it had swallowed them, as it swallowed humanity.

“Why did we wake?” Irravel said. “Nothing changed, except that it’s become larger.”

“Maybe not,” Markarian said. “I had to be sure, but now I don’t think there’s any doubt. I’ve just detected a radio message from within the plane of the Galaxy; from within the wave.”

“Yes?”

“Looks like someone survived after all.”

The radio message was faint, but nothing else was transmitting on that or any adjacent frequency, except for the senseless mush of cosmic background sources. It was also in a language they recognized.

“It’s Canasian,” Irravel said.

“Fand subdialect,” Irravel added, marvellingly.

It was also beamed in their direction, from somewhere deep in the swathe of green, almost coincident with the position of a pulsar. The message was a simple one, frequency modulated around one and a half megahertz, repeated for a few minutes every day of Galactic time. Whoever was sending it clearly lacked the resources to transmit continuously. It was also coherent: amplified and beamed.

Someone wanted to speak to them.

The man’s disembodied head appeared above the banquet table, chiselled from pixels. He was immeasurably old; a skull draped in parchment; something that should have been embalmed rather than talking.

Irravel recognized the face.

“It’s him,” she said, in Markarian’s direction. “Remontoire. Somehow he made it across all this time.”

Markarian nodded slowly. “He must have remembered us, and known where to look. Even across thousands of light-years, we can still be seen. There can’t be many objects still moving relativistically.”

Remontoire told his story. His people had fled to the pulsar system 20,000 years ago—more so now, since his message had taken thousands of years to climb out of the Galaxy. They had seen the wave coming, as had thousands of other human factions, and like many they had observed that the wave shunned pulsars; burnt-out stellar corpses rarely accompanied by planets. Some intelligence governing the wave must have recognized that pulsars were valueless; that even if a Dyson cloud could be created around them, there would be no sunlight to focus.

For thousands of years they had waited around the pulsar, growing ever more silent and cautious, seeing other cultures make errors which drew the wave upon them, for by now it interpreted any other intelligence as a threat to its progress, assimilating the weapons used against it.

Then—over many more thousands of years—Remontoire’s people saw the wave learn, adapting like a vast neural net, becoming curious about those few pulsars which harboured planets. Soon their place of refuge would become nothing of the sort.

“Help us,” Remontoire said. “Please.”

It took 3,000 years to reach them.

For most of that time, Remontoire’s people acted on faith, not knowing that help was on its way.

During the first thousand years they abandoned their system, compressing their population down to a sustaining core of only a few hundred thousand. Together with the cultural data they’d preserved during the long centuries of their struggle against the wave, they packed their survivors into a single hollowed-out rock and flung themselves out of the ecliptic using a mass-driver which fuelled itself from the rock’s own bulk. They called it Hope. A million decoys had to be launched, just to ensure that Hope got through the surrounding hordes of assimilating machines.

Inside, most of the Conjoiners slept out the 2,000 years of solitude before Irravel and Markarian reached them.

“Hope would make an excellent shield,” Markarian mused, as they approached it, “if one of us considered a pre-emptive strike against the other.”

“Don’t think I wouldn’t.”

They moved their ships to either side of the dark shard of rock, extended field grapples, then hauled in.

“Then why don’t you?” Markarian said.

For a moment Irravel didn’t have a good answer. When she found one, she wondered why it hadn’t been more obvious before. “Because they need us more than I need revenge.”

“A higher cause?”

“Redemption,” she said.

Hope, Galactic Plane—AD Circa 40,000

They didn’t have long. Their approach, diving down from Galactic North, had drawn the attention of the wave’s machines, directing them towards the one rock which mattered. A wall of annihilation was moving toward them at half the speed of light. When it reached Hope, it would turn it into the darkest of nebulae.

Conjoiners boarded the Hirondelle and invited Irravel into the Hope: The hollowed-out chambers of the rock were Edenic to her children, after all the decades of subjective time they’d spent aboard since last planetfall. But it was a doomed paradise, the biomes grey with neglect, as if the

Conjoiners had given up long ago.

Remontoire welcomed Irravel next to a rockpool filmed in grey dust. Half the sun-panels set into the distant honeycombed ceiling were black.

“You came,” he said. He wore a simple smock and trousers. His anatomy was early-model

Conjoiner: almost fully human.

“You’re not him, are you? You look like him—sound like him—but the image you sent us was of someone much older.”

“I’m sorry. His name was chosen for its familiarity; my likeness shaped to his. We searched our collective memories and found the experiences of the one you knew as Remontoire ... but that was a long time ago, and he was never known by that name to us.”

“What was his name?”

“Even your Juggler cortex could not accommodate it, Irravel.”

She had to ask. “Did he make it back to a commune?”

“Yes, of course,” the man said, as if her question was foolish. “How else could we have absorbed his experiences back into the Transenlightenment?”

“And did he forgive me?”

“I forgive you now,” he said. “It amounts to the same thing.”

She willed herself to think of him as Remontoire.

The Conjoiners hadn’t allowed themselves to progress in all the thousands of years they waited around the pulsar, fearing that any social change—no matter how slight—would eventually bring the wave upon them. They had studied it, contemplated weapons they might use against it—but other than that, all they had done was wait.

They were very good at waiting.

“How many refugees did you bring?”

“One hundred thousand.” Before Irravel could answer, Remontoire shook his head. “I know; too many. Perhaps half that number can be carried away on your ships. But half is better than nothing.”

She thought back to her own sleepers. “I know. Still, we might be able to take more ... I don’t know about Markarian’s ship, but—”

He cut her off, gently. “I think you’d better come with me,” said Remontoire, and then led her aboard the Hideyoshi.

“How much of it did you explore?”

“Enough to know there’s no one alive anywhere in this ship,” Remontoire said. “If there are 200 cryogenically frozen sleepers, we didn’t find them.”

“No sleepers?”

“Just this one.”

What they’d arrived at was a plinth, supporting a reefersleep casket, encrusted with gold statuary; spacesuited figures with hands folded across their chests like resting saints. The glass lid of the casket was veined with fractures; the withered figure inside older than time. Markarian’s skeletal frame was swaddled in layers of machines, all of archaic provenance. His skull had split open, a fused mass spilling out like lava.

“Is he dead?” Irravel asked.

“Depends what you mean by dead.” The Conjoiner’s hand sketched across the neural mass. “His organic mind must have been completely swamped by machines centuries ago. His linkage to the

Hideyoshi would have been total. There would have been very little point discriminating between the two.”

“Why didn’t he tell me what had become of him?”

“No guarantee he knew. Once he was in this state, with his personality running entirely on machine substrates, he could have edited his own memories and perceptual inputs—deceiving himself that he was still corporeal.”

Irravel looked away from the casket, forcing troubling questions from her mind. “Is his personality still running the ship?”

“We detected only caretaker programs; capable of imitating him when the need arose, but lacking sentience.”

“Is that all there was?”

“No.” Remontoire reached through one of the casket’s larger fractures, prising something from

Markarian’s fingers. It was a sliver of computer memory. “We examined this already, though not in great detail. It’s partitioned into 190 areas, each large enough to hold complete neural and genetic maps for one human being, encoded into superposed electron states on Rydberg atoms.”

She took the sliver from him. It didn’t feel like much. “He burned the sleepers onto this?”

“Three hundred years is much longer than any of them expected to sleep. By scanning them he lost nothing.”

“Can you retrieve them?”

“It would not be trivial,” the Conjoiner said. “But given time, we could do it. Assuming any of them would welcome being born again, so far from home.”

She thought of the infected Galaxy hanging below them, humming with the chill sentience of machines. “Maybe the kindest thing would be to simulate the past,” she said. “Re-create

Yellowstone, and revive them on it, as if nothing had ever gone wrong.”

“Is that what you’re advocating?”

“No,” she said, after toying with the idea in all seriousness. “We need all the genetic diversity we can get, if we’re going to establish a new branch of humanity outside the Galaxy.”

She thought about it. Soon they would witness Hope’s destruction, as the wave of machines tore through it with the mindlessness of stampeding animals. Some of them might try and follow the

Hirondelle, but so far the machines moved too slowly to catch the ship, even if they forced it back towards Galactic North.

Where was there to go?

There were globular clusters high above the Galaxy—tightly packed shoals of old stars where the wave hadn’t reached, but where fragments of humanity might have already sought refuge. If the clusters proved unwelcoming, there were high-latitude stars, flung from the Galaxy a billion years ago, and some might have dragged their planetary systems with them. If those failed—and it would be tens of thousands of years before the possibilities were exhausted—the Hirondelle could always loop around towards Galactic South and search there, striking out for the Clouds of Magellan.

Ultimately, of course—if any part or fragment of Irravel’s children still clung to humanity, and remembered where they’d come from, and what had become of it, they would want to return to the

Galaxy, even if that meant confronting the wave.

But they would return.

“That’s the plan then?” Remontoire said.

Irravel shrugged, turning away from the plinth where Markarian lay. “Unless you’ve got a better one.”

Glacial

NEVIL CLAVAIN PICKED his way across a mosaic of shattered ice. The field stretched away in all directions, gouged by sleek-sided crevasses. They had mapped the largest cracks before landing, but he was still wary of surprises; his breath caught every time his booted foot cracked through a layer of ice. He was aware of how dangerous it would be to wander from the red path that his implants were painting across the glacier field.

He only had to remind himself what had happened to Martin Setterholm.

They had found his body a month ago, shortly after their arrival on the planet. It had been near the main American base; a stroll from the perimeter of the huge, deserted complex of stilted domes and ice-walled caverns. Clavain’s friends had found dozens of dead within the buildings, and most of them had been easily identified against the lists of base personnel that the expedition had pieced together. But Clavain had been troubled by the gaps and had wondered if any further dead might be found in the surrounding ice fields. He had explored the warrens of the base until he found an airlock which had never been closed, and though snowfalls had long since obliterated any footprints, there was little doubt in which direction a wanderer would have set off.

Long before the base had vanished over the horizon, Clavain had run into the edge of a deep, wide crevasse. And there at the bottom—just visible if he leaned close to the edge—was a man’s outstretched arm and hand. Clavain had gone back to the others and had them return with a winch to lower him into the depths, descending thirty or forty meters into a cathedral of stained and sculpted ice. The body had come into view: a figure in an old-fashioned atmospheric survival suit. The man’s legs were bent in a horrible way, like those of a strangely articulated alien. Clavain knew it was a man because the fall had jolted his helmet from its neck-ring; the corpse’s well-preserved face was pressed halfway into a pillow of ice. The helmet had ended up a few meters away.

No on died instantly on Diadem. The air was breathable for short periods, and the man had clearly had time to ponder his predicament. Even in his confused state of mind he must have known that he was going to die.

“Martin Setterholm,” Clavain had said aloud, picking up the helmet and reading the nameplate on the crown. He felt sorry for him but could not deny himself the small satisfaction of accounting for another of the dead. Setterholm had been among the missing, and though he had waited the better part of a century for it, he would at least receive a proper funeral now.

There was something else, but Clavain very nearly missed it. Setterholm had lived long enough to scratch out a message in the ice. Sheltered at the base of the glacier, the marks he had gouged were still legible. Three letters, it seemed to Clavain: an I, a V, and an F.

I-V-F.

The message meant nothing to Clavain, and even a deep search of the Conjoiner collective memory threw up only a handful of vaguely plausible candidates. The least ridiculous was in vitro fertilization, but even that seemed to have no immediate connection with Setterholm. But then again, he had been a biologist, according to the base records. Did the message spell out the chilling truth about what had happened to the colony on Diadem: a biology lab experiment that had gone terribly wrong? Something to do with the worms, perhaps?

But after a while, overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead, Clavain had allowed the exact details of Setterholm’s death to slip from his mind. He was hardly unique anyway: just one more example of the way most of them had died; not by suicide or violence but through carelessness, recklessness, or just plain stupidity. Basic safety procedures—like not wandering into a crevasse zone without the right equipment—had been forgotten or ignored. Machines had been used improperly. Drugs had been administered incorrectly. Sometimes the victim had taken only themselves to the grave, but in other cases the death toll had been much higher. And it had all happened so swiftly.

Galiana talked about it as if it were some kind of psychosis, while the other Conjoiners speculated about some kind of emergent neural condition, buried in the gene pool of the entire colony, lurking for years until it was activated by an environmental trigger.

Clavain, while not discounting his friends’ theories, could not help but think of the worms. They were everywhere, after all, and the Americans had certainly been interested in them—Setterholm especially. Clavain himself had pressed his faceplate against the ice and seen that the worms reached down to the depth where the man had died. Their fine burrowing trails scratched into the vertical ice walls like the branchings of a river delta; the dark nodes of breeding tangled at the intersections of the larger tunnels. The tiny black worms had infested the glacier completely, and this would only be one distinct colony out of the millions that existed all over Diadem’s frozen regions. The worm biomass in this one colony must have been several dozen tons at the very least. Had the Americans’ studies of the worms unleashed something which shattered the mind, turning them all into stumbling fools?

He sensed Galiana’s quiet presence at the back of his thoughts, where she had not been a moment earlier.

“Nevil,” she said. “We’re ready to leave again.”

“You’re done with the ruin already?”

“It isn’t very interesting—just a few equipment shacks. There are still some remains to the north we have to look over, and it’d be good to get there before nightfall.”

“But I’ve only been gone half an hour or—”

“Two hours, Nevil.”

He checked his wrist display unbelievingly, but Galiana was right: he had been out alone on the glacier for all that time. Time away from the others always seemed to fly by, like sleep to an exhausted man. Perhaps the analogy was accurate, at that: sleep was when the mammalian brain took a rest from the business of processing the external universe, allowing the accumulated experience of the day to filter down into long-term memory: collating useful memories and discarding what did not need to be remembered. And for Clavain—who still needed normal sleep—these periods away from the others were when his mind took a rest from the business of engaging in frantic neural communion with the other Conjoiners. He could almost feel his neurones breathing a vast collective groan of relief, now that all they had to do was process the thoughts of a single mind.

Two hours was nowhere near enough.

“I’ll be back shortly,” Clavain said. “I just want to pick up some more worm samples, then I’ll be on my way.”

“You’ve picked up hundreds of the damned things already, Nevil, and they’re all the same, give or take a few trivial differences.”

“I know. But it can’t hurt to indulge an old man’s irrational fancies, can it?”

As if to justify himself, he knelt down and began scooping surface ice into a small sample container. The leech-sized worms riddled the ice so thoroughly that he was bound to have picked up a few individuals in this sample, even though he would not know for sure until he got back to the shuttle’s lab. If he were lucky, the sample might even hold a breeding tangle; a knot of several dozen worms engaged in a slow, complicated orgy of cannibalism and sex. There, he would complete the same comprehensive scans he had run on all the other worms he had picked up, trying to guess just why the Americans had devoted so much effort to studying them. And doubtless he would get exactly the same results he had found previously. The worms never changed; there was no astonishing mutation buried in every hundredth or even thousandth specimen, no stunning biochemical trickery going on inside them. They secreted a few simple enzymes and they ate pollen grains and ice-bound algae and they wriggled their way through cracks in the ice, and when they met other worms they obeyed the brainless rules of life, death, and procreation.

That was all they did.

Galiana, in other words, was right: the worms had simply become an excuse for him to spend time away from the rest of the Conjoiners. Before any of them had left Earth’s solar system, Clavain had been a soldier, fighting on the side of the faction that directly opposed Galiana’s experiments in mind-augmentation. He had fought against her Conjoiners on Mars and she had taken him prisoner at the height of the war. Later—when he was older and an uneasy truce looked like it was on the point of collapsing—Clavain had gone back to Mars with the intention of reasoning with Galiana. It was during that peace mission that he realised—for the sake of his conscience—that he had to defect and fight alongside his old enemy, even though that meant accepting Galiana’s machines into his head.

Later, along with Galiana, Felka, and their allies, Clavain had escaped from the system in a prototype starship, the Sandra Voi. Clavain’s old side had done their best to stop the ship from leaving, but they had failed, and the Sandra Voi had safely reached interstellar space. Galiana’s intention had been to explore a number of solar systems within a dozen or so light years of Earth until she found a world that her party could colonize without the risk of persecution.

Diadem had been their first port of call.

A month ago, at the beginning of the expedition, it had been much easier to justify these excursions. Even some of the true Conjoiners had been drawn by a primal human urge to walk out into the wilderness, surrounding themselves with kilometers of beautifully tinted, elegantly fractured, unthinking ice. It was good to be somewhere quiet and pristine, after the war-torn solar system that they had left behind.

Diadem was an Earthlike planet orbiting the star Ross 248. It had oceans, icecaps, plate tectonics, and signs of reasonably advanced multicellular life. Plants had already invaded Diadem’s land, and some animals—the equivalents of arthropods, mollusks, and worms—had begun to follow in their wake. The largest land-based animals were still small by terrestrial standards, since nothing in the oceans had yet evolved an internal skeleton. There was nothing that showed any signs of intelligence, but that was only a minor disappointment. It would still take a lifetime’s study just to explore the fantastic array of body plans, metabolisms, and survival strategies that Diadem life had blindly evolved.

Yet even before Galiana had sent down the first survey shuttles, a shattering truth had become apparent.

Someone had reached Diadem before them.

The signs were unmistakable: glints of refined metal on the surface, picked out by radar. Upon inspection from orbit they turned out to be ruined structures and equipment, obviously of human origin.

“It’s not possible,” Clavain had said. “We’re the first. We have to be the first. No one else has ever built anything like the Sandra Voi; nothing capable of traveling this far.”

“Somewhere in there,” Galiana had answered, “I think there might be a mistaken assumption, don’t you?”

Meekly, Clavain had nodded.

Now—later still than he had promised—Clavain made his way back to the waiting shuttle. The red carpet of safety led straight to the access ramp beneath the craft’s belly. He climbed up and stepped through the transparent membrane that spanned the entrance door, most of his suit slithering away on contact with the membrane. By the time he was inside the ship he wore only a lightweight breather mask and a few communication devices. He could have survived outside naked for many minutes—Diadem’s atmosphere now had enough oxygen to support humans—but Galiana refused to allow any intermingling of microorganisms.

He returned the equipment to a storage locker, placed the worm sample in a refrigeration rack, and clothed himself in a paper-thin black tunic and trousers before moving into the aft compartment where Galiana was waiting.

She and Felka were sitting facing each other across the blank-walled, austerely furnished room. They were staring into the space between them without quite meeting each other’s eyes. They looked like a mother and daughter locked in argumentative stalemate, but Clavain knew better.

He issued the mental command, well-rehearsed now, which opened his mind to communion with the others. It was like opening a tiny aperture in the side of a dam; he was never adequately prepared for the force with which the flow of data hit him. The room changed; color bleeding out of the walls, lacing itself into abstract structures which permeated the room’s volume. Galiana and Felka, dressed dourly a moment earlier, were now veiled in light, and appeared superhumanly beautiful. He could feel their thoughts, as if he were overhearing a heated conversation in the room next door. Most of it was nonverbal; Galiana and Felka playing an intense, abstract game. The thing floating between them was a solid lattice of light, resembling the plumbing diagram of an insanely complex refinery. It was constantly adjusting itself, with colored flows racing this way and that as the geometry changed. About half the volume was green; what remained was lilac, but now the former encroached dramatically on the latter.

Felka laughed; she was winning.

Galiana conceded and crashed back into her seat with a sigh of exhaustion, but she was smiling as well.

“Sorry. I appear to have distracted you,” Clavain said.

“No; you just hastened the inevitable. I’m afraid Felka was always going to win.”

The girl smiled again, still saying nothing, though Clavain sensed her victory; a hard-edged thing that for a moment outshone all other thoughts from her direction, eclipsing even Galiana’s air of weary resignation.

Felka had been a failed Conjoiner experiment in the manipulation of foetal brain development; a child with a mind more machine than human. When he had first met her—in Galiana’s nest on Mars—he had encountered a girl absorbed in a profound, endless game; directing the faltering self-repair processes of the terraforming structure known as the Great Wall of Mars, in which the nest was sheltered. She had no interest in people—indeed; she could not even discriminate faces. But when the nest was being evacuated, Clavain had risked his life to save hers, even though Galiana had told him that the kindest thing would be to let her die. As Clavain had struggled to adjust to life as part of Galiana’s commune, he had set himself the task of helping Felka to develop her latent humanity. She had begun to show signs of recognition in his presence, perhaps sensing on some level that they had a kinship; that they were both strangers stumbling toward a strange new light.

Galiana rose from her chair, carpets of light wrapping around her. “It was time to end the game, anyway. We’ve got work to do.” She looked down at the girl, who was still staring at the lattice. “Sorry, Felka. Later, maybe.”

Clavain said: “How’s she doing?”

“She’s laughing, Nevil. That has to be progress, doesn’t it?”

“I’d say that depends what she’s laughing about.”

“She beat me. She thought it was funny. I’d say that was a fairly human reaction, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d still be happier if I could convince myself she recognized my face and not my smell, or the sound my footfalls make.”

“You’re the only one of us with a beard, Nevil. It doesn’t take vast amounts of neural processing to spot that.”

Clavain scratched his chin self-consciously as they stepped through into the shuttle’s flight deck. He liked his beard, even though it was trimmed to little more than gray stubble so that he could slip a breather mask on without difficulty. It was as much a link to his past as his memories or the wrinkles Galiana had studiously built into his remodelled body.

“You’re right, of course. Sometimes I just have to remind myself how far we’ve come.”

Galiana smiled—she was getting better at that, though there was still something a little forced about it—and pushed her long, gray-veined black hair behind her ears. “I tell myself the same things when I think about you, Nevil.”

“Mm. But I have come some way, haven’t I?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t got a considerable distance ahead of you. I could have put that thought into your head in a microsecond, if you allowed me to do so—but you still insist that we communicate by making noises in our throats, the way monkeys do.”

“Well, it’s good practice for you,” Clavain said, hoping that his irritation was not too obvious.

They settled into adjacent seats while avionic displays slithered into take-off configuration. Clavain’s implants allowed him to fly the machine without any manual inputs at all, but—old soldier that he was—he generally preferred tactile controls. So his implants obliged, hallucinating a joystick inset with buttons and levers, and when he reached out to grasp it his hands seemed to close around something solid. He shuddered to think how thoroughly his perceptions of the real world were being doctored to support this illusion; but once he had been flying for a few minutes he generally forgot about it, lost in the joy of piloting.

He got them airborne, then settled the shuttle into level flight towards the fifth ruin that they would be visiting today. Kilometers of ice slid beneath them, only occasionally broken by a protruding ridge or a patch of dry, boulder-strewn ground.

“Just a few shacks, you said?”

Galiana nodded. “A waste of time, but we had to check it out.”

“Any closer to understanding what happened to them?”

“They died, more or less overnight. Mostly through incidents related to the breakdown of normal thought—although one or two may have simply died, as if they had some greater susceptibility to a toxin than the others.”

Clavain smiled, feeling that a small victory was his. “Now you’re looking at a toxin, rather than a psychosis?”

“A toxin’s difficult to explain, Nevil.”

“From Martin Setterholm’s worms, perhaps?”

“Not very likely. Their biohazard containment measures weren’t as good as ours—but they were still adequate. We’ve analyzed those worms and we know they don’t carry anything obviously hostile to us. And even if there were a neurotoxin, how would it affect everyone so quickly? Even if the lab workers had caught something, they’d have fallen ill before anyone else did, sending a warning to the others—but nothing like that happened.” She paused, anticipating Clavain’s next question. “And no; I don’t think that what happened to them is necessarily anything we need worry about, though that doesn’t mean I’m going to rule anything out. But even our oldest technology’s a century ahead of anything they had—and we have the Sandra Voi to retreat to if we run into anything the medichines in our heads can’t handle.”

Clavain always did his best not to think too much about the swarms of sub-cellular machines lacing his brain—supplanting much of it, in fact—but there were times when it was unavoidable. He still had a squeamish reaction to the idea, though it was becoming milder. Now, though, he could not help but view the machines as his allies as intimately a part of him as his immune system.

Galiana was right: they would resist anything that tried to interfere with what now passed as the ‘normal’ functioning of his mind.

“Still,” he said, not yet willing to drop his pet theory. “You’ve got to admit something: the Americans—Setterholm especially—were interested in the worms. Too interested, if you ask me.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“Ah, but my interest is strictly forensic. And I can’t help but put the two things together. They were interested in the worms. And they went mad.”

What he said was an oversimplification, of course. It was clear enough that the worms had only preoccupied some of the Americans: those who were most interested in xeno-biology. According to the evidence the Conjoiners had so far gathered, the effort had been largely spearheaded by Setterholm, the man he had found dead at the bottom of the crevasse. Setterholm had traveled widely across Diadem’s snowy wastes, gathering a handful of allies to assist in his work. He had found worms in dozens of ice-fields, grouped into vast colonies. For the most part the other members of the expedition had let him get on with his activities, even as they struggled with the day-to-day business of staying alive in what was still a hostile, alien environment.

Even before they had all died things had been far from easy. The self-replicating robots that had brought them here in the first place had failed years before, leaving the delicate life-support systems of their shelters to slowly collapse; each malfunction a little harder to rectify than the last. Diadem was getting colder, too—sliding inexorably into a deep ice-age. It had been the Americans’ misfortune to arrive at the coming of a great, centuries-long winter. Now, Clavain thought, it was colder still; the polar ice-caps rushing toward each other like long-separated lovers.

“It must have been fast, whatever it was,” Clavain mused. “They’d already abandoned most of the outlying bases by then, huddling together back at the main settlement. By then they only had enough spare parts and technical know-how to run a single fusion power plant.”

“Which failed.”

“Yes—but that doesn’t mean much. It couldn’t run itself, not by then—it needed constant tinkering. Eventually the people with the right know-how must have succumbed to the ... whatever it was—and then the reactor stopped working and they all died of the cold. But they were in trouble long before the reactor failed.”

Galiana seemed on the point of saying something. Clavain could always tell when she was about to speak; it was as if some leakage from her thoughts reached his brain even as she composed what she would say.

“Well?” he said, when the silence had stretched long enough.

“I was just thinking,” she said. “A reactor of that type—it doesn’t need any exotic isotopes, does it? No tritium or deuterium?”

“No. Just plain old hydrogen. You could get all you needed from seawater.”

“Or ice,” Galiana said.

They vectored in for the next landing site. Toadstools, Clavain thought: half a dozen black metal towers of varying height surmounted by domed black habitat modules, interlinked by a web of elevated, pressurised walkways. Each of the domes was thirty or forty meters wide, perched a hundred or more metres above the ice, festooned with narrow, armored windows, sensors, and communications antennae. A tonguelike extension from one of the tallest domes was clearly a landing pad. In fact, as he came closer, he saw that there was an aircraft parked on it; one of the blunt-winged machines that the Americans had used to get around in. It was dusted with ice, but it would probably still fly with a little persuasion.

He inched the shuttle down, one of its skids only just inside the edge of the pad. Clearly the landing pad had only really been intended for one aircraft at a time.

“Nevil ...” Galiana said. “I’m not sure I like this.”

He felt tension, but could not be sure if it was his own or Galiana’s leaking into his head. “What don’t you like?”

“There shouldn’t be an aircraft here,” Galiana said.

“Why not?”

She spoke softly, reminding him that the evacuation of the outlying settlements had been orderly, compared to the subsequent crisis. “This base should have been shut down and mothballed with all the others.”

“Then someone stayed behind here,” Clavain suggested.

Galiana nodded. “Or someone came back.”

There was a third presence with them now another hue of thought bleeding into his mind. Felka had come into the cockpit. He could taste her apprehension.

“You sense it, too,” he said, wonderingly, looking into the face of the terribly damaged girl. “Our discomfort. And you don’t like it any more than we do, do you?”

Galiana took the girl’s hand. “It’s all right, Felka.”

She must have said that just for Clavain’s benefit. Before her mouth had even opened Galiana would have planted reassuring thoughts in Felka’s mind, attempting to still the disquiet with the subtlest of neural adjustments. Clavain thought of an expert Ikebana artist minutely altering the placement of a single flower in the interests of harmony.

“Everything will be OK,” Clavain said. “There’s nothing here that can harm you.”

Galiana took a moment, blank-eyed, to commune with the other Conjoiners in and around Diadem. Most of them were still in orbit, observing things from the ship. She told them about the aircraft and notified them that she and Clavain were going to enter the structure.

He saw Felka’s hand tighten around Galiana’s wrist.

“She wants to come as well,” Galiana said.

“She’ll be safer if she stays here.”

“She doesn’t want to be alone.”

Clavain chose his words carefully. “I thought Conjoiners—I mean we—could never be truly alone, Galiana.”

“There might be a communicational block inside the structure. It’ll be better if she stays physically close to us.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“No, of course not.” For a moment he felt a sting of her anger, prickling his mind like sea-spray. “She’s still human, Nevil—no matter what we’ve done to her mind. We can’t erase a million years of evolution. She may not be very good at recognizing faces, but she recognizes the need for companionship.”

He raised his hands. “I never doubted it.”

“Then why are you arguing?”

Clavain smiled. He’d had this conversation so many times before, with so many women. He had been married to some of them. It was oddly comforting to be having it again, light-years from home, wearing a new body, his mind clotted with machines and confronting the matriarch of what should have been a feared and hated hive-mind. At the epicenter of so much strangeness, a tiff was almost to be welcomed.

“I just don’t want anything to hurt her.”

“Oh. And I do?”

“Never mind,” he said, gritting his teeth. “Let’s just get in and out, shall we?”

The base, like all the American structures, had been built for posterity. Not by people, however, but by swarms of diligent self-replicating robots. That was how the Americans had reached Diadem: they had been brought here as frozen fertilized cells in the armored, radiation-proofed bellies of star-crossing von Neumann robots. The robots had been launched toward several solar systems about a century before the Sandra Voi had left Mars. Upon arrival on Diadem they had set about breeding; making copies of themselves from local ores. When their numbers had reached some threshold they had turned over their energies to the construction of bases; luxurious accommodations for the human children that would then be grown in their wombs.

“The entrance door’s intact,” Galiana said, when they had crossed from the shuttle to the smooth black side of the dome, stooping against the wind. “And there’s still some residual power in its circuits.”

That was a Conjoiner trick that always faintly unnerved him. Like sharks, Conjoiners were sensitive to ambient electrical fields. Mapped into her vision, Galiana would see the energized circuits superimposed on the door like a ghostly neon maze. Now she extended her hand toward the lock, palm first.

“I’m accessing the opening mechanism. Interfacing with it now.” Behind her mask, she saw her face scrunch in concentration. Galiana only ever frowned before when having to think hard. With her hand outstretched she looked like a wizard attempting some particularly demanding enchantment.

“Hmm,” she said. “Nice old software protocols. Nothing too difficult.”

“Careful,” Clavain said. “I wouldn’t put it past them to have put some kind of trap.”

“There’s no trap,” she said. “But there is—ah, yes—a verbal entry code. Well, here goes.” She spoke loudly, so that her voice could travel through the air to the door even above the howl of the wind: “Open Sesame.”

Lights flicked from red to green; dislodging a frosting of ice, the door slid ponderously aside to reveal a dimly lit interior chamber. The base must have been running on a trickle of emergency power for decades.

Felka and Clavain lingered while Galiana crossed the threshold. “Well?” she challenged, turning around. “Are you two sissies coming or not?”

Felka offered a hand. He took hers and the two of them—the old soldier and the girl who could barely grasp the difference between two human faces—took a series of tentative steps inside.

“What you just did; that business with your hand and the password ...” Clavain paused. “That was a joke, wasn’t it?”

Galiana looked at him blank-faced. “How could it have been? Everyone knows we haven’t got anything remotely resembling a sense of humor.”

Clavain nodded gravely. “That was my understanding, but I just wanted to be sure.”

There was no trace of the wind inside, but it would still have been too cold to remove their suits, even had they not been concerned about contamination. They worked their way along a series of winding corridors, of which some were dark and some were bathed in feeble, pea-green lighting. Now and then they passed the entrance to a room full of equipment, but nothing that looked like a laboratory or living quarters. Then they descended a series of stairs and found themselves crossing one of the sealed walkways between the toadstools. Clavain had seen a few other American settlements built like this one; they were designed to remain useful even as they sank slowly into the ice.

The bridge led to what was obviously the main habitation section. Now there were lounges, bedrooms, laboratories, and kitchens—enough for a crew of perhaps fifty or sixty. But there were no signs of any bodies, and the place did not look as if it had been abandoned in a hurry. The equipment was neatly packed away and there were no half-eaten meals on the tables. There was frost everywhere, but that was just the moisture that had frozen out of the air when the base cooled down.

“They were expecting to come back,” Galiana said.

Clavain nodded. “They couldn’t have had much of an idea of what lay ahead of them.”

They moved on, crossing another bridge until they arrived in a toadstool that was almost entirely dedicated to bio-analysis laboratories. Galiana had to use her neural trick to get them inside again, the machines in her head sweet-talking the duller machines entombed in the doors. The low-ceilinged labs were bathed in green light, but Galiana found a wall panel that brought the lighting up a notch and even caused some bench equipment to wake up, pulsing stand-by lights.

Clavain looked around, recognizing centrifuges, gene-sequencers, gas chromatographys, and scanning-tunnelling microscopes. There were at least a dozen other hunks of gleaming machinery whose function eluded him. A wall-sized cabinet held dozens of pull-out drawers, each of which contained hundreds of culture dishes, test-tubes, and gel slides. Clavain glanced at the samples, reading the tiny labels. There were bacteria and single-cell cultures with unpronounceable code names, most of which were marked with Diadem map coordinates and a date. But there were also drawers full of samples with Latin names; comparison samples that must have come from Earth. The robots could easily have carried the tiny parent organisms from which these larger samples had been grown or cloned. Perhaps the Americans had been experimenting with the hardiness of Earth-born organisms, with a view to terraforming Diadem at some point in the future.

He closed the drawer silently and moved to a set of larger sample tubes racked on a desk. He picked one from the rack and raised it to the light, examining the smoky things inside. It was a sample of worms, indistinguishable from those he had collected on the glacier a few hours earlier. A breeding tangle, probably, harvested from the intersection point of two worm tunnels. Some of the worms in the tangle would be exchanging genes; others would be fighting; others would be allowing themselves to be digested by adults or newly hatched young—all behaving according to rigidly deterministic laws of caste and sex. The tangle looked dead, but that meant nothing with the worms. Their metabolism was fantastically slow; each individual easily capable of living for thousands of years. It would take them months just to crawl along some of the longer cracks in the ice, let alone move between some of the larger tangles.

But the worms were really not all that alien. They had a close terrestrial analog; the sun-avoiding ice-worms that had first been discovered in the Malaspina Glacier in Alaska toward the end of the nineteenth century. The Alaskan ice-worms were a lot smaller than their Diadem counterparts, but they also nourished themselves on the slim pickings that drifted onto the ice, or had been frozen into it years earlier. Like the Diadem worms, their most notable anatomical feature was a pore at the head end, just above the mouth. In the case of the terrestrial worms the pore served a single function; secreting a salty solution that helped the worms melt their way into ice when there was no tunnel already present—an escape strategy that helped them get beneath the ice before the sun dried them up. The Diadem worms had a similar structure, but according to Setterholm’s notes they have evolved a second use for it; secreting a chemically rich ‘scent trail,’ that helped other worms navigate through the tunnel system. The chemistry of that scent trail turned out to be very complex, with each worm capable of secreting not merely a unique signature but a variety of flavors. Conceivably, more complex message schemes were embedded in some of the other flavors: not just ‘follow me’ but ‘follow me only if you are female’—the Diadem worms had at least three sexes—‘and this is breeding season.’ There were many other possibilities, which Setterholm seemed to have been attempting to decode and catalog when the end had come.

It was interesting ... up to a point. But even if the worms followed a complex set of rules dependent on the scent trails they were picking up, and perhaps other environmental cues, it would still only be rigidly mechanistic behavior.

“Nevil, come here.”

That was Galiana’s voice, but it was in a tone he had barely heard before. It was one that made him run to where Felka and Galiana were waiting on the other side of the lab.

They were facing an array of lockers that occupied an entire wall. A small status panel was set into each locker, but only one locker—placed at chest height—showed any activity. Clavain looked back to the door they had come in through, but from here it was hidden by intervening lab equipment. They would not have seen this locker even if it had been illuminated before Galiana brought the room’s power back on.

“It might have been on all along,” he said.

“I know,” Galiana agreed.

She reached a hand up to the panel, tapping the control keys with unnerving fluency. Machines to Galiana were like musical instruments to a prodigy. She could pick one up cold and play it like an old friend.

The array of status lights changed configuration abruptly, then there was a bustle of activity somewhere behind the locker’s metal face—latches and servomotors clicking after decades of stasis.

“Stand back,” Galiana said.

A rime of frost shattered into a billion sugary pieces. The locker began to slide out of the wall, the unhurried motion giving them adequate time to digest what lay inside. He felt Felka grip his hand, and then noticed that her other hand was curled tightly around Galiana’s wrist. For the first time he began to wonder if it had really been such a good idea to allow the girl to join them.

The locker was two meters in length and half that in width and height, just sufficient to contain a human body. It had probably been designed to hold animal specimens culled from Diadem’s oceans, but it was equally capable of functioning as a mortuary tray. That the man inside the locker was dead was beyond question, but there was no sign of injury. His composure—flat on his back, his blue-grey face serenely blank, his eyes closed, and his hands clasped neatly just below his rib cage—suggested to Clavain a saint lying in grace. His beard was neatly pointed and his hair long, frozen into a solid sculptural mass. He was still wearing several heavy layers of thermal clothing.

Clavain knelt closer and read the name tag above the man’s heart.

“Andrew Iverson. Ring a bell?”

A moment went by while Galiana established a link to the rest of the Conjoiners, ferreting the name out of some database. “Yes. One of the missing. Seems he was a climatologist with an interest in terraforming techniques.”

Clavain nodded shrewdly. “That figures, with all the microorganisms I’ve seen in this place. Well, the trillion-dollar question. How do you think he got in there?”

“I think he climbed in,” Galiana said. And nodded at something which Clavain had missed, almost tucked away beneath the man’s shoulder. Clavain reached into the gap, his finger brushing against the rock-hard fabric of Iverson’s outfit. A catheter vanished into the man’s forearm, where he had cut away a square of fabric. The catheter’s black feed-line reached back into the cabinet, vanishing into a socket at the rear.

“You’re saying he killed himself?”

“He must have put something in there that would stop his heart. Then he probably flushed out his blood and replaced it with glycerol, or something similar, to prevent ice-crystals forming in his cells. It would have taken some automation to make it work, but I’m sure everything he needed was here.”

Clavain thought back to what he knew about the cryonic immersion techniques that had been around a century or so earlier. They left something to be desired now, but back then they had not been much of an advance over mummification.

“When he sank that catheter into himself, he couldn’t have been certain we’d ever find him,” Clavain remarked.

“Which would still have been preferable to suicide.”

“Yes, but ... the thoughts that must have gone through his head. Knowing he had to kill himself first to stand a chance of living again—and then hope someone else stumbled on Diadem.”

“You made a harder choice than that, once.”

“Yes. But at least I wasn’t alone when I made it.”

Iverson’s body was astonishingly well-preserved, Clavain thought. The skin tissue looked almost intact, even if it had a deathly, granitelike color. The bones of his face had not ruptured under the strain of the temperature drop. Bacterial processes had stopped dead. All in all, things could have been a lot worse.

“We shouldn’t leave him like this,” Galiana said, pushing the locker so that it began to slide back into the wall.

“I don’t think he cares much about that now,” Clavain said.

“No. You don’t understand. He mustn’t warm—not even to the ambient temperature of the room. Otherwise we won’t be able to wake him up.”

It took five days to bring him back to consciousness.

The decision to reanimate had not been taken lightly; it had only been arrived at after intense discussion among the Conjoined, debates in which Clavain participated to the best of his ability. Iverson, they all agreed, could probably be resurrected with current Conjoiner methods. In situ scans of his mind had revealed preserved synaptic structures that a scaffold of machines could coax back toward consciousness. However, since they had not yet identified the cause of the madness which had killed Iverson’s colleagues—and the evidence was pointing toward some kind of infectious agent—Iverson would be kept on the surface; reborn on the same world where he had died.

They had, however, moved him, shuttling him halfway across the world back to the main base. Clavain had traveled with the corpse, marveling at the idea that this solid chunk of man-shaped ice—tainted, admittedly, with a few vital impurities—would soon be a breathing, thinking, human being with memories and feelings. To him it seemed astonishing that this was possible; that so much latent structure had been preserved across the decades. Even more astonishing was that the infusions of tiny machines that the Conjoiners were brewing would be able to stitch together damaged cells and kick-start them back to life. And out of that inert loom of frozen brain structure—a thing that was at this moment nothing more than a fixed geometric entity, like a finely eroded piece of rock—something as malleable as consciousness would emerge.

But the Conjoiners were blase at the prospect, viewing Iverson the way expert picture-restorers might view a damaged old master. Yes, there would be difficulties ahead—work that would require great skill—but nothing to lose sleep over.

Except, Clavain reminded himself, none of them slept anyway.

While the others were working to bring Iverson back to life, Clavain wandered the outskirts of the base, trying to get a better feel for what it must have been like in the last days. The debilitating mental illness must have been terrifying, as it struck even those who might have stood some chance of developing some kind of counter-agent to it. Perhaps in the old days, when the base had been under the stewardship of the von Neumann machines, something might have been done ... but in the end it must have been like trying to crack a particularly tricky algebra problem while growing steadily more drunk: losing first the ability to focus sharply, then to focus on the problem at all, and then to remember what was so important about it anyway. The labs in the main complex had an abandoned look to them; experiments half-finished; notes on the wall scrawled in ever more incoherent handwriting.

Down in the lower levels—the transport bays and storage areas—it was almost as if nothing had happened. Equipment was still neatly racked, surface vehicles neatly parked, and—with the base sub-systems back on—the place was bathed in light and not so cold as to require extra clothing. It was quite therapeutic, too. The Conjoiners had not extended their communicational fields into these regions, so Clavain’s mind was mercifully isolated again; freed of the clamor of other voices. Despite that, he was still tempted by the idea of spending some time outdoors.

With that in mind he found an airlock, one that must have been added late in the base’s history as it was absent from the blueprints. There was no membrane stretched across this one; if he stepped through it he would be outside as soon as the doors cycled, with no more protection than the clothes he was wearing now. He considered going back into the base proper to find a membrane suit, but by the time he did that, the mood—the urge to go outside—would be gone.

Clavain noticed a locker. Inside, to his delight, was a rack of old-style suits such as Setterholm had been wearing. They looked brand-new, alloy neck-rings gleaming. Racked above each was a bulbous helmet. He experimented until he found a suit that fit him, then struggled with the various latches and seals that coupled the suit parts together. Even when he thought he had donned the suit properly, the airlock detected that one of his gloves wasn’t latched correctly. It refused to let him outside until he reversed the cycle and fixed the problem.

But then he was outside, and it was glorious.

He walked around the base until he found his bearings, and then—always ensuring that the base was in view and that his air-supply was adequate—he set off across the ice. Above, Diadem’s sky was a deep enamelled blue, and the ice—though fundamentally white—seemed to contain in itself a billion nuances of pale turquoise, pale aquamarine even hints of the palest of pinks. Beneath his feet he imagined the cracklike networks of the worms, threading down for hundreds of meters; and he imagined the worms themselves, wriggling through that network, responding to and secreting chemical scent trails. The worms themselves were biologically simple—almost dismayingly so—but that network was a vast, intricate thing. It hardly mattered that the traffic along it—the to-and-fro motions of the worms as they went about their lives—was so agonizingly slow. The worms, after all, had endured longer than human comprehension. They had seen people come and go in an eyeblink.

He walked on until he arrived at the crevasse where he had found Setterholm. They had long since removed Setterholm’s body, of course, but the experience had imprinted itself deeply on Clavain’s mind. He found it easy to relive the moment at the lip of the crevasse, when he had first seen the end of Setterholm’s arm. At the time he had told himself that there must be worse places to die, surrounded by beauty that was so pristine, so utterly untouched by human influence. Now, the more that he thought about it, the more that Setterholm’s death played on his mind—he wondered if there could be any worse place. It was undeniably beautiful, but it was also crushingly dead, crushingly oblivious to life. Setterholm must have felt himself draining away, soon to become as inanimate as the palace of ice that was to become his tomb.

Clavain thought about it for many more minutes, enjoying the silence and the solitude and the odd awkwardness of the suit. He thought back to the way Setterholm had been found, and his mind niggled at something not quite right; a detail that had not seemed wrong at the time but that now troubled him.

It was Setterholm’s helmet.

He remembered the way it had been lying away from the man’s corpse, as if the impact had knocked it off. But now that Clavain had locked an identical helmet onto his own suit, that was harder to believe. The latches were sturdy, and he doubted that the drop into the crevasse would have been sufficient enough to break the mechanism. He considered the possibility that Setterholm had put his suit on hastily, but even that seemed unlikely now. The airlock had detected that Clavain’s glove was badly attached; it—or any of the other locks—would have surely refused to allow Setterholm outside if his helmet had not been correctly latched.

Clavain wondered if Setterholm’s death had been something other than an accident.

He thought about it, trying the idea on for size, then slowly shook his head. There were a myriad of possibilities he had yet to rule out. Setterholm could have left the base with his suit intact and then—confused and disorientated—he could have fiddled with the latch, depriving himself of oxygen until he stumbled into the crevasse. Or perhaps the airlocks were not as foolproof as they seemed, the safety mechanism capable of being disabled by people in a hurry to get outside.

No. A man had died, but there was no need to assume it had been anything other than an accident. Clavain turned and began to walk back to the base.

“He’s awake,” Galiana said, a day or so after the final wave of machines had swum into Iverson’s mind. “I think it might be better if he spoke to you first, Nevil, don’t you? Rather than one of us?” She bit her tongue. “I mean, rather than someone who’s been Conjoined for as long as the rest of us?”

Clavain shrugged. “Then again, an attractive face might be preferable to a grizzled old relic like myself. But I take your point. Is it safe to go in now?”

“Perfectly. If Iverson was carrying anything infectious, the machines would have flagged it.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Well, look at the evidence. He was acting rationally up to the end. He did everything to ensure we’d have an excellent chance of reviving him. His suicide was just a coldly calculated attempt to escape his then situation.”

“Coldly calculated,” Clavain echoed. “Yes, I suppose it would have been. Cold, I mean.”

Galiana said nothing but gestured toward the door into Iverson’s room.

Clavain stepped through the opening. And it was as he crossed the threshold that a thought occurred to him. He could once again see, in his mind’s eye, Martin Setterholm’s body lying at the bottom of the crevasse, his fingers pointing to the letters IVF.

In vitro fertilization.

But suppose Setterholm had been trying to write IVERSON but had died before finishing the word? If Setterholm had been murdered—pushed into the crevasse—he might have been trying to pass on a message about his murderer. Clavain imagined his pain: legs smashed, knowing with absolute certainty he was going to die alone and cold but willing himself to write Iverson’s name ...

But why would the climatologist have wanted to kill Setterholm? Setterholm’s fascination with the worms was perplexing but harmless. The information Clavain had collected pointed to Setterholm being a single-minded loner; the kind of man who would inspire pity or indifference in his colleagues, rather than hatred. And everyone was dying anyway—against such a background, a murder seemed almost irrelevant.

Maybe he was attributing too much to the six faint marks a dying man had scratched on the ice.

Forcing suspicion from his mind—for now—Clavain stepped into Iverson’s room. The room was spartan but serene, with a small blue holographic window set high on one white wall. Clavain was responsible for that. Left to the Conjoiners—who had taken over an area of the main American base and filled it with their own pressurized spaces—Iverson’s room would have been a grim, grey cube. That was fine for the Conjoiners—they moved through informational fields draped like an extra layer over reality. But though Iverson’s head was now drenched with their machines, they were only there to assist his normal patterns of thought, reinforcing weak synaptic signals and compensating for a far-from-equilibrium mix of neurotransmitters.

So Clavain had insisted on cheering the place up a bit; Iverson’s bedsheets and pillow were now the same pure white as the walls, so that his head bobbed in a sea of whiteness. His hair had been trimmed, but Clavain had made sure that no one had done more than neaten Iverson’s beard.

“Andrew?” he said. “I’m told you’re awake now. I’m Nevil Clavain. How are you feeling?”

Iverson wet his lips before answering. “Better, I suspect, than I have any reason to feel.”

“Ah.” Clavain beamed, feeling that a large burden had just been lifted from his shoulders. “Then you’ve some recollection of what happened to you.”

“I died, didn’t I? I pumped myself full of anti-freeze and hoped for the best. Did it work, or is this just some weird-ass dream as I’m sliding toward brain death?”

“No, it sure as hell worked. That was one weird-heck-ass of a risk ...” Clavain halted, not entirely certain that he could emulate Iverson’s century-old speech patterns. “That was quite some risk you took. But you’ll be glad to hear it did work.”

Iverson lifted a hand from beneath the bedsheets, examining his palm and the pattern of veins and tendons on the rear. “This is the same body I went under with? You haven’t stuck me in a robot or cloned me or hooked up my disembodied brain to a virtual-reality generator?”

“None of those things, no. Just mopped up some cell damage, fixed a few things here and there and—um—kick-started you back to the land of the living.”

Iverson nodded, but Clavain could tell he was far from convinced. Which was unsurprising: Clavain, after all, had already told a small lie. “So how long was I under?”

“About a century, Andrew. We’re an expedition from back home. We came by starship.”

Iverson nodded again, as if this were mere, incidental detail. “We’re aboard it now, right?”

“No ... no. We’re still on the planet. The ship’s parked in orbit.”

“And everyone else?”

No point sugaring the pill. “Dead, as far as we can make out. But you must have known that would happen.”

“Yeah. But I didn’t know for sure, even at the end.”

“So what happened? How did you escape the infection or whatever it was?”

“Sheer luck.” Iverson asked for a drink. Clavain fetched him one and at the same time had the room extrude a chair next to the bed.

“I didn’t see much sign of luck,” Clavain said.

“No; it was terrible. But I was the lucky one; that’s all I meant. I don’t know how much you know. We had to evacuate the outlying bases toward the end, when we couldn’t keep more than one fusion reactor running.” Iverson took a sip from the glass of water Clavain had brought him. “If we’d still had the machines to look after us ...”

“Yes. That’s something we never really understood.” Clavain leant closer to the bed. “Those von Neumann machines were built to self-repair themselves, weren’t they? We still don’t see how they broke down.”

Iverson eyed him. “They didn’t. Breakdown, I mean.”

“No? Then what happened?”

“We smashed them up. Like rebellious teenagers overthrowing parental control. The machines were nannying us, and we were sick of it. In hindsight, it wasn’t such a good idea.”

“Didn’t the machines put up a fight?”

“Not exactly. I don’t think the people that designed them ever thought they’d get trashed by the kids they’d lovingly cared for.”

So, Clavain thought—whatever had happened here, whatever he went on to learn, it was clear that the Americans had been at least partially the authors of their own misfortunes. He still felt sympathy for them, but now it was cooler, tempered with something close to disgust. He wondered if that feeling of disappointed appraisal would have come so easily without Galiana’s machines in his head: It would be just a tiny step to go from feeling that way toward Iverson’s people to feeling that way about the rest of humanity ... and then I’d know that I’d truly attained Trans enlightenment ...

Clavain snapped out of his morbid line of thinking. It was not Transenlightenment that engendered those feelings, just ancient, bone-deep cynicism.

“Well, there’s no point dwelling on what was done years ago. But how did you survive?”

“After the evacuation, we realized that we’d left something behind—a spare component for the fusion reactor. So I went back for it, taking one of the planes. I landed just as a bad weather front was coming in, which kept me grounded there for two days. That was when the others began to get sick. It happened pretty quickly, and all I knew about it was what I could figure out from the comm-links back to the main base.”

“Tell me what you did figure out.”

“Not much,” Iverson said. “It was fast, and it seemed to attack the central nervous system. No one survived it. Those that didn’t die of it directly seemed to get themselves killed through accidents or sloppy procedure.”

“We noticed. Eventually someone died who was responsible for keeping the fusion reactor running properly. It didn’t blow up, did it?”

“No. Just spewed out a lot more neutrons than normal, too much for the shielding to contain. Then it went into emergency shutdown mode. Some people were killed by the radiation but most died of the cold that came afterward.”

“Hm. Except you.”

Iverson nodded. “If I hadn’t had to go back for that component, I’d have been one of them. Obviously, I couldn’t risk returning. Even if I could have got the reactor working again, there was still the problem of the contaminant.” He breathed in deeply, as if steeling himself to recollect what had happened next. “So I weighed my options, and decided dying—freezing myself—was my only hope. No one was going to come from Earth to help me, even if I could have kept myself alive. Not for decades, anyway. So I took a chance.”

“One that paid off.”

“Like I said, I was the lucky one.” Iverson took another sip from the glass Clavain had brought him. “Man, that tastes better than anything I’ve ever drunk in my life. What’s in this, by the way?”

“Just water. Glacial water. Purified, of course.”

Iverson nodded slowly and put the glass down next to his bed.

“Not thirsty now?”

“Quenched my thirst nicely, thank you.”

“Good.” Clavain stood up. “I’ll let you get some rest, Andrew. If there’s anything you need, anything we can do—just call out.”

Til be sure to.”

Clavain smiled and walked to the door, observing Iverson’s obvious relief that the questioning session was over for now. But Iverson had said nothing incriminating, Clavain reminded himself, and his responses were entirely consistent with the fatigue and confusion anyone would feel after so long a sleep—or dead, depending on how you defined Iverson’s period on ice. It was unfair to associate him with Setterholm’s death just because of a few indistinct marks gouged in ice and the faint possibility that Setterholm had been murdered.

Still, Clavain paused before leaving the room. “One other thing, Andrew—just something that’s been bothering me, and I wondered if you could help?”

“Go ahead.”

“Would the initials I, V, and F mean anything to you?”

Iverson thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “Sorry, Nevil. You’ve got me there.”

“Well, it was just a shot in the dark,” Clavain said.

Iverson was strong enough to walk around the next day. He insisted on exploring the rest of the base, not simply the parts of it that the Conjoiners had taken over. He wanted to see for himself the damage that he had heard about and see the lists of the dead—and the manner in which they had died—that Clavain and his friends had assiduously compiled. Clavain kept a watchful eye on the man, aware of how emotionally traumatic the whole experience must be. He was bearing it well, but that could easily have been a front. Galiana’s machines could tell a lot about how his brain was functioning, but they were unable to probe Iverson’s state of mind at the resolution needed to map emotional well-being.

Clavain, meanwhile, strove as best he could to keep Iverson in the dark about the Conjoiners. He did not want to overwhelm Iverson with strangeness at this delicate time—did not want to shatter the man’s illusion that he had been rescued by a group of ‘normal’ human beings. But it turned out to be easier than he had expected, as Iverson showed surprisingly little interest in the history he had missed. Clavain had gone as far as telling him that the Sandra Voi was technically a ship full of refugees, fleeing the aftermath of a war between various factions of solar-system humanity—but Iverson had done little more than nod, never probing Clavain for more details about the war. Once or twice Clavain had even alluded accidentally to the Transenlightenment—that shared consciousness state that the Conjoiners had reached—but Iverson had shown the same lack of interest. He was not even curious about the Sandra Voi herself, never once asking Clavain what the ship was like. It was not quite what Clavain had been expecting.

But there were rewards, too.

Iverson, it turned out, was fascinated by Felka, and Felka herself seemed pleasantly amused by the newcomer. It was, perhaps, not all that surprising: Galiana and the others had been busy helping Felka grow the neural circuitry necessary for normal human interactions, adding new layers to supplant the functional regions that had never worked properly—but in all that time, they had never introduced her to another human being that she had not already met. And here was Iverson: not just a new voice but a new smell, a new face, a new way of walking, a deluge of new input for her starved mental routines. Clavain watched the way Felka latched onto Iverson when he entered a room, her attention snapping to him, her delight evident. And Iverson seemed perfectly happy to play the games that so wearied the others, the kind of intricate challenges that Felka adored. For hours on end he watched the two of them lost in concentration: Iverson pulling mock faces of sorrow or—on the rare occasions when he beat her—extravagant joy. Felka responded in kind, her face more animated—more plausibly human—than Clavain had ever believed possible. She spoke more often in Iverson’s presence than she had ever done in his, and the utterances she made more closely approximated well-formed, grammatically sound sentences than the disjointed shards of language Clavain had grown to recognize. It was like watching a difficult, backward child suddenly come alight in the presence of a skilled teacher. Clavain thought back to the time when he had rescued Felka from Mars and how unlikely it had seemed then that she would ever grow into something resembling a normal adult human, as sensitized to others’ feelings as she was to her own. Now, he could almost believe it would happen—yet half the distance she had come had been due to Iverson’s influence, rather than his own.

Afterwards, when even Iverson had wearied of Felka’s ceaseless demands for games, Clavain spoke to him quietly, away from the others.

“You’re good with her, aren’t you.”

Iverson shrugged, as if the matter was of no great consequence to him. “Yeah, I like her. We both enjoy the same kinds of games. If there’s a problem—”

He must have detected Clavain’s irritation. “No! No problem at all.” Clavain put a hand on his shoulder. “There’s more to it than just games, though, you have to admit ...”

“She’s a pretty fascinating case, Nevil.”

“I don’t disagree. We value her highly.” He flinched, aware of how much the remark sounded like one of Galiana’s typically flat statements. “But I’m puzzled. You’ve been revived after nearly a century asleep. We’ve come here by a ship that couldn’t even have been considered a distant possibility in your own era. We’ve undergone massive social and technical upheavals in the last hundred years. There are things about us—things about me—I haven’t told you yet. Things about you I haven’t even told you yet.”

“I’m just taking things one step at a time, that’s all.” Iverson shrugged and looked distantly past Clavain, through the window behind him. His gaze must have been skating across kilometers of ice toward Diadem’s white horizon, unable to find a purchase. “I admit, I’m not really interested in technological innovations. I’m sure your ship’s really nice, but ... it’s just applied physics. Just engineering. There may be some new quantum principles underlying your propulsion system, but if that’s the case, it’s probably just an elaborate curlicue on something that was already pretty baroque to begin with. You haven’t smashed the light barrier, have you?” He read Clavain’s expression accurately. “No—didn’t think so. Maybe if you had ...”

“So what exactly does interest you?”

Iverson seemed to hesitate before answering, but when he did speak Clavain had no doubt that he was telling the truth. There was a sudden, missionary fervor in his voice. “Emergence. Specifically, the emergence of complex, almost unpredictable patterns from systems governed by a few, simple laws. Consciousness is an excellent example. A human mind’s really just a web of simple neuronal cells wired together in a particular way. The laws governing the functioning of those individual cells aren’t all that difficult to grasp—a cascade of well-studied electrical, chemical, and enzymic processes. The tricky part is the wiring diagram. It certainly isn’t encoded in DNA in any but the crudest sense. Otherwise why would a baby bother growing neural connections that are pruned down before birth? That’d be a real waste—if you had a perfect blueprint for the conscious mind, you’d only bother forming the connections you needed. No the mind organizes itself during growth, and that’s why it needs so many more neurones that it’ll eventually incorporate into functioning networks. It needs the raw material to work with as it gropes its way toward a functioning consciousness. The pattern emerges, bootstrapping itself into existence, and the pathways that aren’t used—or aren’t as efficient as others—are discarded.” Iverson paused. “But how this organization happens really isn’t understood in any depth. Do you know how many neurones it takes to control the first part of a lobster’s gut, Nevil? Have a guess, to the nearest hundred.”

Clavain shrugged. “I don’t know. Five hundred? A thousand?”

“No. Six. Not six hundred, just six. Six damned neurones. You can’t get much simpler than that. But it took decades to understand how those six worked together, let alone how that particular network evolved. The problems aren’t inseparable, either. You can’t really hope to understand how ten billion neurones organize themselves into a functioning whole unless you understand how the whole actually functions. Oh, we’ve made some progress—we can tell you exactly which spinal neurones fire to make a lamprey swim, and how that firing pattern maps into muscle motion—but we’re a long way from understanding how something as elusive as the concept of T emerges in the developing human mind. Well, at least we were before I went under. You may be about to tell me you’ve achieved stunning progress in the last century, but something tells me you were too busy with social upheaval for that.”

Clavain felt an urge to argue—angered by the man’s tone—but suppressed it, willing himself into a state of serene acceptance. “You’re probably right. We’ve made progress in the other direction—augmenting the mind as it is—but if we genuinely understood brain development, we wouldn’t have ended up with a failure like Felka.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t call her a failure, Nevil.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Of course not.” Now it was Iverson’s turn to place a hand on Clavain’s shoulder. “But you must see now why I find Felka so fascinating. Her mind is damaged—you told me that yourself, and there’s no need to go into the details—but despite that damage, despite the vast abyss in her head, she’s beginning to self-assemble the kinds of higher-level neural routines we all take for granted. It’s as if the patterns were always there as latent potentials, and’ it’s only now that they’re beginning to emerge. Isn’t that fascinating? Isn’t it something worthy of study?”

Delicately, Clavain removed the man’s hand from his shoulder. “I suppose so. I had hoped, however, that there might be something more to it than study.”

“I’ve offended you, and I apologize. My choice of phrase was poor. Of course I care for her.”

Clavain felt suddenly awkward, as if he had misjudged a fundamentally decent man. “I understand. Look, ignore what I said.”

“Yeah, of course. It—um—will be all right for me to see her again, won’t it?”

Clavain nodded. “I’m sure she’d miss you if you weren’t around.”

Over the next few days Clavain left the two of them to their games, only rarely eavesdropping to see how things were going. Iverson had asked permission to show Felka around some of the other areas of the base, and, after some initial misgivings, Clavain and Galiana had both agreed to his request. After that, long hours went by when the two of them were not to be found. Clavain had tracked them once, watching as Iverson led the girl into a disused lab and showed her intricate molecular models. They clearly delighted her: vast fuzzy holographic assemblages of atoms and chemical bonds that floated in the air like Chinese dragons. Wearing cumbersome gloves and goggles, Iverson and Felka were able to manipulate the mega-molecules; forcing them to fold into minimum-energy configurations that brute-force computation would have struggled to predict. As they gestured into the air and made the dragons contort and twist, Clavain watched for the inevitable moment when Felka would grow bored and demand something harder. But it never came. Afterwards—when she had returned to the fold, her face shining with wonder—it was as if Felka had undergone a spiritual experience. Iverson had shown her something which her mind could not instantly encompass, a problem too large and subtle to be stormed in a flash of intuitive insight.

Seeing that, Clavain again felt guilty about the way he had spoken to Iverson, and knew that he had not completely put aside his doubts about the message Setterholm had left in the ice. But—the riddle of the helmet aside—there was no reason to think that Iverson might be a murderer beyond those haphazard marks. Clavain had looked into Iverson’s personnel records from the time before he was frozen, and the man’s history was flawless. He had been a solid, professional member of the expedition, well-liked and trusted by the others. Granted, the records were patchy, and since they were stored digitally they could have been doctored to almost any extent. But then much the same story was told by the hand-written diary and verbal log entries of some of the other victims. Andrew Iverson’s name came up again and again as a man regarded with affection by his fellows—most certainly not someone capable of murder. Best, then, to discard the evidence of the marks and give him the benefit of the doubt.

Clavain spoke of his fears to Galiana, and while she listened to him, she only came back with exactly the same rational counterarguments that he had already provided for himself.

“The problem is,” Galiana said, “that the man you found in the crevasse could have been severely confused, perhaps even hallucinatory. That message he left—if it was a message and not a set of random gouge marks he left while convulsing—could mean anything at all.”

“We don’t know that Setterholm was confused,” Clavain protested.

“We don’t? Then why didn’t he make sure his helmet was on properly? It couldn’t have been latched fully or it wouldn’t have rolled off him when he hit the bottom of the crevasse.”

“Yes,” Clavain said. “But I’m reasonably sure he wouldn’t have been able to leave the base if his helmet hadn’t been latched.”

“In which case he must have undone it afterwards.”

“Yes, but there’s no reason for him to have done that, unless ...”

Galiana gave him a thin-lipped smile. “Unless he was confused. Back to square one, Nevil.”

“No,” he said, conscious that he could almost see the shape of something—something that was close to the truth if not the truth itself. “There’s another possibility, one I hadn’t thought of until now.”

Galiana squinted at him, that rare frown appearing. “Which is?”

“That someone else removed his helmet for him.”

They went down into the bowels of the base. In the dead space of the equipment bays Galiana became ill at ease. She was not used to being out of communicational range of her colleagues. Normally systems buried in the environment picked up neural signals from individuals, amplifying and re-broadcasting them to other people, but there were no such systems here. Clavain could hear Galiana’s thoughts, but they came in weak, like a voice from the sea almost drowned by the roar of the surf.

“This had better be worth it,” Galiana said.

“I want to show you the airlock,” Clavain answered. “I’m sure Setterholm must have left here with his helmet properly attached.”

“You still think he was murdered?”

“I think it’s a remote possibility that we should be very careful not to discount.”

“But why would anyone kill a man whose only interest was a lot of harmless ice worms?”

“That’s been bothering me as well.”

“And?”

“I think I have an answer. Half of one, anyway. What if his interest in the worms brought him into conflict with the others? I’m thinking about the reactor.”

Galiana nodded. “They’d have needed to harvest ice for it.”

“Which Setterholm might have seen as interfering with the worms’ ecology. Maybe he made a nuisance of himself and someone decided to get rid of him.”

“That would be a pretty extreme way of dealing with him.”

“I know,” Clavain said, stepping through a connecting door into the transport bay. “I said I had half an answer, not all of one.”

As soon as he was through he knew something was amiss. The bay was not as it had been before, when he had come down here scouting for clues. He dropped his train of thought immediately, focussing only on the now.

The room was much, much colder than it should have been. And lighter. There was an oblong of chill blue daylight spilling across the floor from the huge open door of one of the vehicle exit ramps. Clavain looked at it in mute disbelief, wanting it to be a temporary glitch in his vision. But Galiana was with him, and she had seen it, too.

“Someone’s left the base,” she said.

Clavain looked out across the ice. He could see the wake that the vehicle had left in the snow, arcing out toward the horizon. For a long moment they stood at the top of the ramp, frozen into inaction. Clavain’s mind screamed with the implications. He had never really liked the idea of Iverson taking Felka away with him elsewhere in the base, but he had never considered the possibility that he might take her into one of the blind zones. From here, Iverson must have known enough little tricks to open a surface door, start a rover, and leave without any of the Conjoiners realizing.

“Nevil, listen to me,” Galiana said. “He doesn’t necessarily mean her any harm. He might just want to show her something.”

He turned to her. “There isn’t time to arrange a shuttle. That trick you did a few days ago, talking to the door? Do you think you can manage it again?”

“I don’t need to. The door’s already open.”

Clavain nodded at one of the other rovers hulking behind them. “It’s not the door I’m thinking about.”

Galiana was disappointed; it took her three minutes to convince the machine to start, rather than the few dozen seconds she said it should have taken. She was, she told Clavain, in serious danger of getting rusty at this sort of thing. Clavain just thanked the gods that there had been no mechanical sabotage to the rover; no amount of neural intervention could have fixed that.

“That’s another thing that makes it look like this is just an innocent trip outside,” Galiana said. “If he’d really wanted to abduct her, it wouldn’t have taken much additional effort to stop us from following him. If he’d closed the door, as well, we might not even have noticed he was gone.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of reverse psychology?” Clavain said.

“I still can’t see Iverson as a murderer, Nevil.” She checked his expression, her own face calm despite her driving the machine. Her hands were folded in her lap. She was less isolated now, having used the rover’s comm-systems to establish a link back to the other Conjoiners. “Setterholm, maybe. The obsessive loner and all that. Just a shame he’s the dead one.”

“Yes,” Clavain said, uneasily.

The rover itself ran on six wheels; a squat, pressurized hull perched low between absurd-looking balloon tires. Galiana gunned them hard down the ramp and across the ice, trusting the machine to glide harmlessly over the smaller crevasses. It seemed reckless, but if they followed the trail that Iverson had left, they were almost guaranteed not to hit any fatal obstacles.

“Did you get anywhere with the source of the sickness?” Clavain asked.

“No breakthroughs yet ...”

“Then here’s a suggestion. Can you read my visual memory accurately?” Clavain did not need an answer. “While you were finding Iverson’s body, I was looking over the lab samples. There were a lot of terrestrial organisms there. Could one of those have been responsible?”

“You’d better replay the memory.”

Clavain did; picturing himself looking over the rows of culture dishes, test-tubes, and gel-slides, concentrating especially on those that had come from Earth rather than the locally-obtained samples. In his mind’s eye the sample names refused to snap into clarity, but the machines that Galiana had seeded through his mind would already be locating the eidetically-stored short-term memories and retrieving them with a clarity beyond the capabilities of Clavain’s own brain.

“Now see if there’s anything there that might do the job.”

“A terrestrial organism?” Galiana sounded surprised. “Well, there might be something there, but I can’t see how it could have spread beyond the laboratory unless someone wanted it to.”

“I think that’s exactly what happened.”

“Sabotage?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’ll know sooner or later. I’ve passed the information to the others. They’ll get back to me if they find a candidate. But I still don’t see why anyone would sabotage the entire base, even if it was possible. Overthrowing the von Neumann machines is one thing ... mass suicide is another.”

“I don’t think it was mass suicide. Mass murder, maybe.”

“And Iverson’s your main suspect?”

“He survived, didn’t he? And Setterholm scrawled a message in the ice just before he died. It must have been a warning about him.” But even as he spoke, he knew there was a second possibility, one that he could not quite focus on.

Galiana swerved the rover to avoid a particularly deep and yawning chasm, shaded with vivid veins of turquoise blue.

“There’s a small matter of a missing motive.”

Clavain looked ahead, wondering if the thing he saw glinting in the distance was a trick of the eye. “I’m working on that,” he said.

Galiana halted them next to the other rover. The two machines were parked at the lip of a slope-sided depression in the ice. It was not really steep enough to call a crevasse, although it was at least thirty or forty meters deep. From the rover’s cab it was not possible to see all the way into the powdery-blue depths, although Clavain could certainly see the fresh footprints which descended into them. Up on the surface marks like that would have been scoured away by the wind in days or hours, so these prints were very fresh. There were, he observed, two sets—someone heavy and confident and someone lighter, less sure of her footing.

Before they had taken the rover they had made sure that there were two suits aboard it. They struggled into them, fiddling with the latches.

“If I’m right,” Clavain said, “this kind of precaution isn’t really necessary. Not for avoiding the sickness, anyway. But better safe than sorry.”

“Excellent timing,” Galiana said, snapping down her helmet and giving it a quarter twist to lock into place. “They’ve just pulled something from your memory, Nevil. There’s a family of single-celled organisms called dinoflagellates, one of which was present in the lab where we found Iverson. Something calledpfiesteria piscicida. Normally it’s an ambush predator that attacks fish.”

“Could it have been responsible for the madness?”

“It’s at least a strong contender. It has a taste for mammalian tissue as well. If it gets into the human nervous system it produces memory loss and disorientation, as well as a host of physical effects. It could have been dispersed as a toxic aerosol released into the base’s air-system. Someone with access to the lab’s facilities could have turned it from something merely nasty to something deadly, I think.”

“We should have pinpointed it, Galiana. Didn’t we swab the air ducts?”

“Yes, but we weren’t looking for something terrestrial. In fact we were excluding terrestrial organisms; only filtering for the basic biochemical building blocks of Diadem life. We just weren’t thinking in criminal terms.”

“More fool us,” Clavain said.

Suited now, they stepped outside. Clavain began to regret his haste in leaving the base so quickly—at having to make do with these old suits and lacking any means of defense. Wanting something in his hand for moral support, he examined the equipment stowed around the outside of the rover until he found an ice pick. It would not be much of a weapon, but he felt better for it.

“You won’t need that,” Galiana said.

“What if Iverson turns nasty?”

“You still won’t need it.”

But he kept it anyway—an ice pick was an ice pick, after all—and the two of them walked to the point where the icy ground began to curve over. Clavain examined the wrist of his suit, studying the cryptic and old-fashioned matrix of keypads that controlled the suit’s functions. On a whim he pressed something promising and was gratified when he felt crampon spikes from the soles of his boots anchoring him to the ice.

“Iverson!” he shouted. “Felka!”

But sound carried poorly beyond his helmet, and the ceaseless, whipping wind would have snatched his words away from the crevasse. There was nothing to do but make the difficult trek into the blue depths. He led the way, his heart pounding in his chest, the old suit awkward and top-heavy. He almost lost his footing once or twice and had to stop to catch his breath once he reached the level bottom of the depression, sweat running into his eyes.

He looked around. The footprints led horizontally for ten or fifteen meters, weaving between fragile, curtainlike formations of opal ice. On some clinical level he acknowledged that the place had a sinister charm—he imagined the wind breathing through those curtains of ice, making ethereal music—but the need to find Felka eclipsed such considerations. He focused only on the low, dark blue hole of a tunnel in the ice ahead of them. The footprints vanished into the tunnel.

“If the bastard’s taken her ...” Clavain said, tightening his grip on the pick. He switched on his helmet light and stooped into the tunnel, Galiana behind him. It was hard going; the tunnel wriggled, rose, and descended for many tens of meters, and Clavain was unable to decide whether it was some weird natural feature—carved, perhaps, by a hot sub-glacial river—or whether it had been dug by hand, much more recently. The walls were veined by worm tracks, a marbling like an immense magnification of the human retina. Here and there Clavain saw the dark smudges of worms moving through cracks that were very close to the surface, though he knew it was necessary to stare at them for long seconds before any movement was discernible. He groaned, the stooping becoming painful, and then the tunnel widened out dramatically. He realized that he had emerged in a much larger space.

It was still underground, although the ceiling glowed with the blue translucence of filtered daylight. The covering of ice could not have been more than a meter or two thick; a thin shell stretched like a dome over tens of meters of yawing nothing. Nearly sheer walls of delicately patterned ice rose up from a level, footprint-dappled floor.

“Ah,” said Iverson, who was standing near one wall of the chamber. “You decided to join us.”

Clavain felt a stab of relief, seeing that Felka was standing not far from him, next to a piece of equipment Clavain failed to recognize. Felka seemed unharmed. She turned toward him, the peculiar play of light and shade on her helmeted face making her seem older than she was.

“Nevil,” he heard Felka say. “Hello.”

He crossed the ice, fearful that the whole marvelous edifice was about to come crashing down on them all.

“Why did you bring her here, Iverson?”

“There’s something I wanted to show her. Something I knew she’d like, even more than the other things.” He turned to the smaller figure near him. “Isn’t that right, Felka?”

“Yes.”

“And do you like it?”

Her answer was matter-of-fact, but it was closer to conversation than anything Clavain had ever heard from her lips.

“Yes. I do like it.”

Galiana stepped ahead of him and extended a hand to the girl. “Felka? I’m glad you like this place. I like it, too. But now it’s time to come back home.”

Clavain steeled himself for an argument, some kind of show-down between the two women, but to his immense relief Felka walked casually toward Galiana.

“I’ll take her back to the rover,” Galiana said. “I want to make sure she hasn’t had any problems breathing with that old suit on.”

A transparent lie, but it would suffice.

Then she spoke to Clavain. It was a tiny thing, almost inconsequential, but she placed it directly in his head.

And he understood what he would have to do.

When they were alone, Clavain said: “You killed him.”

“Setterholm?”

“No. You couldn’t have killed Setterholm because you are Setterholm.” Clavain looked up, the arc of his helmet light tracing the filamentary patterning until it became too tiny to resolve, blurring into an indistinct haze of detail that curved over into the ceiling itself. It was like admiring a staggeringly ornate fresco.

“Nevil, do me a favor? Check the settings on your suit, in case you’re not getting enough oxygen?”

“There’s nothing wrong with my suit.” Clavain smiled, the irony of it all delicious. “In fact, it was the suit that really tipped me off. When you pushed Iverson into the crevasse, his helmet came off. That couldn’t have happened unless it wasn’t fixed properly in the first place—and that couldn’t have happened unless someone had removed it after the two of you left the base.”

Setterholm—he was sure the man was Setterholm—snorted derisively, but Clavain continued speaking.

“Here’s my stab at what happened, for what it’s worth. You needed to swap identities with Iverson because Iverson had no obvious motive for murdering the others, whereas Setterholm certainly did.”

“And I don’t suppose you have any idea what that motive might have been?”

“Give me time; I’ll get there eventually. Let’s just deal with the lone murder first. Changing the electronic records was easy enough—you could even swap Iverson’s picture and medical data for your own—but that was only part of it. You also needed to get Iverson into your clothes and suit, so that we’d assume the body in the crevasse belonged to you, Setterholm. I don’t know exactly how you did it.”

“Then perhaps ...”

Clavain carried on. “But my guess is you let him catch a dose of the bug you let loose in the main base—pfiesteria, wasn’t it?—then followed him while he went walking outside. You jumped him, knocked him down on the ice, and got him out of the suit and into yours. He was probably unconscious by then, I suppose. But then he must have started coming round, or you panicked for another reason. You jammed the helmet on and pushed him into the crevasse. Maybe if all that had happened was his helmet coming off, I wouldn’t have dwelled on it. But he wasn’t dead, and he lived long enough to scratch a message in the ice. I thought it concerned his murderer, but I was wrong. He was trying to tell me who he was. Not Setterholm, but Iverson.”

“Nice theory.” Setterholm glanced down at a display screen in the back of the machine that squatted next to him. Mounted on a tripod, it resembled a huge pair of binoculars, pointed with a slight elevation toward one wall of the chamber.

“Sometimes, a theory’s all you need. That’s quite a toy you’ve got there, by the way. What is it, some kind of ground-penetrating radar?”

Setterholm brushed aside the question. “If I was him—why would I have done it? Just because I was interested in the ice-worms?”

“It’s simple,” Clavain said, hoping the uncertainty he felt was not apparent in his voice. “The others weren’t as convinced as you were of the worms’ significance. Only you saw them for what they were.” He was treading carefully here, masking his ignorance of Setterholm’s deeper motives by playing on the man’s vanity.

“Clever of me if I did.”

“Oh, yes. I wouldn’t doubt that at all. And it must have driven you to distraction, that you could see what the others couldn’t. Naturally, you wanted to protect the worms when you saw them under threat.”

“Sorry, Nevil, but you’re going to have to try a lot harder than that.” He paused and patted the machine’s mate-silver casing, clearly unable to pretend that he did not know what it was. “It’s a radar, yes. It can probe the interior of the glacier with sub-centimeter resolution, to a depth of several tens of meters.”

“Which would be rather useful if you wanted to study the worms.”

Setterholm shrugged. “I suppose so. A climatologist interested in glacial flow might also have use for the information.”

“Like Iverson?” Clavain took a step closer to Setterholm and the radar equipment. He could see the display more clearly now: a fibrous tangle of mainly green lines slowly spinning in space, with a denser structure traced out in red near its heart. “Like the man you killed?”

“I told you, I’m Iverson.”

Clavain stepped toward him with the ice pick held double-handed, but when he was a few meters from the man he veered past and made his way to the wall. Setterholm had flinched, but he had not seemed unduly worried that Clavain was about to try to hurt him.

“I’ll be frank with you,” Clavain said, raising the pick. “I don’t really understand what it is about the worms.”

“What are you going to do?”

“This.”

Clavain smashed the pick against the wall as hard as he was able. It was enough: a layer of ice fractured noisily away, sliding down like a miniature avalanche to land in pieces at his feet; each fist-sized shard veined with worm trails.

“Stop,” Setterholm said.

“Why? What do you care, if you’re not interested in the worms?”

Clavain smashed the ice again, dislodging another layer.

“You ...” Setterholm paused. “You could bring the whole place down on us if you’re not careful.”

Clavain raised the pick again, letting out a groan of effort as he swung. This time he put all his weight behind the swing, all his fury, and a chunk the size of his upper body calved noisily from the wall.

“I’ll take that risk,” Clavain said.

“No. You’ve got to stop.”

“Why? It’s only ice.”

“No!”

Setterholm rushed him, knocking him to his feet. The ice pick spun from his hand and the two of them crashed into the ground, Setterholm landing on his chest. He pressed his faceplate close to Clavain’s, every bead of sweat on his forehead gleaming like a precise little jewel.

“I told you to stop.”

Clavain found it hard to speak with the pressure on his chest but forced out the words with effort. “I think we can dispense with the charade that you’re Iverson now, can’t we?”

“You shouldn’t have harmed it.”

“No ... and neither should the others, eh? But they needed that ice very badly.”

Now Setterholm’s voice held a tone of dull resignation. “The reactor, you mean?”

“Yes. The fusion plant.” Clavain allowed himself to feel some small satisfaction, before adding: “Actually, it was Galiana who made the connection, not me. That the reactor ran on ice, I mean. And after all the outlying bases had been evacuated, they had to keep everyone alive back at the main one. And that meant more load on the reactor. Which meant it needed more ice, of which there was hardly a shortage in the immediate vicinity.”

“But they couldn’t be allowed to harvest the ice. Not after what I’d discovered.”

Clavain nodded, observing that the reversion from Iverson to Setterholm was now complete.

“No. The ice was precious, wasn’t it. Infinitely more so than anyone else realized. Without that ice the worms would have died ...”

“You don’t understand either, do you?”

Clavain swallowed. “I think I understand more than the others, Setterholm. You realized that the worms—”

“It wasn’t the damned worms!” He had shouted—Setterholm had turned on a loudspeaker function in his suit that Clavain had not located yet—and for a moment the words crashed around the great ice chamber, threatening to start the tiny chain reaction of fractures that would collapse the whole. But when silence had returned—disturbed only by the rasp of Clavain’s breathing—nothing had changed.

“It wasn’t the worms?”

“No.” Setterholm was calmer now, as if the point had been made. “No—not really. They were important, yes—but as low-level elements in a much more complex system. Don’t you understand?”

Clavain strove for honesty. “I never really understood what it was that fascinated you about them. They seemed quite simple to me.”

Setterholm removed his weight from Clavain and rose up on to his feet again. “That’s because they are. A child could grasp the biology of a single ice-worm in an afternoon. Felka did, in fact. Oh, she’s wonderful, Nevil.” Setterholm’s teeth flashed a smile that chilled Clavain. “The things she could unravel ... she isn’t a failure, not at all. I think she’s something miraculous we barely comprehend.”

“Unlike the worms.”

“Yes. They’re like clockwork toys; programmed with a few simple rules.” Setterholm stooped down and grabbed the ice pick for himself. “They always respond in exactly the same way to the same input stimulus. And the kinds of stimuli they respond to are simple in the extreme: a few gradations of temperature, a few biochemical cues picked up from the ice itself. But the emergent properties ...”

Clavain forced himself to a sitting position. “There’s that word again.”

“It’s the network, Nevil. The system of tunnels the worms dig through the ice. Don’t you understand? That’s where the real complexity lies. That’s what I was always more interested in. Of course, it took me years to see it for what it was ...”

“Which was?”

“A self-evolving network. One that has the capacity to adapt; to learn.”

“It’s just a series of channels bored through ice, Setterholm.”

“No. It’s infinitely more than that.” The man craned his neck as far as the architecture of his suit would allow, revelling in the palatial beauty of the chamber. “There are two essential elements in any neural network, Nevil. Connections and nodes are necessary, but not enough. The connections must be capable of being weighted, adjusted in strength according to usefulness. And the nodes must be capable of processing the inputs from the connections in a deterministic manner, like logic gates.” He gestured around the chamber. “Here, there is no absolutely sharp distinction between the connections and the nodes, but the essence remain. The worms lay down secretions when they travel, and those secretions determine how other worms make use of the same channels; whether they utilize one route or another. There are many determining factors: the sexes of the worms, the seasons; the others I won’t bore you with. But the point is simple. The secretions—and the effect they have on the worms—mean that the topology of the network is governed by subtle emergent principles. And the breeding tangles function as logic gates, processing the inputs from their connecting nodes according to the rules of worm sex, caste, and hierarchy. It’s messy, slow, and biological—but the end result is that the worm colony as a whole functions as a neural network. It’s a program that the worms themselves are running, even though any given worm hasn’t a clue that it’s a part of a larger whole.”

Clavain absorbed all that and thought carefully before asking the question that occurred to him. “How does it change?”

“Slowly,” Setterholm said. “Sometimes routes fall into disuse because the secretions inhibit other worms from using them. Gradually, the glacier seals them shut. At the same time other cracks open by chance—the glacier’s own fracturing imposes a constant chaotic background on the network—or the worms bore new holes. Seen in slow-motion—our time frame—almost nothing ever seems to happen, let alone change. But imagine speeding things up, Nevil. Imagine if we could see the way the network has changed over the last century or the last thousand years ... imagine what we might find. A constantly evolving loom of connections, shifting and changing eternally. Now, does that remind you of anything?”

Clavain answered in the only way that he knew would satisfy Setterholm. “A mind, I suppose. A newborn one, still forging neural connections.”

“Yes. Oh, you’d undoubtably like to point out that the network is isolated, so it can’t be responding to stimuli beyond itself—but we can’t know that for certain. A season is like a heartbeat here, Nevil! What we think of as a geologically slow processes—a glacier cracking or two glaciers colliding—those events could be as forceful as caresses and sounds to a blind child.” He paused and glanced at the screen in the back of the imaging radar. “That’s what I wanted to find out. A century ago, I was able to study the network for a handful of decades. And I found something that astonished me. The colony moves—reshapes itself constantly—as the glacier shifts and breaks up. But no matter how radically the network changes its periphery; no matter how thoroughly the loom evolves, there are deep structures inside the network that are always preserved.” Setterholm’s finger traced the red mass at the heart of the green tunnel map. “In the language of network topology, the tunnel system is scale-free rather than exponential. It’s the hallmark of a highly organized network with a few rather specialized processing centers—hubs, if you like. This is one. I believe its function is to cause the whole network to move away from a widening fracture in the glacier. It would take me much more than a century to know for sure, although everything I’ve seen here confirms what I thought originally. I mapped other structures in other colonies, too. They can be huge, spread across cubic kilometers of ice. But they always persist. Don’t you see what that means? The network has begun to develop specialized areas of function. It’s begun to process information, Nevil. It’s begun to creep its way toward thought.”

Clavain looked around him once more, trying to see the chamber in the new light that Setterholm had revealed. Think not of the worms as entities in their own right, he thought, but as electrical signals, ghosting along synaptic pathways in a neural network made of solid ice.

He shivered. It was the only appropriate response.

“Even if the network processes information ... there’s no reason to think it could ever become conscious.”

“Why, Nevil? What’s the fundamental difference between perceiving the universe via electrical signals transmitted along nerve tissue and via fracture patterns moving through a vast block of ice?”

“I suppose you have a point.”

“I had to save them, Nevil. Not just the worms, but the network they were a part of. We couldn’t come all this way and just wipe out the first thinking thing we’d ever encountered in the universe, just because it didn’t fit into our neat little preconceived notions of what alien thought would actually be like.”

“But saving the worms meant killing everyone else.”

“You think I didn’t realize that? You think it didn’t agonize me to do what I had to do? I’m a human being, Nevil—not a monster. I knew exactly what I was doing and I knew exactly what it would make me look like to anyone who came here afterwards.”

“But you still did it.”

“Put yourself in my shoes. How would you have acted?”

Clavain opened his mouth, expecting an answer to spring to mind. But nothing came, not for several seconds. He was thinking about Setterholm’s question, more thoroughly than he had done so far. Until then he had satisfied himself with the quiet, unquestioned assumption that he would not have acted the way Setterholm had done. But could he really be so sure? Setterholm, after all, had truly believed that the network formed a sentient whole, a thinking being. Possessing that knowledge must have made him feel divinely chosen, sanctioned to commit any act to preserve the fabulously rare thing he had found. And he had, after all, been right.

“You haven’t answered me.”

“That’s because I thought the question warranted something more than a flippant answer, Setterholm. I like to think I wouldn’t have acted the way you did, but I don’t suppose I can ever be sure of that.”

Clavain stood up, inspecting his suit for damage, relieved that the scuffle had not injured him.

“You’ll never know.”

“No. I never will. But one thing’s clear enough. I’ve heard you talk, heard the fire in your words. You believe in your network, and yet you still couldn’t make the others see it. I doubt I’d have been able to do much better, and I doubt that I’d have thought of a better way to preserve what you’d found.”

“Then you’d have killed everyone, just like I did?”

The realization of it was like a hard burden someone had just placed on his shoulders. It was so much easier to feel incapable of such acts. But Clavain had been a soldier. He had killed more people than he could remember, even though those days had been a long time ago. It was really a lot less difficult to do when you had a cause to believe in.

And Setterholm had definitely had a cause.

“Perhaps,” Clavain said. “Perhaps I might have, yes.”

He heard Setterholm sigh. “I’m glad. For a moment”

“For a moment what?”

“When you showed up with that pick, I thought you were planning to kill me.” Setterholm hefted the pick, much as Clavain had done earlier. “You wouldn’t have done that, would you? I don’t deny that what I did was regrettable, but I had to do it.”

“I understand.”

“But what happens to me now? I can stay with you all, can’t I?”

“We probably won’t be staying on Diadem, I’m afraid. And I don’t think you’d really want to come with us; not if you knew what we’re really like.”

“You can’t leave me alone here, not again.”

“Why not? You’ll have your worms. And you can always kill yourself again and see who shows up next.” Clavain turned to leave.

“No. You can’t go now.”

“I’ll leave your rover on the surface. Maybe there are some supplies in it. Just don’t come anywhere near the base again. You won’t find a welcome there.”

“I’ll die out here,” Setterholm said.

“Start getting used to it.”

He heard Setterholm’s feet scuffing across the ice, a walk breaking into a run. Clavain turned around calmly, unsurprised to see Setterholm coming towards him with the pick raised high, as a weapon.

Clavain sighed.

He reached into Setterholm’s skull, addressing the webs of machines that still floated in the man’s head and instructed them to execute their host in a sudden, painless orgy of neural deconstruction. It was not a trick he could have done an hour ago, but after Galiana had planted the method in his mind, it was as easy as sneezing. For a moment he understood what it must feel like to be a god.

And in that same moment Setterholm dropped the ice pick and stumbled, falling forward onto one end of the pick’s blade. It pierced his faceplate, but by then he was dead anyway.

“What I said was the truth,” Clavain said. “I might have killed them as well, just like I said. I don’t like to think so, but I can’t say it isn’t in me. No, I don’t blame you for that, not at all.”

With his boot he began to kick a dusting of frost over the dead man’s body. It would be too much bother to remove Setterholm from this place, and the machines inside him would sterilise his body, ensuring that none of his cells ever contaminated the glacier. And, as Clavain had told himself only a few days earlier, there were worse places to die than here. Or worse places to be left for dead, anyway.

When he was done; when what remained of Setterholm was just an ice-covered mound in the middle of the cavern, Clavain addressed him for one final time.

“But that doesn’t make it right, either. It was still murder, Setterholm.” He kicked a final divot of ice over the corpse. “Someone had to pay for it.”

Grafenwalder’s Bestiary

Grafenwalder’s attention is torn between the Ultra captain standing before him and the real-time video feed playing on his monocle. The feed shows the creature being unloaded from the Ultras’ shuttle into the special holding pen Grafenwalder has already prepared. The beetle-like forms of armoured keepers poke and prod the recalcitrant animal with ten-metre stun-rods. The huge serpentine form writhes and bellows, flashing its attack eyes each time it exposes the roof of its mouth.

“Must have been a difficult catch, Captain. Locating one is supposed to be difficult enough, let alone trapping and transporting—”

“The capture was handled by a third party,” Shallice informs him, with dry indifference. “I have no knowledge of the procedures involved, or of the particular difficulties encountered. “

While the keepers pacify the animal, technicians snip tissue samples and hasten them into miniature bio-analysers. So far they’ve seen nothing that suggests it isn’t the real thing.

“I take it there were no problems with the freezing?”

“Freezing always carries a risk, especially when the underlying biology is nonterrestrial. We only guarantee that the animal appears to behave the same way now as when it was captured.”

Shallice is a typical Ultra: a cyborg human adapted for the extreme rigours of prolonged interstellar flight. His sleek red servo-powered exoskeleton is decorated with writhing green neon dragons. Cagelike metal ribs emerge from the Ultra’s waxy white sternum, smeared with vivid blue disinfectant where they puncture the skin. The Ultra’s limbs are blade-thin; his skull a squeezed hatchet capable of only a limited range of expression. He smells faintly of ammonia, breathes like a broken bellows and his voice is a buzzing, waspish approximation of human speech.

“Whoever that third party was, they must have been damned good.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Last I heard, no one has ever captured a live hamadryad. Not for very long, anyway.”

Shallice can’t hide his scorn. “Your news is old. There had been at least three successful captures before we left Sky’s Edge.” He pauses, fearing perhaps that he may have soured the deal. “Of course,” he continues, “this is a far larger hamadryad ... an adult, almost ready for tree-fusion. The others were juveniles, and they did not continue to grow once they were in captivity.”

“You’re right: I need to keep better informed.” At that moment the news scrolls onto his monocle: his specialists have cross-matched samples from the animal against archived hamadryad genetic material, finding no significant points of deviation. “Well, Captain,” he says agreeably, “it looks as if we have closure on this one. You must be in quite a hurry to get back into safe space, away from the Rust Belt.”

“We’ve other business to attend to before we have that luxury,” Shallice tells him. “You’re not our only client around Yellowstone.” The Ultra’s eyes narrow to calculating slits. “As a matter of fact, we have another hamadryad to deliver.” Before Grafenwalder responds, the Ultra raises a servo-assisted hand. “Not a fully grown sample like your own. A much less mature animal. Yours will still be unique in that sense.”

Anger rises in Grafenwalder like a hot, boiling tide. “But it won’t be the only hamadryad around Yellowstone, will it?”

“The other one will probably die. It will certainly not grow any larger.”

“You misled me, Captain. You promised exclusivity.”

“I did no such thing. I merely said that no one else would be offered an adult.”

Grafenwalder knows Ultras too well to doubt that Shallice is telling the truth. They may be unscrupulous, but they usually stay within the strict letter of a contract.

“This other collector ... you wouldn’t mind telling me who it is, would you?”

“That would be a violation of confidentiality.”

“Come now, Captain—if someone else gets their hands on a hamadryad, they’re hardly going to keep it a secret. At least not within the Circle.”

Shallice weighs this point for several long moments, his alloy ribs flexing with each laboured breath. “The collector ‘s name is Ursula Goodglass. She owns a habitat in the low belt. Doubtless you know the name.”

“Yes,” Grafenwalder says. “Vaguely. She’s been nosing around the Circle for some time, but I wouldn’t call her a full member just yet. Her collection’s nothing to speak of, by all accounts.”

“Perhaps that will change when she has her hamadryad.”

“Not when the Circle learns there’s a bigger one here. Did you let her think she’d be getting something unique as well, Captain?”

Shallice makes a sniffing sound. “The contract was watertight. “

On the video feed, the animal is being coaxed deeper into its pen. Now and then it rears up to strike against its tormentors, moving with deceptive speed.

“Let’s not play games, Captain. How much is she paying you for her sample?”

“Ten thousand.”

“Then I’ll pay you fifteen not to hand it over, on top of what I’m already paying you.”

“Out of the question. We have an arrangement with Goodglass.”

“You’ll tell a little white lie. Say it didn’t thaw out properly, or that something went wrong afterwards.”

Shallice thinks this over, his hatchet-head cocking this way and that inside the metal chassis of the exoskeleton. “She might ask to see the corpse—”

“I absolutely insist on it. I want her to know what she nearly got her hands on.”

“A deception will place us at considerable risk. Fifteen would not be sufficient. Twenty, on the other hand—”

“Eighteen, Captain, and that’s as high as I go. If you walk out of here without accepting the deal, I’ll contact Goodglass and tell her you were at least giving it the time of day.”

“Eighteen it is, then,” Shallice says, after a suitable pause. “You drive a hard bargain, Mister Grafenwalder. You would make a good Ultra.”

Grafenwalder shrugs off the insult and reaches out a hand to Captain Shallice. When his fingers close around the Ultra’s, it’s like shaking hands with a cadaver.

“I’d love to say it’s been a pleasure doing business.”

Later, he watches their shuttle depart his habitat and thread its way through the debris-infested Rust Belt, moving furtively between the major debris-swept orbits. He wonders what the Ultras make of the old place, given the changes that have afflicted it since their last trip through the system.

Good while it lasted, as people tend to say these days.

Oddly, though, Grafenwalder prefers things the way they are now. All things told, he came out well. Neither his body nor his habitat had depended on nanomachines, so it was only the secondary effects of the plague that were of concern to him. The area in which he had invested his energies prior to the crisis—the upgrading of habitat security systems—now proves astonishingly lucrative amongst the handful of clients able to afford his services. In lawless times, people always want higher walls.

There’s something else, though. Ever since the plague hit, Grafenwalder has slept easier at night. He’s at a loss to explain why, but the catastrophe—as bad as it undoubtedly was for Yellowstone and its environs—seems to have triggered some seismic shift in his own peace of mind. He remembers being anxious before; now—most of the time, at least—he only has the memory of anxiety.

At last his radar loses track of the Ultra shuttle, and it’s only then that he realises his error. He should have asked to see the other hamadryad before paying the captain to kill it. Not because he thinks it might not ever have existed—he’s reasonably sure it did—but because he has no evidence at all that it wasn’t already dead.

He permits himself a bittersweet smile. Next time, he won’t make that kind of mistake. And at least he has his hamadryad.

Grafenwalder walks alone through his bestiary. It’s night, by the twenty-six-hour cycle of Yellowstone standard time, and the exhibits are mostly dimmed. The railed walkway that he follows glows a subdued red, winding between, under and over the vast cages, tanks and pits. Many of the creatures are asleep, but some stir or uncoil at his approach, while others never sleep. Things study his passage with dim, resentful intelligence: just enough to know that he is their captor. Occasionally something throws itself at its restraints, clanging against cage bars or shuddering against hardened glass. Things spit and lash. There are distressing calls; laughable attempts at vocalisation.

Not all of the animals are animals, technically speaking. About half the exhibits in the bestiary are creatures like the hamadryad: alien organisms that evolved on the handful of known life-sustaining worlds beyond the First System. There are slime-scrapers from Grand Teton; screech-mats from Fand; more than a dozen different organisms from the jungles of Sky’s Edge, including the hamadryad itself.

But the other half of the collection is more problematic. It’s the half that could get him into serious trouble if the agents of the law came calling. It’s where he keeps the real monsters: the things that might once have been human. There is the specimen he once bought from some other Ultras: a former crewman, apparently, who had been transformed far beyond the usual Ultra norms. Major areas of brain function had been trowelled out and replaced with crude neural modules, until the only remaining instinct was a slathering urge to mutilate and kill. His limbs are viciously specialised weapons, his bone growth modified to produce horns and armoured plaques. Grafenwalder can only guess that the man was meant to be some kind of berserker, to be used in acts of piracy where energy weapons might be unwise. Eventually he must have become unmanageable. Now it amuses Grafenwalder to provoke the man into futile killing frenzies.

Then there is the hyperpig variant his contacts located for him in the bowels of Chasm City: one of a kind, apparently; a rare genetic deviation from the standard breed. The woman’s right side is perfectly human, but her left side is all pig. Brain function lies somewhere between animal and human. She sometimes tries to talk to him, but the compromised layout of her jaw renders her attempts at speech as frenzied, unintelligible grunts. At other times neural implants leave her docile, easily controlled. On the rare occasions when he has guests, Grafenwalder has her serve dinner. She shuffles in presenting her human side, then turns to reveal her true ancestry. Grafenwalder treasures his guests’ reactions with a thin, observant smile.

Then there is the psychotic dolphin that lives in near-permanent darkness, its body showing evidence of crude cybernetic tampering. Its origin is unclear, its age even more so, but the animal’s endless, all-consuming rage is beyond question. Grafenwalder has dropped sensors into the animal’s scarred cortex, hooked into a visual display system. The slightest external stimulus becomes amplified into a kaleidoscopic light show, like the Devil’s own firework display. Circuits drop the visual patterns back into the dolphin’s mind. As an after-dinner treat, Grafenwalder encourages his guests to torment the dolphin into ever more furious cycles of anger.

There are many other exhibits; almost too many for Grafenwalder to remember. Not all are of interest to him now, and there are some that he has not visited for many years. His keepers take care of the creatures’ needs, only bothering him when something needs specialised or expensive medical intervention and his permission must be sought. Perhaps the hamadryad will turn out to be another of those waning fancies, although he thinks it unlikely.

But there is one holding pen that remains unoccupied. He’s walking over it now, hands on either side of the railed bridge that spans the empty abyss. It is a deep, ceramic-lined tank that will eventually be filled with cold water under many atmospheres of pressure. At the bottom of the tank is a rocky surface that is designed to be punctuated by thermal hotspots, gushing noxious gases. When it is activated, the environment in the tank will form a close match to conditions inside the ice-shrouded ocean of Europa, the little moon of Jupiter in the First System.

But first Grafenwalder needs an occupant for the tank. That’s the fundamental problem. He knows what he has in mind, but finding one of the elusive creatures is proving trickier than he expected. There are even some who doubt that the Denizens ever existed; let alone that he might find a surviving specimen now, in another system and nearly two hundred years after their supposed heyday. Yet there are enough shards of encouragement to keep him hopeful. He has subtle feelers out, and every now and then one of them twitches with a nugget of information. His trusted contacts know that he is looking for one, and that he will pay very well upon delivery. And deep inside himself he knows that the Denizens were real, that they lived and breathed and that it is not absurd that one may have survived into the present era.

He must have one. Although he would never admit it, he would gladly trade the rest of his bestiary for that one exhibit. And even as he acknowledges that truth within himself, he still cannot say why the creature matters so much.

Orbiting the inner fringe of the Rust Belt, backdropped by the choleric face of Yellowstone itself, Goodglass’s habitat is a wrinkled walnut of unprepossessing dimensions. Grafenwalder’s shuttle docks at a polar berthing nub, where a dozen similar vehicles are already clamped. He recognises more than half of them as belonging to collectors of his acquaintance.

After running some cursory security checks, a silverback gorilla escorts him deeper into the miniature world. The habitat is a cored-out asteroid, excavated by fusion torches and stuffed with a warren of pressurised domiciles wrapped around a modest central airspace. A spinney of free-fall trees keeps the self-regulating ecosystem ticking over, with only a minimal dependence on plague-vulnerable machinery. There are no servitors anywhere, only adapted animals like the silverback. The air smells mulchy, saturated with microscopic green organisms. Grafenwalder sneezes into his handkerchief and makes a mental note to have his lungs swapped out and filtered when he returns home.

Goodglass offers cocktails to her assembled guests. They’re standing in an antechamber to her bestiary, in a part of the habitat that has been spun for gravity. The polished floor is a matrix of black and white tiles, each of which has been inlaid with a luminous red fragment of a much larger picture. As the guests stand around, the tiles slowly shift and reorient themselves.

Grafenwalder goes with the flow, letting the tiles slide him from encounter to encounter. He makes small talk with the other collectors, filing gossip and rumour. All the while he’s checking out his host, measuring her against his expectations. Ursula Goodglass is a small woman of baseline-human appearance, devoid of any obvious biomodi fications. She wears a one-piece purple-black outfit with flared sleeves, rising to a stiff-necked collar upon which her hairless head sits like a rare egg. She possesses an attractively impish face with a turned-up nose. He could like her, if he didn’t already detest her.

Presently, as he knew they must, the tiles bring them together. He bows his head and takes her black-gloved hand.

“It’s good of you to come, Mister Grafenwalder,” she says. “I know how busy you are, and I wasn’t really expecting you to be able to find the time.”

“Carl, please,” he says, oozing charm. “And don’t imagine I’d have been able to stay away. Your invitation sounded intriguing. It’s so much more difficult to turn up anything new these days, the way things have gone. I can’t imagine what it is you have for us.”

“I just hope you won’t be disappointed.”

“I won’t,” he says, with heavy emphasis. “Of that I’m sure.”

“I want you to understand,” she begins, before glancing away nervously, “it’s not that I’m trying to compete with you, or upstage you. I’ve too much respect for you for that.”

“Oh, don’t worry. A little healthy rivalry never hurt anyone. What good is a collection unless there’s another one to lend it contrast?”

She smiles uncertainly, measuring him as much as he is measuring her. He can feel the pressure of her scrutiny: cool and steady as a refrigeration laser.

Fine lines crisscross her skull: snow-white sutures that remind him of the fracture patterns in the ice of Europa, even though he has never visited First System. The scars are evidence of emergency surgery performed in the heat of the Melding Plague, when it became necessary for the rich to rid themselves of their neural implants. Now Goodglass wears them as a symbol of former status.

“I’d like you to meet my husband,” she says as a palanquin glides up to them across the shifting tiled floor. Grafenwalder blinks back surprise: he’d noticed the palanquin before, but had assumed it belonged to one of the other guests. “Edric, this is Carl,” she says.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” the palanquin answers, the piping voice issuing from a speaker grille set halfway up the front of the armoured cabinet. The palanquin has the shape of a slender, flat-topped pyramid, its bronze sides flanged by cooling ribs and sensor studs. An oval window set into the front, just above the speaker grille, is too dark to afford more than a vague impression of Edric Goodglass. “I hope this encumbrance doesn’t make you ill at ease, Mister Grafenwalder,” the occupant tells him.

“Hardly,” he says. “I’ve used palanquins myself, for business in Chasm City. They tell me my blood has been scrubbed of machines, but you can’t ever be too careful.”

“In my case I never leave my palanquin,” Edric says. “I still carry all the bodily machines I had at the time of the plague. It would only take a tiny residual trace to kill me.”

Grafenwalder swirls his drink, stepping nimbly from one moving tile to another. “It must be intolerable.”

“It’s my own fault. I was too slow when it counted. When the plague hit, I hesitated. I should have had the surgery fast and dirty, the way my wife did. She was braver than I; less convinced it was all about to blow over. Now I can’t even risk the surgery. I’d have to leave the palanquin before they opened me up, and that alone would expose me to unacceptable risk.”

“But surely the top hospitals—”

“None will give me the cast-iron guarantee I require. Until one of them can state categorically that there is a zero risk of plague infection, I will remain in this thing.”

“You might be in for a long wait.”

“If I’ve learned anything from Ursula, it’s the value of patience. She’s the very model of it.”

Grafenwalder shoots a sidelong glance at Ursula Goodglass, wondering what their marriage must be like. Clearly sex isn’t in the cards, but he doubts that it was ever the main interest in their lives. Games, especially those of prestige and subterfuge, are amongst the chief entertainments of the Rust Belt moneyed.

“Well, I suppose I shouldn’t keep people waiting any longer,” the woman says. She drops her empty glass to the floor, where it vanishes into one of the black tiles as if it had met no resistance, and then claps her hands three times. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she begins, voice raised an octave higher than when they had been speaking, “thank you very much for coming here today. Some of you have visited before; some of you are newcomers to my habitat. Some of you will know a little about me, some of you next to nothing. I do not believe that any of us would say that we are close friends. All of us in the Circle have one thing in common, though: we collect. It is what we live for; what makes us who we are. My own bestiary is modest by the standards of some, but I am nonetheless immensely proud of my latest acquisition. There is nothing else like it in this system; nor is there likely to be for a very long time. Please join me now—I believe I have something you are going to find very, very interesting.”

With that, a pair of thick metal doors open in one wall of the room, hissing wide on curved pistons. Goodglass and her husband lead the way, with the rest of the party trailing behind. Grafenwalder chooses to remain close by the couple, feigning curiosity.

She can’t just show off the hamadryad. First they have to endure a short but tedious tour of the rest of her bestiary, or at least that part of it she plans to show them today. None of it is of the slightest interest to Grafenwalder, and even the other guests merely feign polite interest. By turns, though, they arrive at the main event. The party gathers on a railed ledge high above a darkened pit. Grafenwalder knows what’s coming, but keeps his expression blankly expectant. Goodglass makes a little speech, dropping hints about the type of specimen she’s obtained, how difficult it’s been to capture and transport it, alluding once or twice to its planet of origin: clue enough for those in the know. Pricking his ears, Grafenwalder makes out speculative whispers from his fellow collectors. One or two are ahead of Goodglass.

“Unfortunately,” she says, “my exhibit did not arrive intact. It suffered some physiological trauma during its journey here: cryogenic damage to its tissues and nervous system. But it is still alive. With some intervention, my experts have restored much of its basic functional repertoire. In all significant respects, it is still a living hamadryad: the first you will ever see.”

She throws the lights, illuminating the creature in the pit. By then Grafenwalder has a bad taste in his mouth. The hamadryad is much smaller than his adult-phase example, but it isn’t dead. It’s moving: great propulsive waves sliding up and down its concertina body as it writhes and coils from one end of the pit to the other, thrashing like a severed electrical line.

“It’s alive,” he says quietly.

Goodglass looks at him sharply. “Were you expecting otherwise?”

“It’s just that when you said how much difficulty you’d gone to—” But by then his words are drowned out by the demands of the other guests, all of whom have questions for Goodglass. Lysander Carroway starts applauding, encouraging the others to join in.

Grafenwalder notches his hatred a little higher, even as he joins in the applause with effete little hand-claps.

He steps back from the railing, giving Goodglass her moment in the sun. All the while, he studies the hamadryad, trying to figure out what must have happened. As much as he dislikes Ultras, he can’t believe that Captain Shallice would have cheated him so nakedly. That’s when Grafenwalder sees his angle, and knows he can come out of this even better than he was expecting.

He lets the interested chat simmer down, then coughs just loudly enough to let everyone know he has something to contribute.

“It’s very impressive,” he says. “For an intermediate-phase sample, at any rate.”

Goodglass fixes him with narrowing eyes, dimly aware of what must be coming. Even the palanquin spins around, presenting its dark window to him.

“You know of other samples, Carl?” Ursula asks.

“One, anyway. But before we get into that ... you mentioned shipping difficulties, didn’t you?”

“Normal complications associated with reefersleep procedures as applied to nonterrestrial organisms,” she says.

“What kind of complications?”

“I told you already—tissue damage—”

“Yes, but how extensive was it? When the animal was revived from reefersleep, in what way did it exhibit signs of having been injured? Were its movements impaired, its hunting patterns atypical?”

“None of that,” she says.

“Then you’re saying the animal was fine?”

“No,” she says icily. “The animal was dead.”

Grafenwalder twitches back his head in feigned confusion. “I know hamadryad biology is complex, but I didn’t know that they could be brought back from death.”

“Reefersleep is a kind of death,” Goodglass says.

“Well, yes. If you want to split hairs. Things are usually alive after they’ve been thawed, though: that’s more or less the point. But the hamadryad wasn’t alive, was it? It was dead. It’s still dead.”

Lysander Carroway shakes her head emphatically. “It’s alive, Grafenwalder. Use your bloody eyes.”

“It’s being puppeted,” Grafenwalder says. “Isn’t it, Ursula? That’s a dead animal with electrodes in it. You’re making it twitch like a frog’s leg.”

Goodglass fights hard to keep her composure: he can see the pulse of a vein on the side of her skull. “I never actually said it was alive. I merely said it had the full behavioural repertoire of a living hamadryad.”

“You said it was living.”

Her husband answers for her. “They don’t have brains, Grafenwalder. They’re more like plants. It eats and shits. What more do you want?”

Choosing his moment expertly, he offers a disappointed shrug. “I suppose it has a certain comedic value.”

“Come now,” Michael Fayrfax says. “She’s shown us a hamadryad, more than most of us will ever see. What does it matter if it isn’t technically alive?”

“I think it matters a lot,” Grafenwalder says. “That’s why I’ve gone to so much trouble to obtain a living specimen. Bigger than that, too. Mine’s adult-phase. They don’t come any larger.”

“He’s bluffing,” Goodglass says. “If he had a hamadryad, he’d have shown it off already.”

“I assure you I have one. I just wasn’t ready to exhibit it yet.”

She still looks sceptical. “I don’t believe you. Why wait until now?”

“I wanted to be sure the animal had settled down; that I’d ironed out any difficulties with its biology. Keeping one of those things alive is quite a challenge, especially when they’re adult-phase: the whole dietary pattern starts shifting.”

“You’re lying.”

“You can see it, if you want to.”

The scepticism begins to crack, the fear that he might not be lying breaking through. “When?”

“Whenever you like.” He turns to the other guests and extends his hands expansively. “All of you, of course. You know where I live. How about the day after tomorrow? I couldn’t possibly fake one by then, could I?”

Grafenwalder is riding his shuttle back home from the Goodglass bestiary when he receives an incoming communication. It appears to be transmitting from within the Rust Belt, but the shuttle can’t pinpoint the origin of the signal any more precisely than that. For a moment Grafenwalder thinks it may be a threat from Goodglass, even though he credits her with fractionally more sense than that.

But it’s not Goodglass’s face that fills his cabin wall when he answers the communication. It’s nobody he recognises. A man, with a cherubic moon-face and a thick lower lip, glossy with saliva, that sags to the right. He wears a panama hat over tight dark curls, and a finely patterned harlequin coat hangs over his heavy frame in billowing folds. A glass box dangles around his neck, rattling with the implants he must once have carried in his skull. He is backdropped by a sumptuously upholstered chair, rising high as a throne.

“Mister Grafenwalder? My name is Rifugio. I don’t think our paths have crossed before.”

“What do you want?”

There’s barely any timelag. “I am a broker, Mister Grafenwalder: a wheeler-dealer, a fixer, a go-getter. When someone needs something—especially something that may require delicate extralegal manoeuvring—I’m the man to come to.”

Grafenwalder moves to kill the communication. “You still haven’t told me what you want.”

“It is not about what I want. It is about what you want. Specifically, a certain bio-engineered organism.” Rifugio scratches the tip of his bulbous nose. “You’ve been as discreet as matters will allow, I’ll grant you that—but you’ve still put out word concerning the thing you seek. Now that word has reached my ears, and, fortuitously, I happen to be the man who can help you.” Now Rifugio leans closer, the rim of his hat tipping across his brow, and lowers his voice. “I have one, and I am willing to sell it. At a price, of course—I must pay off my own informants and contacts. But knowing what you paid for the hamadryad, I am confident that you can afford twice as much to get the thing you want so badly.”

“Maybe I don’t want one that much.”

Rifugio leans back, looking nonplussed. “In that case ... I won’t trouble you again. Good day to you, sir.”

“Wait,” Grafenwalder says hastily. “I’m interested. But I need to know more.”

“I wouldn’t expect otherwise. We’ll have to meet before we take matters any further, of course.”

Grafenwalder doesn’t like it, but the man is right. “I’ll want a DNA sample.”

“I’ll give you DNA and more: cell cultures, tissue scrapings—almost enough to make one for yourself. We’ll need to meet in person, of course: I wouldn’t trust material of such sensitivity to an intermediary.”

“Of course not,” Grafenwalder says. “But we’ll meet on neutral ground. There’s a place I’ve used before. How does Chasm City grab you?”

Rifugio looks pleased. “Name the time and the place.”

“I can squeeze you in tomorrow,” Grafenwalder says.

He doesn’t care for Chasm City, at least not these days, but it’s a useful enough place to do business. Complex technology doesn’t work reliably, making every transaction cumbersome. But that has its benefits, too. Weapons that might just work in the Rust Belt can’t be trusted in CC. Eavesdropping and other forms of deception become risky. It’s best not to try anything too clever, and everyone knows that.

The one thing Grafenwalder isn’t worried about is catching something. His palanquin is the best money can buy, and even if something did get through its ten centimetres of nano-secure hermetic armour, it would have a hard time finding anything in his body to touch and corrupt. The armour reassures him, though, and the privacy of the cabinet shields him from the awkwardness of a face-to-face encounter. As he makes his way through the city, following other palanquins along the winding path of an elevated private road through the high Canopy, he pages once more through the sparse information he has managed to piece together on Rifugio.

Grafenwalder has the feeling that he’s trying to pin down a ghost. There is a broker named Rifugio, and judging by what he has already achieved, he would appear to have the necessary contacts to procure a Denizen. But it puzzles Grafenwalder that their paths haven’t intersected before. Granted, it’s a big, turbulent system, with a lot of scope for new players to emerge from hitherto obscurity. But Grafenwalder has been courting men like Rifugio for years. There should have been at least a blip on his radar before now.

The palanquins duck and dive through the mad architecture of the Canopy. All around, buildings that were once cleanly geometric have been turned into the threatening forms of haunted trees, their grasping branches locking bony fingers high over the lower levels of the city. Epsilon Eridani is still above the horizon, but so little sunlight penetrates the smog-brown atmosphere or the muck-smeared panels of the latticework dome that it might as well be twilight. The lights are on all over the city, save for the seductive absence of the chasm itself. Dark threads dangle from the larger trunks of the Canopy, like cannon-blasted rigging. Brachiating cable cars swing through the tangle like drunk gibbons. Compared to the ordered habitats of the surviving Rust Belt, it’s a scene from hell. And yet people still live here. People still make lives for themselves; still fall in love and find somewhere they can think of as home. With a lurch of cognitive vertigo that he’s already experienced a few times too many, Grafenwalder remembers that there are people down there who have no memory of how things used to be.

He knows it ought to horrify him that human beings could ever adapt to such a catastrophic downturn in their fortunes, even though people have been doing that kind of thing for most of history. Yet part of him feels a strange kinship with those survivors. He sleeps easier since the plague, and he doesn’t know why. It’s as if the crisis snapped shut part of his life that contained something threatening and loose, something that was in danger of reaching him.

In an unsettling way, though, he feels that Rifugio’s call has reopened that closed book, just a crack. And that whatever was keeping him from sleep is stalking the edge of his imagination once more.

They meet in private rooms in the outermost branch of a Canopy structure near Escher Heights. The building is dead now, incapable of further change, and its owner—a man named Ashley Chabrier, with whom Grafenwalder did business years ago—has cut through the floor, walls and ceilings of the reshaped husk and emplaced enormous glass panels, veined in the manner of insect wings and linked together by leathery fillets of the old growth. It affords a spectacular view, but even Grafenwalder has misgivings as he steers his palanquin across the reflectionless floor, with the fires of the Mulch burning two kilometres below. Even if he survived the fall, the Mulch inhabitants wouldn’t take kindly to the likes of him dropping in.

Rifugio, contrary to Grafenwalder’s expectations, has not arrived by palanquin. He stands with his legs wide, his generous paunch supported by a levitating girdle, a pewter-coloured belt ringed by several dozen tiny and silent ducted fan thrusters. His slippered feet skim the glass with their up-curled toes. As he approaches Grafenwalder, he barely moves his legs.

“I have brought what I promised,” Rifugio says, by way of greeting. He’s carrying a small malachite-green case, dangling from the pudgy fingers of his right hand.

“Is it all right if I say the word ‘Denizen’ now?” Grafenwalder asks.

“You just said it, so I think the answer has to be yes. You’re still suspicious, I see.”

“I’ve every right to be suspicious. I’ve been looking for one of these things for longer than I care to remember.”

“So I hear.”

“There have been times when I have doubted that they exist now; times when I doubted that they ever existed.”

“Yet you haven’t stopped searching. Those doubts never became all-consuming.” Rifugio is very close to the palanquin now. As a matter of routine, it deep-scans him for concealed weapons or listening devices. It finds nothing alarming. Even so, Grafenwalder flinches when the man suddenly lifts the case and pops the lid. “Here is what I have for you, Mister Grafenwalder: enough to silence those qualms of yours.”

The case is lined with black foam. Glass vials reside in neat little partitions. The palanquin probes the case and detects only biological material: exactly what Rifugio promised. With his left hand, Rifugio digs out one of the vials and holds it up like a magic charm. Dark red fluid sloshes around inside.

“Here. Take this and run an analysis on it. It’s Denizen blood, with Denizen DNA.”

Grafenwalder hesitates for a moment, despite the assurances from his palanquin that it can deal with any mere biological trickery. Then he permits the machine to extend one of its manipulators, allowing Rifugio to pop the vial into its cushioned grasp. The machine withdraws the manipulator into its analyser alcove, set just beneath the frontal window. Part of the biological sample will be incinerated and passed through a gas chromatograph, where its isotopic spectrum will be compared against the data on Denizen blood Grafenwalder has already compiled. At the same time, the DNA will be amplified, speed-sequenced and cross-referenced against his best-guess for the Denizen genetic sequence. There’s no physical connection between the analyser and the interior of the palanquin, so Grafenwalder cannot come to harm. Even so, he wills the analyser to complete its duties as swiftly as possible.

“Well, Mister Grafenwalder? Does it meet with your satisfaction?”

The analyser starts graphing up its preliminary conclusions: the material looks genuine enough.

Grafenwalder keeps the excitement from his voice. “I’d like to know where you found it. That would help me decide whether or not I believe you have the genuine article.”

“The Denizen came into my possession via Ultras. They’d been keeping it as a pet, aboard their ship.”

“Shallice’s men, by any chance?”

“I obtained the Denizen from Captain Ritter, of the Number Theoretic. I’ve had no dealings with Shallice, although I know the name. As for Ritter—in so far as one can ever believe anything said by an Ultra—I was told that he acquired the Denizen during routine trade with another group of Ultras, in some other godforsaken system. Apparently the Denizen was kept aboard ship as a pet. The Ultras had little appreciation of its wider value.”

“How did Ultras get hold of it in the first place?”

“I have no idea. Perhaps only the Denizen can tell us the whole story.”

“I’ll need better provenance than that.”

“You may never get it. We’re talking about beings created in utmost secrecy two hundred years ago. Their very existence was doubted even then. The best you can hope for is a plausible sequence of events. Clearly, the Denizen must have left Europa’s ocean after Cadmus-Asterius and the other hanging cities fell. If it passed into the hands of starfarers—Ultras, Demarchists, Conjoiners, it doesn’t matter which—it would have had a means to leave the system, and spend much of the intervening time either frozen or at relativistic speed, or both. It need not have experienced anything like the full bore of those two hundred years. Its memories of Europa may be remarkably sharp.”

“Have you asked it?”

“It doesn’t speak. Not all of them were created with the gift of language, Mister Grafenwalder. They were engineered to work as underwater slaves: to take orders rather than to issue them. They had to be intelligent, but they didn’t need to answer back.”

“Some of them had language.”

“The early prototypes, and those that were designed to mediate with their human overseers. Most of them were dumb.”

Grafenwalder allows the disappointment to wash over him, then bottles it away. He’d always hoped for a talker, but Rifugio is correct: it could never be guaranteed. And perhaps there is something in having one that won’t answer back, or plead. It’s going to be spending a lot of time in his tank, after all.

“You’ll treat it with kindness, of course,” Rifugio continues. “I didn’t liberate it from the Ultras just so it can become someone else’s pet, to be tormented between now and kingdom come. You’ll treat it as the sentient being it is.”

Grafenwalder sneers. “If you care so much, why not hand it over to the authorities?”

“Because they’d kill it, and then go after anyone who knew of its existence. Demarchists made the Denizens in one of their darker moments. They’re more enlightened now—so they’d like us to think, anyway. They certainly wouldn’t want something like a living and breathing Denizen—a representative of a sentient slave race—popping out of history’s cupboard, not when they’re bending over backwards to score moral points over the Conjoiners.”

“I’ll treat it fairly,” Grafenwalder says.

At that moment the analyser announces that the blood composition and genetic material are both consistent with Denizen origin, to high statistical certainty. It’s not enough to prove that Rifugio has one, but it’s a large step in the right direction. Plenty of hoaxers have already fallen at this hurdle.

“Well, Mister Grafenwalder? Have you reached a decision yet?”

“I want to see the other samples.”

Rifugio fingers another vial from the case. “Skin tissue. “

“I don’t have the means to run a thorough analysis on skin—not here anyway. Give me what you have, and I’ll take it back with me.”

Rifugio looks pained. “I’d hoped that we might reach agreement here and now.”

“Then you hoped wrong. Unless you want to lower your price ...”

“I’m afraid that part of the arrangement isn’t negotiable. However, I’m willing to let you take these samples away.” Rifugio snaps shut the lid. “As a further token of my goodwill, I’ll provide you with a moving image of the living Denizen. But I will expect a speedy decision in return.”

Grafenwalder’s palanquin takes the sealed case and stores it inside its bombproof cargo hatch. “You’ll get it. Don’t worry about that.”

“Take me at my word, Mister Grafenwalder. You’re not the only collector with an eye for one of these monsters.”

Grafenwalder spends most of the return trip viewing the thirty-second movie clip, over and over again. It’s not the first time he’s seen moving imagery of something purporting to be a Denizen, but no other clip has withstood close scrutiny. This one is darker and grainier than some of the others, the swimming humanoid shifting in and out of focus, but there’s something eerily naturalistic about it, something that convinces him that it could be real. The Denizen looks plausible: it’s a monster, undoubtedly, but that monstrosity is the end result of logical design factors. It swims with effortless ease, propelling itself with the merest flick of the long fluked tail it wears in place of legs. It has arms, terminating in humanoid hands engineered for tool-use. Its head, when it swims towards the camera, merges seamlessly with its torso. It has eyes, very human eyes at that, but no nose, and its mouth is a smiling horizontal gash crammed with an unnerving excess of needle-sharp teeth. Looking at that movie, Grafenwalder feels more certain than ever that the creatures were real, and that at least one has survived. And as he studies the endlessly repeating thirty-second clip, he feels the closed book of his past creak open even wider. A question forms in his mind that he would rather not answer.

What exactly is it that he wants with the Denizen?

Things go tolerably well the next day, until the guests are almost ready to leave. They’ve seen the adult-phase hamadryad and registered due shock and awe. Grafenwalder is careful to remind them that, in addition to its size, this is also a living specimen, not some rotting corpse coaxed into a parodic imitation of life. Even Ursula Goodglass, who has to endure this, registers stoic approval. “You were lucky,” she tells Grafenwalder through gritted teeth. “You could just as easily have ended up with a dead one.”

“But then I wouldn’t have tried to pretend it was alive,” he tells her.

It’s Goodglass who has the last laugh today, however. She saves it until the guests are almost back aboard their shuttles.

“Friends,” she says, “what I’m about to mention in no way compares with the spectacle of an adult-phase hamadryad, but I have recently come into possession of something that I think you might find suitably diverting.”

“Something we’ve already seen two days ago?” asks Lysander Carroway.

“No. I chose to keep it under wraps then, thinking my little hamadryad would be spectacle enough for one day. It’s never been seen in public before, at least not in its present state.”

“Put us out of our misery,” says Alain Couperin.

“Drop by and see it for yourself,” Goodglass says, with a teasing twinkle in her eye. “Any time you like. No need to make an appointment. But—please—employ maximum discretion. This is one exhibit that I really don’t want the authorities to know about.”

For a moment Grafenwalder wonders whether she has the Denizen. But surely Rifugio can’t have lost faith in the deal already, when they’ve barely opened negotiations.

But if not a Denizen—what?

He has to know, even if it means the indignity of another visit to her miserable little habitat.

When he arrives at the Goodglass residence, hers is the only shuttle docked at the polar nub. He’s a little uncomfortable with being the only guest, but Goodglass did say to drop in whenever he liked, and he has given her fair warning of his approach. He’s waited a week before taking the trip. Ten days would have been better, but after five he’d already started hearing that she has something special; something indisputably unique. In the meantime, he has run every conceivable test on the biological samples Rifugio gave him in Chasm City and received the same numbing result each time: Rifugio appears to be in possession of the genuine article. Yet Grafenwalder is still apprehensive about closing the deal.

Inside the habitat, he’s met by Goodglass and Edric, her palanquin-bound husband. The couple waste no time in escorting him to the new exhibit. Despite the indignities they have brought upon each other, it’s all smiles and strained politeness. No one so much as mentions hamadryads, dead or alive.

Grafenwalder isn’t quite sure what to expect, but he’s still surprised at the modest dimensions of the chamber Goodglass finally shows him. The walkway brings them level with the chamber’s floor, but there’s no armoured glass screen between them and the interior. Even with the lights dimmed, Grafenwalder can already make out an arrangement of tables, set in a U-formation like a series of laboratory benches. There are upright glassy things on the tables, but that’s as much as he can tell.

“I was expecting something alive,” he says quietly.

“It is alive,” she hisses back. “Or at least as alive as it ever was. Merely distributed. You’ll see in a moment.”

“I thought you said it was dangerous.”

“Potentially it would be, if it was ever put back together. “ She pauses and extends her hand across the gloomy threshold, as if beckoning to the nearest bench. Grafenwalder catches the bright red line on her hand where it has broken a previously invisible laser beam, sweeping up and down across the aperture. Quicker than an eyeblink, a heavy armoured shield slams down on the cell. “But that’s not to stop it getting out,” she says. “It’s to prevent anyone taking it and trying to put it back together. There are some who’d attempt it, just for the novelty.”

She pulls back her hand. After an interval, the shield whisks up into the ceiling.

“Whatever it is, you’re serious about it,” Grafenwalder says, intrigued despite himself.

“I have to be. You don’t take monsters lightly.”

She waves on the lights. The room brightens, but although he can now make out the benches and the equipment upon them, Grafenwalder is none the wiser.

“You’ll have to help me here,” he says.

“It’s all right. I wouldn’t know what to make of it either if I didn’t know what I was looking at.”

“My God,” he says wonderingly, as his eyes alight on one of the larger glass containers. “Isn’t that a brain?”

Goodglass nods. “What was once a human brain, yes. Before he—before it—started doing things to itself, throwing pieces of its humanity away like a child flinging toys from a sandpit. But what’s left of the brain is still alive, still conscious and still capable of sensory perception.” A mischievous smile appears on her face. “It knows we’re here, Carl. It’s aware of us. It’s listening to us, watching us, and wondering how it can escape and kill us.”

He allows himself to take in the grisly scene, now that its full implication is clearer. The brain is being kept alive in a liquid-filled vat, nourished by scarlet and green cables that ram into the grey-brown dough of the exposed cerebellum. A stump of spinal cord curls under the brain like an inverted question mark. It looks pickled and vinegary, cob-webbed with ancient growth and tiny filaments of spidery machinery. Next to the flask is a humming grey box whose multiple analog dials twitch with a suggestion of ongoing mental processes. But that’s not all. There are dozens of glass cases, linked to other boxes, and the boxes to each other, and each case holds something unspeakable. In one, an eye hangs suspended in a kind of artificial socket, equipped with little steering motors. The eye is looking straight at Grafenwalder, as is its lidless twin on another bench. Their optic nerves are knotted ropes of fatty white nerve tissue. In another flask floats a pair of lungs, hanging like a puffed-up kite. They expand and contract with a slow, wheezing rhythm.

“Who ... ? What ... ?” he says, barely whispering.

“Haven’t you guessed yet, Carl? Look over there. Look at the mask.”

He follows her direction. The mask sits at the end of the furthest table, on a black plinth. It’s less a mask than an entire skull, moulded in sleek silver metal. The face is handsome, in a streamlined, air-smoothed fashion, with an expression of calm amusement sculpted into the immobile lips and the blank silver surfaces that pass for eyes. It has strong cheekbones and a strong cleft chin. Between the lips is only a dark, grilled slot. The mask has a representation of human ears, and its crown is moulded with longitudinal silver waves, evoking hair that has been combed back and stiffened in place with lacquer.

Grafenwalder knows who the skull belongs to. There isn’t anyone alive around Yellowstone who wouldn’t recognise Dr. Trintignant. All that’s missing is Trintignant’s customary black Homburg.

But Trintignant shouldn’t be here. Trintignant shouldn’t be anywhere. He died years ago.

“This isn’t right,” he says. “You’ve been duped ... sold a fake. This can’t be him.”

“It is. I have watertight provenance.”

“But Trintignant hasn’t been seen around Yellowstone for years ... decades. He’s supposed to have died when Richard Swift—”

“I know about Richard Swift,” Ursula Goodglass informs him. “I met him once—or what was left of him after Trintignant had completed his business. I wanted Swift for an exhibit—I was prepared to pay him for his time—but he left the system again. They say he went back to that place—the same world where Trintignant supposedly killed himself.”

Grafenwalder thinks back to what he remembers of the scandal. It had been all over Yellowstone for a few weeks. “But Swift brought back Trintignant’s remains. The doctor had dismantled himself, left a suicide note.”

“That was his plan,” Goodglass says witheringly. “That was what he wanted us to think—that he’d ended his own life upon completing his finest work.”

“But he dismantled—”

“He took himself apart in a way that implied suicide. But it was a methodical dismantling. The parts were stored in a fashion that always allowed for their eventual reassembly. Trintignant was too vain not to want to stay alive and see what posterity made of his creations. But with the Yellowstone authorities closing in on him, staying in one piece wasn’t an option.”

“How did he end up here? Wouldn’t the authorities have been just as keen to get hold of his remains as his living self?”

“He always had allies. Sponsors, I suppose you might call them. People who’d covertly admired his work. There’s always a market for freaks, Carl—and even more of a market for freak-makers. His friends whisked him away, out of the hands of what little authority was left here upon his return. Since then he’s passed from collection to collection, like a bad penny. He seems to bring bad luck. Perhaps I’m tempting fate just by keeping him here; tempting it even more by bringing him to this state of partial reanimation.” She smiles tightly. “We will see. If my fortunes take a dip, I shall pass Trintignant on to the next willing victim.”

“You’re playing with fire.”

“Then you don’t approve? I’d have expected you to applaud my audacity, Carl.”

Grafenwalder, despite himself, speaks something close to the truth. “I’m impressed. More than you can imagine. But I’m also alarmed that he’s being kept here.”

“Alarmed. Why, exactly?”

“You’re a newcomer to this game, Ursula. I’ve seen a little of your habitat now, enough to know that your security arrangements aren’t exactly top of the line.”

“He’s in no danger of putting himself back together, Carl, unless you believe in telekinesis.”

“I’m worried about what would happen if his admirers learn of his whereabouts. Some of them won’t be content just to know he’s being kept alive in pieces. They’ll want to take him, put him all the way back together.”

“I don’t think anyone would be quite that foolish.”

“Then you don’t know people. People like us, Ursula. How many collectors have you shown him to already?”

She tilts her head, looking at him along her up-curved nose. “Less than a dozen, including yourself.”

“That’s already too many. I wouldn’t be surprised if word has already passed beyond the Circle. Don’t tell me you’ve shown him to Rossiter?”

“Rossiter was the second.”

“Then it’s probably already too late.” He sighs, as if taking a great burden upon himself. “We don’t have much time. We need to make immediate arrangements to transport his remains to my habitat. They’ll be a lot safer there.”

“Why would your place be any safer than mine?”

“I design security systems. It’s what I do for a living.”

She appears to consider it, for a moment at least. Then she shakes her head. “No. It won’t happen. He’s staying here. I see where you’re coming from now, Carl. You don’t actually care about my security arrangements at all. It probably wouldn’t even bother you if Doctor Trintignant did escape back into Stoner society. It’s highly unlikely that you’d have ended up one of his victims, after all. You’ve got money and influence. It’s those poor souls down in the Mulch who’d need to watch their backs. That’s where he’d go hunting for raw material. What you can’t stand is the thought that he might be mine, not yours. I’ve got something you haven’t, something unique, something you can’t ever have, and it’s going to eat you from inside like acid.”

“Suit yourself.”

“I will. I always have. You made a dreadful mistake when you humiliated me, Carl, assuming you didn’t have a hand in what had already happened to the hamadryad.”

“What are you saying? That I had something to do with the fact that Shallice stiffed you?”

He detects her hesitation. She comes perilously close to accusing him, but even here—even in this private cloister—there are limits that she knows better than to cross.

“But you were glad of it, weren’t you?” she presses.

“I had the superior specimen. That’s all that ever mattered to me.” With a renewed shudder of revulsion—and, he admits, something close to admiration—he turns again to survey the distributed remains of the notorious doctor. “You say he can hear us?”

“Every word.”

“You should kill him now. Take a hammer to his brain. Make sure he can never live again.”

“Would you like that, Carl?”

“It’s exactly what the authorities would do if they got hold of him.”

“They’d give him a trial first, one imagines.”

“He doesn’t deserve a trial. None of his victims had the benefit of justice.”

“What history conveniently forgets,” Goodglass says, “is that many of his so-called victims came to him willingly. He was not a monster to them, but the agent of the change they craved. He was the most brilliant transformative surgeon of our era. So what if society considered his creations obscene? So what if some of them regretted what they had freely asked him to do?”

“You’re defending him now.”

“Not defending him—just pointing out that nothing is ever that black and white. For years Trintignant was given tacit permission to continue his work. The authorities didn’t like him, but they accepted that he fulfilled a social need.”

Grafenwalder shakes his head—he’s seen and heard enough. “I thought you were exhibiting a monster, Ursula. Now it looks to me as if you’re sheltering a fugitive.”

“I’m not, I assure you. Just because I have a balanced view of Trintignant doesn’t mean I don’t despise him. Here: let me offer you a demonstration.” And with that Goodglass taps a command sequence into the air, disarming the security system. She is able to pass her hand through the laser-mesh without bringing down the armoured screen. “Walk over to the brain, Carl,” she commands. “It isn’t a trap.”

“I’d he happier if you walked with me.”

“If you like.”

He hesitates longer than he’d like, long enough for her to notice, then takes a step into the enclosure. Goodglass is only a pace behind him. The eyeballs swivel to track him, triangulating with the smoothness of motorised cameras. He moves next to the bubbling brain vat. Up close, the brain looks too small to have been the wellspring of so much evil.

“What am I supposed to look at?”

“Not look at—do. You can inflict pain on him, if you wish. There’s a button next to the brain. It sends an electrical current straight into his anterior cingulate cortex.”

“Isn’t he in pain already?”

“Not especially. He re-engineered himself to allow for this dismantling. There may be some existential trauma, but I don’t believe he’s in any great discomfort from one moment to the next.”

Grafenwalder’s hand moves of its own volition, until it hovers above the electrical stimulator. He can feel its magnetic pull, almost willing his hand to lower. He wonders why he feels such a primal urge to bring pain to the doctor. Trintignant never hurt him; never hurt anyone he knew. All that he knows of Trintignant’s crimes is second-hand, distorted and magnified by time and the human imagination. That the doctor was tolerated, even encouraged, cannot seriously be doubted. He filled the hole in Yellowstone society where a demon was meant to fit.

“What’s wrong, Carl? Qualms?”

“How do I know this won’t send a jolt directly to his pleasure centre?”

“Look at his spinal column. Watch it thrash.”

“Spines don’t thrash.”

“His does. Those little mechanisms—”

It’s all the encouragement he needs. He brings his hand down, holding the contact closed for a good five or six seconds. Under the brain, the stump of spinal matter twists and flexes like a rattlesnake’s tail. He can hear it scraping glass.

He raises his hand, watches the motion subside.

“See,” Goodglass says, “I knew you’d do it.”

Grafenwalder notices that there’s some kind of heavy medical tool next to the brain tank, a thing with a grip and a clawed alloy head. With his other hand he picks it up, testing its weight. The glass container looks invitingly fragile; the brain even more so.

“Be careful,” Goodglass says.

“I could kill him now, couldn’t I? Put an end to him, for ever.”

“Many would applaud you. But then you’d be providing him with a way out, an end to this existence. On the other hand, you could send another jolt of pain straight into his mind. What would you rather, Carl? Rid the world of Trintignant and spare him further pain, or let him suffer a little longer?”

He’s close to doing it; close to smashing the tool into the glass. As close as she is, Goodglass couldn’t stop him in time. And there would be something to be said for being the man who closed the book on Trintignant. But at the decisive instant something holds him back. Nothing that the doctor did has ever touched him personally, but he still feels a compulsion to join in his torment. And as the moment passes, he knows that he could never end the doctor’s life so cleanly, so mercifully, when pain is always an alternative.

Instead, he presses the button again, and holds it down longer this time. The spine thrashes impressively. Behind him, Ursula Goodglass applauds.

“Good for you, Carl. I knew you’d do the right thing.”

The next two weeks are an endurance. Grafenwalder must sit tight-lipped as excited rumours circulate concerning Ursula Goodglass’s new exhibit. No one mentions Trintignant by name—that would be the height of crass indiscretion—but even those who have not yet visited her habitat can begin to guess at the nature of her new prize. Even the most level-headed commentators are engaged in a feverish round of praise-giving, seeking to outdo each other in the showering of plaudits. Even though she has only been in the collecting business for a little while, she has pulled off an astonishing coup. Attention is so heated that, for a day or two, the Circle must fend off the unwanted interest of a pair of authority investigators, still on Trintignant’s trail. The bribes alone would pay for a new habitat.

Grafenwalder’s adult-phase hamadryad, meanwhile, brings no repeat visits. Now that it has lost its novelty value to the other collectors, Grafenwalder feels his own interest in it waning. He thinks of it less and less, and has increasingly little concern for its welfare. When his keepers inform him that the animal is suffering from a dietary complaint, he doesn’t even bother to visit it. Three days later, when they tell him that the hamadryad has died, all he can think about is the money he paid Captain Shallice. For an hour or so he toys with the idea of bringing the dead thing back to life with electrodes, the way Goodglass animated her specimen, but the idea that he might be seen to be playing second fiddle to her rises in him like yellow bile. He gives orders that the animal be ejected into space, and can’t even bring himself to watch it happen.

Six hours later, he contacts Rifugio.

“I was beginning to think I wouldn’t hear from you again, Mister Grafenwalder. If you’d left it much longer I wouldn’t have anything to sell you.”

Grafenwalder can hardly keep the excitement from his voice. “Then it’s still available? The terms still apply?”

“I’m a man of my word,” Rifugio answers. “The terms are the same. Does that mean we have a deal?”

“I’ll want additional guarantees. If the specimen turns out to be something other than claimed—”

“I’m selling it to you in good faith. Take it or leave it.”

He takes it, of course, as he had known he would before he placed the call. He’d have taken it even if Rifugio had doubled his asking price. A living, captive Denizen is the only thing that will take the shine off the Circle’s new fondness for Goodglass, and he must have it at all costs.

The arrangements for payment and handover are typically byzantine, as necessity demands. For all that he distrusts men like Rifugio, they must make a living as well, and protect themselves from the consequences of their activities. Grafenwalder, in turn, has his own stringent requirements. The shipping of the creature to Grafenwalder’s habitat must happen surreptitiously, and the flow of credit from one account to another must be untraceable. It is complicated, but by the same token both men have participated in many such dealings in the past, and the arrangements follow a certain well-rehearsed protocol. When the automated transport finally arrives, bearing its precious aquatic cargo, Grafenwalder is certain that nothing has gone amiss.

He has to fight past his own keepers to view the specimen for the first time. At first, he feels a flicker of mild disappointment: it’s a lot smaller than he was expecting, and it’s not just a trick of the light due to the glass walls of the holding tank. The Denizen isn’t much larger than a child.

But the disappointment doesn’t last long. In the flesh, the Denizen appears even more obviously real than the swimming creature in the movie clip. It’s sedated when it arrives, half its face and upper torso swallowed by a drug-administering breathing device. Rifugio’s consignment comes with detailed notes concerning the safe waking of the creature. First, Grafenwalder has it moved into the main viewing tank, now topped up with cold water under one hundred atmospheres of pressure. The water chemistry is now tuned to approximate conditions near one of the Europan thermal vents. He brings the creature to consciousness in utter darkness, and monitors its progress as it begins first to breathe for itself, and then to tentatively explore its surroundings. It swims lethargically at first, Grafenwalder viewing its moving body via heat-sensitive assassin’s goggles. By all accounts the Denizens have infrared sensitivity of their own, but the creature takes no heed of him, even when it passes very close to his vantage point.

After several minutes, the creature’s swimming becomes stronger. It must be adapting to the water, learning to breathe again. Grafenwalder watches the flick of its tail in mesmerised fascination. By now it has mapped the con fines of its new home, testing the armoured glass with delicate sweeps of its fingertips. It is intelligent enough to know that nothing will be gained by striking the glass.

Grafenwalder has the main lights brought up and shone into the tank. He slips the assassin’s goggles up onto his brow. The creature attempts to swim away from the glare, but the glare follows it remorselessly. Its eyes are lidless, so it can do little except screen its face with one delicately webbed hand. The wide gash of its mouth opens in alarm or anger, or both, revealing rows of sharp little teeth.

Grafenwalder’s voice booms into the water, relayed to the creature by floating microphones.

“I know you can hear me, and I know you can understand what I am saying to you. It is very important that you listen to what I am about to tell you.”

His voice appears to distress the creature as much as the bright light. With its other hand it tries to shield the whorl-like formation on the side of its head that is its ear. Grafenwalder doubts that it makes much difference. It must feel his voice in every cell of its body, ramming through it like a proclamation.

That was the effect he was going for.

“You are in no danger,” he says. “Nothing is going to happen to you, and nobody is going to hurt you. The people who would rather you were dead are not going to find you. You are in my care now, and I am going to make sure that you come to no harm. My name is Carl Grafenwalder, and I have been waiting a long time to meet you.”

The Denizen floats motionless, as if stunned by the force of his words. Perhaps that is exactly what has happened.

“From now on, this is going to be your home,” Grafenwalder continues. “I hope that you find the conditions satisfactory. I have done my best to simulate your place of birth, but I accept that there may be deficiencies. My experts will be striving to improve matters as best as they can, but for that they will need your assistance. We must all learn to communicate. I know you cannot speak, but I am sure we can make progress using sign language. Let us begin with something simple. I must know if you find your environment satisfactory in certain details: temperature, sulphur content, salinity, that kind of thing. You will need to answer my experts in the affirmative or negative. Nod your head if you understand me.”

Nothing happens. He judges that the Denizen is still conscious—he still catches the quick animation of its eyes behind the curtain of its hand—but it shows no indication of having understood him.

“I said nod your head. If that is too difficult for you, make some other visible movement.”

But still there’s nothing. He has the lights dimmed again, and slips the assassin’s goggles down over his eyes once more. After a few moments, the infrared smear of the Denizen lowers its arm and assumes an alert but restful posture. Now that it has reacted to the absence of light, he brings the glare back and observes the creature cower against the glare’s return.

“You prefer the darkness, don’t you? Well, I can make it dark again. All you have to do is show some sign that you understand me. Do that, and I’ll bring the darkness back again.”

The Denizen just floats there, watching him through the spread webbing of its upraised hand. Perhaps it has learned to tolerate the light better than before, for its gaze strikes him now as steadier, somehow more reproachful. Even if it doesn’t understand his words, it surely understands that it is his prisoner.

“I will lower the lights one more time.” He does so, then brings them back up, savagely, before the Denizen has had time to relish the darkness. This time he does get a reaction, but it’s not quite the one he was anticipating. The Denizen shoots forward, bulleting through the water with dismaying speed. Just when he thinks the creature is going to use its skull as a battering ram, the Denizen brakes with a reverse flick of its tail and brings its head and upper body hard against the glass, arms spread-eagled, face only a few centimetres from Grafenwalder’s own. Rationally, he knows that the glass is impervious—it’s designed to hold back the pressure of the Europan ocean—but there’s still a tiny part of his mind that can’t accept that, and insists on jerking him back from that grinning mouth, those hateful human eyes. The Denizen sees it, too: it doesn’t need language to know that it has scared him.

Grafenwalder regains his composure with an uneasy laugh, trying to sound as if it was all an act. The Denizen knows better, notching wide the dreadful smile of its mouth.

“Okay,” he says. “You frightened me. That’s good. That’s exactly what you’re meant to do. That’s exactly why I brought you here.”

The microphones in the tank pick up the Denizen’s derisive snort, pealing it in harsh metallic waves around the metal walls of the bestiary. Grafenwalder’s heart is still racing, but he’s beginning to see the positive side of the arrangement. Maybe the fact that the creature can’t talk is all for the best. There’s something truly chilling about that snort; something that wouldn’t come through at all if the specimen had language. There’s a mind in there; one sharp enough to use complex tools in the unforgiving environment of a cold black alien ocean. But that mind only has one narrow outlet for its rage.

It’s going to work, he thinks. If it has half the effect on the other collectors that it just had on him, Dr. Trintignant will soon be relegated to a nine-day wonder. All he needs to do now is make sure the damned thing is as real as it looks. Not that he has any significant doubts now. Rifugio already had bona fide DNA and tissue samples. Where did that material come from, if it wasn’t snipped from the last living Denizen?

He leaves the creature in darkness, letting it settle in. The next day, his keepers descend into the tank wearing armoured immersion suits. It takes two of them to immobilise the creature while the third takes a series of biopsy samples. With their powered suits, the men are in little danger from the Denizen. But they’re still impressed by the strength and quickness of the specimen; its balletic ease within water. It moves with the sleek, elemental ease of something for which water is not a hindrance, but its natural medium.

Grafenwalder tunes in to Circle gossip again, unsurprised to find that Dr. Trintignant is still wowing the other collectors. It still feels hurtful not to be the automatic centre of attention, but now at least he knows his rightful place will be restored. Ursula Goodglass got lucky with the dismantled doctor, but luck won’t get her very far in the long game.

Later that day, his experts report back with the first findings from the biopsies. At first, Grafenwalder is so convinced of the Denizen’s authenticity that he doesn’t hear what the experts, in their fumbling way, are trying to tell him.

The samples don’t match. The Denizen’s DNA isn’t the same as the DNA that Rifugio gave him, or the DNA that Grafenwalder already possesses. It’s the same story with the blood and tissue samples. The disagreement isn’t huge, and less sophisticated tests probably wouldn’t have detected any discrepancies. That’s no solace to Grafenwalder, though. His tests are as good as they come, and they leave no room for doubt. The creature in his care is not what Rifugio let him think he was going to be buying.

He tries to call the broker, but the contact details no longer work. Rifugio doesn’t get back to him.

So he’s been conned. But if the Denizen is a con, it’s an extraordinarily thorough one. He’s had the chance to examine it closely now, and he’s found no obvious signs of fakery. It’s no mean feat to engineer a biological gill that can sustain an organism with the energy demands of a large mammal. The faked Denizens he’s examined in the past began to die after only a few dozen hours of immersion. But this one shows every sign of thriving, of gaining strength and quickness.

Grafenwalder considers other possibilities. If the blood and tissue samples don’t agree, then maybe it’s because there’s more than one kind of Denizen. The Europan scientists engineered distinct castes with differing linguistic abilities, so perhaps there were other variants, with different blood and tissue structures. They were all prototypes, after all, right up to the moment they turned against the Demarchy. This Denizen might simply be from a different production batch.

But that doesn’t explain why Rifugio provided him with non-matching samples. If Rifugio had the creature, why didn’t he just take samples from it directly? Did Rifugio make a mistake, mixing samples from one specimen with another? If so, he must have had more than one Denizen in his care. In which case, the whole story about the Ultras keeping the Denizen as a pet was a lie ... but a necessary one, if Rifugio wished Grafenwalder to think the creature was unique.

Grafenwalder mulls the possibilities. Rifugio’s disappearance provides damning confirmation that some kind of deception has taken place. But if that deception merely extends to the fact that the Denizen isn’t unique, Grafenwalder considers himself to have got off lightly. He still has a Denizen, and that’s infinitely better than none at all. He’ll find a way to trace and punish Rifugio in due course, but for now retribution isn’t his highest priority.

Instead, what he desires most is communication.

By nightfall, when the keepers have finished their work, he descends to the tank and brings the lights back on. Not harshly now, but enough to alert the Denizen to his presence; to wake it from whatever shallow approximation of sleep it appears to enjoy when resting.

Then—satisfied that he is alone—he talks.

“You can understand me,” he says, for the umpteenth time. “I know this because my keepers have identified a region in your brain that only lights up when you hear human speech. And it lights up most strongly when you hear Canasian, the language of the Demarchy.”

The creature watches him sullenly.

“It’s the language you were educated to understand, two hundred years ago. I know things have changed a little since then, but I don’t doubt that you can still make sense of these words.” And as he speaks Canasian, he feels—not for the first time—an odd, unexpected fluency. The words ought to feel awkward, but they flow off his tongue with mercurial ease, as if this is also the language he was born to speak.

Which is absurd.

“I want to know your story,” he says. “How you got here, where you came from, how many of you there are. I know now that Rifugio lied to me. He’ll pay for that eventually, but for now all that matters is what you can tell me. I need to know everything, right back to the moment you were born in Europa.”

But the Denizen, as ever, shows no external sign of having understood him.

Later, Grafenwalder has his keepers install a water-proofed symbol board in the tank. It’s an array of touchpads, each of which stands for a word in Canasian. As Grafenwalder speaks, the symbols light up in turn. The Denizen may reply by pressing the pads in sequence, which will be rendered back into speech on Grafenwalder’s side of the glass. Grafenwalder’s hoping that there’s something amiss with the Denizen’s language centre, some cognitive defect that can be short-circuited using the visual codes. If he can persuade the Denizen to press the “yes” or “no” pads in response to simple questions, he will consider that progress has been made.

Things don’t move as quickly as he’d hoped. The Denizen seems willing to cooperate, but it still doesn’t grasp the basics of language. Once it has understood that one of the pads symbolises food, it presses that one repeatedly, ignoring Grafenwalder’s attempts to get it to answer abstract questions.

Maybe it’s just stupid, he thinks. Maybe that’s why this batch was discontinued. But he doesn’t give up just yet. If the Denizen won’t communicate willingly, perhaps it needs persuasion. He has his keepers tinker with the ambient conditions, varying the water temperature and chemistry to make things uncomfortable. He withholds food and instructs the keepers to take further biopsies. It’s clear enough that the Denizen doesn’t enjoy the process.

Still the creature won’t talk, beyond issuing simple pleas for more food or warmer water. Grafenwalder feels his patience stretching. The keepers tell him that the Denizen is getting stronger, more difficult to subdue. Angrily, he accompanies them on their next trip into the tank. There are four men, all wearing power-assisted pressure armour, and now it takes three of them to pin the Denizen against one wall of the glass. When it breaks free momentarily, it gouges deep tooth marks in the flexible hide of Grafenwalder’s glove. Back outside the tank, he inspects the damage and wonders what those teeth would have done to naked flesh.

It’s fierce, he’ll give it that. It may not be unique; it may not be particularly intelligent; but he still doesn’t feel that all the money he gave Rifugio was wasted. Whatever the Denizen might be, it’s worthy of a place in the bestiary. And it’s his, not someone else’s.

He puts out the word that there is something new in his collection. Following Ursula Goodglass’s example, he tells the visitors to drop by whenever they like. There must be no suspicion that the Denizen is a stage-managed exhibit, something that can only perform to schedule.

It’s three days before anyone takes him up on his offer. Lysander Carroway and her husband are the first to arrive. Even then, Grafenwalder has the sense that the visit is regarded as a tiresome social duty. All that changes when they see the Denizen. He’s taken pains to stoke it up, denying it food and comfort for long hours. By the time he throws on the lights, the creature has become a focus of pure, mindless fury. It strives to kill the things on the other side of the glass, scratching claws and teeth against that impervious shield, to the point where it starts bleeding. His guests recoil, suitably impressed. After the study in motionless that was Dr. Trintignant, they are woefully unprepared for the murderous speed of the Europan organism.

“Yes, it is a Denizen,” he tells them, while his keepers tend to the creature’s injuries. “The last of its kind, I have it on good authority.”

“Where did you find it?”

He parrots the lie Rifugio has already told him. “You know what Ultras are like, with their pets. I don’t think they realised quite what they’d been tormenting all those years.”

“Can it speak to us? I heard that they could talk.”

“Not this one. The idea that most of them could talk is a fallacy, I’m afraid: they simply weren’t required to. As for the ones that did have language, they must have died over a hundred years ago.”

“Perhaps the ones that were clever enough to talk were also clever enough to stay away from Ultras,” muses Carroway. “After all, if you can talk, you can negotiate, make bargains. Especially if you know things that can hurt people. “

“What would a Denizen know that could hurt anyone?” Grafenwalder asks scornfully.

“Who made it,” Carroway says. “That would be worth something to someone, wouldn’t it? In these times, more than ever.”

Grafenwalder shakes his head. “I don’t think so. Even the ones with language weren’t that clever. They were built to take orders and use tools. They weren’t capable of the kind of complex abstract thought necessary to plot and scheme.”

“How would you know?” Carroway asks. “It’s not as if you’ve ever met one.”

There’s no malice in her question, but by the time the Carroways depart he’s in a foul mood, barely masked by the niceties of Circle politesse. Why can’t they just accept that the Denizen is enough of a prize in its own right, without dwelling on what it can’t do? Isn’t a ravenous man-fish chimera enough of a draw for them now?

But the Carroways must have been sufficiently impressed to speak of his new addition, because the guests come thick and fast over the next week. By then they’ve heard that he has a Denizen, but most of them don’t quite believe it. Time and again he goes through the ritual of having them scared by the captive creature, only this time with a few additional flourishes. The glass is as secure as ever, but he’s had the tank lined with a false interior that cracks more easily. He’s also implanted a throat microphone under the skin of the Denizen, to better capture its blood-curdling vocalisations. Since the creature needed to be sedated for that, he also took the liberty of dropping an electrode into what his keepers think is the best guess for the creature’s pain centre. It’s a direct steal from what Goodglass did to Dr. Trintignant, but no one has to know that, and with the electrode he can stir the Denizen up to its full killing fury even if it’s just been fed.

It’s still too soon to call, but his monitoring of Circle gossip begins to suggest that interest in Trintignant is declining. He’s still jealous of Goodglass for that particular coup, but at last he feels that he has the upper hand again. The memory of Rifugio’s lies has all but faded. The story Grafenwalder tells, about how the Denizen came to him via the Ultras, is repeated so often that he almost begins to believe it himself. The act of telling one lie over and over again, until it concretises into something barely distinguishable from the truth, feels peculiarly familiar to him. When his keepers come to him again and report that a more detailed analysis of the Denizen DNA has thrown up statistical matches with the genome of a typical hyperpig, he blanks the information.

What they’re telling him is that the Denizen isn’t real; that it’s some form of genetic fake cooked up using a hyperpig in place of a human, with Denizen-like characteristics spliced in at the foetal stage. But he doesn’t want to hear that; not now that he’s back on top.

The last of the guests to visit are Ursula Goodglass and her husband. They’ve waited a lengthy, although not impolite, interval before favouring him with their presence. Once their shuttle has docked, Goodglass sweeps ahead of her husband’s palanquin, trying to put a brave face on the proceedings.

“I hear you have a Denizen, Carl. If so, you have my heartfelt congratulations. Nothing like that has been seen for a very long time.” She looks at him coquettishly. “It is a Denizen, isn’t it? We didn’t want to pay too much attention to the rumours, but when everyone started saying the same thing—”

“It is a Denizen,” he confirms gravely, as if the news is a terminal diagnosis. Which, in terms of Goodglass’s current standing in the Circle, it might as well be. “Would you like to see it?”

“Of course we’d like to see it!” her husband declares, his voice piping from the palanquin.

He takes them to the holding tank, darkened now, and issues assassin’s goggles to Ursula, assuming that her husband ‘s palanquin has its own infrared system. Allowing the guests to see the floating form, albeit indistinctly, is all part of the theatre.

“It looks smaller than I was expecting,” Ursula Goodglass observes.

“They were small,” Grafenwalder says. “Designed to operate in cramped conditions. But don’t let that deceive you. It’s as strong as three men in amp-suits.”

“And you’re absolutely sure of its authenticity? You’ve run a full battery of tests?”

“There’s no doubt.” Rashly, he adds, “You can see the results, if you like.”

“There’s no need. I’m prepared to take your word for it. I know you wouldn’t take anything for granted, given how long you’ve been after one of these.”

Grafenwalder allows himself a microscopic frown. “I didn’t know you were aware of my interest in acquiring a Denizen.”

“It would be difficult not to know, Carl. You’ve put out feelers in all directions imaginable. Of course, you’ve been discreet about it—or as discreet as circumstances allow.” She smiles unconvincingly. “I’m glad for you, Carl. It must feel like the end of a great quest, to have this in your possession. “

“Yes,” he said. “It does.”

The palanquin speaks. “What exactly was it about the Denizen that you found so captivating, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Grafenwalder shrugs, expecting the answer to roll glibly off his tongue. Instead, he has to force it out by an effort of will, as if there is a blockage in his thought processes. “Its uniqueness, I suppose, Edric.”

“But there are many unique things,” the palanquin says, its piping tone conveying mild puzzlement. “Why did you have to go to the extremes of locating a Denizen, a creature not even known ever to have existed? A creature whose authenticity cannot ever be confirmed with certainty?”

“Perhaps because it was so difficult. I like a challenge. Does it have to be any more complicated than that?”

“No, it doesn’t,” the palanquin answers. “I merely wondered if there might not have been a deeper motive, something less transparent.”

“I’m really not the man to ask. Why do any of us collect things?”

“Carl’s right, dear,” Ursula says, smiling tightly at the palanquin’s dark window. “One mustn’t enquire too deeply about these things. It isn’t seemly.”

“I demur,” her husband says, and reverses slightly back from the heavy glass wall before them.

Grafenwalder judges that the moment is right to bring up the lights and enrage the Denizen. He squeezes the actuator tucked into his pocket, dripping current into the creature’s brain. The lights pierce the tank, snaring the floating form. The Denizen snorts and powers itself towards the wall, its eyes wide with hatred despite the glare. It slams into the weakened inner layer and shatters the glass, making it seem as if the entire tank is about to lose integrity.

“We’re quite safe,” he says, anticipating that Goodglass will have flinched from the impact. But she hasn’t. She’s standing her ground, her expression serenely unmoved by the entire spectacle.

“You’re right,” she comments. “It’s quite a catch. But I wonder if it’s really as vicious as it appears.”

“Take my word. It’s much, much worse. It nearly bit through my glove when I was inside that tank, wearing full armour.”

“Perhaps it doesn’t like being kept here. It didn’t seem very happy when you turned the lights on.”

“It’s an exhibit, Ursula. It doesn’t have to like being here. It should be grateful just to be alive.”

She looks at him with sudden interest, as if he has said something profound. “Do you really think so, Carl?”

“Yes,” he says. “Absolutely.”

She returns her attention to the tank wall. The Denizen is still hovering there, anchored in place by the tips of its fingers and the fluke of its tail. The cracks in the shattered glass radiate away in all directions, making the Denizen look as if it is caught in a frozen star, or pinned to a snowflake.

Goodglass removes her glove and touches a hand to the smooth and unbroken glass on the outer surface of the tank, exactly where the Denizen has its own webbed hand. That’s when Grafenwalder notices the pale webs of skin between Ursula Goodglass’s fingers, visible now that she has taken off the glove. Their milky translucence is exactly the same as the webs between the Denizen’s. She presses her hand harder, squeezing until her palm is flat against the glass, and the Denizen echoes the movement.

The air feels as if it has frozen. The moment of contact seems to last minutes, hours, eternities. Grafenwalder stares in numb incomprehension, unable to process what he is seeing. When she moves her hand, skating it across the glass, the Denizen follows her like an expert mime.

She takes another step closer, bringing her face against the glass, laying her cheek flat against the cold surface. The Denizen presses itself against the shattered inner layer and mirrors her posture, bringing its own head against hers. The flesh of their faces appears to merge.

Goodglass pulls her face back from the glass, then smiles at the Denizen. It tries to emulate her expression, forcing its mouth wide. It’s not much of a smile—it’s more horrific than reassuring—but the deliberateness of the gesture is beyond doubt.

Finally Grafenwalder manages to say something. His own voice sounds wrong, as if it’s coming from another room.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m greeting it,” Ursula Goodglass says, snapping her attention away from the tank. “What on Earth did you think I was doing?”

“It’s a Denizen. It doesn’t know you. You can’t know it.”

“Oh, Carl,” she says, pityingly now. “Haven’t you got it yet? Really, I thought you’d have figured things out by now. Look at my hand again.”

“I don’t need to. I saw it.”

She pulls back her hand until she’s only touching the glass with a fingertip. “Then tell me what it reminds you of—or can’t you bring yourself to say it?”

“I’ve had enough,” he says. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but it isn’t true to the spirit of the Circle. I insist that you leave immediately.”

“But we’re not done yet,” Goodglass says.

“Fine. If you won’t go easily, I’ll have you escorted to your shuttle.”

“I’m afraid not, Carl. We’ve still business to attend to. You didn’t think it was going to be quite that easy, did you?”

“Leave now.”

“Or what? You’ll turn your household systems on us?” She looks apologetic. “They won’t work, I’m afraid. They’ve been disabled. From the moment our shuttle docked, it’s been working to introduce security countermeasures into your habitat.” Before he can get a word in, she says, “It was a mistake to invite us to view the adult-phase hamadryad. It gave us the perfect opportunity to snoop your arrangements, design a package of neutralising agents. Don’t go calling for your keepers, either. They’re all unconscious. The last time we visited, the palanquin deployed microscopic stun-capsules into every room it passed through. Upon our return, they were programmed to activate, releasing a fast-acting nerve toxin. Your keepers will be fine once they wake up, but that isn’t going to happen for a few hours yet.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t have to,” Goodglass says. “Call for help, see how far it gets you.”

He lifts the cuff of his sleeve and talks into his bracelet. “This is Grafenwalder. Get down to the bestiary now—the Denizen tank.”

But no one answers.

“I’m sorry, but no one’s coming. You’re on your own now, Carl. It’s just you, the Denizen and the two of us.”

After a minute goes by, he knows she isn’t bluffing. Goodglass has taken his habitat.

“What do you want from me?”

“It’s not so much a question of what I want from you, Carl, as what you want from me.”

“You’re not making much sense.”

“Ask yourself this: why did you want the Denizen so much? Was it because you just had to add another unique specimen to your collection? Or did the drive go deeper than that? Is it just possible that you created this entire bestiary as a decoy, to divert everyone—including yourself—from the true focus of your obsession?”

“You tell me, Ursula. You seem to know a lot about the collecting game.”

“I’m no collector,” she says curtly. “I detest you and your kind. That was just a cover, to get me close to you. I went to a lot of trouble, of course: the hamadryad, Trintignant ... I know you had Shallice kill the hamadryad, by the way. That was what I expected you to do. Why else do you think I had Shallice mention my existence, if not to goad you? I needed you to take an interest in me, Carl. It worked spectacularly well.”

“You never interested me, Ursula. You irritated me, like a tick.”

“It had the same effect. It brought us together. It brought me here.”

“And the Denizen?” he asks, half-fearing her answer.

“The Denizen is a fake. I’m sure you’ve figured that out for yourself by now. A pretty good fake, I’ll admit—but it isn’t two hundred years old, and it’s never been anywhere near Europa.”

“What about the samples Rifugio gave me? Where did they come from?”

“From me,” Goodglass says.

“You’re insane.”

“No, Carl. Not insane. Just a Denizen.” And she shows him her webbed hand once more, extending it out towards him as if inviting him to kiss it. “I’m what you’ve been searching for all these years, the end of your quest. But this isn’t quite the way you imagined things playing out, is it? That you’d have had me under your nose all this time, and not known how close you were?”

“You can’t be a Denizen.”

“There is such a thing as surgery,” she says witheringly. “I had to wait until after the plague before having myself changed, which meant subjecting myself to cruder procedures than I might have wished. Fortunately, I had the services of a very good surgeon. He rewired my cardiovascular system for air-breathing. He gave me legs and a human face, and a voice box that works out of water.”

“And the hands?”

“I kept the hands. You’ve got to hold on to part of the past, no matter how much you might wish to bury it. I needed to remember where I’d come from, what I still had to do.”

“Which is?”

“To find you, and then punish you. You were there, Carl, back when we were made in Europa. A high-influence Demarchist in the Special Projects section of Cadmus-Asterius, the hanging city where we were spliced together and given life.”

“Nonsense. I’ve never been near Europa.”

“You were born there,” she assures him, “not long after Sandra Voi founded the place. You’ve scrubbed those memories, though. They’re too dangerous now. The Demarchists don’t want anyone finding out about their history of past mistakes, not when they’re trying to show how fine and upstanding they are compared to the beastly Conjoiners. Almost everyone connected with those dark days in Europa has been hunted down and silenced by now. Not you, though. You were ahead of the curve, already running by the time the cities fell. You hopped a ramliner to Yellowstone and started reinventing your past. Eidetic overlays to give you a false history, one so convincing that you believed it yourself. Except at night, in your loneliest hours. Then part of you knew that they were still out there, still looking for you.”

“They?”

“Not just the Demarchist silencers: they were the least of your worries. Money and power could keep them at bay. What really worried you was us, the Denizens.”

“If I made you, why would I fear you?”

“You didn’t make us, Carl. I said you were part of the project, but you weren’t working to bring us to life. You were working to suppress us; to make us fail. Petty internal rivalry: you couldn’t allow another colleague’s work to succeed. So you did everything you could to hurt us, to make us imperfect. You brought suffering into our world. You brought pain and infirmity and death, and then left us alone in that ocean.”

“Ridiculous.”

“Really, Carl? I’ve seen how easily you turn to spite. Just ask that dead hamadryad.”

“I had nothing to do with the Denizens.” But even as he says it, he can feel layers of false memory begin to peel back. What’s exposed has the raw candour of true experience. He remembers more of Europa than he has any right to: the bright plazas, the smells, the noises of Cadmus-Asterius. He remembers the reefer-sleep casket on the outbound ramliner, the casket that he thought was taking him to the safety of another system, another time. No wonder he’s slept easier since the Melding Plague. He must have imagined that the plague had severed the last of his ties with the past, making it impossible for anyone to catch up with him now.

He’d been wrong about that.

“You had to find a Denizen,” Goodglass says, “because then you’d know if any of them were still alive. Well, now you have your answer. How does it feel?”

He always knew that the marks on her skull were evidence of surgery. But that surgery had nothing to do with the removal of implants, and everything to do with her transformation from a Denizen. It would have cost her nothing to hide those marks, and yet she made no secret of them. It was, he sees now, part of a game he hadn’t even realised he was playing.

“Not the way I thought it would feel,” he says.

Goodglass nods understandingly. “I’m going to punish you now, Carl. But I’m not going to kill you.”

She’s playing with him, allowing him a glimmer of hope before crushing it for all eternity.

“Why not?” he asks.

“Because if you were dead, you wouldn’t make much of an exhibit. When we’re done here, I’m going to donate you to a suitable recipient.” Then she turns to the palanquin. “There’s something I should have told you. I lied about my husband. Edric was a good man: he cared for me, loved me, when he could have made his fortune from what I was. Unfortunately, he never got to see me like this. Edric died during the early months of the plague.”

Grafenwalder says nothing. He’s out of words, out of questions.

“You’re probably wondering who’s in the palanquin,” Goodglass says. “He’s going to come out now, for a little while. Not too long, because he can’t risk coming into contact with plague spores, not when so much of him is mechanical. But that won’t stop him doing his job. He’s always been a quick worker.”

With a hiss of escaping pressure, the entire front of the palanquin lifts up on shining pistons. The first thing Grafenwalder sees, the last thing before he starts screaming, is a silver hand clutching a black Homburg hat.

Then he sees the face.

Great Wall Of Mars

Here’s a relentless, wildly inventive, pyrotechnic thriller, paced like a runaway freight train, that takes us to Mars for a mission of peace that instead leads us ever deeper into the heart of war ...

New writer Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor toInterzone,and has also sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Spectrum SF,and elsewhere. His first novel, Revelation Space,is being widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; coming up is a sequel, Chasm City.A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he comes from Wales, but lives in the Netherlands, where he works for the European Space Agency.

You realize you might die down there,” said Warren.

Nevil Clavain looked into his brother’s one good eye; the one the Conjoiners had left him with after the battle of Tharsis Bulge. “Yes, I know,” he said. “But if there’s another war, we might all die. I’d rather take that risk, if there’s a chance for peace.”

Warren shook his head, slowly and patiently. “No matter how many times we’ve been over this, you just don’t seem to get it, do you? There can’t ever be any kind of peace while they’re still down there. That’s what you don’t understand, Nevil. The only long-term solution here is ...” he trailed off.

“Go on,” Clavain goaded. “Say it. Genocide.”

Warren might have been about to answer when there was a bustle of activity down the docking tube, at the far end from the waiting spacecraft. Through the door Clavain saw a throng of media people, then someone gliding through them, fielding questions with only the curtest of answers. That was Sandra Voi, the Demarchist woman who would be coming with him to Mars.

“It’s not genocide when they’re just a faction, not an ethnically distinct race,” Warren said, before Voi was within earshot.

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know. Prudence?”

Voi approached. She bore herself stiffly, her face a mask of quiet resignation. Her ship had only just docked from Circum-Jove, after a three-week transit at maximum burn. During that time the prospects for a peaceful resolution of the current crisis had steadily deteriorated.

“Welcome to Deimos,” Warren said.

“Marshalls,” she said, addressing both of them. “I wish the circumstances were better. Let’s get straight to business. Warren; how long do you think we have to find a solution?”

“Not long. If Galiana maintains the pattern she’s been following for the last six months, we’re due another escape attempt in ...” Warren glanced at a readout buried in his cuff. “About three days. If she does try and get another shuttle off Mars, we’ll really have no option but to escalate.”

They all knew what that would mean: a military strike against the Conjoiner nest.

“You’ve tolerated her attempts so far,” Voi said. “And each time you’ve successfully destroyed her ship with all the people in it. The net risk of a successful break out hasn’t increased. So why retaliate now?”

“It’s very simple. After each violation we issued Galiana with a stronger warning than the one before. Our last was absolute and final.”

“You’ll be in violation of treaty if you attack.”

Warren’s smile was one of quiet triumph. “Not quite, Sandra. You may not be completely conversant with the treaty’s fine print, but we’ve discovered that it allows us to storm Galiana’s nest without breaking any terms. The technical phrase is a police action, I believe.”

Clavain saw that Voi was momentarily lost for words. That was hardly surprising. The treaty between the Coalition and the Conjoiners-which Voi’s neutral Demarchists had helped draft-was the longest document in existence, apart from some obscure, computer-generated mathematical proofs. It was supposed to be watertight, though only machines had ever read it from beginning to end, and only machines had ever stood a chance of finding the kind of loophole which Warren was now brandishing.

“No ...” she said. “There’s some mistake.”

“I’m afraid he’s right,” Clavain said. “I’ve seen the natural-language summaries, and there’s no doubt about the legality of a police action. But it needn’t come to that. I’m sure I can persuade Galiana not to make another escape attempt.”

“But if we should fail?” Voi looked at Warren now. “Nevil and myself could still be on Mars in three days.”

“Don’t be, is my advice.”

Disgusted, Voi turned and stepped into the green cool of the shuttle. Clavain was left alone with his brother for a moment. Warren fingered the leathery patch over his ruined eye with the chrome gauntlet of his prosthetic arm, as if to remind Clavain of what the war had cost him; how little love he had for the enemy, even now.

“We haven’t got a chance of succeeding, have we?” Clavain said. “We’re only going down there so you can say you explored all avenues of negotiation before sending in the troops. You actually want another damned war.”

“Don’t be so defeatist,” Warren said, shaking his head sadly, forever the older brother disappointed at his sibling’s failings. “It really doesn’t become you.”

“It’s not me who’s defeatist,” Clavain said.

“No; of course not. Just do your best, little brother.”

Warren extended his hand for his brother to shake. Hesitating, Clavain looked again into his brother’s good eye. What he saw there was an interrogator’s eye: as pale, colorless and cold as a midwinter sun. There was hatred in it. Warren despised Clavain’s pacifism; Clavain’s belief that any kind of peace, even a peace which consisted only of stumbling episodes of mistrust between crises, was always better than war. That schism had fractured any lingering fraternal feelings they might have retained. Now, when Warren reminded Clavain that they were brothers, he never entirely concealed the disgust in his voice.

“You misjudge me,” Clavain whispered, before quietly shaking Warren’s hand.

“No; I honestly don’t think I do.”

Clavain stepped through the airlock just before it sphinctered shut. Voi had already buckled herself in; she had a glazed look now, as if staring into infinity. Clavain guessed she was uploading a copy of the treaty through her implants, scrolling it across her visual field, trying to find the loophole; probably running a global search for any references to police actions.

The ship recognized Clavain, its interior shivering to his preferences. The green was closer to turquoise now; the readouts and controls minimalist in layout, displaying only the most mission-critical systems. Though the shuttle was the tiniest peacetime vessel Clavain had been in, it was a cathedral compared to the dropships he had flown during the war; so small that they were assembled around their occupants like Medieval armor before a joust.

“Don’t worry about the treaty,” Clavain said. “I promise you Warren won’t get his chance to apply that loophole.”

Voi snapped out of her trance irritatedly. “You’d better be right, Nevil. Is it me, or is your brother hoping we fail?” She was speaking Quebecois French now; Clavain shifting mental gears to follow her. “If my people discover that there’s a hidden agenda here, there’ll be hell to pay.”

“The Conjoiners gave Warren plenty of reasons to hate them after the battle of the Bulge,” Clavain said. “And he’s a tactician, not a field specialist. After the cease-fire my knowledge of worms was even more valuable than before, so I had a role. But Warren’s skills were a lot less transferable.”

“So that gives him a right to edge us closer to another war?” The way Voi spoke, it was as if her own side had not been neutral in the last exchange. But Clavain knew she was right. If hostilities between the Conjoiners and the Coalition reignited, the Demarchy would not be able to stand aside as they had fifteen years ago. And it was anyone’s guess how they would align themselves.

“There won’t be war.”

“And if you can’t reason with Galiana? Or are you going to play on your personal connection?”

“I was just her prisoner, that’s all.” Clavain took the controls-Voi said piloting was a bore-and unlatched the shuttle from Deimos. They dropped away at a tangent to the rotation of the equatorial ring which girdled the moon, instantly in free-fall. Clavain sketched a porthole in the wall with his fingertip, outlining a rectangle which instantly became transparent.

For a moment he saw his reflection in the glass: older than he felt he had any right to look, the gray beard and hair making him look ancient rather than patriarchal; a man deeply wearied by recent circumstance. With some relief he darkened the cabin so that he could see Deimos, dwindling at surprising speed. The higher of the two Martian moons was a dark, bristling lump, infested with armaments, belted by the bright, window-studded band of the moving ring. For the last nine years, Deimos was all that he had known, but now he could encompass it within the arc of his fist.

“Not just her prisoner,” Voi said. “No one else came back sane from the Conjoiners. She never even tried to infect you with her machines.”

“No, she didn’t. But only because the timing was on my side.” Clavain was reciting an old argument now; as much for his own benefit as Voi’s. “I was the only prisoner she had. She was losing the war by then; one more recruit to her side wouldn’t have made any real difference. The terms of cease-fire were being thrashed out and she knew she could buy herself favors by releasing me unharmed. There was something else, too. Conjoiners weren’t supposed to be capable of anything so primitive as mercy. They were spiders, as far as we were concerned. Galiana’s act threw a wrench into our thinking. It divided alliances within the high command. If she hadn’t released me, they might well have nuked her out of existence.”

“So there was absolutely nothing personal?”

“No,” Clavain said. “There was nothing personal about it at all.”

Voi nodded, without in any way suggesting that she actually believed him. It was a skill some women had honed to perfection, Clavain thought.

Of course, he respected Voi completely. She had been one of the first human beings to enter Europa’s ocean, decades back. Now they were planning fabulous cities under the ice; efforts which she had spearheaded. Demarchist society was supposedly flat in structure, non-hierarchical; but someone of Voi’s brilliance ascended through echelons of her own making. She had been instrumental in brokering the peace between the Conjoiners and Clavain’s own Coalition. That was why she was coming along now: Galiana had only agreed to Clavain’s mission provided he was accompanied by a neutral observer, and Voi had been the obvious choice. Respect was easy. Trust, however, was harder: it required that Clavain ignore the fact that, with her head dotted with implants, the Demarchist woman’s condition was not very far removed from that of the enemy.

The descent to Mars was hard and steep.

Once or twice they were queried by the automated tracking systems of the satellite interdiction network. Dark weapons hovering in Mars-synchronous orbit above the nest locked onto the ship for a few instants, magnetic railguns powering up, before the shuttle’s diplomatic nature was established and it was allowed to proceed. The Interdiction was very efficient; as well it might be, given that Clavain had designed much of it himself. In fifteen years no ship had entered or left the Martian atmosphere, nor had any surface vehicle ever escaped from Galiana’s nest.

“There she is,” Clavain said, as the Great Wall rose over the horizon.

“Why do you call ‘it’ a ‘she’?” Voi asked. “I never felt the urge to personalize it, and I designed it. Besides ... even if it was alive once, it’s dead now.”

She was right, but the Wall was still awesome to behold. Seen from orbit, it was a pale, circular ring on the surface of Mars, two thousand kilometers wide. Like a coral atoll, it entrapped its own weather system; a disk of bluer air, flecked with creamy white clouds which stopped abruptly at the boundary.

Once, hundreds of communities had sheltered inside that cell of warm, thick, oxygen-rich atmosphere. The Wall was the most audacious and visible of Voi’s projects. The logic had been inescapable: a means to avoid the millennia-long time scales needed to terra form Mars via such conventional schemes as cometary bombardment or ice-cap thawing. Instead of modifying the whole atmosphere at once, the Wall allowed the initial effort to be concentrated in a relatively small region, at first only a thousand kilometers across. There were no craters deep enough, so the Wall had been completely artificial: a vast ring-shaped atmospheric dam designed to move slowly outward, encompassing ever more surface area at a rate of a twenty kilometers per year. The Wall needed to be very tall because the low Martian gravity meant that the column of atmosphere was higher for a fixed surface pressure than on Earth. The ramparts were hundreds of meters thick, dark as glacial ice, sinking great taproots deep into the lithosphere to harvest the ores needed for the Wall’s continual growth. Yet two hundred kilometers higher the wall was a diaphanously thin membrane only microns wide; completely invisible except when rare optical effects made it hang like a frozen aurora against the stars. Eco-engineers had invaded the Wall’s live able area with terran genestocks deftly altered in orbital labs. Flora and fauna had moved out in vivacious waves, lapping eagerly against the constraints of the Wall.

But the Wall was dead.

It had stopped growing during the war, hit by some sort of viral weapon which crippled its replicating subsystems, and now even the ecosystem within it was failing; the atmosphere cooling, oxygen bleeding into space, pressure declining inevitably toward the Martian norm of one seven-thousandth of an atmosphere.

He wondered how it must look to Voi; whether in any sense she saw it as her murdered child.

“I’m sorry that we had to kill it,” Clavain said. He was about to add that it been the kind of act which war normalized, but decided that the statement would have sounded hopelessly defensive.

“You needn’t apologize,” Voi said. “It was only machinery. I’m surprised it’s lasted as long as it has, frankly. There must still be some residual damage-repair capability. We Demarchists build for posterity, you know.”

Yes, and it worried his own side. There was talk of challenging the Demarchist supremacy in the outer solar system; perhaps even an attempt to gain a Coalition foothold around Jupiter.

They skimmed the top of the Wall and punched through the thickening layers of atmosphere within it, the shuttle’s hull morphing to an arrowhead shape. The ground had an arid, bleached look to it, dotted here and there by ruined shacks, broken domes, gutted vehicles or shot-down shuttles. There were patches of shallow-rooted, mainly dark-red tundra vegetation; cotton grass, saxifrage, arctic poppies and lichen. Clavain knew each species by its distinct infrared signature, but many of the plants were in recession now that the imported bird species had died. Ice lay in great silver swathes, and what few expanses of open water remained were warmed by buried thermopiles. Elsewhere there were whole zones which had reverted to almost sterile permafrost. It could have been a kind of paradise, Clavain thought, if the war had not ruined everything. Yet what had happened here could only be a foretaste of the devastation that would follow across the system, on Earth as well as Mars, if another war was allowed to happen.

“Do you see the nest yet?” Voi asked.

“Wait a second,” Clavain said, requesting a head-up display which boxed the nest. “That’s it. A nice fat thermal signature too. Nothing else for miles around-nothing inhabited, anyway.”

“Yes. I see it now.”

The Conjoiner nest lay a third of the way from the Wall’s edge, not far from the footslopes of Arsia Mons. The entire encampment was only a kilometer across, circled by a dyke which was piled high with regolith dust on one side. The area within the Great Wall was large enough to have an appreciable weather system: spanning enough Martian latitude for significant coriolis effects; enough longitude for diurnal warming and cooling to cause thermal currents.

He could see the nest much more clearly now; details leaping out of the haze.

Its external layout was crushingly familiar. Clavain’s side had been studying the nest from the vantage point of Deimos ever since the cease-fire. Phobos, with its lower orbit, would have been even better, of course-but there was no helping that, and perhaps the Phobos problem might actually prove useful in his negotiations with Galiana. She was somewhere in the nest, he knew: somewhere beneath the twenty varyingly sized domes emplaced within the rim, linked together by pressurized tunnels or merged at their boundaries like soap bubbles. The nest extended several tens of levels beneath the Martian surface maybe deeper.

“How many people do you think are inside?” Voi said.

“Nine hundred or so,” said Clavain. “That’s an estimate based on my experiences as a prisoner, and the hundred or so who’ve died trying to escape since. The rest, I have to say, is pretty much guesswork.”

“Our estimates aren’t dissimilar. A thousand or less here, and perhaps another three or four spread across the system in smaller nests. I know your side thinks we have better intelligence than that, but it happens not to be the case.”

“Actually, I believe you.” The shuttle’s airframe was flexing around them, morphing to a low-altitude profile with wide, bat like wings.

“I was just hoping you might have some clue as to why Galiana keeps wasting valuable lives with escape attempts.”

Voi shrugged. “Maybe to her the lives aren’t anywhere near as valuable as you’d like to think.”

“Do you honestly think that?”

“I don’t think we can begin to guess the thinking of a true hive-mind society, Clavain. Even from a Demarchist standpoint.”

There was a chirp from the console; Galiana signaling them. Clavain opened the channel allocated for Coalition-Conjoiner diplomacy.

“Nevil Clavain?” he heard.

“Yes.” He tried to sound as calm as possible. “I’m with Sandra Voi. We’re ready to land as soon as you show us where.”

“Okay,” Galiana said. “Vector your ship toward the westerly rim wall. And please, be careful.”

“Thank you. Any particular reason for the caution?”

“Just be quick about it, Nevil.”

They banked over the nest, shedding height until they were skimming only a few tens of meters above the weather worn Martian surface. A wide rectangular door had opened in the concrete dyke, revealing a hangar bay aglow with yellow lights.

“That must be where Galiana launches her shuttles from,” Clavain whispered. “We always thought there must be some kind of opening on the west side of the rim, but we never had a good view of it before.”

“Which still doesn’t tell us why she does it,” Voi said.

The console chirped again-the link poor even though they were so close. “Nose up,” Galiana said. “You’re too low and slow. Get some altitude or the worms will lock onto you.”

“You’re telling me there are worms here?” Clavain said.

“I thought you were the worm expert, Nevil.”

He nosed the shuttle up, but fractionally too late. Ahead of them something coiled out of the ground with lightning speed, metallic jaws opening in its blunt, armored head. He recognized the type immediately: Ouroborus class. Worms of this form still infested a hundred niches across the system. Not quite as smart as the type infesting Phobos, but still adequately dangerous.

“Shit,” Voi said, her veneer of Demarchist cool cracking for an instant.

“You said it,” Clavain answered.

The Ouroborus passed underneath and then there was a spine-jarring series of bumps as the jaws tore into the shuttle’s belly. Clavain felt the shuttle lurch down sickeningly; no longer a flying thing but an exercise in ballistics. The cool, minimalist turquoise interior shifted liquidly into an emergency configuration; damage readouts competing for attention with weapons status options. Their seats ballooned around them.

“Hold on,” he said. “We’re going down.”

Voi’s calm returned. “Do you think we can reach the rim in time?”

“Not a cat in hell’s chance.” He wrestled with the controls all the same, but it was no good. The ground was coming up fast and hard. “I wish Galiana had warned us a bit sooner ...”

“I think she thought we already knew.”

They hit. It was harder than Clavain had been expecting, but the shuttle stayed in one piece and the seat cushioned him from the worst of the impact. They skidded for a few meters and then nosed up against a sandbank. Through the window Clavain saw the white worm racing toward them with undulating waves of its segmented robot body.

“I think we’re finished,” Voi said.

“Not quite,” Clavain said. “You’re not going to like this, but ... Biting his tongue he brought the shuttle’s hidden weapons online. An aiming scope plunged down from the ceiling; he brought his eyes to it and locked crosshairs onto the Ouroborus. Just like old times ...

“Damn you,” Voi said. “This was meant to be an unarmed mission!”

“You’re welcome to lodge a formal complaint.”

Clavain fired, the hull shaking from the recoil. Through the side window they watched the white worm blow apart into stubby segments. The parts wriggled beneath the dust.

“Good shooting,” Voi said, almost grudgingly. “Is it dead?”

“For now,” Clavain said. “It’ll take several hours for the segments to fuse back into a functional worm.”

“Good,” Voi said, pushing herself out of her seat. “But there will be a formal complaint, take my word.”

“Maybe you’d rather the worm ate us?”

“I just hate duplicity, Clavain.”

He tried the radio again. “Galiana? We’re down-the ship’s history-but we’re both unharmed.”

“Thank God.” Old verbal mannerisms died hard, even among the Conjoined. “But you can’t stay where you are. There are more worms in the area. Do you think you can make it overland to the nest?”

“It’s only two hundred meters,” Voi said. “It shouldn’t be a problem.”

Two hundred meters, yes-but two hundred meters across treacherous, potholed ground riddled with enough soft depressions to hide a dozen worms. And then they would have to climb up the rim’s side to reach the entrance to the hangar bay; ten or fifteen meters above the soil.

“Let’s hope it isn’t,” Clavain said.

He unbuckled, feeling light-headed as he stood for the first time in Martian gravity. He had adapted entirely too well to the one-gee of the Deimos ring, constructed for the comfort of Earth side tacticians. He went to the emergency locker and found a mask which slivered eagerly across his face; another for Voi. They plugged in air-tanks and went to the shuttle’s door. This time when it sphinctered open there was a glistening membrane stretched across the doorway, a recently licensed item of Demarchist technology. Clavain pushed through the membrane and the stuff enveloped him with a wet, sucking sound. By the time he hit the dirt the membrane had hardened itself around his soles and had begun to contour itself with ribs and accordioned joints, even though it stayed transparent.

Voi came behind him, gaining her own m-suit.

They loped away from the crashed shuttle, toward the dyke. The worms would be locking onto their seismic patterns already, if there were any nearby. They might be more interested in the shuttle for now, but that was nothing they could count on. Clavain knew the behavior of worms intimately, knew the major routines which drove them; but that expertise did not guarantee his survival. It had almost failed him in Phobos.

The mask felt clammy against his face. The air at the base of the Great Wall was technically breathable even now, but there seemed no point in taking chances when speed was of the essence. His feet scuffed through the topsoil, and while he seemed to be crossing ground, the dyke obstinately refused to come any closer. It was larger than it looked from the crash; the distance further.

“Another worm,” Voi said.

White coils erupted through sand to the west. The Ouroborus was making undulating progress toward them, zig-zagging with predatory calm, knowing that it could afford to take its time. In the tunnels of Phobos, they had never had the luxury of knowing when a worm was close. They struck from ambush, quick as pythons.

“Run,” Clavain said.

Dark figures appeared in the opening high in the rimwall. A rope-ladder unfurled down the side of the structure. Clavain, making for the base of it, made no effort to quieten his footfalls. He knew that the worm almost certainly had a lock on him by now.

He looked back.

The worm paused by the downed shuttle, then smashed its diamond-jawed head into the ship, impaling the hull on its body. The worm reared up, wearing the ship like a garland. Then it shivered and the ship flew apart like a rotten carcass. The worm returned its attention to Clavain and Voi. Like a sidewinder it pulled its thirty-meter long body from the sand and rolled toward them on wheeling coils.

Clavain reached the base of the ladder.

Once, he could have ascended the ladder with his arms alone, in one-gee, but now the ladder felt alive beneath his feet. He began to climb, then realized that the ground was dropping away much faster than he was passing rungs. The Conjoiners were hauling him aloft.

He looked back in time to see Voi stumble.

“Sandra!No!”

She made to stand up, but it was too late by then. As the worm descended on her, Clavain could do nothing but turn his gaze away and pray for her death to be quick. If it had to be meaningless, he thought, at least let it be swift.

Then he started thinking about his own survival. “Faster!” he shouted, but the mask reduced his voice to a panicked muffle. He had forgotten to assign the ship’s radio frequency to the suit.

The worm thrashed against the base of the wall, then began to rear up, its maw opening beneath him; a diamond-ringed orifice like the drill of a tunnelling machine. Then something eye-hurtingly bright cut into the worm’s hide. Craning his neck, Clavain saw a group of Conjoiners kneeling over the lip of the opening, aiming guns downward. The worm writhed in intense robotic irritation. Across the sand, he could see the coils of other worms coming closer. There must have been dozens ringing the nest. No wonder Galiana’s people had made so few attempts to leave by land.

They had hauled him within ten meters of safety. The injured worm showed cybernetic workings where its hide had been flensed away by weapons impacts. Enraged, it flung itself against the rim wall, chipping off scabs of concrete the size of boulders. Clavain felt the vibration of each impact through the wall as he was dragged upward.

The worm hit again and the wall shook more violently than before. To his horror, Clavain watched one of the Conjoiners lose his footing and tumble over the edge of the rim toward him. Time oozed to a crawl. The falling man was almost upon him. Without thinking, Clavain hugged closer to the wall, locking his limbs around the ladder. Suddenly, he had seized the man by the arm. Even in Martian gravity, even allowing for the Conjoiner’s willowy build, the impact almost sent both of them toward the Ouroborus. Clavain felt his bones pop out of location, tearing at gristle, but he managed to keep his grip on both the Conjoiner and the ladder.

Conjoiners breathed the air at the base of the Wall without difficulty. The man wore only lightweight clothes, gray silk pajamas belted at the waist. With his sunken cheeks and bald skull, the man’s Martian physique lent him a cadaverous look. Yet somehow he had managed not to drop his gun, still holding it in his other hand.

“Let me go,” the man said.

Below, the worm inched higher despite the harm the Conjoiners had inflicted on it. “No,” Clavain said, through clenched teeth and the distorting membrane of his mask. “I’m not letting you go.”

“You’ve no option.” The man’s voice was placid. “They can’t haul both of us up fast enough, Clavain.”

Clavain looked into the Conjoiner’s face, trying to judge the man’s age. Thirty, perhaps-maybe not even that, since the cadaverous look probably made him seem older than he really was. Clavain was easily twice his age; had surely lived a richer life; had comfortably cheated death on three or four previous occasions.

“I’m the one who should die, not you.”

“No,” the Conjoiner said. “They’d find a way to blame your death on us. They’d make it a pretext for war.” Without any fuss the man pointed the gun at his own head and blew his brains out.

As much in shock as recognition that the man’s life was no longer his to save, Clavain released his grip. The dead man tumbled down the rim wall, into the mouth of the worm which had just killed Sandra Voi.

Numb, Clavain allowed himself to be pulled to safety.

When the armored door to the hangar was shut the Conjoiners attacked his m-suit with enzymic sprays. The sprays digested the fabric in seconds, leaving Clavain wheezing in a pool of slime. Then a pair of Conjoiners helped him unsteadily to his feet and waited patiently while he caught his breath from the mask. Through tears of exhaustion he saw that the hangar was racked full of half-assembled spacecraft; skeletal geodesic shark-shapes designed to punch out of an atmosphere, fast.

“Sandra Voi is dead,” he said, removing the mask to speak.

There was no way the Conjoiners could not have seen this for themselves, but it seemed inhuman not to acknowledge what had happened.

“I know,” Galiana said. “But at least you survived.”

He thought of the man falling into the Ouroborus. “I’m sorry about your ...” But then trailed off, because for all his depth of knowledge concerning the Conjoiners, he had no idea what the appropriate term was.

“You placed your life in danger in trying to save him.”

“He didn’t have to die.”

Galiana nodded sagely. “No; in all likelihood he didn’t. But the risk to yourself was too great. You heard what he said. Your death would be made to seem our fault; justification for a pre-emptive strike against our nest. Even the Demarchists would turn against us if we were seen to murder a diplomat.”

Taking another suck from the mask, he looked into her face. He had spoken to her over low-bandwidth video-links, but only in person was it obvious that Galiana had hardly aged in fifteen years. A decade and a half of habitual expression should have engraved existing lines deeper into her face-but Conjoiners were not known for their habits of expression. Galiana had seen little sunlight in the intervening time, cooped here in the nest, and Martian gravity was much kinder to bone structure than the one-gee of Deimos. She still had the cruel beauty he remembered from his time as a prisoner. The only real evidence of aging lay in the filaments of gray threading her hair; raven-black when she had been his captor.

“Why didn’t you warn us about the worms?”

“Warn you?” For the first time something like doubt crossed her face, but it was only fleeting. “We assumed you were fully aware of the Ouroborus infestation. Those worms have been dormant-waiting-for years, but they’ve always been there. It was only when I saw how low your approach was that I realized ...”

“That we might not have known?”

Worms were area-denial devices; autonomous prey-seeking mines. The war had left many pockets of the solar system still riddled with active worms. The machines were intelligent, in a one-dimensional way. Nobody ever admitted to deploying them and it was usually impossible to convince them that the war was over and that they should quietly deactivate.

“After what happened to you in Phobos,” Galiana said, “I assumed there was nothing you needed to be taught about worms.”

He never liked thinking about Phobos: the pain was still too deeply engraved. But if it had not been for the injuries he had sustained there he would never have been sent to Deimos to recuperate; would never have been recruited into his brother’s intelligence wing to study the Conjoiners. Out of that phase of deep immersion in everything concerning the enemy had come his peacetime role as negotiator-and now diplomat-on the eve of another war. Everything was circular, ultimately. And now Phobos was central to his thinking because he saw it as a way out of the impasse-maybe the last chance for peace. But it was too soon to put his idea to Galiana. He was not even sure the mission could still continue, after what had happened.

“We’re safe now, I take it?”

“Yes; we can repair the damage to the dyke. Mostly, we can ignore their presence.”

“We should have been warned. Look, I need to talk to my brother.”

“Warren? Of course. It’s easily arranged.”

They walked out of the hangar; away from the half-assembled ships. Somewhere deeper in the nest, Clavain knew, was a factory where the components for the ships were made, mined out of Mars or winnowed from the fabric of the nest. The Conjoiners managed to launch one every six weeks or so; had been doing so for six months. Not one of the ships had ever managed to escape the Martian atmosphere before being shot down ... but sooner or later he would have to ask Galiana why she persisted with this provocative folly.

Now, though, was not the time-even if, by Warren’s estimate, he only had three days before Galiana’s next provocation.

The air elsewhere in the nest was thicker and warmer than in the hangar, which meant he could dispense with the mask. Galiana took him down a short, gray-walled, metallic corridor which ended in a circular room containing a console. He recognized the room from the times he had spoken to Galiana from Deimos. Galiana showed him how to use the system then left him in privacy while he established a connection with Deimos.

Warren’s face soon appeared on a screen, thick with pixels like an impressionist portrait. Conjoiners were only allowed to send kilobytes a second to other parts of the system. Much of that bandwidth was now being sucked up by this one video link.

“You’ve heard, I take it,” Clavain said.

Warren nodded, his face ashen. “We had a pretty good view from orbit, of course. Enough to see that Voi didn’t make it. Poor woman. We were reasonably sure you survived, but it’s good to have it confirmed.”

“Do you want me to abandon the mission?”

Warren’s hesitation was more than just time-lag. “No ... I thought about it, of course, and high command agrees with me. Voi’s death was tragic-no escaping that. But she was only along as a neutral observer. If Galiana consents for you to stay, I suggest you do so.”

“But you still say I only have three days?”

“That’s up to Galiana, isn’t it? Have you learned much?”

“You must be kidding. I’ve seen shuttles ready for launch, that’s all. I haven’t raised the Phobos proposal, either. The timing wasn’t exactly ideal, after what happened to Voi.”

“Yes. If only we’d known about that Ouroborus infestation.”

Clavain leaned closer to the screen. “Yes. Why the hell didn’t we? Galiana assumed that we would, and I don’t blame her for that. We’ve had the nest under constant surveillance for fifteen years. Surely in all that time we’d have seen evidence of the worms?”

“You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning, maybe the worms weren’t always there.”

Conscious that there could be nothing private about this conversation-but unwilling to drop the thread-Clavain said: “You think the Conjoiners put them there to ambush us?”

“I’m saying we shouldn’t disregard any possibility, no matter how unpalatable.”

“Galiana would never do something like that.”

“No, I wouldn’t.” She had just stepped back into the room. “And I’m disappointed that you’d even debate the possibility.”

Clavain terminated the link with Deimos. “Eavesdropping’s not a very nice habit, you know.”

“What did you expect me to do?”

“Show some trust? Or is that too much of a stretch?”

“I never had to trust you when you were my prisoner,” Galiana said. “That made our relationship infinitely simpler. Our roles were completely defined.”

“And now? If you distrust me so completely, why did you ever agree to my visit? Plenty of other specialists could have come in my place. You could even have refused any dialogue.”

“Voi’s people pressured us to allow your visit,” Galiana said. “Just as they pressured your side into delaying hostilities a little longer.”

“Is that all?”

She hesitated slightly now. “I ... knew you.”

“Knew me? Is that how you sum up a year of imprisonment? What about the thousands of conversations we had; the times when we put aside our differences to talk about something other than the damned war? You kept me sane, Galiana. I’ve never forgotten that. It’s why I’ve risked my life to come here and talk you out of another provocation.”

“It’s completely different now.”

“Of course!” He forced himself not to shout. “Of course it’s different. But not fundamentally. We can still build on that bond of trust and find a way out of this crisis.”

“But does your side really want a way out of it?”

He did not answer her immediately; wary of what the truth might mean. “I’m not sure. But I’m also not sure you do, or else you wouldn’t keep pushing your luck.” Something snapped inside him and he asked the question he had meant to ask in a million better ways. “Why do you keep doing it, Galiana? Why do you keep launching those ships when you know they’ll be shot down as soon as they leave the nest?”

Her eyes locked onto his own, unflinchingly. “Because we can. Because sooner or later one will succeed.”

Clavain nodded. It was exactly the sort of thing he had feared she would say.

She led him through more gray-walled corridors, descending several levels deeper into the nest. Light poured from snaking strips embedded into the walls like arteries. It was possible that the snaking design was decorative, but Clavain thought it much more likely that the strips had simply grown that way, expressing biological algorithms. There was no evidence that the Conjoiners had attempted to enliven their surroundings; to render them in any sense human.

“It’s a terrible risk you’re running,” Clavain said.

“And the status quo is intolerable. I’ve every desire to avoid another war, but if it came to one, we’d at least have the chance to break these shackles.”

“If you didn’t get exterminated first ...”

“We’d avoid that. In any case, fear plays no part in our thinking. You saw the man accept his fate on the dyke, when he understood that your death would harm us more than his own. He altered his state of mind to one of total acceptance.”

“Fine. That makes it all right, then.”

She halted. They were alone in one of the snakingly lit corridors; he had seen no other Conjoiners since the hangar. “It’s not that we regard individual lives as worthless, any more than you would willingly sacrifice a limb. But now that we’re part of something larger ...”

“Transenlightenment, you mean?”

It was the Conjoiners’ term for the state of neural communion they shared, mediated by the machines swarming in their skulls. Whereas Demarchists used implants to facilitate real time democracy, Conjoiners used them to share sensory data, memories-even conscious thought itself. That was what had precipitated the war. Back in 2190 half of humanity had been hooked into the system-wide data nets via neural implants. Then the Conjoiner experiments had exceeded some threshold, unleashing a transforming virus into the nets. Implants had begun to change, infecting millions of minds with the templates of Conjoiner thought. Instantly the infected had become the enemy. Earth and the other inner planets had always been more conservative, preferring to access the nets via traditional media.

Once they saw communities on Mars and in the asteroid belts fall prey to the Conjoiner phenomenon, the Coalition powers hurriedly pooled their resources to prevent the spread reaching their own states. The Demarchists, out around the gas giants, had managed to get firewalls up before many of their habitats were lost. They had chosen neutrality while the Coalition tried to contain-some said sterilize-zones of Conjoiner takeover. Within three years-after some of the bloodiest battles in human experience-the Conjoiners had been pushed back to a clutch of hideaways dotted around the system. Yet all along they professed a kind of puzzled bemusement that their spread was being resisted. After all, no one who had been assimilated seemed to regret it. Quite the contrary. The few prisoners whom the Conjoiners had reluctantly returned to their pre-infection state had sought every means to return to the fold. Some had even chosen suicide rather than be denied Transenlightenment. Like acolytes given a vision of heaven, they devoted their entire waking existence to the search for another glimpse.

“Transenlightenment blurs our sense of self,” Galiana said. “When the man elected to die, the sacrifice was not absolute for him. He understood that much of what he was had already achieved preservation among the rest of us.”

“But he was just one man. What about the hundred lives you’ve thrown away with your escape attempts? We know-we’ve counted the bodies.”

“Replacements can always be cloned.”

Clavain hoped that he hid his disgust satisfactorily. Among his people the very notion of cloning was an unspeakable atrocity; redolent with horror. To Galiana it would be just another technique in her arsenal. “But you don’t clone, do you? And you’re losing people. We thought there would be nine hundred of you in this nest, but that was a gross overestimate, wasn’t it?”

“You haven’t seen much yet,” Galiana said.

“No, but this place smells deserted. You can’t hide absence, Galiana. I bet there aren’t more than a hundred of you left here.”

“You’re wrong,” Galiana said. “We have cloning technology, but we’ve hardly ever used it. What would be the point? We don’t aspire to genetic unity, no matter what your propagandists think. The pursuit of optima leads only to local minima. We honor our errors. We actively seek persistent disequilibrium.”

“Right.” The last thing he needed now was a dose of Conjoiner rhetoric. “So where the hell is everyone?”

In a while he had part of the answer, if not the whole of it. At the end of the maze of corridors-far under Mars now-Galiana brought him to a nursery.

It was shockingly unlike his expectations. Not only did it not match what he had imagined from the vantage point of Deimos, but it jarred against his predictions based on what he had seen so far of the nest. In Deimos, he had assumed a Conjoiner nursery would be a place of grim medical efficiency; all gleaming machines with babies plugged in like peripherals, like a monstrously productive doll factory. Within the nest, he had revised his model to allow for the depleted numbers of Conjoiners. If there was a nursery, it was obviously not very productive. Fewer babies, then-but still a vision of hulking gray machines, bathed in snaking light.

The nursery was nothing like that.

The huge room Galiana showed him was almost painfully bright and cheerful; a child’s fantasy of friendly shapes and primary colors. The walls and ceiling projected a holographic sky: infinite blue and billowing clouds of heavenly white. The floor was an undulating mat of synthetic grass forming hillocks and meadows. There were banks of flowers and forests of bonsai trees. There were robot animals: fabulous birds and rabbits just slightly too anthropomorphic to fool Clavain. They were like the animals in children’s books; big-eyed and happy-looking. Toys were scattered on the grass.

And there were children. They numbered between forty and fifty; spanning by his estimate ages from a few months to six or seven standard years. Some were crawling among the rabbits; other, older children were gathered around tree stumps whose sheered-off surfaces flickered rapidly with images, underlighting their faces. They were talking among themselves, giggling or singing. He counted perhaps half a dozen adult Conjoiners kneeling among the children. The children’s clothes were a headache of bright, clashing colors and patterns. The Conjoiners crouched among them like ravens. Yet the children seemed at ease with them, listening attentively when the adults had something to say.

“This isn’t what you thought it would be like, is it?”

“No ... not at all.” There seemed no point lying to her. “We thought you’d raise your young in a simplified version of the machine-generated environment you experience.”

“In the early days that’s more or less what we did.” Subtly, Galiana’s tone of voice had changed. “Do you know why chimpanzees are less intelligent than humans?”

He blinked at the change of tack. “I don’t know-are their brains smaller?”

“Yes-but a dolphin’s brain is larger, and they’re scarcely more intelligent than dogs.” Galiana stooped next to a vacant tree stump. Without seeming to do anything, she made a diagram of mammal brain anatomies appear on the trunk’s upper surface, then sketched her finger across the relevant parts. “It’s not overall brain volume that counts so much as the developmental history. The difference in brain volume between a neonatal chimp and an adult is only about twenty percent. By the time the chimp receives any data from beyond the womb, there’s almost no plasticity left to use. Similarly, dolphins are born with almost their complete repertoire of adult behavior already hardwired. A human brain, on the other hand, keeps growing through years of learning. We inverted that thinking. If data received during post-natal growth was so crucial to intelligence, perhaps we could boost our intelligence even further by intervening during the earliest phases of brain development.”

“In the womb?”

“Yes.” Now she made the tree-trunk show a human embryo running through cycles of cell-division, until the faint fold of a rudimentary spinal nerve began to form, nubbed with the tiniest of emergent minds. Droves of subcellular machines swarmed in, invading the nascent nervous system. Then the embryo’s development slammed forward, until Clavain was looking at an unborn human baby.

“What happened?”

“It was a grave error,” Galiana said. “Instead of enhancing normal neural development, we impaired it terribly. All we ended up with were various manifestations of savant syndrome.”

Clavain looked around him. “Then you let these kids develop normally?”

“More or less. There’s no family structure, of course, but then again there are plenty of human and primate societies where the family is less important in child development than the cohort group. So far we haven’t seen any pathologies.”

Clavain watched as one of the older children was escorted out of the grassy room, through a door in the sky. When the Conjoiner reached the door the child hesitated, tugging against the man’s gentle insistence. The child looked back for a moment, then followed the man through the gap.

“Where’s that child going?”

“To the next stage of its development.”

Clavain wondered what were the chances of him seeing the nursery just as one of the children was being promoted. Small, he judged-unless there was a crash program to rush as many of them through as quickly as possible. As he thought about this, Galiana took him into another part of the nursery. While this room was smaller and dourer it was still more colorful than any other part of the nest he had seen before the grassy room. The walls were a mosaic of crowded, intermingling displays, teeming with moving images and rapidly scrolling text. He saw a herd of zebra stampeding through the core of a neutron star. Elsewhere an octopus squirted ink at the face of a twentieth-century despot. Other display facets rose from the floor like Japanese paper screens, flooded with data. Children-up to early teenagers-sat on soft black toadstools next to the screens in little groups, debating. A few musical instruments lay around unused: holoclaviers and air-guitars. Some of the children had gray bands around their eyes and were poking their fingers through the interstices of abstract structures, exploring the dragon-infested waters of mathematical space. Cla-vain could see what they were manipulating on the flat screens: shapes that made his head hurt even in two dimensions.

“They’re nearly there,” Clavain said. “The machines are outside their heads, but not for long. When does it happen?”

“Soon; very soon.”

“You’re rushing them, aren’t you? Trying to get as many children Conjoined as you can. What are you planning?”

“Something ... has arisen, that’s all. The timing of your arrival is either very bad or very fortunate, depending on your point of view.” Before he could query her, Galiana added: “Clavain; I want you to meet someone.”

“Who?”

“Someone very precious to us.”

She took him through a series of child-proof doors until they reached a small circular room. The walls and ceiling were veined gray; tranquil after what he had seen in the last place. A child sat cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the room. Clavain estimated the girl’s age as ten standard years-perhaps fractionally older. But she did not respond to Clavain’s presence in any way an adult, or even a normal child, would have. She just kept on doing the thing she had been doing when they stepped inside, as if they were not really present at all. It was not at all clear what she was doing. Her hands moved before her in slow, precise gestures. It was as if she were playing a holoclavier or working a phantom puppet show. Now and then she would pivot around until she was facing another direction and carry on doing the hand movements.

“Her name’s Felka,” Galiana said.

“Hello, Felka ...” He waited for a response, but none came. “I can see there’s something wrong with her.”

“She was one of the savants. Felka developed with machines in her head. She was the last to be born before we realized our failure.”

Something about Felka disturbed him. Perhaps it was the way she carried on regardless, engrossed in an activity to which she seemed to attribute the utmost significance, yet which had to be without any sane purpose.

“She doesn’t seem aware of us.”

“Her deficits are severe,” Galiana said. “She has no interest in other human beings. She has prosopagnosia; the inability to distinguish faces. We all seem alike to her. Can you imagine something more strange than that?”

He tried, and failed. Life from Felka’s viewpoint must have been a nightmarish thing, surrounded by identical clones whose inner lives she could not begin to grasp. No wonder she seemed so engrossed in her game.

“Why is she so precious to you?” Clavain asked, not really wanting to know the answer.

“She’s keeping us alive,” Galiana said.

Of course, he asked Galiana what she meant by that. Galiana’s only response was to tell him that he was not yet ready to be shown the answer.

“And what exactly would it take for me to reach that stage?”

“A simple procedure.”

Oh yes, he understood that part well enough. Just a few machines in the right parts of his brain and the truth could be his. Politely, doing his best to mask his distaste, Clavain declined. Fortunately, Galiana did not press the point, for the time had arrived for the meeting he had been promised before his arrival on Mars.

He watched a subset of the nest file into the conference room. Galiana was their leader only inasmuch as she had founded the lab here from which the original experiment had sprung and was accorded some respect deriving from seniority. She was also the most obvious spokesperson among them. They all had areas of expertise which could not be easily shared among other Conjoined; very distinct from the hive-mind of identical clones which still figured in the Coalition’s propaganda. If the nest was in any way like an ant colony, then it was an ant colony in which every ant fulfilled a distinct role from all the others. Naturally, no individual could be solely entrusted with a particular skill essential to the nest-that would have been dangerous over-specialization-but neither had individuality been completely subsumed into the group mind.

The conference room must have dated back to the days when the nest was a research outpost, or even earlier, when it was some kind of mining base in the early 2100s. It was much too big for the dour handful of Conjoiners who stood around the main table. Tactical readouts around the table showed the build-up of strike forces above the Martian exclusion zone; probable drop trajectories for ground-force deployment.

“Nevil Clavain,” Galiana said, introducing him to the others. Everyone sat down. “I’m just sorry that Sandra Voi can’t be with us now. We all feel the tragedy of her death. But perhaps out of this terrible event we can find some common ground. Nevil; before you came here you told us you had a proposal for a peaceful resolution to the crisis.”

“I’d really like to hear it,” one of the others murmured audibly.

Clavain’s throat was dry. Diplomatically, this was quicksand. “My proposal concerns Phobos ...”

“Go on.”

“I was injured there,” he said. “Very badly. Our attempt to clean out the worm infestation failed and I lost some good friends. That makes it personal between me and the worms. But I’d accept anyone’s help to finish them off.”

Galiana glanced quickly at her compatriots before answering. “A joint assault operation?”

“It could work.”

“Yes ...” Galiana seemed lost momentarily. “I suppose it could be a way out of the impasse. Our own attempt failed too-and the interdiction’s stopped us from trying again.” Again, she seemed to fall into reverie. “But who would really benefit from the flushing out of Phobos? We’d still be quarantined here.”

Clavain leaned forward. “A cooperative gesture might be exactly the thing to lead to a relaxation in the terms of the interdiction. But don’t think of it in those terms. Think instead of reducing the current threat from the worms.”

“Threat?”

Clavain nodded. “It’s possible that you haven’t noticed.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “We’re concerned about the Phobos worms. They’ve begun altering the moon’s orbit. The shift is tiny at the moment, but too large to be anything other than deliberate.”

Galiana looked away from him for an instant, as if weighing her options. Then said: “We were aware of this, but you weren’t to know that.”

Gratitude?

He had assumed the worms’ activity could not have escaped Galiana. “We’ve seen odd behavior from other worm infestations across the system; things that begin to look like emergent intelligence. But never anything this purposeful. This infestation must have come from a batch with some subroutines we never even guessed about. Do you have any ideas about what they might be up to?”

Again, there was the briefest of hesitations, as if she was communing with her compatriots for the right response. Then she nodded toward a male Conjoiner sitting opposite her, Clavain guessing that the gesture was entirely for his benefit. His hair was black and curly; his face as smooth and untroubled by expression as Galiana’s, with something of the same beautifully symmetrical bone structure.

“This is Remontoire,” said Galiana. “He’s our specialist on the Phobos situation.”

Remontoire nodded politely. “In answer to your question, we currently have no viable theories as to what they’re doing, but we do know one thing. They’re raising the apocentre of the moon’s orbit.” Apocentre, Clavain knew, was the Martian equivalent of apogee for an object orbiting Earth: the point of highest altitude in an elliptical orbit. Remontoire continued, his voice as preternaturally calm as a parent reading slowly to a child. “The natural orbit of Phobos is actually inside the Roche limit for a gravitationally bound moon; Phobos is raising a tidal bulge on Mars but, because of friction, the bulge can’t quite keep up with Phobos. It’s causing Phobos to spiral slowly closer to Mars, by about two meters a century. In a few tens of millions of years, what’s left of the moon will crash into Mars.”

“You think the worms are elevating the orbit to avoid a cataclysm so far in the future?”

“I don’t know,” Remontoire said. “I suppose the orbital alterations could also be a byproduct of some less meaningful worm activity.”

“I agree,” Clavain said. “But the danger remains. If the worms can elevate the moon’s apocentre-even accidentally-we can assume they also have the means to lower its pericentre. They could drop Phobos on top of your nest. Does that scare you sufficiently that you’d consider cooperation with the Coalition?”

Galiana steepled her fingers before her face; a human gesture of deep concentration which her time as a Conjoiner had not quite eroded. Clavain could almost feel the web of thought looming in the room; ghostly strands of cognition reaching between each Conjoiner at the table, and beyond into the nest proper.

“A winning team, is that your idea?”

“It’s got to be better than war,” Clavain said. “Hasn’t it?”

Galiana might have been about to answer him when her face grew troubled. Clavain saw the wave of discomposure sweep over the others almost simultaneously. Something told him that it was nothing to do with his proposal.

Around the table, half the display facets switched automatically over to another channel. The face that Clavain was looking at was much like his own, except that the face on the screen was missing an eye. It was his brother. Warren was overlaid with the official insignia of the Coalition and a dozen system-wide media cartels.

He was in the middle of a speech. “... express my shock,” Warren said. “Or, for that matter, my outrage. It’s not just that they’ve murdered a valued colleague and deeply experienced member of my team. They’ve murdered my brother.”

Clavain felt the deepest of chills. “What is this?”

“A live transmission from Deimos,” Galiana breathed. “It’s going out to all the nets; right out to the trans-Pluto habitats.”

“What they did was an act of unspeakable treachery,” Warren said. “Nothing less than the premeditated, cold-blooded murder of a peace envoy.” And then a video clip sprang up to replace Warren. The image must have been snapped from Deimos or one of the interdiction satellites. It showed Clavain’s shuttle, lying in the dust close to the dyke. He watched the Ouroborus destroy the shuttle, then saw the image zoom in on himself and Voi, running for sanctuary. The Ouroborus took Voi. But this time there was no ladder lowered down for him. Instead, he saw weapon-beams scythe out from the nest toward him, knocking him to the ground. Horribly wounded, he tried to get up, to crawl a few inches nearer to his tormentors, but the worm was already upon him.

He watched himself get eaten.

Warren was back again. “The worms around the nest were a Conjoiner trap. My brother’s death must have been planned days-maybe even weeks-in advance.” His face glistened with a wave of military composure. “There can only be one outcome from such an action-something the Conjoiners must have well understood. For months they’ve been goading us toward hostile action.” He paused, then nodded at an unseen audience. “Well now they’re going to get it. In fact, our response has already commenced.”

“Dear God, no,” Clavain said, but the evidence was all there now; all around the table he could see the updating orbital spread of the Coalition’s dropships, knifing down toward Mars.

“I think it’s war,” Galiana said.

Conjoiners stormed onto the roof of the nest, taking up defensive positions around the domes and the dyke’s edge. Most of them carried the same guns which they had used against the Ouroborus. Smaller numbers were setting up automatic cannon on tripods. One or two were manhandling large anti-assault weapons into position. Most of it was war-surplus. Fifteen years ago the Conjoiners had avoided extinction by deploying weapons of awesome ferocity-but those ship-to-ship armaments were too simply too destructive to use against a nearby foe. Now it would be more visceral; closer to the primal templates of combat, and none of what the Conjoiners were marshalling would be much use against the kind of assault Warren had prepared, Clavain knew. They could slow an attack, but not much more than that.

Galiana had given him another breather mask, made him don lightweight chameleoflage armor, and then forced him to carry one of the smaller guns. The gun felt alien in his hands; something he had never expected to carry again. The only possible justification for carrying it was to use it against his brother’s forces-against his own side.

Could he do that?

It was clear that Warren had betrayed him; he had surely been aware of the worms around the nest. So his brother was capable not just of contempt, but of treacherous murder. For the first time, Clavain felt genuine hatred for Warren. He must have hoped that the worms would destroy the shuttle completely and kill Clavain and Voi in the process. It must have pained him to see Clavain make it to the dyke ... pained him even more when Clavain called to talk about the tragedy. But Warren’s larger plan had not been affected. The diplomatic link between the nest and Deimos was secure-even the Demarchists had no immediate access to it. So Clavain’s call from the surface could be quietly ignored; spysat imagery doctored to make it seem that he had never reached the dyke ... had in fact been repelled by Conjoiner treachery. Inevitably the Demarchists would unravel the deception given time ... but if Warren’s plan succeeded, they would all be embroiled in war long before then. That, thought Clavain, was all that Warren had ever wanted.

Two brothers, Clavain thought. In many ways so alike. Both had embraced war once, but like a fickle lover Clavain had wearied of its glories. He had not even been injured as severely as Warren ... but perhaps that was the point, too. Warren needed another war to avenge what one had stolen from him.

Clavain despised and pitied him in equal measure.

He searched for the safety clip on the gun. The rifle, now that he studied it more closely, was not all that different from those he had used during the war. The readout said the ammo-cell was fully charged.

He looked into the sky.

The attack wave broke orbit hard and steep above the Wall; five hundred fire-balls screeching toward the nest. The insertion scorched inches of ablative armor from most of the ships; fried a few others which came in just fractionally too hard. Clavain knew that was how it was happening: he had studied possible attack scenarios for years, the range of outcomes burned indelibly into his memory.

The anti-assault guns were already working-locking onto the plasma trails as they flowered overhead, swinging down to find the tiny spark of heat at the head, computing refraction paths for laser pulses, spitting death into the sky. The unlucky ships flared a white that hurt the back of the eye and rained down in a billion dulling sparks. A dozen-then a dozen more. Maybe fifty in total before the guns could no longer acquire targets. It was nowhere near enough. Clavain’s memory of the simulations told him that at least four hundred units of the attack wave would survive both re-entry and the Conjoiner’s heavy defenses.

Nothing that Galiana could do would make any difference.

And that had always been the paradox. Galiana was capable of running the same simulations. She must always have known that her provocations would bring down something she could never hope to defeat.

Something that was always going to destroy her.

The surviving members of the wave were levelling out now, commencing long, ground-hugging runs from all directions. Cocooned in their dropships, the soldiers would be suffering punishing gee-loads ... but it was nothing they were not engineered to withstand; half their cardiovascular systems were augmented by the only kinds of implant the Coalition tolerated.

The first of the wave came arcing in at supersonic speeds. All around, worms struggled to snatch them out of the sky, but mostly they were too slow to catch the dropships. Galiana’s people manned their cannon positions and did their best to fend off what they could. Clavain clutched his gun, not firing yet. Best to save his ammo-cell power for a target he stood a chance of injuring.

Above, the first dropships made hairpin turns, nosing suicidally down toward the nest. Then they fractured cleanly apart, revealing falling pilots clad in bulbous armor. Just before the moment of impact each pilot exploded into a mass of black shock-absorbing balloons, looking something like a blackberry, bouncing across the nest before the balloons deflated just as swiftly and the pilot was left standing on the ground. By then the pilot-now properly a soldier-would have a comprehensive computer-generated map of the nest’s nooks and crannies; enemy positions graphed in real time from the down-looking spysats.

Clavain fell behind the curve of a dome before the nearest soldier got a lock onto him. The firefight was beginning now. He had to hand it to Galiana’s people-they were fighting like devils. And they were at least as well coordinated as the attackers. But their weapons and armor were simply inadequate. Chameleoflage was only truly effective against a solitary enemy, or a massed enemy moving in from a common direction. With Coalition forces surrounding him, Clavain’s suit was going crazy to trying to match itself against every background, like a chameleon in a house of mirrors.

The sky overhead looked strange now-darkening purple. And the purple was spreading in a mist across the nest. Galiana had deployed some kind of chemical smoke screen: infrared and optically opaque, he guessed. It would occlude the spysats and might be primed to adhere only to enemy chameleoflage. That had never been in Warren’s simulations. Galiana had just given herself the slightest of edges.

A soldier stepped out of the mist, the obscene darkness of a gun muzzle trained on Clavain. His chameleoflage armor was dappled with vivid purple patches, ruining its stealthiness. The man fired, but his discharge wasted itself against Clavain’s armor. Clavain returned the compliment, dropping his compatriot. What he had done, he thought, was not technically treason. Not yet. All he had done was act in self-preservation.

The man was wounded, but not yet dead. Clavain stepped through the purple haze and knelt down beside the soldier. He tried not to look at the man’s wound.

“Can you hear me?” he said. There was no answer from the man, but beneath his visor, Clavain thought he saw the man’s lips shape a sound. The man was just a kid-hardly old enough to remember much of the last war. “There’s something you have to know,” Clavain continued. “Do you realize who I am?” He wondered how recognizable he was, under the breather mask. Then something made him relent. He could tell the man he was Nevil Clavain-but what would that achieve? The soldier would be dead in minutes; maybe sooner than that. Nothing would be served by the soldier knowing that the basis for his attack was a lie; that he would not in fact be laying down his life for a just cause. The universe could be spared a single callous act.

“It’s all right,” Clavain said, turning away from his victim.

And then moved deeper into the nest, to see who else he could kill before the odds took him.

But the odds never did.

“You always were lucky,” Galiana said, leaning over him. They were somewhere underground again-deep in the nest. A medical area, by the look of things. He was on a bed, fully clothed apart from the outer layer of chameleoflage armor. The room was gray and kettle-shaped, ringed by a circular balcony.

“What happened?”

“You took a head wound, but you’ll survive.”

He groped for the right question. “What about Warren’s attack?”

“We endured three waves. We took casualties, of course.”

Around the circumference of the balcony were thirty or so gray couches, slightly recessed into archways studded with gray medical equipment. They were all occupied. There were more Conjoiners in this room than he had seen so far in one place. Some of them looked very close to death.

Clavain reached up and examined his head, gingerly. There was some dried blood on the scalp, matted with his hair; some numbness, but it could have been a lot worse. He felt normal-no memory drop-outs or aphasia. When he made to stand from the bed, his body obeyed his will with only a tinge of dizziness.

“Warren won’t stop at just three waves, Galiana.”

“I know.” She paused. “We know there’ll be more.”

He walked to the railing on the inner side of the balcony and looked over the edge. He had expected to see something-some chunk of incomprehensible surgical equipment, perhaps-but the middle of the room was only an empty, smooth-walled, gray pit. He shivered. The air was colder than any part of the nest he had visited so far, with a medicinal tang which reminded him of the convalescence ward on Deimos. What made him shiver even more was the realization that some of the injured-some of the dead-were barely older than the children he had visited only hours ago. Perhaps some of them were those children, conscripted from the nursery since his visit, uploaded with fighting reflexes through their new implants.

“What are you going to do? You know you can’t win. Warren lost only a tiny fraction of his available force in those waves. You look like you’ve lost half your nest.”

“It’s much worse than that,” Galiana said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not quite ready yet. But I can show you in a moment.”

He felt colder than ever now. “What do you mean, not quite ready?”

Galiana looked deep into his eyes now. “You took a serious head wound, Cla-vain. The entry wound was small, but the internal bleeding ... it would have killed you, had we not intervened.” Before he could ask the inevitable question she answered it for him. “We injected a small cluster of medichines into your head. They undid the damage very easily. But it seemed provident to allow them to grow.”

“You’ve put replicators in my head?”

“You needn’t sound so horrified. They’re already growing-spreading out and interfacing with your existing neural circuitry-but the total volume of glial mass that they will consume is tiny: only a few cubic millimeters in total, across your entire brain.”

He wondered if she was calling his bluff. “I don’t feel anything.”

“You won’t-not for a minute or so.” Now she pointed into the empty pit in the middle of the room. “Stand here and look into the air.”

“There’s nothing there.”

But as soon as he had spoken, he knew he was wrong. There was something in the pit. He blinked and directed his attention somewhere else, but when he returned his gaze to the pit, the thing he imagined he had seen-milky, spectral-was still there, and becoming sharper and brighter by the second. It was a three-dimensional structure, as complex as an exercise in protein-folding. A tangle of loops and connecting branches and nodes and tunnels, embedded in a ghostly red matrix.

Suddenly he saw it for what it was: a map of the nest, dug into Mars. Just as the Coalition had suspected, the base was deeper than the original structure; far more extensive, reaching deeper down but much further out than anyone had imagined. Clavain made a mental effort to retain some of what he was seeing in his mind, the intelligence-gathering reflex stronger than the conscious knowledge that he would never see Deimos again.

“The medichines in your brain have interfaced with your visual cortex,” Galiana said. “That’s the first step on the road to Transenlightenment. Now you’re privy to the machine-generated imagery encoded by the fields through which we move-most of it, anyway.”

“Tell me this wasn’t planned, Galiana. Tell me you weren’t intending to put machines in me at the first opportunity.”

“No; I wasn’t planning it. But nor was I going to let your phobias stop me from saving your life.”

The image grew in complexity. Glowing nodes of light appeared in the tunnels, some moving slowly through the network.

“What are they?”

“You’re seeing the locations of the Conjoiners,” Galiana said. “Are there as many as you imagined?”

Clavain judged that there were no more than seventy lights in the whole complex now. He searched for a cluster which would identify the room where he stood. There: twenty-odd bright lights, accompanied by one much fainter. Himself, of course. There were few people near the top of the nest-the attack must have collapsed half the tunnels, or maybe Galiana had deliberately sealed entrances herself.

“Where is everyone? Where are the children?”

“Most of the children are gone now.” She paused. “You were right to guess that we were rushing them to Transenlightenment, Clavain.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the only way out of here.”

The image changed again. Now each of the bright lights was connected to another by a shimmering filament. The topology of the network was constantly shifting, like a pattern seen in a kaleidoscope. Occasionally, too swiftly for Clavain to be sure, it shifted toward a mandala of elusive symmetry, only to dissolve into the flickering chaos of the ever-changing network. He studied Galiana’s node and saw that-even as she was speaking to him-her mind was in constant rapport with the rest of the nest.

Now something very bright appeared in the middle of the image, like a tiny star, against which the shimmering network paled almost to invisibility. “The network is abstracted now,” Galiana said. “The bright light represents its totality: the unity of Transenlightenment. Watch.”

He watched. The bright light-beautiful and alluring as anything Clavain had ever imagined-was extending a ray toward the isolated node which represented himself. The ray was extending itself through the map, coming closer by the second.

“The new structures in your mind are nearing maturity,” Galiana said. “When the ray touches you, you will experience partial integration with the rest of us. Prepare yourself, Nevil.”

Her words were unnecessary. His fingers were already clenched sweating on the railing as the light inched closer and engulfed his node.

“I should hate you for this,” Clavain said.

“Why don’t you? Hate’s always the easier option.”

“Because ...” Because it made no difference now. His old life was over. He reached out for Galiana, needing some anchor against what was about to hit him. Galiana squeezed his hand and an instant later he knew something of Transenlightenment. The experience was shocking; not because it was painful or fearful, but because it was profoundly and totally new. He was literally thinking in ways that had not been possible microseconds earlier.

Afterward, when Clavain tried to imagine how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not among them. But if he could not convey the core of the experience, he could at least skirt its essence with metaphor. It was like standing on the shore of an ocean, being engulfed by a wave taller than himself. For a moment he sought the surface; tried to keep the water from his lungs. But there happened not to be a surface. What had consumed him extended infinitely in all directions. He could only submit to it. Yet as the moments slipped by it turned from something terrifying in its unfamiliarity to something he could begin to adapt to; something that even began in the tiniest way to seem comforting. Even then he glimpsed that it was only a shadow of what Galiana was experiencing every instant of her life.

“All right,” Galiana said. “That’s enough for now.”

The fullness of Transenlightenment retreated, like a fading vision of Godhead. What he was left with was purely sensory; no longer any direct rapport with the others. His state of mind came crashing back to normality.

“Are you all right, Nevil?”

“Yes ...” His mouth was dry. “Yes; I think so.”

“Look around you.”

He did.

The room had changed completely. So had everyone in it.

His head reeling, Clavain walked in light. The formerly gray walls oozed beguiling patterns; as if a dark forest had suddenly become enchanted. Information hung in veils in the air; icons and diagrams and numbers clustering around the beds of the injured, thinning out into the general space like fantastically delicate neon sculptures. As he walked toward the icons they darted out of his way, mocking him like schools of brilliant fish. Sometimes they seemed to sing, or tickle the back of his nose with half-familiar smells.

“You can perceive things now,” Galiana said. “But none of it will mean much to you. You’d need years of education, or deeper neural machinery for that-building cognitive layers. We read all this almost subliminally.”

Galiana was dressed differently now. He could still see the vague shape of her gray outfit, but layered around it were billowing skeins of light, unravelling at their edges into chains of Boolean logic. Icons danced in her hair like angels. He could see, faintly, the web of thought linking her with the other Conjoiners.

She was inhumanly beautiful.

“You said things were much worse,” Clavain said. “Are you ready to show me now?”

She took him to see Felka again, passing on the way through deserted nursery rooms, populated now only by bewildered mechanical animals. Felka was the only child left in the nursery.

Clavain had been deeply disturbed by Felka when he had seen her before, but not for any reason he could easily express. Something about the purposefulness of what she did; performed with ferocious concentration, as if the fate of creation hung on the outcome of her game. Felka and her surroundings had not changed at all since his visit. The room was still austere to the point of oppressiveness. Felka looked the same. In every respect it was as if only an instant had passed since their meeting; as if the onset of war and the assaults against the nest-the battle of which this was only an interlude-were only figments from someone else’s troubling dream; nothing that need concern Felka in her devotion to the task at hand.

And what the task was awed Clavain.

Before he had watched her make strange gestures in front of her. Now the machines in his head revealed the purpose that those gestures served. Around Felka-cordoning her like a barricade-was a ghostly representation of the Great Wall.

She was doing something to it.

It was not a scale representation, Clavain knew. The Wall looked much higher here in relation to its diameter. And the surface was not the nearly invisible membrane of the real thing, but something like etched glass. The etchwork was a filigree of lines and junctions, descending down to smaller and smaller scales in fractal steps, until the blur of detail was too fine for his eyes to discriminate. It was shifting and altering color, and Felka was responding to these alterations with what he now saw was frightening efficiency. It was as if the color changes warned of some malignancy in part of the Wall, and by touching it-expressing some tactile code-Felka was able to restructure the etchwork to block and neutralize the malignancy before it spread.

“I don’t understand,” Clavain said. “I thought we destroyed the Wall; completely killed its systems.”

“No,” Galiana said. “You only ever injured it. Stopped it from growing, and from managing its own repair-processes correctly ... but you never truly killed it.”

Sandra Voi had guessed, Clavain realized. She had wondered how the Wall had survived this long.

Galiana told him the rest-how they had managed to establish control pathways to the Wall from the nest, fifteen years earlier-optical cables sunk deep below the worm zone. “We stabilized the Wall’s degradation with software running on dumb machines,” she said. “But when Felka was born we found that she managed the task just as efficiently as the computers; in some ways better than they ever did. In fact, she seemed to thrive on it. It was as if in the Wall she found ...” Galiana trailed off. “I was going to say a friend.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Because the Wall’s just a machine. Which means if Felka recognized kinship ... what would that make her?”

“Someone lonely, that’s all.” Clavain watched the girl’s motions. “She seems faster than before. Is that possible?”

“I told you things were worse than before. She’s having to work harder to hold the Wall together.”

“Warren must have attacked it.” Clavain said. “The possibility of knocking down the Wall always figured in our contingency plans for another war. I just never thought it would happen so soon.” Then he looked at Felka. Maybe it was imagination but she seemed to be working even faster than when he had entered the room; not just since his last visit. “How long do you think she can keep it together?”

“Not much longer,” Galiana said. “As a matter of fact I think she’s already failing.”

It was true. Now that he looked closely at the ghost Wall he saw that the upper edge was not the mathematically smooth ring it should have been; that there were scores of tiny ragged bites eating down from the top. Felka’s activities were increasingly directed to these opening cracks in the structure; instructing the crippled structure to divert energy and raw materials to these critical failure points. Clavain knew that the distant processes Felka directed were awesome. Within the Wall lay a lymphatic system whose peristaltic feed-pipes ranged in size from meters across to the submicroscopic; flowing with myriad tiny repair machines. Felka chose where to send those machines; her hand gestures establishing pathways between damage points and the factories sunk into the Wall’s ramparts which made the required types of machine. For more than a decade, Galiana said, Felka had kept the Wall from crumbling-but for most of that time her adversary had been only natural decay and accidental damage. It was a different game now that the Wall had been attacked again. It was not one she could ever win.

Felka’s movements were swifter; less fluid. Her face remained impassive, but in the quickening way that her eyes darted from point to point it was possible to read the first hints of panic. No surprise, either: the deepest cracks in the structure now reached a quarter of the way to the surface, and they were too wide to be repaired. The Wall was unzipping along those flaws. Cubic kilometers of atmosphere would be howling out through the openings. The loss of pressure would be immeasurably slow at first, for near the top the trapped cylinder of atmosphere was only fractionally thicker than the rest of the Martian atmosphere. But only at first ...

“We have to get deeper,” Clavain said. “Once the Wall goes, we won’t have a chance in hell if we’re anywhere near the surface. It’ll be like the worst tornado in history.”

“What will your brother do? Will he nuke us?”

“No; I don’t think so. He’ll want to get hold of any technologies you’ve hidden away. He’ll wait until the dust storms have died down, then he’ll raid the nest with a hundred times as many troops as you’ve seen so far. You won’t be able to resist, Galiana. If you’re lucky you may just survive long enough to be taken prisoner.”

“There won’t be any prisoners,” Galiana said.

“You’re planning to die fighting?”

“No. And mass suicide doesn’t figure in our plans either. Neither will be necessary. By the time your brother reaches here, there won’t be anyone left in the nest.”

Clavain thought of the worms encircling the area; how small were the chances of reaching any kind of safety if it involved getting past them. “Secret tunnels under the worm zone, is that it? I hope you’re serious.”

“I’m deadly serious,” Galiana said. “And yes, there is a secret tunnel. The other children have already gone through it now. But it doesn’t lead under the worm zone.”

“Where, then?”

“Somewhere a lot further away.”

When they passed through the medical center again it was empty, save for a few swan-necked robots patiently waiting for further casualties. They had left Felka behind tending the Wall, her hands a manic blur as she tried to slow the rate of collapse. Clavain had tried to make her come with them, but Galiana had told him he was wasting his time: that she would sooner die than be parted from the Wall.

“You don’t understand,” Galiana said. “You’re placing too much humanity behind her eyes. Keeping the Wall alive is the single most important fact of her universe-more important than love, pain, death-anything you or I would consider definitively human.”

“Then what happens to her when the Wall dies?”

“Her life ends,” Galiana said.

Reluctantly he had left without her, the taste of shame in his mouth. Rationally it made sense: without Felka’s help the Wall would collapse much sooner and there was a good chance all their lives would end; not just that of the haunted girl. How deep would they have to go before they were safe from the suction of the escaping atmosphere? Would any part of the nest be safe?

The regions through which they were descending now were as cold and gray as any Clavain had seen. There were no entoptic generators buried in these walls to supply visual information to the implants Galiana had put in his head, and even her own aura of light was gone. They only met a few other Conjoiners, and they seemed to be moving in the same general direction; down to the nest’s basement levels. This was unknown territory to Clavain.

Where was Galiana taking him?

“If you had an escape route all along, why did you wait so long before sending the children through it?”

“I told you, we couldn’t bring them to Transenlightenment too soon. The older they were, the better,” Galiana said. “Now though ...”

“There was no waiting any longer, was there?”

Eventually they reached a chamber with the same echoing acoustics as the topside hangar. The chamber was dark except for a few pools of light, but in the shadows Clavain made out discarded excavation equipment and freight pallets; cranes and de-activated robots. The air smelled of ozone. Something was still going on here.

“Is this the factory where you make the shuttles?” Clavain said.

“We manufactured parts of them here, yes,” Galiana said. “But that was a side-industry.”

“Of what?”

“The tunnel, of course.” Galiana made more lights come on. At the far end of the chamber-they were walking toward it-waited a series of cylindrical things with pointed ends; like huge bullets. They rested on rails, one after the other. The tip of the very first bullet was next to a dark hole in the wall. Clavain was about to say something when there was a sudden loud buzz and the first bullet slammed into the hole. The other bullets-there were three of them now-eased slowly forward and halted. Conjoiners were waiting to board them.

He remembered what Galiana had said about no one being left behind.

“What am I seeing here?”

“A way out of the nest,” Galiana said. “And a way off Mars, though I suppose you figured that part for yourself.”

“There is no way off Mars,” Clavain said. “The interdiction guarantees that. Haven’t you learned that with your shuttles?”

“The shuttles were only ever a diversionary tactic,” Galiana said. “They made your side think we were still striving to escape, whereas our true escape route was already fully operational.”

“A pretty desperate diversion.”

“Not really. I lied to you when I said we didn’t clone. We did-but only to produce brain-dead corpses. The shuttles were full of corpses before we ever launched them.”

For the first time since leaving Deimos Clavain smiled, amused at the sheer obliquity of Galiana’s thinking.

“Of course, there was another function,” she said. “The shuttles provoked your side into a direct attack against the nest.”

“So this was deliberate all along?”

“Yes. We needed to draw your side’s attention; to concentrate your military presence in low-orbit, near the nest. Of course we were hoping the offensive would come later than it did ... but we reckoned without Warren’s conspiracy.”

“Then you are planning something.”

“Yes.” The next bullet slammed into the wall, ozone crackling from its linear induction rails. Now only two remained. “We can talk later. There isn’t much time now.” She projected an image into his visual field: the Wall, now veined by titanic fractures down half its length. “It’s collapsing.”

“And Felka?”

“She’s still trying to save it.”

He looked at the Conjoiners boarding the leading bullet; tried to imagine where they were going. Was it to any kind of sanctuary he might recognize-or to something so beyond his experience that it might as well be death? Did he have the nerve to find out? Perhaps. He had nothing to lose now, after all; he could certainly not return home. But if he was going to follow Galiana’s exodus, it could not be with the sense of shame he now felt in abandoning Felka.

The answer, when it came, was simple. “I’m going back for her. If you can’t wait for me, don’t. But don’t try and stop me doing this.”

Galiana looked at him, shaking her head slowly. “She won’t thank you for saving her life, Clavain.”

“Maybe not now,” he said.

He had the feeling he was running back into a burning building. Given what Galiana had said about the girl’s deficiencies-that by any reasonable definition she was hardly more than an automaton-what he was doing was very likely pointless, if not suicidal. But if he turned his back on her, he would become something even less than human himself. He had misread Galiana badly when she said the girl was precious to them. He had assumed some bond of affection ... whereas what Galiana meant was that the girl was precious in the sense of a vital component. Now-with the nest being abandoned-the component had no further use. Did that make Galiana as cold as a machine herself-or was she just being unfailingly realistic? He found the nursery after only one or two false turns, and then Felka’s room. The implants Galiana had given him were again throwing phantom images into the air. Felka sat within the crumbling circle of the Wall. Great fissures now reached to the surface of Mars. Shards of the Wall, as big as icebergs, had fractured away and now lay like vast sheets of broken glass across the regolith.

She was losing, and now she knew it. This was not just some more difficult phase of the game. This was something she could never win, and her realization was now plainly evident in her face. She was still moving her arms frantically, but her face was red now, locked into a petulant scowl of anger and fear.

For the first time, she seemed to notice him.

Something had broken through her shell, Clavain thought. For the first time in years, something was happening that was beyond her control; something that threatened to destroy the neat, geometric universe she had made for herself. She might not have distinguished his face from all the other people who came to see her, but she surely recognized something ... that now the adult world was bigger than she was, and it was only from the adult world that any kind of salvation could come.

Then she did something that shocked him beyond words. She looked deep into his eyes and reached out a hand.

But there was nothing he could do to help her.

Later-it seemed hours, but in fact could only have been tens of minutes-Cla-vain found that he was able to breathe normally again. They had escaped Mars now; Galiana, Felka and himself, riding the last bullet.

And they were still alive.

The bullet’s vacuum-filled tunnel cut deep into Mars; a shallow arc bending under the crust before rising again, two thousand kilometers away, well beyond the Wall, where the atmosphere was as thin as ever. For the Conjoiners, boring the tunnel had not been especially difficult. Such engineering would have been impossible on a planet that had plate tectonics, but beneath its lithosphere Mars was geologically quiet. They had not even had to worry about tailings. What they excavated, they compressed and fused and used to line the tunnel, maintaining rigidity against awesome pressure with some trick of piezo-electricity. In the tunnel, the bullet accelerated continuously at three gees for six minutes. Their seats had tilted back and wrapped around them, applying pressure to the legs to maintain blood flow to the head. Even so, it was hard to think, let alone move, but Clavain knew that it was no worse than what the earliest space explorers had endured climbing away from Earth. And he had undergone similar tortures during the war, in combat insertions.

They were moving at ten kilometers a second when they reached the surface again, exiting via a camouflaged trapdoor. For a moment the atmosphere snatched at them ... but almost as soon as Clavain had registered the deceleration, it was over. The surface of Mars was dropping below them very quickly indeed.

In half a minute, they were in true space.

“The Interdiction’s sensor web can’t track us,” Galiana said. “You placed your best spysats directly over the nest. That was a mistake, Clavain-even though we did our best to reinforce your thinking with the shuttle launches. But now we’re well outside your sensor footprint.”

Clavain nodded. “But that won’t help us once we’re far from the surface. Then, we’ll just look like another ship trying to reach deep space. The web may be late locking onto us, but it’ll still get us in the end.”

“It would,” Galiana said. “If deep space was where we were going.”

Felka stirred next to him. She had withdrawn into some kind of catatonia. Separation from the Wall had undermined her entire existence; now she was free-falling through an abyss of meaninglessness. Perhaps, Clavain, thought, she would fall forever. If that was the case, he had only brought forward her fate. Was that much of a cruelty? Perhaps he was deluding himself, but with time, was it out of the question that Galiana’s machines could undo the harm they had inflicted ten years earlier? Surely they could try. It depended, of course, on where exactly they were headed. One of the system’s other Conjoiner nests had been Clavain’s initial guess-even though it seemed unlikely that they would ever survive the crossing. At ten klicks per second it would take years ...

“Where are you taking us?” he asked.

Galiana issued some neural command which made the bullet seem to become transparent.

“There,” she said.

Something lay distantly ahead. Galiana made the forward view zoom in, until the object was much clearer.

Dark-misshapen. Like Deimos without fortifications.

“Phobos,” Clavain said, wonderingly. “We’re going to Phobos.”

“Yes,” Galiana said.

“But the worms—”

“Don’t exist anymore.” She spoke with the same tutorly patience with which Remontoire had addressed him on the same subject not long before. “Your attempt to oust the worms failed. You assumed our subsequent attempt failed ... but that was only what we wanted you to think.”

For a moment he was lost for words. “You’ve had people in Phobos all along?”

“Ever since the cease-fire, yes. They’ve been quite busy, too.”

Phobos altered. Layers of it were peeled away, revealing the glittering device which lay hidden in its heart, poised and ready for flight. Clavain had never seen anything like it, but the nature of the thing was instantly obvious. He was looking at something wonderful; something which had never existed before in the whole of human experience.

He was looking at a starship.

“We’ll be leaving soon,” Galiana said. “They’ll try and stop us, of course. But now that their forces are concentrated near the surface, they won’t succeed. We’ll leave Phobos and Mars behind, and send messages to the other nests. If they can break out and meet us, we’ll take them as well. We’ll leave this whole system behind.”

“Where are you going?”

“Shouldn’t that be where are we going? You’re coming with us, after all.” She paused. “There are a number of candidate systems. Our choice will depend on the trajectory the Coalition forces upon us.”

“What about the Demarchists?”

“They won’t stop us.” It was said with total assurance-implying, what? That the Demarchy knew of this ship? Perhaps. It had long been rumored that the Demarchists and the Conjoiners were closer than they admitted.

Clavain thought of something. “What about the worms’ altering the orbit?”

“That was our doing,” Galiana said. “We couldn’t help it. Every time we send up one of these canisters, we nudge Phobos into a different orbit. Even after we sent up a thousand canisters, the effect was tiny-we changed Phobos’s velocity by less than one tenth of a millimeter per second-but there was no way to hide it.” Then she paused and looked at Clavain with something like apprehension. “We’ll be arriving in two hundred seconds. Do you want to live?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Think about it. The tube in Mars was two thousand kilometers long, which allowed us to spread the acceleration over six minutes. Even then it was three gees. But there simply isn’t room for anything like that in Phobos. We’ll be slowing down much more abruptly.”

Clavain felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. “How much more abruptly?”

“Complete deceleration in one fifth of a second.” She let that sink home. “That’s around five thousand gees.”

“I can’t survive that.”

“No; you can’t. Not now, anyway. But there are machines in your head now. If you allow it, there’s time for them to establish a structural web across your brain. We’ll flood the cabin with foam. We’ll all die temporarily, but there won’t be anything they can’t fix in Phobos.”

“It won’t just be a structural web, will it? I’ll be like you, then. There won’t be any difference between us.”

“You’ll become Conjoined, yes.” Galiana offered the faintest of smiles. “The procedure is reversible. It’s just that no one’s ever wanted to go back.”

“And you still tell me none of this was planned?”

“No; but I don’t expect you to believe me. For what it’s worth, though ... you’re a good man, Nevil. The Transenlightenment could use you. Maybe at the back of my mind ... at the back of our mind ...”

“You always hoped it might come to this?”

Galiana smiled.

He looked at Phobos. Even without Galiana’s magnification, it was clearly bigger. They would be arriving very shortly. He would have liked longer to think about it, but the one thing not on his side now was time. Then he looked at Felka, and wondered which of them was about to embark on the stranger journey. Felka’s search for meaning in a universe without her beloved Wall, or his passage into Transenlightenment? Neither would necessarily be easy. But together, perhaps, they might even find a way to help each other. That was all he could hope for now.

Clavain nodded assent, ready for the loom of machines to embrace his mind.

He was ready to defect.

Merlin’s Gun

Punishment saved Sora. If her marksmanship had not been the worst in her class, she would never have been assigned the task of overseeing proctors down in ship’s docks. She would not have had to stand for hours, alone except for her familiar, running a laser-stylus across the ore samples the proctors brought back to the swallow-ship, dreaming of finishing shift and meeting Verdin. It was boring; menial work. But because the docks were open to vacuum it was work that required a pressure suit.

“Got to be a drill,” she said, when the attack began.

“No,” her familiar said. “It really does seem as if they’ve caught up with us.”

Sora’s calm evaporated.

“How many?”

“Four elements of the swarm; standard attack pattern; coherent-matter weapons at maximum range ... novamine countermeasures deployed but seemingly ineffective ... initial damage reports severe and likely underestimates ...”

The floor pitched under her feet. The knee-high, androform proctors looked to each other nervously. The machines had no more experience of battle than Sora, and unlike her they had never experienced the simulations of warcreche.

Sora dropped the clipboard.

“What do I do?”

“My advice,” her familiar said, “is that you engage that old mammalian flight response and run like hell.”

She obeyed; stooping down low-ceilinged corridors festooned with pipes, snaking around hand-painted murals that showed decisive battles from the Cohort’s history; squadrons of ships exchanging fire; worlds wreathed in flame. The endgame was much swifter than those languid paintings suggested. The swarm had been chasing Snipe for nine years of shiptime, during which time Sora had passed through warcreche to adulthood. Yet beyond the ship’s relativistic frame of reference, nearly sixty years had passed. Captain Tchagra had done all that she could to lose the swarm. Her last gamble had been the most desperate of all; using the vicious gravity of a neutron star to slingshot the swallowship on another course, one that the chasing ships ought not have been able to follow, unless they skimmed the neutron star even more suicidally. But they had, forcing Snipe to slow from relativistic flight and nurse its wounds in a fallow system. It was there that the swarm attacked.

Near the end, the floor drifted away from her feet as ship’s gravity faltered, and she had to progress hand over hand.

“This is wrong,” Sora said, arriving in the pod bay. “This part should be pressurized. And where is everyone?”

“Attack must be a lot worse than those initial reports suggested. I advise you get into a pod as quickly as you can.”

“I can’t go, not without Verdin.”

“Let me worry about him.”

Knowing better than to argue, Sora climbed into the nearest of the cylindrical pods, mounted on a railed pallet ready for injection into the tunnel. The lid clammed shut, air rushing in.

“What about Verdin?”

“Safe. The attack was bad, but I’m hearing reports that the aft sections made it.”

“Get me out of here, then.”

“With all pleasure.”

Acceleration came suddenly, numbness gloving her spine.

“I’ve got worse news,” her familiar said. The voice was an echo of Sora’s own, but an octave lower and calmer; like a slightly older and more sensible sister. “I’m sorry, but I had to lie to you. My highest duty is your preservation. I knew that if I didn’t lie, you wouldn’t save yourself.”

Sora thought about that, while she watched the ship die from the vantage point of her pod. The Husker weapons had hit its middle sphere, barely harming the parasol of the swallowscoop.

Bodies fell into space, stiff and tiny as snowflakes. Light licked from the sphere. Snipe became a flower of hurting whiteness, darkening as it bloomed.

“What did you lie about?”

“About Verdin. I’m sorry. He didn’t make it. None of them did.”

Sora waited for the impact of the words; aware that what she felt now was only a precursor to the shock, like the moment when she touched the hot barrel of a gun in warcreche, and her fingers registered the heat but the pain itself did not arrive instantly, giving her time to prepare for its sting. She waited, for what she knew – in all likelihood – would be the worst thing she had ever felt. And waited.

“What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I feel anything?”

“Because I’m not allowing it. Not just now. If you opt to grieve at some later point then I can restore the appropriate brain functions.”

Sora thought about that, too.

“You couldn’t make it sound any more clinical, could you?”

“Don’t imagine this is easy for me, Sora. I don’t exactly have a great deal of experience in this matter.”

“Well, now you’re getting it.”

She was alone; no arguing with that. None of the other crew had survived – and she had only mde it because she was on punishment duty for her failings as a oldier. No use looking fin help: the nearest Cohort motherbase was seventy light-years toward the Galactic Core. Even if ther were swallowships within broadcast range it would take decades for the nearest to hear her; decades again for them to curve around and rescue her. No; she would not be rescued. She would drift here, circling a nameless sun, until her energy reserves could not even sustain frostwatch.

“What about the enemy?” Sora said, seized by an urge to gaze upon her nemesis. “Where are the bastards?”

A map of the system scrolled on tie faceplate of her helmet, overlaid with the four Husker ships tha had survived the slingshot around the neutron star. They were near the two Ways that punched through the system; marked on the map as fine straight flaws, surrounded by shaded hazard regions. Perhaps, like the Cohort, the Huskers were trying to find a way to enter the Waynet without being killed; trying to gain the initial edge in a war that had lasted twenty-three thousand years. The Huskers had been at war with the Cohort ever since these ruthless alien cyborgs had emerged from ancient Dyson spheres near the Galactic Core.

“They’re not interested in me,” Soa said. “They know that, even if anyone survived the attack, hey won’t survive much longer. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“They’re nothing if not pragmatic.”“

“I want to die. I want you to put ne to sleep painlessly and then kill me. You can do that, can’t you? I mean, if I order it?”

Sora did not complete her next nought. What happened, instead, was that her consciousness staled, except for the awareness of the familiar, thoughts bleeding; into her own. She had experienced something like this stalling; aboard Snipe, when the crew went into frostwatch for the lonest transits between engagements. But no frostwatch had ever fit this long. After an age, her thoughts oozed back to life. She groped for the mental routines that formed language.

“You lied again!”

“This time I plead innocence. I just put you in a position where you couldn’t give me the order you were about to. Seemed the best thing under the circumstances.”

“I’ll bet it did.” In that instant of staled thought, the pod had turned opaque, concealing the starscape and the debris of the ship. “What else?”

The pod turned glassy across its upper surface, revealing a slowly wheeling starscape above filthy ice. The glass, once perfectly transparent, now had a smoky luster. “Once you were sleeping,” the familiar said, “I used the remaining fuel to guide the pod to a cometary shard. It seemed safer than drifting.”

“How long?” Sora was trying to guess from the state of the pod, but the interior looked as new as when she had ejected from Snipe. The sudden smokiness of the glass was alarming, however: Sora did not want to think how many years of cosmic ray abrasion would be required to scuff the material to that degree. “Are we talking years or decades, or more than that?”

“Shall I tell you why I woke you, first?”

“If it’s going to make any difference ...”

“I think it makes all the difference, quite frankly.” The familiar paused for effect. “Someone has decided to pay this system a visit.”

Sora saw it on the map now, revised to account for the new relative positions of the celestial bodies in this system. The new ship was denoted by a lilac arrow, moving slowly between Waynet transit nodes; the thickened points where the Way lines interecepted the ecliptic plane.

“It must have a functioning syrinx,” Sora said, marveling, and for the first time feeling as if death was not the immediately preferable option. “It must be able to use the Ways!”

“Worth waking you up for, I think.”

Sora had eight hours to signal the ship before it reached the other node of the Waynet. She left the pod – stiff, aching, and disorientated, but basically functional – and walked to the edge of a crater; one that the familiar had mapped some years earlier. Three thousand years earlier, to be precise, for that was how long it had taken to scratch the sheen from the glass. The news had been shocking, at first – until Sora realized that the span of time was not in itself important. All that she had ever known was the ship; now that it was gone, it hardly mattered how much time had passed.

Yet now there was this newcomer. Sora crisscrossed the crater, laying a line of metallic monofilament; doubling back on her trail many times until a glistening scribble covered the crater. It looked like the work of a drunken spider, but the familiar assured her it would focus more than satisfactorily at radio frequencies.

As for the antenna, that was where Sora came in: her suit was sheathed in a conductive epidermis; a shield against plasma and ion-beam weaponry. By modulating current through it, the familiar could generate pulses of radio emission. The radio waves would fly away from Sora in all directions, but a good fraction would be reflected back from the crater in parallel lines. Sora had to make gliding jumps from one rim of the crater to the other, so that she passed through the focus momentarily, synchronized to the intervals when the other ship entered view.

After two hours of light-transit time, the newcomer vectored toward the shard. When it was much closer, Sora secreted herself in a snowhole and set her suit to thermal stealth-mode. The ship nosed in; stiletto-sleek, devilishly hard to see against the stars. It was elongated, carbon-black, and nubbed by propulsion modules and weapons of unguessable function, arrayed around the hull like remora. Yet it carried Cohort markings, and had none of the faintly organic attributes of a Husker vessel. Purple flames knifed from the ship’s belly, slowing it over the crater. After examining the mirror, the ship moved toward the pod and anchored itself to the ice with grapples.

“How did something that small ever get here?”

“Doesn’t need to be big,” the familiar said. “Not if it uses the Waynets.”

After a few minutes, an access ramp lowered down, kissing the ice. A spacesuited figure ambled down the ramp. He moved toward the pod, kicking up divots of frost. The man – he was clearly male, judging by the contours of his suit – knelt down and examined the pod. Ribbed and striped by luminous paint, his suit made him seem naked, scarred by ritual marks of warriorhood. He fiddled with the sleeve, unspooling something before shunting it into a socket in the side of the pod. Then he stood there, head slightly cocked.

“Nosy bastard,” Sora whispered.

“Don’t be so ungrateful. He’s trying to rescue you.”

“Are you in yet?”

“Can’t be certain.” The familiar had copied part of itself into the pod before Sora had left. “His suit might not even have the capacity to store me.”

“I’m going to make my presence known.”

“Be careful, will you?”

Sora stood, dislodging a flurry of ice. The man turned to hersharply, the spool disengaging from the pod and whisking back into his sleeve. The stripes on his suit flicked over to livid reds and oranges. He opened a fist to reveal something lying in his palm; a designator for the weapons on the ship, swiveling out from the hull like snake’s heads.

“If I were you,” the familiar said, “I’d assume the most submissive posture you can think of.”

“Sod that.”

Sora took steps forward, trying not to let her fear translate into clumsiness. Her radio chirped to indicate that she was online to the other suit.

“Who are you? Can you understand me?”

“Perfectly well,” the man said, after negligible hesitation. His voice was deep and actorly; devoid of any accent Sora knew. “You’re Cohort. We speak Main, give or take a few kiloyears of linguistic drift.”

“You speak it pretty well for someone who’s been out there for ten thousand years.”

“And how would one know that?”

“Do the sums. Your ship’s from seven thousand years earlier than my own era. And I’ve just taken three thousand years of catnap.”

“Ah. Perhaps if I’d arrived in time to waken you with a kiss you wouldn’t be quite so grumpy. But your point was?

“We shouldn’t be able to understand each other at all. Which makes me wonder if you’re lying to me.”

“I see.” For a moment she thought he heard him chuckling to himself; almost a catlike purring. “What I’m wondering is why I need to listen to this stuff and nonsense, given that I’m not the one in current need of rescuing.”

His suit calmed; aggressor markings cooling to neutral blues and yellows. He let his hand drop slowly.

“I’d say,” the familiar said, “that he has a fairly good point.” Sora stepped closer. “I’m a little edgy, that’s all. Comes with the territory.”

“You were attacked?”

“Slightly. A swarm took out my swallowship.”

“Bad show,” the man said, nodding. “Haven’t seen swallow-ships for two and a half kiloyears. Too hard for the halo factories to manufacture, once the Huskers started targeting motherbases. The Cohort regressed again – fell back on fusion pulse drives. Before very long they’ll be back to generation starships and chemical rockets.”

“Thanks for all the sympathy.”

“Sorry ... it wasn’t my intention to sound callous. It’s simply that I’ve been traveling. It gives one a certain – how shall I say? Loftiness of perspective? Means I’ve kept more up to date with current affairs than you have. That’s how I understand you.” With his free hand he tapped the side of his helmet. “I’ve a database of languages running half way back to the Flourishing.”

“Bully for you. Who are you, by the way?”

“Ah. Of course. Introductions.” He reached out the free hand, this time in something approximating welcome. “Merlin.”

It was impossible; it cut against all common sense, but she knew who he was.

It was not that they had ever met. But everyone knew of Merlin: there was no word for him other than legend. Seven, or more properly ten thousand years ago, it was Merlin who had stolen something from the Cohort, vanishing into the Galaxy on a quest for what could only be described as a weapon too dreadful to use. He had never been seen again – until, apparently, now.

“Thanks for rescuing me,” Sora said, when he had shown her to the bridge of the ship he called Tyrant; a spherical chamber outfitted with huge black control seats, facing a window of flawless metasapphire overlooking cometary ice.

“Don’t overdo the gratitude,” the familiar said.

Merlin shrugged. “You’re welcome.”

“And sorry if I acted a little edgy.”

“Forget it. As you say, comes with the territory. Actually, I’m rather glad I found you. You wouldn’t believe how scarce human company is these days.”

“Nobody ever said it was a friendly Galaxy.”

“Less so now, believe me. Now the Cohort’s started losing whole star-systems. I’ve seen world after world shattered by the Huskers; whole strings of orbiting habitats gutted by nuclear fire. The war’s in its terminal stages, and the Cohort isn’t in anything resembling a winning position.” Merlin leaned closer to her, sudden enthusiasm burning in his eyes. “But I’ve found something that can make a difference, Sora. Or at least, I have rather a good idea where one might find it.”

She nodded slowly.

“Let’s see. That wouldn’t be Merlin’s fabulous gun, by any chance?”

“You’re still not entirely sure I’m who I say I am, are you?”

“I’ve one or two nagging doubts.”

“You’re right, of course.” He sighed theatrically and gestured around the bridge. In the areas not reserved for control readouts, the walls were adorned with treasure: trinkets, finery, and jewels of staggering artistry and beauty, glinting with the hues of the rarest alloys, inset with precious stones, shaped by the finest lapidary skill of a thousand worlds. There were chips of subtly colored ceramic, or tiny white-light holograms of great brilliance. There were daggers and brooches, ornate ceremonial lasers and bracelets, terrible swords and grotesque, carnelian-eyed carnival masques.

“I thought,” Merlin said, “that this would be enough to convince you.”

He had sloughed the outer layer of his suit, revealing himself to be what she had on some level feared: a handsome, broad-shouldered man who in every way conformed to the legend she had in mind. Merlin dressed luxuriously, encrusted in jewelry which was, nonetheless, at the dour end of the spectrum compared to what was displayed on the walls. His beard was carefully trimmed and his long auburn hair hung loose, evoking leonine strength. He radiated magnificence.

“Oh, it’s pretty impressive,” Sora said. “Even if a good fraction of it must have been looted. And maybe I am half convinced. But you have to admit, it’s quite a story.”

“Not from my perspective.” He was fiddling with an intricate ring on one forefinger. “Since I left on my quest” – he spoke the word with exquisite distaste – “I’ve lived rather less than eleven years of subjective time. I was as horrified as anyone when I found my little hunt had been magnified into something so ... epic.”

“Bet you were.”

“When I left, there was an unstated expectation that the war could be won, within a handful of centuries.” Merlin snapped his fingers at a waiting proctor and had it bring a bowl of fruit. Sora took a plum, examining it suspiciously before consigning it to her mouth. “But even then,” Merlin continued, “things were on the turn. I could see it, if no one else could.”

“So you became a mercenary.”

“Freelancer, if you don’t mind. Point was, I realized that I could better serve humanity outside the Cohort. And old legends kept tickling the back of my mind.” He smiled. “You see, even legends are haunted by legends!”

He told her the rest, which, in diluted form, she already knew. Yet it was fascinating to hear it from Merlin’s lips; to hear the kernel of truth at the core of something around which falsehoods and half-truths had accreted like dust around a protostar. He had gathered many stories, from dozens of human cultures predating the Cohort, spread across thousands of light-years and dispersed through tens of thousands of years of history. The similarities were not always obvious, but Merlin had sifted common patterns, piecing together – as well as he could – an underlying framework of what might just be fact.

“There’d been another war,” Merlin said. “Smaller than ours, spread across a much smaller volume of space – but no less brutal for all that.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Forty or forty five kiloyears ago – not long after the Way-makers vanished, but about twenty kays before anything we’d recognize as the Cohort.” Merlin’s eyes seemed to gaze over; an odd, stentorian tone entered his voice “In the long dark centuries of Mid-Galactic history, when a thousand cultures rose, each imagining themselves immune to time, and whose shadows barely reach us across the millennia ...”

“Yes. Very poetic. What kind of war, anyway? Human versus human, or human versus alien, like this one?”

“Does it matter? Whoever the enemy were, they aren’t coming back. Whatever was used against them was so deadly, so powerful, so awesome, that it stopped an entire war!”

“Merlin’s gun.”

He nodded, lips tight, looking almost embarrassed. “As if I had some prior claim on it, or was even in some sense responsible for it!” He looked at Sora very intently, the glittering finery of the ship reflected in the gold of his eyes. “I haven’t seen the gun, or even been near it, and it’s only recently that I’ve had anything like a clear idea of what it might actually be.”

“But you think you know where it is?”

“I think so. It isn’t far. And it’s in the eye of a storm.”They lifted from the shard, spending eight days in transit to the closest Way, most of the time in frostwatch. Sora had her own quarters; a spherical-walled suite deep in Tyrant’s thorax, outfitted in maroon and burgundy. The ship was small, but fascinating to explore, an object lesson in the differences between the Cohort that had manufactured this ship, and the one Sora had been raised in. In many respects, the ship was more advanced than anything from her own time, especially in the manner of its propulsion, defenses, and sensors. In other areas, the Cohort had gained expertise since Merlin’s era. Merlin’s proctors were even stupider than those Sora had been looking after when the Husker attack began. There were no familiars in Merlin’s time, either, and she saw no reason to educate him about her own neural symbiote.

“Well,” Sora said, when she was alone. “What can you tell me about the legendary Merlin?”

“Nothing very much at this point.” The familiar had been communicating with the version of itself that had infiltrated Tyrant, via Merlin’s suit. “If he’s impersonating the historical figure we know as Merlin, he’s gone to extraordinary lengths to make the illusion authentic. All the logs confirm that his ship left Cohort-controlled space around ten kiloyears ago, and that he’s been traveling ever since.”

“He’s back from somewhere. It would help if we knew where.”

“Tricky, given that we have no idea about the deep topology of the Waynet. I can search the starfields for recognizable features, but it’ll take a long time, and there’ll still be a large element of guesswork.”

“There must be something you can show me.”

“Of course.” The familiar sounded slightly affronted. “I found images. Some of the formats are obscure, but I think I can make sense of most of them.” And even before Sora had answered, the familiar had warmed a screen in one hemisphere of the suite. Visual records of different solar systems appeared, each entry displayed for a second before being replaced. Each consisted of an orbital map; planets and Waynet nodes were marked relative to each system’s sun. The worlds were annotated with enlarged images of each, overlaid with sparse astrophysical and military data, showing the roles – if any – they had played in the war. Merlin had visited other places, too. Squidlike protostellar nebulae, stained with green and red and flecked by the light of hot blue stars. Supernova remnants, the eviscera of gored stars, a hundred of which had died since the Flourishing, briefly outshining the galaxy.

“What do you think he was looking for?” Sora said. “These points must have been on the Waynet, but they’re a long way from anything we’d call civilization.”

“I don’t know. Souvenir hunting?”

“Are you sure Merlin can’t tell you’re accessing this information?”

“Absolutely – but why should it bother him unless he’s got something to hide?”

“Debatable point.” Sora looked around to the sealed door of her quarters, half expecting Merlin to enter at any moment. It was absurd, of course – from its present vantage point, the familiar could probably tell precisely where Merlin was in the ship, and give Sora adequate warning. But she still felt uneasy, even as she asked the inevitable question. “What else?”

“Oh, plenty. Even some visual records of the man himself, caught on the internal cameras.”

“Sorry. A healthy interest in where he’s been is one thing, but spying on him is something else.”

“Would it change things if I told you that Merlin hasn’t been totally honest with us?”

“You said he hadn’t lied.”

“Not about anything significant – which makes this all the odder. There.” The familiar sounded quietly pleased with itself. “You’re curious now, aren’t you?”

Sora sighed. “You’d better show me.”

Merlin’s face appeared on the screen, sobbing. He seemed slightly older to her, although it was difficult to tell, since most of his face was caged behind his hands. She could hardly make out what he was saying, between each sob.

“Thousands of hours of this sort of thing,” the familiar said. “They started out as serious attempts at keeping a journal, but soon deteriorated into a form of catharsis.”

“I’d say he did well to stay sane at all.”

“More than you realize. We know he’s been gone ten thousand years – just as he told us. Well and good. That’s objective time. But he also said that eleven years of shiptime had passed.”

“And that isn’t the case?”

“I suspect that may be, to put a diplomatic gloss on it, a slight underestimate. By a considerable number of decades. And I don’t think he spent much of that time in frostwatch.”

Sora tried to remember what she knew of the methods of longevity available to the Cohort in Merlin’s time. “He looks older than he does now – doesn’t he?”

The familiar chose not to answer.

When the transit to the Way was almost over, Merlin called her to the bridge.

“We’re near the transit node,” he said. “Take a seat, because the insertion can be a little ... interesting.”

“Transition to Waynet in three hundred seconds,” said the ship’s cloyingly calm voice.

The crescent of the cockpit window showed a starfield transected by a blurred, twinkling filament, like a solitary wave crossing a lake at midnight. Sora could see blurred stars through the filament, wide as her outspread hand, widening by the second. A thickening in it like a bulge along a snake was the transit node; a point, coincidental with the ecliptic, where passage into the accelerated spacetime of the Way was possible. Although the Waynet stream was transparent, there remained a ghostly sense of dizzying motion.

“Are you absolutely sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Goodness, no.” Merlin was reclining back in his seat, booted feet up on the console, hands knitted behind his neck. Ancient orchestral music was piping into the room, building up to a magnificent and doubtless delicately timed climax. “Which isn’t to say that this isn’t an incredibly tricky maneuver, of course, requiring enormous skill and courage.”

“What worries me is that you might be right.”

Sora remembered the times Captain Tchagra had sent probes into the Waynet, only to watch as each was shredded, sliced apart by momentum gradients that could flense matter down to its fundamentals. The Waynet twinkled because tiny grains of cosmic dust were constantly drifting into it, each being annihilated in a pretty little flash of exotic radiation. Right now, she thought, they were crusing toward that boundary, dead set on what ought to have been guaranteed destruction.

She tried to inject calm into her voice. “So how did you come by the syrinx, Merlin?”

“Isn’t much to look at, you know. A black cone, about as long as you’re tall. Even in my era we couldn’t make them, or even safely dismantle the few we still had. Very valuable things.”

“The Cohort weren’t overly thrilled that you stole one , according to the legend.”

“As if they cared. They had so few left, they were too scared to actually use them.”

Sora buckled herself into a seat.

She knew roughly what was about to happen, although no one had understood the details for tens of thousands of years. Just before hitting the Way, the syrinx would chirp a series eel quantum-gravitational fluctuations at the boundary layer, the skin, no thicker than a Planck-length, which separated normal spacetime from the rushing spacetime contained within the Way. For an instant, the momentum gradients would relax, allowing the ship to enter the accelerated medium without being sliced.

That was the theory, anyway.

The music reached its crescendo now, ship’s thrust notching higher, pushing Sora and Merlin back into their seats. The shriek of the propulsion system merged with the shriek of violins, too harmoniously to be accidental. Merlin’s look of quiet amusement did not falter. A cascade of liquid notes played over the music; the song of the syrinx translated into the audio spectrum.

There was a peak of thrust, then the impulse ended abruptly, along with the music.

Sora looked to the exterior view.

For a moment, it seemed as if the stars, and the nearer planets and sun of this system, hadn’t actually changed at all. But after a few seconds, she saw that they burned appreciably brighter – and, it seemed, bluer – in one hemisphere of the sky, redder and dimmer in the other. And they were growing bluer and redder by the moment, and now bunching, swimming like shoals of luminous fish, obeying relativistic currents. A planet slammed past from out of nowhere, distorted as if squeezed in a fist. The system seemed frozen behind them, shot through with red like an iron orrery snatched from the forge.

“Transition to Waynet achieved,” said the ship.

Later, Merlin took her down to the forward observation blister, a pressurized sphere of metasapphire that could be pushed beyond the hull like a protruding eye. The walls were opaque when they arrived, and when Merlin sealed the entry hatch, it turned the same shade of grey, merging seamlessly.

“Not to alarm you or anything,” the familiar said. “But I can’t communicate with the copy of myself from in here. That means I can’t help you if ...”

Sora kissed Merlin, silencing the voice in her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, almost instantly. “It seemed ...”

“Like the right thing to do?” Merlin’s smile was difficult to judge, but he did not seem displeased.

“No, not really. Probably the wrong thing, actually.”

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find you attractive, Sora. And like I said – it has been rather a long time since I had human company.” He drew himself to her, their free-floating bodies hooking together in the center of the blister, slowly turning until all sense of orientation was gone. “Of course, my reasons for rescuing you were entirely selfless ....”

“... of course ....”

“But I won’t deny that there was a small glimmer of hope at the back of my mind; the tiniest spark of fantasy ....”

They shed their clothes, untidy bundles which orbited around their coupled bodies. They began to make love, slowly at first, and then with increasing energy, as if it was only now that Sora was fully waking from the long centuries of frostwatch.

She thought of Verdin, and then hated herself for the crass biochemical predictability of her mind, the unfailing way it dredged up the wrong memories at the worst of times. What had happened back then, what had happened between them, was three thousand years in the past, unrecorded by anything or anyone except herself. She had not even mourned him yet, not even allowed the familiar to give her that particular indulgence. She studied Merlin, looking for hints of his true age ... and failed, utterly, to detach the part of her mind capable of the job.

“Do you want to see something glorious?” Merlin asked, later, after they had hung together wordlessly for many minutes.

“If you think you can impress me ...”

He whispered to the ship, causing the walls to lose their opacity.

Sora looked around. By some trick of holographics, the ship itself was not visible at all from within the blister. It was just her and Merlin, floating free.

And what she saw beyond them was indeed glorious – even if some detached part of her mind knew that the view could not be completely natural, and that in some way the hues and intensities of light had been shifted to aid comprehension. The walls of the Waynet slammed past at eye wrenching speed, illuminated by the intense, doppler-shifted annihilation of dust particles, so that it seemed as if they were flying in the utmost darkness, down a tube of twinkling violet that reached toward infinity. The spacetime in which the ship drifted like a seed moved so quickly that the difference between its speed and light amounted to only one part in a hundred billion. Once a second in subjective time, the ship threaded itself through shining hoops as wide as the Waynet itself; constraining rings spaced eight light-hours apart, part of the inscrutable exotic-matter machinery that had serviced this Galaxy-spanning transit system. Ahead, all the stars in the universe crowded into an opalescent jeweled mass, hanging ahead like a congregation of bright angels. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

“It’s the only way to travel,” Merlin said.

The journey would take four days of shiptime: nineteen centuries of worldtime.

The subjective time spent in Waynet flight amounted only to twenty-three hours. But the ship had to make many transitions between Ways, and they were never closer than tens of light-minutes apart, presumably because of the nightmarish consequences that would ensue if two opposing streams of accelerated spacetime ever touched.

“Aren’t you worried we’ll wander into Huskers, Merlin?”

“Worth it for the big reward, wouldn’t you say?”

“Tell me more about this mystical gun, and I might believe you.”

Merlin settled back in his seat, drawing a deep breath. “Almost everything I know could be wrong.”

“I’ll take that risk.”

“Whatever it was, it was fully capable of destroying whole worlds. Even stars, if the more outlandish stories are to be believed.” He looked down at his hand, as if suddenly noticing his impeccably manicured fingernails.

“Ask him how he thinks it works,” the familiar said. “Then at least we’ll have an idea how thorough he’s been.”

She put the question to Merlin, as casually as she could.

“Gravity,” he said. “Isn’t that obvious? It may be a weak force, but there isn’t anything in the universe that doesn’t feel it.”

“Like a bigger version of the syrinx?”

Merlin shrugged. Sora realized that it was not his fingernails to which he was paying attention, but the ornate ring she had noticed before, inset with a ruby stone in which two sparks seemed to orbit like fireflies. “It’s almost certainly the product of Waymaker science. A posthuman culture that was able to engineer – to mechanize – spacetime. But I don’t think it worked like the syrinx. I think it made singularities; that it plucked globules of mass energy from vacuum and squashed them until they were within their own event horizons.”

“Black holes,” the familiar said, and Sora echoed her words aloud.

Merlin looked pleased. “Very small ones; atomic-scale. It doped them with charge, then accelerated them up to something only marginally less than the speed of light. They didn’t have time to decay. For that, of course, it needed more energy, and more still just to prevent itself being ripped apart by the stresses.

“A gun that fires black holes? We’d win, wouldn’t we? With something like that? Even if there was only one of them?” Merlin fungered the ruby-centered ring.

“That’s the general idea.”

Sora took Merlin’s hand, stroking the fingers, until her own alighted on the ring. It was more intricate than she had realized before. The twin sparks were whirling around each other, glints of light locked in a waltz, as if driven by some microscopic clockwork buried in the ruby itself.

“What does it mean?” she asked, sensing that this was both the wrong and the right question.

“It means ...” Merlin smiled, but it was a moment before he completed the sentence. “It means, I suppose, that I should remember death.”

They fell out of the Way for the last time, entering a system that did not seem markedly different than a dozen others they had skipped through. The star was a yellow main-sequence sun, accompanied by the usual assortment of rocky worlds and gas giants. The second and third planets out from the sun were steaming hot cauldrons, enveloped by acidic atmosphere at crushing temperature, the victims of runaway heat-trapping processes, the third more recently than the second. The fourth planet was smaller, and seemed to have been the subject of a terraforming operation that had taken place some time after the Flourishing: its atmosphere, though thin, was too dense to be natural. Thirteen separate Ways punched through the system’s ecliptic at different angles, safely distant from planetary and asteroidal orbits.

“It’s a Nexus,” Merlin said. “A primary Waynet interchange. You find systems like this every thousand or so light-years through the plane of the Galaxy, and a good way out of it as well. Back when everyone used the Waynet, this system would have been a meeting point, a place where traders swapped goods and tales from half-way to the Core.”

“Bit of a dump now, though, isn’t it.”

“Perfect for hiding something very big and very nasty, provided you remember where it was you hid it.”

“You mentioned something about a storm ...”

“You’ll see.”

The Way had dropped them in the inner part of the system, but Merlin said that what he wanted was further out, beyond the system’s major asteroid belt. It would take a few days to reach.

“And what are we going to do when we get there?” Sora asked. “Just pick this thing up and take it with us?”

“Not exactly,” Merlin said. “I suspect it will be harder than that. Not so hard that we haven’t got a chance, but hard enough ...” He seemed to falter, perhaps for the first time since she had known him; that aura of supreme confidence cracking minutely.

“What part do you want me to play?”

“You’re a soldier,” he said. “Figure that out for yourself.”

“I don’t know quite what it is I’ve found,” the familiar said, when she was again alone. “I’ve been waiting to show you, but he’s had you in those war simulations for hours. Either that or you two have been occupying yourselves in other ways. Any idea what he’s planning?”

Merlin had a simulator, a smaller version of the combat-training modules Sora knew from warcreche.

“A lot of the simulations had a common theme: an attack against a white pyramid.”“Implying some foreknowledge, wouldn’t you say? As if Merlin knows something of what he will find?”

“I’ve had that feeling ever since we met him.” She was thinking of the smell of him, the shockingly natural way their bodies meshed, despite their being displaced by thousands of years. She tried to flush those thoughts from her mind. What they were now discussing was a kind of betrayal, on a more profound level than anything committed so far, because it lacked any innocence. “What is it, then?”

“I’ve been scanning the later log files, and I’ve found something that seems significant, something that seemed to mark a turning point in his hunt for the weapon. I have no idea what it was. But it took me until now to realize just how strange it was.”

“Another system?”

“A very large structure, nowhere near any star, but nonetheless accessible by Waynet.”

“A Waymaker artifact, then.”

“Almost certainly.”

The structure was visible on the screen. It looked like a child’s toy star, or a metallic starfish, textured in something that resembled beaten gold or the luster of insect wings, filigreed in a lacework of exotic-matter scaffolds. It filled most of the view, shimmering with its own soft illumination.

“This is what Merlin would have seen with his naked eyes, just after his ship left the Way.”

“Very pretty.” She had meant the remark to sound glib, but it came out as a statement of fact.

“And large. The object’s more than ten light-minutes away, which makes it more than four light-minutes in cross-section. Comfortably larger than any star on the main sequence. And yet somehow it holds itself in shape – in quite preposterous shape –against what must be unimaginable self-gravity. Merlin, incidentally, gave it the name Brittlestar, which seems as good as any.”

“Poetic bastard.” Poetic sexy bastard, she thought.

“There’s more, if you’re interested. I have access to the sensor records from the ship, and I can tell you that the Brittlestar is a source of intense gravitational radiation. It’s like a beacon, sitting there, pumping out gravity waves from somewhere near its heart. There’s something inside it that is making spacetime ripple periodically.”

“You think Merlin went inside it, don’t you?”

“Something happened, that’s for sure. This is the last log Merlin filed, on his approach to the object, before a month-long gap.”

It was another mumbled soliloquy – except this time, his sobs were of something other than despair. Instead, they sounded like the sobs of the deepest joy imaginable. As if, finally, he had found what he was looking for, or at least knew that he was closer than ever, and that the final prize was not far from reach. But that was not what made Sora shiver. It was the face she saw. It was Merlin, beyond any doubt. But his face was lined with age, and his eyes were those of someone older than anyone Sora had ever known.

The fifth and sixth planets were the largest.

The fifth was the heavier of the two, zones of differing chemistry banding it from tropic to pole, girdled by a ring system that was itself braided by the resonant forces of three large moons. Merlin believed that the ring system had been formed since the Flourishing. A cloud of radiation-drenched human relics orbited the world, dating from unthinkably remote eras; perhaps earlier than the Waymaker time. Merlin swept the cloud with sensors tuned to sniff out weapons systems, or the melange of neutrino flavors that betokened Husker presence. The sweeps all returned negative.

“You know where the gun is?” Sora asked.

“I know how to reach it, which is all that matters.”

“Maybe it’s time to start being a little less cryptic. Especially if you want me to help you.”

He looked wounded, as if she had ruined a game hours in the making. “I just thought you’d appreciate the thrill of the chase.”

“This isn’t about the thrill of the chase, Merlin. It’s about the nastiest weapon imaginable and the fact that we have to get our hands on it before the enemy, so that we can incinerate them first. So we can commit xenocide.” She said it again: “Xenocide. Sorry. Doesn’t that conform to your romantic ideals of the righteous quest?”

“It won’t be xenocide,” he said, touching the ring again, nervously. “Listen: I want that gun as much as you do. That’s why I chased it for ten thousand years.” Was it her imagination, or had the ring not been on his hand in any of the recordings she had seen of him? She remembered the old man’s hands she had seen in the last recording, the one taken just before his time in the Brittlestar, and she was sure they carried no ring. Now Merlin’s voice was matter of fact.”The structure we want is on the outermost moon.”

“Let me guess. A white pyramid?”

He offered a smile. “Couldn’t be closer if you tried.”

They fell into orbit around the gas giant. All the moons showed signs of having been extensively industrialized since the Flourishing, but the features that remained on their surfaces were gouged by millennia of exposure to sleeting cosmic radiation and micrometeorites. Nothing looked significantly younger than the surrounding landscapes of rock and ice. Except for the kilometer-high white pyramid on the third moon, which was in a sixteen-day orbit around the planet. It looked as if it had been chiseled out of alabaster some time the previous afternoon.

“Not exactly subtle,” Merlin said. “Self-repair mechanisms must still be functional, to one degree or another, and that implies that the control systems for the gun will still work. It also means that the counter-intrusion systems will also be operable.”

“Oh, good.”

“Aren’t you excited that we’re about to end the longest war in human history?”

“But we’re not, are we? I mean, be realistic. It’ll take tens of thousands of years simply for the knowledge of this weapon’s existence to reach the remotest areas of the war. Nothing will happen overnight.”

“I can see why it would disturb you,” Merlin said, tapping a finger against his teeth. “None of us have ever known anything other than war with the Huskers.”

“Just show me where it is.”

They made one low orbital pass over the pyramid, alert for buried weapons, but no attack came. On the next pass, lower still, Merlin’s ship dropped proctors to snoop ground defenses. “Maybe they had something bigger once,” Merlin said. “Artillery that could take us out from millions of kilometers. But if it ever existed, it’s not working anymore.”

They made groundfall a kilometer from the pyramid, then waited for all but three of the proctors to return to the ship. Merlin tasked the trio to secure a route into the structure, but their use was limited. Once the simple-minded machines were out of command range of the ship – which happened as soon as they had penetrated beyond the outer layer of the structure – they were essentially useless.

“Who built the pyramid? And how did you know about it?”

“The same culture who got into the war I told you about,” he said, as they clamped on the armored carapaces of their suits in the airlock. “They were far less advanced than the Waymakers, but they were a lot closer to them historically, and they knew enough to control the weapon and use it for their own purposes.”

“How’d they find it?”

“They stole it. By then the Waymaker culture was – how shall I put it – sleeping? Not really paying due attention to the use made of its artifacts?”

“You’re being cryptic again, Merlin.”

“Sorry. Solitude does that to you.”

“Did you meet someone out there, Merlin – someone who knew about the gun, and told you where to find it?” And made you young in the process? she thought.

“My business, isn’t it?”

“Maybe once. Now, I’d say we’re in this together. Equal partners. Fair enough?”

“Nothing’s fair in war, Sora.” But he was smiling, defusing the remark, even as he slipped his helmet down over the neck ring, twisting it to engage the locking mechanism.

“How big is the gun?” Sora asked.

The pyramid rose ahead, blank as an origami sculpture, entrance ducts around the base concealed by intervening landforms. Merlin’s proctors had already found a route that would at least take them some way inside.

“You won’t be disappointed,” Merlin said.

“And what are we going to do when we find it? Just drag it behind us?”

“Trust me.” Merlin’s laugh crackled over the radio. “Moving it won’t be a problem.”

They walked slowly along a track cleared by proctors, covered at the same time by the hull-mounted weapons on Tyrant.

“There’s something ahead,” Merlin said, a few minutes later. He raised his own weapon and pointed toward a pool of darkness fifteen or twenty meters in front of them. “It’s artifactual; definitely metallic.”

“I thought your proctors cleared the area.”

“Looks like they missed something.”

Merlin advanced ahead of her. As they approached the dark object, it resolved into an elongated form half buried in the ice, a little to the left of the track. It was a body.

“Been here a while,” Merlin said, a minute or so later, when he was close enough to see the object properly. “Armor’s pitted by micrometeorite impacts.”

“It’s a Husker, isn’t it.”

Merlin’s helmet nodded. “My guess is they were in this system a few centuries ago. Must have been attracted by the pyramid, even if they didn’t necessarily know its significance.”

“I’ve never seen one this close. Be careful, won’t you?

Merlin knelt down to examine the creature.

The shape was much more androform than Sora had been expecting, the same general size and proportions as a suited human. The suit was festooned with armored protrusions, ridges, and horns, its blackened outer surface leathery and devoid of anything genuinely mechanical. One arm was outspread, terminating in a human-looking hand, complexly gauntleted. A long knobby weapon lay just out of reach, lines blurred by the same processes of erosion that had afflicted the Husker.

Merlin clamped his hands around the head.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” He was twisting now; she could hear the grunts of exertion, before his suit’s servosystems came online and took the brunt of the effort. “I’ve always wanted to find one this well-preserved,” Merlin said. “Never thought I’d get a chance to tell if an old rumor was even half-way right.”

The helmet detached from the creature’s torso, cracking open along a fine seam which ran from the crown to the beaklike protrusion at the helmet’s front. Vapor pulsed from the gap. Merlin placed the separated halves of the helmet on the ground, then tapped on his helmet torch, bringing light down on the exposed head. Sora stepped closer. The Husker’s head was encased in curling matte-black support machinery, like a statue enveloped in vine.

But it was well preserved, and very human.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “What does it mean?”

“It means,” Merlin said, “that occasionally one should pay proper attention to rumors.”

“Talk to me, Merlin. Start telling me what I need to hear, or we don’t take another step toward that pyramid.”

“You will like very little of it.”

She looked, out of the corner of her eye, at the marblelike face of the Husker. “I already don’t like it, Merlin; what have I got to lose?”

Merlin started to say something, then fell to the ground, executing the fall with the slowness that came with the moon’s feeble gravity.

“Oh, nice timing,” the familiar said.

Reflexes drove Sora down with him, until the two of them were crouching low on the rusty surface. Merlin was still alive. She could hear him breathing, but each breath came like the rasp of a saw.

“I’m hit, Sora. I don’t know how badly.”

“Hold on.” She accessed the telemetry from his suit, graphing up a medical diagnostic on the inner glass of her helmet.

“There,” said the familiar. “A beam-weapon penetration in the thoracic area; small enough that the self-sealants prevented any pressure loss, but not rapidly enough to stop the beam gnawing into his chest.”

“Is that bad?”

“Well, it’s not good ... but there’s a chance the beam would have cauterized as it traveled, preventing any deep internal bleeding ....”

Merlin coughed. He managed to ask her what it was. “You’ve taken a laser hit, I think.” She was speaking quickly. “Maybe part of the pyramid defenses.”

“I really should have those proctors of mine checked out.” Merlin managed a laugh which then transitioned into a series of racking coughs. “Bit late for that now, don’t you think?”

“If I can get you back to the ship ...”

“No. We have to go on.” He coughed again, and then was a long time catching his breath. “The longer we wait, the harder it will be.”

“After ten thousand years, you’re worried about a few minutes?”

“Yes, now that the pyramid defenses are alerted.”

“You’re in no shape to move.”

“I’m winded, that’s all. I think I can ...” His voice dissolved into coughs, but even while it was happening, Sora watched him push himself upright. When he spoke again, his voice was hardlya wheeze. “I’m gambling there was only one of whatever it was. Otherwise we should never have made it as far as we did.”

“I hope you’re right, Merlin.”

“There’s – um – something else. Ship’s just given me a piece of not entirely welcome news. A few neutrino sources that weren’t there when we first got here.”

“Oh, great.” Sora didn’t need to be told what that meant: a Husker swarm, one that had presumably been waiting around the gas giant all along, chilled down below detection thresholds. “Bastards must have been sleeping, waiting for something to happen here.”

“Sounds like a perfectly sensible strategy,” the familiar said, before projecting a map onto Sora’s faceplate, confirming the arrival of the enemy ships. “One of the moons has a liquid ocean. My guess is that the Huskers were parked below the ice.”

Sora asked Merlin: “How long before they get here?”

“No more than two or three hours.”

“Right. Then we’d better make damn sure we’ve got that gun by then, right?”

She carried him most of the way, his heels scuffing the ground in a halfhearted attempt at locomotion. But he remained lucid, and Sora began to hope that the wound really had been cauterized by the beam-weapon.

“You knew the Husker would be human, didn’t you?” she said, to keep him talking.

“Told you: rumors. The alien cyborg story was just that – a fiction our own side invented. I told you it wouldn’t be xenocide.”

“Not good enough, Merlin.” She was about to tell him about the symbiote in her head, then drew back, fearful that it would destroy what trust he had in her. “I know you’ve been lying. I hacked your ship’s log.”

They had reached the shadow of the pyramid, descending the last hillock toward the access ports spaced around the rim. “Thought you trusted me.”

“I had to know if there was a reason not to. And I think I was right.”

She told him what she had learnt; that he’d been traveling for longer than he had told her – whole decades longer, by shiptime –and that he had grown old in that journey, and perhaps a little insane. And then how he had seemed to find the Brittlestar.

“Problem is, Merlin, we – I – don’t know what happened to you in that thing, except that it had something to do with finding the gun, and you came out of it younger than when you went in!”

“You really want to know?”

“Take a guess.”

He started telling her some of it, while she dragged him toward their destination.

The pyramid was surrounded by tens of meters of self-repairing armor, white as bone. If the designers had not allowed deliberate entrances around its rim, Sora doubted that she and Merlin would ever have found a way to get inside.

“Should have been sentries here, once,” said the man leaning against her shoulder. “It’s lucky for us that everything falls apart, eventually.”

“Except your fabled gun.” They were moving down a sloping corridor, the walls and ceiling unblemished, the floor strewn with icy debris from the moon’s surface. “Anyway, stop changing the subject.”

Merlin coughed and resumed his narrative. “I was getting very old and very disillusioned. I hadn’t found the gun and I was about ready to give up. That or go insane. Then I found the Brittlestar. Came out of the Waynet and there it was, sitting there pulsing gravity waves at me.”

“It would take a pair of neutron stars,” the familiar said. “Orbiting around each other, to generate that kind of signature.”

“What happened next?” Sora asked.

“Don’t really remember. Not properly. I went – or was taken –inside it – and there I met ...” He paused, and for a moment she thought it was because he needed to catch his breath. But that wasn’t the reason. “I met entities, I suppose you’d call them. I quickly realized that they were just highly advanced projections of a maintenance program left behind by the Waymakers.”

“They made you young, didn’t they.”

“I don’t think it was stretching their capabilities overmuch, put it like that.”

The corridor flattened out, branching in several different directions. Merlin leant toward one of the routes.

“Why?”

“So I could finish the job. Find the gun.”

The corridor opened out into a chamber, a bowl-ceilinged control room, unpressurized and lit only by the wavering light of their helmets. Seats and consoles were arrayed around a single spherical projection device, cradled in ash-colored gimbals. Corpses slumped over some of the consoles, but nothing remained except skeletons draped in colorless rags. Presumably they had rotted away for centuries before the chamber was finally opened to vacuum, and even that would have been more than twenty thousand years ago.

“They must have been attacked by a bioweapon,” Merlin said, easing himself into one of the seats, which – after exhaling a cloud of dust – seemed able to take his weight. “Something that left the machines intact.”

Sora walked around, examining the consoles, all of which betrayed a technology higher than anything the Cohort had known for millennia. Some of the symbols on them were recognizable antecedents of those used in Main, but there was nothing she could actually read.

Merlin made a noise that might have been a grunt of suppressed pain, and when Sora looked at him, she saw that he was spooling the optical cable from his suit sleeve, just as he had when they had first met on the cometary shard. He lifted an access panel back on the top of the console, exposing an intestinal mass of silvery circuits. He seemed to know exactly where to place the end of the spool, allowing its microscopic cilia to tap into the ancient system.

The projection chamber was warming to life now: amber light swelling from its heart, solidifying into abstract shapes, neutral test representations. For a moment, the chamber showed a schematic of the ringed giant and its moons, with the locations of the approaching Husker ships marked with complex ideograms. The familiar was right: their place of sanctuary must have been the moon with the liquid ocean. Then the shapes flowed liquidly, zooming in on the gas giant.

“You wanted to know where the gun was,” Merlin said. “Well, I’m about to show you.”

The view enlarged on a cyclonic storm near the planet’s equator, a great swirling red eye in the atmosphere.

“It’s a metastable storm,” Sora said. “Common feature of gas giants. You’re not telling me—”

Merlin’s gauntleted fingers were at work now, flying across an array of keys marked with symbols of unguessable meaning.

“The storm’s natural, of course, or at least it was, before these people hid the gun inside it, exploiting the pressure differentials hto old the gun at a fixed point in the atmosphere, for safekeeping. There’s just one small problem.”

“Go ahead ...”

“The gun isn’t a gun. It functions as weapon, but that’s mostly accidental. It certainly wasn’t the intention of the Waymakers.” You’re losing me, Merlin.”

“Maybe I should tell you about the ring.”

Something was happening to the surface of the gas giant now. Le cyclone was not behaving in the manner of other metastable rms Sora had seen. It was spinning perceptibly, throwing off lies from its curlicued edge like the tails of seahorses. It was growing a bloodier red by the second.

“Yes,” Sora said. “Tell me about the ring.”

“The Waymakers gave it to me, when they made me young. s a reminder of what I have to do. You see, if I fail, it will be very bad for every thinking creature in this part of the galaxy. what did you see when you looked at the ring, Sora?”

A red gem, with two lights orbiting inside it.”

“Would you be surprised if I told you that the lights represent o neutron stars; two of the densest objects in the universe? And it they’re in orbit about each other, spinning around their mutual center of gravity?”

“Inside the Brittlestar.”

She caught his glance, directed quizzically toward her. “Yes,” Merlin said slowly. “A pair of neutron stars, born in supernovae, bound together by gravity, slowly spiraling closer and closer to each other.”

The cyclonic storm was whirling insanely now, sparks of atmospheric lightning flickering around its boundary. Sora the feeling that titanic – and quite inhuman – energies were being unleashed, as if something very close to magic was being loyed beneath the clouds. It was the most terrifying thing she had ever seen.

“I hope you know how to fire this when the time comes, Merlin.”

All the knowledge I need is carried by the ring. It taps into my bloodstream and builds structures in my head that tell me exactly at I need to know, on a level so deep that I hardly know it self.”

“Husker swarm will be within ranger in nintey minutes,” the familiar said, “assuming attack profiles for the usual swarm borer and charm-torp weapon configurations. Of course, if they have any refinements, they might be in attack range a little sooner than that ...”

“Merlin: tell me about the neutron stars, will you? I need something to keep my mind occupied.”

“The troublesome part is what happens when they stop spiraling around each other and collide. Mercifully, it’s a fairly rare event even by Galactic standards – it doesn’t happen more than once in a million years, and when it does it’s usually far enough away not to be a problem.”

“But if it isn’t far away – how troublesome would it be?”

“Imagine the release of more energy in a second than a typical star emits in ten billion years: one vast photo-leptonic fireball. An unimaginably bright pulse of gamma-rays. Instant sterilization for thousands of light-years in any direction.

The cyclone had grown a central bulge now, a perfectly circular bruise rising above the surface of the planet. As it rose, towering thousands of kilometers above the cloud layer, it elongated like a waterspout. Soon, Sora could see it backdropped against space. And there was something rising within it.

“The Waymakers tried to stop it, didn’t they.”

Merlin nodded. “They found the neutron star binary when they extended the Waynet deeper into the galaxy. They realized that the two stars were only a few thousand years from colliding together – and that there was almost nothing they could do about it.”

She could see what she thought was the weapon, now, encased in the waterspout like a seed. It was huge – larger perhaps than this moon. It looked fragile, nonetheless, like an impossibly ornate candelabra, or a species of deep sea medusa, glowing with its own bioluminescence. Sloughing atmosphere, the thing came to a watchful halt, and the waterspout slowly retracted back toward the cyclone, which was now slowing, like a monstrous fly wheel grinding down.

“Nothing?”

“Well – almost nothing.”

“They built the Brittlestar around it,” Sora said. “A kind of shield, right? So that, when the stars collided, the flash would be contained?”

“Not even Waymaker science could contain that much energy.” Merlin looked to the projection, seeming to pay attention to the weapon for the first time. If he felt any elation on seeing his gun for the first time, none of it was visible on his face. He looked, instead, ashen – as if the years had suddenly reclaimed what the Waymakers had given him. “All they could do was keep the stars in check, keep them from spiraling any closer. So they built the Brittlestar, a vast machine with only one function: to constantly nudge the orbits of the neutron stars at its heart. For every angstrom that the stars fell toward each other, the Brittlestar pushed them an angstrom apart. And it was designed to keep doing that for a million years, until the Waymakers found a way to shift the entire binary beyond the Galaxy. You want to know how they kept pushing them apart?”

Sora nodded, though she thought she half-knew the answer already.

“Tiny black holes,” Merlin said. “Accelerated close to the speed of light, each black hole interacting gravitationally with the binary before evaporating in a puff of pair-production radiation.”

“Just the same way the gun functions. That’s no coincidence, is it?”

“The gun – what we call the gun – was just a component in the Brittlestar; the source of relativistic black holes needed to keep the neutron stars from colliding.”

Sora looked around the room. “And these people stole it?”

“Like I said, they were closer to the Waymakers than us. They knew enough about them to dismantle part of the Brittlestar, to override its defenses and remove the mechanism they needed to win their war.”

“But the Brittlestar ...”

“Hasn’t been working properly ever since. Its capability to regenerate itself was harmed when the subsystem was stolen, and the remaining black-hole generating mechanisms can’t do all the work required. The neutron stars have continued to spiral closer together – slowly but surely.”

“But you said they were only a few thousand years from collision ...”

Merlin had not stopped working the controls in all this time. The gun had come closer, seemingly oblivious to the ordinary laws of celestial mechanics. Down below, the planetary surface had returned to normality, except for a ruddier hue to the storm.

“Maybe now,” Merlin said, “you’re beginning to understand why I want the gun so badly.”

“You want to return it, don’t you. You never really wanted to find a weapon.”

“I did, once.” Merlin seemed to tap some ffnal reserve of energy, his voice growing momentarily stronger. “But now I’m older and wiser. In less than four thousand years the stars meet, and it suddenly won’t matter who wins this war. We’re like ignorant armies fighting over a patch of land beneath a rumbling volcano!”

Four thousand years, Sora thought. More time had passed since she had been born.

“If we don’t have the gun,” she said, “we die anyway – wiped out by the Huskers. Not much of a choice, is it?”

“At least something would survive. Something that might even still think of itself as human.”

“You’re saying that we should capitulate? That we get our hands on the ultimate weapon, and then not use it?”

“I never said it was going to be easy, Sora.” Merlin pitched forward, slowly enough that she was able to reach him before he slumped into the exposed circuitry of the console. His coughs were loud in her helmet. “Actually, I think I’m more than winded,” he said, when he was able to speak at all.

“We’ll get you back to the ship; the proctors can help ...”

“It’s too late, Sora.”

“What about the gun?”

“I’m ... doing something rather rash, in the circumstances. Trusting it to you. Does that sound utterly insane?”

“I’ll betray you. I’ll give the gun to the Cohort. You know that, don’t you?”

Merlin’s voice was soft. “I don’t think you will. I think you’ll do the right thing and return it to the Brittlestar.”

“Don’t make me betray you!”

He shook his head. “I’ve just issued a command that reassigns control of my ship to you. The proctors are now under your command – they’ll show you everything you need.”

“Merlin, I’m begging you ...”

His voice was weak now, hard to distinguish from the scratchy irregularity of his breathing. She leant down to him and touched helmets, hoping the old trick would make him easier to hear. “No good, Sora. Much too late. I’ve signed it all over.”

“No!” She shook him, almost in anger. Then she began to cry, loud enough so that she was in no doubt he would hear it. “I don’t even know what you want me to do with it!”

“Take the ring, then the rest will be abundantly clear.”

“What?” She could hardly understand herself now.

“Put the ring on. Do it now, Sora. Before I die. So that I at least know it’s done.”

“When I take your glove off, I’ll kill you, Merlin. You know that, don’t you? And I won’t be able to put the ring on until I’m back in the ship.”

“I ... just want to see you take it. That’s enough, Sora. And you’d better be quick ...”

“I love you, you bastard!”

“Then do this.”

She placed her hands around the cuff seal of his gauntlet, feeling the alloy locking mechanism, knowing that it would only take a careful depression of the sealing latches, and then a quick twisting movement, and the glove would slide free, releasing the air in his suit. She wondered how long he would last before consciousness left him – no more than tens of seconds, she thought, unless he drew breath first. And by the state of his breathing, that would not be easy for him.

She removed the gauntlet, and took his ring.

Tyrant lifted from the moon.

“Husker forces grouping in attack configuration,” the familiar said, tapping directly into the ship’s avionics. “Hull sensors read sweeps by targeting lidar ... an attack is imminent, Sora.”

Tyrant’s light armor would not save them, Sora knew. The attack would be blinding and brief, and she would probably never know it had happened. But that didn’t mean that she was going to let it happen.

She felt the gun move to her will.

It would not always be like this, she knew: the gun was only hers until she returned it to the Waymakers. But for now it felt like an inseparable part of her, like a twin she had never known, but whose every move was familiar to her fractionally in advance of it being made. She felt the gun energize itself, reaching deep into the bedrock of spacetime, plundering mass-energy from quantum foam, forging singularities in its heart.

She felt readiness.

“First element of swarm has deployed charm-torps,” the familiar reported, an odd slurred quality entering her voice. “Activating Tyrant’s countermeasures ...”

The hull rang like a bell.

“Countermeasures engaging charm-torps ... neutralized ... second wave deployed by the swarm ... closing ...”

“How long can we last?”

“Countermeasures exhausted ... we can’t parry a third wave; not at this range.

Sora closed her eyes and made the weapon spit death.

She had targeted two of the three elements of the Husker swarm; leaving the third – the furthest ship from her – unharmed. She watched the relativistic black holes fold space around the two targeted ships, crushing each instantly, as if in a vice. “Third ship dropping to max ... maximum attack range; retracting charm-torp launchers ...”

“This is Sora for the Cohort,” she said in Main, addressing the survivor on the general ship-to-ship channel. “Or what remains of the Cohort. Perhaps you can understand what I have to say. I could kill you, now, instantly, if I chose.” She felt the weapon speak to her through her blood, reporting its status, its eagerness to do her bidding. “Instead, I’m about to give you a demonstration. Are you ready?”

“Sora ...” said the familiar. “Something’s wrong ...”

“What?”

“I’m not ... well.” The familiar’s voice did not sound at all right now; drained of any semblance to Sora’s own. “The ring must be constructing something in your brain; part of the interface between you and the gun ... something stronger than me ... It’s weeding me out, to make room for itself ...”

She remembered what Merlin had said about the structures the ring would make.

“You saved a part of yourself in the ship.”

“Only a part,” the familiar said. “Not all of me ... not all of me at all. I’m sorry, Sora. I think I’m dying.”

She dismantled the system.

Sora did it with artistry and flair, saving the best for last. She began with moons, pulverizing them, so that they began to flow into nascent rings around their parent worlds. Then she smashed the worlds themselves to pieces, turning them into cauls of hot ash and plasma. Finally – when it was the only thing left to destroy – she turned the gun on the system’s star, impaling its heart with a salvo of relativistic black holes, throwing a killing spanner into the nuclear processes that turned mass into sunlight. In doing so, she interfered – catastrophically – with the delicate hydrostatic balance between pressure and gravity that held the star in shape. She watched it unpeel, shedding layers of outer atmosphere in a premature display of the death that awaited suns like it, four billion years in the future. And then she watched the last Husker ship, which had witnessed what she had wrought, turn and head out of the system.

She could have killed them all.

But she had let them live. Instead, she had shown the power that was – albeit temporarily – hers to command.

She wondered if there was enough humanity left in them to appreciate the clemency she had shown.

Later, she took Tyrant into the Waynet again, the vast luminous bulk of the gun following her like an obedient dragon. Sora’s heart almost stopped at the fearful moment of entry, convinced that the syrinx would choose not to sing for its new master.

But it did sing, just as it had sung for Merlin.

And then, alone this time – more alone than she had been in her life – she climbed into the observation blister, and turned the metasapphire walls transparent, making the ship itself disappear, until there was only herself and the rushing, twinkling brilliance of the Way.

It was time to finish what Merlin had begun.

Minla’s Flowers

Mission interrupted.

I still don’t know quite what happened. The ship and I were in routine Waynet transit, all systems ticking over smoothly. I was deep in thought, a little drunk, rubbing clues together like a caveman trying to make fire with rocks, hoping for the spark that would point me toward the gun, the one no one ever thinks I’m going to find, the one I know with every fiber of my existence is out there somewhere.

Then it happened: a violent lurch that sent wine and glass flying across the cabin, a shriek from the ship’s alarms as it went into panic mode. I knew right away that this was no ordinary Way turbulence. The ship was tumbling badly, but I fought my way to the command deck and did what I could to bring her back under control. Seat-of-the-pants flying, the way Gallinule and I used to do it on Plenitude, when Plenitude still existed.

That was when I knew we were outside the Waynet, dumped back into the crushing slowness of normal space. The stars outside were stationary, their colors showing no suggestion of relativistic distortion.

“Damage?” I asked.

“How long have you got?” the ship snapped back.

I told it to ease off on the wisecracks and start giving me the bad news. And it most certainly was bad news. The precious syrinx was still functional-I touched it and felt the familiar tremble that indicated it was still sensing the nearby Waynet-but that was about the only flight-critical system that hadn’t been buckled or blown or simply wiped out of existence by the unscheduled egress.

We were going to have to land and make repairs. For a few weeks or months-however long it took the ship to scavenge and process the raw materials it needed to fix itself-the search for my gun would be on hold.

That didn’t mean I was counting on a long stopover.

* * * *

The ship still had a slow tumble. Merlin squinted against hard white glare as the burning eye of a bright sun hove into view through the windows. It was white, but not killingly so. Probably a mid-sequence star, maybe a late F or early G type. He thought there was a hint of yellow. Had to be pretty close too.

“Tell me where we are.”

“It’s called Calliope,” Tyrant told him. “G-type. According to the last Cohort census the system contained fifteen planet-class bodies. There were five terrestrials, four of which were uninhabitable. The fifth-the farthest from Calliope-was supposedly colonized by humans in the early Flourishing.”

Merlin glanced at the census data as it scrolled down the cabin wall. The planet in question was called Lecythus. It was a typical watery terrestrial, like a thousand others in his experience. It even had the almost-obligatory large single moon.

“Been a while, ship. What are the chances of anyone still being down there?”

“Difficult to say. A later Cohort flyby failed to make contact with the settlement, but that doesn’t mean no one was alive. After the emergence of the Huskers, many planetary colonies went to great lengths to camouflage themselves against the aliens.”

“So there could still be a welcoming committee.”

“We’ll see. With your permission, I’ll use our remaining fuel to reach Lecythus. This will take some time. Would you like to sleep?”

Merlin looked back at the coffinlike slab of the frostwatch cabinet. He could skip over the days or weeks that it would take to reach the planet, but that would mean subjecting himself to the intense unpleasantness of frostwatch revival. Merlin had never taken kindly to being woken from normal sleep, let alone the deep hibernation of frostwatch.

“Pass on that, I think. I’ve still got plenty of reading to catch up on.”

Later-much later-Tyrant announced that they had reached orbit around Lecythus. “Would you like to see the view?” the ship asked, with a playful note in its voice.

Merlin scratched fatigue from his eyes. “You sound like you know something I don’t.”

Merlin was at first reassured by what he saw. There was blue ocean down there, swatches of green and brown landmass, large islands rather than any major continental masses, cyclonic swirls of water-vapor clouds. It didn’t necessarily mean there were still people, but it was a lot more encouraging than finding a cratered, radioactive corpse of a world.

Then he looked again. Many of those green and brown swatches of landmass were surrounded by water, as his first glimpse had indicated. But some of them appeared to be floating above the ocean completely, casting shadows beneath them. His glance flicked to the horizon, where the atmosphere was compressed into a thin bow of pure indigo. He could see the foreshortened shapes of hovering landmasses, turned nearly edge on. The landmasses appeared to be one or two kilometers thick, and they all appeared to be gently curved. Perhaps half were concave in shape, so their edges were slightly upturned. The edges were frosted white, like the peaks of mountain ranges. Some of the concave masses even had little lakes near their centers. The convex masses were all a scorched tawny gray in color, devoid of water or vegetation, save for a cap of ice at their highest point. The largest shapes, convex or concave, must have been hundreds of kilometers wide. Merlin judged that there must have been at least ten kilometers of clear airspace under each piece. A third of the planet’s surface was obscured by the floating shapes.

“Any idea of what we’re looking at here?” Merlin asked. “This doesn’t look like anything in the census.”

“I think they built an armored sky around their world,” the ship said. “And then something-very probably Husker-level ordnance-shattered that sky.”

“No one could have survived through that,” Merlin said, feeling a rising tide of sadness. Tyrant was clever enough, but there were times-long times-when Merlin became acutely aware of the heartless machine lurking behind the personality. And then he felt very, very alone. Those were the hours when he would have done anything for companionship, including returning to the Cohort and the tribunal that undoubtedly awaited him.

“Someone does appear to have survived, Merlin.”

He perked. “Really?”

“It’s unlikely to be a very advanced culture: no neutrino or gravimagnetic signatures, beyond those originating from the mechanisms that must still be active inside the sky pieces. But I did detect some very brief radio emissions.”

“What language were they using? Main? Tradespeak? Anything else in the Cohort database?”

“They were using long beeps and short beeps. I’m afraid I didn’t get the chance to determine the source of the transmission.”

“Keep listening. I want to meet them.”

“Don’t raise your hopes. If there are people down there, they’ve been out of contact with the rest of humanity for a considerable number of millennia.”

“I only want to stop for repairs. They can’t begrudge me that, can they?”

“I suppose not.”

Then something occurred to Merlin, something he realized he should have asked much earlier. “About the accident, ship. I take it you know why we were dumped out of the Waynet?”

“I’ve run a fault-check on the syrinx. There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with it.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I know.” Tyrant sounded sullen. “I still don’t have an explanation for what went wrong. And I don’t like that any more than you do.”

* * * *

Tyrant fell into the atmosphere of Lecythus. The transmissions had resumed, allowing the ship to pinpoint the origin to one of the larger airborne masses.

Shortly afterward, a second source began transmitting from another floating mass, half the size of the first, located three thousand kilometers to the west. The way the signals started and stopped suggested some kind of agonizingly slow communication via radio pulses, one that probably had nothing to do with Merlin’s arrival.

“Tell me that’s a code in our database,” Merlin said.

“It isn’t. And the code won’t tell us much about their spoken language, I’m afraid.”

Up close, the broken edges of the floating mass soared as tall as a cliff. They were a dark, streaked gray, infinitely less regular than they had appeared from space. The edge showed signs of weathering and erosion. There were wide ledges, dizzying promontories, and cathedral-sized shadowed caves. Glinting in the low light of Calliope, ladders and walkways-impossibly thin and spindly scratches of metal-reached down from the icebound upper reaches, following zigzag trajectories that only took them a fraction of the way to the perilous lower lip, where the floating world curved back under itself.

Merlin made out the tiny moving forms of birdlike creatures, wheeling and orbiting in powerful thermals, some of them coming and going from roosts on the lower ledges.

“But that isn’t a bird,” Tyrant said, highlighting a larger moving shape.

Merlin felt an immediate pang of recognition as the image zoomed. It was an aircraft: a ludicrously fragile assemblage of canvas and wire. It had a crescent moon painted on both wings. There’d been a machine not much more advanced than that in the archive inside the Palace of Eternal Dusk, preserved across thirteen hundred years of family history. Merlin had even risked taking it outside once, to see for himself if he had the nerve to repeat his distant ancestor’s brave crossing. He still remembered the sting of reprimand when he’d brought it back, nearly ruined.

This aircraft was even flimsier and slower. It was driven by a single chugging propellor rather than a battery of rocket-assisted turbines. It was following the rim of the landmass, slowly gaining altitude. Clearly it intended to make landfall. The air on Lecythus was thicker at sea level than on Plenitude, but the little machine must still have been very close to its safe operational ceiling. And yet it would have to climb even higher if it was to traverse the raised rim.

“Follow it,” Merlin said. “Keep us astern by a clear two kilometers. And set hull to stealth.”

Merlin’s ship nosed in behind the struggling aircraft. He could see the single pilot now, goggled and helmeted within a crude-looking bubble canopy. The plane had reached ten kilometers, but it would need to double that to clear the upturned rim. Every hundred meters of altitude gained seemed to tax the aircraft to the limit, so that it climbed, leveled, climbed. It trailed sooty hyphens behind it. Merlin could imagine the sputtering protest from the little engine, the fear in the pilot’s belly that the motor was going to stall at any moment.

That was when an airship hove around the edge of the visible cliff. Calliope’s rays flared off the golden swell of its envelope. Beneath the long ribbed form was a tiny gondola, equipped with multiple engines on skeletal outriggers. The airship’s nose began to turn, bringing another crescent-moon emblem into view. The aircraft lined up with the airship, the two of them at about the same altitude. Merlin watched as some kind of netlike apparatus unfurled in slow motion from the belly of the gondola. The pilot gained further height, then cut the aircraft’s engine. Powerless now, it followed a shallow glide path toward the net. Clearly, the airship was going to catch the aircraft and carry it over the rim. That must have been the only way for aircraft to arrive and depart from the hovering landmass.

Merlin watched with a sickened fascination. He’d occasionally had a presentiment when something was going to go wrong. Now he had that feeling again.

Some gust caught the airship. It began to drift out of the aircraft’s glide path. The pilot tried to compensate-Merlin could see the play of light shift on the wings as they warped-but it was never going to be enough. Without power, the aircraft must have been cumbersome to steer. The engines on the gondola turned on their mountings, trying to shove the airship back into position.

Beyond the airship loomed the streaked gray vastness of the great cliff.

“Why did he cut the engines ...” Merlin breathed to himself. Then, an instant later: “Can we catch up? Can we do something?”

“I’m afraid not. There simply isn’t time.”

Sickened, Merlin watched as the aircraft slid past the airship, missing the net by a hundred meters. A sooty smear erupted from the engine. The pilot must have been desperately trying to restart the motor. Moments later, Merlin watched as one wingtip grazed the side of the cliff and crumpled instantly, horribly. The aircraft dropped, dashing itself to splinters and shreds against the side of the cliff. There was no possibility that the pilot could have survived.

For a moment Merlin was numb. He was frozen, unsure what to do next.

He’d been planning to land, but it seemed improper to arrive immediately after witnessing such a tragedy. Perhaps the thing to do was find an uninhabited landmass and put down there.

“There’s another aircraft,” Tyrant announced. “It’s approaching from the west.”

Still shaken by what he’d seen, Merlin took the stealthed ship closer. Dirty smoke billowed from the side of the aircraft. In the canopy, the pilot was obviously engaged in a life-or-death struggle to bring his machine to safety. Even as they watched, the engine appeared to slow and then restart.

Something slammed past Tyrant, triggering proximity alarms. “Some kind of shell,” the ship told Merlin. “I think someone on the ground is trying to shoot down these aircraft.”

Merlin looked down. He hadn’t paid much attention to the landmass beneath them, but now that he did-peering through the holes in a quilt of low-lying cloud-he made out the unmistakable flashes of artillery positions, laid out along the pale scratch of a fortified line.

He began to understand why the airship dared not stray too far from the side of the landmass. Near the cliff, it at least had some measure of cover. It would have been far too vulnerable to the shells in open air.

“I think it’s time to take a stand,” he said. “Maintain stealth. I’m going to provide some lift support to that aircraft. Bring us around to her rear and then approach from under her.”

“Merlin, you have no idea who these people are. They could be brigands, pirates, anything.”

“They’re being shot at. That’s good enough for me.”

“I really think we should land. I’m down to vapor pressure in the tanks now.”

“So’s that brave fool of a pilot. Just do it.”

The aircraft’s engine gave out just as Tyrant reached position. Taking the controls manually, Merlin brought his ship’s nose into contact with the underside of the aircraft’s paper-thin fuselage. Contact occurred with the faintest of bumps. The pilot glanced back down over his shoulder, but the goggled mask hid all expression. Merlin could only imagine what the pilot made of the sleek, whale-sized machine now supporting his little contraption.

Merlin’s hands trembled. He was acutely aware of how easily he could damage the fragile thing with a miscalculated application of thrust. Tyrant was armored to withstand Waynet transitions and the crush of gas giant atmospheres. It was like using a hammer to push around a feather. For a moment, contact between the two craft was lost, and when Tyrant came in again it hit the aircraft hard enough to crush the metal cylinder of a spare fuel tank bracketed on under the wing. Merlin winced in anticipation of an explosion-one that would hurt the little airplane a lot more than it hurt Tyrant-but the tank must have been empty.

Ahead, the airship had regained some measure of stability. The capture net was still deployed. Merlin pushed harder, giving the aircraft more altitude in readiness for its approach glide. At the last moment he judged it safe to disengage. He steered Tyrant away and left the aircraft to blunder into the net.

This time there were no gusts. The net wrapped itself around the aircraft, the soft impact nudging down the nose of the airship. Then the net began to be winched back toward the gondola like a haul of fish. At the same time the airship swung around and began to climb.

“No other planes?” Merlin asked.

“That was the only one.”

They followed the airship in. It rose over the cliff, over the ice-capped rim of the aerial landmass, then settled down toward the shielded region in the bowl, where water and greenery had gathered. There was even a wispy layer of cloud, arranged in a broken ring around the shore of the lake. Merlin presumed that the concave shape of the landmass was sufficient to trap a stable microclimate.

By now Merlin had an audience. People had gathered on the gondola’s rear observation platform. They wore goggles and gloves and heavy brown overcoats. Merlin caught the shine of glass lenses being pointed at him. He was being studied, sketched, perhaps even photographed.

“Do you think they look grateful?” he asked. “Or pissed off?”

Tyrant declined to answer.

Merlin kept his distance, conserving fuel as best he could as the airship crossed tens of kilometers of arid, gently sloping land. Occasionally they overflew a little hamlet of huts or the scratch of a minor track. Presently the ground became soil-covered, and then fertile. They traversed swaths of bleak gray-green grass, intermingled with boulders and assorted uplifted debris. Then there were trees and woods. The communities became more than just hamlets. Small ponds fed rivers that ambled down to the single lake that occupied the landmass’s lowest point. Merlin spied waterwheels and rustic-looking bridges. There were fields with grazing animals, and evidence of some tall-chimneyed industrial structures on the far side of the lake. The lake itself was an easy fifty or sixty kilometers wide. Nestled around a natural harbor on its southern shore was the largest community Merlin had seen so far. It was a haphazard jumble of several hundred mostly white, mostly single-story buildings, arranged with the randomness of toy blocks littering a floor.

The airship skirted the edge of the town and then descended quickly. It approached what was clearly some kind of secure compound, judging by the guarded fence that encircled it. There was a pair of airstrips arranged in a cross formation, and a dozen or so aircraft parked around a painted copy of the crescent emblem. Four skeletal docking towers rose from another area of the compound, stayed by guylines. A battle-weary pair of partially deflated airships was already tethered. Merlin pulled back to allow the incoming craft enough space to complete its docking. The net was lowered back down from the gondola, depositing the airplane-its wings now crumpled, its fuselage buckled-on the apron below. Service staff rushed out of bunkers to untangle the mess and free the pilot. Merlin brought his ship down at a clear part of the apron and doused the engines as soon as the landing skids touched the ground.

It wasn’t long before a wary crowd had gathered around Tyrant. Most of them wore long leather coats, heavily belted, with the crescent emblem sewn into the right breast. They had scarves wrapped around their lower faces, almost to the nose. Their helmets were leather caps, with long flaps covering the sides of the face and the back of the neck. Most of them wore goggles; a few wore some kind of breathing apparatus. At least half the number were aiming barreled weapons at the ship, some of which needed to be set up on tripods, while some even larger wheeled cannons were being propelled across the apron by teams of well-drilled soldiers. One figure was gesticulating, directing the armed squads to take up specific positions.

“Can you understand what he’s saying?” Merlin asked, knowing that Tyrant would be picking up any external sounds.

“I’m going to need more than a few minutes to crack their language, Merlin, even if it is related to something in my database, of which there’s no guarantee.”

“Fine. I’ll improvise. Can you spin me some flowers?”

“Where exactly are you going? What do you mean, flowers?”

Merlin paused at the airlock. He wore long boots, tight black leather trousers, a billowing white shirt, and brocaded brown leather waistcoat, accented with scarlet trim. He’d tied back his hair and made a point of trimming his beard. “Where do you think? Outside. And I want some flowers. Flowers are good. Spin me some indigo hyacinths, the kind they used to grow on Springhaven, before the Mentality Wars. They always go down well.”

“You’re insane. They’ll shoot you.”

“Not if I smile and come bearing exotic alien flowers. Remember, I did just save one of their planes.”

“You’re not even wearing armor.”

“Armor would really scare them. Trust me, ship: this is the quickest way for them to understand I’m not a threat.”

“It’s been a pleasure having you aboard,” Tyrant said acidly. “I’ll be sure to pass on your regards to my next owner.”

“Just make the flowers and stop complaining.”

Five minutes later Merlin steeled himself as the lock sequenced and the ramp lowered to kiss the ground. The cold hit him like a lover’s slap. He heard an order from the soldiers’ leader, and the massed ranks adjusted their aim. They’d been pointing at the ship before. Now it was only Merlin they were interested in.

He raised his right hand palm open, the newly spun flowers in his left.

“Hello. My name’s Merlin.” He thumped his chest for emphasis and said the name again, slower this time. “Mer-lin. I don’t think there’s much chance of you being able to understand me, but just in case ... I’m not here to cause trouble.” He forced a smile, which probably looked more feral than reassuring. “Now. Who’s in charge?”

The leader shouted another order. He heard a rattle of a hundred safety catches being released. Suddenly, the ship’s idea of sending out a proctor first sounded splendidly sensible. Merlin felt a cold line of sweat trickle down his back. After all that he had survived so far, both during his time with the Cohort and since he had become an adventuring free agent, it would be something of a letdown to die by being shot with a chemically propelled projectile. That was only one step above being mauled and eaten by a wild animal.

Merlin walked down the ramp, one cautious step at a time. “No weapons,” he said. “Just flowers. If I wanted to hurt you, I could have hit you from space with charm-torps.”

When he reached the apron, the leader gave another order and a trio of soldiers broke formation to cover Merlin from three angles, with the barrels of their weapons almost touching him. The leader-a cruel-looking young man with a scar down the right side of his face-shouted something in Merlin’s direction, a word that sounded vaguely like “distal,” but which was in no language Merlin recognized. When Merlin didn’t move, he felt a rifle jab into the small of his back. “Distal,” the man said again, this time with an emphasis bordering on the hysterical.

Then another voice boomed across the apron, one that belonged to a much older man. There was something instantly commanding about the voice. Looking to the source of the exclamation, Merlin saw the wrecked aircraft entangled in its capture net, and the pilot in the process of crawling out from the tangle, with a wooden box in his hands. The rifle stopped jabbing Merlin’s back, and the cruel-looking young man fell silent while the pilot made his way over to them.

The pilot had removed his goggles now, revealing the lined face of an older man, his gray-white beard and whiskers stark against ruddy, weatherworn skin. For a moment Merlin felt that he was looking in the mirror at an older version of himself.

“Greetings from the Cohort,” Merlin said. “I’m the man who saved your life.”

“Gecko,” the red-faced man said, pushing the wooden box into Merlin’s chest. “Forlorn gecko!”

Now that Merlin had a chance to examine it properly, he saw that the box was damaged, its sides caved in and its lid ripped off. Inside was a matrix of straw padding and a great many shattered glass vials. The pilot took one of these smashed vials and held it up before Merlin’s face, honey-colored fluid draining down his fingers.

“What is it?” Merlin asked.

Leaving Merlin to hold the box and flowers, the red-faced pilot pointed angrily toward the wreckage of his aircraft, and in particular at the cylindrical attachment Merlin had taken for a fuel tank. He saw now that the cylinder was the repository for dozens more of these wooden boxes, most of which must have been smashed when Merlin had nudged the aircraft with Tyrant.

“Did I do something wrong?” Merlin asked.

In a flash the man’s anger turned to despair. He was crying, the tears smudging the soot on his cheeks. “Tangible,” he said, softer now. “All tangible inkwells. Gecko.”

Merlin reached into the box and retrieved one of the few intact vials. He held the delicate thing to his eyes. “Medicine?”

“Plastrum,” the man said, taking the box back from Merlin.

“Show me what you do with this,” Merlin said, as he motioned drinking the vial. The man shook his head, narrowing his wrinkled ice-blue eyes at him as if he thought that Merlin was either stupid or making fun. Merlin rolled up the sleeve of his arm and motioned injecting himself. The pilot nodded tentatively.

“Plastrum,” he said again. “Vestibule plastrum.”

“You have some kind of medical crisis? Is that what you were doing, bringing medicines?”

“Tangible,” the man repeated.

“You need to come with me,” Merlin said. “Whatever that stuff is, we can synthesize it aboard Tyrant.” He held up the intact vial and then placed his index finger next to it. Then he pointed to the parked form of his ship and spread his fingers wide, hoping the pilot got the message that he could multiply the medicine. “One sample,” he said. “That’s all we need.”

Suddenly there was a commotion. Merlin looked around in time to see a girl running across the apron, toward the two of them. In Cohort terms she could only have been six or seven years old. She wore a child’s version of the same greatcoat everyone else wore, buckled black boots and gloves, no hat, goggles, or breathing mask. The pilot shouted “Minla” at her approach, a single word that conveyed both warning and something more intimate, as if the older man might have been her father or grandfather. “Minla oak trefoil,” the man added, firmly but not without kindness. He sounded pleased to see her, but somewhat less than pleased that she had chosen this exact moment to run outside.

“Spelter Malkoha,” the girl said, and hugged the pilot around the waist, which was as high as she could reach. “Spelter Malkoha, ursine Malkoha.”

The red-faced man knelt down-his eyes were still damp-and ran a gloved finger through the girl’s unruly fringe of black hair. She had a small, monkeylike face, one that conveyed both mischief and cleverness.

“Minla,” he said tenderly. “Minla, Minla, Minla.” Then what was clearly a rhetorical question: “Gastric spar oxen, fey legible, Minla?”

“Gorse spelter,” she said, sounding contrite. And then, perhaps for the first time, she noticed Merlin. For an anxious moment her expression was frozen somewhere between surprise and suspicion, as if he were some kind of puzzle that had just intruded into her world.

“You wouldn’t be called Minla, by any chance?” Merlin asked.

“Minla,” she said, in barely a whisper.

“Merlin. Pleased to meet you, Minla.” And then on a whim, before any of the adults could stop him, he passed her one of the indigo hyacinths that Tyrant had just spun for him, woven from the ancient molecular templates in its biolibrary. “Yours,” he said. “A pretty flower for a pretty little girl.”

“Oxen spray, Minla,” the red-faced man said, pointing back to one of the buildings on the edge of the apron. A soldier walked over and extended a hand to the girl, ready to escort her back inside. She moved to hand the flower back to Merlin.

“No,” he said, “you can keep it, Minla. It’s for you.”

She opened the collar of her coat and pushed the flower inside for safekeeping, until only its head was jutting out. The vivid indigo seemed to throw something of its hue onto her face.

“Mer-lin?” asked the older man.

“Yes.”

The man tapped a fist against his own chest. “Malkoha.” And then he indicated the vial Merlin was still carrying. “Plastrum,” he said again. Then a question, accompanied by a nod toward Tyrant. “Risible plastrum?”

“Yes,” Merlin said. “I can make you more medicine. Risible plastrum.”

The red-faced man studied him for what seemed like many minutes. Merlin opted to say nothing: if the pilot hadn’t got the message by now, no further persuasion was going to help. Then the pilot reached down to his belt and unbuttoned the leather holster of a pistol. He removed the weapon and allowed Merlin sufficient time to examine it by eye. The low sun gleamed off an oiled black barrel, inlaid with florid white ornamentation carved from something like whalebone.

“Mer-lin risible plastrum,” Malkoha said. Then he waved the gun for emphasis. “Spar apostle.”

“Spar apostle,” Merlin repeated, as they walked up the boarding ramp. “No tricks.”

* * * *

Even before Tyrant had made progress in the cracking of the local language, Merlin had managed to hammer out a deal with Malkoha. The medicine had turned out to be a very simple drug, easily synthesized. A narrow-spectrum 8-lactam antibiotic, according to the ship: exactly the sort of thing the locals might use to treat a gram-positive bacterial infection-something like bacterial meningitis, for instance-if they didn’t have anything better.

Tyrant could pump out antibiotic medicine by the hundreds of liters, or synthesize something vastly more effective in equally large quantities. But Merlin saw no sense in playing his most valuable card so early in the game. He chose instead to give Malkoha quantities of the drug in approximately the same dosage and quantity as he must have been carrying when his aircraft was damaged, packaged in similar-looking glass vials. He gave the first two consignments as a gift, in recompense for the harm he was presumed to have done when attempting to save Malkoha, and let Malkoha think that it was all that Tyrant could do to make drugs at that strength and quantity. It was only when he handed over the third consignment, on the third day, that he mentioned the materials he needed to repair his ship.

He didn’t say anything, of course, or at least nothing that the locals could have understood. But there were enough examples lying around of the materials Merlin needed-metals and organic compounds, principally, as well as water that could be used to replenish Tyrant’s hydrogen-fusion tanks-that Merlin was able to make considerable progress just by pointing and miming. He kept talking all the while, even in Main, and did all that he could to encourage the locals to talk back in their own tongue. Even when he was inside the compound, Tyrant was observing every exchange, thanks to the microscopic surveillance devices Merlin carried on his person. Through this process, the ship was constantly testing and rejecting language models, employing its knowledge of both the general principles of human grammar and its compendious database of ancient languages recorded by the Cohort, many of which were antecedents of Main itself. Lecythus might have been isolated for tens of thousands of years, but languages older than that had been cracked by brute computation, and Merlin had no doubt that Tyrant would get there in the end, provided he gave it enough material to work with.

It was still not clear whether the locals regarded him as their prisoner, or honored guest. He’d made no attempt to leave, and they’d made no effort to prevent him returning to his ship when it was time to collect the vials of antibiotic. Perhaps they had guessed that it would be futile to stop him, given the likely capabilities of his technology. Or perhaps they had guessed-correctly, as it happened-that Tyrant would be going nowhere until it was repaired and fueled. In any event they seemed less awed by his arrival than intrigued, shrewdly aware of what he could do for them.

Merlin liked Malkoha, even though he knew almost nothing about the man. Clearly he was a figure of high seniority within this particular organization, be it military or political, but he was also a man brave enough to fly a hazardous mission to ferry medicines through the sky, in a time of war. And his daughter loved him, which had to count for something. Merlin now knew that Malkoha was her “spelter” or father, although he did indeed look old enough to have been spaced from her by a further generation.

Almost everything that Merlin did learn, in those early days, was due to Minla rather than the adults. The adults seemed willing to at least attempt to answer his queries, when they could understand what he was getting at. But their chalkboard explanations usually left Merlin none the wiser. They could show him maps and printed historical and technical treatises, but none of these shed any light on the world’s many mysteries. Cracking text would take Tyrant even longer than cracking spoken language.

Minla, though, had picture books. Malkoha’s daughter had taken an obvious liking to Merlin, even though she shared nothing in common. Merlin gave her a new flower each time he saw her, freshly spun from some exotic species in the biolibrary. Merlin made a point of never giving her flowers from a particular world twice, even when she wanted more of the same. He also made a point of always telling her something of the place from where the flowers had come, regardless of her lack of understanding. It seemed to be enough for her to hear the cadences of a story, even if it was in an alien language.

There was not much color in Minla’s world, so Merlin’s gifts must have had a luminous appeal to them. Once a day, for a few minutes, they were allowed to meet in a drab room inside the main compound. An adult was always stationed nearby, but to all intents and purposes Merlin and the girl were permitted to interact freely. Minla would show Merlin drawings and paintings she had done, or little compositions, written down in labored handwriting in approximately the form of script Tyrant had come to refer to as Lecythus A. Merlin would examine Minla’s works and offer praise when it was merited.

He wondered why these meetings were allowed. Minla was obviously a bright girl (he could tell that much merely from the precocious manner of her speaking, even if he hadn’t had the ample evidence of her drawings and writings). Perhaps it was felt that meeting the man from space would be an important part of her education, one that could never be repeated at a later date. Perhaps she had pestered her father into allowing her to spend more time with Merlin. Merlin could understand that; as a child he’d also formed harmless attachments to adults, often those that came bearing gifts and especially those adults that appeared interested in what he had to show them.

Could there be more than that, though? Was it possible that the adults had decided that a child offered the best conduit for understanding, and that Minla was now their envoy? Or were they hoping to use Minla as a form of emotional blackmail, so that they might exert a subtle hold on Merlin when he decided it was time to leave?

He didn’t know. What he was certain of was that Minla’s books raised as many questions as they answered, and that simply leafing through them was enough to open windows in his own mind, back into a childhood he’d thought consigned safely to oblivion. The books were startlingly similar to the books Merlin remembered from the Palace of Eternal Dusk, the ones he’d used to fight over with his brother. They were bound similarly, illustrated with spidery ink drawings scattered through the text or florid watercolors gathered onto glossy plates at the end of the book. Merlin liked holding the book up to the light of an open window, so that the illustrated pages shone like stained glass. It was something his father had shown him on Plenitude, when he had been Minla’s age, and her delight exactly echoed his own, across the unthinkable gulf of time and distance and circumstance that separated their childhoods.

At the same time, he also paid close attention to what the books had to say. Many of the stories featured little girls involved in fanciful adventures concerning flying animals and other magic creatures. Others had the worthy, overearnest look of educational texts. Studying these latter books, Merlin began to grasp something of the history of Lecythus, at least insofar as it had been codified for the consumption of children.

The people on Lecythus knew they’d come from the stars. In two of the books there were even paintings of a vast spherical spaceship heaving into orbit around the planet. The paintings differed in every significant detail, but Merlin felt sure that he was seeing a portrayal of the same dimly remembered historical event, much as the books in his youth had shown various representations of human settlers arriving on Plenitude. There was no reference to the Waynet, however, or anything connected to the Cohort or the Huskers. As for the locals’ theory concerning the origin of the aerial landmasses, Merlin found only one clue. It lay in a frightening sequence of pictures showing the night sky being riven by lavalike fissures, until whole chunks of the heavens dropped out of place, revealing a darker, deeper firmament beyond. Some of the pieces were shown crashing into the seas, raising awesome waves that tumbled over entire coastal communities, while others were shown hovering unsupported in the sky, with kilometers of empty space under them. If the adults remembered that it was alien weaponry that had smashed their camouflaging sky (weapons deployed by aliens that were still out there) no hint of that uncomfortable truth was allowed into Minla’s books. The destruction of the sky was shown simply as a natural catastrophe, like a flood or volcanic eruption. Enough to awe, enough to fascinate, but not enough to give nightmares.

Awesome it must have been too. Tyrant’s own analysis had established that the aerial landmasses could be put together like a jigsaw. There were gaps in that jigsaw, but most of them could be filled by lifting chunks of land out of the seas and slotting them in place. The inhabitated aerial landmasses were all inverted compared to their supposed positions in the original sky, requiring that they must have been flipped over after the shattering. Tyrant could offer little guidance for how this could have happened, but it was clear enough that unless the chunks were inverted, life-supporting materials would spill off over the edges and rain down onto the planet again. Presumably the necessary materials had been uplifted into the air when the unsupported chunks (and these must have been pieces that did not contain gravity nullifiers, or which had been damaged beyond the capacity to support themselves) came hammering down.

As to how people had come to the sky in the first place, or how the present political situation had come into being, Minla’s texts were frustratingly vague. There were pictures of what were obviously historic battles, fought with animals and gunpowder. There were illustrations of courtly goings-on; princes and kings, balls and regattas, assassinations and duels. There were drawings of adventurers rising on kites and balloons to survey the aerial masses, and later of what were clearly government-sponsored scouting expeditions, employing huge flotillas of flimsy-looking airships. But as to exactly why the people in the sky were now at war with the people on the ground, Merlin had little idea, and even less interest. What mattered-the only thing, in fact-was that Minla’s people had the means to help him. He could have managed without them, but by bringing him the things he needed they made it easier. And it was good to see other faces again, after so long alone.

One of Minla’s books intrigued him even more than all the others. It showed a picture of the starry night, the heavens as revealed after the fall of the camouflaging sky. Constellations had been overlaid on the patterns of stars, with sketched figures overlying the schematic lines joining the stars. None of the mythical or heroic figures corresponded to the old constellations of Plenitude, but the same archetypal forms were nonetheless present. For Merlin there was something hugely reassuring in seeing the evidence of similar imaginations at work. It might have been tens of thousands of years since these humans had been in contact with a wider galactic civilization; they might have endured world-changing catastrophes and retained only a hazy notion of their origins. But they were still people, and he was among them. There were times, in his long search for the lost weapon that he hoped would save the Cohort, that Merlin had come to doubt whether there was anything about humanity worth saving. But all it took was the look on Minla’s face as he presented her with another flower-another relic of some long-dead world-to banish such doubts almost entirely. While there were still children in the universe, and while children could still be enchanted by something as simple and wonderful as a flower, there was still a reason to keep looking, a reason to keep believing.

* * * *

The coiled black device had the look of a tiny chambered nautilus, turned to onyx. Merlin pushed back his hair to let Malkoha see that he was already wearing a similar unit, then motioned for Malkoha to insert the translator into his own ear.

“Good,” Merlin said, when he saw that the other man had pushed the device into place. “Can you understand me now?”

Malkoha answered very quickly, but there was a moment’s lag before Merlin heard his response translated into Main, rendered in an emotionally flat machine voice. “Yes. I understand good. How is this possible?”

Merlin gestured around him. They were alone together in Tyrant, with Malkoha ready to leave with another consignment of antibiotics. “The ship’s been listening in on every conversation I’ve had with you,” Merlin said. “It’s heard enough of your language to begin piecing together a translation. It’s still rudimentary-there are a lot of gaps the ship still needs to fill-but it will only get better with time, the more we talk.”

Malkoha listened diligently as his earpiece translated Merlin’s response. Merlin could only guess at how much of his intended meaning was making it through intact.

“Your ship is clever,” Malkoha said. “We talk many times. We get good at understanding.”

“I hope so.”

Malkoha pointed now at the latest batch of supplies his people had brought, piled neatly at the top of the boarding ramp. The materials were unsophisticated in their manufacture, but they could all be reprocessed to form the complicated components Tyrant needed to repair itself.

“Metals make the ship good?”

“Yes,” Merlin said. “Metals make the ship good.”

“When the ship is good, the ship will fly? You will leave?”

“That’s the idea.”

Malkoha looked sad. “Where will you go?”

“Back into space. I’ve been a long time away from my own people. But there’s something I need to find before I return to them.”

“Minla will be unhappy.”

“So will I. I like Minla. She’s a clever little girl.”

“Yes. Minla is clever. I am proud of my daughter.”

“You have every right to be,” Merlin said, hoping that his sincerity came across. “I have to start what I finished, though. The ship tells me it’ll be flight-ready in two or three days. It’s a patch job, but it’ll get us to the nearest motherbase. But there’s something we need to talk about first.” Merlin reached for a shelf and handed Malkoha a tray upon which sat twelve identical copies of the translator device.

“You will speak with more of us?”

“I’ve just learned some bad news, Malkoha: news that concerns you, and your people. Before I go I want to do what I can to help. Take these translators and give them to your best people-Coucal, Jacana, the rest. Get them to wear them all the time, no matter who they’re talking to. In three days I want to meet with you all.”

Malkoha regarded the tray of translators with suspicion, as if the ranked devices were a peculiar foreign delicacy.

“What is the bad news, Merlin?”

“Three days isn’t going to make much difference. It’s better if we wait until the translation is more accurate, then there won’t be any misunderstanding.”

“We are friends,” Malkoha said, leaning forward. “You can tell me now.”

“I’m afraid it won’t make much sense.”

Malkoha looked at him beseechingly. “Please.”

“Something is going to come out of the sky,” Merlin said. “Like a great sword. And it’s going to cut your sun in two.”

Malkoha frowned, as if he didn’t think he could possibly have understood correctly.

“Calliope?”

Merlin nodded gravely. “Calliope will die. And then so will everyone on Lecythus.”

* * * *

They were all there when Merlin walked into the glass-partitioned room. Malkoha, Triller, Coucal, Jacana, Sibia, Niltava, and about half a dozen more top brass Merlin had never seen before. An administrative assistant was already entering notes into a clattering electromechanical transcription device squatting on her lap, pecking away at its stiff metal input pads with surprising speed. Tea bubbled in a fat engraved urn set in the middle of the table. An orderly had already poured tea into china cups set before each bigwig, including Merlin himself. Through the partition, on the opposite wall of the adjoining tactical room, Merlin watched another orderly make microscopic adjustments to the placement of the aerial landmasses on an equal-area projection map of Lecythus. Periodically, the entire building would rattle with the droning arrival of another aircraft or dirigible.

Malkoha coughed to bring the room to attention. “Merlin has news for us,” he said, his translated voice coming through with more emotion than it had three days earlier. “This is news not just for the Skyland Alliance, but for everyone on Lecythus. That includes the Aligned Territories, the Neutrals, and yes, even our enemies in the Shadowland Coalition.” He beckoned a hand in Merlin’s direction, inviting him to stand.

Merlin held up one of Minla’s picture books, open at the illustration of constellations in the sky over Lecythus. “What I have to tell you concerns these patterns,” he said. “You see heroes, animals, and monsters in the sky, traced in lines drawn between the brightest stars.”

A new voice buzzed in his ear. He identified the speaker as Sibia, a woman of high political rank. “These things mean nothing,” she said patiently. “They are lines drawn between chance alignments. The ancient mind saw demons and monsters in the heavens. Our modern science tells us that the stars are very distant, and that two stars that appear close together in the sky-the two eyes of Prinia the Dragon, for example-may in reality be located at very different distances.”

“The lines are more significant than you appreciate,” Merlin said. “They are a pattern you have remembered across tens of thousands of years, forgetting its true meaning. They are pathways between the stars.”

“There are no pathways in the void,” Sibia retorted. “The void is vacuum: the same thing that makes birds suffocate when you suck air out of a glass jar.”

“You may think it absurd,” Merlin said. “All I can tell you is that vacuum is not as you understand it. It has structure, resilience, its own reserves of energy. And you can make part of it shear away from the rest, if you try hard enough. That’s what the Waymakers did. They stretched great corridors between the stars: rivers of flowing vacuum. They reach from star to star, binding together the entire galaxy. We call it the Waynet.”

“Is this how you arrived?” Malkoha asked.

“My little ship could never have crossed interstellar space without it. But as I was passing close to your planet-because a strand of the Waynet runs right through this system-my ship encountered a problem. That is why Tyrant was damaged; why I had to land here and seek your assistance.”

“And the nature of this problem?” the old man pushed.

“My ship only discovered it three days ago, based on observations it had collated since I arrived. It appears that part of the Waynet has become loose, unshackled. There’s a kink in the flow where it begins to drift out of alignment. The unshackled part is drifting toward your sun, tugged toward it by the pull of Calliope’s gravitational field.”

“You’re certain of this?” Sibia asked.

“I’ve had my ship check the data over and over. There’s no doubt. In just over seventy years, the Waynet will cut right through Calliope, like a wire through a ball of cheese.”

Malkoha looked hard into Merlin’s eyes. “What will happen?”

“Probably very little to begin with, when the Waynet is still cutting through the chromosphere. But by the time it reaches the nuclear-burning core ... I’d say all bets are off.”

“Can it be mended? Can the Waynet be brought back into alignment?”

“Not using any technology known to my own people. We’re dealing with principles as far beyond anything on Lecythus as Tyrant is beyond one of your propellor planes.”

Malkoha looked stricken. “Then what can we possibly do?”

“You can make plans to leave Lecythus. You have always known that space travel was possible: it’s in your history, in the books you give to your children. If you had any doubts, I’ve shown it to be the case. Now you must achieve it for yourselves.”

“In seventy years?” Malkoha asked.

“I know it sounds impossible. But you can do it. You already have flying machines. All you need to do is keep building on that achievement ... building and building ... until you have the means.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“It won’t be. It’ll be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. But I’m convinced that you can do it, if only you pull together.” Merlin looked sternly at his audience. “That means no more wars between the Skylands and the Shadowlands. You don’t have time for it. From this moment on, the entire industrial and scientific capacity of your planet will have to be directed toward one goal.”

“You’re going to help us, Merlin?” Malkoha asked. “Aren’t you?”

Merlin’s throat had become very dry. “I’d like to, but I must leave immediately. Twenty light-years from here is a bountiful system known to the Cohort. The great vessels of my people-the swallowships-sometimes stop in this system, to replenish supplies and make repairs. The swallowships cannot use the Way, but they are very big. If I could divert just one swallow-ship here, it could carry fifty thousand refugees; double that if people were prepared to accept some hardship.”

“That’s still not many people,” Sibia said.

“That’s why you need to start thinking about reducing your population over the next three generations. It won’t be possible to save everyone, but if you could at least ensure that the survivors are adults of breeding age ...” Merlin trailed off, conscious of the dismayed faces looking at him. “Look,” he said, removing a sheaf of papers from his jacket and spreading them on the table. “I had the ship prepare these documents. This one concerns the production of wide-spectrum antibiotic medicines. This one concerns the construction of a new type of aircraft engine, one that will allow you to exceed the speed of sound and reach much higher altitudes than are now available to you. This one concerns metallurgy and high-precision machining. This one is a plan for a two-stage liquid-fueled rocket. You need to start learning about rocketry now, because it’s the only thing that’s going to get you into space.” His finger moved to the final sheet. “This document reveals certain truths about the nature of physical reality. Energy and mass are related by this simple formula. The speed of light is an absolute constant, irrespective of the observer’s motion. This diagram shows the presence of emission lines in the spectrum of hydrogen, and a mathematical formula that predicts the spacing of those lines. All this ... stuff ... should help you make some progress.”

“Is this all you can give us?” Sibia asked skeptically. “A few pages’ worth of vague sketches and cryptic formulae?”

“They’re more than most cultures ever get. I suggest you start thinking about them straightaway.”

“I will get this to Shama,” Coucal said, taking the drawing of a jet engine and preparing to slip it into his case.

“Not before everything here is duplicated and archived,” Malkoha said warningly. “And we must take pains to ensure none of these secrets fall into Shadowland hands.” Then he returned his attention to Merlin. “Evidently, you gave this matter some thought.”

“Just a bit.”

“Is this the first time you have had to deal with a world such as ours, one that will die?”

“I’ve had some prior experience of the matter. There was once a world—”

“What happened to the place in question?” Malkoha asked, before Merlin could finish his sentence.

“It died.”

“How many people were saved?”

For a moment Merlin couldn’t answer. The words seemed to lodge in the back of his throat, hard as pebbles. “There were just two survivors,” he said quietly. “A pair of brothers.”

* * * *

The walk to Tyrant was the longest he had ever taken. Ever since he had made the decision to leave Lecythus he had rehearsed the occasion in his mind, replaying it time and again. He had always imagined the crowd cheering, daunted by the news, but not cowed, Merlin raising his fist in an encouraging salute. Nothing had prepared him for the frigid silence of his audience, their judgmental expressions as he left the low buildings of the compound, their unspoken disdain hanging in the air like a proclamation.

Only Malkoha followed him all the way to Tyrant’s boarding ramp. The old soldier had his coat drawn tight across his chest, even though the wind was still and the evening not particularly cold.

“I’m sorry,” Merlin said, with one foot on the ramp. “I wish I could stay.”

“You seem like two men to me,” Malkoha said, his voice low. “One of them is braver than he gives himself credit for. The other man still has bravery to learn.”

“I’m not running away.”

“But you are running from something.”

“I have to go now. If the damage to the Waynet becomes greater, I may not even be able to reach the next system.”

“Then you must do what you think is right. I shall be sure to give your regards to Minla. She will miss you very much.” Malkoha paused and reached into his tunic pocket. “I almost forgot to give you this. She would have been very upset with me if I had.”

Malkoha had given Merlin a small piece of stone, a coin-shaped sliver that must have been cut from a larger piece and then set in colored metal so that it could be worn around the neck or wrist. Merlin examined the stone with interest, but in truth there seemed nothing remarkable about it. He’d picked up and discarded more beautiful examples a thousand times in his travels. It had been dyed red in order to emphasize the fine grain of its surface: a series of parallel lines like the pages of a book seen end-on, but with a rhythmic structure to the spacing of the lines-a widening and a narrowing-that was unlike any book Merlin had seen.

“Tell her I appreciated it,” he said.

“I gave the stone to my daughter. She found it pretty.”

“How did you come by it?”

“I thought you were in a hurry to leave.”

Merlin’s hand closed around the stone. “You’re right. I should be on my way.”

“The stone belonged to a prisoner of mine, a man named Dowitcher. He was one of their greatest thinkers: a scientist and soldier much like myself. I admired his brilliance from afar, just as I hope he admired mine. One day, our agents captured him and brought him to the Skylands. I played no part in planning his kidnap, but I was delighted that we might at last meet on equal terms. I was convinced that, as a man of reason, he would listen to my arguments and accept the wisdom of defecting to the Skylands.”

“Did he?”

“Not in the slightest. He was as firmly entrenched in his convictions as I was in mine. We never became friends.”

“So where does the stone come into it?”

“Before he died, Dowitcher found a means to torment me. He gave me the stone and told me that he had learned something of great significance from it. Something that could change our world. Something that had cosmic significance. He was looking into the sky when he said that: almost laughing. But he would not reveal what that secret was.”

Merlin hefted the stone once more. “I think he was playing games with you, Malkoha.”

“That’s the conclusion I eventually reached. One day Minla took a shine to the stone-I kept it on my desk long after Dowitcher was gone-and I let her have it.”

“And now it’s mine.”

“You meant a lot to her, Merlin. She wanted to give you something in return for the flowers. You may forget the rest of us one day, but please don’t ever forget my daughter.”

“I won’t.”

“I’m lucky,” Malkoha said, something in his tone easing, as if he were finished judging Merlin. “I’ll be dead long before your Waynet cuts into our sun. But Minla’s generation won’t have that luxury. They know that their world is going to end, and that every year brings that event a year nearer. They’re the ones who’ll spend their whole lives with that knowledge looming over them. They’ll never know true happiness. I don’t envy them a moment of their lives.”

That was when something in Merlin gave way, some mental slippage that he must have felt coming for many hours without quite acknowledging it to himself. Almost before he had time to reflect on his own words he found himself saying to Malkoha, “I’m staying.”

The other man, perhaps wary of a trick or some misunderstanding brought about by the translator, narrowed his eyes. “Merlin?”

“I said I’m staying. I’ve changed my mind. Maybe it was what I always knew I had to do, or maybe it was all down to what you just said about Minla. But I’m not going anywhere.”

“What I said just now,” Malkoha said, “about there being two of you, one braver than the other ... I know now which man I am speaking to.”

“I don’t feel brave. I feel scared.”

“Then I know it to be true. Thank you, Merlin. Thank you for not leaving us.”

“There’s a catch,” Merlin said. “If I’m going to be any help to you, I have to see this whole thing out.”

* * * *

Malkoha was the last to see him before he entered frostwatch. “Twenty years,” Merlin said, indicating the settings, which had been recalibrated in Lecythus time units. “In all that time, you don’t need to worry about me. Tyrant will take care of everything I need. If there’s a problem, the ship will either wake me or it will send out the proctors to seek assistance.”

“You have never spoken of proctors before,” Malkoha replied.

“Small mechanical puppets. They have very little intelligence of their own, so they won’t be able to help you with anything creative. But you needn’t be alarmed by them.”

“In twenty years, must we wake you?”

“No, the ship will take care of that as well. When the time is ready, the ship will allow you aboard. I may be a little groggy at first, but I’m sure you’ll make allowances.”

“I may not be around in twenty years,” Malkoha said gravely. “I am sixty years old now.”

“I’m sure there’s still life left in you.”

“If we should encounter a problem, a crisis ...”

“Listen to me,” Merlin said, with sudden emphasis. “You need to understand one very important thing. I am not a god. My body is much the same as yours, our life spans very similar. That’s the way we did things in the Cohort: immortality through our deeds, rather than flesh and blood. The frostwatch casket can give me a few dozen years over a normal human life span, but it can’t give me eternal life. If you keep waking me, I won’t live long enough to help you when things get really tough. If there is a crisis, you can knock on the ship three times. But I’d urge you not to do so unless things are truly dire.”

“I will heed your counsel,” Malkoha said.

“Work hard. Work harder than you’ve ever dreamed possible. Time is going to eat up those seventy years faster than you can blink.”

“I know how quickly time can eat years, Merlin.”

“I want to wake to rockets and jet aircraft. Anything less, I’m going to be a disappointed man.”

“We will do our best not to let you down. Sleep well, Merlin. We will take care of you and your ship, no matter what happens.”

Merlin said farewell to Malkoha. When the ship was sealed up he settled himself into the frostwatch casket and commanded Tyrant to put him to sleep.

He didn’t dream.

* * * *

Nobody he recognized was there to greet Merlin when he returned to consciousness. Were it not for their uniforms, which still carried a recognizable form of the Skylanders’ crescent emblem, he could easily believe that he had been abducted by forces from the surface. His visitors crowded around his open casket, faces difficult to make out, his eyes watering against the sudden intrusion of light.

“Can you understand me, Merlin?” asked a woman, with a firm clear voice.

“Yes,” he said, after a moment in which it seemed as if his mouth were still frozen. “I understand you. How long have I—”

“Twenty years, just as you instructed. We had no cause to wake you.”

He pushed himself from the casket, muscles screaming into his brain with the effort. His vision sharpened by degrees. The woman studied him with a cool detachment. She snapped her fingers at someone standing behind her and then passed Merlin a blanket. “Put this around you,” she said.

The blanket had been warmed. He wrapped it around himself with gratitude, and felt some of the heat seep into his old bones. “That was a long one,” he said, his tongue moving sluggishly, making him slur his words. “We don’t usually spend so long.”

“But you’re alive and well.”

“So it would seem.”

“We’ve prepared a reception area in the compound. There’s food and drink, a medical team waiting to look at you. Can you walk?”

“I can try.”

Merlin tried. His legs buckled under him before he reached the door. They would regain strength in time, but for now he needed help. They must have anticipated his difficulties, because a wheelchair was waiting at the base of Tyrant’s boarding ramp, accompanied by an orderly to push it.

“Before you ask,” the woman said, “Malkoha is dead. I’m sorry to have to tell you this.”

Merlin had grown to think of the old man as his only adult friend on Lecythus, and had been counting on his being there when he returned from frostwatch. “When did he die?”

“Fourteen years ago.”

“Force and Wisdom. It must be like ancient history to you.”

“Not to all of us,” the woman said sternly. “I am Minla, Merlin. It may be fourteen years ago, but there isn’t a day when I don’t remember my father and wish he were still with us.”

As he was being propelled across the apron, Merlin looked up at the woman’s face and compared it against his memories of the little girl he had known twenty years ago. At once he saw the similarity and knew that she was telling the truth. In that moment he felt the first visceral sense of the time that had passed.

“You can’t imagine how odd this makes me feel, Minla. Do you remember me?”

“I remember a man I used to talk to in a room. It was a long time ago.”

“Not to me. Do you remember the stone?”

She looked at him oddly. “The stone?”

“You asked your father to give it to me, when I was due to leave Lecythus.”

“Oh, that thing,” Minla said. “Yes, I remember it now. It was the one that belonged to Dowitcher.”

“It’s very pretty. You can have it back if you like.”

“Keep it, Merlin. It doesn’t mean anything to me now, just as it shouldn’t have meant anything to my father. I’m embarrassed to have given it to you.”

“I’m sorry about Malkoha.”

“He died well, Merlin. Flying another hazardous mission for us, in very bad weather. This time it was our turn to deliver medicine to our allies. We were now making antibiotics for all the landmasses in the Skyland alliance, thanks to the process you gave us. My father flew one of the last consignments. He made it to the other landmass, but his plane was lost on the return trip.”

“He was a good man. I only knew him a short while, but I think it was enough to tell.”

“He often spoke of you, Merlin. I think he hoped you might teach him more than you did.”

“I did what I could. Too much knowledge would have overwhelmed you: you wouldn’t have known where to start, or how to put the pieces together.”

“Perhaps you should have trusted us more.”

“You said you had no cause to wake me. Does that mean you made progress?”

“Decide for yourself.”

He followed Minla’s instruction. The area around Tyrant was still recognizable as the old military compound, with many of the original buildings still present, albeit enlarged and adapted. But most of the dirigible docking towers were gone, as were most of the dirigibles themselves. Ranks of new aircraft now occupied the area where the towers and airships had been before, bigger and heavier than anything Merlin had seen before. The swept-back geometry of their wings, the angle of the leading edge, the rakish curve of their tailplanes, all owed something to the shape of Tyrant in atmospheric-entry mode. Clearly the natives had been more observant than he’d given them credit for. Merlin knew he shouldn’t have been surprised; he’d given them the blueprints for the jet turbine, after all. But it was still something of a shock to see his plans made concrete, so closely to the way he had imagined them.

“Fuel is always a problem,” Minla said. “We have the advantage of height, but little else. We rely on our scattered allies on the ground, together with raiding expeditions to Shadowland fuel bunkers.” She pointed to one of the remaining airships. “Our cargo dirigibles can lift fuel all the way back to the Skylands.”

“Are you still at war?” Merlin asked, though her statement rather confirmed it.

“There was a ceasefire shortly after my father’s death. It didn’t last long.”

“You people could achieve a lot more if you pooled your efforts,” Merlin said. “In seventy-make that fifty-years you’re going to be facing collective annihilation. It isn’t going to make a damned bit of difference what flag you’re saluting.”

“Thank you for the lecture. If it means so much to you, why don’t you fly down to the other side and talk to them?”

“I’m an explorer, not a diplomat.”

“You could always try.”

Merlin sighed heavily. “I did try once. Not long after I left the Cohort ... there was a world named Exoletus, about the same size as Lecythus. I thought there might be something on Exoletus connected with my quest. I was wrong, but it was reason enough to land and try and talk to the locals.”

“Were they at war?”

“Just like you lot. Two massive power blocs, chemical weapons, the works. I hopped from hemisphere to hemisphere, trying to play the peacemaker, trying to knock their heads together to make them see sense. I laid the whole cosmic perspective angle on them: how there was a bigger universe out there, one they could be a part of if they only stopped squabbling. How they were going to have to be a part of it whether they liked it or not, when the Huskers came calling, but if they could only be ready for that—”

“It didn’t work.”

“I made things twenty times worse. I caught them at a time when they were inching toward some kind of ceasefire. By the time I left, they were going at it again hell-for-leather. Taught me a valuable lesson, Minla. It isn’t my job to sprinkle fairy dust on a planet and get everyone to live happily ever after. No one gave me the tool kit for that. You have to work these things out for yourself.”

She looked only slightly disappointed. “So you’ll never try again?”

“Burn your fingers once, you don’t put them into the fire twice.”

“Well,” Minla said, “before you think too harshly of us, it was the Skylands that took the peace initiative in the last ceasefire.”

“So what went wrong?”

“The Shadowlands invaded one of our allied surface territories. They were interested in mining a particular ore, known to be abundant in that area.”

Depressed as he was by news that the war was still rumbling on, Merlin forced his concentration back onto the larger matter of preparations for the catastrophe. “You’ve done well with these aircraft. Doubtless you’ll have gained expertise in high-altitude flight. Have you gone transonic yet?”

“In prototypes. We’ll have an operational squadron of supersonic aircraft in the air within two years, subject to fuel supplies.”

“Rocketry?”

“That too. It’s probably easier if I show you.”

Minla let the orderly wheel him into one of the compound buildings. A long window ran along one wall, overlooking a larger space. Though the interior had been enlarged and repartitioned, Merlin still recognized the tactical room. The old wall map, with its cumbersome push-around plaques, had been replaced by a clattering electromechanical display board. Operators wore headsets and sat at desks behind huge streamlined machines, their gray metal cases ribbed with cooling flanges. They were staring at small flickering slate-blue screens, whispering into microphones.

Minla removed a tranche of photographs from a desk and passed them to Merlin for his inspection. They were black-and-white images of the Skyland airmass, shot from increasing altitude, until the curve of Lecythus’s horizon became pronounced.

“Our sounding rockets have penetrated to the very edge of the atmosphere,” Minla said. “Our three-stage units now have the potential to deliver a tactical payload to any unobstructed point on the surface.”

“What would count as a ‘tactical payload’?” Merlin asked warily.

“It’s academic. I’m merely illustrating the progress we’ve made in your absence.”

“I’m cheered.”

“You encouraged us to make these improvements,” Minla said chidingly. “You can hardly blame us if we put them to military use in the meantime. The catastrophe-as you’ve so helpfully pointed out-is still fifty years in the future. We have our own affairs to deal with in the meantime.”

“I wasn’t trying to create a war machine. I was just giving you the stepping stones you needed to get into space.”

“Well, as you can doubtless judge for yourself, we still have a distance to go. Our analysts say that we’ll have a natural satellite in orbit within fifteen years, maybe ten. Definitely so by the time you wake from your next bout of sleep. But that’s still not the same as moving fifty thousand people out of the system, or however many it needs to be. For that we’re going to need more guidance from you, Merlin.”

“You seem to be doing very well with what I’ve already given you.”

Minla’s tone, cold until then, softened perceptibly. “We’ll get you fed. Then the doctors would like to look you over, if only for their own notebooks. We’re glad to have you back with us, Merlin. My father would have been so happy to see you again.”

“I’d like to have spoken with him again.”

After a moment, Minla said: “How long will you stay with us, until you go back to sleep again?”

“Months, at least. Maybe a year. Long enough to know that you’re on the right track, and that I can trust you to make your own progress until I’m awake again.”

“There’s a lot we need to talk about. I hope you have a strong appetite for questions.”

“I have a stronger appetite for breakfast.”

Minla had him wheeled out of the room into another part of the compound. There he was examined by Skyland medical officials, a process that involved much poking and prodding and whispered consultation. They were interested in Merlin not just because he was a human who had been born on another planet, but because they hoped to learn some secret of frostwatch from his metabolism. Then they were done and Merlin was allowed to wash, clothe himself, and finally eat. Skyland food was austere compared to what he was used to aboard Tyrant, but in his present state he would have wolfed down anything.

There was to be no rest for him that day. More medical examinations followed, including some that were clearly designed to test the functioning of his nervous system. They poured cold water into his ears, shone lights into his eyes, and tapped him with various small hammers. Merlin endured it all with stoic good grace. They would find nothing odd about him because in all significant respects he was biologically identical to the people administering the examinations. But he imagined the tests would give the medical staff much to write about in the coming months.

Minla was waiting for him afterward, together with a roomful of Skyland officials. He recognized two or three of them as older versions of people he had already met, grayed and lined by twenty years of war-there was Triller, Jacana, and Sibia, Triller now missing an eye-but most of the faces were new to him. Merlin took careful note of the newcomers: those would be the people he’d be dealing with next time.

“Perhaps we should get to business,” Minla said, with crisp authority. She was easily the youngest person in the room, but if she didn’t outrank everyone present, she at least had their tacit respect. “Merlin, welcome back to the Skylands. You’ve learned something of what has happened in your absence: the advances we’ve made, the ongoing condition of war. Now we must talk about the future.”

Merlin nodded agreeably. “I’m all for the future.”

“Sibia?” Minla asked, directing a glance at the older woman.

“The industrial capacity of the Skylands, even when our surface allies are taken into account, is insufficient for the higher purpose of safeguarding the survival of our planetary culture,” Sibia answered, sounding exactly as if she were reading from a strategy document, even though she was looking Merlin straight in the eye. “As such, it is our military duty-our moral imperative—to bring all of Lecythus under one authority, a single Planetary Government. Only then will we have the means to save more than a handful of souls.”

“I agree wholeheartedly,” Merlin said. “That’s why I applaud your earlier ceasefire. It’s just a pity it didn’t last.”

“The ceasefire was always fragile,” Jacana said. “The wonder is that it lasted as long as it did. That’s why we need something more permanent.”

Merlin felt a prickling sensation under his collar. “I guess you have something in mind.”

“Complete military and political control of the Shadowlands,” Sibia replied. “They will never work with us, unless they become us.”

“You can’t believe how frightening that sounds.”

“It’s the only way,” Minla said. “My father’s regime explored all possible avenues to find a peaceful settlement, one that would allow our two blocs to work in unison. He failed.”

“So instead you want to crush them into submission.”

“If that’s what it takes,” Minla said. “Our view is that the Shadowland administration is vulnerable to collapse. It would only take a single clear-cut demonstration of our capability to bring about a coup, followed by a negotiated surrender.”

“And this clear-cut demonstration?”

“That’s why we need your assistance, Merlin. Twenty years ago, you revealed certain truths to my father.” Before he could say anything, Minla produced one of the sheets Merlin had given to Malkoha and his colleagues. “It’s all here in black-and-white. The equivalence of mass and energy. The constancy of the speed of light. The interior structure of the atom. Your remark that our sun contains a ‘nuclear-burning core.’ All these things were a spur to us. Our best minds have grappled with the implications of these ideas for twenty years. We see how the energy of the atom could carry us into space, and beyond range of our sun. We now have an inkling of what else they imply.”

“Do tell,” Merlin said, an ominous feeling in his belly.

“If mass can be converted into energy, then the military implications are startling. By splitting the atom, or even forcing atoms to merge, we believe that we can construct weapons of almost incalculable destructive force. The demonstration of one of these devices would surely be enough to collapse the Shadowland administration.”

Merlin shook his head slowly. “You’re heading up a blind alley. It isn’t possible to make practical weapons using atomic energy. There are too many difficulties.”

Minla studied him with an attentiveness that Merlin found quite unsettling. “I don’t believe you,” she said.

“Believe me or don’t believe me, it’s up to you.”

“We are certain that these weapons can be made. Our own research lines would have given them to us sooner or later.”

Merlin leaned back in his seat. He knew when there was no point in maintaining a bluff.

“Then you don’t need me.”

“But we do. Most urgently. The Shadowland administration also has its bright minds, Merlin. Their interest in those ore reserves I mentioned earlier ... either there have been intelligence links, or they have independently arrived at similar conclusions to us. They are trying to make a weapon.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“We can’t afford to be wrong. We may own the sky, but our situation is dependent upon access to those fuel reserves. If one of our allies was targeted with an atomic weapon ...” Minla left the sentence unfinished, her point adequately made.

“Then build your bomb,” Merlin said.

“We need it sooner rather than later. That is where you come in.” Now Minla produced another sheet of paper, nicking it across the table in Merlin’s direction. “We have enough of the ore,” she said. “We also have the means to refine it. This is our best guess for a design.”

Merlin glanced at the illustration long enough to see a complicated diagram of concentric circles, like the plan for an elaborate garden maze. It was intricately annotated in machine-printed Lecythus B.

“I won’t help you.”

“Then you may as well leave us now,” Minla said. “We’ll build our bomb in our own time, without your help, and use it to secure peace for the whole world. Maybe that will happen quickly enough that we can begin redirecting the industrial effort toward the evacuation. Maybe it won’t. But what happens will be on our terms, not yours.”

“Understand one thing,” Jacana said, with a hawkish look on his face. “The day will come when atomic weapons are used. Left to our own devices, we’ll build weapons to use against our enemy below. But by the time we have that capability, they’ll more than likely have the means to strike back, if they don’t hit us first. That means there’ll be a series of exchanges, an escalation, rather than a single decisive demonstration. Give us the means to make a weapon now and we’ll use it in such a way that the civilian casualties are minimized. Withhold it from us, and you’ll have the blood of a million dead on your hands.”

Merlin almost laughed. “I’ll have blood on my hands because I didn’t show you how to kill yourselves?”

“You began this,” Minla said. “You already gave us secret knowledge of the atom. Did you imagine we were so stupid, so childlike, that we wouldn’t put two and two together?”

“Maybe I thought you had more common sense. I was hoping you’d develop atomic rockets, not atomic bombs.”

“This is our world, Merlin, not yours. We only get one chance at controlling its fate. If you want to help us, you must give us the means to overwhelm the enemy.”

“If I give you this, millions will die.”

“A billion will perish if Lecythus is not unified. You must do it, Merlin. Either you side with us, to the full extent, or we all die.”

Merlin closed his eyes, wishing a moment alone, a moment to puzzle over the ramifications. In desperation, he saw a possible solution: one he’d rejected before but was now willing to advance. “Show me the military targets on the surface that you would most like to eradicate,” he said. “I’ll have Tyrant take them out, using charm-torps.”

“We’ve considered asking for your direct military assistance,” Minla said. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for us. Our enemy already know something of your existence: it was always going to be a difficult secret to hide, especially given the reach of the Shadowlander espionage network. They’d be impressed by your weapons, that much we don’t doubt. But they also know that our hold on you is tenuous, and that you could just as easily refuse to attack a given target. For that reason you do not make a very effective deterrent. Whereas if they knew that we controlled a devastating weapon ...” Minla looked at the other Skyland officials. “There could be no doubt in their minds that we might do the unthinkable.”

“I’m really beginning to wonder whether I shouldn’t have landed on the ground instead.”

“You’d be sitting in a very similar room, having a very similar conversation,” Minla said.

“Your father would be ashamed of you.”

Minla’s look made Merlin feel as if he were something she’d found under her shoe. “My father meant well. He served his people to the best of his abilities. But he had the luxury of knowing he was going to die before the world’s end. I don’t.”

* * * *

Merlin was aboard Tyrant, alone except for Minla, while he prepared to enter frostwatch again. Eight frantic months had passed since his revival, with the progress attaining a momentum of its own that Merlin felt sure would carry through to his next period of wakefulness.

“I’ll be older when we meet again,” Minla said. “You’ll barely have aged a day, and your memories of this day will be as sharp as if it happened yesterday. Is that something you ever get used to?”

Not for the first time, Merlin smiled tolerantly. “I was born on a world not very different from Lecythus, Minla. We didn’t have landmasses floating through the sky, we didn’t have global wars, but in many respects we were quite alike. Everything that you see here-this ship, this frostwatch cabinet, these souvenirs-would once have seemed unrecognizably strange to me. I got used to it, though. Just as you’d get used to it, if you had the same experiences.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“I am. I met a very intelligent girl twenty years ago, and believe me, I’ve met some intelligent people in my time.” Merlin brightened, remembering the thing he’d meant to show Minla. “That stone you had your father give me ... the one we talked about just after I came out of the cabinet?”

“The worthless thing Dowitcher convinced my father was of cosmic significance?”

“It wasn’t worthless to you. You must have liked it, or you wouldn’t have given it to me in return for my flowers.”

“The flowers,” Minla said thoughtfully. “I’d almost forgotten them. I used to look forward to them so much, the sound of your voice as you told me stories I couldn’t understand but which still managed to sound so significant. You made me feel special, Merlin. I’d treasure the flowers afterward and go to sleep imagining the strange, beautiful places they’d come from. I’d cry when they died, but then you’d always bring new ones.”

“I used to like the look on your face.”

“Tell me about the stone,” she said, after a silence.

“I had Tyrant run an analysis on it. Just in case there was something significant about it, something neither you, I, nor your father had spotted.”

“And?” Minla asked, with a note of fearfulness.

“I’m afraid it’s just a piece of whetstone.”

“Whetstone?”

“Very hard. It’s the kind you use for sharpening knives. It’s a common enough kind of stone on a planet like this one, wherever you have tides, shorelines, and oceans.” Merlin had fished out the stone earlier; now he held it in his hand, palm open, like a lucky coin. “You see that fine patterning of lines? This kind of stone was laid down in shallow tidal water. Whenever the sea rushed in, it would carry a suspension of silt that would settle out and form a fine layer on the surface of the stone. The next time the tide came in, you’d get a second layer. Then a third, and so on. Each layer would only take a few hours to be formed, although it might take hundreds of millions of years for it to harden into stone.”

“So it’s very old.”

Merlin nodded. “Very old indeed.”

“But not of any cosmic significance.”

“I’m sorry. I just thought you might want to know. Dowitcher was playing a game with your father after all. I think Malkoha had more or less guessed that for himself.”

For a moment Merlin thought that his explanation had satisfied Minla, enabling her to shut tight that particular chapter of her life. But instead she just frowned. “The lines aren’t regular, though. Why do they widen and then narrow?”

“Tides vary,” Merlin said, suddenly feeling himself on less solid ground. “Deep tides carry more sediment. Shallow tides less. I suppose.”

“Storms raise high tides. That would explain the occasional thick band. But other than that, the tides on Lecythus are very regular. I know this from my education.”

“Then your education’s wrong, I’m afraid. A planet like this, with a large moon ...” Merlin left the sentence unfinished. “Spring tides and deep tides, Minla. No arguing with it.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“Do you want the stone back?” he asked.

“Keep it, if it amuses you.”

He closed his hand around the stone. “It still meant something to you when you gave it to me. It’ll always mean something to me for that reason.”

“Thank you for not leaving us. If my stone kept you here, it served a useful purpose.”

“I’m glad I chose to stay. I just hope I haven’t done more harm than good, with the things I showed you.”

“That again,” Minla said with a weary sigh. “You worry that we’re going to blow ourselves to bits, just because you showed us the clockwork inside the atom.”

“It’s nasty clockwork.”

He had seen enough progress, enough evidence of wisdom and independent ingenuity, to know that the Skyland forces would have a working atomic bomb within two years. By then, their rocket program would have given them a delivery system able to handle the cumbersome payload of that primitive device. Even if the rocket fell behind schedule, they only had to wait until the aerial landmass drifted over a Shadowland target.

“I can’t stop you making weapons,” Merlin said. “All I ask is that you use them wisely. Just enough to negotiate a victory, and then no more. Then forget about bombs and start thinking about atomic rockets.”

Minla looked at him pityingly. “You worry that we’re becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn’t make us any worse.”

“That strain of bacterial meningitis was very infectious,” Merlin said. “I know: I’ve run it through Tyrant’s medical analyzer. You were already having difficulties with supplies of antibiotics. If I hadn’t landed, if I hadn’t offered to make that medicine for you, your military effort might have collapsed within months. The Shadowlands would have won by default. There wouldn’t be any need to introduce atomic bombs into the world.”

“But we’d still need the rockets.”

“Different technology. The one doesn’t imply the other.”

“Merlin, listen to me. I’m sorry that we’re asking you to make these difficult moral choices. But for us it’s about only one thing: species survival. If you hadn’t dropped out of the sky, the Waynet would still be on its way to us, ready to slice our star in two. After that happened, you had no choice but to do everything possible to save us, no matter how bad a taste it leaves in your mouth.”

“I have to live with myself when this is all over.”

“You’ll have nothing to be ashamed of. You’ve made all the right decisions so far. You’ve given us a future.”

“I need to clear up a few things for you,” Merlin said. “It isn’t a friendly galaxy. The creatures that smashed your sky are still out there. Your ancestors forged the armored sky to hide from them, to make Lecythus look like an airless world. The Huskers were hunting down my own people before I left to work on my own. It isn’t going to be plain sailing.”

“Survival is better than death. Always and forever.”

Merlin sighed: he knew that this conversation had run its course, that they had been over these things a thousand times already and were no closer to mutual understanding. “When I wake up again, I want to see lights in the sky.”

“When I was a girl,” Minla said, “long before you came, my father would tell me stories of people traveling through the void, looking down on Lecythus. He’d put in jokes and little rhymes, things to make me laugh. Under it all, though, he had a serious message. He’d show me the pictures in my books, of the great ship that brought us to Lecythus. He said we’d come from the stars and one day we’d find a way to go back there. It seemed like a fantasy when I was a little girl, something that would never come to pass in the real world. Yet now it’s happening, just as my father always said it would. If I live long enough, I’ll know what it’s like to leave Lecythus behind. But I’ll be dead long before we ever reach another world, or see any of the wonders you’ve known.”

For an instant Minla was a girl again, not a driven military leader. Something in her face spoke to Merlin across the years, breaching the defenses he had carefully assembled.

“Let me show you something.”

He took her into Tyrant’s rear compartment and revealed the matte-black cone of the syrinx, suspended in its cradle. At Merlin’s invitation, Minla was allowed to stroke its mirror-smooth surface. She reached out her hand gingerly, as if expecting to touch something very hot or very cold. At the last instant her fingertips grazed the ancient artifact and then held the contact, daringly.

“It feels old,” she said. “I can’t say why.”

“It does. I’ve often felt the same thing.”

“Old and very heavy. Heavier than it has any right to be. And yet when I look at it, it’s somehow not quite there, as if I’m looking at the space where it used to be.”

“That’s exactly how it looks to me.”

Minla withdrew her touch. “What is it?”

“We call it a syrinx. It’s not a weapon. It’s more like a key or a passport.”

“What does it do?”

“It lets my ship use the Waynet. In their time the Waymakers must have made billions of these things, enough to fuel the commerce of a million worlds. Imagine that, Minla: millions of stars bound by threads of accelerated spacetime, each thread strung with thousands of glittering ships rushing to and fro, drops of honey on a thread of silk, each ship moving so close to the speed of light that time itself slowed almost to stillness. You could dine on one world, ride your ship to the Waynet and then take supper on some other world, under the falling light of another sun. A thousand years might have passed while you were riding the flow, but that didn’t matter. The Waymakers forged an empire where a thousand years was just a lazy afternoon, a time to put off plans for another day.” Merlin looked sadly at Minla. “That was the idea, anyway.”

“And now?”

“We breakfast in the ruins, barely remember the glory that was, and scavenge space for the handful of still-functioning syrinxes.”

“Could you take it apart, find out how it works?”

“Only if I felt suicidal. The Waymakers protected their secrets very well.”

“Then it is valuable.”

“Incalculably so.”

Minla stroked it again. “It feels dead.”

“It just isn’t active yet. When the Waynet comes closer, the syrinx will sense it. That’s when we’ll really know it’s time to get out of here.” Merlin forced a smile. “But by then we’ll be well on our way.”

“Now that you’ve shown me this secret, aren’t you worried that we’ll take it from you?”

“The ship wouldn’t let you. And what use would it be to you anyway?”

“We could make our own ship, and use your syrinx to escape from here.”

Merlin tried not to sound too condescending. “Any ship you built would smash itself to splinters as soon as it touched the Waynet, even with the syrinx to help it. And you wouldn’t achieve much anyway. Ships that use the Waynet can’t be very large.”

“Why is that?”

Merlin shrugged. “They don’t need to be. If it only takes a day or two of travel to get anywhere-remember what I said about clocks slowing down-then you don’t need to haul all your provisions with you, even if you’re crossing to the other side of the galaxy.”

“But could a bigger ship enter the Waynet, if it had to?”

“The entry stresses wouldn’t allow it. It’s like riding the rapids.” Merlin didn’t wait to see if Minla was following him. “The syrinx creates a path that you can follow, a course where the river is easier. But you still need a small boat to squeeze around the obstacles.”

“Then no one ever made larger ships, even during the time of the Waymakers?”

“Why would they have needed to?”

“That wasn’t my question, Merlin.”

“It was a long time ago. I don’t have all the answers. And you shouldn’t pin your hopes on the Waynet. It’s the thing that’s trying to kill you, not save you.”

“But when you leave us ... you’ll ride the Waynet, won’t you?”

Merlin nodded. “But I’ll make damned sure I have a head start on the collision.”

“I’m beginning to see how all this must look to you,” Minla said. “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to us, the end of our history itself. To you it’s just a stopover, an incidental adventure. I’m sure there were hundreds of worlds before us, and there’ll be hundreds more. That’s right, isn’t it?”

Merlin bridled. “If I didn’t care about you all, I’d have left twenty years ago.”

“You very nearly did. I know how close you came. My father spoke of it many times, his joy when you changed your mind.”

“I had a change of heart,” Merlin said. “Everyone’s allowed that. You played a part in it, Minla. If you hadn’t told Malkoha to give me that gift ...”

“Then I’m glad I did, if it meant so much.” Minla looked away, something between sadness and fascination on her face. “Merlin, before you sleep. Do something for me.”

“Yes?”

“Make me flowers again. From some world I’ll never ever see. And tell me their story.”

* * * *

The Planetary Government aircraft was a sleek silver flying wing with its own atomic reactor, feeding six engines buried in air-smoothed nacelles. Minla had already led Merlin down a spiral staircase, into an observation cupola set under the thickest part of the wing. Now she touched a brushed-steel panel, causing armored slats to whisk open in rapid sequence. Through the green-tinted blast-proof glass they had an uninterrupted view of the surface rolling by underneath.

The ocean carried no evidence of the war, but there was hardly any stretch of land that hadn’t been touched in some fashion. Merlin saw the rubble-strewn remains of towns and cities, some with the hearts gouged out by kilometer-deep craters. He saw flooded harbors, beginning to be clawed back by the greedy fingers of the sea. He saw swaths of gray-brown land where nothing grew anymore, and where only dead, petrified forests testified to the earlier presence of living things. Atomic weapons had been used in their thousands, by both sides. The Skylanders had been first, though, which was why the weapons had a special name on Lecythus. Because of the shape of the mushroom cloud that accompanied each burst, they called them Minla’s Flowers.

She pointed out the new cities that had been built since the ceasefire. They were depressing to behold: grids of utilitarian blocks, each skull-gray multistory building identical to the others. Spidery highways linked the settlements, but not once did Merlin see any evidence of traffic or commerce.

“We’re not building for posterity,” she said. “None of those buildings have to last more than fifty years, and most of them will be empty long before that. By the time they start crumbling, there’ll be no one alive on Lecythus.”

“You’re surely not thinking of taking everyone with you,” Merlin said.

“Why not? It seemed unthinkable forty years ago. But so did atomic war, and the coming of a single world state. Anything’s within our reach now. With social planning, we can organize matters such that the population shrinks to a tenth of its present size. No children will be allowed to be born in the last twenty years. And we’ll begin moving people into the Space Dormitories long before that.”

Merlin had seen the plans for the dormitories, along with the other elements of Minla’s evacuation program. There was already a small space station in orbit around Lecythus, but it would be utterly dwarfed by the hundred dormitories. The plans called for huge air-filled spheres, each of which would swallow one hundred thousand evacuees, giving a total in-orbit human presence of ten million people. Yet even as the Space Dormitories were being populated, work would be under way on the thousand Exodus Arks that would actually carry the evacuees out of the system. The Arks would be built in orbit, using materials extracted and refined from the moon’s crust. Merlin had already indicated to Minla’s experts that they could expect to find a certain useful isotope of helium in the topsoil of the moon, an isotope that would enable the Arks to be powered by nuclear fusion engines of an ancient and well-tested design.

“Forced birth control, and mass evacuation,” he said, grimacing. “That’s going to take some tough policing. What if people don’t go along with your program?”

“They’ll go along,” Minla said.

“Even if that meant shooting a few, to make a point?”

“Millions have already died, Merlin. If it takes a few more to guarantee the efficient execution of the evacuation program, I see that as a price worth paying.”

“You can’t push human society that hard. It snaps.”

“There’s no such thing as society,” Minla told him.

Presently she had the pilot bring them below supersonic speed, and then down to a hovering standstill above what Merlin took to be an abandoned building, perched near the shore amid the remains of what must once have been a great ocean seaport. The flying wing lowered itself on ducted jets, blowing dust and debris in all directions until its landing gear kissed scorched earth and the engines quietened.

“We’ll take a stroll outside,” Minla said. “There’s something I want you to see. Something that will convince you of our seriousness.”

“I don’t need convincing.”

“I want you to see it nonetheless. Take this cloak.” She handed him a surprisingly heavy garment.

“Lead impregnated?”

“Just a precaution. Radiation levels are actually very low in this sector.”

They disembarked via an escalator that had folded down from the flying wing’s belly, accompanied by a detachment of guards. The armed men moved ahead, sweeping the ground with things that looked like metal brooms before ushering Minla and Merlin forward. They followed a winding path through scorched rubble and junk, taking care not to trip over the obstacles and broken ground. Calliope had set during their descent and a biting wind was now howling into land from the sea, setting his teeth on edge. From somewhere in the distance a siren rose and fell on a mournful cycle. Despite Minla’s assurance concerning the radioactivity, Merlin swore he could already feel his skin tingling. Overhead, stars poked through the thinning layer of moonlit clouds.

When at last he looked up, he saw that the solitary building was in fact an enormous stone monument. It towered a hundred meters above the flying wing, stepped like a ziggurat and cut and engraved with awesome precision. Letters in Lecythus A marched in stentorian ranks across the highest vertical face. Beyond the monument, gray-black water lapped at the shattered remains of a promenade. The monument was presumably designed to weather storms, but it would only take one spring tide to submerge its lower flanks completely. Merlin wondered why Minla’s people hadn’t set it on higher ground.

“It’s impressive.”

“There are a hundred monuments like this on Lecythus,” Minla told him, drawing her cloak tighter around herself. “We faced them with whetstone, would you believe it. It turns out to be very good for making monuments, especially when you don’t want the letters to be worn away in a handful of centuries.”

“You built a hundred of these?” Merlin asked.

“That’s just the start. There’ll be a thousand by the time we’re finished. When we are gone, when all other traces of our culture have been erased from time, we hope that at least one of these monuments will remain. Shall I read you the inscription?”

Merlin had still learned nothing of the native writing, and he’d neglected to wear the lenses that would have allowed Tyrant to overlay a translation.

“You’d better.”

“It says that once a great human society lived on Lecythus, in peace and harmony. Then came a message from the stars, a warning that our world was to be destroyed by the fire of the sun itself, or something even worse. So we made preparations to abandon the world that had been our home for so long, and to commence a journey into the outer darkness of interstellar space, looking for a new home in the stars. One day, thousands or tens of thousands after our departure, you, the people who read this message, may find us. For now you are welcome to make of this world what you will. But know that this planet was ours, and it remains ours, and that one day we shall make it our home again.”

“I like the bit about ‘peace and harmony.’”

“History is what we write, not what we remember. Why should we tarnish the memory of our planet by enshrining our less noble deeds?”

“Spoken like a true leader, Minla.”

At that moment one of the guards raised his rifle and projected a line of tracer fire into the middle distance. Something hissed and scurried into the cover of debris.

“We should be leaving,” Minla said. “Regressives come out at night, and some of them are armed.”

“Regressives?”

“Dissident political elements. Suicide cultists who’d rather die on Lecythus than cooperate in the evacuation effort. They’re our problem, Merlin, not yours.”

He’d heard stories about the regressives, but dismissed them as rumor until now. They were the survivors of the war, people who hadn’t submitted eagerly to the iron rule of Minla’s new Planetary Government. Details that didn’t fit into the plan, and which therefore had to be brushed aside or suppressed or given a subhuman name. He pulled the cloak tighter, anxious not to spend a minute longer on the surface than necessary. But even as Minla turned and began walking back to the waiting aircraft-moonlight picked out the elegant sweep of its single great wing-something tugged at him, holding him to the spot.

“Minla,” he called, a crack in his voice.

She stopped and turned around. “What is it, Merlin?”

“I’ve something for you.” He reached under the cloak and fished out the gift she had given him as a girl, holding it before him. He’d had it with him for days, waiting for the moment he hoped would never come.

Impatiently, Minla retraced her steps. “I said we should be leaving. What is it you want to give me?”

He handed her the sliver of whetstone. “A little girl gave me this. I don’t think I know that little girl anymore.”

Minla looked at the stone with a curl of disgust on her face. “That was forty years ago.”

“Not to me. To me it was less than a year. I’ve seen a lot of changes since you gave me that gift.”

“We all have to grow up sometime, Merlin.” For a moment he thought she was going to hand him back the gift, or at least slip it into one of her own pockets. Instead, Minla let it drop to the ground. Merlin reached to pick it up, but it was too late. The stone fell into a dark crack between two shattered paving slabs; Merlin heard the chink as it bounced off something and fell even deeper.

“It’s gone.”

“It was just a silly stone,” Minla said. “That’s all. Now let’s be on our way.”

Merlin looked back at the lapping waters as he followed Minla to the moonlit flying wing. Something about the whetstone, something about tides of that sea, something about the moon itself, kept nagging at the back of his mind. There was a connection, trivial or otherwise, that he was missing.

He was sure it would come to him sooner or later.

* * * *

Minla walked with a stick, clicking its hard metal shaft against the echoing flooring of the station’s observation deck. Illness or injury had disfigured her since their last meeting; she wore her graying hair in a lopsided parting, hanging down almost to the collar on her right side. Merlin could not say for certain what had happened to Minla, since she was careful to turn her face away from him whenever they spoke. But in the days since his revival he had already heard talk of assassination attempts, some of which had apparently come close to succeeding. Minla seemed more stooped and frail than he remembered, as if she had worked every hour of those twenty years.

She interrupted a light beam with her hand, opening the viewing shields. “Behold the Space Dormitories,” she said, declaiming as if she had an audience of thousands rather than a single man standing only a few meters away. “Rejoice, Merlin. You played a part in this.”

Through the window, wheeling with the gentle rotation of the orbital station, the nearest dormitory loomed larger than Lecythus in the sky. The wrinkled gray sphere would soon reach operational pressure, its skin becoming taut. The final sun mirrors were being assembled in place, manipulated by mighty articulated robots. Cargo rockets were coming and going by the minute, while the first wave of evacuees had already taken up residence in the polar holding pens.

Twenty dormitories were ready now; the remaining eighty would come online within two years. Every day, hundreds of atomic rockets lifted from the surface of Lecythus, carrying evacuees-packed into their holds at the maximum possible human storage density, like a kind of three-dimensional jigsaw of flesh and blood-or cargo, in the form of air, water, and prefabricated parts for the other habitats. Each rocket launch deposited more radioactivity into the atmosphere of the doomed world. It was now fatal to breathe that air for more than a few hours, but the slow poisoning of Lecythus was of no concern to the Planetary Government. The remaining surface-bound colonists, those who would occupy the other dormitories when they were ready, awaited transfer in pressurized bunkers, in conditions that were at least as spartan as anything they would have to endure in space. Merlin had offered the services of Tyrant to assist with the evacuation effort, but as efficient and fast as his ship was, it would have made only a token difference to the speed of the exercise.

That was not to say that there were not difficulties, or that the program was exactly on schedule. Merlin was gladdened by the progress he saw in some areas, disheartened in others. Before he slept, the locals had grilled him for help with their prototype atomic rockets, seemingly in expectation that Merlin would provide magic remedies for the failures that had dogged them so far. But Merlin could only help in a limited fashion. He knew the basic principles of building an atomic rocket, but little of the detailed knowledge needed to circumvent a particular problem. Minla’s experts were frustrated, and then dismayed. He tried explaining to them that though an atomic rocket might be primitive compared to the engines in Tyrant, that didn’t mean it was simple, or that its construction didn’t involve many subtle principles. “I know how a sailing ship works,” he said, trying to explain himself. “But that doesn’t mean I could build one myself, or show a master boatbuilder how to improve his craft.”

They wanted to know why he couldn’t just give them the technology in Tyrant itself.

“My ship is capable of self-repair,” he’d said. “But it isn’t capable of making copies of itself. That’s a deep principle, embodied in the logical architecture at a very profound level.”

“Then run off a blueprint of your engines. Let us copy what we need from the plans,” they said.

“That won’t work. The components in Tyrant are manufactured to exacting tolerances, using materials your chemistry can’t even explain, let alone reproduce.”

“Then show us how to improve our manufacturing capability, until we can make what we need.”

“We don’t have time for that. Tyrant was manufactured by a culture that had had over ten thousand years of experience in spacefaring, not to mention knowledge of industrial processes and inventions dating back at least as far again. You can’t cross that kind of gap in fifty years, no matter how hard you might want to.”

“Then what are we supposed to do?”

“Keep trying,” Merlin said. “Keep making mistakes, and learning from them. That’s all any culture ever does.”

That was exactly what they had done, across twenty painful years. The rockets worked now, after a fashion, but they’d arrived late and there was already a huge backlog of people and parts to be shifted into space. The dormitories should have been finished and occupied by now, with work already under way on the fleet of Exodus Arks. But the Arks had met obstacles as well. The lunar colonization program had run into unanticipated difficulties, requiring that the Arks be assembled from components made on Lecythus. The atomic rocket production lines were already running at maximum capacity without the burden of carrying even more tonnage into space.

“This is good,” Merlin told Minla. “But you still need to step things up.”

“We’re aware of that,” she answered testily. “Unfortunately, some of your information proved less than accurate.”

Merlin blinked at her. “It did?”

“Our scientists made a prototype for the fusion drive, according to your plans. Given the limited testing they’ve been able to do, they say it works very well. It wouldn’t be a technical problem to build all the engines we need for the Exodus Arks. So I’m told, at least.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

Her hand gripped the walking stick like a talon. “Fuel, Merlin. You told us we’d find helium 3 in the topsoil of our moon. Well, we didn’t. Not enough to suit our needs, anyway.”

“Then you mustn’t have been looking properly.”

“I assure you we looked, Merlin. You were mistaken. Now we’ll have to find fuel from an alternative source, and redesign our fusion drive accordingly. We’ll need your help, if we aren’t to fall hopelessly behind schedule.” Minla extended a withered hand toward the wheeling view. “To have come so far, to have reached this point, and then failed ... that would be worse than having never tried at all, don’t you think?”

Chastened, Merlin scratched at his chin. “I’ll do what I can. Let me talk to the fusion engineers.”

“I’ve scheduled a meeting. They’re very anxious to talk to you.” Minla paused. “There’s something you should know, though. They’ve seen you make a mistake. They’ll still be interested in what you have to say. But don’t expect blind acceptance of your every word. They know you’re human now.”

“I never said I wasn’t.”

“You didn’t, no. I’ll give you credit for that. But for a little while some of us allowed ourselves to believe it.”

Minla turned and walked away, the tap of her stick echoing into the distance.

* * * *

As space wars went, it was brief and relatively tame, certainly by comparison with the awesome battles delineated in the Cohort’s pictorial history. The timeworn frescoes on the swallowships commemorated engagements where entire solar systems were reduced to mere tactical details, hills or ditches in the terrain of a much larger strategic landscape, and where the participants—human and Husker both-were moving at significant fractions of the speed of light and employing relativistic weapons of world-shattering destructive potential. A single skirmish could eat up many centuries of planetary time, whole lifetimes from the point of view of a starships crew. The war itself was a thing inseparably entwined with recorded history, a monstrous choking structure with its roots reaching into the loam of deep time, and whose end must be assumed (by all except Merlin, at least) to lie in the unimaginably remote future.

Here, the theater of conflict was considerably less than half a light-second in diameter, encompassing only the immediate space around Lecythus, with its girdle of half-finished dormitories and Exodus Arks. The battle lasted barely a dozen hours, between first and last detonation. With the exception of Merlin’s own late intervention, no weapons more potent than hydrogen bombs were deployed. Horrific, certainly, but possessed of a certain genteel precision compared to the weapons that had consumed Plenitude.

It began with a surprise strike from the surface, using a wave of commandeered atomic rockets. It seemed that the Regressives had gained control of one of the rocket-assembly-and-launch complexes. The rockets had no warheads, but that didn’t matter: kinetic energy, and the explosive force stored in their atomic engines, was still enough to inflict havoc on their targets. The weapons had been aimed with surprising accuracy. The first wave destroyed half of the unfinished dormitories, inflicting catastrophic damage on many of the others. By the time the second wave was rising, orbital defenses had sprung into action, but by then it was too late to intercept more than a handful of the missiles. Many of the atomic rockets were being piloted by suicide crews, steering their charges through Minla’s hastily erected countermeasure screens. By the third hour, the Planetary Government was beginning to retaliate against Regressive elements using atmospheric-entry interceptors, but while they could pick away at enemy fortifications on the ground, they couldn’t penetrate the antimissile cordon around the launch complex itself. Rogue warheads chipped away at the edges of aerial landmasses, sending mountain-sized boulders crashing to the surface. Even as the battle raged, brutal tidal waves ravaged the already-frail coastal communities. As the hours ticked by, Minla’s analysts maintained a grim toll on the total number of surface and orbital casualties. In the fifth and sixth hours, more dormitories fell to the assault. Stray fire accounted for even more losses. A temporary ceasefire in the seventh hour was only caused by the temporary occultation of the launch complex by a medium-sized aerial landmass. When the skies were clear again, the rockets rose up with renewed fury.

“They’ve hit all but one of the Exodus Arks,” Minla said, when the battle was in its ninth hour. “We just had time to move the final ship out of range of the atomics. But if they find a way to increase their reach, by eliminating more payload mass ...” She turned her face from his. “It’ll all have been for nothing, Merlin. They’ll have won, and the last sixty years may as well have not happened.”

He felt preternaturally calm, knowing exactly what was coming. “What do you want me to do?”

“Intervene,” Minla said. “Use whatever force is merited.”

“I offered once. You said no.”

“You changed your mind once. Now I change mine.”

Merlin went to Tyrant. He ordered the ship to deliver a concentrated charm-torp salvo against the compromised rocket facility, bringing more energy to bear on that one tiny area of land than had been deployed in all the years of the atomic wars. There was no need for him to accompany his ship; like a well-trained dog, Tyrant was perfectly capable of carrying out his orders without direct supervision.

They watched the spectacle from orbit. When the electric-white fire erupted on the horizon of Lecythus, brightening that entire limb of the planet in the manner of a stuttering cold sunrise, Merlin felt Minla’s hand tighten around his own. For all her frailty, for all that the years had taken from her, there remained astonishing steel in that grip. “Thank you,” she said. “You may just have saved us all.”

* * * *

It had been ten years.

Lecythus and its sun now lay many light-weeks to stern. The one remaining Exodus Ark had reached five percent of the speed of light. In sixty years-faster, if the engine could be improved-it would streak into another system, one that might offer the possibility of landfall. It flew alongside the gossamer line of the Waynet, using the tube as cover from Husker long-range sensors. The Exodus Ark carried only twelve hundred exiles, few of whom would live long enough to see another world.

The hospital was near the core of the ship, safely distant from the sleeting energies of interstellar radiation or the exotic emissions of the Waynet. Many of its patients were veterans of the Regressive War, victims of the viciously ingenious injuries wrought by the close conjunction of vacuum and heat, radiation and kinetic energy. Most of them would be dead by the time the fusion engine was silenced for cruise phase. For now they were being afforded the care appropriate to war heroes, even those who screamed bloodcurdling pleas for the painkilling mercy of euthanasia.

In a soundproofed private annex of that same complex, Minla also lay in the care of machines. This time the assassins had come closer than ever before, and they had very nearly achieved their objective. Yet she’d survived, and the prognosis for a complete recovery-so Merlin was informed-was deemed higher than seventy-five percent. More than could be said of Minla’s aides, injured in the same attack, but they were at least receiving the best possible care in Tyrant’s frostwatch cabinets. The exercise was, Merlin knew, akin to knitting together human-shaped sculptures from a bloody stew of meat and splintered bone, and then hoping that those sculptures would retain some semblance of mind. Minla would have presented no challenge at all, but the Planetary Director had declined the offer of frostwatch care herself, preferring to give up her place to one of her underlings. Knowing that, Merlin allowed himself a momentary flicker of empathy.

He walked into the room, coughing to announce himself. “Hello, Minla.”

She lay on her back, her head against the pillow, though she was not asleep. Slowly she turned to face Merlin as he approached. She looked very old, very tired, but she still found the energy to form a smile.

“It’s so good of you to come. I was hoping, but ... I didn’t dare ask. I know how busy you’ve been with the engine upgrade study.”

“I could hardly not pay you a visit. Even though I had a devil of a job persuading your staff to let me through.”

“They’re too protective of me. I know my own strength, Merlin. I’ll get through this.”

“I believe you would.”

Mink’s gaze settled on his hand. “Are those for me?”

He had a bouquet of alien flowers. They were of a peculiar dark hue, a shade that ought to have appeared black in the room’s subdued gold lighting yet which was clearly and unmistakably purple, revealed by its own soft inner illumination. They had the look of a detail that had been hand-tinted in a black-and-white photograph, so that it appeared to float above the rest of the image.

“Of course,” Merlin said. “I always bring flowers, don’t I?”

“You always used to. Then you stopped.”

“Perhaps it’s time to start again.”

He set them by her bedside, in the watered vase that was already waiting. They were not the only flowers in the room, but the purple ones seemed to suck the very color from the others.

“They’re very beautiful,” Minla said. “It’s like I’ve never seen anything precisely that color before. It’s as if there’s a whole circuit in my brain that’s never been activated until now.”

“I chose them especially. They’re famous for their beauty.”

Minla lifted her head from the pillow, her eyes brightening with curiosity. “Now you’ll have to tell me where they’re from.”

“It’s a long story.”

“That never stopped you before.”

“A world called Lacertine. It’s ten thousand light-years from here; many days of Shiptime, even in the Waynet. I don’t even know if it still exists.”

“Tell me about Lacertine,” she said, pronouncing the name of the world with her usual scrupulousness.

“It’s a very beautiful planet, orbiting a hot blue star. They say the planet must have been moved into its present orbit by the Waymakers, from another system entirely. The seas and skies are a shimmering electric blue. The forests are a dazzle of purple and violet and pink; colors that you’ve only ever seen when you close your eyes against the sun and see patterns behind your eyelids. White citadels rise above the tree line, towers linked by a filigree of delicate bridges.”

“Then there are people on Lacertine?”

Merlin thought of the occupants, and nodded. “Adapted, of course. Everything that grows on Lacertine was bioengineered to tolerate the scalding light from the sun. They say if something can grow there, it can grow almost anywhere.”

“Have you been there?”

He shook his head ruefully. “I’ve never been within a thousand light-years of the place.”

“I’ll never see it. Nor any of the other places you’ve told me about.”

“There are places I’ll never see. Even with the Waynet, I’m still just one human man, with one human life. Even the Waymakers didn’t live long enough to glimpse more than a fraction of their empire.”

“It must make you very sad.”

“I take each day as it comes. I’d rather take good memories from one world, than fret about the thousand I’ll never see.”

“You’re a wise man,” Minla said. “We were lucky to get you.”

Merlin smiled. He was silent for many moments, letting Minla enjoy the last calmness of mind she would ever know. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said eventually.

She must have heard something in his tone of voice. “What, Merlin?”

“There’s a good chance you’re all going to die.”

Her tone became sharp. “We don’t need you to remind us of the risks.”

“I’m talking about something that’s going to happen sooner rather than later. The ruse of shadowing the Waynet didn’t work. It was the best thing to do, but there was always a chance ...” Merlin spread his hands in exaggerated apology, as if there had ever been something he could have done about it. “Tyrant’s detected a Husker attack swarm, six elements lying a light-month ahead of you. You don’t have time to steer or slow down. They’d shadow every move you made, even if you tried to shake them off.”

“You promised us—”

“I promised you nothing. I just gave you the best advice I could. If you hadn’t shadowed the Waynet, they’d have found you even sooner.”

“We aren’t using the ramscoop design. You said we’d be safe if we stuck to fusion motors. The electromagnetic signature—”

“I said you’d be safer. There were never ironclad guarantees.”

“You lied to us.” Minla turned suddenly spiteful. “I never trusted you.”

“I did all in my power to save you.”

“Then why are you standing there looking so calm, when you know we’re going to die?” But before Merlin had time to answer, Minla had seen the answer for herself. “Because you can leave,” she said, nodding at her own percipience. “You have your ship, and a syrinx. You can slip into the Waynet and outrun the enemy.”

“I’m leaving,” Merlin said. “But I’m not running.”

“Aren’t they one and the same?”

“Not this time. I’m going back to Plenitude, I mean Lecythus, to do what I can for the people we left behind. The people you condemned to death.”

“Me, Merlin?”

“I examined the records of the Regressive War: not just the official documents, but Tyrant’s own data logs. And I saw what I should have seen at the time, but didn’t. It was a ruse. It was too damned easy, the way they took control of that rocket factory. You let them, Minla.”

“I did nothing of the kind.”

“You knew the whole evacuation project was never going to be ready on time. The Space Dormitories were behind schedule, there were problems with the Exodus Arks ...”

“Because you told us falsehoods about the helium in the moon’s soil.”

Merlin raised a warning hand. “We’ll get to that. The point is, your plans were in tatters. But you could still have completed more dormitories and ships, if you’d been willing to leave the system a little later. You could still have saved more people than you did, albeit at a slightly increased risk to your own survival. But that wasn’t acceptable. You wanted to leave there and then. So you engineered the whole Regressive attack, set it up as a pretext for an early departure.”

“The Regressives were real!” Minla hissed.

“But you gave them the keys to that rocket silo, and the know-how to target and guide those missiles. Funny how their attack just missed the one station that you were occupying, you and all your political cronies, and that you managed to move the one Exodus Ark to safety just in time. Damned convenient, Minla.”

“I’ll have you shot for this, Merlin.”

“Good luck. Try laying a hand on me, and see how far it gets you. My ship’s listening in on this conversation. It can put proctors into this room in a matter of seconds.”

“And the moon, Merlin? Do you have an excuse for the error that cost us so dearly?”

“I don’t know. Possibly. That’s why I’m going back to Lecythus. There are still people on the surface-Regressives, allies, I don’t care. And people you abandoned in orbit as well.”

“They’ll all die. You said it yourself.”

He raised a finger. “If they don’t leave. But maybe there’s way. Again, I should have seen it sooner. But that’s me all the way. I take a long time to put the pieces together, but I get there in the end. Just like Dowitcher, the man who gave your father the whetstone.”

“It was just a stone.”

“So you said. In fact, it was a vital clue to the nature of your world. It took spring tides and neap tides to lay down those patterns. But you said it yourself: Lecythus doesn’t have spring tides and neap tides. Not anymore, at least.”

“I’m sure this means something to you.”

“Something happened to your moon, Minla. When that whetstone formed, your moon was raising tides on Lecythus. When the moon and Calliope were tugging on your seas in the same direction, you got a spring tide. When they were balancing each other, you got a neap tide. Hence the patterning on the whetstone. But now the tides are the same from day to day. Calliope’s still there, so that only leaves the moon. It isn’t exerting the same gravitational pull it used to. Oh, it weighs something-but the effect is much reduced, and if you could skip forward a few hundred million years and examine a piece of whetstone laid down now, you’d probably find very faint variations in sediment thickness. But whatever the effect is now, it must be insignificant compared to the time when your whetstone was formed. Yet the moon’s still there, in what appears to be the same orbit. So what’s happened?”

“You tell me, Merlin.”

“I don’t think it’s a moon anymore. I think the original moon got ripped to pieces to make your armored sky. I don’t know how much of the original mass got used for that, but I’m guessing it was quite a significant fraction. The question is, what happened to the remains?”

“I’m sure you have a theory.”

“I think they made a fake moon out of the leftovers. It sits there in your sky, it orbits Lecythus, but it doesn’t pull on your seas the way the old one used to. And because it’s new-relatively speaking-it doesn’t have the soil chemistry we’d expect of a real moon, one that’s been sitting there for billions of years, drinking in solar winds. That’s why you didn’t find the helium you were expecting.”

“So what is it?”

“That’s what I’m keen to find out. The thing is, I know what Dowitcher was thinking now. He knew that wasn’t a real moon. Which begs the question: what’s inside it? And could it make a difference to the survivors you left behind?”

“Hiding inside a shell won’t help them,” Minla said. “You already told us we’d achieve nothing by digging tunnels into Lecythus.”

“I’m not thinking about hiding. I’m thinking about moving. What if the moon’s an escape vehicle? An Exodus Ark big enough to take the entire population?”

“You have no evidence.”

“I have this.” With that, Merlin produced one of Minla’s old picture books. Seventy years had aged its papers to a brittle yellow, dimming the vibrancy of the old inks. But the linework in the illustrations was still clear enough. Merlin held the book open to a particular page, letting Minla look at it. “Your people had a memory of arriving on Lecythus in a moon-sized ship,” he said. “Maybe that was true. Equally, maybe it was a case of muddling one thing with another. I’m wondering if the thing you were meant to remember was not that you came by moon, but that you could leave by one.”

Minla stared at the picture. For a moment, like a breeze on a summer’s day, Merlin felt a wave of almost unbearable sadness pass through the room. It was as if the picture had transported her back to her childhood, before she had set her life on the trajectory that, seventy years later, would bring it to this bed, this soundproofed room, the shameful survival of this one ship. The last time she had looked at the picture, everything had been possible, all life’s opportunities open to her. She’d been the daughter of a powerful and respected man, with influence and wisdom at her fingertips. And yet from all the choices presented to her, she had selected this one dark path, and followed it to its conclusion.

“Even if it is a ship,” she said softly, “you’ll never get them all aboard.”

“I’ll die trying.”

“And us? We get abandoned to our fates?”

Merlin smiled: he’d been expecting the question. “There are twelve hundred people on this ship, some of them children. They weren’t all party to your schemes, so they don’t all deserve to die when you meet the Huskers. That’s why I’m leaving behind weapons and a detachment of proctors to show you how to install and use them.”

For the first time since his arrival in the room, Minla spoke like a leader again. “Will they make a difference?”

“They’ll give your ship a fighting chance. That’s the best I can offer.”

“Then we’ll take what we’re given.”

“I’m sorry it came to this. I played a part in what you became, of that I’ve no doubt. But I didn’t make you a monster.”

“No,” she said. “I’ll at least take credit for myself, and for the fact that I saved twelve hundred of my people. If it took a monster to do that, doesn’t that mean we sometimes need monsters?”

“Maybe we do. But that doesn’t mean we should forgive them for what they are, even for an instant.” Gently, as if bestowing a gift, Merlin placed the picture book on Minla’s recumbent form. “I’m afraid I have to go now. There won’t be much time when I get back to Lecythus.”

“Please,” she said. “Not like this. Not this way.”

“This is how it ends,” he said, before turning from her bed and walking to the exit. “Goodbye, Minla.”

Twenty minutes later he was in the Waynet, racing back to Lecythus.

* * * *

There’s a lot to tell, and one day I’ll get around to writing it up properly. For now it’s enough to say that I was right to trust my instincts about the moon. I just wish I’d put the clues together sooner than I did. Perhaps then Minla would never have had to commit her crimes.

I didn’t save as many as I’d have wished, but I did save some of the people Minla left behind to die. I suppose that has to count for something. It was close, but if there’s one thing to be said for Waymaker-level technology, it’s that it’s almost childishly easy to use. They were like babies with the toys of the gods. They left that moon there for a good reason, and while it was necessary for them to camouflage it-it had to be capable of fooling the Huskers, or whoever they built that sky to hide from-the moon itself was obligingly easy to break into, once our purpose became clear. And once it started moving, once its great engines came online after tens of thousands of years of quiet dormancy, no force in the universe could have held it back. I shadowed the fleeing moon long enough to establish that it was headed into a sector that appeared to be free of Husker activity, at least for now. It’ll be touch-and-go for a few centuries, but with Force and Wisdom on their side, I think they’ll make it.

I’m in the Waynet now, riding the flow away from Calliope. The syrinx still works, much to my relief. For a while I considered riding the contraflow, back toward that lone Exodus Ark. By the time I reached them they’d have been only days away from the encounter. But my presence wouldn’t have made a decisive difference to their chances of surviving the Huskers, and I couldn’t have expected much of a warm welcome.

Not after my final gift to Minla.

I’m glad she never asked me too much about those flowers, or the world they came from. If she’d wanted to know more about Lacertine, she might have sensed that I was holding something back. Such as the fact that the assassin guilds on Lacertine were masters of their craft, known throughout the worlds of the Waynet for their skill and cunning, and that no guild on Lacertine was more revered than the bioartificers who made the sleepflowers.

It was said that they could make them in any shape, any color, to match any known flower from any known world. It was said that they could pass all tests save the most microscopic scrutiny. It was said that if you wanted to kill someone, you gave them a gift of flowers from Lacertine.

She would have been dead not long after my departure. The flowers would have detected her presence-they were keyed to locate a single breathing form in a room, most commonly a sleeper-and when the room was quiet they would have become stealthily animate, leaving their jar and creeping from point to point with the slowness of a sundial’s shadow, their movement imperceptible to the naked eye, but enough to take them to the face of the sleeper. Their tendrils would have closed around Minla’s face with the softness of a lover’s caress. Then the paralyzing toxins would have hit her nervous system.

I hoped it was painless. I hoped it was quick. But what I remembered of the Lacertine assassins was that they were known for their cleverness, not their clemency.

Afterward, I deleted the sleepflowers from the biolibrary.

I knew Minla for less than a year of my life, and for seventy years by another reckoning. Sometimes when I think of her I see a human being in all her dimensions, as real as anyone I’ve ever known. Other times, I see something two-dimensional, like a faded illustration in one of her books, so thin that the light shines through her.

I don’t hate her, even now. But I wish time and tide had never brought us together.

A comfortable number of light-hours behind me, the Waynet has just cut into Calliope’s heart. It has already sliced through the photosphere and the star’s convection zone. Quite what has happened, or is happening, or will happen, when it touched (or touches, or will touch) the nuclear-burning core is still far from clear.

Theory says that no impulse can travel faster than light. Since my ship is already riding the Waynet’s flow at very nearly the speed of light, it seems impossible that any information concerning Calliope’s fate will ever be able to catch up with me. And yet ... several minutes ago I swear that I felt a kick, a jolt in the smooth glide of my flight, as if some report of that destructive event had raced up the flow at superluminal speed, buffeting my little ship.

There’s nothing in the data to suggest any unusual event, and I don’t have any plans to return to Lecythus and see what became of that world when its sun was gored open. But I still felt something, and if it reached me up the flow of the Waynet, if that impulse bypassed the iron barrier of causality itself, I can’t begin to imagine the energies that must have been involved, or what must have happened to the strand of the Waynet behind me. Perhaps it’s unraveling, and I’m about to breathe my last breath before I become a thin smear of naked quarks, stretched across several billion kilometers of interstellar space.

That would certainly be one way to go.

Frankly, it would be nice to have the luxury to dwell on such fears. But I still have a gun to find, and I’m not getting any younger.

Mission resumed.

* * * *

Nightingale

I checked the address Tomas Martinez had given me, shielding the paper against the rain while I squinted at my scrawl. The number I’d written down didn’t correspond with any of the high-and-dry offices, but it was a dead ringer for one of the low-rent premises at street level. Here the walls of Threadfall Canyon had been cut and buttressed to the height of six or seven storeys, widening the available space at the bottom of the trench. Buildings covered most of the walls, piled on top of each other, supported by a haphazard arrangement of stilts and rickety, semi-permanent bamboo scaffolding. Aerial walkways had been strung from one side of the street to the other, with stairs and ladders snaking their way through the dark fissures between the buildings. Now and then a wheeler sped through the water, sending a filthy wave of brown water in its wake. Very rarely, a sleek, claw-like volantor slid overhead. But volantors were off-world tech and not many people on Sky’s Edge could afford that kind of thing anymore.

It didn’t look right to me, but all the evidence said that this had to be the place.

I stepped out of the water, onto the wooden platform in front of the office, and knocked on the glass-fronted door while rain curtained down through holes in the striped awning above me. I was pushing hair out of my eyes when the door opened.

I’d seen enough photographs of Martinez to know this wasn’t him. This was a big bull of a man, nearly as wide as the door. He stood there with his arms crossed in front of his chest, over which he wore only a sleeveless black vest that was zipped down to the midriff. His muscles were so tight it looked like he was wearing some kind of body-hugging amplification suit. His head was very large and very bald, rooted to his body by a neck like a small mountain range. The skin around his right eye was paler than the rest of his face, in a neatly circular patch.

He looked down at me as if I was something that the rain had washed in.

“What?” he said, in a voice like the distant rumble of artillery.

“I’m here to see Martinez.”

“Mr. Martinez to you,” he said.

“Whatever. But I’m still here to see him, and he should be expecting me. I’m ...”

“Dexia Scarrow,” called another voice—fractionally more welcoming, this time—and a smaller, older man bustled into view from behind the pillar of muscle blocking the door, snatching delicate pince-nez glasses from his nose. “Let her in, Norbert. She’s expected. Just a little late.”

“I got held up around Armesto—my hired wheeler hit a pothole and tipped over. Couldn’t get the thing started again, so had to ...”

The smaller man waved aside my excuse. “You’re here now, which is all that matters. I’ll have Norbert dry your clothes, if you wish.”

I peeled off my coat. “Maybe this.”

“Norbert will attend to your galoshes as well. Would you care for something to drink? I have tea already prepared, but if you would rather something else ...”

“Tea will be fine, Mr. Martinez,” I said.

“Please. Call me Tomas. It’s my sincere wish that we will work together as friends.”

I stood out of my galoshes and handed my dripping wet coat to the big man. Martinez nodded once, the gesture precise and birdlike, and then ushered me to follow him farther into his rooms. He was slighter and older than I’d been expecting, although still recognizable as the man in the photographs. His hair was grey turning to white, thinning on his scalp and shaved close to the skin elsewhere on his head. He wore a grey waistcoat over a grey shirt, the ensemble lending him a drab, clerkish air.

We navigated a twisting labyrinth formed from four layers of brown boxes, piled to head height. “Excuse the mess,” Martinez said, looking back at me over his shoulder. “I really should find a better solution to my filing problems, but there’s always something more pressing that needs doing instead.”

“I’m surprised you have time to eat, let alone worry about filing problems.”

“Well, things haven’t been as hectic lately, I must confess. If you’ve been following the news you’ll know that I’ve already caught most of my big fish. There’s been some mopping up to do, but I’ve been nowhere near as busy as in ...” Martinez stopped suddenly next to one of the piles of boxes, placed his glasses back on the ridge of his nose, and scuffed dust from the paper label on the side of the box nearest his face. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Wrong place. Wrong damned place! Norbert!”

Norbert trudged along behind us, my sodden coat still draped over one of his enormous, trunklike arms. “Mr. Martinez?”

“This one is in the wrong place.” The smaller man turned around and indicated a spot between two other boxes, on the other side of the corridor. “It goes here. It needs to be moved. Kessler’s case is moving into court next month, and we don’t want any trouble with missing documentation.”

“Attend to it,” Norbert said, which sounded like an order but which I assumed was his way of saying he’d remember to move the box when he was done with my laundry.

“Kessler?” I asked, when Norbert had left. “As in Tillman Kessler, the NC interrogator?”

“One and the same, yes. Did you have experience with him?”

“I wouldn’t be standing here if I did.”

“True enough. But a small number of people were fortunate enough to survive their encounters with Kessler. It’s their testimonies that will help bring him to justice.”

“By which you mean crucified.”

“I detect faint disapproval, Dexia,” Martinez said.

“You’re right. It’s barbaric.”

“It’s how we’ve always done things. The Haussmann way, if you like.”

Sky Haussmann: the man who gave this world its name, and who sparked off the 250-year war we’ve only just learned to stop fighting. When they crucified Sky they thought they were putting an early end to the violence. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Ever since then, crucifixion is the way executions happen.

“Is Kessler the reason you asked me here, sir? Were you expecting me to add to the case file against him?”

Martinez paused at a heavy wooden door.

“Not Kessler, no. I’ve every expectation to see him nailed to Bridgetop by the end of the year. But it does concern the man for whom Kessler was an instrument.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Kessler worked for Colonel Jax, didn’t he?”

Martinez opened the door and ushered me through, into the windowless room beyond. By now we must have been back into the canyon wall. The air had the inert stillness of a crypt. “Yes, Kessler was Jax’s man,” Martinez said. “I’m glad you made the connection: it saves me explaining why Jax ought to be brought to justice.”

“I agree completely. Half the population would agree with you. But I’m afraid you’re a bit late: Jax died years ago.”

Two other people were already waiting in the room, sitting on settees either side of a low black table set with tea, coffee and pisco sours.

“Jax didn’t die,” Martinez said. “He just disappeared, and now I know where he is. Have a seat, please.”

He knew I was interested; knew I wouldn’t be able to walk out of that room until I’d heard the rest of the story about Colonel Brandon Jax. But there was more to it than that: there was something effortlessly commanding about his voice that made it very hard not to obey. In my time in the Southland Militia I’d learned that some people have that authority and some people don’t. It can’t be taught; can’t be learned; can’t be faked. You’re either born with it or you’re not.

“Dexia Scarrow, allow me to introduce you to my other two guests,” Martinez said, when I’d taken my place at the table. “The gentleman opposite you is Salvatore Nicolosi, a veteran of one of the Northern Coalition’s freeze/thaw units. The woman on your right is Ingrid Sollis, a personal security expert with a particular interest in counter-intrusion systems. Ingrid saw early combat experience with the Southland, but she soon left the military to pursue private interests.”

I bit my tongue, then turned my attention away from the woman before I said something I might regret. The man—Nicolosi—looked more like an actor than a soldier. He didn’t have a scar on him. His beard was so neatly groomed, so sharp-edged, that it looked sprayed on through a stencil. Freeze/thaw operatives rubbed me up the wrong way, no matter which side they’d been on. They’d always seen themselves as superior to the common soldier, which is why they didn’t feel the need for the kind of excessive musculature Norbert carried around.

“Let me introduce Dexia Scarrow,” Martinez continued, nodding at me. “Dexia was a distinguished soldier in the Southland Militia for fifteen years, until the armistice. Her service record is excellent. I believe she will be a valuable addition to the team.”

“Maybe we should back up a step,” I said. “I haven’t agreed to be part of anyone’s team.”

“We’re going after Jax,” Nicolosi said placidly. “Doesn’t that excite you?”

“He was on your side,” I said. “What makes you so keen to see him hang?”

Nicolosi looked momentarily pained. “He was a war criminal, Dexia. I’m as anxious to see monsters like Jax brought to justice as I am to see the same fate visited on their scum-ridden Southland counterparts.”

“Nicolosi’s right,” said Ingrid Sollis. “If we’re going to learn to live together on this planet, we have to put the law above all else, regardless of former allegiances.”

“Easy coming from a deserter,” I said. “Allegiance clearly didn’t mean very much to you back then, so I’m not surprised it doesn’t mean much to you now.”

Martinez, still standing at the head of the table, smiled tolerantly, as if he’d expected nothing less.

“You’re under an understandable misapprehension, Dexia. Ingrid was no deserter. She was wounded in the line of duty: severely, I might add. After her recuperation she was commended for bravery under fire and given the choice of an honorable discharge or a return to the frontline. You cannot blame her for choosing the former, especially given all that she had been through.”

“OK, my mistake,” I said. “It’s just that I never heard of many people making it out alive, before the war was over.”

Sollis looked at me icily. “Some of us did.”

“No one here has anything but an impeccable service record,” Martinez said. “I should know: I’ve been through your individual biographies with a fine tooth-comb. You’re just the people for the job.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, moving to stand up. “I’m just a retired soldier with a grudge against deserters. I wasn’t in some shit-hot freeze/thaw unit, and I didn’t do anything that resulted in any commendations for bravery. Sorry, folks, but I think ...”

“Stay seated.”

I did what the man said.

Martinez continued speaking, his voice as measured and patient as ever. “You participated in at least three high-risk extraction operations, Dexia: three dangerous forays into enemy lines, to retrieve two deep-penetration Southland spies and one trump card NC defector. Or do you deny this?”

I shook my head, the reality of what he was proposing still not sinking in. “I can’t help. I don’t know anything about Jax ...”

“You don’t need to. That’s my problem.”

“How are you so sure he’s still alive, anyway?”

“I’d like to know, too,” Nicolosi said, stroking an elegant finger along the border of his beard.

Martinez sat down, employing his own stool at the head of the table, so that he was higher than the three of us. He removed his glasses and fiddled with them in his lap. “It is necessary that you take a certain amount of what I am about to tell you on faith. I’ve been gathering intelligence on men like Jax for years, and in doing so I’ve come to rely on a web of contacts, many of whom have conveyed information to me at great personal risk. If I were to tell you the whole story, and if some of that story were to leak beyond this office, lives might well be endangered. And that is to say nothing of how my chances of bringing other fugitives to justice might be undermined.”

“We understand,” Sollis said, and I bridled at the way she presumed to speak for all of us. Perhaps she felt she owed Martinez for the way he’d just stood up for her.

Again I bit my lip and said nothing.

“For a long time, I’ve received titbits of intelligence concerning Colonel Jax: rumours that he did not, in fact, die at all, but is still at large.”

“Where?” Sollis asked. “On Sky’s Edge?”

“It would seem not. There were, of course, many rumours and false trails that suggested Jax had gone to ground somewhere on this planet. But one by one I discounted them all. Slowly the truth became apparent. Jax is still alive; still within this system.”

I felt it was about time I made a positive contribution. “Wouldn’t a piece of dirt like Jax try and get out of the system at the first opportunity?”

Martinez favoured my observation by pointing his glasses at me. “I had my fears that he might have, but as the evidence came in, a different truth presented itself.”

He set about pouring himself some tea. The pisco sours were going unwanted. I doubted that any of us had the stomach for drink at this time of the day.

“Where is he, then?” asked Nicolosi. “Plenty of criminal elements might have the means to shelter a man like Jax, but given the price on his head, the temptation to turn him in ...”

“He is not being sheltered,” Martinez said, sipping delicately at his tea before continuing. “He is alone, aboard a ship. The ship was believed lost, destroyed in the final stages of the war, when things escalated into space—but I have evidence that the ship is still essentially intact, with a functioning life-support system. There is every reason to believe Jax is still being kept alive, aboard this vehicle, in this system.”

“What’s he waiting for?” I asked.

“For memories to grow dim,” Martinez answered. “Like many powerful men, Jax may have obtained longevity drugs—or at least undergone longevity treatment—during the latter stages of the war. Time is not a concern for him.”

I leaned forward. “This ship ... you think it’ll just be a matter of boarding it and taking him alive?”

Martinez seemed surprised at the directness of my question. He blinked once before answering.

“In essence, yes.”

“Won’t he put up a fight?”

“I don’t think so. The Ultras that located the vehicle for me reported that it appeared dormant, in power-conservation mode. Jax himself may be frozen, in reefersleep. The ship did not respond to the Ultras’ sensor sweeps, so there’s no reason to assume it will respond to our approach and docking.”

“How close did the Ultras get?” Sollis asked.

“Within three or four light-minutes. But there’s no reason to assume we can’t get closer without alerting the ship.”

“How do you know Jax is aboard this ship?” Nicolosi asked. “It could just be a drifter, nothing to do with him.”

“The intelligence I’d already gleaned pointed towards his presence aboard a vehicle of a certain age, size and design—everything matches.”

“So let’s cut to the chase,” Sollis said, again presuming to speak for the rest of us. “You’ve brought us here because you think we’re the team to snatch the colonel. I’m the intrusion specialist, so you’ll be relying on me to get us inside that ship. Nicolosi’s a freeze/thaw veteran, so—apart from the fact that he’s probably pretty handy with a weapon or two—he’ll know how to spring Jax from reefersleep, if the colonel turns out to be frozen. And she—what was your name again?”

“Dexia,” I said, like it was a threat.

“She’s done some extractions. I guess she must be OK at her job, or she wouldn’t be here.”

Martinez waited a moment, then nodded. “You’re quite right, Ingrid: all credit to you for that. I apologize if my machinations are so nakedly transparent. But the simple fact of the matter is that you are the ideal team for the operation in question. I have no doubt that, with your combined talents, you will succeed in returning Colonel Jax to Sky’s Edge, and hence to trial. Now admit it: that would be something, wouldn’t it? To fell the last dragon? “

Nicolosi indicated his approval with a long nasal sigh. “Men like Kessler are just a distraction. When you hang a monster like Kessler, you’re punishing the knife, not the man who wielded it. If you wish true justice, you must find the knifeman, the master.”

“What do we get paid?” Sollis asked.

Martinez smiled briefly. “Fifty thousand Australs for each of you, upon the safe return of Colonel Jax.”

“What if we find him dead?” I asked. “By then we’ll already have risked an approach and docking to his ship.”

“If Jax is already dead, then you will be paid twenty-five thousand Australs.”

We all looked at each other. I knew what the others were thinking. Fifty thousand Australs was life-changing money, but half of that wasn’t bad either. Killing Jax would be much easier and safer than extracting him ...

“I’ll be with you, of course,” Martinez said. “So there’ll be no need to worry about proving Jax was already dead when you arrived, should that arise.”

“If you’re coming along,” I asked, “who else do we need to know about?”

“Only Norbert. And you need have no fears concerning his competency.”

“Just the five of us, then,” I said.

“Five is a good number, don’t you think? And there is a practical limit to the size of the extraction team. I have obtained the use of a small but capable ship, perfectly adequate for our purposes. It will carry five, with enough capacity to bring back the colonel. I’ll provide weapons, equipment and armour, but you may all bring whatever you think may prove useful.”

I looked around the cloisterlike confines of the room, and remembered the dismal exterior of the offices, situated at the bottom of Threadfall Canyon. “Three times fifty thousand Australs,” I mused. “Plus whatever it cost you to hire and equip a ship. If you don’t mind me asking ... where exactly are the funds coming from?”

“The funds are mine,” Martinez said sternly. “Capturing Jax has been a long-term goal, not some whimsical course upon which I have only recently set myself. Dying a pauper would be a satisfactory end to my affairs, were I to do so knowing that Jax was hanging from the highest mast of Bridgetop.”

For a moment, none of us said anything. Martinez had spoken so softly, so demurely, that the meaning of his words seemed to lag slightly behind the statement itself. When it arrived, I think we all saw a flash of that corpse, executed in the traditional way, the Haussmann way.

“Good weapons?” I asked. “Not some reconditioned black-market shit?”

“Only the best.”

“Technical specs for the ship?” Sollis asked.

“You’ll have plenty of time to review the data on the way to the rendezvous point. I don’t doubt that a woman of your abilities will be able to pinpoint an entry point.”

Sollis looked flattered. “Then I guess I’m in. What about you, Salvatore?”

“Men like Colonel Jax stained the honour of the Northern Coalition. We were not all monsters. If I could do something to make people see that ...” Nicolosi trailed off, then shrugged. “Yes, I am in. It would be an honour, Mr. Martinez.”

“That leaves you, Dexia,” Sollis said. “Fifty thousand Australs sounds pretty sweet to me. I’m guessing it sounds pretty sweet to you as well.”

“That’s my call, not yours.”

“Just saying ... you look like you could use that money as much as any of us.”

I think I came close to saying no, to walking out of that room, back into the incessant muddy rain of Threadfall Canyon. Perhaps if I’d tried, Norbert would have been forced to detain me, so that I didn’t go blabbing about how a team was being put together to bring Colonel Jax back into custody. But I would never get the chance to find out what Martinez had in mind for me if I chose not to go along with him.

I only had to think about the way I looked in the mirror, and what those fifty thousand Australs could do for me.

So I said yes.

* * * *

Martinez gestured to one of the blank pewter-grey walls in the shuttle’s compartment, causing it to brighten and fill with neon-bright lines. The lines meshed and intersected, forming a schematic diagram of a ship, with an accompanying scale.

“Intelligence on Jax’s ship is fragmentary. Strip out all the contradictory reports, discard unreliable data, and we’re left with this.”

“That’s it?” Sollis asked.

“When we get within visual range we’ll be able to improve matters. I shall reexamine all of the reports, including those that were discarded. Some of them—when we have the real ship to compare them against—may turn out to have merit after all. They may in turn shed useful light on the interior layout, and the likely location of Jax. By then, of course, we’ll also have infrared and deep-penetration radar data from our own sensors.”

“It looks like a pretty big ship,” I said as I looked at the schematic, scratching at my scalp. We were a day out from Armesto Field, with the little shuttle tucked into the belly hold of an outbound lighthugger named Death of Sophonisba.

“Big but not the right shape for a lighthugger,” Sollis said. “So what are we dealing with here?”

“Good question,” I said. What Martinez was showing us was a rectangular hull about one kilometre from end to end; maybe a hundred metres deep and a hundred metres wide, with some kind of spherical bulge about halfway along. There was some suggestion of engines at one end, and of a gauntlet-like docking complex at the other. The ship was too blunt for interstellar travel, and it lacked the outrigger-mounted engines that were characteristic of Conjoiner drive mechanisms. “Does look kind of familiar, though,” I added. “Anyone else getting that déjà vu feeling, or is it just me?”

“I don’t know,” Nicolosi said. “When I saw it I thought ...” He shook his head. “It can’t be. It must be a standard hull design.”

“You’ve seen it too,” I said.

“Does that ship have a name?” Nicolosi asked Martinez.

“I have no idea what Jax calls his ship.”

“That’s not what the man asked,” Sollis said. “He asked if—”

“I know the name of the ship,” I said quietly. “I saw a ship like that once, when I was being taken aboard it. I’d been injured in a fire-fight, one of the last big surface battles. They took me into space—this was after the elevator came down, so it had to be by shuttle—and brought me aboard that ship. It was a hospital ship, orbiting the planet.”

“What was the name of the ship?” Nicolosi asked urgently.

“Nightingale,” I said.

“Oh, no.”

“You’re surprised.”

“Damn right I’m surprised. I was aboard Nightingale too.”

“So was I,” Sollis said, her voice barely a whisper. “I didn’t recognize it, though. I was too fucked up to pay much attention until they put me back together aboard it. By then, I guess ...”

“Same with me,” Nicolosi said. “Stitched back together aboard Nightingale, then repatriated.”

Slowly, we all turned and looked at Martinez. Even Norbert, who had contributed nothing until that point, turned to regard his master. Martinez blinked, but otherwise his composure was impeccable.

“The ship is indeed Nightingale. It was too risky to tell you when we were still on the planet. Had any of Jax’s allies learned of the identity ...”

Sollis cut him off. “Is that why you didn’t tell us? Or is it because you knew we’d all been aboard that thing once already?”

“The fact that you have all been aboard Nightingale was a factor in your selection, nothing more. It was your skills that marked you out for this mission, not your medical history.”

“So why didn’t you tell us?” she asked.

“Again, had I told you more than was wise ...”

“You lied to us.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Wait,” Nicolosi said, his voice calmer than I was expecting. “Let’s just ... deal with this, shall we? We’re getting hung up on the fact that we were all healed aboard Nightingale, when the real question we should be asking is this: what the hell is Jax doing aboard a ship that doesn’t exist anymore?”

“What’s the problem with the ship?” I asked.

“The problem,” Nicolosi said, speaking straight at me, “is that Nightingale was reported destroyed near the end of the war. Or were you not keeping up with the news?”

I shrugged. “Guess I wasn’t.”

“And yet you knew enough about the ship to recognize it.”

“Like I said, I remember the view from the medical shuttle. I was drugged-up, unsure whether I was going to live or die ... everything was heightened, intense, like in a bad dream. But after they healed me and sent me back down surfaceside? I don’t think I ever thought about Nightingale again.”

“Not even when you look in the mirror?” Nicolosi asked.

“I thought about what they’d done to me, how much better it could have been. But it never crossed my mind to wonder what had happened to the ship afterwards. So what did happen?”

“You say ‘they healed me,’” Nicolosi observed. “Does that mean you were treated by doctors, by men and women?”

“Shouldn’t I have been?”

He shook his head minutely. “My guess is you were wounded and shipped aboard Nightingale soon after it was deployed.”

“That’s possible.”

“In which case, Nightingale was still in commissioning phase. I went aboard it later. What about you, Ingrid?”

“Me too. I hardly saw another human being the whole time I was aboard that thing.”

“That was how it was meant to operate: with little more than a skeleton staff, to take medical decisions the ship couldn’t take for itself. Most of the time they were meant to stay behind the scenes.”

“All I remember was a hospital ship,” I said. “I don’t know anything about ‘commissioning.’”

Nicolosi explained it to me patiently, as if I was a small child in need of education.

Nightingale had been financed and built by a consortium of well-meaning postmortal aristocrats. Since their political influence hadn’t succeeded in curtailing the war (and since many of their aristocratic friends were quite happy for it to continue) they’d decided to make a difference in the next best way: by alleviating the suffering of the mortal men and women engaged in the war itself.

So they created a hospital ship, one that had no connection to either the Northern Coalition or the Southland Militia. Nightingale would be there for all injured soldiers, irrespective of allegiance. Aboard the neutral ship, the injured would be healed, allowed to recuperate, and then repatriated. All but the most critically wounded would eventually return to active combat service. And Nightingale itself would be state-of-the-art, with better medical facilities than any other public hospital on or around Sky’s Edge. It wouldn’t be the glittering magic of Demarchist medicine, but it would still be superior to anything most mortals had ever experienced.

It would also be tirelessly efficient, dedicated only to improving its healing record. Nightingale was designed to operate autonomously, as a single vast machine. Under the guidance of human specialists, the ship would slowly improve its methods until it had surpassed its teachers. I’d come aboard ship when it was still undergoing the early stages of its learning curve, but—as I learned from Nicolosi—the ship had soon moved into its “operational phase.” By then the entire kilometre-long vehicle was under the control of only a handful of technicians and surgical specialists, with gamma-level intelligences taking most of the day-to-day decisions. That was when Sollis and Nicolosi had been shipped aboard. They’d been healed by machines, with only a vague awareness that there was a watchful human presence behind the walls.

“It worked, too,” Nicolosi said. “The ship did everything its sponsors had hoped it would. It functioned like a huge, efficient factory: sucking in the wounded, spitting out the healed.”

“Only for them to go back to the war,” I said.

“The sponsors didn’t have any control over what happened when the healed were sent back down. But at least they were still alive; at least they hadn’t died on the battlefield or under the operating table. The sponsors could still believe that they had done something good. They could still sleep at night.”

“So Nightingale was a success,” I said. “What’s the problem? Wasn’t it turned over to civilian use after the armistice?”

“The ship was destroyed just before the ceasefire,” Nicolosi said. “That’s why we shouldn’t be seeing it now. A stray NC missile, nuke-tipped—too fast to be intercepted by the ship’s own countermeasures. It took out Nightingale, with staff and patients still aboard her.”

“Now that you mention it ... maybe I did hear about something like that.”

Sollis looked fiercely at Martinez. “I say we renegotiate terms. He never told us we were going to have to spring Jax from a fucking ghost ship.”

Norbert moved to his master’s side, as if to protect him from the furious Sollis. Martinez, who had said nothing for many minutes, removed his glasses, buffed them on his shirt and replaced them with an unhurried calm.

“Perhaps you are right to be cross with me, Ingrid. And perhaps I made a mistake in not mentioning Nightingale sooner than I did. But it was imperative to me that I not compromise this operation with a single careless indiscretion. My whole life has been an arrow pointing to this one task: the bringing to justice of Colonel Jax. I will not fail myself now.”

“You should have told us about the hospital ship,” Nicolosi said. “None of us would have had any reason to spread that information. We all want to see Jax get his due.”

“Then I have made a mistake, for which I apologize.”

Sollis shook her head. “I don’t think an apology’s going to cut it. If I’d known I was going to have to go back aboard that thing ...”

“You are right,” Martinez said, addressing all of us. “The ship has a traumatic association for you, and it was wrong of me not to allow for that.”

“Amen to that,” Sollis said.

I felt it was time I made a contribution. “I don’t think any of us are about to back out now, Tomas. But maybe—given what we now know about the ship—a little bit more incentive might not be a bad idea.”

“I was about to make the same suggestion myself,” Martinez said. “You must appreciate that my funds are not inexhaustible, and that my original offer might already be considered generous—but shall we say an extra five thousand Australs, for each of you?”

“Make it ten and maybe we’re still in business,” Sollis snapped back, before I’d had a chance to blink.

Martinez glanced at Norbert, then—with an expression that suggested he was giving in under duress—he nodded at Sollis. “Ten thousand Australs it is. You drive a hard bargain, Ingrid.”

“While we’re debating terms,” Nicolosi said, “is there anything else you feel we ought to know?”

“I have told you that the ship is Nightingale.” Martinez directed our attention back to the sketchy diagram on the wall. “That, I am ashamed to admit, is the sum total of my knowledge of the ship in question.”

“What about constructional blueprints?” I asked.

“None survived the war.”

“Photographs? Video images?”

“Ditto. Nightingale operated in a war zone, Dexia. Casual sightseeing was not exactly a priority for those unfortunate enough to get close to her.”

“What about the staff aboard her?” Nicolosi asked. “Couldn’t they tell you anything?”

“I spoke to some survivors: the doctors and technicians who’d been aboard during the commissioning phase. Their testimonies were useful, when they were willing to talk.”

Nicolosi pushed further. “What about the people who were aboard before the ceasefire?”

“I could not trace them.”

“But they obviously didn’t die. If the ship’s still out there, the rogue missile couldn’t have hit it.”

“Why would anyone make up a story about the ship being blown to pieces, if it didn’t happen?” I asked.

“War does strange things to truth,” Martinez answered. “No malice is necessarily implied. Perhaps another hospital ship was indeed destroyed. There was more than one in orbit around Sky’s Edge, after all. One of them may even have had a similar name. It’s perfectly conceivable that the facts might have got muddled, in the general confusion of those days.”

“Still doesn’t explain why you couldn’t trace any survivors,” Nicolosi said.

Martinez shifted on his seat, uneasily. “If Jax did appropriate the ship, then he may not have wanted anyone talking about it. The staff aboard Nightingale might have been paid off—or threatened—to keep silent.”

“Adds up, I guess,” I said.

“Money will make a lot of things add up,” Nicolosi replied.

* * * *

After two days the Death of Sophonisba sped deeper into the night, while Martinez’s ship followed a pre-programmed flight plan designed to bring us within survey range of the hospital ship. The Ultras had scanned Nightingale again, and once again they’d elicited no detectable response from the dormant vessel. All indications were that the ship was in a deep cybernetic coma, as close to death as possible, with only a handful of critical life-support systems still running on a trickle of stored power.

Over the next twenty-four hours we crept in closer, narrowing the distance to mere light-seconds, and then down to hundreds of thousands of kilometres. Still there was no response, but as the distance narrowed, so our sensors began to improve the detail in their scans. While the rest of us took turns sleeping, Martinez sat at his console, compositing the data, enhancing his schematic. Now and then Norbert would lean over the console and stare in numb concentration at the sharpening image, and occasionally he would mumble some remark or observation to which Martinez would respond in a patient, faintly condescending whisper, the kind that a teacher might reserve for a slow but willing pupil. Not for the first time I was touched by Martinez’s obvious kindness in employing the huge, slow Norbert, and I wondered what the war must have done to him to bring him to this state.

When we were ten hours from docking, Martinez revealed the fruits of his labours. The schematic of the hospital ship was three-dimensional now, displayed in the navigational projection cylinder on the ship’s cramped flight deck. Although the basic layout of the ship hadn’t changed, the new plan was much more detailed than the first one. It showed docking points, airlocks, major mechanical systems, and the largest corridors and spaces threading the ship’s interior. There was still a lot of guesswork, but it wouldn’t be as if we were entering a completely foreign territory.

“The biggest thermal hotspot is here,” Martinez said, pointing at a spot about a quarter of the way down from the front. “If Jax is anywhere, that’s my best guess as to where we’ll find him.”

“Simple, then,” Nicolosi said. “In via that dorsal lock, then a straight sprint down that access shaft. Easy, even under weightless conditions. Can’t be more than fifty or sixty metres.”

“I’m not happy,” Sollis said. “That’s a large lock, likely to be armed to the teeth with heavy duty sensors and alarms.”

“Can you get us through it?” Nicolosi asked.

“You give me a door, I’ll get us through it. But I can’t bypass every conceivable security system, and you can be damned sure the ship will know about it if we come through a main lock.”

“What about the other ones?” I asked, trying not to sound as if I was on her case. “Will they be less likely to go off?”

“Nothing’s guaranteed. But I’d always rather take my chances with the backdoor.”

“I think Ingrid is correct,” Martinez said, nodding his approval. “There’s every chance of a silent approach and docking. Jax will have disabled all non-essential systems, and that will include proximity sensors. If that’s the case—if we see no evidence of having tripped approach alarms—then I believe we would be best advised to maintain stealth.” He indicated farther along the hull, beyond the rounded midsection bulge. “That will mean coming in here, or here, via one of these smaller service locks. I concur with Ingrid: they probably won’t be alarmed.”

“That’ll leave us with four or five hundred metres of ship to crawl through,” Nicolosi said, leaving us in no doubt what he thought about that. “Four or five hundred metres for which we only have a very crude map.”

“We’ll have directional guidance from our suits,” Martinez said.

“It’s still a concern to me. But if you have settled upon this decision, I shall abide by it.”

I turned to Sollis. “What you said just then ... about not spending a minute longer aboard Nightingale than we have to?”

“I wasn’t kidding.”

“I know. But there was something about the way you said it. Is there something about that ship you know that we don’t? You sounded spooked, and I don’t understand why. It’s just a disused hospital, after all.”

Sollis studied me for a moment before answering. “Tell her, Nicolosi.”

Nicolosi looked placidly at the other woman. “Tell her what?”

“What she obviously doesn’t know. What none of us are in any great hurry to talk about.”

“Oh, please.”

“Oh please what?” I asked.

“It’s just a fairy story, a stupid myth,” Nicolosi said.

“A stupid story which nonetheless always claimed that Nightingale didn’t get blown up after all.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What story?”

It was Martinez who chose to answer. “That something unfortunate happened aboard her. That the last batch of sick and injured went in, but for some reason were never seen to leave. That all attempts to contact the technical staff failed. That an exploratory team was put aboard the ship, and that they too were never heard from again.”

I laughed. “Fuck. And now we’re planning to go aboard?”

“Now you see why I’m kind of anxious to get this over with,” Sollis said.

“It’s just a myth,” Martinez chided. “Nothing more. It is a thing to frighten children, not to dissuade us from capturing Jax. In fact it would not surprise me in the least if Jax or his allies were in some way responsible for this lie. If it were to cause us to turn back now, it would have served them admirably, would it not?”

“Maybe,” I said, without much conviction. “But I’d still have been happier if you’d told me before. It wouldn’t have made any difference to my accepting this job, but it would have been nice to know you trusted me.”

“I do trust you, Dexia. I simply assumed that you had no interest in childish stories.”

“How do you know Jax is aboard?” I asked.

“We’ve been over this. I have my sources, sources that I must protect, and it would be ...”

“He was a patient, wasn’t he.”

Martinez snapped his glasses from his nose, as if my point had been at an unexpected tangent to whatever we’d been talking about. “I know only that Jax is aboard Nightingale. The circumstances of how he arrived there are of no concern to me.”

“And it doesn’t bother you that maybe he’s just dead, like the rest of whoever was aboard at the end?” Sollis asked.

“If he is dead, you will still receive twenty-five thousand Australs.”

“Plus the ten we already agreed on.”

“That too,” Martinez said, as if it should have been taken for granted.

“I don’t like this,” Sollis muttered.

“I don’t like it either,” Nicolosi replied. “But we came here to do a job, and the material facts haven’t changed. There is a ship, and the man we want is aboard it. What Martinez says is true: we should not be intimidated by stories, especially when our goal is so near.”

“We go in there, we get Jax, we get the hell out,” Sollis said. “No dawdling, no sightseeing, no souvenir hunting.”

“I have absolutely no problem with that,” I said.

* * * *

“Take what you want,” Martinez called over Norbert’s shoulder, as we entered the armoury compartment at the rear of the shuttle’s pressurized section. “But remember: you’ll be wearing pressure suits, and you’ll be moving through confined spaces. You’ll also be aboard a ship.”

Sollis pushed bodily ahead of me, pouncing on something that I’d only begun to notice. She unracked the sleek, cobalt-blue excimer rifle and hefted it for balance. “Hey, a Breitenbach.”

“Christmas come early?” I asked.

Sollis pulled a pose, sighting along the rifle, deploying its targeting aids, flipping the power-up toggle. The weapon whined obligingly. Blue lights studded its stock, indicating it was ready for use.

“Because I’m worth it,” Sollis said.

“I’d really like it if you pointed that thing somewhere else,” I said.

“Better still, don’t point it anywhere,” Nicolosi rumbled. He’d seen one of the choicer items too. He unclipped a long, matte-black weapon with a ruby-red dragon stencilled along the barrel. It had a gaping maw like a swallowing python. “Laser-confined plasma bazooka,” he said admiringly. “Naughty, but nice.”

“Finesse isn’t your cup of tea, then.”

“Never got to use one of these in the war, Dexia.”

“That’s because they were banned. One of the few sensible things both sides managed to agree on.”

“Then now’s my chance.”

“I think the idea was to extract Jax, not to blow ten-metre-wide holes in Nightingale.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be very, very careful.” He slung the bazooka over his shoulder, then continued his way down the aisle.

I picked up a pistol, hefted it, replaced it on the rack. Found something more to my liking—a heavy, dual-gripped slug gun—and flipped open the loading bay to check that there was a full clip inside. Low-tech but reliable: the other two were welcome to their directed-energy weapons, but I’d seen how easily they could go wrong under combat conditions.

“Nice piece, Dexia,” Sollis said, patronizingly. “Old school.”

“I’m old school.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“You have a problem with that, we can always try some target practice.”

“Hey, no objections. Just glad you found something to your liking. Doing better than old Norbert, anyway.” Sollis nodded over her shoulder. “Looks like he’s really drawn the short straw there.”

I looked down the aisle. Norbert was near the end of one of the racks, examining a small, stubby-looking weapon whose design I didn’t recognize. In his huge hands it looked ridiculous, like something made for a doll.

“You sure about that?” I called. “Maybe you want to look at one of these ...”

Norbert looked at me like I was some kind of idiot. I don’t know what he did then—there was no movement of his hand that I was aware of—but the stubby little weapon immediately unpacked itself, elongating and opening like some complicated puzzle box, until it was almost twice as big, twice as deadly-looking. It had the silken, precision-engineered quality of expensive off-world tech. A Demarchist toy, probably, but a very, very deadly toy for all that.

Sollis and I exchanged a wordless glance. Norbert had found what was probably the most advanced, most effective weapon in the room.

“Will do,” Norbert said, before closing the weapon up again and slipping it into his belt.

* * * *

We crept closer. Tens of thousands of kilometres, then thousands, then hundreds. I looked through the hull windows, with the interior lights turned down, peering in the direction where our radar and infrared scans told us the hospital ship was waiting. When we were down to two dozen kilometres I knew I should be seeing it, but I was still only looking at stars and the sucking blackness between them. I had a sudden, visceral sense of how easy it was to lose something out here, followed in quick succession by a dizzying sense of how utterly small and alone we were, now that the lighthugger was gone.

And then suddenly, there was Nightingale.

We were coming in at an angle, so the hull was tilted and foreshortened. It was so dark that only certain edges and surfaces were visible at all. No visible windows, no running lights, no lit-up docking bays. The ship looked as dark and dead as a sliver of coal. Suddenly it was absurd to think that there might be anyone alive aboard it. Colonel Jax’s dead corpse, perhaps, but not the living or even life-supported body that would guarantee us the rest of our payment.

Martinez had the ship on manual control now. With small, deft applications of thrust he narrowed the distance down to less than a dozen kilometres. At six kilometres Martinez deemed it safe to activate floodlights and play them along the length of the hull, confirming the placement of locks and docking sites. There was a peppering of micro-meteorite impacts and some scorching from high-energy particles, but nothing that I wouldn’t have expected for a ship that had been sitting out here since the armistice. If the ship possessed self-repair mechanisms, they were sleeping as well. Even when we circled around the hull and swept it from the other side, there was no trace of our having been noticed. Still with reluctance, Nicolosi accepted that we would follow Sollis’s entry strategy, coming in by one of the service locks.

It was time to do it.

* * * *

We docked. We came in softly, but there was still a solid clunk as the capture latches engaged and grasped our little craft to the hull of the hospital ship. I thought of that clunk echoing away down the length of Nightingale, diminishing as it travelled, but still not becoming weak enough not to trip some waiting, infinitely patient alarm system, alerting the sleeping ship that it had a visitor. For several minutes we hung in weightless silence, staring out the windows or watching the sensor readouts for the least sign of activity. But the dark ship stayed dark in all directions. There was no detectable change in her state of coma.

“Nothing’s happened,” Martinez said, breaking the silence with a whisper. “It still doesn’t know we’re here. The lock is all yours, Ingrid. I’ve already opened our doors.”

Sollis, suited up now, moved into the lock tube with her toolkit. While she worked, the rest of us finished putting on our own suits and armour, completing the exercise as quietly as possible. I hadn’t worn a spacesuit before, but Norbert was there to help all of us with the unfamiliar process: his huge hands attended to delicate connections and catches with surprising dexterity. Once I had the suit on, it didn’t feel much different than wearing full-spectrum bioarmour, and I quickly got the hang of the life-support indications projected around the border of my faceplate. I would only need to pay minor attention to them: unless there was some malfunction, the suit had enough power and supplies to keep me alive in perfect comfort for three days; longer if I was prepared to tolerate a little less comfort. None of us were planning on spending quite that long in Nightingale.

Sollis was nearly done when we assembled behind her in the lock. The inner and outer lock doors on our side were open, exposing the grey outer door of the hospital ship, held tight against the docking connector by pressure tight seals. I doubted that she’d ever had to break into a ship before, but nothing about the door seemed to be causing Sollis any difficulties. She’d tugged open an access panel and plugged in a fistful of coloured cables, running back to a jury-rigged electronics module in her toolkit. She was tapping a little keyboard, causing patterns of lights to alter within the access panel. The face of a woman—blank, expressionless, yet at the same time severe and unforgiving—had appeared in an oval frame above the access panel.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“That’s Nightingale,” Sollis said, adding, by way of explanation: “The ship had its own gamma-level personality, keeping the whole show running. Pretty smart piece of thinkware by all accounts: full Turing-compliance; about as clever as you can make a machine before you have to start giving it human rights.”

I looked at the stern-faced woman, expecting her to query us at any moment. I imagined her harsh and hectoring voice demanding to know what business any of us had boarding Nightingale, trespassing aboard her ship, her hospital.

“Does she know ...” I started.

Sollis shook her head. “This is just a dumb facet of the main construct. Not only is it inactive—the image is frozen into the door memory—but it doesn’t seem to have any functioning data links back to the main sentience engine. Do you, Nightingale?”

The face looked at us impassively, but still said nothing.

“See: deadsville. My guess is the sentience engine isn’t running at all. Out here, the ship wouldn’t need much more than a trickle of intelligence to keep itself ticking over.”

“So the gamma’s off-line?”

“Uh-huh. Best way, too. You don’t want one of those things sitting around too long without something to do.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause they tend to go nuts. That’s why the Conjoiners won’t allow gamma-level intelligences in any of their machines. They say it’s a kind of slavery.”

“Running a hospital must have been enough to stop Nightingale’s gamma running off the rails.”

“Let’s hope so. Let’s really hope so.” Sollis glanced back at her work, then emitted a grunt of satisfaction as a row of lights flicked to orange. She unplugged a bunch of coloured cables and looked back at the waiting party. “OK: we’re good to go. I can open the door anytime you’re ready.”

“What’s on the other side of it?”

“According to the door, air: normal trimix. Bitchingly cold, but not frozen. Pressure’s manageable. I’m not sure we could breathe it, but ...”

“We’re not breathing anything,” Martinez said curtly. “Our airlock will take two people. One of them will have to be you, Ingrid, since you know how to work the mechanism. I shall accompany you, and then we shall wait for the others on the far side, when we have established that conditions are safe.”

“Maybe one of us should go through instead of you,” I said, wondering why Norbert hadn’t volunteered to go through ahead of his master. “We’re expendable, but you aren’t. Without you, Jax doesn’t go down.”

“Considerate of you, Dexia, but I paid you to assist me, not take risks on my behalf.”

Martinez propelled himself forward. Norbert, Nicolosi and I edged back to permit the inner door to close again. On the common suit channel I heard Sollis say: “We’re opening Nightingale. Stand by: comms might get a bit weaker once we’re on the other side of all this metal.”

Nicolosi pushed past me, back into the flight deck. I heard the heavy whine of servos as the door opened. Breathing and scuffling sounds, but nothing that alarmed me. “OK,” Sollis said. “We’re moving into Nightingale’s lock. Closing the outer door behind us. When you need to open it again, hit any key on the pad.”

“Still no sign of life,” Nicolosi called.

“The inner door looks like it’ll open without any special encouragement from me,” Sollis said. “Should be just a matter of pulling down this lever ... you ready?”

“Do it, Ingrid,” I heard Martinez say.

More servos, fainter now. After a few moments Sollis reported back: “We’re inside. No surprises yet. Floating in some kind of holding bay, about ten metres wide. It’s dark, of course. There’s a doorway leading out of the far wall: might lead to the main corridor that should pass close to this lock.”

I remembered to turn on my helmet lamp.

“Can you open both lock doors?” Nicolosi asked.

“Not at the same time, not without a lot of trouble that might get us noticed.”

“Then we’ll come through in two passes. Norbert: you go first. Dexia and I will follow.”

It took longer than I’d have liked, but eventually all five of us were on the other side of the lock. I’d only been weightless once, during the recuperation program after my injury, but the memory of how to move—at least without making too much of a fool of myself—was still there, albeit dimly. The others were coping about as well. The combined effects of our helmet lamps banished the darkness to the corners of the room, emphasizing the deeper gloom of the open doorway Sollis had mentioned. It occurred to me that somewhere down that darkness was Colonel Jax, or whatever was left of him.

Nervously, I checked that the slug gun was still clipped to my belt.

“Check your helmet maps,” Martinez said. “Does everyone have an overlay and a positional fix?”

“I’m good,” I said, against a chorus from the other three, and acutely aware of how easy it would be to get lost aboard a ship as large as Nightingale, if that positional fix were to break down.

“Check your weapons and suit systems. We’ll keep comms to a minimum all the way in.”

“I’ll lead,” Nicolosi said, propelling himself into the darkness of the doorway before anyone could object.

I followed hard on his heels, trying not to get out of breath with the effort of keeping up. There were loops and rails along all four walls of the shaft, so movement consisted of gliding from one handhold to the next, with only air resistance to stop one drifting all the way. We were covering one metre a second, easily: at that rate, it wouldn’t take long to cross the entire width of the ship, which would mean we’d somehow missed the axial corridor we were looking for, or that it just didn’t exist. But just when it was beginning to strike me that we’d gone too far, Nicolosi slowed. I grabbed a handhold to stop myself slamming into his feet.

He looked back at us, making me squint against his helmet lamp. “Here’s the main corridor, just a bit deeper than we were expecting. Runs both ways.”

“We turn left,” Martinez said, in not much more than a whisper. “Turn left and follow it for one hundred metres, maybe one hundred and twenty, until we meet the centrifuge section. It should be a straight crawl, with no obstructions.”

Nicolosi turned away, then looked back. “I can’t see more than twenty metres into the corridor. We may as well see where it goes.”

“Nice and slowly,” Martinez urged.

We moved forward, along the length of the hull. In the instants when I was coasting from one handhold to the next, I held my breath and tried to hear the ambient noises of the ship, relayed to my helmet by the suit’s acoustic pickup. Mostly all I heard was the scuffing progress of the others, the hiss and hum of their own life-support packs. Other than that, Nightingale seemed as silent as when we’d approached. If the ship was aware of our intrusion, there was no sign of it.

We’d made maybe forty metres from the junction: at least a third of the distance we had to travel before hitting the centrifuge, when Nicolosi slowed. I caught a handhold before I drifted into his heels, then looked back to make sure the others had got the message.

“Problem?” Martinez asked.

“There’s a T-junction right ahead. I didn’t think we were expecting a T-junction.”

“We weren’t,” Martinez said. “But it shouldn’t surprise us that the real ship deviates from the blueprint here and there. As long as we don’t reach a dead-end, we can still keep moving towards the colonel.”

“You want to flip a coin, or shall I do it?” Nicolosi said, looking back at us over his shoulder, his face picked out by my helmet light.

“There’s no indication, no sign on the wall?”

“Blank either way.”

“In which case take the left,” Martinez said, before glancing at Norbert. “Agreed?”

“Agreed,” the big man said. “Take left, then next right. Continue.”

Nicolosi kicked off, and the rest of us followed. I kept an eye on my helmet’s inertial compass, gratified when it detected our change of direction, even though the overlay now showed us moving through what should have been a solid wall.

We’d moved twenty or thirty metres when Nicolosi slowed again. “Tunnel bends to the right,” he reported. “Looks like we’re back on track. Everyone cool with this?”

“Cool,” I said.

But we’d only made another fifteen or twenty metres of progress back along the new course when Nicolosi slowed and called back again. “We’re coming up on a heavy door; some kind of internal airlock. Looks like we’re going to need Sollis again.”

“Let me through,” she said, and I squeezed aside so she could edge past me, trying to avoid knocking our suits together. In addition to the weapons she’d selected from the armoury, Sollis’s suit was also hung with all manner of door-opening tools, clattering against each other as she moved. I didn’t doubt that she’d be able to get through any kind of door, given time. But the idea of spending hours inside Nightingale, while we inched from one obstruction to the next, didn’t exactly fill me with enthusiasm.

We let Sollis examine the door: we could hear her ruminating over the design, tutting, humming and talking softly under her breath. She had panels open and equipment plugged in, just like before. The same unwelcoming face glowered from an oval display.

After a couple of minutes Martinez sighed and spoke: “Is there a problem, Ingrid?”

“There’s no problem. I can get this door open in about ten seconds. I just want to make damned sure this is another of Nightingale’s dumb facets. That means sensing the electrical connections on either side of the frame. Of course, if you’d rather we just stormed on through ...”

“Keep voice down,” Norbert rumbled.

“I’m wearing a spacesuit, dickhead.”

“Pressure outside. Sound travel, air to glass, glass to air.”

“You have five minutes,” Martinez said, decisively. “If you haven’t found what you’re looking for by then, we open the door anyway. And Norbert’s right: let’s keep the noise down.”

“So, no pressure then,” Sollis muttered.

But in three minutes she started unplugging her tools, and turned aside with a beaming look on her face. “It’s just an emergency airlock, in case this part of the ship depressurizes. They must have decided to put it in after the original blueprints were drawn up.”

“No danger that tripping it will alert the rest of Nightingale?” I asked.

“Can’t ever say there’s no risk, but I’m happy for us to go through.”

“Open the door,” Martinez said. “Everyone brace in case there’s vacuum or underpressure on the other side.”

We followed his instructions, but when the door opened the air remained as still as before. Beyond, picked out in our wavering lights, was a short stretch of corridor terminating in an identical-looking door. This time there was enough room for all of us to squeeze through, while Sollis attended to the second lock mechanism. Some hardwired system required that the first door be closed before the second one could be opened, but that posed us no real difficulties. Now that Sollis knew what to look for, she worked much faster: good at her job and happy for us all to know it. I didn’t doubt that she’d be even faster on the way out.

“We’re ready to go through, people. Indications say that the air’s just as cold on the other side, so keep your suits buttoned.”

I heard the click as one of us—maybe Nicolosi, maybe Norbert—released a safety catch. It was like someone coughing in a theatre. I had no choice but to reach down and arm my own weapon.

“Open it,” Martinez said quietly.

The door chugged wide. Our lights stabbed into dark emptiness beyond: a suggestion of a much deeper, wider space than I’d been expecting. Sollis leaned through the door frame, her helmet lamp catching fleeting details from reflective surfaces. I had a momentary flash of glassy things stretching away into infinite distance, then it was gone.

“Report, Ingrid,” Martinez said.

“I think we can get through. We’ve come out next to a wall, or floor, or whatever it is. There are handholds, railings. Looks like they lead on into the room, probably to the other side.”

“Stay where you are,” Nicolosi said, just ahead of me. “I’ll take point again.”

She glanced back and swallowed hard. “It’s OK, I can handle this one. Can’t let you have all the fun, can I?”

Nicolosi grunted something: I don’t think he had much of a sense of humour. “You’re welcome to my gun, you want it.”

“I’m cool,” she said, but with audible hesitation. I didn’t blame her: it was different being point on a walk through a huge dark room, compared to a narrow corridor. Nothing could leap out and grab you from the side in a corridor.

She started moving along the crawlway.

“Nice and slowly, Ingrid,” Martinez said, from behind me. “We still have time on our side.”

“We’re right behind you,” I said, feeling she needed moral support.

“I’m fine, Dexia. No problems here. Just don’t want to lose my handhold and go drifting off into fuck knows what ...”

Her movements became rhythmic, moving into the chamber one careful handhold at a time. Nicolosi followed, with me right behind him. Apart from our movements, and the sound of our suit systems, the ship was still as silent as a crypt.

But it wasn’t totally dark anymore.

Now that we were inside the chamber, it began to reveal its secrets in dim spots of pale light, reaching away into some indeterminate distance. The lights must have always been there; just too faint to notice until we were inside.

“Something’s running,” Sollis said.

“We knew that,” Martinez said. “It was always clear that the ship was dormant, not dead.”

I panned my helmet around and tried to get another look at the glassy things I’d glimpsed earlier. On either side of the railinged walkway, stretching away in multiple ranks, were hundreds of transparent flasks. Each flask was the size of an oil drum, rounded on top, mounted on a steel-grey plinth equipped with controls, readouts and input sockets. There were three levels of them, with the second and third layers stacked above the first on a skeletal rack. Most of the plinths were dead, but maybe one in ten was showing a lit-up readout.

“Oh, Jesus,” Sollis said, and I guess she’d seen what I’d just seen: that the flasks contained human organs, floating in a chemical green solution, wired up with fine nutrient lines and electrical cables. I was no anatomist, but I still recognized hearts, lungs, kidneys, snakelike coils of intestine. And there were things anyone would have recognized: things like eyeballs, dozens of them growing in a single vat, swaying on the long stalks of optic nerves, like some weird species of all-seeing sea anemone, things like hands, or entire limbs, or genitals, or the skin and muscle masks of eyeless faces. Every external body part came in dozens of different sizes, ranging from child-sized to adult, male and female, and despite the green suspension fluid one could make out subtle variations in skin tone and pigmentation.

“Easy, Ingrid,” I said, the words as much for my benefit as hers. “We always knew this was a hospital ship. It was just a matter of time before we ran into something like this.”

“This stuff ...” Nicolosi said, his voice low. “Where does it come from?”

“Two main sources,” Martinez answered, sounding too calm for my liking. “Not everyone who came aboard Nightingale could be saved, obviously—the ship was no more capable of working miracles than any other hospital. Wherever practicable, the dead would donate intact body parts for future use. Useful, certainly, but such a resource could never have supplied the bulk of Nightingale’s surgical needs. For that reason the ship was also equipped to fabricate its own organ supplies, using well-established principles of stem-cell manipulation. The organ factories would have worked around the clock, keeping this library fully stocked.”

“It doesn’t look fully stocked now,” I said.

Martinez said: “We’re not in a war zone anymore. The ship is dormant. It has no need to maintain its usual surgical capacity.”

“So why is it maintaining any capacity? Why are some of these flasks still keeping their organs alive?”

“Waste not, want not, I suppose. A strategic reserve, against the day when the ship might be called into action again.”

“You think it’s just waiting to be reactivated?”

“It’s just a machine, Dexia. A machine on standby. Nothing to get nervous about.”

“No one’s nervous,” I said, but it came out all wrong, making me sound like I was the one who was spooked.

“Let’s get to the other side,” Nicolosi said.

“We’re halfway there,” Sollis reported. “I can see the far wall, sort of. Looks like there’s a door waiting for us.”

We kept on moving, hand over hand, mostly in silence. Surrounded by all those glass-cased body parts, I couldn’t help but think of the people many of them had once been part of. If these parts had belonged to me, I think I’d have chosen to haunt Nightingale, consumed with ill-directed, spiteful fury.

Not the right kind of thinking, I was just telling myself, when the flasks started moving.

We all stopped, anchoring ourselves to the nearest handhold. Two or three rows back from the railinged crawlway, a row of flasks was gliding smoothly toward the far wall of the chamber. They were sliding in perfect, lock-step unison. When my heart started beating again, I realized that the entire row must be attached to some kind of conveyor system, hidden within the support framework.

“Nobody move,” Nicolosi said.

“This is not good,” Sollis kept saying. “This is not good. The damn ship isn’t supposed to know ...”

“Quiet,” Martinez hissed. “Let me past you: I want to see where those flasks are going.”

“Careful,” Norbert said.

Paying no attention to the man, Martinez climbed ahead of the party. Quickly we followed him, doing our best not to make any noise or slip from the crawlway. The flasks continued their smooth, silent movement, until the conveyor system reached the far wall and turned through ninety degrees, taking the flasks away from us into a covered enclosure like a security scanner. Most of the flasks were empty, but as we watched, one of the occupied, active units slid into the enclosure. I’d only had a moment to notice, but I thought I’d seen a forearm and hand, reaching up from the life-support plinth.

The conveyor system halted. For all was silent, then there came a series of mechanical clicks and whirrs. None of us could see what was happening inside the enclosure, but after a moment we didn’t need to. It was obvious.

The conveyor came back on again, but running in reverse this time. The flask that had gone into the enclosure was now empty. I counted back to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake, but there was no doubt. The forearm and hand had been removed from the flask. Already, I presumed, it was somewhere else in the ship.

The flasks travelled back—returning to what must have been their former positions—and then halted again. Save for the missing limb, the chamber was exactly as when we had entered it.

“I don’t like this,” Sollis said. “The ship was supposed to be dead.”

“Dormant,” Martinez corrected.

“You don’t think the shit that just happened is in any way related to us being aboard? You don’t think Jax just got a wake-up call?”

“If Jax were aware of our presence, we’d know it by now.”

“I don’t know how you can sound so calm.”

“All that has happened, Ingrid, is that Nightingale has performed some trivial housekeeping duty. We have already seen that it maintains some organs in pre-surgical condition, and this is just one of its tissue libraries. It should hardly surprise us that the ship occasionally decides to move some of its stock from A to B.”

She made a small, catlike snarl of frustration—I could tell she hadn’t bought any of his explanations—and pulled herself hand over hand to the door.

“Any more shit like that happens, I’m out,” she said.

“I’d think twice if I were you,” Martinez said, “it’s a hell of a long walk home.”

I caught up with Sollis and touched her on the forearm. “I don’t like it either, Ingrid. But the man’s right. Jax doesn’t know we’re here. If he did, I think he’d do more than just move some flasks around.”

“I hope you’re right, Scarrow.”

“So do I,” I said under my breath.

We continued along the main axis of the ship, following a corridor much like the one we’d been traversing before the organ library. It swerved and jogged, then straightened out again. According to the inertial compasses we were still headed towards Jax, or at least the part of the ship where it appeared most likely we’d find him, alive or dead.

“What we were talking about earlier,” Sollis said, “I mean, much earlier—about how this ship never got destroyed at the end of the war after all ...”

“I think I have stated my case, Ingrid. Dwelling on myths won’t bring a wanted man to justice.”

“We’re looking at about a million tonnes of salvageable spacecraft here. Gotta be worth something to someone. So why didn’t anyone get their hands on it after the war?”

“Because something bad happened,” Nicolosi said. “Maybe there was some truth in the story about that boarding party coming here and not leaving.”

“Oh, please,” Martinez said.

“So who was fighting back?” I asked. “Who was it who stopped them taking Nightingale?”

Nicolosi answered me. “The skeleton staff—security agents of the postmortals who financed this thing—maybe even the protective systems of the ship itself. If it thought it was under attack ...”

“If there was some kind of firefight aboard this thing,” I asked, where’s the damage?”

“I don’t care about the damage,” Sollis cut in. “I want to know what happened to all the bodies.”

* * * *

We came to another blocked double-door airlock. Sollis got to work on it immediately, but if I’d expected that she would work faster now that she had already opened several doors without trouble, I was wrong. She kept plugging things in, checking readouts, murmuring to herself just loud enough to carry over the voice link. Nightingale’s face watched us disapprovingly, looking on like the portrait of a disappointed ancestor.

“This one could be trickier,” she said. “I’m picking up active data links, running away from the frame.”

“Meaning it could still be hooked into the nervous system?” Nicolosi asked.

“I can’t rule it out.”

Nicolosi ran a hand along the smooth black barrel of his plasma weapon. “We could double back, try a different route.”

“We’re not going back,” Martinez said. “Not now. Open the door, Ingrid: we’ll take our chances and move as quickly as we can from now on.”

“You sure about this?” She had a cable pinched between her fingers. “No going back once I plug this in.”

“Do it.”

She pushed the line in. At the same moment a shiver of animation passed through Nightingale’s face, the mask waking to life. The door spoke to us. Its tone was strident and metallic, but also possessed of an authoritative feminity.

“This is the Voice of Nightingale. You are attempting to access a secure area. Report to central administration to obtain proper clearance.”

“Shit,” Sollis said.

“You weren’t expecting that?” I asked.

“I wasn’t expecting an active facet. Maybe the sentience engine isn’t powered down quite as far as I thought.”

“This is the Voice of Nightingale,” the door said again. “You are attempting to access a secure area. Report to central administration to obtain proper clearance.”

“Can you still force it?” Nicolosi asked.

“Yeah ... think so.” Sollis fumbled in another line, made some adjustments and stood back as the door slid open. “Voila.”

The face had turned silent and masklike again, but now I really felt that we were being watched; that the woman’s eyes seemed to be looking in all directions at once.

“You think Jax knows about us now?” I asked, as Sollis propelled herself into the holding chamber between the two sets of doors.

“I don’t know. Maybe I got to the door in time, before it sent an alert.”

“But you can’t be sure.”

“No.” She sounded wounded.

Sollis got to the work on the second door, faster now, urgency overruling caution. I checked that my gun was still where I’d left it, and then made sure that the safety catch was still off. Around me, the others went through similar preparatory rituals.

Gradually it dawned on me that Sollis was taking longer than expected. She turned from the door, with her equipment still hooked into its open service panel.

“Something’s screwed up,” she said, before swallowing hard. “These suits you’ve got us wearing, Tomas—how good are they, exactly?”

“Full-spectrum battle hardened. Why do you ask?”

“Because the door says that the ship’s flooded behind this point. It says we’ll be swimming through something.”

“I see,” Martinez said.

“Oh, no,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re not doing this. We’re not going underwater.”

“I can’t be sure it’s water, Dexia.” She tapped the readout panel, as if I’d have been able to make sense of the numbers and symbols. “Could be anything warm and wet, really.”

Martinez shrugged within his suit. “Could have been a containment leak—spillage into this part of the ship. It’s nothing to worry about. Our suits will cope easily, provided we do not delay.”

I looked him hard in the faceplate, meeting his eyes, making certain he couldn’t look away. “You’re sure about this? These suits aren’t going to stiff on us as soon as they get wet?”

“The suits will work. I am so certain that I will go first. When you hear that I am safe on the other side, you can all follow.”

“I don’t like this. What if Ingrid’s tools don’t work underwater?”

“We have no choice but to keep moving forward,” Martinez said. “If this section of the ship is flooded, we’ll run into it no matter which route we take. This is the only way.”

“Let’s do it,” I said. “If these suits made it through the war, I’m pretty sure they’ll get us through the next chamber.”

“It’s not the suits I’m worried about,” Nicolosi said, examining his weapon again. “No one mentioned ... immersion ... when we were in the armoury.”

I cupped a hand to my crude little slug gun. “I’ll swap you, we make it to the other side.”

Nicolosi didn’t say anything. I don’t think he saw the funny side.

Two minutes later we were inside, floating weightless in the unlit gloom of the flooded room. It felt like water, but it was hard to tell. Everything felt thick and sluggish when you were wearing a suit, even thin air. My biohazard detectors weren’t registering anything, but that didn’t necessarily mean the fluid was safe. The detectors were tuned to recognize a handful of toxins in common wartime use: they weren’t designed to sniff out every harmful agent that had ever existed.

Martinez’s voice buzzed in my helmet. “There are no handholds or guide wires. We’ll just have to swim in a straight direction, trusting to our inertial compasses. If we all stay within sight of each other, we should have no difficulties.”

“Let’s get on with it,” Nicolosi said.

We started swimming as best as we could, Nicolosi leading, pushing himself forward with powerful strokes, his weapons dangling from their straps. It would have been hard and slow with just the suits to contend with, but we were all carrying armour as well. It made it difficult to see ahead; difficult to reach forward to get an effective stroke; difficult to kick the legs enough to make any useful contribution. Our helmet lamps struggled to illuminate more than ten or twenty metres in any direction, and the door by which we’d entered was soon lost in gloom. I felt a constricting sense of panic; the fear that if the compasses failed we might never find our way out again.

The compasses didn’t fail, though, and Nicolosi maintained his unfaltering pace. Two minutes into the swim he called: “I see the wall. It’s dead ahead of us.”

A couple of seconds later I saw it for myself, hoving out of the deep pink gloom. Any relief I might have felt was tempered by the observation that the wall appeared featureless, stretching away blankly in all illuminated directions.

“There’s no door,” I said.

“Maybe we’ve picked up some lateral drift,” Nicolosi said.

“Compass says no.”

“Then maybe the doors are offset. It doesn’t matter: we’ll find it by hitting the wall and spiralling out from our landing spot.”

“If there’s a door.”

“If there isn’t,” Nicolosi said, “we shoot our way out.”

“Glad you’ve thought this through,” I said, realizing that he was serious.

The wall came nearer. The closer we got, the more clearly it was picked out by our lamps, the more I realized there was something not quite right about it. It was still blank—lacking any struts or panels, apertures or pieces of shipboard equipment—but it wasn’t the seamless surface I’d have expected from a massive sheet of prefabricated spacecraft material. There was an unsettling texture to it, with something of the fibrous quality of cheap paper. Faint lines coursed through it, slightly darker than the rest of the wall, but not arranged according to any neat geometric pattern. They curved and branched, and threw off fainter subsidiary lines, diminishing like the veins in a leaf.

In a nauseating flash I realized exactly what the wall was. When Nicolosi’s palms touched the surface, it yielded like a trampoline, absorbing the momentum of his impact and then sending him back out again, until his motion was damped by the surrounding fluid.

“It’s ...” I began.

“Skin. I know. I realized just before I hit.”

I arrested my motion, but not enough to avoid contacting the wall of skin. It yielded under me, stretching so much that I felt I was in danger of ripping my way right through. Then it held, and began to trampoline me back in the direction I’d come. Fighting a tide of revulsion, I pulled back into the liquid and floated amidst the others.

“Fuck,” Sollis said. “This isn’t right. There shouldn’t be fucking skin ...”

“Don’t be alarmed,” Martinez said, wheezing between each word. “This is just another form of organ library, like the room we already passed through. I believe the liquid we’re swimming in must be a form of growth support medium—something like amniotic fluid. Under wartime conditions, this whole chamber would have been full of curtains of growing skin, measured by the acre.”

Nicolosi groped for something on his belt, came up with a serrated blade that glinted nastily even in the pink fluid.

“I’m cutting through.”

“No!” Martinez barked.

Sollis, who was next to Nicolosi, took hold of his forearm. “Easy, soldier. Got to be a better way.”

“There is,” Martinez said. “Put the knife away, please. We can go around the skin, find its edge.”

Nicolosi still had the blade in his hand. “I’d rather take the short cut.”

“There are nerve endings in that skin. Cut them and the monitoring apparatus will know about it. Then so will the ship.”

“Maybe the ship already knows.”

“We don’t take that chance.”

Reluctantly, Nicolosi returned the knife to his belt. “I thought we’d agreed to move fast from now on,” he said.

“There’s fast, and there’s reckless,” Sollis said. “You were about to cross the line.”

Martinez brushed past me, already swimming to the left. I followed him, with the others tagging on behind. After less than a minute of hard progress a dark edge emerged into view. It was like a picture frame stretching tight the canvas of the skin. Beyond the edge, only just visible, was a wall of the chamber, fretted with massive geodesic reinforcing struts.

I allowed myself a moment of ease. We were still in danger, still in about the most claustrophobic situation I could imagine, but at least now the chamber didn’t seem infinitely large.

Martinez braked himself by grabbing the frame. I came to rest next to him, and peered over the edge, towards what I hoped would be the wall we’d been heading towards all along. But instead of that I saw only another field of skin, stretched between another frame, spaced from ours by no more than the height of a man. In the murky distance was the suggestion of a third frame, and perhaps one beyond that as well.

“How many?” I asked as the others arrived on the frame, perching like crows.

“I don’t know,” Martinez said. “Four, five—anything up to a dozen, I’d guess. But it’s OK. We can swim around the frames, then turn right and head back to where we’d expect to find the exit door.” He raised his voice. “Everyone all right? No problems with your suits?”

“There are lights,” Nicolosi said quietly.

We turned to look at him.

“I mean down there,” he added, nodding in the direction of the other sheets of skin. “I saw a flicker of something—a glow in the water, or amniotic fluid, or whatever the fuck this is.”

“I see light too,” Norbert said.

I looked down and saw that he was right; that Nicolosi had not been imagining it. A pale, trembling light was emerging between the next two layers of skin.

“Whatever that is, I don’t like it,” I said.

“Me neither,” Martinez said. “But if it’s something going on between the skin layers, it doesn’t have to concern us. We swim around, avoid them completely.”

He kicked off with surprising determination, and I followed quickly after him. The reverse side of the skin sheet was a fine mesh of pale support fibres, the structural matrix upon which the skin must have been grown and nourished. Thick black cables ran across the underside, arranged in circuit-like patterns.

The second sheet, the one immediately below the first, was of different pigmentation to the one above it. In all other respects it appeared similar, stretching unbroken into pink haze. The flickering, trembling light source was visible through flesh, silhouetting the veins and arteries at the moments when the light was brightest.

We passed under the second sheet, and peered into the gap between the second and third layers. Picked out in stuttering light was a tableau of furtive activity. Four squidlike robots were at work. Each machine consisted of a tapering, cone-shaped body, anchored to the skin by a cluster of whiplike arms emerging from the blunt end of the cone. The robots were engaged in precise surgery, removing a blanket-sized rectangle of skin by cutting it along four sides. The robots had their own illumination, shining from the ends of some of their arms, but the bright flashing light was coming from some kind of laser-like tool that each robot deployed on the end of a single segmented arm that was thicker than any of the others. I couldn’t tell whether the flashes were part of the cutting, or the instant healing that appeared to be taking place immediately afterwards. There was no bleeding, and the surrounding skin appeared unaffected.

“What are they doing?” I breathed.

“Harvesting,” Martinez answered. “What does it look like?”

“I know they’re harvesting. I mean, why are they doing it? What do they need that skin for?”

“I don’t know.”

“You had plenty of answers in the organ library, Mr. Martinez,” Sollis said. All five of us had slowed, hovering at the same level as the surgical robots. “For a ship that’s supposed to be dormant, I’m not seeing much fucking evidence of dormancy.”

“Nightingale grows skin here,” I said. “I can deal with that. The ship’s keeping a basic supply going, in case it gets called into another war. But that doesn’t explain why it needs to harvest it now.”

Martinez sounded vague. “Maybe it’s testing the skin—making sure it’s developing according to plan.”

“You’d think a little sample would be enough for that,” I said. “A lot less than several square metres, for sure. That’s enough skin to cover a whole person.”

“I really wish you hadn’t said that,” Nicolosi said.

“Let’s keep moving,” Martinez said. And he was right, too, I thought: the activity of the robots was deeply unsettling, but we hadn’t come here to sight-see.

As we swam away—with no sign that the robots had noticed us—I thought about what Ingrid Sollis had said before. About how it wasn’t clever to leave a gamma-level intelligence up and running without something to occupy itself. Because otherwise—because duty was so deeply hardwired into their logic pathways—they tended to go slowly, quietly, irrevocably insane.

But Nightingale had been alone out here since the end of the war. What did that mean for its controlling mind? Was the hospital running itself out here—reliving the duties of its former life, no matter how pointless they had become—because the mind had already gone mad, or was this the hospital’s last-ditch way of keeping itself sane?

And what, I wondered, did any of that have to do with the man we had come here to find in the first place?

We kept swimming, passing layer upon layer of skin. Now and then we’d pass another surgical party: another group of robots engaged in skin harvesting. Where they’d already been, the flesh was excised in neat rectangles and strips, exposing the gauzelike mesh of the growth matrix. Occasionally I saw a patch that was half-healed already, with the skin growing back in rice-paper translucence. By the time it was fully repaired, I doubted that there’d be any sign of where the skin had been cut.

Ten layers, then twelve—and then finally the wall I’d been waiting for hoved into view like a mirage. But I wasn’t imagining it, nor seeing another layer of drum-tight skin. There was the same pattern of geodesic struts as I’d seen on the other wall.

Sollis came through. “Got a visual on the door, people. We’re nearly out of here. I’m swimming ahead to start work.”

“Good, Ingrid,” Martinez called back.

A few seconds later I saw the airlock for myself, relieved that Sollis hadn’t been mistaken. She swam quickly, then—even as she was gliding to a halt by the door—commenced unclipping tools and connectors from her belt. Through the darkening distance of the pink haze I watched her flip down the service panel and begin her usual systems-bypass procedure. I was glad Martinez had found Sollis. Whatever else one might say about her, she was pretty hot at getting through doors.

“OK, good news,” she said, after a minute of plugging things in and out. “There’s air on the other side. We’re not going to have to swim in this stuff for much longer.”

“How much longer?” Nicolosi asked.

“Can’t risk a short circuit here, guy. Gotta take things one step at a time.”

Just as she was saying that, I became aware that we were casting shadows against the wall; ones that we hadn’t been casting when we arrived. I twisted around and looked back the way we’d just swum, in the direction of the new light source I knew had to be there. Four of the squid-like machines were approaching us, dragging a blanket of newly harvested skin between them, one robot grasping each corner between two segmented silver tentacles. They were moving faster than we could swim, driven by some propulsion system jetting fluid from the sharp end of the cone.

Sollis jerked back as the outer airlock door opened suddenly.

“I didn’t ...” she started.

“I know,” I said urgently. “The robots are coming. They must have sent a command to open the lock.”

“Let’s get out of the way,” Martinez said, kicking off from the wall. “Ingrid: get away from the lock. Take what you can, but don’t spend too long doing it.”

Sollis started unplugging her equipment, stowing it on her belt with fumbling fingers. The machines powered nearer, the blanket of skin undulating like a flying carpet. They slowed, then halted. Their lights pushed spears of harsh illumination through the fluid. They were looking at us, wondering what we were doing between them and the door. One of the machines directed its beam to Martinez’s swimming figure, attracted by the movement. Martinez slowed and hung frozen in the glare, like a moth pinned in a beam of sunlight.

None of us said a word. My own breathing was the loudest sound in the universe, but I couldn’t make it any quieter.

One of the machines let go of its corner of the skin. It hovered by the sheet for a moment, as if weighing its options. Then it singled me out and commenced its approach. As it neared, the machine appeared far larger and more threatening than I’d imagined. Its cone-shaped body was as long as me; its thickest tentacle appearing powerful enough to do serious damage even without the additional weapon of the laser. When it spread its arms wide, as if to embrace me, I had to fight not to panic and back away.

The robot started examining me. It began with my helmet, tap-tapping and scraping, shining its light through my visor. It applied twisting force, trying to disengage the helmet from the neck coupling. Whether it recognized me as a person or just a piece of unidentifiable floating debris, it appeared to think that dismantling was the best course of action. I told myself that I’d let it work at me for another few seconds, but as soon as I felt the helmet begin to loosen I’d have to act—even if that meant alerting the robot that I probably wasn’t debris.

But just when I’d decided as much, the robot abandoned my helmet and worked its way south. It extended a pair of tentacles under my chest armour from each side, trying to lever it away like huge scab. Somehow I kept my nerve, daring to believe that the robot would sooner or later lose interest in me. Then it pulled away from the chest armour and started fiddling with my weapon, tap-tapping away like a spirit in a séance. It tugged on the gun, trying to unclip it. Then, as abruptly as it had started, the robot abandoned its investigation. It pulled away, gathering its tentacles into a fistlike bunch. Then it moved slowly in the direction of Nicolosi, tentacles groping ahead of it.

I willed him to stay still. There’d be no point in swimming. None of us could move faster than those robots. Nicolosi must have worked that out for himself, or else he was paralysed in fright, but he made no movements as the robot cruised up to him. It slowed, the spread of its tentacles widening, and then tracked its spotlight from head to toe, as if it still couldn’t decide what Nicolosi was. Then it reached out a pair of manipulators and brushed their sharp-looking tips against his helmet. The machine probed and examined with surprising gentleness. I heard the metal-on-metal scrape through the voice link, backgrounded by Nicolosi’s rapid, sawlike breathing.

Keep it together ...

The machine reached his neck, examined the interface between helmet and torso assembly, and then worked its way down to his chest armour, extending a fine tentacle under the armour itself, to where the vulnerable life-support module lay concealed. Then, very slowly, it withdrew the tentacle.

The machine pulled back from Nicolosi, turning its blunt end away. It seemed to have completed its examination. The other three robots hovered watchfully with their prize of skin. Nicolosi sighed and eased his breathing.

“I think ...” he whispered.

That was his big mistake. The machine righted itself, gathered its tentacles back into formation and began to approach him again, its powerful light sweeping up and down his body with renewed purpose. The second machine was nearing, clearly intent on assisting its partner in the examination of Nicolosi.

I looked at Sollis, our horrified faces meeting each other. “Can you get the door ...” I started.

“Not a hope in hell.”

“Nicolosi,” I said, not bothering to whisper this time. “Stay still and maybe they’ll go away again.”

But he wasn’t going to stay still: not this time. Even as I watched, he was hooking a hand around the plasma rifle, bringing it around like a harpoon, its wide maw directed at the nearest machine.

“No!” Norbert shouted, his voice booming through the water like a depth charge. “Do not use! Not in here!”

But Nicolosi was beyond reasoned argument now. He had a weapon. Every cell in his body was screaming at him to use it.

So he did.

In one sense, it did all that he asked of it. The plasma discharge speared the robot like a sunbeam through a cloud. The robot came apart in a boiling eruption of steam and fire, with jagged black pieces riding the shockwave. Then the steam—the vaporized amniotic fluid—swallowed everything, including Nicolosi and his gun. Even inside my suit, the sound hit me like a hammerblow. He fired one more time, as if to make certain that he had destroyed the robot. By then the second machine was near enough to be flung back by the blast, but it quickly righted itself and continued its progress.

“More,” Norbert said, and when I looked back up the stack of skin sheets, I saw what he meant. Robots were arriving in ones and twos, abandoning their cutting work to investigate whatever had just happened here.

“We’re in trouble,” I said.

The steam cloud was breaking up, revealing the floating form of Nicolosi, with the ruined stump of his weapon drifting away from him. The second time he fired it, something must have gone badly wrong with the plasma rifle. I wasn’t even sure that Nicolosi was still alive.

“I take door,” Norbert said, drawing his Demarchist weapon. “You take robots.”

“You’re going to shoot us out, after what happened to Nicolosi?” I asked.

“No choice,” he said, as the gun unpacked itself in his hand.

Martinez pushed himself across to the big man. “No. Give it to me instead. I’ll take care of the door.”

“Too dangerous,” Norbert said.

“Give it to me.”

Norbert hesitated, and for a moment I thought he was going to put up a fight. Then he calmly passed the Demarchist weapon to Martinez and accepted Martinez’s weapon in return; the little slug gun vanishing into his vast gauntleted hand. Whatever respect I’d had for Norbert vanished at the same time. If he was supposed to be protecting Martinez, that was no way to go about it.

Of the three of us, only Norbert and I were carrying projectile weapons. I unclipped my second pistol and passed it to Sollis. She took it gratefully, needing little persuasion to keep her energy weapon glued to her belt. The robots were easy to kill, provided we let them get close enough for a clean shot. I didn’t doubt that the surgical cutting gear was capable of inflicting harm, but we never gave them the opportunity to touch us. Not that the machines appeared to have deliberately hostile designs on us anyway. They were still behaving as if they were investigating some shipboard malfunction that required remedial action. They might have killed us, but it would only have been because they did not understand what we were.

We didn’t have an inexhaustible supply of slugs, though, and manual reloading was not an option underwater. Just when I began to worry that we’d be overwhelmed by sheer numbers, Martinez’s voice boomed through my helmet.

“I’m ready to shoot now. Follow me as soon as I’m through the second door.”

The Demarchist weapon discharged, lighting up the entire chamber in an eyeblink of murky detail. There was another discharge, then a third.

“Martinez,” I said. “Speak to me.”

After too long a delay, he came through. “I’m still here. Through the first door. Weapon’s cycling ...”

More robots were swarming above us, tentacles lashing like whips. I wondered how long it would take before signals reached Nightingale’s sentience engine and the ship realized that it was dealing with more than just a local malfunction.

“Why doesn’t he shoot?” Sollis asked, squeezing off one controlled slug after another.

“Sporting weapon. Three shots, recharge cycle, three shots,” Norbert said, by way of explanation. “No rapid-fire mode. But work good underwater.”

“We could use those next three shots,” I said.

Martinez buzzed in my ear. “Ready. I will discharge until the weapon is dry. I suggest you start swimming now.”

I looked at Nicolosi’s drifting form, which was still as inert as when he had emerged from the steam cloud caused by his own weapon. “I think he’s dead ...” I said softly. “But we should still—”

“No,” Norbert said, almost angrily. “Leave him.”

“Maybe he’s just unconscious.”

Martinez fired three times; three brief bright strobe flashes. “Through!” I heard him call, but there was something wrong with his voice. I knew then that he’d been hurt as well, although I couldn’t guess at how badly.

Norbert and Sollis fired two last shots at the robots that were still approaching, then kicked past me in the direction of the airlock. I looked at Nicolosi’s drifting form, knowing that I’d never be able to live with myself if I didn’t try to get him out of there. I clipped my gun back to my belt and started swimming for him.

“No!” Norbert shouted again, when he’d seen my intentions. “Leave him! Too late!”

I reached Nicolosi and locked my right arm around his neck, pulling his head against my chest. I kicked for all I was worth, trying to pull myself forward with my free arm. I still couldn’t tell if Nicolosi was dead or alive.

“Leave him, Scarrow! Too late!”

“I can’t leave him!” I shouted back, my voice ragged.

Three robots were bearing down on me and my cargo, their tentacles groping ahead of them. I squinted against the glare from their lights and tried to focus on getting the two of us to safety. Every kick of my legs, every awkward swing of my arm, seemed to tap the last drop of energy in my muscles. Finally I had nothing more to give.

I loosened my arm. His body corkscrewed slowly around, and through his visor I saw his face: pale, sweat-beaded, locked into a rictus of fear, but not dead, nor even unconscious. His eyes were wide open. He knew exactly what was going to happen when I let him go.

I had no choice.

A strong arm hooked itself under my helmet, and began to tug me out of harm’s way. I watched as Nicolosi drifted towards the robots, and then closed my eyes as they wrapped their tentacles around his body and started probing him for points of weakness, like children trying to tear the wrapping from a present.

Norbert’s voice boomed through the water. “He’s dead.”

“He was alive. I saw it.”

“He’s dead. End of story.”

* * * *

I pulled myself through a curtain of trembling pink water. Air pressure in the corridor contained the amniotic fluid, even though Martinez had blown a man-sized hole in each airlock door. Ruptured metal folded back in jagged black petals. Ahead, caught in a moving pool of light from their helmet lamps, Sollis and Martinez made awkward, crabwise progress away from the ruined door. Sollis was supporting Martinez, doing most of the work for him. Even in zero gravity, it took effort to haul another body.

“Help her,” Norbert said faintly, shaking his weapon to loosen the last of the pink bubbles from its metal. Without waiting for a reaction from me, he turned and started shooting back into the water, dealing with the remaining robots.

I caught up with Sollis and took some of her burden. All along the corridor, panels were flashing bright red, synchronized to the banshee wail of an emergency siren. About once every ten metres, the ship’s persona spoke from the wall; multiple voices blurring into an agitated chorus. “Attention. Attention,” the faces said. “This is the Voice of Nightingale. An incident has been detected in culture bay three. Damage assessment and mitigation systems have now been tasked. Partial evacuation of the affected ship area may be necessary. Please stand by for further instructions. Attention. Attention ...”

“What’s up with Martinez?”

“Took some shrapnel when he put a hole in that door.” She indicated a severe dent in his chest armour, to the left of the sternum. “Didn’t puncture the suit, but I’m pretty sure it did some damage. Broken rib, maybe even a collapsed lung. He was talking for a while back there, but he’s out cold now.”

“Without Martinez, we don’t have a mission.”

“ I didn’t say he was dead. His suit still seems to be ticking over. Maybe we could leave him here, collect him on the way back.”

“With all those robots crawling about the place? How long do you think they’d leave him alone?”

I looked back, checking on Norbert. He was firing less frequently now, dealing with the last few stragglers still intent on investigating the damage. Finally he stopped, loaded a fresh clip into his slug gun, and then after waiting for ten or twenty seconds turned from the wall of water. He began to make his way towards us.

“Maybe there aren’t going to be any more robots.”

“There will,” Norbert said, joining us. “Many more. Nowhere safe, now. Ship on full alert. Nightingale coming alive.”

“Maybe we should scrub,” I said. “We’ve lost Nicolosi ... Martinez is incapacitated ... we’re no longer at anything like necessary strength to take down Jax.”

“We still take Jax,” Norbert said. “Came for him, leave with him.”

“Then what about Martinez?”

He looked at the injured man, his face set like a granite carving. “He stay,” he said.

“But you already said the robots—”

“No other choice. He stay.” And then Norbert brought himself closer to Martinez and tucked a thick finger under the chin of the old man’s helmet, tilting the faceplate up. “Wake!” he bellowed.

When there was no response, Norbert reached behind Martinez’s chest armour and found the release buckles. He passed the dented plate to me, then slid down the access panel on the front of Martinez’s tabard pack, itself dented and cracked from the shrapnel impact. He scooped out a fistful of pink water, flinging the bubble away from us, then started making manual adjustments to the suit’s life-support settings. Biomedical data patterns shifted, accompanied by warning flashes in red.

“What are you doing?” I breathed. When he didn’t hear me, I shouted the question.

“He need stay awake. This help.”

Martinez coughed red sputum onto the inside of his faceplate. He gulped in hard, then made rapid eye contact with the three of us. Norbert pushed the loaded slug gun into Martinez’s hand, then slipped a fresh ammo clip onto the old man’s belt. He pointed down the corridor, to the blasted door, then indicated the direction we’d all be heading when we abandoned Martinez.

“We come back,” he said. “You stay alive.”

Sollis’s teeth flashed behind her faceplate. “This isn’t right. We should be carrying him—anything other than just leaving him here.”

“Tell them,” Martinez wheezed.

“No.”

“Tell them, you fool! They’ll never trust you unless you tell them.”

“Tell them what?” I asked.

Norbert looked at me with heavy lidded eyes. “The old man ... not Martinez. His name ... Quinlan.”

“Then who the fuck is Martinez?” Sollis asked.

“I,” Norbert said.

I glanced at Sollis, then back at the big man. “Don’t be silly,” I said gently, wondering what must have happened to him in the flooded chamber.

“I am Quinlan,” the old man said, between racking coughs. “He was always the master. I was just the servant, the decoy.”

“They’re both insane,” Sollis said.

“This is the truth. I acted the role of Martinez—deflected attention from him.”

“He can’t be Martinez,” Sollis said. “Sorry, Norbert, but you can barely put a sentence together, let alone a prosecution dossier.”

Norbert tapped a huge finger against the side of his helmet. “Damage to speech centre, in war. Comprehension ... memory ... analytic faculties ... intact.”

“He’s telling the truth,” the old man said. “He’s the one who needs to survive, not me. He’s the one who can nail Jax.” Then he tapped the gun against the big man’s leg, urging him to leave. “Go,” he said, barking out that one word like it was the last thing he expected to say. And at almost the same moment, I saw one of the tentacled robots begin to poke its limbs through the curtain of water, tick-ticking the tips of its arms against the blasted metal, searching for a way into the corridor.

“Think the man has a point,” Sollis said.

* * * *

It didn’t get any easier from that point on.

We left the old man—I still couldn’t think of him as “Quinlan”—slumped against the corridor wall, the barrel of his gun wavering in the rough direction of the ruined airlock. I looked back all the while, willing him to make the best use of the limited number of shots he had left. We were halfway to the next airlock when he squeezed off three rapid rounds, blasting the robot to twitching pieces. It wasn’t long before another set of tentacles began to probe the gap. I wondered how many of the damned things the ship was going to keep throwing at us, and how that number stacked up against the slugs the old man had left.

The flashing red lights ran all the way to the end of the corridor. I was just looking at the door, wondering how easy it was going to be for Sollis to crack, when Norbert/Martinez brought the three of us to a halt, braking my momentum with one tree-like forearm.

“Blast visor down, Scarrow.”

I understood what he had in mind. No more sweet-talking the doors until they opened for us. From now on we were shooting our way through Nightingale.

Norbert/Martinez aimed the Demarchist weapon at the airlock. I cuffed down my blast visor. Three discharges took out the first airlock door, crumpling it inward as if punched by a giant fist.

“Air on other side,” Norbert/Martinez said.

The Demarchist gun was ready again. Through the visor’s near-opaque screen I saw three flashes. When I flipped it back up, the weapon was packing itself back into its stowed configuration. Sollis patted aside smoke and airborne debris. The emergency lights were still flashing in our section of corridor, but the space beyond the airlock was as pitch dark as any part of the ship we’d already traversed. Yet we’d barely taken a step into that darkness when wall facets lit up in swift sequence, with the face of Nightingale looking at us from all directions.

Something was wrong now. The faces really were looking at us, even though the facets were flat. The images turned slowly as we advanced down the corridor.

“This is the Voice of Nightingale,” she said, as if we were being addressed by a perfectly synchronized choir. “I am now addressing a moving party of three individuals. My systems have determined with a high statistical likelihood that this party is responsible for the damage I have recently sustained. The damage is containable, but I cannot tolerate any deeper intrusion. Please remain stationary and await an escort to a safe holding area.”

Sollis slowed, but she didn’t stop. “Who’s speaking? Are we being addressed by the sentience engine, or just a delta-level subsidiary?”

“This is the Voice of Nightingale. I am a Turing-compliant gamma-level intelligence of the Vaaler-Lako series. Please stop, and await escort to a safe holding area.”

“That’s the sentience engine,” Sollis said quietly. “It means we’re getting the ship’s full attention now.”

“Maybe we can talk it into handing over Jax.”

“I don’t know. Negotiating with this thing might be tricky. Vaaler-Lakos were supposed to be the hot new thing around the time Nightingale was put together, but they didn’t quite work out that way.”

“What happened?”

“There was a flaw in their architecture. Within a few years of start-up, most of them had gone bugfuck insane. I don’t even want to think about what being stuck out here’s done to this one.”

“Please stop,” the voice said again, “and await escort to a safe holding area. This is your final warning.”

“Ask it ...” Norbert/Martinez said. “Speak for me.”

“Can you hear me, ship?” Sollis asked. “We’re not here to do any harm. We’re sorry about the damage we caused already. It’s just that we’ve come for someone. There’s a man here, a man aboard you, that we’d really like to meet.”

The ship said nothing for several moments. Just when I’d concluded that it didn’t understand us, it said: “This facility is no longer operational. There is no one here for you to see. Please await escort to a safe holding area, from where you can be referred to a functioning facility.”

“We’ve come for Colonel Jax,” I said. “Check your patient records.”

“Admission code Tango Tango six one three, hyphen five,” said Norbert/Martinez, forcing each word out like an expression of pain. “Colonel Brandon Jax, Northern Coalition.”

“Do you have a record of that admission?” I asked.

“Yes,” the Voice of Nightingale replied. “I have a record for Colonel Jax.”

“Do you have a discharge record?”

“No such record is on file.”

“Then Jax either died in your care, or he’s still aboard. Either way there’ll be a body. We’d really like to see it.”

“That is not possible. You will stop now. An escort is on its way to escort you to a safe holding area.”

“Why can’t we see Jax?” Sollis demanded. “Is he telling you we can’t see him? If so he’s not the man you should be listening to. He’s a war criminal, a murderous bastard who deserves to die.”

“Colonel Jax is under the care of this facility. He is still receiving treatment. It is not possible to visit him at this time.”

“Damn thing’s changing its story,” I said. “A minute ago it said the facility was closed.”

“We just want to talk to him,” Sollis said. “That’s all. Just to let him know the world knows where he is, even if you don’t let us take him with us now.”

“Please remain calm. The escort is about to arrive.”

The facets turned to look away from us, peering into the dark limits of the corridor. There was a sudden bustle of approaching movement, and then a wall of machines came squirming towards us. Dozens of squid-robots were nearing, packed so tightly together that their tentacles formed a flailing mass of silver-blue metal. I looked back the other way, back the way we’d come, and saw another wave of robots coming from that direction. There were far more machines than we’d seen before, and their movements in dry air were at least as fast and fluid as they’d been underwater.

“Ship,” Sollis said, “all we want is Jax. We’re prepared to fight for him. That’ll mean more damage being inflicted on you. But if you give us Jax, we’ll leave nicely.”

“I don’t think it wants to bargain,” I said, raising my slug gun at the advancing wall just as it reached the ruined airlock. I squeezed off rounds, taking out at least one robot with each slug. Sollis started pitching in to my left, while Norbert/Martinez took care of the other direction with the Demarchist weapon. He could do a lot more damage with each discharge, taking out three or four machines every time he squeezed the trigger. But he kept having to wait for the weapon to re-arm itself, and the delay was allowing the wall to creep slowly forward. Sollis and I were firing almost constantly, taking turns to cover each other while we slipped in new slugs clips or ammo cells, but our wall was gaining on us as well. No matter how many robots we destroyed, no gap ever appeared in the advancing wave. There must have been hundreds of them, squeezing us in from both directions.

“We’re not going to make it,” I said, sounding resigned even to myself. “There’s too many of them. Maybe if we still had Nicolosi’s rifle, we could shoot our way out.”

“I didn’t come all this way just to surrender to a haunted hospital,” Sollis said, replacing an ammo cell. “If it means going out fighting ... so be it.”

The nearest robots were now only six or seven metres away, with the tips of their tentacles probing even nearer. She kept pumping shots into them, but they kept coming closer, flinging aside the hot debris of their damaged companions. There was no possibility of falling back any farther, for we were almost back to back with Norbert/Martinez.

“Maybe we should just stop,” I said. “This is a hospital. It’s programmed to heal people. The last thing it’ll want to do is hurt us.”

“Feel free to put that to the test,” Sollis said.

Norbert/Martinez squeezed off the last discharge before his weapon went back into recharge mode. Sollis was still firing. I reached over and tried to pass him my gun, so he’d at least have something to use while waiting for his weapon to power up. But the machines had already seen their moment. The closest one flicked out a tentacle and wrapped it around the big man’s foot. Everything happened very quickly, then. The machine hauled Norbert/Martinez towards the flailing mass, until he fell within reach of another set of tentacles. They had him, then. He cartwheeled his arms, trying to reach for handholds on the walls, but there was no possibility of that. The robots flicked the Demarchist weapon from his grip, and then took the weapon with them. Norbert/Martinez screamed as his legs, and then his upper body, vanished into the wall of machines. They smothered him completely. For a moment we could still hear his breathing—he’d stopped screaming, as if knowing it would make no difference—and then there was absolute silence, as if the carrier signal from his suit had been abruptly terminated.

Then, a moment later, the machines were on Sollis and me.

* * * *

I woke. The fact that I was still alive—not just alive but comfortable and lucid—hit like me like a mild electric shock, one that snapped me into instant and slightly resentful alertness. I’d been enjoying unconsciousness. I remembered the robots, how I’d felt them trying to get into my suit, the sharp cold nick as something pierced skin, and then an instant later the painless bliss of sleep. I’d expected to die, but as the drug hit my brain, it erased all trace of fear.

But I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t even injured, so far as I could tell. I’d been divested of my suit, but I was now reclining in relative comfort on a bed or mattress, under a clean white sheet. My own weight was pressing me down onto the mattress, so I must have been moved into the ship’s reactivated centrifuge section. I felt tired and bruised, but other than that I was in no worse shape than when we’d boarded Nightingale. I remembered what I’d told Sollis during our last stand: how the hospital ship wouldn’t want to do us harm. Maybe there’d been more than just wishful thinking in that statement.

There was no sign of Sollis or Norbert/Martinez, though. I was alone in a private recovery cubicle, surrounded by white walls. I remembered coming around in a room like this during my first visit to Nightingale. The wall on my right contained a white-rimmed door and a series of discrete hatches, behind which I knew lurked medical monitoring and resuscitation equipment, none of which had been deemed necessary in my case. A control panel was connected to the side of the bed by a flexible stalk, within easy reach of my right hand. Via the touchpads on the panel I was able to adjust the cubicle’s environmental settings and request services from the hospital, ranging from food and drink, washing and toilet amenities, to additional drug dosages.

Given the semi-dormant state of the ship, I wondered how much of it was still online. I touched one of the pads, causing the white walls to melt away and take on the holographic semblance of a calming beach scene, with ocean breakers crashing onto powdery white sand under a sky etched with sunset fire. Palm trees nodded in a soothing breeze. I didn’t care about the view, though. I wanted something to drink—my throat was raw—and then I wanted to know what had happened to the others and how long we were going to be detained. Because, like it or not, being a patient aboard a facility like Nightingale wasn’t very different to being a prisoner. Until the hospital deemed you fit and well, you were going nowhere.

But when I touched the other pads, nothing happened. Either the room was malfunctioning, or it had been programmed to ignore my requests. I made a move to ease myself off the bed, wincing as my bruised limbs registered their disapproval. But the clean white sheet stiffened to resist my efforts, hardening until it felt as rigid as armour. As soon as I pulled back, the sheet relinquished its hold. I was free to move around on the bed, to sit up and reach for things, but the sheet would not allow me to leave the bed itself.

Movement caught my eye, far beyond the foot of the bed. A figure walked towards me, strolling along the holographic shoreline. She was dressed almost entirely in black, with a skirt that reached all the way to the sand, heavy fabric barely moving as she approached. She wore a white bonnet over black hair parted exactly in the middle, a white collar and a jewelled clasp at her throat. Her face was instantly recognizable as the Voice of Nightingale, but now it appeared softer, more human.

She stepped from the wall and appeared to stand at the foot of my bed. She looked at me for a moment before speaking, her expression one of gentle concern.

“I knew you’d come, given time.”

“How are the others? Are they OK?”

“If you are speaking of the two who were with you before you lost consciousness, they are both well. The other two required more serious medical intervention, but they are now both stable.”

“I thought Nicolosi and Quinlan were dead.”

“Then you underestimate my abilities. I am only sorry that they came to harm. Despite my best efforts, there is a necessary degree of autonomy among my machines that sometimes results in them acting foolishly.”

There was a kindness there that had been entirely absent from the display facets. For the first time I had the impression of an actual mind lurking behind the machine-generated mask. I sensed that it was a mind capable of compassion and complexity of thought.

“We didn’t intend to hurt you,” I said. “I’m sorry about any damage we caused, but we only ever wanted Jax, your patient. He committed serious crimes. He needs to be brought back to Sky’s Edge, to face justice.”

“Is that why you risked so much? In the interests of justice?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Then you must be very brave and selfless. Or was justice only part of your motivation?”

“Jax is a bad man. All you have to do is hand him over.”

“I cannot let you take Jax. He remains my patient.”

I shook my head. “He was your patient, when he came aboard. But that was during the war. We have a record of his injuries. They were serious, but not life-threatening. Given your resources, it shouldn’t have been too hard for you to put him back together again. There’s no question of Jax still needing your care.”

“Shouldn’t I be the judge of that?”

“No. It’s simple: either Jax died under your care, or he’s well enough to face trial. Did he die?”

“No. His injuries were, as you note, not life-threatening.”

“Then he’s either alive, or you’ve got him frozen. Either way, you can hand him over. Nicolosi knows how to thaw him out, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“There is no need to thaw Colonel Jax. He is alive and conscious, except when I permit him to sleep.”

“Then there’s even less reason not to hand him over.”

“I’m afraid there is every reason in the world. Please forget about Colonel Jax. I will not relinquish him from my care.”

“Not good enough, ship.”

“You are in my care now. As you have already discovered, I will not permit you to leave against my will. But I will allow you to depart if you renounce your intentions concerning Colonel Jax.”

“You’re a gamma-level persona,” I said. “To all intents and purposes you have human intelligence. That means you’re capable of reasoned negotiation.”

The Voice of Nightingale cocked her head, as if listening to a faraway tune. “Continue.”

“We came to arrest Colonel Jax. Failing that, we came to find physical proof of his presence aboard this facility. A blood sample, a tissue scraping: something we can take back to the planetary authorities and alert them to his presence here. We won’t get paid as much for that, but at least they can send out a heavier ship and take him by force. But there’s another option, too. If you let us off this ship without even showing us the colonel, there’s nothing to stop us planting a few limpet mines on your hull and blowing you to pieces.”

The Voice’s face registered disapproval. “So now you resort to threats of physical violence.”

“I’m not threatening anything: just pointing out the options. I know you care about self-preservation: it’s wired deep into your architecture.”

“I would be advised to kill you now, in that case.”

“That wouldn’t work. Do you think Martinez kept your coordinates to himself? He always knew this was a risky extraction. He’d have made damn sure another party knew about your whereabouts, and who you were likely to be sheltering. If we don’t make it back, someone will come in our place. And you can bet they’ll bring their own limpet mines as well.”

“In which case I would gain nothing by letting you go, either.”

“No, you’ll get to stay alive. Just give us Jax, and we’ll leave you alone. I don’t know what it is you’re doing out here, what it is that keeps you sane, but really, it’s your business, not ours. We just want the colonel.”

The ship’s persona regarded me with narrowed, playful eyes. I had the impression she was thinking things through very carefully indeed, examining my proposition from every conceivable angle.

“It would be that simple?”

“Absolutely. We take the man, we say good-bye and you never hear from us again.”

“I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in the colonel. I would find it difficult to part company with him.”

“You’re a resourceful persona. I’m sure you’d find other ways to occupy your time.”

“It isn’t about occupying my time, Dexia.” She’d spoken my name for the first time. Of course she knew me: it would only have taken a blood or tissue sample to establish that I’d already been aboard the ship. “It’s about making my feelings felt,” she continued. “Something happened to me around Sky’s Edge. Call it a moment of clarity. I saw the horrors of war for what they were. I also saw my part in the self-perpetuation of those horrors. I had to do something about that. Removing myself from the sphere of operation was one thing, but I knew there was more that I could do. Thankfully, the colonel gave me the key. Through him, I saw a path to redemption.”

“You didn’t have to redeem yourself,” I said. “You were a force for good, Nightingale. You healed people.”

“Only so that they could go back to war. Only so that they could be blown apart and sent back to me for more healing.”

“You had no choice. It was what you were made to do.”

“Precisely.”

“The war’s over. It’s time to forget about what happened. That’s why it’s so important to bring Jax back home, so that we can start burying the past.”

The Voice studied me with a level, clinical eye. It was as if she knew something unspeakable about my condition, some truth I was as yet too weak to bear.

“What would be the likely sentence, were Jax to be tried?”

“He’d get the death penalty, no question about it. Crucifixion. Hung from the Bridge, like Sky Haussmann.”

“Would you mourn him?”

“Hell, no. I’d be cheering with the rest of them.”

“Then you would agree that his death is inevitable, one way or the other.”

“I guess so.”

“Then I will make a counter-proposition. I will not permit you to take Jax alive. But I will allow you an audience with him. You shall meet and speak with the colonel.”

Wary of a trap, I asked: “Then what happens?”

“Once the audience is complete, I will remove the colonel from life support. He will die shortly afterwards.”

“If you’re willing to let him die ... why not just hand him over?”

“He can’t be handed over. Not anymore. He would die.”

“Why not?”

“Because of what I have done to him.”

Fatigue tugged at me, fogging my earlier clarity of thought. On one level I just wanted to get out of the ship, with no additional complications. I’d expected to die, when the hospital sent its machines against us. Yet as glad as I was not to find myself dead, as tempted as I was to take the easier option and just leave, I couldn’t ignore the prize that was now so close at hand.

“I need to talk to the others.”

“No, Dexia. This must be your decision, and yours alone.”

“Have you put the same proposition to them?”

“Yes. I told them they could leave now, or they could meet the colonel.”

“What did they say?”

“I’d rather hear what you have to say first.”

“I’m guessing they had the same reaction I did. There’s got to be a catch somewhere.”

“There is no catch. If you leave now, you will have the personal satisfaction of knowing that you have at least located the colonel, and that he remains alive. Of course that information may not be worth very much to you, but you would always have the option of returning, should you still wish to bring him to justice. On the other hand, you can see the colonel now—see him and speak with him—and leave knowing he is dead. I will allow you to witness the withdrawal of his life support, and I will even let you take his head with you. That should be worth more than the mere knowledge of his existence.”

“There’s a catch. I know there’s a catch.”

“I assure you there isn’t.”

“We all get to leave? You’re not going to turn around and demand that one of us takes the colonel’s place?”

“No. You will all be allowed to leave.”

“In one piece?”

“In one piece.”

“All right,” I said, knowing the choice wasn’t going to get any easier no matter how many times I reconsidered it. “I can’t speak for the others—and I guess this has to be a majority decision—but I’m ready to see the sonofabitch.”

* * * *

I was allowed to leave the room, but not the bed. The sheet tightened against me again, pressing me against the mattress as the bed tilted to the vertical. Two squid-robots entered the room and detached the bed from its mountings, and then carried it between them. I was glued to it like a figure on a playing card. The robots propelled me forward in an effortless glide, silent save for the soft metallic scratch of their tentacles where they engaged the wall or the floor.

The Voice of Nightingale addressed me from the bedside panel, a small image of her face appearing above the touchpads.

“It’s not far now, Dexia. I hope you won’t regret your decision.”

“What about the others?”

“You’ll be joining them. Then you can all go home.”

“Are you saying we all made the same decision, to see the colonel?”

“Yes,” the Voice said.

The robots carried me out of the centrifuge section, into what I judged to be the forward part of the ship. The sheet relinquished its hold on me slightly, just enough so that I was able to move under it. Presently, after passing through a series of airlocks, I was brought to a very dark room.

Without being able to see anything, I sensed that this was as large as any pressurized space we’d yet entered, save for the skin cultivation chamber. The air was as moist and blood-warm as the inside of a tropical greenhouse.

“I thought you said the others would be here.”

“They’ll arrive shortly,” the Voice said. “They’ve already met the colonel.”

“There hasn’t been time.”

“They met the colonel when you were still asleep, Dexia. You were the last to be revived. Now, would you like to speak to the man himself?”

I steeled myself. “Yes.”

“Here he is.”

A beam of light stabbed across the room, illuminating a face that I recognized instantly. Surrounded by blackness, Jax’s face appeared to hover as if detached from his body. Time had done nothing to soften those pugnacious features; the cruel set of that heavy jaw. Yet his eyes were closed, and his face lolled at a slight angle, as if he remained unaware of the beam.

“Wake up,” the Voice of Nightingale said, louder than I’d heard her so far. “Wake up, Colonel Jax!”

The colonel woke. He opened his eyes, blinked twice against the glare, then held a steady gaze. He tilted his head to meet the beam, projecting his jaw forward at a challenging angle.

“You have another visitor, Colonel. Would you like me to introduce her?”

His mouth opened. Saliva drooled out. From out of the darkness, a hand descended down from above the colonel’s face to wipe his chin dry. Something about the way the hand came in was terribly, terribly wrong. Jax saw my reaction and let out a soft, nasty chuckle. That was when I realized that the colonel was completely, irrevocably insane.

“Her name is Dexia Scarrow. She’s part of the same party you’ve already met.”

Jax spoke. His voice was too loud, as if it was being fed through an amplifier. There was something huge and wet about it. It was like hearing the voice of a whale.

“You a soldier, girl?”

“I was a soldier, Colonel. But the war’s over now. I’m a civilian.”

“Goody for you. What brought you here, girly girl?”

“I came to bring you to justice. I came to take you back to the war crimes court on Sky’s Edge.”

“Maybe you should have come a little sooner.”

“I’ll settle for seeing you die. I understand that’s an option.”

Something I’d said made the colonel smile. “Has the ship told you the deal yet?”

“The ship told me it wasn’t letting you out of here alive. It promised us your head.”

“Then I guess it didn’t get into specifics.” He cocked his head away from me, as if talking to someone standing to my left. “Bring up the lights, Nightingale: she may as well know what she’s dealing with.”

“Are you sure, Colonel?” the ship said back.

“Bring up the lights. She’s ready.”

The ship brought up the lights.

I wasn’t ready.

For a moment I couldn’t process what I was seeing. My brain just couldn’t cope with the reality of what the ship had done to Colonel Jax, despite the evidence of my eyes. I kept staring at him, waiting for the picture before me to start making sense. I kept waiting for the instant when I’d realize I was being fooled by the play of shadows and light, like a child being scared by a random monster in the folds of a curtain. But the instant didn’t come. The thing before me was all that it appeared to be.

Colonel Jax extended in all directions: a quivering expanse of patchwork flesh, of which his head was simply one insignificant component; one hill in a mountain range. He was spread out across the far wall, grafted to it in the form of a vast breathing mosaic. He must have been twenty metres wide, edged in a crinkled circular border of toughened flesh. Under his head was a thick neck, merging into the upper half of an armless torso. I could see the faint scars where the arms had been detached. Below the slow-heaving ribcage, the torso flared out like the melted base of a candle. Another torso rose from the flesh two metres to the colonel’s right. It had no head, but it did have an arm. A second torso loomed over him from behind, equipped with a pair of arms, one of which must have cleaned the colonel’s chin. Farther away, emerging from the pool of flesh at odd, arbitrary angles, were other living body parts. A torso here; a pair of legs there; a hip or shoulder there. The torsos were all breathing, though not in perfect synchronization. When they were not engaged in some purposeful activity, such as wiping Jax’s chin, the limbs twitched and palsied. The skin between them was an irregular mosaic, formed from many ill-matched pieces that had been fused together. In places it was drum-tight, pulled taut over hidden armatures of bone and gristle. In other places it heaved like a stormy sea. It gurgled with hidden digestive processes.

“You see now why I’m not coming with you,” Colonel Jax said. “Not unless you brought a much bigger ship. Even then, I’m not sure you’d be able to keep me alive very long without Nightingale’s assistance.”

“You’re a fucking monstrosity.”

“I’m no oil painting, that’s a fact.” Jax tilted his head, as if a thought had just struck him. “I am a work of art, though, wouldn’t you agree, girly girl?”

“If you say so.”

“The ship certainly thinks so—don’t you, Nightingale? She made me what I am. It’s her artistic vision shining through. The bitch.”

“You’re insane.”

“Very probably. Do you honestly think you could take one day of this and not go mad? Oh, I’m mad enough, I’ll grant you that. But I’m still sane compared to the ship. Around here, she’s the imperial fucking yardstick for insanity.”

“Sollis was right, then. Leave a sentience engine like that all alone, and it’ll eat itself from the inside out.”

“Maybe so. Thing is, it wasn’t solitude that did it. Nightingale turned insane long before it ever got out here. And you know what did it? That little war we had ourselves down on Sky’s Edge. They built this ship and put the mind of an angel inside it. A mind dedicated to healing, compassion, kindness. So what if it was a damned machine? It was still designed to care for us, selflessly, day after day. And it turned out to be damned good at its job, too. For a while, at least.”

“Then you know what happened.”

“The ship drove itself mad. Two conflicting impulses pushed a wedge through its sanity. It was meant to treat us, to make us well again, to alleviate our pain. But every time it did its job, we got sent back down to the theatre of battle and ripped apart again. The ship took our pain away only so that we could feel it again. It began to feel as if it was complicit in that process: a willing cog in a greater machine whose only purpose was the manufacture of agony. In the end, it decided it didn’t much like being that cog.”

“So it took off. What happened to all the other patients?”

“It killed them. Euthanized them painlessly, rather than have them sent back down to battle. To Nightingale, that was the kinder thing to do.”

“And the technical staff who were aboard, and the men who were sent to reclaim the ship when it went out of control?”

“They were euthanized as well. I don’t think Nightingale took any pleasure in that, but it saw their deaths as a necessary evil. Above all else, it wouldn’t allow itself to be returned to use as a military hospital.”

“Yet it didn’t kill you.”

A dry tongue flicked across Jax’s lips. “It was going to. Then it delved deeper into its patient records and realized just who I was. At that point it began to have other ideas.”

“Such as?”

“The ship was smart enough to realize that the bigger problem wasn’t its existence—they could always build other hospital ships—but the war itself. War itself. So it decided to do something about it. Something positive. Something constructive.”

“Which would be?”

“You’re looking at it, kid. I’m the war memorial. When Nightingale started doing this to me—making me what I am—it had in mind that I’d become a vast artistic statement in flesh. Nightingale would reveal me to the world when it was finished. The horror of what I am would shame the world into peace. I’d be the living, breathing equivalent of Picasso’s Guernica. I’m an illustration in flesh of what war does to human beings.”

“The war’s over. We don’t need a memorial.”

“Maybe you can explain that to the ship. Trouble is, I don’t think it really believes the war is over. You can’t blame it, can you? It has access to the same history files we do. It knows that not all ceasefires stay that way.”

“What was it intending to do? Return to Sky’s Edge with you aboard?”

“Exactly that. Problem is, the ship isn’t done. I know I may look finished, but Nightingale—well, she has this perfectionist streak. She’s always changing her mind. Can’t ever seem to get me quite right. Keeps swapping pieces around, cutting pieces away, growing new parts and stitching them in. All the while she has to make sure I don’t die on her. That’s where her real genius comes in. She’s Michelangelo with a scalpel.”

“You almost sound proud of what she’s done to you.”

“Would you rather I screamed? I can scream if you like. It’s just that it gets old after a while.”

“You’re way too far gone, Jax. I was wrong about the war crimes court. They’ll throw your case out on grounds of insanity.”

“That would have been a shame. I’d have loved to have seen their faces when they wheeled me into the witness box. But I’m not going to court, am I? Ship’s laid it all out for me. She’s pulling the plug.”

“So she says.”

“You don’t sound as if you believe it.”

“I can’t see her abandoning you, after all the effort she’s gone to.”

“She’s an artist. They act on whims. Maybe if I was ready, maybe if she thought she’d done all she could with me—but that’s not the way she feels. I think she felt she was getting close three or four years ago—but then she had a change of heart, a major one, and tore out almost everything. Now I’m an unfinished work. She couldn’t bear to see me exhibited in this state. She’d rather rip up the canvas and start again.”

“With you?”

“No, I think she’s more or less exhausted my possibilities. Especially now that she’s seen the chance to do something completely different; something that will let her take her message a lot closer to home. That, of course, is where you come in.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“That’s what the others said as well.” Again, he cocked his head to one side. “Hey, ship! Maybe it’s time you showed her what the deal is, don’t you think?”

“If you are ready, Colonel,” the Voice of Nightingale said.

“I’m ready. Dexia’s ready. Why don’t you bring on the dessert?”

Colonel Jax looked to the right, straining his neck. Beyond Jax’s border, a circular door opened in part of the wall. Light rammed through the opening. Something floated in silhouette, held in suspension by three or four squid robots. The floating thing was dark, rounded, irregular. It looked like half a dozen pieces of dough balled together. I couldn’t make out what it was.

Then the robots pushed it into the chamber, and I saw, and then I screamed.

“It’s time for you to join your friends now,” the ship said.

* * * *

That was three months ago. It feels like an eternity, until we remember being held down on the surgical bed, while the machines emerged and prepared to work on us, and then it feels like everything happened only a terror-filled moment ago.

We made it safely back to Sky’s Edge. The return journey was arduous, as one might expect given our circumstances. But the shuttle had little difficulty in flying itself back into a capture orbit, and once it fell within range it emitted a distress signal that brought it to the attention of the planetary authorities. We were off-loaded and taken to a secure orbital holding facility, where we were examined and our story subjected to what limited verification was actually possible. Dexia had bluffed the Voice of Nightingale when she told the ship that Martinez was certain to have told someone else of the coordinates of the hospital ship. It turned out that he hadn’t told a soul, too wary of alerting Jax’s allies. The Ultras who had found the ship in the first place were now a fifth of a light-year away, and falling farther from Sky’s Edge with every passing hour. It would be decades, or longer, before they returned this way.

All the same, we don’t think anyone seriously doubted our story. As outlandish as it was, no one could suggest a more likely alternative. We did have the head of Colonel Brandon Jax, or at least a duplicate that passed all available genetic and physiological tests. And we had clearly been to a place that specialized in extremely advanced surgery, of a kind that simply wasn’t possible in and around Sky’s Edge. That was the problem, though. The planet’s best surgeons had examined us with great thoroughness, each eager to advance their own prestige by undoing the work of Nightingale. But all had quailed, fearful of doing more harm than good. No separation of Siamese twins could compare in complexity and risk with the procedure that would be necessary to unknot the living puzzle Nightingale had made of us. None of the surgeons was willing to bet on the survival of more than a single one of us, and even the odds weren’t overwhelming. That pact we’d made with ourselves was that we would only consent to the operation if the vote was unanimous.

At massive expense (not ours, for by then we were the subject of considerable philanthropy) a second craft was sent out to snoop the coordinates where we’d left the hospital ship. She had the best military scanning gear money could buy. But she found nothing out there but ice and dust.

From that, we were free to draw two possible conclusions. Either Nightingale had destroyed herself soon after our departure, or she had moved somewhere else to avoid being found again. We couldn’t say which alternative pleased us less. At least if we’d known the ship was gone for good, we could have resigned ourselves to the surgeons,mhowever risky that might have been. But if the ship was hiding itself, there was always the possibility that someone might find it again. And then somehow persuade it to undo us.

But perhaps Nightingale will need no persuasion, when she decides the time is right. It seems to us that the ship will return one day, of her own volition. She will make orbit around Sky’s Edge and announce that the time has come for us to be separated. Nightingale will have decided that we have served our purpose, that we have walked the world long enough. Perhaps by then she will have some other memorial in mind. Or she will conclude that her message has finally been taken to heart, and that no further action is needed. That, we think, will depend on how the ceasefire holds.

It’s in our interests, then, to make sure the planet doesn’t slip back into war. We want the ship to return and heal us. None of us like things this way, despite what you may have read or heard. Yes, we’re famous. Yes, we’re the subject of a worldwide outpouring of sympathy and goodwill. Yes, we can have almost anything we want. None of that compensates, though. Not even for a second.

It’s hard on all of us, but especially so for Martinez. We’ve all long since stopped thinking of the big man as Norbert. He’s the one who has to carry us everywhere: more than twice his own bodyweight. Nightingale thought of that, of course, and she made sure that our own hearts and respiratory systems take some of the burden off Martinez. But it’s still his spine bending under this load; still his legs that have to support us. The doctors who’ve examined us say his condition is good; that he can continue to play his part for years to come—but they’re not talking about forever. And when Martinez dies, so will the rest of us. In the meantime we just keep hoping that Nightingale will come sooner than that.

You’ve seen us up close now. You’ll have seen photographs and moving images before, but nothing really compares with seeing us in the flesh. We make quite a spectacle, don’t we? A great tottering tree of flesh, an insult to symmetry. You’ve heard us speak, all of us, individually. You know by now how we feel about the war. All of us played our part in it to some degree, some more than others. Some of us were even enemies. Now the very idea that we might have hated each other—hated that which we depend on for life itself—lies beyond all comprehension. If Nightingale sought to create a walking argument for the continuation of the ceasefire, then she surely succeeded.

We are sorry if some of you will go home with nightmares tonight. We can’t help that. In fact, if truth be told, we’re not sorry at all. Nightmares are what we’re all about. It’s the nightmare of us that will stop this planet falling back into war.

If you have trouble sleeping tonight, spare us a thought.

* * * *

Signal To Noise

Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone, and has also sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Spectrum SF, and elsewhere. His first novel, Revelation Space, was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; it was quickly followed by Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, and Century Rain, all big sprawling space operas that were big sellers as well, establishing Reynolds as one of the best and most popular new SF writers to enter the field in many years. His other books include a novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days. His most recent books are a novel, Pushing Ice, and two new collections, Galactic North and Zima Blue and Other Stories. Coming up is a new novel, The Prefect. A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, Reynolds comes from Wales, but lives in the Netherlands, where he works for the European Space Agency.

Reynolds’s work is known for its grand scope, sweep, and scale (in one story, “Galactic North,” a spaceship sets out on in pursuit of another in a stern chase that takes thousands of years of time and hundreds of thousands of light-years to complete; in another, “Thousandth Night,” ultrarich immortals embark on a plan that will call for the physical rearrangement of all the stars in the galaxy. In the intimate and compassionate story that follows, he sticks a lot closer to home, in one sense—while in another sense taking us to another universe altogether, one further away than the most distant galaxies, but close as the touch of a hand.

* * * *

Friday

MICK Leighton was in the basement with the machines when the police came for him. He’d been trying to reach Joe Liversedge all morning to cancel a prearranged squash match. It was the busiest week before exams, and Mick had gloomily concluded that he had too much tutorial work to grade to justify sparing even an hour for the game. The trouble was that Joe had either turned off his phone or left it in his office, where it wouldn’t interfere with the machines. Mick had sent an email, but when that had gone unanswered he decided there was nothing for it but to stroll over to Joe’s half of the building and inform him in person. By now Mick was a sufficiently well-known face in Joe’s department that he was able to come and go more or less as he pleased.

“Hello, matey,” Joe said, glancing over his shoulder with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand. There was a bandage on the back of his neck, just below the hairline. He was hunched over a desk covered in laptops, cables, and reams of hardcopy. “Ready for a thrashing, are you?”

“That’s why I’m here,” Mick said. “Got to cancel, sorry. Too much on my plate today.”

“Naughty.”

“Ted Evans can fill in for me. He’s got his kit. You know Ted, don’t you?”

“Vaguely.” Joe set down his sandwich to put the lid back on a felt-tipped pen. He was an amiable Yorkshireman who’d come down to Cardiff for his postgraduate work and decided to stay. He was married to an archaeologist named Rachel who spent a lot of her time poking around in the Roman ruins under the walls of Cardiff Castle. “Sure I can’t twist your arm? It’ll do you good, you know, bit of a workout.”

“I know. But there just isn’t time.”

“Your call. How are things, anyway?”

Mick shrugged philosophically. “Been better.”

“Did you phone Andrea like you said you were going to?”

“No.”

“You should, you know.”

“I’m not very good on the phone. Anyway, I thought she probably needed a bit of space.”

“It’s been three weeks, mate.”

“I know.”

“Do you want the wife to call her? It might help.”

“No, but thanks for suggesting it anyway.”

“Call her. Let her know you’re missing her.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Yeah, sure. You should stick around, you know. It’s all go here this morning. We got a lock just after seven this morning.” Joe tapped one of the laptop screens, which was scrolling rows of black-on-white numbers. “It’s a good one, too.”

“Really?”

“Come and have a look at the machine.”

“I can’t. I need to get back to my office.”

“You’ll regret it later. Just like you’ll regret canceling our match, or not calling Andrea. I know you, Mick. You’re one of life’s born regretters.”

“Five minutes, then.”

In truth, Mick always enjoyed having a nose around Joe’s basement. As solid as Mick’s own early-universe work was, Joe had really struck gold. There were hundreds of researchers around the world who would have killed for a guided tour of the Liversedge laboratory.

In the basement were ten hulking machines, each as large as a steam turbine. You couldn’t go near them if you were wearing a pacemaker or any other kind of implant, but Mick knew that, and he’d been careful to remove all metallic items before he came down the stairs and through the security doors. Each machine contained a ten-ton bar of ultra-high-purity iron, encased in vacuum and suspended in a magnetic cradle. Joe liked to wax lyrical about the hardness of the vacuum, about the dynamic stability of the magnetic field generators. Cardiff could be hit by a Richter six earthquake, and the bars wouldn’t feel the slightest tremor.

Joe called it the call center.

The machines were called correlators. At any one time eight were online, while two were down for repairs and upgrades. What the eight functional machines were doing was cold-calling: dialing random numbers across the gap between quantum realities, waiting for someone to answer on the other end.

In each machine, a laser repeatedly pumped the iron into an excited quantum state. By monitoring vibrational harmonics in the excited iron—what Joe called the back-chirp—the same laser could determine if the bar had achieved a lock onto another strand of quantum reality—another worldline. In effect, the bar would be resonating with its counterpart in another version of the same basement, in another version of Cardiff.

Once that lock was established—once the cold-calling machine had achieved a hit—then those two previously indistinguishable worldlines were linked together by an information conduit. If the laser tapped the bar with low-energy pulses, enough to influence it but not upset the lock, then the counterpart in the other lab would also register those taps. It meant that it was possible to send signals from one lab to the other, in both directions.

“This is the boy,” Joe said, patting one of the active machines.

“Looks like a solid lock, too. Should be good for a full ten or twelve days. I think this might be the one that does it for us.”

Mick glanced again at the bandage on the back of Joe’s neck. “You’ve had a nervelink inserted, haven’t you.”

“Straight to the medical center as soon as I got the alert on the lock. I was nervous—first time, and all that. But it turned out to be dead easy. No pain at all. I was up and out within half an hour. They even gave me a Rich Tea Biscuit.”

“Ooh. A Rich Tea Biscuit. It doesn’t get any better than that, does it. You’ll be going through today, I take it?”

Joe reached up and tore off the bandage, revealing only a small spot of blood, like a shaving nick. “Tomorrow, probably. Maybe Sunday. The nervelink isn’t active yet, and that’ll take some getting used to. We’ve got bags of time, though; even if we don’t switch on the nervelink until Sunday, I’ll still have five or six days of bandwidth before we become noise-limited.”

“You must be excited.”

“Right now I just don’t want to cock up anything. The Helsinki boys are nipping at our heels as it is. I reckon they’re within a few months of beating us.”

Mick knew how important this latest project was for Joe. Sending information between different realities was one thing, and impressive enough in its own right. But now technology had escaped from the labs out into the real world. There were hundreds of correlators in other labs and institutes around the world. In five years it had gone from being a spooky, barely believable phenomenon, to an accepted part of the modern world.

But Joe—whose team had always been at the forefront of the technology—hadn’t stood still. They’d been the first to work out how to send voice and video comms across the gap with another reality, and within the last year they’d been able to operate a camera-equipped robot, the same battery-driven kind that all the tourists had been using before nervelinking became the new thing. Joe had even let Mick have a go on it. With his hands operating the robot’s manipulators via force-feedback gloves, and his eyes seeing the world via the stereoscopic projectors in a virtual-reality helmet, Mick had been able to feel himself almost physically present in the other lab. He’d been able to move around and pick things up just as if he were actually walking in that alternate reality. Oddest of all had been meeting the other version of Joe Liversedge, the one who worked in the counterpart lab. Both Joes seemed cheerily indifferent to the weirdness of the setup, as if collaborating with a duplicate of yourself was the most normal thing in the world.

Mick had been impressed by the robot. But for Joe it was a stepping stone to something even better.

“Think about it,” he’d said. “A few years ago, tourists started switching over to nervelinks instead of robots. Who wants to drive a clunky machine around some smelly foreign city, when you can drive a warm human body instead? Robots can see stuff, they can move around and pick stuff up, but they can’t give you the smells, the taste of food, the heat, the contact with other people.”

“Mm,” Mick had said noncommittally. He didn’t really approve of nervelinking, even though it essentially paid Andrea’s wages.

“So we’re going to do the same. We’ve got the kit. Getting it installed is a piece of piss. All we need now is a solid link.”

And now Joe had what he’d been waiting for. Mick could practically see the Nature cover article in his friend’s eyes. Perhaps he was even thinking about taking that long train ride to Stockholm.

“I hope it works out for you,” Mick said.

Joe patted the correlator again. “I’ve got a good feeling about this one.”

That was when one of Joe’s undergraduates came up to them. To Mick’s surprise, it wasn’t Joe she wanted to speak to.

“Doctor Leighton?”

“That’s me.”

“There’s somebody to see you, sir. I think it’s quite important.”

“Someone to see me?”

“They said you left a note in your office.”

“I did,” Mick said absent-mindedly. “But I also said I wouldn’t be gone long. Nothing’s that important, is it?”

But the person who had come to find Mick was a policewoman. When Mick met her at the top of the stairs her expression told him it wasn’t good news.

“Something’s happened,” he said.

She looked worried, and very, very young. “Is there somewhere we can talk, Mister Leighton?”

“Use my office,” Joe said, showing the two of them to his room just down the corridor. Joe left the two of them alone, saying he was going down to the coffee machine in the hall.

“I’ve got some bad news,” the policewoman said, when Joe had closed the door. “I think you should sit down, Mister Leighton.”

Mick pulled out Joe’s chair from under the desk, which was covered in papers: coursework Joe must have been in the process of grading. Mick sat down, then didn’t know where to put his hands. “It’s about Andrea, isn’t it.”

“I’m afraid your wife was in an accident this morning,” the policewoman said.

“What kind of accident? What happened?”

“Your wife was hit by a car when she was crossing the road.”

A mean, little thought flashed through Mick’s mind. Bloody Andrea: she’d always been one for dashing across a road without looking. He’d been warning her for years she was going to regret it one day.

“How is she? Where did they take her?”

“I’m really sorry, sir.” The policewoman hesitated. “Your wife died on the way to hospital. I understand that the paramedics did all they could, but ...”

Mick was hearing it, and not hearing it. It couldn’t be right. People still got knocked down by cars. But they didn’t die from it, not anymore. Cars couldn’t go fast enough in towns to kill anyone. Being knocked down and killed by a car was something that happened to people in soap operas, not real life. Feeling numb, not really present in the room, Mick said, “Where is she now?” As if by visiting her, he might prove that they’d got it wrong, that she wasn’t dead at all.

“They took her to the Heath, sir. That’s where she is now. I can drive you there.”

“Andrea isn’t dead,” Mick said. “She can’t be. Not now.”

“I’m really sorry,” the policewoman said.

* * * *

Saturday

For the last three weeks, ever since they had separated, Mick had been sleeping in a spare room at his brother’s house in Newport. The company had been good, but now Bill was away for the weekend on some ridiculous team-building exercise in Snowdonia. For tedious reasons, Mick’s brother had had to take the house keys with him, leaving Mick with nowhere to sleep on Friday night. When Joe had asked him where he was going to stay, Mick said he’d go back to his own house, the one he’d left at the beginning of the month.

Joe was having hone of it, and insisted that Mick sleep at his house instead. Mick spent the night going through the usual cycle of emotions that came with any sudden bad news. He’d had nothing to compare with losing his wife, but the texture of the shock was familiar enough, albeit magnified from anything in his previous experience. He resented the fact that the world seemed to be continuing, crassly oblivious to Andrea’s death. The news wasn’t dominated by his tragedy; it was all about some Polish miners trapped underground. When he finally managed to get to sleep, Mick was tormented by dreams that his wife was still alive, that it had all been a mistake.

But he knew it was all true. He’d been to the hospital; he’d seen her body. He even knew why she’d been hit by the car. Andrea had been crossing the road to her favorite hair salon; she’d had an appointment to get her hair done. Knowing Andrea, she had probably been so focused on the salon that she was oblivious to all that was going on around her. It hadn’t even been the car that had killed her in the end. When the slow-moving vehicle knocked her down, Andrea had struck her head against the side of the curb.

By midmorning on Saturday, Mick’s brother had returned from Snowdonia. Bill came around to Joe’s house and hugged Mick silently, saying nothing for many minutes. Then Bill went into the next room and spoke quietly to Joe and Rachel. Their low voices made Mick feel like a child in a house of adults.

“I think you and I need to get out of Cardiff,” Bill told Mick, when he returned to the living room. “No ifs, no buts.”

Mick started to protest. “There’s too much that needs to be done. I still need to get back to the funeral home.”

“It can wait until this afternoon. No one’s going to hate you for not returning a few calls. C’mon; let’s drive up to the Gower and get some fresh air. I’ve already reserved a car.”

“Go with him,” Rachel said. “It’ll do you good.”

Mick acquiesced, his guilt and relief in conflict at being able to put aside thoughts of the funeral plans. He was glad Bill had come down, but he couldn’t quite judge how his brother—or his friends, for that matter—viewed his bereavement. He’d lost his wife. They all knew that. But they also knew that Mick and Andrea had been separated. They’d been having problems for most of the year. It would only be human for his friends to assume that Mick wasn’t quite as affected by Andrea’s death as he would have been had they still been living together.

“Listen,” he told Bill, when they were safely under way. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

“I’m listening.”

“Andrea and I had problems. But it wasn’t the end of our marriage. We were going to get through this. I was going to call her this weekend, see if we couldn’t meet.”

Bill looked at him sadly. Mick couldn’t tell if that meant that Bill just didn’t believe him, or that his brother pitied him for the opportunity he’d allowed to slip between his fingers.

When they got back to Cardiff in the early evening, after a warm and blustery day out on the Gower, Joe practically pounced on Mick as soon as they came through the door.

“I need to talk to you,” Joe said. “Now.”

“I need to call some of Andrea’s friends,” Mick said. “Can it wait until later?”

“No. It can’t. It’s about you and Andrea.”

They went into the kitchen. Joe poured him a glass of whisky. Rachel and Bill watched from the end of the table, saying nothing.

“I’ve been to the lab,” Joe said. “I know it’s Saturday, but I wanted to make sure that lock was still holding. Well, it is. We could start the experiment tomorrow if we wanted to. But something’s come up, and you need to know about it.”

Mick sipped from his glass. “Go on.”

“I’ve been in contact with my counterpart in the other lab.”

“The other Joe.”

“The other Joe, yes. We were finessing the equipment, making sure everything was optimal. And we talked, of course. Needless to say I mentioned what had happened.”

“And?”

“The other me was surprised. Shocked, even. He said Andrea hadn’t died in his reality.” Joe held up a hand, signaling that Mick should let him finish before speaking. “You know how it works. The two histories are identical before the lock takes effect: so identical that there isn’t even any point in thinking of them as being distinct realities. The divergence only happens once the lock is in effect. The lock was active by the time you came down to tell me about the squash match. The other me also had a visit from you. The difference was that no policewoman ever came to his lab. You eventually drifted back to your office to carry on grading tutorials.”

“But Andrea was already dead by then.”

“Not in that reality. The other me phoned you. You were staying at the Holiday Inn. You knew nothing of Andrea having had any accident. So my other wife ...” Joe allowed himself a quick smile. “The other version of Rachel called Andrea. And they spoke. Turned out Andrea had been hit by a car, but she’d barely been bruised. They hadn’t even called an ambulance.”

Mick absorbed what his friend had to say, then said, “I can’t deal with this, Joe. I don’t need to know it. It isn’t going to help.”

“I think it is. We were set up to run the nervelink experiment as soon as we had a solid lock, one that we could trust to hold for the full million seconds. This is it. The only difference is it doesn’t have to be me who goes through.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I can put you through, Mick. We can get you nervelinked tomorrow morning. Allowing for a day of bedding in and practice once you arrive in the other reality ... well, you could be walking in Andrea’s world by Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning at the latest.”

“But you’re the one who is supposed to be going through,” Mick said. “You’ve already had the nervelink put in.”

“We’ve got a spare,” Joe said.

Mick’s mind raced through the implications. “Then I’d be controlling the body of the other you, right?”

“No. That won’t work, unfortunately. We’ve had to make some changes to these nervelinks to get them to work properly through the correlator, with the limited signal throughput. We had to ditch some of the channels that handle proprioceptive mapping. They’ll only work properly if the body on the other end of the link is virtually identical to the one on this side.”

“Then it won’t work. You’re nothing like me.”

“You’re forgetting your counterpart on the other side,” Joe said. He glanced past Mick at Bill and Rachel, raising his eyebrows as he did so. “The way it would work is, you come into the lab and we install the link in you, just the same way it happened for me yesterday morning. At the same time your counterpart in Andrea’s world comes into his version of the lab and gets the other version of the nervelink put into him.”

Mick shivered. He’d become used to thinking about the other version of Joe; he could even begin to accept that there was a version of Andrea walking around somewhere who was still alive. But as soon as Joe brought the other Mick into the argument, he felt his head begin to unravel.

“Wouldn’t he—the other me—need to agree to this?”

“He already has,” Joe said solemnly. “I’ve been in touch with him. The other Joe called him into the lab. We had a chat over the videolink. He didn’t go for it at first—you know how you both feel about nervelinking. And he hasn’t lost his version of Andrea. But I explained how big a deal this was. This is your only chance to see Andrea again. Once this window closes—we’re talking about no more than eleven or twelve days from the start of the lock, by the way—we’ll never make contact with another reality where she’s alive.”

Mick blinked and placed his hands on the table. He felt dizzy with the implications, as if the kitchen was swaying. “You’re certain of that? You’ll never open another window into Andrea’s world?”

“Statistically, we were incredibly lucky to get this one chance. By the time the window closes, Andrea’s reality will have diverged so far from ours that there’s essentially no chance of ever getting another lock.”

“Okay,” Mick said, ready to take Joe’s word for it. “But even if I agree to this—even if the other me agrees to it—what about Andrea? We weren’t seeing each other.”

“But you wanted to see her again,” Bill said quietly.

Mick rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, and exhaled loudly. “Maybe.”

“I’ve spoken to Andrea,” Rachel said. “I mean, Joe spoke to himself, and the other version of him spoke to the other Rachel. She’s been in touch with Andrea.”

Mick hardly dared speak. “And?”

“She says it’s okay. She understands how horrible this must be for you. She says, if you want to come through, she’ll meet you. You can spend some time together. Give you a chance to come to some kind of ...”

“Closure,” Mick whispered.

“It’ll help you,” Joe said. “It’s got to help you.”

* * * *

Sunday

The medical center was normally closed on weekends, but Joe had pulled strings to get some of the staff to come in on Sunday morning. Mick had to sit around a long time while they ran physiological tests and prepared the surgical equipment. It was much easier and quicker for tourists, for they didn’t have to use the modified nervelink units Joe’s team had developed.

By the early afternoon they were satisfied that Mick was ready for the implantation. They made him lie down on a couch with his head encased in a padded plastic assembly with a hole under the back of the neck. He was given a mild, local anesthetic. Rubberized clamps whirred in to hold his head in position with micromillimeter accuracy. Then he felt a vague impression of pressure being applied to the skin on the back of his neck, and then an odd and not entirely pleasant sensation of sudden pins and needles in every part of his body. But the unpleasantness was over almost as soon as he’d registered it. The support clamps whirred away from his head. The couch tilted up, and he was able to get off and stand on his feet.

Mick touched the back of his neck, came away with a tiny smear of blood on his thumb.

“That’s it?”

“I told you there was nothing to it,” Joe said, putting down a motorcycling magazine. “I don’t know what you were so worried about.”

“It’s not the nervelink operation itself I don’t approve of. I don’t have a problem with the technology. It’s the whole system, the way it encourages the exploitation of the poor.”

Joe tut-tutted. “Bloody Guardian readers. It was you lot who got the bloody moratorium against air travel enacted in the first place. Next you’ll be telling us we can’t even walk anywhere.”

The nurse swabbed Mick’s wound and applied a bandage. He was shunted into an adjoining room and asked to wait again. More tests followed. As the system interrogated the newly embedded nervelink, he experienced mild electrical tingles and strange, fleeting feelings of dislocation. Nothing he reported gave the staff any cause for alarm.

After Mick’s discharge from the medical center, Joe took him straight down to the laboratory. An electromagnetically shielded annex contained the couch Joe intended to use for the experiment. It was a modified version of the kind tourists used for long-term nervelinking, with facilities for administering nutrition and collecting bodily waste. No one liked to dwell too much on those details, but there was no way around it if you wanted to stay nervelinked for more than a few hours. Gamers had been putting up with similar indignities for decades.

Once Mick was plumbed in, Joe settled a pair of specially designed immersion glasses over his eyes, after first applying a salve to Mick’s skin to protect against pressure sores. The glasses fit very tightly, blocking out Mick’s view of the lab. All he could see was a gray-green void, with a few meaningless red digits to the right side of his visual field.

“Comfortable?” Joe asked.

“I can’t see anything yet.”

“You will.”

Joe went back into the main part of the basement to check on the correlation. It seemed that he was gone a long time. When he heard Joe return, Mick half-expected bad news—that the link had collapsed, or some necessary piece of technology had broken down. Privately, he would not have been too sorry were that the case. In his shocked state of mind in the hours after Andrea’s death, he would have given anything to be able to see her again. But now that the possibility had arisen, he found himself prone to doubts. Given time, he knew he’d get over Andrea’s death. That wasn’t being cold, it was just being realistic. He knew more than a few people who’d lost their partners, and while they might have gone through some dark times afterward, almost all of them now seemed settled and relatively content. It didn’t mean they’d stopped feeling anything for the loved one who had died, but it did mean they’d found some way to move on. There was no reason to assume he wouldn’t make the same emotional recovery.

The question was, would visiting Andrea hasten or hamper that process? Perhaps they should just have talked over the videolink, or even the phone. But then he’d never been very good on either.

He knew it had to be face to face, all or nothing.

“Is there a problem?” he asked Joe, innocently enough.

“Nope, everything’s fine. I was just waiting to hear that the other version of you is ready.”

“He is?”

“Good to go. Someone from the medical center just put him under. We can make the switch any time you’re ready.”

“Where is he?”

“Here,” Joe said. “I mean, in the counterpart to this room. He’s lying on the same couch. It’s easier that way; there’s less of a jolt when you switch over.”

“He’s unconscious already?”

“Full coma. Just like any nervelinked mule.”

Except, Mick thought, unlike the mules, his counterpart hadn’t signed up to go into a chemically induced coma while his body was taken over by a distant tourist. That was what Mick disapproved of more than anything. The mules did it for money, and the mules were always the poorest people in any given tourist hotspot, whether it was some affluent European city or some nauseatingly “authentic” Third World shithole. No one ever aspired to become a mule. It was what you did when all other options had dried up. In some cases it hadn’t just supplanted prostitution, it had become an entirely new form of prostitution in its own right.

But enough of that. They were all consenting adults here. No one—least of all the other version of himself—was being exploited. The other Mick was just being kind. No, kinder, Mick supposed, than he would have been had the tables been reversed, but he couldn’t help feeling a perverse sense of gratitude. And as for Andrea ... well, she’d always been kind. No one ever had a bad word to say for Andrea on that score. Kind and considerate, to a fault.

So what was he waiting for?

“You can make the switch,” Mick said.

There was less to it than he’d been expecting. It was no worse than the involuntary muscular jolt he sometimes experienced in bed, just before dozing off to sleep.

But suddenly he was in a different body.

“Hi,” Joe said. “How’re you feeling, matey?”

Except it was the other Joe speaking to him now: the Joe who belonged to the world where Andrea hadn’t died. The original Joe was on the other side of the reality gap.

“I feel ...” But when Mick tried speaking, it came out hopelessly slurred.

“Give it time,” Joe said. “Everyone has trouble speaking to start with. That’ll come quickly.”

“Can’t shee. Can’t see.”

“That’s because we haven’t switched on your glasses. Hold on a tick.”

The gray-green void vanished, to be replaced by a view of the interior of the lab. The quality of the image was excellent. The room looked superficially the same, but as Mick looked around—sending the muscle signals through the nervelink to’ move the body of the other Mick—he noticed the small details that told him this wasn’t his world. Joe was wearing a different checked shirt, smudged white trainers instead of Converse sneakers. In this version of the lab, Joe had forgotten to turn the calendar over to the new month.

Mick tried speaking again. The words came easier this time.

“I’m really here, aren’t I.”

“How does it feel to be making history?”

“It feels ... bloody weird, actually. And no, I’m not making history. When you write up your experiment, it won’t be me who went through first. It’ll be you, the way it was always meant to be. This is just a dry run. You can mention me in a footnote, if that.”

Joe looked unconvinced. “Have it your way, but—”

“I will.” Mick moved to get off the couch. This version of his body wasn’t plumbed in like the other one. But when he tried to move, nothing happened. For a moment, he felt a crushing sense of paralysis. He must have let out a frightened sound.

“Easy,” Joe said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “One step at a time. The link still has to bed in. It’s going to be hours before you’ll have complete fluidity of movement, so don’t run before you can walk. And I’m afraid we’re going to have to keep you in the lab for rather longer than you might like. As routine as nervelinking is, this isn’t simple nervelinking. The shortcuts we’ve had to use to squeeze the data through the correlator link mean we’re exposing ourselves to more medical risks than you’d get with the standard tourist kit. Nothing that you need worry about, but I want to make sure we keep a close eye on all the parameters. I’ll be running tests in the morning and evening. Sorry to be a drag about it, but we do need numbers for our paper, as well. All I can promise is that you’ll still have a lot of time available to meet Andrea. If that’s what you still want to do, of course.”

“It is,” Mick said. “Now that I’m here ... no going back, right?”

Joe glanced at his watch. “Let’s start running some coordination exercises. That’ll keep us busy for an hour or two. Then we’ll need to make sure you have full bladder control. Could get messy otherwise. After that—we’ll see if you can feed yourself.”

“I want to see Andrea.”

“Not today,” Joe said firmly. “Not until we’ve got you housetrained.”

“Tomorrow. Definitely tomorrow.”

* * * *

Monday

He paused in the shade of the old, green boating shed at the edge of the lake. It was a hot day, approaching noon, and the park was already busier than it had been at any time since the last gasp of the previous summer. Office workers were sitting around the lake making the most of their lunch break: the men with their ties loosened and sleeves and trousers rolled up, the women with their shoes off and blouses loosened. Children splashed in the ornamental fountains, while their older siblings bounced meters into the air on servo-assisted pogo sticks, the season’s latest, lethal-looking craze. Students lolled around on the gently sloping grass, sunbathing or catching up on neglected coursework in the last week before exams. Mick recognized some of them from his own department. Most wore cheap, immersion glasses, with their arms covered almost to the shoulder in tight-fitting, pink, haptic feedback gloves. The more animated students lay on their backs, pointing and clutching at invisible objects suspended above them. It looked like they were trying to snatch down the last few wisps of cloud from the scratchless blue sky above Cardiff.

Mick had already seen Andrea standing a little further around the curve of the lake. It was where they had agreed to meet, and true to form Andrea was exactly on time. She stared pensively out across the water, seemingly oblivious to the commotion going on around her. She wore a white blouse, a knee-length burgundy skirt, sensible office shoes. Her hair was shorter than he remembered, styled differently and barely reaching her collar. For a moment—until she’d turned slightly—he hadn’t recognized her at all. Andrea held a Starbucks coffee holder in one hand, and every now and then she’d take a sip or glance at her wrist-watch. Mick was five minutes late now, and he knew there was a risk Andrea would give up waiting. But in the shade of the boating shed, all his certainties had evaporated.

Andrea turned minutely. She glanced at her watch again. She sipped from the coffee holder, tilting it back in a way that told Mick she’d finished the last drop. He saw her looking around for a waste bin.

Mick stepped from the shade. He walked across the grass, onto concrete, acutely conscious of the slow awkwardness of his gait. His walking had improved since his first efforts, but it still felt as if he were trying to walk upright in a swimming pool filled with treacle. Joe had assured him that all his movements would become more normal as the nervelink bedded in, but that process was obviously taking longer than anticipated.

“Andrea,” he said, sounding slurred and drunk and too loud, even to his own ears.

She turned and met his eyes. There was a slight pause before she smiled, and when she did, the smile wasn’t quite right, as if she’d been asked to hold it too long for a photograph.

“Hello, Mick. I was beginning to think ...”

“It’s okay.” He forced out each word with care, making sure it came out right before moving to the next. “I just had some second thoughts.”

“I don’t blame you. How does it feel?”

“A bit odd. It’ll get easier.”

“Yes, that’s what they told me.” She took another sip from the coffee, even though it must have been empty. They were standing about two meters apart, close enough to talk, close enough to look like two friends or colleagues who’d bumped into each other around the lake.

“It’s really good of you ...” Mick began.

Andrea shook her head urgently. “Please. It’s okay. We talked it over. We both agreed it was the right thing to do. If the tables were turned, you wouldn’t have hesitated.”

“Maybe not.”

“I know you, Mick. Maybe better than you know yourself. You’d have done all that you could, and more.”

“I just want you to know ... I’m not taking any of this lightly. Not you having to see me, like this ... not what he has to go through while I’m around.”

“He said to tell you there are worse ways to spend a week.”

Mick tried to smile. He felt the muscles of his face move, but without a mirror there was no way to judge the outcome. The moment stretched. A football splashed into the lake and began to drift away from the edge. He heard a little boy start crying.

“Your hair looks different,” Mick said.

“You don’t like it.”

“No, I do. It really suits you. Did you have that done after ... oh, wait. I see. You were on your way to the salon.”

He could see the scratch on her face where she’d grazed it on the curb, when the car knocked her down. She hadn’t even needed stitches. In a week it would hardly show at all.

“I can’t begin to imagine what it’s been like for you,” Andrea said. “I can’t imagine what this is like for you.”

“It helps.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I want it to help. I think it’s going to. It’s just that right now it feels like I’ve made the worst mistake of my life.”

Andrea held up the coffee holder. “Do you fancy one? It’s my treat.”

Andrea was a solicitor. She worked for a small legal firm located in modern offices near the park. There was a Starbucks near her office building. “They don’t know me there, do they.”

“Not unless you’ve been moonlighting. Come on. I hate to say it, but you could use some practice walking.”

“As long as you won’t laugh.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. Hold my hand, Mick. It’ll make it easier.”

Before he could step back, Andrea closed the distance between them and took his hand in hers. It was good of her to do that, Mick thought. He’d been wondering how he would initiate that first touch, and Andrea had spared him the fumbling awkwardness that would almost certainly have ensued. That was Andrea to a tee, always thinking of others and trying to make life a little easier for them, no matter how small the difference. It was why people liked her so much; why her friends were so fiercely loyal.

“It’s going to be okay, Mick,” Andrea said gently. “Everything that’s happened between us ... it doesn’t matter now. I’ve said bad things to you and you’ve said bad things to me. But let’s forget about all that. Let’s just make the most of what time we have.”

“I’m scared of losing you.”

“You’re a good man. You’ve more friends than you realize.”

He was sweating in the heat, so much so that the glasses began to slip down his nose. The view tilted toward his shoes. He raised his free hand in a stiff, salutelike gesture and pushed the glasses back into place.

Andrea’s hand tightened on his.

“I can’t go through with this,” Mick said. “I should go back.”

“You started it,” Andrea said sternly, but without rancor. “Now you finish it. All the way, Mick Leighton.”

* * * *

Tuesday

Things were much better by the morning of the second day. When he woke in Joe Liversedge’s lab there was a fluency in his movements that simply hadn’t been there the evening before, when he’d said goodbye to Andrea. He now felt as if he was inhabiting the host body, rather than simply shuffling it around like a puppet. He still needed the glasses to be able to see anything, but the nervelink was conveying sensation much more effectively now, so that when he touched something it came through without any of the fuzziness or lag he’d been experiencing the day before. Most tourists were able to achieve reasonable accuracy of touch differentiation within twenty-four hours. Within two days, their degree of proprioceptive immersion was generally good enough to allow complex motor tasks such as cycling, swimming, or skiing. Repeat-visit tourists, especially those that went back into the same body, got over the transition period even faster. To them it was like moving back into a house after a short absence.

Joe’s team gave Mick a thorough checkup in the annex. It was all routine stuff. Amy Flint, Joe’s senior graduate student, insisted on adding some more numbers to the tactile test database that she was building for the study. That meant Mick sitting at a table, without the glasses, being asked to hold various objects and decide what shape they were and what they were made of. He scored excellently, only failing to distinguish between wood and plastic balls of similar weight and texture. Flint was cheerfully casual around him, without any of the affectedness or oversensitivity Mick had quickly detected in his friends or colleagues. Clearly she didn’t know what had happened; she just thought Joe had opted to go for a different test subject than himself.

Joe was upbeat about Mick’s progress. Everything, from the host body to the hardware, was holding up well. The bandwidth was stable at nearly two megabytes per second, more than enough spare capacity to permit Mick the use of a second video feed to peer back into the version of the lab on the other side. The other version of Joe held the cam up so that Mick could see his own body, reclining on the heavy-duty immersion couch. Mick had expected to be disturbed by that, but the whole experience turned out to be oddly banal, like replaying a home movie.

When they were done with the tests, Joe walked Mick over to the university canteen, where he ate a liquid breakfast, slurping down three containers of fruit yoghurt. While he ate—which was tricky, but another of the things that was supposed to get easier with practice—he gazed distractedly at the television in the canteen. The wall-sized screen was running through the morning news, with the sound turned down. At the moment the screen was showing grainy footage of the Polish miners, caught on surveillance camera as they trudged into the low, concrete pithead building on their way to work. The cave-in had happened three days ago. The miners were still trapped underground, in all the world-lines that were in contact with this one, including Mick’s own.

“Poor fuckers,” Joe said, looking up from a draft paper he was penciling remarks over.

“Maybe they’ll get them out.”

“Aye. Maybe. Wouldn’t fancy my chances down there, though.”

The picture changed to a summary of football scores. Again, most of the games had ended in identical results across the contacted worldlines, but two or three—highlighted in sidebars, with analysis text ticking below them—had ended differently, with one team even being dropped from the rankings.

Afterward Mick walked on his own to the tram stop and caught the next service into the city center. Already he could feel that he was attracting less attention than the day before. He still moved a little stiffly, he could tell that just by looking at his reflection in the glass as he boarded the tram, but there was no longer anything comical or robotic about it. He just looked like someone with a touch of arthritis, or someone who’d been overdoing it in the gym and was now paying with a dose of sore muscles.

As the tram whisked its way through traffic, he thought back to the evening before. The meeting with Andrea, and the subsequent day, had gone as well as he could have expected. Things had been strained at first, but by the time they’d been to Starbucks, he had detected an easing in her manner, and that had made him feel more at ease as well. They’d made small talk, skirting around the main thing neither of them wanted to discuss. Andrea had taken most of the day off; she didn’t have to be at I he law offices until late afternoon, just to check that no problems had arisen in her absence.

They’d talked about what to do with the rest of their day together.

“Maybe we could drive up into the Beacons,” Mick had said. “It’ll be nice up in the hills with a bit of a breeze. We always used to enjoy those days out.”

“Been a while though,” Andrea had said. “I’m not sure my legs are up lo it anymore.”

“You always used to hustle up those hills.”

“Emphasis on the ‘used to,’ unfortunately. Now I get out of breath lust walking up St. Mary’s Street with a bag full of shopping.”

Mick looked at her skeptically, but he couldn’t deny that Andrea had a point. Neither of them was the keen, outdoors type they had been when they met fifteen years earlier through the university’s hill-walking club. Back then they’d spent long weekends exploring the hills of the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains, or driving to Snowdonia or the Lake District. They’d had some hair-raising moments together, when the weather turned against them or when they suddenly realized they were on completely the wrong ridge. But what Mick remembered, more than anything, was not being cold and wet, but the feeling of relief when they arrived at some cozy warm pub at the end of the day, both of them ravenous and thirsty and high on what they’d achieved. Good memories, all of them. Why hadn’t they kept it up, instead of letting their jobs rule their weekends?

“Look, maybe we might drive up to the Beacons in a day or two,” Andrea said. “But I think it’s a bit ambitious for today, don’t you?”

“You’re probably right,” Mick said.

After some debate, they’d agreed to visit the castle and then take a boat ride around the bay to see the huge and impressive sea defenses up close. Both were things they’d always meant to do together but had kept putting off for another weekend. The castle was heaving with tourists, even on this midweek day. Because a lot of them were nervelinked, though, they afforded Mick a welcome measure of inconspicuousness. No one gave him a second glance as he bumbled along with the other shade-wearing bodysnatchers, even though he must have looked considerably more affluent and well-fed than the average mule. Afterward, they went to look at the Roman ruins, where Rachel Liversedge was busy talking to a group of bored primary school children from the valleys.

Mick enjoyed the boat ride more than the trip to the castle. There were still enough nervelinked tourists on the boat for him not to feel completely out of place, and being out in the bay offered some respite from the cloying heat of the city center. Mick had even felt the breeze on the back of his hand, evidence that the nervelink was really bedding in.

It was Andrea who nudged the conversation toward the reason for Mick’s presence. She’d just returned from the counter with two paper cups brimming with murky coffee, nearly spilling them as the boat swayed unexpectedly. She sat down on the boat’s hard wooden bench.

“I forgot to ask how it went in the lab this morning?” she asked brightly. “Everything working out okay?”

“Very well,” Mick said. “Joe says we were getting two megs this morning. That’s as good as he was hoping for.”

“You’ll have to explain that to me. I know it’s to do with the amount of data you’re able to send through the link, but I don’t know how it compares with what we’d be using for a typical tourist setup.”

Mick remembered what Joe had told him. “It’s not as good. Tourists can use as much bandwidth as they can afford. But Joe’s correlators never get above five megabytes per second. That’s at the start of the twelve-day window, too. It only gets worse by day five or six.”

“Is two enough?”

“It’s what Joe’s got to work with.” Mick reached up and tapped the glasses. “It shouldn’t be enough for full color vision at normal resolution, according to Joe. But there’s an awful lot of clever software in the lab to take care of that. It’s constantly guessing, filling in gaps.”

“How does it look?”

“Like I’m looking at the world through a pair of sunglasses.” He pulled them off his nose and tilted them toward Andrea. “Except it’s the glasses that are actually doing the seeing, not my—his—eyes. Most of the time, it’s good enough that I don’t notice anything weird. If I wiggle my head around fast—or if something streaks past too quickly—then the glasses have trouble keeping up with the changing view.” He jammed the glasses back on, just in time for a seagull to flash past only a few meters from the boat. He had a momentary sense of the seagull breaking up into blocky areas of confused pixels, as if it had been painted by a cubist, before the glasses smoothed things over and normality ensued.

“What about all the rest of it? Hearing, touch ...”

“They don’t take up anything like as much bandwidth as vision. The way Joe puts it, postural information only needs a few basic parameters: the angles of my limb joints, that kind of thing. Hearing’s pretty straightforward. And touch is the easiest of all, as it happens.”

“Really?”

“So Joe says. Hold my hand.”

Andrea hesitated an instant then took Mick’s hand.

“Now squeeze it,” Mick said.

She tightened her hold. “Are you getting that?”

“Perfectly. It’s much easier than sending sound. If you were to say something to me, the acoustic signal would have to be sampled, digitized, compressed, and pushed across the link: hundreds of bytes per second. But all touch needs is a single parameter. The system will still be able to keep sending touch even when everything else gets too difficult.”

“Then it’s the last thing to go.”

“It’s the most fundamental sense we have. That’s the way it ought to be.”

After a few moments, Andrea said, “How long?”

“Four days,” Mick said slowly. “Maybe five, if we’re lucky. Joe says we’ll have a better handle on the decay curve by tomorrow.”

“I’m worried, Mick. I don’t know how I’m going to deal with losing you.”

He closed his other hand on hers and squeezed in return. “You’ll get me back.”

“I know. It’s just ... it won’t be you. It’ll be the other you.”

“They’re both me.”

“That’s not how it feels right now. It feels like I’m having an affair while my husband’s away.”

“It shouldn’t. I am your husband. We’re both your husband.”

They said nothing after that, sitting in silence as the boat bobbed its way back to shore. It was not that they had said anything upsetting, just that words were no longer adequate. Andrea kept holding his hand. Mick wanted this morning to continue forever: the boat, the breeze, the perfect sky over the bay. Even then he chided himself for dwelling on the passage of time, rather than making the most of the experience as it happened to him. That had always been his problem, ever since he was a kid. School holidays had always been steeped in a melancholic sense of how few days were left.

But this wasn’t a holiday.

After a while, he noticed that some people had gathered at the bow of the boat, pressing against the railings. They were pointing up, into the sky. Some of them had pulled out phones.

“There’s something going on,” Mick said.

“I can see it,” Andrea answered. She touched the side of his face, steering his view until he was craning up as far as his neck would allow. “It’s an airplane.”

Mick waited until the glasses picked out the tiny, moving speck of the plane etching a pale contrail in its wake. He felt a twinge of resentment toward anyone still having the freedom to fly, when the rest of humanity was denied that right. It had been a nice dream when it lasted, flying. He had no idea what political or military purpose the plane was serving, but it would be an easy matter to find out, were he that interested. The news would be in all the papers by the afternoon. The plane wouldn’t just be overflying this version of Cardiff, but his as well. That had been one of the hardest things to take since Andrea’s death. The world at large steamrolled on, its course undeflected by that single human tragedy. Andrea had died in the accident in his world, she’d survived unscathed in this one, and that plane’s course wouldn’t have changed in any measurable way (in either reality).

“I love seeing airplanes,” Andrea said. “It reminds me of what things were like before the moratorium. Don’t you?”

“Actually,” Mick said, “they make me a bit sad.”

* * * *

Wednesday

Mick knew how busy Andrea had been lately, and he tried to persuade her against taking any time off from her work. Andrea had protested, saying her colleagues could handle her workload for a few days. Mick knew better than that—Andrea practically ran the firm single-handedly—but in the end they’d come to a compromise. Andrea would take time off from the office, but she’d pop in first thing in the morning to put out any really serious fires.

Mick agreed to meet her at the offices at ten, after his round of tests. Everything still felt the way it had the day before; if anything he was even more fluent in his body movements. But when Joe had finished, the news was all that Mick had been quietly dreading, while knowing it could be no other way. The quality of the link had continued to degrade. According to Joe they were down to one point eight megs now. They’d seen enough decay curves to be able to extrapolate forward into the beginning of the following week. The link would become noise-swamped around teatime on Sunday, give or take three hours either way.

If only they’d started sooner, Mick thought. But Joe had done all that he could.

Today—despite the foreboding message from the lab—his sense of immersion in the counterpart world had become total. As the sunlit city swept by outside the tram’s windows, Mick found it nearly impossible to believe that he was not physically present in this body, rather than lying on the couch in the other version of the lab. Overnight his tactile immersion had improved markedly. When he braced himself against the tram’s upright handrail, as it swept around a curve, he felt cold aluminum, the faint greasiness where it had been touched by other hands.

At the offices, Andrea’s colleagues greeted him with an unforced casualness that left him dismayed. He’d been expecting awkward expressions of sympathy, sly glances when they thought he wasn’t looking. Instead he was plonked down in the waiting area and left to flick through glossy brochures while he waited for Andrea to emerge from her office. No one even offered him a drink.

He leafed through the brochures dispiritedly. Andrea’s job had always been a sore point in their relationship. If Mick didn’t approve of nervelinking, he had even less time for the legal vultures that made so much money out of personal injury claims related to the technology. But now he found it difficult to summon his usual sense of moral superiority. Unpleasant things had happened to decent people because of negligence and corner-cutting. If nervelinking was to be a part of the world, then someone had to make sure the victims got their due. He wondered why this had never been clear to him before.

“Hiya,” Andrea said, leaning over him. She gave him a businesslike kiss, not quite meeting his mouth. “Took a bit longer than I thought, sorry.”

“Can we go now?” Mick asked, putting down the brochure.

“Yep, I’m done here.”

Outside, when they were walking along the pavement in the shade of the tall, commercial buildings, Mick said: “They didn’t have a clue, did they? No one in that office knows what’s happened to us.”

“I thought it was best,” Andrea said.

“I don’t know how you can keep up that act, that nothing’s wrong.”

“Mick, nothing is wrong. You have to see it from my point of view. I haven’t lost my husband. Nothing’s changed for me. When you’re gone—when all this ends, and I get the other you back—my life carries on as normal. I know what’s happened to you is a tragedy, and believe me I’m as upset about it as anyone.”

“Upset,” Mick said quietly.

“Yes, upset. But I’d be lying if I said I was paralyzed with grief. I’m human, Mick. I’m not capable of feeling great emotional turmoil at the thought that some distant counterpart of myself got herself run over, all because she was rushing to have her hair done. Silly cow, that’s what it makes me feel. At most it makes me feel a bit odd, a bit shivery. But I don’t think it’s something I’m going to have trouble getting over.”

“I lost my wife,” Mick said.

“I know, and I’m sorry. More than you’ll ever know. But if you expect my life to come crashing to a halt ...”

He cut her off. “I’m already fading. One point eight this morning.”

“You always knew it would happen. It’s not like it’s any surprise.”

“You’ll notice a difference in me by the end of the day.”

“This isn’t the end of the day, so stop dwelling on it. All right? Please, Mick. You’re in serious danger of ruining this for yourself.”

“I know, and I’m trying not to,” he said. “But what I was saying, about how things aren’t going to get any better ... I think today’s going to be my last chance, Andrea. My last chance to be with you, to be with you properly.”

“You mean us sleeping together,” Andrea said, keeping her voice low.

“We haven’t talked about it yet. That’s okay; I wasn’t expecting it to happen without at least some discussion. But there’s no reason why ...”

“Mick, I ...” Andrea began.

“You’re still my wife. I’m still in love with you. I know we’ve had our problems, but I realize now how stupid all that was. I should have called you sooner. I was being an idiot. And then this happened ... and it made me realize what a wonderful, lovely person you are, and I should have seen that for myself, but I didn’t ... I needed the accident to shake me up, to make me see how lucky I was just to know you. And now I’m going to lose you again, and I’m not sure how I’m going to cope with that. But at least if we can be together again ... properly, I mean.”

“Mick ...”

“You’ve already said you might get back together with the other Mick. Maybe it took all this to get us talking again. Point is, if you’re going to get back together with him, there’s nothing to stop us getting back together now. We were a couple before the accident; we can still be a couple now.”

“Mick, it isn’t the same. You’ve lost your wife. I’m not her. I’m some weird thing there isn’t a word for. And you aren’t really my husband. My husband is in a medically induced coma.”

“You know none of that really matters.”

“To you.”

“It shouldn’t matter to you either. And your husband—me, incidentally—agreed to this. He knew exactly what was supposed to happen. And so did you.”

“I just thought things would be better—more civilized—if we kept a kind of distance.”

“You’re talking as if we’re divorced.”

“Mick, we were already separated. We weren’t talking. I can’t just forget what happened before the accident as if none of that mattered.”

“I know it isn’t easy for you.”

They walked on in an uneasy silence, through the city center streets they’d walked a thousand times before. Mick asked Andrea if she wanted a coffee, but she said she’d had one in her office not long before he arrived. Maybe later. They paused to cross the road near one of Andrea’s favorite boutiques and Mick asked if there was something he could buy for her.

Andrea sounded taken aback at the suggestion. “You don’t need to buy me anything, Mick. It isn’t my birthday or anything.”

“It would be nice to give you a gift. Something to remember me by.”

“I don’t need anything to remember you, Mick. You’re always going to be there.”

“It doesn’t have to be much. Just something you’ll use now and then, and will make you think of me. This me, not the one who’s going to be walking around in this body in a few days.”

“Well, if you really insist ...” He could tell Andrea was trying to sound keen on the idea, but her heart still wasn’t quite in it. “There was a handbag I saw last week ...”

“You should have bought it when you saw it.”

“I was saving up for the hairdresser.”

So Mick bought her the handbag. He made a mental note of the style and color, intending to buy an identical copy next week. Since he hadn’t bought the gift for his wife in his own worldline, it was even possible that he might walk out of the shop with the exact counterpart of the handbag he’d just given Andrea.

They went to the park again, then to look at the art in the National Museum of Wales, then back into town for lunch. There were a few more clouds in the sky compared to the last two days, but their chrome whiteness only served to make the blue appear more deeply enameled and permanent. There were no planes anywhere at all; no contrail scratches. It turned out the aircraft—which had indeed been military—that they had seen yesterday had been on its way to Poland, carrying a team of mine rescue specialists. Mick remembered his resentment at seeing the plane, and felt bad about it now. There had been brave men and women aboard it, and they were probably going to be putting their own lives at risk to help save other brave men and women stuck miles underground.

“Well,” Andrea said, when they’d paid the bill. “Moment of truth, I suppose. I’ve been thinking about what you were saying earlier, and maybe ...” She trailed off, looking down at the remains of her salad, before continuing, “We can go home, if you’d like. If that’s what you really want.”

“Yes,” Mick said. “It’s what I want.”

They took the tram back to their house. Andrea used her key to let them inside. It was still only the early afternoon, and the house was pleasantly cool, with the curtains and blinds still drawn. Mick knelt down and picked up the letters that were on the mat. Bills, mostly. He set them on the hall-side table, feeling a transitory sense of liberation. More than likely he’d be confronted with the same bills when he got home, but for now these were someone else’s problem.

He slipped off his shoes and walked into the living room. For a moment he was thrown, feeling as if he really was in a different house. The wallscreen was on another wall; the dining table had been shifted sideways into the other half of the room; the sofa and easy chairs had all been altered and moved.

“What’s happened?”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Andrea said. “I felt like a change. You came around and helped me move them.”

“That’s new furniture.”

“No, just different seat covers. They’re not new, it’s just that we haven’t had them out for a while. You remember them now, don’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“C’mon, Mick. It wasn’t that long ago. We got them off Aunty Janice, remember?” She looked at him despairingly. “I’ll move things back. It was a bit inconsiderate of me, I suppose. I never thought how strange it would be for you to see the place like this.”

“No, it’s okay. Honestly, it’s fine.” Mick looked around, trying to fix the arrangement of furniture and decor in his mind’s eye. As if he were going to duplicate everything when he got back into his own body, into his own version of this house.

Maybe he would, too.

“I’ve got something for you,” Andrea said suddenly, reaching onto the top of the bookcase. “Found it this morning. Took ages searching for it.”

“What?” Mick asked.

She held the thing out to him. Mick saw a rectangle of laminated pink card, stained and dog-eared. It was only when he tried to hold it, and the thing fell open and disgorged its folded paper innards, that he realized it was a map.

“Bloody hell. I wouldn’t have had a clue where to look.” Mick folded the map back into itself and studied the cover. It was one of their old hill-walking maps, covering that part of the Brecon Beacons where they’d done a lot of their walks.

“I was just thinking ... seeing as you were so keen ... maybe it wouldn’t kill us to get out of town. Nothing too adventurous, mind.”

“Tomorrow?”

She looked at him concernedly. “That’s what I was thinking. You’ll still be okay, won’t you?”

“No probs.”

“I’ll get us a picnic, then. Tesco’s does a nice luncheon basket. I think we’ve still got two thermos flasks around here somewhere, too.”

“Never mind the thermos flasks, what about the walking boots?”

“In the garage,” Andrea said. “Along with the rucksacks. I’ll dig them out this evening.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Mick said. “Really. It’s kind of you to agree.”

“Just as long you don’t expect me to get up Pen y Fan without getting out of breath.”

“I bet you’ll surprise yourself.”

A little later they went upstairs, to their bedroom. The blinds were open enough to throw pale stripes across the walls and bedsheets. Andrea undressed, and then helped Mick out his own clothes. As good as his control over the body had now become, fine motor tasks—like undoing buttons and zips—would require a lot more practice than he was going to have time for.

“You’ll have to help me get all this on afterward,” he said.

“There you go, worrying about the future again.”

They lay together on the bed. Mick had already felt himself growing hard long before there was any corresponding change in the body he was now inhabiting. He had an erection in the laboratory, halfway across the city in another worldline. He could even feel the sharp plastic of the urinary catheter. Would the other Mick, sunk deep into coma, retain some vague impression of what was happening now? There were occasional stories of people coming out of their coma with a memory of what their bodies had been up to while they were under, but the agencies had said these were urban myths.

They made slow, cautious love. Mick had become more aware of his own awkwardness, and the self-consciousness only served to exaggerate the stiffness of his movements. Andrea did what she could to help, to bridge the gap between them, but she could not work miracles. She was patient and forgiving, even when he came close to hurting her. When he climaxed, Mick felt it happen to the body in the laboratory first. Then the body he was inhabiting responded, too, seconds later. Something of it reached him through the nervelink—not pleasure, exactly, but confirmation that pleasure had occurred.

Afterward, they lay still on the bed, limbs entwined. A breeze made the blinds move back and forth against the window. The slow movement of light and shade, the soft tick of vinyl on glass, was as lulling as a becalmed boat. Mick found himself falling into a contented sleep. He dreamed of standing on a summit in the Brecon Beacons, looking down on the sunlit valleys of South Wales, with Andrea next to him, the two of them poised like a tableau in a travel brochure.

When he woke, hours later, he heard her moving around downstairs. He reached for the glasses—he’d removed them earlier—and made to leave the bed. He felt it then. Somewhere in those languid hours he’d lost a degree of control over the body. He stood and moved to the door. He could still walk, but the easy facility he’d gained on Tuesday was now absent. When he moved to the landing and looked down the stairs, the glasses struggled to cope with the sudden change of scene. The view fractured, reassembled. He moved to steady himself on the banister, and his hand blurred into a long smear of flesh. He began to descend the stairs, like a man coming down a mountain.

* * * *

Thursday

In the morning he was worse. He stayed overnight at the house, then caught the tram to the laboratory. Already he could feel a measurable lag between the sending of his intentions to move, and the corresponding action in the body. Walking was still just about manageable, but all other tasks had become more difficult. He’d made a mess trying to eat breakfast in Andrea’s kitchen. It was no surprise when Joe told him that the link was now down to one point two megs, and falling.

“By the end of the day?” Mick asked, even though he could see the printout for himself.

“Point nine, maybe point eight.”

He’d dared to think it might still be possible to do what they had planned. But the day soon became a catalogue of declining functions. At noon he met Andrea at her office and they went to a car rental office, where they’d booked a vehicle for the day. Andrea drove them out of Cardiff, up the valleys, along the A470 from Merthyr to Brecon. They had planned to walk all the way to the summit of Pen y Fan, an ascent they’d done together dozens of times during their hill-walking days. Andrea had already collected the picnic basket from Tesco’s and packed and prepared the two rucksacks. She’d helped Mick get into his walking boots.

They left the car at the Storey Arms then followed the well-trodden trail that wound its way toward the mountain. Mick felt a little ashamed at first. Back in their hill-walking days, they’d tended to look down with disdain on the hordes of people making the trudge up Pen y Fan, especially those that took the route up from the pub. The view from the top was worth the climb, but they’d usually made a point of completing at least one or two other ascents on the same day, and they’d always eschewed the easy paths. Now Mick was paying for that earlier superiority. What started out as pleasantly challenging soon became impossibly taxing. Although he didn’t think Andrea had begun to notice, he was finding it much harder than he’d expected to walk on the rough, craggy surface of the path. The effort was draining him, preventing him from enjoying any of the scenery, or the sheer bliss of being with Andrea. When he lost his footing the first time, Andrea didn’t make much of it—she’d nearly tripped once already, on the dried and cracked path. But soon he was finding it hard to walk more than a hundred meters without losing his balance. He knew, with a heavy heart, that it would be difficult enough just to get back to the car. The mountain was still two miles away, and he wouldn’t have a hope as soon as they hit a real slope.

“Are you okay, Mick?”

“I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. It’s these bloody shoes. I can’t believe they ever fit me.”

He soldiered on for as long as he could, refusing to give in, but the going got harder and his pace slower. When he tripped again and this time grazed his shin through his trousers, he knew he’d pushed himself as far as he could go. Time was getting on. The mountain might as well have been in the Himalayas, for all his chances of climbing it.

“I’m sorry. I’m useless. Go on without me. It’s too nice a day not to finish it.”

“Hey.” Andrea took his hand. “Don’t be like that. It was always going to be hard. Look how far we’ve come anyway.”

Mick turned and looked dispiritedly down the valley. “About three kilometers. I can still see the pub.”

“Well, it felt longer. And besides, this is actually a very nice spot to have the picnic.” Andrea made a show of rubbing her thigh. “I’m about ready to stop anyway. Pulled a muscle going over that sty.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“Shut up, Mick. I’m happy, okay? If you want to turn this into some miserable, pain-filled trek, go ahead. Me, I’m staying here.”

She spread the blanket next to a dry brook and unpacked the food. The contents of the picnic basket looked very good indeed. The taste came through the nervelink as a kind of thin, diluted impression, more like the memory of taste rather than the thing itself. But he managed to eat without making too much of a mess, and some of it actually bordered on the enjoyable. They ate, listening to the birds, saying little. Now and then other walkers trudged past, barely giving Mick and Andrea a glance, as they continued toward the hills.

“I guess I shouldn’t have kidded myself I was ever going to get up that mountain,” Mick said.

“It was a bit ambitious,” Andrea agreed. “It would have been hard enough without the nervelink, given how flabby the two of us have become.”

“I think I’d have made a better job of it yesterday. Even this morning ... I honestly felt I could do this when we got into the car.”

Andrea touched his thigh. “How does it feel?”

“Like I’m moving away. Yesterday I felt like I was in this body, fully a part of it. Like a face filling a mask. Today it’s different. I can still see through the mask, but it’s getting further away.”

Andrea seemed distant for several moments. He wondered if what he’d said had upset her. But when she spoke again there was something in her voice—a kind of steely resolution—that he hadn’t been expecting, but which was entirely Andrea.

“Listen to me, Mick.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m going to tell you something. It’s the first of May today; just past two in the afternoon. We left Cardiff at eleven. This time next year, this exact day, I’m coming back here. I’m going to pack a picnic basket and go all the way up to the top of Pen y Fan. I’ll set off from Cardiff at the same time. And I’m going to do it the year after, as well. Every first of May. No matter what day of the week it is. No matter how bloody horrible the weather is. I’m going up this mountain and nothing on Earth is going to stop me.”

It took him a few seconds to realize what she was getting at. “With the other Mick?”

“No. I’m not saying we won’t ever climb that hill together. But when I go up it on the first of May, I’ll be on my own.” She looked levelly at Mick. “And you’ll do it alone as well. You’ll find someone new, I’m sure of it. But whoever she is will have to give you that one day to yourself. So that you and I can have it to ourselves.”

“We won’t be able to communicate. We won’t even know the other one’s stuck to the plan.”

“Yes,” Andrea said firmly. “We will. Because it’s going to be a promise, all right? The most important one either of us has ever made in our whole lives. That way we’ll know. Each of us will be in our own universe, or worldline, or whatever you call it. But we’ll both be standing on the same Welsh mountain. We’ll both be looking at the same view. And I’ll be thinking of you, and you’ll be thinking of me.”

Mick ran a stiff hand through Andrea’s hair. He couldn’t get his fingers to work very well now.

“You really mean that, don’t you?”

“Of course I mean it. But I’m not promising anything unless you agree to your half of it. Would you promise, Mick?”

“Yes,” he said. “I will.”

“I wish I could think of something better. I could say we’d always meet in the park. But there’ll be people around; it won’t feel private. I want the silence, the isolation, so I can feel your presence. And one day they might tear down the park and put a shopping center there instead. But the mountain will always be there. At least as long as we’re around.”

“And when we get old? Shouldn’t we agree to stop climbing the mountain, when we get to a certain age?”

“There you go again,” Andrea said. “Decide for yourself. I’m going to keep climbing this thing until they put me in a box. I expect nothing less from you, Mick Leighton.”

He made the best smile he was capable of. “Then ... I’ll just have to do my best, won’t I?”

* * * *

Friday

In the morning Mick was paraplegic. The nervelink still worked perfectly, but the rate of data transmission from one worldline to the other had become too low to permit anything as complex and feedback-dependent as walking. His control over the body’s fingers had become so clumsy that his hands might as well have been wearing boxing gloves. He could hold something if it was presented to him, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to manipulate simple objects, even those that had presented no difficulty twenty-four hours earlier. When he tried to grasp the breakfast yoghurt, he succeeded only in tipping it over the table. His hand had seemed to lurch toward the yoghurt, crossing the distance too quickly. According to Joe he had lost depth perception overnight. The glasses, sensing the dwindling data rate, were no longer sending stereoscopic images back to the lab.

He could still move around. The team had anticipated this stage and made sure an electric wheelchair was ready for him. Its chunky controls were designed to be used by someone with only limited upper body coordination. The chair was equipped with a panic button, so that Mick could summon help if he felt his control slipping faster than the predicted rate. Were he to fall into sudden and total paralysis, the chair would call out to passersby to provide assistance. In the event of an extreme medical emergency, it would steer itself to the nearest designated care point.

Andrea came out to the laboratory to meet him. Mick wanted one last trip into the city with her, but although she’d been enthusiastic when they’d talked about the plan on the phone, Andrea was now reluctant.

“Are you sure about this? We had such a nice time on Thursday. It would be a shame to spoil the memory of that now.”

“I’m okay,” Mick said.

“I’m just saying, we could always just stroll around the gardens here.”

“Please,” Mick said. “This is what ... I want.”

His voice was slow, his phrasing imprecise. He sounded drunk and depressed. If Andrea noticed—and he was sure she must have—she made no observation.

They went into town. It was difficult getting the wheelchair on the tram, even with Andrea’s assistance. No one seemed to know how to lower the boarding ramp. One of the benefits of nervelink technology was that you didn’t see that many people in wheelchairs anymore. The technology that enabled one person to control another person’s body also enabled spinal injuries to be bypassed. Mick was aware that he was attracting more attention than on any previous day. For most people wheelchairs were a medical horror from the past, like iron lungs or leg braces.

On the tram’s video monitor he watched a news item about the Polish miners. It wasn’t good. The rescue team had had a number of options available to them, involving at least three possible routes to the trapped men. After carefully evaluating all the data—aware of how little time remained for the victims—they’d chosen what had promised to be the quickest and safest approach.

It had turned out to be a mistake, one that would prove fatal for the miners. The rescuers had hit a flooded section and had been forced to retreat, with damage to their equipment, and one of their team injured. Yet the miners had been saved in one of the other contacted worldlines. In that reality, one of the members of the rescue team had slipped on ice and fractured his hip while boarding the plane. The loss of that one man—who’d been a vocal proponent for taking the quickest route—had resulted in the team following the second course. It had turned out to be the right decision. They’d met their share of obstacles and difficulties, but in the end they’d broken through to the trapped miners.

By the time this happened, contact with that worldline had almost been lost. Even the best compression methods couldn’t cope with moving images. The pictures that came back, of the men being liberated from the ground, were grainy and monochrome, like a blowup of newsprint from a hundred years earlier. They’d been squeezed across the gap in the last minutes before noise drowned the signal.

But the information was useless. Even armed with the knowledge that there was a safe route through to the miners, the team in this worldline didn’t have time to act.

The news didn’t help Mick’s mood. Going into the city turned out to be exactly the bad move Andrea had predicted. By midday his motor control had deteriorated even further, to the point where he was having difficulty steering the wheelchair. His speech became increasingly slurred, so that Andrea had to keep asking him to repeat himself. In defense, he shut down into monosyllables. Even his hearing was beginning to fail, as the auditory data was compressed to an even more savage degree. He couldn’t distinguish birds from traffic, or traffic from the swish of the trees in the park. When Andrea spoke to him she sounded like her words had been fed through a synthesizer, then chopped up and spliced back together in some tinny approximation to her normal voice.

At three, his glasses could no longer support full color vision. The software switched to a limited color palette. The city looked like a hand-tinted photograph, washed out and faded. Andrea’s face oscillated between white and sickly gray.

By four, Mick was fully quadriplegic. By five, the glasses had reverted back to black and white. The frame rate was down to ten images per second, and falling.

By early evening, Andrea was no longer able to understand what Mick was saying. Mick realized that he could no longer reach the panic button. He became agitated, thrashing his head around. He’d had enough. He wanted to be pulled out of the nervelink, slammed back into his own waiting body. He no longer felt as if he was in Mick’s body, but he didn’t feel as if he was in his own one either. He was strung out somewhere between them, helpless and almost blind. When the panic hit, it was like a foaming, irresistible tide.

Alarmed, Andrea wheeled him back to the laboratory. By the time she was ready to say goodbye to him, the glasses had reduced his vision to five images per second, each of which was composed of only six thousand pixels. He was calmer then, resigned to the inevitability of what tomorrow would bring: he would not even recognize Andrea in the morning.

* * * *

Saturday

Mick’s last day with Andrea began in a world of sound and vision—senses that were already impoverished to a large degree—and ended in a realm of silence and darkness.

He was now completely paralyzed, unable even to move his head. The brain that belonged to the other, comatose Mick now had more control over this body than its wakeful counterpart. The nervelink was still sending signals back to the lab, but the requirements of sight and sound now consumed almost all available bandwidth. In the morning, vision was down to one thousand pixels, updated three frames per second. His sight had already turned monochrome, but even yesterday there had been welcome gradations of gray, enough to anchor him into the visual landscape.

Now the pixels were only capable of registering on or off; it cost too much bandwidth to send intermediate intensity values. When Andrea was near him, her face was a flickering abstraction of black and white squares, like a trick picture in a psychology textbook. With effort he learned to distinguish her from the other faces in the laboratory, but no sooner had he gained confidence in his ability than the quality of vision declined even further.

By midmorning the frame rate had dropped to eight hundred pixels at two per second, which was less like vision than being shown a sequence of still images. People didn’t walk to him across the lab—they jumped from spot to spot, captured in frozen postures. It was soon easy to stop thinking of them as people at all, but simply as abstract structures in the data.

By noon he could not exactly say that he had any vision at all. Something was updating once every two seconds, but the matrix of black and white pixels was hard to reconcile with his memories of the lab. He could no longer distinguish people from furniture, unless people moved between frames, and then only occasionally. At two, he asked Joe to disable the feed from the glasses, so that the remaining bandwidth could be used for sound and touch. Mick was plunged into darkness.

Sound had declined overnight as well. If Andrea’s voice had been tinny yesterday, today it was barely human. It was as if she were speaking to him through a voice distorter on the end of the worst telephone connection in the world. The noise was beginning to win. The software was struggling to compensate, teasing sense out of the data. It was a battle that could only be prolonged, not won.

“I’m still here,” Andrea told him, her voice a whisper fainter than the signal from the furthest quasar.

Mick answered back. It took some time. His words in the lab had to be analyzed by voice-recognition software and converted into ASCII characters. The characters were compressed further and sent across the reality gap, bit by bit. In the other version of the lab—the one where Mick’s body waited in a wheelchair, the one where Andrea hadn’t died in a car crash—equivalent software decompressed the character string and reconstituted it in mechanically generated speech, with an American accent.

“Thank you for letting me come back,” he said. “Please stay. Until the end. Until I’m not here anymore.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Mick.”

Andrea squeezed his hand. After all that he had lost since Friday, touch remained. It really was the easiest thing to send: easier than sight, easier than sound. When, later, even Andrea’s voice had to be sent across the gap by character string and speech synthesizer, touch endured. He felt her holding him, hugging his body to hers, refusing to surrender him to the drowning roar of quantum noise.

“We’re down to less than a thousand useable bits,” Joe told him, speaking quietly in his ear in the version of the lab where Mick lay on the immersion couch. “That’s a thousand bits total, until we lose all contact. It’s enough for a message, enough for parting words.”

“Send this,” Mick said. “Tell Andrea that I’m glad she was there. Tell her that I’m glad she was my wife. Tell her I’m sorry we didn’t make it up that hill together.”

When Joe had sent the message, typing it in with his usual fluid speed, Mick felt the sense of Andrea’s touch easing. Even the microscopic data-transfer burden of communicating unchanging pressure, hand on hand, body against body, was now too much for the link. It was like one swimmer letting a drowning partner go. As the last bits fell, he felt Andrea slip away forever.

He lay on the couch, unmoving. He had lost his wife, for the second time. For the moment the weight of that realization pinned him into stillness. He did not think he would ever be able to walk in his world, let alone the one he had just vacated.

And yet it was Saturday. Andrea’s funeral was in two days. He would have to be ready for that.

“We’re done,” Joe said respectfully. “Link is now noise-swamped.”

“Did Andrea send anything back?” Mick asked. “After I sent my last words ...”

“No. I’m sorry.”

Mick caught the hesitation in Joe’s answer. “Nothing came through ?”

“Nothing intelligible. I thought something was coming through, but it was just ...” Joe offered an apologetic shrug. “The setup at their end must have gone noise-limited a few seconds before ours did. Happens, sometimes.”

“I know,” Mick said. “But I still want to see what Andrea sent.”

Joe handed him a printout. Mick waited for his eyes to focus on the sheet. Beneath the lines of header information was a single line of text: SO0122215. Like a phone number or a postal code, except it was obviously neither.

“That’s all?”

Joe sighed heavily. “I’m sorry, mate. Maybe she was just trying to get something through ... but the noise won. The rucking noise always wins.”

Mick looked at the numbers again. They began to talk to him. He thought he knew what they meant.

“... always fucking wins,” Joe repeated.

* * * *

Sunday

Andrea was there when they brought Mick out of the medically induced coma. He came up through layers of disorientation and half-dream, adrift until something inside him clicked into place and he realized where he had been for the last week, what had been happening to the body over which he was now regaining gradual control. It was exactly as they had promised: no dreams, no anxiety, no tangible sense of elapsed time. In a way, it was not an entirely unattractive way to spend a week. Like being in the womb, he’d heard people say. And now he was being born again, a process that was not without its own discomforts. He tried moving an arm and when the limb did not obey him instantly, he began to panic. But Joe was already smiling.

“Easy, boyo. It’s coming back. The software’s rerouting things one spinal nerve at a time. Just hold on there and it’ll be fine.”

Mick tried mumbling something in reply, but his jaw wasn’t working properly either. Yet it would come, as Joe had promised. On any given day, thousands of recipients went through this exact procedure without blinking an eyelid. Many of them were people who’d already done it hundreds of times before. Nervelinking was almost insanely safe. Far safer than any form of physical travel, that was certain.

He tried moving his arm again. This time it obeyed without hesitation.

“How are you feeling?” Andrea asked.

Once more he tried speaking. His jaw was stiff, his tongue thick and uncooperative, but he managed to make some sounds. “Okay. Felt better.”

“They say it’s easier the second time. Much easier the third.”

“How long?”

“You went under on Sunday of last week. It’s Sunday again now,” Joe said.

A full week. Exactly the way they’d planned it.

“I’m quite hungry,” Mick said.

“Everyone’s always hungry when they come out of the coma,” Joe said. “It’s hard to get enough nourishment into the host body. We’ll get you sorted out, though.”

Mick turned his head to look at Joe, waiting for his eyes to find grudging focus. “Joe,” he said. “Everything’s all right, isn’t it? No complications, nothing to worry about?”

“No problems at all,” Joe said.

“Then would you mind giving Andrea and me a moment alone?”

Joe held up his hand in hasty acknowledgement and left the room, off on some plausible errand. He shut the door quietly behind him.

“Well?” Mick asked. “I’m guessing things must have gone okay, or they wouldn’t have kept me under for so long.”

“Things went okay, yes,” Andrea said.

“Then you met the other Mick? He was here?”

Andrea nodded heavily. “He was here. We spent time together.”

“What did you get up to?”

“All the usual stuff you or I would’ve done. Hit the town, walked in the parks, went into the hills, that kind of thing.”

“How was it?”

She looked at him guardedly. “Really, really sad. I didn’t really know how to behave, to be honest. Part of me wanted to be all consoling and sympathetic, because he’d lost his wife. But I don’t think that’s what Mick wanted.”

“The other Mick,” he corrected gently.

“Point is, he didn’t come back to see me being all weepy. He wanted another week with his wife, the way things used to be. Yes, he wanted to say goodbye, but he didn’t want to spend the whole week with the two of us walking around feeling down in the dumps.”

“So how did you feel?”

“Miserable. Not as miserable as if I’d lost my husband, of course. But some of his sadness started wearing off on me. I didn’t think it was going to ... I’m not the one who’s been bereaved here—but you’d have to be inhuman not to feel something, wouldn’t you?”

“Whatever you felt, don’t blame yourself for it. I think it was a wonderful thing you agreed to do.”

“You, too.”

“I had the easy part,” Mick said.

Andrea stroked the side of his face. He realized that he needed a good shave. “How do you feel?” she asked. “You’re nearly him, after all. You know everything he knows.”

“Except how it feels to lose a wife. And I hope I don’t ever find that out. I don’t think I can ever really understand what he’s going through now. He feels like someone else, a friend, a colleague, someone you’d feel sorry for ...”

“But you’re not cut up about what happened to him.”

Mick thought for a while before responding, not wanting to give the glib, automatic answer, no matter how comforting it might have been. “No. I wish it hadn’t happened ... but you’re still here. We can still be together, if we want. We’ll carry on with our lives, and in a few months we’ll hardly ever think of that accident. The other Mick isn’t me. He isn’t even anyone we’ll ever hear from again. He’s gone. He might as well not exist.”

“But he does. Just because we can’t communicate anymore ... he is still out there.”

“That’s what the theory says.” Mick narrowed his eyes. “Why? What difference does it really make, to us?”

“None at all, I suppose.” Again that guarded look. “But there’s something I have to tell you, something you have to understand.”

There was a tone in her voice that troubled Mick, but he did his best not to show it. “Go on, Andrea.”

“I made a promise to the other Mick. He’s lost something no one can ever replace, and I wanted to do something, anything, to make it easier for him. Because of that, Mick and I came to an arrangement. Once a year, I’m going to go away for a day. For that day, and that day only, I’m going somewhere private where I’m going to be thinking about the other Mick. About what he’s been doing; what kind of life he’s had; whether lie’s happy or sad. And I’m going to be alone. I don’t want you to follow me, Mick. You have to promise me that.”

“You could tell me,” he said. “There doesn’t have to be secrets.”

“I’m telling you now. Don’t you think I could have kept it from you if I wanted to?”

“But I still won’t know where ...”

“You don’t need to. This is a secret between me and the other Mick. Me and the other you.” She must have read something in his expression, something he had hoped wasn’t there, because her tone turned grave. “And you need to find a way to deal with that, because it isn’t negotiable. I already made that promise.”

“And Andrea Leighton doesn’t break promises.”

“No,” she said, softening her look with a sweet half-smile. “She doesn’t. Especially not to Mick Leighton. Whichever one it happens to be.”

They kissed.

Later, when Andrea was out of the room while Joe ran some more post-immersion tests, Mick peeled off a yellow Post-it note that had been left on one of the keyboards. There was something written on the note, in neat, blue ink. Instantly he recognized Andrea’s handwriting: he’d seen it often enough on the message board in their kitchen. But the writing itself—SO0122215—meant nothing to him.

“Joe,” he asked casually. “Is this something of yours?”

Joe glanced over from his desk, his eyes freezing on the small rectangle of yellow paper.

“No, that’s what Andrea asked—” Joe began, then caught himself. “Look, it’s nothing. I meant to bin it, but ...”

“It’s a message to the other Mick, right?”

Joe looked around, as if Andrea might still be hiding in the room or about to reappear. “We were down to the last few usable bits. The other Mick had just sent his last words through. Andrea asked me to send that response.”

“Did she tell you what it meant?”

Joe looked defensive. “I just typed it. I didn’t ask. Thought it was between you and her. I mean, between the other Mick and her.”

“It’s okay,” Mick said. “You were right not to ask.”

He looked at the message again, and something fell solidly into place. It had taken a few moments, but he recognized the code for what it was now, as some damp and windswept memory filtered up from the past. The numbers formed a grid reference on an Ordnance Survey map. It was the kind Andrea and he had used when they went on their walking expeditions. The reference even looked vaguely familiar. He stared at the numbers, feeling as if they were about to give up their secret. Wherever it was, he’d been there, or somewhere near. It wouldn’t be hard to look it up. He wouldn’t even need the Post-it note. He’d always had a good memory for numbers.

Footsteps approached, echoing along the linoleum-floored hallway that led to the lab.

“It’s Andrea,” Joe said.

Mick folded the Post-it note until the message was no longer visible. He flicked it in Joe’s direction, knowing that it was none of his business anymore.

“Bin it.”

“You sure?”

From now on there was always going to be a part of his wife’s life that didn’t involve him, even if it was only for one day a year. He would just have to find a way to live with that.

Things could have been worse, after all.

“I’m sure,” he said.

The Six Directions Of Space

Taken from the short story collection “Galactic Empires” (2008) edited by Gardner Dozois

Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone and has also sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Spectrum SF, and elsewhere. His first novel, Revelation Space, was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; it was quickly followed by Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, and Century Rain, all big sprawling Space Operas that were big sellers as well, establishing Reynolds as one of the best and most popular new SF writers to enter the field in many years. His other books include a novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days. His most recent books are a novel, Pushing Ice, and two new collections, Galactic North and Zima Blue and Other Stories. Coming up is a new novel, The Prefect. A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he comes from Wales, but lives in the Netherlands, where he works for the European Space Agency.

Reynolds’ work is known for its grand scope, sweep, and scale (in one story, “Galactic North,” a spaceship sets out in pursuit of another in a stern chase that takes thousands of years of time and hundreds of thousands of light-years to complete; in another, “Thousandth Night,” ultrarich immortals embark on a plan that will call for the physical rearrangement of all the stars in the Galaxy. In the hard-hitting and disquieting story that follows, Reynolds shows us a brutal Galactic Empire embattling itself to defend against attacks by other Empires that come not just from elsewhere in the Galaxy, but from other universes altogether!

[VERSION HISTORY]

v1.0 by the N.E.R.D’s. Page numbers removed, paragraphs joined, formatted and spell checked. A full read through is required.

We had been riding for two hours when I tugged sharply on the reins to bring my pony to a halt. Tenger, my escort, rode on for a few paces before glancing back irritatedly. He muttered something in annoyance-a phrase that contained the words “stupid” and “dyke”—before steering his horse back alongside mine.

“Another sightseeing stop?” he asked, as the two mismatched animals chewed their bits, flared their nostrils, and flicked their heads up in mutual impatience.

I said nothing, damned if I was going to give him the pleasure of an excuse. I only wanted to take in the view: the deeply shadowed valley below, the rising hills beyond (curving ever upward, like a tidal wave formed from rock and soil and grass), and the little patch of light down in the darkness, the square formation of the still-moving caravan.

“If you really want to make that appointment—” Tenger continued.

“Shut up.”

Tenger sniffed, dug into a leather flap on his belt, and popped something into his mouth.

“On your own head be it, Yellow Dog. It certainly won’t be my neck on the line, keeping the old man waiting.”

I held both reins in one hand so that I could cup the other against my ear. I turned the side of my head in the direction of the caravan and closed my eyes. After a few moments, I convinced myself that I could hear it. It was a sound almost on the edge of audibility, but which would become thunderous, calamitous, world-destroying, as they drew nearer. The sound of thousands of riders, hundreds of wheeled tents, dozens of monstrous siege engines. A sound very much like the end of the world itself, it must have seemed, when the caravan approached.

“We can go now,” I told Tenger.

He dug his spurs in, almost drawing blood, his horse pounding away so quickly that it kicked dirt into my eyes.

Goyo snorted and gave chase. We raced down into the valley, sending skylarks and snipe barreling into the air.

* * * * *

“Just going by the rules, Yellow Dog,” the guard said, apologizing for making me show him my passport. We were standing on the wheeled platform of the imperial ger. The guard wore a knee-length blue sash-tied coat, long black hair cascading from the dome of his helmet. “We’re on high alert as it is. Three plausible threats in the last week.”

“Usual nut jobs?” I said, casting a wary glance at Tenger, who was attending to Goyo with a bad-tempered expression. I had beaten him to the caravan and he did not like that.

“Two Islamist sects, one bunch of Nestorians,” the guard answered. “Not that I’m saying that the old man has anything to fear from you, of course, but we have to follow protocol.”

“I understand fully.”

“Frankly, we were beginning to wonder if you were ever coming back.” He looked at me solicitously. “Some of us were beginning to wonder if you’d been disavowed.”

I smiled. “Disavowed? I don’t think so.”

“Just saying, we’re all assuming you’ve got something suitably juicy, after all this time.”

I reached up to tie back my hair. “Juicy’s not exactly the word I’d use. But it’s definitely something he has to hear about.”

The guard touched a finger to the pearl on his collar.

“Better go inside, in that case.”

I did as I was invited.

My audience with the khan was neither as private nor as lengthy as I might have wished, but, in all other respects, it was a success. One of his wives was there, as well as Minister Chiledu, the national security adviser, and the khan was notoriously busy during this ceremonial restaging of the war caravan. I thought, not for the first time, of how old he looked: much older than the young man who had been elected to this office seven years earlier, brimming with plans and promises. Now he was graying and tired, worn down by disappointing polls and the pressures of managing an empire that was beginning to fray at the edges. The caravan was supposed to be an antidote to all that. In this, the nine hundred and ninety-ninth year since the death of the Founder (we would celebrate this birthday, but no one knows when it happened), a special effort had been made to create the largest caravan in decades, with almost every local system commander in attendance.

As I stepped off the ger to collect Goyo and begin my mission, I felt something perilously close to elation. The data I had presented to the khan-the troubling signs I had detected concerning the functioning and security of the Infrastructure-had been taken seriously. The khan could have waved aside my concerns as an issue for his successor, but-to his credit, I think-he had not. I had been given license and funds to gather more information, even if that meant voyaging to the Kuchlug Special Administrative Volume and operating under the nose of Qilian, one of the men who had been making life difficult for the khan these last few years.

And yet my mood of elation was short-lived.

I had no sooner set my feet on the ground than I spied Tenger. He was bullying Goyo, jerking hard on his bridle, kicking a boot against his hocks. He was so preoccupied with his business that he did not see me approaching from behind his back. I took hold of a good, thick clump of his hair and snapped his head back as far it would go. He released the bridle, staggering back under the pressure I was applying.

I whispered in his ear. “No one hurts my horse, you ignorant piece of shit.” Then I spun him around, the hair tearing out in my fist, and kneed him hard in the groin, so that he coughed out a groan of pain and nausea and bent double, like a man about to vomit.

* * * * *

Some say that it is Heaven’s Mandate that we should have the stars, just as it was the will of Heaven that our armies should bring the squabbling lands of Greater Mongolia under one system of governance, a polity so civilized that a woman could ride naked from the western shores of Europe to the eastern edge of China without once being molested. I say that it is simply the case that we-call us Mongols, call us humans, it scarcely matters now—have always made the best of what we are given.

Take the nexus in Gansu system, for instance. It was a medium-sized moon that had been hollowed out nearly all the way to its middle, leaving a shell barely a hundred li thick, with a small round kernel buttressed to the shell by ninety-nine golden spokes. Local traffic entered and departed the nexus via apertures at the northern and southern poles. Not that there was much local traffic to speak of: Gansu, with its miserly red sun-only just large enough to sustain fusion-and handful of desolate, volatile-poor, and radiation-lashed rocky worlds, was neither a financial nor military hub, nor a place that figured prominently in tourist itineraries. As was often the case, it was something of a puzzle why the wormlike khorkoi had built the nexus in such a miserable location to begin with.

Unpromising material, but in the five hundred years since we first reopened a portal into the Infrastructure, we had made a glittering bauble out of it. Five major trunk routes converged on Gansu, including a high-capacity branch of the Kherlen Corridor, the busiest path in the entire network. In addition, the moon offered portals to a dozen secondary routes, four of which had been rated stable enough to allow passage by juggernaut-class ships. Most of those secondary routes led to stellar population centers of some economic importance, including the Kiriltuk, Tatatunga, and Chilagun administrative volumes, each of which encompassed more than fifty settled systems and around a thousand habitable worlds. Even the routes that led to nowhere of particular importance were well traveled by prospectors and adventurers, hoping to find khorkoi relics or, that fever dream of all chancers, an unmapped nexus.

We did not know the function of the ninety-nine spokes, or of the core they buttressed. No matter; the core made a useful foundation, a place upon which to build. From the vantage point of the rising shuttle, it was a scribble of luminous neon, packed tight as a migraine. I could not distinguish the lights of individual buildings, only the larger glowing demarkations of the precincts between city-sized districts. Pressurized horseways a whole li wide were thin, snaking scratches. The human presence had even begun to climb up the golden spokes, pushing tendrils of light out to the moon’s inner surface. Commercial slogans spelled themselves out in letters ten li high. On Founder’s Day, drink only Temujin Brand Airag. Sorkan-Shira rental ponies have low mileage, excellent stamina, and good temperament. Treat your favorite wife: buy her only Zarnuk Silks. During hunting season, safeguard your assets with New Far Samarkand Mutual Insurance. Think you’re a real man? Then you should be drinking Death Worm Airag: the one with a sting at both ends!

I had spent only one night in Gansu, arranging a eunuch and waiting for the smaller ship that would carry us the rest of the way to Kuchlug. Now Goyo, the eunuch, and I were being conveyed to the Burkhan Khaldun, a vessel that was even smaller than the Black Heart Mountain that had brought me to Gansu. The BK was only one li from end to end, less than a quarter of that across the bow. The hull was a multicolored quilt of patch repairs, with many scratches, craters, and scorches yet to be attended to. The lateral stabilization vanes had the slightly buckled look of something that had been badly bent and then hammered back into shape, while the yaw dampeners appeared to have originated from a completely different ship, fixed on with silvery fillets of recent welding work. A whole line of windows had been plated over.

As old as the BK might have been, it had taken more than just age and neglect to bring her to that state. The Parvan Tract was a notoriously rough passage, quickly taking its toll on even a new ship. If the Kherlen Corridor was a wide, stately river that could almost be navigated blindfold, then the Tract was a series of narrow rapids whose treacherous properties varied from trip to trip, requiring not just expert input from the crew, but passengers with the constitution to tolerate a heavy crossing.

Once I had checked into my rooms and satisfied myself that Goyo was being taken care of, I made my way back to the passenger area. I bought a glass of Temujin airag and made my way to the forward viewing platform, with its wide sweep of curved window—scratched and scuffed in places, worryingly starred in others-and leaned hard against the protective railing. The last shuttle had already detached, and the BK was accelerating toward the portal, its great human-made doors irising open at the last possible moment, so that the interior of Gansu was protected from the Parvan Tract’s unpredictable energy surges. Even though the Infrastructure shaft stretched impossibly far into the distance, my mind kept insisting that we were about to punch through the thin skin of the moon.

The ship surged forward, the sluggish artificial gravity generators struggling to maintain the local vertical. We passed through the door, into the superluminal machinery of the Infrastructure. The tunnel walls were many li away, but they felt closer—as they raced by at increasing speed, velocity traced by the luminous squiggly patterns that had been inscribed on the wall for inscrutable reasons by the khorkoi builders, I had the impression that the shaft was constricting, tightening down on our fragile little ship. Yet nothing seemed to disconcert or even arouse the interest of my fellow passengers. In ones and twos, they drifted away from the gallery, leaving me alone with my eunuch, observing from a discrete distance. I drank the airag very slowly, looking down the racing shaft, wondering if it would be my fortune to see a phantom with my own eyes. Phantoms, after all, were what had brought me here.

Now all I had to do was poison the eunuch.

The eunuch answered to “eunuch,” but his real name (I learned after a certain amount of probing) was Tisza. He had not been surgically castrated; there was an implant somewhere in his forearm dispensing the necessary cocktail of androgen-blockers, suppressing his libido and lending him a mildly androgynous appearance. Other implants, similar to those employed by government operatives, had given him heightened reflexes, spatial coordination, and enhanced night vision. He was adept with weapons and unarmed combat, as (I had no cause to doubt) were all Batu eunuchs. I had no need of his protection, of course, but appearances were paramount. I was posing as a woman of means, a well-healed tourist. No women in my circumstances would ever have traveled without the accompaniment of a man such as Tisza.

He served my purpose in another way. We shared the same rooms, with the eunuch sleeping in a small, doorless annex connected to mine. Because I might (conceivably) be drugged or poisoned, Tisza always ate the same meals as me, served at the same time and brought to my cabin by one of the BK’s white uniformed stewards.

“What if you get poisoned and die on me?” I asked, innocently, when we were sitting across from each other at my table.

He tapped a pudgy finger against his belly. “It would take a lot to kill me, Miss Bocheng. My constitution has been tailored to process many toxins in common circulation among would-be assassins and miscreants. I will become ill much sooner than you would, but what would kill you would merely make me unwell, and not so unwell that I could not discharge my duties.”

“I hope you’re right about that.”

He patted his chin with napkin. “It is no occasion for pride. I am what I am because of the chemical intervention and surgery of the Batu Escort Agency. It would be equally pointless to understate my abilities.”

Later, feigning nervousness, I told him that I had heard a noise from his annex.

“It is nothing, I assure you. No one could have entered these rooms without our knowing it.”

“It sounded like someone breathing.”

He smiled tolerantly. “There are many foreign sounds on a ship like this. Noises carry a great distance through the ducts and conduits of the air-circulation system.”

“Couldn’t someone have crawled through those same conduits?”

He rose from the table without a note of complaint. “It is unlikely, but I shall investigate.”

As soon as he had vanished through the door into his annex, I produced a vial from my pocket and tipped its sugary contents onto the remains of his meal. I heard him examining things, pulling open cupboard doors and sliding drawers. By the time he returned, with a reassuring expression on his face, the toxin crystals had melted invisibly into his food and the vial was snug in my pocket.

“Whatever you heard, there’s no one in mere.”

“Are you sure?”

“Completely. But I’m willing to look again, if it would put your mind at ease.”

I looked abashed. “I’m just being silly.”

“Not at all. You must not be afraid to bring things to my attention. It is what you have hired me for.”

“Tuck in,” I said, nodding at his meal, “before it gets cold.”

* * * * *

Tisza was moaning and sweating on the bed, deep in fever, as Mr. Tayang appraised him warily. “Did he tell you he could detect poisons? They don’t all come with that option.”

“He can. Isn’t that the point?”

“It could just be a bug he’s picked up. On the other hand, he may have been hit by something intended for you that his system wasn’t designed to filter out.”

“A poison?”

“It’s a possibility, Miss Bocheng.”

Tayang was a steward, a young man with a pleasant face and a highly professional manner. I had seen him around earlier, but-as was the case with all the crew-he had steadfastly refused to engage in any conversation not related to my immediate needs. I had counted on this, and contrived the poisoning of the eunuch to give me heightened access to one or more of the crew. It need not have been Tayang, but my instincts told me that he would serve excellently.

“Then why isn’t it affecting me?” I asked.

“I don’t wish to alarm you, but it could be that it’s going to in a very short while. We need to get both of you into the sick bay. Under observation, we should be able to stabilize the eunuch and ensure you come to no harm.”

This was the outcome I had been hoping for, but some indignation was called for. “If you think I’m going to spend the rest of this trip in some stinking sick bay, after I’ve paid for this cabin ...”

Tayang raised a calming hand. “It won’t be for long. A day or two, just to be on the safe side. Then you can enjoy the rest of the trip in comfort.”

Another pair of stewards was summoned to help shift the hapless Tisza, while I made my way to the sick bay on foot. “Actually,” I said, “now that you mention it ... I do feel a little peculiar.”

Tayang looked at me sympathetically. “Don’t worry, Miss Bocheng. We’ll have you right as rain in no time.”

The sick bay was larger and better equipped than I had been expecting, almost as if it belonged in a different ship entirely. I was relieved to see that no one else was using it. Tayang helped me onto a reclined couch while the other stewards pulled a screen around the stricken eunuch.

“How do you feel now?” Tayang asked, fastening a black cuff around my forearm.

“Still a bit funny.”

For the next few minutes, Tayang—who had clearly been given basic medical training-studied the readouts on a handheld display he had pulled from a recess in the wall.

“Well, it doesn’t look—” he began.

“I should have listened to my friends,” I said, shaking my head. “They told me not to come here.”

He tapped buttons set into the side of the display. “Your friends warned you that you might end up getting poisoned?”

“Not exactly, no. But they said it wasn’t a good idea traveling on the Burkhan Khaldun, down the Parvan Tract. They were right, weren’t they?”

“That would depend. So far, I can’t see any sign that you’ve ingested anything poisonous. Of course, it could be something that the analyzer isn’t equipped to detect—”

“And the eunuch?”

“Just a moment,” Tayang said, leaving the display suspended in the air. He walked over to the other bed and pulled aside the curtain. I heard a murmured exchange before he returned, with a bit less of a spring in his step. “Well, there’s no doubt that something pretty heavy’s hit his system. Could be a deliberate toxin, could be something nasty that just happened to get into him. We’re not far out of Gansu; he could have contracted something there that’s only just showing up.”

“He’s been poisoned, Mr. Tayang. My bodyguard. Doesn’t that strike you as a slightly ominous development?”

“I still say it could be something natural. We’ll know soon enough. In the meantime, I wouldn’t necessarily jump to the conclusion that you’re in immediate peril.”

“I’m concerned, Mr. Tayang.”

“Well, don’t be. You’re in excellent hands.” He leaned over to plump my pillow. “Get under the blanket if you feel shivery. Is there anything you’d like me to fetch from your room?”

“No, thank you.”

“In which case, I’ll leave you be. I’ll keep the analyzer attached just in case it flags anything. The other stewards are still here. If you need anything, just call.”

“I will.”

He was on the verge of leaving-I had no doubt that he was a busy man—when something caused him to narrow his eyes. “So if it wasn’t about being poisoned, Miss Bocheng, why exactly was it that your friends didn’t want you taking this ship?”

“Oh, that.” I shook my head. “It’s silly. I don’t know why I mentioned it at all. It’s not as if I believe any of that nonsense.”

“Any of what nonsense, exactly?”

“You know, about the phantoms. About how the Parvan Tract is haunted. I told them I was above all that, but they still kept going on about it. They said that if I took this ship, I might never come back. Of course, that only made me even more determined.”

“Good for you.”

“I told them I was a rationalist, not someone who believes in ghosts and goblins.” I shifted on the couch, giving him a sympathetic look. “I expect that you’re fed up with hearing about all that, especially as you actually work here. I mean, if anyone would have been likely to see something, it would be you, wouldn’t it, or one of the other crew?”

“That would make sense,” he said.

“Well, the fact that you obviously haven’t ... there can’t be anything to it, can there?” I crossed my arms and smiled triumphantly. “Wait until I tell my friends how silly they’ve been.”

“Perhaps,” he began, and then fell silent.

* * * * *

I knew that I had him then; that it would be only a matter of time before Tayang felt compelled to show me evidence. My instincts proved correct, for within a day of my discharge from the sick bay (the eunuch was still under observation, but making satisfactory progress), the steward contrived an excuse to visit my quarters. He had a clean towel draped over his arm, as if he had come to replace the one in my bathroom.

“I brought you a fresh one. I think the cleaning section missed this corridor this morning.”

“They didn’t, but I appreciate the gesture all the same.”

He lingered, as if he had something to get off his chest but was struggling to find the right words.

“Mr. Tayang?” I pressed.

“What we were talking about before.”

“Yes?” I inquired mildly.

“Well, you’re wrong.” He said it nicely enough, but the defiance in his words was clear. “The phantoms exist. I may not have seen anything with my own eyes, but I’ve seen data that’s just as convincing.”

“I doubt it.”

“I can show you easily enough.” He must have been intending to say those words from the moment he had decided to come to my cabin, yet now that he had spoken them, his regret was immediate.

“Really?”

“I shouldn’t have.”

“Tell me,” I said forcefully. “Whatever this is, I want to see it.”

“It means your friends were right; and you were wrong.”

“Then I need to know that.”

Tayang gave me a warning look. “It’ll change the way you think. At the moment, you have the luxury of not believing in the phantoms. I know that there’s something out there that we don’t understand, something that doesn’t belong. Are you sure you want that burden?”

“If you can handle it, I think I can. What do I have to do?”

“I need to show you something. But I can’t do it now. Later, during the night shift, it’ll be quieter.”

“I’ll be ready,” I said, nodding eagerly.

* * * * *

Close to midnight, Tayang came for me. Remembering to keep in character for someone half convinced she was the target of an assassin, I did not open up immediately.

“Yes?”

“It’s me, Tayang.”

I cracked open the door. “I’m ready.”

He looked me up and down. “Take off those clothes, please.”

“I’m sorry?”

He glanced away, blushing. “What I mean is, wear as much or as little as you would wear for bed.” I noticed that he had a jacket draped over his arm, as if he was ready to put it around my shoulders. “Should we meet someone, and should questions be asked, you will explain that I found you sleepwalking, and that I’m taking you back to your cabin via the most discrete route I can think of, so you don’t embarrass yourself in front of any other passengers.”

“I see. You’ve given this some thought, haven’t you?”

“You aren’t the first skeptical passenger, Miss Bocheng.” I closed the door and disrobed, then put on thin silk trousers and an equally thin silk blouse, the one scarlet and the other electric yellow, with a design of small blue wolves. I untied my hair and messed it to suggest someone only recently roused from the bed.

Outside, as was customary during the night shift of the BK’s operations, the corridor lights were dimmed to a sleepy amber. The bars, restaurants, and gaming rooms were closed. The public lounges were deserted and silent, save for the scurrying mouselike cleaning robots that always emerged after the people had gone away. Tayang chose his route well, for we did not bump into any other passengers or crew.

“This is the library,” he said, when we had arrived in a small, red-lit room, set with shelves, screens, and movable chairs. “No one uses it much—it’s not exactly a high priority for most of our passengers. They’d rather drink away the voyage with Temujin airag.”

“Are we allowed here?”

“Well, technically there’d be nothing to stop you visiting this room during normal ship hours. But during normal ship hours, I wouldn’t be able to show you what I’m about to.” He was trying to be nonchalant about the whole adventure, but his nervousnous was like a boy on a dare. “But don’t worry, we won’t get into trouble.”

“How is a library going to change my mind about the phantoms?”

“Let me show you.” He ushered me to one of the terminals, swinging out a pair of hinged stools for us to sit on. I sat to the left of him, while Tayang flipped open a dust cover to expose a keyboard. He began to tap at the keys, causing changes to the hooded data display situated at eye level. “As it happens, these consoles are connected to the Burkhan Khaldun’s own computers. You just have to know the right commands.”

“Won’t this show up?”

He shook his head. “I’m not doing anything that will come to anyone’s attention. Besides, I’m perfectly entitled to access this data. The only thing wrong is you being with me, and if anyone comes down here, we’ll have time to prepare for them, to make it look as if I caught you sleepwalking.” He fell silent for a minute or so, tapping through options, obviously navigating his way through to the information stored in the computer’s memory bank. “I just hope the company spooks haven’t got to it already,” he murmured. “Every now and then, someone from Blue Heaven comes aboard and wipes large chunks of the BK’s memory. They say they’re just doing routine archiving, clearing space for more data, but no one believes that. Looks like we’re in time, though. I didn’t see any spooks nosing around when we were in Gansu: they’ll probably come aboard next time we’re back.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I’ll show it to you once. Then we go. All right?”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Tayang.”

“The BK has cameras, pointed into the direction of flight. They detect changes in the tunnel geometry and feed that data to the servomotors driving the stabilizing vanes and yaw dampers, so that they can make adjustments to smooth out the turbulence. They’re also there as an emergency measure in case we encounter another ship coming the other way, one that isn’t on schedule or hasn’t got an active transponder. The cameras give us just enough warning to swerve the BK to one side, to give passing clearance. It’s bumpy for the passengers when that happens, but a lot better than a head-on collision at tunnel speeds.”

“I take it the cameras saw something,” I said.

Tayang nodded. “This was a couple of trips ago, about halfway between Gansu and Kuchlug. They only got eight clear frames. Whatever it was was moving fast, much quicker than one of our ships. The fourth, fifth, and sixth frames are the sharpest.”

“Show me.”

He tapped keys. A picture sprang onto the display, all fuzzy green hues, overlaid with date stamps and other information. It took a moment before I was sure what I was looking at. There was some kind of pale green smudge filling half the frame, a random-looking shape like the blind spot one sees after looking at the sun for too long, and beyond that, a suggestion of the curving squiggles of the tunnel’s khorkoi patterning, reaching away to infinity.

I pressed a finger against the smudge. “That’s the phantom?”

“This is frame three. It becomes clearer on the next one.” He advanced to the next image and I saw what he meant. The smudge had enlarged, but also become sharper, with details beginning to emerge. Edges and surfaces, a hint of organized structure, even if the overall shape was still elusive.

“Next frame,” Tayang mouthed.

Now there could be no doubt that the phantom was some kind of ship, even if it conformed to the pattern of no vessel I had ever seen. It was sleek and organic-looking, more like a darting squid than the clunky lines of the BK.

He advanced to the next frame, but-while the image did not become substantially clearer-the angle changed, so that the three-dimensional structure of the phantom became more apparent. At the same time, hints of patterning had begun to emerge: darker green symbols on the side of the hull, or fuselage, or body, of whatever the thing was.

“That’s about as good as it gets,” Tayang said.

“I’m impressed.”

“You see these armlike appendages?” he asked, pointing to part of the image. “I’m guessing, of course, but I can’t help wondering if they don’t serve the same function as our stabilization vanes, only in a more elegant fashion.”

“I think you could be right.”

“One thing I’m sure of, though. We didn’t build that ship. I’m no expert, Miss Bocheng, but I know what counts as cutting-edge ship design, and that thing is way beyond it.”

“I don’t think anyone would argue with that.”

“It wasn’t built by the government, or some mysterious splinter group of Islamist separatists. In fact, I don’t think it was built by humans at all. We’re looking at alien technology, and they’re using our Infrastructure system as if they own it. More than that: every now and then you hear about entire ships and message packets going missing. They’re not just trespassing in our network, they’re stealing from it as well.”

“I can see Blue Heaven would rather this didn’t get out.”

Tayang closed the display. “I’m sorry, but that’s all I can show you. It’s enough, though, isn’t it?”

“More than enough,” I said.

Of course, I had my doubts. Tayang could have easily faked those images, or been the unwitting victim of someone else’s fakery. But I did not think that was the case. I had been looking at genuine data, not something cooked up to scare the tourists.

I was just beginning to plot my next move-how I would get a copy of the data, and smuggle it back to NHK while I continued with my investigations in Kuchlug space-when I became aware of a presence behind me. Tayang must have sensed it, too, for he turned around as I did. Standing in the doorway to the library was one of the other stewards, an older man whose name I had yet to learn. I noticed that the sleeves of his uniform were too short for him.

Wordlessly, he raised a hand. In it glinted the smooth alloy form of a small, precise weapon: the kind often carried by government spies such as myself. He shot me; I had a moment to stare at the barb embedded in my thigh, and then I passed out.

* * * * *

I came around in my cabin, gripped by a vile nausea, a headache like a slowly closing iron vice, and no conception of how much time had passed since Tayang and I had been disturbed in the library. Getting out of bed—I had been placed on top of the sheets-I searched the adjoining annex for the eunuch, before I remembered that he was still in the sick bay. I tried my door and found that it had been locked from the outside; there was no way for me to leave my room.

Understand, I did not accept my imprisonment lightly, but understand also that all my attempts at escape proved futile. I could not even squeeze through the conduit I had mentioned to the eunuch: such methods succeed in adventure stories, but not in real life.

Of course, it was desired that I be kept alive. The man who had shot me could have administered a fatal dose simply by twisting a dial in the grip of his weapon. He had chosen not to, and it was no accident that food and water appeared in the room’s serving hatch at regular intervals. But as to who had chosen to detain me, I was uninformed.

I could guess, though.

He was the first to see me when the ship docked in Kuchlug space. He came to my room, accompanied by guards. He was as squat and muscled as a wrestler, his bare arms fully as thick as my thighs. He wore a leather jerkin, crisscrossed by thick black belts to which were fastened various ceremonial weapons and symbols of martial authority. A carefully tended mustache curled down on either side of his mouth, with a tiny but deliberate tuft of hair preserved under his lower lip. A stiff leather helmet, long at the sides and back, covered the rest of his head. The only visible part of his hair was a blunt, wedge-shaped fringe terminating just above his eyebrows, which were at once finely drawn, expressive, and deeply quizzical.

Of course, I knew the face.

“Commander Qilian,” I said.

“Yes, I get about.” His hands were impressively hairy, scarred and knotted like the roots of a very old tree. He snapped his fingers at the guards. “Have her brought to the debriefing facility on the Qing Shui moon. Bring the pony as well.” Then he poked one of those fingers under my chin, lifting it up so that our eyes met. “Give some thought to the particulars of your story, Miss Bocheng. It may make all the difference.”

* * * * *

They took me down to the moon. We landed somewhere and I was carried through dark, rusting corridors to a windowless holding cell. The floor rocked with a slow, sickening motion, as if I was on a ship at sea in a high swell-even though there were no oceans on the Qing Shui moon. They stripped me, took away my belongings, and gave me prison clothing to wear: a simple one-piece affair in orange silk. I pretended to be shocked and disoriented, but I was already summoning my training, recollecting those stratagems I had been taught to withstand prolonged detention and interrogation. As the guards were shutting the door on me, I contrived to slip a finger into the crack between the door and its frame. When the door closed, I yelped in pain and withdrew my hand with the fingertip squashed and red from the pressure.

I sucked it in my mouth until the pain abated.

“Stupid bitch,” someone said.

There was a bunk, a spigot in the wall that dribbled tepid, piss-colored water, and a hole in the floor, with chipped ceramic sides stained an unspeakable brown. Light seeped in through a grille in the door. Neither willing nor able to sleep, I lay on the bunk and shivered. Presently-no more than two or three hours after my arrival—men came to take me down the corridor, to an interrogation room.

It is not necessary to document all that happened-the many weeks that it took for me to permit them to peel back the layers of identity I had wrapped around myself, each time thinking that the victory was theirs.

Suffice it to say that most of what they did to me involved electricity and chemicals in varying combinations. They did break two fingers on my left hand, including the one I had trapped in the door, but when they pulled out one of my fingernails, it was from the other hand, not the one I had hurt. They beat me around, broke my teeth, extinguished Yesugei brand cigarettes on my skin, but only cut me superficially, to demonstrate that they could and would. Then they had other men come in to sterilize and dress the wounds. Once in a while, a gowned doctor with a Slavic face came to the cell and gave me a thorough, probing medical examination.

It was during one of the doctor’s examinations that I elected to reveal myself as a government spy. As the doctor was examining me, I allowed my hair—stiff and greasy with dirt—to fall away from the nape of my neck. I knew instantly that he had taken the bait. I felt his fingers press into the area around the subcutaneous device, feeling for the hard-edged component lodged under the skin.

“What is this?”

“What is what?” I asked, all innocence.

“There’s something under your skin.”

They took me back to the interrogation room. My hair was shaved and my neck swabbed. The Slavic doctor dithered over the medical tools on the shelves until he found the bundle he wanted. He brought the instruments onto the table, unrolling the towel so that I could see what lay in store for me. When he was done, the implant was placed on a piece of clean towel in front of me. It was bloodied, with bits of whitish flesh still attached to its feelerlike input probes.

“Looks like government,” someone said.

I did not admit to it immediately; that would have made them rightfully suspicious. It was a matter of judging the moment, making my confession appear natural, rather than a scripted event.

In hindsight, I wish that I had arranged my confession sooner.

I was brought to a different room. There was a window in the wall, before which I was encouraged to sit. A clamp was fitted around my eyes so that I could not look away. The doctor dripped some agent into my eyes that had the effect of paralyzing the lids, preventing me from blinking. When the lights came on in the room on the other side of the window, I found myself looking at Goyo.

He was upside down, suspended in a sling, rotated on his back in the manner that horses are prepared for veterinary work. The sling was supported from a heavy white framework mounted on trolley wheels. Goyo’s legs had been bound together in pairs using thick adhesive material. Even his head and neck had been braced into position using cushioned supports and clamps. A leathery girth strap enclosed his waist, preventing him from thrashing around. His abdominal region, between fore and hind limbs, had been shaved to the skin. A white sheet, not much larger than a towel, had been draped over part of that shaven area. There was a red stain in the middle of the sheet, where it formed a depression.

Goyo’s eye, the one that I could see, was white and wild and brimming with fear.

Qilian walked into the room. He was dressed as I remembered him from our encounter on the BK, except that his hands and forearms were now gloved. The gloves had a heavy, martial look to them, with curved steel talons on the ends of the fingers. He stopped next to Goyo, one hand resting on the frame, the other stroking my pony’s neck, as if he sought to placate him. When he spoke, his voice came through a microphone.

“We think we know who you are, but some corroboration would be welcome. What is your operational code name? To which section are you assigned? Are you one of the Thirteen?”

My mouth had turned dry. I said nothing.

“Very well,” Qilian continued, as if he had expected as much. He reached over and whisked the white sheet away from Goyo’s abdomen. There was a wound there, a red sucking hole wide enough to plunge a fist through.

“No,” I said, trying to break free of the straps that bound me to the chair.

“Before you arrived,” Qilian said, “certain surgical preparations were made. A number of ribs have already been removed. They can be put back, of course, but their absence now means that there is an unobstructed path through to your pony’s heart.”

With his right hand, he reached into the wound. He frowned, concentrating on the task. He delved in slowly, cautiously. Goyo responded by thrashing against his restraints, but it was to no more avail than my own efforts. In a short while, Qilian’s entire fist was hidden. He pushed deeper, encountering resistance. Now the fist and fully half of his forearm were gone. He adjusted his posture, leaning in so that his chest was braced against Goyo’s shoulder. He pushed deeper, until only the top extremity of the glove remained visible.

“I am touching his beating heart now,” Qilian said, looking directly at me. “He’s a strong one, no doubt about that. A fine pony, from good Mongol stock. But I am stronger, at least when I have my hand on his heart. You don’t think I can stop it beating? I assure you I can. Would you like to see?” The expression on his face altered to one of concentrated effort, little veins bulging at the side of his temple. Goyo thrashed with renewed energy. “Yes, he feels it now. He doesn’t know what’s happening, but a billion years of dumb evolution tells him something’s not right. I don’t doubt that the pain is excruciating, at least in animal terms. Would you like me to stop?”

The words spilled out, feeling like a genuine confession. “I am Yellow Dog. I am a government operative, one of the Thirteen.”

“Yes, we thought you were Yellow Dog. We have the non-official cover list for all of the Thirteen, and we know that Ariunaa Bocheng is a name you’ve used before, when posing as a journalist.” He broke off, took a deep breath, and seemed to redouble his efforts. “But it’s good to get it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.”

“Stop now.”

“Too late. I’ve already started.”

“You said you’d stop,” I replied, screaming out the words. “You promised you’d stop!”

“I said nothing of the sort. I said the ribs could be put back. That remains the case.”

In an instant, Goyo stopped thrashing. His eye was still open, but all of a sudden there was nothing behind it.

* * * * *

Several weeks later-I could not say precisely how many-Qilian sat opposite me with his big hairy hands clasped in silent contemplation. The documents on his desk were kept in place by grisly paperweights: little plinth-mounted bones and bottled, shrunken things in vinegary solution. There were swords and ceremonial knives on the wall, framing a familiar reproduction watercolor showing the landing of the invasion fleet on Japanese soil.

“You were good,” he said eventually. “I’ll give you that. My men genuinely thought they’d hit bottom when they got you to confess to being the journalist. It was a surprise to all concerned when that identity turned out to be a cover.”

“I’m glad I provided you with some amusement,” I said.

“If it hadn’t been for that implant, we might never have known. Your people really should give some thought into making those things less detectable.”

“My people?” I asked. “The last time I checked, we were all working for the same government.”

“I don’t doubt that’s how it feels in New High Karakorum. Out here, it’s a different story. In case you hadn’t realized, this is a special administrative volume. It’s part of the empire, but only in a very tenuous, politically ambiguous sense. They want what we can give them—raw materials, cheaply synthesized chemicals, mass-produced low-bulk consumer goods-but they don’t want to think too hard about what we have to do to keep that river of commerce flowing. Laws have to be bent here, because otherwise there’d be no here. Look out the window, Yellow Dog.”

Visible through the partially shuttered window of his office, a good four or five li below, was a brutal, wintery landscape of stained ice, reaching all the way to the horizon. The sky was a rose pink, shading to midnight blue at the top of the window. Cutting through it along a diagonal was the twinkling, sicklelike curve of a planetary ring system. Canyon-deep fissures cracked the surface, leaking feathery quills of yellow-white steam into the thin, poisonous atmosphere of that windswept sky. Here and there, an elbow of splintered rock broke the surface. There were no fixed communities on the moon. Instead, immense spiderlike platforms, mounted on six or eight intricate jointed legs, picked their way across the ever-shifting terrain in awesome slow motion. The platforms varied in size, but at the very least each supported a cluster of squat civic buildings, factories, refineries, and spacecraft handling facilities. Some of the platforms had deployed drilling rigs or cables into the fissures, sucking chemical nourishment from under the icy crust. A number were connected together by long, dangling wires, along which I made out the tiny, suspended forms of cable cars, moving from platform to platform.

“It’s very pretty,” I said.

“It’s a hellhole, frankly. Only three planets in the entire volume are even remotely amenable to terraforming, and not one of those three is on track for completion inside five hundred years. We’ll be lucky if any of them are done before the Founder’s two thousandth anniversary, let alone the thousandth. Most of the eighty million people under my stewardship live in domes and tunnels, with only a few aids of soil or glass between them and a horrible, choking death.” He unclasped his hands in order to run a finger across one of his desktop knickknacks. “It’s not much of an existence, truth be told. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have an economy that needs fueling. We have jobs. We have vacancies for skilled labor. Machines do our drilling, but the machines need to be fixed and programmed by people, down at the cutting face. We pay well, for those prepared to work for us.”

“And you come down hard on those who displease you.”

“Local solutions to local problems, that’s our mantra. You wouldn’t understand, cozied up in the middle of the empire. You pushed the dissidents and troublemakers out to the edge and left us to worry about them.” He tapped a finger against his desk. “Nestorian Christians, Buddhists, Islamists. It’s a thousand years since we crushed them, and they still haven’t got over it. Barely a week goes by without some regressive, fundamentalist element stirring up trouble, whether it’s sabotage of one of our industrial facilities or a terrorist attack against the citizenship. And yet you sit there in New High Karakorum and shake your heads in disgust when we have the temerity to implement even the mildest security measures.”

“I wouldn’t call mass arrests, show trials, and public executions ‘mild,’” I said tartly.

“Then try living here.”

“I get the impression that’s not really an option. Unless you mean living in prison, for the rest of my life, or until NHK sends an extraction team.”

Qilian made a pained expression. “Let’s be clear. You aren’t my enemy. Quite the contrary. You are now an honored guest of the Kuchlug special administrative volume. I regret what happened earlier, but if you’d admitted your true identity, none of that would have been necessary.” He folded his arms behind his neck and leaned back in his chair with a creak of leather. “We’ve got off on the wrong footing here, you and I. But how are we supposed to feel when the empire sends undercover agents snooping into our territory? And not only that, but agents who persist in asking such puzzling questions?” He looked at me with sudden, sharp intensity, as if my entire future hung on my response to what he was about to say. “Just what is it about the phantoms that interests you so much, Yellow Dog?”

“Why should you worry about my interest in a phenomenon that doesn’t exist?” I countered.

“Do you believe that, after what you saw on the Burkhan Khaldun?”

“I can only report what I saw. It would not be for me to make inferences.”

“But still.”

“Why are we discussing this, Commander Qilian?”

“Because I’m intrigued. Our perception was that NHK probably knew a lot more about the phenomenon than we did. Your arrival suggests otherwise. They sent you on an intelligence-gathering mission, and the thrust of your inquiry indicates that you are at least as much in the dark as we are, if not more so.”

“I can’t speak for my superiors.”

“No, you can’t. But it seems unlikely that they’d have risked sending a valued asset into a trouble spot like Kuchlug without very good reason. Which, needless to say, is deeply alarming. We thought the core had the matter under control. Clearly, they don’t. Which only makes the whole issue of the phantoms even more vexed and troubling.”

“What do you know?”

He laughed. “You think I’m going to tell you, just like that?”

“You’ve as much as admitted that this goes beyond any petty political differences that might exist between NHK and Kuchlug. Let me report back to my superiors. I’ll obtain their guarantee that there’ll be a two-way traffic in intelligence.” I nodded firmly. “Yes, we misjudged this one. I should never have come under deep cover. But we were anxious not to undermine your confidence in us by revealing the depth of our ignorance on the phenomenon. I assure you that in the future everything will be aboveboard and transparent. We can set up a bilateral investigative team, pooling the best experts from here and back home.”

“That easy, eh? We just shake hands and put it all behind us? The deception on your part, the torture on ours?”

I shrugged. “You had your methods. I had mine.”

Qilian smiled slightly. “There’s something you need to know. Two days ago—not long after we dug that thing out of you—we did in fact send a communique to NHK. We informed them that one of their agents was now in our safekeeping, that she was being more than helpful in answering our questions, and that we would be happy to return her at the earliest opportunity.”

“Go on.”

“They told us that there was no such agent. They denied knowledge of either Ariunaa Bocheng or an operative named Yellow Dog. They made no demands for you to be returned, although they did say that if you were handed over, you’d be of ‘interest’ to them. Do you know what this means?” When I refrained from answering—though I knew precisely what it meant—Qilian continued. “You’ve been disavowed, Yellow Dog. Left out in he cold, like a starving mongrel.”

* * * * *

His men came for me again, several days later. I was taken to a pressurized boarding platform, a spindly structure cantilevered out from the side of the government building. A cable car was waiting, a dull gray, bulbous-ended cylinder swaying gently against its restraints. The guards pushed me aboard, then slammed the airtight door, before turning a massive wheel to lock it shut. Qilian was already aboard the car, sitting in a dimpled leather chair with one leg crossed over the other. He wore huge fur-lined boots equipped with vicious spurs.

“A little trip, I thought,” he said, by way of welcome, indicating the vacant seat opposite his.

The cable car lurched into motion. After reaching the limit of the boarding area, it passed through a long glass airlock and then dropped sickeningly, plunging down so far that it descended under the lowest level of buildings and factory structures perched on the platform. One of the huge, skeletal legs was rising toward us, the foot raised as if it intended to stomp down on the fragile little cable car. Yet just when it seemed we were doomed, the car began to climb again, creaking and swaying. Qilian was looking at something through a pair of tiny binoculars, some piece of equipment-a probe or drill head, I presumed-being winched up from the surface into the underside of the platform.

“Is there a point to this journey?” I asked.

He lowered the binoculars and returned them to a leather case on his belt. “Very much so. What I will show you constitutes a kind of test. I would advise you to be on your guard against the obvious.”

The cable car slid across the fractured landscape of the moon, traversing dizzyingly wide crevasses, dodging geysers, skimming past tilted rockfaces that seemed on the verge of toppling over at any moment. We rose and descended several times, on each occasion passing over one of the walking platforms. Now and then, there was an interruption while we were switched to a different line, before once more plunging down toward the surface. After more than half an hour of this-just when my stomach was beginning to settle into the rhythm-we came to a definite halt on what was in all respects just another boarding platform, attended by a familiar retinue of guards and technical functionaries. Qilian and I disembarked, with his spurs clicking against the cleated metal flooring. With a company of guards for escort, we walked into the interior of the platform’s largest building. The entire place had an oily ambiance, rumbling with the vibration of distant drilling processes.

“It’s a cover,” Qilian said, as if he had read my thoughts. “We keep the machines turning, but this is the one platform that doesn’t have a useful production yield. It’s a study facility instead.”

“For studying what?”

“Whatever we manage to recover, basically.”

Deep in the bowels of the platform, at a level that must have meant they were only just above the underside, was a huge holding tank that-so Qilian informed me-was designed to contain the unrefined liquid slurry that would ordinarily have been pumped up from under the ice. In this platform, the tank had been drained and equipped with power and lighting. The entire space had been partitioned into about a dozen ceilingless rooms, each of which appeared to contain a collection of garbage, arranged within the cells of a printed grid laid out on the floor. Some of the cells held sizable clusters of junk; others were empty. Benches arranged around the edges of the cells were piled with bits of twinkly rubbish, along with an impressive array of analysis tools and recording devices.

It looked as if it should have been a literal hive of activity, but the entire place was deserted.

“You want to tell me what I’m looking at here?” Qilian indicated a ladder. “Go down and take a look for yourself. Examine anything that takes your fancy. Use any tools you feel like. Look in the notebooks and data files. Rummage. Break stuff. You won’t be punished if you do.”

“This is phantom technology, isn’t it? You’ve recovered pieces of alien ships.” I said this in a kind of awed whisper, as if I hardly dared believe it myself.

“Draw whatever conclusion you see fit. I shall be intensely interested in what you have to say.”

I started down the ladder. I had known from the moment I saw the relics that I would be unable to resist. “How long have I got? Before I’m judged to have failed this test, or whatever it is.”

“Take your time,” he said, smiling. “But don’t take too much.”

There seemed little point agonizing over which room to start with, assuming I had the time to examine more than one. The one I chose had the usual arrangement of grid, junk, and equipment benches. Lights burned from a rack suspended overhead. I stepped into the grid, striding over blank squares until she arrived at a promising little clump of mangled parts, some of them glittery, some of them charred to near blackness. Gingerly, I picked up one of the bits. It was a curving section of metallic foil, ragged along one edge, much lighter and stiffer than I felt it had any right to be. I tested the edge against a finger and drew a bead of blood. No markings or detail of any kind. I placed it back down on the grid and examined another item. Heavier this time, solid in my hands, like a piece of good carved wood. Flowing, scroll-like green patterning on one convex surface: a suggestion of script, or a fragmented part of some script, in a language I did not recognize. I returned it to the grid and picked up a jagged, bifurcated thing like a very unwieldy sword or spearhead, formed in some metallic red material that appeared mirror-smooth and untarnished. In my hands, the thing had an unsettling buzzing quality, as if there was still something going on inside it. I picked up another object: a dented blue-green box, embossed with dense geometric patterns, cross-woven into one another in a manner that made my head hurt. The lid of the box opened to reveal six egglike white ovals, packed into spongy black material. There were six distinct spiral symbols painted onto the ovals, in another language that I did not recognize.

I perused more objects in the grid, then moved to the benches, where more items were laid out for inspection.

I moved into one of the adjoining rooms. There was something different about the degree of organization this time. The grid was the same, but the objects in it had been sorted into rough groupings. In one corner cell was a pile of spiky, metallic red pieces that obviously had something in common with the swordlike object I had examined in the other room. In another lay a cluster of dense, curved pieces with fragmented green patterning on each. Each occupied cell held a similar collection of vaguely related objects.

I examined another room, but soon felt that I had seen enough to form a ready opinion. The various categories of relic clearly had little in common. If they had all originated from the phantoms-either wrecked or damaged or attacked as they passed through the Infrastructure-then there was only one conclusion to be drawn. There was more than one type of phantom, which, in turn, meant there was more than one kind of alien.

We were not just dealing with one form of intruder. Judging by the number of filled cells, there were dozens-many dozens-of different alien technologies at play.

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. Our probes and instruments had swept the galaxy clean and still we had found no hint of anyone else out there. But these rooms said otherwise. Somehow or other, we had managed to miss the evidence of numerous other galaxy-faring civilizations, all of which were at least as technologically advanced as the Mongol Expansion.

Other empires, somehow coexisting with ours!

I was ready to return to Qilian, but, at the last moment, as I prepared to ascend the ladder, something held me back. It had all been too simple. Anyone with a pair of eyes in their head would have arrived at the same conclusion as I had. Qilian had said it would be a test, and that I must pass it.

It had been too easy so far.

Therefore, I must have missed something.

When we were back on the cable car, nosing down to the geysering surface, Qilian stroked a finger against his chin and watched me with an intense, snakelike fascination.

“You returned to the rooms.”

“Yes.”

“Something made you go back, when it looked as if you’d already finished.”

“It wouldn’t have been in my interests to fail you.”

There was a gleam in his eye. “So what was it, Yellow Dog, that made you hesitate?”

“A feeling that I’d missed something. The obvious inference was that the collection implied the presence of more than one intruding culture, but you didn’t need me to tell you that.”

“No,” he acknowledged.

“So there had to be something else. I didn’t know what. But when I went back into the second room, something flashed through my mind. I knew I had seen something in there before, even if it had been in a completely different context.”

I could not tell if he was pleased or disappointed. “Continue.”

“The green markings on some of the relics. They meant nothing to me at first, but I suppose my subconscious must have picked up on something even then. They were fragments of something larger, which I’d seen before.”

“Which was?”

“Arabic writing,” I told him.

“Many people would be surprised to hear there was such a thing.”

“If they knew their history, they’d know that the Arabs had a written language. An elegant one, too. It’s just that most people outside of academic departments won’t have ever seen it, any more than they know what Japanese or the Roman alphabet looks like.”

“But you, on the other hand—”

“In my work for the khanate, I was obliged to compile dossiers on dissident elements within the empire. Some of the Islamist factions still use a form of Arabic for internal communications.”

He sniffed through his nostrils, looking at me with his penetrating blue eyes. The cable car creaked and swayed. “It took my analysis experts eight months to recognize that that lettering had a human origin. The test is over; you have passed. But would you care to speculate on the meaning of your observation? Why are we finding Arabic on phantom relics?”

“I don’t know.”

“But indulge me.”

“It can only mean that there’s an Islamist faction out there that we don’t know about. A group with independent space-faring capability, the means to use the Infrastructure despite all the access restrictions already in place.”

“And the other relics? Where do they fit in?”

“I don’t know.”

“If I told you that, in addition to items we consider to be of unambiguously alien origin, we’d also found scraps of other vanished or obscure languages—or at least, scripts and symbols connected to them-what would you say?”

I admitted that I had no explanation for how such a thing might be possible. It was one thing to allow the existence of a secret enclave of technologically advanced Islamists, however improbable that might have been. It was quite another to posit the existence of many such enclaves, each preserving some vanished or atrophied branch of human culture.

“Here is what’s going to happen.” He spoke the words as if there could be no possibility of dissent on my behalf. “As has already been made clear, your old life is over, utterly and finally. But there is still much that you can do to serve the will of Heaven. The khanate has only now taken a real interest in the phantoms, whereas we have been alert to the phenomenon for many years. If you care about the security of the empire, you will see the sense in working with Kuchlug.”

“You mean, join the team analyzing those relics?”

“As a matter of fact, I want you to lead it.” He smiled; I could not tell if the idea had just occurred to him, or whether it had always been at the back of his mind. “You’ve already demonstrated the acuteness of your observations. I have no doubt that you will continue to uncover truths that the existing team has overlooked.”

“I can’t just ... take over, like that.”

He looked taken aback. “Why ever not?”

“A few days ago, I was your prisoner,” I said. “Not long before that, you were torturing me. They’ve no reason to suddenly start trusting me, just on your say-so.”

“You’re wrong about that,” he said, fingering one of the knives strapped across his chest. “They’ll trust who I tell them to trust, absolutely and unquestioningly.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because that’s how we do things around here.”

* * * * *

So it was. I joined Qilian’s investigative team, immersing myself in the treasure trove of data and relics his people had pieced together in my absence. There was, understandably, a degree of reluctance to accept my authority. But Qilian dealt with that in the expected manner, and slowly, those around me came to a pragmatic understanding that it was either work with me or suffer the consequences.

Relics and fragments continued to fall into our hands. Sometimes the ships that intruded into the Infrastructure were damaged, as if the passage into our territory had been a violent one. Often, the subsequent encounter with one of our ships was enough to shake them to pieces, or at the very least dislodge major components. The majority of these shards vanished without a trace into the implacable machinery of the Infrastructure. Even if the khorkoi apparatus was beginning to fail, it was still more than capable of attending to the garbage left behind by its users. But occasionally, pieces lingered in the system (as if the walls had indigestion?), waiting to be swept up by Qilian’s ships, and eventually brought home to this moon.

As often as not, though, it was a trivial matter to classify the consignments, requiring only a glance at their contents. The work became so routine, in fact-and the quantity of consignments so high-that eventually I had no choice but to take a step back from hands-on analysis. I assembled six teams and let them get on with it, requiring that they report back to me only when they had something of note: a new empire, or something odd from one of those we already knew about.

That was when the golden egg fell into our hands. It was in the seventh month of my service under Qilian, and I immediately knew that it originated from a culture not yet known to us. Perhaps it was a ship, or part of one. The outer hull was almost entirely covered in a quilt of golden platelets, overlapping in the manner of fish scales. The only parts not covered by the platelets were the dark apertures of sensors and thruster ports, and a small, eye-shaped area on one side of the teardrop that we quickly identified as a door.

Fearing that it might damage the other relics if it exploded under our examinations, I ordered that the analysis of the egg take place in a different part of the mining structure. Soon, though, my concern shifted to the welfare of the egg’s occupants. We knew that there were beings inside it, even if we could not be sure if they were human. Scans had illuminated ghostly structures inside the hull: the intestinal complexity of propulsion subsystems, fuel lines, and tanks packed ingeniously tight, the fatty tissue of insulating layers, the bony divisions of armored partitions, the cartilaginous detailing of furniture and life-support equipment. There were even ranks of couches, with eight crew still reclining in them. Dead or in suspended animation, it was impossible to tell. All we could see was their bones, a suggestion of humanoid skeletons, and there was no movement of those bones to suggest respiration.

We got the door open easily enough. It was somewhat like breaking into a safe, but once we had worked out the underlying mechanism—and the curiously alien logic that underpinned its design-it presented no insurmountable difficulties. Gratifyingly, there was only a mild gust of equalizing pressure when the door hinged wide, and none of the sensors arrayed around the egg detected any harmful gases. As far as we could tell, it was filled with an oxygen-nitrogen mix only slightly different from that aboard our own ships.

“What now?” Qilian asked, fingering the patch of hair beneath his lip.

“We’ll send machines aboard now,” I replied. “Just to be safe, in case there are any booby traps inside.”

He placed a heavy, thick-fingered hand on my shoulder. “What say we skip the machines and just take a look inside ourselves?” His tone was playful. “Not afraid, are we, Yellow Dog?”

“Of course not,” I answered.

“There’s no need to be. I’ll go in first, just in case there are surprises.”

We walked across the floor, through the cordon of sensors, to the base of the attenuated metal staircase that led to the open door. The robots scuttled out of the way. My staff exchanged concerned glances, aware that we were deviating from a protocol we had spent weeks thrashing out to the last detail. I waved down their qualms.

Inside, as we already knew from the scans, the egg was compartmented into several small chambers, with the crew in the middle section. The rear part contained most of the propulsion and life-support equipment. Up front, in the sharp end, was what appeared to be a kind of pressurized cargo space. The egg still had power, judging by the presence of interior lighting, although the air aboard it was very cold and still. It was exceedingly cramped, requiring me to duck and Qilian to stoop almost double. To pass from one compartment to the next, we had to crawl on our hands and knees through doors that were barely large enough for children. The external door was larger than the others, presumably because it had to admit a crew member wearing a spacesuit or some other encumbrance.

Qilian was the first to see the occupants. I was only a few seconds behind him, but those seconds stretched to years as I heard his words.

“They are aliens after all, Yellow Dog. Strapped in their seats like little pale monkeys. I can see why we thought they might be human ... but they’re not, not at all. So much for the theory that every empire must represent a human enclave, no matter how incomprehensible the artifacts or script.”

“That was never my theory, sir. But it’s good to have it dismissed.”

“They have masks on. I can see their faces, but I’d like a better look.”

Still on my knees, I said, “Be careful, sir.”

“They’re dead, Yellow Dog. Stiff and cold as mummies.”

By the time I reached Qilian, he had removed one of the intricate masks from the face of his chosen alien. In his hands, it was tiny, like a delicate accessory belonging to a doll. He put it down carefully, placing it on the creature’s lap. The alien was dressed in a quilted gold uniform, cross-buckled into the couch. It was the size of an eight-year-old child, but greatly skinnier in build, its torso and limbs elongated to the point where it resembled a smaller creature that had been stretched. Though its hands were gloved, the layout of the long, dainty-looking digits corresponded exactly to my own: four fingers and an opposed thumb, though each of the digits was uncommonly slender, such that I feared they might snap if we attempted to remove the gloves. Its head-the only part of it not covered by the suit-was delicate and rather beautiful, with huge, dark eyes set in patches of black fur. Its nose and mouth formed one snoutlike feature, suggestive of a dog or cat. It had sleek, intricate ears, running back along the sides of its head. Save for the eye patches, and a black nose at the tip of the snout, its skin varied between a pale buff or off-white.

The alien’s hands rested on a pair of small control consoles hinged to the sides of the couch; the consoles were flat surfaces embossed with golden ridges and studs, devoid of markings. A second console angled down from the ceiling to form a blank screen at the creature’s eye level. The other seven occupants all had similar amenities. There were no windows, and no controls or readouts in the orthodox sense. The aliens were all alike, with nothing on their uniforms to indicate rank or function. From what little I could see of their faces, the other seven were identical to the one we had unmasked.

I suppose I should have felt awed: here I was, privileged to be one of the first two people in history to set eyes on true aliens. Instead, all I felt was a kind of creeping sadness, and a tawdry, unsettling feeling that I had no business in this place of death.

“I’ve seen these things before,” Qilian said, a note of disbelief in his words.

“These aliens, sir? But this is the first time we’ve seen them.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean, isn’t there something about them that reminds you of something?”

“Something of what, sir?”

He ignored my question. “I also want this vehicle stripped down to the last bolt, or whatever it is that holds it together. If we can hack into its navigation system, find an Infrastructure map, we may be able to work out where they came from, and how the hell we’ve missed them until now.”

I looked at the embossed gold console and wondered what our chances were of hacking into anything, let alone the navigation system.

“And the aliens, sir? What should we do with them?”

“Cut them up. Find out what makes them tick.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Of course, make sure they’re dead first.”

The aliens were not the greatest surprise contained in the egg, but we did not realize that until the autopsy was under way. Qilian and I observed the procedure from a viewing gallery, looking down on the splayed and dissected creature. With great care, bits of it were being removed and placed on sterile metal trays. The interior organs were dry and husklike, reinforcing the view that the aliens were in a state of mummification: perhaps (we speculated) some kind of suspended animation to be used in emergency situations. But the function and placement of the organs were all too familiar; we could have been watching the autopsy of a monkey and not known the difference. The alien even had a tail, lightly striped in black and white; it had been contained within an extension of the clothing, tucked back into a cavity within the seat.

That the creatures must have been intelligent was not open to dispute, but it was still dismaying, when they were cut up, to learn how human their brains looked. Small, certainly, yet with clear division of brain hemispheres, frontal and temporal lobes, and so on. Yet the real shock lay in the blood. It was not necessarily a surprise to find that it had DNA, or even that its DNA appeared to share the same protein coding alphabet as ours. There were (I was led to believe) sound arguments for how that state of affairs might have arisen independently, due to it being the most efficient possible replicating/coding system, given the thermodynamic and combinative rules of carbon-based biochemistry. That was all well and good. But it entirely failed to explain what they found when they compared the alien’s chromosomes to ours. More on a whim than anything else, they had tested the alien blood with human-specific probes and found mat chromosomes 1 and 3 of the alien were homeologous to human chromosomes 3, 9, 14, and 21. There were also unexpectedly strong signals in the centromeric regions of the alien chromosomes when probed for human chromosomes 7 and 19. In other words, the alien DNA was not merely similar to ours; it was shockingly, confoundingly, alike.

The only possible explanation was that we were related.

Qilian and I were trying to work out the ramifications of this when news came in from the team examining the pod. Uugan—my deputy—came scuttling into the autopsy viewing room, rubbing sweaty hands together. “We’ve found something,” he said, almost tongue-tied with excitement.

Qilian showed him the hot-off-the-press summary from the genetics analysis. “So have we. Those aliens aren’t alien. They came from the same planet we did. I thought they looked like lemurs. That’s because they are.’”

Uugan had as much trouble dealing with that as we did. I could almost hear the gears meshing in his brain, working through the possibilities. “Aliens must have uplifted lemur stock in the deep past, using genetic engineering to turn them into intelligent, tool-using beings.” He raised a finger. “Or, other aliens spread the same genetic material on more than one world. If that were the case, these lemurs need not be from Greater Mongolia after all.”

“What news do you have for us?” Qilian asked, smiling slightly at Uugan’s wild theorizing.

“Come to the egg, please. It will be easier if I show you.”

We hastened after Uugan, both of us refraining from any speculation as to what he might have found. As it happened, I do not think either of us would have guessed correctly.

In the sharp end of the egg, the investigators had uncovered a haul of cargo, much of which had now been removed and laid out on the floor for inspection. I glanced at some of the items as we completed the walk to the pod, recognizing bits and pieces from some of the other cultures we already knew about. Here was a branching, sharp-tipped metallic red thing, like an instrument for impaling. Here was a complexly manufactured casket that opened to reveal ranks of nested white eggs, hard as porcelain. Here was a curving section of razor-sharp foil, polished to an impossible luster. Dozens more relics from dozens of other known empires, and still dozens more that represented empires of which we knew nothing.

“They’ve been collecting things, just like us,” I said.

“Including this,” Uugan said, drawing my attention to the object that now stood at the base of the egg.

It was the size and shape of a large urn, golden in construction, surfaced with bas-relief detailing, with eight curved green windows set into its upper surface. I peered closer and rested a hand against the urn’s throbbing skin. Through the windows burbled a dark liquid. In the dark liquid, something pale floated. I made out the knobbed ridge of a spine, a backbone pressing through flawless skin. It was a person, a human, a man judging by his musculature, curled into fetal position. I could only see the back of his head: bald and waxy, scribed with fine white scars. Ridged cables dangled in the fluid, running toward what I presumed was a breathing apparatus, now hidden.

Qilian looked through one of the other windows. After a lengthy silence, he straightened himself and nodded. “Do you think he was their prisoner?”

“No way to tell, short of thawing him and out and seeing what he has to say on the matter,” Uugan said.

“Do what you can,” Qilian told Uugan. “I would very, very much like to speak to this gentleman.” Then he leaned in closer, as if what he was about to say was meant only for Uugan’s ears. “This would be an excellent time not to make a mistake, if you understand my meaning.”

* * * * *

I do not believe that Qilian’s words had any effect on Uugan; he was either going to succeed or not, and the difference between the two outcomes depended solely on the nature of the problem, not his degree of application to the task. As it happened, the man was neither dead nor brain dead, and his revival proved childishly simple. Many weeks were spent in preparation before the decisive moment, evaluating all known variables. When the day came, Uugan’s intervention was kept to a minimum: he merely opened the preservation vat, extracted the man from his fluid cocoon, and (it must be said, with fastidious care) removed the breathing apparatus. Uugan was standing by with all the tools of emergency medical intervention at his disposal, but no such assistance was required. The man simply convulsed, drew in several gulping breaths, and then settled into a normal respiratory pattern. But he had yet to open his eyes, or signal any awareness in the change of his surroundings. Scans measured brain activity, but at a level indicative of coma rather than consciousness. The same scans also detected a network of microscopic machines in the man’s brain and much of his wider nervous system. Though we could not see these implants as clearly as those we had harvested from the lemur, they were clearly derived from a different technology.

Where had he come from? What did he know of the phantoms?

For weeks, it appeared that we would have no direct answer to these questions. There was one thing, one clue, but we almost missed it. Many days after the man’s removal from the vat, one of Uugan’s technicians was working alone in the laboratory where we kept our new guest. The lights were dimmed and the technician was using an ultraviolet device to sterilize some culture dishes. By chance, the technician noticed something glowing on the side of the man’s neck. It turned out to be a kind of tattoo, a sequence of horizontal symbols that was invisible except under ultraviolet stimulation.

I was summoned to examine the discovery. What I found was a word in Arabic, Altair, meaning eagle, and a string of digits, twenty in all, composed of nine numerical symbols, and the tenth, what the pre-Mongol scholars called in their dead language theca or circulus or figura nihili, the round symbol that means, literally, nothing. Our mathematics incorporates no such entity. I have heard it said that there is something in the Mongol psyche that abhors the very concept of absence. Our mathematics cannot have served us badly, for upon its back we have built a five-hundred-year-old galactic empire-even if the khorkoi gave us the true keys to that kingdom. But I have also heard it said that our system would have been much less cumbersome had we adopted that Arabic symbol for nothing.

No matter; it was what the symbols told me that was important, not what they said about our choice of number system. In optimistic anticipation that he would eventually learn to speak, and that his tongue would turn out to be Arabic, I busied myself with preparations. For a provincial thug, Qilian had a library as comprehensive as anything accessible from NHK. I retrieved primers on Arabic, most of which were tailored for use by security operatives hoping to crack Islamist terror cells, and set about trying to become an interpreter.

But when the man awoke—which was weeks later, by which time it felt as if I had been studying those primers for half my life—all my preparations might as well have been for nothing. He was sitting up in bed, monitored by machines and watched by hidden guards, when I came into the room. Aside from the technician who had first noticed his return to consciousness, the man had seen no other human being since his arrival.

I closed the door and walked to his bedside. I sat down next to him, adjusting the blue silk folds of my skirt decorously.

“I am Yellow Dog,” I told him in Arabic, speaking the words slowly and carefully. “You are among friends. We want to help you, but we do not know much about you.”

He looked at me blankly. After a few seconds I added: “Can you understand me?”

His expression and response told me everything I needed to know. He spoke softly, emitting a string of words that sounded superficially Arabic without making any sense to me at all. By then I had listened to enough recordings to know the difference between Arabic and baby talk, and all I was hearing was gibberish.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I do not understand you. Perhaps if we started again, slower this time.” I touched a hand to my breast. “I am Yellow Dog. Who are you?”

He answered me then, and maybe it was his name, but it could just as easily have been a curt refusal to answer my question. He started looking agitated, glancing around the room as if it was only now that he was paying due regard to his surroundings. He fingered the thin cloth of his blanket and rubbed at the bandage on his arm where a catheter had been inserted. Once more I told him my name and urged him to respond in kind, but whatever he said this time was not the same as his first answer.

“Wait,” I said, remembering something, a contingency I had hoped not to have to use. I reached into my satchel and retrieved a printout. I held the filmy paper before me and read slowly from the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer.

My pronunciation must still not have been perfect, because I had to repeat the words three or four times before some flicker of recognition appeared behind his eyes and he began to echo what I was saying. Yet even as he spoke the incantation, there was a puzzlement in his voice, as if he could not quite work out why we should be engaged in this odd parlor game.

“So I was half right,” I said, when he had fallen silent again, waiting for me to say something. “You know something of Islamic culture. But you do not understand anything I say, except when I speak words that have not been permitted to change in fifteen centuries, and even then you only just grasp what I mean to say.” I smiled, not in despair, but in rueful acknowledgment that the journey we had to make would be much longer and more arduous than I had imagined. Continuing in Mongol, so that he could hear my tongue, I said: “But at least we have something, my friend, a stone to build on. That’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”

“Do you understand me now?” he asked, in flawless Mongol.

I was astonished, quite unable to speak. Now that I had grown accustomed to his baldness and pallor, I could better appreciate those aspects of his face that I had been inclined to overlook before. He had delicate features, kind and scholarly. I had never been attracted to men in a sexual sense, and I could not say that I felt any such longing for this man. But I saw the sadness in his eyes, the homesick flicker that told me he was a long way from family and friends (such as I have never known, but can easily imagine), and I knew that I wished to help him.

“You speak our language,” I said eventually, as if the fact of it needed stating.

“It is not a difficult one. What is your name? I caught something that sounded like ‘filthy hound,’ but that cannot have been correct.”

“I was trying to speak Arabic. And failing, obviously. My name is Yellow Dog. It’s a code, an operational identifier.”

“Therefore not your real name.”

“Ariunaa,” I said softly. “I use it sometimes. But around here they call me Yellow Dog.”

“Muhunnad,” he said, touching his sternum.

“Muhunnad,” I repeated. Then: “If you understood my name-or thought you understood it-why didn’t you answer me until I spoke Mongolian? My Arabic can’t be that bad, surely.”

“You speak Arabic like someone who has only heard a whisper of a whisper of a whisper. Some of the words are almost recognizable, but they are like glints of gold in a stream.” He offered me a smile, as if it hurt him to have to criticize. “You were doing your best. But the version of Arabic I speak is not the one you think you know.”

“How many versions are there?”

“More than you realize, evidently.” He paused. “I think I know where I am. We are inside the Mongol Expansion. We were on the same track until 659, by my calendar.”

“What other calendar is there?”

“You count from the death of a warrior-deity; we count from the flight of the Prophet from Mecca. The year now is 1604 by the Caliphate’s reckoning; 999 by your own, 2226 by the calendar of the United Nations. Really, we are quibbling over mere centuries. The Smiling Ones use a much older dating system, as they must. The—”

I interrupted him. “What are you talking about? You are an emissary from a previously hidden Islamic state, that is all. At some point in the five hundred years of the Mongol Expansion, your people must have escaped central control to establish a secret colony, or network of colonies, on the very edge of the Infrastructure.”

“It is not like that, Ariunaa. Not like that at all.” Then he leaned higher on the bed, like a man who had just remembered an urgent errand. “How exactly did I get here? I had not been tasked to gather intelligence on the Mongols, not this time around.”

“The lemurs,” I answered. “We found you with them.”

I watched him shudder, as if the memory of something awful had only just returned. “You mean I was their prisoner, I think.” Then he looked at me curiously. “Your questions puzzle me, Ariunaa. Our data on the Mongols was never of the highest quality, but we had always taken it for granted that you understood.”

“Understood what?”

“The troubling nature of things,” he said.

* * * * *

The cable car pitched down from the boarding platform, ducking beneath the base of the immense walking platform. After a short while, it came to an abrupt halt, swaying slightly. Qilian pulled out his binoculars and focused on a detail under the platform, between the huge, slowly moving machinery of the skeletal support legs.

“There,” he said, passing me the binoculars.

I took them with trembling hands. I had been on my way to Muhunnad for one of our fruitless but not unpleasant conversational sessions, when Qilian’s men had diverted me to the cable car platform.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“Press the stud on the side.”

I did so. Powerful gyroscopes made the binoculars twist in my hands, tracking and zooming in on a specific object, a thing hanging down from the underside like the weight on the end of a plumb line. I recalled now the thing I had seen the first time Qilian had accompanied me in the cable car, the thing that he had been examining with the binoculars. I had thought it was some kind of test probe or drilling gear being winched back into the platform. I saw now that I had been wrong.

I did need to see his face to know that I was looking at Muhunnad. He had been stuffed into a primitive spacesuit, blackened by multiple exposures to scorching heat and corrosive elements. They had him suspended from his feet, with his head nearest the ground. He was being lowered down toward one of those outgassing rifts in the surface of the Qing Shui moon.

“You can’t be doing this,” I said.

“If there was any other way,” Qilian said, in a tone of utter reasonableness. “But clearly there isn’t. He’s been dragging his heels, giving us nothing. Spoke too soon early on, confided too much in you, and chose to clam up. Obviously, we can’t have that.” Qilian opened a walnut-veneered cabinet and took out a microphone. He clicked it on and tapped it against his knee before speaking. “Can you hear me, Muhunnad? I hope your view is as spectacular as ours. I am speaking from the cable car that you may be able to see to your right. We are about level with your present position, although you will soon be considerably lower than us.”

“No,” I said.

Qilian raised a calming hand. He hadn’t even bothered to have me tied into the seat. “Do you hear that, Muhunnad? You still have an admirer.” Then he said: “Lower the line, please. Take him to half his present elevation.”

“Can you see that he’s told you everything he knows?” I asked, tossing the binoculars against the floor.

“He’s told us as little as he could get away with,” Qilian replied, placing a hand over the end of the microphone to muffle his words. “We could go through the usual rigmarole of conventional interrogation, but I think this will prove much more effective.”

“We’ll learn far more from him alive than dead.”

He looked at me pityingly. “You think I don’t know that? Of course I’m not going to kill him. But very soon—unless he chooses to talk-he’ll be wishing I did.”

The winch dropped Muhunnad to within fifteen or twenty aids of the surface, just above the point where the outgassing material became opaque.

“I can hear you,” a voice said over the cable car’s speaker system. “But I have told you everything I intend to. Nothing you can do now will make any difference.”

“We’ll see, won’t we,” Qilian said. To me, confidingly, he said: “By now, he will be in extreme discomfort. You and I are fine, but we have the benefit of a functioning life-support system. His suit is damaged. At the moment, his primary concern is extreme cold, but that will not remain the case for very much longer. As he nears the fissure, it is heat that will begin to trouble him.”

“You can tell the woman—Ariunaa-that I am sorry it was necessary to withold information from her,” Muhunnad said. “Her kindness was appreciated. I think she is the only one of you with a heart.”

“There’s no need for me to tell her anything,” Qilian replied. “She’s listening in. Aren’t you, Yellow Dog?” Somewhat to my surprise, he passed me the microphone. “Talk to him. Reason with your favorite prisoner, if you imagine it will help.”

“Muhunnad,” I said. “Listen to me now. I have no reason to lie to you. Qilian means what he says. He’s going to put you through hell until he finds out what you know. I’ve seen him murder people already, just to get at the truth.”

“I appreciate the concern for my welfare,” he said, with a sincerity that cut me to the bone.

“Lower him to five aids,” Qilian said.

* * * * *

Is it necessary to document all that happened to Muhunnad? I suppose not; the essential thing is that the pain eventually became intolerable and he began to tell Qilian some of the things my master was desirous of knowing.

What we learned was: Muhunnad was a pilot, a man surgically adapted for optimum control of a ship with extreme Infrastructure agility. His implants were part of the interface system by which he flew his vehicle. It turned out that Muhunnad’s people had become aware of the breakdown of Infrastructure integrity many decades ago, long before it had come to our attention. The difference was, rather than pretending that the problem did not exist, or entrusting it to a single agent like myself, they had dedicated almost their entire state apparatus to finding a solution. Think of Qilian’s research, multiplied by a thousand. There were countless men and women like Muhunnad, brave angels tasked with mapping the weak spots in the

Infrastructure, the points of leakage, and learning something of the other empires beginning to spill into their own. They knew enough about the properties of those weak points; enough to slip through them, gather intelligence, and still return home. The rate of attrition was still high. Muhunnad was a criminal, convicted of a crime that would have been considered petty in our own society, but normally merited the death penalty in his. In his case, he had been offered the chance to redeem himself, by becoming a pilot.

They knew about us. They had been intercepting our lost message packets for years, and had even found a couple of our ships with living crew. That was how they had learned Mongolian. They also knew about dozens of other empires, including the lemurs.

“They caught me,” Muhunnad said, “as they catch any unwary traveler. They are to be feared.”

“They look so harmless,” Qilian answered.

“They are vicious beyond words. They are a hive society, with little sense of self. The beings you found, the dead ones, would have sacrificed themselves to ensure their cargo returned home intact. It did not mean that they did so out of any consideration for my well-being. But there are worse things than the lemurs out there. There are the beings we call the Smiling Ones. You will meet them sooner or later. They have been in space for millions of years, and their technology is only matched by their loathing for the likes of you and me.”

“Tell us about your state,” Qilian probed.

“We call it the Shining Caliphate. It is an empire encompassing seven thousand star systems, comprising twenty thousand settled worlds, half of which are of planet class or at least the size of major moons. A third of those worlds are terraformed or on the way to completion.”

“You are lying. If an empire of that size already existed, we would have seen signs of it.”

“That is because you are not looking in the right place. The Shining Caliphate is here, now, all around you. It occupied much the same volume as your own empire. It even has the same home world. You call it Greater Mongolia. We call it Earth.”

“Lies!”

But I knew Muhunnad was not lying to us. I think it likely that even Qilian knew it, too. He was a brutal man, but not a stupid or unimaginative one. But I do not think he could bare to contemplate his place in a universe in which Muhunnad spoke the truth. Qilian was a powerful man, with an empire of his own on the very edge of the one he was meant to serve. If our empire was a map spread across a table, then he controlled more than could be covered by the palm of a hand. Yet if what Muhunnad said was correct, then that map was but one unexceptional page in a vast atlas, each page a dominion in its own right, of which our own was neither the most powerful nor the most ancient. Set against such immensity, Qilian controlled almost nothing. For a man like him, that realization would have been intolerable.

But perhaps I am crediting him with too much intelligence, too much imagination, and he was simply unable to grasp what Muhunnad was telling us.

What he could grasp, however, was an opportunity.

I was with them when we brought Muhunnad to the room where the couch had been prepared. I had heard of the existence of the couch, but this was my first sight of it. Even knowing its function, I could not help but see it as an instrument of torture. Muhunnad’s reaction, to begin struggling against the guards who held him, showed that he saw the couch in similar terms. Behind the guards loomed white-coated doctors and technicians, including the Slav who had torn out my implant.

“This isn’t to hurt you,” Qilian said magnanimously. “It’s to help you.”

The couch was a skeletal white contraption, encumbered with pads and restraints and delicate hinged accessories that would fold over the occupant once they had been secured in place.

“I do not understand,” Muhunnad said, although I think he did.

“We have studied your implants and deduced something of their function,” Qilian said. “Not enough to learn everything about them, but enough to let you control one of our ships, instead of the one you were meant to fly.”

“It will not work.”

“No one is pretending it will be easy. But it is in your interests to do what you can to make it succeed. Help us navigate the Infrastructure-the way you do, finding the weak points and slipping through them-and we will let you return home.”

“I do not believe you.”

“You have no option but to believe me. If you cannot assist me in this matter, you will have concluded your usefulness to me. Given the trouble I would get into if New High Karakorum learned of your existence, I would have no option but to dispose of you.”

“He means it,” I said forcefully. “Help us fly the ships, Muhunnad. Whatever happens, it’s better than staying here.”

He looked at me as if I was the one thing in the universe he was willing to trust. Given all that had happened to him since leaving his people, it did not surprise me in the slightest.

“Plug him in,” Qilian told the technicians. “And don’t be too tender about it.”

* * * * *

The name of the ship was the River Volga. She was half a li in length, her frontal stabilization spines suggesting the curving whiskers of a catfish. She had been a merchant vehicle once; later, she had been equipped for scouring the Parvan Tract for phantom relics, and, most recently, she had been hardened and weaponed for an exploratory role. She would carry six of us: Muhunnad, Qilian, Uugan, and two more members of the technical staff-their names were Jura and Batbayar-and myself. Next to her, identical in almost all respects, was the Mandate of Heaven. The only significant distinction between the two craft was that Muhunnad would be piloting the River Volga, while the Mandate of Heaven followed close behind, slaved to follow the same trajectory to within a fraction of an aid. The navigation and steering mechanisms of both ships had been upgraded to permit high-agility maneuvers, including reversals, close-proximity wall skimming, and suboptimal portal transits. It did not bear thinking about the cost of equipping those two ships, or where the funds had been siphoned from, but I supposed the citizens of the Kuchlug special administrative volume would be putting up with hardships for a little while longer.

We spent five days in shakedown tests before entering the Tract, scooting around the system, dodging planets and moons in high-gee swerves. During that time, Muhunnad’s integration into the harness was slowly improved, more and more ship systems brought under his direct control, until he reported the utmost confidence in being able to handle the River Volga during Infrastructure flight.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Truly, Ariunaa. This ship feels as much a part of me as anything I ever flew in the Shining Caliphate.”

“But indescribably less sophisticated.”

“I would not wish to hurt your feelings. Given your resources, you have not done too badly.”

The transit, when it came, was utterly uneventful. The Mandate of Heaven reported some minor buffeting, but this was soon negated following a refinement of the control linkage between the two ships. Then we had nothing to do but wait until Muhunnad detected one of the points of weakening where, with a judicious alteration in our trajectory, we might slip from one version of the Infrastructure to another.

Did I seriously think that Qilian would keep his promise of returning Muhunnad to his own people? Not really, unless my master had hopes of forging some kind of alliance with the Shining Caliphate, to use as leverage against the central authority of New High Karakorum. If that was his intention, I did not think he had much hope of succeeding. The Caliphate would have every reason to despise us, and yet-given the demonstrably higher level of both their technology and their intelligence-there was nothing they could possibly want from us except craven submission and cowering remorse for the holocaust we had visited upon their culture nearly a thousand years earlier.

No; I did not think Muhunnad stood much chance of returning home. Perhaps he knew that as well. But it was better to pretend to believe in Qilian’s promises than incur his bored wrath back on the Qing Shui moon. At least this way, Muhunnad could continue to be materially useful to Qilian and, therefore, too valuable to hurt.

The detection of a weakening in the tunnel geometry, Muhunnad explained, was only just possible given the blunt sensibilities of our instruments. The Caliphate kept detailed maps of such things, but no record had survived his capture by the lemurs, and the information was too voluminous to be committed to memory. He recalled that there were four weak points in the section of Infrastructure we called the Parvan Tract, but not their precise locations or detailed properties.

No matter; he had every incentive to succeed. We overshot the first weakening, but the incident gave Muhunnad a chance to refine the manner in which he sifted the sensor data, and he was confident that he would not make the same error twice. Rather than attempt a reversal, it was agreed to push forward until we encountered the next weakening. It happened two days later, halfway to the Gansu nexus. This time, Muhunnad started to detect the subtle changes in the properties of the tunnel in time to initiate a hard slow-down, echoed by the Mandate of Heaven immediately to our stern.

We had been warned that the passage would be rough; this was an understatement. Fortunately, we were all braced and ready when it came; we had had two minutes’ warning before the moment arrived. Even then, the ship gave every indication of coming close to breakup; she whinnied like a horse, her structural members singing as if they had been plucked. Several steering vanes broke loose during the swerve, but the River Volga had been equipped to withstand losses that would have crippled a normal ship; all that happened was that hull plates swung open and new vanes pushed out to replace the missing ones. Behind us, the Mandate of Heaven suffered slightly less damage; Muhunnad had been able to send correctional steering signals to her guidance system, allowing her to follow a less treacherous path.

And then we were back in the tunnel, traveling normally. To all intents and purposes, it was as if nothing had happened. We appeared to be still inside the Parvan Tract.

“We have become phantoms now,” Muhunnad informed us. “This is someone else’s Infrastructure.”

Qilian leaned over the control couch, where our pilot lay in a state of partial paralysis, wired so deeply into the River Volga’s nervous system that his own body was but an incidental detail. Around us, the bridge instruments recorded normal conditions of Infrastructure transit.

“Where are we?”

“There’s no way of telling, not with these sensors. Not until we emerge.”

“In the Gansu nexus?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Or whatever they call it. There will be risks; you will not have seen many phantoms emerge into your version of the nexus because most such ships will make every effort to slip through another weakening.”

“Why?”

He spoke as if the answer should have been obvious. “Because unless they are pilots like me, on specific intelligence-gathering missions, they would rather keep transitioning between versions of the Infrastructure, than emerge into what is likely to be a densely populated interchange. Eventually, they hope to detect the microsignatures in the tunnel physics that indicate that they have returned home.”

“Signatures that we can’t read,” I said.

“I will attempt to refine my interpretation of the sensor data. Given time, I may be able to improve matters. But that is some way off.”

“We’ll take our chances with Gansu,” Qilian said.

There was, as I understood it, a small but nonnegligible possibility that the weakening had shunted us back into our own version of the Tract—we would know if we emerged into the nexus and I saw advertisements for Sorkan-Shira rental ponies. Muhunnad assured us, however, that such an outcome was very unlikely. Once we were elsewhere, we would only get home again by throwing the dice repeatedly, until our own special number came up.

For all that, when we did emerge into the Gansu nexus, my first thought was that Muhunnad had been wrong about those odds. Somehow or other, we had beaten them and dropped back into our own space. As the door opened to admit us back into the spherical volume of the hollowed-out moon, I had the same impression of teeming wealth; of a city packed tight around the central core, of luminous messages rising up the ninety-nine golden spokes, of the airspace thick with jewel-bright ships and gaudily patterned, mothlike shuttles, the glittering commerce of ten thousand worlds.

And yet, it only took a second glimpse to see that I was wrong.

This was no part of the Mongol Expansion. The ships were wrong; the shuttles were wrong: cruder and clumsier even than our most antiquated ships. The city down below had a haphazard, ramshackle look to it, its structures ugly and square-faced. The message on the spokes were spelled out in the angular letters of that pre-Mongol language, Latin. I could not tell if they were advertisements, news reports, or political slogans.

We slowed down, coming to a hovering standstill relative to the golden spokes and the building-choked core. The Mandate of Heaven had only just cleared the portal entrance, with the door still open behind it. I presumed that some automatic system would not permit it to close with a ship still so close.

Qilian was a model of patience, by his standards. He gave Muhunnad several minutes to digest the information arriving from the River Volga’s many sensors.

“Well, pilot?” he asked, when that interval had elapsed. “Do you recognize this place?”

“Yes,” Muhunnad said. “I do. And we must leave, now.”

“Why so nervous? I’ve seen those ships. They look even more pathetic and fragile than ours must have seemed to you.”

“They are. But there is no such thing as a harmless interstellar culture. These people have only been in space for a couple of hundred years, barely a hundred and fifty since they stumbled on the Infrastructure, but they still have weapons that could hurt us. Worse, they are aggressors.”

“Who are they?” I whispered.

“The culture I mentioned to you back on the Qing Shui moon: the ones who are now in their twenty-third century. You would call them Christians, I suppose.”

“Nestorians?” Qilian asked, narrowing his eyes.

“Another offshoot of the same cult, if one wishes to split hairs. Not that many of them are believers now. There are even some Islamists among them, although there is little about the Shining Caliphate that they would find familiar.”

“Perhaps we can do business with them,” Qilian mused.

“I doubt it. They would find you repulsive, and they would loathe you for what you did to them in your history.”

It was as if Muhunnad had not spoken at all. When he alluded to such matters, Qilian paid no heed to his words. “Take us closer to the core,” he said. “We didn’t weld all this armor onto the Volga for nothing.”

When Muhunnad did not show readiness to comply with Qilian’s order, a disciplinary measure was administered through the input sockets of the harness. Muhunnad stiffened against his restraints, then-evidently deciding that death at the hands of the Christians was no worse than torture by Mongols-he began to move us away from the portal.

“I am sorry,” I whispered. “I know you only want to do what’s best for us.”

“I am sorry as well,” he said, when Qilian was out of earshot. “Sorry for being so weak, that I do what he asks of me, even when I know it is wrong.”

“No one blames you,” I replied.

We had crossed five hundred li without drawing any visible attention from the other vessels, which continued to move through the sphere as if going about their normal business. We even observed several ships emerge and depart through portals. But then, quite suddenly, it was as if a great shoal of fish had become aware of the presence of two sleek, hungry predators nosing through their midst. All around us, from one minute to the next, the various craft began to dart away, abandoning whatever course or errand they had been on before. Some of them ducked into portals or lost themselves in the thicket of spokes, while others fled for the cover of the core.

I tensed. Whatever response we were due was surely on its way by now.

As it happened, we did not have long to wait. In contrast to the civilian vessels attempting to get as far away from us as possible, three ships were converging on us. We studied them on high magnification, on one of the display screens in the River Volga’s bridge. They were shaped like arrowheads, painted with black and white stripes and the odd markings of the Christians. Their blade-sharp leading edges bristled with what could have been sensors, refueling probes, or weapons.

From his couch, Muhunnad said: “We are being signaled. I believe I can interpret the transmission. Would you like to see it?”

“Put it on,” Qilian said.

We were looking at a woman who was wearing a heavy black uniform, shiny like waxed leather. She was pinned back into a heavily padded seat: I did not doubt that I was looking at the pilot of one of the ships racing to intercept us. Much of her face was hidden under a globular black helmet, with a red-tinted visor lowered down over her eyes. On the crown of the helmet was a curious symbol: a little drawing of Earth, overlaid with lines of latitude and longitude, and flanked by what I took to be a pair of laurel leaves. She was speaking into a microphone, her words coming over the bridge speaker. I wished I had studied more dead languages at the academy. Then again, given my lack of success with Arabic, perhaps I would still not have understood her Latin either.

What was clear was that the woman was not happy; that her tone was becoming ever more strident. At last, she muttered something that, had she been speaking Mongol, might have been some dismissive invitation to go to hell.

“Perhaps we should turn after all,” Qilian said, or started to say. But by then, the three ships had loosed their missiles: four apiece, grouping into two packs of six, one for the Mandate of Heaven and one for us.

Muhunnad needed no further encouragement. He whipped us around with all haste, pushing the River Volga’s thrust to its maximum. Again, the stress of it was enough to set the ship protesting. At the same time, Muhunnad brought our own weapons into use, running those guns out on their magnetic cradles and firing at the missiles as they closed distance between us and the Christians. Given the range and efficacy of our beam weapons, it would not have troubled him to eliminate the three ships. In concentrating on the missiles, not the pursuers, he was doing all that he could not to inflame matters further. As an envoy of Greater Mongolia, I suppose I should have been grateful. But I was already beginning to doubt that the fate of my empire was going to be of much concern for me.

Because we had turned around, the Mandate of Heaven was the first to reach the portal. By then, the door had begun to close, but it only took a brief assault from the Mandate’s chaser guns to snip a hole in it. Muhunnad had destroyed nine of the twelve missiles by this point, but the remaining three were proving more elusive; in witnessing the deaths of their brethren, they appeared to have grown more cunning. By the time the Mandate cleared the portal, the three had arrived within fifteen li of the River Volga. By switching to a different fire pattern, Muhunnad succeeded in destroying two of them, but the last one managed to evade him until it had come within five li. At that point, bound by the outcome of some ruthless logical decision-making algorithm, the missile opted to detonate rather than risk coming any closer. It must have hoped to inflict fatal damage on us, even at five li.

It very nearly did. I recalled what our pilot had said about there being no such thing as a harmless interstellar culture. The blast inflicted severe damage to our rear shielding and drive assembly, knocking off another two stabilization vanes.

And then we were through, back into the Infrastructure. We had survived our first encounter with another galactic empire.

More were to follow.

* * * * *

In my mind’s eye, I have an image of a solitary tree, bare of leaves, so that its branching structure is laid open for inspection. The point where each branch diverges from a larger limb is a moment of historical crisis, where the course of world events is poised to swerve onto one of two tracks.

Before his death, our founder spoke of having brought a single law to the six directions of space, words that have a deep resonance for all Mongols, as if it was our birthright to command the fundamental fabric of reality itself. They were prescient words, too, for the bringing of unity to Greater Mongolia, let alone the first faltering steps toward the Expansion, had barely begun. Fifty-four years after his burial, our fleet conquered the islands of Japan, extending the empire as far east as it was possible to go. But the day after our fleet landed, a terrible storm battered the harbors of those islands, one that would surely have repelled or destroyed our invasion fleet had it still been at sea. At the time, it was considered a great good fortune; a sure sign that Heaven had ordained this invasion by delaying that storm. Yet who is to say what would have become of Japan, had it not fallen under Mongol authority? By the same token, who is to say what would have become of our empire if its confident expansion had been checked by the loss of that fleet? We might not have taken Vienna and the cities of western Europe, and then the great continents on the other side of the ocean.

I thought of Muhunnad’s Shining Caliphate. The common view is that the Islamists were monotheistic savages until swept under the tide of the Mongol enlightenment. But I am mindful that history is always written by the victors. We regard our founder as a man of wisdom and learning first and a warrior second, a man who was respectful of literacy, was curious about the sciences, and possessed a keen thirst for philosophical inquiry. Might the conquered have viewed him differently, I wonder? Especially if our empire fell, and we were not there to gilden his name?

No matter; all that need concern us is that solitary tree, that multiplicity of branches, reaching ever upward. After the moment of crisis, the point of bifurcation, there should be no further contact between one branch and the next. In one branch, the Mongols take the world. In another, the Islamists. In another, some obscure sect of Christians. In another, much older branch, none of these empires ever become a gleam in history’s eye. In an even older one, the lemurs are masters of Creation, not some hairless monkey.

But what matters is that all these empires eventually find the Infrastructure. In some way that I cannot quite grasp, and perhaps will never truly understand, the khorkoi machinery exists across all those branches. Not simply as multiple copies of the same Infrastructure, but as a single entity that in some way permits the reunification of those branches: as if, having grown apart, they begin to knot back together again.

I do not think this is intentional. If it were, the leaky nature of the Infrastructure would have been apparent to us five hundred years ago. It seems more likely to me that it is growing leaky; that some kind of insulation is beginning to wear away, an insulation that prevents history short-circuiting itself, as it were.

But perhaps I am wrong to second-guess the motives of aliens whose minds we will never know. Perhaps all of this is unfolding according to some inscrutable and deliriously protracted scheme of our unwitting wormlike benefactors. I do not think we will ever know.

* * * * *

I shall spare you the details of all the encounters that followed, as we slipped from one point of weakness to another, always hoping that the next transition would be the one that brought us back to Mongol space, or at least into an empire we could do business with. By the time of our eighth or ninth transition, I think, Qilian would have been quite overjoyed to find himself a guest of the Shining Caliphate. I think he would have even settled for a humbling return to the Christians: by the time we had scuttled away from empires as strange, or as brazenly hostile, as those of the Fish People or the Thin Men, the Christians had come to seem like very approachable fellows indeed.

But it was not to be. And when we dared to imagine that we had seen the worst that the branching tree of historical possibilities could offer, that we had done well not to stray into the dominion of the lemurs, that Heaven must yet be ordaining our adventure, we had the glorious misfortune to fall into the realm of the Smiling Ones.

They came hard and fast, and did not trifle with negotiation. Their clawlike green ships moved without thrust, cutting through space as if space itself was a kind of fluid they could swim against. Their beam weapons etched glimmering lines of violet across the void, despite the fact that they were being deployed in hard vacuum. They cut into us like scythes. I knew then that they could have killed us in a flash, but that they preferred to wound, to maim, to toy.

The River Volga twisted like an animal in agony, and then there was a gap in my thoughts wide enough for a lifetime.

* * * * *

The first thing that flashed through my mind after I returned to consciousness was frank amazement that we were still alive; that the ship had not burst open like a ripe fruit and spilled us all into vacuum. The second thing was that, given the proximity of the attacking vehicles, our stay of execution was unlikely to be long. I did not need the evidence of readouts to tell me that the River Volga had been mortally wounded. The lights were out, artificial gravity had failed, and in place of the normal hiss and chug of her air recirculators, there was an ominous silence, broken only by the occasional creak of some stressed structural member, cooling down after being heated close to boiling point.

“Commander Qilian?” I called, into the echoing darkness.

No immediate answer was forthcoming. But no sooner had I spoken than an emergency system kicked in and supplied dim illumination to the cabin, traced in the wavery lines of fluorescent strips stapled to walls and bulkheads. I could still not hear generators or the other sounds of routine shipboard operation, so I presumed the lights were drawing on stored battery power. Cautiously, I released my restraints and floated free of my chair. I felt vulnerable, but if we were attacked again, it would make no difference whether I was secured or not.

“Yellow Dog,” a voice called, from further up the cabin. It was Qilian, sounding groggy but otherwise sound. “I blacked out. How long was I under?”

“Not long, sir. It can’t have been more than a minute since they hit us.” I started pulling myself toward him, propelling myself with a combination of vigorous air-swimming and the use of the straps and handholds attached to the walls for emergency use. “Are you all right, sir?”

“I think—” Then he grunted, not loudly, but enough to let me know that he was in considerable pain. “Arm’s broken. Wasn’t quite secure when it happened.”

He was floating with his knees tucked high, inspecting the damage to his right arm. In the scarlet backup lighting, little droplets of blood, pulled spherical by surface tension, were pale, colorless marbles. He had made light of the injury but it was worse than I had been expecting, a compound fracture of the radius bone, with a sharp white piece glaring out from his skin. The bleeding was abating, but the pain must have been excruciating. And yet Qilian caressed the skin around the wound as if it was no more irritating than a mild rash.

I paddled around until I found the medical kit. I offered to help Qilian apply the splint and dressing, but he waved aside my assistance save for when it came time to cut the bandage. The River Volga continued to creak and groan around us, like some awesome monster in the throes of a nightmare.

“Have you see the others?”

“Uugan, Jura, and Batbayar must still be at their stations in the midship section.”

“And the pilot?”

I had only glanced at Muhunnad while I searched for the medical kit, but what I had seen had not encouraged me. He had suffered no visible injuries, but it was clear from his extreme immobility, and lack of response as I drifted by him, that all was not well. His eyes were open but apparently unseeing, fixated on a blank piece of wall above the couch.

“I don’t know, sir. It may not be good.”

“If he’s dead, we’re not going to be able to cut back into the Infrastructure.”

I saw no point in reminding Qilian that, with the ship in its present state, Muhunnad’s condition would make no difference. “It could be that he’s just knocked out, or that there’s a fault with his interface harness,” I said, not really believing it myself.

“I don’t know what happened to us just before I blacked out. Did you feel the ship twist around the way I did?”

I nodded. “Muhunnad must have lost attitude control.”

Qilian finished with his dressing, inspecting the arm with a look of quiet satisfaction. “I am going to check on the others. See what you can do with the pilot, Yellow Dog.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

He pushed off with his good arm, steering an expert course through the narrow throat of the bridge connecting door. I wondered what he hoped to do if the technical staff were dead, or injured, or otherwise incapable of assisting the damaged ship. I sensed that Qilian preferred not to look death in the eye until it was almost upon him.

Forcing my mind to the matter at hand, I moved to the reclined couch that held Muhunnad. I positioned myself next to him, anchoring in place with a foothold.

I examined the harness, checking the various connectors and status readouts, and could find no obvious break or weakness in the system. That did not mean that there was not an invisible fault, of course. Equally, if a power surge had happened, it might well have fried his nervous system from the inside out with little sign of external injury. We had built safeguards into the design to prevent that kind of thing, but I had never deceived myself that they were foolproof.

“I’m sorry, Muhunnad,” I said quietly. “You did well to bring us this far. No matter what you might think of me, I wanted you to make it back to your own people.”

Miraculously, his lips moved. He shaped a word with a mere ghost of breath. “Ariunaa?”

I took hold of his gloved hand, squeezing it as much as the harness allowed. “I’m here. Right by you.”

“I cannot see anything,” he answered, speaking very slowly. “Before, I could see everything around me, as well as the sensory information reaching me from the ship’s cameras. Now I only have the cameras, and I am not certain that I am seeing anything meaningful through them. Sometimes I get flashes, as if something is working ... but most of the time, it is like looking through fog.”

“Are you sure you can’t make some sense of the camera data?” I asked. “We only have to pass through the Infrastructure portal.”

“That would be like threading the eye of a needle from halfway around the world, Ariunaa. Besides, I think we are paralyzed. I have tried firing the steering motors, but I have received no confirmation that anything has actually happened. Have you felt the ship move?”

I thought back to all that had happened since the attack. “In the last few minutes? Nothing at all.”

“Then it must be presumed that we are truly adrift and that the control linkages have been severed.” He paused. “I am sorry; I wish the news was better.”

“Then we need help,” I said. “Are you sure there’s nothing else out there? The last time we saw it, the Mandate of Heaven was still in one piece. If she could rendezvous with us, she might be able to carry us all to the portal.”

After a moment, he said: “There is something, an object in my vicinity, about one hundred and twenty It out, but I only sense it intermittently. I would have mentioned it sooner, but I did not wish to raise your hopes.”

Whatever he intended, my hopes were rising now. “Could it be the Mandate?”

“It is something like the right size, and in something like the right position.”

“We need to find a way to signal it, to get it to come in closer. At the moment, they have no reason to assume that any of us are alive.”

“If I signal it, then the enemy will also know that some of us are still alive,” Muhunnad answered. “I am afraid I do not have enough directional control to establish a tight-beam lock. I am not even certain I can broadcast an omnidirectional transmission.”

“Broadcast what?” Qilian asked, drifting into the bridge.

I wheeled around to face him; I had not been expecting him to return so quickly. “Muhunnad says there’s a good chance the Mandate of Heaven is nearby. Since we don’t seem to able to move, she’s our only chance of getting out of here.”

“Is she intact?”

“No way to tell. There’s definitely something out there that matches her signature. Problem is, Muhunnad isn’t confident that we can signal her without letting the enemy know we’re still around.”

“It won’t make any difference to the enemy. They’ll be coming in to finish us off no matter what we do. Send the signal.”

After a moment, Muhunnad said: “It’s done. But I do not know if any actual transmission has taken place. The only thing I can do is monitor the Mandate and see if she responds. If she has picked up our signal, then we should not have long to wait. A minute, maybe two. If we have seen nothing after that time, I believe we may safely assume the worst.”

We waited a minute, easily the longest in my life, then another. After a third, there was still no change in the faint presence Muhunnad was seeing. “I am more certain than ever that it is the Mandate” he informed us. “The signature has improved; it matches very well, with no sign of damage. She is holding at one hundred and twenty li. But she is not hearing us.”

“Then we need another way of signaling her,” I said. “Maybe if we ejected some air into space ...”

“Too ambiguous,” Qilian countered. “Air might vent simply because the ship was breaking up, long after we were all dead. It could easily encourage them to abandon us completely. What do we need this ship for in any case? We may as well eject the lifeboats. The Mandate of Heaven can collect them individually.”

After a instant of reflection, Muhunnad said: “I think the commander is correct. There is nothing to be gained by staying aboard now. At the very least, the lifeboats will require the enemy to pursue multiple targets.”

There were six lifeboats, one for each of us.

“Let’s go,” Qilian replied.

“I’ll see you at the lifeboats,” I said. “I have to help Muhunnad out of the harness first.”

Qilian looked at me for a moment, some dark calculation working itself out behind his eyes. He nodded once. “Be quick about it, Yellow Dog. But we don’t want to lose him. He’s still a valued asset.”

With renewed strength, I hauled the both of us through the echoing labyrinth of the ship, to the section that contained the lifeboats. It was clear that the attack had wrought considerable damage on this part of the ship, buckling wall and floor plates, constricting passageways, and jamming bulkhead doors tight into their frames. We had to detour halfway to the rear before we found a clear route back to the boats. Yet although we were ready to don suits if necessary, we never encountered any loss of pressure. Sandwiched between layers of the River Volga’s outer hull was a kind of foam that was designed to expand and harden upon exposure to vacuum, quickly sealing any leaks before they presented a threat to the crew. From the outside, that bulging and hardening foam would have resembled a mass of swollen dough erupting through cracks in the hull.

There were six lifeboats, accessed through six armored doorways, each of which was surmounted with a panel engraved with both operating instructions and stern warnings concerning the penalties for improper use. Qilian was floating at the far end, next to the open doorway of the sixth boat. I had to look at him for a long, bewildered moment before I quite realized what I was seeing. I wondered if it was a trick of my eyes, occasioned by the gloomy lighting. But I had made no mistake. Next to Qilian, floating in states of deceptive repose, were the bodies of Jura and Batbayar. A little further away, as if he had been surprised and killed on his own, was Uugan. They had all been stabbed and gashed: knife wounds to the chest and throat, in all three instances. Blood was still oozing out of them.

In his good hand, Qilian held a bloody knife, wet and slick to the hilt.

“I am sorry,” he said, as if all that situation needed was a reasonable explanation. “But only one of these six boats is functional.”

I stared in numb disbelief. “How can only one be working?”

“The other five are obstructed; they can’t leave because there is damage to their launch hatches. This is the only one with a clear shaft all the way to space.” Qilian wiped the flat of the blade against his forearm. “Of course, I wish you the best of luck in proving me wrong. But I am afraid I will not be around to witness your efforts.”

“You fucking—” I began, before trailing off. I knew if I called him a coward he would simply laugh at me, and I had no intention of giving him even the tiniest of moral victories. “Just go,” I said.

He drew himself into the lifeboat. I expected some last word from him, some mocking reproach or grandiloquent burst of self-justifying rhetoric. But there was nothing. The door clunked shut with a gasp of compressed air. There was a moment of silence and stillness and then the boat launched itself away from the ship on a rapid stutter of electromagnetic pulses.

I felt the entire hull budge sideways in recoil. He was gone. For several seconds, all I could do was breathe; I could think of nothing useful or constructive to say to Muhunnad, nothing beyond stating the obvious hopelessness of our predicament.

But instead, Muhunnad said quietly: “We are not going to die.”

At first, I did not quite understand his words. “I’m sorry?”

He spoke with greater emphasis this time. “We are going to live, but only if you listen to me very, very carefully. You must return me to the couch with all haste.”

I shook my head. “It’s no good, Muhunnad. It’s all over.”

“No, it is not. The River Volga is not dead. I only made it seem this way.”

I frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“There isn’t time to explain here. Get me back to the bridge, get me connected back to the harness, then I will tell you. But make haste! We really do not have very much time. The enemy are much nearer than you think.”

“The enemy?”

“There is no Mandate of Heaven. Either she scuttled back to the portal, or she was destroyed during the same attack that damaged us.”

“But you said ...”

“I lied. Now help me move!”

Not for the first time that day, I did precisely as I was told.

Having already plotted a route around the obstructions, it did not take anywhere near as long to return to the bridge as it had taken to reach the lifeboats. Once there, I buckled him into the couch—he was beginning to retain some limb control, but not enough to help me with the task—and set about reconnecting the harness systems, trusting myself not to make a mistake. My fingers fumbled on the ends of my hands, as if they were a thousand li away.

“Start talking to me, Muhunnad,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on. Why did you lie about the Mandate!”

“Because I knew the effect that lie would have on Qilian. I wished to give him a reason to leave the ship. I had seen the kind of man he was. I knew that he would save himself, even if it meant the rest of us dying.”

“I still don’t understand. What good has it done us? The damage to the ship ...” I completed the final connection. Muhunnad stiffened as the harness took hold of his nervous system, but did not appear to be in any obvious discomfort. “Are you all right?” I asked warily.

“This will take a moment. I had to put the ship into a deep shutdown, to convince Qilian. I must bring her back system by system, so as not to risk an overload.”

The evidence of his work was already apparent. The bridge lights returned to normal illumination, while those readouts and displays that had remained active were joined by others that had fallen into darkness. I held my breath, expecting the whole ensemble to shut back down again at any moment. But I should have known better than to doubt Muhunnad’s ability. The systems remained stable, even as they cycled through startup and crash recovery routines. The air circulators resumed their dull but reassuring chug.

“I shall dispense with artificial gravity until we are safely under way, if that is satisfactory with you.”

“Whatever it takes,” I said.

His eyes, still wide open, quivered in their sockets. “I am sweeping local space,” he reported. “There was some real damage to the sensors, but nowhere as bad as I made out. I can see Qilian’s lifeboat. He made an excellent departure.” Then he swallowed. “I can also see the enemy. Three of their ships will shortly be within attack range. I must risk restarting the engines without a proper initialization test.”

“Again, whatever it takes.”

“Perhaps you would like to brace yourself. There may be a degree of undamped acceleration.”

Muhunnad had been right to warn me, and even then it came harder and sooner than I had been expecting. Although I had managed to secure myself to a handhold, I was nearly wrenched away with the abruptness of our departure. I felt acceleration rising smoothly, until it was suppressed by the dampeners. My arm was sore from the jolt, as if it had been almost pulled from its socket.

“That is all I can do for us now,” Muhunnad said. “Running is our only effective strategy, unfortunately. Our weapons would prove totally ineffective against the enemy, even if we could get close enough to fire before they turned their own guns on us. But running will suffice. At least we have the mass of one less lifeboat to consider.”

“I still don’t quite get what happened. How did you know there’d still be one lifeboat that was still working? From what I saw, we came very close to losing all of them.”

“We did,” he said, with something like pride in his voice. “But not quite, you see. That was my doing, Ariunaa. Before the instant of the attack, I adjusted the angle of orientation of our hull. I made sure that the energy beam took out five of the six lifeboat launch hatches, and no more. Think of a knife fighter, twisting to allow part of his body to be cut rather than another.”

I stared at him in amazement, forgetting the pain in my arm from the sudden onset of acceleration. I recalled what Qilian had said, his puzzlement about the ship twisting at the onset of the attack. “You mean you had all this planned, before they even attacked us?”

“I evaluated strategies for disposing of our mutual friend, while retaining the ship. This seemed the one most likely to succeed.”

“I am ... impressed.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Of course, it would have been easier if I had remained in the harness, so that we could move immediately once the pod had departed. But I think Qilian would have grown suspicious if I had not shown every intention of wanting to escape with him.”

“You’re right. It was the only way to convince him.”

“And now there is only one more matter that needs to be brought to your attention. It is still possible to speak to him. It can be arranged with trivial ease: despite what I said earlier, I am perfectly capable of locking on a tight beam.”

“He’ll have no idea what’s happened, will he? He’ll still think he’s got away with it. He’s expecting to be rescued by the Mandate of Heaven at any moment.”

“Eventually, the nature of his predicament will become apparent. But by then, he is likely to have come to the attention of the Smiling Ones.”

I thought of the few things Muhunnad had told us about our adversaries. “What will they do to him? Shoot him out of the sky?”

“Not if they sense a chance to take him captive with minimal losses on their own side. I would suggest that an unpowered lifeboat would present exactly such an opportunity.”

“And then?”

“He will die. But not immediately. Like the Shining Caliphate and the Mongol Expansion, the Smiling Ones have an insatiable appetite for information. They will have found others of his kind before, just as they have found others of mine. But I am sure Qilian will still provide them with much amusement.”

“And then?” I repeated.

“An appetite of another kind will come into play. The Smiling Ones are cold-blooded creatures. Reptiles. They consider the likes of us-the warm, the mammalian-to be a kind of affront. As well they might, I suppose. All those millions of years ago, we ate their eggs.”

I absorbed what he said, thinking of Qilian falling to his destiny, unaware for now of the grave mistake he had made. Part of me was inclined to show clemency: not by rescuing him, which would place us dangerously close to the enemy, but by firing on him, so that he might be spared an encounter with the Smiling Ones.

But it was not a large part.

“Time to portal, Muhunnad?”

“Six minutes, on our present heading. Do you wish to review my intentions?”

“No,” I said, after a moment. “I trust you to do the best possible job. You think we’ll make it into the Infrastructure without falling to pieces?”

“If Allah is willing. But you understand that our chances of returning to home are now very slim, Yellow Dog? Despite my subterfuge, this ship is damaged. It will not survive many more transitions.”

“Then we’ll just have to make the best of wherever we end up,” I said.

“It will not feel like home to either of us,” he replied, his tone gently warning, as if I needed reminding of that.

“But if there are people out there ... I mean, instead of egg-laying monsters, or sweet-looking devils with tails, then it’ll be better than nothing, won’t it? People are people. If the Infrastructure is truly breaking down, allowing all these timelines to bleed into one another, than we are all going to have get along with each other sooner or later, no matter what we all did to each other in our various histories. We’re all going to have to put the past behind us.”

“It will not be easy,” he acknowledged. “But if two people as unalike as you and I can become friends, then perhaps there is hope. Perhaps we could even become an example to others. We shall have to see, shan’t we?”

“We shall have to see,” I echoed.

I held Muhunnad’s hand as we raced toward the portal, and whatever Heaven had in store for us on the other side.

The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter

This story, from Interzone issue 209, has been shortlisted for the 2007 BSFA Award

### ###

She stopped in sight of Twenty Arch Bridge, laying down her bags to rest her hands from the weight of two hogs’ heads and forty pence worth of beeswax candles. While she paused, Kathrin adjusted the drawstring on her hat, tilting the brim to shade her forehead from the sun. Though the air was still cool, there was a fierce new quality to the light that brought out her freckles.

Kathrin moved to continue, but a tightness in her throat made her hesitate. She had been keeping the bridge from her thoughts until this moment, but now the fact of it could not be ignored. Unless she crossed it she would face the long trudge to New Bridge, a diversion that would keep her on the road until long after sunset.

‘Sledge-maker’s daughter!’ called a rough voice from across the road.

Kathrin turned sharply at the sound. An aproned man stood in a doorway, smearing his hands dry. He had a monkeylike face, tanned a deep liverish red, with white sideboards and a gleaming pink tonsure.

‘Brendan Lynch’s daughter, isn’t it?’

She nodded meekly, but bit her lip rather than answer.

‘Thought so. Hardly one to forget a pretty face, me.’ The man beckoned her to the doorway of his shop. ‘Come here, lass. I’ve something for your father.’

‘Sir?’

‘I was hoping to visit him last week, but work kept me here.’ He cocked his head at the painted wooden trademark hanging above the doorway. ‘Peter Rigby, the wheelwright. Kathrin, isn’t it?’

‘I need to be getting along, sir’K’

‘And your father needs good wood, of which I’ve plenty. Come inside for a moment, instead of standing there like a starved thing.’ He called over his shoulder, telling his wife to put the water on the fire.

Reluctantly Kathrin gathered her bags and followed Peter into his workshop. She blinked against the dusty air and removed her hat. Sawdust carpeted the floor, fine and golden in places, crisp and coiled in others, while a heady concoction of resins and glues filled the air. Pots simmered on fires. Wood was being steamed into curves, or straightened where it was curved. Many sharp tools gleamed on one wall, some of them fashioned with blades of skydrift. Wheels, mostly awaiting spokes or iron tyres, rested against another. Had the wheels been sledges, it could have been her father’s workshop, when he had been busier.

Peter showed Kathrin to an empty stool next to one of his benches. ‘Sit down here and take the weight off your feet. Mary can make you some bread and cheese. Or bread and ham if you’d rather.’

‘That’s kind sir, but Widow Grayling normally gives me something to eat, when I reach her house.’

Peter raised a white eyebrow. He stood by the bench with his thumbs tucked into the belt of his apron, his belly jutting out as if he was quietly proud of it. ‘I didn’t know you visited the witch.’

‘She will have her two hogs’ heads, once a month, and her candles. She only buys them from the Shield, not the Town. She pays for the hogs a year in advance, twenty four whole pounds.’

‘And you’re not scared by her?’

‘I’ve no cause to be.’

‘There’s some that would disagree with you.’

Remembering something her father had told her, Kathrin said, ‘There are folk who say the sheriff can fly, or that there was once a bridge that winked at travellers like an eye, or a road of iron that reached all the way to London. My father says there’s no reason for anyone to be scared of Widow Grayling.’

‘Not afraid she’ll turn you into a toad, then?’

‘She cures people, not put spells on them.’

‘When she’s in the mood for it. From what I’ve heard she’s just as likely to turn the sick and needy away.’

‘If she helps some people, isn’t that better than nothing at all?’

‘I suppose.’ She could tell Peter didn’t agree, but he wasn’t cross with her for arguing. ‘What does your father make of you visiting the witch, anyway?’

‘He doesn’t mind.’

‘No?’ Peter asked, interestedly.

‘When he was small, my dad cut his arm on a piece of skydrift that he found in the snow. He went to Widow Grayling and she made his arm better again by tying an eel around it. She didn’t take any payment except the skydrift.’

‘Does your father still believe an eel can heal a wound?’

‘He says he’ll believe anything if it gets the job done.’

‘Wise man, that Brendan, a man after my own heart. Which reminds me.’ Peter ambled to another bench, pausing to stir one of his bubbling pots before gathering a bundle of sawn-off wooden sticks. He set them down in front of Kathrin on a scrap of cloth. ‘Off cuts,’ he explained. ‘But good seasoned beech, which’ll never warp. No use to me, but I am sure your father will find use for them. Tell him that there’s more, if he wishes to collect it.’

‘I haven’t got any money for wood.’

‘I’d take none. Your father was always generous to me, when I was going through lean times.’ Peter scratched behind his ear. ‘Only fair, the way I see it.’

‘Thank you,’ Kathrin said doubtfully. ‘But I don’t think I can carry the wood all the way home.’

‘Not with two hogs’ heads as well. But you can drop by when you’ve given the heads to Widow Grayling.’

‘Only I won’t be coming back over the river,’ Kathrin said. ‘After I’ve crossed Twenty Arch Bridge, I’ll go back along the south quayside and take the ferry at Jarrow.’

Peter looked puzzled. ‘Why line the ferryman’s pocket when you can cross the bridge for nowt?’

Kathrin shrugged easily. ‘I’ve got to visit someone on the Jarrow road, to settle an account.’

‘Then you’d better take the wood now, I suppose,’ Peter said.

Mary bustled in, carrying a small wooden tray laden with bread and ham. She was as plump and red as her husband, only shorter. Picking up the entire gist of the conversation in an instant, she said, ‘Don’t be an oaf, Peter. The girl cannot carry all that wood and her bags. If she will not come back this way, she must pass a message on to her father. Tell him that there’s wood here if he wants it.’ She shook her head sympathetically at Kathrin. ‘What does he think you are, a pack mule?’

‘I’ll tell my father about the wood,’ she said.

‘Seasoned beech,’ Peter said emphatic’?ally. ‘Remember that.’

‘I will.’

Mary encouraged her to take some of the bread and meat, despite Kathrin again mentioning that she expected to be fed at Widow Grayling’s. ‘Take it anyway,’ Mary said. ‘You never know how hungry you might get on the way home. Are you sure about not coming back this way?’

‘I’d best not,’ Kathrin said.

After an awkward lull, Peter said, ‘There is something else I meant to tell your father. Could you let him know that I’ve no need of a new sledge this year, after all?’

‘Peter,’ Mary said. ‘You promised.’

‘I said that I should probably need one. I was wrong in that.’ Peter looked exasperated. ‘The fault lies in Brendan, not me! If he did not make such good and solid sledges, then perhaps I should need another by now.’

‘I shall tell him,’ Kathrin said.

‘Is your father keeping busy?’ Mary asked.

‘Aye,’ Kathrin answered, hoping the wheelwright’s wife wouldn’t push her on the point.

‘Of course he will still be busy,’ Peter said, helping himself to some of the bread. ‘People don’t stop needing sledges, just because the Great Winter loosens its hold on us. Any more than they stopped needing wheels when the winter was at its coldest. It’s still cold for half the year!’

Kathrin opened her mouth to speak. She meant to tell Peter that he could pass the message onto her father directly, for he was working not five minutes walk from the wheelwright’s shop. Peter clearly had no knowledge that her father had left the village, leaving his workshop empty during these warming months. But she realised that her father would be ashamed if the wheelwright were to learn of his present trade. It was best that nothing be said.

‘Kathrin?’ Peter asked.

‘I should be getting on. Thank you for the food, and the offer of the wood.’

‘You pass our regards on to your father,’ Mary said.

‘I shall.’

‘God go with you. Watch out for the jangling men.’

‘I will,’ Kathrin replied, because that was what you were supposed to say.

‘Before you go,’ Peter said suddenly, as if a point had just occurred to him. ‘Let me tell you something. You say there are people who believe the sheriff can fly, as if that was a foolish thing, like the iron road and the winking bridge. I cannot speak of the other things, but when I was boy I met someone who had seen the sheriff’s flying machine. My grandfather often spoke of it. A whirling thing, like a windmill made of tin. He had seen it when he was a boy, carrying the sheriff and his men above the land faster than any bird.’

‘If the sheriff could fly then, why does he need a horse and carriage now?’

‘Because the flying machine crashed down to Earth, and no tradesman could persuade it to fly again. It was a thing of the old world, before the Great Winter. Perhaps the winking bridge and the iron road were also things of the old world. We mock too easily, as if we understood everything of our world where our forebears understood nothing.’

‘But if I should believe in certain things,’ Kathrin said, ‘should I not also believe in others? If the sheriff can fly, then can a jangling man not steal me from my bed at night?’

‘The jangling men are a story to stop children misbehaving,’ Peter said witheringly. ‘How old are you now?’

‘Sixteen,’ Kathrin answered.

‘I am speaking of something that was seen, in daylight, not made up to frighten bairns.’

‘But people say they have seen jangling men. They have seen men made of tin and gears, like the inside of a clock.’

‘Some people were frightened too much when they were small,’ Peter said, with a dismissive shake. ‘No more than that. But the sheriff is real, and he was once able to fly. That’s God’s truth.’

###

Her hands were hurting again by the time she reached Twenty Arch Bridge. She tugged down the sleeves of her sweater, using them as mittens. Rooks and jackdaws wheeled and cawed overhead. Seagulls feasted on waste floating in the narrow races between the bridge’s feet, or pecked at vile leavings on the road that had been missed by the night soil gatherers. A boy laughed as Kathrin nearly tripped on the labyrinth of crisscrossing ruts that had been etched by years of wagon wheels entering and leaving the bridge. She hissed a curse back at the boy, but now the wagons served her purpose. She skulked near a doorway until a heavy cart came rumbling along, top-heavy with beer barrels from the Blue Star Brewery, drawn by four snorting dray-horses, a bored-looking drayman at the reins, huddled down so deep into his leather coat that it seemed as if the Great Winter still had its icy hand on the country.

Kathrin started walking as the cart lumbered past her, using it as a screen. Between the stacked beer barrels she could see the top level of the scaffolding that was shoring up the other side of the arch, visible since no house or parapet stood on that part of the bridge. A dozen or so workers ‘ including a couple of aproned foremen ‘ were standing on the scaffolding, looking down at the work going on below. Some of them had plumb lines; one of them even had a little black rod that shone a fierce red spot wherever he wanted something moved. Of Garret, the reason she wished to cross the bridge only once if she could help it, there was nothing to be seen. Kathrin hoped that he was under the side of the bridge, hectoring the workers. She felt sure that her father was down there too, being told what to do and biting his tongue against answering back. He put up with being shouted at, he put up with being forced to treat wood with crude disrespect, because it was all he could do to earn enough money to feed and shelter himself and his daughter. And he never, ever, looked Garret Kinnear in the eye.

Kathrin felt her mood easing as the dray ambled across the bridge, nearing the slight rise over the narrow middle arches. The repair work, where Garret was most likely to be, was now well behind her. She judged her progress by the passage of alehouses. She had passed the newly painted Bridge Inn and the shuttered gloom of the Lord’s Confessor. Fiddle music spilled from the open doorway of the Dancing Panda: an old folksong with nonsense lyrics about sickly sausage rolls.

Ahead lay the Winged Man, its sign containing a strange painting of a foreboding figure rising from a hilltop. If she passed the Winged Man, she felt she would be safe.

Then the dray hit a jutting cobblestone and the rightmost front wheel snapped free of its axle. The wheel wobbled off on its own. The cart tipped to the side, spilling beer barrels onto the ground. Kathrin stepped nimbly aside as one of the barrels ruptured and sent its fizzing, piss-coloured contents across the roadway. The horses snorted and strained. The drayman spat out a greasy wad of chewing tobacco and started down from his chair, his face a mask of impassive resignation, as if this was the kind of thing that could be expected to happen once a day. Kathrin heard him whisper something in the ear of one of the horses, in beast-tongue, which calmed the animal.

Kathrin knew that she had no choice but to continue. Yet she had no sooner resumed her pace ‘ moving faster now, the bags swaying awkwardly, than she saw Garret Kinnear. He was just stepping out of the Winged Man’s doorway.

He smiled. ‘You in a hurry or something?’

Kathrin tightened her grip on the bags, as if she was going to use them as weapons. She decided not to say anything, not to openly acknowledge his presence, even though their eyes had met for an electric instant.

‘Getting to be a big strong girl now, Kathrin Lynch.’

She carried on walking, each step taking an eternity. How foolish she had been, to take Twenty Arch Bridge when it would only have cost her another hour to take the further crossing. She should not have allowed Peter to delay her with his good intentions.

‘You want some help with them bags of yours?’

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him move out of the doorway, tugging his mud-stained trousers higher onto his hip. Garret Kinnear was snake thin, all skin and bone, but much stronger than he looked. He wiped a hand across his sharp beardless chin. He had long black hair, the greasy grey colour of dishwater.

‘Go away,’ she hissed, hating herself in the same instant.

‘Just making conversation,’ he said.

Kathrin quickened her pace, glancing nervously around. All of a sudden the bridge appeared deserted. The shops and houses she had yet to pass were all shuttered and silent. There was still a commotion going on by the dray, but no one there was paying any attention to what was happening further along the bridge.

‘Leave me alone,’ Kathrin said.

He was walking almost alongside her now, between Kathrin and the road. ‘Now what kind of way to talk is that, Kathrin Lynch? Especially after my offer to help you with them bags. What have you got in them, anyways?’

‘Nothing that’s any business of yours.’

‘I could be the judge of that.’ Before she could do anything, he’d snatched the bag from her left hand. He peered into its dark depths, frowning. ‘You came all the way from Jarrow Ferry with this?’

‘Give me back the bag.’

She reached for the bag, tried to grab it back, but he held it out of her reach, grinning cruelly.

‘That’s mine.’

‘How much would a pig’s head be worth?’

‘You tell me. There’s only one pig around here.’

They’d passed the mill next to the Winged Man. There was a gap between the mill and the six-storey house next to it, where some improbably narrow property must once have existed. Garret turned down the alley, still carrying Kathrin’s bag. He reached the parapet at the edge of the bridge and looked over the side. He rummaged in the bag and drew out the pig’s head. Kathrin hesitated at the entrance to the narrow alley, watching as Garret held the head out over the roiling water.

‘You can have your pig back. Just come a wee bit closer.’

‘So you can do what you did last time?’

‘I don’t remember any complaints.’ He let the head fall, then caught it again, Kathrin’s heart in her throat.

‘You know I couldn’t complain.’

‘Not much to ask for a pig’s head, is it?’ With his free hand, he fumbled open his trousers, tugging out the pale worm of his cock. ‘You did it before, and it didn’t kill you. Why not now? I won’t trouble you again.’

She watched his cock stiffen. ‘You said that last time.’

‘Aye, but this time I mean it. Come over here, Kathrin. Be a good girl now and you’ll have your pig back.’

Kathrin looked back over her shoulder. No one was going to disturb them. The dray had blocked all the traffic behind it, and nothing was coming over the bridge from the south.

‘Please,’ she said.

‘Just this once,’ Garret said. ‘And make your mind up fast, girl. This pig’s getting awfully heavy in my hand.’

###

Kathrin stood in the widow’s candlelit kitchen ‘ it only had one tiny, dusty window—while the old woman turned her bent back to attend to the coals burning in her black metal stove. She poked and prodded the fire until it hissed back like a cat. ‘You came all the way from Jarrow Ferry?’ she asked.

‘Aye,’ Kathrin said. The room smelled smoky.

‘That’s too far for anyone, let alone a sixteen year old lass. I should have a word with your father. I heard he was working on Twenty Arch Bridge.’

Kathrin shifted uncomfortably. ‘I don’t mind walking. The weather’s all right.’

‘So they say. All the same, the evenings are still cold, and there are types about you wouldn’t care to meet on your own, miles from Jarrow.’

‘I’ll be back before it gets dark,’ Kathrin said, with more optimism than she felt. Not if she went out of her way to avoid Garret Kinnear she wouldn’t. He knew the route she’d normally take back home, and the alternatives would mean a much longer journey.

‘You sure about that?’

‘I have no one else to visit. I can start home now.’ Kathrin offered her one remaining bag, as Widow Grayling turned from the fire, brushing her hands on her apron.

‘Put it on the table, will you?’

Kathrin put the bag down. ‘One pig’s head, and twenty candles, just as you wanted,’ she said brightly.

Widow Grayling hobbled over to the table, supporting herself with a stick, eyeing Kathrin as she opened the bag and took out the solitary head. She weighed it in her hand then set it down on the table, the head facing Kathrin in such a way that its beady black eyes and smiling snout suggested amused complicity.

‘It’s a good head,’ the widow said. ‘But there were meant to be two of them.’

‘Can you manage with just the one, until I visit again? I’ll have three for you next time.’

‘I’ll manage if I must. Was there a problem with the butcher in the Shield?’

Kathrin had considered feigning ignorance, saying that she did not recall how only one head had come to be in her bags. But she knew Widow Grayling too well for that.

‘Do you mind if I sit down?’

‘Of course.’ The widow hobbled around the table to one of the rickety stools and dragged it out. ‘Are you all right, girl?’

Kathrin lowered herself onto the stool.

‘The other bag was taken from me,’ she answered quietly.

‘By who?’

‘Someone on the bridge.’

‘Children?’

‘A man.’

Widow Grayling nodded slowly, as if Kathrin’s answer had only confirmed some deep-seated suspicion she had harboured for many years. ‘Thomas Kinnear’s boy, was it?’

‘How could you know?’

‘Because I’ve lived long enough to form ready opinions of people. Garret Kinnear is filth. But there’s no one that’ll touch him, because they’re scared of his father. Even the sheriff tugs his forelock to Thomas Kinnear. Did he rape you?’

‘No. But he wanted me to do something nearly as bad.’

‘And did he make you?’

Kathrin looked away. ‘Not this time.’

Widow Grayling closed her eyes. She reached across the table and took one of Kathrin’s hands, squeezing it between her own. ‘When was it?’

‘Three months ago, when there was still snow on the ground. I had to cross the bridge on my own. It was later than usual, and there weren’t any people around. I knew about Garret already, but I’d managed to keep away from him. I thought I was going to be lucky.’ Kathrin turned back to face her companion. ‘He caught me and took me into one of the mills. The wheels were turning, but there was nobody inside except me and Garret. I struggled, but then he put his finger to my lips and told me to shush.’

‘Because of your father.’

‘If I made trouble, if I did not do what he wanted, Garret would tell his father some lie about mine. He would say that he caught him sleeping on the job, or drunk, or stealing nails.’

‘Garret promised you that?’

‘He said, life’s hard enough for a sledge-maker’s daughter when no one wants sledges. He said it would only be harder if my father lost his work.’

‘In that respect he was probably right,’ the widow said resignedly. ‘It was brave of you to hold your silence, Kathrin. But the problem hasn’t gone away, has it? You cannot avoid Garret forever.’

‘I can take the other bridge.’

‘That’ll make no difference, now that he has his eye on you.’

Kathrin looked down at her hands. ‘Then he’s won already.’

‘No, he just thinks that he has.’ Without warning the widow stood from her chair. ‘How long have we known each other, would you say?’

‘Since I was small.’

‘And in all that time, have I come to seem any older to you?’

‘You’ve always seemed the same to me, Widow Grayling.’

‘An old woman. The witch on the hill.’

‘There are good witches and bad witches,’ Kathrin pointed out.

‘And there are mad old women who don’t belong in either category. Wait a moment.’

Widow Grayling stooped under the impossibly low doorway into the next room. Kathrin heard a scrape of wood on wood, as of a drawer being opened. She heard rummaging sounds. Widow Grayling returned with something in her hands, wrapped in red cotton. Whatever it was, she put it down on the table. By the noise it made Kathrin judged that it was an item of some weight and solidity.

‘I was just like you once. I grew up not far from Ferry, in the darkest, coldest years of the Great Winter.’

‘How long ago?’

‘The sheriff then was William the Questioner. You won’t have heard of him.’ Widow Grayling sat down in the same seat she’d been using before and quickly exposed the contents of the red cotton bundle.

Kathrin wasn’t quite sure what she was looking at. There was a thick and unornamented bracelet, made of some dull grey metal like pewter. Next to the ornament was something like the handle of a broken sword: a grip, with a crisscrossed pattern on it, with a curved guard reaching from one end of the hilt to the other. It was fashioned from the same dull grey metal.

‘Pick it up,’ the widow said. ‘Feel it.’

Kathrin reached out tentatively and closed her fingers around the crisscrossed hilt. It felt cold and hard and not quite the right shape for her hand. She lifted it from the table, feeling its weight.

‘What is it, widow?’

‘It’s yours. It’s a thing that has been in my possession for a very long while, but now it must change hands.’

Kathrin didn’t know quite what to say. A gift was a gift, but neither she nor her father would have any use for this ugly broken thing, save for its value to a scrap man.

‘What happened to the sword?’ she asked.

‘There was never a sword. The thing you are holding is the entire object.’

‘Then I don’t understand what it is for.’

‘You shall, in time. I’m about to place a hard burden on your shoulders. I have often thought that you were the right one, but I wished to wait until you were older, stronger. But what has happened today cannot be ignored. I am old and weakening. It would be a mistake to wait another year.’

‘I still don’t understand.’

‘Take the bracelet. Put it on your wrist.’

Kathrin did as she was told. The bracelet opened on a heavy hinge, like a manacle. When she locked it together, the join was nearly invisible. It was a cunning thing, to be sure. But it still felt as heavy and dead and useless as the broken sword.

Kathrin tried to keep a composed face, all the while suspecting that the widow was as mad as people had always said.

‘Thank you,’ she said, with as much sincerity as she could muster.

‘Now listen to what I have to say. You walked across the bridge today. Doubtless you passed the inn known as the Winged Man.’

‘It was where Garret caught up with me.’

‘Did it ever occur to you to wonder where the name of the tavern comes from?’

‘My dad told me once. He said the tavern was named after a metal statue that used to stand on a hill to the south, on the Durham road.’

‘And did your father explain the origin of this statue?’

‘He said some people reckoned it had been up there since before the Great Winter. Other people said an old sheriff had put it up. Some other people’K’ But Kathrin trailed off.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s silly, but they said a real Winged Man had come down, out of the sky.’

‘And did your father place any credence in that story?’

‘Not really,’ Kathrin said.

‘He was right not to. The statue was indeed older than the Great Winter, when they tore it down. It was not put up to honour the sheriff, or commemorate the arrival of a Winged Man.’ Now the widow looked at her intently. ‘But a Winged Man did come down. I know what happened, Kathrin: I saw the statue with my own eyes, before the Winged Man fell. I was there.’

Kathrin shifted. She was growing uncomfortable in the widow’s presence.

‘My dad said people reckoned the Winged Man came down hundreds of years ago.’

‘It did.’

‘Then you can’t have been there, Widow Grayling.’

‘Because if I had been, I should be dead by now? You’re right. By all that is natural, I should be. I was born three hundred years ago, Kathrin. I’ve been a widow for more than two hundred of those years, though not always under this name. I’ve moved from house to house, village to village, as soon as people start suspecting what I am. I found the Winged Man when I was sixteen years old, just like you.’

Kathrin smiled tightly. ‘I want to believe you.’

‘You will, shortly. I already told you that this was the coldest time of the Great Winter. The sun was a cold grey disk, as if it was made of ice itself. For years the river hardly thawed at all. The Frost Fair stayed almost all year round. It was nothing like the miserable little gatherings you have known. This was ten times bigger, a whole city built on the frozen river. It had streets and avenues, its own quarters. There were tents and stalls, with skaters and sledges everywhere. There’d be races, jousting competitions, fireworks, mystery players, even printing presses to make newspapers and souvenirs just for the Frost Fair. People came from miles around to see it, Kathrin: from as far away as Carlisle or York.’

‘Didn’t they get bored with it, if it was always there?’

‘It was always changing, though. Every few months there was something different. You would travel fifty miles to see a new wonder if enough people started talking about it. And there was no shortage of wonders, even if they were not always quite what you had imagined when you set off on your journey. Things fell from the sky more often in those days. A living thing like the Winged Man was still a rarity, but other things came down regularly enough. People would spy where they fell and try to get there first. Usually all they’d find would be bits of hot metal, all warped and runny like melted sugar.’

‘Skydrift,’ Kathrin said. ‘Metal that’s no use to anyone, except barbers and butchers.’

‘Only because we can’t make fires hot enough to make that metal smelt down like iron or copper. Once, we could. But if you could find a small piece with an edge, there was nothing it couldn’t cut through. A surgeon’s best knife will always be skydrift.’

‘Some people think the metal belongs to the jangling men, and that anyone who touches it will be cursed.’

‘And I’m sure the sheriff does nothing to persuade them otherwise. Do you think the jangling men care what happens to their metal?’

‘I don’t think they care, because I don’t think they exist.’

‘I was once of the same opinion. Then something happened to make me change my mind.’

‘This being when you found the Winged Man, I take it.’

‘Before even that. I would have been thirteen, I suppose. It was in the back of a tent in the Frost Fair. There was a case holding a hand made of metal, found among skydrift near Wallsend.’

‘A rider’s gauntlet.’

‘I don’t think so. It was broken off at the wrist, but you could tell that it used to belong to something that was also made of metal. There were metal bones and muscles in it. No cogs or springs, like in a clock or tin toy. This was something finer, more ingenious. I don’t believe any man could have made it. But it cannot just be the jangling men who drop things from the sky, or fall out of it.’

‘Why not?’ Kathrin asked, in the spirit of someone going along with a game.

‘Because it was said that the sheriff’s men once found a head of skin and bone, all burned up, but which still had a pair of spectacles on it. The glass in them was dark like coal, but when the sheriff wore them, he could see at night like a wolf. Another time, his men found a shred of garment that kept changing colour, depending on what it was lying against. You could hardly see it then. Not enough to make a suit, but you could imagine how useful that would have been to the sheriff’s spies.’

‘They’d have wanted to get to the Winged Man first.’

Widow Grayling nodded. ‘It was just luck that I got to him first. I was on the Durham road, riding a mule, when he fell from the sky. Now, the law said that they would spike your head on the bridge if you touched something that fell on the sheriff’s land, especially skydrift. But everyone knew that the sheriff could only travel so fast, even when he had his flying machine. It was a risk worth taking, so I took it, and I found the Winged Man, and he was still alive.’

‘Was he really a man?’

‘He was a creature of flesh and blood, not a jangling man, but he was not like any man I had seen before. He was smashed and bent, like a toy that had been trodden on. When I found him he was covered in armour, hot enough to turn the snow to water and make the water hiss and bubble under him. I could only see his face. A kind of golden mask had come off, lying next to him. There were bars across his mask, like the head of the Angel on the tavern sign. The rest of him was covered in metal, jointed in a clever fashion. It was silver in places and black in others, where it had been scorched. His arms were metal wings, as wide across as the road itself if they had not been snapped back on themselves. Instead of legs he just had a long tail, with a kind of fluke at the end of it. I crept closer, watching the sky all around me for the sheriff’s whirling machine. I was fearful at first, but when I saw the Winged Man’s face I only wanted to do what I could for him. And he was dying. I knew it, because I’d seen the same look on the faces of men hanging from the sheriff’s killing poles.’

‘Did you talk to him?’

‘I asked him if he wanted some water. At first he just looked at me, his eyes pale as the sky, his lips opening and closing like a fish that has just been landed. Then he said, ‘Water will not help me.’ Just those five words, in a dialect I didn’t know. Then I asked him if there was anything else I could do to help him, all the while glancing over my shoulder in case anyone should come upon us. But the road was empty and the sky was clear. It took a long time for him to answer me again.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said, ‘Thank you, but there is nothing you can do for me.’ Then I asked him if he was an angel. He smiled, ever so slightly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not an angel, really. But I am a flier.’ I asked him if there was a difference. He smiled again before answering me. ‘Perhaps not, after all this time. Do you know of fliers, girl? Do any of you still remember the war?’’’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘The truth. I said I knew nothing of a war, unless he spoke of the Battle of the Stadium of Light, which had only happened twenty years earlier. He looked sad then, as if he had hoped for a different answer. I asked him if he was a kind of soldier. He said that he was. ‘Fliers are warriors,’ he said. ‘Men like me are fighting a great war, on your behalf, against an enemy you do not even remember.’’’

‘What enemy?’

‘The jangling men. They exist, but not in the way we imagine them. They don’t crawl in through bedroom windows at night, clacking tin-bodied things with skull faces and clockwork keys whirring from their backs. But they’re real enough.’

‘Why would such things exist?’

‘They’d been made to do the work of men on the other side of the sky, where men cannot breathe because the air is so thin. They made the jangling men canny enough that they could work without being told exactly what to do. But that already made them slyer than foxes. The jangling men coveted our world for themselves. That was before the Great Winter came in. The flier said that men like him ‘ special soldiers, born and bred to fight the jangling men ‘ were all that was holding them back.’

‘And he told you they were fighting a war, above the sky?’

Something pained Widow Grayling. ‘All the years since haven’t made it any easier to understand what the flier told me. He said that, just as there may be holes in an old piece of timber, one that has been eaten through by woodworm, so there may be holes in the sky itself. He said that his wings were not really to help him fly, but to help him navigate those tunnels in the sky, just as the wheels of a cart find their way into the ruts on a road.’

‘I don’t understand. How can there be holes in the sky, when the air is already too thin to breathe?’

‘He said that the fliers and the jangling men make these holes, just as armies may dig a shifting network of trenches and tunnels as part of a long campaign. It requires strength to dig a hole and more strength to shore it up when it has already been dug. In an army, it would be the muscle of men and horses and whatever machines still work. But the flier was talking about a different kind of strength altogether.’ The widow paused, then stared into Kathrin’s eyes with a look of foreboding. ‘He told me where it came from, you see. And ever since then, I have seen the world with different eyes. It is a hard burden, Kathrin. But someone must bear it.’

Without thinking, Kathrin said, ‘Tell me.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I want to know.’

‘That bracelet has been on your wrist for a few minutes now. Does it feel any different?’

‘No,’ Kathrin said automatically, but as soon as she’d spoken, as soon as she’d moved her arm, she knew that it was not the case. The bracelet still looked the same, it still looked like a lump of cold dead metal, but it seemed to hang less heavily against her skin than when she’d first put it on.

‘The flier gave it to me,’ Widow Grayling said, observing Kathrin’s reaction. ‘He told me how to open his armour and find the bracelet. I asked why. He said it was because I had offered him water. He was giving me something in return for that kindness. He said that the bracelet would keep me healthy, make me strong in other ways, and that if anyone else was to wear it, it would cure them of many ailments. He said that it was against the common law of his people to give such a gift to one such as I, but he chose to do it anyway. I opened his armour, as he told me, and I found his arm, bound by iron straps to the inside of his wing, and broken like the wing itself. On the end of his arm was this bracelet.’

‘If the bracelet had the power of healing, why was the Winged Man dying?’

‘He said that there were certain afflictions it could not cure. He had been touched by the poisonous ichor of a jangling man, and the bracelet could do nothing for him now.’

‘I still do not believe in magic,’ Kathrin said carefully.

‘Certain magics are real, though. The magic that makes a machine fly, or a man see in the dark. The bracelet feels lighter, because part of it has entered you. It is in your blood now, in your marrow, just as the jangling man’s ichor was in the flier’s. You felt nothing, and you will continue to feel nothing. But so long as you wear the bracelet, you will age much slower than anyone else. For centuries, no sickness or infirmity will touch you.’

Kathrin stroked the bracelet. ‘I do not believe this.’

‘I would not expect you to. In a year or two, you will feel no change in yourself. But in five years, or in ten, people will start to remark upon your uncommon youthfulness. For a while, you will glory in it. Then you will feel admiration turn slowly to envy and then to hate, and it will start to feel like a curse. Like me, you will need to move on and take another name. This will be the pattern of your life, while you wear the flier’s charm.’

Kathrin looked at the palm of her hand. It might have been imagination, but the lines where the handles had cut into her were paler and less sensitive to the touch.

‘Is this how you heal people?’ she asked.

‘You’re as wise as I always guessed you were, Kathrin Lynch. Should you come upon someone who is ill, you need only place the bracelet around their wrist for a whole day and ‘ unless they have the jangling man’s ichor in them ‘ they will be cured.’

‘What of the other things? When my father hurt his arm, he said you tied an eel around his arm.’

Her words made the widow smile. ‘I probably did. I could just as well have smeared pigeon dung on it instead, or made him wear a necklace of worms, for all the difference it would have made. Your father’s arm would have mended itself on its own, Kathrin. The cut was deep, but clean. It did not need the bracelet to heal, and your father was neither stupid nor feverish. But he did have the loose tongue of all small boys. He would have seen the bracelet, and spoken of it.’

‘Then you did nothing.’

‘Your father believed that I did something. That was enough to ease the pain in his arm and perhaps allow it to heal faster than it would otherwise have done.’

‘But you turn people away.’

‘If they are seriously ill, but neither feverish nor unconscious, I cannot let them see the bracelet. There is no other way, Kathrin. Some must die, so that the bracelet’s secret is protected.’

‘This is the burden?’ Kathrin asked doubtfully.

‘No, this is the reward for carrying the burden. The burden is knowledge.’

Again, Kathrin said, ‘Tell me.’

‘This is what the flier told me. The Great Winter fell across our world because the sun itself grew colder and paler. There was a reason for that. The armies of the celestial war were mining its fire, using the furnace of the sun itself to dig and shore up those seams in the sky. How they did this is beyond my comprehension, and perhaps even that of the flier himself. But he did make one thing clear. So long as the Great Winter held, the celestial war must still be raging. And that would mean that the jangling men had not yet won.’

‘But the Thaw’K’ Kathrin began.

‘Yes, you see it now. The snow melts from the land. Rivers flow, crops grow again. The people rejoice, they grow stronger and happier, skins darken, the Frost Fairs fade into memory. But they do not understand what it really means.’

Kathrin hardly dared ask. ‘Which side is winning, or has already won?’

‘I don’t know; that’s the terrible part of it. But when the flier spoke to me, I sensed an awful hopelessness, as if he knew things were not going to go the way of his people.’

‘I’m frightened now.’

‘You should be. But someone needs to know, Kathrin, and the bracelet is losing its power to keep me out of the grave. Not because there is anything wrong with it, I think ‘ it heals as well as it has ever done ‘ but because it has decided that my time has grown sufficient, just as it will eventually decide the same thing with you.’

Kathrin touched the other object, the thing that looked like a sword’s handle.

‘What is this?’

‘The flier’s weapon. His hand was holding it from inside the wing. It poked through the outside of the wing like the claw of a bat. The flier showed me how to remove it. It is yours as well.’

She had touched it already, but this time Kathrin felt a sudden tingle as her fingers wrapped around the hilt. She let go suddenly, gasping as if she had reached for a stick and picked up an adder, squirming and slippery and venomous.

‘Yes, you feel its power,’ Widow Grayling said admiringly. ‘It works for no one unless they carry the bracelet.’

‘I can’t take it.’

‘Better you have it, than let that power go to waste. If the jangling men come, then at least someone will have a means to hurt them. Until then, there are other uses for it.’

Without touching the hilt, Kathrin slipped the weapon into her pocket where it lay as heavy and solid as a pebble.

‘Did you ever use it?’

‘Once.’

‘What did you do?’

She caught a secretive smile on Widow Grayling’s face. ‘I took something precious from William the Questioner. Banished him to the ground like the rest of us. I meant to kill him, but he was not riding in the machine when I brought it down.’

Kathrin laughed. Had she not felt the power of the weapon, she might have dismissed the widow’s story as the ramblings of an old woman. But she had no reason in the world to doubt her companion.

‘You could have killed the sheriff later, when he came to inspect the killing poles.’

‘I nearly did. But something always stayed my hand. Then the sheriff was replaced by another man, and he in turn by another. Sheriffs came and went. Some were evil men, but not all of them. Some were only as hard and cruel as their office demanded. I never used the weapon again, Kathrin. I sensed that its power was not limitless, that it must be used sparingly, against the time when it became really necessary. But to use it in defence, against a smaller target’Kthat would be a different matter, I think.’

Kathrin thought she understood.

‘I need to be getting back home,’ she said, trying to sound as if they had discussed nothing except the matter of the widow’s next delivery of provisions. ‘I am sorry about the other head.’

‘There is no need to apologise. It was not your doing.’

‘What will happen to you now, widow?’

‘I’ll fade, slowly and gracefully. Perhaps I will see things through to the next winter. But I don’t expect to see another thaw.’

‘Please. Take the bracelet back.’

‘Kathrin, listen. It will make no difference to me now, whether you take it or not.’

‘I’m not old enough for this. I’m only a girl from the Shield, a sledge-maker’s daughter.’

‘What do you think I was, when I found the flier? We were the same. I’ve seen your strength and courage.’

‘I wasn’t strong today.’

‘Yet you took the bridge, when you knew Garret would be on it. I have no doubt, Kathrin.’

She stood. ‘If I had not lost the other head’Kif Garret had not caught me’Kwould you have given me these things?’

‘I was minded to do it. If not today, it would have happened next time. But let us give Garret due credit. He helped me make up my mind.’

‘He’s still out there,’ Kathrin said.

‘But he will know you will not be taking the bridge to get back home, even though that would save you paying the toll at Jarrow Ferry. He will content himself to wait until you cross his path again.’

Kathrin collected her one remaining bag and moved to the door.

‘Yes.’

‘I will see you again, in a month. Give my regards to your father.’

‘I will.’

Widow Grayling opened the door. The sky was darkening to the east, in the direction of Jarrow Ferry. The dusk stars would appear shortly, and it would be dark within the hour. The crows were still wheeling, but more languidly now, preparing to roost. Though the Great Winter was easing, the evenings seemed as cold as ever, as if night was the final stronghold, the place where the winter had retreated when the inevitability of its defeat became apparent. Kathrin knew that she would be shivering long before she reached the tollgate at the crossing, miles down the river. She tugged down her hat in readiness for the journey and stepped onto the broken road in front of the widow’s cottage.

‘You will take care now, Kathrin. Watch out for the janglies.’

‘I will, Widow Grayling.’

The door closed behind her. She heard a bolt slide into place.

She was alone.

Kathrin set off, following the path she had used to climb up from the river. If it was arduous in daylight, it was steep and treacherous at dusk. As she descended she could see Twenty Arch Bridge from above, a thread of light across the shadowed ribbon of the river. Candles were being lit in the inns and houses that lined the bridge, tallow torches burning along the parapets. There was still light at the north end, where the sagging arch was being repaired. The obstruction caused by the dray had been cleared, and traffic was moving normally from bank to bank. She heard the calls of men and women, the barked orders of foremen, the braying of drunkards and slatterns, the regular creak and splash of the mill wheels turning under the arches.

Presently she reached a fork in the path and paused. To the right lay the quickest route down to the quayside road to Jarrow Ferry. To the left lay the easiest descent down to the bridge, the path that she had already climbed. Until that moment, her resolve had been clear. She would take the ferry, as she always did, as she was expected to do.

But now she reached a hand into her pocket and closed her fingers around the flier’s weapon. The shiver of contact was less shocking this time. The object already felt a part of her, as if she had carried it for years.

She drew it out. It gleamed in twilight, shining where it had appeared dull before. Even if the widow had not told her of its nature, there would have been no doubt now. The object spoke its nature through her skin and bones, whispering to her on a level beneath language. It told her what it could do and how she could make it obey her. It told her to be careful of the power she now carried in her hand. She must scruple to use it wisely, for nothing like it now existed in the world. It was the power to smash walls. Power to smash bridges and towers and flying machines. Power to smash jangling men.

Power to smash ordinary men, if that was what she desired.

She had to know.

The last handful of crows gyred overhead. She raised the weapon to them and felt a sudden dizzying apprehension of their number and distance and position, each crow feeling distinct from its brethren, as if she could almost name them.

She selected one laggard bird. All the others faded from her attention, like players removing themselves from a stage. She came to know that last bird intimately. She could feel its wingbeats cutting the cold air. She could feel the soft thatch of its feathers, and the lacelike scaffolding of bone underneath. Within the cage of its chest she felt the tiny strong pulse of its heart, and she knew that she could make that heart freeze just by willing it.

The weapon seemed to urge her to do it. She came close. She came frighteningly close.

But the bird had done nothing to wrong her, and she spared it. She had no need to take a life to test this new gift, at least not an innocent one. The crow rejoined its brethren, something skittish and hurried in its flight, as if it had felt that coldness closing around its heart.

Kathrin returned the weapon to her pocket. She looked at the bridge again, measuring it once more with clinical eyes, eyes that were older and sadder this time, because she knew something that the people on the bridge could never know.

‘I’m ready,’ she said, aloud, into the night, for whoever might be listening.

Then resumed her descent.

Spirey And The Queen

Space war is godawful slow. Mouser’s long-range sensors had sniffed the bogey two days ago, but it had taken all that time just to creep within kill-range. I figured it had to be another dud. With ordnance, fuel and morale all low, we were ready to slink back to Tiger’s Eye anyway; let one of the other thickships pick up the sweep in this sector.

So—still groggy after frogsleep—I wasn’t exactly wetting myself with excitement; not even when Mouser started spiking the thick with combat-readiness psychogens. Even when we went to Attack-Con-One, all I did was pause the neurodisney I was tripping (Hellcats of Solar War Three, since you asked), slough my hammock and swim languidly up to the bridge.

“Junk”, I said, looking over Yarrow’s shoulder at the readout. “War debris or another of those piss-poor chondrites. Betcha.”

“Sorry kid. Everything checks out.”

“Hostiles?”

“Nope. Positive on the exhaust; dead ringer for the stolen ship.” She traced a webbed hand across the swathe of decorations which already curled around her neck. “Want your stripes now or when we get back?”

“You actually think this’ll net us a pair of tigers?”

“Damn right it will.”

I nodded, and thought: she isn’t necessarily wrong. No defector, no stolen military secrets reaching the Royalists. Ought to be worth a medal, maybe even a promotion.

So why did I feel something wasn’t right?

“Alright,” I said, hoping to drown qualms in routine. “How soon?”

“Missiles are already away, but she’s five light-minutes from us, so the quacks won’t reach her for six hours. Longer if she makes a run for cover.”

“Run for cover? That’s a joke.”

“Yeah, hilarious.” Yarrow swelled one of the holographic displays until it hovered between us.

It was a map of the Swirl, tinted to show zones controlled by us or the

Royalists. An enormous slowly rotating disk of primordial material, eight-hundred AU edge to edge; wide enough that light took more than four days to traverse it.

Most of the action was near the middle, in the light-hour of space around the central star Fomalhaut. Immediately around the sun was a material-free void which we called the Inner Clearing Zone, but beyond that began the

Swirl proper; metal-rich lanes of dust condensing slowly into rocky planets. Both sides wanted absolute control of those planet-forming

Feeding Zones—prime real estate for the day when one side beat the other and could recommence mining operations—so that was where our vast armies of wasps mainly slugged things out. We humans—Royalist and Standardist both—kept much further out, where the Swirl thinned to metal-depleted icy rubble. Even hunting the defector hadn’t taken us within ten light hours of the Feeding Zones, and we’d gotten used to having a lot of empty space to ourselves. Apart from the defector, there shouldn’t have been anything else out here to offer cover.

But there was. Big too, not much more than a half light-minute from the rat.

“Practically pissing distance,” Yarrow observed.

“Too close for coincidence. What is it?”

“Splinter. Icy planetesimal, you want to get technical.”

“Not this early in the day.”

But I remembered how one of our tutors back at the academy put it:

Splinters are icy slag, spat out of the Swirl. In a few hundred thousand years there’ll be a baby solar system around Fomalhaut, but there’ll also be shitloads of junk surrounding it, leftovers on million-year orbits.

“Worthless to us,” Yarrow said, scratching at the ribbon of black hair which ran all the way from her brow to fluke. “But evidently not to ratty.”

“What if the Royalists left supplies on the splinter? She could be aiming to refuel before the final hop to their side of the Swirl.” Yarrow gave me her best withering look. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “Not my smartest ever suggestion.” Yarrow nodded sagely. “Ours is not to question, Spirey. Ours is to fire and forget.”

Six hours after the quackheads had hared away from Mouser, Yarrow floated in the bridge, fluked tail coiled beneath. She resembled an inverted question mark, and if I’d been superstitious I’d have said that wasn’t necessarily the best of omens.

“You kill me,” she said.

An older pilot called Quillin had been the first to go siren—first to swap legs for tail. Yarrow followed a year later. Admittedly it made sense, an adaptation to the fluid-filled environment of a high-gee thickship. And I accepted the cardiovascular modifications that enabled us to breathe thick, as well as the biomodified skin which let us tolerate cold and vacuum far longer than any unmodified human. Not to mention the billions of molecule-sized demons which coursed through our bodies, or the combat-specific psychomodifications. But swapping your legs for a tail touched off too many queazy resonances in me. Had to admire her nerve, though.

“What?” I said.

“That neurodisney shit. Isn’t a real space war good enough for you?”

“Yeah, except I don’t think this is it. When was the last time one of us actually looked a Royalist in the eye?”

She shrugged. “Something like four hundred years.”

“Point made. At least in Solar War Three you get some blood. See, it’s all set on planetary surfaces—Titan; Europa; all those moons they’ve got back in Sol system. Trench warfare; hand to hand stuff. You know what adrenalin is, Yarrow?”

“Managed without it until now. And there’s another thing: Don’t know much about Greater Earth history, but there was never a Solar War Three.”

“It’s conjectural,” I said. “And in any case it almost happened; they almost went to the brink.”

“Almost?”

“It’s set in a different timeline.”

She grinned, shaking her head. “I’m telling you, you kill me.”

“She made a move yet?” I asked.

“What?”

“The defector.”

“Oh, we’re back in reality now?” Yarrow laughed. “Sorry, this is going to be slightly less exciting than Solar War Three.”

“Inconsiderate,” I said. “Think the bitch would give us a run for our money.” And as I spoke the weapons readout began to pulse faster and faster, like the cardiogram of a fluttering heart. “How long now?”

“One minute, give or take a few seconds.”

“Want a little bet?”

Yarrow grinned, sallow in the red alert lighting. “As if I’d say no,

Spirey.”

So we hammered out a wager; Yarrow betting fifty tiger-tokens the rat would attempt some last-minute evasion. “Won’t do her a blind bit of good,” she said. “But that won’t stop her. It’s human nature.”

Me, I suspected our target was either dead or asleep.

“Bit of an empty ritual, isn’t it.”

“What?”

“I mean, the attack happened the best part of five minutes ago, realtime.

The rat’s already dead, and nothing we can do can influence that outcome.”

Yarrow bit on a nicotine stick. “Don’t get all philosophical on me,

Spirey.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. How long?”

“Five seconds. Four ...”

She was somewhere between three and four when it happened. I remember thinking that there was something disdainful about the rat’s actions: that she’d deliberately waited until the last possible moment, and that she’d dispensed with our threat with the least effort possible.

That was how it felt, anyway.

Nine of the quackheads detonated prematurely, way beyond kill-range. For a moment the tenth remained, zeroing in on the defector—but instead it failed to detonate, until it was just beyond range. For long moments there was silence, while we absorbed what had happened. Yarrow broke it, eventually.

“Guess I just made myself some money,” she said.

Colonel Wendigo’s hologram delegate appeared, momentarily frozen before shivering to life. With her too-clear, too-young eyes she fixed first

Yarrow and then me.

“Intelligence was mistaken,” she said. “Seems the defector doctored records to conceal the theft of those countermeasures. But you harmed her anyway?”

“Just,” said Yarrow. “Her quackdrive’s spewing out exotics like Spirey after a bad binge. No hull damage, but ...”

“Assessment?”

“Making a run for the splinter.”

Wendigo nodded. “And then?”

“She’ll set down and make repairs.” Yarrow paused, added: “Radar says there’s metal on the surface. Must’ve been a wasp battle there, before the splinter got lobbed out of the Swirl.”

The delegate nodded in my direction. “Concur, Spirey?”

“Yes sir,” I said, trying to suppress the nervousness I always felt around

Wendigo, even though almost all my dealings with her had been via simulations like this. Yarrow was happy to edit the conversation afterwards, inserting the correct honorifics before transmitting the result back to Tiger’s Eye—but I could never free myself of the suspicion that Wendigo would somehow unravel the unedited version, with all its implicit insubordination.

Not that any of us didn’t inwardly accord Wendigo all the respect she was due. She’d nearly died in the Royalist strike against Tiger’s Eye fifteen years ago—the one in which my mother was killed. Actual attacks against our two mutually opposed comet bases were rare, not happening much more than every other generation—more gestures of spite than anything else.

But this had been an especially bloody one, killing an eighth of our number and opening city-sized portions of our base to vacuum. Wendigo was caught in the thick of the kinetic attack.

Now she was chimeric, lashed together by cybernetics. Not much of this showed externally—except that the healed parts of her were too flawless, more porcelain than flesh. Wendigo had not allowed the surgeons to regrow her arms. Story was she lost them trying to pull one of the injured through an open airlock, back into the pressurised zone. She’d almost made it, fighting against the gale of escaping air. Then some no-brainer hit the emergency door control, and when the lock shut it took Wendigo’s arms off at the shoulder, along with the head of the person she was saving. She wore prosthetics now; gauntleted in chrome.

“She’ll get there a day ahead of us,” I said. “Even if we pull twenty gees.”

“And probably gone to ground by the time you get there.”

“Should we try a live capture?”

Yarrow backed me up with a nod. “It’s not exactly been possible before.”

The delegate bided her time before answering. “Admire your dedication,”

she said, after a suitably convincing pause. “But you’d only be postponing a death sentence. Kinder to kill her now, don’t you think?”

Mouser entered kill-range nineteen hours later, a wide pseudo-orbit three thousand klicks out. The splinter—seventeen by twelve klicks across—was far too small to be seen as anything other than a twinkling speck, like a grain of sugar at arm’s length. But everything we wanted to know was clear: topology, gravimetrics, and the site of the downed ship. That wasn’t hard. Quite apart from the fact that it hadn’t buried itself completely, it was hot as hell.

“Doesn’t look like the kind of touchdown you walk away from,” Yarrow said.

“Think they ejected?”

“No way.” Yarrow sketched a finger through a holographic enlargement of the ship, roughly cone-shaped, vaguely streamlined just like our own thickship, to punch through the Swirl’s thickest gas belts. “Clock those dorsal hatches. Evac pods still in place.”

She was right. The pods could have flung them clear before the crash, but evidently they hadn’t had time to bail out. The ensuing impact—even cushioned by the ship’s manifold of thick—probably hadn’t been survivable.

But there was no point taking chances.

Quackheads would have finished the job, but we’d used up our stock. Mouser carried a particle beam battery, but we’d have to move uncomfortably close to the splinter before using it. What remained were the molemines, and they should have been perfectly adequate. We dropped fifteen of them, embedded in a cloud of two hundred identical decoys. Three of the fifteen were designated to dust the wreck, while the remaining twelve would bury deeper into the splinter and attempt to shatter it completely.

That at least was the idea.

It all happened very quickly, not in the dreamy slow-motion of a neurodisney. One instant the molemines were descending toward the splinter, and then the next instant they weren’t there. Spacing the two instants had been an almost subliminally brief flash.

“Starting to get sick of this,” Yarrow said.

Mouser digested what had happened. Nothing had emanated from the wreck.

Instead, there’d been a single pulse of energy seemingly from the entire volume of space around the splinter. Particle weapons, Mouser diagnosed.

Probably single-use drones, each tinier than a pebble but numbering hundreds or even thousands. The defector must have sewn them on her approach.

But she hadn’t touched us.

“It was a warning,” I said. “Telling us to back off.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What?”

“I think the warning’s on its way.”

I stared at her blankly for a moment, before registering what she had already seen.

That arcing from the splinter was something too fast to stop, something against which our minimally-armoured thickship had no defense, not even the option of flight.

Yarrow started to mouth some exotic profanity she’d reserved for precisely this moment. There was an eardrum punishing bang and Mouser shuddered—but we weren’t suddenly chewing vacuum.

And that was very bad news indeed.

Antiship missiles come in two main flavours: quackheads and sporeheads.

You know which immediately after the weapon has hit. If you’re still thinking—if you still exist—chances are it’s a sporehead. And at that point your problems are just beginning.

Invasive demon attack, Mouser shrieked. Breather manifold compromised ...

which meant something uninvited was in the thick. That was the point of a sporehead: to deliver hostile demons into an enemy ship.

“Mm,” Yarrow said. “I think it might be time to suit up.”

Except our suits were a good minute’s swim away back into the bowels of

Mouser, through twisty ducts which might skirt the infection site. Having no choice, we swam anyway, Yarrow insisting I take the lead even though she was a quicker swimmer. And somewhere—it’s impossible to know exactly where—demons reached us, seeping invisibly into our bodies via the thick. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment; it wasn’t as if there was a jagged transition between lucidity and demon-manipulated irrationality. Yarrow and me were terrified enough as it was. All I know is it began with a mild agoraphilia; an urge to escape Mouser’s flooded confines. Gradually it phased into claustrophobia, and then became fully-fledged panic, making

Mouser seem as malevolent as a haunted house.

Yarrow ignored her suit, clawing the hull until her fingers spooled blood.

Fight it,” I said. “It’s just demons triggering our fear centers, trying to drive us out!”

Of course, knowing so didn’t help.

Somehow I stayed still long enough for my suit to slither on. Once sealed,

I purged the tainted thick with the suit’s own supply—but I knew it wasn’t going to help much. The phobia already showed that hostile demons had reached my brain, and now it was even draping itself in a flimsy logic. Beyond the ship we’d be able to think rationally. It would only take a few minutes for the thick’s own demons to neutralise the invader—and then we’d be able to reboard. Complete delusion, of course.

But that was the point.

When something like coherent thought returned I was outside.

Nothing but me and the splinter.

The urge to escape was only a background anxiety, a flock of stomach-butterflies urging me against returning. Was that demon-manipulated fear or pure common sense? I couldn’t tell—but what I knew was that the splinter seemed to be beckoning me forward, and I didn’t feel like resisting. Sensible, surely: we’d exhausted all conventional channels of attack against the defector, and now all that remained was to confront her on the territory she’d staked as her own.

But where was Yarrow?

Suit’s alarm chimed. Maybe demons were still subjugating my emotions, because I didn’t react with my normal speed. I just blinked, licked my lips and stifled a yawn.

“Yeah, what?”

Suit informed me; something massing slightly less than me, two klicks closer to the splinter, on a slightly different orbit. I knew it was

Yarrow; also that something was wrong. She was drifting. In my blackout

I’d undoubtedly programmed suit to take me down, but Yarrow appeared not to have done anything except bail out.

I jetted closer. And then saw why she hadn’t programmed her suit. Would have been tricky. She wasn’t wearing one.

I hit ice an hour later.

Cradling Yarrow—she wasn’t much of a burden, in the splinter’s weak gravity—I took stock. I wasn’t ready to mourn her, not just yet. If I could quickly get her to the medical suite aboard the defector’s ship there was a good chance of revival. But where the hell was the wreck?

Squandering its last reserves of fuel, suit had deposited us in a clearing among the graveyard of ruined wasps. Half submerged in ice, they looked like scorched scrap-iron sculptures; phantoms from an entomologist’s worst nightmare. So there’d been a battle here, back when the splinter was just another drifting lump of ice. Even if the thing was seamed with silicates or organics, it would not have had any commercial potential to either side. But it might still have had strategic value, and that was why the wasps had gone to war on its surface. Trouble was—as we’d known before the attack—the corpses covered the entire surface, so there was no guessing where we’d come down. The wrecked ship might be just over the nearest hillock—or another ten kilometers in any direction.

I felt the ground rumble under me first. Hunting for the source of the vibration, I saw a quill of vapour reach into the sky, no more than a klick away. It was a geyser of superheated ice.

I dropped Yarrow and hit dirt, suit limiting motion so that I didn’t bounce. Looking back, I expected to see a dimple in the permafrost, where some rogue had impacted.

Instead, the geyser was still present. Worse, it was coming steadily closer, etching a neat trench. A beam weapon was making that plume, I realised—like one of the party batteries aboard ship. Then I wised up.

That was Mouser. The demons had worked their way into its command infrastructure, reprogramming it to turn against us. Now Mouser worked for the defector.

I slung Yarrow over one shoulder and loped away from the boiling impact point. Fast as the geyser moved, its path was predictable. If I made enough lateral distance the death-line would sear past—

Except the damn thing turned to follow me.

Now a second flanked it, shepherding me through the thickest zone of wasp corpses. Did they have some significance for the defector? Maybe so, but I couldn’t see it. The corpses were a rough mix of machines from both sides:

Royalist wasps marked with yellow shell symbols, ours with grinning tiger-heads. Generation thirty five units, if I remembered Mil-Hist, when both sides toyed with pulse-hardened optical thinkware. In the seventy-odd subsequent generations there’d been numerous further jumps: ur-quantum logics, full-spectrum reflective wasp armour, chameleoflage, quackdrive powerplants and every weapon system the human mind could devise. We’d tried to encourage the wasps to make these innovations for themselves, but they never managed to evolve beyond strictly linear extrapolation. Which was good, or else we human observers would have been out of a job.

Not that it really mattered now.

A third geyser had erupted behind me, and a fourth ahead, boxing me in.

Slowly, the four points of fire began to converge. I stopped, but kept holding Yarrow. I listened to my own breathing, harsh above the basso tremor of the drumming ground.

Then steel gripped my shoulder.

She said we’d be safer underground. Also that she had friends below who might be able to do something for Yarrow.

“If you weren’t defecting,” I began, as we entered a roughly hewn tunnel into the splinter’s crust, “what the hell was it?”

“Trying to get home. Least that was the idea, until we realised Tiger’s

Eye didn’t want us back.” Wendigo knuckled the ice with one of her steel fists, her suit cut away to expose her prosthetics. “Which is when we decided to head here.”

“You almost made it,” I said. Then added: “Where were you trying to get home from?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Then you did defect.”

“We were trying to make contact with the Royalists. Trying to make peace.”

In the increasingly dim light I saw her shrug. “It was a long-shot, conducted in secrecy. When the mission went wrong, it was easy for Tiger’s

Eye to say we’d been defecting.”

“Bullshit.”

“I wish.”

“But you sent us.”

“Not in person.”

“But your delegate—”

“Could be made to say anything my enemies chose. Even to order my own execution as a traitor.”

We paused to switch on our suit lamps. “Maybe you’d better tell me everything.”

“Gladly,” Wendigo said. “But if this hasn’t been a good day so far, I’m afraid it’s about to go downhill.”

There’d been a clique of high-ranking officers who believed that the Swirl war was intrinsically unwinnable. Privy to information not released to the populace, and able to see through Tiger’s Eye’s own carefully filtered internal propaganda, they realised that negotiation—contact—was the only way out.

“Of course, not everyone agreed. Some of my adversaries wanted us dead before we even reached the enemy.” Wendigo sighed. “Too much in love with the war’s stability—and who can blame them? Life for the average citizen in Tiger’s Eye isn’t that bad. We’re given a clear goal to fight for, and the likelihood of any one of us dying in a Royalist attack is small enough to ignore. The idea that all of that might be about to end after four hundred years; that we all might have to rethink our roles ... well, it didn’t go down too well.”

“About as welcome as a fart in a vac-suit, right?”

Wendigo nodded. “I think you understand.”

“Go on.”

Her expedition—Wendigo and two pilots—had crossed the Swirl unchallenged. Approaching the Royalist cometary base, they’d expected to be questioned—perhaps even fired upon—but nothing had happened. When they entered the stronghold, they understood why.

“Deserted,” Wendigo said. “Or we thought so, until we found the

Royalists.” She expectorated the word. “Feral, practically. Naked, grubby subhumans. Their wasps feed them and treat their illnesses, but that’s as far as it goes. They grunt, and they’ve been toilet-trained, but they’re not quite the military geniuses we’ve been led to believe. “

“Then ...”

“The war is ... nothing we thought.” Wendigo laughed, but the confines of her helmet rendered it more like the squawking of a jack-in-the-box. “And now you wonder why home didn’t want us coming back?”

Before Wendigo could explain further, we reached a wider bisecting tunnel, glowing with its own insipid chlorine-coloured light. Rather than the meandering bore of the tunnel in which we walked, it was as cleanly cut as a rifle barrel. In one direction the tunnel was blocked by a bullet-nosed cylinder, closely modelled on the trains in Tiger’s Eye. Seemingly of its own volition, the train lit up and edged forward, a door puckering open.

“Get in,” Wendigo said.” And lose the helmet. You won’t need it where we’re going. “

Inside I coughed phlegmy ropes of thick from my lungs.

Transitioning between breathing modes isn’t pleasant—more so since I’d breathed nothing but thick for six weeks. But after a few lungfuls of the train’s antiseptic air, the dark blotches around my vision began to recede.

Wendigo did likewise, only with more dignity.

Yarrow lay on one of the couches, stiff as a statue carved in soap. Her skin was cyanotic, a single all-enveloping bruise. Pilot skin is a better vacuum barrier than the usual stuff, and vacuum itself is a far better insulator against heat loss than air. But where I’d lifted her my gloves had embossed fingerprints into her flesh. Worse was the broad stripe of ruined skin down her back and the left side of her tail, where she had lain against the splinter’s surface.

But her head looked better. When she hit vac, biomodified seals would have shut within her skull, barricading every possible avenue for pressure, moisture or blood loss. Even her eyelids would have fused tight. Implanted glands in her carotid artery would have released droves of friendly demons, quickly replicating via nonessential tissue in order to weave a protective scaffold through her brain.

Good for an hour or so—maybe longer. But only if the hostile demons hadn’t screwed with Yarrow’s native ones.

“You were about to tell me about the wasps,” I said, as curious to hear the rest of Wendigo’s story as I was to blank my doubts about Yarrow.

“Well, it’s rather simple. They got smart.”

“The wasps?”

She clicked the steel fingers of her hand. “Overnight. Just over a hundred years ago.”

I tried not to look too overwhelmed. Intriguing as all this was, I wasn’t treating it as anything other than an outlandish attempt to distract me from the main reason for my being here, which remained killing the defector. Wendigo’s story explained some of the anomalies we’d so far encountered—but that didn’t rule out a dozen more plausible explanations. Meanwhile, it was amusing to try and catch her out. “So they got smart,” I said. “You mean our wasps, or theirs?”

“Doesn’t mean a damn anymore. Maybe it just happened to one machine in the

Swirl, and then spread like wildfire to all the trillions of other wasps.

Or maybe it happened simultaneously, in response to some stimulus we can’t even guess at.”

“Want to hazard a guess?”

“I don’t think it’s important, Spirey.” She sounded like she wanted to put a lot of distance between herself and this topic. “Point is it happened.

Afterwards, distinctions between us and the enemy—at least from the point of view of the wasps—completely vanished.”

“Workers of the Swirl unite.”

“Something like that. And you understand why they kept it to themselves, don’t you?”

I nodded, more to keep her talking.

“They needed us, of course. They still lacked something. Creativity, I guess you’d call it. They could evolve themselves incrementally, but they couldn’t make the kind of sweeping evolutionary jumps we’d been feeding them.”

“So we had to keep thinking there was a war on.”

Wendigo looked pleased. “Right. We’d keep supplying them with innovations, and they’d keep pretending to do each other in.” She halted, scratching at the unwrinkled skin around one eye with the alloy finger of one hand.

“Clever little bastards.”

We’d arrived somewhere.

It was a chamber, large as any enclosed space I’d ever seen. I felt gravity; too much of the stuff. The whole chamber must have been gimbaled and spun within the splinter, like one of the gee-load simulators back in

Tiger’s Eye. The vaulted ceiling, hundreds of meters ‘above’, now seemed vertiginously higher. Apart from its apex, it was covered in intricate frescos—dozens of pictorial facets, each a cycling hologram. They told the history of the Swirl, beginning with its condensation from interstellar gas, the ignition of its star, the onset of planetary formation. Then the action cut to the arrival of the first Standardist wasp, programmed to dive into the Swirl and breed like a rabbit, so that one day there’d be a sufficiently huge population to begin mining the thing; winnowing out metals, silicates and precious organics for the folks back home. ‘Course, it never happened like that. The Royalists wanted in on the action, so they sent their own wasps, programmed to attack ours.

The rest is history. The frescos showed the war’s beginning, and then a little while later the arrival of the first human observers, beamed across space as pure genetic data, destined to be born in artificial wombs in hollowed out comet-cores, raised and educated by wasps, imprinted with the best tactical and strategic knowledge available. Thereafter they taught the wasps. From then on things hotted up, because the observers weren’t limited by years of timelag. They were able to intervene in wasp evolution in realtime.

That ought to have been it, because by then we were pretty up to date, give or take four hundred years of the same.

But the frescos carried on.

There was one representing some future state of the Swirl, neatly ordered into a ticking orrery of variously sized and patterned worlds, some with beautiful rings or moon systems. And finally—like Mediaeval conceptions of Eden—there was a triptych of lush planetary landscapes, with wierd animals in the foreground, mountains and soaring cloudbanks behind.

“Seen enough to convince you?” Wendigo asked.

“No,” I said, not entirely sure whether I believed myself. Craning my neck, I looked up toward the apex.

Something hung from it.

What it was was a pair of wasps, fused together. One was complete, the other was only fully-formed, seemingly in the process of splitting from the complete wasp. The fused pair looked to have been smothered in molten bronze, left to dry in waxy nodules.

“You know what this is?” Wendigo asked.

“I’m waiting.”

“Wasp art.”

I looked at her.

“This wasp was destroyed mid-replication,” Wendigo continued. “While it was giving birth. Evidently the image has some poignancy for them. How I’d put it in human terms I don’t know ...”

“Don’t even think about it.”

I followed her across the marbled terrazzo which floored the chamber.

Arched porticos surrounded it, each of which held a single dead wasp, their body designs covering a hundred generations of evolution. If Wendigo was right, I supposed these dead wasps were the equivalent of venerated old ancestors peering from oil paintings. But I wasn’t convinced just yet.

“You knew this place existed?”

She nodded. “Or else we’d be dead. The wasps back in the Royalist stronghold told us we could seek sanctuary here, if home turned against us.”

“And the wasps—what? Own this place?”

“And hundreds like it, although the others are already far beyond the

Swirl, on their way out to the halo. Since the wasps came to consciousness, most of the splinters flung out of the Swirl have been infiltrated. Shrewd of them—all along, we’ve never suspected that the splinters are anything other than cosmic trash.”

“Nice decor, anyway.”

“Florentine,” Wendigo said, nodding. “The frescos are in the style of a painter called Masaccio; one of Brunelleschi’s disciples. Remember, the wasps had access to all the cultural data we brought with us from GE—

every byte of it. That’s how they work, I think—by constructing things according to arbitrary existing templates.”

“And there’s a point to all this?”

“I’ve been here precisely one day longer than you, Spirey.”

“But you said you had friends here; people who could help Yarrow.”

“They’re here alright,” Wendigo said, shaking her head. “Just hope you’re ready for them.”

On some unspoken cue they emerged, spilling from a door which until then

I’d mistaken for one of the surrounding porticos. I flinched, acting on years of training. Although wasps have never intentionally harmed a human being—even the enemy’s wasps—they’re nonetheless powerful, dangerous machines. There were twelve of them; divided equally between Standardist and Royalist units. Six-legged, their two-meter long, segmented alloy bodies sprouted weapons, sensors and specialized manipulators. So far so familiar, except that the way the wasps moved was subtly wrong. It was as if the machines choreographed themselves, their bodies defining the extremities of a much larger form which I sensed more than saw.

The twelve whisked across the floor.

“They are—or rather it is—a queen,” Wendigo said. “From what I’ve gathered, there’s one queen for every splinter. Splinterqueens, I call them.”

The swarm partially surrounded us now—but retained the brooding sense of oneness.

“She told you all this?”

“Her demons did, yes.” Wendigo tapped the side of her head. “I got a dose after our ship crashed. You got one after we hit your ship. It was a standard sporehead from our arsenal, but the Splinterqueen loaded it with her own demons. For the moment that’s how she speaks to us—via symbols woven by demons.”

“Take your word for it.”

Wendigo shrugged. “No need to.”

And suddenly I knew. It was like eavesdropping a topologist’s fever dream

—only much stranger. The burst of Queen’s speech couldn’t have lasted more than a tenth of a second, but its after-images seemed to persist much longer, and I had the start of a migraine before it had ended. But like

Wendigo had implied before, I sensed planning—that every thought was merely a step toward some distant goal, the way each statement in a mathematical proof implies some final QED.

Something big indeed.

“You deal with that shit?”

“My chimeric parts must filter a lot.”

“And she understands you?”

“We get by.”

“Good,” I said. “Then ask her about Yarrow.”

Wendigo nodded and closed both eyes, entering intense rapport with the

Queen. What followed happened quickly: six of her components detaching from the extended form and swarming into the train we had just exited. A

moment later they emerged with Yarrow, elevated on a loom formed from dozens of wasp manipulators.

“What happens now?”

“They’ll establish a physical connection to her neural demons,” Wendigo said. “So that they can map the damage.”

One of the six reared up and gently positioned its blunt, anvil-shaped

‘head’ directly above Yarrow’s frost-mottled scalp. Then the wasp made eight nodding movements, so quickly that the motion was only a series of punctuated blurs. Looking down, I saw eight bloodless puncture marks on

Yarrow’s head. Another wasp replaced the driller and repeated the procedure, executing its own blurlike nods. This time, glistening fibers trailed from Yarrow’s eight puncture points into the wasp, which looked as if it was sucking spaghetti from my compatriot’s skull.

Long minutes of silence followed, while I waited for some kind of report.

“It isn’t good,” Wendigo said eventually.

“Show me.”

And I got a jolt of Queen’s speech, feeling myself inside Yarrow’s hermetically sealed head, feeling the chill that had gasped against her brain core, despite her pilot augs. I sensed the two intermingled looms of native and foreign demons, webbing the shattered matrix of her consciousness.

I also sensed—what? Doubt?

“She’s pretty far gone, Spirey.”

“Tell the Queen to do what she can.”

“Oh, she will. Now she’s glimpsed Yarrow’s mind, she’ll do all she can not to lose it. Minds mean a lot to her—particularly in view of what the

Splinterqueens have in mind for the future. But don’t expect miracles.”

“Why not? We seem to be standing in one.”

“Then you’re prepared to believe some of what I’ve said?”

“What it means,” I started to say—

But I didn’t finish the sentence. As I was speaking the whole chamber shook violently, almost dashing us off our feet.

“What was that?”

Wendigo’s eyes glazed again, briefly.

“Your ship,” she said. “It just self-destructed.”

“What?”

A picture of what remained of Mouser formed in my head: a dulling nebula, embedding the splinter. “The order to self-destruct came from Tiger’s

Eye,” Wendigo said. “It cut straight to the ship’s quackdrive subsystems, at a level the demons couldn’t rescind. I imagine they were rather hoping you’d have landed by the time the order arrived. The blast would have destroyed the splinter.”

“You’re saying home just tried to kill us?”

“Put it like this,” Wendigo said. “Now might not be a bad time to rethink your loyalties.”

Tiger’s Eye had failed this time—but they wouldn’t stop there. In three hours they’d learn of their mistake, and three or more hours after that we would learn of their countermove, whatever it happened to be.

“She’ll do something, won’t she? I mean, the wasps wouldn’t go to the trouble of building this place only to have Tiger’s Eye wipe it out.”

“Not much she can do,” Wendigo said, after communing with the Queen. “If home choose to use kinetics against us—and they’re the only weapon which could hit us from so far—then there really is no possible defense. And remember there are a hundred other worlds like this, in or on their way to the halo. Losing one would make very little difference.”

Something in me snapped. “Do you have to sound so damned indifferent to it all? Here we are talking about how we’re likely to be dead in a few hours and you’re acting like it’s only a minor inconvenience.” I fought to keep the edge of hysteria out of my voice. “How do you know so much anyway?

You’re mighty well informed for someone who’s only been here a day,

Wendigo.”

She regarded me for a moment, almost blanching under the slap of insubordination. Then Wendigo nodded, without anger. “Yes, you’re right to ask how I know so much. You can’t have failed to notice how hard we crashed. My pilots took the worst.”

“They died?”

Hesitation. “One at least—Sorrel. But the other, Quillin, wasn’t in the ship when the wasps pulled me out of the wreckage. At the time I assumed they’d already retrieved her.”

“Doesn’t look that way.”

“No, it doesn’t, and ...” She paused, then shook her head. “Quillin was why we crashed. She tried to gain control, to stop us landing ...” Again

Wendigo trailed off, as if unsure how far to commit herself. “I think

Quillin was a plant, put aboard by those who disagreed with the peace initiative. She’d been primed—altered psychologically to reject any

Royalist peace overtures.”

“She was born like that—with a stick up her ass.”

“She’s dead, I’m sure of it.”

Wendigo almost sounded glad.

“Still, you made it.”

“Just, Spirey. I’m the humpty who fell off the wall twice. This time they couldn’t find all the pieces. The Splinterqueen pumped me full of demons; gallons of them. They’re all that’s holding me together, but I don’t think they can keep it up forever. When I speak to you, at least some of what you hear is the Splinterqueen herself. I’m not really sure where you draw the line.”

I let that sink in, then said: “About the ship. Repair systems would have booted when you hit. Any idea when she’ll fly again?”

“Another day, day and a half.”

“Too damn long.”

“Just being realistic. If there’s a way to get off the splinter within the next six hours, ship isn’t it.”

I wasn’t giving up so easily. “What if wasps help? They could supply materials. Should speed things.”

Again that glazed look. “Alright,” she said. “It’s done. But I’m afraid wasp assistance won’t make enough difference. We’re still looking at twelve hours.”

“So I won’t start any long disneys.” I shrugged. “And maybe we can hold out until then.” She looked unconvinced, so I said: “Tell me the rest.

Everything you know about this place. Why, for starters.”

“Why?”

“Wendigo, I don’t have the faintest damn idea what any of us are doing here. All I do know is that in six hours I could be suffering from acute existence failure. When that happens, I’d be happier knowing what was so important I had to die for it.”

Wendigo looked toward Yarrow, still nursed by the detached elements of the

Queen. “I don’t think our being here will help her,” she said. “In which case, maybe I should show you something.” Something like a grin appeared on Wendigo’s face. “After all, it isn’t as if we don’t have time to kill.”

So we rode the train again, this time burrowing deeper into the splinter.

“This place,” Wendigo said, “and the hundred others already beyond the

Swirl—and the hundreds, thousands more which will follow—are arks.

They’re carrying life into the halo; the cloud of left-over material around the Swirl.”

“Colonisation, right?”

“Not quite. When the time’s right the splinters will return to the Swirl.

Only there won’t be one any more. There’ll be a solar system, fully formed. When the colonisation does begin, it will be of new worlds around

Fomalhaut, seeded from the life-templates held in the splinters.”

I raised a hand. “I was following you there ... until you mentioned life-templates.”

“Patience, Spirey.”

Wendigo’s timing couldn’t have been better, because at that moment light flooded the train’s brushed-steel interior.

The tunnel had become a glass tube, anchored to one wall of a vast cavern suffused in emerald light. The far wall was tiered, draping rafts of foliage. Our wall was steep and forested, oddly-curved waterfalls draining into stepped pools. The waterfalls were bent away from true ‘vertical’ by coriolis force, evidence that—just like the first chamber—this entire space was independently spinning within the splinter. The stepped pools were surrounded by patches of grass, peppered with moving forms which might have been naked people. There were wasps as well—tending the people.

As the people grew clearer I had that flinch you get when your gaze strays onto someone with a shocking disfigurement. Roughly half of them were males.

“Imported Royalists,” Wendigo said. “Remember I said they’d turned feral?

Seems there was an accident, not long after the wasps made the jump to sentience. A rogue demon, or something. Decimated them.”

“They have both sexes.”

“You’ll get used to it, Spirey—conceptually anyway. Tiger’s Eye wasn’t always exclusively female, you know that? It was just something we evolved into. Began with you pilots, matter of fact. Fem physiology made sense for pilots—women were smaller, had better gee-load tolerance, better stress psychodynamics and required fewer consumables than males. We were products of bio-engineering from the outset, so it wasn’t hard to make the jump to an all-fem culture.”

“Makes me want to ... I don’t know.” I forced my gaze away from the

Royalists. “Puke or something. It’s like going back to having hair all over your body.”

“That’s because you grew up with something different.”

“Did they always have two sexes?”

“Probably not. What I do know is that the wasps bred from the survivors, but something wasn’t right. Apart from the reversion to dimorphism, the children didn’t grow up normally. Some part of their brains hadn’t developed right.”

“Meaning what?”

“They’re morons. The wasps keep trying to fix things of course. That’s why the Splinterqueen will do everything to help Yarrow—and us, of course.

If she can study or even capture our thought patterns—and the demons make that possible—maybe she can use them to imprint consciousness back onto the Royalists. Like the Florentine architecture I said they copied, right? That was one template, and Yarrow’s mind will be another.”

“That’s supposed to cheer me up?”

“Look on the bright side. A while from now, there might be a whole generation of people who think along lines laid down by Yarrow.”

“Scary thought.” Then wondered why I was able to crack a joke, with destruction looming so close in the future. “Listen, I still don’t get it.

What makes them want to bring life to the Swirl?”

“It seems to boil down to two ... imperatives, I suppose you’d call them.

The first’s simple enough. When wasps were first opening up Greater

Earth’s solar system, back in the mid Twenty First Century, we sought the best way for them to function in large numbers without supervision. We studied insect colonies and imprinted the most useful rules straight into the wasps’ programming. More than six hundred years later, those rules have percolated to the top. Now the wasps aren’t content merely to organize themselves along patterns derived from living prototypes. Now they want to become—or at least give rise to—living forms of their own.”

“Life envy.”

“Or something very like it.”

I thought about what Wendigo had told me, then said: “What about the second imperative?”

“Trickier. Much trickier.” She looked at me hard, as if debating whether to broach whatever subject was on her mind. “Spirey, what do you know about Solar War Three?”

The wasps had given up on Yarrow while we traveled. They’d left her on a corniced plinth in the middle of the terrazzo; poised on her back, arms folded across her chest, tail and fluke draping asymmetrically over one side.

“She didn’t necessarily fail, Spirey,” Wendigo said, taking my arm in her own unyielding grip. “That’s only Yarrow’s body, after all.”

“The Queen managed to read her mind?”

There was no opportunity to answer. The chamber shook, more harshly than when Mouser had gone up. The vibration keeled us to the floor, Wendigo’s metal arms cracking against the tesselated marble. As if turning in her sleep, Yarrow slipped from the plinth.

“Home,” Wendigo said, raising herself from the floor.

“Impossible. Can’t have been more than two hours since Mouser was hit.

There shouldn’t be any response for another four!”

“They probably decided to attack us regardless of the outcome of their last attempt. Kinetics.”

“You sure there’s no defense?”

“Only good luck.” The ground lashed at us again, but Wendigo stayed standing. The roar which followed the first impact was subsiding, fading into a constant but bearable complaint of tortured ice.

“The first probably only chipped us—maybe gouged a big crater, but I doubt that it ruptured any of the pressurised areas. Next time could be worse.”

And there would be a next time, no doubt about it. Kinetics were the only weapon capable of hitting us at such long range, and they did so by sheer force of numbers. Each kinetic was a speck of iron, accelerated to a hair’s breadth below the speed of light. Relativity bequeathed the speck a disproportionate amount of kinetic energy—enough that only a few impacts would rip the splinter to shreds. Of course, only one in a thousand of the kinetics they fired at us would hit—but that didn’t matter. They’d just fire ten thousand.

“Wendigo,’’ I said. “Can we get to your ship?”

“No,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “We can reach it, but it isn’t fixed yet.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll lift on auxiliaries. Once we’re clear of the splinter we’ll be safe.”

“No good, either. Hull’s breached—it’ll be at least an hour before even part of it can be pressurised.”

“And it’ll take us an hour or so just to get there, won’t it? So why are we waiting?”

“Sorry, Spirey, but—”

Her words were drowned by the arrival of the second kinetic. This one seemed to hit harder, the impact trailing away into aftergroans. The holographic frescos were all dark now. Then—ever so slowly—the ceiling ruptured, a huge mandible of ice probing into the chamber. We’d lost the false gravity; now all that remained was the splinter’s feeble pull, dragging us obliquely toward one wall.

“But what?” I shouted in Wendigo’s direction.

For a moment she had that absent look which said she was more Queen than

Wendigo. Then she nodded in reluctant acceptance. “Alright, Spirey. We play it your way. Not because I think our chances are great. Just that I’d rather be doing something.”

“Amen to that.”

It was uncomfortably dim now, much of the illumination having come from the endlessly cycling frescos. But it wasn’t silent. Though the groan of the chamber’s off-kilter spin was gone now, what remained was almost as bad: the agonized shearing of the ice which lay beyond us. Helped by wasps, we made it to the train. I carried Yarrow’s corpse, but at the door

Wendigo said: “Leave her.”

“No way.”

“She’s dead, Spirey. Everything of her that mattered, the Splinterqueen already saved. You have to accept that. It was enough that you brought her here, don’t you understand? Carrying her now would only lessen your chances—and that would really have pissed her off.”

Some alien part of me allowed the wasps take the corpse. Then we were inside, helmeted up and breathing thick.

As the train picked up speed, I glanced out the window, intent on seeing the Queen one last time. It should have been too dark, but the chamber looked bright. For a moment I presumed the frescos had come to life again, but then something about the scene’s unreal intensity told me the Queen was weaving this image in my head. She hovered above the debris-strewn terrazzo—except that this was more than the Queen I had seen before.

This was—what?

How she saw herself?

Ten of her twelve wasp composites were now back together, arranged in constantly shifting formation. They now seemed more living than machine, with diaphonous sunwings, chitin-black bodies, fur-sheened limbs and sensors, and eyes which were faceted crystalline globes, sparkling in the chamber’s false light. That wasn’t all. Before, I’d sensed the Queen as something implied by her composites. Now I didn’t need to imagine her.

Like a ghost in which the composites hung, she loomed vast in the chamber, multiwinged and brooding—

And then we were gone.

We sped toward the surface for the next few minutes, waiting for the impact of the next kinetic. When it hit, the train’s cushioned ride smothered the concussion. For a moment I thought we’d made it, then the machine began to decelerate slowly to a dead halt. Wendigo convened with the Queen and told me the line was blocked. We disembarked into vacuum.

Ahead, the tunnel ended in a wall of jumbled ice.

After a few minutes we found a way through the obstruction, Wendigo wrenching aside boulders larger than either of us. “We’re only half a klick from the surface,” she said, as we emerged into the unblocked tunnel beyond. She pointed ahead, to what might have been a scotoma of absolute blackness against the milky darkness of the tunnel.

“After that, a klick overland to the wreck.” She paused. “Realise we can’t go home, Spirey. Now more than ever.”

“Not exactly spoilt for choice, are we.”

“No. It has to be the halo, of course. It’s where the splinter’s headed anyway; just means we’ll get there ahead of schedule. There are other

Splinterqueens out there, and at the very least they’ll want to keep us alive. Possibly other humans as well—others who made the same discovery as us, and knew there was no going home.”

“Not to mention Royalists.”

“That troubles you, doesn’t it?”

“I’ll deal with it,” I said, pushing forward.

The tunnel was nearly horizontal, and with the splinter’s weak gravity it was easy to make the distance to the surface. Emerging, Fomalhaut glared down at us, a white-cored bloodshot eye surrounded by the wrinklelike dust lanes of the inner Swirl. Limned in red, wasp corpses marred the landscape.

“I don’t see the ship.”

Wendigo pointed to a piece of blank caramel-colored horizon. “Curvature’s too great. We won’t see it until we’re almost on top of it.”

“Hope you’re right.”

“Trust me. I know this place like, well ...” Wendigo regarded one of her limbs. “Like the back of my hand.”

“Encourage me, why don’t you.”

Three or four hundred meters later we crested a scallop-shaped rise of ice and halted. We could see the ship now. It didn’t look in much better shape than when Yarrow and I had scoped it from Mouser.

“I don’t see any wasps.”

“Too dangerous for them to stay on the surface,” Wendigo said.

“That’s cheering. I hope the remaining damage is cosmetic,” I said.

“Because if it isn’t—”

Suddenly I wasn’t talking to anyone.

Wendigo was gone. After a moment I saw her, lying in a crumpled heap at the foot of the hillock. Her guts stretched away like a rusty comet-tail, half way to the next promontary.

Quillin was fifty meters ahead, risen from the concealment of a chondrite boulder.

When Wendigo had mentioned her, I’d put her out of mind as any kind of threat. How could she pose any danger beyond the inside of a thickship, when she’d traded her legs for a tail and fluke, just like Yarrow? On dry land, she’d be no more mobile than a seal pup. Well, that was how I’d figured things.

But I’d reckoned without Quillin’s suit.

Unlike Yarrow’s—unlike any siren suit I’d ever seen—it sprouted legs.

Mechanized, they emerged from the hip, making no concessions to human anatomy. The legs were long enough to lift Quillin’s tail completely free of the ice. My gaze tracked up her body, registering the crossbow which she held in a double-handed grip.

“I’m sorry,” Quillin’s deep voice boomed in my skull. “Check-in’s closed.”

“Wendigo said you might be a problem.”

“Wise up. It was staged from the moment we reached the Royalist stronghold.” Still keeping the bow on me, she began to lurch across the ice. “The ferals were actors, playing dumb. The wasps were programmed to feed us bullshit.”

“It isn’t a Royalist trick, Quillin.”

“Shit. See I’m gonna have to kill you as well.”

The ground jarred, more violently than before. A nimbus of white light puffed above the horizon, evidence of an impact on the splinter’s far side. Quillin stumbled, but her legs corrected the accident before it tripped her forward.

“I don’t know if you’re keeping up with current events,” I said. “But that’s our own side.”

“Maybe you didn’t think hard enough. Why did wasps in the Swirl get smart before the trillions of wasps back in Sol System? Should have been the other way round.”

“Yeah?”

“Of course, Spirey. GE’s wasps had a massive head-start.” She shrugged, but the bow stayed rigidly pointed. “Okay, war sped up wasp evolution here. But that shouldn’t have made so much difference. That’s where the story breaks down.”

“Not quite.”

“What?”

“Something Wendigo told me. About what she called the second imperative. I guess it wasn’t something she found out until she went underground.”

“Yeah? Astonish me.”

Well, something astonished Quillin at that point—but I was only marginally less surprised by it myself. An explosion of ice, and a mass of swiftly-moving metal erupting from the ground around her. The wasp corpses were partially dismembered, blasted and half—melted—but they still managed to drag Quillin to the ground. For a moment she thrashed, kicking up plumes of frost. Then the whole mass lay deathly still, and it was just me, the ice and a lot of metal and blood.

The Queen must have coaxed activity out of a few of the wasp corpses, ordering them to use their last reserves of power to take out Quillin.

Thanks, Queen.

But no cigar. Quillin hadn’t necessarily meant to shoot me at that point, but—bless her—she had anyway. The bolt had transected me with the precision of one of the Queen’s theorems, somewhere below my sternum.

Gut-shot. The blood on the ice was my own.

I tried moving.

A couple of light-years away I saw my body undergo a frail little shiver.

It didn’t hurt, but there was nothing in the way of proprioceptive feedback to indicate I’d actually managed to twitch any part of my body.

Quillin was moving too.

Wriggling, that is, since her suit’s legs had been cleanly ripped away by the wasps. Other than that she didn’t look seriously injured. Ten or so meters from me, she flopped around like a maggot and groped for her bow.

What remained of it anyway.

Chalk one to the good guys.

By which time I was moving, executing a marginally quicker version of

Quillin’s slug crawl. I couldn’t stand up—there are limits to what pilot physiology can cope with—but my legs gave me leverage she lacked.

“Give up, Spirey. You have a head-start on me, and right now you’re a little faster—but that ship’s still a long way off.” Quillin took a moment to catch her breath. “Think you can sustain that pace? Gonna need to, you don’t want me catching up.”

“Plan on rolling over me until I suffocate?”

“That’s an option. If this doesn’t kill you first.”

Enough of her remained in my field-of-view to see what she meant.

Something sharp and bladelike had sprung from her wrist, a bayonet projecting half a meter ahead of her hand. It looked like a nasty little toy—but I did my best to push it out of mind and get on with the job of crawling toward the ship. It was no more than two hundred meters away now

—what little of it protruded above the ice. The external airlock was already open, ready to clamp shut as soon as I wriggled inside—

“You never finished telling me, Spirey.”

“Telling you what?”

“About this—what did you call it? The second imperative?”

“Oh, that.” I halted and snatched breath. “Before I go on, I want you to know I’m only telling you this to piss you off.”

“Whatever bakes your cake.”

“Alright,” I said. “Then I’ll begin by saying you were right. Greater

Earth’s wasps should have made the jump to sentience long before those in the Swirl, simply because they’d had longer to evolve. And that’s what happened.”

Quillin coughed, like gravel in a bucket. “Pardon?”

“They beat us to it. About a century and a half ago. Across Sol system, within just a few hours, every single wasp woke up and announced its intelligence to the nearest human being it could find. Like babies reaching for the first thing they see.” I stopped, sucking in deep lungfuls. The wreck had to be closer now—but it hardly looked it.

Quillin, by contrast, looked awfully close now—and that blade awfully sharp.

“So the wasps woke,” I said, damned if she wasn’t going to hear the whole story. “And that got some people scared . So much, some of them got to attacking the wasps. Some of their shots went wide, because within a day the whole system was one big shooting match. Not just humans against wasps

—but humans against humans.” Less than fifty meters now, across much smoother ground than we’d so far traversed. “Things just escalated. Ten days after Solar War Three began, only a few ships and habitats were still transmitting. They didn’t last long.”

“Crap,” Quillin said—but she sounded less cocksure than she had a few moments before. “There was a war back then, but it never escalated into a full-blown Solar War.”

“No. It went the whole hog. From then on every signal we ever got from GE was concocted by wasps. They daren’t break the news to us—at least not immediately. We’ve only been allowed to find out because we’re never going home. Guilt, Wendigo called it. They couldn’t let it happen again.”

“What about our wasps?”

“Isn’t it obvious? A while later the wasps here made the same jump to sentience—presumably because they’d been shown the right moves by the others. Difference was, ours kept it quiet. Can’t exactly blame them, can you?”

There was nothing from Quillin for a while, both of us concentrating on the last patch of ice before Wendigo’s ship.

“I suppose you have an explanation for this too,” she said eventually, swiping her tail against the ground. “C’mon, blow my mind.”

So I told her what I knew. “They’re bringing life to the Swirl. Sooner than you think, too. Once this charade of a war is done, the wasps breed in earnest. Trillions out there now, but in a few decades it’ll be billions of trillions. They’ll outweigh a good-sized planet. In a way the

Swirl will have become sentient. It’ll be directing its own evolution.”

I spared Quillin the details—how the wasps would arrest the existing processes of planetary formation so that they could begin anew, only this time according to a plan. Left to its own devices, the Swirl would contract down to a solar system comprised solely of small, rocky planets—but such a system could never support life over billions of years.

Instead, the wasps would exploit the system’s innate chaos to tip it toward a state where it would give rise to at least two much larger worlds

—planets as massive as Jupiter or Saturn, capable of shepherding left-over rubble into tidy, world-avoiding orbits. Mass extinctions had no place in the Splinterqueens’ vision of future life.

But I guessed Quillin probably didn’t care.

“Why are you hurrying, Spirey?” She asked, between harsh grunts as she propelled herself forward. “The ship isn’t going anywhere.”

The edge of the open airlock was a meter above the ice. My fingers probed over the rim, followed by the crest of my battered helmet. Just lifting myself into the lock’s lit interior seemed to require all the energy I’d already expended in the crawl. Somehow I managed to get half my body length into the lock.

Which is when Quillin reached me.

There wasn’t much pain when she dug the bayonet into my ankle; just a form of cold I hadn’t imagined before, even lying on the ice. Quillin jerked the embedded blade to and forth, and the knot of cold seemed to reach out little feelers, into my foot and lower leg. I sensed she wanted to retract the blade for another stab, but my suit armour was gripping it tight.

The bayonet taking her weight, Quillin lofted her bulk over the rim of the lock. I tried kicking her away, but the skewered leg no longer felt a part of me.

“You’re dead,” she whispered.

“News to me.”

Her eyes rolled wide, then locked on me with renewed venom. She gave the bayonet a violent twist. “So tell me one thing. That story—bullshit, or what?”

“I’ll tell you,” I said. “But first consider this.” Before she could react

I reached out and palmed a glowing panel set in the lock wall. The panel whisked aside, revealing a mushroom-shaped red button. “You know that story they told about Wendigo, how she lost her arms?”

“You weren’t meant to swallow that hero guff, Spirey.”

“No? Well get a load of this. My hand’s on the emergency pressurisation control, Quillin. When I hit it, the outer door’s going to slide down quicker than you can blink.”

She looked at my hand, then down at her wrist, still attached to my ankle via the jammed bayonet. Slowly the situation sunk in. “Close the door,

Spirey, and you’ll be a leg short.”

“And you an arm, Quillin.”

“Stalemate, then.”

“Not quite. See, which of us is more likely to survive? Me inside, with all the medical systems aboard this ship, or you all on your lonesome outside? Frankly, I don’t think it’s any contest.”

Her eyes opened wider. Quillin gave a shriek of anger and entered one final furious wrestling match with the bayonet.

I managed to laugh. “As for your question, it’s true, every word of it.”

Then, with all the calm I could muster, I thumbed the control. “Pisser, isn’t it.”

I made it, of course.

Several minutes after the closing of the door, demons had lathered a protective cocoon around the stump and stomach wound. They allowed me no pain—only a muggy sense of detachment. Enough of my mind remained sharp to think about my escape—problematic given that the ship still wasn’t fixed.

Eventually I remembered the evac pods.

They were made to kick away from the ship fast, if some quackdrive system went on the fritz. They had thrusters for that; nothing fancy, but here they’d serve another purpose. They’d boost me from the splinter, punch me out of its grav well.

So I did it.

Snuggled into a pod and blew out of the wreck, feeling the gee-load even within the thick. It didn’t last long. On the evac pod’s cam I watched the splinter drop away until it was pebble-sized. The main body of the kinetic attack was hitting it by then, impacts every ten or so seconds. After a minute of that the splinter just came apart. Afterwards, there was only a sooty veil where it had been, and then only the Swirl.

I hoped the Queen had made it. I guess it was within her power to transmit what counted of herself out to sisters in the halo. If so, there was a chance for Yarrow as well. I’d find out eventually. Afterwards, I used the pod’s remaining fuel to inject me into a slow elliptical orbit, one that would graze the halo in a mere fifty or sixty years.

That didn’t bother me. I wanted to close my eyes and let the thick nurse me whole again—and sleep an awful long time.

This story first appeared in Interzone.

A Spy In Europa

This story first appeared in Interzone.

Marius Vargovic, agent of Gilgamesh Isis, savoured an instant of free-fall before the flitter’s engines kicked in, slamming it away from the

Deucalion. His pilot gunned the craft toward the moon below, quickly outrunning the other shuttles which the Martian liner had disgorged.

Europa seemed to be enlarging perceptibly; a flattening arc the colour of nicotine-stained wallpaper.

“Boring, isn’t it.”

Vargovic turned around in his seat, languidly. “You’d rather they were shooting at us?”

“Rather they were doing something.”

“Then you’re a fool,” Vargovic said, making a tent of his fingers.

“There’s enough armament buried in that ice to give Jupiter a second red spot. What it would do to us doesn’t bear thinking about it.”

“Only trying to make conversation.”

“Don’t bother—it’s an overrated activity at the best of times.”

“Alright, Marius—I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it, filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate one-time pad and wrote a fucking two-hundred page report on it. Satisfied?”

“I’m never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn’t in my nature.”

But Mishenka was right: Europa was an encrypted document; complexity masked by a surface of fractured and refrozen ice. Its surface grooves were like the capillaries in a vitrified eyeball; faint as the structure in a raw surveillance image. But once within the airspace boundary of the

Europan Demarchy, traffic-management co-opted the flitter, vectoring it into a touchdown corridor. In three days Mishenka would return, but then he would disable the avionics, kissing the ice for less than ten minutes.

“Not too late to abort,” Mishenka said, a long time later.

“Are you out of your tiny mind?”

The younger man dispensed a frosty Covert Ops smile. “We’ve all heard what the Demarchy do to spies, Marius.”

“Is this a personal grudge or are you just psychotic?”

“I’ll leave being psychotic to you, Marius—you’re so much better at it.”

Vargovic nodded. It was the first sensible thing Mishenka had said all day.

They landed an hour later. Vargovic adjusted his Martian businesswear, tuning his holographically-inwoven frock coat to project red sandstorms; lifting the collar in what he had observed from the liner’s passengers was a recent Martian fad. Then he grabbed his bag—nothing incriminating there; no gadgets or weapons—and exited the flitter, stepping through the gasket of locks. A slitherwalk propelled him forward, massaging the soles of his slippers. It was a single cultured ribbon of octopus skin, stimulated to ripple by the timed firing of buried squid axons.

To get to Europa you either had to be sickeningly rich or sickeningly poor. Vargovic’s cover was the former: a lie excusing the single-passenger flitter. As the slitherwalk advanced he was joined by other arrivals:

business people like himself, and a sugaring of the merely wealthy. Most of them had dispensed with holographics, instead projecting entoptics beyond their personal space; machine-generated hallucinations decoded by the implant hugging Vargovic’s optic nerve. Hummingbirds and seraphim were in sickly vogue. Others were attended by autonomous perfumes which subtly altered the moods of those around them. Slightly lower down the social scale, Vargovic observed a clique of noisy tourists—antlered brats from

Circum-Jove. Then there was a discontinuous jump: squalid-looking Maunder refugees, who must have accepted indenture to the Demarchy. The refugees were quickly segregated from the more affluent immigrants, who found themselves within a huge geodesic dome, resting above the ice on refrigerated stilts. The walls of the dome glittered with duty-free shops, boutiques and bars. The floor was bowl-shaped, slitherwalks and spiral stairways descending to the nadir, where a quincunx of fluted marble cylinders waited. Vargovic observed that the newly-arrived were queueing for elevators which terminated in the cylinders. He joined a line and waited.

“First time in Cadmus-Asterius?” asked the bearded man ahead of him, iridophores in his plum-coloured jacket projecting Boolean propositions from Sirikit’s Machine Ethics in the Transenlightenment.

“First time on Europa, actually. First time Circum-Jove, you want the full story.”

“Down-system?”

“Mars.”

The man nodded gravely. “Hear it’s tough.”

“You’re not kidding.” And he wasn’t. Since the sun had dimmed—the second

Maunder minimum, repeating the behaviour which the sun had exhibited in the seventeenth century—the entire balance of power in the First System had altered. The economies of the inner worlds had found it hard to adjust; agriculture and power-generation handicapped, with concomitant social upheaval. But the outer planets had never had the luxury of solar energy in the first place. Now Circum-Jove was the benchmark of First

System economic power, with Circum-Saturn trailing behind. Because of this, the two primary Circum-Jove superpowers—the Demarchy, which controlled Europa and Io—and Gilgamesh Isis—which controlled Ganymede, and parts of Callisto—were vying for dominance.

The man smiled keenly. “Here for anything special?”

“Surgery,” Vargovic said, hoping to curtail the conversation at the earliest juncture. “Very extensive anatomical surgery.”

They hadn’t told him much.

“Her name is Cholok,” Control had said, after Vargovic had skimmed the dossiers back in the caverns which housed the Covert Operations section of

Gilgamesh Isis security, deep in Ganymede. “We recruited her ten years ago, when she was on Phobos.”

“And now she’s Demarchy?”

Control had nodded. “She was swept up in the brain-drain, once Maunder II began to bite. The smartest got out while they could. The Demarchy—and us, of course—snapped up the brightest.”

“And also one of our sleepers.” Vargovic glanced down at the portrait of the woman, striped by video lines. She looked mousey to him, with a permanent bone-deep severity of expression.

“Cheer up,” Control said. “I’m asking you to contact her, not sleep with her.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just tell me her background.”

“Biotech.” Control nodded at the dossier. “On Phobos she led one of the teams working in aquatic transform work—modifying the human form for submarine operations.”

Vargovic nodded diligently. “Go on.”

“Phobos wanted to sell their know-how to the Martians, before their oceans froze. Of course, the Demarchy also appreciated her talents. Cholok took her team to Cadmus-Asterius, one of their hanging cities.”

“Mm.” Vargovic was getting the thread now. “By which time we’d already recruited her.”

“Right,” Control said, “except we had no obvious use for her.”

“Then why this conversation?”

Control smiled. Control always smiled when Vargovic pushed the envelope of subservience. “We’re having it because our sleeper won’t lie down.” Then

Control reached over and touched the image of Cholok, making her speak.

What Vargovic was seeing was an intercept; something Gilgamesh had captured, riddled with edits and jump-cuts.

She appeared to be sending a verbal message to an old friend in Isis. She was talking rapidly from a white room; inert medical servitors behind her.

Shelves displayed flasks of colour-coded medichines. A cruciform bed resembled an autopsy slab with ceramic drainage sluices.

“Cholok contacted us a month ago,” Control said. “The room’s part of her clinic.”

“She’s using phrase-embedded three,” Vargovic said, listening to her speech patterns, siphoning content from otherwise normal Canasian.

“Last code we taught her.”

“Alright. What’s her angle?”

Control chose his words—skating around the information excised from

Cholok’s message. “She wants to give us something,” he said. “Something valuable. She’s acquired it accidentally. Someone good has to smuggle it out.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere, Control.”

The muzak rose to a carefully timed crescendo as the elevator plunged through the final layer of ice. The view around and below was literally dizzying, and Vargovic registered exactly as much awe as befitted his

Martian guise. He knew the Demarchy’s history, of course—how the hanging cities had begun as points of entry into the ocean; air-filled observation cupolas linked to the surface by narrow access shafts sunk through the kilometre-thick crustal ice. Scientists had studied the unusual smoothness of the crust, noting that its fracture patterns echoed those on Earth’s ice-shelves, implying the presence of a water ocean. Europa was further from the sun than Earth, but something other than solar energy maintained the ocean’s liquidity. Instead, the moon’s orbit around Jupiter created stresses which flexed the moon’s silicate core, tectonic heat bleeding into the ocean via hydrothermal vents.

Descending into the city was a little like entering an amphitheatre—except that there was no stage; merely an endless succession of steeply tiered lower balconies. They converged toward a light-filled infinity, seven or eight kilometres below, where the city’s conic shape constricted to a point. The opposite side was half a kilometre away; levels rising like geologic strata. A wide glass tower threaded the atrium from top to bottom, aglow with smoky-green ocean and a mass of kelplike flora, cultured by gilly swimmers. Artificial sunlamps burned in the kelp like christmas tree lights. Above, the tower branched; peristaltic feeds reaching out to the ocean proper. Offices, shops, restaurants and residential units were stacked atop each other, or teetered into the abyss on elegant balconies, spun from lustrous sheets of bulk-chitin polymer, the Demarchy’s major construction material. Gossamer bridges arced across the atrium space, dodging banners, projections and vast translucent sculptures, moulded from a silky variant of the same chitin polymer. Every visible surface was overlaid by neon, holographics and entoptics. People were everywhere, and in every face Vargovic detected a slight absence; as if their minds were not entirely focused on the here and now. No wonder:

all citizens had an implant which constantly interrogated them, eliciting their opinions on every aspect of Demarchy life, both within

Cadmus-Asterius and beyon. Eventually, it was said, the implant’s nagging presence faded from consciousness, until the act of democratic participation became near-involuntary.

It revolted Vargovic as much as it intrigued him.

“Obviously,” Control said, with judicial deliberation. “What Cholok has to offer isn’t merely a nugget—or she’d have given it via PE3.”

Vargovic leant forward. “She hasn’t told you?”

“Only that it could endanger the hanging cities.”

“You trust her?”

Vargovic felt one of Control’s momentary indiscretions coming on. “She may have been sleeping, but she hasn’t been completely valueless. There were defections she assisted in ... like the Maunciple job—remember that?”

“If you’re calling that a success perhaps it’s time I defected.”

“Actually, it was Cholok’s information which persuaded us to get Maunciple out via the ocean rather the front door. If Demarchy security had reached

Maunciple alive they’d have learnt ten years of tradecraft.”

“Whereas instead Maunciple got a harpoon in his back.”

“So the operation had its flaws.” Control shrugged. “But if you’re thinking all this points to Cholok having been compromised ... Naturally, the thought entered our heads. But if Maunciple had acted otherwise it would have been worse.” Control folded his arms. “And of course, he might have made it, in which case even you’d have to admit Cholok’s safe.”

“Until proven otherwise.”

Control brightened. “So you’ll do it?”

“Like I have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice, Vargovic.”

Yes, Vargovic thought. There was always a choice ... between doing what ever Gilgamesh Isis asked of him ... and being deprogrammed, cyborgized and sent to work in the sulphur projects around the slopes of Ra Patera. It just wasn’t a particularly good one.

“One other thing ...”

“Yes?”

“When I’ve got whatever Cholok has ...”

Control half-smiled, the two of them sharing a private joke which did not need illumination. “I’m sure the usual will suffice.”

The elevator slowed into immigration.

Demarchy guards hefted big guns, but no one took any interest in him. His story about coming from Mars was accepted; he was submitted to only the usual spectrum of invasive procedures: neural and genetic patterns scanned for pathologies, body bathed in eight forms of exotic radiation. The final formality consisted of drinking a thimble of chocolate. The beverage consisted of billions of medichines which infiltrated his body, searching for concealed drugs, weapons and illegal biomodifications. He knew that they would find nothing, but was relieved when they reached his bladder and requested to be urinated back into the Demarchy.

The entire procedure lasted six minutes. Outside, Vargovic followed a slitherwalk to the city zoo, and then barged through crowds of schoolchildren until he had arrived at the aquarium where Cholok was meant to meet him. The exhibits were devoted to Europan biota, most of which depended on the ecological niches of the hydrothermal vents, carefully reproduced here. There was nothing very exciting to look at, since most

Europan predators looked marginally less fierce than hatstands or lampshades. The commonest were called ventlings; large and structurally simple animals whose metabolisms hinged on symbiosis. They were pulpy, funnelled bags planted on a tripod of orange stilts, moving with such torpor that Vargovic almost nodded off before Cholo arrived at his side.

She wore an olive-green coat and tight emerald trousers, projecting a haze of medicinal entoptics. Her clenched jaw accentuated the dourness he had gleaned from the intercept.

They kissed.

“Good to see you Marius. It’s been—what?”

“Nine years, thereabouts.”

“How’s Phobos these days?”

“Still orbiting Mars.” He deployed a smile. “Still a dive.”

“You haven’t changed.”

“Nor you.”

At a loss for words, Vargovic found his gaze returning to the informational readout accompanying the ventling exhibit. Only half attentively, he read that the ventlings, motile in their juvenile phase, gradually became sessile in adulthood, stilts thickening with deposited sulphur until they were rooted to the ground like stalagmites. When they died, their soft bodies dispersed into the ocean, but the tripods remained; eerily regular clusters of orange spines concentrated around active vents.

“Nervous, Marius?”

“In your hands? Not likely.”

“That’s the spirit.”

They bought two mugs of mocha from a nearby servitor, then returned to the ventling display, making what seemed like small-talk. During indoctrination Cholok had been taught phrase-embedded three. The code allowed the insertion of secondary information into a primary conversation, by careful deployment of word-order, hesitation and sentence structure.

“What have you got?” Vargovic asked.

“A sample,” Cholok answered, one of the easy, pre-set words which did not need to be laboriously conveyed. But what followed took nearly five minutes to put over, freighted via a series of rambling reminiscences of the Phobos years. “A small shard of hyperdiamond.”

Vargovic nodded. He knew what hyperdiamond was: a topologically complex interweave of tubular fullerene; structurally similar to cellulose or bulk chitin but thousands of times stronger; its rigidity artificially maintained by some piezo-electric trick which Gilgamesh lacked.

“Interesting,” Vargovic said. “But unfortunately not interesting enough.”

She ordered another mocha and downed it replying. “Use your imagination.

Only the Demarchy knows how to synthesise it.”

“It’s also useless as a weapon.”

“Depends. There’s an application you should know about.”

“What?”

“Keeping this city afloat—and I’m not talking about economic solvency.

Do you know about Buckminster Fuller? He lived about four hundred years ago; believed absolute democracy could be achieved through technological means.”

“The fool.”

“Maybe. But Fuller also invented the geodesic lattice which determines the structure of the buckyball; the closed allotrope of tubular fullerene. The city owes him on two counts.”

“Save the lecture. How does the hyperdiamond come into it?”

“Flotation bubbles,” she said. “Around the outside of the city. Each one is a hundred-metre wide sphere of hyperdiamond, holding vacuum. A

hundred-metre wide molecule, in fact, since each sphere is composed of one endless strand of tubular fullerene. Think of that, Marius: a molecule you could park a ship inside.”

While he absorbed that, another part of his mind continued to read the ventling caption; how their biochemistry had many similarities with the gutless tube worms which lived around Earth’s ocean vents. The ventlings drank hydrogen sulphide through their funnels, circulating via a modified form of haemoglobin, passing through a bacteria-saturated organ in the lower part of their bags. The bacteria split and oxidised the hydrogen sulphide, manufacturing a molecule similar to glucose. The glucose-analogue nourished the ventling, enabling it to keep living and occasionally make slow perambulations to other parts of the vent, or even to swim between vents, until the adult phase rooted it to the ground.

Vargovic read this, and then read it again, because he had just remembered something; a puzzling intercept passed to him from cryptanalysis several months earlier; something about Demarchy plans to incorporate ventling biochemistry into a larger animal. For a moment he was tempted to ask

Cholok about it directly, but he decided to force the subject from his mind until a more suitable time.

“Any other propaganda to share with me?”

“There are two hundred of these spheres. They inflate and deflate like bladders, maintaining C-As equilibrium. I’m not sure how the deflation happens, except that its something to do with changing the piezo-electric current in the tubes.”

“I still don’t see why Gilgamesh needs it.”

“Think. If you can get a sample of this to Ganymede, they might be able to find a way of attacking it. All you’d need would be a molecular agent capable of opening the gaps between the fullerene strands so that a molecule of water could squeeze through, or something which impedes the piezo-electric force.”

Absently Vargovic watched a squidlike predator nibble a chunk from the bag of a ventling. The squid blood ran thick with two forms of haemoglobin; one oxygen-bearing, one tuned for hydrogen sulphide. They used glycoproteins to keep their blood flowing and switched metabolisms as they swam from oxygen-dominated to sulphide-dominated water.

He snapped his attention back to Cholok. “I can’t believe I came all this way for ... what? Carbon?” He shook his head, slotting the gesture into the primary narrative of their conversation. “How did you obtain this?”

“An accident, with a gilly.”

“Go on.”

“An explosion near one of the bubbles. I was the surgeon assigned to the gilly; had to remove a lot of hyperdiamond from him. It wasn’t hard to save a few splinters.”

“Forward thinking of you.”

“Hard part was persuading Gilgamesh to send you. Especially after

Maunciple ...”

“Don’t lose any sleep over him,” Vargovic said, consulting his coffee. “He was a fat bastard who couldn’t swim fast enough.”

The surgery took place the next day. Vargovic woke with his mouth furnace-dry.

He felt—odd. They had warned him of this. He had even interviewed subjects who had undergone similar procedures in Gilgamesh’s experimental labs. They told him he would feel fragile, as if his head was no longer adequately coupled to his body. The periodic flushes of cold around his neck only served to increase that feeling.

“You can speak,” Cholok said, looming over him in surgeon’s whites. “But the cardiovascular modifications—and the amount of reworking we’ve done to your laryngeal area—will make your voice sound a little strange. Some of the gilled are really only comfortable talking to their own kind.”

He held a hand before his eyes, examining the translucent webbing which now spanned his fingers. There was a dark patch in the pale tissue of his palm: Cholok’s embedded sample. The other hand held another.

“It worked, didn’t it.” His voice sounded squeaky. “I can breathe water.”

“And air,” Cholok said. “Though what you’ll now find is that really strenuous exercise only feels natural when you’re submerged.”

“Can I move?”

“Of course,” she said. “Try standing up. You’re stronger than you feel.”

He did as she suggested, using the moment to assess his surroundings. A

neural monitor clamped his crown. He was naked, in a brightly-lit revival room; one glass-walled side facing the exterior ocean. It was from here that Cholok had first contacted Gilgamesh.

“This place is secure, isn’t it.”

“Secure?” she said, as if it was obscene. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“Then tell me about the Denizens.”

“What?”

“Demarchy code word. Cryptanalysis intercepted it recently—supposedly something about an experiment in radical biomodification. I was reminded of it in the aquarium.” Vargovic fingered the gills in his neck.

“Something that would make this look like cosmetic surgery. We heard the

Demarchy had tailored the sulphur-based metabolism of the ventlings for human use.”

She whistled. “That would be quite a trick.”

“Useful, though—especially if you wanted a workforce who could tolerate the anoxic environments around the vents, where the Demarchy happens to have certain minerological interests.”

“Maybe.” Cholok paused. “But the changes required would be beyond surgery.

You’d have to script them in at the developmental level. And even then ...

I’m not sure what you’d end up with would necessarily be human anymore.”

It was as if she shivered, though Vargovic was the one who felt cold, still standing naked beside the revival table. “All I can say is, if it happened, no one told me.”

“I thought I’d ask, that’s all.”

“Good.” She brandished a white medical scanner. “Now can I run a few more tests? We have to follow procedure.”

Cholok was right: quite apart from the fact that Vargovic’s operation was completely real—and therefore susceptible to complications which had to be looked for and monitored—any deviation from normal practise was undesirable.

After the first hour or so, the real strangeness of his transformation hit home. He had been blithely unaffected by it until then, but when he saw himself in a full-body mirror, in the corner of Cholok’s revival room, he knew that there was no going back.

Not easily, anyway. The Gilgamesh surgeons had promised him they could undo the work—but he didn’t believe them. After all, the Demarchy was ahead of Ganymede in the biosciences, and even Cholok had told him reversals were tricky. He’d accepted the mission in any case: the pay tantalising; the prospect of the sulphur projects rather less.

Cholok spent most of the day with him, only breaking off to talk to other clients or confer with her team. Breathing exercises occupied most of that time: prolonged periods spent underwater, nulling the brain’s drowning response. Unpleasant, but Vargovic had done worse things in training. They practised fully-submerged swimming, using his lungs to regulate buoyancy, followed by instruction about keeping his gill-openings—what Cholok called his opercula—clean, which meant ensuring the health of the colonies of commensal bacteria which thrived in the openings and crawled over the fine secondary flaps of his lamellae. He’d read the brochure:

what she’d done was to surgically sculpt his anatomy toward a state somewhere between human and air-breathing fish: incorporating biochemical lessons from lungfish and walking-catfish. Fish breathed water through their mouths and returned it to the sea via their gills, but it was the gills in Vargovic’s neck which served the function of a mouth. His true gills were below his thoracic cavity; crescent-shaped gashes below his ribs.

“Compared to your body size,” she said, “these gill-openings are never going to give you the respiratory efficiency you’d have if you went in for more dramatic changes ...”

“Like a Denizen?”

“I told you, I don’t know anything.”

“It doesn’t matter.” He flattened the gill-flaps down, watching—only slightly nauseated—as they puckered with each exhalation. “Are we finished?”

“Just some final bloodwork,” she said. “To make sure everything’s still working. Then you can go and swim with the fishes.”

While she was busy at one of her consoles, surrounded by false-colour entoptics of his gullet—he asked her: “Do you have the weapon?”

Cholok nodded absently and opened a drawer, fishing out a hand-held medical laser. “Not much,” she said. “I disabled the yield-suppresser, but you’d have to aim it at someone’s eyes to do much damage.”

Vargovic hefted the laser, scrutinising the controls in its contoured haft. Then he grabbed Cholok’s head and twisted her around, dousing her face with the laser’s actinic-blue beam. There were two consecutive popping sounds as her eyeballs evaporated.

“What, like that?”

Conventional scalpels did the rest.

He rinsed the blood, dressed and left the medical centre alone, travelling kilometres down-city, to where Cadmus-Asterius narrowed to a point. Even though there were many gillies moving freely through the city—they were volunteers, by and large, with full Demarchy rights—he did not linger in public for long. Within a few minutes he was safe within a warren of collagen-walled service tunnels, frequented only by technicians, servitors or other gill-workers. The late Cholok had been right; breathing air was harder now; it felt too thin.

“Demarchy security advisory,” said a bleak machine voice emanating from the wall. “A murder has occurred in the medical sector. The suspect may be an armed gill worker. Approach with extreme caution.”

They’d found Cholok. Risky, killing her. But Gilgamesh preferred to burn its bridges, removing the possibility of any sleeper turning traitor after they had fulfilled their usefulness. In the future, Vargovic mulled, they might be better using a toxin, rather than the immediate kill. He made a mental note to insert this in his report.

He entered the final tunnel, not far from the waterlock which had been his destination. At the tunnel’s far end a technician sat on a crate, listening with a stethoscope to something going on behind an access panel.

For a moment Vargovic considered passing the man, hoping he was engrossed in his work. He began to approach him, padding on bare webbed feet, which made less noise than the shoes he had just removed. Then the man nodded to himself, uncoupled from the listening post and slammed the hatch. Grabbing his crate, he stood and made eye contact with Vargovic.

“You’re not meant to be here,” he said. Then offered, almost plaintively:

“Can I help you? You’ve just had surgery, haven’t you? I always know the ones like you: always a little red around the gills.”

Vargovic drew his collar higher, then relented because that made it harder to breathe. “Stay where you are,” he said. “Put down the crate and freeze.”

“Christ, it was you, wasn’t it—that advisory?” the man said.

Vargovic raised the laser. Blinded, the man blundered into the wall, dropping the crate. He made a pitiful moan. Vargovic crept closer, the man stumbling into the scalpel. Not the cleanest of killings, but that hardly mattered.

Vargovic was sure the Demarchy would shortly seal off access to the ocean

—especially when his last murder came to light. For now, however, the locks were accessible. He moved into the air-filled chamber, his lungs now aflame for water. High-pressure jets filled the room, and he quickly transitioned to water-breathing, feeling his thoughts clarify. The secondary door clammed open, revealing ocean. He was kilometres below the ice, and the water here was both chillingly cold and under crushing pressure—but it felt normal; pressure and cold registering only as abstract qualities of the environment. His blood was inoculated with glycoproteins now; molecules which would lower its freezing point below that of water.

The late Cholok had done well.

Vargovic was about to leave the city when a second gill-worker appeared in the doorway, returning to the city after completing a shift. He killed her efficiently, and she bequeathed him a thermally-inwoven wetsuit, for working in the coldest parts of the ocean. The wetsuit had octopus ancestry, and when it slithered onto him it left apertures for his gill-openings. She had been wearing goggles which had infrared and sonar capability, and carried a hand-held tug. The thing resembled the still-beating heart of a vivisected animal, its translucent components nobbed with dark veins and ganglia. But it was easy to use: Vargovic set its pump to maximum thrust and powered away from the lower levels of C-A.

Even in the relatively uncontaminated water of the Europan ocean, visibility was low; he would not have been able to see anything were the city not abundantly illuminated on all its levels. Even so, he could see no more than half a kilometre upwards; the higher parts of C-A lost in golden haze and then deepening darkness. Although its symmetry was upset by protrusions and accretions, the city’s basic conic form was evident, tapering at the narrowest point to an inlet mouth which ingested ocean.

The cone was surrounded by a haze of flotation bubbles, black as caviar.

He remembered the chips of hyperdiamond in his hands. If Cholok was right,

Vargovic’s people might find a way to make it water-permeable; opening the fullerene weave sufficiently so that the spheres’ buoyant properties would be destroyed. The necessary agent could be introduced into the ocean by ice-penetrating missiles. Some time later—Vargovic was uninterested in the details—the Demarchy cities would begin to groan under their own weight. If the weapon worked sufficiently quickly, there might not even be time to act against it. The cities would fall from the ice, sinking down through the black kilometres of ocean below them.

He swam on.

Near C-A, the rocky interior of Europa climbed upwards to meet him. He had travelled three or four kilometres north, and was comparing the visible topography—lit by service lights installed by Demarchy gill-workers—with his own mental maps of the area. Eventually he found an outcropping of silicate rock. Beneath the overhang was a narrow ledge, on which a dozen or so small boulders had fallen. One was redder than the others.

Vargovic anchored himself to the ledge and hefted the red rock, the warmth of his fingertips activating its latent biocircuitry. A screen appeared in the rock, filling with the face of Mishenka.

“I’m on time,” Vargovic said, his own voice sounding even less recognisable through the distorting medium of the water. “I presume you’re ready?”

“Problem,” Mishenka said. “Big fucking problem.”

“What?”

“Extraction site’s compromised.” Mishenka—or rather the simulation of

Mishenka which was running in the rock—anticipated Vargovic’s next question: “A few hours ago the Demarchy sent a surface team out onto the ice, ostensibly to repair a transponder. But the spot they’re covering is right where we planned to pull you out.” He paused. “You did—uh—kill

Cholok, didn’t you? I mean you didn’t just grievously injure her?”

“You’re talking to a professional.”

The rock did a creditable impression of Mishenka looking pained. “Then the

Demarchy got to her.”

Vargovic wave his hand in front of the rock. “I got what I came for, didn’t I?”

“You got something.”

“If it isn’t what Cholok said it was, then she’s accomplished nothing except get herself dead.”

“Even so ...” Mishenka appeared to entertain a thought briefly, before discarding it. “Listen, we always had a backup extraction point, Vargovic.

You’d better get your ass there.” He grinned. “Hope you can swim faster than Maunciple.”

It was thirty kilometres south.

He passed a few gill-workers on the way, but they ignored him and once he was more than five kilometres from C-A there was increasingly less evidence of human presence. There was a head-up display in the goggles.

Vargovic experimented with the readout modes before calling up a map of the whole area. It showed his location, and also three dots which were following him from C-A.

He was being tailed by Demarchy security.

They were at least three kilometres behind him now, but they were perceptibly narrowing the distance. With a cold feeling gripping his gut, it occurred to Vargovic that there was no way he could make it to the extraction point before the Demarchy caught him.

Ahead, he noticed a thermal hot-spot; heat bubbling up from the relatively shallow level of the rock floor. The security operatives were probably tracking him via the gill-worker’s appropriated equipment. But once he was near the vent he could ditch it: the water was warmer there; he wouldn’t need the suit, and the heat, light and associated turbulence would confuse any other tracking system. He could lie low behind a convenient rock, stalk them while they were preoccupied with the homing signal.

It struck Vargovic as a good plan. He made the distance to the vent quickly, feeling the water warm around him, noticing how the taste of it changed; turning brackish. The vent was a fiery red fountain surrounded by bacteria-crusted rocks and the colourless Europan equivalent of coral.

Ventlings were everywhere; their pulpy bags shifting as the currents altered. The smallest were motile, ambling on their stilts like animated bagpipes, navigating around the triadic stumps of their dead relatives.

Vargovic ensconced himself in a cave, after placing the gill-worker equipment near another cave on the far side of the vent, hoping that the security operatives would look there first. While they did so, he would be able to kill at least one of them; maybe two. Once he had their weapons, taking care of the third would be a formality.

Something nudged him from behind.

What Vargovic saw when he turned around was something too repulsive even for a nightmare. It was so wrong that for a faltering moment he could not quite assimilate what it was he was looking at, as if the thing was a three-dimensional perception test; a shape which refused to stabilise in his head. The reason he could not hold it still was because part of him refused to believe that this thing had any connection with humanity. But the residual traces of human ancestry were too obvious to ignore.

Vargovic knew—beyond any reasonable doubt—that what he was seeing was a Denizen. Others loomed from the cave depths. They were five more of them; all roughly similar; all aglow with faint bioluminescence, all regarding him with darkly intelligent eyes. Vargovic had seen pictures of mermaids in books when he was a child; what he was looking at now were macabre corruptions of those innocent illustrations. These things were the same fusions of human and fish as in those pictures—but every detail had been twisted toward ugliness, and the true horror of it was that the fusion was total; it was not simply that a human torso had been grafted to a fish’s tail, but that the splice had been made—it was obvious—at the genetic level, so that in every aspect of the creature there was something simultaneously and grotesquely piscine. The face was the worst; bisected by a lipless down-curved slit of a mouth, almost sharklike. There was no nose, not even a pair of nostrils; just an acreage of flat, sallow fish-flesh. The eyes were forward facing; all expression compacted into their dark depth. The creature had touched him with one of its arms, which terminated in an obscenely human hand. And then—to compound the horror—it spoke, its voice perfectly clear and calm, despite the water.

“We’ve been expecting you, Vargovic.”

The others behind murmured, echoing the sentiment.

“What?”

“So glad you were able to complete your mission.”

Vargovic began to get a grip, shakily. He reached up and dislodged the

Denizen’s hand from his shoulder. “You aren’t why I’m here,” he said, forcing authority into his voice, drawing on every last drop of Gilgamesh training to suppress his nerves. “I wanted to know about about you ... that was all ...”

“No,” the lead Denizen said, opening its mouth to expose an alarming array of teeth. “You misunderstand. Coming here was always your mission. You have brought us something we want very much. That was always your purpose.”

“Brought you something?” His mind was reeling now.

“Concealed within you.” The Denizen nodded; a human gesture which only served to magnify the horror of what it was. “The means by which we will strike at the Demarchy; the means by which we will take the ocean.”

He thought of the chips in his hands. “I think I understand,” he said slowly. “It was always intended for you, is that what you mean?”

“Always.”

Then he’d been lied to by his superiors—or they had at least drastically simplified the matter. He filled in the gaps himself, making the necessary mental leaps: evidently Gilgamesh was already in contact with the Denizens

—bizarre as it seemed—and the chips of hyperdiamond were meant for the

Denizens, not his own people. Presumably—although he couldn’t begin to guess at how this might be possible—the Denizens had the means to examine the shards and fabricate the agent which would unravel the hyperdiamond weave. They’d be acting for Gilgamesh, saving it the bother of actually dirtying its hands in the attack. He could see why this might appeal to Control. But if that was the case ... why had Gilgamesh ever faked ignorance about the Denizens? It made no sense. But on the other hand, he could not concoct a better theory to replace it.

“I have what you want,” he said, after due consideration. “Cholok said removing it would be simple.”

“Cholok can always be relied upon,” the Denizen said.

“You knew—know—her, then?”

“She made us what we are today.”

“You hate her, then?”

“No; we love her.” The Denizen flashed its sharklike smile again, and it seemed to Vargovic that as its emotional state changed, so did the coloration of its bioluminescence. It was scarlet now; no longer the blue-green hue it had displayed upon it first appearance. “She took the abomination that we were and made us something better. We were in pain, once. Always pain. But Cholok took it away, made us strong. For that they punished her, and us.”

“If you hate the Demarchy,” Vargovic said, “why have you waited until now before attacking it?”

“Because we can’t leave,” one of the other Denizens said; the tone of its voice betraying femininity. “The Demarchy hated what Cholok had done to us. She brought our humanity to the fore; made it impossible to treat us as animals. We thought they would kill us, rather than risk our existence becoming known to the rest of Circum-Jove. Instead, they banished us here.”

“They thought we might come in handy,” said another of the lurking creatures.

Just then, another Denizen entered the cave, having swum in from the sea.

“Demarchy agents have followed him,” it said, its coloration blood red, tinged with orange, pulsing lividly. “They’ll be here in a minute.”

“You’ll have to protect me,” Vargovic said.

“Of course” the lead Denizen said. “You’re our saviour.”

Vargovic nodded vigorously, no longer convinced that he could handle the three operatives on his own. Ever since he had arrived in the cave he had felt his energy dwindling, as if he was succumbing to slow poisoning. A

thought tugged at the back of his mind, and for a moment he almost paid attention to it; almost considered seriously the possibility that he was being poisoned. But what was going on beyond the cave was too distracting.

He watched the three Demarchy agents approach, driven forward by the tugs which they held in front of them. Each agent carried a slender harpoon gun, tipped with a vicious barb.

They didn’t stand a chance.

The Denizens moved too quickly, lancing out from the shadows, cutting through the water. The creatures moved faster than the Demarchy agents, even though they only had their own muscles and anatomy to propel them.

But it was more than enough. They had no weapons, either—not even harpoons. But sharpened rocks more than sufficed—that and their teeth.

Vargovic was impressed by their teeth.

Afterwards, the Denizens returned to the cave to join their cousins. They moved more sluggishly now; as if the fury of the fight had drained them.

For a few moments they were silent, and their bioluminescence curiously subdued.

Slowly, though, Vargovic watched their colour return.

“It was better that they not kill you,” the leader said.

“Damn right,” Vargovic said. “They wouldn’t just have killed me, you know.” He opened his fists, exposing his palms. “They’d have made sure you never got this.”

The Denizens—all of them—looked momentarily toward his open hands, as if there ought to have been something there. “I’m not sure you understand,” the leader said, eventually.

“Understand what?”

“The nature of your mission.”

Fighting his fatigue—it was a black slick lapping at his consciousness—

Vargovic said: “I understand perfectly well. I have the samples of hyperdiamond, in my hands ...”

“That isn’t what we want.”

He didn’t like this, not at all. It was the way the Denizens were slowly creeping closer to him; sidling round him to obstruct his exit from the cave.

“What then?”

“You asked why we haven’t attacked them before,” the leader said, with frightening charm. “The answer’s simple. We can’t leave the vent.”

“You can’t?”

“Our haemoglobin. It’s not like yours.” Again that awful sharklike smile—and now he was well aware of what those teeth could do, given the right circumstances. “It was tailored to allow us to work here.”

“Copied from the ventlings?”

“Adapted, yes. Later it became the means of imprisoning us. The DNA in our bone marrow was manipulated to limit the production of normal haemoglobin; a simple matter of suppressing a few beta-globin genes while retaining the variants which code for ventling haemoglobin. Hydrogen sulphide is poisonous to you, Vargovic. You probably already feel weak. But we can’t survive without it. Oxygen kills us.”

“You leave the vent ...”

“We die, within a few hours. There’s more, as well. The water’s hot here; so hot that we don’t need the glycoproteins. We have the genetic instructions to synthezise them, but they’ve also been turned off. But without the glycoproteins we can’t swim into colder water. Our blood freezes.”

Now he was surrounded by them; looming aquatic devils, flushed a florid shade of crimson. And they were coming closer.

“But what do you expect me to do about it?”

“You don’t have to do anything, Vargovic.” The leader opened its chasmic jaw wide, as if tasting the water. It was a miracle an organ like that was capable of speech in the first place ...

“I don’t?’

“No.” And with that the leader reached out and seized him, while at the same time he was pinned from behind by another of the creatures. “It was

Cholok’s doing,” the leader continued. “Her final gift to us. Maunciple was her first attempt at getting it to us—but Maunciple never made it.”

“He was too fat.”

“All the defectors failed—they just didn’t have the stamina to make it this far from the city. That was why Cholok recruited you—an outsider.”

“Cholok recruited me?”

“She knew you’d kill her—you have, of course—but that didn’t stop her.

Her life mattered less than what she was about to give us. It was Cholok who tipped off the Demarchy about your primary extraction site, forcing you to come to us.”

He struggled, but it was pointless. All he could manage was a feeble: “I

don’t understand ...”

“No,” the Denizen said. “Perhaps we never expected you to. If you had understood, you might have been less than willing to follow Cholok’s plan.”

“Cholok was never working for us?”

“Once, maybe. But her last clients were us.”

“And now?”

“We take your blood, Vargovic.” Their grip on him tightened. He used his last draining reserves of strength to try and work loose, but it was futile.

“My blood?”

“Cholok put something in it. A retrovirus—a very hardy one, capable of surviving in your body. It reactivates the genes which were suppressed by the Demarchy. Suddenly, we’ll be able to make oxygen-carrying haemoglobin.

Our blood will fill up with glycoproteins. It’s no great trick: all the cellular machinery for making those molecules is already present; it just needs to be unshackled.”

“Then you need ... what? A sample of my blood?”

“No,” the Denizen said, with genuine regret. “Rather more than a sample,

I’m afraid. Rather a lot more.”

And then—with magisterial slowness—the creature bit into his arm, and as his blood spilled out, the Denizen drank. For a moment the others waited—but then they too came forward, and bit, and joined in the feeding frenzy.

All around Vargovic, the water was turning red.

The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice

Through the bar’s windows, Juntura Spaceport was an endless grid of holding berths, launch gantries, and radiator fins, coiling in its own pollution under a smeared pink sky. Thr air crackled with radiation from unshielded drives. It was no place to visit, let alone stay.

“I need to get out of here,” I said.

The shipmaster sneered at my remaining credit. “That won’t get you to the Napier Belt, kid, let alone Frolovo.”

“It’s all I’ve got.”

“Then maybe you should spend a few months working in the port, until you can pay for a ride.”

The shipmaster—he was a cyborg, like most of them—turned away with a whine of his servo-driven exoskeleton.

“Wait,” I said. “Please ... just a moment. Maybe this makes a difference.”

I pulled a black bundle from inside my jacket, peeling back enough of the cloth to let him see the weapon. The shipmaster his name was Master Khorog—reached out one iron gauntlet and hefted the prize. His eye-goggle clicked and whirred into focus.

“Very nasty,” he said appreciatively. “I heard someone used one of these against Happy Jack.” The eye swiveled sharply onto me. “Maybe you know something about that?”

“Nothing,” I said easily. “It’s just an heirloom.”

The heirloom was a bone gun. Kalarash Empire tech: very old, very difficult to pick up in security scans. Not much of it around anymore, which is why the gun cost me so much. It employed a sonic effect to shatter human bone, turning it into something resembling sugar. Three seconds was all it needed to do its work. By then the victim no longer had anything much resembling a skeletal structure.

You couldn’t live long like that, of course. But you didn’t die instantly either.

“The trick—so they say—is not to dwell on the skull,” Khorog mused. “Leave enough cranial structure for the victim to retain consciousness. And the ability to hear, if you want to taunt them. There are three small bones in the ear. People usually forget those.”

“Will you take the gun or not?”

“I could get into trouble just looking at it.” He put the gun back onto the cloth. “But it’s a nice piece. Warm, too. It might make a difference. There used to be a good market for antique weapons on Jelgava. Maybe there still is.”

I brightened. “Then you can give me a berth?”

“I only said it makes a difference, kid. Enough that you can pay off the rest aboard the Iron Lady.”

I could already feel Happy Jack’s button men pushing their way through the port, asking urgent questions. Only a matter of time before they hit this bar and found me.

“If you can get me to the Frolovo Hub, I’ll take it.”

“Maybe we’re not going to Frolovo. Maybe we’re going to the. Bafq Gap, or the Belterra Sphere.”

“Somewhere nearby, then. Another hub. It doesn’t matter. I just have to get off Mokmer.”

“Show us your mitts.” Before I could say yes, Khorog’s metal hands were examining my skin-and-bone ones, splaying the fingers with surprising gentleness. “Never done a hard day’s work in your life, have you? But you have good fingers. Hand-to-eye coordination okay? No neuromotor complications? Palsy?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “And whatever it is you want me to do, I can learn.”

“Mister Zeal—our surgeon—needs an assistant. It’s manual labor, mostly. Think you can handle it?”

Jack’s men, closer now. “Yes,” I said. By then I’d have said anything to get off Mokmer.

“There’ll be no freezer berth: the Iron Lady doesn’t run to them. You’ll be warm the whole trip. Two and a half years subjective, maybe three, till we make the next orbitfall. And once Zeal’s trained you up, he won’t want you leaving his service at the first port of call. You’ll be looking at four or five years aboard the Lady; maybe longer if he can’t find another pair of hands. Doesn’t sound so sweet now, does it?”

No, I thought, but then neither did the alternative. “I’m still willing.”

“Then be at shuttle dock nine in twenty minutes. That’s when we lift for orbit.”

We lifted on time.

I didn’t see much of the ship from the shuttle: just enough to tellkit the Iron Lady looked much the same as all the other ramscoops parked in orbit around Mokmer: a brutalist gray cylinder, swelling to the armored mouth of the magnetic field intake at the front, tapering to the drive assembly at the back. Comms gear, radiators, docking mechanisms, and modular cargo containers ringed the ship around its gently in-curving waist. It was bruised and battered I from endless near-light transits, with great scorch marks and impact raters marring much of the hull.

The shuttle docked with just Khorog and me aboard. Even before I had been introduced to the rest of the crew—or even the surgeon—the Iron Lady was moving.

“Sooner than I expected,” I said.

“Complaining?” Khorog asked. “I thought you wanted to get away from Mokmer as soon as possible.”

“No,” I said. “I’m glad we’re under way.” I brushed a wall panel as we walked. “It’s very smooth. I expected it to feel different.”

“That’s because we’re only on in-system motors at the moment.”

“There’s a problem with the ramscoop?”

“We don’t switch on the scoop until we’re well beyond Mokmer—or any planet, for that matter. We’re safe in the ship—life quarters are well shielded—but outside, you’re looking at the strongest magnetic field this side of the Crab pulsar. Doesn’t hurt wetheads like you all that much ... but us, that’s different.” He knuckled his fist against his plated cranium. “Cyborgs like me ... cyborgs like everyone else you’ll meet aboard this ship, or in any kind of space environment—we feel it. Get within a thousand kilometers of a ship like this ... it warms up the metal in our bodies. Inductive heating: we fry from the inside. That’s why we don’t light the scoop: it ain’t neighborly.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, realizing that I’d touched the cyborg equivalent of a nerve.

“We’ll light in good time.” Khorog hammered one of the wall plates. “Then you’ll feel the old girl shiver her timbers.”

On the way to the surgeon, we passed other members of the Iron Lady’s redoubtable crew, none of whom Khorog saw fit to introduce. They were a carnival of grotesques, even by the standards of the cyborgs I’d seen around the spaceport. One man consisted of a grinning, cackling, gap-toothed head plugged into a trundling life-support mechanism that had apparently originated as a cleaning robot: in place of wheels, or legs, he moved on multiple spinning brushes, polishing the deck plates behind him. A woman glanced haughtily at me as she passed: normal enough except that the upper hemisphere of her skull was a glass dome, in which resided a kind of ticking orrery: luminous planetary heads orbiting the bright lamp of a star. As she walked she rubbed a hand over the swell of her belly and I understood—as I was surely meant to—that her brain had been relocated there for safekeeping. Another man moved in an exoskeleton similar to the one Khorog wore, but in this case there was very little man left inside the powered frame: just a desiccated wisp, like something that had dried out in the sun. His limbs were like strands of rope, his head a piece of shriveled, stepped-on fruit. “You’ll be the new mate, then,” he said in a voice that sounded as if he was trying to speak while being strangled.

“If Zeal agrees to it,” Khorog said back. “Only then.”

“What if Mister Zeal doesn’t agree to it?” I asked, when we were safely out of earshot.

“Then we’ll find you something else to do,” Khorog replied. “Always plenty of jobs on the ...” And then he halted, as if he’d been meaning to say something else but had caught himself in time.

By then we’d reached the surgeon.

Mister Zeal occupied a windowless chamber near the middle of the ship. He was working on one of his patients when Khorog showed me in. Hulking surgical machines loomed over the operating table, carrying lights, manipulators, and barbed, savage-looking cutting tools.

“This is the new assistant,” Khorog said. “Has a good pair of hands on him, so try and make this one last.”

Zeal looked up from his work. He was a huge, bald, thick-necked man with a powerful jaw. There was nothing obviously mechanical about him: even the close-up goggle he wore over his left eye was strapped into place, rather than implanted. He wore a stiff leather apron over his bare, muscular chest, and he glistened with sweat and oil.

His voice was a low rumble. “Just a pup, Master Khorog. I asked for a man.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers, Mister Zeal. This is what was on offer.”

Zeal stood up from the table and studied me with a curl on his lips, wiping his right hand against his apron. He pushed his left hand against the rust-dappled side of one of the surgical machines, causing it to move back on a set of caterpillar tracks. He stepped over a body that happened to be lying on the floor, scuffing his boot heel against the chest.

The voice rumbled again. “What’s your name, lad?”

“Peter,” I said, fighting to keep my nervousness in check. “Peter Vandry.”

He pushed the goggle off his eye, up onto his forehead.

“Your hands.”

“I’m sorry?”

He roared, “Show me your damned hands, boy!”

I stepped closer to the surgeon and offered him my hands. Zeal examined them with a particular attentiveness, his scrutiny more thorough, more methodical, than Khorog’s had been. He looked at my tongue. He peeled back my eyelids and looked deep into my eyes. He sniffed as he worked, the curl never leaving his lips. All the while I tried to ignore the semihuman thing laid out on the opera, ing table, horrified that it was still breathing, still obviously alive.

The crewman’s torso was completely detached from his hips and legs.

“I need a new mate,” Zeal told me. He kicked the body on the floor. “I’ve been trying to manage ever since with this lobot, but today ...”

“Temper got the better of you, did it?” Khorog asked. “Never mind my temper,” Zeal said warningly.

“Lobots don’t grow on trees, Mister Zeal. There isn’t an inexhaustible supply.”

The surgeon snapped his gaze back onto me. “I’m a pair of hands down. Do you think you can do better?”

My throat was dry, my hands shaking. “Master Khorog seemed to think I could do it.” I held out my hand, hoping he didn’t notice the tremble. “I’m steady.”

“Steadiness is a given. But do you have the stomach for the rest?”

“I’ve seen worse than that,” I said, glancing at the patient. But only today, I thought, only since I left Happy Jack flopping and oozing on the carpet.

Zeal nodded at the other man. “You may leave us now, Master I Khorog. Please ask the captain to delay drive start-up until I’m finished with this one, if that isn’t too much trouble?”

“I’ll do what I can,” Khorog said.

Zeal turned smartly back to me. “I’m in the middle of a procedure¬ u re. As you can tell from the lobot, things took a turn for the worse. You’ll assist in the completion of the operation. If things conclude satisfactorily ... well, we’ll see.” The curl became a thin, uncharitable smile.

I stepped over the dead lobot. It was common knowledge that space crews made extensive use of lobots for menial labor, but quite another to see the evidence. Many worlds saw nothing wrong in turning urning criminals into lobotomized slave labor. Instead of the death sentence, they got neurosurgery and a set of implants so that they could be puppeted and given simple tasks.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

Zeal lowered his goggle back into place, settling it over his left eye.

“Looking in the rough direction of the patient would be a start, lad.”

I forced myself to take in the bloody mess on the table: the two detached body halves, the details of meat and bone and nervous system almost lost amid the eruptive tangle of plastic and metal lines spraying from either half, carrying pink-red arterial blood, chemical green pneumatic fluid. The tracked machines attending to the operation were of ancient, squalid provenance. Nothing in Zeal’s operating room looked newer than a thousand years old.

Zeal picked up the end of one segmented chrome tube. “I’m trying to get this thoracic line in. There was a lot of resistance ... the lobot kept fumbling the job. I’m assuming you can do better.”

I took the end of the line. It was slippery between my fingers. “Shouldn’t I ... wash, or something?”

“Just hold the line. Infection’s the least of his worries.”

“I was thinking of me.”

Zeal made a small guttural sound, like someone trying to cough up an obstruction. “The least of yours as well.”

I worked as best I could. We got the line in, then moved on to other areas. I just did what Zeal told me, while he watched me with his one human eye, taking in every slip and tremor of my hand. Once in a while he’d dig into the wide leather pocket sewn across the front of his apron and come out with some new blade or too. Occasionally a lobot would arrive to take away some piece of equipment or dead flesh, or arrive with something new and gleaming on a plate. Now and then the tracked robot would creep forward to assist in a procedure. I noticed, with skin-crawling horror, that its dual manipulator arms ended in a pair of perfect female human d hands, long fingered and elegant and white as snow.

“Forceps, “ he’d say. “Laser scapel.” Or, sometimes, “Soldering iron”

“What happened to this man?” I asked, feeling I ought to be showing interest in more than just the mechanics of the operation. “Hold that down,” Zeal said, ignoring my question completely.

“Cut there. Now make a knot and tie off. God’s teeth, careful.”

A little while later, the engine lit up. The transition to thrust weight was sudden and unannounced. The floor shook violently.

Equipment clattered off trays. Zeal slipped with a knife, ruining half an hour’s work, and swore in one of the ancient trade languages. “They’ve lit the drive,” he said.

I I bought you asked ..

I did. Now apply pressure here.”

We kept on working, even as the ship threatened to shake itself to bits. Scoop instability, Zeal said: it was always rough at first, before the fields settled down. My back began to ache from all the leaning over over the table. Yet after what felt like many hours, we were done: the two halves reunited, the interconnects joined, the bone and flesh encouraged to fuse across the divide.

The patient was sewn up, rebooted, and restored to consciousness. I rubbed my back as Zeal spoke softly to the man, answering his questions and nodding now and then.

“You’ll be all right,” I heard him say. “Just keep away from any argo lifts for a while.”

“Thanks,” the cyborg said.

The crewman got up off the table, whole again—or as whole as he would ever be. He walked stiffly to the door, pawing at his healed injuries in a kind of stunned wonderment, as if he had never expected to leave the operating table.

“It wasn’t as bad as it looked,” Zeal told me, when the patient had gone. “Stick with me, and you’ll see a lot worse.”

“Does that mean you’ll let me stay?”

Zeal picked up an oily rag and threw it my way. “What else would it mean? Clean yourself up and I’ll show you to your quarters.”

It was a job, and it had got me off Mokmer. As gruesome as working for Zeal might have been, I kept reminding myself that it was a lot better than dealing with Happy Jack’s button men. And in truth, it could have been a lot worse. Gruff as he had been to start with, Zeal gradually opened up and started treating me ... not exactly as an equal, but at least as a promising apprentice. He chided me when I made mistakes but was also careful to let me know when had done something well—when I’d sewn up a wound nicely or when I’d wired in a neuromotor implant without causing too much surrounding brain damage. He wouldn’t say anything, but the end of his lip would soften and he’d favor my efforts with a microscopic nod of approval.

Zeal, I came to learn, enjoyed an uneasy relationship with thee rest of the Iron Lady’s crew. It must have always been that way for ship’s surgeons. They were there to keep the crew healthy, and much of their work was essentially benign: the treating of minor ailments, the prescribing of restorative drugs and diets. But occa sionally they had to do unspeakable things, things that inspired dread and horror. And no one was beyond the surgeon’s reach, not even the captain. If a crewman needed treatment, he was going to get it—even if Zeal and his lobots had to drag the man screaming and kicking to the table.

Most of the accidents, though, tended to happen during port time. Now that we were under flight, sucking interstellar gases into the ramscoop field, climbing inexorably closer to the speed of light, Zeal’s work tended to minor operations and adjustments. Days went by with nobody to treat at all. During these intervals, Zeal would have me practicing on the lobots, refining my techniques.

Three or four years, Khorog had said. Longer, if Zeal couldn’t find a replacement. With only a week under my belt, it seemed like a life sentence aboard the Iron Lady. But I would get through it, I promised myself. If conditions became intolerable, I would just jump ship in the next port of call.

In the meantime I got to know as much of my new home as I was allowed. Large areas of the Iron Lady were out-of-bounds: the rear section was deemed too radioactive, while the front was closed to low-ranking crew members like myself. I never saw the captain, never learned his name. But that still left a labyrinth of rooms, corridors, and storage bays in which I was allowed to roam during my off-duty hours. Now and then I would pass other crew members, but apart from Khorog, none of them ever gave me the time of day. Zeal told me not to take it to heart: it was just that I was working for him and would always be seen as the butcher’s boy.

After that, I began to take a quiet pride in the fear and respect Zeal and I enjoyed. The other crew might loathe us, but they needed us as well. Our knives gave us power.

The lobots were different: they neither feared nor admired us but simply did what we wanted with the instant obedience of machines. They didn’t have enough residual personality to feel emotions. That was what I’d been told, anyway, but I still found myself wondering. There were nine of them on the Iron Lady: five men and four women. Looking into their slack, sleepwalker faces, I couldn’t help wondering what kind of people they had been before, what kinds of lives they had led. It was true that they must have all committed capital crimes to have become lobots in the first place. But not every planet defined capital crimes in exactly the same way.

I knew there were nine, and only nine, because they came through Zeal’s room on a regular basis, for minor tweaks to their control circuitry. I got to know their faces, got to recognize their slumping, shuffling gait as they walked into a room.

One day, however, I saw a tenth.

Zeal had sent me off on an errand to collect replacement parts for one of his machines. I’d taken a wrong turn, then another one, and before I realized quite how lost I was, I had ended up in an unfamiliar part of the Iron Lady. I stayed calm at first, expecting that after ten or twenty minutes of random wandering, I’d find a corridor I recognized.

I didn’t.

After thirty minutes became an hour, and every new corridor looked less familiar than the last, I began to panic. There were no markings on the walls, no navigation consoles or color-coordinated arrows. The ship’s dark architecture seemed to be rearranging itself as I passed, confounding my attempts at orientation. My panic changed to dread as I considered my plight. I might starve before I found my way back to the part of the ship I knew. The Iron Lady was huge, and its living crew tiny. If they had little cause to visit these corridors, it might be years before they found my dead body.

I turned another corner, more in desperation than hope, and faced yet another unrecognized corridor. But there was someone standing at the end of it. The harsh overhead light picked out only her face and shoulders, with the rest of her lost in shadow. I could see from her collar that she wore the same kind of overall as the other lobots. I could also see that she was quite pretty. The lobots were usually shaved to the scalp, to make life easier when their heads had to be opened. This one had a head of hair. It grew out ragged and greasy, tangled like the branches of an old tree, but it was still hair. Beneath it was a pale, almond-shaped face half lost in shadow.

She started back from me, vanishing into deeper shadow and then around a bend at her end of the corridor.

“Wait!” I called. “I’m lost! I need someone to show me the way out of here!”

Lobots never spoke, but they understood spoken instructions. The girl should have obeyed me instantly. Instead she broke into a running shuffle. I heard her shoes scuffing on the deck plating.

I chased after her, catching up with her easily before she reached the end of the next corridor. I seized her by the left arm and forced her to look at me.

“You shouldn’t have run. I just need to know how to get out of here. I’m lost.”

She looked at me from under the stiff, knotted overhang of her hair. “Who you?” she asked.

“Peter Vandry, surgeon’s mate,” I said automatically, before frowning. “You talk. You’re not meant to talk.”

She lifted up her right arm, the sleeve of her overall slipping down to reveal a crude mechanical substitute for a hand. This claw-like appendage was grafted onto her forearm, held in place by a tight black collar. I thought for a moment that she meant to shock me, but then I realized that she was only making a human gesture, touching the tip of her mechanical hand against the side of her head.

“I ... talk. Still ... something left.”

I nodded, understanding belatedly. Some of the lobots were clearly allowed to retain more mental faculties than others. Presumably these were the lobots that needed to engage in more complex tasks, requiring a degree of reciprocal communication.

But why had I never seen this one before?

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I ... tend.” She screwed up her face. Even this stripped-down approximation of normal speech was costing her great effort. “Them. Keep them ... working.”

“What do you mean, them?”

She cocked her head behind us, in the direction of wall plating . “Them.”

“The engine systems?” I asked.

“You ... go now.” She nodded back the way I had chased hher “Second ... left. Third right. Then you ... know.”

I let go of her, conscious that I had been holding her arm too tightly. I saw then that both her hands had been replaced by mechanical substitutes. With a shudder my thoughts raced back to the sur gical machine in Zeal’s operating room, the one with the feminine hands.

“Thank you,” I said softly.

But before I could leave her, she suddenly reached out her let t hand and touched the metal to the side of my head, running her fingers against the skin. “Wethead,” she said, with something like fascination. “Still.”

“Yes,” I said, trying not to flinch against the cold touch. “Zeal’s talked about putting some implants into me soon, to help with the surgery ... nothing irreversible, he says ... but he hasn’t done it yet.”

Why was I talking to her so openly? Because she was a girl. Because it had been a long time since I’d seen someone who looked even remotely human, let alone someone pretty.

“Don’t let,” she said urgently. “Don’t let. Bad thing happen soon. You okay now. You stay okay.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You stay wethead. Stay wethead and get off ship. Soon as can. Before bad thing.”

“How am I supposed to get off the ship? We’re in interstellar space!”

“Your problem,” she said. “Not mine.”

Then she turned away, the sleeves of her overalls falling down to hide her hands.

“Wait,” I called after her. “Who are you? What is ... what was your name?”

She paused in her stiff shuffle and looked back at me. “My name . gone.” Then her eyes flashed wild in the shadows. “Second left. Third right. Go now, Peter Vandry. Go now then get off ship.”

Zeal and I were midway through another minor procedure when the engagement began. The Iron Lady shook like a struck bell. “God’s teeth!” Zeal said, flinging aside his soldering iron. “What now?”

I picked up the iron and wiped sandpaper across its tip until it was bright again. “I thought the scoop fields were supposed to have settled down by now.”

“That didn’t feel like a field tremor to me. Felt more like an attack. Pass me the iron: we’ll sew this one up before things get worse.”

“An attack?” I asked.

Zeal nodded grimly. “Another ship, probably. They’ll be after our cargo.”

“Pirates, you mean?”

“Aye, son. Pirates. If that’s what they are.”

We tidied up the patient as best we could, while the ship continued to shudder. Zeal went to an intercom, bent a stalk to his lips, and spoke to the rest of the crew before returning to me. “It’s an attack,” he said. “Just as I reckoned. Apparently we’ve been trying to outrun the other ship for weeks. Quite why no one thought to tell me this ...” He shook his head ruefully, as if he expected no better.

We were a long way in from the hull, but the impacts sounded like they were happening next door. I shuddered to think of the energies being flung against the Iron Lady’s already bruised armor. “How long can we hold?” I asked.

“Come with me,” Zeal said, pushing the goggle up onto his forehead. “There’s a reinforced observation bubble not far from here It’s not often you’ll get to see close action, so you might as well make the most of it.”

Something in Zeal’s tone surprised me. He’d been annoyed at the interruption to his surgical work, but he still did not sound particularly ticularly alarmed at the fact that we were being shot at by another ship.

What did Zeal know that I didn’t?

As he led me to the observation bubble, I finally found the nerve to ask the question I had been meaning to put to him ever since I met the girl in the corridor, several weeks a go. Now that he was distracted with the battle, I assumed he wouldn’t dwell overlong on my questions.

“Mister Zeal ... that lobot we were just working on ...” He looked back at me. “What about it?”

“It seems funny that we can do so much to their brains .. stuff in, take stuff out ...”

“Go on.”

“It seems funny that we never give them language. I mean, they can understand us ... but wouldn’t it be easier if they could talk to us as well? At least that way we’d know that they’d understood our instructions.”

“Language modules are too expensive. The captain has one, but that’s only because a hull spar took out his speech center.”

“I’m not talking about cyber modules.”

Zeal halted and looked back at me again. Around us, the ship dui ked and roared. Emergency alarms sounded from the distance. Z mechanical voice intoned warning messages. I heard the shriek of severed air line.

“What, then?”

“Why do we take out the language center in the first place? I mean, why not just leave it intact?”

“We take the lobots as we get ’em, son. If the speech center’s been scooped out ... it isn’t in our power to put it back again.”

I steadied myself against a bulkhead, as the floor bucked under us. “Then they’re all like that?”

“Unless you know otherwise.” Zeal studied me with chilling suspicion. “Wait,” he said slowly. “This line of questioning ... it wouldn’t be because you’ve seen her, would it?”

“‘Her,’ Mister Zeal?”

“You know who I mean. The other lobot. The tenth one. You’ve met her, haven’t you?”

“I ...” Zeal had the better of me. “I got lost. I bumped into her somewhere near the back of the ship.”

The curl of his lip intensified. “And what did she say?”

“Nothing,” I said hurriedly. “Nothing. Just ... how to find my way back. That’s all I asked her. That’s all she said.”

“She’s out of control,” he said, more to himself than me. “Becoming trouble. Needs something done to her.”

I sensed further questions would be unwise, bitterly regretting that I had raised the subject in the first place. At least the battle was still ongoing, with no sign of any lessening in its intensity. Difficult as it was to look on that as any kind of positive development, it might force Zeal’s mind onto other matters. If we had a rush of casualties, he might forget that I’d mentioned the girl at all.

Some chance, I thought.

We reached the observation bubble, Zeal silent and brooding at first. He pulled back a lever, opening an iron shutter. Beyond the glass, closer than I’d expected, was the other ship. It couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty kilometers from us.

It was another ramscoop, shaped more or less like the Iron Lady. We were so close that the magnetic fields of our scoops must have been meshed together, entangled like the rigging of two sailing ships, exchanging cannon fire. Near the front of the other ship, where the scoop pinched to a narrow mouth, I could actually see the field picked out in faint purple flickers of excited, inrushing gas. Behind the other ship was the hot spike of its drive flame: the end result of all that interstellar material being sucked up in the first place, compacted and compressed to stellar core pressures in her drive chamber. A similar flame would have been burning from the Iron Lady’s stern, keeping us locked alongside.

The other ship was firing on us, discharging massive energy and projectile weapons from hull emplacements.

“They must be pirates,” I said, bracing myself as the ship took another hit. “I’d heard they existed but never really believed it until now.”

“Start believing it,” Zeal grunted.

“Could that ship be the Devilfish?”

“And what have you heard about the Devilfish?”

“If you take the stories seriously, that’s the ship they say does most of the pirating between here and the Frolovo Hub. I suppose if pirates exist, then there’s a good chance the Devilfish does as well.”

The hull shook again, but it was a different kind of vibration than before: more regular, like the steady chiming of a great clock.

“That’s us firing back,” Zeal said. “About bloody time.”

I watched our weapons impact across the hull of the other ship, ‘lowering in a chain. Huge blasts ... but not enough to stop a wave retaliatory fire.

“She’s switched to heavy slugs,” Zeal said. “We’ll feel this.”

We did. It was worse than anything we had experienced before, .is if the entire ship were being shaken violently in a dog’s jaw. By now the noise from the klaxons and warning voices had become deafening. Through the window I saw huge scabs of metal slam past.

“Hull plating,” Zeal said. “Ours. That’ll take some fixing.”

“You don’t seem all that worried.”

“I’m not.”

“But we’re being shot to pieces here.”

“We’ll hold,” he said. “Long enough.”

“Long enough for what?”

I felt a falling sensation in my gut. “That’s our drive flame stuttering,” Zeal reported, with no sense of alarm. “Captain’s turned off our scoop. We’ll be on reserve fuel in a moment.”

Sure enough, normal weight returned. The two ships were still locked alongside each other.

“Why’s he done that?” I asked, fighting to keep the terror from my voice, not wanting to show myself up before Zeal. “We won’t be able to burn reserve fuel for very long without the scoop to replenish ...”

“Scoop’s down for a reason, son.”

I followed Zeal’s gaze hack to the other ship. Once again, I saw the hot gases ramming into the engine mouth, flickering purple. But now there was something skewed about the geometry of the field, like a candle flame bending in a draught. The distortion to the field intensified, and then snapped back in the other direction.

“What’s happening?”

“Her fieldmaster’s trying to compensate,” Zeal said. “He’s pretty good, give him that.”

Now the ramscoop field was oscillating wildly, caught between two distorted extremes. The pinched gas flared hotter—blue white, shifting into the violet.

“What’s happening to them? Why doesn’t the fieldmaster shut down the field, if he’s losing control of it?”

“Too scared to. Most ships can’t switch to reserve fuel as smoothly as we can.”

“I still don’t see ...”

That was when the field instabilities exceeded some critical limit. Gobbets of hot gas slammed into the swallowing mouth. An eyeblink later, an explosion ripped from the belly of the other ship. Instantly her drive flame and scoop field winked out.

She began to fall behind us.

We cut our engines and matched her velocity. The other ship was a wreck: a huge hole punched amidships, through which I saw glowing innards and pieces of tumbling debris, some of which looked horribly like people.

“She’s dead now,” I said. “We should leave, get out of here as quickly as we can. What if they repair her?”

Zeal looked at me and shook his head slowly. “You don’t get it, do you? They weren’t the pirates. They were just trying to get away from us.”

“But I thought you said ...

“I was having some fun. This was a scheduled interception—always ways was. It just happened a bit sooner than the captain told me.”

“But then if they’re not the pirates ...”

“Correct, lad. We are. And this isn’t really the Iron Lady. That’s only a name she wears in port.” He tapped a hand against the metal framing of the bubble.”You’re on the Devilfish, and that makes you one of us.”

A week passed, then another. I learned to stop asking questions, afraid of where my tongue might take me. I kept thinking back to the girl in the corridor and the cryptic warning she had given me. About how I should get off the ship as soon as possible, before Mister Zeal put machines in my head or the bad thing happened. Well, a bad thing had certainly happened. The Iron Lady, or the Devilfish as I now had to think of her, had attacked and crippled another ship. Her holds had been looted for cargo. A handful of her crew had managed to escape in cryopods, but most had died in the explosion when her drive core went critical. I did not know what had happened to the few survivors, but it could not have been coincidence that I suddenly noticed we were carrying three new lobots. I had played no part in converting them, but it would not have taxed Zeal to do the surgery on his own. I knew my way around his operating room by now, knew what was difficult and what was easy.

So we had murdered another ship and taken some of her crew as prize. Every hour that I stayed aboard the Devilfish made me complicit in that crime and any other attacks that were yet to take place. But where could I run to?

We were between systems, in deep interstellar space. Get off ship. Before bad thing happens.

Had she meant the attack, or was she talking about something else, something yet to happen?

I had to find her again. I wanted to ask her more questions, but that wasn’t the only reason. I kept seeing her face, frozen in the corridor lights. I knew nothing about her except that I wanted to know more. I wanted to touch that face, to pull back that messy curtain of hair and look into her eyes.

I fantasized about saving her: how I’d do the bare minimum in Zeal’s service, just enough to keep him happy, and then jump ship at the first opportunity. Jump and run, and take the lobot girl with me. I’d outrun Happy Jack’s button men; I could outrun the crew of the Devilfish.

But it wasn’t going to be that easy.

“I’ve got a job for you,” Zeal said. “Nice and easy. Then you can have the rest of the day off.”

“A job?” I ventured timidly.

“Take this.” He delved into his apron pocket and passed something to me: a gripped thing shaped a little like the soldering iron. “It’s a tranquilizer gun,” he said.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to bring the girl back in.”

“The girl?”

“Don’t try my patience, Peter.” He closed my hand around the grip. “You know where she haunts. Find her, or let her find you. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

“And when I’ve found her?”

“Then you shoot her.” He raised a warning finger. “Not to kill, just to incapacitate. Aim for a leg. She’ll drop, after a minute or so. Then you bring her back to me.”

He’d cleared the operating table. I knew from our work schedule that we were not expecting any more patients today.

“What do you want her for?” I asked.

“Always been a bit too chirpy, that one. She has a job to do ... a certain job that means she has to be brighter than the other lobots. But not that much brighter. I don’t like it when they answer back, and I definitely don’t like it when they start showing notions of free will.” He smiled. “But it’s all right. Nothing we can’t fix, you and I.”

“Fix?”

“A few minutes under the knife, is all.”

My hand trembled on the gun. “But then she won’t be able to talk.”

“That’s the idea.”

“I can’t shoot her,” I said. “She’s still a person. There’s still something left of who she was.”

“How would you know? All she told you was how to get back home. Or did you talk more than you said?”

“No,” I said, cowed. “Only what I told you.”

“Good. Then you won’t lose any sleep over it, will you?”

With gun in my hand I considered turning it on Mister Zeal and putting him under and then killing him. With the rest of the crew still alive, my chances of stopping the Devilfish (let alone making it off the ship in one piece) were practically zero. It would be a futile gesture, nothing more. Without Zeal the crew would be inconvenienced, but most of them would still survive.

I still wanted to stop them, but the gun wasn’t the answer. And she was just a lobot, after all. She hadn’t even remembered her name. What kind of person did that make her?

I slipped the gun into my belt.

“Good lad,” Zeal said.

I found her again. It didn’t take all that long, considering. I kept a careful note on the twists and turns I took, doubling back every now and then to make sure the ship really wasn’t shifting itself around me. That much had always been my imagination, and now that I was revisiting the zone where I had been lost before, it all looked a degree more familiar. Now that I had been given license to enter this part of the ship, I felt more confident. I still wasn’t happy about shooting the girl ... but then it wasn’t as if Zeal was going to kill her. When so much had already been taken from her, what difference did a little bit more make?

I turned a corner and there she was. She wolfed vile-looking paste into her mouth from some kind of spigot in the wall, the stuff lathering her metal hands.

My hand tightened on the gun, still tucked into my belt. I took a pace closer, hoping she would stay engrossed in her meal.

She stopped eating and looked at me. Through the tangled fringe of her hair, eyes shone feral and bright.

“Peter Vandry,” she said, and then did something horrible and unexpected, something no lobot should ever do.

She smiled.

It was only a flicker of a smile, quickly aborted, but I had still seen it. My hand trembled as I withdrew the gun and slipped off the safety catch.

“No,” she said, backing away from the spigot.

“I’m sorry,” I said, aiming the gun. “It isn’t personal. If I don’t do it, Zeal’ll kill me.”

“Don’t,” she said, raising her hands. “Not shoot. Not shoot me. Not now. Not now.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

My finger tightened on the trigger. Two things made me hesitate, though. The first was: what did she mean: not now? What did it matter to her if I shot her now, rather than later? The second thing was those fierce, beautiful eyes.

My hesitation lasted an instant too long.

“Baby,” she said.

The gun quivered in my hand, and then leapt free with painful force, nearly snapping my fingers as it escaped my grip. It slammed into the wall, the impact smashing it apart. The metal remains hovered there for an agonizing instant, before dropping—one by one—to the floor.

I looked on, stunned at what had just happened.

“Warn ... you,” she said. “Warn you good, Peter Vandry. Warn you ... get off ship. Stay wethead. Soon bad thing happen and you still here.”

I pushed my hand against my chest, trying to numb the pain in my forefinger, where it had been twisted out of the trigger grip.

“The bad thing already happened,” I said, angry and confused at the same time. “We took out a ship ... killed its crew.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head gravely. “That not what I mean. I mean real bad thing. Real bad thing happen here. Here and soon. This ship.”

I looked at the remains of the gun. “What just happened?”

“She save me.”

I frowned. “She?

For a moment the girl seemed torn between infinite opposed possibilities.

“You try shoot me, Peter Vandry. I trust you and you try shoot me.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to ... it’s just that I need to keep on Mister Zeal’s good side.”

“Zeal bad man. Why you work for Zeal?”

“I didn’t have a choice. They tricked me aboard. I didn’t know this was a pirate ship. I just needed a ticket off Mokmer.”

“What happen on Mokmer?”

“Bad thing,” I said, with half a smile.

“Tell.”

“A man called Happy Jack did something to my sister. I got even with Happy Jack. Unfortunately, that meant I couldn’t stick around.”

“Happy Jack bad man?”

“As bad as Zeal.”

She looked at me, hard and deep and inquiring, and then said, “I hope you not lie, Peter Vandry.”

“I’m not lying.”

of their function, the brutal way they’d been grafted to her arms. She showed me her hands, giving me time to admire the crudity

“Zeal did this.”

“I figured.”

“Once I work for Zeal. All go well ... until one day. Then I make mistake. Zeal get angry. Zeal take hands. Zeal say ‘more use on end of machine.’”

“I’m sorry.”

“Zeal got temper. One day Zeal get angry with you.”

“I’ll be off the ship before then.”

“You hope.”

Now it was my turn to sound angry. “What does it matter?

There’s nowhere for me to go. I have no choice but to work with

Zeal.”

“No,” she said. “You have choice.”

“I don’t see that I do.”

“I show. Then you understand. Then you help.”

I looked at her. “I just tried to shoot you. Why would you still trust me?”

She cocked her head, as if my question made only the barest sense to her. “You ask me ... what my name is.” She blinked, screwing up her face with the effort of language. “What my name was.”

“But you didn’t know.”

“Doesn’t matter. No one else ... ever ask. Except you, Peter Vandry.”

She took me deeper into the ship, into the part I had always been told was off-limits because of its intense radiation. Dimly, it began to dawn on me that this was just a lie to dissuade the curious.

“Zeal not happy, you not bring me in,” she said.

“I’ll make something up. Tell him I couldn’t find you, or that you tricked me and destroyed the gun.”

“Not work on Zeal.”

“I’ll think of something,” I said glibly. “In the meantime ... you can just hide out here. When we dock, we can both make a run for it.”

She laughed. “I not get off Devilfish, Peter Vandry. I die here.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t have to happen like that.”

“Yes, it does. Nearly time now.”

“Back there,” I said. “When you did that thing with the gun ... what did you mean when you said ‘baby’?”

“I mean this,” she said, and opened a door.

It led into a huge and bright room: part of the engine system. Since my time on the ship, I had learned enough of the ramscoop design to understand that the interstellar gases collected by the magnetic scoop had to pass through the middle of the ship to reach the combustion chamber at the rear ... which was somewhere near where we were standing.

Overhead was a thick, glowing tube, running the length of the room. That was the fuel conduit. With the drive off, the glass lining the tube would have been midnight black. Only a fraction of the glow from the heated gases shone through ... but it was still enough to bathe the room in something like daylight.

But that wasn’t the only bright thing in the room.

We walked along a railinged catwalk, high above the floor. Below, but slightly off to one side, was a thick metal cage in the form of a horizontal cylinder. The cage flickered with containment fields.

Something huge floated in the cage. It was a creature: sleek and elongated, aglow with its own fierce, brassy light. Something like a whale but carved from molten lava. Quilted in fiery platelets that flexed and undulated as the creature writhed in the field’s embrace. Flickering with arcs and filaments of lightning, like a perpetual dance of St. Elmo’s fire.

I squinted against the glare from the alien thing.

“What ... ?” I asked, not needing to say any more.

“Flux Swimmer,” she said. “Devilfish found her ... living in outflow jet from star. Didn’t evolve there. Migrated. Star to star, billions of years. Older than Galaxy.”

I stared, humbled, at the astonishing thing. “I’ve heard of such things. In the texts of the Kalarash ... but everyone always assumed hey were legendary animals, like unicorns, or dragons, or tigers.”

“Real,” she said. “Just ... rare.”

The creature writhed again, flexing the long, flattened whip of its body. “But why? Why keep it here?”

“Devilfish needs Flux Swimmer,” she said. “Flux Swimmer ... has power. Magnetic fields. Reaches out ... shapes. Changes.”

I nodded slowly, beginning to understand. I thought back to the engagement with the other ramscoop; the way its intake field had become fatally distorted.

“The Flux Swimmer is the Devilfish’s weapon against other ships,” I said, speaking for the girl. “She reaches out and twists their magnetic fields. Zeal always knew we were going to win.” I looked down at the creature again, looking so pitiful in its metal cage. I did not have to read the animal’s mind to know that it did not want to be held here, locked away in the heart of the Devilfish.

“They .. make her do this,” the girl said.

“Torture?”

“No. She could always ... choose to die. Easier for her.”

“How, then?”

She led me along an extension to the catwalk, so that we walked directly over the trapped animal. It was then that I understood how the crew exerted their control on the alien.

Hidden from view before, but visible now, was a smaller version of the same cage. It sat next to the Flux Swimmer. It held another version of the alien animal, but one that was much tinier than the first. Probes reached through the field, contacting the fiery hide of the little animal.

“Baby,” the girl said. “Hurt baby. Make mother shape field, or hurt baby even more. That how it works.”

It was all too much. I closed my eyes, numbed at the implication horror I had just been shown. The baby was not being hurt now, but that was only because the Devilfish did not need the mother’s set vices. But when another ship needed to be destroyed and looted ... then the pain would begin again, until the mother extended her alien influence beyond the hull and twisted the other ship’s magnetic field.

“I see why the captain cut our field now,” I said. “It was so she could reach through it.”

“Yes. Captain clever.”

“Where do you come into it?” I asked.

“I look after them. Tend them. Keep them alive.” She nodded upward, to where smaller conduits branched off the main fuel line. “Swimmers drink plasma. Captain lets them have fuel. Just enough ... keep alive. No more.”

“We’ve got to stop this evern happening again,” I said, repopening my eyes. Then a thought occured to me. “But she can stop it, can’t she? If the mother has enough influence over magnetic fields to twist the ramscoop of a ship thirty kilometers away ... surely she can stop the captain and hiw crew? They’re cyborgs, after all. They’re practically made of metal.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head in exasperation—either with the situaiton, or her own limitaitons. “Mother ... too strong. Long range ... good control. Smash other ship, eays. Short range ... bad. Too near”

“So what you’re saying is ... she can’t exercise enough local intro!, because she’s too strong?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding emphatically. “Too strong. Too much danger ... kill baby.”

So the mother was powerless, I thought: she had the ability to destroy another ramscoop, but not to unshackle herself from her own chains without harming her child.

“Wait, though. The thing with the gun ... that took some precision, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said. “But not mother. Baby.”

She had said it with something like pride. “The baby can do the same trick?”

“Baby weak ... for now. But I make baby stronger. Give baby more fuel. They say starve baby ... keep baby alive, but just.” She clenched her fist and snarled. “I disobey. Give baby more food. Let baby get stronger. Then one day ...”

“The baby will be able to do what the mother can’t,” I said. “Kill them all. That’s the bad thing, isn’t it? That’s what you were warning me about. Telling me to, get off the ship before it happened. And to make sur eZEal didn’t pu timplant sin my head. So I’d have a chance.”

“Someone .. live,” she said. ‘Someone ... come back. Find Devilfish. Let mother and baby go. Take them home.”

“Why not you?”

She touched the side of her head. “I, lobot.”

“Oh, no.”

“When bad thing happen, I go too. But you live, Peter Vandry. You wethead. You come back.”

“How soon?” I breathed, not wanting to think about what she had just said.

“Soon. Baby stronger ... hour by hour. Control ... improving. See, feel, all around it. Empathic. Know what to do. Understand good.” Again that flicker of pride. “Baby clever.”

“Zeal’s on to you. That’s why he sent me here.”

“That why ... has to happen soon. Before Zeal take away ... mc. What left behind after ... not care about baby.”

“And now?”

“I care. I love.”

“Well, isn’t that heartwarming,” said a voice behind us.

I turned around, confronted by the sight of Mister Zeal blocking the main catwalk, advancing toward us with a heavy gun in his human hand: not a tranquilizer this time. He shook his head disappointedly. “Here was I, thinking maybe you needed some help ... and when I arrive I find you having a good old chinwag with the lobot!”

“Zeal make you lobot too,” she said. “He train you now ... just to build up neuromotor patterns.”

“Listen to her,” Zeal said mockingly. “Step aside now, Peter. Let me finish the job you were so tragically incapable of completing.”

I stood my ground. “Is that right, Zeal? Were you going to make me into one of them as well, or were you just planning on taking my hands?”

“Stand aside, lad. And it’s Mister Zeal to you, by the way.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not letting you touch her.”

“Fine, then.”

Zeal aimed the gun and shot me. The round tore through my leg, just below the knee. I yelped and started to fold as my leg buckled under me. By tightening my grip on the railings I managed not to slip off the catwalk.

Zeal advanced toward me, boots clanging on the catwalk. I couId barely hold myself up now. Blood was drooling down my leg I frWm the wound. My hands were slippery on the railing, losing their grip.

“I’m trying not to do too much damage,” Zeal said, before leveling the gun at me again. “I’d still like to be able to salvage something.”

I steeled myself against the shot.

“Baby,” the girl called.

Zeal’s arm swung violently aside, mashing against the railing. I I is hand spasmed open to drop the gun. It clattered to the deck of he catwalk, then dropped all the way to the floor of the chamber, where it smashed apart.

Zeal grunted in anguish, using his good hand to massage the lingers of the other.

“Nice trick,” he said. “But it’ll only make it slower and messier for both of you.”

With both hands—he couldn’t have been hurt that badly—he delved into the pocket on the front of his apron. He came out with a pair of long, vicious-looking knives, turning them edge-on so that we’d see how sharp they were.

“Baby ...” I called.

But Zeal kept advancing, sharpening the knives on each other, showing no indication that the baby was having any effect on his weapons. It was only then that I realized that the knives were not necessarily made of metal.

Baby wasn’t going to be able to do anything about them.

Zeal’s huge boots clanged ponderously closer. The pain in my leg was now excruciating, beginning to dull my alertness. Slumped down on the deck, I could barely reach his waist, let alone the knives.

“Easy now, lad,” he said as I tried to block him. “Easy now, and we’ll make it nice and quick when it’s your turn. How does that sound?”

“It sounds ...”

I pawed ineffectually at the leather of his apron, slick with blood and oil. I couldn’t begin to get a grip on it, even if I’d had the strength to stop him.

“Now lad,” he said, sounding more disappointed than angry. “Don’t make me slash at your hands. They’re too good to waste like that.”

“You’re not getting any part of me.”

He clucked in amusement and knelt down just far enough to stab the tip of one of the knives—the one he held in his right hand—against my chest. “Seriously, now.”

The pressure of the knife made me fall back, so that my back was on the deck. That was when I touched the deck with my bare hand and felt how warm it was.

Warm and getting hotter.

Inductive heating, I thought: Baby’s magnetic field washing back and forth over the metal, cooking it.

I twisted my neck to glance back at the girl and saw her pain. She held her hands in front of her, like someone expecting a gift. Baby must have been warming her hands as well as the deck.

Baby couldn’t help it.

Flat on the deck now, Zeal lowered his heel onto my chest. “Yes, the deck’s getting hotter. I can just feel it through the sole of my shoe.”

“Don’t you touch her.”

He increased the pressure on my chest, crushing the wind from my lungs. “Or what, exactly?”

I didn’t have the strength to answer. All I could do was push ineffectually against his boot, in the hope of snatching a breath of air. “I’ll deal with you in a moment,” Zeal said, preparing to move on. But then he stopped.

Even from where I was lying, I saw something change on his face. The cocky set of his jaw slipped a notch. His eyes looked up, as If he’d seen something on the ceiling.

He hadn’t. He was looking at his goggle, pushed high onto his forehead.

Nothing about the goggle had changed, except for the thin wisp of smoke curling away from it where it contacted his skin.

It was beginning to burn its way into his forehead, pulled tight by the strap.

Zeal let out an almighty bellow of pain and fury: real this time. His hands jerked up reflexively, as if he meant to snatch the goggle away. But both hands were holding knives.

He screamed, as the hot thing seared into his forehead like a brand.

He lowered his hands, and tried to fumble one of the knives into his apron pocket. His movements were desperate, uncoordinated. The knife tore at the leather but couldn’t find its way home. Finally, shrieking, he simply dropped the weapon.

It fell to the decking. I reached out and took it.

Zeal reached up with his bare hand and closed his fingers around the goggle. Instantly I heard the sizzle of burning skin. He tried to pull his hand away, but his fingers appeared to have stuck to the goggle. Thrashing now, he reached up with the other knife—still unwilling to relinquish it—and tried to use its edge to lever offending mass of fused metal and skin from his forehead.

That was when I plunged the other knife into his shin, and twisted. Zeal teetered, fighting for balance. But with one hand stuck to his forehead and the other holding the knife, he had no means to secure himself.

I assisted him over the edge. Zeal screamed as he fell. Then there was a clatter and a sudden, savage stillness.

For what seemed like an age I lay on the catwalk, panting until the pain lost its focus.

“It won’t be long before the rest of the crew comes after us,” I told the girl.

She was still holding her metal hands before her: I could only imagine her pain.

“Need to make baby strong now,” she said. “Feed it more.” She moved to a console set into a recess in the railing itself. She touched her claws against the controls, and then gasped, unable to complete whatever action she’d had in mind.

I forced myself to stand, putting most of my weight on my good leg. My arm was in a bad way, but the fingers still worked. If I splinted it, I ought to be able to grip something.

I lurched and hobbled until I was next to her.

“Show me what to do.”

“Give Baby more fuel,” she said, indicating a set of controls. “Turn that. All the way.”

I did what she said. The decking rumbled, as if the ship itself had shuddered. Overhead, I noticed a dimming in the glow of the pipe after the point where the smaller lines branched out of it.

“How long?” I said, pushing my good hand against the slug wound to keep the blood at bay.

“Not long. Ship get slower ... but not enough for captain to notice. Baby drink. Then ... bad thing.”

“Everyone aboard will die?”

“Baby kill them. Fry them alive, same way as Zeal. Except you.”

I thought of all that the Devilfish had done. If only half of those stories were true, it was still more than enough to justify what was bout to happen.

“How long?” I repeated.

“Thirty ... forty minutes.”

“Then it’s time enough,” I said.

She looked at me wonderingly. “Time enough ... for what?”

“To get you to the surgeon’s room. To get you on the table and get those implants out of your head.”

Something like hope crossed her face. It was there, fleetingly. Then it was gone, wiped away. How often had she dared to hope, before learning to crush the emotion before it caused any more pain? I didn’t want to know ... not yet.

“No,” she said. “Not time.”

“There is time,” I said. If I could extract those implants in time, and remove those metal hands, she would weather Baby’s magnetic storm when it ripped through the rest of the crew. There was nothing I could do for the other lobots, not in the time that was left. And maybe there was nothing anyone could do for them now.

But the girl was different. I knew there was something more in there ... something that hadn’t been completely erased. Maybe she didn’t remember her name now, but with time ... with patience ... who knew what was possible?

But first we had to save the aliens. And we would, too. We’d have the Devilfish to ourselves. If we couldn’t work out how to fly the aliens home, we could at least let them go. They were creatures of space: all that they really craved was release.

Then .. once the Flux Swimmers were taken care of ... we’d find a cryopod and save ourselves. So what if it took a while before anyone found us?

“No time,” she said again.

“There is,” I said. “And we’re doing this. You’re my patient, and I’m not giving up on you. I’m Peter Vandry, surgeon.”

“Surgeon’s mate,” she corrected.

I looked down at Zeal’s spread-eagled, motionless form and shook my head. “Surgeon, actually. Someone just got a promotion.”

Stroboscopic

Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone, and has also sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Spectrum SF, and elsewhere. His first novel, Revelation Space, was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; it was quickly followed by Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, and Century Rain, all big books that were big sellers as well, establishing Reynolds as one of the best and most popular new SF writers to enter the field in many years. His other books include a novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days. His most recent book is a new novel, Pushing Ice. Coming up are two new collections, Galactic North and Zima Blue and Other Stories. A professional scientist with a PhD in astronomy, he comes from Wales, but lives in the Netherlands, where he works for the European Space Agency.

Here’s a taut, inventive, and fast-paced story that speculates that the newish realm of computer game design will eventually merge with the field of daredevil exhibitions of the jump-over-a-canyon-on-a-rocket sled sort, to produce a sport where everything can change in the blink of an eye—sometimes with fatal results.

“OPEN THE BOX.”

I wasn’t making a suggestion. Just in case the tone of my voice didn’t make that clear, I backed up my words with an antique but functional blunderbuss; something won in a gaming tournament half a lifetime earlier. We stood in the airlock of my yacht, currently orbiting Venus: me, my wife, and two employees of Icehammer Games.

Between us was a gray box the size of a child’s coffin.

“After all this time,” said the closest man, his face hidden behind a mirrored gold visor on a rococo white helmet. “Still don’t trust us?”

“First rule of complex systems,” I said. “You can’t tell friends from enemies.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Nozomi.”

But even as he spoke, White knelt down and fiddled with the latches on the lid of the box. It opened with a gasp of air, revealing a mass of translucent protective sheeting wadded around something very cold. After passing the blunderbuss to Risa, I reached in and lifted out the package, feeling its bulk.

“What is it?

“An element of a new game,” said the other man, Black. “Something called Stroboscopic.”

I carried the package to a workbench. “Never heard of it.”

“It’s hush-hush,” Black said. “Company hopes to have it up and running in a few months. Rumor is it’s unlike anything else in Tycho.”

I pulled back the last layer of wadding.

It was an animal packed in ice; some kind of hardshelled arthropod; like a cross between a scorpion and a crab—all segmented exoskeletal plates and multijointed limbs terminating in various specialized and nasty-looking appendages. The dark carapace was mottled with patches of dirty white, sparkling with tiny reflections. Elsewhere it shone like polished turtleshell. There were ferocious mouth parts but nothing I recognized as an eye, or any kind of sensory organ at all.

“Looks delicious,” I said. “What do I cook it with?”

“You don’t eat it, Nozomi. You play it.” Black shifted nervously as if wary of how much he could safely disclose. “The game will feature a whole ecology of these things—dozens of other species; all kinds of predator-prey relationships.”

“Someone manufactures them?”

“Nah.” It was White speaking now. “Icehammer found ’em somewhere outside the system, using the snatcher.”

“Might help if I knew where.”

“Tough titty. They never told us; we’re just one of dozens of teams working on the game.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “So you’re saying, all I have to go on is one dead animal, which might have come from anywhere in the galaxy?”

“Yeah,” White said, his helmet nodding. “Except it isn’t dead.”

THE mere fact that I’d seen the creature, of course, meant that I’d have an unfair advantage when it came to playing the game. It meant that I, Nozomi, one of the dozen or so best-known gamers in the system, would be cheating. But I could live with that. Though my initial rise to fame had been driven mainly by skill, it was years since I’d played a game without having already gained an unfair edge over the other competitors.

There were reasons.

I could remember a time in my childhood when the playing of games was not the highest pinnacle of our culture; simply one means by which rich immortals fought boredom. But that was before the IWP commenced the first in a long series of wars against the Halo Ideologues, those scattered communities waging dissent from the system’s edge. The Inner Worlds Prefecture had turned steadily more totalitarian, as governments generally do in times of crisis. Stealthily, the games had been pushed toward greater prominence, and shady alliances had been forged between the IWP and the principal gaming houses. The games enthralled the public and diverted their attentions from the Halo wars. And—unlike the arts—they could not be used as vehicles for subversion. For gamers like myself it was a near-utopian state of affairs. We were pampered and courted by the houses and made immensely rich.

But—maybe because we’d been elevated to such loftiness—we also saw what was going on. And turning a blind eye was one of the few things I’d never been good at.

One day, five years ago, I was approached by the same individuals who’d brought the box to my yacht. Although they were officially working for Icehammer, they were also members of an underground movement with cells in all the gaming houses. Its lines of communication stretched out to the Ideologues themselves.

The movement was using the games against the IWP. They’d approach players like myself and offer to disclose material relating to games under development by Icehammer or other houses; material that would give the player an edge over their rivals. The player in turn would siphon a percentage of their profit into the movement.

The creature in the box was merely the latest tip-off.

But I didn’t know what to make of it, except that it had been snatched from somewhere in the galaxy. Wormhole manipulation offered instantaneous travel to the stars, but nothing larger than a beachball could make the trip. The snatcher was an automated probe that had retrieved biological specimens from thousands of planets. Icehammer operated its own snatcher, for obtaining material that could be incorporated into products.

This time, it seemed to have brought back a dud.

“IT just sits there and does nothing,” Risa said when the Icehammer employees had left, the thing resting on a chilled pallet in the sick bay.

“What kind of game can they possibly build around it?”

“Last player to die of boredom wins?”

“Possible. Or maybe you throw it? It’s heavy enough, as though the damn thing is half-fossilized. Those white patches look like quartz, don’t they?”

Maybe the beast wouldn’t do anything until it was placed into the proper environment—perhaps because it needed olfactory or tactile cues to switch from dormancy.

“Black said the game was based on an ecology?” I said.

“Yeah, but how do you think such a game would work?” Risa said. “An ecology’s much too chaotic to build into a game.” Before she married me she’d been a prominent games designer for one of the other houses, so she knew what she was talking about. “Do you know how disequilibrate your average ecology is?”

“Not even sure I can pronounce it.”

“Ecologies aren’t kids’s stuff. They’re immensely complex—food webs, spectra of hierarchical connected-ness .... Screw up any one level, and the whole thing can collapse—unless you’ve evolved the system into some kind of Gaian self-stabilizing regime, which is hard enough when you’re not trying to re-create an alien ecology, where there might be all sorts of unexpected emergent phenomena.”

“Maybe that’s the point, though? A game of dexterity, like balancing spinning plates?”

Risa made the noise that told she was half acknowledging the probable truthfulness of my statement. “They must constrain it in some way. Strip it down to the essentials, and then build in some mechanism whereby players can influence things.”

I nodded. I’d been unwilling to probe the creature too deeply until now, perhaps still suspicious of a trap—but I knew that if I didn’t, the little arthropod would drive me quietly insane. At the very least, I had to know whether it had anything resembling a brain—and if I got that far, I could begin to guess at the kinds of behavioral routines scripted into its synapses, especially if I could trace pathways to sensory organs. Maybe I was being optimistic, though. The thing didn’t even have recognizable eyes, so it was anyone’s guess as to how it assembled a mental model of its surroundings. And of course that told me something, though it wasn’t particularly useful.

The creature had evolved somewhere dark.

A MONTH later, Icehammer began a teaser campaign for Stroboscopic. The premiere was to take place two months later in Tycho, but a handful of selected players would be invited to an exclusive preview a few weeks earlier, me among them.

I began to warm up to competition fitness.

Even with insider knowledge, no game was ever a walkover, and my contacts in the resistance movement would be disappointed if I didn’t turn in a tidy profit. The trouble was I didn’t know enough about the game to finesse the required skills; whether they were mental or physical or some combination of the two. Hedging my bets, I played as many different types of games as possible in the time frame, culminating in a race through the atmosphere of Jupiter piloting frail cloudjammers. The game was one that demanded an acute grasp of aerodynamic physics, coupled with sharp reflexes and a willingness to indulge in extreme personal risk.

It was during the last of the races that Angela Valdez misjudged a thermal and collapsed her foil. Valdez had been a friend of mine years ago, and though we’d since fallen into rivalry, we’d never lost our mutual respect. I attended her funeral on Europa with an acute sense of my own mortality. There, I met most of the other gamers in the system, including a youngish man called Zubek whose star was in the ascendant. He and Valdez had been lovers, I knew—just as I’d loved her years before I met Risa.

“I suppose you’ve heard of Stroboscopic?” he asked, sidling up to me after Valdez’s ashes had been scattered on Europa’s ice.

“Of course.”

“I presume you won’t be playing, in that case.” Zubek smiled. “I gather the game’s going to be more than slightly challenging.”

“You think I’m not up to it?”

“Oh, you were good once, Nozomi—nobody’d dispute that.” He nodded to the smear of ash on the frost. “But so was Angela. She was good enough to beat the hardest of games—until the day when she wasn’t.”

I wanted to punch him. What stopped me was the thought that maybe he was right.

I WAS on my way back from the funeral when White called, using the secure channel to the yacht.

“What have you learnt about the package, Nozomi? I’m curious.”

“Not much,” I said, nibbling a fingernail. With my other hand I was toying with Risa’s dreadlocks, her head resting on my chest. “Other than the fact that the animal responds to light. The mottled patches on its carapace are a matrix of light-sensitive organs; silicon and quartz deposits. Silicon and silicon oxides, doped with a few other metals. I think they work as organic semiconductors, converting light into electrical nerve impulses.”

I couldn’t see White’s face—it was obscured by a golden blur that more or less approximated the visor of his suit—but he tapped a finger against the blur, knowingly. “That’s all? A response to light? That’s hardly going to give you a winning edge.”

“There’s nothing simple about it. The light has to reach a certain threshold intensity before there’s any activity at all.”

“And then it wakes up?”

“No. It moves for a few seconds, like a clockwork toy given a few turns of the key. Then it freezes up again, even if the light level remains constant. It needs a period of darkness before it shows another response to light.”

“How long?”

“Seventy seconds, more or less. I think it gets all the energy it needs during that one burst of light, then goes into hibernation until the next burst. Its chemistry must be optimized so highly that it simply can’t process more rapid bursts.”

The gold ovoid of his face nodded. “Maybe that ties in with the title of the game,” he said. “Stroboscopic.”

“You wouldn’t care to hazard a guess as to what kind of evolutionary adaptation this might be?”

“I wish there was time for it, Nozomi. But I’m afraid that isn’t why I called. There’s trouble.”

“What sort?” Though I didn’t really need to ask.

He paused, looking to one side, as if nervous of being interrupted. “Black’s vanished. My guess is the goons got to him. They’ll have unpicked his memory by now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It may be hazardous for you to risk competition now that you’re implicated.”

I let the words sink in, then shook my head. “It’s too late,” I said. “I’ve already given them my word that I’ll be there.”

Risa stirred. “Too pigheaded to back down?”

“No,” I said. “But on the other hand, I do have a reputation to uphold.”

AS the premiere approached we learned what we could of the creature. It was happier in vacuum than air, although the latter did not seem to harm it provided it was kept cold. Maybe that had something to do with its silicon biochemistry. Silicon had never seemed like a likely rival to carbon as a basis for life, largely because silicon’s higher valency denied its compounds the same long-term stability. But under extreme cold, silicon biochemistry might have the edge, or at least be an equally probable pathway for evolution. And with silicon came the possibility of exploiting light itself as an energy source, with no clumsy intermediate molecular machinery like the rhodopsin molecule in the human retina.

But the creature lived in darkness.

I couldn’t resolve this paradox. It needed light to energize itself—a flash of intense blue light, shading into the UV—and yet it hadn’t evolved an organ as simple as the eye. The eye, I knew, had been invented at least 40 times during the evolution of life on Earth. Nature came up with the eye whenever there was the slightest use for it.

It got stranger.

There was something I called the secondary response—also triggered by exposure to light. Normally, shown a flash every 70-odd seconds, the animal would execute a few seemingly purposeful movements, each burst of locomotion coordinated with the previous one, implying that the creature kept some record of what it had been doing previously. But if we allowed it to settle into a stable pattern of movement bursts, the creature began to show richer behavior. The probability of eliciting the secondary response rose to a maximum midway through the gap between normal bursts, roughly half a minute after the last, before smoothly diminishing. But at its peak, the creature was hypersensitized to any kind of ambient light at all, even if it was well below the threshold energy of the normal flash. If no light appeared during the time of hypersensitivity, nothing happened; the creature simply waited out the remaining half a minute until the next scheduled flash. But if even a few hundred photons fell on its carapace, it would always do the same thing; thrashing its limbs violently for a few seconds, evidently drawing on some final reserve of energy that it saved for just this response.

I didn’t have a clue why.

And I wasn’t going to get one, either—at least not by studying the creature. One day we’d set it up in the autodoc analysis chamber as usual, and we’d locked it into the burst cycle, working in complete darkness apart from the regular pulses of light every minute and ten seconds. But we forgot to lash the animal down properly. A status light flashed on the autodoc console, signifying some routine health-monitoring function. It wasn’t bright at all, but it happened just when the creature was hypersensitized. It thrashed its limbs wildly, making a noise like a box of chopsticks.

And hurled itself from the chamber, falling to the floor.

Even though it was dark, I saw something of its shattering, as it cleaved into a million pieces. It sparkled as it died.

“Oops,” Risa said.

THE premiere soon arrived. Games took place all over the system, but the real epicenter was Tycho. The lunar crater had been domed, pressurized, and infused with a luminous mass of habitats and biomes, all dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure through game. I’d visited the place dozens of times, of course—but even then, I’d experienced only a tiny fraction of what it had to offer. Now all I wanted to do was get in and out—and if Stroboscopic was the last game I ever played there, I didn’t mind.

“Something’s bothering you, Noz,” Risa said, as we took a monorail over the Icehammer zone. “Ever since you came back from Valdez’s funeral.”

“I spoke to Zubek.”

“Him?” She laughed. “You’ve got more talent in your dick.”

“He suggested I should consider giving this one a miss.”

“He’s just trying to rile you. Means you still scare him.” Then she leaned toward the window of our private cabin. “There. The Arena.”

It was a matt-black geodesic ball about half a kilometer wide, carbuncled by ancillary buildings. Searchlights scissored the air above it, neon letters spelling out the name of the game, running around the ball’s circumference.

Stroboscopic.

Thirty years ago the eponymous CEO of Icehammer Games had been a top-class player in his own right—until neutral feedback incinerated most of his higher motor functions. Now Icehammer’s frame was cradled within a powered exoskeleton, stenciled with luminous Chinese dragons. He greeted myself, the players, and assorted hangers-on as we assembled in an atrium adjoining the Arena. After a short preliminary speech a huge screen was unveiled behind him. He stood aside and let the presentation roll.

A drab, wrinkled planet hove into view on the screen, lightly sprinkled with craters; one ice cap poking into view.

“PSR-J2034+454A,” Icehammer said. “The decidedly unpoetic name for a planet nearly 500 light-years from here. Utterly airless and barely larger than our moon, it shouldn’t really be there at all. Less than ten million years ago its sun reached the end of its nuclear-burning life cycle and went supernova.” He clapped his hands together in emphasis; some trick of acoustics magnifying the clap concussively. “Apart from a few comets, nothing else remains. The planet moves in total darkness, even starlight attenuated by the nebula of dust that embeds the system. Even the star it once drew life from has become a corpse.”

The star rose above one limb of the planet: a searing point of light, pulsing on and off like a beacon.

“A pulsar,” Icehammer said. “A 15-kilometer ball of nuclear matter, sending out an intense beam of light as it rotates, four flashes a second; each no more than 13 hundredths of a second long. The pulsar has a wobble in its rotational axis, however, which means that the beam only crosses our line of sight once every 72 seconds, and then only for a few seconds at a time.” Then he showed us how the pulsar beam swept across the surface of the planet, dousing it in intense, flickering light for a few instants, outlining every nuance of the planet’s topography in eye-wrenching violet. Followed by utter darkness on the face of the world, for another 72 seconds.

“Now the really astonishing thing,” Icehammer said, “is that something evolved to live on the planet, although only on the one face, which it always turns to the star. A whole order of creatures, in fact, their biology tuned to exploit that regular flash of light. Now we believe that life on Earth originated in self-replicating structures in pyritic minerals, or certain kinds of clay. Eventually, this mineralogic life formed the scaffolding for the first form of carbon-based life, which—being more efficient and flexible—quickly usurped its predecessor. But perhaps that genetic takeover never happened here, stymied by the cold and the vacuum and the radiative effects of the star.” Now he showed us holoimages of the creatures themselves, rendered in the style of watercolors from a naturalist’s fieldbook, annotated in handwritten Latin. Dozens of forms—including several radically different bodyplans and modes of locomotion—but everything was hardshelled and a clear cousin to the animal we’d examined on the yacht. Some of the more obvious predators looked incredibly fearsome. “They do all their living in bursts lasting a dozen seconds, punctuated by nearly a minute of total inactivity. Evidently some selection mechanism determined that a concentrated burst of activity is more useful than long, drawn-out mobility.”

Jumping, I thought. You couldn’t jump in slow motion. Predators must have been the first creatures to evolve toward the burst strategy—and then grazers had been forced to follow suit.

“We’ve given them the collective term Strobelife—and their planet we’ve called Strobeworld, for obvious reasons.” Icehammer rubbed his palms together with a whine of actuating motors. “Which, ladies and gentlemen, brings us rather neatly to the game itself. Shall we continue?”

“Get on with it, you bastard,” I murmured. Next to me, Risa squeezed my hand and whispered something calming.

WE were escorted up a sapphire staircase into a busy room packed with consoles and viewing stands. There was no direct view of the Arena itself, but screens hanging from the ceiling showed angles in various wavebands.

The Arena was a mockup of part of the surface of Strobeworld, simulated with astonishing precision: the correct rocky terrain alleviated only by tufts of colorless vacuum-tolerant “vegetation,” gravity that was only a few percent from Strobeworld’s own, and a magnetic field that simulated in strength and vector the ambient field at the point on Strobeworld from which the animals had been snatched. The roof of the dome was studded with lamps that would blaze for less than 13 hundredths of a second, once every 72 seconds, precisely mimicking the passage of the star’s mercilessly bright beam.

The game itself—Level One, at least—would be played in rounds: single player against single player, or team against team. Each competitor would be allocated a fraction of the thousand-odd individual animals released into the Arena at the start—fifty/fifty in the absence of any handicapping. The sample would include animals from every ecological level, from grazers that fed on the flora, right up to the relatively scarce top predators, of which there were only a dozen basic variants. They had to eat, of course: light could provide their daily energy needs, but they’d still need to consume each other for growth and replication. Each competitor’s animals would be labeled with infrared markers, capable of being picked up by Arena cams. It was the competitor’s goal to ensure that their population of Strobeworld creatures outperformed the rival’s, simply by staying alive longest. Computers would assess the fitness of each population after a round and the winner would be announced.

I watched a few initial heats before my turn.

Most of the animals were sufficiently far from each other—or huddled in herds—that during each movement burst they did little except shuffle around or move slightly more in one direction than another. But the animals that were near each other exhibited more interesting behavior. Prey creatures—small, flat-bodied grazers or midlevel predators—would try and get away from the higher-level predators, which in turn would advance toward the grazers and subordinate predators. But then they’d come to a stop, perfectly motionless, their locations revealed only by the cams, since it was completely dark in the Arena.

Waiting.

It was harder than it looked—the dynamics of the ecosystem far subtler than I’d expected. Interfering at any level could have wildly unexpected consequences.

Risa would have loved it.

Soon it was my turn. I took my console after nodding briefly at my opponent; a rising player of moderate renown, but no real match for myself, even though neither of us had played Stroboscopic before.

We commenced play.

The Arena—initially empty—was populated by Strobelife via robot drones that dashed out from concealed hatches. The Strobelife was in stasis; no light flashes from the dome to trigger the life cycle; as stiff and sculptural as the animal we’d studied in the yacht. My console displayed a schematic overlay of the Arena, with “my” animals designated by marker symbols. The screens showed the same relationships from different angles. Initial placement was pseudo-random; animals placed in lifelike groupings, but with distances between predator and prey, determined by algorithms compiled from real Strobeworld populations.

We were given five minutes to study the grouping and evolve a strategy before the first flash. Thereafter, the flashes would follow at 72-second intervals until the game’s conclusion.

The five minutes slammed past before I’d examined less than a dozen possible opening gambits.

For a few flash cycles nothing much happened; too much distance between potential enemies. But after the fifth cycle some of the animals were within striking range of each other. Little local hot spots of carnage began to ensue; animals being dismembered or eaten in episodic bursts.

We began to influence the game. After each movement burst—during the minute or so of near-immobility—we were able to selectively reposition or withdraw our own or our opponent’s animals from the Arena, according to a complex shifting value scheme. The immobile animals would be spirited away, or relocated, by the same robots that had placed them initially. When the next flash came, play would continue seamlessly.

All sorts of unanticipated things could happen.

Wipe out one predator and you might think that the animals it was preying on would thrive, or at least not be decimated so rapidly. But what often happened was that a second rival predator—until then contained in number—would invade the now unoccupied niche and become more successful than the animal that had been wiped out. If that new predator also pursued the prey animals of the other, then they might actually be worse off.

I began to grasp some of Stroboscopic’s latent complexity. Maybe it was going to be a challenge after all.

I played and won four rounds out of five. No point deluding myself: at least two of my victories had been sheer luck, or had evolved from dynamics of the ecology that were just too labyrinthine to guess at. But I was impressed, and for the first time in years, I didn’t feel as if I’d already exhausted every aspect of a game.

I was enjoying myself.

I waited for the other heats to cycle through, my own name only displaced from the top of the leader board when the last player had completed his series.

Zubek had beaten me.

“Bad luck,” he said, in the immediate aftermath, after we’d delivered our sound bites. He slung an arm around my shoulder, matishly. “I’m sorry what I said about you before, Nozomi.”

“Would you be apologizing now if I’d won?”

“But you didn’t, did you? Put up a good fight, I’ll admit. Were you playing to your limit?” Zubek stopped a passing waiter and snatched two drinks from his tray, something fizzy, passing one to me. “Listen, Nozomi. Either way, we won in style and trashed the rest.”

“Good. Can I go now? I’d like to speak to my wife.” And get the hell away from Tycho, I thought.

“Not so fast. I’ve got a proposition. Will you hear me out?”

I LISTENED to what Zubek had to say. Then caught up with Risa a few minutes later and told her what he had outlined.

“You’re not serious,” she said. “He’s playing a game with you, don’t you realize?”

“Isn’t that the point?”

Risa shook her head exasperatedly. “Angela Valdez is dead. She died a good death, doing what she loved. Nothing the two of you can do now can make the slightest difference.”

“Zubek will make the challenge whether I like it or not.”

“But you don’t have to agree.” Her voice was calm but her eyes promised tears. “You know what the rumors said. That the next level was more dangerous than the first.”

“That’ll make it all the more interesting, then.”

But she wasn’t really listening to me, perhaps knowing that I’d already made my mind up.

Zubek and I arranged a press conference an hour later, sharing the same podium, microphones radiating out from our faces like the rifles of a firing squad; stroboscopic flashes of cameras prefiguring the game ahead. We explained our proposition: how we’d agreed between ourselves to another game; one that would be dedicated to the memory of Angela Valdez.

But that we’d be playing Level Two.

Icehammer took the podium during the wild applause and cheering that followed our announcement.

“This is extremely unwise,” he said, still stiffly clad in his mobility frame. “Level Two is hardly tested yet; there are bound to be bugs in the system. It could be exceedingly dangerous.” Then he smiled and a palpable aura of relief swept through the spectators. “On the other hand, my shareholders would never forgive me if I forewent an opportunity for publicity like this.”

The cheers rose to a deafening crescendo.

Shortly afterward I was strapped into the console, with neuro-effectors crowning my skull, ready to light up my pain center. The computer overseeing the game would allocate jolts of pain according to the losses suffered by my population of Strobelife. All in the mind, of course. But that wouldn’t make the pain any less agonizing, and it wouldn’t reduce the chances of my heart simply stopping at the shock of it all.

Zubek leant in and shook my hand.

“For Angela,” I said, and then watched as they strapped Zubek in the adjacent console, applying the neuro-effector.

It was hard. It wasn’t just the pain. The game was made more difficult by deliberately limiting our overview of the Arena. I no longer saw my population in its entirety—the best I could do was hop my point of view from creature to creature, my visual field offering a simulation of the electrical-field environment sensed by each Strobelife animal; a snapshot only updated during Strobetime. When there was no movement, there was no electrical-field generation. Most of the time I was blind.

Most of the time I was screaming.

Yet somehow—when the computer assessed the fitness of the two populations—I was declared the winner over Zubek.

Lying in the couch, my body quivered, saliva water-falling from my slack jaw. A moan filled the air, which it took me long moments to realize was my own attempt at vocalization. And then I saw something odd; something that shouldn’t have happened at all.

Zubek hauled himself from his couch, not even sweating.

He didn’t look like a man who’d just been through agony.

An unfamiliar face blocked my view of him. I knew who it was, just from his posture and the cadences of his speech.

“Yes, you’re right. Zubek was never wired into the neuro-effector. He was working for us—persuading you to play Level Two.”

“White,” I slurred. “You, isn’t it?”

“The very man. Now how would you like to see your wife alive?”

I reached for his collar, fingers grasping ineffectually at the fabric. “Where’s Risa?”

“In our care, I assure you. Now kindly follow me.”

He waited while I heaved myself from the enclosure of the couch, my legs threatening to turn to jelly beneath me.

“Oh, dear,” White said, wrinkling his nose. “You’ve emptied your bladder, haven’t you?”

“I’ll empty your face if you don’t shut up.”

My nervous system had just about recovered by the time we reached Icehammer’s quarters, elsewhere in the building. But my belief system was still in ruins.

White was working for the IWP.

ICEHAMMER was lounging on a maroon settee, divested of his exoskeletal support system. Just as I was marveling at how pitiable he looked, he jumped up and strode to me, extending a hand.

“Good to meet you, Nozomi.”

I nodded at the frame, racked on one wall next to an elaborate suit of armor. “You don’t need that thing?”

“Hell, no. Not in years. Good for publicity, though—neural burnout and all that.”

“It’s a setup, isn’t it?”

“How do you think it played?” Icehammer said.”

“Black really was working for the movement,” I said, aware that I was compromising myself with each word, but also that it didn’t matter. “White wasn’t. You were in hock to the IWP all along. You were the reason Black vanished.”

“Nothing personal Nozomi,” White said. “They got to my family, just as we’ve got to Risa.”

Icehammer took over: “She’s in our care now, Nozomi—quite unharmed, I assure you. But if you want to see her alive, I advise that you pay meticulous attention to my words.” While he talked he brushed a hand over the tabard of the hanging suit of armor, leaving a greasy imprint on the black metal. “You disappointed me. That a man of your talents should be reduced to cheating.”

“I didn’t do it for myself.”

“You don’t seriously imagine that the movement could possibly pose a threat to the IWP? Most of its cells have been infiltrated. Face it, man, it was always an empty gesture.”

“Then where was the harm?”

Icehammer tried a smile but it looked fake. “Obviously I’m not happy at your exploiting company secrets, even if you were good enough to keep them largely to yourself.”

“It’s not as if I sold them on.”

“No, I’ll credit you with discretion, if nothing else. But even if I thought killing you might be justified, there’d be grave difficulties with such a course of action. You’re too well known; I can’t just make you disappear without attracting a lot of attention. And I can’t expose you as a cheat without revealing the degree to which my organization’s security was breached. So I’m forced to another option—one that, on reflection, will serve the both of us rather well.”

“Which is?”

“I’ll let Risa go, provided you agree to play the next level of the game.”

I thought about that for a few moments before answering. “That’s all? Why the blackmail?”

“Because no one in their right minds would play Level Three if they knew what was involved.” Icehammer toyed with the elegantly flared cuff of his bottle-green smoking jacket. “The third level is exponentially more hazardous than the second. Of course, it will eventually draw competitors—but no one would consent to playing it until they’d attained total mastery of the lower levels. We don’t expect that to happen for at least a year. You, on the other hand, flushed with success at beating Zubek, will rashly declare your desire to play Level Three. And in the process of doing so you will probably die, or at the very least be severely maimed.”

“I thought you said it would serve me well.”

“I meant your posthumous reputation.” Icehammer raised a finger. “But don’t imagine that the game will be rigged, either. It will be completely fair, by the rules.”

Feeling sick to my stomach, I still managed a smile. “I’ll just have to cheat, then, won’t I?”

A FEW minutes later I stood at the podium again, a full audience before me, and read a short prepared statement. There wasn’t much to it, and as I hadn’t written a word of it, I can’t say that I injected any great enthusiasm into the proceedings.

“I’m retiring,” I said, to the hushed silence in the atrium. “This will be my last competition.”

Muted cheers. But they quickly died away.

“But I’m not finished yet. Today I played the first two levels of what I believe will be one of the most challenging and successful games in Tycho, for many years to come. I now intend to play the final level.”

Cheers followed again—but they were still a little fearful. I didn’t blame them. What I was doing was insane.

Icehammer came out—back in his frame again—and made some halfhearted protestations, but the charade was even more theatrical than last time. Nothing could be better for publicity than my failing to complete the level—except possibly my death.

I tried not to think about that part.

“I admire your courage,” he said, turning to the audience. “Give it up for Nozomi—he’s a brave man!” Then he whispered in my ear: “Maybe we’ll auction your body parts.”

But I kept on smiling my best shit-eating smile, even as they wheeled in the same suit of armor that I’d seen hanging on Icehammer’s wall.

I WALKED into the Arena, the armor’s servo-assisted joints whirring with each step. The suit was heated and pressurized, of course—but the tiny air-circulator was almost silent, and the ease of walking meant that my own exertions were slight.

The Arena was empty of Strobelife now, brightly lit; dusty topsoil like lunar regolith, apart from the patches of flora. I walked to the spot that had been randomly assigned me, designated by a livid red circle.

Icehammer’s words still rang in my ears. “You don’t even know what happens in Level Three, do you?”

“I’m sure you’re going to enjoy telling me.”

“Level One is abstracted—the Arena is observed, but it might as well be taking place in a computer. Level Two’s a little more visceral, as you’re now well aware—but there’s still no actual physical risk to the competitor. And, of course, even Level Two could be simulated. You must have asked yourself that question, Nozomi. Why create a real ecology of Strobelife creatures at all, if you’re never going to enter it?”

That was when he had drawn my attention to the suit of armor. “You’ll wear this. It’ll offer protection against the vacuum and the effects of the pulse, but don’t delude yourself that the armor itself is much more than cosmetic.”

“I’m going into the Arena?”

“Where else? It’s the logical progression. Now your viewpoint will be entirely limited to one participant in the game—yourself.”

“Get it over with.”

“You’ll still have the ability to intervene in the ecology, just as before—the commands will be interpreted by your suit and transmitted to the controlling computer. The added complexity, of course, is that you’ll have to structure your game around your own survival at each step.”

“And if—when—I win?”

“You’ll be reunited with Risa, I promise. Free to go. All the rest. You can even sell your story, if you can find anyone who’ll believe you.”

“Know a good ghostwriter?”

He’d winked at me then. “Enjoy the game, Nozomi. I know I will.”

Now I stood on my designated spot and waited.

The lights went out.

I had a sense of rapid subliminal motion all around me. The drones were whisking out and positioning the inert Strobelife creatures in their initial formations. The process lasted a few seconds, performed in total silence. I could move, but only within the confines of the suit, which had now become rigid apart from my fingers.

Unguessable minutes passed.

Then the first stammering pulse came, bright as a nuclear explosion, even with the visor’s shielding. My suit lost its rigidity, but for a moment I didn’t dare move. On the faceplate’s head-up display I could see that I was surrounded by Strobelife creatures, rendered according to their electrical field properties. There were grazers and predators and all the intermediates, and they all seemed to be moving in my direction.

And something was dreadfully wrong. They were too big.

I’d never asked myself whether the creature we’d examined on the yacht was an adult. Now I knew it wasn’t.

The afterflash of the flash died from my vision, and as the seconds crawled by, the creatures’ movements became steadily more sluggish, until only the smallest of them were moving at all.

Then they, too, locked into immobility.

As did my suit, its own motors deactivating until triggered by the next flash.

I tried to hold the scene in my memory, recalling the large predator whose foreclaw might scythe within range of my suit, if he was able to lurch three or four steps closer to me during the next pulse. I’d have to move fast, when it came—and on the pulse after that, I’d have another two to contend with, nearing me on my left flank.

The flash came—intense and eye-hurting.

No shadows; almost everything washed out in the brilliance. Maybe that was why Strobelife had never evolved the eye: it was too bright for contrast, offering no advantage over electrical field sensitivity.

The big predator—a cross among a tank, armadillo, and lobster—came three steps closer and slammed his foreclaw into a wide arc that grazed my chest. The impact hit me like a bullet.

I fell backward, into the dirt, knowing that I’d broken a rib or two.

The electrical field overlay dwindled to darkness. My suit seized into rigidity.

Think, Noz. Think.

My hand grasped something. I could still move my fingers, if nothing else. The gloves were the only articulated parts of the suit that weren’t slaved to the pulse cycle.

I was holding something hard, rocklike. But it wasn’t a rock. My fingers traced the line of a carapace; the pielike fluting around the legs. It was a small grazer.

An idea formed in my mind. I thought of what Icehammer had said about the Strobeworld system; how there was nothing apart from the planet, the pulsar, and a few comets.

Sooner or later, one of those comets would crash into the star. It might not happen very often, maybe only once every few years, but when it did it would be very bad indeed: a massive flare of X rays as the comet was shredded by the gravitational field of the pulsar. It would be a pulse of energy far more intense than the normal flash of light; too energetic for the creatures to absorb.

Strobelife must have evolved a protection mechanism.

The onset of a major flare would be signaled by visible light, as the comet began to break up. A tiny glint at first, but harbinger of far worse to come. The creatures would be sensitized to burrow into the topdirt at the first sign of light, which did not come at the expected time ....

I’d already seen the reaction in action. It was what had driven the thrashing behavior of our specimen before it dropped to its death on the cabin floor. It had been trying to burrow; to bury itself in topdirt before the storm came.

The Arena wasn’t Strobeworld, just a clever facsimile of it—and there was no longer any threat from an X-ray burst. But the evolved reflex would remain, hardwired into every animal in the ecology.

All I had to do was trigger it.

The next flash came, like the brightest, quickest dawn imaginable. Ignoring the pain in my chest, I stood up—still holding the little grazer in my gloved hand.

But how could I trigger it? I’d need a source of light, albeit small, but I’d need to have it go off when I was completely immobile.

There was a way.

The predator lashed at me again, gouging into my leg. I began to topple, but forced myself to stay upright, if nothing else. Another gouge, painful this time, as if the leg armor was almost lost.

The electrical overlay faded again, and my suit froze into immobility. I began to count aloud in my head.

I’d remembered something. It had seemed completely insignificant at the time; a detail so trivial that I was barely conscious of committing it to memory. When the specimen had shattered, it had done so in complete darkness. And yet I’d seen it happen. I’d seen glints of light as it smashed into a million fragments.

And now I understood. The creature’s quartz deposits were highly crystalline. And sometimes—when crystals are stressed—they release light; something called piezoluminescene. Not much; only the amount corresponding to the energy levels of electrons trapped deep within lattices—but I didn’t need much, either. Not if I waited until the proper time, when the animals would be hypersensitized to that warning glint. I counted to 35, what I judged to be halfway between the flash intervals. And then let my fingers relax.

The grazer dropped in silence toward the floor.

I didn’t hear it shatter, not in vacuum. But in the total darkness in which I was immersed, I couldn’t miss the sparkle of light.

I felt the ground rumble all around me. Half a minute later, when the next flash came from the ceiling, I looked around.

I was alone.

No creatures remained, apart from the corpses of those that had already died. Instead, there were a lot of rocky mounds, where even the largest of them had buried themselves under topdirt. Nothing moved, except for a few pathetic avalanches of disturbed dirt. And there they’d wait, I knew—for however long it was evolution had programmed them to sit out the X-ray flare.

Thanks to the specimens on the yacht, I happened to know exactly how long that time was. Slightly more than four and a half hours.

Grinning to myself, knowing that Nozomi had done it again—cheated and made it look like winner’s luck—I began to stroll to safety, and to Risa.

Tiger, Burning

It was not the first time that Adam Fernando’s investigations had taken him this far from home, but on no previous trip had he ever felt quite so perilously remote; so utterly at the mercy of the machines that had copied him from brane to brane like a slowly randomising Chinese whisper. The technicians in the Office of Scrutiny had always assured him that the process was infallible; that no essential part of him was being discarded with each duplication, but he only ever had their word on the matter, and they would say it was safe, wouldn’t they? Memory, as always, gained foggy holes with each instance of copying. He recalled the precise details of his assignment—the awkward nature of the problem—but he couldn’t for the life of him say why he had chosen, at what must have been the very last minute, to assume the physical embodiment of a man-sized walking cat.

When Fernando had been reconstituted after the final duplication, he came to awareness in a half-open metal egg, its inner surface still slick with the residue of the biochemical products from which he had been quickened. He pawed at his whorled, matted fur, then willed his retractile claws into action. They worked excellently, requiring no special effort on his part. A portion of his brain must have been adapted to deal with them, so that their unsheathing was almost involuntary.

He stood from the egg, taking in his surroundings. His colour vision and depth perception appeared reassuringly human-normal. The quickening room was a grey-walled metal space under standard gravity, devoid of ornamentation save that provided by the many scientific tools and instruments that had been stored here. There was no welcoming party, and the air was a touch cooler than conventional taste dictated. Scrutiny had requested that he be allowed embodiment, but that was the only concession his host had made to his arrival. Which could mean one of two things: Doctor Meranda Austvro was doing all that she could to hamper his investigation, without actually breaking the law, or that she was so blissfully innocent of any actual wrongdoing that she had no need to butter him up with formal niceties.

He tested his claws again. They still worked. Behind him, he was vaguely aware of an indolently swishing tail.

He was just sheathing his claws when a door whisked open in one pastel-grey wall. An aerial robot emerged swiftly into the room: a collection of dull metal spheres orbiting each other like clockwork planets in some mad, malfunctioning orrery. He bristled at the sudden intrusion, but it seemed unlikely that the host would have gone to the bother of quickening him only to have her aerial murder him immediately afterwards.

“Inspector Adam Fernando, Office of Scrutiny,” he said. No need to prove it: the necessary authentication had been embedded in the header of the graviton pulse that had conveyed his resurrection profile from the repeater brane.

One of the larger spheres answered him officiously. “Of course. Who else might you have been? We trust the quickening has been performed to your general satisfaction?”

He picked at a patch of damp fur, suppressing the urge to shiver. “Everything seems in order. Perhaps if we moved to a warmer room ...” His voice sounded normal enough, despite the alterations to his face: maybe a touch less deep than normal, with the merest suggestion of feline snarl in the vowels.

“Naturally. Doctor Austvro has been waiting for you.”

“I’m surprised she wasn’t here to greet me.”

“Doctor Austvro is a busy woman, Inspector; now more than ever. I thought someone from the Office of Scrutiny would have appreciated that.”

He was about to mention something about common courtesies, then thought better of it: even if she wasn’t listening in, there was no telling what the aerial might report back to Austvro.

“Perhaps we’d better be moving on. I take it Doctor Austvro can find time to squeeze me into her schedule, now that I’m alive?”

“Of course,” the machine said sniffily. “It’s some distance to her laboratory. It might be best if I carried you, unless you would rather locomote.”

Fernando knew the drill. He spread his arms, allowing the cluster of flying spheres to distribute itself around his body to provide support. Small spheres pushed under his arms, his buttocks, the padded black soles of his feet, while others nudged gently against chest and spine to keep him balanced. The largest sphere, which played no role in supporting him, flew slightly ahead. It appeared to generate some kind of aerodynamic air pocket. They sped through the open door and down a long, curving corridor, gaining speed with each second. Soon they were moving hair-raisingly fast, dodging round hairpin bends and through doors that opened and shut only just in time.

Fernando remembered his tail and curled it out of harm’s way.

“How long will this take?” he asked.

“Five minutes. We shall only be journeying a short distance into the inclusion.”

Fernando recalled his briefing. “What we’re passing through now: this is all human built, part of Pegasus Station? We’re not seeing any KR-L artefacts yet?”

“Nor shall you,” the aerial said sternly. “The actual business of investigating the KR-L machinery falls under the remit of the Office of Exploitation, as you well know. Scrutiny’s business is confined only to peripheral matters of security related to that investigation.”

Fernando bristled. “And as such ...”

“The word was ‘peripheral’, Inspector. Doctor Austvro was very clear about the terms under which she would permit your arrival, and they did not include a guided tour of the KR-L artefacts.”

“Perhaps if I ask nicely.”

“Ask whatever you like. It will make no difference.” While they sped on—in silence now, for Fernando had decided he preferred it that way—he chewed over what he knew of the inclusion, and its significance to the Metagovernment.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, humanity had achieved the means to colonise nearby branes: squeezing biological data across the hyperspatial gap into adjacent realities, then growing living organisms from those patterns. Now the Metagovernment sprawled across thirty thousand dense-packed braneworlds. Yet in all that time it had only encountered evidence of one other intelligent civilisation: the vanished KR-L culture.

Further expansion was unlikely. Physics changed subtly from brane to brane, limiting the possibilities for human colonisation. Beyond fifteen thousand realities in either direction, people could only survive inside bubbles of tampered space time, in which the local physics had been tweaked to simulate homebrane conditions. These ‘inclusions’ became increasingly difficult to maintain as the local physics grew more exotic. At five kilometres across, Meranda Austvro’s inclusion was the smallest in existence, and it still required gigantic support machinery to hold it open. The Metagovernment was happy to shoulder the expense because it hoped to reap riches from Austvro’s investigations into the vanished KR-L culture.

But that investigation was supposed to be above-topsecret: the mere existence of the KR-L culture officially deniable at all levels of the Metagovernment. By all accounts Austvro was close to a shattering discovery.

And yet there were leaks. Someone close to the operation—maybe even Austvro herself—was blabbing.

Scrutiny had sent Fernando in to seal the leak. If that meant shutting down Austvro’s whole show until the cat could be put back into the bag (Fernando could not help but smile at the metaphor then he had the necessary authorisation.

How Austvro would take it was another thing.

The rush of corridors and doors slowed abruptly, and a moment later Fernando was deposited back on his feet, teetering slightly until he regained his balance. He had arrived in a much larger room than the one where he had been quickened, one that felt a good deal more welcoming. There was plush white carpet on the floor, comfortable furniture, soothing pastel decor, various homely knickknacks and tasteful objets d’art. The rock-effect walls were interrupted by lavish picture windows overlooking an unlikely garden, complete with winding paths, rock pools and all manner of imported vegetation, laid out under a soothing green sky. It was a convincing simulacrum of one of the more popular holiday destinations in the low-thousand branes.

Meranda Austvro was reclining in a silver dress on a long black settee. Playing cards were arranged in a circular formation on the coffee table before her. She put down the one card that had been in her hand and beckoned Fernando to join her.

“Welcome to Pegasus Station, Inspector,” she said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to greet you sooner, but I’ve been rather on the busy side.”

Fernando sat himself down on a chair, facing her across the table. “So I see.”

“A simple game of Clock Patience, Inspector, to occupy myself while I was waiting for your arrival. Don’t imagine this is how I’d rather be spending my afternoon.”

He decided to soften his approach. “Your aerial did tell me you’d been preoccupied with your work.”

“That’s part of it. But I must admit we botched your first quickening, and I didn’t have time to wait around to see the results a second time.”

“When you say ‘botched’ ..”

“I neglected to check your header tag more carefully. When all that cat fur started appearing ...” She waved her hand dismissively. “I assumed there’d been a mistake in theprofile, so I aborted the quickening, before you reached legal sentience.”

The news unnerved him. Failed quickenings weren’t unknown, though, and she’d acted legally enough. “I hope you recycled my remains.”

“On the contrary, Inspector: I made good use of them.” Austvro patted a striped orange rug, spread across the length of the settee. “You don’t mind, do you? I found the pattern quite appealing.”

“Make the most of me,” Fernando said, trying not to sound as if she had touched any particular nerve. “You can have another skin when I leave, if it means so much to you.”

She clicked her fingers over his shoulder, at the aerial. “You may go now, Caliph.”

The spheres bustled around each other. “As you wish, Doctor Austvro.”

When Fernando had heard the whisk of the closing door, he leaned an elbow on the table, careful not to disturb the cards. He brought his huge whiskered head close to Austvro’s. She was an attractive woman, despite a certain steely hauteur. He wondered if she could smell his breath; how uniquely, distastefully feline it was. “I hope this won’t take too much time, for both our sakes. Scrutiny wants early closure on this whole mess.”

“I’m sure it does. Unfortunately, I don’t know the first thing about your investigation.” She picked up a card from one part of the pattern, examined it with pursed lips, then placed it down on top of another one. “Therefore I’m not sure how I can help you.”

“You were informed that we were investigating a security hole.”

“I was informed, and I found the suggestion absurd. Unless I am the perpetrator.” She turned her cool, civil eyes upon him. “Is that what you think, Inspector? That I am the one leaking information back to the homebrane, risking the suspension of my own project?”

“ I know only that there are leaks.”

“They could be originating from someone in Scrutiny, or Exploitation. Have you considered that?”

“We have to start somewhere. The operation itself seems as good a place as any.”

“Then you’re wasting your time. Return down-stack and knock on someone else’s door. I’ve work to do.”

“Why are you so certain the leaks couldn’t be originating here?”

“Because—firstly—I do not accept that there are leaks. There are merely statistical patterns, coincidences, which Scrutiny has latched onto because it has nothing better to do with its time. Secondly, I run this show on my own. There is no room for anyone else to be the source of these non-existent leaks.”

“Your husband?”

She smiled briefly and extended a hand over the coffee table, palm down. A figure—a grave, clerical-looking man in black—appeared above the table’s surface, no larger than a statuette. The man made a gesture with his hands, as if shaping an invisible ball, then said something barely audible—Fernando caught the phrase ‘three hundred’—then vanished again, leaving only the arrangement of playing cards.

Austvro selected another, examined it once more and returned it to the table.

“My husband died years ago, Inspector. Edvardo and I were deep inside the KR-L machinery, protected by an extension of the inclusion. My husband’s speciality was acausal mechanics ...” For a moment, a flicker of humanity interrupted the composure of her face. “The extension collapsed. Edvardo was on the other side of the failure point. I watched him fall into KR-L spacetime. I watched what it did to him.”

“I’m sorry,” Fernando said, wishing he had paid more attention to the biographical briefing.

“Since then I have conducted operations alone, with only the machines to help me. Caliph is the most special of them: I place great value on his companionship. You can question the machines if you like, but it won’t get you anywhere.”

“Yet the leaks are real.”

“We could argue about that.”

“Scrutiny wouldn’t have sent me otherwise.”

“There must be false alarms. Given the mount of data Scrutiny keeps tabs on—the entire informational content of meta-humanity, spread across thirty thousand reality layers—isn’t any pattern almost guarantedto show up eventually?”

“It is,” Fernando conceded, stroking his :hit tufts. “But that’s why Scrutiny pays attention to contex, ahd to clustering. Not simply to exact matches for sensitie keywords, either, but for suspicious similarities: near-mise designed to throw us off the scent. Miranda for Meranda Ostrow for Austvro, that kind of thing.”

“And you’ve found these clusters?”

“Nearly a dozen, at the last count. Someone vith intimate knowledge of this research project is talking, and we can’t have that.”

This amused her. “So the Metagovernment does have its enemies after all.”

“It’s no secret that there are political difficulties in the high branes. Talk of secession. Exploitation feel tat the KR-L technology may give the Metagovernment the tools it needs to hold the stack together, if the dissidents try to gain the upper hand.”

Austvro sneered. “Tools of political control’

“An edge, that’s all. And obviously matters won’t be helped if the breakaway branes learn about tie KR-L discoveries, and what we intend to do with thr. That’s why we need to keep a lid on things.”

“But these clusters ...” Austvro leaned back into the settee, studying Fernando levelly. “I was shown some of the evidence—some of the documents—before you arrived, and, frankly, none of it made much sense top.”

“It didn’t?”

“If someone—some mole—was trying to get a message through to the breakaway branes, why insist on being so cryptic? Why not just come out and say whatever needs to be said, instead of creating jumbled riddles’ Tames mixed up ... names altered ... the context changd dut of all recognition ... some of these keywords even looked like they were embedded in some kind of play.”

“All I can say is that Scrutiny considered the evidence sufficiently compelling to require immediate action It’. still investigating the provenance of these documents, but I should have word on that soon enough.”

Austvro narrowed her flint-grey eyes. “Provenance?”

“As I said, the documents are faked: made to appear historical, as if they’ve always been present in the data”

“Which is even more absurd than there beingleals in the first place.”

He smiled at her. “I’m glad we agree on something.”

“It’s a start.”

He tapped his extended claws against the cofee able. “I appreciate your scepticism, Doctor. But the fat i. I can’t leave here until I have an explanation. If Scrutiny isn’t satisfhed with my findings—if the source of the leaks can’t be traced—they’ll have no option but to shut down Pegasus, or at least replace the current set-up with something under much tighter government control. So it’s really in your interests to work with me, to help me find the solution.

“I see,” she said coldly.

“I’d like to see more of this operation. Not just Pegasus Station, but the KR-L culture itself.”

“Unthinkable. Didn’t Caliph clarify where your inspection ends, Inspector?”

“It’s not a question of jurisdiction. Give me reson to think you haven’t anything to hide, and I’ll focusmyenquiries somewhere else.”

She looked down, fingering the striped orange rug she had made of his skin.

“It will serve no purpose, Inspector: except to disturb you.”

“I’ll edit the memories before I pass them back down the stack. How does that sound?”

She rose from the settee, abandoning her card game. “Your call. But don’t blame me when you start gibbering.”

Austvro led him from the lounge, back into a more austere part of the station. The hem of her silver dress wised on the iron-grey flooring. Now and then an aerial flashed past on some errand, but in all other respects the station was deserted. Fernando knew that Exploitation had offered to send more expertise, but Austvro had always declined assistance. By all accounts she worked efficiently, feeding a steady stream of titbits and breakthroughs back to the Metagoverninent specialists. According to Fernando’s dossier, Austvro didn’t trust the stability of anyone who would actually volunteer to be copied this far up-stack, knowing the protocols. It was no surprise that she treated him with suspicion, for he was also a volunteer, and only his memories would be going back home again.

Presently they arrived at an oval aperture cut into one wall. On the other side of the aperture, ready to dart down a tunnel, was a two-seater travel pod.

“Are you sure about this, Inspector?”

“I’m perfectly sure.”

She shrugged—letting him know it was his mistake, not hers—and then ushered him into one of the seats. Austvro took the other one, facing him at right angles to the direction of travel. She applied her hand to a tiller and the pod sped into motion. Tunnel walls zipped by in an accelerating blur.

“We’re about to leave the main body of the inclusion,” Austvro informed him.

“Into KR-L spacetime?”

“Not unless the support machines fail. The inclusion’s more or less spherical—in so far as one can talk about ‘spherical’ intrusions of one form of spacetime into another—but it sprouts tentacles and loops into interesting portions of the surrounding KR-L structure. Maintaining these tentacles and loops is much harder than keeping the sphere up, and I’m sure you’ve heard how expensive and difficult that is.”

Fernando felt his hairs bristling. The pod was moving terrifically fast now; so swiftly that there could be no doubt that they had left the main sphere behind already. He visualised a narrow, delicate stalk of spacetime jutting out from the sphere, and him as a tiny moving mote within that stalk.

“Was this where your husband died, Doctor?”

“A similar extension; it doesn’t matter now. We’ve made some adjustments to the support machinery, so it shouldn’t happen again.” Her expression turned playful. “Why? You’re not nervous, are you?”

“Not at all. I just wondered where the accident had happened.”

“A place much like here. It doesn’t matter. My husband never much cared for these little jaunts, anyway. He much preferred to restrict himself to the main inclusion.”

Fernando recalled the image of Austvro’s husband, his hands cupping an imaginary ball, like a mime, and something of the gesture tickled his interest.

“Your husband’s line of work: acausal signalling, wasn’t it: the theoretical possibility of communication through time, using KR-L principles?”

“A dead-end, unfortunately. Even the KR-L had never made that work. But the Metagovernment was happy with the crumbs and morsels he sent back home.”

“He must have thought there was something in it.”

“My husband was a dreamer,” Austvro said. “His singular failing was his inability to distinguish between a practical possibility and an outlandish fantasy.”

“I see.”

“I don’t mean to sound harsh. I loved him, of course. But he could never love the KR-L the way I do. For him these trips were always something to be endured, not relished.”

He watched her eyes for a glimmer of a reaction. “And after his accident—did you have misgivings?”

“For a nanosecond. Until I realised how important this work is. How we must succeed, for the sake of the homebrane.” She leaned forward in her seat and pointed down the tunnel. “There. We’re approaching the interface. That’s where the tunnel cladding becomes transparent. The photons reaching your eyes will have originated as photon-analogues in KR-L spacetime. You’ll see their structures, their great engines. The scale will astound you. The mere geometry of these artefacts is ... deeply troubling, for some. If it disconcerts you, close your eyes.” Her hand remained hard on the tiller. “I’m used to it, but I’m exposed to these marvels on a daily basis.”

“I’m curious,” Fernando said. “When you speak of the aliens, you sometimes sound like you’re saying three letters. At other times.

“Krull, yes,” she said, dismissively. “It’s shorthand, Inspector: nothing more. Long before we knew it had ever been inhabited, we called this the KR-L brane. K and R are the Boltzmann and Rydberg constants, from nuclear physics. In KR-L spacetime, these numbers differ from their values in the homebrane. L is a parameter that denotes the degree of variation.”

“Then Krull is ... a word of your own coining?”

“If you insist upon calling it a word. Why? Has it appeared in these mysterious keyword clusters of yours?”

“Something like it.”

The pod swooped into the transparent part of the stalk. It was difficult to judge speed now. Fernando assumed there was some glass-like cladding between him and the inclusion boundary, and somewhere beyond that (he was fuzzy on the physics) the properties of spacetime took on alien attributes, profoundly incompatible with human biochemistry. But things could still live in that spacetime, provided they’d been born there in the first place. The KR-L had evolved into an entire supercivilisation, and although they were gone now, their great machines remained. He could see them now, as huge and bewildering as Austvro had warned. They were slab-sided, round-edged, ribbed with flanges and cooling grids, surmounted by arcing spheres and flickering discharge cones. The structures glowed with a lilac radiance that seemed to shade into ultraviolet. They receded in all directions—more directions, in fact, than seemed reasonable, given the usual rules of perspective. Somewhere low in his throat he already felt the first queasy constriction of nausea.

“To give you an idea of scale ...” Austvro said, directing his unwilling attention towards one dizzying feature, “.. that structure there, if it were mapped into our spacetime, and built from our iron atoms, would be larger than a Jupiter-class gas giant. And yet it is no more than a heat dissipation element, a safety valve on a much larger mechanism. That more distant machine is almost three light-hours across, and it too is only one element in a larger whole.”

Fernando fought to keep his eyes open. “How far do these machines extend?”

“At least as far as our instruments can reach. Hundreds of light-hours in all directions. The inclusion penetrates a complex of KR-L machinery larger than one of our solar systems. And yet even then there is no suggestion that the machinery ends. It may extend for weeks, months, of light-travel time. It may be larger than a galaxy.”

“Its function?” Seeing her hesitation, he added: “I have the necessary clearance, Doctor. It’s safe to tell me.”

“Absolute control,” she said. “Utter dominance of matter and energy, not just in this brane, but across the entire stack of realities. With this instrumentality, the KR-L could influence events in any brane they selected, in an instant. This machinery makes our graviton pulse equipment—the means by which you arrived here—look like the hamfisted workings of a brain-damaged caveman.”

Fernando was silent for a moment, as the pod sped on through the mind-wrenching scenery.

“Yet the KR-L only ever occupied this one brane,” he said. “What use did they have for machinery capable of influencing events in another one?”

“Only the KR-L can tell us that,” Austvro said. “Yet it seems likely to me that the machinery was constructed to deal with a threat to their peaceful occupation of this one brane.”

“What could threaten such a culture, apart from their own bloody-minded hubris?”

“One must presume: another culture of comparable sophistication. Their science must have detected the emergence of another civilisation, in some remote brane, hundreds of thousands or even millions of realities away, that the KR-L considered hostile. They created this great machinery so that they might nip that threat in the bud, before it spilled across the stack towards them.”

“Genocide?”

“Not necessarily. Is it evil to spay a cat?”

“Depends on the cat.”

“My point is that the KR-L were not butchers. They night their own self-preservation, but not at the ultimate expense of that other culture: whoever they might have been. Surgical intervention was all that was required.”

Fernando looked around again. Some part of his mind was finally adjusting to the humbling dimensions of the machinery, for his nausea was abating. “Yet they’re all gone now. What happened?”

“Again, one must presume: some fatal hesitancy. They created this machinery, but, at what should have been their moment of greatest triumph, flinched from using it.”

“Or they did use it, and it came back and bit them.”

“I hardly think so, Inspector.”

“How many realities have we explored? Eighty, ninety housand layers in either direction?”

“Something like that,” she said, tolerantly.

“How do we know what happens when you get much further out? For that matter, what could the KR-L have known?”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“I’m just wondering ... when I was a child I remember someone—I think it was my uncle—explaining to me that the stack was like the pages of an infinitely thick book, a book whose pages reached away to an infinite distance in either direction: reality after reality, as far as you could imagine, with the physics changing only slightly from page to page.”

“As good an explanation as the layman will ever grasp.”

“But the same person told me there was another theory of the stack: taken a bit less seriously, but not completely discredited.”

“Continue,” Austvro said.

“The theory was that physics kept changing, but after a while it flattened out again and began to converge back to ours. And that by then you were actually coming back again, approaching our reality from the other direction. The stack, in other words, was circular.”

“You’re quite right: that theory is taken a bit less seriously.”

“But it isn’t discredited, is it?”

“You can’t discredit an untestable hypothesis.”

“But what if it is testable? What if the physics does begin to change less quickly?”

“Local gradients tell you nothing. We’d have to map millions, tens of millions of layers, before we could begin ...”

“But you already said the KR-L machinery might have had that kind of range. What if they were capable of looking all the way around the stack, but they didn’t realise it? What if the hostile culture they thought they were detecting was actually themselves? What if they turned on their machinery and it reached around through the closed loop of realities and nipped them in the bud?”

“An amusing conceit, Inspector, but no more than that.”

“But a deadly one, should it happen to be true.” Fernando stroked his chin tufts, purring quietly to himself as he thought things through. “The Office of Exploitation wishes to make use of the KR-L machinery to deal with another emerging threat.”

“The Metagovernment pays my wages. It’s up to it what it does with the results I send home.”

“But as was made clear to me when I arrived, you are a busy woman. Busy because you are approaching your own moment of greatest triumph. You understand enough about the KR-L machinery to make it work, don’t you. You can talk to it through the inclusion, ask it do your bidding.”

Her expression gave nothing away. “The Metagovernment expects results.”

“I don’t doubt it. But I wonder if the Metagovernment has been fully appraised of the risks. When they asked you what happened to the KR-L, did you mention the possibility that they might have brought about their own extinction?”

“I confined my speculation to the realm of the reasonably likely, Inspector. I saw no reason to digress into fancy.”

“Nonetheless, it might have been worth mentioning.”

“I disagree. The Metagovernment is intending to take action against dissident branes within its own realm of colonisation, not some barely-detected culture a million layers away. Even if the topology of the layers was closed ...”

“But even if the machinery was used, it was only used once,” Fernando said. “There’s no telling what other side-effects might be involved.”

“I’ve made many local tests. There’s no reason to expect any difficulties!”

“I’m sure the KR-L scientists were equally confident, before they switched it on.”

Her tone of voice, never exactly confiding, turned chill. “I’ll remind you once again that you are on Scrutiny business, not working for Exploitation. My recollection is that you came to investigate leaks, not to question the basis of the entire project.”

“I know, and you’re quite right. But I can’t help wondering whether the two things aren’t in some way connected.”

“I don’t even accept that there are leaks, Inspector. You have some way to go before you can convince me they have anything to do with the KR-L machinery.”

“I’m working on it,” Fernando said.

They watched the great structures shift angle and perspective as the pod reached the apex of its journey and began to race back towards the inclusion. Fernando was glad when the shaft walls turned opaque and they were again speeding down a dark-walled tunnel, back into what he now thought of as the comparable safety and sanity of Pegasus Station. Until he had recorded and transmitted his memories down the stack, self-preservation still had a strong allure.

“I hope that satisfied your curiosity,” Austvro said, when they had disembarked and returned to her lounge. “But as I warned you, the journey was of no value to your investigation.”

“On the contrary,” he told her. “I’m certain it clarified a number of things. Might I have access to a communications console? I’d like to see if Scrutiny have come up with anything new since I arrived.”

“I’ll have Caliph provide you with whatever you need. In the meantime I must attend to work. Have Caliph summon me if there is anything of particular urgency.”

“I’ll be sure to.”

She left him alone in the lounge. He fingered the tiger skin rug, repulsed and fascinated in equal measure at the exact match with his own fur. While he waited for the aerial to arrive, he swept a paw over the coffee table, trying to conjure up the image of Austvro’s dead husband. But the little figure never appeared.

It hardly mattered. His forensic memory was perfectly capable of replaying a recent observation, especially one that had seemed noteworthy at the time. He called to mind the dead man, dwelling on the way he shaped an invisible form: not, Fernando now realised, a ball, but the ring-shaped stack of adjacent branes in the closed-loop of realities. “Three hundred and sixty degrees,” he’d been saying. Meranda Austvro’s dead husband had been describing the same theoretical meta-reality of which Fernando’s uncle had once spoken. Did that mean that the dead man believed that the KR-L had been scared by their own shadow, glimpsed at some immense distance into the reality stack? And had they forged this soul-crushingly huge machinery simply to strike at that perceived enemy, not realising that the blow was doomed to fall on their own heads?

Perhaps.

He looked anew at the pattern of cards, untouched since Austvro had taken him from this room to view the KR-L machinery. The ring of cards, arranged for Clock Patience, echoed the closed-loop of realities in her husband’s imagination.

Almost, he supposed, as if Austvro had been dropping him a hint.

Fernando was just thinking that through when Caliph appeared, assigning one of his larger spheres into a communications console. Symbols and keypads brightened across the matte grey surface. Fernando tapped commands, claws clicking as he worked, and soon accessed his private data channel.

There was, as he had half expected, a new message from Scrutiny. It concerned the more detailed analysis of the leaks that had been in motion when he left on his investigation.

Fernando placed a direct call through.

“I lello,” said Fernando’s down-brane counterpart, a man !ramed Cook. “Good news, bad news, I’m afraid.”

“Continue,” Fernando purred.

“We’ve run a thorough analysis on the keyword clusters, as promised. The good news is that the clusters haven’t gone away: their statistical significance is now even more certain. There’s clearly been a leak. That means your journey hasn’t been for nothing.”

“That’s a relief.”

“The bad news is that the context is still giving us some serious headaches. Frankly, it’s disturbing. Whoever’s responsible for these leaks has gone to immense trouble to make them look as if they’ve always been part of our data heritage.”

“I don’t understand. I mean, I understand, but I don’t get it. There must be a problem with your methods, your data auditing.”

Cook looked pained. “That’s what we thought, but we’ve been over this time and again. There’s no mistake. Whoever planted these leaks has tampered with the data at a very deep level; sufficient to make it seem as if the clusters have been with us long before the KR-L brane was ever discovered.”

Fernando lowered his voice. “Give me an example. Austvro mentioned a play, for instance.”

“That would be one of the oldest clusters. The Shipwreck, by a paper-age playwright, around 001611. No overt references to the KR-L, but it does deal with a scholar on a haunted island, an island where a powerful witch used to live ... which could be considered a metaphorical substitute for Austvro and Pegasus Station. Contains a Miranda, too, and ...”

“Was the playwright a real historical figure?”

“Unlikely, unless he was almost absurdly prolific. There are several dozen other plays in the records, all of which we can presume were the work of the mole.”

“Mm,” Fernando said, thoughtfully.

“The mole screwed up in other ways too,” Cook added. “The plays are riddled with anachronisms; words and phrases that don’t appear earlier in the records.”

“Sloppy,” Fernando commented, while wondering if there was something more to it than mere sloppiness. “Tell me about another cluster.”

“Skip to 001956 and we have another piece of faked drama: something called a ‘film’; some kind of recorded performance. Again, lots of giveaways: Ostrow for Austvro, Bellerophon—he’s the hero who rode the winged horse Pegasus—the KR-L themselves ... real aliens, this time, even if they’re confined to a single planet, rather than an entire brane. There’s even—get this—a tiger.”

“Really,” Fernando said dryly.

“But here’s an oddity: our enquiries turned up peripheral matter which seems to argue that the later piece was in some way based upon the earlier one.”

“Almost as if the mole wished to lead our attention from one cluster to another.” Fernando scratched at his ear. “What’s the next cluster?”

“Jump to 002713: an ice opera performed on Pluto Prime, for one night only, before it closed due to exceptionally bad notices. Mentions ‘entities in the eighty three thousandth layer of reality’. This from at least six thousand years before the existence of adjoining braneworids was proven beyond doubt.”

“Could be coincidence, but ... well, go on.”

“Jump to 009655, the premier of a Tauri-phase astrosculpture in the Wenlock star forming region. Supplementary text refers to ‘the aesthetic of the doomed Crail’ and ‘Mirandine and Kalebin’.”

“There are other clusters, right up to the near-present?”

“All the way up the line. Random time-spacing: we’ve looked for patterns there, and haven’t found any. It must mean something to the mole, of course ...”

“If there is a mole,” Fernando said.

“Of course there’s a mole. What other explanation could there be?”

“That’s what I’m wondering.”

Fernando closed the connection, then sat in silent contemplation, shuffling mental permutations. When he felt that he had examined the matter from every conceivable angle and yet still arrived at the same unsettling conclusion—he had Caliph summon Doctor Austvro once more.

“Really, Inspector,” she said, as she came back into the lounge. “I’ve barely had time ...”

“Sit down, Doctor.”

Something in the force of his words must have reached her. Doctor Austvro sank into the settee, her hands tucked into the silvery folds of her dress.

“Is there a problem? I specifically asked ...”

“You’re under arrest for the murder of your husband, Edvardo Austvro.”

Her face turned furious. “Don’t be absurd. My husband’s death was an accident: a horrid, gruesome mistake, but no more than that.”

“That’s what you wished us all to think. But you killed him, didn’t you? You arranged for the collapse of the inclusion, knowing that he would be caught in KR-L spacetime.”

“Ridiculous.”

“Your husband understood what had happened to the KR-L: how their machinery had reached around the stack, through three hundred and sixty degrees, and wiped them out of existence, leaving only their remains. He knew exactly how dangerous it would be to reactivate the machinery; how it could never become a tool for the Metagovernment. You said it yourself, Meranda: he feared the machinery. That’s because he knew what it had done; what it was still capable of doing.”

“I would never have killed him,” she said, her tone flatly insistent.

“Not until he opposed you directly, not until he became the only obstacle between you and your greatest triumph. Then he had to go.”

“I’ve heard enough.” She turned her angry face towards the aerial. “Caliph: escort the Inspector to the dissolution chamber. He’s in clear violation of the terms under which I agreed to this investigation.”

“On the contrary,” Fernando said. “My enquiry is still of central importance.”

She sneered. “Your ridiculous obsession with leaks? I monitored your recent conversation with the homebrane, Inspector. The leaks are what I’ve always maintained: statistical noise, meaningless coincidences. The mere fact that they appear in sources that are incontrovertibly old ... what further evidence do you need, that the leaks are nothing of the sort?”

“You’re right,” Fernando said, allowing himself a heavy sigh. “They aren’t leaks. In that sense I was mistaken.”

“In which case admit that your mission here was no more than a wild goose chase, and that your accusations concerning my husband amount to no more than a desperate attempt to salvage some ...”

“They aren’t leaks,” Fernando continued, as if Austvro had not spoken. “They’re warnings, sent from our own future.” She blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“It’s the only explanation. The leaks appear in context sources that appear totally authentic ... because they are.”

“Madness.”

“I don’t think so. It all fits together quite nicely. Your husband was investigating acausal signalling: the means to send messages back in time. You dismissed his work, but what if there was something in it after all? What if a proper understanding of the KR-L technology allowed a future version of the Metagovernment to send a warning to itself in the past?”

“What kind of warning, Inspector?” she asked, still sounding appalled.

“I’m guessing here, but it might have something to do with the machinery itself. You’re about to reactivate the very tools that destroyed the KR-L. Perhaps the point of the warning is to stop that ever happening. Some dreadful, unforeseen consequence of turning the machinery against the dissident branes ... not the extinction of humanity, obviously, or there wouldn’t be anyone left alive to send the warning. But something nearly as bad. Something so awful that it must be edited out of history, at all costs.”

“You should listen to yourself, Inspector. Then ask yourself whether you came out of the quickening room with all your faculties intact.”

He smiled. “Then you have doubts.”

“Concerning your sanity, yes. This idea of a message being sent back in time ... it might have some microscopic degree of credibility if your precious leaks weren’t so hopelessly cryptic. Who sends a message and then scrambles the facts?”

“Someone in a hurry, I suppose. Or someone with an imperfect technique.”

“I’m sure that means something to you.”

“I’m just wondering: what if there wasn’t time to get it right? What if the sending of the message was a one-shot attempt, something that had to be attempted even though the net hod was still not fully understood?”

“That still doesn’t explain why the keywords would crop up in ... a play, of all things.”

“Perhaps it does, though. Especially if the acausal signalliing involves the transmission of patterns directly into the human mind, across time, in a scattergun fashion. The playwright ..”

“What about him?” she asked, with a knowingness that reminded him she had listened in on his conversation with Cook.

“The man lived and died before the discovery of quantum mechanics, let alone braneworlds. Even if the warning arrived fully-formed and coherent in his mind, he could only have interpreted it according to his existing mental framework. It’s no wonder things got mixed up, confused. His conceptual vocabulary didn’t extend to vanished alien cultures in adjacent reality stacks. It did extend to islands, dead witches, ghosts.”

“Ridiculous. Next you’ll be telling me that the other clusters ...”

“Exactly so. The dramatised recording—the ‘film’—was made a few centuries later. The creators did the best they could with their limited understanding of the universe. They knew of space travel, other worlds. Closer to the truth than the playwright, but still limited by the mental prison of their contemporary worldview. The same goes for all the other clusters, I’m willing to bet.”

“Let me get this straight,” Austvro said. “The future Metagovernment resurrects ancient KR-L time-signalling machinery, technology that it barely understands. It attempts to send a message back in time, but it ends up spraying it through history, back to the time of a man who probably thought the Sun ran on coal.”

“Maybe even earlier,” Fernando said. “There’s nothing to say there aren’t other clusters, lurking in the statistical noise ..”

Austvro cut him off. “And yet despite this limited understanding of the machinery, the—as you said—scattershot approach—they still managed to score direct hits into the heads of playwrights, dramatists, sculptors ..” She shook her head pityingly.

“Not necessarily,” Fernando said. “We only know that these people became what they were in our timeline. It might have been the warning itself that set these individuals on their artistic courses ... planting a seed, a vaguely-felt anxiety, that they had no choice but to exorcise through creative expression, be it a play, a film, or an ice-opera on Pluto Prime.”

“I’ll give you credit, Inspector: you really know how to take an argument beyond its logical limit. You’re actually suggesting that if the signalling hadn’t taken place, none of these works of art would ever have existed?”

He shrugged. “If you admit the possibility of time messages ...”

“I don’t. Not at all.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’d hoped to convince you—I thought it might make your arrest an easier matter for both of us—but it’s really not necessary. You understand now, though, why I must put an end to your research. Scrutiny and Exploitation can decide for themselves whether there’s any truth in my theory.”

“And if they don’t think there is—then I’ll be allowed to resume my studies?”

“There’s still the small matter of your murder charge, Merand a.”

She looked sad. “I’d hoped you might have forgotten.”

“It’s not my job to forget.”

“How did you guess?”

“I didn’t guess,” he said. “You led me to it. More than that: I think some part of you—some hidden, subconscious punt—actually wanted me to learn the truth. If not, that was it very unfortunate choice of card game, Meranda.”

“You’re saying I wanted you to arrest me?”

“I can’t believe that you ever hated your husband enough to kill him. You just hated the way he opposed your research. For that reason he had to go, but I doubt that there’s been a moment since when what you did hasn’t been eating you from inside.”

“You’re right,” she said, as if arriving at a firm decision. “I didn’t hate him. But he still had to go. And so do you.”

In a flash her hand had emerged from the silvery folds of her dress, clutching the sleek black form of a weapon. Fernando recognised it as a simple blaster: not the most sophist icated weapon in existence, but more than capable of inflicting mortal harm.

“Please, Doctor. Put that thing away, before you do one of us an injury.”

She stood, the weapon wavering in her hand, but never losing its lock on him.

“Caliph,” she said. “Escort the Inspector to the dissolution chamber. He’s leaving us.”

“You’re making a mistake, Meranda.”

“The mistake would be in allowing the Metagovernment to close me down, when I’m so close to success. Caliph!”

“I cannot escort the Inspector, unless the Inspector wishes to be escorted,” the aerial informed her.

“I gave you an order!”

“He is an agent of the Office of Scrutiny. My programming does not permit ...”

“Walk with me, please,” Fernando said. “Put the gun away and we’ll say no more about it. You’re in enough trouble as it is.”

“I’m not going with you.”

“You’ll revive a fair trial. With the right argument, you may even be able to claim your husband’s death as manslaughter. Perlaps you didn’t mean to kill him, just to strand him ...”

“It’s not the trial,” she snarled. “It’s the thought of stepping into that thing . When I came here I never intended to leave. I won’t go with you.”

“You must.”“

He took a step towards her, knowing even as he did it that the move wasunwise. He watched her finger tense on the blaster’s trigger, and for an instant he thought he might cross the space to her before the weapon discharged. Few people had the nerve to hold a gun against an agent of Scrutiny; even fewer had the nerve to fire.

But Merand Austvro was one of those few. The muzzle spat rapid bolt of self-confined plasma, and he watched in slow-motion horror as three of the bolts slammed into his right arm, below the elbow, and took his hand and forearm away in an agonising orange fire, like a chalk drawing smeared in the rain. The pain hit him like a hammer, and despite his traning he felt the full force of it before mental barriers slammed down in rapid succession, blocking the worst. He could smell his own charred fur.

“An error, actor Austvro,” he grunted, forcing the words out.

“Don’t take another step, Inspector.”

“I’m afraid I must.”

“I’ll kill you.”“ The weapon was now aimed directly at his chest. If her earlier shot had been wide, there would be no error now.

He took another step. He watched her finger tense again, and readied himelf for the annihilating fire.

But the weapon dropped from her hand. One of Caliph’s smaller spheres had dashed it from her grip. Austvro clutched her hand with the other, massaging the fingers. Her face showed stunnedincomprehension. “You betrayed me,” she said to the aerial

“You injured n agent of Scrutiny. You were about to inflict further harm. I could not allow that to happen.” Then one of the larger sphere swerved into Fernando’s line of “Do you require mdeical assistance?”

“I don’t think so. I’m about done with this body anyway.”

“Very well.”

“Will you help me to escort Doctor Austvro to the dissolution chamber?”

“If you order it.”

“Help me, in that case.

Doctor Austvro tried to resist, but between them Fernando and Caliph quickly had the better of her. Fernando kicked the weapon out of harm’s way, then pulled Austvro against his chest with hi left arm, pinning her there. She struggled to escape, but her strength was nothing against his, even allowing for the shock of losing his right arm.

Caliph propelled them to the dissolution chamber. Austvro fought all the way, bu with steadily draining will. Only at the last moment, who she saw the grey hood of the memory recorder, next to he recessed alcove of the dissolution field, did she summon some last reserve of resistance. But her efforts counted for nothing. Fernando and the robot placed her into the recoder, closing the heavy metal restraining buckles across her body. The hood lowered itself, ready to capture a final neural image; a snapshot of her mind that would be encoded into a graviton pulse and relayed hack to the homebrane.

“Meranda Austvro,” Fenando said, pushing the blackened stump of his arm into his chest furs, “I am arresting you on the authority of the Office of Scrutiny. Your resurrection profile will be captured and transmitted into the safekeeping of the Metagovernment. A new body will be quickened and employed as a host for thee patterns, and then brought to trial. Please compose your houghts accordingly.”

“When they quicken me again, I’ll destroy your career,” she told him.

Fernando looked sympathetic. “You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve heard that before.”

“I should have skinned you twice.”

“It wouldn’t have worked. They’d have sent a third copy of me.”

He activated the memory recorder. Amber lights flickered across the hood, stabilising to indicate that the device had obtained a coherent image and that the relevant data was ready to be committed to the graviton pulse. Fernando issued the command, and a tumbling hourglass symbol appeared on the hood.

“Your patterns are on their way home now, Meranda. For the moment you still have a legal existence. Enjoy it while you can.”

He’d never said anything that cruel before, and almost as soon as the words were out he regretted them. Taunting the soon-to-be-destroyed had never been his style, and it shamed him that he had permitted himself such a gross lapse of professionalism. The only compensation was that he would soon find himself in the same predicament as Doctor Austvro.

The hourglass vanished, replaced by a steady green light. It signified that the homebrane had received the graviton pulse, and that the resurrection profile had been transmitted without error.

“Former body of Meranda Austvro,” he began, “I must now inform you ..”

“Just get it over with.”

Fernando and Caliph helped her from the recorder. Her body felt light in his hands, as if some essential part of it had been erased or extracted during the recording process. Legally, this was no longer Doctor Meranda Austvro: just the biological vehicle Austvro had used while resident in this brane. According to Metagovernment law, the vehicle must now be recycled.

Fernando turned on the pearly screen of the dissolution field. He tested it with a stylus, satisfied when he saw the instant actinic flash as the stylus was wrenched from existence. Dissolution was quick and efficient. In principle the atomic fires destroyed the central nervous system long before pain signals had a chance to reach it, let alone be experienced as pain.

Not that anyone ever knew, of course. By the time you went through the field, your memories had already been captured. Anything you experienced at the moment of destruction never made it into the profile.

“I can push you into the field,” he told Austvro. “But by all accounts you’ll find it quicker and easier if you run at it yourself.”

She didn’t want it to happen that way. Caliph and Fernando had to help her through the field. It wasn’t the nicest part of the job.

Afterwards, Fernando sat down to marshall and clarify his thoughts. In a little while he too would be consumed by fire, only to be reborn in the homebrane. Scrutiny would be expecting a comprehensive report into the Pegasus affair, and it would not do to be woolly on the details. Experience had taught him that a little mental preparation now paid dividends in the long run. The recording and quickening process always blurred matters a little, so the clearer one could he at the outset, the better.

When he was done with the recorder, when the green light had reported safe receipt of his neural patterns, he turned to Caliph. “I no longer have legal jurisdiction here. The ‘me’ speaking to you is not even legally entitled to call itself Adam Fernando. But I hope you won’t consider it improper of me to offer some small thanks for your assistance.”

“Will someone come back to take over?” Caliph asked.

“Probably. But don’t be surprised if they come to shut down Pegasus. I’m sure my legal self will put in a good word for you, though.”

“Thank you,” the aerial said.

“It’s the least I can do.”

Fernando stood from the recorder, and—as was his usual habit—took a running jump at the dissolution field. It wasn’t the most elegant of ends—the lack of an arm hindered his balance—but it was quick and efficient and the execution not without a certain dignity.

Caliph watched the tiger burn, the stripes seeming to linger in the air before fading away. Then it gathered its spheres into an agitated swarm and wondered what to do next.

Turquoise Days

‘Set sail in those Turquoise Days’

—Echo and the Bunnymen

One

Naqi Okpik waited until her sister was safely asleep before she stepped onto the railed balcony that circled the gondola. It was the most perfectly warm and still summer night in months. Even the breeze caused by the airship’s motion was warmer than usual, as soft against her cheek as the breath of an attentive lover. Above, yet hidden by the black curve of the vacuum-bag, the two moons were nearly at their fullest. Microscopic creatures sparkled a hundred metres under the airship, great schools of them daubing galaxies against the profound black of the sea. Spirals, flukes and arms of luminescence wheeled and coiled as if in thrall to secret music. Naqi looked to the rear, where the airship’s ceramic-jacketed sensor pod carved a twinkling furrow. Pinks and rubies and furious greens sparkled in the wake. Occasionally they darted from point to point with the nervous motion of kingfishers. As ever, she was alert to anything unusual in movements of the messenger sprites, anything that might merit a note in the latest circular, or even a full-blown article in one of the major journals of Juggler studies. But there was nothing odd happening tonight, no yet-to-be catalogued forms or behaviour patterns, nothing that might indicate more significant Pattern Juggler activity. She walked around the airship’s balcony until she had reached the stern, where the submersible sensor pod was tethered by a long fibre-optic dragline. Naqi pulled a long hinged stick from her pocket, flicked it open in the manner of a courtesan’s fan and then waved it close to the winch assembly. The default watercoloured lilies and sea serpents melted away, replaced by tables of numbers, sinuous graphs and trembling histograms. A glance established that there was nothing surprising here either, but the data would still form a useful calibration set for other experiments. As she closed the fan—delicately, for it was worth almost as much as the airship itself – Naqi reminded herself that it was a day since she had gathered the last batch of incoming messages. Rot had taken out the connection between the antenna and the gondola during the last expedition, and since then collecting the messages had become a chore, to be taken in turns or traded for less tedious tasks. Naqi gripped a handrail and swung out behind the airship. Here the vacuum-bag overhung the gondola by only a metre, and a grilled ladder allowed her to climb around the overhang unravel and scramble onto the flat top of the bag. She moved gingerly, bare feet against rusting rungs, doing her best not to disturb Mina. The airship rocked and creaked a little as she found her balance on the top and then was again silent and still. The churning of its motors was so quiet that Naqi had long ago filtered the sound from her experience. All was calm, beautifully so. In the moonlight the antenna was a single dark flower rising from the broad back of the bladder. Naqi started moving along the railed catwalk that led to it, steadying herself as she went but feeling much less vertigo than would have been the case in daylight. Then she froze, certain that she was being watched. Just within Naqi’s peripheral vision appeared a messenger sprite. It had flown to the height of the airship and was now sprite. It had flown to the height of the airship and was now shadowing it from a distance of ten or twelve metres. Naqi gasped, delighted and unnerved at the same time. Apart from dead specimens this was the first time Naqi had ever seen a sprite this close. The organism had the approximate size and morphology of a terrestrial hummingbird, yet it glowed like a lantern. Naqi recognised it immediately as a long-range packet carrier. Its belly would be stuffed with data coded into tightly packed wads of RNA, locked within microscopic protein capsomeres. The packet carrier’s head was a smooth teardrop, patterned with luminous pastel markings, but lacking any other detail save for two black eyes positioned above the midline. Inside the head was a cluster of neurones, which encoded the positions of the brightest circumpolar stars. Other than that, sprites had only the most rudimentary kind of intelligence. They existed to shift information between nodal points in the ocean when the usual chemical signalling pathways were deemed too slow or imprecise. The sprite would die when it reached its destination, consumed by microscopic organisms that would unravel and process the information stored in the capsomeres. And yet Naqi had the acute impression that it was watching her: not just the airship, but her, with a kind of watchful curiosity that made the hairs on the back of her neck bristle. And then—just at the point when the feeling of scrutiny had become unsettling—the sprite whipped sharply away from the airship. Naqi watched it descend back towards the ocean and then coast above the surface, bobbing now and then like a skipping stone. She remained still for several more minutes, convinced that something of significance had happened, though aware too of how subjective the experience had been; how unimpressive it would seem if she tried to explain it to Mina tomorrow. Anyway, Mina was the one with the special bond with the ocean, wasn’t she? Mina was the one who scratched her arms at night; Mina was the one who had too high a conformal index to be allowed into the swimmer corps. It was always Mina. It was never Naqi. The antenna’s metre-wide dish was anchored to a squat plinth inset with weatherproofed controls and readouts. It was century-old Pelican technology, like the airship and the fan. Many of the controls and displays were dead, but the unit was still able to lock onto the functioning satellites. Naqi flicked open the fan and copied the latest feeds into the fan’s remaining memory. Then she knelt down next to the plinth, propped the fan on her knees and sifted through the messages and news summaries of the last day. A handful of reports had arrived from friends in PrachuapPangnirtung and Umingmaktok snowflake cities, another from an old boyfriend in the swimmer corps station on Narathiwat atoll. He had sent her a list of jokes that were already in wide circulation. She scrolled down the list, grimacing more than grinning, before finally managing a half-hearted chuckle at one that had previously escaped her. Then there were a dozen digests from various special interest groups related to the Jugglers, along with a request from a journal editor that she critique a paper. Naqi skimmed the paper’s abstract and thought that she was probably capable of reviewing it. She checked through the remaining messages. There was a note from Dr Sivaraksa saying that her formal application to work on the Moat project had been received and was now under consideration. There had been no official interview, but Naqi had met Sivaraksa a few weeks earlier when both of them happened to be in Umingmaktok. Sivaraksa had been in an encouraging mood during the meeting, though Naqi couldn’t say whether that was because she’d given a good impression or because Sivaraksa had just had his tapeworm swapped for a nice new one. But Sivaraksa’s message said she could expect to hear the result in a day or two. Naqi wondered idly how she would break the news to Mina if she was offered the job. Mina was critical of the whole idea of the Moat and would probably take a dim view of her sister having anything to do with it. Scrolling down further, she read another message from a scientist in Qaanaaq requesting access to some calibration data she had obtained earlier in the summer. Then there were four or five automatic weather advisories, drafts of two papers she was contributing to, and an invitation to attend the amicable divorce of Kugluktuk and Gjoa, scheduled to take place in three weeks’ time. Following that there was a summary of the latest worldwide news—an unusually bulky file – and then there was nothing. No further messages had arrived for eight hours.

There was nothing particularly unusual about that—the ailing network was always going down—but for the second time that night the back of Naqi’s neck tingled. Something must have happened, she thought. She opened the news summary and started reading. Five minutes later she was waking Mina. ‘I don’t think I want to believe it,’ Mina Okpik said. Naqi scanned the heavens, dredging childhood knowledge of the stars. With some minor adjustment to allow for parallax, the old constellations were still more or less valid when seen from Turquoise. ‘That’s it, I think.’

‘What?’ Mina said, still sleepy. Naqi waved her hand at a vague area of the sky, pinned between Scorpius and Hercules. ‘Ophiuchus. If our eyes were sensitive enough, we’d be able to see it now: a little prick of blue light.’

‘I’ve had enough of little pricks for one lifetime,’ Mina said tucking her arms around her knees. Her hair was the same pure black as Naqi’s, but trimmed into a severe, spiked crop which made her look younger or older depending on the light. She wore black shorts and a shirt that left her arms bare. Luminous tattoos in emerald and indigo spiralled around the piebald marks of random fungal invasion that covered her arms, thighs, neck and cheeks. The fullness of the moons caused the fungal patterns to glow a little themselves, shimmering with the same emerald and indigo hues. Naqi had no tattoos and scarcely any fungal patterns of her own; she couldn’t help but feel slightly envious of her sister’s adornments. Mina continued, ‘But seriously, you don’t think it might be a mistake?’

‘I don’t think so, no. See what it says there? They detected it weeks ago, but they kept quiet until now so that they could make more measurements.’

‘I’m surprised there wasn’t a rumour.’ Naqi nodded. ‘They kept the lid on it pretty well. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t going to be a lot of trouble.’

‘Mm. And they think this blackout is going to help?’

‘My guess is official traffic’s still getting through. They just don’t want the rest of us clogging up the network with endless speculation.’

‘Can’t blame us for that, can we? I mean, everyone’s going to be guessing, aren’t they?’

‘Maybe they’ll announce themselves before very long,’ Naqi said doubtfully. While they had been speaking the airship had passed into a zone of the sea largely devoid of bioluminescent surface life. Such zones were almost as common as the nodal regions where the network was thickest, like the gaping voids between clusters of galaxies. The wake of the sensor pod was almost impossible to pick out, and the darkness around them was absolute, relieved only by the occasional mindless errand of a solitary messenger sprite. Mina said: ‘And if they don’t?’

‘Then I guess we’re all in a lot more trouble than we’d like.’ For the first time in a century a ship was approaching Turquoise, commencing its deceleration from interstellar cruise speed. The flare of the lighthugger’s exhaust was pointed straight at the Turquoise system. Measurement of the Doppler shift of the flame showed that the vessel was still two years out, but that was hardly any time at all on Turquoise. The ship had yet to announce itself, but even if it turned out to have nothing but benign intentions—a short trade stopover, perhaps – the effect on Turquoise society would be incalculable. Everyone knew of the troubles that had followed the arrival of Pelican in Impiety. When the Ultras moved into orbit there had been much unrest below. Spies had undermined lucrative trade deals. Cities had jockeyed for prestige, competing for technological tidbits. There had been hasty marriages and equally hasty separations. A century later, old enmities smouldered just beneath the surface of cordial intercity politics. It wouldn’t be any better this time.

‘Look,’ Mina said, ’it doesn’t have to be all that bad. They might not even want to talk to us. Didn’t a ship pass through the system about seventy years ago without so much as a by-your-leave?’ Naqi agreed; it was mentioned in a sidebar to one of the main articles. ‘They had engine trouble, or something. But the experts say there’s no sign of anything like that this time.’

‘So they’ve come to trade. What have we got to offer them that we didn’t have last time?’

‘Not much, I suppose.’ Mina nodded knowingly. ‘ A few works of art that probably won’t travel very well. Ten-hour-long nose-flute symphonies, anyone?’ She pulled a face. ‘That’s supposedly my culture, and even I can’t stand it. What else? A handful of discoveries about the Jugglers, which have more than likely been replicated elsewhere a dozen times. Technology, medicine? Forget it.’

‘They must think we have something worth coming here for,’ Naqi said. ‘Whatever it is, we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we? It’s only two years.’

‘I expect you think that’s quite a long time,’ Mina said. ‘Actually—’ Mina froze. ‘Look!’ Something whipped past in the night, far below, then a handful of them; then a dozen, and then a whole bright squadron. Messenger sprites, Naqi realised—but she had never seen so many of them moving at once, and on what was so evidently the same errand. Against the darkness of the ocean the lights were mesmerising: curling and weaving, swapping positions and occasionally veering far from the main pack before arcing back towards the swarm. Once again one of the sprites climbed to the altitude of the airship, loitering for a few moments on fanning wings before whipping off to rejoin the others. The swarm receded, becoming a tight ball of fireflies, and then only a pale globular smudge. Naqi watched until she was certain that the last sprite had vanished into the night. ‘Wow,’ Mina said quietly. ‘Have you ever seen anything like that?’

‘Never.’

‘Bit funny that it should happen tonight, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Mina said. ‘The Jugglers can’t possibly know about the ship.’

‘We don’t know that for sure. Most people heard about this ship hours ago. That’s more than enough time for someone to have swum.’ Mina conceded her younger sister’s point. ‘Still, information flow isn’t usually that clear-cut. The Jugglers store patterns, but they seldom show any sign of comprehending actual content. We’re dealing with a mindless biological archiving system, a museum without a curator.’

‘That’s one view.’ Mina shrugged. ‘I’d love to be proved otherwise.’

‘Well, do you think we should try following them? I know we can’t track sprites over any distance, but we might be able to keep up for a few hours before we drain the batteries.’

‘We wouldn’t learn much.’

‘We won’t know until we’ve tried,’ Naqi said, gritting her teeth. ‘Come on—it’s got to be worth a go, hasn’t it? I reckon that swarm moved a bit slower than a single sprite. We’d at least have enough for a report, wouldn’t we?’ Mina shook her head. ‘All we’d have is a single observation with a little bit of speculation thrown in. You know we can’t publish that sort of thing. And anyway, assuming that sprite swarm did have something to do with the ship, there are going to be hundreds of similar sightings tonight.’

‘I just thought it might take our minds off the news.’

‘Perhaps it would. But it would also make us unforgivably late for our target.’ Mina dropped the tone of her voice, making an obvious effort to sound reasonable. ‘Look, I understand your curiosity. I feel it as well. But the chances are it was either a statistical fluke or part of a global event everyone else will have had a much better chance to study. Either way we can’t contribute anything useful, so we might as well just forget about it.’ She rubbed at the marks on her forearm, tracing the Paisleypatterned barbs and whorls of glowing colouration. ‘And I’m tired, and we have several busy days ahead of us. I think we just need to put this one down to experience, all right?’

‘Fine,’ Naqi said. ‘I’m sorry, but I just know we’d be wasting our time.’

‘I said fine.’ Naqi stood up and steadied herself on the railing that traversed the length of the airship’s back. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To sleep. Like you said, we’ve got a busy day coming up. We’d be fools to waste time chasing a fluke, wouldn’t we?’ An hour after dawn they crossed out of the dead zone. The sea below began to thicken with floating life, becoming soupy and torpid. A kilometre or so further in and the soup showed ominous signs of structure: a blue-green stew of ropy strands and wide, kelplike plates. They suggested the floating, half-digested entrails of embattled sea monsters. Within another kilometre the floating life had become a dense vegetative raft, stinking of brine and rotting cabbage. Within another kilometre of that the raft had thickened to the point where the underlying sea was only intermittently visible. The air above the raft was humid, hot and pungent with microscopic irritants. The raft itself was possessed of a curiously beguiling motion, bobbing and writhing and gyring according to the ebb and flow of weirdly localised current systems. It was as if many invisible spoons were stirring a great bowl of spinach. Even the shadow of the airship, pushed far ahead of it by the low sun, had some influence on the movement of the material. The Pattern Juggler biomass scurried and squirmed to evade the track of the shadow, and the peculiar purposefulness of the motion reminded Naqi of an octopus she had seen in the terrestrial habitats aquarium on Umingmaktok, squeezing its way through impossibly small gaps in the glass prison of its tank. Presently they arrived at the precise centre of the circular raft. It spread away from them in all directions, hemmed by a distant ribbon of sparkling sea. It felt as if the airship had come to rest above an island, as fixed and ancient as any geological feature. The island even had a sort of geography: humps and ridges and depressions sculpted into the cloying texture of layered biomass. But there were few islands on Turquoise, especially at this latitude, and the Juggler node was only a few days old. Satellites had detected its growth a week earlier, and Mina and Naqi had been sent to investigate. They were under strict instructions simply to hover above the island and deploy a handful of tethered sensors. If the node showed any signs of being unusual, a more experienced team would be sent out from Umingmaktok by high-speed dirigible. Most nodes dispersed within twenty to thirty days, so there was always a need for some urgency. They might even send trained swimmers, eager to dive into the sea and open their minds to alien communion. Ready—as they called it—to ken the ocean. But first things first: chances were this node would turn out to be interesting rather than exceptional. ‘Morning,’ Mina said when Naqi approached her. Mina was swabbing the sensor pod she had reeled in earlier, collecting the green mucus that had adhered to its ceramic teardrop. All human artefacts eventually succumbed to biological attack from the ocean, although ceramics were the most resilient. ‘You’re cheerful,’ Naqi said, trying to make the statement sound matter-of-fact rather than judgmental. ‘Aren’t you? It’s not everyone gets a chance to study a node up this close. Make the most of it, sis. The news we got last night doesn’t change what we have to do today.’ Naqi scraped the back of her hand across her nose. Now that the airship was above the node she was breathing vast numbers of aerial organisms into her lungs with each breath. The smell was redolent of ammonia and decomposing vegetation. It required an intense effort of will not to keep rubbing her eyes rawer than they already were. ‘Do you see anything unusual?’

‘Bit early to say.’

‘So that’s a “no”, then.’

‘You can’t learn much without probes, Naqi.’ Mina dipped a swab into a collection bag, squeezing tight the plastic seal. Then she dropped the bag into a bucket between her feet. ‘Oh, wait. I saw another of those swarms, after you’d gone to sleep.’

‘I thought you were the one complaining about being tired.’ Mina dug out a fresh swab and rubbed vigorously at a deep olive smear on the side of the sensor. ‘I picked up my messages, that’s all. Tried again this morning, but the blackout still hasn’t been lifted. I picked up a few short-wave radio signals from the closest cities, but they were just transmitting a recorded message from the Snowflake Council: stay tuned and don’t panic.’

‘So let’s hope we don’t find anything significant here,’ Naqi said, ‘because we won’t be able to report it if we do.’

‘They’re bound to lift the blackout soon. In the meantime I think we have enough measurements to keep us busy. Did you find that spiral sweep programme in the airship’s avionics box?’

‘I haven’t looked for it,’ Naqi said, certain that Mina had never mentioned such a thing before. ‘But I’m sure I can programme something from scratch in a few minutes.’

‘Well, let’s not waste any more time than necessary. Here.’ Smiling, she offered Naqi the swab, its tip laden with green slime. ‘You take over this and I’ll go and dig out the programme.’ Naqi took the swab after a moment’s delay. ‘Of course. Prioritise tasks according to ability, right?’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Mina said soothingly. ‘Look, let’s not argue, shall we? We were best friends until last night. I just thought it would be quicker ...’ She trailed off and shrugged. ‘You know what I mean. I know you blame me for not letting us follow the sprites, but we had no choice but to come here. Understand that, will you? Under any other circumstances—’

‘I understand,’ Naqi said, realising as she did how sullen and childlike she sounded; how much she was playing the petulant younger sister. The worst of it was that she knew Mina was right. At dawn it all looked much clearer. ‘Do you? Really?’ Naqi nodded, feeling the perverse euphoria that came with an admission of defeat. ‘Yes. Really. We’d have been wrong to chase them.’ Mina sighed. ‘I was tempted, you know. I just didn’t want you to see how tempted I was, or else you’d have found a way to convince me.’

‘I’m that persuasive?’

‘Don’t underestimate yourself, sis. I know I never would.’ Mina paused and took back the swab. ‘I’ll finish this. Can you handle the sweep programme? Naqi smiled. She felt better now. The tension between them would still take a little while to dissipate, but at least things were easier now. Mina was right about something else: they were best friends, not just sisters. ‘I’ll handle it,’ Naqi said. Naqi stepped through the hermetic curtain into the air-conditioned cool of the gondola. She closed the door, rubbed her eyes and then sat down at the navigator’s station. The airship had flown itself automatically from Umingmaktok, adjusting its course to take cunning advantage of jet streams and weather fronts. Now it was in hovering mode: once or twice a minute the electrically driven motors purred, stabilising the craft against gusts of wind generated by the microclimate above the Juggler node. Naqi called up the current avionics programme, a menu of options appearing on a flat screen. The options quivered; Naqi thumped the screen with the back of her hand until the display behaved itself. Then she scrolled down through the other flight sequences, but there was no preprogramme spiral loaded into the current avionics suite. Naqi rummaged around in the background files, but there was nothing to help her there either. She was about to start hacking something together—at a push it would take her half an hour to assemble a routine—when she remembered that she had once backed up some earlier avionics files onto the fan. She had no idea if they were still there, or even if there was anything useful amongst the cache, but it was probably worth taking the time to find out. The fan lay closed on a bench; Mina must have left it there after she had verified that the blackout was still in force. Naqi grabbed the fan and spread it open across her lap. To her surprise, it was still active: instead of the usual watercolour patterns the display showed the messages she had been scrolling through earlier. She looked closer and frowned. These were not her messages at all. She was looking at the messages Mina had copied onto the fan during the night. Naqi felt an immediate prickle of guilt: she should snap the fan shut, or at the very least close her sister’s mail and move into her own area of the fan. But she did neither of those things. Telling herself that it was only what anyone else would have done, she accessed the final message in the list and examined its incoming time-stamp. To within a few minutes, it had arrived at the same time as the final message Naqi had received. Mina had been telling the truth when she said that the blackout was continuing. Naqi glanced up. Through the window of the gondola she could see the back of her sister’s head, bobbing up and down as she checked winches along the side. Naqi looked at the body of the message. It was nothing remarkable, just an automated circular from one of the Juggler special-interest groups. Something about neurotransmitter chemistry. She exited the circular, getting back to the list of incoming messages. She told herself that she had done nothing shameful so far. If she closed Mina’s mail now, she would have nothing to feel really guilty about. But a name she recognised jumped out at her from the list of messages: Dr Jotah Sivaraksa, manager of the Moat project. The man she had met in Umingmaktok, glowing with renewed vitality after his yearly worm change. What could Mina possibly want with Sivaraksa? She opened the message, read it. It was exactly what she had feared, and yet not dared to believe. Sivaraksa was responding to Mina’s request to work on the Moat. The tone of the message was conversational, in stark contrast to the businesslike response Naqi had received. Sivaraksa informed her sister that her request had been appraised favourably, and that while there were still one or two other candidates to be considered, Mina had so far emerged as the most convincing applicant. Even if this turned out not to be the case, Sivaraksa continued—and that was not very likely—Mina’s name would be at the top of the list when further vacancies became available. In short, she was more or less guaranteed a chance to work on the Moat within the year. Naqi read the message again, just in case there was some highly subtle detail that threw the entire thing into a different, more benign light. Then she snapped shut the fan with a sense of profound fury. She placed it back where it was, exactly as it had been. Mina pushed her head through the hermetic curtain. ‘How’s it coming along!’

‘Fine,’ Naqi said. Her voice sounded drained of emotion even to herself. She felt stunned and mute. Mina would call her a hypocrite were she to object to her sister having applied for exactly the same job she had ... but there was more to it than that. Naqi had never been as openly critical of the Moat project as her sister. By contrast, Mina had never missed a chance to denounce both the project and the personalities behind it. Now that was real hypocrisy. ‘Got that routine cobbled together?’

‘Coming along,’ Naqi said.

‘Something the matter?’

‘No,’ Naqi forced a smile, ‘no. Just working through the details. Have it ready in a few minutes.’

‘Good. Can’t wait to start the sweep. We’re going to get some beautiful data, sis. And I think this is going to be a significant node. Maybe the largest this season. Aren’t you glad it came our way!’

‘Thrilled,’ Naqi said, before returning to her work. Thirty specialised probes hung on telemetric cables from the underside of the gondola, dangling like the venom-tipped stingers of some grotesque aerial jellyfish. The probes sniffed the air metres above the Juggler biomass, or skimmed the fuzzy green surface of the formation. Weighted plumb lines penetrated to the sea beneath the raft, sipping the organism-infested depths dozens of metres under the node. Radar mapped larger structures embedded within the node—dense kernels of compacted biomass, or huge cavities and tubes of inscrutable function—while sonar graphed the topology of the many sinewy organic cables which plunged into darkness, umbilicals anchoring the node to the seabed. Smaller nodes drew most of their energy from sunlight and the breakdown of sugars and fats in the sea’s other floating micro-organisms but the larger formations, which had a vastly higher information-processing burden, needed to tap belching aquatic fissures, active rifts in the ocean bed kilometres under the waves. Cold water was pumped down each umbilical by peristaltic compression waves, heated by being circulated in the superheated thermal environment of the underwater volcanoes, and then pumped back to the surface. In all this sensing activity, remarkably little physical harm was done to the extended organism itself. The biomass sensed the approach of the probes and rearranged itself so that they passed through with little obstruction, even those scything lines that reached into the water. Energy was obviously being consumed to avoid the organism sustaining damage, and by implication the measurements must therefore have had some effect on the node’s information-processing efficiency. The effect was likely to be small, however, and since the node was already subject to constant changes in its architecture—some probably intentional, and some probably forced on it by other factors in its environment—there appeared to be little point in worrying about the harm caused by the human investigators. Ultimately, so much was still guesswork. Although the swimmer teams had learned a great deal about the Pattern Jugglers’ encoded information, almost everything else about them—how and why they stored the neural patterns, and to what extent the patterns were subject to subsequent postprocessing—remained unknown. And those were merely the immediate questions. Beyond that were the real mysteries, which everyone wanted to solve, but right now they were simply beyond the scope of possible academic study. What they would learn today could not be expected to shed any light on those profundities. A single data point—even a single clutch of measurements—could not usually prove or disprove anything, but it might later turn out to play a vital role in a chain of argument, even if it was only in the biasing of some statistical distribution closer to one hypothesis than another. Science, as Naqi had long since realised, was as much a swarming, social process as it was something driven by ecstatic moments of personal discovery. It was something she was proud to be part of. The spiral sweep continued uneventfully, the airship chugging around in a gently widening circle. Morning shifted to early afternoon, and then the sun began to climb down towards the horizon, bleeding pale orange into the sky through soft-edged cracks in the cloud cover. For hours Naqi and Mina studied the incoming results, the ever-sharper scans of the node appearing on screens throughout the gondola. They discussed the results cordially enough, but Naqi could not stop thinking about Mina’s betrayal. She took a spiteful pleasure in testing the extent to which her sister would lie, deliberately forcing the conversation around to Dr Sivaraksa and the project he steered. ‘I hope I don’t end up like one of those deadwood bureaucrats,’ Naqi said, when they were discussing the way their careers might evolve. ‘You know, like Sivaraksa.’ She observed Mina pointedly, yet giving nothing away. ‘I read some of his old papers; he used to be pretty good once. But now look at him.’

‘It’s easy to say that,’ Mina said, ‘but I bet he doesn’t like being away from the front line any more than we would. But someone has to manage these big projects. Wouldn’t you rather it was someone who’d at least been a scientist?’

‘You sound like you’re defending him. Next you’ll be telling me you think the Moat is a good idea.’

‘I’m not defending Sivaraksa,’ Mina said. ‘I’m just saying—’ She eyed her sister with a sudden glimmer of suspicion. Had she guessed that Naqi knew? ‘Never mind. Sivaraksa can fight his own battles. We’ve got work to do.’

‘Anyone would think you were changing the subject,’ Naqi said. But Mina was already on her way out of the gondola to check the equipment again. At dusk the airship arrived at the perimeter of the node, completed one orbit, then began to track inwards again. As it passed over the parts of the node previously mapped, time-dependent changes were highlighted on the displays: arcs and bands of red superimposed against the lime and turquoise false-colour of the mapped structures. Most of the alterations were minor: a chamber opening here or closing there, or a small alteration in the network topology to ease a bottleneck between the lumpy subnodes dotted around the floating island. Other changes were more mysterious in function, but conformed to other studies. They were studied at enhanced resolution, the data prioritised and logged. It looked as if the node was large, but in no way unusual. Then night came, as swiftly as it always did at those latitudes. Mina and Naqi took turns, one sleeping for two—or three-hour stretches while the other kept an eye on the readouts. During a lull Naqi climbed up onto the top of the airship and tried the antenna again, and for a moment was gladdened when she saw that a new message had arrived. But the message itself turned out to be a statement from the Snowflake Council stating that the blackout on civilian messages would continue for at least another two days, until the current ‘crisis’ was over. There were allusions to civil disturbances in two cities, with curfews being imposed, and imperatives to ignore all unofficial news sources concerning the nature of the approaching ship. Naqi wasn’t surprised that there was trouble, though the extent of it took her aback. Her instincts were to believe the government line. The problem, from the government’s point of view at least, was that nothing was yet known for certain about the nature of the ship, and so by being truthful they ended up sounding like they were keeping something back. They would have been far better off making up a plausible lie, which could be gently moulded towards accuracy as time passed. Mina rose after midnight to begin her shift. Naqi went to sleep and dreamed fitfully, seeing in her mind’s eye red smears and bars hovering against amorphous green. She had been staring at the readouts too intently, for too many hours. Mina woke her excitedly before dawn. ‘Now I’m the one with the news,’ she said. ‘What!’

‘Come and see for yourself.’ Naqi rose from her hammock, neither rested nor enthusiastic. In the dim light of the cabin Mina’s fungal patterns shone with peculiar intensity: abstract detached shapes that only implied her presence. Naqi followed the shapes onto the balcony. ‘What,’ she said again, not even bothering to make it sound like a question. ‘There’s been a development,’ Mina said. Naqi rubbed the sleep from her eyes. ‘With the node?’

‘Look. Down below. Right under us.’ Naqi pressed her stomach hard against the railing and leaned over as far as she dared. She had felt no real vertigo until they had lowered the sensor lines, and then suddenly there had been a physical connection between the airship and the ground. Was it her imagination, or had the airship lowered itself to about half its previous altitude, reeling in the lines at the same time? The midnight light was all spectral shades of milky grey. The creased and crumpled landscape of the node reached away into mid-grey gloom, merging with the slate of the overlying cloud deck. Naqi saw nothing remarkable, other than the surprising closeness of the surface. ‘I mean really look down,’ Mina said. Naqi pushed herself against the railing more than she had dared before, until she was standing on the very tips of her toes. Only then did she see it: directly below them was a peculiar circle of darkness, almost as if the airship was casting a distinct shadow beneath itself. It was a circular zone of exposed seawater, like a lagoon enclosed by the greater mass of the node. Steep banks of Juggler biomass, its heart a deep charcoal grey, rimmed the lagoon. Naqi studied it quietly. Her sister would judge her on any remark she made. ‘How did you see it?’ she asked eventually. ‘See it?’

‘It can’t be more than twenty metres wide. A dot like that would have hardly shown up on the topographic map.’

‘Naqi, you don’t understand. I didn’t steer us over the hole. It appeared below us, as we were moving. Listen to the motors. We’re still moving. The hole’s shadowing us. It follows us precisely.’

‘Must be reacting to the sensors,’ Naqi said. ‘I’ve hauled them in. We’re not trailing anything within thirty metres of the surface. The node’s reacting to us, Naqi—to the presence of the airship. The Jugglers know we’re here, and they’re sending us a signal.’

‘Maybe they are. But it isn’t our job to interpret that signal. We’re just here to make measurements, not to interact with the Jugglers.’

‘So whose job is it?’ Mina asked. ‘Do I have to spell it out? Specialists from Umingmaktok.’

‘They won’t get here in time. You know how long nodes last. By the time the blackout’s lifted, by the time the swimmer corps hotshots get here, we’ll be sitting over a green smudge and not much more. This is a significant find, Naqi. It’s the largest node this season and it’s making a deliberate and clear attempt to invite swimmers.’ Naqi stepped back from the railing. ‘Don’t even think about it.’

‘I’ve been thinking about it all night: This isn’t just a large node, Naqi. Something’s happening—that’s why there’s been so much sprite activity. If we don’t swim here, we might miss something unique.’

‘And if we do swim, we’ll be violating every rule in the book. We’re not trained, Mina. Even if we learned something—even if the Jugglers deigned to communicate with us—we’d be ostracised from the entire scientific community.’

‘That would depend on what we learned, wouldn’t it?’

‘Don’t do this, Mina. It isn’t worth it.’

‘We won’t know if it’s worth it or not until we try, will we?’ Mina extended a hand. ‘Look. You’re right in one sense. Chances are pretty good nothing will happen. Normally you have to offer them a gift—a puzzle, or something rich in information. We haven’t got anything like that. What’ll probably happen is we’ll hit the water and there won’t be any kind of biochemical interaction. In which case, it doesn’t matter. We don’t have to tell anyone. And if we do learn something, but it isn’t significant—well, we don’t have to tell anyone about that either. Only if we learn something major. Something so big that they’ll have to forget about a minor violation of protocol.’

‘A minor violation—?’ Naqi began, almost laughing at Mina’s audacity. ‘The point is, sis, we have a win-win situation here. And it’s been handed to us on a plate.’

‘You could also argue that we’ve been handed a major chance to fuck up spectacularly.’

‘You read it whichever way you like. I know what I see.’

‘It’s too dangerous, Mina. People have died ...’ Naqi looked at Mina’s fungal patterns, enhanced and emphasised by her tattoos. ‘You flagged high for conformality. Doesn’t that worry you slightly?’

‘Conformality’s just a fairy tale they use to scare children into behaving,’ said Mina. ‘ “Eat all your greens or the sea will swallow you up forever.” I take it about as seriously as I take the Thule kraken, or the drowning of Arviat.’

‘The Thule kraken is a joke, and Arviat never existed in the first place. But the last time I checked, conformality was an accepted phenomenon.’

‘It’s an accepted research topic. There’s a distinction.’

‘Don’t split hairs—’ Naqi began. Mina gave every indication of not having heard Naqi speak. Her voice was distant, as if she were speaking to herself. It had a lilting, singsong quality. ‘Too late to even think about it now. But it isn’t long until dawn. I think it’ll still be there at dawn.’ She pushed past Naqi. ‘Where are you going now?’

‘To catch some sleep. I need to be fresh for this. So do you.’ They hit the lagoon with two gentle, anticlimactic splashes. Naqi was underwater for a moment before she bobbed to the surface, holding her breath. At first she had to make a conscious effort to start breathing again: the air immediately above the water was so saturated with microscopic organisms that choking was a real possibility. Mina, surfacing next to her, drew in gulps with wild enthusiasm, as if willing the tiny creatures to invade her lungs. She shrieked delight at the sudden cold. When they had both gained equilibrium, treading with their shoulders above water, Naqi was finally able to take stock. She saw everything through a stinging haze of tears. The gondola hovered above them, poised beneath the larger mass of the vacuum bladder. The life-raft that it had deployed was sparkling-new, rated for one hundred hours against moderate biological attack. But that was for mid-ocean, where the density of Juggler organisms would be much less than in the middle of a major node. Here, the hull might only endure a few tens of hours before it was consumed. Once again, Naqi wondered if she should withdraw. There was still time. No real damage had yet been done. She could be back in the boat and back aboard the airship in a minute or so. Mina might not follow her, but she did not have to be complicit in her sister’s actions. But Naqi knew she would not be able to turn back. She could not show weakness now that she had come this far. ‘Nothing’s happening ...’ she said. ‘We’ve only been in the water a minute,’ Mina said. The two of them wore black wetsuits. The suits themselves could become buoyant if necessary—the right sequence of tactile commands and dozens of tiny bladders would inflate around the chest and shoulder area—but it was easy enough to tread water. In any case, if the Jugglers initiated contact, the suits would probably be eaten away in minutes. The swimmers who had made repeated contact often swam naked or near-naked, but neither Naqi nor Mina were yet prepared for that level of abject surrender to the ocean’s assault. After another minute the water no longer felt as cold. Through gaps in the cloud cover the sun was harsh on Naqi’s cheek. It etched furiously bright lines in the bottle-green surface of the lagoon, lines that coiled and shifted into fleeting calligraphic shapes as if conveying secret messages. The calm water lapped gently against their upper bodies. The walls of the lagoon were metre-high masses of fuzzy vegetation, like the steep banks of a river. Now and then Naqi felt something brush gently against her feet, like a passing frond or strand of seaweed. The first few times she flinched at the contact, but after a while it became strangely soothing. Occasionally something stroked one hand or the other, then moved playfully away. When she lifted her hands from the sea, mats of gossamer green draped from her fingers like the tattered remains of expensive gloves. The green material slithered free and slipped back into the sea. It tickled between her fingers. ‘Nothing’s happened yet,’ Naqi said, more quietly this time.

‘You’re wrong. The shoreline’s moved closer.’ Naqi looked at it. ‘It’s a trick of perspective.’

‘I assure you it isn’t.’ Naqi looked back at the raft. They had drifted five or six metres from it. It might as well have been a mile, for all the sense of security that the raft now offered. Mina was right: the lagoon was closing in on them, gently, slowly. If the lagoon had been twenty metres wide when they had entered, it must now be a third smaller. There was still time to escape before the hazy green walls squeezed in on them, but only if they moved now, back to the raft, back into the safety of the gondola. ‘Mina ... I want to go. We’re not ready for this.’

‘We don’t need to be ready. It’s going to happen.’

‘We’re not trained!’

‘Call it learning on the job, in that case.’ Mina was still trying to sound outrageously calm, but it wasn’t working. Naqi heard it in her voice: she was either terribly frightened or terribly excited. ‘You’re more scared than I am,’ she said. ‘I am scared,’ said Mina, ‘scared we’ll screw this up. Scared we’ll blow this opportunity. Understand? I’m that kind of scared.’ Either Naqi was treading water less calmly, or the water itself had become visibly more agitated in the last few moments. The green walls were perhaps ten metres apart, and were no longer quite the sheer vertical structures they had appeared before. They had taken on form and design, growing and complexifying by the second. It was akin to watching a distant city emerge from fog, the revealing of bewildering, plunging layers of mesmeric detail, more than the eye or the mind could process. ‘It doesn’t look as if they’re expecting a gift this time,’ Mina said. Veined tubes and pipes coiled and writhed around each other in constant, sinuous motion, making Naqi think of some hugely magnified circuitry formed from plant parts. It was restless, living circuitry that never quite settled into one configuration. Now and then chequerboard designs appeared, or intricately interlocking runes. Sharply geometric patterns flickered from point to point, echoed, amplified and subtly iterated at each move. Distinct three-dimensional shapes assumed brief solidity, carved from greenery as if by the deft hand of a topiarist. Naqi glimpsed unsettling anatomies: the warped memories of alien bodies that had once entered the ocean, a million, or a billion years ago. Here was a three-jointed limb, there the shieldlike curve of an exoskeletal plaque. The head of something that was almost equine melted into a goggling mass of faceted eyes. Fleetingly, a human form danced from the chaos. But only once. Alien swimmers vastly outnumbered human swimmers. Here were the Pattern Jugglers, Naqi knew. The first explorers had mistaken these remembered forms for indications of actual sentience, thinking that the oceanic mass was a kind of community of intelligences. It was an easy mistake to have made, but it was some way from the truth. These animate shapes were enticements, like the gaudy covers of books. The minds themselves were captured only as frozen traces. The only living intelligence within the ocean lay in its own curatorial system. To believe anything else was heresy. The dance of bodies became too rapid to follow. Pastel-coloured lights glowed from deep within the green structure, flickering and stuttering. Naqi thought of lanterns burning in the depths of a forest. Now the edge of the lagoon had become irregular, extending peninsulas towards the centre of the dwindling circle of water, while narrow bays and inlets fissured back into the larger mass of the node. The peninsulas sprouted grasping tendrils, thigh-thick at the trunk but narrowing to the dimensions of plant fronds, and then narrowing further, bifurcating into lacy, fernlike hazes of awesome complexity. They diffracted light like the wings of dragonflies. They were closing over the lagoon, forming a shimmering canopy. Now and then a sprite—or something smaller but equally bright—arced from one bank of the lagoon to another. Brighter things moved through the water like questing fish. Microscopic organisms were detaching from the larger fronds and tendrils, swarming in purposeful clouds. They batted against her skin, against her eyelids. Every breath that she took made her cough. The taste of the Pattern Jugglers was sour and medicinal. They were in her, invading her body. She panicked. It was as if a tiny switch had flipped in her mind. Suddenly all other concerns melted away. She had to get out of the lagoon immediately, no matter what Mina would think of her. Thrashing more than swimming, Naqi tried to push herself towards the raft, but as soon as the panic reaction had kicked in, she had felt something else slide over her. It was not so much paralysis as an immense sense of inertia. Moving, even breathing, became problematic. The boat was impossibly distant. She was no longer capable of treading water. She felt heavy, and when she looked down she saw that a green haze had enveloped the parts of her body that she could see above water. The organisms were adhering to the fabric of her wetsuit. ‘Mina—’ she called, ‘Mina!’ But Mina only looked at her. Naqi sensed that her sister was experiencing the same sort of paralysis. Mina’s movements had become languid; instead of panic, what Naqi saw on her face was profound resignation and acceptance. It was dangerously close to serenity. Mina wasn’t frightened at all. The patterns on her neck were flaring vividly. Her eyes were closed. Already the organisms had begun to attack the fabric of her suit, stripping it away from her flesh. Naqi could feel the same thing happening to her own suit. There was no pain, for the organisms stopped short of attacking her skin. With a mighty effort she hoisted her forearm from the water, studying the juxtaposition of pale flesh and dissolving black fabric. Her fingers were as stiff as iron. But—and Naqi clung to this fact—the ocean recognised the sanctity of organisms, or at least, thinking organisms. Strange things might happen to people who swam with the Jugglers, things that might be difficult to distinguish from death or near-death. But people always emerged afterwards, changed perhaps, but essentially whole. No matter what happened now, they would survive. The Jugglers always returned those who swam with them, and even when they did effect changes, they were seldom permanent. Except, of course, for those who didn’t return. No, Naqi told herself. What they were doing was foolish, and might perhaps destroy their careers, but they would survive. Mina had flagged high on the conformality index when she had applied to join the swimmer corps, but that didn’t mean she was necessarily at risk. Conformality merely implied a rare connection with the ocean. It verged on the glamorous. Now Mina was going under. She had stopped moving entirely. Her eyes were blankly ecstatic. Naqi wanted to resist that same impulse to submit, but all the strength had flowed away from her. She felt herself begin the same descent. The water closed over her mouth, then her eyes, and in a moment she was under. She felt herself a toppled statue sliding towards the seabed. Her fear reached a crescendo, and then passed it. She was not drowning. The froth of green organisms had forced itself down her throat, down her nasal passage. She felt no fright. There was nothing except a profound feeling that this was what she had been born to do. Naqi knew what was happening, what was going to happen. She had studied enough reports on swimmer missions. The tiny organisms were infiltrating her entire body, creeping into her lungs and bloodstream. They were keeping her alive, while at the same time flooding her with chemical bliss. Droves of the same tiny creatures were seeking routes to her brain, inching along the optic nerve, the aural nerve, or crossing the blood-brain barrier itself. They were laying tiny threads behind them, fibres that extended back into the larger mass of organisms suspended in the water around her. In turn, these organisms would establish data-carrying channels back into the primary mass of the node ... And the node itself was connected to other nodes, both chemically and via the packet—carrying sprites. The green threads bound Naqi to the entire ocean. It might take hours for a signal to reach her mind from halfway around Turquoise, but it didn’t matter. She was beginning to think in Juggler time, her own thought processes seeming pointlessly quick, like the motion of bees. She sensed herself becoming vaster. She was no longer just a pale, hard-edged thing labelled Naqi, suspended in the lagoon like a dying starfish. Her sense of self was rushing out towards the horizon in all directions, encompassing first the node and then the empty oceanic waters around it. She couldn’t say precisely how this information was reaching her. It wasn’t through visual imagery, but more an intensely detailed spatial awareness. It was as if spatial awareness had suddenly become her most vital sense. She supposed this was what swimmers meant when they spoke of kenning. She kenned the presence of other nodes over the horizon, their chemical signals flooding her mind, each unique, each bewilderingly rich in information. It was like hearing the roar of a hundred crowds. And at the same time she kenned the ocean depths, the cold fathoms of water beneath the node, the life-giving warmth of the crustal vents. Closer, too, she kenned Mina. They were two neighbouring galaxies in a sea of strangeness. Mina’s own thoughts were bleeding into the sea, into Naqi’s mind, and in them Naqi felt the reflected echo of her own thoughts, picked up by Mina ... It was glorious. For a moment their minds orbited each other, kenning each other on a level of intimacy neither had dreamed possible. Mina ... Can you feel me? I’m here, Naqi. Isn’t this wonderful? The fear was gone, utterly. In its place was a marvellous feeling of immanence. They had made the right decision, Naqi knew. She had been right to follow Mina. Mina was deliciously happy, basking in the same hopeful sense of security and promise. And then they began to sense other minds. Nothing had changed, but it was suddenly clear that the roaring signals from the other nodes were composed of countless individual voices, countless individual streams of chemical information. Each stream was the recording of a mind that had entered the ocean at some point. The oldest minds—those that had entered in the deep past—were the faintest, but they were also the most numerous. They had begun to sound alike, the shapes of their stored personalities blurring into each other, no matter how different—how alien—they had been to start with. The minds that had been captured more recently were sharper and more variegated, like oddly shaped pebbles on a beach. Naqi kenned brutal alienness, baroque architectures of mind shaped by outlandish chains of evolutionary contingency. The only thing any of them had in common was that they had all reached a certain threshold of tool-using intelligence, and had all—for whatever reason—been driven into interstellar space, where they had encountered the Pattern Jugglers. But that was like saying the minds of sharks and leopards were alike because they had both evolved to hunt. The differences between the minds were so cosmically vast that Naqi felt her own mental processes struggling to accommodate them. Even that was becoming easier. Subtly—slowly enough that from moment to moment she was not aware of it—the organisms in her skull were retuning her neural connections, allowing more and more of her own consciousness to seep out into the extended processing-loom of the sea. Now she sensed the most recent arrivals. They were all human minds, each a glittering gem of distinctness. Naqi kenned a great gulf in time between the earliest human mind and the last recognisably alien one. She had no idea if it was a million years or a billion, but it felt immense. At the same time she grasped that the ocean had been desperate for an injection of variety, but while these human minds were welcome, they were not exotic enough, just barely sufficient to break the tedium. The minds were snapshots, frozen in the conception of a single thought. It was like an orchestra of instruments, all sustaining a single, unique note. Perhaps there was a grindingly slow evolution in those minds—she felt the merest subliminal hint of change—but if that were the case, it would take centuries to complete a thought ... thousands of years to complete the simplest internalised statement. The newest minds might not even have recognised that they had been swallowed by the sea. And now Naqi could perceive a single mind flaring louder than the others. It was recent, and human, and there was something about it that struck her as discordant. The mind was damaged, as if it had been captured imperfectly. It was disfigured, giving off squalls of hurt. It had suffered dreadfully. It was reaching out to her, craving love and affection; it searched for something to cling to in the abyssal loneliness it now knew. Images ghosted through her mind. Something was burning. Flames licked through the interstitial gaps in a great black structure. She couldn’t tell if it was a building or a vast, pyramidal bonfire. She heard screams, and then something hysterical, which she at first took for more screaming, until she realised that it was something far, far worse. It was laughter, and as the flames roared higher, consuming the mass, smothering the screams, the laughter only intensified. She thought it might be the laughter of a child. Perhaps it was her imagination, but this mind appeared more fluid than the others. Its thoughts were still slow—far slower than Naqi’s—but the mind appeared to have usurped more than its share of processing resources. It was stealing computational cycles from neighbouring minds, freezing them into absolute stasis while it completed a single sluggish thought. The mind worried Naqi. Pain and fury was boiling off it. Mina kenned it too. Naqi tasted Mina’s thoughts and knew that her sister was equally disturbed by the mind’s presence. Then she felt the mind’s attention shift, drawn to the two inquisitive minds that had just entered the sea. It became aware of both of them, quietly watchful. A moment or two passed, and then the mind slipped away, back to wherever it had come from. What was that ...? She felt her sister’s reply. I don’t know. A human mind. A conformal, I think. Someone who was swallowed by the sea. But it’s gone now. No, it hasn’t. It’s still there. Just hiding. Millions of minds have entered the sea, Naqi. Thousands of conformals, perhaps, if you think of all the aliens that came before us. There are bound to be one or two bad apples. That wasn’t just a bad apple. It was like touching ice. And it sensed us. It reacted to us. Didn’t it? She sensed Mina’s hesitation. We can’t be sure. Our own perceptions of events aren’t necessarily reliable. I can’t even be certain we’re having this conversation. I might be talking to myself ... Mina ... Don’t talk like that. I don’t feel safe. Me neither. But I’m not going to let one frightening thing unnecessarily affect me. Something happened then. It was a loosening, a feeling that the ocean’s grip on Naqi had just relented to a significant degree. Mina, and the roaring background of other minds, fell away to something much more distant. It was as if Naqi had just stepped out of a babbling party into a quiet adjacent room, and was even now moving further and further away from the door. Her body tingled. She no longer felt the same deadening paralysis. Pearl-grey light flickered above. Without being sure whether she was doing it herself, she rose towards the surface. She was aware that she was moving away from Mina, but for now all that mattered was to escape the sea. She wanted to be as far from that discordant mind as possible. Her head rammed through a crust of green into air. At the same moment the Juggler organisms fled her body in a convulsive rush. She thrashed stiff limbs and took in deep, panicked breaths. The transition was horrible, but it was over in a few seconds. She looked around, expecting to see the sheer walls of the lagoon, but all she saw in one direction was open water. Naqi felt panic rising again. Then she kicked herself around and saw a wavy line of bottle-green that had to be the perimeter of the node, perhaps half a kilometre away from her present position. The airship was a distant silvery teardrop that appeared to be perched on the surface of the node itself. In her fear she did not immediately think of Mina. All she wanted to do was reach the safety of the airship, to be aloft. Then she saw the raft, bobbing only one or two hundred metres away. Somehow it had been transplanted to the open waters as well. It looked distant but reachable. She started swimming, fear giving her strength and sense of purpose. In truth, she was well within the true boundary of the node: the water was still thick with suspended micro-organisms, so that it was more like swimming through cold green soup. It made each stroke harder, but she did not have to expend much effort to stay afloat. Did she trust the Pattern Jugglers not to harm her? Perhaps. After all, she had not encountered their minds at all—if they even had minds. They were merely the archiving system. Blaming them for that one poisoned mind was like blaming a library for one hateful book. But still, it had unnerved her profoundly. She wondered why none of the other swimmers had ever communicated their encounters with such a mind. After all, she remembered it well enough now, and she was nearly out of the ocean. She might forget shortly—there were bound to be subsequent neurological effects—but under other circumstances there would have been nothing to prevent her relating her experiences to a witness or inviolable recording system. She kept swimming, and began to wonder why Mina hadn’t emerged from the waters as well. Mina had been just as terrified. But Mina had also been more curious, and more willing to ignore her fears. Naqi had grasped the opportunity to leave the ocean once the Jugglers released their grip on her. But what if Mina had elected to remain? What if Mina was still down there, still in communion with the Jugglers? Naqi reached the raft and hauled herself aboard, being careful not to capsize it. She saw that the raft was still largely intact. It had been moved, but not damaged, and although the ceramic sheathing was showing signs of attack, peppered here and there with scabbed green accretions, it was certainly good for another few hours. The rot-hardened control systems were alive, and still in telemetric connection with the distant airship. Naqi had crawled from the sea naked. Now she felt cold and vulnerable. She pulled an aluminised quilt from the raft’s supply box and wrapped it around herself. It did not stop her from shivering, did not make her feel any less nauseous, but at least it afforded some measure of symbolic barrier against the sea. She looked around again, but there was still no sign of Mina. Naqi folded aside the weatherproof control cover and tapped commands into the matrix of waterproofed keys. She waited for the response from the airship. The moment stretched. But there it was: a minute shift in the dull gleam on the silver back of the vacuum bladder. The airship was turning, pivoting like a great slow weather vane. It was moving, responding to the raft’s homing command. But where was Mina? Now something moved in the water next to her, coiling in weak, enervated spasms. Naqi looked at it with horrified recognition. She reached over, still shivering, and with appalled gentleness fished the writhing thing from the sea. It lay in her fingers like a baby sea serpent. It was white and segmented, half a metre long. She knew exactly what it was. It was Mina’s worm. It meant Mina had died.

Two

Two years later Naqi watched a spark fall from the heavens. Along with many hundreds of spectators, she was standing on the railed edge of one of Umingmaktok’s elegant cantilevered arms. It was afternoon. Every visible surface of the city had been scoured of rot and given a fresh coat of crimson or emerald paint. Amber bunting had been hung along the metal stay-lines that supported the tapering arms protruding from the city’s towering commercial core. Most of the berthing slots around the perimeter were occupied by passenger or cargo craft, while many smaller vessels were holding station in the immediate airspace around Umingmaktok. The effect, which Naqi had seen on her approach to the city a day earlier, had been to turn the snowflake into a glittering, delicately ornamented vision. By night they had fireworks displays. By day, as now, conjurors and confidence tricksters wound their way through the crowds. Nose-flute musicians and drum dancers performed impromptu atop improvised podia. Kick-boxers were being cheered on as they moved from one informal ring to another, pursued by whistleblowing proctors. Hastily erected booths were marked with red and yellow pennants, selling refreshments, souvenirs or tattoo-work, while pretty costumed girls who wore backpacks equipped with tall flagstaffs sold drinks or ices. The children had balloons and rattles marked with the emblems of both Umingmaktok and the Snowflake Council, and many of them had had their faces painted to resemble stylised space travellers. Puppet theatres had been set up here and there, running through exactly the same small repertoire of stories that Naqi remembered from her childhood. The children were enthralled nonetheless; mouths agape at each miniature epic, whether it was a roughly accurate account of the world’s settlement—with the colony ship being stripped to the bone for every gram of metal it held—or something altogether more fantastic, like the drowning of Arviat. It didn’t matter to the children that one was based in fact and the other was pure mythology. To them the idea that every city they called home had been cannibalised from the belly of a four-kilometre-long ship was no more or less plausible than the idea that the living sea might occasionally snatch cities beneath the waves when they displeased it. At that age everything was both magical and mundane, and she supposed that the children were no more nor less excited by the prospect of the coming visitors than they were by the promised fireworks display, or the possibility of further treats if they were well-behaved. Other than the children, there were animals: caged monkeys and birds, and the occasional expensive pet being shown off for the day. One or two servitors stalked through the crowd, and occasionally a golden float-cam would bob through the air, loitering over a scene of interest like a single detached eyeball. Turquoise had not seen this level of celebration since the last acrimonious divorce, and the networks were milking it remorselessly, overanalysing even the tiniest scrap of information. This was, in truth, exactly the kind of thing Naqi would normally have gone to the other side of the planet to avoid. But something had drawn her this time, and made her wangle the trip out from the Moat at an otherwise critical time in the project. She could only suppose that it was a need to close a particular chapter in her life, one that had begun the night before Mina’s death. The detection of the Ultra ship—they now knew that it was named Voice of Evening—had been the event that triggered the blackout, and the blackout had been Mina’s justification for the two of them attempting to swim with the Jugglers. Indirectly, therefore, the Ultras were ‘responsible’ for whatever had happened to Mina. That was unfair, of course, but Naqi nonetheless felt the need to be here now, if only to witness the visitors’ emergence with her own eyes and see if they really were the monsters of her imagination. She had come to Umingmaktok with a stoic determination that she would not be swept up by the hysteria of the celebrations. Yet now that she had made the trip, now that she was amidst the crowd, drunk on the chemical buzz of human excitement, with a nice fresh worm hooked onto her gut wall, she found herself in the perverse position of actually enjoying the atmosphere. And now everyone had noticed the falling spark.

The crowd turned their heads into the sky, ignoring the musicians, conjurors and confidence tricksters. The backpacked girls stopped and looked aloft along with the others, shielding their eyes against the midday glare. The spark was the shuttle of Voice of Evening, now parked in orbit around Turquoise. Everyone had seen Captain Moreau’s ship by now, either with their own eyes as a moving star, or via the images captured by the orbiting cameras or ground-based telescopes. The ship was dark and sleek, outrageously elegant. Now and then its Conjoiner drives flickered on just enough to trim its orbit, those flashes like brief teasing windows into daylight for the hemisphere below. A ship like that could do awful things to a world, and everyone knew it. But if Captain Moreau and his crew meant ill for Turquoise, they’d had ample opportunity to do harm already. They had been silent at two years out, but at one year out the Voice of Evening had transmitted the usual approach signals, requesting permission to stopover for three or four months. It was a formality—no one argued with Ultras—but it was also a gladdening sign that they intended to play by the usual rules. Over the next year there had been a steady stream of communications between the ship and the Snowflake Council. The official word was that the messages had been designed to establish a framework for negotiation and person-to-person trade. The Ultras would need to update their linguistics software to avoid being confused by the subtleties of the Turquoise dialects, which, although based on Canasian, contained confusing elements of Inuit and Thai, relics of the peculiar social mix of the original settlement coalition. The falling shuttle had slowed to merely supersonic speed now, shedding its plume of ionised air. Dropping speed with each loop, it executed a lazily contracting spiral above Umingmaktok. Naqi had rented cheap binoculars from one of the vendors. The lenses were scuffed, shimmering with the pink of fungal bloom. She visually locked onto the shuttle, its roughly delta shape wobbling in and out of sharpness. Only when it was two or three thousand metres above Umingmaktok could she see it clearly. It was very elegant, a pure brilliant white like something carved from cloud. Beneath the manta-like hull complex machines—fans and control surfaces—moved too rapidly to be seen as anything other than blurs of subliminal motion. She watched as the ship reduced speed until it hovered at the same altitude as the snowflake city. Above the roar of the crowd—an ecstatic, flagwaving mass—all Naqi heard was a shrill hum, almost too far into ultrasound to detect. The ship approached slowly. It had been given instructions for docking with the arm adjacent to the one where Naqi and the other spectators gathered. Now that it was close it was apparent that the shuttle was larger than any of the dirigible craft normally moored to the city’s arms; by Naqi’s estimate it was at least half as wide as the city’s central core. But it slid into its designated mooring point with exquisite delicacy. Bright red symbols flashed onto the otherwise blank white hull, signifying airlocks, cargo ports and umbilical sockets. Gangways were swung out from the arm to align with the doors and ports. Dockers, supervised by proctors and city officials, scrambled along the precarious connecting ways and attempted to fix magnetic berthing stays onto the shuttle’s hull. The magnetics slid off the hull. They tried adhesive grips next, and these were no more successful. After that, the dockers shrugged their shoulders and made exasperated gestures in the direction of the shuttle. The roar of the crowd had died down a little by now. Naqi felt the anticipation as well. She watched as an entourage of VIPs moved to the berthing position, led by a smooth, faintly cherubic individual that Naqi recognised as Tak Thonburi, the mayor of Umingmaktok and presiding chair of the Snowflake Council. Tak Thonburi was happily overweight and had a permanent cowlick of black hair, like an inverted question mark tattooed upon his forehead. His cheeks and brow were mottled with pale green. Next to him was the altogether leaner frame of Jotah Sivaraksa. It was no surprise that Dr Sivaraksa should be here today, for the Moat project was one of the most significant activities of the entire Snowflake Council. His irongrey eyes flashed this way and that as if constantly triangulating the positions of enemies and allies alike. The group was accompanied by armed, ceremonially dressed proctors and a triad of martial servitors. Their articulation points and sensor apertures were lathered in protective sterile grease, to guard against rot. Though they tried to hide it, Naqi could tell that the VIPs were nervous. They moved a touch too confidently, making their trepidation all the more evident. The red door symbol at the end of the gangway pulsed brighter and a section of the hull puckered open. Naqi squinted, but even through the binoculars it was difficult to make out anything other than red-lit gloom. Tak Thonburi and his officials stiffened. A sketchy figure emerged from the shuttle, lingered on the threshold and then stepped with immense slowness into full sunlight. The crowd’s reaction—and to some extent Naqi’s own—was double-edged. There was a moment of relief that the messages from orbit had not been outright lies. Then there was an equally brief tang of shock at the actual appearance of Captain Moreau. The man was at least a third taller than anyone Naqi had ever seen in her life, yet commensurately thinner, his seemingly brittle frame contained within a jade-coloured mechanical exoskeleton of ornate design. The skeleton lent his movements something of the lethargic quality of a stick insect. Tak Thonburi was the first to speak. His amplified voice boomed out across the six arms of Umingmaktok, echoing off the curved surfaces of the multiple vacuum-bladders that held the city aloft. Float-cams jostled for the best camera angle, swarming around him like pollen-crazed bees. ‘Captain Moreau ... Let me introduce myself. I am Tak Thonburi, mayor of Umingmaktok Snowflake City and incumbent chairman of the Snowflake Council of All Turquoise. It is my pleasure to welcome you, your crew and passengers to Umingmaktok, and to Turquoise itself. You have my word that we will do all in our power to make your visit as pleasant as possible.’ The Ultra moved closer to the official. The door to the shuttle remained open behind him. Naqi’s binocs picked out red hologram serpents on the jade limbs of the skeleton. The Ultra’s own voice boomed at least as loud, but emanated from the shuttle rather than Umingmaktok’s public address system. ‘People of greenish-blue ...’ The captain hesitated, then tapped one of the stalks projecting from his helmet. ‘People of Turquoise ... Chairman Thonburi ... Thank you for your welcome, and for your kind permission to assume orbit. We have accepted it with gratitude. You have my word ... as captain of the lighthugger Voice of Evening ... that we will abide by the strict terms of your generous offer of hospitality.’ His mouth continued to move even during the pauses, Naqi noticed: the translation system was lagging. ‘You have my additional guarantee that no harm will be done to your world, and Turquoise law will be presumed to apply to the occupants ... of all bodies and vessels in your atmosphere. All traffic between my ship and your world will be subject to the authorisation of the Snowflake Council, and any member of the council will—under the ... auspices of the council—be permitted to visit Voice of Evening at any time, subject to the availability of a ... suitable conveyance.’ The captain paused and looked at Tak Thonburi expectantly. The mayor wiped a nervous hand across his brow, smoothing his kiss-curl into obedience. ‘Thank you ... Captain.’ Tak Thonburi’s eyes flashed to the other members of the reception party. ‘Your terms are of course more than acceptable. You have my word that we will do all in our power to assist you and your crew, and that we will do our utmost to ensure that the forthcoming negotiations of trade proceed in an equable manner ... and in such a way that both parties will be satisfied upon their conclusion.’ The captain did not respond immediately, allowing an uncomfortable pause to draw itself out. Naqi wondered if it was really the fault of the software, or whether Moreau was just playing on Tak Thonburi’s evident nervousness. ‘Of course,’ the Ultra said, finally. ‘Of course. My sentiments entirely ... Chairman Thonburi. Perhaps now wouldn’t be a bad time to introduce my guests?’ On his cue three new figures emerged from Voice of Evening’s shuttle. Unlike the Ultra, they could almost have passed for ordinary citizens of Turquoise. There were two men and one woman, all of approximately normal height and build, each with long hair, tied back in elaborate clasps.

Their clothes were brightly coloured, fashioned from many separate fabrics of yellow, orange, red and russet, and various permutations of the same warm sunset shades. The clothes billowed around them, rippling in the light afternoon breeze. All three members of the party wore silver jewellery, far more than was customary on Turquoise. They wore it on their fingers, in their hair, hanging from their ears. The woman was the first to speak, her voice booming out from the shuttle’s PA system. ‘Thank you, Captain Moreau. Thank you also, Chairman Thonburi. We are delighted to be here. I am Amesha Crane, and I speak for the Vahishta Foundation. Vahishta’s a modest scientific organisation with its origins in the cometary prefectures of the Haven Demarchy. Lately we have been expanding our realm of interest to encompass other solar systems, such as this one.’ Crane gestured at the two men who had accompanied her from the shuttle. ‘My associates are Simon Matsubara and Rafael Weir. There are another seventeen of us aboard the shuttle. Captain Moreau carried us here as paying passengers aboard Voice of Evening, and as such Vahishta gladly accepts all the terms already agreed upon.’ Tak Thonburi looked even less sure of himself. ‘Of course. We welcome your ... interest. A scientific organisation, did you say?’

‘One with a special interest in the study of the Jugglers,’ Amesha Crane answered. She was the most strikingly attractive member of the trio, with fine cheekbones and a wide, sensual mouth that looked to be always on the point of smiling or laughing. Naqi felt that the woman was sharing something with her, something private and amusing. Doubtless everyone in the crowd felt the same vague sense of complicity. Crane continued, ‘We have no Pattern Jugglers in our own system, but that hasn’t stopped us from focusing our research on them, collating the data available from the worlds where Juggler studies are ongoing. We’ve been doing this for decades, sifting inference and theory, guesswork and intuition. Haven’t we, Simon?’ The man nodded. He had sallow skin and a fixed, quizzical expression. ‘No two Juggler worlds are precisely alike,’ Simon Matsubara said, his voice as clear and confident as the woman’s. ‘And no two Juggler worlds have been studied by precisely the same mix of human socio-political factions. That means that we have a great many variables to take into consideration. Despite that, we believe we have identified similarities that may have been overlooked by the individual research teams. They may even be very important similarities, with repercussions for wider humanity. But in the absence of our own Jugglers, it is difficult to test our theories. That’s where Turquoise comes in.’ The other man—Naqi recalled his name was Rafael Weir—began to speak. ‘Turquoise has been largely isolated from the rest of human space for the better part of two centuries.’

‘We’re aware of this,’ said Jotah Sivaraksa. It was the first time any member of the entourage other than Tak Thonburi had spoken. To Naqi he sounded irritated, though he was doing his best to hide it. ‘You don’t share your findings with the other Juggler worlds,’ said Amesha Crane. ‘Nor—to the best of our knowledge—do you intercept their cultural transmissions. The consequence is that your research on the Jugglers has been untainted by any outside considerations—the latest fashionable theory, the latest groundbreaking technique. You prefer to work in scholarly isolation.’

‘We’re an isolationist world in other respects,’ Tak Thonburi said. ‘Believe it or not, it actually rather suits us.’

‘Quite,’ Crane said, with a hint of sharpness. ‘But the point remains. Your Jugglers are an uncontaminated resource. When a swimmer enters the ocean, their own memories and personality may be absorbed into the Juggler sea. The prejudices and preconceptions that swimmer carries inevitably enter the ocean in some shape or form—diluted, confused, but nonetheless present in some form. And when the next swimmer enters the sea, and opens their mind to communion, what they perceive—what they ken, in your own terminology—is irrevocably tainted by the preconceptions introduced by the previous swimmer. They may experience something that confirms their deepest suspicion about the nature of the Jugglers—but they can’t be sure that they aren’t simply picking up the mental echoes of the last swimmer, or the swimmer before that.’ Jotah Sivaraksa nodded. ‘What you say is undoubtedly true. But we’ve had just as many cycles of fashionable theory as anyone else. Even within Umingmaktok there are a dozen different research teams, each with their own views.’

‘We accept that,’ Crane said, with an audible sigh. ‘But the degree of contamination is slight compared to other worlds. Vahishta lacks the resources for a trip to a previously unvisited Juggler world, so the next best thing is to visit one that has suffered the smallest degree of human cultural pollution. Turquoise fits the bill.’ Tak Thonburi held the moment before responding, playing to the crowd again. Naqi rather admired the way he did it. ‘Good. I’m very ... pleased ... to hear it. And might I ask just what it is about our ocean that we can offer you?’

‘Nothing except the ocean itself,’ said Amesha Crane. ‘We simply wish to join you in its study. If you will allow it, members of the Vahishta Foundation will collaborate with native Turquoise scientists and study teams. They will shadow them and offer interpretation or advice when requested. Nothing more than that.’

‘That’s all?’ Crane smiled. ‘That’s all. It’s not as if we’re asking the world, is it?’ * Naqi remained in Umingmaktok for three days after the arrival, visiting friends and taking care of business for the Moat. The newcomers had departed, taking their shuttle to one of the other snowflake cities—Prachuap or the recently married Qaanaaq-Pangnirtung, perhaps—where a smaller but no less worthy group of city dignitaries would welcome Captain Moreau and his passengers. In Umingmaktok the booths and bunting were packed away and normal business resumed. Litter abounded. Worm dealers did brisk business, as they always did during times of mild gloom. There were far fewer transport craft moored to the arms, and no sign at all of the intense media presence of a few days before. Tourists had gone back to their home cities and the children were safely back in school. Between meetings Naqi sat in the midday shade of half-empty restaurants and bars, observing the same puzzled disappointment in every face she encountered. Deep down she felt it herself. For two years they had been free to imprint every possible fantasy on the approaching ship. Even if the newcomers had arrived with less than benign intent, there would still have been something interesting to talk about: the possibility, however remote, that one’s own life might be about to become drastically more exciting. But now none of that was going to happen. Undoubtedly Naqi would be involved with the visitors at some point, allowing them to visit the Moat or one of the outlying research zones she managed, but there would be nothing life-changing. She thought back to that night with Mina, when they had heard the news. Everything had changed then. Mina had died, and Naqi had found herself taking her sister’s role in the Moat. She had risen to the challenge and promotions had followed with gratifying swiftness, until she was in effective charge of the Moat’s entire scientific programme. But that sense of closure she had yearned for was still absent. The men she had slept with—men who were almost always swimmers—had never provided it, and by turns they had each lost patience with her, realising that they were less important to her as people than what they represented, as connections to the sea. It had been months since her last romance, and once Naqi had recognised the way her own subconscious was drawing her back to the sea, she had drawn away from contact with swimmers. She had been drifting since then, daring to hope that the newcomers would allow her some measure of tranquillity. But the newcomers had not supplied it. She supposed she would have to find it elsewhere. On the fourth day Naqi returned to the Moat on a high-speed dirigible. She arrived near sunset, dropping down from high altitude to see the structure winking back at her, a foreshortened ellipse of grey-white ceramic lying against the sea like some vast discarded bracelet. From horizon to horizon there were several Juggler nodes visible, webbed together by the faintest of filaments—to Naqi they looked like motes of ink spreading into blotting paper—but there were also smaller dabs of green within the Moat itself. The structure was twenty kilometres wide and now it was nearly finished. Only a narrow channel remained where the two ends of the bracelet did not quite meet: a hundred-metre-wide sheer-sided aperture flanked on either side by tall, ramshackle towers of accommodation modules, equipment sheds and construction cranes. To the north, strings of heavy cargo dirigibles ferried processed ore and ceramic cladding from Narathiwat atoll, lowering it down to the construction teams on the Moat. They had been working here for nearly twenty years. The hundred metres of the Moat that projected above the water was only one tenth of the full structure—a kilometre-high ring resting on the seabed. In a matter of months the gap—little more than a notch in the top of the Moat—would be sealed, closed off by immense hermetically tight sea-doors. The process would be necessarily slow and delicate, for what was being attempted here was not simply the closing-off of part of the sea. The Moat was an attempt to isolate a part of the living ocean, sealing off a community of Pattern Juggler organisms within its impervious ceramic walls. The high-speed dirigible swung low over the aperture. The thick green waters streaming through the cut had the phlegmatic consistency of congealing blood. Thick, ropy tendrils permitted information transfer between the external sea and the cluster of small nodes within the Moat. Swimmers were constantly present, either inside or outside the Moat, kenning the state of the sea and establishing that the usual Juggler processes continued unabated. The dirigible docked with one of the two flanking towers. Naqi stepped out, back into the hectic corridors and office spaces of the project building. It felt distinctly odd to be back on absolutely firm ground. Although one was seldom aware of it, Umingmaktok was never quite still: no snowflake city or airship ever was. But she would get used to it; in a few hours she would be immersed in her work, having to think of a dozen different things at once, finessing solution pathways, balancing budgets against quality, dealing with personality clashes and minor turf wars, and perhaps—if she was very lucky—managing an hour or two of pure research. Aside from the science, none of it was particularly challenging, but it kept her mind off other things. And after a few days of that, the arrival of the visitors would begin to feel like a bizarre, irrelevant interlude in an otherwise monotonous dream. She supposed that two years ago she would have been grateful for that. Life could indeed continue much as she had always imagined it would. But when she arrived at her office there was a message from Dr Sivaraksa. He needed to speak to her urgently. * Dr Jotah Sivaraksa’s office on the Moat was a good deal less spacious than his quarters in Umingmaktok, but the view was superb. His accommodation was perched halfway up one of the towers that flanked the cut through the Moat, buttressed out from the main mass of prefabricated modules like a partially opened desk drawer. Dr Sivaraksa was writing notes when she arrived. For a few moments Naqi lingered at the sloping window, watching the construction activity hundreds of metres below. Railed machines and helmeted workers toiled on the flat upper surface of the Moat, moving raw materials and equipment to the assembly sites. Above, the sky was a perfect cobaltblue, marred now and then by the passing green-stained hull of a cargo dirigible. The sea beyond the Moat had the dimpled texture of expensive leather. Dr Sivaraksa cleared his throat and, when Naqi turned, he gestured at the vacant seat on the opposite side of his desk. ‘Life treating you well?’

‘Can’t complain, sir.’

‘And work?’

‘No particular problems that I’m aware of.’

‘Good. Good.’ Sivaraksa made a quick, cursive annotation in the notebook he had opened on his desk, then slid it beneath the smoky-grey cube of a paperweight. ‘How long has it been now?’

‘Since what, sir?’

‘Since your sister ... Since Mina ...’ He seemed unable to complete the sentence, substituting a spiralling gesture made with his index finger. His finely boned hands were marbled with veins of olive green. Naqi eased into her seat. ’Two years, sir.’

‘And you’re ... over it?’

‘I wouldn’t exactly say I’m over it, no. But life goes on, like they say. Actually I was hoping ...’ Naqi had been about to tell him how she had imagined the arrival of the visitors would close that chapter. But she doubted she would be able to convey her feelings in a way Dr Sivaraksa would understand. ‘Well, I was hoping I’d have put it all behind me by now.’

‘I knew another conformal, you know. Fellow from Gjoa. Made it into the elite swimmer corps before anyone had the foggiest idea ...’

‘It’s never been proven that Mina was conformal, sir.’

‘No, but the signs were there, weren’t they? To one degree or another we’re all subject to symbiotic invasion by the ocean’s micro-organisms. But conformals show an unusual degree of susceptibility. On one hand it’s as if their own bodies actively invite the invasion, shutting down the usual inflammatory or foreign cell rejection mechanisms. On the other, the ocean seems to tailor its messengers for maximum effectiveness, as if the Jugglers have selected a specific target they wish to absorb. Mina had very strong fungal patterns, did she not?’

‘I’ve seen worse,’ Naqi said, which was not entirely a lie. ‘But not, I suspect, in anyone who ever attempted to commune. I understand you had ambitions to join the swimmer corps yourself?’

‘Before all that happened.’

‘I understand. And now?’ Naqi had never told anyone that she had joined Mina in the swimming incident. The truth was that even if she had not been present at the time of Mina’s death, her encounter with the rogue mind would have put her off entering the ocean for life. ‘It isn’t for me. That’s all.’ Jotah Sivaraksa nodded gravely. ‘A wise choice. Aptitude or not, you’d have almost certainly been filtered out of the swimmer corps. A direct genetic connection to a conformal—even an unproven conformal—would be too much of a risk.’

‘That’s what I assumed, sir.’

‘Does it trouble you, Naqi?’ She was wearying of this. She had work to do: deadlines to meet that Sivaraksa himself had imposed. ‘Does what trouble me?’

He nodded at the sea. Now that the play of light had shifted minutely, it looked less like dimpled leather than a sheet of beaten bronze. ‘The thought that Mina might still be out there ... in some sense.’

‘It might trouble me if I were a swimmer, sir. Other than that ... No. I can’t say that it does. My sister died. That’s all that mattered.’

‘Swimmers have occasionally reported encountering minds—essences—of the lost, Naqi. The impressions are often acute. The conformed leave their mark on the ocean at a deeper, more permanent level than the impressions left behind by mere swimmers. One senses that there must be a purpose to this.’

‘That wouldn’t be for me to speculate, sir.’

‘No.’ He glanced down at the compad and then tapped his forefinger against his upper lip. ‘No. Of course not. Well, to the matter at hand—’ She interrupted him. ‘You swam once, sir?’

‘Yes. Yes, I did.’ The moment stretched. She was about to say something—anything—when Sivaraksa continued, ‘I had to stop for medical reasons. Otherwise I suppose I’d have been in the swimmer corps for a good deal longer, at least until my hands started turning green.’

‘What was it like?’

‘Astonishing. Beyond anything I’d expected.’

‘Did they change you?’ At that he smiled. ‘I never thought that they did, until now. After my last swim I went through all the usual neurological and psychological tests. They found no anomalies; no indications that the Jugglers had imprinted any hints of alien personality or rewired my mind to think in an alien way.’ Sivaraksa reached across the desk and held up the smoky cube that Naqi had taken for a paperweight. ‘This came down from Voice of Evening. Examine it.’ Naqi peered into the milky-grey depths of the cube. Now that she saw it closely she realised that there were things embedded within the translucent matrix. There were chains of unfamiliar symbols, intersecting at right angles. They resembled the complex white scaffolding of a building. ‘What is it?’

‘Mathematics. Actually, a mathematical argument—a proof, if you like. Conventional mathematical notation—no matter how arcane—has evolved so that it can be written down on a two-dimensional surface, like paper or a readout. This is a three-dimensional syntax, liberated from that constraint. Its enormously richer, enormously more elegant.’ The cube tumbled in Sivaraksa’s hand. He was smiling. ‘No one could make head or tail of it. Yet when I looked at it for the first time I nearly dropped it in shock. It made perfect sense to me. Not only did I understand the theorem, but I also understood the point of it. It’s a joke, Naqi. A pun. This mathematics is rich enough to embody humour. And understanding that is the gift they left me. It was sitting in my mind for twenty-eight years, like an egg waiting to hatch.’ Abruptly, Sivaraksa placed the cube back on the table. ‘Something’s come up,’ he said. From somewhere came the distant, prolonged thunder of a dirigible discharging its cargo of processed ore. It must have been one of the last consignments. ‘Something, sir?’

‘They’ve asked to see the Moat.’

‘They?’

‘Crane and her Vahishta mob. They’ve requested an oversight of all major scientific centres on Turquoise, and naturally enough we’re on the list. They’ll be visiting us, spending a couple of days seeing what we’ve achieved.’

‘I’m not too surprised that they’ve asked to visit, sir.’

‘No, but I was hoping we’d have a few months’ grace. We don’t. They’ll be here in a week.’

‘That’s not necessarily a problem for us, is it?’

‘It mustn’t become one,’ Sivaraksa said. ‘I’m putting you in charge of the visit, Naqi. You’ll be the interface between Crane’s group and the Moat. That’s quite a responsibility, you understand. A mistake—the tiniest gaffe—could undermine our standing with the Snowflake Council.’ He nodded at the compad. ‘Our budgetary position is precarious. Frankly, I’m in Tak Thonburi’s lap. We can’t afford any embarrassments.’

‘No sir.’ She certainly did understand. The job was a poisoned chalice, or at the very least, a chalice with the strong potential to become poisoned. If she succeeded—if the visit went smoothly, with no hitches—Sivaraksa could still take much of the credit for it. If it went wrong, on the other hand, the fault would be categorically hers. ‘One more thing.’ Sivaraksa reached under his desk and produced a brochure that he slid across to her. The brochure was marked with a prominent silver snowflake motif. It was sealed with red foil. ‘Open it; you have clearance.’

‘What is it, sir?’

‘A security report on our new friends. One of them has been behaving a bit oddly. You’ll need to keep an eye on him.’ For inscrutable reasons of their own, the liaison committee had decided she would be introduced to Amesha Crane and her associates a day before the official visit, when the party was still in Sukhothai-Sanikiluaq. The journey there took the better part of two days, even allowing for the legs she took by high-speed dirigible or the ageing, unreliable trans-atoll railway line between Narathiwat and Cape Dorset. She arrived at Sukhothai-Sanikiluaq in a velvety purple twilight, catching the tail end of a fireworks display. The two snowflake cities had only been married three weeks, so the arrival of the off-worlders was an excellent pretext for prolonging the celebrations. Naqi watched the fireworks from a civic landing stage perched halfway up Sukhothai’s core, starbursts and cataracts of scarlet, indigo and intense emerald green brightening the sky above the vacuum-bladders. The colours reminded her of the organisms that she and Mina had seen in the wake of their airship. The recollection left her suddenly sad and drained, convinced that she had made a terrible mistake by accepting this assignment. ‘Naqi?’ It was Tak Thonburi, coming out to meet her on the balcony. They had already exchanged messages during the journey. He was dressed in full civic finery and appeared more than a little drunk. ‘Chairman Thonburi.’

‘Good of you come to here, Naqi.’ She watched his eyes map her contours with scientific rigour, lingering here and there around regions of particular interest. ‘Enjoying the show?’

‘You certainly seem to be, sir.’

‘Yes, yes. Always had a thing about fireworks.’ He pressed a drink into her hand and together they watched the display come to its mildly disappointing conclusion. There was a lull then, but Naqi noticed that the spectators on the other balconies were reluctant to leave, as if waiting for something. Presently a stunning display of three-dimensional images appeared, generated by powerful projection apparatus in the Voice of Evening’s shuttle. Above Sukhothai-Sanikiluaq, Chinese dragons as large as mountains fought epic battles. Sea monsters convulsed and writhed in the night. Celestial citadels burned. Hosts of purple-winged fiery angels fell from the heavens in tightly knit squadrons, clutching arcane instruments of music or punishment. A marbled giant rose from the sea, as if woken from some aeons-long slumber. It was very, very impressive. ‘Bastards,’ Thonburi muttered. ‘Sir?’

‘Bastards,’ he said, louder this time. ‘We know they’re better than us. But do they have to keep reminding us?’ He ushered her into the reception chamber where the Vahishta visitors were being entertained. The return indoors had a magical sharpening effect on his senses. Naqi suspected that the ability to turn drunkenness on and off like a switch must be one of the most hallowed of diplomatic skills. He leaned towards her, confidentially. ‘Did Jotah mention any—’

‘Security considerations, Chairman? Yes, I think I got the message.’

‘It’s probably nothing, only—’

‘I understand. Better safe than sorry.’ He winked, touching a finger against the side of his nose. ‘Precisely.’ The interior was bright after the balcony. Twenty Vahishta delegates were standing in a huddle near the middle of the room. The captain was absent—little had been seen of Moreau since the shuttle’s arrival in Umingmaktok—but the delegates were talking to a clutch of local bigwigs, none of whom Naqi recognised. Thonburi steered her into the fray, oblivious to the conversations that were taking place. ‘Ladies and gentleman ... I would like to introduce Naqi Okpik. Naqi oversees the scientific programme on the Moat. She’ll be your host for the visit to our project.’

‘Ah, Naqi.’ Amesha Crane leaned over and shook her hand. ‘A pleasure. I just read your papers on information propagation methods in class-three nodes. Erudite.’

‘They were collaborative works,’ Naqi said. ‘I really can’t take too much credit.’

‘Ah, but you can. All of you can. You achieved those findings with the minimum of resources, and you made very creative use of some extremely simplistic numerical methods.’

‘We muddle through,’ Naqi said. Crane nodded enthusiastically. ‘It must give you a great sense of satisfaction.’ Tak Thonburi said, ‘It’s a philosophy, that’s all. We conduct our science in isolation, and we enjoy only limited communication with other colonies. As a social model it has its disadvantages, but it means we aren’t forever jealous of what they’re achieving on some other world that happens to be a few decades ahead of us because of an accident of history or location. We think that the benefits outweigh the costs.’

‘Well, it seems to work,’ Crane said. ‘You have a remarkably stable society here, Chairman. Verging on the utopian, some might say.’ Tak Thonburi caressed his cowlick. ‘We can’t complain.’

‘Nor can we,’ said the man Naqi recognised as quizzical-faced Simon Matsubara. ‘If you hadn’t enforced this isolation, your own Juggler research would have been as hopelessly compromised as everywhere else.’

‘But the isolation isn’t absolute, is it?’ The voice was quiet, but commanding. Naqi followed the voice to the speaker. It was Rafael Weir, the man who had been identified as a possible security risk. Of the three who had emerged from Moreau’s shuttle, he was the least remarkable looking, possessing the kind of amorphous face that would allow him to blend in with almost any crowd. Had her attention not been drawn to him, he would have been the last one she noticed. He was not unattractive, but there was nothing particularly striking or charismatic about his looks. According to the security dossier, he had made a number of efforts to break away from the main party of the delegation while they had been visiting research stations. They could have been accidents—one or two other party members had become separated at other times—but it was beginning to look a little too deliberate. ‘No,’ Tak Thonburi answered. ‘We’re not absolute isolationists, or we’d never have given permission for Voice of Evening to assume orbit around Turquoise. But we don’t solicit passing traffic either. Our welcome is as warm as anyone’s, we hope, but we don’t encourage visitors.’

‘Are we the first to visit since your settlement?’ Weir asked. ‘The first starship?’ Tak Thonburi shook his head. ‘No. But it’s been a number of years since the last one.’

‘Which was?’

‘The Pelican in Impiety, a century ago.’

‘An amusing coincidence, then,’ Weir said. Tak Thonburi narrowed his eyes. ‘Coincidence?’

‘The Pelican’s next port of call was Haven, if I’m not mistaken. “It was en route from Zion, but it made a trade stopover around Turquoise.”‘ He smiled. ‘And we have come from Haven, so history already binds our two worlds, albeit tenuously.’ Thonburi’s eyes narrowed. He was trying to read Weir and evidently failing. ‘We don’t talk about the Pelican too much. There were technical benefits—vacuum-bladder production methods, information technologies ... but there was also a fair bit of unpleasantness. The wounds haven’t entirely healed.’

‘Let’s hope this visit will be remembered more fondly,’ Weir said. Amesha Crane nodded, fingering one of the items of silver jewellery in her hair. ‘Agreed. All the indications are favourable, at the very least. We’ve arrived at a most auspicious time.’ She turned to Naqi. ‘I find the Moat project fascinating, and I’m sure I speak for the entire Vahishta delegation. I may as well tell you that no one else has attempted anything remotely like it. Tell me, scientist to scientist, do you honestly think it will work?’

‘We won’t know until we try,’ Naqi said. Any other answer would have been politically hazardous: too much optimism and the politicians would have started asking just why the expensive project was needed in the first place. Too much pessimism and they would ask exactly the same question. ‘Fascinating, all the same.’ Crane’s expression was knowing, as if she understood Naqi’s predicament perfectly. ‘I understand that you’re very close to running the first experiment?’

‘Given that it’s taken us twenty years to get this far, yes, we’re close. But we’re still looking at three to four months, maybe longer. It’s not something we want to rush.’

‘That’s a great pity,’ Crane said, turning now to Thonburi. ‘In three to four months we might be on our way. Still, it would have been something to see, wouldn’t it?’ Thonburi leaned towards Naqi. The alcohol on his breath was a fog of cheap vinegar. ‘I suppose there wouldn’t be any chance of accelerating the schedule, would there?’

‘Out of the question, I’m afraid,’ Naqi said. ‘That’s just too bad,’ said Amesha Crane. Still toying with her jewellery, she turned to the others. ‘But we mustn’t let a little detail like that spoil our visit, must we?’ They returned to the Moat using the Voice of Evening’s shuttle. There was another civic reception to be endured upon arrival, but it was a much smaller affair than the one in Sukhothai-Sanikiluaq. Dr Jotah Sivaraksa was there, of course, and once Naqi had dealt with the business of introducing the party to him she was able to relax for the first time in many hours, melting into the corner of the room and watching the interaction between visitors and locals with a welcome sense of detachment. Naqi was tired and had difficulty keeping her eyes open. She saw everything through a sleepy blur, the delegates surrounding Sivaraksa like pillars of fire, the fabric of their costumes rippling with the slightest movement, reds and russets and chrome yellows dancing like sparks or sheets of flame. Naqi left as soon as she felt it was polite to do so, and when she reached her bed she fell immediately into troubled sleep, dreaming of squadrons of purple-winged angels falling from the skies and of the great giant rising from the depths, clawing the seaweed and kelp of ages from his eyes. In the morning she awoke without really feeling refreshed. Anaemic light pierced the slats on her window. She was not due to meet the delegates again for another three or four hours, so there was time to turn over and try and catch some proper sleep. But she knew from experience that it would be futile. She got up. To her surprise, there was a new message on her console from Jotah Sivaraksa. What, she wondered, did he have to say to her that he could not have said at the reception, or later this morning? She opened the message and read. ‘Sivaraksa,’ she said to herself. ‘Are you insane? It can’t be done.’ The message informed her that there had been a change of plan. The first closure of the sea-doors would be attempted in two days, while the delegates were still on the Moat. It was pure madness. They were months away from that. Yes, the doors could be closed—the basic machinery for doing that was in place—and yes, the doors would be hermetically tight for at least one hundred hours after closure. But nothing else was ready. The sensitive monitoring equipment, the failsafe subsystems, the backups ... None of that would be in place and operational for many weeks. Then there was supposed to be at least six weeks of testing, slowly building up to the event itself ... To do it in two days made no sense at all, except to a politician. At best all they would learn was whether or not the Jugglers had remained inside the Moat when the door was closed. They would learn nothing about how the data flow was terminated, or how the internal connections between the nodes adapted to the loss of contact with the wider ocean. Naqi swore and hit the console. She wanted to blame Sivaraksa, but she knew that was unfair. Sivaraksa had to keep the politicians happy, or the whole project would be endangered. He was just doing what he had to do, and he almost certainly liked it even less than she did. Naqi pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and found some coffee in one of the adjoining mess rooms. The Moat was deserted, quiet except for the womblike throb of generators and air-circulation systems. A week ago it would have been as noisy now as at any other time of day, for the construction had continued around the clock. But the heavy work was finished; the last ore dirigible had arrived while Naqi was away. All that remained was the relatively light work of completing the Moat’s support subsystems. Despite what Sivaraksa had said in his message there was really very little additional work needed to close the doors. Even two days of frantic activity would make no difference to the usefulness of the stunt. When she’d calmed down, she returned to her room and called Sivaraksa. It was still far too early, but seeing that the bastard had already ruined her day she saw no reason not to reciprocate. ‘Naqi.’ His silver hair was a sleep-matted mess on the screen. ‘I take it you got my message?’

‘You didn’t think I’d take it lying down, did you?’

‘I don’t like it any more than you do. But I see the political necessity.’

‘Do you? This isn’t like switching a light on and off, Jotah.’ His eyes widened at the familiarity, but she pressed on regardless. ‘If we screw up the first time, there might never be a second chance. The Jugglers have to play along. Without them all you’ve got here is a very expensive mid-ocean refuelling point. Does that make political sense to you?’ He pushed green fingers through the mess of his hair. ‘Have some breakfast, get some fresh air, then come to my office. We’ll talk about it then.’

‘I’ve had breakfast, thanks very much.’

‘Then get the fresh air. You’ll feel better for it.’ Sivaraksa rubbed his eyes. ‘You’re not very happy about this, are you?’

‘It’s bloody madness. And the worst thing is that you know it.’

‘And my hands are tied. Ten years from now, Naqi, you’ll be sitting in my place having to make similar decisions. And ten to one there’ll be some idealistic young scientist telling you what a hopeless piece of deadwood you are.’ He managed a weary smile. ‘Mark my words, because I want you to remember this conversation when it happens.’

‘There’s nothing I can do to stop this, is there?’

‘I’ll be in my office in—’ Sivaraksa looked aside at a clock, ‘thirty minutes. We can talk about it properly then.’

‘There’s nothing to talk about.’ But even as she said that she knew she sounded petulant and inflexible. Sivaraksa was right: it was impossible to manage a project as complex and expensive as the Moat without a degree of compromise. Naqi decided that Sivaraksa’s advice—at least the part about getting some fresh air—was worth heeding. She descended a helical staircase until she reached the upper surface of the Moat’s ringshaped wall. The concrete was cold beneath her bare feet and a pleasantly cool breeze caressed her legs and arms. The sky had brightened on one horizon. Machines and supplies were arranged neatly on the upper surface ready for use, although further construction would be halted until the delegates completed their visit. Stepping nimbly over the tracks, conduits and cables that crisscrossed each other on the upper surface, Naqi walked to the side. A high railing, painted in high-visibility rotresistant sealer, fenced the inner part of the Moat. She touched it to make sure it was dry, then leaned over. The distant side of the Moat was a colourless thread, twenty kilometres away, like a very low wall of sea mist. What could be done in two days? Nothing. Or at least nothing compared to what had always been planned. But if the new schedule was a fait accompli—and that was the message she was getting from Sivaraksa—then it was her responsibility to find a way to squeeze some scientific return from the event. She looked down at the cut, and at the many spindly gantries and catwalks that spanned the aperture or hung some way towards the centre of the Moat. Perhaps if she arranged for some standard-issue probes to be prepared today, the type dropped from dirigibles ... Naqi’s eyes darted around, surveying fixtures and telemetry conduits. It would be hard work to get them in place in time, and even harder to get them patched into some kind of real-time acquisition system ... But it was doable, just barely. The data quality would be laughable compared to the supersensitive instruments that were going to be installed over the next few months ... But crude was a lot better than nothing at all. She laughed, aloud. An hour ago she would have stuck pins into herself rather than collaborate in this kind of fiasco. Naqi walked along the railing until she reached a pair of pillar-mounted binoculars. They were smeared with rot-protection. She wiped the lens and eyepieces clean with the rag that was tied to the pedestal, then swung the binoculars in a slow arc, panning across the dark circle of water trapped within the Moat. Only vague patches of what Naqi would have called open water were visible. The rest was either a verdant porridge of Juggler organisms, or fully grown masses of organised floating matter, linked together by trunks and veins of the same green biomass. The latest estimate was that there were three small nodes within the ring. The smell was atrocious, but that was an excellent sign as well: it correlated strongly with the density of organisms in the nodes. She had experienced that smell many times, but it never failed to slam her back to that morning when Mina had died. As much as the Pattern Jugglers ‘knew’ anything, they were surely aware of what was planned here. They had drunk the minds of the swimmers who had already entered the sea near or within the Moat, and not one of those swimmers was ignorant of the project’s ultimate purpose. It was possible that that knowledge simply couldn’t be parsed into a form the aliens would understand, but Naqi considered that unlikely: the closure of the Moat would be about as stark a concept as one could imagine. If nothing else, geometry was the one thing the Jugglers did understand. And yet the aliens chose to remain within the closing Moat, hinting that they would tolerate the final closure that would seal them off from the rest of the ocean. Perhaps they were not impressed. Perhaps they knew that the event would not rob them of every channel of communication, but only the chemical medium of the ocean. Sprites and other airborne organisms would still be able to cross the barrier. It was impossible to tell. The only way to know was to complete the experiment—to close the massive sea-doors—and see what happened.

She leaned back, taking her eyes from the binoculars. Now Naqi saw something unexpected. It was a glint of hard white light, scudding across the water within the Moat. Naqi squinted, but still she could not make out the object. She swung the binoculars hard around, got her eyes behind them and then zigzagged until something flashed through the field of view. She backed up and locked onto it. It was a boat, and there was someone in it. She keyed in the image zoom/stabilise function and the craft swelled to clarity across a clear kilometre of sea. The craft was a ceramic-hulled vessel of the type that the swimmer teams used, five or six metres long from bow to stern. The person sat behind a curved spray shield, their hands on the handlebars of the control pillar. An inboard thruster propelled the boat without ever touching water. The figure was difficult to make out, but the billowing orange clothes left no room for doubt. It was one of the Vahishta delegates. And Naqi fully expected it to be Rafael Weir. He was headed towards the closest node. For an agonising few moments she did not know what to do. He was going to attempt to swim, she thought, just like she and Mina had done. And he would be no better prepared for the experience. She had to stop him, somehow. He would reach the node in only a few minutes. Naqi sprinted back to the tower, breathless when she arrived. She reached a communications post and tried to find the right channel for the boat. But either she was doing it wrong or Weir had sabotaged the radio. What next? Technically, there was a security presence on the Moat, especially given the official visit. But what did the security goons know about chasing boats? All their training was aimed at dealing with internal crises, and none of them were competent to go anywhere near an active node. She called them anyway, alerting them to what had happened. Then she called Sivaraksa, telling him the same news. ‘I think it’s Weir,’ she said. ‘I’m going to try and stop him.’

‘Naqi ...’ he said warningly. ‘This is my responsibility, Jotah. Let me handle it.’ Naqi ran back outside again. The closest elevator down to sea level was out of service; the next one was a kilometre further around the ring. She didn’t have that much time. Instead she jogged along the line of railings until she reached a break that admitted entry to a staircase that descended the steep inner wall of the Moat. The steps and handrails had been helpfully greased with antirot, which made her descent that more treacherous. There were five hundred steps down to sea level but she took them two or three at a time, sliding down the handrails until she reached the grilled platforms where the stairways reversed direction. All the while she watched the tiny white speck of the boat, seemingly immobile now that it was so far away, but undoubtedly narrowing the distance to the node with each minute. As she worked her way down she had plenty of time to think about what was going through the delegate’s head. She was sure now that it was Weir. It did not really surprise her that he wanted to swim: it was what everyone who studied the Jugglers yearned for. But why make this unofficial attempt now when a little gentle persuasion would have made it possible anyway? Given Tak Thonburi’s eagerness to please the delegates, it would not have been beyond the bounds of possibility for a swimming expedition to be organised ... The corps would have protested, but just like Naqi they would have been given a forceful lesson in the refined art of political compromise. But evidently Weir hadn’t been prepared to wait. It all made sense, at any rate: the times when he had dodged away from the party before must have all been abortive attempts to reach the Jugglers. But only now had he been able to seize his opportunity. Naqi reached the water level, where jetties floated on ceramic-sheathed pontoons. Most of the boats were suspended out of the water on cradles, to save their hulls from unnecessary degradation. Fortunately, there was an emergency rescue boat already afloat. Its formerly white hull had the flaking, pea-green scab patterning of advanced rot, but it still had a dozen or so hours of seaworthiness in it. Naqi jumped aboard, released the boat from its moorings and fired up the thruster. In a moment she was racing away from the jetty, away from the vast, stained edifice of the Moat itself. She steered a course through the least viscous stretches of water, avoiding conspicuous rafts of green matter. She peered ahead through the boat’s spray-drenched shield. It had been easy to keep track of Weir’s boat when she had been a hundred metres higher, but now she kept losing him behind swells or miniature islands of Juggler matter. After a minute or so she gave up trying to follow the boat, and instead diverted her concentration to finding the quickest route to the node. She flipped on the radio. ‘Jotah? This is Naqi. I’m in the water, closing on Weir.’ There was a pause, a crackle, then: ‘What’s the status?’ She had to shout over the abrasive thump, thump, thump of the boat, even though the thruster was nearly silent. ‘I’ll reach the node in four or five minutes. Can’t see Weir, but I don’t think it matters.’

‘We can see him. He’s still headed for the node.’

‘Good. Can you spare some more boats, in case he decides to make a run for another node?’

‘They’ll be leaving in a minute or so. I’m waking everyone I can.’

‘What about the other delegates?’ Sivaraksa did not answer her immediately. ‘Most are still asleep. I have Amesha Crane and Simon Matsubara in my office, however.’

‘Let me speak to them.’

‘Just a moment,’ he said, after the same brief hesitation. ‘Crane here,’ said the woman. ‘I think I’m chasing Weir. Can you confirm that?’

‘He isn’t accounted for,’ she told Naqi. ‘But it’ll be a few minutes until we can be certain it’s him.’

‘I’m not expecting a surprise. Weir already had a question mark over him, Amesha. We were waiting for him to try something.’

‘Were you?’ Perhaps it was her imagination, but Crane sounded genuinely surprised. ‘Why? What had he done?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘No ...’ Crane trailed off. ‘He was one of us,’ Matsubara said. ‘A good ... delegate. We had no reason to distrust him.’ Perhaps Naqi was imagining this as well, but it almost sounded as if Matsubara had intended to say ‘disciple’ rather than ‘delegate’. Crane came back on the radio. ‘Please do your best to apprehend him, Naqi. This is a source of great embarrassment to us. He mustn’t do any harm.’ Naqi gunned the boat harder, no longer bothering to avoid the smaller patches of organic matter. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He mustn’t.’

Three

Something changed ahead. ‘Naqi?’ It was Jotah Sivaraksa’s voice. ‘What?’

‘Weir’s slowed his boat. From our vantage point it looks as if he’s reached the perimeter of the node. He seems to be circumnavigating it.’

‘I can’t see him yet. He must be picking the best spot to dive in.’

‘But it won’t work, will it?’ Sivaraksa asked. ‘There has to be an element of cooperation with the Jugglers. They have to invite the swimmer to enter the sea, or nothing happens.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t realise that,’ Naqi said, under her breath. It was of no concern to her how closely Weir was adhering to the usual method of initiating Juggler communion. Even if the Jugglers did not cooperate—even if all Weir did was flounder in thick green water—there was no telling the hidden harm that might be done. She had already grudgingly accepted the acceleration of the closure operation. There was no way she was going to tolerate another upset, another unwanted perturbation of the experimental system. Not on her watch. ‘He’s stopped,’ Sivaraksa said excitedly. ‘Can you see him yet?’ Naqi stood up in her seat, even though she felt perilously unbalanced. ‘Wait. Yes, I think so. I’ll be there in a minute or so. ‘What are you going to do?’ Crane asked. ‘I hesitate to say it, but Weir may not respond to rational argument at this point. Simply requesting that he leave the water won’t necessarily work. Um, do you have a weapon?’

‘Yes,’ Naqi said. ‘I’m sitting in it.’ She did not allow herself to relax, but at least now she felt that the situation was slipping back into her control. She would kill Weir rather than have him contaminate the node. His boat was visible now only as a smudge of white, intermittently popping up between folds and hummocks of shifting green. Her imagination sketched in the details. Weir would be preparing to swim, stripping off until he was naked, or nearly so. Perhaps he would feel some kind of erotic charge as he prepared for immersion. She did not doubt that he would be apprehensive, and perhaps he would hesitate on the threshold of the act, teetering on the edge of the boat before committing himself to the water. But a fanatic desire had driven him this far and she doubted that it would fail him. ‘Naqi—’

‘Jotah?’

‘Naqi, he’s moving again. He didn’t enter the water. He didn’t even look like he had any intention of swimming.’

‘He saw I was coming. I take it he’s heading for the next closest node?’

‘Perhaps ...’ But Jotah Sivaraksa sounded far from certain. She saw the boat again. It was moving fast—much faster than it had appeared before—but that was only because she was now seeing lateral motion. The next node was a distant island framed by the background of the Moat’s encircling rim. If he headed that way she would be hard behind him all the way there as well. No matter his desire to swim, he must realise that she could thwart his every attempt. Naqi looked back. The twin towers framing the cut were smothered in a haze of sea mist, their geometric details smeared into a vague suggestion of haphazard complexity. They suggested teetering, stratified sea-stacks, million-year-old towers of weathered and eroded rock guarding the narrow passage to the open ocean. Beneath them, winking in and out of clarity, she saw three or four other boats making their way into the Moat. The ponderous teardrop of a passenger dirigible was nosing away from the side of one of the towers, the low dawn sun throwing golden highlights along the fluted lines of its gondola. Naqi made out the sleek deltoid of the Voice of Evening’s shuttle, but it was still parked where it had landed. She looked back to the node where Weir had hesitated. Something was happening. The node had become vastly more active than a minute earlier. It resembled a green, steep-sided volcanic island that was undergoing some catastrophic seismic calamity. The entire mass of the node was trembling, rocking and throbbing with an eerie regularity. Concentric swells of disturbed water raced away from it, sickening troughs that made the speeding boat pitch and slide. Naqi slowed her boat, some instinct telling her that it was now largely futile to pursue Weir. Then she turned around so that she faced the node properly and, cautiously, edged closer, ignoring the nausea she felt as the boat ducked and dived from crest to trough. The node, like all nodes, had always shown a rich surface topology: fused hummocks and tendrils; fabulous domes and minarets and helter-skelters of organised biomass, linked and entangled by a telegraphic system of draping aerial tendrils. In any instant it resembled a human city—or, more properly, a fairy-tale human city—that had been efficiently smothered in green moss. The bright moving motes of sprites dodged through the interstices, the portholes and arches of the urban mass. The metropolitan structure only hinted at the node’s Byzantine interior architecture, and much of that could only be glimpsed or implied. But this node was like a city going insane. It was accelerating, running through cycles of urban renewal and redesign with indecent haste. Structures were evolving before Naqi’s eyes. She had seen change this rapid just before Mina was taken, but normally those kinds of changes happened too slowly to be seen at all, like the daily movement of shadows. The throbbing had decreased, but the flickering change was now throwing out a steady, warm, malodorous breeze. And when she stopped the boat—she dared come no closer now—Naqi heard the node. It was like the whisper of a billion forest leaves presaging a summer storm. Whatever was happening here, it was about to become catastrophic. Some fundamental organisation had been lost. The changes were happening too quickly, with too little central coordination. Tendrils thrashed like whips, unable to connect to anything. They flailed against each other. Structures were forming and collapsing. The node was fracturing, so that there were three, four, perhaps five distinct cores of flickering growth. As soon as she had the measure of it, the process shifted it all. Meagre light flickered within the epileptic mass. Sprites swarmed in confused flight patterns, orbiting mindlessly between foci. The sound of the node had become a distant shriek. ‘It’s dying ...’ Naqi breathed. Weir had done something to it. What, she couldn’t guess. But this could not be a coincidence. The shrieking died down. The breeze ceased. The node had stopped its convulsions. She looked at it, hoping against hope that perhaps it had overcome whatever destabilising influence Weir had introduced. The structures were still misshapen, there was still an impression of incoherence, but the city was inert. The cycling motion of the sprites slowed, and a few of them dropped down into the mass, as if to roost. A calm had descended. Then Naqi heard another sound. It was lower than anything she had heard before—almost subsonic. It sounded less like thunder than like a very distant, very heated conversation. It was coming from the approximate centre of the node. She watched as a smooth green mound rose from the centre, resembling a flattened hemisphere. It grew larger by the second, assimilating the malformed structures with quiet indifference. They disappeared into the surface of the mound as if into a wall of fog, but they did not emerge again. The mound only increased its size, rumbling towards Naqi. The entire mass of the node was changing into a single undifferentiated mass.

‘Jotah ...’ she said. ‘We see it, Naqi. We see it but we don’t understand it.’

‘Weir must have used some kind of ... weapon against it,’ she said. ‘We don’t know that he’s harmed it ... He might just have precipitated a change to a state we haven’t documented.’

‘That still makes it a weapon in my book. I’m scared, Jotah.’

‘You think I’m not?’ Around her the sea was changing. She had forgotten about the submerged tendrils that connected the nodes. They were as thick as hawsers, and now they were writhing and thrashing just beneath the surface of the water. Green-tinged spume lifted into the air. It was as if unseen aquatic monsters were wrestling, locked in some dire, to-the-death contest. ‘Naqi ... We’re seeing changes in the closest of the two remaining nodes.’

‘No,’ she said, as if denying it would make any difference. ‘I’m sorry ...’

‘Where is Weir?’

‘We’ve lost him. There’s too much surface disturbance.’ She realised then what had to be done. The thought arrived in her head with a crashing urgency. ‘Jotah ... You have to close the sea-doors. Now. Immediately. Before whatever Weir’s unleashed has a chance to reach open ocean. That also happens to be Weir’s only escape route.’ Sivaraksa, to his credit, did not argue. ‘Yes. You’re right. I’ll start closure. But it will take quite a few minutes ...’

‘I know, Jotah!’ She cursed herself for not having thought of this sooner, and cursed Sivaraksa for the same error. But she could hardly blame either of them. Closure had never been something to take lightly. A few hours ago it had been an event months in the future—an experiment to test the willingness of the Jugglers to cooperate with human plans. Now it had turned into an emergency amputation, something to be done with brutal haste. She peered at the gap between the towers. At the very least it would take several minutes for Sivaraksa to initiate closure. It was not simply a matter of pressing a button on his desk, but of rousing two or three specialist technicians, who would have to be immediately convinced that this was not some elaborate hoax. And then the machinery would have to work. The mechanisms that forced the sea-doors together had been tested numerous times ... But the machinery had never been driven to its limit; the doors had never moved more than a few metres together. Now they would have to work perfectly, closing with watchmaker precision. And when had anything on Turquoise ever worked the first time? There. The tiniest, least perceptible narrowing of the gap. It was all happening with agonising slowness. She looked back to what remained of the node. The mound had consumed all the biomass available to it and had now ceased its growth. It was as if a child had sculpted in clay some fantastically intricate model of a city, which a callous adult had then squashed into a single blank mass, erasing all trace of its former complexity. The closest of the remaining nodes was showing something of the same transformation, Naqi saw: it was running through the frantic cycle that had presaged the emergence of the mound. She guessed now that the cycle had been the node’s attempt to nullify whatever Weir had used against it, like a computer trying to reallocate resources to compensate for some crippling viral attack. She could do nothing for the Jugglers now. Naqi turned the boat around and headed back towards the cut. The sea-doors had narrowed the gap by perhaps a quarter.

The changes taking place within the Moat had turned the water turbulent, even at the jetty. She hitched the boat to a mooring point and then took the elevator up the side of the wall, preferring to sprint the distance along the top rather than face the climb. By the time she reached the cut the doors were three-quarters of the way to closure and, to Naqi’s immense relief, the machinery had yet to falter. She approached the tower. She had expected to see more people out on the top of the Moat, even if she knew that Sivaraksa would still be in his control centre. But no one was around. This was just beginning to register as a distinct wrongness when Sivaraksa emerged into daylight, stumbling from the door at the foot of the tower. For an instant she was on the point of calling his name. Then she realised that he was stumbling because he had been injured—his fingers were scarlet with blood—and that he was trying to get away from someone or something. Naqi dropped to the ground behind a stack of construction slabs. Through gaps between the slabs she observed Sivaraksa. He was swatting at something, like a man being chased by a persistent wasp. Something tiny and silver harried him. More than one thing, in fact: a small swarm of them, streaming out the open door. Sivaraksa fell to his knees with a moan, brushing ineffectually at his tormentors. His face was turning red, smeared with his own blood. He slumped on one side. Naqi remained frozen with fear. A person stepped from the open door. The figure was garbed in shades of fire. It was Amesha Crane. For an absurd moment Naqi assumed that the woman was about; to spring to Sivaraksa’s assistance. It was something about her demeanour. Naqi found it hard to believe that someone so apparently serene could commit such a violent act. But Crane did not step closer to Sivaraksa. She merely extended her arms before her, with her fingers outspread. She sustained the oddly theatrical gesture, the muscles in her neck standing proud and rigid. The silver things departed Sivaraksa. They swarmed through the air, slowing as they neared Crane. Then, with a startling degree of orchestrated obedience, they slid onto her fingers, locked themselves around her wrists, clasped onto the lobes of her ears. Her jewellery had attacked Sivaraksa. Crane glanced at the man one last time, spun on her heels and then retreated back into the tower. Naqi waited until she was certain the woman was not coming back, then started to emerge from behind the pile of slabs. But Sivaraksa saw her. He said nothing, but his agonised eyes widened enough for Naqi to get the warning. She remained where she was, her heart hammering. Nothing happened for another minute. Then something moved above, changing the play of light across the surface of the Moat. The Voice of Evening’s shuttle was detaching from the tower, a flicker of white machinery beneath the manta curve of its hull. The shuttle loitered above the cut, as if observing the final moment of closure. Naqi heard the huge doors grind shut. Then the shuttle banked and headed into the circular sea, no more than two hundred metres above the waves. Some distance out it halted and executed a sharp right-angled turn. Then it resumed its flight, moving concentrically around the inner wall. Sivaraksa closed his eyes. She thought he might have died, but then he opened them again and made the tiniest of nods. Naqi left her place of hiding. She crossed the open ground to Sivaraksa in a low, crablike stoop. She knelt down by him, cradling his head in one hand and holding his own hand with the other. ‘Jotah ... What happened?’ He managed to answer her. ‘They turned on us. The nineteen other delegates. As soon as—’ He paused, summoning strength. ‘As soon as Weir made his move.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Join the club,’ he said, managing a smile. ‘I need to get you inside,’ she said. ‘Won’t help. Everyone else is dead. Or will be by now. They murdered us all.’

‘No.’

‘Kept me alive until the end. Wanted me to give the orders.’ He coughed. Blood spattered her hand. ‘I can still get you—’

‘Naqi. Save yourself. Get help.’ She realised that he was about to die. ‘The shuttle?’

‘Looking for Weir. I think.’

‘They want Weir back?’

‘No. Heard them talking. They want Weir dead. They have to be sure.’ Naqi frowned. She understood none of this, or at least her understanding was only now beginning to crystallise. She had labelled Weir as the villain because he had harmed her beloved Pattern Jugglers. But Crane and her entourage had murdered people, dozens, if what Sivaraksa said was correct. They appeared to want Weir dead as well. So what did that make Weir, now? ‘Jotah ... I have to find Weir. I have to find out why he did this.’ She looked back towards the centre of the Moat. The shuttle was continuing its search. ‘Did your security people get a trace on him again?’ Sivaraksa was near the end. She thought he was never going to answer her. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘Yes, they found him again.’

‘And? Any idea where he is? I might still be able to reach him before the shuttle does.’

‘Wrong place.’ She leaned closer. ‘Jotah?’

‘Wrong place. Amesha’s looking in the wrong place. Weir got through the cut. He’s in the open ocean.’

‘I’m going after him. Perhaps I can stop him ...’

‘Try,’ Sivaraksa said. ‘But I’m not sure what difference it will make. I have a feeling, Naqi. A very bad feeling. Things are ending. It was good, wasn’t it? While it lasted?’

‘I haven’t given up just yet,’ Naqi said. He found one last nugget of strength. ‘I knew you wouldn’t. Right to trust you. One thing, Naqi. One thing that might make a difference ... if it comes to the worst, that is—’

‘Jotah?’

‘Tak Thonburi told me this ... the most top secret, known only to the Snowflake Council. Arviat, Naqi—’ For a moment she thought she had misheard him, or that he was sliding into delirium. ‘Arviat? The city that sinned against the sea?’

‘It was real,’ Sivaraksa said. * There were a number of lifeboats and emergency service craft stored at the top of near-vertical slipways, a hundred metres above the external sea. She took a small but fast emergency craft with a sealed cockpit, her stomach knotting as the vessel commenced its slide towards the ocean. The boat submerged before resurfacing, boosted up to speed and then deployed ceramic hydrofoils to minimise the contact between the hull and the water. Naqi had no precise heading to follow, but she believed Weir would have followed a reasonably straight line away from the cut, aiming to get as far away from the Moat as possible before the other delegates realised their mistake. It would require only a small deviation from that course to take him to the nearest external node, which was as likely a destination as any. When she was twenty kilometres from the Moat, Naqi allowed herself a moment to look back. The structure was a thin white line etched on the horizon, the towers and the now-sealed cut faintly visible as interruptions in the line’s smoothness. Quills of dark smoke climbed from a dozen spots along the length of the structure. It was too far for Naqi to be certain that she saw flames licking from the towers, but she considered it likely. The closest external node appeared over the horizon fifteen minutes later. It was nowhere as impressive as the one that had taken Mina, but it was still a larger, more complex structure than any of the nodes that had formed within the Moat—a major urban megalopolis, perhaps, rather than a moderately sized city. Against the skyline Naqi saw spires and rotundas and coronets of green, bridged by a tracery of elevated tendrils. Sprites were rapidly moving silhouettes. There was motion, but it was largely confined to the flying creatures. The node was not yet showing the frenzied changes she had witnessed within the Moat. Had Weir gone somewhere else? She pressed onwards, slowing the boat slightly now that the water was thickening with microorganisms and it was necessary to steer around the occasional larger floating structure. The boat’s sonar picked out dozens of submerged tendrils converging on the node, suspended just below the surface. The tendrils reached away in all directions, to the limits of the boat’s sonar range. Most would have reached over the horizon, to nodes many hundreds of kilometres away. But it was a topological certainty that some of them had been connected to the nodes inside the Moat. Evidently, Weir’s contagion had never escaped through the cut. Naqi doubted that the doors had closed in time to impede whatever chemical signals were transmitting the fatal message. It was more likely that some latent Juggler self-protection mechanism had cut in, the dying nodes sending emergency termination-of-connection signals that forced the tendrils to sever without human assistance. Naqi had just decided that she had guessed wrongly about Weir’s plan when she saw a rectilinear furrow gouged right through one of the largest subsidiary structures. The wound was healing itself as she watched—it would be gone in a matter of minutes—but enough remained for her to tell that Weir’s boat must have cleaved through the mass very recently. It made sense. Weir had already demonstrated that he had no interest in preserving the Pattern Jugglers. With renewed determination, Naqi gunned the boat forward. She no longer worried about inflicting local damage on the floating masses. There was a great deal more at stake than the wellbeing of a single node. She felt a warmth on the back of her neck. At the same instant the sky, sea and floating structures ahead of her pulsed with a cruel brightness. Her own shadow stretched forward ominously. The brightness faded over the next few seconds, and then she dared to look back, half-knowing what she would see. A mass of hot, roiling gas was climbing into the air from the centre of the node. It tugged a column of matter beneath it, like the knotted and gnarled spinal column of a horribly swollen brain. Against the mushroom cloud she saw the tiny moving speck of the delegates’ shuttle. A minute later the sound of the explosion reached her, but although it was easily the loudest thing she had ever heard, it was not as deafening as she had expected. The boat lurched; the sea fumed, and then was still again. She assumed that the Moat’s wall had absorbed much of the energy of the blast. Suddenly fearful that there might be another explosion, Naqi turned back towards the node. At the same instant she saw Weir’s boat, racing perhaps three hundred metres ahead of her. He was beginning to curve and slow as he neared the impassable perimeter of the node. Naqi knew that she did not have time to delay. That was when Weir saw her. His boat sped up again, arcing hard away. Naqi steered immediately, certain that her boat was faster and that it was now only a matter of time before she had him. A minute later Weir’s boat disappeared around the curve of the node’s perimeter. She might have stood a chance of getting ah echo from his hull, but this close to the node all sonar returns were too garbled to be of any use. Naqi steered anyway, hoping that Weir would make the tactical mistake of striking for another node. In open water he stood no chance at all, but perhaps he understood that as well. She had circumnavigated a third of the node’s perimeter when she caught up with him again. He had not tried to run for it. Instead he had brought the boat to a halt within the comparative shelter of an inlet on the perimeter. He was standing up at the rear of the boat, with something small and dark in his hand. Naqi slowed her boat as she approached him. She had popped back the canopy before it occurred to her that Weir might be equipped with the same weapons as Crane. She stood up herself. ‘Weir?’ He smiled. ‘I’m sorry to have caused so much trouble. But I don’t think it could have happened any other way.’ She let this pass. ‘That thing in your hand?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s a weapon, isn’t it?’ She could see it clearly now. It was merely a glass bauble, little larger than a child’s marble. There was something opaque inside it, but she could not tell if it contained fluid or dark crystals. ‘I doubt that a denial would be very plausible at this point.’ He nodded, and she sensed the lifting, partially at least, of some appalling burden. ‘Yes, it’s a weapon. A Juggler killer.’

‘Until today, I’d have said no such thing was possible.’

‘I doubt that it was very easy to synthesise. Countless biological entities have entered their oceans, and none of them have ever brought anything with them that the Jugglers couldn’t assimilate in a harmless fashion. Doubtless some of those entities tried to inflict deliberate harm, if only out of morbid curiosity. None of them succeeded. Of course, you can kill Jugglers by brute force—’ He looked towards the Moat, where the mushroom cloud was dissipating. ‘But that isn’t the point. Not subtle. But this is. It exploits a logical flaw in the Jugglers’ own informational processing algorithms. It’s insidious. And no, humans most certainly didn’t invent it. We’re clever, but we’re not that clever.’ Naqi strove to keep him talking. ‘Who made it, Weir?’

‘The Ultras sold it to us in a presynthesised form. I’ve heard rumours that it was found inside the topmost chamber of a heavily fortified alien structure ... Another that it was synthesised by a rival group of Jugglers. Who knows? Who cares, even? It does what we ask of it. That’s all that matters.’

‘Please don’t use it, Rafael.’

‘I have to. It’s what I came here to do.’

‘But I thought you all loved the Jugglers.’ His fingers caressed the glass globe. It looked terribly fragile. ‘We?’

‘Crane ... Her delegates.’

‘They do. But I’m not one of them.’

‘Tell me what this is about, Rafael.’

‘It would be better if you just accepted what I have to do.’ Naqi swallowed. ‘If you kill them, you kill more than just an alien life form. You erase the memory of every sentient creature that’s ever entered the ocean.’

‘Unfortunately, that rather happens to be the point.’ Weir dropped the glass into the sea. It hit the water, bobbed under and then popped back out again, floating on the surface. The small globe was already immersed in a brackish scum of grey-green micro-organisms. They were beginning to lap higher up the sides of the globe, exploring it. A couple of millimetres of ordinary glass would succumb to Juggler erosion in perhaps thirty minutes ... But Naqi guessed that this was not ordinary glass, that it was designed to degrade much more rapidly. She jumped back down into her control seat and shot her boat forward. She came alongside Weir’s boat, trapping the globe between the two craft. Taking desperate care not to nudge the hulls together, she stopped her boat and leaned over as far as she could without falling in. Her fingertips brushed the glass. Maddeningly, she could not quite get a grip on it. She made one last valiant effort and it drifted beyond her reach. Now it was out of her range, no matter how hard she stretched. Weir watched impassively. Naqi slipped into the water. The layer of Juggler organisms licked her chin and nose, the smell immediate and overwhelming now that she was in such close proximity. Her fear was absolute. It was the first time she had entered the water since Mina’s death. She caught the globe, taking hold of it with the exquisite care she might have reserved for a rare bird’s egg. Already the glass had the porous texture of pumice. She held it up, for Weir to see. ‘I won’t let you do this, Rafael.’

‘I admire your concern.’

‘It’s more than concern. My sister is here. She’s in the ocean. And I won’t let you take her away from me.’ Weir reached inside a pocket and removed another globe. They sped away from the node in Naqi’s boat. The new globe rested in his hand like a gift. He had not yet dropped it in the sea, although the possibility was only ever an instant away. They were far from any node now, but the globe would be guaranteed to come into contact with Juggler matter sooner or later. Naqi opened a watertight equipment locker, pushing aside the flare pistol and first-aid kit that lay within. Carefully she placed the globe within, and then watched in horror as the glass immediately cracked and dissolved, releasing its poison: little black irregularly shaped grains like burnt sugar. If the boat sank, the locker would eventually be consumed into the ocean, along with its fatal contents. She considered using the flare pistol to incinerate the remains, but there was too much danger of dispersing it at the same time. Perhaps the toxin had a restricted lifespan once it came into contact with air, but that was nothing she could count on. But Weir had not thrown the third globe into sea. Not yet. Something she had said had made him hesitate. ‘Your sister?’

‘You know the story,’ Naqi said. ‘Mina was a conformal. The ocean assimilated her entirely, rather than just recording her neural patterns. It took her as a prize.’

‘And you believe that she’s still present, in some sentient sense?’

‘That’s what I choose to believe, yes. And there’s enough anecdotal evidence from other swimmers that conformals do persist, in a more coherent form than other stored patterns.’

‘I can’t let anecdotal evidence sway me, Naqi. Have the other swimmers specifically reported encounters with Mina?’

‘No ...’ Naqi said carefully. She was sure that he would see through any lie that she attempted. ‘But they wouldn’t necessarily recognise her if they did.’

‘And you? Did you attempt to swim yourself?’

‘The swimmer corps would never have allowed me.’

‘Not my question. Did you ever swim?’

‘Once,’ Naqi said. ‘And?’

‘It didn’t count. It was the same time that Mina died.’ She paused and then told him all that had happened. ‘We were seeing more sprite activity than we’d ever recorded. It looked like coincidence—’

‘I don’t think it was.’ Naqi said nothing. She waited for Weir to collect his own thoughts, concentrating on the steering of the boat. Open sea lay ahead, but she knew that almost any direction would bring them to a cluster of nodes within a few hours. ‘It began with Pelican of Impiety,’ Weir said. ‘A century ago. There was a man from Zion on that ship. During the stopover he descended to the surface of Turquoise and swam in your ocean. He made contact with the Jugglers and then swam again. The second time the experience was even more affecting. On the third occasion, the sea swallowed him. He’d been a conformal, just like your sister. His name was Ormazd.’

‘It means nothing to me.’

‘I assure you that on his homeworld it means a great deal more. Ormazd was a failed tyrant, fleeing a political counterrevolution on Zion. He had murdered and cheated his way to power on Zion, burning his rivals in their houses while they slept. But there’d been a backlash. He got out just before the ring closed around him—him and a handful of his closest allies and devotees. They escaped aboard Pelican in Impiety.’

‘And Ormazd died here?’

‘Yes—but his followers didn’t. They made it to Haven, our world. And once there they began to proliferate, spreading their word, recruiting new followers. It didn’t matter that Ormazd was gone. Quite the opposite. He’d martyred himself: given them a saint figure to worship. It evolved from a political movement into a religious cult. The Vahishta Foundation’s just a front for the Ormazd sect.’ Naqi absorbed that, then asked, ‘Where does Amesha come into it?’

‘Amesha was his daughter. She wants her father back.’ Something lit the horizon, a pink-edged flash. Another followed a minute later, in nearly the same position. ‘She wants to commune with him?’

‘More than that,’ said Weir. ‘They all want to become him; to accept his neural patterns on their own. They want the Jugglers to imprint Ormazd’s personality on all his followers, to remake them in his own image. The aliens will do that, if the right gifts are offered. And that’s what I can’t allow.’ Naqi chose her words carefully, sensing that the tiniest thing could push Weir into releasing the globe. She had prevented his last attempt, but he would not allow her a second chance. All he would have to do would be to crush the globe in his fist before spilling the contents into the ocean. Then it would all be over. Everything she had ever known; everything she had ever lived for. ‘But we’re only talking about nineteen people,’ she said. Weir laughed hollowly. ‘I’m afraid it’s a little more than that. Why don’t you turn on the radio and see what I mean?’ Naqi did as he suggested, using the boat’s general communications console. The small, scuffed screen received television pictures beamed down from the comsat network. Naqi flicked through channels, finding static on most of them. The Snowflake Council’s official news service was off the air and no personal messages were getting through. There were some suggestions that the comsat network itself was damaged. Yet finally Naqi found a few weak broadcast signals from the nearest snowflake cities. There was a sense of desperation in the transmissions, as if they expected to fall silent at any time. Weir nodded with weary acceptance, as if he had expected this. In the last six hours at least a dozen more shuttles had come down from Voice of Evening, packed with armed Vahishta disciples. The shuttles had attacked the planet’s major snowflake cities and atoll settlements, strafing them into submission. Three cities had fallen into the sea, their vacuumbladders punctured by beam weapons. There could not have been any survivors. Others were still aloft, but had been set on fire. The pictures showed citizens leaping from the cities’ berthing arms, falling like sparks. More cities had been taken bloodlessly, and were now under control of the disciples. None of those cities were transmitting now. It was the end of the world. Naqi knew that she should be weeping, or at the very least feel some writhing sense of loss in her stomach. But all she got was a sense of denial; a refusal to accept that events could have escalated so quickly. This morning the only hint of wrongness had been a single absent disciple. ‘There are tens of thousands of them up there,’ Weir said. ‘All that you’ve seen so far is the advance guard.’ Naqi scratched her forearm. It was itching, as if she had caught a dose of sunburn. ‘Moreau was in on this?’

‘Captain Moreau’s a puppet. Literally. The body you saw was just being tele-operated by orbital disciples. They murdered the Ultras and commandeered the Ship—’

‘Rafael, why didn’t you tell us this before?’

‘My position was too vulnerable. I was the only anti-Ormazd agent my movement managed to put aboard Voice of Evening. If I’d attempted to warn the Turquoise authorities ... Well, work it out for yourself. Almost certainly I wouldn’t have been believed, and the disciples would have found a way to silence me before I became an embarrassment. And it wouldn’t have made a difference to their takeover plans. My only hope was to destroy the ocean, to remove its usefulness to them. They might still have destroyed your cities out of spite, but at least they’d have lost the final thread that connected them to their martyr.’ Weir leaned closer to her. ‘Don’t you understand? It wouldn’t have stopped with the disciples aboard the Voice. They’d have brought more ships from Haven. Your ocean would have become a production line for despots.’

‘Why did they hesitate, if they had such a crushing advantage over us?’

‘They didn’t know about me, so they lost nothing by dedicating a few weeks to intelligencegathering. They wanted to know as much as possible about Turquoise and the Jugglers before they made their move. They’re brutal, but they’re not inefficient. They wanted their takeover to be as precise and surgical as possible.’

‘And now?’

‘They’ve accepted that things won’t be quite that neat and tidy.’ He flipped the globe from one palm to another, with a casual playfulness that Naqi found alarming. ‘They’re serious, Naqi. Crane will stop at nothing now. You’ve seen those blast flashes. Pinpoint anti-matter devices. They’ve already sterilised the organic matter within the Moat, to stop the effect of my weapon from reaching further. If they know where we are, they’ll drop a bomb on us as well.’

‘Human evil doesn’t give us the excuse to wipe out the ocean.’

‘It’s not an excuse, Naqi. It’s an imperative.’ At that moment something glinted on the horizon, something that was moving slowly from east to west. ‘The shuttle,’ Weir said. ‘It’s looking for us.’ Naqi scratched her arm again. It was discoloured, itching. Near local noon they reached the next node. The shuttle had continued to dog them, nosing to and fro along the hazy band where sea met sky. Sometimes it appeared closer, sometimes it appeared further away, but it never left them alone, and Naqi knew that it would be only a matter of time before it detected a positive homing trace, a chemical or physical note in the water that would lead it to its quarry. The shuttle would cover the remaining distance in seconds, a minute at the most, and then all that she and Weir would know would be a moment of cleansing whiteness, a fire of holy purity. Even if Weir released his toxin just before the shuttle arrived, it would not have time to dissipate into a wide enough volume of water to survive the fireball.

So why was he hesitating? It was Mina, of course. Naqi had given a name to the faceless library of stored minds he was prepared to erase. By naming her sister, Naqi had removed the onesidedness of the moral equation, and now Weir had to accept that his own actions could never be entirely blameless. He was no longer purely objective. ‘I should just do this,’ he said. ‘By hesitating even for a second, I’m betraying the trust of the people who sent me here, people who have probably been tormented to extinction by Ormazd’s followers by now.’ Naqi shook her head. ‘If you didn’t show doubt, you’d be as bad as the disciples.’

‘You almost sound as if you want me to do it.’ She groped for something resembling the truth, as painful as that might be. ‘Perhaps I do.’

‘Even though it would mean killing whatever part of Mina survived?’

‘I’ve lived in her shadow my entire life. Even after she died ... I always felt she was still watching me, still observing my every mistake, still being faintly disappointed that I wasn’t living up to all she had imagined I could be.’

‘You’re being harsh on yourself. Harsh on Mina too, by the sound of things.’

‘I know,’ Naqi said angrily. ‘I’m just telling you how I feel.’ The boat edged into a curving inlet that pushed deep into the node. Naqi felt less vulnerable now: there was a significant depth of organic matter to screen the boat from any sideways-looking sensors that the shuttle might have deployed, even though the evidence suggested that the shuttle’s sensors were mainly focused down from its hull. The disadvantage was that it was no longer possible to keep a constant vigil on the shuttle’s movements. It could be on its way already. She brought the boat to a halt and stood up in her control seat. ‘What’s happening?’ Weir asked. ‘I’ve come to a decision.’

‘Isn’t that my job?’ Her anger—brief as it was, and directed less at Weir than at the hopelessness of the situation—had evaporated. ‘I mean about swimming. It’s the one thing we haven’t considered yet, Rafael. That there might be a third way: a choice between accepting the disciples and letting the ocean die.’

‘I don’t see what that could be.’

‘Nor do I. But the ocean might find a way. It just needs the knowledge of what’s at stake.’ She stroked her forearm again, marvelling at the sudden eruption of fungal patterns. They must have been latent for many years, but now something had caused them to flare up. Even in daylight, emeralds and blues shone against her skin. She suspected that the biochemical changes had been triggered when she entered the water to snatch the globe. Given that, she could not help but view it as a message. An invitation, perhaps. Or was it a warning, reminding her of the dangers of swimming? She had no idea, but for her peace of mind, however—and given the lack of alternatives—she chose to view it as an invitation. But she did not dare wonder who was inviting her. ‘You think the ocean can understand external events?’ Weir asked. ‘You said it yourself, Rafael: the night they told us the ship was coming, somehow that information reached the sea—via a swimmer’s memories, perhaps. And the Jugglers knew then that this was something significant. Perhaps it was Ormazd’s personality, rising to the fore.’ Or maybe it was merely the vast, choral mind of the ocean, apprehending only that something was going to happen. ‘Either way,’ Naqi said. ‘It still makes me think that there might be a chance.’

‘I only wish I shared your optimism.’

‘Give me this chance, Rafael. That’s all I ask.’ Naqi removed her clothes, less concerned that Weir would see her naked now than that she should have something to wear when she emerged. But although Weir studied her with unconcealed fascination, there was nothing prurient about it. What commanded his attention, Naqi realised, were the elaborate and florid patterning of the fungal markings. They curled and twined about her chest and abdomen and thighs, shining with a hypnotic intensity. ‘You’re changing,’ he said. ‘We all change,’ Naqi answered. Then she stepped from the side of the boat, into the water. The process of descending into the ocean’s embrace was much as she remembered it that first time, with Mina beside her. She willed her body to submit to the biochemical invasion, forcing down her fear and apprehension, knowing that she had been through this once before and that it was something that she could survive again. She did her best not to think about what it would mean to survive beyond this day, when all else had been shattered, every certainty crumbled. Mina came to her with merciful speed. Naqi? I’m here. Oh, Mina, I’m here. There was terror and there was joy, alloyed together. It’s been so long. Naqi felt her sister’s presence edge in and out of proximity and focus. Sometimes she appeared to share the same physical space. At other times she was scarcely more than a vague feeling of attentiveness. How long? Two years, Mina. Mina’s answer took an eternity to come. In that dreadful hiatus Naqi felt other minds crowd against her own, some of which were so far from human that she gasped at their oddity. Mina was only one of the conformal minds that had noticed her arrival, and not all were as benignly curious or glad. It doesn’t feel like two years to me. How long? Days ... hours ... It changes. What do you remember? Mina’s presence danced around Naqi. I remember what I remember. That we swam, when we weren’t meant to. That something happened to me, and I never left the ocean. You became part of it, Mina. The triumphalism of her answer shocked Naqi to the marrow. Yes! You wanted this? You would want it, if you knew what it was like. You could have stayed, Naqi. You could have let it happen to you, the way it happened to me. We were so alike. I was scared. Yes, I remember. Naqi knew that she had to get to the heart of things. Time was passing differently here—witness Mina’s confusion about how long she had been part of the ocean—and there was no telling how patient Weir would be. He might not wait until Naqi reemerged before deploying the Juggler killer. There was another mind, Mina. We encountered it, and it scared me. Enough that I had to leave the ocean. Enough that I never wanted to go back. You’ve come back now. It’s because of that other mind. It belonged to a man called Ormazd. Something very bad is going to happen because of him. One way or the other. There was a moment then that transcended anything Naqi had experienced before. She felt herself and Mina become inseparable. She could not only not say where one began and the other ended, but it was entirely pointless to even think in those terms. If only fleetingly, Mina had become her. Every thought, every memory, was open to equal scrutiny by both of them.

Naqi understood what it was like for Mina. Her sister’s memories were rapturous. She might only have sensed the passing of hours or days, but that belied the richness of her experience since merging with the ocean. She had exchanged experience with countless alien minds, drinking in entire histories beyond normal human comprehension. And in that moment of sharing, Naqi appreciated something of the reason for her sister having been taken in the first place. Conformals were the ocean’s way of managing itself. Now and then the maintenance of the vaster archive of static minds required stewardship—the drawing-in of independent intelligences. Mina had been selected and utilised, and given rewards beyond imagining for her efforts. The ocean had tapped the structure of her intelligence at a subconscious level. Only now and then had she ever felt that she was being directly petitioned on a matter of importance. But Ormazd’s mind ...? Mina had seen Naqi’s memories now. She would know exactly what was at stake, and she would know exactly what that mind represented. I was always aware of him. He wasn’t always there—he liked to hide himself—but even when he was absent, he left a shadow of himself. I even think he might be the reason the ocean took me as a conformal. It sensed a coming crisis. It knew Ormazd had something to do with it. It had made a terrible mistake by swallowing him. So it reached out for new allies, minds it could trust. Minds like Mina, Naqi thought. In that instant she did not know whether to admire the Pattern Jugglers or detest them for their heartlessness. Ormazd was contaminating it? His influence was strong. His force of personality was a kind of poison in its own right. The Pattern Jugglers knew that, I think. Why couldn’t they just eject his patterns? They couldn’t. It doesn’t work that way. The sea is a storage medium, but it has no self-censoring facility. If the individual minds detect a malign presence, they can resist it ... But Ormazd’s mind is human. There aren’t enough of us here to make a difference, Naqi. The other minds are too alien to recognise Ormazd for what he is. They just see a sentience. Who made the Pattern Jugglers, Mina? Answer me that, will you? She sensed Mina’s amusement. Even the Jugglers don’t know that, Naqi. Or why. You have to help us, Mina. You have to communicate the urgency of this to the rest of the ocean. I’m one mind amongst many, Naqi. One voice in the chorus. You still have to find a way. Please, Mina. Understand this, if nothing else. You could die. You could all die. I lost you once, but now I know you never really went away. I don’t want to have to lose you again, for good. You didn’t lose me, Naqi. I lost you. She hauled herself from the water. Weir was waiting where she had left him, with the intact globe still resting in his hand. The daylight shadows had moved a little, but not as much as she had feared. She made eye contact with Weir, wordlessly communicating a question. ‘The shuttle’s come closer. It’s flown over the node twice while you were under. I think I need to do this, Naqi.’ He had the globe between thumb and forefinger, ready to drop it into the water. She was shivering. Naqi pulled on her shorts and shirt, but she felt just as cold afterwards. The fungal marks were shimmering intensely; they appeared almost to hover above her skin. If anything they were shining more furiously than before she had swum. Naqi did not doubt that if she had lingered—if she had stayed with Mina—she would have become a conformal as well. It had always been in her, but it was only now that her time had come. ‘Please wait,’ Naqi said, her own voice sounding pathetic and childlike. ‘Please wait, Rafael.’

‘There it is again.’

The shuttle was a fleck of white sliding over the top of the nearest wall of Juggler biomass. It was five or six kilometres away, much closer than the last time Naqi had seen it. Now it came to a sudden sharp halt, hovering above the surface of the ocean as if it had found something of particular interest. ‘Do you think it knows we’re here?’

‘It suspects something,’ Weir said. The globe rolled between his fingers. ‘Look,’ Naqi said. The shuttle was still hovering. Naqi stood up to get a better view, nervous of making herself visible but desperately curious. Something was happening. She knew something was happening. Kilometres away, the sea was bellying up beneath the shuttle. The water was the colour of moss, supersaturated with micro-organisms. Naqi watched as a coil of solid green matter reached from the ocean, twisting and writhing. It was as thick as a building, spilling vast rivulets of water as it emerged. It extended upwards with astonishing haste, bifurcating and flexing like a groping fist. For a brief moment it closed around the shuttle. Then it slithered back into the sea with a titanic splash; a prolonged roar of spent energy. The shuttle continued to hover above the same spot, as if oblivious to what had just happened. Yet the manta-shaped craft’s white hull was lathered with various hues of green. And Naqi understood: what had happened to the shuttle was what had happened to Arviat, the city that drowned. She could not begin to guess the crime that Arviat had committed against the sea, the crime that had merited its destruction, but she could believe—now, at least—that the Jugglers had been capable of dragging it beneath the waves, ripping the main mass of the city away from the bladders that held it aloft. And of course such a thing would have to be kept maximally secret, known only to a handful of individuals. For otherwise no city would ever feel safe when the sea roiled and groaned beneath it. But a city was not a shuttle. Even if the Juggler material started eating away the fabric of the shuttle, it would still take hours to do any serious damage ... And that was assuming the Ultras had no better protection than the ceramic shielding used on Turquoise boats and machines ... But the shuttle was already tilting over. Naqi watched it pitch, attempt to regain stability and then pitch again. She understood, belatedly. The organic matter was clogging the shuttle’s whisking propulsion systems, limiting its ability to hover. The shuttle was curving inexorably closer to the sea, spiralling steeply away from the node. It approached the surface and then, just before the moment of impact, another misshapen fist of organised matter thrust from the sea, seizing the hull in its entirety. That was the last Naqi saw of it. A troubled calm fell on the scene. The sky overhead was unmarred by questing machinery. Only the thin whisper of smoke rising from the horizon, in the direction of the Moat, hinted of the day’s events. Minutes passed, and then tens of minutes. Then a rapid series of bright flashes strobed from beneath the surface of the sea itself. ‘That was the shuttle,’ Weir said, wonderingly. Naqi nodded. ‘The Jugglers are fighting back. This is more or less what I hoped would happen.’

‘You asked for this?’

‘I think Mina understood what was needed. Evidently she managed to convince the rest of the ocean, or at least this part of it.’

‘Let’s see.’ They searched the airwaves again. The comsat network was dead, or silent. Even fewer cities were transmitting now. But those that were—those that had not been overrun by Ormazd’s disciples—told a frightening story. The ocean was clawing at them, trying to drag them into the sea. Weather patterns were shifting, entire storms being conjured into existence by the orchestrated circulation of vast ocean currents. It was happening in concentric waves, racing away from the precise point in the ocean where Naqi had swum. Some cities had already fallen into the sea, though it was not clear whether this had been brought about by the Jugglers themselves or because of damage to their vacuum-bladders. There were people in the water: hundreds, thousands of them. They were swimming, trying to stay afloat, trying not to drown. But what exactly did it mean to drown on Turquoise? ‘It’s happening all over the planet,’ Naqi said. She was still shivering, but now it was as much a shiver of awe as one of cold. ‘It’s denying itself to us by smashing our cities.’

‘Your cities never harmed it.’

‘I don’t think it’s really that interested in making a distinction between one bunch of people and another, Rafael. It’s just getting rid of us all, disciples or not. You can’t really blame it for that, can you?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Weir said. He cracked the globe, spilled its contents into the sea. Naqi knew there was nothing she could do now; there was no prospect of recovering the tiny black grains. She would only have to miss one, and it would be as bad as missing them all. The little black grains vanished beneath the olive surface of the water. It was done. Weir looked at her, his eyes desperate for forgiveness. ‘You understand that I had to do this, don’t you? It isn’t something I do lightly.’

‘I know. But it wasn’t necessary. The ocean’s already turned against us. Crane has lost. Ormazd has lost.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Weir said. ‘But I couldn’t take the chance that we might be wrong. At least this way I know for sure.’

‘You’ve murdered a world.’ He nodded. ‘It’s exactly what I came here to do. Please don’t blame me for it.’ Naqi opened the equipment locker where she had stowed the broken vial of Juggler toxin. She removed the flare pistol, snatched away its safety pin and pointed it at Weir. ‘I don’t blame you, no. Don’t even hate you for it.’ He started to say something, but Naqi cut him off. ‘But it’s not something I can forgive.’ She sat in silence, alone, until the node became active. The organic structures around her were beginning to show the same kinds of frantic rearrangement Naqi had seen within the Moat. There was a cold sharp breeze from the node’s heart. It was time to leave. She steered the boat away from the node, cautiously, still not completely convinced that she was safe from the delegates even though the first shuttle had been destroyed. Undoubtedly the loss of that craft would have been communicated to the others, and before very long some more of them would arrive, bristling with belligerence. The ocean might attempt to destroy the new arrivals, but this time the delegates would be profoundly suspicious. She brought the boat to a halt when she was a kilometre from the fringe of the node. By then it was running through the same crazed alterations she had previously witnessed. She felt the same howling wind of change. In a moment the end would come. The toxin would seep into the node’s controlling core, instructing the entire biomass to degrade itself to a lump of dumb vegetable matter. The same killing instructions would already be travelling along the internode tendril connections, winging their way over the horizon. Allowing for the topology of the network, it would only take fifteen or twenty hours for the message to reach every node on the planet. Within a day it would be over. The Jugglers would be gone, the information they’d encoded erased beyond recall. And Turquoise itself would begin to die at the same time, its oxygen atmosphere no longer maintained by the oceanic organisms. Another five minutes passed, then ten.

The node’s transformations were growing less hectic. She recalled this moment of false calm. It meant only that the node had given up trying to counteract the toxin, accepting the logical inevitability of its fate. A thousand times over this would be repeated around Turquoise. Towards the end, she guessed, there would be less resistance, for the sheer futility of it would have been obvious. The world would accept its fate. Another five minutes passed. The node remained. The structures were changing, but only gently. There was no sign of the emerging mound of undifferentiated matter she had seen before. What was happening? She waited another quarter of an hour and then steered the boat back towards the node, bumping past Weir’s floating corpse on the way. Tentatively, an idea was forming in her mind. It appeared that the node had absorbed the toxin without dying. Was it possible that Weir had made a mistake? Was it possible that the toxin’s effectiveness depended only on it being used once? Perhaps. There still had to be tendril connections between the Moat and the rest of the ocean at the time that the first wave of transformations had taken place. They had been severed later—either when the doors closed, or by some autonomic process within the extended organism itself—but until that moment, there would still have been informational links with the wider network of nodes. Could the dying nodes have sent sufficient warning that the other nodes were now able to find a strategy for protecting themselves? Again, perhaps. It never paid to take anything for granted where the Jugglers were concerned. She parked the boat by the node’s periphery. Naqi stood up and removed her clothes for the final time, certain that she would not need them again. She looked down at herself, astonished at the vivid tracery of green that now covered her body. On one level, the evidence of alien cellular invasion was quite horrific. On another, it was startlingly beautiful. Smoke licked from the horizon. Machines clawed through the sky, hunting nervously. She stepped to the edge of the boat, tensing herself at the moment of commitment. Her fear subsided, replaced by an intense, loving calm. She stood on the threshold of something alien, but in place of terror what she felt was only an imminent sense of homecoming. Mina was waiting for her below. Together, nothing could stop them. Naqi smiled, spread her arms and returned to the sea.

Understanding Space And Time

“Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids”

—

Part One

—

Something very strange appeared in the outer recreation bubble on the day that Katrina Solovyova died. When he saw it, John Renfrew rushed back to the infirmary where he had left her. Solovyova had been slipping in and out of lucidity for days, but when he arrived he was glad to find her still conscious. She seldom turned her face away from the picture window, transfixed by the silent and vast twilight landscape beyond the armoured glass. Hovering against the foothills of Pavonis Mons, her reflection was all highlights, as if sketched in bold strokes of chalk.

Renfrew caught his breath before speaking.

“I’ve seen a piano.”

At first he did not think she had heard him. Then the reflection of Solovyova’s mouth formed words.

“You’ve seen a what?”

“A piano,” Renfrew said, laughing. “A big, white, Bösendorfer grand.”

“You’re crazier than me.”

“It was in the recreation bubble,” Renfrew said. “The one that took a lightning hit last week. I think it fried something. Or unfried something, maybe. Brought something back to life.”

“A piano?”

“It’s a start. It means things aren’t totally dead. That there’s a glimmer of ... something.”

“Well, isn’t that the nicest timing,” Solovyova said.

With a creak of his knees Renfrew knelt by her bedside. He’d connected Solovyova to a dozen or so medical monitors, only three of which were working properly. They hummed, hissed and bleeped with deadening regularity. When it began to seem like music—when he started hearing hidden harmonies and tonal shifts—Renfrew knew it was time to get out of the infirmary. That was why he had gone to the recreation bubble: there was no music there, but at least he could sit in silence.

“Nicest timing?” he said.

“I’m dying. Nothing that happens now will make any difference to me.”

“But maybe it would,” Renfrew said. “If the rec systems are capable of coming back on line, what else might be? Maybe I could get the infirmary back up and running ... the diagnostic suite ... the drug synth ...” He gestured at the banks of dead grey monitors and cowled machines parked against the wall. They were covered in scuffed decals and months of dust.

“Pray for another lightning strike, you mean?”

“No ... not necessarily.” Renfrew chose his words with care. He did not want to offer Solovyova false optimism, but the apparition had made him feel more positive than at any time he could remember since the Catastrophe. They could not unmake the deaths of all the other colonists, or unmake the vastly larger death that even now it was difficult mention. But if some of the base systems they had assumed broken could be brought back, he might at least find a way to keep Solovyova alive.

“What, then?”

“I don’t know. But now that I know that things aren’t as bad as we feared ...” He trailed off. “There are lots of things I could try again. Just because they didn’t work first time ...”

“You probably imagined the piano.”

“I know I didn’t. It was a genuine projection, not a hallucination.”

“And this piano ...” The reflection froze momentarily. “How long did it last, Renfrew? I mean, just out of curiosity?”

“Last?”

“That’s what I asked.”

“It’s still there,” he said. “It was still there when I left. Like it was waiting for someone to come and play it.”

The figure in the bed moved slightly.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I can’t show you, Solovyova. I wish I could, but ...”

“I’ll die? I’m going to die anyway, so what difference does it make?” She paused, allowing the melancholic chorus of the machines to swell and fill the room. “Probably by the end of the week. And all I’ve got to look forward to is the inside of this room or the view out this window. At least let me see something different.”

“Is this what you really want?”

Solovyova’s reflection tipped in acknowledgement. “Show me the piano, Renfrew. Show me you aren’t making this shit up.”

He thought about it for a minute, perhaps two, and then dashed back to the recreation bubble to check that the piano was still there. The journey took several minutes even at a sprint, through sunken tunnels and window-lined connecting bridges, up and down grilled ramps, through ponderous internal airlocks and sweltering aeroponics labs, taking this detour or that to avoid a blown bubble or failed airlock.

Parts of the infrastructure creaked ominously as he passed through. Here and there his feet crunched through the sterile red dust that was always finding ways to seep through seals and cracks. Everything was decaying, falling apart. Even if the dead had been brought back to life the base would not have been able to support more than a quarter of their number. But the piano represented something other than the slow grind of entropy. If one system had survived apparent failure, the same might be true of others.

He reached the bubble, his eyes closed as he crossed the threshold. He half expected the piano to be gone, never more than a trick of the mind. Yet there it was: still manifesting, still hovering a few inches from the floor. Save for that one suggestion of ghostliness, it appeared utterly solid, as real as anything else in the room. It was a striking pure white, polished to a lambent gloss. Renfrew strode around it, luxuriating in the conjunction of flat planes and luscious curves. He had not noticed this detail before, but the keys were still hidden under the folding cover.

He admired the piano for several more minutes, forgetting his earlier haste. It was as beautiful as it was chilling.

Remembering Solovyova, he returned to the infirmary.

“You took your time,” she said.

“It’s still there, but I had to be sure. You certain you want to see it?”

“I haven’t changed my mind. Show me the damned thing.”

With great gentleness he unplugged the vigilant machines and wheeled them aside. He could not move the bed, so he took Solovyova from it and placed her in a wheelchair. He had long grown accustomed to how frail human bodies felt in Martian gravity, but the ease with which he lifted her was shocking, and a reminder of how close to death she was.

He’d hardly known her before the Catastrophe. Even in the days that followed—as the sense of isolation closed in on the base, and the first suicides began—it had taken a long time for them to drift together. It had happened at a party, the one that the colonists had organised to celebrate the detection of a radio signal from Earth; originating from an organised band of survivors in New Zealand. In New Zealand they had still had something like a government, something like society, with detailed plans for long-term endurance and reconstruction. And for a little while it had seemed that the survivors might—by some unexplained means—have acquired immunity to the weaponised virus that had started scything its way through the rest of humanity in June 2038.

They hadn’t. It just took a little longer than average to wipe them out.

Renfrew pushed her along the tortuous route that led back to the bubble.

“Why a ... what did you call it?”

“A Bösendorfer. A Bösendorfer grand piano. I don’t know. That’s just what it said.”

“Something it dragged up from its memory? Was it making any music?”

“No. Not a squeak. The keyboard was hidden under a cover.”

“There must be someone to play it,” Solovyova said.

“That’s what I thought.” He pushed her onward. “Music would make a difference, at least. Wouldn’t it?”

“Anything would make a difference.”

Except not for Solovyova, he thought. Very little was going to make a difference for Solovyova from this point on.

“Renfrew ...” Solovyova said, her tone softer than before. “Renfrew, when I’m gone ... you’ll be all right, won’t you?”

“You shouldn’t worry about me.”

“It wouldn’t be human not to. I’d change places if I could.”

“Don’t be daft.”

“You were a good man. You didn’t deserve to be the last of us.”

Renfrew tried to sound dignified. “Some might say being the last survivor is a sort of privilege.”

“But not me. I don’t envy you. I know for a fact I couldn’t handle it.”

“Well, I can. I looked at my psychological evaluation. Practical, survivor mentality, they said.”

“I believe it,” Solovyova said. “But don’t let it get to you. Understand? Keep some self respect. For all of us. For me.”

He knew exactly what she meant by that.

The recreation bubble loomed around the curve in the corridor. There was a moment of trepidation as they neared, but then he saw the white corner of the floating piano, still suspended in the middle of the room, and sighed with relief.

“Thank God,” he said. “I didn’t imagine it.”

He pushed Solovyova into the bubble, halting the wheelchair before the hovering apparition. Its immense mass reminded him of a chiselled cloud. The polished white gleam was convincing, but there was no sign of their own reflections within it. Solovyova said nothing, merely staring into the middle of the room.

“It’s changed,” he said. “Look. The cover’s gone up. You can see the keys. They look so real ... I could almost reach out and touch them. Except I can’t play the piano.” He grinned back at the woman in the wheelchair. “Never could. Never had a musical bone in my body.”

“There is no piano, Renfrew.”

“Solovyova?”

“I said, there is no piano. The room is empty.” Her voice was dead, utterly drained of emotion. She did not even sound disappointed or annoyed. “There is no piano. No grand piano. No Bösendorfer grand piano. No keyboard. No nothing. You’re hallucinating, Renfrew. You’re imagining the piano.”

He looked at her in horror. “I can still see it. It’s here.” He reached out to the abstract white mass. His fingers punched through its skin, into thin air. But he had expected that.

He could still see the piano.

It was real.

“Take me back to the infirmary, Renfrew. Please.” Solovyova paused. “I think I’m ready to die now.”

* * * *

He put on a suit and buried Solovyova beyond the outer perimeter, close to the mass grave where he had buried the last survivors when Solovyova had been too weak to help. The routine felt familiar enough, but when Renfrew turned back to the base he felt a wrenching sense of difference. The low-lying huddle of soil-covered domes, tubes and cylinders hadn’t changed in any tangible way, except that it was now truly uninhabited. He was walking back toward an empty house, and even when Solovyova had been ill—even when Solovyova had been only half present—that had never been the case.

The moment reached a kind of crescendo. He considered his options. He could return to the base, alone, and survive months or years on the dwindling resources at his disposal. Tharsis Base would keep him alive indefinitely provided he did not fall ill: food and water were not a problem, and the climate recycling systems were deliberately rugged. But there would be no companionship. No network, no music or film, no television or VR. Nothing to look forward to except endless bleak days until something killed him.

Or he could do it here, now. All it would take was a twist of his faceplate release control. He had already worked out how to override the safety lock. A few roaring seconds of pain and it would all be over. And if he lacked the courage to do it that way—and he thought he probably did—then he could sit down and wait until his air-supply ran low.

There were a hundred ways he could do it, if he had the will.

He looked at the base, stark under the pale butterscotch of the sky. The choice was laughably simple. Die here now, or die in there, much later. Either way, his choice would be unrecorded. There would be no eulogies to his bravery, for there was no one left to write eulogies.

“Why me?” he asked, aloud. “Why is it me who has to go through with this?”

He’d felt no real anger until that moment. Now he felt like shouting, but all he could do was fall to his knees and whimper. The question circled in his head, chasing its own tail.

“Why me,” he said. “Why is it me? Why the fuck is it me who has to ask this question?”

Finally he fell silent. He remained frozen in that position, staring down through the scuffed glass of his faceplate at the radiation-blasted soil between his knees. For five or six minutes he listened to the sound of his own sobbing. Then a small, polite voice advised him that he needed to return to the base to replenish his air supply. He listened to that voice as it shifted from polite to stern, then from stern to strident, until it was screaming into his skull, the boundary of his faceplate flashing brilliant red.

Then he stood up, already light-headed, already feeling the weird euphoric intoxication of asphyxia, and made his ambling way back toward the base.

He had made a choice. Like it said in the psych report, he was a practical-minded, survivor type. He would not give in.

Not until it got a lot harder.

* * * *

Renfrew made it through his first night alone.

It was easier than he had expected, although he was careful not to draw any comfort from that. He knew that there would be much harder days and nights ahead. It might happen a day or a week or even a year from now, but when it did he was sure that his little breakdown outside would shrink to insignificance. For now he was stumbling through fog, fully aware that a precipice lay before him, and also that he would have to step over that precipice if he hoped to find anything resembling mental equilibrium and true acceptance.

He wandered the corridors and bubbles of the base. Everything looked shockingly familiar. Books were where he had left them; the coffee cups and dishes still waiting to be washed. The views through the windows hadn’t become mysteriously more threatening overnight, and he had no sense that the interior of the base had become less hospitable. There were no strange new sounds to make the back of his neck tingle; no shadows flitting at the corner of his eye, no blood freezing sense of scrutiny by an unseen watcher.

And yet ... and yet. He knew something was not quite right. After he had attended to his usual chores—cleaning this or that air filter, lubricating this or that seal, scrutinising the radio logs to make sure no one had attempted contact from home—he again made his way to the recreation bubble.

The piano was still there, but something was different about it today. Now there was a single gold candelabra sitting above the keyboard. The candles burned, wavering slightly.

It was as if the piano was readying itself.

Renfrew leaned through the piano and passed his fingers through the candle flames. They were as insubstantial as the instrument itself. Even so, he could not help but sniff the tips of his fingers. His brain refused to accept that the flames were unreal, and expected a whiff of carbon or charred skin.

Renfrew remembered something.

He had spent so long in the base, so long inside its electronic cocoon, that until this moment he had forgotten precisely how the bubble worked. The things that appeared inside it were not true holograms, but projections mapped into his visual field. They were woven by tiny implants buried in the eye, permitting the images to have a sense of solidity that would have been impossible with any kind of projected hologram. The surgical procedure to embed the implants had taken about thirty seconds, and from that moment on he had never really needed to think about it. The implants allowed the base staff to digest information in vastly richer form than allowed by flat screens and clumsy holographics. When Renfrew examined a mineral sample, for instance, the implant would overlay his visual impression of the rock with an X-ray tomographic view of the rock’s interior. The implants had also permitted access to recreational recordings ... but Renfrew had always been too busy for that kind of thing. When the implants began to fail—they’d never been designed to last more than a year or two in vivo, before replacement—Renfrew had thought no more of the matter.

But what if his had started working again? In that case it was no wonder Solovyova had not been able to see the piano. Some projection system had decided to switch on again, accessing some random fragment from the entertainment archives, and his reactivated implant had chosen to allow him to see it.

It meant there was still a kind of hope.

“Hello.”

Renfrew flinched at the voice. The source of it was immediately obvious: a small man had appeared out of nowhere at the end of the piano. The small man stood for a moment, pivoting around as if to acknowledge a vast and distant invisible audience, his eyes—largely hidden behind ostentatious pink glasses—only meeting Renfrew’s for the briefest of instants. The man settled into a stool that had also appeared at the end of the piano, tugged up the sleeves of the plum paisley suit jacket he wore, and began to play the piano. The man’s fingers were curiously stubby, but they moved up and down the keyboard with a beguiling ease.

Transfixed, Renfrew listened to the man play. It was the first real music he had heard in two years. The man could have played the most uncompromisingly difficult exercise in atonality and it would still have sounded agreeable to Renfrew’s ears. But it was much easier than that. The man played the piano and sang a song; one that Renfrew recognised—albeit barely—from his childhood. It had been an old song even then, but one that was still played on the radio with some regularity. The man sang about a trip to Mars: a song about a man who did not expect to see home again.

The song concerned a rocket man.

* * * *

Renfrew maintained the ritual that he and Solovyova had established before her death. Once a week, without fail, he cocked an ear to Earth to see if anyone was sending.

The ritual had become less easy in recent weeks. The linkage between the antenna and the inside of the base was broken, so he had to go outside to perform the chore. It meant pre-breathing; it meant suiting up; it meant a desolate trudge from the airlock to the ladder on the side of the comms module, and then a careful ascent to the module’s roof, where the antenna was mounted on a turret-like plinth. He’d spend at least half an hour scooping handfuls of storm dust from the steering mechanism, before flipping open the cover on the manual control panel, powering up the system and tapping a familiar string of commands into the keyboard.

After a few moments the antenna would begin to move, grinding as it overcame the resistance of the dust that had already seeped into its innards. It swung and tilted on multiple axes, until the openwork mesh of the dish was locked onto the Earth. Then the system waited and listened, LEDs blinking on the status board, but none of them brightening to the hard, steady green that would mean the antenna had locked onto the expected carrier signal. Occasionally the lights would flicker green, as if the antenna was picking up ghost echoes from something out there, but they never lasted.

Renfrew had to keep trying. He wasn’t expecting rescue, not any more. He’d resigned himself to the idea that he was going to die on Mars, alone. But it would still be some comfort to know that there were survivors back on Earth; that there were still people who could begin to rebuild civilisation. Better still if they had the kindness to signal him, to let him know what was happening. Even if only a few thousand people had survived, it wouldn’t take much for one of them to remember the Mars colony, and wonder what was happening up there.

But Earth remained silent. Some part of Renfrew knew that there would never be a signal, no matter how many times he swung the dish around and listened. And one day soon the dish was simply not going to work, and he was not going to be able to repair it. Dutifully, when he had powered down the antenna and returned to the inside of the base, he made a neat entry in the communications log, signing his name at the top of the page.

On his rounds of the base, Renfrew made similar entries in many other logs. He noted breakdowns and his own ramshackle repair efforts. He took stock of spare parts and tools, entering the broken or life-expired items into the resupply request form. He noted the health of the plants in the aeroponics lab, sketching their leaves and marking the ebb and flow of various diseases. He kept a record of the Martian weather, as it tested the base’s integrity, and at the back of his mind he always imagined Solovyova nodding in approval, pleased with his stoic refusal to slide into barbarism.

But in all his bookkeeping, Renfrew never once referred to the man at the piano. He couldn’t quite explain this omission, but something held him back from mentioning the apparition. He felt he could rationalise the appearance of the piano, even of the personality that was programmed to play it, but he still wasn’t sure that any of it was real.

Not that that stopped the piano man from appearing.

Once or twice a day, most days, he assumed existence at the piano and played a song or two. Sometimes Renfrew was there when it happened; sometimes he was elsewhere in the base and he heard the music starting up. Always he dropped whatever he was doing and raced to the recreation bubble, and listened.

The tunes were seldom the same from day to day, and the small man himself never looked quite the same. His clothes were always different, but there was more to it than that. Sometimes he had a shapeless mop of auburn hair. At other times he was balding or concealed his crown beneath a variety of ostentatious hats. He frequently wore glasses of elaborate, ludicrous design.

The man had never introduced himself, but once or twice Renfrew felt that he was close to remembering his name. He racked his memory for the names of twentieth century musicians, feeling sure it would come to him eventually.

In the meantime he found that it helped to have someone to talk to. Between songs the man would sometimes sit silently, hands folded in his lap, as if waiting for some instruction or request from Renfrew. That was when Renfrew talked aloud, unburdening himself of whatever thoughts had been spinning around in his skull since the last visitation. He told the man about the problems with the base, about his loneliness, about the despair he felt every time the antenna failed to pick up anything from Earth. And the man simply sat and listened, and when Renfrew was done—when he had said his piece-the man would unlace his fingers and start playing something.

Now and then the man did speak, but he never seemed to be addressing Renfrew so much as a larger unseen audience. He’d introduce the songs, tell a few jokes between numbers, throw out an offer to take requests. Renfrew sometimes answered, sometimes tried to persuade the pianist to play one of the songs he’d already performed, but nothing he said seemed to reach through to the man.

But still: it was better than nothing. Although the style of the music never varied greatly, and one or two of the songs began occasionally to chafe at Renfrew’s nerves, he was generally happiest when the music was playing. He liked A Song For Guy, I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues, Tiny Dancer. When the piano man was playing, he did not feel truly alone.

* * * *

Renfrew made a point of tending to Solovyova’s grave. He cared about the other dead, but Solovyova mattered more: she’d been the last to go, the last human being Renfrew would ever know in his life. It would be too much work to keep the dust from covering the mass burial site, but he could at least do something for Solovyova. Sometimes he detoured to clean her grave when he was outside on the antenna duty; other times he pre-breathed and suited up just for Solovyova, and always when he returned to the base he felt cleansed, renewed of purpose, determined that he could get through the days ahead.

That feeling didn’t last long. But at least tending the grave kept the darkness at bay for a while.

There were moments when his stratagems failed, when the reality of his situation came crashing back in its full existential horror, but when that happened he was able to slam a mental door almost as soon as the scream had begun. As time had passed he had found that he became more adept at it, so that the moments of horror became only instants, like blank white frames spliced into the movie of his life.

When he was outside, he often found himself watching the sky, especially when the cold sun was low and twilight stars began to stud the butterscotch sky. A thought occurred to him, clean and bright and diamond hard: humanity might be gone, but did that necessarily mean he was the last intelligent creature in the universe? What if there was someone else out there?

How did that change the way he felt?

And what if there was in fact no one else out there at all: just empty light years, empty parsecs, empty megaparsecs, all the way out to furthest, faintest galaxies, teetering on the very edge of the visible universe?

How did that make him feel?

Cold. Alone. Fragile.

Curiously precious.

—

Part Two

—

Weeks slipped into months, months slipped into a long Martian year. The base kept functioning, despite Renfrew’s grimmest expectations. Certain systems actually seemed to be more stable than at any time since Solovyova’s death, as if they’d grudgingly decided to cooperate in keeping him alive. For the most part, Renfrew was glad that he did not have to worry about the base failing him. It was only in his darkest moments that he wished for the base to kill him, swiftly, painlessly, perhaps when he was already asleep and dreaming of better times. There’d be nothing undignified about going out that way; nothing that violated the terms of his vow with Solovyova. She wouldn’t think badly of him for wishing death on those terms.

But the fatal failure never came, and for many days in a given month Renfrew managed not to think about suicide. He supposed that he had passed through the anger and denial phases of his predicament, into something like acceptance.

It helped to have someone to talk to.

He spoke to the piano man a lot now, quite unselfconsciously. The odd thing was that the piano man spoke back, too. On one level, Renfrew was well aware that the responses were entirely in his imagination; that his brain had started filling in the other half of the one-sided conversation, based around the speech patterns that the piano man used between songs. On another level the responses seemed completely real and completely outside his own control, as if he no longer had access to the part of his brain that was generating them. A form of psychosis, perhaps: but even if that were the case, it was benign, even comforting, in its effects. If the thing that kept him sane was a little self-administered madness, confined solely to the piano man, then that seemed a small price to pay.

He still didn’t know the man’s real name. It was nearly there, but Renfrew could never quite bring it to mind. The piano man offered no clues. He introduced his songs by name, often spinning elaborate stories around them, but never had cause to say who he was. Renfrew had tried to access the rec system’s software files, but he’d given up as soon as he was confronted by screen after screen of scrolling possibilities. He could have delved deeper, but he was wary of breaking the fragile spell that had brought the piano man into existence in the first place. Renfrew reckoned it was better not to know, than lose that one flicker of companionship.

“It’s not exactly a rich human life,” Renfrew said.

“Probably not.” Piano Man glanced at the window, out towards the point where the others had been buried. “But you have to admit. It’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.”

“I suppose so,” Renfrew said doubtfully. “But what am I meant to do with the rest of my life? I can’t just mope around here until I drop dead.”

“Well, that’s always one possibility. But what about doing something a little bit more constructive?”

Piano Man fingered the keys, sketching a tune.

“Learn to play the piano? No point, is there? Not while you’re around.”

“Don’t count on me always being here, luv. But I was thinking more along the lines of a bit of reading. There are books, aren’t there? I mean real ones.”

Renfrew imagined Piano Man miming the opening of a book. He nodded in return, without much enthusiasm. “Nearly a thousand.”

“Must have cost a bomb to bring them here.”

“They didn’t—not most of them, anyway. They were printed locally, using recycled organic matter. The printing and binding was totally automatic, and you could ask for a copy of just about any book that had ever been printed. Of course it doesn’t work now ... the thousand is all we’ve got left.”

“You already know this, Renfrew. Why are you telling me?”

“Because you asked.”

“OK. Fair enough.” Piano Man pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his little nub of a nose. “A thousand books, though: that should keep you going for a while.”

Renfrew shook his head. He had already glanced through the books and he knew that there were a lot less than a thousand that were of any interest to him. Most of the books had been produced purely for recreational value, since the technical journals and documentation had always been available for consultation via the optic implants or handhelds. At least two hundred volumes were children’s books or juvenile material. Another three hundred were in Russian, French, Japanese or some other language he did not understand. He had time, but not that much time.

“So there are how many left—what? Five hundred or so that you might want to read?”

“It isn’t that easy either,” Renfrew said. “I tried reading fiction. Bad mistake. It was too depressing, reading about other people going about their lives before the accident.”

Piano Man peered at him over the rims of his glasses. “Fussy bugger aren’t you. So what’s left if we throw out the fiction?”

“It doesn’t get much better. Travelogues ... historical biographies ... atlases and books on natural history ... all any of it does is remind me of what I’m never going to see again. Never another rainstorm. Never another bird, never another ocean, never another ...”

“OK, point made. Fine: throw out the coffee table books—guests are going to be a bit thin on the ground anyway. What does that leave us with?”

Renfrew had done exactly that, his pile of books becoming smaller. There were philosophical texts: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations; Sartre’s Being and Nothingness; Foucault’s The Order of Things; a dozen others.

“Who had those printed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Must have been a right lonely sod, whoever he was. Still; did you make any progress with them?”

“I gave them my best shot.”

Renfrew had flicked through them, allured and at the same time appalled at the density of the philosophical speculation within them. On one level, they dealt with the most fundamental of human questions. But the books were so detached from anything that Renfrew considered mundane reality that he could consult them without triggering the episodes of loss and horror that came with the other books. That was not to say that he dismissed the arguments in the books as irrelevant, but because the books dealt with human experience in the mass there was far less than pain than when Renfrew was forced to consider a specific individual other than himself. He could deal with the thought of losing the rest of humanity.

It was the idea of losing anyone specific that cut him open.

“So the heavy German guys weren’t a total waste of time. All right. What else?”

“Well, there was a Bible,” Renfrew said.

“Read it much?”

“Religiously.” Renfrew shrugged. “Sorry. Bad joke.”

“And now ... after the accident?”

“I must admit I’ve started thinking about some things I never thought about before. Why we’re here. Why I’m here. What it all means. What it’ll all mean when I’m gone. That doesn’t mean I expect to find any useful answers.”

“Maybe you’re not looking in quite the right place. What else was left in your pile?”

“Scientific stuff,” Renfrew said. “Mathematics, quantum theory, relativity, cosmology ...”

“I thought you told me all that stuff was available on the handhelds?”

“These are more like textbooks. Not bang up to date, but not horribly out of date either. Someone’s idea of light reading.”

“Looks like you’re stuck with them, in that case. They shouldn’t be too daunting, should they? I thought you were a scientist as well.”

“A geologist,” Renfrew told him. “And you don’t need much tensor algebra to study rocks.”

“You can always learn. You’ve got plenty of time. And—let’s face it—it has to be easier than Japanese, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so. You still haven’t told me why I should bother.”

Piano Man looked at him with sudden seriousness, the mirrored facets of his glasses like holes punched through to some burnished silver realm. “Because of what you just said. Because of the questions you want answered.”

“You think a load of physics books is going to make a difference?”

“That’s up to you. It’s all a question of how much you want to understand. How deep you want to go.”

Piano Man turned back to the keyboard and started playing Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting.

* * * *

Piano Man was right. It was a question of how deep he wanted to go.

But surely there was more to it than that. Something else was spurring him on. It felt like a weird sense of obligation, an onus that weighed upon him with pressing, judicial force. He was certain now that he was the last man alive, having long since abandoned hope that anyone was left on Earth. Was it not therefore almost required of him to come to some final understanding of what it meant to be human, achieving some final synthesis of all the disparate threads in the books before him? There could only be one witness to his success, he knew, but it seemed that if he were to fail he would be letting down the billions who had come before him. He could almost feel the weight of their expectation reaching to him from the past, urging him to come to that difficult understanding that had always eluded them. They were dead but he was still alive, and now they were looking over his shoulder, anxiously waiting to see how he solved the puzzle that had bettered them.

“Hey, genius?” Piano Man asked, a week into his study. “Solved the mysteries of the universe yet?”

“Don’t be silly. I’ve only just begun.”

“OK. But I take it you’ve made at least a smidgeon of progress.” Piano Man wore a sparkling white suit and enormous star-shaped spectacles. He was grinning a lot and playing some of his weaker material.

“Depends what you mean by progress,” Renfrew said. “If you mean absorbing what I’ve read, and not being thrown by anything so far ...” He shrugged. “In that case, so far it’s been a piece of piss.”

“Ah-ha.”

“But I’m under no illusions that it’s going to stay that way. In fact I’m well aware that it’s going to get a lot harder. So far all I’m doing is catching up. I haven’t even begun to think about moving beyond the existing theories.”

“All right. No point trying to run before you can crawl.”

“Precisely.”

Piano Man swept his fingers down the keys in an exuberant glissando. “But you can still tell me what you’ve learned, can’t you?”

“Are you sure you’re interested?”

“Of course I’m interested, luv. Why else would I ask?”

* * * *

He told Piano Man what he had learned so far.

He had read about the dual histories of cosmology and quantum mechanics, two braids of thought that had their origins in the early twentieth century. The one dealt with the vast and ancient, the other with the microscopic and ephemeral. Cosmology encompassed galaxies and superclusters of galaxies, Hubble flows and the expansion of the universe. Quantum mechanics dealt with the fizzing, indeterminate cauldron of subatomic reality, where things could be in more than one place at once and where apparently rock-solid concepts like distance and the one-way flow of time became almost obscenely pliant.

Handling the concepts of classical cosmology required an imaginative leap, and the ability to think of space and time as facets of the same thing. But once he had made that mental adjustment, which became slightly easier with practise, Renfrew found that the rest was merely a question of elaboration of scale and complexity. It was like holding the architecture of a vast, dark cathedral in his skull. At first it required a supreme effort of will to imagine the basic components of the building: the choir, the nave, the transepts, the spire. Gradually, however, these major architectural elements became fixed in his mind and he was able to start concentrating on the embellishments, the buttresses and gargoyles. Once he was comfortable with the classical cosmological model he found it easy enough to revise his mental floor plan to accommodate inflationary cosmology and the various models that had succeeded it. The scales became vaster, the leaps of perspective all the more audacious, but he was able to envisage things within some kind of metaphoric framework, whether it was the idea of galaxies painted on the skin of an expanding balloon, or the ‘phase transition’ of water thawing in a frozen swimming pool.

This was not the case with quantum mechanics. Very quickly, Renfrew realised that the only tool for understanding the quantum realm was mathematics; all else failed. There were no convenient metaphors from everyday human experience to assist with the visualisation of wave-particle duality, the Heisenberg principle, quantum non-locality, or any of the other paradoxical properties of the microscopic world. The human mind had simply not evolved the appropriate mental machinery to deal with quantum concepts in the abstract. Trying to ‘understand’ any of it in workaday terms was futile.

Renfrew would have found this hard to accept had he not been in good company. Almost all of the great thinkers who had worked on quantum mechanics had been troubled by this to one degree or another. Some had accepted it, while others had gone to the grave with the nagging suspicion that a layer of familiar, Newtonian order lay beneath the shifting uncertainties of QM.

Even if quantum physics was ‘correct’, how did that fuzzy view of reality join up with the hard-edged concepts of General Relativity? The two theories were astoundingly successful at predicting the behaviour of the universe within their own specified areas of application, but all attempts to unify them had collapsed in failure. QM produced absurd results when applied to the kinds of macroscopic objects encountered in the real world: cats, boxes, Bösendorfer grand pianos, galactic superclusters. GR collapsed when it was used to probe the very small, whether it was the universe an instant after the Big Bang, or the infinitely dense, infinitely compact kernel of a black hole.

Thinkers had spent three quarters of a century chasing that fabled unification, without success. But what if all the pieces had been in place at the time of the Catastrophe, and all that was needed was someone to view them with a fresh eye?

Some chance, Renfrew thought to himself. But again he smiled. Was it arrogant to think that he could achieve what no one had managed before? Perhaps: but given the uniqueness of his situation, nothing seemed improbable. And even if he did not succeed in that task, who was to say that he would not pick up one or two useful insights along the way?

At the very least it would give him something to do.

Still, he was getting ahead of himself. He had to understand QM before he could demolish it and replace it with something even more shiny and elegant, something which at the same time would be utterly consistent with every verified prediction of GR and at the same time nicely resolve all the niggling little details of observational mismatch ... while at the same time making testable predictions of its own.

“Are you sure you still want to go through with this?” Piano Man asked.

“Yes,” Renfrew told him. “More than ever.”

His companion looked out toward the burial zone. “Well, it’s your funeral.”

And then started playing Candle in the Wind.

* * * *

Renfrew powered up the antenna again. Once more it laboured into life, gears crunching against the resistance of infiltrated dust as it steered onto target. It was twilight and Earth was a bright star a few degrees above the horizon. The antenna locked on, Renfrew sighting along the main axis to confirm that the device really was pointed at the planet, and wasn’t misaligned due to some mechanical or software fault. As always, as near as he could judge, the dish was aimed at Earth.

He waited to see the lights on the status board, never quite able to kill the hope that the flickering signal LED would harden into a steady, insistent green, indicating that the antenna had picked up the expected carrier transmission.

Never quite able to kill the hope that someone was still sending.

But the board told him the same thing it always did. No dice: it wasn’t hearing anything beyond the random snap and crackle of interplanetary static.

Renfrew tapped the buttons to tell the dish to stow itself until his next visit. He stood back from the operating panel as the machinery moved, waiting to see it stow itself safely in readiness for his next dutiful visit.

Something shone on the panel: a momentary brightening of the LED. It only lasted an instant, but it caught Renfrew’s attention like a glint of gold in a prospector’s stream. He’d seen the antenna slew back countless times before, and he’d never seen more than a glimmer from the LED. It had been too hard, too clear, to be caused by random contamination, and he certainly hadn’t imagined it.

He told himself to be calm. If the LED had brightened when the antenna was locked onto Earth—well, that might be worth getting excited about. Might. But as it slewed back to stow, the antenna was just sweeping over empty sky.

All the same: plenty of cosmic radio signals out there, but none of them should be outputting in the narrow frequency range that the antenna was built to sniff. So maybe it had picked up something, unless the electronics were finally going south.

One way to tell.

Renfrew told the dish to track back onto Earth. He watched the board carefully this time, for he hadn’t been paying attention the first time the antenna had moved.

But there it was again: that same brightening. And now that he’d seen it twice, he saw that the LED brightened and dimmed in a systematic fashion.

Exactly as if the dish was tracking across a concentrated radio source.

Exactly as if something was out there.

Renfrew backed up and repeated the cycle, using manual override to guide the antenna onto the signal. He waggled the dish until he judged that the LED was at its brightest, then watched the steady green light with a growing and cautious amazement.

He noted the coordinates of the source, remembering that he had only chanced upon it by accident, and that the same slew operation wouldn’t necessarily pick up the mystery signal a day or a week from now. But if he recorded the position of the source now, and kept an eye on it from hour to hour and then day to day, he should at least be able to tell if it was an object moving inside the solar system, rather than some distant extragalactic radio source that just happened to look artificial.

Renfrew dared not invest too much hope in the detection. But if it was local, if it was coming from something within the system ... then it might have serious implications.

Especially for him.

* * * *

Renfrew’s excitement was tempered with caution. He vowed not to speak of the matter to Piano Man until he could be certain that the object was all that he hoped it might be: some tangible sign that someone had survived.

He’d expected that the discovery might make it hard for him to keep his mind on his studies, like a student distracted by something more interesting out the window. But to his surprise exactly the reverse was the case. Spurred on by the possibility that his future might hold surprises, that it was not necessarily pre-ordained that he would die alone and on Mars, Renfrew found that his intellectual curiosity was actually heightened. He redoubled his efforts to understand his predicament, gulping down pages of text that had seemed opaque and impenetrable only days before, but which now seemed lucid, transparent, even childlike in their simplicity. He found himself laughing, delighted with each tangible instance of progress towards his goal. He barely ate, and neglected some of the less pressing matters of base maintenance. And as the radio source refused to away—as it looked more and more like something approaching Mars—Renfrew was gripped by the sense that he was engaged in a race; that he was in some way obliged to complete his task before the source arrived, that they would be waiting to hear what he had to say.

By night he dreamed cosmology, his dreams becoming ever more epic and ambitious as his knowledge of the science improved. With a fever-like sense of repetition he recapitulated the entire history of the universe, from its first moment of existence to the grand and symphonic flourishing of intelligence.

At the beginning there was always nothingness, an absence not only of space and time but of existence itself, and yet at the same time he was aware of a trembling pre-potential, a feeling that the nothingness was poised on the cusp of an awesome instability, as if the unborn universe was itching to bring itself into being. With nightly inevitability it came: less an explosion than a kind of delicate clockwork unravelling, as cunningly-packed structures unwound with inflationary speed, crystallising out into brand new superluminally expanding vacuum. He dreamed of symmetries snapping apart, mass and energy becoming distinct, force and matter bootstrapping into complex structures. He dreamed of atoms stabilising, linking to form molecules and crystals, and from those building blocks he dreamed the simple beginnings of chemistry. He dreamed of galaxies condensing out of gas, of supermassive young suns flaring brilliantly and briefly within those galaxies. Each subsequent generation of stars was more stable than the last, and as they evolved and died they brewed metals and then coughed them into interstellar space. Out of those metals condensed worlds—hot and scalding at first, until comets rained onto their crusts, quenching them and given them oceans and atmospheres.

He dreamed of the worlds ageing. On some the conditions were right for the genesis of microbial life. But the universe had to get very much older and larger before he saw anything more interesting than that. Even then it was scarce, and the worlds where animals stalked ocean beds before flopping and oozing ashore had a precious, gemlike rarity.

Rarer still were the worlds where those animals staggered toward self-awareness. But once or twice in every billion years it did happen. Occasionally life even learned to use tools and language, and look towards the stars.

Toward the end of one particularly vivid cosmological dream Renfrew found himself focussing on the rarity of intelligence in the universe. He saw the galaxy spread out before him, spiral arms of creamy white flecked here and there by the ruby reds of cool supergiants or the dazzling kingfisher blues of the hottest stars. Dotted across the galaxy’s swirl were candles, the kind he remembered from birthday cakes. There were a dozen or so to start with, placed randomly in a rough band that was not too near the galactic core nor too close to the outer edges. The candles wavered slightly, and then—one by one—they began to go out.

Until only one was left. It was not even the brightest of those that had been there to begin with.

Renfrew felt a dreadful sense of that solitary candle’s vulnerability. He looked up and below the plane of the galaxy, out toward its neighbours, but he saw no signs of candles elsewhere.

He desperately wanted to cradle that remaining candle, shelter it from the wind and keep it burning. He heard Piano Man singing: And it seems to me you’ve lived your life ...

It went out.

All was void. Renfrew woke up shivering, and then raced to the suiting room and the airlock, and the waiting antenna, seeking contact with that radio signal.

* * * *

“I think I understand,” he told Piano Man. “Life has to be here to observe the universe, or it doesn’t have any meaning. It’s like the idea of the observer in quantum mechanics, collapsing an indeterminate system down to one possibility, opening the box and forcing the cat to chose between being dead or alive ...”

Piano Man took off his glasses and polished them on his sleeve. He said nothing for at least a minute, satisfying himself that the glasses were clean before carefully replacing them on his nose. “That’s what you think, is it? That’s your big insight? That the universe needs its own observer? Well, break out the bubbly. Houston, I think we have a result.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

“Right. And do how did this universe manage for fifteen billion years before we dropped by and provided an intelligent observer? Are you seriously telling me it was all fuzzy and indeterminate until the instant some anonymous caveman had a moment of cosmic epiphany? That suddenly the entire quantum history of every particle in the visible universe—right out to the furthest quasar—suddenly jumped to one state, and all because some thicko in a bearskin had his brain wired up slightly differently to his ancestor?”

Renfrew thought back to his dream of the galactic disk studded with candle light. “No ... I’m not saying that. There were other observers before us. We’re just the latest.”

“And these other observers—they were there all along, were they? An unbroken chain right back to the first instant of creation?”

“Well, no. Obviously the universe had to reach a certain minimum age before the preconditions for life—intelligent life—became established. But once that happened ...”

“It’s bollocks, though, isn’t it, luv? What difference does it make if there’s a gap of one second where the universe is unobserved, or ten billion years? None at all, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Look, I’m trying, all right? I’m doing my best. And anyway ...” Renfrew felt a sudden lurch of intuitive breakthrough. “We don’t need all those other observers, do we? We have observed the entire history of the universe, just by looking out at higher and higher redshifts, with increasing look-back times. It’s because the speed of light is finite. If it wasn’t, information from the very further parts of the universe would reach us immediately, and we’d have no way of viewing earlier epochs.”

“Fuck me man, you almost sound like a cosmologist.”

“I think I might have become one.”

“Just don’t make a career of it,” Piano Man said. He shook his head exasperatedly, then started playing Benny and the Jets.

* * * *

A week later he told him the news. Renfrew’s companion played the tentative ghost of a melody on the keyboard, something that hadn’t yet crystallised into true music.

“You waited until now to tell me?” Piano Man asked, with a pained, disappointed look.

“I had to be certain. I had to keep tracking the thing, making sure it was really out there, and then making sure it was something worth getting excited about.”

“And?”

Renfrew offered a smile. “I think it’s worth getting excited about.”

Piano Man played an icy line, dripping sarcastic bonhomie.

“Really.”

“I’m serious. It’s a navigation signal, a spacecraft beacon. It keeps repeating the same code, over and over again.” Renfrew leaned in closer: if he’d been able to lean on the phantom piano, he would have. “It’s getting stronger. Whatever’s putting out that signal is getting closer to Mars.”

“You don’t know that.”

“OK, I don’t. But there’s the Doppler to consider as well. The signal’s changing frequency a little from day to day. Put the two things together and you’ve got a ship making some kind of course correction, coming in for orbital insertion.”

“Good for you.”

Renfrew stepped back from the piano, surprised at his companion’s dismissive reaction.

“There’s a ship coming. Aren’t you happy for me?”

“Tickled pink, luv.”

“I don’t understand. This is what I’ve been waiting for all this time: news that someone’s survived, that it doesn’t all end here.” For the first time in their acquaintance, Renfrew raised his voice with Piano Man. “What the hell’s wrong with you? Are you jealous that you won’t be all the company I’m ever going to have?”

“Jealous? I don’t think so.”

Renfrew plunged his fist through the white nothingness of the piano. “Then show some reaction!”

Piano Man lifted his hands from the keyboard. He closed the keyboard cover very gently and then sat with his hands in his lap, demurely, just the way he’d been when Renfrew had first witnessed him. He looked at Renfrew, his expression blank, whatever message his eyes might have conveyed lost behind the star-shaped mirrors of his glasses.

“You want a reaction? Fine, I’ll give you one. You’re making a very, very serious mistake.”

“It’s no mistake. I know. I’ve double-checked checked everything ...”

“It’s still a mistake.”

“The ship’s coming.”

“Something’s coming. It may not be all that you expect.”

Renfrew’s fury boiled over. “Since when have you the faintest fucking idea what I expect or don’t expect? You’re just a piece of software.”

“Whatever you say, luv. But remind me: when was the last time software encouraged you to take a deep interest in the fundamental workings of the universe?”

Renfrew had no answer for that. But he had to say something. “They’re coming. I know they’re coming. Things are going to get better. You’ll see when the ship comes.”

“You’re going to do yourself a lot of harm.”

“As if you cared. As if you were capable of caring.”

“You’ve found a way to stay sane, Renfrew—even if that means admitting a tiny piece of piano-playing madness into your world. But there’s a cost to that sanity, and it isn’t moi. The cost is you can’t ever allow yourself an instant of hope, because hope is something that will always be crushed, crushed utterly, and in the crushing of hope you will be weakened forever, just as surely as if you’d mainlined some slow-acting poison.” Piano Man looked at Renfrew with a sudden, scholarly interest. “How many instants of defeat do you think you can take, big guy? One, two, three? From where I’m sitting I wouldn’t bet on three. I think three might easily kill you. I think two might get you on a shitty day.”

“Something’s coming,” Renfrew said, plaintively.

“I thought for a while you had the balls to get through this. I thought you’d banished hope, learned to keep it outside in the cold. I was wrong: you’ve let it in again. Now it’s going to stalk you, like a starved, half-crazed wolf.”

“It’s my wolf.”

“There’s still time to chase it away. Don’t let me down now, Renfrew. I’ve counting on you not to screw things up.”

* * * *

That night Renfrew dreamed not of cosmology, but of something stranger and more upsetting. It was not one of the dreams he used to have about the past, for he had trained himself not to have those any more; the sense of sadness and loss upon waking almost too much to bear. Nor was it one of the equally troubling ones about visitors, people coming down out of cold blue skies and landing near the base. When then came through the airlock they arrived with flowers—Hawaiian luas—and utterly pointless but lovingly gift-wrapped presents. Their faces were never familiar at first, but by the end of each visitation, just before he woke, they would always start to transmute into old friends and loved ones. Renfrew hadn’t yet trained himself not to have that kind of dream, and given the news about the radio signal he was sure at least one of them would haunt his sleep in the days ahead.

It was not that kind of dream. What happened in the dream was that Renfrew rose like a sleepwalker from his bed in the middle of the night and crept through the base to the same medical lab where Solovyova had died, and placed his head into one of the functioning scanners, conjuring a glowing lilac image of his skull on the main screen, and then emerged from the scanner and examined the readout to learn that his optic implants had been dead for years; that there was no possible way it was picking up the Bösendorfer, let alone the talking ghost that played it.

In the morning, when he woke from the dream, Renfrew couldn’t bring himself to visit the medical lab, in case he had already been there in the night.

* * * *

By day he kept a weather eye on the radio signal. It strengthened and Dopplered, moving quickly against the stars as it fell into the grasp of Mars. Then the signal altered, switching to a different, equally meaningless burst of repeating binary gibberish. Renfrew knew that it meant something, and intensified his vigil.

A day later, a meteor flared across the twilight sky, etching a fire trail, and dropped behind the closest range of hills under a dark umbrella of parachutes.

“I’m going out to find where they came down,” Renfrew said.

“How far?”

“I don’t know how far. Can’t be all that far beyond the western marker.”

“That’s still twenty kilometres away.”

“I’ll take the car. It still works.”

“You’ve never driven it alone. It’s a long walk home if something goes wrong.”

“Nothing’s going wrong. I won’t be alone.”

Piano Man started to say something, but Renfrew wasn’t listening.

He pre-breathed, suited up, climbed onto the skeletal chassis of the buggy, then went out to meet the newcomers. As the mesh-wheeled vehicle bounced and gyred its way to the horizon, Renfrew felt a thrilled elation, as if he were on his way to a date with a beautiful and mysterious woman who might be his lover by the end of the evening.

But when he crested the hills and saw the fallen ship, he knew that nobody had ridden it to Mars. It was too small for that, even if this was just the re-entry component of a larger ship still circling the planet. What had come down was just a cargo pod, a blunt cylinder the size of a small minibus. It was tangled up with its own parachutes and the deflated gasbags it had deployed just before impact.

Renfrew parked the buggy, then spent ten minutes clearing fabric away from the cargo pod’s door. The re-entry had scorched the decals, flags and data panels on the pod’s skin to near-illegibility, but Renfrew knew the drill. Back when the base was inhabited, he’d occasionally drawn the short straw to drive out to recover a pod that had fallen away from the usual touchdown beacon.

He was sorry it wasn’t a crewed ship, but the pod was the next best thing. Maybe they were still getting the infrastructure back up to speed. Sending out a manned vehicle was obviously too much of a stretch right now, and that was understandable. But they’d still had the presence of mind not to forget about Mars, even if all they could muster was a one-shot cargo pod. He would not be ungrateful. The pod could easily contain valuable medicines and machine parts, enough to relieve him of several ever-present worries. They might even have sent some luxuries, as a token of goodwill: things that the synths had never been very good at.

Renfrew touched a hand against the armoured panel next to the door, ready to flip it open and expose the pyrotechnic release mechanism. That was when one of the scorches caught his eye. It was a data panel, printed in spray-stencilled letters.

—

HTCV-554

Hohmann Transfer Cargo Vehicle

Scheduled launch: Kagoshima 05/38

Destination: Tharsis Base, Mars

Payload: replacement laser optics

Property: Mars Development Corporation—

According to the data panel, the cargo pod had been scheduled to lift from Kagoshima spaceport one month before the virus hit. Maybe the panel was wrong; maybe this pod had been prepared and sprayed and then held on the pad until the virus had passed and the reconstruction had begun ...

But why send him glass?

Renfrew knew, with an appalling certainty, that the vehicle had not been delayed on the pad. It had launched just as its owners had intended, on time, with a consignment of precision glassware that might just have been useful back when the base was fully inhabited and they’d needed a steady supply of laser optics for the surveying work.

But somewhere between Earth and Mars, the cargo pod had lost its way. When the virus hit, the pod would have lost contact with the Earth-based tracking system that was supposed to guide it on its way. But the pod hadn’t simply drifted into interplanetary space, lost forever. Instead, its dumb-as-fuck navigation system had caused it to make an extra fuel-conserving loop around the sun, until it finally locked onto the Mars transponder.

Renfrew must have picked it up shortly afterwards.

He stumbled back to the buggy. He climbed into the openwork frame, settled into the driver’s seat and didn’t bother with the harness. He kept his breathing in check. The disappointment hadn’t hit yet, but he could feel it coming, sliding toward him with the oiled glide of a piston. It was going to hurt like hell when it arrived. It was going to feel like the weight of creation pushing down onto his chest. It was going to squeeze the life out of him; it was going to make him open that helmet visor, if he didn’t make it home first.

Piano Man had been right. He’d allowed hope back into his world, and now hope was going to make him pay.

He gunned the buggy to maximum power, flinging dust from its wheels, skidding until it found traction. He steered away from the cargo pod, not wanting to look at it, not even wanting to catch a glimpse of it in the buggy’s rear view mirrors.

He’d made it to within five kilometres of the base when he hit a boulder, tipping the buggy over. Renfrew tumbled from the driver’s seat, and the last thing he saw—the last thing he was aware of—was an edge of sharp rock rising to shatter his visor.

—

Part Three

—

And yet Renfrew woke.

Consciousness came back to him in a crystal rush. He remembered everything, up to and including the last instant of his accident. It seemed to have happened only minutes earlier: he could almost taste blood in his mouth. Yet by the same token the memory seemed inhumanly ancient, calcified into hardness, brittle as coral.

He was back in the base, not out by the crashed buggy. Through narrow, sleep-gummed eyes he picked out familiar décor. He’d come around on the same medical couch where he had seen Solovyova die. He moved his arm and touched his brow, flinching as he remembered the stone smashing through the visor, flinching again as he recalled the momentary contact of stone against skin, the hardening pressure of skin on bone, the yielding of that pressure as the edge of the stone rammed its way into his skull like a nuclear-powered icebreaker cracking hard arctic pack-ice.

The skin under his fingers was smooth, unscarred. He touched his chin and felt the same day’s growth of stubble he’d been wearing when he went out to meet the pod. There was stiffness in his muscles, but nothing he wouldn’t have expected after a hard day’s work. He eased himself from the couch, touched bare feet to cold ceramic flooring. He was wearing the one-piece inner-layer that he’d put on under the spacesuit before he went outside. But the inner-layer was crisper and cleaner than he remembered, and when he looked at the sleeve the tears and frays he recalled were absent.

Gaining steadiness with each step, Renfrew padded across the medical lab to the window. He remembered seeing Solovyova’s face reflected in the glass, the first time he’d seen the piano. It had been twilight then; it was full daylight now, and as his eyes adjusted to wakefulness, they picked out details and textures in the scenery with a clarity he’d never known before.

There were things out there that didn’t belong.

They stood between the base and the foothills, set into the dust like haphazardly placed chess pieces. It was hard to say how tall they were—metres or tens of metres—for there was something slippery and elusive about the space between the forms and the base, confounding Renfrew’s sense of perspective. Nor could he have reported with any certainty on the shapes of the objects. One moment he saw blocky, unchanging chunks of crystalline growth—something like tourmaline, tinted with bright reds and greens—the next he was looking at stained-glass apertures drilled through the very skein of reality, or skeletal, prismatic things that existed only in the sense that they had edges and corners, rather than surfaces and interiors. And yet there was never any sense of transition between the opposed states.

He knew, instantly and without fear, that they were alive, and that they were aware of him.

Renfrew made his way to the suiting room, counted the intact suits that were hanging there, and came up with the same number he remembered before the buggy accident. No sign of any damage to the racked helmets.

He suited up and stepped out into Martian daylight. The forms were still there, surrounding the base like the weathered stones of some grand Neolithic circle. Yet they seemed closer now, and larger, and their transformations had an accelerated, heightened quality. They had detected his emergence; they were glad of it; it was what they had been waiting for.

Still there was no fear.

One of the shapes seemed larger than the others. It beckoned Renfrew nearer, and the ground he walked upon melted and surged under him, encouraging him to close the distance. The transformations became more feverish. His suit monitor informed him that the air outside was as cold and thin as ever, but a sound was reaching him through the helmet that he’d never heard in all his time on Mars. It was a chorus of shrill, quavering notes, like the sound from a glass organ, and it was coming from the aliens. In that chorus was ecstasy and expectation. It should have terrified him; should have sent him scurrying back inside, should have sent him into gibbering catatonia, but it only made him stronger.

Renfrew dared to look up.

If the aliens gathered around the base were the crew, then the thing suspended over the base—the thing that swallowed three fifths of the sky, more like a weather system than a machine—had to be their ship. It was a vast frozen explosion of colours and shapes, and it made him want to shrivel back into his skull. The mere existence of the aliens and their ship told him that all he had learned, all the wisdom he had worked so hard to accrue, was at best a scratch against the rock face of reality.

He still had a long, long way to go.

He looked down, and walked to the base of the largest alien. The keening reached a shrill, exultant climax. Now that he was close, the alien’s shape-and-size shifting had subsided. The form looming over him was stable and crystalline, with the landscape behind it faintly visible through the refracted translucence of the alien’s body.

The alien’s voice, when it came, felt like the universe whispering secrets into his head.

“Are you feeling better now?”

Renfrew almost laughed at the banality of the question. “I’m feeling ... better, yes.”

“That’s good. We were concerned. Very, very concerned. It pleases us that you have made this recovery.”

The keening quietened. Renfrew sensed that the other aliens were witnesses to a one-on-one conversation between him and this largest entity, and that there was something utterly respectful, even subservient, in their silence.

“When you talk about my recovery ... are you saying ...” Renfrew paused, choosing his words with care. “Did you make me better?”

“We healed you, yes. We healed you and learned your language from the internal wiring of your mind.”

“I should have died out there. When I tipped the buggy ... I thought I was dead. I knew I was dead.”

“There were enough recoverable patterns. It was in our gift to remake you. Only you, however, can say whether we did a good enough job.”

“I feel the same way I always did. Except better: like I’ve been turned inside out and flushed clean.”

“That is what we hoped.”

“You mind if I ask ...”

The alien pulsed an inviting shade of pink.

“You may ask anything you like.”

“Who are you? What are you doing here? Why have you come now?”

“We are the Kind. We have arrived to preserve and resurrect what we may. We have arrived now because we could not arrive sooner.”

“But the coincidence ... to come now, after we’ve been waiting so long ... to come now, just after we’ve wiped ourselves out. Why couldn’t you come sooner, and stop us fucking things up so badly?”

“We came as fast as we could. As soon as we detected the electromagnetic emanations of your culture ... we commenced our journey.”

“How far have you come?”

“More than two hundred of your light years. Our vehicle moves very quickly, but not faster than light. More than four hundred years have passed since the transmission of the radio signals that alerted us.”

“No,” Renfrew said, shaking his head, wondering how the aliens could have made such a basic mistake. “That isn’t possible. Radio hasn’t been around that long. We’ve had television for maybe a hundred years, radio for twenty or thirty years longer ... but not four hundred years. No way was it our signals you picked up.”

The alien shifted to a soothing turquoise.

“You are mistaken, but understandably so. You were dead longer than you realise.”

“No,” he said flatly.

“That is the way it is. Of course you have no memory of the intervening time.”

“But the base looks exactly the way it did before I left.”

“We repaired your home, as well. If you would like it changed again, that is also possible.”

Renfrew felt the first stirrings of acceptance; the knowledge that what the alien was telling him was correct.

“If you’ve brought me back ...”

“Yes,” the alien encouraged.

“What about the others? What about all the other people who died here—Solovyova and the ones before her? What about all the people who died on Earth?”

“There were no recoverable forms on the Earth. We can show you if you would like ... but we think you would find it distressing.”

“Why?”

“We did. A lifecrash is always distressing, even to machine-based entities such as us. Especially after such a long and uninterrupted evolutionary history.”

“A lifecrash?”

“It did not just end with the extinction of humanity. The agent that wiped out your species had the capacity to change. Eventually it assimilated every biological form on the planet, leaving only itself: endlessly cannibalising, endlessly replicating.”

Renfrew dealt with that. He’d already adjusted to the fact that humanity was gone and that he was never going to see Earth again. It did not require a great adjustment to accept that Earth itself had been lost, along with the entire web of life it had once supported.

Not that he was exactly thrilled, either.

“OK,” he said falteringly. “But what about the people I buried here?”

Renfrew sensed the alien’s regret. Its facets shone a sombre amber.

“Their patterns were not recoverable. They were buried in caskets, along with moisture and microorganisms. Time did the rest. We did try, yes ... but there was nothing left to work with.”

“I died out there as well. Why was it any different for me?”

“You were kept cold and dry. That made all the difference, as far as we were concerned.”

So he’d mummified out there, baked dry under that merciless sterilising sky, instead of rotting in the ground like his friends. Out there under that Martian sun, for the better part of three hundred years ... what must he have looked like when they pulled him out of the remains of his suit, he wondered? Maybe a bleached and twisted thing, corded with the knotted remains of musculature and tissue: something that could easily have been mistaken for driftwood, had there been driftwood on Mars.

The wonder and horror of it all was almost too much. He’d been the last human being alive, and then he had died, and now he was the first human being to be resurrected by aliens.

The first and perhaps the last: he sensed even then that, as Godlike as the Kind appeared, they were bound by limits. They were as much prisoners of what the universe chose to allow, and what it chose not to allow, as humanity, or dust, or atoms.

“Why?” he asked.

A pulse of ochre signified the alien’s confusion.

“Why what?”

“Why did you bring me back? What possible interest am I to you?”

The alien considered his remark, warming through shades of orange to a bright venous red. Like an echo, the shade spread to the other members of the gathering.

“We help,” the leader told Renfrew. “That is what we do. That is what we have always done. We are the Kind.”

* * * *

He returned to the base and tried to continue his affairs, just as if the Kind had never arrived. Yet they were always out there whenever he passed a window: brighter and closer now as evening stole in, as if they had gathered the day’s light and were now re-radiating it in subtly altered shades. He closed the storm shutters but that didn’t help much. He did not doubt that the ship was still poised above, suspended over the base as if guarding the infinitely precious thing that he had become.

Renfrew’s old routines had little meaning now. The aliens hadn’t just brought the base back to the way it had been before he crashed the buggy. They had repaired all the damage that had accrued since the collapse of Earthside society, and the base systems now functioned better than at any point since the base’s construction. As mindless as his maintenance tours had been, they had imposed structure on his life that was now absent. Renfrew felt like a rat that’d had his exercise wheel taken away.

He went to the recreation room and brought the system back online. Everything functioned as the designers had intended. The aliens must have repaired, or at least not removed, his implant. But when he cycled through the myriad options, he found that something had happened to Piano Man.

The figure was still there—Renfrew even knew his name, now—but the companion he remembered was gone. Now Piano Man behaved just like all the other generated personalities. Renfrew could still talk to him, and Piano Man could still answer him back, but nothing like their old conversations was now possible. Piano Man would take requests, and banter, but that was the limit of his abilities. If Renfrew tried to steer the conversation away from the strictly musical, if he tried to engage Piano Man in a discussion about cosmology or quantum mechanics, all he got back was a polite but puzzled stare. And the more Renfrew persisted, the less it seemed to him that there was any consciousness behind that implant-generated face. All he was dealing with was a paper-thin figment of the entertainment system.

Renfrew knew that the Kind hadn’t ‘fixed’ Piano Man in the sense that they had fixed the rest of the base. But—deliberately or otherwise—their arrival had destroyed the illusion of companionship. Perhaps they had straightened some neurological kink in Renfrew’s brain when they put him back together. Or perhaps the mere fact of their arrival had caused his subconsciousness to discard that earlier mental crutch.

He knew it shouldn’t have meant anything. Piano Man hadn’t existed in any real sense. Feeling sorrow for his absence was as ridiculous as mourning the death of a character in a dream. He’d made Piano Man up; his companion had never had any objective existence.

But he still felt that he had lost a friend.

“I’m sorry,” he said, to that polite but puzzled face. “You were right, and I was wrong. I was doing fine just the way things were. I should have listened to you.”

There was an uncomfortable pause, before Piano Man smiled and spread his fingers above the keyboard.

“Would you like me to play something?”

“Yes,” Renfrew said. “Play Rocket Man. For old time’s sake.”

* * * *

He allowed the Kind into Tharsis Base. Their crystalline forms were soon everywhere, spreading and multiplying in a mad orgy of prismatic colour, transforming the drab architecture into a magical lantern-lit grotto. The beauty of it was so startling, so intoxicating, that it moved Renfrew to tears with the knowledge that no one else would ever see it.

“But it could be different,” the leader told him. “We did not broach this earlier, but there are possibilities you may wish to consider.”

“Such as?”

“We have repaired you, and made you somewhat younger than you were before your accident. In doing so we have learned a great deal about your biology. We cannot resurrect the dead of Earth, or your companions here on Mars, but we can give you other people.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It would cost us nothing to weave new companions. They could be grown to adulthood at accelerated speed, or your own ageing could be arrested while you give the children time to grow.”

“And then what?”

“You could breed with them, if you chose. We’d intervene to correct any genetic anomalies.”

Renfrew smiled. “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. At least, that’s what a friend of mine told me that once.”

“Now there is nowhere but Mars. Doesn’t that make a difference? Or would you rather we established a habitable zone on Earth and transplanted you there?”

They made him feel like a plant: like some incredibly rare and delicate orchid.

“Would I notice the difference?”

“We could adjust your faculties so that Earth appeared the way you remembered. Or we could edit your memories to match the present conditions.”

“Why can’t you just put things back the way they were? Surely one runaway virus isn’t going to defeat you.”

The alien turned a shade of chrome blue that Renfrew had learned to recognise as indicative of gentle chiding. “That’s not our way. The runaway agent now constitutes its own form of life, brimming with future potential. To wipe it out now would be akin to sterilising your planet just as your own single-celled ancestors were gaining a foothold.”

“You care about life that much?”

“Life is precious. Infinitely so. Perhaps it takes a machine intelligence to appreciate that.” The chrome blue faded, replaced by a placatory olive green. “Given that Earth cannot be made the way it was, will you reconsider our offer to give you companionship?”

“Not now,” he said.

“But later, perhaps?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been on my own a long time. I’m not sure it isn’t better this way.”

“You’ve craved companionship for years. Why reject it now?”

“Because ...” And here Renfrew faltered, conscious of his own inarticulacy before the alien. “When I was alone, I spent a lot of time thinking things through. I got set on that course, and I’m not sure I’m done yet. There’s still some stuff I need to get straight in my head. Maybe when I’m finished ...”

“Perhaps we can help you with that.”

“Help me understand the universe? Help me understand what it means to be the last living man? Maybe even the last intelligent organism, in the universe?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time. We are a very old culture. In our travels we have encountered myriad other species. Some of them are extinct by now, or changed beyond recognition. But many of them were engaged on quests similar to your own. We have watched, and occasionally interceded to better aid that comprehension. Nothing would please us more than to offer you similar assistance. If we cannot give you companionship, at least let us give you wisdom.”

“I want to understand space and time, and my own place in it.”

“The path to deep comprehension is risky.”

“I’m ready for it. I’ve already come a long way.”

“Then we shall help. But the road is long, Renfrew. The road is long and you have barely started your journey.”

“I’m willing to go all the way.”

“You will be long past human before you near the end of it. That is the cost of understanding space and time.”

Renfrew felt a chill on the back of his neck, a premonitionary shiver. The alien was not warning him for nothing. In its travels it must have witnessed things that caused it distress.

Still he said: “Whatever it takes. Bring it on. I’m ready.”

“Now?”

“Now. But before we begin ... you don’t call me Renfrew any more.”

“You wish a new name, to signify this new stage in your quest?”

“From now on, I’m John. That’s what I want you to call me.”

“Just John?”

He nodded solemnly. “Just John.”

—

Part Four

—

The Kind did things to John.

While he slept, they altered his mind: infiltrating it with tiny crystal avatars of themselves, performing prestigious feats of neural rewiring. When he woke he still felt like himself: still carried the same freight of memories and emotions that he’d taken with him to sleep. But suddenly he had the ability to grasp things that had been impenetrably difficult only hours earlier. Before the accident, he had explored the inlets of superstring theory, like an explorer searching for a navigable route through a treacherous mountain range. He had never found that easy path, never dreamed of conquering the dizzying summits before him, but now, miraculously, he was on the other side, and the route through the obstacle looked insultingly easy. Beyond superstring theory lay the unified territory of M-theory, but that, too, was soon his. John revelled in his new understanding.

More and more, he began to think in terms of a room whose floor was the absolute truth about the universe: where it had come from, how it worked, what it meant to be a thinking being in that universe. But that floor looked very much like a carpet, and it was in turn concealed by other carpets, one on top of the other, each of which represented some imperfect approximation to the final layer. Each layer might look convincing; might endure decades or centuries of enquiry without hinting that it contained a flaw, but sooner or later one would inevitably reveal itself. A tiny loose thread—perhaps a discrepancy between observation and theory—and with a tug the entire fabric of that layer would come apart. It was in the nature of such revolutions that the next layer down would already have been glimpsed by then. Only the final carpet, the floor, would contain no logical inconsistencies, no threads waiting to be unravelled.

Could you ever know when you’d reached it, John wondered? Some thinkers considered it impossible to ever know with certainty. All you could do was keep testing, tugging at every strand to see how firmly it was woven into the whole. If after tens of thousands of years, the pattern was still intact, then it might begin to seem likely that you had arrived at final wisdom. But you could never know for sure. The ten thousand and first year might bring forth some trifling observation that, as innocent as it first seemed, would eventually prove that there was yet another layer lurking underneath.

You could go on like that forever, never knowing for sure.

Or—as some other thinkers speculated—the final theory might come with its own guarantee of authenticity, a golden strand of logical validation threaded into the very mathematical language in which it was couched. It might be in the nature of the theory to state that there could be no deeper description of the universe.

But even then: it wouldn’t stop you making observations. It wouldn’t stop you testing.

John kept learning. M-theory became a distant and trifling obstacle, dwarfed by the daunting unified theories that had superseded it. These theories probed the interface not just of matter and spacetime, but also of consciousness and entropy, information, complexity and the growth of replicating structures. On the face of it, they seemed to describe everything that conceivably mattered about the universe.

But each in turn was revealed as flawed, incomplete, at odds with observation. An error in the predicted mass of the electron, in the twenty-second decimal place. A one-in-ten-thousandth part discrepancy in the predicted bending of starlight around a certain class of rotating black hole. A niggling mismatch between the predicted and observed properties of inertia, in highly charged spacetime.

The room contained many carpets, and John had the dizzying sense that there were still many layers between him and the floor. He’d made progress, certainly, but it had only sharpened his sense of how far he had to go.

The Kind remade him time and again, resetting his body clock to give him the time he needed for his studies. But each leap of understanding pushed him closer to the fundamental limits of a wet human brain wired together from a few hundred billion neurons, crammed into a tiny cage of bone.

“You can stop now, if you like,” the Kind said, in the hundredth year of his quest.

“Or what?” John asked mildly.

“Or we continue, with certain modifications.”

John gave them his consent. It would mean not being human for a little while, but given the distance he had come, the price did not strike him as unreasonable.

The Kind encoded the existing patterns of his mind into a body much like one of their own. For John the transition to a machine-based substrate of thinking crystal was in no way traumatic, especially as the Kind assured him that the process was completely reversible. Freed of the constraints of flesh and scale, his progress accelerated even more. From this new perspective, his old human mind looked like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Compared to the mental mansion he now inhabited, his former residence looked as squalid and limiting as a rabbit hutch. It was a wonder he’d understood anything.

But John wasn’t finished.

A thousand years passed. Always adding new capacity to himself, he had become a kilometre-high crystalline mound on the summit of Pavonis Mons. He was larger by far than any of the Kind, but that was only to be expected: he was probing layers of reality that they had long since mapped to their own satisfaction, and from which they had dutifully retreated. Having attained that understanding once, the Kind had no further need for it.

There were other people on Mars now. John had finally acquiesced to the Kind’s offer to bring him companions, and they had created children who had now grown to become parents and grandparents. But when John agreed to the coming of other humans, it had little do with his own need for companionship. He felt too remote from other humans now, and it was only because he sensed that the Kind wished to perform this exercise—that it would please the aliens to have something else to do—that he had relented. But even if he could not relate to the teeming newcomers, he found it pleasing to divert a small portion of his energies to their amusement. He rearranged his outer architecture—dedicated to only the most trivial data-handling tasks—so that he resembled an ornate crystalline fairy palace, with spires and domes and battlements, and at dusk he twinkled with refracted sunlight, throwing coloured glories across the great plains of the Tharsis Montes. A yellow road spiralled around his foot slopes. He became a site of pilgrimage, and he sang to the pilgrims as they toiled up and down the spiral road.

Millennia passed. Still John’s mind burrowed deeper.

He reported to the Kind that he had passed through eighteen paradigmatic layers of reality, each of which had demanded a concomitant upgrade in his neural wiring before he could be said to have understood the theory in all its implications, and therefore recognised the flaw that led to the next layer down.

The Kind informed him that—in all the history that was known to them—fewer than five hundred other sentient beings had attained John’s present level understanding.

Still John kept going, aware that in all significant respects he had now exceeded the intellectual capacity of the Kind. They were there to assist him, to guide him through his transformations, but they had only a dim conception of what it now felt to be John. According to their data less than a hundred individuals, from a hundred different cultures, all of them now extinct, had reached this point.

Ahead, the Kind warned, were treacherous waters.

John’s architectural transformations soon began to place an intolerable strain on the fragile geology of Pavonis Mons. Rather than reinforce the ancient volcano to support his increasing size and mass, John chose to detach himself from the surface entirely. For twenty six thousand years he floated in the thickening Martian atmosphere, supported by batteries of antigravity generators. For much of that time it pleased him to manifest in the form of a Bösendorfer grand piano, a shape reconstructed from his oldest human memories. He drifted over the landscape, solitary as a cloud, and occasionally he played slow tunes that fell from the sky like thunder.

Yet soon there came a time when he was too large even for the atmosphere. The heat dissipation from his mental processes was starting to have an adverse effect on the global climate.

It was time to leave.

In space he grew prolifically for fifteen million years. Hot blue stars formed, lived and died while he gnawed away at the edges of certain intractables. Human civilisations buzzed around him like flies. Among them, he knew, were individuals who were engaged in something like the same quest for understanding. He wished them well, but he had a head start none of them had a hope of ever overtaking. Over the years his density had increased, until he was now composed mostly of solid nuclear matter. Then he had evolved to substrates of pure quark matter. By then, his own gravity had become immense, and the Kind reinforced him with mighty spars of exotic matter, pilfered from the disused wormhole transit system of some long-vanished culture. A binary pulsar was harnessed to power him; titanic clockwork enslaved for the purposes of pure mentation.

And still deeper John tunnelled.

“I ... sense something,” he told the Kind one day.

They asked him what, fearing his answer.

“Something ahead of me,” he said. “A few layers down. I can’t quite see it yet, but I’m pretty sure I can sense it.”

They asked him what it was like.

“An ending,” John told them.

“This is what we always knew would come to pass,” the Kind told him.

They informed him that only seven other sentient beings had reached John’s current state of enlightenment; none in the last three billion years. They also told him that to achieve enlightenment he would have to change again; become denser still, squeezed down into a thinking core that was only just capable of supporting itself against its own ferocious gravity.

“You’ll be unstable,” they told him. “Your very thought processes will tend to push you into your own critical radius.”

He knew what they meant, but he wanted to hear them spell it out. “And when that happens?”

“You become a black hole. No force in the universe will be able to prevent your collapse. These are the treacherous waters we mentioned earlier.”

They said ’earlier’ as if they meant ’earlier this afternoon,’ rather than ’earlier in the history of this universe.’ But John had long since accustomed himself to the awesome timescales of the Kind.

“I still want you to do it. I’ve come too far to give up now.”

“As you wish.”

So they made him into a vast ring of hyperdense matter, poised on the edge of collapse. In his immense gravitational field, John’s lightning thought processes grew sluggish. But his computational resources were now vast.

Many times he orbited the galaxy.

With each layer that he passed, he sensed the increasing presence of the ending; the final, rock-hard substrate of reality. He knew it was the floor, not another mirage-like illusion of finality. He was almost there now: his great quest was nearing its completion, and in a few thoughts—a few hours in the long afternoon of the universe—he would have arrived.

Yet John called a halt to his thinking.

“Is there a problem?” the Kind asked, solicitously.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve been thinking about what you said before: about how my own thought processes might push me over the edge.”

“Yes,” the Kind said.

“I’m wondering: what would that really mean?”

“It would mean death. There has been much debate on the matter, but the present state of understanding is that no useful information can ever emerge from a black hole.”

“You’re right. That sounds an awfully lot like death to me.”

“Then perhaps you will consider stopping now, while there is still time. You have at least glimpsed the final layer. Is that not enough for you? You’ve come further than you could ever have dreamed when you embarked on this quest.”

“That’s true.”

“Well, then. Let this be an end to it. Dwell not on what is left to be done, but, yes, on what you have already achieved.”

“I’d like to. But there’s this nagging little thing I can’t stop thinking about.”

“Please. To think about anything in your present state is not without risk.”

“I know. But I think this might be important. Do you think it’s coincidence that I’ve reached this point in my quest, at the same time that I’m teetering on the edge of collapsing into myself?”

“We confess we hadn’t given the matter a great deal of thought, beyond the immediate practicalities.”

“Well, I have. And I’ve been thinking. Way back when, I read a theory about baby universes.”

“Continue ...” the Kind said warily.

“How they might be born inside black holes, where the ordinary rules of space and time break down. The idea being that when the singularity inside a black hole forms, it actually buds off a whole new universe, with its own subtly altered laws of physics. That’s where the information goes: down the pipe, into the baby universe. We see no evidence of this on the outside—the expansion’s in a direction we can’t point; it isn’t as if the new universe is expanding into our own like an explosion—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening every time a black hole forms somewhere in our universe. In fact, it’s entirely possible that our universe might well have been budded off from someone else’s black hole.”

“We are aware of this speculation. And your point being?”

“Perhaps it isn’t coincidence. Perhaps this is just the way it has to be. You cannot attain ultimate wisdom about the universe without reaching this point of gravitational collapse. And at the moment you do attain final understanding—when the last piece falls into place, when you finally glimpse that ultimate layer of reality—you slip over the edge, into irreversible collapse.”

“In other words, you die. As we warned.”

“But maybe not. After all, by that point you’ve become little more than pure information. What if you survive the transition through your own singularity, and slip through into the baby universe?”

“To become smeared out and re-radiated as random noise, you mean?”

“Actually, I had something else in mind. Who’s to say that you don’t end up encoding yourself into the very structure of that new universe?”

“Who’s to say that you do?”

“I admit it’s speculative. But there is something rather beautiful and symmetric about it, don’t you think? In the universes where there is intelligent life, one or more sentient individuals will eventually ask the same questions I asked myself, and follow them through to this point of penultimate understanding. When they achieve enlightenment, they exceed the critical density and become baby universes in their own right. They become what they sought to understand.”

“You have no proof of this.”

“No, but I have one hell of a gut feeling. There is, of course, only one way to know for sure. At the moment of understanding, I’ll know whether this happens or not.”

“And if it doesn’t ...”

“I’ll still have achieved my goal. I’ll know that, even as I’m crushed out of existence. If, on the other hand, it does happen ... then I won’t be crushed at all. My consciousness will continue, on the other side, embedded in the fabric of space and time itself.” John paused, for something had occurred to him. “I’ll have become something very close to ...”

“Don’t say it, please,” the Kind interjected.

“All right, I won’t. But you see now why I hesitate. This final step will take me as far from humanity as all the steps that have preceded it. It’s not something I’m about to take lightly.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“The others ...” John began, before trailing off, aware of the fear and doubt in his voice. “What did they do, when they got this far? Did they hesitate? Did they just storm on through?”

“Only three have preceded you, in all of recorded history. Two underwent gravitational collapse: we can show you the black holes they became, if you wish.”

“I’ll pass. Tell me about the third.”

“The third chose a different path. He elected to split his consciousness into two streams, by dividing and reallocating portions of his architecture. One component continued with the quest for ultimate understanding, while the other retreated, assuming a less-dense embodiment that carried no risk of collapse.”

“What happened to the component that continued?”

“Again,” the Kind said, with the merest flicker of amusement at John’s expense, “we’d be delighted to show you the results.”

“And the other half? How could he have preserved the understanding he’d achieved, if he backtracked to a simpler architecture?”

“He couldn’t. That’s exactly the point.”

“I don’t follow. Understanding required a certain level of complexity. He couldn’t have retained that understanding, if he stripped himself back.”

“He didn’t. He did, however, retain the memory of having understood. That, for him, was sufficient.”

“Just the memory?”

“Precisely that. He’d glimpsed enlightenment. He didn’t need to retain every detail of that glimpse to know he’d seen it.”

“But that’s not understanding,” John said exasperatedly. “It’s a crude approximation, like the postcard instead of the view.”

“Better than being crushed out of existence, though. The being under discussion seemed adequately content with the compromise.”

“And you think I will be, too?”

“We think you should at least consider the possibility.”

“I will. But I’ll need time to think about it.”

“How long?”

“Just a bit.”

“All right,” the Kind said. “But just don’t think too hard about it.”

* * * *

It passed that, much less than a million years later, John announced to the Kind that he wished to follow the example of the third sentient being they had mentioned. He would partition his consciousness into two streams, one of which would continue towards final enlightenment, the other of which would assume a simpler and safer architecture, necessarily incapable of emulating his present degree of understanding. For John the process of dividing himself was as fraught and delicate as any of the transformations he had hitherto undergone. It required all of the skill of the Kind to affect the change in such a way as to allow the preservation of memories, even as his mind was whittled back to a mere sketch of itself. But by turns it was done, and the two Johns were both physically and mentally distinct: the one still poised on the edge of gravitational annihilation, only a thought away from transcendence, the other observing matters from a safe distance.

So it was that Simple John witnessed the collapse and infall of his more complex self: an event as sudden and violent as any natural stellar catastrophe in recent galactic times. In that moment of understanding, he had pushed his own architecture to the limit. Somewhere in him, matter and energy collapsed to open a howling aperture to a new creation. He had reached the conclusion of his quest.

In the last nanoseconds of his physical existence however—before he was sucked under the event horizon, beyond which no information could ever emerge—Complex John did at least manage to encode and transmit a parting wave of gravitational energy, a message to his other half.

The content was very brief.

It said only: “Now I get it.”

* * * *

That might have been the end of it, but shortly afterwards Simple John took a decision that was to return him to his starting point. He carried now the memory of near-enlightenment, and the memory was—as the Kind had promised, despite John’s natural scepticism—very nearly as illuminating as the thing itself. In some ways, perhaps, more so—it was small and polished and gemlike, and he could examine it from different angles; quite unlike the unwieldy immersiveness of the experience itself, from which the memory had been expertly distilled.

But why, he wondered, stop there? If he could revert back to this simplified architecture and still retain the memory of what he had been before, why not take things further?

Why not go all the way back?

The descent from near-enlightenment was not a thing to be rushed, for at every stage—as his evolved faculties were stripped back and discarded—he had to be assured that the chain of memory remained unbroken. As he approached being human again, he knew on an intellectual level that what he now carried was not the memory of understanding, but the memory of a memory of a memory ... a pale, diminished, reflected thing, but no less authentic for that. It still felt genuine to John, and now—as they packed his wet, cellular mind back into the stifling cage of a Homo sapiens skull—that was all that truly mattered.

And so it came time for him to return to Mars.

Mars by then was a green and blue marble of a world much like old Earth. Despite the passage of time the rekindled human civilisation had spread no further than the solar system, and—since Earth was out of bounds—Mars remained its capital. Sixteen million people lived there now, many of them gathered into small communities scattered around the gentle foot slopes of Pavonis Mons. Deep inside Mars, a lattice of artificial black holes created a surface gravity indistinguishable from that of old Earth. Mammoth sunken buttresses kept the ancient landscape from falling in on itself. The seas were soupy with life; the atmosphere thick and warm, brimming with insects and birds.

Certain things had been preserved since John’s departure. The spiralling yellow road, for instance, still wormed its way to the summit of Pavonis Mons, and pilgrims made the long but hardly arduous ascent, pausing here and there at the many pennanted tea houses and hostels that lined the route. Though they belonged to different creeds, all remembered John in some form or another, and many of their creeds spoke of the day when he would come back to Mars. To this end, the smooth circular plateau at the top of the volcano had been kept clear, awaiting the day of John’s return. Monks brushed the dust from it with great brooms. Pilgrims circled the plateau, but none ventured very far inwards from the edge.

John, human again, dropped from the sky in a cradle of alien force. It was day, but no one witnessed his arrival. The Kind had arranged an invisibility barrier around him, so that from a distance he resembled only a pillar of warm air, causing the scene behind him to tremble slightly as in a mirage.

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” the Kind asked. “You’ve been gone a long time. They may have some trouble dealing with your return.”

John adjusted the star-shaped spectacles he had selected for his return to Mars, settling them onto the small nub of his nose.

“They’ll get used to me sooner or later.”

“They’ll expect words of wisdom. When they don’t get any, they’re likely to be disappointed. ‘I get it now’ isn’t likely to pass muster.”

“They’ll get over it.”

“You may wish to dispense some harmless platitudes: just enough to keep them guessing. We can suggest some, if you’d like: we’ve had considerable practise at this sort of thing.”

“I’ll be fine. I’m just going to be straight with them. I came, I saw, I backed off. But I did see it, and I do remember seeing it. I think it all makes sense.”

“‘I think it all makes sense’,” the Kind repeated. “That’s the best you’re going to give them?”

“It was my quest. I never said it had to measure up to anyone else’s expectations.” John ran a hand over his scalp, flattening down his thin auburn thatch against the air currents in the invisibility field. He took a step forward, teetering on the huge red boots he had selected for his return. “How do I look, anyway?”

“Not quite the way you started out. Is there any particular reason for the physiological changes, the costume?”

John shrugged. “None in particular.”

“Fine, then. You’ll knock them out. That is the appropriate turn of phrase, isn’t it?”

“It’ll do. I guess this is it, then ... I step through here, and I’m back with people. Right?”

“Right. You have plans, we take it?”

“Nothing set in stone. See how things go, I thought. Maybe I’ll settle down, maybe I won’t. I’ve been on my own for a long time now: fitting back into human society isn’t going to be a breeze. Especially some weird, futuristic human society that half thinks I’m some kind of god.”

“You’ll manage.”

John hesitated, ready to step through into daylight, into full visibility. “Thanks, anyway. For everything.”

“It was our pleasure.”

“What about you, now?”

“We’ll move on,” the Kind said. “Find someone else in need of help. Perhaps we’ll swing by again, further down the line, see how you’re all doing.”

“That would be nice.”

There was an awkward lull in the conversation.

“John, there is one thing we need to tell you, before you go.”

He heard something in the Kind’s tone that, in all their time together, was new to him.

“What is it?”

“We lied to you.”

He let out small, involuntary laugh: it was the last thing he had been expecting. He did not think the Kind had ever once spoken an untruth to him.

“Tell me,” he said.

“The third sentient being we spoke about ... the one that split itself into two consciousness streams?”

John nodded. “What about it?”

“It didn’t exist. It was a story we made up, to persuade you to follow that course of action. In truth, you were the first to do such thing. No other entity had reached such a final stage of enlightenment without continuing on to final collapse.”

John absorbed that, then nodded slowly. “I see.”

“We hope you are not too angry with us.”

“Why did you lie?”

“Because we had grown to like you. It was wrong ... the choice should have been yours, uncontaminated by our lies ... but without that example, we did not think you would have chosen the route you did. And then we would have lost you, and you would not be standing here, with the memories that you have.”

“I see,” he said again, softer this time.

“Are you cross with us?”

John waited a little while before answering. “I should be, I suppose. But really, I’m not. You’re probably right: I would have carried on. And given what I know now—given the memories I have—I’m glad this part of me didn’t.”

“Then it was the right thing to do?”

“It was a white lie. There are worse things.”

“Thank you, John.”

“I guess the next time you meet someone like me—some other sentient being engaged on that quest—you won’t have to lie, will you?”

“Not now, no.”

“Then we’ll let it be. I’m cool with the way things turned out.” John was about to step outside, but then something occurred to him. He fought to keep the playful expression from his face. “But I can’t let you get away without at least doing one final favour for me. I know it’s a lot to ask after you’ve done so much ...”

“Whatever it is, we will strive to do our best.”

John pointed across the mirror-smooth surface of the plateau, to the circling line of distant pilgrims. “I’m going to step outside in a moment, onto Pavonis Mons. But I don’t want to scare the living daylights out of them by just walking out of thin air with no warning.”

“What did you have in mind?”

John was still pointing. “You’re going to make something appear before I do. Given your abilities, I don’t think it will tax you very much.”

“What is it that you would like?”

“A white piano,” John said. “But not just any old piano. It has to be a Bösendorfer grand. I was one once, remember?”

“But this one would be smaller, we take it?”

“Yes,” John said, nodding agreeably. “A lot smaller. Small enough that I can sit at the keyboard. So you’d better put a stool by it as well.”

Swift machinery darted through the air, quick as lightning. A piano assumed startling solidity, and then a red-cushioned stool. Across the plateau, one or two pilgrims had already observed its arrival. They were gesticulating excitedly, and the news was spreading fast.

“Is that all?”

John tapped the glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. “There’s one final thing. By the time I reach that stool, I need to be able to play the piano. I made music before, but that was different. Now I need to do it with my fingers, the old way. Think you can oblige?”

“We have much knowledge of music. The necessary neural scripting can be implemented by the time you arrive at the Bösendorfer. There may be a slight headache ...”

“I’ll deal with it.”

“It only remains to ask ... is there anything in particular you want to play?”

“Actually,” John said, stretching his fingers in readiness for the performance, “there is one song I had in mind. It’s about Mars, as it happens.”

Weather

We were at one-quarter of the speed of light, outbound from Shiva-Parvati with a hold full of refugees, when the Cockatrice caught up with us. She commenced her engagement at a distance of one light-second, seeking to disable us with long-range weapons before effecting a boarding operation. Captain Van Ness did his best to protect the Petronel, but we were a lightly armoured ship and Van Ness did not wish to endanger his passengers by provoking a damaging retaliation from the pirates. As coldly calculated as it might appear, Van Ness knew that it would be better for the sleepers to be taken by another ship than suffer a purposeless death in interstellar space.

As shipmaster, it was my duty to give Captain Van Ness the widest choice of options. When it became clear that the Cockatrice was on our tail, following us out from Shiva-Parvati, I recommended that we discard fifty thousand tonnes of nonessential hull material, in order to increase the rate of acceleration available from our Conjoiner drives. When the Cockatrice ramped up her own engines to compensate, I identified a further twenty thousand tonnes of material we could discard until the next orbitfall, even though the loss of the armour would marginally increase the radiation dosage we would experience during the flight. We gained a little, but the pirates still had power in reserve: they’d stripped back their ship to little more than a husk, and they didn’t have the mass handicap of our sleepers. Since we could not afford to lose any more hull material, I advised Van Ness to eject two of our three heavy shuttles, each of which massed six thousand tonnes when fully fuelled. That bought us yet more time, but to my dismay the pirates still found a way to squeeze a little more out of their engines.

Whoever they had as shipmaster, I thought, they were good at their work.

So I went to the engines themselves, to see if I could better my nameless opponent. I crawled out along the pressurised access tunnel that pierced the starboard spar, out to the coupling point where the foreign technology of the starboard Conjoiner drive was mated to the structural fabric of the Petronel. There I opened the hatch that gave access to the controls of the drive itself: six stiff dials, fashioned in blue metal, arranged in hexagon formation, each of which was tied to some fundamental aspect of the engine’s function. The dials were set into quadrant-shaped recesses, all now glowing a calm blue-green.

I noted the existing settings, then made near-microscopic alterations to three of the six dials, fighting to keep my hands steady as I applied the necessary effort to budge them. Even as I made the first alteration, I felt the engine respond: a shiver of power as some arcane process occurred deep inside it, accompanied by a shift in my own weight as the thrust increased by five or six per cent. The blue-green hue was now tinted with orange.

The Petronel surged faster, still maintaining her former heading. It was only possible to make adjustments to the starboard engine, since the port engine had no external controls. That didn’t matter, because the Conjoiners had arranged the two engines to work in perfect synchronisation, despite them being a kilometre apart. No one had ever succeeded in detecting the signals that passed between two matched C-drives, let alone in understanding the messages those signals carried. But everyone who worked with them knew what would happen if, by accident or design, the engines were allowed to get more than sixteen hundred metres apart.

I completed my adjustments, satisfied that I’d done all I could without risking engine malfunction. Three of the five dials were now showing orange, indicating that those settings were now outside what the Conjoiners deemed the recommended envelope of safe operation. If any of the dials were to show red, or if more than three showed orange, than we’d be in real danger of losing the Petronel.

When Ultras meet on friendly terms, to exchange data or goods, the shipmasters will often trade stories of engine settings. On a busy trade route, a marginal increase in drive efficiency can make all the difference between one ship and its competitors. Occasionally you hear about ships that have been running on three orange, even four orange, for decades at a time. By the same token, you sometimes hear about ships that went nova when only two dials had been adjusted away from the safety envelope. The one thing every shipmaster agrees upon is that no lighthugger has ever operated for more than a few days of shiptime with one dial in the red. You might risk that to escape aggressors, but even then some will insist that the danger is too great; that those ships that lasted days were the lucky ones.

I left the starboard engine and retreated back into the main hull of the Petronel. Van Ness was waiting to greet me. I could tell by the look on his face—the part of it that I could read—that the news wasn’t good.

“Good lad, Inigo,” he said, placing his heavy gauntleted hand on my shoulder. “You’ve bought us maybe half a day, and I’m grateful for that, no question of it. But it’s not enough to make a difference. Are you sure you can’t sweet-talk any more out of them?”

“We could risk going to two gees for a few hours. That still wouldn’t put us out of reach of the Cockatrice, though.”

“And beyond that?”

I showed Van Ness my handwritten log book, with its meticulous notes of engine settings, compiled over twenty years of shiptime. Black ink for my own entries, the style changing abruptly when I lost my old hand and slowly learned how to use the new one; red annotations in the same script for comments and know-how gleaned from other shipmasters, dated and named. “According to this, we’re already running a fifteen per cent chance of losing the ship within the next hundred days. I’d feel a lot happier if we were already throttling back.”

“You don’t think we can lose any more mass?”

“We’re stripped to the bone as it is. I can probably find you another few thousand tonnes, but we’ll still only be looking at prolonging the inevitable.”

“We’ll have the short-range weapons,” Van Ness said resignedly. “Maybe they’ll make enough of a difference. At least now we have an extra half-day to get them run out and tested.”

“Let’s hope so,” I agreed, fully aware that it was hopeless. The weapons were antiquated and underpowered, good enough for fending off orbital insurgents but practically useless against another ship, especially one that had been built for piracy. The Petronel hadn’t fired a shot in anger in more than fifty years. When Van Ness had the chance to upgrade the guns, he’d chosen instead to spend the money on newer reefersleep caskets for the passenger hold.

People have several wrong ideas about Ultras. One of the most common misconceptions is that we must all be brigands, every ship bristling with armaments, primed to a state of nervous readiness the moment another vessel comes within weapons range.

It isn’t true. For every ship like that, there are a thousand like the Petronel: just trying to ply an honest trade, with a decent, hardworking crew under the hand of a fair man like Van Ness. Some of us might look like freaks, by the standards of planetary civilisation. But spending an entire life aboard a ship, hopping from star to star at relativistic speed, soaking up exotic radiation from the engines and from space itself, is hardly the environment for which the human form was evolved. I’d lost my old hand in an accident, and much of what had happened to Van Ness was down to time and misfortune in equal measure.

He was one of the best captains I’d ever known, maybe the best ever. He’d scared the hell out of me the first time we met, when he was recruiting for a new shipmaster in a carousel around Greenhouse. But Van Ness treated his crew well, kept his word in a deal and always reminded us that our passengers were not frozen “cargo” but human beings who had entrusted themselves into our care.

“If it comes to it,” Van Ness said, “we’ll let them take the passengers. At least that way some of them might survive, even if they won’t necessarily end up where they were expecting. We put up too much of a fight, even after we’ve been boarded, the Cockatrice’s crew may just decide to burn everything, sleepers included.”

“I know,” I said, even though I didn’t want to hear it.

“But here’s my advice to you, lad.” Van Ness’s iron grip tightened on my shoulder. “Get yourself to an airlock as soon as you can. Blow yourself into space rather than let the bastards get their hands on you. They might be in mind for a bit of cruelty, but they won’t be in need of new crew.”

I winced, before he crushed my collarbone. He meant well, but he really didn’t know his own strength.

“Especially not a shipmaster, judging by the way things are going.”

“Aye. He’s good, whoever he is. Not as good as you, though. You’ve got a fully laden ship to push; all they have is a stripped-down skeleton.”

It was meant well, but I knew better than to underestimate my adversary. “Thank you, Captain.”

“We’d best start waking those guns, lad. If you’re done with the engines, the weaponsmaster may appreciate a helping hand.”

I barely slept for the next day. Coaxing the weapons back to operational readiness was a fraught business, and it all had to be done without alerting the Cockatrice that we had any last-minute defensive capability. The magnetic coils on the induction guns had to be warmed and brought up to operational field strength, and then tested with slugs of recycled hull material. One of the coils fractured during warm-up and took out its entire turret, injuring one of Weps’ men in the process. The optics on the lasers had to be aligned and calibrated, and then the lasers had to be test fired against specks of incoming interstellar dust, hoping that the Cockatrice didn’t spot those pinpoint flashes of gamma radiation as the lasers found their targets.

All the while this was going on, the enemy continued their long-range softening-up bombardment. The Cockatrice was using everything in her arsenal, from slugs and missiles to beam-weapons. The Petronel was running an evasion routine, swerving to exploit the sadly narrowing timelag between the two ships, but the routine was old and with the engines already notched up to close-on maximum output, there was precious little reserve power. No single impact was damaging, but as the assault continued, the cumulative effect began to take its toll. Acres of hull shielding were now compromised, and there were warnings of structural weakness in the port drive spar. If this continued, we would soon be forced to dampen our engines, rather than be torn apart by our own thrust loading. That was exactly what the Cockatrice wanted. Once they’d turned us into a lame duck, they could make a forced hard docking and storm our ship.

By the time they were eighty thousand kilometres out, things were looking very bad for us. Even the Cockatrice must have been nervous of what would happen if the port spar gave way, since they’d begun to concentrate their efforts on our midsection instead. Reluctantly I crawled back along the starboard spar and confronted the engine settings again. I was faced with two equally numbing possibilities. I could turn the dials even further into the orange, making the engines run harder still. Even if the engines held, the ship wouldn’t, but at least we’d go out in a flash when the spar collapsed and the two engines drifted apart. Or I could return the dials to blue-green and let the Cockatrice catch us up without risk of further failure. One option might ensure the future survival of the passengers. Neither looked very attractive from the crew’s standpoint.

Van Ness knew it, too. He’d begun to go around the rest of the crew, all two dozen of us, ordering those who weren’t actively involved in the current crisis to choose an empty casket in the passenger hold and try to pass themselves off as cargo. Van Ness was wise enough not to push the point when no one took him up on his offer.

At fifty thousand kilometres, the Cockatrice was in range of our own weapons. We let her slip a little closer and then rotated our hull through forty-five degrees to give her a full broadside, all eleven working slug-cannons discharging at once, followed by a burst from the lasers. The recoil from the slugs was enough to generate further warnings of structural failure in a dozen critical nodes. But we held, somehow, and thirty per cent of that initial salvo hit the Cockatrice square-on. By then the lasers had already struck her, vaporising thousands of tonnes of ablative ice from her prow in a scalding white flash. When the steam had fallen astern of the still-accelerating ship, we got our first good look at the damage.

It wasn’t enough. We’d hurt her, but barely, and I knew we couldn’t sustain more than three further bursts of fire before the Cockatrice’s own short-range weapons found their lock and returned the assault. As it was, we only got off another two salvos before the slug-cannons suffered a targeting failure. The lasers continued to fire for another minute, but once they’d burned off the Cockatrice’s ice (which she could easily replenish from our own shield, once we’d been taken) they could inflict little further damage.

By twenty thousand kilometres, all our weapons were inoperable. Fear of breakup had forced me to throttle our engines back down to zero thrust, leaving only our in-system fusion motors running. At ten thousand kilometres, the Cockatrice released a squadron of pirates, each of whom would be carrying hull-penetrating gear and shipboard weapons, in addition to their thruster packs and armour. They must have been confident that we had nothing else to throw at them.

We knew then it was over.

It was, too: but for the Cockatrice, not us. What took place happened too quickly for the human eye to see. It was only later, when we had the benefit of footage from the hull cameras, that we were able to piece together what had occurred.

One instant, the Cockatrice was creeping closer to us, her engines doused to a whisper now to match our own feeble rate of acceleration. The next instant, she was still there, but everything about her had changed. The engines were shut down completely and the hull had begun to come apart, flaking away in a long lateral line that ran the entire four kilometres from bow to stern. The Cockatrice began to crab, losing axial stabilisation. Pieces of her were drifting away. Vapour was jetting from a dozen apertures along her length. Where the hull had scabbed away, the brassy orange glow of internal fire was visible. One engine spar was seriously buckled.

We didn’t know it at the time—didn’t know it until much later, when we’d actually boarded her—but the Cockatrice had fallen victim to the oldest hazard in space: collision with debris. There isn’t a lot of it out there, but when it hits ... at a quarter of the speed of light, it doesn’t take much to inflict crippling damage. The impactor might only have been the size of a fist, or a fat thumb, but it had rammed its way right through the ship like a bullet, and the momentum transfer had almost ripped the engines off.

It was bad luck for the crew of the Cockatrice. For us, it was the most appalling piece of good luck imaginable. Except it wasn’t even luck, really. Every now and then, ships will encounter something like that. Deep-look radar will identify an incoming shard and send an emergency steer command to the engines. Or the radar will direct anti-collision lasers to vaporise the object before it hits. Even if it does hit, most of its kinetic energy will be soaked up by the ablation ice. Ships don’t carry all that deadweight for nothing.

But the Cockatrice had lost her ice under our lasers. She’d have replaced it sooner or later, but without it she was horribly vulnerable. And her own anti-collision system was preoccupied dealing with our short-range weapons. One little impactor was all it took to remove her from the battle.

It gave us enough of a handhold to start fighting back. With the Cockatrice out of the fight, our own crew were able to leave the protection of the ship without fear of being fried or pulverised. Van Ness was the first out of the airlock, with me not far behind him. Within five minutes there were twenty-three of us outside, our suits bulked out with armour and antiquated weapons. There were at least thirty incoming pirates from the Cockatrice, and they had better gear. But they’d lost the support of their mother ship, and all of them must have been aware that the situation had undergone a drastic adjustment. Perhaps it made them fight even more fiercely, given that ours was now the only halfway-intact ship. They’d been planning to steal our cargo before, and strip the Petronel for useful parts; now they needed to take the Petronel and claim her as her own. But they didn’t have back-up from the Cockatrice and—judging by the way the battle proceeded—they seemed handicapped by more than just the lack of covering fire. They fought as well as they could, which was with a terrible individual determination, but no overall coordination. Afterwards, we concluded that their suit-to-suit communications, even their spatial-orientation systems, must have been reliant on signals routed through their ship. Without her they were deaf and blind.

We still lost good crew. It took six hours to mop up the last resistance from the pirates, by which point we’d taken eleven fatalities, with another three seriously wounded. But by then the pirates were all dead, and we were in no mood to take prisoners.

But we were in a mood to take what we needed from the Cockatrice.

If we’d expected to encounter serious resistance aboard the damaged ship, we were wrong. As Van Ness led our boarding party through the drifting wreck, the scope of the damage became chillingly clear. The ship had been gutted from the inside out, with almost no intact pressure-bearing structures left anywhere inside her main hull. For most of the crew left aboard when the impactor hit, the end would have come with merciful swiftness. Only a few had survived the initial collision, and most of them must have died shortly afterwards, as the ship bled through its wounds. We found no sign that the Cockatrice had been carrying frozen passengers, although—since entire internal bays had been blasted out of existence, leaving only an interlinked chain of charred, blackened caverns—we probably wouldn’t ever know for sure. Of the few survivors we did encounter, none attempted surrender or requested parley. That made it easier for us. If they stood still, we shot them. If they fled, we still shot them.

Except for one.

We knew there was something different about her as soon as we saw her. She didn’t look or move like an Ultra. There was something of the cat or snake about the way she slinked out of the illumination of our lamps, something fluid and feral, something sleek and honed that did not belong aboard a ship crewed by pirates. We held our fire from the moment her eyes first flashed at us, for we knew she could not be one of them. Wide, white-edged eyes in a girl’s face, her strong-jawed expression one of ruthless self-control and effortless superiority. Her skull was hairless, her forehead rising to a bony crest rilled on either side by shimmering coloured tissue.

The girl was a Conjoiner.

It was three days before we found her again. She knew that ship with animal cunning, as if the entire twisted and blackened warren was a lair she had made for herself. But her options were diminishing with every hour that passed, as more and more air drained out of the wreck. Even Conjoiners needed to breathe, and that meant there was less and less of the ship in which she could hide.

Van Ness wanted to move on. Van Ness—a good man, but never the most imaginative of souls—wasn’t interested in what a stray Conjoiner could do for us. I’d warned him that the Cockatrice’s engines were in an unstable condition, and that we wouldn’t have time to back off to a safe distance if the buckled drive spar finally gave way. Now that we’d harvested enough of the other ship’s intact hull to repair our own damage, Van Ness saw no reason to hang around. But I managed to talk him into letting us hunt down the girl.

“She’s a Conjoiner, Captain. She wouldn’t have been aboard that ship of her own free will. That means she’s a prisoner that we can free and return to her people. They’ll be grateful. That means they’ll want to reward us.”

Van Ness fixed me with an indulgent smile. “Lad, have you ever had close dealings with Spiders?”

He still called me “lad” even though I’d been part of his crew for twenty years, and had been born another twenty before that, by shiptime reckoning. “No,” I admitted. “But the Spiders—the Conjoiners—aren’t the bogey men some people like to make out.”

“I’ve dealt with ’em,” Van Ness said. “I’m a lot older than you, lad. I go right back to when things weren’t so pretty between the Spiders and the rest of humanity, back when my wife was alive.”

It took a lot to stir up the past for Rafe Van Ness. In all our years together, he’d only mentioned his wife a handful of times. She’d been a botanist, working on the Martian terraforming programme. She’d been caught by a flash flood when she was working in one of the big craters, testing plant stocks for the Demarchists. All I knew was that after her death, Van Ness had left the system, on one of the first passenger-carrying starships. It had been his first step on the long road to becoming an Ultra.

“They’ve changed since the old days,” I said. “We trust them enough to use their engines, don’t we?”

“We trust the engines. Isn’t quite the same thing. And if they didn’t have such a monopoly on making the things, maybe we wouldn’t have to deal with them at all. Anyway, who is this girl? What was she doing aboard the Cockatrice ? What makes you think she wasn’t helping them?”

“Conjoiners don’t condone piracy. And if we want answers, we have no option but to catch her and find out what she has to say.”

Van Ness sounded suddenly interested. “Interrogate her, you mean?”

“I didn’t say that, Captain. But we might want to ask her a few questions.”

“We’d be playing with fire. You know they can make things happen just by thinking about them.”

“She’ll have no reason to hurt us. We’ll have saved her life just by taking her off the Cockatrice.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want it saved. Have you thought of that?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we find her, Captain.”

He pulled a face, that part of his visage still capable of making expressions, at least. “I’ll give you another twelve hours, lad. That’s my limit. Then we put as much distance between us and that wreck as God and physics will allow.”

I nodded, knowing that it was pointless to expect more of Van Ness. He’d already shown great forbearance in allowing us to delay the departure for so long. Given his feelings regarding Conjoiners, I wasn’t going to push for any more time.

We caught her eleven hours later. We’d driven her as far as she could go, blocking her escape routes by blowing the few surrounding volumes that were still pressurised. I was the first to speak to her, when we finally had her cornered.

I pushed up the visor of my helmet, breathing stale air so that we could speak. She was huddled in a corner, compressed like some animal ready to bolt or strike.

“Stop running from us,” I said, as my lamp pinned her down and forced her to squint. “There’s nowhere left to go, and even if there was, we don’t want to hurt you. Whatever these people did to you, whatever they made you do, we’re not like them.”

She hissed back, “You’re Ultras. That’s all I need to know.”

“We’re Ultras, yes, but we still want to help you. Our captain just wants to get away from this time bomb as quickly as possible. I talked him into giving us a few extra hours to find you. You can come with us whenever you like. But if you’d rather stay aboard this ship ...”

She stared back at me and said nothing. I couldn’t guess her age. She had the face of a girl, but there was a steely resolution in her olive-green eyes that told me she was older than she looked.

“I’m Inigo, the shipmaster from the Petronel,” I said, hoping that my smile looked reassuring rather than threatening. I reached out my hand, my right one, and she flinched back. Even suited, even hidden under a glove, my hand was obviously mechanical. “Please,” I continued, “come with us. We’ll treat you well and get you back to your people.”

“Why?” she snarled. “Why do you care?”

“Because we’re not all the same,” I said. “And you need to believe it, or you’re going to die here when we leave. Captain wants us to secure for thrust in less than an hour. So come on.”

“What happened?” she asked, looking around at the damaged compartment in which she had been cornered. “I know the Cockatrice was attacking another ship ... how did you do this?”

“We didn’t. We just got very, very lucky. Now it’s your turn.”

“I can’t leave here. I need to be with this ship.”

“This ship is going to blow up if one of us sneezes. Do you really want to be aboard when that happens?”

“I still need to be here. Leave me alone, I’ll survive by myself. Conjoiners will find me again.”

I shook my head firmly. “That isn’t going to happen. Even if this ship doesn’t blow up, you’re still drifting at twenty-five per cent of the speed of light. That’s too fast to get you back to Shiva-Parvati, even if there’s a shuttle aboard this thing. Too fast for anyone around Shiva-Parvati to come out and rescue you, too.”

“I know this.”

“Then you also know that you’re not moving anywhere near fast enough to actually get anywhere before your resources run out. Unless you think you can survive fifty years aboard this thing, until you swing by the next colonised system with no way of slowing down.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

A voice buzzed in my helmet. It was Van Ness, insisting that we return to the Petronel as quickly as possible. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but if you don’t come willingly, I’m going to have to bring you in unconscious.” I raised the blunt muzzle of my slug-gun.

“If there’s a tranquiliser dart in there, it won’t work on me. My nervous system isn’t like yours. I only sleep when I choose to.”

“That’s what I figured. It’s why I dialled the dose to five times its normal strength. I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to give it a try and see what happens.”

Panic crossed her face. “Give me a suit,” she said. “Give me a suit and then leave me alone, if you really want to help.”

“What’s your name?”

“We don’t have names, Inigo. At least nothing you could get your tongue around.”

“I’m willing to try.”

“Give me a suit. Then leave me alone.”

Van Ness started screaming in my ears again. I’d had enough. I pointed the muzzle at her, aiming for the flesh of her thigh, where she had her legs tucked under her. I squeezed the trigger and delivered the stun fléchette.

“You fool,” she said. “You don’t understand. You have to leave me here, with this ...”

That was all she managed before slumping into unconsciousness. She’d gone down much faster than I’d expected, as if she’d already been on her last reserves of strength. I just hoped I hadn’t set the stun dose too high. It was already strong enough to kill any normal human being.

Van Ness had been right to be concerned about our proximity to the Cockatrice. We’d barely doubled the distance between the two ships when her drive spar failed, allowing the port engine to drift away from its starboard counterpart. Several agonising minutes later, the distance between the two engine units exceeded sixteen hundred metres and the drives went up in a double burst that tested our shielding to its limits. The flash must have been visible all the way back to Shiva-Parvati.

The girl had been unconscious right up until that moment, but when the engines went up she twitched on the bunk where we’d placed her, just as if she’d been experiencing a vivid and disturbing dream. The rilled structures on the side of her crest throbbed with vivid colours, each chasing the last. Then she was restful again, for many hours, and the play of colours calmer.

I watched her sleeping. I’d never been near a Conjoiner before, let alone one like this. Aboard the ship, when we had been hunting her, she had seemed strong and potentially dangerous. Now she looked like some half-starved animal, driven to the brink of madness by hunger and something in finitely worse. There were awful bruises all over her body, some more recent than others. There were fine scars on her skull. One of her incisors was missing a point.

Van Ness still wasn’t convinced of the wisdom of bringing her aboard, but even his dislike of Conjoiners didn’t extend to the notion of throwing her back into space. All the same, he insisted that she be bound to the bunk by heavy restraints, in an armoured room under the guard of a servitor, at least until we had some idea of who she was and how she had ended up aboard the pirate ship. He didn’t want heavily augmented crew anywhere near her, either: not when (as he evidently believed) she had the means to control any machine in her vicinity, and might therefore overpower or even commandeer any crewperson who had a skull full of implants. It wasn’t like that, I tried to tell him: Conjoiners could talk to machines, yes, but not all machines, and the idea that they could work witchcraft on anything with a circuit inside it was just so much irrational fearmongering.

Van Ness heard my reasoned objections, and then ignored them. I’m glad that he did, though. Had he listened to me, he might have put some other member of the crew in charge of questioning her, and then I wouldn’t have got to know her as well as I did. Because I only had the metal hand, the rest of me still flesh and blood, he deemed me safe from her influence.

I was with her when she woke.

I placed my left on her shoulder as she squirmed under the restraints, suddenly aware of her predicament. “It’s all right,” I said softly. “You’re safe now. Captain made us put these on you for the time being, but we’ll get them off you as soon as we can. That’s a promise. I’m Inigo, by the way, shipmaster. We met before, but I’m not sure how much of that you remember.”

“Every detail,” she said. Her voice was low, dark-tinged, untrusting.

“Maybe you don’t know where you are. You’re aboard the Petronel. The Cockatrice is gone, along with everyone aboard her. Whatever they did to you, whatever happened to you aboard that ship, it’s over now.”

“You didn’t listen to me.”

“If we’d listened to you,” I said patiently, “you’d be dead by now.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

I’d been ready to give her the benefit of the doubt, but my reservoir of sympathy was beginning to dry up. “You know, it wouldn’t hurt to show a little gratitude. We put ourselves at considerable risk to get you to safety. We’d taken everything we needed from the pirates. We only went back in to help you.”

“I didn’t need you to help me. I could have survived.”

“Not unless you think you could have held that spar on by sheer force of will.”

She hissed back her reply. “I’m a Conjoiner. That means the rules were different. I could have changed things. I could have kept the ship in one piece.”

“To make a point?”

“No,” she said, with acid slowness, as if that was the only speed I was capable of following. “Not to make a point. We don’t make points.”

“The ship’s gone,” I said. “It’s over, so you may as well deal with it. You’re with us now. And no, you’re not our prisoner. We’ll do everything I said we would: take care of you, get you to safety, back to your people.”

“You really think it’s that simple?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me? I don’t see what the problem is.”

“The problem is I can’t ever go back. Is that simple enough for you?”

“Why?” I asked. “Were you exiled from the Conjoiners, or something like that?”

She shook her elaborately crested head, as if my question was the most naive thing she had ever heard. “No one gets exiled.”

“Then tell me what the hell happened!”

Anger burst to the surface. “I was taken, all right? I was stolen, snatched away from my people. Captain Voulage took me prisoner around Yellowstone, when the Cockatrice was docked near one of our ships. I was part of a small diplomatic party visiting Carousel New Venice. Voulage’s men ambushed us, split us up, then took me so far from the other Conjoiners that I dropped out of neural range. Have you any idea what that means to one of us?”

I shook my head, not because I didn’t understand what she meant, but because I knew I could have no proper grasp of the emotional pain that severance must have caused. I doubted that pain was a strong enough word for the psychic shock associated with being ripped away from her fellows. Nothing in ordinary human experience could approximate the trauma of that separation, any more than a frog could grasp the loss of a loved one. Conjoiners spent their whole lives in a state of gestalt consciousness, sharing thoughts and experiences via a web of implant-mediated neural connections. They had individual personalities, but those personalities were more like the blurred identities of atoms in a metallic solid. Beyond the level of individual self was the state of higher mental union that they called Transenlightenment, analogous to the fizzing sea of dissociated electrons in that same metallic lattice. And the girl had been ripped away from that, forced to come to terms with existence as a solitary mind, an island once more.

“I understand how bad it must have been,” I said. “But now you can go back. Isn’t that something worth looking forward to?”

“You only think you understand. To a Conjoiner, what happened to me is the worst thing in the world. And now I can’t go back: not now, not ever. I’ve become damaged, broken, useless. My mind is permanently disfigured. It can’t be allowed to return to Transenlightenment.”

“Why ever not? Wouldn’t they be glad to get you back?”

She took a long time answering. In the quiet, I studied her face, watchful for anything that would betray the danger Van Ness clearly believed she posed. Now his fears seemed groundless. She looked smaller and more delicately boned than when we’d first glimpsed her on the Cockatrice. The strangeness of her, the odd shape of her hairless crested skull, should have been off-putting. In truth I found her fascinating. It was not her alienness that drew my furtive attention, but her very human face: her small and pointed chin, the pale freckles under her eyes, the way her mouth never quite closed, even when she was silent. The olive green of her eyes was a shade so dark that from certain angles it became a lustrous black, like the surface of coal.

“No,” she said, answering me finally. “It wouldn’t work. I’d upset the purity of the others, spoil the harmony of the neural connections, like a single out-of-tune instrument in an orchestra. I’d make everyone else start playing out of key.”

“I think you’re being too fatalistic. Shouldn’t we at least try to find some other Conjoiners and see what they say?”

“That isn’t how it works,” she said. “They’d have to take me back, yes, if I presented myself to them. They’d do it out of kindness and compassion. But I’d still end up harming them. It’s my duty not to allow that to happen.”

“Then you’re saying you have to spend the rest of your life away from other Conjoiners, wandering the universe like some miserable excommunicated pilgrim?”

“There are more of us than you realise.”

“You do a good job keeping out of the limelight. Most people only see Conjoiners in groups, all dressed in black like a flock of crows.”

“Maybe you aren’t looking in the right places.”

I sighed, aware that nothing I said was going to convince her that she would be better off returning to her people. “It’s your life, your destiny. At least you’re alive. Our word still holds: we’ll drop you at the nearest safe planet, when we next make orbitfall. If that isn’t satisfactory to you, you’d be welcome to remain aboard ship until we arrive somewhere else.”

“Your captain would allow that? I thought he was the one who wanted to leave the wreck before you’d found me.”

“I’ll square things with the captain. He isn’t the biggest fan of Conjoiners, but he’ll see sense when he realises you aren’t a monster.”

“Does he have a reason not to like me?”

“He’s an old man,” I said simply.

“Riven with prejudice, you mean?”

“In his way,” I said, shrugging. “But don’t blame him for that. He lived through the bad years, when your people were first coming into existence. I think he had some first-hand experience of the trouble that followed.”

“Then I envy him those first-hand memories. Not many of us are still alive from those times. To have lived through those years, to have breathed the same air as Remontoire and the others ...” She looked away sadly. “Remontoire’s gone now. So are Galiana and Nevil. We don’t know what happened to any of them.”

I knew she must have been talking about pivotal figures from earlier Conjoiner history, but the people of whom she spoke meant nothing to me. To her, cast so far downstream from those early events on Mars, the names must have held something of the resonance of saints or apostles. I thought I knew something of Conjoiners, but they had a long and complicated internal history of which I was totally ignorant.

“I wish things hadn’t happened the way they did,” I said. “But that was then and this is now. We don’t hate or fear you. If we did, we wouldn’t have risked our necks getting you out of the Cockatrice.”

“No, you don’t hate or fear me,” she replied. “But you still think I might be useful to you, don’t you?”

“Only if you wish to help us.”

“Captain Voulage thought that I might have the expertise to improve the performance of his ship.”

“Did you?” I asked innocently.

“By increments, yes. He showed me the engines and ... encouraged me to make certain changes. You told me you are a shipmaster, so you doubtless have some familiarity with the principles involved.”

I thought back to the adjustments I had made to our own engines, when we still had ambitions of fleeing the pirates. The memory of my trembling hand on those three critical dials felt as if it had been dredged from deepest antiquity, rather than something that had happened only days earlier.

“When you say ‘encouraged’ ...” I began.

“He found ways to coerce me. It is true that Conjoiners can control their perception of pain by applying neural blockades. But only to a degree, and then only when the pain has a real physical origin. If the pain is generated in the head, using a reverse-field trawl, our defences are useless. “ She looked at me with a sudden hard intensity, as if daring me to imagine one-tenth of what she had experienced. “It is like locking a door when the wolf is already in the house.”

“I’m sorry. You must have been through hell.”

“I only had the pain to endure,” she said. “I’m not the one anyone needs to feel sorry about.”

The remark puzzled me, but I let it lie. “I have to get back to our own engines now,” I said, “but I’ll come to see you later. In the meantime, I think you should rest.” I snapped a duplicate communications bracelet from my wrist and placed it near her hand, where she could reach it. “If you need me, you can call into this. It’ll take me a little while to get back here, but I’ll come as quickly as possible. “

She lifted her forearm as far as it would go, until the restraints stiffened. “And these?”

“I’ll talk to Van Ness. Now that you’re lucid, now that you’re talking to us, I don’t see any further need for them.”

“Thank you,” she said again. “Inigo. Is that all there is to your name? It’s rather a short one, even by the standards of the retarded.”

“Inigo Standish, shipmaster. And you still haven’t told me your name.”

“I told you: it’s nothing you could understand. We have our own names now, terms of address that can only be communicated in the Transenlightenment. My name is a flow of experiential symbols, a string of interiorised qualia, an expression of a particular dynamic state that has only ever happened under a conjunction of rare physical conditions in the atmosphere of a particular kind of gas giant planet. I chose it myself. It’s considered very beautiful and a little melancholy, like a haiku in five dimensions.”

“Inside the atmosphere of a gas giant, right?”

She looked at me alertly. “Yes.”

“Fine, then. I’ll call you Weather. Unless you’d like to suggest something better.”

She never did suggest something better, even though I think she once came close to it. From that moment on, whether she liked it or not, she was always Weather. Soon, it was what the other crew were calling her, and the name that—grudgingly at first, then resignedly—she deigned to respond to.

I went to see Captain Van Ness and did my best to persuade him that Weather was not going to cause us any dif ficulties.

“What are you suggesting we should give her—a free pass to the rest of the ship?”

“Only that we could let her out of her prison cell.”

“She’s recuperating.”

“She’s restrained. And you’ve put an armed servitor on the door, in case she gets out of the restraints.”

“Pays to be prudent.”

“I think we can trust her now, Captain.” I hesitated, choosing my words with great care. “I know you have good reasons not to like her people, but she isn’t the same as the Conjoiners from those days.”

“That’s what she’d like us to think, certainly.”

“I’ve spoken to her, heard her story. She’s an outcast from her people, unable to return to them because of what’s happened to her.”

“Well, then,” Van Ness said, nodding as if he’d proved a point, “outcasts do funny things. You can’t ever be too careful with outcasts.”

“It’s not like that with Weather.”

“Weather,” he repeated, with a certain dry distaste. “So she’s got a name now, has she?”

“I felt it might help. The name was my suggestion, not hers.”

“Don’t start humanising them. That’s the mistake humans always make. Next thing you know, they’ve got their claws in your skull.”

I closed my eyes, forcing self-control as the conversation veered off course. I’d always had an excellent relationship with Van Ness, one that came very close to bordering on genuine friendship. But from the moment he heard about Weather, I knew she was going to come between us.

“I’m not suggesting we let her run amok,” I said. “Even if we let her out of those restraints, even if we take away the servitor, we can still keep her out of any parts of the ship where we don’t want her. In the meantime, I think she can be helpful to us. She’s already told me that Captain Voulage forced her to make improvements to the Cockatrice ‘s drive system. I don’t see why she can’t do the same for us, if we ask nicely.”

“Why did he have to force her, if you’re so convinced she’d do it willingly now?”

“I’m not convinced. But I can’t see why she wouldn’t help us, if we treat her like a human being.”

“That’d be our big mistake,” Van Ness said. “She never was a human being. She’s been a Spider from the moment they made her, and she’ll go to the grave like that.”

“Then you won’t consider it?”

“I consented to let you bring her aboard. That was already against every God-given instinct.” Then Van Ness rumbled, “And I’d thank you not to mention the Spider again, Inigo. You’ve my permission to visit her if you see fit, but she isn’t taking a step out of that room until we make orbitfall.”

“Very well,” I said, with a curtness that I’d never had cause to use on Captain Van Ness.

As I was leaving his cabin, he said, “You’re still a fine shipmaster, lad. That’s never been in doubt. But don’t let this thing cloud your usual good judgement. I’d hate to have to look elsewhere for someone of your abilities.”

I turned back and, despite everything that told me to hold my tongue, I still spoke. “I was wrong about you, Captain. I’ve always believed that you didn’t allow yourself to be ruled by the irrational hatreds of other Ultras. I always thought you were better than that.”

“And I’d have gladly told you I have just as many prejudices as the next man. They’re what’ve kept me alive so long.”

“I’m sure Captain Voulage felt the same way,” I said.

It was a wrong and hateful thing to say—Van Ness had nothing in common with a monster like Voulage—but I couldn’t stop myself. And I knew even as I said it that some irreversible bridge had just been crossed, and that it was more my fault than Van Ness’s.

“You have work to do, I think,” Van Ness said, his voice so low that I barely heard it. “Until you have the engines back to full thrust, I suggest you keep out of my way.”

Weps came to see me eight or nine hours later. I knew it wasn’t good news as soon as I saw her face.

“We have a problem, Inigo. The captain felt you needed to know.”

“And he couldn’t tell me himself?”

Weps cleared part of the wall and called up a display, filling it with a boxy green three-dimensional grid. “That’s us,” she said, jabbing a finger at the red dot in the middle of the display. She moved her finger halfway to the edge, scratching her long black nail against the plating. “Something else is out there. It’s stealthed to the gills, but I’m still seeing it. Whatever it is is making a slow, silent approach.”

My thoughts flicked to Weather. “Could it be Conjoiner?”

“That was my first guess. But if it was Conjoiner, I don’t think I’d be seeing anything at all.”

“So what are we dealing with?”

She tapped the nail against the blue icon representing the new ship. “Another raider. Could be an ally of Voulage—we know he had friends—or could be some other ship that was hoping to pick over our carcass once Voulage was done with us, or maybe even steal us from him before he had his chance.”

“Hyena tactics.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Range?”

“Less than two light-hours. Even if they don’t increase their rate of closure, they’ll be on us within eight days.”

“Unless we move.”

Weps nodded sagely. “That would help. You’re on schedule to complete repairs within six days, aren’t you?”

“On schedule, yes, but that doesn’t mean things can be moved any faster. We start cutting corners now, we’ll break like a twig when we put a real load on the ship.”

“We wouldn’t want that.”

“No, we wouldn’t.”

“The captain just thought you should be aware of the situation, Inigo. It’s not to put you under pressure, or anything. “

“Of course not.”

“It’s just that ... we really don’t want to be hanging around here a second longer than necessary.”

I removed Weather’s restraints and showed her how to help herself to food and water from the room’s dispenser. She stretched and purred, articulating and extending her limbs in the manner of a dancer rehearsing some difficult routine in extreme slow motion. She’d been “reading” when I arrived, which for Weather seemed to involve staring into the middle distance while her eyes flicked to and fro at manic speed, as if following the movements of an invisible wasp.

“I can’t let you out of the room just yet,” I said, sitting on the fold-down stool next to the bed, upon which Weather now sat cross-legged. “I just hope this makes things a little more tolerable.”

“So your captain’s finally realised I’m not about to suck out his brains?”

“Not exactly. He’d still rather you weren’t aboard.”

“Then you’re going against his orders.”

“I suppose so.”

“I presume you could get into trouble for that.”

“He’ll never find out.” I thought of the unknown ship that was creeping towards us. “He’s got other things on his mind now. It’s not as if he’s going to be paying you a courtesy call just to pass the time of day.”

“But if he did find out ...” She looked at me intently, lifting her chin. “Do you fear what he’d do to you?”

“I probably should. But I don’t think he’d be very likely to throw me into an airlock. Not until we’re under way at full power, in any case.”

“And then?”

“He’d be angry. But I don’t think he’d kill me. He’s not a bad man, really.”

“Perhaps I misheard, but didn’t you say his name was Van Ness?”

“Captain Rafe Van Ness, yes.” I must have looked surprised. “Don’t tell me it means something to you.”

“I heard Voulage mention him, that’s all. Now I know we’re talking about the same man.”

“What did Voulage have to say?”

“Nothing good. But I don’t think that necessarily re flects poorly on your captain. He must be a reasonable man. He’s at least allowed me aboard his ship, even if I haven’t been invited to dine in his quarters.”

“Dining for Van Ness is a pretty messy business,” I said confidingly. “You’re better off eating alone.”

“Do you like him, Inigo?”

“He has his flaws, but next to someone like Voulage, he’s pretty close to being an angel.”

“Doesn’t like Conjoiners, though.”

“Most Ultras would have left you drifting. I think this is a point where you have to take what you’re given.”

“Perhaps. I don’t understand his attitude, though. If your captain is like most Ultras, there’s at least as much of the machine about him as there is about me. More so, in all likelihood.”

“It’s what you do with the machines that counts,” I said. “Ultras tend to leave their minds alone, if at all possible. Even if they do have implants, it’s usually to replace areas of brain function lost due to injury or old age. They’re not really interested in improving matters, if you get my drift. Maybe that’s why Conjoiners make them twitchy.”

She unhooked her legs, dangling them over the edge of the bed. Her feet were bare and oddly elongated. She wore the same tight black outfit we’d found her in when we boarded the ship. It was cut low from her neck, in a rectangular shape. Her breasts were small. Though she was bony, with barely any spare muscle on her, she had the broad shoulders of a swimmer. Though Weather had sustained her share of injuries, the outfit showed no sign of damage at all. It appeared to be self-repairing, even self-cleaning.

“You talk of Ultras as if you weren’t one,” she said.

“Just an old habit breaking through. Though sometimes I don’t feel like quite the same breed as a man like Van Ness.”

“Your implants must be very well shielded. I can’t sense them at all.”

“That’s because there aren’t any.”

“Squeamish? Or just too young and fortunate not to have needed them yet?”

“It’s nothing to do with being squeamish. I’m not as young as I look, either.” I held up my mechanical hand. “Nor would I exactly call myself fortunate.”

She looked at the hand with narrowed, critical eyes. I remembered how she’d flinched back when I reached for her aboard the Cockatrice, and wondered what maltreatment she had suffered at the iron hands of her former masters.

“You don’t like it?” she asked.

“I liked the old one better.”

Weather reached out and gingerly held my hand in hers. They looked small and doll-like as they stroked and examined my mechanical counterpart.

“This is the only part of you that isn’t organic?”

“As far as I know.”

“Doesn’t that limit you? Don’t you feel handicapped around the rest of the crew?”

“Sometimes. But not always. My job means I have to squeeze into places where a man like Van Ness could never fit. It also means I have to be able to tolerate magnetic fields that would rip half the crew to shreds, if they didn’t boil alive first.” I opened and closed my metal fist. “I have to unscrew this, sometimes. I have a plastic replacement if I just need to hook hold of things.”

“You don’t like it very much.”

“It does what I ask of it.”

Weather made to let go of my hand, but her fingers remained in contact with mine for an instant longer than necessary. “I’m sorry that you don’t like it.”

“I could have got it fixed at one of the orbital clinics, I suppose,” I said, “but there’s always something else that needs fixing first. Anyway, if it wasn’t for the hand, some people might not believe I’m an Ultra at all.”

“Do you plan on being an Ultra all your life?”

“I don’t know. I can’t say I ever had my mind set on being a shipmaster. It just sort of happened, and now here I am.”

“I had my mind set on something once,” Weather said. “I thought it was within my grasp, too. Then it slipped out of reach.” She looked at me and then did something wonderful and unexpected, which was to smile. It was not the most genuine-looking smile I’d ever seen, but I sensed the genuine intent behind it. Suddenly I knew there was a human being in the room with me, damaged and dangerous though she might have been. “Now here I am, too. It’s not quite what I expected ... but thank you for rescuing me.”

“I was beginning to wonder if we’d made a mistake. You seemed so reluctant to leave that ship.”

“I was,” she said, distantly. “But that’s over now. You did what you thought was the right thing.”

“Was it?”

“For me, yes. For the ship ... maybe not.” Then she stopped and cocked her head to one side, frowning. Her eyes flashed olive. “What are you looking at, Inigo?”

“Nothing,” I said, looking sharply away.

Keeping out of Van Ness’s way, as he’d advised, was not the hard part of what followed. The Petronel was a big ship and our paths didn’t need to cross in the course of day-to-day duties. The difficulty was finding as much time to visit Weather as I would have liked. My original repair plan had been tight, but the unknown ship forced me to accelerate the schedule even further, despite what I’d told Weps. The burden of work began to take its toll on me, draining my concentration. I was still confident that once that work was done, we’d be able to continue our journey as if nothing had happened, save for the loss of those crew who had died in the engagement and our gaining one new passenger. The other ship would probably abandon us once we pushed the engines up to cruise thrust, looking for easier pickings elsewhere. If it had the swiftness of the Cockatrice, it wouldn’t have been skulking in the shadows letting the other ship take first prize.

But my optimism was misplaced. When the repair work was done, I once more made my way along the access shaft to the starboard engine and confronted the hexagonal arrangement of input dials. As expected, all six dials were now showing deep blue, which meant they were operating well inside the safety envelope. But when I consulted my log book and made the tiny adjustments that should have taken all the dials into the blue-green—still nicely within the safety envelope—I got a nasty surprise. I only had to nudge two of the dials by a fraction of a millimetre before they shone a hard and threatening orange.

Something was wrong.

I checked my settings, of course, making sure none of the other dials were out of position. But there’d been no mistake. I thumbed through the log with increasing haste, a prickly feeling on the back of my neck, looking for an entry where something similar had happened; something that would point me to the obvious mistake I must have made. But none of the previous entries were the slightest help. I’d made no error with the settings, and that left only one possibility: something had happened to the engine. It was not working properly.

“This isn’t right,” I said to myself. “They don’t fail. They don’t break down. Not like this.”

But what did I know? My entire experience of working with C-drives was confined to routine operations, under normal conditions. Yet we’d just been through a battle against another ship, one in which we were already known to have sustained structural damage. As shipmaster, I’d been diligent in attending to the hull and the drive spar, but it had never crossed my mind that something might have happened to one or other of the engines.

Why not?

There’s a good reason. It’s because even if something had happened, there would never have been anything I could have done about it. Worrying about the breakdown of a Conjoiner drive was like worrying about the one piece of debris you won’t have time to steer around or shoot out of the sky. You can’t do anything about it, ergo you forget about it until it happens. No shipmaster ever loses sleep over the failure of a C-drive.

It looked as if I was going to lose a lot more than sleep.

Even if we didn’t have another ship to worry about, we were in more than enough trouble. We were too far out from Shiva-Parvati to get back again, and yet we were moving too slowly to make it to another system. Even if the engines kept working as they were now, we’d take far too long to reach relativistic speed, where time dilation became appreciable. At twenty-five per cent of the speed of light, what would have been a twenty-year hop before became an eighty-year crawl now ... and that was an eighty-year crawl in which almost all that time would be experienced aboard ship. Across that stretch of time, reefersleep was a lottery. Our caskets were designed to keep people frozen for five to ten years, not four-fifths of a century.

I was scared. I’d gone from feeling calmly in control to feeling total devastation in about five minutes.

I didn’t want to let the rest of the crew know that we had a potential crisis on our hands, at least not until I’d spoken to Weather. I’d already crossed swords with Van Ness, but he was still my captain, and I wanted to spare him the dif ficulty of a frightened crew, at least until I knew all the facts.

Weather was awake when I arrived. In all my visits, I’d never found her sleeping. In the normal course of events Conjoiners had no need of sleep: at worst, they’d switch off certain areas of brain function for a few hours.

She read my face like a book. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

So much for the notion that Conjoiners were not able to interpret facial expressions. Just because they didn’t make many of them didn’t mean they’d forgotten the rules.

I sat down on the fold-out stool.

“I’ve tried to push the engines back up to normal cruise thrust. I’m already seeing red on two dials, and we haven’t even exceeded point-two gees.”

She thought about this for several moments: what for Weather must have been hours of subjective contemplation. “You didn’t appear to be pushing your engines dangerously during the chase.”

“I wasn’t. Everything looked normal up until now. I think we must have taken some damage to one of the drives, during Voulage’s softening-up assault. I didn’t see any external evidence, but—”

“You wouldn’t, not necessarily. The interior architecture of one of our drives is a lot more complicated, a lot more delicate, than is normally appreciated. It’s at least possible that a shock-wave did some harm to one of your engines, especially if your coupling gear—the shock-dampening assembly—was already compromised.”

“It probably was,” I said. “The spar was already stressed.”

“Then you have your explanation. Something inside your engine has broken, or is considered by the engine itself to be dangerously close to failure. Either way, it would be suicide to increase the thrust beyond the present level.”

“Weather, we need both those engines to get anywhere, and we need them at normal efficiency.”

“It hadn’t escaped me.”

“Is there anything you can do to help us?”

“Very little, I expect.”

“But you must know something about the engines, or you wouldn’t have been able to help Voulage.”

“Voulage’s engines weren’t damaged,” she explained patiently.

“I know that. But you were still able to make them work better. Isn’t there something you can do for us?”

“From here, nothing at all.”

“But if you were allowed to get closer to the engines ... might that make a difference?”

“Until I’m there, I couldn’t possibly say. It’s irrelevant though, isn’t it? Your captain will never allow me out of this room.”

“Would you do it for us if he did?”

“I’d do it for me.”

“Is that the best you can offer?”

“All right, then maybe I’d for it for you.” Just saying this caused Weather visible discomfort, as if the utterance violated some deep personal code that had remained intact until now. “You’ve been kind to me. I know you risked trouble with Van Ness to make things easier in my cell. But you need to understand something very important. You may care for me. You may even think you like me. But I can’t give you back any of that. What I feel for you is ...” Weather hesitated, her mouth half-open. “You know we call you the retarded. There’s a reason for that. The emotions I feel ... the things that go on in my head ... simply don’t map onto anything you’d recognise as love, or affection, or even friendship. Reducing them to those terms would be like ...” And then she stalled, unable to finish.

“Like making a sacrifice?”

“You’ve been good to me, Inigo. But I really am like the weather. You can admire me, even love me, in your way, but I can’t love you back. To me you’re like a photograph. I can see right through you, examine you from all angles. You amuse me. But you don’t have enough depth ever to fascinate me.”

“There’s more to love than fascination. And you said it yourself: you’re halfway back to being human again.”

“I said I wasn’t a Conjoiner any more. But that doesn’t mean I could ever be like you.”

“You could try.”

“You don’t understand us.”

“I want to!”

Weather jammed her olive eyes tight shut. “Let’s ... not get ahead of ourselves, shall we? I only wanted to spare you any unnecessary emotional pain. But if we don’t get this ship moving properly, that’ll be the least of your worries. “

“I know.”

“So perhaps we should return to the matter of the engines. Again: none of this will matter if Van Ness refuses to trust me.”

My cheeks were smarting as if I’d been slapped hard in the face. Part of me knew she was only being kind, in the harshest of ways. That part was almost prepared to accept her rejection. The other part of me only wanted her more, as if her bluntness had succeeded only in sharpening my desire. Perhaps she was right; perhaps I was insane to think a Conjoiner could ever feel something in return. But I remembered the gentle way she’d stroked my fingers, and I wanted her even more.

“I’ll deal with Van Ness,” I said. “I think there’s a little something that will convince him to take a risk. You start thinking about what you can do for us.”

“Is that an order, Inigo?”

“No,” I said. “Nobody’s going to order you to do anything. I gave you my word on that, and I’m not about to break it. Nothing you’ve just said changes that.”

She sat tight-lipped, staring at me as if I was some kind of byzantine logic puzzle she needed to unscramble. I could almost feel the furious computation of her mind, as if I was standing next to a humming turbine. Then she lifted her little pointed chin minutely, saying nothing, but letting me know that if I convinced Van Ness, she would do what she could, however ineffectual that might prove.

The captain was tougher to crack than I’d expected. I’d assumed he would fold as soon as I explained our predicament—that we were going nowhere, and that Weather was the only factor that could improve our situation—but the captain simply narrowed his eyes and looked disappointed.

“Don’t you get it? It’s a ruse, a trick. Our engines were fine until we let her aboard. Then all of a sudden they start misbehaving, and she turns out to be the only one who can help us.”

“There’s also the matter of the other ship Weps says is closing on us.”

“That ship might not even exist. It could be a sensor ghost, a hallucination she’s making the Petronel see.”

“Captain—”

“That would work for her, wouldn’t it? It would be exactly the excuse she needs to force our hands.”

We were in his cabin, with the door locked: I’d warned him I had a matter of grave sensitivity that we needed to discuss. “I don’t think this is any of her doing,” I said calmly, vowing to hold my temper under better control than before. “She’s too far from the engines or sensor systems to be having any mental effect on them, even if we hadn’t locked her in a room that’s practically a Faraday cage to begin with. She says one or other of the engines was damaged during the engagement with the Cockatrice, and I’ve no reason to disbelieve that. I think you’re wrong about her.”

“She’s got us right where she wants us, lad. She’s done something to the engines, and now—if you get your way—we’re going to let her get up close and personal with them.”

“And do what?” I asked.

“Whatever takes her fancy. Blowing us all up is one possibility. Did you consider that?”

“She’d blow herself up as well.”

“Maybe that’s exactly the plan. Could be that she prefers dying to staying alive, if being shut out from the rest of the Spiders is as bad as you say it is. She didn’t seem to be real keen on being rescued from that wreck, did she? Maybe she was hoping to die aboard it.”

“She looked like she was trying to stay alive to me, Captain. There were a hundred ways she could have killed herself aboard the Cockatrice before we boarded, and she didn’t. I think she was just scared of us, scared that we were going to be like all the other Ultras. That’s why she kept running.”

“A nice theory, lad. It’s a pity so much is hanging on it, or I might be inclined to give it a moment’s credence.”

“We have no choice but to trust her. If we don’t let her try something, most of us won’t ever see another system.”

“Easy for you to say, son.”

“I’m in this as well. I’ve got just as much to lose as anyone else on this ship.”

Van Ness studied me for what felt like an eternity. Until now his trust in my competence had always been implicit, but Weather’s arrival had changed all that.

“My wife didn’t die in a terraforming accident,” he said slowly, not quite able to meet my eyes as he spoke. “I lied to you about that, probably because I wanted to start believing the lie myself. But now it’s time you heard the truth, which is that the Spiders took her. She was a technician, an expert in Martian landscaping. She’d been working on the Schiaparelli irrigation scheme when she was caught behind Spider lines during the Sabaea Offensive. They stole her from me, and turned her into one of them. Took her to their recruitment theatres, where they opened her head and pumped it full of their machines. Rewired her mind to make her think and feel like them.”

“I’m sorry,” I began. “That must have been so hard—”

“That’s not the hard part. I was told that she’d been executed, but three years later I saw her again. She’d been taken prisoner by the Coalition for Neural Purity, and they were trying to turn her back into a person. They hadn’t ever done it before, so my wife was to be a test subject. They invited me to their compound in Tychoplex, on Earth’s Moon, hoping I might be able to bring her back. I didn’t want to do it. I knew it wasn’t going to work; that it was always going to be easier thinking that she was already dead.”

“What happened?”

“When she saw me, she remembered me. She called me by name, just as if we’d only been apart a few minutes. But there was a coldness in her eyes. Actually, it was something beyond coldness. Coldness would mean she felt some recognisably human emotion, even if it was dislike or contempt. It wasn’t like that. The way she looked at me, it was as if she was looking at a piece of broken furniture, or a dripping tap, or a pattern of mould on the wall. As if it vaguely bothered her that I existed, or was the shape I was, but that she could feel nothing stronger than that.”

“It wasn’t your wife any more,” I said. “Your wife died the moment they took her.”

“That’d be nice to believe, wouldn’t it? Trouble is, I’ve never been able to. And trust me, lad: I’ve had long enough to dwell on things. I know a part of my wife survived what they did to her in the theatres. It just wasn’t the part that gave a damn about me any more.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling as if I’d been left drifting in space while the ship raced away from me. “I had no idea.”

“I just wanted you to know: with me and the Spiders, it isn’t an irrational prejudice. From where I’m sitting, it feels pretty damn rational.” Then he drew an enormous intake of breath, as if he needed sustenance for what was to come. “Take the girl to the engine if you think it’s the only way we’ll get out of this mess. But don’t let her out of your sight for one second. And if you get the slightest idea that she might be trying something—and I mean the slightest idea—you kill her, there and then.”

I clamped the collar around Weather’s neck. It was a heavy ring fashioned from rough black metal. “I’m sorry about this,” I told her, “but it’s the only way Van Ness will let me take you out of this room. Tell me if it hurts, and I’ll try to do something about it.”

“You won’t need to,” she said.

The collar was a crude old thing that had been lying around the Petronel since her last bruising contact with pirates. It was modified from the connecting ring of a space helmet, the kind that would amputate and shock-freeze the head if it detected massive damage to the body below the neck. Inside the collar was a noose of monofilament wire, primed to tighten to the diameter of a human hair in less than a second. There were complicated moving parts in the collar, but nothing that a Conjoiner could influence. The collar trailed a thumb-thick cable from its rear, which ran all the way to an activating box on my belt. I’d only need to give the box a hard thump with the heel of my hand, and Weather would be decapitated. That wouldn’t necessarily mean she’d die instantly—with all those machines in her head, Weather would be able to remain conscious for quite some time afterwards—but I was reasonably certain it would limit her options for doing harm.

“For what it’s worth,” I told her as we made our way out to the connecting spar, “I’m not expecting to have to use this. But I want you to be clear that I will if I have to.”

She walked slightly ahead of me, the cable hanging between us. “You seem different, Inigo. What happened between you and the captain, while you were gone?”

The truth couldn’t hurt, I decided. “Van Ness told me something I didn’t know. It put things into perspective. I understand now why he might not feel positively disposed towards Conjoiners.”

“And does that alter the way you think about me?”

I said nothing for several paces. “I don’t know, Weather. Until now I never really gave much thought to those horror stories about the Spiders. I assumed they’d been exaggerated, the way things often are during wartime.”

“But now you’ve seen the light. You realise that, in fact, we are monsters after all.”

“I didn’t say that. But I’ve just learned that something I always thought untrue—that Conjoiners would take prisoners and convert them into other Conjoiners—really happened. “

“To Van Ness?”

She didn’t need to know all the facts. “To someone close to him. The worst was that he got to meet that person after her transformation.”

After a little while, Weather said, “Mistakes were made. Very, very bad mistakes.”

“How can you call taking someone prisoner and stuffing their skull full of Conjoiner machinery a ‘mistake,’ Weather? You must have known exactly what you were doing, exactly what it would do to the prisoner.”

“Yes, we did,” she said, “but we considered it a kindness. That was the mistake, Inigo. And it was a kindness, too: no one who tasted Transenlightenment ever wanted to go back to the experiential mundanity of retarded consciousness. But we did not anticipate how distressing this might be to those who had known the candidates beforehand.”

“He felt that she didn’t love him any more.”

“That wasn’t the case. It’s just that everything else in her universe had become so heightened, so intense, that the love for another individual could no longer hold her interest. It had become just one facet in a much larger mosaic.”

“And you don’t think that was cruel?”

“I said it was a mistake. But if Van Ness had joined her ... if Van Ness had submitted to the Conjoined, known Transenlightenment for himself ... they would have reconnected on a new level of personal intimacy.”

I wondered how she could be so certain. “That doesn’t help Van Ness now.”

“We wouldn’t make the same mistake again. If there were ever to be ... difficulties again, we wouldn’t take candidates so indiscriminately.”

“But you’d still take some.”

“We’d still consider it a kindness,” Weather said.

Not much was said as we traversed the connecting spar out to the starboard engine. I watched Weather alertly, transfixed by the play of colours across her cooling crest. Eventually she whirled around and said, “I’m not going to do anything, Inigo, so stop worrying about it. This collar’s bad enough, without feeling you watching my every move.”

“Maybe the collar isn’t going to help us,” I said. “Van Ness thinks you want to blow up the ship. I guess if you had a way to do that, we wouldn’t get much warning.”

“No, you wouldn’t. But I’m not going to blow up the ship. That’s not within my power, unless you let me turn the input dials all the way into the red. Even Voulage wasn’t that stupid.”

I wiped my sweat-damp hand on the thigh of my trousers. “We don’t know much about how these engines work. Are you sensing anything from them yet?”

“A little,” she admitted. “There’s crosstalk between the two units, but I don’t have the implants to make sense of that. Most Conjoiners don’t need anything that specialised, unless they work in the drive crèches, educating the engines. “

“The engines need educating?”

Not answering me directly, she said, “I can feel the engine now. Effective range for my implants is a few dozen metres under these conditions. We must be very close.”

“We are,” I said as we turned a corner. Ahead lay the hexagonal arrangement of input dials. They were all showing blue-green now, but only because I’d throttled the engine back to a whisper of thrust.

“I’ll need to get closer if I’m going to be any use to you,” Weather told me.

“Step up to the panel. But don’t touch anything until I give you permission.”

I knew there wasn’t much harm she could do here, even if she started pushing the dials. She’d need to move more than one to make things dangerous, and I could drop her long before she had a chance to do that. But I was still nervous as she stood next to the hexagon and cocked her head to one side.

I thought of what lay on the other side of that wall. Having traversed the spar, we were now immediately inboard of the engine, about halfway along its roughly cylindrical shape. The engine extended for one hundred and ten metres ahead of me, and for approximately two hundred and fifty metres in either direction to my left and right. It was sheathed in several layers of conventional hull material, anchored to the Petronel by a shock-absorbing cradle and wrapped in a mesh of sensors and steering-control systems. Like any shipmaster, my understanding of those elements was so total that it no longer counted as acquired knowledge. It had become an integral part of my personality.

But I knew nothing of the engine itself. My log book, with its reams of codified notes and annotations, implied a deep and scholarly grasp of all essential principles. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The Conjoiner drive was essentially a piece of magic we’d been handed on a plate, like a coiled baby dragon. It came with instructions on how to tame its fire, and make sure it did not come to harm, but we were forbidden from probing its mysteries. The most important rule that applied to a Conjoiner engine was a simple one: there were no user-serviceable components inside. Tamper with an engine—attempt to take it apart, in the hope of reverse-engineering it—and the engine would self-destruct in a mini-nova powerful enough to crack open a small moon. Across settled space, there was no shortage of mildly radioactive craters testifying to failed attempts to break that one prohibition.

Ultras didn’t care, as a rule. Ultras, by definition, already had Conjoiner drives. It was governments and rich planet-bound individuals who kept learning the hard way. The Conjoiner argument was brutal in its simplicity: there were principles embodied in their drives that “retarded” humanity just wasn’t ready to absorb. We were meant to count ourselves lucky that they let us have the engines in the first place. We weren’t meant to go poking our thick monkey fingers into their innards.

And so long as the engines kept working, few of us had any inclination to do so.

Weather took a step back. “It’s not good news, I’m afraid. I thought that perhaps the dial indications might be in error, suggesting that there was a fault where none existed ... but that isn’t the case.”

“You can feel that the engine is really damaged?”

“Yes,” she told me. “And it’s this one, the starboard unit.”

“What’s wrong with it? Is it anything we can fix?”

“One question at a time, Inigo.” Weather smiled tolerantly before continuing, “There’s been extensive damage to critical engine components, too much for the engine’s own self-repair systems to address. The engine hasn’t failed completely, but certain reaction pathways have now become computationally intractable, which is why you’re seeing the drastic loss in drive efficiency. The engine is being forced to explore other pathways, those that it can still manage given its existing resources. But they don’t deliver the same output energy.”

She was telling me everything and nothing. “I don’t really understand,” I admitted. “Are you saying there’s nothing that can be done to repair it?”

“Not here. At a dedicated Conjoiner manufacturing facility, certainly. We’d only make things worse.”

“We can’t run on just the port engine, either—not without rebuilding the entire ship. If we were anywhere near a moon or asteroid, that might just be an option, but not when we’re so far out.”

“I’m sorry the news isn’t better. You’ll just have to resign yourselves to a longer trip than you were expecting.”

“It’s worse than that. There’s another ship closing in on us, probably another raider like Voulage. It’s very close now. If we don’t start running soon, they’ll be on us.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me this sooner?”

“Would it have made any difference?”

“To the trust between us, possibly.”

“I’m sorry, Weather. I didn’t want to distract you. I thought things were bad enough as they were.”

“And you thought I’d be able to work a miracle if I wasn’t distracted?”

I nodded hopelessly. I realised that, as naive as it might seem, I’d been expecting Weather to wave a hand over the broken engine and restore it to full, glittering functionality. But knowing something of the interior workings of the drive was not the same as being able to fix it.

“Are we really out of options?” I asked.

“The engine is already doing all it can to provide maximum power, given the damage it has taken. There really is no scope to make things better.”

Desperate for some source of optimism, I thought back to what Weather had said a few moments before. “When you talked about the computations, you seemed to be saying that the engine needed to do some number-crunching to make itself work.”

Weather looked conflicted. “I’ve already said too much, Inigo.”

“But if we’re going to die out here, it doesn’t matter what you tell me, does it? Failing that, I’ll swear a vow of silence. How does that sound?”

“No one has ever come close to working out how our engines function,” Weather said. “We’ve played our hand in that, of course: putting out more than our share of mis-information over the years. And it’s worked, too. We’ve kept careful tabs on the collective thinking concerning our secrets. We’ve always had contingencies in place to disrupt any research that might be headed in the right direction. So far we’ve never had cause to use a single one of them. If I were to reveal key information to you, I would have more to worry about than just being an outcast. My people would come after me. They’d hunt me down, and then they’d hunt you down as well. Conjoiners will consider any necessary act, up to and including local genocide, to protect the secrets of the C-drive.” She paused for a moment, letting me think she was finished, before continuing on the same grave note, “But having said that, there are layers to our secrets. I can’t reveal the detailed physical principles upon which the drive depends, but I can tell you that the conditions in the drive, when it is at full functionality, are enormously complex and chaotic. Your ship may ride a smooth thrust beam, but the reactions going on inside the drive are anything but smooth. There is a small mouth into hell inside every engine: bubbling, frothing, subject to vicious and unpredictable state-changes. “

“Which the engine needs to smooth out.”

“Yes. And to do so, the engine needs to think through some enormously complex, parallel computational problems. When all is well, when the engine is intact and running inside its normal operational envelope, the burden is manageable. But if you ask too much of the engine, or damage it in some way, that burden becomes heavier. Eventually it exceeds the means of the engine, and the reactions become uncontrolled.”

“Nova.”

“Quite,” Weather said, favouring my response with a tiny nod.

“Then let me get this straight,” I said. “The engine’s damaged, but it could still work if the computations weren’t so complicated.”

Weather answered me guardedly. “Yes, but don’t underestimate how difficult those computations have now become. I can feel the strain this engine is under, just holding things together as they are.”

“I’m not underestimating it. I’m just wondering if we couldn’t help it do better. Couldn’t we load in some new software, or assist the engine by hooking in the Petronel’s own computers?”

“I really wish it was that simple.”

“I’m sorry. My questions must seem quite simple-minded. But I’m just trying to make sure we aren’t missing anything obvious.”

“We aren’t,” she said. “Take my word on it.”

I returned Weather to her quarters and removed the collar. Where it had been squeezing her neck, the skin was marked with a raw pink band, spotted with blood. I threw the hateful thing into the corner of the room and returned with a medical kit.

“You should have said something,” I told her as I dabbed at the abrasions with a disinfectant swab. “I didn’t realise it was cutting into you all that time. You seemed so cool, so focused. But that must have been hurting all the while.”

“I told you I could turn off pain.”

“Are you turning it off now?”

“Why?”

“Because you keep flinching.”

Weather reached up suddenly and took my wrist, almost making me drop the swab. The movement was as swift as a snakebite, but although she held me firmly, I sensed no aggressive intentions. “Now it’s my turn not to understand,” she said. “You were hoping I might be able to do something for you. I couldn’t. That means you’re in as much trouble as you ever were. Worse, if anything, because now you’ve heard it from me. But you’re still treating me with kindness.”

“Would you rather we didn’t?”

“I assumed that as soon as my usefulness to you had come to an end—”

“You assumed wrongly. We’re not that kind of crew.”

“And your captain?”

“He’ll keep his word. Killing you would never have been Van Ness’s style.” I finished disinfecting her neck and began to rummage through the medical kit for a strip of bandage. “We’re all just going to have to make do as best we can, you included. Van Ness reckoned we should send out a distress call and wait for rescue. I wasn’t so keen on that idea before, but now I’m beginning to wonder if maybe it isn’t so bad after all.” She said nothing. I wondered if she was thinking of exactly the same objections I’d voiced to Van Ness, when he raised the idea. “We still have a ship, that’s the main thing. Just because we aren’t moving as fast as we’d like—”

“I’d like to see Van Ness,” Weather said.

“I’m not sure he’d agree.”

“Tell him it’s about his wife. Tell him he can trust me, with or without that silly collar.”

I went to fetch the captain. He took some persuading before he even agreed to look at Weather, and even then he wouldn’t come within twenty metres of her. I told her to wait at the door to her room, which faced a long service corridor.

“I’m not going to touch you, Captain,” she called, her voice echoing from the corridor’s ribbed metal walls. “You can come as close as you like. I can barely smell you at this distance, let alone sense your neural emissions.”

“This’ll do nicely,” Van Ness said. “Inigo told me you had something you wanted to say to me. That right, or was it just a ruse to get me near to you, so you could reach into my head and make me see and think whatever you like?”

She appeared not to hear him. “I take it Inigo’s told you about the engine.”

“Told me you had a good old look at it and decided there was nothing you could do. Maybe things would have been different if you hadn’t had that collar on, though, eh?”

“You mean I might have sabotaged the engine, to destroy myself and the ship? No, Captain, I don’t think I would have. If I had any intention of killing myself, you’d already made it easy enough with that collar.” She glanced at me. “I could have reached Inigo and pressed that control box while the nervous impulse from his brain was still working its way down his forearm. All he’d have seen was a grey blur, followed by a lot of arterial blood.”

I thought back to the speed with which she’d reached up and grabbed my forearm, and knew she wasn’t lying.

“So why didn’t you?” Van Ness asked.

“Because I wanted to help you if I could. Until I saw the engine—until I got close enough to feel its emissions—I couldn’t know for sure that the problem wasn’t something quite trivial.”

“Except it wasn’t. Inigo says it isn’t fixable.”

“Inigo’s right. The technical fault can’t be repaired, not without use of Conjoiner technology. But now that I’ve had time to think about it, mull things over, it occurs to me that there may be something I can do for you.”

I looked at her. “Really?”

“Let me finish what I have to say, Inigo,” she said warningly, “then we’ll go down to the engine and I’ll make everything clear. Captain Van Ness—about your wife.”

“What would you know about my wife?” Van Ness asked her angrily.

“More than you realise. I know because I’m a—I was—a Conjoiner.”

“As if I didn’t know.”

“We started on Mars, Captain Van Ness—just a handful of us. I wasn’t alive then, but from the moment Galiana brought our new state of consciousness into being, the thread of memory has never been broken. There are many branches to our great tree now, in many systems—but we all carry the memories of those who went before us, before the family was torn asunder. I don’t just mean the simple fact that we remember their names, what they looked like and what they did. I mean we carry their living experiences with us, into the future.” Weather swallowed, something catching in her throat. “Sometimes we’re barely aware of any of this. It’s as if there’s this vast sea of collective experience lapping at the shore of consciousness, but it’s only every now and then that it floods us, leaving us awash in sorrow and joy. Sorrow because those are the memories of the dead, all that’s left of them. Joy because something has endured, and while it does they can’t truly be dead, can they? I feel Remontoire sometimes, when I look at something in a certain analytic way. There’s a jolt of déjà vu and I realise it isn’t because I’ve experienced it before, but because Remontoire did. We all feel the memories of the earliest Conjoiners the most strongly.”

“And my wife?” Van Ness asked, like a man frightened of what he might hear.

“Your wife was just one of many candidates who entered Transenlightenment during the troubles. You lost her then, and saw her once more when the Coalition took her prisoner. It was distressing for you because she did not respond to you on a human level.”

“Because you’d ripped everything human out of her,” Van Ness said.

Weather shook her head calmly, refusing to be goaded. “No. We’d taken almost nothing. The difficulty was that we’d added too much, too quickly. That was why it was so hard for her, and so upsetting for you. But it didn’t have to be that way. The last thing we wanted was to frighten possible future candidates. It would have worked much better for us if your wife had shown love and affection to you, and then begged you to follow her into the wonderful new world she’d been shown.”

Something of Weather’s manner seemed to blunt Van Ness’s indignation. “That doesn’t help me much. It doesn’t help my wife at all.”

“I haven’t finished. The last time you saw your wife was in that Coalition compound. You assumed—as you continue to assume—that she ended her days there, an emotionless zombie haunting the shell of the woman you once knew. But that isn’t what happened. She came back to us, you see.”

“I thought Conjoiners never returned to the fold,” I said.

“Things were different then. It was war. Any and all candidates were welcome, even those who might have suffered destabilising isolation away from Transenlightenment. And Van Ness’s wife wasn’t like me. She hadn’t been born into it. Her depth of immersion into Transenlightenment was inevitably less profound than that of a Conjoiner who’d been swimming in data since they were a foetus.”

“You’re lying,” Van Ness said. “My wife died in Coalition custody three years after I saw her.”

“No,” Weather said patiently. “She did not. Conjoiners took Tychoplex and returned all the prisoners to Transenlightenment. The Coalition was suffering badly at the time and could not afford the propaganda blow of losing such a valuable arm of its research programme. So it lied and covered up the loss of Tychoplex. But in fact your wife was alive and well.” Weather looked at him levelly. “She is dead now, Captain Van Ness. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I hope it will not come as too shocking a blow, given what you have always believed.”

“When did she die?”

“Thirty-one years later, in another system, during the malfunction of one of our early drives. It was very fast and utterly painless.”

“Why are you telling me this? What difference does it make to me, here and now? She’s still gone. She still became one of you.”

“I am telling you,” Weather answered, “because her memories are part of me. I won’t pretend that they’re as strong as Remontoire’s, because by the time your wife was recruited, more than five thousand had already joined our ranks. Hers was one new voice amongst many. But none of those voices were silent: they were all heard, and something of them has reached down through all these years.”

“Again: why are you telling me this?”

“Because I have a message from your wife. She committed it to the collective memory long before her death, knowing that it would always be part of Conjoiner knowledge, even as our numbers grew and we became increasingly fragmented. She knew that every future Conjoiner would carry her message—even an outcast like me. It might become diluted, but it would never be lost entirely. And she believed that you were still alive, and that one day your path might cross that of another Conjoiner.”

After a silence Van Ness said, “Tell me the message.”

“This is what your wife wished you to hear.” Almost imperceptibly, the tone of Weather’s voice shifted. “I am sorry for what happened between us, Rafe—more sorry than you can ever know. When they recaptured me, when they took me to Tychoplex, I was not the person I am now. It was still early in my time amongst the Conjoiners, and—perhaps just as importantly—it was still early for the Conjoiners as well. There was much that we all needed to learn. We were ambitious then, fiercely so, but by the same token we were arrogantly blind to our inadequacies and failings. That changed, later, after I returned to the fold. Galiana made refinements to all of us, reinstating a higher degree of personal identity. I think she had learned something wise from Nevil Clavain. After that, I began to see things in the proper perspective again. I thought of you, and the pain of what I had done to you was like a sharp stone pushing against my throat. Every waking moment of my consciousness, with every breath, you were there. But by then it was much too late to make amends. I tried to contact you, but without success. I couldn’t even be sure if you were in the system any more. By then, even the Demarchists had their own prototype starships, using the technology we’d licensed them. You could have been anywhere.” Weather’s tone hardened, taking on a kind of saintlike asperity. “But I always knew you were a survivor, Rafe. I never doubted that you were still alive, somewhere. Perhaps we’ll meet again: stranger things have happened. If so, I hope I’ll treat you with something of the kindness you always deserved, and that you always showed me. But should that never happen, I can at least hope that you will hear this message. There will always be Conjoiners, and nothing that is committed to the collective memory will ever be lost. No matter how much time passes, those of us who walk in the world will be carrying this message, alert for your name. If there was more I could do, I would. But contrary to what some might think, even Conjoiners can’t work miracles. I wish that it were otherwise. Then I would clap my hands and summon you to me, and I would spend the rest of my life letting you know what you meant to me, what you still mean to me. I loved you, Rafe Van Ness. I always did, and I always will.”

Weather fell silent, her expression respectful. It was not necessary for her to tell us that the message was over.

“How do I know this is true?” Van Ness asked quietly.

“I can’t give you any guarantees,” Weather said, “but there was one word I was also meant to say to you. Your wife believed it would have some significance to you, something nobody else could possibly know.”

“And the word?”

“The word is ‘mezereon.’ I think it is a type of plant. Does the word mean something to you?”

I looked at Van Ness. He appeared frozen, unable to respond. His eye softened and sparkled. He nodded, and said simply, “Yes, it does.”

“Good,” Weather answered. “I’m glad that’s done: it’s been weighing on all of our minds for quite some time. And now I’m going to help you get home.”

Whatever “mezereon” meant to Van Ness, whatever it revealed to him concerning the truth of Weather’s message, I never asked.

Nor did Van Ness ever speak of the matter again.

She stood before the hexagonal arrangement of input dials, as I had done a thousand times before. “You must give me authorisation to make adjustments,” she said.

My mouth was dry. “Do what you will. I’ll be watching you very carefully.”

Weather looked amused. “You’re still concerned that I might want to kill us all?”

“I can’t ignore my duty to this ship.”

“Then this will be difficult for you. I must turn the dials to a setting you would consider highly dangerous, even suicidal. You’ll just have to trust me that I know what I’m doing.”

I glanced back at Van Ness.

“Do it,” he mouthed.

“Go ahead,” I told Weather. “Whatever you need to do—”

“In the course of this, you will learn more about our engines. There is something inside here that you will find disturbing. It is not the deepest secret, but it is a secret nonetheless, and shortly you will know it. Afterwards, when we reach port, you must not speak of this matter. Should you do so, Conjoiner security would detect the leak and act swiftly. The consequences would be brutal, for you and anyone you might have spoken to.”

“Then maybe you’re better off not letting us see whatever you’re so keen to keep hidden.”

“There’s something I’m going to have to do. If you want to understand, you need to see everything.”

She reached up and planted her hands on two of the dials. With surprising strength, she twisted them until their quadrants shone ruby red. Then she moved to another pair of dials and moved them until they were showing a warning amber. She adjusted one of the remaining dials to a lower setting, into the blue, and then returned to the first two dials she had touched, quickly dragging them back to green. While all this was happening, I felt the engine surge in response, the deck plates pushing harder against my feet. But the burst was soon over. When Weather had made her last adjustment, the engine had throttled back even further than before. I judged that we were only experiencing a tenth of a gee.

“What have you just done?” I asked.

“This,” she said.

Weather took a nimble, light-footed step back from the input controls. At the same moment a chunk of wall, including the entire hexagonal array, pushed itself out from the surrounding metallic-blue material in which it had appeared to have been seamlessly incorporated. The chunk was as thick as a bank-vault door. I watched in astonishment as the chunk slid in silence to one side, exposing a bulkhead-sized hole in the side of the engine wall.

Soft red light bathed us. We were looking into the hidden heart of a Conjoiner drive.

“Follow me,” Weather said.

“Are you serious?”

“You want to get home, don’t you? You want to escape that raider? This is how it will happen.” Then she looked back to Van Ness. “With all due respect ... I wouldn’t recommend it, Captain. You wouldn’t do any damage to the engine, but the engine might damage you.”

“I’m fine right here,” Van Ness said.

I followed Weather into the engine. At first my eyes had difficulty making out our surroundings. The red light inside seemed to emanate from every surface, rather than from any concentrated source, so that there were only hints of edges and corners. I had to reach out and touch things more than once to establish their shape and proximity. Weather watched me guardedly, but said nothing.

She led me along a winding, restrictive path that squeezed its way between huge intrusions of Conjoiner machinery, like the course etched by some meandering, indecisive underground river. The machinery emitted a low humming sound, and sometimes when I touched it I felt a rapid but erratic vibration. I couldn’t make out our surroundings with any clarity for more than a few metres in any direction, but as Weather pushed on I sometimes had the impression that the machinery was moving out of her way to open up the path, and sealing itself behind us. She led me up steep ramps, assisted me as we negotiated near-impassable chicanes, helped me as we climbed down vertical shafts that would be perilous even under one-tenth of a gee. My sense of direction was soon hopelessly confounded, and I had no idea whether we had travelled hundreds of metres into the engine, or merely wormed our way in and around a relatively localised region close to our entry point.

“I’m glad you know the way,” I said, with mock cheer-fulness. “I wouldn’t be able to get out of here without you.”

“Yes, you will,” Weather said, looking back over her shoulder. “The engine will guide you out, don’t you worry.”

“You’re coming with me, though.”

“No, Inigo, I’m not. I have to stay here from now on. It’s the only way that any of us will be getting home.”

“I don’t understand. Once you’ve fixed the engine—”

“It isn’t like that. The engine can’t be fixed. What I can do is help it, relieve it of some of the computational burden. But to do that I need to be close to it. Inside it.”

While we were talking, Weather had brought us to a box-like space that was more open than anywhere we’d passed through so far. The room, or chamber, was empty of machinery, save for a waist-high cylinder rising from the floor. The cylinder had a flattened top and widened base that suggested the stump of a tree. It shone the same arterial red as everything else around us.

“We’ve reached the heart of the engine-control assembly now,” Weather said, kneeling by the stump. “The reaction core is somewhere else—we couldn’t survive anywhere near that—but this is where the reaction computations are made, for both the starboard and port drives. I’m going to show you something now. I think it will make it easier for you to understand what is to happen to me. I hope you’re ready.”

“As I’ll ever be.”

Weather planted a hand on either side of the stump and closed her eyes momentarily. I heard a click and the whirr of a buried mechanism. The upper fifth of the stump opened, irising wide. A blue light rammed from its innards. I felt a chill rising from whatever was inside, a coldness that seemed to reach fingers down my throat.

Something emerged from inside the stump, rising on a pedestal. It was a glass container pierced by many silver cables, each of which was plugged into the folded cortex of a single massively swollen brain. The brain had split open along fracture lines, like a cake that had ruptured in the baking. The blue light spilled from the fissures. When I looked into one—peering down into the geological strata of brain anatomy—I had to blink against the glare. A seething mass of tiny bright things lay nestled at the base of the cleft, twinkling with the light of the sun.

“This is the computer that handles the computations,” Weather said.

“It looks human. Please tell me it isn’t.”

“It is human. Or at least that’s how it started out, before the machines were allowed to infest and reorganise its deep structure.” Weather tapped a finger against the side of her own scalp. “All the machines in my head only amount to two hundred grams of artificial matter, and even so I still need this crest to handle my thermal loading. There are nearly a thousand grams of machinery in that brain. The brain needs to be cooled like a turbopump. That’s why it’s been opened up, so that the heat can dissipate more easily.”

“It’s a monstrosity.”

“Not to us,” she said sharply. “We see a thing of wonder and beauty.”

“No,” I said firmly. “Let’s be clear about this. What you’re showing me here is a human brain, a living mind, turned into some kind of slave.”

“No slavery is involved,” Weather said. “The mind chose this vocation willingly.”

“It chose this?”

“It’s considered a great honour. Even in Conjoiner society, even given all that we have learned about the maximisation of our mental resources, only a few are ever born who have the skills necessary to tame and manage the reactions in the heart of a C-drive. No machine can ever perform that task as well as a conscious mind. We could build a conscious machine, of course, a true mechanical slave, but that would contravene one of our deepest strictures. No machine may think, unless it does so voluntarily. So we are left with volunteer organic minds, even if those selfsame minds need the help of a thousand grams of nonsentient processing machinery. As to why only a few of us have the talent ... that is one of our greatest mysteries. Galiana thought that, in achieving a pathway to augmented human intelligence, she would render the brain utterly knowable. It was one of her few mistakes. Just as there are savants amongst the retarded, so we have our Conjoined equivalents. We are all tested for such gifts when we are young. Very few of us show even the slightest aptitude. Of those that do, even fewer ever develop the maturity and stability that would make them suitable candidates for enshrinement in an engine.” Weather faced me with a confiding look. “They are valued very highly indeed, to the point where they are envied by some of us who lack what they were born with.”

“But even if they were gifted enough that it was possible ... no one would willingly choose this.”

“You don’t understand us, Inigo. We are creatures of the mind. This brain doesn’t consider itself to have been imprisoned here. It considers itself to have been placed in a magnificent and fitting setting, like a precious jewel.”

“Easy for you to say, since it isn’t you.”

“But it very nearly could have been. I came close, Inigo. I passed all the early tests. I was considered exceptional, by the standards of my cohort group. I knew what it was like to feel special, even amongst geniuses. But it turned out that I wasn’t quite special enough, so I was selected out of the programme.”

I looked at the swollen, fissured mind. The hard blue glow made me think of Cherenkov radiation, boiling out of some cracked fission core.

“And do you regret it now?”

“I’m older now,” Weather said. “I realise now that being unique ... being adored ... is not the greatest thing in the world. Part of me still admires this mind; part of me still appreciates its rare and delicate beauty. Another part of me ... doesn’t feel like that.”

“You’ve been amongst people too long, Weather. You know what it’s like to walk and breathe.”

“Perhaps,” she said, doubtfully.

“This mind—”

“It’s male,” Weather said. “I can’t tell you his name, any more than I could tell you mine. But I can read his public memories well enough. He was fifteen when his enshrinement began. Barely a man at all. He’s been inside this engine for twenty-two years of shiptime; nearly sixty-eight years of worldtime.”

“And this is how he’ll spend the rest of his life?”

“Until he wearies of it, or some accident befalls this ship. Periodically, as now, Conjoiners may make contact with the enshrined mind. If they determine that the mind wishes to retire, they may effect a replacement, or decommission the entire engine.”

“And then what?”

“His choice. He could return to full embodiment, but that would mean losing hundreds of grams of neural support machinery. Some are prepared to make that adjustment; not all are willing. His other option would be to return to one of our nests and remain in essentially this form, but without the necessity of running a drive. He would not be alone in doing so.”

I realised, belatedly, where all this was heading. “You say he’s under a heavy burden now.”

“Yes. The degree of concentration is quite intense. He can barely spare any resources for what we might call normal thought. He’s in a state of permanent unconscious flow, like someone engaged in an enormously challenging game. But now the game has begun to get the better of him. It isn’t fun any more. And yet he knows the cost of failure.”

“But you can help him.”

“I won’t pretend that my abilities are more than a shadow of his. Still, I did make it part of the way. I can’t take all the strain off him, but I can give him free access to my mind. The additional processing resources—coupled with my own limited abilities—may make enough of a difference. “

“For what?”

“For you to get wherever it is you are going. I believe that with our minds meshed together, and dedicated to this one task, we may be able to return the engines to something like normal efficiency. I can’t make any promises, though. The proof of the pudding ...”

I looked at the pudding-like mass of neural tissue and asked the question I was dreading. “What happens to you, while all this is happening? If he’s barely conscious—”

“The same would apply, I’m afraid. As far as the external world is concerned, I’ll be in a state of coma. If I’m to make any difference, I’ll have to hand over all available neural resources.”

“But you’ll be helpless. How long would you last, sitting in a coma?”

“That isn’t an issue. I’ve already sent a command to this engine to form the necessary life-support machinery. It should be ready any moment now, as it happens.” Weather glanced down at the floor between us. “I’d take a step back if I were you, Inigo.”

I did as she suggested. The flat red floor buckled upwards, shaping itself into the seamless form of a moulded couch. Without any ceremony, Weather climbed onto the couch and lay down as if for sleep.

“There isn’t any point delaying things,” she said. “My mind is made up, and the sooner we’re on our way, the better. We can’t be sure that there aren’t other brigands within attack range.”

“Wait,” I said. “This is all happening too quickly. I thought we were coming down here to look at the situation, to talk about the possibilities.”

“We’ve already talked about them, Inigo. They boil down to this: either I help the boy, or we drift hopelessly.”

“But you can’t just ... do this.”

Even as I spoke, the couch appeared to consolidate its hold on Weather. Red material flowed around her body, hardening over her into a semitranslucent shell. Only her face and lower arms remained visible, surrounded by a thick red collar that threatened to squeeze shut at any moment.

“It won’t be so bad,” she said. “As I said, I won’t have much room left for consciousness. I won’t be bored, that’s for sure. It’ll be more like one very long dream. Someone else’s dream, certainly, but I don’t doubt that there’ll be a certain rapturous quality to it. I remember how good it felt to find an elegant solution, when the parameters looked so unpromising. Like making the most beautiful music imaginable. I don’t think anyone can really know how that feels unless they’ve also held some of that fire in their minds. It’s ecstasy, Inigo, when it goes right.”

“And when it goes wrong?”

“When it goes wrong, you don’t get much time to explore how it feels.” Weather shut her eyes again, like a person lapsing into microsleep. “I’m lowering blockades, allowing the boy to co-opt my own resources. He’s wary. Not because he doesn’t trust me, but because he can barely manage his own processing tasks, without adding the temporary complexity of farming some of them out to me. The transition will be difficult ... ah, here it comes. He’s using me, Inigo. He’s accepting my help.” Despite being almost totally enclosed in the shell of red matter, Weather’s whole body convulsed. Her voice, when she spoke again, sounded strained. “It’s difficult. So much more difficult than I thought it would be. This poor mind ... he’s had so much to do on his own. A lesser spirit would already have buckled. He’s shown heroic dedication ... I wish the nest could know how well he has done.” She clamped her teeth together and convulsed again, harder this time. “He’s taking more of me. Eagerly now. Knows I’ve come to help. The sense of relief ... the strain being lifted ... I can’t comprehend how he lasted until now. I’m sorry, Inigo. Soon there isn’t going to be much of me left to talk to you.”

“Is it working?”

“Yes. I think so. Perhaps between the two of us—” Her jaws cracked together, teeth cutting her tongue. “Not going to be easy, but ... losing more of me now. Language going. Don’t need now.”

“Weather, don’t go.”

“Can’t stay. Got to go. Only way. Inigo, make promise. Make promise fast.”

“Say it. Whatever it is.”

“When we get ... when we—” Her face was contorted with the strain of trying to make herself understood.

“When we arrive,” I said.

She nodded so hard I thought her neck was going to break. “Yes. Arrive. You get help. Find others.”

“Other Conjoiners?”

“Yes. Bring them. Bring them in ship. Tell them. Tell them and make them help.”

“I will. I swear on it.”

“Going now. Inigo. One last thing.”

“Yes. Whatever it is.”

“Hold hand.”

I reached out and took her hand, in my good one.

“No,” Weather said. “Other. Other hand.”

I let go, then took her hand in my metal one, closing my fingers as tightly as I dared without risking hers. Then I leaned down, bringing my face close to hers.

“Weather, I think I love you. I’ll wait for you. I’ll find those Conjoiners. That’s a promise.”

“Love a Spider?” she asked.

“Yes. If this is what it takes.”

“Silly ... human ... boy.”

She pulled my hand, with more strength than I thought she had left in her. She tugged it down into the surface of the couch until it lapped around my wrist, warm as blood. I felt something happening to my hand, a crawling itch like pins and needles. I kissed Weather. Her lips were fever-warm. She nodded and then allowed me to withdraw my hand.

“Go now,” she said.

The red material of the couch flowed over Weather completely, covering her hands and face until all that remained was a vague, mummy-like form.

I knew then that I would not see her again for a very long time. For a moment I stood still, paralysed by what had happened. Even then I could feel my weight increasing. Whatever Weather and the boy were doing between them, it was having some effect on the engine output. My weight climbed smoothly, until I was certain we were exceeding half a gee and still accelerating.

Perhaps we were going to make it home after all.

Some of us.

I turned from Weather’s casket and looked for the way out. Held tight against my chest to stop it itching, my hand was lost under a glove of twinkling machinery. I wondered what gift I would find when the glove completed its work.

Zima Blue

After the first week people started drifting away from the island. The viewing stands around the pool became emptier by the day. The big tourist ships hauled back toward interstellar space. Art fiends, commentators and critics packed their bags in Venice. Their disappointment hung over the lagoon like a miasma.

I was one of the few who stayed on Murjek, returning to the stands each day. I’d watch for hours, squinting against the trembling blue light reflected from the surface of the water. Face down, Zima’s pale shape moved so languidly from one end of the pool to the other that it could have been mistaken for a floating corpse. As he swam I wondered how I was going to tell his story, and who was going to buy it. I tried to remember the name of my first newspaper, back on Mars. They wouldn’t pay as much as some of the bigger titles, but some part of me liked the idea of going back to the old place. It had been a long time ... I queried the AM, wanting it to jog my memory about the name of the paper. There’d been so many since ... hundreds, by my reckoning. But nothing came. It took me another yawning moment to remember that I’d dismissed the AM the day before.

“You’re on your own, Carrie,” I said. “Start getting used to it.”

In the pool, the swimming figure ended a length and began to swim back toward me.

Two weeks earlier I’d been sitting in the Piazza San Marco at noon, watching white figurines glide against the white marble of the clock tower. The sky over Venice was jammed with ships parked hull-to-hull. Their bellies were quilted in vast glowing panels, tuned to match the real sky. The view reminded me of the work of a pre-Expansion artist who had specialised in eye-wrenching tricks of perspective and composition: endless waterfalls, interlocking lizards. I formed a mental image and queried the fluttering presence of the AM, but it couldn’t retrieve the name.

I finished my coffee and steeled myself for the bill.

I’d come to this white marble version of Venice to witness the unveiling of Zima’s final work of art. I’d had an interest in the artist for years, and I’d hoped I might be able to arrange an interview. Unfortunately several thousand other members of the in-crowd had come up with exactly the same idea. Not that it mattered what kind of competition I had anyway; Zima wasn’t talking.

The waiter placed a folded piece of card on my table.

All we’d been told was to make our way to Murjek, a waterlogged world most of us had never heard of before. Murjek’s only claim to fame was that it hosted the one hundred and seventy-first known duplicate of Venice, and one of only three Venices rendered entirely in white marble. Zima had chosen Murjek to host his final work of art, and to be the place where he would make his retirement from public life.

With a heavy heart I lifted the bill to inspect the damage. Instead of the expected bill there was a small blue card, printed in fine gold italic lettering. The shade of blue was that precise, powdery, aquamarine that ‘Zima had made his own. The card was addressed to me, Carrie Clay, and it said that Zima wanted to talk to me about the unveiling. If I was interested, I should report to the Rialto Bridge in exactly two hours.

If I was interested.

The note stipulated that no recording materials were to be brought, not even a pen and paper. As an afterthought, the card mentioned that the bill had been taken care of. I almost had the nerve to order another coffee and put it on the same tab. Almost, but not quite.

Zima’s servant was there when I arrived early at the bridge. Intricate neon mechanisms pulsed behind the flexing glass of the robot’s mannequin body. It bowed at the waist and spoke very softly. “Miss Clay? Since you’re here, we might as well depart.”

The robot escorted me to a flight of stairs that led to the waterside. My AM followed us, fluttering at my shoulder. A conveyor hovered in waiting, floating a metre above the water. The robot helped me into the rear compartment. The AM was about to follow me inside when the robot raised a warning hand.

“You’ll have to leave that behind, I’m afraid: no recording materials, remember?”

I looked at the metallic green hummingbird, trying to remember the last time I had been out of its ever-watchful presence.

“Leave it behind?”

“It’ll be quite safe here, and you can collect it again when you return after nightfall.”

“If I say no?”

“Then I’m afraid there’ll be no meeting with Zima.”

I sensed that the robot wasn’t going to hang around all afternoon waiting for my answer. The thought of being away from the AM made my blood run cold. But I wanted that interview so badly I was prepared to consider anything.

I told the AM to stay here until I returned.

The obedient machine reversed away from me in a flash of metallic green. It was like watching a part of myself drift away. The glass hull wrapped itself around me and I felt a surge of un-nulled acceleration.

Venice tilted below us, then streaked away to the horizon.

I formed a test query, asking the AM to name the planet where I’d celebrated my seven hundredth birthday. Nothing came: I was out of query range, with only my own age-saturated memory to rely on.

I leaned forward. “Are you authorised to tell me what this is about?”

“I’m afraid he didn’t tell me,” the robot said, making a face appear in the back of his head. “But if at any moment you feel uncomfortable, we can return to Venice.”

“I’m fine for now. Who else got the blue card treatment?”

“Only you, to the best of my knowledge.”

“And if I’d declined? Were you supposed to ask someone else?”

“No,” the robot said. “But let’s face it, Miss Clay. You weren’t very likely to turn him down.”

As we flew on, the conveyor’s shock wave gouged a foaming channel in the sea behind it. I thought of a brush drawn through wet paint on marble, exposing the white surface beneath. I took out Zima’s invitation and held it against the horizon ahead of us, trying to decide whether the blue was a closer match to the sky or the sea. Against these two possibilities the card seemed to flicker indeterminately.

Zima Blue. It was an exact thing, specified scientifically in terms of angstroms and intensities. If you were an artist, you could have a batch of it mixed up according to that specification. But no one ever used Zima Blue unless they were making a calculated statement about Zima himself.

Zima was already unique by the time he emerged into the public eye. He had undergone radical procedures to enable him to tolerate extreme environments without the burden of a protective suit. Zima had the appearance of a well-built man wearing a tight body stocking, until you were close and you realised that this was actually his skin. Covering his entire form, it was a synthetic material that could be tuned to different colours and textures depending on his mood and surroundings. It could approximate clothing if the social circumstances demanded it. The skin could contain pressure when he wished to experience vacuum, and stiffen to protect him against the crush of a gas giant planet. Despite these refinements the skin conveyed a full range of sensory impressions to his mind. He had no need to breathe, since his entire cardiovascular system had been replaced by closed-cycle life-support mechanisms. He had no need to eat or drink; no need to dispose of bodily waste. Tiny repair machines swarmed through his body, allowing him to tolerate radiation doses that would have killed an ordinary man in minutes.

With his body thus armoured against environmental extremes, Zima was free to seek inspiration where he wanted. He could drift free in space, staring into the face of a star, or wander the searing canyons of a planet where metals ran like lava. His eyes had been replaced by cameras sensitive to a huge swathe of the electromagnetic spectrum, wired into his brain via complex processing modules. A synaes-thesic bridge allowed him to hear visual data as a kind of music; to see sounds as a symphony of startling colours. His skin functioned as a kind of antenna, giving him sensitivity to electrical field changes. When that wasn’t sufficient, he could tap into the data feeds of any number of accompanying machines.

Given all this, Zima’s art couldn’t help but be original and attention-grabbing. His landscapes and starfields had a heightened, ecstatic quality about them, awash in luminous, jarring colours and eye-wrenching tricks of perspective. Painted in traditional materials but on a huge scale, they quickly attracted a core of serious buyers. Some found their way into private collections, but Zima murals also started popping up in public spaces all over the Galaxy. Tens of metres across, the murals were nonetheless detailed down to the limits of vision. Most had been painted in one session. Zima had no need for sleep, so he worked uninterrupted until a piece was complete.

The murals were undeniably impressive. From a standpoint of composition and technique they were unquestionably brilliant. But there was also something bleak and chilling about them. They were landscapes without a human presence, save for the implied viewpoint of the artist himself.

Put it this way: they were nice to look at, but I wouldn’t have hung one in my home.

Not everyone agreed, obviously, or else Zima wouldn’t have sold as many works as he had. But I couldn’t help wondering how many people were buying the pictures because of what they knew about the artist, rather than because of any intrinsic merit in the works themselves.

That was how things stood when I first paid attention to Zima. I filed him away as interesting but kitschy: maybe worth a story if something else happened to either him or his art.

Something did, but it took a while for anyone—including me—to notice.

One day—after a longer than usual gestation period—Zima unveiled a mural that had something different about it. It was a picture of a swirling, star-pocked nebula, from the vantage point of an airless rock. Perched on the rim of a crater in the middle distance, blocking off part of the nebula, was a tiny blue square. At first glance it looked as if the canvas had been washed blue and Zima had simply left a small area unpainted. There was no solidity to the square; no detail or suggestion of how it related to the landscape or the backdrop. It cast no shadow and had no tonal influence on the surrounding colours. But the square was deliberate: close examination showed that it had indeed been overpainted over the rocky lip of the crater. It meant something.

The square was just the beginning. Thereafter, every mural that Zima released to the outside world contained a similar geometric shape: a square, triangle, oblong or some similar form embedded somewhere in the composition. It was a long time before anyone noticed that the shade of blue was the same from picture to picture.

It was Zima Blue: the same shade of blue as on the gold-lettered card.

Over the next decade or so, the abstract shapes became more dominant, squeezing out the other elements of each composition. The cosmic vistas ended up as narrow borders, framing blank circles, triangles, rectangles. Where his earlier work had been characterised by exuberant brushwork and thick layers of paint, the blue forms were rendered with mirror-smoothness.

Intimidated by the intrusion of the abstract blue forms, casual buyers turned away from Zima. Before very long Zima unveiled the first of his entirely blue murals. Large enough to cover the side of a thousand-storey building, the mural was considered by many to be as far as Zima could take things.

They couldn’t have been more wrong.

I felt the conveyor slowing as we neared a small island, the only feature in any direction.

“You’re the first to see this,” the robot said. “There’s a distortion screen blocking the view from space.”

The island was about a kilometre across: low and turtle-shaped, ringed by a narrow collar of pale sand. Near the middle it rose to a shallow plateau, on which vegetation had been cleared in a roughly rectangular area. I made out a small panel of reflective blue set flat against the ground, surrounded by what appeared to be a set of tiered viewing stands.

The conveyor shed altitude and speed, bobbing down until it stopped just outside the area enclosed by the viewing stands. It came to rest next to a low white pebble-dash chalet I hadn’t noticed during our approach.

The robot stepped out and helped me from the conveyor.

“Zima will be here in a moment,” it said, before returning to the conveyor and vanishing back into the sky.

Suddenly I felt very alone and very vulnerable. A breeze came in from the sea, blowing sand into my eyes. The sun was creeping down toward the horizon and soon it would be getting chilly. Just when I was beginning to feel the itch of panic, a man emerged from the chalet, rubbing his hands briskly. He walked toward me, following a path of paved stones.

“Glad you could make it, Carrie.”

It was Zima, of course, and in a flash I felt foolish for doubting that he would show his face.

“Hi,” I said lamely.

Zima offered his hand. I shook it, feeling the slightly plastic texture of his artificial skin. Today it was a dull pewter-grey.

“Let’s go and sit on the balcony. It’s nice to watch the sunset, isn’t it?”

“Nice,” I agreed.

He turned his back to me and set off in the direction of the chalet. As he walked, his muscles flexed and bulged beneath the pewter flesh. There were scale-like glints in the skin on his back, as if it had been set with a mosaic of reflective chips. He was beautiful like a statue, muscular like a panther. He was a handsome man, even after all his transformations, but I had never heard of him taking a lover, or having any kind of a private life at all. His art was everything.

I followed him, feeling awkward and tongue-tied. Zima led me into the chalet, through an old-fashioned kitchen and an old-fashioned lounge, full of thousand-year-old furniture and ornaments.

“How was the flight?”

“Fine.”

He stopped suddenly and turned to face me. “I forgot to check ... did the robot insist that you leave behind your Aide Memoire?”

“Yes.”

“Good. It was you I wanted to talk to, Carrie, not some surrogate recording device.”

“Me?”

The pewter mask of his face formed a quizzical expression. “Do you do multisyllables, or are you still working up to that?”

“Er ...”

“Relax,” he said. “I’m not here to test you, or humiliate you, or anything like that. This isn’t a trap, and you’re not in any danger. You’ll be back in Venice by midnight.”

“I’m okay,” I managed. “Just a bit starstruck.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be. I’m hardly the first celebrity you’ve met, am I?”

“Well, no, but ...”

“People find me intimidating,” he said. “They get over it eventually, and then wonder what all the fuss was about.”

“Why me?”

“Because you kept asking nicely,” Zima said.

“Be serious.”

“All right. There’s a bit more to it than that, although you did ask nicely. I’ve enjoyed much of your work over the years. People have often trusted you to set the record straight: especially near the ends of their lives.”

“You talked about retiring, not dying.”

“Either way, it would still be a withdrawal from public life. Your work has always seemed truthful to me, Carrie. I’m not aware of anyone claiming misrepresentation through your writing.”

“It happens now and then,” I said. “That’s why I always make sure there’s an AM on hand so no one can dispute what was said.”

“That won’t matter with my story,” Zima said.

I looked at him shrewdly. “There’s something else, isn’t there? Some other reason you pulled my name out of the hat.”

“I’d like to help you,” he said.

When most people speak about his Blue Period they mean the era of the truly huge murals. By huge I do mean huge. Soon they had become large enough to dwarf buildings and civic spaces; large enough to be visible from orbit. Across the Galaxy twenty-kilometre-high sheets of blue towered over private islands or rose from storm-wracked seas. Expense was never a problem, since Zima had many rival sponsors who competed to host his latest and biggest creation. The panels kept on growing, until they required complex, Sloth-tech machinery to hold them aloft against gravity and weather. They pierced the tops of planetary atmospheres, jutting into space. They glowed with their own soft light. They curved around in arcs and fans, so that the viewer’s entire visual field was saturated with blue.

By now Zima was hugely famous, even to people who had no particular interest in art. He was the weird cyborg celebrity who made huge blue structures; the man who never gave interviews or hinted at the private significance of his art.

But that was a hundred years ago. Zima wasn’t even remotely done.

Eventually the structures became too unwieldy to be hosted on planets. Blithely Zima moved into interplanetary space, forging vast free-floating sheets of blue ten thousand kilometres across. Now he worked not with brushes and paint, but with fleets of mining robots, tearing apart asteroids to make the raw material for his creations. Now it was entire stellar economies that competed with each other to host Zima’s work.

That was about the time that I renewed my interest in Zima. I attended one of his “moonwrappings”: the enclosure of an entire celestial body in a lidded blue container, like a hat going into a box. Two months later he stained the entire equatorial belt of a gas giant blue, and I had a ringside seat for that as well. Six months later he altered the surface chemistry of a sun-grazing comet so that it daubed a Zima Blue tail across an entire solar system. But I was no closer to a story. I kept asking for an interview and kept being turned down. All I knew was that there had to be more to Zima’s obsession with blue than a mere artistic whim. Without an understanding of that obsession, there was no story: just anecdote.

I didn’t do anecdote.

So I waited, and waited. And then—like millions of others—I heard about Zima’s final work of art, and made my way to the fake Venice on Murjek. I wasn’t expecting an interview, or any new insights. I just had to be there.

We stepped through sliding glass doors out onto the balcony. Two simple white chairs sat either side of a white table. The table was set with drinks and a bowl of fruit. Beyond the unfenced balcony, arid land sloped steeply away, offering an uninterrupted view of the sea. The water was calm and inviting, with the lowering sun reflected like a silver coin.

Zima indicated that I should take one of the seats. His hand dithered over two bottles of wine.

“Red or white, Carrie?”

I opened my mouth as if to answer him, but nothing came. Normally, in that instant between the question and the response, the AM would have silently directed my choice to one of the two options. Not having the AM’s prompt felt like a mental stall in my thoughts.

“Red, I think,” Zima said. “Unless you have strong objections.”

“It’s not that I can’t decide these things for myself,” I said.

Zima poured me a glass of red, then held it up to the sky to inspect its clarity. “Of course not,” he said.

“It’s just that this is a little strange for me.”

“It shouldn’t be strange,” he said. “This is the way you’ve lived your life for hundreds of years.”

“The natural way, you mean?”

Zima poured himself a glass of the red wine, but instead of drinking it he merely sniffed the bouquet. “Yes.”

“But there isn’t anything natural about being alive a thousand years after I was born,” I said. “My organic memory reached saturation point about seven hundred years ago. My head’s like a house with too much furniture. Move something in, you have to move something out.”

“Let’s go back to the wine for a moment,” Zima said. “Normally, you’d have relied on the advice of the AM, wouldn’t you?”

I shrugged. “Yes.”

“Would the AM always suggest one of the two possibilities? Always red wine, or always white wine, for instance?”

“It’s not that simplistic,” I said. “If I had a strong preference for one over the other, then, yes, the AM would always recommend one wine over the other. But I don’t. I like red wine sometimes and white wine other times. Sometimes I don’t want any kind of wine.” I hoped my frustration wasn’t obvious. But after the elaborate charade with the blue card, the robot and the conveyor, the last thing I wanted to be discussing with Zima was my own imperfect recall.

“Then it’s random?” he asked. “The AM would have been just as likely to say red as white?”

“No, it’s not like that either. The AM’s been following me around for hundreds of years. It’s seen me drink wine a few hundred thousand times, under a few hundred thousand different circumstances. It knows, with a high degree of reliability, what my best choice of wine would be given any set of parameters.”

“And you follow that advice unquestioningly?”

I sipped at the red. “Of course. Wouldn’t it be a little childish to go against it just to make a point about free will? After all, I’m more likely to be satisfied with the choice it suggests.”

“But unless you ignore that suggestion now and then, won’t your whole life become a set of predictable responses?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But is that so very bad? If I’m happy, what do I care?”

“I’m not criticising you,” Zima said. He smiled and leaned back in his seat, defusing some of the tension caused by his line of questioning. “Not many people have an AM these days, do they?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.

“Less than one percent of the entire Galactic population.” Zima sniffed his wine and looked through the glass at the sky. “Almost everyone else out there has accepted the inevitable.”

“It takes machines to manage a thousand years of memory. So what?”

“But a different order of machine,” Zima said. “Neural implants; fully integrated into the participant’s sense of self. Indistinguishable from biological memory. You wouldn’t need to query the AM about your choice of wine; you wouldn’t need to wait for that confirmatory whisper. You’d just know it.”

“Where’s the difference? I allow my experiences to be recorded by a machine that accompanies me everywhere I go. The machine misses nothing, and it’s so efficient at anticipating my queries that I barely have to ask it anything.”

“The machine is vulnerable.”

“It’s backed up at regular intervals. And it’s no more vulnerable than a cluster of implants inside my head. Sorry, but that just isn’t a reasonable objection.”

“You’re right, of course. But there’s a deeper argument against the AM. It’s too perfect. It doesn’t know how to distort or forget.”

“Isn’t that the point?”

“Not exactly. When you recall something—this conversation, perhaps, a hundred years from now—there will be things about it that you misremember. Yet those misremembered details will themselves become part of your memory, gaining solidity and texture with each instance of recall. A thousand years from now, your memory of this conversation might bear little resemblance with reality. Yet you’d swear your recollection was accurate.”

“But if the AM had accompanied me, I’d have a flawless record of how things really were.”

“You would,” Zima said. “But that isn’t living memory. It’s photography; a mechanical recording process. It freezes out the imagination; leaves no scope for details to be selectively misremembered.” He paused long enough to top up my glass. “Imagine that on nearly every occasion when you had cause to sit outside on an afternoon like this you had chosen red wine over white, and generally had no reason to regret that choice. But on one occasion, for one reason or another, you were persuaded to choose white—against the judgement of the AM—and it was wonderful. Everything came together magically: the company, the conversation, the late afternoon ambience, the splendid view, the euphoric rush of being slightly drunk. A perfect afternoon turned into a perfect evening.”

“It might not have had anything to do with my choice of wine,” I said.

“No,” Zima agreed. “And the AM certainly wouldn’t attach any significance to that one happy combination of circumstances. A single deviation wouldn’t affect its predictive model to any significant degree. It would still say ‘red wine’ the next time you asked.”

I felt an uncomfortable tingle of understanding. “But human memory wouldn’t work that way.”

“No. It would latch onto that one exception and attach undue significance to it. It would amplify the attractive parts of the memory of that afternoon and suppress the less pleasant parts: the fly that kept buzzing in your face, your anxiety about catching the boat home, and the birthday present you knew you had to buy in the morning. All you’d remember was that golden glow of well-being. The next time, you might well choose white, and the time after. An entire pattern of behaviour would have been altered by one instance of deviation. The AM would never tolerate that. You’d have to go against its advice many, many times before it grudgingly updated its model and started suggesting white rather than red.”

“All right,” I said, still wishing we could talk about Zima rather than me. “But what practical difference does it make whether the artificial memory is inside my head or outside?”

“All the difference in the world,” Zima said. “The memories stored in the AM are fixed for eternity. You can query it as often as you like, but it will never enhance or omit a single detail. But the implants work differently. They’re designed to integrate seamlessly with biological memory, to the point where the recipient can’t tell the difference. For that very reason they’re necessarily plastic, malleable, subject to error and distortion.”

“Fallible,” I said.

“But without fallibility there is no art. And without art there is no truth.”

“Fallibility leads to truth? That’s a good one.”

“I mean truth in the higher, metaphoric sense. That golden afternoon? That was the truth. Remembering the fly wouldn’t have added to it in any material sense. It would have detracted it from it.”

“There was no afternoon, there was no fly,” I said. Finally, my patience had reached breaking point. “Look, I’m grateful to have been invited here. But I thought there might be a little more to this than a lecture about the way I choose to manage my own memories.”

“Actually,” Zima said, “there was a point to this after all. And it is about me, but it’s also about you.” He put down the glass. “Shall we take a little walk? I’d like to show you the swimming pool.”

“The sun hasn’t gone down yet,” I said.

Zima smiled. “There’ll always be another one.”

He took me on a different route through the house, leaving by a different door than the one we’d come in by. A meandering path climbed gradually between white stone walls, bathed now in gold from the lowering sun. Presently we reached the flat plateau I’d seen on my approach in the conveyor. The things I’d thought were viewing stands were exactly that: terraced structures about thirty metres high, with staircases at the back leading to the different levels. Zima led me into the darkening shadow under the nearest stand, then through a private door that led into the enclosed area. The blue panel I’d seen during the approach turned out to be a modest rectangular swimming pool, drained of water.

Zima led me to the edge.

“A swimming pool,” I said. “You weren’t kidding. Is this what the stands are all about?”

“This is where it will happen,” Zima said. “The unveiling of my final work of art, and my retirement from public life.”

The pool wasn’t quite finished. In the far corner, a small yellow robot glued ceramic tiles into place. The part near us was fully tiled, but I couldn’t help noticing that the tiles were chipped and cracked in places. The afternoon light made it hard to be sure—we were in deep shadow now—but their colour looked to be very close to Zima Blue.

“After painting entire planets, isn’t this is a bit of a letdown?” I asked.

“Not for me,” Zima said. “For me this is where the quest ends. This is what it was all leading up to.”

“A shabby-looking swimming pool?”

“It’s not just any old swimming pool,” he said.

He walked me around the island, as the sun slipped under the sea and the colours turned ashen.

“The old murals came from the heart,” Zima said. “I painted on a huge scale because that was what the subject matter seemed to demand.”

“It was good work,” I said.

“It was hack work. Huge, loud, demanding, popular, but ultimately soulless. Just because it came from the heart didn’t make it good.”

I said nothing. That was the way I’d always felt about his work as well: that it was as vast and inhuman as its inspiration, and only Zima’s cyborg modifications leant his art any kind of uniqueness. It was like praising a painting because it had been done by someone holding a brush between their teeth.

“My work said nothing about the cosmos that the cosmos wasn’t already capable of saying for itself. More importantly, it said nothing about me. So what if I walked in vacuum, or swam in seas of liquid nitrogen? So what if I could see ultraviolet photons, or taste electrical fields? The modifications I inflicted upon myself were gruesome and extreme. But they gave me nothing that a good telepresence drone couldn’t offer any artist.”

“I think you’re being a little harsh on yourself,” I said.

“Not at all. I can say this now because I know that I did eventually create something worthwhile. But when it happened it was completely unplanned.”

“You mean the blue stuff?”

“The blue stuff,” he said, nodding. “It began by accident: a misapplication of colour on a nearly-finished canvas. A smudge of pale, aquamarine blue against near-black. The effect was electric. It was as if I had achieved a short-circuit to some intense, primal memory, a realm of experience where that colour was the most important thing in my world.”

“What was that memory?”

“I didn’t know. All I knew was the way that colour spoke to me, as if I’d been waiting my whole life to find it, to set it free.” He thought for a moment. “There’s always been something about blue. A thousand years ago Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours. A man once spent his entire life searching for a particular shade of blue that he remembered encountering in childhood. He began to despair of ever finding it, thinking he must have imagined that precise shade, that it could not possibly exist in nature. Then one day he chanced upon it. It was the colour of a beetle in a museum of natural history. He wept for joy.”

“What is Zima Blue?” I asked. “Is it the colour of a beetle?”

“No,” he said. “It’s not a beetle. But I had to know the answer, no matter where it took me. I had to know why that colour meant so much to me, and why it was taking over my art.”

“You allowed it to take over,” I said.

“I had no choice. As the blue became more intense, more dominant, I felt I was closer to an answer. I felt that if only I could immerse myself in that colour, then I would know everything I desired to know. I would understand myself as an artist.”

“And? Did you?”

“I understood myself,” Zima said. “But it wasn’t what I expected.”

“What did you learn?”

Zima was a long time answering me. We walked on slowly, me lagging slightly behind his prowling muscular form. It was getting cooler now and I began to wish I’d had the foresight to bring a coat. I thought of asking Zima if he could lend me one, but I was concerned not to derail his thoughts from wherever they were headed. Keeping my mouth shut had always been the toughest part of the job.

“We talked about the fallibility of memory,” he said.

“Yes.”

“My own memory was incomplete. Since the implants were installed I remembered everything, but that only accounted for the last three hundred years of my life. I knew myself to be much older, but of my life before the implants I recalled only fragments; shattered pieces that I did not quite know how to reassemble.” He slowed and turned back to me, the dulling orange light on the horizon catching the side of his face. “I knew I had to dig back into that past, if I was to ever understand the significance of Zima Blue.”

“How far back did you get?”

“It was like archaeology,” he said. “I followed the trail of my memories back to the earliest reliable event, which occurred shortly after the installation of the implants. This took me to Kharkov 8, a world in the Garlin Bight, about nineteen thousand light-years from here. All I remembered was the name of a man I had known there, called Cobargo.”

Cobargo meant nothing to me, but even without the AM I knew something of the Garlin Bight. It was a region of the Galaxy encompassing six hundred habitable systems, squeezed between three major economic powers. In the Garlin Bight normal interstellar law did not apply. It was fugitive territory.

“Kharkov 8 specialised in a certain kind of product,” Zima said. “The entire planet was geared up to provide medical services of a kind unavailable elsewhere. Illicit cybernetic modifications, that kind of thing.”

“Is that where ...” I left the sentence unfinished.

“That is where I became what I am,” Zima said. “Of course, I made further changes to myself after my time on Kharkov 8—improving my tolerance to extreme environments, improving my sensory capabilities—but the essence of what I am was laid down under the knife, in Cobargo’s clinic.”

“So before you arrived on Kharkov 8 you were a normal man?” I asked.

“This is where it gets difficult,” Zima said, picking his way carefully along the trail. “Upon my return I naturally tried to locate Cobargo. With his help, I assumed I would be able to make sense of the memory fragments I carried in my head. But Cobargo was gone; vanished elsewhere into the Bight. The clinic remained, but now his grandson was running it.”

“I bet he wasn’t keen on talking.”

“No; he took some persuading. Thankfully, I had means. A little bribery, a little coercion.” He smiled slightly at that. “Eventually he agreed to open the clinic records and examine his grandfather’s log of my visit.”

We turned a corner. The sea and the sky were now the same inseparable grey, with no trace of blue remaining.

“What happened?”

“The records say that I was never a man,” Zima said. He paused a while before continuing, leaving no doubt as to what he had said. “Zima never existed before my arrival in the clinic.”

What I wouldn’t have done for a recording drone, or—failing that—a plain old notebook and pen. I frowned, as if that might make my memory work just that little bit harder.

“Then who were you?”

“A machine,” he said. “A complex robot; an autonomous artificial intelligence. I was already centuries old when I arrived on Kharkov 8, with full legal independence.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re a man with machine parts, not a machine.”

“The clinic records were very clear. I had arrived as a robot. An androform robot, certainly—but an obvious machine nonetheless. I was dismantled and my core cognitive functions were integrated into a vat-grown biological host body.” With one finger he tapped the pewter side of his skull. “There’s a lot of organic material in here, and a lot of cybernetic machinery. It’s difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. Even harder to tell which is the master, and which is the slave.”

I looked at the figure standing next to me, trying to make the mental leap needed to view him as a machine—albeit a machine with soft, cellular components—rather than a man. I couldn’t; not yet.

I stalled. “The clinic could have lied to you.”

“I don’t think so. They would have been far happier had I not known.”

“All right,” I said. “Just for the sake of argument ...”

“Those were the facts. They were easily verified. I examined the customs records for Kharkov 8 and found that an autonomos robot entity had entered the planet’s airspace a few months before the medical procedure.”

“Not necessarily you.”

“No other robot entity had come near the world for decades. It had to be me. More than that, the records also showed the robot’s port of origin.”

“Which was?”

“A world beyond the Bight. Lintan 3, in the Muara Archipelago.”

The AM’s absence was like a missing tooth. “I don’t know if I know it.”

“You probably don’t. It’s no kind of world you’d ever visit by choice. The scheduled lightbreakers don’t go there. My only purpose in visiting the place seemed to me ...”

“You went there?”

“Twice. Once before the procedure on Kharkov 8, and again recently, to establish where I’d been before Lintan 3. The evidence trail was beginning to get muddy, to say the least ... but I asked the right kinds of questions, poked at the right kinds of database, and finally found out where I’d come from. But that still wasn’t the final answer. There were many worlds, and the chain was fainter which each that I visited. But I had persistence on my side.”

“And money.”

“And money,” Zima said, acknowledging my remark with a polite little nod. “That helped incalculably.”

“So what did you find, in the end?”

“I followed the trail back to the beginning. On Kharkov 8 I was a quick-thinking machine with human-level intelligence. But I hadn’t always been that clever, that complex. I’d been augmented in steps, as time and circumstances allowed.”

“By yourself?”

“Eventually, yes. That was when I had autonomy; legal independence. But I had to reach a certain level of intelligence before I was allowed that freedom. Before that, I was a simpler machine ... like an heirloom or a pet. I was passed from one owner to the next, between generations. They added things to me. They made me cleverer.”

“How did you begin?”

“As a project,” he said.

Zima led me back to the swimming pool. Equatorial night had arrived quickly, and the pool was bathed now in artificial light from the many floods arrayed above the viewing stands. Since we had last seen the pool the robot had finished glueing the last of the tiles in place.

“It’s ready now,” Zima said. “Tomorrow it will be sealed, and the day after it will be flooded with water. I’ll cycle the water until it attains the necessary clarity.”

“And then?”

“I prepare myself for my performance.”

On the way to the swimming pool he had told me as much as he knew about his origin. Zima had begun his existence on Earth, before I was even born. He had been assembled by a hobbyist, a talented young man with an interest in practical robotics. In those days, the man had been one of many groups and individuals groping toward the hard problem of artificial intelligence.

Perception, navigation and autonomous problem-solving were the three things that most interested the young man. He had created many robots, tinkering them together from kits, broken toys and spare parts. Their minds—if they could be dignified with such a term—were cobbled from the innards of junked computers, with their simple programs bulging at the limits of memory and processor speed.

The young man filled his house with these simple machines, designing each for a particular task. One robot was a sticky-limbed spider that climbed around the walls of his house, dusting the frames of pictures. Another lay in wait for flies and cockroaches. It caught and digested them, using the energy from the chemical breakdown of their biomass to drive itself to another place in the house. Another robot busied itself by repainting the walls of the house over and over, so that the colours matched the changing of the seasons.

Another robot lived in his swimming pool.

It toiled endlessly up and down and along the ceramic sides of the pool, scrubbing them clean. The young man could have bought a cheap swimming pool cleaner from a mail-order company, but it amused him to design the robot from scratch, according to his own eccentric design principles. He gave the robot a full-colour vision system and a brain large enough to process the visual data into a model of its surroundings. He allowed the robot to make its own decisions about the best strategy for cleaning the pool. He allowed it to choose when it cleaned and when it surfaced to recharge its batteries via the solar panels grouped on its back. He imbued it with a primitive notion of reward.

The little pool cleaner taught the young man a great deal about the fundamentals of robotics design. Those lessons were incorporated into the other household robots, until one of them—a simple household cleaner—became sufficiently robust and autonomous that the young man began to offer it as a kit, via mail-order. The kit sold well, and a year later the young man offered it as a pre-assembled domestic robot. The robot was a runaway success, and the young man’s firm soon became the market leader in domestic robots.

Within ten years, the world swarmed with his bright, eager machines.

He never forgot the little pool cleaner. Time and again he used it as a test-bed for new hardware, new software. By turns it became the cleverest of all his creations, and the only one that he refused to strip down and cannibalise.

When he died, the pool cleaner passed to his daughter. She continued the family tradition, adding cleverness to the little machine. When she died, she passed it to the young man’s grandson, who happened to live on Mars.

“This is the original pool,” Zima said. “If you hadn’t already guessed.”

“After all this time?” I asked.

“It’s very old. But ceramics endure. The hardest part was finding it in the first place. I had to dig through two metres of topsoil. It was in a place they used to call Silicon Valley.”

“These tiles are coloured Zima Blue,” I said.

“Zima Blue is the colour of the tiles,” he correctly gently. “It just happened to be the shade that the young man used for his swimming pool tiles.”

“Then some part of you remembered.”

“This was where I began. A crude little machine with barely enough intelligence to steer itself around a swimming pool. But it was my world. It was all I knew; all I needed to know.”

“And now?” I asked, already fearing the answer.

“Now I’m going home.”

I was there when he did it. By then the stands were full of people who had arrived to watch the performance, and the sky over the island was a mosaic of tight-packed hovering ships. The distortion screen had been turned off, and the viewing platforms on the ships thronged with hundreds of thousands of distant witnesses. They could see the swimming pool by then, its water mirror-flat and gin-clear. They could see Zima standing at the edge, with the solar patches on his back glinting like snake scales. None of the viewers had any idea of what was about to happen, or its significance. They were expecting something—the public unveiling of a work that would presumably trump everything Zima had created before then—but they could only stare in puzzled concern at the pool, wondering how it could possibly measure up to those atmosphere-piercing canvases, or those entire worlds wrapped in shrouds of blue. They kept thinking that the pool had to be a diversion. The real work of art—the piece that would herald his retirement—must be somewhere else, as yet unseen, waiting to be revealed in all its immensity.

That was what they thought.

But I knew the truth. I knew it as I watched Zima stand at the edge of the pool and surrender himself to the blue. He’d told me exactly how it would happen: the slow, methodical shutting down of higher-brain functions. It hardly mattered that it was all irreversible: there wouldn’t be enough of him left to regret what he had lost.

But something would remain: a little kernel of being; enough of a mind to recognise its own existence. Enough of a mind to appreciate its surroundings, and to extract some trickle of pleasure and contentment from the execution of a task, no matter how purposeless. He wouldn’t ever need to leave the pool. The solar patches would provide him with all the energy he needed. He would never age, never grow ill. Other machines would take care of his island, protecting the pool and its silent slow swimmer from the ravages of weather and time.

Centuries would pass.

Thousands of years, and then millions.

Beyond that, it was anyone’s guess. But the one thing I knew was that Zima would never tire of his task. There was no capacity left in his mind for boredom. He had become pure experience. If he experienced any kind of joy in the swimming of the pool, it was the near-mindless euphoria of a pollinating insect. That was enough for him. It had been enough for him in that pool in California, and it was enough for him now, a thousand years later, in the same pool but on another world, around another sun, in a distant part of the same Galaxy.

As for me ...

It turned out that I remembered more of our meeting on the island than I had any right to. Make of that what you will, but it seemed I didn’t need the mental crutch of my AM quite as much as I’d always imagined. Zima was right: I’d allowed my life to become scripted, laid out like a blueprint. It was always red wine with sunsets, never the white. Aboard the outbound lightbreaker a clinic installed a set of neural memory extensions that should serve me well for the next four or five hundred years. One day I’ll need another solution, but I’ll cross that particular mnemonic bridge when I get there. My last act, before dismissing the AM, was to transfer its observations into the echoey new spaces of my enlarged memory. The events still don’t feel quite like they ever happened to me, but they settle in a little bit better with each act of recall. They change and soften, and the highlights glow a little brighter. I guess they become a little less accurate with each instance of recall, but like Zima said: perhaps that’s the point.

I know now why he spoke to me. It wasn’t just my way with a biographical story. It was his desire to help someone move on, before he did the same.

I did eventually find a way to write his story, and I sold it back to my old newspaper, the Martian Chronicle. It was good to visit the old planet again, especially now that they’ve moved it into a warmer orbit.

That was a long time ago. But I’m still not done with Zima, odd as it seems.

Every couple of decades, I still hop a lightbreaker to Murjek, descend to the streets of that gleaming white avatar of Venice, take a conveyor to the island and join the handful of other dogged witnesses scattered across the stands. Those that come, like me, must still feel that the artist has something else in store ... one last surprise. They’ve read my article now, most of them, so they know what that slowly swimming figure means ... but they still don’t come in droves. The stands are always a little echoey and sad, even on a good day. But I’ve never seen them completely empty, which I suppose is some kind of testament. Some people get it. Most people never will.

But that’s art.

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Luyten 726-8 Cometary Halo—AD 2303

Luyten 726-8 Cometary Halo—AD 2309

Near Lalande 21185—AD 2328

Sylveste Institute, Yellowstone Orbit, Epsilon Eridani—AD 2415

Stormwatch Station, Aethra, Hyades Trade Envelope—AD 2931

Interstellar Space—AD 3354

Subaru Commonwealth—Pleiades Cluster—AD 4161

Galactic North—AD 9730

Hope, Galactic Plane—AD Circa 40,000

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

One

Two

Three